It was undoubtedly my intention to build a real boat in Livingston and proceed on my voyage before the spring rise went down. Just why I came to falter in my enterprise I can't quite remember, but I am almost certain it was because the local semi-pro baseball team of the Montana League needed a first baseman the same day that the editor of the local paper was sent to the Keeley Institute with delirium tremens. Never having been an editor before, there was a glamour about the name that I must confess hardly surrounds it in my mind today. I can see now, therefore, how I came to fall when a somewhat mixed delegation waited upon me with the proposal that I edit the Enterprise five days of the week and play ball Saturdays and Sundays. I would fall for the same thing again today, that is, without the editor stuff. At any rate, summer and the tide of the Yellowstone waxed and began to wane without my boating farther seaward than the timberless bluffs of Big Timber, to where, with a couple of companions, I went slap-banging in a skiff one Sunday morning when the team was scheduled for a game there in the afternoon.
Finally, it seems to me, it was tennis and some challenge mugs that had to be defended that took me back to Washington, and so to California. I was destined to form more or less intimate boating acquaintance with practically every one of the great rivers of South America, Asia, and Africa before returning to resume my interrupted voyage down the Yellowstone.
There were several moving considerations operative in bringing about my decision to attempt a Yellowstone-Missouri-Mississippi voyage last summer. Not the least of these, doubtless, was the desire to complete the unfinished business of the original venture. A more immediate inspiration, however, was traceable to a voyage I had made down the Columbia the previous autumn. Second only to the scenic grandeur and the highly diverting sport of running the rapids of this incomparable stream, was the discovery that the supposedly long-quenched flame of frontier kindliness and hospitality still flickered in the West, that there were still a few folk in existence to whom the wayfarer was neither a bird to be plucked nor a lemon to be squeezed. It wasn't quite a turning of the calendar back to frontier days, but rather, perhaps, to about those not unhappy pre-war times before the yellow serum of profiteering was injected into the red blood of so many Americans. Living well off the main arteries of travel, these river folk seemed to have escaped the corroding infection almost to a man, and it was a mightily reassuring experience to meet them, if no more than to shake hands and exchange greetings in passing. So few will have had the experience of late, that I quite despair of being understood when I speak of the good it does one to encounter a fellow being whom one knows wants and expects no more than is coming to him. Meeting a number of such was like going into a new world.
I told myself frankly that I could do with a lot more people of that kind, and perhaps come out rather less of an undesirable myself as a consequence of the contact. If I found them all along the Columbia, why not along the Yellowstone, and perhaps the Missouri and the Mississippi? And what wouldn't four or five months' association with such do in the way of eradicating incipient Bolshevism? And so I planned, embarked upon, and finally completed the journey from the snows of the Continental Divide where the Yellowstone takes its rise, to New Orleans where the Mississippi meets the tide of the Gulf of Mexico. I trust the dedication to this rambling volume of reminiscence may give some hint of the extent to which my hopes for the voyage were justified.
To maintain perspective, I am beginning my story by sketching in a few high lights from my earlier jaunt to the sources of the Yellowstone. I saw things then that few have had the opportunity to see since, just as I embarked lightsomely on several little enterprises that I have neither the nerve nor the wind to attempt today. Also, I had fairly intimate glimpses in the course of that delectable interval of vagabondage of several notable frontier characters whom no present-day wanderer by the ways of the Yellowstone can ever hope to meet. The priceless "Yankee Jim" was inextricably mixed up with my rattle-headed attempt to flounder through the canyon to which he had given his name. He really belongs in the picture. "Calamity Jane" is more of an exotic (to shift my metaphoric gear), so that the chapter I have devoted to the most temperamental lady of a tempestuous epoch will have to be its own justification.
Frequent historical allusions will be found in the pages of the narrative of my later down-river voyage. I am sorry about this, but it couldn't be helped. History-makers have boated upon, and camped by, the Missouri for a hundred years, just as the Mississippi has known them for thrice a hundred. Most of the things that path-finders leave behind them are imponderable. In the thousands of miles between the mouth of the Missouri and the mouth of the Columbia a few practically obliterated scratches on a rock in Montana are all that one can point to as left by the Lewis and Clark expedition; yet memories of those two lurk in the shadows of every cliff, spring to meet one across the sandy bars of every muddy tributary. And so with all who came after them, from Hunt and his trapper contemporaries on down to Custer, "Buffalo Bill" and Sitting Bull. And so on the Mississippi, from Marquette and La Salle to Grant and Mark Twain. You can't ignore them, try as you will; that is, if you're going to write at all about your voyagings. I've done the best I could on that score. For the rest, I have written freely of rivers and mountains, of adventure and misadventure, and somewhat of cities and towns; much of men and little of institutions. In short, I seem to have picked on about the same things that a commuter on his summer vacation would choose to write of to a fellow-commuter who has staid at home. I only hope that my view-point has been half as fresh.
CONTENTS
PART I