They had about fifty miles to go, northward, straight away from the railroad. It was a clear, lovely day, the air so transparent that you could apparently walk to the top of one of those mountains in an hour or two.
“Gee, I know now how that Englishman felt,” Joe laughed.
The road was not what would be called a good road, or even a decent road, in the East, as it was only a track in the grass, full of sand and sharp little stones; it did not lead into the mountains at all; it ran along just to the east of the great range, over the bare, rolling hills of the prairie, so that from the motor bus you could see the entire mountain wall, mile after mile. What a wonderful wall it was, too! It sprang right up out of this rolling green prairie, a great procession of peaks, and now they were so near the boys could see they were not blue at all, but every color of the rainbow, with red predominating. Up their sides for a way stretched timber—all evergreen, and not very big—and then came the rocks—red rocks, yellow rocks, gray rocks, white rocks, in long horizontal strata, and in the ravines and hollows on the slopes great patches of snow stretching down from the snow caps on the summits like vast white fingers.
As they sped along, every eye in the motor fixed on the mountains, a man in the front seat pointed ahead to a huge red mountain which stood out eastward from the range, a noble mountain shaped like a tremendous dome.
“That’s old Rising Wolf,” he said.
“Rising Wolf!” said Tom. “That’s a good name. It’s Indian, I suppose?”
“It’s Indian, but it was the name of a white man,” the first speaker replied. “It was the name the Indians gave to Hugh Monroe. He’s buried almost under the shadow of that mountain. Pretty good monument, eh?”
“I don’t believe anybody’ll move it,” Joe laughed. “Who was Hugh Monroe?”
“Hugh Monroe,” said the man on the front seat, who evidently knew a lot about the Park, “was probably the first white man who ever saw those mountains. He was born in Montreal in 1798. He entered the Hudson Bay Company when he was only seventeen, about as old as you boys, I guess, and was sent way out into the Blackfeet Indian country on the Saskatchewan River. Monroe was assigned to live with the Indians, and learn their language, and the next winter—1816—he went southward with them, following along near the base of the range, crossed what’s now the boundary line, and came here. He even went on farther, to the Yellowstone. Monroe stayed with the Blackfeet all the rest of his life. He married a squaw, and got an Indian name—Makwiipowaksin—or Rising Wolf——”
“I guess I’ll always say it in English,” Spider laughed.