Day after day we progressed. There were bright days and days when we rode through a steady mist of rain. Always it was worth while. What matters a little rain when there is a yellow slicker to put on and no one to care how one looks? Once, riding down a mountain-side, water pouring over the rim of my old felt hat and pattering merrily on my slicker, I looked to one side to see a great grizzly raise himself from behind a tree-trunk, and, standing upright, watch impassively as my horse and I proceeded. I watched him as far as I could see him. We were mutually interested. The party had gone on ahead. For a long time afterward I heard the crackling of small twigs in theheavy woods beside the trail. But I never saw him again.
It is strange to remember how little animal life, after all, there seemed to be. There was plenty, of course. But our party was large. We had no chance to creep up silently on the wild life of the park. The vegetation was so luxuriant in the valleys. Beyond an occasional bear, once or twice the screaming of a mountain lion, and the gophers and marmots, we saw nothing. There were not many birds. We never saw a snake. It was too high.
One day, riding along a narrow trail on a mountain-side, the horse in front of mine stampeded, and for a moment it looked like serious trouble. For a stampeding horse on a two-foot trail is a dangerous thing. It developed that there was a wasp's nest there, and the horse had been stung. We all got by finally by lashing our horses and running past at a canter.
PUMPELLY'S PILLAR AND EATON PARTYPUMPELLY'S PILLAR AND EATON PARTY
Another time, working slowly up a mountain-side, I told the chief ranger of the park of having seen many Western horses at the front in France.
"Do you remember any of the brands?" he asked.
I did. A Diamond-Z, a flank brand on a black horse at Ypres.
"That's curious," he commented. "That man just ahead of us has shipped a carload of Montana horses to the front, and I believe that is his brand."
We called to the man ahead, and he halted. Up we rode and demanded his brand. It was the Diamond-Z. To be quite certain, he showed it to me registered in his notebook.
So there, where we could see out over what seemed unlimited space, where the earth appeared a vast thing, we decided that, after all, it was a small place. The Rocky Mountains and Ypres!
Having risen at five, by eleven o'clock thoughts of luncheon were always obtrusive. People began stealthily to consult watches and look ahead for a shady place to stop. By half-past eleven we were generally dismounted in some grove and the pack-train was coming up with its clattering pans, its coffee-pot, its cold boiled ham.
Howard Eaton always made the coffee. It was good coffee. Apparently nobody ever thought of tea. In the out-doors it is coffee—strong coffee, as hot as possible—that one craves.
There was one young woman in the party to whom things were always happening—not by her own fault. If there was a platter of meat to be dropped, it fell in her lap. And so I remember that one day, the coffee having been made at a luncheon stop, the handle came off the coffee-pot and this same young woman had an uncomfortable baptism.
But it was all in the game. Hot coffee, marmalade, bread and butter, cheese, sardines, and the best ham in the world—that was luncheon. Often there was a waterfall near, where for the mere holding out of a cup there was ice water to drink. The horses were not unsaddled at these noonday stops, but, having climbed hard all morning, they were glad to stand in the shade and rest.
Sometimes we lunched on a ledge where all the kingdoms of the earth seemed spread out before us. We sprawled on rocks, on green banks, and relaxed muscles that were weary with much climbing. There was much talk of a desultory sort. We settled many problems, but without rancor. The war was far away. Here were peace and a great contentment, food and a grassy bank, and overhead the trail called us to new vistas, new effort.
One young man was the party poet. He hit us all off sooner or later. I have the odehe wrote to me, but modesty forbids that I give it.
The poet having pocketed his pad and pencil, and the amateur photographers having put up their cameras, the order to start was given. The dishes were piled back in the crates and strapped to the pack-horses. The ruin of the ham was wrapped up and tied on somewhere. Dark glasses were adjusted against the glare, and we were off.
Sometimes our destination towered directly overhead, up a switchback of a trail where it was necessary to divide the party into groups, so that no stone dislodged by a horse need fall on some one below. Always at the head, riding calmly, with keen blue eyes, that are like the eyes of aviators and sailors in that they seem to look through long distances, was Howard Eaton. Every step of the trail he tested first, he and his big horse. And I dare say many a time hedrew a breath of relief when the last timid woman had reached a summit or descended a slope or forded a river, and nothing untoward had happened.
MEMBERS OF THE EATON PARTY TOBOGGANING WITHOUT TOBOGGANSMEMBERS OF THE EATON PARTY TOBOGGANING WITHOUT TOBOGGANSCopyright A. J. Baker, Kalispell, Montana
There were days when we reached our camping-places by mid-afternoon. Then the anglers got their rods and started out for trout. There were baths to be taken in sunny pools that looked warm and were icy cold. There were rents in riding-clothes to be mended; even—whisper it—a little laundry work to be done now and then by women, some of them accustomed to the ministrations of a lady's maid at home. And there was supper and the camp-fire. Charley Russell, the cowboy artist, was the camp-fire star. To repeat one of his stories would be desecration. No one but Charley Russell himself, speaking through his nose, with his magnificent head outlined against the firelight, will ever be able to tell one of his stories.
There were other good story-tellers in the party. And Howard Eaton himself could match them all. A hundred miles from a railroad, we gathered around that camp-fire in the evening in a great circle. There were, you will remember, forty-two of us—no mean gathering. The pine and balsam crackled and burned, and overhead, often rising in straight walls around us for thousands of feet, were the snow-capped peaks of the Continental Divide. Little by little the circle would grow smaller until at last only a dozen choice spirits remained for a midnight debauch of anecdote.
I have said that the horses ranged wide at night. Occasionally they stayed about the camp. There was one big horse that was belled at night. Now and then toward dawn he brought his ungainly body, his tinkling bell, and his satellites, the other horses, into the quiet streets of tepee town. More than once I have seen an irate female,clad in pajamas and slippers, with flying braids, shooing the horses away from her tent in the gray, cold dawn, and flinging after them things for which she vainly searched the next morning.
Holidays are rare with me. So, on those occasional days when the party rested, I was up and away. I happen to like to fish. The same instinct which sent me as a child on my grandaunt's farm, armed with a carefully bent pin, an old cigar box full of worms, and a piece of twine, to sit for hours over a puddle in a meadow and fish for minnows; the same ambition which took me on flying feet up the hillside to deposit my prey, still wriggling, in a water barrel, where for days I offered it food in the shape of broken crackers, and wept to find eventually its little silver belly upturned to the morning sky—that joy of running water and still pools and fish is still mine.
I cannot cast for trout. I do it, but my technique sets the boat to rocking and fishermen to grinding their teeth.
But I had taken West with me a fly book and a trout rod, and I meant to use them. Now and then, riding along the trail, we met people who drew aside to let us pass, and who held up such trout as I had never dreamed of. Or, standing below a waterfall, would be a silent fisherman too engrossed to more than glance at our procession as it wound along.
But repeated early attempts brought me not a single strike. Once in my ardor I fell into an extremely cold lake and had to be dried out for hours. I grew caustic about the trout. Then somebody, with the interests of the park at stake, said that he would make up a party and see that I caught some trout. He would see that I caught something, he said, if he had to crawl into the lake and bite my hook himself.
So we went to Red Eagle Lake. There are trout in that lake; there are cutthroat trout weighing four pounds. I sat in a boat with a man who drew one in. I saw two college boys in their undergarments standing up to the waist in ice water and getting more large trout than I knew were in the world. I ate trout that other people caught. But they were bitter in my mouth.
I threatened to write up Glacier Park as being a fishing failure. The result was calamitous. Earnest-eyed fishermen spent hours in rowing me about. They imperiled my life, taking me into riffles; they made me brave pneumonia and influenza and divers other troubles in the determination that I should catch a mammoth fish. And nothing happened—nothing whatever. Once a man in the boat hooked a big one and it ran under the boat. I caught the line and jerked the fish into the boat. That was the nearest I came to catching a large cutthroat troutat Red Eagle Lake. Later on—but I haven't come to that yet.
I did catch some fish at Red Eagle. I caught some Dolly Varden and rainbow trout. One of the earnest fishermen led me on foot over several miles of Rocky Mountain scenery, stopping ever and anon to show me where a large bear had just passed. The trail was fresh. Here were the stones he had turned over for ants, the old trunks he had scratched for grubs. Then we arrived at the foot of a waterfall.
What a place it was! The water poured down in clouds of spray on which the afternoon sun painted a rainbow. Tiny water ouzels bathed and played in the pools in shallow rocks. And here, in deep holes, there were trout for the catching.
The fisherman stationed me on a rock, weighted my hook, told me to drop in about forty feet of line, and stand still. They would hook themselves. They did. I caughteight in fifteen minutes. But it was not sport. It was as interesting as fishing for gold-fish in an aquarium.
I lay that night at Red Eagle in a tent on a bed built of young trees driven into the ground and filled with balsam branches. A pack-horse had carried up the blankets and pillows. It was a couch for a queen. In the forest a mountain lion screamed like a woman, and at two o'clock in the morning one of the college boys got up from the cook tent where he was sleeping, and said he thought he would go fishing!
As I look back, that was a strange gathering at the fishing-camp at Red Eagle—so very far from anything approaching civilization. There was a moving-picture man and his outfit, there were the two college men, there was the chief ranger of Glacier Park. There was a young couple from New England who were tramping through the park, carrying their tent and other thingson their backs. They were very young and very enthusiastic. I suspected them of being bride and groom, although I did not know, and the most vivid recollection I have is of seeing the young woman washing their camp-dishes in the cleanest, soapiest dishwater I had seen since I left home. And there was a cook who is a business man in the winter, and who made excellent soda biscuit and talked books to me.
GUNSIGHT LAKE AND MOUNT JACKSON FROM FUSILLADE MOUNTAINGUNSIGHT LAKE AND MOUNT JACKSONFROM FUSILLADE MOUNTAIN
That night, around the camp-fire, there were more stories told. The college boys—"Pie" Way, the Yale pitcher, was one—related many marvelous tales. They said they were true. I hope so. If they were, life is even more interesting and thrilling a thing than I had believed. If they were fiction, they had me beaten at my own game.
The next day was lowering and cold. I spent the morning trying to get fish, and retired sour and disappointed when every one else succeeded and I failed. Sometime I amgoing back to Red Eagle Lake, and I shall take with me a tin of coral-colored salmon eggs—a trick I learned from George Locke on the Flathead River later on. And then I intend to have my photograph taken with strings of fish like bunches of bananas around me.
As the days went on there was a subtle change in the party. Women, who had to be helped into their saddles at the beginning of the trip, swung into them easily. Waistbands were looser, eyes were clearer; we were tanned; we were calm with the large calmness of the great outdoors. And with each succeeding day the feeling of achievement grew. We were doing things and doing them without effort. To some of us the mountains had made their ancient appeal. Never again should we be clear of their call.
To those of us who felt all this inevitably in the future would come times when cities and even civilization itself would cramp.
I have traveled a great deal. The Alps have never held this lure for me. Perhapsit is because these great mountains are my own, in my own country. Cities call—I have heard them. But there is no voice in all the world so insistent to me as the wordless call of the Rockies. I shall go back. Those who go once always hope to go back. The lure of the great free spaces is in their blood.
We crossed many passes. Dawson Pass was the first difficult Rocky Mountain pass I had ever seen. There was a time when I had thought that a mountain pass was a depression. It is not. A mountain pass is a place where the impossible becomes barely possible. It is a place where wild game has, after much striving, discovered that it may get from one mountain valley to another. Along these game trails men have built new paths. Again and again we rode through long green valleys, the trail slowly rising until it had left timber far below. Then at last we confronted a great rock wall, a seeminglyimpassable barrier. Up this, by infinite windings, back and forward went the trail. At the top was the pass.
DAWSON PASSDAWSON PASS
"I'm getting right tired," said Charley Russell, "of standing in a cloud up to my waist."
Each new pass brought a new vista of blue distance, of white peaks. Each presented its own problems of ascent or descent. No two were alike. Mountain-climbing is like marriage. Whatever else it may be, it is always interesting.
There was the day we went over the Cutbank Pass, with instructions to hold our horses' manes so that our saddles would not slip back. I shall never forget my joy at reaching the summit and the horror that followed when I found I was on a rocky wall about twenty feet wide which dropped a half-mile straight down on the other side to a perfectly good blue lake. There was Triple Divide. There was the Piegan Pass, where,having left the party for a time, I rode back to them on the pack-horse I have mentioned before, with my left foot dangling over eternity.
Triple Divide. The trail had just been completed, and ours was the first party after the trail-makers. I had expected to be the first woman on the top of Triple Divide. But when I arrived, panting and breathless and full of the exaltation of the moment, two girls were already there sitting on a rock. I shall not soon recover from the indignant surprise of that moment. Perhaps they never knew that they had taken the laurel wreath from my brow.
Triple Divide is really the culminating point of the continent. It is called Triple Divide because water flows from it into the Gulf of Mexico, into the Pacific Ocean, and into Hudson Bay.
PARTY CROSSING TRIPLE DIVIDEPARTY CROSSING TRIPLE DIVIDE
There was the day when, on our way to Gunsight, we rode for hours along a trailthat heavy rains had turned into black swamp. The horses struggled, constantly mired. It was the hardest day of the trip, not because of the distance, which was only thirty-five miles, but on account of the constant rocking in the saddle as our horses wallowed out of one "jack pot" into another—jack pots, I presume, because they are easy to get into and hard to get out of!
There was some grunting when at the end of that day we fell out of our saddles, but no complaining. That night, for the first time, the Eaton party slept under a roof at the Gunsight Chalet, on the shores of a blue lake. The Blackfoot Glacier was almost overhead. It was the end of a hot July, but we gathered around a fire that evening, and crawled in under heavy blankets to the quick sleep of fatigue.
One more pass, and we should be across the Rockies and moving down the Pacific Slope. The moon came up that night andshone on the ice-caps of the mountains all around us, on the glacier, on the Gunsight itself, appropriately if not beautifully named. As far up the mountain-side as the glacier our tired horses ranged for grass, and the tiny fire of the herder made a red glow that disappeared as the night mist closed down.
No "Come and get it" the next morning, but a good breakfast, nevertheless: a frosty morning, with the sun out, and the moving-picture man gone ahead to catch us as we climbed. There was another photographer who had joined the party. He had been up at dawn, on the chance of snapping a goat or two.
Late the next night, when after a hard day's ride we had reached civilization again at Lake Macdonald, and had dined and rested, the ambitious young man limped into the hotel on foot. For more than twenty miles he had tramped, carrying aheavy plate camera and extra plates. The zeal of the artist had made him careless. He left his horse untied, and it promptly followed the others.
Of the last part of that trip of his afoot I do not care to think. The trail, having scaled great heights, below the Sperry Glacier dropped sharply into the dense forest of the Pacific Slope. There were bears there. We saw seven at one time the next day, six black and one silver tip, on the very trail he had covered.
But he got the picture.
Once over the crest of the Gunsight, there was a change in the air. It blew about us, warm with the heat it had gathered in the South Pacific. Such animal life as the altitude permitted was out, basking in the sun. There were still snow-fields in the shadows, but they were not so numerous. The rocks threw back the sun-rays on to our burned faces. The trail dipped, climbed, dippedagain. Here on a ledge was a cry, "Pack-train coming," and we halted to let pass by a train of men on horseback and of laden little burros, tidy and strong.
Climbing again, the trail was lost in the shale, and arrows painted on the rocks gave us the direction. Two lakes lay together below. One appeared from our elevation rather higher than the other. Rather higher! The rock wall that separated them was fourteen hundred feet high, and vertical.
As we began the last descent, the party grew silent. It was the last leg of the journey. A day or so more and we should be scattered over the continent on whose spine we were so incontinently tramping. Back to civilization, to porcelain bathtubs and course dinners and facial massage, to stays and skirts, to roofs and servants and the vast impedimenta of living.
MOUNTAIN GOAT AND KID ON PTARMIGAN PASS (The white objects about two thirds of the way down)MOUNTAIN GOAT AND KID ON PTARMIGAN PASS(The white objects about two thirds of the way down)Copyright, A. J. Baker, Kalispell, Montana
Sperry Chalet and luncheon. No more the ham and coffee over a wood fire, the cuttingof much bread on a flat stone. Here were tables, chairs, and linen. Alas, there was a waitress who crumbed the table and brought in dessert.
Back, indeed, with a vengeance. But only to the ways of civilization itself. All afternoon we went on, descending always, through the outriders of the forest to the forest itself. Dusk came, dusk in the woods, with strange soft paddings of unseen feet, with a gray light half-religious, half-faëry, that only those who penetrate to the hearts of great forests can know.
"It makes me think of death," some one said in a low tone. "Just a great shadow, no color. Nothing real. And silence, and infinite distance."
Then Lake Macdonald. We burst out of the forest on a run. The horses had known, by the queer instinct of horses, that just ahead would be oats and a corral and grass for the eating. They broke into a canter.The various things we had hung to ourselves during the long, slow progress over the mountain rattled and banged. We hung on in a kind of mad exultation. We had done it. We had crossed the Continental Divide, the Lewis Overthrust, whatever geographers choose to call it.
The trail led past a corral, past a vegetable garden such as our Eastern eyes had seldom seen. Under trees, around a corner at a gallop. Then the Glacier Hotel at Lake Macdonald, generally known as "Lewis's."
Soft winds from the Pacific blew across Lake Macdonald and warmed us. Great strawberries were ripening in the garden. Our horses got oats, all they could eat. In a pool in front of the hotel lazy trout drifted about.
There was good food. Again there were people dressed in civilized raiment, people who looked at us and our shabby riding-clotheswith a disdain not unmixed with awe. There was fox-trotting and one-stepping, in riding-boots, with an orchestra. And that night at Lewis's they gave Howard Eaton a potlatch.
A potlatch is an Indian party. An Indian's idea of a party is to give away everything he possesses and then start all over again. That is one reason why our Indians are so poor to-day. We sat in a great lobby hung with Indian trophies and bearskins, sat in a circle with Howard Eaton in the center. There were a few speeches and some anecdotes. Then the potlatch went on.
There were hot fried trout, sandwiches, and chips of dried meat—buffalo and deer, I believe. There was beer. After that came the gifts. Everybody got something. Howard Eaton received a waistcoat made of spotted hide, and the women got necklaces of Indian beads. It was extraordinary,hospitable, lavish, and—Western. To have a party and receive gifts is one thing, but to have a party so you can give away things is another.
The visit to the executive department of the park was disappointing. I found the superintendent's office in a two-room frame shack; the Government warehouse an old barn: five miles from a railroad, too. That's management for you! Why, O gentlemen at Washington who arrange these things, why not at Belton, on the railroad, five miles away? The park extends to Belton.
Inadequate appropriations, the necessity for putting the entire heavy machinery of the Government in motion for the long-distance control of the park, poor automobile roads, and insufficient rangers—these are the black marks against us in Glacier Park. On every hand the enthusiasm of a most efficient superintendent must contendwith these things. That marvels of trail-making and road-building in this vast domain have been done with so little money and encouragement is due, primarily, to the faith the men closely connected with the park have had in its future.
Doubtless all these things will remedy themselves in time. But they make the immediate problems of the park difficult to cope with. The chief ranger must live where he can. No building erected by the superintendent must cost over one thousand dollars. It is not easy in that country of cheap wood and dear labor to build a house for one thousand dollars.
And there is always the difficulty of long-distance supervision. In 1914 the former Superintendent of National Parks, Mr. Daniels, spent a week in Glacier Park. Last year he was at the entrance, Glacier Park Station, for a half a day, and not in the park at all.
There are several parks, and it is easy to believe that Mr. Daniels found it difficult to visit them all. But the method must be wrong. It is Washington that must order and pay for each bit of new trail- and road-building. If Washington does not come to the park, the park cannot go to Washington. There is something lacking in efficiency in a system which depends on across-the-continent supervision.
This year I hope the Superintendent of National Parks will go out to Glacier Park, not by automobile, but on a horse, and ride over his great domain. Then I hope he will go back to Washington and arrange for enough rangers to make the park safe and to save its timber from forest fires. Yellowstone Park has soldiers. It is not soldiers, but woodsmen, trail-riders, rangers, that are needed. Canada, in this same country, has her Northwest Mounted Police.
They want real men out there. But themountains take care of that. The weaklings don't stick. From just north of Glacier Park went a band of twenty-five cavalrymen that I met last year in Flanders. They were rangers: mountain riders. For weeks during the German invasion they rode on skirmish duty between the advancing Germans and the retiring armies. They became famous. Where there were reckless courage and fine horsemanship needed, those men were sent.
If we ever have a war, we shall draw hard on the West for cavalry. Our national parks should be able to send out trained skirmishers. Under present conditions Glacier Park could furnish about a dozen.
And, now that we are criticizing,—every one may criticize the Government: it is the English blood in us,—why is it that, with the most poetic nomenclature in the world,—the Indian,—one by one the historic names of peaks, lakes, and rivers of GlacierPark are being replaced by the names of obscure Government officials, professors in small universities, unimportant people who go out there to the West and memorialize themselves on Government maps? Each year sees some new absurdity. What names in the world are more beautiful than Going-to-the-Sun and Rising-Wolf? Here are Almost-a-Dog Mountain, Two-Medicine Lake, Red Eagle—a few that have survived.
UPPER TWO MEDICINE LAKEUPPER TWO MEDICINE LAKE
Every peak, every butte, every river and lake of this country has been named by the Indians. The names are beautiful and romantic. To preserve them in a Government reservation is almost the only way of preserving them at all. What has happened? Look over the map of Glacier Park. The Indian names have been done away with. Majestic peaks, towering buttes are being given names like this: Haystack Butte, Trapper Peak, Huckleberry Mountain, the Guard House, the Garden Wall. One of themost wonderful things in the Rocky Mountains is this Garden Wall. I wish I knew what the Indians called it. Then there are Iceberg Lake, Florence Falls, Twin Lakes, Gunsight Mountain, Split Mountain, Surprise Pass, Peril Peak,—that last was a dandy! Alliterative!—Church Butte, Statuary Mountain, Buttercup Park. Can you imagine the inspiration of the man who found some flowery meadow between granite crags and took away from it its Indian name and called it Buttercup Park?
The Blackfeet are the aristocrats among American Indians. They were the buffalo hunters, and this great region was once theirs. To the mountains and lakes of what is now Glacier Park, they attached their legends, which are their literature.
The white man came, and not content with eliminating the Indians, he went further and wiped out their history. Any Government official, if he so desires, any white manseeking perpetuation on the map of his country, may fasten his name to a mountain and go down in the school geographies. It has been done again and again. It is being done now. And the lover of the old names stands helpless and aghast.
Is there no way to stop this vandalism? Year after year goes by, and just as the people connected with the park are beginning to learn new names for the peaks, they are again rechristened. There must be seven Goat Mountains. Here and there is a peak, like Reynolds Peak or Grinnell Mountain, and some others, properly named for men intimately associated with the region. But Reynolds's Indian name was Death-on-the-Trail. When you have seen the mountain you can well believe that Death-on-the-Trail would fit it well.
There are many others. Take an old peak that the Indians have known as Old-Man-of-the-Winds or Red-Top Plume and call itMount Thompson or Mount Morgan or Mount Pinchot or Mount Oberlin—for Oberlin College, presumably—or Mount Pollack—after the Wheeling stogie, I suppose!
There is hardly a name in the telephone directory that is not fastened to some wonderful peak in this garden spot of ours. Not very long ago I got a letter—a pathetic letter. It said that a college professor from an Eastern college had been out there this summer and insisted that one of the peaks be named for him and one for his daughter. It was done.
Here, then, the Government has done a splendid thing and done it none too well. It has preserved for the people of the United States and for all the world a scenic spot so beautiful and so impressive that I have not even attempted to describe it. It is not possible. But it has failed to open up the park properly. It has been niggardly in appropriation.It has allowed its geographers to take away the original Indian names of this home of the Blackfeet and so destroy the last trace of a vanishing race.
Were it not for the Great Northern Railway, travel through Glacier Park would be practically impossible. Probably the Great Northern was not entirely altruistic, and yet I believe that Mr. Louis Warren Hill, known always as "Louie" Hill, has had an ideal and followed it—followed it with an enthusiasm that is contagious. And with an inspiring faith.
The Great Northern has built huge hotels in three places and at a dozen other locations has built groups of log houses, Swiss fashion, so that it is possible to follow the trails by day and to be comfortably housed and fed each night.
These hotels, built by the Great Northern, are now owned and controlled by the Glacier Park Hotel Company.
At the entrance to the park is the Glacier Park Hotel that cost half a million dollars and is almost as large as the National Capitol at Washington. Like all the hotels and chalets in the park, it is constructed largely of the huge trunks of the trees of the Northwest. The Indians call the Glacier Park Hotel the "Great Log Lodge." There is everything from a store to a swimming-pool.
Fifty miles away in the very heart of the park there is the new Many Glaciers Hotel. It also cost a half-million dollars. There is an automobile road leading to Many Glaciers.
VIEW FROM DINING-ROOM, MANY-GLACIER HOTELVIEW FROM DINING-ROOM, MANY-GLACIER HOTEL
The chalet system, also built by the Great Northern, has done more than anything else to make the park possible for tourists. Automobile roads and trails alike touch the chalets, and, although I am firm in my conviction that it is impossible to see the park properly from an automobile, I realize thatthere are many who will not take the more arduous and sportsmanly method. For them, then, a short trip of twelve or fifteen miles each day takes them from chalet to chalet. There are chalets at Two-Medicine Lake, at Cutbank Canyon, at Going-to-the-Sun, at St. Mary's Lake, at Gunsight Pass, at the Sperry Glacier, at Granite Park, and at Belton.
There are inclusive and very moderate rates for various tours to take up a certain number of days. A saddle-horse costs two dollars a day; a pack-horse two dollars a day; a guide, who will furnish his own horse and board himself, five dollars a day.
There are rates from chalet to chalet—including a night's lodging in comfortable beds, morning breakfast, evening dinner, and a carefully packed luncheon—that are astonishingly cheap. For those who wish to go even more simply, there are the tepee camps. There are three of these,at St. Mary's, Going-to-the-Sun, and Many Glaciers. They comprise a number of Indian tepees grouped about a central cabin which includes a kitchen provided with a range and cooking utensils. The tepees themselves are wooden-floored and each is equipped with two single cot beds and bedding. At all of the tepee camps the charge for lodging is fifty cents per bed per night; the use of the range and cooking utensils is free. At the chalets near by, hikers may purchase food at very reasonable prices.
It is, you see, possible to go through Glacier Park without Howard Eaton. It is even safe, and, to those who have never known Howard, highly satisfactory. But there will be something missing—that curious thing called personality, which could take forty-two entirely different, blasé, feeble-muscled, uncertain, and effete Easterners and mould them in a few days into a homogeneous whole: that took excursionistsand made them philosophers and sportsmen.
CUT BANK CHALETS ON CUT BANK RIVERCUT BANK CHALETS ON CUT BANK RIVERCopyright, 1912, Kiser Photo Co.
He was hunting in Arizona later on. The party ate venison, duck, and mountain lion—which tastes like veal.
"We have had several fights with grizzlies," he wrote. "They are so strong that they have whipped the hounds and carved them up some in each fight. Country pretty rough and considerable fallen timber, which delays us. I was kicked the other day by a horse when almost up to a bear. The boys thought I had a broken leg or two, so they let the bear escape."
He was sending a rider off to the nearest post-office and wondering what was doing in the war.
"Has Port Arthur fallen yet?" he inquired whimsically.
A hunter who puts the greenest tenderfoot at ease and teaches him without apparently teaching at all; a host whose firstthought is always for his guests; a calm-faced man with twinkling blue eyes, who is proud of his "boys" and his friends all over the world—that is Howard Eaton as nearly as he can be put on paper.
Wherever he is when he reads this, hunting in Arizona or the Jackson Hole country, or snowed in at the ranch at Wolf, I hope he will forgive me for putting him into print, in memory of those days when the entire forty-two of us followed him, like the tail of a kite, across the Great Divide.
It was the next day that I made my first close acquaintance with bears. There are many bears in Glacier Park. Firearms are forbidden, of course, and the rangers kill them only in case of trouble. Naturally, so protected, they are increasing rapidly. They find good forage where horses would starve. Mr. Ralston, the park supervisor, saw a she bear with three cubs last spring. There are no tame bears, as in the Yellowstone.
There are plenty of animals. Some fifty moose graze along the Flathead. Beavers have colonies in many of the valleys and industriously build dams that deepen the fords. I remember one place along the Cutbank Trail where the first horses found themselves above the belly in water andconfronting a perpendicular bank up which one or two scrambled as best they could. The rest turned and, riding in the stream for a half-mile détour, made the trail again. That was the work of beavers.
There are coyotes a-plenty. Because they kill the deer and elk, the rangers poison them in the winter with strychnine. A few mountain lions remain. As one can make a whole night hideous, a few are sufficient.
There is something particularly interesting about a bear. Perhaps it is because he can climb a tree. In other words, ordinary subterfuges do not go with him. Reports vary—he is a fighter; he is a craven; the fact being, of course, that he is, like all wild animals and most humans, a bit of each.
The trip was over, and I had seen but one bear. At Lewis's that last Sunday I voiced my disappointment. Soon after I received word quietly that Frank Higgins, guide and companion on many hunting trips to StewartEdward White and other hunters, had offered to show me some bears.
He had horses saddled under a tree when I went back, and two men, one of them a Chicago newspaper artist, were with him. We mounted and rode up the trail back of the hotel.
I was dubious. For days I had tried to see bears and failed, and now to have them offered with certainty by Mr. Higgins made me skeptical. I had an idea that under his tall impassiveness he was having a little fun at my expense. He was not. We went out into the forest, to where the hotel dumps its garbage. That was rather a blow, at first. And there were no bears. Only a great silence and a considerable stench.
We got off our horses, tied them, and sat down on a log. Almost immediately there was a distant crackling of branches.
"One coming now," said Frank Higgins. "Just sit quiet."
That first bear, however, was nervous. He circled around us. I set my camera for one hundred feet, and waited. But the creature, a big black, was shy. He refused to come out. Mr. Higgins went after him. He snarled. I looked after Mr. Higgins with a new respect, and the Chicago newspaper man said he was perfectly satisfied with the bear where he was, and that enough was enough.
The bear suddenly took to a tree, climbing like a cat. He looked about the size of a grand piano. Urged by Mr. Higgins, we approached the tree. Finally we stood directly beneath. He growled—the bear, of course, not Frank Higgins. But my courage was rising. Wild bear he was, but he was a craven. I moved up the focus of my camera and took his picture. We left him there and went back to the log. All at once there were bears in every direction, six in all. I moved my camera to thirty feet and snappedanother. They circled about, heads turned toward us. Now and then they stood up to see us better. We were between them and supper.
LUNCHEON ON FLATHEAD RIVER TRIPLUNCHEON ON FLATHEAD RIVER TRIP