Chapter 5

It is notorious of Governments that they are short-sighted, detached, impersonal, aloof, and haughty. We gathered in the road, a gayly bandanaed, dusty, and highly indignant crowd, and conferred.

The telegram had been imperative. It did not request. It commanded. It unhorsed us violently at a time when it did not suit either ourselves or our riding-clothes to be unhorsed.

We conferred. We were, we said, paying two dollars and a half a day for each of those horses. Besides, we were out of adhesive tape, which is useful for holding on patches. Besides, also, we had the horses. If they wanted them, let them come and get them. Besides, this was discrimination. Ever since the Park was opened, horses had been taken out of it, either on to the Reservation or into Canada, to get about to other parts of the Park. Why should the Government pick on us?

We were very bitter and abusive, and the rest of the way I wrote mentally a dozen sarcastic telegrams. Yes; the rest of the way. Because we went on. With a round-up ahead and the Department of the Interior in the rear, we rode forward to our stolen holiday, now and then pausing, an eye back to see if we were pursued. But nothing happened; no sheriff in a buckboard drove up with a shotgun across his knees. The Government, or its representative in Glacier Park, was contenting itself with foaming at the mouth. We rode on through the sunlight, and sang as we rode.

Kalispell is a flourishing and attractive town of northwestern Montana. It is notable for many other things besides its annual round-up. But it remains dear to me for one particular reason.

My hat was done. It had no longer the spring and elasticity of youth. It was scarred with many rains and many fish-hooks. It had ceased to add its necessary jaunty touch to my costume. It detracted. In its age, I loved it, but the Family insisted cruelly on a change. So, sitting on Angel, a new one was brought me, a chirky young thing, a cowgirl affair of high felt crown and broad rim.

And, at this moment, a gentleman I had never seen before, but who is green in my memory, stepped forward and presented me with his own hat-band. It was of leather, and it bore this vigorous and inspiriting inscription: "Give 'er pep and let 'er buck."

To-day, when I am low in my mind, I take that cowgirl hat from its retreat and read its inscription: "Give 'er pep and let 'er buck." It is a whole creed.

Somewhere among my papers I have the programme of that round-up at Kalispell. It was a very fine round-up. There was a herd of buffalo; there were wild horses and long-horned Mexican steers. There was a cheering crowd. There was roping, and marvelous riding.

But my eyes were fixed on the grand-stand with a stony stare.

I am an adopted Blackfoot Indian, known in the tribe as "Pi-ta-mak-an," and only a few weeks before I had had a long conference with the chiefs of the tribe, Two Guns, White Calf (the son of old White Calf, the great chief who dropped dead in the White House during President Cleveland's administration), Medicine Owl and Curly Bear and Big Spring and Bird Plume and Wolf Plume and Bird Rattler and Bill Shute and Stabs-by-Mistake and Eagle Child and Many Tail-Feathers--and many more.

And these Indians had all promised me that, as soon as our conference was over, they were going back to the Reservation to get in their hay and work hard for the great herd which the Government had promised to give them. They were going to be good Indians.

So I stared at the grand-stand with a cold and fixed eye. For there, very many miles from where they should have been, off the Reservation without permission of the Indian agent, painted and bedecked in all the glory of their forefathers--paint, feathers, beads, strings of thimbles and little mirrors--handsome, bland, and enjoying every instant to the full in their childish hearts, were my chiefs.

During the first lull in the proceedings, a delegation came to visit me and to explain. This is what they said: First of all, they desired me to make peace with the Indian agent. He was, they considered, most unreasonable. There were many times when one could labor, and there was but one round-up. They petitioned, then, that I intercede and see that their ration-tickets were not taken away.

And even as the interpreter told me their plea, one old brave caught my hand and pointed across to the enclosure, where a few captive buffalo were grazing. I knew what it meant. These, my Blackfeet, had been the great buffalo-hunters. With bow and arrow they had followed the herds from Canada to the Far South. These chiefs had been mighty hunters. But for many years not a single buffalo had their eyes beheld. They who had lived by the buffalo were now dying with them. A few full-bloods shut away on a reservation, a few buffalo penned in a corral--children of the open spaces and of freedom, both of them, and now dying and imprisoned. For the Blackfeet are a dying people.

They had come to see the buffalo.

But they did not say so. An Indian is a stoic. He has both imagination and sentiment, but the latter he conceals. And this was the explanation they gave me for the Indian agent:--

I knew that, back in my home, when a friend asked me to come to an entertainment, I must go or that friend would be offended with me. And so it was with the Blackfeet Indians--they had been invited to this round-up, and they felt that they should come or they would hurt the feelings of those who had asked them. Therefore, would I, Pi-ta-mak-an, go to the Indian agent and make their peace for them? For, after all, summer was short and winter was coming. The old would need their ration-tickets again. And they, the braves, would promise to go back to the Reservation and get in the hay, and be all that good Indians should be.

And I, too, was as good an Indian as I knew how to be, for I scolded them all roundly and then sat down at the first possible opportunity and wrote to the agent.

And the agent? He is a very wise and kindly man, facing one of the biggest problems in our country. He gave them back their ration-tickets and wiped the slate clean, to the eternal credit of a Government that has not often to the Indian tempered justice with mercy.

X

OFF FOR CASCADE PASS

How many secrets the mountains hold! They have forgotten things we shall never know. And they are cruel, savagely cruel. What they want, they take. They reach out a thousand clutching hands. They attack with avalanche, starvation, loneliness, precipice. They lure on with green valleys and high flowering meadows where mountain-sheep move sedately, with sunlit peaks and hidden lakes, with silence for tired ears and peace for weary souls. And then--they kill.

Because man is a fighting animal, he obeys their call, his wit against their wisdom of the ages, his strength against their solidity, his courage against their cunning. And too often he loses.

I am afraid of the mountains. I have always the feeling that they are lying in wait. At night, their very silence is ominous. The crack of ice as a bit of slow-moving glacier is dislodged, lightning, and the roar of thunder somewhere below where I lie--these are the artillery of the range, and from them I am safe. I am too small for their heavy guns. But a shelving trail on the verge of a chasm, a slip on an ice-field, a rolling stone under a horse's foot--these are the weapons I fear above the timber-line.

Even below there is danger--swamps and rushing rivers, but above all the forest. In mountain valleys it grows thick on the bodies of dead forests beneath. It crowds. There is barely room for a tent. And all through the night the trees protest. They creak and groan and sigh, and sometimes they burn. In a _cul-de-sac_, with only frowning cliffs about, the forest becomes ominous, a thing of dreadful beauty. On nights when, through the crevices of the green roof, there are stars hung in the sky, the weight lifts. But there are other nights when the trees close in like ranks of hostile men and take the spirit prisoner.

The peace of the wilderness is not peace. It is waiting.

On the Glacier Park trip, there had been one subject which came up for discussion night after night round the camp-fire. It resolved itself, briefly, into this: Should we or should we not get out in time to go over to the State of Washington and there perform the thrilling feat which Bob, the Optimist, had in mind?

This was nothing more nor less than the organization of a second pack-outfit and the crossing of the Cascade Mountains on horseback by a virgin route. The Head, Bob, and Joe had many discussions about it. I do not recall that my advice was ever asked. It is generally taken for granted in these wilderness-trips of ours that I will be there, ready to get a story when the opportunity presents itself.

Owing to the speed with which the North Fork of the Flathead River descends from the Canadian border to civilization, we had made very good time. And, at last, the decision was made to try this new adventure.

"It will be a bully story," said the Optimist, "and you can be dead sure of this: it's never been done before."

So, at last, it was determined, and we set out on that wonderful harebrain excursion of which the very memory gives me a thrill. Yet, now that I know it can be done, I may try it again some day. It paid for itself over and over in scenery, in health, and in thrills. But there were several times when it seemed to me impossible that we could all get over the range alive.

We took through thirty-one horses and nineteen people. When we got out, our horses had had nothing to eat, not a blade of grass or a handful of grain, for thirty-six hours, and they had had very little for five days.

On the last morning, the Head gave his horse for breakfast one rain-soaked biscuit, an apple, two lumps of sugar, and a raw egg. The other horses had nothing.

We dropped three pack-horses over cliffs in two days, but got them again, cut and bruised, and we took out our outfit complete, after two weeks of the most arduous going I have ever known anything about. When the news that we had got over the pass penetrated to the settlements, a pack-outfit started over Cascade Pass in our footsteps to take supplies to a miner. They killed three horses on that same trail, and I believe gave it up in the end.

Doubtless, by next year, a passable trail will have been built up to Doubtful Lake and another one up that eight-hundred-foot mountain-wall above the lake, where, when one reaches the top, there is but room to look down again on the other side. Perhaps, too, there will be a trail down the Agnes Creek Valley, so that parties can get through easily. When that is done,--and it is promised by the Forest Supervisor,--one of the most magnificent horseback trips in the country will be opened for the first time to the traveler.

Most emphatically, the trip across the Cascades at Doubtful Lake and Cascade Pass is not a trip for a woman in the present condition of things, although any woman who can ride can cross Cloudy Pass and get down Agnes Creek way. But perhaps before this is published, the Chelan National Forest will have been made a National Park. It ought to be. It is superb. There is no other word for it. And it ought not to be called a forest, because it seems to have everything but trees. Rocks and rivers and glaciers--more in one county than in all Switzerland, they claim--and granite peaks and hair-raising precipices and lakes filled with ice in midsummer. But not many trees, until, at Cascade Pass, one reaches the boundaries of the Washington National Forest and begins to descend the Pacific slope.

The personnel of our party was slightly changed. Of the original one, there remained the Head, the Big, the Middle, and the Little Boy, Joe, Bob, and myself. To these we added at the beginning six persons besides our guides and packers. Two of them did not cross the pass, however--the Forest Pathologist from Washington, who travels all over the country watching for tree-diseases and tree-epidemics and who left us after a few days, and the Supervisor of Chelan Forest, who had but just come from Oregon and was making his first trip over his new territory.

We were fortunate, indeed, in having four forest-men with us, men whose lives are spent in the big timber, who know the every mood and tense of the wilderness. For besides these two, the Pathologist and the Forest Supervisor, there was "Silent Lawrie" Lindsley, naturalist, photographer, and lover of all that is wild, a young man who has spent years wandering through the mountains around Chelan, camera and gun at hand, the gun never raised against the wild creatures, but used to shoot away tree-branches that interfere with pictures, or, more frequently, to trim a tree into such outlines as fit it into the photograph.

And then there was the Man Who Went Ahead. For forty years this man, Mr. Hilligoss, has lived in the forest. Hardly a big timber-deal in the Northwest but was passed by him. Hardly a tree in that vast wilderness but he knew it. He knew everything about the forest but fear--fear and fatigue. And, with an axe and a gun, he went ahead, clearing trail, blazing trees, and marking the detours to camp-sites by an arrow made of bark and thrust through a slash in a tree.

Hour after hour we would struggle on, seeing everywhere evidences of his skill on the trail, to find, just as endurance had reached its limit, the arrow that meant camp and rest.

And--there was Dan Devore and his dog, Whiskers. Dan Devore was our chief guide and outfitter, a soft voiced, bearded, big souled man, neither very large nor very young. All soul and courage was Dan Devore, and one of the proud moments of my life was when it was all over and he told me I had done well. I wanted most awfully to have Dan Devore think I had done well.

He was sitting on a stone at the time, I remember, and Whiskers, his old Airedale, had his head on Dan's knee. All of his thirteen years, Whiskers had wandered through the mountains with Dan Devore, always within call. To see Dan was to see Whiskers; to see Whiskers was to see Dan.

He slept on Dan's tarp bed at night, and in the daytime led our long and winding procession. Indomitable spirit that he was, he traveled three miles to our one, saved us from the furious onslaughts of many a marmot and mountain-squirrel, and, in the absence of fresh meat, ate his salt pork and scraps with the zest of a hungry traveler.

Then there were Mr. and Mrs. Fred. I call them Mr. and Mrs. Fred, because, like Joe, that was a part of their name. I will be frank about Mrs. Fred. I was worried about her before I knew her. I was accustomed to roughing it; but how about another woman? Would she be putting up her hair in curlers every night, and whimpering when, as sometimes happens, the slow gait of her horse became intolerable? Little did I know Mrs. Fred. She was a natural wanderer, a follower of the trail, a fine and sound and sporting traveling companion. And I like to think that she is typical of the women of that Western country which bred her, feminine to the core, but strong and sweet still.

Both the Freds were great additions. Was it not after Mr. Fred that we trailed on that famous game-hunt of ours, of which a spirited account is coming later? Was it not Mr. Fred who, night after night, took the junior Rineharts away from an anxious mother into the depths of the forest or the bleakness of mountain-slopes, there to lie, armed to the teeth, and wait for the first bears to start out for breakfast?

Now you have us, I think, except the men of the outfit, and they deserve space I cannot give them. They were a splendid lot, and it was by their incessant labor that we got over.

Try to see us, then, filing along through deep valleys, climbing cliffs, stumbling, struggling, not talking much, a long line of horses and riders. First, far ahead, Mr. Hilligoss. Then the riders, led by "Silent Lawrie," with me just behind him, because of photographs. Then, at the head of the pack-horses, Dan Devore. Then the long line of pack-ponies, sturdy and willing, and piled high with our food, our bedding, and our tents. And here, there, and everywhere, Joe, with the moving-picture camera.

We were determined, this time, to have no repetition of the Glacier Park fiasco, where Bill, our cook, had deserted us at a bad time--although it is always a bad time when the cook leaves. So now we had two cooks. Much as I love the mountains and the woods, the purple of evening valleys, the faint pink of sunrise on snow-covered peaks, the most really thrilling sight of a camping-trip is two cooks bending over an iron grating above a fire, one frying trout and the other turning flapjacks.

Our trail led us through one of the few remaining unknown portions of the United States. It cannot long remain unknown. It is too superb, too wonderful. And it has mineral in it, silver and copper and probably coal. The Middle Boy, who is by way of being a chemist and has systematically blown himself up with home-made explosives for years--the Middle Boy found at least a dozen silver mines of fabulous value, although the men in the party insisted that his specimens were iron pyrites and other unromantic minerals.

XI

LAKE CHELAN TO LYMAN LAKE

Now, as to where we were--those long days of fording rivers and beating our way through jungle or of dizzy climbs up to the snow, those short nights, so cold that six blankets hardly kept us warm, while our tired horses wandered far, searching for such bits of grass as grew among the shale.

In the north-central part of the State of Washington, Nature has done a curious thing. She has built a great lake in the eastern shoulders of the Cascade Mountains. Lake Chelan, more than fifty miles long and averaging a mile and a half in width, is ten hundred and seventy-five feet above sea-level, while its bottom is four hundred feet below the level of the ocean. It is almost completely surrounded by granite walls and peaks which reach more than a mile and a half into the air.

The region back from the lake is practically unknown. A small part of it has never been touched by the Geological Survey, and, in one or two instances, we were able to check up errors on our maps. Thus, a lake shown on our map as belonging at the head of McAllister Creek really belongs at the head of Rainbow Creek, while McAllister Lake is not shown at all. Mr. Coulter, a forester who was with us for a time, last year discovered three lakes at the head of Rainbow Creek which have never been mapped, and, so far as could be learned, had never been seen by a white man before. Yet Lake Chelan itself is well known in the Northwest. It is easily reached, its gateway being the famous Wenatchee Valley, celebrated for its apples.

It was from Chelan that we were to make our start. Long before we arrived, Dan Devore and the packers were getting the outfit ready.

Yet the first glimpse of Chelan was not attractive. We had motored half a day through that curious, semi-arid country, which, when irrigated, proves the greatest of all soils in the world for fruit-raising. The August sun had baked the soil into yellow dust which covered everything. Arid hillsides without a leaf of green but dotted thickly with gray sagebrush, eroded valleys, rocks and gullies--all shone a dusty yellow in the heat. The dust penetrated everything. Wherever water could be utilized were orchards, little trees planted in geometrical rows and only waiting the touch of irrigation to make their owners wealthy beyond dreams.

The lower end of Lake Chelan was surrounded by these bleak hillsides, desert without the great spaces of the desert. Yet unquestionably, in a few years from now, these bleak hillsides will be orchard land. Only the lower part, however, is bleak--only an end, indeed. There is nothing more beautiful and impressive than the upper part of that strangely deep and quiet lake lying at the foot of its enormous cliffs.

By devious stages we reached the head of Lake Chelan, and there for four days the outfitting went on. Horses were being brought in, saddles fitted; provisions in great cases were arriving. To outfit a party of our size for two weeks means labor and generous outlay. And we were going to be comfortable. We were willing to travel hard and sleep hard. But we meant to have plenty of food. I think we may claim the unique distinction of being the only people who ever had grapefruit regularly for breakfast on the top of that portion of the Cascade Range.

While we waited, we learned something about the country. It is volcanic ash, disintegrated basalt, this great fruit-country to the right of the range. And three things, apparently, are responsible for its marvelous fruit-growing properties. First, the soil itself, which needs only water to prove marvelously fertile; second, the length of the growing-season, which around Lake Chelan is one hundred and ninety-two days in the year. And this just south of the Canadian border! There is a third reason, too: the valleys are sheltered from frost. Even if a frost comes,--and I believe it is almost unknown,--the high mountains surrounding these valleys protect the blossoms so that the frost has evaporated before the sun strikes the trees. There is no such thing known as a killing frost.

But it is irrigation on a virgin and fertile soil that is primarily responsible. They run the water to the orchards in conduits, and then dig little trenches, running parallel among the trees. Then they turn it on, and the tree-roots are bathed, soaked. And out of the desert spring such trees of laden fruit that each branch must be supported by wires!

So we ate such apples as I had never dreamed of, and waited. Joe got his films together. The boys practiced shooting. I rested and sharpened lead-pencils. Bob had found a way to fold his soft hat into what he fondly called the "Jennings do," which means a plait in the crown to shed the rain, and which turned an amiable _ensemble_ into something savage and extremely flat on top. The Head played croquet.

And then into our complacency came, one night, a bit of tragedy.

A man staggered into the little hotel at the head of the lake, carrying another man on his back. He had carried him for forty hours, lowering him down, bit by bit, from that mountain highland where he had been hurt--forty hours of superhuman effort and heart-breaking going, over cliffs and through wilderness.

The injured man was a sheep-herder. He had cut his leg with his wood-axe, and blood-poisoning had set in. I do not know the rest of that story. The sheep-herder was taken to a hospital the next day, traveling a very long way. But whether he traveled still farther, to the land of the Great Shepherd, I do not know. Only this I do know: that this Western country I love is full of such stories, and of such men as the hero of this one.

At last we were ready. Some of the horses were sent by boat the day before, for this strange lake has little or no shore-line. Granite mountains slope stark and sheer to the water's edge, and drop from there to frightful depths below. There are, at the upper end, no roads, no trails or paths that border it. So the horses and all of us went by boat to the mouth of Railroad Creek,--so called, I suppose, because the nearest railroad is more than forty miles away,--up which led the trail to the great unknown. All around and above us were the cliffs, towering seven thousand feet over the lake. And beyond those cliffs lay adventure.