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A CHAPTER GUT OF THE PAST - FROM JOSEPH PTOTEIL 
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"My evenings were spent usually with Professor W. H. 
Holmes and a number of other artists, when I was not with 
a crowd of cyclers at the rooms of the Capitol Bicycle Club, 
Professor Holmes was then in Major Powell's department of 
the Ethnological Bureau, and so was Thomas Moran, who ought 
to have been a great artist - he is bigger than the present- 
day duffers, anyway - and Holmes had assisted at the dis- 
covery not only of the Yellowstone G-eysers but of the Grand 
Canyon of the Colorado. He gave wonderful descriptions 
of the way Powell's party traveled across the desert, know- 
ing nothing of the Canyon; and how for some days they crossed 
the level plain, at last sighting trees on the faraway horizon 
with nothing but clouds beyond, strange in that country, 
astonishing these scientists as they slowly approached; of 
their keeping on until the mules refused to go further; of 
their own terror as they came to the trees and that awful 
screen of clouds; and how, when they did reach the edge, 
there was nothing, and Major Powell, in his ghastly fright, 
whispered, f My God, boys, its true, we've struck the end of i!' 
the world!' 
In the Yellowstone they sat dov/n for supper one evening 
If. 
by a quiet boiling spring and put things in it to cook, but 
suddenly, it went off and spouted a hundred feet in the air; 
¥, *• « 
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