To the canyons and the waters of the West.
We spent a night at the hotel and were much amused by the idea of a room with a bath in such a place, and by the notice that you could have your linen laundered in twenty-four hours. There was dancing in the evening in an immense hall lit by red Chinese lanterns and adorned by bear-skins and Alaskan ornaments—a fair company of people, too, though mostly from the West.
We, however, were eager for the road, and set out next morning with blankets and provisions and steered a north-westerly or west by north-westerly course by our compasses, abjuring trails and guides. Our idea was to obtain a cross-section view of the Rockies in their most primitive state unguided by convention. We hoped to realise something of what America was like for at least a hundred years after Columbus discovered it. We were headed for the virgin land.
How quickly did we leave that hotel with its “stopping over” crowd behind! In an hour we were in the deep silence of the mountains encompassed on each side by exuberant pink larkspurs and blanket flowers and red paint-brush. We clambered upward, ever upward, through fresh, young, chattering aspens and then green tangled pinewood—and then also through old dead forests lying in black confusion, uprooted, snapped, stricken, in heaps like the woods of the Somme Valley. Then we walked through new dead forests, burned only last year, and then through brown scorched forests that did not burn, but died merely of the great heat which their neighbours’ burning had caused.
We stepped from log to log and tree to tree, making for the open and the light, with the gaiety of troubadours, and Lindsay seemed romantically happy. I also was happy, and thought of the happy days before the war, when I tramped in this fashion back and forth across the Caucasus Mountains and along hundreds of miles of Black Sea shore. It was pure joy to light the first fire and fry our bacon and make our coffee in the full effulgence of the sun.
Glacier National Park, which we passed through first, is a preserve. It is God’s holy mountain on which no man may shoot. By the laws you are not allowed even to frighten a bird. You may not carry firearms into the region. We were therefore not very agreeably surprised to hear in the thickets the whiz-ping of a gun which some Indians were using. Lindsay nearly got a shot in the head as he got up from luncheon. The fact is, Glacier adjoins the Blackfeet Indian reservation, and the Indians are all hunters by instinct and preference. It is difficult to restrain them. They are a gay, independent, and wild lot. We saw a number of these men with an array of plumes round their heads, steel padlocks in their ears for ear-rings, cow-bells on their sleeves, and chequer-work embroidery on their gay vests and cloaks. They had with them their squaws, fat and handsome women, all swollen out and weather-beaten like fishwives, with high cheek-bones and red-ochre faces. They danced together and skirled in wild Asiatic strains while four intent ruffians in ordinary attire beat upon one small drum with sticks. I seemed to recognise in them some sort of acquaintance to my old friends, the nomads of Central Asia, the Kirghiz—the same sort of faces and the same way of being musical. I have had a similar musical entertainment during weeks and months tramping in Turkestan and Seven Rivers Land. Both Kirghiz and Indians are dying out and both are red. I was struck by the feminine expression of the faces of the Indians and the absence of hair on their lips and chins—as if their males were not male.
However, we soon left the Blackfeet behind, and came out of their forests, and in late afternoon stood high above the lovely length of water which we identified as Medicine Lake.
The Indians are dancing as we enter their paradise,