March %, 1902} 
FOREST- AN ID STREAM 
lines in the snow where my feet plowed in the hillside. 
I came into a sidehill cow pasture with a big hulk, 
where an overhead wire tram got its buckets filled. There 
I lost the road, but by the big electric light and the many 
yellow house lights, I succeeded in finding my way along 
a Z-route to the Palmer Inn, guided by a big darky who 
was going that way, but hesitated to walk beside me for 
fear he might be rebuked. But he was a good darky, 
named -Henry Johnson, and the mile-long walk with him 
down the railroad track in a drizzly rain, past a hillside 
row of houses, located by their yellow, comfortable-look- 
ing lights, was not the least interesting of the miles I've 
come. 
It was toward the close of the supper hour when I 
came dripping up the hotel steps and dropped my pack 
with a thump at the feet of a plump young lady, Miss 
America Farris, and asked could I get something to eat? 
I ate; then listened to a discussion about mesmerism, 
hypnotism and some of the — ologies, which I could keep 
track of, though it was mighty interesting. Then the 
negro question came in for its share of motion and emo- 
tion. One young man said he hoped that when the time 
came to kill off the black men, that he'd be there with a 
double-barreled shotgun. 
One man in the office was exceedingly attractive. He 
was very broad in the shoulders, erect, brown-eyed, 
black-haired, and black-mustached. His skin looked soft, 
rendered pliable by many climates. There was something 
in the bearing of the man that showed he was not like 
the others there in most respects. It was Christmas eve, 
and in spite of the rain there were fireworks being set 
0 ff_Roman candles, skyrockets and giant firecrackers. 
When one of the latter went off with a bang unexpectedly 
many of those in the room — some professed fire-eaters — 
jumped and looked behind them. This man's eye light- 
ened a little, but that was all the sign he gave. 
I answered a few questions on the following day, and 
somebody pointed to the man whom I had noticed on 
the previous evening to say: 
"There's a man who's traveled everywhere. He's been 
all over the world. His name is Backley." 
We passed a "Good morning," and then Backley and 
I became acquainted. It was a dismal Christmas so far 
as the weather was concerned; a harsh mist came down 
intermittently, all the while the clouds hung leaden-hued 
at the tops of the fort-crowned ridges around Saltville— 
fortified because the salt wells there were very important 
to the Confederacy during the Civil War. A mile above 
town was a battle ground. It was hard for me to be 800 
or so miles from home on that day, and Backley was 
not more cheerful than I. 
Backley had been in New Zealand and Australia for 
many years. He was longing for that land of moderation, 
as I was longing for the deep snow and teethed winds of 
the Adirondack's. We could, at least, tell of those lands 
we could ttiink of only with quickening pulse and lifting 
chests. 
His room had a fire in it, so we went there. He had 
"camped down" by many streams, on many trails. Once 
he and a pardner were coming down a New Zealand river 
in a canvas canoe with 2,000 ounces of gold; a sharp rock 
split the craft in a rapid and the men were glad to escape 
with their lives. He had rolled the dough of his baking 
powda- bread round a two-foot long stick and turned it 
over and over a blaze made out of dry grass for fuel. 
While his pardner fed the fire and pulled grass the roly- 
poly was kept as close to the heat as was best. He had 
seen the Yagans at Cape Horn, and the Indians of 
Canada. He had been a United States Navy sailor, a 
cowman in Australia, and had dug the vegetable cater- 
pillar under the rata tree. He had been from New York 
to California, from Egypt to Australia; he could sympa- 
thize with the foot-sore and travel-stained more than any- 
one I had seen before. So I got out my French harp 
(harmonica) and he took down his banjo, and we went 
at it with a quiver and a twang. 
"Did you ever step into 
An Irishman's shanty, 
Where the boys and the girls 
Are always in plenty, ' 
And the door of the shanty 
Was locked with a latch?" [ 
"Oh, round town gals, ! 
Can you come out to-night? 
Can you come out to-night? 
Can you come out to-night? 
And dance by the light of the moon?" 
These and other tunes followed one another in rapid 
melodious progression till even Christmas was bearable 
far from home. 
Backley had a knife — one of those 9-inch bladed, bone- 
handled, pound-and-a-half affairs. His pardner had car- 
ried it through British India to Australia, where on some 
wallaby trail Backley met him. After a while Backley 
received the knife as a gift, and he carried it through 
France, Egypt and the Australasia wilds. Far up in the 
mountains of Southwest Virginia, at a little town where 
they make caustic soda, alkalies and salt, Backley and I 
met 
"You're started now," said Backley, when he heard that 
I was inexperienced. "I'm afraid there's no telling when 
you'll stop. Take this knife; you'll find it useful." 
I took it and then looked through the window at the 
hills beyond the oil-well-like salt derricks. 
For days Backley and I kept the music or the memory 
going. Others heard us at the music. One night -we had 
a dance. The three fast jigs I knew were just right. 
Many of the changes in the square dances were familiar 
ones, but some were new, and some had novel names. 
We of the Adirondacks call "Cut that figure eight," 
where the Virginian called out "Now chase the squirrel." 
"Swing through" means balance to the rear; "Shoo-fly" 
is just "Cut 'er down." 
Backley and I were astonished when we tried some 
waltzes and two-steps on the dancers. There was not one 
present among them who could go through the round 
dances. 
The rain fell steadily most of the time I was at Saltville. 
But Backley and I got out our cameras and took photo- 
graphs in spite of the weather. We were equally enter- 
tained by the accounts Ed Eulis gave of his experiences. 
He had shot a man in self-defense, "rocked niggers," 
seen men shot and stabbed. He knew of a West End 
Radford (Virginia) boy who went to see an East End 
Radford girl, greatly to the dislike of the East End boys. 
The East End boys tried to run the West Ender out. The 
West Enders came, to the rescue. There were thirty-two 
shots fired, and four boys hurt. 
Meantime I learned that it would be a good plan to get 
a boat and go down the Little (North Fork) Holston 
after I got down the river a ways. The days of my pack 
carrying seemed to be drawing to a close, and, all rose- 
hued and lovely, loomed before me the idea of a skiff 
ride down the Holston to the Tennessee, and down the 
Tennessee to — where? 
Raymond S. Spears. 
Floating on the Missouri.— IV. 
Our friend Norris had said that the prairie chickens 
were not nearly so numerous as they had been the previous 
season. In the spring great numbers of them had nested 
in his hay fields, and their nests and young had been 
destroyed by irrigation. When I stepped out shortly 
after sunrise, I wondered what the number of the birds 
could have been the year before, for here they were on 
every hand in the haystacks, the barn roof, in the trees 
around, and covey after covey was in the air. Large 
flocks of ducks were also on the wing, flying up and down 
the course of the Judith, and geese were honking here and 
there from their roosts in the sandbars of the river. This 
was surely an ideal place for sport with gun and dog. 
After an early breakfast we boarded the Good Shield 
and resumed our voyage. A mile below Norris' place we 
passed a ranch on the opposite side of the river, which 
depended upon a wheel for irrigation. It was an immense 
affair of wood and steel rods, sixty feet in diameter, and 
revolving by the force of the current against its broad 
blades. Large, deep troughs, or buckets, took up the 
water and poured it into a long flume extending to the 
irrigated land. It kept up a constant stream of more than 
100 inches, and 'that quantity will water a very large 
acreage. 
Passing Council Island, so named from the Council or 
Treaty of 1855, we shot through the rapids and entered the 
country Lewis and Clarke named the Dark Hills, the high- 
est elevations on the whole course of the river below Great 
Falls. The formation is brown clay and decomposed 
pummice stone, in places wholly devoid of verdure. Some 
of these butts have sharp summits, others are table-topped 
and support a crown of pine and fir. In places they rise 
abruptly from the river's edge, and again there are wide 
sagebrush flats at their base. There is no place along 
the river where the sagebrush grows so luxuriantly as in 
these flats. We startled a couple of mule deer which 
were browsing along the shore, and they were lost to view 
as soon as they entered its shelter. But in any case they 
were safe, as we still had a portion of the buck we had 
killed at Arrow Creek. The larger part of it had found 
its way into the larder of our Judith friends, and right 
glad we were to dispose of it, as we then had an excuse 
to kill another one in the near future. 
The swiftest part of the navigable Missouri is a twenty- 
six-mile stretch east from the Judith; the water is all 
swift, and' there are thirteen rapids in the course. We 
found well-defined channels of deep water through the 
Birch, Holmes, McKeevers, Gallatin, Bear and Little Dog 
rapids, and then drew near the Dauphin Rapids, which I 
had been worrying about ever since our start from Fort 
Benton. Years before the Government engineers had run 
a long wing dam out rom the south shore at this point, 
throwing all the water into one narrow, deep channel. 
But the ice had battered it season after season, wearing 
it away, and as I looked now I could see only a line of 
white foam where it had once stood. The roar of the 
• water Avas sullen and menacing. On the flat near by 
some men were building a cabin, and rowing ashore I 
walked over to them. "Are you building a sheep ranch?" 
I asked. 
"Not on ;/Our life!" one of them replied. "We've got 
a little bunch of cattle; the sheep men run us out where 
we were located over on the railroad, and we've found a 
good range here. The first blankety blank sheep man 
that shows up in this vicinity with his flocks had better 
come heeled, for we'll sure fight." 
I sympathized with them. The sheep men are, with- 
out doubt, "killing the golden goose" ; the luxuriant range 
which would have lasted forever if stocked with cattle 
only, is being rapidly ruined by them. And then, what 
will our children do? There is no great West for them to 
explore and exploit. 
The cattlemen were very sociable. They pointed to a 
cellar they had dug, about five feet in depth, and said 
that at the bottom of it their shovels had uncovered the 
remains of a fire, some .44-caHber cartridge shells and 
some human bones. There were no cartridges of that 
kind used in this country until 1866, so in thirty-five years 
or less the wash from the hills had deposited five feet of 
soil upon the bottom. How I wished I could know the 
tragedy which had here, taken place. Most likely the 
bones were the remains of some white men, surprised and 
murdered by Indians. 
Game, especially mule deer, the cattlemen said, was 
fairly abundant. The day before one of them had seen 
two good-sized bunches of mountain sheep back in the 
hills. "But," he continued, with a sly wink, "of course 
I didn't shoot at them, as the game law prohibits the 
killing of them at any season of the year." 
I asked about the rapids, and was informed that the 
main channel was full of bowlders, two boats having been 
wrecked on them that season. This was not encouraging, 
so I decided to investigate a gap I had seen in the wing 
dam near the south shore. Crossing over, I put on the 
waders, and staff in hand, ventured out step by step to 
the center of the opening, finding eighteen inches of water 
in the shallowest place. Below the gap that part of the 
stream narrowed considerably, and while it was too swift 
to be sounded afoot, it looked to have plenty of depth, so I 
waded back to the boat and determined to try it. We 
started slowly, with just enough speed to afford steering 
way. Sah-ne-to was frightened and confused by the 
leaping, foaming, roaring water off to the left, so I bade 
her let go of the tiller, and steered with the oars. We 
glided over the shallow place and through the gap with- 
out a bump or scrape, and then into the narrow channel ; 
here I could not touch bottom with the oars, and felt 
sure I had solved the problem of the dreaded rapids. And 
so I had, for in a minute or two we ran safely into the 
main channel at the foot of them. 
I have been unable to learn much about "old man" 
Dauphin, for whom these rapids were named. He was a 
French Creole, born in St. Charles, Mo., and was long 
an employe of the American Fur Company. In 1857 he 
resigned from their service and became a "freeman," or 
free trapper. Employes were known as "company men." 
In the winter of- 1857-8, Dauphin made his headquarters 
at the mouth of Milk River, trapping for some distance up 
that stream and on the Missouri. When spring came he 
made four large, long dugouts, lashed them together, and 
then piling his beaver skins on them drifted down to St. 
Louis with the current, nineteen hundred and fifty miles 
by the channel of the river. What a large number of 
the flat-tails he must have had. 
Below these rapids the hills are lower, the valley wider, 
the pine groves on the slopes more frequent. Five miles 
further down we passed a rock chimney, sole remnant 
of a once comfortable woodhawk's cabin. I remembered 
taking refuge in it once, on a trip up the river on the ice. 
It was bitterly cold, night was coming on, the horses 
were tired, and we were looking for a sheltered place to 
camp when we sighted the cabin. No one was at home, 
but the latch string hung out, and we took possession of 
it after unharnessing the horses and picketing them. My 
half-breed companion built a roaring fire in the broad 
fireplace and we had some meat roasting, the coffee pot 
boiling, in short order. Many and many a time since I 
have thought of the unique chair which stood in front of 
the hearth. The framework was of large pine poles, over 
which had been stretched a green buffalo hide, dark and 
glossy, and heavy furred, the head, where the hair was 
longest and thickest, forming the seat, the rest of it the 
long, sloping back. Used day after day as the hide dried, 
it had shrunk here and given away there, until when it 
finally set, it fitted every curve of one's body. It was 
the most comfortable chair I ever sat in, and I determined 
to make one like it as soon as I got back to our trading 
post. But one thing or another always prevented, and at 
last the buffalo were exterminated, and then there was 
no more of the required material to be had. 
The Lone Pine Rapids were met; by the time we came 
to them a fierce, hot, gusty wind was roaring down the 
valley and tossing the water so, that I could not make 
out the channel. However, from the lay of the shores we 
thought the deep water was next the north side, and 
chanced it, running through without touching bottom. 
Then we came in sight of Castle Bluff, a bold, high, white 
sandstone promontory on the south side of the river. 
On its rim are all sorts of fantastic carvings of the soft 
stone by Mother Nature and Father Time, turrets, 
minarets, escarpments and bastions, all capped by the 
usual portion of dark, hard stone. The bluff was well 
named. Opposite it are Castle Bluff Rapids, and below 
them a short distance the Magpie Rapids, through both 
of which the channel is next to the north shore. We 
went through them with water to spare, then through a 
nameless piece of swift water, and finally came to the head of 
the last one, the Bird Rapids. Just above them on the 
south side there is a fine grove of cotton woods, and as 
the wind was blowing unpleasantly hard, bringing with it 
occasional squalls of rain, we decided to camp in their 
shelter. We tied up, and digging a trail to the top of 
the bank with a pickax, set out to find a clear place 
among the willows and buck brush for the tent. Not 
twenty yards from the shore five whitetail deer broke 
cover and ran for the hills, on their way starting four 
more, which ran up the valley. There was no grassy place 
in the timber, and upon coming to its outer edge we saw 
something which made us think that we did not care to 
camp there after all. In the center of the wide flat Just 
above was a deserted woodhawk's cabin, windowless and 
doorless, and in front of it stood two men watching the 
deer which had run up that way. Then they turned and 
looked in our direction long and carefully. With my 
glass I could see that their faces were covered with beard 
and that beside their rifles, they each had two revolvers 
at their belts. 
Before leaving Fort Benton I had heard that a certain 
desperado named Larson, who had escaped from the 
Canadian mounted police and from the Montana authori- 
ties, was in hiding somewhere on the river. At the Judith 
it was claimed that he had been seen near Cow Island. 
Also, it was surmised that the Kid Curry gang, murderers 
and robbers of the Great Northern express car, were still 
hiding somewhere in these bad lands. 
Now Sah-ne-to knew nothing of this, as she does not 
understand English, and I had thought best to say noth- 
ing about it; but as soon as she saw the men near the 
deserted cabin, their horses picketed nearby, her suspi- 
cions were aroused. "Surely," she said, "these men are 
not of good heart; let us go on." 
And we went. They saw us and hurried toward their 
horses; we rushed to the boat and pulled across to the 
north side, where the channel is, and shot down through 
the rapids. Just below them, at the bend, cut coulees 
and a high bluff precluded any possibility of their follow- 
ing us horseback if they felt so inclined, but we saw no 
more of them. Likely they had been badly scared. I 
hoisted a part of the sail and we fairly flew for about four 
miles before the fierce wind, landing finally on Sturgeon 
Island for the night. Its broad, sandy shore was dotted 
with tracks, fresh and old, of both whitetail and mule 
deer, and when we came to put up our tent in the shelter 
of a few cottonwoods, we found their trails and beds 
everywhere in the tall grass. While unloading the boat 
two men passed us in a long, narrow scow. They had 
up an immense square sail and the craft went with the 
speed of a steam launch, piling up a roll of foaming water 
at the bow. In answer to my hail they shouted that 
they were from Fort Benton, and bound for "St. Louis 
or bust." They were undoubtedly frozen in somewhere 
in the Dacotahs. 
Beside deer sign, we had noticed many wolf tracks 
along the shore of the island, and shortly after dark, as 
we sat down to dinner, a band of the animals serenaded 
us from the nearby hills. The wind had ceased and their 
long and melancholy wails filled the silent valley with 
vibrant sound. It was pleasant to hear, bringing back 
many memories to both of us of other days we had spent 
along the river and upon the adjacent plains. 
Sah-ne-to had lost her bearings during our devious 
windings through the dark hills. I explained that we 
were a short run above the mouth of Cow Creek, the 
