A Daughter of the Middle Border. Garland Hamlin
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Mission. Less wild than the Cheyenne reservation the Flat Head country was much more beautiful, and we were entirely happy in our camp beside the rushing stream which came down from the Jocko Lakes.
"Yes, there is such a herd," the trader said. "It is owned by Michel Pablo and consists of about two hundred, old and young. They can be reached by riding straight north for some twenty miles and then turning to the west. You will have to hunt them, however; they are not in a corral. They are feeding just as they used to do. They come and go as they happen to feel the need of food or water."
With these stimulating directions we set forth one morning to "hunt a herd of buffalo," excited as a couple of boys, eager as hunters yet with only the desire to see the wild kine.
After we left the road and turned westward our way led athwart low hills and snake-like ravines and along deep-worn cattle paths leading to water holes. All was magnificently primeval. No mark of plow or spade, no planted stake or post assailed our eyes. We were deep in the land of the bison at last.
Finally, as we topped a long, low swell, my brother shouted, "Buffalo!" and looking where he pointed, I detected through the heated haze of the midday plain, certain vague, unfamiliar forms which hinted at the prehistoric past. They were not cows or horses, that was evident. Here and there purple-black bodies loomed, while close beside them other smaller objects gave off a singular and striking contrast. There was no mistaking the character of these animals. They were bison.
To ride down upon them thus, in the silence and heat of that uninhabited valley, was to realize in every detail, a phase of the old-time life of the plains. We moved in silence. The grass-hoppers springing with clapping buzz before our horses' feet gave out the only sound. No other living thing uttered voice. Nothing moved save our ponies and those distant monstrous kine whose presence filled us with the same emotion which had burned in the hearts of our pioneer ancestors.
As we drew nearer, clouds of dust arose like lazy smoke from smoldering fires, curtains which concealed some mighty bull tossing the powdery earth with giant hoof. The cows seeing our approach, began to shift and change. The bulls did not hurry, on the contrary, they fell to the rear and grimly halted our advance. Towers of alkali dust, hot and white, lingering smoke-like in the air shielded us like a screen, and so—slowly riding—we drew near enough to perceive the calves and hear the mutter of the cows as they reënacted for us the life of the vanished millions of their kind.
Here lay a calf beside its dam. Yonder a solitary ancient and shaggy bull stood apart, sullen and brooding. Nearer a colossal chieftain, glossy, black, and weighing two thousand pounds moved from group to group, restless and combative, wrinkling his ridiculously small nose, and uttering a deep, menacing, muttering roar. His rivals, though they slunk away, gave utterance to similar sinister snarls, as if voicing bitter resentment. They did not bellow, they growled, low down in their cavernous throats, like angry lions. Nothing that I had ever heard or read of buffaloes had given me the quality of this majestic clamor.
Occasionally one of them, tortured by flies, dropped to earth, and rolled and tore the sod, till a dome of dust arose and hid him. Out of this gray curtain he suddenly reappeared, dark and savage, like a dun rock emerging from mist. One furious giant, moving with curling upraised tail, challenged to universal combat, whilst all his rivals gave way, reluctant, resentful, yet afraid. The rumps of some of the veterans were as bare of hair as the loins of lions, but their enormous shoulders bulked into deformity by reason of a dense mane. They moved like elephants—clumsy, enormous, distorted, yet with astonishing celerity.
It was worth a long journey to stand thus and watch that small band of bison, representatives of a race whose myriads once covered all America, for though less than two hundred in number, they were feeding and warring precisely as their ancestors had fed and warred for a million years. Small wonder that the red men believe the white invader must have used some evil medicine, some magic power in sweeping these majestic creatures from the earth. Once they covered the hills like a robe of brown, now only a few small bands are left to perpetuate the habits and the customs of the past.
As we watched, they fed, fought, rose up and lay down in calm disdain of our presence. It was as if, unobserved, and yet close beside them, we were studying the denizens of a small corner of aboriginal America, America in pre-Columbian times. Reluctantly, slowly we turned and rode away, back to our tent, back to the railway and the present day.
* * * * * *
On our return to Missoula we found the town aflame with a report that a steamer had just landed at Seattle, bringing from Alaska nearly three million dollars in gold-dust, and that the miners who owned the treasure had said, "We dug it from the valley of the Yukon, at a point called the Klondike. A thousand miles from anywhere. The Yukon is four thousand miles long, and flows north, so that the lower half freezes solid early in the fall, and to cross overland from Skagway—the way we came out—means weeks of travel. It is the greatest gold camp in the world but no one can go in now. Everybody must wait till next June."
It was well that this warning was plainly uttered, for the adventurous spirits of Montana instantly took fire. Nothing else was talked of by the men on the street and in the trains. Even my brother said, "I wish I could go."
"But you can't," I argued. "It is time you started for New York. Herne will drop you if you don't turn up for rehearsal in September."
Reluctantly agreeing to this, he turned his face toward the East whilst I kept on toward Seattle, to visit my classmate Burton Babcock, who was living in a village on Puget Sound.
The coast towns were humming with mining news and mining plans. The word "Klondike" blazed out on banners, on shop windows and on brick walls. Alert and thrifty merchants at once began to advertise Klondike shoes, Klondike coats, Klondike camp goods. Hundreds of Klondike exploring companies were being organized. In imagination each shop-keeper saw the gold seekers of the world in line of march, their faces set toward Seattle and the Sound. Every sign indicated a boom.
This swift leaping to grasp an opportunity was characteristically American, and I would have gladly taken part in the play, but alas! my Grant history was still unfinished, and I had already overstayed my vacation limit. I should have returned at once, but my friend Babcock was expecting me to visit him, and this I did.
Anacortes (once a port of vast pretentions), was, at this time, a boom-town in decay, and Burton whom I had not seen for ten years, seemed equally forlorn. After trying his hand at several professions, he had finally drifted to this place, and was living alone in a rude cabin, camping like a woodsman. Being without special training in any trade, he had fallen into competition with the lowest kind of unskilled labor.
Like my Uncle David, another unsuccessful explorer, he had grown old before his time, and for a few minutes I could detect in him nothing of the lithe youth I had known at school on the Iowa prairie twenty years before. Shaggy of beard, wrinkled and bent he seemed already an old man.
By severest toil in the mills and in the forest he had become the owner of two small houses on a ragged street—these and a timber claim on the Skagit River formed his entire fortune.
Though careless of dress and hard of hand, his speech remained that of the thinker, and much of his reading was still along high, philosophical lines. He had been a singular youth, and he had developed into a still more singular man. With an instinctive love of the forest, he had become a daring and experienced mountaineer. As he described to me his solitary trips over the high Cascades I was reminded of John Muir, for he, too, often spent weeks in the high peaks above his claim with only such outfit as he could carry on his back.
"What do you do it for?" I asked. "Are you gold-hunting?"
With a soft chuckle he answered, "Oh, no; I do it just for the fun of it. I love to move around up there, alone, above timber line. It's beautiful up there."
Naturally, I recalled the scenes of our boyhood. I spoke of the Burr Oak Lyceums, of our life at the Osage Seminary, and of the boys and girls we had loved, but he was not disposed, at the moment, to dwell on them or on the past. His heart (I soon discovered) was aflame with desire to join the rush of gold-seekers. "I wish you would grubstake me," he timidly suggested. "I'd like to try my hand at digging gold in