Down the Yellowstone Part 13

Bless your generous heart, "Happy"; I only hope I may be cruising in your vicinity if you ever need that hand-out. That bucket of California home-dried apricots I left you didn't go toward balancing our grub account.

With no very swift water ahead and the prospect of a fairly clear night, I had hopes for a while of drifting right on through to Glendive. These hopes--along with me and my outfit--were dampened by a shower shortly after I started, and completely dashed by a steady drizzle that set in about nine. Dragging up the skiff on the first bar on which it grounded in the now pitchy darkness, I inflated my sleeping-pocket, crawled into it and went to sleep. Awakening at dawn to find a cloudless sky, I crawled out, pushed off, and was in Glendive before six o'clock. Landing half a mile above town, I climbed up to a shack which "Happy" Coogan had told me was owned by a friend of his who had worked in the local pool-room. It was no sort of hour to awaken a tired business man of a Sunday morning, but "Happy's" name proved _open sesame_. It took some rearranging to get my stuff into that ten-by-twelve shack with a man, his wife and their seven children. Somehow we managed it, however; moreover, the whole nine of them pledged themselves to stand watch-and-watch over the skiff until I showed up again, no matter how long that might be. The true river spirit had awakened even in these dwellers on the fringes of Glendive's munic.i.p.al dump. Bath, breakfast, snooze and another seance with inevitable proofs was the order of the day.

CHAPTER VI

GLENDIVE TO THE MISSOURI

Glendive, located on the Yellowstone at a point where the Northern Pacific leaves the river to cut across the Bad Lands straight for the plains of North Dakota, owes more to the railroad than perhaps any other town of the valley. Although Glendive Creek was a frequent halt in the steamboat days of the Indian campaigns, there was never much of a settlement there until railway construction commenced in the late 'seventies. The first train pulled into Glendive almost forty years to a day previous to my arrival by boat. I found a fine, clean, prosperous little city of 6000 where my puffing predecessor had drawn up to little more than a typical frontier construction camp. Range stock helped the town along in its earlier days, but the railway shops probably did more.

Finally the completion of the dam at Intake and the distribution of water to the most extensive irrigable area in the Yellowstone Valley provided a tributary agricultural territory of great wealth.

There was one thing I was especially interested in seeing in Glendive--a school musical system that is probably without a near rival in any town in America five times as large. I was a.s.sured that, of a school enrolment of about a thousand, nearly two hundred pupils played some kind of a musical instrument. There was an orchestra of sixty pieces, and a boy's military band of sixty-five. Each was divided into junior and senior grades, and a member was pushed ahead or dropped back according to talent and effort. At no time did a pupil have a place cinched; nothing but steady conscientious effort, regular attendance at rehearsals, and proper general deportment won promotion, or prevented demotion. Perhaps the finest thing about the whole system, was the fact that it was undertaken entirely apart from the regular curriculum, no school credits whatever being given for the work. I was told the credit for this fine achievement belonged to a princ.i.p.al of one of the grade schools, a Miss Lucille Hennigar, who had put herself behind it purely out of love of music and children.

I did not have the honour of meeting Miss Hennigar, but I did make the acquaintance of some of her proteges. First and last, about two score of them must have chanced along in the hour I was tinkering with my boat late Sunday afternoon. They were regular fellows all right (every other one wanted to come down in the morning and sign on with me), but not a hoodlum in the lot. Not a mother's darling of them tried to kick a hole in my little tin shallop. As none of them exhibited any symptoms of infantile paralysis, I decided it must be music--quieting the mean foot as well as soothing the savage breast.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ONE OF THE FAMOUS SCHOOL BANDS OF GLENDIVE]

Warned by every authority from Captain Clark to an agate-hunter I had pa.s.sed at the mouth of the Powder that I was now approaching the "Mosquito Coast" of the Yellowstone, I made special point of preparing to go into battle by getting the best kind of a sleep I could in Glendive. This made it particularly gratifying to find that this good little city had just about the cleanest, most comfortable and best run hotel in the valley. I should have paid it that tribute even had not its genial manager, in company with the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, driven down to see me off--bringing an especially appealing little cold lunch.

It was late in the forenoon before I got away. Just as I was about to push off a telegram was brought down to me from Mr. A. M. Cleland, Pa.s.senger Traffic Manager of the Northern Pacific, saying that he had heard of my trip and was wiring all the company's agents along the river to be on the watch to lend me a hand, and to consider any of the N. P.'s shops at my service for repairs. Even though it arrived at the very moment I was turning away from the main line of the Northern Pacific, which I had paralleled all the way from Livingston, I was nevertheless just as appreciative of the spirit that prompted the courteous and kindly message.

Captain Clark had made camp just above Glendive,[1] "where they saw the largest white bear that any of the party had ever before seen, devouring a dead buffalo on a sand bar. They fired two b.a.l.l.s into him; he then swam to the mainland and walked along the sh.o.r.e. Captain Clark pursued him and lodged two more b.a.l.l.s in his body; but though he bled profusely he made his escape, as night prevented them from following him."

As the country below Glendive is probably both the richest and most intensively cultivated in the whole Yellowstone Valley, I was especially struck by the contrast presented by verdant irrigated fields of alfalfa and clover to the howling wilderness Clark described. Nowhere else in all of his journey back and forth across the continent had he seen such a variety and such numbers of animals. It must have been somewhere below the present site of the great Government dam at Intake that the buffalo began to appear in vast numbers. As their boat floated down "a herd happened to be on their way across the river. Such was the mult.i.tude of these animals that, though the river, including an island over which they pa.s.sed, was a mile wide, the herd stretched, as thickly as they could swim, from one side to the other, and the party was obliged to stop for an hour." Forty-five miles below, two other herds as numerous as the first blocked their way again.

[1] In reading Clark's notes in the original it should be born in mind that they were written almost entirely in the third person. His spellings were often most originally phonetic, but not always conforming to one system. I have found three distinct spellings of mosquito in a single paragraph, and buffalo was often rendered "buffaloe" and "buffalow."

L. R. F.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _J. E. Haynes, St. Paul_

BUFFALO STAMPEDE]

The following day they found the "buffalo and elk, as well as the pursuers of both, the wolves, in great numbers." Moreover, "the bears, which gave so much trouble on the head of the Missouri, are equally fierce in this quarter. This morning one of them, which was on a sand-bar as the boat pa.s.sed, raised himself on his hind legs; and after looking at the party, plunged in and swam toward them. He was received with three b.a.l.l.s in the body; he then turned around and made for the sh.o.r.e. Toward evening another entered the water to swim across. Captain Clark ordered the boat toward the sh.o.r.e, and just as the bear landed, shot the animal in the head. It proved to be the largest female they had ever seen, so old that its tusks were worn quite smooth. The boats escaped with difficulty between two herds of buffalo that were crossing the river." On this same day great numbers of bull elk were reported, and also, "on some rugged hills to the southeast," numerous bighorn.

In all the records of western exploration and travel I can recall nothing that suggested such an astonis.h.i.+ng plenitude of many kinds of large animals in one region. It would not have been so hard to conjure up the picture along some of the wilder reaches of the upper river, but here--with those pretty little forty and fifty-acre farms, all under ditch and cultivated to their last foot, stretching away mile after mile on my left--it was asking almost too much of the imagination to perform such acrobatics.

In a steady but ever slackening current it took me about four hours to pull the thirty miles to the Intake dam. The town was on the left but the abrupt bluff at that point indicated the right as the easier portage. The smooth green current of the water over the end of the concrete barrier tempted me for a moment to avoid portaging by letting down the empty boat on a line. Sober second thought counselled caution--that water at the end of a twelve-foot drop had too much of a kick in reserve to make it safe to trifle with. Better safe than submerged is a serviceable variation of the old saw for river use.

There was a considerable stretch of rip-raping and other rocky barriers--laid to protect the end of the dam at flood time--to get the boat over, but a young rancher, just driving up to the ferry, kindly volunteered to come up and give me a hand. Carrying the trim little craft bodily for a couple of hundred feet, we put it into his wagon and drove down a hundred yards to the ferry-landing where it was easier launching than near the dam. He was all against being paid for his trouble, but finally suggested twenty-five cents as his idea of what was fair. He looked actually distressed when, with a wristy movie actor's gesture of finality, I gave him the whole of a dollar bill. What wouldn't a farmer on a country highway have charged for half that much labour pulling a Ford out of a mud-hole?

But it appears that even non-river dwelling folk are not mercenary in this neck of Montana. A cowboy-like girl who had just ridden up on a prancing pinto frowned darkly when she saw the greenback pa.s.s. Spurring down to the water as I finished tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the boat, she leaned down close to my ear, whispering stagily through her hollowed gauntlet: "Too bad you didn't see me first, stranger; I'd 'a yanked down that lil'

sardine-tin there on the end of my rope for nothin'." That was the first time I ever heard anybody called "stranger" outside of Wild West stories written in the Tame East. Later, down Nebraska and Missouri-way, however, I found that address in common use by people in real life.

There's no end of a thrill in finding story-book stuff in real life--I suppose because it happens so darn'd seldom.

There were a few flashes of white in the riffle below the dam; then a broadening river and slackening water. Many and unmistakable signs told me that I was now skirting the dread "Mosquito Coast." Cattle nose-deep in the water or rus.h.i.+ng blindly through the th.o.r.n.y bull-berry bushes, smudge-barrages round the ranch houses, dark, s.h.i.+fting clouds over the marshes and over-flow lakes--every one of them was a sign of an ancient enemy, an enemy who had drawn first and last blood on every field I had met him from the Amazon to Alaska. Knowing that I was going to run the gauntlet of him for many hundreds of miles, I had come prepared, both mentally and physically. Nevertheless I looked forward with no small apprehension to a contest which could not be other than a losing one--for me. Moreover, I had too many dormant malarial germs in my once-fever thinned blood to care to risk their being driven to the warpath again by too intimate contact with other Bolsheviki of the same breed. Frankly, Herr Mosquito, with his _shrecklichkeit_, was one thing above all others that had given me pause in planning a voyage that would carry me through so many thousand miles of his Happy Hunting Grounds.

Miles and Terry and Crook had driven the Redskin from the Yellowstone and Missouri, Civilization had exterminated the buffalo, but the mosquito still ranged unchecked over his ancient domain. It was just a question of how much blood one was going to have to yield up to get by his toll-gate-keepers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DAM ACROSS THE YELLOWSTONE AT INTAKE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTAGING MY BOAT ROUND THE INTAKE DAM]

[Ill.u.s.tration: COMPLETING THE PORTAGE]

Some kind of a poor old river-rat--doubtless an agate-hunter,--ringed with smudges and trying to spare time enough from fighting the enemy to hold a frying pan over a smouldering fire gave me a graphic warning of what fate awaited me if I tried to camp by the bank. Forthwith I decided to get my supper in the boat, run till near dark, pick the likeliest-looking ranch, tell them I was a farmer myself, and let human nature take its course. I had had the plan of adding a galley to the boat in mind for some days. Drifting while I munched a cold lunch had already eliminated the noonday halt, and I was now figuring to let the river also go on with its work during breakfast and supper hours as well. My first plan was to make a little stove by cutting holes in an oil-can, setting this on the non-inflammable steel bottom of my boat and cooking with wood in the ordinary way. Then, in a store window in Glendive, I saw a midget of a stove that worked with gasoline pumped under pressure. It was called a "Kampkook," but I could see every reason why it would also make a perfectly good "Boatkook." Drifting just beyond the wall of the coastwise mosquito barrage, I tried it out that evening. Bacon and eggs, _pet.i.t pois_, mulligatawny soup, dried apricots and a pot of cocoa--all these delectables I fried, boiled or stewed without pausing from rowing for more than an occasional prod, stir or shake. When all was ready, I removed the thwart from the forward section, threw my half-inflated sleeping-bag in the bottom, disposed a couple of cus.h.i.+ons, and suppered like Cleopatra on her barge, reclining at my ease. With occasional spice-lending-variations, that sybaritic program was followed on many another evening right on to the finish of my voyage. I loved too well the smell of "wood smoke at twilight" to forego entirely the joy of the camp on the bank, but wherever that bank was muddy or infested by mosquitos, I. W. W.'s, or other undesirables, or whenever I was trying to make time, I had a perfectly self-contained s.h.i.+p aboard which I could eat and sleep with entire comfort.

It was early twilight before I came to just the ranch that I was looking for. Distantly at first, like the gold at the end of a rainbow, I saw it transfigured in the sunset glow at the end of the vista of a long wine-dark side-channel. There was a sprawling, broad-eaved bungalow, vine-covered and inviting, big new red barns and a lofty silo that loomed like a tower against the sun-flushed western sky. I named it "Ranch of the Heart's Desire" on the instant, for I knew that it could give all that I most intensely craved--cover from the enemy. I tied up at the landing as a sea-worn skipper drops his anchor in a harbour of the Islands of the Blest.

The long avenue of cottonwoods up to the bungalow seemed to be filled with about equal parts of mosquitos and Jersey cows. Doubtless the mosquitos were much the more numerous. But because it hurts more to hit a running cow than a flying insect I probably was impressed with the Jerseys out of all proportion to their actual numbers. A dash through a "No-Man's-Land" of smouldering smudges and I burst into a Haven of Refuge at the bungalow door. A genial chap with a steady smile met me as I emerged from the smoke, complimented me upon the smartness of my open-field running among the Jerseys, and opined that I must have been a pretty s.h.i.+fty fullback in my day. A youth in greasy overalls who came wiggling out from under a Ford he introduced as "My hired man." But when the latter blushed and protested: "Now there you go again, dear!" he admitted that it was only his wife. They promptly insisted I should have supper, while I had considerable difficulty in making them believe I had a galley functioning in my boat. We finally compromised on ice-cream and strawberries. All the ranchers along the lower Yellowstone and upper Missouri have ice-houses.

They were just the kind of folk one knew he would have to find in a haven called "Ranch of the Heart's Desire." Their name was Patterson, and they had lived most of their lives in Was.h.i.+ngton--in some kind of departmental service. Becoming tired--or perhaps ashamed--of working six hours a day, they bought a ranch under the Yellowstone project ditch and started working sixteen. So far they had been spending rather more money than they had made but, like all on the threshold of bucolic life, looked confidently to a future rainbow-bright with prospects. They confessed that it awakened a wee bit of nostalgia to meet one who had been in Was.h.i.+ngton, and so it chanced that it was of "Things Was.h.i.+ngtonese" that we talked rather than of our experiences as farmers.

There was something strangely appealing to the imagination in sitting there where the bison in his millions had so lately trod and putting everything and everybody at the Primal Fount in their proper places.

Long into the night we rattled on just as though over a table at the Sh.o.r.eham, the New Williard or Chevy Chase--just as we would have talked in Was.h.i.+ngton. Knocking Wilson whenever any other subject was exhausted, we bemoaned the predominance of third-cla.s.s men in Congress, agreed that Harding wouldn't do much harm and might do good, swapped yarns about the funny things Congressmen's wives had said and done, and pa.s.sed by acclamation a motion that the most unrepresentative inst.i.tution in America was the House of Representatives. It was highly refres.h.i.+ng to meet people you could be really frank with in discussing the more or less esoteric phases of these and kindred subjects. I enjoyed that evening's yarn only less than I did my couch on a breeze-swept porch that was armoured with a woven copper mesh against the a.s.saults of the common enemy.

Before I pushed off in the morning Mr. Patterson took me around two sides of his ranch and showed me some splendid fields of alfalfa and sweet clover, just ready for cutting. Prices were good, he said, and the prospects were bright for the best clean-up they had known so far. I have often wondered just how those green, fragrant fields looked ten hours later, just how much those optimistic forecasts were modified as a consequence of certain little inequalities of atmospheric pressure that were already making their differences felt in a lightning-shot murkiness hanging low on the northeastern horizon. I did not make sure of the Patterson's address and a postcard of inquiry I subsequently dispatched brought no reply.

I was aware of the heavy humidity of the atmosphere the moment I pulled out in the slow current of the still broadening river. There was plenty of air stirring but with no fixed plan of action in its mind. Now it would swoop down over the banks in sudden gusts; now it would blow down river for a few moments and then turn on its heel and come breezing right back, like a commuter who has forgotten his ticket; now it would deliberately "Box-the-Compa.s.s" right round the boat, as a cat circles a rat that it is just a bit chary about springing on.

The easterly gusts paved the surface of the water with evanescent patches of floating gra.s.shoppers, evidently part of a flight that had not yet found lodgment in the growing fields under the irrigation project on the other bank. After each gust the fish would rise greedily to the feast for a few minutes. Satiation would come quickly, however, and most of the hoppers were left to drown or perhaps to gain a few hours longer lease on life by drifting to a bar. One gust that came while I was skirting the sh.o.r.e poured a literal gra.s.shopper cataract over the cut-bank into the boat. There was a sharp, rasping contact where the saw-toothed legs side-swiped my arms and face that would undoubtedly have left abrasions on the skin if it had been kept up for any time. For a few moments there was a layer of hoppers two or three inches deep in the bottom of the skiff; then the most of them hurdled out into the water. The dessicated remains of the few _ambuscados_ that took refuge in the grub-box kept turning up in a variety of frys, stews, and frica.s.sees for the next fortnight.

I pulled up to Riverview Ferry, well on toward the North Dakota line, at one o'clock. Mr. and Mrs. Meadows, with whom I had lunch, once operated a pontoon bridge at this point but had given it up on account of the trouble from high water. They wanted to sell the twenty or more pontoons left on their hands but said they could not see where a buyer would come from. It occurred to me that one of these floats would make an ideal hull for a houseboat, for a Missouri-Mississippi voyage, just as Riverview would be an ideal place for launching one. I have not Mr.

Meadows' address, but fancy Sidney, Montana, would reach him. I shall not take the responsibility of urging any one to attempt a trip of this kind, but should the urge have developed spontaneously I think there is a chance here to acquire the makings of an extremely serviceable house-boat at a fraction of what it would cost to go about building it in the ordinary way. Starting at high water in June, an outfit of this kind--with luck and in the hands of the right party--might well go through to New Orleans before Christmas. Manned by a party without much common sense and persistence, it might conceivably be abandoned by some wildly regretful people before it swung out into the "Big Muddy." I utterly refuse to pa.s.s upon any one's qualification, or to take other than hostile notice of letters charging me with ruining what but for me might have been a comparatively inexpensive and enjoyable holiday in Bermuda or on the Riviera.

The ferryman at Riverview claimed to have made the voyage from Miles City to somewhere on the lower Mississippi in a house-boat, taking two seasons for it. He was the first ferryman I ever met who was full of doleful warnings about troubles ahead. My little tin boat might be all right for the rapids of the Yellowstone, he said, but just wait till it went up against the white caps kicked up by the winds of the Missouri and the Mississippi. He said no word about the winds of the Yellowstone.

If he wasn't prepared for them, I only hope his ferryboat was not caught in midstream by a zephyr that breezed up river about three hours later.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _L. A. Huffman_

THE "OLD N----" CROSSING THE POWDER RIVER]

It must have been toward three o'clock that I first noticed how what had been a grey murkiness to the north-east all morning was now rising in a solid bank of swiftly advancing cloud. For a while its front was smooth and rounded, like the rim of a tin-plate. Half-way up to the zenith this front began to reveal itself as a wind-riven line of madly racing nimbus, black, sinister and ominous. And yet, blissfully ignorant of the h.e.l.l-broth a-brew, I worried not a whit--didn't even begin to edge away from mid-channel for a while, in fact. What a lamb it was! Never again, with so much as a man's-hand-sized cloud blinking on the windward horizon, was I to know the calm, quiet, serenity of a confident soul.

A long, lean, torpedo-like shaft of blue-black cloud, breaking away from the ruck and aiming in a direction that would bring it directly over my head, produced the first splash in the pool of my perfect serenity. That _did_ look just a bit as though I might be running into the centre of a heavy thunder-storm, I confessed to myself. Perhaps, if there was a ranch-house convenient, it might be just as well to be thinking of getting under cover. Yes, there were three or four houses off to the left--places on the irrigation project, doubtless, they were so close together. I started to pull in toward a sandy flat, but sheered off again when it became apparent that a slough and marsh would cut me off from the first of the houses, a place with a silo and the inevitable red barn. Plainly the only way to reach any of the farms would be by landing at the foot of the bluff a quarter of a mile ahead, climbing up and cutting across the fields. That might not be possible before the storm broke--but what did a warm summer rain matter anyhow?

Leaning hard onto my oars, I headed straight down stream for where a coal-streaked yellow bluff blocked the northerly course of the river and bent it off almost directly eastward. Swelling monstrously as it approached, the black arrow-head of the storm, deflecting slightly, began to pa.s.s overhead to the left. I distinctly remember thinking how its shape now suggested the picked skeleton of a gigantic mackerel--just a backbone and right-angling ribs. The sun dimmed and reddened as the flying clouds began to drive across its face, and the even ribs barred the dulling glow like a furnace grating. A sulphurous, copperly glare streaming through cast a weird unearthly sheen on the unrhythmically lapping wavelets of the river. My serenity was blotted out with the sun.

I recalled only too well now where I had known that ghostly yellow light before--the sullen fore-glow by which the South Sea hurricane slunk upon its helpless prey. It had always been a.s.sociated in my mind with the shriek of the wind, the roar of the surf and the explosive detonations of snapped coco palm boles. There were no coco palms here to snap, I reflected, but--ah, that was surely a roar, and there came the wind!

Pulling in a dead calm myself, I saw the river and air at the bend turn white almost between one stroke and the next. A tongue of wind seemed to have shot out from behind a point to the right and begun scooping up hunks of the river and throwing them across the flats. This blast was at right angles to my course down stream, but I came parallel to it as I swung and headed for the sand-bar on my left. The air was coiling and twisting upon itself as I landed, but that out-licking tongue of the storm was pa.s.sing me by and circling the bluffs beyond the flat.

Without unloading the skiff, I dragged her as far in on the bar as I could, threw my stuff together in the forward section and snugged it down under a tarpaulin. Its weight might keep the boat from blowing away, I figured. Then I drove oars in the sand with an ax and ran lines to them from bow and stern--land-moorings, so to speak. The fore-front of the wind hard and solid as the side of a moving barn, caught me from behind as I made fast the bowline. I went forward to my knees, sprawled flat, wiggled round head-on and then, leaning far forward, slowly struggled to my feet. Hanging balanced at angle of forty-five degrees, I started slowly crabbing back to the boat. It wasn't so bad after all, I told myself. The skiff was not giving an inch to the blast, while leaning up against the wind that way was rather good fun. I recalled a stunt something like it that Little Tich used to pull in the London Halls--an eccentric dance with enormously elongated shoes. I decided that perhaps I was even enjoying the diversion a bit. In half-pretended nonchalance I turned my head and cast a side-glance over toward the farmhouses back of the bluffs. That was the last move of even a.s.sumed nonchalance I was guilty of for some time.

That side-glance photographed three things on my memory: a grove of willows flattened almost against the earth by the wind, two women, with wondrously billowing skirts, crawling along the side of a house toward a door, and a flimsy unpainted outbuilding resolving into its component parts and pelting across a corral full of horses. Doubtless there was more animated action to be observed had I been spared another hundredth of a second or so to get a line on it. The three things mentioned were as far as I got when the hail opened up.

With the viciousness of spattering shrapnel that first salvo of frozen pellets raked me across the right cheek. The tingle of pain was astonis.h.i.+ngly sharp, like that from the blow of a back-snapped thorn branch on an overgrown trail, and I was a bit surprised when an explorative finger revealed no trace of blood. Hunching my neck brought my face under cover, but the batteries of the storm had got my range now and there was a decided sting to the impact of those baby icebergs, even through my slicker and s.h.i.+rt. People are very p.r.o.ne to exaggerate about the size of hail-stones, so I shall endeavour to make a special effort to be conservative about these. They felt a lot bigger when they hit, of course, but as I examined heaps of them afterward the average size seemed to be about that of shrapnel or large marbles. There may have been hail-stones the size of hens' eggs, but no one who was ever exposed to them in the open can have lived to tell the tale. Men looking out through the bars of jail may have seen them and survived to make affidavits; most other authentic reports of egg-sized hail-stones will doubtless be pretty well confined to the minutes of coroners' juries.