University of California Berkeley From the FRANCIS P. FARQUHAR EXPLORATION LIBRARY Gift of THE MARJORY BRIDGE FARQUHAR 1972 TRUST A o THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST THE CROSS PULL THE YELLOW HORDE THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST ANIMAL STORIES An ancient buffalo bull had left the herd and drifted down to the flat. FRONTISPIECE. See page 233. THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST .BY HAL G. EVARTS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1921 Copyright, 1921, BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. All rights reserved Published October, 1921 Published serially as " Old-Timer " Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Gushing Co. Norwood, Mass., U. S. A. ILLUSTRATIONS An ancient buffalo bull had left the herd and drifted down to the flat . . Frontispiece " Once Manitou looked down upon plains made dark with buffalo" . . . PAGE 4 Great white cranes stalked majestically in the open flats . ' . . . . . " 61 Here the bighorn of the peaks gazed down 69 The old bear launched forth and coasted for two hundred yards, the cubs following at short intervals . , . . . " 137 Three thousand antelope had crossed out- side in a single night ., ^ . . " 148 The^moose could winter in the heavy drifts where all others starved . '-.. * , . " 169 The great brown bear moved into the road and reared to his full height . . . " 209 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST THE cook fires from five thousand lodges spread their thin film of smoke above the broad valley of the Musselshell. Upstream, straggling irregularly along the base of the hills that flanked the far side of the bottoms, the teepees which sheltered all that was left of the mighty tribe of Crows showed in minia- ture through the clear air of the hill country. A like distance downstream, appearing as but a tiny toy encampment, even streets and regularly spaced tents marked the temporary abode of the soldiery. A half-mile back from one shore a thousand mounted warriors, the pick of a fighting nation, injected into the picture an element of constant motion and clashing hues as the fretful war ponies milled and shifted, the glittering lances and gaudy headdress of their riders weaving ever new and colorful patterns against the green back- ground of the hills. Small detachments 1 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST swooped in aimless charges to the accompani- ment of brandished rifles and quavering yelps, evidencing a lack of restraint in sharp contrast to the stolid quiet which prevailed through- out the formation stationed well back from the opposite shore, a field battery and two troops of cavalry drawn up in orderly array. A slight mound reared above the surround- ing bottoms, the pivotal point of the whole wild scene, and here the dress uniforms of the officers bade for supremacy of grandeur against the savage finery of Indian chiefs and marked the spot where solemn confer- ence held sway. General McClain had ably stated the cause of the whites. The keynote of his speech had revolved round the pressing neces- sity for development and he had glowingly depicted the inestimable benefits to be derived from the white man's method of developing the natural resources of the country. The conference had been long and the sun hung low in the west as Red Cloud, war chief of the mighty Crows, rose to make final reply for his people. He stood for long with folded arms. "Development!" he began at last. "The white chief speaks of development. So, in my youth, spoke the men of the three great companies." THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST The aged chieftain delved into the misty past and touched upon the halcyon day of the fur trade, when the beaver swarmed in untold millions on the tributaries of the Arkansas and the Platte, of that day when the three great companies the American, the Rocky Mountain and the Hudson Bay had struggled for control of that vast beyond which lay to the westward of the Big River and fought for complete supremacy of the Indian trade; of the time when the emis- saries of rival interests and the headmen of the roving bands of free trappers had prom- ised great wealth to his people through the rapid development of the fur trade. "Where are the beaver?" he demanded. "Show them to me, you who come with fresh promises. The whack of the beaver's tail upon the water once sounded in every night camp of the Crows for a thousand miles each way. Now the lakes are silent. The beaver is gone from the streams and the fur trade died with its promises from lack of pelts to satisfy its greed. "Red Cloud has looked long upon the working of this word with two meanings. The Indian has come to know development as a wonderful promise of future glory which beckons to his people 'as the phantom lake of the desert lures the thirsty, always just 3 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST ahead but forever beyond reach. The white man knows it as an excuse, softened by great words, as the sunset beautifies the bad lands. Under its cover he does much that is wonderful, working for his favorite God, this Development before whom he bows, but in his haste to reach the shores of the phantom lake he destroys much that he might better leave and which he never can replace. As Red Cloud has looked upon it so will the children of the white chief live to see it. "Once Manitou looked down upon plains made dark with buffalo; now his nostrils are poisoned by the reek of a million car- casses stripped of their pelts and left to rot under the sun. As the otter and the beaver are gone from the streams so will the buffalo and the antelope be swept from the plains, the deer from the valleys and the bull elk from the hills ; even the last bighorn among the highest peaks will be sacrificed to the greedy God, Development!" The ancient chieftain of the Crows gazed off to the east as if the gathering held a vision for his eyes alone to read. He swept an arm in the direction of his gaze. "There is the yesterday of the Indian," he said. Turning, he executed a similar sweep to the west. "And there the to- morrow of the whites. Red Cloud has seen 4 Once Manitou looked down upon plains made dark with buffalo. " Page 4. THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST it written. What the white man asks he will have. It will always be so. The old days are gone. They have followed the beaver to return no more/' In view of the fact that one of the oldest translations in the world, a record of man's thoughts transcribed on stone, reads thus : "The good old days are gone forever", the sentiment was not original with the aged war chief of the Crows ; but he knew not that his observation was as old as the spoken word, that the lament for the good day that had passed had been the portion of each generation since that time when Adam was excluded from the Garden. He spoke only what he felt, and of what he knew. Red Cloud wheeled abruptly and followed by his fellow chiefs he turned his back upon those who represented the new order of things and set his face toward the shifting mass of mounted warriors which typified all that, re- mained of the old. Two horsemen topped the ridge and stopped to look back at the scene spread out below them. A slender, many-colored line twisted for miles across the winding hills on the far slopes of the Musselshell, a flashing serpent writhing interminably across the green. An hour before sunrise the Crows had struck their teepees and started on the back trail for their ancestral home in the Bighorns. The sweet clear notes of a bugle, long-drawn and sustained, floated up from the bottoms. The soldiers were breaking camp. The sun flared forth and touched the horsemen on the high ground while the valley of the Musselshell was still shrouded in the gray of early morning shadows. The patriarch of the hide-hunters found nothing inspiring in the scene. With seventy- odd years of experience behind him he viewed most things before him with but casual con- cern. This indifference was not shared by his companion, who, notwithstanding his studied simulation of casualness in all things a trait which marked the manner of his 6 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST elder associates was alert with all the natural interest of his seventeen summers for whatever the new day might fling across his path. Perhaps, as he turned in his saddle to look back upon the twisting line which marked the homeward trail of the Crows, the soldiers breaking camp in the bottoms while the last notes of the bugle drifted to his ears, he partly visioned the immensity of the future toward which all this tended ; a vague, half- formed picture of the end which every present circumstance, however slight, would have a hand in shaping. He groped for an answer as to the bearing this parting of the ways to- day would have upon the vast to-morrow, and suddenly the boy wondered what part he himself would play in shaping it. What mark would he leave ? It did not come to him couched in definite thought : rather it was an emotion, an ex- pansion roused by the dying strains of the bugle and translated into vague longing for great things ; rare moments which come to exalt the lives of all ambitious young. The impressions coincident to such moments, vivid and therefore ineradicable, leave their certain imprint. In the light of an earlier and contrasting impression, ingrained by reiteration upon 7 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST the plastic tablets of his infancy to an extent which left it ever near the surface of his con- sciousness, it was but natural that Mart Woodson should experience a recurrence of that thought and be proud that he had been born what he was, a native American. It occurred to him in no such trite thought- group, nor even as a patriotic realization of nativity but rather in the more personal sense of what it meant to him. All before him and to either side, for as far as his eye could reach was his, belonged to him as a birthright. It was his estate. He was master of himself and free to shape his own destiny as he willed. And it was in this sense that it came to him more than any actual conscious- ness of nationality. That he should dwell appreciatively upon these things, so readily accepted by others as a matter of course, was the result of child- hood tales absorbed from the grandparents who had raised him. Always their speech had harked back to the home of their youth, and the boy had gathered that there the land was granted in broad tracts for the enjoy- ment of the privileged few; that the great mass was but a tenant existing through the sufferance of others, its collective life largely predetermined by circumstances over which it had small control. This picture of limita- 8 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST tions compared to the wide scope of his own world had worked to build up in him an appre- ciation of the fact that he was free to map out his own course as he chose. He could select his own path and travel it with no limitation but those imposed by the bounds of his own ability, which is really what it means to have been born an American. He turned to his companion and found old Tom North gazing abstractedly in the opposite direction from the scene which had so inspired the youth. The great moment passed ; the eager questioning light died out of his blue eyes and he headed his horse across country toward where the outfit was camped. But as he rode he missed no detail of what transpired along his route, everything viewed through the eyes of youth. He had been raised among the hardwood hills ; maple and hickory, walnut and oak, miles and miles of standing timber stretching endlessly away on all sides of his boyhood home. The preced- ing year he had drifted west to hunt out of Dodge and so had come to know and love the short-grass plains. Now the rolling foothills of the sage country had fastened upon him with even stronger grip; and even while he felt the succeeding spell exerted by new frontiers his mind traveled ahead to the great unexplored, to that land of rumored marvels 9 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST about which, of late, many tales had been afloat. It was said that the three great river sys- tems of the country were fed by the snows which fell in one rugged mass of peaks and valleys, the high country for which each tribe had its own name but which was known to all as the Land of Many Rivers. Somewhere up in there lay the country of the fabled Two Ocean Water, the stream which split and drained both ways. He turned to old Tom North. "Do you believe it ?" he asked, "what they said about the land where the water runs three ways?" "It may be, Son," the old hide-hunter assented. "It 's maybe so. I 've always heard it said ; but the whites don't believe. I 've been all ways from it myself and there 's many a river comes pouring down from there and them rivers runs three ways. I 'm telling you, Son, just what I 've seen myself. Some day I '11 maybe trail one to its head, and when I do I 'm thinking that right close somewhere will be the tip prongs of the other two." Their route teemed with life, a land of meat in plenty, an inexhaustible supply. On all sides the sage hens swarmed in untold thousands. In the heads of the gulches 10 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST where the snow lay longest in the spring the dark green of gooseberry, currant and wild rose stood out from the silvery blue-gray of the sage and here the big chickens of the foothills congregated in immense flocks to feed. Some few took wing as they approached only to pitch down after a short flight, but the most of them merely moved aside to let the horses pass. Three coyotes prowled through a vast dog town while the villagers barked from ten thousand mounds and the little owls bobbed with false cordiality. Antelope ranged on every hand, some feeding in twos and threes, some in droves of hundreds. Every broad bottom and every grassy slope, every side hill and each rocky bench held its quota of the pronghorn tribe. They rode out along the rim of a shallow box canyon and below them, among the stunted cedars on the floor of it, a band of forty mule deer grazed within easy gunshot. A string of big gray buffalo wolves, gaunt and grim, stood on the skyline of a low divide and gazed bleakly down upon the ascending horsemen before vanishing down the opposite slope. The two men pulled up to breathe their horses at the top of a steep pitch and from there they could command an immense stretch 11 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST of country. Below and to the left of them it opened out into rolling lowlands, broad flats and valleys intersected by shallow washes and barely perceptible waves of ground. The boy pointed and North inclined his head, having already seen the thing himself. A fresh drift of buffalo moved up from the south. Great dark blotches showed against the green of the range and between these the countless specks grazed slowly ahead. Stationary masses indicated where thousands had bedded down. Some of these spread fanwise as the two men looked on, expand- ing till the dark blots dispersed and gradually merged with the scattered feeders. At other points this maneuver was reversed, the dark moving points converging on a common line and forming into a compact mass as those that had fed to repletion grouped for travel. There were half-mile breaks in the herd, but throughout the whole irregular throng there was a steady forward drift into the north. Extending to the horizon, the vast horde surged on over a twenty-mile front. The two hide-hunters rode down the slope to meet it and long before the vanguard of the herd was within gunshot Mart Woodson had unslung the heavy rifle suspended be- neath his thigh by rawhide thongs- There was a sudden acceleration of the forward THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST drift and the earth vibrated to the rumble of half a million hoofs. Up from the south rolled the billowing roar of black powder and the boy knew that some other of his outfit had cut into the herd and fired the first shot of the kill. The one report was multiplied by scores and the thunder of hoofs increased. A single buffalo topped the low rise of ground before them. The boy shot from the saddle and the ancient bull went down with the crash of the big Sharp, his broad skull drilled through. As he pitched to his knees a black line swept over the crest. North fired into it, Woodson shot again and the mass split to stream by on either side. Woodson rode with it, shooting the shaggy monsters down from the saddle. Always as one drove passed him there were fresh arrivals from the south to replace those gone before. Bands of frightened antelope dashed past at twice the speed of their heavier plains- mates. The bison came at times in scattered bands, again in massed droves of thousands, and for three hours without a break the vast horde streamed past ; a hundred thou- sand tons of red meat on the hoof, a quarter- million sides of leather for the taking. And above the jar and rumble of the hoofs there sounded the deadly roll of the buffalo guns. Then the drive had passed. W'oodson 13 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST looked back over the trail of the run. The green range was dotted with dark specks as before, but these were still. He made out a dozen riders, the men from his own outfit, moving among the slain. He rode across a low ridge and joined Tom North. "Eight hundred head or thereabouts," the hide-hunter estimated. "Three days' skinning for all hands if the weather holds cool. More than half will sour on us, likely, if, it turns off hot. You start slitting 'em out while I bring the wagons up." The boy opened the hide of one animal and moved to the next, merely slitting the pelt and laying back the edges an inch from the meat, to be peeled off later by teams when the wagons should arrive. Off across the flats he could see men similarly engaged; and as he toiled he heard the dull roar of the buffalo guns far off to the north as another hide outfit got in its deadly work on the herd. 14 Ill THE spring hunt was over. Mart Woodson viewed the scene about him and found it good. Ten white-topped schooners and a dozen heavy trail wagons were drawn up in a circle round the camp. At a little distance the horses grazed under guard. Massive piles of dried hides, folded once each way, w r ere staked as so much wood, and for a hundred yards round the camp the last thou- sand hides were staked flat on the ground to cure. A stale, strong taint pervaded the whole air for a hundred miles each way, the rank odor of carcasses drying under the white glare of the sun. On every flat bench and in every bottom the bodies of the slain lay bunched in scores where the animals had been snaked to central spots by horses, their hoofs snubbed to stakes sledged deep through the prairie sod and their hides stripped off by means of chainhooks and teams. Between these valleys of the dead, scattered far and wide, ugly blots marred the range, the bloated remains of buffalo with the pelts left on. A portion of each kill had soured before the hides could be peeled, unavoidable loss when occasional IS THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST days of fierce heat had varied the usual cool, crisp run of spring. These bloated ones spoke of wasted ammunition freighted across great distances. That night the boy lay in his blankets and gazed up at the stars, his body weary from a strenuous day of fleshing pelts but his mind alert to the good days that were his to shape as he might see fit. It had been a great hunt. Seventeen thousand hides had been har- vested for division among a dozen men, a two months' kill. And this was but one small spot, a pinprick in the whole. From the Staked Plains to Abilene, from the Arkansas to the Platte, and from Old Fort Laramie to the Musselshell this was going on. Throughout a million square miles one hide outfit had rarely been beyond the sound of the guns as another made its kill. The rasp of a nighthawk floated down to him from above. The coyote chorus exulted in the night, the weird quavers rising from ten thousand throats as the little yellow wolves led their pups from the dens and prowled about the scene of slaughter to voice leering thanks for easy meat. Occa- sionally the aching wail of a gray buffalo split through all other sounds of the night, commanding a vast hush till some other of the big gray hunters answered. 16 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Woodson's mind was concerned with what he had best do next, the concern rising not from any possible lack of future occupation but from the untold variety of attractive alternatives crowding his thoughts. Hide- hunting was remunerative and to his liking. He might drift southeast from his present stand and run cows upon the range that was free to all. The fever for yellow metal had gripped the country and a swarm of pros- pectors scoured the western hills for gold. He might join their ranks and wrest a for- tune from the ground. Back in the hardwood hills where he had lived there were trees for the taking, millions of them for whomever would wield an ax. As he had traveled westward he had rarely been beyond sound of some sawmill's whirring rasp. Truly this land in which he lived was a land of plenty almost past belief. A voice spoke from close at hand, mur- muring softly as if to avoid reaching a single ear of all that sleeping camp, the voice of his chief, carrying a note of lament which the boy found difficult to associate with the old hide-hunter. Could it be that his casual stare, his seeming indifference to all that transpired, was but a mask assumed to cover some deep hurt? His words had expressed the exact opposite of the thought that ob- 17 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST sessed the mind of the boy ; for the meaning of plenty, once the line of actual necessity is crossed, is but relative, according to the viewpoint of the one who pronounces upon it. "The old days are gone," Tom North had said. "Gone for good and all." He too had known the great days of the fur trade. Millions had been gleaned yearly from the streams. Then, without warning, the beaver had disappeared. It was freely predicted that a few years would suffice to restore their old numbers, that soon the streams would once more swarm with fur. North had seen the time when a man might easily average a score of valuable pelts for each round of his traps and now, for a moment in the night, he allowed himself to brood upon the fact that he was reduced to peeling the heavy skins from the buffalo for a dollar a hide. "This killing ought to stop," North said. "It ought to be checked up some." The boy had heard this expressed before, infrequently, it is true, but coming from North it seemed unreal. "Why should we stop?" he asked. "Are we not free men ? Is not all this ours to draw from as we choose? It brings money into the country the sale of these hides. A free country for free men." "My own argument of a few years past," 18 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST North said. " Way back I saw the time when they took two hundred thousand beaver pelts a year from the Adirondack Hills alone. Take the country as a whole and there was fifty million dollars' worth of beaver shipped each year. There was talk of restricting the catch so they could hold them at that figure. We trappers raised the cry of 'A free country for free men.' We made extra hard drives for fur, the traders backing us up, and for a time there was eighty million dollars coming in each year instead of fifty. Then it was over. The fur trade died." "But the beaver will soon come back," Woodson urged. "Men who have seen those days claim that they will." North grunted his disbelief and for long minutes he was silent. The boy shifted un- easily in his blankets. "Once we 're through here we '11 make a start for up there beyond," North stated at last. "I 'd like to have a look at it." Woodson had no need to inquire as to what particular country the old hide-hunter had reference. The two men had frequently dis- cussed the fabled wonders of that land so recently made famous by Jim Bridger's im- possible tales. "We could swing west from here and move in from the north," the old man said. "Or 19 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST again we might quarter southeast and work up from the south. There 's a range of peaks that walls it in on the east and which men say can't be crossed. After freighting the hides it 's likely the south trail will be our best." Woodson was content with this first inti- mation that, once the hides were sold, his chief would set forth with him for the mythical country where the water flowed three ways. At daylight of a crisp morning early in September, the old man and the young, mounted and each with a led pack horse, rode from their night camp on the Roaring Fork of the Green which they had reached after many days on the trail. "This is one of the three," North said. "This water drains through the big canyon down Arizona way. I 've looked down into the gorge myself. From there it runs into that neck of the sea that splits up into Cali- fornia from the south. I stood there in 'forty- nine so I 'm telling you what I know." He pointed to the divide which reared to the north of them. " It 's over across there we 're wanting to go. The water on the far slope sheds to the west, the same as this, but it swings to the north and empties at the far corner, better than a thousand miles from where this runs in." The old plainsman had taught the boy to 20 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST read signs as others of his years are taught to read the printed page, and now he mo- tioned him to take the lead and choose their way. Out in the low country Woodson had found broad paths beaten deep in banks of the streams at every possible crossing point where, for centuries past, millions of hoofs had worn trails which converged at the shallows of easy fords. Here in the hills he found trails rutted deep by the hoofs of elk and mule deer. * An elk trail branched off up a tributary creek that headed back toward the divide he sought to cross. He turned his horse's feet upon it and held on. The trail was dim in the more open stretches and at times played out in the grassy meadows of the bottoms, but always, when the way narrowed and the going was rough, it appeared again to guide him on the easiest course. The way mounted abruptly and he found that in the hills the game trails converged at the passes as on the plains they combined at the fords, sharply defined through deep gorges, swinging away at odd angles to cross jutting spurs when the straight course was blocked by some sheer wall of rock, threading the open lanes in the matted spruce growth of down-timbered sidehills, pointing straight to passable breaks in the crumbling rims and at last leading out into the lowest saddle in the high divide. THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST The narrow valley of the Gros Ventre opened out below them. "The Grovant," North informed. "It flows west to the Snake. I 've cut the Snake down below a ways, maybe two hundred mile, but never as far up as this. We '11 follow the Grovant down and work north up the Snake." As they threaded the valley of the Gros Ventre the boy was impressed by the wealth of food. The open sidehills were clothed with a luxuriant stand of grass that grew to the knees of the horses. Near the con- fluence with the larger stream the country widened out ; great stretches of open country ; willow swamps marking the course of trickling spring seeps meandering across meadows rank with natural hay; grassy parks claiming a full half of the aspen hills lifting from the bottoms. A vast sagebrush flat flanked the near side of the river at one point and rose in succeeding tiers of flat benches; and here they had a touch of the outside plains, for the light dots that moved below them were antelope, twenty thousand ranging in sight at once in this gem of a valley hemmed in by mighty hills. They traveled north and every- where there was grass, feed for untold thou- sands of the grazing tribes. Three days after crossing the watershed from the Green they made their night camp on the shores of THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Jackson Lake. Even this far spot had not been immune from invasion by the trappers of long ago. Roving bands, sent out in the interests of the three great companies, had penetrated to the very base of the Tetons and harvested the thickest of the fur. But the trappers had gone with the fur trade into the annals of the past and perhaps not even the boot-print of a white man had marked the lake shore for twenty years. First the quiet beauty of the hardwood country had seemed all that was wonderful to the boy. He had passed through succeed- ing stages as the limitless horizons of the short-grass plains had called him, and later when he felt the spell of the rolling sage- clad foothills. Now the lure of the giant ranges claimed him for their very own. The mighty Tetons reared their crests across from him, towering five thousand feet sheer from the placid waters of the lake, their lower reaches clothed with dense jungles of spruce except where wild, tumbling ravines pitched down from the peaks and tore jagged rents through this softening garb of greenery. Above the trees vast sweeps of naked rock, glacier-studded and capped with perpetual snow, thrust their bald pinnacles to the skies. And the crystal waters of the lake seemed bottomless, the inverted reflections 23 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST of the peaks on the mirrored surface appear- ing to plunge their ragged points as many thousands of feet below the water line as they towered in actuality above it. In all Nature there is no sight more breathless, more calculated to impress man with his own pitiful insignificance, than this first glimpse of the Three Tetons across Jackson Lake. The bald ridges of the Hoback and the Gros Ventre hills shut the valley in to the south. It spread out to the east in rolling hills, open parks and sidehills fringed with the heavy green of spruce and silvery clumps of aspen. Valleys of lodgepole pine swept away toward the snow-capped peaks of the eastward ranges for which old Tom North knew no name. Miles and miles of beaver swamps, meadows rank with slough grass and broken by jungles of willow and birch flanked the northeast shores of the lake. Be- yond it to the north the Continental Divide spread a barrier as far as the eye could reach. West, the Grand Tetons stood guard over this basin rimmed in by lofty peaks. Mart Woodson looked first on the high country during the season which the hill tribes know as the Short Blue Moon. The mule-deer bucks had shed their garb of the season past and now stepped forth in new 24 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST short-haired coats of sleek blue-gray. The streams had passed the muddy summer flood tide swelled by melting drifts and now carried no clouding sediments in their flow, their waters a deep blue-green. A bluish haze hung in the hills and filtered a silvery luster over distant spruce slopes. Open ridges thrust their slender tongues back through stands of heavy timber, their crests capped with the pale blue-gray sage of the higher hills. The mass of far-off ranges loomed deep blue, outlined against the paler turquoise blue of the autumn sky; the Short Blue Moon of the hill country. Myriads of waterfowl, hatched in the depths of the beaver swamps, were being marshaled by their elders into great flocks preparatory to the southward migration which would set in with the cold days of fall. Thousands of big gray geese floated on the surface of the lake. A dozen varieties of ducks buzzed in vast swarms. Where the swamp merged with the parent body of water a hundred whooping cranes waded in the shallows, standing five feet tall, the most majestic birds in America, the snow-white plumage of the adults forming beautiful contrast to the pure golden buff of the young. Near them a thousand smaller relatives, the sand- hill cranes, executed a war dance on the oozy 25 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST surface of a mud bar. A clump of mixed spruce and cottonwoods sprouting from a knoll out in the swamp was built thick with broad flat nests of heavy sticks, a giant rook- ery of the great blue herons. The Tetons spread their lengthening shadows across the picture as the boy pick- eted one horse in a grassy park and turned the rest out to graze. The scene blurred; the purple shadows deepened, to merge imperceptibly into the velvet black of a mountain night, and the silent hills woke to life. It was the running time of the antlered game. The lordly rulers of the elk tribe were feeling the urge of the season and descending from their summer homes in the high pockets, coming down to the valleys where dwelt the cows. A mighty herd bull on the shores of the lake thrust forth his head and sent his clarion challenge pealing across the hills. Another answered. As if at a given signal a score of others chimed in, the shrill squeal- ing whistles of young aspirants mingling with the rich full bugles of the six-point monarchs who bossed herds of their own. From far and near the whole expanse of the hills rang with the silvery peals of lovelorn bulls. A huge grizzly shuffled silently on broad 26 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST padded feet and stood swaying from side to side as he tested the wind from the camp. A chorus of yelping barks rose from close at hand as a band of cow elk regarded the dancing rays of the fire. A hundred big- horn sheep peered from the slopes of the Tetons at the red reflection, a slender thread of fire reaching out across the still surface to connect them with the glowing spark on the far shore of the lake. Music of unseen wings filled the night, the soft wing-whistles of snow-flying birds fre- quently varied by the hissing screech of some flock of speedsters hurtling through the air with tremendous velocity. The weird whoops of the great white cranes rose above the con- tented chuckles of half a million ducks, the harsh squawks of herons and the clamor of big gray honkers. A volley of wild, clear notes dropped into the medley from on high as a band of trumpeter swans winged up the lake. The beaver were busy making their food caches against the lean days of winter, and scarce a passing minute but was punctuated by the whack of a broad tail upon the waters of some beaver pond out in the swamp. A twelve-inch cottonwood, undermined by their scoring teeth, toppled and crashed down, the hollow boom of its impact with the water 27 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST filling the valley and rolling on across the hills in overlapping waves of sound to be tossed in rumbling echoes from rim to rim. And the sound reached the ears of a hundred thousand elk on their native range. IV THE Bannocks of the west and the Black- feet of the north spoke of the stream as the Yellow Rock and early in the century the whites had so labeled the unknown country which shrouded its head reaches, calling it the Yellowstone. The Crows pointed west- ward from their country in the Bighorns and referred to an ancient legend, handed down through generations to their people, which told of the land of the Two Ocean Waters. When the first roving bands of free trappers penetrated the country of the Gros Ventres, on the Snake, the Indians pointed north and shook their heads. "Burning Mountain. No good," they told the white men. All tribes referred to it in a general way as the Land of Many Rivers, and all whites knew it as Colter's Hell, from the wondrous and incredible tales which John Colter, the first pioneer to look upon its marvels, had given broadcast to the world. And it was with mixed emotions, tempered both by the rev- erent awe of the red men and the irreverent 29 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST disbelief of the whites, that Mart Woodson pushed ever deeper into the heart of the un- known hills. A week after leaving that first camp on the shores of Jackson Lake the two men mounted a divide. They had pressed north- ward through a network of lakes and con- necting streams. The heavy timber on the crest of the divide obscured their view as they took the steep drop at the head of a tiny stream which broke down the far slope. Throughout the day they threaded the tan- gled blow-downs of the stream bed and just at nightfall came out upon the point of a spur which overlooked the little river into which it flowed. Woodson held up his hand, believing that he had come upon the haunt of some un- known tribe, some mighty nation numbering ten thousand lodges. A broad bottom spread out before them, closed in again far down the valley, guarded by the black bulk of the hills, and against this somber background in- numerable vaporous columns showed in milk- white relief. From the sheltering fringe of trees behind him old Tom North peered down upon the spectacle which the boy mistook for the smoke from ten thousand teepees pitched out in the flats. "The Firehole," he said. "The Burning 30 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Mountain of the Grovants Colter's Hell. We 've come smack on to it." It is at this time of evening, an hour after sundown, when the white glare of the day has passed and thousands of steam jets show in pallid outline against the encircling tim- bered slopes, that the mind of man is most apt to comprehend the immensity of the Geyser Basin. As they gazed upon it, a column of steam and water rose in the air, seemed to recede only to gather fresh impetus from some unseen force below, rose with new strength and tossed its scalding pillar two hundred feet aloft, then sank back, descending slowly as if resisting the destructive power that sucked its fragile grandeur back to earth. Every hour throughout the night, with a per- sistent regularity which impressed the boy as later it impressed the millions, this monster of the deeps sought to uproot its fetters and ascend on high. The hiss of escaping steam filled the gather- ing dusk as the whispers of terrestrial spirits, while from beneath issued deep rumblings such as might spring from the booming tom- toms of subterranean gods. For days there- after the two traveled through the miles of Colter's Hell. They peered into flower-like pools of boiling water shaded with rainbow hues, viewed scalding jets pouring from vents 31 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST in the valley floor and stood on the brink of caldrons stewing with oil paints of gray tints and of pink ; watched giant columns of water flung skyward to dissolve in rainbow mists till the boy's brain was surfeited with the steady procession of all the fresh marvels of the world rolled into one. It was with a surge of relief a sense of coming out from the occult to the real, an escape from the freakishly unnatural to the majestic serenity of the silent hills that he led the way across a high plateau to look down into a vast gorge hemmed in by brilliant yellow walls, the Grand Canyon of the Yellow- stone, and he slept that night to the hollow pound of the falls. North knew from this that since leaving Jackson Lake, somewhere among this inter- lacing whirl of lakes and streams, they had crossed the great divide of a continent, for the waters of the Yellowstone found their way to a different sea than that which re- ceived those of the Snake ; yet they had failed to come upon the fabled stream whose waters flowed both ways. They turned up country and followed the shores of the Yellowstone and at last, after many long days on the game trails and in following out a dozen false leads, they stood in the dip of a high divide. A creek wandered along its broad crest, 32 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST flowing down the gentle slope from melting drifts above, splitting into a dozen courses to wander through the flat meadow in the dip, collecting again in two channels to fall away on either side of the pass. One trickle drained toward the Grand Tetons which they could see against the sky, flowing by way of the Snake and the Columbia to empty in the Pacific. The other, they knew, drained on the side that shed toward the broad lake of the Yellowstone which they had passed three days before, and from there found its way through the Missouri and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Off to the south they could see the dim outlines of the pass through which they had crossed days back notching the divide between the Gros Ventre and the Green. Beyond it the water drained through the Grand Canyon of the Colorado to the California Gulf. Truly the water from these hills flowed three ways. The valley of the Firehole had verified the Burning Mountain of the Gros Ventres; the brilliant yellow walls of the canyon had justified the appellation given it by the Ban- nocks and the Blackfeet of the north ; and here, under their very feet, the two men found incontrovertible evidence of the truth of that ancient Crow legend which referred to the Two Ocean Waters. 33 V THE war chief of the Crows, and later old Tom North, had said that the beaver were gone from the streams, yet, in all his travels since striking the mouth of the Gros Ventre, Woodson had rarely been beyond sight of their workings. Every soggy bottom was padded thick with beaver drags from one pond to the next. The sloping banks of the streams were cut by the slides of bank beaver and every aspen grove on the lake shores showed the marks of their teeth. The course of each seeping spring-fed trickle was dammed again and again, leading down in terraced series of backed-up pools with great beaver houses of logs and mud rising above their waters. It seemed to him that the numbers of the furred engineers were legion. In this high country the streams had not been trapped out to the last pelt and the fur was on the in- crease since the trap lines had been pulled. Even in the face of this evidence of plenty he knew that throughout the country as a whole there was not one beaver in the streams 34 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST to every ten thousand that had used them in the past; but from the abundance of fur signs he was confident that his winter's catch would rival that of the half -wild trappers of an earlier day. With but two packs they had been able to transport only the bare necessities for a winter in the hills, the traps constituting a full half of the total weight and bulk brought in on the two pack animals, so with no other tools than their axes and knives the two men set about making themselves comfortable for the winter months. Woodson selected a grove of eight-inch lodgepole, the trees towering a hundred feet without a crook, their slender trunks rising as straight and true as the barrel of a rifle. A score of these he felled and cut into proper lengths for house logs while North notched the ends half through. By fitting these notches to overlap the ends, they carried up the corners of a hut ten feet by twelve. The boy poured water on the earth at one rear corner and tamped the spot with the smooth end of a log. He carried flat stones from a rock slide and North built a rude fireplace on this hearth of beaten earth, carry- ing a rough chimney up the corner till it protruded two feet above the open top of the 35 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST hut and cementing the stones with puddled clay. They roofed the sloping top with five-inch jack pine, stripped each crack with a smaller pole and covered the whole with a deep layer of earth. A crude opening two feet by four had been left in the front of the hut and this sole aperture was covered with an elk hide to shut out the cold. The cracks were chinked with mud and their winter's shelter stood complete. Then North set forth to instruct the boy in the ways of the trap line as formerly he had taught him all he knew of the trails of heavier game. The first soft snowfalls of the season had melted, save on the sheltered slopes of heavy timber, but for two weeks every night frost had formed a thin skin of ice on the still surface of the beaver ponds. Two hundred yards from camp they made the first set of the trap line. A beaver slide came up the banks of the Yellowstone and followed through the rank grass of the meadow to an aspen grove where this particular family of bank beaver carried on their logging operations. A score of fresh stumps and two newly felled trees gave evidence that they were still at work. Twenty feet from the slide and some ten inches under water North set the trap, bed- ding it on a flat rock which he pressed in the 36 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST mud. Beyond it the bank sloped sharply into three feet of water. He fastened the chain to a heavy stone and slid this drag gently down into the deeper water offshore. Every animal is endowed with glands secret- ing the general scent of its tribe, thus being easily classified by the noses of other beasts. There can be no doubt that each individual has a distinctive scent of its own, as identi- fication among animals is conducted almost exclusively by scent, not by sight as is the case with man. Any beaver in a colony will rise to the scent of a stranger invading its neighborhood. North fashioned a mud pile on the bank, such as beaver throw up for purposes of identification, and into this sign heap, as it is called by trappers, he thrust a tiny portion of beaver castor obtained from an animal he had shot in a different locality. They worked down the Yellowstone to its junction with the Thorofare and made a dozen such sets for bank beaver. North swung aside to investigate every beaver pool dammed up on the little streams that mean- dered across the bottoms to join the river. Here the beaver lived in houses built up in the center of the ponds. The water in the majority of these pools was shallow near the margins and he made no sets except where 37 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST there was drowning water immediately off- shore. For the rest he contented himself with locating the food caches where the thrifty colonists had covered patches of the pond floors with willows and sections of heavy green aspen logs jammed down into the mud ; these observations were made with an eye to future and more cunning sets after the ice should form. They turned up the Thoro- fare and worked that stream after the same manner. The following day their course lay up- stream from camp and covered the head of the Yellowstone and its tributary creeks. The boy carried his own traps and followed a separate route, and when they reached the cabin at nightfall the last of their fifty beaver traps was in the water, waiting with gaping jaws for the first unwary foot to be thrust upon its pan. North had noted that the ducks had sud- denly deserted the streams and pools of the high country. The beaver houses were cov- ered with a fresh coating of wet mud. And the old man knew the signs. "She 's going to tighten up," he said. We 're in for a stiff freeze to-night." So, in imitation of the beaver, they carried soft mud from the streams and plastered the outside of their hut to seal the crevices which 38 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST had worked through as the clay chinking baked dry and drew apart. The hills were silent, lacking even the rustle of a breeze to stir the pines, and into this dead calm a gripping chill was beginning to settle down from the peaks. During the night the mud plaster froze into an iron shell which shut out the frost. Toward morning it warmed, and the first spitting flakes of a storm sifted down through the trees; when Woodson drew aside the elk hide to peer forth in the first gray light he looked out upon a white world, the ghostly flakes still falling. Then he reached behind him for his gun. Fifty yards down an aisle through the trees a monster silver tip stood curiously survey- ing this strange structure of logs and mud which had sprung up in the center of his range. For fifty years he had roamed the head reaches of the Yellowstone and had never before looked upon such work as this. North peered over the boy's shoulder as he steadied the gun against the logs and looked down the barrel at the bear. The shot went true and as the heavy slug from the Sharp ripped through his chest the big grizzly loosed a roar that rivaled the deep bellow of the buffalo gun. He tore at the rent with raking claws then charged headlong toward the two men in the door, 39 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST intent upon crushing them down and mauling them with the last of his strength. He wavered in his stride and lurched down in the snow; a fortunate kill, for the bears would soon take to their winter dens and sleep the long sleep till spring, blocked in by heavy drifts; and the men needed lard in camp. They stripped the pelt from the baldface and laid bare the thick layer of fat stored up to nourish his great frame through the lean winter months. Hour after hour, while it snowed outside, they tried out the drip- ping chunks of fat over a slow fire on the hearth, mixing with it a portion of the solid tallow of an elk to lend stiffness and body to the soft lard of the bear. This they drained off into their few pots and pans and placed outside where it quickly cooled, then dumped it from the containers in solid molds to be stored on the roof of the hut. The storm shov/ed no symptoms of lifting and they set forth the next day to run the lower trap line, traveling in a foot of soft feathery snow. The ponds were frozen over but the flow of the running water had kept the streams open, moving black and smooth be- tween shores of white. Woodson looked over the bank at the first set below the camp. The trap was gone. 40 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST A few feet out in the river and well below the surface a big furry shape wavered in the current. North hooked the trap chain with a forked stick and drew their catch ashore, a three-year-old beaver in late fall fur. He had made for the deep water when the jaws clamped on his foot and the rock weight had anchored him there to drown, North's reason for choosing the set adjacent to deep water and toggling the trap to a rock. He could thus make use of smaller traps of much less weight to pack and yet be sure of retaining every victim that stepped upon a trap pan. The run yielded twelve pelts. For four days it stormed without a break and the snow lay thirty inches on the level. During the last two days North was busy fashioning snowshoes from tough saplings of mountain alder and webbing them with elk hide thongs. A savage wind followed the cessation of the snow, lashing the branches and shaking the banked flakes from the trees. It scoured the snow from the ridges and piled it deep in the bottoms and in the heavy timber of the slopes. They kept to the stout log shelter out of the fierce blast of biting crystals that hurtled before the drive of the wind, fleshing the pelts of their first catch and listening to the screech of the gale through the trees. When they peered out- 41 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST side the hills seemed alive with ghostly shapes as the elk herds started drifting before the storm, the backs of the animals crusted with white and their hoofs making no sound on the feathery carpet underfoot, a silent army of wraiths headed for new stamping grounds. "Most of this snow will lay in the hills till spring," North said. "The elk are bunching to pull out of the high country and work down to the winter range. We '11 have to get our meat." The wind died down at last and the sun flared forth. They set out on their new webs, traveling separately, to make the rounds of the whole trap line, and that night found thirty fresh pelts in camp. A hundred thou- sand elk had grazed on the Thorofare and the Yellowstone before the storm. Now the meadows were empty, the broad plateaus devoid of life. North had noted great trails plowed through the snow where thousands had drifted down the bottoms toward the lower feed. Others led out through the passes in the surrounding divides. "There 's enough elk summer in these hills to feed the world," North said. "But they winter lower down. To-morrow we '11 lay in enough meat to see us through." The big droves had gone but there were still 42 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST hundreds of laggards in the high valleys and with the dawn of the next day the silence of the white hills was shattered by the reports of North's old Henry rifle and the boy's heavy Sharp. They downed a score of elk and for two days were busy dressing them out and hanging the quarters up to freeze. Then they turned to the business of trapping to the exclusion of all else. There came occasional warm days which settled the snow, others when low-scudding clouds obscured the peaks and shed new layers of white on the old packed drifts. As long as there was sufficient open water on the streams and the bank beaver kept the mouths of their slides free of ice, the two men used the same sets as at first. They worked hard at their lines and averaged better than the ten hides a day, and at night they sat before the fire on the hearth and fleshed out the pelts. Day by day they increased their lines and brought their smaller traps into play. Some of these they placed back in sheltered cave-ins under the banks, where mink were most apt to prowl as they traveled down the ice. Marten lines were thrown across the timbered divides separating the tributary streams. With these last a spring pole served the pur- pose of the rock weights of the beaver sets. Woodson learned to place a pole through the 43 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST forks of a tree, pull the light end down and slip it under a wooden peg driven into a spruce trunk, the trap toggled to the slender tip of the pole. The first leap of a trapped marten released the tip from beneath the peg. The heavy butt of the pole dropped to earth on the far side of the forks to swing the light end aloft and leave both trap and marten dangling high in the air. Winter tightened down in earnest and the last strips of open water pinched out. The beaver no longer prowled abroad for food but lived on the caches of willow, aspen and birch stored long past in the mud. The slides in the banks were snowed under, their mouths clogged with ten inches of ice, and so the bank sets were pulled. North initiated the boy into the mysteries of the under-ice set in the ponds. With his web he scooped the snow from above a food cache noted earlier in the fall and cut a hole through the ice. Thirty inches below its under edge they could see the soft mud of the bottom. He drove a sharpened wood peg into a green aspen pole and over this hooked one spring of a double- spring trap, then bent the other back on the far side of the pole and lashed it fast. When he thrust this down far into the mud of the bottom the trap stood straight out from the 44 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST upright log, both springs cocked well back to either side. This green log was food, and once the ice re-formed over the open hole it was wedged in place. A beaver, in rearing to cut off the stick at the under edge of the ice, would rest his forefoot on the protruding shelf of the trap eight inches below. Thereafter the boy used this set. The mercury hung for weeks at twenty below, then sank again. The edge of the elk hide which sheltered the doorway was perpetually fringed with a rim of white frost as the cold blast from without met and battled with the warm air seeping through from the inside of the hut. A foot of spruce boughs, packed behind a log that lay parallel to one side of the room and mattressed down with an elk hide, served as their bunk. Over them the half- tanned pelt of the mighty bear was added to their meager supply of blankets to keep them warm at night. They lived almost exclusively upon meat, elk steaks occasionally varied by a meal of beaver tails, lynx cutlets as tender and white as veal, or a few trout caught through holes in the ice. Infrequently, as a special treat, they drew upon their slender store of flour and baked a meager portion of frying-pan bread, washing down the heavy bannock with a pot of tea. 45 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST North's strength waned as the winter advanced and he could no longer cover his full share of the line. Woodson took over first one tributary creek, then an extra marten line on the ridges, till at last he was covering the whole of their lines while the old hide- hunter stayed within to prepare the meals and care for their catch. For a time the horses had fared well on a high plateau exposed to the sweep of the wind which kept the cured grass free of snow. When this feed played out Woodson moved them down the country to a little side valley where warm springs laid bare small patches of grass. The snow lay five feet on the level across the open bottoms, and in the timber it was at places twice that depth. As the boy fol- lowed his lone trail over the trap line the solitude and the white silence of the hills grew on him and held him. He had come to know and love the high country in both its fall and winter moods. He had yet to see the spring. In the fall the whole hills, blazing with warm color, had teemed with life. Now they were but a dead white expanse with no night sounds to relieve the frozen silence; never the rustle of a wing or the cheep of a bird. Even the garrulous red squirrels had withdrawn to their holes and the gruff hoot of the great gray owls was 46 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST missing; only the popping of the ice under the clamp of intense frost could be heard. The trap line now extended down to Lake Yellowstone. This vast sheet of water, tucked under the shadow of the peaks, was frozen over and buried beneath the snow, its hundred and forty miles of surface stretch- ing away in an unbroken plain of white, un- marred by so much as a footprint save where some traveling otter left his tracks from one air hole to the next. Added to this was the lure of the trap line. There is that hope and expectancy, the urge to visit the next set and find what it holds ; the variety and uncertainty of the catch. It gets into the blood, and once a man winters on the trap line he never forgets. He may shoot till the slaughter palls, may fish the streams till he tires of the sport, but till the day he dies his blood will speed up when his mind travels back over the trap line ; to the casing boards for marten and mink, the beaver hides stretched flat, to a good catch of fur in a winter camp. Often the boy stopped in the little valley of warm springs which sheltered the horses. They looked for his coming and at such times he spoke to them as he would have con- versed with other men. Fur was increasingly difficult to catch and 47 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST the yield of the line was small. Bright days came to start brief thaws between the long frozen nights. The days lengthened and some few nights carried a breath of spring. The drifts were settling; a few trickles of water seeped under the snow and the wind rotted and honeycombed the ice on the ponds. Open lanes showed in the streams. The fur of the marten was beginning to slip and the flesh side of the pelts showed blue, so Woodson pulled his traps. But the spring coat of the beaver is better furred than the one he wears in the fall and he worked on these at every pond which revealed fresh sign. Open patches appeared in the meadows, the hardy green grass sprouting clear to the foot of the drifts. Then Woodson sprang the last of his traps. He had made a good catch; twelve hun- dred pelts, mainly beaver, but with a goodly showing of marten and mink and a few skins of otter, foxes and cats. The fur would have to be relayed out, for there was far more than their slender pack string could transport at a single trip. Woodson waited now only for the passes to clear of snow and afford good going so he could make a start with old Tom North. And while he waited the dead hills came to 48 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST life. The first leaves shot out from deciduous trees. The bears came from their winter dens and left their tracks on the melting spring drifts as they prowled the hills in search of food after the six months' fast. The little squirrels chattered and scolded and the harsh squawk of the big gray jays answered them from the timber. Chipmunks came out to sun themselves on the rocks and explored the windfall jams that rose above the drifts. The skies were streaked with north-bound fliers and the beaver ponds were covered with mating ducks. Then the elk came back to their summer range. They drifted up the bottoms in great droves, moving up from the lower Yellowstone ; others streamed in through the passes from all sides. The land was alive with meat as the mighty bands came back to the summer feed. Woodson had forgotten that there was such abundant life in the world and as the herds continued to pour into the meadows he wondered if even the bison on the plains could compare in numbers with this royal tribe that swarmed in every valley of the hills. 49 VI RUMORS heretofore discredited were dis- covered to be founded on facts, the facts duly recorded in the log of accredited explorers and heralded to the world. But wherever men fared, no matter how secluded the pocket of the hills to which they penetrated, they found evidence that some solitary wan- derer had been before them. His horses had grazed in hidden meadows and they found the ashes of his camp fires on the shores of unmapped lakes. It was said that the range that rimmed the new land in on the east was impenetrable, that no man could cross through its wild passes ; but in the dead of winter, long after the Crow tribe had taken to winter quarters in the lower valleys, some white man's lone trail was often seen leading down out of these peaks which others shunned even in the warmth of summer. He was ever welcome in the wigwams of the Crows and frequently he tarried for a few days in their villages, but his restlessness always drove him forth to leave his tracks in the secluded fastnesses of the winter hills. When a party of explorers 50 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST pressed westward up the valley of the Stink- ing Water to determine if an entrance might be effected from the east, they found the trails of horses leading up a tributary stream which broke in from the west where the main river flared back in a wide sweeping curve to the north and east. These tracks led up an elk trail, threaded the mazes of a frowning gorge, crossed the lower extremities of late- melting snow banks and came out at last upon the Yellowstone Slope. The news of the segregation of these hills and valleys he loved had brought to Mart Woodson another of those rare moments of exaltation. The invariable theme of his childhood tales had dealt with the near- serfdom of the inhabitants of far countries and had built up in his mind the belief that the people of other lands were chattels. Now, as if in direct refutation of those ancient policies which decreed that the land was God-given for the benefit and pleasure of the few, his country had set aside the wonder- spot of the world for the enjoyment of the many. This vast reservation, more than three thousand square miles of it, belonged to the people as a whole, a joint estate to descend to unborn generations for a thousand years to come. Never a foot of it could come into the possession of individuals or concerns. 51 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST What more could a man ask than to live his life upon his own estate comprising hun- dreds of square miles? This belonged to him. A thousand might share it, or ten thousand, but his own rights would ever remain the same. He could make his night fire on the shores of some stream, leave it the next morning and never look upon it again till the last day of his life, but always with the certain knowledge that on that day he could return and say, "Here is my camp," and no man could wave him off. But a man should know his own property, so Mart Woodson set forth to explore every nook of this vast estate which had so un- expectedly been willed to him. His wants were few. He killed his meat as he needed it and when he felt the necessity of gaining a few dollars with which to buy supplies he worked with the construction gang that had been sent here to hew out a primitive road system through the People's Park while the nearest railroad point was yet five hundred miles away; but mostly he roamed the hills and whenever seen was mounted on a bay mare that mothered a mare colt. He scoured the hills for gold in summers and panned the streams from the Flathead to the Green, prospected the ledges for quartz from Big Wing River to the Galla- 52 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST tin. When a party of explorers verified the existence of the stream which flowed to both seas and heralded to the world their find of Two Ocean Pass, they found also a low mound of earth surmounted by a headboard slabbed out with an ax and rudely carved with the words "Tom North," testimony that in this spot men had lived and died before they came. Jim Bridger's tale of the mountain of black glass had roused a shriek of derision that echoed round the earth, yet in time others found it as he had said they would, and as they gazed upon the obsidian cliff they found the tracks of a mare and colt along its base. Homeric mirth had rocked the world at Bridger's assertion that he had caught fish in the icy waters of a lake and cooked them in boiling springs without rising from his seat or removing his prey from the hook. When explorers reached this spot they found the bones of fish upon the rocks. The lone wanderer had once more preceded them and cooked his meal of trout a month before they came. And it was Woodson himself who now came in for a share of ridicule and met general disbelief when he told men of the petrified forest he had found. It stood on a steep sidehill cut away by the action of water. 53 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Tier upon tier it rose, succeeding layers ex- posed to view, fifteen periods of forestation one above the other. Near the base were stumps more than a dozen feet in diameter, relics of the ages past, when tropical vegeta- tion flourished here. Above these ancient ones, in successive accumulation, was the evidence of the gradual cooling of the earth on down to date, the top strata containing vegetation of the present age. Here were not merely crumbling fragments of bygone periods but exact reproductions, the pre- served record of the whole ; bark and twigs intact, ferns and shrubbery, even to the buds, held in delicate tracery of stone and sprouting from the outcroppings to the cliff. But in Woodson's case the disbelief was not so widespread. Men were beginning to be- lieve all things possible of this wondrous corner of the earth. It was decided that he should lead a party to the spot, but when they sought for him the wanderer was gone. Years later he led men to the ledges and they found it as he had said, the most complete record of its kind in the world. Woodson had moved on in search of new lands and for months he traveled into the west, moving by easy stages with his little pack string, sampling the ledges and panning the streams en , route. Everywhere there 54 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST was food in plenty and he lived off the country as he roamed. He came at last into a land whose natural wealth staggered his imagina- tion, the giant forests of the northwest coast. There were stretches where he might travel for weeks without once leaving the timber; and such timber ! Fir, spruce and cedar side by side, each monster capable of furnishing from within its own mighty trunk the lumber for a small village. They stood ten to eighteen feet through at the butts, rising with barely perceptible lessening of dimension, towering three hundred feet aloft, two thirds of their height without a limb. From these a man might cut beams six feet through by a hundred feet in length as easily as eight-inch board stuff is cut from the average tree. Week after week he wandered through this king of forests, the ferns growing to his saddle skirts. There was one stretch of a hundred miles each way, covered with a solid stand of the finest timber known to man. He lingered in this tract for a solid year. Here, in this one stretch, he estimated, was enough lumber to rebuild the world, lumber that was clear, straight-grained and without a knot. He was a man of the open, attuned to Nature's varying moods ; he had felt the different spells exerted by mountain, lake and plain and thought that he knew them all ; 55 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST yet here was something new. There was a hush in the dim aisles of this mightiest of all forests, a reverent silence rarely broken. It was so completely roofed over by the tufted tops as to almost exclude the light. Even the night sounds were subdued as if the wild things hesitated to raise their voices above the softest croon and cheep necessary for communication among themselves. Woodson some way disliked to shatter the silence with his voice and when he spoke to his horses it was in the modulated tones one uses in some ancient cathedral freighted with reverent memories. After a year the call of the Yellowstone drew him on the back trail. As he traveled he sometimes pondered about that mark he would make for himself in the world. Yet there was no hurry. There was undreamed plenty of everything in this land of his. One had but to choose his course, dip in and help himself from the storehouse that was inexhaustible, Nature's storehouse that re- plenished itself without help. He reflected that ever since history began, this natural reservoir had been refilled more rapidly than it could possibly be depleted by man. A world of plenty; leather for all the world from the buffalo of the plains; hardwood timber without end to the eastward; free 56 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST grass for fifty million cows ; meat for the na- tion from the antelope of the plains and the elk and mule deer of the hills ; wealth untold for those who would seek for it and burrow in the ground for gold; and in this great un- touched forest of the northwest coast was enough lumber to roof the earth. He smiled and slapped the brown mare on the neck as a whimsical thought crossed his mind. "She did n't forget a thing," he said. "She did n't leave one thing out. There 's enough of everything to go round and a lot to spare. Back in the Yellowstone, where we 're headed for, there 's enough natural and unnatural wonders to entertain the people of the world. She did n't even leave that out plenty of everything for us all." As he traveled eastward his desire to look again upon this best land of all increased and he made longer packs. Soon it was rumored that the lone wanderer, for so long a part of the Park, had returned to roam once more in the hills of the Yellowstone. He knew the valleys of warm springs where his horses might winter while others were forced to drive their stock to the lower country. He prospected far and wide in summer but always he came back to winter within the limits of his own estate. After a lapse of perhaps fifteen years since 57 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Woodson and Old Tom had quit the plains, a little pack train was seen winding down the east slope of the hills. The man rode a bay mare that mothered a mare colt. In the rear of the string still another bay mare, ancient and decrepit, pensioned for long service and unburdened by a pack, trailed stiffly after the rest. The man told those he met along the trails that he was headed for the lower country to join a hide outfit for one last buffalo hunt on the plains. Men smiled at the naive plans of this Rip Van Winkle who had been alseep in the hills; for the buffalo was gone. Woodson knew that the men from his old outfit Hanson, Cleve, McCann and all the rest would be wherever the most of the shaggy beasts had congregated for the southward drift of fall. But when he made inquiry he found that their names were un- known to the present-day dwellers of the foothills. Men told him that the buffalo was no more. That the last of them had been killed off to make room for the settler's cows. As he traveled east he experienced a series of surprises. Stockmen's cabins showed at every water hole where, but a few years past, there had been no human habitation within two hundred miles. All this was as it should be, he reflected; a wild country 58 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST tamed and made habitable for man. It was clear that the buffalo had to go to make room for the cows. But the job had certainly been sweeping and thorough. He crossed vast stretches where domestic stock had not yet arrived but the way had been paved for them years in advance of their coming, for not a single buffalo track could he find. Little towns had sprung up with amazing rapidity. Out in the long desolate stretch between Lander and Rawlins he covered forty-two miles unmarked by a water hole, an arid region where domestic stock could not live but where the buffalo might have ranged in thousands ; but here too they had been wiped out to the last hoof. It came to him that he knew of enough waste areas, as yet untouched by cows, to support a half- million head of buffalo. They would have constituted a source of revenue for many years to come. Men spoke vaguely of the "lost herd" that lived in some unknown spot and would one day repopulate these waste stretches with buffalo. Woodson could see that all this development was for the best ; there were now homes where no homes stood before. But a vague uneasiness assailed him, a sense of something gone amiss with a popular idol. Some way it seemed that he had been warned of this. Some for- 59 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST gotten prophecy welled up out of the past to clamor for expression at the threshold of his consciousness. It troubled him that he should not quite place the thing and he attempted to shake it off. He left his horses with a cowman and held on to the east. The old trails where once the prairie schooners and the oxbows had wound interminably to the far horizon were no longer traveled. Steel rails stretched away in their stead; and the creak of wheels and leather and the bawls of plodding oxen, all these were replaced by the rattle and roar of freight cars and the screech of the locomo- tives' whistles ; city streets wound where there had been naught but dog towns on blistering flats. Truly development was wonderful and he rejoiced with the rest over this sweeping transformation, the swiftest and most com- plete reclamation in the history of the world. But again the still small voice assailed him from within and whispered that a good and worthy job had been just a trifle too well done. A cold fall storm was driving down from the nortn and overtook him in the salt- marsh country of Western Kansas. The waterfowl scurried ahead of it. Every pond and slough, each broad prairie lake and 60 Great white cranes stalked majestically in the open flats. Page 61. THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST marshy bottom was covered with members of the feathered horde en route to the winter quarters on the Gulf. Flock followed flock in an endless procession, streaking the sky. The prairies were covered with feeding geese. Great white cranes stalked majestically in the open flats, traveling in bands of hundreds, and at night the wild whoops of overhead squadrons almost drowned the clamor of oncoming hordes of geese. This evidence of abundance cheered him. He estimated that he saw over a million birds a day; and he reflected that everywhere east and west of him this great migration was going on; the east coast and the west, the Mississippi fly- way and the course of every inland river ; all were experiencing this same deluge of birds headed into the south. Nowhere had he seen so much bird life except during the pigeon flights in the hardwood country of his boyhood home. There he had seen the skies blackened with wild pigeons, had seen limbs broken from the trees by the sheer weight of thousands of roosting birds. The shock of finding the buffalo gone from the plains in a' few short years was counteracted by this fresh evidence of plenty. It was in Dodge that his trail crossed that of Hanson, a man from his old outfit. Hanson, with a younger man named Rice, was hunting 61 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST antelope for the hides. The two spoke of old friends. Cleve had gone to the lumber camps of the northwest coast, Hanson in- formed, and McCann to the hardwood belt to the east. They had quit the hunting. Antelope were fleet and it was difficult to stalk them in the flats. Hanson had known the time when all hands might kill and skin an average of twenty buffalo to the man each day. He now lamented the necessity of hunting the wary pronghorn for less than a dollar a hide. A man was doing well to average four a day. "The old days are gone," he said. "Things are different now. It 's hard pickings for a man to make a living in times like these." But Rice looked forth on the world with the optimism of youth. It was a land of plenty in which he lived. He had planned a hunt in the hills of Western Colorado and urged Woodson to throw in with them. "There 's millions of deer up there," he said. "They 're paying three dollars apiece for venison saddles at the mines. I 've seen ten thousand mule deer boiling through the passes, all in sight at once, when they gathered from the Gore Range and the Rabbit Ear to drift down to the Oak Hills for the winter. There 's deer without end. I hunted up there last year. We loaded thirty four-horse freight 62 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST wagons with deer saddles, high as we could lash 'em on, all from a two-day kill in one pass as they came streaming down, a thou- sand to the band. There 's good money in meat-hunting for the mines. You better throw in with us, Mart, and come along." They urged their case but Woodson would not join. The rapidity with which old condi- tions had slipped past him filled him with a sense of bewilderment. He could not get his start, as he had intended, by hide-hunting on the plains. That day had gone, and some way he could see no future in hunting deer to supply Denver and the Colorado mining towns with meat. Perhaps he would better go to the lumber camps, either east or west, and take up that end. There was more permanency to that. He could not make up his mind and decided at last to go back to the quiet hills of the Yellowstone for one final look around while making his decision. 63 VII THE road loop had been hacked out of the hills so that sightseers might tour the main points of interest in four-horse coaches. As Mart Woodson held the reins over the lead four and led a long file of stages down toward the basin of the Mammoth Hot Springs, completing a round started ten days before, the hills echoed to the strains of a bugle ; twinkling fires gleamed in the falling dusk. A troop of cavalry had pitched camp in the basin and military rule had supplanted the regime of lawlessness. A vague rule had permitted the killing of game to answer the necessities of campers and acted as an unrestricted license to slaughter everything that moved. Recently it had been superseded by a law prohibiting all hunting within the limits of the reserva- tion, but that law was not enforced. Men en- gaged in killing for the market stood on their rights as free men. Was not the game the property of all and from which each one could draw as he chose? Meat hunters sold their game at good prices to the permanent camps along tourist routes ; trappers worked the 64 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST country for fur and gold seekers prospected the Park at will. The beaver had disappeared from Falls River and their fresh cuttings were few on the Lewis, the Bechler and the Snake. The slaughter went on unchecked. The new commandant clamped down on various offenders and forbade them the free- dom of the Park. The cry was raised that the rights of free-born men were being ar- bitrarily curtailed and, as always, this gained a following. Hostility toward the new regime smoldered throughout the hills, but the commandant calmly pursued his way. Buildings for quartering a few troopers were erected at several strategic points within the reservation and the men stationed therein set about their long patrols to detect and crush out the abuses that had reigned supreme for so long a time. The troopers were un- familiar with the ways of the hills. It was a wild, rough tract they had to guard and the poachers were a hard lot with a thorough knowledge of the country. A corps of civilian scouts was organized to supplement the work of the troopers, men recruited from among those who had roamed the country for long years before the soldiers came. It was then that the driver of the lead coach crawled down from his seat at the end of a trip and presented himself before the new commandant. 65 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "What 's the lookout for a job as scout?" he asked. "I'd like to get put on. I've been driving the loop for two years and traveled this country on and off before there was a road." The officer knew something of the history of the man before him. It was said that he had left his tracks from Clark's Fork to the Gallatin, from the Teton Basin to Bridger Lake; that he knew every square mile in between and well beyond. If only he lined up on the right side this knowledge would be invaluable. But almost without exception the men who had been long in the country were hostile to the least suggestion of re- striction. The officer touched upon this fact. "How does it happen that you take the opposite end," he asked, "when the others sincerely feel that this Park belongs to them ? " "Because I feel that it belongs to me," Woodson surprisingly announced. "I see," the officer observed. 'Your rights against theirs. Is that the way it is ? " Woodson leaned forward and tapped the desk. "Listen, this Park is mine. It 's also a fact that it belongs to them. They claim the right of free men to turn everything in here to profit for themselves. I want to see it all left here for me. Whenever a few THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST men take anything out of here they 're taking a part of something that belongs to me - and to every other man who calls himself an American. That 's how it is." The officer grasped something of what the Park meant to Woodson. He viewed it as some great estate set aside for him, the way every American should view it. He was willing, even anxious, to share it, but unalterably opposed to the removal of one stick or stone. He felt the actuality of possession, of part ownership in every hill and valley. As he had followed lonely trails he had reasoned it out so many times that he felt it a tangible reality. The officer had found the man for whom he sought, The blue-eyed driver of the lead coach was there- after missing from the box and a new chief of Park Scouts was prowling the hills in search of those who would profit at the public's expense. Woodson went straight from headquarters to the meadow twenty miles away, where he had left his horses. He located them but before entering upon his new duties he scaled the summit of a lofty peak for a sweeping survey of his domain. From the bald crest of Mount Washburn the whole reservation unrolled before him. Those features re- named since first he saw them he could now 67 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST pick out and give the more or less applicable titles which had in late years been bestowed on them. He had seen the New West while both the country and himself were young. Now, while still a young man himself, men spoke of that day in the past tense. Already it was known to the world as the Old West of yesterday. His journey to the plains had weighed him down. Future generations could never see "the-old days as he had seen them. But now his depression lifted. Here, spread for miles all round him, was the one best spot of all the great outdoors, remaining the same as Nature had fashioned it. And it had been decreed that so it should always stand. This was to remain intact, one spot where men who had never known the old days themselves might come to look upon things as they had been. And to him this meant even more than the preservation of freak phenomena set down in this far spot with lavish hand the retention of naturalness as it had always been; the green of forested slopes unscarred by the lumberman's ax; crystal streams unpolluted by the cities' drainage, lakes never to be exploited as resorts for individual gain; the only sounds of the hills those sounds of Nature's own in her varying moods of calm and storm, areas of silence and of sound, 68 Here the bighorn of the peaks gazed down. Page 69. THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST the hush of prairies unruffled by the wind, the boom and throb of waterfalls pouring from the lip of overhanging ledges to pound the floor of the gorge below, all this without the roar of miners' blasts that jarred the foun- dation of the hills; animal life as it had been in the long ago. Truly the origina- tors of the reservation had chosen well. Here the bighorn of the peaks gazed down upon the specks that were antelope of the prairies grazing the broad bottoms of the Lamar. Future generations, who would re- construct the old times by looking upon the shaggy beasts that had roamed in millions and furnished food for the westward march of the pioneers across the plains, could come to this spot and view the largest herds of wild buffalo left alive, ranging in the Hayden Valley and on the Madison and Pitchstone plateaus. Those who would gaze still farther into the past, returning to the great day of the fur trade, might still come and hear the whack of the beaver's tail upon the water and view his fresh cuttings in the aspen groves, might find mink and otter following the streams as the roving bands of half- wild trappers had found them a century before. Here bobcat snarled at the badger in the foothills. The howl of yellow prairie wolves lifted to the ears of red, cross and 69 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST silver foxes that traveled the bald ridges above timber line. Bears black, brown and grizzly padded the pockets of the hills where lynx and marten made their tracks on the timbered slopes. The wolverine, cache and trap-line robber of the north, found easy meat in the victims left behind by the cougar, the tawny killer of the hills. Mule deer met the whitetail on the winter feeding ground and there were giant moose in the beaver swamps of the Bechler and the Upper Yellowstone. The clawed and furred of north and south, the horned and hoofed of mountain and plain met here and mingled; and from end to end of the reservation the whole hills swarmed with a lordly tribe, a summer paradise for two hundred thousand elk. Woodson had always known that some day he would set out to find his niche in life and often he had wondered what mark he would leave upon the passing time. The mark of his prospector's pick upon a thou- sand hills, the ashes of his camp fires in the valleys and the ax blazes of his trap lines in the timber; all these were as perishable in the face of time as the tracks of his webs in the melting drifts. The open breeds men of strength and humility : the strength of self -reliance drawn from the proven ability to meet new and 70 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST untried conditions with resourcefulness; humility from the realization of man's pitiful insignificance in the whole of Nature's scheme of things. Woodson knew himself a pigmy, of little more importance than an ant; knew that whatever mark he might leave, no matter how deep-grooved in his day, would swiftly fade and eventually be erased by that leveling process of the ages which defies the most egotistical endeavors of man to rear some edifice through which his individuality shall linger long after his mortal hulk has passed. Therefore the making of his own personal mark must, for the present, be relegated to second place while he helped perpetuate this heritage of future generations in all its naturalness. Whatever tithe he had to give them must consist of that. He dropped to the meadow and caught a bay mare, the third descended in a straight line from Tom North's old favorite, the last gift of his friend, and with a led horse packed with bed roll and supplies he entered upon his round of duty. For a month after his appointment the commandant heard no word of the whereabouts of his new chief scout. Woodson's course lay up the East Fork of the Yellowstone, recently renamed Lamar, round its sweeping curve under the shadow 71 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST of the Absaroka Peaks, across the divide to the head of the Pelican and down that stream to the Yellowstone. It seemed that Nature not quite content with thus gathering together in one spot the most magnificent peaks and canyons, the most beautiful lakes and rivers in the world and adding an un- rivaled assortment of freaks and oddities had been intent upon bringing in a touch of the wide plains by way of contrast. Woodson sat his horse on the shoulder of a hill and gazed off across the rolling sweep of Hay den Valley. Except for the timbered hills in the distance he could imagine himself once more on the limitless prairies of the Arkansas and the Platte. And as he looked there came toward him a herd of buffalo to lend a touch of reality to the illusion. Some were scattered and grazed as they came. Others stood in close-packed bunches or bedded down in groups. His mind flashed back to a day not many years past when he had sat with old Tom North and viewed a similar scene on a grander scale while the vast horde streamed past for hours without a break. As he rode down through the bottoms he found scores of bull wallows such as had pit- marked the plains of Dodge. He held to no road or trail but moved west across the reservations, seeking the broad open stretches. 72 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Three days he spent on the Madison Plateau, working south to the Pitchstone and visiting the Falls River Meadows and the Bechler. Then, after perhaps a month, he appeared before the commandant. "I 've made a count of the buffalo," he said. "I know where every little bunch is holding out. There 's some thirty-eight hundred head in the Park. The number won't vary fifty either way. It 's likely those are the only buffalo left running wild in the world." The officer nodded and together they planned the future of this last remnant of a vanishing race. "We've thousands of the other varieties of game," the commandant said. "The others will take care of themselves. We '11 have to build this buffalo herd up to twenty thousand head. I 'm going to make that your special charge." Woodson knew this would be no easy task ; for even now, only five years after the last big hide-hunting campaign, men spoke of the buffalo in the past tense as a relic of other days ; and, as relics have value, the hides of the once despised beasts, instead of going at a dollar apiece, had risen in price till a hundred dollars or more was the quotation on every robe. Poachers would take any chance for such a fancy price. 73 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST The new chief of scouts avoided even the game trails as he headed for the Madison Plateau and made his secret camp in a bunch of jack pines. The first snowfall of the season caught him there. For a week he scouted the country for fresh horse tracks, his ears alert for the sound of a distant rifle shot, any sign which would indicate that men worked on the Madison herd. When the soft snow had melted from the open stretches he moved his camp south to the Bechler. The second day of his scouting he crossed the trail of a dozen horses. This sign was some ten days old, made before the snow. The storm had blotted it in spots and in the bottoms it had been tramped out by elk. It led across Falls River Basin towards the west line of the Park and the scout knew that poachers had made their kill and de- parted with the spoils. He took the back track of the horses, frequently losing it and patiently circling to pick it up. Twice the trail of a single shod horse, made since the snow, crossed the faint sign he followed. Just at dusk his perseverance was rewarded by the find of a carcass, that of an old buffalo bull, and beyond it, strung out through the bottoms for three hundred yards, lay twenty more. The hunters had downed five old cows, two ' 74 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST bulls and fourteen head of young stuff yearlings and twa-year-olds stripped off the hides and made good their escape. The dim footprints round the scene of the skin- ning indicated that only two men had been concerned in it. The scout moved on, and again the tracks of a single horse cut the poacher's trail. Lee Page, a park scout, had been instructed to pitch his camp two miles above the mouth of Proposition and guard the Bechler and Falls River country. Woodson headed his horse up Falls River and crossed over to Prosposition, stayed on that stream for the night, and the following day moved down its course to come upon Page's camp from the south. The trail of that single horse which showed so frequently was in the background of Wood- son's thoughts as he rode up. Page had been long without human society and was glad to have the company of his chief. "Which way did you come in?" he asked, after urging that Woodson stay over night. "There 's a soldier camp over on the Lewis," Woodson said. "Sergeant and six men. I 've been there for ten days, helping them get the country located so they could patrol it alone. Just dropped over to see 75 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST how things were with you. Any report you want to send when I go in ? " Page shook his head. "Not a syllable," he said. "Everything dead quiet." "Have you watched the bottoms close ?" "Raked 'em from end to end," said Page. His eyes met Woodson's without a flicker. "Covered every square mile between here and both lines." "Then I won't bother to ride that country myself," Woodson decided. "If you 're sure you covered it thorough." "Dead sure," stated Page. "But I'll ride it with you if you say the word. I 'd like right well to have you stay over a few days for company. What say ?" "About all I can do is to make every scout camp and take in the reports," Woodson in- formed. " I have to make the whole rounds and it will likely be a month before I see Mammoth again. I '11 have to ramble on to-morrow." He stayed over night with Page and in the morning packed for his departure. "Where to from here?" Page asked. "East to the Snake," said Woodson. "Then up the Yellowstone to the Thorofare; back and out round above the Lake, up the Pelican and down Lamar. I '11 be back this way again in a month." 76 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST He swung to the saddle and headed the brown mare upstream. Two days later, in the gray of early morn- ing, irregular spurts of shooting drifted from the Falls River Meadows. Three miles below Page's camp two men set about skinning out seventeen head of buffalo that were scattered through the bottom. Their work was unhurried but they kept their guns always close at hand. They peeled the hides from two that had dropped well out in the open, then chose for the third an old bull that lay within a few yards of one of the numerous tongues of willows that intersected the swampy bottoms. Both men straightened swiftly as a voice spoke from behind them. " Hello," it greeted. They turned and looked into the muzzle of a rifle protruding from the willow point. "Lift 'em," Woodson said. "The game 's up, boys. Move away from your guns." They moved, and the scout possessed him- self of the rifles that leaned against a bush. " Where 's your outfit?" he demanded. "Half a mile down country in that patch of timber," one man volunteered. "Two saddle horses and six packs." "You can ride the two and we'll throw the pack stuff loose," Woodson said. 77 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "They '11 drift out of the Park and head for home. We '11 go past that way as soon as I get my own pair." An hour later they rode up to Page's camp. 'You made a real rapid trip," Page greeted. "If you covered all that country you was mentioning. How come ? " "I turned back from the Lewis to bring you a message from the soldier camp. You 're to report in at Mammoth. They 're going to transfer you to Lamar." "How'd you happen to come in from the west if you 're coming back from the Lewis ? " Page inquired. "I dropped down Mountain Ash Creek by mistake. I don't know this southwest corner very well," the chief scout confessed. "So I swung back from the mouth. You 'd better start packing and come along in with us. These boys are going that way themselves." Then, apparently for the first time, Page let his eyes rest on the two extra rifles thrust under the lash ropes of the pack, on the empty saddle scabbards slung beneath the knees of the other two men. "What 'sup? "he asked. "They downed seventeen head a couple of miles below," Woodson said. :< You can help me take them in." 78 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST \ "I '11 help you, fast enough," Page agreed. 4 'And help hand 'em when we reach the other end." His face darkened with a frown as he regarded the two culprits caught red-handed in his territory. "Funny, though," he com- mented, "that I didn't hear the shooting - not one single shot." " Yes," Woodson agreed. " Likely the wind was wrong." Woodson dismounted and kept an eye on the two men while Page struck camp and lashed his outfit on a pack horse. The four men filed back the way they had come, the two poachers riding first, Page following, while Woodson brought up the rear. When some- thing over a hundred yards from the deserted camp Woodson pulled up his horse. "I left my knife," he said. "It 's sticking in that log that laid alongside your teepee the one I was sitting on. If you 'd get it for me I 'd be right obliged. I 'd go myself only the responsibility is mostly mine and I don't want this pair out from under my eye." He reached for the reins as Page turned his horses. "I'll hold them," he offered. "You can just step back on foot." Page did not question this queer order of his chief but dropped from the saddle and disappeared over the little rise toward the missing knife. 79 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST 'You two ride on ahead into that open park," Woodson instructed the prisoners, " and stop right in its middle. I '11 be looking square at you all the time. I '11 just wait here." Apparently he changed his mind, for after a moment he followed them and stopped in the park, where Page found him when he re- turned with the knife. The timber played out and they rode down the open, grassy bottom and angled northwest across Falls River Basin to the Bechler. They crossed that stream and held on through its expansive meadows till they came to the first roll of the hills that mounted toward the Madison Pla- teau and commenced the climb. The poachers seemed but little concerned over their capture. Woodson seldom spoke, but Page at intervals addressed the two and predicted a speedy hanging, once their destination had been reached. They crossed out over the broad flat top of the Continental Divide and pitched their night camp at Summit Lake. From this point a well beaten trail led across and intersected the wagon road on the Firehole. Woodson stood first guard, sitting with his back against a tree and occasionally re- plenishing the fire while the others slept. He did not rouse Page when it was time for him to go on guard. Twice Page raised his head 80 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST and encountered the casual stare of his chief, but on both occasions Woodson assured him that the time had not come for him to stand his turn. Eventually Page rose and stretched. "You 're giving me the best of it," he in- sisted. "Turn in and gather a few winks. I '11 take balance of the night." "We '11 have easy trails to-morrow and make a long pack," Woodson prophesied, as he settled into his blankets. :< You '11 have to wake me if you need a hand. I most generally sleep sound." An hour passed. The fire flickered low and only the dying coals shed a dim glow over the sleeping figures. Page sagged against the trunk of a spruce, his head sunk on his chest, apparently asleep. One of the poachers rose on his elbow and inspected Woodson, then sat up and touched his companion, who was instantly alert. He rose to his knees, drop- ping his blankets without a sound. Both men whirled as Woodson spoke. "Hello," he said. "What's going on?" His rifle lay in plain view of them, within easy reach of his hand, but he did not reach out for it. He sat with his knees drawn up before him, and in the dip formed between knees and body the nose of a pistol menaced the two men. "Restless, boys? Page isn't much of a hand to keep up a fire." 81 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "Not much," Page confessed. He had roused suddenly from his feigned slumber and his rifle was trained steadily on Woodson's chest. "Sit tight," he admonished, his eye on Woodson's rifle. "It 's all up any time you reach for that gun. I guess you know, likely, that I was cutting in with the boys. It struck me that way when you turned up so sudden, bringing them in from the west when you 'd headed due east two days back." "I doubled and camped right over the ridge from you," Woodson admitted. "I was wondering about you a little." "Well, now you know for sure," Page re- turned. " I was counting on the boys to make a run for it while I was supposed to be asleep. Then I could have kept on working from the inside. But it don't matter any, to speak of. One of you get Mart's gun," he instructed the prisoners. "Get your stuff together and we '11 be off." The shadow of Woodson's knees shrouded the forty-five in his lap. Page could not see it. "He 's got a gun in his lap, Lee," one of the two men warned. Page's eyes hardened with purpose. "Lift 'em ; quick, " he ordered. Woodson shook his head. "I '11 have to put you under arrest and take you in," he stated mildly. He slowly raised 82 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST the gun into Page's field of view. Page's hand tightened on the grip of his rifle and the hammer clicked hollowly on an empty chamber. " No use, Lee," Woodson said. "I emptied her while you went back after my knife, and I 've noticed particular all day to see that you did n't observe the fact and reload." Page laughed shortly and leaned his useless rifle against a tree. "All right. But what 's the use of taking us in ? " he demanded. " They can't do a thing to us and they know it. We 're within our rights. The game is free for any that '11 take it and there 's no law that can deprive a free man of what belongs to him." " But you 're taking something that belongs to me," Woodson argued. "A share of every- thing in this reservation is mine." "Then declare yourself," Page offered. "Name your share and we'll settle and be on our way." "But I 'm representing a good many mil- lion folks," the scout pointed out. "Every one of 'em has an interest in those buffalo hides. Did you ever figure it that way ? " "Never did," Page confessed. "Not yet! You '11 find out, and that right soon, that you 're on the wrong end of the game if you keep at this sort of thing." 83 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "Maybe so," said Woodson. "You get back into your blankets and I '11 sit up. It 's near morning now, so I '11 try and stay awake." Lee Page and the two Watsons were found guilty of illegally killing buffalo in the Yellow- stone. The commandant formally ordered that they be conducted to the line and for- bidden the privileges of the Park. The chief scout was puzzled, filled with a sense of justice gone astray. "What 's to hinder them from coming back inside?" he demanded. The officer frowned and shook his head regretfully. "Not one damn thing!" he stated. "Not one thing in the world. There's no penalty cited in the law forbidding the killing of buffalo in the Park; only the provision that violators shall be sent outside the limits of the reservation." Woodson faced his chief. "That's a poor law," he stated bluntly. "Mighty poor." "Rotten," the officer agreed. "We 've got to get that changed; get a real law passed. In the meantime we '11 do the best we can. At least you can worry them and cut their operations down till after we get a penalty provided for such as the three you just brought 84 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST in. Then we can do some constructive work. It 's so clear that they can't help but see the necessity for an effective law and pass it. It won't be long." 85 vm RAILROADS had tapped the near-by country and made the reservation of the Yellowstone more accessible. Thousands of sightseers toured the road loop annually to look upon the spouting geysers, simmering paint pots and vats of stewing mud. Between these main points of interest the passengers drank in the naturalness of their surroundings. Except for the road, the one slender tentacle of civilization stretching through the wilderness, there were no works of man. Here all was Nature's own, standing as she had fashioned it. The sightseers scanned the meadows and open sidehills along their route for a sign of game, for the game of other parts was going fast and here the last big herds were making their final stand. There was never a coach that made the loop but what it contained at least one pas- senger who persistently inquired about the range of the buffalo, eager for a sight of the last few of the animals that had played such historic part in the early day of the plains. Some drivers pointed toward the far heights 86 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST of the Madison Plateau and informed their charges that buffalo ranged in thousands on those broad table-lands. Others swept a comprehensive arm up the reaches of the Hayden Valley and surmised that the great droves that quartered there had just moved out of sight behind some intervening wave of ground. A few chose the Pelican or the Lamar as the designated stamping grounds of vast bands, always, unfortunately, drifted beyond view just prior to the passing of the coaches. And so, while many regretted not actually sighting them, the majority were more or less content to carry to their friends the tidings that the Yellowstone bands were on the increase and faring well. But Mart Woodson knew that the herds did not increase. Superintendents had come and gone but Woodson, Park scout, remained. The first commandant had gripped his hand in parting. "Stay with it, Mart," he had urged. "You have a big job here ; bigger than you know." The departing officer had dwelt upon the importance of the work in hand. The per- petuation of the wild buffalo herd rested with one man. What more could a man ask than to have his name go down to posterity as the preserver of a vanishing race, he had pointed out ; and Woodson had promised to stay till 87 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST the herd should be built up to ten thousand head and the necessary protective laws were passed. As the Park scout rode slowly along the Turkeypen Trail he reflected that the coming of the law was slow indeed. For more than a decade the flimsy ruling had stood un- changed. His first high hope of associating his name with the preservation of his special charges had waned from constant discourage- ments. He could not do it without help and the apparent lethargy of the people weighed upon his mind. His was a thankless task. "This Park belongs to them but they don't concern themselves over what 's happening to it, Teton," he told the horse he rode. Teton, the young gelding, was descended straight from old Tom North's favorite mare. He was the last of his line, as truly a mountain horse as his owner was a mountain man. Teton tilted one ear sidewise and back toward the sound of his master's voice. He had heard this same complaint rather fre- quently of late. Woodson had endeavored to fathom the reason for this general indiffer- ence toward the looting of the Park and had at last attributed it to the misinformation, to the popular fallacy that all was protected as long as two troops of cavalry patrolled the trails of the Yellowstone. But Woodson 88 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST felt that the soldiers were of small avail. New troops were frequently brought in to replace those who had spent one or more rigorous winters in the high country. De- tails were continually transferred from one post to the next, shifted again before they were able to do more than learn the beaten trails over part of their territory. What patrols they made were along well-defined lines of travel. The poachers were men well- versed in the ways of the hills and avoided these highways. Woodson himself scoured every isolated corner of his domain. He penetrated the wild heights of the Absarokas in the dead of winter, the swamps of the Bechler and the head of the Yellowstone when the whole country was a quivering morass from the melting drifts of spring. He had come to play a lone hand and had grown secretive in his habits, making frequent doubles and detours to drop in unexpectedly upon some outlying soldier station or camp of Park scouts; for there had been other defections similar to that of Page, mainly among the soldiery, but a few also among the ranks of his own men. Yet he had found that he could rely for able assistance only upon the handful of civilian scouts, for the soldiers were never left in one spot for a sufficient period to learn the country. The records proved that con- 89 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST clusively, he reflected, as he checked them off in his mind. He himself had made seventy -three arrests unaided ; twelve more with the assistance of other men. The rest of the scouts had made twice that many among them, while all the hundreds of troopers that had been stationed at one time or another in the Park were credited with but twenty-odd arrests. Yet, for all that, each new commandant bent his energies toward materially increasing the military establishment of the Park. "This is the wrong system we 've got here, Teton," Woodson said; "in spite of popular opinion to the contrary. Every superinten- dent forgets the importance of preserving naturalness but instead settles right down in earnest to build more military establishments. In the end they '11 have one big fort covering all these hills if this goes on. The comman- dants aren't at fault themselves. Their hearts are in their calling. That 's the reason why they 're successful soldiers ; because military matters come first with them. The same if a cowman run the reservation. It would look best to him with a bunch of cows feeding in every bottom. A lumberman, if he was in control, would dwell upon the advisability of logging crews and sawmills. Each man to his own ideas. The sincere conviction that 90 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST what looks best to him his own pet occu- pation is best for all ; that 's what puts him at the head of his line. This Park would look best to a soldier if it was covered with parade grounds and barracks from end to end ; but the question in my mind is whether it would n't be better suited to the tastes of the millions it was set aside for if it was covered with the things Nature put here on the start." It had been impressed upon the scout's mind of late that he had failed in his allotted task. Instead of building up the herds he had seen them diminish in numbers year by year. When the two Watsons cleaned out the Bechler herd to the last hoof in one spectacular foray he had been confident that this loss would rouse to action those who made the laws. Surely the people would rise up and insist that this loss of their property must cease. He had waited eagerly for the news but no news came. Then, within a year, the Radey boys and Mitchells killed seventy-six head of buffalo on the Madison Plateau in a single day. This caused not even a ripple of comment outside the limits of the Park itself. W r oodson's discouragement mounted in the face of this general apathy. He was well past forty now and had achieved absolutely 91 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST nothing of lasting benefit. His was a losing game and he made a definite decision to start out for himself. During the coming winter he would gather his few personal effects, at present scattered throughout the reservation, and the following spring he would depart. In the background of his mind there had always been the purpose to return some day to the home of his youth. The past few years, during which the full realization of the hope- lessness of his present task had come to him, had strengthened this purpose and the desire to revisit early scenes grew upon him. It is always those men who wander farthest and longest that treasure in their hearts the most cherished pictures of the home they have left behind. He would see the hardwood hills in autumn. Then he would return to the west coast and once more roam the great forest he had seen but once ; the land of giant trees, their tops roofing the forest floor for a hundred miles without a break; the wood of deep silences where even the voices of the wild things were subdued. In one of these favored lands he would find some calling upon which to bend his energies. So throughout the fall and early winter he planned for spring and with the coming of heavy snows he set forth to gather his effects from various caches and secret camps throughout the Park. 92 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST He made no effort to search for evidence of looters operating inside the line. It would be useless to take them in. Three times he had conducted Lee Page to headquarters, caught red-handed in the act of skinning buffalo or lifting trapped beaver from the streams. Twice he had brought in the two Watsons for the same offense ; other men by the score. In each instance the various officers in charge, powerless to do more, had solemnly warned the offenders to remain outside the limits of the Park. Woodson's own interest in striving to build up the Yellow- stone herds had waned. His earliest re- flections had centered on the unlimited plenty of his native land, a wealth of natural re- sources that had overwhelmed his youthful imagination ; and as a consequence his nature was not to be satisfied with a remnant of vanished abundance, but instead demanded lavish profusion of anything in which his interest centered. So now the sight of an old buffalo bull roused only his pity for the last few stragglers of a vanishing breed. It was but natural, in view of this fact, that for years his main interest had, almost uncon- sciously, been transferred to the elk. For these most noble monarchs of all antlered game still ranged the hills in bands of thou- sands, their numbers apparently undiminished. 93 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST There would always be elk in the hills, he reflected, and with this knowledge he would be content. By careful questioning of some of the thou- sands of sightseers who had toured the Park the preceding summer, he had learned that the general apathy as to what transpired in the Park was in reality not so much indiffer- ence as lack of adequate information. No news of the big kills on the Bechler and the Madison, in the Hay den Valley or the Lamar, had reached the outside world. No man had heard of the organized raid launched with intent to pick out tons of the delicate speci- mens of flowers and shrubs of a bygone age preserved in the petrified forest, the only specimens of this kind in the world that would have succeeded but for Woodson's timely and single-handed intervention, which, incidentally, had netted him a bullet in the thigh, another through the shoulder and the loss of the brown mare, Teton's mother, shot through the lungs. The authorities, with that delicate thoughtfulness for the people's welfare so characteristic of all political minds, had decided not to harass the sensibilities of the voter with these distressing details of the looting of his property. All this Woodson knew; but his was a small, unknown voice speaking from the wilderness, and he had no 94 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST way of diffusing his knowledge where it would be of the least avail. The scout traveled less than formerly. He spent days on some favorite ridge or point affording a good view and dreamed great dreams of the things he would do when he reached the outside world where all was a mad rush of development. He built railroads through the hills and spanned sheer canyons with trestles of concrete and steel, erected giant warehouses and filled them with the treasures of the world; planned cities of his own on sites which he felt had been overlooked and waited only for his coming. Soon he would be part of it instead of apart from it. And while he planned an early winter shut down over the hills. The first few heavy snows lay deep ; then it chinooked for a week and the warm winds settled and packed the drifts. Then for three days it snowed without a break and cleared only with the tightening down of after-storm cold. Two days after the cessation of the snowfall Woodson coasted down the south face of the Sulphur Hills with two companions, soldiers from the detachment at the Canyon. The three men shot down a smooth open slope, starting abreast and some twenty yards apart. Woodson's skis suddenly slid up and 95 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST over some obstruction such as might be caused by a down-log just beneath the sur- face of the snow. Off to the left he noted the same queer rise and dip of both his com- panions as they rode their skis over some similar ridge. His mind, occupied with dreams of the world outside, came back to the present, and instantly he became again the man hunter. His ski pole checked his slide and he climbed back to the point, brushing the loose snow from the object with his mitts. Some man had left a ski trail round the side- hill after the previous storm, while the chinook was thawing the drifts, the packed trail freezing into a ridge as the looser snow melted away from it, and leaving it standing out above the rest as the cold clamped down in the chinook's wake, the whole scene once more covered by eight inches of fresh snow. The soldiers waited below but Woodson made no mention of his find. The temper- ature dropped steadily as they rounded a bend and traveled down the Canyon road. When they reached the soldier station the thermometer registered fifty-two below. At daylight the scout prepared to leave. "Where away?" asked the sergeant in charge of the station. "It 's rough outside." "Rough," Woodson agreed. "But I Ve a hike to make." 96 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST The sergeant fitted him out with an extra blanket and a few supplies. He shivered at the icy blast that bored past him with every opening of the door. "A man can't live out there," he stated. "I would n't send a man of mine out in that unless I wanted to see him killed. You better hole up with us till she eases off." "I can weather it, likely," Woodson said. "I '11 stop in at the Lake Station if it clamps down a few more degrees." "What you heading back that way for ? " the sergeant asked. "Thought you 'd started in." "One more round," Woodson said. "Clear to the Snake Station, then round Norris way coming back. I can make the Snake in two days if it breaks." "An' if it don't break we '11 find your car- cass along sometime in the spring," the sergeant prophesied. He watched the soli- tary figure out of sight. The sergeant called the Lake Station at noon and the soldier in charge there reported no sign of the scout. He gave the same report that night. "Either he's started out on one of them secret swings, after lying to me to beat all hell about his destination like he most generally does or else he 's froze stiff by now," the sergeant mused. 97 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Woodson's reason for failing to divulge his destination was based on former experiences. He did not distrust the sergeant; but tele- phones, recently installed, were handy imple- ments with which to while away the time and the isolated detachments made good use of them. Any detail furnished food for con- versation, even the coming and departure of a scout. Soldiers, in their loneliness, fre- quently made friends among those outside and were not too prone to investigate the operations of those friends. With the news of a scout's destination always traveling over the wire before him there was ever the chance that the man he sought might be warned in time by some soldier friend; and Woodson had followed many trails that led outside which might well have been ended before the line was reached. At midnight the sergeant called the Lake Station again but Woodson had not appeared. "He 's got it this time," the sergeant said. "He 's curled up somewheres, froze stiff by now. Well, I guess it won't raise much com- motion one way or another. He 's all right enough, Mart is, but I don't reckon he 's ever done anything that amounts to a puff of smoke." Mart Woodson, far up the Pelican, was brooding over that same thought. The one 98 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST thing to which he had put his hand had crumbled to nothingness. The millions, whose property he guarded from the inroads of the few, were unaware of his very existence. He had gained only the enmity of those who lived in the hills. Men in three States bordering the park, men who had never seen him, bristled at the name of Woodson. These men stood on their rights as free-born citizens and hated the one figure that opposed their code of life. The very fact that game was no longer plentiful outside the Park intensified their indignation over the fact that they were not allowed the right to hunt within it. This enmity was his sole reward for years of service. The scout squatted before a fire, both blankets wrapped round him and with his arms locked around a tree. In case he dozed, the relaxing of his arms and the consequent backward lurch would rouse him to replenish the fire. Otherwise he might well freeze as he slept. He had not intended to take up another trail; but he had been at the game too long to pass over a sign that challenged his interest. He revolved the thing in his mind and attempted to put himself in the place of the man he stalked. If he were poaching on the Pelican where would he camp ? He decided that he would pick some 99 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST isolated patch of timber in a pocket where no other would be apt to cross in passing up or down the Pelican; he would leave no trails in the open. First he would construct a wikiup of poles and boughs to shut" out the snow, a sheltered nest in which to unroll his blankets. He lurched suddenly backward and realized that he had fallen asleep in this comfortable retreat he had pictured for the other. The fire was low. One ear was stiff with frost. He replenished the fire and treated the frozen member with a brisk application of snow. The following day he reached a poacher's deserted cabin on a tributary of the Pelican ; one he had unearthed years before and whose owner he had taken. From this point he ransacked the hills for two days but found no tracks. His man had left. Twice he had crossed frozen ski trails under the surface of the new layer of snow. Toward evening of the second day, in a patch of heavy timber on Astringent Creek, he found his way studded with these old signs. He circled through the patch and came upon the deserted wikiup of poles and bows ; but not quite deserted, for the man had left a few supplies, evidence that he expected to return. For another six days the scout watched the long openings breaking down from the north. A rise in temperature 100 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST had brought with it a light fall of snow to cover the tracks of his single visit to the poacher's retreat and he neared it no more. His patience bore fruit and on the morning of the seventh day he made out a trail crossing an open park on a distant slope, a wide swathe in the snow which told him that his man had towed a toboggan behind him. He would be at the wikiup by now. The scout circled to come in behind the spot, choosing a route by which he could approach unseen through the heavy timber. As he neared the man's hidden hang-out he stopped to listen. A shot had drifted faintly to his ears, coming from well up Astringent Creek. A dozen others followed and the scout turned his steps that way. "He's working fast," he said. "He's made his kill. He '11 skin to-day and make his start for the outside to-night." An hour later he looked down through an opening in the timber. A hundred yards below the tree line, well out in a sloping meadow, a man leaned over a dark shape in the snow. Other still forms were scattered near. The scout turned his skis downhill, boring down the steep declivity with the speed of a flying thing, the impetus of his rush carrying him out across the flat on silent skis. Not until within forty yards of his man did 101 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST the faint hiss of wood on snow reach the poacher's ears. He turned for a quick glance behind him, then reached for the rifle that leaned against the carcass on which he worked ; and as he whirled with it, the butt-plate of the scout's rifle, driven with a straight-arm jab, smashed between his eyes and the two men rolled together in the snow. Two days thereafter a party of outdoor devotees, having braved the winter of the high country, pressed up the Canyon road in search of the buffalo range. They had met with every courtesy and had been furnished with soldier guides, but they had failed to cross the tracks of a single one of the beasts they had come so far to see. But they were not to be deterred and they headed now for the Hayden Valley. Each new guide had promised to show them buffalo in great droves but each in turn had failed and surmised that they had drifted to some other point before the recent storms. There were at least two of the party who, in a vague sort of way, felt that they had been neatly sidetracked at every turn. Two men, one walking slightly in advance, turned a bend and came down the road. The man in the rear wore the uniform of Park scouts and the party hailed him and made inquiry concerning the whereabouts of the animals they had come to see. 102 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST | "The last twelve head in the reservation pulled out of Astringent Creek, heading north two days ago," the scout informed them bluntly; "I counted the tracks. If they don't all winter-kill there '11 be that many left in the spring." "Twelve head!" exclaimed the leader of the party. "Why, there 's a total of some three thousand-odd inside the park." "If a man shows you over twelve head I '11 give him all I 've got," the scout retorted doggedly. "I know! There hasn't been a track on the Bechler or the Madison Plateau these two years back. Carnahan here," jerk- ing his thumb at the prisoner, "cleaned the Hayden Valley bunch to the last hoof a few months past; and two days ago he downed half of the Pelican herd, the last left in the Park." "But you must be wrong," the man de- murred. "It's facts I'm telling you," the scout insisted. The soldier guide was a candid fellow. "Old Mart has been here since before this country was throwed into a Park," he volun- teered. " It 's him that knows. I 've only been stationed here six months which is six months too long so I don't know much local history myself, and don't want to learn, 103 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST but whatever old Mart says is gospel. You can bet on that." The appellation occasioned the scout a swift flash of apprehension. It was the first time any one had referred to him as Old Mart. He was old only in Park annals, he assured himself. It was his length of resi- dence, not his age, that had suggested the ad- jective. That was all. The leader of the party had turned a somber gaze upon Carnahan. "And what will they do with him?" he demanded. "Throw him loose," Woodson predicted. "That 's what they 've always done before. This is the third time I 've had him up for the same offense." The leader noted the scout's frosted ear, swollen to twice its normal thickness. There were frost buttons in both cheeks and the whole face was scarred with the marks of former exposure. He turned back with Wood- son and his prisoner and sought to learn past and present conditions from the words of this first resident in the Park. The scout answered his questions without reserve, briefly but to the point. He grasped something of Wbodson's original hope of preserving the naturalness of the Yellowstone, a hope that waned from lack of support. He demurred when the scout stated his intention of leaving in the spring. 104 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "But your task is only started," he objected. "It 's finished," Woodson returned. "The thing I set out to do has failed. The buffalo are cleaned out of the Park." "One out of a dozen," the other urged. "The other game holds its own. The forests and streams are still untouched. The Petri- fied Forest and the Knotted Wood still stand, thanks to you. Don't desert because one interest out of a hundred has been destroyed. Stay and save the rest. It 's a big work you are doing here." The scout stubbornly shook his head. "I have to play almost a lone hand," he said. "The people at large, the real owners of the Park, don't give one continental damn what becomes of it ; so why should I put in my time saving something they don't want? Can you tell me that?" The man could and did. He insisted that the public had never known the truth; that the news of a single raid had never found its way into print ; that the seeming lethargy was merely misinformation as to the true state of affairs. He was gifted with per- suasive eloquence and he stressed the impor- tance of the scout's part, painted a glowing picture of the future. Two hundred thousand elk still ranged the hills ; the beaver held their own in sections of the Park ; more than three 105 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST thousand square miles of virgin forests, a thousand lakes and streams as they had always been; five thousand antelope still roaming from the Yancey Meadows to the bottoms of the fair Lamar. Bit by bit he built a picture of the future as he wished to see it and Woodson's hope revived, expanding under the sincere praise of his past perform- ances, even though in the end they had resulted only in blank failure. The young man promised that the public should learn the facts ; that the chief scout would soon have ample support. And in the end Wood- son gave his promise to remain for at least another year. Carnahan was tried and found guilty, as he had been found twice before, and warned to stay outside the Park. Then the storm broke round the ears of those in authority. The public press announced the facts of the case from coast to coast, stated that, instead of thousands as generally supposed, there were but twelve buffalo remaining in the Park; offered to prove the assertion, sup- plementing the news with details of raids long past and withheld from print. Popular wrath, instead of subsiding, increased to such an extent that it occasioned the hasty passage of needed legislation. Tame buffalo were purchased from a few 106 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST far-sighted individuals who had captured and preserved a few of the vanishing race before it was too late. These were installed in the Park where tourists could view them and see for themselves that the buffalo still existed there. Corrals were erected for their hand- ling and great areas partially fenced. Wood- son saw the start of expenditures, eventually to run into large sums, for the purpose of building up a domesticated herd which the people would always believe to be descended from the thousands ranging wild in the reser- vation when it was first set aside for them. 107 IX THE long-contemplated visit to the old home had been realized at last and Woodson sat on the porch of a store in the sleepy little village of his youth, not greatly altered in the more than thirty years since he had last looked upon it, for the rush of progress had passed it by. The trip had been deferred for another decade, for a new system had been inaugurated in the land of the Yellowstone, a policy of conservation such as Woodson himself had visioned from the first, so he had remained to become associated with the new movement. His We work was now definitely identified with the preservation of the Park, since the policy of its management was so nearly in accord with his own ideas. Eventu- ally he had applied for leave with the promise to return at the end of a year. Yet at the end of three weeks his restlessness was upper- most and he fought down the desire to leave. McCann, of the old hide-hunting days, sat with him on the store porch. "I '11 wait anyway to see the pigeon flight this fall," Woodson said, voicing one of the 108 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST arguments with which he sought to convince himself against the too early departure that crept insistently to his mind ; for things were not as he had so fondly anticipated. The dead village remained the same and many old friends had tarried there. It was the landscape that had changed. The whole countryside was altered beyond recognition, the hardwood timber cut from a thousand valleys, much of it piled and burned to clear the land for farming, some of the straight- grained logs split for fence rails, these later replaced by the more modern wire fence and the rails burned to be rid of them or cut into stove-wood lengths. He reflected that this wholesale slashing had been unavoidable; it was part of the general age of progress, a measure necessary to get the land in shape for farming. 'Yes," he said again, "I '11 wait anyhow for the pigeon flight. I 'd like to watch them go over again in swarms that cloud the sun. We don't have birds in such numbers out in the hills. They 're more scattered like, out there. I 've thought about the pigeon flight back here a thousand times and wanted to see it all again." McCann grunted amusedly at the others gathered before the store. "There has n't been a pigeon flight in twenty years," he said. "So if that 's what 109 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST you 're waiting for, you might as well pile on the train with me to-morrow/' "I was n't expecting to see them as thick as they were years back," Woodson confessed. "It don't seem that there 's anything in the quantity it used to be. I 've seen ten million wild pigeons in a day. If I could see a few flocks of ten thousand in a bunch it would be enough for me " "You can make ten thousand dollars in a bunch if you can see one pigeon and bring it in," McCann returned. "Don't you know there has n't been a pigeon seen in the last fifteen years ? " "It seems like they must have changed their flights to somewheres else," one man volunteered. "I 've heard it said that they was likely in South America. Maybe that 's where they 're at. It would n't surprise me a mite to see 'em come swarming back in here any time. I 've seen the time when we shipped a thousand barrels of pigeons to the Chicago markets from this county every day." The discussion turned to the various re- wards posted for the body of a single pas- senger pigeon. These sums ranged from one hundred dollars to a thousand, offered by various societies and individuals, and the aggregate was large. 110 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "A man could make a good stake if he only knowed where they 'd gone," remarked one of the group. "I know where they've gone," said McCann. He laughed and prodded Woodson with his thumb. "We know, you and me; eh, Mart ? They Ve followed the beaver and the lost herd." "And the hardwood trees," Woodson ampli- fied. McCann's grin faded and he nodded som- berly. For twenty years he had worked in the lumber camps and the disappearance of standing timber was nearer his heart than the disappearance of all else combined. He was about to set forth for new fields in which to ply his trade. The next morning Woodson boarded the train with McCann. The eager anticipation with which he had looked forward to his trip was gone. It would have been far better if he had never come. For those who had stagnated in one spot the transition had seemed gradual indeed, barely perceptible ; but to Woodson, come back after all the years, the difference was so apparent as to strike home with a shock. He had seen that it was necessary, this wholesale sacrifice of the timber in the valleys, to make room for the farms of men. But now the train rolled 111 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST through miles and miles of unsightly slash- ings. A hundred million acres of hardwood hills, totally unfit for the plow, had been cut over to the last available tree, stripped of all save the worthless scrubs. Black walnut logs had been ripped into dimension stuff or used for heavy beams and pilings. Smooth white oak and sturdy hickory had furnished planks for bridges. Nature had started to conceal her scars, and endless miles of these waste areas, grown up with matted jungles of brush and stunted second growth, stood as the only monument of the great day of the lumber trade. In other parts the best of the fir and spruce, the pick of the cedar, pine and hem- lock had been rafted to the mills, the few remaining tracts in the hands of individuals or concerns who could cut it at their will. McCann broke a long silence to grumble surlily about his lot in life. "The old days are gone," he said. "What 's this country coming to, anyway? A man has to ask permission of some one else and have them pick out his logs before he can go into government timber and drop a tree." He referred to the Forest Service, which had been in operation for a number of years. For suddenly men had paused in the mad rush to wonder. Just possibly it would have been wiser to use less headlong haste. The THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST smaller trees, sacrificed for railroad ties or to fire the boilers of the mills, would, if con- served, soon have developed into trees of sufficient dimension to command fabulous prices when laid down at the doors of the factories engaged in the manufacture of fine furniture; for the common and abundant of a few years past were now the rare and priceless treasures of the present, and those same trees, so wantonly destroyed, would now have been used sparingly, cut into thin sheets of veneer. Many a man gazed rue- fully upon his woodlot pasture, covered with a scant growth of worthless trees, regarding the rotting stumps of giants he had felled for firewood or merely to be rid of them because they shaded too much land and held back the growth of grass for feed. If he had but a dozen of those trees now they would con- stitute a fortune. But the nation was alive to the wreckage at last. What tracts of timber were left uncut, mainly stands of spruce and jack pine, formerly too low-grade or too inaccessible to log, had been preserved in time. Broad areas were withdrawn from settlement and turned into Forest Reserves, administered with care under a policy that provided only for the thinning of the heaviest stands, the young trees being left to grow. Reforestation was mentioned as a possibility 113 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST and experiments were under way. Conser- vation had replaced destruction as the watch- word of the times. "Plant a tree" societies were organized and school children marched to view the installation of slender seedlings among the ghosts of towering ancestors whose shade had once graced the spot. In the schoolroom the story of the woodman and his ax gave way to the pretty tale of the little acorn that grew into a mighty oak. As the train rolled on into the West it carried Woodson into the land of "Timber Claims." To the uninitiated this title vaguely suggested forested areas in far corners of their country, open to settlement by those who would make their homes in distant spots. But the reverse of this was true. Arid regions were open to settlement by those who would plant trees where no trees grew. Such were the "Timber Claims." The train sped across flat wastes, dotted with clumps of gnarled and wind-torn cotton- woods, hand-planted and hand-tended, that struggled to survive under adverse conditions, a pitiful reminder of the worth of any tree to-day and the reckless waste of all trees yesterday. Woodson reflected that succeed- ing waves of development had always come out of the East. He would spend his period of leave to the westward instead. His mind 114 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST leaped forward to the land of the big trees, the wonderful forests of the west coast wherein he had spent a year so long ago. The rattle and roar of civilization had palled and he dwelt upon the solemn hush of the coast-belt forests, the churchlike quiet that opens up a man's soul to his own view and convinces him for all time of his own minuteness ; shears his egotism from him. There he knows that the universe was not created solely for man alone, the one thought that pervades the minds of those who dwell solely amid works of men and know not Nature. Once alone and in close communion with the Mother of us all, if a man be capable of thought, his conceit drops from him and he comes to know that he is but one of the forms of life in Nature's vast balance wheel, a pygmy in the scheme of things, to be as easily crushed, once he succeeds in disturbing that delicate balance which he constantly perverts and which he fondly dreams was constructed for his delight alone. All these things Woodson had learned in his youth and they had never left him. A failure in the eyes of men who measured only in material gain ; yet, through his very failure at striving for things which to him were the greater, from his habit of thinking to himself amid the works of Nature instead of thinking among others chained by precept and con 115 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST vention among the artificialities of men, perhaps from all these his vision was far broader, and he was nearer to understanding the source of life that men call God than those who, by their own standards, have succeeded in whatever they undertook to do. Woodson saw man as one creature among many. From a brute with a club he had become a man, even as the Eohippus had become a horse, and throughout his evolution he had gained knowledge from other creatures and improved upon their methods. Like them, he drew upon Nature's storehouse for his own purposes. His inventive brain had given him tools which did his killing and supplied his meat more easily than the claws and fangs that served that purpose for the real meat-eating tribes. He dammed streams more ably than the beaver and diverted the water for his own use. Once, like other creatures, his habitat had shifted with the food supply, and he had prowled in nomadic bands in search of those spots where food was plentiful. Later, perhaps from aping the actions of the bee, he had learned to bring the food supply to him instead. By carry- ing the pollen from one blossom to the next the bee assures the fertility and seed supply necessary to perpetuate in his neighborhood the flowers from which he draws his honey. 116 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Perhaps it was also from the bee, or from the ant, the beaver or the squirrel that man learned to store his surplus food against lean days. He had learned to build better dwellings than the beaver or the muskrat. From the birds he learned how to weave rushes and the wool of animals, the down of flowers and the bark of trees ; from the insects he learned to spin, and now he both spins and weaves far better than the spider or the bird. Like the ant, the bee and the beaver, he clusters in colonies and works for the common good, but in this respect it is probable that, except for the more complicated scheme of it, he has not attained so high a plane as those inferior creatures, for their social life is constructively for the common good of the community in- stead of a continuous struggle for individual ascendency. Men war among themselves as do the beasts. The male human quarrels over his love affairs and kills for his she the same as the wolf and the jackal. But he points with pride to the fact that he has law to enforce the right as his narrow vision sees it, and right changes overnight with him. Throughout the ages men have been torn apart by law for some wrong that the next day would have been the right and earned them the praise of 117 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST multitudes. So do the beasts have laws; and the insects, laws that are inflexible. The pack tears apart the individual that menaces the interests of the many, killing him openly and frankly and without the subtleties and complications which go with ridding human society of rabid individuals. Only a few years back, a pin-prick in the span of time, man himself resorted to no such niceties in his killing, but was more direct, after the manner of those from whom he sprang. He points with pride to his "Thou Shalt Nots." The beasts have them as well. Man has his various moralities resting solely upon the race, or sect within a race, into which he happened to be born. One sect's morality and philosophy of life consists of many wives, of no recognition of the human soul of his women. Such, too, is the attitude of the bull elk, the buck deer and the bighorn sheep. Another's morality consists of monogamy, of the family tie. So lives the eagle, the horned owl and the fox; all as it should be except that man, in his vast con- ceit, has forgotten that he is but one of Nature's toys and has come to believe instead that She is one of his. He is apt to forget his insignificance and the fact that forces beyond his control may sink one continent 118 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST into the sea and throw another up from the depths of it with one convulsion, wiping out the evidence of man's building of centuries as easily as man himself might casually spill a tub of water and blot the work of generations of busy ants at a single stroke. These things had all come to Woodson in the open, on the wide plains or in his hills. For a time these thoughts had been but vague mental gropings, unassembled into the chan- nels of consecutive reasoning which had eventually developed into the belief that shaped his life. It had been the days under the big trees days when he had felt the solemn hush of the noblest forest the world has ever seen; when he had stood, antlike, at the base of one mighty trunk and tried to comprehend the fact that for a hundred miles each way these monsters grew in such dense masses that a man could scarce squeeze be- tween that had gathered up the fragmen- tary particles of thought and crystallized them into the whole, which had become his creed And each click of the wheels ticked off one rail-length of the distance and carried him nearer to his goal. Then at last he stood on a high divide where once he had stood before. A hundred miles of the big trees had spread out before him then. Now the great forest was gone. 119 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST A jungle of brush and second growth had sprung up to conceal the amputated stumps. Log roads, now deserted and slipping back to Nature from lack of travel, made a network of dividing lines among the ruins. There were patches where fire had beat the loggers to the work. Miles of burnings where the blackened trees lay piled in great tangled log jams, with here and there a spot where some could not find space to fall, their butts wedged by their fellows, and towered black and gaunt against the sky as the spars of some gigantic fire-ridden ship sunk in the shallows. For hours Woodson sat motionless in one spot, his chin cupped in his hand. A week later he stood on a spur of the west slope of the Absarokas, back once more in the Yellowstone. The autumn hills unrolled be- fore him. The early frosts had touched the deciduous trees with magic brush and wherever the white shafts of aspens gleamed through the black stand of lodge-pole trunks, there was color; splashes of yellows grading from palest lemon to deep orange hues ; vivid tongues of crimson leaping from the green of the spruce as the first hungry flames of a forest fire; mauve shadings in the willow and alder swamps of the bottoms ; soft wine tints and magenta, rolling away in a riot of blending hues as if but a month-old afterglow 120 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST of summer sunsets. Woodson spoke to Teton, who grazed near by. 4 'This is a little different from that other view I had a week ago, Teton," he said. "They Ve waked up in time to save our trees up here, anyway. There 's sixteen thousand square miles in one body, including the Park itself, that has gone into Forest Reserve and been withdrawn from settlement." The reservation was blocked in on all sides by these national forests of which he spoke; to the north lay the Gallatin Forest, the Beartooth and the Absaroka; the Shoshone Reserve on the east. All along the southern boundary the Park was flanked by the Teton Forest, to the west by the Madison and the Targhee. He had seen little of the outside world and the news of its development had reached him mainly by hearsay. Now that he had seen for himself, he gloried in the wonderful stride made by this young nation of which he was a part. Yet some way he was haunted by a doubt, the same sensation that had assailed his mind on that former visit to the plains years before, a feeling that a good job had been a trifle too well done ; that elusive impression that he had been warned of this tremendous waste. He sat and gazed off across the country and his mind wandered THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST into the past. The course of a stream that twisted through the hills was marked by a slender line of many-colored aspens. Through half-closed eyes this variegated thread ap- peared to take on life and again he looked upon the homeward trail of the Crows, winding a tortuous course through the hills. The blue-gray of scattered balsam, held in relief against the darker stands of spruce, took on the semblance of smoke-blots rising from the teepees. The words of the old chief of the Crows came back to him out of the past. "He does much that is wonderful but in his haste to reach the shores of the phantom lake he tears down much that he might better leave and which he can never replace." The source of that warning was clear to him now, the half -forgotten rebuke of the old chief for those who followed only the white man's God, Development. ( "They 've saved our trees, Teton," Wood- son said. "If only they 'd started in time to save some of the rest those that can't be regrown in the lives of twenty men and all cut down within the life of one. We 're a great people but we always go a mite too fast and don't watch the signs along the trail. Then we back track and spend twice as much in covering up the wreck as we gained by THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST traveling too rapid on the start. That 's our big fault. We 're too busy to see farther ahead than to-day; so anxious to gather in the crop that we pull up the roots and kill the seed. We killed off a revenue of fifty million dollars a year in the beaver. We shipped wild pigeons to the market by the trainload for five cents apiece; now one single bird would be worth a small fortune to the finder. The last ten million buffalo were shot down for a dollar a hide; then we spent twenty million preserving the last few hundred head. Now we Ve wasted the trees. God knows what will come next or where it all will end. But we 're a thorough people, once we start. Now that we 're starting to conserve in place of tearing down, we '11 do it well. If only just once we could start to conserve before it was just too late." He mounted Teton and led the single pack horse. For miles he threaded tangled jams of blow-downs without a trail. "They '11 never find our little private hang- out, Teton," he predicted. "Men won't fight five miles of the worst kind of down- timber to get nowhere in the end." The way led up to the mouth of a forbidding canyon that widened unexpectedly just within the sheer masses of rock that flanked the portals. He rode out into a blind canyon THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST that formed an oval basin a mile long by half that distance across, rimmed in by towering walls, its only exit the one twisting, narrow gap through which he had just passed. Here, in this basin unknown to other men, Mart Woodson had the whole hills in miniature, a touch of everything afforded by any other part of the Park. A long meadow stretched the length of the basin, a tiny creek winding through it. Dense forested slopes led up to the rock rubble at the base of the walls, these rising in pile on pile to thrust their rims above timber line. Narrow swathes had been ripped through the timber by snowslides plunging from the cliffs above and shearing all life in their paths, piling logs and debris, collected in their rush, into massive heaps in the bottoms. Here, in the more sheltered spots, the snow never wholly disappeared and there were miniature glaciers that defied the summer sun to completely blot them out before the early snows of autumn should once more start to build them up. Silvery cascades sparkled through breaks in the wall at the upper end as the tiny stream leaped down from the heights in succeeding falls, the last two hundred feet of its descent being almost sheer, a beautiful slide down rock that was smooth-glazed from its action. It tinkled into a rock pool hol- lowed out at its base. A willow swamp 124 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST covered the upper end of the flats. Here two young beaver, transported to the spot by Woodson the preceding year when they were kits, had damned the stream and backed up a pond, forming the only lake in the pocket. At the lower end of the meadow a dozen tiny hot springs were scattered out for two hun- dred yards, adding a touch of completeness to Woodson's private park, a spot no other man had seen. A little cabin stood just within the edge of the timber, an exact duplicate, except that it had a rough slab door instead of an elk hide, of that hut in which he and old Tom North had wintered that first year on the head of the Yellowstone. As he rode toward the hut two antelope, a pair he had brought to this far spot as kids, rose from their beds in the meadow, and one of them loosed a gruff, hoarse bark of warning. As if understanding this signal of a different species, three cow elk and their calves climbed a knoll near the edge of the meadow and an old cow, evidently the leader of the little band, gave her yelping bark three times. Two mule-deer does, fol- lowed by three fawns, came to the edge of the timber and peered curiously at the intruders. Woodson dismounted before the cabin and threw off saddles and packs, turning the two horses out on the meadow to graze. His first 125 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST move after storing away the equipment and supplies was to shoulder a heavy sack of salt and repair to a spring some twenty yards from the hut. It was merely a trickle whose flow spread fan wise down the slope and disappeared within a few yards of its source. Where it came from the sidehill the scout had scooped out a pool and lined it with rock. From this he drew his water supply. He dumped the salt just below the outlet of this little reservoir and watched the overflow eating into the white mass, trickling on to carry the salt in solution and impregnate the few yards of soft mud below. This expanse had been trampled by many hoofs. " There, now," he said, as he viewed this artificial saltlick, "they '11 come for their salt and we '11 get acquainted all over again. It takes 'em a few days to get used to me every time I come in." Here he could watch the wild things in their native haunts, undisturbed by men, their habits unchanged. They were all here of their own accord except the beaver and the antelope that he had packed in on horses to add to his colony. The little herd of elk and the mule deer had discovered the retreat themselves and always came back to summer in their chosen pocket. He cooked an early meal and sat on the doorsill of the cabin as 126 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST the first dusk settled into the basin. A porcu- pine waddled from beneath a windfall and came toward him. Woodson tossed him a bacon rind and the animal munched the delicacy within a few feet of the man. "Prickley, if this plan goes through, men will be out looking for your scalp," said the scout. He drew a folded clipping from his pocket and perused it again. "We 're a thorough people, once we start. American resourcefulness is no idle boast. There 's a thousand suggestions put forward to advance any popular movement no point too small to overlook ; not even you, Prickley, for this article deals with the wasteful porcupine. You girdle the nice trees with those teeth of yours. It says so here. Now since we 've started out to save what trees are left, we 're doing a good job of it and may do it a trifle too well as we have before. This advocates putting a bounty on all porcupines. There 's maybe two thousand porcupines within a hundred miles, and some two billion trees. Maybe one spruce or jack pine out of every hundred thousand shows the marks of a porky 's teeth. But that 's the way it goes. After it 's just too late we get downright hysterical about back tracking and covering up the waste. You hedgehogs live on bark and you '11 have to go. There 's another 127 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST move on foot to kill off the ospreys and the pelicans, the mergansers and the herons, all because they catch some fish. There 's no limit to the number of fish a man can catch in the Park. I Ve seen folks pull out two hun- dred pounds and get their pictures snapped with more fish than they could eat in a month. Then those same ones advocate killing off the birds that take only what they eat. Maybe there 's some of us would rather see a blue heron standing out in a swamp, as solemn as a judge; or a squadron of pelicans winging down the lake ; maybe we 'd rather hear an osprey scream and watch him make his plunge than to see some human have his picture snapped with half-a-ton of fish. But if this goes through, Prickley, men will make your tribe hard to find. When we 're through with you we '11 kill the birds." He scanned the high slopes and the ava- lanche slides with his glasses. He knew well the ways of antlered game; that the lords of the species did not summer with their families, deserting them till the running moon called them back to their harems in the fall. "The elk ought to start running about now," he said. "If Wapiti came back this spring and is in here anywheres, we '11 hear him whistle in a day or two." As if in answer to his prophesy the shrill 128 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST squealing bugle of a young bull floated down from above. "Wapiti was wise to come back," the scout asserted. "If he 'd stayed outside some old herd bull would have run him off from every cow he tried to cut out of a band. In here he '11 have the cows to himself and run this pocket according to his own ideas." His glasses were trained toward the spot from which the bugle sounded. Far up under the rims, at the upper extremity of the trees, a bull elk left the timber and grazed out into the open path left by a snowslide. He was a five-point bull ; the following year he would reach his prime. Up under the rims he had summered, high above his cows. He had a score of bull wallows tramped out in the muddy seeps below the perpetual snow banks and in these he cooled himself on warm days, plastering himself with mud to protect his tender flanks and underparts from the insect pests. Woodson turned his glasses on the rims above in search of Krag, the bighorn ram. Krag's habit, too, was to summer apart from the females of his kind, but he summered below them, not above. His ewes and lambs ranged out on the ridges and plateau above timber line while Krag held out along the shelves and ledges of the cliffs, subsisting 129 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST on the grass that sprouted from the cracks of the rock or clothed occasional shoulders in the breaks between offset rims. It took some time to locate Krag but at last he saw him, a tiny speck far up the walls. Even with the glasses it was impossible to determine whether or not he had a foothold or simply adhered to the face of the cliff as a fly clings to a pane of glass. The old ram stood motionless, peering down at Woodson, and the man knew that the bighorn could see him as easily with the naked eye as he himself could see the ram with binoculars. Assured of the presence of the ram, Wood- son sought for some sign of the mule-deer buck who had spent the preceding summer in this hidden nook. He had first looked upon the buck in the autumn when the deer were in short blue, and from this he had named him Blue. He trained his glasses upon the upper extremities of the timber, examining every snowslide trail and opening under the rim. Blue would be in some such locality as Wapiti, the bull, their choice of summer homes almost identical. But he failed to sight the buck and feared that he had not returned that spring. The scout started up the valley toward the swamp at the far end of it and each animal gave evidence of its one supersense, the most 130 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST highly developed of its faculties and the one upon which it mainly relied. The two antelope had moved far up the meadow, well beyond the elk, yet at the instant he stepped into the open they detected him ; for the antelope is essentially a creature of wide plains and flat distances and his most dependable sense is the sense of sight. His sense of hearing or of smell may mislead him, but it is impossible to deceive the prong- horn's eye. Even as the antelope had spotted his presence the instant he cleared the trees, so too, Woodson reflected, had the bighorn ram. The scout knew that from far up the cliffs the eyes of the old sheep were watching his every move; for the bighorn's most reliable source of warning lies in his all-seeing eyes. Scent seems to mean little to him, sound evidently nothing at all, but as he rests on some lofty shelf he sweeps the far hills with his eyes and defies his enemies to ap- proach unseen. In this the bighorn of the peaks is one with the pronghorn of the plains. Woodson had frequently experimented to determine the degree of development of the various senses in different animals and he did so now. The warning bark of the antelope sounded the instant he stepped from the trees. The scout stopped in his tracks. An old cow 131 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST elk yelped excitedly in sympathy with the warning of the pronghorn. She was but half the distance to the antelope yet had not seen the man. Every cow and calf whirled and looked toward the source of warning, their backs to Woodson. The hackle hair of the pronghorns bristled and the light rump patch flared. They stood gazing back past the elk. Another antelope would have known in- stantly the direction of the danger by noting the direction of the others' gaze. But the elk paid small heed to this, another bit of evidence that they placed but small reliance on their eyes. They sought for the menace in the opposite direction since the warning had come from there. When the man moved again one cow turned and saw him. He advanced a few steps at a time and the elk milled uneasily. The wind came quartering down the basin and he kept to the far side of the meadow from them. None of the animals was really frightened, only slightly uneasy at the presence of man among them. On each succeeding visit they must let the newness of it wear off before accepting the man as a harmless creature, one of themselves. He proceeded to the beaver pond and peered from the fringe of trees that bordered it. A giant bull moose, a cow and a long- legged calf stood knee-deep in the water where 132 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST it backed up among the willows across from him. The bull waded out to the deepest part and plunged his head below the surface. Only the hump of his withers showed above the water and he remained in this submerged state for so long a time that Woodson mar- veled. Then the great head lifted into view and the bull munched contentedly the mouth- ful of roots and vegetation he had uprooted from the floor of the pond. The cow and calf fed nearer the margin where the water was more shallow. The mother saw the man as he moved quietly along the shore; but the wind was wrong and when he stopped she could not be sure. The moose depended mainly on scent, distrusting the evidence of their eyes. The three big beasts neared him and stood in the shallow on his side of the pool while he remained motionless. Their little eyes, set high in the massive heads, glared wickedly and the bull and the cow popped their thick lips at him with a sucking sound. They did not fear him and when he left they stood and watched him go. On the return trip down the basin he chose the opposite side of the meadow, keeping just within the trees. The quartering wind was now at his back and it was the elk who first detected his approach. While he was yet some two hundred yards from them they 133 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST whirled to face him, the ribbon of scent pointing out his whereabouts as surely for the elk as sight of him had warned the two antelope on the up -trip. Now the antelope found themselves at a loss to locate him, knowing his direction only for the reason that their eyes noted the way the elk were facing, but they could not be certain till their eyes were trained on the man himself, the scent that was so evident to the elk apparently being too slight to register on the conscious- ness of the pronghorns. Thus Woodson had proved that the most dependable sense of one of these animals was that of scent, the other that of sight. It was almost dark when he reached the cabin. A dozen times during the night the bull elk bugled and when Woodson rose in the morning Wapiti had joined his cows and calves in the meadow. The scout repaired to the salt lick and found there the tracks of all his colony. Even Krag had come down from his cliff for a share of the salt. The track of a buck deer showed among the rest and Woodson knew that Blue was somewhere in the pocket. The running moon of the deer was later than that of the elk and moose. Blue still lived alone and had not yet joined his does. As he finished his breakfast and stepped 134 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST outside, Woodson noted that Teton was peering down the meadow, his ears pricked sharply in the direction of his gaze. A few yards behind him the pack horse was making a similar point. Woodson turned his eyes that way and saw a big black she-bear just within the entrance to the basin. She stood swaying from side to side, her nose testing the air currents eddying down the bottoms. Behind her a black cub and a brown sat on their haunches. "Here come the two blue-ribbon pests," Woodson said, "Wakinee and Wakinoo, They '11 most certainly make me lock up every time I go even to the spring for water. But I *m glad to see them back." The old she-bear had denned the preceding winter in the pocket and when she came forth in the spring she was followed by two cubs. She had learned from long experience that the easiest living was to be rustled round the permanent tourist camps. During the sum- mer a thousand tourists had contributed bits of food to the old bear and her cubs. But now the season was over, the camps closed and deserted, and she had brought her family back to rustle in the wild till such time as she was ready to den. She advanced upon the cabin without the least hesitation and Woodson tossed her 135 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST scraps of food. For every morsel he gave the cubs he insisted that they stand up and beg, holding the morsel out of their reach till they reared upon their short hind legs and stretched to take it from his fingers ; Wakinee, the black cub, and Wakinoo, his ^ brown brother, were both reasoning animals. After two days they rarely approached the man without rearing up on their hind feet and advancing to meet him, waddling as two bandy-legged infants. Within a week Krag had disappeared from the cliffs. The old ram had climbed to the plateaus in search of his ewes and lambs. Blue had dropped down to join his does and fawns. The wild things had come to accept the man as one of themselves. He sat one day on the doorsill and watched the animals following their natural lives. Two calf elk rose from their beds in the timber and trotted into the meadow, where they indulged in a make-believe duel. With heads pressed to- gether, backs arched to exert the last ounce of strength, they shoved each other about the meadow till tired of the sport, then rejoined their mothers in the timber. A blue grouse hen led her brood of seven chicks to the cabin, advancing cautiously and with many halts, to feed on the crumbs the man tossed out for them; forest chickens 136 The old bear launched forth and coasted for two hun- dred yards, the cubs following at short intervals. Page 137. THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST coming in to be fed in the haunts of man. The three bears came out high under the rims and crossed on to an old snow-bank that pitched down the slope. The old bear launched forth and coasted for two hundred yards on her haunches, the cubs following at short intervals. Wakinoo lost his balance and tumbled end over end, a whirling ball of brown fur. At least twice a day the bears took their coast. On all sides of him Woodson had ample evidence that animals frequently indulged in play when unmolested by men. The young of all species must have their games, the same as the young of the human race. The does and fawns came from the timber and moved across the meadow toward the cabin. When within a few yards they halted. In their big brown eyes was friend- liness, also a hint of doubt, as if the animals were slightly alarmed by their own temerity. The scout tossed them crusts of bread and they gradually neared till at last a fawn thrust her muzzle toward Woodson's out- stretched hand, her big ears working uneasily, then stretched her neck till she could reach the lump of sugar held between his fingers. Aside from the three bears the deer were the only creatures in the basin that would feed from his hand. The antelope, elk and moose did not fear him but would permit of no such 137 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST familiarity as that. Even the grouse, though they came to feed at his very feet, refused to take crumbs from his fingers. Conditions had been bettered materially during the past few years. The game in the Park was holding its own. The bears had learned that their lives were safe and had come in to make friends with man. Thousands of tourists marveled to see black and brown bears prowling the vicinity of hotels and camps in search of food and accepting scraps from the hands of all who would feed them. And it was no unusual occurrence for some monster grizzly to lurch from the timber at dusk and drive the blacks and browns away, affording the tourists a sight of this rare beast, so nearly extinct in the United States except within the borders of the Yellowstone. Of late the tendency had been to preserve the naturalness of the Park; and Woodson was more or less content. His end had been partially attained. But all this had consumed years of time. Woodson was well past fifty, nearer sixty, and the fringe of hair revealed below his hatband showed gray. Men spoke of him as Old Mart, the first Park Scout. He had seen it all. Superintendents had come and gone, some of them inefficient and indifferent, their administrations a backset and a detri- 138 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST ment to the general welfare of the reservation ; others conscientious and constructive, working to repair the damage permitted by prior oc- cupants of the post. The majority of the men in charge had been sincere in their efforts. Yet each in turn had believed that the one best thing for the Park lay in increasing the military machine within its borders. They had been content to let the record of their work rest upon the in- stallation of added martial equipment. Wood- son reflected that this was a natural state of affairs, for the officers' hearts were in their calling, military matters of paramount im- portance in their eyes. It had evidently occurred to no man to raise the question of whether or not the soldiers were necessary to the administration of affairs in the Yellowstone. But in his heart Woodson felt that they were merely an incumbrance, the facts so self-evident that he marveled that others did not see them at a glance. He sat on his doorsill and checked the matter over in his mind. Year by year the military equipage had been increased until now a million-dollar post was maintained at Mammoth; yet eighty per cent of the Park boundary was un- protected except by infrequent patrols of the soldiery and the strenuous efforts of the hand- 139 THE PASSING OF THE OLD- WEST ful of civilian scouts. The site for every outlying station, without one exception, had been recommended and its installation urged by Woodson. Poachers had worked almost without hindrance on Falls River and the Bechler, and though the equipment at Mam- moth was increasing steadily, it had required ten years of insistence on the part of the scouts to secure the recent establishment of a station for a sergeant and four men in that far corner. With a field battery and three troops of cavalry stationed in the Park, the dozen civilian scouts made ten arrests each year for every one accredited to all the soldiery combined. Woodson reflected that by elimi- nating the dead weight of hundreds of sol- diers and doubling the little force of civilian scouts the efficiency would be increased two- fold and the expense of administration cut to ten per cent of its present volume. But even so he knew that conditions were far better than in the past ; he felt that some day the public would see the situation in the light he saw it now and insist that matters be regu- lated in that way ; and he hoped that the new superintendent would not prove to be an inefficient whose regime would counteract the effects of the advancement won prior to his time. The early fall snows were heavy and with 140 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST only a few days' interim between storms. Wapiti departed with his cows and calves, headed for the winter range. Blue followed a few days later with his does and fawns. The three bears would soon take to the den and sleep the long sleep till spring. The moose wintered here in the pocket, browsing the willows and aspens as the snow banked deep. The two antelope would not chance the five miles of down-timber but would stay where they were. The hot springs near the lower end of the basin would lay bare sufficient food to winter them through ; he had known this and would not otherwise have brought them to his retreat as kids. Snow was falling when Woodson saddled Teton and packed the led horse for the start outside. The little procession filed out of the pass in two feet of snow, the white flakes still falling. "Teton, this winter will be a bad one," Woodson prophesied. "Unless I've misread the signs she 's going to be rough ; hard on men and game alike." 141 THE new superintendent was a man of superb conceit, infuriated by the least sug- gestion offered by another, reasoning in his egotism that one with the temerity to suggest was guilty, at least by implication, of setting his judgment above the superintendent's own. He lost no opportunity to impress those about him with the fact that his insight was in- fallible; querulous and fault-finding, he sub- jected all with whom he came in contact to a chirping monologue that inflated his own qualifications and belittled those of others. When he traveled he was accompanied by an imposing escort. Civilian employees in the reservation had left their jobs in flocks. Three out of the dozen Park scouts had quit their posts. Old Mart was disappointed but not unduly surprised. The Park had been a political plaything since its conception. He knew that the inefficiency of one man such as the present incumbent could counteract the con- structive progress made by several able com- mandants during the past few years. 142 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Other officers had sought Woodson's counsel and profited by the application of his ideas, worked out through decades of actual experi- ence. With the confidence of long service and untarnished record, Old Mart committed the grave error of volunteering information as to the proper care of the Park antelope herd. Hat in hand he stood before his chief and requested that a detail of six troopers be held subject to his call if occasion rose. The officer was given to short snatches of jerky repetition in his speech. "No, no," he returned irritably. "No, no. They 're not shepherds. They 're soldiers. Fool idea. Fool idea !" He waved abruptly to signify that the interview was ended. But Woodson stubbornly urged his point. "There 's some four thousand head ranging the Lamar and Yancey flats," he said. "When we have a heavy winter they 're still apt to gather and drift down-country, like they did years ago. We '11 have to watch them sharp if they get down to the Gardiner Flat. A few men can get behind and shove them back up the bottoms till the next storm hits. But if we once let 'em drift across the line it 's the last we '11 see of them." "Antelope ! Antelope !" the officer jerked. "Who gives a damn about antelope? This is no pet stock farm. It 's a military post. 143 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Military post ! You hear me Military post!" Again he motioned to the door. " Get out. Get out. Get out." His hand jerked in accompaniment to his words and Old Mart thought of a prairie dog whose tail flipped in accentuation of every chirp. As he passed down the hall the querulous complaint drifted after him : "Damn the antelope! Military post! Military post ! Want to make a pet stock farm out of Fort Yellowstone, I 'd like to know?" As a consequence of his temerity in thus volunteering his advice, Woodson, Chief Scout no longer but merely a private in disgrace, had for more than a month been patrolling the south line from the Snake River Station to Bridger Lake. The snow lay six feet on the level round the post on the Snake and the winter was little more than half gone. His route covered sixty miles with but two snow- shoe cabins for overnight stops between. The cabin at Bridger Lake was but a hut. Beyond it, thirty-five miles by the route a man must take, lay the station at Sylvan Pass and the intervening stretch was not patrolled. Only on every sixth night, when he completed his round and returned to the station on the Snake, did Woodson have an hour of human companionship, 144 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST As he left the Snake on the start of his seventh patrol of this country he was accom- panied by the swirling flakes of a storm, the worst one of the whole hard winter. He reached the first snowshoe cabin well after dark, his webs sinking in eighteen inches of fresh snow that had fallen on top of the old. "This will start the antelope to drifting down-country," he mused aloud. "If this keeps up they '11 never stop." In his mind he followed the drift he had viewed in reality a dozen times. "They 're streaming all down the Lamar by now," he said. "The head of the drift is past Junction Butte and milling through Yancy Meadows. Those that were at Yancy on the start have about reached the Gardiner Flat by now." It snowed all through the night and the following day. At the second snowshoe cabin of his patrol he prepared a late meal and rolled in his blankets. But he tossed rest- lessly and sleep would not come to him. He visioned the Gardiner Flat with the storm sweeping and eddying across it, and thousands of antelope plodding toward the line. The past few years he had looked upon the ante- lope as his special charges, as a few years back he had guarded the Park buffalo. He was doomed to failure in this as well. He re- viewed his life, a succession of failures in 145 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST everything he had set out to do. He knew that by now at least three thousand antelope were on the flat and would cross the line unless headed back. The whole scene was as clear to him as if he looked upon it in reality. He closed his eyes and once again he was riding the Gardiner Flats in a storm. It seemed that he rode against the wind with the snow crystals stinging his face and ears. He removed his hat and swung it against his knee to free it of the flakes banked on brim and crown. A band of small figures moved slowly through the blinding swirl of flakes and he veered Teton to head them. The dim forms stopped, huddled together and stamped fretfully. He heard the gruff hoarse bark of an antelope doe. A dozen barked in chorus. Then the band milled and turned back up- country and he hazed them along for three hundred yards. The storm thickened and closed in on him. His eyes availed him little now for he could not distinguish objects at ten yards. The gentle motion of his horse was soothing and he had ceased to feel the cold. Teton was accustomed to this work and could be trusted to warn him of any drift of antelope passing by. A few miles away three hundred troopers slept in com- fortable quarters at the post. He drowsed in the saddle, only to wake with a start as Teton 146 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST nickered and received an answer. Twenty yards away another scout was riding through the storm. The two men drew together. "We're holding 'em, I guess," Woodson said. "Have you seen the other two boys?" "Once each," the other man said. "It's a wonder they would n't turn out a few of them damn troopers to help us on a job like this." Woodson nodded. "But we '11 have to make out the best we can," he said. "When it breaks we '11 shove them back up the country." "This is two nights without sleep," the other said. "Here 's hoping she lifts before the third or I '11 fall off my horse." He rode away and the eddy of flakes swallowed man and horse. Woodson gave Teton his head and dozed in the saddle, then roused as the horse swerved and turned into the teeth of the storm. His ears were pricked alertly forward. Woodson peered ahead but could see only the shifting white. The gruff bark of warning sounded from immediately before the horse and proved that Teton had been right. The horse held on, with an occa- sional twist to the right or left, and the man knew that a drove of antelope scurried ahead of them, though he could not sight one himself. "I wonder now, Teton, if you 'd do that 147 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST alone if I was to pile off and collect a little sleep," he said. "But I reckon not." The old scout rolled over in his blankets. "But who gives a damn about antelope?" he asked. "Nobody. This is a military post." In the first gray dawn he rose, swallowed a bite of breakfast and started on. He sketched what had actually occurred the previous night on the Gardiner Flat as accurately as if he had been an eyewitness of the whole affair. Three thousand antelope had crossed outside in a single night. The new superintendent airily predicted that they 'd soon come back but they never did, and when spring came there were less than four hundred pronghorns in the reservation. Throughout the day, as he covered the snowy miles of the last lap of his patrol, Woodson pictured all that was taking place. "About now some squatter is getting up and is real surprised to see a bunch of antelope stringing through his pasture," he said, as he left the cabin. "He 's reaching for his gun to pile up enough meat to run him through the winter. His next-door neighbor is bent on doing the same ; and so on, all down the line. They '11 shoot 'em up all day and keep 'em on the run. We 've seen the last of them." W r oodson slept that night in the snowshoe 148 Three thousand antelope had crossed outside in a single night. Page 148. THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST cabin at Bridger Lake, the end of his patrol ; but in the morning he did not start on the return trip to the Snake. Instead he held straight on up the Yellowstone, towing a toboggan. He turned up Atlantic Creek and camped that night at Two Ocean Pass. The storm had lifted and the wind rose to whip the white particles into motion. Blind- ing clouds of wind-driven crystals bored past him as he traveled, and he laid over a day in the heavy timber, sheltered by a ledge that broke the drive of the gale. Mart was alone with his thoughts and with nothing to do but review them. He had failed in all that he had set out to do, an absolute, blank failure in the eyes of men. He had worked harder than most, had fought the elements when others remained inside, and it had brought him this ! At various times he had brought in the hardest characters in three States, men who had thought to vary their activities by making some swift raid in the Park. And throughout those three States his name was mentioned only with a curse; for he stood flatly against many things in which others deemed it their privilege as free men to indulge at will. One of the greatest statesmen America has ever seen had laid a hand on his shoulder and thanked him for his work. 149 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST 'You Ve guarded the property of the millions against the invasion of the few," he had said. "They don't fully realize that fact yet ; but some day they will." That constituted his sole reward for nearly thirty years of service. Now he was through, he told himself. It was not because his was a thankless job that part did not greatly matter but for the reason that it was a useless one. It was foredoomed to failure, had been from the first. With the cessation of the wind he headed down Pacific Creek toward Jackson Hole, having no particular destination in view. It had been years since he had visited this locality. He remembered the wealth of natural feed, the meadows rank with hay and the open sidehills of the Grovant and the Snake covered with luxuriant stands of grass. This was the favorite winter feeding ground of the elk. They would always have elk, he decided. Hide-hunting had been tabooed by law. The elk had no particular value, so men killed them only as they needed meat. Mountain men would always do that. He had never known a locality where moun- taineers could be induced to give up their right to kill what meat they chose. But Wyoming, first of all the States to take steps before it was too late, had made every effort to protect her game. Broad tracts 150 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST covering hundreds of square miles had been set aside as game preserves and all shooting in those parts prohibited. Other States had done this thing but they had waited till it was just too late. Wyoming had profited by observing the mistakes of others and started in good time. More than a hundred thousand elk fed in the Park and the Wyoming game preserves. Some sixty thousand head of these wintered south of the Park in Jackson Hole. Fifteen thousand drifted east to winter in the Shoshone and the Sunlight; perhaps forty thousand head left the State, half of them moving west, out Madison way into Idaho, the rest wintering to the north in the valleys of the Montana hills. Small bands had stopped along Pacific Creek and he saw them feeding on exposed sidehills cleared of snow by the recent wind. But the big droves had moved farther down. He would find them on the rolling aspen hills of Spread Creek, Ditch Creek, and the open country of the Grovant, even beyond that stream and south to the Hoback Range. W 7 oodson camped that night at the mouth of Pacific and the next day crossed the Buffalo Fork and swung east up Spread Creek. Out across the bottoms he could see snow- covered mounds which he knew for hay stacks. The country had settled up somewhat 151 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST in the last ten years. Men had filed their homestead rights on the valleys and had cut the natural meadow hay for winter feed. He found the carcasses of a dozen elk in an aspen clump and wondered what could have caused this wholesale slaughter. But when he viewed the south slopes that broke down into Spread Creek he knew. These open hills had blown free of snow but instead of the wealth of grass he remembered from the past, he saw only bare dirt and gravel now. The feed was gone. This was open range, free to any man who would graze his stock. Here, as in other places, with a prodigality that was character- istically American, men had thrown more cows out to summer in the hills than the range could possibly support. These south slopes, last to snow under in the fall and first to show green in the spring, had been fed off to the very grass roots the summer past. There was not a spear of grass for the elk. Thousands were scattered through the aspens and the bark and twigs were stripped from the smaller trees. "They 're down to eating the bark off the quaking asps already," Woodson said. "And the winter only a little better than half gone. Nothing but quakin' asp bark. But that's good feed. They '11 winter through on that." 152 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Yet in his heart he knew that the elk was primarily a grazing animal and must have grass; that he could not live exclusively by browsing as could the moose and deer. "I wonder why they don't go farther down," he said a dozen times during the day. "The Grovant always was the best feed country in the hills." It was well after dark when he headed out across the bottoms toward a stack-yard, some six or eight stacks of hay surrounded by a pole stockade. He was followed by a persistent music that haunted and sickened him, : the smash of brush as the elk tore down the aspens, the steady, never-ending crunch of the frozen crust as the ravenous brutes pawed to reach the grass that was not there. As he neared the stack-yard, he glimpsed a hat-brim in silhouette against the sky and stopped. "Hello," he called. The man on the stack knew that greeting. It had a familiar ring. That invariable, laconic salutation had startled hundreds of offenders and it was linked with the name of Old Mart wherever poachers congregated. Lee Page had heard that casual greeting on four separate occasions in the old days, and each time he had seen his plunder confiscated. The last instance had occurred nine years 153 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST before, when he had almost reached the line with the heads and scalps of a dozen bighorn rams. Page swung his rifle into line as the figure below him advanced a few feet. "Stop right there," he ordered. "This place is mine." Woodson stopped. "That you, Lee?" he inquired. "Seems like I know the voice. I 've wondered where you was holding out. I was aiming to sleep in the stacks. It 's cold laying out these nights." "I ought to know," Page returned. "I 've been laying out for the last three weeks. Listen," he went on. :< You 're on a false lead if you 're after me. I 'm telling you. My whereabouts every day for the past two months could be easy proved ; so I would n't mind going along only it '11 clean me out to the last dollar I own if I quit these stacks for an hour. I stay right here." "I 'm not looking for you," Woodson said. "Didn't even know you was within a thousand miles. I 've quit up above, any- way. Well, Lee, I '11 be sauntering along. Any stacks anywheres close around?" "Not right close," said Page. He gazed after the figure disappearing in the night. "Better crawl up and burrow in for the night, Mart," he called. "There 's considerable 154 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST space. I guess you 're not looking for me or you would n't be starting off." "All right, Lee." Woodson turned back. "No ; I was telling you straight. I 've quit." A fourteen-foot stockade of heavy poles had been erected round the stack-yard but the snow had drifted halfway to the top. "Hand me up your toboggan rope," Page said. "I'll pull and you give her a boost from down there. We '11 put her inside the fence. Load lashed on so it won't spill off ? " "Yes, it's lashed," Woodson assured him. "But I '11 just leave it here." "It'll get smashed flat out there," Page demurred. "Let 's drag her in." Wooason handed him the rope and they hoisted the toboggan and its light load over the fence. Page gave him a hand to the top of the nearest stack. W 7 oodson scooped away the snow, scratched out a trough in the hay, unrolled his blankets and burrowed in. "So you 've quit up above," said Page. "It 's a losing game," Mart stated. "I 'd have been a considerable better off if I 'd found that out thirty years before ; and that 's a fact." "Likely we Ve both played losing ends," said Page. "Neither extreme is what you might call remunerative, and a pile of grief goes with either way. I 'm what you might THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST call middle-aged, fifty-eight last spring, and this little filing and fifty -odd head of cows is all I 've got to show for it." With only their heads protruding, ear-flaps tied down to shut out the bite of frost, the two old-time enemies alternately talked and drowsed. A scattering volley of rifle shots sounded from far down the bottoms. Then, from some two miles away, came the heavy detonation of a shotgun, bellowing forth on the still cold night in a quick succession of reports. Woodson could see the red flashes before the sound of the shots reached his ears. In an hour he heard some two hundred shots. From all sides came the music of famine and slow death. Five hundred dim shapes prowled the flat, disregarding the proximity of man and riveted to the spot by the sight of the hay which might mean life if they could but reach it. The crackle and crash of brush sounded from adjacent slopes as the famished horde tore down the trees and stripped the bark. And through it all came that awful crunch as ten thousand hoofs pawed desper- ately at the frozen crust. Again there came the roar of the shotgun and the sound of general firing for miles down the valley. Jackson Hole had long been held up to the world as a nest of poachers. Here was the home of the tusk-hunter, the man who shot 156 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST down elk merely for the price of their teeth. But Woodson had not imagined it was so bad as this ; that men could be so vindictive as to kill elk or drive them off when starving rather than scatter a few forkfuls of hay which might save their lives. Suddenly there came a clatter of hoofs and the splintering crash of poles. Page's gun flared again and again in the face of fifty elk that had stormed the crib in a bunch. They shrank back before this fusilade. "It 's hell, Mart," Page said. "The poor devils are starving fast." Woodson had experienced a sudden glimpse of the other side. He had thought he knew all about elk but this desperate storming of stack-yards in the face of men was new to him. It accounted for all that shooting down the valley, and for Page's assertion that he would be cleaned out if he left his stacks for an hour. All down the length of the Hole a hundred settlers were sleeping in their stacks, unable to leave them for a minute in the night lest a thousand head of starving brutes should fall on their hay and devour it, dooming the settlers' own cows to starvation before spring. "There 's been a dozen men through here in the last couple of years that have lost every hoof they owned by going to sleep on the job 157 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST and leaving their stacks unguarded for one night," Page explained. "Harvey lost two hundred head of cows last winter because the elk got his hay. Only last week they tore down Peterson's stack-yard in an hour. His cows will winter-kill as sure as fate, only maybe his neighbors can let him have a little of their surplus to feed him through." "They won't stand for this sort of thing," Woodson prophesied. "They '11 lose patience and kill every elk in the Jackson Hole if this keeps up. I expect the most of the shots we heard to-night was fired into elk instead of in the air." "Some," Page admitted. "But not as many as you 'd think. A few of them gut- shoot the critters and let 'em crawl off some- wheres to die. Barton boasts that he 's gut- shot three hundred elk this year. There 's a few like him scattered round. But mostly folks make the best of it. They 're sorry for the poor devils and would feed 'em if they could. We 'd most of us hate to see 'em go the way everything else has gone. But this business of sleeping out and standing guard, night after night, and year after year, in forty below weather and in heavy storms, that 's enough to make any man show his teeth." Three times during the night bands of starving elk stormed the crib, and three times 158 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Page drove them back. With the first morn- ing light the most of the animals withdrew to adjacent hills but some fifty head, too far gone to heed the presence of men, remained and bedded in the flat. "Come up to the house," Page said. "We '11 stir up a bite to eat." Woodson followed him to the cabin set back among the trees at the mouth of a gulch that broke back into the hills. The bawling of cows issued from the timber back of the house. Page had fenced the entrance to the gulch to hold them there. When the meal was finished he hitched a team to a hay- rack built on a sled and the two men drove to the meadow for a load of feed. Woodson noted that the elk rose to their feet and watched their approach. At first he attrib- uted this to a revival of their fear of man; but he observed that a number of cows and calves advanced toward the sleigh. Their course lay over a road packed on successive snows by repeated trips of the sled. The four-foot layer of snow was trampled flat on either side of this single trail. "You 've been feeding them," he said. "Now and then," Page confessed. "I don't want 'em dying all over the place and have to put in the whole spring snaking car- casses out of the field. I throw out a little 159 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST to the weak bunch in the morning. It gives 'em strength to make it back to the hills and rustle round among the quakin' asp. They '11 all be gone in a few more years of this. Damn it all, a man that 's lived his life ahead of the railroad, like you and me, hates to think what the old hills will be like when the last hoof of game is cleaned and the last tree cut." It came to Woodson that men were much alike. He himself had started as a killer, had shot down more buffalo than there were left alive in the world to-day. Every man he knew who stood for conservation to-day had stood for destruction yesterday. It was not such inconsistency as it seemed on the surface, merely that realization came soonest to the ones who had participated in the waste them- selves and saw the end looming just ahead. The two men loaded the sleigh from a stack- butt and as they started out across the meadow the elk crowded around them, the stronger ones shoving the weaker animals aside. Page tossed forkfuls of hay high in the air and the wind fanned it out for twenty yards so that all could have a chance at it. This was a strange sight to Woodson, elk feeding at the end of a pitchfork the same as domestic cows. They returned for a second load and hauled it to Page's stock in the gulch. 160 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST An hour later, as he looked from the window of the cabin, Woodson saw five cow-elk pass through the dooryard. They jumped the five-foot fence and fed with Page's cows. Woodson stepped outside and walked to the fence. The elk threw up their heads for a brief look at the intruder, crowded to the far side of the cows and resumed their feeding. Mart went back inside. "How much surplus feed have you got over what will run you through till spring?" he inquired of Page. "I 'd like to experi- ment." "Maybe thirty ton," Page estimated. "What 's the going price ?" "It 's bringing round ten dollars down below," said Page. "I '11 buy you out," Woodson offered. "I 'm going to try something out." "We '11 cut it in half," Page said. "It 's likely that before spring I 'd have fed it all into 'em, anyway. I was sort of experi- menting, myself. We '11 split the deal. You stay here and we '11 see how feeding elk by hand works out." The two men carefully doled out their feed and hoped for a chinook but the cold held without a break. After two weeks Woodson set forth for a rapid survey of conditions farther down where the big herds 161 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST wintered on the Grovant, the best grass country in the hills. His way was lined with the remains of the starved, carcasses scattered in hundreds through the aspens, and he found the Grovant grubbed off to the very roots. Instead of exposed shoulders carpeted with the pale brown of cured feed, as he had anticipated, they loomed between the white snowbanks in many colors, according to the composition of the soil ; greenish on the clay slopes, yellow on the gravel hills, with here and there a darker splotch of black muck round the springs and sidehill bogs, naked and devoid of vegetation. But the situation was not without its ray of hope. Woodson found many ranches win- tering little bunches of elk through with their cows. Others would have done the same except that they were short of feed. The State had made an appropriation to feed the elk and all surplus hay in the valley had been purchased. The chinook came at last and broke the grip of winter. No more heavy storms came to finish the destruction and spring broke across the hills. Woodson left Page's for another survey of the lower bottoms. He stood on a shoulder overlooking the valley of the Grovant and estimated that he could move for two miles either way from where he 162 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST stood by leaping from one to the next of the bodies of the winter-killed. He had seen at least five thousand carcasses during the day and could see that many more from where he stood. They lay in the open and in the heavy timber. Every way he turned he found them, gruesome evidence of the winter's toll. He stayed with Page till the early part of June. The elk had lingered in the low country to calve and he made one last trip to the Grovant before returning to the valley where he had left Teton and his other horses in the fall. The big herds were moving back to the summer range and for all of the appalling loss of the last few months, he could see that there were still elk in plenty. The river was at flood tide from melting drifts and he stood with a dozen ranchers and watched a spectacle such as is given to but few men to witness. Thousands of cows had plunged in and crossed the swollen stream. On the far side the calves were huddled in swarms, loath to risk the boiling current. On one side the cows yelped and entreated; five thousand calves squealed in unison from the other shore. The water between was dotted by the heads of scores of swimming cows, some fresh arrivals just up from the south, other cows crossing back to nurse 163 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST their calves and to try and wheedle their offspring into the stream. An average of two hundred calves an hour took to the water. Many were swept away, turning over and over in the suck of the current, but the majority effected safe crossings and joined the cows. The younger men that viewed this scene were inclined to scoff at the death toll of the preceding months. What mattered such a loss in the face of this abun- dance ? But those of long experience shook their heads. A decade before they had been able to see ten thousand antelope from this same point. Now an antelope was a curiosity in Jackson Hole. A middle-aged man stood among the group. There was a haunting familiarity about him that Woodson could not quite place. The man nodded. "I reckon you Ve forgot about me," he said. "Do you recollect where we met up last?" Woodson's memory flashed back across the years. It was Rice, the boy who had planned a hunt with Hanson to supply meat for the mining camps; Rice, but a boy no longer. "I thought you was hunting deer for the mines down in the Colorado hills," he said. Rice grinned and shook his head. "Where have you been living at?" he 164 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST inquired. "The deer have been gone from the Gore Range and the Rabbit Ear for fifteen years. Ten-day open seasons, some- times only four can't hunt when there 's snow on one buck deer with horns." He waved a hand at the elk droves along the river. "One fall I saw mule deer coming down to the Oak Hills to winter, thicker than what them elk are, by far. I 've seen twenty thousand in a day and shot a hundred for their saddles from one stand. Two years later there was n't enough deer to pay you to outfit for a hunt." The young men present smiled at this apparent exaggeration; but the old settlers did not smile. There were those among them who had hunted for the Colorado mining camps themselves and had seen long strings of freight wagons piled high with saddles of venison. "What happened to the deer in two years if they was ever as thick as these elk?" a young man demanded. "Where did they all go to?" "When I left down there the settlers was saying that they 'd changed their range," Rice said. "They was sitting round waiting for 'em to come back to their old stamping ground. They 're waiting yet." Rice had later shot ducks for the market 165 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST on the prairie lakes and marshes of the Middle West. c "There was real money there," he stated to those assembled. "I J ve killed better than three hundred bluebills and redheads in one morning's flight. I averaged better than ten dollars a day for two months, spring and fall, and made enough to last me through the year. The last few seasons it was harder and I didn't clear much over five a day. It seems like the duck flights through the marshes has slacked off. I expect likely the big flights have been going round some other way." His face turned somber as he looked back over a past of plenty as compared to the lean days of now. "The old days are gone for good," he lamented. "They Ve passed a damn-fool law that says a man can't sell his ducks." 166 XI WOODSON pulled up his horse to view the stump of a tree that stood even with his eyes as he sat in the saddle. That tree, a six- inch lodgepole, had been felled with an ax and its height told him it had been cut in the winter or early spring while the drifts lay deep in the timber. It stood in a dense jungle of down-timber, not even an elk trail near it, close under the western base of the Absarokas where men seldom traveled. It had not been cut for firewood for the work had been done when the tree was green. This single stump challenged his curiosity and he circled the spot to determine what use had been made of the trunk. Even as he rode he assured himself that the matter was of small interest to him, that he had no further object in ferreting out the meaning of any such evidence in the Park. The fact that he had been inside the reservation for more than a month without his presence having been suspected was ample evidence of the ease with which malefactors could operate. It was evidence too, he reflected, of the 167 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST demoralized condition of the little force of scouts. Good men had quit when subjected to petty persecutions ; and to him that meant that the Park was practically unguarded, for he considered the good accomplished by the patrols of troopers was but negligible; but he was through with all that, he told himself again, so why dwell upon it ? It was growing dark so he made only a superficial survey of the neighborhood before heading Teton back the way he had come. When night shut down about him he gave the horse his head and Teton took him straight to the pass leading into the pocket that sheltered his little cabin. He stripped the saddle from the horse and prepared a bite to eat, then sat upon the sill and smoked. ! He had lingered here for a full month since gathering his horses, attempting to reach a decision as to what he should do next ; for now that he had quit the force he found himself without a purpose, one of the army of oldish men that are scattered through the hills with no definite object but to live from day to day, prospecting or following the trap line. Woodson had no immediate need of funds and for the present was content to linger here. The purr of the little waterfall sliding down the face of the cliff was soothing. This 168 The moose could winter in the heavy drifts where all others starved. Page 169. THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST was home. A fox squalled from the high ridges above timber line and a coyote lifted his voice in an eerie howl from the timber just outside the pass. The invasion of the hills by these little yellow prairie wolves was but one of the many transitions he had witnessed in the last two decades. He had seen the country when moose were practically unknown and now they ranged in hundreds in the swampy bottoms, increasing as the other game died out. These big migrants from the north and the yellow invaders from the plains were the only two that held their own; the moose for the reason that they could winter in the heavy drifts where all others starved; the coyotes because their cunning was superior to all the wiles that man might employ against them, adapting them- selves to new conditions more rapidly than men could invent new means to harass their kind. With the elk it was now more of a question of winter range than of shooting. On the north and west the cowmen of Idaho and the sheepmen of Montana grazed their stock to the very Park line and fed off every spear of grass. Woodson had been at the game too long, had wandered the hills and shifted from point to point for too many years to be able now to remain wholly inactive, and to 169 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST relieve this restlessness he followed long self-imposed patrols along the base of the Absarokas either way from the mouth of his retreat. In the intervals between these jaunts he whiled away the time with the wild things that made up his colony. None of them feared him and the elk and moose stood unconcerned at his close approach, but only the little band of mule deer, now increased by three fawns, paid him the compliment of repaying his calls. At least once each day they came to the cabin and ate biscuits or lumps of sugar from his hand. The bears had long since departed for the vicinity of the hotels and permanent tourists' camp. The bull elk and the mule-deer buck had retired to their lofty nooks, nursing their velvet growth from harm, and seldom ven- tured into the bottoms except for brief visits to the salt-lick. The blue grouse hen had mothered a second brood of chicks and these fed in the dooryard, as had the flock of the preceding year. All these interests filled his day but there was too a certain sense of emptiness, as if his lifelong ambition had trickled swiftly to an end of faltering futility, all past effort of no avail. And always there came a day when old habit was reasserted and drove him forth to ride the hills for some sign of an unfriendly presence in his domain. 170 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST His book was the book of the open, and the telltale sign of the forest floor unfolded be- neath his practiced eyes, as easily inter- preted as the open page of print is intelligible to the eyes of other men. Little escaped him and there was no displacement of natural deposit too minute to have its meaning ; faint streaks of slanting grass among the upright growth of the meadows, the slightest dis- turbance of the pine-straw that denoted the passing of scuffing feet ; depressions in gravel bars or the mud of the stream beds, almost obliterated by the wash and swirl of water; the smallest rock dislodged from its former bed ; all these told their story. But of late the only bit of sign worthy of interest had been that single stump in the timber some ten miles from his retreat. That challenged his curiosity and a few days later he returned to the spot. He circled the vicinity and found a second stump cut some eight feet from the ground. Within a limited area he discovered a score of others scattered through the timber. Par- ticles still adhering to the stumps told him that the tops had been draped with moss when fresh cut, undoubtedly with a view to breaking the glaring white of the ax- work which might loom up and attract the eye of any man traveling through the neigh- borhood. 171 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "Somewheres round here he's built a hut," Woodson said. "We '11 have to locate that hang-out, Teton. These trees were cut a year ago last winter, while the snow was on." After an hour's search he found it, a hut six feet by eight, located in a clump of feathery young jack pines. "This here was built when the ground was firm," Woodson decided. "Likely he cut his logs and dragged 'em here on the snow, then came back and built the place in the summer when the drifts were gone. I wonder now, Teton, just what his game was. There 's no beaver near enough round to pay him to operate from here. Maybe he had out some marten lines last winter. There 's plenty of marten running these high ridges. W r e '11 lay over here a day or two and find out what he was doing here." He led Teton some two hundred yards up the slope to picket him for the night in a sidehill park that opened out in the timber. He was not left long in doubt as to the man's occupation in the locality. Just outside the open park, behind a windfall jam, he found the bones of a six-point bull. The animal had not lain there many months for the bones were not bleached dead-white but showed faintly pink. The shoulder blades were shattered by the passage of a heavy ball. 172 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST This was no winter-killed animal, the old bull had been shot down for his teeth. There were six more carcasses in the timber on that side of the open space. Woodson pro- spected the vicinity for three days, and his search revealed a total of sixty carcasses of bull elk. These mute witnesses told him exactly the months that the other man had hunted here. Some carried fully matured antlers, the points polished for the running moon, showing that they had been killed the preceding fall. The skulls of others were adorned with antlers well matured but still revealing shreds of velvet, killed in late summer the year before. Still others had been slain while the velvet growth had attained but small proportions. These last had been killed in the spring just past. "He came in and put up that hut late in the summer and hunted up till the herds drifted out in the fall," Woodson said. " Then he caught the first upward drift this spring and hunted for a month. We '11 put out, Teton, and not leave too much sign round the place. It 's likely he '11 come back in again this fall." The thing he had found weighed on the old man's mind. A definite value had now been placed on the elk. A pair of teeth were worth from ten to fifty dollars on the market. 173 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST The sixty animals he had discovered con- stituted but a portion of one man's tusk- hunting operations for two months in the fall and one month in the spring. There would be easily that many scattered round the hills and which he had failed to locate, shot down for their teeth and left to rot. The coyotes and cats had picked the carcasses, the bears had cleaned up every morsel that was left when they came from their dens in the spring, and now the porcupine gnawed the bones and scored deep grooves in the horns. All these magnificent creatures shot down that men in distant spots might adorn their vest fronts with trinkets of another's killing. "A bad piece of work, Teton," Woodson said. "Human vanity breaks out in many a queer way from time to time. We have n't altered much in the last few thousand years. Our inclinations still run about the same, only tastes have changed. The cannibal wore a boar-tusk through his nose. Likely the buck Indian frowned on that as right poor sort of taste and instead he decked him- self out in bear claws, and porcupine quills. Now we consider that a downright vain and outlandish style of get-up so we men folks of to-day modestly drape a cluster of bull- elk teeth on our paunch." 174 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Twice during the next month Woodson revisited the vicinity of the hut but found no evidence of the man's return. The first snow of the autumn fell and melted except in the more sheltered places and he rode to the spot again, then held on past it. He sat his horse on the shoulder of a spur and gazed absently off across the hills. A raven swooped in spirals and pitched into the timber a mile away. Three others of the big black scaven- gers winged their way to the spot, one utter- ing guttural croaks, the remaining pair emit- ting throaty whistles with a rising inflection as if to inquire if all were well. Woodson knew well what this presaged; the meat- eating birds of the hills were assembling for a banquet. He headed Teton for the spot, guided by the conversation of the ravens. A score of black shapes flapped away at his approach, raucously protesting this inter- ruption of their feast. A bull elk lay in the timber, shot through the lungs, his tushes gone. "He 's working again, Teton," Woodson said. "It 's likely when he came back to the hut he found we 5 d been there and discovered his hang-out. Chances are that he saw where you 'd been picketed in the little park. Now he 's operating from some other base." He dismounted and scouted round the 175 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST scene of the kill but found not even a heel print. The work had been done while the snow was on, but even so there should have been a few telltale depressions where the killers' boots had pressed the melting snow down into the soft earth underneath. But there was not a scratch. "We'll pick him up, Teton," Woodson predicted. "It 's only a question of days." But after the expiration of two weeks he was not so sure. The bird flights led him to a dozen freshly killed bulls, but he had yet to find a single trace of the killer. For the first time in his life he found all his knowl- edge of hill-craft set at naught. The poacher seemed a phantom slayer who plied his bloody trade and left no sign. Never once had W T oodson found so much as a boot-print. Solid balls had slain the elk but the report of a single shot had failed to reach his ears ; yet he held doggedly to his purpose. He knew that the poacher's rifle was equipped with a silencer, which accounted for his soundlessness, and he waited and watched for some signs that would consti- tute the equally simple key to the reason he could travel the hills and leave no track. The fall storms fell and melted and the killing went on unchecked. Woodson knew that he himself left tracks for the other man to 176 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST read, that the tusk-hunter must be aware of his presence and did not fear him. And while he scoured the hills for the phantom killer a new commandant had insti- tuted a search for Old Mart Woodson. The first Park scout was wanted at the head- quarters to help rebuild the old organization, recently broken down, to its former state of efficiency. But no man could give informa- tion as to his whereabouts since leaving Jackson Hole four months before. Instead of being depressed by the con- tinued futility of his search, Woodson was more nearly content than he had been for months, his whole time absorbed in unravel- ing a hard trail. The hunt had been on for three weeks, when, on the morning after a two-inch snowfall during the night, the ravens led him to the carcass of a bull elk in the heavy timber. The body of the animal had not yet stiffened. It had been killed less than two hours past. Almost unconsciously Old Mart turned his eyes aloft as if to search for some sign of the slayer, as if indeed he had traveled overhead from tree to tree after the fashion of some great ape; for the snow lay undis- turbed. The bull had apparently stumbled about in this spot for a few seconds before he fell and then struggled slightly in his 177 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST death throes. There had been two bulls together, or at least traveling the same general route, for the trail of the second animal ran parallel to that of the one that lay here dead, occasionally crossing it. This second trail left the spot and Woodson wondered why the poacher had not shot both bulls. Perhaps the one had been ahead, out of sight of the man when he fired. Per- haps, too, the killer had followed and shot down the other animal farther on. Woodson mounted Teton and took up the tracks of the second bull. As he did so a wild theory, the first he had formed while on the case, flashed across his mind. Teton pricked his ears alertly and dropped his muzzle to the trail. He snorted explosively and sent a shower of snow from the spot. 'You know there J s something queer going on, Teton," Woodson asserted. "I wish you could tell me what made you blow off like that. Do you suppose that a man could break a bull elk in to ride?" He examined the tracks at length as he leaned from the saddle, then dismounted and knelt in the snow. There were hoof- prints of the hind feet where the animal stepped each time in the track of the fore- foot and blotted it out, the little, lifting, forward cuff on the surface of the snow, the 178 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST stride spaced just right for a bull traveling at a leisurely walk. Woodson swung to the saddle and followed the rail. "No, Teton, he 's not straddling a saddle- broke bull elk," he said. "But we 've got him now." After a half mile he pulled up the horse and stared. "Look at that, now, Teton," he urged. "If that don't beat a bull elk at his own game then I miss my guess. An elk can travel down-timber at top speed but I never see one do it just like that." The elk had made a clean side step of at least six feet to the right, clearing the top of a down-log that lay four feet high, landing apparently on one hind foot. After this performance he had proceeded at a leisurely pace as before. The sun had flared forth and the soft snow was already disappearing from the open spots. Woodson tied Teton in the timber and pro- ceeded on foot. Droves of elk had crossed the trail of the one he followed and at times their course was the same. Very carefully he worked out one print at a time in the snow or mud. Just at dusk a man knelt over a tiny fire before a rude wikiup of poles and bows in a jungle of down-timber. A voice called softly from behind him. 179 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST ."Hello," it said. "Steady." The man whirled and gazed into the muzzle of a rifle that was balanced across the top of a windfall. "So it 's you, Rice," Woodson said. : *You stumbled on me by accident," Rice stated sourly. "Without the devil's own luck you would n't have found me in a dozen years." "Bull elk don't step sideways across four- foot blow-downs and light on one foot two yards away," Woodson observed. "Now if he 'd squared round to face it before he jumped and landed with all four feet bunched close, why maybe you'd still be running loose." "Well, and what business is it of yours?" Rice demanded. 'You 're not in the scouts nowadays. You quit. You 've got no more business up here than me. You 're trepass- ing on the reservation too. Where 's your authority to take me in?" This truth had not crossed W T oodson's mind but he saw it now. "Fact," he confessed. "I had n't thought of that. But I guess it will be all right. Anyway, you 're going along." "Maybe," said Rice. "But there could n't be any charge placed against me, as if I was resisting arrest. It would merely be one 180 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST trespasser leaving the society of another. You 're getting to be an old man and I don't want to take advantage of you ; but if you think you can travel those hills alone with me for three or four days without my protest- ing some, why, you 're just miles wrong." In all his life Woodson had never threatened a prisoner and what he said now was not so much a threat as it was a mere statement of simple fact. "Likely you're correct about the legality of the thing," he admitted. "And I'm correct in surmising that you 're the lowest- down critter I 've run across to date. God only knows how many elk you Ve shot down for nothing but their teeth. Any time you feel like making that little break you was remarking about won't be a bit too soon for me. Because then I '11 shoot you in the back and chuck you under a windfall some- wheres out of sight. That would be the simplest way out of the whole mess for me. So you just perform anyway that suits you best." "What have you got on me anyway?" Rice inquired. "I'm merely up here where I have n't any particular business without a permit. So are you." "I '11 have a look around as soon as I 've snubbed you to a tree," said Woodson. "Elk 181 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST tushes are small and easy cached, but likely you was n't looking for this visit." Some four days thereafter the new super- intendent, fretfully wondering if the snow of the past two days would continue through- out the third, heard the laughing voice of a trooper just outside. "Who said that Old Mart had winter- killed last year?" he demanded. "If he did, then here comes his ghost as natural as life and up to the old tricks. It 's an odd bird he 5 s dragged in this trip." The officer looked from the window and saw a strange procession filing across the parade ground toward headquarters. The leading figure was a man mounted on a pair of lofty stilts and carrying a ten-pound lard bucket in his hand. An old fellow followed close behind him, leading a horse packed with a scanty camp equipment. The outfit passed from his field of view and a moment later he heard the thud of feet outside as Woodson stamped to shake the snow from his clothing and swung his hat against the door jamb. "Old Mart, sir," a sergeant reported. "Send him in, sergeant," the officer ordered. "And detail two men to guard that fellow he brought in." When Woodson stood before the superinten- 182 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST dent his intended explanation was forestalled. "So this is Old Mart," the officer greeted. "Glad to see you back. Need you round here bad. So you Ve been working even while you were on your vacation. By the way before I forget it ; full pay all the time you were gone; new rule in the Park about vacations on full pay." It gradually dawned upon Woodson that a new superintendent had been installed since he left; that the new officer took it for granted that he had merely been away on leave but was still enrolled in the personnel of the civilian scouts. This assumption ren- dered unnecessary the awkward explanation of his arresting a man without authority. He was still a unit in the force he had served for thirty years. His shoulders straightened and he reverted to old habit. "Prisoner to report, sir," he said. The officer nodded and motioned to a chair. "Sit down and tell me all about it," he instructed. "What's he been up to that fellow you brought in ? " The annals of Park history are full of such reports as Woodson now recited, all brief and clipped. It had never been his habit to turn in voluminous reports, merely the bare facts unadorned. 183 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "Killing elk for the teeth," he stated. "He 's been at it for two years. There 's the tushes of fifty -odd bulls he 's killed the past month cached in the bottom of that grease pail he packed in, stored underneath his lard. He traveled on a pair of stilts built up on elk hoofs." Then followed one of the few unessential details that Old Mart had ever thrown in with a report. "They was awkward things to pack on a horse and I did n't want to leave that evidence behind. He seemed to fancy that style of locomotion previous, and besides, I can't muster up much sympathy for him after what he 's done, so I marched him in on his own tools for fifty miles." 184 XII WHEN the ice went out in the spring and the grass showed green between the drifts the civilian scouts had been reorganized and were working at their old-time standard of efficiency. Their numbers were few but every one on the rolls was an experienced hillman. It was estimated that something over eight hundred head of elk had been killed for their teeth in the last year within the limits of the Yellowstone; but in the past few months at least half of the tusk-hunters participating in this slaughter had been tracked down. Colonel Harper summoned his chief scout for a conference. "Things are running better now," he said. "We're picking up the most of them and driving the fear into the rest. Now since that 's ironed out we '11 tackle the next. How many elk are left out here ?" "Round ninety thousand head, even since the big loss a year ago," Woodson estimated. "Not all right inside, but the big part of them, and the rest within a few miles outside the line." 185 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "Now, how are we going to handle them? Can you outline a practical constructive plan for keeping those herds intact?" "Not all of them. I used to think it could be done but I see it different now. But I can show you how to save a big percentage with- out relying on protection outside the Park." 'You tell me," the officer instructed. "You outline a practical plan and I'll put the measure through." "We '11 have to wait till along sometime in the summer," Woodson said. "Then I can show you what I mean and prove my point as we go along if you '11 take a swing through the Park with me." "That 's a long time," the Colonel objected. "But we'll wait if you think best. In the meantime I want you to go out with me on a few short trips right now. This is my time of year." It must be that Nature, in sustaining that intricate balance that is so apparent throughout all her works, however varied, has even diffused the tastes of men, apportion- ing their interests so that none of her moods or her creations might be entirely slighted. It is given to some men to love best the sea that others loathe. Some are in love with the spell of the plains while the hearts of others expand to the lure of the hills. Some thrill 186 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST to the screech of the storm which depresses those who are content only when the skies are fair. There are those who love the winter months, their tonic the sting of frost. And Colonel Harper, a soldier by profession but by inclination a dabbler in botany, loved the spring. On this first spring season in the Yellowstone he reveled in a variety of flowers, unfolding in such wonderful profusion as might be expected only in the tropics. Woodson knew them all and together they took a ten-mile jaunt in search of possible new specimens. Toward the close of the day they sat on a down-log at the edge of the timber and looked out across the meadow. "Nature didn't overlook one thing when she made the Yellowstone," the Colonel said. "She even finished it off with a carpet of flowers from the bottoms to the peaks." In one day they had seen banks upon banks of blossoms tinged with every shade known to man. Out above the timber line, in every opening between the drifts, the blue of the forget-me-nots contrasted with the pure gold of the alpine buttercup and the purple of clematis. The columbine and the harebell lifted shy heads in the timber; the crimson of Indian paint-brush flamed in relief against the silvery aspen trunks at the fringe of open parks; jungles of wild rose in the sheltered 187 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST bottoms, and sidehills massed with golden- rod; heavy-headed clusters of bee plant at the timber's edge ; rose mallow and shooting star. Dainty fringed gentians lifted from the meadows where purple banks of lupin and pale lemon seas of the mountain parsley were broken only by the splashes of color where a hundred other flowers raised their faces to the sun. The Colonel drank in every detail of the spring riot unrolling before his eyes. "And if the stockmen have their way we '11 soon see that color cut off beneath the grass roots and trampled flat into the ground," Woodson observed. The Colonel roused from his abstraction with a start. "How 's that?" he queried. "For the last ten years stockmen have been bringing every pressure to bear to have the Park thrown open for cows and sheep," Woodson stated. "I 'd hate to see that measure pass." "Yes," Harper agreed. "I 'd rather dis- like that myself ; but it is n't likely they '11 let them in." "Isn't it?" Woodson asked. "They've let them graze other places. As near as I can find out this is about the only National Park in the United States that is n't open to grazing now. It breaks a sheepman's heart 188 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST to go through here and see this feed. It spoils a cowman's trip. There 's no beauty here for them without a band of woollies feeding on every sidehill or a bunch of range cows bedded in every meadow and open park. They '11 never rest till they get across the line." " Maybe," the officer admitted. "It's a question of development of added pro- duction. We have to look at that side too. They think that the grass is theirs to graze as they see fit free grass, more cows ; that 's their argument. Of course, if you look at it like that "Why, then, you've got to look at it like this," Woodson said. "That with free trees there 's more lumber. If a sheepman can run his sheep on the grass in here that belongs to a hundred million souls, then why can't some lumberman throw a logging crew in here and start lumbering in the Park ? Or a man that wants to trap come here and make a catch of mink and fox ? Or hunt for elk and bear? Why can't some equally free citizen stake out his claim on Lewis Lake and fence if off for his private fishing pond?" "But their point is that the best grass country in the hills is being withheld from them." Harper pointed out. "And it cer- tainly is a better feed country here than that outside." 189 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "Did it ever occur to you to wonder why the grass grows here and there 's no grass outside?" the old scout inquired. "Does it strike you as queer that Nature covered the hills with grass right up to an imaginary line that constitutes the boundary of the Park while all outside on the north and west there 's nothing much but bare dirt and gravel left ? " "I know it 's a fact, but I don't know why," the officer confessed. "Suppose you tell me." "I 've seen these whole hills covered with feed," Woodson said. "It was all grass country then; lots of it far better than the Park itself is to-day. The stockmen would n't put just enough stuff on the range to stock it to capacity. Each one had to throw out a bunch to try and feed off a certain locality and beat his neighbors to it. You never saw a cow country where range quarrels were n't the topic of the times. Every man crowds the range with every last hoof he can shove onto it. Down in the low country, where it 's more or less solid grass land, the range stood overstocking after a fashion. Up here in the hills it 's different again. There 's steep slopes, gravel and looser soil, and the grass grows scattering in place of heavy sod land. The roots come out along 190 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST with the tops when it's grubbed too close. The hoofs churn up the gravel on the slopes. In my day I 've seen five million acres of hills absolutely ruined by overstocking just because they threw out a few head more stuff in every locality than there was grass to feed." "It surely can't be that all that bare country outside once had grass the same as we have in here," the officer dissented. "Better," Woodson insisted. "The Park is n't a real grass country only by com- parison. I 'm telling you just what I 've seen myself. There 's hills that you look at now, with hardly enough soil to hold the gravel on the slopes ; and you say, * There never was any grass grew there. There 's not even soil for a roothold.' But grass did grow there. I saw it; on every hill that looks bleak and barren to you now. They threw out too many head of stock and they had to grub for the last spear of grass, right down into the ground, and loosened the roots. There was nothing to hold down the thin surface soil. The wind whittled it off and the gravel started to slide. That 's why there 's no grass outside. And you can keep every hoof of stock off lots of it now and it '11 take fifteen years to reseed itself and get back to where it was ten years ago." 191 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST "Still, while that may be true, the stockmen in the hills are hard-pressed," the Colonel said. "They suffer losses every year. They actually do need more range." "What they actually need," Woodson stub- bornly contested, "is less cows for what range they 've got, and more winter feed. It 's coming to that. They suffer losses from overstocking what range they have left. Then they go into the winter with half enough feed and suffer a percentage of winter- kills. They have to throw out too early in the spring and the larkspur gets some cows. Then they send out a cry that range is being held back from them and causing them loss. People who live in cities and way off from here have no way to know the facts. They think it 's true. In a hill country like this, where it 's eight months winter, what they do need is not more range for the four open months but twice as much hay for the other eight." "But they claim that this grass is going to waste," Harper explained. "That 's their main hold. They sent a delegation in here and took officials through to point out that the bottoms are n't touched by the game. They rode for miles in the open meadow without seeing a hundred head of elk, all told, showing that the grass in the bottoms was going to 192 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST waste when it might be turned into mutton and beef." "I know," Woodson said wearily. "I know. And a while back they did the same thing with officials outside, down in the Teton Game Preserve toward Jackson Hole. Buffalo Fork and Pacific Creek were closed to grazing that much grass set aside for the elk. The stock interests invited officials in to pass on the case. They piloted them through the meadows in the middle of the day. Most of the elk were back in the peaks for the summer. What few were down had naturally bedded in the timber during the heat of the day. They did n't see any elk. Those men knew the officials could n't read signs would n't know the tracks of a thou- sand elk from the trail of a lone coyote. It was n't natural that they should. Their training has run to other things. They left fully satisfied that that grass was n't used by the elk. There was a general laugh after the delegation was out of sight. Smooth work ! That 's a favorite joke in the Hole to-day ; about how they bunked the officials into believing there were no elk on Pacific and Buffalo Fork. They did the same thing out in Idaho ; and worse in Montana. That 's why the grass grows knee-deep inside the Park on Slough and Hell-roaring creeks and 193 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST is bare as a table outside, cut off clear under the roots by those sharp little cutting hoofs where the Montana sheepmen threw out just a few too many bands of sheep for what grass there was. How can the officials that come through here get the truth ? It 's easy to make fallacies stand out like facts. If they J d bring them here in late fall which they never will they 'd see that that grass in the bottoms is used by the elk. They come down a stage at a time as the snow crowds them out of the peaks. That bottom feed keeps them for two months sometimes three. Feed that out and they '11 starve. But the people don't know. They hear only one side. One day they '11 let sheep and cows come in here. Then thou- sands of part owners who summer up here every year will have to drive steers off every bend of every trail instead of seeing elk and deer. At night, instead of the tang of pine and balsam, they '11 inhale the smell of sheep. Instead of the night sounds of the hills they '11 listen to the blat of ten thou- sand woollies on the bed ground. There "11 be mud wallows where there 's meadows now and gravel where there 's grass. A few men will have made a profit and a hundred million easy-going, good-natured folks will have been bunked to the devil's taste." 194 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST The Colonel smiled at the old hillman's positiveness. "I take it you don't care much for cows and sheep," he said. "You take it wrong," Woodson assured him. "I 'm a lover of stock myself. And I don't blame the stockmen for a second. They 're mostly broad-gauge men. The reason they 're successful in their line is because their stock comes first with them. This country would actually be more beautiful to them with a bunch of cows or sheep according to their respective occupations feeding in sight of them at every turn. They 're sincere in that. I 'd be the last to censure the stock- men themselves if they get in here. I 'd keep on doing the best I could, as I always have, and help 'em apportion the range. No, I would n't blame them for doing what 's next their hearts I 'd blame all those other millions for not showing an equal interest in what is next to theirs and keeping out the stock if they don't want it in." His former positive manner had departed. "Sometimes I 'm sorry I did n't fall on the stockmen's side to start," he said reflectively. "At! least I 'd be associated with folks that know what they want and try to get it. The side I've been working for all the millions' of joint owners of this Park have n't figured 195 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST out just what they do want and don't care much whether or not they get it." This impartiality surprised the Colonel and he sensed that Woodson had spent a lifetime playing his own hand according to his own ideas, and with but little encouragement. "But the bulk of the people are veering to your side," he said. "Most of them are beginning to view things the way you have seen them all along. Every year there is an increasing popular demand to set aside Na- tional Parks. On all sides you hear of con- servation of game conservation of trees. Ten years ago you never glanced at a news- paper without seeing a column devoted to the exploitation of some natural resources. Now you can't find one without some ref- erence to conservation. It 's been a long time coming but it 's here and growing stronger every day. You '11 come into your own at last." Harper turned over in his mind the old scout's semi-defense of the stockmen who would graze the Park, even while he opposed their purpose. At least he was sufficiently broad-minded to commend their sincerity, even though their ideas were the opposite of his own. "But you say they are ruining their range," he said, reverting to that topic. "Don't 196 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST you blame them for that shortsightedness ? " "Not overmuch," Woodson stated. "It is n't given to many folks to look ahead further than to-morrow morning after break- fast at the most. In fact, lots of 'em don't see clear through one whole day till after it 's gone by. Why censure folks for a common failing? Others have done the same before them. The fur trade killed its own business by overtrapping ; the hide-hunters ended theirs by overshooting. The lumber trade sailed through their golden day of prosperity and overplayed their hand by wasteful cutting. The market hunters worked dead against their own best interests by shooting a few too many pigeons and chickens, ducks and geese and so on every year. So why should we settle particularly on the stockmen for overcrowd- ing what range they have ? It 's simple repetition of a purely American trait." He waved a hand toward the riot of flowers before them in the meadow. "Going back to flowers, where we started," he said. "There 's several little plants that will likely play an important role all through these hills within the next few years. It 's been my observation that Nature can't be over- worked or crowded to the wall without fighting back. Men know that they can't overtax themselves without feeling the effects 197 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST of it and breaking down physically. They realize that they can't drag two hours a day of extra work out of a good horse without killing the animal before its time. That 's because they have object lessons under their very eyes to prove it. But their vision does n't extend far enough to apply that same rule to all outdoors because it ? s too big and too spread out for them to read. Already the stockmen are beginning to curse the larkspur, the camas and the loco and to wonder what their use is here on earth. For a while I wondered too but finally I got it. Likely there 's some purpose for everything if you study it close enough. A man can't spend a life in the open and believe that Nature went at things blind and scattered stuff haphazard. There 's always the balance to be struck. You can figure the purpose of the killers among the animal tribes to hold down the numbers of the beasts they kill for feed; the weaknesses of the victims so that the meat-eaters are assured of sufficient food supply; the contradictory limitations you find handicapping different killers so that they can't kill too much. Balance ! And the same thing holds true of the outdoors as a whole. That must be the reason for the presence of these three little poison plants. When the grazing tribes grew so plentiful 198 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST as to overfeed a certain range and started to kill off the grass these weeds grew up to mow them down to decent numbers ; dif- ferent plants that were death to certain kinds and did n't hurt the rest, so that all of any one animal would n't be exterminated. Balance and proportion, even in the killing. All through these hills where the range is overstocked you find Nature getting ready to fight back. The loco kills a horse but does n't seem to affect cows or sheep. A horse seems immune to larkspur but for cow critters it 's sure death ; and the camas kills the sheep. A few more years of overgrazing and these hills will be shot so full of poison that a man will be risking his whole herd to turn them out. That 's my own little personal solution about the poison flowers. Likely scientists will disagree with me. They 're trying out ways now of fighting to kill out the poison, instead of pulling off part of the stock and letting the grass regrow and crowd the poison out, according to Nature's simple scheme of things that men refuse to recognize." In a way the Colonel and Old Mart were kindred souls and during their short excur- sions they exchanged ideas that either would have hesitated to express to other men. Old Mart was a man hunter, and hard citizens who feared little here on earth confessed 199 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST that he was harder than themselves. Harper was a soldier, a rigid disciplinarian. Yet each recognized in the other that inner self deep within that bowed to the beautiful in Nature, a soft spot of which no exterior hint was evident. In midsummer they started off together, just the two of them, unaccom- panied by the retinue that had characterized the travels of many former commandants. They rode up the Tower Falls road and as they drew abreast of Yancy Meadows Wood- son halted and waved an arm out across the flats. "That 's part of what I aimed to show you," he informed his companion. The meadows were rank with natural hay ready to be cut. "That's just a speck; but we could put up somewhere round a hundred tons of hay with only a rake and a mowing machine, the work of a few men and teams for a week." "I 'm beginning to see," Harper nodded. "And only just beginning," Woodson said. "Before we 're through this tour I '11 show you square miles of that." They turned aside up Slough Creek, the bottoms widening just within the low hills that flanked its mouth. Grass country un- rolled before them in successive meadows. "We could put up better than two thousand 200 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST tons on Slough Creek alone," Woodson stated. "Back here out of sight where not fifty tourists have ever been since time began. In dry years we might have to put in a small ditch system to water the hay. The land lays just right and the ditch system would n't cost to exceed two thousand dollars, a dollar a ton on the initial cut. You can drive nearly the whole length of it now. I '11 guarantee to build all the road that 's neces- sary to get out the hay at a cost of three hundred dollars. In wet years we would n't even have to irrigate; that would be two years out of three." All up the bottoms of the Lamar he pointed out bottom land covered with heavy stands of native grass. "There 's wild timothy, bunch grass, wild oats, slough grass and redtop scattered all through the Park," he said. "And lots of others. All we 've got to do is to cut the hay." "We'll cut it," the Colonel asserted. "Leave that to me." They crossed over the divide and down the Pelican and found more meadows ; round to the west of Turbid Lake more grass ; still more at Squaw Lake. They followed the road round Lake Yellowstone and turned off below the Thumb. For a day they fought 201 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST dense tangles of down-timber and came out at last into unsuspected meadows hemmed in by heavy forests. "There 's only a scattering of folks have ever seen this spot," said Woodson. "You have to cross through miles of jungle and down-stuff to get in here. There 's meadows here that will cut five thousand tons of the best kind of hay." "But it would be a big undertaking to build a road in here big expense," Harper ob- jected. "But the hay is certainly here." Woodson pointed to a sheen of water show- ing through a fringe of trees. "See that?" he asked. "Well, that 's a prong of the South Arm of Lake Yellowstone. We could take the launch and run right up within three hundred yards of the start of these meadows, leave the hay tools crated and set them up here on the ground. The transportation for all the equipment we 'd need here, after it 's once laid down at Gar- diner, would n't cost to exceed a hundred dollars ; freight it to the Lake Landing by team and set it down here with the launch in one day." The following day they moved east and skirted the end of the southeast arm of the lake, riding through miles of natural meadow, the ripening grass waving in ripples before 202 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST the breeze. All the way up the broad bot- toms of the Yellowstone clear to the con- fluence with the Thorofare they traversed great stretches of feed country where the horses waded through grass to their knees. They camped the second night on the shores of Bridger Lake. As they sat before their fire the Colonel raised a question that had troubled him. "There 's only one drawback to this scheme," he said. "The snow lays so deep over most of the Park that the elk never stay through the winter in the greater part of it." "Up here on the head of the Yellowstone it lays maybe six inches deeper on an average than it does in Jackson Hole," Woodson admitted. "Down on the Lamar and round the mouth of Slough and Hell-roaring creeks, Yancey Meadows and along the river clear to Gardiner, it will average a foot less. I Ve seen elk winter in the Hole on four feet of packed snow and make it in good shape on hay. Snow does n't bother them ; it' s merely the question of feed. We would n't work this country up here till after we 'd cut over Lamar and Slough Creek first and tried it for a season. But if it will work down Jackson way it will work up here. That 's sure." "But for years there 's been a regular migration of the elk out of the Park," Harper 203 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST objected. "Won't old habit be so strong that they '11 pull down out of here just the same ? " "I 've seen all the wild things change their ways of living," Woodson said. "In my day I 've seen the coyotes quit the prairies and overrun the hills. A dozen years ago a herd of antelope could n't be forced to enter a bunch of trees. Hide-hunters knew that trait and made use of it. Some of them would crowd a big drove of pronghorns toward a strip of timber. They 'd turn and skirt it every time and run the gantlet of men stationed there in preference to cutting through among the trees. Five years later men were hunting antelope in the cedars or even in jack-pine country, the same as they 'd hunt for deer. They 'd changed their ways. Right now the elk are changing theirs. All down the Snake they stop and hang round every ranch where there 's a hay-stack. They '11 stop round ours just the same. I '11 stake my life on it. It 's already been proved successful. Down in the Hole the Govern- ment has started a big hay ranch for a winter feed-ground. They winter-feed elk there the same as you 'd feed domestic stock. It 's the plan to increase the layout till they 're taking care of them all and relieve the ranchers of sleeping every winter in their stacks. We 204 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST know we can do the same thing down Gardiner way and no reason why we can't later extend up here. We can salt them and hold them any place there 's feed. There 's the plan. Now the rest is up to you." "Never fear," Harper confidently assured him. "I '11 put it through. More and more now the people are lining up behind practical conservation plans. There won't be any trouble about that." "We can't hold them all at first," Woodson said. "Wouldn't want to if we could, for we would n't have the feed. But we can start Slough Creek and Lamar and then put in more feed lots at other points. There 's enough hay could be cut on Falls River Meadows and the Bechler to winter all the elk that summer on the Pitchstone and the Madison Plateau. But we '11 have to work on that point right soon if we do any good. A few more years of wintering out in Idaho and the western herds are gone. If we start now we can hold twenty to thirty thousand head of elk right here in the Park and the increase will overflow and help stock the hills outside." "It's as good as done," Harper stated. "We'll be putting up ten thousand tons of hay to start it off next year." "I hope so," Woodson said. "I hope so 205 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST for a fact. Everything I 've planned and counted on has seemed to play out to nothing in the end. But folks are changing, like you say, and some way I feel that this is going to work out all right." "Just as sure as fate," Harper concurred. "It 's bound to come. You 've worked hard at a thankless job, Mart. But you 're going to win out in the end." 206 XIII IT is said that the streets of a famous city are laid out along the cow paths that threaded the pastures adjacent to the site of its infancy. It is certain that the highways of the West follow the game trails of yesterday. Wood- son had seen the bull teams follow the trails made by the buffalo, then the steel rails crowding close upon the heels of the prairie schooner and the oxbow. He had seen marauding war parties of red men traveling the trails laid out through the mountain passes by the hoofs of elk and deer, later traversed by the pack trains of the white invaders and now by the automobile that toured the highways hewed out along the onetime arteries of game migration routes. W T here a few years past he had listened to the bugling of a thousand lovelorn bulls his ears were now assailed by the shriek of a thousand sirens as autoists rounded the sharp curves of the mountain grades. It was but another of the transitions he had witnessed; the four-horse coach had slipped into the days pf "once there was" and the swifter automo- 207 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST bile had crowded out one more link with a day that had served its usefulness and passed. The soldiers had gone with the stagecoach, and civilian superintendents once more held sway in the Park. Those who guarded the reservation were no longer scouts but were now known as rangers. Old Mart sprawled on a point that over- looked a stretch of the Canyon road. Teton had grazed to repletion and stood with drooping head. The horse that had carried his master on so many hard trails was old. Woodson had always saved his mount where- ever possible and had seldom overtaxed his strength, so Teton's span of life had been longer than that of the average mountain horse. The mellow summer sun had dis- sipated the early morning chill of the high country. A picket-pin gopher sat upright in the grass before a tiny heap of fresh earth which he had excavated. His near relative, the chipmunk, had whisked swiftly round the roots of an ancient stump, then mounted it and trilled defiantly. A huge fat marmot gathered a mouthful of grass and carried it to her family in the depths of a bowlder heap while her mate sunned himself on the topmost rock. An osprey screamed as he wheeled over the river, then made his spectacular plunge and rose on high with a fish gripped 208 The great brown bear moved into the road and reared to his full height. Page 209. THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST in his talons. Woodson watched him carry it to the mate who mothered three young fish-eagles in a big nest built on the top of a shattered snag. Down below, from the edge of a strip of timber, a huge brown bear peered up the ribbon of the road that wound along the river. Long years ago he had been a tiny cub in a rim-rocked pocket. A man had called him Wakinoo, the brown bear, and had made him rise on his hind feet and beg whenever he approached the little cabin in search of food. Later he had found his accomplish- ment of great benefit round the hotels and tourist camps. Wakinoo was hungry. The air throbbed to the purr of an auto coming round a bend. The great brown bear moved into the road and reared to his full height. An astonished driver clamped down on the brakes and brought the car to a stop. The huge beast waddled to the side and rested his forepaws on the door, his little eyes search- ing the faces of the occupants while he sniffed in eager anticipation. "I 'd heard of this," said the driver; "but thought I was being strung. A beggar bear, as sure as I 'm a white man." Other cars pulled in behind the first and the brown highwayman feasted on bits of food produced from the lunch boxes of the tourists. 209 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Far away on the Snake River road another string of autos was being similarly held up by Wakinee, the black bear. Between the Geyser Basin and the Thumb a brown yearling and a black two-year-old had joined forces and stood on their hind feet in the edge of the road to stop the early morning travelers. All over the Park this was going on. Tourists had heard that of late years bears had come from the forests to beg for food along the roads. None would believe till he had wit- nessed the strange thing himself; but before the summer ended some fifty thousand travelers were ready to testify that a race of beggar bears were plying their trade in the Yellowstone. Woodson watched Wakinoo entertaining the occupants of a dozen cars on the road below him. Each year the people took a keener interest in the wild life of the Park. Once they had come here only to look upon the geysers, the mud caldrons and the paint pots. Now the sight of wild things in their native haunts was even a greater curiosity than the freak phenomena. For the game was gone from all save this one last strong- hold. The old ranger had observed that the tourists flocked by hundreds to watch the bears come in and feed upon the kitchen refuse of hotels and camps ; strings of auto- 10 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST coaches were halted while the drivers pointed out elk or deer feeding on distant hillsides. Tourists were conducted to beaver dams along the streams and the work of the furred engineers, once numbering at least ten millions throughout the country, was now deemed of sufficient oddity to be listed among the attractions along with the petrified forest and the boiling mineral springs. "But folks are slow in learning, Teton; mighty slow," Woodson said. "It 's hard to make 'em believe they own the Yellow- stone themselves. Most of them still reason that we rangers are here to guard the Park against them, instead of guarding it for them, which last is the true facts of the case. In- stead of thanking us for looking after their interests, the bulk of them sort of resent the sight of a ranger's uniform." Frequently he had experimented along this line when meeting parties of tourists in the Park. "This Park is yours," he was wont to say. " Every stick and stone, every lake and river in all the Yellowstone belongs to you. Did you ever stop to figure that ? " Few of them had. Many smiled at this statement and deemed it but an exaggerated sense of courtesy and hospitality on the part of this mild old man. More and more he THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST had come to realize how restricted is the life outlook of the average being. Those he met could not grasp the fact that they had a definite interest in this great common property. For man's viewpoint is mainly limited to the personal equation, and he counts only those things his possessions of which he can acquire tangible proof of belonging to him individually. When he shares a corporate interest he has the certificate that specifically denotes the exact degree of individual proprietorship to show for it. His interest in a National Park is equally real but less apparent to his under- standing. "I wonder now, Teton," the old ranger said. "I wonder if we 'd issue every citizen a little gold-and-green certificate stating his ownership to be pro rata, according to the population, if he would n't set up nights studying the census and looking into immi- gration reports. He 'd have something then that he could see with his own eyes. But he '11 never believe he owns any of this till he has a scrap of paper to prove it to himself." Woodson had acquired a vast patience. His hair had been bleached by the rigors of nearly seventy mountain winters, his drooping mustache held in dead-white relief against the mahogany background of a face weathered by the wind and sun of as many THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST summers. The blue eyes peered forth un- dimmed from among the maze of sun wrinkles at their corners. He had lived to learn that great issues are not effected in a day. But his perseverance had borne fruit and the things he had always sponsored were coming into popular favor at last. Conservationists were gaining strength and numbers and the half-hearted support of the bulk of the public. He knew that conservation would eventually win the day. It was but a question of time, and of how much of anything would re- main to be conserved after the day was won. It had narrowed to an issue between two forces and the fight centered round the Yellowstone, the last strip of country left for the one faction to exploit and develop, the one last bit of the great outdoors left for the opposing party to preserve in a state of naturalness. Men had always deemed it their privilege as free citizens to convert any natural resource into quick profit for their individual benefit, regardless of the trail of waste to be cleaned up at ten times the cost by those who followed in their wake ; and this belief died hard. The forces of overdevelop- ment surged at the borders of the Park and sought to enter. Cooke City worked in- cessantly for legislation that would permit a railroad through the center of the reserva- 213 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST tion. The stock interests never ceased their striving to have the Yellowstone thrown open for sheep and cows. Idaho pressed her de- mands that a portion of Falls River and the Bechler be thrown out of the Park and ceded to that State. Irrigationists raised the hue and cry of added production and cheaper prices to further their plans for raising all the lakes in the Park for storage reservoirs. These numerous schemes that would benefit a few local communities at the expense of others had so far been held in check. In an hour Woodson was to meet a com- mission at the Canyon, a party of conserva- tionists going through to gather facts to help fight down the plans to raise the lakes. The following week a game conservation committee was scheduled to come in. There were many of these now, where ten years past the only delegations were those who sought some means to get a grip on the re- sources of the Park. The old ranger met the committee at the Canyon. He gave them facts to investigate as they proceeded, details they would have overlooked if not warned in advance, then volunteered a suggestion of his own. "We conservationists will have to change our plea," he said. "We 've been going at this wrong and working on sentiment. What THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST we have to do is to hang out the dollar sign : we '11 have an audience then. It 's the only thing our people thoroughly understand. Quit talking to them about beauty and sentiment and speak in dimes and decimals instead. Don't bother to explain that raising Lake Yellowstone will wreck a section of the Park and destroy its scenic beauty; will cover fifty square miles of standing timber and make a horrible mess that can't be cleaned up in a hundred years. They don't give a damn about all that. Tell 'em this : That tourists spent seven million dollars in this locality this year. Tell the folks out to the east, round Cody way, that the people that left a million dollars of tourist money out there this year will never come in through the East Entrance and ride past miles of dead and rotting timber, past thousands of acres of stewing, stinking mud-flats that breed billions of mosquitoes and insect pests. Tell the folks along the Snake and in Jackson Hole what likely they don't many of 'em know themselves : that last year the dudes left half as much money in Jackson Hole as was brought into it from the sales of stock throughout the entire valley. Show them that if they raise Yellowstone, Shoshone and Lewis lakes you could n't pay a tourist to make the trip in from the South Entrance THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST on a bet. Ask them if an extra few thou- sand acres under cultivation way off in Montana and Idaho is going to replace the silver lining of their pockets after the dude money quits coming in. Then they '11 come to life and quit supporting this move. Don't tell 'em their souls are dead to loveliness and beauty: they don't care. Show 'em that they 're plain fools on the side of their pocketbooks and they '11 come up fighting mad. Then they '11 beat this thing them- selves. Then puncture this old rally cry of 'added production' that always gets a crowd. Go into any valley of the hills and point out good ranches here and there with perfect water rights, ranches that have n't been farmed for years. There 's thousands like that. Then tell them that there 's as much idle land right in their own communities as the raising of the lakes will irrigate on the other side. Tell them that if the country is actually in such desperate need of added production the wise thing to do is to get the idle land in their own localities under the plow and reap the benefits themselves. Talk dollars and dimes. You 've got the facts to back you up." Woodson's knowledge of game conditions had been acquired throughout a lifetime of actual experience and recently he had gathered financial data to supplement this 216 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST information against the time when the game conservation committee should arrive ; for he had definitely decided that none but financial appeals would gain his end. As he waited at the Yellowstone Entance with a pack outfit to conduct the party through the game fields he reviewed the facts in his mind. "Doctor Ainslee is a big man in his field, Teton," Woodson said. "He's represent- ing the two largest wild-life societies alive. I wonder if we '11 be able to make him see things from our angle." He met the party and for three days they wound across the southern extremity of the Madison Plateau, over the Continental Divide, then traversed the table-lands of the Pitch- stone. Woodson pointed to far bottoms spread out in the southwest corner of the reservation, showing green below them. "There "s hay to winter-feed ten thousand or more head of elk," he said, "if only it could be cut." "But where are the elk?" Doctor Ainslee demanded. They had covered thirty miles and had seen but a single bull. There were no tracks in the hills. "I thought you were going to show us elk." "I will," Old Mart assured him. "But first I wanted to show you this." 217 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST They moved south and east to the station on the Snake and from there crossed the Big Game Ridge and the heights of Two Ocean Plateau. Here, in two days, they saw thou- sands of elk on the summer range. Off southwest the serrated teeth of the Grand Tetons stood guard over Jackson Hole. "Jackson Hole," Ainslee commented. "The slaughter pen of the last elk herds." "Listen," Woodson urged. He laid one hand on the doctor's shoulder and with the other pointed off in the direction from which they had come. "Do you know why I took you all through there and let you fret because you could n't find even an elk track when you 'd come all this distance to see game?" " No," the doctor confessed. " Just why ? " "Because five years ago there was some twenty thousand head ranging the Pitch- stone and the Madison plateaus." "Where are they now?" Ainslee asked. "The Idaho meat-hunters wiped them out to the last hoof," Old Mart stated. "There was so much thunder leveled at Jackson Hole that you did n't observe the western herd being exterminated to a point where right now an elk is as rare as a camel all along the Idaho side of the Park. The northern herd is getting the same medicine now, 18 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST The Montana law allows shooting up till Christmas right outside the line." "But that late season is to prevent meat being killed while the weather is warm and left to spoil," Ainslee explained. "It 's really framed to conserve the meat." "Is it?" Woodson asked. "It's really framed to exterminate the elk. Wyoming has set aside more than a thousand square miles of game preserves that block in two sides of the Park. She has the least popula- tion of any State save one, yet she makes an annual appropriation to winter-feed her game. Thousands of elk live for eight months on W T yoming grass, get rolling fat and cross out into Montana to try and winter through for the other four. Do they find any grass out there ? It 's sheeped as bare as a gravel bar right over the boundary. Is there any hay furnished for the starving ? Not a pound ! Is there even a refuge where men can't shoot them down ? There 's thousands of hunters waiting just over the line on Crevice and Hell-roaring creeks, the two big migration highways, to pick out two elk apiece that have been raised on Wyoming feed while the residents of the other State are only allowed one. And they leave the season open till Christmas to make sure the elk can't stay back in the hills and have a chance. They 219 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST don't even want to get out and hunt, but just wait till their meat comes to them, meat raised at the expense of a sister State, and slaughter them like butchering tame sheep. And while they 're doing that, the ranchers of Jackson Hole are sleeping every winter in their stacks, scores of them all down the line. The Government made a good start down there a few years back and installed a hay ranch for a winter feed- ground. It was hoped they 'd increase the layout and maybe put in another to handle all the elk and take the burden off the settlers. But they have n't up to date. They 're still sleeping in their stacks. There 's a pile of killing goes on there for a fact but the only marvel is that there is n't a whole lot more. When a man winters a bunch of elk through with his cows at his own expense, like some of them actually do, and he sees them starve by the score, why it 's downright hard to convince that man where he 's wrong in killing one for himself when he 's needing meat. You conservationists have got to swap ends. What is needed is to give Jack- son Hole some help and give that Gardiner outfit hell ! I 'm telling you." For a month he led the party through the summer range of the elk herds. They visited Buffalo Fork and followed the Blackrock to 220 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Two-Gow-Tee Pass and looked down upon the head of Wind River, tarried for a week on the head reaches of the Yellowstone, then ascended the Thorofare and crossed through Rampart Pass to the Elk Fork of the Sho- shone. He ended the trip by escorting them through the grass lands of Slough Creek and Lamar. "A big percentage of the elk that summers back where we 've been rambling come down this way with the heavy snows," Old Mart explained. "We 've cut some hay on Yancy Meadows and Lamar; enough to prove our point that the elk will stop and winter right here inside the Park. We 're furnished some hay each year now to feed on the Gar- diner Flat. But we '11 have to cut hay up here and hold bunches all along. It 's hard to get appropriations though. They orate and dally and delay. Procrastination killed the Yellowstone herds of buffalo ; and a few years back the antelope herds were lost through negligence. Every one was sorry after it was just too late. They always are." As the party bade him good-by in Mam- moth, Doctor Ainslee asked if there were any additional points which might be used as levers to gain their ends. "Just one; the only one that will really count," Old Mart stated. "The conserva- THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST tionists have confined themselves to the appeal of sentiment. They tell how the bison are swept from the plains and the dodo is no more. Folks can't seem to feel upset over the shortage of dodoes to pose as targets. Trade the dodo for the dollar and show them where the elk and other game that 's left are worth real money. Then you '11 get a crowd. The game has always given way to domestic stock. Prove that up here in the last few pockets of the hills the elk are worth more to a community than the cows that could be run on that same feed. Right away they '11 start to listen where they 'd go to sleep if you started holding another service over the dear departed dodo." "But that 's the very point we 're trying to avoid," Doctor Ainlsee explained. "They advance the argument that a given amount of feed will produce so much meat and that the cows that could be grazed on the little feed reserved for elk will add that much produc- tion and bring money into the country ; that the Government would derive revenue from grazing permits. We can't refute these facts." "But you can explode those fallacies," Old Mart returned. "In a big range country, or even here in the hills a few years back, those arguments were true. But up here to-day that meat and revenue theory is a 222 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST pose. I '11 give you an example of one spot you 've been in yourself. The Elk Fork is about the only creek out of forty flowing into the Shoshone that is closed to grazing the one little winter feed-ground for the eastern herd of elk. Before it was closed Art Hinman run cows up there. Three hundred-odd head ate it out in five months every summer. Those who want it open now claim it will support more but it won't. But there was eighteen hundred elk wintered there last season. They summer in the peaks on grass the cows never reach and only touch the bottom feed when a heavy soft snow is on. Then they come down. As soon as the wind blows the ridges bare they go back till the next storm hits. There 's your * pound-of -meat-on-so-much-feed ' fal- lacy as compared to elk and cows, in the hills to-day. Even providing that the creek would support five hundred cows for six months in the year which it won't the Government would take in possibly a hundred dollars in grazing fees at twenty cents a head. What it actually did take in last year was over four thousand dollars in non-resident licenses issued to outside sportsmen who hunted adjacent coun- try. There 's your revenue ! And the license money goes to their own State while the grazing fees on the Forest would go to THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Federal sources. There were nineteen guides outfitted on the Shoshone and took in forty- three thousand dollars from non-resident hunters besides what money they spent in the towns. Can your little bunch of cows equal that? Then on top of it all, just for good measure, the people of the com- munity killed four hundred elk last year out of the increase from that bunch four hundred big animals for free meat ! The same thing is true in other localities. Don't tell the folks of Jackson Hole it 's wrong to kill off their elk. Show them where it 's profit in their pockets to let them live and take the outside hunter's money. Tell them that other States where the game is almost gone have discovered that it 's profitable even to buy live game to restock; that the revenues from resident licenses run well over a hundred thousand dollars annually in some States where there 's nothing much left but crows and cottontails ; that Pennsyl- vania is buying live rabbits by the tens of thousands to restock. Show them what rank folly it is to waste their game out here. Edu- cate them up to see that true development to- day lies in conservation, that overdevelopment is waste. Feed them financial facts instead of sentiment. Swap the dodo for the dollar and prove your point. Then you '11 win." XIV THE cook fires of two hundred hunting camps spread their thin film of smoke above the northern boundary of the Yellowstone. On one side half a dozen rangers guarded the Park along the crest of Crevice Mountain. Across from them a thousand hunters waited just outside the line. Two horsemen topped a ridge and pulled up to view the scene spread out below them. It was the winter of the big snows. Heavy storms had followed in swift succession and spread their white layers over all the hills. Across from the two men a band of forty mule deer climbed the shoulder of a ridge. Below them a few antelope traveled the Turkeypen Trail, headed for the feed-ground on the Gardiner Flat. A dozen bighorn sheep showed as tiny specks on a point of Mount Everts. The younger man pointed to the rolling country far up the bottoms of Blacktail Deer Creek. A fresh drift of elk moved toward them from the south, some traveling in big droves, others in straggling groups. The foremost ranks of the drift THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST fanned out and angled up the south slope of Crevice. Some turned off on the Turkey- pen Trail. Everywhere they trained their eyes there were elk in plenty. As they sat their horses and watched this spectacle the young man unfolded his great dream while Old Mart listened. He would take this land of the Yellowstone and pre- serve it for a vast playground for future generations so that they might come here and see what the great outdoors had been in a day before their time. Those who would reconstruct the mighty day of the fur trade could come and find marten on the pifion ridges, foxes traveling the high divides, mink and otter following the streams where the beaver built his dams. For those who might wish to see a touch of the great westward trek across the plains there were more than three hundred antelope still ranging the beautiful bottoms of the Lamar and the buffalo herd had increased to more than four hundred head. There were rare bighorn sheep in the peaks and deer in the lodgepole valleys. Here were black and brow r n bears in scores and some few of the monster grizzlies, so nearly extinct within the borders of the nation. There were moose in the swampy bottoms and all about them were hordes of elk, nearly thirty thousand ranging in the 226 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST Park; a hundred placid lakes and frothing cataracts, scores of crystal creeks and rivers ; forests unscarred by the lumberman's ax ; meadows where only wild things grazed; the sounds only those of the hills and rivers, Nature's own, never to be shattered by the rasp of sawmill or the miner's blast. All this must be preserved in its naturalness. What nobler monument could be bequeathed to future Americans than this one spot where they might come and with their own eyes look upon a miniature of the greatest day of their country's early history, one last bit of the Great West left intact ? As Old Mart listened it seemed but an echo of his own words of almost a half- century before cast back to him out of the past. The younger man planned now as Old Mart had planned when he himself was young. He devoted the same driving energy and sincere purpose to the work that Woodson had given it in the years gone by. The keen bark of smokeless powder sounded from up the slope as some meat-hunter made the first shot of the kill. Four hundred head of elk had milled across the line. A string of six shots followed the first. Then hell broke loose in Crevice Mountain. Every man in sight opened fire. Those on far THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST shoulders emptied their guns at long range as droves of elk climbed sidehills or crossed through open parks. From a scattered volley the sound whipped into a steady roar as two hundred men with magazine guns went into action at once. The elk plunged through the heavy drifts and crossed between the hunters. Other bands followed in their wake and ran the gantlet of the guns. The whole side of the mountain was streaked with stampeding elk. Some wavered and turned back inside the Park but the general drift was up the slope. The animals could move but slowly as they bucked the snow-banks and climbed the steep ascent. It was easy meat for the hunters. For ten minutes the starving horde streamed past without a break. The steady, rolling volume of firing died away in a crackle of scattering shots. Old Mart looked up over the course of the run. Three hundred dead elk lay sprawled in the snow. Half as many wounded moved among the carcasses of the slain, the result of bunch-shooting by inexperienced hunters who had not the ability to pick their animal and make a clean kill but instead emptied their guns into the thickest of every drove that crossed the line, wounding twice as many as they killed. A score of these crippled ones gained the Park line and temporary 228 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST safety. Some had bedded in the snow, too weak to rise, while others stood with droop- ing heads, legs spraddled wide apart to sup- port their sagging weight. All along the face of Crevice men were dressing out their meat. Then they raised from their work to listen as a volley of shots, far and faint, drifted across the hills to the eastward, coming at first in ragged strings ripped from automatics, then increasing to a steady roll. Another drift of elk had crossed out by way of Hell- roaring Creek and run the gantlet of a hundred hunters waiting just outside the line. As this shooting died away, another outburst sounded from far off to the west as the survivors of the massacre on Crevice poured along the roads and open sidehills back of Gardiner. For almost two months this had been going on the length of the northern boundary of the Yellowstone from Gardiner to Cooke City. Day after day bad news had reached Old Mart from other parts. The Sylvan Pass Ranger Station had sent in the tidings that the eastern herd was gone. One last heavy storm had crowded the animals out and they followed down the Shoshone to be shot down in hundreds on the road. The Jones Creek herd on the far slope of the Absarokas had been wiped out to the last head. Down in Jackson Hole 229 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST they had made the biggest kill in years. The little Swan Lake herd, numbering some five hundred head, had circled out round Electric Peak, crossed into Montana and had been exterminated in a single day. Old Mart was gaunt and hollow-eyed from sustained exertions. Day and night he had been out patrolling the lines in the heavy storms. This was the last day of the season. The slaughter would soon cease. He headed Teton down toward the Gardiner Flat where a big band of elk was being guarded and wintered through on hay. The young man was responsible for the survival of this one drove of the northern herds. His year's salary had furnished the feed to hold the elk there while he urged the necessity of imme- diate appropriations to buy hay. And through his energetic presentation of the matter the funds to winter this bunch through had been granted. Woodson rode down into the flat and crossed out into the town of Gardiner. The packed snow on the main street showed red from the bloody splashes dripping from the trucks and wagons, piled high with butchered elk, that filed through town to the railroad. Along the platform of the station the carcasses were stacked in hundreds, waiting shipment. Old Mart esti- mated that no less than ten thousand head 23Q THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST of elk had been shot down in the recent slaughter on the Gardiner side. The railroad shipped out four thousand carcasses during the open season. As many more had been hauled away in sleds and wagons. He knew that some twelve hundred wounded animals had crossed back over the Park line and died. As he rode back across the flat a band of thirty mule deer, going down, filed past him. For three years these deer had wintered on the lawns of Mammoth and no less than a hundred times he had watched them crowd- ing round the doors of the houses to take sugar and crusts of bread from the hands of the ladies living at headquarters. They had no fear of man, these hand-fed deer, and the little band started through the big stone entrance arch to investigate the town of Gardiner, confident of the same wel- come reception that was accorded them each day in Mammoth. Woodson turned in his saddle at the sound of a pair of keen reports behind him. A hunter in the streets of Gardiner had watched the approach of the little band and shot down the big buck in the lead the instant he cleared the arch. The rest had crowded back and now stood in a huddled group just inside the line. This was no unusual occurrence, Old Mart re- flected, this killing of game right in the 231 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST streets of Gardiner, only slight incidents in the annual carnival of slaughter. Woodson pulled up his horse and waited for the young man, now his chief, to ride across the flat and join him. As they sat and watched the sun drop behind the peaks Woodson knew that he was but a clinging relic of a period that had passed. In his own lifetime he had seen three fifths of the best timber cut with lavish hand and forestry statistics showed that the rest was being logged each year at a rate of four times that grown in reforestation areas to replace it. He had read engineers' estimates reporting that only one heat unit out of every ten was conserved and utilized out of the coal that was burned, for the reason that the trend of development was toward methods of getting more coal out of the ground rather than toward perfecting methods for less wasteful burning. He had seen millions of acres of hill-country range partially ruined by over- grazing and the poison loco, camas and the larkspur sprouting thicker as the grass thinned out; the wild life of a continent had been wiped out in his own lifetime. He had heard the spring song of the West when it was young, and in the ragged spurts of shoot- ing up on Crevice Mountain he listened now to the final notes of its swan song. As he THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST reviewed the transitions he had witnessed in his day, he wondered what the young man beside him would live to see in his, and he feared that another dream would be fore- doomed to trickle out at last in blank failure as had his own. Teton was very old and he stood now with drooping head. An ancient buffalo bull had left the herd on the Lamar and drifted down to the flat. A buck antelope fed near the bison as if aware that they were kindred spirits. The largest bull elk on the feed- ground stood apart from the rest. His knees were sprung and the weight of his massive antlers bowed his head. For a week he had stood almost in that same spot. Woodson knew what that sprung-kneed, toed-out atti- tude presaged. He had seen other old bulls draw away from the bands to die. A big- horn ram had come far down the shoulder of an adjacent ridge. "Here we are, Teton," Old Mart said. "All the old he-ones of yesterday gathered for a final rally. It 's sunset for us old- timers. We 're just a whisper of the past, fossils of the old days that are gone." He faced to the West and gazed for long as if the sunset held a vision for his eyes alone to read. A black cloud had flung its banners from beyond the range. All on the 233 THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST near side had faded and its shadow blotted the last bit of absolute naturalness left in all the hills. The jagged peaks took on instead a semblance of gaunt and crumbling ruins. The black cloud twisted into the form of a giant letter "S." The last rays of the sun shot two golden bars up through it. "It 's time to kneel and say our prayers, Teton," Old Mart said. "We've followed the weak gods all our lives. Now we 're given one last chance to bow before the strong. There 's the banner of the winning Deity out there. We 've just time to pay our first respects to it before it fades." For in the sunset Old Mart had seen the symbol of the Mad God, Overdevelop- ment. THE END 234 V37V P3 Jt'ZI