March 13, 1909.] 
FOREST AND STREAM 
primitive art, and in many similar places there 
are imprints of hands. With all of these he 
was familiar, but he insisted that the drawings 
in the cjve must be the work of some strange 
tribe. About thirty years before, he said, the 
Shoshones had camped on the ground now in¬ 
closed by the ranch fence, near the foot of the 
cliff, and below this cave. One of their party 
went out by moonlight to look after his horses, 
but did not return. In the morning he was 
found shot with arrows. 
He inferred that the cave was used as a lurk¬ 
ing place by the enemies of the Shoshones in 
early times, and that they lay concealed there 
during the day, as there is an extended view 
of the valley from its mouth. Perhaps, too, the 
designs on the wall are the records of their 
exploits, but who attempted to erase them— 
since the Shoshones have denied all knowledge 
of them—is hard to say. This merely means, 
of course, that the present generation of Sho¬ 
shones have no tradition in regard to these old 
paintings which may nevertheless have been 
made by their ancestors. 
On a later visit I copied the drawings—it was 
impossible to photograph them—and also dug a 
short distance into the floor of the cave with 
a pollpick. The floor, on superficial inspection, 
appeared to be of earth with a slight mixture 
of disintegrated limestone which had fallen 
from above, but on digging into it I found it 
composed almost entirely of manure, at least 
to a depth of fourteen inches, at which point 
there was a considerable stratum of the dis¬ 
integrated stone below which I made no attempt 
to dig. The stone had. apparently fallen from 
time to time from the roof, forming strata be¬ 
low and between which further excavation 
would no doubt have revealed other beds of 
manure, and so on to a depth of ten feet or 
more. The manure formed a comparatively solid 
mass which could, however, be crumbled to a 
yellow dust, it having entirely lost its original 
form except for an occasional pellet which 
showed it conclusively to be that of either moun¬ 
tain sheep or deer, but in all probability the 
former. This, then, had been a regular stable 
where the mountain flocks had weathered the 
storms of ages. The height of the cave at its 
mouth is about ten feet. Inside it is twenty or 
thirty feet high, some seventy feet wide and 
forty deep. With the exception of the paint¬ 
ings there were no visible signs of human occu¬ 
pancy, no smoke on the walls or other traces 
of fire, and nothing in the accumulation below 
as far as I dug to indicate that the place had 
ever been used as a habitation, though this of 
course is only negative evidence, as nothing 
short of a complete excavation down to the 
original rock bottom would be conclusive. In 
several such caves human relics have been found 
at a depth of many feet below the surface, but 
I preferred to leave any such investigation to 
experienced archaeologists. 
There are many holes and alcoves in the rocks 
of this region, most of which have never been 
visited, at least not by white men, while others, 
near the foot of the cliffs, are heaped with the 
manure of cattle and buffalo, with occasional 
skulls and bones, for these animals also have 
the habit of taking shelter in places of this kind 
during severe storms; in fact, in bad winter 
weather the cowboys are obliged to watch closely 
to keep the cattle out of them, for if allowed 
to remain they will stay for days without food 
until they become weak and crowd each other 
to suffocation. 
I must mention one other curious place which 
has caused considerable wonder and speculation. 
Far up the side of a deep canon with a vertical 
wall of rock at its top and eighty feet above 
the talus, there is a black hole but a few feet 
in diameter, and leading up to it, through a 
narrow crevice, are some rough quaking asp 
poles, evidently forming at one time a rude 
ladder which gave access to the cave above. 
Even with this ladder in good condition the 
ascent must have been a nerve-trying ordeal, for 
in addition to the vertical height of eighty feet 
TWO VIEWS OF AN IDAHO MOUNTAIN SHEEP CAVE. 
above the talus, the cavern must be nearly two 
thousand feet above the bottom of the canon, 
and merely to stand at the foot of the perpen¬ 
dicular rock and look down is enough for any¬ 
one not accustomed to mountain climbing. 
In order to account for the ladder reaching 
up to this inaccessible eyrie, the prospectors and 
ranchmen have invented a number of ingenious 
though not altogether satisfying explanations, 
the most pleasing of which is that perhaps a 
prospector in the early days, after some success¬ 
ful placer work, had been so harassed by sav¬ 
ages that he had climbed to this cranny with 
his buckskin bags, and maybe his coffee pot as 
well, filled with the precious dust, and had hid¬ 
den his treasure there—perhaps died there. No 
one seemed to -want to attempt the ascent from 
below, but one young fellow had the courage 
to allow himself to be lowered from the top 
of the cliff by a rope. The overhang of the 
upper ledges was so great, however, that he 
4II 
could not reach the cave, and‘after swinging 
and revolving at-’tll'e end of the rope like a 
plumb-bob, he was hauled up again without hav¬ 
ing seen more than a dark hollow in the rock 
and a yawning abyss beyond. He said he 
thought he could climb up from below, but 
somehow he never could find time to go. 
I found one man who knew he could get up 
and was willing to try. Encouraged by his con¬ 
fidence I had as good an opinion of my own 
ability, so off we started with an axe, one or 
two poles and some rope. It was easy enough 
to get to the foot of the cliff, but then it be¬ 
came necessary to shin up over the rock some 
forty feet before we could reach even the lower 
poles, and to do this we had to avail ourselves 
of slight clefts and projections which gave us 
a precarious hold for our toes and fingers. We 
got up about thirty feet, where the difficulties 
became greater, and the thought of the shaky 
poles above the thousand feet of sharp slide- 
rock below and our tired fingers became so ab¬ 
sorbing that we decided it was not worth while 
after all. Neither of us seriously thought that 
there was any gold there, anyway, and I had 
not much confidence in there being anything 
“Indian,” so we backed down in a dignified 
manner with mutual explanations. Then we 
looked around and found on a flat upright plane 
of the rock a number of imprints of hands, both 
right and left, in red paint, but so nearly ob¬ 
literated by age that at first we hardly noticed 
them. We examined several of the poles which 
had fallen from above. They were evidently 
of quaking asp, but so checked and weathered 
that absolutely no trace of bark remained, and 
the ends gave no evidence of whether they had 
been cut, broken or burned off. The knots stood 
out like thumbs and the grain between was split 
and hollowed nearly to the core, leaving as one 
might say only a shell and showing great age, 
probably centuries, for in this dry climate wood 
decays very slowly. One curious feature is that 
there are no aspens growing anywhere in this 
neighborhood, the nearest being a mile or so 
away, and two thousand feet below. 
As we left the place our courage began to 
return and increased in proportion to the dis¬ 
tance we put behind us until, by the time we 
reached the ranch, we were both inclined to 
think it would not be so much of an exploit 
to climb up there after all, if there was any 
object in it. My partner said if there was really 
a pot of gold there he could get it, and I was 
sure that I could get up if there was anything 
“Indian.” An experienced prospector and miner 
said he could put in stulls and climb up in the 
dark, but not in the day time; he had not a 
good enough head to go up if there was light 
so he could see below him. I have heard since 
that the ascent was actually made, but that noth¬ 
ing was found. 
Evidently the red hands on the rocks and the 
placing of the poles are the work of Indians, but 
why they should have wished to reach such a 
place I cannot imagine, except that the motive 
was probably a religious one. It may be that 
when their “hearts were poor,” when they 
needed divine help and wished to show how 
desperate and despondent they were, they climbed 
to this dizzy height at the risk of life and limb, 
and there fasted and prayed in solitude. 
Or was this a retreat of the Broken Mocca¬ 
sins? Quien sabe? 
