A Daughter of the Middle Border Part 6

Occasionally one of them, tortured by flies, dropped to earth, and rolled and tore the sod, till a dome of dust arose and hid him. Out of this gray curtain he suddenly reappeared, dark and savage, like a dun rock emerging from mist. One furious giant, moving with curling upraised tail, challenged to universal combat, whilst all his rivals gave way, reluctant, resentful, yet afraid. The rumps of some of the veterans were as bare of hair as the loins of lions, but their enormous shoulders bulked into deformity by reason of a dense mane. They moved like elephants--clumsy, enormous, distorted, yet with astonishing celerity.

It was worth a long journey to stand thus and watch that small band of bison, representatives of a race whose myriads once covered all America, for though less than two hundred in number, they were feeding and warring precisely as their ancestors had fed and warred for a million years. Small wonder that the red men believe the white invader must have used some evil medicine, some magic power in sweeping these majestic creatures from the earth. Once they covered the hills like a robe of brown, now only a few small bands are left to perpetuate the habits and the customs of the past.

As we watched, they fed, fought, rose up and lay down in calm disdain of our presence. It was as if, un.o.bserved, and yet close beside them, we were studying the denizens of a small corner of aboriginal America, America in pre-Columbian times. Reluctantly, slowly we turned and rode away, back to our tent, back to the railway and the present day.

On our return to Missoula we found the town aflame with a report that a steamer had just landed at Seattle, bringing from Alaska nearly three million dollars in gold-dust, and that the miners who owned the treasure had said, "We dug it from the valley of the Yukon, at a point called the Klondike. A thousand miles from anywhere. The Yukon is four thousand miles long, and flows north, so that the lower half freezes solid early in the fall, and to cross overland from Skagway--the way we came out--means weeks of travel. It is the greatest gold camp in the world but no one can go in now. Everybody must wait till next June."

It was well that this warning was plainly uttered, for the adventurous spirits of Montana instantly took fire. Nothing else was talked of by the men on the street and in the trains. Even my brother said, "I wish I could go."

"But you can't," I argued. "It is time you started for New York. Herne will drop you if you don't turn up for rehearsal in September."

Reluctantly agreeing to this, he turned his face toward the East whilst I kept on toward Seattle, to visit my cla.s.smate Burton Babc.o.c.k, who was living in a village on Puget Sound.

The coast towns were humming with mining news and mining plans. The word "Klondike" blazed out on banners, on shop windows and on brick walls.

Alert and thrifty merchants at once began to advertise Klondike shoes, Klondike coats, Klondike camp goods. Hundreds of Klondike exploring companies were being organized. In imagination each shop-keeper saw the gold seekers of the world in line of march, their faces set toward Seattle and the Sound. Every sign indicated a boom.

This swift leaping to grasp an opportunity was characteristically American, and I would have gladly taken part in the play, but alas! my Grant history was still unfinished, and I had already overstayed my vacation limit. I should have returned at once, but my friend Babc.o.c.k was expecting me to visit him, and this I did.

Anacortes (once a port of vast pretentions), was, at this time, a boom-town in decay, and Burton whom I had not seen for ten years, seemed equally forlorn. After trying his hand at several professions, he had finally drifted to this place, and was living alone in a rude cabin, camping like a woodsman. Being without special training in any trade, he had fallen into compet.i.tion with the lowest kind of unskilled labor.

Like my Uncle David, another unsuccessful explorer, he had grown old before his time, and for a few minutes I could detect in him nothing of the lithe youth I had known at school on the Iowa prairie twenty years before. s.h.a.ggy of beard, wrinkled and bent he seemed already an old man.

By severest toil in the mills and in the forest he had become the owner of two small houses on a ragged street--these and a timber claim on the Skagit River formed his entire fortune.

Though careless of dress and hard of hand, his speech remained that of the thinker, and much of his reading was still along high, philosophical lines. He had been a singular youth, and he had developed into a still more singular man. With an instinctive love of the forest, he had become a daring and experienced mountaineer. As he described to me his solitary trips over the high Cascades I was reminded of John Muir, for he, too, often spent weeks in the high peaks above his claim with only such outfit as he could carry on his back.

"What do you do it for?" I asked. "Are you gold-hunting?"

With a soft chuckle he answered, "Oh, no; I do it just for the fun of it. I love to move around up there, alone, above timber line. It's beautiful up there."

Naturally, I recalled the scenes of our boyhood. I spoke of the Burr Oak Lyceums, of our life at the Osage Seminary, and of the boys and girls we had loved, but he was not disposed, at the moment, to dwell on them or on the past. His heart (I soon discovered) was aflame with desire to join the rush of gold-seekers. "I wish you would grubstake me," he timidly suggested. "I'd like to try my hand at digging gold in the Klondike."

"It's too late in the season," I replied. "Wait till spring. Wait till I finish my history of Grant and I'll go in with you."

With this arrangement (which on my part was more than half a jest) I left him and started homeward by way of Lake MacDonald, the Blackfoot Reservation and Fort Benton, my mind teeming with subjects for poems, short stories and novels. My vacation was over. Aspiring vaguely to qualify as the fictionist of this region, I was eager to be at work.

Here was my next and larger field. As my neighbors in Iowa and Dakota were moving on into these more splendid s.p.a.ces, so now I resolved to follow them and be their chronicler.

This trip completed my conversion. I resolved to preempt a place in the history of the great Northwest which was at once a wilderness and a cosmopolis, for in it I found men and women from many lands, drawn to the mountains in search of health, or recreation, or gold. I perceived that almost any character I could imagine could be verified in this amazing mixture. I began to sketch novels which would have been false in Wisconsin or Iowa. With a sense of elation, of freedom, I decided to swing out into the wider air of Colorado and Montana.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Telegraph Trail

The writing of the last half of my Grant biography demanded a careful study of war records, therefore in the autumn of '97 I took lodgings in Washington, and settled to the task of reading my way through the intricacies of the Grant Administrations. Until this work was completed I could not make another trip to the Northwest.

The new Congressional Library now became my grandiose work-shop. All through the winter from nine till twelve in the morning and from two till six in the afternoon, I sat at a big table in a special room, turning the pages of musty books and yellowed newspapers, or dictating to a stenographer the story of the Reconstruction Period as it unfolded under my eyes. I was for the time entirely the historian, with little time to dream of the fictive material with which my memory was filled.

I find this significant note in my diary. "My Grant life is now so nearly complete that I feel free to begin a work which I have long meditated. I began to dictate, to-day, the story of my life as boy and man in the West. In view of my approaching perilous trip into the North I want to leave a fairly accurate chronicle of what I saw and what I did on the Middle Border. The truth is, with all my trailing about in the Rocky Mountains I have never been in a satisfying wilderness. It is impossible, even in Wyoming, to get fifty miles from settlement. I long to undertake a journey which demands hardihood, and so, after careful investigation, I have decided to go into the Yukon Valley by pack train over the British Columbian Mountains, a route which offers a fine and characteristic New World adventure."

To prepare myself for this expedition I ran up to Ottawa in February to study maps and to talk with Canadian officials concerning the various trails which were being surveyed and blazed. "No one knows much about that country," said Dawson with a smile.

I returned to Washington quite determined on going to Teslin Lake over a path which followed an abandoned telegraph survey from Quesnelle on the Fraser River to the Stickeen, a distance estimated at about eight hundred miles, and I quote these lines as indicating my mind at the time:

The way is long and cold and lone-- But I go!

It leads where pines forever moan Their weight of snow-- But I go!

There are voices in the wind which call There are shapes which beckon to the plain I must journey where the peaks are tall, And lonely herons clamor in the rain.

One of my most valued friends in Washington at this time was young Theodore Roosevelt, who had resigned his position as Police Commissioner in New York City to become a.s.sistant Secretary of the Navy. His life on a Dakota ranch had not only filled him with a love for western trails and sympathy with western men, but had created in him a special interest in western writers. No doubt it was this regard for the historians of the West which led him to invite me to his house; for during the winter I occasionally lunched or dined with him. He also gave me the run of his office, and there I sometimes saw him in action, steering the department toward efficiency.

Though nominally a.s.sistant Secretary he was in fact the Head of the Navy, boldly pushing plans to increase its fighting power. This I know, for one day as I sat in his office I heard him giving orders for gun practice and discussing the higher armament of certain ships. I remember his words as he showed me a sheet on which was indicated the relative strength of the world's navies. "We must raise all our guns to a higher power," he said with characteristic emphasis.

John Hay, Senator Lodge, Major Powell and Edward Eggleston were among my most distinguished hosts during this winter and I have many pleasant memories of these highly distinctive personalities. Major Powell appealed to me with especial power by reason of his heroic past. He had been an engineer under Grant at Vicksburg and was very helpful to me in stating the methods of the siege, but his experiences after the war were still more romantic. Though a small man and with but one arm, he had nevertheless led a fleet of canoes through the Grand Canon of the Colorado--the first successful attempt at navigating that savage and sullen river, and his laconic account of it enormously impressed me. He was, at this time, the well-known head of the Ethnological Bureau, and I frequently saw him at the Cosmos Club, grouped with Langley, Merriam, Howard and other of my scientific friends. He was a somber, silent, and rather unkempt figure, with the look of a dreaming lion on his face. It was hard to relate him with the man who had conquered the Grand Canon of the Colorado.

His direct ant.i.thesis was Edward Eggleston, whose residence was a small brick house just back of the Congressional Library. Eggleston, humorous, ready of speech, was usually surrounded by an attentive circle of delighted listeners and I often drew near to share his monologue. He was a handsome man, tall and shapely with abundant gray hair and a full beard, and was especially learned in American early history. "Edward loves to monologue," his friends smilingly said as if in criticism, but to me his talk was always interesting.

We became friends on the basis of a common love for the Western prairie, which he, as a "circuit rider" in Minnesota had minutely explored. I told him, gladly and in some detail, of my first reading of _The Hoosier School-master_, and in return for my interest he wrote a full page of explanation on the fly leaf of a copy which I still own and value highly, for I regard him now, as I did then, as one of the brave pioneers of distinctive Middle Border fiction.

Roosevelt considered me something of a Populist, (as I was), and I well remember a dinner in Senator Lodge's house where he and Henry Adams heckled me for an hour or more in order to obtain a statement of what I thought "ailed" Kansas, Nebraska and Dakota. They all held the notion that I understood these farmer folk well enough to reflect their secret antagonisms, which I certainly did. I recall getting pretty hot in my plea, but Roosevelt seemed rather proud of me as I warmly defended my former neighbor. "The man on the rented farm who is raising corn at fifteen cents per bushel to pay interest on a mortgage is apt to be bitter," I argued.

However, this evening was an exception. Generally we talked of the West, of cattle ranching, of trailing and of the splendid types of pioneers who were about to vanish from the earth. One night as we sat at dinner in his house, he suddenly leaned back in his chair and said with a smile "I can't tell you how I enjoy having a man at my table who knows the difference between a _parfleche_ and an _aparejo_."

Although I loved the trail I had given up shooting. I no longer carried a gun even in the hills--although, I will admit, I permitted my companions to do so. Roosevelt differed from me in this. He loved "the song of the bullet." "It gives point and significance to the trail," he explained.

I recall quoting to him one of his own vividly beautiful descriptions of dawn among the hills, a story which led up to the stalking and the death of a n.o.ble elk. "It was fine, all fine and true and poetic," I declared, "but I should have listened with grat.i.tude to the voice of the elk and watched him go his appointed way in peace."

"I understand your position perfectly," he replied, "but it is illogical. You must remember every wild animal dies a violent death. Elk and deer and pheasants are periodically destroyed by snows and storms of sleet--and what about the butcher killing lambs and chickens for your table? I notice you accept my roast duck."

He was greatly interested in my proposed trip into the Yukon. "By George, I wish I could go with you," he said, and I had no doubt of his sincerity. Then his tone changed. "We are in for trouble with Spain and I must be on the job."

To this I replied, "If I really knew that war was coming, I'd give up my trip, but I can't believe the Spaniards intend to fight, and this is my last and best chance to see the Northwest."

In my notebook I find this entry: "Jan., 1898. Dined again last night with Theodore Roosevelt, a.s.sistant Secretary of the Navy, a man who is likely to be much in the public eye during his life. A man of great energy, of n.o.ble impulses, and of undoubted ability."

I do not put this forward as evidence of singular perception on my part, for I imagine thousands were saying precisely the same thing. I merely include it to prove that I was not entirely lacking in penetration.

Henry B. Fuller, who came along one day in January, proved a joy and comfort to me. His att.i.tude toward Washington amused me. a.s.suming the air of a Cook tourist, he methodically, and meticulously explored the city, bringing to me each night a detailed report of what he had seen.

His concise, humorous and self-derisive comment was literature of a most delightful quality, and I repeatedly urged him to write of the capital as he talked of it to me, but he professed to have lost his desire to write, and though I did not believe this, I hated to hear him say it, for I valued his satiric humor and his wide knowledge of life.

He was amazed when I told him of my plan to start, in April, for the Yukon, and in answer to his question I said, "I need an expedition of heroic sort to complete my education, and to wash the library dust out of my brain."

In response to a cordial note, I called upon John Hay one morning. He received me in a little room off the main hall of his house, whose s.p.a.ciousness made him seem diminutive. He struck me as a dapper man, noticeably, but not offensively, self-satisfied. His fine black beard was streaked with white, but his complexion was youthfully clear. Though undersized he was compact and st.u.r.dy, and his voice was crisp, musical, and decisive.