For many months Chauvin repeated to our friends the extraordinary circumstances of my lip and eyes swelling up from a yellow jacket’s sting on the finger.  He had hunted and trapped all his life, but could not get over that one incident.

What we had expected to be a pleasant outing proved to be rather a hard experience, but we were too old at the game not to have enjoyed it, and do you realize that after we got rested up, we felt better for our experience?  Life in the open, the change of air, the excitement of hunting, all united in sweeping the cobwebs from our brains and left us better prepared for the battle of life than we were before we started.

Professor “Lo,” Philosopher

My Interview with an Educated Indian in the Wilds of Oregon: 

In the summer of 1902 I was camping, in company with the late Judge Sterry of Los Angeles, on Spring Creek in the Klamath Indian Reservation in Southeast Oregon.  Spring Creek rises out, of lava rocks and flows in a southeasterly direction, carrying over 200,000 inches of the clearest, coldest water I ever saw.  In fact, its waters are so clear that the best anglers can only catch trout, with which the stream abounds, in riffles, that is where the stream runs over rocks of such size as to keep the surface in constant commotion, thus obscuring the vision of the fish.

Two miles, or thereabouts, from its source, Spring Creek empties into the Williamson River.  The Williamson rises miles away in a tule swamp, and its waters are as black as black coffee.  Where the two streams come together, the dark waters of the Williamson stay on the left hand side of the stream, going down, and the clear waters of Spring Creek on the right hand side, for half a mile or more.  Here some rapids, formed by a swift declivity of the stream, over sunken boulders, cause a mixup of the light and dark waters, and from there on they flow intermingled and indistinguishable.

Nine miles down stream, the Sprague River comes in from the left.  It is as large as the Williamson, and its waters are the color of milk, or nearly so.  The stream flows for miles over chalk beds and through chalk cliffs, which gives its waters their weird coloring.  The union of the waters of the Williamson and the Sprague Rivers results in the dirty, gray coloring of the waters of Klamath Lake, into which they empty, and of the Klamath River, which discharges the lake into the Pacific Ocean.

Killican.

The place where the Williamson is joined by the Sprague is known as the “Killican.”  The stream here flows over a lava bottom and is quite wide, in places very deep and in places quite shallow.  There seemed to be quite an area of this shallow water.  The shallow places suddenly dropped off into pools of great depth, and it was something of a stunt to wander around on the shallow bed rock and cast off into the pools below.  I tried it and found the lava as smooth and slippery as polished glass.