Down the Yellowstone - Lewis R. Freeman

Though I knew that the fall of the river would be easing off very rapidly from now on, there was little indication of it in the twenty-five-mile stretch I ran before dark that evening. Bouncing back and forth between broken lines of red-yellow bluffs, there were frequent sharp riffles and even two or three corners where considerable water was splashed in. For only the shortest of reaches was the stream sufficiently quiet to allow me to take my eyes off it long enough to enjoy the really entrancing diorama of the scenery. I was especially sorry for this, for on my right was unfolding the verdant loveliness of the Crow Reservation, the very heart of the hunting grounds which the Indians had loved above all others for hundreds of years—the region they had fought hardest to save from relinquishment to the relentless white. Read what, according to Irving in the "Adventures of Captain Bonneville," an Absaroka said about this Red Man's Garden of Eden a hundred years ago:

"The Crow country is a good country. The Great Spirit has put it in exactly the right place; while you are in it you fare well; whenever you go out of it, whichever way you travel, you fare worse." After going on to tell of the unspeakable climatic conditions and the scarcity of game prevailing in the regions to the north, south, east and west, this progenitor of the modern booster goes on: "The Crow country is in exactly the right place. It has snowy mountains and sunny plains; all kinds of climate and good things for every season. When summer heats scorch the prairies, you can draw up under the mountains where the air is sweet and cool, the grass fresh, and the bright streams come tumbling out of the snowy-banks. There you can hunt the elk, the deer and the antelope, when their skins are fit for dressing; there you will find plenty of white bears and the mountain sheep.

"In the autumn, when your horses are fat and strong from the mountain pastures, you can go down to the plains and hunt buffalo, or trap beaver on the streams. And when winter comes, you can take shelter in the woody bottoms along the rivers; there you will find buffalo meat for yourselves and cottonwood bark for your horses; or you may winter in the Wind River valley, where there is salt weed in abundance.

"The Crow country is exactly in the right place. Everything good is to be found there. There is no country like the Crow country."

Like the scent of fern leaves wafted out of the dear, dead past, those lines awakened in my heart memories of something that had long gone out of my life.

"Something is, or something seems,
Which touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams ...
Of something seen, I know not where,
Such as no language may declare."

I muttered that in fragments, but the lines only adumbrated the longing without revealing its hidden fount. Still groping mentally, I unwrapped some forks and spoons done up in a page of the Los Angeles Times. Ah, that gave me the cue! Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce tourist literature. And to think a Crow Indian started that kind of a thing!

Running until the river bottoms were swamped in purple shadows, I landed and made camp in a soft little nest of snowy sand left behind by a high-water eddy. There was an abrupt yellow cliff rising straight out of a woolly-white riffle on the right bank, and beyond a grove of cottonwood to the left were the shadowy buildings of some kind of a ranch. Even in the deepening twilight I could read something of the record of its growth—groups of log cabins, groups of unpainted, rough-sawed lumber and finally a huge red barn and a great square, verandahed house that was all but a mansion. I was wondering if the same pioneering frontiersman who had built the cabins had survived to occupy the big green and white house, when the soft southerly wind brought the scent of sweet clover and the strains of a phonograph. "Evening Star," the Jocelyn Lullaby, the Baccarole, wafted me their "convoluted runes" one after the other; then a piano began to strum and a girl, neither mean of voice nor temperament, sang Tosti's "Good-Bye." It always had had a softly sentimentalizing effect on me, that "Lines of white on a sullen Sea," sung (as it always is) the night before the steamer reaches port. And here it was getting me in the same old place—that mushy spot under the solar plexus that non-anatomically trained poets confuse with the heart. I simply had to hike over and tell that impassioned songstress how perfectly her song matched the scent of sweet clover. Cleaning up the last of the dried apricot stew in my army mess tin, I pushed southward across the moonlit bar. No luck. I was on an island.