With the Indians in the Rockies

by James Willard Schultz

The trail was plain and easy to follow. We picked up the traps, and mounting steadily, arrived at the extreme summit of the great range not long after midday. From where we stood, the trail ran slightly downward, along a narrow divide, across to the next mountain. The south side of the divide was a sheer drop of several thousand feet. The top was a narrow, jagged knife of rock, along which a man could not have passed on foot. On the north side the sharp reef dropped almost precipitously to a narrow and exceedingly steep slope of fine shale rock, which terminated at the edge of a precipice of fearful depth.

It was along this shale slope that the trail ran, but there were no signs of it now, for the tracks of the last horses that passed had been filled. Even while we stood there, small particles of shale were constantly rolling and tinkling down it and off into abysmal space. Shuddering, I proposed that we turn back, but Pitamakan made light of the danger.

"I have been here before, and know what to do," he said. "I can make it so that we can safely cross it."

With a long, thin and narrow slab of rock he began gouging a trail out of the steep slide. The small and the large pieces of detritus which he dislodged rattled off the edge of the cliff, but strain my ears as I might, I could not hear them strike bottom. It was fully a hundred yards across this dangerous place, but Pitamakan soon made his way along it, and back to me.

His path seemed more fit for coyotes than for horses, but he insisted that it was wide enough, and started leading his animal out on it. There was nothing for me to do but to follow with mine. When part way across, my horse's hind feet broke down the little path, and he went with the sliding shale for several feet, all the time madly pawing to get back on the sound portion on which I stood. When I tried to help him by pulling on the lead-rope, the shale began sliding under my feet. At that, Pitamakan, starting to run with his horse, shouted to me to do the same.

For the rest of the way across, the strain on me and my animal was killing. We tore out all trace of the path in our efforts to keep from going down and off the slide. Wherever we put down our feet the shale started slipping, and the struggle to climb faster than it slipped exhausted our strength. When finally we did reach the firm rock where my companion stood waiting, we were utterly fatigued and dripping with sweat.

Pitamakan's face was ashy gray from the strain of watching my struggles. He drew me to him, and I could feel him trembling, while he said, in a choking voice, "Oh, I thought you would never get here, and I just had to stand and look, unable to help you in any way! I didn't know. I should have made a wider, firmer path."

We sat down, and he told me about this pass: that after the winter snows came neither man nor horse could cross it, since the least movement would start the snow sliding. Three Blackfeet had once lost their lives there. In that manner, the avalanche which they loosened had swept them with it over the cliff, to the horror of their comrades who stood looking on. Upon our return, he said, he would make a safe path there, if it took him all day to finish the task.

Soon we went on, turned the shoulder of the twin mountain, and felt that we had come into another world. Near by there were some tremendous peaks, some of them covered with great fields of ice, which I learned later were true glaciers.

In other ways, too, this west side was different from the east side of the Rockies. As far as we could see there were no plains, only one great, dark, evergreen forest that covered the slopes of the mountains and filled the endless valleys. Here, too, the air was different; it was damp and heavy, and odorous of plants that grow in moist climates.