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H 32X 1 2 3 !' 1 2 3 4 5 6 J^Wt THE NEW NORTH-WEST. FIRST paper: the DAKOTA WHEAT REGION, THE BAD LANDS, AND THE YELLOWSTONE COUNTRY. ^ The Red River of the North is the frontier of what is commonly called the New North- west. It separates the State of Minnesota from the Territory of Dakota. A queer, dis- appointing, contradictory stream it is, making off due northward when all its neighbors run south, finding an outlet in distant and frigid Lake Winnipeg, and in a highly unpatriotic fashion draining off the waters of one of the richest sections of Uncle Sam's farm into the dominions of the Queen. It is disappointing, because you expect from its imposing name and the great figure it cuts upon the map to find a stream of size and dignity, and dis- cover when you cross it on the railroad bridge between Morehead and Fargo nothing but a dirty, narrow diich, across which a small boy can pitch a stone. It looks more like a canal than a river, and is so narrow that coves are dug in the banks for the little steamboats to turn around in. Yet this sluggish drain carries off the surplus rainfall of a vast, rich plain, forty miles wide and nearly two hundred long, and has an uncomfoitable way in the spring sea- son of rising up to the top of its high banks in a few hours and spreading over the flat country. One day last April it rose thirty- eight feet in a single day and night, submerg- ing the farms and villages. The people do not seem to mind these inundations much, however. There is scarcely any current in the widened stream, and if it lifts a settler's cabin off the ground it sets it down again not far from the original location, and no great harm is done. With the cheerful philosophy of all pioneers the inhabitants of the va'ley call the river the " Nile of America," and try to convince the new-comer, and themselves too, no doubt, that the overflows are good for the land, while deploring that they are due to the northward course of the river, which breaks up first on its upper waters and is dammed below by the ice in Manitoba. The two smart towns of Fargo and More- head look at each other across the muddy Red River ditch with jealous eyes. They will not bridge the stream, because each is afraid the other would profit by a convenient cross- ing. Vehicles ferry over on a rude flat-boat, worked by hand-power applied to a rope stretched from bank to bank, and pedestrians are beholden to the railroad company for the 11^ use of its bridge. Morehead, the Minnesota town, has three thousand inhabitants ; Fargo, the Dakota town, boasts of six thousand, and styles itself the Red River metropolis. Both welter in a sea of black mud in the season of thaws and rains ; both are largely devoted to speculation in lots and lands, and both aie equally unattractive to the eye. They are in reality a single town, commercially speaking, and a remarkably prosperous one too. The railroad system has made, them the business center and distributing-point for the entire Red River Valley, and out of their present jumble of muddy streets, cheap-pine cot- tages and shanties, vacant lots, saloons, stores, and lumber-piles, will grow up a handsome city of fifty thousand inhabitants within the present generation. Already there is a hand- some hotel, rejoicing in the architecti'ral oddities of the Queen Anne craze, a street railway, an electric light company, water- works, half a dozen banks, a daily newspaper, a number of creditable churches and school buildings, and a few pretty dwellings. Real estate speculation runs wild. Visions of a second change have turned the heads of the inhabitants. The talk is all about lots and val- ues — how much this or that comer is worth, what Jones paid for his strip of mud, or what Smith holds his at. The real-estate agents have their offices in the hotels, in order to watch the arrival of guests and seize upon the supposed capitalist seeking investments, or the immigrant looking for a farm. No well- dressed stranger need wait long for the offer of a free ride about the future city and a valuable guide to explain the many choice openings waiting for him and his money. The spirit of all these far western towns seems essentially sordid. One wearies of the never-ending talk of speculation and schemes for money-getting, but on further acquaint- ance with these eager, pushing pioneers, eacii with his exaggerated estimates of his own particular town, he finds that they have as much heart and generosity as the people of old communities, and a great deal more public spirit. Much of their boasting of lucky in- vestments and the rapid growth of values is not altogether in their own selfish interest. They are on the skirmish line of civilization, and they feel bound to make a noise to attract * * (3-^~ (. THE NEW NORTH-WEST. ta the attention of the main army and induce it to move up to them. The Red River Valley is an enormous de- gosit of rich black loam, almc3t perfectly level, ounded on the east by the lake-dotted for- est region of Northern Minnesota, and on the west by a rolling prairie belt, but of almost equal fertility. There is no waste land save in little depressions which collect surface drainage and are called "slews" (sloughs) in the local par- lance. There is a scattered belt of settlement in the valley extending back about ten miles on both sides of the river clear down to Winnipeg, and from east to west across the valley the land is cultivated for about the same distance on each side of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railroad runs a line down the eastern side of the valley to Winnipeg, and has a second line on the western bank to Grand Forks, the chief town between Fargo and Pembina. The same company is project- ing or building two or three other branch lines in the valley, and the Northern Pacific has thrown a branch northward from Casselton, a litde to^yn twenty miles west of Fargo, which is working toward south-western Manitoba , it is also building a diagonal line from Fargo southwest to the valley of the James. The competition of railroad lines for the traffic of the Red River country is the best evidence of its great productiveness. Nowhere else in the United States, unless it be in the distant and little known valleys of Eastern Oregon and Washington Territory, are such large crops of wheat raised with such small expense and such certainty of success year after year. The grain is sown late in the spring, as soon as the hot suns of the northern latitude have dried the soaked lands, and grows with mar- velous rapidity. By August it is fully mature and ready for reaping. All the farm-work is done by machinery. 'Fhe plowman rides upon a sulky-plow; the grain is sown with a drill or a broad-caster • the reaping-machines bind the sheaves as they move over the ground, and the threshers do their work in the fields driven by portable steam-engines that bum the straw for fuel. The grain is hauled at once to elevators at the nearest railway sta- tion, and then the whole farm ecjuipment of apparatus is left standing in the fields until need"d the next year. Except on the big "bonanza farms," owned and operated by capitalists, it is rare to find any sheds for im- plements, or, indeed, any farm-buildings Pdve a little bare box of a dwelling, and a rude stable of boards, sod and straw, to shelter the horses from the winter blizzards. The red barns of the bonanza farms make a great show upon the wild, vacant prairie, but they arvi42 are not much larger than thrifty Pennsylvania farmers, who till a hundred acres, build to house their crops and stock. It is within bounds to say that, taking one year with another, a profit of ten dollars an acre is made on the Red River wheat-lands, after paying all expenses of seed, cultivation, and marketing. The great merit of this mag- nificent grain-field does not lie wholly in its richness, however. Its structure is peculiarly favorable for the transportation of its product to the seaboard. Two hundred and fifty miles of rail transit brings the Red River wheat to Duluth at the head of Lake Supe- rior, from whence there is water-carriage all the way to New York harbor. Dakota seems to have been fitted by nature for a vast, permanent wheat-field. The conditions of climate and soil exist for producing the best grade of wheat and the largest average crops harvested for a succession of years in the United States, except, perhaps, Washington Territory. From Fargo to Bismarck by rail is a day's journey, the distance being one hundred and ninety-seven miles, and the road running almost as straight as the crow flies. For about forty miles the country is flat, and the landscapes seen from the car-windows would be tame were it not for the vast sweep of vision, which produces upon the mind something of the ex- hilarating effect of the view from the deck of a ship at sea. All objects on the horizon, the homesteader's shanty, the straw sta^k, or the plowmen at work with their teams, stand out sharply against the sky and sxm magnified to more than twice their real size. Here are no trees save the belts o' alders and cotton- woods that fringe the Cheyenne and the Maple rivers, two pretty streams that wander here and there over the plain ?s if in doubt where to go, and finally, after (\^,v 'ing again and again in their tracks, manage to find the Red River. They serve but scantily the pur- pose of drainage, however, for when I traversed Dakota in early May (1882), many square miles of land near their banks were submerged by the spring rains and thousands of acres of wheat-fields were converted into lakes and ponds. The farmer suffiers small detr. nent from these inundations, however, for the sun and wind working together rarely fail to dry the ground in time for plowing. Casselton, twenty milos west of Fargo, is a smart little market town of perhaps one thousand inhabitants. Beyond, the country gradually changes from flat to rolling prairie, and is much more agreeable to the eye. A little hamlet, living upon buying wheat and selling goods, is found every ten or fifteen miles. Each aspires to be a city, and each B. .\ Each aspires to be a city. So6 THE NEW north-west. ridicules the pretensions of its neighbors un- mercifully. Tower City boasts of its artesian well and of its prohibition ordinance, which keeps out the saloon, that curse of frontier towns. It has a weekly newspaper. So has Valley City, which got down too close to a stream and was flooded in the May freshet. The Tower City editor taunted his confrere of the neighboring town with being forced to " paddle to his grub-counter in a wagon-box." Whereupon the Valley City editor remarked in his next issue that it was true that his place was not zs " dry " as Tower City, and he hoped it never would be. Both these ac- tive, ambitious litde setdements are surpassed in population by Jamestown, which has a pretty situation on a high shale shelf in a bend of the James or Dakota river, in an amphi- theatre formed by a sweep of bold green bluffs that look like the glacis of some immense for- tification. The place used to be called Jim- town, but has quite outgrown the nickname. It has perhaps fifteen hundred inhabitants, and already supports a daily paper. In older communities, a town of ten thousand with a thickly populated country tributary to it will barely sustain a little daily, but in the far West the daily appears abouc as soon as the <:hurch-steeple. How these sheets live is a mystery to journalists. They are probably sustained b^ merchants and real-estate owners as an appliance for " booming " a town. To " boom " a town in Dakota is an art requiring a little gioney, a good deal of printers' ink, and no end of push and cheek. Dropping the quotation-marks, for the word in its various forms is one of the most common in north- western phraseology and answers equally well for a noun or a verb, the object of a boom is to attract setders, advance the price of real estate, and promote speculation. Fargo is said to be the best-boomed town in Dakota. As a specimen of skillful booming, here is a paragraph from the circular of a Fargo real- estate operator : " We have anything you want, and at any price. We can sell yoa a City or Country Home, and it you ever come near our oitice, we will do it. The preachers will look after your moral and spiritual welfare and we will take care of your temporal aftairs ; and if you come our way, it shall never be said, when a final settlement is had, that you were like one of the foolish virgins of old who wrapped her talent in a napkin and sunk it in a well, f .See New Version. ) On the contrary, your record shall be that of the good husbandman, who put his wheat in good, rich Red River valley soil, ana it produced a ( aousand fold, and it came to pass that he, who had nothing, had more ducats than he knew what to do with." Another real-estate dealer bursts into rhyme in the heading of his announcements in this fashion : " No Other Land, No Other Clime On Top of God's Green Earth, Where Land is Free as Church Bells' Chime, Save the Land of Dakota Dirt. Here, For a Year of Honest Toil A Home You May Insure, And From the Black and I.,oamy Soil a Title In Fee Ma- ture. No Money I. ceded until the Day When the Earth Itself Provides ; Until You Raise a Crop, No Pay :— What Can You Ask Besides ? !' Perhaps the future American p ot the full name of the region. On the larger maps the term is " Plateau du Coteau du Missouri." Here we have a meaning and one that is not misleading. The region is a high plateau, about eighty miles broad, which skirts the Missouri River all the way around its great bend for a distance of about four hundred miles. From the James River the ascent to the highest point on the plateau crossed by the railroad is about five hundred feet, and the average elevation of the plateau above the sea-level is about one thousand eight hundred and fifty feet. This elevation is by no means too great for successful agriculture, and the question of the value of a belt of coun- try embracing over thirty thousand square miles will soon become one of iiiiportance. I doubt whether there are now five hundred persons living upon the whole of this great territory. The broad band of settlement push- ing across Dakota along both sides of the Northern Pacific Railroad has already reached its eastern slope, however, and a few adven- turous settlers, discovering that the soil on the Coteaus is just as good as on the rolling prairie below, have opened farms this season, encouraged by the success last year of three " bonanza wheat-farms," the Troy, the Steele, So8 THE NEW NORTH-WEST. and t!je Clark, at each of which nearly two thousand acres are under cultivation. If the surface of the Red River Valley re- minds one of a sea in a dead calm, that of the Coteaus invites the simile of a sea lashed by a ctorm with gig[antic waves, and changed in an instant by a miracle to solid turf-covered earth. Nothing less noble than water swept by strong winds can convey an idea of the myriad different outlines of these billowy hills. Even the foam on the crests of the waves is imitated by the masses of loose bowlders on the crests and summits of the ridges and peaks. On the slopes and in the little valleys the land is all a good brown loam, about eighteen inches deep, resting upon a dry sub- soil. Only the heights are barren, and they arc valuable to the settler for the stones caught by them from the glaciers in the great ice period. The whole Coteau belt is desti- tute of trees and of running streams. All the drainage runs into little ponds in the hollows. Good water is found by sinking wells, how- ever, and many of the ponds do not dry up in summer. For wheat and oats the region is only second in its productive capacity to the Red River Valley, and for stock-raising it is much better, because the animals can find shelter from the blizzards in the valleys. It is much surpassed as a range by the bad lands west of the Missouri and the valleys of Mon- tana, of which I shall speak farther on. Traveling westward on the railway, you notice toward evening that all the grades tend downward, and about six o'clock you emerge from the Coteaus and see in the dis- tance the broad brown flood of the Missouri, bordered by the usual fringe of cotton-wood trees that marks the course of all large streams in the far West. On a shelf above the bottom-lands sits Bismarck, a blotch of black streets and mean little buildings on the green face of the landscape. Nearer acquaintance with the town does not give a much better impression than is made by the first view from the car-windows. It is called on the circulars of the real-estate agents the " Banner City " and the » Bride of Fortune," but it has little to show the tourist, save the glorious views from its hills. It is a prosperous place, how- ever, decent and orderly as frontier towns go, and can boast of a good hotel, a pretty little Episcopal church, a free reading-room, and a Chamber of Commerce. It may, have 2,500 inhabitants, living upon the railroad, the Gov- ernment, and the trade of the upper Missouri, which employs a dozen steamboats. Only lately has anybody thought of farming, although the place is six years old. In the first stage of the growth of a frontier town, the inhabitants all try to live by speculation, or whisky-selling, or oflice-holding, or selling goods at exorbitant prices, or, if by hard work, it must be some kind that has a spice of adventure in it. A man will crawl a mile in the snow with the mercury at 20° below zero to kill a buffalo, but he will not plow & field or dig a cellar. He will drive a mule- team across the plains, in storm and dust, sleep on the ground, and eat hard-tack and jerked buffalo-meat, or he will carry tlie mail over bleak snow- wastes in the dead of winter, but no wages will tempt him to hoe [lotatoes. Later comes the period of substantial growth, when the drift-wood of gamblers, liquor-sellers, and desperndoes seeks a farther frontier, and the farmers and mechanics come in. Bismarck is just entering on this second stage of prog- ress. The fertility of. the Coteau lands back of it is its best dependence for the future. There are no valley lands proper along the Missouri, save the bottoms, which are subject to overflow. On one side or the other the high, grassy bluffs come close to the water's edge, and opposite, beyond the line of cotton- woods, is always a stretch of from half a mile to two miles of flat, rich bottom, valuable chiefly for the natural nay crop. Bismarck has a " boomer." He is hired by the Chamber of Commerce, at a good salary, to ride upon the trains east of Fargo and talk to emigr.;nts about the advantages of settling near the Banner City. In a word, he is a drummer for his town. When I was there he had not started upon his mission, and I found him plowing a field for oats on the only farm within sight of the town. He war a mem- ber of the Territorial Legislature, he said, and he demonstrated his capacity for the business of booming by fifteen minutes of inteUigent conversation on the capacity of the soil of Burleigh County and its attractions to people who by the plow would thrive. He was evi- dently what they call in Dakota a "rustler." To say that a man is a rustler is the highest indorsement a Dakotan can give. It means that he is pushing, energetic, smart, and suc- cessful. The word and its derivatives have rany shades of meaning. To rustle around is to bestir one's self in a business way. " What are you going to do in Mandan ? " asked one man of another in a Bismarck saloon. '• Oh, I'll rustle around and pick up something," which meant that he would look about for a good business opening. •* Rustle the things off that table," means clear the table in a hurry. To do a rustling business is to carry on an active trade. The word was coined by the Montana herdsmen to describe the action of cattle brushing the snow from the roots of the bunch-grass with their noses. The mode of settlement and farming on the 7 HE NEW NORTH-WEST. S09 plains of Dakota is by no means the best to promote comfortable living or to develop a high type of character. It is the American system of isolated farm-houses. Drearily iso- lated, indeed, are the little, bare dwellings that dot the wild prairies and rolling plateaux. Only in the summer season can the farmers move about to see each other or to visit the vil- lages with any pleasure, and then they are too busy with their crops to leave home. The frost in the spring and the fall rains make the roads rivers of black wax, and in the winter there is the danger of the blizzard. How much more agreeable life would be for them if they bor- rowed the custom of the peasantry of Con- tinental Europe and built their dwellings in groups, forming little hamlets at intervals of three or four miles, each with its church and school! Two obstacles stand in tb^ way of tliis evident improvement : the habit of American farmers to live upon the tracts they cultivate, and the United States homestead and pre "nption laws, which require actual residence upon the particular quarter-section claimed. Perhaps in course of time, after the Dakota settlers have obtained their titles from the Government, the manifest advantages of coining together in groups of families for social pleasures and for the protection of their homes by barriers of trees against the fierce winds, will lead them to adopt the village mode of life, copying from the Swiss rural communes the system of owning a pasture range and timber tract in common. The farm industry of the region being almost exclusively the raising of wheat, is peculiarly adapted for village farming. The farmer has no need to live in the midst of his grain-field, and as he threshes his crop where he harvests it, and usually hauls the grain to the railroad at once, he requires no barns or granaries. The village could build a granary for the use of all its inhabitants, and thus the wheat could be held to await favorable changes in the market. The care of cattle would be a lighter labor, for a common inclosure would answer for all the stock of the community ; or if there were open country for herding, a single herdsman could look after the animals and protect the growing gram. At Bismarck the Missouri is crossed on a transfer steamer, which does temporary duty in place of the great bridge now building, and ferries the cars over to the new town of Man- dan just struggling into existence, and having noj^hing to boast of as yet save a commodious brick hotel. The Heart River empties into the " Big Muddy " at this point, and up its narrow valley and the narrow valley of its tributaries the Sweet Brier, the Curlew and the Green, one travels for half a day seeing nothing but the green walls of steep hills and greener floor of the level bottom-land through which the streams creep slowly along, twist- ing and curving, and often turning back as if loth to reach the end of their courses. The country is absolutely uninhabited save by the section hands and station-masters along the railroad and the laborers at its coal-mines. In the cuttings along the track one can see that the soil in the valley is a good, strong loam, and the grassy hills proclaim for them- selves their value for pasturage. In a few years this region, forming a triangle between the Missouri and the Little Missouri, will doubtless be settled by people who will own wheat and vegetable farms m the valleys and cattle-ranges on the hills. After dinner, in the embryonic town of Dickinson, on Green River — a hotel and three houses — you have time to smoke a cigar or two before the train climbs a sharp grade, runs through a deep cut, and rushes down into the Bad Lands of the Little Missouri. The change in the scene is so startling, and the appearance of the landscape so wholly novel and so singularly grotesque, that you rub your eyes to make sure that you are not dreaming of some ancient geologic epoch, when the rude, unfinished earth was the sport of Titanic forces, or fancying yourself trans- ported to another planet. Enormous masses of conglomerate — red, griy, black, brown, and blue, in towers, pyramids, peaks, ridges, domes, castellated heights — occupy the face of the country. In the spaces between are grassy, lawn-like expanses, dotted with the petrified stumps of huge trees. The finest efiect of color is produced by the dark red rock — not rock in fact, but actual terra-cotta, baked by the heat of underlymg layers of ligiiire. At some points the coa) is still on fire, and the process of transforming mountains of blue clay into mountains of potteiy may be observed from day to day. It has been going on for count- less ages, no doubt. To bake one of these colossal masses n.ay have required ten thou- sand years of smoldering heat. I despair of giving any adequate idea of the fantastic forms of the buttes or of the wonderful effects of color they offer. The pen and brush of a skillful artist would alone be competent for the task. The photographer, be he never so deft with his camera and chemicals, only be- littles these marvelous views. He catches only bare outlines, without color, and color is the chief thing in the picture. He cannot get the true effect of distance, and his negatives show only staring blacks and whites m place of the infinite variations of light and shadow effects in valleys and gorges and hollows, and upon crags and pinnacles. Look, if you can, by Sio THE NEW NORTH-WEST, the feeble aid of written words upon a single butte, and see how impossible it is to photo- graph it satisfactorily. It rises from a carpet of green grass. Its base has a bluish hue, and appears to be clay solidiiied by enormous pressure. It is girdled by bands of light gray stone and black lignite coal. Its upper por- tion is of the rich red color of old Egyptian pottery. Crumbled fragments strew its sides. Its summit, rising three hundred feet above the plain, has been carved by the elements into turrets, battlements, sharp spires, gro- tesque gargoyles, and huge projecting buttresses — an amazing jumble of weird architectural effects, that startle the eye with suggestions of intelligent design. Above, the sky is wonder- fully clear and blue, the rays of the setting sun spread a rosy tint over the crest, and just above its highest tower floats a little, flame- colored cloud like a banner. When I say there are thousands of these buttes, and that you ride on a fast train for more than an hour in the midst of them, the reader will per- ceive that the Bad Lands of the Little Mis- souri is a region of extraordinary interest to the tourist and artist. By another year there will no doubt be a summer hotel in Pyramid Park, as the section lying near the railroad is called. This summer visitors will have to take their own camp equipage. The term Bad Lands does not apply to the ([uality of the soil. The Indian name was accurately ren- dered by the early French voyageurs as Mauvaises Terres pour traverser — bad lands to cross. The ground between the buttes is fertile, and the whole region is an excellent cattle-range, the rock formations affording the best possible winter protection. Cattle come out of the Bad Lands in the spring as fat as though they had been stall-fed all winter. Beyond these Mauvaises Terres is a stretch of fine prairie country so inviting in its ap- pearance that it seems to say : " Come, plow, sow, and reap these broad, fertile, sunny acres." Toward evening the Yellowstone Valley bursts into view. The train has run two hundred and nineteen miles nearly due weit from the Missouri River, and has reached Glendive, an ambitious little town of a year's growth, that has been overmuch boomed. The visitor is disappointed at its size, and, after a night spent m an execrable inn, is apt to go away with a grudge against the place. Nevertheless, Glendive has good prospects. Across the country is all rich, arable prairie, clear through to the Missouri, and the Yellowstone Valley is fertile and virgin soil down to its mouth, and for three hundred and fifty miles above Glendive. At least a hundred mile of the Valley will be tributary to Glen- dive, besides the prairie regions north and east of it. Travelers new to frontier life laugh at these droll and dirty congeries of shanties and " shacks," which make a figure as cities upon the railroad maps, forgetting that all the great towns of the older west have gone through the same primary stage of growth. They, too, wallowed in mud and were redolent of bad whisky. The dance-house, gambling-den, and vile variety show, were once the most con- spicuous features of Omaha and Kansas City, as they are now of raw Montana settlements. About three hours is consumed in running from Glendive up the valley to Miles City. Instead of the terra-cotta buttes, the hiUs that thrust their shoulders into the water on one side or the other of the streiim are of streaky clay, and melt under a rain like so many cakes of soap. Nature seems to have formed them in the rough and forgotten to harden them. Back of these mud buttes (everything in the way of hill, rock, mountain, or clay-heap is called a butte in Montana) are immense stretches of grazing country, and in the narrow valley, usually from two to three miles wide, the bottom-lands lit in such excellent form for tillage, that one often for- gets that he is in a country redeemed from the Sioux only five years ago, and involunta- rily* looks for neat farm-houses and church- spires in landscapes so pleasing to the eye and so civilized in appearance, if the word can be applied to a country almost destitute of popu- lation. The Yellowstone Valley has been settled, where it is settled at all, from the West, and its lower half has only just begun to attract emigrants. Miles City was a good trading town before the railroad reached it, and is prospering in a steady way without any booming. It may have 2,000 inhabitants, a large proportion of whom seem to spend their leisure hours in the gaming-saloons, which are open day and night the week through. Saloons and stores also are open on Sunday. There were no church services in the place when I visited it in May, but a church building was almost finished, and there was a hopeful prospect of getting a settled minister from St. Paul. An itinerant had arrived on his way farther west, and services were held one Sunday in a car- penter's shop. In one comer was a pile of six coffins ; in another a dog enjoyed a rest- less sleep on a pile of shavings. The audience, consisting of fifteen persons, sat on boards supported by saw-horses. At the same hour there were probably more than three hundred men congregated in the bar-rooms and gambling-hells. With all the open and shameless dissipation, good order prevails, as a rule, in Miles City. There are few drunken brawls. A man is THE NEW NORTH-WEST. 5" killed now and then, but as a scuffle or a blow means a speedy resort to revolvers, the rudest characters are singularly circumspect in their behavior. I have seen the Texan frontier, and I find the north-western fron- tier much more orderly. There is as much drinking and gaming, and more vice of another sort, but much less rioting and shoot- ing. In place of the cow-boy we find the buffalo-hunter, who comes into the town in the spring with the spoils of his winter's work, and lives merrily, after his fashion, so long as the money lasts. But, though as rude a bar- barian in appearance as any wearing a white skin, he is rarely a boaster or a quarreler. His calling exposes him to great danger and severe hardship. Often he crawls for half an hour in the snow, with the mercury at 30° below zero, to get the wind of a herd and approach near enough to kill. He must have courage, presence of mind, and a sure aim, to escape the charge of a wounded bull. Usually he is grave and reticent. In his hideous, greasy garb he will sit for hours at the gaming- table playing faro or stud -poker, without moving a muscle of his face at either gains or losses. Around Miles City, in the valleys of the Yellowstone and the Tongue, which there joins the larger stream, successful fanning has been earned on for five years, without irrigation. The current notion in the East that the arid belt of Western Texas, Colo- rado, and Wyoming extends as far north as the Yellowstone is, I am convinced, a mis- take. Large crops of wheat, oats, and pota- toes are raised year after year at a hundred scattered ranches between Coulson and Miles City, and in the tributary valleys west of Coulson the rainfall is not always sufficient. For over three hundred miles the bottom- lands receive ample moisture for general farm- ing, heavy showers falling as late as the middle of June. Farming in these valleys seems as pleasant and profitable as in any section of the United States. Sixty bushels of oats, thirty of wheat, and two or three hun- dred of potatoes, are raised to the acre on the smooth, sloping valley lands, and the hill country is all open as a stock-range. At the rate homesteading is progressing this summer, in five or six years the whole Yellowstone country will be well settled with prosperous farmers. The scenery in the Valley is unique and striking, because of the sharp contrast be- tween the smooth, grassy expanse of the bottoms, fringed on the water's edge with cot- ton-wood and dotted here and there with clumps of the same timber, resembling old New- England orchards, and the rugged, sav- age wall of the line of buttes that bounds the horizon. Sometimes there is a mantle of green on the heads of the buttes; often they are bare, and carved by the elements into an infinite variety of shapes. The rock is a sandstone of a gray color, which some- times varies to sage-green or an indurated clay of a bluish-black hue, frequently banded with broad belts of li^ite. The bottom-lands occur now on one side of the river, now on the other, rarely on both, and slope up genUy to the cliffs, at the foot of which there are often living springs. 'I'he tawny river winds about, spreading out in broad pools or cop tracting into swift, nanow and angry rapids, very much in the fashion of its bigger brother, the Missouri. It is only navigable for two or three months of the year. Shacks arc the common dwellings of the Valley. A shack is a one-story house built of cotton-wood logs, driven in the ground like piles, or laid one upon another. The roof IS of sticks and twigs covered with dirt, and if there is no woman to insist on tidiness the floor will be of pounded earth. Below the shack in social rank is the dug-out — a square cut in a bank, with a dirt roof and a door. In one of these kennels five or six men will frequently house. Above the shack is the shanty, a board dwelling containing one or two rooms. In the whole Valley outside of Glendive, Miles City, and Billings, and half a dozen smaller villages, there is no structure that deserves the name of house. I know of no equal extent of country in the United States so favored by nature in regard to soil and climate where the processes of civ- ilization can be observed in so rudimentary a stage of development. One can see the build- ing of a new State begun at the very bottom — in the mud. The chief tributaries of the Yellowstone— the Powder, the Tongue, the Rosebud, and the Big Horn — all run through fertile valleys resembling that of the longer stream in their geneiMl features, and the whole region favors in a striking degree a combination of the two industries of tillage and herding. Cattle sub- sist on the dried grasses, without shelter, all winter. Sheep-raising begins to attract attention. The winters are ccid and dry, and there is not much snow ; the springs are rainy, the summers hot, and the autumns delightful. Some mys- terious quality in the air has a champagne effect on the blood and brain. One thinks fast, moves fast, cannot keep still, awakens at four o'clock in the early northern dawn and cannot sleep again, and feels a delightful sense of exhilaration all the time. Do people wear out quick as a compensation for this vigor and elasticity ? The Territory has not been 5" THE NEW NORTH-WEST. settled long enough for an answer to be given to this question. One bright, warm day in mid- May, jour- neying westward with a good team of bays and a stout spring-wagon, we climbed up from the valley to a high plateau near the mouth of the Big Horn River and saw on the south- western horizon a sight that was welcomed with a spontaneous shout of enthusiastic delight. There were the mountains ! — snow- clad mountains, too — a hi^h ridge with bands and patches of white fleckmg their slopes, and one great dazzling fiekl of snow. They were the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming. Beyond them a sharp pyramid pierced the blue heavens — Clouds Peak, one hundred and fifty miles distant. Below us Ipy the smiling valley dotted with cosy, log-fam.houses, where we had just passed rclds of oats and men plant- ing potatoes in tlie dark, mellow loam. Yon- der the snow-peaks; here the farms. There is then a belt of habitable country fitted for agriculture extending all the way from the fruitful prairies of Dakota to the very base of the outer bulwark of the Rocky Mountain system. No break need exist between the Missouri and the mountains in the chain of settlements now fast being formed link by link. Even the worst of the Bad Lands are excellent for pasturage, and the whole of the Yellowstone Valley is admirably adapted to careful farming on a small or large scale. No irrigation is required as far west at least as the 109th meridian. The old theory still enter- tained to a considerable extent in Kansas and Nebraska, that fanning is unsafe west of the 1 00th meridian, does not apply to the valleys of the Yellowstone River sys- tem. I believe, however, it will be found to hold good as regards the hills and table- lands separating the valleys. The soil in the highlands is good, but the winds and hot June- sun dry up the moirture too soon for the crops to mature. The greater part of the sur- face of Eastern Montana will always be what it is now — a vast pasture; but the buffalo herds which now roam over it will in a few years give place to fat cattle. It is estimated that 250,000 buffaloes were slaughtered in the Yellowstone country last winter. There is no lack of excitement in travel in Montana, though game is scarce and the In- dians are quite harmless, unless they can catch a man alone and ofT his guard. The difficulties and the adventures of the road keep the mind on the alert. There are no bridges, and the only way to get over sloughs is to pull through. Sometimes a river must be crossed by swim- ming the horses and putting the wagon upon a crazy skiff. Soon after leaving the railway, which had brought our outfit eighty miles l)eyond Miles City, the Yellowstone had to be crossed. The boatmen were stout, daring fellows, but they took no risk on the property thpy transported. They loaded our wagon upon one skiff and trieil to tow it across with another; but the current was running at a tremendous rate in mid-stream, anil the heavily laden boat careened and spilled the wagon into the river. Here, it seemed, was a total shipwreck of all our plans for the journey. Nothing but the tongue of the vehicle re- mained in sight. But now the reserve forces of strength and skill of the two ferrymen came into play. They brought a long rope from their hut, rowed out and attached it to the tongue, and by a herculean tug drew the wagon ashore. Tnen they fished out seats, blankets, and valises — everything, in fact, but the harness, and that night there was a grand drying-bee in the log-huts of Krutzville. Next morning the horses were driven into the river with blows and shouts, as reluctant to enter the swift, muddy current as any sensible beast might well be. Twice they pulled the boat ashore by their halters. At last they got their knack of swimming, but getting loose from tl'.c skiff were carried down toward the rapids, struggling bravely for life, side by side, only their eyes and noses above the water. " They 're goners ! " shouted the group of frontiersmen on the bank. But suddenly they struck upon a shallow in mid-stream, and soon were caught by the boatmen and towed safe to the northern bank. The reader who sits in an easy-chair in a snug Eastern home, or perhaps the breezy veranda of some sea-side hotel, turning the pages of his favorite magazine, may think the i.->omentary peril to the lives of two horses a small matter ; but if upon those two had rested his hopes for compassing six hundred miles of mountain, plain, and valley, in the heart of the continent, he would have held his breath as we did, when they were battling with the Yellow River. For the worry and anxiety of the night and morning, however, there was compensation in the brisk drive up the valley and over the plateaux, the inspiring view of the mountains and the evening's repose in a railroad engineer's cabin on the Crow Indian Reservation. After supper, eaten with a keen appetite, stories of hunting adventures and Indians were told, the buffalo-robes and blankets were spread on the floor, and before the pine-logs had ceased to blaze in the great stone fire-place all were asleep. An owl kept up a dismal lament all night in a cotton-wood by the cabin-door, and a stray wolf came to the edge of the bluffs and set up a protest against the advance of civilization in a long, melancholy howl. E. V. Siiiaiiey. had to be t, daring jiroperty xr wagon ;ros9 with ling at a and the pilled the led, was a e journey, chicle rc- Tve forces ferrymen long rope Lched it to 5 drew the out seats, n fact, but :re was a Krutzville. ;n into the eluctant to ny sensible pulled the St they got tting loose toward the de by side, the water, group of Idenly they n, and soon towed safe r-chair in a the breezy uming the y think the vo horses a liad rested ed miles of e heart of his breath g with the anxiety of there was ) the valley ,ng view of epose in a row Indian :n with a adventures i-robes and and before in the g'-eat n owl kept otton-vood olf came to ip a protest in a long, Smalley. ■.,.« .'.« f^^. v "^ tf THE NEW NORTH-WEST. SECOND PAPER : ACROSS THE ROCKIES IN MONTANA. The old order of developing new regions in the West is reversed since the railroad tut began. Formerly the country was settled first, and the towns grew up to supply thr needs of the rural pojjulation. Now the f'-vus are created by speculators far in adva of the farming settlement ; and by the conven- ■inces they afford for selling crops, and buy- ing implements, lumber, and household sup plies, they attract farmers to their vicmity. Each new frontier town is an advertisement of the surrounding country, upon the settle- ment of which it must depend for its existence. The towns-folk aie untinng in their praises of the soil and climate, and if you believe them the next grade of human felicity to living in their raw little village is to live upon a farm in the neighborhood. Whatever happens in the way of disagreeable weather, they assure you it is good for the crops. If it snoivs in May or hails in June, they come up smiling, and remark blandly that it is just what the crops need. The creation of a new town on a line of railroad pushing its track out into the vacant, treeless spaces of the far West, is an interesting process to observe. A specula- tor, or a company of speculators, look over the ground carefully fifty or a hundred miles in advance of the temporary terminus of the rail- road, and hit upon a site which they think has special advantages, and is far enough away fix)m the last towr.. They make a treaty with the rail- road company for a section of land, agreeing, perhaps, to share the prospective profits on the sale of lots. Then they " scrip " the ad- joining sections of Government land, or tuke it up with desert land claims. A large amoc.jt of land scrip is afloat on the market issued in pursuance of Indian treaties. Agricultural College grants, old Military Bounty Land acts, and other peculiar features of our com- plicated Public Land System. The speculator with his pocket stocked with scrip is able to pick out any choice sections not occupied by homestead or preemption claimants. Having thus obtained a sufficient body of land to operate with, the founding of the new town is trumpeted in the newspapers, and in all the frontier region for hundreds of miles there is a stir of excitement about the coming city. Billings, on the Yellowstone, is a good exam- ple of a town made by this process. A few Vol- XXIV.— 67. months ago it had no existence save in the 'trains of its inventors. The bare i)iairie was ; aked out in streets, avenues, and parks, on \ scale for a city of twenty thousand inhab- itants. A map wns engraved, and within a tew weeks after the place got its name, the ' Billings boom" began to be talked of as far r.-'st as St. Paul. Billings lots were advertised in every town from St. Paul to Miles City, and whole blocks were sold in Chicago and New York. The purchasers, as a rule, knew no more abont the valley of the Yellowstone than about that of ihc Congo, and few of them could have i)ut their finger on a spot upon a map within a hundred miles of Billings. They heard there was a boom, and were eager to take their chances for profit or loss. It was enough for them to hear the place spoken of as the future metropolis of the Yellowstone Valley. Within sixty days from the time when Billings got a local habitation and a name, lots to the value of $220,000 were sold within its limits, and before thirty days more had elapsed the purchasers had advanced the imaginary value of their holdings from one hundred to three hundred per cent. Charles Dickens once said that the typi- cal American would hesitate about entering heaven, unless assured that he could go fur- ther West. Going West is still a potent phrase to stir the blood of the enterprising and ad- venturous, and the farther West you go the greater seems to be its power. The men who lead the advance of the army of civilization on the frontier skirmish line do not come from the rear. They are always the scouts and pickets. The people of the six-weeks-old town do not come from the East. As a rule they are from the one-year-old and two-year- old towns a litde further back. Most of the men I met in the Yellowstone country were from Eastern Dakota, or the Black Huis^ region, or from Western Minnesota. When asked why they left homes so recently made in a new country, their reply was invariably that they wanted to g>it further West. We came upon Billings one sunny day in May — dropped upon it, I might say ; for after a ten miles' drive across a high and windy plateau, the immense dazzling range of the Big Snowy Mountains looming up in front, the ground fell away abruptly and the town THE NEW NORTH-WEST. 771 ^^ ■L'-V ,1 I. lay at our feet in a broad, green valley. The yellow-pine houses, untouched by paint, glistened in the sunlight like gold. The val- ley, hemmed m by precipitous cliffs on the north, and by black, bare hills beyond the muddy river on the south, stretched away to the west to distant mountain slopes. Under the shadow of a huge sandstone butte lay the little hamlet of Coulson, now quite out of spirits because of the new town a mile further on. Old Coulson, it is called, though I be- lieve its age is only three years. It has made some money buying buffalo robes of the Crow Indians across the river, and selling shirting, groceries, and whisky to a few herds- men whose cattle graze in the Musselshell Ranges. Now it must abandon its score of " shacks " and shanties or move them up to Billings. The new town, when I visited it, consisted of perhaps fifty cheap structures scat- tered over a square mile of bottom-land, but the number may be increased tenfold by the time this article is printed. Many peo- ple were living in little A tents or in their canvas-covered wagons, waiting for lumber to arrive with which to build nouses. Sixty dollars a thousand was the price of a poor quality of green stuff brought from a mill twenty miles up the Yellowstone. All articles of food, except beef, were frightfully dear. Potatoes were eight cents a pound, flour six dollars a sack. I doubt if one in ten of the inhabitants could tell why he had come. The migrating impulse is the only way to account for the movement of merchants, mechanics, farmers, speculators, gamblers, liquor-sellers, Ereachers, and doctors to a point nearly one andred and fifty miles from anything that f^n be called a town — a point, too, in a re- gion inhabited only by Crow Indians and a ll'w scattered nerdsmen. At the signal that a town was to be created, all these people, of d'vers possessions and ambitions, moved for- ward and occupied the site as though they were soldiers marching at the word of com- mand. What a wonderful self-organizing thing is society ! How did the German baker from St. Paul, the milliner from Minneapolis, the Chinese laundryman from the Pacific slope, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the butcher, the beer-seller, the grocer, and all the other constituent parts of a complete community happen to feel the desire, at the same time, to go with their trades and wares to a remote spot in an unknown land ? Billings expects to be a trading center for the stock country between the Yellowstone and the Missouri, and for the Clark's Fork and Maginnis Mines. It is at the western end of a rich bottom about thirty miles long and from three to seven wide, all of which is to be turned into farms by an irrigating ditch. Good crops can be raised without irrigation three seasons out of four on land skirting the river, but the productiveness of the soil will be greatly increased, as well as all fear of droughts removed, by tapping the abundant water supply of the Yellowstone. Divided into small farms, and irrigated, the valley above Billings may, in a few years, be as fruitful in grain and vegetables as it is now attractive for its striking and beautiful scenery. The Upper Yellowstone Valley differs greatly in its character from the lower valley. The bottom on which Billings stands is the last ample stretch of tillable land as you go to- ward the mountains. Further up there is a succession of smaller bottoms closely hemmed in by the graceful contpur of steep hills, whose tops are sparsely covered with pines. Now and then there is a stone butte, but these monotonous sentinels of the lower stream grow more and more rare. The last one I remember as conspicuous for its form stands a few miles above the mouth of Clark's Fork. We named it Ehrenbreitstein from its resem- blance to the great fortress on the Rhine. A colony of farmers from near Ripon, Wiscon- sin, has settled hard by. As one progresses westward, following the course of the river, or striking across the grassy hill country to avoid its bends and bluffs, there are evidences of diminishing rainfall in the beds of streams (already dry in May), and in the dusty soil and the scantier herbage. Only along the great level, in the valley hugging the river do the ranchmen try to raise crops without irrigation. On the cattle ranches in the hills there is no tillage save where a living spring affords a little water for a garden. All the valley land is admirably situated for irrigation ; and the Yellowstone, fed by meltir.'r snows, has its highest stage in June and July, when its wa- ters are needed by the thirsty soil. What can be done for the thousands of square miles of rich land between the valleys of the streams in all this wild mountain country is a prob- lem which the future must solve. The soil is excellent for grain and vegetables, yet it can be used for nothing but cattle ranges unless artesian wells can be made to supply the lack of rainfall. For a day's journey west of Billings the magnificent range of the Snowy Mountains keens die traveler company. They loom up aheu.u in the clear air as if hardly ten miles away, though the distance to their near- est base is fifty miles. At the time of my journey their tops were thickly shrouded in snow, and on their sides only here and there a streak of rock was to be seen. There are few Alpine prospects that surpass for grand- r 772 THE NEW NORTH-WEST. eur and beauty the view of this mighty range. From the heights skirting the valley another range can be seen to the southward — the Prior Mountains, a long, black, regular ridge, with a sheet of snow thrown over its top. The second day out from Billings, the Crazy Mountains, an isolated gioup, also of marked Alpine character, take the place of the Big Snowies on the western horizon. All thsse peaks and ridges are virgin to foot of man. Some day, perhaps, there will be cozy hotels at their feet ; and young men with alpenstocks in hand and with sun-blistered faces, anvi hob- nailed shoes, will come down from their sum- mits displaying in their hats, not the Edelweiss, — ^for this shy, fuzzy flower is nowhere found on our continent, — but the wild larkspur, the blue- bell and the golden wjld-pea blossoms which love lofty and sterile places. The wild flowers of Montana are as; abun dant as those of the Alps, and more varied. Choicest of them all, because most delicate and fragrant, is a white, star-shaped, wax-like blos- som which grows very close to the ground, and the large golden stamens of which give out an odor like mingled hyacinth and lily of the val- ley. The people call it the mountain-lily. There is another lily, however, and a real one- — yel- low with purple stamens — that grows on high slopes in shaded places. The yellow flower- ing currant abounds on the lower levels, and the streams are often bordered with thickets of wild-rose bushes. Dandelions abound, but do not open in full, rounded perfection. The common blue larkspur, however, is as well developed as in our eastern gardens, and the little yellow violet which in the States haunts the woods and copses is at home in Montana, alike in the moist valleys and upon the bleak dry hill-sides. Small sunflowers are plentiful, the bluebell is equally abundant in valleys and on mountain ridges, and in early June there blooms a unique flower called the shooting sta', shaped like a shutdecock. There are a dozen other pretty flowers, but I could not learn their names — among them a low-growing mass the clumps of which are starred over with delicate white or purple blooms. It was a surprise to find the Upper Yellow- stone Valley already well settled. In the hundred miles before the road to Bozeman leaves the river and climbs the divide of the Belt Mountains one is rarely out of sight of a ranch. The settlers came in from the west during the last two years, anticipating the building of the railroad. They have al- ready done a good deal of fencing with pine saplings, and their litde dirt-roofed log "shacks" are snug and warm, if not roomy. A log stable and a corral for stock complete the array of farm buildings. A little land is culti- vated close to the river, and there is unlimited range for stock upon the hills. The people are intelligent and hospitable, but very rude in their ways of living. Some have drifted all the way from California or Oregon, establish- ing .inches in one valley after another and selling them to go to a farther frontier. They will soon meet the tide of settlement moving up the Yellowstone from the east. There is only a gap of about three hundred miles to be closed ; and that is by no means a vacant space, for in it are the little towns of Miles City, Junction City, Huntley, Coulson, and Billings. A serious obstacle to the thorough setde- ment of this region is the Crow Indian Res- ervation, which stretches alcng the south side of the river for oVer two hundred miles, and has an average width of about seventy- five miles. Its area cannot be much less than that of Massachusetts, and it probably contains as much land valuable for the vses of man as tha'. State. Upon this magnificent domain live about three thousand Indiai.s. I do not know what the statistics of the Interior Department may be upon which rations and blanke's are issued, but set- tlers living near the reservation place the population, including the " squaw-men " and half-breeds, at from two thousand five hundred to three thousand. A squaw-man, by the way, is a white man who has an Indian wife and lives with a tribe. The Crows make no use of their land save to hunt over it. In winter they cluster around the agency and subsist on Government beef and flour, killing a few buflaloes for their hides, which they sell, and in summer they roam across the country. They own forty thousand ponies. They are rarely seen in the valley of late, having been scared away by stories of small- pox in the camps of the graders on the rail- road line. Some of the shrewder chiefs begin to recognize the inevitable, and say that their people must soon learn to farm and give up their hunting grounds. The Crows have long been friends of the whites, but they are a thievish, begging race, and far below their old enemies, the Sioux, in intelligence, handicraft, and fighting qualities. On their buffalo robes they picture their warriors as chasing, killing, and scalping the Sioux, but they rarely fail to seek the protection of the nearest military post when the Sioux hunting jjonies come within a hundred miles of them. In the North-western country, the Indians have of late seldom committed any more serious crime than running off" stock ; but solitary travelers still find it prudent to make a display of a magazine rifle, and to keep a ndisculti- unlimited he people very rude drifted all , establish- lother and ;ier. They nt moving There is d miles to s a vacant s of Miles ilson, and iigh settle- idian Res- the south dred miles, at seventy- much less t probably )r the uses nagnificent d Indians, ics of the jon which , but set- place the ■men " and isand five quaw-man, ho has an The Crows hunt over the agency and flour, ides, which across the nd ponies. ey of late, s of small- pn the rail- hiefs begin y that their ind give up rows have but they far below ntelligence. On their warriors as Sioux, but :tion of the )ux hunting es of them, he Indians any more stock ; but ;ni. to make 1 to keep a THE NEW NORTH-WEST. 773 sharp eye on any roving bands they may encounter. The Indian, whether he be Crow, Blackfoot, Flathead, or Sioux, finds it hard to resist the temptation of a good opportunity to secure a horse and a scalp at the same time. The Crows lately gave up the western end of their reservation — a strip about forty miles long by sixty wide, contaming the recently- discovered Clark's Fork gold and silver mines. This strip fronts on the Yellowstone, and con- tains some good bottom-land favorably sit- uated for irrigation. The bill ratifying the treaty for the cession was signed by the Pres- ident on the 1 2th of April. Weeks before, the north bank of the river was dotted at short intervals with the canvas-covered wagons of squatters from the older-settled valleys of Montana, each of whom had his eye on a section opposite, and was waiting for news of the signing of the bill to cross over and take possession. One morning a courier came over the pass from Bozeman with the word that the bill was signed and the land restored to the public domain. Immediately there was a forward movement all along the forty-mile line. It is said that by seven o'clock that evening there was not a single section of good bottom-land unoccupied. When I passed through the valley, six weeks later, most of the new settlers had their log- cabins already up, and had fenced a great deal of land. The eager enterprise shown in the instant occupancy of the retroceded portion of the Crow Reservation is an evi- dence that good land which can easily be irri- gated is not abundant, and has a special value in the eyes of Montana farmers. It is probably safe to say that west of the mouth of the Big Horn River the whole of the Yellowstone country, including the main val- ley and those of the tributary streams, is a region where only by irrigation can farming be successfully earned on, year after year. Narrow strips of land bordering a stream are here and there found moist enough to pro- duce oats and potatoes without irrigating; but no general culture of the region is possi- ble save where water can be brought upon the soil by artificial means. The whole of eastern Montana is a vast grazing region, creased with little winding valleys sunk two or three hundred feet below the general level, in ■ 'hich farming by means of irrigating ditches IS very profitable. Not one acre in one thou- sand, however, can ever be made to produce crops unless a system of artesian wells is found in the future to be practicable. The place of eastern Montana m the industrial economy of the Union is to raise beef and mutton. Her farmers will never do more Near the mouth Upper Yellowstone, old Crow cemetery, about twelve feet than to supply with grain and provisions the herdsmen of the hills and plateaus and the miners of the mountain gulches. With a home market at high prices always ready to take his products, the Montana farmer will always be more favorably situated than the farmer of Iowa, Kansas, and others ot the great agricultural States of the West whose crops must go to the distant eastern cities to find consumers. of Skull Creek, on the are the remains of an Upon a rude platform above the ground, lie one on another perhaps thirty bodies, wrap- ped in blankets and buffalo-robes. The bears have torn down a portion of the platform, and the ground is strewn with a horrible debris of bones, •^.kulls, fragments of gar- ments, and drea Iful, half-decayed, shape- less masses covered with vermin. Another platform on a high hill near by we did not care to visit, nor did we go down to the cot- ton-wood grove by the river to get a closer view of the dark objects hanging like gigantic fruit to the limbs. The Crow custom of placing their dead upon platforms, or of sus- pending them by leather thongs to the branches of trees, no doubt originated in the difficulty of burying bodies with the rude im- plements of their savage state, at a sufficient depth to protect them from the coyotes, those jackals of the plains. Some religious superstition has probably grown with time around a practice originally purely utilitarian. Hard by the broken platform with its disgust- ing burden stands the neat little log-cabin of a settler who has fenced in a claim, and counts upon comfort in the near future from his fertile acres and from his herd of catde on the range among the hills. Two pretty children were playing around the door. The mother was busy with the house-work, and the father stopped chopping wood to show us the peas and beets growing in his garden. Here was a striking contrast between the old ar''. new order of things in the far West. In sight of the moldering corpses of a dying race of sav- ages stood the homestead of the typical American pioneer — a hardy, intelligent man, delighting in the robust toil with which he was winning from the wilds a competency for his later years, and proud of his place as a private soldier in the advancing army of civ- ilization. Is it not better that such men, with their wives and children, should occupy the land, than that a few thousand painted sav- ages should roam over it in search of buffalo- skins and scalps ? I do not overlook the humanities of the Indian question, but I see no reason why a handful of people should keep 774 THE NEW NORTH-WEST. !i lili vast regions from settlement, should be exempt from toil, and dad and fed at the public ex- pense, merely because they have red skins. We followed the Yellowstone as far as the Great Bend, where to pursue its course further would have taken us southward through nar- row defiles and canons to the National Park. Thence we crossed the Belt Mountains to Bozeman in the Gallatin Valley. The river for the last two days of our journey was a cold-blue, rapid stream abounding m trout, and drawing its waters from springs and the laelting snows in the mountains. The scenery became more and more attractive as we ad- vanced, gigantic peaks, covered with snow, rising on either hand, and making, with their white summits and white-streaked sides, and the dark firs belting their lower slopes, a vivid contrast of color with the turf of the uplands, the vivid light green of the young cotton-woods and aspens, and the Rhme-like blue of the river. Among the mountain groups and ranges the most fascinating and the most de- cidedly Alpine in appearance is the isolated group of the Crazy Mountains lying north of Sie nver. It resembles somewhat the Shreck- hom and Wetterhom group near Griindel- wald in Switzerland. The Crazies send down no glaciers from their towering rocky sides, but the deep masses of snow which fill the de- pressions between the shoulders of the differ- ent peaks might easily be taken for such rivers of ice as push their way into the Swiss valleys. Skirting the base of the Crazies we were met by one of those sudden and severe storms of wind, rain, and hail so common in the Rocky Mountain regions. It swooped down upon us majestically from the Yellowstone Mountains, a snowy range bounding the valley at that point on the south, and it buffeted us for fifteen minutes with mad fury, and then sailed off to the east like a gigantic black bird. While we were struggling in the icy grasp of the tempest, we could see the white crags and pinnacles of the Crazies luminous in vivid sunlight against a sky of perfect azure. The spectacle seemed almost supernatural, so startling and wonderful was its beauty. It V, as like gazing on the gleaming walls of Para- dise from the midst of the storm and darkness of the vexed and toilsome life of earth. Animal life is not abundant in the Yellow- stone Valley, Buffaloes rarely cross the river now, but the whole country is strewn with their skulls and bones, and now and then one comes upon the remains of a bull killed by the Indians during the last winter hunting season. There are antelope back in the hills, and the enormous antlers of the elk, which adorn the gable of every ranchman's cabin, testify to the sport which may be found by striking back from the valley into the rugged mountain defiles. As to the common black- tail deer, they are still so plentiful that a few hours' tramp of a morning rarely fails to afford the hunter a good shot. The prairie dog still inhabits the whole valley, and you are not long out of sight of a village of these merry, chattering little creatures, who keep tune with their tails to their querulous notes, and pro- voke you by their impudence to try a shot with your revolver, but always dodge down into their holes in time to escape a bullet. Large herds ot cattle graze in the valleys of the Yellowstone and its tributaries, and in the hill country as far north as the Upper Missouri, wherever there are small streams or water holes. Now that the buffalo is fast disappearing, the region would afford pastur- age to at least ten times as many cattle as it supports at present. The stock men who oc- cupy it are generally careful, however, not to let this fact be known, as they naturally would like to keep the whole section for the future increase of their own herds. Cattle-raising in Montana is an exceedingly profitable business. One hears a great deal said in the Territory of the wealth of the " cattle-kings," and how they began their careers a few years ago with on! a few hundred dollars. The local esti- mate of the annual return from money in- vested in a herd of cattle is from thirty to fifty per cent. The life of a stockman is not, however, an idle and comfortable one, as often pictured in the newspaper accounts of the business. Unless he is nch enough to hire herdsmen he must look after his herd con- stantly. He lives, as a rule, in a wretched dirt-roof " shack," and passes most of the time in the saddle, seeing that his animals do not stray too far off the range. In the fierce winter storms he must be out driving the herd into ravines and deep valleys, where they will be protected from the wind. No shelter is built for stock in Montana. The dried bunch-grass furnishes abundant winter grazing, and the animals get through the severe weather with a loss rarely exceeding four per cent. In the spring each owner "rounds up " his herd, and brands th j calves. Every ranchman has his own brand, which he registers in the office of the county clerk, and advertises in the nearest local paper, printed, it may be, one or two hundred miles from his range. The annual drive of bullocks across the plains southward to the Union Pacific Railroad, or eastward to the tempo- rary terminus of the Northern Pacific, takes place in the summer months. Before taking leave of the Yellowstone Valley, along which this article has thus far carried the reader, let me say that the pict- THE NEW NORTH-WEST. 775 where ures I have tried to draw of its scenery are all from observations made in a journey in the brief spring season of May, 1882, when the grass was green. After June it is a sere and yellow land, the bunch-grass curing upon the ground and giving to all the landscape a sad, autumnal look. It is a treeless region, too, save where the cotton-wood, that Proteus of trees, borders the streams, or the dwarf fir clings to the steep mountain sides, making black patches below the snow-line. The beauty of the valley is not, therefore, the beauty of green and wooded valleys like those of the Hudson, the Connecticut, or the Ohio, but the valley has a beauty of its own, — strange, singular, and often startling by its sharp contrasts between lofty and savage mountain peaks, gigantic walls of rock and gentle slopes and fair, level pastures, basking by the side of swift, limpid streams. The Belt Mountains are crossed by the road leading from the Upper Yellowstone to the Gallatin Valley, at an elevation of five thousand four hundred feet, — a little less than the height of Mount Washington. The as- cent is easy and gradual, but the descent is abrupt through a savage gorge, where the narrow path clings to the side of dizzy abysses. Once out of the gorge, you come suddenly into the wide, fertile, and well-set- tled plain, watered by the Gallatin and its branches, and passing Fort Ellis, are at Bozeman in an hour. A western fort, by the way, has nothing warlike in its appearance. There are neither walls nor cannon, — nothing, in fact, but a rectangle of frame structures surrounding a parade ground, neat cottages for the officers, long, ugly barracks for the men, store-houses, stables, etc. The soldiers look like laborers in blue blouses, and the officers, when not on duty, dress in easy n^gligd costumes, — blue flannel shirts, loose jackets and trowsers, and felt hats. They are genial, hospitable gentlemen, but are apt to have the failing of the army in Flanders. As story-tellers they are unrivaled, and few men can get as much amusement out of a pack of cards. A pleasant, social life is often found at a post. The older officers have fam- ilies, and the presence of ladies and children brings to the garrison the refinements of civ- ilized society. Bozeman, named from the brave Montana pioneer who was killed by Indians on the Yellowstone, has, perhaps, fifteen hundred inhabitants, and, never having been a mining town, wears a settled and respectable air rare in the far West. Trtere are many pretty frame houses with gardens and door-yards, a few substantial brick blocks, two or three churches, a big school-house, and a court- house with an ambitious tower. Indeed, were it not for tht- irrigating ditches which run through the place and the lofty snow mountains which bound the horizon on all sides, one might think himself in some Illi- nois or Iowa county-seat. Strangers visiting Bozeman are always taken by some public-spirited citizen up to a mount of vision west of the town, from whence the whole broad valley can be seen, with its fields of grain, its swift streams, its irrigating ditches glistening in the sunlight like silver ribbons, its cozy litde farm-houses, and its encircling rim of gray mountains crowned with snow. It is a lovely prospect, and doubly impressive because of the hun- dreds of miles of savage, desolate country one traverses to reach it. At Bozeman I encountered an interesting specimen of the independent western waiter. Nobody serves willingly in the western terri- tories. The man who brings you a pitcher of water, or harnesses your horse, puts on a familiar swagger, as if to show that he is only doing such menial work temporarily, and considers himself just as good as you. The Bozeman waiter came up to the new guest with a patronizing air and asked if he were hungry. The guest replied that he was. " I'm glad of it," remarked the waiter; "I like a hungry man." The next meal the guest pre- sumed upon his enjoyment of the waiter's acquaintance to ask, " How are the cakes this morning ? " but the waiter was out of humor and replied in a surly tone, " Darned if I know, I haint tried 'em." Our party stopped at a wayside inn one day. There was a hamlet of three or four houses on a creek. The place seemed de- serted, but the halting of a team before the log building where refreshments were dis- pensed rallied the whole population. One man appeared from behind a barn, another from a field, a third from a gulch; in fact they seemed to rise up out of the ground; the prospect of a treat, however remote, where liquor is twenty-five cents a drink, never fails to gather a crowd in this thirsty region. One of the party fell into conversation with a man who proved to be a doctor. A rough fellow, wearing leather riding-breeches and an im- mense dirt-colored felt hat, took a seat on the bar near by and listened intently to the talk. " I suppose your practice here must be largely eleemosynary," said the traveler to the physi- cian. " Hell! stranger," interrupted the cow- boy, " that's a good word. Whar did you git it?" Apropos of frontier manners is an incident which can be located, as well as anywhere, at Kurtzville, a log town of seventeen saloons, IT 776 THE NEW NORTH-WEST. one store, and one hotel. A New York gen- tleman got out of the stage-coach and enter- ing one of the saloons, asked politely for a little sherry in a wine-glass. The bar-keeper glared at him for a moment, then reached for a six-shooter and pointing it at the terrified traveler shouted, " Now, I tell you, tender- foot, you take whisky. You take it in a tin- cup and you like it." The stranger took the whisky in the tin cup, asserted that it was the best he ever drank, and made haste to get back to the coach. The valleys of the three rivers which form the Missouri, the Gallatin, the Madison, and the Jefferson, seen from the hill east of Boze- man form the best developed agricultural region of Montana, and I think the only sec- tion of the Territory where broad areas of land can be seen under cultivation. Else- where the farms are narrow strips skirting the banks of streams. Not that the good land all lies in belts close to the creeks and rivers, but thus far farming has only been attempted where water could be brought upon the fields without much labor or expense. The time will soon come when a system of scientific irrigation requiring considerable capital for constructing long main ditches will be intro- duced, as has already been done in Colorado. Hundreds of thousands of fertile acres lie idle which can easily be reclaimed and made to produce large crops by utilizing the water now running to waste. Montana agriculture thus far is rudimentary and superficial. Men took to it as a business, because the isolation of the Territory and the demands of the min- ing camps for food and forage opened home markets at exceedingly high prices. When land could be had for the takmg, and by a cheap and simple method of irrigation be made to produce sixty bushels of oats, fifly of wheat or three hundred of potatoes to the acre, farming was more profitable than gold mining. The old ranchmen would like to see this state of things continue. They are angry at the railroads pushing into the Terri- tory fi*om east, west, and south, fc eseeing that the old era of high prices, free and easy liv- ing, vigilance committees and revolver law is doomed, and that they must soon conform to the general conditions of life prevailing in the densely settled portions of the country. One of the results of the construction of railroads through Montana will be to increase the price of land and diminish the value of crops, — a seeming paradox explained by the fact that hitherto no reasonable ratio has existed between the two. A man's farm has hardly been salable for the amount realized from its annual product. For example, a young man, owning one of the best ranches in the Galla- tin valley, recently married in the East; and as his wife did not like Montana — no woman does until she has lived a long time in the Territory — he sold his ranch for $2500. A few days after he signed the deed, one of the Bozeman merchants paid him $3500 for the crop of oats he had just harvested. Farming by irrigation is more laborious and expensive than the ordinary method, but it yields much larger returns. A Montana farmer would think he had unusually bad luck if a field of fifty acres did not average sixty bushels of oats to the acre year after year. The water brought upon the land is believed to have fertilizing properties, although it is usu- ally as clear as spring water. A field farmed by irrigation must be so situated that water can be brought along one side of it in a main ditch, and must have sufficient slope for cross ditches to be run with a plow from twelve to twenty feet apart. If the season is very dry, water must be brought upon the whole field three times; in an ordinary season once or twice is often enough. The ground must be thoroughly moistened plowshare deep. The farmer goes along the ditches with a spade, making little dams to spread the water, and thus patch by patch he gets the whole sur- face drenched at last. From Bozeman to Helena is about one hundred miles, and the sparsely settled condi- tion of Montana will be understood when I say, that in the region settled seventeen years ago, with the exception of one little min- ing village of perhaps two hundred inhabit- ants, nothing which can possibly be called a. town is seen in the whole journey. A little belt of fanning settlement follows the banks of the Missouri for twenty miles below the junction of the three rivers, and a few creeks coming down from the mountain sides are dotted with ranches. The lines of black alders fringing these creeks can be seen ten miles away, — narrow, bright-green ribbons laid across the gray, bunch-grass slopes from the gorges in the foot-hills down to the deep valley of the river. There are striking views of the Belt Mountains on the east and the main range of the Rockies on the west to be had from the high divides between the creeks, and at one point the Missouri can be seen for many miles, — a clear, winding stream embrac- ing countless little green islands. The country is covered with a sparse growth of bunch- grass growing in stands of about a dozen stacks with bare spaces as large as a dinner- plate between. The grass gives color to the valleys, slopes, and hills; but nowhere is it thick enough to look like an eastern pasture. Herds of horses and cattle are seen here and there. They look fat and contented, but to 1 THE NEW NORTH-WEST. Ill thrive upon the scant grass they require a wide range. As much as ten acres of grazing ground for each animal is the ranchman's usual estimate. Helena is a tovn of six thousand inhabit- ants, wedged in a cleft between base hills and debouching upon the plain as best it can among enormous piles of stones and dirt, — the ddbris of extensive placer mines. Scarcely have the miners spared room enough for the road to get into the town among their hideous heaps and holes. An unclean business this placer mining, carried on in mud and dirty water and leaving ghastly gashes and scars on the face of the country. The town is the out- growth of a prosperous mining camp, — the Last Chance gulch, from which it is said more gold has been taken than from any other sin- gle locality in the world. Its situation as the nearest point in the mining region to the head of navigation on the Missouri P.iver at Fort Benton made Helena a distributing center in the days when merchants brought in a year's supply of goods during the brief season of navigation. Thus it got a start as the chief commercial town of the territory. It still keeps the lead, and will continue to keep it unless the railroads should develop a larger town in the Yellowstone Valley. Ugly to the eye, with its scrambling, shadeless streets clinging to the steep hills ; its narrow, crooked, ill-built business thoroughfare, and its blotch of a Chinese suburb, Helena is, nevertheless, an attractive place. The traveler can enjoy his ease in a comfortable hotel, read the news morning and evening in intelligent, well- printed daily papers, take his choice of seven churches on Sunday, read the new publica- tions in & public library, supply his needs at stores as large and as well-stocked as are found in cities ten times as large in the east, and enjoy the society of people who add to culture that stamp of originality of character so common in the far Weoc, and so rare in old communities. The town is singularly self-centered. Small as it is, it has metropoli- tan airs. It does its OAvn thinking without refererne to Chicago or New York, and has its own code of morals, which includes the toleration of public gaming-houses on fhe most eligible comers of the main street. People speak of " the States," as of some far- distant country in whose affairs they take but slight interest. The height of hqman felicity, in their opinion, is to live in Montana and " strike it rich " on a quartz lead. The highest title to distinction is to be an old resident. The red-faced miner or ranchman in a big clay-colored sombrero, who brings down his fist upon the bar and says, ^' I am an old Montanian," feels as genuine a pride as did the Roman citizen of old when he boasted of a share in the empire of the worid. To have come into the territory in 1862 is an honor here as great as a lord's title in England. The cordial hospitality shown to strangers by the better class of residents of the Montana towns is a pleasant surprise. Acquaintances are easily made ; and the traveler .who lately was glad of a chance to unroll his blankets at night on the floor of a ranchman's cabin finds himself entertained at bountiful tables, and surrounded by the accessories of a tasteful and comfortable home life. It is a thousand miles across vast, desolate spaces to the nearest city ; but here are pictures, books, pianos, and luxurious furniture. The only noticeable dif- ference in the talk of social circles observed by one fresh from the east, is that the current news and political discussion of "the States" are of slight interest here, and are rarely men- tioned, and that local affairs, including the heroic days of the Vigilance Committee, are much dwelt upon. You will very likely learn that the prominent lawyer or banker who sits next you at dinner, was a leading vigilant and helped hang a dozen robbers and murderers. The papers give but a meager telegraphic summary of events in the world outside Mon- tana, and the St. Paul and Chicago papers are so old when they reach here that they have few readers. Hemmed in by mountains and separated from the well-settled portions of the west by wide areas of vacant country, Montana has thus far been a region apart, and has worked out her own destiny without much help from beyond. Soon the territory will be traversed from east to west by eight hundred miles of railway. Population will pour in and the little mountain community, grown to the dimensions of a State, will as- similate with the nation at large. We crossed the main divide of the Rockies at Frenchwoman's Pass, about fifteen miles north-west of Helena. The pass gets its name from a woman who was murdered by her hus- band in the eaily lays of Montana settlement, and over it runs the main road between Helena and the Upper Missouri country, and the valleys watered by the tributaries of the Columbia. We went up the pass in fine style, — four handsome horses and the best driver in Montana, " Gib," a graduate of the Over- land Mail service, a powerful man with bronzed face and the neck and shoulders of a Spanish bull-fighter, but with a soft voice, and an admirable dignity and quietness of manner. He talked to his horses in low tones, never a loud word or an oath, chiding or en- couraging them as they deserved, and they seemed perfectly to understand every word he said. When we came to narrow places in i^ 778 THE NEW NORTH-WEST. n: \ ill the road, overhanging precipices, where two teams could not pass, his voice rang out like a bugle in a high, piercing cry to warn team- sters who might be out of sight around a comer, not to advance further. Less musical, perhaps, than the modulated shout with which the Venetian gondolier turns a corner, the cry of the Rocky Mountain driver, flung back from lofty peak or canon wall, is nevertheless much more thrilling. Gib's leaders were adorned with a great number of ivory rings attached to the martingales, — the private property of the driver and a badge of distinction on the road. All the farmers' "whips" ornament their leaders in this fashion, — the greater the driver the more ivory rings on the martingales. The teamsters gave way to the great man as we passed, and even the stages yielded half the road, — a cour- tesy accorded to no ordinary outfit, — and the drivers h.)iled Gib in tones of respectful com- radeship. The ascent of the eastern slope of French- woman's Pass is not at all difficult. A fair road climbs up through a forest of firs between masses of rock and over brawling torrents. Through rifts in the forest there are here and there views of the broad Prickly Pear Valley and the Belt Range beyond, and of nearer rounded summits of the Rockies, — huge hemi- spheres of granite and snow. At the . top of the pass is a broad green meadow-like ex- panse, flecked with patches of snow all sum- mer, and rimmed around with the dark firs. Upon the very ridge-pole of the water-shed, where a melting snow-bank divided its favors between two tiny rivulets, one running to the Atlantic and the other to the Pacific, we halted and opened a bottle of Beaujolais, pre- sented to one of the party weeks before by a fellow traveler at the foot of Gray's Peak in Colorado. Flowers grew in abundance among the snow-banks — adder's-tongues, bluebells, yel- low violets, wind-flowers, and half a dozen other species. The road from the summit wound down over green slopes, and through woodland patches, following the course of the Little Blackfoot Creek for two hours; then across windy ridges until the deep, broad valley of the Deer Lodge River burst into sight. A great difference was observed be- tween the vegetation on the two sides of the Main Divide. The Pacific Slope shows a much richer flora; the grass is better and more abundant ; many shrubs and flowers flourish that are not seen east of the range ; the forests of fir and pine descend farther into the valleys ; streams are more frequent, and have a greater volume of water. Evidently the warm, moist currents of air from the Pacific Ocean striking against the Rockies leave much of their moisture before they reach the valleys of the eastern slope. In thirty miles' drive from the pass to Deer Lodge the only signs of settlement we saw were four log-houses, a saw-mill, and a flock of sheep. Plenty of room here for people who want to lead a pastoral life on sunny green slopes near mighty forests, by swift, clear streams, with snow peaks cutting the blue sky and nature furnishing whole acres of dwarf sunflowers and larkspur for flower- gardens. Not so far from the good things of civilization, either ; for what is that ten miles away in the valley ? Church spires, surely, and pretty white houses in a mass of green. Yes, it is the village of Deer Lodge, prettiest of the Montana towns. Near acquaintance does not lessen its beauty. Its twelve hundred inhabitants support excellent schools in build- ings that would do no discredit to a New England town. They live in neat houses, and have gardens and lawns \vatered by clear, full streams, and boast of the best weekly newspaper in the territory. Their valley lies about four thousand feet above the sea level, and is rather cold for agriculture ; but good crops of wheat, oats, barley, and potatoes are produced. Montana potatoes, by the way, are of prodigious size and of corresponding excellence. Until you have eaten them you do not know what the potato is capable of. From Deer Lodge my route led westward fifty miles over high grassy hills, past placer mining camps where the face of the country for miles has been gashed and scarred — all of the soil washed away in the eager search for grains and nuggets of gold, and nothing left but sand and heaps of bowlders. Hideous Httle villages squat on the brink of thest exca- vations, or sprawl out, hot and dusty, in the bottoms of the gulches, populated chiefly by saloon-keepers and Chinamen. In the single street of one of these villages, where we stopped for dinner, lay a big rock, an obstruc- tion to teams of fifteen years' date, no doubt. The loungers at the store got into a dispute about its probable weight ; bets were quickly made ; crowbars and a truck were brought, and with a deal of sweating and swearing, prying and lifting, the rock was put upon a scale and weighed. The losers paid their bets, business at the saloons became brisk for a time, and the excitement promised to last the dull town for the rest of the summer. The country both sides of the Deer Lodge River is all good pasture land, save where gashed by the gold grubbers for a day's journey west. Then the stream takes another name, and is called the Hell Gate, and runs for another fifty miles through a magnificent mountain gorge, the narrow valley and the UNQUENCHED. m steep declivities being heavily timbered with halters tied around the lower jaw — with the red fir and the Rocky Mountain pine as much skill as the old bucks and sc^uaws. (Pinus ponderosa). If the reader has seen the The squaws looked after the spare ponies, of valley of the French Broad River in North which there was always a numerous drove, Carolina, below Asheville, he will have a and the patient nags that trotted along, tolerably correct idea of the Hell Gate defile, dragging the tepee poles, while the braves save that the Montana forest has no hard- rode ahead, silent, disdainful, and hideous in wood trees, and the somber evergreen hue is red paint and long, braided hair, only relieved, close to the stream, by the Out of the Hell Gate defile we emerged light tint of the pinking aspens. It was a one evening in early June, to rest in the delight to get into the woods after a month frontier village of Missoula, whi h thrives on of travel across the treeless country of Dakota the trade of the Bitter Root Valley — best of and Eastern Montana. We passed a caravan the farming valleys of West Montana — on the of Mormons, who had come five hundred necessities and vices of a military post, and miles from Utah with wagons and wives to on what lawful or unlawful business can be work on the railroad. We met bands of Flat- done with the dwellers on the Jocko Indian head Indians bound for Camas Prairie to Reservation twenty-five miles distant. Here gather and dnr the camas root : picturesque at the river takes a third name, and, after it re- a distance in their motley garb of blankets and ceives the Bitter Root, is styled the Missoula, skins, but dirty and ugly on near acquaintance, and runs with wide and hurrying current All were mounted, even to babies of three westw -d to join the Clark's Fork of the years old, who guided their ponies — by rope Columbia. E. V. Smalley. (To be continued.) UNQUENCHED.* I THINK upon the conquering Greek who ran (Brave was the racer !) that brave race of old — Swifter than hope his feet that did not tire. Calmer than love the hand which reached that goal; A torch it bore, and cherished to the end And rescued from the winds the sacred fire. O life the race! O heart the race-! Hush! And listen long enough to learn ot him Who sleeps beneath the dust with his desire. Go! shame thy coward weariness, and wail. Who doubles contest, doubles victory. Go ! learn to run the race, and carry fire. O Friend! The lip is brave, the heart is weak. Stay near. The runner faints — the torch falls pale. Save me the flame that mounteth ever higher! Grows it so dark ? I lift mine eyes to thine ; Blazing within them, steadfast, pure, and strong, Against the wind there fights the eternal fire. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. sacrificial • At the Promethean and other festivals, j^oung men ran with torches or lamps lighted from the ficial altar. " In this contest, only he was victorious whose lamp remained unextinguished in the race." ■aMIaaiauAaUiiWfc-" G^ f^ THE NEW NORTH-WEST.» THIRD PAPER : FROM THE ROCKIES TO THE CASCADE RANGE. I TAKE up the thread of the narrative of north-western travel, which the reader may have followed in previous numbers of this maga;.ine, at Missoula, a little trading town of perhaps eight hundred inhabitants, prettily situated on a plateau facing Hell Gate River, a few miles above its junction with the Bitter Root. South of Missoula, within rifle-shot, is the entrance to the great Hell Gate Canon ; westward across the angle formed by the two rivers rises the huge, dark wall of the Bitter Root Mountains, higher here, and more picturesque, than the main range of the Rockies, which arc half concealed by the grassy swells of the foot-hills on the east. Lo-Lo Peak, the loftiest and most individual mountain of the Bitter Root chain, is covered with snow all summer; its altitude must be about ten thousand feet. North-west of the town the valley is broad enough for cultiva- tion for a distance of twenty miles, when it closes in at the canon of the Missoula River. A range for which there is not even a local name nms the valley on the north. One sum- mit, called Skotah Peak, is a perfect pyramid in form. This cloud-compassed landmark we shall not lose sight of in three days' travel. Up the Bitter Root Valley there are farms scattered for sixty miles. The valley is warmer than any other in Western Montana, and the small fruits and some hardy varieties of apples are grown. Herds of horses and catde feed on the slopes of the mountains. Grain and potatoes are grown by irrigation, and the valley is a source of food-supply for military posts and mining-camns. Hogs are fattened upon peas and wheat, and the flavor of a Bitter Root ham is something altogether unique and appetizing. In June the bitter-root plant, from which the valley gets its name, covers all the uncultivated ground with its delicate rose-colored stars. The blossom, about as large as a wild rose, lies close upon the earth. The long, pipestem-like root is greatly relished by the Indians for food. When dried it looks like macaroni, and it is by no means unpalatable when cooked with a little salt or butter, or eaten raw. The squaws dig it with long sticks, and dry it for winter food. Another root, also a staple in the aboriginal larder, is the camas, which loves moist prairies. where it flaunts its blue flowers in the early summer. In June, when the camas is ready to gather, even the most civilized Indian on the Flathead reservation feels the nomadic impulse too strong to resist. He packs his lodge upon ponies, and starts with his family for some ca- mas prairie, where he is sure to meet a numer- ous company bent on having a good time. The picturesque features of life in a West- em Montana town like Missoula are best seen as evening approaches. Crowds of roughly clad men gather around the doors of the drinking-saloons. A group of Indians, who have be^-n squatting on the sidewalk for two hours playing some mysterious game of cards of their own invention, breaks up. One of the squaws throws the cards into the street, which is already decorated from end to end with simi- lar relics of other games. Another swings a baby upon her back, ties a shawl around it and herself, secures the child with a strap buckled across her chest, and strides off, her mocca- sined , , toeing inward in the traditional Indian fashion. She wears a gown made of a scarlet calico bed-quilt, with leggings of some blue stuff; but she has somehow managed to get a civilized dress for the child. They all go off to their camp on the hill near by. Some blue-coated soldiers from the neighbor- ing military post, remembering the roll-call at sunset, swing themselves upon their horses and go galloping off, a litde the worse for the bad whisky they have been drinking in the saloons. A miner in blue woolen shirt and brown canvas trousers, with a hat of as- tonishing dimensions and a beard of a year's growth, trots up the street on a mule, and, with droll oaths and shuffling talk, offers the animal for sale to the crowd of loungers on the hotel piazza. No one wants to buy, and, after provoking a deal of laughter, the miner gives his ultimatum : " I'll hitch the critter to one of them piazzer posts, and if he don't pull it down you may have him." This gen- erous offer is declined by the landlord; and the miner rides off, declaring that he has not a solitary four-bit piece to pay for his supper, and is bound to sell the mule to somebody. Toward nightfall the whole male popula- tion seems to be in the street, save the busy Chinamen in the laundries, who keep on See Map on page 770, September Century. 864 THE NEW NORTH-WEST. I Bbrinkling clothes by blowing water out of their mouths. Early or late, you will find these industrious little yellow men at work. One shuffles back and forth from the hydrant, carrying water for the morning w.ish in old coal-oil cans hung to a stick balanced across his shoulders. More Indians now — a '* buck" and twu squaws, leading ponies heavily laden with tent, clothes, and buffalo robes. A rope tied around a pony's lower jaw is the ordi- nary halter and bridle of the Indians. These people want to buy some article at the sad- dler's shop. They do not go in, but stare through the windows for five minutes. The saddler, knowing the Indian way of dealing, pays no attention to them. After a while they all sit down on the ground in front of the shop. Perhaps a quarler of an hour passes before the saddler asks what they want. If he had noticed them at first, they would have gone away without buying. Now the great event of the day is at hand. The cracking of a whip and a rattle of wheels are heard up the street : the stage is coming. Thirty-six hours ago it left the terminus of the railroad one hundred and fifty miles away. It is the connecting link between the little isolated mountain commu- nity and the outside world. No handsome Concord coach appears, but only a clumsy "jerky " covered with dust. The "jerky "is a sort of cross between a coach proper and a common wagon. As an instrument of torture this hideous vehicle has no equal in modern times. The passengers emerge from its cavernous interior lot' ,ng more dead than alive. A hundred able-bodied men, not one of them with a respectable coat or a tolerable hat, .-^avc two flashy gamblers, look on at the unloading of the luggage. The stage goes off to a stable, and the crowd disperses, to rally again, largely reinforced, at the word that there is to be a horse-race. Now the drinking saloons — each one of which runs a faro bank and a table for " stud poker" — are lighted up, and the gaming and gu/zling begin. Every third building on the principal business street is a saloon. The gambling goes on until daylight without any effort at concealment. In all the Montana towns keeping gaming-tables Is treated as a perfectly legitimate business. Indeed, it is licensed by the Territorial laws. Some of the saloons have music, but this is a rather super- fluous attraction. In one a woman sings pop- ular ballads in a cracked voice, to the accom- panim.'nt of a banjo. Women of a certain sort mingle with the men and try their luck at tlie tables. Good order usually prevails, less probably from respect for law than from a prudent recognition of the fact that every man carries a pistol in his hip-pocket, and a quarrel means shooting. The games played are faro and " stud poker," the latter beinj^ the favorite. It is a game in which "bluff" goes farther than luck or skill. Few whisky saloons in Montana are without a rude pine table cov- ered with an old blanket, which, with a pack of cards, is all the outfit required for this diversion. The main street of tne frontier town, given up at night to drinking and gambling, by no means typifies the wnole life of the place. The current of business and society, on the surface of which surges a deal of mud and drift-wood, is steady and decent. There ta V. Smalley, ■y^«!««MJ.SJW"l !i f^^m^smn'Mwt-^i"! vii^_[ iwum