THE VANISHED SCENE
HAL G. EVARTS
From “The Passing of the Old West.” Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Little, Brown, and Company.[31]
Wherever men fared, no matter how secluded the pocket of the hills to which they penetrated, they found evidence that some solitary wanderer had been before them. His horses had grazed in hidden meadows and they found the ashes of his camp fires on the shores of unmapped lakes. It was said that the range that rimmed the new land in on the east was impenetrable, that no man could cross through its wild passes; but in the dead of winter, long after the Crow tribe had taken to winter quarters in the lower valleys, some white man’s lone trail was often seen leading down out of these peaks which others shunned even in the warmth of summer. He was even welcome in the wigwams of the Crows and frequently he tarried for a few days in their villages, but his restlessness always drove him forth to leave his tracks in the secluded fastnesses of the winter hills. When a party of explorers pressed westward up the valley of the Stinking Water to determine if an entrance might be effected from the east, they found the trails of horses leading up a tributary stream which broke in from the west where the main river flared back in a wide sweeping curve to the north and east. These tracks led up an elk trail, threaded the mazes of a frowning gorge, crossed the lower extremities of late-melting snow banks and came out at last upon the Yellowstone Slope.
The news of the segregation of these hills and valleys he loved had brought to Mart Woodson another of those rare moments of exaltation. The invariable theme of his childhood tales had dealt with the near-serfdom of the inhabitants of far countries and had built up in his mind the belief that the people of other lands were chattels. Now, as if in direct refutation of those ancient policies which decreed that the land was God-given for the benefit and pleasure of the few, his country had set aside the wonder-spot of the world for the enjoyment of the many. This vast reservation, more than three thousand square miles of it, belonged to the people as a whole, a joint estate to descend to unborn generations for a thousand years to come. Never a foot of it could come into the possession of individuals or concerns.
What more could a man ask than to live his life upon his own estate comprising hundreds of square miles? This belonged to him. A thousand might share it, or ten thousand, but his own rights would ever remain the same. He could make his night fire on the shores of some stream, leave it the next morning and never look upon it again till the last day of his life, but always with the certain knowledge that on that day he could return and say, “Here is my camp,” and no man could wave him off. But a man should know his own property,—so Mart Woodson set forth to explore every nook of this vast estate which had so unexpectedly been willed to him.
His wants were few. He killed his meat as he needed it and when he felt the necessity of gaining a few dollars with which to buy supplies he worked with the construction gang that had been sent here to hew out a primitive road system through the People’s Park while the nearest railroad point was yet five hundred miles away; but mostly he roamed the hills and whenever seen was mounted on a bay mare that mothered a mare colt. He scoured the hills for gold in summers and panned the streams from the Flathead to the Green, prospected the ledges for quartz from Big Wing River to the Gallatin. When a party of explorers verified the existence of the stream which flowed to both seas and heralded to the world their find of Two Ocean Pass, they found also a low mound of earth surmounted by a headboard slabbed out with an ax and rudely carved with the words “Tom North,” testimony that in this spot men had lived and died before they came.
Jim Bridger’s tale of the mountain of black glass had roused a shriek of derision that echoed round the earth, yet in time others found it as he had said they would, and as they gazed upon the obsidian cliff they found the tracks of a mare and colt along its base. Homeric mirth had rocked the world at Bridger’s assertion that he had caught fish in the icy waters of a lake and cooked them in boiling springs without rising from his seat or removing his prey from the hook. When explorers reached this spot they found the bones of fish upon the rocks. The lone wanderer had once more preceded them and cooked his meal of trout a month before they came.
And it was Woodson himself who now came in for a share of ridicule and met general disbelief when he told men of the petrified forest he had found. It stood on a steep side-hill cut away by the action of water. Tier upon tier it rose, succeeding layers exposed to view, fifteen periods of forestation one above the other. Near the base were stumps more than a dozen feet in diameter, relics of the ages past, when tropical vegetation flourished here. Above these ancient ones, in successive accumulation, was the evidence of the gradual cooling of the earth on down to date, the top strata containing vegetation of the present age. Here were not merely crumbling fragments of bygone periods but exact reproductions, the preserved record of the whole; bark and twigs intact, ferns and shrubbery, even to the buds, held in delicate tracery of stone and sprouting from the outcroppings to the cliff. But in Woodson’s case the disbelief was not so widespread. Men were beginning to believe all things possible of this wondrous corner of the earth. It was decided that he should lead a party to the spot, but when they sought for him the wanderer was gone. Years later he led men to the ledges and they found it as he had said, the most complete record of its kind in the world.
Woodson had moved on in search of new lands and for months he traveled into the west, moving by easy stages with his little pack string, sampling the ledges and panning the streams en route. Everywhere there was food in plenty and he lived off the country as he roamed. He came at last into a land whose natural wealth staggered his imagination, the giant forests of the northwest coast. There were stretches where he might travel for weeks without once leaving the timber; and such timber! Fir, spruce and cedar side by side, each monster capable of furnishing from within its own mighty trunk the lumber for a small village. They stood ten to eighteen feet through at the butts, rising with barely perceptible lessening of dimension, towering three hundred feet aloft, two-thirds of their height without a limb. From these a man might cut beams six feet through by a hundred feet in length as easily as eight-inch board stuff is cut from the average tree. Week after week he wandered through this king of forests, the ferns growing to his saddle skirts. There was one stretch of a hundred miles each way, covered with a solid stand of the finest timber known to man. He lingered in this tract for a solid year. Here, in this one stretch, he estimated, was enough lumber to rebuild the world, lumber that was clear, straight-grained and without a knot.