Down the Yellowstone Part 1

Down the Yellowstone.

by Lewis R. Freeman.

INTRODUCTION

It must have been close to twenty years ago that I first started to boat from the head of the Yellowstone to the Gulf of Mexico. On that occasion I covered something over a hundred miles from the source of the Yellowstone--a good part of it on the ice, on the bank, or floundering in the water. As a start it was not auspicious, nor was it destined to be anything more than a start.

Shrouded in the mists of comparative antiquity, the reason for my embarking on this voyage is only less obscure than my reason for failing to continue it. As nearly as I can figure it today, it was a series of tennis tournaments in Was.h.i.+ngton and British Columbia that lured me to the North-west in the first place. Then a hunting trip in eastern Was.h.i.+ngton merged into an enchanting interval of semi-vagabondage through the silver-lead mining camps of the C[oe]ur d'Alene and the copper camps of Montana, at that time in the hey-day of their glory.

From b.u.t.te to the Yellowstone was only a step. That it was still winter at those alt.i.tudes, and that the Park, under from ten to forty feet of snow, would not be opened to tourists for another two months, were only negligible incidentals. That deep snow, far from being a hindrance, actually facilitated travel over a rough country, I had learned the previous year in Alaska.

I should have known better than to expect that permission would be granted me to make a tour of the Park out of season, and, as a matter of fact, it doubtless would not have been had I proceeded by the proper official channels via Was.h.i.+ngton. Knowing nothing of either propriety or officialdom at my then immature age (would that I could say the same today!), I simply journeyed jauntily up to Fort Yellowstone and told the U. S. Army officer in command that I was a writer on game protection, and that I wanted the loan of a pair of ski in order to fare forth and study the subject at first hand. When he asked me if I knew how to use ski, adding that he could not let me proceed if I did not, I replied that I did.

Now each of these confident a.s.sertions was made with a mental reservation. I was really only a _potential_ writer on game protection, just as I was only a _potential_ ski-runner. I knew that I could write something about game protection, just as surely as I knew I could do something with the ski. As to just what I should write about game protection I was in some doubt, never having written about anything at all up to that time. Similarly, in the matter of the ski, never having seen a ski before. But I knew I could use them, for something, and hoped it would be as aids to linear progression over snow.

Thanks to some previous experience with web snowshoes, I came through fairly well with the ski, but at the cost of many b.u.mps and bruises and strained muscles. What it cost me to make good that game protection scribe boast would require some figuring. I recall that there was one old shark of an editor of a yellow-covered outdoor magazine in New York who quoted me advertising rates for the article I submitted him, but I believe we compromised by my taking twenty paid-in-advance subscriptions. Another editor sent me a bill for the cost of the cuts, and offered to include my own photograph--in evening clothes if desired--for five dollars extra. I still have several game protection articles on hand.

It must have been sometime previous to the two or three weeks that I spent mus.h.i.+ng about the valleys of the upper Yellowstone on the ice and snow that the idea came to me that it would be a nice thing to float down on the spring rise to the Missouri, the Mississippi and the Gulf.

In any event, I knew that the thought came to me before arriving at the Park. I have a distinct recollection of pre-empting for my own use a big iron staple which some soldier had put in the mineral-charged water of Mammoth Hot Springs to acquire a frosty coating. I purposed driving it into the bow of my boat to bend the painter to.

The boat I secured about ten miles down river from the Park boundary.

The famous "Yankee Jim" gave it to me. This may sound generous on Jim's part, but seeing the boat didn't belong to him it wasn't especially so.

Nor was the craft really a boat, either. It had been built by a coal miner from Aldridge, with the intention of using it to float down the Yellowstone, Missouri and Mississippi to his childhood home in Hickman, Kentucky. It had done such strange things in the comparatively quiet ten-mile stretch below Gardiner that the miner abandoned it a good safe distance above "Yankee Jim's" Canyon, went back to Cinnabar and bought a ticket to Hickman by rail. I knocked the top-heavy house off the queer contraption, and in, under and round about the sh.e.l.l-like residue b.u.mped and battered my way through the Canyon, and about twenty miles beyond.

The last five miles were made astride of the only three remaining planks. I walked the ties the intervening fifteen miles to Livingston.

It was undoubtedly my intention to build a real boat in Livingston and proceed on my voyage before the spring rise went down. Just why I came to falter in my enterprise I can't quite remember, but I am almost certain it was because the local semi-pro baseball team of the Montana League needed a first baseman the same day that the editor of the local paper was sent to the Keeley Inst.i.tute with _delirium tremens_. Never having been an editor before, there was a glamour about the name that I must confess hardly surrounds it in my mind today. I can see now, therefore, how I came to fall when a somewhat mixed delegation waited upon me with the proposal that I edit the _Enterprise_ five days of the week and play ball Sat.u.r.days and Sundays. I would fall for the same thing again today, that is, without the editor stuff. At any rate, summer and the tide of the Yellowstone waxed and began to wane without my boating farther seaward than the timberless bluffs of Big Timber, to where, with a couple of companions, I went slap-banging in a skiff one Sunday morning when the team was scheduled for a game there in the afternoon.

Finally, it seems to me, it was tennis and some challenge mugs that had to be defended that took me back to Was.h.i.+ngton, and so to California. I was destined to form more or less intimate boating acquaintance with practically every one of the great rivers of South America, Asia, and Africa before returning to resume my interrupted voyage down the Yellowstone.

There were several moving considerations operative in bringing about my decision to attempt a Yellowstone-Missouri-Mississippi voyage last summer. Not the least of these, doubtless, was the desire to complete the unfinished business of the original venture. A more immediate inspiration, however, was traceable to a voyage I had made down the Columbia the previous autumn. Second only to the scenic grandeur and the highly diverting sport of running the rapids of this incomparable stream, was the discovery that the supposedly long-quenched flame of frontier kindliness and hospitality still flickered in the West, that there were still a few folk in existence to whom the wayfarer was neither a bird to be plucked nor a lemon to be squeezed. It wasn't quite a turning of the calendar back to frontier days, but rather, perhaps, to about those not unhappy pre-war times before the yellow serum of profiteering was injected into the red blood of so many Americans.

Living well off the main arteries of travel, these river folk seemed to have escaped the corroding infection almost to a man, and it was a mightily rea.s.suring experience to meet them, if no more than to shake hands and exchange greetings in pa.s.sing. So few will have had the experience of late, that I quite despair of being understood when I speak of the good it does one to encounter a fellow being whom one knows wants and expects no more than is coming to him. Meeting a number of such was like going into a new world.

I told myself frankly that I could do with a lot more people of that kind, and perhaps come out rather less of an undesirable myself as a consequence of the contact. If I found them all along the Columbia, why not along the Yellowstone, and perhaps the Missouri and the Mississippi?

And what wouldn't four or five months' a.s.sociation with such do in the way of eradicating incipient Bolshevism? And so I planned, embarked upon, and finally completed the journey from the snows of the Continental Divide where the Yellowstone takes its rise, to New Orleans where the Mississippi meets the tide of the Gulf of Mexico. I trust the dedication to this rambling volume of reminiscence may give some hint of the extent to which my hopes for the voyage were justified.

To maintain perspective, I am beginning my story by sketching in a few high lights from my earlier jaunt to the sources of the Yellowstone. I saw things then that few have had the opportunity to see since, just as I embarked lightsomely on several little enterprises that I have neither the nerve nor the wind to attempt today. Also, I had fairly intimate glimpses in the course of that delectable interval of vagabondage of several notable frontier characters whom no present-day wanderer by the ways of the Yellowstone can ever hope to meet. The priceless "Yankee Jim" was inextricably mixed up with my rattle-headed attempt to flounder through the canyon to which he had given his name.

He really belongs in the picture. "Calamity Jane" is more of an exotic (to s.h.i.+ft my metaphoric gear), so that the chapter I have devoted to the most temperamental lady of a tempestuous epoch will have to be its own justification.

Frequent historical allusions will be found in the pages of the narrative of my later down-river voyage. I am sorry about this, but it couldn't be helped. History-makers have boated upon, and camped by, the Missouri for a hundred years, just as the Mississippi has known them for thrice a hundred. Most of the things that path-finders leave behind them are imponderable. In the thousands of miles between the mouth of the Missouri and the mouth of the Columbia a few practically obliterated scratches on a rock in Montana are all that one can point to as left by the Lewis and Clark expedition; yet memories of those two lurk in the shadows of every cliff, spring to meet one across the sandy bars of every muddy tributary. And so with all who came after them, from Hunt and his trapper contemporaries on down to Custer, "Buffalo Bill" and Sitting Bull. And so on the Mississippi, from Marquette and La Salle to Grant and Mark Twain. You can't ignore them, try as you will; that is, if you're going to write at all about your voyagings. I've done the best I could on that score. For the rest, I have written freely of rivers and mountains, of adventure and misadventure, and somewhat of cities and towns; much of men and little of inst.i.tutions. In short, I seem to have picked on about the same things that a commuter on his summer vacation would choose to write of to a fellow-commuter who has staid at home. I only hope that my view-point has been half as fresh.

PART I

TWENTY YEARS BEFORE

DOWN THE YELLOWSTONE

CHAPTER I

THE YELLOWSTONE IN WINTER

The present-day Indian inhabitants of the Yellowstone and Big Horn valleys, whose ancestors hunted bear, buffalo and elk in the Devil's Land now known as Yellowstone Park, preserve a legend to the effect that when the world was made, because this region was the most desirable section of Creation, Mog the G.o.d of Fire, and Lob the G.o.d of rains and snows, contended for the control of it. After some preliminary skirmis.h.i.+ng, the disputants carried the matter to the court of the Great Spirit for settlement. Here the ruling was that Mog should occupy the land for six moons, when Lob should follow with possession for a similar interval, thus dividing the year equally between them.

But Mog, being a bad G.o.d as well as a tricky one, spent his first six moons in connecting the valleys with h.e.l.l by a thousand pa.s.sages, and thus bringing up fire and sulphur and boiling water wherever it suited his fiendish fancy. Then he threw dust on all of the beautiful colored mountains, dried up the gra.s.s and shook the leaves from the trees, so that when it came to his rival's turn to take charge, Lob found affairs in a very sad way indeed.

But Lob set himself to work, like the good G.o.d that he was, and dusted and furbished up the mountains, watered the gra.s.s and trees, and heaped the snow in mighty drifts on geyser and hot spring in an effort to stop their mouths and force their boiling waters back from whence they came.

But the latter task was too much for him. When the end of his allotted time came, though the gra.s.s was springing green and fresh and the trees were bursting into leaf again, the geysers and hot springs spouted merrily on. All the incoming Mog had to do was to kick up a few clouds of dust and turn the sun loose on the gra.s.s and trees to have the place just as he had left it.

And so for some thousands of alternating tenancies the fight has gone on, all the best of it with the bad G.o.d. Although Lob is gaining somewhat year by year, and has already dried many a spouting geyser and bubbling hot spring and reduced countless pots of boiling sulphur to beds of yellow crystals, he still has many a moon to work before he can force h.e.l.l to receive its own and leave him free to complete his mighty task of reclamation.

In strong support of this legend is the fact that at the time of year when the Indians say that Lob is compelled to abdicate, and before Mog begins his annual dust-throwing--the middle of April or thereabouts,--the Yellowstone Park is incomparably more beautiful than at any other season. And moreover, there are those who maintain that even at other seasons it is still more beautiful than any other place in the world, just as it was in the beginning when it aroused the jealousies of the rival G.o.ds and precipitated their eternal conflict.

What the Yellowstone is in the early spring only those who have seen it at that season can realize, and only those who have made the summer tour are in a position to imagine. Let one who has breasted the sweltering heat-waves that radiate from Obsidian Cliff in July, trying to picture the impressive beauty of that ma.s.sive pile of volcanic gla.s.s through the translucent dust-clouds raised by the pa.s.sage of two or three score cars--let him fancy that cliff, its summit crowned with a feathered crest of snow, huge drifts at its base, and its whole face, washed and polished by the elements, glittering as though panelled with s.h.i.+ning ebony. Let him think of the time his car was halted on the Continental Divide and the driver endeavoured to point out one of the distant eminences, guessed dimly through the smoke-clouds rising beyond Shoshone Lake, as the Grand Teton, and then fancy himself standing at the same point and looking out across the valley through air that, windowed and cleansed by the winds and snows of the winter, is so clear that the bottle-green in the rims of the glaciers is discernible at forty miles. Let him who has admired the transcendent beauty of the steam-clouds swirling above Old Faithful in the summer imagine these clouds increased two-fold in whiteness and density, and ten-fold in volume, by the quicker condensation of a zero morning. Let him picture the black gorge of the Fire Hole Canyon, where the river plunges down to the Upper Geyser Basin, forming Kepplar Cascade, transformed to a s.h.i.+ning fairyland of sparkling crystal and silver, everything in range of the flying spray spangled and plated and jewelled by the ice and frost, as though a whole summer day's suns.h.i.+ne had been shaken up with a winter night's snowfall, and then fas.h.i.+oned by an army of elfin workmen into a marvellous million-pieced fretwork, adorned with traceries ethereal and delicate, and of a fragile loveliness beyond words to describe.

All these things, and many more, the summer tourist will have to picture in coming near to a conception of what the wizardry of winter has effected. There is the novelty of seeing a rim of ice around the Devil's Frying Pan, and the great hole that the up-shooting gush of a geyser tears in a cloud of driven snow. There is the ma.s.sive beauty of the ice bulwark upon Virginia Cascade, and then, in winter as in summer the scenic climax, the lower falls and the Grand Canyon.

And nowhere more than in the incomparable Canyon is the general effect heightened by the presence of the ice and the snow and the clean-washed air. The very existence of the brilliant streaks and patches of yellow and umber and a dozen shades of red depends upon the water from the rain and melting snow dissolving the colouring matters from the rocks of the upper levels and depositing them upon the canyon walls as it trickles down to the river. Clear and sharp in the early springtime, the bright pigments are bleached and blended by the sun and winds of the summer until, by the time the fall storms set in, the contrast between streak and streak is far less marked than when, chrysalis like, they first burst from their snow coc.o.o.ns of winter.

It is in the spring, when the blaze of the great colour-drenched diorama is set off by patches of dazzling snow, when every vagrant sunbeam glancing from the canyon side is caught and refracted in the mazes of glittering icicles that fringe every jutting cornice and battlement till it reaches the eyes of the beholder like a flash from a thousand-hued star; when the slide from the mountainside forms a snow dam in the river, and the angry torrent, leaping like a lion at the bars of its cage, brushes away the obstruction and rages onward in renewed fury to the valley; when the great mouth under the snow-cap at the top of the falls is tearing itself wider day by day in its frantic efforts to disgorge the swollen stream that comes surging down from the over-flowing lake--it is at this time, when Nature has whipped on her mightiest forces to the extreme limit of their powers in a grandstand finish to her spring house-cleaning, that the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone has a beauty and a depth of appeal beyond all other seasons.

From the time that I first conceived the idea of an early springtime trip through the Yellowstone Park the difficulties in the way of carrying out such a plan, like rolled s...o...b..a.l.l.s, seemed to grow as my inquiries progressed. Every objection was urged, from the possibility of snow-blindness to the certainty of death from cold, snow-slides, or wild animals, from the probability of opposition from the Fort to the improbability of securing provisions en route. Old "Yankee Jim" even told me that the spirits of the hot springs and geysers, while peaceable enough in the mild days of summer, were not to be trusted after they had been "riled and fruz" by the winds and snows of winter. That was about the last straw. I felt that I was literally between the devil and the deep snow.

But when I reached Fort Yellowstone, at the entrance to the Park, I learned that nearly the whole of the hundred and fifty miles of road followed on the summer tour were patrolled by soldiers, and that the scouts made a complete round several times during the winter. The officer in command received me most kindly. He had no objection at all to my going out with the scouts or the soldiers on game patrol. If I would satisfy him that I could conduct myself properly on ski he would see that all necessary equipment and facilities were provided me for the winter tour.

I learned later that the sergeant who was detailed to test me out had boasted that he intended to break me of my fool notion if he had to break my fool neck. From the way he started, I am actually inclined to believe he meant it. He led me on foot up the road to Golden Gate, circled round to the west, ordered me to put on my ski, and then started down through the timber toward the terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs. I, of course, fell at the end of ten feet. Having little way on, my worst difficulty was getting my head out from under the toe of my left ski the while that same toe was held down by the rear end of my right ski. It was just the usual ski beginner's mix-up. My instructor, however, had descended about five hundred feet right side up when a loop of willow caught the toe of one of his ski and sent him spinning the next five hundred end over end. It was only by the greatest of good luck that he kissed lightly off five or six trees in pa.s.sing instead of colliding with one head-on. Even as it was they had to send a sled up from the fort to bring down his much-abused anatomy. The remainder of my ski novitiate, thank heaven, was served under the skilful and considerate tutelage of Peter Holt, the scout. Thanks to my Alaska snow-shoe work and the fact that I was hard as nails physically, I was p.r.o.nounced ready to take the road at the end of a couple of days. It was intensive training, and accompanied by many b.u.mps and thrills. I shall probably always be in Holt's debt for the b.u.mps. Most of the thrills I paid back last June when, finding him the Chief of Police of Livingston, I took him along as pa.s.senger for the first fifty miles of my run down the Yellowstone.

The morning after I was adjudged sufficiently ski-broke to attempt the winter tour of the Park with a fair chance of finis.h.i.+ng I was attached to a party of troopers detailed to pack in bacon to the station at Norris Basin. The memories of the doings of the delectable weeks that followed, which I spent with bear and elk and spouting geysers and bubbling mud springs as my daily play-fellows, are still tinged with rose at the end of a score of years. I am appending here--in the form of verbatim extracts from my religiously kept diary--some account of a few of the more amusing episodes. The wording follows hard upon the original; the spelling, I regret to say, I have just had to go over with a dictionary and dephonetize. If the view-point is a bit nave in spots, please remember that you are reading the babblings of a very moony and immature youth, more or less tipsy with his first draughts of life, who had just discovered that he was standing on the verge of a world full of innumerable things and imagining that they were all put there for his own special entertainment.

CHAPTER II

SKI SNAPS

Lake Station, April 13.