THROUGH WONDERLAND . 
19 
be distinguished merry groups of returning tourists, while, reclining in a luxu¬ 
rious Pullman car, or tempting dyspepsia with the rich and varied dainties of 
the dining car, may be seen one of the early settlers of California, a weather¬ 
beaten pioneer, who reached the Pacific slope by way of the Horn, twenty years 
ahead of the first transcontinental railway, and now goes east, by the Wonder¬ 
land route, to revisit the scenes of his childhood. 
Twenty-nine miles east of Billings, the next divisional terminus and impor¬ 
tant trading point on the line of the road, the traveler will observe, rising from 
the right bank of the river, a huge mass of sandstone, interesting as bearing 
upon its face the name of William Clarke, cut in the rock by the veteran explorer 
himself, when he visited the locality in 1806. He will, about the same time, be 
able dimly to descry the peaks of the Big Snow Mountains, which, at first 
scarcely distinguishable from the fleecy clouds that hang around them, subse¬ 
quently loom up grandly, constituting one of the most beautiful pieces of 
scenery in the Northwest. 
The disciple of Izaak Walton will not have traveled 225 miles along the 
banks of the Yellowstone without having seen many an inviting spot for indul¬ 
gence in what his great master called the most calm, quiet and innocent of all 
recreations. His arrival, therefore, at Billings, the largest town on the upper 
river, and the metropolis—notwithstanding that it has a population of only 
2,000—of a region larger than Maine, South Carolina, West Virginia or Indi¬ 
ana, affords a not unfitting opportunity for a brief reference to the incompara¬ 
ble trout fishing afforded by the numerous streams accessible from points on 
the Montana and Yellowstone divisions of the road. 
The Yellowstone river itself, west of Billings, has no superior as a trout 
stream. It contains trout of four distinct varieties, and fishing is so easy as 
at times to be in danger of losing its charm. The individual scores of various 
tourists, reported in the American Angler during the summer and fall of 1885, 
and not containing any that were phenomenally large, averaged twenty-five 
trout per hour for each rod, a record with which the most ardent angler ought 
surely to be satisfied. A majority of these scores were made in the vicinity of 
Livingston, near which town another visitor is reported to have caught twenty- 
one fine, large trout “ after supper,” while two others are stated to have 
brought in 160 as the result of “a day’s sport.” The Yellowstone also 
contains a gamey fish known to local anglers as grayling, but pronounced by 
Mr. W. C. Harris to be the whitefish (Corregonus tullibee). That gentleman 
refers, in a recent article, to the abundance, in these waters, of the celebrated 
“ cut-throat ” trout, whose size and abundance, in conjunction with the 
picturesqueness of its habitat, will, he adds, when generally known, “ make a 
visit to the Yellowstone imperative to the angler who aspires to a well-rounded 
life as a rodster.” Among other waters, mention may be made of Rosebud 
Lake, a beautiful spot reached by wagon from Billings, where the trout fishing 
is declared to be splendid ; Little Rosebud Creek, near Stillwater, where 
eighty-seven trout are reported to have been caught in four hours with a single 
