hand and pointed across to the enclosure, where a few captive buffalo
were grazing. I knew what it meant. These, my Blackfeet, had been the
great buffalo-hunters. With bow and arrow they had followed the herds
from Canada to the Far South. These chiefs had been mighty hunters. But
for many years not a single buffalo had their eyes beheld. They who had
lived by the buffalo were now dying with them. A few full-bloods shut
away on a reservation, a few buffalo penned in a corral--children of the
open spaces and of freedom, both of them, and now dying and imprisoned.
For the Blackfeet are a dying people.
They had come to see the buffalo.
But they did not say so. An Indian is a stoic. He has both imagination
and sentiment, but the latter he conceals. And this was the explanation
they gave me for the Indian agent:--
I knew that, back in my home, when a friend asked me to come to an
entertainment, I must go or that friend would be offended with me. And
so it was with the Blackfeet Indians--they had been invited to this
round-up, and they felt that they should come or they would hurt the
feelings of those who had asked them. Therefore, would I, Pi-ta-mak-an,
go to the Indian agent and make their peace for them? For, after all,
summer was short and winter was coming. The old would need their
ration-tickets again. And they, the braves, would promise to go back to
the Reservation and get in the hay, and be all that good Indians should
be.
And I, too, was as good an Indian as I knew how to be, for I scolded
them all roundly and then sat down at the first possible opportunity and
wrote to the agent.
And the agent? He is a very wise and kindly man, facing one of the
biggest problems in our country. He gave them back their ration-tickets
and wiped the slate clean, to the eternal credit of a Government that
has not often to the Indian tempered justice with mercy.
X
OFF FOR CASCADE PASS
How many secrets the mountains hold! They have forgotten things we shall
never know. And they are cruel, savagely cruel. What they want, they
take. They reach out a thousand clutching hands. They attack with
avalanche, starvation, loneliness, precipice. They lure on with green
valleys and high flowering meadows where mountain-sheep move sedately,
with sunlit peaks and hidden lakes, with silence for tired ears and
peace for weary souls. And then--they kill.
Because man is a fighting animal, he obeys their call, his wit against
their wisdom of the ages, his strength against their solidity, his
courage against their cunning. And too often he loses.
[Illustration: COPYRIGHT BY L. D. LINDSLEY
_A high mountain meadow_]
I am afraid of the mountains. I have always the feeling that they are
lying in wait. At night, their very silence is ominous. The crack of ice
as a bit of slow-moving glacier is dislodged, lightning, and the roar
of thunder somewhere below where I lie--these are the artillery of the
range, and from them I am safe. I am too small for their heavy guns. But
a shelving trail on the verge of a chasm, a slip on an ice-field, a
rolling stone under a horse's foot--these are the weapons I fear above
the timber-line.
Even below there is danger--swamps and rushing rivers, but above all the
forest. In mountain valleys it grows thick on the bodies of dead forests
beneath. It crowds. There is barely room for a tent. And all through the
night the trees protest. They creak and groan and sigh, and sometimes
they burn. In a _cul-de-sac_, with only frowning cliffs about, the
forest becomes ominous, a thing of dreadful beauty. On nights when,
through the crevices of the green roof, there are stars hung in the sky,
the weight lifts. But there are other nights when the trees close in
like ranks of hostile men and take the spirit prisoner.
The peace of the wilderness is not peace. It is waiting.
On the Glacier Park trip, there had been one subject which came up for
discussion night after night round the camp-fire. It resolved itself,
briefly, into this: Should we or should we not get out in time to go
over to the State of Washington and there perform the thrilling feat
which Bob, the Optimist, had in mind?
This was nothing more nor less than the organization of a second
pack-outfit and the crossing of the Cascade Mountains on horseback by a
virgin route. The Head, Bob, and Joe had many discussions about it. I do
not recall that my advice was ever asked. It is generally taken for
granted in these wilderness-trips of ours that I will be there, ready to
get a story when the opportunity presents itself.
Owing to the speed with which the North Fork of the Flathead River
descends from the Canadian border to civilization, we had made very good
time. And, at last, the decision was made to try this new adventure.
"It will be a bully story," said the Optimist, "and you can be dead sure
of this: it's never been done before."
So, at last, it was determined, and we set out on that wonderful
harebrain excursion of which the very memory gives me a thrill. Yet, now
that I know it can be done, I may try it again some day. It paid for
itself over and over in scenery, in health, and in thrills. But there
were several times when it seemed to me impossible that we could all get
over the range alive.
We took through thirty-one horses and nineteen people. When we got out,
our horses had had nothing to eat, not a blade of grass or a handful of
grain, for thirty-six hours, and they had had very little for five days.
On the last morning, the Head gave his horse for breakfast one
rain-soaked biscuit, an apple, two lumps of sugar, and a raw egg. The
other horses had nothing.
We dropped three pack-horses over cliffs in two days, but got them
again, cut and bruised, and we took out our outfit complete, after two
weeks of the most arduous going I have ever known anything about. When
the news that we had got over the pass penetrated to the settlements, a
pack-outfit started over Cascade Pass in our footsteps to take supplies
to a miner. They killed three horses on that same trail, and I believe
gave it up in the end.
Doubtless, by next year, a passable trail will have been built up to
Doubtful Lake and another one up that eight-hundred-foot mountain-wall
above the lake, where, when one reaches the top, there is but room to
look down again on the other side. Perhaps, too, there will be a trail
down the Agnes Creek Valley, so that parties can get through easily.
When that is done,--and it is promised by the Forest Supervisor,--one of
the most magnificent horseback trips in the country will be opened for
the first time to the traveler.
Most emphatically, the trip across the Cascades at Doubtful Lake and
Cascade Pass is not a trip for a woman in the present condition of
things, although any woman who can ride can cross Cloudy Pass and get
down Agnes Creek way. But perhaps before this is published, the Chelan
National Forest will have been made a National Park. It ought to be. It
is superb. There is no other word for it. And it ought not to be called
a forest, because it seems to have everything but trees. Rocks and
rivers and glaciers--more in one county than in all Switzerland, they
claim--and granite peaks and hair-raising precipices and lakes filled
with ice in midsummer. But not many trees, until, at Cascade Pass, one
reaches the boundaries of the Washington National Forest and begins to
descend the Pacific slope.
The personnel of our party was slightly changed. Of the original one,
there remained the Head, the Big, the Middle, and the Little Boy, Joe,
Bob, and myself. To these we added at the beginning six persons besides
our guides and packers. Two of them did not cross the pass, however--the
Forest Pathologist from Washington, who travels all over the country
watching for tree-diseases and tree-epidemics and who left us after a
few days, and the Supervisor of Chelan Forest, who had but just come
from Oregon and was making his first trip over his new territory.
We were fortunate, indeed, in having four forest-men with us, men whose
lives are spent in the big timber, who know the every mood and tense of
the wilderness. For besides these two, the Pathologist and the Forest
Supervisor, there was "Silent Lawrie" Lindsley, naturalist,
photographer, and lover of all that is wild, a young man who has spent
years wandering through the mountains around Chelan, camera and gun at
hand, the gun never raised against the wild creatures, but used to shoot
away tree-branches that interfere with pictures, or, more frequently, to
trim a tree into such outlines as fit it into the photograph.
And then there was the Man Who Went Ahead. For forty years this man, Mr.
Hilligoss, has lived in the forest. Hardly a big timber-deal in the
Northwest but was passed by him. Hardly a tree in that vast wilderness
but he knew it. He knew everything about the forest but fear--fear and
fatigue. And, with an axe and a gun, he went ahead, clearing trail,
blazing trees, and marking the detours to camp-sites by an arrow made of
bark and thrust through a slash in a tree.
Hour after hour we would struggle on, seeing everywhere evidences of his
skill on the trail, to find, just as endurance had reached its limit,
the arrow that meant camp and rest.
And--there was Dan Devore and his dog, Whiskers. Dan Devore was our
chief guide and outfitter, a soft voiced, bearded, big souled man,
neither very large nor very young. All soul and courage was Dan Devore,
and one of the proud moments of my life was when it was all over and he
told me I had done well. I wanted most awfully to have Dan Devore think
I had done well.
He was sitting on a stone at the time, I remember, and Whiskers, his old
Airedale, had his head on Dan's knee. All of his thirteen years,
Whiskers had wandered through the mountains with Dan Devore, always
within call. To see Dan was to see Whiskers; to see Whiskers was to see
Dan.
He slept on Dan's tarp bed at night, and in the daytime led our long and
winding procession. Indomitable spirit that he was, he traveled three
miles to our one, saved us from the furious onslaughts of many a marmot
and mountain-squirrel, and, in the absence of fresh meat, ate his salt
pork and scraps with the zest of a hungry traveler.
Then there were Mr. and Mrs. Fred. I call them Mr. and Mrs. Fred,
because, like Joe, that was a part of their name. I will be frank about
Mrs. Fred. I was worried about her before I knew her. I was accustomed
to roughing it; but how about another woman? Would she be putting up her
hair in curlers every night, and whimpering when, as sometimes happens,
the slow gait of her horse became intolerable? Little did I know Mrs.
Fred. She was a natural wanderer, a follower of the trail, a fine and
sound and sporting traveling companion. And I like to think that she is
typical of the women of that Western country which bred her, feminine to
the core, but strong and sweet still.
Both the Freds were great additions. Was it not after Mr. Fred that we
trailed on that famous game-hunt of ours, of which a spirited account is
coming later? Was it not Mr. Fred who, night after night, took the
junior Rineharts away from an anxious mother into the depths of the
forest or the bleakness of mountain-slopes, there to lie, armed to the
teeth, and wait for the first bears to start out for breakfast?
Now you have us, I think, except the men of the outfit, and they deserve
space I cannot give them. They were a splendid lot, and it was by their
incessant labor that we got over.
Try to see us, then, filing along through deep valleys, climbing cliffs,
stumbling, struggling, not talking much, a long line of horses and
riders. First, far ahead, Mr. Hilligoss. Then the riders, led by "Silent
Lawrie," with me just behind him, because of photographs. Then, at the
head of the pack-horses, Dan Devore. Then the long line of pack-ponies,
sturdy and willing, and piled high with our food, our bedding, and our
tents. And here, there, and everywhere, Joe, with the moving-picture
camera.
We were determined, this time, to have no repetition of the Glacier Park
fiasco, where Bill, our cook, had deserted us at a bad time--although it
is always a bad time when the cook leaves. So now we had two cooks.
Much as I love the mountains and the woods, the purple of evening
valleys, the faint pink of sunrise on snow-covered peaks, the most
really thrilling sight of a camping-trip is two cooks bending over an
iron grating above a fire, one frying trout and the other turning
flapjacks.
Our trail led us through one of the few remaining unknown portions of
the United States. It cannot long remain unknown. It is too superb, too
wonderful. And it has mineral in it, silver and copper and probably
coal. The Middle Boy, who is by way of being a chemist and has
systematically blown himself up with home-made explosives for years--the
Middle Boy found at least a dozen silver mines of fabulous value,
although the men in the party insisted that his specimens were iron
pyrites and other unromantic minerals.
XI
LAKE CHELAN TO LYMAN LAKE
Now, as to where we were--those long days of fording rivers and beating
our way through jungle or of dizzy climbs up to the snow, those short
nights, so cold that six blankets hardly kept us warm, while our tired
horses wandered far, searching for such bits of grass as grew among the
shale.
In the north-central part of the State of Washington, Nature has done a
curious thing. She has built a great lake in the eastern shoulders of
the Cascade Mountains. Lake Chelan, more than fifty miles long and
averaging a mile and a half in width, is ten hundred and seventy-five
feet above sea-level, while its bottom is four hundred feet below the
level of the ocean. It is almost completely surrounded by granite walls
and peaks which reach more than a mile and a half into the air.
The region back from the lake is practically unknown. A small part of it
has never been touched by the Geological Survey, and, in one or two
instances, we were able to check up errors on our maps. Thus, a lake
shown on our map as belonging at the head of McAllister Creek really
belongs at the head of Rainbow Creek, while McAllister Lake is not shown
at all. Mr. Coulter, a forester who was with us for a time, last year
discovered three lakes at the head of Rainbow Creek which have never
been mapped, and, so far as could be learned, had never been seen by a
white man before. Yet Lake Chelan itself is well known in the Northwest.
It is easily reached, its gateway being the famous Wenatchee Valley,
celebrated for its apples.
It was from Chelan that we were to make our start. Long before we
arrived, Dan Devore and the packers were getting the outfit ready.
[Illustration: _Sitting Bull Mountain, Lake Chelan_]
Yet the first glimpse of Chelan was not attractive. We had motored half
a day through that curious, semi-arid country, which, when irrigated,
proves the greatest of all soils in the world for fruit-raising. The
August sun had baked the soil into yellow dust which covered
everything. Arid hillsides without a leaf of green but dotted thickly
with gray sagebrush, eroded valleys, rocks and gullies--all shone a
dusty yellow in the heat. The dust penetrated everything. Wherever water
could be utilized were orchards, little trees planted in geometrical
rows and only waiting the touch of irrigation to make their owners
wealthy beyond dreams.
The lower end of Lake Chelan was surrounded by these bleak hillsides,
desert without the great spaces of the desert. Yet unquestionably, in a
few years from now, these bleak hillsides will be orchard land. Only the
lower part, however, is bleak--only an end, indeed. There is nothing
more beautiful and impressive than the upper part of that strangely deep
and quiet lake lying at the foot of its enormous cliffs.
By devious stages we reached the head of Lake Chelan, and there for four
days the outfitting went on. Horses were being brought in, saddles
fitted; provisions in great cases were arriving. To outfit a party of
our size for two weeks means labor and generous outlay. And we were
going to be comfortable. We were willing to travel hard and sleep hard.
But we meant to have plenty of food. I think we may claim the unique
distinction of being the only people who ever had grapefruit regularly
for breakfast on the top of that portion of the Cascade Range.
While we waited, we learned something about the country. It is volcanic
ash, disintegrated basalt, this great fruit-country to the right of the
range. And three things, apparently, are responsible for its marvelous
fruit-growing properties. First, the soil itself, which needs only water
to prove marvelously fertile; second, the length of the growing-season,
which around Lake Chelan is one hundred and ninety-two days in the year.
And this just south of the Canadian border! There is a third reason,
too: the valleys are sheltered from frost. Even if a frost comes,--and I
believe it is almost unknown,--the high mountains surrounding these
valleys protect the blossoms so that the frost has evaporated before the
sun strikes the trees. There is no such thing known as a killing frost.
But it is irrigation on a virgin and fertile soil that is primarily
responsible. They run the water to the orchards in conduits, and then
dig little trenches, running parallel among the trees. Then they turn it
on, and the tree-roots are bathed, soaked. And out of the desert spring
such trees of laden fruit that each branch must be supported by wires!
So we ate such apples as I had never dreamed of, and waited. Joe got his
films together. The boys practiced shooting. I rested and sharpened
lead-pencils. Bob had found a way to fold his soft hat into what he
fondly called the "Jennings do," which means a plait in the crown to
shed the rain, and which turned an amiable _ensemble_ into something
savage and extremely flat on top. The Head played croquet.
And then into our complacency came, one night, a bit of tragedy.
A man staggered into the little hotel at the head of the lake, carrying
another man on his back. He had carried him for forty hours, lowering
him down, bit by bit, from that mountain highland where he had been
hurt--forty hours of superhuman effort and heart-breaking going, over
cliffs and through wilderness.
The injured man was a sheep-herder. He had cut his leg with his
wood-axe, and blood-poisoning had set in. I do not know the rest of that
story. The sheep-herder was taken to a hospital the next day, traveling
a very long way. But whether he traveled still farther, to the land of
the Great Shepherd, I do not know. Only this I do know: that this
Western country I love is full of such stories, and of such men as the
hero of this one.
At last we were ready. Some of the horses were sent by boat the day
before, for this strange lake has little or no shore-line. Granite
mountains slope stark and sheer to the water's edge, and drop from there
to frightful depths below. There are, at the upper end, no roads, no
trails or paths that border it. So the horses and all of us went by boat
to the mouth of Railroad Creek,--so called, I suppose, because the
nearest railroad is more than forty miles away,--up which led the trail
to the great unknown. All around and above us were the cliffs, towering
seven thousand feet over the lake. And beyond those cliffs lay
adventure.
For it _was_ adventure. Even Dan Devore, experienced mountaineer and
guide that he was, had only been to Cascade Pass once, and that was
sixteen years before. He had never been across the divide. "Silent
Lawrie" Lindsley, the naturalist, had been only part-way down the Agnes
Creek Valley, which we intended to follow. Only in a general way had we
any itinerary at all.
Now a National Forest is a happy hunting-ground. Whereas in the National
Parks game is faithfully preserved, hunting is permitted in the forests.
To this end, we took with us a complete arsenal. The naturalist carried
a Colt's revolver; the Big Boy had a twelve-gauge hammerless, called a
"howitzer." We had two twenty-four-gauge shotguns in case we met an
elephant or anything similarly large and heavy, and the Little Boy
proudly carried, strapped to his saddle, a twenty-two high-power rifle,
shooting a steel-jacketed, soft-nose bullet, an express-rifle of high
velocity and great alarm to mothers. In addition to this, we had a
Savage repeater and two Winchester thirties, and the Forest Supervisor
carried his own Winchester thirty-eight. We were entirely prepared to
meet the whole German army.
It is rather sad to relate that, with all this preparation, we killed
nothing whatever. Although it is not true that, on the day we
encountered a large bear, and the three junior members of the family
were allowed to turn the artillery loose on him, at the end of the
firing the bear pulled out a flag and waved it, thinking it was the
Fourth of July.
As we started, that August midday, for the long, dusty ride up the
Railroad Creek Trail, I am sure that the three junior Rineharts had
nothing less in mind than two or three bearskins apiece for school
bedrooms. They deserved better luck than they had. Night after night,
sitting in the comparative safety of the camp-fire, I have seen my three
sons, the Big, the Middle, and the Little Boy, starting off, armed to
the teeth with deadly weapons, to sleep out under the stars and catch
the first unwary bear on his way to breakfast in the morning.
Morning after morning, I have sat breakfastless and shaken until the
weary procession of young America toiled into camp, hungry and bearless,
but, thank Heaven, whole of skin save where mosquitoes and black flies
had taken their toll of them. They would trudge five miles, sleep three
hours, hunt, walk five miles back, and then ride all day.
* * * * *
The first day was the least pleasant. We were still in the Railroad
Creek Valley; the trail was dusty; packs slipped on the sweating horses
and had to be replaced. The bucking horse of the outfit had, as usual,
been given the eggs, and, burying his head between his fore legs, threw
off about a million dollars' worth before he had been on the trail an
hour.
On that first part of the trip, we had three dogs with us--Chubb and
Doc, as well as Whiskers. They ran in the dust with their tongues out,
and lay panting under bushes at each stop. Here and there we found the
track of sheep driven into the mountain to graze. For a hundred or two
hundred feet in width, it was eaten completely clean, for sheep have a
way of tearing up even the roots of the grass so that nothing green
lives behind them. They carry blight into a country like this.
Then, at last, we found the first arrow of the journey, and turned off
the trail to camp.
On that first evening, the arrow landed us in a great spruce grove where
the trees averaged a hundred and twenty-five feet in height. Below, the
ground was cleared and level and covered with fine moss. The great gray
trunks rose to Gothic arches of green. It was a churchly place. And
running through it were little streams living with trout.
And in this saintly spot, quiet and peaceful, its only noise the
babbling of little rivers, dwelt billions on billions of mosquitoes that
were for the first time learning the delights of the human frame as
food.
There was no getting away from them. Open our mouths and we inhaled
them. They hung in dense clouds about us and fought over the best
locations. They held loud and noisy conversations about us, and got in
our ears and up our nostrils and into our coffee. They went
trout-fishing with us and put up the tents with us; dined with us and on
us. But they let us alone at night.
It is a curious thing about the mountain mosquito as I know him. He is a
lazy insect. He retires at sundown and does not begin to get in any
active work until eight o'clock the following morning. He keeps union
hours.
Something of this we had anticipated, and I had ordered
mosquito-netting, to be worn as veils. When it was unrolled, it proved
to be a brilliant scarlet, a scarlet which faded in hot weather on to
necks and faces and turned us suddenly red and hideous.
Although it was late in the afternoon when we reached that first camp,
Camp Romany, two or three of us caught more than a hundred trout before
sundown. We should have done better had it not been necessary to stop
and scratch every thirty seconds.