Capt. G. H. Remington, an early gunsmith in the Town of Waterloo, is a native of Rome, New York. In 1872 he established a gun shop in Waterloo in a little frame building which stood at 125 Fourth Street East. In a few years he moved to the west side. In 1876, Captain Remington went to San Francisco, but the following year he returned to Waterloo and opened his shop again in a frame building at the east end of the bridge where the Union Mill elevator now stands.
At this time game birds were becoming very scarce and the wild pigeons which the captain netted were nearly extinct. Accordingly he moved to Kansas.
Prior to Remington's first appearance in Waterloo but few anglers were aware of the value of artificial bait. Remington made spoon hooks and one drizzly day, shortly after he became a resident, he spent about an hour casting with a kidney spoon in Hale's slough, as the bayou a few rods above the east side ice houses was then called, with the result that he captured a dozen large pickerel, several of them weighing about five pounds. His spoon hooks speedily became popular. He made a spoon especially for pike fishing and would wade out below the Fourth Street dam and catch long strings of pike and bass. His shop was headquarters for Al and Jud Page, Mel and Alonzo Vaughn, and other hunters who made a comfortable living in those days shooting ducks, prairie chickens and other game. Many were the hunting yarns spun by Remington's fireside and he never forgot the mad buffalo that tried to climb a tree, according to Vaughn, also Al Page's setter dog "Nip" was another subject. Nip had the misfortune to lose a foot, but it did not interfere with his field work in the least.
Remington was an expert trapper and caught fur in nearly all the streams around Waterloo. When the first thaws occurred in February it was his custom to visit the timber between Waterloo and Cedar Falls in quest of raccoons. These animals emerge from their winter quarters during the first warm days, and when Remington found a 'coon track he would follow it for miles and seldom returned without one or two pelts. He belonged to a class of men who followed the pioneers into the West farther on and it is not strange when civilization became an encroachment upon his hunting grounds that he should move before it. He could locate a bee tree, too, if there was one in the woods and could tell days in advance when the first flocks of young teal would come down from the North.
Remington's wife died shortly after he moved to Kansas and later he married a Chickasaw Indian woman, who also died. Remington is still living in Oklahoma and has married for the third time.
