The Mouth of the James.The Mouth of the James.
There are many men who live and die with the undisputed reputation of being good fellows—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 human 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 wabbles. 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—"
"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 face of three of the four, I saw the yellow streak. 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 haslittle 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 and beautiful things often come as paradoxes. I looked for a man and found him in a boy.
Bill talked about home and stared into the twilight. The "floaters" were irritable, quarreling 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 surface of the river was like polished ebony—a dream-path wroughtof 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 glistered 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 luggage. It occurred to me for the first time 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 ChopinNocturneplayed on a 'cello—a vocal yearning, a wailing of frustrate aspirations, a brushing of sick wings across the gates of 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 egotistic, 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 wouldn't do. In the evening—yes. Butnow! Truly there is something womanly about Night, something loverlike in a vast impersonal way; but too big—she is too terribly big to woo with human sentiment. Only a windlike chant would do—something with an undertone of human despair, outsoared 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—through its nose perhaps, but still it was singing—out of that machine. It was Wagner'sEvening Starplayed 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 perceptible 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 answered—a dolefultenson.
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 huge lamp-flame, which is familiar to every one, but a billowing of color, rainbows gone mad! In the northeast the long rolling columns formed—many-colored clouds of spectral 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 at the river's edge three hundred yards away. So far as we were concerned, it was a dream-deer. We blinked 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 nevertheless 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, separating 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 paddles, 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 establish a precedent for day after day of inactivity. The prevailing winds would be head winds. We clungto 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 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 skywas 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 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 distance, 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 abouttwenty-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, 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.
AT 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, melancholy tone. And when you nibble at the boiled gray-blue meat of an adult crane, you catch yourself wondering just what sort ofragoutcould be made out of boots; you have a morbid longing to know just how bad such aragoutwould really be!
Hereafter on whatever trails I may follow, blue cranes shall be used chiefly for Japanesescreen effects. Little by little (the latent philosopher in me emerges to remark) by experience 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 myself—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 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 through the suggestiveness of his written symbols, and their own remembered experiences.
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 bigger than that. This mounted man became at oncefor me the incarnation of the meaning of bacon!
When two parties meet and each wants what the other can give, it doesn'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! 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 Broadwaythere in the wilderness—the lights, the din, the hurrying, jostling theater crowds, the cafés, 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 Broadway.
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 disappeared. 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. Wehad 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 of what we took to be Hell Creek, which flows (when it has any water in it!) out of the Bad Lands. It didn't take much imagination 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.
Reveille!Reveille!
The Pen and Key Ranch.The Pen and Key Ranch.
The windings of the ravine soon hid us fromthe 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 as we went. A creek of a burnt-out hell it was, 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 water 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, surrounded by the weird hills—a grotesque, wind-carved amphitheater, 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 pitifuldefiance of desperate things. It seemed natural enough that something should be dead in this sepulcher; but the living weeds, fighting bitterly for life, seemed out of place.
I looked about and thought of Poe. Surely just beyond those summits where the melancholy sky touched the melancholy hills, one would come 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 place 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, overpowering 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. It was as though one groped about a strange dark room and saw, for a briefmoment 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 personality that was the Night.
I had a dream which was not all a dream;The bright sun was extinguished, and the starsDid wander darkling in eternal space,Rayless and pathless; and the icy earthSwung blind and blackening in the moonless air.
I had a dream which was not all a dream;The bright sun was extinguished, and the starsDid wander darkling in eternal space,Rayless and pathless; and the icy earthSwung blind and blackening in the moonless air.
Low thunder shook the ink-sopped night—I thought of it as the Spirit of Byron applauding his own terrific lines.
A fearful hope was all the world contained;Forests were set on fire—but hour by hourThey fell and faded—and the crackling trunksExtinguished with a crash—and all was black.
A fearful hope was all the world contained;Forests were set on fire—but hour by hourThey fell and faded—and the crackling trunksExtinguished with a crash—and all was black.
Out in the wind-voiced darkness, swept by spasmodic deluges of rapid flame and muffled thunder, it seemed I could hear the dream-forestsof the moody Master crackling and booming in the gloom.
—looked upWith mad disquietude on the dull sky,The pall of a past world.
—looked upWith mad disquietude on the dull sky,The pall of a past world.
"Say, how long is that piece?" asked the Kid.
And vipers crawledAnd twined themselves among the multitude,Hissing—
And vipers crawledAnd twined themselves among the multitude,Hissing—
We wondered if there might not be some rattlesnakes in that vicinity.
—They raked upAnd, shivering, scraped with their cold skeleton handsThe feeble ashes, and their feeble breathBlew for a little life, and made a flameWhich was a mockery; then they lifted upTheir eyes as it grew brighter, and beheldEach other's aspects—saw and shrieked and died—
—They raked upAnd, shivering, scraped with their cold skeleton handsThe feeble ashes, and their feeble breathBlew for a little life, and made a flameWhich was a mockery; then they lifted upTheir eyes as it grew brighter, and beheldEach other's aspects—saw and shrieked and died—
"Cut that out!" said the Kid.
"Why?" I asked.
"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 thedripping shelter, and that was a 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 information 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 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 withdust 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) concerning 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 campeight 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 downpour. 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.
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 readL'Assomoir; 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 conquering 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 thewind-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; theAtomswung round 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-berry 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 without the gasoline was decidedly better than the gasoline without the hope. Whereat the philosopher in me emerges to remark—but who cares? Philosophy proceeds backward, and 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 cottonwoods 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-whipped 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 himon. He heaped big curses upon 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. Before 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 theAtomfollowed 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 together under one blanket, and the others bunked apart. We had become the main party of the expedition; the others were nowmerely 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 number 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 thousand miles to the sunrise. The horizon was merely a blue haze—and the endless land was sere. The river ran for days with a succession 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 opposite each headland was the same stony bluff, wind- and water-carved in the same way: until at last we cried out against the tediousness 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 incontestable grounds that they were by far the prettiest women I had seen for many days! The effect of my generous praise is fixed forever on the pictured faces presented herewith.
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 Frank'sgâteaux à la chansonnettewere things of beauty and therefore joys forever.
Assiniboine Indian Chief.Assiniboine Indian Chief.
Assiniboine Indian Camp.Assiniboine Indian Camp.
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 torture us at about five o'clock in the afternoon, and left off only when the cold of night came, relieving usof one discomfort by the substitution 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 strenuously 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 Montana ranch—the Pen and Key. The residence, barns, sheds, fences were built of logs. The great rolling country about it was 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 whenhe returns from an extended absence. I told at once the purpose of my errand, explaining briefly what we were doing on the river. Why, yes, certainly we could have provisions. But we weren'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 persuasion 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 notbuy. And after the dishes were cleared away, they brought out a phonograph, and we all sat round like one family, swapping information and yarns 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 the physiognomy of houses. Some have a forbidding, sick-the-dog-on-you aspect about them, not at all due, I am sure, to architectural 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 wasn'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 instantly make you think of your own mother. Some very well constructedhouses look surly, and some shabby ones look kind, somehow. 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. 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 senseless walls like an effluvium. Who knows but that every house has its telltale aura, plain to a vision of sufficient spiritual keenness? Perhaps some one will some day write a bookOn 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 theshallows and intermittent deeps of an inside channel. The outer channel was rolling viciously in that eternal thing, the head wind. We had covered the first six 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 animated 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!" 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 Ihad clambered up the forward companionway and stood dripping before the captain of the steamerExpansion. At this closer range, the strength of the face was even more impressive, with its eagle beak and its lines of firmness; 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 freighting supplies up the Yellowstone for the great Crane Creek irrigation dam, sixty miles above the mouth. TheExpansionwas 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. I think I should prefer hod-carrying as a profession, for we had a heavy cargo, ranging from lumber and tiling to flourand 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 everything 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 wouldn'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 superiority—the superiority of thirty dollars per month over nothing at all.
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 briefinterval 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. And I said to myself: I can conceive of heaven only as an improbable condition 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 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 corners 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 entertained 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 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 wouldn't come. The river wind moaned through the grasses.
I looked off a half mile to the modern town of Mondak, and wondered how many in that town cared about this spot where so much hadhappened, 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 grassAlong the battlefield!
But ah, how deep the grassAlong the battlefield!
THE 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 travelers felt the truth of it; and Captain Marsh, who has piloted river craft through every navigable foot of the entire system of rivers, having 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 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 characteristics by which the Missouri River is known are given to it by the Yellowstone—its turbulence, 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 Missouri atKansisCity, it is the Yellowstone that you behold!