III. TAKING THE ROAD
Wepacked our knapsacks at Springfield, and stowed away blankets and socks, a coffee-pot, and a frying-pan. We bought at a ten-cent store knife and fork and spoon, skillet, towels which we sewed into sacks, mugs, and what was labelled “The Mystic Mit—the greatest discovery since soap for cleaning pots and pans.” Lindsay had hobnails put in his old boots and bought a handsome pair of corduroy breeches, which, together with his old black hat, made him look like a tramping violinist. Springfieldbade us farewell. We were one night in the train to Chicago and travelled all day north to St. Paul. We were then two nights and a day crossing the great land ocean of Minnesota, North Dakota, and eastern Montana—what was once an unending stage-coach trail to the West.
“This is what I like,” said Lindsay—“the prairie to the horizon, no fences, no stone walls, as in New England. It is all broad and unlimited; that is why since the days of Andrew Jackson all the great politicians have come from the West—the unfenced West. I’d like to put all the Boston and New York people out here on the plains and let the plain men run the East.”
To me, however, it looked a land of endless toil as I saw it from train windows, and I thought of the toiling pioneers and the Russians in the Dakotas, the Swedes and the Germans content to live and toil and be swallowed up at last by the distances and the primitive. European life-rivers have flowed into these deserts and made them what they are. One day their children perhaps will have a Western consciousness, an American consciousness.
Westepped off the train at Glacier Park Station. Some dozen women in khaki riding breeches were waiting on the platform, and six or seven people got out from the tourist and Pullman cars to cross to the great log-built hotel opposite. Then the train started again and toiled onwards to the heights of the divide, whence, as Kipling put it:
They ride the iron stallions down to drink;To the canyons and the waters of the West.
They ride the iron stallions down to drink;To the canyons and the waters of the West.
They ride the iron stallions down to drink;
To the canyons and the waters of the West.
We spent a night at the hotel and were much amused by the idea of a room with a bath in such a place, and by the notice that you could have your linen laundered in twenty-four hours. There was dancing in the evening in an immense hall lit by red Chinese lanterns and adorned by bear-skins and Alaskan ornaments—a fair company of people, too, though mostly from the West.
We, however, were eager for the road, and set out next morning with blankets and provisions and steered a north-westerly or west by north-westerly course by our compasses, abjuring trails and guides. Our idea was to obtain a cross-section view of the Rockies in their most primitive state unguided by convention. Wehoped to realise something of what America was like for at least a hundred years after Columbus discovered it. We were headed for the virgin land.
How quickly did we leave that hotel with its “stopping over” crowd behind! In an hour we were in the deep silence of the mountains encompassed on each side by exuberant pink larkspurs and blanket flowers and red paint-brush. We clambered upward, ever upward, through fresh, young, chattering aspens and then green tangled pinewood—and then also through old dead forests lying in black confusion, uprooted, snapped, stricken, in heaps like the woods of the Somme Valley. Then we walked through new dead forests, burned only last year, and then through brown scorched forests that did not burn, but died merely of the great heat which their neighbours’ burning had caused.
We stepped from log to log and tree to tree, making for the open and the light, with the gaiety of troubadours, and Lindsay seemed romantically happy. I also was happy, and thought of the happy days before the war, when I tramped in this fashion back and forth across the Caucasus Mountains and along hundreds ofmiles of Black Sea shore. It was pure joy to light the first fire and fry our bacon and make our coffee in the full effulgence of the sun.
Glacier National Park, which we passed through first, is a preserve. It is God’s holy mountain on which no man may shoot. By the laws you are not allowed even to frighten a bird. You may not carry firearms into the region. We were therefore not very agreeably surprised to hear in the thickets the whiz-ping of a gun which some Indians were using. Lindsay nearly got a shot in the head as he got up from luncheon. The fact is, Glacier adjoins the Blackfeet Indian reservation, and the Indians are all hunters by instinct and preference. It is difficult to restrain them. They are a gay, independent, and wild lot. We saw a number of these men with an array of plumes round their heads, steel padlocks in their ears for ear-rings, cow-bells on their sleeves, and chequer-work embroidery on their gay vests and cloaks. They had with them their squaws, fat and handsome women, all swollen out and weather-beaten like fishwives, with high cheek-bones and red-ochre faces.They danced together and skirled in wild Asiatic strains while four intent ruffians in ordinary attire beat upon one small drum with sticks. I seemed to recognise in them some sort of acquaintance to my old friends, the nomads of Central Asia, the Kirghiz—the same sort of faces and the same way of being musical. I have had a similar musical entertainment during weeks and months tramping in Turkestan and Seven Rivers Land. Both Kirghiz and Indians are dying out and both are red. I was struck by the feminine expression of the faces of the Indians and the absence of hair on their lips and chins—as if their males were not male.
However, we soon left the Blackfeet behind, and came out of their forests, and in late afternoon stood high above the lovely length of water which we identified as Medicine Lake.
The Indians are dancing as we enter their paradise,Our hearts are dancing too.We love the Indians because they never bent their backsTo slavery,To civilisation,To office-desks.What matter if they are dying out,They have at least lived once.
The Indians are dancing as we enter their paradise,Our hearts are dancing too.We love the Indians because they never bent their backsTo slavery,To civilisation,To office-desks.What matter if they are dying out,They have at least lived once.
The Indians are dancing as we enter their paradise,
Our hearts are dancing too.
We love the Indians because they never bent their backs
To slavery,
To civilisation,
To office-desks.
What matter if they are dying out,
They have at least lived once.