The Yellowstone Park is a perfect little world of wonders. They call it the "New Wonderland," and there are as many strange things to be found in it as "Alice" saw in her fairy realm.
On reaching Livingston, we take a train which runs southward to within six miles of the entrance to the Park. Soon after leaving the station we pass through a grand cañon of towering rocks called "The Gate of the Mountains," and then through pleasant valleys, always near the beautiful Yellowstone river.
We then pass, on our right, Cinnabar Mountain, which rises to a height of about 2,000 feet above the river; a broad streak of red down the mountain is called "The Devil's Slide," and suggests at the same time that his black majesty in sliding down must have had a rough time of it.
The terminus of the line is at a place called Cinnabar City, which at present contains about twelve shanties; several of these are drinking saloons. From Cinnabar we take a stage-coach and six horses for the drive, through some very grand scenery, to the "Mammoth Springs Hotel." The driver of this stage is a fellow of infinite wit, and tells marvellous stories in a manner which kept us on a roar the whole way. I wish I could give you, in his own style and words, the story of a corpse which he once carried on his coach.
"THE GATE OF THE MOUNTAINS."
"Once," said he, "I was driving a coach down in Utah—a sixty-mile drive. One night a corpse came along, packed in a leaden coffin, and then in a wooden one, and then in a box. They fixed him on the top of the stage. Of course we had no passengers; who would want to travel with a corpse if they could help it? It was a bitter cold and pitchy dark night, sometimes snowing and raining, with lightning and thunder. The way that blessed corpse kept rolling backwards and forwards on the top of the coach was, I tell you, pretty scaring. For about thirty miles the road ran along the side of a mountain. You bet I whipped them horses along, and my off-wheels travelled in the air most of the way. I got to the end of my journey two hours quicker than I ever done that journey before. I am not a bit superstitious; but driving a corpse all alone over the mountains on a night like that isn't very lively. If I had known the party in the box it might have been different, but we were strangers. Next time a corpse comes along wanting a ride with me, I guess he'll have to walk. I never want to drive another."
Charlie told us that he was once the driver of a circus coach—
"And I tell you," said he, "that was an experience! The pay wasn't much, a hundred dollars a month or so; the rest was made up by appropriation! I had a trunk full of things when I started, but I hadn't been driving a week before everything was gone out of it, and then they stole the trunk. I had nothing left but what I stood up in, and I asked a fellow-driver what I was to do. 'Do?' says he; 'why don't you take a coat?' The next hotel we stopped at, 'Circus Bill,' that was his name, stood round and unhooked a splendid buffalo coat. I wore that coat all winter, and then sold it in the spring to a Mormon in Salt Lake City for seventy-five dollars, which about repaid me for the loss of my own trunk. I once knew two of them fellows who got drunk and stole their own blankets, and were locked up for it!"
