Part 1

TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES

BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM

THE GENTLE ART OF TRAMPING THE DIVIDING LINE OF EUROPE IN QUEST OF EL DORADO TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES EUROPE--WHITHER BOUND? THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD CHILDREN OF THE SLAVES A PRIVATE IN THE GUARDS THE QUEST OF THE FACE RUSSIA IN 1916 PRIEST OF THE IDEAL THROUGH RUSSIAN CENTRAL ASIA THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY RUSSIA AND THE WORLD WITH POOR EMIGRANTS TO AMERICA WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM CHANGING RUSSIA A TRAMP’S SKETCHES UNDISCOVERED RUSSIA A VAGABOND IN THE CAUCASUS ST. VITUS DAY

TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES

BY STEPHEN GRAHAM AUTHOR OF “EUROPE--WHITHER BOUND?”

WITH THIRTY-EIGHT EMBLEMS BY VERNON HILL

D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY INCORPORATED NEW YORK LONDON 1936

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

_All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission of the publisher._

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

Vachel Lindsay is the poet. He is best known as the author of _General William Booth Enters Heaven_, _The Congo_ and _Johnny Appleseed_. He also wrote a highly comical piece called _The Daniel Jazz_. He is a wonderful reciter, and is aided by a sonorous, heaven-reaching voice. All his poems are written to be read aloud, chanted, or declaimed; in some cases they are written to be danced also, and played as games. In many of his recitations the audience is called upon to take part in choruses and refrains. Thus, in one poem, when Lindsay says, “I’ve been to Palestine,” the audience as one man has to cry back to him, “_What did you see in Palestine?_” This is rapturously enjoyed by the audience. When you have heard the poet you can well understand that he did not starve when he used to tramp in America and recite to the farmers for a meal and a night’s lodging. He has gained a great popularity.

He is, however, something more than an entertainer. He has a spiritual message to the world, and is deeply in earnest. In a large experience of men and women in many countries, I have rarely met such a rebel against vulgarity, materialism, and the modern artificial way of life. At the same time, despite his poetry, he is almost inarticulate. He has helped me, and here in a way I help him by giving in a new form part of the richness of his thoughts and his opinions.

Vachel Lindsay visited England in 1920, and recited his poems at Oxford and Cambridge and to several groups of friends in London. His mother, Catharine Frazee Lindsay, who accompanied him, was a notable woman in Springfield, Illinois, in religious and progressive activities. She succumbed to an attack of pneumonia this year. But those who met her in this country recognised in her a remarkable figure. At Vachel’s invitation I visited Springfield last summer, and we went to the Rockies, and tramped together to Canada, and this volume is a record of our holiday. A mutual friend of ours is Christopher Morley, who brought us together in 1919. When he heard of our projected expedition he interposed to get some letters for the New York _Evening Post_. Some thirty-two of these were written, mostly by the camp fire or sitting on the rocks in the sun, and were printed in the _Post_, where they attracted considerable attention. “Centurion” in the _Century Magazine_ for August wrote: “Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Graham are having a glorious time. As for those of us who must spend the dog-days in stuffy cities and stuffier offices, the picture of the two of them by a camp fire in the Rockies waking to the freshness and glory of a mountain dawn is--well, if there are no future issues of the _Century Magazine_, you may be sure that the entire staff, inspired by this example, has started vagabonding.” Another, a facetious scribe, wrote: “It is conceded by every one that Stephen Graham’s _Tramping with a Poet_ will some day stand on the shelf of open-air literature beside _Travels with a Donkey_.”

My thanks are due to the representatives of the Great Northern Railway of America, at St. Paul, who gave us a wonderful collection of pictures, maps, and books, when they heard we were going, on the subject of Glacier Park, which we tramped through. In fact, the railway company would have done a great deal for us, but we eluded their kind care, as was our wish, and got out entirely on our own.

As Vachel Lindsay was an art student before he was a poet, and wrote his first verses as scrolls to be illuminated below emblematic figures, we naturally discussed emblems and emblematic art and hieroglyphics as we tramped together. The emblems in this book are an attempt to express that side of our mutual experience. They have been done by my friend, Vernon Hill, who drew once that very precious work, “The Arcadian Calendar.”

One of the poems is by “Rusticus,” who, anent our adventures, contributed it to the New York _Evening Post_.

A last point: Vachel is pronounced to rhyme with Rachel, and is spelt with one l. It does not rhyme with satchel. The poet asked me to tell you that.

STEPHEN GRAHAM

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. TRAMPING AGAIN 1

II. FINDING THE POET 7

III. TAKING THE ROAD 14

IV. FIRST NIGHTS OUT 21

V. GOING UP TO THE SNOW 28

VI. DIFFERENT WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD 34

VII. SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS 40

VIII. NIGHT AND NOTHING ON THE MOUNTAINS 47

IX. “WIFE, GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER” 54

X. CLEAR BLUE 62

XI. NATIONAL WILDERNESS 71

XII. GOING WEST 77

XIII. CLIMBING RED EAGLE 82

XIV. DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE 89

XV. PEOPLE IN CAMP 95

XVI. VISITED BY BEARS 101

XVII. LINDSAY’S STONE COFFEE 108

XVIII. MAKING MAPS OF THE WORLD 114

XIX. A MOUNTAIN POINT OF VIEW 121

XX. BY THE CAMP FIRE 127

XXI. DOWN CATARACT MOUNTAIN 133

XXII. “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN” 139

XXIII. THE SUN-WORSHIPPERS 146

XXIV. TWO VOICES 151

XXV. STOPPED BY THE CLOUDS 158

XXVI. LINDSAY ON ROOSEVELT 165

XXVII. THE WILLOWS 171

XXVIII. JOHNNY APPLESEED 177

XXIX. LOG-ROLLING 184

XXX. TOWARD THE KOOTENAI 190

XXXI. AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD 196

XXXII. THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD 201

XXXIII. FLAT TOP MOUNTAIN 213

XXXIV. CROSSING THE CANADIAN LINE 221

XXXV. THE DIFFERENCE 231

XXXVI. DUKHOBORS 239

XXXVII. A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 247

XXXVIII. “BLOOM FOR EVER, O REPUBLIC!” 274

TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES

I. TRAMPING AGAIN

WELL, it’s good to be going tramping again. I’ve been sitting in European cafés and reading newspapers half a year, from Constantinople to Berlin, and I’ve only stretched my legs when in strange cities I needed to find a hotel, beating it pleasurelessly on asphalt. Last autumn, yes, I was tramping over the ruins and wreck of the war in France, and the year before that walked across Georgia on the track of old Sherman. But with a purpose, and in lands where after all there are hotels, and one pulls the blinds down when the stars appear.

But now I’ve had a real call from Hesperus and the wilds, and am off with a knapsack and a pot and a blanket, and a free mind--yes, and, I confess, a few yards of mosquito netting. I’ve left a notice, “Not at home,” at my Soho flat, though I don’t spend much time there, anyhow; “Back in half an hour or so,” and there are already four thousand miles between my arm-chair and me.

And as I hasten to the West the link stretches, stretches. Not that my flat could ever be lasting home. Where the lady of your heart is, there is home! And where is she not? The worst thing man ever did to man was to nail him down. So hail to all things and men which move and keep moving.

* * * * *

I AM called by one of the most wonderful men who ever broke silence with a song. He belongs to the same sub-species. Yes, a tramping species. His hat has got a hole in it, and so have his breeches. But he is a poet, and he sings of what the world will be when the years have passed away. He can charm a supper out of a farmer with a song. And I who have tramped without music know what a miracle that is. They always said to me, “Chop this wood,” or “Turn that hay,” or “If a man do not work, then neither shall he eat.”

_Grande erreur_, Mr. Farmer!

“Well, _I_ can’t take to the road,” says Mrs. Farmer. “Look at me!--it’s wuk, wuk, wuk, all day!” Mrs. Farmer was born on a Saturday. I always feel sorry for Saturday’s children. They were born a day before I was. For I was born on a Sunday. How sadly we used to intone it when we were children--“Saturday’s child works _hard_ for his living!” And then the relief, “But the child who is born on the good Sunday, is happy and loving and blithe and gay.” That is the tramp-baby, born on the day of rest.

* * * * *

I AM sitting at this moment in the St. Louis train heading for Missouri. The little negro marionette with set smile and the borrowed voice of a ventriloquist has offered coffee, ice-cream, oranges, without response, and now the car-conductor has just put into my hand a tract. It is entitled “Millions Now Living Will Never Die,” and costs 25 cents.

“The emphatic announcement that millions now living on earth will never die must seem presumptuous to many people; but when the evidence is carefully considered I believe that almost every fair mind will concede that the conclusion is a reasonable one.” So the book begins. And you who are spiritually a citizen of Missouri will doubtless require, like doubting Thomas of old, to be shown the very truth in substance and reality.

But the car-conductor has made a mistake. I have not read this book, but I believe. Though I have not seen, I believe and am blessed. And though in the Missouri train, I am not going to Missouri. I am stepping off at Flora, Illinois, to catch the Beardstown local train to Springfield, which unlike St. Louis and Jerusalem and Capernaum, and perhaps more like Tyre and Sidon, is a city of faith where they have bread from heaven to eat.

Not that I am staying in Springfield. But there I pick up the poet. That is where he haunts--“where Lincoln dreamed in Illinois.” The poet thinks that the world could be regenerated from a centre in Illinois--this beautiful state upon which Chicago has thought fit to rear its awful form.

Some one of Illinois, not the poet, wrote to me, “What do you think of Springfield as a centre of world thought?” Now I know the craze of “Boost your home town” can be, and often is, carried to excess, and little Springfield is not even on a main line from New York. But neither is Bethlehem nor the human heart. If you want to regenerate your wicked world you can begin here and now--or, to use the language of the country, put your hand to your bosom and say it--“_You can begin right here._” And then, to quote the poet himself, you will have--

Crossed the Appalachians, And turned to blazing warrior souls Of the lazy forest.

Springfield will not hold us. But we shall take Springfield with us. We are going to take it in our hearts and place it on the top of the Rocky Mountains, at the Triple Divide, where the waters of the new world flow north and east and west--

_Going tramping again, Going to the mountains, To recapture the stars, To meet again the nymphs of the fountains. To visit the bear, To salute the eagles, To be kissed all night by wild-flowers in the grass!_

II. FINDING THE POET

FLORA, Illinois, where one changes for Springfield, has a Main Street, and, like many a little town of the Middle West of America, looks rather self-consciously askance at visitors, like the village that voted the earth was flat in Kipling’s tale. For the novel of the hour is called _Main Street_ and is sold to hundreds of thousands of people and read by every American who reads anything, and is bitterly or jocularly discussed at every tea-table. It sheds a bright light on the life of a typical little town in the Middle West. It names the town Gopher Prairie--because the Middle West is prairie land and the gopher-rats or marmots live there in myriads in their little burrows. The novelist seems to suggest that the people themselves are a species of gopher, a little people, limited of view, good-natured, of the earth earthy, but always bobbing-up. Because of the criticism implied in this novel the Middle West would rather now be called the “Central West.”

These Main Streets, however, except for the sophisticated eyes of a college girl inauspiciously married, are probably not so bad as the realist paints them. They are dull, but genuine. They exhibit our modern civilisation without too many shams. See the people working in the heat. The minds of the young are set on their dull jobs and not thinking of drink or sex--it is sufficiently wonderful. There are “Main Street” towns in every country in Europe, and life is dull in them though adorned by fights and drinks and “hussies”--but where will you find such an unexhausted _élan_ and zest for the unornamented reality that America affords? Where else moreover will you find the working-men to-day working in silk shirts? Life in Main Street seems worth while, at least to those who live there.

It’s a by-line from Flora to Springfield, and you plough iron slowly through Illinois corn. An old mechanical car-conductor with grey straw hat and fat stubby face calls the stations one by one in an outlandish accent which to a stranger is entirely baffling. He collects the tickets, and if you are for Springfield he puts a red check in your hat-band; if you are for anywhere else it is a white check. Springfield is now in the mind’s eye as a large place and is printed everywhere in big type. The Springfield _Register_ and the Springfield _Journal_ make showing.

* * * * *

I READ the newspapers and then tick off the names of the stations on the printed time-table of the B. and O. folder and patiently await the city and its bard. A four-hour journey in a slow train in England would seem intolerable, but America has a different sense of time and space, and a long time is not thought so long. At last, in the late dusk, behold Springfield, Illinois, and the unmistakable marble of the poet’s face under a small black felt--“waitin’ for me, prayin’ for me,” and certainly not really believing in the act of faith which can bring the mountain to Mahomet. In the literary world when invitations are rife there is a golden rule--_Promise everything and do just what you like._ So one never really knows whether “Yes, I’ll come,” means yea, yea or nay, nay.

It meant yea, yea this time, and so, getting out of the Beardstown local which pulled up outside the station, behold--two strong men stand face to face and they come from the ends of the earth. Vachel Lindsay rasped out sentences of welcome in broad Illinois and I replied in whispering English, and we bundled along Fifth Street for home. Then mother, of seventy years, tiptoed and curtsied and smiled with the roguishness of a young maid, and brought us in. So we sit now on rocking-chairs and talk while beads of moisture roll ticklingly adown our brows, and it is home.

Vachel is a poetical vagabond. I also am a vagabond. There lies our common ground. He is an old-fashioned hiker of the tramping parson type. He leaves home, as it were to post a letter, and does a thousand or so miles. He made a rule once to travel without money, and he recited his poems to the farmers and their wives for food and a night’s lodging. Like Weston, who tramped with ice-blocks under his hat and water streaming down his neck, he can do his twenty miles a day over a long time and has travelled some huge distances in his day. I for my part hardly believe in tramping for tramping’s sake, but in living with Nature for what that is worth.

To sleep under the stars, to live with the river that sings as it flows, to sit by the embers of morning or evening fire and just dream away time and earnestness, to gather sticks to keep the old pot a-boiling, to laze into the company of strangers and slip out of their company in time, to make friends with bird and beast, and watch insects and grubs--to relax and to be; that’s my idea of tramping. The blessed nights full of dew or rain and breeze, the full length of a ferny bed that Mother Earth provides--don’t they attract, don’t they pull one away from the town! And then the day, with celestial, unadvertised, unpaid-for sunshine or shade, on the rocks, on the tufty hills, beside tiny springs or stream on the stairs of the mountains!

* * * * *

I HAD an idea I was finding my poet at Springfield--well, I know I shall not find him now till we get to the wilderness. He is yet incarcerated in the home town. He reflects in his soul the grey walls and squat architecture of the city; his nerves are still tied to the leading strings of audiences and friends; his soul, like a rare singing bird lately caught by the curious, flings itself against the bars and pines for the wilderness. All is going to go well with him and us, I surmise, and his eyes will have mountains and stars in them, and his nerves get free of strings and sink into their natural beds for a rest, and his soul, that rarely plumaged, wingéd wanderer ’twixt heaven and earth--well, some one has come to open the cage door and let him fly away, to heart’s desire.

The world will have to send a fowler after him with a net, if it wants to get him back. And to find him--it will be “a long ways.”

_The poet was in Fifth Street Mewed up as in a prison. He was moping in his bedchamber All the day long Far from the mountains and the flowers, But see, a visitor has arrived From strange parts._

III. TAKING THE ROAD

WE packed our knapsacks at Springfield, and stowed away blankets and socks, a coffee-pot, and a frying-pan. We bought at a ten-cent store knife and fork and spoon, skillet, towels which we sewed into sacks, mugs, and what was labelled “The Mystic Mit--the greatest discovery since soap for cleaning pots and pans.” Lindsay had hobnails put in his old boots and bought a handsome pair of corduroy breeches, which, together with his old black hat, made him look like a tramping violinist. Springfield bade us farewell. We were one night in the train to Chicago and travelled all day north to St. Paul. We were then two nights and a day crossing the great land ocean of Minnesota, North Dakota, and eastern Montana--what was once an unending stage-coach trail to the West.

“This is what I like,” said Lindsay--“the prairie to the horizon, no fences, no stone walls, as in New England. It is all broad and unlimited; that is why since the days of Andrew Jackson all the great politicians have come from the West--the unfenced West. I’d like to put all the Boston and New York people out here on the plains and let the plain men run the East.”

To me, however, it looked a land of endless toil as I saw it from train windows, and I thought of the toiling pioneers and the Russians in the Dakotas, the Swedes and the Germans content to live and toil and be swallowed up at last by the distances and the primitive. European life-rivers have flowed into these deserts and made them what they are. One day their children perhaps will have a Western consciousness, an American consciousness.

* * * * *

WE stepped off the train at Glacier Park Station. Some dozen women in khaki riding breeches were waiting on the platform, and six or seven people got out from the tourist and Pullman cars to cross to the great log-built hotel opposite. Then the train started again and toiled onwards to the heights of the divide, whence, as Kipling put it:

They ride the iron stallions down to drink; To the canyons and the waters of the West.

We spent a night at the hotel and were much amused by the idea of a room with a bath in such a place, and by the notice that you could have your linen laundered in twenty-four hours. There was dancing in the evening in an immense hall lit by red Chinese lanterns and adorned by bear-skins and Alaskan ornaments--a fair company of people, too, though mostly from the West.

We, however, were eager for the road, and set out next morning with blankets and provisions and steered a north-westerly or west by north-westerly course by our compasses, abjuring trails and guides. Our idea was to obtain a cross-section view of the Rockies in their most primitive state unguided by convention. We hoped to realise something of what America was like for at least a hundred years after Columbus discovered it. We were headed for the virgin land.

How quickly did we leave that hotel with its “stopping over” crowd behind! In an hour we were in the deep silence of the mountains encompassed on each side by exuberant pink larkspurs and blanket flowers and red paint-brush. We clambered upward, ever upward, through fresh, young, chattering aspens and then green tangled pinewood--and then also through old dead forests lying in black confusion, uprooted, snapped, stricken, in heaps like the woods of the Somme Valley. Then we walked through new dead forests, burned only last year, and then through brown scorched forests that did not burn, but died merely of the great heat which their neighbours’ burning had caused.

We stepped from log to log and tree to tree, making for the open and the light, with the gaiety of troubadours, and Lindsay seemed romantically happy. I also was happy, and thought of the happy days before the war, when I tramped in this fashion back and forth across the Caucasus Mountains and along hundreds of miles of Black Sea shore. It was pure joy to light the first fire and fry our bacon and make our coffee in the full effulgence of the sun.

* * * * *