At the time I made the trip to Yellowstone Park with President
Roosevelt in the spring of 1903, I promised some friends to write up
my impressions of the President and of the Park, but I have been slow
in getting around to it. The President himself, having the absolute
leisure and peace of the White House, wrote his account of the trip
nearly two years ago! But with the stress and strain of my life
at "Slabsides,"--administering the affairs of so many of the wild
creatures of the woods about me,--I have not till this blessed season
(fall of 1905) found the time to put on record an account of the most
interesting thing I saw in that wonderful land, which, of course, was
the President himself.
When I accepted his invitation I was well aware that during the
journey I should be in a storm centre most of the time, which is not
always a pleasant prospect to a man of my habits and disposition. The
President himself is a good deal of a storm,--a man of such abounding
energy and ceaseless activity that he sets everything in motion around
him wherever he goes. But I knew he would be pretty well occupied on
his way to the Park in speaking to eager throngs and in receiving
personal and political homage in the towns and cities we were to pass
through. But when all this was over, and I found myself with him in
the wilderness of the Park, with only the superintendent and a few
attendants to help take up his tremendous personal impact, how was it
likely to fare with a non-strenuous person like myself? I asked. I had
visions of snow six and seven feet deep, where traveling could be
done only upon snow-shoes, and I had never had the things on my feet
in my life. If the infernal fires beneath, that keep the pot boiling
so furiously in the Park, should melt the snows, I could see the party
tearing along on horseback at a wolf-hunt pace over a rough country;
and as I had not been on a horse's back since the President was born,
how would it be likely to fare with me then?
I had known the President several years before he became famous, and
we had had some correspondence on subjects of natural history. His
interest in such themes is always very fresh and keen, and the main
motive of his visit to the Park at this time was to see and study in
its semi-domesticated condition the great game which he had so often
hunted during his ranch days; and he was kind enough to think it would
be an additional pleasure to see it with a nature-lover like myself.
For my own part, I knew nothing about big game, but I knew there was
no man in the country with whom I should so like to see it as
Roosevelt.
Some of our newspapers reported that the President intended to hunt in
the Park. A woman in Vermont wrote me, to protest against the hunting,
and hoped I would teach the President to love the animals as much as I
did,--as if he did not love them much more, because his love is
founded upon knowledge, and because they had been a part of his life.
She did not know that I was then cherishing the secret hope that I
might be allowed to shoot a cougar or bobcat; but this fun did not
come to me. The President said, "I will not fire a gun in the Park;
then I shall have no explanations to make." Yet once I did hear him
say in the wilderness, "I feel as if I ought to keep the camp in
meat. I always have." I regretted that he could not do so on this
occasion.
I have never been disturbed by the President's hunting trips. It is to
such men as he that the big game legitimately belongs,--men who regard
it from the point of view of the naturalist as well as from that of
the sportsman, who are interested in its preservation, and who share
with the world the delight they experience in the chase. Such a hunter
as Roosevelt is as far removed from the game-butcher as day is from
night; and as for his killing of the "varmints,"--bears, cougars, and
bobcats,--the fewer of these there are, the better for the useful and
beautiful game.
The cougars, or mountain lions, in the Park certainly needed killing.
The superintendent reported that he had seen where they had slain
nineteen elk, and we saw where they had killed a deer and dragged its
body across the trail. Of course, the President would not now on his
hunting trips shoot an elk or a deer except to "keep the camp in
meat," and for this purpose it is as legitimate as to slay a sheep or
a steer for the table at home.
We left Washington on April 1, and strung several of the larger
Western cities on our thread of travel,--Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison,
St. Paul, Minneapolis,--as well as many lesser towns, in each of which
the President made an address, sometimes brief, on a few occasions of
an hour or more.
He gave himself very freely and heartily to the people wherever he
went. He could easily match their Western cordiality and
good-fellowship. Wherever his train stopped, crowds soon gathered, or
had already gathered, to welcome him. His advent made a holiday in
each town he visited. At all the principal stops the usual programme
was: first, his reception by the committee of citizens appointed to
receive him,--they usually boarded his private car, and were one by
one introduced to him; then a drive through the town with a concourse
of carriages; then to the hall or open-air platform, where he spoke to
the assembled throng; then to lunch or dinner; and then back to the
train, and off for the next stop,--a round of hand-shaking,
carriage-driving, speech-making each day. He usually spoke from eight
to ten times every twenty-four hours, sometimes for only a few minutes
from the rear platform of his private car, at others for an hour or
more in some large hall. In Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul,
elaborate banquets were given him and his party, and on each occasion
he delivered a carefully prepared speech upon questions that involved
the policy of his administration. The throng that greeted him in the
vast Auditorium in Chicago--that rose and waved and waved again--was
one of the grandest human spectacles I ever witnessed.
In Milwaukee the dense cloud of tobacco smoke that presently filled
the large hall after the feasting was over was enough to choke any
speaker, but it did not seem to choke the President, though he does
not use tobacco in any form himself; nor was there anything foggy
about his utterances on that occasion upon legislative control of the
trusts.
[Illustration: ARRIVAL AT GARDINER, MONT.
(ENTRANCE TO YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK.)
From stereograph, copyright 1906, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York.]
In St. Paul the city was inundated with humanity,--a vast human tide
that left the middle of the streets bare as our line of carriages
moved slowly along, but that rose up in solid walls of town and
prairie humanity on the sidewalks and city dooryards. How hearty and
happy the myriad faces looked! At one point I spied in the throng on
the curbstone a large silk banner that bore my own name as the title
of some society. I presently saw that it was borne by half a dozen
anxious and expectant-looking schoolgirls with braids down their
backs. As my carriage drew near them, they pressed their way through
the throng and threw a large bouquet of flowers into my lap. I think
it would be hard to say who blushed the deeper, the girls or myself.
It was the first time I had ever had flowers showered upon me in
public; and then, maybe, I felt that on such an occasion I was only a
minor side issue, and public recognition was not called for. But the
incident pleased the President. "I saw that banner and those flowers,"
he said afterwards; "and I was delighted to see you honored that way."
But I fear I have not to this day thanked the Monroe School of St.
Paul for that pretty attention.
The time of the passing of the presidential train seemed well known,
even on the Dakota prairies. At one point I remember a little brown
schoolhouse stood not far off, and near the track the school-ma'am,
with her flock, drawn up in line. We were at luncheon, but the
President caught a glimpse ahead through the window, and quickly took
in the situation. With napkin in hand, he rushed out on the platform
and waved to them. "Those children," he said, as he came back, "wanted
to see the President of the United States, and I could not disappoint
them. They may never have another chance. What a deep impression such
things make when we are young!"
At some point in the Dakotas we picked up the former foreman of his
ranch and another cowboy friend of the old days, and they rode with
the President in his private car for several hours. He was as happy
with them as a schoolboy ever was in meeting old chums. He beamed with
delight all over. The life which those men represented, and of which
he had himself once formed a part, meant so much to him; it had
entered into the very marrow of his being, and I could see the joy of
it all shining in his face as he sat and lived parts of it over again
with those men that day. He bubbled with laughter continually. The
men, I thought, seemed a little embarrassed by his open-handed
cordiality and good-fellowship. He himself evidently wanted to forget
the present, and to live only in the memory of those wonderful ranch
days,--that free, hardy, adventurous life upon the plains. It all came
back to him with a rush when he found himself alone with these heroes
of the rope and the stirrup. How much more keen his appreciation was,
and how much quicker his memory, than theirs! He was constantly
recalling to their minds incidents which they had forgotten, and the
names of horses and dogs which had escaped them. His subsequent life,
instead of making dim the memory of his ranch days, seemed to have
made it more vivid by contrast.
When they had gone I said to him, "I think your affection for those
men very beautiful."
"How could I help it?" he said.
"Still, few men in your station could or would go back and renew such
friendships."
"Then I pity them," he replied.
He said afterwards that his ranch life had been the making of him. It
had built him up and hardened him physically, and it had opened his
eyes to the wealth of manly character among the plainsmen and
cattlemen.
Had he not gone West, he said, he never would have raised the Rough
Riders regiment; and had he not raised that regiment and gone to the
Cuban War, he would not have been made governor of New York; and had
not this happened, the politicians would not unwittingly have made his
rise to the Presidency so inevitable. There is no doubt, I think, that
he would have got there some day; but without the chain of events
above outlined, his rise could not have been so rapid.
Our train entered the Bad Lands of North Dakota in the early evening
twilight, and the President stood on the rear platform of his car,
gazing wistfully upon the scene. "I know all this country like a
book," he said. "I have ridden over it, and hunted over it, and
tramped over it, in all seasons and weather, and it looks like home to
me. My old ranch is not far off. We shall soon reach Medora, which
was my station." It was plain to see that that strange,
forbidding-looking landscape, hills and valleys to eastern eyes,
utterly demoralized and gone to the bad,--flayed, fantastic, treeless,
a riot of naked clay slopes, chimney-like buttes, and dry
coulees,--was in his eyes a land of almost pathetic interest. There
were streaks of good pasturage here and there where his cattle used to
graze, and where the deer and the pronghorn used to linger.
When we reached Medora, where the train was scheduled to stop an hour,
it was nearly dark, but the whole town and country round had turned
out to welcome their old townsman. After much hand-shaking, the
committee conducted us down to a little hall, where the President
stood on a low platform, and made a short address to the standing
crowd that filled the place. Then some flashlight pictures were taken
by the local photographer, after which the President stepped down,
and, while the people filed past him, shook hands with every man,
woman, and child of them, calling many of them by name, and greeting
them all most cordially. I recall one grizzled old frontiersman whose
hand he grasped, calling him by name, and saying, "How well I remember
you! You once mended my gunlock for me,--put on a new hammer." "Yes,"
said the delighted old fellow; "I'm the man, Mr. President." He was
among his old neighbors once more, and the pleasure of the meeting was
very obvious on both sides. I heard one of the women tell him they
were going to have a dance presently, and ask him if he would not stay
and open it! The President laughingly excused himself, and said his
train had to leave on schedule time, and his time was nearly up. I
thought of the incident in his "Ranch Life," in which he says he once
opened a cowboy ball with the wife of a Minnesota man, who danced
opposite, and who had recently shot a bullying Scotchman. He says the
scene reminded him of the ball where Bret Harte's heroine "went down
the middle with the man that shot Sandy Magee."
Before reaching Medora he had told me many anecdotes of "Hell-Roaring
Bill Jones," and had said I should see him. But it turned out that
Hell-Roaring Bill had begun to celebrate the coming of the President
too early in the day, and when we reached Medora he was not in a
presentable condition. I forget now how he had earned his name, but no
doubt he had come honestly by it; it was a part of his history, as was
that of "The Pike," "Cold-Turkey Bill," "Hash-Knife Joe," and other
classic heroes of the frontier.
It is curious how certain things go to the bad in the Far West, or a
certain proportion of them,--bad lands, bad horses, and bad men. And
it is a degree of badness that the East has no conception of,--land
that looks as raw and unnatural as if time had never laid its shaping
and softening hand upon it; horses that, when mounted, put their heads
to the ground and their heels in the air, and, squealing defiantly,
resort to the most diabolically ingenious tricks to shake off or to
kill their riders; and men who amuse themselves in bar-rooms by
shooting about the feet of a "tenderfoot" to make him dance, or who
ride along the street and shoot at every one in sight. Just as the old
plutonic fires come to the surface out there in the Rockies, and hint
very strongly of the infernal regions, so a kind of satanic element in
men and animals--an underlying devilishness--crops out, and we have
the border ruffian and the bucking broncho.
The President told of an Englishman on a hunting trip in the West,
who, being an expert horseman at home, scorned the idea that he could
not ride any of their "grass-fed ponies." So they gave him a bucking
broncho. He was soon lying on the ground, much stunned. When he could
speak, he said, "I should not have minded him, you know, _but 'e 'ides
'is 'ead_."
At one place in Dakota the train stopped to take water while we were
at lunch. A crowd soon gathered, and the President went out to greet
them. We could hear his voice, and the cheers and laughter of the
crowd. And then we heard him say, "Well, good-by, I must go now."
Still he did not come. Then we heard more talking and laughing, and
another "good-by," and yet he did not come. Then I went out to see
what had happened. I found the President down on the ground shaking
hands with the whole lot of them. Some one had reached up to shake his
hand as he was about withdrawing, and this had been followed by such
eagerness on the part of the rest of the people to do likewise, that
the President had instantly got down to gratify them. Had the secret
service men known it, they would have been in a pickle. We probably
have never had a President who responded more freely and heartily to
the popular liking for him than Roosevelt. The crowd always seem to be
in love with him the moment they see him and hear his voice. And it is
not by reason of any arts of eloquence, or charm of address, but by
reason of his inborn heartiness and sincerity, and his genuine
manliness. The people feel his quality at once. In Bermuda last winter
I met a Catholic priest who had sat on the platform at some place in
New England very near the President while he was speaking, and who
said, "The man had not spoken three minutes before I loved him, and
had any one tried to molest him, I could have torn him to pieces." It
is the quality in the man that instantly inspires such a liking as
this in strangers that will, I am sure, safeguard him in all public
places.
I once heard him say that he did not like to be addressed as "His
Excellency;" he added laughingly, "They might just as well call me
'His Transparency,' for all I care." It is this transparency, this
direct out-and-out, unequivocal character of him that is one source of
his popularity. The people do love transparency,--all of them but the
politicians.
A friend of his one day took him to task for some mistake he had made
in one of his appointments. "My dear sir," replied the President,
"where you know of one mistake I have made, I know of ten." How such
candor must make the politicians shiver!
I have said that I stood in dread of the necessity of snowshoeing in
the Park, and, in lieu of that, of horseback riding. Yet when we
reached Gardiner, the entrance to the Park, on that bright, crisp
April morning, with no snow in sight save that on the mountain-tops,
and found Major Pitcher and Captain Chittenden at the head of a squad
of soldiers, with a fine saddle-horse for the President, and an
ambulance drawn by two span of mules for me, I confess that I
experienced just a slight shade of mortification. I thought they might
have given me the option of the saddle or the ambulance. Yet I entered
the vehicle as if it was just what I had been expecting.
The President and his escort, with a cloud of cowboys hovering in the
rear, were soon off at a lively pace, and my ambulance followed close,
and at a lively pace, too; so lively that I soon found myself gripping
the seat with both hands. "Well," I said to myself, "they are giving
me a regular Western send-off;" and I thought, as the ambulance swayed
from side to side, that it would suit me just as well if my driver did
not try to keep up with the presidential procession. The driver and
his mules were shut off from me by a curtain, but, looking ahead out
of the sides of the vehicle, I saw two good-sized logs lying across
our course. Surely, I thought (and barely had time to think), he will
avoid these. But he did not, and as we passed over them I was nearly
thrown through the top of the ambulance. "This _is_ a lively
send-off," I said, rubbing my bruises with one hand, while I clung to
the seat with the other. Presently I saw the cowboys scrambling up
the bank as if to get out of our way; then the President on his fine
gray stallion scrambling up the bank with his escort, and looking
ominously in my direction, as we thundered by.
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT WITH MR. BURROUGHS AND SECRETARY
LOEB JUST BEFORE ENTERING THE PARK.
From stereograph, copyright 1906, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York.]
"Well," I said, "this is indeed a novel ride; for once in my life I
have sidetracked the President of the United States! I am given the
right of way over all." On we tore, along the smooth, hard road, and
did not slacken our pace till, at the end of a mile or two, we began
to mount the hill toward Fort Yellowstone. And not till we reached the
fort did I learn that our mules had run away. They had been excited
beyond control by the presidential cavalcade, and the driver, finding
he could not hold them, had aimed only to keep them in the road, and
we very soon had the road all to ourselves.
Fort Yellowstone is at Mammoth Hot Springs, where one gets his first
view of the characteristic scenery of the Park,--huge, boiling springs
with their columns of vapor, and the first characteristic odors which
suggest the traditional infernal regions quite as much as the boiling
and steaming water does. One also gets a taste of a much more rarefied
air than he has been used to, and finds himself panting for breath on
a very slight exertion. The Mammoth Hot Springs have built themselves
up an enormous mound that stands there above the village on the side
of the mountain, terraced and scalloped and fluted, and suggesting
some vitreous formation, or rare carving of enormous, many-colored
precious stones. It looks quite unearthly, and, though the devil's
frying pan, and ink pot, and the Stygian caves are not far off, the
suggestion is of something celestial rather than of the nether
regions,--a vision of jasper walls, and of amethyst battlements.
With Captain Chittenden I climbed to the top, stepping over the rills
and creeks of steaming hot water, and looked at the marvelously clear,
cerulean, but boiling, pools on the summit. The water seemed as
unearthly in its beauty and purity as the gigantic sculpturing that
held it.
The Stygian caves are still farther up the mountain,--little pockets
in the rocks, or well-holes in the ground at your feet, filled with
deadly carbon dioxide. We saw birds' feathers and quills in all of
them. The birds hop into them, probably in quest of food or seeking
shelter, and they never come out. We saw the body of a martin on the
bank of one hole. Into one we sank a lighted torch, and it was
extinguished as quickly as if we had dropped it into water. Each cave
or niche is a death valley on a small scale. Near by we came upon a
steaming pool, or lakelet, of an acre or more in extent. A pair of
mallard ducks were swimming about in one end of it,--the cool end.
When we approached, they swam slowly over into the warmer water. As
they progressed, the water got hotter and hotter, and the ducks'
discomfort was evident. Presently they stopped, and turned towards us,
half appealingly, as I thought. They could go no farther; would we
please come no nearer? As I took another step or two, up they rose and
disappeared over the hill. Had they gone to the extreme end of the
pool, we could have had boiled mallard for dinner.
Another novel spectacle was at night, or near sundown, when the deer
came down from the hills into the streets and ate hay, a few yards
from the officers' quarters, as unconcernedly as so many domestic
sheep. This they had been doing all winter, and they kept it up till
May, at times a score or more of them profiting thus on the
government's bounty. When the sundown gun was fired a couple of
hundred yards away, they gave a nervous start, but kept on with their
feeding. The antelope and elk and mountain sheep had not yet grown
bold enough to accept Uncle Sam's charity in that way.
The President wanted all the freedom and solitude possible while in
the Park, so all newspaper men and other strangers were excluded. Even
the secret service men and his physician and private secretaries were
left at Gardiner. He craved once more to be alone with nature; he was
evidently hungry for the wild and the aboriginal,--a hunger that seems
to come upon him regularly at least once a year, and drives him forth
on his hunting trips for big game in the West.
We spent two weeks in the Park, and had fair weather, bright, crisp
days, and clear, freezing nights. The first week we occupied three
camps that had been prepared, or partly prepared, for us in the
northeast corner of the Park, in the region drained by the Gardiner
River, where there was but little snow, and which we reached on
horseback.
The second week we visited the geyser region, which lies a thousand
feet or more higher, and where the snow was still five or six feet
deep. This part of the journey was made in big sleighs, each drawn by
two span of horses.
On the horseback excursion, which involved only about fifty miles of
riding, we had a mule pack train, and Sibley tents and stoves, with
quite a retinue of camp laborers, a lieutenant and an orderly or two,
and a guide, Billy Hofer.
The first camp was in a wild, rocky, and picturesque gorge on the
Yellowstone, about ten miles from the fort. A slight indisposition,
the result of luxurious living, with no wood to chop or to saw, and no
hills to climb, as at home, prevented me from joining the party till
the third day. Then Captain Chittenden drove me eight miles in a
buggy. About two miles from camp we came to a picket of two or three
soldiers, where my big bay was in waiting for me. I mounted him
confidently, and, guided by an orderly, took the narrow, winding trail
toward camp. Except for an hour's riding the day before with Captain
Chittenden, I had not been on a horse's back for nearly fifty years,
and I had not spent as much as a day in the saddle during my youth.
That first sense of a live, spirited, powerful animal beneath you, at
whose mercy you are,--you, a pedestrian all your days,--with gullies
and rocks and logs to cross, and deep chasms opening close beside
you, is not a little disturbing. But my big bay did his part well, and
I did not lose my head or my nerve, as we cautiously made our way
along the narrow path on the side of the steep gorge, with a foaming
torrent rushing along at its foot, nor yet when we forded the rocky
and rapid Yellowstone. A misstep or a stumble on the part of my steed,
and probably the first bubble of my confidence would have been
shivered at once; but this did not happen, and in due time we reached
the group of tents that formed the President's camp.
The situation was delightful,--no snow, scattered pine trees, a
secluded valley, rocky heights, and the clear, ample, trouty waters of
the Yellowstone. The President was not in camp. In the morning he had
stated his wish to go alone into the wilderness. Major Pitcher very
naturally did not quite like the idea, and wished to send an orderly
with him.
"No," said the President. "Put me up a lunch, and let me go alone. I
will surely come back."
And back he surely came. It was about five o'clock when he came
briskly down the path from the east to the camp. It came out that he
had tramped about eighteen miles through a very rough country. The day
before, he and the major had located a band of several hundred elk on
a broad, treeless hillside, and his purpose was to find those elk, and
creep up on them, and eat his lunch under their very noses. And this
he did, spending an hour or more within fifty yards of them. He came
back looking as fresh as when he started, and at night, sitting before
the big camp fire, related his adventure, and talked with his usual
emphasis and copiousness of many things. He told me of the birds he
had seen or heard; among them he had heard one that was new to him.
From his description I told him I thought it was Townsend's solitaire,
a bird I much wanted to see and hear. I had heard the West India
solitaire,--one of the most impressive songsters I ever heard,--and I
wished to compare our Western form with it.
The next morning we set out for our second camp, ten or a dozen miles
away, and in reaching it passed over much of the ground the President
had traversed the day before. As we came to a wild, rocky place above
a deep chasm of the river, with a few scattered pine trees, the
President said, "It was right here that I heard that strange bird
song." We paused a moment. "And there it is now!" he exclaimed.
Sure enough, there was the solitaire singing from the top of a small
cedar,--a bright, animated, eloquent song, but without the richness
and magic of the song of the tropical species. We hitched our horses,
and followed the bird up as it flew from tree to tree. The President
was as eager to see and hear it as I was. It seemed very shy, and we
only caught glimpses of it. In form and color it much resembles its
West India cousin, and suggests our catbird. It ceased to sing when we
pursued it. It is a bird found only in the wilder and higher parts of
the Rockies. My impression was that its song did not quite merit the
encomiums that have been pronounced upon it.
At this point, I saw amid the rocks my first and only Rocky Mountain
woodchucks, and, soon after we had resumed our journey, our first blue
grouse,--a number of them like larger partridges. Occasionally we
would come upon black-tailed deer, standing or lying down in the
bushes, their large ears at attention being the first thing to catch
the eye. They would often allow us to pass within a few rods of them
without showing alarm. Elk horns were scattered all over this part of
the Park, and we passed several old carcasses of dead elk that had
probably died a natural death.
In a grassy bottom at the foot of a steep hill, while the President
and I were dismounted, and noting the pleasing picture which our pack
train of fifteen or twenty mules made filing along the side of a steep
grassy slope,--a picture which he has preserved in his late volume,
"Out-Door Pastimes of an American Hunter,"--our attention was
attracted by plaintive, musical, bird-like chirps that rose from the
grass about us. I was almost certain it was made by a bird; the
President was of like opinion; and we kicked about in the tufts of
grass, hoping to flush the bird. Now here, now there, arose this
sharp, but bird-like note. Finally, we found that it was made by a
species of gopher, whose holes we soon discovered. What its specific
name is I do not know, but it should be called the singing gopher.
Our destination this day was a camp on Cottonwood Creek, near
"Hell-Roaring Creek." As we made our way in the afternoon along a
broad, open, grassy valley, I saw a horseman come galloping over the
hill to our right, starting up a band of elk as he came; riding across
the plain, he wheeled his horse, and, with the military salute, joined
our party. He proved to be a government scout, called the "Duke of
Hell Roaring,"--an educated officer from the Austrian army, who, for
some unknown reason, had exiled himself here in this out-of-the-way
part of the world. He was a man in his prime, of fine, military look
and bearing. After conversing a few moments with the President and
Major Pitcher, he rode rapidly away.
Our second camp, which we reached in mid-afternoon, was in the edge of
the woods on the banks of a fine, large trout stream, where ice and
snow still lingered in patches. I tried for trout in the head of a
large, partly open pool, but did not get a rise; too much ice in the
stream, I concluded. Very soon my attention was attracted by a strange
note, or call, in the spruce woods. The President had also noticed it,
and, with me, wondered what made it. Was it bird or beast? Billy Hofer
said he thought it was an owl, but the sound in no way suggested an
owl, and the sun was shining brightly. It was a sound such as a boy
might make by blowing in the neck of an empty bottle. Presently we
heard it beyond us on the other side of the creek, which was pretty
good proof that the creature had wings.
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT IN THE BEAR COUNTRY
From stereograph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York]
"Let's go run that bird down," said the President to me.
So off we started across a small, open, snow-streaked plain, toward
the woods beyond it. We soon decided that the bird was on the top of
one of a group of tall spruces. After much skipping about over logs
and rocks, and much craning of our necks, we made him out on the peak
of a spruce. I imitated his call, when he turned his head down toward
us, but we could not make out what he was.
"Why did we not think to bring the glasses?" said the President.
"I will run and get them," I replied.
"No," said he, "you stay here and keep that bird treed, and I will
fetch them."
So off he went like a boy, and was very soon back with the glasses. We
quickly made out that it was indeed an owl,--the pigmy owl, as it
turned out,--not much larger than a bluebird. I think the President
was as pleased as if we had bagged some big game. He had never seen
the bird before.
Throughout the trip I found his interest in bird life very keen, and
his eye and ear remarkably quick. He usually saw the bird or heard its
note as quickly as I did,--and I had nothing else to think about, and
had been teaching my eye and ear the trick of it for over fifty years.
Of course, his training as a big-game hunter stood him in good stead,
but back of that were his naturalist's instincts, and his genuine love
of all forms of wild life.
I have been told that his ambition up to the time he went to Harvard
had been to be a naturalist, but that there they seem to have
convinced him that all the out-of-door worlds of natural history had
been conquered, and that the only worlds remaining were in the
laboratory, and to be won with the microscope and the scalpel. But
Roosevelt was a man made for action in a wide field, and laboratory
conquests could not satisfy him. His instincts as a naturalist,
however, lie back of all his hunting expeditions, and, in a large
measure, I think, prompt them. Certain it is that his hunting
records contain more live natural history than any similar records
known to me, unless it be those of Charles St. John, the Scotch
naturalist-sportsman.
The Canada jays, or camp-robbers, as they are often called, soon found
out our camp that afternoon, and no sooner had the cook begun to throw
out peelings and scraps and crusts than the jays began to carry them
off, not to eat, as I observed, but to hide them in the thicker
branches of the spruce trees. How tame they were, coming within three
or four yards of one! Why this species of jay should everywhere be so
familiar, and all other kinds so wild, is a puzzle.
In the morning, as we rode down the valley toward our next
camping-place, at Tower Falls, a band of elk containing a hundred or
more started along the side of the hill a few hundred yards away. I
was some distance behind the rest of the party, as usual, when I saw
the President wheel his horse off to the left, and, beckoning to me to
follow, start at a tearing pace on the trail of the fleeing elk. He
afterwards told me that he wanted me to get a good view of those elk
at close range, and he was afraid that if he sent the major or Hofer
to lead me, I would not get it. I hurried along as fast as I could,
which was not fast; the way was rough,--logs, rocks, spring runs, and
a tenderfoot rider.
Now and then the President, looking back and seeing what slow progress
I was making, would beckon to me impatiently, and I could fancy him
saying, "If I had a rope around him, he would come faster than that!"
Once or twice I lost sight of both him and the elk; the altitude was
great, and the horse was laboring like a steam engine on an upgrade.
Still I urged him on. Presently, as I broke over a hill, I saw the
President pressing the elk up the opposite slope. At the brow of the
hill he stopped, and I soon joined him. There on the top, not fifty
yards away, stood the elk in a mass, their heads toward us and their
tongues hanging out. They could run no farther. The President laughed
like a boy. The spectacle meant much more to him than it did to me. I
had never seen a wild elk till on this trip, but they had been among
the notable game that he had hunted. He had traveled hundreds of
miles, and undergone great hardships, to get within rifle range of
these creatures. Now here stood scores of them with lolling tongues,
begging for mercy.
After gazing at them to our hearts' content, we turned away to look up
our companions, who were nowhere within sight. We finally spied them a
mile or more away, and, joining them, all made our way to an elevated
plateau that commanded an open landscape three or four miles across.
It was high noon, and the sun shone clear and warm. From this lookout
we saw herds upon herds of elk scattered over the slopes and gentle
valleys in front of us. Some were grazing, some were standing or lying
upon the ground, or upon the patches of snow. Through our glasses we
counted the separate bands, and then the numbers of some of the bands
or groups, and estimated that three thousand elk were in full view in
the landscape around us. It was a notable spectacle. Afterward, in
Montana, I attended a council of Indian chiefs at one of the Indian
agencies, and told them, through their interpreter, that I had been
with the Great Chief in the Park, and of the game we had seen. When I
told them of these three thousand elk all in view at once, they
grunted loudly, whether with satisfaction or with incredulity, I could
not tell.
In the midst of this great game amphitheatre we dismounted and enjoyed
the prospect. And the President did an unusual thing, he loafed for
nearly an hour,--stretched himself out in the sunshine upon a flat
rock, as did the rest of us, and, I hope, got a few winks of sleep. I
am sure I did. Little, slender, striped chipmunks, about half the size
of ours, were scurrying about; but I recall no other wild things save
the elk.
From here we rode down the valley to our third camp, at Tower Falls,
stopping on the way to eat our luncheon on a washed boulder beside a
creek. On this ride I saw my first and only badger; he stuck his
striped head out of his hole in the ground only a few yards away from
us as we passed.
Our camp at Tower Falls was amid the spruces above a canyon of the
Yellowstone, five or six hundred feet deep. It was a beautiful and
impressive situation,--shelter, snugness, even cosiness, looking over
the brink of the awful and the terrifying. With a run and a jump I
think one might have landed in the river at the bottom of the great
abyss, and in doing so might have scaled one of those natural obelisks
or needles of rock that stand up out of the depths two or three
hundred feet high. Nature shows you what an enormous furrow her plough
can open through the strata when moving horizontally, at the same time
that she shows you what delicate and graceful columns her slower and
gentler aerial forces can carve out of the piled strata. At the Falls
there were two or three of these columns, like the picket-pins of the
elder gods.
Across the canyon in front of our camp, upon a grassy plateau which was
faced by a wall of trap rock, apparently thirty or forty feet high, a
band of mountain sheep soon attracted our attention. They were within
long rifle range, but were not at all disturbed by our presence, nor
had they been disturbed by the road-builders who, under Captain
Chittenden, were constructing a government road along the brink of the
canyon. We speculated as to whether or not the sheep could get down the
almost perpendicular face of the chasm to the river to drink. It
seemed to me impossible. Would they try it while we were there to see?
We all hoped so; and sure enough, late in the afternoon the word came
to our tents that the sheep were coming down. The President, with coat
off and a towel around his neck, was shaving. One side of his face was
half shaved, and the other side lathered. Hofer and I started for a
point on the brink of the canyon where we could have a better view.
"By Jove," said the President, "I must see that. The shaving can wait,
and the sheep won't."
So on he came, accoutred as he was,--coatless, hatless, but not
latherless, nor towelless. Like the rest of us, his only thought was
to see those sheep do their "stunt." With glasses in hand, we watched
them descend those perilous heights, leaping from point to point,
finding a foothold where none appeared to our eyes, loosening
fragments of the crumbling rocks as they came, now poised upon some
narrow shelf and preparing for the next leap, zig-zagging or plunging
straight down till the bottom was reached, and not one accident or
misstep amid all that insecure footing. I think the President was the
most pleased of us all; he laughed with the delight of it, and quite
forgot his need of a hat and coat till I sent for them.
In the night we heard the sheep going back; we could tell by the noise
of the falling stones. In the morning I confidently expected to see
some of them lying dead at the foot of the cliffs, but there they all
were at the top once more, apparently safe and sound. They do,
however, occasionally meet with accidents in their perilous climbing,
and their dead bodies have been found at the foot of the rocks.
Doubtless some point of rock to which they had trusted gave way, and
crushed them in the descent, or fell upon those in the lead.
The next day, while the rest of us went fishing for trout in the
Yellowstone, three or four miles above the camp, over the roughest
trail that we had yet traversed on horseback, the President, who never
fishes unless put to it for meat, went off alone again with his lunch
in his pocket, to stalk those sheep as he had stalked the elk, and to
feel the old sportsman's thrill without the use of firearms. To do
this involved a tramp of eight or ten miles down the river to a bridge
and up the opposite bank. This he did, and ate his lunch near the
sheep, and was back in camp before we were.
We took some large cut-throat trout, as they are called, from the
yellow mark across their throats, and I saw at short range a
black-tailed deer bounding along in that curious, stiff-legged,
mechanical, yet springy manner, apparently all four legs in the air at
once, and all four feet reaching the ground at once, affording a very
singular spectacle.
[Illustration: MR. BURROUGHS'S FAVORITE PASTIME.