rocks gave us the direction. Two lakes lay together below. One appeared
from our elevation rather higher than the other. Rather higher! The rock
wall that separated them was fourteen hundred feet high, and vertical.
As we began the last descent, the party grew silent. It was the last
leg of the journey. A day or so more and we should be scattered over
the continent on whose spine we were so incontinently tramping. Back to
civilization, to porcelain bathtubs and course dinners and facial massage,
to stays and skirts, to roofs and servants and the vast impedimenta
of living.
[Illustration: MOUNTAIN GOAT AND KID ON PTARMIGAN PASS
(The white objects about two thirds of the way down)
_Copyright, A. J. Baker, Kalispell, Montana_]
Sperry Chalet and luncheon. No more the ham and coffee over a wood fire,
the cutting of much bread on a flat stone. Here were tables, chairs, and
linen. Alas, there was a waitress who crumbed the table and brought in
dessert.
Back, indeed, with a vengeance. But only to the ways of civilization
itself. All afternoon we went on, descending always, through the
outriders of the forest to the forest itself. Dusk came, dusk in the
woods, with strange soft paddings of unseen feet, with a gray light
half-religious, half-faëry, that only those who penetrate to the hearts
of great forests can know.
"It makes me think of death," some one said in a low tone. "Just a great
shadow, no color. Nothing real. And silence, and infinite distance."
Then Lake Macdonald. We burst out of the forest on a run. The horses
had known, by the queer instinct of horses, that just ahead would be
oats and a corral and grass for the eating. They broke into a canter.
The various things we had hung to ourselves during the long, slow
progress over the mountain rattled and banged. We hung on in a kind of
mad exultation. We had done it. We had crossed the Continental Divide,
the Lewis Overthrust, whatever geographers choose to call it.
The trail led past a corral, past a vegetable garden such as our Eastern
eyes had seldom seen. Under trees, around a corner at a gallop. Then
the Glacier Hotel at Lake Macdonald, generally known as "Lewis's."
Soft winds from the Pacific blew across Lake Macdonald and warmed
us. Great strawberries were ripening in the garden. Our horses got
oats, all they could eat. In a pool in front of the hotel lazy trout
drifted about.
There was good food. Again there were people dressed in civilized raiment,
people who looked at us and our shabby riding-clothes with a disdain
not unmixed with awe. There was fox-trotting and one-stepping, in
riding-boots, with an orchestra. And that night at Lewis's they gave
Howard Eaton a potlatch.
A potlatch is an Indian party. An Indian's idea of a party is to give
away everything he possesses and then start all over again. That is one
reason why our Indians are so poor to-day. We sat in a great lobby hung
with Indian trophies and bearskins, sat in a circle with Howard Eaton
in the center. There were a few speeches and some anecdotes. Then the
potlatch went on.
There were hot fried trout, sandwiches, and chips of dried meat--buffalo
and deer, I believe. There was beer. After that came the gifts. Everybody
got something. Howard Eaton received a waistcoat made of spotted hide,
and the women got necklaces of Indian beads. It was extraordinary,
hospitable, lavish, and--Western. To have a party and receive gifts is
one thing, but to have a party so you can give away things is another.
VII
THE BLACK MARKS
The visit to the executive department of the park was disappointing.
I found the superintendent's office in a two-room frame shack; the
Government warehouse an old barn: five miles from a railroad, too. That's
management for you! Why, O gentlemen at Washington who arrange these
things, why not at Belton, on the railroad, five miles away? The park
extends to Belton.
Inadequate appropriations, the necessity for putting the entire heavy
machinery of the Government in motion for the long-distance control of
the park, poor automobile roads, and insufficient rangers--these are
the black marks against us in Glacier Park. On every hand the enthusiasm
of a most efficient superintendent must contend with these things. That
marvels of trail-making and road-building in this vast domain have been
done with so little money and encouragement is due, primarily, to the
faith the men closely connected with the park have had in its future.
Doubtless all these things will remedy themselves in time. But they make
the immediate problems of the park difficult to cope with. The chief
ranger must live where he can. No building erected by the superintendent
must cost over one thousand dollars. It is not easy in that country of
cheap wood and dear labor to build a house for one thousand dollars.
And there is always the difficulty of long-distance supervision. In 1914
the former Superintendent of National Parks, Mr. Daniels, spent a week
in Glacier Park. Last year he was at the entrance, Glacier Park Station,
for a half a day, and not in the park at all.
There are several parks, and it is easy to believe that Mr. Daniels
found it difficult to visit them all. But the method must be wrong. It
is Washington that must order and pay for each bit of new trail- and
road-building. If Washington does not come to the park, the park cannot
go to Washington. There is something lacking in efficiency in a system
which depends on across-the-continent supervision.
This year I hope the Superintendent of National Parks will go out to
Glacier Park, not by automobile, but on a horse, and ride over his
great domain. Then I hope he will go back to Washington and arrange for
enough rangers to make the park safe and to save its timber from forest
fires. Yellowstone Park has soldiers. It is not soldiers, but woodsmen,
trail-riders, rangers, that are needed. Canada, in this same country,
has her Northwest Mounted Police.
They want real men out there. But the mountains take care of that. The
weaklings don't stick. From just north of Glacier Park went a band of
twenty-five cavalrymen that I met last year in Flanders. They were
rangers: mountain riders. For weeks during the German invasion they
rode on skirmish duty between the advancing Germans and the retiring
armies. They became famous. Where there were reckless courage and fine
horsemanship needed, those men were sent.
If we ever have a war, we shall draw hard on the West for cavalry. Our
national parks should be able to send out trained skirmishers.
Under present conditions Glacier Park could furnish about a dozen.
And, now that we are criticizing,--every one may criticize the Government:
it is the English blood in us,--why is it that, with the most poetic
nomenclature in the world,--the Indian,--one by one the historic names
of peaks, lakes, and rivers of Glacier Park are being replaced by the
names of obscure Government officials, professors in small universities,
unimportant people who go out there to the West and memorialize
themselves on Government maps? Each year sees some new absurdity. What
names in the world are more beautiful than Going-to-the-Sun and
Rising-Wolf? Here are Almost-a-Dog Mountain, Two-Medicine Lake, Red
Eagle--a few that have survived.
[Illustration: UPPER TWO MEDICINE LAKE]
Every peak, every butte, every river and lake of this country has been
named by the Indians. The names are beautiful and romantic. To preserve
them in a Government reservation is almost the only way of preserving
them at all. What has happened? Look over the map of Glacier Park. The
Indian names have been done away with. Majestic peaks, towering
buttes are being given names like this: Haystack Butte, Trapper Peak,
Huckleberry Mountain, the Guard House, the Garden Wall. One of the most
wonderful things in the Rocky Mountains is this Garden Wall. I wish I
knew what the Indians called it. Then there are Iceberg Lake, Florence
Falls, Twin Lakes, Gunsight Mountain, Split Mountain, Surprise Pass,
Peril Peak,--that last was a dandy! Alliterative!--Church Butte, Statuary
Mountain, Buttercup Park. Can you imagine the inspiration of the man
who found some flowery meadow between granite crags and took away from
it its Indian name and called it Buttercup Park?
The Blackfeet are the aristocrats among American Indians. They were the
buffalo hunters, and this great region was once theirs. To the mountains
and lakes of what is now Glacier Park, they attached their legends,
which are their literature.
The white man came, and not content with eliminating the Indians, he
went further and wiped out their history. Any Government official,
if he so desires, any white man seeking perpetuation on the map of his
country, may fasten his name to a mountain and go down in the school
geographies. It has been done again and again. It is being done now. And
the lover of the old names stands helpless and aghast.
Is there no way to stop this vandalism? Year after year goes by, and
just as the people connected with the park are beginning to learn new
names for the peaks, they are again rechristened. There must be seven
Goat Mountains. Here and there is a peak, like Reynolds Peak or Grinnell
Mountain, and some others, properly named for men intimately associated
with the region. But Reynolds's Indian name was Death-on-the-Trail. When
you have seen the mountain you can well believe that Death-on-the-Trail
would fit it well.
There are many others. Take an old peak that the Indians have known as
Old-Man-of-the-Winds or Red-Top Plume and call it Mount Thompson or
Mount Morgan or Mount Pinchot or Mount Oberlin--for Oberlin College,
presumably--or Mount Pollack--after the Wheeling stogie, I suppose!
There is hardly a name in the telephone directory that is not fastened
to some wonderful peak in this garden spot of ours. Not very long ago
I got a letter--a pathetic letter. It said that a college professor from
an Eastern college had been out there this summer and insisted that one
of the peaks be named for him and one for his daughter. It was done.
Here, then, the Government has done a splendid thing and done it none
too well. It has preserved for the people of the United States and for
all the world a scenic spot so beautiful and so impressive that I have
not even attempted to describe it. It is not possible. But it has failed
to open up the park properly. It has been niggardly in appropriation.
It has allowed its geographers to take away the original Indian names
of this home of the Blackfeet and so destroy the last trace of a vanishing
race.
Were it not for the Great Northern Railway, travel through Glacier
Park would be practically impossible. Probably the Great Northern was
not entirely altruistic, and yet I believe that Mr. Louis Warren Hill,
known always as "Louie" Hill, has had an ideal and followed it--followed
it with an enthusiasm that is contagious. And with an inspiring faith.
The Great Northern has built huge hotels in three places and at a dozen
other locations has built groups of log houses, Swiss fashion, so that
it is possible to follow the trails by day and to be comfortably housed
and fed each night.
These hotels, built by the Great Northern, are now owned and controlled
by the Glacier Park Hotel Company.
At the entrance to the park is the Glacier Park Hotel that cost half
a million dollars and is almost as large as the National Capitol at
Washington. Like all the hotels and chalets in the park, it is constructed
largely of the huge trunks of the trees of the Northwest. The Indians
call the Glacier Park Hotel the "Great Log Lodge." There is everything
from a store to a swimming-pool.
Fifty miles away in the very heart of the park there is the new Many
Glaciers Hotel. It also cost a half-million dollars. There is an
automobile road leading to Many Glaciers.
[Illustration: VIEW FROM DINING-ROOM, MANY-GLACIER HOTEL]
The chalet system, also built by the Great Northern, has done more
than anything else to make the park possible for tourists. Automobile
roads and trails alike touch the chalets, and, although I am firm in
my conviction that it is impossible to see the park properly from an
automobile, I realize that there are many who will not take the more
arduous and sportsmanly method. For them, then, a short trip of twelve
or fifteen miles each day takes them from chalet to chalet. There are
chalets at Two-Medicine Lake, at Cutbank Canyon, at Going-to-the-Sun,
at St. Mary's Lake, at Gunsight Pass, at the Sperry Glacier, at Granite
Park, and at Belton.
There are inclusive and very moderate rates for various tours to take
up a certain number of days. A saddle-horse costs two dollars a day;
a pack-horse two dollars a day; a guide, who will furnish his own horse
and board himself, five dollars a day.
There are rates from chalet to chalet--including a night's lodging in
comfortable beds, morning breakfast, evening dinner, and a carefully
packed luncheon--that are astonishingly cheap. For those who wish to
go even more simply, there are the tepee camps. There are three of these,
at St. Mary's, Going-to-the-Sun, and Many Glaciers. They comprise a number
of Indian tepees grouped about a central cabin which includes a kitchen
provided with a range and cooking utensils. The tepees themselves are
wooden-floored and each is equipped with two single cot beds and bedding.
At all of the tepee camps the charge for lodging is fifty cents per bed
per night; the use of the range and cooking utensils is free. At the
chalets near by, hikers may purchase food at very reasonable prices.
It is, you see, possible to go through Glacier Park without Howard
Eaton. It is even safe, and, to those who have never known Howard,
highly satisfactory. But there will be something missing--that curious
thing called personality, which could take forty-two entirely different,
blasé, feeble-muscled, uncertain, and effete Easterners and mould them
in a few days into a homogeneous whole: that took excursionists and made
them philosophers and sportsmen.
[Illustration: CUT BANK CHALETS ON CUT BANK RIVER
_Copyright, 1912, Kiser Photo Co._]
He was hunting in Arizona later on. The party ate venison, duck, and
mountain lion--which tastes like veal.
"We have had several fights with grizzlies," he wrote. "They are so
strong that they have whipped the hounds and carved them up some in each
fight. Country pretty rough and considerable fallen timber, which delays
us. I was kicked the other day by a horse when almost up to a bear. The
boys thought I had a broken leg or two, so they let the bear escape."
He was sending a rider off to the nearest post-office and wondering what
was doing in the war.
"Has Port Arthur fallen yet?" he inquired whimsically.
A hunter who puts the greenest tenderfoot at ease and teaches him without
apparently teaching at all; a host whose first thought is always for his
guests; a calm-faced man with twinkling blue eyes, who is proud of his
"boys" and his friends all over the world--that is Howard Eaton as nearly
as he can be put on paper.
Wherever he is when he reads this, hunting in Arizona or the Jackson Hole
country, or snowed in at the ranch at Wolf, I hope he will forgive me for
putting him into print, in memory of those days when the entire forty-two
of us followed him, like the tail of a kite, across the Great Divide.
VIII
BEARS
It was the next day that I made my first close acquaintance with
bears. There are many bears in Glacier Park. Firearms are forbidden, of
course, and the rangers kill them only in case of trouble. Naturally, so
protected, they are increasing rapidly. They find good forage where horses
would starve. Mr. Ralston, the park supervisor, saw a she bear with
three cubs last spring. There are no tame bears, as in the Yellowstone.
There are plenty of animals. Some fifty moose graze along the
Flathead. Beavers have colonies in many of the valleys and industriously
build dams that deepen the fords. I remember one place along the Cutbank
Trail where the first horses found themselves above the belly in water
and confronting a perpendicular bank up which one or two scrambled as
best they could. The rest turned and, riding in the stream for a
half-mile détour, made the trail again. That was the work of beavers.
There are coyotes a-plenty. Because they kill the deer and elk, the
rangers poison them in the winter with strychnine. A few mountain lions
remain. As one can make a whole night hideous, a few are sufficient.
There is something particularly interesting about a bear. Perhaps it
is because he can climb a tree. In other words, ordinary subterfuges
do not go with him. Reports vary--he is a fighter; he is a craven; the
fact being, of course, that he is, like all wild animals and most humans,
a bit of each.
The trip was over, and I had seen but one bear. At Lewis's that last
Sunday I voiced my disappointment. Soon after I received word quietly
that Frank Higgins, guide and companion on many hunting trips to Stewart
Edward White and other hunters, had offered to show me some bears.
He had horses saddled under a tree when I went back, and two men, one
of them a Chicago newspaper artist, were with him. We mounted and rode
up the trail back of the hotel.
I was dubious. For days I had tried to see bears and failed, and now to
have them offered with certainty by Mr. Higgins made me skeptical. I had
an idea that under his tall impassiveness he was having a little fun at
my expense. He was not. We went out into the forest, to where the hotel
dumps its garbage. That was rather a blow, at first. And there were no
bears. Only a great silence and a considerable stench.
We got off our horses, tied them, and sat down on a log. Almost
immediately there was a distant crackling of branches.
"One coming now," said Frank Higgins. "Just sit quiet."
That first bear, however, was nervous. He circled around us. I set
my camera for one hundred feet, and waited. But the creature, a big
black, was shy. He refused to come out. Mr. Higgins went after him.
He snarled. I looked after Mr. Higgins with a new respect, and the Chicago
newspaper man said he was perfectly satisfied with the bear where he was,
and that enough was enough.
The bear suddenly took to a tree, climbing like a cat. He looked about
the size of a grand piano. Urged by Mr. Higgins, we approached the
tree. Finally we stood directly beneath. He growled--the bear, of course,
not Frank Higgins. But my courage was rising. Wild bear he was, but he
was a craven. I moved up the focus of my camera and took his picture. We
left him there and went back to the log. All at once there were bears in
every direction, six in all. I moved my camera to thirty feet and snapped
another. They circled about, heads turned toward us. Now and then they
stood up to see us better. We were between them and supper.
[Illustration: LUNCHEON ON FLATHEAD RIVER TRIP]
[Illustration: PHOTOGRAPHING A BEAR]
The newspaper man offered to sketch me with a "bear" background. And
he did. Now and then he would say:--
"Isn't there one behind me?"
"About twenty feet away," I would say.
"Good Lord!" But he went on drawing. I have that picture now. It is very
good, but my eyes have the look of a scared rabbit.
Our friend still clung in the tree. The other man had ridden back to
the hotel for camera films. Time went on and he did not return. We
made would-be facetious remarks about his courage--from our own
pinnacle. Almost an hour! The sketch was nearly finished, and twilight
was falling. Still he had not come. Then he appeared. He had taken the
wrong trail, and had been riding those bear-infested regions alone. He
was smiling, but pale. To visit bears in a party is one thing; to ride
alone, with fleeting black and brown figures skulking behind fallen
timber, is another. Not for a long time, I think, will that gentleman
forget the hour or so when he was lost in the forest, with bears
"Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks,
In Vallombrosa."
The poetic quotation is my own idea. What he said was entirely
different. As a matter of fact, his own expression was: "Hell, the
place is full of them!"
At last, very quietly, Mr. Higgins got up.
"Here's a grizzly," he said. "You might stand near the horses."
We did. The grizzly looked the exact size of a seven-passenger automobile
with a limousine top, and he had the same gift of speed. The black
bears looked at him and ran. I looked at him and wanted to. The artist
put away his sketch, and we strolled toward the horses. They had not
objected to the black bears, beyond watching them with careful eyes. But
now they pulled and flung about to free themselves. Wherever he goes,
a grizzly bear owns his entire surroundings. He carries a patent of
ownership.
He could have the woods, for all of me.
The black bears were in full retreat. A hound dog came loping up the
trail and caught the scent. In an instant he was after them. Any hope
I had ever had of outrunning a bear died then and there. The dog was
running without a muffler. One of his frantic yelps changed to a howl
as the rearmost bear turned and swatted him. A moment, and the chase
was on again.
There is only one thing to do if a bear takes a sudden dislike to one.
It is useless to climb or to run. Go toward it and try kindness. Ask
about the children, in a carefully restrained tone. Make the Indian
sign that you are a friend. If you have a sandwich about you, proffer
it. Then, while the bear is staring at you in amazement, turn and walk
quietly away.
It was growing dark. The grizzly, having driven off the black bears,
turned his attention to us. We decided that it was almost dinner time,
and that we did not care to be late. Anyhow, we had seen enough bears.
Enough is enough. We mounted and rode down the trail.
Not all game is as plentiful as bears in Glacier Park or thrives so
well. With the cutting-up of the range many of them have lost their
winter grazing-grounds. Practically the last of the Rocky Mountain sheep
and goats are in Glacier Park. Last winter numbers of these increasingly
rare animals were found dead by the rangers. That is another thing the
Government will do eventually. It may never see that the Blackfeet
Indians have a square deal, but it will feed what is left of the game.
There is little of the old West left. Irrigation, wheat, the cutting-up
of the Indian reservations into allotments, the homesteader, all spell
the end of the most picturesque period of America's development.
Not for long, then, the cow-puncher in his gorgeous chaps, the pack-train
winding its devious way along the trail. The boosting spirit has struck
the West. Settlements of one street and thirteen houses, eleven of them
saloons, are suddenly becoming cities. The railroads and the automobiles,
by obliterating time, have done away with distance. The old West is
almost gone. Now is the time to see it--not from a train window; not,
if you can help it, from an automobile, but afoot or on horseback,
leisurely, thoroughly.
IX
DOWN THE FLATHEAD RAPIDS
The trip was over. I had seen such things as I had never dreamed of. I
had done things which I intended to relate at home. But I had caught no
fish to amount to anything. On a Monday night I was to take the train
East. On Sunday came great tales of the Flathead River. But I had only
one more day. How was it possible?
It was possible. Everything is possible to those Westerners. I could
put on my oldest clothes and fish the Flathead for twenty miles or so
the following day under the guidance of one George Locke, celebrated
trout-sleuth. Then, rod and fish and all, I could take the Great Northern
Eastern Express at a station and start on my three days' journey home.
I did it.
I can still see the faces of the people in that magnificent club car
when a woman in riding-clothes, stained and torn, wearing an old
sweater and a man's hat, and carrying a camera, a fishing-rod, and a
cutthroat trout weighing three and a half pounds, invaded their bored
and elegant privacy. The woman was burned to a deep cerise. She summoned
the immaculate porter and held out the trout to him. He was very dubious
about taking it. Thereupon the woman put on her most impressive manner
and told him how she wished it placed on the ice and how the cook was
to fix it and various other details.