Nov., 1912 
A HORSEBACK TRIP ACROSS MONTANA 
219 
flying against the wires and had not been dead more than a day or two. I 
presume from this that the ilson Phalarope breeds in the marshes of the 
Prickly Pear Valley, though there were no marshes in the near vicinity of the 
place where I found the bird. 
The next day I decided to take only a short ride, as the weather was hot and 
trips of the last two days had been rather hard ones, particularly for my horse. 
So I started rather late and stopped early, going north along the route of the 
Great Northern Railway as far as a ranch near the station of Mitchell. On the 
way out of Helena, I remember seeing a Solitaire, seated on a wire in the northern 
part of the town. It seemed to me a rather low elevation for this bird and de- 
cidedly not in its usual habitat. It is possible though, that this species breeds 
among the rocky cliffs of Mount Helena a few miles west of the town, though 
even there it would be at an unusually low elevation. 
The people were early risers at the ranch where I stopped that night, so 
I was on my way early on the following morning. A short distance north of 
the ranch the road entered the Prickly Pear Canyon, and in the next ten miles, 
between here and Wolf Creek, I enjoyed the best scenery of my entire trip. 
High walls of reddish colored rock, seamed and broken into rectangular masses, 
rose on either side, while along the canyon bottom flowed a fair sized stream, 
its banks fringed with willows, alders, and occasionally tall cottonwoods. On 
the steep slopes above the canyon walls were clumps of Douglas firs and yellow 
pines. The road followed along the stream bottom, or occasionally climbed a 
little way up the hillside on one side or the other, where a better view up and 
down the canyon could be obtained. Wild rose bushes, covered with pink blos- 
soms, grew in profusion along the road, while syringa bushes, growing in clefts 
of the rocks, formed dense white masses, often extending high up into the walls 
of the canyon, the fragrant blossoms filling the air with their sweet perfume. 
At Wolf Creek I left the canyon road and turned westward, on the road to 
Stearns, which was my destination for the night. The road left the canyon and 
climbed up hill, till it reached a wide stretch of rolling grassy hills. This 
country, neither valley nor mountain, continued all the way to Stearns. Tall 
waving, green grass clothed the hillsides, and with it were many flowers of 
various colors, but the most abundant of these, one whose spire shaped clusters 
of blue flowers covered the hillsides everywhere, was the lupine. The two most 
abundant birds, in fact almost the only birds in this country, were the Meadowlark 
and the Vesper Sparrow. These two birds were everywhere and their songs 
rang from the grass hills on all sides. 
The next morning I left Stearns, which is merely a ranch and post office on 
the South Fork of the Dearborn River, and rode on northward across the divide 
between the Dearborn and Sun rivers to Augusta. The same grassy hills con- 
tinued through the Dearborn country, but where I crossed the main branch of 
the Dearborn, the road took me down into a steep-sided canyon, whose walls 
were grown with Douglas fir and limber pine. Here in the firs I heard the 
voices of two mountain birds, the Audubon Warbler and the Western Tanager. 
On the other side of the river I found that the road carried me in decidedly 
the wrong direction, so, since there were no fences across the grassy hills as far 
as I could see, I left it and rode across the open country. As I crossed the divide 
between the drainages of the Dearborn and Sun Rivers, a decided change in 
the character of the country was noticeable. The rolling, round-topped hills 
changed to fantastically shaped, flat-topped, prairie buttes, the tall grass and 
