ON TO THE YELLOWSTONE
At last one evening (shall I confess it?) we had blue-crane soup for
supper!
Now a flight of gray-blue cranes across a pearl-gray sky, shot with
threads of evening scarlet, makes a masterly picture: indeed, an effect
worthy of reproduction in Art. You see a Japanese screen done in heroic
size; and it is a sight to make you long exquisitely for things that are
not--like a poet. But----
Let us have no illusions about this matter! Crane soup is not
satisfactory. It looks gray-blue and tastes gray-blue, and gives to your
psychic inwardness a dull, gray-blue, melancholy tone. And when you
nibble at the boiled gray-blue meat of an adult crane, you catch
yourself wondering just what sort of _ragout_ could be made out of
boots; you have a morbid longing to know just how bad such a _ragout_
would really be!
Hereafter on whatever trails I may follow, blue cranes shall be used
chiefly for Japanese screen effects. Little by little (the latent
philosopher in me emerges to remark) by experience we place not only
ourselves but all things in their proper places in the universe. This
process of fitting things properly in one's cosmos seems to be one of
the chief aims of conscious life. Therefore I score one for
myself--having placed blue cranes permanently in that cosmic nook given
over to Japanese screen effects!
Next morning we pushed on. The taste of that crane soup clung to me all
day like the memory of an old sorrow dulled by time.
Deer tracks were plentiful, but it has long been conceded that the
tracks are by far the least edible things pertaining to an animal.
Cranes seemed to have multiplied rapidly. Impudently tame, they lined
the gravel-bars, and regarded us curiously as we fought our way past
them. Now and then a flock of wild ducks alighted several hundred yards
from us. We had only a rifle. To shoot a moving duck out of a moving
boat with a rifle is a feat attended with some difficulties. Once we
wounded a wild goose, but it got away; which offended our sense of
poetic justice. After crane soup one would seem to deserve roast goose.
I scanned the dreary monotonous valleys stretching away from the river.
We had for several days been living on scenery, tobacco, and flapjacks.
The scenery had flattened out, tobacco was running low; but the
flapjacks bid fair to go on forever. I sought in my head for the exact
adjective, the particular epithet with the inevitable feel about it,
with which to describe that monotonous melancholy stretch. Every time I
tried, I came back to the word "_baconless_." The word took on exquisite
overtones of gray meaning, and I worked up those overtones until I had a
perfectly wrought melancholy poem of one word--"_Baconless_." For, after
all, a poem never existed upon paper, but lives subtly in the
consciousness of the poet, and in the minds of those who understand the
poet through the suggestiveness of his written symbols, and their own
remembered experiences.
But during the next morning, poetic justice worked. A rider mounted on a
piebald pony appeared on the bank and shouted for us to pull in.
I suddenly realized why a dog wags his tail at a stranger. But the
feeling I had was bigger than that. This mounted man became at once for
me the incarnation of the meaning of bacon!
When two parties meet and each wants what the other can give, it doesn't
take long to get acquainted. The rider was a youth of about seventeen.
One glance at his face told you the story of his rearing. He was
unmistakably city-bred, and his hands showed that his life had begun too
easy for his own good.
"From the East?" he questioned joyously. "Say, you know little old New
York, don't you? When were you there last?"
The lad was hungry, but not for bacon. Alas! Our hunger was the
healthier one! We talked of New York. "Mother's in Paris," he
volunteered, "and Dad's in New York meeting her bills. But the Old Man's
got a grouch at me, and so he sent me 'way out here in this God-forsaken
country! Say, what did they make this country for? Got any tailor-made
cigarettes about you? How did Broadway look when you were there last?
Lights all there yet at night? I've been here two years--it seems like
two hundred! Talk about Robinson Crusoe! Say, I've got him distanced!"
I helped him build up a momentary Broadway there in the wilderness--the
lights, the din, the hurrying, jostling theater crowds, the cafés,
faces, faces--anguished faces, eager faces, weary faces, painted faces,
squalor, brilliance. For me the memory of it only made me feel the pity
of it all. But the lad's eyes beamed. He was homesick for Broadway.
I changed the subject from prose to poetry; that is, from Broadway to
bacon.
"Wait here till I come back," said the lad, mounting. He spurred up a
gulch and disappeared. In an hour he reappeared with a half strip of the
precious stuff. "Take money for it? Not on your life!" he insisted.
"You've been down there, and that goes for a meal ticket with me!"
Fried bacon! And flapjacks sopped in the grease of it! After all, a
banquet is very much a state of mind.
When we pulled away, the ostracized New Yorker bade us farewell with a
snatch of a song once more or less popular: "Give my regards to
Broadway!"
We pushed on vigorously now. The head wind came up. _The head wind!_ It
seemed one of the eternal things. We paddled and cordelled valiantly,
discussing Milk River the while. We had grown very credulous on that
subject. Somehow or other an unlimited supply of gasoline was all the
engine needed for the complete restoration of its health; and Milk River
stood for gasoline in liberal quantities. Hope is generally represented
by the poets as a thing winged and ethereal; nevertheless it can be fed
on bacon.
The next morning we arrived at the mouth of what we took to be Hell
Creek, which flows (when it has any water in it!) out of the Bad Lands.
It didn't take much imagination to name that creek. The whole country
from which it debouches looks like Hell--"with the lights out," as
General Sully once remarked. A country of lifeless hills that had the
appearance of an endless succession of huge black cinder heaps from
prehistoric fires.
The wind had increased steadily all day, and now we saw ahead of us a
long rolling stretch of wind-lashed river that discouraged us somewhat.
A gray mist rolled with the wind, and dull clouds scudded over. We
pitched camp in a clump of cottonwoods and made flapjacks; after which
the Kid and I, taking our blankets and the rifle, set out to explore
Hell Creek.
[Illustration: REVEILLE!]
[Illustration: THE PEN AND KEY RANCH.]
The windings of the ravine soon hid us from the river, and we found
ourselves in a melancholy world, without life and without any human
significance. It was very easy to imagine one's self lost amid the drear
ashen craters of the moon. We pushed on up the creek, kicking up clouds
of alkali dust as we went. A creek of a burnt-out hell it was, to be
sure. It seemed almost blasphemous to call this arid gully a creek. Boys
swim in creeks, and fishes twinkle over the shallows where the sweet
eager waters make a merry sound. Creek, indeed! Did a cynic name this
dry ragged gash in the midst of a bleak black world where nothing lived,
where never laughter sounded?
A seething, fiery ooze might have flowed there once, but surely never
did water make music there.
We pushed on five or six miles, and the evening shade began to press in
about us. At last we issued forth into a flat basin, surrounded by the
weird hills--a grotesque, wind-carved amphitheater, admirably suited for
a witches' orgy. Some bleached bison heads with horns lay scattered
about the place, and a cluster of soapweeds grew there--God knows how!
They thrust their sere yellow sword-blades skyward with the pitiful
defiance of desperate things. It seemed natural enough that something
should be dead in this sepulcher; but the living weeds, fighting
bitterly for life, seemed out of place.
I looked about and thought of Poe. Surely just beyond those summits
where the melancholy sky touched the melancholy hills, one would come
upon the "dank tarn of Auber" and the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."
We gathered a quantity of the dry sword-bladed soapweeds, and with one
of the blankets made a lean-to shelter against the steep hillside. The
place was becoming eerie in the gray evening that spread slowly over the
dead land. The mist driven by the moaning wind became a melancholy
drizzle. We dragged the soapweeds under cover and lit a fire with
difficulty. It was a half-hearted, smudgy, cheerless fire.
And then the night fell--tremendous, overpowering night! The Kid and I,
huddled close in one blanket, thrust our heads out from under the
shelter and watched the ghastly world leap by fits out of the dark, when
the sheet lightning flared through the drizzle. It gave one an odd
shivery feeling. It was as though one groped about a strange dark room
and saw, for a brief moment in the spurting glow of a wind-blown
sulphur match, the staring face of a dead man. Over us the great wind
groaned. Water dripped through the blanket--like tears. We scraped the
last damp ends of the weeds together that the fire might live a little
longer. Byron's poem came back to me with a new force; and lying on my
stomach in the cheerless drip before a drowning fire, I chanted snatches
of it aloud to the Kid and to that sinister personality that was the
Night.
I had a dream which was not all a dream;
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in eternal space,
Rayless and pathless; and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.
Low thunder shook the ink-sopped night--I thought of it as the Spirit of
Byron applauding his own terrific lines.
A fearful hope was all the world contained;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguished with a crash--and all was black.
Out in the wind-voiced darkness, swept by spasmodic deluges of rapid
flame and muffled thunder, it seemed I could hear the dream-forests of
the moody Master crackling and booming in the gloom.
--looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world.
"Say, how long is that piece?" asked the Kid.
And vipers crawled
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing--
We wondered if there might not be some rattlesnakes in that vicinity.
--They raked up
And, shivering, scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew brighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw and shrieked and died--
"Cut that out!" said the Kid.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because," said the Kid.
But what are Bad Lands for? I had hoped to chant a bit of James Thomson,
the younger, also, there in that "dreadful night." I never was in a
place where it seemed to fit so well.
But we huddled up in our blanket under the dripping shelter, and that
was a long night. The soppy gray morning came at length. A midsummer
morning after a night of rain--and yet, no bird, no hopeful greenery, no
sense of the upward yearning Earth-Soul!
When we sighted the Missouri River again, the sun had broken through
upon the greengirt, glinting stream. It seemed like Paradise.
By almost continuous travel we reached Lismus Ferry on the second
morning from Hell Creek. The ferryman had a bit of information for us.
We would find nothing at the mouth of Milk River but a sandbar, he
advised us. But he had some ointment to apply to the wound thus
inflicted, in that Glasgow, a town on the Great Northern, was only
twenty-five miles inland. The weekly stage had left on the morning
before; but the ferryman understood that the trail was not overcrowded
with pedestrians.
It was a smarting ointment to apply to so fresh a wound; but we took the
medicine. Frank, Charley, and I set out at once for Glasgow, leaving the
others at camp to repair the leaking boat during our absence. The stage
trail led through an arid, undulating prairie of yellow buffalo grass.
There were creek beds, but they were filled with dust at this season of
the year. The Englishman set the pace with the stride of the
long-legged. The sun rose high; the dry runs reminded us unpleasantly of
our increasing thirst, and the puffing wind blew hot as from a distant
prairie fire.
I followed at the Englishman's heels, and by and by it began to occur to
me that he could walk rather rapidly. The Frenchman trailed after at a
steadily increasing distance, until finally I could no longer hear his
forceful remarks (uttered in two languages) concerning a certain corn
which he possessed. We had been cramped up in a boat for several weeks,
and the frequent soakings in the cold water had done little good to our
joints. None of us was fit for walking. I kept back a limp until the
Englishman ahead of me began to step with a little jerking of the knees;
and then with an almost vicious delight, I gave over and limped. I never
knew before the great luxury of limping. We covered the distance in
something less than six hours.
The next morning, in a drizzling rain, each packing a five-gallon can of
gasoline and some provisions, we set out for the Ferry; and it was a
sorry, bedraggled trio that limped up to camp eight hours later. We did
little more than creep the last five miles. And all for a spiteful
little engine that might prove ungrateful in the end!
It rained all night--a cold, insistent downpour. Our log fire was
drowned out; the tent dripped steadily; our blankets got soppy; and
three of us were so stiff that the least movement gave keen pain.
Soppy dawn--wet wood--bad grub for breakfast--and bad humor concealed
with difficulty; but through it all ran a faint note of victory at the
thought of the gasoline, and the way that engine would go! We lay in
camp all day--soppy, sore--waiting for the rain to let up. By way of
cheering up I read _L'Assomoir_; and a grim graveyard substitute for
cheer it was. But the next day broke with a windy, golden dawn. We
filled the tank, packed the luggage and lo! the engine worked! It took
all the soreness out of our legs to see it go.
We rejoiced now in the heavy and steadily increasing head wind; for it
was like conquering an old enemy to go crashing through the rolling
water that had for so many days given us pitiless battle.
For five or six miles we plunged on down the wind-tumbled river. There
was a distinct change in the temper of the crew. A vote at that time
would have been unanimous for finishing at New Orleans.
_Squash!_
The engine stopped; the _Atom_ swung round in the trough of the waves,
and the tow-skiff rammed us, trying to climb over our gunwale. We
wallowed in the wash of a bar, and cranked by turns. At the end of an
hour no illusions were left us. Holding an inquest over the engine, we
pronounced it dead.
In the drear fag end of the windy day, soaked from much wading and weary
of paddling with little headway, we made camp in a clump of scarlet
bull-berry bushes; and by the evening fire two talked of railroad
stations, one talked of home, and I thought of that one of the "soldiers
three" who "swore quietly into the sky."
The Milk River illusion was lost. Two hundred miles below was the mouth
of the Yellowstone--the first station in the long journey. A few days
back we had longed for gasoline; but there was no one to sell. Now we
had fifteen gallons to sell--and there was no one to buy. The hope
without the gasoline was decidedly better than the gasoline without the
hope. Whereat the philosopher in me emerges to remark--but who cares?
Philosophy proceeds backward, and points out errors of thought and
action chiefly when it has become too late to mend them. But it is
possible to be poor in the possession of erstwhile prospective wealth,
and rich in retrospective poverty. Oh, blessed is he who is negatively
rich!
Being a bit stunned by the death of the hope conceived in weariness, we
did not put off that night, but huddled up in our blankets close to the
log fire; for this midsummer night had in it a tang of frost.
Day came--cloudy and cold--blown over the wilderness by a wind that made
the cottonwoods above us groan and pop. The waves were higher than we
had seen them before. We had little heart for cordelling, and no
paddling could make headway against that gale. It was Sunday. Everything
was damp and chilly. Shivers ran up our backs while we toasted our feet
and faces; and the wind-whipped smoke had a way of blowing in every
direction at once. Charley struggled with the engine, which now and then
made a few revolutions--backwards--by way of leading him on. He heaped
big curses upon it, and it replied periodically with snorts of rage.
Bad blood developed, and mutiny ensued, which once gave promise of
pirate-story developments--fortunately warded off. Before the day was
done, it was made plain that the Kid and I would travel alone from the
mouth of the Yellowstone. "For," said the Kid with certain virile
decorations of speech, "I'm going with you if we have to buy skates!"
The wind fell at sunset. A chill, moonless, starry night lured me, and I
decided to travel. The mutineers, eager to reach a railroad as soon as
possible, agreed to go. The skiff led and the _Atom_ followed with
paddles. A mile or so below we ran into shallows and grounded. We waded
far around in the cold water that chilled us to the marrow, but could
find neither entrance nor outlet to the pocket in which we found
ourselves. Wading ashore, we made a cheerless camp in the brush, leaving
the boats stuck in the shallows. For the first time, the division in the
camp was well marked. The Kid and I instinctively made our bed together
under one blanket, and the others bunked apart. We had become the main
party of the expedition; the others were now merely enforced camp
followers. It was funny in an unpleasant way.
In the morning a sea of stiff fog hid our boats. Packing the camp stuff
on our backs, we waded about and found the crafts.
At last, after a number of cheerless days and nights of continuous
travel, the great, open, rolling prairies ahead of us indicated our
approach toward the end of the journey's first stage. The country began
to look like North Dakota, though we were still nearly two hundred miles
away. The monotony of the landscape was depressing. It seemed a thousand
miles to the sunrise. The horizon was merely a blue haze--and the
endless land was sere. The river ran for days with a succession of
regularly occurring right-angled bends to the north and east. Each
headland shot out in the same way, with, it seemed, the same snags in
the water under it, and the same cottonwoods growing on it; and opposite
each headland was the same stony bluff, wind- and water-carved in the
same way: until at last we cried out against the tediousness of the
oft-repeated story, wondering whether or not we were continually passing
the same point, and somehow slipping back to pass it again.
But at last we reached Wolf Point--the first town in five hundred miles.
We had seen no town since we left Benton. An odd little burlesque of a
town it was; but walking up its main street we felt very metropolitan
after weeks on those lonesome river stretches.
Five Assiniboine Indian girls seemed to be the only women in the town. I
coaxed them to stand for a photograph on the incontestable grounds that
they were by far the prettiest women I had seen for many days! The
effect of my generous praise is fixed forever on the pictured faces
presented herewith.
Here, during the day, Frank and Charley disposed of their skiff and we
saw them no more. We pushed on with little mourning. But in a spirit of
fairness, let me record that Charley's biscuits were marvels, and that
Frank's _gâteaux à la chansonnette_ were things of beauty and therefore
joys forever.
[Illustration: ASSINIBOINE INDIAN CHIEF.]
[Illustration: ASSINIBOINE INDIAN CAMP.]
The days that followed were long and hard; and half the chilly nights
were spent in drying ourselves before a roaring fire. There were more
mosquitoes now. They began to torture us at about five o'clock in the
afternoon, and left off only when the cold of night came, relieving us
of one discomfort by the substitution of another. Bill, of whom I had
come to think as the expatriated turnip, gave me an opportunity to study
homesickness--at once pitiful and ludicrous in a man with abundant
whiskers. But he pulled strenuously at the forward paddle, every stroke
as he remarked often, taking him closer to home.
The river had fallen alarmingly, and was still falling. Several times we
were obliged to unload the entire cargo, piling it high in the shallow
water, that we might be able to carry the empty boat to the channel.
One evening we came upon a typical Montana ranch--the Pen and Key. The
residence, barns, sheds, fences were built of logs. The great rolling
country about it was thickly dotted with horses and cattle. The place
looked like home. It was a sight from Pisgah--a glimpse of a Promised
Land after the Wilderness. We pulled in, intending to buy some
provisions for the last stage of the journey to the Yellowstone.
I went up to the main ranch-house, and was met at the door by one of
those blessed creatures that have "mother" written all over them. Hers
were not the eyes of a stranger. She looked at me as she must look at
one of her sons when he returns from an extended absence. I told at
once the purpose of my errand, explaining briefly what we were doing on
the river. Why, yes, certainly we could have provisions. But we weren't
going any farther that night--were we? The rancher appeared at this
moment--a retired major of the army, who looked the part--and decided
that we would stay for supper. How many were there in our party? Three?
"Three more plates," he said to the daughters of the house, busy about
the kitchen.
Let's be frank! It really required no persuasion at all to make a guest
of me. Had I allowed myself adequate expression of my delight, I should
have startled the good mother by turning a somersault or a series of
cartwheels! Oh, the smell of an old-fashioned wholesome meal in process
of development!
A short while back I sang the praises of the feast in the open--the
feast of your own kill, tanged with the wood smoke. And even here I
cling to the statement that of all meals, the feast of wild meat in the
wilderness takes precedence. But the supper we ate that evening takes
close second. Welcome on every face!--the sort of welcome that the most
lavish tips could not buy. And after the dishes were cleared away, they
brought out a phonograph, and we all sat round like one family, swapping
information and yarns even up, while the music went on. When we left
next morning at sunrise, it seemed that we were leaving home--and the
river reaches looked a bit dismal all that day.
Having once been a vagabond in a non-professional way, I have a theory
about the physiognomy of houses. Some have a forbidding,
sick-the-dog-on-you aspect about them, not at all due, I am sure, to
architectural design. Experience has taught me to be suspicious of such
houses. Some houses have the appearance of death--their windows strike
you as eyeless sockets, the doors look like mouths that cannot speak.
The great houses along Fifth Avenue seemed like that to me. I could walk
past them in the night and feel like a ghost. I have seen cottages that
I wanted to kneel to; and I'm sure this feeling wasn't due to the vine
growing over the porch or the roses nodding in the yard. Knock at the
door of such a house, and the chances are in favor of your being met by
a quiet, motherly woman--one who will instantly make you think of your
own mother. Some very well constructed houses look surly, and some
shabby ones look kind, somehow. If you have ever been a book agent or a
tramp, how you will revel in this seeming digression! God grant that no
man in need may ever look wistfully at your house or at mine, and pass
on with a shake of the head. It is a subtle compliment to have book
agents and tramps frequently at one's door.
Am I really digressing? My theme is a trip on a great river. Well,
kindness and nature are not so far apart, let us believe.
Now this ranch-house looked hospitable; there was no mistaking it.
Wherefore I deduce that the spirit of the inhabitants must pierce
through and emanate from the senseless walls like an effluvium. Who
knows but that every house has its telltale aura, plain to a vision of
sufficient spiritual keenness? Perhaps some one will some day write a
book _On the Physio-Psychological Aspect of Houses_: and there will be
an advance sale of at least one copy on that book.
At noon on the fourth day from the Pen and Key Ranch, we pulled up at
the Mondak landing two miles above the mouth of the Yellowstone. We were
thoroughly soaked, having dragged the boat the last two or three miles
through the shallows and intermittent deeps of an inside channel. The
outer channel was rolling viciously in that eternal thing, the head
wind. We had covered the first six hundred miles with a power boat
(called so, doubtless, because it required so much power to shove it
along!) in a little less than four weeks. During that time we had
received no mail, and I was making a break for the post-office, oozing
and feeling like an animated sponge, when a great wind-like voice roared
above me: "_Hey there!_"
I looked up to the hurricane deck of a steamer that lay at the bank
taking on freight. A large elderly man, dressed like a farmer, with an
exaggerated straw hat shading a face that gripped my attention at once,
was looking down at me. It was the face of a born commander; it struck
me that I should like to have it cast in bronze to look at whenever a
vacillating mood might seize me.
"_Come aboard!_" bawled the man under the ample hat. There was nothing
in the world just then that I wished for more than my mail; but somehow
I felt the will to obey--even the necessity of obeying.
"You came from Benton?" he asked, when I had clambered up the forward
companionway and stood dripping before the captain of the steamer
_Expansion_. At this closer range, the strength of the face was even
more impressive, with its eagle beak and its lines of firmness; but a
light of kindness was shed through it, and the eyes took on a gentle
expression.
"How did you find the water?"
"Very low, sir; we cordelled much of the way."
"I tried to get this boat to Benton," he said, "and got hung up on the
rocks above Lismus Ferry."
"And we drifted over them helter-skelter at midnight!"
He smiled, and we were friends. Thus I met Captain Grant Marsh, the
Grand Old Man of the Missouri River. He was freighting supplies up the
Yellowstone for the great Crane Creek irrigation dam, sixty miles above
the mouth. The _Expansion_ was to sail on the following day, and I was
invited to go along. Seeing that the Captain was short of help, I
insisted upon enlisting as a deck hand for the trip.
It was work. I think I should prefer hod-carrying as a profession, for
we had a heavy cargo, ranging from lumber and tiling to flour and beer;
and there are no docks on the Yellowstone. The banks were steep, the sun
was very hot, and the cargo had to be landed by man power. My companions
in toil swore bitterly about everything in general and steamboating in
particular.
"How much are you getting?" asked a young Dane of me, as we trudged up
the plank together.
"Nothing at all," I said.
He swore an oath of wonder, and stopped to look me over carefully for
the loose screw in my make-up.
"--nothing but the fun of it," I added.
He sniffed and looked bewildered.
"Did it ever occur to you," said I, "that a man will do for nothing what
he wouldn't do for money?"
I could see my conundrum playing peek-a-boo all about his stolid
features. After that the Dane treated me with an air of superiority--the
superiority of thirty dollars per month over nothing at all.
We stopped twice to coal, and worked far into the night. There are no
coal chutes on the Yellowstone. We carried and wheeled the stuff aboard
from a pile on the bank. During a brief interval of rest, the young
Dane announced to the others that I was working for nothing; whereat
questioning eyes were turned upon me in the dull lantern light. And I
said to myself: I can conceive of heaven only as an improbable condition
in which all men would be willing and able to work for nothing at all. I
had read in the Dane's face the meaning of a price. Heaving coal, I
built Utopias.
When the boat was under way, I sat in the pilot-house with the Captain,
watching the yellow flood and the yellow cliffs drift past like a
vision. And little by little, this old man who has followed the river
for over sixty years, pieced out the wonderful story of his life--a
story fit for Homer. That story may now be read in a book, so I need not
tell it here. But I came to think of him as the incarnation of the
river's mighty spirit; and I am proud that I served him as a deck hand.
As we steamed out of the Yellowstone into the clear waters of the
Missouri, the Captain pointed out to me the spot upon which Fort Union
stood. Upon landing, I went there and found two heaps of stone at the
opposite corners of a rectangle traced by a shallow ditch where of old
the walls stood. This was all that remained of the powerful
fort--virtually the capital of the American Fur Company's Upper Missouri
empire--where Mackenzie ruled--Mackenzie who was called King!
Long slough grass grew there, and blue waxen flowers struggled up amid
the rubble of what were once defiant bastions. I lay down in the
luxuriant grass, closed my eyes, and longed for a vision of heroic days.
I thought of the Prince who had been entertained there with his great
retinue; of the regality of the haughty Scotchman who ruled there; of
Alexander Harvey, who had killed his enemy on the very spot, doubtless,
where I lay: killed him as an outraged brave man kills--face to face
before the world. I thought of Bourbonais, the golden-haired Paris of
this fallen Ilium. I thought of the plague that raged there in '37, and
of Larpenteur and his friend, grim, jesting carters of the dead!
It all passed before me--the unwritten Iliad of a stronghold forgotten.
But the vision wouldn't come. The river wind moaned through the grasses.
I looked off a half mile to the modern town of Mondak, and wondered how
many in that town cared about this spot where so much had happened, and
where the grass grew so very tall now.
I gathered blue flowers and quoted, with a slight change, the lines of
Stevenson:
But ah, how deep the grass
Along the battlefield!