Angling Echoes Season of Ice Fishing
Angling Echoes Season of Ice Fishing; Emerson Hough (1857-1923) was one of the finest American outdoor writers of his era. Best known for his historical novels like The Mississippi Bubble and 54-40 or Fight, he penned the “Chicago and the West” column for Forest & Stream for many years, introducing many American readers for the first time to the wonders of angling and hunting in the Midwest. In this article, penned for one of the dozen or so Chicago daily newspapers, he gives a beautiful description of what ice fishing was like in the late nineteenth century.-Ed
Season of Ice Fishing
By Emerson Hough
……Indeed, winter is a time of the keenest delight for outdoor
folk. As a season it is all too little understood. The men who growl at winter only advertise their own decadence. It is the men from the winter countries who have done the great things in this world. The land that knows no snow is not the place for a man to live who wants to get the most out of his natural endowment of energy and resource. So far from being a season of “slothful hibernation,” winter may be, and should be, a season of renewal or energy and activity. For some reason best known to the captains of commerce, the summer time has always been that set aside for the vacation season. The average man comes back from a summer vacation more tired than when he went away. He has loafed around some summer resort or breathed the lifeless air of some superheated country, and has gained absolutely nothing in old tissue cast off and new blood made. Quite otherwise is it with the man who has hardihood enough to face the woods and waters in the wintertime when he has a whole uncrowded world all for his own, and a world whose thrice
clean air is free of every disease germ and full of a keen stimulus. The winter sportsman comes home with an increased store of vitality, not with forces depleted and made stale. If employers knew as much as they might know — though it is the habit of employers to believe devoutly that they know everything worth knowing — they would tell such of their employees as wish to get away during the winter season they will best get a real recreation by going north, and not south, on their pleasure journeys.
To Read the article and many great others in this Premier Issue of Angling Echoes in its entirety, please visit https://finandflame.com/angling-echoes/
