Heavy snows covering their pastures drive them down from their high
ranges to the lower hills, cañons, and draws about Gardiner and Mammoth
Hot Springs, and here the Government, during times of storm and stress,
feeds them alfalfa hay and thus saves them from starvation. Elk by
hundreds, or even thousands, dot the hillsides,--there are from 30,000
to 40,000 of them by actual count,--while antelope in goodly numbers
range on the open and lower hill-slopes. In Gardiner Cañon beside the
road the beautiful mule-deer and the white-tailed deer, touchingly
innocent and trustful, and the mountain-sheep--the big-horn
fellows--stand or lie, eating alfalfa, and enjoying the protecting care
of a beneficent, animal-loving government. They become almost as
domesticated as barn-yard animals. Indeed, at Mammoth Hot Springs, the
deer actually haunt the kitchen doors and rear themselves on their hind
legs against the porch railings, or even climb the steps and peer into
the doors and windows, mutely begging for food, which they often take
from one's hand. At night they lie on the snow under the large trees,
or, in some cases, even sleep in the large cavalry-barns, which have
been vacant since the soldiers were removed from the park in the fall
of 1916.
Over at the bison range and corral on Lamar River, in the northeastern
corner of the park, one sees an interesting sight. Here the mountain
scenery of the park reaches its finest development. In summer or winter
the ride to the corral from Mammoth Hot Springs is a treat. In summer
the bison herd of about three hundred--there is a so-called wild herd
of about a hundred some miles farther south--ranges in a beautiful
valley and on the adjoining hills and mountain-slopes near the
Petrified Forest and Death Gulch. It is under the care of a keeper who
lives here with his family, in a comfortable home provided by the
Government. The bison are rounded up at intervals during the summer so
that their condition and whereabouts shall be always known. The herd
originally consisted of only twenty-one animals, purchased by the
Government in 1902 at a cost of $15,000.
In January, 1917, I made a trip by sleigh, drawn by a pair of sturdy
horses, to the bison corral. On the hills at intervals along the entire
route large bands of elk were to be seen. The snow was more than two
feet deep, and it required two days, mostly at a walk, to travel the
thirty-five miles between Gardiner and the corral. The thermometer
registered from ten to fifteen degrees below zero, and for the week
following the mercury ranged, in the morning, from thirty-two to fifty
degrees below.
In winter the bison are kept in a large pasture-corral a square mile in
extent, lying along Rose Creek and Lamar River, and here they remain
very contentedly. Long before daylight each morning the herd
congregates about the corral gate, waiting for feeding-time. Soon after
daylight a sleigh is driven into the inclosure, loaded with alfalfa hay
and drawn by a pair of horses that have become so accustomed to the
buffalo as to pay no attention to them, even though the latter crowd
close about them. The hay is pitch-forked to the ground as the sleigh
is slowly driven along, and the animals line themselves out, following
it until all are supplied. In an hour or two, after they have eaten
their fill, they "mosey" over to the steaming creek that has its
sources in some hot springs in the hills, drink slowly and long, and
then sedately walk back along deep trails in the snow, the mother bison
followed by their calves, to the feeding-ground, where most of them
then lie down and sleep for a good part of the day. Mock fights or
hunting jousts are indulged in by some of the younger animals and
afford variety and amusement, to the participants at least. In the dim
light of a winter morning the animals resemble a herd of young
elephants.
Reference has been made to the fact that this particular locality is
especially interesting from a geographical standpoint. Including the
Jackson Lake country it is in this respect one of the most important
and interesting regions on the continent. It lies on both sides of the
great Continental Divide, which twists and turns in all directions in
its course northward and southward.
Outside of the limits of Yellowstone Park itself, the mountain
structure found here is, perhaps, not greatly different from that of
other parts of the Rockies. The Teton range lies south of the park, and
is one of the most prominent and commanding in the entire Rocky
Mountain chain. The park region itself seems to be a vent for the
pent-up heat of the earth. It is not improbable that these boiling
springs and geysers may serve as escape-valves, and be the means of
preventing very serious volcanic disturbances, such as occurred here in
past ages.
As a watershed the region is equally remarkable. It has been noted that
here four of the largest rivers of our country have their sources,
interlacing with one another. It is, indeed, a network of thousands of
mountain streams forming, ultimately, four great rivers, each flowing
to a different point of the compass. The headwaters of the Snake River,
joining with the Columbia, find their way into the North Pacific Ocean.
The waters of the Green, after a journey through the great cañons of
the Southwest, flow into the Pacific through the Gulf of California. To
the east flows the Yellowstone, which merges its waters with those of
the Missouri, and, after a journey of three thousand miles, flows into
the Atlantic through the Gulf of Mexico.
This unique region is no longer difficult of access. Railways reach it
from three sides, the north, west, and east, and the Government has
spent between one million and two million dollars in establishing
excellent roads to enable travelers to view the beauties of the
Yellowstone. Here is to be found the finest automobile trip of its
length in the country, supplemented by telephone-lines and large and
costly hotels. The construction of these buildings must be carried on
in winter, and the nails used have to be heated in order to handle them.
With the year 1917 will disappear the last remnant of the old
stage-coaching days, a mode of travel which for years was the only
method of land travel in the West, and which until now has been the
method of transportation in the park. Beginning with this season,
automobiles will displace the horses and coaches and numerous other
changes in the way of increased comfort, convenience, and pleasure have
been planned. The old six-day now becomes one of five days, with
several advantageous changes in route and in the time to be spent at
different points.
The policy of our Government in establishing these national parks has
since been followed by other nations, and it has been praised by such
thoughtful observers as, for example, Lord Bryce, ex-ambassador to this
country from England. That it has accomplished the object of its
originators and is a blessing to mankind is now beyond question.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIRECRACKERS
BY ERICK POMEROY
TEMPLE OF THE EMPRESS OF HEAVEN, CHINA
This is the thirteenth day of the fifth moon of the thirty-third year
of Kwang-su, very early in the morning--that is, "very early" for me,
because I ordered my "boy" last evening to call me at eight o'clock
this morning and not a minute before. Here, in the rambling old temple
where we live, we have learned to go to bed with the sun on the
fourteenth and on the last day of each Chinese moon, because we know
that the wailing pipes of the early morning celebrations before the
gods on the first and fifteenth of the moon will be certain to wake us
at a truly heathenish hour. But when an extra, unannounced, unexpected
festival day is ushered in with cymbals, pipes, and firecrackers, then
we just have to lose our morning sleep and try not to lose our tempers.
This morning is one of those dawns of misery. Even as I write the
temple bells, the drums, and those peculiar jig-time horns are setting
up a discordant hubbub in the courtyards, while at intervals a big
cracker sends me springing into the air with a start that fearfully
tries my nerves. At first this morning I endeavored to sleep, but I
soon gave that up to don my kimono and sally forth to find out the
cause of this gratuitous Fourth of July. Out on the terrace in front of
the inner gates of the temple, to which the rays of the rising sun had
not yet bent down, there was gathered a small group of men and boys
watching such a display of firecrackers as would have attracted a whole
City Hall Park full of people at home. Yet their interest was
apparently much like their numbers--very small. They just gazed at the
exploding end of the red string of noise without any comments and
without any more evident interest than they took in seeing that the
small boys picked up all of the unexploded crackers that were blown out
of the danger circle by their more powerful brothers. My appearance in
a kimono and straw sandals seemed to furnish them with more excitement
than the rope of crackers which hung from the firecrackers pole hard
by. Such a din! Can you imagine a string of firecrackers, large and
small woven together, of over one hundred thousand?
But I am getting ahead of my story. By way of introduction I meant only
to tell you that I have for some time been planning to write a letter
to your good editor in the hope that he might be willing to pass on to
you of the fast-disappearing American "firecracker age" my story of how
this country, the native land of the "whip-guns," manufactures and uses
these crackers which we think of as belonging only to our Fourth of
July.
The desire and determination to write this letter had their birth one
day in a city of North China when I was walking along the street where
many of the firecracker-makers live--since dubbed "Firecracker Row" on
my private chart of the city--and when I suddenly realized how much I
should have liked as a boy, when I was "shooting off crackers," to see
these places and to know their ways of manufacture. It is difficult not
to be interrupted nor to interrupt these lines. Now there are two
little pigtailed heads stretched up just over my window-sill, peeping
in and asking if I do not wish to buy the tiger-lilies they have
gathered on the hillside. So first I will try to tell you how the
crackers are made and then how they are used out here, in the hope that
you may find as much interest in reading the story as I have found in
gathering the information and pictures for it.
Several times I went into the city to visit Firecracker Row, and on one
occasion took a series of photographs to show more clearly than words
will do the important steps in the process of manufacture. The first
step consists in cutting the rough brown paper into pieces long enough
to make a hollow tube of several layers in thickness, and wide enough
to give the tube a length just twice that of the finished cracker. From
the top of his pile the workman takes a pack of these slips, lays them
out with one end arranged just like steps, and then slides down the
stairs, as it were, with a brush of paste, so as to make the outer ends
of the slips stick fast when rolled against the tube. Then he bends the
other--the dry--end around an iron nail, and places the nail under a
board, which rolls it along the slip until all the paper has curled
around it. Once the cracker skeleton is thus formed, he gives it an
extra roll or two down the bench for good measure, slides it off the
nail into a basket, and has another started before you realize what he
is about. Then one of the small apprentices in the shop arranges the
skeletons together in a six-sided bundle, like those on the drying
board in Cut II, in each of which he puts just five hundred and seven.
Why that particular number, I could not find out.
Once dry, the skeletons receive their covering garment of red paper,
which makes them so truly "little redskins"--this from the hands of one
of the workers without the aid of any machine whatever. He just rolls
one of the narrow slips around the tube with his fingers and hurries
the growing agitator into another basket to await the time for stuffing
in the material that will make him such a lively fellow. Once more,
however, they all have to be packed up into the six-sided bundles, this
time with two stout strings tied around them a third of the way from
the top and bottom, leaving the middle free. The worker takes his big
knife and chops right down through the whole bundle to make the clean
ends for the tops of the shorter tubes.
These shorter tubes next have a thin paper covering pasted over both
tops and bottoms before the bottoms are closed by tapping them with a
nail that is just a little larger than the hole in the tube, so that it
crowds down some of the paper from the sides. With the bundles right
side up, the workman then makes holes in the paper cover over the top,
scatters on this the powder dust, and distributes it fairly evenly
among the five hundred and seven hungry ones by means of a light brush.
When the dust has been tamped a little, the powder finds its way to the
middle of the tube in the same manner, the fuse is inserted by another
workman, the top layer of dust added, and the whole supply of bottled
fun packed in by another tamping with a nail and mallet. Completed and
still crowded together in the bundles, the little redskins, with the
fuses sticking out of their caps, seem to wear a festive, promising
look that clearly says: "You give us a light, and we'll do the rest.
And what a high old time it will be!"
When asked how many of these bundles one man could make in a day, the
good-natured master of the shop said that one man is counted on to make
twenty bundles up to the point where the powder is put in, when the
crackers are passed along to others to finish and weave into strings.
What a "string" means here in this land, where the diminutive "packs"
we used to buy for a nickel would be scored, may be gathered from a
glance at those which the maker is holding up in Cut I and at those on
the drying-boards in the view shown in Cut II.
Once the crackers have been fully prepared for stringing, either they
are put together in such strings as you see in the pictures or they
have bigger fellows--four or five times the size of the little
ones--plaited in at regular intervals. Then they are wrapped neatly
with red or white paper in long packages bearing on the face a red slip
with the shop's name printed on it in gilt characters. Some of these
packets would have seemed monstrous--needlessly extravagant--in those
days when I used to make one or two nickel packs last the better part
of a Fourth of July morning by firing them one by one in a hole in the
tie-post or under a tin can. To give these longer strings sufficient
strength to hang from a pole, as is the usual way of firing them, the
workmen weave in with the fuses a light piece of hemp twine. But even
this is not an adequate protection against a break in those monster
strings that come out on special occasions. The one that started this
letter to you was fifteen feet long when I arrived on the scene to
investigate the disturbance and had already lost one-half its numbers
(I have seen strings from thirty to fifty feet long). To keep such a
string from breaking, the Chinese fasten it at intervals to a rope
which runs through the pulley at the top of the pole, and then draw the
line up until the bottom clears the ground. As the explosions tear away
the lowest crackers, the rope is let down and, at the same time, held
out away from the bottom of the pole to make a graceful curve of the
last few feet of the string. When such long strings have eaten
themselves up, you can imagine the amount of fragments around the base
of the pole. There are literally basketfuls of them to be first wetted
down to guard against fire and then swept up or allowed to blow away
when the winds so will.
Thus far you have heard only of little and big crackers. However, there
are many distinguishing names among the Chinese for the several
varieties and sizes, which I am going to give you before passing on to
the story of the special uses of crackers in the Chinese life. First
come the ordinary _pien p'ao_, or "whip-guns," the small ones which
derive their name from the similarity which their explosion bears to
the snapping of a whip. Sometimes they are called simply "whips," in
the same way that the Chinese speak of many things by shortened or
changed names. To make these names seem more real to you I have had my
Chinese teacher write out for me on separate slips the characters which
represent them. More diminutive than the ordinary crackers are the
"small whips," about an inch long, that are made especially for the
small children to use without danger. For one American cent you could
buy about one hundred of these. Then above the whip-guns the next class
is the "bursting bamboos," which are said to have taken their name from
the fact that in early times bamboo was used as the tubes for these
crackers. If such were the case, a line of them must have "made the
splinters fly." Even still more powerful are the "hemp thunderers," or,
to take a little liberty with the translation, the "hemp sons of
thunder," whose name also indicates their construction and their
magnitude. Bearing a close similarity in power to our cannon crackers,
these have been known at times to break the second-story paper windows
in a small compound. They play an important part in the worshiping, or
propitiating of the gods in our courtyard, inasmuch as it is considered
good form to set them off at intervals while the whip-guns--which my
teacher assures me "do not require any watching"--are keeping up their
unbroken stream of praise and prayer. They may be considered as good
lusty "Amens" throughout the service.
Slightly different in form are the "double noises," which are nothing
more or less than our "boosters" that go off first on the ground and
again up in the air. To intersperse these throughout the explosions of
the whips during any special demonstration is also considered good
form. Then allied to these we find another booster, which when it
explodes on the ground drives ten others up into the air to become the
"flying in heaven ten sounds" with the Chinese. These are only "for
play," and that chiefly in the homes from the thirteenth to the
seventeenth days of the first moon of the year. With the "lamp flower
exploders," that is, our flower-pot, the list of the most common forms
of crackers and fire-works becomes exhausted, although the Chinese have
several other less usual species, together with many alternative names
for both these and the ones I have mentioned.
[Illustration: Strings of firecrackers]
[Illustration: Hexagonal bundles of firecrackers drying in the sun]
The time when the Chinese receive most crackers is at the New Year
season, when, among the well-to-do families of Tientsin and Peking, it
is customary to give a boy the equivalent of our fifty cents for his
purchases. In Peking the shops issue special red notes, like our old
"shinplasters" in value, for this one use at the New Year. In giving
the cracker money to the boys, the parents often make smaller presents
to the girls, who are wont to buy paper flowers with their pennies, in
proof of which the Chinese have a proverb which runs, "Girls like
flowers; boys like crackers."
But this juvenile use of the whip-guns consumes only an infinitesimal
part of the whole supply of the year. At many festivals and on many
occasions the head of the house, the manager of the shop, or the
officers of the gild require great quantities of these propitious
harbingers. Greatest of all occasions is the passing of the year, when
the people keep up the successor to the ancient custom of setting off
the "bamboo guns" in order to drive away the evil spirits of the past
twelvemonth and to usher in all that is good for the coming one. All
night long the crackers have been popping in the town below, and an
early gathering in the temple is held to add the final touch before the
new day shall break.
When morning came, I wandered leisurely to my office through the
business section of the town to watch the fun at the big shops. Never
shall I forget the picture of that street with its dozen or more great
red strings of crackers hanging in front of the bigger hongs and
seemingly waiting for some word to start the fusillade. Fortunately
this came and the storm broke as I waited. For sheer noise, vivacity,
and demonstrative liveliness I never have seen the equal of those
snarling, bursting lines that poured out their wrath with incessant
fervor upon the evil spirits below and shot up their welcome to the
good ones above. Then, although this display on New Year's Day seemed
grand enough to last a long time, there came more explosions as the
shops took down their doors and began their routine business on the
fifth or sixth of the moon. Furthermore, custom demands in certain
parts that throughout the first ten days of the year there shall be
occasional snappings of the whips, to be followed on the fifteenth, at
the Feast of Lanterns, by a still greater demonstration.
When a new shop is opened, it is customary for all the front boards to
be left up until just before the opening ceremony takes place; then one
or two boards are taken down, the manager and his assistants come out
to light a string of crackers, and, as the whips are snapping, the
remaining boards come down to the sound of this propitious music of the
land. Very often there are several strings hung from poles or tripods,
and one is lighted after the other in such a way as to maintain a long,
unbroken stream of noise.
In most parts of the empire it is also customary for an official, when
he receives the seals of office from his predecessor, to have a string
of crackers let off at the proper moment. And I must confess to having
yielded myself to the pressure of my Chinese assistants in having
purchased a few for use at the time we opened our new office at this
place. Likewise, when a military official is leaving a post, he is
usually accorded a send-off with crackers which have been subscribed
for by his men.
And thus, from what has gone before, you may catch some idea of the
persistency with which the little redskins have poked their noses into
almost all the important celebrations of the Chinese life.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CURIOUS CLOCKS
BY CHARLES A. BRASSLER
Many of the German cities of the Middle Ages enjoyed great prosperity,
which they liked to exhibit in the form of splendid churches and other
public buildings; and each one tried to excel the others. When,
therefore, in the year 1352, Strassburg was the first to erect a great
cathedral clock, which not only showed the hour to hundreds of
observers, but whose strokes proclaimed it far and near, there was a
rivalry among the rich cities as to which should set up within its
walls the most beautiful specimen of this kind.
The citizens of Nuremberg, who were renowned all over the European
world for their skill, were particularly jealous of Strassburg's
precedence over them.
In 1356, when the Imperial Council, or Reichstag, held in Nuremberg,
issued the Golden Bull, an edict or so-called "imperial constitution"
which promised to be of greatest importance to the welfare of the
kingdom, a locksmith, whose name is unfortunately not recorded, took
this as his idea for the decoration of a clock which was set up in the
Frauenkirche in the year 1361. The emperor, Charles IV, was
represented, seated upon a throne; at the stroke of twelve, the seven
Electors, large moving figures, passed and bowed before him to the
sound of trumpets.
This work of art made a great sensation.
Other European cities, naturally, desired to have similar sights, and
large public clocks were therefore erected in Breslau in 1368, in Rouen
in 1389, in Metz in 1391, in Speyer in 1395, in Augsburg in 1398, in
Lübeck in 1405, in Magdeburg in 1425, in Padua in 1430, in Dantzic in
1470, in Prague in 1490, in Venice in 1495, and in Lyons in 1598.