BEAUTIFUL LAKE McDONALD
“Fish and game abound for experts with rod and gun who will follow them to their haunts. The cold water of streams that are born of melting snow and ice of the upper ranges produce trout of solid sweetness and finest grain. Twelve miles of bridle path take on to Avalanche basin, a deep recess shut in between a horseshoe sweep of granite cliffs that rise 2,500 feet above the torquoise lakelet in its center, while all around the mountains lift their proud heads to the height of two miles, more or less, above sea level. Half a score of white streamlets leap over the edge of the curving precipice and drop a clear 1,000 feet upon the shelving detritus below, over which they slide and jump in broken lines of foam down into the deep, green waters of the lake. One is reminded of Jean Paul’s imagery of a mirror upheld by snowy ribbons, when he was writing of a German lakelet among the hills.
“These lakes and rivulets are all fed by the melting glacier above. This neighborhood furnishes the best opportunity to study living and dying glaciers to be found within our national boundaries, Alaska excepted. John Muir, the king of western naturalists, whose name is born by the finest of Alaska glaciers, has written in ardent appreciation of the region we are describing. Thirty-three hundred feet above Lake McDonald, 6,500 above sea level, is Glacier camp, seven miles from Hotel Glacier, at the head of the lake. From this fine camping place an hour’s climb leads to Sperry glacier, named after the indefatigable explorer and popular lecturer, Professor Lyman B. Sperry, of Oberlin. He has spent eight summer vacations here and knows the places round about better, probably, than any other person. The serrated edge of this interesting ice formation measures in width over two miles, and from its upper edge to the end of the longest finger is a stretch of five miles of blue ice. At one time this ice sheet extended a mile further down and plunged over the abrupt precipice that walls the Avalanche basin. Its deserted track furnishes to-day an open page whereon the process of glacial erosion and deposit may be studied even more plainly and instructively than in the days of its greatest extent. Nearly every glacial phenomenon described in the books, it is said, may be found illustrated in this unique body of ice.”
The Lewis and Clarke expedition crossed the Rocky mountains ninety-four years ago, and only a few miles further south from where the Great Northern now crosses. Those glaciers, and beautiful Lake McDonald, were not known then, and, for that matter, for over sixty years afterwards. For all that, those phenomena of nature may have been there for thousands of years. One thing is certain, they are there now.
It may not be out of place to give a brief history of the “then and now” of the Great Northern railway, for it is and has been one of the great factors in developing the mines, valleys and plains of the Northwest.
IN THE ROCKIES ON THE GREAT NORTHERN RY.
In 1857 a grant of land was made by congress to aid the Territory of Minnesota in the construction of a line of railway to extend from Stillwater via St. Paul and St. Anthony, to what is now Breckenridge, on the Red river, and a branch via St. Paul to St. Vincent, near the international boundary line. At that time the Territory of Minnesota included all of the two Dakotas to the Missouri river. The legislature of the territory accepted the grant which amounted to six sections of land per mile. In the following year Minnesota was admitted as a state and a constitutional amendment was adopted allowing the state to issue bonds to carry along the work. Contracts were let and considerable grading was done at different times, but the financial crash which preceded, and the war, delayed the progress and it was not until 1862 that any track was laid, and that was only ten miles; it was from St. Paul to St. Anthony, and was all the trackage of the first division of what is “now” the Great Northern railway; also the first railway ever built in the state of Minnesota. All the material and rolling stock was brought by steamboat on the Mississippi. Minnesota was at the time but a sparsely settled and remote section of the Union.
I shall not attempt to detail the gradual upbuilding of this great transcontinental railway to its present system—its growth from a “then” ten-mile railroad to its “now” grand proportions of 4,786 miles. Its existence as a strong commercial force in the Northwest dates from 1879, when it passed into the control of the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway Company, organized by J. J. Hill.