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"It's too late in the season," I replied. "Wait till spring. Wait till I finish my history of Grant and I'll go in with you."
With this arrangement (which on my part was more than half a jest) I left him and started homeward by way of Lake MacDonald, the Blackfoot Reservation and Fort Benton, my mind teeming with subjects for poems, short stories and novels. My vacation was over. Aspiring vaguely to qualify as the fictionist of this region, I was eager to be at work. Here was my next and larger field. As my neighbors in Iowa and Dakota were moving on into these more splendid spaces, so now I resolved to follow them and be their chronicler.
This trip completed my conversion. I resolved to preempt a place in the history of the great Northwest which was at once a wilderness and a cosmopolis, for in it I found men and women from many lands, drawn to the mountains in search of health, or recreation, or gold. I perceived that almost any character I could imagine could be verified in this amazing mixture. I began to sketch novels which would have been false in Wisconsin or Iowa. With a sense of elation, of freedom, I decided to swing out into the wider air of Colorado and Montana.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Telegraph Trail
The writing of the last half of my Grant biography demanded a careful study of war records, therefore in the autumn of '97 I took lodgings in Washington, and settled to the task of reading my way through the intricacies of the Grant Administrations. Until this work was completed I could not make another trip to the Northwest.
The new Congressional Library now became my grandiose work-shop. All through the winter from nine till twelve in the morning and from two till six in the afternoon, I sat at a big table in a special room, turning the pages of musty books and yellowed newspapers, or dictating to a stenographer the story of the Reconstruction Period as it unfolded under my eyes. I was for the time entirely the historian, with little time to dream of the fictive material with which my memory was filled.
I find this significant note in my diary. "My Grant life is now so nearly complete that I feel free to begin a work which I have long meditated. I began to dictate, to-day, the story of my life as boy and man in the West. In view of my approaching perilous trip into the North I want to leave a fairly accurate chronicle of what I saw and what I did on the Middle Border. The truth is, with all my trailing about in the Rocky Mountains I have never been in a satisfying wilderness. It is impossible, even in Wyoming, to get fifty miles from settlement. I long to undertake a journey which demands hardihood, and so, after careful investigation, I have decided to go into the Yukon Valley by pack train over the British Columbian Mountains, a route which offers a fine and characteristic New World adventure."
To prepare myself for this expedition I ran up to Ottawa in February to study maps and to talk with Canadian officials concerning the various trails which were being surveyed and blazed. "No one knows much about that country," said Dawson with a smile.
I returned to Washington quite determined on going to Teslin Lake over a path which followed an abandoned telegraph survey from Quesnelle on the Fraser River to the Stickeen, a distance estimated at about eight hundred miles, and I quote these lines as indicating my mind at the time:
| The way is long and cold and lone— But I go! It leads where pines forever moan Their weight of snow— But I go! There are voices in the wind which call There are shapes which beckon to the plain I must journey where the peaks are tall, And lonely herons clamor in the rain. |
One of my most valued friends in Washington at this time was young Theodore Roosevelt, who had resigned his position as Police Commissioner in New York City to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy. His life on a Dakota ranch had not only filled him with a love for western trails and sympathy with western men, but had created in him a special interest in western writers. No doubt it was this regard for the historians of the West which led him to invite me to his house; for during the winter I occasionally lunched or dined with him. He also gave me the run of his office, and there I sometimes saw him in action, steering the department toward efficiency.
Though nominally Assistant Secretary he was in fact the Head of the Navy, boldly pushing plans to increase its fighting power. This I know, for one day as I sat in his office I heard him giving orders for gun practice and discussing the higher armament of certain ships. I remember his words as he showed me a sheet on which was indicated the relative strength of the world's navies. "We must raise all our guns to a higher power," he said with characteristic emphasis.
John Hay, Senator Lodge, Major Powell and Edward Eggleston were among my most distinguished hosts during this winter and I have many pleasant memories of these highly distinctive personalities. Major Powell appealed to me with especial power by reason of his heroic past. He had been an engineer under Grant at Vicksburg and was very helpful to me in stating the methods of the siege, but his experiences after the war were still more romantic. Though a small man and with but one arm, he had nevertheless led a fleet of canoes through the Grand Cañon of the Colorado—the first successful attempt at navigating that savage and sullen river, and his laconic account of it enormously impressed me. He was, at this time, the well-known head of the Ethnological Bureau, and I frequently saw him at the Cosmos Club, grouped with Langley, Merriam, Howard and other of my scientific friends. He was a somber, silent, and rather unkempt figure, with the look of a dreaming lion on his face. It was hard to relate him with the man who had conquered the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.
His direct antithesis was Edward Eggleston, whose residence was a small brick house just back of the Congressional Library. Eggleston, humorous, ready of speech, was usually surrounded by an attentive circle of delighted listeners and I often drew near to share his monologue. He was a handsome man, tall and shapely with abundant gray hair and a full beard, and was especially learned in American early history. "Edward loves to monologue," his friends smilingly said as if in criticism, but to me his talk was always interesting.
We became friends on the basis of a common love for the Western prairie, which he, as a "circuit rider" in Minnesota had minutely explored. I told him, gladly and in some detail, of my first reading of The Hoosier School-master, and in return for my interest he wrote a full page of explanation on the fly leaf of a copy which I still own and value highly, for I regard him now, as I did then, as one of the brave pioneers of distinctive Middle Border fiction.
Roosevelt considered me something of a Populist, (as I was), and I well remember a dinner in Senator Lodge's house where he and Henry Adams heckled me for an hour or more in order to obtain a statement of what I thought "ailed" Kansas, Nebraska and Dakota. They all held the notion that I understood these farmer folk well enough to reflect their secret antagonisms, which I certainly did. I recall getting pretty hot in my plea, but Roosevelt seemed rather proud of me as I warmly defended my former neighbor. "The man on the rented farm who is raising corn at fifteen cents per bushel to pay interest on a mortgage is apt to be bitter," I argued.
However, this evening was an exception. Generally we talked of the West, of cattle ranching, of trailing and of the splendid types of pioneers who were about to vanish from the earth. One night as we sat at dinner in his house, he suddenly leaned back in his chair and said with a smile "I can't tell you how I enjoy having a man at my table who knows the difference between a parfleche and an aparejo."
Although I loved the trail I had given up shooting. I no longer carried a gun even in the hills—although, I will admit, I permitted my companions to do so. Roosevelt differed from me in this. He loved "the song of the bullet." "It gives point and significance to the trail," he explained.
I recall quoting to him one of his own vividly beautiful descriptions of dawn among the hills, a story which led up to the stalking and the death of a noble elk. "It was fine, all fine and true and poetic," I declared, "but I should have listened with gratitude to the voice of the elk and watched him go his appointed way in peace."
"I understand your position perfectly," he replied, "but it is illogical. You must remember every wild animal dies a violent death. Elk and deer and pheasants are periodically destroyed by snows and storms of sleet—and what about the butcher killing lambs and chickens for your table? I notice you accept my roast duck."
He was greatly interested