to the Car Window and Reach the Rocky Mountains
Neither Tom nor Joe had ever been West before, even as far as Chicago.
As soon as they had changed cars to the through train, not far from
their home town, each armed with a ticket about a yard and a half long,
and got settled in their seats in the sleeping car, they glued
themselves to the windows, and watched the country. There was something
new to see every minute--the Berkshire Hills, the Hudson River at
Albany, the great factories at Schenectady, the Mohawk River and the
Erie Canal, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo. They slept soundly that
night, and woke up as they were passing along the southern shore of Lake
Michigan. In Chicago they had to change cars again, to another station,
and they had time, after seeing that their baggage was transferred, to
walk around a little, among the high buildings, and out to the lake
front.
"It's an awful dirty place, strikes me," said Joe. "All the buildings
look as if somebody had spilled soot over 'em."
"I guess somebody has," Tom answered. "I guess they burn soft coal here.
The air's full of it. Wait till we get to the Rockies, though; there's
the air!"
The trip from Chicago to St. Paul was even more interesting than the
first stage, because after a while the train followed the bank of the
Mississippi River (the scouts had a railroad folder with a map spread
out in their seat, to see where they were every minute), and there was
something thrilling to both of them about the first sight of the great
river, which they had heard about all their lives.
"Say, it's yellow, all right," Joe exclaimed. "I'd rather go swimming in
our old hole back home, I guess. It ain't so awful big, either."
"Not way up here. We're a thousand miles from the mouth. But you'd
better not try to jump it, even here--not till you get well," Tom
laughed.
At St. Paul they changed once more, for the final train, the
trans-continental limited which would take them right through to the
Park.
"Golly, we won't see any of Minnesota," Tom complained. "It'll be dark
while we go through that. And look at all those lakes we pass." He
pointed to the map.
"Well, there has to be night as well as day out here, just like home. I
guess we can't do anything about it," said Joe. "I'm kind o' glad to
sleep, at that."
"Poor old Joe, I forget you get tired," Tom cried, penitently. "Seems to
me I _never_ want to go to sleep, with so much to see!"
"Oh, I'm not tired any more,--just sleepy," Joe said, bravely. But Tom
saw he was tired, and called the porter to make up the berths.
They woke up in the prairie country of North Dakota--or, rather, Spider
did. He was sleeping in the upper berth, of course, so Joe could have
all the air possible, and he climbed down as quietly as he could and
went into the observation car to see where they were. It was bright
sunlight, almost as it would be at home at eight o'clock, yet his watch
told him it was only a little after four. He looked out of the window on
a strange land--on the prairies about which he had read all his life and
never seen before. He had been disappointed in the Mississippi River,
but there was no disappointment here. They were more wonderful than he
had ever dreamed--just one endless green sea of growing wheat stretching
to the horizon, without a hill or a valley, as flat as the floor of the
ocean. Indeed, they looked like a green ocean, with the small houses,
the big red barns and silos, the little groves of trees behind the barns
for a windbreak, rising like islands every mile or so. The whole world
here seemed to be grain. Everything was under cultivation, there were no
trees at all except the groves planted beside the farmhouses, mile after
mile as far as the eye could see to the far horizon rolled the sea of
young wheat, or else the golden stubble where the winter crop had been
harvested.
For the first time, Tom understood what men mean when they speak of "the
great wheat fields of the West," for the first time he realized the
bigness of America. He wanted to go wake Joe at once, and if Joe hadn't
been sick, he certainly would have done so. As it was, he let him sleep
till six, and then he couldn't stand it any longer, and shook him awake.
"Joe! we're on the prairie!" he cried.
All that day, mile after mile, they traveled through the wheat, with
never a break in the vast monotony of the level land, the endless
procession of houses and barns far off, like islands in the green sea.
The sun did not set till late, and even at nine o'clock they could read
on the back platform of the observation car, as the prairie turned
dusky, and in the west the lingering sunset was like a sunset over the
sea.
"My, it's been a wonderful day!" Joe sighed, as they went to bed. "I
feel as if I'd just been soaked in _bigness_. I guess the Rockies aren't
any bigger than these prairies. But what gets me, though, is how the
kids here go sliding in winter."
A man on the platform beside them laughed.
"Say, I never saw a toboggan till I went East after I was twenty-one
years old," he said. "But I've seen some drifts that were twenty feet
high, and that's quite a hill for us."
The next morning Tom again was the first awake, and he hurried out to
see the prairie once more--but there was no prairie. The world looked
exactly as if there had come a great wind or earthquake in the night and
kicked the calm prairie sea up into waves. There were still no trees,
only a great expanse of grayish grass and wild flowers, but you couldn't
see far from the train in any direction, because the land was so cut up
with the billows, little rounded hills and earth waves maybe fifty feet
high. This was the cattle country now, and every little while a rough
log cabin and log stables, half dug out of the side of a bank, would
appear beside the track, and there would be cattle and horses grazing
over the slopes. Again Spider waked Joe, and they watched for a cowboy,
but none appeared.
As they were eating an early breakfast, the train seemed to be running
into more level prairie country again, though it never settled back into
the really flat prairies. Presently they stopped at a little town, with
a single street of low wooden and brick stores and houses, and no trees,
and the two scouts got out to stretch their legs. The first thing they
saw as they alighted was a cowboy! Clad in a flannel shirt, with big
black fur chaps down his legs and a wide-brimmed felt hat mysteriously
sticking on his head, he came dashing up about a mile a minute, kicking
up a tremendous dust, and pulling his horse down with a quick sweep that
stopped him exactly against the platform. The boys were so interested in
him that it was not till they were getting aboard again, at the
conductor's shout, that Joe looked to the west, and cried, "Spider,
quick! Look there!"
Tom followed his finger, and, lo! there they were, the Rocky Mountains!
As far to the north, as far to the south, as the eye could see stretched
the great, blue procession of towering peaks, dazzling white with great
patches of snow on summits and shoulders, and seemingly only a few miles
away.
"And we could have seen 'em _hours_ ago, if we'd only been looking
ahead," Joe complained, as they took their seats on the observation
platform. "They can't be more'n ten miles off now."
A big, heavy man who was sitting there laughed loudly.
"Guess you ain't never been out here before, have you?" he asked.
"No, we never have."
"Well, this train's making thirty miles an hour, and we got three hours
to go yet before we get to them hills," he went on. "You chaps remind me
of a story, about a friend o' mine who was prospectin' up here before
the government made a park out o' Glacier. An Englishman came along one
day, and he started out to walk to the base o' one o' them mountains
before breakfast, so my friend, bein' just naturally curious, allowed
he'd go along too. Fust, though, he sneaked out and got a bite o' grub.
Well, they walked and walked till along about ten o'clock, and the
mountain not gettin' any nearer. By'mby they come to a brook a baby
could have jumped, and the Englishman started to peel off his clothes.
"'What in blazes be you goin' to do?' asked my friend.
"'Well,' said the bally Britisher, 'that _looks_ like a brook, but I
ain't taking no chances.'"
Tom and Joe laughed.
"I've always heard you could see awfully plain out here," said Tom. "It
must bother you at first sighting a gun."
"I reckon it does bother a stranger. I seen fellers sight for a goat at
four hundred yards, when he was a clean eight hundred, and kick up the
dust on the rocks twenty feet below him."
"Have you hunted goats?" the boys demanded.
"What I've not hunted, _ain't_," said the man. "I don't know what folks
want goats for, though. They're the hardest work to get, and no good
when you get 'em. A bighorn, now!"
"What's a bighorn?" asked Joe.
The man looked at him in profound surprise. "By glory, don't you know
what a bighorn is?" he demanded. "Where do you come from, anyhow? A
bighorn's a Rocky Mountain sheep, the old ram of the flock, with horns
fifty inches long that curl around in a circle, and he's the handsomest,
finest, proudest lookin' critter God Almighty ever made. Wait till you
see one!"
"Do you think we can see one in the Park this summer?" the boys asked.
"If you climb up a cliff about seven thousand feet and make a noise like
a bunch o' grass, I reckon maybe you can," said the stranger.
The next three hours were about the longest the boys had ever spent.
They went back into the sleeper as soon as the berths were moved out of
the way and they could sit at the window, and with their faces glued to
the pane strained their eyes ahead to see the mountains. Whenever the
road made a curve, they could see them plainly, a vast, sawtooth range
of blue peaks, some of them sharp like pyramids, some of them rounded
into domes, marching down out of the north and stretching away to the
south as far as the eye could see. Not only were they bigger mountains
than the scouts had ever seen, even on a trip the year before to the
White Mountains in New Hampshire, but all over them, on their summits,
in great patches on their sides, sometimes quite covering an entire
peak, were great fields of snow. Here it was about the 4th of July, with
flowers blooming in the grass beside the track and a blazing hot sun in
the heavens--and the mountains just out there covered with vast fields
of snow!
"Gee, I wish the old engineer'd put on some steam!" sighed Joe.
"I wish he would," Tom answered. "But I guess that snow ain't all going
to melt before we get there. Say, Joe, why do you suppose that range
goes right up out of the prairie without any foot-hills? Remember, when
we went to the White Mountains we got into smaller mountains long before
we reached Washington? They went up like steps. But here the Rockies
just jump right up out of the plain."
"I don't know--wish I'd studied geology. Maybe the guy who had the
friend who walked with the Englishman can tell us."
Tom shook his head. "I have a hunch he knows more about goats than
geology," said he. "Maybe we can get a book at the Park."
The mountains were now getting perceptibly nearer. They were becoming
less blue, the snow showed more plainly on their sharp peaks and great
shoulders, and the boys began to pack up their handbags and get ready to
disembark.
Their rear-platform friend, coming through the car, stopped and laughed.
"Don't go trying to jump no brooks, now," he said.
"Sure--we'll throw a stone first," Spider answered. "Can you tell us why
the Rocky Mountains haven't any foot-hills?"
The stranger seemed to take this very seriously. "They did have once,"
said he, "but they was all dug away for the gold and copper."
Then he passed on, still laughing.
"He's a good scout," laughed Joe.
"But I'd hate to have him for a geology teacher," Tom answered.
The mountains didn't seem much nearer than they had looked for half an
hour when the train finally rolled up to the Glacier Park station and
stopped. The boys, together with several tourists, got off, and the
minute they stepped on the platform they felt how much cooler it was
than back in St. Paul, and how much purer the air.
"Take a big lungful, Joey," Tom cried. "This is the real old ozone!"
The station is at the gate of the mountains, where the railroad enters
the pass which takes it through the range. The mountains here do not
look very high, for you are so close under that you do not see much of
them. The boys looked up at a ragged wall to the north, covered first
with fir timber and then with snow patches on the reddish rocks. Behind
them to the east, they looked out over the rolling plains. Close by the
station was a big hotel, several stories high, but built entirely of
huge fir logs. Even the tall columns in front were single logs.
"I suppose I go up there and report," said Tom. "Let's see if our
baggage is all here, first"
They found the baggage on the platform, and set out for the hotel,
passing on the way an Indian tepee, with pictures painted on the
outside, and smoke ascending from the peak. This was the home of old
Chief Three Bears, the boys learned, a Blackfeet Indian who lives here
by the hotel in summer, and welcomes arriving guests. He was coming down
the path, in fact, as the boys walked up, a tall Indian, over six feet,
and looking taller still because of his great feathered head-dress. He
was very old, but still erect, though his face was covered all over with
tiny wrinkles.
The two scouts stopped and saluted him.
Old Three Bears smiled at them, and grunted, "Okeea" (with the accent on
the first syllable, and the _ee_ and _a_ sounds slid together). Then he
held his blanket around him with his left hand, and putting out his
right, solemnly shook both boys by their hands.
"Say, the old Chief's got a big fist, all right," said Joe, as they went
on. "I'll bet he was strong once."
"He must 'a' been good looking, too," said Tom. "I didn't know Indians
were so big and--and sort of noble looking."
They now entered the great lobby of the hotel, which, like the outside,
was all made of fir logs, with tremendous trunks, bark and all, used as
the columns clear to the fourth story. Hunting out the manager, they
learned that they were to take the motor bus for Many Glacier Hotel in
fifteen minutes, and they just had time to go to the news stand and
secure a government map of the Park and a government report about its
geology, before turning in their baggage checks and climbing aboard the
bus, a four-seated motor something like a "Seeing New York" automobile.
This bus was full, three on a seat, and a moment later the driver
cranked his engine, gave a toot on his horn, and they were off.