Down the Yellowstone Part 4

Jim said that a homesick miner at Aldridge had built this fearful and wonderful craft with the idea of using it to return to his family in Hickman, Kentucky. He had bade defiance to the rapids of the Yellowstone with the slogan "HICKMAN OR BUST." The letters were still discernible in tarry basrelief. So also the name on bow and stern. (Or was it stern and bow? I was never quite sure which was which.) _Kentucky Mule_ he had called it, but I never knew why till years later. And sorry I was I ever learned, too.

The fellow was lacking in heart, Jim said. He had run no rapids to speak of in the _Mule_, and if she had hit any rocks in the five or six miles of comparatively open water above she had doubtless nosed them out of the way. The princ.i.p.al trouble appeared to have been that she preferred to progress on her side or on her back rather than right side up. This had caused her to fill with water, and that, while apparently not affecting her buoyancy greatly, had made her cabin uncomfortable. Her owner abandoned her just as soon as she could be brought to bank, selling what was salvable of his outfit and leaving the rest. What Jim complained of was the chap's failure to live up to his slogan. Nothing had busted except his nerve. He hoped that in case I did push off I wouldn't disgrace myself--and him, who was sponsoring me, so to speak--by not keeping going. Old Jim had good sound basic instincts. No doubt about that.

Working with ax and crowbar, we finally succeeded in knocking off the cabin of what had been intended for a houseboat, leaving behind a half-undecked scow. It was about twenty-five feet in length, with a beam of perhaps eight feet. The inside of this hull was revealed as braced and double-braced with railroad ties, while at frequent intervals along the water lines similar timbers had been spiked, evidently for the purpose of absorbing the impact of rocks and cliffs. She was plainly unsinkable whatever side was upward, but as it was my idea to ballast her in an endeavour to maintain an even keel, I went over her caulking of tarry rags in the hope of reducing leakage to a minimum. We also hewed out and rigged a clumsy stern-sweep for steering purposes, and it was my intention to have a lighter one at the bow in the event I was able to s.h.i.+p a crew to man it. I didn't care a lot for looks at this juncture as I was going to rebuild the _Mule_ at Livingston in any case.

With the aid of a couple of chaps from a neighbouring ranch, we launched her down a runaway of cottonwood logs into the rising back-current of the eddy. It was not yet sunset, so there was still time to stow a heavy ballasting of n.i.g.g.e.r-head boulders before dark. Water came in for a while, but gradually stopped as the dry pine swelled with the long-denied moisture. She still rode high after receiving all of a thousand pounds of rocks, but as I did not want to reduce her freeboard too much I let it go at that. She was amazingly steady withal, so that I could stand on either rail without heaving her down more than an inch or two. She looked fit to ram the Rock of Gibraltar, let alone the comparatively fragile banks and braes of "Yankee Jim's Canyon." Never again has it been my lot to s.h.i.+p in so staunch a craft.

Returning at dusk to Jim's cabin, we had word that "Buckskin Jim" Cutler was away from home and not expected back for several days. That ended my search for a crew, as there appeared to be no other eligible candidates. Of "Buckskin Jim" I was not to hear for twenty years, when it chanced that he was again recommended to me as the best available river-man on the upper Yellowstone. How that grizzled old pioneer fought his last battle with the Yellowstone on the eve of my push-off from Livingston for New Orleans I shall tell in proper sequence.

Jim insisted on casting my "horryscoop" that night, just to give me an idea how things were going to shape for the next week or two. Going into a dark room that opened off the kitchen, he muttered away for some minutes in establis.h.i.+ng communication with his "little friends up thar."

Finally he called me in, closed the door, took my hand and talked balderdash for a quarter of an hour or more. I made note in my diary of only three of the several dozen things he told me. One was: "Young man, you have the sweetest mother in all the world"; another: "I see you struggling in the water beside a great black boat"; and the third: "You will meet a dark woman, with a scowling face, to whom you will become much attached."

Now that "sweetest mother" stuff was ancient stock formula of the fortune-telling faker, and considering what Jim knew of my immediate plans it hardly seemed that he needed to get in touch with his "little friends up thar" to know that there was more than an even break that I was going to be doing some floundering around a big black boat; but how in the deuce did the old rascal know that I was going to meet the one and only "Calamity Jane" the following week in Livingston?

Jim was bubbling with reminiscence when he came out of his averred trance, but only in a gentle and benevolent vein. He claimed that he was able to prove that Curley, the Crow Scout, was not a real survivor of the Custer ma.s.sacre, but only witnessed a part of the battle from concealment in a nearby _coulee_. When I pressed him for details, however, he seemed to become suspicious, and switched off to a rather mild version of his meeting with Bob Ingersoll.

"Bob and his family stopped a whole day with me," he said, "and we got to be great friends. His girls came right out here into this kitchen where you are sitting now and helped me wash the dishes. They was calling me 'Uncle Jim' before they had been here an hour. Well, the people down there persuaded Bob to give a lecture in Livingston, and I drove down the whole forty miles to hear it. When the lecture was over Bob came up to me in the Albermarle and asked me what I thought of it.

'Mr. Ingersoll,' said I, 'I don't like to tell you.' 'I like a man that speaks his mind,' says he; 'go on.' 'Well, Mr. Ingersoll,' said I, 'I think you're making a grievous mistake in standing there and hurting the feelings, and shaking the faith, of almost the whole audience, just for the sake of the one or two as thinks as you do.' At first I thought he was going to come back at me, but all of a sudden he laughed right out in his jolly way, and took my arm and said, 'Mr. George, let's have a drink.' Bob, in spite of his pernishus doctrines, was the most lovable man I ever met."

Now this was a very different account of the clash from the one I had heard in Livingston. There I was a.s.sured that the debate took place at the Albemarle bar about midnight, and that Jim had Bob's hide on the fence at the end of five minutes of verbal pyrotechnics. But it was characteristic of Jim that he would neither boast nor talk of Injuns during his non-drinking periods. Doubtless, therefore, he was far from doing himself justice in relating the Ingersoll episode. I surely would like to have heard it when the sign of the black bottle was in the ascendant.

Jim admitted a clear remembrance of Kipling's visit, but was chary of speaking of it, doubtless on account of the squaw-at-the-stake story.

(His atrocity yarns troubled him more than any other when they came home to roost, so they a.s.sured me in Livingston.) Of Roscoe Conkling his impressions were not friendly, even in the benevolence of his present mood. "Conkling caught the biggest fish a tourist ever caught in the Canyon," he said, "He was a great hand with a rod, but, in my candid opinion, greatly over-rated as a public man. He had the nerve to cheat me out of the price of a case of beer. Ordered it for a couple of coachloads of his friends and then drove off without paying for it. Yes, possibly a mistake; but these politicians are slippery cusses at the best."

Our plan of operation for the morrow was something like this: Bill and Herb, the neighbouring ranchers, were to go up and help me push off, while Jim went down to the first fall at the head of the Canyon to be on hand to pilot me through. If I made the first riffle all right, I was to try to hold up the boat in an eddy until Jim could amble down to the second fall and stand-by to signal me my course into that one in turn.

And so on down through. Once out of the Canyon there were no bad rapids above Livingston. I was to take nothing with me save my camera. My bags were to remain in Jim's cabin until he had seen me pa.s.s from sight below the Canyon. Then he was to return, flag the down train from Cinnabar, and send the stuff on to me at Livingston. Looking back on it from the vantage of a number of years' experience with rough water, that decision to leave the luggage to come on by train was the only intelligent feature of the whole plan.

Steering a boat in swift water with any kind of a stern oar is an operation demanding a skill only to be acquired by long practice. For a greenhorn to try to throw over the head of a craft like _Kentucky Mule_ was about comparable to swinging an elephant by the tail. This fact, which it took me about half a minute of pulling and tugging to learn, did not bother me a whit however. I felt sure the _Mule_ was equal to meeting the Canyon walls strength for strength. I knew I had considerable endurance as a swimmer, and I was fairly confident that a head that had survived several seasons of old style ma.s.s-play football ought not to be seriously damaged by the rocks of the Yellowstone. Well, I was not right--only lucky. Not one of the considerations on which my confidence was based really weighed the weight of a straw in my favour.

That I came out at the lower end comparatively unscathed was luck, pure luck. Subsequently I paid dearly for my initial success in running rapids like a bull at a gate. In the long run over-confidence in running rough water is about as much of an a.s.set as a millstone tied round the neck. Humility is the proper thing; humility and a deep distrust of the wild beast into whose jaws you are poking your head.

As I swung round the bend above the head of the Canyon I espied old Jim awaiting my coming on a rocky coign of vantage above the fall. A girl in a gingham gown had dismounted from a calico pony and was climbing up to join us. With fore-blown hair and skirt she cut an entrancing silhouette against the sun-shot morning sky. I think the presence of that girl had a deal to do with the impending disaster, for I would never have thought of showing off if none but Jim had been there. But something told me that the exquisite creature could not but admire the _sang froid_ of a youth who would let his boat drift while he stood up and took a picture of the thundering cataract over which it was about to plunge. And so I did it--just that. Then, waving my camera above my head to attract Jim's attention to the act, I tossed it ash.o.r.e. That was about the only sensible thing I did in my run through the Canyon.

As I resumed my steering oar I saw that Jim was gesticulating wildly in an apparent endeavour to attract my attention to a comparatively rock-free chute down the left bank. Possibly if I had not wasted valuable time displaying my _sang froid_ I might have worried the _Mule_ over in that direction, and headed right for a clean run through. As it was, the contrary brute simply took the bit in her teeth and went waltzing straight for the reef of barely submerged rock at the head of the steeply cascading pitch of white water. Broadside on she sunk into the hollow of a refluent wave, struck cras.h.i.+ngly fore and aft, and hung trembling while the full force of the current of the Yellowstone surged against her up-stream gunwale.

Impressions of what followed are considerably confused in my mind, but it seems to me things happened in something like the following order: The pressure on her upper side heeled the _Mule_ far over, so that her boulder ballast began to s.h.i.+ft and spill out at the same time the refluent wave from below began pouring across the down-stream gunwale.

The more she heeled the more ballast she lost and the more water she s.h.i.+pped. Fortunately most of the boulders had gone before the pin of the stern-sweep broke and precipitated me after the ballast. The few n.i.g.g.e.rheads that did come streaming in my wake were smooth and round and did not seem to be falling very fast when they b.u.mped my head and shoulders. Certainly I hardly felt them at the time, nor was I much marked from them afterwards.

Sticking to my oar I came up quickly and went bobbing down the undulating stream of the rapid, kissing off a rock now and then but never with sharp impact. I had gone perhaps a hundred yards when the lightened boat broke loose above and started to follow me. Right down the middle of the riffle she came, wallowing mightily but s.h.i.+pping very little additional water. Holding my oar under one arm and paddling lightly against the current with my other, I waited till the _Mule_ floundered abreast of me and clambered aboard. She was about a third full of water, but as the weight of it hardly compensated for the rocks dumped overboard she was riding considerably higher than before, though much less steadily.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "YANKEE JIM" WITH A TROUT FROM HIS CANYON]

[Ill.u.s.tration: JUST ABOVE THE FIRST DROP IN "YANKEE JIM'S" CANYON]

Looking back up-stream as the reeling _Mule_ swung in the current, I saw Jim, with the Gingham Girl in his wake, ambling down the bank at a broken-kneed trot in an apparent endeavour to head me to the next fall as per schedule. Poor old chap! He was never a hundred-to-one shot in that race now that the _Mule_ had regained her head and was running away down mid-channel regardless of obstacles. He stumbled and went down even as I watched him with the tail of my eye. The Gingham Girl pulled him to his feet and he seemed to be leaning heavily against her fine shoulder as the _Mule_ whisked me out of sight around the next bend. That was the last I ever saw of either of them. Jim, I understand, died some years ago, and the Gingham Girl.... Dear me, she must be forty herself by now and the mother of not less than eight. Even ten is considered a conservative family up that way. They are not race suicidists on the upper Yellowstone.

With the steering oar permanently uns.h.i.+pped there was more difficulty than ever in exercising any control over the balkiness of the stubborn _Mule_. After a few ineffectual attempts I gave up trying to do anything with the oar and confined my navigation to fending off with a cottonwood pike-pole. This really helped no more than the oar, so it was rather by good luck than anything else that the _Mule_ hit the next pitch head-on and galloped down it with considerable smartness. When she reeled through another rapid beam-on without s.h.i.+pping more than a bucket or two of green water I concluded she was quite able to take care of herself, and so sat down to enjoy the scenery. I was still lounging at ease when we came to a sharp right-angling notch of a bend where the full force of the current was exerted to push a sheer wall of red-brown cliff out of the way. Not unnaturally, the _Mule_ tried to do the same thing. That was where I discovered I had over-rated her strength of construction.

I have said that she impressed me at first sight as being quite capable of nosing the Rock of Gibraltar out of her way. This optimistic estimate was not borne out. That little patch of cliff was not high enough to make a respectable footstool for the guardian of the Mediterranean, but it must have been quite as firmly socketed in the earth. So far as I could see it budged never the breadth of a hair when the _Mule_, driving at all of fifteen miles an hour, crashed into it with the shattering force of a battering-ram. Indeed, everything considered, it speaks a lot for her construction that she simply telescoped instead of resolving into cosmic star-dust. Even the telescoping was not quite complete.

Although there were a number of loose planks and timbers floating in her wake, the hashed ma.s.s of wood that backed soddenly away from the cliff and off into the middle of the current again had still a certain seeming of a boat--that is, to one who knew what it was intended for in the first place. With every plank started or missing, however, water had entered at a score of places, so that all the buoyancy she retained was that of floating wood.

The _Mule_ had ceased to be a boat and become a raft, but not a raft constructed on scientific principles. The one most desirable characteristic of a properly built raft of logs is its stability. It is almost impossible to upset. The remains of the _Mule_ had about as much stability as a toe-dancer, and all of the capriciousness. She kept more or less right side up on to the head of the next riffle and then laid down and negotiated the undulating waves by rolling.

It was not until some years later, if I remember aright, that stout women adopted the expedient of rolling to reduce weight. The _Mule_ was evidently well in advance of the times, for she reduced both weight and bulk by all of a quarter in that one series of rolls. I myself, after she had spilled me out at the head of the riffle, rode through on one of her planks, but it was a railroad tie, with a big spike in it, that rasped me over the ear in the whirlpool at the foot.

And so I went on through to the foot of "Yankee Jim's Canyon." In the smoother water I clung to a tie, plank or the thinning remnants of the _Mule_ herself. At the riffles, to avoid another clout on the head from the spike-fanged flotsam, I found it best to swim ahead and flounder through on my own. I was not in serious trouble at any time, for much the worst of the rapids had been those at the head of the Canyon. Had I been really hard put for it, there were a dozen places at which I could have crawled out. As that would have made overtaking the _Mule_ again somewhat problematical, I was reluctant to do it. Also, no doubt, I was influenced by the fear that Jim and the Gingham Girl might call me a quitter.

Beaching what I must still call the _Mule_ on a bar where the river fanned out in the open valley at the foot of the Canyon, I dragged her around into an eddy and finally moored her mangled remains to a friendly cottonwood on the left bank. Taking stock of damages, I found that my own scratches and bruises, like Beauty, were hardly more than skin deep, while the _Mule_, especially if her remaining spikes could be tightened up a bit, had still considerable rafting potentialities. As the day was bright and warm and the water not especially cold, I decided to make way while the sun shone--to push on as far toward Livingston as time and tide and my dissolving craft would permit. But first for repairs.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

_Courtesy Northern Pacific R. R._

FOOT OF "YANKEE JIM'S" CANYON]

Crossing a flat covered with a thick growth of willow and cottonwood, I clambered up the railway embankment toward a point where I heard the clank of iron and the voices of men at work. The momentary focus of the section gang's effort turned out to be round a bend from the point where I broke through to the right-of-way, but almost at my feet, lying across the sleepers, was a heavy strip of rusty iron, pierced at even intervals with round holes. Telling myself that I might well go farther and fare worse in my quest for a tool to drive spikes with, I s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and returned to the river. Scarcely had my l.u.s.ty blows upon the _Mule's_ sagging ribs begun to resound, however, than a great commotion broke forth above, which presently resolved itself into mingled cursings and lamentations in strange foreign tongues. Then a howling-mad Irish section-boss came cras.h.i.+ng through the underbrush, called me a train-wrecker, grabbed the piece of iron out of my hand, and, shouting that he would "sittle" with me in a jiffy, rushed back to the embankment.

The fellow seemed to attach considerable importance to that strip of rusty iron. Why this was I discovered a couple of minutes later when I found him and three Italians madly bolting it to the loose ends of a couple of rails before the down-bound train hove in sight up the line.

"I'll larn ye to steal a fish-plate, ye snakin' spalpheen," he roared as the train thundered by and disappeared around the bend.

"I didn't steal any fish-plate," I remonstrated quaveringly, backing off down the track as the irate navvy advanced upon me brandis.h.i.+ng a three-foot steel wrench; "I only borrowed a piece of rusty iron. I didn't see any fish-plate. I didn't even know where your lunch buckets are. I wish I did, for I've just swum through the Canyon and I'm darned hungry." Gad, but I was glad the Gingham Gown and "Yankee Jim" couldn't see me then!

With characteristic Hibernian suddenness, the bellow of rage changed to a guffaw of laughter. "Sure an' the broth o' a bhoy thot a fish-plate wuz a contryvance fer to eat off uv! An' it's jest through the Canyon he's swam! An' it's hoongry an' wet thot he is! Bejabbers then, we won't be afther murtherin' him outright; we'll jest let him go back to the river an' dhrown hisself! Stip lively, ye skulkin' dagoes, an' bring out the loonch."

And so while I sat on the bank quaffing Dago Red and munching garlic-stuffed sausages, Moike and his gang of Eyetalians abandoned their four-mile stretch of the Northern Pacific to drive more spikes in the _Mule's_ bulging sides and render her as raft-shape as possible for a further run. The boss led his gang in a cheer as they pushed me off into the current, and the last I saw of him he was still guffawing mightily over his little fish-plate joke. As a matter of fact, since Mike in his excitement appeared to have neglected to send out a flagman when he discovered his fish-plate was missing, I have always had a feeling that the northbound train that morning came nearer than I did to being wrecked in "Yankee Jim's Canyon of the Yellowstone."

The rest of that day's run was more a matter of chills than thrills, especially after the evening shadows began to lengthen and the northerly wind to strengthen. The _Mule_ repeated her roll-and-reduce tactics every time she came to a stretch of white water. There were only three planks left when I abandoned her at dusk, something over twenty miles from the foot of the Canyon, and each of these was sprinkled as thickly with spike-points as a Hindu _fakir's_ bed of nails. One plank, by a curious coincidence, was the strake that had originally borne the defiant slogan. "HICKMAN OR BUST." Prying it loose from its c.u.mbering mates, I shoved it gently out into the current. There was no question that _Kentucky Mule_ was busted, but it struck me as the sporting thing to do to give that plank a fighting chance to nose its way down to Hickman. If I had known what I learned last summer I should not have taken the trouble. Hickman has had more "Kentucky Mule" than is good for it all the time; also a huge box factory where soft pine planks are cut up into shooks. The last of my raft deserved a better fate. I hope it stranded on the way.

Spending the night with a hospitable rancher, I walked into Livingston in the morning. There I found my bags and camera, which good old "Yankee Jim" had punctually forwarded by the train I had so nearly wrecked. The accompanying pictures of Jim and his Canyon are from the roll of negatives in the kodak at the time.

CHAPTER V

"CALAMITY JANE"

Thrilled with the delights of swift-water boating as they had been vouchsafed to me in running the _Mule_ through "Yankee Jim's Canyon," I hastened to make arrangements to continue my voyage immediately upon arriving in Livingston. A carpenter called Sydney Lamartine agreed to build me a skiff and have it ready at the end of three days. Hour by hour I watched my argosy grow, and then--on the night before it was ready to launch--came "Calamity."

In every man's life there is one event that transcends all others in the bigness with which it bulks in his memory. This is not necessarily the biggest thing that has really happened to him. Usually, indeed, it is not. It is simply the thing that impresses most deeply the person he happens to be at the time. The thunderbolt of a living, breathing "Calamity Jane" striking at my feet from a clear sky is my biggest thing. One does his little curtsey to a lot of queens, real and figurative, in the course of twenty years' wandering, but not the most regal of them has stirred my pulse like the "Queen of the Plains."

Queens of Dance, Queens of Song, and Queens of real kingdoms, cannibalistic and otherwise, there have been, but only one "Queen of the Rockies." And this was not because "Calamity Jane" was either young, or beautiful or good. (There may have been a time when she was young, and possibly even good, but beautiful--never.) So far as my own heart-storm was concerned, it was because she had been the heroine of that saffron-hued thriller called "The Beautiful White Devil of the Yellowstone," the which I had devoured in the hay-mow in my adolescence.

The fragrance of dried alfalfa brings the vision of "Calamity Jane"

before my eyes even to this day. She is the only flesh-and-blood heroine to come into my life.

My initial meeting with "Calamity" was characteristic. It was a bit after midnight. On my way home to the old Albemarle to bed I became aware of what I thought was a spurred and _chap-ed_ cowboy in the act of embracing a lamp-post. A gruff voice hailed me as I came barging by.

"Short Pants!" it called; "oh, Short Pants--can't you tell a lady where she lives?"