“Now, we can go by motor car from Monida right to the mouth of Hell Roaring Cañon, at the foot of Mount Jefferson, and up in there, at the head of that cañon, there is a wide hole in the top of the mountains, where the creek heads that everybody now calls Hell Roaring Creek. J. V. Brower went up in there with a rancher named Culver, who lived at the head of Picnic Creek, at the corner of the Alaska Basin, and Brower wrote a book about it.[4] He called that cañon Culver Cañon, but the name does not seem to have stuck. Now, Culver’s widow, the same Lilian Hackett Culver whose picture Brower prints as the first woman to see the utmost source of the Missouri, still lives on her old homestead, where a full-sized river bursts out from a great spring, right at the foot of a rocky ridge. She’s owner of the river a couple of miles, I guess, down to the second dam.
“She stocked that water, years ago, every kind of trout she could get—native cutthroat, rainbow, Dolly Varden, Eastern brook, steelheads, and I don’t know what all, including grayling—and she has made a living by selling the fishing rights there to anglers who stop at her house. I’ve been there many times.
“I’ve fished a lot everywhere, but that is the most wonderful trout water in all the world, in my belief. I’ve seen grayling there up to three pounds, and have taken many a rainbow over eight pounds; one was killed there that went twelve and one-half pounds. I’ve caught lots of steelheads there of six and seven pounds, and ‘Dollies’ as big, and natives up to ten pounds—there is no place in the West where all these species get such weights.
“They call the place now ‘Lil Culver’s ranch.’ She is held in a good deal of affection by the sportsmen who have come there from all over the country. She is now a little bit of an old lady, sprightly as a cricket, and very bright and well educated. She was from New England, once, and came away out here. She’s a fine botanist and she used to have books and a lot of things. Lives there all alone in a little three-room log house right by the big spring. And she’s the first woman to see the head of the Missouri. Her husband was the first man. That looks sort of like headquarters, doesn’t it?”
“It certainly does!” said Rob. “Let’s head in there. What do you say, Uncle Dick?”
“It looks all right to me,” said Uncle Dick. “That’s right on our way, and it’s close, historically and topographically, to the utmost source. You surely have a good head, Billy, and you surely do know all this country of the Big Bend.”
“I ought to,” said Billy. “Well, then suppose we call that a go? We can fish on the spring creek, and live at Lil Culver’s place; you can drive right there with a car. Then the mail road runs right on east, past the foot of Jefferson Mountain and over the Red Rock Pass—Centennial Pass, some call it—to Henry’s Lake. All the fishing you want over there—the easiest in the world—but only one kind of trout—natives—and they taste muddy now, at low water. Too easy for fun, you’ll say.
“But at the head of Henry’s Lake is a ranch house, what they call a ‘dude place.’ I know the owner well; he’s right on the motor road from Salt Lake to Helena and Butte, and just above the road that crosses the Targhee Pass, east of Henry’s Lake, to the Yellowstone Park.