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Title: Through Glacier Park
seeing America first with Howard Eaton
Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
Release Date: August 3, 2013 [EBook #43394]
Language: English
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By Mary Roberts Rinehart
THROUGH GLACIER PARK. Illustrated.
K. Illustrated.
THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS.
THE AFTER HOUSE. Illustrated.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston and New York
THROUGH GLACIER PARK
SEEING AMERICA FIRST WITH HOWARD EATON
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR]
THROUGH GLACIER PARK
SEEING AMERICA FIRST WITH HOWARD EATON
BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY P. F. COLLIER & SON, INCORPORATED
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published May 1916_
_FOREWORD_
_There are many to whom new places are only new pictures. But, after
much wandering, this thing I have learned, and I wish I had learned it
sooner: that travel is a matter, not only of seeing, but of doing._
_It is much more than that. It is a matter of new human contacts. It
is not of places, but of people. What are regions but the setting for
life? The desert, without its Arabs, is but the place that God forgot._
_To travel, then, is to do, not only to see. To travel best is to be of
the sportsmen of the road. To take a chance, and win; to feel the glow
of muscles too long unused; to sleep on the ground at night and find
it soft; to eat, not because it is time to eat, but because one's body
is clamoring for food; to drink where every stream and river is pure
and cold; to get close to the earth and see the stars--this is travel._
CONTENTS
I. The Adventurers 3
II. "Fall in" 13
III. The Sporting Chance 21
IV. All in the Game 35
V. "Running Water and Still Pools" 44
VI. The Call 51
VII. The Black Marks 63
VIII. Bears 77
IX. Down the Flathead Rapids 86
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Author _Frontispiece_
Baring Creek, Citadel Mountain, and Blackfeet Glacier 4
A Rainy Day in Camp, showing Howard Eaton 8
Hikers on Piegan Pass 16
Gold Dollar, the Author's Buckskin Horse 16
Eaton Party climbing to Piegan Pass 22
_Photograph by A. J. Baker, Kalispell, Montana_
Eaton Camp near Altyn Mountain 30
Pumpelly's Pillar and Eaton Party 36
Members of the Eaton Party tobogganing without Toboggans 40
_Photograph by A. J. Baker_
Gunsight Lake and Mount Jackson from Fusillade Mountain 48
Dawson Pass 52
Party crossing Triple Divide 54
Mountain Goat and Kid on Ptarmigan Pass 58
_Photograph by A. J. Baker_
Upper Two Medicine Lake 66
View from Dining-Room, Many Glaciers Hotel 72
Cut Bank Chalets on Cut Bank River 74
_Photograph by Kiser Photo Company_
Luncheon on Flathead River Trip 80
Photographing a Bear 80
Appistoki Falls near Two Medicine Chalets 88
THROUGH GLACIER PARK
I
THE ADVENTURERS
This is about a three-hundred mile trip across the Rocky Mountains
on horseback with Howard Eaton. It is about fishing, and cool nights
around a camp-fire, and long days on the trail. It is about a party of
all sorts, from everywhere, of men and women, old and young, experienced
folk and novices, who had yielded to a desire to belong to the sportsmen
of the road. And it is by way of being advice also. Your true convert
must always preach.
If you are normal and philosophical; if you love your country; if you like
bacon, or will eat it anyhow; if you are willing to learn how little you
count in the eternal scheme of things; if you are prepared, for the first
day or two, to be able to locate every muscle in your body and a few
extra ones that seem to have crept in and are crowding, go ride in the
Rocky Mountains and save your soul.
If you are of the sort that must have fresh cream in its coffee, and
its steak rare, and puts its hair up in curlers at night, and likes to
talk gossip in great empty places, don't go. Don't read this. Sit in a
moving-picture theater and do your traveling.
But if you go--!
It will not matter that you have never ridden before. The horses are
safe and quiet. The Western saddle is designed to keep a cow-puncher
in his seat when his rope is around an infuriated steer. Fall off! For
the first day or two, dear traveler, you will have to be extracted! After
that you will learn that swing of the right leg which clears the saddle,
the slicker, a camera, night-clothing, soap, towel, toothbrush, blanket,
sweater, fishing-rod, fly-hook, comb, extra boots, and sunburn lotion,
and enables you to alight in a vertical position and without jarring
your spine up into your skull.
[Illustration: BARING CREEK, CITADEL MOUNTAIN, AND BLACKFEET GLACIER]
Now and then the United States Government does a very wicked thing. Its
treatment of the Indians, for instance, and especially of the Blackfeet,
in Montana. But that's another story. The point is that, to offset
these lapses, there are occasional Government idealisms. Our National
Parks are the expression of such an ideal.
I object to the word "park," especially in connection with the
particular National Reserve in northwestern Montana known as Glacier
Park. A park is a civilized spot, connected in all our minds with neat
paths and clipped lawns. I am just old enough to remember when it meant
"Keep-Off-the-Grass" signs also, and my childhood memories of the only
park I knew are inseparably connected with a one-armed policeman with
a cane and an exaggerated sense of duty.
There are no "Keep-Off-the-Grass" signs in Glacier Park, no graveled paths
and clipped lawns. It is the wildest part of America. If the Government
had not preserved it, it would have preserved itself. No homesteader
would ever have invaded its rugged magnificence or dared its winter
snows. But you and I would not have seen it.
True, so far most niggardly provision has been made. The Government
offices are a two-roomed wooden cabin. The national warehouse is a
barn. To keep it up, to build trails and roads, to give fire protection
for its fourteen hundred square miles of great forest, with many millions
of dollars worth of timber, are provided thirteen rangers! Thirteen
rangers, and an annual allowance less than half of what is given to
Yellowstone Park,--with this difference, too, that Yellowstone Park
has had money spent on it for thirty-two years while Glacier Park is
in the making! It is one of the merry little jests we put over now
and then. For seventy-five miles in the north of the park there is no
ranger. Government property, you see, and no protection.
But no niggardliness on the part of the Government can cloud the ideal
which is the _raison d'être_ for Glacier Park. Here is the last
stand of the Rocky Mountain sheep, the Rocky Mountain goat. Here are
antelope and deer, black and grizzly bears, mountain lions, trout--well,
we are coming to the trout. Here are trails that follow the old game
trails along the mountain-side; here are meadows of June roses, true
forget-me-nots, larkspur, Indian paintbrush, fireweed,--that first
plant to grow after forest fires,--a thousand sorts of flowers, growing
beside snow-fields. Here are ice and blazing sun, vile roads, and trails
of a beauty to make you gasp.
A congressional committee went out to Glacier Park in 1914 and three
of their machines went into the ditch. They went home and voted a
little money for roads after that, out of gratitude for their lives.
But they will have to vote more money, much more money, for roads. A
Government mountain reserve without plenty of roads is as valuable as
an automobile without gasoline.
Nevertheless,--bad roads or good or none, thirteen rangers or a
thousand,--seen from an automobile or from a horse, Glacier Park is a
good place to visit. Howard Eaton thinks so. Last July, with all of the
West to draw from, he took his first party through Glacier. This year
in June, with his outfit on a pack-horse, he is going to investigate
some new trails and in July he will take a party of riders over them.
[Illustration: A RAINY DAY IN CAMP
(Howard Eaton is fifth from left of those standing)]
Forty-two people set out with Howard Eaton last summer to ride through
Glacier Park. They were of every age, weight, and temperament. About
half were women. But one thing they had in common--the philosophy of
true adventure.
Howard Eaton is extremely young. He was born quite a number of years
ago, but what is that? He is a boy, and he takes an annual frolic. And,
because it means a cracking good time, he takes people with him and
puts horses under them and the fear of God in their hearts, and bacon
and many other things, including beans, in their stomachs.
He has taken foreign princes and many of the great people of the earth to
the tops of high mountains, and shown them grizzly bears, and their own
insignificance, at one and the same time. He is a hunter, a sportsman,
and a splendid gentleman. And, because equipment is always a matter of
much solicitude on the part of the novice, I shall tell you what he
wears when, on his big horse, he leads his long line of riders over
the trails. He wears a pair of serviceable trousers, a blue shirt, and
a vest! Worn by Howard Eaton, believe me, they are real clothes. He
has hunted along the Rockies from Alaska to Mexico. He probably knows
Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho as well as any man in the country.
When Howard Eaton first went West he located in the Bad Lands. Those
were the "buffalo" days, and it was then that he began taking his
friends with him on hunting trips. At first they went as his guests.
Even now they are his guests in the truest sense of the word.
By their own insistence, as the parties grew larger, they determined
to help defray the cost of the expeditions. Every one who knows Howard
Eaton knows that his trips are not made for profit. Probably they barely
pay for themselves. It is impossible to talk to him about money. Save as
a medium of exchange it does not exist for him. Life for him
is twenty-four hours in the open air,--half of that time in the
saddle,--long vistas, the trail of game, the camp-fire at night, and a
few hours of quiet sleep under the stars.
Roosevelt's ranch was near the Eaton ranch when it was in the Bad
Lands. Roosevelt and Howard Eaton have taken many hunting trips
together. Titled foreigners of all sorts have come over and hunted elk,
deer, and other game with him. He has supplied museums, parks, and
animal shows in every part of America with game. He was and is a crack
shot, of course. He says he always treated the Indians with respect.
"I was always a little shy when Indians were in the same country with
me, and once when hunting I retired so fast that the boys said I beat
my shadow six miles in fifteen minutes."
In those days the town of Sentinel Butte consisted of a canvas saloon
with the sign:--
Rev. C. A. Duffy
_Best Wines, Liquors, and Cigars_
"I had a fine chance to steal that sign once," says Howard Eaton,
"but some folks are fools, and I overlooked a bet."
The Eaton "boys"--for there are three--left Pittsburg and went West
many years ago. Howard was the first. He went in 1879. In 1884 Theodore
Roosevelt went out to the same country. It was in 1904 when the Eatons
left the Bad Lands and went toward the Big Horn Mountain. There, at
the foot of Wolf Creek and in the center of the historic battle-ground
of the Arapahoes, Sioux, Crows, and Cheyennes, they established a new
ranch at Wolf, Wyoming.
II
"FALL IN"
The rendezvous for the Eaton party last summer was at Glacier
Park Station on the Great Northern Railway. Getting to that point,
remote as it seemed, had been surprisingly easy--almost disappointingly
easy. Was this, then, going to the borderland of civilization, to the last
stronghold of the old West? Over the flat country, with inquiring prairie
dogs sitting up to inspect us, the train of heavy Pullman diners and club
car moved steadily toward the purple drop-curtain of the mountains. West,
always west.
Now and then we stopped, and passengers got on. They brought with them
something new, rather electric. It was enthusiasm. The rest, who had
been Eastern and greatly bored, roused and looked out of the windows. For
the newcomers were telling fairy tales, with wheat for gold and farmers
for princes, and backing everything with figures. They think in bushels
over rather a large part of America to-day.
West. Still west. An occasional cowboy silhouetted against the sky; thin
range cattle; impassive Indians watching the train go by; a sawmill,
and not a tree in sight over a vast horizon! Red raspberries as large
as strawberries served in the diner, and trout from the mountains that
seemed no nearer by mid-day than at dawn!
Then, at last, at twilight, Glacier Park Station, and Howard Eaton on
the platform, and old Chief Three Bears, of the Blackfeet, wonderfully
dressed and preserved at ninety-three.
It was rather a picturesque party. Those who had gone up from the
Eaton ranch in Wyoming--a trifle of seven hundred miles--wore their
riding-clothes to save luggage. Khaki was the rule, the women mostly in
breeches and long coats, with high-laced shoes reaching to the knee and
soft felt hats, the men in riding-clothes, with sombreros and brilliant
bandannas knotted about their throats. One or two had rather overdone
the part and were the objects of good-natured chaffing later on by the
guides and cowboys.
"Hi!" cried an urchin as we walked about the streets of Billings, Montana,
to stretch train-tired muscles. "Here's the 101 Ranch!"
Not very long before I had been to the front in Belgium and in France. I
confess that no excursion to the trenches gave me a greater thrill than
the one that accompanied that start the next morning from the Glacier
Park Hotel to cross the Continental Divide. For we were going to cross
the Rockies. Our route was three hundred miles long. It was over six
passes, and if you believe, as I did, that a pass is a valley between
two mountains, I am here to set you right.
[Illustration: HIKERS ON PIEGAN PASS]
A pass is a bloodcurdling spot up which one's horse climbs like a goat
and down the other side of which it slides as you lead it, trampling
ever and anon on a tender part of your foot. A pass is the highest place
between two peaks. A pass is not an opening, but a barrier which you
climb with chills and descend with prayer. A pass is a thing which
you try to forget at the time and which you boast about when you get
back home. For I have made it clear, I think, that a horseback trip
through Glacier Park, across the Rockies, and down the Pacific Slope,
is a sporting proposition. It is safe enough. Howard Eaton has never
had an accident. But there are times--
[Illustration: GOLD DOLLAR, THE AUTHOR'S BUCKSKIN HORSE]
Once, having left the party to make a side trip, my precious buckskin
horse--called "Gold Dollar"--was "packed" over. Now, Gold Dollar was a
real horse with a beard. He was not a handsome horse. Even when I was
on him, no one would have turned to admire. But he was a strong horse,
and on a trail up a switchback--do you know what a switchback is?--well,
a mountain switchback bears about as much relation to the home-grown
amusement-park variety as a stepmother to the real thing--on a switchback
he was well-behaved. He hugged the inside of the trail, and never tried
to reach over the edge, with a half-mile drop below, to crop grass. He
was not reckless. He was a safe and sane horse. He never cared for me,
but that is beside the question.
So, having temporarily left Gold Dollar, I had to get back to him. I
had to go fifty miles to do it, and I was provided with a horse by the
man who holds the horse concession in the park. A horse? A death-trap,
a walking calamity, a menace. If the companies who carry my life insurance
had seen me on that horse, they would have gone pale. He was a white
horse, and he was a pack-horse. Now, the way of a pack-horse is on the
edge of the grave. Because of his pack he walks always at the outer side
of the trail. If his pack should happen to hit the rocky wall, many
unpleasant things would follow, including buzzards. So this beast, this
creature, this steed of death, walked on the edge of the precipice. He
counted that moment lost that saw not two feet dangling blithely over
the verge. Now and then the verge crumbled. We dislodged large stones
that fell for a mile or two, with a sickening thud. Once we crossed a
snow-field which was tilted. He kept one foot on the trail and gave the
other three a chance to take a slide. There was a man riding behind
me. When it was all over, he shook my hand.
Off, then, to cross the Rocky Mountains--forty-two of us, and two wagons
which had started early to go by road to the first camp: cowboys in chaps
and jingling spurs; timorous women, who eyed rather askance the blue and
purple mountains back of the hotel; automobile tourists, partly curious
and partly envious; the inevitable photographer, for whom we lined up
in a semi-circle, each one trying to look as if starting off on such a
trip was one of the easiest things we did; and over all the bright sun,
a breeze from the mountains, and a sense of such exhilaration as only
altitude and the West can bring.
Then a signal to fall in. For a mile or two we went two abreast, past
a village of Indian tepees, past meadows scarlet with the Indian
paintbrush, past--with condescension--automobile busses loaded with
tourists who craned and watched. Then to the left, and off the road. The
cowboys and guides were watching us. As we strung out along the trail,
they rode back and forward, inspecting saddles, examining stirrups,
seeing that all were comfortable and safe. For even that first day we were
to cross Mount Henry, and there must be no danger of saddle slipping.
Quite without warning we plunged into a rocky defile, with a small river
falling in cascades. The shadow of the mountain enveloped us. The horses
forded the stream and moved sedately on.
Did you ever ford a mountain stream on horseback? Do it. Ride out of
the hot sun into a brawling valley. Watch your horse as he feels his
way across, the stream eddying about his legs. Give him his head and
let him drink lightly, skimming the very surface of the water with his
delicate nostrils. Lean down and fill your own cup. How cold it is, and
how clear! Uncontaminated it flows down from the snow-covered mountains
overhead. It is living.
III
THE SPORTING CHANCE
The trail began to rise to the tree-covered "bench." It twisted as it
rose. Those above called cheerfully to those below. We had settled to the
sedate walk of our horses, the pace which was to take us over our long
itinerary. Hardly ever was it possible, during the days that followed,
to go faster than a walk. The narrow, twisting trails forbade it. Now
and then a few adventurous spirits, sighting a meadow, would hold back
until the others had got well ahead, and then push their horses to the
easy Western lope. But such joyous occasions were rare.
Up and up. The trail was safe, the grade easy. At the edge of the
bench we turned and looked back. The great hotel lay below in the
sunlight. Leading to it were the gleaming rails of the Great Northern
Railway. We turned our horses and went on toward the snow-covered
peaks ahead.
The horses moved quietly, one behind the other. As the trail rose there
were occasional stops to rest them. Women who had hardly dared to look
out of a third-story window found themselves on a bit of rocky shelf,
with the tops of the tallest trees far below. The earth, as we had known
it, was falling back. And, high overhead, Howard Eaton, at the head of
the procession, was sitting on his big horse silhouetted against the sky.
[Illustration: EATON PARTY CLIMBING TO PIEGAN PASS
_Copyright, A. J. Baker_]
The first day was to be an easy one--twelve miles and camp. "Twelve
miles!" said the experienced riders. "Hardly a Sunday morning canter!"
But a mountain mile is a real mile. Possibly they measure from peak to
peak. I do not know. I do know that we were almost six hours making
that twelve miles and that for four of it we led our horses down a
mountain-side over a vacillating path of shale. Knees, that up to that
point had been fairly serviceable, took to chattering. Riding-boots
ceased to be a matter of pride and emerged skinned and broken. The
horses slid and stumbled. And luncheon receded.
Down and down! Great granite cliffs of red and blue and yellow across the
valley--and no luncheon! Striped squirrels hiding in the shale--and no
luncheon! A great glow of moving blood through long-stagnant vessels,
deep breaths of clear mountain air, a camera dropped on the trail,
a stone in a horse's foot--and no luncheon!
Two o'clock, and we were down. The nervous woman who had never been on a
horse before was cinching her own saddle and looking back and up. The
saddle tightened, she sat down and emptied her riding-boots of a few
pieces of rock. Her silk stockings were in tatters.
"I feel as though my knees will never meet again," she said reflectively.
"But I'm so swollen with pride and joy that I could shriek."
That's what it is, partly. A sense of achievement; of conquering the
unconquerable; of pitting human wits against giants and winning--a
sporting chance. You may climb peaks in a railroad coach and see
things as wonderful. But you are doing this thing yourself. Every mile
is an achievement. And, after all, it is miraculously easy. The trails
are good. The horses are steady and sure-footed. It is a triumph of
endurance rather than of courage.
If you have got this far, you are one of us, and you will go on. For the
lure of the high places is in your blood. The call of the mountains is
a real call. The veneer, after all, is so thin. Throw off the impedimenta
of civilization, the telephones, the silly conventions, the lies that
pass for truth. Go out to the West. Ride slowly, not to startle the
wild things. Throw out your chest and breathe; look across green valleys
to wild peaks where mountain sheep stand impassive on the edge of
space. Let the summer rains fall on your upturned face and wash away
the memory of all that is false and petty and cruel. Then the mountains
will get you. You will go back. The call is a real call.
Above the timber-line we rode along bare granite slopes. Erosion had been
busy here. The mighty winds that sweep the crests of the Rockies had
bared the mountains' breasts. Beside the trails high cairns of stones
were piled, so that during the winter snow the rangers might find their
way about. Remember, this is northwestern Montana; the Canadian border
is only a few miles away, and over these peaks sweeps the full force
of the great blizzards of the Northwest.
The rangers keep going all winter. There is much to be done. In the summer
it is forest fires and outlaws. In the winter there are no forest fires,
but there are poachers after mountain sheep and goats, opium smugglers,
bad men from over the Canadian border. Now and then a ranger freezes to
death. All summer these intrepid men on their sturdy horses go about
armed with revolvers. But in the fall--snow begins early in September,
sometimes even in August--they take to snowshoes. With a carbine strung
to his shoulders, matches in a waterproof case, snowshoes and a package
of food in his pocket, the Glacier Park ranger covers unnumbered miles,
patrolling the wildest and most storm-ridden country in America. He
travels alone. The imprint of a strange snowshoe on the trail rouses his
suspicion. Single-handed he follows the marks in the snow. A blizzard
comes. He makes a wikiup of branches, lights a small fire, and plays
solitaire until the weather clears. The prey he is stalking cannot
advance either. Then one day the snow ceases; the sun comes out. Over
the frozen crust his snowshoes slide down great slopes with express
speed. Generally he takes his man in. Sometimes the outlaw gets the drop
on the ranger first and gets away.
During the winter of 1913 one of these rangers was frozen to death. He was
caught in a blizzard, and he knew what was coming. When at last he sat
down beside the trail to wait for death he placed his snowshoes points
upward in the snow beside him. He sat there, and the snow came down and
covered him. They found him the next day by the points of his snowshoes.
The snow melts in the summer on the meadows and in the groves. But the
peaks are still covered, and here and there the trail leads through a
snow-field. The horses venture out on it gingerly. The hot sun that
blisters the face seems to make no impression on these glacier-like
patches, snow on top and ice beneath. Flowers grow at their very
borders. Striped squirrels and whistling marmots, much like Eastern
woodchucks, run about, quite fearless, or sit up and watch the passing of
the line of horses and riders, so close that they can almost be touched.
Great spaces; cool, shadowy depths in which lie blue lakes; mountain-sides
threaded with white, where, from some hidden lake or glacier far
above, the overflow falls a thousand feet or more, and over all the
great silence of the Rockies! Nerves that have been tightened for
years slowly relax. There is not much talking. The horses move along
slowly. The sun beats down. Some one, shading his eyes with his hand,
proclaims a mountain sheep or goat on a crag overhead. The word passes
back along the line. Also a thrill. Then some wretched electrical
engineer or college youth or skeptical lawyer produces a pair of
field-glasses and announces it to be a patch of snow.
Here and there we saw "tourist goats," rocks so shaped and situated as to
defy the strongest glass. The guides pointed them out and listened with
silent enjoyment to the resulting acclamation. After that discovery, we
adopted a safe rule: nothing was a goat that did not move. Long hours we
spent while our horses wandered on with loose reins, our heads lifted
to that line, just above the timber, which is Goatland. And the cry
"A goat!" and the glasses, and skepticism--often undeserved.
The first night out of doors I did not sleep. I had not counted on
the frosty nights, and I was cold. The next day I secured from a more
provident member of the party woolen pajamas. Clad in those, and covered
with all the extra portions of my wardrobe, I was more comfortable. But
it takes woolen clothing and bed socks to keep out the chill of those
mountain nights.
One rises early with Howard Eaton's party. No matter how late the
story-tellers have held the crowd the night before around the camp-fire,
somewhere about five o'clock, Howard--he is either Howard or Uncle
Howard to everybody--comes calling among the silent tepees.
"Time to get up!" he calls. "Five o'clock and a fine morning. Up with you!"
And everybody gets up. There are basins about. Each one clutches his
cake of soap and his towel, and fills his basin from whatever lake or
stream is at hand. There is plenty of water in Glacier Park, and the
camps are generally beside a lake. The water is cold. It ought to be,
being glacier water, cold and blue. The air is none too warm. A few
brave spirits seek isolation and a plunge bath. The majority are cowards.
[Illustration: EATON CAMP NEAR ALTYN MOUNTAIN]
Now and then a luxurious soul worried the cook for hot water. They tell
of a fastidious lady who carried a small tin pail of water to the cook
tent and addressed the cook nervously as he beat the morning flapjacks
with a savage hand.
"Do you think," she inquired nervously, "if--if I put this water on your
stove, it will heat?"
He turned and eyed her.
"You see it's like this, lady," he said. "My father was a poor man and
couldn't give me no education. Damned if I know. What do you think?"
Before one is fairly dressed, with extra garments thrust into the canvas
war-sack or duffle-bag which is each person's allowance for luggage,
the tents are being taken down and folded. The cook comes to the end
of the big tent.
"Come and get it!" he yells through hollowed hands.
"Come and get it!" is repeated down the line of tepees. That is the food
call of an Eaton camp. Believe me, it has the butler's "Dinner is
served, madame," beaten forty ways for Sunday. There is no second call.
You go or you don't go. The long tables under the open end of the cook
tent are laden with bacon, ham, fried eggs, flapjacks, round tins of
butter, enameled cups of hot coffee, condensed milk, sometimes fried
fish. For the cook can catch trout where the most elaborately outfitted
Eastern angler fails.
The horses come in with a thudding of hoofs and are rounded up by the
men into the rope corral. Watched by night herders, they have been
grazing quietly all night in mountain valleys. There is not much grass
for them. By the end of the three hundred-mile trip they are a little
thin, although in good condition. It is the hope of the Superintendent
of the Park and of others interested that the Government will soon realize
the necessity for planting some of the fertile valleys and meadows
with grass. There are certain grasses that will naturalize themselves
there--for instance, clover, blue-joint, and timothy. Beyond the first
planting they would need nothing further. And, since much of the beauty
of this park will always be inaccessible by motor, it can never be
properly opened up until horses can get sufficient grazing.
Sometimes, at night, our horses ranged far for food,--eight miles,--even
more. Again and again I have watched my own horse nosing carefully
along a green bank and finding nothing at all, not a blade of grass it
could eat.
With the second day came a new sense of physical well-being, and this in
spite of a sunburn that had swollen my face like a toothache. Already
telephones and invitations to dinner and tailor's fittings and face
powder belonged to the forgotten past. I carried over my saddle and
placed it beside my horse, and a kindly and patronizing member of Howard
Eaton's staff put it on and cinched it for me. I never learned how to
put the thing on, but I did learn, after a day or two, to take it off,
as well as the bridle and the red hackamore, and then to stand clear
while my buckskin pony lay down and rolled in the grass to ease his
weary back. All the horses rolled, stiff-legged. If the saddle did not
come off in time, they rolled anyhow, much to the detriment of cameras,
field-glasses, and various impedimenta strapped thereon.
IV
ALL IN THE GAME
Day after day we progressed. There were bright days and days when we rode
through a steady mist of rain. Always it was worth while. What matters
a little rain when there is a yellow slicker to put on and no one to
care how one looks? Once, riding down a mountain-side, water pouring
over the rim of my old felt hat and pattering merrily on my slicker,
I looked to one side to see a great grizzly raise himself from behind
a tree-trunk, and, standing upright, watch impassively as my horse and
I proceeded. I watched him as far as I could see him. We were mutually
interested. The party had gone on ahead. For a long time afterward I
heard the crackling of small twigs in the heavy woods beside the trail.
But I never saw him again.
It is strange to remember how little animal life, after all, there seemed
to be. There was plenty, of course. But our party was large. We had no
chance to creep up silently on the wild life of the park. The vegetation
was so luxuriant in the valleys. Beyond an occasional bear, once or twice
the screaming of a mountain lion, and the gophers and marmots, we saw
nothing. There were not many birds. We never saw a snake. It was too high.
One day, riding along a narrow trail on a mountain-side, the horse
in front of mine stampeded, and for a moment it looked like serious
trouble. For a stampeding horse on a two-foot trail is a dangerous
thing. It developed that there was a wasp's nest there, and the horse
had been stung. We all got by finally by lashing our horses and running
past at a canter.
[Illustration: PUMPELLY'S PILLAR AND EATON PARTY]
Another time, working slowly up a mountain-side, I told the chief ranger
of the park of having seen many Western horses at the front in France.
"Do you remember any of the brands?" he asked.
I did. A Diamond-Z, a flank brand on a black horse at Ypres.
"That's curious," he commented. "That man just ahead of us has shipped a
carload of Montana horses to the front, and I believe that is his brand."
We called to the man ahead, and he halted. Up we rode and demanded his
brand. It was the Diamond-Z. To be quite certain, he showed it to me
registered in his notebook.
So there, where we could see out over what seemed unlimited space,
where the earth appeared a vast thing, we decided that, after all,
it was a small place. The Rocky Mountains and Ypres!
Having risen at five, by eleven o'clock thoughts of luncheon were always
obtrusive. People began stealthily to consult watches and look ahead for
a shady place to stop. By half-past eleven we were generally dismounted
in some grove and the pack-train was coming up with its clattering pans,
its coffee-pot, its cold boiled ham.
Howard Eaton always made the coffee. It was good coffee. Apparently
nobody ever thought of tea. In the out-doors it is coffee--strong coffee,
as hot as possible--that one craves.
There was one young woman in the party to whom things were always
happening--not by her own fault. If there was a platter of meat to be
dropped, it fell in her lap. And so I remember that one day, the coffee
having been made at a luncheon stop, the handle came off the coffee-pot
and this same young woman had an uncomfortable baptism.
But it was all in the game. Hot coffee, marmalade, bread and butter,
cheese, sardines, and the best ham in the world--that was luncheon. Often
there was a waterfall near, where for the mere holding out of a cup
there was ice water to drink. The horses were not unsaddled at these
noonday stops, but, having climbed hard all morning, they were glad to
stand in the shade and rest.
Sometimes we lunched on a ledge where all the kingdoms of the earth
seemed spread out before us. We sprawled on rocks, on green banks,
and relaxed muscles that were weary with much climbing. There was much
talk of a desultory sort. We settled many problems, but without rancor.
The war was far away. Here were peace and a great contentment, food and a
grassy bank, and overhead the trail called us to new vistas, new effort.
One young man was the party poet. He hit us all off sooner or later. I
have the ode he wrote to me, but modesty forbids that I give it.
The poet having pocketed his pad and pencil, and the amateur photographers
having put up their cameras, the order to start was given. The dishes were
piled back in the crates and strapped to the pack-horses. The ruin of
the ham was wrapped up and tied on somewhere. Dark glasses were adjusted
against the glare, and we were off.
Sometimes our destination towered directly overhead, up a switchback of
a trail where it was necessary to divide the party into groups, so that
no stone dislodged by a horse need fall on some one below. Always at
the head, riding calmly, with keen blue eyes, that are like the eyes of
aviators and sailors in that they seem to look through long distances,
was Howard Eaton. Every step of the trail he tested first, he and his
big horse. And I dare say many a time he drew a breath of relief when
the last timid woman had reached a summit or descended a slope or forded
a river, and nothing untoward had happened.
[Illustration: MEMBERS OF THE EATON PARTY TOBOGGANING WITHOUT TOBOGGANS
_Copyright A. J. Baker, Kalispell, Montana_]
There were days when we reached our camping-places by mid-afternoon. Then
the anglers got their rods and started out for trout. There were baths
to be taken in sunny pools that looked warm and were icy cold. There
were rents in riding-clothes to be mended; even--whisper it--a little
laundry work to be done now and then by women, some of them accustomed to
the ministrations of a lady's maid at home. And there was supper and the
camp-fire. Charley Russell, the cowboy artist, was the camp-fire star. To
repeat one of his stories would be desecration. No one but Charley Russell
himself, speaking through his nose, with his magnificent head outlined
against the firelight, will ever be able to tell one of his stories.
There were other good story-tellers in the party. And Howard Eaton himself
could match them all. A hundred miles from a railroad, we gathered
around that camp-fire in the evening in a great circle. There were,
you will remember, forty-two of us--no mean gathering. The pine and balsam
crackled and burned, and overhead, often rising in straight walls around
us for thousands of feet, were the snow-capped peaks of the Continental
Divide. Little by little the circle would grow smaller until at last
only a dozen choice spirits remained for a midnight debauch of anecdote.
I have said that the horses ranged wide at night. Occasionally they stayed
about the camp. There was one big horse that was belled at night. Now and
then toward dawn he brought his ungainly body, his tinkling bell, and
his satellites, the other horses, into the quiet streets of tepee town.
More than once I have seen an irate female, clad in pajamas and slippers,
with flying braids, shooing the horses away from her tent in the gray,
cold dawn, and flinging after them things for which she vainly searched
the next morning.
V
"RUNNING WATER AND STILL POOLS"
Holidays are rare with me. So, on those occasional days when the party
rested, I was up and away. I happen to like to fish. The same instinct
which sent me as a child on my grandaunt's farm, armed with a carefully
bent pin, an old cigar box full of worms, and a piece of twine, to sit for
hours over a puddle in a meadow and fish for minnows; the same ambition
which took me on flying feet up the hillside to deposit my prey, still
wriggling, in a water barrel, where for days I offered it food in the
shape of broken crackers, and wept to find eventually its little silver
belly upturned to the morning sky--that joy of running water and still
pools and fish is still mine.
I cannot cast for trout. I do it, but my technique sets the boat to
rocking and fishermen to grinding their teeth.
But I had taken West with me a fly book and a trout rod, and I meant
to use them. Now and then, riding along the trail, we met people who
drew aside to let us pass, and who held up such trout as I had never
dreamed of. Or, standing below a waterfall, would be a silent fisherman
too engrossed to more than glance at our procession as it wound along.
But repeated early attempts brought me not a single strike. Once in my
ardor I fell into an extremely cold lake and had to be dried out for
hours. I grew caustic about the trout. Then somebody, with the interests
of the park at stake, said that he would make up a party and see that
I caught some trout. He would see that I caught something, he said,
if he had to crawl into the lake and bite my hook himself.
So we went to Red Eagle Lake. There are trout in that lake; there are
cutthroat trout weighing four pounds. I sat in a boat with a man who
drew one in. I saw two college boys in their undergarments standing up
to the waist in ice water and getting more large trout than I knew were
in the world. I ate trout that other people caught. But they were bitter
in my mouth.
I threatened to write up Glacier Park as being a fishing failure. The
result was calamitous. Earnest-eyed fishermen spent hours in rowing me
about. They imperiled my life, taking me into riffles; they made me brave
pneumonia and influenza and divers other troubles in the determination
that I should catch a mammoth fish. And nothing happened--nothing
whatever. Once a man in the boat hooked a big one and it ran under the
boat. I caught the line and jerked the fish into the boat. That was the
nearest I came to catching a large cutthroat trout at Red Eagle Lake.
Later on--but I haven't come to that yet.
I did catch some fish at Red Eagle. I caught some Dolly Varden and rainbow
trout. One of the earnest fishermen led me on foot over several miles of
Rocky Mountain scenery, stopping ever and anon to show me where a large
bear had just passed. The trail was fresh. Here were the stones he had
turned over for ants, the old trunks he had scratched for grubs. Then
we arrived at the foot of a waterfall.
What a place it was! The water poured down in clouds of spray on which the
afternoon sun painted a rainbow. Tiny water ouzels bathed and played in
the pools in shallow rocks. And here, in deep holes, there were trout
for the catching.
The fisherman stationed me on a rock, weighted my hook, told me to
drop in about forty feet of line, and stand still. They would hook
themselves. They did. I caught eight in fifteen minutes. But it was not
sport. It was as interesting as fishing for gold-fish in an aquarium.
I lay that night at Red Eagle in a tent on a bed built of young trees
driven into the ground and filled with balsam branches. A pack-horse
had carried up the blankets and pillows. It was a couch for a queen. In
the forest a mountain lion screamed like a woman, and at two o'clock
in the morning one of the college boys got up from the cook tent where
he was sleeping, and said he thought he would go fishing!
As I look back, that was a strange gathering at the fishing-camp at Red
Eagle--so very far from anything approaching civilization. There was
a moving-picture man and his outfit, there were the two college men,
there was the chief ranger of Glacier Park. There was a young couple
from New England who were tramping through the park, carrying their
tent and other things on their backs. They were very young and very
enthusiastic. I suspected them of being bride and groom, although I did
not know, and the most vivid recollection I have is of seeing the young
woman washing their camp-dishes in the cleanest, soapiest dishwater I
had seen since I left home. And there was a cook who is a business man in
the winter, and who made excellent soda biscuit and talked books to me.
[Illustration: GUNSIGHT LAKE AND MOUNT JACKSON FROM FUSILLADE MOUNTAIN]
That night, around the camp-fire, there were more stories told. The
college boys--"Pie" Way, the Yale pitcher, was one--related many
marvelous tales. They said they were true. I hope so. If they were, life
is even more interesting and thrilling a thing than I had believed.
If they were fiction, they had me beaten at my own game.
The next day was lowering and cold. I spent the morning trying to get
fish, and retired sour and disappointed when every one else succeeded
and I failed. Sometime I am going back to Red Eagle Lake, and I shall
take with me a tin of coral-colored salmon eggs--a trick I learned from
George Locke on the Flathead River later on. And then I intend to have my
photograph taken with strings of fish like bunches of bananas around me.
VI
THE CALL
As the days went on there was a subtle change in the party. Women, who
had to be helped into their saddles at the beginning of the trip, swung
into them easily. Waistbands were looser, eyes were clearer; we were
tanned; we were calm with the large calmness of the great outdoors. And
with each succeeding day the feeling of achievement grew. We were doing
things and doing them without effort. To some of us the mountains had
made their ancient appeal. Never again should we be clear of their call.
To those of us who felt all this inevitably in the future would come
times when cities and even civilization itself would cramp.
I have traveled a great deal. The Alps have never held this lure for
me. Perhaps it is because these great mountains are my own, in my own
country. Cities call--I have heard them. But there is no voice in all
the world so insistent to me as the wordless call of the Rockies. I
shall go back. Those who go once always hope to go back. The lure of
the great free spaces is in their blood.
We crossed many passes. Dawson Pass was the first difficult Rocky Mountain
pass I had ever seen. There was a time when I had thought that a mountain
pass was a depression. It is not. A mountain pass is a place where the
impossible becomes barely possible. It is a place where wild game has,
after much striving, discovered that it may get from one mountain valley
to another. Along these game trails men have built new paths. Again
and again we rode through long green valleys, the trail slowly rising
until it had left timber far below. Then at last we confronted a great
rock wall, a seemingly impassable barrier. Up this, by infinite windings,
back and forward went the trail. At the top was the pass.
[Illustration: DAWSON PASS]
"I'm getting right tired," said Charley Russell, "of standing in a cloud
up to my waist."
Each new pass brought a new vista of blue distance, of white peaks. Each
presented its own problems of ascent or descent. No two were alike.
Mountain-climbing is like marriage. Whatever else it may be, it is always
interesting.
There was the day we went over the Cutbank Pass, with instructions to
hold our horses' manes so that our saddles would not slip back. I shall
never forget my joy at reaching the summit and the horror that followed
when I found I was on a rocky wall about twenty feet wide which dropped
a half-mile straight down on the other side to a perfectly good blue
lake. There was Triple Divide. There was the Piegan Pass, where, having
left the party for a time, I rode back to them on the pack-horse I have
mentioned before, with my left foot dangling over eternity.
Triple Divide. The trail had just been completed, and ours was the first
party after the trail-makers. I had expected to be the first woman on
the top of Triple Divide. But when I arrived, panting and breathless
and full of the exaltation of the moment, two girls were already there
sitting on a rock. I shall not soon recover from the indignant surprise
of that moment. Perhaps they never knew that they had taken the laurel
wreath from my brow.
Triple Divide is really the culminating point of the continent. It is
called Triple Divide because water flows from it into the Gulf of Mexico,
into the Pacific Ocean, and into Hudson Bay.
[Illustration: PARTY CROSSING TRIPLE DIVIDE]
There was the day when, on our way to Gunsight, we rode for hours along
a trail that heavy rains had turned into black swamp. The horses
struggled, constantly mired. It was the hardest day of the trip, not
because of the distance, which was only thirty-five miles, but on account
of the constant rocking in the saddle as our horses wallowed out of one
"jack pot" into another--jack pots, I presume, because they are easy
to get into and hard to get out of!
There was some grunting when at the end of that day we fell out of our
saddles, but no complaining. That night, for the first time, the Eaton
party slept under a roof at the Gunsight Chalet, on the shores of a
blue lake. The Blackfoot Glacier was almost overhead. It was the end
of a hot July, but we gathered around a fire that evening, and crawled
in under heavy blankets to the quick sleep of fatigue.
One more pass, and we should be across the Rockies and moving down the
Pacific Slope. The moon came up that night and shone on the ice-caps of
the mountains all around us, on the glacier, on the Gunsight itself,
appropriately if not beautifully named. As far up the mountain-side as
the glacier our tired horses ranged for grass, and the tiny fire of the
herder made a red glow that disappeared as the night mist closed down.
No "Come and get it" the next morning, but a good breakfast, nevertheless:
a frosty morning, with the sun out, and the moving-picture man gone
ahead to catch us as we climbed. There was another photographer who
had joined the party. He had been up at dawn, on the chance of snapping
a goat or two.
Late the next night, when after a hard day's ride we had reached
civilization again at Lake Macdonald, and had dined and rested, the
ambitious young man limped into the hotel on foot. For more than twenty
miles he had tramped, carrying a heavy plate camera and extra plates.
The zeal of the artist had made him careless. He left his horse untied,
and it promptly followed the others.
Of the last part of that trip of his afoot I do not care to think. The
trail, having scaled great heights, below the Sperry Glacier dropped
sharply into the dense forest of the Pacific Slope. There were bears
there. We saw seven at one time the next day, six black and one silver
tip, on the very trail he had covered.
But he got the picture.
Once over the crest of the Gunsight, there was a change in the
air. It blew about us, warm with the heat it had gathered in the South
Pacific. Such animal life as the altitude permitted was out, basking
in the sun. There were still snow-fields in the shadows, but they were
not so numerous. The rocks threw back the sun-rays on to our burned
faces. The trail dipped, climbed, dipped again. Here on a ledge was a
cry, "Pack-train coming," and we halted to let pass by a train of men
on horseback and of laden little burros, tidy and strong.
Climbing again, the trail was lost in the shale, and arrows painted on the
rocks gave us the direction. Two lakes lay together below. One appeared
from our elevation rather higher than the other. Rather higher! The rock
wall that separated them was fourteen hundred feet high, and vertical.
As we began the last descent, the party grew silent. It was the last
leg of the journey. A day or so more and we should be scattered over
the continent on whose spine we were so incontinently tramping. Back to
civilization, to porcelain bathtubs and course dinners and facial massage,
to stays and skirts, to roofs and servants and the vast impedimenta
of living.
[Illustration: MOUNTAIN GOAT AND KID ON PTARMIGAN PASS
(The white objects about two thirds of the way down)
_Copyright, A. J. Baker, Kalispell, Montana_]
Sperry Chalet and luncheon. No more the ham and coffee over a wood fire,
the cutting of much bread on a flat stone. Here were tables, chairs, and
linen. Alas, there was a waitress who crumbed the table and brought in
dessert.
Back, indeed, with a vengeance. But only to the ways of civilization
itself. All afternoon we went on, descending always, through the
outriders of the forest to the forest itself. Dusk came, dusk in the
woods, with strange soft paddings of unseen feet, with a gray light
half-religious, half-faëry, that only those who penetrate to the hearts
of great forests can know.
"It makes me think of death," some one said in a low tone. "Just a great
shadow, no color. Nothing real. And silence, and infinite distance."
Then Lake Macdonald. We burst out of the forest on a run. The horses
had known, by the queer instinct of horses, that just ahead would be
oats and a corral and grass for the eating. They broke into a canter.
The various things we had hung to ourselves during the long, slow
progress over the mountain rattled and banged. We hung on in a kind of
mad exultation. We had done it. We had crossed the Continental Divide,
the Lewis Overthrust, whatever geographers choose to call it.
The trail led past a corral, past a vegetable garden such as our Eastern
eyes had seldom seen. Under trees, around a corner at a gallop. Then
the Glacier Hotel at Lake Macdonald, generally known as "Lewis's."
Soft winds from the Pacific blew across Lake Macdonald and warmed
us. Great strawberries were ripening in the garden. Our horses got
oats, all they could eat. In a pool in front of the hotel lazy trout
drifted about.
There was good food. Again there were people dressed in civilized raiment,
people who looked at us and our shabby riding-clothes with a disdain
not unmixed with awe. There was fox-trotting and one-stepping, in
riding-boots, with an orchestra. And that night at Lewis's they gave
Howard Eaton a potlatch.
A potlatch is an Indian party. An Indian's idea of a party is to give
away everything he possesses and then start all over again. That is one
reason why our Indians are so poor to-day. We sat in a great lobby hung
with Indian trophies and bearskins, sat in a circle with Howard Eaton
in the center. There were a few speeches and some anecdotes. Then the
potlatch went on.
There were hot fried trout, sandwiches, and chips of dried meat--buffalo
and deer, I believe. There was beer. After that came the gifts. Everybody
got something. Howard Eaton received a waistcoat made of spotted hide,
and the women got necklaces of Indian beads. It was extraordinary,
hospitable, lavish, and--Western. To have a party and receive gifts is
one thing, but to have a party so you can give away things is another.
VII
THE BLACK MARKS
The visit to the executive department of the park was disappointing.
I found the superintendent's office in a two-room frame shack; the
Government warehouse an old barn: five miles from a railroad, too. That's
management for you! Why, O gentlemen at Washington who arrange these
things, why not at Belton, on the railroad, five miles away? The park
extends to Belton.
Inadequate appropriations, the necessity for putting the entire heavy
machinery of the Government in motion for the long-distance control of
the park, poor automobile roads, and insufficient rangers--these are
the black marks against us in Glacier Park. On every hand the enthusiasm
of a most efficient superintendent must contend with these things. That
marvels of trail-making and road-building in this vast domain have been
done with so little money and encouragement is due, primarily, to the
faith the men closely connected with the park have had in its future.
Doubtless all these things will remedy themselves in time. But they make
the immediate problems of the park difficult to cope with. The chief
ranger must live where he can. No building erected by the superintendent
must cost over one thousand dollars. It is not easy in that country of
cheap wood and dear labor to build a house for one thousand dollars.
And there is always the difficulty of long-distance supervision. In 1914
the former Superintendent of National Parks, Mr. Daniels, spent a week
in Glacier Park. Last year he was at the entrance, Glacier Park Station,
for a half a day, and not in the park at all.
There are several parks, and it is easy to believe that Mr. Daniels
found it difficult to visit them all. But the method must be wrong. It
is Washington that must order and pay for each bit of new trail- and
road-building. If Washington does not come to the park, the park cannot
go to Washington. There is something lacking in efficiency in a system
which depends on across-the-continent supervision.
This year I hope the Superintendent of National Parks will go out to
Glacier Park, not by automobile, but on a horse, and ride over his
great domain. Then I hope he will go back to Washington and arrange for
enough rangers to make the park safe and to save its timber from forest
fires. Yellowstone Park has soldiers. It is not soldiers, but woodsmen,
trail-riders, rangers, that are needed. Canada, in this same country,
has her Northwest Mounted Police.
They want real men out there. But the mountains take care of that. The
weaklings don't stick. From just north of Glacier Park went a band of
twenty-five cavalrymen that I met last year in Flanders. They were
rangers: mountain riders. For weeks during the German invasion they
rode on skirmish duty between the advancing Germans and the retiring
armies. They became famous. Where there were reckless courage and fine
horsemanship needed, those men were sent.
If we ever have a war, we shall draw hard on the West for cavalry. Our
national parks should be able to send out trained skirmishers.
Under present conditions Glacier Park could furnish about a dozen.
And, now that we are criticizing,--every one may criticize the Government:
it is the English blood in us,--why is it that, with the most poetic
nomenclature in the world,--the Indian,--one by one the historic names
of peaks, lakes, and rivers of Glacier Park are being replaced by the
names of obscure Government officials, professors in small universities,
unimportant people who go out there to the West and memorialize
themselves on Government maps? Each year sees some new absurdity. What
names in the world are more beautiful than Going-to-the-Sun and
Rising-Wolf? Here are Almost-a-Dog Mountain, Two-Medicine Lake, Red
Eagle--a few that have survived.
[Illustration: UPPER TWO MEDICINE LAKE]
Every peak, every butte, every river and lake of this country has been
named by the Indians. The names are beautiful and romantic. To preserve
them in a Government reservation is almost the only way of preserving
them at all. What has happened? Look over the map of Glacier Park. The
Indian names have been done away with. Majestic peaks, towering
buttes are being given names like this: Haystack Butte, Trapper Peak,
Huckleberry Mountain, the Guard House, the Garden Wall. One of the most
wonderful things in the Rocky Mountains is this Garden Wall. I wish I
knew what the Indians called it. Then there are Iceberg Lake, Florence
Falls, Twin Lakes, Gunsight Mountain, Split Mountain, Surprise Pass,
Peril Peak,--that last was a dandy! Alliterative!--Church Butte, Statuary
Mountain, Buttercup Park. Can you imagine the inspiration of the man
who found some flowery meadow between granite crags and took away from
it its Indian name and called it Buttercup Park?
The Blackfeet are the aristocrats among American Indians. They were the
buffalo hunters, and this great region was once theirs. To the mountains
and lakes of what is now Glacier Park, they attached their legends,
which are their literature.
The white man came, and not content with eliminating the Indians, he
went further and wiped out their history. Any Government official,
if he so desires, any white man seeking perpetuation on the map of his
country, may fasten his name to a mountain and go down in the school
geographies. It has been done again and again. It is being done now. And
the lover of the old names stands helpless and aghast.
Is there no way to stop this vandalism? Year after year goes by, and
just as the people connected with the park are beginning to learn new
names for the peaks, they are again rechristened. There must be seven
Goat Mountains. Here and there is a peak, like Reynolds Peak or Grinnell
Mountain, and some others, properly named for men intimately associated
with the region. But Reynolds's Indian name was Death-on-the-Trail. When
you have seen the mountain you can well believe that Death-on-the-Trail
would fit it well.
There are many others. Take an old peak that the Indians have known as
Old-Man-of-the-Winds or Red-Top Plume and call it Mount Thompson or
Mount Morgan or Mount Pinchot or Mount Oberlin--for Oberlin College,
presumably--or Mount Pollack--after the Wheeling stogie, I suppose!
There is hardly a name in the telephone directory that is not fastened
to some wonderful peak in this garden spot of ours. Not very long ago
I got a letter--a pathetic letter. It said that a college professor from
an Eastern college had been out there this summer and insisted that one
of the peaks be named for him and one for his daughter. It was done.
Here, then, the Government has done a splendid thing and done it none
too well. It has preserved for the people of the United States and for
all the world a scenic spot so beautiful and so impressive that I have
not even attempted to describe it. It is not possible. But it has failed
to open up the park properly. It has been niggardly in appropriation.
It has allowed its geographers to take away the original Indian names
of this home of the Blackfeet and so destroy the last trace of a vanishing
race.
Were it not for the Great Northern Railway, travel through Glacier
Park would be practically impossible. Probably the Great Northern was
not entirely altruistic, and yet I believe that Mr. Louis Warren Hill,
known always as "Louie" Hill, has had an ideal and followed it--followed
it with an enthusiasm that is contagious. And with an inspiring faith.
The Great Northern has built huge hotels in three places and at a dozen
other locations has built groups of log houses, Swiss fashion, so that
it is possible to follow the trails by day and to be comfortably housed
and fed each night.
These hotels, built by the Great Northern, are now owned and controlled
by the Glacier Park Hotel Company.
At the entrance to the park is the Glacier Park Hotel that cost half
a million dollars and is almost as large as the National Capitol at
Washington. Like all the hotels and chalets in the park, it is constructed
largely of the huge trunks of the trees of the Northwest. The Indians
call the Glacier Park Hotel the "Great Log Lodge." There is everything
from a store to a swimming-pool.
Fifty miles away in the very heart of the park there is the new Many
Glaciers Hotel. It also cost a half-million dollars. There is an
automobile road leading to Many Glaciers.
[Illustration: VIEW FROM DINING-ROOM, MANY-GLACIER HOTEL]
The chalet system, also built by the Great Northern, has done more
than anything else to make the park possible for tourists. Automobile
roads and trails alike touch the chalets, and, although I am firm in
my conviction that it is impossible to see the park properly from an
automobile, I realize that there are many who will not take the more
arduous and sportsmanly method. For them, then, a short trip of twelve
or fifteen miles each day takes them from chalet to chalet. There are
chalets at Two-Medicine Lake, at Cutbank Canyon, at Going-to-the-Sun,
at St. Mary's Lake, at Gunsight Pass, at the Sperry Glacier, at Granite
Park, and at Belton.
There are inclusive and very moderate rates for various tours to take
up a certain number of days. A saddle-horse costs two dollars a day;
a pack-horse two dollars a day; a guide, who will furnish his own horse
and board himself, five dollars a day.
There are rates from chalet to chalet--including a night's lodging in
comfortable beds, morning breakfast, evening dinner, and a carefully
packed luncheon--that are astonishingly cheap. For those who wish to
go even more simply, there are the tepee camps. There are three of these,
at St. Mary's, Going-to-the-Sun, and Many Glaciers. They comprise a number
of Indian tepees grouped about a central cabin which includes a kitchen
provided with a range and cooking utensils. The tepees themselves are
wooden-floored and each is equipped with two single cot beds and bedding.
At all of the tepee camps the charge for lodging is fifty cents per bed
per night; the use of the range and cooking utensils is free. At the
chalets near by, hikers may purchase food at very reasonable prices.
It is, you see, possible to go through Glacier Park without Howard
Eaton. It is even safe, and, to those who have never known Howard,
highly satisfactory. But there will be something missing--that curious
thing called personality, which could take forty-two entirely different,
blasé, feeble-muscled, uncertain, and effete Easterners and mould them
in a few days into a homogeneous whole: that took excursionists and made
them philosophers and sportsmen.
[Illustration: CUT BANK CHALETS ON CUT BANK RIVER
_Copyright, 1912, Kiser Photo Co._]
He was hunting in Arizona later on. The party ate venison, duck, and
mountain lion--which tastes like veal.
"We have had several fights with grizzlies," he wrote. "They are so
strong that they have whipped the hounds and carved them up some in each
fight. Country pretty rough and considerable fallen timber, which delays
us. I was kicked the other day by a horse when almost up to a bear. The
boys thought I had a broken leg or two, so they let the bear escape."
He was sending a rider off to the nearest post-office and wondering what
was doing in the war.
"Has Port Arthur fallen yet?" he inquired whimsically.
A hunter who puts the greenest tenderfoot at ease and teaches him without
apparently teaching at all; a host whose first thought is always for his
guests; a calm-faced man with twinkling blue eyes, who is proud of his
"boys" and his friends all over the world--that is Howard Eaton as nearly
as he can be put on paper.
Wherever he is when he reads this, hunting in Arizona or the Jackson Hole
country, or snowed in at the ranch at Wolf, I hope he will forgive me for
putting him into print, in memory of those days when the entire forty-two
of us followed him, like the tail of a kite, across the Great Divide.
VIII
BEARS
It was the next day that I made my first close acquaintance with
bears. There are many bears in Glacier Park. Firearms are forbidden, of
course, and the rangers kill them only in case of trouble. Naturally, so
protected, they are increasing rapidly. They find good forage where horses
would starve. Mr. Ralston, the park supervisor, saw a she bear with
three cubs last spring. There are no tame bears, as in the Yellowstone.
There are plenty of animals. Some fifty moose graze along the
Flathead. Beavers have colonies in many of the valleys and industriously
build dams that deepen the fords. I remember one place along the Cutbank
Trail where the first horses found themselves above the belly in water
and confronting a perpendicular bank up which one or two scrambled as
best they could. The rest turned and, riding in the stream for a
half-mile détour, made the trail again. That was the work of beavers.
There are coyotes a-plenty. Because they kill the deer and elk, the
rangers poison them in the winter with strychnine. A few mountain lions
remain. As one can make a whole night hideous, a few are sufficient.
There is something particularly interesting about a bear. Perhaps it
is because he can climb a tree. In other words, ordinary subterfuges
do not go with him. Reports vary--he is a fighter; he is a craven; the
fact being, of course, that he is, like all wild animals and most humans,
a bit of each.
The trip was over, and I had seen but one bear. At Lewis's that last
Sunday I voiced my disappointment. Soon after I received word quietly
that Frank Higgins, guide and companion on many hunting trips to Stewart
Edward White and other hunters, had offered to show me some bears.
He had horses saddled under a tree when I went back, and two men, one
of them a Chicago newspaper artist, were with him. We mounted and rode
up the trail back of the hotel.
I was dubious. For days I had tried to see bears and failed, and now to
have them offered with certainty by Mr. Higgins made me skeptical. I had
an idea that under his tall impassiveness he was having a little fun at
my expense. He was not. We went out into the forest, to where the hotel
dumps its garbage. That was rather a blow, at first. And there were no
bears. Only a great silence and a considerable stench.
We got off our horses, tied them, and sat down on a log. Almost
immediately there was a distant crackling of branches.
"One coming now," said Frank Higgins. "Just sit quiet."
That first bear, however, was nervous. He circled around us. I set
my camera for one hundred feet, and waited. But the creature, a big
black, was shy. He refused to come out. Mr. Higgins went after him.
He snarled. I looked after Mr. Higgins with a new respect, and the Chicago
newspaper man said he was perfectly satisfied with the bear where he was,
and that enough was enough.
The bear suddenly took to a tree, climbing like a cat. He looked about
the size of a grand piano. Urged by Mr. Higgins, we approached the
tree. Finally we stood directly beneath. He growled--the bear, of course,
not Frank Higgins. But my courage was rising. Wild bear he was, but he
was a craven. I moved up the focus of my camera and took his picture. We
left him there and went back to the log. All at once there were bears in
every direction, six in all. I moved my camera to thirty feet and snapped
another. They circled about, heads turned toward us. Now and then they
stood up to see us better. We were between them and supper.
[Illustration: LUNCHEON ON FLATHEAD RIVER TRIP]
[Illustration: PHOTOGRAPHING A BEAR]
The newspaper man offered to sketch me with a "bear" background. And
he did. Now and then he would say:--
"Isn't there one behind me?"
"About twenty feet away," I would say.
"Good Lord!" But he went on drawing. I have that picture now. It is very
good, but my eyes have the look of a scared rabbit.
Our friend still clung in the tree. The other man had ridden back to
the hotel for camera films. Time went on and he did not return. We
made would-be facetious remarks about his courage--from our own
pinnacle. Almost an hour! The sketch was nearly finished, and twilight
was falling. Still he had not come. Then he appeared. He had taken the
wrong trail, and had been riding those bear-infested regions alone. He
was smiling, but pale. To visit bears in a party is one thing; to ride
alone, with fleeting black and brown figures skulking behind fallen
timber, is another. Not for a long time, I think, will that gentleman
forget the hour or so when he was lost in the forest, with bears
"Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks,
In Vallombrosa."
The poetic quotation is my own idea. What he said was entirely
different. As a matter of fact, his own expression was: "Hell, the
place is full of them!"
At last, very quietly, Mr. Higgins got up.
"Here's a grizzly," he said. "You might stand near the horses."
We did. The grizzly looked the exact size of a seven-passenger automobile
with a limousine top, and he had the same gift of speed. The black
bears looked at him and ran. I looked at him and wanted to. The artist
put away his sketch, and we strolled toward the horses. They had not
objected to the black bears, beyond watching them with careful eyes. But
now they pulled and flung about to free themselves. Wherever he goes,
a grizzly bear owns his entire surroundings. He carries a patent of
ownership.
He could have the woods, for all of me.
The black bears were in full retreat. A hound dog came loping up the
trail and caught the scent. In an instant he was after them. Any hope
I had ever had of outrunning a bear died then and there. The dog was
running without a muffler. One of his frantic yelps changed to a howl
as the rearmost bear turned and swatted him. A moment, and the chase
was on again.
There is only one thing to do if a bear takes a sudden dislike to one.
It is useless to climb or to run. Go toward it and try kindness. Ask
about the children, in a carefully restrained tone. Make the Indian
sign that you are a friend. If you have a sandwich about you, proffer
it. Then, while the bear is staring at you in amazement, turn and walk
quietly away.
It was growing dark. The grizzly, having driven off the black bears,
turned his attention to us. We decided that it was almost dinner time,
and that we did not care to be late. Anyhow, we had seen enough bears.
Enough is enough. We mounted and rode down the trail.
Not all game is as plentiful as bears in Glacier Park or thrives so
well. With the cutting-up of the range many of them have lost their
winter grazing-grounds. Practically the last of the Rocky Mountain sheep
and goats are in Glacier Park. Last winter numbers of these increasingly
rare animals were found dead by the rangers. That is another thing the
Government will do eventually. It may never see that the Blackfeet
Indians have a square deal, but it will feed what is left of the game.
There is little of the old West left. Irrigation, wheat, the cutting-up
of the Indian reservations into allotments, the homesteader, all spell
the end of the most picturesque period of America's development.
Not for long, then, the cow-puncher in his gorgeous chaps, the pack-train
winding its devious way along the trail. The boosting spirit has struck
the West. Settlements of one street and thirteen houses, eleven of them
saloons, are suddenly becoming cities. The railroads and the automobiles,
by obliterating time, have done away with distance. The old West is
almost gone. Now is the time to see it--not from a train window; not,
if you can help it, from an automobile, but afoot or on horseback,
leisurely, thoroughly.
IX
DOWN THE FLATHEAD RAPIDS
The trip was over. I had seen such things as I had never dreamed of. I
had done things which I intended to relate at home. But I had caught no
fish to amount to anything. On a Monday night I was to take the train
East. On Sunday came great tales of the Flathead River. But I had only
one more day. How was it possible?
It was possible. Everything is possible to those Westerners. I could
put on my oldest clothes and fish the Flathead for twenty miles or so
the following day under the guidance of one George Locke, celebrated
trout-sleuth. Then, rod and fish and all, I could take the Great Northern
Eastern Express at a station and start on my three days' journey home.
I did it.
I can still see the faces of the people in that magnificent club car
when a woman in riding-clothes, stained and torn, wearing an old
sweater and a man's hat, and carrying a camera, a fishing-rod, and a
cutthroat trout weighing three and a half pounds, invaded their bored
and elegant privacy. The woman was burned to a deep cerise. She summoned
the immaculate porter and held out the trout to him. He was very dubious
about taking it. Thereupon the woman put on her most impressive manner
and told him how she wished it placed on the ice and how the cook was
to fix it and various other details.
It had been a day to live for. The Flathead River does not flow; it runs.
It is a series of rapids, incredibly swift, with here and there a quiet
pool. Attempts to picture the rapids as we ran them were abortive. We
reeled and wallowed, careened and whirled. And always the fisherman-guide
was calm, and the gentleman who engineered the party was calm, and I
pretended to be calm.
At the foot of each rapids we fished. I was beginning to learn that
twist of the wrist that sends out the line in curves, and drops the
fly delicately on to the surface of the water.
As I learned, so that he did not close his eyes each time I raised my
rod, George Locke told of the Easterner he had taken down the river
some time before.
"He wanted a lesson in casting," he said. "And I worked over him pretty
hard. I told him all I knew. Then, after I'd told him all I knew, and
he'd had all the fun with me he wanted, he just stood up in the bow of
the boat and put out ninety feet of line without turning a hair. Cast?
He could have cast from a spool of thread."
In a boat behind us was a moving-picture man. For weeks he had always
been just behind or just ahead. When the time came to leave the West,
I missed that moving-picture man. He had come to be a part of the
landscape. I can still see him trying to get past us down those rapids,
going at lightning speed to gain some promontory where he could set
up his weapon and catch our boat in case it upset or did anything else
worth recording.
[Illustration: APPISTOKI FALLS NEAR TWO MEDICINE CHALETS]
He had two pieces of luck on that trip. I had hooked my first trout and
was busy trying to throw it in the boatman's face when it escaped. He
caught me at the exact instant when the triumph of my face turned to
a purple rage; and later on in the day he had the machine turned on me
when I caught two trout on two flies at the same time. Incidentally, I
slipped off the stone I was standing on at the same moment. He probably
got that, too.
I caught twelve trout in as many minutes from that same rock and furnished
the luncheon for the party. I took back loudly everything I had said
against the fishing in Glacier Park. I ate more trout than anybody else,
as was my privilege. If there were nothing else to it, I would still go
back to the Montana Rockies for the fishing in the Flathead River.
At noon we stopped for luncheon. The trout was fried with bacon, and
coffee was made. We ate on a little tongue of land around which the
river brawled and rushed.
From the time we had left Lake McDermott we had seen no single human
being. Mostly the river ran through tall canyons of its own cutting;
always it looked dangerous. Generally, indeed, it was! But never once
did the boatman lose control. It reminded me of the story Mark Twain
told of the passenger who says to the pilot something like this:--
"I suppose you know where every hidden rock and sunken tree and sandbar
is in this river?"
To which the pilot replies: "No, sir-ee. But I know where they ain't."
* * * * *
The train swung on into the summer twilight, past the ruins of old
mining-towns, now nothing but names, past brawling streams and great
deep woods.
The large trout was cooked and served. It had been worth the effort.
There were four of us to eat it--the moving-picture man, the chief
ranger of the park, the gentleman from St. Paul who had engineered the
fishing-trip, and myself.
At Glacier Park Station my wardrobe, which I had not seen for weeks, was
put on the train. "They do you very well," as the English say, in the
West. Everything was pressed. Even my shoes had been freshly polished.
A crowd of people had gathered at the station. My supper companions left
the train. There were many good-byes. Then the train moved slowly off.
I stood on the platform as long as I could and watched the receding
lights. Behind the hotel rose the purple-black silhouette of the
mountains, touched with faint gold by the lingering finger of the sun.
Stealthy coyotes had taken advantage of the dusk to creep close to the
track. A light glimmered from a tent on the Indian reservation. Flat,
treeless country, a wagon drawn by tired horses, range cattle that were
only shadows.
Then night--and the East.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.
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