Down the Yellowstone - Lewis R. Freeman

I descended to the river at several points in the Canyon, but found it quite impossible to proceed down stream any distance in the bottom of the gorge. The fall is tremendous all the way through and I doubt if there are many stretches of over a few hundred yards in length in which a boat could live. The total fall from the Lake to the foot of the Grand Canyon is something like three thousand feet, probably not far from a hundred feet to the mile. I cannot recall offhand a river of so great a volume anywhere in the world that has so considerable a fall. The Indus, in the great bend above Leh, in Ladakh, may approximate such a drop, and so may the Brahmaputra, where it cleaves the main range of the Himalayas after passing Lhassa. The Yangtse, where it comes tumbling down from the Tibetan plateau into Szechuan, is hardly more than a mountain torrent. With the possible exception of the main affluents of the Upper Amazon in the Peruvian Cordillera, these are the only great rivers in the running for a record of this kind.

In walking from the Grand Canyon to Mammoth Hot Springs I followed the road over Mount Washburn, stopping for the night at Camp Roosevelt, below Tower Falls. This most recently established of the Park camps takes its name from the fact that it is located on the spot where Roosevelt and John Burroughs made headquarters on the occasion of their winter tour of the Yellowstone a decade and a half ago. The best fishing in the Park is found in this section, and for that reason the management has developed and maintained it very largely as a sporting camp. Only those with a really genuine love of the out-of-doors stop there, while the regular ruck of the tourists pass it by. Those facts alone set it apart in a class by itself as the pleasantest spot in the Park for a prolonged sojourn.

On account of the class of people it attracts, Roosevelt has been made rather a pet of the management from its inception. This is especially true of personnel. The wholly charming couple—a Kentucky gentleman and his wife—whom I found in charge last summer presided over the camp as over a country home in the Blue Grass. The staff—all college boys and girls—was practically a complete Glee Club in itself. Good sports, too. Roosevelt was the only camp at which I did not find myself consumed with longing for the primeval solitude of the Park as I had known it on my winter tour—during the closed season for tourists.

Mammoth Hot Springs, in spite of the passing of Fort Yellowstone, I found to have augmented greatly since my former visit. Most of my old friends were gone, however, Assistant Superintendent Lindsay being the only one remaining who recalled my coming and going. In company with a couple of officers from the Post we had, I believe, enjoyed an afternoon of fearful and wonderful tennis on the still ice- and snow-covered court. Federal Judge Meldrum, terror of poachers, had been in the party twenty years ago, but said he did not remember me. I was rather glad he had had no occasion to. Had I ever been connected with the geyser that Private Ikey Einstein soaped, or with aiding and abetting Sergeant Hope to drive a flock of sheep over the bluffs into the Gardiner River, the Judge would doubtless have been able to refer to the official memoranda to jog his memory—possibly some thumb prints and a side and front view of my criminal phiz.

To my great regret I learned that F. Jay Haynes, official photographer of the Park, had died but a few months before. In his place I found Jack Haynes, his son, who is brilliantly maintaining the reputation of his illustrious father, both as an artist and as a factor in forwarding the destiny of the Yellowstone. What the intrepid Kolb Brothers are doing in photographing the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, what Byron Harmon is doing in the Canadian Rockies, that the Haynes family have done for the Yellowstone Park. I say "have done," because their work, having been carried on during nearly four decades, is much more nearly complete than that of the others who have worked a shorter time in a rather less concentrated sphere.

But F. Jay Haynes was far more than a great photographic artist. He was a great lover of the out-of-doors generally and of that of Yellowstone Park particularly. In his organization of the transportation companies to serve respectively the east and west entrances to the Park, it was the bringing of the latter to the people that was the main consideration in his mind; the financial success of his ventures was secondary. I believe these were successful on both counts, however. I know that Mr. Haynes is given the credit for inducing the late E. H. Harriman to build a branch of the Union Pacific to the western entrance of the Park, now the principal portal so far as number of tourists is concerned. They have recently done the memory of Mr. Haynes the honour of naming a mountain after him. This is a fitting tribute, and well deserved. Far more impressive a monument, however, are his pictures. Mount Haynes may be seen for a distance of perhaps a hundred miles; the Yellowstone photographs of F. Jay Haynes may be seen at the ends of the world.

Jack Haynes is trying to do everything his father did, both as an artist and as a friend of the Yellowstone. He was on the ground early. He claims to have had his first ride over the Park roads some thirty years ago—in a baby carriage. Now he burns up those same roads in a Stutz roadster, taking hours to make the Grand Circuit where his father took days or weeks. A Ranger at the Canyon told me that Jack made the round so fast that he often headed back into Norris before the dust from his outward trip had settled down. I think that is somewhat exaggerated; yet Judge Meldrum, who trundled Jack on his knee, has figured that the latter's time for some of his rounds averages about twice the speed limit. The old judge swears that it is his dearest ambition to soak the boy good and plenty for his defiance of Uncle Sam's laws—when he catches him at it. So far, however, the only times that the Judge has had any really unimpeachable evidence in point was when he himself was a passenger in Jack's car! Then, he confesses, he couldn't take out his watch because he was using both hands to hold on. Nor would the watch have been of any use anyhow, he further admits, for they were going so fast that the mile-posts looked just like a white stone wall, with a very impressionistic black streak along near the top where the numbers came!

Not so far behind Jim Bridger and his telescopic glass cliff, that little touch about the mile-posts. And it proves that John Colter's dash from his Indian captors can't always hope to stand as a speed record. Surely it is good to know that the best of ancient Yellowstone tradition is being so well maintained.

Jack Haynes drove me down to meet Superintendent Horace M. Albright, who had only returned to Mammoth a couple of hours before I had to leave to catch my train at Gardiner. I had Mr. Albright very much in mind when I tried to pay the most fitting compliment I could to the type of men that are being drawn to the National Park Service. An ever-ready sneer from the common run of political heelers for the man in office who is trying to accomplish something for the common good in a decent and honourable manner is "impractical idealist." The words are all but inseparably linked from long usage. Indeed, it seems rarely to occur to anybody that there might be such a thing as a practical idealist. And yet just that is what Horace M. Albright impressed me as being; and such, I would gather from all I can learn, is his Chief, Stephen T. Mather, Director of the National Park Service. No one will question that they are idealists, I daresay. That they are also practical, I doubt not that very strong affirmative admissions might be secured from a number of baffled politicians who have tried to encroach upon Yellowstone Park with power and irrigation schemes.