Joseph Le Conte that an effort be made to induce the national government
to save it from defacement and private exploitation. Returning home they
prepared a petition to President Cleveland, who promptly withdrew ten
townships from settlement pending a bill before Congress to create a
national park. Congress refused to pass the bill on the ground that
Oregon should protect her own lake. Then Steel began an effort, or
rather an unbroken succession of efforts, to interest Congress. For
seventeen years he agitated the project at home, where he made speeches
winter and summer all over the State, and at Washington, which he
deluged with letters and circulars. Finally the bill was passed. Crater
Lake became a national park on May 22, 1902.
Mr. Steel's work was not finished. He now began just as vigorous a
campaign to have the lake properly stocked with trout. It required years
but succeeded. Then he began a campaign for funds to build a road to the
lake. This was a stubborn struggle which carried him to Washington for a
winter, but it finally succeeded.
During most of this time Mr. Steel was a country school-teacher without
other personal income than his salary. He spent many of his summers
talking Crater-Lake projects to audiences in every part of the State,
depending upon his many friends for entertainment and for "lifts" from
town to town. He was superintendent of the park from 1913 to the winter
of 1920, when he became United States commissioner for the park.
The attitude of the Indians toward Crater Lake remains to be told. Steel
is authority for the statement that previous to 1886 no modern Indian
had looked upon its waters. Legends inherited from their ancestors made
them greatly fear it. I quote O.C. Applegate's "Klamath Legend of La-o,"
from _Steel Points_ for January, 1907:
"According to the mythology of the Klamath and Modoc Indians, the chief
spirit who occupied the mystic land of Gaywas, or Crater Lake, was La-o.
Under his control were many lesser spirits who appeared to be able to
change their forms at will. Many of these were monsters of various
kinds, among them the giant crawfish (or dragon) who could, if he chose,
reach up his mighty arms even to the tops of the cliffs and drag down to
the cold depths of Crater Lake any too venturesome tourist of the primal
days.
"The spirits or beings who were under the control of La-o assumed the
forms of many animals of the present day when they chose to go abroad on
dry land, and this was no less true of the other fabulous inhabitants of
Klamath land who were dominated by other chief spirits, and who occupied
separate localities; all these forms, however, were largely or solely
subject to the will of Komookumps, the great spirit.
"Now on the north side of Mount Jackson, or La-o Yaina (La-o's
Mountain), the eastern escarpment of which is known as La-o Rock, is a
smooth field sloping a little toward the north which was a common
playground for the fabled inhabitants of Gaywas and neighboring
communities.
"Skell was a mighty spirit whose realm was the Klamath Marsh country,
his capital being near the Yamsay River on the eastern side of the
marsh. He had many subjects who took the form of birds and beasts when
abroad on the land, as the antelope, the bald eagle, the bliwas or
golden eagle, among them many of the most sagacious and active of all
the beings then upon the earth.
"A fierce war occurred between Skell and La-o and their followers, which
raged for a long time. Finally Skell was stricken down in his own land
of Yamsay and his heart was torn from his body and was carried in
triumph to La-o Yaina. Then a great gala day was declared and even the
followers of Skell were allowed to take part in the games on Mount
Jackson, and the heart of Skell was tossed from hand to hand in the
great ball game in which all participated.
"If the heart of Skell could be borne away so that it could be restored
to his body he would live again, and so with a secret understanding
among themselves the followers of Skell watched for the opportunity to
bear it away. Eventually, when it reached the hands of Antelope, he
sped away to the eastward like the wind. When nearly exhausted, he
passed it on to Eagle, and he in turn to Bliwas, and so on, and although
La-o's followers pursued with their utmost speed, they failed to
overtake the swift bearers of the precious heart. At last they heard the
far-away voice of the dove, another of Skell's people, and then they
gave up the useless pursuit.
"Skell's heart was restored and he lived again, but the war was not over
and finally La-o was himself overpowered and slain and his bleeding body
was borne to the La-o Yaina, on the very verge of the great cliff, and a
false message was conveyed to La-o's monsters in the lake that Skell had
been killed instead of La-o, and, when a quarter of the body was thrown
over, La-o's monsters devoured it thinking it a part of Skell's body.
Each quarter was thrown over in turn with the same result, but when the
head was thrown into the lake the monsters recognized it as the head of
their master and would not touch it, and so it remains to-day, an island
in the lake, to all people now known as Wizard Island."
In 1885, at Fort Klamath, Steel obtained from Allen David, the
white-headed chief of the Klamath Indians, the story of how the Indians
returned to Crater Lake. It was "long before the white man appeared to
drive the native out." Several Klamaths while hunting were shocked to
find themselves on the lake rim, but, gazing upon its beauty, suddenly
it was revealed to them that this was the home of the Great Spirit.
They silently left and camped far away. But one brave under the spell of
the lake returned, looked again, built his camp-fire and slept. The next
night he returned again, and still again. Each night strange voices
which charmed him rose from the lake; mysterious noises filled the air.
Moons waxed and waned. One day he climbed down to the water's edge,
where he saw creatures "like in all respects to Klamath Indians"
inhabiting the waters. Again and again he descended, bathed, and soon
began to feel mysteriously strong, "stronger than any Indian of his
tribe because of his many visits to the waters."
Others perceiving his growing power ventured also to visit the lake,
and, upon bathing in its waters also received strength.
"On one occasion," said David solemnly, "the brave who first visited the
lake killed a monster, or fish, and was at once set upon by untold
numbers of excited Llaos (for such they were called), who carried him to
the top of the cliffs, cut his throat with a stone knife, then tore his
body into small pieces which were thrown down to the waters far beneath
and devoured by angry Llaos."
In 1886 two Klamaths accompanied Captain Clarence E. Dutton's Geological
Survey party to Crater Lake and descended to the water's edge. The news
of the successful adventure spread among the Indians, and others came to
look upon the forbidden spot. That was the beginning of the end of the
superstition. Steel says that two hundred Klamaths camped upon the rim
in 1896, while he was there with the Mazamas.
The lake was variously named by its early visitors. The Hillman party
which discovered it named it Deep Blue Lake on the spot. Later it was
known as Lake Mystery, Lake Majesty, and Hole in the Ground. A party
from Jacksonville named it Crater Lake on August 4, 1869.
X
YELLOWSTONE, A VOLCANIC INTERLUDE
THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING, NORTHWESTERN WYOMING. AREA,
3,348 SQUARE MILES
I
John Coulter's story of hot springs at the upper waters of the
Yellowstone River was laughed at by the public of 1810. Jim Bridger's
account of the geysers in the thirties made his national reputation as a
liar. Warren Angus Ferris's description of the Upper Geyser Basin was
received in 1842 in unbelieving silence. Later explorers who sought the
Yellowstone to test the truth of these tales thought it wholesome to
keep their findings to themselves, as magazines and newspapers refused
to publish their accounts and lecturers were stoned in the streets as
impostors. It required the authority of the semiofficial
Washburn-Langford expedition of 1869 to establish credence.
The original appeal of the Yellowstone, that to wonder, remains its most
popular appeal to-day, though science has dissipated mystery these many
years. Many visitors, I am persuaded, enjoy the wonder of it more even
than the spectacle. I have heard people refuse to listen to the
explanation of geyser action lest it lessen their pleasure in Old
Faithful. I confess to moods in which I want to see the blue flames and
smell the brimstone which Jim Bridger described so eloquently. There are
places where it is not hard to imagine both.
For many years the uncanny wonders of a dying volcanic region absorbed
the public mind to the exclusion of all else in the Yellowstone
neighborhood, which Congress, principally in consequence of these
wonders, made a national park in 1872. Yet all the time it possessed two
other elements of distinction which a later period regards as equal to
the volcanic phenomena; elements, in fact, of such distinction that
either one alone, without the geysers, would have warranted the
reservation of so striking a region for a national park. One of these is
the valley of the Yellowstone River with its spectacular waterfalls and
its colorful canyon. The other is its population of wild animals which,
in 1872, probably was as large and may have been larger than to-day's.
Yet little was heard of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in those
days, although Moran's celebrated painting, now in the Capitol at
Washington, helped influence Congress to make it a national park; and so
little did the wild animals figure in the calculations of the period
that they were not even protected in the national park until 1894, when
hunting had reduced the buffalo to twenty-five animals.
Even in these days of enlightenment and appreciation the great majority
of people think of the Yellowstone only as an area enclosing geysers.
There are tourists so possessed with this idea that they barely glance
at the canyon in passing. I have heard tourists refuse to walk to
Inspiration Point because they had already looked over the rim at a
convenient and unimpressive place. Imagine coming two thousand miles to
balk at two miles and a half to the only spectacle of its kind in the
world and one of the world's great spectacles at that! As for the
animals, few indeed see any but the occasional bears that feed at the
hotel dumps in the evening.
The Yellowstone National Park lies in the recesses of the Rocky
Mountains in northwestern Wyoming. It slightly overlaps Montana on the
north and northwest, and Idaho on the southwest. It is rectangular, with
an entrance about the middle of each side. It is the largest of the
national parks, enclosing 3,348 square miles. It occupies a high plain
girt with mountains. The Absarokas bound it on the east, their crest
invading the park at Mount Chittenden. The Gallatin Range pushes into
the northwestern corner from the north. The continental divide crosses
the southwestern corner over the lofty Madison Plateau and the ridge
south of Yellowstone Lake. Altitudes are generally high. The plains
range from six to eight thousand feet; the mountains rise occasionally
to ten thousand feet. South of the park the Pitchstone Plateau merges
into the foothills of the Teton Mountains, which, thirty miles south of
the southern boundary, rise precipitously seven thousand feet above the
general level of the country.
Though occupying the heart of the Rocky Mountains, the region is not of
them. In no sense is it typical. The Rockies are essentially granite
which was forced molten from the depths when, at the creation of this
vast central mountain system, lateral pressures lifted the earth's skin
high above sea-level, folded it, and finally eroded it along the crest
of the folds. In this granite system the Yellowstone is a volcanic
interlude, and of much later date. It belongs in a general way to the
impulse of volcanic agitation which lighted vast beacons over three
hundred thousand square miles of our northwest. The Cascade Mountains
belong in this grouping. Four national parks of to-day were then in the
making, Mount Rainier in Washington, Crater Lake in Oregon, Lassen
Volcanic in California, and the Yellowstone in Wyoming. Subterranean
heat, remaining from those days of volcanic activity, to-day boils the
water which the geysers hurl in air.
In the northeastern part of the Yellowstone a large central crater was
surrounded by smaller volcanoes. You can easily trace the conformation
from Mount Washburn which stood upon its southeastern rim, heaped there,
doubtless, by some explosion of more than common violence. This volcanic
period was of long duration, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. In
the northeastern part of the park the erosion of a hill has exposed the
petrified remains of thirteen large forests in layers one on top of the
other, the deep intervening spaces filled with thick deposits of ashes.
Thirteen consecutive times were great forests here smothered in the
products of eruption. Thirteen times did years enough elapse between
eruptions for soil to make and forests to grow again, each perhaps of
many generations of great trees.
Yellowstone's mountains, then, are decayed volcanoes, its rock is lava,
its soil is ash and disintegrated lava. The resulting outline is soft
and waving, with a tendency to levels. There are no pinnacled heights,
no stratified, minareted walls, no precipiced cirques and
glacier-shrouded peaks. Yet glaciers visited the region. The large
granite boulder brought from afar and left near the west rim of the
Grand Canyon with thousands of feet of rhyolite and other products of
volcanism beneath it is alone sufficient proof of that.
Between the periods from volcano to glacier and from glacier to to-day,
stream erosion has performed its miracles. The volcanoes have been
rounded and flattened, the plateaus have been built up and levelled, and
the canyons of the Yellowstone, Gibbon, and Madison Rivers have been
dug. Vigorous as its landscape still remains, it has thus become the
natural playground for a multitude of people unaccustomed to the rigors
of a powerfully accented mountain country.
The fact is that, in spite of its poverty of peaks and precipices, the
Yellowstone country is one of the most varied and beautiful wildernesses
in the world. Among national parks it gains rather than loses by its
difference. While easily penetrated, it is wild in the extreme, hinting
of the prairies in its broad opens, pasture for thousands of wild
ruminants, and of the loftier mountains in its distant ranges, its
isolated peaks and its groups of rugged, rolling summits. In the number,
magnitude, and variety of its waters it stands quite alone. It contains
no less than three watersheds of importance, those of the Yellowstone,
Madison, and Snake Rivers, flowing respectively north, west, and south.
The waters of the Yellowstone and Madison make it an important source of
the Missouri. There are minor rivers of importance in the park and
innumerable lesser streams. It is a network of waterways. Its waterfalls
are many, and two of them are large and important. Its lakes are many,
and several are large. Yellowstone Lake is the largest of its altitude
in the world.
As a wilderness, therefore, the Yellowstone is unequalled. Its
innumerable waters insure the luxuriance of its growths. Its forested
parts are densely forested; its flower-gardens are unexcelled in range,
color, and variety, and its meadows grow deep in many kinds of rich
grass. If it were only for the splendor of its wilderness, it still
would be worth the while. Imagine this wilderness heavily populated with
friendly wild animals, sprinkled with geysers, hot springs, mud
volcanoes, painted terraces and petrified groves, sensational with
breath-taking canyons and waterfalls, penetrable over hundreds of miles
of well built road and several times the mileage of trails, and
comfortable because of its large hotels and public camps located
conveniently for its enjoyment, and you have a pleasure-ground of
extraordinary quality. Remember that one may camp out almost anywhere,
and that all waters are trout waters. Yellowstone offers the best
fishing easily accessible in the continent.
Another advantage possessed by the Yellowstone is a position near the
centre of the country among great railroad systems. The Northern Pacific
reaches it on the north, the Burlington on the east, and the Union
Pacific on the west. One can take it coming or going between oceans; it
is possible to buy tickets in by any one railroad and out by either of
the others. An elaborate system of automobile-coaches swings the
passenger where he pleases, meeting all incoming trains and delivering
at all outgoing trains. It is much easier now to see the Yellowstone
than in the much-vaunted stage-coach times previous to 1915, times
sorely lamented by the romantic because their passing meant the passing
of the picturesque old horse-drawn stage-coach from its last stand in
the United States; times when a tour of the Yellowstone meant six and a
half days of slow, dusty travel, starting early and arriving late, with
a few minutes or hours at each "sight" for the soiled and exhausted
traveller to gape in ignorant wonder, watch in hand.
To-day one travels swiftly and comfortably in entire leisure, stopping
at hotels or camps as he pleases, and staying at each as long as he
likes. The runs between the lingering places are now a pleasure. If
hurried, one can now accomplish the stage-coach trip of the past in two
days, while the old six and a half days now means a leisurely and
delightful visit.
With the new order of travel began a new conception of the
Yellowstone's public usefulness. It ceased to be a museum of wonders and
began to be a summer pleasure-ground. Instead of the fast
automobile-stage decreasing the average length of visit, the new idea
which it embodied has lengthened it. This new idea is a natural
evolution which began with the automobile and spread rapidly. The
railroads had been bringing tourists principally on transcontinental
stop-overs. Automobiles brought people who came really to see the
Yellowstone, who stayed weeks at public camps to see it, or who brought
outfits and camped out among its spectacles. The first Ford which
entered the park on the morning of August 1, 1915, the day when private
cars were first admitted, so loaded with tenting and cooking utensils
that the occupants scarcely could be seen, was the herald of the new and
greater Yellowstone. Those who laughed and those who groaned at sight of
it, and there were both, were no seers; for that minute Yellowstone
entered upon her destiny.
The road scheme is simple and effective. From each entrance a road leads
into an oblong loop road enclosing the centre of the park and touching
the principal points of scenic interest. This loop is connected across
the middle for convenience. From it several short roads push out to
special spectacles, and a long road follows Lamar Creek through a
northeastern entrance to a mining town which has no other means of
communication with the world outside. This is the road to Specimen
Ridge with its thirteen engulfed forests, to the buffalo range, and,
outside the park boundaries, to the Grasshopper Glacier, in whose glassy
embrace may be seen millions of grasshoppers which have lain in very
cold storage indeed from an age before man. All are automobile roads.
II
The hot-water phenomena are scattered over a large area of the park. The
Mammoth Hot Springs at the northern entrance are the only active
examples of high terrace-building. The geysers are concentrated in three
adjoining groups upon the middle-west side. But hot springs occur
everywhere at widely separated points; a steam jet is seen emerging even
from the depths of the Grand Canyon a thousand feet below the rim.
The traveller is never long allowed to forget, in the silent beauty of
the supreme wilderness, the park's uncanny nature. Suddenly encountered
columns of steam rising from innocent meadows; occasional half-acres of
dead and discolored brush emerging from hot and yellow mud-holes within
the glowing forest heart; an unexpected roaring hillside running with
smoking water; irregular agitated pools of gray, pink, or yellow mud,
spitting, like a pot of porridge, explosive puffs of steam; the warm
vaporing of a shallow in a cold forest-bound lake; a continuous violent
bellowing from the depths of a ragged roadside hole which at intervals
vomits noisily quantities of thick brown and purple liquid; occasional
groups of richly colored hot springs in an acre or more of dull yellows,
the whole steaming vehemently and interchanging the pinks and blues of
its hot waters as the passing traveller changes his angle of
vision--these and other uncouth phenomena in wide variety and frequent
repetition enliven the tourist's way. They are more numerous in geyser
neighborhoods, but some of them are met singly, always with a little
shock of surprise, in every part of the park.
The terrace-building springs in the north of the park engulf trees. The
bulky growing mounds of white and gray deposit are edged with minutely
carven basins mounted upon elaborately fluted supports of ornate design,
over whose many-colored edges flows a shimmer of hot water. Basin rises
upon basin, tier upon tier, each in turn destined to clog and dry and
merge into the mass while new basins and new tiers form and grow and
glow awhile upon their outer flank. The material, of course, is
precipitated by the water when it emerges from the earth's hot interior.
The vivid yellows and pinks and blues in which these terraces clothe
themselves upon warm days result from minute vegetable algae which thrive
in the hot saturated lime-water but quickly die and fade to gray and
shining white on drying. The height of some of these shapeless masses of
terrace-built structures is surprising. But more surprising yet is the
vividness of color assumed by the limpid springs in certain lights and
at certain angles.
Climbing the terraces at the expense of wet feet, one stands upon
broad, white, and occasionally very damp plateaus which steam vigorously
in spots. These spots are irregularly circular and very shallow pools of
hot water, some of which bubble industriously with a low, pleasant hum.
They are not boiling springs; the bubbling is caused by escaping gases;
but their waters are extremely hot. The intense color of some of these
pools varies or disappears with the changing angle of vision; the water
itself is limpid.
Elsewhere throughout the park the innumerable hot springs seem to be
less charged with depositable matter; elsewhere they build no terraces,
but bubble joyously up through bowls often many feet in depth and
diameter. Often they are inspiringly beautiful. The blue Morning Glory
Spring is jewel-like rather than flower-like in its color quality, but
its bowl remarkably resembles the flower which gives it name. Most
springs are gloriously green. Some are the sources of considerable
streams. Some stir slightly with the feeling rather than the appearance
of life; others are perpetually agitated, several small springs
betraying their relationship to the geysers by a periodicity of
activity.
When the air is dry and the temperature low, the springs shoot thick
volumes of steam high in air. To the incomer by the north or west
entrance who has yet to see a geyser, the first view of the Lower Geyser
Basin brings a shock of astonishment no matter what his expectation. Let
us hope it is a cool, bracing, breezy morning when the broad yellow
plain emits hundreds of columns of heavy steam to unite in a
wind-tossed cloud overlying and setting off the uncanny spectacle.
Several geysers spout vehemently and one or more roaring vents bellow
like angry bulls in a nightmare. This is appropriately the introduction
to the greater geyser basins which lie near by upon the south.