GREAT WHEAT FARMS
of Mr. Oliver Dalrymple, comprising some 50,000 acres. Continuing westward, we pass, in rapid succession, various flourishing settlements, among them being Valley City, on the Sheyenne river, the judicial seat of Barnes county.
Presently the train descends into the valley of the James, or Dakota, river, and the prosperous city of Jamestown is reached.
From this point a branch line extends northward, ninety miles, to Minnewaukan, at the west end of Devil's Lake. This remarkable body of salt water, with its deeply indented and richly wooded shores, where the briny odor of the ocean mingles with the fragrance of the prairie flower, is surrounded by some of the best farming lands in Dakota. Its attractions for the tourist, angler and sportsman have obtained wide recognition, fish and game being very plentiful, the climate highly salubrious, the scenery picturesque, and the hotel accommodations good. The James river is said to be the longest unnavigable river on the continent, if not in the world, its flow, for hundreds of miles, being distinguished by scarcely any perceptible increase of volume.
Crossing a high table land, 1,850 feet above sea-level, and 950 feet higher than the Red river at Fargo, and known geographically as the Coteaux de Missouri, the train rapidly pursues its way past various large and well-managed farms to Bismarck, the capital of the Territory.
This city has long commanded an important trade with various settlements on the Upper Missouri, the steamboats employed having transported as much as 45,000,000 pounds of freight within a single brief period of navigation. It is the shipping and distributing point of a vast area whose only railroad facilities are those afforded by the great transcontinental line that here crosses the Missouri river. With the various important settlements that have been established in that great tract of country, Bismarck has either stage or steamboat communication. While, however, river navigation is limited to a comparatively short season, the stages run regularly all the year round, having even been known not to miss a single trip, or to be more than a few hours late, during an entire winter.
But it is not the Fargos, the Jamestowns or the Bismarcks with which the tourist chiefly concerns himself. They attract his attention only because of the evidence they afford of the development and stability of the country, and the enterprise of the people, and he is far more interested in the crossing of the Missouri river, than in either of the two cities that frown at each other across its turbid waters.
The bridge, by which the railroad is carried across the great river, here 2,800 feet in breadth, although 3,500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, is a structure of immense strength, and not more substantial than it is graceful. It consists of three spans, each of 400 feet, and two approach spans, each of 113 feet, with a long stretch of strongly built trestle work over the gently sloping west bank of the river.
Here the train runs into Mandan, a pleasant little city, nestling under low ranges of hills which encompass it on three sides. This is the terminus of the Missouri and Dakota divisions of the road. The change from Central to Mountain time is made at this point, and the west-bound traveler sets his watch back one hour.
The country west of the Missouri river presents an entirely different appearance from that through which the tourist has been traveling since he entered the Territory at Fargo. It is more diversified; its numerous streams, with handsome groves of cottonwood upon their banks, meandering through pleasant valleys, clothed, where still uncultivated, with that nutritious bunch grass, which, but a few short years ago, made them the favorite feeding grounds of the buffalo. The vast beds of lignite coal that underlie this portion of the Territory crop out at various points, twelve car loads being mined daily at Sims, 35 miles west of Mandan, for shipment by rail. The most important settlements on this division of the road are Gladstone and Dickinson.
Twenty miles west of the latter town, the line enters the singular and picturesque region known as the Bad Lands of the Little Missouri. For a full hour the train pursues its way through scenery of which the whole world is not known to afford any counterpart.
The product of natural forces, still working to the same end, the picture that meets the astonished gaze of the traveler, suggests, where it does not utterly bewilder, either supernatural agency or the operation of laws whose reign has ceased. Reasonable hypotheses all failing, one's imagination connects the weird and mysterious scene with some early geologic epoch when, perchance under the brooding darkness of night, the yet plastic earth was tortured by some wild spirit of Caprice into the fantastic forms in which we see it to-day. But evidences of intelligent design are not altogether wanting, and we turn from mounds of wonderful regularity and symmetry of form, standing like Egyptian pyramids, to reproductions of the frowning battlements of Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein, or the dome and towers of some great cathedral.
Marvelous as they are, however, these forms and outlines excite even less astonishment than the wealth of coloring in which they are arrayed. Composed largely of clay, solidified by pressure, and converted into terra-cotta by the slow combustion of underlying masses of lignite, each dome and pyramid and mimic castle is encircled with chromatic bands presenting vivid and startling contrasts. Huge petrifactions and vast masses of scoria contribute to the weirdness of the scene, and, as if to complete its plutonic appearance, smoke goes up unceasingly from unquenchable subterranean fires.
It is a mistake to suppose that these lands are worthless for agricultural or stock-raising purposes. The valleys and ravines are covered with nutritious grasses, and thousands of cattle may be seen grazing where the buffalo and other herbivorous wild animals were wont to roam in days gone by. The term “Bad Lands” is a careless and incomplete translation of the designation bestowed upon the country by the early French voyageurs, who described it as “mauvaises terres pour traverser.”
At the crossing of the Little Missouri, the Marquis de Mores, a wealthy young French nobleman, has established the headquarters of an extensive stock raising and dressed meat shipping business.
From this point, Medora, excursions may be made to Cedar Cañon, one of the most interesting localities in the Bad Lands; or to the burning mine, where may be seen, raging, perhaps the most extensive of the subterranean fires of the entire region. It is also a good point from which to start out on hunting expeditions, large game being by no means exterminated.
Sixteen miles beyond the Little Missouri, the train passes Sentinel Butte, a lofty peak rising precipitously from the plain on the south side of the railroad. One mile more and the Montana boundary is crossed, at an elevation of 2,840 feet above sea-level.
In crossing the great Territory of Dakota, the tourist has traveled 367 miles; in traversing that of Montana, he performs a journey of no less than 800 miles, almost equivalent to the distance from New York to Indianapolis. Fortunately, the luxurious appointments of the train render weariness well nigh impossible, and the trip hourly becomes more interesting and enjoyable.
At Glendive, 692 miles from St. Paul, the road enters the valley of the Yellowstone, the windings of which famous river it follows, more or less closely, for 340 miles.
The valley, from five to ten miles in width, is inclosed by high bluffs of clay and sandstone, their curious formations occasionally reminding the traveler of the Bad Lands, though they have but little variety of color.
If the Red River of the North may justly be regarded as the true Arimaspes, the Yellowstone may, with equal propriety, be designated the modern Amphrysus. It is upon its banks and those of its tributaries that there has been developed, since the opening of the Northern Pacific Railroad, that vast grazing interest which has given Montana as great a reputation for its stock as Dakota has for its wheat.
For many years,—up to and including the winter of 1881–82,—this was the finest buffalo hunting country on the continent. But the slaughter that season was enormous, 250,000 hides being shipped East, principally from Miles City. Few have been seen since that time. There are hunters who believe that small herds might still be found north of the international boundary; but, so far as the United States is concerned, the buffalo is practically extinct. There is, however, a small herd in the National Park. Safe from the hunter's deadly repeater, they will probably multiply rapidly, as it may be supposed that they will soon know instinctively the limits within which they are unmolested.
Miles City, a few years ago the principal rendezvous of the hunter, is now the great resort of the grazier and cowboy, it being the metropolis of the stock interest of the Territory.
The development of this interest within recent years has been as rapid as that of wheat raising in Dakota, and the economist who should turn to the United States census reports for 1880 for the present condition of any considerable section of the Northwest would be led seriously astray.
In 1880, Montana contained 490,000 cattle and 520,000 sheep. According to a recent report of the Governor of the Territory, it contains, at the present time, 900,000 cattle, 1,200,000 sheep, and 120,000 horses. The grazing interests of the West are moving steadily toward Eastern Montana; for, so rapidly do cattle thrive on the nutritious grasses of these northern valleys, that a yearling steer is worth $10 more in Montana than in Texas.
Glendive, already mentioned as the point at which the railroad enters the Yellowstone valley, is second only to Miles City in importance as a shipping and distributing point. It is also a divisional terminus of the railroad.
Two miles west of Miles City is Fort Keogh, one of the largest and most beautiful military posts in the United States. It was established in 1877 by Gen. Nelson A. Miles, as a means of holding in check the warlike Sioux. There are but few Indians to be seen now along the line of the railroad, and those are engaged in agricultural and industrial pursuits. The extinction of the buffalo has rendered the Indian much more amenable to the civilizing influences brought to bear upon him than he formerly was, and very fair crops of grain are now being raised at the various agencies. At the Devil's Lake Agency, 60,000 bushels of wheat were raised in 1885, and purchased by the United States Government at $1 per hundred pounds. The Crows, along the northern border of whose reservation—nearly as large as the State of Massachusetts—the road runs for two hundred miles, are said to be the richest nation in the world, in proportion to their numbers, their wealth aggregating $3,500 per head. This, however, is due to the natural increase of their live stock, chiefly ponies, rather than to their own industry and thrift.
Out amid the solitudes of the far Northwest—for it must not be supposed that the entire country is a succession of settlements—it is wonderful with what interest the traveler regards that trivial event of daily occurrence, the meeting of the east-bound train. But, as he peers through the car window, or stands out on the platform, in critical survey of its passengers, it probably does not occur to him that he is as much an object of curiosity to them as they are, each of them, to him. He represents the far East of this great continent, they the far West. He, perchance, is making his first trip to the Pacific slope, they theirs to the Great Lakes or the Atlantic coast. Among them, however, may be distinguished merry groups of returning tourists, while, reclining in a luxurious Pullman car, or tempting dyspepsia with the rich and varied dainties of the dining car, may be seen one of the early settlers of California, a weather-beaten pioneer, who reached the Pacific slope by way of the Horn, twenty years ahead of the first transcontinental railway, and now goes east, by the Wonderland route, to revisit the scenes of his childhood.
VIEWS OF “OLD FAITHFUL” GEYSER, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK.
Twenty-nine miles east of Billings, the next divisional terminus and important trading point on the line of the road, the traveler will observe, rising from the right bank of the river, a huge mass of sandstone, interesting as bearing upon its face the name of William Clarke, cut in the rock by the veteran explorer himself, when he visited the locality in 1806. He will, about the same time, be able dimly to descry the peaks of the Big Snow Mountains, which, at first scarcely distinguishable from the fleecy clouds that hang around them, subsequently loom up grandly, constituting one of the most beautiful pieces of scenery in the Northwest.
The disciple of Izaak Walton will not have traveled 225 miles along the banks of the Yellowstone without having seen many an inviting spot for indulgence in what his great master called the most calm, quiet and innocent of all recreations. His arrival, therefore, at Billings, the largest town on the upper river, and the metropolis—notwithstanding that it has a population of only 2,000—of a region larger than Maine, South Carolina, West Virginia or Indiana, affords a not unfitting opportunity for a brief reference to the incomparable trout fishing afforded by the numerous streams accessible from points on the Montana and Yellowstone divisions of the road.
The Yellowstone river itself, west of Billings, has no superior as a trout stream. It contains trout of four distinct varieties, and fishing is so easy as at times to be in danger of losing its charm. The individual scores of various tourists, reported in the American Angler during the summer and fall of 1885, and not containing any that were phenomenally large, averaged twenty-five trout per hour for each rod, a record with which the most ardent angler ought surely to be satisfied. A majority of these scores were made in the vicinity of Livingston, near which town another visitor is reported to have caught twenty-one fine, large trout “after supper,” while two others are stated to have brought in 160 as the result of “a day's sport.” The Yellowstone also contains a gamey fish known to local anglers as grayling, but pronounced by Mr. W. C. Harris to be the whitefish (Corregonus tullibee). That gentleman refers, in a recent article, to the abundance, in these waters, of the celebrated “cut-throat” trout, whose size and abundance, in conjunction with the picturesqueness of its habitat, will, he adds, when generally known, “make a visit to the Yellowstone imperative to the angler who aspires to a well-rounded life as a rodster.” Among other waters, mention may be made of Rosebud Lake, a beautiful spot reached by wagon from Billings, where the trout fishing is declared to be splendid; Little Rosebud Creek, near Stillwater, where eighty-seven trout are reported to have been caught in four hours with a single rod; Prior Creek, near Huntley; Mission Creek, twelve miles east of Livingston; and Sixteen-Mile Creek, sixteen miles from Townsend, all of which are said by visitors to afford excellent sport.
It must not, however, be supposed that the angler enjoys a monopoly of sport in this country of varied attractions; for grouse and ducks are plentiful, as are also, on the mountain ranges, deer, elk and antelope.
Passing Springdale, where the traveler will observe hacks in readiness to convey visitors to Hunter's Hot Springs, two and one-half miles distant, the train approaches, amid scenery increasing in grandeur, the little city of Livingston. Whatever interest may, in the near future, attach to this place as a resort of the gentle brotherhood from all parts of the continent, it will certainly fall short of that which will belong to it as the gateway of that world-renowned region, the