Tag: 1923 Page 1 of 3
By Gregory Clark, November 10, 1923.
The prisoner had a ruffled look: perspired: had lost control of his eyes, which shifted helplessly; trying to hide; trying not to see; trying not to comprehend.
“Not guilty, he says,” roared the policeman on guard at the prisoner’s side: it was nothing to the policeman; a policeman twenty-one years. It was everything to the damp young man in the dock.
He compressed his lips; squeezed his pale fingers into knots; tried to concentrate his wild gaze on the iron rail a foot from his nose; but couldn’t.
“Evidence?” said the magistrate absently. He was thinking of this and that.
“This lady,” said a policeman with a jovial face, but with a scornful voice, “informed me the prisoner had been following her on the street – singing under his breath –
“Singing,” repeated the magistrate.
“So I arrested him.”
“What did the accused say when arrested?”
“He denied the charge and tried to break away.”
“Ah! Did he use violence?”
“He broke a bag of eggs he was carrying.”
“That’ll do,” said the magistrate. To the lady he said:
“Did this prisoner follow you on the street?”
“M’hm!” said the lady who was just out of her youth, and had rarely if ever been pretty. “He walked along behind me all the way from Bathurst to Spadina, and kept humming –
“Singing?”
– “Singing all the time – right behind me!”
“Did you molest this lady on the street?” demanded the magistrate.
“No – no! I saw no lady – I was going home there was no lady – I was hurrying along – “
“Were you singing?”
The prisoner clamped the iron rail with both hands.
“Yes,” he said, hoarsely.
“What were you singing?”
The prisoner rolled his eyes, licked his lips, made a fearful effort to smile: turned whiter than death.
“Home Sweet Home,” he replied.
Seven persons in the court sniggered. The other sixty-three hadn’t heard: were paying no attention.
“Home Sweet Home,” repeated the magistrate.
The other sixty-three in the court began to pay attention.
“Yes, sir. That was it.”
“Was that it?” asked the magistrate.
“M’hm,” replied the lady,
“Why were you singing? Had you been drinking?” asked his Worship.
“No-no! It was five o’clock – and after – I was going home – you see – I had the eggs and the ribbon and the white wool-“
The policeman on guard looked sharply at the prisoner and drew one pace further away.
“Is he quite right?” asked the magistrate, sotto voce, of the policeman at the witness box.
“I doubt It,” scornfully replied the jovial policeman.
“What’s the matter with you?” demanded the magistrate.
The prisoner bowed his head and his mouth trembled.
“I saw no lady – nobody – I was going home,” chanted the prisoner: “and the policeman took my arm – I broke the eggs. Yes, I was singing: I remembered that. But what about my wife -“
You should have thought of that first, my man,” put in the magistrate.
“-she is only a girl,” went on the prisoner, head down, chanting, “she’s little and afraid and she’s – she’s – she’s not very well – she’s making little clothes – and I was not to forget the Beehive1 four-play – white wool – now I’ve been out all night – maybe I’ve lost my job – and she’s been sitting at the front window – maybe – maybe – “
A great light of comprehension lit up the magistrate’s face.
“Discharged!” he cried.
The lady looked indignant, What should she tell her friends now, for goodness sakes?
The policeman on guard had been a policeman twenty-one years; he opened the gate of the dock and automatically roared “Order!” to fill in the time.
The prisoner, without a hat, feeling in his pockets for the wool and the ribbon, ran out the door of the courtroom exclaiming –
“Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Editor’s Notes: I’m not sure what the point of the story was, don’t sing or hum suspiciously?
- Beehive wool is a brand, that still exists. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, September 8, 1923.
Roaring Bunch of Men Go From East Every Summer Seeking Adventure, Find None, and, Without Price of Return Ticket, Stay West and Make Good.
Harvesters going west are like troops going to war in more respects than one.
There is the same noise and abandon. The primitive colonist sleeper cars bear the same crowded and forbidding look. And both harvesters and soldiers are full to the brim with the expectation of high adventure.
And adventure doesn’t come.
Just as the soldier landed with a chilling flop into the drab and unfruitful and uneventful round of spit and polish and drill and the stupid eternity of the trenches, so the harvester, ready for big doings in the wide romantic west, finds a hay fork in his hand, or about twenty square miles of new-cut wheat to be stooked before dark, or a thousand bushels of grain to be heaved by brute force into the separator, amidst a smother of dust and chaff, before the boss calls it a day and lets the cook sound his whistle.
A harvesters’ excursion is spoken of in the east here as something picturesque and outward bound. So it is. Eight hundred men all in a roaring bunch constitute a picture.
But when a harvesters’ excursion hits the west and is smashed by the impact into countless little squads and sections and troops of four or ten or seventeen men, dumped all forlorn off the train at some little packing box way station in middle of a limitless prairie, the romance goes out of it.
Eighty per cent. of the men who leave the east on a harvesters’ excursion hope never to return. They have visions of the Big Chance which life so far has denied them.
And eighty per cent. of that eighty per cent. are broke when they leave the east.
And what are the rewards of a harvester?
In Manitoba, this year, the wage per day ran round $3.50. Out further west it ran to $4 and In seme places as high, as $4.501. The harvester paid strictly by the day. If it rains and there no cutting or stooking or threshing, there is no pay. If it blows up rain about noon there is half a day’s pay, and no more. Sundays, no pay. At four dollars a day, working at most twenty-four days in the one month’s work the harvester must put in before he can use the return stub of his cheap fare, he can earn $96.
He has had to pay $15 plus half a cent a mile beyond Winnipeg to come out west. It will cost him half a cent a mile to Winnipeg and twenty dollars from there heme. If he smokes cigarets and has any other expensive habits the likelihood is he will return to the hard and undemonstrative east as broke as he left it. In fact, many of them are so broke they can’t pay their fare home and have to stay west.
In Brandon I talked with one old chap in the livery business who said that that was how he came to settle in the west – came out harvesting and couldn’t pay his way home. And blamed if he didn’t think the west was largely populated with people in the same predicament.
Thousands of the harvesters don’t get regular jobs helping a farmer for a steady month or six weeks. Only a few lucky ones get taken on with “outfits” – which are threshing gangs that travel from farm to farm. Most of them get a few days’ work at stooking, and then get tired and move over a few miles to some I place they’ve heard about where there are better jobs going begging.
“The trouble with harvesters is this,” said a Manitoba wheat rancher, “the tough ones that can do the hard manual labor of harvesting are a restless crew, either finding fault with the grub or getting into fights or moving on for the sheer love of moving on. The quiet, conscientious fellows are usually those not accustomed to hard manual labor. They will stay on the job, but they can’t handle the work.”
So this army of fifty thousand men dumped into the west every August spreads thin or thick over the map, restless, hard-worked, disillusioned, most of them making just barely enough money to pay their passage back to the east at the end of four to six weeks.
But like old soldiers, who will keep on going to wars no matter how sour the last one turned, there are old harvesters who keep on going west every autumn, moved by the expectation of adventure which is so elusive a jade in this workaday world.
The harvesters’ special from the east, with a three to four day weary jam of passengers, usually pulls into Winnipeg at night. I don’t know whether Winnipeg has arranged that or not. But at any rate the great majority of harvesters never see Winnipeg at all.
Their train pulls in in the dead of night.
As they break, gasping with relief, out of the train that has imprisoned them for four days, into the Winnipeg freight yards, they find themselves being lined up before a small wicketed office under arc lights, where representatives of the Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta government employment bureaus are waiting to inform them where harvesters are required.
The expeditionary nature of the excursion goes out of the harvesters’ special right there in Winnipeg.
“Have you any place in mind?” asks the agent.
“No,” replies the harvester.
“How about Lethbridge?” says the agent. “Twenty-five men wanted there at once by farmers not ten miles out.”
“Done.”
“Have you the fare?”
Then the harvester walks over to the ticket booths and gets his half cent a mile fare to Lethbridge.
“A train for Lethbridge leaves from here in two hours,” says the ticket man.
It is three o’clock in the morning. Winnipeg lies cold and asleep without. The harvester goes out to see Winnipeg, walks a deserted block, rambles back to the station to sit till his train is ready in the dawn. Gets aboard, pounds westward another few hundred miles in a colonist sleeper, and wakes up to be debarked in Lethbridge.
Farmers are waiting at the employment bureaus in the station. The harvester is hailed by the farmer.
“How much a day?”
“Four dollars, sleep in the house, home cooking.”
The great majority go to no such town as Lethbridge for the jumping off place. They find themselves unloaded, amid the cheerful hoots of fellow passengers, at a little packing case station, without a human habitation in sight for all the miles and miles of bronzed fields on every side. Half a dozen farmers are waiting, with motor cars and flat wagons, to snaffle such men as are getting off at that point.
Thefts of good men occur. When the train stops at one of these little jerkwater stations, and ten men debark for fifteen farmers waiting, the farmers will jump aboard the train, swiftly scan the cars, and make take-it-or-leave-it offers to the best looking men in the car. That is, men booked through to further points.
Or they will run along the open windows of the car, calling:
“Any good men in there want four dollars a day and six weeks steady work?”
“I want five old hands.”
“Two men wanted – have you had any experience? Hop out. Four a day.”
Many of the farmers won’t take pot luck in the men sent. They prefer to board the train and pick out the men they want on appearance, offering them half a dollar a day extra for a bribe. In this way they get the men they want.
In nearly all the farms, which run from a half section of 320 acres to a section of 640 acres, the harvesters are taken right into the home of the farmer and eat at the family board. On the big wheat ranches of one and two or more sections, the farmer has a bunk house built within the tree enclosure in which his homestead stands and which is used for accommodating harvesters only. He hires a cook for the season. The food is always plentiful and plain.
But it is with an “outfit” that the harvester comes nearest adventure.
An outfit consists of a tractor, a threshing separator and a caboose. The tractor drags the threshing machine and the caboose from farm to farm and runs the separator at threshing. From eight to fifteen men constitute the crew of an outfit.
As soon as the grain is in the shock, the outfit sets forth on the rounds which it has planned during the summer. From ranch to ranch it goes, snorting and steaming. The caboose is cut off in a shady spot – if possible – and the thresher is set up in the middle of a field. The farmer, with rented and borrowed teams, totes the shocks of grain to the roaring maw of the separator. No bringing in the sheaves to the barn in the West. They just thresh right in the field. When they have cleaned up one square mile, they move the outfit to another part of the prairie and thresh all the wheat within range. The threshed grain is either stored in little granary sheds or is carted into the barns.
Great heaps of straw and chaff, as big as city houses, are thus left dotting the stubble fields, like slag heaps around Hill 702.
Passing from Winnipeg. I saw three huge columns of smoke ascending in the air to the north.
“Forest fires, eh?” I remarked to the passenger beside me. He chuckled.
“Ain’t no forests in these parts, mister. Them’s straw stacks burning.”
“How would that happen?” I asked, from the east where straw is so much per so much.
“Well, a farmer jest throwed a match into it, I guess.”
They burn their mountains of straw in the West.
No greenhorn can get aboard one of these “outfits.” They are prize workers. The owner of the outfit gets so many cents a bushel for the threshing, and it is in his interests so get the job done in record time. He hires men with some pride in their shoulders. They work like demons. They work all hours, from dawn to dark. They take joy in beating the last day’s record, the record of former crews. They go to their caboose at the end of the day dead beat, hardly able to sit up and sing after their huge if unornamental meal.
But it is the nearest thing to adventure there is in harvesting.
The ordinary harvester bends his back at stooking, at teaming sheaves to the threshers, at bucketing grain into the granaries, at all the simple, ancient acts of agriculture which have changed little in ten thousand years. It is uneventful, healthy, heartbreaking work, the kind of work a man can easily pass up when the spirt moves him.
The railroad officials figure that 20 per cent. of the return ticket stubs they issue are not used each year. Twenty per cent. of fifty thousand men is ten thousand. That is draining the east and populating the west at a pretty good rate.
But the west is a large and roomy and hospitable place, for all its cold and its bleak wastes of prairie (how an Englishman from the green rolling hills of ‘ome must pine!) and somehow the thousands who stay either stranded or by choice in the west as the result of their harvest excursion, shake down.
That cheery, hail spirit of the adventurous trainload of irresponsibles somehow sticks to the westerner. If you whoop on the main street of an eastern city, a policeman will run you in or a space will be left about you in the traffic. Whoop at the main crossings in a western city and nobody pays the slightest attention, unless you look lonesome, and then a crowd will form around you in the traffic and take you home to supper.
In Winnipeg, I asked a man the time, and he took me home to dinner. In Brandon, I enquired the location of the railroad station, and my informant turned out to be a cousin. In Dauphin, I picked up a man’s hat the wind blew off and he introduced me to a member of parliament, a judge, the local chairman of the newly formed license commission, and the leading Presbyterian divine, right there and then on the street.
And by special interrogation, I found that each and every one of these cheery informants was originally a harvester who came west, went broke, settled and made good.
Editor’s Notes:
- $4 in 1923 would be $70 in 2024. ↩︎
- The Battle of Hill 70 was a World War One battle. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, August 4, 1923.
Hundreds of Abandoned Homesteads Throughout the Lakes Region of the Great Summer Resort Bear Witness to a Past of Hardship and Despair.
To the world Muskoka means gaiety, ease and joy.
It is a bit of the earth, it seems, set aside at the creation for the delights of summer.
But in back of those bright shores that are studded with hotels and cottages are evidences of an epic struggle in former days.
Muskoka and winter, Muskoka and grim hardship, Muskoka and dark despair seem absurd contradictions in terms.
But back over those splendid hills of light green and dark green, on little side roads where lovers stroll, throughout that beautiful region now largely given over to the summer resort, you will come across hundreds of ruined and abandoned homesteads, the mute records of at least one defeat Ontario dealt her pioneers.
The lake region of Muskoka is peculiar in this respect, there is no average farmstead. As you motor through the district you pass some small areas that appear to be excellent farm lands. But when you leave the highways and the neighborhood of the larger towns you strike the great contrast. For miles you will traverse hills and dales of wilderness, with infrequent clearings where a pitiful, tumbledown little shanty, new or old, scrabbles a meagre existence from a small patch of ground. Then you will emerge all of a sudden on a wide and beautiful clearing of hundreds of acres, and in its midst a modern red brick house, large barns and out-buildings, in perfect repair, every evidence of being a very successful farm.
There is no average. Either they are very well fixed or very poor.
And to add a sinister touch to the poor ones, the wilds are filled with hundreds of these ruined and abandoned homesteads, most of them the log houses and rough barns of the pioneer, the picturesque, hand-made homesteads of the builders of the province.
The reason is simple enough. That part of Muskoka consists largely of sand and rocks. It is fine soil for pines and hollyhocks, but poor for potatoes and other fruitful crops. Scattered all over the district are deposits of better soil, valleys where great forests have stood for ages, flats where swamps have been easily or naturally drained away.
When the pioneers came thrusting into Muskoka from the south they knew not which was good soil and which was stones. The forest hid that vital fact. The shrewdest were rewarded with a hundred or two hundred acres of loam over and in the sand. The less shrewd came wearily into some gorgeous valley filled with the sunset which Muskoka alone can devise and proudly and gladly they made a camp and, unladed their ox-cars and cried to the dark hills:
“Home!”
And when with gigantic toil which this older part of the province has forgotten, even when it looks at its endless fields, the forest was torn down and laid in piles and burned, these less shrewd pioneers found under the strong and sturdy forest only hummocks of sand and countless boulders, and here and there outcroppings of the fundamental rock which lies shallow under the whole of that northern country.
If you look at some of these abandoned homesteads with a recreative eye, you will be able to reconstruct the whole tragedy. For the clearings about the log shanties are not regular and ordered, spreading out squarely, but are in patches, a couple of acres cleared here, and over a ridge in a neighboring gulley, a couple of acres more, and so on, as the pioneer, finding rocks and sand in this dark valley where he so gladly cried “Home!” searched each autumn, with fire and axe, for that stretch of hidden earth which would be black and smooth and soft to the plow.
You don’t have to travel far in from your cottage or hotel to find one of these tragedies clearly written in logs and boulders and brushy meadows already falling victim to the enfolding forest. Fate has played a pretty trick with Muskoka. For fifty years it was the scene of a thousand failures made more bitter by the few successes. To-day, it is a nation’s playground, full of ease and music and brightness. Its million dollar breezes dimpling lakes and driving light sails and cooling ten thousand screened verandahs, have touched far different scenes.
The opening up of the west and its prairies and the arrival of the summer resort saved Muskoka from being a tragedy for those who had pioneered into it. Hundreds who had struggled faithfully to find the black acres under the forest gave up and went to the west, from which, twenty-five to forty years ago, fabulous reports were coming into the east. Far away were boundless acres of black soil covered not with forests, but with grass. To select your homestead you had not to cruise a wilderness and trust to luck for what the clearing would show, but merely walk over your hundred and sixty acres and feel it with your feet. No clearing but to drive the plow through the sod and burn a little swale of willows.
And by the hundred from Muskoka, as from all other parts of the province where disappointment had sought out the pioneer, they packed up and set forth for the west.
Those who remained, either from doubt or from poverty, were persuaded to remain by the arrival of the summer resorters. The exploitation of Muskoka as a summer resort is thirty years old, and yet it has only begun.
When the first cottagers came they brought relief to the poorest settlers. Garden crops could be sold at the best of prices. Milk, butter and meat were in demand. The labor of the man was needed for clearing, building and well-digging about the summer cottages.
Other settlers took in a few summer boarders and so were put on the first step towards the summer hotel. The majority and many of the best of the Muskoka hotels are run by the descendants of pioneers. From keeping a few visitors in the homestead to the erection of a small hotel and from the small hotel to the modern Muskoka hotel were logical steps.
There are golf links in Muskoka on pastures that were regarded as hopeless by the pioneer who cleared them. There are farms in Muskoka found to be more profitable as pleasure grounds for two months of the year than as farms for twelve months.
One old lady in her eighties told me the story of her pioneering in Muskoka. She came as a girl of eighteen by ox-cart into the country now the heart of the gayest resorts. A party of fifteen entered the district. They cleared their acres and found sand and stones. But they added to their income by cutting lumber for the markets at Bracebridge and Gravenhurst. Winter was desperately hard. They were cooped up for five months, while wolves possessed the forests.
They lived poorly and lonely, and the men went off in the winter to the lumber camps and in the summer added small patches to their clearings and tended sparse crops of hay and wheat and a limited garden.
When the west boomed her brothers and brothers-in-law and other men of the community promptly abandoned their clearings and went west. Everyone of them proved successful farmers in the west, died, well off, and deeded over their little Muskoka clearings to their sister, who owns hundreds of acres of bush and scrub.
Yet she still dwells in a small and poor farmhouse amid about forty acres of cultivated soil, growing corn and vegetables for the summer resorts, and pasturing a herd of cows for milk for the same market. She is poor, but quite happy. Her grandchildren own and operate several tourist hotels throughout the lakes.
Not far out of Bracebridge I talked to a settler in his seventies. His two chums, after five years pioneering beside him in Muskoka, gave up and went to the legendary west. They sold him their clearings for three hundred dollars each, no cash down, to be paid in instalments as the remaining man found convenient,
Both the wayfarers settled out of Winnipeg and became very wealthy wheat farmers and cattle-raisers. Both are dead now. But for many years the two of them made trips every other year to Muskoka for fishing and hunting. They came and stayed with their old chum who stuck to Muskoka. In this way, be paid off the three hundred dollars each for the clearings, the westerners paying part cash for their accommodation and part the old debt until it was wiped out.
You would think they would have given him the clearings. That they would have persuaded him to give up his miserable stone acres and come out west with them.
“This is good land,” said the old man to me, “I have been very happy on it. I have more fun than those chums of mine. They died before me. They had to come back here for their fun. Ther coaxed me to come out west, but they knew I wouldn’t budge-“
Those two well-off westerners wouldn’t have insulted their chum by offering him their abandoned land for nothing.
“Still you have had to struggle hard for what you’ve got here?” I asked, waving at the little unpainted home, the rock bound pasture, the undefeated forest all about the clearing.
“No harder than anybody else. I had a strong time. My sons are doing well, some in the towns, some at the resorts.
“Nobody can dig a well like me. I have doctors and lawyers and millionaires coming to me for advice and help all the time. They would be no good without me. There was a bank president just drove up here to this clearing an hour ago to get me to tell him where to build his new boat house. Big blue car. I am going with him to-morrow to show him where-“
So it wasn’t a tragedy altogether. They had a strong time. The desolate homesteads you will find everywhere in the lake region of Muskoka were the original settlings of men who went west or moved out to the lake shores to meet the cottagers and the tourists.
Still, for all the joy and the fame and gaiety that have made Muskoka a beautiful, byword there has been a grim contrast of bitter struggle and disillusionment which somehow hallows the district and justifies the compensation of these days of dancing and idling and making merry.
This illustration went with a story by Frank Mann about crooked hockey games.
Five-pin bowling is a Canadian game invested in 1909 when customers complained that the ten-pin game was too strenuous.
The entire crew take hold of the rope and yank the lunge in hand over hand
Did a Fish Ever Fight or Are All Yarns of Battles Pure Fiction? A Tale of the Only Bass That Ever Put Up a Real Struggle.
By Gregory Clark, July 7, 1923.
Fishing is full of fictions.
In fact, after a careful study of the whole subject of fishing over a period of a quarter of a century, I am convinced that fishing is largely fiction.
At times during my intensive study of the subject, I have come very definitely to the conclusion that there is no such thing as fishing, and that fish themselves are only a delusion.
But there is a weakness in human nature which some call gullibility and others call credulousness, which demands for the human spirit some outlet other than that provided by the perusal of cold facts. It manifested itself in olden days in the legend of the griffin and in the unicorn. Fables grew up about these strange beasts.
In modern times this outlet is provided by fish. And mankind lets loose these restless longings for the mystic and unknown and the incredible through the fabulous tales of fishing.
To go thoroughly into the whole matter would require more than a short story. And a short story is what the editor demands.
I shall take, therefore, only one aspect of fishing: the fable of the fighting fish.
You will hear men commonly arguing with great animation as to which fish is the gamest and fights longest.
“Give me the lunge,” says one. “Give me a lunge of ten pounds or over and I am set for life. There is no fish that swims to compare for gameness and furious fighting spirit with the lunge.”
“Inch for inch, and pound for pound,” says another, quoting I know not what authority, “the small mouth bass is the gamest fish that swims.”
“A trout,” says another, “is never beaten. I have fought a one-pound brook trout, with light tackle, fine and far off, for three-quarters of an hour, and when, through utter exhaustion, I was forced to put the net under him, that trout was as fresh and full of fight as the moment I hooked him.”
That’s the way they talk.
“One hour and twenty minutes it took me to land that twenty-two pound lunge,” says the lunger. “A battle royal all the way.”
Here we are in the very core of fiction.
The lunge fisherman usually drags a stout rope behind a rowboat, at the end of which dangles a large metal trolling spoon set with gangs of hooks one inch or more in size. Similar sets of hooks are used by life-savers when they are dragging for drowned humans. When the poor fish seizes the metal bait, the entire crew of the rowboat take hold of the stout rope and yank the lunge in, hand over hand, like a log. With a whoop and a roar, the lunge is slammed into the bottom of the boat and clubbed to death. The whole operation takes from twenty to forty seconds.
But fiction demands a story about the fish. So the fishermen stretch it into a battle of forty minutes.
About ninety per cent. of the lunge caught in this fishermen’s paradise are thus caught on a rope in a few seconds.
The remaining ten per cent., I find, are caught by real sportsmen, who use a rod to troll with. It is a stout steel rod, strong enough to hold a bull. The line is tested to hold twenty pounds, and the biggest lunge that swims weighs, in the water, only three pounds, owing to the laws of specific gravity. So the odds are slightly in the fisherman’s favor.
When a lunge is struck, the first thing they do is look around to see if anybody is in sight. If there is nobody around, the lunge is reeled in, quite as effectively and a little more safely than by the hand-line method. If anybody is within sight, they spread the battle over three or four minutes. The poor fish wonders what has happened. It wiggles and yanks. But in it comes.
That battle took an hour and six minutes, “by the watch.”
Bass fishermen use a hand net, and as soon the bass is hooked, so alarmed is the fishermen for fear it will escape, he drags it alongside and dips it out of the water with the net.
Trout fishermen are the fictionest fishermen of the lot. Never yet have I met a straight out-and-out worm fisherman. Ninety-nine per cent. of trout fishermen are loaded up with fly hooks, leader boxes, light fly rods and little landing nets. Ninety-nine per cent. of them have a can of worms secreted about their person.
When in sight of their friends, they whip the stream with files. But you will notice that trout fishermen always like to get away by themselves.
“You fish up stream and I’ll fish down,” says one, selecting a cast of files with loving care.
And the other promptly agrees.
The minute they are out of sight of each other, off come the flies, and one of those known as a Gardenia or garden hackle goes on. The cast of flies is hung handy in the hat, in case anyone should be met on the stream.
You see a trout fishermen sneaking very softly up a stream. They tell you the reason is that trout are very wary and have to be stalked. Not at all. Another fish legend. They are sneaking so softly not for the trout, but listening for other fishermen, lest they be caught fishing with worms. I have seen a couple of country boys standing in the water under a bridge snaring trout with fine wire. And the trout flittering about their feet. Trout wary? Trout fishermen wary!
The way ninety-eight per cent. of trout are caught is this: The fisherman hooks it, and with a violent swipe slams the poor little thing high and dry up on the bank.
The other two per cent. are caught in the presence of other fishermen, and for fiction’s sake the catcher has to play it around in the water for a moment, with his heart in his mouth, before scooping it up in the net.
The only authentic case I know of where a bass put up anything like the legendary scrap was a personal experience in which that bass far exceeded any fiction tale I ever heard.
It was up on the Muskosh River, just above the rapids known as Brown’s Cookery.
Evening was falling, and a purple haze hung like a magic curtain over the grey rocks and the dark green firs.
I drifted in my canoe about seventy-five yards above the head of the swift rapids. I was using frog bait and casting to the shores on either hand. In my canoe I had seven of the eight bass the law allows, all of which had put up remarkably good battles, considering that it was only fiction.
I had dropped my bait fair in the middle of swirl of current, when a giant bass leaped and took it. He came fully four feet clear of the surface in that wonderful rush.
With a steady rush that took all but ten feet of my hundred and fifty foot line, he passed me upstream, leaping every few feet and shaking his beautiful bronze body. At the end of the rush, when I had despaired, he turned and rushed as madly down stream, still leaping, and entered the rapids. There he had the swift current to aid him, and he took all but a foot and a half of my line. So intent was I on the battle that I did not notice I was drifting towards the dangerous rapids, which no man had ever shot, except in fiction.
Feeling the stern, if hopeless, pressure on my hold, that bass turned again, raced up stream, and again I was facing north. Leaping every four seconds, by the watch, which I was using to time him, in the interests of truth, he fought over that river.
To my horror, I suddenly saw white water at my side.
I was in the rapids. Would I relinquish that fabulous bass and seize the paddle in the vain effort to save my life? Or would I go to my doom like a good fisherman, holding grimly to my catch?
I decided to die game. Halfway through those raging rapids, with the bass following me in great triumphant leaps, with the dim shades of night upon us, my canoe overturned and I was thrown down, down, deep into that boiling rapids. I lost consciousness. I know not how I escaped from the ragged rocks of that furious stream. But when I came to, I was lying on the beach, three hundred yards below Brown’s Cookery, and morning was breaking. And that bass was still leaping and racing out in the pool below the rapids, with only two and one-half inches of my line on the reel. It had safely come through the rapids with me, and had fought me all night. But unconscious though I was, I held him.
When I dragged it ashore, along about noon, I was utterly exhausted. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the bass had missed his regular feeding time, I never would have got him. He weighed, if I remember rightly, seven and a half pounds – the largest bass ever caught in Ontario. I didn’t enter him in The Star competition, not did I tell my friends about him. For if there is one thing I detest, it is that air of incredulity with which a man’s fishing stories are received.
I tell the tale now, only by way of proving the rule that most fishing stories are fiction. Exceptions prove the rule. This case I have recited is the only instance I know of where a bass really did fight. Most bass are hauled in like an old boot.
I have similar tales to prove my contentions about lunge and trout. Once I fought a thirty-eight pound lunge which I had caught inadvertently on a three-ounce trout rod. It took me four days to land It. Owing to bad weather, I have no photos to prove it. And on another occasion, I hooked a two-pound trout which fought me a distance of seventeen miles up a stream near Caledon. Mile after mile we struggled, the creek getting smaller and smaller. My frail tackle and the delicate fly hook were almost frayed out. If it hadn’t been for the fact that at last we came to the headwaters of the stream, which were a small spring about two feet in diameter, I never would have landed that beauty. When I put my net under him in that small pool of crystal water, I was scarcely able to see. But the trout was just ready to make the seventeen mile journey back to where we had started.
It is cases like these which go to prove, by exception, just to what extent fishing is a legend, a fiction and a pure fabrication.
By Gregory Clark, June 23, 1923.
You know this freckle-faced, barefoot country boy, with a string of fish dragging on the ground and an old alder pole in his hand?
Have you ever seen him?
Sure you have – in cartoons.
Did you ever see him in the life?
Not likely. For he is only a sentimental fiction.
He is often pictured as selling his string of trout or bass to some perspiring and disappointed city man who is laden with scores of dollars’ worth of expensive fishing tackle.
He is quoted right and left by those who don’t fish for the discomfiture of those who do. If a man goes away for a week-end of bass, and comes home without them because wind or weather were against him, his motoring or gardening or golfing friends crow at him about the freckle-faced country boy with the willow tad who can go out any old time and bring home a string as long as your leg.
This country boy, however, is one of those sentimental fictions of which the world is unfortunately full. Fictions such as this hide the truth and are at the root of half the ills of the universe. This barefoot boy was conceived and is kept alive not by the scoffers, but by the anglers themselves. All good sportsmen like to cover their defeats with good-humored self-derision. When a man goes out for trout, and gets none, he does not blame the wind or the weather, which are really to blame. He blames himself, and says that he passed some freckled urchins on the stream who were getting plenty. When a man will so deride himself, watch out.
With a patience covering many years, I have hunted for one of these country boys I have heard so much about. I would meet boys on the side roads with willow gads and bare feet and freckles, with all the equipment, in fact, except the fish. I have encountered country boys on streams, and they have hung around me for hours watching my methods, trying to learn the secret, and hinting broadly in the hope that I would part with some of my bagfull of beauties.
Up east of Toronto I met four boys striding down the highway towards the lake. There was a likely looking trout stream crossing where we met, and I asked the boys if there were any fish in it.
“No,” they replied. “The on’y fish they is hereabouts is down in the Pickering River. Perch and suckers.”
Having long ago discovered the country boy to be the worst-informed angler in the world, I promptly disembarked at that stream, and as the boys went on with winks and grins, towards the Pickering River, I unlimbered all my tackle.
That evening we met again. From the Pickering River came the four barefoot country boys and their willow gads. One had three dried and miserable little perch on a twig. The other three had nothing.
And I had a bag of twenty as nice trout as ever graced a frying pan.
Needless to say, I didn’t show them my fish. I intended coming back to that creek. No, I admitted I had caught nothing, and they passed proudly up the road with their three perch, grinning derisively, perfectly conforming to the legend of the freckle-faced country boy.
And that’s the way it should be.
I could recount scores of instances such as that one. Like any good fisherman, I can tell them by the hour.
In fact, I am all for organizing a new fishing competition in which, on the first of June each year, the best ten trout fishermen in the National Club, say, or any other such easily sorted institution, would go up to Orangeville, or some such centre, and compete with the ten best barefoot, freckle-faced country boys of that neighborhood. At dawn of the first of June, the two parties would be turned loose on a given township, in which are enough trout creeks to accommodate twenty anglers.
If the country boys win, then the country boy crack can be sprung on all anglers for the current year.
But if the city anglers, with their fancy tackle, win, then the rule would be that the country boy gag be buried for the current year.
These images went with an article about declining manners by Laura Mason.
