PART II
DOWN THE YELLOWSTONE
CHAPTER I
PRESENT-DAY YELLOWSTONE PARK
In embarking anew on a journey from the Continental Divide to the mouth of the Mississippi I was influenced by three considerations in deciding to start on the Yellowstone rather than on one of the three forks of the Missouri. There was the sentimental desire to see again the land of geysers and hot springs and waterfalls, no near rival of which had I ever discovered in twenty years of travel in the out-of-the-way places of the earth. Then I wanted to go all the way by the main river, and there was no question in my mind that the Yellowstone was really the main Missouri, just as the Missouri was the main Mississippi. John Neihardt has put this so well in his inimitable "River and I" that I cannot do better than quote what he has written in this connection.
"The geographer tells us that the mouth of the Missouri is about seventeen miles above St. Louis, and that the mouth of the Yellowstone is near Buford, North Dakota. It appeared to me that the fact is inverted. The Missouri's mouth is near Buford, and the Yellowstone empties directly into the Mississippi. I find that I am not alone in this opinion. Father de Smet and other early travellers felt the truth of it; and Captain Marsh, who has piloted river craft through every navigable foot of the entire system of rivers, having sailed the Missouri within sound of the Falls and the Yellowstone above Pompey's Pillar, feels that the Yellowstone is the main stem and the Missouri a tributary.
"Where the two rivers join, even at low water, the Yellowstone pours a vast turbulent flood, compared with which the clear and quieter Missouri appears an overgrown rain-water creek. The Mississippi after some miles obliterates all traces of its great western tributary; but the Missouri at Buford is entirely lost in the Yellowstone within a few hundred yards. All of the unique characteristics by which the Missouri River is known are given it by the Yellowstone—its turbulence, its tawniness, its feline treachery, its giant caprices."
I cannot agree with Mr. Neihardt that the Mississippi obliterates the Missouri within a few hundred yards, or even a few hundred miles; for in all but name it is the latter, not the former, that mingles its mud with the Gulf of Mexico. But in his contention that the Yellowstone is the dominant stream where it joins the Missouri he is borne out by all that I saw and the opinion of every authority I talked with, from a half-breed river-rat at Buford to the Army engineers at Kansas City.