CHAPTER V--The Scouts Learn Why the Rocky Mountains Have No Foot-Hills

and Arrive at Many Glacier

They had about fifty miles to go, northward, straight away from the railroad. It was a clear, lovely day, the air so transparent that you could apparently walk to the top of one of those mountains in an hour or two.

"Gee, I know now how that Englishman felt," Joe laughed.

The road was not what would be called a good road, or even a decent road, in the East, as it was only a track in the grass, full of sand and sharp little stones; it did not lead into the mountains at all; it ran along just to the east of the great range, over the bare, rolling hills of the prairie, so that from the motor bus you could see the entire mountain wall, mile after mile. What a wonderful wall it was, too! It sprang right up out of this rolling green prairie, a great procession of peaks, and now they were so near the boys could see they were not blue at all, but every color of the rainbow, with red predominating. Up their sides for a way stretched timber--all evergreen, and not very big--and then came the rocks--red rocks, yellow rocks, gray rocks, white rocks, in long horizontal strata, and in the ravines and hollows on the slopes great patches of snow stretching down from the snow caps on the summits like vast white fingers.

As they sped along, every eye in the motor fixed on the mountains, a man in the front seat pointed ahead to a huge red mountain which stood out eastward from the range, a noble mountain shaped like a tremendous dome.

"That's old Rising Wolf," he said.

"Rising Wolf!" said Tom. "That's a good name. It's Indian, I suppose?"

"It's Indian, but it was the name of a white man," the first speaker replied. "It was the name the Indians gave to Hugh Monroe. He's buried almost under the shadow of that mountain. Pretty good monument, eh?"

"I don't believe anybody'll move it," Joe laughed. "Who was Hugh Monroe?"

"Hugh Monroe," said the man on the front seat, who evidently knew a lot about the Park, "was probably the first white man who ever saw those mountains. He was born in Montreal in 1798. He entered the Hudson Bay Company when he was only seventeen, about as old as you boys, I guess, and was sent way out into the Blackfeet Indian country on the Saskatchewan River. Monroe was assigned to live with the Indians, and learn their language, and the next winter--1816--he went southward with them, following along near the base of the range, crossed what's now the boundary line, and came here. He even went on farther, to the Yellowstone. Monroe stayed with the Blackfeet all the rest of his life. He married a squaw, and got an Indian name--Makwiipowaksin--or Rising Wolf----"

"I guess I'll always say it in English," Spider laughed.

"After a while," the man went on, laughing too, "the Blackfeet came down here to live. We are going through part of their reservation now, and the whole Park was bought from them by the government. This was all their hunting ground, and right here, in Two Medicine Valley that you see leading in beside Rising Wolf Mountain, and in the Cut Bank and St. Mary's Valley we'll soon come to, Hugh Monroe hunted moose and elk and buffalo and silver tips, and he killed sheep and goats up on the slopes. He used to tell me how he had a cabin by St. Mary Lake (we get there in an hour) once, and had to stand off a raid of hostile Indians for two days--he and his wife and children. He's often told me, too, how he and the Blackfeet used to drive the buffalo over the Cut Bank River cliffs. The buffalo would stampede, and not seeing the cliffs ahead, would all go crashing over."

"_He_ told you?" cried Joe, incredulous. "Say, how old are you, anyhow? I thought you said he came here in 1816--that's a hundred years ago."

Again the man laughed. "Rising Wolf was buried in 1896," he answered. "He was ninety-eight years old. We folks out in the Montana mountains" [he pronounced Montana with the first _a_ short, as in _cat_] "live a good while, son. It's the air. I can remember him well, and a fine old figure he was, a real pioneer, like Daniel Boone and the chaps you've read about in school. Yes sir, he's got a good monument."

And the man looked up again at the great red dome of Rising Wolf Mountain, towering over them.

"Ask him about there being no foot-hills," Joe whispered, nudging Tom.

"Can you tell us why there aren't any foot-hills to this range?" Tom asked. "Of course, all this prairie here is rolling and high, but it's not really little mountains. The main range just jumps right up without any warning."

"Yes, I've been wondering about that, too," put in a man on the seat behind the boys. "I wish you would explain it."

The man on the front seat laughed. "I seem to be the Park encyclopaedia," said he. "Well, I hunted in these mountains before the government ever thought of making a park of 'em, and I'm glad to tell you all I can. I'll tell you just as it was told to me by one of the government chaps that came out here--a scientist. He was looking for prehistoric animal fossils up in the Belly River Canon, and he sure knew a lot. It was this way--all the prairies, he said, and all the land west of here, was once the bottom of the sea, or a lake, or something, and finally it pushed up and became land, and then, as the earth crust went on contracting, it cracked."

The man now put his hands together, spread flat side by side, and pushed them one against the other.

"The crack formed from north to south," he said, "and as the contraction went on something had to give, just as something has to give if I push my hands hard enough. See----"

He pushed harder yet, and his left hand slid up over the back of his right.

"That's what happened here. One edge of the earth crust, thousands of feet thick, rose right up and slid east a dozen miles or more, and then stopped. I believe the scientific fellers call that a fault. They call the eastern edge of this range the Lewis overthrust, because that's where the overlapping stopped. Look--you can see all along here the precipices where the crust stuck out over the prairie, and all those parallel lines of different colored rocks are the different layers in the old crust. They find the skeletons and fossils exposed in 'em, which would be buried two or three thousand feet if you had to dig down."

"But what I don't see," Joe said, "is why the top isn't just level? Why are there any peaks and valleys?"

"It happened a few million years ago, son," the man laughed. "I suppose things were some broken up at the first crack, and since then glaciers have come grinding down, and rains have fallen, and snows melted, and frosts cracked, and the ice and water have washed out canyons and carved the peaks. The high point was right where the undercrust stopped, back a dozen miles or more from the edge of the overthrust, so that became the Divide. That's pretty near level in places even to-day. But east and west the running water has carved out long valleys and left harder rock sticking up as peaks. Up farther north old Chief Mountain sticks right out into the prairie, a tower of limestone, with everything else around it carved right away."

"I get you," said Joe. "I bet I'd have studied geography harder if I'd had these mountains to look at while I was doing it!"

The man in the seat behind laughed. "There must have been some shake up when the crack formed, and these six thousand feet of crust came up over."

"I'd rather been some place else than standin' right on 'em," said the man in front.

The motor presently rolled through rather thick pine timber, up over a high ridge, and down into a valley.

"That's Divide Mountain to the left," said their guide. "Behind it is Triple Divide Peak. From the peak, the water flows to three oceans--west to the Pacific, east to the Missouri River, the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, northeast to Canada and Hudson Bay. From here on all the brooks we cross are bound for Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean."

In a short time they came to the foot of a lovely lake, and stopped at a group of buildings, built like Swiss chalets, on the shore.

"St. Mary Lake," their impromptu guide said. "A lot of people think it's the most beautiful lake in the world, but you have to get to the upper end to see its full beauty. It runs twelve miles, right up to the foot of the Great Divide. That's Going-to-the-Sun Mountain you can just see the peak of on the right."

The scouts looked far up the dancing, wonderfully green-blue waters of the lake, to the tip of a vast pyramid of rock, blue with distance.

"Is that an Indian name? It's pretty," said Joe.

"No," the man answered. "A French missionary priest, who came here with Hugh Monroe back in the 1830's named the lake St. Mary Lake, and then he went on up it, and over the pass to the west, into the setting sun. So Monroe named the mountain Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. But, of course, it was really Indian in a way, because if Monroe hadn't lived with the Indians he wouldn't have thought of such a poetic name."

The boys were still only half-way to their destination, and the bus soon started off again, still keeping on the prairie, along the eastern edge of the range, and passing along the shore of Lower St. Mary Lake for many miles. At last the road turned sharp west, and began to climb. It climbed into a deep, narrow valley which led right up into the tumbled mass of red and gray and green peaks and rock precipices.

"This is the last stage," said the man. "We are going up the Swift Current Valley."

The road was very narrow, and it swung around ledges where there was a massive wall above them on one side and a sheer drop, without protection, on the other. The bus had a siren horn, which the driver set going three hundred yards before he reached one of these curves. As they climbed, the great mountainsides seemed to come nearer and nearer, and at last they towered over their heads, some of them almost perpendicular, and composed of layers of jagged red rock. It was not long before they crossed the tumbling green water of Swift Current River on a bridge close to a foaming waterfall, and brought up in front of a large hotel on the shore of a small green lake.

This was the end of their journey. The scouts got out, and went around to the lake in front of the hotel. Here the full view was spread before them, and Tom whistled, while Joe gasped.

Right in front of them lay Lake McDermott, perhaps a mile long and half a mile wide, the water a beautiful green, for all the lakes in the Park are fed from glaciers, and glacier water is green in color. This lake was surrounded by a fringe of pines. Out of the farther side sprung up a cone-shaped mountain, almost out of the water. To the left and right of this peak, called Sharp's Peak, and only two or three miles behind it, rose the abrupt head wall of the Continental Divide itself, a vast gray precipice, with great peaks thrusting up from it, and gleaming white snow-fields lying like gigantic sheets spread out to dry wherever there was a place for them to cling. Behind the hotel, on both sides, nearer mountains went up precipitously.

"It's some big!" Joe exclaimed. "Say--it--it kind of scares me! Think of climbing one of those cliffs!"

"We'll get used to it," Tom declared. "And we're going to climb 'em! We're going to get photographs of a goat, and see this old Park, top and bottom."

"Gosh, it looks all top to me," poor Joe replied.

"Come on--we'll find our boss, and get our tent pitched, and some grub into us--and we'll feel better," Tom cried cheerfully.