The River and I Part 12

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 us of one discomfort by the subst.i.tution 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 when he 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 not buy. 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 constructed houses 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! G.o.d grant that no man in need may ever look wistfully at your house or at mine, and pa.s.s 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 book _On 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 the shallows 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 I had clambered up the forward companionway and stood dripping before the captain of the steamer _Expansion_. 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. The _Expansion_ was 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 flour and 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 brief interval 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 gra.s.s grew there, and blue waxen flowers struggled up amid the rubble of what were once defiant bastions. I lay down in the luxuriant gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed before me--the unwritten Iliad of a stronghold forgotten.

But the vision wouldn't come. The river wind moaned through the gra.s.ses.

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 had happened, and where the gra.s.s grew so very tall now.

I gathered blue flowers and quoted, with a slight change, the lines of Stevenson:

But ah, how deep the gra.s.s Along the battlefield!

CHAPTER VIII

DOWN FROM THE YELLOWSTONE

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 at Kansis City, it is the Yellowstone that you behold!

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE HURRICANE DECK OF THE "EXPANSION"; CAPT. MARSH THIRD FROM THE LEFT.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FORT UNION IN 1837.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SITE OF OLD FORT UNION.]

But names are idle sounds; and being of a peace-loving disposition, I would rather withdraw my contention than seriously disturb the geographical _status quo_! Let it be said that the Upper Missouri is the mother and the Yellowstone the father of this turbulent t.i.tan, who inherits his father's might and wonder, and takes through courtesy the maiden name of his mother. There! I am quite appeased, and the geographers may retain their nomenclature.