In the most northern corner of the Piegans' country, in northwestern
Montana, almost grazing the Canadian border with its abrupt side, stands
a turret-shaped mountain. Behind it the great range of the Rockies,
which for hundreds of miles has been trending steadily northwood, bends
sharply away toward the west, leaving the corner on which the mountain
stands a huge protruding pedestal for its weird shape. Ninety years ago
Lewis and Clarke saw it from far to southward as they passed along the
dwindling Missouri and called it Tower Mountain; but to the Indians it
has always been The Chief Mountain. Even those prosaic German
geographers to whom we owe so much for information about our own and
other lands have either seen it and fallen under the spell of its
strange power, or have taken their nomenclature directly from the
Piegans, for they have crowned it Kaiser Peak.
For more than a year we had been numbered with the Chief's subjects.
During the previous summer we had been seeking the acquaintance of the
mountain goat; not the shorn degenerate which throngs the slopes of the
Cascades and straggles among the southern peaks of Montana, but the true
snowy buffalo of the northern Rockies; and from the ledges of the St.
Mary Mountains, where we had sought him, could be seen still further to
the northward the Piegans' Chief. Of the range, yet not in it, like a
captain well to the front of his battle-line, he pressed out into the
broad prairie, as if leading a charge of Titans toward the far distant
lakes. And through the long months of an Eastern winter, and the still
longer months of an Eastern summer, above all the memories of that
wondrous land where every butte and mountain peak teems with legend, and
where every bison skull on the prairie tells its story, had towered the
clear-cut image of that Northern mountain, a worthy sovereign of any
man's allegiance. Now, as inevitably as an antelope returns to its lure,
we had returned for a closer look at our mountain. Down deep in our
hearts, battling with the awe which we felt for him, was the almost
unspoken hope that perhaps in some way we might struggle up his sheer
sides and make him, in a way he was to no one else, our king.
We were a party of three, the Doctor and I, and our faithful packer,
Fox. A cold storm was blowing spitefully across the open foothills and
out on to the prairie as we broke camp under the high banks of Kennedy
Creek on the morning of the last stage of our journey. The clouds,
driving over the range from the northwest, swung so low that they hid
the peaks, and the great pedestal of the Chief met them all uncrowned,
indistinguishable from the others about him. It was one of those
doubtful mornings with which the mountains love to warn off strangers,
or to greet their friends--one which might presage a week of storm or
usher in a fortnight of surpassing beauty.
We had camped for the night at the last of those ranches which stretch
along the bottom lands of the St. Mary River, and just as we started,
its owner, Indian Billy, decided to go with us.
Even he had never been to the foot of his tribe's famous peak, and the
dark-skinned idlers of the ranch who gathered about us as we flung the
lash ropes over our horses could tell us little more than legends of
it. Several Bloods from across the Canadian border declared that the
boundary line ran, not where the white men had marked it on the prairie
with their insignificant piles of stones, but through the deep cleft in
the Chief's wall, where the Great Spirit himself had placed it; thus
giving to the Bloods, who knew it best, their proper share of the
mountain. And, getting warmer in their enthusiasm, they reminded Billy
of their standing challenge to his tribe, the Piegans--fifty horses to
anyone who should run around that wall, small as it seemed, in half a
day.
For our part it was hard to realize even on that cold September morning
that the long dreaming was over and the reality before us. It took all
the straining of the pack ponies on the wet lead-ropes to remind us that
we were at last climbing the foothills of the great peak. Our presence
there, far from breaking the long enchantment, surrendered us bodily to
it, and Billy, riding over the successive slopes before us, swaying in
the saddle with the hawk-like motion of the prairie Indian, seemed a fit
ambassador to lead us to his king. As the day passed, the clouds
gradually lightened; and finally, just as we surmounted one of the
higher foothills, at the summit of the long, sloping, forest-clad
pedestal before us broke through the crown of the Chief. Toward us, on
the east, it showed a black rectangular wall 2,000 feet in length, 1,500
in height, and from its sharp corners the broken mists streamed away
southward like tattered garments.
A few hasty pictures, taken while Fox mended a broken pack cinch, and we
pressed on toward the foot of the mountain. Some benign influence was
with us even thus early, and we were guided into the easiest way.
Streaks of burned forest, bristling with windfalls, were slowly but
successfully threaded, long rock slides luckily avoided, while we
mounted steadily slope after slope; until finally, late in the
afternoon, we pulled our panting horses out, just above timber line,
upon the comparatively level summit of the pedestal. The foot of the
great crown wall was still a mile away and 1,000 feet above us, but we
were near enough and high enough for our purpose; and in a deep basin,
sheltered from the wind and carpeted with softest mountain grass, and
with the only water in the neighborhood sparkling up from a spring in
the bottom, we found a perfect camp. As soon as the tents were pitched,
Fox set about preparing dinner, while the seven horses, freed from their
loads, buried their noses in the grass in perfect contentment.
As he sat in the door of the tent, the Doctor's eyes seemed glued to his
field glass, while the object lenses ever pointed in the one direction,
westward; under the brim of the Indian's broad hat, as he lay apparently
dozing before the fire, I could see his black eyes fixed on the same
point; and even Fox, constantly shifting his position about the fire,
rarely took one which placed his back toward that black wall behind
which the sun was now gradually sinking. For myself, all the longing of
the past year had concentrated itself into a desire to rush over this
last remaining distance; to get to that magic crown, to feel it with
hand and foot, and to see whether, as the Piegans aver, it denied even a
single foothold for a mortal man.
After dinner the Doctor and I did go to it. We clambered out of our
little basin on to the higher portion of the domelike pedestal, and from
this platform, on which rests the great crown, looked past its two edges
at the vast mountain range behind it, stretching north and south. Then
we picked our way toward it, through the loose boulders and broken rock;
saw the summit hang further and further over us as we advanced into the
gloom at its foot, and after finally reaching it and pressing ourselves
against it where it rose sheer from its pedestal, we hurried back to
camp through the twilight, thoroughly awed by the solemnity of the
place.
The storm of the morning had cleared into a most perfect night; and, as
we lay about the fire, Billy told us all that the old men had told him
of the Chief. A full-blooded Piegan, in his new life as a ranchman he
had not lost touch with the traditions of his tribe. Only one Piegan, he
said, had ever attempted to climb the mountain. Years ago a hunting
party of their young men had been encamped on the opposite side, where
the cliffs do not overhang so much, and ledges run temptingly up for a
distance; and one of them, the youngest and most ambitious of the band,
declared that he would go to the summit. He started, and his companions
watched him from below until he passed along one of the very highest
ledges, out of sight. Then the spirit of the mountain must have met
him; for, though they waited many days, and searched for him all around
the base, he never came back. And the Piegans, being a prairie tribe and
not over fond of the mountains at best, thereafter avoided any close
acquaintance with their king.
A story had come to them, however, from the Flatheads across the
range--a tribe whose prowess they always respected in war, as they
believed in their truthfulness in peace--and as the story related to
their mountain, they had treasured it among their own legends. Still
earlier, many years before even the oldest Piegan was a boy, there had
lived a great Flathead warrior, a man watched over by a spirit so mighty
that no peril of battle or of the hunt could overcome him. When at last
in his old age he came to die, he told the young men his long-kept
secret. Many years before, as the time approached for him to go off into
the forest and sleep his warrior sleep, in which he hoped to see the
vision which should be his guide and protection through life, he had
decided to seek a spot and a spirit which had never before been tried.
So, carrying the usual sacred bison skull for his pillow, he had
crossed the mountains eastward into the far-off Piegan country. Then,
with none to aid him save the steady power of his own courage, he had
ventured upon the ledges of the Chief of the Mountains, and, choking
down each gasp of panic when at overhanging corners the black walls
seemed striving to thrust him off and down, he had finally forced his
way to the very summit. For four days and nights he had fasted there,
sleeping in the great cleft which one can see from far out on the
prairie. On each of the first three nights, with ever increasing
violence, the spirit of the mountain had come to him and threatened to
hurl him off the face of the cliff if he did not go down on the
following day. Each time he had refused to go, and had spent the day
pacing the summit, chanting his warrior song and waving his peace pipe
in the air as an offering, until finally, on the fourth night, the
spirit had yielded, had smoked the pipe, and had given him the token of
his life. None of the young Flatheads, however, said Billy, had dared to
follow their great warrior's example; so that to this day he was the
only man who had braved the spirit of the Chief and made it his friend.
[Illustration: THE CHIEF'S CROWN, FROM THE EAST.]
After we were rolled in our blankets, and the late moon, rising from
the prairie ocean behind us, had turned the dark, threatening wall to
cheering silver, we thought again of the old warrior's steadfastness and
longed to make his example ours.
* * * * *
The Doctor's thermometer marked 20 degrees Fahrenheit when Fox called
us, and the morning bucket which he dashed over us was flavored with
more of the spirit of duty than usual. But otherwise the weather had
been made for us. Yesterday's storm had beaten down the smoke from
Washington forest fires, which had clouded everything for the past
month, and the Sweet Grass Hills twinkled across one hundred miles of
prairie as if at our feet; and yet there was hardly a breath of wind.
Under the lee of the wall itself absolute stillness brooded over ledges
which even a moderate breeze could have made dangerous. We did not make
an early start. The thing could be done quickly if it could be done at
all, for there was only 1,500 feet of cliff.
Our men did not give the attempt to reach the summit from this, the
eastern side, even the scant compliment of a doubt; in their minds its
failure was certain, but they were willing to see how far we could get
up. The Doctor, too, had at first suggested, and with perfect
correctness, that to try a difficult side of a mountain before
reconnoitering the other was bad mountaineering, to say the least. But,
on the other hand, this east side was the famous side of the Chief--the
side which every passer-by on the prairie saw and wondered at. With our
glasses we had mapped a course which seemed not impossible; was it not
better to meet our king face to face than to steal on him from behind?
Besides, this wonderful weather might not last long enough for us to
reach the other side. And so our final conclusion was to try the east
face.
Half way up the sheer face of the cliff was divided horizontally by a
broad, steep shelf which ran nearly the length of the mountain. That
shelf could clearly be crossed at any place; the difficulty would lie
with the walls below and above it. The lower one was bad enough at best,
but it was easy to recognize as least bad a place where a slope of shale
abutted against it, shortening it some 300 feet. The upper wall in
general seemed even worse, but it was furrowed by two deep chimneys,
side by side, one of which led into the mountain's well-known cleft.
The other chimney seemed to lead directly to the summit, but its lower
mouth was inaccessible--cut off by overhanging cliff. Our plan,
therefore, if we could ever reach the halfway shelf, was to use the
first chimney in the beginning, then try to find a way around the
dividing shoulder into the second, then follow that to the top. And at 9
o'clock we began on the lower wall.
Of course, the work which followed was not so difficult as it had
promised from below--rock work rarely is--but it thoroughly taxed our
slender experience, and, for a single man without a rope, must have been
far worse. The Doctor and I took turns in leading, carrying up or having
thrown to us from below a rope, on which the others then ascended. Most
of the difficulty was thus confined to one man, and he could often be
assisted from beneath. We were not skilled enough in the use of the rope
to risk tying ourselves together.
Two hundred feet up came our first trouble, perhaps the worst of the
day. We were sidling along a narrow shelf, with arms outstretched
against the wall above, when we reached a spot where the shelf was
broken by a round protruding shoulder. Beyond it the ledge commenced
again and seemed to offer our only way upward. I was leading at the
time, and, after examining it, turned back to a wider portion of the
shelf for consultation. It was not a place one would care to try if
there was an alternative.
We braced the Indian against the wall, and his skillful hand sent the
lariat whirling up at a sharp rock above our heads. Time after time the
noose settled fairly around it, but found no neck to hold it, and came
sliding down. Then, almost before we knew it, the Doctor had run out
along the ledge to the shoulder and had started around. For a moment he
hung, griping the rounded surface with arms and knees; then a dangerous
wriggle and he was on the other side.
Under his coaching the Indian and I followed; but Fox, when half way,
lost his head, and barely succeeded in getting back to the starting
point. He would not try again. The poor fellow's moccasins had lost some
of their nails and he had slipped once or twice that morning, thus
destroying the nerve of one who had at other times shown himself a good
climber. But of the Indian's companionship for the rest of the day we
were now sure.
Again, when near the top of that first wall, and when the halfway ledge
seemed almost within our grasp, the shallow cleft--up which we were
scrambling--ended in a deep pocket in the cliff's face, with no outlet
above. The Doctor tried it at one corner, but the treacherous crumbling
rock warned him back. I tried it at another, but was stopped by an
overhang in the cliff. No help for it but to go back and try to find a
way around.
Fifty feet below we landed on a small shelf running horizontally along
the mountain's face, and, after following it northward a few moments, we
found another channel leading up. The Doctor started to investigate it,
while Billy and I continued on slowly looking for a better. Almost
immediately, however, we heard the Doctor shout "All right," and,
following him, came out at last upon the great halfway shelf of the
mountain.
This was a steep slope of shale, which seemed in places quite ready to
slide in an avalanche of loose rock over the edge of the cliff below;
but the relief of being out upon it, and able once more to stand upright
without the sensation of a wall against your face, apparently trying to
shove you outward from your slender foothold, was simply indescribable.
After crossing the shelf and eating our lunch in the mouth of the first
or left-hand chimney, we attacked the upper wall. Following up the
chimney a short distance, we found at last a narrow ledge leading to the
right, and, creeping around on it, I looked into the right-hand chimney
above its forbidding mouth. It led as a broad, almost easy, staircase
clear to the top of the wall above, and for the first time we felt as if
our king were really ours.
Six or seven hundred feet more of steady work, and we could feel the
summit breeze beginning to blow down the narrow mouth of the chimney.
Billy was then sent to the front, and at half past one the first Piegan
stepped out on the summit of the Chief Mountain.
It is a long ridge of disintegrated rock, flanked at either end by lower
rounded turrets, and at its highest part is no wider than a New England
stone wall. On the opposite western side the cliffs fell away as on our
own, but they seemed shorter, were composed of looser rock, and far down
below we could see steep slopes of shale meeting them part way. After
we had picked out our various landmarks in the wonderful outlook about
us, and I had made my record from compass and barometer, we pushed our
way carefully along to the highest point of the narrow ridge, in order
to mark it with a cairn of rocks. Just as we reached it, the Indian, who
was still in the lead, suddenly stopped and pointed to the ground.
There, on the very summit of Chief Mountain, safely anchored by rocks
from the effect of wind or tempest, lay a small, weather-beaten bison
skull. It was certainly one of the very oldest I have ever seen. Even in
the pure air of that mountain top it had rotted away until there was
little else than the frontal bone and the stubs on which had been the
horns. Billy picked it up and handed it to us quietly, saying with
perfect conviction, "The old Flathead's pillow!"
We left the skull where it had been found. Much as we should have
treasured it as a token of that day, the devotion of the old warrior who
had brought it was an influence quite sufficient to protect this
memorial of his visit. We shared his reverence far too much to allow us
to remove its offering. And then, too, as Billy suggested, we were still
on top of the Chief, and the Chief had certainly been very forbearing
to us. Those long walls, now darkened by the afternoon shade, those
narrow ledges whence the downward climber could no longer avoid seeing
the stone he dislodged bound, after two or three lengthening jumps,
clear to the pedestal below, loomed very suggestively before his mind.
But the Chief still remained gracious, and Billy worked even more
steadily and sure-footedly going down than in the morning. We had all
gained confidence, and besides we were certain of our course. By 5
o'clock we had reached the last bad place--where Fox had left us--and,
after avoiding that by swinging down hand over hand on the rope from a
ledge above, it was only a few moments to the bottom.
That night, after we were all safe in camp, and the great cliff beamed
down on us more kindly than ever in the moonlight, the Doctor and I
decided that we had been more favored than the old Flathead warrior, for
the spirit of our mountain had been with us even before we reached its
top.
And for our success an explanation beyond our physical powers seemed
necessary to others also; for, when a few days later we returned to the
ranch in the St. Mary's Valley, Billy, who had preceded us, met us with
the mien of the prophet who is denied by his own, and told us that his
cousins, the Bloods from across the border, had suggested that, when
next he returned from a trip to the range, he should bring them a
likelier story than that he had climbed the east face of the Chief
Mountain.
_Henry L. Stimson._