Part 3

There was the day when, on our way to Gunsight, we rode for hours along a trail that heavy rains had turned into black swamp. The horses struggled, constantly mired. It was the hardest day of the trip, not because of the distance, which was only thirty-five miles, but on account of the constant rocking in the saddle as our horses wallowed out of one "jack pot" into another--jack pots, I presume, because they are easy to get into and hard to get out of!

There was some grunting when at the end of that day we fell out of our saddles, but no complaining. That night, for the first time, the Eaton party slept under a roof at the Gunsight Chalet, on the shores of a blue lake. The Blackfoot Glacier was almost overhead. It was the end of a hot July, but we gathered around a fire that evening, and crawled in under heavy blankets to the quick sleep of fatigue.

One more pass, and we should be across the Rockies and moving down the Pacific Slope. The moon came up that night and shone on the ice-caps of the mountains all around us, on the glacier, on the Gunsight itself, appropriately if not beautifully named. As far up the mountain-side as the glacier our tired horses ranged for grass, and the tiny fire of the herder made a red glow that disappeared as the night mist closed down.

No "Come and get it" the next morning, but a good breakfast, nevertheless: a frosty morning, with the sun out, and the moving-picture man gone ahead to catch us as we climbed. There was another photographer who had joined the party. He had been up at dawn, on the chance of snapping a goat or two.

Late the next night, when after a hard day's ride we had reached civilization again at Lake Macdonald, and had dined and rested, the ambitious young man limped into the hotel on foot. For more than twenty miles he had tramped, carrying a heavy plate camera and extra plates. The zeal of the artist had made him careless. He left his horse untied, and it promptly followed the others.

Of the last part of that trip of his afoot I do not care to think. The trail, having scaled great heights, below the Sperry Glacier dropped sharply into the dense forest of the Pacific Slope. There were bears there. We saw seven at one time the next day, six black and one silver tip, on the very trail he had covered.

But he got the picture.

Once over the crest of the Gunsight, there was a change in the air. It blew about us, warm with the heat it had gathered in the South Pacific. Such animal life as the altitude permitted was out, basking in the sun. There were still snow-fields in the shadows, but they were not so numerous. The rocks threw back the sun-rays on to our burned faces. The trail dipped, climbed, dipped again. Here on a ledge was a cry, "Pack-train coming," and we halted to let pass by a train of men on horseback and of laden little burros, tidy and strong.

Climbing again, the trail was lost in the shale, and arrows painted on the rocks gave us the direction. Two lakes lay together below. One appeared from our elevation rather higher than the other. Rather higher! The rock wall that separated them was fourteen hundred feet high, and vertical.

As we began the last descent, the party grew silent. It was the last leg of the journey. A day or so more and we should be scattered over the continent on whose spine we were so incontinently tramping. Back to civilization, to porcelain bathtubs and course dinners and facial massage, to stays and skirts, to roofs and servants and the vast impedimenta of living.

Sperry Chalet and luncheon. No more the ham and coffee over a wood fire, the cutting of much bread on a flat stone. Here were tables, chairs, and linen. Alas, there was a waitress who crumbed the table and brought in dessert.

Back, indeed, with a vengeance. But only to the ways of civilization itself. All afternoon we went on, descending always, through the outriders of the forest to the forest itself. Dusk came, dusk in the woods, with strange soft paddings of unseen feet, with a gray light half-religious, half-faëry, that only those who penetrate to the hearts of great forests can know.

"It makes me think of death," some one said in a low tone. "Just a great shadow, no color. Nothing real. And silence, and infinite distance."

Then Lake Macdonald. We burst out of the forest on a run. The horses had known, by the queer instinct of horses, that just ahead would be oats and a corral and grass for the eating. They broke into a canter. The various things we had hung to ourselves during the long, slow progress over the mountain rattled and banged. We hung on in a kind of mad exultation. We had done it. We had crossed the Continental Divide, the Lewis Overthrust, whatever geographers choose to call it.

The trail led past a corral, past a vegetable garden such as our Eastern eyes had seldom seen. Under trees, around a corner at a gallop. Then the Glacier Hotel at Lake Macdonald, generally known as "Lewis's."

Soft winds from the Pacific blew across Lake Macdonald and warmed us. Great strawberries were ripening in the garden. Our horses got oats, all they could eat. In a pool in front of the hotel lazy trout drifted about.

There was good food. Again there were people dressed in civilized raiment, people who looked at us and our shabby riding-clothes with a disdain not unmixed with awe. There was fox-trotting and one-stepping, in riding-boots, with an orchestra. And that night at Lewis's they gave Howard Eaton a potlatch.

A potlatch is an Indian party. An Indian's idea of a party is to give away everything he possesses and then start all over again. That is one reason why our Indians are so poor to-day. We sat in a great lobby hung with Indian trophies and bearskins, sat in a circle with Howard Eaton in the center. There were a few speeches and some anecdotes. Then the potlatch went on.

There were hot fried trout, sandwiches, and chips of dried meat--buffalo and deer, I believe. There was beer. After that came the gifts. Everybody got something. Howard Eaton received a waistcoat made of spotted hide, and the women got necklaces of Indian beads. It was extraordinary, hospitable, lavish, and--Western. To have a party and receive gifts is one thing, but to have a party so you can give away things is another.

VII

THE BLACK MARKS

The visit to the executive department of the park was disappointing. I found the superintendent's office in a two-room frame shack; the Government warehouse an old barn: five miles from a railroad, too. That's management for you! Why, O gentlemen at Washington who arrange these things, why not at Belton, on the railroad, five miles away? The park extends to Belton.

Inadequate appropriations, the necessity for putting the entire heavy machinery of the Government in motion for the long-distance control of the park, poor automobile roads, and insufficient rangers--these are the black marks against us in Glacier Park. On every hand the enthusiasm of a most efficient superintendent must contend with these things. That marvels of trail-making and road-building in this vast domain have been done with so little money and encouragement is due, primarily, to the faith the men closely connected with the park have had in its future.

Doubtless all these things will remedy themselves in time. But they make the immediate problems of the park difficult to cope with. The chief ranger must live where he can. No building erected by the superintendent must cost over one thousand dollars. It is not easy in that country of cheap wood and dear labor to build a house for one thousand dollars.

And there is always the difficulty of long-distance supervision. In 1914 the former Superintendent of National Parks, Mr. Daniels, spent a week in Glacier Park. Last year he was at the entrance, Glacier Park Station, for a half a day, and not in the park at all.

There are several parks, and it is easy to believe that Mr. Daniels found it difficult to visit them all. But the method must be wrong. It is Washington that must order and pay for each bit of new trail- and road-building. If Washington does not come to the park, the park cannot go to Washington. There is something lacking in efficiency in a system which depends on across-the-continent supervision.

This year I hope the Superintendent of National Parks will go out to Glacier Park, not by automobile, but on a horse, and ride over his great domain. Then I hope he will go back to Washington and arrange for enough rangers to make the park safe and to save its timber from forest fires. Yellowstone Park has soldiers. It is not soldiers, but woodsmen, trail-riders, rangers, that are needed. Canada, in this same country, has her Northwest Mounted Police.

They want real men out there. But the mountains take care of that. The weaklings don't stick. From just north of Glacier Park went a band of twenty-five cavalrymen that I met last year in Flanders. They were rangers: mountain riders. For weeks during the German invasion they rode on skirmish duty between the advancing Germans and the retiring armies. They became famous. Where there were reckless courage and fine horsemanship needed, those men were sent.

If we ever have a war, we shall draw hard on the West for cavalry. Our national parks should be able to send out trained skirmishers. Under present conditions Glacier Park could furnish about a dozen.

And, now that we are criticizing,--every one may criticize the Government: it is the English blood in us,--why is it that, with the most poetic nomenclature in the world,--the Indian,--one by one the historic names of peaks, lakes, and rivers of Glacier Park are being replaced by the names of obscure Government officials, professors in small universities, unimportant people who go out there to the West and memorialize themselves on Government maps? Each year sees some new absurdity. What names in the world are more beautiful than Going-to-the-Sun and Rising-Wolf? Here are Almost-a-Dog Mountain, Two-Medicine Lake, Red Eagle--a few that have survived.

Every peak, every butte, every river and lake of this country has been named by the Indians. The names are beautiful and romantic. To preserve them in a Government reservation is almost the only way of preserving them at all. What has happened? Look over the map of Glacier Park. The Indian names have been done away with. Majestic peaks, towering buttes are being given names like this: Haystack Butte, Trapper Peak, Huckleberry Mountain, the Guard House, the Garden Wall. One of the most wonderful things in the Rocky Mountains is this Garden Wall. I wish I knew what the Indians called it. Then there are Iceberg Lake, Florence Falls, Twin Lakes, Gunsight Mountain, Split Mountain, Surprise Pass, Peril Peak,--that last was a dandy! Alliterative!--Church Butte, Statuary Mountain, Buttercup Park. Can you imagine the inspiration of the man who found some flowery meadow between granite crags and took away from it its Indian name and called it Buttercup Park?

The Blackfeet are the aristocrats among American Indians. They were the buffalo hunters, and this great region was once theirs. To the mountains and lakes of what is now Glacier Park, they attached their legends, which are their literature.

The white man came, and not content with eliminating the Indians, he went further and wiped out their history. Any Government official, if he so desires, any white man seeking perpetuation on the map of his country, may fasten his name to a mountain and go down in the school geographies. It has been done again and again. It is being done now. And the lover of the old names stands helpless and aghast.

Is there no way to stop this vandalism? Year after year goes by, and just as the people connected with the park are beginning to learn new names for the peaks, they are again rechristened. There must be seven Goat Mountains. Here and there is a peak, like Reynolds Peak or Grinnell Mountain, and some others, properly named for men intimately associated with the region. But Reynolds's Indian name was Death-on-the-Trail. When you have seen the mountain you can well believe that Death-on-the-Trail would fit it well.

There are many others. Take an old peak that the Indians have known as Old-Man-of-the-Winds or Red-Top Plume and call it Mount Thompson or Mount Morgan or Mount Pinchot or Mount Oberlin--for Oberlin College, presumably--or Mount Pollack--after the Wheeling stogie, I suppose!

There is hardly a name in the telephone directory that is not fastened to some wonderful peak in this garden spot of ours. Not very long ago I got a letter--a pathetic letter. It said that a college professor from an Eastern college had been out there this summer and insisted that one of the peaks be named for him and one for his daughter. It was done.

Here, then, the Government has done a splendid thing and done it none too well. It has preserved for the people of the United States and for all the world a scenic spot so beautiful and so impressive that I have not even attempted to describe it. It is not possible. But it has failed to open up the park properly. It has been niggardly in appropriation. It has allowed its geographers to take away the original Indian names of this home of the Blackfeet and so destroy the last trace of a vanishing race.

Were it not for the Great Northern Railway, travel through Glacier Park would be practically impossible. Probably the Great Northern was not entirely altruistic, and yet I believe that Mr. Louis Warren Hill, known always as "Louie" Hill, has had an ideal and followed it--followed it with an enthusiasm that is contagious. And with an inspiring faith.

The Great Northern has built huge hotels in three places and at a dozen other locations has built groups of log houses, Swiss fashion, so that it is possible to follow the trails by day and to be comfortably housed and fed each night.

These hotels, built by the Great Northern, are now owned and controlled by the Glacier Park Hotel Company.

At the entrance to the park is the Glacier Park Hotel that cost half a million dollars and is almost as large as the National Capitol at Washington. Like all the hotels and chalets in the park, it is constructed largely of the huge trunks of the trees of the Northwest. The Indians call the Glacier Park Hotel the "Great Log Lodge." There is everything from a store to a swimming-pool.

Fifty miles away in the very heart of the park there is the new Many Glaciers Hotel. It also cost a half-million dollars. There is an automobile road leading to Many Glaciers.

The chalet system, also built by the Great Northern, has done more than anything else to make the park possible for tourists. Automobile roads and trails alike touch the chalets, and, although I am firm in my conviction that it is impossible to see the park properly from an automobile, I realize that there are many who will not take the more arduous and sportsmanly method. For them, then, a short trip of twelve or fifteen miles each day takes them from chalet to chalet. There are chalets at Two-Medicine Lake, at Cutbank Canyon, at Going-to-the-Sun, at St. Mary's Lake, at Gunsight Pass, at the Sperry Glacier, at Granite Park, and at Belton.

There are inclusive and very moderate rates for various tours to take up a certain number of days. A saddle-horse costs two dollars a day; a pack-horse two dollars a day; a guide, who will furnish his own horse and board himself, five dollars a day.

There are rates from chalet to chalet--including a night's lodging in comfortable beds, morning breakfast, evening dinner, and a carefully packed luncheon--that are astonishingly cheap. For those who wish to go even more simply, there are the tepee camps. There are three of these, at St. Mary's, Going-to-the-Sun, and Many Glaciers. They comprise a number of Indian tepees grouped about a central cabin which includes a kitchen provided with a range and cooking utensils. The tepees themselves are wooden-floored and each is equipped with two single cot beds and bedding. At all of the tepee camps the charge for lodging is fifty cents per bed per night; the use of the range and cooking utensils is free. At the chalets near by, hikers may purchase food at very reasonable prices.

It is, you see, possible to go through Glacier Park without Howard Eaton. It is even safe, and, to those who have never known Howard, highly satisfactory. But there will be something missing--that curious thing called personality, which could take forty-two entirely different, blasé, feeble-muscled, uncertain, and effete Easterners and mould them in a few days into a homogeneous whole: that took excursionists and made them philosophers and sportsmen.

He was hunting in Arizona later on. The party ate venison, duck, and mountain lion--which tastes like veal.

"We have had several fights with grizzlies," he wrote. "They are so strong that they have whipped the hounds and carved them up some in each fight. Country pretty rough and considerable fallen timber, which delays us. I was kicked the other day by a horse when almost up to a bear. The boys thought I had a broken leg or two, so they let the bear escape."

He was sending a rider off to the nearest post-office and wondering what was doing in the war.

"Has Port Arthur fallen yet?" he inquired whimsically.

A hunter who puts the greenest tenderfoot at ease and teaches him without apparently teaching at all; a host whose first thought is always for his guests; a calm-faced man with twinkling blue eyes, who is proud of his "boys" and his friends all over the world--that is Howard Eaton as nearly as he can be put on paper.

Wherever he is when he reads this, hunting in Arizona or the Jackson Hole country, or snowed in at the ranch at Wolf, I hope he will forgive me for putting him into print, in memory of those days when the entire forty-two of us followed him, like the tail of a kite, across the Great Divide.

VIII

BEARS

It was the next day that I made my first close acquaintance with bears. There are many bears in Glacier Park. Firearms are forbidden, of course, and the rangers kill them only in case of trouble. Naturally, so protected, they are increasing rapidly. They find good forage where horses would starve. Mr. Ralston, the park supervisor, saw a she bear with three cubs last spring. There are no tame bears, as in the Yellowstone.

There are plenty of animals. Some fifty moose graze along the Flathead. Beavers have colonies in many of the valleys and industriously build dams that deepen the fords. I remember one place along the Cutbank Trail where the first horses found themselves above the belly in water and confronting a perpendicular bank up which one or two scrambled as best they could. The rest turned and, riding in the stream for a half-mile détour, made the trail again. That was the work of beavers.

There are coyotes a-plenty. Because they kill the deer and elk, the rangers poison them in the winter with strychnine. A few mountain lions remain. As one can make a whole night hideous, a few are sufficient.

There is something particularly interesting about a bear. Perhaps it is because he can climb a tree. In other words, ordinary subterfuges do not go with him. Reports vary--he is a fighter; he is a craven; the fact being, of course, that he is, like all wild animals and most humans, a bit of each.

The trip was over, and I had seen but one bear. At Lewis's that last Sunday I voiced my disappointment. Soon after I received word quietly that Frank Higgins, guide and companion on many hunting trips to Stewart Edward White and other hunters, had offered to show me some bears.

He had horses saddled under a tree when I went back, and two men, one of them a Chicago newspaper artist, were with him. We mounted and rode up the trail back of the hotel.

I was dubious. For days I had tried to see bears and failed, and now to have them offered with certainty by Mr. Higgins made me skeptical. I had an idea that under his tall impassiveness he was having a little fun at my expense. He was not. We went out into the forest, to where the hotel dumps its garbage. That was rather a blow, at first. And there were no bears. Only a great silence and a considerable stench.

We got off our horses, tied them, and sat down on a log. Almost immediately there was a distant crackling of branches.

"One coming now," said Frank Higgins. "Just sit quiet."

That first bear, however, was nervous. He circled around us. I set my camera for one hundred feet, and waited. But the creature, a big black, was shy. He refused to come out. Mr. Higgins went after him. He snarled. I looked after Mr. Higgins with a new respect, and the Chicago newspaper man said he was perfectly satisfied with the bear where he was, and that enough was enough.

The bear suddenly took to a tree, climbing like a cat. He looked about the size of a grand piano. Urged by Mr. Higgins, we approached the tree. Finally we stood directly beneath. He growled--the bear, of course, not Frank Higgins. But my courage was rising. Wild bear he was, but he was a craven. I moved up the focus of my camera and took his picture. We left him there and went back to the log. All at once there were bears in every direction, six in all. I moved my camera to thirty feet and snapped another. They circled about, heads turned toward us. Now and then they stood up to see us better. We were between them and supper.

The newspaper man offered to sketch me with a "bear" background. And he did. Now and then he would say:--

"Isn't there one behind me?"

"About twenty feet away," I would say.

"Good Lord!" But he went on drawing. I have that picture now. It is very good, but my eyes have the look of a scared rabbit.

Our friend still clung in the tree. The other man had ridden back to the hotel for camera films. Time went on and he did not return. We made would-be facetious remarks about his courage--from our own pinnacle. Almost an hour! The sketch was nearly finished, and twilight was falling. Still he had not come. Then he appeared. He had taken the wrong trail, and had been riding those bear-infested regions alone. He was smiling, but pale. To visit bears in a party is one thing; to ride alone, with fleeting black and brown figures skulking behind fallen timber, is another. Not for a long time, I think, will that gentleman forget the hour or so when he was lost in the forest, with bears

"Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks, In Vallombrosa."

The poetic quotation is my own idea. What he said was entirely different. As a matter of fact, his own expression was: "Hell, the place is full of them!"

At last, very quietly, Mr. Higgins got up.

"Here's a grizzly," he said. "You might stand near the horses."

We did. The grizzly looked the exact size of a seven-passenger automobile with a limousine top, and he had the same gift of speed. The black bears looked at him and ran. I looked at him and wanted to. The artist put away his sketch, and we strolled toward the horses. They had not objected to the black bears, beyond watching them with careful eyes. But now they pulled and flung about to free themselves. Wherever he goes, a grizzly bear owns his entire surroundings. He carries a patent of ownership.

He could have the woods, for all of me.