THE CRAWLING STONE
Where the mountain chains of North America have been flung up into a
continental divide, the country in many of its aspects is still
terrible. In extent alone this mountain empire is grandiose. The
swiftest transcontinental trains approaching its boundaries at night
find night falling again before they have fairly penetrated it.
Geologically severe, this region in geological store is the richest of
the continent; physically forbidding beyond all other stretches of
North America, the Barren Land alone excepted, in this region lie its
gentlest valleys. Here the desert is most grotesque, and here are
pastoral retreats the most secluded. It is the home of the Archean
granite, and its basins are of a fathomless dust. Under its sagebrush
wastes the skeletons of earth's hugest mammals lie beside behemoth and
the monsters of the deep. The eternal snow, the granite peak, the
sandstone butte, the lava-bed, the gray desert, the far horizon are
familiar here. With the sunniest and bluest of skies, this is the
range of the deadliest storms, and its delightful summers contrast
with the dreadest cold.
Here the desert of death simulates a field of cooling snow, green
hills lie black in the dazzling light of day, limpid waters run green
over arsenic stone, and sunset betricks the fantastic rock with column
and capital and dome. Clouds burst here above arid wastes, and where
dew is precious the skies are most prodigal in their downpour. If the
torrent bed is dry, distrust it.
This vast mountain shed parts rivers whose waters find two oceans, and
their valleys are the natural highways up which railroads wind to the
crest of the continent. To the mountain engineer the waterway is the
sphinx that holds in its silence the riddle of his success; with him
lies the problem of providing a railway across ranges which often defy
the hoofs of a horse.
The construction engineer studies the course of the mountain water.
The water is both his ally and his enemy--ally because it alone has
made possible his undertakings; enemy because it fights to destroy his
puny work, just as it fights to level the barriers that oppose him.
Like acid spread on copperplate, water etches the canyons in the
mountain slopes and spreads wide the valleys through the plains. Among
these scarcely known ranges of the Rocky Mountain chain the Western
rivers have their beginnings. When white men crowded the Indian from
the plains he retreated to the mountains, and in their valleys made
his final stand against the aggressor. The scroll of this invasion of
the mountain West by the white man has been unrolled, read, and put
away within a hundred years, and of the agencies that made possible
the swiftness of the story transportation overshadows all others. The
first railroad put across those mountains cost twenty-five thousand
miles of reconnaissances and fifteen thousand miles of instrument
surveys. Since the day of that undertaking a generation of men has
passed, and in the interval the wilderness that those men penetrated
has been transformed. The Indian no longer extorts terms from his foe:
he is not.
Where the tepee stood the rodman drives his stakes, and the country of
the great Indian rivers, save one, has been opened for years to the
railroad. That one is the Crawling Stone. The valley of Crawling Stone
River marked for more than a decade the dead line between the Overland
Route of the white man and the last country of the Sioux. It was long
after the building of the first line before even an engineer's
reconnaissance was made in the Crawling Stone country. Then, within
ten years, three surveys were made, two on the north side of the river
and one on the south side, by interests seeking a coast outlet. Three
reports made in this way gave varying estimates of the expense of
putting a line up the valley, but the three coincided in this, that
the cost would be prohibitive. Engineers of reputation had in this
respect agreed, but Glover, who looked after such work for Bucks,
remained unconvinced, and before McCloud was put into the operating
department on the Short Line he was asked by Glover to run a
preliminary up Crawling Stone Valley. Before the date of his report
the conclusions reached by other engineers had stood unchallenged.
The valley was not unknown to McCloud. His first year in the
mountains, in which, fitted as thoroughly as he could fit himself for
his profession, he had come West and found himself unable to get work,
had been spent hunting, fishing, and wandering, often cold and often
hungry, in the upper Crawling Stone country. The valley in itself
offers to a constructionist no insuperable obstacles; the difficulty
is presented in the canyon where the river bursts through the Elbow
Mountains. South of this canyon, McCloud, one day on a hunting trip,
found himself with two Indians pocketed in the rough country, and was
planning how to escape passing a night away from camp when his
companions led him past a vertical wall of rock a thousand feet high,
split into a narrow defile down which they rode, as it broadened out,
for miles. They emerged upon an open country that led without a break
into the valley of the Crawling Stone below the canyon. Afterward,
when he had become a railroad man, McCloud, sitting at a camp-fire
with Glover and Morris Blood, heard them discussing the coveted and
impossible line up the valley. He had been taken into the circle of
constructionists and was told of the earlier reports against the line.
He thought he knew something about the Elbow Mountains, and disputed
the findings, offering in two days' ride to take the men before him to
the pass called by the Indians The Box, and to take them through it.
Glover called it a find, and a big one, and though more immediate
matters in the strategy of territorial control then came before him,
the preliminary was ordered and McCloud's findings were approved.
McCloud himself was soon afterward engrossed in the problems of
operating the mountain division; but the dream of his life was to
build the Crawling Stone Line with a maximum grade of eight tenths
through The Box.
The prettiest stretch of Crawling Stone Valley lies within twenty
miles of Medicine Bend. There it lies widest, and has the pick of
water and grass between Medicine Bend and the Mission Mountains.
Cattlemen went into the Crawling Stone country before the Indians had
wholly left it. The first house in the valley was the Stone Ranch,
built by Richard Dunning, and it still stands overlooking the town of
Dunning at the junction of the Frenchman Creek with the Crawling
Stone. The Frenchman is fed by unfailing springs, and when by summer
sun and wind every smaller stream in the middle basin has been licked
dry, the Frenchman runs cold and swift between its russet hills.
Richard Dunning, being on the border of the Indian country, built for
his ranch-house a rambling stone fortress. He had chosen, it afterward
proved, the choice spot in the valley, and he stocked it with cattle
when yearlings could be picked up in Medicine Bend at ten dollars a
head. He got together a great body of valley land when it could be had
for the asking, and became the rich man of the Long Range.
The Dunnings were Kentuckians. Richard was a bridge engineer and
builder, and under Brodie built some of the first bridges on the
mountain division, notably the great wooden bridge at Smoky Creek.
Richard brought out his nephew, Lance Dunning. He taught Lance
bridge-building, and Murray Sinclair, who began as a cowboy on the
Stone Ranch, learned bridge-building from Richard Dunning. The
Dunnings both came West, though at different times, as young men and
unmarried, and, as far as Western women were concerned, might always
have remained so. But a Kentucky cousin, Betty, one of the Fairfield
Dunnings, related to Richard within the sixth or eighth degree, came
to the mountains for her health. Betty's mother had brought Richard up
as a boy, and Betty, when he left Fairfield, was a baby. But Dick--as
they knew him at home--and the mother wrote back and forth, and he
persuaded her to send Betty out for a trip, promising he would send
her back in a year a well woman.
Betty came with only her colored maid, old Puss Dunning, who had taken
her from the nurse's arms when she was born and taken care of her ever
since. The two--the tall Kentucky girl and the bent mammy--arrived at
the Stone Ranch one day in June, and Richard, done then with bridges
and looking after his ranch interests, had already fallen violently in
love with Betty. She was delicate, but, if those in Medicine Bend who
remembered her said true, a lovely creature. Remaining in the
mountains was the last thing Betty had ever thought of, but no one,
man or woman, could withstand Dick Dunning. She fell quite in love
with him the first time she set eyes on him in Medicine Bend, for he
was very handsome in the saddle, and Betty was fairly wild about
horses. So Dick Dunning wooed a fond mistress and married her and
buried her, and all within hardly more than a year.
But in that year they were very happy, never two happier, and when she
slept away her suffering she left him, as a legacy, a tiny baby girl.
Puss brought the mite of a creature in its swaddling-clothes to the
sick mother,--very, very sick then,--and poor Betty turned her dark
eyes on it, kissed it, looked at her husband and whispered "Dicksie,"
and died. Dicksie had been Betty's pet name for her mountain lover, so
the father said the child's name should be Dicksie and nothing else;
and his heart broke and soon he died. Nothing else, storm or flood,
death or disaster, had ever moved Dick Dunning; then a single blow
killed him. He rode once in a while over the ranch, a great tract by
that time of twenty thousand acres, all in one body, all under fence,
up and down both sides of the big river, in part irrigated, swarming
with cattle--none of it stirred Dick! and with little Dicksie in his
arms he slept away his suffering.
So Dicksie was left, as her mother had been, to Puss, while Lance
looked after the ranch, swore at the price of cattle, and played cards
at Medicine Bend. At ten, Dicksie, as thoroughly spoiled as a pet baby
could be by a fool mammy, a fond cousin, and a galaxy of devoted
cowboys, was sent, in spite of crying and flinging, to a far-away
convent--her father had planned everything--where in many tears she
learned that there were other things in the world besides cattle and
mountains and sunshine and tall, broad-hatted horsemen to swing from
their stirrups and pick her hat from the ground--just to see little
Dicksie laugh--when they swooped past the house to the corrals. When
she came back from Kentucky, her grandmother dead and her schooldays
finished, all the land she could see in the valley was hers, and all
the living creatures in the fields. It seemed perfectly natural,
because since childhood even the distant mountains and their snows had
been Dicksie's.