Chapter 1

TRAIL TALES

BY

JAMES DAVID GILLILAN

THE ABINGDON PRESS

NEW YORK--CINCINNATI

Copyright, 1915, by

JAMES DAVID GILLILAN

DEDICATED AFFECTIONATELY TO MY MOTHER, TO MY WIFE; LIKEWISE TO THE PREACHERS OF UTAH MISSION AND IDAHO ANNUAL CONFERENCE

CONTENTS

PREFACE 9 GOD'S MINISTER 11 THE WESTERN TRAIL 13 THE LONG TRAIL 19 THE DESERT 31 SAGEBRUSH 39 THE IRON TRAIL 47 A Railroad Saint in Idaho 49 An Unusual Kindness 59 INDIANS OF THE TRAIL 63 Introductory Words 65 Pocatello, the Chief 67 The Babyless Mother 72 Mary Muskrat 76 Bad Ben 79 A Three-Cornered Sermon 82 Three Years After 87 Chief Joseph and His Lost Wallowa 92 The White Man's Book 96 LIGHTS AND SIDELIGHTS 99 THE STAGECOACH 107 AMONG THE HILLS 117 The Mother Deer 119 The Shepherd 121 The Feathered Drummer 122 MORMONDOM 123 The Trail of the Mormon 125 Some Mormon Beliefs 131 Weber Tom, Ute Polygamist 138 Polygamy of To-Day 145 GREAT SALT LAKE 149 ARGONAUT SAM'S TALE 157 THE WRAITH OF THE BLIZZARD 167 THE GREAT NORTHWEST 175

ILLUSTRATIONS

J. D. Gillilan _Frontispiece_ Chief Joseph, Nez Perce Indian 64 Wallowa Lake 94 End of the Trail 183

PREFACE

In his young manhood the writer of these sketches came up into this realm of widest vision, clearest skies, sweetest waters, and happiest people to engraft the green twig of his life upon the activities of the mountaineers of the thrilling West.

At that time the vast plains and the barren valleys were silvered over with the ubiquitous sage through which crept lazily and aimlessly the many unharnessed arroyo-making streams waiting only the appearance of their master, man. Under his scientific, skilled, and economic guidance these wild waters, lassoed, tamed, and set to work, taking the place of clouds where there are none, were soon to cause the gray garden of nature to become goldened by the well-nigh illimitable acres of grain and other home-making products.

The West has an abundant variety of life of a sort most intensely human. Life, always so earnest in Anglo-Saxon lands, seems to have accentuated individuality here in a wondrous and contagious degree.

These few stories, culled from the répertoire of an active life of more than thirty years, are samples of personal experiences, and are taken almost at random from mining camp, frontier town and settlement, public and private life.

As a minister the writer has had wide and varied opportunities in all the Northwest, but more especially in Utah, Oregon, and Idaho. Many a man much more modest has far excelled him in life experiences, but some of them have never told.

This little handful of goldenrod is affectionately dedicated to them of the Trails.

THE AUTHOR.

GOD'S MINISTER

_Dedicated to the Mountain Ministers_

As terrace upon terrace Rise the mountains o'er the humbler hills And stretch away to dizzy heights To meet heaven's own pure blue; From thence to steal those soft and filmy clouds With which to wrap their heads and shoulders-- Bare of other cloak-- Transforming them to rains and snows To bless this elsewise desert world:

So, he who stands God's minister 'mong men, High reaches out above all earthly things And comes in contact with the thoughts of God; Conveys them down in blessings to mankind-- Richest of blessings, Holiest fruit of heaven-- Plucked fresh from off the Tree of Life That springs hard by the Lamb's white throne, And bears the plenteous leaves which grow To heal the wounded nations.

THE WESTERN TRAIL

And step by step since time began I see the steady gain of man. --Whittier.

THE WESTERN TRAIL

"An overland highway to the Western sea" was the thought variously expressed by many men in both public and private life among the French, English, and Americans from very early times. In 1659 Pierre Radisson and a companion, by way of the Great Lakes, Fox, and "Ouisconsing" Rivers, discovered the "east fork" of the "Great River" and crossed to the "west fork," up which they went into what is now the Dakotas, only to find it going still "interminably westward."

In 1766 Carver, an Englishman, went by the same route up the "east fork" to Saint Anthony Falls; thence he traveled to Canada, to learn from the Assiniboin Indians the existence of the "Shining Mountains" and that beyond them was the "Oregan," which went to the salt sea.

As early as 1783 Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Rogers Clark to tell him he understood the English had subscribed a very large sum of money for exploration of the country west of the Mississippi, and as far as California. He even expressed himself as being desirous of forming a party of Americans to make the trip.

Twenty years later, under the direction of _President_ Thomas Jefferson, General Clark was made a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which went up the "great river" and ultimately crossed through Montana and Idaho to the Columbia (Oregan?) and the "salt sea."

Zebulon Pike was turned back by the imperious Rocky Mountains in 1806. A few years later Captain Bonneville braved the plains, the plateaus, the mountain passes, and the deserts, and saw the Columbia. Then continuous migrations finally fixed the overland highway known from ocean to ocean as the Oregon Trail.

The Mormons followed this national road when they trekked to the valley of Salt Lake in 1847--a dolorous path to many.

Because the Oregon Trail was nature's way, man and commerce made it their way. Road sites are not like city sites--made to order; they are discovered. For that reason the pioneer railway transcontinental also followed this trail. The Union Pacific marks with iron what so many of the emigrants marked with their tears and their graves. From the mouth of the Platte to the heart of the Rocky Mountains and beyond is a continuous cemetery of nameless tombs.

The next few pages will give some sketches of fact depicting scenes of sunlight and shadow that fell on this highway in days not so very long agone.

THE LONG TRAIL

Those mighty pyramids of stone That wedge-like pierce the desert airs, When nearer seen and better known Are but gigantic flights of stairs. --_Longfellow_.

THE LONG TRAIL

The Old Overland Trail from the Missouri River to the Willamette is a distance of nearly two thousand miles. Before Jason Lee and Marcus Whitman sanctioned its use for the migrating myriads of Americans seeking the shores of the sunset sea, trappers and adventurers, good and bad, had mapped out a general route over the wind-whipped passes, where the storm stands sentinel and guards the granite ways among the rough Rocky Mountains. They had followed the falls-filled Snake and the calmer Columbia, which plow for a thousand miles or more among basaltic bastions buttressing the mountain sides, or through the lava lands where cavernous chasms yawn and abysmal depths echo back the sullen roar of the raging rapids.

In the early forties of the nineteenth century restless spirits from Missouri and eastward began to filter through the fingertips of the beckoning mountains of the West and locate in the land where storms seldom come and where the extremes of heat and cold are unknown--Willamette Valley, Oregon.

In these early days, a farmer, whom we shall name Johnson, with wife and son, hoping to better conditions and prolong life, thus sought the goal toward the setting sun. Starting when the sturdy spring was enlivening all nature, they left the malarial marshes of the Mississippi Valley, where quinine and whisky for "fevernagur" were to be had at every crossroads store, and in a couple of weeks found themselves west of the muddy Missouri, where the herds of humped bison grazed as yet unafraid among the rolling, well-wooded hills of eastern Kansas.

Barring a few common hindrances, they went well and reached the higher and hotter plains in midsummer; they were out of the sight of hills and trees--just one weary, eternal, unchangeable vista day after day. Mrs. Johnson had not been well, and after a few weeks that promised more for the future than they fulfilled, she began gradually to lose strength.

But she was made of the uncomplaining material pioneers are wrought of, the ones who so lived, loved, and labored that the hard-earned sweets of civilization grew to highest perfection about their graves, and proved the most enduring monument to their memory. She never murmured other than to ask occasionally: "Father, how much farther? Isn't it a wonderfully long way to Oregon?"

"Just over that next range of hills, I think, from what the trappers told me," was the reply, after they had come to the toes of the foothills that terminate the long-lying limbs of the giant Rockies. But he did not know the stealth of the mountains nor the fantastic pranks the cañony ranges can play upon the stranger. A snowy-haired peak, brother to Father Time, wearing a fringe of evergreens for his neckruff, would play hide-and-seek with them for days, dodging behind this eminence and hiding away back of that hill, only to reappear apparently as far off as ever, and sometimes in a different direction from where he last seemed to be.

After a few more days: "Father, how many more miles do you think?"

"O, not many now, I am sure!" cheerily and optimistically would come the answer.

As they climbed, and climbed, and climbed, the ripening service-berry, blackened by weeks of attention by the unclouded sun, and the pine-hen and the speckled beauties from the noisy trout-streams, added to their comforts, and for a little while appeared to enliven the tired and fading woman. A frosty night or two, a peak newly whitened with early snow, put an invigorating thrill and pulse into the blood of the man and the boy, but she crept just a little nearer to the camp fire of evenings and found herself more and more languid in responding to the call of the day that returned all too soon for her. At last, rolling out on the Wahsatch side of the continental backbone, they encountered very warm but shortening days, while the nights grew chillier. Having passed to the north of Salt Lake by the trail so well and faithfully marked by Mr. Ezra Meeker in recent years, they began to realize that they were with the waters that flow to the west.

One evening, after the tin plates, iron forks and knives, and the pewter spoons had been washed and returned to their box, and as they were getting ready for their nightly rest, Mrs. Johnson said, wearily: "Father, it just seems to me I would be glad if I never would waken again. It seems I would enjoy never again hearing the everlasting squeech, squeech of the wheels in the sand, and see the sun go down day after day so red and so far away over those new mountains. O, I am so tired!"

"Never mind, mother, we are not far from our new home now;" and moving over to her side as she sat leaning against the wagon-tongue, the man slipped his own tired arm about her shoulders and let her rest against him, for he was indeed weary, and the trail _was_ wonderfully long.

The following morning he purposely lay still just a little longer than was his custom, although he was most prudently desirous of making as much speed as he could while the weather continued so good; he knew the rains might soon set in and make travel over unmade roads much worse than it already was.

When he arose he noiselessly crept away from her side and quietly called the boy to go and bring up the horses and the cow, cautioning him to take off the horse-bell and carry it so as not to arouse the mother when he came to camp. Quietly as possible he made the fire and prepared their breakfast of fare that was daily becoming scantier. Then, when all was ready, he tiptoed through the sand to where she lay under the spreading arms of a little desert juniper, such as are occasionally found in the deserts, and where she had said the night before she wished she could sleep forever. She looked so calm and restful he hesitated to wake her; it seemed like robbery to take from her one moment of the longed-for and hard-earned rest. Yet it was time they were on their road, and the day was fine; so after a few minutes he called, gently, "Mother, you're getting a nice rest, aren't you?"

She did not stir. He then stooped to kiss the languid lips--they were cold. She was dead. They had been seeking a home by the shores of the sunset sea; she had found the sunrise land.

It is a sad, solemn, and sacred thing to be with our dead, but to be alone, hundreds of miles from the face of any friend, in such an hour, is an experience few ever have to meet. Pioneer-like, the father scans the horizon, locating all the prominent features of the landscape. He makes a rude map, not forgetting the juniper. As best he can he prepares the body for the burying. And such a burying! No lumber with which to make even a rough box; nothing but their daily clothing and nightly bedding was to be had. The unlined grave was more than usually forbidding. The desert demon had trailed that brave body and was now swallowing it up. They made the grave by the juniper where she last slept, and, sorrowing, the father and the son went on, firm in the resolve that the loved one should not always lie in a desert grave.

Forty years later a man past middle-age, riding a horse and leading another, to whose packsaddle was fastened a box, went slowly along that old trail in Southern Idaho, now almost obliterated by many-footed Progress. He was scanning the hills and consulting a piece of age-yellowed paper, broken at all its ancient creases. It was the son obeying the dying request of the old father--going to find, if possible, the spot where the tired mother went to sleep so long ago, and bring all that remained to rest by his side.

It was no easy task. Fertile fields, whose irrigated areas now presented billowy breasts of ripening grain; mighty ditches like younger and better-behaved rivers; a railway following the general direction of the old trail; ranch-houses and fat haystacks indenting the sky-line once so bare of all except clumps of sagebrush--these all conspired to make the task next to impossible.

Man may scratch the hillsides, but cannot mar the majesty of the mountains; they were unchanged. The map he carried was the one his father made on the spot more than a generation before. It had been well made and the specifications were minute. After a long while, carefully measuring and comparing, he found the spot to him so sacred. The juniper tree, so rare in that section, had not been disturbed by the new owner of the land, and as the precious burden, secured at last, was borne away, it still stood on guard--as if lonely now. Like father, like son. Both were faithfully bound by the strongest tie in the universe--love!

THE DESERT

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. --_Gray_.

As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs. --_Plutarch_.

THE DESERT

Much of the Old Overland Trail lay across the "Great American Desert," as it was named in the earlier geographies. Irrigation and progressive energy have made these wastes in many instances literally to "blossom as the rose"; but until that was done these stretches were weary enough.

He who knows only the desert of the geography naturally conceives it an absolutely forsaken and empty region where nothing but dust-storms are born unattended and die "without benefit of the clergy." But the desert has character and is as variable as many another creature.

THE SAND STORM

An experience in an actual sand storm is food upon which the reminiscent may ruminate many a day, being much more pleasant in memory than in the making. First come the scurrying outriders, lithe and limber whisking gusts, dancing and whirling like Moslem dervishes, coyly brushing the traveler or boldly flinging fierce fistfuls of dirt into his eyes; then off with a swish of invisible skirts--vanishing possibly in the same direction whence they came. They go leaving him wiping his astonished eyes disgustedly, for the act was so sudden and tragic as to excite tears. Before he is aware of it other and stronger gusts duplicate the dastardly deed of the first wingless wizard of the plains, and the hapless voyager is left gasping. Almost immediately there are to be seen the regular "desert devils," as they are called, bringing a dozen or more whirling columns of yellow silt rapidly through the air, each pirouetting on one foot, assuming meanwhile all sorts of fantastic shapes.

Now for the fierce onset. Like blasts of a blizzard, the shrapnel of the desert is hurled into eyes, face, ears, and nostrils; little rivers pour down the back and fill every discoverable wrinkle and cranny of the clothing with their gritty load.

If in summer, buttoning the clothing is suffocation, and the perspiration soon makes one a mass of grime; if in winter, it is not so unbearable, for a comfortable fencing can be made against the sand and the cold.

The whole landscape is obliterated by and by, and the trails are so often drift-filled that unless one is himself accustomed to such methods of travel or has an experienced plainsman as his driver and guide, there is danger of becoming lost, or so out of the way that night may overtake him and compel a waterless camp for himself and team.

TWILIGHT AND DAWN

But to see the morning slip off its night clothes and step out into daylight, or watch day don her night-wraps and snuggle down into twilight on the quiet sand-ocean! In summer it is a scene of splendor, often coming after a day or an evening of sandy wrath.

At early dawn, lining the eastern horizon, are the soft pencils of bashful day over-topping the jagged sawteeth of the yet sleeping mountains, fifty or more miles away. A faint hinting of the lightening of the sky only deepens the blackness of the snow-streaked peaks. The cowardly coyote's yelp comes more and more faintly, the burrowing owl's "to-whit, to-whoo" falls dying on the moveless air, and the white sparrow of the sagebrush starts up as if to catch the early worm he is almost sure not to find. The loping jack rabbit slips softly to his greasewood shelter and the prairie dog bounces barking from his snake-infested haunt, noisily preparing for his day's digging and foraging.

The stubborn mountains begin to let the sun's forerunning rays glide between them; the sky, now old gold, is fast transforming into kaleidoscopic crimsons and other reds, while the swift arms of the day-painter are reaching from between the peaks of the precipitous crags and dyeing the scales of the mackerel sky with hues and tints the rainbow would covet.

In the opposite direction a morning mirage inverts an image of a stretch of trees along the far-away river and blends them top to top till they seem greenish-black columns supporting the dun clouds of the west, while the belated moon peers through the half-unreal corridors.

SUNSET

The sunset is far more gorgeous; it often reaches grandeur. Let it be a winter evening. A suggestion of storm has been playing threats. The western hills have reached up their time-toughened arms and carried the burnt-out lantern of day to bed, tucking him away in gold-lace tapestry and rose-tinted down. Then the blue, black, and brown clouds change quickly to purple, pink, and red by turns, and the opaline sky itself forms a background for the dissolving community of interlacing filaments of priceless filigree, till in time too full of interest to compute by measure, the whole heavens are aflame with a riotous orgy of color, a prodigality of shifting scene, making one think of the descriptions essayed by the writer of the Apocalypse.

We think of Moses who wished to see God "face to face," but was told he would be permitted to behold only the "dying away of his glory." No wonder the man who was forty years in the wilderness before that grand exode, and forty more through the unsurveyed deserts, was enabled to write the majestic prose-poems that have lived unaltered through all these thousands of critical years! He was in the region where inspiration is dispensed with hands of infinite wealth. God is the dispenser.

SAGEBRUSH

This is the forest primeval.--_Longfellow_.

The continuous woods where rolls the Oregon.--_Bryant_.

SAGEBRUSH

Frequently within these pages mention has been made of the commonest of all our native plants on the Trail--sagebrush. Botanically, it is, _Artemisia tridentata_. The new Standard Dictionary defines sagebrush as "any one of the various shrubby species of Artemisia, of the aster family, growing on the elevated plains of the Western United States, especially _Artemisia tridentata_, very abundant from Montana to Colorado and westward." The leaf ends in three points; hence the adjective tridentata--the three-toothed artemisia.