felt the different spells exerted by mountain, lake and plain and
thought that he knew them all; yet here was something new. There was
a hush in the dim aisles of this mightiest of all forests, a reverent
silence rarely broken. It was so completely roofed over by the tufted
tops as to almost exclude the light. Even the night sounds were
subdued as if the wild things hesitated to raise their voices above the
softest croon and cheep necessary for communication among themselves.
Woodson some way disliked to shatter the silence with his voice and
when he spoke to his horses it was in the modulated tones one uses in
some ancient cathedral freighted with reverent memories.
After a year the call of the Yellowstone drew him on the back trail.
As he traveled he sometimes pondered about that mark he would make
for himself in the world. Yet there was no hurry. There was undreamed
plenty of everything in this land of his. One had but to choose
his course, dip in and help himself from the storehouse that was
inexhaustible,--Nature’s storehouse that replenished itself without
help. He reflected that ever since history began, this natural
reservoir had been refilled more rapidly than it could possibly be
depleted by man. A world of plenty; leather for all the world from the
buffalo of the plains; hardwood timber without end to the eastward;
free grass for fifty million cows; meat for the nation from the
antelope of the plains and the elk and mule deer of the hills; wealth
untold for those who would seek for it and burrow in the ground for
gold; and in this great untouched forest of the northwest coast was
enough lumber to roof the earth. He smiled and slapped the brown mare
on the neck as a whimsical thought crossed his mind.
“She didn’t forget a thing,” he said. “She didn’t leave one thing out.
There’s enough of everything to go round and a lot to spare. Back in
the Yellowstone, where we’re headed for, there’s enough natural and
unnatural wonders to entertain the people of the world. She didn’t even
leave that out--plenty of everything for us all.”
As he traveled eastward his desire to look again upon this best land of
all increased and he made longer packs. Soon it was rumored that the
lone wanderer, for so long a part of the Park, had returned to roam
once more in the hills of the Yellowstone. He knew the valleys of warm
springs where his horses might winter while others were forced to drive
their stock to the lower country. He prospected far and wide in summer
but always he came back to winter within the limits of his own estate.
After a lapse of perhaps fifteen years since Woodson and Old Tom had
quit the plains, a little pack train was seen winding down the east
slope of the hills. The man rode a bay mare that mothered a mare colt.
In the rear of the string still another bay mare, ancient and decrepit,
pensioned for long service and unburdened by a pack, trailed stiffly
after the rest. The man told those he met along the trails that he
was headed for the lower country to join a hide outfit for one last
buffalo-hunt on the plains. Men smiled at the naïve plans of this Rip
Van Winkle who had been asleep in the hills; for the buffalo was gone.
Woodson knew that the men from his old outfit--Hanson, Cleve, McCann
and all the rest--would be wherever the most of the shaggy beasts had
congregated for the southward drift of fall. But when he made inquiry
he found that their names were unknown to the present-day dwellers of
the foothills. Men told him that the buffalo was no more. That the
last of them had been killed off to make room for the settler’s cows.
As he traveled east he experienced a series of surprises. Stockmen’s
cabins showed at every water hole where, but a few years past, there
had been no human habitation within two hundred miles. All this was as
it should be, he reflected; a wild country tamed and made habitable
for man. It was clear that the buffalo had to go to make room for the
cows. But the job had certainly been sweeping and thorough. He crossed
vast stretches where domestic stock had not yet arrived but the way
had been paved for them years in advance of their coming, for not a
single buffalo track could he find. Little towns had sprung up with
amazing rapidity. Out in the long desolate stretch between Lander and
Rawlins he covered forty-two miles unmarked by a water hole, an arid
region where domestic stock could not live but where the buffalo might
have ranged in thousands; but here too they had been wiped out to the
last hoof. It came to him that he knew of enough waste areas, as yet
untouched by cows, to support a half-million head of buffalo. They
would have constituted a source of revenue for many years to come. Men
spoke vaguely of the “lost herd” that lived in some unknown spot and
would one day repopulate these waste stretches with buffalo. Woodson
could see that all this development was for the best; there were now
homes where no homes stood before. But a vague uneasiness assailed
him, a sense of something gone amiss with a popular idol. Some way it
seemed that he had been warned of this. Some forgotten prophecy welled
up out of the past to clamor for expression at the threshold of his
consciousness. It troubled him that he should not quite place the thing
and he attempted to shake it off.
He left his horses with a cowman and held on to the east. The old
trails where once the prairie schooners and the oxbows had wound
interminably to the far horizon were no longer traveled. Steel rails
stretched away in their stead; and the creak of wheels and leather and
the bawls of plodding oxen,--all these were replaced by the rattle and
roar of freight cars and the screech of the locomotives’ whistles; city
streets wound where there had been naught but dog towns on blistering
flats.
Truly development was wonderful and he rejoiced with the rest over this
sweeping transformation, the swiftest and most complete reclamation in
the history of the world. But again the still small voice assailed him
from within and whispered that a good and worthy job had been just a
trifle too well done.
A cold fall storm was driving down from the north and overtook him in
the salt-marsh country of Western Kansas. The water-fowl scurried ahead
of it. Every pond and slough, each broad prairie lake and marshy bottom
was covered with members of the feathered horde en route to the winter
quarters on the Gulf. Flock followed flock in an endless procession,
streaking the sky. The prairies were covered with feeding geese. Great
white cranes stalked majestically in the open flats, traveling in
bands of hundreds, and at night the wild whoops of overhead squadrons
almost drowned the clamor of oncoming hordes of geese. This evidence of
abundance cheered him. He estimated that he saw over a million birds a
day; and he reflected that everywhere east and west of him this great
migration was going on; the east coast and the west, the Mississippi
flyway and the course of every inland river; all were experiencing this
same deluge of birds headed into the south. Nowhere had he seen so much
bird life except during the pigeon flights in the hardwood country
of his boyhood home. There he had seen the skies blackened with wild
pigeons, had seen limbs broken from the trees by the sheer weight of
thousands of roosting birds. The shock of finding the buffalo gone from
the plains in a few short years was counteracted by this fresh evidence
of plenty.
It was in Dodge that his trail crossed that of Hanson, a man from his
old outfit. Hanson, with a younger man named Rice, was hunting antelope
for the hides. The two spoke of old friends. Cleve had gone to the
lumber camps of the northwest coast, Hanson informed, and McCann to
the hardwood belt to the east. They had quit the hunting. Antelope
were fleet and it was difficult to stalk them in the flats. Hanson had
known the time when all hands might kill and skin an average of twenty
buffalo to the man each day. He now lamented the necessity of hunting
the wary pronghorn for less than a dollar a hide. A man was doing well
to average four a day.
“The old days are gone,” he said. “Things are different now. It’s hard
pickings for a man to make a living in times like these.”
But Rice looked forth on the world with the optimism of youth. It was
a land of plenty in which he lived. He had planned a hunt in the hills
of Western Colorado and urged Woodson to throw in with them.
“There’s millions of deer up there,” he said. “They’re paying three
dollars apiece for venison saddles at the mines. I’ve seen ten thousand
mule deer boiling through the passes, all in sight at once, when they
gathered from the Gore Range and the Rabbit Ear to drift down to
the Oak Hills for the winter. There’s deer without end. I hunted up
there last year. We loaded thirty four-horse freight-wagons with deer
saddles, high as we could lash ’em on, all from a two-day kill in one
pass as they came streaming down, a thousand to the band. There’s good
money in meat-hunting for the mines. You better throw in with us, Mart,
and come along.”
They urged their case but Woodson would not join. The rapidity with
which old conditions had slipped past him filled him with a sense
of bewilderment. He could not get his start, as he had intended, by
hide-hunting on the plains. That day had gone, and some way he could
see no future in hunting deer to supply Denver and the Colorado mining
towns with meat. Perhaps he would better go to the lumber camps, either
east or west, and take up that end. There was more permanency to that.
He could not make up his mind and decided at last to go back to the
quiet hills of the Yellowstone for one final look around while making
his decision.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Platte and Missouri Rivers. The expedition started May 14th.
[2] To Washington.
[3] The organization was military.
[4] Forty-one men, full musters.
[5] A small cannon.
[6] Concerning this great race for life, it may appear impossible to
some for a human being to accomplish such a feat. Those who survive of
Sublet’s company, and who know the distances from point to point of my
celebrated race, will please to correct me publicly if I am in error in
the distance. I have known instances of Indian runners accomplishing
more than one hundred and ten miles in one day.
[7] This is Captain Jim Bridger, a celebrated Western character who
figures in “A Frontier Duel.”
[8] Beckwourth had lived in the wilds for several years and might
easily have been mistaken for an Indian.--EDITOR.
[9] Beckwourth left the Crows several years afterwards and lived for
many years in California, where he was a celebrated character.--EDITOR.
[10] Kit Carson, the celebrated scout.
[11] Copyright, 1914, 1920, by Grace P. Coffin.
[12] Copyright, 1922, by Emerson Hough. Copyright, 1922, by the Curtis
Publishing Co.
[13] Named for the celebrated Parker House in Boston.
[14] Copyright, 1914, by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
[15] Copyright, 1899, by Bret Harte.
[16] “Ole Ephraim” is the mountain-man’s _sobriquet_ for the grizzly
bear.
[17] I have frequently heard this legend from Gentiles, never from
Mormons; yet even the Saints own that as early as 1842 visions of the
mountains and kanyons, the valley and the lake, were revealed to Mr.
Joseph Smith, jun., who declared it privily to the disciples whom he
loved. Thus Messrs. O. Pratt and E. Snow, apostles, were enabled to
recognize the Promised Land, as, the first of the pioneers, they issued
from the ravines of the Wasach. Of course the Gentiles declare that the
exodists hit upon the valley by the purest chance. The spot is becoming
classical: here Judge and Apostle Phelps preached his “Sermon on the
Mount,” which, anti-Mormons say, was a curious contrast to the first
discourse so named.
[18] I subjoin one of the promising sort of advertisements:
“Tom Mitchell!!! dispenses comfort to the weary (!), feeds the hungry
(!!), and cheers the gloomy (!!!), at his old, well-known stand,
thirteen miles east of Fort Des Moines. _Don’t pass by me._”
[19] Poole--the celebrated London tailor.
[20] Alluding to one Thos. H. Ferguson, a Gentile; he killed, on Sept.
17th, 1859, in a drunken moment, A. Carpenter, who kept a boot and
shoe store. Judge Sinclair, according to the Mormons, was exceedingly
anxious that somebody should be _sus. per coll._, and, although
intoxication is usually admitted as a plea in the Western States, he
ignored it, and hanged the man on Sunday. Mr. Ferguson was executed in
a place behind the city; he appeared costumed in a Robin Hood style,
and complained bitterly to the Mormon troops, who were drawn out, that
his request to be shot had not been granted.
[21] Copyright, 1890, by Nathaniel P. Langford. Copyright, 1912, by A.
C. McClurg & Co.
[22] Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by
Sheldon & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress.
[23] Copyright, 1871, 1899, by the American Publishing Company.
Copyright, 1899, by Samuel L. Clemens. Copyright, 1913, by Clara
Gabrilowitsch.
[24] “The Vigilantes of Montana,” by Prof. Thos. J. Dimsdale.
[25] Copyright, 1885, by David McKay.
[26] Copyright, 1891, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[27] Copyright, 1880, by Harper and Brothers.
[28] Copyright, 1895, by Harper and Brothers. Copyright, 1923, by Owen
Wister.
[29] Copyright, 1909, by Hamlin Garland.
[30] Copyright, 1886 and 1914, by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
[31] Copyright, 1921, by Little, Brown, and Company.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.