Tramping With a Poet in the Rockies

by Stephen Graham; Vachel Lindsay

WASHINGTONIA WELLINGTONIA HINDENBURGER

XXXV. THE DIFFERENCE

So we entered the Dominion National Park of Waterton Lakes. We climbed the next mountain after Mount Bertha and saw on every hand the pinnacled and pillared tops of the Canadian mountains, crags surmounted by mighty teeth of stone blackly silhouetted against a radiant sky. Some Dominion officials came into these parts last year, cancelled the old names of the mountains, and gave them a new set—Mount Joffre, Mount Foch, and the rest, as if they were No. 1 and No. 2 of Great War villas. I see by old maps that Mount Cleveland used to be called Kaiser Peak. How war changes the names of places! It changed St. Petersburg to Petrograd, Pressburg to Bratislavl; it has even changed the names of the Rocky Mountains.

“Luckily the Germans did not win,” I said to Vachel, “or New York might have become ‘Zeppelindorf.’”

We were walking down a slope which Nature had planted out with pompous trees called “Wellingtonias.”

“What do you call them?” asked the poet.

“Wellingtonias.”

“Not in America. We call them ‘Washingtonias.’”

“You forget you’ve crossed the line—Washingtonias this morning, but Wellingtonias this afternoon.”

The poet submitted.