BILLINGS TO GLENDIVE
Getting round the power-dam did not prove a serious problem. The night
man at the power-house told me it would be possible to land on the right
side and let the boat down over a series of "steps" that had been built
at that end of the dam. This was probably true, but as landing on the
almost perpendicular cliff immediately above the drop-off looked a bit
precarious I decided in favour of being safe by portaging rather than
run the chance of being sorry through trying to line down. It was
against just such emergencies as this that I had provided my
feather-weight outfit.
A wooden skiff of the size of my steel one would have required at least
four men to lift it up the forty-five degree slope of the bank above the
intake of the power canal. It was not an easy task with my little
shallop, but I managed it alone without undue exertion. Five minutes
more sufficed to drag it a couple of hundred feet along the levee and
launch it at the head of the rapid below the dam. Two trips brought down
my outfit, and I was off into the river again.
Running at a slashing rate round the bend of the bluff, I kept on for a
couple of miles or more to where the Northern Pacific and a highway
bridge span the river a couple of miles from the centre of Billings.
Leaving the boat and my outfit in the care of a genial pumping-house
engineer, I phoned for a taxi and went up to the hotel behind closed
curtains. To return to the scene of my last night's triumph as a mere
river-rat and hack writer was a distinct anti-climax. As I had been
warned by wire that a hundred pages of urgently needed proofs from New
York would await me in Billings for correction, there was no
side-stepping the necessity. The risk would have to be run, but to
minimize it as far as was humanly possible I planned to keep to my room
as much as I could, and to disguise myself by dressing as a gentleman or
a drummer when I had to venture upon the streets. Then by keeping to the
more refined parts of towns it seemed to me that I ought to stand a
reasonably good chance of avoiding the poignancy of humiliation that
would inevitably follow recognition by any of those fine fellows who had
sat at my feet the night before. It was a well devised plan, and so came
pretty near to succeeding.
I tumbled out of my bath into bed, stayed there an hour, got up, dressed
in immaculate flannels and started in on the proofs. A reporter from the
_Gazette_ called up about noon to say he had been lying in ambush for
me ever since the Livingston papers had warned him of my departure.
Could he come over for a story? I couldn't very well refuse that, but
took the precaution of throwing my "Indian Police" uniform in the closet
before he arrived. Then I made a special point of telling him I always
wore flannels and duck on my river trips--sort of survival of my South
Sea yatching days. If he would only put that in, I reckoned, it would
effectually drag a red herring across any suspicions that might be
aroused by a reading of the story in the minds of my late subjects. He
forgot it as a matter of fact, but it wasn't that that did the harm. It
was just hard luck--_Joss_, as the sailors say.
The next day was the Fourth of July, a holiday, but a very obliging
express agent, who came down town and opened up his office to let me get
out a sleeping bag, made it unnecessary to hang on another night in
Billings. The _Gazette_ story brought no demonstrations--that is, of a
hostile nature. Calls from scouting secretaries searching for a fatted
calf to butcher for club holidays were the only ripples on the surface.
Still with my fingers crossed, I ordered a closed taxi for the run down
to my boat. It would have been a perfectly clean get-away had not _Joss_
decreed that I should leave my package at the railway station to be
picked up as I went by. Returning to the taxi from the check-room a man
was waiting for me outside of the door.
[Illustration:
(C) _L. A. Huffman_
HERD, POWDER RIVER VALLEY]
[Illustration:
(C) _L. A. Huffman_
SHEEP BY THE WATER, BIG POWDER RIVER]
"My name is Allstein," he began; but I had observed that before he
opened his hard-set jaw. Without waiting for him to go on I made one
wild, despairing bid to keep my honour white. I feel to this day that it
deserved to have succeeded.
"Came in on the brake-beams, going out on shank's mare," I chirruped
blithely, and forthwith (to the very evident perturbation of the
taxi-driver) started as if off for Miles City on foot. Some will say my
reasoning was quixotic, but this was the way of it at any rate: I cared
no whit if hardware-drummer Allstein believed I was a hobo, just as long
as he continued to believe I was an ex-sparring partner of Jack Dempsey.
And what he must be prevented from knowing at any cost was that, far
from being even the hammiest of ham-and-sparring partners, I was what
the _Gazette_ cub had characterized as a "daring novelist seeking
material for new book by running rapids of Yellowstone."
But the fat was already in the fire. Allstein halted my Miles City
Marathon with a gesture half weary, half contemptuous. "That taxi looks
about as much like you're hoboing as did them three dishes of
strawberries at the _Northern_ this morning," he growled, glowering. I
caved at once and meekly asked him to get in and come down to see my
little steel boat. Lightest outfit that ever went down river.... Boat
and all my stuff weighed less than I did myself....
I was in the taxi by that time. Allstein had continued to register
"Betrayed! Betrayed!" but had not moved to cut off my retreat. That was
something to be thankful for anyhow. Not knowing what else to say, I
remarked to the driver that it must be getting along toward boat-time.
And so away we went. Allstein's reproachful gaze bored into my back
until we swung out of eye-range into the Custer Trail. I know that I
shall be reminded of him every time I see a ruined maiden in the movies
or at Drury Lane to the end of my days.
Billings is a fine modern city, which makes me regret all the more that
most of my daylight impressions of it had to be gained by peeking under
a taxicab curtain. It is by long odds the largest town on the
Yellowstone; in fact, I saw no city comparable with it for size and
vigour until at Sioux City I came to the first of the packing-house
metropolises of the Missouri. Billings owed its first prosperity to
cattle and sheep and its fine strategic situation for distribution.
Pastoral industries cut less of a figure today, but the town has
continued to gain ground as the principal distributing centre for
western Montana. That, with agricultural and power development, has
brought mills and factories, and the town now ranks high among the
manufacturing centres of the North-west. I shall live in hopes of going
back some-day and seeing Billings properly--as a visiting Chamber of
Commerce booster or a Rotary excursionist, or something equally _sans
reproche_.
The point where the Northern Pacific Railway bridge crosses the
Yellowstone below Billings is of considerable interest historically. It
was here that Clark ferried Sergeant Pryor and his remaining pack
animals across the river, preliminary to the overland journey that was
to be attempted with the animals to the Mandan Villages. Here, also, is
the point that is popularly credited with being the high-water mark of
steamboat navigation on the Yellowstone. On June 6, 1875, Captain Grant
Marsh in the _Josephine_, conducting a rough survey of the river under
the direction of General J. W. Forsyth, reached a point which he
estimated to be forty-six miles above Pompey's Pillar, 250 miles above
Powder River and 483 miles above the mouth of the Yellowstone. Major
Joseph Mills Hanson, in his "Conquest of the Missouri," stirringly
describes the climax of this remarkable voyage.
After leaving Pompey's Pillar "the great river, though apparently
undiminished in volume, grew more and more swift, constantly breaking
into rapids through which it was necessary to warp and spar the boat,
while numberless small islands split the channel into chutes, no one of
which was large enough for easy navigation. At times it seemed that a
smooth stretch of water had been reached, ... but invariably just beyond
another rapid would be encountered.... Before nightfall a tremendous
rapid was encountered, and though, after a hard struggle, it was
successfully passed, so forbidding was its aspect and so savage the
resistance it offered, that it was appreciatively named 'Hell Roaring
Rapids.' At the head of it the boat lay up for the night, with a line
stretched to the bank ahead to help her forward in the morning. But when
dawn came, General Forsyth, seeing the nature of the river in front,
ordered out a reconnoitring party who marched up the bank for several
miles examining the channel. On their return they reported the whole
river ahead so broken up by islands and with so powerful a current that
it could not be navigated without constant resort to warping and
sparring.... General Forsyth and Captain Marsh held a consultation and
decided that no adequate reward for the labour involved could be gained
by going further. So, at two o'clock p. m. on June 7th, the boat was
turned about and started on her return.... Before leaving this highest
point attained, Captain Marsh blazed the trunk of a gigantic cottonwood
to which the _Josephine_ was tied, and carved thereon the name of the
boat and the date. It is exceedingly improbable that a steam vessel will
ever again come within sight of that spot or be entitled to place her
name beneath the _Josephine's_ on that ancient tree trunk, almost under
the shadow of the Rocky Mountains."
[Illustration: THE COUNTY BRIDGE OVER THE YELLOWSTONE]
The _Josephine's_ farthest west on the Yellowstone stands as the record
for steamers by many miles, but what wouldn't I have given to have found
that big cottonwood and tied up there myself! No one along the river
could tell me anything about it, and there is little doubt that, like so
many thousands of its less distinguished brethren, it has been swallowed
up by the spring floods. Neither above nor below the bridge for many
miles, however, could I locate a riffle sufficiently savage to fit
Captain Marsh's description of "Hell Roaring Rapids." It has occurred to
me as just possible that such a rapid was wiped out when the power dam
was built, the comparatively short distance the water is backed up at
that point suggesting that the original fall was very considerable.
Again, it is possible that to Captain Marsh, after his many years in the
comparatively smooth waters of the Missouri, such riffles as still go
slap-banging down along the bluffs opposite Billings would appear a lot
rougher than they would to one just down from the almost continuously
white and rock-torn rapids of the upper river.
At any event it stirred my imagination mightily to locate the
_Josephine's_ turning point even approximately. From now on I was going
to have a fellow pilot for Captain Clark. Captain Grant Marsh was
henceforth at my call at any point I needed him between Billings and St.
Louis. The stout frame of that splendid old river Viking had been tucked
under the sod down Bismarck-way for a number of years, but I knew his
spirit still took its wonted tricks at the wheel. Captain William Clark
and Captain Grant Marsh! Could you beat that pair if it came to standing
watch-and-watch down the Yellowstone and Missouri? And there were others
waiting just round the bend. At the Big Horn I could sign on Manual Lisa
if I wanted him; or John Colter, who discovered the Yellowstone Park
while flying from the Blackfeet. But Colter was not truthful, which
disqualified him for pilotage. I should have to ship him simply as a
congenial spirit--one of my own kind.
Returning to my boat, I found that the little daughters of the
pumping-station man had roofed it over like a Venetian gondola and moved
in with all their worldly goods. They confronted me with the clean-cut
alternatives of coming to live with them right there or taking them
with me down the river. Fortunately their parents intervened on my side.
With the aid of those two kindly and tactful diplomats--and a lot of
milk chocolate and dried apricots--I finally contrived an ejection. The
operation delayed me till after four o'clock, though, so there was no
hope of making Pompey's Pillar that night.
Though I knew that the fall of the river would be easing off very
rapidly from now on, there was little indication of it in the
twenty-five-mile stretch I ran before dark that evening. Bouncing back
and forth between broken lines of red-yellow bluffs, there were frequent
sharp riffles and even two or three corners where considerable water was
splashed in. For only the shortest of reaches was the stream
sufficiently quiet to allow me to take my eyes off it long enough to
enjoy the really entrancing diorama of the scenery. I was especially
sorry for this, for on my right was unfolding the verdant loveliness of
the Crow Reservation, the very heart of the hunting grounds which the
Indians had loved above all others for hundreds of years--the region
they had fought hardest to save from relinquishment to the relentless
white. Read what, according to Irving in the "Adventures of Captain
Bonneville," an Absaroka said about this Red Man's Garden of Eden a
hundred years ago:
"The Crow country is a good country. The Great Spirit has put it in
exactly the right place; while you are in it you fare well; whenever you
go out of it, whichever way you travel, you fare worse." After going on
to tell of the unspeakable climatic conditions and the scarcity of game
prevailing in the regions to the north, south, east and west, this
progenitor of the modern booster goes on: "The Crow country is in
exactly the right place. It has snowy mountains and sunny plains; all
kinds of climate and good things for every season. When summer heats
scorch the prairies, you can draw up under the mountains where the air
is sweet and cool, the grass fresh, and the bright streams come tumbling
out of the snowy-banks. There you can hunt the elk, the deer and the
antelope, when their skins are fit for dressing; there you will find
plenty of white bears and the mountain sheep.
"In the autumn, when your horses are fat and strong from the mountain
pastures, you can go down to the plains and hunt buffalo, or trap beaver
on the streams. And when winter comes, you can take shelter in the woody
bottoms along the rivers; there you will find buffalo meat for
yourselves and cottonwood bark for your horses; or you may winter in the
Wind River valley, where there is salt weed in abundance.
"The Crow country is exactly in the right place. Everything good is to
be found there. There is no country like the Crow country."
Like the scent of fern leaves wafted out of the dear, dead past, those
lines awakened in my heart memories of something that had long gone out
of my life.
"Something is, or something seems,
Which touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams ...
Of something seen, I know not where,
Such as no language may declare."
I muttered that in fragments, but the lines only adumbrated the longing
without revealing its hidden fount. Still groping mentally, I unwrapped
some forks and spoons done up in a page of the Los Angeles _Times_. Ah,
that gave me the cue! _Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce tourist
literature._ And to think a Crow Indian started that kind of a thing!
Running until the river bottoms were swamped in purple shadows, I landed
and made camp in a soft little nest of snowy sand left behind by a
high-water eddy. There was an abrupt yellow cliff rising straight out of
a woolly-white riffle on the right bank, and beyond a grove of
cottonwood to the left were the shadowy buildings of some kind of a
ranch. Even in the deepening twilight I could read something of the
record of its growth--groups of log cabins, groups of unpainted,
rough-sawed lumber and finally a huge red barn and a great square,
verandahed house that was all but a mansion. I was wondering if the
same pioneering frontiersman who had built the cabins had survived to
occupy the big green and white house, when the soft southerly wind
brought the scent of sweet clover and the strains of a phonograph.
"_Evening Star_," the _Jocelyn_ Lullaby, the _Baccarole_, wafted me
their "convoluted runes" one after the other; then a piano began to
strum and a girl, neither mean of voice nor temperament, sang Tosti's
"_Good-Bye_." It always had had a softly sentimentalizing effect on me,
that "_Lines of white on a sullen Sea_," sung (as it always is) the
night before the steamer reaches port. And here it was getting me in the
same old place--that mushy spot under the solar plexus that
non-anatomically trained poets confuse with the heart. I simply _had_ to
hike over and tell that impassioned songstress how perfectly her song
matched the scent of sweet clover. Cleaning up the last of the dried
apricot stew in my army mess tin, I pushed southward across the moonlit
bar. No luck. I was on an island.
[Illustration:
(C) _L. A. Huffman_
POMPEY'S PILLAR]
[Illustration:
(C) _L. A. Huffman_
THE YELLOWSTONE FROM THE TOP OF POMPEY'S PILLAR]
I tried out my new bed for the first time that night. It turned out to
be a combination of a canvas bag and inflatable rubber mattress, called
by its makers a "Sleeping Pocket." Here again it transpired I had played
in luck in the matter of a pig bought in a poke. I used that precious
little ten-pound packet of rubber and canvas all the way to New
Orleans without blankets. On wind-blown sand bars, mud-banks, coal
barges or the greasy steel decks of engine-rooms it was ever the
same--always dry, always soft, always warm. Comfortable sleeping
measures just about the whole difference between the success and failure
of many a trip. I shudder to think of the messy nights I must inevitably
have suffered had all those lurking thunder-storms that I weathered so
snugly caught me in blankets.
I overslept the next morning and so did not carry out my over-night
resolution of pulling across to the ranch and thanking the "Good-Bye"
girl. Or rather, I did start and then changed my mind. She was on the
upper verandah recuperating from a shampoo. Scarlet kimono and bobbed
hair! No, not with a river to escape by. Stifling my _au revoir_ impulse
I decided to leave well enough alone by taking that "Good-bye"
literally. Abandoning the boat to the will of the current I departed via
the lines of white under the sullen cliff.
At the end of a couple of hours' run in a slackening current I landed in
an eddy above Pompey's Pillar, quite the most outstanding landmark on
the Yellowstone. Clark describes how he halted "to examine a very
remarkable rock situated in an extensive bottom on the right, about two
hundred and fifty paces from the shore. It is nearly four hundred paces
in circumference, two hundred feet high and accessible from the
north-east, the other sides being a perpendicular cliff of a
light-coloured, gritty rock.... The Indians have carved the figures of
animals and other objects on the sides of the rock, and on the top are
raised two piles of stones." Captain Clark, after writing down a careful
description of the country on all sides, marked his name and the date on
the rock and went on his way.
This was the first point at which I had opportunity to make accurate
comparison of the respective stages of water encountered by Clark and
myself. I found the base of the rock less than a hundred paces from the
river, which indicated--as the channel seems to have been well fixed
here--that I was enjoying three or four feet more water than did my
illustrious predecessor. This would seem to be just about accounted for
by the fact that I was voyaging three weeks earlier in the season than
he--that much nearer the high water of early June, at which time it was
apparent that the river backed up right to the cliff.
Add the telegraph poles of a distant railway line and a picnic booth
littered with papers and watermelon rinds, and Clark's description of
what was unrolled to him from the top of Pompey's Pillar would stand
today. I located the place where his name had been carved by a grating
which the Northern Pacific engineers had erected to protect it from
vandals, but the most careful scrutiny failed to reveal any trace of the
letters themselves. The practical obliteration of what is probably the
only authentic physical mark of their passing that either Lewis or Clark
left between St. Louis and the mouth of the Columbia is hardly
compensated for by the presence of several hundred somewhat later and
rather less important signatures at this point. Several of these latter
bore the date of the previous day--July 4th, 1921,--and so represented a
bold bid for fame on the part of some of the watermelon guzzling
picnickers. One of these had even pried a bar aside in a not entirely
successful endeavour to emblazon his name in the protected area. It was
all rather annoying. These new names are piling up very fast with the
coming of the flivver, but it is going to take a lot of them to make up
for the one they have blotted out.
Clark's apparent mental processes in the christening of Pompey's Pillar
are rather amusing. Neither a profound historian nor a classicist, the
Captain still had a sort of vague idea in his head that there was some
kind of a rocky erection out Nile-way named after Pompey. That being so,
what could be more fitting--since the names of all of the members of
his own party had been used a half dozen times over first and last--than
that this rocky eminence by the Yellowstone should be called after
Pompey. That he was not clear in his mind as to the character of the
historic original at Alexandria is evidenced by the fact that he first
called the Yellowstone prototype "Pompy's Tower." Whether he or his
publisher was responsible for the subsequent change to "Pillar" is not
clear. As a matter of fact the latter is only a detached fragment of
"the high romantic clifts" that Clark observed jutting over the water on
the opposite side of the river. It bears about as much actual
resemblance to the real Pompey's Pillar as the Enchanted Mesa does to
Cleopatra's Needle.
The river was broader and slower below Pompey's Pillar, with the rapids
shorter and farther between. At five I landed at a very pretty alfalfa
ranch on the left bank to inquire about passing what appeared to be a
submerged dam some hundreds of yards ahead. Only two women were at
home--a beaming old lady and her very stout daughter. They insisted on
my staying to tea, which required no great persuasiveness on their part
after Joanna remarked that she was out of breath from turning the
ice-cream freezer. The girl was astonishingly red, round and sweet--a
veritable bifurcated apple. She seemed to have a very good knowledge of
the river, and assured me I should have no trouble at the diversion dam
provided I kept well toward the left bank. Indeed, if I thought it would
help at all, she would ride down with me and show the way. There was a
path back home from their lower pasture.
[Illustration: CUSTER'S PILLAR, BAD LANDS]
[Illustration: THE GRATING WHICH PROTECTS THE INITIALS CARVED BY CAPTAIN
CLARK ON THE SIDE OF POMPEY'S PILLAR]
Considering how shy I had found most of the rancher folk to be of the
river, this game offer pretty nearly took my breath away. I would have
been all for accepting it save for one very good and sufficient
reason--it was physically impossible. I had noticed that Joanna's
personal chair was of home construction, and considerable amplitude of
beam--certainly six inches more than the stern-sheets of my slender
shallop. She could wedge in sidewise, of course, but that still left the
matter of a life-preserver. I didn't feel it was quite the thing to take
an only child into a rapid without some provision for floating her out
in case of an upset. And my Gieve wouldn't do. The inflated "doughnut"
that slipped so easily up and down my own brawny brisket would just
about have served Joanna as an armlet. So I declined with what grace I
could, and we all parted on the best of terms--I with a fragrant flitch
of their home-cured bacon, they with three double handfuls of my
California home-dried apricots.
I had no trouble at the dam, which was only on the right side, where it
had been erected to divert the water into the head of an irrigation
ditch. Running until nearly dark, I landed and made camp on a
breeze-swept bar away from the mosquitos.
I passed the mouth of the Big Horn in mid-forenoon of the following day.
I should have liked to land but was fearful I would get out of hand and
take too much time once I turned myself loose at the one point above all
others where the most Yellowstone history has been made. The Big Horn
was known in a vague way through the Indian accounts of it even before
the time of Lewis and Clark, but the first permanent establishment upon
it was the trading post which Manuel Lisa erected there in 1807. It was
to this point that John Colter fled after being chased by the Blackfeet
across Yellowstone Park, and it was his point of departure in a canoe on
a voyage to St. Louis which he claimed to have made in thirty days.
Colter's account of how he ran down several black-tail deer and bighorn
before relaxing the tremendous burst of speed he had put on to distance
the Redskins never bothered me much, but that average of close to a
hundred miles a day--most of it down the languid Missouri--somehow won't
stick. I found I couldn't keep it up even after I put on my engine.
Colter undoubtedly exaggerated about his time on this trip, and that
being true, doubtless, also, about trampling underfoot the deer and
bighorn. Colter was a liar but not an artistic one. Now if old Jim
Bridger had been telling that canoe-voyage yarn he would doubtless have
hung a bag of alum over the bow and shrunk the distance as a starter,
and then probably used a trained catfish for auxiliary power. _That's_
the kind of liar that makes the world safe for democracy.
Post after post was founded at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Big
Horn until, in the 'seventies, it became the centre of operations for
the Army in the greatest of our Indian wars. In comparison with the
broad, rolling tide of the Yellowstone the turbid current of the
tributary appeared shallow and of no great volume--the last place in the
world for a river steamer to venture with any hope of going its own
length without grounding. And yet, I reflected, the Big Horn could have
been scarcely higher on that sultry Sunday of June 25th, 1876, when
Captain Grant Marsh, acting on orders from General Terry, sparred and
warped and crabbed the wonderful old _Far West_ up twenty-five miles of
those rock-choked, foam-white rapids. The skies to the south were black
with rolling smoke clouds, but with nothing to indicate that under their
shadows five companies of the 7th Cavalry were paying with their lives
for the precipitancy of their brave but hot-headed commander. The next
day the _Far West_ reached, passed and returned to the mouth of the
Little Big Horn, and it was there that a half-crazed Crow scout, all but
speechless with terror, brought on the first lap of its way to the outer
world the story of the Custer Massacre.
On the morning of June 30th, with Major Reno's wounded aboard, the _Far
West_ cast off for the start of her epic run to Fort Lincoln. Major
Joseph Hanson records that that Captain Marsh all but collapsed in the
pilot-house as the terrible responsibility of that fifty-three-mile run
down the rock-paved channel of the Big Horn suddenly assailed him on
stepping to the wheel. General Terry had just said to him: "Captain, you
have on board the most precious cargo a boat ever carried. Every soldier
here who is suffering with wounds is the victim of a terrible blunder; a
sad and terrible blunder." Crabbing up stream with supplies was one
thing, floundering down with a shattered human cargo of that kind, quite
another. Captain Marsh declared the moment the most sickening of his
life. Then he pulled himself together and drove her through. I tried to
imagine the relief her skipper must have felt as he rounded that last
bend above where I now saw a railway bridge and headed the _Far West_
into the deep, clear channel of the Yellowstone, but couldn't come near
to compassing it. A man has to have carried a load of that kind to know
what it means to put it down. The _Far West_ broke all upper river
records for speed in her run to Fort Lincoln, below Bismarck, the
nearest hospital. Captain Marsh's splendid achievement in saving Reno's
wounded by his masterly navigation is the one bright bit of silver
lining on the sodden black cloud of the Massacre of the Little Big Horn.
At the mouth of the Rosebud I passed another important rendezvous of the
Sioux campaign. From here, after taking his final orders from General
Terry, Custer had departed on the march that was to finish upon the
Little Big Horn. Major Hanson relates an incident that occurred here an
hour or two after the ill-fated command had disappeared up the valley,
and which was particularly interesting to me at the moment as it
involved the upset of a skiff in a riffle I was about to run. All of the
letters written by Custer's men since leaving Fort Lincoln were put in a
bag and started by boat for Fort Buford. "Sergeant Fox and two privates
of the escort were detailed to carry the precious cargo down," wrote
Major Hanson. "Amid a chorus of hearty cheers from the people on the
steamer, they started out. But they were totally unfamiliar with the
handling of a small boat in the swirling current of the Yellowstone.
Before they had gone fifty feet their skiff overturned. There, in full
view of all their comrades, who could not reach them in time to save,
all three of the unfortunate fellows sank from sight, while the mail
sack went to the bottom of the river."
The soldiers were drowned, but persistent dragging of the river under
the direction of Captain Marsh finally brought up the mail sack, thus
saving for their relatives and friends the last letters of the men who
were to fall before the Sioux a few days later. These included Custer's
note to his wife as well as young Boston Custer's letter to his mother.
Sending three inexperienced soldiers to boat down the Yellowstone with
so humanly precious a freight in their care cannot but strike one as
about on all fours with other blunders that led up to the tragic climax
of that disastrous campaign.
I found a shallow bar clawed with sprawling channels but no riffles to
speak of below the Rosebud. There could hardly have been bad water there
at any time.
Landing at a grassy point to make camp about seven-thirty I found the
mosquitos so thick that I beat a hasty retreat to the boat and pushed
off again in search of a gravel bar in midstream. The sight of new and
comfortable ranch buildings lured me to land a half mile below, however,
where an invitation to spend the night in the screened bunk-house was
promptly forthcoming. The ranch turned out to be a part of an extensive
irrigation enterprise, promoted and managed by a chap named Cummings
from Minneapolis, who chanced to be on the place at the time. Except for
the general farming depression, prospects were good, he said--better
than in the dry farming sections, where crops, already very short, were
being still further shortened by grasshoppers. He was rather more
optimistic than the run of Montanan pastoralists and agriculturalists I
had met, all of whom had been having terribly hard sledding.
A leisurely three-hour's run in the morning brought me to Fort Keogh and
Miles City, respectively above and below the Tongue. The red-brown
current of the latter tinged the Yellowstone for a mile below their
confluence. Clark camped at the mouth of the Tongue, and his painstaking
description of the second in size of the Yellowstone's tributaries might
have been written today.
"It has a very wide bed.... The water is of a light-brown colour and
nearly milk-warm; it is shallow and its rapid current throws out great
quantities of mud and some coarse gravel.... The warmth of the water
would seem to indicate that the country through which it passes is open
and without shade."
Captain Clark was a splendid geographer, even if he did run amuck a bit
with his historical nomenclature.
The annual Round-up had come to an end the previous day, so that I found
Miles City, if not quite a banquet hall deserted, at least in something
of a morning-after frame of mind. It rather warmed one's heart to see so
many people rubbing throbbing temples, and I seemed to see in it some
explanation of what a cowboy meant when he told me that the only critter
at the Round-up that he couldn't ride was the "White Mule."
All the cities of the Yellowstone have character and individuality, and
none more than Miles City. Not so beautifully located as Livingston, not
quite so metropolitan as Billings, there is something in the fine, broad
streets of Miles that suggests the frank, bluff, open-heartedness of a
cowboy straight from the ranges. The town looks you squarely between the
eyes and says "Put it there"! in a deep, mellow voice that goes straight
to the heart. That voice and that look embody the quintessence of
reassurance. You know in an instant that you are face to face with the
kind of a town that couldn't play a mean trick on a man if it
tried--that there isn't going to be any need of slinking around with one
hand on your wallet and the other on your hip-pocket. Even though you
may have been warned that various sorts of rough stuff have been pulled
in Miles, you are certain that outsiders will have been found at the
bottom of it if all the facts were known. (My over-night stop in Miles
was hardly sufficient to prove out the truth of all this. Just the same,
that's the way I felt about the town, and that's the way I still feel.)
[Illustration: _By Haynes, St. Paul_
STOCKYARDS, MILES CITY]
[Illustration: (C) _L. A. Huffman_
"FREIGHTIN'"]
Miles City owed its early importance to sheep and cattle, and still has
the distinction of being the principle horse market of America.
Agriculture has played an increasingly important part in its later
growth. The splendid valleys of the Powder and the Tongue are both
tributary territory, while the irrigation of the rich lands of the
Yellowstone is bringing year by year an augmented flow of wealth to the
city's gates. (Darn it! I wonder if I have cribbed that last sentence
from Chamber of Commerce literature. In any event, it is quite true in
this case.)
Besides its extensive cattle and sheep ranges, the Miles City region
distinguishes itself by having the greatest range of temperature of any
place in the world. The Government Weather Bureau is authority for the
fact that a winter temperature of sixty-five degrees below Zero has been
balanced by a summer one of one hundred and fifteen above. Neither
California nor the Riviera can give the tourist anything like that
variety to choose from. From Esquimo to Hottentot, what race couldn't
establish itself right there by the Yellowstone under almost normal home
weather conditions? Of course, if they were going to establish
themselves for long some kind of a meteorological Joshua would be needed
to command the thermometer to stand still; also some one to see that the
command was carried out. And there would lie the way to complications
and friction, for one can hardly imagine a Hottentot Joshua quite in
agreement with an Esquimo Joshua as to just what point the thermometer
should be commanded to stand at. That might be solved by the
establishment of thermostat villages, but then would arise the endless
train of legal complications inevitably following in the wake of
infringing on the riparian rights (whatever they are) of the irrigation
people. No, probably Miles had best be left to its present inhabitants,
who appear to have waxed both amiable and prosperous by browsing on
their temperature ranges just as Nature provided them.
I made special inquiry about Buffalo Rapids while in Miles City. This
was for two reasons. Reading that Clark had been compelled to let down
his boats over an abrupt fall of several feet at that point, I thought
it just as well not to go blundering into it myself without further
information. I also heard that there was a project for developing
extensive power at this series of riffles. I spent a pleasant and
profitable afternoon with Mr. Doane, the engineer of the project. He
said that I ought to have little trouble in running right through all of
the rapids, but suggested it might be well to land at a farmhouse near
the head and see for myself. He also gave me a few facts about the power
project. I would have to refer to my notes (which I never do if at all
avoidable) to recall the hydro-electric data; but I need no such
adventitious aid to remember Mrs. Doane's freshly distilled "Essence of
Dandelion." Literal liquid golden sunshine it was, with a bouquet
recalling to me that of an ambrosial decoction made by the monks of
Mount Athos from buds of asphodel, and which a masked hermit lets down
to you on a string from the tower in which he is supposed to be walled
up with the makings and his retorts. Buffalo Rapids never troubled me
again.
I pushed off about eleven in the forenoon of July 8th, and an hour's run
in moderately fast water took me within sight and sound of the white
caps of the first pitch of Buffalo Rapids. Clark had originally named
these riffles "Buffaloe Shoal, from the circumstance of one of these
animals being found in them." He describes it further as a "succession
of bad shoals, interspersed with hard, brown, gritty rock, extending
for six miles; the last shoal stretches nearly across the river, and has
a descent of about three feet. At this place we were obliged to let the
canoes down by hand, for fear of their splitting on a concealed rock;
though when the shoals are known a large canoe could pass with safety
through the worst of them. This is the most difficult part of the whole
Yellowstone River...."
Captain Clark would hardly have registered the latter verdict had he run
the Yellowstone all the way from the Big Bend, where he first came upon
it. Indeed, it seems to me that he must have run rapids above Billings
that were quite as menacing as the one which now put his party to so
much trouble to avoid. I would not be too dogmatic on that point,
however. A hundred years of time bring great changes even to bedrock
riffles, and these latter themselves also vary greatly according to the
stage of water. I was assured that from August on there is still a
nearly abrupt drop of several feet at one point in Buffalo Rapids.
Although I was sure I could see my way past the first riffle without
serious difficulty, I still thought it best to learn what I could at the
farmhouse Doane had indicated. This proved to be a comfortable old log
structure at a point where the right bank was being rapidly torn down by
the swift current. A very deaf chap at the first door I approached
strongly urged that I line all the way down, saying that there was at
least one point where my boat could not possibly live. As that wasn't
quite what I wanted to hear, I went round the house and tried another
door. Here, in a big, fragrant kitchen, I found a family at lunch, but
with one nice, juicy helping of cream-splashed tapioca pudding still
unconsumed. I helped them out with that, and in return asked for
information about the rapids. None of them was river-broke, but they
said they had seen a rowboat run down the left side of the first riffle
the previous summer and that they afterwards heard it was not upset
until it got to Wolf Rapids, down Terry-way. That was more encouraging,
at least as far as Buffalo Rapids were concerned, and I decided to push
off and let Nature take its course. All of them, including the careful
deaf brother, came down to speed me on. Rather anxious for a bit more
weight aft to bring the head higher, I asked if any of them cared to run
through with me to the railway bridge below the bend. All of them shook
their heads save a flower-like slip of a girl of fourteen or
thereabouts. She would have been game, I think--had the proper
encouragement from her mother been forthcoming. What a handicap a
solicitous mother is to a flower-like child! This mother was rather an
old dear, too. All I really held against her at the last was on the
score of letting her emergency reserve of tapioca and cream sink so low.
The way past the worst of the first riffle looked so clear on the right
that I did not trouble to pull across to the other side. I ran through
in easy, undulant water, without being forced uncomfortably close to
some patches of rather savage looking white where the teeth of the
bedrock were flecked with tossing foam. Rounding a wide bend, I found
myself drifting down onto the main run of riffles, the passing of one of
which caused Clark's party some trouble. These filled the channel much
more completely than did those above, and it hardly looked possible to
avoid bad water all of the way through. Even so, there was nothing that
looked wicked enough to be worth landing to avoid.
Pulling hard to the right, I gave good berth to a line of badly messed
up combers with not enough foam on them to cover all of the black-rock
ledge beneath. Then, feeling more or less on easy street, I let the
skiff slowly draw in toward the middle of a long, straight line of
smoothly-running rollers that extended to and under the long railway
bridge. I could have kept clear of the worst of this water by hard work,
but with the beautifully rounded waves signalling "All clear"! as far as
snags and really hostile rocks were concerned it seemed too bad to miss
the fun. Wallowing somewhat wildly now and then and shipping a good bit
of water in her dives, my little tin shallop went through like a duck. I
knew I was getting down toward the end of that kind of thrills and it
was well to make hay while the sun shone.
Before I was out of the rapid a long overland rolled out upon and over
the bridge below. The engine gave me a friendly toot and waving hands
down the winding line of coaches gave the train the look of a giant
centipede trying to pirouette with all of its port-side legs. Warned by
what had happened to me under similar circumstances in the riffle under
Rapids Station, I kept my eye right on the ball to the end of the swing.
A few days later, in the hotel at Glendive, a notions drummer told me he
had been on the observation platform on the occasion in question, adding
jocularly that every one there had been wishing I would pull a spill for
them. "Cose why?" I asked him just a bit bluntly; "those rapids have
been known to drown a buffalo."
Perhaps I should not have been quite so abrupt, for that was what
cramped the delightfully drummeresque ingenuousness with which he had
begun. Muttering something about "breaking the monotony of a run through
the Bad Lands," the good chap backed off and out of my life. I was
sorry for that, sorry to have embarrassed him, and especially sorry I
didn't have the _savoir faire_ to make it easy for him to finish as
frankly as he opened up. I didn't blame him and his friends for wishing
for that spill. I know perfectly well I would have hoped for it myself
had our positions been reversed. Almost any good red-blooded human would
get a kick out of watching, from a nice, dry car platform, another good
red-blooded human bumping-the-bumps down a rocky riffle. But I would
never have been honest enough to confess my hopes--to the man who might
have figured in the spill, that is. That was where this chap with the
notions line would always have me one down. And what a shame it was I
couldn't hold him long enough to learn how he made himself that way.
"Buffaloe Shoal" was the first of what one might call Clark's "Menagerie
Series" of rapids. The next, twenty miles below, was named Bear Rapid,
because they saw a bear standing there. The third, two miles below the
mouth of the Powder, was christened Wolf Rapid, "from seeing a wolf
there." Clark describes Bear Rapids as "a shoal, caused by a number of
rocks strewed over the river; but though the waves are high, there is a
very good channel to the left, which renders the passage secure." Wolf
is dismissed as "a rapid of no great danger." A hundred spring floods
have doubtless had the effect of worsening Wolf--a bedrock
rapid--somewhat, and of scouring out the worst of the boulders in Bear.
I found the latter only an inconsiderable riffle, but the Wolf still
showed some mighty vicious fangs. They were easy enough to avoid in a
light skiff, but the old steamboat skippers always reckoned there was
more potential trouble lying in ambush in the cracks of these shallowly
submerged reefs of black rock than at any other place on the navigated
Yellowstone or Missouri.
The Powder is the last of the great southerly tributaries of the
Yellowstone. Sprawling over a shifting estuary in several runlets, it
looked much as it must have appeared to Clark when he wrote: "The water
is very muddy, and like its banks of a dark brown colour. Its current
throws out great quantities of red stones; which circumstances, with the
appearance of the distant hills, induced Captain Clark to call it the
Redstone, which he afterward found to be the meaning of its Indian name,
_Wahasah_." At his camp here Clark found the buffalo prowling so close
during the night that "they excited much alarm, lest in crossing the
river they should tread on the boats and split them to pieces."
Below the Powder the river flows for some distance through an extensive
belt of Bad Lands, a burnt, barren, savage-looking country with little
vegetation, few streams, and miles of fantastic castles, kiosks and
minarets of black and red rock. It is desolate in the extreme even when
viewed from the cool current of the river, but surely in no wise so
sinister and forbidding as those terrible stretches of Bad Lands between
the Yellowstone and Little Missouri which grim old General Sully, after
pursuing the Sioux over their scorched rocks for a season, so aptly
described as "Hell-With-the-Lights-Out."
Finding Terry was out of sight behind the hills, I landed about eight
o'clock to make camp on a gravel bar. A grizzled old codger, across
whose fish-lines I came crabbing in, seemed more pleased than put out
over the diversion. He could fish twenty-four hours a day, he explained,
but a man willing to be talked to wasn't the sort of a bird that came
along to that neck of the river every day. So he went up to his cabin,
brought down some eggs and milk, and we pooled grub and suppered
together there under the cottonwoods by the river. He had hunted,
trapped, prospected and searched for agates for fifty years, and it was
well into the night before he had told me all about it. A confession of
my old love for "Calamity Jane" broke down his reserve at the outset. He
had seen a lot of the dear old girl at the very zenith of her career. He
told a delicious story of how "Calamity," her paprika temperament
ruffled by a dude's red necktie, had tried to make that unfortunate
_eat_ the offending rag at the point of a pistol. The advice with which
she had endeavoured to sauce the untoothsome morsel was rather the best
part of the yarn, but it was hardly sufficiently "drawing-room" to find
place in these chaste chronicles.
There was a strong up-river breeze blowing when I got under way at six
the next morning. When this came dead ahead it had no effect other than
slowing down my progress greatly, but when the direction of the channel
brought it more or less abeam I had great difficulty in keeping from
being blown under the caving banks. This was, as I remember it, my first
experience of what later became perhaps the most annoyingly persistent
difficulty attending my progress down both the Missouri and Mississippi.
After getting in trouble two or three times and having to stop to bail
out and recover my wind, I gave up the fight about noon and landed at a
highly picturesque old ranch twenty-five miles above Glendive. The
clanging of a dinner gong was not the least pleasant sound that assailed
my ears as I climbed the bank.
Belonging to Charley Krug of Glendive, the place was one of the oldest
and most historic of Montana cattle ranches. Built in the Indian days,
and in an extremely windy section of country, the buildings appeared to
be something of a compromise between forts and cyclone cellars. Nothing
short of a "Big Bertha" could have made much impression upon the
enormous cottonwood logs--and the Sioux, I believe, had nothing heavier
than Springfields.
The professional personnel of the outfit was wrapped in gloom over the
advent of a devastating light of grasshoppers that was rapidly cleaning
up the ranges down to the gravel. This sodden shroud, however, did not
blanket the cook--an exception of importance from my standpoint. This
individual was a part-time wrestler and prize-fighter, abandoning the
squared-circle for the pots and pans only in the off seasons. He
introduced himself to me as "Happy" Coogan, and then proceeded to show
why he was so called. Backing me up behind a food barrage, he sang a
song, danced a jig, illustrated Jack Dempsey's left hook and Gotch's
"toe-hold" on a half-breed cow-puncher, and then challenged all-comers
at a "catch-as-catch-can" rough-and-tumble with nothing barred but
gouging and biting. Now who could worry about grasshoppers with a man
like that around?
"Happy" recited excerpts from his ring career all afternoon while I ate
apple pie with cream poured over it and waited for the wind to cease. It
was falling lighter by five, but my host would not hear of my leaving
before supper. Impromptu cabaret work lengthened that banquet out to
eight o'clock, and it was early twilight before I finally broke away and
went down to push off. "Happy" followed me down, his arms filled with
eggs, milk, jams, pies and various other comestibles. "Don't like to let
a man go off hungry," he explained. "Never know when I may be needing a
hand-out myself."
Bless your generous heart, "Happy"; I only hope I may be cruising in
your vicinity if you ever need that hand-out. That bucket of California
home-dried apricots I left you didn't go toward balancing our grub
account.
With no very swift water ahead and the prospect of a fairly clear night,
I had hopes for a while of drifting right on through to Glendive. These
hopes--along with me and my outfit--were dampened by a shower shortly
after I started, and completely dashed by a steady drizzle that set in
about nine. Dragging up the skiff on the first bar on which it grounded
in the now pitchy darkness, I inflated my sleeping-pocket, crawled into
it and went to sleep. Awakening at dawn to find a cloudless sky, I
crawled out, pushed off, and was in Glendive before six o'clock. Landing
half a mile above town, I climbed up to a shack which "Happy" Coogan had
told me was owned by a friend of his who had worked in the local
pool-room. It was no sort of hour to awaken a tired business man of a
Sunday morning, but "Happy's" name proved _open sesame_. It took some
rearranging to get my stuff into that ten-by-twelve shack with a man,
his wife and their seven children. Somehow we managed it, however;
moreover, the whole nine of them pledged themselves to stand
watch-and-watch over the skiff until I showed up again, no matter how
long that might be. The true river spirit had awakened even in these
dwellers on the fringes of Glendive's municipal dump. Bath, breakfast,
snooze and another seance with inevitable proofs was the order of the
day.