The cone of Soda Butte stands out on the open and level plain of the valley, an isolated beehive-shaped mass eighty feet high, and presenting a rough appearance of irregular courses of crumbled gray stone. It is a perfectly extinct geyser-cone, chiefly notable for its seeming isolation from other deposits of like nature, of which, however, the nearer hills show some evidence. Close to the butte is a spring, pointed out to us by the major's orderly, who had been left behind to secure our tasting its delectable waters, which have immense credit as of tonic and digestive value. I do not distinctly recall all the nasty tastes which have afflicted my palate, but I am quite sure this was one of the vilest. It was a combination of acid, sulphur and saline, like a diabolic julep of lucifer-matches, bad eggs, vinegar and magnesia. I presume its horrible taste has secured it a reputation for being good when it is down. Close by it kindly Nature has placed a stream of clear, sweet water.
A mile or so more brought us (August 3d) to camp, which was pitched at the end of the valley of Soda Butte. We had had eleven hours in the saddle, and had not ridden over twenty-eight or thirty miles. The train came straggling in late, and left us time to sharpen our appetites and admire the reach of grassy plain, the bold brown summits around us, and at our feet a grass-fringed lake of two or three acres. This pond is fed by a quick mountain-stream of a temperature of 45° Fahrenheit, and the only outlet is nearly blocked up by a tangled network of weeds and fallen timber which prevents the fish from escaping. The bottom is thick with long grasses, and food must be abundant in this curious little preserve. The shores slope, so that it is necessary to use a raft to get at the deep holes in the middle.
At breakfast next morning some one growled about the closeness of the night air, when we were told, to our surprise, that the minimum thermometer marked 36° as the lowest night temperature. Certain it is, the out-of-door-life changes one's feelings about what is cold and what is not. While we were discussing this a soldier brought in a five-pound trout taken in the lake, which so excited the fishermen that presently there was a raft builded, and the major and Mr. T., with bare feet, were loading their frail craft with huge trout, and, alas! securing for themselves a painful attack of sunburn. I found all these large trout to have fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, but no worms. They took the fly well.
August 5th, under clear skies as usual, we struck at once into a trail which for seventeen miles might have been a park bridle-path, a little steeper, and in places a little boggy. Our way took us east by north into Soda Butte Cañon, a mile wide below, and narrowing with a gradual rise, until at Miner's Camp it is quite closely bounded by high hillsides, the upper level of the trail being over eight thousand feet above the sea. The ride through this irregular valley is very noble. For a mile or two on our left rose a grand mass of basalt quite two thousand feet in height, buttressed with bold outlying rocks and presenting very regular basaltic columns. A few miles farther the views grew yet more interesting, because around us rose tall ragged gray or dark mountains, and among them gigantic forms of red, brown and yellow limestone rocks, as brilliant as the dolomites of the Southern Tyrol. These wild contrasts of form and color were finest about ten miles up the cañon, where lies to the west a sombre, dark square mountain, crowned by what it needed little fancy to believe a castle in ruins, with central keep and far-reaching walls. On the brow of a precipice fifteen hundred feet above us, at the end of the castle-wall, a gigantic figure in full armor seemed to stand on guard for ever. I watched it long as we rode round the great base of the hill, and cannot recall any such striking simulation elsewhere. My guides called it the "Sentinel," but it haunted me somehow as of a familiar grace until suddenly I remembered the old town of Innspruck and the Alte Kirche, and on guard around the tomb of the great Kaiser the bronze statues of knight and dame, and, most charming of all, the king of the Ostrogoths: that was he on the mountain-top.
Everywhere on these hills the mining prospector has roamed, and on the summit of the pass we found a group of cabins where certain claims have been "staked out" and much digging done. As yet, they are as profitable, by reason of remoteness, as may be the mines in the lunar mountains. With careless glances at piles of ore which may or may not be valuable, we rode on to camp, two miles beyond—not very comfortably, finding water scarce, some rain falling and a great wealth of midges, such as we call in upper Pennsylvania "pungies," and needing a smudge for the routing of them. The night was cold and dewy, and our sufferers were wretched with sunburn.
The doctor and George Houston here left us, and went on to a salt-lick famous for game, but this proved a failure, some one having carelessly set fire to the tract. Indeed, in summer it is hard not to start these almost endless fires, since a spark or a bit of pipe-cinder will at once set the grasses ablaze, to the destruction of hunting and the annoyance of all travellers, to whom a fire is something which suggests man, and the presence of man needs, sad to say, an explanation. At 6 a. m., August 6th, Captain G. and the lad Lee also went off on a side-trail after game, and with lessened numbers we broke camp rather late, and rode into dense woods down a steady descent on a fair trail. The changes of vegetation were curious and sudden—from pines and firs to elders, stunted willows and sparse cottonwood bending over half-dry beds of torrents, with vast boulders telling of the fierce fury of water which must have undermined, then loosened and at last tumbled them from the hillsides. These streams are, in the early spring, impassable until a cold day and night check the thaw in the hills, and thus allow the impatient traveller to ford.
Gradually, as we rode on, the hills to our left receded, and on our right the summits of Index and Pilot stood up and took the morning—long, straggling volcanic masses of deep chocolate-brown, black as against the crystalline purity of cloudless blue skies, rising in the middle to vast rugged, irregular cones fourteen thousand feet above tide. From the bewildering desolateness of these savage peaks the eye wanders to the foot-hills, tree-clad with millions of pines, and lower yet to the wide valley of the West Branch of Clarke's Fork of the Yellowstone, through which a great stream rushes; and then, beyond the river, park over park with gracious boundaries of fir and pine, and over all black peak and snow-clad dome and slope, nameless, untrodden, an infinite army of hills beyond hills. The startling combination of black volcanic peaks with gray and tinted limestone still makes every mile of the way strange and grand. In one place the dark rock-slopes end abruptly in a wall of white limestone one hundred to two hundred feet high and regular as ancient masonry. A little below was a second of these singular dikes, which run for twenty miles or more.
On a rising ground where we halted to lunch a note was found stating that Dr. T., failing to find game at the salt-lick, had gone on ahead. While lingering over our lunch in leisurely fashion, encircled by this great mass of snow and blackness, an orderly suddenly rode up to hasten us to camp, as Indian signs had been seen down the valley. In a moment we were running our horses over a sage-plain, and were soon in camp, which was pitched on the West Branch in the widening valley. Dr. T. and George Houston, it appeared, had seen a column of smoke four miles below on a butte across the river. As the smoke was steady and did not spread, like an accidental fire, it seemed wise to wait for the party. There being no news of Indians, and no probability of white travellers, it was well to be cautious. It might be a hunters' or prospectors' camp, or a rallying-signal for scattered bands of Sioux, or a courier from Fort Custer. The doubt was unpleasant, and its effect visible in the men, two of whom already saw Indians.
"See 'em?" says Jack. "Yes, they're like the Devil: you just doesn't see 'em!"
While we pitched camp sentinels were thrown out, and two guides went off to investigate the cause of the fire. Houston came back in two hours, and relieved us by his statement that no trails led to the fire, and that its probable cause was the lightning of the storm which had overtaken us in camp the day before.