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.