“After a while,” the man went on, laughing too, “the Blackfeet came down here to live. We are going through part of their reservation now, and the whole Park was bought from them by the government. This was all their hunting ground, and right here, in Two Medicine Valley that you see leading in beside Rising Wolf Mountain, and in the Cut Bank and St. Mary’s Valley we’ll soon come to, Hugh Monroe hunted moose and elk and buffalo and silver tips, and he killed sheep and goats up on the slopes. He used to tell me how he had a cabin by St. Mary Lake (we get there in an hour) once, and had to stand off a raid of hostile Indians for two days—he and his wife and children. He’s often told me, too, how he and the Blackfeet used to drive the buffalo over the Cut Bank River cliffs. The buffalo would stampede, and not seeing the cliffs ahead, would all go crashing over.”
“He told you?” cried Joe, incredulous. “Say, how old are you, anyhow? I thought you said he came here in 1816—that’s a hundred years ago.”
Again the man laughed. “Rising Wolf was buried in 1896,” he answered. “He was ninety-eight years old. We folks out in the Montana mountains” [he pronounced Montana with the first a short, as in cat] “live a good while, son. It’s the air. I can remember him well, and a fine old figure he was, a real pioneer, like Daniel Boone and the chaps you’ve read about in school. Yes sir, he’s got a good monument.”
And the man looked up again at the great red dome of Rising Wolf Mountain, towering over them.
“Ask him about there being no foot-hills,” Joe whispered, nudging Tom.
“Can you tell us why there aren’t any foot-hills to this range?” Tom asked. “Of course, all this prairie here is rolling and high, but it’s not really little mountains. The main range just jumps right up without any warning.”
“Yes, I’ve been wondering about that, too,” put in a man on the seat behind the boys. “I wish you would explain it.”
The man on the front seat laughed. “I seem to be the Park encyclopædia,” said he. “Well, I hunted in these mountains before the government ever thought of making a park of ’em, and I’m glad to tell you all I can. I’ll tell you just as it was told to me by one of the government chaps that came out here—a scientist. He was looking for prehistoric animal fossils up in the Belly River Cañon, and he sure knew a lot. It was this way—all the prairies, he said, and all the land west of here, was once the bottom of the sea, or a lake, or something, and finally it pushed up and became land, and then, as the earth crust went on contracting, it cracked.”
The man now put his hands together, spread flat side by side, and pushed them one against the other.
“The crack formed from north to south,” he said, “and as the contraction went on something had to give, just as something has to give if I push my hands hard enough. See——”