Yellowstone National Park, Canyon Hotel, August 16: We were not
disappointed in the weather today. A rarer Sunday morning never dawned,
not even in the mountains. There were still some remnant clouds in the
sky. Fortunately, too, these did not disappear entirely. All day bits
of fleecy clouds floated between the sun and the earth, not enough to
darken, but just enough for contrasts. The air was bracing and there
was plenty of it.
As usual, our coach led all the rest. Forty or fifty came trailing
behind. Every one was filled with persons in high glee and in great
expectations. The road was a winding one along the Yellowstone River,
up ridges and dipping down into hollows, with many a curve and a few
short angles, the rolling and tumbling river nearly always in sight.
The river is the outlet for the lake, or rather, the lake is but an
extension, in width, of the river, forming a large reservoir for
the waters from the mountains and from the springs, thus insuring a
constant flow for the river.
After leaving the lake, the waters in the river flow on as they do in
any other river, leisurely and calmly. The water is wonderfully clear,
coming from the snows in the mountains. The rocky bottoms of the river
are visible from the tops of the coaches and fishes may often be seen
swimming and darting about. Across the river there is a gradual ascent
of ground, until it forms a skyline of miniature mountain peaks. There
are vast mountain meadows clothed in grays and browns, autumn colors
mingled with the colors of the sage. It makes an indescribable color
and the effect of it also is an indescribable one. On our own side of
the river we are riding through endless beds of flowers, the kind of
beds that nature makes in a large and liberal country. Their colors
are blue and purple and red. Of mountain daisies, yellow flowers on
delicate stems, there are millions. The flowers alone would be worth
coming to see, to say nothing of the furzy mountain meadows, like vast
oriental rugs spread out by the hand of a generous God!
The water in the river is green, when it flows over beds of moss and
black and foreboding when it runs under the shadows of the overhanging
rocks. As we proceed on our journey, these projecting rocks become more
numerous. The banks gradually grow more precipitous and the channel,
narrower. The waters grow more disturbed. Signs of some impending
catastrophe to the river multiply. The waters now roll and surge. From
side to side they dash themselves against the rocks, filling the air
with a spray. The river becomes furious and it makes a great commotion.
Finally, in one great dash the waters rush over the upper falls, a
distance of one hundred and ten feet down. Then, imprisoned in a narrow
gorge, seething and foaming and roaring, they rush forward until they
come to the lower falls, where they make a spectacular descent of three
hundred and six feet, filling the air with foam and spray and the scene
with glory, all the way down. The whole thing is God-like, that is the
only phrase that can describe it. God-like in power, in beauty and in
majesty.
The lower falls is the beginning of the greater glory of the
Yellowstone river. At the bottom of the gorge the tumultuous waters
continue on their way, so far down that what is a river looks like
a yellow ribbon. From the river bed the gorge widens and makes the
magnificent spectacle of the Canyon of the Yellowstone river. If such a
gorge had been cut in the dullest stone, it would be an awe-inspiring
thing, but cut through rocks of the brightest hues the scene is
bewildering, amazing and enthralling. And the longer you look at it,
the more the wonder grows. What at first appears to be a wild riot of
colors, yellow predominating, becomes a fabric of the most delicate
colorings, blended as nature blends colors and softened as time softens
them. There is no color and no shade that is missing. There is as much
there as the eye has time or capacity to develop. No one has seen it
all, no one will ever see it all. Each man sees but a fraction and a
fragment of it. All the eyes of the world cast into one with all time
at its command could not exhaust the possibilities of the combinations
in forms and colors.
Here, I thought, is the one place where no traveler can be
disappointed, no dreamer disillusioned. Here the things that are, are
more than the things imagined. This is the transformation scene of
all the earth. This is the one great masterpiece in nature, perfect in
all its details, endless in all its combinations of colors and forms,
imposing in its grandeur. As I looked at it, I felt that nature had
nothing more to say to me and that in the way of scenery my heart had
nothing more to long for. Here is the throne of majesty in the temple
of the beautiful. With unuttered thoughts in his mind and unfinished
sentences on his lips, one must turn away from the Canyon of the
Yellowstone.
Monday morning, when we rode away from the scene, a dense fog hung
over the river. Others were coming where we were leaving. Our day’s
journey was back to the Mammoth Springs Hotel. For us the Park was a
finished book, however many the pages which we had skipped, and however
imperfectly we may have read the few passages that fell under our eyes.
Streams and meadows, cliffs and mountain peaks covered with snow, lined
the way outward bound, but it seemed to me that, somehow, the falling
of the waters and the glimmering of the colors of the Canyon, dimmed
all other things.
V
Seattle, Washington, August 19: After spending a few hours in
Livingston, which has a sightly location, at the mouth of a canyon and
in sight of a mountain on which the snow lies for ten months in the
year, we proceeded westward. From Montana we passed into Idaho, where
the tree butchers are cutting up the last remnants of the white pine.
It is, for the most part, a dreary country, where the timber has been
cut over and where forest fires have left masses of charred stumpage.
Waste everywhere and nothing but waste! The American lumberman in the
past has picked out the best and left the rest to the desolation that
follows the man with the axe and the torch. It has been the working out
of the practical American idea of getting the most money with the least
care about the future. It is pity and disgust and indignation that one
feels. But such are the ravages of commerce in a commercial era among
a commercial people.
The next day we reached Spokane, on the other side of the Rockies,
mistress of a vast industrial area, reaching up into the mountains on
one side, with their mines and their lumber, and stretching out over
the Washington wheat fields, on the other. A great city, the creation
of a few years, but to the casual traveler, more or less uninteresting,
broiling and sizzling in the August sun, treeless, for the most part,
and to that extent cheerless. But the volume of business transacted is
large and the business buildings are fine and the people, grown richer,
are building new houses and surrounding themselves with the luxuries
which American people everywhere seek after and prize.
Leaving Spokane, going westward, one enters the great wheat country, a
plateau lying between the Rocky Mountains and the coast ranges. Where
the railroads run, the country is more or less rough, with here and
there formations that suggest “bad lands,” but much of the country is
level and productive. It is a vast treeless region; rainless in summer.
The mercury rises as high as 100 in the night time. When the wind
blows, which it is apt to do, dust fills the air. Much of the soil
seems to be as fine as flour and very light when it is very dry. We
rode for hours without seeing a drop of water, in creek or lake. What a
precious thing water must be to the people--in summer time, when they
need it most! There are no homes in these wheat fields. Here and there
are scattered hovels which the sowers and the reapers use in their
seasons, but no permanent abodes. Wire fences are stretched across the
fields, far apart. How different it all is from the farming countries
of the Mississippi Valley, with their well fenced farms, the homes of
the farmers in the midst of groves and orchards and the grazing herds
of cattle and flocks of sheep. Here and there one saw a horseman riding
in a pillar of dust. The trails of dust one sees are the only evidences
of highways, or of travel. It is a great wheat producing country, when
it has been revived by the rains of winter, but the men who grow that
wheat ought to be well paid for their labors. It was night when we
reached the Columbia River, the mighty stream that wends across these
wheat fields, deep down in its channel, so deep that the use of its
waters for purposes of irrigation seems almost hopeless. The winds that
blow across the plateau may solve the question.
Seattle is a marvel in the way of city building. It is growing in every
direction and in every way. Located on a great inland sea, in sight of
the mountains and blest with a climate of wonderful evenness, at the
end of the great transcontinental railways and where the large vessels
are loaded and unloaded for the orient and the coastwise trade, the
destiny of this city can hardly be overdrawn. Seattle has absorbed
the major energies of the American northwest. The men who founded the
city laid out its streets in almost impossible places, but modern
engineering is cutting down the hills and filling up the hollows. There
is no end to the enterprise of the people in these respects. Every
breath one breathes in Seattle is a city breath. Men from the prairies
of Iowa have become city builders in Seattle. Industrial reverses may
overtake them, they likely will, and their winters are said to be
atrociously foggy and wet, but they are going to make Seattle a place
of which all Americans will be proud, one of the great commercial
cities of the Pacific Ocean.