28 August: In the morning, drizzling rain. We stayed in the house until nine o’clock. At eight o’clock the hunters went out. They wanted to check the bear traps immediately. Several wagons were loaded with shingles. They are a major source of livelihood for the local farmers in the forest. The wood of the white pine (Pinus strobus) is used to make these shingles. These people steal most of the wood for this purpose. There are wooded areas here whose owners live far away and are not seriously concerned about their forests, and thus, where there is no supervision, they take the wood. In one day a man can make 300 to 400 shingles, which people buy locally for one half-dollar, or fifty cents, per hundred. At Bethlehem, 42 [miles] from here, the best shingles cost eleven dollars per thousand. Two varieties of these wood panels are made here: German shingles, first made by Germans, which are regarded as the best ones; and English. The former are equally thick on both sides lengthwise; the latter are thicker on one side than on the other. [Page 1:76]Many persons who have no other work for their horses drive here themselves and fetch them; others are hauled to the buyer. Among the wooden buildings here on the Poconos, the schoolhouse stands out. It is 10 to 12 feet in width and length, a small hut made from boards, with a little iron stove. Some of the remaining dwellings are log cabins, some made of boards, all of them roofed with shingles.

At ten o’clock we went to the house where the bear had been caught the day before yesterday to see the bear trap. The owner of the house had invited us here so that he could accompany us. He was now at his sawmill in the wild forest, and we were to follow him there. The path led through a desolate wilderness of felled trees and very soon entered the dense, lofty forest of Canadian hemlocks, beeches, chestnuts, and other tall sturdy trees. Here there was a genuine wilderness. Bare tree roots crisscrossed the path, in which there were large stones. Thick trunks lay rotting in disarray. We soon reached the sawmill on Tunkhannock Creek, which rushes wildly through old broken-down trunks of Canadian hemlock and deciduous timber. The surrounding area is a real wilderness for bears, where blackberries, Smilax, and other thorny plants tear one’s clothing. With every step we had to climb over old fallen trunks, something for which one of my shinbones had already had to suffer.

The man was occupied making some repairs on his mill dike. The rain fell steadily. We returned to the habitation of the man, who took his rifle in order to lead us to the trap. From the beginning we went through a dense underbrush of blackberries in the tall forest, climbed over fallen tree trunks, got very wet, and reached the part of the tall forest that was more open near the ground. Here, however, even more fallen trees lying in all directions formed a Ridingeresque wilderness for bears. Tall Canadian pine (hemlock pine) and sturdy beeches of great thickness with equally massive chestnut trees formed a dark forest. There, after again struggling through several areas with blackberries and other bushes, we came down to the place where the bear had been caught two days before.

On a spot somewhat cleared of big trunks, the trap stood between young hemlocks. It was a genuine deadfall made of heavy trunks in such a way that a young bear can be captured in it alive. It consists of two trunks lying on the ground, between which two others, supported by a trigger [‘d’], fall, as the sketch here shows[Page 1:77] [see fig. 3.5]. The entire trap is concealed on all sides with branches, and all the parts of the trap must retain their bark. The head of the recently caught bear had been placed in the trap as bait. We wanted to have it, and the man therefore took it out and fastened the animal’s lungs in its place. Then we returned, delighted by our excursion into this bear wilderness in the immediate vicinity of human habitations.

We found several interesting plants that were new to us: a beautiful Viburnum with large roundish leaves (Viburnum lentago?) and the European Oxalis acetosella, which grew in the moss on the decaying trunks of this primeval forest. Woodpeckers hammered away in this solitude. We obtained the Picus villosus,M30This bird bears a great resemblance to our great spotted woodpecker (Picus major) but has no red on its rump. and several small birds were around us. The thrushes were very numerous in the cultivated field before the forest and on all the fences. In the afternoon our hunters returned but brought nothing with them. Later, for two and three-quarter dollars, I bought another hide of a bear that had been killed 15 miles from here last week. The hunters found four bears together in the blueberries and shot two of them, the old female and a young one; if they had had dogs, they would have gotten all of them. This morning we had also eaten some of the bear meat and had found it similar to mutton.

The hunters I had hired included a drunkard who drank here all day, the following night, and the next morning after he had received his pay. He slept off his drunkenness on a table and constantly bragged. Here there were, indeed, an accumulation of such persons who hang out in the so-called barroom. In America, drinking among country people is more common than in Europe; they drink bad spirits made from grain (whiskey). Our just-mentioned hunter lived in the direct vicinity in a wretched hovel. There are very many of these here, some of which are very small and of flimsy construction. The stables for cattle, pigs, and sheep are often not completely caulked; the wind blows straight through them, for the logs (tree trunks) have wide gaps between them. Often, too, these stalls have half collapsed. The pigs graze around them, and a triangular collar has been fastened around their necks so that they cannot squeeze through fences. In all these areas, small, elevated seedbeds for garden plants are seen beside every house; that is, the seeds are sown in a structure made of boards that stands on four posts, somewhat as tobacco is sown, because otherwise the common flea beetles consume all the plants. From this box the seedlings are later planted in the ground. No maple sugar is extracted anywhere in this area, because the tree seldom grows here.

On the upper side of the place where we stayed, there was a nice, tall beech forest with splendid, sturdy trees. Here pheasants liked to congregate in the undergrowth. We got two of these birds, but we completely failed to achieve our main goal, because we obtained neither deer nor bear. At the home of the other Sachs, there were also heath hens (grouse, Tetrao cupido). These, however, are found only at this one place. There they said in the German dialect of the region: “Here there are Hersch [deer], Buschhinkel [heath hens], and Fasanden [ruffed grouse],” of which, however, only the last strayed into our zoological collection.