At its last annual meeting the Club determined to have an exhibit at
Chicago. It was felt that it would be a pity if at the World's Fair
there was no representation of so typical and peculiar a phase of
American national development as life on the frontier. Accordingly it
was determined to erect a regular frontier hunter's cabin, and to fit it
out exactly as such cabins are now fitted out in the wilder portions of
the great plains and among the Rockies, wherever the old-time hunters
still exist, or wherever their immediate successors, the ranchmen and
pioneer settlers, have taken their places.
The managers of the World's Fair very kindly gave the Club for its
exhibit the wooded island in the middle lagoon. Here the club erected a
long, low cabin of unhewn logs; in other words, a log house of the kind
in which the first hunters and frontier settlers dwelt on the frontier,
whether this frontier was in the backwoods of the East in the days when
Daniel Boone wandered and hunted in Kentucky, or later when Davy
Crockett ranked not only as the best rifle-shot in all Tennessee, but
also as a Whig congressman of note; or whether, as in the times of Kit
Carson, the frontier had been pushed westward to the great plains, while
new settlements were springing up on the Pacific coast and among the
Rockies. The inside fittings of the cabin were just such as those with
which we are all familiar in the ranch-houses and cabins of the
wilderness and of the cattle country. There was a rough table and
settles, with bunks in one corner, and a big open stone fireplace. Pegs
and deer antlers were driven into the wall to support shaps, buckskin
shirts, broad hats, stock-saddles, and the like. Rifles stood in the
corners, or were supported by pegs above the fireplace. Nothing was to
be seen save what would be found in such a cabin in the wilds; and, as a
matter of fact, the various rifles, stock-saddles, and indeed the shaps
and buckskin shirts, too, had all seen active service. Elk- and
bear-hides were scattered over the floor or tacked to the walls. The
bleached skull and antlers of an elk were nailed over the door outside;
the head of a buffalo hung from the mid partition, fronting the
entrance, inside; and the horns of other game, such as mountain sheep
and deer, were scattered about. Without the door stood a white-capped
prairie-schooner, a veteran of long service in cow-camps and on hunting
expeditions.
The exhibit was put in charge of Elwood Hofer, of the Yellowstone
National Park. On June 15 it was formally opened with a club dinner, at
which a number of the gentlemen connected with the World's Fair were
present as guests.
Big-game hunters visiting the Fair must have been especially struck with
the colossal figures of moose, elk, bison, bear, and cougar which guard
the various bridges; some are by Proctor, and some by Kemys. Well worthy
of notice likewise were the groups of mounted big game in the Government
Building, and those put up by Mr. L. L. Dyche in the Kansas State
Building.