The professional personnel of the outfit was wrapped in gloom over the advent of a devastating light of grasshoppers that was rapidly cleaning up the ranges down to the gravel. This sodden shroud, however, did not blanket the cook—an exception of importance from my standpoint. This individual was a part-time wrestler and prize-fighter, abandoning the squared-circle for the pots and pans only in the off seasons. He introduced himself to me as "Happy" Coogan, and then proceeded to show why he was so called. Backing me up behind a food barrage, he sang a song, danced a jig, illustrated Jack Dempsey's left hook and Gotch's "toe-hold" on a half-breed cow-puncher, and then challenged all-comers at a "catch-as-catch-can" rough-and-tumble with nothing barred but gouging and biting. Now who could worry about grasshoppers with a man like that around?
"Happy" recited excerpts from his ring career all afternoon while I ate apple pie with cream poured over it and waited for the wind to cease. It was falling lighter by five, but my host would not hear of my leaving before supper. Impromptu cabaret work lengthened that banquet out to eight o'clock, and it was early twilight before I finally broke away and went down to push off. "Happy" followed me down, his arms filled with eggs, milk, jams, pies and various other comestibles. "Don't like to let a man go off hungry," he explained. "Never know when I may be needing a hand-out myself."
Bless your generous heart, "Happy"; I only hope I may be cruising in your vicinity if you ever need that hand-out. That bucket of California home-dried apricots I left you didn't go toward balancing our grub account.
With no very swift water ahead and the prospect of a fairly clear night, I had hopes for a while of drifting right on through to Glendive. These hopes—along with me and my outfit—were dampened by a shower shortly after I started, and completely dashed by a steady drizzle that set in about nine. Dragging up the skiff on the first bar on which it grounded in the now pitchy darkness, I inflated my sleeping-pocket, crawled into it and went to sleep. Awakening at dawn to find a cloudless sky, I crawled out, pushed off, and was in Glendive before six o'clock. Landing half a mile above town, I climbed up to a shack which "Happy" Coogan had told me was owned by a friend of his who had worked in the local pool-room. It was no sort of hour to awaken a tired business man of a Sunday morning, but "Happy's" name proved open sesame. It took some rearranging to get my stuff into that ten-by-twelve shack with a man, his wife and their seven children. Somehow we managed it, however; moreover, the whole nine of them pledged themselves to stand watch-and-watch over the skiff until I showed up again, no matter how long that might be. The true river spirit had awakened even in these dwellers on the fringes of Glendive's municipal dump. Bath, breakfast, snooze and another séance with inevitable proofs was the order of the day.
CHAPTER VI
GLENDIVE TO THE MISSOURI
Glendive, located on the Yellowstone at a point where the Northern Pacific leaves the river to cut across the Bad Lands straight for the plains of North Dakota, owes more to the railroad than perhaps any other town of the valley. Although Glendive Creek was a frequent halt in the steamboat days of the Indian campaigns, there was never much of a settlement there until railway construction commenced in the late 'seventies. The first train pulled into Glendive almost forty years to a day previous to my arrival by boat. I found a fine, clean, prosperous little city of 6000 where my puffing predecessor had drawn up to little more than a typical frontier construction camp. Range stock helped the town along in its earlier days, but the railway shops probably did more. Finally the completion of the dam at Intake and the distribution of water to the most extensive irrigable area in the Yellowstone Valley provided a tributary agricultural territory of great wealth.
There was one thing I was especially interested in seeing in Glendive—a school musical system that is probably without a near rival in any town in America five times as large. I was assured that, of a school enrolment of about a thousand, nearly two hundred pupils played some kind of a musical instrument. There was an orchestra of sixty pieces, and a boy's military band of sixty-five. Each was divided into junior and senior grades, and a member was pushed ahead or dropped back according to talent and effort. At no time did a pupil have a place cinched; nothing but steady conscientious effort, regular attendance at rehearsals, and proper general deportment won promotion, or prevented demotion. Perhaps the finest thing about the whole system, was the fact that it was undertaken entirely apart from the regular curriculum, no school credits whatever being given for the work. I was told the credit for this fine achievement belonged to a principal of one of the grade schools, a Miss Lucille Hennigar, who had put herself behind it purely out of love of music and children.