We discovered also that as a guide our map was now practically useless. Such features of the country as the mountains of the Teton range, the most conspicuous objects within a circle of a hundred miles, or a great river like the Snake, were set down with some pretentions to accuracy, but otherwise our speculative map-maker had committed sins both of omission and commission. He had decorated his map with streams and mountains which did not exist, while a trifling feature such as the Teton Basin, a district containing some eight hundred square miles of the finest grass-land, he appeared to think unworthy of notice; at any rate he had neither named nor indicated it upon his map. Evidently this important basin, though well known to trappers and hunters, was a terra incognita to the world in general and to our geographer in particular.
But it was little we cared about that. We were not afraid of losing ourselves. We could not well cross the Teton range to the east without being aware of it, while we knew that by turning westward and continuing in that direction for an indefinite number of miles we should eventually come first upon the Henry River and later upon the stage-road. In fact, the unreliability of our map rather added zest to our enterprise; it proved, to our satisfaction at least, that we might with justice lay claim to the proud titles of “Pioneers of the Wilderness,” “Explorers of the Great West.” So strong, indeed, was this feeling of self-complacency, that, as we rode along in the glorious sunshine, with the peak of the Teton straight in front of us, Percy burst forth singing Hail Columbia with great gusto. He was obliged to desist, however, after the first verse, for Calliope insisted upon joining in, with disastrous results. Calliope might be a good singer (for a mule), but it must be confessed she had one fatal fault: she would not pay attention to the time or the tune; a defect which is ruinous to the proper rendering of a concerted piece.
CHAPTER VIII
A QUEER COUNTRY
AN eastward ride of several days carried us to the neighbourhood of the Grand Teton, a splendid mountain, whose height, isolation, and conspicuous outline have made it a landmark and guide to the trapper and the explorer ever since the days when Lewis and Clark first struggled across the continent; and thence, diverging to the left, we took a northward course along the foothills.
Our progress through this thickly timbered country was extremely slow, for we felt it necessary to test for gold every one of the numberless little streams which cut across our path, sometimes making a stop of two or three days for the purpose.
A common obstacle to a rapid advance, too, was the frequent occurrence of swamps,—the work of the beavers. The cleverness of these little engineers is matter for admiration, but the result of their labours is apt to be annoying to the traveller. They would build a dam across a stream, backing up the water until it overflowed its banks on either side; then they would go a little farther up-stream and build another, and another, and another, until the valley for several miles of its length would be converted into an impassable morass.
These oft-recurring impediments, as I have said, rendered our northward progress very slow. At length, however, sometime early in August as we supposed—for we had but a very indefinite idea of the progress of time—we were forced out of our course by a great series of beaver-dams, and going a long way to the left in the attempt to circumvent them, we came upon a good-sized river flowing swiftly toward the south. On consulting our map we decided that this must be the Henry, or North Fork of the Snake; but our map-maker, though he had knowledge of the existence of such a stream, evidently did not know many particulars concerning it, for he failed altogether to take notice of the fact that it had its source in a beautiful lake, upon whose shore we unexpectedly found ourselves one day. It was the lake that our friend Tracker Jim had mentioned.
By this time Percy and I had begun to understand what was meant by the name “Rocky Mountains.” Previously, I, at least, had taken my idea of this great “system” from the maps in common use in English schools, where the backbone of the continent was represented by an object which might be taken for a long, hairy caterpillar crawling up from Mexico to the Arctic Ocean; sometimes with little caterpillars crawling beside it. It had never occurred to me (or to Percy either, I believe) that one might travel from east to west for seven hundred miles or more and be surrounded by mountains all the way. In common with most schoolboys (begging their pardons if I do them an injustice) I vaguely supposed that I should find a long string of peaks, rough and sharp-pointed like the Grand Teton, with depressions between them, over which one might climb with difficulty; but that anybody could pass over the main range of the Rocky Mountains and not know it, would have seemed to me too absurd to be thought of for a moment. Nevertheless, that is precisely what we did, impossible as it may seem.
Leaving the lake on our left hands, we rode up a gentle acclivity and down the other side,—as we had done a hundred times before,—and presently found ourselves on the bank of a fine creek running toward the north. Without suspecting it, we had passed from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of the great continental watershed; we were standing by a stream which was flowing to join the Missouri, a tributary of that mighty river upon whose bank we had stepped from an ocean-going vessel so many weeks before.