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NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY

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The River and I

John G: Neihardt

Author of "A Bundle of Myrrh," "Man-Song," etc.

With 50 Illustrations

G. P. Putnam's Sons

New York and London
^be 1kntcF?erbochec press

1910

THE NEW YORK

PUBUC LIBRARY

MTOA, LENOX AND
TfLOEW FOUNDATIONS.

n 1910 L

JOHN G. NEIHARDT

TTbc ItnCcherbochcr press, flcvp J^otR

r""-!

leeked
y 1913

XLo
MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — The River of an Unwritten Epic . i

II. — Sixteen Miles of Awe ... 33

III. — Half-way to the Moon . . . 6o

IV. — Making a Getaway . . .106

V. — Through the Region of Weir . -131

VI. — Getting Down to Business . .172

VII. — On to the Yellowstone . . . 207

VIII. — Down from the Yellowstone . . 260

Vlll

Illustrations

Typical Rapids on Upper Missouri

" HoLE-iN-THE- Wall " Rock on Upper Mis-
souri . .

The Palisades of the Upper Missouri
Fresh Meat! .....

Supper!

Night in Camp .....

Wolf Point, the First Town in Five Hun
DRED Miles ....

Night on the Upper Missouri
The Entrance to the Bad Lands
"Walking" Boats over Shallows

Reveille

Typical Upper Missouri River Reach
A String of Assiniboine Pearls!.
An Assiniboine Indian Chief
An Assiniboine Indian Camp

The Pen and Key Ranch

PAGE

189

213
217

221

" Atom " Sailing up-stream in a Head- Wind 225

229

233

237
241

245

On the Hurricane Deck of the "Expan-
sion" ; Capt. Marsh Third from the Left 251

Illustrations ix

Crane Creek Irrigation Dam, up the Yellow-
stone River .....

PAGE

255

Steamboat "Expansion" on the Yellow-
stone 263

Fort Union in 1837 ..... 267

The Site of Old Fort Union . . .271

Deapolis, N.D.,the Site of Old Fort Clark. 285

Washburn, North Dakota .... 289

The Landing at Bismarck, N. D. . . 293

The Boats Laid up for the Winter at Wash-
burn, N. D. . . . . . . 297

Roosevelt's Ranch House; now in Posses-
sion OF THE North Dakota Historical
Society at Bismarck . . . .301

Moonlight on the Missouri below the

Yellowstone ..... 305

Meeting a Steamboat in Mid-Stream . . 309

The Mouth of the James River . . .313

The Yankton Landing IN THE Old Days . 317

"Atom H" Landing at Sioux City . .321

THE RIVER AND I

CHAPTER I

THE RIVER OF AN UNWRITTEN EPIC

TT was Carlyle — was it not? — who said that
all great works produce an unpleasant im-
pression, on first acquaintance. It is so with
the Missouri River. Carlyle was not, I think,
speaking of rivers; but he was speaking of
masterpieces — and so am I.

It makes little difference to me whether or
not an epic goes at a hexameter gallop through
the ages, or whether it chooses to be a flood
of muddy water, ripping out a channel from
the mountains to the sea. It is merely a
matter of how the great dynamic force shall
express itself.

I have seen trout streams that I thought

2 The River and I

were better lyrics than I or any of my fellows
can ever hope to create. I have heard the
moaning of rain winds among mountain pines
that struck me as being equal, at least, to
Adonais. I have seen the solemn rearing of a
mountain peak into the pale dawn that gave
me a deep religious appreciation of my signi-
ficance in the Grand Scheme, as though I had
heard and understood a parable from the holy
lips of an Avatar. And the vast plains of my
native country are as a mystic scroll unrolled,
scrawled with a cabalistic writ of infinite
things.

In the same sense, I have come to look
upon the Missouri as more than a river. To
me, it is an epic. And it gave me my first big
boy dreams. It was my ocean. I remember
well the first time I looked upon my turbulent
friend, who has since become as a brother to
me. It was from a bluff at Kansas City. I
know I must have been a very little boy,
for the terror I felt made me reach up to
the saving forefinger of my father, lest this
insane devil-thing before me should suddenly
develop an unreasoning hunger for little boys.

The River of an Unwritten Epic 3

My father seemed as tall as Alexander — and
quite as courageous. He seemed to fear
it almost not at all. And I should have felt
little surprise had he taken me in his arms
and stepped easily over that mile or so of
liquid madness. He talked calmly about it — •
quite calmly. He explained at what angle
one should hold one's body in the current, and
how one should conduct one's legs and arms
in the whirlpools, providing one should swim
across.

Swim across! Why, it took a giant even to
talk that way ! For the summer had smitten
the distant mountains, and the June floods
ran. Far across the yellow swirl that spread
out into the wooded bottom-lands, we watched
the demolition of a little town. The siege had
reached the proper stage for a sally, and the
attacking forces were howling over the walls.
The sacking was in progress. Shacks, stores,
outhouses, suddenly developed a frantic de-
sire to go to St. Louis. It was a weird retreat
in very bad order. A cottage with a garret
window that glared like the eye of a Cyclops,
trembled, rocked with the athletic lift of the

4 The River and I

flood, made a panicky plunge into a conven-
ient tree; groaned, dodged, and took off
through the brush Hke a scared cottontail.
I felt a boy's pity and sympathy for those
houses that got up and took to their legs across
the yellow waste. It did not seem fair. I
have since experienced the same feeling for a
jack-rabbit with the hounds a-yelp at its heels.
But — to swim this thing! To fight this
cruel, invulnerable, resistless giant that went
roaring down the world with a huge uprooted
oak tree in its mouth for a toothpick! This
yellow, sinuous beast with hell-broth slaver-
ing from its jaws! This dare-devil boy-god
that sauntered along with a town in its pocket,
and a steepled church under its arm for a
moment's tov! Swim this?

For days I marvelled at the magnificence of
being a fullgrown man, unafraid of big rivers.

But the first sight of the Missouri River was
not enough for me. There was a dreadful
fascination about it — the fascination of all
huge and irresistible things. I had caught
my first wee glimpse into the infinite; I was
six years old.

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The River of an Unwritten Epic 7

Many a lazy Sunday stroll took us back to
the river; and little by little the dread became
less, and the wonder grew — and a little love
crept in. In my boy heart I condoned its
treachery and its giant sins. For, after all,
it sinned through excess of strength, not
through weakness. And that is the eternal
way of virile things. We watched the steam-
boats loading for what seemed to me far
distant ports. (How the world shrinks!) A
double stream of ''roosters" coming and going
at a dog-trot rushed the freight aboard; and
at the foot of the gang-plank the mate swore
masterfully while the perspiration dripped
from the point of his nose.

And then — the raucous whistles blew.
They reminded me of the lions roaring at the
circus. The gang-plank went up, the hawsers
went in. The snub nose of the steamer
swung out with a quiet majesty. Now she
feels the urge of the flood, and yields herself
to it, already dwindled to half her size. The
pilot turns his wheel — he looks very big and
quiet and masterful up there. The boat
veers round ; bells jangle. And now the engine

8 The River and I

wakens in earnest. She breathes with spurts
of vapor !

Breathed? No, it was sighing; for about it
all clung an inexplicable sadness for me — the
sadness that clings about all strong and beauti-
ful things that must leave their moorings and
go very, very far away. (I have since heard
it said that river boats are not beautiful!)
My throat felt as though it had smoke in it.
I felt that this queenly thing really wanted
to stay; for far down the muddy swirl where
she dwindled, dwindled, I heard her sobbing
hoarsely.

Off on the perilous flood for "faerie lands
forlorn"! It made the world seem almost
empty and very lonesome

And then the dog-days came, and I saw
my river tawny, sinewy, gaunt — a half-
starved lion. The long dry bars were like
the protruding ribs of the beast when the
prey is scarce, and the ropy main current
was like the lean, terrible muscles of its back.

In the spring it had roared; now it only
purred. But all the while I felt in it a dread-
ful economy of force, just as I have since felt

"barriers formed before him "

The River of an Unwritten Epic n

it in the presence of a great lean jungle-cat
at the zoo. Here was a thing that crouched
and purred — a mewing but terrific thing.
Give it an obstacle to overcome — fling it
something to devour; and lo! the crushing
impact of its leap !

And then again I saw it lying very quietly
in the clutch of a bitter winter — an awful
hush upon it, and the white cerement of the
snow flung across its face. And yet, this
did not seem like death; for still one felt in it
the subtle influence of a tremendous person-
ality. It slept, but sleeping it was still a
giant. It seemed that at any moment the
sleeper might turn over, toss the white cover
aside and, yawning, saunter down the val-
ley with its thunderous seven-league boots.
And still, back and forth across this heavy
sleeper went the pigmy wagons of the farmers
taking corn to market !

But one day in March the far-flung arrows
of the geese went over. Ilonk! hoik! A
vague, prophetic sense crept into the world
out of nowhere — part sound, part scent, and
yet too vague for either. Sap seeped from the

12 The River and I

maples. Weird mist-things went moaning
through the night. And then, for the first
time, I saw my big brother win a fight!

For days, strange premonitory noises had
run across the shivering surface of the ice.
Through the foggy nights, a muffled inter-
mittent booming went on under the wild
scurrying stars. Now and then a staccato
crackling ran up the icy reaches of the river,
like the sequent bickering of Krags down a
firing line. Long seams opened in the dis-
turbed surface, and from them came a
harsh sibilance as of a line of cavalry unsheath-
ing sabres.

But all the while, no shov/ of violence —
only the awful quietness with deluge po-
tential in it. The lion was crouching for
the leap.

Then one day under the warm sun a boom-
ing as of distant big guns began. Faster and
louder came the dull shaking thunders, and
passed swiftly up and down, drawling into
the distance. Fissures yawned, and the
sound of the grumbling black water beneath
came up. Here and there the surface lifted

BOATS WRECKED IN AN ICE GORGE

The River of an Unwritten Epic 15

— bent — broke with shriekings, groanings,
thunderings. And then

The giant turned over, yawned and got to
his feet, flinging his arms about him! Barri-
ers formed before him. Confidently he set
his massive shoulders against them — smashed
them into little blocks, and went on singing,
shouting, toward the sea. It w^as a glorious
victory. It made me very proud of my big
brother. And yet all the w^hile I dreaded
him — just as I dread the caged tiger that I
long to caress because he is so strong and so
beautiful.

Since then I have changed somewhat,
though I am hardly as tall, and certainly
not so courageous as Alexander. But I
have felt the sinews of the old yellow giant
tighten about my naked body. I have been
bent upon his hip. I have presumed to throw
against his Titan strength the craft of man.
I have often swum in what seemed liquid
madness to my boyhood. And we have be-
come acquainted through battle. No friends
like fair foes reconciled !

And I have lain panting on his bars, while

i6 The River and I

all about me went the lisping laughter of my
brother. For he has the strength of a god,
the headlong temper of a comet; but along
with these he has the glad, mad, irresponsi-
ble spirit of a boy. Thus ever are the epic
things.

The ^Missouri is unique among rivers. I
think God wished to teach the beauty of a
virile soul fighting its way toward peace —
and His precept was the ^Missouri. To me,
the Amazon is a basking alligator; the Tiber
is a dream of dead glory; the Rhine is a
fantastic fairy-tale; the Nile a mummy,
periodically resurrected; the Mississippi, a
convenient geographical boundary line; the
Hudson, an epicurean philosopher.

But the Missouri — my brother — is the
eternal Fighting ]\Ian!

I love all things that yearn toward far
seas: the singing Tennysonian brooks that
flow b}^ ''Philip's farm" but "go on forever";
the little Ik Walton rivers, where one may
*' study to be quiet and go a-fishing"! the
Babylonian streams by which we have all
pined in captivity; the sentimental Danubes

The River of an Unwritten Epic 19

which we can never forget because of "that
night in June"; and at a very early age I
had already developed a decent respect for
the verbose manner in which the ''waters
come down at Lodore."

But the Missouri is more than a sentiment —
even more than an epic. It is the symbol of
my own soul, which is, I surmise, not unlike
other souls. In it I see flung before me all
the stern w^orld-old struggle become materi-
alized. Here is the concrete representation
of the earnest desire, the momentarily frus-
trate purpose, the beating at the bars, the
breathless fighting of the half -whipped but
never-to-be-conquered spirit, the sobbing of
the wind-broken runner, the anger, the mad-
ness, the laughter. And in it all the unweary-
ing urge of a purpose, the unswerving belief in
the peace of a far away ocean.

If in a moment of despair I should reel for
a breathing space away from the fight, with
no heart for battle-cries, and with only a
desire to pray, I could do it in no better
manner than to lift my arms above the river
and cry out into the big spaces: ''You who

20 The River and I

somehow understand — behold this river! It
expresses what is voiceless in me. It prays
for me ! ' '

Not only in its physical aspect does the
Missouri appeal to the imagination. From
Three Forks to its mouth — a distance of three
thousand miles — this zigzag watercourse is
haunted with great memories. Perhaps never
before in the history of the world has a river
been the thoroughfare of a movement so
tremendously epic in its human appeal, so
vastly significant in its relation to the de-
velopment of man. And in the building
of the continent Nature fashioned well the
scenery for the great human story that was to
be enacted here in the fulness of years. She
built her stage on a large scale, taking no
account of miles; for the coming actors were
to be big men, mighty travellers, intrepid
fighters, laughers at time and space. Plains
limited only by the rim of sky; mountains
severe, huge, tragic as fate; deserts for the
trying of strong spirits; grotesque volcanic
lands — dead, utterly ultra-human — where
athletic souls might struggle with despair;

The River of an Unwritten Epic 21

impetuous streams with their rapids terrible
as Scylla, where men might go down fighting:
thus Nature built the stage and set the scenes.
And that the arrangements might be complete,
she left a vast tract unfinished, where still
the building of the world goes on — a place
of awe in which to feel the mighty Doer of
Things at work. Indeed, a setting vast and
weird enough for the coming epic. And as the
essence of all story is struggle, tribes of wild
fighting men grew up in the land to oppose
the coming masters; and over the limitless
wastes swept the blizzards.

I remember when I first read the words
of Vergil beginning Ubi tot Simois, 'Svhere
the Simois rolls along so many shields and
helmets and strong bodies of brave men
snatched beneath its floods." The far-see-
ing sadness of the lines thrilled me; for it
was not of the little stream of the ^ncid
that I thought Vv^hile the Latin professor
quizzed me as to constructions, but of that
great river of my own epic country — the
Missouri. Was I unfair to old Vergil, think
you? As for me, I think I flattered him a

22 The River and I

bit! And in this modern application, the
ancient lines ring true. For the Missouri
from Great Falls to its mouth is one long
grave of men and boats. And such men!

It is a time-honored habit to look back
through the ages for the epic things. Modern
affairs seem a bit commonplace to some of us.
A horde of semi-savages tears down a town
in order to avenge the theft of a faithless
wife who was probably no better than she
should have been — and we have the Iliad.
A petty king sets sail for his native land,
somehow losing himself ten years among the
isles of Greece — and we have the Odyssey.
(I would back a Missouri River ''rat" to
make the same distance in a row boat within
a month!) An Argive captain returns home
after an absence of ten years to find his wife
interested overmuch in a trusted friend who
went not forth to battle; a wrangle ensues;
the tender spouse finishes her lord with an
axe — and you have the Agamemnon. (To-
day we should merely have a sensational
trial, and hysterical scareheads in the news-
papers.) Such were the ancient stories that

The River of an Unwritten Epic 23

move us all — sordid enough, be sure, when
you push them hard for facts. But time and
genius have glorified them. Not the deeds,
but Homer and ^schylus were great.

We no longer write epics — we live them.
To create an epic, it has been said somewhere,
the poet must write with the belief that the
immortal gods are looking over his shoulder.

We no longer prostrate ourselves before
the immortal gods. We have long since dis-
covered the divinity within ourselves, and
so we have flung across the continents and
the seas the visible epics of will.

The history of the American fur trade
alone miakes the Trojan War look like a Punch
and Judy show! and the Missouri River was
the path of the conquerors. We have the
facts — but we have not Homer.

An epic story in its essence is the story of
heroic men battling, aided or frustrated by
the superhuman. And in the fur trade era
there was no dearth of battling men, and
the elements left no lack of superhuman
obstacles.

I am more thrilled by the history of the

24 The River and I

Lewis and Clark expedition than by the tale
of Jason. John Colter, wandering three
years in the wilderness and discovering the
Yellowstone Park, is infinitely more heroic
to me than Theseus. Alexander Harvey
makes ^neas look like a degenerate. It was
Harvey, you know, who fell out with the
powers at Fort Union, with the result that
he was ordered to report at the American Fur
Company's office at St. Louis before he could
be reinstated in the service. This was at
Christmas time — Christmas of a Western
winter. The distance was seventeen hun-
dred miles, as the crow flies. "Give me a
dog to carry my blankets," said he, "and
by God I '11 report before the ice goes out!"
He started afoot through the hostile tribes
and blizzards. He reported at St. Louis
early in March, returning to Union by the
first boat out that year. And when he ar-
rived at the Fort, he called out the man who
was responsible for the trouble, and quietly
killed him. That is the stern human stuff
with which you build realms. What could
not Homer do with such a man? And when

The River of an Unwritten Epic 25

one follows him through his recorded career,
even Achilles seems a bit ladylike beside him!
The killing of Carpenter by his treacherous
friend, Mike Fink, would easily make a whole
book of hexameters — with a nice assortment
of gods and goddesses thrown in. There
was a woman in the case — a half-breed.
Well, this half-breed woman fascinates me
quite as much as she whose face "launched a
thousand ships and burnt the topless towers
of Ilium"! In ancient times the immortal
gods scourged nations for impieties; and, as we
read, we feel the black shadow of inexorable
fate moving through the terrific gloom of
things. But the smallpox scourge that broke
out at Fort Union in 1837, sweeping with
desolation through the prairie tribes, moves
me more than the storied catastrophes of old.
It was a Reign of Terror. Even Larpen-
teur's bald account of it fills me with the
fine old Greek sense of fate. Men sickened
at dawn and were dead at sunset. Every
day a cartload or two of corpses went over
the bluff into the river; and men became
reckless. Larpenteur and his friend joked daily

26 The River and I

about the carting of the gruesome freight.
They felt the irresistible, and they laughed
at it, since struggle was out of the question.
Some drank deeply and indulged in hysterical
orgies. Some hollowed out their own graves
and waited patiently beside them for the
hidden hand to strike. At least fifteen
thousand died — Audubon says one hundred
and fifty thousand; and the buffalo in-
creased rapidly — because the hunters were
few.

Would not such a > story — here briefly
sketched — move old Sophocles?

The story of the half-breed woman — a
giantess — who had a dozen sons, has about it
for me all the glamour of an ancient yarn.
The sons were free- trappers, you know, and,
incidentally, thieves and murderers. (I sus-
pect some of our classic heroes were as much !)
But they were doubtless living up to the
light that was in them, and they were game
to the finish. So was the old woman; they
called her ''the mother of the devils." Trap-
pers from the various posts organized to
hunt them down, and the mother and the sons

The River of an Unwritten Epic 27

barricaded their home. The fight was a
hard one. One by one the ''devils" fell
fighting about their mother. And then the
besieging party fired the house. With all
her sons wounded or dead, the old woman
sallied forth. She fought like a grizzly and
went dow^n like a heroine.

A sordid, brutal story? Ah, but it was life!
Fling about this story of savage mother-love
the glamour of time and genius, and it will
move you, believe me!

And the story of old Hugh Glass! Is it
not fateful enough to be the foundation of a
tremendous ^schylean drama .^ A big man
he was — old and bearded. A devil to fight,
a giant to endure, and an angel to forgive!
He was in the Leavenworth campaign against
the Aricaras, and afterward he went as a
hunter with the Henry expedition. He had a
friend — a mere boy — and these two were very
close. One day Glass, who was in advance
of the party, beating up the country for game,
fell in with a grizzly ; and when the main party
came up, he lay horribly mangled with the
bear standing over him. They killed the bear,

28 The River and I

but the old man seemed done for; his face had
all the features scraped off, and one of his
legs went wobbly when they lifted him.

It was merely a matter of one more man
being dead, so the expedition pushed on,
leaving the young friend with several others
to see the old man under ground. But the
old man was a fighter and refused to die,
though he was unconscious: scrapped stub-
bornly for several days, but it seemed plain
enough that he would have to let go soon.
So the young friend and the others left the
old man in the wilderness to finish up the
job by himself. They took his weapons and
hastened after the main party, for the
country was hostile.

But one day old Glass woke up and got one
of his eyes open. And when he saw how
things stood, he swore to God he would live,
merely for the sake of killing his false friend.
He crawled to a spring near by, where he
found a bush of ripe bull-berries. He waited
day after day for strength, and finally started
out to crawl a small matter of one hundred
miles to the nearest fort. And he did it, too!

The River of an Unwritten Epic 29

Also he found his friend after much wandering
— and forgave him.

Fancy ^schyhas working up that story
with the Furies for a chorus and Nemesis
appearing at intervals to nerve the old hero!

And Rose the Renegade, who became the
chief of a powerful tribe of Indians! And
Father de Smet, one of the noblest figures in
history, carrying the gospel into the wilder-
ness! And Le Barge, the famous pilot, whose
biography reads like a romance! In the his-
tory of the Missouri River there were hun-
dreds of these heroes, these builders of the
epic West. Some of them were violent at
times; some were good men and some were
bad. But they were masterful always. They
met obstacles and overcame them. They
struck their foes in front. They thirsted
in deserts, hungered in the wilderness, froze
in the blizzards, died with the plagues, and
were massacred by the savages. Yet they
conquered. Heroes of an unwritten epic!
And their pathway to defeat and victory was
the Missouri River.

If you wish to have your epic spiced wdth

30 The River and I

the glamour of kings, the history of the river
will not fail you; for in those days there
were kings as well as giants in the land.
Though it was not called such, all the blank
space on the map of the Missouri River
country and even to the Pacific, v/as one
vast empire — the empire of the American
Fur Company; and J. J. Astor in New York
spoke the words that filled the wilderness
with deeds. Thus democratic America once
beheld within her own confines the paradox
of an empire truly Roman in character.

Here and there on the banks of the great
waterway — an imperial road that would have
delighted Cccsar — many forts were built.
These were the ganglia of that tremendous
organism of which Astor was the brain. The
bourgeois of one of these posts was virtually
proconsul with absolute power in his terri-
tory. Mackenzie at Union — which might
be called the capital of the Upper Missouri
country — was called "King of the Missouri."
He had an eye for seeing purple. At one
time he ordered a complete suit of armor
from England ; and even went so far as to have

The River of an Unwritten Epic 31

medals struck, in true imperial fashion, to be
distributed among his loyal followers.

Far and wide these Western American kings
flung the trappers, their subjects, into the
wilderness. Verily, in the unwritten "Miss-
ouriad" there is no lack of regal glamour.

The ancients had a way of making vast
things small enough to be famihar. They
m_ade gods of the elements, and natural
phenomena became to them the awful acts
of the gods.

These moderns made no gods of the ele-
ments— they merely conquered them! The
ancients ideaHzed the material. These mod-
erns materialized the ideal. The latter
method is much more appealing to me — an
American — than the former. I love the
ancient stories; but it is for the modern mar-
vellous facts that I reserve my admiration.

When one looks upon his own country as
from a height of years, old tales lose something
of their wonder for him. It is owing to this
attitude that the prospect of descending the
great river in a power canoe from the head
of navigation gave me delight.

32 The River and I

Days and nights filled with the singing and
muttering of my big brother ! And I would need
only to close my eyes, and all about me would
come and go the ghosts of the mighty doers —
who are my kin. Big men, bearded and pow-
erful, pushing up stream with the cordelle on
their shoulders! Voyageurs chanting at the
paddles! ]\Iackinaws descending with pre-
cious freights of furs! Steamboats grunting
and snoring up stream! Old forts spnuig up
again out of the dusk of things forgotten, with
all the old turbulent life, where in reality
to-day the plough of the fanner goes or the
steers browse! Forgotten battles blowing by
in the wind! And from a bluff's summit, here
and there, ghostly war parties peering down
upon me — the lesser kin of their old enemies —
taking a simimer's outing where of old went
forth the fighting men, the builders of the
unwritten epic!

CHAPTER II

SIXTEEN MILES OF AWE

/^UR party of three left the railroad at
^^^ Great Falls, a good two-days' walk
up river from Benton, the head of Missouri
River navigation, to which point our boat
material had been shipped and our baggage
checked.

A vast sun-burned waste of buffalo-grass,
prickly pears, and sagebrush stretched before
us to the north and east ; and on the west the
filmy blue contour of the Highwoods Aloun-
tains lifted like sun-smitten thunder clouds in
the July swelter. One squinting far look, how-
ever, told you that these were not rain clouds.
The very thought of rain came to you with the
vagueness of some birth-surviving memory of
a former time. You looked far up and out
to the westward and caught the glint of snow
on the higher peaks. But the sight was

3 33

34 The River and I

unconvincing; it was like a story told without
the ''vital impulse." Always had these
plains blistered under this July sun; always
had the spots of alkali made the only white-
ness; and the dry harsh snarl and snap of the
grasshoppers' wings had pricked this torrid
silence through all eternity.

A stern and pitiless prospect for the amateur
pedestrian, to be sure; for we devotees of the
staff and pack have come to associate pedes-
trianism with the idyllic, and the idyllic
flourishes only in a land of frequent showers.
Theocritus and prickly pears are not com-
patible. Yet it was not without a certain
thrill of exaltation that we strapped on our
packs and stretched our legs after four days
on the dusty plush.

And though ahead of us lay no shady,
amiably crooked country roads and bosky
dells, wherein one might lounge and dawdle
over Hazlitt, yet we knew how crisscross
cattle-trails should take us skirting down the
river's sixteen miles of awe.

Five hundred miles below its source, the
falls of the Missouri begin with a vertical

Sixteen Miles of Awe 35

plunge of sixty feet. This is the Black Eagle
Falls, presumably named so by Lewis and
Clark and other explorers, because of the
black eagles found there.

With all due courtesy to my big surly
grumbling friend, the Black Eagle Falls, I
must say that I was a bit disappointed in
him. Oh! he is quite magnificent enough,
and every inch a Titan, to be sure; but of
late years it seems he has taken up with
company rather beneath him. First of all,
he has gone to work in a most plebeian, almost
slave-like fashion, turning wheels and making
lights and dragging silly little trolley cars
about a straggling town. Also, he hobnobs
continually with a sprawling, brawling, bad-
breathed smelter, as no respectable Titan
should do. And on top of it all — and this
was the straw that broke the back of my sen-
timental camel — he allows them to maintain
a park on the cliffs above him, where the
merest white-skinned, counter- jumping pigmy
may come of a Sunday for his glass of pop and
a careless squint at the toiling Titan. Puny
Philistines eating peanuts and watching

36 The River and I

Samson at his Gaza stunt! I hke it not.
Rather would I see the Muse Cho peahng
potatoes or Persephone busy with a banana
cart! Enceladus wriggHng under a mountain
is well enough; but Enceladus composedly-
turning a crank for little men — he seemed
too heavy for that light work.

Leaning on the frame observation platform,
I closed my eyes, and in the dull roar that
seemed the voices of countless ages, the park
and the smelter and the silly bustling trolley
cars and the ginger-ale and the peanuts and
my physical self — all but my own soul —
were swallowed up. I saw my Titan brother
as he was made — four hundred yards of
writhing, liquid sinew, strenuously idle, mag-
nificently worthless, flinging meaningless
thunders over the vast arid plain, splendidly
empty under sun and stars! I saw him as
La Verendrye must have seen him — busy only
at the divine business of being a giant. And
for a moment behind shut eyes, it seemed
very inconsequential to me that cranks should
be turned and that trolley cars should run
up and down precisely in the same place,

BLACK EAGLE FALLS

Sixteen Miles of Awe 39

never getting anywhere, and that there should
be anything in all that tract but an austere
black eagle or two, and my own soul, and my
Titan brother.

When I looked again, I could half imagine
the old turbulent fellow winking slily at me
and saying in that undertone you hear when
you forget the thunders for a moment: ''Don't
you worry about me, little man. It 's all a
joke, and I don't mind. Only to-morrow and
then another to-morrow, and there won't be
any smelters or trolley cars or ginger-ale or pea-
nuts or sentimentalizing outers like yourself.
But I '11 be here howling under sun and stars."

Whereupon I posed the toiling philosopher
before the camera, pressed the bulb, and des-
scended from the summit of the cliff (as well
as from my point of view) to the trail skirting
northward up the river, leaving Enceladus
grumbling at his crank.

Perhaps, after all, cranks really have to be
turned. Still, it seems too bad, and I have
long bewailed it almost as a personal grief,
that utility and ugliness should so often be
running mates.

40 The River and I

They tell me that the Matterhorn never
did a tap of work; and you could n't color one
Easter egg with all the gorgeous sunsets of
the world! May we all become, some day,
perfectly useless and beautiful!

At the foot of the first fall, a mammoth
spring wells up out of the rock. Nobody
tells you about it ; you run across it by chance,
and it interests you much more in that way.
It would seem that a spring throwing out a
stream equivalent to a river one hundred
yards wide and two feet deep would deserve
a little exploitation. Down East they would
have a great white sprawling hotel built close
by it wherein one could drink spring water (at
a quarter the quart), with half a pathology
pasted on the bottle as a label. But nobody
seems to care much about so small an ooze
out there: everything else is so big. And so
it has nothing at all to do but go right on being
one of the very biggest springs of all the
world. This is really something; and I like
it better than the quarter-per-quart idea.

In sixteen miles the Missouri River falls
four hundred feet. Incidentally, this stretch

Sixteen Miles of Awe 41

of river is said to be capable of producing
the most tremendous water-power in the
world.

After skirting four miles of water that ran
like a mill-race, we came upon the Rainbow
Falls, where a thousand feet of river takes a
drop of fifty feet over a precipice regular as a
wall of masonry. This was much more to
my liking — a million horse-power or so busy
making rainbows ! Bully!

It was a very hot day and the sun was now
high. I sat down to wipe the sweat out of
my eyes. (One does not perspire in July up
there ; one sweats!) I wished to get acquainted
with this weaver of iridescent nothings who
knew so well the divine art of doing nothing
at all and doing it good and hard! After all,
it isn't so easy to do nothing and make it
count !

And in the end, when all broken lights
have blended again with the Source Light,
I 'm not so sure that rainbows will seem less
important than rows and rows of arc lights
and clusters and clusters of incandescent
globes. Are you? I can contract an indefin-

42 The River and I

able sort of heartache from the blue sputter
of a city light that snuffs out moon and stars
for tired scurrying folks: but the opalescent
mist-drift of the Rainbow Falls wove
heavens for me in its sheen, and through its
whirlwind rifts and crystal flaws, far reaches
opened up with all the heart's desire at the
other end. You shut your eyes with that
thunder in 3^our ears and that gusty mist on
your face, and you see it very plainly — more
plainly than ever so many arc lights could
make you see it — the ultimate meaning of
things. To be sure, when you open your
eyes again, it 's all gone — the storm-flung
rainbows seem to hide it again.

A mile below, we came upon the Crooked
Falls of twenty feet. Leaving the left bank,
and running almost parallel with it for some
three hundred yards, then turning and making
a horseshoe, and returning to the right bank
almost opposite the place of flrst observation,
this fall is nearly a mile in length, being an
unbroken sheet for that distance. This one,
also, does nothing at all, and in a beautifully
irregular way. Somehow it made me think

Sixteen Miles of Awe 43

of Walt Whitman! But we left it soon,
swinging out into the open parched country.
We knew all this turbulence to be merely the
river's bow before the great stunt.

As we swung along, kicking up the acrid
alkali dust from the cattle-trail that snaked
its way through the cactus and sagebrush,
the roar behind us died; and before us, far
away, dull muffled thunders grew up in the
hush of the burning noon. Thunders in a
desert, and no cloud! For an hour we swung
along the trail, and ever the thunders in-
creased— like the undertone of the surf when
the sea whitens. We were approaching the
Great Falls of the Missouri. There were no
sign posts in that lonesome tract; no one of
whom to ask the way. Little did we need
direction. The voice of thunder crying in
the desert led us surely.

A half -hour more of clambering over shale-
strewn gullies, up sun-baked watercourses,
and we found ourselves toiling up the ragged
slope of a bluff; and soon we stood upon a
rocky ledge with the thunders beneath us.
Damp gusts beat upward over the blistering

44 The River and I

scarp of the cHff. I lay down, and crawHng
to the edge, looked over. Two hundred feet
below me — straight down as a pebble drops
— a watery Inferno raged, and far-flung
whirlwinds, all but exhausted with the dizzy
upward reach, whisked cool, invisible mops
of mist across my face.

Flung down a preliminary mile of steep
descent, choked in between soaring walls of
rock four hundred yards apart, innumerable
crystal tons rushed down ninety feet in one
magnificent plunge. You saw the long bent
crest — shimmering with the changing colors of
a peacock's back — smooth as a lake when all
winds sleep; and then the mighty river was
snuffed out in gulfs of angry gray. Capri-
cious river draughts, sucking up the damp
defile, w^hipped upward into the blistering
sunlight gray spiral towers that leaped into
opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond
and pearl and amethyst.

I caught myself tightly gripping the ledge
and shrinking with a shuddering instinctive
fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed
to stifle all memory of sound — and left only

GREAT FALLS FROM CLIFF ABOVE

THf

NEW YORK

HUBL»C LIBRARY

Sixteen Miles of Awe 47

the silent universe with myself and this terri-
bly beautiful thing in the midst of utter
emptiness. And I loved it with a strange,
desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself
so magnificently; and that is really all a man,
or a waterfall, or a mountain, or a flower,
or a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, or
an ocean, or a thunderstorm has to do in
this world. And it was doing it right
out in the middle of a desert, bleak, sun-
leprosied, forbidding, with only the stars and
the moon and the sun and a cliff-swallow or
two to behold. Thundering out its message
into the waste places, careless of audiences —
like a Master! Bully, grizzled old Master-
Bard singing — as most of them do — to empty
benches! And it had been doing that ten
thousand thousand years, and would do so for
ten thousand thousand more, and never pause
for plaudits. I suspect the soul of old Homer
did that — and is still doing it, somehow, some-
where. After all there is n't much difference
between really tremendous things — Homer or
waterfalls or thunderstorms — is there? It 's
only a matter of hov/ things happen to be big.

48 The River and I

I was absent-mindedly chasing some big
thundering line of Sophocles when Bill, the
little Cornishman, ran in between me and
the evasive line: "Lord! what a waste of
power!" n

There is some difference in temperaments.
Most men, I fancy, would have enjoyed a
talk with a civil engineer upon that ledge.
I should have liked to have Shelley there,
myself. It 's the difference between poetry
and horse-power, dithyrambics and dynamos,
Keats and Kipling! What is the energy
exerted by the Great Falls of the Missouri?
How many horse-power did Shelley fling into
the creation of his West Wind? How many
foot-pounds did the boy heart of Chatterton
beat before it broke? Please leave something
to the imagination!

We backtrailed to a point where the cliff
fell away into a rock-strewn incline, and clam-
bered down a break-neck slope to the edge
of the crystal broil. There was a strange
exhilaration about it — a novel sense of dis-
covering a natural wonder for ourselves.
We seemed the first men who had ever been

:z:

o
en

bi
X
H

O
Pi

H
Oi

-^ ^'^ Titian

Sixteen Miles of Awe 51

there: that was the most gripping thing
about it.

Aloof, stupendous, terrific, staggering in
the intensity of its wild beauty, you reach
it by a trail. There are no 'busses running
and you can't buy a sandwich or a peanut
or a glass of beer within ten miles of its
far-flung thunders. For twentieth century
America, that is doing rather well!

Skirting the slippery rocks at the lip of the
mad flood, we swung ourselves about a ledge,
dripping with the cool mist-drift; descended
to the level of the lower basin, where a
soaking fog made us shiver; pushed through
a dripping, oozing, autumnal sort of twilight,
and came out again into the beat of the desert
sun, to look squarely into the face of the
giant.

A hawk wheeled and swooped and floated far
up in the dazzling air. Somehow that hawk
seemed to make the lonely place doubly lonely.
Did you ever notice how a lone coyote on a
snow-heaped prairie gives you a heartache,
whereas the empty waste would only have
exhilarated you? Always, it seemed, that

52 The River and I

veering hawk had hung there, and would
hang so always — outliving the rising of suns
and the drifting of stars and the visits of the
moon.

A vague sense of grief came over me at the
thought of all this eternal restlessness, this
turbulent fixity; and, after all, it seemed much
greater to be even a very little man, living
largely, dying, somehow, into something big
and new; than to be this Promethean sort of
thing, a giant waterfall in a waste.

I have known men who felt dwarfed in the
presence of vast and awful things. I never
felt bigger than when I first looked upon the
ocean. The skyward lift of a mountain peak
makes me feel very, very tall. And when a
thunderstorm comes down upon the world
out of the northwest, with jagged blades of
fire ripping up the black bellies of the clouds,
I know all about the heart of Attila and the
Vikings and tigers and Alexander the Great!
So I think I grew a bit, out there talking
to that water-giant who does nothing at all —
not even a vaudeville stunt — and does it so
masterfully.

Sixteen Miles of Awe 53

By and by they '11 build a hotel in the flat
at the edge of the lower basin; plant prim
flowers in very prim beds; and rob you on
the genteel European plan. Comfortably sit-
ting in a willow chair on the broad veranda, one
will read the signs on those cliffs — all about
the best shoes to wear, and what particular
pill of all the pills that be, sjiould be taken
for that ailing kidney. But it will not be I
who shall sit in that willow chair on that
broad, as yet unbuilt, veranda.

The sun was glinting at the rim of the cliffs,
and the place of awe and thunders was slowly
filling with shadow. We found a steep trail,
inaccessible for vehicles, leading upward
in the direction of Benton. It was getting
that time of day when even a sentimentalist
wants a beefsteak, especially if he has hiked
over dusty scorching trails and scrambled
over rocks all day.

Some kind man back in the town, with a
fund of that most useless article, information,
had told us of a place called Goodale, theoreti-
cally existing on the Great Northern Railroad
between Great Falls and Benton. We had

54 The River and I

provided only for luncheon, trusting to fate
and Goodale for supper.

Goodale! A truly beautiful name! No
doubt in some miraculous way the character
of the country changed suddenly just before
you got there merely to justify the name.
Surely no one would have the temerity to
conjure up so beautiful a name for a desert
town. Yet, half unwillingly, I thought of a
little place I once visited — against my will,
since the brakeman put me off there — by the
name of Forest City. I remembered with
misgivings how there wasn't a tree within
something like four hundred miles. But I
pushed that memory aside as a lying prophet.
I believed in Goodale and beefsteak. Goodale
would be a neat, quiet little town, set snugly
in a verdant valley. We would come into it
by starlight — down a careless gypsying sort of
country road; and there would be the sound
of a dear little trickling bickering cool stream
out in the shadows of the trees fringing
the approach to Goodale. And we 'd pass
pretty little cottages with vines growing
over the doors, and hollyhocks peeping

Sixteen Miles of Awe 55

over the fences, and cheerful lights in the
windows.

Goodale! And then, right in the middle
of the town (no, village — the word is cosier
somehow) — right in the middle of the village
there would be a big restaurant, with such
alluring scents of beefsteak all about it.

I set the pace up that trail. It was a
swinging, loose, cavalry-horse sort of pace —
the kind that rubs the blue off the distance
and paints the back trail gray. Goodale was
a sort of Mecca. I thought of it with some-
thing like a religious awe. How far was
Goodale, would you suppose? Not far, cer-
tainly, once we found the railroad.

We made the last steep climb breath-
lessly, and came out on the level. A great,
monotonous, heartachy prairie lay before
us — utterly featureless in the twilight. Far
off across the scabby land a thin black line
swept out of the dusk into the dusk —
straight as a crow's flight. It was the rail-
road. We made a cross-cut for it, tum-
bling over gopher holes, plunging through
sagebrush, scrambling over gullies that told

56 The River and I

the incredible tale of torrents having been
there once. I ate quantities of alkali dust
and went on believing in Goodale and beef-
steak. Beefsteak became one of the princi-
pal stations on the Great Northern Railroad,
so far as I was concerned personally. That
is what you might call the geography of a
healthy stomach.

With the falling of the sun the climate of the
country had changed. It was no longer
blistering. You sat down for a moment
and a shiver went up your spine. At noon I
thought about all the lime-kilns I had ever met.
Now I could hear the hickory nuts dropping
in the crisp silence down in the old Missouri
woods.

We struck the railroad and went faster.
Since my first experience with railroad ties, I
have continued to associate them with hunger.
I need only look an ordinary railroad tie in
the face to contract a wonderful appetite.
It works on the principle of a memory
system. So, as we put the ties behind us,
I increased my order at that restaurant
in the sweet little pedestrian's village of

Sixteen Miles of Awe 57

Goodale. "A couple of eggs on the side,
waiter," I said half audibly to the petite
woman in the white apron who served the
tables in the restaurant there. She was
very real to me. I could count the rings
on her fingers; and when she smiled, I noted
that her teeth were very white — doubtless
they got that way from eating quantities and
quantities of thick juicy beefsteak!

The track took a sudden turn ahead.
"Around that bend," said I aloud, ''lies
Goodale." We went faster. We rounded
the bend, only to see the dusky, heartachy,
barren stretch.

"Railroads," explained I to myself, "have
a way of going somewhere; it is one of their
peculiarities." No doubt this track had been
laid for the express purpose of guiding hungry
folks to the hospitable little village. We
plunged on for an hour. Meanwhile my
orders to the trim little woman in the white
apron increased steadily. She smiled broadly
but winsomely, showing those charming beef-
steak-polished teeth. They shone like a beacon
ahead of me, for it was now dark.

58 The River and I

Suddenly we came upon a signboard. We
went up to it, struck a match, and read breath-
lessly ' ' GOODALE. ' '

We looked about us. Goodale was a switch
and a box car.

Nothing beside remains,

I quoted audibly:

'round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Alas for the trim little lady with the white
teeth and the smile and the beefsteak!

We said bitter things there in that waste
about the man with the information. We
loaded his memory with anathemas. One
cannot eat a signboard, even with so inviting
a name upon it. An idea struck me — it
seemed a very brilliant one at the moment.
I sat down and delivered myself of it to my
companions, who also had lusted after the
flesh-pots. ''We have wronged that man
with the information," said I. "He was no
ordinary individual; he was a prophet: he
simply got his dates mixed. In precisely one

Sixteen Miles of Awe 59

hundred years from now, there will be a town
on this spot — and a restaurant! Shall we
wait?"

They cursed me bitterly. I suspect neither
of them is a philosopher. Thereat I proceeded
to eat a thick juicy steak from the T-bone
portion of an unborn steer, served by the
trim little lady of a hundred years hence,
there in that potential village of Goodale.
And as I smoked my cigarette, I felt very
thankful for all the beautiful things that do
not exist.

And I slept that night in the great front
bedroom, the ceiling of which is of diamond
and turquoise.

CHAPTER III

HALF-WAY TO THE MOON

A T last the sinuous yellow road dropped
over the bluff rim and, to all appear-
ances, dissolved into the sky — a gray-blue,
genius-colored sky.

It was sundown, and this was the end of
the trail for us. Beneath the bluff rim lay
Benton. We flung ourselves down in the
bunch-grass that whispered drily in a cool
wind fresh from the creeping night-shade.
Now that Benton lay beneath us, I was in
no hurry to look upon it.

Fort Benton ? What a clarion cry that name

had been to me! Old men — too old for

voyages — had talked about this place; a long

time ago, 'way down on the Kansas City

docks, I had heard them. How far away it

was then! Reach after reach, bend after

bend, grunting, snoring, toiling, sparring

Half- Way to the Moon 6i

over bars, bucking the currents, dodging
the snags, went the snub-nosed steamers —
brave Httle steamers! — forging on toward
Fort Benton. And it was so very, very far
away — half-way to the moon no doubt! St.
Louis was indeed very far away. But Fort
Benton!

Well, they spoke of the Fort Benton traffic
as "the mountain trade," and I had not then
seen a mountain. You could stand on the
very tallest building in Kansas City, and you
could look and look and never see a mountain.
And to think how far the brave little steamers
had to go! How did they ever manage to
get back?

But the old men on the docks — they had
been there and all the way back, perhaps
hundreds of times. And they were such
heroes! Great paw-like hands they had,
toughened with the gripping of cables;
eyes that had that way of looking through
and far beyond things. (Seamen and plains-
men have it.) And they had such romantic,
crinkly, wrinkly, leathery faces. They got
so on the way to Benton and back. And

62 The River and I

they talked about it — those old men lounging
on the docks — because it was so far away and
they were so old that they could n't get there
any more.

What a picture I made out of their kaleido-
scopic chatter; beautifully inaccurate, im-
possibly romantic picture, in which big
muscley men had fights with yawping painted
savages that always got gloriously licked, in
the approved story-book manner! I could
shut my eyes and see it all very plainly, away
off there half-way to the moon. And I used
to wonder how my father could be such a
strong man and never have any hankering
to go up there at all! The two facts were
quite incompatible. He should have been a
captain and taken me on for cub pilot, or at
least a ''striker" engineer; though I wouldn't
have objected seriously to the business of a
cabin boy. I thought it would be very nice
to engage in the mountain trade.

And then, after a while, in the new light that
creeps in with years, I began to rearrange
my picture of things up there; and Benton
crept a wee bit closer — until I could see its

H
/^

H
OS
O

Half-Way to the Moon 65

four adobe walls and its two adobe bastions,
stern with portholes, sitting like bulldogs
at the opposite corners ready to bark at
intruders. And in and out at the big gate
went the trappers — sturdy, rough-necked,
hirsute fellows in buckskins, with Northwest
fusils on their shoulders; lean-bodied, capable
fellows, with souls as lean as their bodies,
survivors of long hard trails, men who could
go far and eat little and never give up. I
was very fond of that sort of man.

Little by little the picture grew. Indian
bull boats flocked at the river front beneath the
stem adobe walls; moored mackinaws swayed
in the current, waiting to be loaded with pel-
tries and loosed for the long drift back to the
States; and keel-boats, looking very fat and
lazy, unloaded supplies in the late fall that were
loaded at St. Louis in the early spring. And
these had come all the way without the stroke
of a piston or the crunch of a paddle-wheel or
a pound of steam. Nothing but grit and man-
muscle to drag them a small matter of two or
three thousand miles up the current of the most
eccentric old dufler of a river in the world !

66 The River and I

What men it did take to do that! I saw
them on the wild shelterless banks of the
yellow flood — a score or so of them — stripped
and sweating under the prairie sun, with the
cordelle on their calloused shoulders, straight-
ening out to the work like honest oxen. What
males those cordelle men were — what stayers I
Fed on wild, red meat, lean and round of
waist, thick of chest, thewed for going on to
the finish! Ten or fifteen miles a day and
every inch a fight ! Be sure they did n't do
it merely for the two or three hundred dollars
a year they got from the Company. They
did it because they were that sort of men, and
had to express themselves. Everything worth
while is done that way.

Do they raise that breed now? Never
doubt it! You need only find your keel-
boats or their equivalents, and the men will
come around for the job, I 'm sure. But when
you speak enthusiastically of the old Greek
doers of things, I 'd like to put in a few words
for those old up-river men. They belong to
the unwritten American epic.

And then the keel-boats and the bull-boats

Half-Way to the Moon 67

and the mackinaws and the up-river men
flashed out — Hke a stereopticon picture when
the man moves the sHde; and I saw a Httle
ragged village of log houses scattered along
the water front. I saw the levees piled with
merchandise, and a score or more of packets
rushing fresh cargoes ashore — mates bawling
commands down the gangplanks where the
roustabouts came and went at a trot. Gold-
mad hundreds thronged the wagon-rutted
streets of this raw little village, the commer-
cial centre of a vast new empire. Six-horse
freighters trundled away toward the gold
fields; and others trundled in, their horses
jaded with the precious freight they pulled.
And I saw steamers dropping out for the long
voyage back to the States, freighted with
cargoes of gold dust — really truly story-book
treasure-ships that would have made old
Captain Kidd's men mad with delight.

As I lay dreaming in the bunch-grass, it all
grew up so real that I had to get up and take
my first look, half expecting to find it all
there just as in the old days.

We stood at the rim of the bluff and looked

6S The River and I

down into a cup-like valley upon a quiet
little village, winking with scattered lights
in the gloaming. Past it swept the river —
glazed with the twilight and silver-splotted
with early stars.

This was Benton — it could have been almost
any other town as well. And yet, once upon
a time, it had filled my day-dreams with
wonders — this place that seemed half-way
to the moon.

The shrill shriek of a Great Northern
locom.otive, trundling freight cars through
the gloom, gave the death-stroke to the old
boy-dream. It was the cry of modernity.
This boisterous, bustling, smoke-breathing
thing, plunging through the night with flame
in its throat, had made the change, dragged
old Benton out of the far-off lunar regions
and set what is left of it right down in the
back yard of the world. Even a very little
boy could get there now.

"And yet," thought I, as we set out rapidly
for the village in the valley, ''the difference
between the poetry of mackinaws and Great
Northern locomotives is merely a matter of

NtW YOKK

Half- Way to the Moon 71

perspective. If those old cordelle men could
only come back for a while from their
Walhalla, how they would crowd about that
wind-splitting, fire-eating, iron beast, panting
from its long run, and catching its breath for
another plunge into the waste places and the
night! And I? I would be gazing wide-
mouthed at the cordelle men. It's only the
human curiosity about the other side of the
moon. How perfect the nights would be if
we could only see that lost Pleiad!"

Ankle-deep in the powdery sand, we entered
the little town with its business row facing the
water front. One glance at the empty levees
told you of the town's dead glory. Not a
steamboat's stacks, blackening in the gloom,
broke the peaceful glitter of the river under
the stars. But along the sidewalk where
the electric-lighted bar-rooms buzzed and
hummed, brawny cow-men, booted and
spurred, lounged about, talking in that odd
but not unpleasant Western English that
could almost be called a dialect.

But it was not the Benton of the cow-men
that I felt about me. It was still for me the

72 The River and I

Benton of the fur trade and the steamboats
and the gold rush — my boyhood's Benton
half-way to the moon — the ghost of a dead
town.

At Goodale I had sought a substantial town
and found a visionary one. At Benton I had
sought a visionary town and found a substan-
tial one. Philosophy was plainly indicated as
the proper thing. And, after all, a steaming
plate of lamb chops in a Chinese chuck-house
of a substantial though disappointing town,
is more acceptable to even a dreamer than
the visionary beefsteak I ate out there in that
latent restaurant of a potential village.

This was a comfortable thought; and for a
quarter of an hour, the far weird cry of things
that are no more, was of no avail. The
rapid music of knife and fork drowned out
the asthmatic snoring of the ghostly packets
that buck the stream no more. How grub
does win against sentiment !

Swallowing the last of the chops, ''Where
will I find the ruins of the old fort?" I
asked of my bronze-faced neighbor across
the wreck of supper. He looked bored and

O
(/I

Half-Way to the Moon 75

stiffened a horny practical thumb in the
general direction of the ruins. ''Over there,"
he said laconically.

I caught myself wondering if a modern
Athenian would thus carelessly direct you to
the Acropolis. Is the comparison faulty?
Surely a ruin is sacred only for what men did
there. We are indeed a headlong race. We
keep our ruins behind us. Perhaps that is
why we get somewhere. And yet, what
beauty blooms flowerlike to the backward
gaze! Music and poetry — all the deepest,
purest sentiments of the heart — are fed
greatly upon the memory of the things that
were but can never be again. Mnemosyne
is the mother of all the Muses.

I got up and went out. By the light of a
thin moon, I found the place "over there."
An odd, pathetic little ruins it is, to be sure.
Nothing imposing about it. It does n't
compel through admiration: it wooes through
pity — the great, impersonal kind of pity.

"A single little turret that remains
On the plains" —

Browning tells about all there is to tell

76 The River and I

about it, though he never heard of it; only
they called it a ''bastion" in old days — the
little square adobe blockhouse that won't
stand much longer. One crumbling bastion
and two gaunt fragments of adobe walls in a
waste of sand beside the river — that's Fort
Benton.

A thin pale grudging strip of moon lit it up :
just the moon by which to see ruins — a moon
for backward looking and regrets. A full
round love-moon would n't have served at all.

Out of pure moon-haze I restored the walls
of the house where the bourgeois lived. The
fireplace and the great mud chimney are
still there, and the smut of the old log fires
still clings inside. The man who sat before
that hearth was an American king. A simple
word of command spoken in that room was the
thunder of the law in the wilderness about
and men obeyed. There 's a bat living there
now. He tumbled about me in the dull light,
filling the silence with the harsh whir of pinions.

I thought about that night a long, long
time ago when all the people under the pro-
tection of the newly erected fort, gathered

mtff\m't •■ 1

Am3WB

THE HOUSE OF THE BOURGEOIS

Half- Way to the Moon 79

here for a house-warming. How clearly I
could hear that squawking, squeaking, good-
natured fiddle and the din of dancing feet!
Only the sound got mixed up with the dim,
weird moonlight, until you did n't know
whether you were hearing or seeing or feel-
ing it — the music of the fiddles and the feet.
Oh, the dim far music !

I thought about the other ruins of the
world, the exploited, tourist-haunted ruins;
and I w^ondered why the others attract so
much attention while this one attracts prac-
tically none at all. How they do dig after
old Troy — poor old long-buried, much-abused
Troy! And nobody even cares to steal a
brick from this ruined citadel that took so
great a part in the American epic. Indeed,
you would not be obliged to steal a brick;
there are no guards.

Some one has said that the history of our
country as taught in the common schools is
the history of a narrow strip of land along the
Atlantic coast. The statement is significant.
The average school-teacher knows very little
about Fort Benton, I suspect.

8o The River and I

And yet, one of the most tremendous of all
human movements centred about it — the
movement that brought about the settlement
of the Northwest. One of these days they
will plant a potato patch there !

But modern Benton?

Get on a train in the East, snuggle up in
your berth, plunge on to the Western coast,
and you run through the real West in the
night. They are getting Eastern out there
at the rim of the big sea. Benton is in the
West — the big, free, heart-winning West; and
it gives promise of staying there for a while
yet.

Charter a bronco and canter out across
the river for an hour, and it will be very plain
to you that the romantic West still lives —
the West of the cowboy and the bronco and
the steer. Not the average story-book West,
to be sure. Perhaps that West never existed.
But it is the West that has bred and is still
breeding a race of men as beautiful in a virile
way (and how else should men be beautiful?)
as this dear old mother of an Earth ever
suckled.

«o

H
O

Q
55

D
O
Oi

Half- Way to the Moon 83

I stood once on the yellow slope of a hill
and watched a round-up outfit passing in the
gulch below. Four-horse freighters grumbling
up the dusty trail; cook wagons trundling
after ; whips popping over the sweating teams ;
a hundred or more saddle ponies trailing
after in rolling clouds of glinting dust; a
score of bronze-faced, hard-fisted outriders,
mounted on gaunt, tough, wise little horses — ■
such strong, outdoor, masterful Americans,
truly beautiful in a big manly way!

The sight of it all put that glorious little
achy feeling in my throat that you get when
they start the fife and drum, or when a
cavalry column wheels at the word of com-
mand, or when a regiment swings past with
even tread, or when you stand on a dock and
watch a liner dropping out into the fog. It 's
the feeling that you 're a man and mighty
proud of it. But somehow it always makes
you just a little sad.

I felt proud of that bunch of strong capable
fellows — proud as though I had created them
myself.

And once again the glorious little achy

84 The River and I

feeling in the throat came. The Congressman
from Choteau County had returned from
Washington with fresh laurels; and Benton
turned out to welcome her Great Man.
Down the dusty, poorly lighted, front street
came the little band — a shirt-sleeved squad.
Halting under the dingy glow of a corner
street-lamp, they struck up the best-inten-
tioned, noisiest noise I ever heard. The tuba
raced lumberingly after the galloping cornet,
that ran neck-and-neck with the wheezing
clarinet; and the drums beat up behind,
pounding like the hoofs of stiff -kneed horses
half a stretch behind.

It was a mad, exciting race of sounds —
a sort of handicap. The circular glow of the
street-lamp became the social centre of Benton.
At last the mad race was ended. I think it
was the cornet that won, with the clarinet a
close second. The tuba, as I recollect it,
complacently claimed third money, and the
bass-drum finished last with a shameless,
resolute boom !

A great hoarse cry went up — probably for
the winning cornet; a big-lunged, generous,

Half-Way to the Moon 85

warrior cry that made you think of a cavalry
charge in the face of bayonets. And the
shirt-sleeved band swung off down the
street in the direction of the little cottage
where the Great Alan lived. All Benton
fell in behind — clerks and bar-keeps and sheep-
men and cowboys tumbling into fours. Under
the yellow flare of the kerosene torches they
went down the street like a campaigning com-
pany in rout step, scattering din and dust.

Great, deep-chested, happy-looking, open
air fellows, they were; big lovers, big haters,
good laughers, eaters, drinkers — and every
one of them potentially a fighting man.

And suddenly, as I watched them pass,
something deep down in me cried out:
"Great God! What a fighting force we can
drum up out of the cactus and the sagebrush
when the time comes!" And when I looked
again, not one of the sun-bronzed faces was
strange to me, but every one was the face of
a brother. Choteau's Congressman was my
Congressman! Benton's Great Man was my
Great Man ! I fell into line alongside a big
bronco-buster with his high - heeled boots

86 The River and I

and his clanking spurs and his bandy-legged,
firm-footed horseman's stride. Thirty yards
farther on we were old comrades. That is
the Western way.

Once again the little band struck up a
march, which was very little more than a
rhythmic snarling and booming of the drums,
with now and then the shrill savage cry of the
clarinet stabbing the general din. Irresisti-
bly the whole line swung into step.

What is it about the rhythmic stride of
many men down a dusty road that grips you
by the throat and makes your lungs feel like
overcharged balloons? I felt something like
the maddening, irritating tang of powder-
smoke in my throat. Trumpet cries that I
had never heard, yet somehow dimly remem-
bered, wakened in the night about us — far
and faint, but haughty with command. It
took very little imagination for me to feel
the whirlwind*of battles I may never know, to
hear the harsh metallic snarl of high-power
bullets I may never face. For, marching
there in the dusty, torch -painted night,
with that ragged procession of Westerners,

Half- Way to the Moon 87

a deep sense of the essential comradeship of
free men had come upon me; and I could
think of these men in no other way than as
potential fighting men — the stern hard stuff
with which you build and keep your empires.
What a row little old Napoleon could have
kicked up with half a million of these sage-
brush boys to fling foeward under his cannon-
clouds !

We reached the cottage of the Great Man
with the fresh laurels. He met us at the
gate. He called us Jim and Bill and Frank
and Kid something or other. We called him
Charlie. And he wasn't the least bit stiff
or proud, though we hadn't the least doubt
that half of Washington was in tears at his
departure for the West.

The sudden flare of a torch betrayed his
moist eyes as he told us how he loved us.
And I 'm sure he meant it. He said, with that
Western drawl of his: ''Boys, while I was
back there trying to do a little something for
you in Congress, I heard a lot of swell bands;
but I did n't hear any such music as this little
old band of ours has made to-night!" The

8S The River and I

unintentional humor somehow did n't make
you want to laugh at all.

We're all riding with his outfit; and next
year we 're going to send Charlie back East
again. May we all die sheepmen if we don't
— and that's the limit in Montana!

Talking about sheepmen, reminds me of
Joe, the big bronco-buster, and his mot. I
was doing the town with Joe, and he was
carefully educating me in the Western mys-
teries. He told me all about "day-wranglers "
and "night-hawks" and "war-bags" and
"round-ups"; showed me how to tie a "bull-
noose" and a "sheep-shank" and a "Mexican
hacamore"; put me onto the twist-of-the-
wrist and the quick arm-thrust that puts
half -hitches 'round a steer's legs; showed
me how a cowboy makes dance music with a
broom and a mouth-harp — and many other
wonderful feats, none of which I can myself
perform.

I wanted to feel the mettle of the big typical
fellow, and so I said playfully: "Say, Joe, come
to confession — you 're a sheepman, now
arc n't you?"

./O

Half- Way to the Moon 91

He clanked down a glass of long-range
liquid, and glared down at me with a monitory
forefinger pointing straight between my eyes:

Now you look here, Shorty," he drawled;

you're a friend of mine, and whatever you
say, goes, as long as I ain't all caved in! But
you cut that out, and don't you say that out
loud again, or you and me '11 be having to
scrap the whole outfit ! ' '

He resumed his glass. I told him, still
playfully, that a lot of mighty good poetry
had been written about sheep and sheepmen
and crooks and lambs and things like that,
and that I considered my question compli-
mentary.

"You 're talkin' about sheepmen in the
old country. Shorty," he drawled. ''There
ain't any cattle ranges there, you know. Do
you know the difference between a sheep-
man in Scotland, say, and in Montana?"

I did not.

"Well," he proceeded, "over in Scotland
when a feller sees a sheepman coming down
the road with his sheep, he says: 'Behold
the gentle shepherd with his fleecy flock!'

92 The River and I

That's poetry. Now in Montana, that same
feller says, when he sees the same feller
coming over a ridge with the same sheep:
^ Look at that crazy hlankety -blank with his
wooliesT That's fact. You mind what I
say, or you'll get spurred."

I don't quite agree with Joe, how-
ever. Once, lying in my tent across the
river, I looked out over the breaks through
that strange purple moonlight, such as I had
always believed to exist only in the staging
of a melodrama, and saw four thousand sheep
descending to the ferry.

Like lava from a crater they poured over
the slope above me; and above them, seeming
prodigiously big against the weird sky, went
the sheepman with his staff in his hand and
a war-bag over his arm, while at his heels a
wise collie followed. It was a picture done
by chance very much as Millet could have
done it. And somehow Joe's mot couldn't
stand before that picture.

There is indeed a big Pindaric sort of poetry
about a plunging mass of cattle. And just
as truly there is a sort of Theocritus poetry

a
X

Half-Way to the Moon 95

about sheep. Only m the latter case, the
poetical vanishing point is farther away for
me than is the case with cattle. I think I
couldn't write very good verses about a flock
of sheep, unless I were at least five hundred
yards from them. I haven't figured the
exact distance as yet. But when you have
a large flock of sheep camping about you all
night, making you eat fine sand and driving
you mad with that most idiotic of all noises
(which happened once to me), you don't get
up in the morning quoting Theocritus. You
remember Joe's mot!

We found a convenient gravel bar on the
farther side of the river, where we established
our navy-yard. There we proceeded to set
up the keel of the Atom I — a twenty-foot
canoe with forty-inch beam, lightly ribbed
with oak and planked with quarter-inch
cypress.

No sooner had we screwed up the bolts in
the keel, than our ship-yard became a sort
of free information bureau. Every evening
the cable ferry brought over a contingent of

96 The River and I

well-wishers, v/ho were ardent in their desire
to encourage us in our undertaking, which
was no less than that of making a toboggan
slide down the roof of the continent.

The salient weakness of the genus homo,
it has always seemed to me, is an overwhelm-
ing desire to give advice. Through several
weeks of toil, we were treated to a most lib-
eral education on marine matters. It ap-
peared that we had been laboring under a
fatal misunderstanding regarding the general
subject of navigation. Our style of boat
was indeed admirable — for a lake, if you
please, but — well, of course, they did not wish
to discourage us. It was quite possible that
we were unacquainted with the Upper Mis-
souri. Now the Upper River (hanging out
the bleached rag of a sympathetic smile),
the Upper River was not the Lower River,
you know. (That really did seem remarkably
true, and we became alarmed.) The Upper
River, mind you, was terrific. Why, those
frail ribs and that impossible planking would
go to pieces on the first rock — like an egg-
shell! Of course, we w^ere free to do as we

^'p-

im,i^'

Half- Way to the Moon 99

pleased — they would not discourage us for
the world. And the engine! Gracious!
Such a boat would never stand the vibration
of a four-horse, high-speed engine driving a
f ourteen-inch screw ! It appeared plainly that
we were almost criminally wrong in all our
calculations. Shamefacedly we continued to
drive nails into the impossible hull, knowing
full well — poor misguided heroes — that we
were only fashioning a death trap! There
could be no doubt about it. The free informa-
tion bureau was unanimous. It was all very
pathetic. Nothing but the tonic of an habit-
ual morning swim in the clear cold river kept
us game in the face of the inevitable !

We saw it all. With a sort of forlorn,
cannon-torn-cavalry-column hope we pushed
on with the fatal work. Never before did I
appreciate old Job in the clutches of good
advice. I used to accuse him of rabbit
blood. In the light of experience, I wish to
record the fact that I beg his pardon. He
was in the house of his friends. I think
Job and I understand each other better now.
It was not the boils, but the free advice 1

4881J0

lOO

The River and I

At last the final nail was driven and clenched ,
the canvas glued on and ironed, the engine
installed. The trim, slim little craft with
her admirable speed lines, tapering fore and
aft like a fish, lay on the ways ready for the
plunge.

We had arranged to christen her with beer.
The Kid stood at the prow with the bottle
poised, awaiting his cue. The little Cor-
nishman knelt at the prow. He was not
bowed in prayer. He was holding a bucket
under the soon-to-be-broken bottle. "For,"
said he, ''in a country where beer is so dear
and advice so cheap, let us save the beer
that we may be strong to stand the advice!"

The argument was indeed Socratic.

"And now, little boat," said I, in that dark
brown tone of voice of which I am particu-
larly proud, "be a good girl! Deliver me
not unto the laughter of my good advisers.
I christen thee Atom!''

The bottle broke — directly above that
bucket.

And now before us lay the impossible as
plainly pointed out, not only by local talent,

H
U
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Q
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Half-Way to the Moon 103

but by no less a man than the august captain
of a government snag-boat. Several weeks
before the launching, an event had taken
place at Benton. The first steamboat for
sixteen years tied up there one evening. She
was a government snag-boat. Now a gov-
ernment snag-boat may be defined as a boat
maintained by the government for the sole
purpose of navigating rivers a7id dodging snags.
This particular snag-boat, I learned after-
ward in the course of a long cruise behind her,
holds the snag-boat record. I consider her
pilot a truly remarkable man. He seemed
to have dodged them all.

All Benton turned out to view the big
red and w^hite government steamer. There
was something almost pathetic about the
pubHc demonstration when you thought
of the good old steamboat days. During
her one day's visit to the town, I met the
captain.

He was very stiff and proud. He awed
me. I stood before him fumbhng my hat.
Said I to myself: "The personage before me
is more than a snag-boat captain. This is

lo^ The River and I

none other than the gentleman who invented
the Missouri River. No doubt even now he
carries the patent in his pocket!"

"Going down river in a power canoe, eh?"
he growled, regarding me critically. "Well,
you '11 never get down!"

"That so?" croaked I, endeavoring to
swallow my Adam's apple.

"No, you won't!"

"Why?" ventured I timidly, almost
pleadingly; "Isn't there — uh — isn't there —
uh — water enough ? ' '

"Water enough — yes!" growled the per-
sonage who invented the longest river in the
world and therefore knew what he was
talking about. "Plenty of water — hut you
won't find it!'''

Now as the Atom slid into the stream, I
thought of the captain's words. Since that
time the river had fallen three feet. We
drew eighteen inches.

Sixty-five days after that oraculous utter-
ance of the captain, the Kid and I, half
stripped, sunburned, sweating at the oars,
were forging slowly against a head wind at

Half- Way to the Moon 105

the mouth of the Cheyenne, sixteen hun-
dred miles below the head of navigation. A
big white and red steamer was creeping up
stream over the shallow crossing of the Chey-
enne 's bar, sounding every foot of the water
fallen far below the usual summer level.

It was the snag-boat. Crossing her bows
and drifting past her slowly, I stood up and
shouted to the party in the pilot house:

" I want to speak to the captain."

He came out on the hurricane deck — the
man who invented the river. He was still
stiff and proud, but a swift smile crossed his
face as he looked down upon us, half -naked
and sun-blackened there in our dinky little
craft.

"Captain," I cried, and perhaps there was
the least vain-glory in me; "I talked to you
at Benton."

"Yes sir."

"Well, / have found that water!''

CHAPTER IV

MAKING A GETAWAY

HTELL a Teuton that he can't, and very
Hkely he will show you that he can.
It 's in the blood. Between the prophecy
of the snag-boat captain and my vain-glori-
ous answer at the Cheyenne crossing, I
learned to respect the words of the man who
invented the eccentric old river. In the face
of heavy head winds, I quoted the words,
''You '11 never get down" — and they bit deep
like whip lashes. On many a sand-bar and
gravel reef, with the channel far away, I
heard the words, "Plenty of water, yes, but
you won't find it!" And always something
stronger than my muscles cried out within
me: "The devil I won't, O you inventor of
rain-water creeks!" Hour by hour, day by
day, against almost continual head winds
and with the lowest water in years, that dis-

io6

Making a Getaway 107

couraging prophecy invaded my ego and was
repulsed. And that is why we have pessi-
mists in the world. A pessimist is merely
a counter-irritant.

I stood on the bank for some time after the
Atom I slid into the water, admiring her
truly beautiful lines. Once I was captain
of a trunk lid that sailed a frog-pond
down in Kansas City; and at that time I
thought I knew the meaning of pride. I did
not. All three of us were a bit puffed up over
that boat. Something of that pride that
goes before a fall awoke in my captain's
breast as I loved her with my eyes — that
trim, slim speed-thing, tugging at her forward
line, graceful and slender and strong and fleet
as a Diana.

I said at last: ''I will now get in her, drop
down to the town landing, and proceed to
put to shame a few of these local motor-
tubs that make so much fuss and don't get
anywhere ! " ■

I loved her as a man should love all things
that are swift and strong and honest, keen for
marks and goals — a big, clean-limbed, thor-

io8 The River and I

oughbred horse that will break his heart to
get under the wire first; a high-power rifle,
sHm of muzzle, thick of breech, with its
widted little throaty cry, doing its business
over a flat trajectory a thousand yards away:
I loved her as a man should love those.
Little did I dream that she would betray me.

I took in the line and went aboard. At
that moment I almost understood the snag-
boat captain's bearing. To be master of the
Atom I seemed quite enough; but to be the
really truly captain of a big red and white
snag-boat — it must have been overwhelming!

I dropped out into the current that, fresh
from its plunge of four hundred feet in sixteen
miles, ran briskly. Everything was in readi-
ness. I meant to put a crimp in the vanity of
that free-information bureau.

I turned on the switch, opened the needle
valve, swung the throttle over to the notch
numbered with a big ''2." I placed the crank
on the wheel and gave it a vigorous turn.

"Poof!" said the engine sweetly, and the
kind word encouraged me immensely. Again
I cranked.

Making a Getaway 109

"Poof! Poof!"

It seemed that I had somehow misunder-
stood the former communication, and it was
therefore repeated with emphasis. Like a
model father who walks the floor with the
weeping child, tenderly seeking the offending
pin, I looked over that engine. ''What have
I neglected?" said I. I intended to be quite
logical and fair in the matter.

I once presided over a country newspaper
that ran its presses with a gasoline engine
with a most decided artistic temperament.
That engine used to have a way of communing
silently with its own soul right in the middle
of press day. I remembered this with fore-
bodings. I remembered how firm but kind
I was obliged to be with that old engine. I
remembered how it always put its hands in
its pockets and took an extended vacation
every time I swore at it. I decided to be
nothing but a perfect gentleman with this
engine. I even endeavored to be a jovial
good fellow.

''What is it, Little One?" said I mentally;
"does its little carburetor hurt it? Or did

no The River and I

the bad man strangle it with that horrid
old gasoline?"

I tenderly jiggled its air valve, fiddled
gently with its spark-control lever. I cranked
it again. It barked at me like a dog! I
had been kind to it, and it barked right in
my face. I wanted to slap it. I lifted my
eyes and saw that the rapid current would
soon carry me past the town landing. I
seized a paddle and shoved her in. Of course,
a member of the free-information bureau was
at the landing. He had with him a bland
smile and a choice bit of informa,tion.

''Having trouble with your engine, aren't
you?" he said as I leaped ashore with the
line. "There must be something wrong
with it!" The remark was indeed illuminat-
ing. It struck me with the force of an in-
spiration. It seemed so true.

"Strange that I had n't thought of that!"
I remarked. "That really must be the
trouble — there 's something wrong with it.
Thanks!"

I tied the boat and went up-town, hoping
to sidetrack the benevolent member of that

Making a Getaway

III

ubiquitous bureau. When I returned, I
found half a dozen other benevolent members
at the landing. They were holding a con-
sultation, evidently; and the very air felt
gummy with latent advice.

"What 's the matter with your engine?"
they chorused.

"Why, there 's something wrong with it!"
I explained cheerfully, as I went aboard
again. I began to crank, praying steadily
for a miracle. Now and then I managed to
coax forth a gaseous chortle or two. The
convention on the landing understood every
chortle in a truly marvellous way.

"It's the spark-plug, that's sure!" an-
nounced one with an air of finality. "When
an engine has run for a while (!) the spark-
plug gets all smutted up. Have you cleaned
your spark-plug?"

"No Jim!" contradicted another, "it's
all in the oil feed! Look how she puffs!
W'y it 's in the oil feed — plain as day! Now
if you '11 take off that carburetor and "

I cranked on heroically.

"It 's in the timer," volunteered another.

112 The River and I

"You see that Httle brass lever back there?
Well, you take and remove that and you '11
find that "

I cranked on shamelessly.

"The batteries ain't no good!" growled
a man with a big voice that reminded me
of a bass-drum booming up among the wind
instruments in a medley. Like the barber
who owned the white owl, I stuck to my
business. I cranked on.

"It ain't in them batteries — them batteries
is all right ! ' ' piped a weazened little man who
had been grinning wisely at the lack of me-'
chanical ability so shamelessly exposed by his
fellows. "Now in a jump-spark engine,"
he explained leisurely, with a knowing squint
of his eyes and an uplifted explanatory
forefinger: "in a jump-spark engine, gentle-
men, there is a number of things to consider.
Now if you '11 take and remove that cylinder-
head, pull out the piston, and "

The voice of the expounder was suddenly
drowned out by the earsplitting rapid-fire
of the exhaust! The miracle had happened!
Hooray!

Making a Getaway 113

I grasped the steering cords and jammed
her rudder hard to port. Her fourteen-inch
screw, suddenly started at full speed ahead,
made the light, slim craft leap like a spike-
spurred horse.

But the turn was too short. She thrust her
sharp haughty nose into the air like an offended
lady, and started up the bank after that in-
formation bureau. If a tree had been con-
venient, I think she would have climbed it.

I shut her down.

''She went that time!'' chorused the infor-
mation bureau. Coming from an informa-
tion bureau, the statement was marvellously
correct. But I had suddenly become too
glad-hearted for a sharp retort.

"If you will please throw me the line, and
push me off," I said confidently, ''I '11 drop
out into the current."

I dropped out.

"Now for putting a crimp in some people's
vanity!" I exulted.

I cranked. Nothing doing! I cranked
some more. No news from the crimping
department. I continued to crank; also, I

114 The River and I

continued to drift. Somehow that current
seemed to have increased alarmingly in speed.
I thought I heard a sound of merriment.
I looked up. The little weazened man was
gesticulating wildly with that forefinger of
his. He was explaining something. The
information bureau, steadily dwindling into
the distance, was not Hstening. It seemed to
be enjoying itself immensely.

I swallowed a half-spoken word that tasted
bitter as it went down. Then I cranked
again. There seemed to be nothing else to
do. It was a hot day; hot sweat blinded me,
and trickled off the tip of my nose. My
hands began to develop blisters. Finally, a
deep disgust seized me. I once saw a tender-
hearted lady on her knees in the dust before
a balky auto. I remembered her half -sobbed
words: " You mean thing, you! What is the
matter with you, anyway! Oh, you mean,
mean thing!''

I sat down in front of that engine and
abandoned myself to a great feeling of tender-
ness and chivalry for that unfortunate lady.
In that moment I believe I would have fought

Making a Getaway 115

a bear for her! Oh that all the gasoline
engines in the world could be concentrated
somehow into one big woolly, scary black
bear, how I could have set my teeth in its
neck and died chewing !

I heard a roaring of waters that broke my
vision of bear fights and gentle ladies in dis-
tress. A hundred yards ahead of me I saw
rapids. The words of the information bureau
came back to me with terrible distinctness:
''Why, her light timbers will go to pieces on
the first rock!"

Although I am no hero, I did n't get fright-
ened. I got sore. "Go ahead, and smash
yourself up, if you like!" I cried to the balky
craft. And then I waited to see her do it.
She swung 'round sharply with the first suck
of the rapids, struck a rock, side-stepped,
struck another, and went on down, grinding
and dragging on a stony reef.

It suddenly came to me that this was what
they called the Grocondunez Rapids. I re-
membered that they said the name meant
"the big bridge of the nose. " The name had
a powerful fascination for me — I wanted

ii6 The River and I

to hit something good and hard somewhere
in that region !

Finally she swung clear of the reef, caught
the swirl of the main current, and started for
New Orleans with the bit in her teeth. I
was n't ready to arrive in New Orleans at
once; I had made other arrangements. So
I grasped a paddle and drove her into shallow
water. I leaped out, waist-deep in the cold
stream, and threw my weight against her.
Pantingly, I wondered what was the exact
distance to the nearest axe. I resolved to crank
her once more and then for the axe hunt !

I leaned over the gunwale and began to
grind. For the life of me, I don't know just
what I did to her; but it seemed that she had
taken some offence. Without the least warn-
ing, she leaped forward at three-quarter speed,
and started up stream with that haughty head
of hers thrust skyward!

I clung desperately to her gunwale, and she
dragged me insultingly in the drink! She
made a soppy rag of me! I managed to
scramble aboard — something after the fashion
of a bronco-buster who mounts at a gallop.

Making a Getaway 117

But the way she travelled! I forgot the
ducking and forgave her with all my heart.
I held her nose well out into the channel
where the current ran with swells, though
no wind blew.

Bucking the rapids, she split the fast water
over her nose and sent it aft in two clean-cut
masses, that hissed about her like angry
skirts. A light, V-shaped wake spread after,
scarcely agitating the surface. She dragged
no water. There was no churning at her
stern. Only the dull, subaqueous drone, felt
rather than heard beneath the rapid banging of
her exhaust, told me how the honest little
screw thrust hard.

I pushed the spark-lever close to the revers-
ing point, and opened her throttle wide.
This acted like a bottle-fly on the flank of a
spirited mare. She shook herself, quivering
through all her light, pliable construction,
lifted her prow another inch or two, and flung
the rapids behind her.

Slim, fleet, clean-heeled, and hungry for
distance, she raced toward the Benton landing
two miles up.

ii8 The River and I

In my anxiety to show her to the benevo-
lent ones, I left the current and took a crosscut
over a rocky ford. Pebbles flung from her
pounding heels showered down upon me. I
climbed forward and let her hammer away.
She cleared the gravel bar, and as she plunged
past the now silent information bureau on the
landing, condescendingly I waved a hand at
them and went on splitting water.

We shot under the bridge, forged into the
crossing current, passed the big brick hotel,
where a considerable number came out to
salute us. They dubbed her the fastest
boat that had ever climbed that current, I
learned afterward. Alas! I was getting my
triumph early and in one big chunk! I
figure that that one huge breakfast of tri-
umph, if properly distributed, would have fed
me through the whole two thousand miles
of back-strain and muscle-cramp. And yet,
through all the days of snail-paced toil that
followed, I remained truly thankful for that
early breakfast.

The Kid and the Cornishman, busy in
camp with the packing for the voyage, had

Making a Getaway 119

shared in the gloom of my temporary defeat.
But now, as I plunged past them, I could see
them leaping into the air and cracking their
heels together with delight. They had wet
every plank of her with their sweat, and they
were as proud as I. In the light of the fol-
lowing days, their delight dwindled into a
pathetic thing.

I held her on her course up-stream, reached
the bend a mile above, swung round and —
discovered that she had only then begun to
lift her heels! With the rapid current to
aid, her speed was truly wonderful. She
could have kept pace with any respectable
freight train at least.

I indulged in a little feverish mental calcu-
lation. She could make, with the minimum
current, eighteen miles per hour. Every
day meant fifteen hours of light. Sioux City
was two thousand miles away. We could
reach Sioux City eajsily in ten days of actual
running !

While I was covering that fast mile back
to camp, I saw the Atom I passing Sioux
City with an air of high-nosed contempt.

I20 The River and I

I developed a sort of unreasoning hunger
for New Orleans — a kind of violent thirst
for the Gulf of Mexico! Nothing short of
these, it seemed to me, could be worthy of so
fleet a craft. When I shoved her nose into
the landing, I found that my companions
thoroughly agreed with me.

All that night in my restless sleep I drove
speed boats at a terrific pace through im-
possible channels and rock-toothed Scyllas;
and the little Cornishman fought angry seas
and heard a dream-wind shrieking in the
cordage, and felt the salt spume on his face.
'T wonder why I am always dreaming that,"
he said. ''Atavism," I ventured; and he
regarded me narrowly, as though I might
be maligning his character in some way.

At dawn we had already eaten and were
loading the Atom for the voyage. With her
cargo she drew eighteen inches of water. At
full speed, she would squat four inches. It was
the first of August and the water, which had
reached in the spring its highest point for
twenty years, had been falling rapidly, and
now promised to go far below the average

H
D
O

(X.

W
H

^♦;t:

»«</

"^a/^i

Making a Getaway 123

low-water mark. We had ahead of us a long
voyage, every mile of which was strange
water.

Once again I went over that feverish cal-
culation. This time I was more generous.
I decided upon fifteen days. The cable
ferry towed us out beyond the gravel bars
that, during the last week, had been slowly
lifting their bleached masses higher. In
mid-stream we cut loose.

At the first turn the engine started. We
were going at a good half- speed clip, when
suddenly the engine changed its mind.
''Squash!" it said wearily. Then it let off a
gasoline sigh and went into a peaceful sleep.
We had reached the brick hotel. We pulled
in with the paddles and tied up. The in-
formation bureau was there, and at once
went into consultation.

"I'm looking for an engine doctor," I said.
"How about Mr. Blank? They tell me he
knows the unknowable."

''Best man with an engine in town," said
one.

"For gracious' sake, keep that man away

124 The River and I

from your engine if you don't want it ruined! "
said others. A man who can arouse a diver-
sity of opinions is at least a man of originality.
I went after that man.

He came — with an air of mystery and a
monkey wrench. He sat down in front of the
patient (how that word does fit!) and after
some time he said : ' ' Hm I ' '

He unscrewed this — and whistled awhile;
he unscrewed that — and whistled some more-
Then he screwed up both this and that and
cranked her.

' ' Phew-oo-oo-oo ! ' ' said the engine. Whereat
the doctor smiled knowingly. It was plain
that she was an open book to him.

"What is the trouble?" said I, with that
tone of voice you use in a sick-room.

It appeared to be appendicitis.
Spark-plug," muttered the doctor.
Shall I get another?" I asked, half apolo-
getically.

"Better," grunted the doctor.

I chased down an automobile owner, and
a launch owner and a man who had a small
pumping-cngine. I was eloquent in my

Making a Getaway 125

appeal for spark-plugs. I made a very fine
collection of them^ and hastened back to the
doctor. He did n't seem to appreciate my
efforts. He had the patient on the operating-
table. Everything was either unscrewed or
pulled out. He was carefully scrutinizing
the wreck — for more things to screw out!

''Locate the trouble?" I ventured.

"Buzzer 's out of w^hack," replied the Man
of Awe; "Have to get another spark-coil!"
In times of sickness even the sternest man
submits to medical tyranny. I ran down a
man who once owned a power boat, and he
had a spark-coil. He finally agreed to forego
the pleasure of possessing it for a suitable
reward. Considering the size of that reward,
he had undoubtedly become greatly attached
to his spark-coil!

I returned in triumph to the doctor. He
was now screwing up all that he had previously
unscrewed.

"Think she '11 go now?" I pleaded.

1 Dear Reader: Should you undertake the Missouri River
trip, don't lay anything out on spark-plugs. I sowed them
all along up there. Take a drag-net. You will scoop up
several hundred dry batteries, but don't mind them; they are
probably spoiled.

126 The River and I

He screwed up several dozen things, and
whistled a while. Then the oracle gave voice:
*"Fraid the batteries won't do; they 're awful
weak!"

With a bitter heart, I turned on my heel
and went forth once more. Electrical supplies
were not on sale at any of the stores. But I
found a number of gentlemen who were evi-
dently connoisseurs in the battery business.
They had batteries of which they were ex-
tremely fond. They parted with some of
superior quality upon the consideration of a
friendly regard for me — and a slight emolu-
ment on my part. I was evidently very
popular.

At a breathless speed I returned to — not to
the doctor. He had vanished. Rumor had
it that he had gone home to lunch, for the sun
was now high. So far as I know, he is still
at lunch.

Several things were yet unscrewed. I fell
to work. Wherever anything seemed to make
a snug fit, I screwed it in. Other remaining
things I drove into convenient holes. All
the while I begged blind fate to guide me.

►J

MEW y.

Making a Getaway 129

Then I connected the batteries, supplied the
new spark-coil, selected a new spark-plug at
random, and screwed it in.

Having done various things, I carefully
surveyed my environs for a lady. There
were no ladies present, so I spoke out freely.
''And now," said I, having exhausted my
vocabulary, ''I shall crank!"

Bill and the Kid sat on a pile of rocks
looking very sullen. For some reason or
other they seemed to doubt that engine.
I don't know how long I cranked. I know
only that the impossible happened. The
boat started for the hotel piazza!

I did n't shut her down this time. I leaped
out and took her by the nose. Putting our
shoulders against the power of the screw,
we walked her out into the current, headed
her down stream, and scrambled in, wet to the
ears.

My logbook speaks for that day as follows:
''Left Benton at 2:30 p.m. Gypsied along
under half gasoline for several hours, safely
crossing the Shonkin and Grocondunez bars.
Struck a rock in Fontenelle Rapids at 4:30,

130 The River and I

taking off rudder. Landed with difficulty
on a gravel-bar and repaired damages. At
5:30 engine bucked. A heavy wind from the
west beat us against a ragged shore for an
hour and a half. Impossible to proceed
without power, except by cordelling — which
we did, walking waist-deep in the water much
of the time. Paddles useless in such a head
wind. The wind falling at sunset, we drifted,
again losing our rudder while shooting Brule
Rapids. Tied up at the head of Black
Bluffs Rapids at dusk, having made twenty
miles out of two thousand for the first day's
run. Have to extend that fifteen days!
Just the same, that information bureau saw us
leave under power!"

CHAPTER V

THROUGH THE REGION OF WEIR

A A /"E awoke with light hearts on the second
^ morning of the voyage. All about

us was the sacred silence of the wilderness
dawn. The coming sun had smitten the chill
night air into a ghostly fog that lay upon the
valley like a fairy lake.

We were at the rim of the Bad Lands and
there were no birds to sing; but crows,
wheeling about a sandstone summit, flung
doleful voices downward into the morning
hush — the spirit of the place grown vocal.

Cloaked with the fog, our breakfast fire

of driftwood glowed ruddily. What is there

about the tang of wood-smoke in a lonesome

place that fills one with glories that seem half

memory and half dream? Crouched on my

haunches, shivering just enough to feel the

beauty there is in fire, I needed only to close

131

132 The River and I

my eyes, smarting with the smoke, to feel
myself the first man huddled close to the
first flame, blooming like a mystic flower in
the chill dawn of the world!

Perhaps that is what an outing is for — to
strip one down to the lean essentials, press in
upon one the glorious privilege of being
one's self, unique in all the universe of in-
numerable unique things. Crouched close to
your wilderness campfire, the great Vision
comes easily out of the smoke. Once again
you feel the bigness of your world, the tre-
mendous significance of everything in it —
including yourself — and a far-seeing sadness
grips you. Living in the flesh seems so
transient, almost a pitiful thing in the last
analysis. But somehow you feel that there is
something bigger — not beyond it, but all
about it continually. And you wonder that
you ever hated anyone. You know, some-
how, there in the smoky silence, why men are
noble or ignoble; why they He or die for a
principle; why they kill, or suffer martyr-
dom; why they love and hate and fight;
why women smile under burdens, sin splen-

Through the Region of Weir 133

didly or sordidly — and why hearts sometimes
break.

And expanded by the bigness of the empty
silent spaces about you, like a spirit independ-
ent of it and outside of it all, you love the
great red straining Heart of Man more than
you could ever love it at your desk in town.
And you want to get up and move — push on
through purple distances — whither? Oh,
anywhere will do! What you seek is at the
end of the rainbow; it is in the azure of dis-
tance; it is just behind the glow of the sunset,
and close under the dawn. And the glorious
thing about it is that you know you '11 never
find it until you reach that lone, ghostly land
where the North Star sets, perhaps. You 're
merely glad to know that you 're not a vege-
table— and that the trail never really ends
anywhere.

Just now, however, the longing for the
abstract had the semblance of a longing for
the concrete. It always has that semblance,
for that matter. You never really want what
you think you are seeking. Touch the sub-
stance— and away you go after the shadow !

134 The River and I

I Around the bend lay Sionx City. Around
what bend? What matter? Somewhere
down stream the last bend lay, and in
between lay the playing of the game. Any
bend will do to sail around! There 's a
lot of fun in merely being able to move
about and do things. For this reason I am
overwhelmed with gratitude whenever I
think that, through some slight error in the
cosmic process, the life forces that glow in
me might have been flung into a turnip —
but were n't I The thought is truly appalling
— is n't it? The avoidance of that one awful
possibility is enough to make any man feel
lucky all his life. It 's such fun to waken in
the morning with all your legs and arms and
eyes and ears about you, waiting to be used
again! So strong was this thought in me
when we cast off, that even the memory of
Bill's amateurish pancakes could n't keep
back the whistle.

The current of the Black Bluffs Rapids
whisked us from the bank with a giddy speed,
spun us about a right-angled bend, and landed
us in a long quiet lake. Contrary to the

Throu^^h the Re^^ion of Weir 135

average opinion, the Upper Missouri is merely
a succession of lakes and rapids. In the low-
water season, this statement should be itali-
cised. When you are pushing down w^ith the
power of your arms alone the rapids show
you how fast you want to go, and the lakes
show you that you can't go that fast. For
the teaching of patience, the arrangement is
admirable. But when head winds blow, a
three-mile reach means about a two-hour
fight.

This being a very invigorating morning,
however, the engine decided to take a con-
stitutional. It ran. Below the mouth of the
Marias River, twenty minutes later, we
grounded on Archer's Bar and shut down.
After dragging her off the gravel, we dis-
covered that the engine wished to sleep.
No amount of cranking could arouse it. Now
and then it would say '' sqtcash/' feebly rolling
its wheel a revolution or two — like a sleepy-
head brushing off a fly with a languid hand.

A light breeze had sprung up out of the west.
The stream ran east and northeast. We
hastily rigged a tarp on a pair of oars spliced

136 The River and I

for a mast, and proceeded at a care-free pace.
The Hght breeze scarcely ruffled the surface
of the slow stream;

yet still the sail made on

ycL si/iii uiic aa.11 J

A pleasant noise till noon.'

In the lazy heat of the mounting sun,
tempered by the cool river draught, the yel-
low sandstone bluffs, whimsically decorated
with sparse patches of greenery, seemed to
waver as though seen through shimmering
silken gauze. And over it all was the hush
of a dream, except when, in a spasmodic fresh-
ening of the breeze, the rude mast creaked
and a sleepy watery murmur grew up for a
moment at the wake.

Now and then at a break in the bluffs,
where a little coulee entered the stream, the
gray masses of the bull-berry bushes lifted
like smoke, and from them, flame-like, flashed
the vivid scarlet of the berry-clusters, smiting
the general dreaminess like a haughty cry
in a silence.

A wilderness indeed ! It seemed that waste
land of which Tennyson sang, ''where no man

Through the Region of Weir 137

comes nor hath come since the making of the
world." I thought of the steamboats and
the mackinaws and the keel-boats and the
thousands of men who had pushed through
this dream-world and the thought was uncon-
vincing. Fairies may have lived here, indeed ;
and in the youth of the world, a glad young
race of gods might have dreamed gloriously
among the yellow crags. But surely we were
the first men who had ever passed that way —
and should be the last.

Suddenly the light breeze boomed up into a
gale. The Atom, with bellying sail, leaped
forward down the roughening water, swung
about a bend, raced with a quartering wind
down the next reach, shot across another
bend — and lay drifting in a golden calm.
Still above us the great wind buzzed in the
crags like a swarm of giant bees, and the waters
about us lay like a sheet of flawless glass.

With paddles we pushed on lazily for an
hour. At the next bend, where the river
turned into the west, the great gale that had
been roaring above us, suddenly struck us
full in front. Sucking up river between the

138 The River and I

wall rocks on either side, its force was terrific.
You tried to talk while facing it, and it took
your breath away. In a few minutes, in
spite of our efforts with the paddles, we lay
pounding on the shallows of the opposite
shore.

We got out. Two went forward with the
line and the third pushed at the stern. Pro-
gress was slow — no more than a mile an hour.
The clear water of the upper river is always
cold, and the great wind chilled the air.
Even under the August noon it took brisk
work to keep one's teeth from chattering.
The bank we were following became a preci-
pice rising sheer from the river's edge, and
the water deepened until we could no longer
wade. We got in and poled on to the next
shallows, often for many minutes at a time
barely holding our own against the stiff
gusts. For two hours we dragged the heavily
laden boat, sometimes walking the bank,
sometimes wading in mid-stream, sometimes
poling, often swimming with the line from
one shallow to another. And the struggle
ended as suddenly as it began. Upon round-

Through the Region of Weir 139

ing the second bend the head wind became a
stern wind, driving us on at a jolly clip until
nightfall.

During the late afternoon, we came upon
a place where the Great Northern Railroad
touches the river for the last time in five
hundred miles. Here we saw two Italian
section hands whiling away their Sunday with
fishing rods. I went ashore, hoping to buy
some fish. Neither of the two could speak
English, and Italian sounds to me merely
like an unintelligible singing. However, they
gave me to understand that the fish were not
for sale, and my proffered coin had no persua-
sive powers.

Still wanting those fish, I rolled a smoke,
carelessly whistling the while a strain from
an opera I had once heard. For some reason
or other that strain had been in my head all
day. I had gotten up in the morning with it ;
I had whistled it during the fight with the
head wind. The Kid called it "that Dago
tune." I think it was something from //
Trovatore.

Suddenly one of the little Italians dropped

I40 The River and I

his rod, stood up to his full height, lifted his
arms very much after the manner of an or-
chestra leader and joined in with me. I
stopped — because I saw that he could whistle.
He carried it on with much expression to the
last thin note with all the ache of the world in
it. And then he grinned at me.

"Verdi!" he said sweetly.

I applauded. Whereat the little Italian
produced a bag of tobacco. We sat down on
the rocks and smoked together, holding a
wordless but perfectly intelligible conver-
sation of pleasant grins.

That night we had fish for supper! I got
them for a song — or, rather, for a whistle. I
was fed with more than fish. And I went to
sleep that night with a glorious thought for a
pillow: Truth expressed as Art is the univer-
sal language. One immortal strain from
Verdi, poorly whistled in a wilderness, had
made a Dago and a Dutchman brothers!

Scarcely had the crackling of the ruddy log
lulled us to sleep, when the night had flitted
over like a shadow, and we were cooking
breakfast. A lone, gray wolf, sitting on his

Through the Region of Weir 141

haunches a hundred paces away, regarded
us curiously. Doubtless we were new to his
generation; for in the evening dusk we had
drifted well into the Bad Lands.

Bad Lands? Rather the Land of Awe!

A light stem wind came up with the sun.
During the previous evening we had rigged a
cat-sail, and noiselessly we glided down the
glinting trail of crystal into the "Region of
Weir."

On either hand the sandstone cliffs reared
their yellow masses against the cloudless sky.
Worn by the ebbing floods of a prehistoric
sea, carved by the winds and rains of ages,
they presented a panorama of wonders.

Rows of huge colonial mansions with
pillared porticoes looked from their dizzy
terraces across the stream to where soaring
mosques and mystic domes of worship caught
the sun. It was all like the visible dream of
a master architect gone mad. Gaunt, sinister
ruins of mediaeval castles sprawled down the
slopes of unassailable summits. Grim brown
towers, haughtily crenellated, scowled defiance
on the unappearing foe. Titanic stools of

142 The River and I

stone dotted barren garden slopes, where
surely gods had once strolled in that far time
when the stars sang and the moon was young.
Dark red walls of regularly laid stone — huge
as that the Chinese flung before the advance of
the Northern hordes — held imaginary empires
asunder. Poised on a dizzy peak, Jove's
eagle stared into the eye of the sun, and raised
his wings for the flight deferred these many
centuries. Kneeling face to face upon a
lonesome summit, their hands clasped before
them, their backs bent as with the burdens
of the race, two women prayed the old, old,
woman prayer. The snow-white ruins of a
vast cathedral lay along the water's edge, and
all about it was a hush of worship. And
near it, arose the pointed pipes of a colossal
organ — with the summer silence for music.

With a lazy sail we drifted through this
place of awe; and for once I had no regrets
about that engine. The popping of the ex-
haust would have seemed sacrilegious in this
holy quiet.

Seldom do men pass that way. It is out
of the path of the tourist. No excursion

Through the Region of Weir 143

steamers ply those awesome river reaches.
Across the sacred whiteness of that cathedral's
imposing mass, no sign has ever been painted
telling you the merits of the best five-cent
cigar in the world! Few beside the hawks
and the crows would see it, if it were there.

And yet, for all the quiet in this land of
wonder, somehow you cannot feel that the
place is unpeopled. Surely, you think, in-
visible knights clash in tourney under those
frowning towers. Surely a lovelorn maiden
spins at that castle window, weaving her
heartache into the magic figures of her loom.
Stately dames must move behind the shut
doors of those pillared mansions; devotees
mutter Oriental prayers beneath those sun-
smitten domes. And amid the awful inner
silence of that cathedral, white-robed priests
lift wan faces to their God.

Under the beat of the high sun the light
stern wind fell. The slack sail drooped like
a sick-hearted thing. Idly drifting on the
slow glassy fiood, we seemed only an inci-
dental portion of this dream in which the
deepest passions of man were bodied forth in

144 The River and I

eternal fixity. Towers of battle, domes
of prayer, fanes of worship, and then — the
kneeling women! Somehow one could n't
whistle there. Bill and the Kid, little given
to sentiment, sat quietly and stared.

Late in the afternoon we found ourselves
out of this "Region of Weir." Great wall
rocks soared above us. Consulting our map,
we found that we were nearing Eagle Rapids,
the first of a turbulent series. I had fondly
anticipated shooting them all under power.
So once more I decided to go over that engine.
We landed at the wooded mouth of a little
ravine, having made a trifle over twenty
miles that day.

With those tools of the engine doctor —
an air of mystery and a monkey-wrench — I
unscrewed everything that appeared to have a
thread on it, and pulled out the other things.
The odds, I figured, were in my favor. A
sick engine is useless, and I felt assured of
either killing or curing. I did something —
I don't know what; but having achieved the
complete screwing up and driving in of things
— it went !

Through the Region of Weir 145

So on the morning of the fourth day, we
were up early, eager for the shooting of rapids.
We had understood from the conversation of
the seemingly wise, that Eagle Rapids was
the first of a series that made the other rapids
we had passed through look like mere ripples
on the surface. In some of those we had gone
at a very good clip, and several times we had
lost our rudder.

I remembered how the steamboats used to
be obliged to throw out cables and slowly
wind themselves up with the power of the
''steam nigger." I also remembered the
words of Father de Smet: ''There are many
rapids, ten of which are very difficult to ascend
and very dangerous to go down."

We had intended from the very first to get
wrecked in one or all of these rapids. For
this reason we had distributed forward, aft,
and amidships, eight five-gallon cans, soldered
air-tight. The frail craft would, we figured, be
punctured. The cans would displace nearly
three hundred and fifty pounds of water, and
the boat and engine, submerged, would lose
a certain weight. I had made the gruesome

146 The River and I

calculation with fond attention to detail.
I decided that she should be wrecked quite
arithmetically. We should be able, the
figures said, to recover the engine and patch
the boat. We had provided three life-pre-
servers, but one had been stolen; so I had
fancied what a bully fight one might have if
he should be thrown out into the mad waters
without a life-preserver.

I have never been able to explain it satis-
factorily; it is one of the paradoxes; but
human nature seems to take a weird delight
in placing in jeopardy that which is dearest.
Even a coward with his fingers clenched
desperately on the ragged edge of hazard,
feels an inexplicable thrill of glory. Having
several times been decently scared, I know.

One likes to take a sly peep behind the
curtain of the big play, hoping perhaps to get
a slight hint as to what machinery hoists the
moon, and what sort of contrivance flings
the thunder and lightning, and many other
things that are none of his business. Only,
to be sure, he intends to get away safely with
his information. When you think you see

Through the Region of Weir 147

your finish bowing to receive you, something
happens in your head. It 's hke a suhry
sheet of rapid fire lapping up for a moment
the thunder-shaken night — and discovering a
strange land to you. And it 's really good
for you.

Under half speed we cruised through the
windless golden morning; and the lonesome
canyon echoed and re-echoed with the joyful
chortle of the resurrected engine. We had
covered about ten miles, w^hen a strange
sighing sound grew up about us. It seemed
to emanate from the soaring walls of rock.
It seemed faint, yet it arose above the din
of the explosions, drowned out the droning
of the screw.

Steadily the sound increased. Like the
ghost of a great wind it moaned and sighed
about us. Little by little a new note crept in
— a sibilant, metalHc note as of a tense sheet
of silk drawn rapidly over a thin steel edge.

We knew it to be the mourning voice of the
Eagle Rapids; but far as we could see, the
river was quiet as a lake. We jogged on for
a mile, with the invisible moaning presence

148 The River and I

about us. It was somewhat Hke that intangi-
ble something you feel about a powerful but
sinister personality. The golden morning was
saturated with it.

Suddenly, turning a sharp bend about the
wall of rock that flanked the channel, a
wind of noise struck us. It was like the hiss-
ing of innumerable snakes against a tonal
background of muffled continuous thunder.
A hundred yards before us was Eagle Rapids
— a forbidding patch of writhing, whitening
water, pricked with the upward thrust of
toothlike rocks.

The first sight of it turned the inside of
me mist-gray. Temporarily, wrecks and the
arithmetic of them had little charm for me.
I seized the spark-lever, intending to shut
down. Instead, I threw it wide open. With
the resulting leap of the craft, all the gray
went out of me.

I grasped the rudder ropes and aimed at
a point where the sinuous current sucked
through a passage in the rocks like a lean
flame through a windy flue. Did you ever
hear music that made you see purple? It

TYPICAL RAPIDS ON UPPER MISSOURI

149

Through the Region of Weir 151

was that sort of purple I saw (or did I hear it
like music?) when we plunged under full speed
into the first suck of the rapids. We seemed
a conscious arrow hurled through a gray,
writhing world, the light of which was noise.
And then, suddenly, the quiet, golden morning
flashed back; and we were ripping the placid
waters of a lake.

The Kid broke out into boisterous laughter
that irritated me strangely: ''Where the devil
do you suppose our life-preservers are?" he
bawled. "They 're clear down under all the
cargo!"

A world of wonderful beauty was forging
past us. In the golden calm, the scintillant
sheet of water seemed to be rushing back-
ward, splitting itself over the prow, like a
fabric woven of gold and silver drawn rapidly
against a keen stationary blade.

The sheer cliffs had fallen away into pine-
clad slopes, and vari-colored rocks flung notes
of scarlet and gold through the sombre
green of the pines — like the riotous treble
cries of an organ pricking the sullen mur-
mur of the bass. So still were the clean

152 The River and I

waters that we seemed midway between two
skies.

I We skirted the base of a conical rock that
towered three hundred feet above us — a Titan
sentinel. It was the famous Sentinel Rock
of the old steamboat days. I shut the
engine down to quarter speed, for somehow
from the dizzy stmimit a sad dream fell upon
me and bade me linger.

I stared down into the cold crystal waters
at the base of the rock. Many-colored mosses,
sickly green, pale, feverish red, yellow like
fear, black like despair, purple like the lips of a
strangled man, clung there. I remembered
an old spring I used to haunt v/hen I was
just old enough to be awed by the fact of life
and frightened at the possibility of death.
Just such mosses grew in the depths of that
spring. I used to stare into it for hours.

It fascinated me in a terrible way. I
thought Death looked like that. Even now
I am afraid I could not swim long in clear
waters with those fearful colors under me.
I am sure they found Ophelia floating Hke
a ghastly lily in such a place.

Through the Region of Weir 153

Filled with a shadow of the old childish
dread, I looked up to the austere summit of
the Sentinel. Scarred and haggard with time
it caught the sun. I thought of how long it
had stood there just so, under the intermittent
flashing of moon and sun and star, since first
its flinty peak had pricked through the hot
spume of prehistoric seas.

Fantastic reptiles, winged and finned and
fanged, had basked upon it — grotesque, ten-
tative vehicles of the Flame of Life! And
then these flashed out, and the wild sea fell,
and the land arose — hideous and naked, a
steaming ooze fetid with gasping life. And
all the while this scarred Sentinel stared
unmoved. And then a riot of giant vegeta-
tion all about it — divinely extravagant, many-
colored as fire. And this too flashed out —
like the impossible dream of a god too young.
And the Great Change came, and the para-
dox of frost was in the world, stripping life
down to the lean essentials till only the sane,
capable things might live. And still the
Titan stared as in the beginning. And then,
men were in the land — gaunt, terrible, wolf-

154 The River and I

like men, loving and hating. And La
Verendrye forged past it; and Lewis and
Clark toiled under it through these waters
of awful quiet. And then the bull boats and
the mackinaws and the packets. And all
these flashed out; and still it stood unmoved.
And I came — and I too would flash out, and
all men after me and all life.

I viewed the colossal watcher with some-
thing like terror — the aspect of death about
its base and that cynical glimmer of sunlight
at its top. I flung the throttle open, and we
leaped forward through the river hush. I
wanted to get away from this thing that had
seen so much of life and cared so little. It
depressed me strangely; it thrust a bitter
question within the charmed circle of my
ego. It gave me an almost morbid desire
for speed, as though there were some place
I should reach before the terrible question
should be answered against me.

We fled down five or six miles of depres-
singly quiet waters. Once again the wall
rocks closed about us. We seemed to be going
at a tediously slow pace, yet the two thin

Through the Region of Weir 157

streams of water rushed hissing from prow
to stern. A strange mood was upon me.
Once when I was a boy and far from home, I
awoke in the night with a bed of raihoad
ties under me, and the chill black blanket
of the darkness about me. I wanted to get
up and run through that damned night —
anywhere, just so I went fast enough — stop-
ping only when exhaustion should drag me
down. And yet I was afraid of nothing
tangible; hunger and the stranger had sharp-
ened whatever blue steel there was in my
nature. I was afraid of being still! Were
you ever a homesick boy, too proud to tell
the truth about it?

I felt something of that boy's ache as we
shot in among the wall rocks again. It was
a psychic hunger for something that does
not exist. Oh, to attain the terrible speed one
experiences in a fever-dream, to get some-
where before it is too late, before the black
curtain drops !

To some this may sound merely like the
grating of overwrought nerves. But it is more
than that. All religions grew out of that

158 The River and I

most human mood. And whenever one is
deeply moved, he feels it. For even the
most matter-of-fact person of us all has now
and then a suspicion that this life is merely
episodic — that curtain after curtain of dark-
ness is to be pierced, world after world of
consciousness and light to be passed through.

Once more the rocks took on grotesque
shapes — utterly ultra-human in their sug-
gestiveness. Those who have marvelled at
the Hudson's beauty should drop down this
lonesome stretch. ,

We shot through the Elbow Rapids at the
base of the great Hole-in-the-Wall Rock. It
was deep and safe — much like an exaggerated
mill-race. It ran in heavy swells, yet the day
was windless.

In the late afternoon we shot the Dead
Man's Rapids, a very turbulent and rocky
stretch of water. We went through at a
freight -train speed, and began to develop
a slight contempt for fast waters. That
night we camped at the mouth of the Judith
River on the site of the now forgotten Fort
Chardon. We had made only ninety-eight

j..«ij.'-> m-A^}:f'imM^ ¥ .'Amaim

. a .•-.^- ^^.

Through the Region of Weir i6i

miles in four days. It began to appear that
we might be obliged to finish on skates!

We were up and off with the first gray of
the morning. We knew Dauphin Rapids to
be about seventeen miles below, and since
this particular patch of water had by far the
greatest reputation of all the rapids, we were
eager to make its acquaintance.

The engine began to show unmistakable
signs of getting tired of its job. Now and
then it barked spitefully, had half a notion
to stop, changed its mind, ran faster than it
should, wheezed and slowed down — acting in
an altogether unreasonable way. But it
kept the screw humming nevertheless.

Fortunately it was going at a mad clip
when we sighted the Dauphin. There was
not that sibilance and thunder that had
turned me a bit gray inside at first sight of the
Eagle. The channel was narrow, and no rocks
appeared above the surface. But speed was
there; and the almost noiseless rolling of the
swift flood ahead had a more formidable ap-
pearance than that of the Eagle. Rocks above
the surface are not much to be feared when

i62 The River and I

you have power and a good rudder. But
we drew about twenty-two inches of water,
and I thought of the rocks under the surface.

I had, however, only a moment to think,
for we were already travelling a good eighteen
miles, and when the main swirl of the rapids
seized us, we no doubt reached twenty-five.
I was grasping the rudder ropes and we were
all grinning a sort of idiotic satisfaction at the
amazing spurt of speed, when

Something was about to happen!

The Kid and I were sitting behind the en-
gine in order to hold her screw down to solid
water. Bill, decorated with a grin, sat amid-
ships facing us. I caught a pink flash in
the swirl just under our bow, and then it
happened !

The boat reared like a steeple-chaser
taking a fence! The Kid shot forward over
the engine and knocked the grin off Bill's
face! Clinging desperately to the rudder
ropes, I saw, for a brief moment, a good
three fourths of the frail craft thrust skyward
at an angle of about forty-five degrees. Then
she stuck her nose in the water and her screw

Through the Region of Weir 163

came up, howling like seven devils in the air
behind me! Instinctively, I struck the spark-
lever; the howling stopped, — and we were
floating in the slow waters below Dauphin
Rapids.

All the cargo had forged forward, and the
persons of Bill and the Kid were considerably
tangled. We laughed loud and long. Then
we gathered ourselves up and wondered if
she might be taking water under the cargo.
It developed that she was n't. But one of
our grub boxes, containing all the bacon, was
missing. So were the short oars that we
used for paddles. While we laughed, these
had found some convenient hiding-place.

We had struck a smooth boulder and leaped
over it. A boat with the ordinary launch
construction would have opened at every
seam. The light springy tough construction
of the Atom had saved her. Whereat I thought
of the Information Bureau and was well
pleased.

Altogether we looked upon the incident as
a purple spot. But we were many miles from
available bacon, and when, upon trial, the

1 64 The River and I

engine refused to make a revolution, we began
to get exceedingly hungry for meat.

Having a dead engine and no paddles, we
drifted. We drifted very slowly. The Kid
asked if he might not go ashore and drive a
stake in the bank. For what purpose? Why, to
ascertain whether we were going up or down
stream! While we drifted in the now blister-
ing sun, we talked about meat. With a
devilish persistence we quite exhausted the
subject. We discussed the best methods
for making a beefsteak delicious. It made us
very hungry for meat. The Kid announced
that he could feel his backbone sawing at the
front of his shirt. But perhaps that was
only the hyperbole of youth. Bill confessed
that he had once grumbled at his good wife
for serving the steak too rare. He now stated
that at the first telegraph station he would
wire for forgiveness. I advised him to wire
for money instead' and buy meat with it.
Personally I felt a sort of wistful tenderness
for packing-houses.

That day passed somehow, and the next
morning we were still hungry for meat. We

Through the Region of Weir 165

spent most of the morning talking about it.
In the bhstering windless afternoon, we
drifted lazily. Now and then we took turns
cranking the engine.

We were going stern foremost and I was
cranking. We rounded a bend where the
wall rocks sloped back, leaving a narrow
arid sagebrush strip along both sides of the
stream. I had straightened up to get the
kink out of my back and mop the sweat out
of my eyes, when I saw something that made
my stomach turn a double somersault.

A good eight hundred yards down stream
at the point of a gravel-bar, something that
looked like and yet unlike a small cluster of
drifting, leafless brush moved slowly into the
water. Now it appeared quite distinct, and
now it seemed that a film of oil all but blotted
it out. I blinked my eyes and peered hard
through the bafliing yellow glare. Then I
reached for the rifle and climbed over the
gunwale. I smelled raw meat.

Fortunately, we were drifting across a bar,
and the slow water came only to my shoulders.
The thing eight hundred yards away was

1 66 The River and I

forging across stream by this time — heading
for the mouth of a coulee. I saw plainly
now that the brush grew out of a head. It
was a buck with antlers.

Just below the coulee's mouth, the wall
rocks began again. The buck would be
obliged to land above the wall rocks, and the
drifting boat would keep him going. I
reached shore and headed for that coulee.
The sagebrush concealed me. At the critical
moment, I intended to show myself and start
him up the steep slope. Thus he would be
forced to approach me while fleeing me.
When I felt that enough time had passed, I
stood up. The buck, shaking himself like
a dog, stood against the yellow sandstone
at the mouth of the gulch. He saw me,
looked back at the drifting boat, and appeared
to be undecided.

I wondered what the range might be.
Back home in the ploughed field where I fre-
quently plug tin cans at various long ranges,
I would have called it six hundred yards — at
first. Then suddenly it seemed three or
four hundred. Like a thing in a dream the

X
■r.

Through the Region of Weir 169

buck seemed to waver back and forth in the
oily sunHght.

"Call it four hundred and fifty," I said to
myself, and let drive. A spurt of yellow
stone-dust leaped from the cliff a foot or so
above the deer's back. Only four hundred?
But the deer had made up his mind. He
had urgent business on the other side of that
slope — he appeared to be overdue.

I pumped up another shell and drew fine at
four hundred. That time his rump quivered
for a second as though a great weight had
been dropped on it. But he went on with
increased speed. Once more I let him have
it. That time he lost an antler. He had
now reached the summit, two hundred feet
up at the least.

i He hesitated — seemed to be shivering. I
have hunted with a full stomach and brought
down game. But there 's a difference when
you are empty. In that moment before you
kill, you became the sort of fellow your
mother would n't like. Perhaps the average
man would feel a little ashamed to tell the
truth about that big savage moment. I

170 The River and I

got down on my knee and put a final soft-
nosed ball where it would do the most good.
The buck reared, stiffened, and came down,
tumbling over and over.

That night we pitched camp under a lone
scrubby tree at the mouth of an arid gulch
that led back into the utterly God-forsaken
Bad Lands. It was the wilderness indeed.
Coyotes howled far away in the night, and
diving beaver boomed out in the black
stream.

We built half a dozen fires and swung above
them the choice portions of our kill. And
how we ate — with what glorious appetites!

It is good to sit with a glad-hearted com-
pany flinging words of joyful banter across
very tall steins. It is good to draw up to a
country table at Christmas time with turkey
and pumpkin-pies and old-fashioned puddings
before you, and the ones you love about you.
I have been deeply happy with apples and
cider before an open fireplace. I have been
present when the brilliant sword-play of wit
flashed across a banquet table — and it thrilled
me. But

Throuo^h the Region of Weir 171

There is no feast Hke the feast in the open-
the feast in the flaring Hght of a night fire-

the feast of your own kill, with the tang of the
wild and the tang of the smoke in it !

CHAPTER VI

GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

IT all came back there by the smouldering
*• fires — the wonder and the beauty and the
awe of being alive. We had eaten hugely
— a giant feast. There had been no formali-
ties about that meal. Lying on our blankets
under the smoke-drift, we had cut with our
jack-knives the tender morsels from a haunch
as it roasted. When the haunch was at last
cooked to the bone, only the bone was left.

Heavy with the feast, I lay on my back
watching the gray smoke brush my stars that
seemed so near. My stars I Soft and gentle
and mystical! Like a dark-browed Yotun
woman wooing the latent giant in me, the
night pressed down. I closed my eyes, and
through me ran the sensuous surface fires
of her dream- wrought limbs. Upon my face

the weird magnetic lure of ever-nearing, never-

172

Getting Down to Business 173

kissing lips made soundless music. Like a
sister, like a mother she caressed me, lazy
with the giant feast; and yet, a drowsy,
half -voluptuous joy shimmered and rippled
in my veins.

Drowsing and dreaming under the drifting
smoke- wrack, I felt the sense of time and self
drop away from me. No now, no to-mor-
row, no yesterday, no I! Only eternity, one
vast whole — sun-shot, star-sprent, love-filled,
changeless. And in it all, one spot of con-
sciousness more acute than other spots; and
that was the something that had eaten hugely,
and that now felt the inward-flung glory of it
all; the swooning, half -voluptuous sense of
awe and wonder, the rippling, shimmering,
universal joy.

• And then suddenly and without shock — like
the shifting of the wood smoke — the mood
veered, and there was nothing but I. Space
and eternity were I — vast projections of
myself, tinghng with my consciousness to
the remotest fringe of the outward swing-
ing atom-drift; through immeasurable night,
pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic

174 The River and I

day; through and beyond the awful circle
of y earless duration, my ego lived and knew
itself and thrilled with the glory of being.
The slowly revolving Milky Way was only
a glory within me; the great woman-star
jewelling the summit of a cliff, was only an
ecstasy within me; the murmuring of the
river out in the dark was only the singing of
my heart; and the deep, deep blue of the
heavens was only the splendid color of my
soul.

Bill snored. Among the glowing fires
moved the black bulk of the Kid, turning
the hunks of venison. And then the universe
and I, curiously mixed, swooned into nothing
at all, and I was blinking at a golden glow,
and from the river came a shouting.

It was broad day. We leaped up, and rub-
bing the sleep from our eyes, saw a light skiff
drifting toward us. It contained two men —
Frank and Charley. We had met them at
Benton, and during an acquaintance of three
weeks we had learned of their remarkable
ability as cooks. Frank was a little Canadian
Frenchman, and Charley was English. Both,

Getting- Down to Business 175

in the parlance of the road, were "floaters";
that is to say, no locaHty ever knew them
long; the earth was their floor, the sky their
ceiling — and their god was Whim. Naturally
our trip had appealed to them, and one month
in Benton had aggravated that hopelessly
incurable disease — Wanderlust.

So we had agreed that somewhere down
river we would camp for a week and wait for
them. They would do the cooking, and we
would take them in tow. Two days after we
dropped out of Benton, they had abruptly
"jumped" an unflnished job and put off after
us in a skiff, rowing all day and most of the
night in order to overtake us.

Certainly they had arrived at the moment
most psychologically favorable for the begin-
ning of an odd sort of tyranny that followed.
Cooking is a weird mystery to me. As for
Bill and the Kid, courtesy forbids detailed
comment. The Kid had been uniformly sue-
cessful in disguising the most familiar articles
of diet; and Bill was perhaps least unsuccess-
ful in the making of flapjacks. According to
his naive statement, he had discovered the

176 The River and I

trick of mixing the batter while manufac-
turing photographer's mounting paste. His
statement was never questioned. My only-
criticism on his flapjacks was simply that
he left too much to the imagination. For
these and kindred reasons, we gladly hailed
the newcomers.

Ten minutes after the skiff touched shore,
the camp consisted of two cooks and three
scullions. The Kid was a hewer and packer
of wood, I was a pealer and slicer of things,
and Bill, sweetly oblivious of his bewhiskered
dignity, danced about in the humblest of
moods, handing this and that to the grub-
lords.

"You outfitted like greenhorns!" announced
the usurpers. "What you want is raw
material. Run down to the boat, please, and
bring me this! Oh, yes, and bring me that!
And you '11 find the other in the bottom of the
skiff's forward locker! Put a little more wood
on the fire. Kid; and say, Bill, hand me that,
won't you? Who 's going to get a pail of
water?"

All three of us were going to get a pail of

an
w

Getting Down to Business 179

water, of course! It was the one thing in the
world we wanted to do very much — get a pail
of water !

But the raw materials — how they played
on them! I regarded their performance as a
species of duet ; and the raw materials, ranged
in the sand about the fire, were the keys.
Frank touched this, Charley touched that,
and over the fire the music grew — perfectly
stomach-ravishing !

We had bought with much care all, or nearly
all the ordinary cooking-utensils. These the
usurpers scorned. Three or four gasoline
cans, transformed by a jack-knife into skillets,
ovens, platters, etc., sufficed for these masters
of their craft. The downright Greek simpli-
city of their methods won me completely.

"This is indeed Art," thought I; "first,
the elimination of the non-essential, and then
the virile, unerring directness, the seemingly
easy accomplishment resulting from effort
long forgotten; and, above all, the final, con-
vincing delivery of the goods."

Out of the chaos of the raw material,
beneath the touch of Charley's wise hands,

i8o The River and I

emerged a wondrous cosmos of biscuits, light
as the heart of a boy. And Frank, singing
a French ditty, created wheat cakes. His
method struck me as poetic. He scorned the
ordinary uninspired cook's manner of turning
the half-baked cake. One side being done, he
waited until the ditty reached a certain lilting
upward leap in the refrain, when, with a dex-
terous movement of the frying-pan, he tossed
the cake into the air, making it execute a joy-
ful somersault, and catching it with a sizzling
splat in the pan, just as the lilting measure
ceased abruptly.

Why, I could taste that song in the pan-
cakes !

I wonder why domestic economy has so per-
sistently overlooked the value of song as an
adjunct to cookery. Gateaux a la chanson-
nette! Who would n't eat them for breakfast?

At six in the evening we put off, Charley,
the Kid, and I manning the power boat, Bill
and Frank the skiff, which was towed by a
thirty-foot line. I had, during the day, trans-
formed my unquestioned slavery into a dis-
tinct advantage, having carefully impressed

Getting Down to Business i8i

Upon the Englishman the honor I would do
him by allowing him to become chief engineer
of the Atom. I carefully avoided the subject
of cranking. I was tired cranking. I felt
that I had exhausted the possibilities of enjoy-
ment in that particular form of physical
exercise. It had developed during the day
that Charley had once run a gasoline engine.
I was careful to emphasize my ridiculous lack
of mechanical ability. Charley took the
bait beautifully.

But just now the engine ran merrily.
Above its barking I sang the praises of the
Englishman, with a comfortable feeling that,
at least in this, the tail would wag the
dog.

Through the clear quiet waters, between
soaring canyon walls, we raced eastward into
the creeping twilight. Here and there the
banks widened out into valleys of wondrous
beauty, flanked by jagged miniature moun-
tains transfigured in the slant evening light.
It seemed the ''faerie land forlorn" of which
Keats dreamed, where year after year come
only the winds and the rains and the snow

i82 The River and I

and the sunhght and the star- sheen and the
moon-glow.

In the deepening evening our widening
V-shaped wake glowed with opalescent witch-
fires. Watching the oily ripples, I steered
wild and lost the channel. We all got out
and, wading in different directions, went
hunting for the Missouri River. It had flat-
tened out into a lake three or four hundred
yards wide and eight inches deep. Slipping
poles under the power boat, we carried it
several hundred yards to a point where the
stream deepened. It was now quite dark, and
the engine quit work for the day. The skiff
towed us another mile or so to a camping
place.

Having moored the boats, we lined up on
the shore and had a song. It was a quintet,
consisting of a Frenchman, an Englishman,
an Irishman, a Cornishman, and a German.
A very strong quintet it was; that is to say,
strong on volume. As to quality — we were n't
thrusting ourselves upon an audience. The
river and the sky did n't seem to mind, and,
the cliffs sang after us, lagging a beat or two.

<
u

Gettine Down to Business i8s

We wished to sing ever so beautifully; and,
after all, it would be much better to have
the whole world wishing to sing melodiously,
than to have just a few masters here and
there who really can! Did you ever hear a
barefooted, freckle-faced ploughboy singing
powerfully and quite out of tune, the stubble
fields about him still glistening with the
morning dew, and the meadow larks joining
in from the fence-posts? I have: and soaring
above the faulty execution, I heard the lark-
heart of the never-aging world wooing the
far-off eternal dawn. True song is merely a
hopeful condition of the soul. And so I am
sure we sang very wonderfully that night.

And how the flapjacks disappeared as a
result of that singing! We ate until Charley
refused to bake any more; then we rolled up
in our blankets by the fire and "swapped
lies," dropping off one at a time into sleep
until the last speaker finished his story with
only the drowsy stars for an audience. At
least I suppose it was so; I was not the last
speaker.

Alas! too seldom were we to hail the even-

1 86 The River and I

ing star with song. So far we had made in a
week httle more than one hundred and fifty
miles. With the exception of a few hours of
head winds, that week had been a week of
dream. We now awoke fully to the fact that
in low water season the Missouri is not swift.
In our early plans we had fallen in with the
popular fallacy that one need only cut loose
and let the current do the rest; whereas, in
low water, one would probably never reach
the end of his journey by that method. In
addition to this, our gasoline was running low.
We had trusted to irrigation plants for
replenishing our supply from time to time.
But the great flood of the spring had swept
the valley clean. Where the year before
there were prosperous ranch establishments
with gasoline pumping plants, there was only
desolation now. It was as though we trav-
elled in the path of a devastating army.
Perhaps the summer of 1908 was the most
unfavorable season for such a trip in the last
fifty years. Steamboating on the upper river
is only a memory. There are now no wood-
yards as formerly. We found ourselves with

Getting Down to Business 187

no certainty of procuring grub and oil; our
engine became more and more untrust-
worthy; our paddles had been lost. What
winds we had generally blew against us, and
the character of the banks was changing.
The cliffs gave w^ay to broad alluvial valleys,
over which, at times, the gales swept with
terrific force.

Our map told us of a number of river
''towns." We had already been partially
disillusioned as to the character of those
''towns." They were pretty much in a class
with Goodale, except that they lacked the
switch and the box-car and the sign. Just
now Rocky Point lay ahead of us. Rocky
Point meant a new supply of food and oil.
Stimulated by this thought, Charley cranked
heroically under the blistering sun and man-
aged to arouse the engine now and then into
spasms of speed. He had not yet begun to
swear. Fearfully I awaited the first evidence
of the new mood, which I knew must come.

At least once a day we put the machinery
on the operating table. Each time we suc-
ceeded only in developing new symptoms.

i88 The River and I

At a point about fifty miles from the
"town" so deeply longed for, a lone cow-
punch appeared on the bank.

''How far to Rocky Point?" I cried.

"Oh, something less than two hundred
miles!" drawled the horseman. (How care-
lessly they juggle with miles in that big
country !)

"It's just a little place, isn't it?" I con-
tinued.

"Little place!" answered the cow-punch;
"hell, no!"

"What!" I cried in glee; "Is it really a
town of importance?" I had visions of a
budding metropolis, full of gasoline and grub.

"I guess it ain't a little place," explained
the rider; ''w'y, they 've got nigh onto ten
thousand cattle down there 1^^

Ten minutes after that, Charley, after a
desperate but unsuccessful fit of cranking,
straightened the kink out of his back, mopped
the perspiration from his face — and swore I

Almost immediately I felt, or at least
thought I felt, a distinct change in the temper
of the crew — for the worse. We used the

Q
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Getting Down to Business 191

better part of two days covering the last fifty
miles into Rocky Point, only to find that the
place consisted of a log ranch-house, two
women, an old man, and ''Texas." The
cattle and the other men were scattered over
a hundred miles or so of range. The women
either would not or could not supply us with
grub, explaining that the nearest railroad
town was ninety miles av/ay. Gasoline was
out of the question. We might be able to
buy some at the mouth of Milk River, huo
hundred miles down stream!

"Texas," who made me think of Gargan-
tua, and w^ho had a chest like a bison bull's,
and a drawling fog-horn voice, ran a saloon
in an odd little shanty boat brought down
by the flood. He solved the problem for us.

"You cain't get no gasoline short o' Milk
River," he bellowed drawlingly; "and you
sure got to paddle, so you better buy
whiskey!"

While we were deciding to accept the
offered advice, "Texas" whittled a stick and
got off a few jokes of Rabelaisian directness.
We laughed heartily, and as a mark of his

192 The River and I

appreciation, he gave us five quarts for a gal-
lon. Which proved, in spite of his appear-
ance, that ''Texas" was very human.

We gave the engine a final trial. It ran
by spasms — backwards. Then, finally, it re-
fused to run at all. We tried to make our-
selves believe that the gasoline was too low
in the tank, that the pressure of the oil had
something to do with it. At first we really
knew better. But days of drudgery at the
paddles transformed the makeshift hope into
something almost like a certainty.

There was no lumber at Rocky Point. We
rummaged through a pile of driftwood and
found some half-rotted two-by-sixes. These
we hacked into paddles. They weighed,
when thoroughly soaked, at least fifteen
pounds apiece.

Sending Bill and Frank on ahead with the
skiff and the small store of provisions, Charley
and I, the Kid at the steering rope, set out
pushing the power canoe with the paddles.
The skiff was very soon out of sight.

The Atom, very fast under power, was,
with paddles, the slowest boat imaginable.

Getting Down to Business 193

There was no lift to her prow, no exhilarating
leap as with the typical light canoe driven by
regulation paddles. And she was as unwiedly
as a log. A light wind blew up-stream, and
the current was very slow. After dark we
caught up with Bill and Frank, who had sup-
per waiting. I had been tasting venison all
day; but there was none for supper. In
spite of a night's smoking, all of it had spoiled.
This left us w^ithout meat. Our provisions
now consisted mostly of flour. We had a few
potatoes and some toasted wind called "break-
fast food." During six or seven hours of
hard work at the paddles, we had covered no
more than fifteen miles. These facts put
together gave no promising result. In addi-
tion to this, it was impossible to stir up a song.
Even the liquor would n't bring it out. And
the flapjacks were not served a la chanson-
fiette that night. I tried to explain why the
trip was only beginning to get interesting;
but my words fell flat. And when the irre-
pressible Kid essayed a joke, I alone laughed
at it, though rather out of gratitude than
mirth.

194 The River and I

There are many men who Hve and die with
the undisputed reputation of being good fel-
lows— your friends and mine — who, if put
to the test, would fail miserably. Fortunate
is that man to whom it is not given to test all
of his friends. This is not cynicism; it is
only human nature; and I love humian nature,
being myself possessed of so much of it. I
admire it when it stands firmly upon its legs,
and I love it when it wobbles. But when it
gains power with increasing odds, grows big
with obstacles, I worship it.

" To thrill with the joy of girded men,
To go on forever and fail, and go on again —
With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night — ' '

Thus it should have been. But that night,
staring into the faces of three of the four, I
saw the yellow strea.k. The Kid was not one
of the three. The first railroad station would
hold out no temptation to him. He was a
kid, but manhood has little to do with age.
It must exist from the first like a tang of iron
in the blood. Age does not really create
anything — it only develops. Your wonderful

X
H

»— «

;<5

Getting Down to Business 197

and beautiful things often come as para-
doxes. I looked for a man and found him in
a boy.

Bil talked about home and stared into the
twilight. The ''floaters" were irritable, quar-
relling with the fire, the grub, the cooking-
utensils, and verbally sending the engine to
the devil.

Seeing about eighteen hundred miles of
paddle work ahead, knowing that at that
season of the year the prevailing winds would
be head winds, and having very little faith in
the engine under any conditions, I decided
to travel day and night, for the water was
falling steadily and already the channels were
at times hard to find. Charley and Frank
grumbled. I told them we would split the
grub fairly, a fifth to a man, and that they
might travel as slowly as they liked, the skiff
being their property. They stayed with us.

We lashed the boats together and put off
into the slow current. A haggard, eerie
fragment of moon slinked westward. Stars
glinted in the flawless chilly blue. The sur-
face of the river was like polished ebony — a

198 The River and I

dream-path wrought of gloom and gleam.
The banks were lines of dusk, except where
some lone cottonwood loomed skyward like a
giant ghost clothed with a mantle that glist-
ered and darkled in the chill star-sheen.

There was the feel of moving in eternity
about it all. The very limitation of the dusk
gave the feeling of immensity. There was no
sense of motion, yet we moved. The sky
seemed as much below as above. We seemed
suspended in a hollow globe. Now and then
the boom of a diving beaver's tail accented
the clinging quiet; and by fits the drowsy
muttering of waterfowl awoke in the adjacent
swamps, and droned back into the universal
hush.

Frank and I stood watch, the three others
rolling up in their blankets among the lug-
gage. It occurred to me for the first tim.e
that we had a phonograph under the cargo.
I went down after it. At random I chose a
record and set the machine going. It was a
Chopin Nocturne played on a 'cello — a vocal
yearning, a wailing of frustrate aspirations,
a brushing of sick wings across the gates of

Getting Down to Business 199

heavens never to be entered; and then the
finale — an insistent, feverish repetition of the
human ache, ceasing as with utter exhaustion.

I looked about me drinking in the night.
How little this music really expressed it! It
seemed too humanly near-sighted, too egotis-
tic, too petty to sound out under those far-
seeing stars, in that divine quiet.

I slipped on another record. This time it
was a beautiful little song, full of the sweet
melancholy of love. I shut it down. The
thing would n't do. In the evening — yes.
But now! Truly there is something womanly
about Night, something loverlike in a vast
impersonal way; but too big— she is too ter-
ribly big to woo with human sentiment.
Only a windlike chant would do — something
with an undertone of human despair, out-
soared by brave, savage flights of invincible
soul-hope — great virile singing man-cries,
winged as the starlight, weird as space —
Whitman sublimated, David's soul poured out
in symphony.

I started another going. This time I did
not stop it, for the Night was singing —

200 The River and I

— through its nose perhaps, but still it was
singing — out of that machine. It was Wag-
ner's Evening Star played by an orchestra.
It filled the night, swept the glittering
reaches, groped about in the glooms; and
then, leaving the human theme behind, soul-
like the upward yearning violins took flight,
dissolving at last into starlight and immensity.
Ages swept by me like a dream- wind. When
I got back, the machine, all but run down,
was scratching hideously.

Slowly we swung about in the scarcely percep-
tible current. Down among the luggage the
three snored discordantly. Frank's cigarette
glowed intermittently against the dim horizon,
like a bonfire far off. Somewhere out in the
gloom coyotes chattered and yelped, and
from far across the dusky valley others an-
swered— a doleful tenson.

I dozed. Frank awoke us all with a shout.
We leaped up and stared blinkingly into the
north. That whole region of the sky was
aflame from zenith to horizon with spectral
fires. It was the aurora. Not the pale,
ragged glow, sputtering like the ghost of a

Getting Down to Business 201

huge lamp-flame, which is famihar to every
one, but a billowing of color, rainbows gone
mad! In the northeast the long rolling col-
imms formed — many-colored clouds of spec-
tral light whipped up as by a whirlwind — flung
from eastward to westward, devouring Polaris
and the Wain — rapid sequent towers of
smokeless fire !

It dazzled and whirled and mounted and
fell like the illumined filmy skirts of some
invisible Titanic serpentine dancer, madly
pirouetting across a carpet of stars. Then
suddenly it all fell into a dull ember-glow and
flashed out. The ragged moon dropped out
of the southwestern sky. In the chill of the
night, gray, dense fog wraiths crawled upon
the hidden face of the waters.

Again I dozed and awakened with the sense
of having stopped suddenly. A light wind
had arisen and we were fast on a bar. Frank
and I took our blankets out on the sand,
rolled up and went to sleep.

The red of dawn awoke us as though some
one had shouted. Frank and I sat up and
stared about. A white- tail deer was drinking

202 The River and I

at the river's edge three hundred yards away.
So far as we were concerned, it was a dream-
deer. We bHnked complacently at it until
it disappeared in the brush. Then we thought
of the rifle.

We were all stiff and chilled. The boats
were motionless in shallow water. We all
got out in the stream that felt icy to us,
and waded the crafts into the channel.
Incidentally we remembered Texas and his
wisdom.

The time was early August; but nev-
ertheless there was a tang of frost in the
air and the river seemed to flow not water
but a thick frore fog. I smelled persimmons
distinctly — it was that cold; brown spicy
persimmons smashed on crisp autumn leaves
down in old Missouri! The smell haunted
me all morning like a bitter-sweet regret.

We breakfasted on flapjacks and, separat-
ing the boats, put off. The skiff left us
easily and disappeared. A head wind arose
with the sun and increased steadily. By
eleven o'clock it blew so strongly that we
could make no headway with the rude pad-

Getting- Down to Business 203

dies, and the waves, rolling at least four feet
from trough to crest, made it impossible to
hold the boat in course. We quit paddling,
and got out in the water with the line. Two
pulled and one pushed. All day we waded,
sometimes up to our necks; sometimes we
swam a bit, and sometimes we clung to the
boat and kicked it on to the next shallows.
Our progress was ridiculously slow, but we
kept moving. When we stopped for a few
minutes to smoke under the lee of a bank, our
legs cramped.

To lay up one day would be only to estab-
lish a precedent for day after day of inactiv-
ity. The prevailing winds would be head
winds. We clung to the shoddy hope held
out by that magic name — Milk River. We
knew too well that Milk River was only a
snare and a delusion; but one must fight
toward something — it makes little difference
what you call that something. A goal, in
itself, is an empty thing; all the virtue lies
in the moving toward the goal.

Often we sank deep in the mud; often at
the bends we could scarcely forge against the

204 The River and I

blast that held us leaning to the pull. Noon
came and still we had not overtaken the skiff.
Dark came, and we had not yet sighted it.
But with the sun, the wind fell, and we
paddled on, lank and chilled. About ten
o'clock we sighted the campfire.

We ate flapjacks once more — delicious,
butterless flapjacks! — and then once more
we put off into the chill night. We made
twelve miles that day, and every foot had
been a fight. I wanted to raise it to twenty-
five before sunrise. No one grumbled this
time; but in the light of the campfire the
faces looked cheerless — except the Kid's face.

We huddled up in our blankets and,
naturally, all of us went to sleep. A great
shock brought us to our feet. The moon
had set and the sky was overcast. Thick
night clung around us. We saw nothing, but
by the rocking of the boats and the roaring
of the river, we knew we were shooting
rapids.

Still dazed with sleep, I had a curious sense
of being whirled at a terrific speed into some
subterranean suck of waters. There was

Getting Down to Business 205

nothing to do but wait. We struck rocks and
went rolling, shipping buckets of water at
every dip. Then there was a long sickening
swoop through utter blackness. It ended
abruptly with a thud that knocked us
down.

We found that we were no longer moving.
We got out, hanging to the gunwales. The
boats were lodged on a reef of rock, and we
were obliged to "walk" them for some dis-
tance, when suddenly the water deepened,
and we all went up to our necks. And the
night seemed bitterly cold. I never shivered
more in January.

It was yet too dark to find a camping place ;
so we drifted on until the east paled. Then
we built a great log fire and baked ourselves
until sunrise.

Day after day my log-book begins with the
words, ''Heavy head winds," and ends with
"Drifted most of the night." We covered
about twenty-five miles every twenty-four
hours. Every day the cooks grumbled
more; and Bill had a way of staring wistfully
into the distance and talking about home,

2o6 The River and I

that produced in me an odd mixture of anger
and pity.

We had lost our map : we had no calendar.
Time and distance, curiously confused, were
merely a weariness in the shoulders.

CHAPTER VII

ON TO THE YELLOWSTONE

A T last one evening (shall I confess it?)
we had blue-crane soup for supper!
Now a flight of gray-blue cranes across a
pearl-gray sky, shot with threads of evening
scarlet, makes a masterly picture: indeed,
an effect worthy of reproduction in Art. You
see a Japanese screen done in heroic size ; and
it is a sight to make you long exquisitely for

things that are not — like a poet. But

Let us have no illusions about this matter!
Crane soup is not satisfactory. It looks gray-
blue and tastes gray-blue, and gives to your
psychic inwardness a dull, gray-blue, mel-
ancholy tone. And when you nibble at the
boiled gray-blue meat of an adult crane, you
catch yourself wondering just what sort of

ragout could be made out of boots; you have

207

2o8 The River and I

a morbid longing to know just how bad such
a ragout would really be!

Hereafter on whatever trails I may follow,
blue cranes shall be used chiefly for Japanese
screen effects. Little by little (the latent phi-
losopher in me emerges to remark) by exper-
ience we place not only ourselves but all things
in their proper places in the universe. This
process of fitting things properly in one's
cosmos seems to be one of the chief aims of
conscious life. Therefore I score one for my-
self— having placed blue cranes permanently
in that cosmic nook given over to Japanese
screen effects !

Next morning we pushed on. The taste
of that crane soup clung to me all day like
the memory of an old sorrow dulled by time.

Deer tracks were plentiful, but it has long
been conceded that the tracks are by far the
least edible things pertaining to an animal.
Cranes seemed to have multiplied rapidly.
Impudently tame, they lined the gravel-bars,
and regarded us curiously as we fought our
way past them. Now and then a flock of
wild ducks alighted several hundred yards

On to the Yellowstone 209

from us. We had only a rifle. To shoot a

moving duck out of a moving boat with a

rifle is a feat attended with some difficulties.

Once we wounded a wild goose, but it got

away; which offended our sense of poetic

justice. After crane soup one would seem

to deserve roast goose.

I scanned the dreary monotonous valleys

stretching away from the river. We had for

several days been living on scenery, tobacco,

and flapjacks. The scenery had flattened out,

tobacco was running low; but the flapjacks

bid fair to go on forever. I sought in my head

for the exact adjective, the particular epithet

with the inevitable feel about it, with which

to describe that monotonous melancholy

stretch. Every time I tried, I came back to

the word ''baconless.'' The word took on

exquisite overtones of gray meaning, and I

worked up those overtones until I had a

perfectly wrought melancholy poem of one

word — ''Baconless.'' For, after all, a poem

never existed upon paper, but lives subtly

in the consciousness of the poet, and in the

minds of those who understand the poet
14

210 The River and I

through the suggestiveness of his written
symbols, and their own remembered exper-
iences.

But during the next morning, poetic justice
worked. A rider mounted on a piebald
pony appeared on the bank and shouted for
us to pull in.

I suddenly realized why a dog wags his tail
at a stranger. But the feeling I had was big-
ger than that. This mounted man became at
once for me the incarnation of the meaning of
bacon! *

When two parties meet and each wants
what the other can give, it does n't take long
to get acquainted. The rider was a youth of
about seventeen. One glance at his face
told you the story of his rearing. He was
unmistakably city-bred, and his hands showed
that his life had begun too easy for his own
good.

"From the East?" he questioned joyously.
''Say, you know little old New York, don't
you? When were you there last?"

The lad was hungry, but not for bacon.
Alas! Our hunger was the healthier one!

On to the Yellowstone 211

We talked of New York. ''Mother's in
Paris," he volunteered, "and Dad 's in New
York meeting her bills. But the Old Man 's
got a grouch at me, and so he sent me 'way
out here in this God-forsaken country! Say,
what did they make this country for? Got
any tailor-made cigarettes about you.'^ How
did Broadway look when you were there last?
Lights all there yet at night? I 've been here
two years — it seems like two hundred! Talk
about Robinson Crusoe! Say, I 've got him
distanced!"

I helped him build up a momentary Broad-
way there in the wilderness — the lights, the
din, the hurrying, jostling theatre crowds, the
cafes, faces, faces — anguished faces, eager
faces, weary faces, painted faces, squalor,
brilliance. For me the memory of it only
made me feel the pity of it all. But the lad's
eyes beamed. He was homesick for Broad-
way.

I changed the subject from prose to poetry;
that is, from Broadway to bacon.

"Wait here till I come back," said the lad,
mounting. He spurred up a gulch and dis-

212 The River and I

appeared. In an hour he reappeared with a
half strip of the precious stuff. "Take money
for it? Not on your life!" he insisted.
"You 've been down there, and that goes for
a meal ticket with me! "

Fried bacon! And flapjacks sopped in the
grease of it ! After all, a banquet is very much
a state of mind.

When we pulled away, the ostracized New
Yorker bade us farewell with a snatch of a
song once more or less popular: "Give my
regards to Broadway!"

We pushed on vigorously now. The head
wind came up. The head wind! It seemed
one of the eternal things. We paddled and
cordelled valiantly, discussing Milk River
the while. We had grown very credulous on
that subject. Somehow or other an unlimited
supply of gasoline was all the engine needed
for the complete restoration of its health;
and Milk River stood for gasoline in liberal
quantities. Hope is generally represented by
the poets as a thing winged and ethereal;
nevertheless it can be fed on bacon.

The next morning we arrived at the mouth

a
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On to the Yellowstone 215

of what we took to be Hell Creek, which
flows (when it has any water in it !) out of the
Bad Lands. It did n't take much imagina-
tion to name that creek. The whole country
from which it debouches looks like Hell —

"with the lights out," as General Sully once
remarked. A country of lifeless hills that had
the appearance of an endless succession of
huge black cinder heaps from prehistoric fires.

The wind had increased steadily all day,
and now we saw ahead of us a long rolling
stretch of wind-lashed river that discouraged
us somewhat. A gray mist rolled with the
wind, and dull clouds scudded over. We
pitched camp in a clump of cottonwoods and
made flapjacks; after which the Kid and I,
taking our blankets and the rifle, set out to
explore Hell Creek.

The windings of the ravine soon hid us
from the river, and we found ourselves in a
melancholy world, without life and without
any human significance. It was very easy
to imagine one's self lost amid the drear
ashen craters of the moon. We pushed on
up the creek, kicking up clouds of alkali dust

2i6 The River and I

as we went. A creek of aburnt-ou,thellitwas,
to be sure. It seemed almost blasphemous
to call this arid gully a creek. Boys swim in
creeks, and fishes twinkle over the shallows
where the sweet eager waters make a merry
sound. Creek, indeed! Did a cynic name
this dry ragged gash in the midst of a bleak
black world where nothing lived, where never
laughter sounded?

A seething, fiery ooze might have flowed
there once, but surely never did v/ater make
music there.

We pushed on five or six miles, and the
evening shade began to press in about us. At
last we issued forth into a flat basin, sur-
rounded by the weird hills — a grotesque,
wind-carved amphitheatre, admirably suited
for a witches' orgy. Some bleached bison
heads with horns lay scattered about the
place, and a cluster of soapweeds grew there —
God knows how! They thrust their sere
yellow sword-blades skyward with the pitiful
defiance of desperate things. It seemed nat-
ural enough that something should be dead
in this sepulchre; but the living weeds,

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On to the Yellowstone 219

fighting bitterly for life, seemed out of
plaee.

I looked about and thought of Poe. Surely
just beyond those summits where the mel-
aneholy sky touehed the melancholy hills,
one would eome upon the "dank tarn of
Auber" and the "ghoul-haunted woodland of
Weir."

We gathered a quantity of the dry sword-
bladed soapweeds, and with one of the
blankets made a lean-to shelter against the
steep hillside. The plaee was becoming eerie
in the gray evening that spread slowly over
the dead land. The mist driven by the
moaning wind became a melancholy drizzle.
We dragged the soapweeds under cover and
lit a fire with difficulty. It was a half-hearted,
smudgy, cheerless fire.

And then the night fell — tremendous, over-
powering night! The Kid and I, huddled
close in one blanket, thrust our heads out
from under the shelter and watched the
ghastly world leap by fits out of the dark,
when the sheet lightning flared through the
drizzle. It gave one an odd shivery feeling.

220 The River and I

It was as though one groped about a strange
dark room and saw, for a brief moment in the
spurting glow of a wind-blown sulphur match,
the staring face of a dead man. Over us the
great wind groaned. Water dripped through
the blanket — like tears. We scraped the
last damp ends of the weeds together that
the fire might live a little longer. Byron's
poem came back to me with a new force;
and lying on my stomach in the cheerless drip
before a drowning fire, I chanted snatches of it
aloud to the Kid and to that sinister person-
ality that was the Night.

I had a dream which was not all a dream;

The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars

Did wander darkHng in eternal space,

Rayless and pathless; and the icy earth

Swung bHnd and blackening in the moonless air.

Low thunder shook the ink- sopped night —
I thought of it as the Spirit of Byron applaud-
ing his own terrific lines.

A fearful hope was all the world contained;
Forests were set on fire — but hour by hour
They fell and faded — and the crackling trunks
Extinguished with a crash — and all w^as black.

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On to the Yellowstone 223

Out in the wmd- voiced darkness, swept by
spasmodic deluges of rapid flame and muffled
thunder, it seemed I could hear the dream-
forests of the moody Master crackling and
booming in the gloom.

— looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world.

" Say, how long is that piece ?'' asked the
Kid.

And vipers crawled

And twined themselves among the multitude.

Hissing —

We wondered if there might not be some
rattlesnakes in that vicinity.

— They raked up

And shivering, scraped with their cold skeleton hands

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a httle hfe, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew brighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects— saw and shrieked and died—

"Cut that out!" said the Kid.
''Why?" I asked.

224 The River and I

"Because," said the Kid.

But what are Bad Lands for? I had hoped
to chant a bit of James Thomson, the younger,
also, there in that "dreadful night." I never
was in a place where it seemed to fit so well.

But we huddled up in our blanket under
the dripping shelter, and I gave myself over
to a downright, almost wickedly primitive
feeling. We slept some — but that was a
rather long night. The soppy gray morning
came at length. A midsummer morning after
a night of rain — and yet, no bird, no hopeful
greenery, no sense of the upward yearning
Earth-Soul !

When we sighted the Missouri River again,
the sun had broken through upon the
greengirt, glinting stream. It seemed like
Paradise.

By almost continuous travel we reached
Lismus Ferry on the second morning from
Hell Creek. The ferryman had a bit of in-
formation for us. We would find nothing
at the mouth of Milk River but a sandbar,
he advised us. But he had some ointment
to apply to the wound thus inflicted, in that

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On to the Yellowstone 227

Glasgow, a town on the Great Northern, was
only twenty-five miles inland. The weekly
stage had left on the morning before; but the
ferryman understood that the trail was not
overcrowded with pedestrians.

It was a smarting ointment to apply to so
fresh a wound; but we took the medicine.
Frank, Charley, and I set out at once for
Glasgow, leaving the others at camp to repair
the leaking boat during our absence. The
stage trail led through an arid, undulating
prairie of yellow buffalo grass. There were
creek beds, but they were filled with dust at
this season of the year. The Englishman
set the pace with the stride of the long-legged.
The sun rose high; the dry runs reminded us
unpleasantly of our increasing thirst, and the
puffing wind blew hot as from a distant prairie
fire.

I followed at the Englishman's heels, and
by and by it began to occur to me that he
could walk rather rapidly. The Frenchman
trailed after at a steadily increasing distance,
until finally I could no longer hear his forceful
remarks (uttered in two languages) concern-

228 The River and I

ing a certain corn which he possessed. We
had been cramped up in a boat for several
weeks, and the frequent soakings in the cold
water had done little good to our joints.
None of us was fit for walking. I kept back
a limp until the Englishman ahead of me
began to step with a little jerking of the
knees; and then with an almost vicious
delight, I gave over and limped. I never
knew before the great luxury of limping. We
covered the distance in something less than
six hours.

The next morning, in a drizzling rain, each
packing a five-gallon can of gasoline and
some provisions, we set out for the Ferry;
and it was a sorry, bedraggled trio that
limped up to camp eight hours later. We
did little more than creep the last five miles.
And all for a spiteful little engine that might
prove ungrateful in the end!

It rained all night — a cold, insistent down-
pour. Our log fire was drowned out; the
tent dripped steadily ; our blankets got soppy ;
and three of us were so stiff that the least
movement gave keen pain.

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Soppy dawn — wet wood — bad grub for
breakfast — and bad humor concealed with
difficulty; but through it all ran a faint note
of victory at the thought of the gasoline, and
the way that engine would go! We lay in
camp all day — soppy, sore — waiting for the
rain to let up. By way of cheering up I read
UAssomoir; and a grim graveyard substitute
for cheer it was. But the next day broke with
a windy, golden dawn. We filled the tank,
packed the luggage and lo ! the engine worked !
It took all the soreness out of our legs to see
it go.

We rejoiced now in the heavy and steadily
increasing head wind; for it was like con-
quering an old enemy to go crashing through
the rolling water that had for so many days
given us pitiless battle.

For five or six miles we plunged on down the
wind-tumbled river. There was a distinct
change in the temper of the crew. A vote at
that time would have been unanimous for
finishing at New Orleans.

Squash!

The engine stopped; the Atom swung round

232 The River and I

in the trough of the waves, and the tow-skiff
rammed us, trying to climb over our gunwale.
We wallowed in the wash of a bar, and cranked
by turns. At the end of an hour no illusions
were left us. Holding an inquest over the
engine, we pronounced it dead.

In the drear fag end of the windy day,
soaked from much wading and weary of
paddling with little headway, we made camp
in a clump of scarlet bull-beriy bushes; and
by the evening fire two talked of railroad
stations, one talked of home, and I thought
of that one of the "soldiers three" who
''swore quietly into the sky."

The Milk River illusion was lost. Two
hundred miles below was the mouth of the
Yellowstone — the first station in the long
journey. A few days back we had longed
for gasoline; but there was no one to sell.
Now we had fifteen gallons to sell — and there
was no one to buy. The hope v/ithout the
gasoline was decidedly better than the gaso-
line without the hope. Whereat the phi-
losopher in me emerges to remark — but who
cares? Philosophy proceeds backward, and

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On to the Yellowstone 235

points out errors of thought and action chiefly
when it has become too late to mend them.
But it is possible to be poor in the possession
of erstwhile prospective wealth, and rich in
retrospective poverty. Oh, blessed is he
who is negatively rich !

Being a bit stunned by the death of the hope
conceived in weariness, we did not put off
that night, but huddled up in our blankets
close to the log fire ; for this midsummer night
had in it a tang of frost.

Day came — cloudy and cold — blown over
the wilderness by a wind that made the
cotton woods above us groan and pop. The
waves were higher than we had seen them
before. We had little heart for cordelling,
and no paddling could make headway against
that gale. It was Sunday. Everything was
damp and chilly. Shivers ran up our backs
while we toasted our feet and faces; and the
wind-whipt smoke had a way of blowing in
every direction at once. Charley struggled
with the engine, which now and then made
a few revolutions — backwards — by way of
leading him on. He heaped big curses upon

236 The River and I

it, and it replied periodically with snorts of
rage.

Bad blood developed, and mutiny ensued,
which once gave promise of pirate-story
developments — fortunately warded off. Be-
fore the day was done, it was made plain that
the Kid and I would travel alone from the
mouth of the Yellowstone. ''For," said the
Kid with certain virile decorations of speech,
"I 'm going with you if we have to buy
skates ! ' '

The wind fell at sunset. A chill, moonless,
starry night lured me, and I decided to travel.
The mutineers, eager to reach a railroad as
soon as possible, agreed to go. The skiff led
and the Atom followed with paddles. A mile
or so below we ran into shallows and grounded.
We waded far around in the cold water that
chilled us to the marrow, but could find neither
entrance nor outlet to the pocket in which we
found ourselves. Wading ashore, we made a
cheerless camp in the brush, leaving the boats
stuck in the shallows. For the first time,
the division in the camp was well marked.
The Kid and I instinctively made our bed

ASSINIBOINE INDIAN CHIEF

237

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On to the Yellowstone 239

together under one blanket, and the others
bunked apart. We had become the main
party of the expedition; the others were now
merely enforced camp followers. It was
funny in an unpleasant way.

In the morning a sea of stiff fog hid our
boats. Packing the camp stuff on our backs,
we waded about and found the crafts.

At last, after a numxber of cheerless days
and nights of continuous travel, the great,
open, rolling prairies ahead of us indicated our
approach toward the end of the journey's
first stage. The country began to look like
North Dakota, though we were still nearly two
hundred miles away. The monotony of the
landscape was depressing. It seemed a thou-
sand miles to the sunrise. The horizon was
merely a blue haze — and the endless land was
sere. The river ran for days with a succes-
sion of regularly occurring right-angled bends
to the north and east. Each headland shot
out in the same way, with, it seemed, the
same snags in the water under it, and the
same cottonwoods growing on it; and oppo-
site each headland was the same stony bluff,

240 The River and I

wind- and water-carved in the same way:
until at last we cried out against the tedious-
ness of the oft-repeated story, wondering
whether or not we were continually passing
the same point, and somehow slipping back
to pass it again.

But at last we reached Wolf Point — the
first town in five hundred miles. We had
seen no town since we left Benton. An odd
little burlesque of a town it was; but walking
up its main street we felt very metropolitan
after weeks on those lonesome river stretches.

Five Assiniboine Indian girls seemed to be
the only women in the town. I coaxed them
to stand for a photograph on the incontest-
able grounds that they were by far the
prettiest women I had seen for many days!
The effect of my generous praise is fixed for-
ever on the pictured faces presented here-
with.

Here, during the day, Frank and Charley
disposed of their skiff and we saw them no
more. We pushed on with little mourning.
But in a spirit of fairness, let me record that
Charley's biscuits were marvels, and that

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Frank's gateaux a la chansoniiette were things
of beauty and therefore joys forever.

The days that followed were long and hard ;
and half the chilly nights were spent in drying
ourselves before a roaring fire. There were
more mosquitoes now. They began to tor-
ture us at about five o'clock in the afternoon,
and left off only when the cold of night came,
relieving us of one discomfort by the substitu-
tion of another. Bill, of whom I had come
to think as the expatriated turnip, gave me
an opportunity to study homesickness— at
once pitiful and ludicrous in a man with
abundant whiskers. But he pulled strenu-
ously at the forward paddle, every stroke, as
he remarked often, taking him closer to home.

The river had fallen alarmingly, and was
still falling. Several times we were obliged
to unload the entire cargo, piling it high in
the shallow water, that we might be able to
carry the empty boat to the channel.

One evening we came upon a typical Mon-
tana ranch — the Pen and Key. The resi-
dence, barns, sheds, fences were built of logs.
The great rolling country about it was

244 The River and I

thickly dotted with horses and cattle. The
place looked like home. It was a sight from
Pisgah — a glimpse of a Promised Land after
the Wilderness. We pulled in, intending to
buy some provisions for the last stage of the
journey to the Yellowstone.

I went up to the main ranch-house, and was
met at the door by one of those blessed
creatures that have "mother" written all
over them. Hers were not the eyes of a
stranger. She looked at me as she must look
at one of her sons when he returns from an
extended absence. I told at once the pur-
pose of my errand, explaining briefly what
we were doing on the river. Why, yes, cer-
tainly we could have provisions. But we
were n't going any farther that night — were
we ? The rancher appeared at this moment —
a retired major of the army, who looked the
part — and decided that we would stay for
supper. How many were there in our party?
Three? "Three more plates," he said to the
daughters of the house, busy about the
kitchen.

Let 's be frank! It really required no per-

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On to the Yellowstone 247

suasion at all to make a guest of me. Had I
allowed myself adequate expression of my
delight, I should have startled the good
mother by turning a somersault or a series
of cartwheels! Oh, the smell of an old-
fashioned wholesome meal in process of
development !

A short while back I sang the praises of the
feast in the open — the feast of your own kill,
tanged with the wood smoke. And even
here I cling to the statement that of all meals,
the feast of wild meat in the wilderness takes
precedence. But the supper we ate that
evening takes close second. Welcome on
every face! — the sort of welcome that the
most lavish tips could not buy. And after
the dishes were cleared away, they brought
out a phonograph, and we all sat round like
one family, swapping information and yams
even up, while the music went on. When we
left next morning at sunrise, it seemed that
we were leaving home — and the river reaches
looked a bit dismal all that day.

Having once been a vagabond in a non-
professional way, I have a theory about

248 The River and I

the physiognomy of houses. Some have a
forbidding, sick-the-dog-on-you aspect about
them, not at all due, I am sure, to architect-
ural design. Experience has taught me to be
suspicious of such houses. Some houses have
the appearance of death — their windows strike
you as eyeless sockets, the doors look like
mouths that cannot speak. The great houses
along Fifth Avenue seemed like that to me.
I could walk past them in the night and feel
like a ghost. I have seen cottages that I
wanted to kneel to; and I 'm sure this feeling
was n't due to the vine growing over the
porch or the roses nodding in the yard.
Knock at the door of such a house, and the
chances are in favor of your being met by a
quiet, motherly woman — one who will in-
stantly make you think of your own mother.
Some very well constructed houses look
surly, and some shabby ones look kind, some-
how. If you have ever been a book agent or
a tramp, how you will revel in this seeming
digression! God grant that no man in need
may ever look wistfully at your house or
at mine, and pass on with a shake of the head.

On to the Yellowstone 249

It is a subtle compliment to have book agents
and tramps frequently at one's door.

Am I really digressing? My theme is a
trip on a great river. Well, kindness and
nature are not so far apart, let us believe.

Now this ranch-house looked hospitable;
there was no mistaking it. Wherefore I
deduce that the spirit of the inhabitants must
pierce through and emanate from the sense-
less walls like an effluvium. Who knows
but that every house has its telltale aura,
plain to a vision of sufficient spiritual keen-
ness? Perhaps some one will some day write
a book On the Physio-Psychological Aspect
of Houses : and there will be an advance
sale of at least one copy on that book.

At noon on the fourth day from the Pen and
Key Ranch, we pulled up at the Mondak
landing two miles above the mouth of the
Yellowstone. We were thoroughly soaked,
having dragged the boat the last two or three
miles through the shallows and intermittent
deeps of an inside channel. The outer chan-
nel was rolling viciously in that eternal thing,
the head wind. We had covered the first six

250 The River and I

hundred miles with a power boat (called so,
doubtless, because it required so much power
to shove it along!) in a little less than four
weeks. During that time we had received
no mail, and I was making a break for the
post-office, oozing and feeling like an ani-
mated sponge, when a great wind-like voice
roared above me: ''Hey there ! "

I looked up to the hurricane deck of a
steamer that lay at the bank taking on
freight. A large elderly man, dressed like
a farmer, with an exaggerated straw hat
shading a face that gripped my attention at
once, was looking down at me. It was the
face of a born commander; it struck me that
I should like to have it cast in bronze to look
at whenever a vacillating mood might seize
me.

''Come aboard I " bawled the man under the
ample hat. There was nothing in the world
just then that I wished for more than my
mail; but somehow I felt the will to obey —
even the necessity of obeying.

"You came from Benton?" he asked, when
I had clambered up the forward companion-

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On to the Yellowstone 2^t,

way and stood dripping before the captain of
the steamer Expansion. At this closer range,
the strength of the face was even more impres-
sive, with its eagle beak and its lines of firm-
ness ; but a light of kindness was shed through
it, and the eyes took on a gentle expression.
How did you find the water?"
Very low, sir; we cordelled much of the
way."

'' I tried to get this boat to Benton," he said,
''and got hung up on the rocks above Lismus
Ferry."

''And we drifted over them helter-skelter
at midnight ! ' '

He smiled, and we were friends. Thus I
met Captain Grant Marsh, the Grand Old
Man of the Missouri River. He was freight-
ing supplies up the Yellowstone for the great
Crane Creek irrigation dam, sixty miles above
the mouth. The Expansion was to sail on the
following day, and I was invited to go along.
Seeing that the Captain was short of help,
I insisted upon enlisting as a deck hand for
the trip.

It was work, very hard work. I think I

254 The River and I

should prefer hod-carrying as a profession,
for we had a heavy cargo, ranging from lum-
ber and tiling to flour and beer; and there
are no docks on the Yellowstone. The banks
were steep, the sun was very hot, and the
cargo had to be landed by man power. My
companions in toil swore bitterly about every-
thing in general and steamboating in particular.

''How much are you getting?" asked a
young Dane of me, as we trudged up the
plank together.

"Nothing at all," I said.

He swore an oath of wonder, and stopped
to look me over carefully for the loose screw
in my make-up.

" — nothing but the fun of it," I added.

He sniffed and looked bewildered.

"Did it ever occur to you," said I, "that a
man will do for nothing what he would n't do
for money?"

I could see my conundrum playing peek-a-
boo all about his stolid features. After that
the Dane treated me with an air of superior-
ity— the superiority of thirty dollars per
month over nothing at all.

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On to the Yellowstone 257

We stopped twice to coal, and worked far
into the night. There are no coal chutes on
the Yellowstone. We carried and wheeled
the stuff aboard from a pile on the bank.
During a brief interval of rest, the young
Dane announced to the others that I was
working for nothing ; whereat questioning eyes
were turned upon me in the dull lantern light;
whereupon I thought of the world-old mutual
misunderstanding between the proletaire and
the dreamer. And I said to myself: I can
conceive of heaven only as an improbable con-
dition in which all men would be willing and
able to work for nothing at all. I had read
in the Dane's face the meaning of a price.
Heaving coal, I built Utopias.

When the boat was under way, I sat in
the pilot-house with the Captain, watching
the yellow flood and the yellow cliffs drift
past like a vision. And little by little, this
old man who has followed the river for over
sixty years, pieced out the wonderful story
of his life — a story fit for Homer. That story
may now be read in a book, so I need not tell
it here. But I came to think of him as the

25B The River and I

incarnation of the river's mighty spirit; and
I am proud that I served him as a deck hand.

As we steamed out of the Yellowstone into
the clear waters of the Missouri, the Captain
pointed out to me the spot upon which Fort
Union stood. Upon landing, I went there
and found two heaps of stone at the opposite
comers of a rectangle traced by a shallow
ditch where of old the walls stood. This
was all that remained of the powerful fort —
virtually the capital of the American Fur
Company's Upper Missouri empire — where
Mackenzie ruled — Mackenzie who was called
King !

Long slough grass grew there, and blue
waxen flowers struggled up amid the rubble
of what were once defiant bastions. I lay
down in the luxuriant grass, closed my eyes,
and longed for a vision of heroic days. I
thought of the Prince who had been enter-
tained there with his great retinue; of the
regality of the haughty Scotchman who ruled
there; of Alexander Harvey, who had killed
his enemy on the very spot, doubtless, where
I lay: killed him as an outraged brave man

On to the Yellowstone 259

kills — face to face before the world. I thought
of Bourbonais, the golden-haired Paris of this
fallen Ilium. I thought of the plague that
raged there in '37, and of Larpenteur and his
friend, grim, jesting carters of the dead!

It all passed before me — the unwritten
Iliad of a stronghold forgotten. But the
vision would n't come. The river wind
moaned through the grasses.

I looked off a half-mile to the modem town
of Mondak, and wondered how many in that
town cared about this spot where so much
had happened, and where the grass grew so
very tall now.

I gathered blue flowers and quoted, with
a slight change, the lines of Stevenson:

But ah, how deep the grass
Along the battlefield!

CHAPTER VIII

DOWN FROM THE YELLOWSTONE

T^HE geographer tells us that the mouth of
the Missouri is about seventeen miles
above St. Louis, and that the mouth of the
Yellowstone is near Buford, North Dakota.
It appeared to me that the fact is inverted.
The Missouri's mouth is near Buford, and
the Yellowstone empties directly into the
Mississippi !

I find that I am not alone in this opinion.
Father de Smet and other early travellers
felt the truth of it; and Captain Marsh, who
has piloted river craft through every navi-
gable foot of the entire system of rivers, hav-
ing sailed the Missouri within sound of the
Falls and the Yellowstone above Pompey's
Pillar, feels that the Yellowstone is the main
stem and the Missouri a tributary.

Where the two rivers join, even at low

260

Down from the Yellowstone 261

water, the Yellowstone pours a vast turbulent
flood, compared with which the clear and
quieter Missouri appears an overgrown rain-
water creek. The Mississippi after some
miles obliterates all traces of its great western
tributary; but the Missouri at Buford is
entirely lost in the Yellowstone within a few
hundred yards. All of the unique character-
istics by which the Missouri River is known
are given to it by the Yellowstone — its tur-
bulence, its tawniness, its feline treachery, its
giant caprices.

Examine closely, and everything will take
on before your eyes either masculine or
feminine traits. Gender, in a broad sense, is
universal, and nothing was created neuter.
The Upper Missouri is decidedly female:
an Amazon, to be sure, but nevertheless not a
man. Beautiful, she is, alluring or terrible,
but always womanlike. But when you strike
the ragged curdling line of muddy water
where the Yellowstone comes in, it is all
changed. You feel the sinewy, nervous might
of the man.

So it is, that when you look upon the Mis-

262 The River and I

souri at Kansas City, it is the Yellowstone
that you behold !

But names are idle sounds; and being of a
peace-loving disposition, I would rather with-
draw my contention than seriously disturb
the geographical status quo 1 Let • it be said
that the Upper Missouri is the mother and
the Yellowstone the father of this turbulent
Titan, who inherits his father's might and
wonder, and takes through courtesy the
maiden name of his mother. There! I am
quite appeased, and the geographers may
retain their nomenclature.

At Mondak, Luck stood bowing to receive
us. The Atom I had suffered more from con-
tact with snags and rocks than we had sup-
posed. For several hundred miles her intake
of water had steadily increased. We had
toiled at the paddles with the water half-way
to our knees much of the time; though now
and then — by spasms — we bailed her dry.
She had become a floating lump of discourage-
ment, and still fourteen hundred miles lay
ahead.

But on the day previous to our sailing, a

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Down from the Yellowstone 265

nervous little man with a wistful eye offered
us a trade. He had a steel boat, eighteen
feet long, forty inches beam, which he had
built in the hours between work and sleep
during the greater part of a year.

His boat was some miles up the Yellowstone,
but he spoke of her in so artless and loving a
manner — as a true workman might speak —
and with such a wistful eye cast upon our
boat, that I believed in him and his boat.
He had no engine. It was the engine in our
boat that attracted him, as he wished to make
a hunting trip up river in the fall. He stated
that his boat would float, that it was a dry
boat, that it would row with considerable
ease. ''Then," said I, ''paddle her down to
the mouth of the Yellowstone, and the deal is
made." After dark he returned to our camp
with a motor boat, ready to take us to our new
craft. Atom II,

Leaving all our impedimenta to be shipped
by rail, that is, Bill, the tent, extra blankets,
phonograph — everything but a few cooking-
utensils, an axe, a tarp, and a pair of blankets
— ^the Kid and I got in with the little man

266 The River and I

and dropped down to the Yellowstone. The
new boat was moored under a mud bank.
I climbed in, lit a match, and my heart leaped
with joy. She was staunch and beautiful — a
work of love, which means a work of honesty.
Fore and aft were air-tight compartments.
She had an oil tank, a water tank, engine
housing, steering wheel, lockers. She was
ready for the very engine I had ordered to be
shipped to me at Bismarck. She was dry as
a bone, and broad enough to make a snug
bed for two.

The little man and the motor boat dropped
out into the gloom and left us gloating over
our new possession, sending thankful rings
of tobacco smoke at the stars. When the
first flush of triumph had passed, we rolled up
in the bottom of the boat, lulled to sleep by
the cooing of the fusing rivers, united under
our gunwale. Such a sleep — a dry sleep!
and the sides of the boat protected us against
the chill night wind.

And the dawn came — shouting merrily like
a boy! I once had a chum who had a habit
of whistling me out of bed now and then of a

Down from the Yellowstone 269

summer morning, when the birds were just
awakening, and the dew looked like frost on
the grass. And the sun that morning made
me think of my old boy chum with his blithe,
persistent whistling. For the first hard stage
of the journey was done; all had left me but
a brave lad who would take his share of the
hardships with a light heart. (All boys are
instinctively true sportsmen!) And before
us lay the great winding stretch of a savage
river that I had loved long — the real Missouri
of my boyhood.

A new spirit had come upon us with the
possession of the Atom II — the spirit of the
forced march. For nearly a month we had
floundered, trusting to a sick engine and ineffi-
cient paddles. Now we had a staunch, dry
boat, and eight-foot oars. We trusted only
ourselves, and we were one in the desire to
push the crooked yellow miles behind us.
During the entire fourteen hundred miles
that desire increased, until our progress was
little more than a retreat. We pitched no
camps; we halted only when we could pro-
ceed no further owing to sandbars encountered

270 The River and I

in the dark; we ate as we found it convenient
to do so. Regularly relieving each other at
the oars, one sat at the steering wheel, feeling
for the channel. And it was not long until I
began to note a remarkable change in the
muscles of the Kid, for we toiled naked to the
waist most of the time. His muscles had
shown little more than a girl's when we first
swam together at Benton. Now they began
to stand out, clearly defined, those of his chest
sprawling rigidly downward to the lean ribs,
and little eloquent knots developed on the
bronzed surface of his once smooth arms.
He was at the age of change, and he was grow-
ing into a man before my eyes. It was good
to see.

All the first day the gods breathed gently
upon us, and we made fifty miles, passing
Trenton and Williston before dark. But the
following day, our old enemy, the head wind,
came with the dawn. We were now sailing
a river more than twice the size of the Upper
Missouri, and the waves were in proportion.
Each at an oar, with the steering wheel lashed,
we forged on slowly but steadily. In mid-

I ^

Down from the Yellowstone 273

stream we found it impossible to control the
boat, and though we hugged the shore when-
ever possible, we were obliged to cross with
the channel at every bend. When the waves
caught us broadside, we were treated to many
a compulsory bath, and our clothes were
thoroughly washed without being removed.
An ordinary skiff would have capsized early in
the day, but the Atom II could carry a full
cargo of water and still float.

By sunset the wind fell, the river smoothed
as a wrinkled brow at the touch of peace.
Aided by a fair current, we skulled along in
the hush of evening through a land of vast
green pastures with "cattle upon a thousand
hills." The great wind had spread the
heavens with ever deepening clouds. The
last reflected light of the sun fell red upon the
burnished surface of the water. It seemed
we were sailing a river of liquified red flame;
only for a short distance about us was the
water of that peculiar Missouri hue which
makes one think of bad coffee colored with
condensed milk.

Slowly the colors changed, until we were

:274 The River and I

in the midst of a stream of iridescent opal
fires; and quite lost in the gorgeous spectacle,
at length we found ourselves upon a bar.

We got out and waded around in water
scarcely to our ankles, feeling for a channel.
The sand was hard ; the bar seemed to extend
across the entire river; but a thin rippling
line some fifty yards ahead told us where it
ended. We found it impossible to push the
heavy boat over the shallows. The clouds
were deepening, and the night was coming
rapidly. Setting the Kid to work digging
with an oar at the prow, I pushed and wrig-
gled the stem until I saw galaxies. Thus
alternately digging and pushing, we at last
reached navigable depths.

It was now quite dark. Low thunder was
rolling, and now and then vivid flashes of
lightning discovered the moaning river to us —
ghastly and forbidding in the momentary
glare. We decided to pull in for the night;
but in what direction should we pull? A
drizzling rain had begun to fall, and the sheet
lightning glaring through it only confused
us — more than the sooty darkness that show-

Down from the Yellowstone 275

ered in upon us after the rapid flashes. We
sat still and waited. In the intermittent
silences, the rain hissed on the surface of the
river like a shower of innumerable heated
pebbles. Ahead of us we heard the dull
booming of the cut banks, as the current
undermined ponderous ledges of sand.

Now, a boat that happens under a falling
cut bank, passes at once into the region of for-
gotten things. The boat would follow the
main current; the main current flows always
under the cut banks. How long would it
take us to get there? Which way should we
pull? Put a simpler question: In which way
were we moving? We had n't the least
conception of direction. For us the night had
only one dimension — out I

Finally a great booming and splashing
sounded to our left, and the boat rocked
violently a moment after. We grasped the
oars and pulled blindly in what we supposed
to be the opposite direction, only to be met
by another roar of falling sand from that
quarter.

There seemed to be nothing to do but have

276 The River and I

faith in that divinity which is said to superin-
tend the goings and comings of fools and
drunkards. Therefore we abandoned the oars,
twiddled our thumbs, and let her drift. We
could n't even smoke, for the rain was now
coming down merrily. The Kid thought it
a great lark, and laughed boisterously at our
predicament. By flashes I saw the drenched
grin under his dripping nose. But for me,
some lines written by that sinister genius,
Wainwright, came back with a new force, and
clamored to be spoken:

*' Darkness — sooty, portentous darkness —
shrouds the whole scene; as if through a horrid
rift in a murky ceiling, a rainy deluge — 'sleety
flaw, discolored water ' — streams down amain,
spreading a grisly spectral light, even more hor-
rible than that palpable nights

At length the sensation of sudden stopping
dizzied us momentarily. We thrust out an
oar and felt a slowly sloping bar. Driving
the oar half-way into the soft sand, we wrapped
the boat's chain about it and went to bed,
flinging the tarp over us.

A raw dawn wind sprinkled a cheerless

Down from the Yellowstone 2^^

morning over us, and we got up with our
joints grinding rustily. We were in the midst
of a desolate waste of sand and water. The
bar upon which we had lodged was utterly-
bare. Drinking a can of condensed milk
between us, we pushed on.

That day we found ourselves in the country
of red barns. It was like warming cold
hands before an open grate to look upon
them. At noon we saw the first wheat-field
of the trip — an undulating golden flood,
dimpled with the tripping feet of the wind.
These were two joys — quite enough for one
day. But in the afternoon the third came —
the first golden-rod. My first impulse was
to take off my hat to it, offer it my hand.

That evening we pulled up to a great bank,
black-veined with outcrops of coal, and
cooked supper over a civilized fire. For
many miles along the river in North Dakota,
as well as along the Yellowstone in Montana,
these coal outcrops are in evidence. Doubt-
less, within another generation, vast mining
operations will be opened up in these localities.
Coal barges will be loaded at the mines and

278 The River and I

dropped down stream to the nearest railroad
point.

We were in the midst of an idylHc country —
green, sloping, lawn-like pastures, dotted
sparsely with grotesque scrub oaks. Far
over these the distant hills lifted in filmy blue.
The bluffs along the water's edge were streaked
with black and red and yellow, their colors
deepened by the recent rains. Lazy with a
liberal supper, we drifted idly and gave our-
selves over for a few minutes to the spell of
this twilight dreamland. I stared hard upon
this scene that would have delighted Theo-
critus ; and with little effort, I placed a half-
naked shepherd boy under the umbrella top
of that scrub oak away up yonder on the
lawny slope. With his knees huddled to his
chin, I saw him, his fresh cheeks bulged with
the breath of music. I heard his pipe —
clear, dream-softened — the silent music of my
own heart. Dream flocks sprawled tinkling
up the hills.

With a wild burst of scarlet, the sunset
flashed out. Black clouds darkened the vis-
ible idyll. A chill gust swept across stream,

Down from the Yellowstone 279

showering rain and darkness. Each at an
oar, we forged on, until we lost the channel in
the gloom. At the first peep of day we were
off again, after a breakfast of pancakes,
bacon, and coffee.

We were gradually becoming accustomed
to the strain of constant rowing. For at
least sixteen hours a day we fought the wind,
during which time the oars were constantly
dipping; and very often our day lengthened
out to twenty hours. We had no time-piece,
and a night of drifting was divided into two
watches. These watches we determined
either by the dropping of a star toward the
horizon, or by the position of the moon when
it shone. On dark nights, the sleeper trusted
to the judgment of his friend to call when the
watch seemed sufficiently long. Daily the
water fell, and every inch of fall increased
the difficulty of travelling.

We were now passing through the country
of the Mandans, Gros Ventres, and Ricarces,
the country through which old Hugh Glass
crawled his hundred miles with only hate to
sustain him. To the west lay the barren

28o The River and I

lands of the Little Missouri, through which
Sully pushed with his military expedition
against the Sioux on the Yellowstone. An
army flung boldly through a dead land — a
land without forage, and waterless — a laby-
rinth of dry ravines and ghastly hills! Sully
called it "hell with the lights out." A mag-
nificent, Quixotic expedition that succeeded!
I compared it with the ancient expeditions —
and I felt the eagle's wings strain within me.
Sully I There were trumpets and purple
banners for me in the sound of the name!

Late in the evening we reached the mouth
of the Little Missouri. There we found one
of the few remaining mud lodges of the an-
cient type. We landed and found ourselves
in the midst of a forsaken little frontier town.
A shambling shack bore the legend, "Store,"
with the "S" looking backward — perhaps
toward dead municipal hopes. A few ttmible-
down frame and log shanties sprawled up the
desultory grass-grown main street, at one end
of which dwelt a Mandan Indian family in
the mud lodge.

A dozen curs from the lodge resented our

Down from the Yellowstone 281

intrusion with canine vituperation. I thrust
my head into the log-cased entrance of the
circular hotise of mud, and was greeted with
a sound scolding in the Mandan jargon,
delivered by a squaw of at least eighty years.
She arose from the fire that burned in the
centre of the great circular room, and ap-
proached me with an " I-want-your-scalp "
expression. One of her daughters, a girl
dressed in a caricature of the white girl's gar-
ments, said to me : "She wants to know what
you 've got to trade." To this old woman
of the prairie, all white men were traders.

''I want to buy," I said, "eggs, meat,
bread, anything to eat."

The old woman looked me over with a
whimper of amused superiority, and disap-
peared, soon reappearing with a dark brown
object not wholly unlike a loaf of bread.
"Wahtoo," she remarked, pointing to the
dark brown substance.

I gave her a half-dollar. Very quietly she
took it and went back to her fire. "But,"
said I, "do you sell your bread for fifty cents
per loaf?"

282 The River and I

The girl giggled, and the old woman gave
me another piece of her Mandan mind. She
had no change, it appeared. I then insisted
upon taking the balance in eggs. The old
woman said she had no eggs. I pointed to a
flock of hens that was holding a sort of
woman's club convention in the yard, dis-
cussing the esthetics of egg-laying, doubtless,
while neglecting their nests.

The old lady arose majestically, disap-
peared again, and reappeared with three eggs.
I protested. The Mandan lady forthwith
explained (or at least it appeared so to me)
all the execrable points in my character.
They seemed to be numerous, and she ap-
peared to be very frank about the matter. My
moral condition, apparently, was clearly de-
fined in her own mind. I withdrew in haste,
fearing that the daughter at any moment
might begin to translate.

We dropped down river a few miles, pre-
pared supper, and attacked the dark brown
substance which the Indian lady had called
"wahtoo." At the first bite, I began to
learn the Mandan tongue. I swallowed a

Down from the Yellowstone 283

chunk whole, and then enlightened the Kid
as to a portion of the Mandan language.
''Wahtoo," said I, ''means 'indigestible'; it is
an evident fact." Then, being strengthened
by our linguistic triumph, we fell upon the
dark brown substance again. But almost
anything has its good points; and I can
conscientiously recommend Mandan bread
for durability!

Once more we had a rainy night. The
tarp, stretched across the boat, sagged with
the water it caught, and poured little persist-
ent streams upon us. The chief of these
streams, from point of size, seemed con-
sciously aiming at my ear. Thrice I turned
over, shifted my position; thrice I was awak-
ened by the sound of a merry brooklet pouring
into that persecuted member.

Somewhere in the world the white cock
was crowing sleepily when we put off, stiff
and soaked and shivering.

Early in the day the fine sand from banks
and bars began to lift in the wind. It
smarted our faces like little whip lashes.
Very often we could, see no further than a

284 The River and I

hundred and fifty yards in any direction.
Only by a constant, rapid dipping of the oars
could the boat be held perpendicular to the
choppy waves. One stroke missed meant
hard work for both of us in getting out of the
trough.

Fighting every foot of water, we wallowed
through the swells — past Elbow Woods, past
Fort Berthold, past the forlorn, raggedy
little town, ''Expansion." (We rechristened
it ''Contraction"!)

During the day the gale swept the sky
clear. The evening air was crisp and invigo-
rating. We cooked supper early and rowed
on silently over the mirroring waters, between
two vast sheets of stars, through a semi-
lucent immensity. Far ahead of us a high
cliff loomed black and huge against the
spangled blue-black velvet of the sky. On
its summit a dark mass soared higher. We
thought it a tree, but surely a gigantic one.
Approaching it, the soaring mass became a
medieval castle sitting haughtily with frown-
ing crenellations upon an impregnable rock;
and the Missouri became for the moment a

■'-"-^ '- •''

00
CI

Down from the Yellowstone 287

larger Rhine. At last, rowing up under the
sheer cliff, the castle resolved itself into a
huge grain elevator, its base a hundred feet
above the stream.

Although it was late, we tied our boat,
clambered up a zigzag path, and found our-
selves in one of the oddest little towns in the
Vv^est — Manhaven — one of the few remaining
steamboat towns.

The main street zigzagged carelessly
through a jumble of little houses. One light
in all the street designated the social centre of
the town, so we went there. It was the
grocery store — a general emporium of ideas
and canned goods.

Entering, we found ourselves in the midst
of "the rustic cackle of the burg." I am sure
the municipal convention was verbally re-
constructing the universe; but upon our en-
trance, the matter was abruptly laid on the
table. When we withdrew, the entire con-
vention, including the groceryman, adjourned,
and accompanied us to the river where the
general merits of our boat were thoroughly
discussed by lantern light. Also, various

288 The River and I

conflicting versions of the distance to Bis-
marck were given — each party being certain
of his own infalHbiHty.

There is something curious about the
average man's conception of distance. Dur-
ing the entire trip we found no two men who
agreed on this general subject. After acquir-
ing a book of river distances, we created
much amusement for ourselves by asking
questions. The conversation very often pro-
ceeded in this manner:

"Will you please tell us how far it is to
So-and-So?"

"One hundred and fifty-two and a half
miles!" (with an air of absolute certainty).

"But you are slightly mistaken, sir; the
exact distance is sixty-two and seven tenths
miles!" (Consternation on the face of the
omniscient informant.)

Once a man told us that a certain town
was one hundred and fifty miles down stream.
We reached the town in an hour and a half !

Information and advice are the two things
in this world that the average man will give
gladly; and in ninety-nine cases out of a

a
<

Down from the Yellowstone 291

possible hundred, he is mistaken. I am con-
vinced that in most cases there is no lying
intent. A curious chapter could be written on
''The Psychology of Information and Advice."

However, we had more success with the
Indian. On day we came upon an old Man-
dan buck and squaw, who were taking a bath
in the river, doubtless feeling convinced that
they needed it. The current took us within
fifty yards of them. Upon our approach,
they got out of the water and sat in the sand,
quite as nude and unashamed as our much
abused first parents before the apple ripened.

''Bismarck — how far?" I shouted, standing
up in the boat.

The buck arose in all his unclothed dignity,
raised his two hands, shut and opened them
seven times, after which he lowered one arm,
and again opened and shut a hand. Then
with a spear-like thrust of the arm toward the
southeast, he stiffened the index finger in the
direction of Bismarck. He meant "seventy-
five miles as the crow flies." As near as I
could figure it out afterward, he was doubt-
less correct.

292 The River and I

At noon the next day we reached the mouth
of the Knife River, near which stood the
Mandan village made famous by Lewis and
Clark as their winter quarters. Fort Clark
also stood here. Nothing remains of the
Fort but the name and a few slight indenta-
tions in the ground. A modern steamboat
town, Deapolis, occupies the site of the old
post. Across the river there are still to be
seen the remains of trenches. A farmer
pointed them out to us as all that remains of
the winter camp of the great explorers.

In the late evening we passed Washburn,
the ''steamboat centre" of the upper river,
fifty water miles from Bismarck. It made a
very pretty appearance with its neat houses
climbing the hillside. Along the water front,
under the elevators, a half-dozen steamboats
of the good old-fashioned type, lay waiting
for their cargoes. Two more boats were
building on the ways.

Night caught us some five miles below the
town, and, wrapping ourselves in our blankets,
we set to drifting. I went on watch and the
Kid rolled up forward and went to sleep.

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Down from the Yellowstone 295

After sixteen hours of rowing in the wind, it
is a difficult matter to keep awake. The night
was very calm; the quiet waters crooned
sleepily about the boat. I set myself the
task of watching the new moon dip toward
the dim hills ; I intended to keep myself awake
in that manner. The moon seemed to have
stuck. Slowly I passed into an impossible
world, in w^hich, with drowsy will, I struggled
against an exasperating moon that had some-
how gotten itself tangled in star-sheen and
could n't go down.

I awoke with a start. My head was hang-
ing over the gunwale — the dawn was breaking
through the night wall. A chill wind was
rolling breakers upon us, and we were fast
upon a bar. I awakened the Kid and we put
off. We had no idea of the distance covered
while sleeping. It must have been at least
twenty miles, for, against a heavy wind, we
reached Bismarck at one o'clock.

We had covered about three hundred and
fifty miles in six days, but we had paid well
for every mile. As we passed under the
Bismarck bridge, we confessed that we were

296 The River and I

thoroughly fagged. It was the thought of
the engine awaiting us at this town that had
kept us from confessing weariness before.

I landed and made for the express office
three miles away. A half -hour later I stood,
covered with humility and perspiration, in
the awful presence of the expressman, who
regarded me with that lofty " God-and-I " air,
characteristic of some emperors and almost
all railroad officials. I stated to the august
personage that I was looking for an engine
shipped to me by express.

It seems that my statement was insulting.
The man snarled and shook his head. I have
since thought that he was the owner of the
Northern Pacific system in disguise. I sug-
gested that the personage might look about.
The personage couldn't stoop to that; but a
clerk who overheard my insulting remark (he
had not yet become the owner of a vast trans-
portation system) condescended to make a
desultory search. He succeeded in digging
up a spark-coil — and that is all I ever saw of
the engine.

During my waiting at Bismarck, I had a

Down from the Yellowstone 299

talk with Captain Baker, manager of the
Benton Packet Line. We agreed in regard
to the Government's neglect of duty toward
the country's most important natural thor-
oughfare, the Missouri River. Above Sioux
City, the Government operates a snag-boat,
the Mandan, at an expense ridiculously dis-
proportionate to its usefulness. The Mandcui
is little more than an excursion boat main-
tained for a few who are paid for indulging in
the excursions. A crew of several hundred
men with shovels, picks, and dynamite, could
do more good during one low water season
than such boats could do during their entire
existence.

The value of the great river as an avenue
of commerce is steadily increasing; and those
who discourage the idea of ''reopening"
navigation of the river, are either railroad
men or persons entirely ignorant of the
geography of the Northwest. Captain Marsh
would say, "Reopen navigation? I 've sailed
the river sixty years, and in that time navi-
gation has not ceased."

Rocks could and should be removed from

300 The River and I

the various rapids, and the banks at certain
points should be protected against further
cutting. A natural canal, extending from
New Orleans in the South and Cincinnati in
the East to the Rockies in the Northwest, is
not to be neglected long by an intelligent
Government.

As a slow freight thoroughfare, this vast
natural system of waterways is unequalled
on the globe. Within another generation,
doubtless, this all-but-forgotten fact will be
generally rediscovered.

Having waited four days for the engine,
we put off again with oars. It was near sun-
down when we started, hungry for those
thousand miles that remained. When we
had pulled in to the landing at Bismarck, we
were like boxers who stagger to their comers
all but whipped. But we had breathed, and
were ready for another round. A kind of
impersonal anger at the failure of another
hope nerved us; and this new fighting spirit
was like another man at the oars. Many of
the hard days that followed left on our
memories little more than the impress of a

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Down from the Yellowstone 303

troubled dream. We developed a sort of
contempt for our old enemy, the head wind —
that tireless, intangible giant that lashed us
with w^hips of sand, drove us into shallows,
set its mighty shoulders against our prow,
roared with laughter at us when, soaked and
weary, we w^alked and pushed our boat for
miles at a time. The quitter that is in all
men more or less, often whispered to us when
we were weariest: ''Why not take the train?
What is it all for?" Well, what is life for?
We were expressing ourselves out there on
the windy river. The wind said we could n't,
and our muscles said we should n't, and the
snag-boat captain had said we could n't get
down — so we went on. We were now in
full retreat — retreat from the possibility of
quitting.

During the first night out, an odd circum-
stance befell us that, for some hours, seemed
likely to lose us our boat. As usual, we set
to drifting at dark. The moon, close on its
half, was flying, pale and frightened, through
scudding clouds. However, the wind blew
high, and the surface of the water was un-

304 The River and I

•

ruffled. There could be nothing more eerie
than a night of drifting on the Missouri, with
a ghastly moon dodging in and out among
the clouds. The strange glimmer, peculiar
to the surface of the tawny river at night,
gives it a forbidding aspect, and you seem
surrounded by a murmuring immensity.

We were, presumably, drifting into a great
sandy bend, for we heard the constant boom-
ing of falling sand ahead. It was impossible
to trace the channel, so we swung idly about
with the current. Suddenly, we stopped.
Our usual proceeding in . such cases was to
leap out and push the boat off. That night,
fortunately, we were chilly, and did not
fancy a midnight ducking. Each taking an
oar, we thrust at the bar. The oars went
down to the grip in quicksand. Had we
leaped out as usual, there would have been
two burials that night without the customary
singing.

We rocked the boat without result. We
were trapped; so we smoked awhile, thought
about the matter, and decided to go to bed.
In the morning we would fasten on our cork

w
a

Bi
D
O

K
O

o
o

Down from the Yellowstone 307

belts and reach shore — perhaps. Having
reached shore, we would find a stray skiff and
go on. But the Atom II seemed booked for
a long wait on that quicksand bar.

During the night a violent shaking of the
boat awakened us. A heavy wind was blow-
ing, and the prow of the boat was swinging
about. It soon stopped with a chug. We
stood up and rocked, the boat vigorously. It
broke loose again, and swung half-way around.
Continuing this for a half-hour, we finally
drifted into deep water.

The next day we passed Cannon Ball River,
and reached Standing Rock Agency in the
late evening. Sitting Bull is buried there.
After a late supper, we went in search of his
grave. We found it after much lighting of
matches at headstones, in a weed-grown
corner of the Agency burying-ground. A
slab of wood, painted white, bears the follow-
ing inscription in black: "In Alemory of
Sitting Bull. Died Dec. 15, 1890."

Perched upon the ill-kept grave, we smoked
for an hour under the flying moon. A dog
howled somewhere off in the gloomy waste.

3o8 The River and I

That night the Erinnyes, in the form of a
swarm of mosquitoes, attacked us lying in
our boat. The weary Kid rolled and swore
till dawn, when a light wind sprang up astern.
We hoisted our sail, and for one whole day
cruised merrily, making sixty miles by sunset.
This took us to the town of Mobridge.

I was charmed with the novelty of driving
our old enemy in harness. So, letting the
Kid go to sleep forward under the sail, I
cruised on into the night. The wind had
fallen somewhat, but it kept the canvas filled.
The crooning of the water, the rustling of the
sail, the thin voices of bugs on shore, and the
guttural song of the frogs, shocking the gen-
eral quiet — these sounds only intensified the
weird calm of the night. The sky was cloud-
less, and the moon shone so brightly that I
wrote my day's notes by its glow.

The winking lights of Mobridge slowly
dropped astern and faded into the glimmering
mist.

Lonely seamen all the night
Sail astonished amid stars.

H
en

<
O

H
1/3

Down from the Yellowstone 311

The remembered lines gave me the divine
itch for quoting verses. I did so, until the
poor tired Kid swore drowsily in his sleep
under the mast. The air was of that invig-
orating coolness that makes you think of
cider in its sociable stage of incipient snappi-
ness. Sleepy dogs bayed far away. Lone
trees approached me, the motion seeming to
belong to them rather than to me, and drifted
slowly past — austere spectral figures. Some-
where about midnight I fell asleep and was
awakened by a flapping sail and a groaning
mast, to find myself sprawling over the wheel.
The wind had changed; it was once more
blowing up-stream, and a drizzling rain
was driving through the gloom. During
my sleep the boat had gone ashore. I
moored her to a drift log, lowered sail, flung
a tarp over us, and went to sleep again.
And the morning came — blanketed with
gray oozing fog. The greater part of that
day we rowed on in the rain without a
covering. In the evening we reached Forest
City, an odd little old town, looking wist-
fully across stream at the youthful red

312 The River and I

and white government buildings of the Chey-
enne Agency.

Despite its name, this town is utterly tree-
less! I once knew a particularly awkward,
homely, and freckled young lady named
''Lily." The circumstance always seemed
grimly humorous to me, and I remembered it
as we strolled through the town that could n't
live up to its name.

We were ravenously hungry, and as soon as
possible we got our feet under the table of the
town's dingy restaurant. A long, lean man
came to take our orders. He was a walking
picture of that condition known to patent
medicine as ''before taking." I looked for
the fat, cheerful person who should illustrate
the effect of eating at that place, but in vain.
When the lean man reappeared with the two
orders carefully tucked away in the palms of
his bony hands, I thought I grasped the eti-
ology of his thinness. It was indeed a frugal
repast. We took in the situation at a glance.

"Please consider us four hearty men, if you
will," I said kindly; "and bring two more
meals." The man obeyed. My third order,

Down from the Yellowstone 315

it seems, met objections from the cook. The
lean man, after a half audible colloquy with
the presiding spirit of the kitchen, reported
with a whipped expression that the house was
''all out of grub." I regretted the matter
very much, as I had looked forward to a long,
unbroken series of meals that evening.

Setting out at moonrise, just after sunset,
we reached Pascal Island, fifteen miles below,
before sleep came upon us in a manner not to
be resisted. All night coyotes yelped from the
hilltops about us, recounting their imme-
morial sorrows to the wandering moon — a sort
of Hecate worship.

At sunset of the fifth day from Bismarck,
we pulled in at Pierre. Although I had never
been there before, Carthage was not more hos-
pitable to storm-tossed ^neas than Pierre to
the weather-beaten crew of the Atom. At a
reception given us by Mr. Doane Robinson,
secretary of the State Historical Society, I felt
again the warmth of the great heart of the

West.

During the first night out of Pierre, the Kid,
having stood his watch, called me at about

3i6 The River and I

one o'clock. The moon was sailing high. I
grasped the oars and fell to rowing with a res-
olute swing, meaning, in the shortest possible
time, to wear off the disagreeable stupor inci-
dent to arising at that time of night. I had
been rowing some time when I noted a tree on
the bank near which the current ran. Still
drowsy, I turned my head away and pulled
with a will. After another spell of energetic
rowing, I looked astern, expecting to see that
tree at least a mile behind. There was no
tree in sight, and yet I could see in that direc-
tion with sufficient clearness to discern the
bulk of a tree if any were there.

'' I am rowing to beat the devil! " thought I;
''that tree is away around the bend already!"
So I increased the speed and length of my
stroke, and began to come out of my stupor.
Some time later, I happened to look behind me.
The tree in question was about three hundred
yards ahead of the boat! I had been rowing up-
stream for at least a half -hour in a strenuous
race with that tree! The Kid, aroused by my
laughter, asked sleepily what in thunder
tickled me. I told him I had merely thought

Crt

X
H

>?;

O
H

Down from the Yellowstone 319

of a funny story; whereat he mumbled some
unintelligible anathema, and lapsed again into
a snoring state. But I claim the distinction
of being the only man on record who ever
raced a half -hour with a tree, and finished
three city blocks to the bad!

The next day we rounded the great loop, in
which the river makes a detour of thirty miles.
Having rowed the greater part of the day, we
found ourselves in the evening only two or
three miles from a point we had reached in the
morning.

In a drizzling rain we passed Brule A.gency.
In the evening, soppy and chilled, we were
pulling past a tumble-down shanty built under
the bluffs, when a man stepped from the door
and hailed us. We pulled in. "You fellers
looks like you needed a drink of booze," said
the man as we stepped ashore. " Well, I got it
for sale, and it ain't no harm to advertise!"

This strenuous liquor merchant bore about
him all the wretched marks of the stuff he

sold.

"Have your wife cook us two meals," said I,
"and I '11 deal with you."

320 The River and I

''Jump in my boat," said he. I got in his
skiff, wondering what his whim might mean.
After several strokes of the oars, he pulled a
flask from his pocket, took my coin and rowed
back to shore. "Government license," he
explained; "got to sell thirty feet from the
bank." ''Poor old Government," thought I;
"they beat you wherever they deal with
you!"

We went up to the wretched shanty, built
of driftwood, and entered. The interior was
a melee of wash tubs, rickety chairs, babies,
and flies. The woman of the house hung out
a ragged smile upon her puckered mouth,
etched at the lips with many thin lines of
worry, and aped hospitality in a manner at
once pathetic and ridiculous. A little girl,
who looked fifty or five, according to how
you observed her, dexterously dodged the drip
from the cracks in the roof, as she backed
away into a corner, from whence she regarded
us with eyes already saddened with the ache
of life.

After my many days and nights in the
great open, fraternizing with the stars and

<
C

Down from the Yellowstone 323

the moon and the sun and the river, it gave
me a heartache to have the old bitter human
fact thrust upon me again. ''What is there
left here to live for?" thought I. And just
then I noted, hanging on the wall where the
water did not drip, a neatly framed marriage
certificate. This was the one attempt at
decoration.

It was the household's 'scutcheon of respec-
tability. This woman, even in her degrada-
tion, true to the noblest instinct of her sex,
clung to this holy record of a faded glory.

Two days later, pushing on in the starlit
night, we heard ahead the sullen boom of
waters in turmoil. For a half -hour, as we
proceeded, the sound increased, until it
seemed close under our prow. We knew
there was no cataract in the entire lower por-
tion of the river; and yet, only from a water-
fall had I ever heard a sound like that. We
pulled for the shore, and went to bed with
the sinister booming under our bow.

Waking in the gray of dawn, we found our-
selves at the mouth of the Niobrara River.
Though a small stream compared with the

324 The River and I

Missouri, so great is its speed, and so tre-
mendous the impact of its flood, that the
mightier, but less impetuous Missouri is driven
back a quarter of a mile.

Reaching Springfield — twelve miles below —
before breakfast, in the evening we lifted
Yankton out of a cloud of flying sand. The
next day Vermilion and Elk Point dropped
behind; and then, thirty miles of the two
thousand remained.

In the weird hour just before the first faint
streak of dawn grows out of the dark, we were
making coffee — the last outdoor coffee of the
year. Oh, the ambrosial stuff!

We were under way when the stars paled.
At sunrise the smoke of Sioux City was waving
huge ragged arms of welcome out of the south-
east. At noon we landed. We had rowed
fourteen hundred miles against almost con-
tinual head winds in a month, and we had
finished our two thousand miles in two months.
It was hard work. And yet

The clang of the trolleys, the rumble of the
drays, the rushing of the people!

I prefer the drifting of the stars, the wan-

Down from the Yellowstone 325

dering of the moon, the coming and going of
the sun, the crooning of the river, the shout
of the big, mianly, devil-may-care winds, the
boom of the diving beaver in the night.

I never felt at home in a town. Up river
when the night dropped over me, somehow
I always felt comfortably, kindly housed.
Towns, after all, are machines to facilitate
getting psychically lost.

When I started for the head of navigation
a friend asked me what I expected to find on
the trip. "Some more of myself," I answered.

And, after all, that is the Great Discovery.

THE END

American Waterways

The Columbia River

Its History — Its Myths— Its Scenery — Its Commerce

By William Denison Lyman

Professor of History in Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

430 pages, with 80 Illustrations and a Map. S3.50 net

This is the first effort to present a book distinctively on the Columbia
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American Inland Waterways

Their Relation to Railway Transportation and to the National
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By Herbert Quick
262 pages, with 60 Illustrations and a Map, $3.50 net

A study of our water highways, and a comparison of them with the
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The Mississippi River

And Its Wonderful Valley Twenty^seven Hundred and
Seventy'^five Miles from Source to Sea
By Julius Chambers

Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society
324 pages with 30 Illustrations and Maps. 53.50 net

Lake George and Lake Champlain

The War Trail of the Mohawk and the Battleground of France
and England in their Contest lor the Control of North America

By W. Max Reid
Author of " The Mohawk Valley," " The Story of Old Fort Johnson," etc.

In Preparation:

The Story of the Chesapeake By Rutheiu Mory Bibbins

American Waterways

The Romance of the Colorado River

The Story of its Discovery in 1 540, with an account of the Later
Explorations, and with Special Reference to the Voyages of Powell
through the Line of the Great Canyons.

By Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

Member of the United States Colorado River Expedition of 1871 and 1872
435 pages, with 200 Illustrations, and Frontispiece in Color, $3.50 net

" His scientific training, his long experience in this region, and his eye
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ten for many years to come — not until our knowledge of the river is
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" Mr. Dellenbaugh writes with enthusiasm and balance about his
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leave it, and brings him thirty years later to its description with undimin-
ished interest. — New York Tribune.

The Ohio River

A COURSE OF EMPIRE
By Archer B. Hulbert

Associate Professor of American History, Marietta College,
Author of " Historic Highways of America," etc.

390 pages, with 100 Illustrations and a Map, $3.50 net

An interesting description from a fresh point of view of the interna-
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The most widely read students of the Ohio Valley will find a unique and
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"A wonderfully comprehensive and entirely fascinating book." —
Chicago Inter-Ocean.

American Waterways

Narragansett Bay

Is Historic and Romantic Associations and Picturesque Setting

By Edgar Mayhew Bacon

Author of " The Hudson River," " Chronicles of Tarrytown," etc.

340 pages, with 50 Drawings by the Author, and with Numerous
Photographs and a Map. 53.50 net

Impressed by the important and singular part played by the settlers

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Vessels That Plough Them, Their Owners, Their Sailors, and Their Cargoes /
together with A Brief History of Our Inland Seas

By James Oliver Curwood
244 pages, with 72 Illustrations and a Map, $3,50 net

lliis profusely illustrated book, as entertaining as it is informing, has
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'American Waterways

The St. Lawrence River

Historical — Legendary — Picturesque

By George Waldo Browne

Author of " Japan — the Place and the People," " Paradise of the Pacific," etc.

385 pages f with 100 Illustrations and a Map, S3 50 net

While the St. Lawrence River has been the scene of many important
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waterway. This is not denying that considerable has been written relating
to it, but the various offerings have been scattered through many volumes,
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This work presents in a consecutive narrative the most important
historic incidents connected with the river, combined with descriptions of
some of its most picturesque scenery and delightful excursions into its
legendary lore. In selecting the hundred illustrations care has been taken
to give as wide a scope as possible to the views belonging to the river.

The Niagara River

By Archer Butler Hulbert

Piofessor of American History, Marietta College; author of " The Ohio River,"
" Historic Highways of America," etc.

350 pages, with 70 Illustrations and Maps, $3,50 net

Professor Hulbert tells all that is best worth recording of the history
of the river which gives the book its title, and of its commercial present
and its great commercial future. An immense amount of carefully ordered
information is here brought together into a most entertaining and informing
book. No mention of this volume can be quite adequate that fails to take
into account the extraordinary chapter which is given to chronicling the
mad achievements of that company of dare-devil bipeds of both sexes who
for decades have been sweeping over the Falls in barrels and other
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yl merican Waterways
The Hudson River

FROM OCEAN TO SOURCE
Historical — Legendary — Picturesque
By Edgar Mayhew Bacon

Author of " Chronicles of Tarrytown," " Narrag.insett Bay," etc.

600 Pages, with 100 Illustrations, including a Sectional Map of the Hudson

River, S3. 50 net

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Outlook.

The Connecticut River

AND THE

Valley of the Connecticut

THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES FROM MOUNTAIN TO SEA

Historical and Descriptive
By Edwin Munroe Bacon

Author of " W.^.lks and Rides in the Country Round About Boston," etc.

500 Pages, with 100 Illustrations and a Map. S3.50 net

From ocean to source every mile of the Connecticut is crowded with
reminders of the early explorers, of the Indian wars, of the struggle of the
Colonies, and of the quaint, peaceful village existence of the early days of
the Republic. Beginning with the Dutch discovery, Mr. Bacon traces
the interesting movements and events which are associated with this chief
river of New England.

L^-

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