At the time I made the trip to Yellowstone
Park with President Roosevelt in
the spring of 1903, I promised some
friends to write up my impressions of
the President and of the Park, but I have
been slow in getting around to it. The
President himself, having the absolute
leisure and peace of the White House,
wrote his account of the trip nearly two
years ago! But with the stress and strain
of my life at "Slabsides,"—administering
the affairs of so many of the wild
creatures of the woods about me,—I
have not till this blessed season (fall of
1905) found the time to put on record an
account of the most interesting thing I
saw in that wonderful land, which, of
course, was the President
himself.
When I accepted his invitation I was
well aware that during the journey I
should be in a storm centre most of the
time, which is not always a pleasant
prospect to a man of my habits and disposition.
The President himself is a good
deal of a storm,—a man of such abounding
energy and ceaseless activity that he
sets everything in motion around him
wherever he goes. But I knew he would
be pretty well occupied on his way to the
Park in speaking to eager throngs and in
receiving personal and political homage
in the towns and cities we were to pass
through. But when all this was over, and
I found myself with him in the wilderness
of the Park, with only the superintendent
and a few attendants to help take
up his tremendous personal impact, how
was it likely to fare with a non-strenuous
person like myself? I asked. I had visions
of snow six and seven feet deep, where
traveling could be done only upon snow-shoes,
and I had never had the things on
my feet in my life. If the infernal fires
beneath, that keep the pot boiling so
furiously in the Park, should melt the
snows, I could see the party tearing along
on horseback at a wolf-hunt pace over a
rough country; and as I had not been
on a horse's back since the President
was born, how would it be likely to fare
with me then?
I had known the President several
years before he became famous, and we
had had some correspondence on subjects
of natural history. His interest in such
themes is always very fresh and keen,
and the main motive of his visit to the
Park at this time was to see and study in
its semi-domesticated condition the great
game which he had so often hunted during
his ranch days; and he was kind
enough to think it would be an additional
pleasure to see it with a nature-lover like
myself. For my own part, I knew nothing
about big game, but I knew there was no
man in the country with whom I should
so like to see it as Roosevelt.
Some of our newspapers reported that
the President intended to hunt in the
Park. A woman in Vermont wrote me,
to protest against the hunting, and hoped
I would teach the President to love the
animals as much as I did,—as if he did
not love them much more, because his
love is founded upon knowledge, and
because they had been a part of his life.
She did not know that I was then cherishing
the secret hope that I might be allowed
to shoot a cougar or bobcat; but
this fun did not come to me. The President
said, "I will not fire a gun in the
Park; then I shall have no explanations
to make." Yet once I did hear him say
in the wilderness, "I feel as if I ought to
keep the camp in meat. I always have."
I regretted that he could not do so on this
occasion.
I have never been disturbed by the
President's hunting trips. It is to such
men as he that the big game legitimately
belongs,—men who regard it from the
point of view of the naturalist as well as
from that of the sportsman, who are interested
in its preservation, and who share
with the world the delight they experience
in the chase. Such a hunter as Roosevelt
is as far removed from the game-butcher
as day is from night; and as for his killing
of the "varmints,"—bears, cougars,
and bobcats,—the fewer of these there
are, the better for the useful and beautiful
game.
The cougars, or mountain lions, in the
Park certainly needed killing. The superintendent
reported that he had seen where
they had slain nineteen elk, and we saw
where they had killed a deer and dragged
its body across the trail. Of course, the
President would not now on his hunting
trips shoot an elk or a deer except to
"keep the camp in meat," and for this
purpose it is as legitimate as to slay a
sheep or a steer for the table at home.
We left Washington on April 1, and
strung several of the larger Western cities
on our thread of travel,—Chicago, Milwaukee,
Madison, St. Paul, Minneapolis,—as
well as many lesser towns, in each
of which the President made an address,
sometimes brief, on a few occasions of an
hour or more.
He gave himself very freely and heartily
to the people wherever he went. He could
easily match their Western cordiality
and good-fellowship. Wherever his train
stopped, crowds soon gathered, or had
already gathered, to welcome him. His
advent made a holiday in each town he
visited. At all the principal stops the
usual programme was: first, his reception
by the committee of citizens appointed to
receive him,—they usually boarded his
private car, and were one by one introduced
to him; then a drive through the
town with a concourse of carriages; then
to the hall or open-air platform, where
he spoke to the assembled throng; then
to lunch or dinner; and then back to the
train, and off for the next stop,—a round
of hand-shaking, carriage-driving, speech-making
each day. He usually spoke
from eight to ten times every twenty-four
hours, sometimes for only a few minutes
from the rear platform of his private car,
at others for an hour or more in some
large hall. In Chicago, Milwaukee, and
St. Paul, elaborate banquets were given
him and his party, and on each occasion
he delivered a carefully prepared speech
upon questions that involved the policy
of his administration. The throng that
greeted him in the vast Auditorium in
Chicago—that rose and waved and
waved again—was one of the grandest
human spectacles I ever witnessed.
In Milwaukee the dense cloud of tobacco
smoke that presently filled the
large hall after the feasting was over was
enough to choke any speaker, but it did
not seem to choke the President, though
he does not use tobacco in any form himself;
nor was there anything foggy about
his utterances on that occasion upon
legislative control of the trusts.
ARRIVAL AT GARDINER, MONT.
(ENTRANCE TO YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK.)
From stereograph, copyright 1906, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
In St. Paul the city was inundated
with humanity,—a vast human tide
that left the middle of the streets bare as
our line of carriages moved slowly along,
but that rose up in solid walls of town
and prairie humanity on the sidewalks
and city dooryards. How hearty and
happy the myriad faces looked! At one
point I spied in the throng on the curbstone
a large silk banner that bore my
own name as the title of some society. I
presently saw that it was borne by half
a dozen anxious and expectant-looking
schoolgirls with braids down their backs.
As my carriage drew near them, they
pressed their way through the throng
and threw a large bouquet of flowers into
my lap. I think it would be hard to say
who blushed the deeper, the girls or myself.
It was the first time I had ever had
flowers showered upon me in public; and
then, maybe, I felt that on such an occasion
I was only a minor side issue, and
public recognition was not called for.
But the incident pleased the President.
"I saw that banner and those flowers," he
said afterwards; "and I was delighted to
see you honored that way." But I fear I
have not to this day thanked the Monroe
School of St. Paul for that pretty
attention.
The time of the passing of the presidential
train seemed well known, even
on the Dakota prairies. At one point I
remember a little brown schoolhouse
stood not far off, and near the track the
school-ma'am, with her flock, drawn up
in line. We were at luncheon, but the
President caught a glimpse ahead through
the window, and quickly took in the
situation. With napkin in hand, he
rushed out on the platform and waved to
them. "Those children," he said, as he
came back, "wanted to see the President
of the United States, and I could not disappoint
them. They may never have
another chance. What a deep impression
such things make when we are young!"
At some point in the Dakotas we picked
up the former foreman of his ranch and
another cowboy friend of the old days,
and they rode with the President in his
private car for several hours. He was as
happy with them as a schoolboy ever was
in meeting old chums. He beamed with
delight all over. The life which those
men represented, and of which he had
himself once formed a part, meant so
much to him; it had entered into the very
marrow of his being, and I could see the
joy of it all shining in his face as he sat
and lived parts of it over again with those
men that day. He bubbled with laughter
continually. The men, I thought, seemed
a little embarrassed by his open-handed
cordiality and good-fellowship. He himself
evidently wanted to forget the present,
and to live only in the memory of those
wonderful ranch days,—that free, hardy,
adventurous life upon the plains. It all
came back to him with a rush when he
found himself alone with these heroes of
the rope and the stirrup. How much
more keen his appreciation was, and how
much quicker his memory, than theirs!
He was constantly recalling to their
minds incidents which they had forgotten,
and the names of horses and dogs which
had escaped them. His subsequent life,
instead of making dim the memory of his
ranch days, seemed to have made it more
vivid by contrast.
When they had gone I said to him, "I
think your affection for those men very
beautiful."
"How could I help it?" he said.
"Still, few men in your station could
or would go back and renew such friendships."
"Then I pity them," he replied.
He said afterwards that his ranch life
had been the making of him. It had
built him up and hardened him physically,
and it had opened his eyes to the
wealth of manly character among the
plainsmen and cattlemen.
Had he not gone West, he said, he
never would have raised the Rough Riders
regiment; and had he not raised that
regiment and gone to the Cuban War, he
would not have been made governor of
New York; and had not this happened,
the politicians would not unwittingly
have made his rise to the Presidency so
inevitable. There is no doubt, I think,
that he would have got there some day;
but without the chain of events above
outlined, his rise could not have been so
rapid.
Our train entered the Bad Lands of
North Dakota in the early evening twilight,
and the President stood on the rear
platform of his car, gazing wistfully upon
the scene. "I know all this country like a
book," he said. "I have ridden over it,
and hunted over it, and tramped over it,
in all seasons and weather, and it looks
like home to me. My old ranch is not
far off. We shall soon reach Medora,
which was my station." It was plain to
see that that strange, forbidding-looking
landscape, hills and valleys to eastern
eyes, utterly demoralized and gone to the
bad,—flayed, fantastic, treeless, a riot
of naked clay slopes, chimney-like buttes,
and dry coulees,—was in his eyes a land
of almost pathetic interest. There were
streaks of good pasturage here and there
where his cattle used to graze, and where
the deer and the pronghorn used to
linger.
When we reached Medora, where the
train was scheduled to stop an hour, it
was nearly dark, but the whole town and
country round had turned out to welcome
their old townsman. After much hand-shaking,
the committee conducted us
down to a little hall, where the President
stood on a low platform, and made a
short address to the standing crowd that
filled the place. Then some flashlight pictures
were taken by the local photographer,
after which the President stepped
down, and, while the people filed past
him, shook hands with every man, woman,
and child of them, calling many of
them by name, and greeting them all
most cordially. I recall one grizzled old
frontiersman whose hand he grasped,
calling him by name, and saying, "How
well I remember you! You once mended
my gunlock for me,—put on a new
hammer." "Yes," said the delighted old
fellow; "I'm the man, Mr. President."
He was among his old neighbors once
more, and the pleasure of the meeting
was very obvious on both sides. I heard
one of the women tell him they were going
to have a dance presently, and ask him
if he would not stay and open it! The
President laughingly excused himself, and
said his train had to leave on schedule
time, and his time was nearly up. I
thought of the incident in his "Ranch
Life," in which he says he once opened a
cowboy ball with the wife of a Minnesota
man, who danced opposite, and who had
recently shot a bullying Scotchman. He
says the scene reminded him of the ball
where Bret Harte's heroine "went down
the middle with the man that shot Sandy
Magee."
Before reaching Medora he had told
me many anecdotes of "Hell-Roaring
Bill Jones," and had said I should see
him. But it turned out that Hell-Roaring
Bill had begun to celebrate the coming of
the President too early in the day, and
when we reached Medora he was not in a
presentable condition. I forget now how
he had earned his name, but no doubt he
had come honestly by it; it was a part of
his history, as was that of "The Pike,"
"Cold-Turkey Bill," "Hash-Knife Joe,"
and other classic heroes of the
frontier.
It is curious how certain things go to
the bad in the Far West, or a certain proportion
of them,—bad lands, bad horses,
and bad men. And it is a degree of badness
that the East has no conception of,—land
that looks as raw and unnatural
as if time had never laid its shaping and
softening hand upon it; horses that, when
mounted, put their heads to the ground
and their heels in the air, and, squealing
defiantly, resort to the most diabolically
ingenious tricks to shake off or to kill
their riders; and men who amuse themselves
in bar-rooms by shooting about
the feet of a "tenderfoot" to make him
dance, or who ride along the street and
shoot at every one in sight. Just as the
old plutonic fires come to the surface out
there in the Rockies, and hint very
strongly of the infernal regions, so a kind
of satanic element in men and animals—an
underlying devilishness—crops
out, and we have the border ruffian and
the bucking broncho.
The President told of an Englishman
on a hunting trip in the West, who, being
an expert horseman at home, scorned the
idea that he could not ride any of their
"grass-fed ponies." So they gave him a
bucking broncho. He was soon lying on
the ground, much stunned. When he
could speak, he said, "I should not have
minded him, you know, but 'e 'ides 'is
'ead."
At one place in Dakota the train stopped
to take water while we were at lunch. A
crowd soon gathered, and the President
went out to greet them. We could hear
his voice, and the cheers and laughter of
the crowd. And then we heard him say,
"Well, good-by, I must go now." Still
he did not come. Then we heard more
talking and laughing, and another "good-by,"
and yet he did not come. Then I
went out to see what had happened. I
found the President down on the ground
shaking hands with the whole lot of them.
Some one had reached up to shake his
hand as he was about withdrawing, and
this had been followed by such eagerness
on the part of the rest of the people to do
likewise, that the President had instantly
got down to gratify them. Had the secret
service men known it, they would have
been in a pickle. We probably have never
had a President who responded more
freely and heartily to the popular liking
for him than Roosevelt. The crowd always
seem to be in love with him the
moment they see him and hear his voice.
And it is not by reason of any arts of eloquence,
or charm of address, but by reason
of his inborn heartiness and sincerity,
and his genuine manliness. The people
feel his quality at once. In Bermuda last
winter I met a Catholic priest who had
sat on the platform at some place in New
England very near the President while
he was speaking, and who said, "The
man had not spoken three minutes before
I loved him, and had any one tried to
molest him, I could have torn him to
pieces." It is the quality in the man that
instantly inspires such a liking as this in
strangers that will, I am sure, safeguard
him in all public places.
I once heard him say that he did not
like to be addressed as "His Excellency;"
he added laughingly, "They might just
as well call me 'His Transparency,' for all
I care." It is this transparency, this direct
out-and-out, unequivocal character of
him that is one source of his popularity.
The people do love transparency,—all
of them but the politicians.
A friend of his one day took him to
task for some mistake he had made in one
of his appointments. "My dear sir,"
replied the President, "where you know
of one mistake I have made, I know of
ten." How such candor must make the
politicians shiver!
I have said that I stood in dread of the
necessity of snowshoeing in the Park,
and, in lieu of that, of horseback riding.
Yet when we reached Gardiner, the entrance
to the Park, on that bright, crisp
April morning, with no snow in sight save
that on the mountain-tops, and found
Major Pitcher and Captain Chittenden
at the head of a squad of soldiers, with a
fine saddle-horse for the President, and
an ambulance drawn by two span of
mules for me, I confess that I experienced
just a slight shade of mortification. I
thought they might have given me the
option of the saddle or the ambulance.
Yet I entered the vehicle as if it was just
what I had been expecting.
The President and his escort, with a
cloud of cowboys hovering in the rear,
were soon off at a lively pace, and my
ambulance followed close, and at a lively
pace, too; so lively that I soon found myself
gripping the seat with both hands.
"Well," I said to myself, "they are giving
me a regular Western send-off;" and I
thought, as the ambulance swayed from
side to side, that it would suit me just as
well if my driver did not try to keep up
with the presidential procession. The
driver and his mules were shut off from
me by a curtain, but, looking ahead out
of the sides of the vehicle, I saw two good-sized
logs lying across our course. Surely,
I thought (and barely had time to think),
he will avoid these. But he did not, and
as we passed over them I was nearly
thrown through the top of the ambulance.
"This is a lively send-off," I said, rubbing
my bruises with one hand, while I clung
to the seat with the other. Presently I
saw the cowboys scrambling up the bank
as if to get out of our way; then the President
on his fine gray stallion scrambling
up the bank with his escort, and looking
ominously in my direction, as we thundered
by.
THE PRESIDENT WITH MR. BURROUGHS AND SECRETARY LOEB JUST BEFORE ENTERING THE PARK.
From stereograph, copyright 1906, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
"Well," I said, "this is indeed a novel
ride; for once in my life I have sidetracked
the President of the United
States! I am given the right of way over
all." On we tore, along the smooth, hard
road, and did not slacken our pace till,
at the end of a mile or two, we began to
mount the hill toward Fort Yellowstone.
And not till we reached the fort did I
learn that our mules had run away. They
had been excited beyond control by the
presidential cavalcade, and the driver,
finding he could not hold them, had
aimed only to keep them in the road,
and we very soon had the road all to
ourselves.
Fort Yellowstone is at Mammoth Hot
Springs, where one gets his first view of
the characteristic scenery of the Park,—huge,
boiling springs with their columns
of vapor, and the first characteristic odors
which suggest the traditional infernal
regions quite as much as the boiling and
steaming water does. One also gets a
taste of a much more rarefied air than he
has been used to, and finds himself panting
for breath on a very slight exertion.
The Mammoth Hot Springs have built
themselves up an enormous mound that
stands there above the village on the side
of the mountain, terraced and scalloped
and fluted, and suggesting some vitreous
formation, or rare carving of enormous,
many-colored precious stones. It looks
quite unearthly, and, though the devil's
frying pan, and ink pot, and the Stygian
caves are not far off, the suggestion is of
something celestial rather than of the
nether regions,—a vision of jasper walls,
and of amethyst battlements.
With Captain Chittenden I climbed to
the top, stepping over the rills and creeks
of steaming hot water, and looked at the
marvelously clear, cerulean, but boiling,
pools on the summit. The water seemed
as unearthly in its beauty and purity as
the gigantic sculpturing that held it.
The Stygian caves are still farther up
the mountain,—little pockets in the
rocks, or well-holes in the ground at your
feet, filled with deadly carbon dioxide.
We saw birds' feathers and quills in all of
them. The birds hop into them, probably
in quest of food or seeking shelter,
and they never come out. We saw the
body of a martin on the bank of one hole.
Into one we sank a lighted torch, and it
was extinguished as quickly as if we had
dropped it into water. Each cave or niche
is a death valley on a small scale. Near by
we came upon a steaming pool, or lakelet,
of an acre or more in extent. A pair of
mallard ducks were swimming about in
one end of it,—the cool end. When we
approached, they swam slowly over into
the warmer water. As they progressed,
the water got hotter and hotter, and the
ducks' discomfort was evident. Presently
they stopped, and turned towards us,
half appealingly, as I thought. They
could go no farther; would we please
come no nearer? As I took another step
or two, up they rose and disappeared
over the hill. Had they gone to the extreme
end of the pool, we could have had
boiled mallard for dinner.
Another novel spectacle was at night,
or near sundown, when the deer came
down from the hills into the streets and
ate hay, a few yards from the officers'
quarters, as unconcernedly as so many
domestic sheep. This they had been
doing all winter, and they kept it up
till May, at times a score or more of
them profiting thus on the government's
bounty. When the sundown gun was
fired a couple of hundred yards away,
they gave a nervous start, but kept on
with their feeding. The antelope and elk
and mountain sheep had not yet grown
bold enough to accept Uncle Sam's charity
in that way.
The President wanted all the freedom
and solitude possible while in the Park,
so all newspaper men and other strangers
were excluded. Even the secret service
men and his physician and private secretaries
were left at Gardiner. He craved
once more to be alone with nature; he
was evidently hungry for the wild and
the aboriginal,—a hunger that seems to
come upon him regularly at least once a
year, and drives him forth on his hunting
trips for big game in the West.
We spent two weeks in the Park, and
had fair weather, bright, crisp days, and
clear, freezing nights. The first week
we occupied three camps that had been
prepared, or partly prepared, for us in
the northeast corner of the Park, in the
region drained by the Gardiner River,
where there was but little snow, and
which we reached on horseback.
The second week we visited the geyser
region, which lies a thousand feet or more
higher, and where the snow was still five
or six feet deep. This part of the journey
was made in big sleighs, each drawn by
two span of horses.
On the horseback excursion, which
involved only about fifty miles of riding,
we had a mule pack train, and Sibley
tents and stoves, with quite a retinue of
camp laborers, a lieutenant and an orderly
or two, and a guide, Billy Hofer.
The first camp was in a wild, rocky,
and picturesque gorge on the Yellowstone,
about ten miles from the fort. A
slight indisposition, the result of luxurious
living, with no wood to chop or to saw,
and no hills to climb, as at home, prevented
me from joining the party till the
third day. Then Captain Chittenden
drove me eight miles in a buggy. About
two miles from camp we came to a picket
of two or three soldiers, where my big
bay was in waiting for me. I mounted
him confidently, and, guided by an orderly,
took the narrow, winding trail
toward camp. Except for an hour's riding
the day before with Captain Chittenden,
I had not been on a horse's back for
nearly fifty years, and I had not spent as
much as a day in the saddle during my
youth. That first sense of a live, spirited,
powerful animal beneath you, at whose
mercy you are,—you, a pedestrian all
your days,—with gullies and rocks and
logs to cross, and deep chasms opening
close beside you, is not a little disturbing.
But my big bay did his part well, and I
did not lose my head or my nerve, as we
cautiously made our way along the narrow
path on the side of the steep gorge,
with a foaming torrent rushing along at
its foot, nor yet when we forded the rocky
and rapid Yellowstone. A misstep or a
stumble on the part of my steed, and
probably the first bubble of my confidence
would have been shivered at once; but
this did not happen, and in due time we
reached the group of tents that formed
the President's camp.
The situation was delightful,—no
snow, scattered pine trees, a secluded
valley, rocky heights, and the clear,
ample, trouty waters of the Yellowstone.
The President was not in camp. In the
morning he had stated his wish to go
alone into the wilderness. Major Pitcher
very naturally did not quite like the idea,
and wished to send an orderly with him.
"No," said the President. "Put me
up a lunch, and let me go alone. I will
surely come back."
And back he surely came. It was
about five o'clock when he came briskly
down the path from the east to the camp.
It came out that he had tramped about
eighteen miles through a very rough
country. The day before, he and the
major had located a band of several hundred
elk on a broad, treeless hillside, and
his purpose was to find those elk, and
creep up on them, and eat his lunch
under their very noses. And this he did,
spending an hour or more within fifty
yards of them. He came back looking as
fresh as when he started, and at night,
sitting before the big camp fire, related
his adventure, and talked with his usual
emphasis and copiousness of many things.
He told me of the birds he had seen or
heard; among them he had heard one
that was new to him. From his description
I told him I thought it was Townsend's
solitaire, a bird I much wanted to
see and hear. I had heard the West India
solitaire,—one of the most impressive
songsters I ever heard,—and I wished
to compare our Western form with it.
The next morning we set out for our
second camp, ten or a dozen miles away,
and in reaching it passed over much of
the ground the President had traversed
the day before. As we came to a wild,
rocky place above a deep chasm of the
river, with a few scattered pine trees, the
President said, "It was right here that I
heard that strange bird song." We paused
a moment. "And there it is now!" he
exclaimed.
Sure enough, there was the solitaire
singing from the top of a small cedar,—a
bright, animated, eloquent song, but
without the richness and magic of the
song of the tropical species. We hitched
our horses, and followed the bird up as it
flew from tree to tree. The President was
as eager to see and hear it as I was. It
seemed very shy, and we only caught
glimpses of it. In form and color it much
resembles its West India cousin, and
suggests our catbird. It ceased to sing
when we pursued it. It is a bird found
only in the wilder and higher parts of the
Rockies. My impression was that its
song did not quite merit the encomiums
that have been pronounced upon it.
At this point, I saw amid the rocks my
first and only Rocky Mountain woodchucks,
and, soon after we had resumed
our journey, our first blue grouse,—a
number of them like larger partridges.
Occasionally we would come upon black-tailed
deer, standing or lying down in the
bushes, their large ears at attention being
the first thing to catch the eye. They
would often allow us to pass within a few
rods of them without showing alarm.
Elk horns were scattered all over this
part of the Park, and we passed several
old carcasses of dead elk that had probably
died a natural death.
In a grassy bottom at the foot of a
steep hill, while the President and I were
dismounted, and noting the pleasing
picture which our pack train of fifteen or
twenty mules made filing along the side
of a steep grassy slope,—a picture which
he has preserved in his late volume, "Out-Door
Pastimes of an American Hunter,"—our
attention was attracted by plaintive,
musical, bird-like chirps that rose
from the grass about us. I was almost
certain it was made by a bird; the President
was of like opinion; and we kicked
about in the tufts of grass, hoping to flush
the bird. Now here, now there, arose
this sharp, but bird-like note. Finally,
we found that it was made by a species of
gopher, whose holes we soon discovered.
What its specific name is I do not
know, but it should be called the singing
gopher.
Our destination this day was a camp
on Cottonwood Creek, near "Hell-Roaring
Creek." As we made our way in the
afternoon along a broad, open, grassy
valley, I saw a horseman come galloping
over the hill to our right, starting up a
band of elk as he came; riding across the
plain, he wheeled his horse, and, with the
military salute, joined our party. He
proved to be a government scout, called
the "Duke of Hell Roaring,"—an educated
officer from the Austrian army,
who, for some unknown reason, had exiled
himself here in this out-of-the-way
part of the world. He was a man in his
prime, of fine, military look and bearing.
After conversing a few moments with
the President and Major Pitcher, he rode
rapidly away.
Our second camp, which we reached in
mid-afternoon, was in the edge of the
woods on the banks of a fine, large trout
stream, where ice and snow still lingered
in patches. I tried for trout in the head of
a large, partly open pool, but did not get
a rise; too much ice in the stream, I concluded.
Very soon my attention was attracted
by a strange note, or call, in the
spruce woods. The President had also
noticed it, and, with me, wondered what
made it. Was it bird or beast? Billy
Hofer said he thought it was an owl, but
the sound in no way suggested an owl,
and the sun was shining brightly. It was
a sound such as a boy might make by
blowing in the neck of an empty bottle.
Presently we heard it beyond us on the
other side of the creek, which was pretty
good proof that the creature had wings.
THE PRESIDENT IN THE BEAR COUNTRY
From stereograph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
"Let's go run that bird down," said
the President to me.
So off we started across a small, open,
snow-streaked plain, toward the woods
beyond it. We soon decided that the bird
was on the top of one of a group of tall
spruces. After much skipping about over
logs and rocks, and much craning of our
necks, we made him out on the peak of
a spruce. I imitated his call, when he
turned his head down toward us, but we
could not make out what he was.
"Why did we not think to bring the
glasses?" said the President.
"I will run and get them," I replied.
"No," said he, "you stay here and keep
that bird treed, and I will fetch them."
So off he went like a boy, and was very
soon back with the glasses. We quickly
made out that it was indeed an owl,—the
pigmy owl, as it turned out,—not
much larger than a bluebird. I think the
President was as pleased as if we had
bagged some big game. He had never
seen the bird before.
Throughout the trip I found his interest
in bird life very keen, and his eye and
ear remarkably quick. He usually saw
the bird or heard its note as quickly as I
did,—and I had nothing else to think
about, and had been teaching my eye and
ear the trick of it for over fifty years. Of
course, his training as a big-game hunter
stood him in good stead, but back of that
were his naturalist's instincts, and his
genuine love of all forms of wild life.
I have been told that his ambition up to
the time he went to Harvard had been to
be a naturalist, but that there they seem
to have convinced him that all the out-of-door
worlds of natural history had been
conquered, and that the only worlds remaining
were in the laboratory, and to be
won with the microscope and the scalpel.
But Roosevelt was a man made for action
in a wide field, and laboratory conquests
could not satisfy him. His instincts as a
naturalist, however, lie back of all his
hunting expeditions, and, in a large measure,
I think, prompt them. Certain it is
that his hunting records contain more live
natural history than any similar records
known to me, unless it be those of Charles
St. John, the Scotch naturalist-sportsman.
The Canada jays, or camp-robbers, as
they are often called, soon found out our
camp that afternoon, and no sooner had
the cook begun to throw out peelings and
scraps and crusts than the jays began to
carry them off, not to eat, as I observed,
but to hide them in the thicker branches
of the spruce trees. How tame they were,
coming within three or four yards of one!
Why this species of jay should everywhere
be so familiar, and all other kinds so wild,
is a puzzle.
In the morning, as we rode down the
valley toward our next camping-place, at
Tower Falls, a band of elk containing a
hundred or more started along the side of
the hill a few hundred yards away. I was
some distance behind the rest of the party,
as usual, when I saw the President wheel
his horse off to the left, and, beckoning to
me to follow, start at a tearing pace on the
trail of the fleeing elk. He afterwards told
me that he wanted me to get a good view
of those elk at close range, and he was
afraid that if he sent the major or Hofer
to lead me, I would not get it. I hurried
along as fast as I could, which was not
fast; the way was rough,—logs, rocks,
spring runs, and a tenderfoot rider.
Now and then the President, looking
back and seeing what slow progress I was
making, would beckon to me impatiently,
and I could fancy him saying, "If I had
a rope around him, he would come faster
than that!" Once or twice I lost sight of
both him and the elk; the altitude was
great, and the horse was laboring like a
steam engine on an upgrade. Still I urged
him on. Presently, as I broke over a hill,
I saw the President pressing the elk up
the opposite slope. At the brow of the
hill he stopped, and I soon joined him.
There on the top, not fifty yards away,
stood the elk in a mass, their heads toward
us and their tongues hanging out.
They could run no farther. The President
laughed like a boy. The spectacle meant
much more to him than it did to me. I had
never seen a wild elk till on this trip, but
they had been among the notable game
that he had hunted. He had traveled
hundreds of miles, and undergone great
hardships, to get within rifle range of
these creatures. Now here stood scores
of them with lolling tongues, begging for
mercy.
After gazing at them to our hearts' content,
we turned away to look up our companions,
who were nowhere within sight.
We finally spied them a mile or more away,
and, joining them, all made our way to
an elevated plateau that commanded an
open landscape three or four miles across.
It was high noon, and the sun shone clear
and warm. From this lookout we saw
herds upon herds of elk scattered over
the slopes and gentle valleys in front of
us. Some were grazing, some were standing
or lying upon the ground, or upon the
patches of snow. Through our glasses we
counted the separate bands, and then the
numbers of some of the bands or groups,
and estimated that three thousand elk
were in full view in the landscape around
us. It was a notable spectacle. Afterward,
in Montana, I attended a council of Indian
chiefs at one of the Indian agencies,
and told them, through their interpreter,
that I had been with the Great Chief in
the Park, and of the game we had seen.
When I told them of these three thousand
elk all in view at once, they grunted
loudly, whether with satisfaction or with
incredulity, I could not tell.
In the midst of this great game amphitheatre
we dismounted and enjoyed the
prospect. And the President did an unusual
thing, he loafed for nearly an hour,—stretched
himself out in the sunshine
upon a flat rock, as did the rest of us, and,
I hope, got a few winks of sleep. I am
sure I did. Little, slender, striped chipmunks,
about half the size of ours, were
scurrying about; but I recall no other wild
things save the elk.
From here we rode down the valley to
our third camp, at Tower Falls, stopping
on the way to eat our luncheon on a
washed boulder beside a creek. On this
ride I saw my first and only badger; he
stuck his striped head out of his hole in
the ground only a few yards away from
us as we passed.
Our camp at Tower Falls was amid
the spruces above a cañon of the Yellowstone,
five or six hundred feet deep. It
was a beautiful and impressive situation,—shelter,
snugness, even cosiness, looking
over the brink of the awful and
the terrifying. With a run and a jump I
think one might have landed in the river
at the bottom of the great abyss, and in
doing so might have scaled one of those
natural obelisks or needles of rock that
stand up out of the depths two or three
hundred feet high. Nature shows you
what an enormous furrow her plough can
open through the strata when moving
horizontally, at the same time that she
shows you what delicate and graceful
columns her slower and gentler aerial
forces can carve out of the piled strata.
At the Falls there were two or three of
these columns, like the picket-pins of the
elder gods.
Across the cañon in front of our camp,
upon a grassy plateau which was faced
by a wall of trap rock, apparently thirty
or forty feet high, a band of mountain
sheep soon attracted our attention. They
were within long rifle range, but were not
at all disturbed by our presence, nor had
they been disturbed by the road-builders
who, under Captain Chittenden, were
constructing a government road along
the brink of the cañon. We speculated
as to whether or not the sheep could get
down the almost perpendicular face of
the chasm to the river to drink. It seemed
to me impossible. Would they try it while
we were there to see? We all hoped so;
and sure enough, late in the afternoon
the word came to our tents that the sheep
were coming down. The President, with
coat off and a towel around his neck, was
shaving. One side of his face was half
shaved, and the other side lathered. Hofer
and I started for a point on the brink of the
cañon where we could have a better view.
"By Jove," said the President, "I
must see that. The shaving can wait, and
the sheep won't."
So on he came, accoutred as he was,—coatless,
hatless, but not latherless, nor
towelless. Like the rest of us, his only
thought was to see those sheep do their
"stunt." With glasses in hand, we watched
them descend those perilous heights, leaping
from point to point, finding a foothold
where none appeared to our eyes, loosening
fragments of the crumbling rocks as
they came, now poised upon some narrow
shelf and preparing for the next leap, zig-zagging
or plunging straight down till the
bottom was reached, and not one accident
or misstep amid all that insecure footing.
I think the President was the most pleased
of us all; he laughed with the delight of it,
and quite forgot his need of a hat and coat
till I sent for them.
In the night we heard the sheep going
back; we could tell by the noise of the
falling stones. In the morning I confidently
expected to see some of them lying
dead at the foot of the cliffs, but there
they all were at the top once more, apparently
safe and sound. They do, however,
occasionally meet with accidents in
their perilous climbing, and their dead
bodies have been found at the foot of the
rocks. Doubtless some point of rock to
which they had trusted gave way, and
crushed them in the descent, or fell upon
those in the lead.
The next day, while the rest of us went
fishing for trout in the Yellowstone, three
or four miles above the camp, over the
roughest trail that we had yet traversed
on horseback, the President, who never
fishes unless put to it for meat, went off
alone again with his lunch in his pocket,
to stalk those sheep as he had stalked the
elk, and to feel the old sportsman's thrill
without the use of firearms. To do this
involved a tramp of eight or ten miles
down the river to a bridge and up the
opposite bank. This he did, and ate his
lunch near the sheep, and was back in
camp before we were.
We took some large cut-throat trout,
as they are called, from the yellow mark
across their throats, and I saw at short
range a black-tailed deer bounding along
in that curious, stiff-legged, mechanical,
yet springy manner, apparently all four
legs in the air at once, and all four feet
reaching the ground at once, affording a
very singular spectacle.
MR. BURROUGHS'S FAVORITE PASTIME.
By kind permission of Forest and Stream.
We spent two nights in our Tower Falls
camp, and on the morning of the third
day set out on our return to Fort Yellowstone,
pausing at Yancey's on our way,
and exchanging greetings with the old
frontiersman, who died a few weeks later.
While in camp we always had a big fire
at night in the open near the tents, and
around this we sat upon logs or camp-stools,
and listened to the President's talk.
What a stream of it he poured forth! and
what a varied and picturesque stream!—anecdote,
history, science, politics, adventure,
literature; bits of his experience
as a ranchman, hunter, Rough Rider,
legislator, civil service commissioner, police
commissioner, governor, president,—the
frankest confessions, the most telling
criticisms, happy characterizations
of prominent political leaders, or foreign
rulers, or members of his own Cabinet;
always surprising by his candor, astonishing
by his memory, and diverting by
his humor. His reading has been very
wide, and he has that rare type of memory
which retains details as well as mass
and generalities. One night something
started him off on ancient history, and
one would have thought he was just fresh
from his college course in history, the dates
and names and events came so readily.
Another time he discussed palæontology,
and rapidly gave the outlines of the science,
and the main facts, as if he had been reading
up on the subject that very day. He
sees things as wholes, and hence the relation
of the parts comes easy to him.
At dinner, at the White House, the
night before we started on the expedition,
I heard him talking with a guest,—an
officer of the British army, who was just
back from India. And the extent and variety
of his information about India and
Indian history and the relations of the
British government to it were extraordinary.
It put the British major on his
mettle to keep pace with him.
One night in camp he told us the story
of one of his Rough Riders who had just
written him from some place in Arizona.
The Rough Riders, wherever they are
now, look to him in time of trouble. This
one had come to grief in Arizona. He was
in jail. So he wrote the President, and
his letter ran something like this:—
"Dear Colonel,—I am in trouble.
I shot a lady in the eye, but I did not intend
to hit the lady; I was shooting at my
wife."
And the presidential laughter rang out
over the tree-tops. To another Rough
Rider, who was in jail, accused of horse
stealing, he had loaned two hundred
dollars to pay counsel on his trial, and,
to his surprise, in due time the money
came back. The ex-Rough wrote that his
trial never came off. "We elected our district
attorney;" and the laughter again
sounded, and drowned the noise of the
brook near by.
On another occasion we asked the President
if he was ever molested by any of
the "bad men" of the frontier, with whom
he had often come in contact. "Only
once," he said. The cowboys had always
treated him with the utmost courtesy,
both on the round-up and in camp; "and
the few real desperadoes I have seen were
also perfectly polite." Once only was he
maliciously shot at, and then not by a
cowboy nor a bona fide "bad man," but
by a "broad-hatted ruffian of a cheap and
common-place type." He had been compelled
to pass the night at a little frontier
hotel where the bar-room occupied the
whole lower floor, and was, in consequence,
the only place where the guests of the
hotel, whether drunk or sober, could sit.
As he entered the room, he saw that every
man there was being terrorized by a half-drunken
ruffian who stood in the middle
of the floor with a revolver in each hand,
compelling different ones to treat.
"I went and sat down behind the stove,"
said the President, "as far from him as I
could get; and hoped to escape his notice.
The fact that I wore glasses, together
with my evident desire to avoid a fight,
apparently gave him the impression that
I could be imposed upon with impunity.
He very soon approached me, flourishing
his two guns, and ordered me to treat. I
made no reply for some moments, when
the fellow became so threatening that I
saw something had to be done. The
crowd, mostly sheep-herders and small
grangers, sat or stood back against the
wall, afraid to move. I was unarmed,
and thought rapidly. Saying, 'Well, if I
must, I must,' I got up as if to walk around
him to the bar, then, as I got opposite him,
I wheeled and fetched him as heavy a
blow on the chin-point as I could strike.
He went down like a steer before the axe,
firing both guns into the ceiling as he went.
I jumped on him, and, with my knees on
his chest, disarmed him in a hurry. The
crowd was then ready enough to help me,
and we hog-tied him and put him in an
outhouse." The President alludes to this
incident in his "Ranch Life," but does not
give the details. It brings out his mettle
very distinctly.
He told us in an amused way of the
attempts of his political opponents at Albany,
during his early career as a member
of the Assembly, to besmirch his character.
His outspoken criticisms and denunciations
had become intolerable to
them, so they laid a trap for him, but he
was not caught. His innate rectitude and
instinct for the right course saved him,
as it has saved him many times since. I
do not think that in any emergency he has
to debate with himself long as to the right
course to be pursued; he divines it by a
kind of infallible instinct. His motives
are so simple and direct that he finds a
straight and easy course where another
man, whose eye is less single, would flounder
and hesitate.
One night he entertained us with reminiscences
of the Cuban War, of his efforts
to get his men to the firing line when the
fighting began, of his greenness and general
ignorance of the whole business of
war, which in his telling was very amusing.
He has probably put it all in his book
about the war, a work I have not yet read.
He described the look of the slope of Kettle
Hill when they were about to charge up it,
how the grass was combed and rippled by
the storm of rifle bullets that swept down
it. He said, "I was conscious of being
pale when I looked at it and knew that in
a few moments we were going to charge
there." The men of his regiment were all
lying flat upon the ground, and it became
his duty to walk along their front and encourage
them and order them up on their
feet. "Get up, men, get up!" One big
fellow did not rise. Roosevelt stooped
down and took hold of him and ordered
him up. Just at that moment a bullet
struck the man and went the entire length
of him. He never rose.
On this or on another occasion when
a charge was ordered, he found himself a
hundred yards or more in advance of his
regiment, with only the color bearer and
one corporal with him. He said they
planted the flag there, while he rushed
back to fetch the men. He was evidently
pretty hot. "Can it be that you flinched
when I led the way!" and then they came
with a rush. On the summit of Kettle
Hill he was again in advance of his men,
and as he came up, three Spaniards rose
out of the trenches and deliberately fired
at him at a distance of only a few paces,
and then turned and fled. But a bullet
from his revolver stopped one of them.
He seems to have been as much exposed to
bullets in this engagement as Washington
was at Braddock's defeat, and to have
escaped in the same marvelous manner.
The President unites in himself powers
and qualities that rarely go together.
Thus, he has both physical and moral
courage in a degree rare in history. He
can stand calm and unflinching in the
path of a charging grizzly, and he can
confront with equal coolness and determination
the predaceous corporations
and money powers of the country.
He unites the qualities of the man of
action with those of the scholar and writer,—another
very rare combination. He
unites the instincts and accomplishments
of the best breeding and culture with the
broadest democratic sympathies and affiliations.
He is as happy with a frontiersman
like Seth Bullock as with a fellow
Harvard man, and Seth Bullock is happy,
too.
He unites great austerity with great
good nature. He unites great sensibility
with great force and will power. He loves
solitude, and he loves to be in the thick
of the fight. His love of nature is equaled
only by his love of the ways and marts of
men.
He is doubtless the most vital man on
the continent, if not on the planet, to-day.
He is many-sided, and every side throbs
with his tremendous life and energy; the
pressure is equal all around. His interests
are as keen in natural history as in
economics, in literature as in statecraft,
in the young poet as in the old soldier,
in preserving peace as in preparing for
war. And he can turn all his great power
into the new channel on the instant. His
interest in the whole of life, and in the
whole life of the nation, never flags for a
moment. His activity is tireless. All the
relaxation he needs or craves is a change
of work. He is like the farmer's fields,
that only need a rotation of crops. I
once heard him say that all he cared
about being President was just "the big
work."
During this tour through the West,
lasting over two months, he made nearly
three hundred speeches; and yet on his
return Mrs. Roosevelt told me he looked
as fresh and unworn as when he left home.
We went up into the big geyser region
with the big sleighs, each drawn by four
horses. A big snow-bank had to be shoveled
through for us before we got to the
Golden Gate, two miles above Mammoth
Hot Springs. Beyond that we were at an
altitude of about eight thousand feet, on
a fairly level course that led now through
woods, and now through open country,
with the snow of a uniform depth of four
or five feet, except as we neared the "formations,"
where the subterranean warmth
kept the ground bare. The roads had
been broken and the snow packed for us
by teams from the fort, otherwise the
journey would have been impossible.
The President always rode beside the
driver. From his youth, he said, this seat
had always been the most desirable one to
him. When the sleigh would strike the
bare ground, and begin to drag heavily,
he would bound out nimbly and take
to his heels, and then all three of us—Major
Pitcher, Mr. Childs, and myself—would
follow suit, sometimes reluctantly
on my part. Walking at that altitude is
no fun, especially if you try to keep pace
with such a walker as the President is.
But he could not sit at his ease and let
those horses drag him in a sleigh over
bare ground. When snow was reached,
we would again quickly resume our seats.
As one nears the geyser region, he gets
the impression from the columns of steam
going up here and there in the distance—now
from behind a piece of woods, now
from out a hidden valley—that he is approaching
a manufacturing centre, or a
railroad terminus. And when he begins
to hear the hoarse snoring of "Roaring
Mountain," the illusion is still more complete.
At Norris's there is a big vent
where the steam comes tearing out of a
recent hole in the ground with terrific
force. Huge mounds of ice had formed
from the congealed vapor all around it,
some of them very striking.
The novelty of the geyser region soon
wears off. Steam and hot water are steam
and hot water the world over, and the
exhibition of them here did not differ,
except in volume, from what one sees by
his own fireside. The "Growler" is only
a boiling tea-kettle on a large scale, and
"Old Faithful" is as if the lid were to fly
off, and the whole contents of the kettle
should be thrown high into the air. To
be sure, boiling lakes and steaming rivers
are not common, but the new features
seemed, somehow, out of place, and as if
nature had made a mistake. One disliked
to see so much good steam and hot water
going to waste; whole towns might be
warmed by them, and big wheels made
to go round. I wondered that they had
not piped them into the big hotels which
they opened for us, and which were
warmed by wood fires.
SUNRISE IN YELLOWSTONE PARK.
From stereograph, copyright 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
At Norris's the big room that the President
and I occupied was on the ground
floor, and was heated by a huge box stove.
As we entered it to go to bed, the President
said, "Oom John, don't you think
it is too hot here?"
"I certainly do," I replied.
"Shall I open the window?"
"That will just suit me." And he
threw the sash, which came down to the
floor, all the way up, making an opening
like a doorway. The night was cold, but
neither of us suffered from the abundance
of fresh air.
The caretaker of the building was a
big Swede called Andy. In the morning
Andy said that beat him: "There was
the President of the United States sleeping
in that room, with the window open to the
floor, and not so much as one soldier outside
on guard."
The President had counted much on
seeing the bears that in summer board at
the Fountain Hotel, but they were not yet
out of their dens. We saw the track of
only one, and he was not making for the
hotel. At all the formations where the
geysers are, the ground was bare over a
large area. I even saw a wild flower—an
early buttercup, not an inch high—in
bloom. This seems to be the earliest
wild flower in the Rockies. It is the only
fragrant buttercup I know.
As we were riding along in our big
sleigh toward the Fountain Hotel, the
President suddenly jumped out, and,
with his soft hat as a shield to his hand,
captured a mouse that was running along
over the ground near us. He wanted it
for Dr. Merriam, on the chance that it
might be a new species. While we all
went fishing in the afternoon, the President
skinned his mouse, and prepared
the pelt to be sent to Washington. It was
done as neatly as a professed taxidermist
would have done it. This was the only
game the President killed in the Park. In
relating the incident to a reporter while
I was in Spokane, the thought occurred
to me, Suppose he changes that u to an o,
and makes the President capture a moose,
what a pickle I shall be in! Is it anything
more than ordinary newspaper enterprise
to turn a mouse into a moose? But, luckily
for me, no such metamorphosis happened
to that little mouse. It turned out
not to be a new species, as it should have
been, but a species new to the Park.
I caught trout that afternoon, on the
edge of steaming pools in the Madison
River that seemed to my hand almost
blood-warm. I suppose they found better
feeding where the water was warm. On
the table they did not compare with our
Eastern brook trout.
I was pleased to be told at one of the
hotels that they had kalsomined some of
the rooms with material from one of the
devil's paint-pots. It imparted a soft, delicate,
pinkish tint, not at all suggestive of
things satanic.
One afternoon at Norris's, the President
and I took a walk to observe the
birds. In the grove about the barns there
was a great number, the most attractive
to me being the mountain bluebird. These
birds we saw in all parts of the Park, and
at Norris's there was an unusual number
of them. How blue they were,—breast
and all! In voice and manner they
were almost identical with our bluebird.
The Western purple finch was abundant
here also, and juncos, and several kinds
of sparrows, with an occasional Western
robin. A pair of wild geese were feeding
in the low, marshy ground not over one
hundred yards from us, but when we
tried to approach nearer they took wing.
A few geese and ducks seem to winter in
the Park.
The second morning at Norris's one
of our teamsters, George Marvin, suddenly
dropped dead from some heart affection,
just as he had finished caring for
his team. It was a great shock to us all.
I never saw a better man with a team
than he was. I had ridden on the seat
beside him all the day previous. On one
of the "formations" our teams had got
mired in the soft, putty-like mud, and at
one time it looked as if they could never
extricate themselves, and I doubt if they
could have, had it not been for the skill
with which Marvin managed them. We
started for the Grand Cañon up the Yellowstone
that morning, and, in order to
give myself a walk over the crisp snow in
the clear, frosty air, I set out a little while
in advance of the teams. As I did so, I
saw the President, accompanied by one
of the teamsters, walking hurriedly toward
the barn to pay his last respects to
the body of Marvin. After we had returned
to Mammoth Hot Springs, he
made inquiries for the young woman to
whom he had been told that Marvin was
engaged to be married. He looked her
up, and sat a long time with her in her
home, offering his sympathy, and speaking
words of consolation. The act shows
the depth and breadth of his humanity.
At the Cañon Hotel the snow was very
deep, and had become so soft from the
warmth of the earth beneath, as well as
from the sun above, that we could only
reach the brink of the Cañon on skis.
The President and Major Pitcher had
used skis before, but I had not, and,
starting out without the customary pole,
I soon came to grief. The snow gave way
beneath me, and I was soon in an awkward
predicament. The more I struggled,
the lower my head and shoulders went,
till only my heels, strapped to those long
timbers, protruded above the snow. To
reverse my position was impossible till
some one came and reached me the end
of a pole, and pulled me upright. But I
very soon got the hang of the things, and
the President and I quickly left the superintendent
behind. I think I could have
passed the President, but my manners
forbade. He was heavier than I was, and
broke in more. When one of his feet
would go down half a yard or more, I
noted with admiration the skilled diplomacy
he displayed in extricating it. The
tendency of my skis was all the time to
diverge, and each to go off at an acute
angle to my main course, and I had constantly
to be on the alert to check this
tendency.
Paths had been shoveled for us along
the brink of the Cañon, so that we got
the usual views from the different points.
The Cañon was nearly free from snow,
and was a grand spectacle, by far the
grandest to be seen in the Park. The
President told us that once, when pressed
for meat, while returning through here
from one of his hunting trips, he had
made his way down to the river that we
saw rushing along beneath us, and had
caught some trout for dinner. Necessity
alone could induce him to fish.
Across the head of the Falls there was
a bridge of snow and ice, upon which we
were told that the coyotes passed. As the
season progressed, there would come a
day when the bridge would not be safe.
It would be interesting to know if the
coyotes knew when this time arrived.
The only live thing we saw in the
Cañon was an osprey perched upon a
rock opposite us.
THE PRESIDENT ON A TRAIL
From stereograph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
Near the falls of the Yellowstone, as at
other places we had visited, a squad of
soldiers had their winter quarters. The
President called on them, as he had called
upon the others, looked over the books
they had to read, examined their housekeeping
arrangements, and conversed
freely with them.
In front of the hotel were some low hills
separated by gentle valleys. At the President's
suggestion, he and I raced on our
skis down those inclines. We had only to
stand up straight, and let gravity do the
rest. As we were going swiftly down
the side of one of the hills, I saw out of
the corner of my eye the President taking
a header into the snow. The snow had
given way beneath him, and nothing
could save him from taking the plunge.
I don't know whether I called out, or
only thought, something about the downfall
of the administration. At any rate,
the administration was down, and pretty
well buried, but it was quickly on its feet
again, shaking off the snow with a boy's
laughter. I kept straight on, and very
soon the laugh was on me, for the treacherous
snow sank beneath me, and I took
a header, too.
"Who is laughing now, Oom John?"
called out the President.
The spirit of the boy was in the air
that day about the Cañon of the Yellowstone,
and the biggest boy of us all was
President Roosevelt.
The snow was getting so soft in the
middle of the day that our return to the
Mammoth Hot Springs could no longer
be delayed. Accordingly, we were up in
the morning, and ready to start on the
home journey, a distance of twenty miles,
by four o'clock. The snow bore up the
horses well till mid-forenoon, when it
began to give way beneath them. But
by very careful management we pulled
through without serious delay, and were
back again at the house of Major Pitcher
in time for luncheon, being the only outsiders
who had ever made the tour of the
Park so early in the season.
A few days later I bade good-by to the
President, who went on his way to California,
while I made a loop of travel to
Spokane, and around through Idaho and
Montana, and had glimpses of the great,
optimistic, sunshiny West that I shall not
soon forget.
CAMPING &
THE PRESIDENT ON GLACIER POINT, YOSEMITE VALLEY
