Now and then the United States Government does a very wicked thing. Its treatment of the Indians, for instance, and especially of the Blackfeet, in Montana. But that's another story. The point is that, to offset these lapses, there are occasional Government idealisms. Our National Parks are the expression of such an ideal.
I object to the word "park," especially in connection with the particular National Reserve in northwestern Montana known as Glacier Park. A park is a civilized spot, connected in all our minds with neat paths and clipped lawns. I am just old enough to remember when it meant "Keep-Off-the-Grass" signs also, and my childhood memories of the only park I knew are inseparably connected with a one-armed policeman with a cane and an exaggerated sense of duty.
There are no "Keep-Off-the-Grass" signs in Glacier Park, no graveled paths and clipped lawns. It is the wildest part of America. If the Government had not preserved it, it would have preserved itself. No homesteader would ever have invaded its rugged magnificence or dared its winter snows. But you and I would not have seen it.
True, so far most niggardly provision has been made. The Government offices are a two-roomed wooden cabin. The national warehouse is a barn. To keep it up, to build trails and roads, to give fire protection for its fourteen hundred square miles of great forest, with many millions of dollars worth of timber, are provided thirteen rangers! Thirteen rangers, and an annual allowance less than half of what is given to Yellowstone Park,—with this difference, too, that Yellowstone Park has had money spent on it for thirty-two years while Glacier Park is in the making! It is one of the merry little jests we put over now and then. For seventy-five miles in the north of the park there is no ranger. Government property, you see, and no protection.
But no niggardliness on the part of the Government can cloud the ideal which is the raison d'être for Glacier Park. Here is the last stand of the Rocky Mountain sheep, the Rocky Mountain goat. Here are antelope and deer, black and grizzly bears, mountain lions, trout—well, we are coming to the trout. Here are trails that follow the old game trails along the mountain-side; here are meadows of June roses, true forget-me-nots, larkspur, Indian paintbrush, fireweed,—that first plant to grow after forest fires,—a thousand sorts of flowers, growing beside snow-fields. Here are ice and blazing sun, vile roads, and trails of a beauty to make you gasp.
A congressional committee went out to Glacier Park in 1914 and three of their machines went into the ditch. They went home and voted a little money for roads after that, out of gratitude for their lives. But they will have to vote more money, much more money, for roads. A Government mountain reserve without plenty of roads is as valuable as an automobile without gasoline.
Nevertheless,—bad roads or good or none, thirteen rangers or a thousand,—seen from an automobile or from a horse, Glacier Park is a good place to visit. Howard Eaton thinks so. Last July, with all of the West to draw from, he took his first party through Glacier. This year in June, with his outfit on a pack-horse, he is going to investigate some new trails and in July he will take a party of riders over them.
