58 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 



luncheon on a washed boulder beside a creek. On 

 this ride I saw my first and only badger; he stuck his 

 striped head out of his hole in the ground only a few 

 yards away from us as we passed. 



Our camp at Tower Falls was amid the spruces 

 above a canon of the Yellowstone, five or six hundred 

 feet deep. It was a beautiful and impressive situation, 

 shelter, snugness, even cosiness, looking over the 

 brink of the awful and the terrifying. With a run and 

 a jump I think one might have landed in the river at 

 the bottom of the great abyss, and in doing so might 

 have scaled one of those natural obelisks or needles 

 of rock that stand up out of the depths two or three 

 hundred feet high. Nature shows you what an enor- 

 mous furrow her plough can open through the strata 

 when moving horizontally, at the same time that she 

 shows you what delicate and graceful columns her 

 slower and gentler aerial forces can carve out of the 

 piled strata. At the Falls there were two or three of 

 these columns, like the picket-pins of the elder gods. 



Across the canon in front of our camp, upon a grassy 

 plateau which was faced by a wall of trap rock, ap- 

 parently thirty or forty feet high, a band of moun- 

 tain sheep soon attracted our attention. They were 

 within long rifle range, but were not at all disturbed by 

 our presence, nor had they been disturbed by the road- 

 builders who, under Captain Chittenden, were con- 

 structing a government road along the brink of the 

 canon. We speculated as to whether or not the sheep 

 could get down the almost perpendicular face of the 

 chasm to the river to drink. It seemed to me impos- 

 sible. Would they try it while we were there to see ? 

 We all hoped so; and sure enough, late in the after- 



