Down the Yellowstone

by Lewis R. Freeman

Now that "sweetest mother" stuff was ancient stock formula of the fortune-telling faker, and considering what Jim knew of my immediate plans it hardly seemed that he needed to get in touch with his "little friends up thar" to know that there was more than an even break that I was going to be doing some floundering around a big black boat; but how in the deuce did the old rascal know that I was going to meet the one and only "Calamity Jane" the following week in Livingston?

Jim was bubbling with reminiscence when he came out of his averred trance, but only in a gentle and benevolent vein. He claimed that he was able to prove that Curley, the Crow Scout, was not a real survivor of the Custer massacre, but only witnessed a part of the battle from concealment in a nearby coulée. When I pressed him for details, however, he seemed to become suspicious, and switched off to a rather mild version of his meeting with Bob Ingersoll.

"Bob and his family stopped a whole day with me," he said, "and we got to be great friends. His girls came right out here into this kitchen where you are sitting now and helped me wash the dishes. They was calling me 'Uncle Jim' before they had been here an hour. Well, the people down there persuaded Bob to give a lecture in Livingston, and I drove down the whole forty miles to hear it. When the lecture was over Bob came up to me in the Albermarle and asked me what I thought of it. 'Mr. Ingersoll,' said I, 'I don't like to tell you.' 'I like a man that speaks his mind,' says he; 'go on.' 'Well, Mr. Ingersoll,' said I, 'I think you're making a grievous mistake in standing there and hurting the feelings, and shaking the faith, of almost the whole audience, just for the sake of the one or two as thinks as you do.' At first I thought he was going to come back at me, but all of a sudden he laughed right out in his jolly way, and took my arm and said, 'Mr. George, let's have a drink.' Bob, in spite of his pernishus doctrines, was the most lovable man I ever met."

Now this was a very different account of the clash from the one I had heard in Livingston. There I was assured that the debate took place at the Albemarle bar about midnight, and that Jim had Bob's hide on the fence at the end of five minutes of verbal pyrotechnics. But it was characteristic of Jim that he would neither boast nor talk of Injuns during his non-drinking periods. Doubtless, therefore, he was far from doing himself justice in relating the Ingersoll episode. I surely would like to have heard it when the sign of the black bottle was in the ascendant.

Jim admitted a clear remembrance of Kipling's visit, but was chary of speaking of it, doubtless on account of the squaw-at-the-stake story. (His atrocity yarns troubled him more than any other when they came home to roost, so they assured me in Livingston.) Of Roscoe Conkling his impressions were not friendly, even in the benevolence of his present mood. "Conkling caught the biggest fish a tourist ever caught in the Canyon," he said, "He was a great hand with a rod, but, in my candid opinion, greatly over-rated as a public man. He had the nerve to cheat me out of the price of a case of beer. Ordered it for a couple of coachloads of his friends and then drove off without paying for it. Yes, possibly a mistake; but these politicians are slippery cusses at the best."

Our plan of operation for the morrow was something like this: Bill and Herb, the neighbouring ranchers, were to go up and help me push off, while Jim went down to the first fall at the head of the Canyon to be on hand to pilot me through. If I made the first riffle all right, I was to try to hold up the boat in an eddy until Jim could amble down to the second fall and stand-by to signal me my course into that one in turn. And so on down through. Once out of the Canyon there were no bad rapids above Livingston. I was to take nothing with me save my camera. My bags were to remain in Jim's cabin until he had seen me pass from sight below the Canyon. Then he was to return, flag the down train from Cinnabar, and send the stuff on to me at Livingston. Looking back on it from the vantage of a number of years' experience with rough water, that decision to leave the luggage to come on by train was the only intelligent feature of the whole plan.

Steering a boat in swift water with any kind of a stern oar is an operation demanding a skill only to be acquired by long practice. For a greenhorn to try to throw over the head of a craft like Kentucky Mule was about comparable to swinging an elephant by the tail. This fact, which it took me about half a minute of pulling and tugging to learn, did not bother me a whit however. I felt sure the Mule was equal to meeting the Canyon walls strength for strength. I knew I had considerable endurance as a swimmer, and I was fairly confident that a head that had survived several seasons of old style mass-play football ought not to be seriously damaged by the rocks of the Yellowstone. Well, I was not right—only lucky. Not one of the considerations on which my confidence was based really weighed the weight of a straw in my favour. That I came out at the lower end comparatively unscathed was luck, pure luck. Subsequently I paid dearly for my initial success in running rapids like a bull at a gate. In the long run over-confidence in running rough water is about as much of an asset as a millstone tied round the neck. Humility is the proper thing; humility and a deep distrust of the wild beast into whose jaws you are poking your head.

As I swung round the bend above the head of the Canyon I espied old Jim awaiting my coming on a rocky coign of vantage above the fall. A girl in a gingham gown had dismounted from a calico pony and was climbing up to join us. With fore-blown hair and skirt she cut an entrancing silhouette against the sun-shot morning sky. I think the presence of that girl had a deal to do with the impending disaster, for I would never have thought of showing off if none but Jim had been there. But something told me that the exquisite creature could not but admire the sang froid of a youth who would let his boat drift while he stood up and took a picture of the thundering cataract over which it was about to plunge. And so I did it—just that. Then, waving my camera above my head to attract Jim's attention to the act, I tossed it ashore. That was about the only sensible thing I did in my run through the Canyon.

As I resumed my steering oar I saw that Jim was gesticulating wildly in an apparent endeavour to attract my attention to a comparatively rock-free chute down the left bank. Possibly if I had not wasted valuable time displaying my sang froid I might have worried the Mule over in that direction, and headed right for a clean run through. As it was, the contrary brute simply took the bit in her teeth and went waltzing straight for the reef of barely submerged rock at the head of the steeply cascading pitch of white water. Broadside on she sunk into the hollow of a refluent wave, struck crashingly fore and aft, and hung trembling while the full force of the current of the Yellowstone surged against her up-stream gunwale.

Impressions of what followed are considerably confused in my mind, but it seems to me things happened in something like the following order: The pressure on her upper side heeled the Mule far over, so that her boulder ballast began to shift and spill out at the same time the refluent wave from below began pouring across the down-stream gunwale. The more she heeled the more ballast she lost and the more water she shipped. Fortunately most of the boulders had gone before the pin of the stern-sweep broke and precipitated me after the ballast. The few niggerheads that did come streaming in my wake were smooth and round and did not seem to be falling very fast when they bumped my head and shoulders. Certainly I hardly felt them at the time, nor was I much marked from them afterwards.