Terms, Four Pallors a Year. I 

 Ten Cents a (Jopy. ) 



NEW YORK, THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 1878- 



/ Volume 9.— No. 23. 

 INo. Ill Fallon St., JS.Y. 



For Forest and Stream and Mod and Gun. 



"WILD PIGEONS (Eetopistes Migratorius). 



HP HE Autumn sky is fleck'd with gold, 



1 



As slow tue westering sun declines, 



The floating clouds' ensanguine fold 



With a resplendent glory shines : 

 And as the glimmering shadows creep 



Across the fading landscape's breast 

 And o'er the purpling mountain's sweep, 



The drowsy breezes sink to rest. 



The roe-buck to his thicket goes, 

 Where dense the wood its covert throws 

 The red stag that had paused to drink 

 Beside the rivulet's plashy brink 

 Exhausted flings his dappled side 

 Along the cool, transparent tide— 

 'Tis there the pigeons seek the wood 

 To roost, a blue-wing'd, fluttering brood. 



Deep in Wisconsin wilderness, 



In forests dim of Michigan, 

 The bending boughs their bosoms press, 



The air their clanging pinions fan. 

 So vast their numbers, hunters say 

 They sweep the bough and break the spray, 

 And oft their startled millions rise 

 With roar, like thunder of the skies. 



Years since, in wild woods of the East, 

 They gathered to the harvest leaf 

 They swarm'd by river and by shore, 

 In vast flocks flew the pastures o'er ; 

 They swept, innumerable, the plain. 

 Gleaning the corn-Held and the grain- 

 Then, winging to some wood their flight, 

 Settled in roosting-place for night. 



When emigration, toward the West, 

 In restless emulation press'd, 

 And ax and plow, and farmer's toil, 

 Open'd the furrows of the soil; 

 And myriad acres of the wheat 

 Yellow'd in Summer's sultry heat ; 

 And bearded rye and golden corn 

 Shook their blight tresses to the morn — 

 Then, to these sumptuous pastures new 

 These wing'd, devouring robbers flew. 



When June, with rose-red cheeks aglow. 

 Broadcast, wild strawberries doth strow; 

 When August, on the sun-bright hills, 

 With nectar the ripe blueberry fills ; 

 O'er all the heated pasture pours 

 The blackberry in honied stores ; 

 And ripens on the swinging vine 

 The grapes, like amethysts that shine- 

 Then to this rich, luxurious fare, 

 So prodigal, the flocks repair, 

 Rejoicing in the festival 

 That bounteous Nature yields to all. 



Isaac MuLellan. 



For Forest and Stream and Rod and Gun. 



^omaing on fife ^ti%ter Jpsstw/i 



By Ernest Ixgeesoll. 



THE sources of great rivers are invested with a certain 

 romantic interest. The mind follows a mighty flood 

 to its small beginnings as naturally as it asks the causes of 

 strange phenomena or studies the birth of a great man to find 

 some sign of bis future eminence. If the springs of the Nile 

 have been sought •with unwearied patience and reckless outlay 

 of treasure until they have become almost as fabulous as the 

 alluring fountains of elixir vitm, because the whole race was 

 curious to solve the riddle of the sacred river's origin, the 

 writer need not beg pardon of the reader in proposing to take 

 him to the very ultimate head of a river twice the length of 

 the Nile— our own Missouri. 



The Missouri rises in the Rocky Mountains not far west of 

 the National Park, where the Main Range divides Montana 

 from Idaho. This water-shed is prolific of rivers, three 

 branches of the Missouri, the Yellowstone, two confluents of 

 the Snake (which forms the Columbia), and the Green River 

 (that finally becomes the Rio Colorado), taking their rise 

 within a few leagues of each ether. 



High on the northwestern slope of these mountains, in 

 longitude 112£° and latitude 44i° approximately, the meltings 

 of the snowbanks trickle into a little marshy basin. This 

 overflowing, a slender rivulet finds its way down through 



devious and rock-obstructed channels, tumbling and foaming 

 as is the custom of snow-fed torrents, until it gets away from 

 the spruce forests and winds out northward among the foot- 

 hills, from whose color it receives its name — Red Rock Creek. 

 Then is added to it Horse Plain, Grasshopper, Rattlesnake, 

 Beaver, Black Tail and some other creeks, outlets for mountain 

 snows, which together form a river called by Lewis and Clarke, 

 more than seventy years ago, Jefferson Eiver, in honor of the 

 President of the United States. A hundred miles farther on 

 this is joined by the Madison and the Gallatin, the christening 

 is repeated and the united streams become the " Missouri,' 1 

 which name in turn is exchanged for " Mississippi," just above 

 St. Louis. But the stream I have traced is the real Father of 

 Waters, and there is little reason why it should not be known 

 as the Missouri, or else Mississippi, from the Red Rock 

 f ouutains to the Gulf of Mexico. That makes a river to be 

 proud of — a river navigable by large steamboats for 4,000 

 miles, and draining 1,250,000 square miles of territory. 



Leaving out of the question the expedition sent northward 

 by Cortez and his successors, which never wandered so far, 

 the earliest exploration of the West was guided by this water- 

 course, and more than a century ago white men, notably Le 

 | Sieur de la Verendrye, in 1743 -4, had penetrated to its head- 

 waters, although, perhaps, without recognizing the true geog- 

 raphy. The trappers of the fur companies scattered more 

 and more widely through the gorges, and their stories fired 

 the zeal of LeAvis and Clarke, who reached the Forks of the 

 Missouri in 1804, and passing through the valleys southeast of 

 it, gave names to the streams and mountains, names which, 

 unfortunately, have largely been replaced by more modern 

 but less worthy ones. Yet it was not before the discovery of 

 gold mines in 1862 brought eager crowds to Montana that 

 anything in detail came to be known about the sources of the 

 Missouri, nor until Dr. F. V. Hayden went there in 1S71 was 

 the region begun to be surveyed. Even now few persons 

 will undertake to guide a partj r through this wilderness of 

 mountains, and with the exception of two skirting stage routes 

 there are no roads ; while travel continues to be dangerous on 

 account of prowling bands of Indians. 



The scenery along the parent streams is striking and beauti- 

 ful. Noble mountains are piled to the sky ; distant gray 

 plains stretch into blue indistinctness ; pleasant valleys open 

 here and there embowered in foliage through which you catch 

 the sparkle of icy brooks. The Rocky Mountains at this point 

 are broken into a vast irregular group of granite peaks, snowy 

 atop, and lower down bristling with sharp pinnacles and stud- 

 ded M'ith mighty crags or detached masses of basalt and caps 

 of purple porphyry that stand beetling above the spruces and 

 firs, or crop out of a grassy sl^pe as an Indians sinewy shoulder 

 protrudes from his blanket. The stratified conglomerates, 

 marls and sandstones have weathered into quaint architectural 

 forms, and add picturesqueness to the scene. Tumbling and 

 leaping in rash haste, the young rivers rushing to their ren- 

 dezvous, meet with many an adventure : here plunge headlong 

 down the ledges, there quietly meander through a valley 

 spread widely between banks that bear blooming gardens, 

 anon gathering their forces to run the gauntlet of some canyon 

 between brown walls hundreds of feet high, whose strata, 

 heated to pliancy, the hand of geologic force has some time 

 gripped so tightly that it has distorted and crumpled them as 

 I might crush this sheet of paper in my fist. Such is the 

 history of the Jefferson, which, eluding the tremendous cliffs 

 that stand in its way at Beaverhead, gradually widens and 

 pursues an even way through extensive valleys of fertile, red- 

 dish soil, bounded by pine-clothed foothills sweeping up on 

 either hand in fine contrast to the gentle curve of the broad, 

 drab meadow. 



The Three Forks is the point of junction of the Jefferson, 

 Madison and Gallatin, and is 250 miles from the sources of 

 the first-mentioned. The Madison drains the geyser basin of 

 Yellowstone Park, flowing almost directly northward through 

 magnificent mountains and attractive valleys. Between it 

 and the Gallatin, the smallest and easternmost of the three, is 

 only a range of hills, at the end of which the trio come to- 

 gether with much swirling of stranger currents and eddying 

 of newly mingled waters, each losing its identity, and all 

 flowing hence to the Missouri. 



I was there last August, and although the summits of the 

 mountains hemming in the valley were streaked with snow — a 

 picture of winter— at their base summer reigned. The courses 



of the streams, with their many cut-offs and sloughs, are marked 

 by graceful lines of cottonwood and black alder, by islands 

 clothed with verdure, and by jungles of sweetly fragrant wild 

 currant, as they pass through the wide park. The soft carpet 

 of olive-brown bunch-grass, the sheen of the waters seen be- 

 tween the groves, with the shadowy forms of the silvery- 

 rimmed mountains in the distance, made in the twilight a 

 rarely enchanting landscape. 



A town has been elaborately laid out there with the high 

 hopes that animate all Western settlements, but thus far a 

 flouring mill, some stores, a race-course and a few inhabitants 

 comprise all there is of Gallatin City. The place is annually 

 the scene of exciting races upon "Cayuse" ponies, when 

 ranchmen from the, Gallatin and Madison valleys— both of 

 which are filled with marvelously productive farms— meet 

 miners from the surrounding mountains to stake gold dust 

 against flour and bacon on their favorite nags. 



Here my personal experience of the river ends, to be resum- 

 ed at Fort Benton, 250 miles below. Nevertheless, as I fol- 

 lowed its general course much of the way to Helena, and 

 caught sight of it often between Helena and Fort Benton, I 

 might be able to give a sufficiently accurate description of its 

 troubled passage for this distance. But fortunately there is 

 at hand the excellent account of Mr. Thos. P. Roberts, who, 

 in 1872, made a boat journey for the survey of the river course 

 from the Forks to Fort Benton. To his entertaining narrative 

 I am therefore indebted. 



At first the river is 500 feet wide and a fathom deep, the 

 banks varying from rocky hills to open grassy knolls. Then 

 a picturesque canyon of reddish rock is wriggled through, and 

 beyond that for fifty miles its waters are worried by bould- 

 ers, islands and rapids, here elbowed out of their straight 

 track by the pushing of hills, and there lured from it by the 

 breadth of prairies where herds of splendid cattle come down 

 to drink. After this the river gathers itself into a narrow 

 channel to glide with the stillness of profound depth through 

 the canyons of the Belt Mountains, separating central Mon- 

 tana from the buffalo plains. On the sides of some of these 

 canyons rounded rocks of great size are piled, tier on tier 

 above each other, like cannon balls, to a height of five or sis 

 hundred feet ; in others the frowning cliffs are solid, rough- 

 hewn granite, with deep black clefts here and there, and oc- 

 casional jutting ledges where great yellow pines get foothold 

 and cast pointed shadows across the narrow gorge. The last 

 of these canyons is the most remarkable of all on the Missouri. 

 "Not until we were within the portal," say the survey- 

 ors, " and the sunlight was shut out from behind us, did we 

 fully realize how closely the river is here locked within the 

 embrace of the mountains. For two miles ahead a wonderful 

 vista now began to open out, and stdl there was visible no out- 

 let to the turreted and pinnacled walls which penned us in. 

 Higher the walls grew, and darker and more sombre became 

 the shadows, while a solemn stillness seemed not only to per- 

 vade the air, but the water, which, fortunately for our obser- 

 vations, flowed sluggishly along. * * * * High up on either 

 hand were colossal statues, carved by the master, Time, in the 

 niches of this gigantic winding hall, five miles long. The 

 walls rose majestically six hundred, eight hundred and one 

 thousand feet high, and in places appeared to rest against the 

 white clouds above, which completed the arch over our heads. 

 The sides afforded no foothold^for man or beast, except oc- 

 casionally, up through lateral fissures, in whose dark recesses 

 lay tumbled in rare confusion huge broken pillars and angular 

 rocks, jammed, and forming natural bridges from chasm to 

 chasm. 



" Down the river, midway in the canyon, at the principal 

 turn to the left, the wall actually hung over the river, so that 

 a plummet-line six hundred feet long dropped from the brow, 

 would have struck our boat as we passed beneath it. Pine 

 trees fringed the summit, and struggled for an existence in 

 some of the crevices, some of their tops pointing downward, 

 and many were broken off where the superincumbent growth 

 was too weighty for the slight hold of their roots. 



" We longed for the pencil of a Bierstadt or a Moran. Such 

 grotesque forms, such heights, such depths, suchjllights and 

 shades as here presented themselves, were far beyond the 

 power of pen to illustrate. Words may exaggerate points, 

 but no descriptive language can do justice to this scene. Dur- 

 ing our speculations the boat drifted around and around as it 

 slowly floated past the ' Black Crook Dtns' skirting the deep 



