“Not against the Indians. Against the Negroes. You and I don’t think a Negro could rise to Presidency. But an Indian is different. There is a great romance connected with the Indians; there are the traditions of the battles with them; there is the personal grandeur of the braves. Every American boy has longed to be an Indian chief. And then there is the strain of Pocahontas, the Indian princess, married into the pride of Virginia. I believe an Indian President is just what we want to root us in America and give us a genuine American inspiration. It would bring poetry into politics. It would bring all the glamour of the West.”
“But it is not a practical possibility,” I urged.
“I believe it could be put over,” said the poet. “You see, the Indians are a hunting people, a sporting people. They’ve refused to bow the knee to the sordid side of life.”
We agreed that they were such good hunters that it was in vain the United States Government protected game in these parts. The Flat-Heads seemed to have swept off everything. You may go for days and see nothing more edible than marmots and porcupines. On the other hand, I have heard it said that the animals know the difference between the reservations of the Indians and the preserved regions of the Rockies, and at sight of an Indian on the horizon they rush to safety.
Lindsay recounted to me the story of the political campaigns of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!” and how the wild tokens of Western life invaded the East and moved the imagination of America. Every American politician is aware of this motive force. Even Roosevelt, a pure New Yorker, played the Western game—as Colonel of the Rough Riders.
We had a wonderful walk along the Flat Top, which was a prolonged mountain meadow full of flowers. Vachel began to repine because he foresaw that, like everything else, our tramp must end, and that in a few weeks we should be back in Springfield and the mere town. I told him a story of how one summer day in Petrograd I paused at a fruiterer’s shop to buy some strawberries which looked very inviting. They were very dear, but the shopkeeper said, “I have some very good second quality strawberries inside the shop, and I strongly recommend them.” “Thanks,” said I. “But I never buy second quality strawberries.” “So in life, eh Vachel, let us never accept second quality strawberries.”
The poet laughed, and began talking of grades of eggs, new-laid eggs, State eggs, selected eggs, political eggs. So walking gently we reached the north-western extremity of the tableland and came upon a grandiose diversified scene of shadows and gloomy greens and barren scarps, and of crowned monarchs of ice and snow. The pines of the Canadian approach were posted like companies of soldiers and disposed in beleaguering armies as if the line, unguarded by men, was guarded by trees, the forest wardens of the Empire and the Republic. The poet saw in the scene another Turner engraving.
We plunged then downward through thick masses of alder and hazel, a whole mountain-side solid with low growth. Here also were thousands of raspberry bushes all agleam with rosy fruits. Vachel called the descent a “raspberry epic.” Down, down we plunged to the dark valley of the rushing Kootenai, only finding a camping-ground after dark.
We came to an aged river in a steep vale of years with old shaggy firs on its very water-edge, and with the ruins of the uncontrollable ever-encroaching forest piled up like walls. We lighted a fire on a humpy-bumpy bit of shore where it was hard either to walk or sit, but easy to find wood to burn. We each cleared ourselves a cradle in the brown needles of the infringing firs.
It was a magnificent enclosure which the old river was a-running through, like a cypress-walled garden of an Asiatic mountain-castle. The trees stood like gigantic janissaries or guardsmen with their cloaks on. The night-stars were exalted by the climbing forest and peeped but faintly into the depths, and like a mighty black bastion the sheer rock of the mountain cut off the view northward.