THE VANISHED SCENEHAL G. EVARTSFrom “The Passing of the Old West.” Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Little, Brown, and Company.[31]
HAL G. EVARTS
From “The Passing of the Old West.” Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Little, Brown, and Company.[31]
Wherevermen fared, no matter how secluded the pocket of the hills to which they penetrated, they found evidence that some solitary wanderer had been before them. His horses had grazed in hidden meadows and they found the ashes of his camp fires on the shores of unmapped lakes. It was said that the range that rimmed the new land in on the east was impenetrable, that no man could cross through its wild passes; but in the dead of winter, long after the Crow tribe had taken to winter quarters in the lower valleys, some white man’s lone trail was often seen leading down out of these peaks which others shunned even in the warmth of summer. He was even welcome in the wigwams of the Crows and frequently he tarried for a few days in their villages, but his restlessness always drove him forth to leave his tracks in the secluded fastnesses of the winter hills. When a party of explorers pressed westward up the valley of the Stinking Water to determine if an entrance might be effected from the east, they found the trails of horses leading up a tributary stream which broke in from the west where the main river flared back in a wide sweeping curve to the north and east. These tracks led up an elk trail, threaded the mazes of a frowning gorge, crossed the lower extremities of late-melting snow banks and came out at last upon the Yellowstone Slope.
The news of the segregation of these hills and valleys he loved had brought to Mart Woodson another of those rare moments of exaltation. The invariable theme of his childhood tales had dealt with the near-serfdom of the inhabitants of far countries and had built up in his mind the belief that the people of other lands were chattels. Now, as if in direct refutation of those ancient policies which decreed that the land was God-given for the benefit and pleasure of the few, his country had set aside the wonder-spot of the world for the enjoyment of the many. This vast reservation, more than three thousand square miles of it, belonged to the people as a whole, a joint estate to descend to unborn generations for a thousand years to come. Never a foot of it could come into the possession of individuals or concerns.
What more could a man ask than to live his life upon his own estate comprising hundreds of square miles? This belonged to him. A thousand might share it, or ten thousand, but his own rights would ever remain the same. He could make his night fire on the shores of some stream, leave it the next morning and never look upon it again till the last day of his life, but always with the certain knowledge that on that day he could return and say, “Here is my camp,” and no man could wave him off. But a man should know his own property,—so Mart Woodson set forth to explore every nook of this vast estate which had so unexpectedly been willed to him.
His wants were few. He killed his meat as he needed it and when he felt the necessity of gaining a few dollars with which to buy supplies he worked with the construction gang that had been sent here to hew out a primitive road system through the People’s Park while the nearest railroad point was yet five hundred miles away; but mostly he roamed the hills and whenever seen was mounted on a bay mare that mothered a mare colt. He scoured the hills for gold in summers and panned the streams from the Flathead to the Green, prospected the ledges for quartz from Big Wing River tothe Gallatin. When a party of explorers verified the existence of the stream which flowed to both seas and heralded to the world their find of Two Ocean Pass, they found also a low mound of earth surmounted by a headboard slabbed out with an ax and rudely carved with the words “Tom North,” testimony that in this spot men had lived and died before they came.
Jim Bridger’s tale of the mountain of black glass had roused a shriek of derision that echoed round the earth, yet in time others found it as he had said they would, and as they gazed upon the obsidian cliff they found the tracks of a mare and colt along its base. Homeric mirth had rocked the world at Bridger’s assertion that he had caught fish in the icy waters of a lake and cooked them in boiling springs without rising from his seat or removing his prey from the hook. When explorers reached this spot they found the bones of fish upon the rocks. The lone wanderer had once more preceded them and cooked his meal of trout a month before they came.
And it was Woodson himself who now came in for a share of ridicule and met general disbelief when he told men of the petrified forest he had found. It stood on a steep side-hill cut away by the action of water. Tier upon tier it rose, succeeding layers exposed to view, fifteen periods of forestation one above the other. Near the base were stumps more than a dozen feet in diameter, relics of the ages past, when tropical vegetation flourished here. Above these ancient ones, in successive accumulation, was the evidence of the gradual cooling of the earth on down to date, the top strata containing vegetation of the present age. Here were not merely crumbling fragments of bygone periods but exact reproductions, the preserved record of the whole; bark and twigs intact, ferns and shrubbery, even to the buds, held in delicate tracery of stone and sprouting from the outcroppings to the cliff. But in Woodson’s case the disbelief was not so widespread. Men were beginning to believe all thingspossible of this wondrous corner of the earth. It was decided that he should lead a party to the spot, but when they sought for him the wanderer was gone. Years later he led men to the ledges and they found it as he had said, the most complete record of its kind in the world.
Woodson had moved on in search of new lands and for months he traveled into the west, moving by easy stages with his little pack string, sampling the ledges and panning the streams en route. Everywhere there was food in plenty and he lived off the country as he roamed. He came at last into a land whose natural wealth staggered his imagination, the giant forests of the northwest coast. There were stretches where he might travel for weeks without once leaving the timber; and such timber! Fir, spruce and cedar side by side, each monster capable of furnishing from within its own mighty trunk the lumber for a small village. They stood ten to eighteen feet through at the butts, rising with barely perceptible lessening of dimension, towering three hundred feet aloft, two-thirds of their height without a limb. From these a man might cut beams six feet through by a hundred feet in length as easily as eight-inch board stuff is cut from the average tree. Week after week he wandered through this king of forests, the ferns growing to his saddle skirts. There was one stretch of a hundred miles each way, covered with a solid stand of the finest timber known to man. He lingered in this tract for a solid year. Here, in this one stretch, he estimated, was enough lumber to rebuild the world, lumber that was clear, straight-grained and without a knot.
He was a man of the open, attuned to Nature’s varying moods; he had felt the different spells exerted by mountain, lake and plain and thought that he knew them all; yet here was something new. There was a hush in the dim aisles of this mightiest of all forests, a reverent silence rarely broken. It was so completely roofed over by the tufted tops as to almost exclude the light. Even the night sounds weresubdued as if the wild things hesitated to raise their voices above the softest croon and cheep necessary for communication among themselves. Woodson some way disliked to shatter the silence with his voice and when he spoke to his horses it was in the modulated tones one uses in some ancient cathedral freighted with reverent memories.
After a year the call of the Yellowstone drew him on the back trail. As he traveled he sometimes pondered about that mark he would make for himself in the world. Yet there was no hurry. There was undreamed plenty of everything in this land of his. One had but to choose his course, dip in and help himself from the storehouse that was inexhaustible,—Nature’s storehouse that replenished itself without help. He reflected that ever since history began, this natural reservoir had been refilled more rapidly than it could possibly be depleted by man. A world of plenty; leather for all the world from the buffalo of the plains; hardwood timber without end to the eastward; free grass for fifty million cows; meat for the nation from the antelope of the plains and the elk and mule deer of the hills; wealth untold for those who would seek for it and burrow in the ground for gold; and in this great untouched forest of the northwest coast was enough lumber to roof the earth. He smiled and slapped the brown mare on the neck as a whimsical thought crossed his mind.
“She didn’t forget a thing,” he said. “She didn’t leave one thing out. There’s enough of everything to go round and a lot to spare. Back in the Yellowstone, where we’re headed for, there’s enough natural and unnatural wonders to entertain the people of the world. She didn’t even leave that out—plenty of everything for us all.”
As he traveled eastward his desire to look again upon this best land of all increased and he made longer packs. Soon it was rumored that the lone wanderer, for so long a part of the Park, had returned to roam once more in the hills of the Yellowstone. He knew the valleys of warmsprings where his horses might winter while others were forced to drive their stock to the lower country. He prospected far and wide in summer but always he came back to winter within the limits of his own estate.
After a lapse of perhaps fifteen years since Woodson and Old Tom had quit the plains, a little pack train was seen winding down the east slope of the hills. The man rode a bay mare that mothered a mare colt. In the rear of the string still another bay mare, ancient and decrepit, pensioned for long service and unburdened by a pack, trailed stiffly after the rest. The man told those he met along the trails that he was headed for the lower country to join a hide outfit for one last buffalo-hunt on the plains. Men smiled at the naïve plans of this Rip Van Winkle who had been asleep in the hills; for the buffalo was gone.
Woodson knew that the men from his old outfit—Hanson, Cleve, McCann and all the rest—would be wherever the most of the shaggy beasts had congregated for the southward drift of fall. But when he made inquiry he found that their names were unknown to the present-day dwellers of the foothills. Men told him that the buffalo was no more. That the last of them had been killed off to make room for the settler’s cows. As he traveled east he experienced a series of surprises. Stockmen’s cabins showed at every water hole where, but a few years past, there had been no human habitation within two hundred miles. All this was as it should be, he reflected; a wild country tamed and made habitable for man. It was clear that the buffalo had to go to make room for the cows. But the job had certainly been sweeping and thorough. He crossed vast stretches where domestic stock had not yet arrived but the way had been paved for them years in advance of their coming, for not a single buffalo track could he find. Little towns had sprung up with amazing rapidity. Out in the long desolate stretch between Lander and Rawlins he covered forty-two miles unmarked by a water hole, an arid region wheredomestic stock could not live but where the buffalo might have ranged in thousands; but here too they had been wiped out to the last hoof. It came to him that he knew of enough waste areas, as yet untouched by cows, to support a half-million head of buffalo. They would have constituted a source of revenue for many years to come. Men spoke vaguely of the “lost herd” that lived in some unknown spot and would one day repopulate these waste stretches with buffalo. Woodson could see that all this development was for the best; there were now homes where no homes stood before. But a vague uneasiness assailed him, a sense of something gone amiss with a popular idol. Some way it seemed that he had been warned of this. Some forgotten prophecy welled up out of the past to clamor for expression at the threshold of his consciousness. It troubled him that he should not quite place the thing and he attempted to shake it off.
He left his horses with a cowman and held on to the east. The old trails where once the prairie schooners and the oxbows had wound interminably to the far horizon were no longer traveled. Steel rails stretched away in their stead; and the creak of wheels and leather and the bawls of plodding oxen,—all these were replaced by the rattle and roar of freight cars and the screech of the locomotives’ whistles; city streets wound where there had been naught but dog towns on blistering flats.
Truly development was wonderful and he rejoiced with the rest over this sweeping transformation, the swiftest and most complete reclamation in the history of the world. But again the still small voice assailed him from within and whispered that a good and worthy job had been just a trifle too well done.
A cold fall storm was driving down from the north and overtook him in the salt-marsh country of Western Kansas. The water-fowl scurried ahead of it. Every pond and slough, each broad prairie lake and marshy bottom wascovered with members of the feathered horde en route to the winter quarters on the Gulf. Flock followed flock in an endless procession, streaking the sky. The prairies were covered with feeding geese. Great white cranes stalked majestically in the open flats, traveling in bands of hundreds, and at night the wild whoops of overhead squadrons almost drowned the clamor of oncoming hordes of geese. This evidence of abundance cheered him. He estimated that he saw over a million birds a day; and he reflected that everywhere east and west of him this great migration was going on; the east coast and the west, the Mississippi flyway and the course of every inland river; all were experiencing this same deluge of birds headed into the south. Nowhere had he seen so much bird life except during the pigeon flights in the hardwood country of his boyhood home. There he had seen the skies blackened with wild pigeons, had seen limbs broken from the trees by the sheer weight of thousands of roosting birds. The shock of finding the buffalo gone from the plains in a few short years was counteracted by this fresh evidence of plenty.
It was in Dodge that his trail crossed that of Hanson, a man from his old outfit. Hanson, with a younger man named Rice, was hunting antelope for the hides. The two spoke of old friends. Cleve had gone to the lumber camps of the northwest coast, Hanson informed, and McCann to the hardwood belt to the east. They had quit the hunting. Antelope were fleet and it was difficult to stalk them in the flats. Hanson had known the time when all hands might kill and skin an average of twenty buffalo to the man each day. He now lamented the necessity of hunting the wary pronghorn for less than a dollar a hide. A man was doing well to average four a day.
“The old days are gone,” he said. “Things are different now. It’s hard pickings for a man to make a living in times like these.”
But Rice looked forth on the world with the optimismof youth. It was a land of plenty in which he lived. He had planned a hunt in the hills of Western Colorado and urged Woodson to throw in with them.
“There’s millions of deer up there,” he said. “They’re paying three dollars apiece for venison saddles at the mines. I’ve seen ten thousand mule deer boiling through the passes, all in sight at once, when they gathered from the Gore Range and the Rabbit Ear to drift down to the Oak Hills for the winter. There’s deer without end. I hunted up there last year. We loaded thirty four-horse freight-wagons with deer saddles, high as we could lash ’em on, all from a two-day kill in one pass as they came streaming down, a thousand to the band. There’s good money in meat-hunting for the mines. You better throw in with us, Mart, and come along.”
They urged their case but Woodson would not join. The rapidity with which old conditions had slipped past him filled him with a sense of bewilderment. He could not get his start, as he had intended, by hide-hunting on the plains. That day had gone, and some way he could see no future in hunting deer to supply Denver and the Colorado mining towns with meat. Perhaps he would better go to the lumber camps, either east or west, and take up that end. There was more permanency to that. He could not make up his mind and decided at last to go back to the quiet hills of the Yellowstone for one final look around while making his decision.