The mountain; renewed studies in impressions and appearances

Front matter

THE FRANCIS P. FARQUHAR

COLLECTION OF MOUNTAINEERING

LITERATURE

Contents

Chapter I. From Afar. — The great prairie — The Sioux hunting — The Sunset Trail — Riding with the Sioux — Indian hfe — The lure of the wild — The Cheyennes — Twilight pictures — Dawn on the prairie — Breaking camp — The march — Prairie silence — Animal Ufe on the prairie — The heat — Indian endurance — Prairie lakes — The night camp — Divides and swales — The uplands — Buttes and trenches — The Bad Lands — Fire and water wear — Strange colors — Montana mesas — The clear night air — Planets and constellations — Powder River ranges — An upland valley — Sighting buffalo — The buffalo hunt — The Sioux attack — The buffalo defense — The stampede — The pursuit and death — Across the Tongue — The table-lands — Deer and elk — Untenanted expanses — Love of the wilderness— Far views from the divides — Distant mountains — The Big Horn mountain tops — The Cheetahs — Valley of the Big Horn — Barren buttes — Across the Yellowstone — The blossomed table-lands — The wide reach — The distant Rockies — Snow peaks — Sunset on the peaks — The return — Memories — First impressions — The great change in Dacotah — The vanished life — The mountain wall still stands 1

Chapter II. Mountain-Making. — Indian dislike of mountains — The love of the open — Spirits in the mountains— Indian superstitions — Mountain gods — Siva the creator — Sacred mountains — Teutonic behefs — The Brocken — Good spirits in mountains — Shrines to Deity — Jehovah's footstool — Scientific theories and changes — World-building — The nebular hypothesis — The planetessimal theory — The spiral nebula — CoUision and conjunction — The solar system — The new behef — ix

CONTENTS

Chapter I

Dacotah ! The Dacotah of the Sioux ! Before the railways crossed it, before a wagontrail was broken, before ever the white man came, what a wilderness it was ! The prairie-grass reached up to the pony's knees, the sun came up out of it and went down into it, a wide horizon stretched around one in a ring, a light-shot sky of blue came down to meet it. The buffalo, the gray wolf, and the coyote were its occupants. It was Any Man's Land, it was No Man's Land. The antelope, with restless, bulging eyes, kept watch about him in a circle. And the human who ventured there, whether white man or red, never relaxed his vigilance. The right of might was the law of the prairie, and from it there was no appeal. Life was for those who could keep it.

Rare, indeed, was the sight of man in that wilderness. There were few camps and no set- 1

The great prairie.

tlements. Even the Indians, seen occasionally in small, bead-like strings crossing the wide expanse, seemed somewhat out of place, somewhat like shore birds lost at sea, winging a weary way over endless swales and divides. They were never too fond of the grass prairies, for they lacked in protection. They crossed and recrossed them on hunting expeditions, they camped on them, hunted on them; but they never cared to live on them. Almost always the band was small and moving toward the west — toward the northern range in IMontana, where the buffalo herds were plentiful. The way led across the Missouri, through the Bad Lands, over into the valleys of the Powder, the Tongue, and the Big Horn. It was a wild, wild way, but what a lure it had for the venturesome ! There is always a mad fascination about a new and unexplored country.

It required something of enthusiasm and more of endurance to ride with the Sioux in those days. Your horse was only a mustang, half bridle-wise and wholly wicked, that rolled you under in swimming a river and pounded you with his fore feet when he got his head; your stirrups, into which you thrust moocasined feet, were mere loops in a buckskin thong flung over the pony's shoulder; your saddle was a flap of moose or buffalo skin or more often the pony's bare back. You rode with the band until the chief gave the sign for a halt. Camp meant a place where there was a prairie pool or water standing in a buffalo wallow; food meant anything that could be caught, shot, or gathered on the way; sleep meant any spot of ground in a bunch of grass or under a bush where you chose to curl up. To look out for yourself, to ask no questions, and to make no murmur were imperative. In the wild neither man nor beast pays any heed to the cry of the weak. The human, like the wolf, endures in silence.

But the hardships, the dangers, even the disasters of such an expedition were willingly borne by youth for the love of adventure and the pure joy of the open. That riding day by day, riding into the sunset west, riding into the unknown, had an attraction about it difficult to explain yet none the less real. The unexpected was always expected. No one knew what surprise would be sprung from the top of the next divide. There was always the outlook of the hunter watching for game, for

Indian life.

The lure of the wild.

The Cheyennes.

Twilight pictures.

Davm on the prairie.

Breaking camp.

food was the one great demand. And there was also the keen watch of the hunted — the trahied eye looking for danger. Advance riders were continually looking over slopes for hostile bands of southern Cheyennes or prowling marauders from over the northern border. The last thing seen at night was scouts riding along the high divides, taking a final look around the huge circle. What a picture, those half-naked Sioux silhouetted against the bloodred twilight, each one bunched over his pony's shoulder and peering catlike into the gathering gloom ! And what nights of mystery with the hushed camp asleep in the great silence — asleep and yet half-consciously listening for the slightest danger sound.

Dawn on the prairie was almost as mysterious as dusk. The light was not shot up suddenly from the bow of the horizon, but gradually grew around the whole wide halfcircle of the east and then flooded softly into the upper sky. There was no sharp division-line between the night and the day as in the tropics. The light spread upward through the dark turning it slowly into half-light. Just as gradually the dark outlines of the divides melted away, some odd spots of shadow around the camp grew into picketed ponies, some moving blurs here and there turned into the Sioux getting ready for the day's march.

An Indian band gets under way quickly, not being bothered with much impedimenta in the shape of baggage. The chief and the hunters rode first, strung out in single file, as elks move when migrating. After them came the squaws, with ponies trailing teepee poles across which were lashed carryalls for the children and the camp plunder. In the rear trotted the dogs — snarling, wolf -like curs that always seem inseparable from an Indian outfit wherever it may be. Only the dogs gave tongue. The band rode on in silence.

And silent, too, in the early morning, the wild life of the prairie. Even the whimpering coyote that had yelped at intervals through the night made no whine after daylight. The wolves slipped away to holes under cut-banks or in washouts, the small buffalo ring (cows and calves on the inside and bulls on the outside) that had fought off the wolves through the night broke guard and grazed at ease, the antelope nibbling grass on the far-away ridges were seen only as spots of white flashing in the rising sun. Not a sound from any of them.

The march.

Prairie silence.

The prairie was profoundly still save, perhaps, for the call of some lone goose seeking its kind in the prairie pools or the cry of a curlew that fluttered and dipped above the wolf that had come too near her nest.

By ten o'clock floods of light poured from the sky. The tall grass of the lower swales, as it bent and rolled in the morning breeze, seemed to glitter with light, the prairie pools flashed it like mirrors, the gentle roll of the divides received it but projected no shadow. And the heat ! Great stretches of it could be seen radiating upward from the bare spots and dry lake beds, the air grew rosy with it, the sky became opalescent. The matted hair of the Sioux and the tough hide of the ponies beat it ojff; the women, children, and dogs endured it with grim unconcern. The band pushed on. By midday it had, perhaps, picked up a stray buffalo or antelope, the women and children had caught young prairie-chickens or gathered wild onions, carrots, and lily bulbs, and there was a pause in some creek bottom, under a lone cottonwood, for a feast and a doze.

Again the night camp, perhaps at the edge of a long-linked lake, fringed with wild rice, where clouds of ducks came pouring in at dusk, where blue herons waded along the muddy edges, and white swans glided down vast inclines to rest upon the open water. No fear of bog or quicksand could keep the ponies out of it. Into it they pushed, plunging their noses deep under the water, drinking with long gulps, and then lurching back to dry land. And once more at dusk the shadowy teepees and ponies, the scouts seen in silhouette against the twilight sky, and the blue overhead studded with golden stars.

Gradually, after many days, the prairie-grass grew shorter and finally disappeared. The buffalo bunch-grass, lying low and curling much, took its place. Gradually the divides grew higher and the swales deeper. Small hills and valleys came into existence. The creeks turned into little rivers with muddy water and steep, sloughing banks, cottonwood grew along them, with here and there clumps of box-elder in which deer and white grouse found a refuge from the noonday heat. The uplands were covered with sage-brush dotted at intervals by clumps of nopal and yucca, the soil had become a "gumbo," the margins of the pools were fringed with a white alkaline sediment

Prairie lakes.

The night camp.

Divides and swales.

The uplands.

Buttes and trenches.

The Bad

Lands.

Fire and water wear.

Strange colors.

instead of wild rice. Moreover, there soon came into being abrupt sinks in the ground — isolated trenches sometimes miles in length with steep banks, sometimes many feet in depth. And to balance them there sprang up from flat plateaus tall, mound-like buttes with domes and turrets and towers rising in fantastic forms. The edge of the Bad Lands had been reached.

The strange surprises of the Mauvaises Terres — those vast, treeless uplands composed of loose sands, gravels, and sediments, and by reason of insufficient grass or bush covering washed and gulched by every passmg rain ! The elements of fire, water, and air seemed to have conspu-ed against them. Water was the chief element to drag them down, but the wind honeycombed and rounded them, and fire burnt them. Fires in the underground lignite had been burning for centuries and were still apparent in blue smoke stealing out of faults and fissures in the ground. The burnt buttes showed their burning. Sometimes they were banded and streaked by a hundred different tones of terra-cotta. Strange color was everywhere in that strange land. It was in the sky, the air, the soU. The alkali dust stirred by the pony's hoof, when struck by the sunUght, turned into a pale hehotrope, and the pony's moving shadow was Hlac-hued. And what thin, almost breathless atmosphere on those high mesas that succeeded to the Bad Lands ! We were on the sage-brush and grass-grown uplands of the Powder River, and the air was so pure and clear that objects at a distance cut out in sharp detail and seemed to move up close to us. Hills twenty miles away were apparently only a half-hour's ride from us, and ten-mile valleys seemed little larger than the prairie swales we had left behind us. At night the air seemed still more wonderful because apparently non-existent. It did not move, you scarcely felt it in breathing, there was not enough of it to make the stars twinkle. The blue Vega and the white Arcturus burned but did not blaze. The Milky Way, with its constellations cast upon a blue-black sky, shone but did not glitter. Oh ! the splendor of those soft, windless nights on the Montana table-lands ! The smouldering camp-fire, the shadowy teepees, the blurred ponies grazing at a distance seemed the necessary foils to set off that great peace and glory of the sky.

Montana mesas.

The clear night air.

Planets and constellations.

Powder

Ricer

ranges.

An upland valley.

Sighting buffalo.

There came an evening when the band drew into a range of hills — beautiful, grass-grown hills with rounded tops that flowed against the sky — and at dusk made camp in a valley at the head of a tributary of the Powder. Before sunrise the hunters were on the rounded tops looking over into a near valley perhaps a dozen miles in length. It was not an unusual valley, being treeless and covered with low bunch-grass, like many others. And to the untrained eye there was nothing unwonted in its appearance that morning save that in the far end of it the ground seemed covered for many acres with a brown-black growth. The more one looked at this gro\\i;h the more strangely interesting it became. It was apparently motionless, but along the edges of it there were tiny brown spots in bunches that moved out from the mass of it, and in the central part were other groups or bunches that moved and made gaps or openings in the mass. The brown-black gro\Ni:h was alive, though silent and apparently motionless. It was grazing, milling, pawing, fighting. It was a buffalo herd.

In an hour or so a portion of the Sioux had ridden completely around the back hills and had come in upon the buffalo herd from the rear. The plan of the hunt was to drive the buffalo up the valley in the direction of the camp, where another line of concealed hunters would dash down upon them. Directly the first party came into sight a stampede took place. The huge, brown-black spot got under way with incredible swiftness, forming as it ran a protective Ime, with the cows and calves on the inside and the bulls on the outer edge. A blue haze of dust arose from it through which one could occasionally see on the outside a Sioux hunter lashing his pony along and shooting as he rode. The small puffs of smoke could be seen but no sound was heard. And occasionally, too, the pursued turned into a pursuer. An angry bull would drive out from the herd with the directness of an arrow and the force of a catapult. Every horse and rider knew the wisdom of keeping away from that monstrous head. The young men, some of them still using the bow and arrow, took risks among the cows and calves, but the elders held a distance and closely watched the bull line.

On came the herd, bumping, rumbling, pushing to get away from the worrying fire of the

The buffalo hunt.

The Sioux attack.

The buffalo defense.

hunters. Then the waiting Sioux, stationed in the foot-hills near the camp, charged down upon the leaders. The great patch, attacked at the head, swerved like a deflected wave, pushed off to the left through a defile in the hills, choked up the defile and rose on the sides of it, pushed over and on into the big valley of the Powder and, with the hunters, disappeared from view. The blue dust gradually settled LQ the valley, and the only things now seen were brown-black units of the herd, some plunging here and there with broken legs, some tmnbling over in attempts to get up, and some lying quite still. Creeping down toward the still ones were gray spots that first reconnoitred, then came close up and set to work. They were the skinners from the camp.

For days the herd was followed and then abandoned for other hopes. The hunter, like the gold-digger, is never content with the present. Just beyond, over in some other river basin, the catch is sure to be easier and more plentiful. The band moved on across the Powder, swam the racing Tongue, and began the ascent to higher table-lands. The high points of the hills soon became fringed with ragged juniper, cedar, and scrub pine; the sage brush still flourished but other upland growths came in; the clay butte did not disappear but rocky ledges began to crop out; white-tailed deer jumped from the bushes and bands of elk scattered with a bump of hoofs through the scrub pine. Around the edge of almost every water hole the paw of the mountam lion could be seen in the alkali mud, and near it the huge clawed foot of the silvertip.

It was a land of game — that high land beyond the Tongue. The hunters were busy from morning until night and the camp poles hung heavy with strings of dried meat. But more wonderful than the game and the growths was the enormous expanse of country that one saw from every high point. Was there ever such a land for distances, for far sight across the hills and buttes and mesas ! It was a pink and gold and lilac land, another terra'-cotta world lying under a rosy sky. And untenanted. Even the Indian tribes that usually hunted there were not seen by us. It seemed as though

" We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea."

The table-lands.

Deer and

elk.

Untenanted eX' panses.

Love of the icilderness.

Far views from the divides.

Distant mountains.

What an exultant throb in the thought ! The call of the wild is as strong in the human as in the wolf. He is forever longing to escape from the gilded cage of civilization, longing to get back to savagery. The Gardens of the Hesperides were never so attractive as the uplands of the wilderness.

One day at sunset, at the top of a high divide, the chief drew rein and sat still, looking away, across rivers and hills and valleys, far away to the south. We came up beside him and followed his gaze. Lying low down along the horizon, perhaps a hundred miles in an air-line, was something that looked like heaped cloud-vapors. It was no more than an outlined mist against the lower sky, a little sharper, perhaps, in the edges than elsewhere ; and what made it noticeable to our eyes was its color. In the sunset it had a rosy hue and its edgings were fire-red. Sometimes over arid regions the cloud banks at sunset take on just such color, but these were not clouds. The bronze profile of the chief never relaxed, never showed either pleasure or pain, never showed even so much as recognition of the sight before him. He said something in a low tone but his lips scarcely moved. Was it possible? Was that faint outline of color the high ridge of the Big Horn Mountains down in Wyoming? Could the glow of sunset upon barren rock produce such wonderful color as that?

The band moved on, rising higher and higher into the short range known as the Cheetah Mountains,* winding on toward the west — hunters, ponies, squaws, papooses, and snarling dogs as before. The marches were now short, the hunting good, the camping easy; but gradually, as the days came and went, valleys were crossed, rivers were forded, new ranges were traversed, until there came an afternoon when again the chief and the foremost riders drew rein upon a lofty height to gaze a moment at a grand panorama outspread before them. It was the look across the basin of the Big Horn River and beyond. Was there ever such another strange vista ! A loosely cemented table-land had been gulched by rains and slashed by rivers until thousands of enormous, cone-shaped peaks seemed

* I cannot remember what, if any, name the Sioux gave these mountains. On a later trip across Montana, in the early eighties, I found the cowboys calling them the Cheetahs. The name is now geographical, I beUeve.

The

Big Horn mountain tops.

The Cheetahs.

Valley of the Big Horn.

Barren buttes.

Across the Yellowstone.

The

blossomed

table-lands.

The wide reach.

pitched tent-like upon the plain. As far as the eye could see this barren and soiuidless camping ground of nature lay bleaching under a summer sun, the very acme of desolation. The chief gave no sign nor word about it, but the next day the course lay more to the northwest, and, after several campings, we swam the Yellowstone and drew away into a more open country.

More grass-lands, more buffalo, and more hunting. And then a broken, elevated country leading up and out to the west stretched before us. Oh! the beauty of those uplands covered with buffalo and bunch-grass and spattered with pale geraniums, wild roses, lavender daisies, and sago lilies ! As we rose to the tops of the ridges, what beauty in the long, swinging lines of the divides ! These were the high and wide benches that led up to the Rockies — huge green-and-golden mesas spread out in apparently endless reaches. What air and sunlight, what glorious color, what a feeling of elation and aloofness on those camas-blossomed table-lands! In its primitive, untrodden state the sim never shone on a more beautiful world. The reach of it in tremendous steps leading down to the Missouri was so great that no one could imagine it other than a whole world in itself. And never a thought of any other existence occurred to one. All space was ours, time was not, and history, civilization, and the arts were flung behind us like broken baubles of the past.

We were rising step by step, mesa by mesa, to the great divide, the sky-line of the continent, the high range of the Rockies. At last one day some peaks of the range swung into view. They were far away, a blue-and-silver wonder, and two or three of them were as chalky white as the cliffs on the Powder River. It was difficult at noonday to persuade one's self that they were not mountains of chalk. But their bases were too dark, their tops too light for deception. The white cones of the central peaks were unmistakably snow caps. What radiant beauty in those distant peaks against the blue ! The sunset fire on the Big Horn Mountains had not the serenity nor the purity of the snowy crowns. For days they hung upon our horizon. We looked to them in the morning and saw them glittering white, at noon we saw them grow pale and shadowy under the midday heat, and at night the last shaft of sunset fire was reflected rose-hued from theu: summits. Seen through that thin, untainted air, in that wild, untrodden land, the high peaks of the Rockies had a peculiar glory of their own.

The Sioux band turned sharply to the north, swung in an enormous circle to the east, and began hunting homeward. They were seeking buffaloes, not mountains. The white peaks sank below the western verge and were not seen again for many years, the table-lands and foot-hills fell away into the Bad Lands, and the prairie came back to us. The hunt was over. We were once more on the savage edge of civilization.

But what memories of the wild remained ! Brightest of all was the vision of the far-away white peaks of the Rockies. Many ranges in many portions of the earth — Mexican sierras, Spanish cordilleras, Alpine peaks, and even "the frosty Caucasus" — have been seen and studied since then; but that sight, seen in the early days from the uplands of Montana, has never faded, never been equalled. It was a first impression of the high mountains and has remained through many years the most lasting impression of all.

It is something of a pity that the Dacotah prairies and the Montana uplands have undergone such great changes. The sea of grass that stretched away far westward to the setting sun, the prairie flowers, the buffalo, wolves, and Indians have all been ploughed under, and ridges of grain are now growing where the antelope grazed and the wild horse stamped. The wilderness is no more and the blossomed plain but a border memory. That civilization replaced the prairie with the farm may argue something for human well-being, but the change has been at the expense of natural beauty. Nature always goes out when the white man comes in.

Fortunately the higher peaks of the Rockies are still practically inaccessible. The white crests lift aloft as though defiant of change. Their walls of rock and peaks of snow may be seen a long way off, looking up from such comparatively wild country still as the Montana table-lands. There they seem to stand as a barrier, a parapet against any further invasion.

" Long may they stand — the ages through — Undimmed by time, untrod by man, A flash of light on Nature's plan, A wall of white against the blue."

The great change in Dacotah.

The

vanished

life.

The

mountain wall still stands.

Indian dislike of mountains.

The love of the open.

CHAPTER n

The Indians were never too fond of the mountains — in fact, they cared less for them than for the prairies. Occasionally they went into the Big Horn to hunt mountain sheep or they pushed after elk up into the high foot-hills of the Rockies; but they never cared to live there. They disliked the timber and preferred the edge of open country such as the Bad Lands. In this they were not different from the furred and feathered nature about them. There are few birds in the mountain forests as compared with those in the open; and what animals live there do so by force of circumstance. They go there seeking protection. No doubt the sheep and the goats now love the semi-barren regions of the mountain above the timber-line, having adapted themselves to them ; but they went there originally under compulsion, and they live there now largely as a condition of living at all.

With the Sioux there was always some superstitious fear regarding the mountains. They 20 believed that the Great Spirit rested upon the summit of the Rockies and that sometimes in the evening glow he sat there with the white feathers of his war-bonnet streaming in the west wind, smoking his red pipe-stone and sorrowing over the disappearance of his people. All the lesser peaks were peopled by evil spirits who were seeking to destroy the Great Father. Wakon-Shecha, the Evil One, had his abode in weird canyons and deep mountain caves, and came forth by night seeking whom he might devour. The younger men laughed at the tales, but they usually took good care to come away from the mountains before dark. They felt safer in the open country.

Their fears were groundless, to be sure, but by no means singular. Other races, with larger frontal development than the Sioux, have believed similar things about the mountains. Indeed, it seems to have been an early superstition of mankind in general that the mountains were peopled with gods, that they were even created by them. In the far-back heroic days the mountains had been hurled hither and yon in Titanic combat; and the little hills were dropped as landmarks from the lap of a huge, striding giantess that she might know her way back home. In India Siva was the creator and shaper of the world. He dwelt in the remotest heights of the Himalayas enwrapped in purple-and-gold clouds and seated on a bed of snow-white glittering diamonds. It was from mountain tops that Buddha and Christ ascended into heaven; from them Moses received the tables of the law and saw the promised land; and in the heights of the Caucasus Prometheus was chained. Almost every one of the older countries had its sacred mountain, from which the gods came and went — Lofen in China, Fujiyama in Japan, Samanala in Ceylon, Ararat in Armenia, Lebanon in Palestine. In Greece each separate mountain seemed to have its presiding deity. Pan was in every mountain grove; Apollo and the Muses held revelry on the top of Parnassus; while Zeus and his following heard the hymns and prayers of the faithful from the heights of Olympus.

At the north the tale varied. A Scandinavian belief prevailed that the mountain contained a hoard of gold guarded by gnomes and frightful dwarfs and that the queen of the mountain, sitting in state, was a virgin of ice who turned the bridegroom beside her into everlasting crystal. In Germany the queen of the mountain was Venus and those who entered her court were doomed eternally. Tannhauser, by the aid of the Blessed Virgin, was the only one that ever escaped from the Venusberg. At the entrance could be heard the groans and lamentations of those who had ventured within. In the Harz, on the summit of the Brocken, all the witches of earth and air assembled on Walpurgis Night to enjoy high carnival. The mountain heights were peopled thick with myrmidons, pygmies, emmets, fingerlings, furies, spectres — all the unearthly rabble that usually travels in the train of Mephistopheles. Weird lightnings flashed along the Blocksberg and thunders shook the ground.