I tried out my new bed for the first time that night. It turned out to be a combination of a canvas bag and inflatable rubber mattress, called by its makers a "Sleeping Pocket." Here again it transpired I had played in luck in the matter of a pig bought in a poke. I used that precious little ten-pound packet of rubber and canvas all the way to New Orleans without blankets. On wind-blown sand bars, mud-banks, coal barges or the greasy steel decks of engine-rooms it was ever the same—always dry, always soft, always warm. Comfortable sleeping measures just about the whole difference between the success and failure of many a trip. I shudder to think of the messy nights I must inevitably have suffered had all those lurking thunder-storms that I weathered so snugly caught me in blankets.
I overslept the next morning and so did not carry out my over-night resolution of pulling across to the ranch and thanking the "Good-Bye" girl. Or rather, I did start and then changed my mind. She was on the upper verandah recuperating from a shampoo. Scarlet kimono and bobbed hair! No, not with a river to escape by. Stifling my au revoir impulse I decided to leave well enough alone by taking that "Good-bye" literally. Abandoning the boat to the will of the current I departed via the lines of white under the sullen cliff.
At the end of a couple of hours' run in a slackening current I landed in an eddy above Pompey's Pillar, quite the most outstanding landmark on the Yellowstone. Clark describes how he halted "to examine a very remarkable rock situated in an extensive bottom on the right, about two hundred and fifty paces from the shore. It is nearly four hundred paces in circumference, two hundred feet high and accessible from the north-east, the other sides being a perpendicular cliff of a light-coloured, gritty rock.... The Indians have carved the figures of animals and other objects on the sides of the rock, and on the top are raised two piles of stones." Captain Clark, after writing down a careful description of the country on all sides, marked his name and the date on the rock and went on his way.
This was the first point at which I had opportunity to make accurate comparison of the respective stages of water encountered by Clark and myself. I found the base of the rock less than a hundred paces from the river, which indicated—as the channel seems to have been well fixed here—that I was enjoying three or four feet more water than did my illustrious predecessor. This would seem to be just about accounted for by the fact that I was voyaging three weeks earlier in the season than he—that much nearer the high water of early June, at which time it was apparent that the river backed up right to the cliff.
Add the telegraph poles of a distant railway line and a picnic booth littered with papers and watermelon rinds, and Clark's description of what was unrolled to him from the top of Pompey's Pillar would stand today. I located the place where his name had been carved by a grating which the Northern Pacific engineers had erected to protect it from vandals, but the most careful scrutiny failed to reveal any trace of the letters themselves. The practical obliteration of what is probably the only authentic physical mark of their passing that either Lewis or Clark left between St. Louis and the mouth of the Columbia is hardly compensated for by the presence of several hundred somewhat later and rather less important signatures at this point. Several of these latter bore the date of the previous day—July 4th, 1921,—and so represented a bold bid for fame on the part of some of the watermelon guzzling picnickers. One of these had even pried a bar aside in a not entirely successful endeavour to emblazon his name in the protected area. It was all rather annoying. These new names are piling up very fast with the coming of the flivver, but it is going to take a lot of them to make up for the one they have blotted out.
Clark's apparent mental processes in the christening of Pompey's Pillar are rather amusing. Neither a profound historian nor a classicist, the Captain still had a sort of vague idea in his head that there was some kind of a rocky erection out Nile-way named after Pompey. That being so, what could be more fitting—since the names of all of the members of his own party had been used a half dozen times over first and last—than that this rocky eminence by the Yellowstone should be called after Pompey. That he was not clear in his mind as to the character of the historic original at Alexandria is evidenced by the fact that he first called the Yellowstone prototype "Pompy's Tower." Whether he or his publisher was responsible for the subsequent change to "Pillar" is not clear. As a matter of fact the latter is only a detached fragment of "the high romantic clifts" that Clark observed jutting over the water on the opposite side of the river. It bears about as much actual resemblance to the real Pompey's Pillar as the Enchanted Mesa does to Cleopatra's Needle.
|
CUSTER'S PILLAR, BAD LANDS |
THE GRATING WHICH PROTECTS THE INITIALS CARVED BY CAPTAIN CLARK ON THE SIDE OF POMPEY'S PILLAR |
The river was broader and slower below Pompey's Pillar, with the rapids shorter and farther between. At five I landed at a very pretty alfalfa ranch on the left bank to inquire about passing what appeared to be a submerged dam some hundreds of yards ahead. Only two women were at home—a beaming old lady and her very stout daughter. They insisted on my staying to tea, which required no great persuasiveness on their part after Joanna remarked that she was out of breath from turning the ice-cream freezer. The girl was astonishingly red, round and sweet—a veritable bifurcated apple. She seemed to have a very good knowledge of the river, and assured me I should have no trouble at the diversion dam provided I kept well toward the left bank. Indeed, if I thought it would help at all, she would ride down with me and show the way. There was a path back home from their lower pasture.
Considering how shy I had found most of the rancher folk to be of the river, this game offer pretty nearly took my breath away. I would have been all for accepting it save for one very good and sufficient reason—it was physically impossible. I had noticed that Joanna's personal chair was of home construction, and considerable amplitude of beam—certainly six inches more than the stern-sheets of my slender shallop. She could wedge in sidewise, of course, but that still left the matter of a life-preserver. I didn't feel it was quite the thing to take an only child into a rapid without some provision for floating her out in case of an upset. And my Gieve wouldn't do. The inflated "doughnut" that slipped so easily up and down my own brawny brisket would just about have served Joanna as an armlet. So I declined with what grace I could, and we all parted on the best of terms—I with a fragrant flitch of their home-cured bacon, they with three double handfuls of my California home-dried apricots.
I had no trouble at the dam, which was only on the right side, where it had been erected to divert the water into the head of an irrigation ditch. Running until nearly dark, I landed and made camp on a breeze-swept bar away from the mosquitos.