THROUGH THE YELLOWSTONE PARK TO FORT CUSTER.
CONCLUDING PAPER.
It was about 8.30 a. m. before the boat was found, some travellers having removed it from the place where Baronette had cachéd it. A half hour sufficed to wrap a tent-cover neatly around the bottom and to tack it fast on the thwarts. Then two oblongs of flat wood were nailed on ten feet of pine-stems and called oars; and, so equipped, we were ready to start.
We had driven or ridden hundreds of miles over a country familiar to any one who chooses to read half a dozen books or reports; but, once across the Yellowstone, we should enter a region of which little has been written since Lewis and Clarke wandered across the head-waters of the Missouri in 1805, and had their perils and adventures told anonymously by one who was to become famous for many noble qualities of mind and heart, for great accomplishments and unmerited misfortunes.[A]
Two or three of us sat on the bluff enjoying our after-breakfast pipes and watching the transport of our baggage. The gray beach at our feet stretched with irregular outline up the lake, and offered one prominent cape whence the boat started for its trips across the stream. By 10.30 all the luggage was over, and then began the business of forcing reluctant mules and horses to swim two hundred yards of cold, swift stream. The bell-mare promptly declined to lead, and only swam out to return again to the shore. Then one or two soldiers stripped and forced their horses in, but in turn became scared, and gave it up amidst chaff and laughter. At last a line of men, armed with stones, drove the whole herd of seventy-five animals into the water with demoniac howls and a shower of missiles. Once in, they took it calmly enough, and, the brave little foal leading, soon reached the farther bank. One old war-horse of recalcitrant views turned back, and had to be towed over.
Finally, we ourselves crossed, and the judge and I, leaving the confusion behind us, struck off into some open woods over an indistinct trail. Very soon Major Gregg overtook us, and we went into camp about 4 p. m. on a rising ground two miles from the lake, surrounded by woods and bits of grass-land. Here Captain G. and Mr. E. left us, going on with Mr. Jump for a two days' hunt.
Next day, at 7 a. m., we rode away over little prairies and across low pine-clad hills, and saw to right and left tiny parks with their forest boundaries, until, after two miles, we came to Pelican Creek, a broad grayish stream, having, notwithstanding its swift current, a look of being meant by Nature for stagnation. As we followed this unwholesome-looking water eastward we crossed some quaking, ill-smelling morasses, and at last rode out on a spacious plain, with Mounts Langford, Doane and Stevenson far to the south-east, and Mount Sheridan almost south-west of us. The first three are bold peaks, while about them lie lesser hills numberless and nameless. The day seemed absolutely clear, yet the mountains were mere serrated silhouettes, dim with a silvery haze, through which gleamed the whiter silver of snow in patches or filling the long ravines. Striking across the plain, we came upon a tent and the horses of Captain G. and Mr. E., who were away in the hills.
Thence we followed the Pelican Valley, which had broadened to a wide meadowy plain, and about ten miles from the camp we began a rough ride up the lessening creek from the level. The valley was half a mile wide, noisome with sulphur springs and steam-vents, with now and then a gayly-tinted hill-slope, colored like the cañon of the Yellowstone. Some one seeing deer above us on the hills, Dr. T., Mr. K. and Houston rode off in pursuit. Presently came a dozen shots far above us, and the major, who had followed the hunters, sent his orderly back for pack-mules to carry the two black-tailed deer they had killed. After a wild scramble through bogs we began to ascend a narrow valley with the creek on our left. Jack Baronette "guessed some timber might have fell on that trail." Trail there was none in reality, only steep hillsides of soft scoriæ, streaming sulphur-vents and a cat's cradle of tumbled dead trees. Every few minutes the axes were ringing, and a way was cleared; then another halt, and more axe-work, until we slipped and scrambled and stumbled on to a little better ground, to the comfort of man and beast.
Eighteen miles of this savage riding brought us to our next camp, where, as the shooting was said to be good and the cattle needed rest, it was decided to remain two days. Our tents were pitched on a grassy knoll overlooking the main valley, which was bounded by hills of some three or four hundred feet high, between which the Pelican ran slowly with bad water and wormy trout, though there was no lack of wholesome springs on the hill.
Mr. C. and Mr. T. went off with Jack, and Mr. K. with Jump, to camp out and hunt early. The night was clear, the thermometer down to 24° Fahrenheit, and the ice thick on the pails when we rose. One of our parties came in with six deer: the captain and Mr. C. remained out. The camp was pleasant enough to an idling observer like myself, but it was not so agreeable to find the mountain-side, where Mr. T. and I were looking for game, alive with mosquitos. I lit on a place where the bears had been engaged in some rough-and-tumble games: the ground was strewed with what the lad who was with us asserted to be bears' hair. It looked like the wreck of a thousand chignons, and proved, on inspection, to be a kind of tawny-colored moss!
All night long, at brief intervals, our mules were scared by a dull, distant noise like a musket-shot. A soldier told me it was a mud volcano which he had seen the day we arrived. I then found it marked on Hayden's map, but learned that it had not been seen by him, and was only so located on information received from hunters. On the morning of August 1st I persuaded the major to walk over and look for the volcano. We crossed the valley, and, guided by the frequent explosions, climbed the hills to the east, and, descending on the far side, came into a small valley full of sluggish, ill-smelling rills, among which we found the remarkable crater, which, as it has not been hitherto examined by any save hunters, I shall describe at some length.
A gradual rising ground made up of soft sulphureous and calcareous earth was crowned by a more abrupt rise some thirty-five feet high, composed of tough gray clay. This was pierced by a cone of regular form about thirty feet across at top and five feet at the bottom. On the west, about one-third of the circumference was wanting from a point six feet above the lowest level, thus enabling one to be at a distance or to stand close by, and yet see to the bottom of the pit. The ground all around and the shrubs and trees were dotted thick with flakes of dry mud, which gave, at a distance, a curious stippled look to the mud-spattered surfaces. As I stood watching the volcano I could see through the clouds of steam it steadily emitted that the bottom was full of dark gray clay mud, thicker than a good mush, and that, apparently, there were two or more vents. The outbreak of imprisoned steam at intervals of a half minute or more threw the mud in small fig-like masses from five to forty feet in air with a dull, booming sound, sometimes loud enough to be heard for miles through the awful stillness of these lonely hills. It is clear, from the fact of our finding these mud-patches at least one hundred yards from the crater, that at times much more violent explosions take place. The constant plastering of the slopes of the crater which these explosions cause tends to seal up its vent, but the greater explosions cleanse it at times, and all the while the steam softens the masses on the sides, so that they slip back into the boiling cauldron below. As one faces the slit in the cone there lies to the right a pool of creamy thin mud, white and yellow, feebly boiling. It is some thirty feet wide, and must be not more than twenty feet from the crater: its level I guessed at sixteen feet above that of the bottom of the crater.
After an hour's observation near to the volcano I retired some fifty feet, and, sheltering myself under a stunted pine, waited in the hope of seeing a greater outbreak. After an hour more the boiling lessened and the frequent explosions ceased for perhaps fifteen minutes. Then of a sudden came a booming sound, followed by a hoarse noise, as the crater filled with steam, out of which shot, some seventy-five feet in air, about a cartload of mud. It fell over an area of fifty yards around the crater in large or small masses, which flattened as they struck. As soon as it ended I walked toward the crater. A moment later a second squirt shot out sideways and fell in a line athwart the mud-pool near by, crossing the spot where I had been standing so long, and covering me, as I advanced, with rare patches of hot mud. Some change took place after this in the character and consistency of the mud, and now, at intervals, the curious spectacle was afforded of rings of mud like the smoke-rings cast by a cannon or engine-chimney. As they turned in air they resembled at times the figure 8: once they assumed the form of a huge irregular spiral some ten feet high, although usually the figures were like long spikes, or, more rarely, thin formless leaves, and even like bats or deformed birds.
I walked back over the hills to camp, where we found Captain G. and the commissary with the best of two deer they had shot. Later, Mr. C. and Mr. K. came in with four elk, so that we were well supplied. Of these various meats the deer proved the best, the mountain-sheep the poorest. The minimum of the night temperature was 34° Fahrenheit. At eighty-five hundred feet above tide the change at sundown was abrupt. Our camp-fires had filled the little valley with smoke, and through it the moon rose red and sombre above the pine-clad outlines of the eastward hills.
The next day Mr. E. and I, who liked to break the journey by a walk, started early, and, following a clear trail, soon passed the mules. We left Pelican Creek on our right, and crossed a low divide into a cooly,[B] the valley of Broad Creek: a second divide separated this from Cañon Creek, both of which enter the Yellowstone below the falls.
After some six miles afoot over grassy rolling plains and bits of wood, the command overtook us, and, mounting, we followed the major for an hour or two through bogs and streams, where now and then down went a horse and over went a trooper, or some one or two held back at a nasty crossing until the major smiled a little viciously, when the unlucky ones plunged in and got through or not as might chance.
About twelve some of us held up to lunch, the train and escort passing us. We followed them soon through dense woods, and at last up a small brook in a deep ravine among boulders big and small. At last we lost the trail at the foot of a slope one thousand feet high of loose stones and earth, from the top of which a cry hailed us, and we saw that somehow the command had got up. The ascent was very steep, but before we made it a mule rolled down. As he was laden with fresh antelope and deer meat, the scattering of the yet red joints as he fell made it look as if the poor beast had been torn limb from limb; but, as a packer remarked, "Mules has got an all-fired lot of livin' in 'em;" and the mule was repacked and started up again. "They jist falls to make yer mad, anyway," added the friendly biographer of the mule.
The sheer mountain-side above us was not to be tried mounted; so afoot, bridle in hand, we started up, pulling the horses after us. I had not thought it could be as hard work as it proved. There was a singular and unfeeling lack of intelligence in the fashion the horse had of differing with his leader. When the man was well blown and stopped, the horse was sure to be on his heels, or if the man desired to move the horse had his own opinion and proved restive. At last, horses and men came out on a bit of level woodland opening into glades full of snow. We were eighty-four hundred feet in air, on a spur of Amethyst or Specimen Mountain. We had meant, having made eighteen miles, to camp somewhere on this hill, but the demon who drives men to go a bit farther infested the major that day; so presently the bugle sounded, and we were in the saddle again, and off for a delusive five-mile ride. As Mr. G. Chopper once remarked, "De mile-stones to hebben ain't set no furder apart dan dem in dis yere land;" and I believed him ere that day was done.
The top of this great hill, which may be some ten thousand feet in height, is large and irregular. Our trail lay over its south-eastern shoulder. After a little ride through the woods we came out abruptly on a vast rolling plain sloping to the north-east, and broadening as it fell away from us until, with intervals of belts of wood, it ended in a much larger plain on a lower level, quite half a mile distant, and of perhaps one thousand acres. About us, in the coolies, the "Indian paint-brush" and numberless flowers quite strange to us all so tinted the dried grasses of these little vales as to make the general hue seem a lovely pink-gray. Below us, for a mile, rolled grassy slopes, now tawny from the summer's rainless heat, and set with thousands of balsam-firs in groups, scattered as with the hand of unerring taste here and there over all the broad expanse. Many of them stood alone, slim, tall, gracious cones of green, feathered low, and surrounded by a brighter green ring of small shoots extending from two to four feet beyond where the lowest boughs, touching the earth, were reflected up from it again in graceful curves. On all sides long vistas, bounded by these charming trees, stretched up into the higher spurs. Ever the same flowers, ever the same amazing look of centuries of cultivation, and the feeling that it would be natural to come of a sudden on a gentleman's seat or basking cows, rather than upon the scared doe and dappled fawn which fled through the coverts near us. We had seen many of these parks, but none like this one, nor any sight of plain and tree and flowers so utterly satisfying in its complete beauty. It wanted but a contrast, and, as we rode through and out of a line of firs, with a cry of wonder and simple admiration the rudest trooper pulled up his horse to gaze, and the most brutal mule-guard paused, with nothing in his heart but joy at the splendor of it.
At our feet the mountain fell away abruptly, pine-clad, and at its base the broad plain of the East Branch of the Yellowstone wandered through a vast valley, beyond which, in a huge semicircle, rose a thousand nameless mountains, summit over summit, snow-flecked or snow-clad, in boundless fields—a grim, lonely, desolate horror of rugged, barren peaks, of dark gray for the most part, cleft by deep shadows, and right in face of us one superb slab of very pale gray buttressed limestone, perhaps a good thousand feet high. I thought it the most savage mountain-scenery I had ever beheld, while the almost feminine and tender beauty of the parks which dotted these wild hills was something to bear in remembrance.
But the escort was moving, the mules crowding on behind our halted column; so presently we were slipping, sliding, floundering down the hillside, now on steep slopes, which made one a bit nervous to ride along; now waiting for the axemen to clear away the tangle of trees crushed to earth by the burden of some year of excessive snow; now on the horses, now off, through marsh and thicket. I ask myself if I could ride that ride to-day: it seems to me as if I could not. One so fully gets rid of nerves in that clear, dry altitude and wholesome life that the worst perils, with a little repetition, become as trifles, and no one talks about things which at home would make a newspaper paragraph. Yet I believe each of us confessed to some remnant of nervousness, some special dread. Riding an hour or two at night in a dense wood with no trail is an experiment I advise any man to try who thinks he has no nerves. A good steep slope of a thousand feet of loose stones to cross is not much more exhilarating: nobody likes it.
The command was far ahead of two or three of us when we had our final sensation at a smart little torrent near the foot of the hill, a tributary of the main river. The horses dive, in a manner, into a cut made dark by overgrowth of trees, then down a slippery bank, scuttle through wild waters surging to the cinche, over vast boulders and up the farther bank, the stirrups striking the rocks to left or right, till horse and man draw long breaths of relief, and we are out on the slightly-rolling valley of the East Yellowstone, and turn our heads away from Specimen Mountain toward Soda Butte.
Captain G. and I, who had fallen to the rear, rode leisurely northward athwart the open prairie on a clear trail, which twice crossed the shallow river, and, leaving the main valley, carried us up a narrowing vale on slightly rising ground. On either side and in front rose abrupt mountains some two thousand feet above the plain, and below the remarkable outline of Soda Butte marked the line of the Park boundary. Near by was a little corral where at some time herdsmen had settled to give their cattle the use of the abundant grasses of these well-watered valleys. When there are no Indian scares, the cattle herdsmen make immense marches in summer, gradually concentrating their stock as the autumn comes on and returning to the shelter of some permanent ranche. The very severity and steadiness of the winters are an advantage to cattle, which do not suffer so much from low temperature as from lack of food. Farther south, the frequent thaws rot the dried grasses, which are otherwise admirable fodder, but in Montana the steady cold is rather preservative, and the winds leave large parts of the plains so free from snow that cattle readily provide themselves with food.
The cone of Soda Butte stands out on the open and level plain of the valley, an isolated beehive-shaped mass eighty feet high, and presenting a rough appearance of irregular courses of crumbled gray stone. It is a perfectly extinct geyser-cone, chiefly notable for its seeming isolation from other deposits of like nature, of which, however, the nearer hills show some evidence. Close to the butte is a spring, pointed out to us by the major's orderly, who had been left behind to secure our tasting its delectable waters, which have immense credit as of tonic and digestive value. I do not distinctly recall all the nasty tastes which have afflicted my palate, but I am quite sure this was one of the vilest. It was a combination of acid, sulphur and saline, like a diabolic julep of lucifer-matches, bad eggs, vinegar and magnesia. I presume its horrible taste has secured it a reputation for being good when it is down. Close by it kindly Nature has placed a stream of clear, sweet water.
A mile or so more brought us (August 3d) to camp, which was pitched at the end of the valley of Soda Butte. We had had eleven hours in the saddle, and had not ridden over twenty-eight or thirty miles. The train came straggling in late, and left us time to sharpen our appetites and admire the reach of grassy plain, the bold brown summits around us, and at our feet a grass-fringed lake of two or three acres. This pond is fed by a quick mountain-stream of a temperature of 45° Fahrenheit, and the only outlet is nearly blocked up by a tangled network of weeds and fallen timber which prevents the fish from escaping. The bottom is thick with long grasses, and food must be abundant in this curious little preserve. The shores slope, so that it is necessary to use a raft to get at the deep holes in the middle.
At breakfast next morning some one growled about the closeness of the night air, when we were told, to our surprise, that the minimum thermometer marked 36° as the lowest night temperature. Certain it is, the out-of-door-life changes one's feelings about what is cold and what is not. While we were discussing this a soldier brought in a five-pound trout taken in the lake, which so excited the fishermen that presently there was a raft builded, and the major and Mr. T., with bare feet, were loading their frail craft with huge trout, and, alas! securing for themselves a painful attack of sunburn. I found all these large trout to have fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, but no worms. They took the fly well.
August 5th, under clear skies as usual, we struck at once into a trail which for seventeen miles might have been a park bridle-path, a little steeper, and in places a little boggy. Our way took us east by north into Soda Butte Cañon, a mile wide below, and narrowing with a gradual rise, until at Miner's Camp it is quite closely bounded by high hillsides, the upper level of the trail being over eight thousand feet above the sea. The ride through this irregular valley is very noble. For a mile or two on our left rose a grand mass of basalt quite two thousand feet in height, buttressed with bold outlying rocks and presenting very regular basaltic columns. A few miles farther the views grew yet more interesting, because around us rose tall ragged gray or dark mountains, and among them gigantic forms of red, brown and yellow limestone rocks, as brilliant as the dolomites of the Southern Tyrol. These wild contrasts of form and color were finest about ten miles up the cañon, where lies to the west a sombre, dark square mountain, crowned by what it needed little fancy to believe a castle in ruins, with central keep and far-reaching walls. On the brow of a precipice fifteen hundred feet above us, at the end of the castle-wall, a gigantic figure in full armor seemed to stand on guard for ever. I watched it long as we rode round the great base of the hill, and cannot recall any such striking simulation elsewhere. My guides called it the "Sentinel," but it haunted me somehow as of a familiar grace until suddenly I remembered the old town of Innspruck and the Alte Kirche, and on guard around the tomb of the great Kaiser the bronze statues of knight and dame, and, most charming of all, the king of the Ostrogoths: that was he on the mountain-top.
Everywhere on these hills the mining prospector has roamed, and on the summit of the pass we found a group of cabins where certain claims have been "staked out" and much digging done. As yet, they are as profitable, by reason of remoteness, as may be the mines in the lunar mountains. With careless glances at piles of ore which may or may not be valuable, we rode on to camp, two miles beyond—not very comfortably, finding water scarce, some rain falling and a great wealth of midges, such as we call in upper Pennsylvania "pungies," and needing a smudge for the routing of them. The night was cold and dewy, and our sufferers were wretched with sunburn.
The doctor and George Houston here left us, and went on to a salt-lick famous for game, but this proved a failure, some one having carelessly set fire to the tract. Indeed, in summer it is hard not to start these almost endless fires, since a spark or a bit of pipe-cinder will at once set the grasses ablaze, to the destruction of hunting and the annoyance of all travellers, to whom a fire is something which suggests man, and the presence of man needs, sad to say, an explanation. At 6 a. m., August 6th, Captain G. and the lad Lee also went off on a side-trail after game, and with lessened numbers we broke camp rather late, and rode into dense woods down a steady descent on a fair trail. The changes of vegetation were curious and sudden—from pines and firs to elders, stunted willows and sparse cottonwood bending over half-dry beds of torrents, with vast boulders telling of the fierce fury of water which must have undermined, then loosened and at last tumbled them from the hillsides. These streams are, in the early spring, impassable until a cold day and night check the thaw in the hills, and thus allow the impatient traveller to ford.
Gradually, as we rode on, the hills to our left receded, and on our right the summits of Index and Pilot stood up and took the morning—long, straggling volcanic masses of deep chocolate-brown, black as against the crystalline purity of cloudless blue skies, rising in the middle to vast rugged, irregular cones fourteen thousand feet above tide. From the bewildering desolateness of these savage peaks the eye wanders to the foot-hills, tree-clad with millions of pines, and lower yet to the wide valley of the West Branch of Clarke's Fork of the Yellowstone, through which a great stream rushes; and then, beyond the river, park over park with gracious boundaries of fir and pine, and over all black peak and snow-clad dome and slope, nameless, untrodden, an infinite army of hills beyond hills. The startling combination of black volcanic peaks with gray and tinted limestone still makes every mile of the way strange and grand. In one place the dark rock-slopes end abruptly in a wall of white limestone one hundred to two hundred feet high and regular as ancient masonry. A little below was a second of these singular dikes, which run for twenty miles or more.
On a rising ground where we halted to lunch a note was found stating that Dr. T., failing to find game at the salt-lick, had gone on ahead. While lingering over our lunch in leisurely fashion, encircled by this great mass of snow and blackness, an orderly suddenly rode up to hasten us to camp, as Indian signs had been seen down the valley. In a moment we were running our horses over a sage-plain, and were soon in camp, which was pitched on the West Branch in the widening valley. Dr. T. and George Houston, it appeared, had seen a column of smoke four miles below on a butte across the river. As the smoke was steady and did not spread, like an accidental fire, it seemed wise to wait for the party. There being no news of Indians, and no probability of white travellers, it was well to be cautious. It might be a hunters' or prospectors' camp, or a rallying-signal for scattered bands of Sioux, or a courier from Fort Custer. The doubt was unpleasant, and its effect visible in the men, two of whom already saw Indians.
"See 'em?" says Jack. "Yes, they're like the Devil: you just doesn't see 'em!"
While we pitched camp sentinels were thrown out, and two guides went off to investigate the cause of the fire. Houston came back in two hours, and relieved us by his statement that no trails led to the fire, and that its probable cause was the lightning of the storm which had overtaken us in camp the day before.
As the day waned the tints of the great mountains before us changed curiously. Of a broken chocolate-brown at noon, as the sun set their eastern fronts assumed a soft velvety look, while little purple clouds of haze settled in the hollows and rifts, fringing with tender grays the long serrated ridges as they descended to the plain. As the sun went down the single huge obelisk of Pilot Mountain seemed to be slowly growing upward out of the gathering shadows below. Presently, as the sun fell lower, the base of the mountain being swarthy with the growing nightfall, all of a sudden the upper half of the bleak cone yet in sunshine cast upward, athwart the blue sky, upon the moisture precipitated by the falling temperature, a great dark, broadening shaft of shadow, keen-edged and sombre, and spreading far away into measureless space—a sight indescribably strange and solemn.
The next day's ride down Clarke's Fork still gave us morass and mud and bad trails, with the same wonderful views in the distance of snow-clad hills, and, nearer, brown peaks and gray, with endless limestone dikes. We camped at twelve on Crandall's Creek, a mile from the main branch of Clarke's Fork of the Yellowstone, and learned from the guides that no fish exist in these ample waters. The doubts I at first had were lessened after spending some hours in testing the matter. Strange as it may seem, and inexplicable, I am disposed to think the guides are right. We saw two "cow-punchers," who claimed to be starving, and were questioned with some scepticism. In fact, every stranger is looked after sharply with the ever-present fear of horse-thieves and of the possibility of being set afoot by a night-stampede of the stock. Our hunting-parties were still out when I started next morning at 8.30 to climb a huge butte opposite our camp. I reached the top at about twelve, and found on the verge of a precipice some twenty-five hundred feet above the vale a curious semicircle of stones—probably an Indian outlook made by the Nez Percés in their retreat. Sitting with my back against it, I looked around me. A doe and fawn leapt away, startled from their covert close by. Never, even in the Alps, have I so felt the sense of loneliness—never been so held awestruck by the silence of the hills, by the boundlessness of the space before me. No breath of air stirred, no bird or insect hovered near. Away to the north-west Pilot and Index rose stern and dark; across the valley, to the north, out of endless snow-fields, the long regular red-and-yellow pyramid of Bear Tooth Mountain glowed in vivid light with amazing purity of color; while between me and it the hills fell away, crossed by intersecting bands of dark firs, and between marvellous deceits of fertile farm-lands, hedges and orchards. Here and there on the plain tiny lakes lit up the sombre grasses, and lower down the valley the waters of Clarke's Fork, now green, now white with foam, swept with sudden curve to the north-east, and were lost in the walls of its cañon like a scimitar half sheathed. On my right, across the vast grass-slopes of this great valley, on a gradual hill-slope, rose the most remarkable of the lime dikes I have seen. It must enclose with its gigantic wall a space of nearly two miles in width, in the centre of which a wild confusion of tinted limestone strata, disturbed by some old convulsion of Nature, resembles the huge ruins of a great town.
Soon after my return to camp, C. and the doctor came in with great triumph, having slain four bears. I was not present on this occasion, but I am inclined to fancy, as regards the doctor, that he verily believed the chief end and aim of existence for him was to kill bears, while C. had an enthusiasm of like nature, somewhat toned down.
After a wild ride on cayooses across Clarke's Fork and on the glowing pink side-slopes of Bear Tooth, and a camp in the hills, the ponies, which are always astray, were caught, and a game-trail followed among the mountains. Suddenly, Houston, in a stage-whisper, exclaimed, "We've got him! He's an old buster, he is!" He had seen a large gray bear—improperly called a grizzly—feeding a mile away in a long wide cooly. A rough, scrambling ride under cover of a spur, amid snow-drifts and tumbled trees, enabled the bear-hunters to tie up their ponies and push on afoot. If a man desire to lose confidence in his physical powers, let him try a good run with a Winchester rifle in hand nine thousand feet above tidewater. Rounding the edge of a hill and crossing a snow-drift, they came in view of Bruin sixty yards away. He came straight toward them against the wind, when there appeared on the left Bruin No. 2, to which the doctor directed his attention. Both bears fell at the crack of the rifles, and with grunt and snort rolled to the foot of the cooly. Houston climbed a snowbank to reconnoitre, aware, as there were no trees to climb, that an open cooly was no good place in which to face wounded bears. Away went the doctor.
"Let them alone, doctor," said Houston. "Hold up! That valley's full of bears." For he had seen a third.
The doctor paused a moment, and then there was a rush down the slope. A second shot finished one bear, and then began a running fight of a mile, in which wind was of more value than courage. Finally, Bruin No. 2 stopped. Leaving C. to end his days, the doctor and Houston pursued No. 3. As the bear grew weak and they approached him, the doctor's excitement and Houston's quite reasonable prudence rose together.
"Don't go down that cooly, doctor."
Then a shot or two, a growl, and the doctor gasping, "Do you think I left my practice to let that bear die in his bed?"
"Well, the place is full of bears," said George; and so on they went, now a shot and now a growl, and then a hasty retreat of Bruin, until, utterly blown and in full sight of his prey, the unhappy doctor murmured in an exhausted voice, "Give me one cool shot, George."
"Darn it!" replied George, "who's been warming your shots?"
And this one cool shot ended the fray. Returning, they found the judge had driven his bear into a thicket, and, having probably taken out a ne exeat or an injunction, or some such effective legal remedy against him, awaited reinforcements. As George and the doctor arrived the bear moved out into the open, and was killed by a final shot.
Mr. Jump informs us that one gets an awful price out of the Chinese for bear-galls; and it is the judge's opinion that at this supreme moment the doctor would have taken a contract to supply all China with bile of Bruin. I suspect our friend George has since told at many a camp-fire how the doctor's spurs danced down the coolies, and how the judge corralled his bear.
We broke camp August 10th at four, after a night of severe cold—27° Fahrenheit—but perfectly dry and dewless. E. and I, as usual, pushed on ahead across Lodge Pole Creek, and so down the valley of Clarke's Fork. An increasing luxury of growth gave us, in wood or swamp, cottonwood, alder, willow, wild currants and myriads of snow-white lilies, and, in pretty contrast, the red or pink paint-brush. Losing Pilot and Index as the windings of the main valley hid them, and leaving them behind us, we began to see rocks of bright colors and more and more regular walls of silvery gray stone. At last the widening valley broadened, and from it diverged five valleys, like the fingers from a hand, each the bed of a stream. As we turned to the left and crossed the wildly-rolling hills, and forded Clarke's Fork to camp by Dead Indian Creek, the novelty and splendor of this almost unequalled view grew and grew. As I close my eyes it comes before me as at the call of an enchanter. From the main valley the outlook is down five grass-clad valleys dotted with trees and here and there flashing with the bright reflection from some hurrying stream. The mountains between rise from two to ten thousand feet, and are singular for the contrasts they present. The most distant to the right were black serrated battlements, looking as if their darkness were vacant spaces in the blue sky beyond. The next hill was a mass of gray limestone, and again, on the left, rose a tall peak of ochreous yellows, sombre reds and grays. The hill above our camp was composed of red and yellow rocks, fading below to gray débris, bounded beneath by a band of grasses, and below this another stratum of tinted rock; and so down to the plain. The side-view of this group showed it to be wildly distorted, the strata lying at every angle, coming out against the distant lava-peaks and the green slopes below them in a glory of tenderly-graded colors.
It seems as if it should be easy to describe a landscape so peculiar, and yet I feel that I fail utterly to convey any sense of the emotions excited by the splendid sweep of each valley, by the black fierceness of the lava-peaks thrown up in Nature's mood of fury, by the great "orchestra of colors" of the limestone hills, and by a burning red sunset, filling the spaces between the hills with hazy, ruddy gold, and, when all was cold and dark, of a sudden flooding each grim lava-battlement with the dim mysterious pink flush of the afterglow, such as one may see at rare times in the Alps or the Tyrol. In crossing the heads of these valleys, some day to be famous as one of the sights of the world, we forded Clarke's Fork, the major, Jack and I being ahead. We came out on the far side upon a bit of strand, above and around which rose almost perpendicularly the eroded banks of the stream, some fifteen feet high. While the guides broke down the bank to allow of our horses climbing it, I was struck with a wonderful bit of water. To my right this tall bank was perforated by numerous holes, out of which flowed an immense volume of water. It bounded forth between the matted roots and welled up below from the sand, and, higher up the bank, had, with its sweet moisture, bribed the ready mosses to build it numerous green basins, out of which also it poured in prodigal flood.
At this point, Dead Indian, we at first decided to await the looked-for scout, but on the next morning the major resolved to leave a note on a tripod for Mr. T., still out hunting, and to camp and wait on top of Cañon Mountain above us. So we left the noisy creek and the broken tepees of Joseph and the Nez Percés, and the buffalo and deer-bones and the rarer bones of men, and climbed some twenty-four hundred feet of the hill above us: then passed over a rolling plain, by ruddy gravel-hills and grasses gray- or pink-stemmed, to camp, on what Mr. Baronette called Cañon Mountain, among scattered groups of trees having a quaint resemblance to an old apple-orchard. Here we held counsel as to whether we should wait longer for the scout, push on rapidly to Custer, or complete our plans by turning southward to see the Black Cañon of the Big Horn River. Our doubt as to the steam-boats, which in the autumn are few and far between, and our failing provisions, decided us to push on to the fort. Having got in all our parties, with ample supplies of game, we started early next day to begin the descent from these delightful hills to the plains below. We rode twenty-eight miles, descending about thirty-seven hundred feet over boundless rolling, grass-clad foot-hills, behind us, to the left, the long mountain-line bounding the rugged cañon of Clarke's Fork, and to the right a march of lessening hills, and all before us one awful vast gray, sad and silent plain, and in dimmest distance again the gray summits about Pryor's Gap. The space before us was a vast park, thick with cactus and sage-brush, lit up here and there—but especially at the point where the cañon sets free the river on to the plain—by brilliant masses of tinted rocks or clays in level strata overlapping one another in bars of red, silver, pink, yellow and gray. With a certain sense of sadness we took a last look at these snowy summits rising out of their green crowns of pine and fir, and, bidding adieu to the wholesome hills, rode on to the grim alkali plain with the thermometer at 92°.
And now the days of bad water had come, each spring being the nastiest, and the stuff not consoling when once down, but making new and unquenchable thirst, and leaving a vile and constant taste of magnesia and chalk. And thus, over sombre prairies and across a wicked ford—where, of course, the captain and T. got their baggage wet—and past bones of men on which were piled stones, and the man's breeches thrown over these for a shroud or as a remembrance of the shrivelled thing below being human, we followed the Nez Percés' trail, to camp at four by the broad rattling waters of Clarke. Jack reported Indians near by—indeed saw them: guessed them to be Bannocks, as Crows would have come in to beg. Sentinels were thrown out on the bluffs near us and the stock watched with redoubled care.
I think every man who has camped much remembers, with a distinct vividness, the camp-fires. I recall happy hours by them in Maine and Canada and on the north shore of Lake Superior, and know, as every lover of the woods knows, how each wood has its character, its peculiar odors—even a language of its own. The burning pine has one speech, the gum tree another. One friend at least who was with me can recall our camps in Maine,
Where fragrant hummed the moist swamp-spruce,
And tongues unknown the cedar spoke,
While half a century's silent growth
Went up in cheery flame and smoke.
The cottonwood burns with a rich, ruddy, abundant blaze and a faint pleasant aroma. Not an unpicturesque scene, our camp-fire, with the rough figures stretched out on the grass and the captain marching his solemn round with utterly unfatigable legs, Jack and George Houston good-humoredly chaffing, and now and again a howl responsive to the anguish of a burnt boot. He who has lived a life and never known a camp-fire is—Well, may he have that joy in the Happy Hunting-grounds!
The next day's ride was only interesting from the fact that we forded Clarke's Fork five times in pretty wild places, where, of course, Captain G. and the doctor again had their baggage soaked. The annoyance of this when, after ten hours in the saddle, you come to fill your tobacco-bag and find the precious treasure hopelessly wet, your writing-paper in your brushes, the lovely photographs, a desolated family presented on your departure, brilliant with yellow mud—I pause: there are inconceivable capacities for misery to be had out of a complete daily wetting of camp-traps. I don't think the captain ever quite got over this last day's calamity, and I doubt not he mourns over it to-day in England.
The ride of the next two days brought us again to rising ground, the approach to Pryor's Gap. On the 13th I rode on ahead with George Houston, and had an unsuccessful buffalo-hunt. We saw about forty head, but by no device could we get near enough for effective shooting. I had, however, the luck to kill a buck antelope and two does. Rejoining the command in great triumph, I found Jump, to my amusement, waving over his head a red cotton umbrella which some wandering Crow had dropped on the trail. The umbrella being, from the Crow point of view, a highly-prized ornament, it was not strange to find it on our trail. In an evil moment I asked Jump to hand it to me. As he did so it fell, open, over the nose of my cayoose. As to what happened I decline to explain: there have been many calumnies concerning what Mr. Jump called "that 'ere horse-show."
On this day we rode through the last range of considerable hills, past a vast rock which meant "medicine" of some kind for the Indian, as its clefts were dotted with sacrificial beads, arrows and bits of calico. A brief scramble and a long descent carried us through Pryor's Gap, and out again on to boundless plains, thick with the fresh dung of the buffaloes, which must have been here within two days and been hurried southward by Crow hunting-parties. This to our utter disgust, as we had been promised abundance of buffalo beyond Pryor's Gap.
A thirty-mile march brought us to a poor camp by a marshy stream. Man and beast showed the effects of the alkaline waters, which seemed to me more nasty every day. There is no doubt, however, that it is possible to become accustomed to their use, and no lands are more capable of cultivation than these if the water be sufficient for irrigation. The camp was enlivened by an adventure of the major's, which revenged for us his atrocious habit of rising at 3 a. m. and saying "Now, gentlemen!" as he stood relentless at the tent-doors. C. and I had found a cañon near by about one hundred feet deep and having a good bathing stream. As we returned toward it at evening we saw the gallant major standing barelegged on the edge of the cañon, gesticulating wildly, his saddle-bags and toilette matters far below beside the creek. Still suffering with the sunburn, he had been cooling his feet in the water preparatory to a bath, when, lo! a bear standing on his hind legs eating berries at a distance of only about fifteen feet! The major promptly availed himself of the shelter offered by the bank of the stream; but once there, how was he to escape unseen? The water was cold, the bear big, the major shoeless. Perhaps a bark simulative of a courageous dog might induce the bear to leave. No doubt, under such inspirations, it was well done. The bear, amazed at the resources of the army, fled—alas! not pursued by the happy major, who escaped up the cañon-wall, leaving his baggage to a generous foe, which took no advantage of comb or toothbrush. How the whole outfit turned out to hunt that bear, and how he was never found, I have not space to tell more fully.
All of twelve hours the next day we rode on under a blinding sunlight, a cloudless sky, over dreary, rolling, dusty plains, where the only relief from dead grasses was the gray sage-brush and cactus, from the shelter of which, now and again, a warning rattle arose or a more timid snake fled swiftly through the dry grasses. Tinted cones of red and brown clays or toadstool forms of eroded sandstone added to the strange desolateness of the view; so that no sorrow was felt when, after forty miles of it, we came upon a picturesque band of Crows with two chiefs, Raw Hide and Tin Belly.
It was an amazing sight to fresh eyes—the clever ponies, these bold-featured, bareheaded, copper-tinted fellows with bead-decked leggins, gay shirts or none, and their rifles slung in brilliantly-decorated gun-covers across the saddle-bows. We rode down the bluffs with them to the flat valley of Beauvais Creek, where a few lodges were camped with the horses, twelve hundred or more, in a grove of lordly cottonwood—a wild and picturesque sight. Tawny squaws surrounded us in crowds, begging. A match, a cartridge, anything but a quill toothpick, was received with enthusiasm. I rode ahead to the ford of the Beauvais Creek, and met the squaws driving in the cayooses. Altogether, it was much like a loosely-organized circus. Our own camp being set, we took our baths tranquilly, watched by the squaws seated like men on their ponies. One of them kindly accepted a button and my wornout undershirt.
The cottonwood tree reigns supreme throughout this country wherever there is moisture, and marks with its varied shades of green the sinuous line of every water-course. Despised even here as soft and easily rotted, "warping inside out in a week," it is valuable as almost the sole resource for fuel and timber, and as making up in speed of growth for a too ready rate of decay. Four or five years' growth renders it available for rails, and I should think it must equal the eucalyptus for draining moist lands. Many a pretty face is the more admired for its owner's wealth, and were the now-despised cottonwood of greater market-value it could not, I think, have escaped a reputation for beauty. A cottonwood grove of tall trees ten to eighteen feet in diameter, set twenty to forty feet apart, with dark-green shining leaves spreading high in air over a sod absolutely free of underbrush, struck such of us as had no Western prejudices as altogether a noble sight. Between Forts Custer and Keogh the cottonwoods are still finer, and what a mocking-bird is among birds are these among trees—now like the apple tree, now like the olive, now resembling the cork or the red-oak or the Lombardy poplar, and sometimes quaintly deformed so as to exhibit grotesque shapes,—all as if to show what one tree can do in the way of mimicking its fellows.
To our delight, General Sheridan's old war-scout, Mr. Campbell, rode in with letters at dusk, and we had the happiness to learn that our long absence had made ill news for none of us. By six next day we were up and away to see the great Crow camp, which we reached by crossing a long ford of the swift Big Horn River. There were one hundred and twenty lodges, about one thousand Crows, about two thousand dogs and as many ponies. I think it was the commissary who dared to say that every dog could not have his day among the Crows, as there would not be enough days to go round; but surely never on earth was such a canine chorus. It gave one a respect for Crow nerves. Let me add, as a Yankee, my veneration for the Crow as a bargainer, and you will have the most salient ideas I carried away from this medley of dogs, horses, sullen, lounging braves with pipes, naked children warmly clad with dirt, hideous squaws, skin lodges, medicine-staffs gay with bead and feathers, and stenches for the describing of which civilized language fails.
Crossing a branch of the Big Horn, we rode away again over these interminable, lonely grass-plains; past the reaping-machines and the vast wagons, with a dozen pairs of oxen to each, sent out to gather forage for the winter use of the fort; past dried-up streams, whitewashed with snowy alkaline deposits, cheating the eye at a distance with mockery of foaming water. Still, mile on mile, across rolling lands, with brief pause at the river to water horses, scaring the gay little prairie-dogs and laughing at the swift scuttle away of jack-rabbits, until by noon the long lines of Custer came into sight.
These three days of sudden descent from high levels to the terrible monotony of the thirsty plains, without shade, with the thermometer still in the nineties, began to show curiously in the morale of the outfit. The major got up earlier and rode farther: our English captain walked more and more around the camp-fire. On one day the coffee gave out, and on the next the sugar, and everything except the commissary's unfailing good-humor, which was, unluckily, not edible. Mr. T. rode in silence beside the judge, grimly calculating how soon he could get a railroad over these plains. Even the doctor fell away in the "talk" line. Says Mr. Jump: "These 'ere plains ain't as social as they might be." Some one is responsible for the following brief effort to evolve in verse the lugubrious elements of a ride over alkali plains with failing provender, weary horses, desiccating heat and quenchless thirst:
Silent and weary and sun-baked, we rode o'er the alkaline grass-plains,
Into and out of the coolies and through the gray green of the sage-brush—
All the long line of the horses, with jingle of spur and of bridle,
All the brown line of the mule-train, tired and foot-sore and straggling;
Nothing to right and to left, nothing before and behind us,
Save the dry yellowing grass, and afar on the hazy horizon,
Sullen, and grim, and gray, sunburnt, monotonous sand-heaps.
So we rode, sombre and listless, day after day, while the distance
Grew as we rode, till the eyeballs ached with the terrible sameness.
By this time the command was straggling in a long broken line, all eyes set on the fort, where, about 1.30, we dismounted from our six hundred miles in the saddle to find in the officers' club-room a hearty welcome and the never-to-be-forgotten sensation of a schooner of iced Milwaukee beer. From Fort Custer we rode a hundred and thirty miles in ambulances to Fort Keogh. This portion of our journey took us over the line to be followed by the Northern Pacific Railroad, and gave us a good idea of the wealthy grass-lands, capable of easy irrigation, bordering the proposed line of rail. The river is navigable to Custer until the middle of September, and in wet seasons still later. Already, much of the best land is taken up, and we were able to buy chickens if we could shoot them, and eggs and potatoes, the latter the best I have seen in any country. The river is marked by ample groves of superb cottonwoods and by immense thickets of the wild prairie-rose and moss-rose, while the shores are endlessly interesting and curious, especially the left bank, on account of the singular forms of the mud and sandstone hills, along which, in places, lie for miles black level strata of lignite. At Fort Keogh we took a steamer to Bismarck, whence we travelled by rail on the Northern Pacific road, reaching home September 9th. We had journeyed sixty-five hundred miles—on horses, six hundred; by ambulances, four hundred; by boat, six hundred and seventy-five.
S. Weir Mitchell, M. D.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Nicholas Biddle.
[B] A little valley—probably from the French coulisse, a narrow channel.