I marveled at the endurance and sure-footedness of our Indian horses. In the worst places they rarely stumbled; I did not see one of them fall. In emergencies they never lost their heads. They walked serenely along the edges of precipices where I shuddered to look down. Steep places did not bother them; they sat back on their haunches, bunched their feet together and slid.
But we had one rattle-brained pack horse. If he happened to get in the lead, he wavered and hesitated and held back the outfit; he wandered from the trail to try fool routes of his own, and tore his pack against rocks and trees.
Our last camp on the western slope of the Rockies was in [[14]]a grassy park surrounded by groups of tall firs, spruces and thickets of balsam, close to huge banks of snow and the precipitous cliffs of the Continental Divide. A stream of water, cold as ice, flowed through a meadow of rich grass, fine food for our horses, tired and hungry after their hard climb.
Hoary marmots greeted us with shrill whistles from the cliffs, and a red fox barked sharply and ran into his den. We saw a herd of Rocky Mountain goats feeding on a high shelf in an inaccessible part of the mountain. They lay in the sunlight near a cavern in the wall-rock, while their sentinel, an enormous billy with long white beard, stood like a statue close to the edge of a precipice.
Then from a high elevation above our camp, where everlasting snowdrifts lay under the shadow of huge rocks, we had a view of massive mountain ranges, with fields of snow and ice glistening in the sunlight; great valleys with sky-blue lakes and vast forests stretching toward the west to meet blue and distant plains. Through a massive rent in the rocky wall of the Divide, we looked eastward, toward the Blackfoot country and the end of our journey—a view of plains so vast and distant they looked like an ocean meeting the horizon.
North, lay Triple Divide Mountain, the Crown of the Continent, where the watershed divides between the Pacific Ocean, Hudson Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico. To the northwest was Mount Blackfoot and the Blackfoot Glacier, a vast expanse of snow and ice; Mount Cleveland (10,438 ft.), a lofty and massive dome; Mount Siyeh (10,004 ft.), named after the Blackfoot chief who was to be my Indian father; and Mount Jackson (10,023 ft.), named after my Indian guide Siksikaí-koan (William Jackson), because he was the first to climb its steep and rocky slopes. [[15]]
[1] This incident is referred to in the Report of General W. T. Sherman, Secretary of War, 1876, p. 33. [↑]