Down the Yellowstone Part 15

In the Marquesas there is a little yellow-blossomed bush called the _ca.s.si_, the pollen from which blows far to leeward before the South-east Trade. At times I have thought that I could detect the delicate odour of blown-_ca.s.si_ ten miles at sea, yet never even in kicking my way through a copse of the fragrant little bush have I been a.s.sailed with such a veritable flow of perfume as coiled and streamed about me as I drifted down toward the mouth of the Yellowstone that morning after the great hail-storm. Doubtless, indeed, the hail was responsible. Crushed and dying, the voiceless "Friend of Man" was chanting its "Swan Song" in the only medium at its command.

A couple of miles below the bend where the storm had caught me I pa.s.sed into North Dakota at a point called the State Line Ferry. An hour later I ran under the bridge of a branch of the Great Northern. It was a fine, bold piece of construction, and it was in my mind at the time that its builder must be an outstanding man in his line. This surmise was vindicated a month later when I found him putting in the first piers of a bridge to span the Missouri at Yankton. Incidentally, some of his false-work got in the way of my skiff and all but dumped me out into the "Big Muddy."

Below Forsyth's b.u.t.te, last of the outstanding landmarks of the Yellowstone, the country on both sides began to smoothen and flatten out and offer less resistance to the spread of the river. The broad over-flow flats offered an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos, recalling to me that a very large portion of Clark's journey of early August was devoted to telling of the mental and physical suffering inflicted upon the members of his party by the swarms of stinging pests they had encountered just above and below the mouth of the Yellowstone.

From Clark's time down to the present this particular region has always been regarded as "The Dark and b.l.o.o.d.y Ground of the Mosquito Coast of Dakota." I was resolved to put bars between myself and the enemy that night--if not the mosquito bars of a hotel room, then the mid-stream sand-bars of the Missouri.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BROAD STREAM OF THE YELLOWSTONE BELOW GLENDIVE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LAST BRIDGE ABOVE THE MISSOURI]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE THE YELLOWSTONE TAKES POSSESSION OF THE MISSOURI]

A broad, sweeping curve to the left, a wide bend, and then an equally broad and sweeping curve to the right opened up a long vista with low, dry, rounded hills at the end of it. With a quick catch of breath I recognized the telegraph poles of the Great Northern Railway and the scattering buildings of Fort Buford--both _beyond the Missouri_. A swift run under a crumbling cut-bank on the left carried me past an out-reaching tongue of yellow clay and into a quiet, sluggish, dark-stained current that came meandering along from the west.

I have mentioned the quieter, calmer current in which I had been drifting below Glendive. So it had seemed after the tumultuous mountain torrent which I had run from Livingston to Billings; yet in comparison with this decorous bride from the west the Yellowstone came to its marriage bed like a raging lion. Or, to borrow an animal from the next cage in the zoo, the Missouri, in coming down to meet and mingle with the Yellowstone, fared much like the lady who went out to ride on the tiger. If I may paraphrase:

"I finished my ride with the Lady inside, And the smile on the face of the Tiger,"

meaning the Yellowstone. Without even pausing to crouch for a spring, the tawny, impetuous feline on whose back I had ridden all the way down from the Rockies, simply rushed out upon the muddy lamb from the western plains and gobbled it up. Seven or eight weeks later I saw the latter do the same thing to the Mississippi--crowd it right over against the Illinois sh.o.r.e and gulp it down. And along toward the end of October I remember thinking how like the blonde beast of the Yellowstone was a ropy coil of tawny current I found undermining a levee in Louisiana.

According to the maps I had been travelling for upwards of three thousand miles on the Missouri and Mississippi, but in fancy it was the tawny tiger of the Yellowstone that had carried me all the way from the borders of Wyoming to the tide-waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

THE END