190 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Sept. 3, 1904. 
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TOTUKMP 
Wilderness Reserves.* 
BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT. 
(Concluded from page 171.) 
After we had finished this horseback trip, we went on 
sleds and skids to the upper Geyser Basin and the Falls of 
the Yellowstone. Although it was the third week in 
April, the snow was still several feet, deep, and only thor- 
oughly trained snow horses could have taken the sleighs 
along, while around the Yellowstone Falls it was possible 
to move only on snowshoes. There was very little life in 
those woods. We saw an occasional squirrel, rabbit or 
marten ; and in the open meadows around the hot waters 
there were geese and ducks, and now and then a coyote. 
Around camp Clark's crows and Stellar's jays, and occa- 
sionally magpies came to pick at the refuse; and oi 
course they were accompanied by the whiskey jacks with 
their usual astounding familiarity. At Noras _ Geyser 
Basin there was a perfect chorus of bird music from 
robins, purple finches, j uncos, and mountain bluebirds. 
In the woods there were mountain chickadees and nut- 
hatches of various kinds, together with an occasional 
woodpecker. In the northern country we had come across 
a very few blue grouse and ruffed grouse, both as tame 
as possible. We had seen a pigmy owl no larger than 
a robin sitting on top of a pine in broad daylight, and 
uttering at short intervals a queer un-owl-like cry. 
The birds that interested us most were the solitaires, 
and especially the dippers or water-ousels. We were for- 
tunate enough to hear the solitaires sing not only when 
perched on trees, but on the wing, soaring over a great 
canon. The dippers are, to my mind, well nigh the most 
attractive of all our birds. They stay through the winter 
in the Yellowstone because the waters are in many places 
open. We heard them singing cheerfully, their ringing 
melody having a certain suggestion of the winter wren's. 
Usually they sang while perched on some rock on the 
edge or in the middle of the stream; but sometimes on 
the wing. In the open places the western meadowlarks 
were also uttering their singular beautiful songs. No 
bird escaped John Burroughs' eye; no bird note escaped 
his ear. 
On the last day of my stay it was arranged that I 
should ride down from Mammoth Hot Springs to the 
town of Gardiner, just outside the Park limits, and there 
make an address at the laying of the corner stone of the 
arch by which the main road is to enter the Park. Some 
three thousand people had gathered to attend the cere- 
monies. A little over a mile from Gardiner we came 
down out of the hills to the flat plain ; from the hills we 
could see the crowd gathered around the arch waiting 
for me to come. We put spurs to our horses and can- 
tered rapidly toward the appointed place, and on the way 
we passed within forty yards of a score of black-tails, 
which merely moved to one side and looked at us, and 
within a hundred yards of half a dozen antelope. To any 
lover of nature it could not help being a delightful thing 
to see the wild and timid creatures of the wilderness ren- 
dered so tame; and their tameness in the immediate 
neighborhood of Gardiner, on the very edge of the Park, 
spoke volumes for the patriotic good sense of the citizens 
of Montana. Major Pitcher informed me that both the 
Montana and Wyoming people were co-operating with 
him in zealous fashion to preserve the game and put a 
stop to poaching. For their attitude in this regard they 
deserve the cordial thanks of all Americans interested in 
these great popular playgrounds, where bits of the old 
wilderness scenery and the old wilderness life are to be 
kept unspoiled for the benefit of our children's children. 
Eastern people, and especially eastern sportsmen, need 
to keep steadily in mind the fact that the westerners who 
live in the neighborhood of the forest preserves are the 
men who in the last resort will determine whether or not 
these preserves are to be permanent. They cannot in the 
long run be kept as forest and game reservations unless 
the settlers roundabout believe in them and heartily sup- 
port them ; and the rights of these settlers must be care- 
fully safeguarded, and they must be shown that the move- 
ment is really in their interest. The eastern sportsman 
who fails to recognize these facts can do little but harm 
by advocacy of forest reserves. 
It was in the interior of the Park, at the hotels beside 
the lake, the falls, and the various geyser basins, that we 
would have seen the bears had the season been late 
enough; but unfortunately the bears were still for the 
most part hibernating. We saw two or three tracks, and 
found one place where a bear had been feeding on a dead 
elk, but the animals themselves had not yet begun to come 
about the hotels. Nor were the hotels open. No visitors 
had previously entered the Park in the winter or early 
spring — the scouts and other employes being the only 
ones who occasionally traverse it. I was sorry not to 
see the bears, for the effect of protection upon bear life 
in the Yellowstone has been one of the phenomena of 
natural history. Not only have they grown to realize that 
they are safe, but, being natural scavengers and foul 
feeders, they have come to recognize the garbage heaps of 
the hotels as their special sources of food supply. 
Throughout the summer months they come to all the 
hotels in numbers, usually appearing in the late afternoon 
01 evening, and they have become as indifferent to the 
presence of men as the deer themselves — some of them very 
*This is one of the chapters in the new volume of the Boone 
and Crockett Club Book, "American Big Game in its Haunts." 
much more indifferent. They have now taken their place 
among the recognized sights of the Park, and the tourists 
are nearly as much interested in them as in the geysers. 
It was amusing to read the proclamations addressed to 
the tourists by the Park management, in which they were 
solemnly warned that the bears were really wild animals, 
and that they must on no account be either fed or teased. 
It is curious to think that the descendants of the great 
grizzlies which were the dread of the early explorers and 
hunters should now be semi-domesticated, creatures, 
boldly hanging around crowded hotels for the sake of 
what they can pick up, and quite harmless so long as any 
reasonable precaution is exercised. They are much safer, 
for instance, than any ordinary bull or stallion, or even 
ram, and, in fact, there is no danger from them at all 
unless they are encouraged to grow too familiar or are in 
some way molested. Of course among the thousands of 
tourists there is a percentage of thoughtless and foolish 
people; and when such people go out in the afternoon to 
look at the bears feeding they occasionally bring them- 
selves into jeopardy by some senseless act. The black 
bears and the cubs of the bigger bears can readily be 
driven up trees, and some of the tourists occasionally do 
this. Most of the animals never think of resenting it; 
but now and then one is run across which has its feelings 
ruffled by the performance. In the summer of 1902 the 
result proved disastrous to a too inquisitive tourist. He 
was traveling with his wife, and at one of the hotels they 
went out toward the garbage pile to see the bears feeding. 
The only bear in sight was a large she, which, as it turned 
out, was in a bad temper because another party of tourists 
a few minutes before had been chasing her cubs up a tree. 
The man left his wife and walked toward the bear to see 
how close he could get. When he was some distance off 
she charged him, whereupon he bolted back toward his 
wife. The bear overtook him, knocked him down and bit 
him severely. But the man's wife, without hesitation, 
attacked the bear with that thoroughly feminine weapon, 
an umbrella, and frightened her off. The man spent 
several weeks in the Park hospital before he recovered. 
Perhaps the following telegram sent by the manager of 
the Lake Hotel to Major Pitcher illustrates with sufficient 
clearness the mutual relations of the bears, the tourists, 
and the guardians of the public weal in the Park. The 
original was sent me by Major Pitcher. It runs: 
"Lake. 7-27-03. Major Pitcher, Yellowstone: As 
many as seventeen bears in an evening appear on my 
garbage dump. To-night eight or ten. Campers and 
people not of my hotel throw things at them to make 
them run away. I cannot, unless there personally, control 
this. Do you think you could detail a trooper to be there 
every evening from say six o'clock until dark and make 
people remain behind danger line laid out by Warden 
Jones? Otherwise I fear some accident. The arrest of 
one or two of these campers might help. My own guests 
do pretty well as they are told. James Barton Key. 
9 A. M." 
Major Pitcher issued the order as requested. 
At times the bears get so bold that they take to making 
inroads on the kitchen. One completely terrorized a 
Chinese cook. It would drive him off and then feast 
upon whatever was left behind. When a bear begins to 
act in this way or to show surliness it is sometimes neces- 
sary to shoot it. Other bears are tamed until they will 
feed out of the hand, and will come at once if called. 
Not only have some of the soldiers and scouts tamed 
bears in this fashion, but occasionally a chambermaid or 
waiter girl at one of the hotels has thus developed a 
bear as a pet. 
The accompanying photographs not only show bears 
very close up, with men standing by within a few yards 
of them, but they also show one bear being fed from the 
piazza by a cook, and another standing beside a particular 
friend, a chambermaid in one of the hotels. In these pho- 
tographs it will be seen that some are grizzlies and some 
black bears. 
This whole episode of bear life in the Yellowstone 
is so extraordinary that it will be well worth while for 
any man who has the right powers and enough time, to 
make a complete study of the life and history of the 
Yellowstone bears. Indeed, nothing better could be done 
by some one of our outdoor faunal naturalists than to 
spend at least a year in the Yellowstone, and to study the 
life habits of all the wild creatures therein. A man able 
to do this, and to write down accurately and interestingly 
what he had seen, would make a contribution of perma- 
nent value to our nature literature. 
In May, after leaving the Yellowstone, I visited the 
Grand Canon of the Colorado, and spent three days 
camping in the Yosemite Park with John Muir. It is 
hard to make comparisons among different kinds of 
scenery ; all of them very grand and very beautiful ; yet per- 
sonally to me the Grand Canon of the Colorado, strange 
and desolate, terrible and awful in its sublimity, stands 
alone and unequaled. I very earnestly wish that Congress 
would make it a national park, and I am sure that such 
course would meet the approbation of the people of Ari- 
zona. As to the Yosemite Valley, if the people of Cali- 
fornia desire it, as many of them certainly do, it also 
should be taken by the National Government to be kept 
as a national park, just as the_ surrounding country, in- 
cluding some of the groves of giant trees, is now kept. 
John Muir and I, with two packers and three pack 
mules, spent a delightful three days in the Yosemite. The 
first night was clear, and we lay in the open on beds of 
soft fir boughs among the giant sequoias. It was like ly- 
ing in a great and solemn cathedral, far vaster and more 
beautiful than any built by hand of man. Just at night- 
fall I heard, among other birds, thrushes which I think 
were Rocky Mountain hermits — the appropriate choir for 
such a place of worship. Next day we went by trail 
through the woods, seeing some deer — which were not 
wild — as well as mountain quail and blue grouse. In the 
afternoon we struck snow, and had considerable difficulty 
in breaking our own trails. A snow storm came on to- 
ward evening, but we kept warm and comfortable in a 
grove of the splendid silver firs — rightly named magnifi- 
cent, near the brink of the wonderful Yosemite Valley. 
Next day we clambered down into it and at nightfall 
camped in its bottom, facing the giant cliffs over which 
the waterfalls thundered. 
Surely our people do not understand even yet the rich 
heritage that is theirs. There can be nothing in the world 
more beautiful than the Yosemite, its groves of giant 
sequoias and redwoods, the Canon of the Colorado, the 
Canon of the Yellowstone, the three Tetons; and the 
representatives of the people should see to it that they are 
preserved for the people forever, with their majestic 
beauty all unmarred. 
Trails of the Pathfinders. -XVI. 
Alexander Henry (The Yoorger). 
(Continued from page 1M.) 
We know too little of the hardy men who a hundred 
years ago or later pushed westward into the unbroken 
tracts that lay beyond, in search of knowledge or wealth. 
Among them were many who were true heroes, and all 
we have by which we can judge of the deeds they per- 
formed are the few accounts left by some of them. 
These accounts give us hints of the real character of 
the men, but we must remember that they were oc- 
cupied more by the matters immediately before them 
than by any thought of how posterity might think 
of them. They considered more the outlook for beaver 
and. the success of the Indian trade than literature; 
their hands were readier to the rifle and the paddle than 
to the pen. If among them there were a few who strove 
to describe the scenes through which they passed, and 
to set down in some order the incidents of their lives, 
such were few in number and were writing for their own 
amusement. The vast majority of pathfinders have left 
us no hint of the deeds they performed. 
Among the northmen who overran the country long 
known as the Hudson's Bay Territory, Alexander 
Henry, the younger, was a commanding figure. He was 
a nephew of that other Alexander Henry who, thirty 
years before, had been a fur trader among the Indians, 
had traveled westward nearly to the Rocky Mountains, 
and after many adventures, wrote of his travels over the 
great meadows and among the wild oxen of the West.* 
To _ Alexander Henry, the younger, we owe the most 
curious and complete record ever printed of the daily 
life of the fur trader in the north. 
Alexander Henry, the younger, was a diarist; he kept 
a journal in which he set down, in the most matter of 
fact way, everything that happened to him, and, as has 
been said by Dr. Coues, "it mirrors life in a way Mr. 
Samuel Pepys might envy could he compare his in- 
imitable diary with this curious companion piece of 
causerie, and perceive that he who goes- over the sea 
may change his sky, but not his mind." 
The wonderful journal of Henry's slept for nearly a 
century. Where the original may be we do not know, 
but a copy was made by George Coventry about the 
year 1824, and this copy about seventy years later came 
under the notice of Dr. Elliott Coues, whose studies 
of the old west, published by F. P. Harper, of New 
York, have furnished so great a mass of material from 
which the student of history may glean. 
The diary covers a period of about fifteen years, from 
1799 to 1814, during which time Henry traveled from 
Lake Superior to the Pacific, often residing at different 
points for long periods. Thus he lived in and traveled 
through, at various times, the Canadian Provinces of 
Ontario, Manitoba, Assiniboia, Keewatin, Saskatche- 
wan, Alberta, and British Columbia ; while in the United 
States his travels were through Wisconsin, Min- 
nesota, North Dakota, Idaho, Oregon and Washing- 
ton. In these long journeys he met many different 
tribes of Indians, and saw much of the Chippewas, the 
three tribes of the Blackfeet, the Crees, Assinaboines, 
Sioux, Sarcees, and other northern tribes, while in his 
southern journeyings he reached the Mandans, the 
Minitari, the Rees, and even the Cheyennes, south of 
the Missouri River, and on the west coast saw many 
tribes of the Columbia. 
The journal begins in the autumn of 1799, when he 
was camped on the White Earth River, near the foot 
of what is now known as Riding Mountain, in Manitoba, 
a little west of Portage La Prairie. Here he had 
stopped after his journey from Montreal, to trade 
with the Indians the liquor, blankets, strouding, and 
various trinkets the Indians liked. He made that fall 
a clear profit of £700. This was his first trial in the 
Northwest. 
*See papers on Alexander Henry in our issues of March 5 and 12. 
