20 ***** "Oh, Ranger!" 



of the tales have grown with the years until they have become known 

 as "whoppers." The whoppers started in the Yellowstone country 

 shortly after the first explorers returned to civilization. The stories 

 they told of boiling water spouts eighty feet high, of boiling mud pud 

 dles and hot-water pools and streams, were not believed by the wise 

 folks at home, who knew such things just could not exist. 



Most noted of all these early purveyors of whoppers was Jim Brid- 

 ger, the pioneer trapper and pathfinder and one of the first white men 

 to penetrate the fastnesses of the Yellowstone. When Jim Bridger 

 found that the truth was doubted anyway, he concluded that he might 

 as well make his lies colossal ones. He enlarged and developed upon 

 them until he arrived at a state of perfection, the like of which has 

 never been equaled since his time. One of his best stories was an ac 

 count of how he caught fish in a cold stream, flopped them into a pool 

 of boiling water alongside the stream, and cooked them there. This 

 was not necessarily fiction, for there are at least a dozen places in Yel 

 lowstone where one could do exactly that. To vindicate Jim Bridger's 

 veracity in that one instance the Sierra Club, the California moun 

 taineering society, on the occasion of an outing in the Yellowstone did 

 cook trout and make coffee in a boiling pool. So the distance between 

 the truth and the whopper is not very great after all. 



A few years ago, in the course of a summer spent in the Yellowstone, 

 Harry W. Frantz, the well-known Washington correspondent and 

 writer, became interested in these whoppers from the old days and 

 gathered from some of the Old-Timers their most whopping whoppers. 

 He used to come to the evening meetings in old buckskin clothes, a 

 Buffalo Bill hat and long, black whiskers. Interrupting the ranger's 

 talk, this picturesque character, who apparently had just straggled into 

 the audience, would demand : 



"Ranger, where does the West begin ?" 

 The ranger never seemed to know. 



"Well, I'll tell you," the old man would say. "It's halfway between 



St. Paul and Minneapolis. I know, be 

 cause I came out here in the 'sixties when 

 there wuz nothin' but sagebrush an' 

 Injuns as far as the eye could see. I 

 helped to start the West, right there. Say, 

 would you like to hear about some of the 

 Injun fights?" 



The Dudes always would. 

 "Well, it wuz in the fall o' sixty-nine 

 an' the Injuns out here wuz thicker 'n 

 fleas on a yaller dog. I ran into thou- 



