ON NATIONAL PARKS AND GUIDES
Nothing fit to print can be said of the Yellowstone Trail, advertised
by various and sundry people as a “good road all the way,” with the
freedom people take with other people’s axles. Here and there are
smooth patches, but they failed to atone for the viciousness of the
greater part of the route from Salt Lake City to the Park. Some of it
was merely annoying, but there were places where we had to keep our
wits about us every moment, and had we met another car, so narrow and
tortuous and hilly were the last few miles, we should have come to an
eternal deadlock. We had for consolation a view of some lovely lakes
grown about with great pines, and in the open stretches, a long view
of the great saw-toothed Tetons sheltering Jackson’s Hole, that region
beloved of Jesse James before he encountered the “dirty little coward
who shot Mr. Howard.” All the sinister Robin Hoods of the West once
knew the supreme advantage of Jackson’s Hole as a place of temporary
withdrawal from the world when it became too much with them. Now it
is infested only by the “dude” sportsman, who has discovered its
loveliness without as yet spoiling it. A tempting sign-post pointed
an entrance to this paradise of mountains and lakes, but we had been
warned that the road there was far worse than the one we came over,
which was impossible, so we gritted our teeth, and went on to the Park.
I shall not attempt a description of Yellowstone Park, for the same
reason that I dodged the Grand Canyon, and because its bears, mudholes,
geysers, sulphur basins, lakes, Wiley camps, falls and dam, its famous
parti-colored canyon, its busses and Old Faithful were well known to
thousands long before I was born.
Yellowstone used to be known less attractively among the Indians by
the name of Stinking Waters. The park is still circled by a roundabout
trail, made by superstitious tribes, who refused to approach this
haunt of devils. Nobody who has stood on the seething ground of Norris
Basin, and watched its manifold evil spirits, hardly tethered, burst
forth and sullenly subside can fail to sympathize with the untutored
savage’s reaction. If we had not been taught a smattering of chemistry
and geology, we should undoubtedly feel as he did, and even in spite
of scientific explanations, the place seemed too personally malevolent
to be comfortable. Think of a God-fearing and devil-respecting mind
to whom science was unknown, looking on the terrors, the inexplicable
manifestations this Park contains for the first time!
I for one, who rap on wood and walk around ladders, would have ridden
a long way to avoid those powerful spirits. Yet some Indians boldly
hunted and trapped in what was once a most happy hunting ground. The
overland course of the buffalo lay through this Park, and wherever the
buffalo was, the Indian was sure to follow. Yellowstone was the refuge
of Chief Joseph, of the Nez Perces, in his resistance against Howard
and United States troops.
Everyone ought to see Yellowstone at least once. Nowhere else are so
many extraordinary freaks in so convenient and beautiful a setting.
The freaks leave you as bewildered as the Whatisit’s used to, in the
sideshows of your youth. Before the last paint pot and boiling spring
are investigated, the average tourist is in a state of bewildered
resentment at Nature for putting it over on him so frequently. Besides,
his feet ache, and he is stiff from climbing in and out that yellow bus.
Everyone ought to see Yellowstone at least twice. The second time he
will forget the freaks and geysers and busses running on schedule, and
go if possible in his own car, with his own horse, or on his own feet.
He will take his time on the Cody Trail, now I believe, a part of the
Park but until recently outside its limits. Here he will see what is
perhaps the most glorious natural scenery in Yellowstone, great pointed
needles rising from gigantic cliffs, deep ravines, and endless forests,
pretty little intervales and ideal camping and fishing nooks. Or
further in, beyond Mt. Washburn and the Tower Falls where comparatively
few go, he will find deep groves and gorgeous mountain scenery. Beyond
Yellowstone Lake he can penetrate to the benign Tetons walling the Park
to the southeast. He can take his own “grub” and horses, and lose sight
of hotels and schedules for a month, if he likes. He is not required,
as at Glacier, to hire a guide if he wishes to camp. Yellowstone’s
chief charm to me is not so much its beauty nor its wonders as that
it is, pre-eminently, the People’s Park. Founded the earliest of any
national park, when outdoor life was more of a novelty than it is
today, and far less organized a sport, it follows a _laisser aller_
course. And the people appreciate and make use of it. Whole families
camp from one end to the other of the Park, using its open-air ovens
to cook the fish which they catch in its lakes and streams. They
know far more of its charm than the tourists who buy their five-day
excursions from the railroads, and don’t move a hand to feed or convey
themselves from the time they enter at Gardiner to the time they leave
at Cody.
[Illustration: CAMPING NEAR YELLOWSTONE PARK.]
I have had experience both ways, once as a personally conducted tourist
and once as a human being. With our own car we covered the sight-seeing
far more easily and quickly than by bus, with the advantage of being
able to linger as long as we pleased over the fascinating mudholes
blub-blubbing restfully by a tardily performing geyser, or in some
out-of-the-way forest where the tripper never drags his dusty feet.
Cars herd together in enticing groves, and their owners exchange
destinations and food and confidences about their offspring with an
unsuspiciousness lacking at the big hotels. Toby and I proved the
efficacy of the old adage about the early bird catching the worm, one
morning when we camped near the Great Falls. Our wide-awake neighbors
from the wide-awake West got up and caught the worms, then caught the
fish, while their slug-abed Eastern neighbors lay in their tents till
the sun was high. When we emerged, they presented us with their surplus
of four large trout, crisply fried in cornmeal and still piping hot.
The early bird has my sincere endorsement every time, so long as I do
not have to be one.
Still I think some improvements could be made in Yellowstone. I never
go there without getting completely exhausted chasing geysers,--rushing
from one which should have spouted but didn’t, in time to reach the
other end of the Park just too late to see another go off, only to
miss a magnificent eruption somewhere else. Or else I arrive, to learn
that some geyser which managed to keep its mouth shut for a decade went
off with a bang just yesterday, and another rare one is scheduled for
the week after I leave.
They really need a good young efficiency engineer to rearrange the
schedule of geysers according to location, so that one could progress
easily and naturally from one to the other. One first class geyser
should perform every day. Then the bears ought to be organized. You
are always meeting someone who just saw the cutest little black cub
down the road, but when you hurry back he has departed. So with the
grizzlies; they never come out to feed on the tempting hotel garbage
the evenings you are in the neighborhood. Only Old Faithful keeps up
her performances every two hours, as if she realized that without her
sense of responsibility and system the Park would go all to pieces. But
you can’t work a willing geyser to death, which is what is happening to
Old Faithful. They ought to arrange to have some geyser with an easy
schedule,--say the one which goes off every twenty years,--stop loafing
on the job, and give Old Faithful a much deserved vacation.
[Illustration: GRAND CANYON, YELLOWSTONE PARK.]
Having “done” Yellowstone far more comfortably with the car in three
days than we could have in six without it, we left on the fourth day
for Glacier. The road improved vastly as we entered Montana. Both
the Red and Yellowstone Trails were well made and kept in excellent
condition. We skimmed over a beautiful country. Bold and free hills,
soft brown in color and the texture of velours spread below us. The
road curved just enough for combined beauty and safety, and was well
marked most of the way. We mistakenly chose the shorter route to
Glacier Park entrance, instead of taking the more roundabout but far
more beautiful drive through Kalispell. It is a mistake most motorists
make sooner or later, in the fever to save time. But to compensate
we had a glimpse of Browning, half Canadian, its streets full of
Indians, half-breeds and cowboys dressed almost as gayly as the redmen
and their squaws. Some garage helper there made the usual mistake of
saying “left” and pointing right, with the result that our prairie
road suddenly vanished and we were left in the midst of a ploughed
track which had not yet fulfilled its intention of becoming a road.
For the next twelve miles to the Park we went through wild gyrations,
now leaping stumps, now dropping a clear two feet or more, or tilting
above a deep furrow or a tangle of roots. Once more we marveled at the
enduring powers of the staunch old lady.
Glacier Park is not primarily a motorist’s park, as is Yellowstone. An
excellent highway runs outside the Park along the range of bold peaks
that guard the Blackfeet reservation, and an interior road connects the
entrance with St. Mary’s Lake and Many Glaciers, the radiating point
for most of the trail rides. To run a machine past these barriers of
solid peaks would be nearly impossible, yet there are still extensions
of the mileage of motoring roads which can and probably will be made.
Tourists with their own cars can do as we did, cover what roads are
already accessible, then leave their car at Many Glaciers. There they
can take the many trail trips, either afoot or on horseback, over the
glorious passes from which the whole world may be seen; climb ridges
and cross mountain brooks, ice cold from melting glaciers; or look
down from Gunsight or Grinnell or Mt. Henry into passes where chain
after chain of exquisite lakes lie half a mile below.
Nowhere else have I seen such a wilderness of various kinds of beauty,
dizzy ravines and dainty nooks, peaks and precipices with a hundred
feet of snow and unmelted ice packed about them, and the other side
of the mountain glowing with dog-tooth violets, or blue with acres
of forget-me-nots. Fuzzy white-topped Indian plumes border the snow.
Icebergs float on lakes just beyond them. Mountain goats make white
specks far up a wall of granite, and deer cross one’s path in the
lowlands, which are a tangle of vines and flowers in the midst of pine
forests. Over a narrow ridge dividing two valleys, each linking lakes
till they fade into the blue of hill and sky, we ride to an idyllic
pasture surrounded by mountain peaks, for nowhere in the Park, again
unlike Yellowstone, can you go without being in the shadow of some
benign giant. There is, as the parched Arizonans say, “a world of
water,”--little trickles of streams far up toward the sky, melting from
æon-old glaciers which freeze again above them; roaring swashbuckling
rivers and cascades, such as you see near Going-to-the-Sun, and
the double falls of Two Medicine; placid sun-flecked little pools,
reflecting only the woods, broad lakes black as night, mirroring every
ripple and stir above them, lakes so cold you freeze before you can
wade out far enough to swim, yet full of trout; and belting the whole
park, a chain of long lakes and quiet rivers.
[Illustration: GLACIER PARK, MONTANA. You can go nowhere in the park
without being in the shadow of some benign giant.]
The center of the Park is the corral in front of the big hotel at Many
Glaciers, where Lake McDermott mirrors a dozen mountains. From this
point trails radiate in all directions, varying in length from three
hours to three days.
Nature is nowhere more fresh and delightful than when seen from the
trails of Glacier Park,--and as for human nature! I don’t know which is
more engrossing,--the tourist or the guides. Personally I lean toward
the guides, for the subtler flavor of personality is theirs. They can
be unconsciously funny without being ridiculous, which the tourist
cannot be. And they have an element of romance, real or carelessly
cultivated, which no tourist has to any other tourist. What each thinks
of the other you hear expressed now and then.
“You mightn’t think it, but some of those chaps are pretty bright,”
said a lecturer of a Middle Western circuit to me, as he tried to mount
his horse from the right.
“They sent us over that trail with a dozen empties and twenty head of
tourists,” I heard one guide tell another, with an unconsciousness that
cut deep.
Every morning at eight the riderless horses come galloping down the
road to Many Glaciers, urged on by a guide whose feelings, judging by
his riding, seem to be at a boiling point. In a half hour the tourists
straggle out, some in formal riding clothes, some in very informal
ones, and some dressed as they think the West expects every man to
dress. The assembled guides with wary glances “take stock” of their
day’s “outfit,”--always a gamble. With uncanny instinct they sort the
experienced riders from the “doods” and lead each to his appropriate
mount. These indifferent looking, lean, swarthy men sit huddled on
the corral rail, and exchange quiet monosyllables which would mean
nothing to the “dood” if he could overhear. With their tabloid lingo
they could talk about you to your face,--though most of them are too
well-mannered,--and from their gravely courteous words you would never
suspect it. Guides are past masters of overtones. Their wit is seldom
gay and robust,--always gently ironic.
I saw a very stout lady go through the Great Adventure of mounting,
plunging forward violently and throwing her right leg forward over the
pommel. It was a masterly effort which her guide watched with impassive
face, encouraging her at the finish with a gently whispered, “Fine,
lady! And next time I bet you could do it even better by throwing your
leg backwards.”
He was the same one who soothed a nervous and inexperienced rider who
dreaded the terrors of Swiftcurrent Pass.
“Now, lady, just hang your reins over the horn, and leave it to the
horse.”
“Heavens,” she replied, “will he go down that terrible trail all alone?”
“Oh, no, lady. He’ll take you right along with him.”
There is always one tourist whose tardiness holds up the party, and one
morning it chanced I was that one. The guide--it was Bill--handed me
my reins and adjusted my stirrups with a with-holding air. As we rode
up Gunsight, I heard him humming a little tune. A word now and then
whetted my curiosity.
“What are you singing, Bill?” All guides have monosyllabic names, as
Ed, Mike, Jack, Cal, and Tex.
Very impersonally Bill repeated the song in a cracked tenor:
“I wrangled my horses, was feelin’ fine,
Couldn’t git my doods up till half past nine.
I didn’t cuss, and I didn’t yell,
But we lit up the trail like a bat out of hell.”
“A very nice song, Bill. Did you compose it yourself?”
“No, ma’am. It’s just a song.”
They have a way of taking their revenge, neat and bloodless, but your
head comes off in their hand just the same. Bill had a honeymoon couple
going to Sperry, and taking a dislike to the groom, whom he thought
“too fresh,” he placed him at the tail of the queue, and the bride, who
was pretty, behind himself. The sight of Bill chatting gaily with his
bride of a day, and his bride chatting gaily with Bill, became more
than the groom could bear, and in spite of resentful glances from those
he edged past on the narrow trail, he worked his way patiently up to a
position behind the bride, only to receive a cold glare from Bill, and
the words, “Against the rules of the Park to change places in line,
Mister.” Bill was not usually so punctilious about Park rules, but the
groom did not know this, and suffered Bill to dismount and lead his
horse back to the rear, after which he returned to his conversation
with the pretty bride. This play continued throughout the day with no
change of expression or loss of patience on the part of Bill. Glacier
Park is no place to go on a honeymoon.
At Glacier, society has no distinctions, but it has three
divisions,--excluding, of course, the Blackfeet Indians to whom the
Park originally belonged. They are the “doods,” the guides, and the
“hash-slingers.” Each guide, as he slants lop-sidedly over a mile
deep cut-bank keeps a pleased eye on some lithe figure in the neatest
of boots and Norfolk coats, whom he has picked for his “dood girl.”
He favors her with a drink from his canteen, long anecdotes about his
“hoss,” or if he is hard hit and she is a good rider, with offers of a
ride on his “top-hoss.” But when he has helped his tourists dismount,
limping and sore at the foot of a twenty mile descent, he gallops his
string of “empties” to the corral, and in half an hour is seen roping
some dainty maiden in Swiss costume,--playing his tinkling notes on the
Eternal Triangle.
When they do cast an eye in your direction it is something to remember.
There was Tex,--or was his name Sam?--who took us up to Iceberg. He
never looked back at us, nor showed any of the kittenishness common
to the male at such moments, but every five minutes issued a solitary
sentence, impersonal and, like a jigsaw puzzle, meaningless until put
together.
“I never had no girl.”
We turned three switchbacks.
“Don’t suppose no girl would ever look at me.”
Five minutes passed. He looked over the ears of his roan top-horse.
“I got a little hoss home I gentled. She was a wild hoss, and only me
could ride her. But I rode her good.”
He stopped to lengthen a tourist’s stirrups, and mounted again.
“I got a silver-mounted bridle cost $500 when it was new. I bought it
cheap. Has one of those here monograms on it, J. W. and two silver
hearts.”
“Are they your initials?”
“No, ma’am. They stood for something else--George Washington maybe.”
A pause. “I taught that little pony of mine to do tricks.”
A momentous pause. “If I had a girl I liked real good, I’d give her
that hoss and saddle.”
We had nearly reached the top of the trail.
“I’d kinder like an Eastern girl that could ride a hoss good.”
And then the approach direct.
“Onct I had a diamond neck pin. I aint got it now. I pawned it. But I
got a picter of myself wearin’ that pin you could have.”
That night, he sauntered to the hotel, and leaned against the door, and
looked at the moon, which was full.
“A great night,” he said. And a pause. “One of these here nights when a
feller just feels like----”
I thought he had stopped, but sometime later he resumed, still
regarding the moon.
“Like kinder spoonin’.”
[Illustration: BLACKFEET INDIANS AT GLACIER PARK, MONTANA.]
But it takes a moon to bring out the softer side of the guide nature,
and they waste little time in thoughts of “kinder spoonin’” when they
have a party on a difficult trail. There they are nurse-maids, advisers
and grooms, entertainers and disciplinarians, all in an outwardly
casual manner. As they swing in their saddles up the trail, what they
are thinking has much to do with whom they are guiding. We saw all
kinds of “doods” while at Glacier, and some would have driven me mad,
but I never yet saw a guide lose his temper.
“Honest,” confided Johnson,--Johnson is an old timer who limps from an
ancient quarrel with a grizzly, and wears overalls and twisted braces
and humps together in the saddle,--“honest, there’s some of them you
couldn’t suit not if you had the prettiest pair of wings ever was.”
There was the gentleman who appeared in very loud chaps and bandana
and showed his knowledge of western life, regardless of the fact that
Toby’s horse and mine just behind him were showing a tendency to buck,
by shouting, “Hi-yi” and bringing down his Stetson with a bang on the
neck of the spiritless hack the guides had sardonically bestowed on him.
There was the fond mother who held up the whole party to Logan Pass
while she pleaded with her twelve-year-old son to wear one of her
veils to keep off the flies. Poor little chap! His red face showed the
tortures he endured, and the guide turned away and pretended not to
hear.
There was the old lady and her spinster daughter from Philadelphia
who took a special camping trip high into the mountains where crystal
streams start from their parent glaciers, and insisted on the guide
boiling every drop of water before they would drink it. And when they
left they sent all the saddle bags to be dry cleaned, thereby ruining
them.
There was also Mr. Legion, who had never been on a horse before, who
complained all the twenty-six miles up and down hill that his stirrups
were too long, and too short, that his horse wouldn’t go, and that
he jolted when he trotted, that the saddle was too hard and that the
guide went so fast nobody could keep up with him. It was Mrs. Legion
who got dizzy at the steep places and stopped the procession on the
worst switchback while she got off and walked, or insisted on taking
her eight-year-old child along, and then frightened both the child
and herself into hysteria when they gazed down on those lake-threaded
valleys straight beneath them.
There was the lady who took a walk up a tangled mountain-side to pick
flowers, and got lost and kept the whole outfit hunting for her an
entire night.
But there were many as well who were good-natured and good sports,
whether they had little or much experience in riding and roughing
it,--many who acquired here a life-long habit for outdoors.
Having seen all these sorts and conditions of “doods,” we tried not to
be vain when Bill introduced us to his friend Curly in these words. The
fact that Bill had visited Lewis’, the only place in the Park where
there was a saloon, had no effect on our pride, for Bill had tightly
kept his opinion to himself, heretofore, and _in vino veritas_.
“Girls,” he said from his horse, his dignity not a whit impaired
because of the purple neck-handkerchief pinned to his Stetson, because
“the boys said I didn’t look quite wild enough,”----“Girls, this is
Curly. Curly, this is the girls. You’ll like them, Curly, they aint
helpless!”
Praise is as sweet to me as to most, but those words of Bill’s, even
with the evidence of the bandana, meant more than the wildest flattery.
Of all the “dood-wranglers” in the Park, Bill was possessed of the
most whimsical personality. He had been our guide several summers ago,
the year the draft bill was passed. Bill always spoke in a slow drawl,
his words, unhurried and ceaseless, forming into an unconscious blank
verse frequently at odd variance with their import. Could Edgar Lee
Masters do better than this?
“I had a legacy from my uncle,
The only one in the fam’ly had money.
They quarreled over the will.
When I got my share
It was just eighty dollars.
I bought me a saddle with it,
Then I got gamblin’,----
Pawned the saddle,
Tore up the tickets
And throwed them away.”
“I was never in jail but onct,” he told us, rather surprised at his own
restraint, “and then I was drunk. I was feelin’ fine,--rode my hoss on
the sidewalk, shot off my gun and got ten days. Was you ever drunk?
No? Well, beer’s all right if you want a drink, but if you want to get
drunk, try champagne. You take it one day, and rense out your mouth the
next, and you’re as drunk as you were the night before.”
When the draft came, no high sentiments of patriotism flowed in vers
libre from Bill’s lips.
“There’s places in the Grand Canyon I know of where I reckon I could
hide out, and no draft officer could find me till the war was over,” he
declared. “I’d rather be a live coward than a dead hero any day.”
But he went, and of course was drafted into the infantry, he who
saddled his horse to cross the street, and who had said earnestly,
“Girls, if you want to make a cow-puncher sore, set him afoot.” Like
several other of his “doods” who had witnessed the tragedy of his being
drafted, when he went about with lugubrious forebodings and refused
to be cheered, I sent him a sweater, and received promptly a letter of
thanks.
“I thought everybody had forgotten me, judging by my feelings. I am
the worst disgusted cowboy that ever existed. Existed is right at the
present. This is no life for a cowboy that has been used to doing as he
pleases. Here you do as they please. They keep me walking all day long.
They ball me out, and make me like it. I dassent fight and they wont
let me leave. Say--what complexion is butter? I aint seen any sense
I left Glacier. I’ve eat macaroni till I look like a Dago and canned
sammin till I dassent cover up my head at night for fear I would smell
my own breath. If this training camp don’t kill me there will be no
chance for the Germans, but I’d sooner a German would get me than die
by inches in this here sheep corral.”
When Toby and I reached the Park, I inquired for Bill from one of his
buddies who was a guide that year, and learned that his fortunes had
mended from this peak of depression. He had been transferred to the
remount department, and when a mule broke his arm his homesickness
departed, and he was filled with content. He even clamored to be sent
over to “scalp a few Huns.”
“He did things anyone else would be court-martialed for,” his buddy
related, “but Bill always had an alibi. When we were ordered out on a
hike, Bill would go along, taking pains to march on the outside. When
we came to a culvert, he would drop over the edge, hide awhile and go
back to his bunk for the day. They never did find him out.
“The mud was a foot deep in the corral, and once when Bill was roping
a mule, the mule got away, dragging Bill after. He splashed in, and
when we see him again he was mud all over. And mad. The air was blue.
He rushed into the Major’s office just as he was. The Major was a stiff
old bird every one else was afraid of. But not Bill.
“‘Look at me,’ he sputtered. ‘Look at me!’ And then he swore some more.
‘Look at this new uniform!’
“‘What do you mean,’ says the Major, drawing himself up and gettin’ red
in the face. ‘Are you drunk?’
“‘No,’ says Bill, very innocent, ‘do I have to be drunk to talk to you?’
“But he got his new uniform. Any of the rest of us would have been
stood up against a wall at sunrise. Another time a consignment of shoes
came in that was meant for a race of giants. None of us could wear
them. Bill was awful proud of his feet, too. He swore he would get a
pair to fit. So he put his on, and went to see the Major.
“‘Look at these shoes,’ he says.
“‘They look all right to me,’ says the Major. ‘Seems like a pretty good
fit.’
“‘Yes, but see here,’ says Bill. And he took off the shoes, and there
was his other shoes underneath. He got a pair that fit, right away.
Nobody else did.”
Such initiative otherwise applied might well make a captain of industry
of him, were it not that Bill is typical of his kind, his creed “for
to admire an’ for to see, for to behold this world so wide.” Free and
foot loose they will be, rejecting the bondage of routine that makes of
a resourceful man, as they all are, a captain of industry. The world
is their playground, not their schoolroom. Independent they will be of
discipline.
“Aren’t you afraid of losing your job?” we asked a guide who confided
some act of insubordination.
“Well, I _come_ here looking for a job,” he answered.
As Bill put it, in his rhythmic way,--“The Lord put me on earth to eat
and sleep and ride the ponies, and I ain’t figurin’ on doin’ nothin’
else.”
And he finished, “There’s just three things in the world I care
about,--my hawss, and my rope and my hat.”
The genius of the west lies, I think, in its power of objectiveness.
The east is subjective. When an easterner tells a story, he locates
himself emotionally with much concern. He may be vague as to time and
place, but you know his moods and impressions with subtle exactness.
Every westerner I ever knew begins his first sentence of a story with
his location and objective. Then he adds dates and follows with an
anecdote of bare facts, untinged by his emotions. His audience fills in
the chinks with what he does not say. For example, a guide, telling of
a trip, might say----
“I was headed north over Eagle Pass with an outfit of geologists in a
northwest storm. The animals had just come in from winter feedin’ the
day before. My top-hawss had went lame on me, and I had to borrow a
cayuse from an Indian. I had a pack outfit of burros and was drivin’
three empties that give out on us. We was short of grub, and twenty
miles to make to the trader’s. The dudes had wore setfasts on their
hawsses, and when I ast them could they kinder trot along, the ladies
would hit their saddles with a little whip and say ‘gittap, hawsie.’”
Only bald facts are told in that narrative, mainly unintelligible
unless you know what the facts connote. Told to a fellow guide they
bring forth nods of silent sympathy. Many experiences of the same sort
help him to see the huddled, inexpert figures of saddle-sore dudes,
some clad piecemeal, some in the extreme of appropriateness. He knows
the exasperating slowness of horses drained of the last ounce of
endurance. He, too, has tried to urge on a miscellaneous collection
of tired horses, burros and dudes, all wandering in different
directions, at differing gaits. He knows the self-respecting guide’s
chagrin at losing the pride of his life,--his top-horse, and he knows
the condition of Indian cayuses at the end of winter. He has felt
unutterable disgust at having to ride a hack. He knows the necessity of
keeping patient and courteous under irritation, and the responsibility
of getting his party of tenderfeet over a bad divide in a storm with
night coming and food scarce, when a slight mishap may accumulate more
serious disasters. He knows how weary burros wander in circles so
persistently that the most patient guide,--and all guides are patient,
they have to be,--wants to murder them brutally. And the sickening
scrape of girths on raw, bleeding sores, requiring tender care after
treatment of weeks. He knows every party has its foolish, ineffectual
members who tire the first mile out, and after that sink into limp
dejection, remarking plaintively and often, “This horse is no good,”
as they give him a light flick which hits leather or saddle roll, but
never the horse, and kick at him without touching him. And geologists!
One or two, he knows, can ride and camp and are as good as the guides,
but others will want to stop the outfit on the worst spot in the trail,
and nearly cause a stampede gathering rocks which the guide must
secure to the already overweighty pack.
[Illustration: TWO MEDICINE LAKE, GLACIER PARK, MONTANA.]
[Illustration: WRANGLING HORSES, GLACIER PARK, MONTANA.]
But see how much longer it takes a story Eastern fashion. Once you have
the key to the Westerner’s narrative, you get the vividness of these
compressed facts. If you have not, he might as well be talking Sanscrit
as colloquial English of one and two syllables. You listen and wonder
what has happened to your mind: you seem to understand everything he is
saying, yet you understand nothing.