GRIZZLY BEAR AND COOK
The accompanying photographs not only show bears very close up, with men standing by within a few yards of them, but they also show one bear being fed from the piazza by a cook, and another standing beside a particular friend, a chambermaid in one of the hotels. In these photographs it will be seen that some are grizzlies and some black bears.
This whole episode of bear life in the Yellowstone is so extraordinary that it will be well worth while for any man who has the right powers and enough time, to make a complete study of the life and history of the Yellowstone bears. Indeed, nothing better could be done by some of our outdoor faunal naturalists than to spend at least a year in the Yellowstone, and to study the life habits of all the wild creatures therein. A man able to do this, and to write down accurately and interestingly what he had seen, would make a contribution of permanent value to our nature literature.
In May, after leaving the Yellowstone, I visited the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and then went through the Yosemite Park with John Muir—the companion above all others for such a trip. It is hard to make comparisons among different kinds of scenery, all of them very grand and very beautiful; but nothing that I have ever seen has impressed me quite as much as the desolate and awful sublimity of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. I earnestly wish that Congress would make it a national park, and I am sure that such course would meet the approbation of the people of Arizona. The people of California with wise and generous forethought have given the Yosemite Valley to the National Government to be kept as a national park, just as the surrounding country, including some of the groves of giant trees, has been kept. The flower-clad slopes of the Sierras—golden with the blazing poppy, brilliant with lilies and tulips and red-stemmed Manzinita bush—are unlike anything else in this country. As for the giant trees, no words can describe their majesty and beauty.
John Muir and I, with two packers and three pack mules, spent a delightful three days in the Yosemite. The first night was clear, and we lay in the open, on beds of soft fir boughs, among the huge, cinnamon-colored trunks of the sequoias. It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by hand of man. Just at nightfall I heard, among other birds, thrushes which I think were Rocky Mountain hermits—the appropriate choir for such a place of worship. Next day we went by trail through the woods, seeing some deer—which were not wild—as well as mountain quail and blue grouse. Among the birds which we saw was a white-headed woodpecker; the interesting carpenter woodpeckers were less numerous than lower down. In the afternoon we struck snow, and had considerable difficulty in breaking our trails. A snow-storm came on toward evening, but we kept warm and comfortable in a grove of splendid silver firs—rightly named “magnificent”—near the brink of the wonderful Yosemite Valley. Next day we clambered down into it and at nightfall camped in its bottom, facing the giant cliffs over which the waterfalls thundered.
THE BEAR AND THE CHAMBERMAID
Surely our people do not understand even yet the rich heritage that is theirs. There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.
CHAPTER X
BOOKS ON BIG GAME
The nineteenth century was, beyond all others, the century of big game hunters, and of books about big game. From the days of Nimrod to our own there have been mighty hunters before the Lord, and most warlike and masterful races have taken kindly to the chase, as chief among those rough pastimes which appeal naturally to men with plenty of red blood in their veins. But until the nineteenth century the difficulties of travel were so great that men of our race with a taste for sport could rarely gratify this taste except in their own neighborhood. The earlier among the great conquering kings of Egypt and Assyria, when they made their forays into Syria and the region of the Upper Euphrates, hunted the elephant and the wild bull, as well as the lions with which the country swarmed; and Tiglath-Pileser the First, as overlord of Phœnicia, embarked on the Mediterranean, and there killed a “sea-monster,” presumably a whale—a feat which has been paralleled by no sport-loving sovereign of modern times, save by that stout hunter, the German Kaiser; though I believe the present English King, like several members of his family, has slain both elephants and tigers before he came to the throne. But the elephant disappeared from Eastern Asia a thousand years before our era; and the lion had become rare or unknown in lands where the dwellers were of European stock, long before the days of written records.