Few and far between are the traces of Moose horns in Pennsylvania.
But they do exist, and probably in some remote farmhouse garret a set
or two are still to be found. The writer, when engaged in antiquarian
studies along the Blue Mountains accidentally learned of the last known
pair. They hung for many years above the front door of Heller's stone
tavern, near the Wind Gap, in Northampton County, once the famous
pathway of the Moose from Northern to Southerly regions. It was related
that Marks John Biddle, a celebrated lawyer of Reading, while stopping
at this tavern, when on a horseback journey, noticed the horns, and
asked about them of the landlord. Old Jacob Heller obliged his guest
by taking them down and letting him measure them. They had a width of
78-1/2 inches and weighed a trifle over 91 pounds. Dr. Hornaday in
his "American Natural History" tells of a Moose killed in the Kenai
Peninsula, Alaska, in 1903, the antlers and skull of which weighed
93-1/2 pounds. The Record Moose Horns in the Field Columbian Museum,
Chicago, weigh about 92 pounds. This Record Moose was taken in the
Kenai Peninsula in 1899. The late Captain F. C. Selous (recently killed
in battle in British East Africa) stated that the antlers of a Moose
which he killed on the McMillan River, Canada, in 1904 had a spread of
66-1/2 inches and weighed 75 pounds.
[Illustration: JOHN Q. DYCE (1830-1904),
A Hunter Who Delighted to Tell of the Times When Moose Were Visitors to
the Wilds of the Keystone State.]
Doubtless the Moose of Colonial days was a much larger animal than any
specimens seen today, even the gigantic so-called "Alaskan" Moose.
By studying the deterioration of European Red Deer, by the actual
measurements of horns in various Continental collections and actual
weights recorded in old-time sportsmen's note books, during the past
three hundred years from antlered giants to puny runts, it is doubtless
the same with our Moose. Like the Red Deer of Europe, the Moose of
America is hunted ruthlessly for exceptional heads, and is no longer
troubled by wolves which formerly pulled down the weakly and imperfect
specimens; result a sure deterioration. That the predatory animals do
not deteriorate in size is proved by the fact that fossil bones of
wolves discovered in England are not any larger than those of European
wolves of the present day. The Wind Gap moose horns were taken, Heller
said, from a Moose which had been driven by dogs at a trot through
the Gap, and at the Easterly end it had staggered and fallen to the
roadway from exhaustion. A farmer named Adam Gross got an improvised
rope and tackle, and swung the huge brute, which he averred weighed at
least a ton, into his barn. It lived only a week, despite all manner
of attentions devoted to it. The dead Moose was propped up astride of
a fodder-shocker and exhibited in Gross's barn as long as the cold
weather lasted. Heller remarked that there was another set of Moose
horns on the out-kitchen of Eckhard's tavern, beyond the Wind Gap, of
similar size, but they were not viewed by Mr. Biddle. Several old men
hanging about the tap-room told Mr. Biddle that the Pennsylvania Moose
was a creature of appalling size, the males often stood eight feet at
the hump, that the spread of the horns was tremendous but the creatures
handled these appendages with great dexterity. Marks John Biddle, let
it be said, was one of the very few gentlemen hunters of his day in
Pennsylvania. In his stable at Reading he had a room fitted up as a
museum, with cases all around the walls filled with stuffed animals and
birds that he had shot. On top of the cases were stuffed panthers, one
of which had a white spot on its breast, and above hung the antlers
of deer and elks. Mr. Biddle was particularly fond of elk hunting,
and is the gentleman who hunted elks "on some barren mountains in
Northwestern Pennsylvania" in company with Mr. Peale of Philadelphia,
which has been so often quoted by natural history writers. De Kay in
his "Natural History of New York" mentions a set of what were probably
Adirondack Moose horns in the Lyceum of Natural History in New York as
being 48 inches in width. Beside the Pennsylvania horns at Heller's
tavern they would have appeared like pygmies. Charles Augustus Murray,
the distinguished English traveller thus describes the Wind Gap.
"From Owego to Easton the country is undulating, wild, wooded and the
soil light and poor. A few miles from the latter town the road passes
through the Blue Ridge of mountains at a point called the Wind-Gap;
and a most noble situation it is for a temple of Aeolus. I know not the
exact elevation, but it is very high, and being the only gorge in the
neighborhood, the wind sweeps through it with tremendous violence."
It may be that in the bleak winds of today can be detected the shrill
whistle of the vanished Moose, the stalwart _Orignal_ of other days. As
stated in previous chapters moose horns were found in St. James Park,
Bradford, about 1819, embedded in the slough of the old salt lick,
another set was dug out of the Tamarack Swamp, in Northern Clinton
County, by a farmer named John Hennessy about 1850, and another set
adorned the lintel of Captain Logan's cabin at Chickalacamoose the
last years of the Eighteenth Century. This last named Moose is said to
have weighed, including antlers, over one thousand pounds after death.
According to some it was killed by Logan himself, by others it was
claimed that pioneers named Smith and Flegal were the slayers. It is
to be hoped that information leading to the discovery of other sets of
Pennsylvania Moose horns will be forthcoming.
[Illustration of mink]