“One winter while I was trapping in upper Michigan I lost my gun while crossing a treacherous stream, and if I could not have killed porcupines, fool-hens, and snowshoe rabbits with a club, I should have had to pull out of the country and leave my traps and furs.”
When they arrived at camp, Tim was wild at the sight of the giant paddle-fish, and the boys found that the odd paddle-shaped snout of the fish was almost half the length of the fish.
“What does he do with his big paddle?” Tim wanted to know. But neither the Indian nor the trapper could answer the question.
“Have they a paddle when they are just hatched?” Bill asked, but neither Tatanka nor Barker had ever seen a paddle-fish less than a foot long.
The life of the paddle-fish or spoonbill is a mystery to this day, and little more is known of it now than was known to Indians and whites when Bill and Tim camped on Lake Pepin.
The armor-plated gars and paddle-fish are found only in the Mississippi and its tributaries, while bass and pickerel and eel are found in most waters flowing into the North Atlantic, both in America and Europe.
Both gar and spoonbill are still caught in Lake Pepin. A European fish, the German carp, has become naturalized in the Mississippi basin and many carloads of it are shipped to Eastern markets every year. However, the game fish of the old days are still all there and will never become scarce, if good fish and game laws are wisely administered.
In the days of Barker and Tatanka, fishing with any kind of net or tackle was lawful, but to-day both commercial fishermen and anglers have to observe the laws, or our lakes and streams will become fished out; for the resources and gifts of nature are not inexhaustible, and the number of men and boys who go fishing increases each year.
For fishing, camping, and canoeing, for grand scenery, for house-boating, motor-boating, for trees, flowers, and birds and for all kinds of water creatures such as clams, crayfish and muskrats, the Mississippi, the “Everywhere River” of the Chippewa Indians, has no equal on the northern hemisphere and is surpassed only by the Amazon of South America.
In the Itasca Forest of Minnesota, the Mississippi begins as a tiny stream, which sometimes loses itself in a tamarack swamp, and which the beaver people, the little animal engineers, can easily dam with mud and brush. When it leaves Itasca, it is large enough to carry a canoe. But the rippling little creek grows rapidly by receiving the water from many lakes and streams and long before it reaches Minneapolis, where it furnishes power to grind the wheat grown over half a continent, it is a stately navigable river, whose enormous volumes of flood-water only the most skillful engineer can control.