Again and again did California and I prance down that reach to the
little bay, each with a salmon in tow, and land him in the shallows.
Then Portland took my rod and caught some ten-pounders, and my spoon was
carried away by an unknown leviathan. Each fish, for the merits of the
three that had died so gamely, was hastily hooked on the balance and
flung back. Portland recorded the weight in a pocket-book, for he was
a real-estate man. Each fish fought for all he was worth, and none more
savagely than the smallest, a game little six-pounder. At the end of
six hours we added up the list. Read it. Total: Sixteen fish; aggregate
weight, one hundred and forty pounds. The score in detail runs something
like this--it is only interesting to those concerned: fifteen, eleven
and a half, twelve, ten, nine and three quarters, eight, and so forth;
as I have said, nothing under six pounds, and three ten-pounders.
Very solemnly and thankfully we put up our rods--it was glory enough for
all time--and returned weeping in each other's arms, weeping tears of
pure joy, to that simple, bare-legged family in the packing-case house
by the water-side.
The old farmer recollected days and nights of fierce warfare with the
Indians “way back in the fifties,” when every ripple of the Columbia
River and her tributaries hid covert danger. God had dowered him with a
queer, crooked gift of expression and a fierce anxiety for the welfare
of his two little sons--tanned and reserved children, who attended
school daily and spoke good English in a strange tongue.
His wife was an austere woman, who had once been kindly, and perhaps
handsome.
Very many years of toil had taken the elasticity out of step and voice.
She looked for nothing better than everlasting work--the chafing
detail of housework--and then a grave somewhere up the hill among the
blackberries and the pines.
But in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter, a small
and silent maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very far from the meals
she tended and the pans she scoured.
We stumbled into the household at a crisis, and there was a deal of
downright humanity in that same. A bad, wicked dress-maker had promised
the maiden a dress in time for a to-morrow's rail-way journey, and
though the barefooted Georgy, who stood in very wholesome awe of his
sister, had scoured the woods on a pony in search, that dress never
arrived. So, with sorrow in her heart and a hundred Sister-Anne glances
up the road, she waited upon the strangers and, I doubt not, cursed them
for the wants that stood between her and her need for tears. It was
a genuine little tragedy. The mother, in a heavy, passionless voice,
rebuked her impatience, yet sat up far into the night, bowed over a heap
of sewing for the daughter's benefit.
These things I beheld in the long marigold-scented twilight and
whispering night, loafing round the little house with California, who
un-folded himself like a lotus to the moon, or in the little boarded
bunk that was our bedroom, swap-ping tales with Portland and the old
man.
Most of the yarns began in this way:--“Red Larry was a bull-puncher back
of Lone County, Montana,” or “There was a man riding the trail met a
jack-rabbit sitting in a cactus,” or “'Bout the time of the San Diego
land boom, a woman from Monterey,” etc.
You can try to piece out for yourselves what sort of stories they were.
IV. THE YELLOWSTONE
ONCE upon a time there was a carter who brought his team and a friend
into the Yellowstone Park without due thought. Presently they came upon
a few of the natural beauties of the place, and that carter turned his
team into his friend's team, howling:--“Get out o' this, Jim. All hell's
alight under our noses!”
And they called the place Hell's Half-Acre to this day to witness if the
carter lied.
We, too, the old lady from Chicago, her husband, Tom, and the good
little mares, came to Hell's Half-Acre, which is about sixty acres in
extent, and when Tom said:--“Would you like to drive over it?”
We said:--“Certainly not, and if you do we shall report you to the park
authorities.”
There was a plain, blistered, peeled, and abominable, and it was given
over to the sportings and spoutings of devils who threw mud, and steam,
and dirt at each other with whoops, and halloos, and bellowing curses.
The places smelled of the refuse of the pit, and that odor mixed with
the clean, wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils throughout the
day.
This Yellowstone Park is laid out like Ollendorf, in exercises of
progressive difficulty. Hell's Half-Acre was a prelude to ten or twelve
miles of geyser formation.
We passed hot streams boiling in the forest; saw whiffs of steam beyond
these, and yet other whiffs breaking through the misty green hills in
the far distance; we trampled on sulphur in crystals, and sniffed things
much worse than any sulphur which is known to the upper world; and so
journeying, bewildered with the novelty, came upon a really park-like
place where Tom suggested we should get out and play with the geysers on
foot.
Imagine mighty green fields splattered with lime-beds, all the flowers
of the summer growing up to the very edge of the lime. That was our
first glimpse of the geyser basins.
The buggy had pulled up close to a rough, broken, blistered cone of
spelter stuff between ten and twenty feet high. There was trouble in
that place--moaning, splashing, gurgling, and the clank of machinery.
A spurt of boiling water jumped into the air, and a wash of water
followed.
I removed swiftly. The old lady from Chicago shrieked. “What a wicked
waste!” said her husband.
I think they call it the Riverside Geyser. Its spout was torn and ragged
like the mouth of a gun when a shell has burst there. It grumbled madly
for a moment or two, and then was still. I crept over the steaming
lime--it was the burning marl on which Satan lay--and looked fearfully
down its mouth. You should never look a gift geyser in the mouth.
I beheld a horrible, slippery, slimy funnel with water rising and
falling ten feet at a time. Then the water rose to lip level with a
rush, and an infernal bubbling troubled this Devil's Bethesda before
the sullen heave of the crest of a wave lapped over the edge and made me
run.
Mark the nature of the human soul! I had begun with awe, not to say
terror, for this was my first experience of such things. I stepped back
from the banks of the Riverside Geyser, saying:--“Pooh! Is that all it
can do?”
Yet for aught I knew, the whole thing might have blown up at a minute's
notice, she, he, or it being an arrangement of uncertain temper.
We drifted on, up that miraculous valley. On either side of us were
hills from a thousand or fifteen hundred feet high, wooded from crest to
heel. As far as the eye could range forward were columns of steam in the
air, misshapen lumps of lime, mist-like preadamite monsters, still pools
of turquoise-blue stretches of blue corn-flowers, a river that coiled on
itself twenty times, pointed bowlders of strange colors, and ridges of
glaring, staring white.
A moon-faced trooper of German extraction--never was park so carefully
patrolled--came up to inform us that as yet we had not seen any of
the real geysers; that they were all a mile or so up the valley, and
tastefully scattered round the hotel in which we would rest for the
night.
America is a free country, but the citizens look down on the soldier. I
had to entertain that trooper. The old lady from Chicago would have none
of him; so we loafed alone together, now across half-rotten pine logs
sunk in swampy ground, anon over the ringing geyser formation, then
pounding through river-sand or brushing knee-deep through long grass.
“And why did you enlist?” said I.
The moon-faced one's face began to work. I thought he would have a fit,
but he told me a story instead--such a nice tale of a naughty little
girl who wrote pretty love letters to two men at once. She was a simple
village wife, but a wicked “family novelette” countess couldn't have
accomplished her ends better. She drove one man nearly wild with the
pretty little treachery, and the other man abandoned her and came West
to forget the trickery.
Moon-face was that man.
We rounded and limped over a low spur of hill, and came out upon a field
of aching, snowy lime rolled in sheets, twisted into knots, riven with
rents, and diamonds, and stars, stretching for more than half a mile in
every direction.
On this place of despair lay most of the big, bad geysers who know when
there is trouble in Krakatoa, who tell the pines when there is a cyclone
on the Atlantic seaboard, and who are exhibited to visitors under pretty
and fanciful names.
The first mound that I encountered belonged to a goblin who was
splashing in his tub.
I heard him kick, pull a shower-bath on his shoulders, gasp, crack his
joints, and rub himself down with a towel; then he let the water out of
the bath, as a thoughtful man should, and it all sunk down out of sight
till another goblin arrived.
So we looked and we wondered at the Beehive, whose mouth is built up
exactly like a hive, at the Turban (which is not in the least like a
turban), and at many, many other geysers, hot holes, and springs. Some
of them rumbled, some hissed, some went off spasmodically, and others
lay dead still in sheets of sapphire and beryl.
Would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be guarded
by the troopers to prevent the irreverent Americans from chipping the
cones to pieces, or, worse still, making the geyser sick? If you take a
small barrel full of soft-soap and drop it down a geyser's mouth, that
geyser will presently be forced to lay all before you, and for days
afterward will be of an irritated and inconstant stomach.
When they told me the tale I was filled with sympathy. Now I wish that
I had soft-soap and tried the experiment on some lonely little beast far
away in the woods. It sounds so probable and so human.
Yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the Giantess.
She is flat-lipped, having no mouth; she looks like a pool, fifty
feet long and thirty wide, and there is no ornamentation about her. At
irregular intervals she speaks and sends up a volume of water over
two hundred feet high to begin with, then she is angry for a day and a
half--sometimes for two days.
Owing to her peculiarity of going mad in the night, not many people have
seen the Giantess at her finest; but the clamor of her unrest, men say,
shakes the wooden hotel, and echoes like thunder among the hills.
The congregation returned to the hotel to put down their impressions
in diaries and note-books, which they wrote up ostentatiously in the
verandas. It was a sweltering hot day, albeit we stood some-what higher
than the level of Simla, and I left that raw pine creaking caravansary
for the cool shade of a clump of pines between whose trunks glimmered
tents.
A batch of United States troopers came down the road and flung
themselves across the country into their rough lines. The Mexican
cavalryman can ride, though he keeps his accoutrements pig-fashion and
his horse cow-fashion.
I was free of that camp in five minutes--free to play with the heavy,
lumpy carbines, have the saddles stripped, and punch the horses
knowingly in the ribs. One of the men had been in the fight with
“Wrap-up-his-Tail,” and he told me how that great chief, his horse's
tail tied up in red calico, swaggered in front of the United States
cavalry, challenging all to single combat. But he was slain, and a few
of his tribe with him.
“There's no use in an Indian, anyway,” concluded my friend.
A couple of cow-boys--real cow-boys--jingled through the camp amid a
shower of mild chaff. They were on their way to Cook City, I fancy,
and I know that they never washed. But they were picturesque ruffians
exceedingly, with long spurs, hooded stirrups, slouch hats, fur
weather-cloth over their knees, and pistol-butts just easy to hand.
“The cow-boy's goin' under before long,” said my friend. “Soon as the
country's settled up he'll have to go. But he's mighty useful now. What
would we do without the cow-boy?”
“As how?” said I, and the camp laughed.
“He has the money. We have the skill. He comes in winter to play poker
at the military posts. We play poker--a few. When he's lost his money we
make him drunk and let him go. Sometimes we get the wrong man.”
And he told me a tale of an innocent cow-boy who turned up, cleaned out,
at an army post, and played poker for thirty-six hours. But it was
the post that was cleaned out when that long-haired Caucasian removed
himself, heavy with everybody's pay and declining the proffered liquor.
“Noaw,” said the historian, “I don't play with no cow-boy unless he's a
little bit drunk first.”
Ere I departed I gathered from more than one man the significant fact
that up to one hundred yards he felt absolutely secure behind his
revolver.
“In England, I understand,” quoth the limber youth from the South,--“in
England a man isn't allowed to play with no fire-arms. He's got to be
taught all that when he enlists. I didn't want much teaching how to
shoot straight 'fore I served Uncle Sam. And that's just where it is.
But you was talking about your Horse Guards now?”
I explained briefly some peculiarities of equipment connected with our
crackest crack cavalry. I grieve to say the camp roared.
“Take 'em over swampy ground. Let 'em run around a bit an' work the
starch out of 'em, an' then, Almighty, if we wouldn't plug 'em at ease
I'd eat their horses.”
There was a maiden--a very little maiden--who had just stepped out of
one of James's novels. She owned a delightful mother and an equally
delightful father--a heavy-eyed, slow-voiced man of finance. The parents
thought that their daughter wanted change.
She lived in New Hampshire. Accordingly, she had dragged them up to
Alaska and to the Yosemite Valley, and was now returning leisurely, via
the Yellowstone, just in time for the tail-end of the summer season at
Saratoga.
We had met once or twice before in the park, and I had been amazed and
amused at her critical commendation of the wonders that she saw.
From that very resolute little mouth I received a lecture on American
literature, the nature and inwardness of Washington society, the precise
value of Cable's works as compared with Uncle Remus Harris, and a few
other things that had nothing whatever to do with geysers, but were
altogether pleasant.
Now, an English maiden who had stumbled on a dust-grimed, lime-washed,
sun-peeled, collarless wanderer come from and going to goodness knows
where, would, her mother inciting her and her father brandishing an
umbrella, have regarded him as a dissolute adventurer--a person to be
disregarded.
Not so those delightful people from New Hampshire. They were good enough
to treat him--it sounds almost incredible--as a human being, possibly
respectable, probably not in immediate need of financial assistance.
Papa talked pleasantly and to the point.
The little maiden strove valiantly with the accent of her birth and that
of her rearing, and mamma smiled benignly in the background.
Balance this with a story of a young English idiot I met mooning about
inside his high collar, attended by a valet. He condescended to tell
me that “you can't be too careful who you talk to in these parts.” And
stalked on, fearing, I suppose, every minute for his social chastity.
That man was a barbarian (I took occasion to tell him so), for he
comported himself after the manner of the head-hunters and hunted of
Assam who are at perpetual feud one with another.
You will understand that these foolish stories are introduced in order
to cover the fact that this pen cannot describe the glories of the Upper
Geyser Basin. The evening I spent under the lee of the Castle Geyser,
sitting on a log with some troopers and watching a baronial keep forty
feet high spouting hot water. If the Castle went off first, they said
the Giantess would be quiet, and vice versa, and then they told tales
till the moon got up and a party of campers in the woods gave us all
something to eat.
Then came soft, turfy forest that deadened the wheels, and two
troopers on detachment duty stole noiselessly behind us. One was the
Wrap-up-his-Tail man, and they talked merrily while the half-broken
horses bucked about among the trees. And so a cavalry escort was with
us for a mile, till we got to a mighty hill strewn with moss agates,
and everybody had to jump out and pant in that thin air. But how
intoxicating it was! The old lady from Chicago ducked like an
emancipated hen as she scuttled about the road, cramming pieces of rock
into her reticule. She sent me fifty yards down to the hill-side to pick
up a piece of broken bottle which she insisted was moss agate.
“I've some o' that at home, an' they shine. Yes, you go get it, young
man.”
As we climbed the long path the road grew viler and viler till it
became, without disguise, the bed of a torrent; and just when things
were at their rockiest we nearly fell into a little sapphire lake--but
never sapphire was so blue--called Mary's Lake; and that between eight
and nine thousand feet above the sea.
Afterward, grass downs, all on a vehement slope, so that the buggy,
following the new-made road, ran on the two off-wheels mostly till we
dipped head-first into a ford, climbed up a cliff, raced along down,
dipped again, and pulled up dishevelled at “Larry's” for lunch and an
hour's rest.
Then we lay on the grass and laughed with sheer bliss of being alive.
This have I known once in Japan, once on the banks of the Columbia, what
time the salmon came in and California howled, and once again in the
Yellowstone by the light of the eyes of the maiden from New Hampshire.
Four little pools lay at my elbow, one was of black water (tepid), one
clear water (cold), one clear water (hot), one red water (boiling).
My newly washed handkerchief covered them all, and we two marvelled as
children marvel.
“This evening we shall do the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” said the
maiden.
“Together?” said I; and she said, “Yes.”
The sun was beginning to sink when we heard the roar of falling waters
and came to a broad river along whose banks we ran. And then--I might
at a pinch describe the infernal regions, but not the other place. The
Yellowstone River has occasion to run through a gorge about eight miles
long. To get to the bottom of the gorge it makes two leaps, one of
about one hundred and twenty and the other of three hundred feet. I
investigated the upper or lesser fall, which is close to the hotel.
Up to that time nothing particular happens to the Yellowstone--its banks
being only rocky, rather steep, and plentifully adorned with pines.
At the falls it comes round a corner, green, solid, ribbed with a little
foam, and not more than thirty yards wide. Then it goes over, still
green, and rather more solid than before. After a minute or two, you,
sitting upon a rock directly above the drop, begin to understand that
something has occurred; that the river has jumped between solid cliff
walls, and that the gentle froth of water lapping the sides of the gorge
below is really the outcome of great waves.
And the river yells aloud; but the cliffs do not allow the yells to
escape.
That inspection began with curiosity and finished in terror, for it
seemed that the whole world was sliding in chrysolite from under my
feet. I followed with the others round the corner to arrive at the brink
of the canyon. We had to climb up a nearly perpendicular ascent to begin
with, for the ground rises more than the river drops. Stately pine woods
fringe either lip of the gorge, which is the gorge of the Yellowstone.
You'll find all about it in the guide books.
All that I can say is that without warning or preparation I looked into
a gulf seventeen hundred feet deep, with eagles and fish-hawks
circling far below. And the sides of that gulf were one wild welter of
color--crimson, emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with port
wine, snow white, vermilion, lemon, and silver gray in wide washes. The
sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time, and water, and air
into monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs--men and women of the old
time. So far below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the
Yellowstone River ran a finger-wide strip of jade green.
The sunlight took those wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to those that
nature had already laid there.
Evening crept through the pines that shadowed us, but the full glory
of the day flamed in that canyon as we went out very cautiously to
a jutting piece of rock--blood-red or pink it was--that overhung the
deepest deeps of all.
Now I know what it is to sit enthroned amid the clouds of sunset as the
spirits sit in Blake's pictures. Giddiness took away all sensation of
touch or form, but the sense of blinding color remained.
When I reached the mainland again I had sworn that I had been floating.
The maid from New Hampshire said no word for a very long time. Then she
quoted poetry, which was perhaps the best thing she could have done.
“And to think that this show-place has been going on all these days an'
none of we ever saw it,” said the old lady from Chicago, with an acid
glance at her husband.
“No, only the Injians,” said he, unmoved; and the maiden and I laughed.
Inspiration is fleeting, beauty is vain, and the power of the mind for
wonder limited. Though the shining hosts themselves had risen choiring
from the bottom of the gorge, they would not have prevented her papa
and one baser than he from rolling stones down those stupendous
rainbow-washed slides. Seventeen hundred feet of steep-est pitch and
rather more than seventeen hundred colors for log or bowlder to whirl
through!
So we heaved things and saw them gather way and bound from white rock to
red or yellow, dragging behind them torrents of color, till the noise of
their descent ceased and they bounded a hundred yards clear at the last
into the Yellowstone.
“I've been down there,” said Tom, that evening. “It's easy to get down
if you're careful--just sit an' slide; but getting up is worse. An'
I found down below there two stones just marked with a picture of the
canyon. I wouldn't sell these rocks not for fifteen dollars.”
And papa and I crawled down to the Yellowstone--just above the first
little fall--to wet a line for good luck. The round moon came up and
turned the cliffs and pines into silver; and a two-pound trout came up
also, and we slew him among the rocks, nearly tumbling into that wild
river.
. . . . . .
Then out and away to Livingstone once more. The maiden from New
Hampshire disappeared, papa and mamma with her. Disappeared, too, the
old lady from Chicago, and the others.
V. CHICAGO
“I know thy cunning and thy greed,
Thy hard high lust and wilful deed,
And all thy glory loves to tell
Of specious gifts material.”
I HAVE struck a city--a real city--and they call it Chicago.
The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as
well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon.
This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds
rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same
sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to
see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the
Hooghly, and its air is dirt. Also it says that it is the “boss” town of
America.
I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country. They told
me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded and mirrored,
and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble crammed with people
talking about money, and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians
charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their
hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite
as much as was good for him told me that this was “the finest hotel in
the finest city on God Almighty's earth.” By the way, when an American
wishes to indicate the next country or state, he says, “God A'mighty's
earth.” This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity.
Then I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and without
end. And verily it is not a good thing to live in the East for any
length of time. Your ideas grow to clash with those held by every
right-thinking man. I looked down interminable vistas flanked with nine,
ten, and fifteen-storied houses, and crowded with men and women, and the
show impressed me with a great horror.