GLENDIVE TO THE MISSOURI
Glendive, located on the Yellowstone at a point where the Northern
Pacific leaves the river to cut across the Bad Lands straight for the
plains of North Dakota, owes more to the railroad than perhaps any other
town of the valley. Although Glendive Creek was a frequent halt in the
steamboat days of the Indian campaigns, there was never much of a
settlement there until railway construction commenced in the late
'seventies. The first train pulled into Glendive almost forty years to
a day previous to my arrival by boat. I found a fine, clean, prosperous
little city of 6000 where my puffing predecessor had drawn up to little
more than a typical frontier construction camp. Range stock helped the
town along in its earlier days, but the railway shops probably did more.
Finally the completion of the dam at Intake and the distribution of
water to the most extensive irrigable area in the Yellowstone Valley
provided a tributary agricultural territory of great wealth.
There was one thing I was especially interested in seeing in
Glendive--a school musical system that is probably without a near rival
in any town in America five times as large. I was assured that, of a
school enrolment of about a thousand, nearly two hundred pupils played
some kind of a musical instrument. There was an orchestra of sixty
pieces, and a boy's military band of sixty-five. Each was divided into
junior and senior grades, and a member was pushed ahead or dropped back
according to talent and effort. At no time did a pupil have a place
cinched; nothing but steady conscientious effort, regular attendance at
rehearsals, and proper general deportment won promotion, or prevented
demotion. Perhaps the finest thing about the whole system, was the fact
that it was undertaken entirely apart from the regular curriculum, no
school credits whatever being given for the work. I was told the credit
for this fine achievement belonged to a principal of one of the grade
schools, a Miss Lucille Hennigar, who had put herself behind it purely
out of love of music and children.
I did not have the honour of meeting Miss Hennigar, but I did make the
acquaintance of some of her proteges. First and last, about two score of
them must have chanced along in the hour I was tinkering with my boat
late Sunday afternoon. They were regular fellows all right (every other
one wanted to come down in the morning and sign on with me), but not a
hoodlum in the lot. Not a mother's darling of them tried to kick a hole
in my little tin shallop. As none of them exhibited any symptoms of
infantile paralysis, I decided it must be music--quieting the mean foot
as well as soothing the savage breast.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE FAMOUS SCHOOL BANDS OF GLENDIVE]
Warned by every authority from Captain Clark to an agate-hunter I had
passed at the mouth of the Powder that I was now approaching the
"Mosquito Coast" of the Yellowstone, I made special point of preparing
to go into battle by getting the best kind of a sleep I could in
Glendive. This made it particularly gratifying to find that this good
little city had just about the cleanest, most comfortable and best run
hotel in the valley. I should have paid it that tribute even had not its
genial manager, in company with the Secretary of the Chamber of
Commerce, driven down to see me off--bringing an especially appealing
little cold lunch.
It was late in the forenoon before I got away. Just as I was about to
push off a telegram was brought down to me from Mr. A. M. Cleland,
Passenger Traffic Manager of the Northern Pacific, saying that he had
heard of my trip and was wiring all the company's agents along the river
to be on the watch to lend me a hand, and to consider any of the N. P.'s
shops at my service for repairs. Even though it arrived at the very
moment I was turning away from the main line of the Northern Pacific,
which I had paralleled all the way from Livingston, I was nevertheless
just as appreciative of the spirit that prompted the courteous and
kindly message.
Captain Clark had made camp just above Glendive,[1] "where they saw the
largest white bear that any of the party had ever before seen, devouring
a dead buffalo on a sand bar. They fired two balls into him; he then
swam to the mainland and walked along the shore. Captain Clark pursued
him and lodged two more balls in his body; but though he bled profusely
he made his escape, as night prevented them from following him."
As the country below Glendive is probably both the richest and most
intensively cultivated in the whole Yellowstone Valley, I was especially
struck by the contrast presented by verdant irrigated fields of alfalfa
and clover to the howling wilderness Clark described. Nowhere else in
all of his journey back and forth across the continent had he seen such
a variety and such numbers of animals. It must have been somewhere below
the present site of the great Government dam at Intake that the buffalo
began to appear in vast numbers. As their boat floated down "a herd
happened to be on their way across the river. Such was the multitude of
these animals that, though the river, including an island over which
they passed, was a mile wide, the herd stretched, as thickly as they
could swim, from one side to the other, and the party was obliged to
stop for an hour." Forty-five miles below, two other herds as numerous
as the first blocked their way again.
[1] In reading Clark's notes in the original it should be born in mind
that they were written almost entirely in the third person. His
spellings were often most originally phonetic, but not always conforming
to one system. I have found three distinct spellings of mosquito in a
single paragraph, and buffalo was often rendered "buffaloe" and
"buffalow."
L. R. F.
[Illustration: (C) _J. E. Haynes, St. Paul_
BUFFALO STAMPEDE]
The following day they found the "buffalo and elk, as well as the
pursuers of both, the wolves, in great numbers." Moreover, "the bears,
which gave so much trouble on the head of the Missouri, are equally
fierce in this quarter. This morning one of them, which was on a
sand-bar as the boat passed, raised himself on his hind legs; and after
looking at the party, plunged in and swam toward them. He was received
with three balls in the body; he then turned around and made for the
shore. Toward evening another entered the water to swim across. Captain
Clark ordered the boat toward the shore, and just as the bear landed,
shot the animal in the head. It proved to be the largest female they had
ever seen, so old that its tusks were worn quite smooth. The boats
escaped with difficulty between two herds of buffalo that were crossing
the river." On this same day great numbers of bull elk were reported,
and also, "on some rugged hills to the southeast," numerous bighorn.
In all the records of western exploration and travel I can recall
nothing that suggested such an astonishing plenitude of many kinds of
large animals in one region. It would not have been so hard to conjure
up the picture along some of the wilder reaches of the upper river, but
here--with those pretty little forty and fifty-acre farms, all under
ditch and cultivated to their last foot, stretching away mile after mile
on my left--it was asking almost too much of the imagination to perform
such acrobatics.
In a steady but ever slackening current it took me about four hours to
pull the thirty miles to the Intake dam. The town was on the left but
the abrupt bluff at that point indicated the right as the easier
portage. The smooth green current of the water over the end of the
concrete barrier tempted me for a moment to avoid portaging by letting
down the empty boat on a line. Sober second thought counselled
caution--that water at the end of a twelve-foot drop had too much of a
kick in reserve to make it safe to trifle with. Better safe than
submerged is a serviceable variation of the old saw for river use.
There was a considerable stretch of rip-raping and other rocky
barriers--laid to protect the end of the dam at flood time--to get the
boat over, but a young rancher, just driving up to the ferry, kindly
volunteered to come up and give me a hand. Carrying the trim little
craft bodily for a couple of hundred feet, we put it into his wagon and
drove down a hundred yards to the ferry-landing where it was easier
launching than near the dam. He was all against being paid for his
trouble, but finally suggested twenty-five cents as his idea of what was
fair. He looked actually distressed when, with a wristy movie actor's
gesture of finality, I gave him the whole of a dollar bill. What
wouldn't a farmer on a country highway have charged for half that much
labour pulling a Ford out of a mud-hole?
But it appears that even non-river dwelling folk are not mercenary in
this neck of Montana. A cowboy-like girl who had just ridden up on a
prancing pinto frowned darkly when she saw the greenback pass. Spurring
down to the water as I finished trimming the boat, she leaned down close
to my ear, whispering stagily through her hollowed gauntlet: "Too bad
you didn't see me first, stranger; I'd 'a yanked down that lil'
sardine-tin there on the end of my rope for nothin'." That was the first
time I ever heard anybody called "stranger" outside of Wild West stories
written in the Tame East. Later, down Nebraska and Missouri-way,
however, I found that address in common use by people in real life.
There's no end of a thrill in finding story-book stuff in real life--I
suppose because it happens so darn'd seldom.
There were a few flashes of white in the riffle below the dam; then a
broadening river and slackening water. Many and unmistakable signs told
me that I was now skirting the dread "Mosquito Coast." Cattle nose-deep
in the water or rushing blindly through the thorny bull-berry bushes,
smudge-barrages round the ranch houses, dark, shifting clouds over the
marshes and over-flow lakes--every one of them was a sign of an ancient
enemy, an enemy who had drawn first and last blood on every field I had
met him from the Amazon to Alaska. Knowing that I was going to run the
gauntlet of him for many hundreds of miles, I had come prepared, both
mentally and physically. Nevertheless I looked forward with no small
apprehension to a contest which could not be other than a losing
one--for me. Moreover, I had too many dormant malarial germs in my
once-fever thinned blood to care to risk their being driven to the
warpath again by too intimate contact with other Bolsheviki of the same
breed. Frankly, Herr Mosquito, with his _shrecklichkeit_, was one thing
above all others that had given me pause in planning a voyage that would
carry me through so many thousand miles of his Happy Hunting Grounds.
Miles and Terry and Crook had driven the Redskin from the Yellowstone
and Missouri, Civilization had exterminated the buffalo, but the
mosquito still ranged unchecked over his ancient domain. It was just a
question of how much blood one was going to have to yield up to get by
his toll-gate-keepers.
[Illustration: THE DAM ACROSS THE YELLOWSTONE AT INTAKE]
[Illustration: PORTAGING MY BOAT ROUND THE INTAKE DAM]
[Illustration: COMPLETING THE PORTAGE]
Some kind of a poor old river-rat--doubtless an agate-hunter,--ringed
with smudges and trying to spare time enough from fighting the enemy to
hold a frying pan over a smouldering fire gave me a graphic warning of
what fate awaited me if I tried to camp by the bank. Forthwith I decided
to get my supper in the boat, run till near dark, pick the
likeliest-looking ranch, tell them I was a farmer myself, and let human
nature take its course. I had had the plan of adding a galley to the
boat in mind for some days. Drifting while I munched a cold lunch had
already eliminated the noonday halt, and I was now figuring to let the
river also go on with its work during breakfast and supper hours as
well. My first plan was to make a little stove by cutting holes in an
oil-can, setting this on the non-inflammable steel bottom of my boat and
cooking with wood in the ordinary way. Then, in a store window in
Glendive, I saw a midget of a stove that worked with gasoline pumped
under pressure. It was called a "Kampkook," but I could see every reason
why it would also make a perfectly good "Boatkook." Drifting just
beyond the wall of the coastwise mosquito barrage, I tried it out that
evening. Bacon and eggs, _petit pois_, mulligatawny soup, dried apricots
and a pot of cocoa--all these delectables I fried, boiled or stewed
without pausing from rowing for more than an occasional prod, stir or
shake. When all was ready, I removed the thwart from the forward
section, threw my half-inflated sleeping-bag in the bottom, disposed a
couple of cushions, and suppered like Cleopatra on her barge, reclining
at my ease. With occasional spice-lending-variations, that sybaritic
program was followed on many another evening right on to the finish of
my voyage. I loved too well the smell of "wood smoke at twilight" to
forego entirely the joy of the camp on the bank, but wherever that bank
was muddy or infested by mosquitos, I. W. W.'s, or other undesirables,
or whenever I was trying to make time, I had a perfectly self-contained
ship aboard which I could eat and sleep with entire comfort.
It was early twilight before I came to just the ranch that I was looking
for. Distantly at first, like the gold at the end of a rainbow, I saw it
transfigured in the sunset glow at the end of the vista of a long
wine-dark side-channel. There was a sprawling, broad-eaved bungalow,
vine-covered and inviting, big new red barns and a lofty silo that
loomed like a tower against the sun-flushed western sky. I named it
"Ranch of the Heart's Desire" on the instant, for I knew that it could
give all that I most intensely craved--cover from the enemy. I tied up
at the landing as a sea-worn skipper drops his anchor in a harbour of
the Islands of the Blest.
The long avenue of cottonwoods up to the bungalow seemed to be filled
with about equal parts of mosquitos and Jersey cows. Doubtless the
mosquitos were much the more numerous. But because it hurts more to hit
a running cow than a flying insect I probably was impressed with the
Jerseys out of all proportion to their actual numbers. A dash through a
"No-Man's-Land" of smouldering smudges and I burst into a Haven of
Refuge at the bungalow door. A genial chap with a steady smile met me as
I emerged from the smoke, complimented me upon the smartness of my
open-field running among the Jerseys, and opined that I must have been a
pretty shifty fullback in my day. A youth in greasy overalls who came
wiggling out from under a Ford he introduced as "My hired man." But when
the latter blushed and protested: "Now there you go again, dear!" he
admitted that it was only his wife. They promptly insisted I should have
supper, while I had considerable difficulty in making them believe I had
a galley functioning in my boat. We finally compromised on ice-cream
and strawberries. All the ranchers along the lower Yellowstone and upper
Missouri have ice-houses.
They were just the kind of folk one knew he would have to find in a
haven called "Ranch of the Heart's Desire." Their name was Patterson,
and they had lived most of their lives in Washington--in some kind of
departmental service. Becoming tired--or perhaps ashamed--of working six
hours a day, they bought a ranch under the Yellowstone project ditch and
started working sixteen. So far they had been spending rather more money
than they had made but, like all on the threshold of bucolic life,
looked confidently to a future rainbow-bright with prospects. They
confessed that it awakened a wee bit of nostalgia to meet one who had
been in Washington, and so it chanced that it was of "Things
Washingtonese" that we talked rather than of our experiences as farmers.
There was something strangely appealing to the imagination in sitting
there where the bison in his millions had so lately trod and putting
everything and everybody at the Primal Fount in their proper places.
Long into the night we rattled on just as though over a table at the
Shoreham, the New Williard or Chevy Chase--just as we would have talked
in Washington. Knocking Wilson whenever any other subject was
exhausted, we bemoaned the predominance of third-class men in Congress,
agreed that Harding wouldn't do much harm and might do good, swapped
yarns about the funny things Congressmen's wives had said and done, and
passed by acclamation a motion that the most unrepresentative
institution in America was the House of Representatives. It was highly
refreshing to meet people you could be really frank with in discussing
the more or less esoteric phases of these and kindred subjects. I
enjoyed that evening's yarn only less than I did my couch on a
breeze-swept porch that was armoured with a woven copper mesh against
the assaults of the common enemy.
Before I pushed off in the morning Mr. Patterson took me around two
sides of his ranch and showed me some splendid fields of alfalfa and
sweet clover, just ready for cutting. Prices were good, he said, and the
prospects were bright for the best clean-up they had known so far. I
have often wondered just how those green, fragrant fields looked ten
hours later, just how much those optimistic forecasts were modified as a
consequence of certain little inequalities of atmospheric pressure that
were already making their differences felt in a lightning-shot murkiness
hanging low on the northeastern horizon. I did not make sure of the
Patterson's address and a postcard of inquiry I subsequently dispatched
brought no reply.
I was aware of the heavy humidity of the atmosphere the moment I pulled
out in the slow current of the still broadening river. There was plenty
of air stirring but with no fixed plan of action in its mind. Now it
would swoop down over the banks in sudden gusts; now it would blow down
river for a few moments and then turn on its heel and come breezing
right back, like a commuter who has forgotten his ticket; now it would
deliberately "Box-the-Compass" right round the boat, as a cat circles a
rat that it is just a bit chary about springing on.
The easterly gusts paved the surface of the water with evanescent
patches of floating grasshoppers, evidently part of a flight that had
not yet found lodgment in the growing fields under the irrigation
project on the other bank. After each gust the fish would rise greedily
to the feast for a few minutes. Satiation would come quickly, however,
and most of the hoppers were left to drown or perhaps to gain a few
hours longer lease on life by drifting to a bar. One gust that came
while I was skirting the shore poured a literal grasshopper cataract
over the cut-bank into the boat. There was a sharp, rasping contact
where the saw-toothed legs side-swiped my arms and face that would
undoubtedly have left abrasions on the skin if it had been kept up for
any time. For a few moments there was a layer of hoppers two or three
inches deep in the bottom of the skiff; then the most of them hurdled
out into the water. The dessicated remains of the few _ambuscados_ that
took refuge in the grub-box kept turning up in a variety of frys, stews,
and fricassees for the next fortnight.
I pulled up to Riverview Ferry, well on toward the North Dakota line, at
one o'clock. Mr. and Mrs. Meadows, with whom I had lunch, once operated
a pontoon bridge at this point but had given it up on account of the
trouble from high water. They wanted to sell the twenty or more pontoons
left on their hands but said they could not see where a buyer would come
from. It occurred to me that one of these floats would make an ideal
hull for a houseboat, for a Missouri-Mississippi voyage, just as
Riverview would be an ideal place for launching one. I have not Mr.
Meadows' address, but fancy Sidney, Montana, would reach him. I shall
not take the responsibility of urging any one to attempt a trip of this
kind, but should the urge have developed spontaneously I think there is
a chance here to acquire the makings of an extremely serviceable
house-boat at a fraction of what it would cost to go about building it
in the ordinary way. Starting at high water in June, an outfit of this
kind--with luck and in the hands of the right party--might well go
through to New Orleans before Christmas. Manned by a party without much
common sense and persistence, it might conceivably be abandoned by some
wildly regretful people before it swung out into the "Big Muddy." I
utterly refuse to pass upon any one's qualification, or to take other
than hostile notice of letters charging me with ruining what but for me
might have been a comparatively inexpensive and enjoyable holiday in
Bermuda or on the Riviera.
The ferryman at Riverview claimed to have made the voyage from Miles
City to somewhere on the lower Mississippi in a house-boat, taking two
seasons for it. He was the first ferryman I ever met who was full of
doleful warnings about troubles ahead. My little tin boat might be all
right for the rapids of the Yellowstone, he said, but just wait till it
went up against the white caps kicked up by the winds of the Missouri
and the Mississippi. He said no word about the winds of the Yellowstone.
If he wasn't prepared for them, I only hope his ferryboat was not caught
in midstream by a zephyr that breezed up river about three hours later.
[Illustration: (C) _L. A. Huffman_
THE "OLD N----" CROSSING THE POWDER RIVER]
It must have been toward three o'clock that I first noticed how what had
been a grey murkiness to the north-east all morning was now rising in a
solid bank of swiftly advancing cloud. For a while its front was smooth
and rounded, like the rim of a tin-plate. Half-way up to the zenith this
front began to reveal itself as a wind-riven line of madly racing
nimbus, black, sinister and ominous. And yet, blissfully ignorant of the
hell-broth a-brew, I worried not a whit--didn't even begin to edge away
from mid-channel for a while, in fact. What a lamb it was! Never again,
with so much as a man's-hand-sized cloud blinking on the windward
horizon, was I to know the calm, quiet, serenity of a confident soul.
A long, lean, torpedo-like shaft of blue-black cloud, breaking away from
the ruck and aiming in a direction that would bring it directly over my
head, produced the first splash in the pool of my perfect serenity. That
_did_ look just a bit as though I might be running into the centre of a
heavy thunder-storm, I confessed to myself. Perhaps, if there was a
ranch-house convenient, it might be just as well to be thinking of
getting under cover. Yes, there were three or four houses off to the
left--places on the irrigation project, doubtless, they were so close
together. I started to pull in toward a sandy flat, but sheered off
again when it became apparent that a slough and marsh would cut me off
from the first of the houses, a place with a silo and the inevitable red
barn. Plainly the only way to reach any of the farms would be by landing
at the foot of the bluff a quarter of a mile ahead, climbing up and
cutting across the fields. That might not be possible before the storm
broke--but what did a warm summer rain matter anyhow?
Leaning hard onto my oars, I headed straight down stream for where a
coal-streaked yellow bluff blocked the northerly course of the river and
bent it off almost directly eastward. Swelling monstrously as it
approached, the black arrow-head of the storm, deflecting slightly,
began to pass overhead to the left. I distinctly remember thinking how
its shape now suggested the picked skeleton of a gigantic mackerel--just
a backbone and right-angling ribs. The sun dimmed and reddened as the
flying clouds began to drive across its face, and the even ribs barred
the dulling glow like a furnace grating. A sulphurous, copperly glare
streaming through cast a weird unearthly sheen on the unrhythmically
lapping wavelets of the river. My serenity was blotted out with the sun.
I recalled only too well now where I had known that ghostly yellow light
before--the sullen fore-glow by which the South Sea hurricane slunk upon
its helpless prey. It had always been associated in my mind with the
shriek of the wind, the roar of the surf and the explosive detonations
of snapped coco palm boles. There were no coco palms here to snap, I
reflected, but--ah, that was surely a roar, and there came the wind!
Pulling in a dead calm myself, I saw the river and air at the bend turn
white almost between one stroke and the next. A tongue of wind seemed to
have shot out from behind a point to the right and begun scooping up
hunks of the river and throwing them across the flats. This blast was at
right angles to my course down stream, but I came parallel to it as I
swung and headed for the sand-bar on my left. The air was coiling and
twisting upon itself as I landed, but that out-licking tongue of the
storm was passing me by and circling the bluffs beyond the flat.
Without unloading the skiff, I dragged her as far in on the bar as I
could, threw my stuff together in the forward section and snugged it
down under a tarpaulin. Its weight might keep the boat from blowing
away, I figured. Then I drove oars in the sand with an ax and ran lines
to them from bow and stern--land-moorings, so to speak. The fore-front
of the wind hard and solid as the side of a moving barn, caught me from
behind as I made fast the bowline. I went forward to my knees, sprawled
flat, wiggled round head-on and then, leaning far forward, slowly
struggled to my feet. Hanging balanced at angle of forty-five degrees, I
started slowly crabbing back to the boat. It wasn't so bad after all, I
told myself. The skiff was not giving an inch to the blast, while
leaning up against the wind that way was rather good fun. I recalled a
stunt something like it that Little Tich used to pull in the London
Halls--an eccentric dance with enormously elongated shoes. I decided
that perhaps I was even enjoying the diversion a bit. In half-pretended
nonchalance I turned my head and cast a side-glance over toward the
farmhouses back of the bluffs. That was the last move of even assumed
nonchalance I was guilty of for some time.
That side-glance photographed three things on my memory: a grove of
willows flattened almost against the earth by the wind, two women, with
wondrously billowing skirts, crawling along the side of a house toward a
door, and a flimsy unpainted outbuilding resolving into its component
parts and pelting across a corral full of horses. Doubtless there was
more animated action to be observed had I been spared another hundredth
of a second or so to get a line on it. The three things mentioned were
as far as I got when the hail opened up.
With the viciousness of spattering shrapnel that first salvo of frozen
pellets raked me across the right cheek. The tingle of pain was
astonishingly sharp, like that from the blow of a back-snapped thorn
branch on an overgrown trail, and I was a bit surprised when an
explorative finger revealed no trace of blood. Hunching my neck brought
my face under cover, but the batteries of the storm had got my range
now and there was a decided sting to the impact of those baby icebergs,
even through my slicker and shirt. People are very prone to exaggerate
about the size of hail-stones, so I shall endeavour to make a special
effort to be conservative about these. They felt a lot bigger when they
hit, of course, but as I examined heaps of them afterward the average
size seemed to be about that of shrapnel or large marbles. There may
have been hail-stones the size of hens' eggs, but no one who was ever
exposed to them in the open can have lived to tell the tale. Men looking
out through the bars of jail may have seen them and survived to make
affidavits; most other authentic reports of egg-sized hail-stones will
doubtless be pretty well confined to the minutes of coroners' juries.
Indeed, I am inclined to think that a considerable crimp would have been
put in my down-river schedule by the comparatively diminutive pellets I
faced on this occasion but for the shelter I presently found for my head
under the side of the skiff.
As the hail-stones, flying before the wind, were hurtling along almost
horizontally, huddling under the lee bow of the skiff protected just
about all of me but my feet. Even that was not good enough, however, for
the impact of the blows on the tops of my toes left an extraordinary
ache behind it--something that I could not contemplate standing for an
indefinite number of murderous minutes. Clawing over the side for a
canvas or _poncho_ to buffer the worst of the barrage, my hand came in
contact with the roll of my sleeping pocket. That gave me an idea. The
wind, getting inside the hollow bag, nearly tore it from my hands as I
started to unroll it, but once I got it smothered under me the rest was
easy. With my legs inside of the bag and the uninflated rubber mattress
between my feet and the hail-stones, about all I had to bother about
seemed to be a wind strong enough to carry the boat away and me with it.
From the way things developed for the next couple of minutes this
appeared to be just about what was going to happen, however. I cannot
recall ever having felt more panicky in my life than when I saw that
that fore-running tongue of wind, which had originally come charging
round the bend from east, had now circled southward along the bluffs
below the farmhouses and was heading straight back into the east again.
That meant that I was now occupying the almost mathematical centre of
the vortex of a real "twister"--that I was about to be rocked on the
bosom of a fairly husky young cyclone. Something pronounced in the way
of an uplift movement was inevitably due the moment that back-curving
tongue of air lapped round to the place it started from.
A whimsical comparison flashed across my mind in watching through the
crook of my fending arm the witch-dance of that circling blast. In some
town up-river I had seen a movie of the Custer Massacre, at the
climacteric moment of which the howling hordes of Gall and
Rain-in-the-Face and Crazy-Horse whirled in a wide circle round their
doomed victims, the mental agonies of which latter were shown in
successive cut-ins of close-ups. Now I was once assured by a
world-famous movie star that he always actually felt in his heart--to
the very depths of his being--the emotion he was called on to register,
was it murderous lust, ineffable virtue, mother-love or what-not. Very
well. Assuming this to be true of all great movie actors, I have very
grave doubt if any of that silver-screen last-stand battalion of
Custer's felt any more real a pricking of the scalp in watching the
closing circle of dancing Redskins than did I in waiting for that
spinning blast of wind to decide whether or not it was going to stage a
"Pick-me-up" party.
It is not quite clear in my mind even now why things in my immediate
vicinity did not start to aviate. Several loosely built structures on
the bluff went flying off like autumn leaves, and wind enough to blow
boards into tree-tops would have at least sent my boat rolling if not
sky-ing. I am inclined to think, however, that the failure of any
marked heliocoptic action to develop was due to a lack of pronounced
opposition on the part of a bluffing turncoat of a southwesterly wind.
The latter skirmished just long enough to turn in the vanguards of the
main storm, but took to its heels the moment the thunderbolt phalanx was
launched upon it. It was the advent of this Juggernaut that marked the
end of my consecutive impressions. Primal Chaos simply clapped the lid
down over me and kept it there for several aeons--fifteen minutes to be
exact.
Although it was rapidly getting darker, I had still been able to see not
a little of what was going on up to the moment the God of the Thunders
uncorked his artillery; after that I simply heard and felt and grovelled
in the sand. The big red silo was the last of the old workaday world I
remember seeing before my horizon contracted from a quarter of a mile to
a scant ten feet. (I don't recall that old Jim Bridger ever made
anything shrink as fast and far as that, even with the astringent waters
of Alum Creek.) The boat and I were lying in a grey-walled
cocktailshaker and being churned up with flying sand, hail and jagged
hunks of blown river water. At first the resultant mixture was
milk-warm, but presently it became literally ice-cold, so that I
shivered in it like a new-shorn lamb. (The warm water was that blown
from the river. The subsequent chilling, as I figured out afterwards,
was due to the hail banking up against the windward side of the skiff,
finally filling the forward section of the latter and drifting right on
over to congeal my cowering anatomy.)
The thunder did not come into action battery by battery after its wonted
practice, but seemed to open up all of a sudden with a crashing barrage
all along the line. Flashes and crashes were simultaneous. The light of
the jagged bolts broadened the diameter of my bowl by not a foot. The
solid grey walls simply glowed and dulled like a ground-glass bulb when
its light is switched on and off. Not one clear-cut flash did I see in
the whole bombardment.
I have always been a great believer in whistling to keep up ebbing
courage; not necessarily a blowing of air through pursed lips, but any
easy and spontaneous action to show nonchalance and _sang froid_ in the
face of danger. The particular practice which had always seemed to
produce the best results was reciting stirring and appropriate poetry.
"Spartacus to the Gladiators" and "Roll on thou deep and dark blue
ocean, roll!" had steadied my faltering nerve in many crises. On this
occasion it was when the boat broke loose from its moorings and started
to roll over upon me that I began to feel the need of spiritual
stiffening. I must have picked on Kipling because "The Song of the Red
War Boat" had been running in my head for a day or two.
"Hearken, Thor of the Thunder! (I sputtered)
We are not here for a jest."
But that was altogether too obvious. I broke off and began again:
"The thunders bellow and clamour
The harm that they mean to do;
There goes Thor's own Hammer
Cracking the night in two!
Close! But the blow has missed her...."
But that was premature. Far from missing her, the blow had at last got a
shoulder under the bottom of my poor little skiff and over she came! By
Thor's grace she hung there, instead of going on rolling; but those
fifteen or twenty gallons of slightly liquefied hail seemed to drain
straight from the base of the North Pole. I tried to continue
registering nonchalance and _sang froid_, but accomplished an only too
literal rendition of the latter. I was still spitting sand and quavering
"_There goes Thor's own Hammer_" when the walls of my hail-hole began to
brighten and recede--and presently it was a warm, soft summer afternoon
again. That three-mile-wide Juggernaut of Primal Chaos was rolling away
straight across those verdant irrigated farms of the Yellowstone
Project and leaving desolation in its wake. I only hope that it
chastened the mendacious ferryman at Riverview and made a sharp
right-angle bend round the Patterson farm above Savage.
It was a considerably altered world that met the owl-like blink of my
still somewhat sand-filled eyes. The big red barn and the silo still
loomed against the sky-line above the bluff, and most of the other
houses and barns were still standing. All of the windmills had slipped
out of the picture, however, and many lesser wooden structures. Trees
were broken off or uprooted in all directions. But the strangest effect
was from the practical disappearance of the thousands of acres of
standing crops--beaten into the earth by the hail. There, I knew, lay
the real tragedy of Thor's little field-day. Quite likely no human
beings had been killed--but how many human hopes? The American public
like to think and talk in millions. Very well. There went a natural mill
that was grinding up corn and alfalfa and clover and wheat at the rate
of a million dollar's worth a minute. Who said the mills of the gods
grind slowly? Much as I was longing for the cheering propinquity of
fellow creatures just at that moment, I hated the thought of intruding
upon the blank despair that I knew had preceded me as a guest in the
farmhouse beyond the big red barn.
Laying out a change of dry clothes from one of my water-proof bags, I
stripped off my wet ones and freshened up with a plunge into the warm,
invigorating current of the river. Thanks to the lightness and
simplicity of my outfit, salvage operations were easily and
expeditiously effected. The skiff had dumped itself in blowing over and
was ready for launching as soon as it was tipped back. Most of my
clothes were dry; most of my grub wet. The worst loss in the latter was
the sentimental one of the residue of my California home-dried apricots.
I didn't care much for the darn things myself, but the people along the
river had proved dead keen for the succulent amber slabs. Moreover, it
had always lent a pretty touch at parting to hand my host or hostess
something produced on my own ranch, with perhaps a few words about how
it had been picked, pitted, sulphured, dried and packed by Mexican
_senoritas--all young and dark-eyed and beautiful_. That last had been
especially effective in lone cow-camps. Yes, I was sorry to be compelled
to give the last of those apricots away all at once to prevent their
spoiling from dampness. I resolved to buy some more to replace them--for
making up intimate little packets of parting--at the first opportunity.
The river had become its own quiet self again within a few moments, and
I pulled through a slow current to the foot of the bluff at the bend,
which appeared to be the only place one could land and avoid the
mud-flats. The long sand-bar on which I had ridden out the storm had
been scoured almost beyond recognition by the blown river waters. In a
dozen places channels had been scoured straight through it to the slough
behind, and the latter, greatly augmented both from the river and from
the drainage from the heights above, was pouring a muddy torrent back
into the mother stream at the bend. I saw that I was luckier than I had
at first appreciated in not having had the bar dissolve beneath my feet.
Fully resolved, if no alternative cover offered, to tunnel into the
bluff to avoid exposure to another of Thor's Juggernautic joy-rides, I
landed on a jutting ledge of water-soaked lignite at the bend. Stacking
up my outfit, I clapped the skiff down upon it, threw a few lashings
over the whole, and climbed out up the bluff. With the fields themselves
deep in water and liquid mud, I had to zigzag cross-country toward the
nearest house by following the embankments of the irrigating ditches.
Not a blade of grass was left standing. All that remained of alfalfa,
oats and corn was a tangled green mat half covered with slowly melting
hail-stones. Half-grown corn had not only been beaten flat, but the
very stalks were crushed and shredded as if pounded by hammers.
There was only one cheering thing about that whole sodden field of
desolation--millions on millions of mosquitos had been battered to death
by the hail. Great masses of them, literally pulped, had been strained
out of the water and collected against heaps of debris in the ditches.
One could scoop them up by the double handfuls. How often had I bemoaned
the fact that every mosquito around some swampy Alaskan or Guinanan camp
of mine had not a single head so that I could sever it with one fell
swoop of and ax or _machete_! That was too much to hope for, of course;
but right here was a tolerably fair approach to it. I squeezed three or
four fistfuls of those pulped tormentors through my fingers and felt
appreciably less depressed.
Cut off by a deep-scoured drainage canal from a direct approach to the
farm of the big red barn, I fared back for a quarter of a mile to a road
and a bridge. Crossing the latter and wading through deep puddles, I
came upon what I first took to be a deserted ranch. The corrals were
down, the barn partially unroofed, and the windowless house was all but
stripped of its shingles. There was a response to my knock, however, and
I entered a half-wrecked kitchen to find three men sitting round a
table. A lamp was burning on a wall-shelf, but its flickering flame
barely threw a glow above the top of the opaquely smoked chimney.
The greeting I received was unconventional--even slightly disconcerting.
"Are you broke?" boomed the blunt query from a big chap with a hammer,
evidently just through tacking a blanket over a window. His two
companions took pipes from their mouths and hung on my answer as though
it might be a matter of considerable importance.
"Not at all...." I began, intending to go on and assure them that, far
from being the hobo I looked, I had money in my pocket and a large bag
of California home-dried apricots to give away. But they waited only on
my denial.
"All right. Move on!" they chorused to the accompaniment of stagy
gestures. "This is no place for a man that ain't broke. We _are_. Went
broke half an hour ago. _Hailed out!_" An old fellow with whiskers added
the explanatory trimmings.
I gulped two or three times and was about to frame a minimum demand for
an hour to dry my wet togs by the fire when the big chap strode over,
clapped me jovially on the shoulder and forced me into a chair by the
table.
"Don't mind our little joke, friend," he said with a ringing laugh.
"Whatever there is left in this shack in the way of comfort is at your
disposal for the night, or as long as you want to stay. Where did the
storm catch you? Car stalled on the road, I suppose."
"Boat--on river--sand-bar," I replied between gulps from the mug of
steaming black coffee the big fellow had poured me.
The three of them exchanged glances, first quizzical and then indicative
of dawning comprehension. Finally they threw back their heads and
guffawed louder than ever. I finished my coffee and gave them time to
finish their laugh. Then I asked, in a slightly hurt tone I fear, just
what joke they saw in being caught on a sand-bar by an embryonic
cyclone. Perhaps if they had been there themselves....
That set them off again, and I had time to pour and empty another mug of
coffee before one of them was sufficiently recovered to reply. The old
boy with whiskers was the first to get his merriment under leash, and so
it was he who explained: "_That_ wasn't what tickled us; we was only
laughin' 'cause youse was already drowned an' had a gang scoutin' for
your dead body."
[Illustration: THE YELLOWSTONE JUST ABOVE LIVINGSTON]
[Illustration: THE YELLOWSTONE JUST AFTER RECEIVING THE BIG HORN]
As that fell well within the compass of my own sense of humour, I joined
the mirth party too, and the four of us laughed all together. It
appeared that a gang of ditch-hands, before taking to cover, had seen a
man pulling down stream into the teeth of the advancing storm. The last
they saw of him he was trying to climb out on a sand-bar. The waves were
all around him and he appeared to be at his last gasp. When the storm
had blown by and they looked again, no trace remained of man nor boat.
That was substantially the story the ditch-hands told in recruiting a
posse to search for the body. If they had ventured out from cover five
minutes sooner they would have seen just what had become of both man and
boat, instead of having to have it explained to them by a trio of
hilarious farmers who seemed to feel the need of something in the way of
comic relief to take the edge off the tragedy of being "hailed out."
The big chap's name was Solberg. He was of Norwegian descent, extremely
well educated, and had spent a number of years teaching in the schools
of Minnesota. I was only too glad to accept his invitation to stay
over-night and dry out, especially as the weather appeared to be far
from settled. After calling in my search-party, I returned home with him
and we spent the remaining hours of daylight boarding up windows,
patching the roof and rendering first-aid generally to his wounded
house. The plucky fellow was far from being crushed. He admitted that
his crops were a total loss, that he was borrowed up to the limit with
the bank, and that he didn't even see just how he was going to pay any
of his debts. And yet--if he could only get hold of a bunch of sheep to
fatten. Sheep were more in his line. Perhaps, in the long run, he would
be all the better off for having to get back to them. Calling over his
collie, he took the dog's head between his knees and asked him what he
thought about it. The intelligent animal eyed his master seriously for a
few moments and then wagged his tail approvingly. "'Shag' thinks it will
be best to go back to sheep," pronounced Solberg. Then, musingly. "Yes,
I reckon sheep's the answer."
After supper Solberg said that he was a good deal worried about his
neighbours to the east--that they were harder hit than any one else, and
in rather worse shape to stand it. A woman and kiddies didn't make it
any easier when a man was hailed out. X---- had seemed pretty despondent
when he had dropped in just after the storm. Talked rather wildly. Said
he was through for good. Solberg hadn't been quite sure whether X----
had just meant he was through with farming, or something else. He was
rather a moody chap at best.... Perhaps no harm would be done if we
took a turn over that way....
The "neighbour to the east" turned out to be the big red barn and silo
which, during the storm, had stood to me as the symbols of all that
remained stable in the universe. A young woman opened the door of the
staunch little farmhouse to us--a girl with a baby in her arms and a
couple of youngsters fastened on her skirt. Her face was
pretty--decidedly so, as I saw presently,--but at the moment I noticed
that less than the courage it expressed. There was a well of tears
behind her fine eyes, but I knew the shedding of them was going to be
postponed indefinitely. Solberg, after directing a questioning look
round the kitchen and sitting-room, asked bluntly where her husband was.
With a nervous glance in my direction, she replied evasively that he was
"outside walking round," adding that she had milked the cows and done
the chores herself. With a keen and sympathetic glance of understanding,
my friend turned on his heel and vanished into the darkness.
Never having seen any one hailed-out before, I was somewhat at a loss to
know just what form my comforting ought to take. Finally, doubtless
subconsciously inspired by "The Greatest Mother in the World" picture, I
scooped up all the kiddies in sight and started to dandle them. I had
always won approving nods for pulling that kind of a stunt, whether it
was in a London Zeppelin raid or a drive of Armenian refugees at
Trebizond. Even here it was sound--theoretically at least--for it gave
the mother a chance to use her hands and apron to wipe dishes. Where it
miscarried was on the practical side--the oldest boy would keep putting
his hob-nailed boot in the baby's eye. But when I had cached the baby in
its crib and gagged the other two with a handful of wet dried apricots,
instinct came to my rescue and headed me off on the proper
tack--sympathy stuff. That is, I told her my own troubles and led her to
forget hers in sympathizing with them.
Sincerely and unfeignedly sorry as I was for these people, I was
(momentarily) almost as sorry for myself before I came to the end of
that tale of woe. I was a poor farmer from California. (Just how poor,
and in how many senses of the word, I didn't confess.) Of all the
farmers in the world, none had so many troubles as the California
farmer. Take oranges, for example. If the buds escaped the frost
probably the tiny green fruit would succumb to the "June Drop." If the
latter was weathered, there were the black scale, the brown rot and the
red spider lying in ambush, complicated by the probability of water
shortage at the end of the summer. If the fruit ran that gauntlet and
came to maturity, then there lurked the worst menace of all--the January
frosts. And finally, if the ripe fruit survived the frost barrage and
reached the packing-house, it was only to be pushed on into the "No
Man's Land" of an overstocked market. No man lived with so many
Damoclean swords suspended over him as the California orange
grower--unless it was the California peach, prune, apricot, grape,
nectarine or olive grower; or the walnut or almond grower; or the
alfalfa, barley or wheat farmer; or the truck gardener.
I had been all of these, I said, and was just about to go on
particularizing on the diseases and dangers threatening each crop, as I
had done with the orange, when the rustle of a skirt caused me to raise
my bowed head. There she was, a half-wiped pie-tin still in the bight of
her apron, standing over me and looking down with tears a lot nearer to
brimming than when we entered.
"And so you have had to come up to Montana looking for work?" she asked
in a voice vibrant with sympathy. "What a shame it is we're all
hailed-out round here, with no work in sight, and nothing to pay for it
with if there was."
Having over-sailed the mark by a mile, I hastened to trim in canvas and
beat back onto the course as originally charted. The last year or two in
California hadn't been so bad, I admitted. I had even made quite a bit
of money, so that this little river jaunt of mine on the Yellowstone was
really almost in the nature of a pleasure trip. (Funny thing, but that
river-pleasure-jaunt assertion was the only statement I made at which
she seemed inclined to lift an eyebrow.) I had brought a few of my
California home-dried apricots along, I continued. Perhaps they would
enjoy a few for a change. _That_ was the point I had been man[oe]uvring
to. Now I would play my comforter role.
Spreading the last of my bag of sticky slabs out before the fire, I
started to tell how they were made. First there was the picking by men
and the cutting and pitting by Mexican girls. She interrupted to ask
what the girls were paid. I told her about fifteen cents a box, adding
that some of the defter fingered of them often made three and four
dollars a day. She sighed at that, and wished she had a chance to earn
that much--sure and safe where the hail couldn't get it.
Solberg came in with her husband at this juncture. He was a good-looking
young chap, well set up and with the right kind of an eye. There was no
doubt of the depth of his discouragement and depression, but he was
plainly too good stuff to sulk for long. He shook hands warmly enough,
but there was a trace of bitterness in the smile with which he remarked
that he was glad to see that I had survived the hail better than had his
oats and corn. I rattled right on about the apricots, telling of the
sulphuring, sunning, stacking, binning and packing, adding--in a
convenient moment when the wife had stepped out to shake the
tablecloth--that ever effective little capsule about the Mexican
_senoritas_, all young, dark-eyed and beautiful. The good chap actually
lifted his head and took a deep, shoulder-squaring breath at that. He
relapsed again when I failed to develop the theme, but it was only
temporary. Ten minutes later, with great inconsequentiality, I heard him
asking his wife how she would like to go to California and work in the
apricots. Then he went over, wound up the Victrola and put on "_Smiles!
Smiles! Smiles!_" What a lot of latent good there was in those
California home-dried apricots, I reflected as we splashed along
homeward! Surely I must not fail to renew my supply at the next town.
As we were preparing to turn in for the night, I took Solberg to task
for his remark earlier in the evening to the effect that a woman and
kiddies didn't make it any easier for a man who had been hailed-out.
"Don't you think," I asked, "that a plucky little woman like that comes
in pretty handy to buffer the bumps in a time of trouble like this?" For
the first and only time my host was guilty of sarcasm. "Well," he said
with a cynical glint in his blue eye, "if I had been in your place down
there on the sand-bar I daresay I would have been glad of almost
anything to buffer the bumps of the hail-stones. As it is, I reckon I
can do my own buffering."
Recognizing the familiar symptoms of an ancient but still unhealed
wound, I thought the best thing I could do under the circumstances was
to concentrate on blowing up my sleeping-bag and turning in. Funny how
imagination works in a man who is much alone. Given a pin-prick over the
heart, with ten years of solitude to brood over it, and he'll convince
himself that the original wound was from nothing of less calibre than a
"Big Bertha."
The next morning was bright and clear, with no signs of any menace
lurking under the northeastern horizon. Solberg accompanied me across
his ruined fields to my boat. His corn and oats, he admitted, were a
total loss, but he thought there were signs that the tough, stringy
stalks of the sweet clover had some vitality left in them. He seemed
especially attached to this beautiful plant, calling it "The Friend of
Man" and saying that he had experimented with several foods and drinks
from it that promised well for human consumption. There was something
particularly appealing to me in this fine, and bluff, if slightly
eccentric, chap. I think it was his wholesomeness--the firmness with
which he seemed to have his feet planted on the earth. One who has been
attracted to the French peasant for his love of the land from which he
draws his life will know what I mean.
I pushed off into a quiet current that was in strange contrast to the
wind-torn welter of white I had seen at that bend the evening before.
The air on the river was fairly drenched with the heavy odour of crushed
vegetation, which seemed to have drained there from higher levels. This
was pronounced at all times, but where I skirted fields of sweet clover
there was a palpability to the perfume which suggested that one might
almost gather it in his hands and allow it to pour through his fingers.
In the Marquesas there is a little yellow-blossomed bush called the
_cassi_, the pollen from which blows far to leeward before the
South-east Trade. At times I have thought that I could detect the
delicate odour of blown-_cassi_ ten miles at sea, yet never even in
kicking my way through a copse of the fragrant little bush have I been
assailed with such a veritable flow of perfume as coiled and streamed
about me as I drifted down toward the mouth of the Yellowstone that
morning after the great hail-storm. Doubtless, indeed, the hail was
responsible. Crushed and dying, the voiceless "Friend of Man" was
chanting its "Swan Song" in the only medium at its command.
A couple of miles below the bend where the storm had caught me I passed
into North Dakota at a point called the State Line Ferry. An hour later
I ran under the bridge of a branch of the Great Northern. It was a fine,
bold piece of construction, and it was in my mind at the time that its
builder must be an outstanding man in his line. This surmise was
vindicated a month later when I found him putting in the first piers of
a bridge to span the Missouri at Yankton. Incidentally, some of his
false-work got in the way of my skiff and all but dumped me out into the
"Big Muddy."
Below Forsyth's Butte, last of the outstanding landmarks of the
Yellowstone, the country on both sides began to smoothen and flatten out
and offer less resistance to the spread of the river. The broad
over-flow flats offered an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos,
recalling to me that a very large portion of Clark's journey of early
August was devoted to telling of the mental and physical suffering
inflicted upon the members of his party by the swarms of stinging pests
they had encountered just above and below the mouth of the Yellowstone.
From Clark's time down to the present this particular region has always
been regarded as "The Dark and Bloody Ground of the Mosquito Coast of
Dakota." I was resolved to put bars between myself and the enemy that
night--if not the mosquito bars of a hotel room, then the mid-stream
sand-bars of the Missouri.
[Illustration: THE BROAD STREAM OF THE YELLOWSTONE BELOW GLENDIVE]
[Illustration: THE LAST BRIDGE ABOVE THE MISSOURI]
[Illustration: WHERE THE YELLOWSTONE TAKES POSSESSION OF THE MISSOURI]
A broad, sweeping curve to the left, a wide bend, and then an equally
broad and sweeping curve to the right opened up a long vista with low,
dry, rounded hills at the end of it. With a quick catch of breath I
recognized the telegraph poles of the Great Northern Railway and the
scattering buildings of Fort Buford--both _beyond the Missouri_. A swift
run under a crumbling cut-bank on the left carried me past an
out-reaching tongue of yellow clay and into a quiet, sluggish,
dark-stained current that came meandering along from the west.
I have mentioned the quieter, calmer current in which I had been
drifting below Glendive. So it had seemed after the tumultuous mountain
torrent which I had run from Livingston to Billings; yet in comparison
with this decorous bride from the west the Yellowstone came to its
marriage bed like a raging lion. Or, to borrow an animal from the next
cage in the zoo, the Missouri, in coming down to meet and mingle with
the Yellowstone, fared much like the lady who went out to ride on the
tiger. If I may paraphrase:
"I finished my ride with the Lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the Tiger,"
meaning the Yellowstone. Without even pausing to crouch for a spring,
the tawny, impetuous feline on whose back I had ridden all the way down
from the Rockies, simply rushed out upon the muddy lamb from the western
plains and gobbled it up. Seven or eight weeks later I saw the latter do
the same thing to the Mississippi--crowd it right over against the
Illinois shore and gulp it down. And along toward the end of October I
remember thinking how like the blonde beast of the Yellowstone was a
ropy coil of tawny current I found undermining a levee in Louisiana.
According to the maps I had been travelling for upwards of three
thousand miles on the Missouri and Mississippi, but in fancy it was the
tawny tiger of the Yellowstone that had carried me all the way from the
borders of Wyoming to the tide-waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
* Spelling errors repaired:
pg. 31: saffon =====> saffron
pg. 64 grevious =====> grievous
pg. 77: capenter =====> carpenter
pg. 84: setting =====> sitting
pg. 92: Bozeban =====> Bozeman
pg. 135: transporation =====> transportation
pg. 159: slighty =====> slightly
pg. 171: he =====> be
pg. 186: imparing =====> impairing
pg. 186: side-urge =====> side-surge
pg. 192: about =====> above
pg. 196: by =====> my
pg. 215: an =====> a
pg. 239 Glendives =====> Glendive
pg. 244: servicable =====> serviceable
pg. 279: particulary =====> particularly
* Other changes:
pg. 185: Removed duplicate "to".
* Spelling differences unchanged:
Albemarle and Albermarle
Drownded and drowned
* Inconsistent hyphenations left as originally printed.
End of Project Gutenberg's Down the Yellowstone, by Lewis R. Freeman