Down the Yellowstone

by Lewis R. Freeman

There was a considerable stretch of rip-raping and other rocky barriers—laid to protect the end of the dam at flood time—to get the boat over, but a young rancher, just driving up to the ferry, kindly volunteered to come up and give me a hand. Carrying the trim little craft bodily for a couple of hundred feet, we put it into his wagon and drove down a hundred yards to the ferry-landing where it was easier launching than near the dam. He was all against being paid for his trouble, but finally suggested twenty-five cents as his idea of what was fair. He looked actually distressed when, with a wristy movie actor's gesture of finality, I gave him the whole of a dollar bill. What wouldn't a farmer on a country highway have charged for half that much labour pulling a Ford out of a mud-hole?

But it appears that even non-river dwelling folk are not mercenary in this neck of Montana. A cowboy-like girl who had just ridden up on a prancing pinto frowned darkly when she saw the greenback pass. Spurring down to the water as I finished trimming the boat, she leaned down close to my ear, whispering stagily through her hollowed gauntlet: "Too bad you didn't see me first, stranger; I'd 'a yanked down that lil' sardine-tin there on the end of my rope for nothin'." That was the first time I ever heard anybody called "stranger" outside of Wild West stories written in the Tame East. Later, down Nebraska and Missouri-way, however, I found that address in common use by people in real life. There's no end of a thrill in finding story-book stuff in real life—I suppose because it happens so darn'd seldom.

THE DAM ACROSS THE YELLOWSTONE AT INTAKE

PORTAGING MY BOAT ROUND THE INTAKE DAM

COMPLETING THE PORTAGE

There were a few flashes of white in the riffle below the dam; then a broadening river and slackening water. Many and unmistakable signs told me that I was now skirting the dread "Mosquito Coast." Cattle nose-deep in the water or rushing blindly through the thorny bull-berry bushes, smudge-barrages round the ranch houses, dark, shifting clouds over the marshes and over-flow lakes—every one of them was a sign of an ancient enemy, an enemy who had drawn first and last blood on every field I had met him from the Amazon to Alaska. Knowing that I was going to run the gauntlet of him for many hundreds of miles, I had come prepared, both mentally and physically. Nevertheless I looked forward with no small apprehension to a contest which could not be other than a losing one—for me. Moreover, I had too many dormant malarial germs in my once-fever thinned blood to care to risk their being driven to the warpath again by too intimate contact with other Bolsheviki of the same breed. Frankly, Herr Mosquito, with his shrecklichkeit, was one thing above all others that had given me pause in planning a voyage that would carry me through so many thousand miles of his Happy Hunting Grounds. Miles and Terry and Crook had driven the Redskin from the Yellowstone and Missouri, Civilization had exterminated the buffalo, but the mosquito still ranged unchecked over his ancient domain. It was just a question of how much blood one was going to have to yield up to get by his toll-gate-keepers.

Some kind of a poor old river-rat—doubtless an agate-hunter,—ringed with smudges and trying to spare time enough from fighting the enemy to hold a frying pan over a smouldering fire gave me a graphic warning of what fate awaited me if I tried to camp by the bank. Forthwith I decided to get my supper in the boat, run till near dark, pick the likeliest-looking ranch, tell them I was a farmer myself, and let human nature take its course. I had had the plan of adding a galley to the boat in mind for some days. Drifting while I munched a cold lunch had already eliminated the noonday halt, and I was now figuring to let the river also go on with its work during breakfast and supper hours as well. My first plan was to make a little stove by cutting holes in an oil-can, setting this on the non-inflammable steel bottom of my boat and cooking with wood in the ordinary way. Then, in a store window in Glendive, I saw a midget of a stove that worked with gasoline pumped under pressure. It was called a "Kampkook," but I could see every reason why it would also make a perfectly good "Boatkook." Drifting just beyond the wall of the coastwise mosquito barrage, I tried it out that evening. Bacon and eggs, petit pois, mulligatawny soup, dried apricots and a pot of cocoa—all these delectables I fried, boiled or stewed without pausing from rowing for more than an occasional prod, stir or shake. When all was ready, I removed the thwart from the forward section, threw my half-inflated sleeping-bag in the bottom, disposed a couple of cushions, and suppered like Cleopatra on her barge, reclining at my ease. With occasional spice-lending-variations, that sybaritic program was followed on many another evening right on to the finish of my voyage. I loved too well the smell of "wood smoke at twilight" to forego entirely the joy of the camp on the bank, but wherever that bank was muddy or infested by mosquitos, I. W. W.'s, or other undesirables, or whenever I was trying to make time, I had a perfectly self-contained ship aboard which I could eat and sleep with entire comfort.

It was early twilight before I came to just the ranch that I was looking for. Distantly at first, like the gold at the end of a rainbow, I saw it transfigured in the sunset glow at the end of the vista of a long wine-dark side-channel. There was a sprawling, broad-eaved bungalow, vine-covered and inviting, big new red barns and a lofty silo that loomed like a tower against the sun-flushed western sky. I named it "Ranch of the Heart's Desire" on the instant, for I knew that it could give all that I most intensely craved—cover from the enemy. I tied up at the landing as a sea-worn skipper drops his anchor in a harbour of the Islands of the Blest.

The long avenue of cottonwoods up to the bungalow seemed to be filled with about equal parts of mosquitos and Jersey cows. Doubtless the mosquitos were much the more numerous. But because it hurts more to hit a running cow than a flying insect I probably was impressed with the Jerseys out of all proportion to their actual numbers. A dash through a "No-Man's-Land" of smouldering smudges and I burst into a Haven of Refuge at the bungalow door. A genial chap with a steady smile met me as I emerged from the smoke, complimented me upon the smartness of my open-field running among the Jerseys, and opined that I must have been a pretty shifty fullback in my day. A youth in greasy overalls who came wiggling out from under a Ford he introduced as "My hired man." But when the latter blushed and protested: "Now there you go again, dear!" he admitted that it was only his wife. They promptly insisted I should have supper, while I had considerable difficulty in making them believe I had a galley functioning in my boat. We finally compromised on ice-cream and strawberries. All the ranchers along the lower Yellowstone and upper Missouri have ice-houses.

They were just the kind of folk one knew he would have to find in a haven called "Ranch of the Heart's Desire." Their name was Patterson, and they had lived most of their lives in Washington—in some kind of departmental service. Becoming tired—or perhaps ashamed—of working six hours a day, they bought a ranch under the Yellowstone project ditch and started working sixteen. So far they had been spending rather more money than they had made but, like all on the threshold of bucolic life, looked confidently to a future rainbow-bright with prospects. They confessed that it awakened a wee bit of nostalgia to meet one who had been in Washington, and so it chanced that it was of "Things Washingtonese" that we talked rather than of our experiences as farmers.