The Mountains ...................................................................................................................................................1

Stewart Edward White ............................................................................................................................1

PREFACE ................................................................................................................................................1

I. THE RIDGE TRAIL............................................................................................................................1

II. ON EQUIPMENT ..............................................................................................................................3

III. ON HORSES.....................................................................................................................................6

IV. ON HOW TO GO ABOUT IT........................................................................................................12

V. THE COAST RANGES ....................................................................................................................16

VI. THE INFERNO...............................................................................................................................19

VII. THE FOOTHILLS.......................................................................................................................22

VIII. THE PINES ...................................................................................................................................23

IX. THE TRAIL .....................................................................................................................................25

X. ON SEEING DEER..........................................................................................................................30

XI. ON TENDERFEET.........................................................................................................................33

XII. THE CAÑON .................................................................................................................................37

XIII. TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS ............................................................................41

XIV. ON CAMP COOKERY ................................................................................................................47

XV. ON THE WIND AT NIGHT ..........................................................................................................52

XVI. THE VALLEY ..............................................................................................................................53

XVII. THE MAIN CREST....................................................................................................................57

XVIII. THE GIANT FOREST ...............................................................................................................60

XIX. ON COWBOYS ............................................................................................................................62

XX. THE GOLDEN TROUT................................................................................................................67

XX. ON GOING OUT ...........................................................................................................................69

XXII. THE LURE OF THE TRAIL......................................................................................................74

The author has followed a true sequence of events practically in all particulars save in respect to the character

of the Tenderfoot. He is in one sense fictitious; in another sense real. He is real in that he is the apotheosis of

many tenderfeet, and that everything he does in this narrative he has done at one time or another in the

author's experience. He is fictitious in the sense that he is in no way to be identified with the third member of

SIX trails lead to the main ridge. They are all good trails, so that even the casual tourist in the little

SpanishAmerican town on the seacoast need have nothing to fear from the ascent. In some spots they

contract to an arm's length of space, outside of which limit they drop sheer away; elsewhere they stand up on

end, zigzag in lacets each more hair raising than the last, or fill to demoralization with loose boulders and

shale. A fall on the part of your horse would mean a more than serious accident; but Western horses do not

fall. The major premise stands: even the casual tourist has no real reason for fear, however scared he may

Our favorite route to the main ridge was by a way called the Cold Spring Trail. We used to enjoy taking

visitors up it, mainly because you come on the top suddenly, without warning. Then we collected remarks.

You rode three miles on the flat, two in the leafy and gradually ascending creekbed of a cañon, a half ^#

hour of laboring steepness in the overarching mountain lilac and laurel. There you came to a great rock

gateway which seemed the top of the world. At the gateway was a Bad Place where the ponies planted warily

their little hoofs, and the visitor played ``eyes front,'' and besought that his mount should not stumble.

Beyond the gateway a lush level cañon into which you plunged as into a bath; then again the laboring trail, up

and always up toward the blue California sky, out of the lilacs, and laurels, and redwood chaparral into the

manzanita, the Spanish bayonet, the creamy yucca, and the fine angular shale of the upper regions. Beyond

the apparent summit you found always other summits yet to be climbed. And all at once, like thrusting your

Then came the remarks. Some swore softly; some uttered appreciative ejaculation; some shouted aloud; some

gasped; one man uttered three times the word ``Oh,'' once breathlessly, Oh! once in awakening

appreciation, Oh! once in wild enthusiasm, OH ! Then invariably they fell silent and looked.

For the ridge, ascending from seaward in a gradual coquetry of foothills, broad low ranges, crosssystems,

cañons, little flats, and gentle ravines, inland dropped off almost sheer to the river below. And from under

your very feet rose, range after range, tier after tier, rank after rank, in increasing crescendo of wonderful

tinted mountains to the main crest of the Coast Ranges, the blue distance, the mightiness of California's

western systems. The eye followed them up and up, and farther and farther, with the accumulating emotion of

a wild rush on a toboggan. There came a point where the fact grew to be almost too big for the appreciation,

just as beyond a certain point speed seems to become unbearable. It left you breathless, wonderstricken,

awed. You could do nothing but look, and look, and look again, tongue tied by the impossibility of doing

justice to what you felt. And in the far distance, finally, your soul, grown big in a moment, came to rest on

the great precipices and pines of the greatest mountains of all, close under the sky.

In a little, after the change had come to you, a change definite and enduring, which left your inner processes

forever different from what they had been, you turned sharp to the west and rode five miles along the

knifeedge Ridge Trail to where Rattlesnake Cañon led you down and back to your accustomed environment.

To the left as you rode you saw, far on the horizon, rising to the height of your eye, the mountains of the

channel islands. Then the deep sapphire of the Pacific, fringed with the soft, unchanging white of the surf and

the yellow of the shore. Then the town like a little map, and the lush greens of the wide meadows, the

fruitgroves, the lesser ranges all vivid, fertile, brilliant, and pulsating with vitality. You filled your senses

with it, steeped them in the beauty of it. And at once, by a mere turn of the eyes, from the almost crude

insistence of the bright primary color of life, you faced the tenuous azures of distance, the delicate mauves

This was the wonder we never tired of seeing for ourselves, of showing to others. And often, academically,

perhaps a little wistfully, as one talks of something to be dreamed of but never enjoyed, we spoke of how fine

it would be to ride down into that land of mystery and enchantment, to penetrate one after another the cañons

dimly outlined in the shadows cast by the westering sun, to cross the mountains lying outspread in easy grasp

of the eye, to gain the distant blue Ridge, and see with our own eyes what lay beyond.

For to its other attractions the prospect added that of impossibility, of unattainableness. These rides of ours

were day rides. We had to get home by nightfall. Our horses had to be fed, ourselves to be housed. We had

not time to continue on down the other side whither the trail led. At the very and literal brink of achievement

Gradually the idea possessed us. We promised ourselves that some day we would explore. In our afterdinner

smokes we spoke of it. Occasionally, from some hunter or forestranger, we gained little items of

information, we learned the fascination of musical names Mono Cañon, Patrera Don Victor, Lloma

Paloma, Patrera Madulce, Cuyamas, became familiar to us as syllables. We desired mightily to body them

forth to ourselves as facts. The extent of our mental vision expanded. We heard of other mountains far

beyond these farthest mountains whose almost unexplored vastnesses contained great forests, mighty

valleys, strong watercourses, beautiful hangingmeadows, deep cañons of granite, eternal snows,

mountains so extended, so wonderful, that their secrets offered whole summers of solitary exploration. We

came to feel their marvel, we came to respect the inferno of the Desert that hemmed them in. Shortly we

graduated from the indefiniteness of railroad maps to the intricacies of geological survey charts. The fever

A dozen of us desired. Three of us went; and of the manner of our going, and what you must know who

IF you would travel far in the great mountains where the trails are few and bad, you will need a certain

unique experience and skill. Before you dare venture forth without a guide, you must be able to do a number

First and foremost of all, you must be possessed of that strange sixth sense best described as the sense of

direction. By it you always know about where you are. It is to some degree a memory for back tracks and

landmarks, but to a greater extent an instinct for the lay of the country, for relative bearings, by which you are

able to make your way acrosslots back to your startingplace. It is not an uncommon faculty, yet some lack

it utterly. If you are one of the latter class, do not venture, for you will get lost as sure as shooting, and being

Some men possess it; others do not. The distinction seems to be almost arbitrary. It can be largely developed,

but only in those with whom original endowment of the faculty makes development possible. No matter how

long a directionblind man frequents the wilderness, he is never sure of himself. Nor is the lack any

reflection on the intelligence. I once traveled in the Black Hills with a young fellow who himself frankly

confessed that after much experiment he had come to the conclusion he could not ``find himself.'' He asked

me to keep near him, and this I did as well as I could; but even then, three times during the course of ten days

he lost himself completely in the tumultuous upheavals and cañons of that badly mixed region. Another, an

old grousehunter, walked twice in a circle within the confines of a thick swamp about two miles square. On

the other hand, many exhibit almost marvelous skill in striking a beeline for their objective point, and can

always tell you, even after an engrossing and wandering hunt, exactly where camp lies. And I know nothing

more discouraging than to look up after a long hard day to find your landmarks changed in appearance, your

choice widened to at least five diverging and similar cañons, your pockets empty of food, and the chill

Analogous to this is the ability to follow a dim trail. A trail in the mountains often means merely a way

through, a route picked out by some prospector, and followed since at long intervals by chance travelers.

It may, moreover, mean the only way through. Missing it will bring you to evernarrowing ledges, until at

last you end at a precipice, and there is no room to turn your horses around for the return. Some of the great

box cañons thousands of feet deep are practicable by but one passage, and that steep and ingenious in its

utilization of ledges, crevices, little ravines, and ``hog'sbacks''; and when the only indications to follow

consist of the dim vestiges left by your last predecessor, perhaps years before, the affair becomes one of

considerable skill and experience. You must be able to pick out scratches made by shod hoofs on the granite,

depressions almost filled in by the subsequent fall of decayed vegetation, excoriations on fallen trees. You

must have the sense to know at once when you have overrun these indications, and the patience to turn back

immediately to your last certainty, there to pick up the next clue, even if it should take you the rest of the day.

Parenthetically; having found the trail, be charitable. Blaze it, if there are trees; otherwise ``monument'' it by

piling rocks on top of one another. Thus will those who come after bless your unknown shade.

Third, you must know horses. I do not mean that you should be a horseshow man, with a knowledge of

points and pedigrees. But you must learn exactly what they can and cannot do in the matters of carrying

weights, making distance, enduring without deterioration hard climbs in high altitudes; what they can or

cannot get over in the way of bad places. This last is not always a matter of appearance merely. Some bits of

trail, seeming impassable to anything but a goat, a Western horse will negotiate easily; while others, not

particularly terrifying in appearance, offer complications of abrupt turn or a single bit of unstable,

legbreaking footing which renders them exceedingly dangerous. You must, moreover, be able to manage

your animals to the best advantage in such bad places. Of course you must in the beginning have been wise as

Fourth, you must know good horsefeed when you see it. Your animals are depending entirely on the

country; for of course you are carrying no dry feed for them. Their pasturage will present itself under a

variety of aspects, all of which you must recognize with certainty. Some of the greenest, lushest, most

satisfyinglooking meadows grow nothing but watergrasses of large bulk but small nutrition; while

apparently barren tracts often conceal small but strong growths of great value. You must differentiate these.

Fifth, you must possess the ability to pare a hoof, fit a shoe cold, nail it in place. A bare hoof does not last

long on the granite, and you are far from the nearest blacksmith. Directly in line with this, you must have the

trick of picking up and holding a hoof without being kicked, and you must be able to throw and tie without

Last, you must of course be able to pack a horse well, and must know four or five of the most essential

With this personal equipment you ought to be able to get through the country. It comprises the absolutely

But further, for the sake of the highest efficiency, you should add, as finish to your mountaineer's education,

certain other items. A knowledge of the habits of deer and the ability to catch trout with fair certainty are

almost a necessity when far from the base of supplies. Occasionally the trail goes to pieces entirely: there you

must know something of the handling of an axe and pick. Learn how to swim a horse. You will have to take

lessons in campfire cookery. Otherwise employ a guide. Of course your lungs, heart, and legs must be in

As to outfit, certain especial conditions will differentiate your needs from those of forest and canoe travel.

You will in the changing altitudes be exposed to greater variations in temperature. At morning you may travel

in the hot arid foothills; at noon you will be in the cool shades of the big pines; towards evening you may

wallow through snowdrifts; and at dark you may camp where morning will show you icicles hanging from

the brinks of little waterfalls. Behind your saddle you will want to carry a sweater, or better still a buckskin

waistcoat. Your arms are never cold anyway, and the pockets of such a waistcoat, made many and deep, are

handy receptacles for smokables, matches, cartridges, and the like. For the nighttime, when the cold creeps

down from the high peaks, you should provide yourself with a suit of very heavy underwear and an extra

sweater or a buckskin shirt. The latter is lighter, softer, and more impervious to the wind than the sweater.

Here again I wish to place myself on record as opposed to a coat. It is a useless ornament, assumed but rarely,

Inasmuch as you will be a great deal called on to handle abrading and sometimes frozen ropes, you will want

a pair of heavy buckskin gauntlets. An extra pair of stout highlaced boots with small Hungarian hobnails

will come handy. It is marvelous how quickly leather wears out in the downhill friction of granite and shale. I

once found the heels of a new pair of shoes almost ground away by a single giantstrides descent of a steep

shalecovered thirteen thousandfoot mountain. Having no others I patched them with haircovered

rawhide and a bit of horseshoe. It sufficed, but was a long and disagreeable job which an extra pair would

Balsam is practically unknown in the high hills, and the rocks are especially hard. Therefore you will take, in

addition to your gray armyblanket, a thick quilt or comforter to save your bones. This, with your

saddleblankets and pads as foundation, should give you ease if you are tough. Otherwise take a second

A tarpaulin of heavy canvas 17 x 6 feet goes under you, and can be, if necessary, drawn up to cover your

head. We never used a tent. Since you do not have to pack your outfit on your own back, you can, if you

choose, include a small pillow. Your other personal belongings are those you would carry into the Forest I

The most important point for yourself is your riding saddle. The cowboy or military style and seat are the

only practicable ones. Perhaps of these two the cowboy saddle is the better, for the simple reason that often in

roping or leading a refractory horse, the horn is a great help. For steeptrail work the double cinch is

preferable to the single, as it need not be pulled so tight to hold the saddle in place.

Your ridingbridle you will make of an ordinary halter by riveting two snaps to the lower part of the

headpiece just above the corners of the horse's mouth. These are snapped into the rings of the bit. At night

you unsnap the bit, remove it and the reins, and leave the halter part on the horse. Each animal, riding and

Of packsaddles the ordinary sawbuck tree is by all odds the best, provided it fits. It rarely does. If you can

adjust the wood accurately to the anatomy of the individual horse, so that the side pieces bear evenly and

smoothly without gouging the withers or chafing the back, you are possessed of the handiest machine made

for the purpose. Should individual fitting prove impracticable, get an old low California ridingtree and have

a blacksmith bolt an upright spike on the cantle. You can hang the loops of the kyacks or alforjas the

sacks slung on either side the horse from the pommel and this iron spike. Whatever the saddle chosen, it

The kyacks or alforjas just mentioned are made either of heavy canvas, or of rawhide shaped square and dried

over boxes. After drying, the boxes are removed, leaving the stiff rawhide like small trunks open at the top. I

prefer the canvas, for the reason that they can be folded and packed for railroad transportation. If a stiffer

receptacle is wanted for miscellaneous loose small articles, you can insert a soapbox inside the canvas. It

Probably the point now of greatest importance is that of saddlepadding. A sore back is the easiest thing in

the world to induce, three hours' chafing will turn the trick, and once it is done you are in trouble for a

month. No precautions or pains are too great to take in assuring your packanimals against this. On a pinch

you will give up cheerfully part of your bedding to the cause. However, two good quality woolen blankets

properly and smoothly folded, a pad made of two ordinary collarpads sewed parallel by means of canvas

strips in such a manner as to lie along both sides of the backbone, a wellfitted saddle, and care in packing

will nearly always suffice. I have gone months without having to doctor a single abrasion.

You will furthermore want a packcinch and a packrope for each horse. The former are of canvas or

webbing provided with a ring at one end and a big bolted wooden hook at the other. The latter should be

halfinch lines of good quality. Thirtythree feet is enough for packing only; but we usually bought them

forty feet long, so they could be used also as picketropes. Do not fail to include several extra. They are

always fraying out, getting broken, being cut to free a fallen horse, or becoming lost.

Besides the picketropes, you will also provide for each horse a pair of strong hobbles. Take them to a

harnessmaker and have him sew inside each ankle band a broad strip of soft washleather twice the width

of the band. This will save much chafing. Some advocate sheepskin with the wool on, but this I have found

tends to soak up water or to freeze hard. At least two loud cowbells with neckstraps are handy to assist you

in locating whither the bunch may have strayed during the night. They should be hung on the loose horses

Accidents are common in the hills. The repairkit is normally rather comprehensive. Buy a number of extra

latigos, or cinchstraps. Include many copper rivets of all sizes they are the best quickrepair known for

almost everything, from putting together a smashed packsaddle to cobbling a wornout boot. Your

horseshoeing outfit should be complete with paringknife, rasp, nailset, clippers, hammer, nails, and shoes.

The latter will be the malleable soft iron, lowcalked ``Goodenough,'' which can be fitted cold. Purchase a

dozen front shoes and a dozen and a half hind shoes. The latter wear out faster on the trail. A box or so of

hobnails for your own boots, a waxed end and awl, a whetstone, a file, and a piece of buckskin for strings

Thus equipped, with your grub supply, your cooking utensils, your personal effects, your rifle and your

fishingtackle, you should be able to go anywhere that man and horses can go, entirely selfreliant,

I REALLY believe that you will find more variation of individual and interesting character in a given number

of Western horses than in an equal number of the average men one meets on the street. Their whole

education, from the time they run loose on the range until the time when, branded, corralled, broken, and

saddled, they pick their way under guidance over a bad piece of trail, tends to develop their selfreliance.

To begin with two misconceptions, merely by way of clearing the ground: the Western horse is generally

designated as a ``bronco.'' The term is considered synonymous of horse or pony. This is not so. A horse is

``bronco'' when he is ugly or mean or vicious or unbroken. So is a cow ``bronco'' in the same condition, or a

mule, or a burro. Again, from certain Western illustrators and from a few samples, our notion of the

cowpony has become that of a lean, rangy, wiry, thinnecked, scrawny beast. Such may be found. But the

average good cowpony is apt to be an exceedingly handsome animal, cleanbuilt, graceful. This is natural,

when you stop to think of it, for he is descended direct from Moorish and Arabian stock.

Certain characteristics he possesses beyond the capabilities of the ordinary horse. The most marvelous to me

I once was engaged with a crew of cowboys in rounding up mustangs in southern Arizona. We would ride

slowly in through the hills until we caught sight of the herds. Then it was a case of running them down and

heading them off, of turning the herd, milling it, of rushing it while confused across country and into the big

corrals. The surface of the ground was composed of angular volcanic rocks about the size of your two fists,

between which the bunchgrass sprouted. An Eastern rider would ride his horse very gingerly and at a walk,

and then thank his lucky stars if he escaped stumbles. The cowboys turned their mounts through at a dead

run. It was beautiful to see the ponies go, lifting their feet well up and over, planting them surely and firmly,

and nevertheless making speed and attending to the game. Once, when we had pushed the herd up the slope

of a butte, it made a break to get through a little hog back. The only way to head it was down a series of

rough boulder ledges laid over a great sheet of volcanic rock. The man at the hogback put his little gray over

the ledges and boulders, down the sheet of rock, hop, slip, slide, and along the side hill in time to head

off the first of the mustangs. During the ten days of riding I saw no horse fall. The animal I rode, Button by

In the Black Hills years ago I happened to be one of the inmates of a small miningcamp. Each night the

workanimals, after being fed, were turned loose in the mountains. As I possessed the only cowpony in the

outfit, he was fed in the corral, and kept up for the purpose of rounding up the others. Every morning one of

us used to ride him out after the herd. Often it was necessary to run him at full speed along the

mountainside, over rocks, boulders, and ledges, across ravines and gullies. Never but once in three months

On the trail, too, they will perform feats little short of marvelous. Mere steepness does not bother them at all.

They sit back almost on their haunches, bunch their feet together, and slide. I have seen them go down a

hundred feet this way. In rough country they place their feet accurately and quickly, gauge exactly the proper

balance. I have led my saddle horse, Bullet, over country where, undoubtedly to his intense disgust, I myself

have fallen a dozen times in the course of a morning. Bullet had no such troubles. Any of the mountain horses

will hop cheerfully up or down ledges anywhere. They will even walk a log fifteen or twenty feet above a

stream. I have seen the same trick performed in Barnum's circus as a wonderful feat, accompanied by brass

bands and breathlessness. We accomplished it on our trip with out any brass bands; I cannot answer for the

breathlessness. As for steadiness of nerve, they will walk serenely on the edge of precipices a man would hate

to look over, and given a palm's breadth for the soles of their feet, they will get through. Over such a place I

In an emergency the Western horse is not apt to lose his head. When a packhorse falls down, he lies still

without struggle until eased of his pack and told to get up. If he slips off an edge, he tries to double his fore

legs under him and slide. Should he find himself in a tight place, he waits patiently for you to help him, and

then proceeds gingerly. A friend of mine rode a horse named Blue. One day, the trail being slippery with rain,

he slid and fell. My friend managed a successful jump, but Blue tumbled about thirty feet to the bed of the

cañon. Fortunately he was not injured. After some difficulty my friend managed to force his way through the

chaparral to where Blue stood. Then it was fine to see them. My friend would go ahead a few feet, picking a

route. When he had made his decision, he called Blue. Blue came that far, and no farther. Several times the

little horse balanced painfully and unsteadily like a goat, all four feet on a boulder, waiting for his signal to

advance. In this manner they regained the trail, and proceeded as though nothing had happened. Instances

A good animal adapts himself quickly. He is capable of learning by experience. In a country entirely new to

him he soon discovers the best method of getting about, where the feed grows, where he can find water. He is

accustomed to foraging for himself. You do not need to show him his pasturage. If there is anything to eat

anywhere in the district he will find it. Little tufts of bunchgrass growing concealed under the edges of the

brush, he will search out. If he cannot get grass, he knows how to rustle for the browse of small bushes.

Bullet would devour sage brush, when he could get nothing else; and I have even known him

philosophically to fill up on dry pineneedles. There is no nutrition in dry pine needles, but Bullet got a

satisfyingly full belly. On the trail a wellseasoned horse will be always on the forage, snatching here a

mouthful, yonder a single spear of grass, and all without breaking the regularity of his gait, or delaying the

packtrain behind him. At the end of the day's travel he is that much to the good.

By long observation thus you will construct your ideal of the mountain horse, and in your selection of your

animals for an expedition you will search always for that ideal. It is only too apt to be modified by personal

idiosyncrasies, and proverbially an ideal is difficult of attainment; but you will, with care, come closer to its

realization than one accustomed only to the conventionality of an artificially reared horse would believe

The ideal mountain horse, when you come to pick him out, is of medium size. He should be not smaller than

fourteen hands nor larger than fifteen. He is strongly but not clumsily built, shortcoupled, with none of the

snipy speedy range of the valley animal. You will select preferably one of wide full forehead, indicating

intelligence, low in the withers, so the saddle will not be apt to gall him. His sureness of foot should be

beyond question, and of course he must be an expert at foraging. A horse that knows but one or two kinds of

feed, and that starves unless he can find just those kinds, is an abomination. He must not jump when you

throw all kinds of rattling and terrifying tarpaulins across him, and he must not mind if the packropes fall

about his heels. In the day's march he must follow like a dog without the necessity of a leadrope, nor must

Fortunately, when removed from the reassuring environment of civilization, horses are gregarious. They hate

to be separated from the bunch to which they are accustomed. Occasionally one of us would stop on the trail,

for some reason or another, thus dropping behind the packtrain. Instantly the saddle horse so detained

would begin to grow uneasy. Bullet used by all means in his power to try to induce me to proceed. He would

nibble me with his lips, paw the ground, dance in a circle, and finally sidle up to me in the position of being

mounted, than which he could think of no stronger hint. Then when I had finally remounted, it was hard to

hold him in. He would whinny frantically, scramble with enthusiasm up trails steep enough to draw a protest

at ordinary times, and rejoin his companions with every symptom of gratification and delight. This

gregariousness and alarm at being left alone in a strange country tends to hold them together at night. You are

reasonably certain that in the morning, having found one, you will come upon the rest not far away.

The personnel of our own outfit we found most interesting. Although collected from divergent localities they

soon became acquainted. In a crowded corral they were always compact in their organization, sticking close

together, and resisting as a solid phalanx encroachments on their feed by other and stranger horses. Their

internal organization was very amusing. A certain segregation soon took place. Some became leaders; others

The order of precedence on the trail was rigidly preserved by the packhorses. An attempt by Buckshot to

pass Dinkey, for example, the latter always met with a bite or a kick by way of hint. If the gelding still

persisted, and tried to pass by a long detour, the mare would rush out at him angrily, her ears back, her eyes

flashing, her neck extended. And since Buckshot was by no means inclined always to give in meekly, we had

opportunities for plenty of amusement. The two were always skirmishing. When by a strategic short cut

across the angle of a trail Buckshot succeeded in stealing a march on Dinkey, while she was nipping a

mouthful, his triumph was beautiful to see. He never held the place for long, however. Dinkey's was the

leadership by force of ambition and energetic character, and at the head of the packtrain she normally

Yet there were hours when utter indifference seemed to fall on the militant spirits. They trailed peacefully

and amiably in the rear while Lily or Jenny marched with pride in the coveted advance. But the place was

theirs only by sufferance. A bite or a kick sent them back to their own positions when the true leaders grew

However rigid this order of precedence, the saddle animals were acknowledged as privileged; and knew

it. They could go where they pleased. Furthermore theirs was the duty of correcting infractions of the trail

discipline, such as grazing on the march, or attempting unauthorized short cuts. They appreciated this duty.

Bullet always became vastly indignant if one of the packhorses misbehaved. He would run at the offender

angrily, hustle him to his place with savage nips of his teeth, and drop back to his own position with a

comical air of virtue. Once in a great while it would happen that on my spurring up from the rear of the

column I would be mistaken for one of the packhorses attempting illegally to get ahead. Immediately

Dinkey or Buckshot would snake his head out crossly to turn me to the rear. It was really ridiculous to see the

expression of apology with which they would take it all back, and the ostentatious, noseelevated

indifference in Bullet's very gait as he marched haughtily by. So rigid did all the animals hold this convention

that actually in the San Joaquin Valley Dinkey once attempted to head off a Southern Pacific train. She ran at

full speed diagonally toward it, her eyes striking fire, her ears back, her teeth snapping in rage because the

I rode, as you have gathered, an Arizona pony named Bullet. He was a handsome fellow with a chestnut

brown coat, long mane and tail, and a beautiful pair of brown eyes. Wes always called him ``Baby.'' He was

in fact the youngster of the party, with all the engaging qualities of youth. I never saw a horse more willing.

He wanted to do what you wanted him to; it pleased him, and gave him a warm consciousness of virtue which

the least observant could not fail to remark. When leading he walked industriously ahead, setting the pace;

when driving, that is, closing up the rear, he attended strictly to business. Not for the most luscious

bunch of grass that ever grew would he pause even for an instant. Yet in his off hours, when I rode

irresponsibly somewhere in the middle, he was a great hand to forage. Few choice morsels escaped him. He

confided absolutely in his rider in the matter of bad country, and would tackle anything I would put him at. It

seemed that he trusted me not to put him at anything that would hurt him. This was an invaluable trait when

an example had to be set to the reluctance of the other horses. He was a great swimmer. Probably the most

winning quality of his nature was his extreme friendliness. He was always wandering into camp to be petted,

nibbling me over with his lips, begging to have his forehead rubbed, thrusting his nose under an elbow, and

otherwise telling how much he thought of us. Whoever broke him did a good job. I never rode a betterreined

horse. A mere indication of the bridlehand turned him to right or left, and a mere raising of the hand without

the slight est pressure on the bit stopped him short. And how well he understood cowwork! Turn him loose

after the bunch, and he would do the rest. All I had to do was to stick to him. That in itself was no mean task,

for he turned like a flash, and was quick as a cat on his feet. At night I always let him go foot free. He would

be there in the morning, and I could always walk directly up to him with the bridle in plain sight in my hand.

Even at a feedless camp we once made where we had shot a couple of deer, he did not attempt to wander off

in search of pasture, as would most horses. He nosed around unsuccessfully until pitch dark, then came into

camp, and with great philosophy stood tail to the fire until morning. I could always jump off anywhere for a

shot, without even the necessity of ``tying him to the ground,'' by throwing the reins over his head. He would

Nevertheless Bullet had his own sense of dignity. He was literally as gentle as a kitten, but he drew a line. I

shall never forget how once, being possessed of a desire to find out whether we could swim our outfit across

a certain stretch of the Merced River, I climbed him bareback. He bucked me off so quickly that I never even

got settled on his back. Then he gazed at me with sorrow, while, laughing irrepressibly at this unusual

assertion of independent ideas, I picked myself out of a wildrose bush. He did not attempt to run away from

me, but stood to be saddled, and plunged boldly into the swift water where I told him to. Merely he thought it

disrespectful in me to ride him without his proper harness. He was the pet of the camp.

As near as I could make out, he had but one fault. He was altogether too sensitive about his hind quarters, and

Wes rode a horse we called Old Slob. Wes, be it premised, was an interesting companion. He had done

everything, sealhunting, abalonegathering, boarhunting, all kinds of shooting, cowpunching in the

rough Coast Ranges, and all other queer and outlandish and picturesque vocations by which a man can make

a living. He weighed two hundred and twelve pounds and was the best game shot with a rifle I ever saw.

As you may imagine, Old Slob was a stocky individual. He was built from the ground up. His disposition was

quiet, slow, honest. Above all, he gave the impression of vast, very vast experience. Never did he hurry his

mental processes, although he was quick enough in his movements if need arose. He quite declined to worry

about anything. Consequently, in spite of the fact that he carried by far the heaviest man in the company, he

stayed always fat and in good condition. There was something almost pathetic in Old Slob's willingness to go

on working, even when more work seemed like an imposition. You could not fail to fall in love with his mild

inquiring gentle eyes, and his utter trust in the goodness of human nature. His only fault was an excess of

caution. Old Slob was very very experienced. He knew all about trails, and he declined to be hurried over

what he considered a bad place. Wes used sometimes to disagree with him as to what constituted a bad place.

``Some day you're going to take a tumble, you old fool,'' Wes used to address him, ``if you go on fiddling

down steep rocks with your little old monkey work. Why don't you step out?'' Only Old Slob never did take a

tumble. He was willing to do anything for you, even to the assuming of a pack. This is considered by a

The Tenderfoot, by the irony of fate, drew a tenderfoot horse. Tunemah was a big fool gray that was

constitutionally rattlebrained. He meant well enough, but he did 't know anything. When he came to a bad

place in the trail, he took one good look and rushed it. Constantly we expected him to come to grief. It

wore on the Tenderfoot's nerves. Tunemah was always trying to wander off the trail, trying fool routes of his

own invention. If he were sent ahead to set the pace, he lagged and loitered and constantly looked back,

worried lest he get too far in advance and so lose the bunch. If put at the rear, he fretted against the bit, trying

to push on at a senseless speed. In spite of his extreme anxiety to stay with the train, he would once in a blue

moon get a strange idea of wandering off solitary through the mountains, passing good feed, good water,

good shelter. We would find him, after a greater or less period of difficult tracking, perched in a silly fashion

on some elevation. Heaven knows what his idea was: it certainly was neither search for feed, escape, return

whence he came, nor desire for exercise. When we came up with him, he would gaze mildly at us from a

foolish vacant eye and follow us peaceably back to camp. Like most weak and silly people, he had occasional

stubborn fits when you could beat him to a pulp without persuading him. He was one of the type already

mentioned that knows but two or three kinds of feed. As time went on he became thinner and thinner. The

other horses prospered, but Tunemah failed. He actually did not know enough to take care of himself; and

could not learn. Finally, when about two months out, we traded him at a cowcamp for a little buckskin

A study of Dinkey's character and an experience of her characteristics always left me with mingled feelings.

At times I was inclined to think her perfection: at other times thirty cents would have been esteemed by me as

a liberal offer for her. To enumerate her good points: she was an excellent weight carrier; took good care of

her pack that it never scraped nor bumped; knew all about trails, the possibilities of short cuts, the best way of

easing herself downhill; kept fat and healthy in districts where grew next to no feed at all; was pastmistress

in the picking of routes through a trailless country. Her endurance was marvelous; her intelligence equally so.

In fact too great intelligence perhaps accounted for most of her defects. She thought too much for herself; she

made up opinions about people; she speculated on just how far each member of the party, man or beast,

would stand imposition, and tried conclusions with each to test the accuracy of her speculations; she

obstinately insisted on her own way in going up and down hill, a way well enough for Dinkey, perhaps,

but hazardous to the other less skillful animals who naturally would follow her lead. If she did condescend to

do things according to your ideas, it was with a mental reservation. You caught her sardonic eye fixed on you

contemptuously. You felt at once that she knew another method, a much better method, with which yours

compared most unfavorably. ``I'd like to kick you in the stomach,'' Wes used to say; ``you know too much for

If one of the horses bucked under the pack, Dinkey deliberately tried to stampede the others and generally

succeeded. She invariably led them off whenever she could escape her picketrope. In case of trouble of any

sort, instead of standing still sensibly, she pretended to be subject to wildeyed panics. It was all pretense, for

when you did yield to temptation and light into her with the toe of your boot, she subsided into common

Her performances when she was being packed were ridiculously histrionic. As soon as the saddle was

cinched, she spread her legs apart, bracing them firmly as though about to receive the weight of an iron safe.

Then as each article of the pack was thrown across her back, she flinched and uttered the most heartrending

groans. We used sometimes to amuse ourselves by adding merely an empty sack, or other article quite

without weight. The groans and tremblings of the braced legs were quite as pitiful as though we had piled on

a sack of flour. Dinkey, I had forgotten to state, was a white horse, and belonged to Wes.

Jenny also was white and belonged to Wes. Her chief characteristic was her devotion to Dinkey. She

worshiped Dinkey, and seconded her enthusiastically. Without near the originality of Dinkey, she was yet a

very good and sure packhorse. The deceiving part about Jenny was her eye. It was baleful with the spirit of

evil, snaky and black, and with green sideways gleams in it. Catching the flash of it, you would forever

after avoid getting in range of her heels or teeth. But it was all a delusion. Jenny's disposition was mild and

The third member of the packoutfit we bought at an auction sale in rather a peculiar manner. About sixty

head of Arizona horses of the C. A. Bar outfit were being sold. Toward the close of the afternoon they

brought out a wellbuilt stocky buckskin of firstrate appearance except that his left flank was ornamented

``Here is a firstrate allround horse,'' said he. ``He is sound; will ride, work, or pack; perfectly broken, mild,

and gentle. He would make a firstrate family horse, for he has a kind disposition.''

The official rider put a saddle on him to give him a demonstrating turn around the track. Then that mild,

gentle, perfectly broken family horse of kind disposition gave about as pretty an exhibition of barbedwire

bucking as you would want to see. Even the auctioneer had to join in the wild shriek of delight that went up

from the crowd. He could not get a bid, and I bought the animal in later very cheaply.

As I had suspected, the trouble turned out to be merely exuberance or nervousness before a crowd. He bucked

once with me under the saddle; and twice subsequently under a pack, that was all. Buckshot was the best

packhorse we had. Bar an occasional saunter into the brush when he got tired of the trail, we had no fault to

find with him. He carried a heavy pack, was as surefooted as Bullet, as sagacious on the trail as Dinkey, and

he always attended strictly to his own business. Moreover he knew that business thoroughly, knew what

should be expected of him, accomplished it well and quietly. His disposition was dignified but lovable. As

long as you treated him well, he was as gentle as you could ask. But once let Buckshot get it into his head

that he was being imposed on, or once let him see that your temper had betrayed you into striking him when

he thought he did not deserve it, and he cut loose vigorously and emphatically with his heels. He declined to

There remains but Lily. I don't know just how to do justice to Lily the ``Lily maid.'' We named her that

because she looked it. Her color was a pure white, her eye was virginal and silly, her long bang strayed in

wanton carelessness across her face and eyes, her expression was foolish, and her legs were long and rangy.

She had the general appearance of an overgrown schoolgirl too big for short dresses and too young for long

At first hers was the attitude of the timid and shrinking tenderfoot. She stood in awe of her companions; she

appreciated her lack of experience. Humbly she took the rear; slavishly she copied the other horses; closely

she clung to camp. Then in a few weeks, like most tenderfeet, she came to think that her short experience had

taught her everything there was to know. She put on airs. She became too cocky and conceited for words.

Everything she did was exaggerated, overdone. She assumed her pack with an air that plainly said, ``Just see

what a good horse am I!'' She started out three seconds before the others in a manner intended to shame their

procrastinating ways. Invariably she was the last to rest, and the first to start on again. She climbed

overvigorously, with the manner of conscious rectitude. ``Acts like she was trying to get her wages raised,''

In this manner she wore herself down. If permitted she would have climbed until winded, and then would

probably have fallen off somewhere for lack of strength. Where the other horses watched the movements of

those ahead, in order that when a halt for rest was called they might stop at an easy place on the trail, Lily

would climb on until jammed against the animal immediately preceding her. Thus often she found herself

forced to cling desperately to extremely bad footing until the others were ready to proceed. Altogether she

Two virtues she did possess. She was a glutton for work; and she could fall far and hard without injuring

herself. This was lucky, for she was always falling. Several times we went down to her fully expecting to find

her dead or so crippled that she would have to be shot. The loss of a little skin was her only injury. She got to

be quite philosophic about it. On losing her balance she would tumble peaceably, and then would lie back

with an air of luxury, her eyes closed, while we worked to free her. When we had loosened the pack, Wes

would twist her tail. Thereupon she would open one eye inquiringly as though to say, ``Hullo! Done

ONE truth you must learn to accept, believe as a tenet of your faith, and act upon always. It is that your entire

welfare depends on the condition of your horses. They must, as a consequence, receive always your first

consideration. As long as they have rest and food, you are sure of getting along; as soon as they fail, you are

reduced to difficulties. So absolute is this truth that it has passed into an idiom. When a Westerner wants to

tell you that he lacks a thing, he informs you he is ``afoot'' for it. ``Give me a fill for my pipe,'' he begs; ``I'm

Consequently you think last of your own comfort. In casting about for a place to spend the night, you look

out for good feed. That assured, all else is of slight importance; you make the best of whatever camping

facilities may happen to be attached. If necessary you will sleep on granite or in a marsh, walk a mile for

firewood or water, if only your animals are well provided for. And on the trail you often will work twice as

hard as they merely to save them a little. In whatever I may tell you regarding practical expedients, keep this

As to the little details of your daily routine in the mountains, many are worth setting down, however trivial

they may seem. They mark the difference between the greenhorn and the oldtimer; but, more important,

they mark also the difference between the right and the wrong, the efficient and the inefficient ways of doing

In the morning the cook for the day is the first man afoot, usually about half past four. He blows on his

fingers, casts malevolent glances at the sleepers, finally builds his fire and starts his meal. Then he takes

fiendish delight in kicking out the others. They do not run with glad shouts to plunge into the nearest pool, as

most camping fiction would have us believe. Not they. The glad shout and nearest pool can wait until noon

when the sun is warm. They, too, blow on their fingers and curse the cook for getting them up so early. All

Now the cook smokes in lordly ease. One of the other men washes the dishes, while his companion goes forth

to drive in the horses. Washing dishes is bad enough, but fumbling with frozen fingers at stubborn

hobblebuckles is worse. At camp the horses are caught, and each is tied near his own saddle and pack.

The saddlehorses are attended to first. Thus they are available for business in case some of the others should

make trouble. You will see that your saddle blankets are perfectly smooth, and so laid that the edges are to

the front where they are least likely to roll under or wrinkle. After the saddle is in place, lift it slightly and

loosen the blanket along the back bone so it will not draw down tight under the weight of the rider. Next hang

your riflescabbard under your left leg. It should be slanted along the horse's side at such an angle that

neither will the muzzle interfere with the animal's hind leg, nor the butt with your bridlehand. This angle

must be determined by experiment. The loop in front should be attached to the scabbard, so it can be hung

over the horn; that behind to the saddle, so the muzzle can be thrust through it. When you come to try this

method, you will appreciate its handiness. Besides the rifle, you will carry also your rope, camera, and a

sweater or waistcoat for changes in temperature. In your saddle bags are pipe and tobacco, perhaps a chunk of

bread, your notebook, and the map if there is any. Thus your saddlehorse is outfitted. Do not forget

your collapsible rubber cup. About your waist you will wear your cartridgebelt with sixshooter and

sheathknife. I use a fortyfive caliber belt. By threading a buck skin thong in and out through some of the

cartridge loops, their size is sufficiently reduced to hold also the 3040 rifle cartridges. Thus I carry

ammunition for both revolver and rifle in the one belt. The belt should not be buckled tight about your waist,

but should hang well down on the hip. This is for two reasons. In the first place, it does not drag so heavily at

your anatomy, and falls naturally into position when you are mounted. In the second place, you can jerk your

gun out more easily from a loosehanging holster. Let your knifesheath be so deep as almost to cover the

handle, and the knife of the very best steel procurable. I like a thin blade. If you are a student of animal

anatomy, you can skin and quarter a deer with nothing heavier than a pocketknife.

When you come to saddle the packhorses, you must exercise even greater care in getting the saddle

blankets smooth and the saddle in place. There is some give and take to a rider; but a pack carries ``dead,''

and gives the poor animal the full handicap of its weight at all times. A rider dismounts in bad or steep

places; a pack stays on until the morning's journey is ended. See to it, then, that it is on right.

Each horse should have assigned him a definite and, as nearly as possible, unvarying pack. Thus you will not

For example, in our own case, Lily was known as the cookhorse. She carried all the kitchen utensils, the

fireirons, the axe, and matches. In addition her alforjas contained a number of little bags in which were

small quantities for immediate use of all the different sorts of provisions we had with us. When we made

camp we unpacked her near the best place for a fire, and everything was ready for the cook. Jenny was a sort

of supply store, for she transported the main stock of the provisions of which Lily's little bags contained

samples. Dinkey helped out Jenny, and in addition since she took such good care of her pack was

intrusted with the fishingrods, the shotgun, the medicinebag, small miscellaneous duffle, and whatever

deer or bear meat we happened to have. Buckshot's pack consisted of things not often used, such as all the

ammunition, the horse shoeing outfit, repairkit, and the like. It was rarely disturbed at all.

These various things were all stowed away in the kyacks or alforjas which hung on either side. They had to

be very accurately balanced. The least difference in weight caused one side to sag, and that in turn chafed the

So far, so good. Next comes the affair of the top packs. Lay your dufflebags across the middle of the saddle.

Spread the blankets and quilts as evenly as possible. Cover all with the canvas tarpaulin suitably folded.

The first thing anybody asks you when it is discovered that you know a little something of pack trains is,

``Do you throw the Diamond Hitch?'' Now the Diamond is a pretty hitch and a firm one, but it is by no means

the fetish some people make of it. They would have you believe that it represents the height of the packer's

art; and once having mastered it, they use it religiously for every weight, shape, and size of pack. The truth of

the matter is that the style of hitch should be varied according to the use to which it is to be put.

The Diamond is good because it holds firmly, is a great flattener, and is especially adapted to the securing of

square boxes. It is celebrated because it is pretty and rather difficult to learn. Also it possesses the advantage

for singlehanded packing that it can be thrown slack throughout and then tightened, and that the last pull

tightens the whole hitch. However, for ordinary purposes, with a quiet horse and a comparatively soft pack,

the common Square Hitch holds well enough and is quickly made. For a load of small articles and heavy

alforjas there is nothing like the Lone Packer. It too is a bit hard to learn. Chiefly is it valuable because the

last pulls draw the alforjas away from the horse's sides, thus preventing their chafing him. Of the many

hitches that remain, you need learn, to complete your list for all practical purposes, only the Bucking Hitch. It

is complicated, and takes time and patience to throw, but it is warranted to hold your deckload through the

These four will be enough. Learn to throw them, and take pains always to throw them good and tight. A loose

pack is the best expedient the enemy of your soul could possibly devise. It always turns or comes to pieces on

the edge of things; and then you will spend the rest of the morning trailing a wildly buck ing horse by the

burst and scattered articles of camp duffle. It is furthermore your exhilarating task, after you have caught him,

to take stock, and spend most of the afternoon looking for what your first search passed by. Wes and I once

hunted two hours for as large an object as a Dutch oven. After which you can repack. This time you will snug

Next, the leadropes are made fast to the top of the packs. There is here to be learned a certain knot. In case

of trouble you can reach from your saddle and jerk the whole thing free by a single pull on a loose end.

All is now ready. You take a last look around to see that nothing has been left. One of the horsemen starts on

ahead. The packhorses swing in behind. We soon accustomed ours to recognize the whistling of ``Boots and

Saddles'' as a signal for the advance. Another horseman brings up the rear. The day's journey has begun.

To one used to pleasureriding the affair seems almost too deliberate. The leader plods steadily, stopping

from time to time to rest on the steep slopes. The others string out in a leisurely procession. It does no good to

hurry. The horses will of their own accord stay in sight of one another, and constant nagging to keep the rear

closed up only worries them without accomplishing any valuable result. In going uphill especially, let the

train take its time. Each animal is likely to have his own ideas about when and where to rest. If he does,

respect them. See to it merely that there is no prolonged yielding to the temptation of meadow feed, and no

careless or malicious straying off the trail. A minute's difference in the time of arrival does not count.

The day's distance will not seem to amount to much in actual miles, especially if, like most Californians, you

are accustomed on a fresh horse to make an occasional sixty or seventy between suns; but it ought to suffice.

There is a lot to be seen and enjoyed in a mountain mile. Through the high country two miles an hour is a fair

average rate of speed, so you can readily calculate that fifteen make a pretty long day. You will be afoot a

good share of the time. If you were out from home for only a few hours' jaunt, undoubtedly you would ride

your horse over places where in an extended trip you will prefer to lead him. It is always a question of saving

About ten o'clock you must begin to figure on water. No horse will drink in the cool of the morning, and so,

As to the method of travel, you can either stop at noon or push straight on through. We usually arose about

half past four; got under way by seven; and then rode continuously until ready to make the next camp. In the

high country this meant until two or three in the afternoon, by which time both we and the horses were pretty

hungry. But when we did make camp, the horses had until the following morning to get rested and to graze,

while we had all the remainder of the afternoon to fish, hunt, or loaf. Sometimes, however, it was more

expedient to make a lunchcamp at noon. Then we allowed an hour for grazing, and about half an hour to

pack and unpack. It meant steady work for ourselves. To unpack, turn out the horses, cook, wash dishes,

saddle up seven animals, and repack, kept us very busy. There remained not much leisure to enjoy the

scenery. It freshened the horses, however, which was the main point. I should say the first method was the

better for ordinary journeys; and the latter for those times when, to reach good feed, a forced march becomes

On reaching the night's stoppingplace, the cook for the day unpacks the cookhorse and at once sets about

the preparation of dinner. The other two attend to the animals. And no matter how tired you are, or how

hungry you may be, you must take time to bathe their backs with cold water; to stake the picketanimal

where it will at once get good feed and not tangle its rope in bushes, roots, or stumps; to hobble the others;

and to bell those inclined to wander. After this is done, it is well, for the peace and wellbeing of the party, to

A smoke establishes you in the final and normal attitude of good humor. Each man spreads his tarpaulin

where he has claimed his bed. Said claim is indicated by his hat thrown down where he wishes to sleep. It is a

mark of preemption which every one is bound to respect. Lay out your saddleblankets, cover them with

your quilt, place the sleeping blanket on top, and fold over the tarpaulin to cover the whole. At the head

About dusk you straggle in with trout or game. The campkeeper lays aside his mending or his repairing or

his notebook, and stirs up the cooking fire. The smell of broiling and frying and boiling arises in the air.

By the dancing flame of the campfire you eat your third dinner for the day in the mountains all meals are

dinners, and formidable ones at that. The curtain of blackness draws down close. Through it shine stars, loom

mountains cold and mistlike in the moon. You tell stories. You smoke pipes. After a time the pleasant chill

creeps down from the eternal snows. Some one throws another handful of pinecones on the fire. Sleepily

you prepare for bed. The pinecones flare up, throwing their light in your eyes. You turn over and wrap the

soft woolen blanket close about your chin. You wink drowsily and at once you are asleep. Along late in the

night you awaken to find your nose as cold as a dog's. You open one eye. A few coals mark where the fire

has been. The mist mountains have drawn nearer, they seem to bend over you in silent contemplation. The

With a sigh you draw the canvas tarpaulin over your head. Instantly it is morning.

AT last, on the day appointed, we, with five horses, climbed the Cold Spring Trail to the ridge; and then,

instead of turning to the left, we plunged down the zigzag lacets of the other side. That night we camped at

Mono Cañon, feeling ourselves strangely an integral part of the relief map we had looked upon so many times

that almost we had come to consider its features as in miniature, not capacious for the accommodation of

lifesized men. Here we remained a day while we rode the hills in search of Dinkey and Jenny, there

We found Jenny peaceful and inclined to be corralled. But Dinkey, followed by a slavishly adoring brindle

mule, declined to be rounded up. We chased her up hill and down; along creekbeds and through the spiky

chaparral. Always she dodged craftily, warily, with forethought. Always the brindled mule, wrapt in

admiration at his companion's cleverness, crashed along after. Finally we teased her into a narrow cañon.

Wes and the Tenderfoot closed the upper end. I attempted to slip by to the lower, but was discovered. Dinkey

tore a frantic mile down the side hill. Bullet, his nostrils wide, his ears back, raced parallel in the

boulderstrewn streambed, wonderful in his avoidance of bad footing, precious in his selection of good,

interested in the game, indignant at the wayward Dinkey, profoundly contemptuous of the besotted mule. At a

bend in the cañon interposed a steep bank. Up this we scrambled, dirt and stones flying. I had just time to

bend low along the saddle when, with the ripping and tearing and scratching of thorns, we burst blindly

through a thicket. In the open space on the farther side Bullet stopped, panting but triumphant. Dinkey,

surrounded at last, turned back toward camp with an air of utmost indifference. The mule dropped his long

At camp we corralled Dinkey, but left her friend to shift for himself. Then was lifted up his voice in mulish

lamentations until, cursing, we had to ride out bareback and drive him far into the hills and there stone him

into distant fear. Even as we departed up the trail the following day the voice of his sorrow, diminishing like

the echo of grief, appealed uselessly to Dinkey's sympathy. For Dinkey, once captured, seemed to have

shrugged her shoulders and accepted inevitable toil with a real though cynical philosophy.

The trail rose gradually by imperceptible gradations and occasional climbs. We journeyed in the great cañons.

High chaparral flanked the trail, occasional wide gray stretches of ``old man'' filled the air with its pungent

odor and with the calls of its quail. The crannies of the rocks, the stretches of wide loose shale, the crumbling

bottom earth offered to the eye the dessicated beauties of creamy yucca, of yerba buena, of the gaudy red

paintbrushes, the Spanish bayonet; and to the nostrils the hot dry perfumes of the semiarid lands. The air

was tepid; the sun hot. A singsong of bees and locusts and strange insects lulled the mind. The ponies

plodded on cheerfully. We expanded and basked and slung our legs over the pommels of our saddles and

At no time did we seem to be climbing mountains. Rather we wound in and out, round and about, through a

labyrinth of valleys and cañons and ravines, farther and farther into a mysterious shutin country that seemed

to have no end. Once in a while, to be sure, we zigzagged up a trifling ascent; but it was nothing. And then at

We turned. Through a long straight aisle which chance had placed just there, we saw far in the distance a

sheer slatecolored wall; and beyond, still farther in the distance, overtopping the slatecolored wall by a

``It's our mountains,'' said Wes, ``and that blue ridge is the channel islands. We've got up higher than our

We looked about us, and tried to realize that we were actually more than halfway up the formidable ridge we

had so often speculated on from the Cold Spring Trail. But it was impossible. In a few moments, however,

our broad easy cañon narrowed. Huge crags and sheer masses of rock hemmed us in. The chaparral and yucca

and yerba buena gave place to pinetrees and mountain oaks, with little close clumps of cottonwoods in the

stream bottom. The brook narrowed and leaped, and the white of alkali faded from its banks. We began to

climb in good earnest, pausing often for breath. The view opened. We looked back on whence we had come,

and saw again, from the reverse, the forty miles of ranges and valleys we had viewed from the Ridge Trail.

At this point we stopped to shoot a rattlesnake. Dinkey and Jenny took the opportunity to push ahead. From

time to time we would catch sight of them traveling earnestly on, following the trail accurately, stopping at

stated intervals to rest, doing their work, conducting themselves as decorously as though drivers had stood

``Never mind,'' said Wes, ``they've been over this trail before. They'll stop when they get to where we're

We halted a moment on the ridge to look back over the lesser mountains and the distant ridge, beyond which

the islands now showed plainly. Then we dropped down behind the divide into a cup valley containing a little

meadow with running water on two sides of it and big pines above. The meadow was brown, to be sure, as all

typical California is at this time of year. But the brown of California and the brown of the East are two

different things. Here is no snow or rain to mat down the grass, to suck out of it the vital principles. It grows

ripe and sweet and soft, rich with the life that has not drained away, covering the hills and valleys with the

effect of beaver fur, so that it seems the great roundbacked hills must have in a strange manner the yielding

fleshelasticity of living creatures. The brown of California is the brown of ripeness; not of decay.

Our little meadow was beautifully named Madulce,1 and was just below the highest point of this section of

the Coast Range. The air drank fresh with the cool of elevation. We went out to shoot supper; and so found

ourselves on a little knoll fronting the brownhazed east. As we stood there, enjoying the breeze after our

climb, a great wave of hot air swept by us, filling our lungs with heat, scorching our faces as the breath of a

furnace. Thus was brought to our minds what, in the excitement of a new country, we had forgotten, that

we were at last on the eastern slope, and that before us waited the Inferno of the desert.

That evening we lay in the sweet ripe grasses of Madulce, and talked of it. Wes had been across it once

``It's hot, just plain hot,'' said he, ``and that's all there is about it. And there's mighty little water, and what

there is is sickish and a long ways apart. And the sun is strong enough to roast potatoes in.''

``No place to sleep under daytimes,'' explained Wes. ``It's better to keep traveling and then get a chance for a

``Of course we'll start early, and take a long nooning, and travel late. We won't get such a lot of sleep.''

The next morning we descended from Madulce abruptly by a dirt trail, almost perpendicular until we slid into

a cañon of sagebrush and quail, of mescale cactus and the fierce dry heat of sunbaked shale.

Near noon we came to a little cattle ranch situated in a flat surrounded by red dikes and buttes after the

manner of Arizona. Here we unpacked, early as it was, for through the dry countries one has to apportion his

day's journeys by the water to be had. If we went farther today, then tomorrow night would find us in a dry

The horses scampered down the flat to search out alfilaria. We roosted under a slanting shed, where were

stock saddles, silvermounted bits and spurs, rawhide riatas, brandingirons, and all the lumber of the cattle

business, and hung out our tongues and gasped for breath and earnestly desired the sun to go down or a

breeze to come up. The breeze shortly did so. It was a hot breeze, and availed merely to cover us with dust, to

swirl the stableyard into our faces. Great swarms of flies buzzed and lit and stung. Wes, disgusted, went

over to where a solitary cow puncher was engaged in shoeing a horse. Shortly we saw Wes pressed into

service to hold the horse's hoof. He raised a pathetic face to us, the big round drops chasing each other down

The fierce perpendicular rays of the sun beat down. The air under the shed grew stuffier and more oppressive,

but it was the only patch of shade in all that pink and red furnace of a little valley. The Tenderfoot discovered

a pair of horseclippers, and, becoming slightly foolish with the heat, insisted on our barbering his head. We

told him it was cooler with hair than without; and that the flies and sun would be offered thus a beautiful

opportunity, but without avail. So we clipped him, leaving, however, a beautiful long scalplock in the

middle of his crown. He looked like Highlowkickapoowaterpot, chief of the Wamwams. After a while

Shortly the riders began to come in, jingling up to the shed, with a rattle of spurs and bitchains. There they

unsaddled their horses, after which, with great unanimity, they soused their heads in the horsetrough. The

chief, a sixfooter, wearing beautifully decorated gauntlets and a pair of white buckskin chaps, went so far as

to say it was a little warm for the time of year. In the freshness of evening, when frazzled nerves had regained

their steadiness, he returned to smoke and yarn with us and tell us of the peculiarities of the cattle business in

the Cuyamas. At present he and his men were riding the great mountains, driving the cattle to the lowlands in

We slept in the ranch vehicles, so the air could get under us. While the stars still shone, we crawled out, tired

and unrefreshed. The Tenderfoot and I went down the valley after the horses. While we looked, the dull pallid

gray of dawn filtered into the darkness, and so we saw our animals, out of proportion, monstrous in the half

light of that earliest morning. Before the range riders were even astir we had taken up our journey, filching

Until ten o'clock we traveled in the valley of the Cuyamas. The river was merely a broad sand and stone bed,

although undoubtedly there was water below the surface. California rivers are said to flow bottom up. To the

northward were mountains typical of the arid countries, boldly defined, clear in the edges of their folds,

with sharp shadows and hard, uncompromising surfaces. They looked brittle and hollow, as though made of

papier maché and set down in the landscape. A long four hours' noon we spent beneath a liveoak near a tiny

spring. I tried to hunt, but had to give it up. After that I lay on my back and shot doves as they came to drink

at the spring. It was better than walking about, and quite as effective as regards supper. A band of cattle filed

stolidly in, drank, and filed as stolidly away. Some halfwild horses came to the edge of the hill, stamped,

snorted, essayed a tentative advance. Them we drove away, lest they decoy our own animals. The flies would

not let us sleep. Dozens of valley and mountain quail called with maddening cheerfulness and energy. By a

mighty exercise of will we got under way again. In an hour we rode out into what seemed to be a grassy

The little round hills of a few hundred feet rolled gently away to the artificial horizon made by their closing

in. The trail meandered white and distinct through the clear furlike brown of their grasses. Cat tle grazed.

Here and there grew liveoaks, planted singly as in a park. Beyond we could imagine the great plain, grading

And then all at once we surmounted a slight elevation, and found that we had been traveling on a plateau, and

We stood on the brink of a wide smooth velvet creased range that dipped down and down to miniature

cañons far below. Not a single little boulder broke the rounded uniformity of the wild grasses. Out from

Threads of trails, dull white patches of alkali, vague brown areas of brush, showed indeterminate for a little

distance. But only for a little distance. Almost at once they grew dim, faded in the thickness of atmosphere,

lost themselves in the mantle of heat that lay palpable and brown like a shimmering changing veil, hiding the

distance in mystery and in dread. It was a land apart; a land to be looked on curiously from the

vantageground of safety, as we were looking on it from the shoulder of the mountain, and then to be

turned away from, to be left waiting behind its brown veil for what might come. To abandon the high

country, deliberately to cut loose from the known, deliberately to seek the presence that lay in wait, all at

once it seemed the height of grotesque perversity. We wanted to turn on our heels. We wanted to get back to

our hills and fresh breezes and clear water, to our beloved cheerful quail, to our trails and the sweet upper air.

For perhaps a quarter of an hour we sat our horses, gazing down. Some unknown disturbance lazily rifted the

brown veil by ever so little. We saw, lying inert and languid, obscured by its own rank steam, a great round

lake. We knew the water to be bitter, poisonous. The veil drew together again. Wes shook himself and sighed,

``There she is, damn her!'' said he. [1] In all Spanish names the final e should be pronounced.

FOR eight days we did penance, checking off the hours, meeting doggedly one after another the disagreeable

things. We were bathed in heat; we inhaled it; it soaked into us until we seemed to radiate it like so many

furnaces. A condition of thirst became the normal condition, to be only slightly mitigated by a few mouthfuls

from zinc canteens of tepid water. Food had no attractions: even smoking did not taste good. Always the flat

country stretched out before us. We could see far ahead a landmark which we would reach only by a

morning's travel. Nothing intervened between us and it. After we had looked at it a while, we became

possessed of an almost insane necessity to make a run for it. The slow maddening three miles an hour of the

pack train drove us frantic. There were times when it seemed that unless we shifted our gait, unless we

stepped outside the slow strain of patience to which the Inferno held us relentlessly, we should lose our minds

And when the last and most formidable hundred yards had slunk sullenly behind us to insignificance, and we

had dared let our minds relax from the insistent need of selfcontrol then, beyond the cotton. woods, or

creekbed, or group of buildings, whichever it might be, we made out another, remote as paradise, to which

we must gain by sunset. So again the wagontrail, with its white choking dust, its staggering sun, its miles

We sang everything we knew; we told stories; we rode crosssaddle, sidewise, erect, slouching; we walked

and led our horses; we shook the powder of years from old worn jokes, conundrums, and puzzles, and at

the end, in spite of our best efforts, we fell to morose silence and the redeyed vindictive contemplation of

For now we lost accurate sense of time. At first it had been merely a question of going in at one side of eight

days, pressing through them, and coming out on the other side. Then the eight days would be behind us. But

once we had entered that enchanted period, we found ourselves more deeply involved. The seemingly limited

area spread with startling swiftness to the very horizon. Abruptly it was borne in on us that this was never

going to end; just as now for the first time we realized that it had begun infinite ages ago. We were caught in

the entanglement of days. The Coast Ranges were the experiences of a past incarnation: the Mountains were a

myth. Nothing was real but this; and this would endure forever. We plodded on because somehow it was part

of the great plan that we should do so. Not that it did any good: we had long since given up such ideas.

The illusion was very real; perhaps it was the anodyne mercifully administered to those who pass through the

Most of the time we got on well enough. One day, only, the Desert showed her power. That day, at five of the

afternoon, it was one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade. And we, through necessity of reaching the

next water, journeyed over the alkali at noon. Then the Desert came close on us and looked us fair in the

eyes, concealing nothing. She killed poor Deuce, the beautiful setter who had traveled the wild countries so

long; she struck Wes and the Tenderfoot from their horses when finally they had reached a longlegged

water tank; she even staggered the horses themselves. And I, lying under a bush where I had stayed after the

others in the hope of succoring Deuce, began idly shooting at ghostly jackrabbits that looked real, but

After this day the Tenderfoot went watercrazy. Watering the horses became almost a mania with him. He

could not bear to pass even a mudhole without offering the astonished Tunemah a chance to fill up, even

though that animal had drunk freely not twenty rods back. As for himself, he embraced every opportunity;

After that it was not so bad. The thermometer stood from a hundred to a hundred and five or six, to be sure,

but we were getting used to it. Discomfort, ordinary physical discomfort, we came to accept as the normal

environment of man. It is astonishing how soon uniformly uncomfortable conditions, by very lack of contrast,

do lose their power to color the habit of mind. I imagine merely physical unhappiness is a matter more of

contrasts than of actual circumstances. We swallowed dust; we humped our shoulders philosophically under

the beating of the sun, we breathed the débris of high winds; we cooked anyhow, ate anything, spent long idle

fly infested hours waiting for the noon to pass; we slept in horsecorrals, in the trail, in the dust, behind

It is now all confused, an impression of events with out sequence, a mass of little prominent purposeless

things like rock conglomerate. I remember leaning my elbows on a low windowledge and watching a poker

game going on in the room of a dive. The light came from a sickly suspended lamp. It fell on five players,

two miners in their shirtsleeves, a Mexican, a tough youth with sidetilted derby hat, and a fat gorgeously

dressed Chinaman. The men held their cards close to their bodies, and wagered in silence. Slowly and

regularly the great drops of sweat gathered on their faces. As regularly they raised the backs of their hands to

wipe them away. Only the Chinaman, broadfaced, calm, impassive as Buddha, save for a little crafty smile

in one corner of his eye, seemed utterly unaffected by the heat, cool as autumn. His loose sleeve fell back

from his forearm when he moved his hand forward, laying his bets. A jade bracelet slipped back and forth as

Or again, one night when the plain was like a sea of liquid black, and the sky blazed with stars, we rode by a

sheepherder's camp. The flicker of a fire threw a glow out into the dark. A tall wagon, a group of silhouetted

men, three or four squatting dogs, were squarely within the circle of illumination. And outside, in the

penumbra of shifting half light, now showing clearly, now fading into darkness, were the sheep,

indeterminate in bulk, melting away by mysterious thousands into the mass of night. We passed them. They

looked up, squinting their eyes against the dazzle of their fire. The night closed about us again.

Or still another: in the glare of broad noon, after a hot and trying day, a little inn kept by a French couple.

And there, in the very middle of the Inferno, was served to us on clean scrubbed tables, a meal such as one

gets in rural France, all complete, with the pôtage, the fish fried in oil, the wonderful ragout, the chicken and

salad, the cheese and the black coffee, even the vin ordinaire. I have forgotten the name of the place, its

location on the map, the name of its people, one has little to do with detail in the Inferno, but that

dinner never will I forget, any more than the Tenderfoot will forget his first sight of water the day when the

Once the brown veil lifted to the eastward. We, souls struggling, saw great mountains and the whiteness of

eternal snow. That noon we crossed a river, hurrying down through the flat plain, and in its current came the

These things should have been as signs to our jaded spirits that we were nearly at the end of our penance, but

Then we came on a real indication. It did not amount to much. Merely a dry riverbed; but the farther bank,

instead of being flat, cut into a low swell of land. We skirted it. Another swell of land, like the sullen

afterheave of a storm, lay in our way. Then we crossed a ravine. It was not much of a ravine; in fact it was

more like a slight gouge in the flatness of the country. After that we began to see oaktrees, scattered at rare

intervals. So interested were we in them that we did not notice rocks beginning to outcrop through the soil

until they had become numerous enough to be a feature of the landscape. The hills, gently, quietly, without

abrupt transition, almost as though they feared to awaken our alarm by too abrupt movement of growth,

glided from little swells to bigger swells. The oaks gathered closer together. The ravine's brother could almost

And yet, so gradually had this change come about that we did not awaken to a full realization of our escape.

To us it was still the plain, a trifle modified by local peculiarity, but presently to resume its wonted aspect.

But at a little before noon, as we rounded the cheek of a slope, we encountered an errant current of air. It

came up to us curiously, touched us each in turn, and went on. The warm furnace heat drew in on us again.

But it had been a cool little current of air, with something of the sweetness of pines and water and

snowbanks in it. The Tenderfoot suddenly reined in his horse and looked about him.

Wes calculated rapidly. ``It's the eighth day today: I guessed right on the time.''

We stretched our arms and looked about us. They were dry brown hills enough; but they were hills, and they

had trees on them, and cañons in them, so to our eyes, wearied with flatness, they seemed wonderful.

AT once our spirits rose. We straightened in our saddles, we breathed deep, we joked. The country was

scorched and sterile; the wagontrail, almost paralleling the mountains themselves on a long easy slant

toward the high country, was ankledeep in dust; the ravines were still dry of water. But it was not the

Inferno, and that one fact sufficed. After a while we crossed high above a river which dashed white water

The country went on changing. The change was always imperceptible, as is growth, or the stealthy advance

of autumn through the woods. From moment to moment one could detect no alteration. Something intangible

was taken away; something impalpable added. At the end of an hour we were in the oaks and sycamores; at

the end of two we were in the pines and low mountains of Bret Harte's FortyNine.

The wagontrail felt ever farther and farther into the hills. It had not been used as a stageroute for years, but

the freighting kept it deep with dust, that writhed and twisted and crawled lazily kneehigh to our horses, like

a living creature. We felt the swing and sweep of the route. The boldness of its stretches, the freedom of its

reaches for the opposite slope, the wide curve of its horseshoes, all filled us with the breath of an expansion

Everything here was reminiscent of long ago. The very names hinted stories of the Argonauts. Coarse Gold

Gulch, Whiskey Creek, Grub Gulch, Fine Gold PostOffice in turn we passed. Occasionally, with a fine

round dash into the open, the trail drew one side to a stagestation. The huge stables, the wide corrals, the

low livinghouses, each shut in its dooryard of blazing riotous flowers, were all familiar. Only lacked the

oldfashioned Concord coach, from which to descend Jack Hamlin or Judge Starbottle. As for M'liss, she

Down in the gulch bottoms were the old placer diggings. Elaborate little ditches for the deflection of water,

long cradles for the separation of gold, decayed rockers, and shining in the sun the tons and tons of pay dirt

which had been turned over pound by pound in the concentrating of its treasure. Some of the old cabins still

stood. It was all deserted now, save for the few who kept trail for the freighters, or who tilled the restricted

bottomlands of the flats. Roadrunners racked away down the paths; squirrels scurried over wornout

placers; jays screamed and chattered in and out of the abandoned cabins. Strange and shy little creatures and

birds, reassured by the silence of many years, had ventured to take to themselves the engines of man's

industry. And the warm California sun embalmed it all in a peaceful forgetfulness.

Now the trees grew bigger, and the hills more impressive. We should call them mountains in the East. Pines

covered them to the top, straight slender pines with voices. The little flats were planted with great oaks. When

we rode through them, they shut out the hills, so that we might have imagined ourselves in the level wooded

country. There insisted the effect of limitless treegrown plains, which the warm drowsy sun, the parklike

landscape, corroborated. And yet the contrast of the clear atmosphere and the sharp air equally insisted on the

mountains. It was a strange and delicious double effect, a contradiction of natural impressions, a negation of

Always the trail wound up and up. Never was it steep; never did it command an outlook. Yet we felt that at

last we were rising, were leaving the level of the Inferno, were nearing the threshold of the high country.

Mountain peoples came to the edges of their clearings and gazed at us, responding solemnly to our

salutations. They dwelt in cabins and held to agriculture and the herding of the wild mountain cattle. From

them we heard of the high country to which we were bound. They spoke of it as you or I would speak of

interior Africa, as something inconceivably remote, to be visited only by the adventurous, an uninhabited

realm of vast magnitude and unknown dangers. In the same way they spoke of the plains. Only the narrow

pineclad strip between the two and six thousand feet of elevation they felt to be their natural environment.

In it they found the proper conditions for their existence. Out of it those conditions lacked. They were as

much a localized product as are certain plants which occur only at certain altitudes. Also were they densely

All this, you will understand, was in what is known as the low country. The landscape was still brown; the

streams but trickles; sagebrush clung to the ravines; the valley quail whistled on the side hills.

But one day we came suddenly into the big pines and rocks; and that very night we made our first camp in a

I DO not know exactly how to make you feel the charm of that first camp in the big country. Certainly I can

Remember that for two months we had grown accustomed to the brown of the California landscape, and that

for over a week we had traveled in the Inferno. We had forgotten the look of green grass, of abundant water;

almost had we forgotten the taste of cool air. So invariably had the trails been dusty, and the campingplaces

hard and exposed, that we had come subconsciously to think of such as typical of the country. Try to put

Then imagine yourself climbing in an hour or so up into a high ridge country of broad cuplike sweeps and

bold outcropping ledges. Imagine a forest of pinetrees bigger than any pines you ever saw before, pines

eight and ten feet through, so huge that you can hardly look over one of their prostrate trunks even from the

back of your pony. Imagine, further, singing little streams of icecold water, deep refreshing shadows, a soft

carpet of pineneedles through which the faint furrow of the trail runs as over velvet. And then, last of all, in

a wide opening, clear as though chopped and plowed by some back woodsman, a park of grass, fresh grass,

This was our first sight of the mountain meadows. From time to time we found others, sometimes a half

dozen in a day. The rough country came down close about them, edging to the very hairline of the magic

circle, which seemed to assure their placid sunny peace. An upheaval of splintered granite often tossed and

tumbled in the abandon of an unrestrained passion that seemed irresistibly to overwhelm the sanities of a

whole region; but somewhere, in the very forefront of turmoil, was like to slumber one of these little

meadows, as unconscious of anything but its own flawless green simplicity as a child asleep in midocean.

Or, away up in the snows, warmed by the fortuity of reflected heat, its emerald eye looked bravely out to the

heavens. Or, as here, it rested confidingly in the very heart of the austere forest.

Always these parks are green; always are they clear and open. Their size varies widely. Some are as little as a

city lawn; others, like the great Monache,[2] are miles in extent. In them resides the possibility of your

Being desertweary, the Tenderfoot and I cried out with the joy of it, and told in extravagant language how

``It's a bum camp,'' growled Wes. ``If we could 't get better camps than this, I'd quit the game.''

He expatiated on the fact that this particular meadow was somewhat boggy; that the feed was too watery; that

there'd be a cold wind down through the pines; and other small and minor details. But we, our backs propped

against appropriately slanted rocks, our pipes well aglow, gazed down the twilight through the wonderful

great columns of the trees to where the white horses shone like snow against the unaccustomed relief of

green, and laughed him to scorn. What did we or the horses for that matter care for trifling discomforts

of the body? In these intangible comforts of the eye was a great refreshment of the spirit.

The following day we rode through the pine forests growing on the ridges and hills and in the elevated

bowllike hollows. These were not the so called ``big trees,'' with those we had to do later, as you shall

see. They were merely sugar and yellow pines, but never anywhere have I seen finer specimens. They were

planted with a grand sumptuousness of space, and their trunks were from five to twelve feet in diameter and

upwards of two hundred feet high to the topmost spear. Underbrush, ground growth, even saplings of the

same species lacked en tirely, so that we proceeded in the clear open aisles of a tremendous and spacious

This very lack of the smaller and usual growths, the generous plan of spacing, and the size of the trees

themselves necessarily deprived us of a standard of comparison. At first the forest seemed immense. But after

a little our eyes became accustomed to its proportions. We referred it back to the measures of long

experience. The trees, the woodaisles, the extent of vision shrunk to the normal proportions of an Eastern

pinery. And then we would lower our gaze. The packtrain would come into view. It had become lilliputian,

the horses small as white mice, the men like tin soldiers, as though we had undergone an enchantment. But in

a moment, with the rush of a mighty transformation, the great trees would tower huge again.

In the pine woods of the mountains grows also a certain closeclipped parasitic moss. In color it is a brilliant

yellowgreen, more yellow than green. In shape it is crinkly and curly and tangled up with itself like very

fine shavings. In consistency it is dry and brittle. This moss girdles the trunks of trees with innumerable

parallel inchwide bands a foot or so apart, in the manner of oldfashioned striped stockings. It covers

entirely sundry twigless branches. Always in appearance is it fantastic, decorative, almost Japanese, as

though consciously laid in with its vivid yellowgreen as an intentional note of a tone scheme. The somberest

shadows, the most neutral twilights, the most austere recesses are lighted by it as though so many freakish

sunbeams had severed relations with the parent luminary to rest quietly in the coolnesses of the ancient forest.

Underfoot the pineneedles were springy beneath the horse's hoof. The trail went softly, with the courtesy of

great gentleness. Occasionally we caught sight of other ridges, also with pines, across deep sloping

valleys, pine filled. The effect of the distant trees seen from above was that of roughened velvet, here smooth

and shining, there dark with rich shadows. On these slopes played the wind. In the level countries it sang

through the forest progressively: here on the slope it struck a thousand trees at once. The air was ennobled

with the great voice, as a church is ennobled by the tones of a great organ. Then we would drop back again to

the inner country, for our way did not contemplate the descents nor climbs, but held to the general level of a

Clear fresh brooks ran in every ravine. Their water was snowwhite against the black rocks; or lay dark in

bankshadowed pools. As our horses splashed across we could glimpse the rainbow trout flashing to cover.

Where were the watered hollows grew lush thickets full of birds, outposts of the aggressively and cheerfully

worldly in this pineland of spiritual detachment Gorgeous bushflowers, great of petal as magnolias, with

perfume that lay on the air like a heavy drowsiness; long clear stretches of an ankle high shrub of vivid

emerald, looking in the distance like sloping meadows of a peculiar colorbrilliance; patches of smaller

flowers where for the trifling space of a street's width the sun had unobstructed fall, these from time to

time diversified the way, brought to our perceptions the endearing trifles of earthiness, of humanity,

befittingly to modify the austerity of the great forest. At a brookside we saw, still fresh and moist, the print of

a bear's foot. From a patch of the little emerald brush, a barren doe rose to her feet, eyed us a moment, and

then bounded away as though propelled by springs. We saw her from time to time surmounting little

The air was like cold water. We had not lung capacity to satisfy our desire for it. There came with it a dry

exhilaration that brought high spirits, an optimistic viewpoint, and a tremendous keen appetite. It seemed that

we could never tire. In fact we never did. Sometimes, after a particularly hard day, we felt like resting; but it

was always after the day's work was done, never while it was under way. The Tenderfoot and I one day went

afoot twentytwo miles up and down a mountain fourteen thousand feet high. The last three thousand feet

were nearly straight up and down. We finished at a fourmile clip an hour before sunset, and discussed what

to do next to fill in the time. When we sat down, we found we had had about enough; but we had not

All of us, even the morose and cynical Dinkey, felt the benefit of the change from the lower country. Here we

were definitely in the Mountains. Our plateau ran from six to eight thousand feet in altitude. Beyond it

occasionally we could see three more ridges, rising and falling, each higher than the last. And then, in the

blue distance, the very crest of the broad system called the Sierras, another wide region of sheer granite

rising in peaks, pinnacles, and minarets, rugged, wonderful, capped with the eternal snows. [2] Do not fail to

WHEN you say ``trail'' to a Westerner, his eye lights up. This is because it means something to him. To

another it may mean something entirely different, for the blessed word is of that rare and beautiful category

which is at once of the widest significance and the most intimate privacy to him who utters it. To your mind

leaps the picture of the dim forestaisles and the murmurings of treetop breezes; to him comes a vision of

the wide dusty desert; to me, perhaps, a high wild country of wonder. To all of us it is the slender, unbroken,

For in a mysterious way, not to be understood, our trails never do end. They stop sometimes, and wait

patiently while we dive in and out of houses, but always when we are ready to go on, they are ready too, and

so take up the journey placidly as though nothing had intervened. They begin, when? Sometime, away in the

past, you may remember a single episode, vivid through the mists of extreme youth. Once a very little boy

walked with his father under a green roof of leaves that seemed farther than the sky and as unbroken. All of a

sudden the man raised his gun and fired upwards, apparently through the green roof. A pause ensued. Then,

hurtling roughly through still that same green roof, a great bird fell, hitting the earth with a thump. The very

little boy was I. My trail must have begun there under the bright green roof of leaves.

From that earliest moment the Trail unrolls behind you like a thread so that never do you quite lose

connection with your selves. There is something a little fearful to the imaginative in the insistence of it. You

may camp, you may linger, but some time or another, sooner or later, you must go on, and when you do, then

once again the Trail takes up its continuity without reference to the muddied place you have tramped out in

your indecision or indolence or obstinacy or necessity. It would be exceedingly curious to follow out in

patience the chart of a man's going, tracing the pattern of his steps with all its windings of nursery,

playground, boys afield, country, city, plain, forest, mountain, wilderness, home, always on and on into the

higher country of responsibility until at the last it leaves us at the summit of the Great Divide. Such a pattern

A certain magic inheres in the very name, or at least so it seems to me. I should be interested to know

whether others feel the same glamour that I do in the contemplation of such syllables as the LoLo Trail, the

Tunemah Trail, the Mono Trail, the Bright Angel Trail. A certain elasticity of application too leaves room for

the more connotation. A trail may be almost anything. There are wagontrails which East would rank as

macadam roads; horsetrails that would compare favorably with our best bridlepaths; foottrails in the fur

country worn by constant use as smooth as so many gardenwalks. Then again there are other arrangements.

I have heard a muledriver overwhelmed with skeptical derision because he claimed to have upset but six

times in traversing a certain bit of trail not over five miles long; in charts of the mountains are marked many

trails which are only ``ways through,'' you will find few traces of predecessors; the same can be said of

trails in the great forests where even an Indian is sometimes at fault. ``Johnny, you're lost,'' accused the white

man. ``Trail lost: Injun here,'' denied the red man. And so after your experience has led you by the campfires

of a thousand delights, and each of those campfires is on the Trail, which only pauses courteously for your

stay and then leads on untiring into new mysteries forever and ever, you come to love it as the donor of great

joys. You too become a Westerner, and when somebody says ``trail,'' your eye too lights up.

The general impression of any particular trail is born rather of the little incidents than of the big accidents.

The latter are exotic, and might belong to any time or places; the former are individual. For the Trail is a

vantageground, and from it, as your day's travel unrolls, you see many things. Nine tenths of your

experience comes thus, for in the long journeys the side excursions are few enough and unimportant enough

almost to merit classification with the accidents. In time the character of the Trail thus defines itself.

Most of all, naturally, the kind of country has to do with this generalized impression. Certain surprises,

through trees, of vista looking out over unexpected spaces; little notches in the hills beyond which you gain

to a placid far country sleeping under a sun warmer than your elevation permits; the delicious excitement of

the moment when you approach the very knifeedge of the summit and wonder what lies beyond, these

are the things you remember with a warm heart. Your saddle is a point of vantage. By it you are elevated

above the country; from it you can see clearly. Quail scuttle away to right and left, heads ducked low; grouse

boom solemnly on the rigid limbs of pines; deer vanish through distant thickets to appear on yet more distant

ridges, thence to gaze curiously, their great ears forward; across the cañon the bushes sway violently with the

passage of a cinnamon bear among them, you see them all from your post of observation. Your senses are

always alert for these things; you are always bending from your saddle to examine the tracks and signs that

Our trail of this summer led at a general high elevation, with comparatively little climbing and comparatively

easy traveling for days at a time. Then suddenly we would find ourselves on the brink of a great box cañon

from three to seven thousand feet deep, several miles wide, and utterly precipitous. In the bottom of this

cañon would be good feed, fine groves of trees, and a river of some size in which swam fish. The trail to the

cañonbed was always bad, and generally dangerous. In many instances we found it bordered with the bones

of horses that had failed. The river had somehow to be forded. We would camp a day or so in the good feed

and among the fine groves of trees, fish in the river, and then address ourselves with much reluctance to the

ascent of the other bad and dangerous trail on the other side. After that, in the natural course of events,

subject to variation, we could expect nice trails, the comfort of easy travel, pines, cedars, redwoods, and joy

of life until another great cleft opened before us or another great mountainpass barred our way.

This was the web and woof of our summer. But through it ran the patterns of fantastic delight such as the

West alone can offer a man's utter disbelief in them. Some of these patterns stand out in memory with

Below Farewell Gap is a wide cañon with high walls of dark rock, and down those walls run many streams of

water. They are white as snow with the dash of their descent, but so distant that the eye cannot distinguish

their motion. In the half light of dawn, with the yellow of sunrise behind the mountains, they look like gauze

streamers thrown out from the windows of morning to celebrate the solemn pageant of the passing of many

Again, I know of a cañon whose westerly wall is colored in the dull rich colors, the fantastic patterns of a

Moorish tapestry. Umber, seal brown, red, terra cotta, orange, Nile green, emerald, purple, cobalt blue, gray,

lilac, and many other colors, all rich with the depth of satin, glow wonderful as the craftiest textures. Only

There is no use in telling of these things. They, and many others of their like, are marvels, and exist; but you

cannot tell about them, for the simple reason that the average reader concludes at once you must be

exaggerating, must be carried away by the swing of words. The cold sober truth is, you cannot exaggerate.

They have 't made the words. Talk as extravagantly as you wish to one who will in the most childlike manner

believe every syllable you utter. Then take him into the Big Country. He will probably say, ``Why, you did 't

tell me it was going to be anything like this!'' We in the East have no standards of comparison either as

regards size or as regards color especially color. Some people once directed me to ``The Gorge'' on the

New England coast. I could 't find it. They led me to it, and rhapsodized over its magnificent terror. I could

have ridden a horse into the ridiculous thing. As for color, no Easterner believes in it when such men as

Lungren or Parrish transposit it faithfully, any more than a Westerner would believe in the autumn foliage of

our own hardwoods, or an Englishman in the glories of our gaudiest sunsets. They are all true.

In the mountains, the high mountains above the seven or eight thousand foot level, grows an affair called the

snowplant. It is, when full grown, about two feet in height, and shaped like a loosely constructed pinecone

set up on end. Its entire substance is like wax, and the whole concern stalk, broad curling leaves, and all

is a brilliant scarlet. Sometime you will ride through the twilight of deep pine woods growing on the slope

of the mountain, a twilight intensified, rendered more sacred to your mood by the external brilliancy of a

glimpse of vivid blue sky above dazzling snow mountains far away. Then, in this monotone of dark green

frond and dull brown trunk and deep olive shadow, where, like the ordered library of one with quiet tastes,

nothing breaks the harmony of unobtrusive tone, suddenly flames the vivid red of a snowplant. You will

Flowers in general seem to possess this concen trated brilliancy both of color and of perfume. You will ride

into and out of strata of perfume as sharply defined as are the quartz strata on the ridges. They lie sluggish

As for color, you will see all sorts of queer things. The ordered flowerscience of your childhood has gone

mad. You recognize some of your old friends, but strangely distorted and changed, even the dear old

``butter 'n eggs'' has turned pink! Patches of purple, of red, of blue, of yellow, of orange are laid in the

hollows or on the slopes like brilliant blankets out to dry in the sun. The fine grasses are spangled with them,

so that in the cup of the great fierce countries the meadows seem like beautiful green ornaments enameled

with jewels. The Mariposa Lily, on the other hand, is a poppyshaped flower varying from white to purple,

and with each petal decorated by an ``eye'' exactly like those on the great Cecropia or Polyphemus moths, so

that their effect is that of a flock of gorgeous butterflies come to rest. They hover over the meadows poised. A

movement would startle them to flight; only the proper movement somehow never comes.

The great redwoods, too, add to the colored edition impression of the whole country. A redwood, as perhaps

you know, is a tremendous big tree sometimes as big as twenty feet in diameter. It is exquisitely proportioned

like a fluted column of noble height. Its bark is slightly furrowed longitudinally, and of a peculiar elastic

appearance that lends it an almost perfect illusion of breathing animal life. The color is a rich umber red.

Sometimes in the early morning or the late afternoon, when all the rest of the forest is cast in shadow, these

massive trunks will glow as though incandescent. The Trail, wonderful always, here seems to pass through

the outer portals of the great flaming regions where dwell the risings and fallings of days.

As you follow the Trail up, you will enter also the permanent dwellingplaces of the seasons. With us each

visits for the space of a few months, then steals away to give place to the next. Whither they go you have not

known until you have traveled the high mountains. Summer lives in the valley; that you know. Then a little

higher you are in the spring time, even in August. Melting patches of snow linger under the heavy firs; the

earth is soggy with halfabsorbed snowwater, trickling with exotic little rills that do not belong; grasses of

the year before float like drowned hair in pellucid pools with an air of permanence, except for the one fact;

fresh green things are sprouting bravely; through bare branches trickles a shower of bursting buds, larger at

the top, as though the Sower had in passing scattered them from above. Birds of extraordinary cheerfulness

sing merrily to new and doubtful flowers. The air tastes cold, but the sun is warm. The great spring hum

ming and promise is in the air. And a few thousand feet higher you wallow over the surface of drifts while a

winter wind searches your bones. I used to think that Santa Claus dwelt at the North Pole. Now I am

convinced that he has a workshop somewhere among the great mountains where dwell the Seasons, and that

Here the birds migrate up and down instead of south and north. It must be a great saving of trouble to them,

and undoubtedly those who have discovered it maintain toward the unenlightened the same delighted and

fraternal secrecy with which you and I guard the knowledge of a good troutstream. When you can migrate

Also do I remember certain spruce woods with openings where the sun shone through. The shadows were

very black, the sunlight very white. As I looked back I could see the packhorses alternately suffer eclipse

and illumination in a strange flickering manner good to behold. The dust of the trail eddied and billowed

lazily in the sun, each mote flashing as though with life; then abruptly as it crossed the sharp line of shade it

From these spruce woods, level as a floor, we came out on the rounded shoulder of a mountain to find

ourselves nearly nine thousand feet above the sea. Below us was a deep cañon to the middle of the earth. And

spread in a semicircle about the curve of our mountain a most magnificent panoramic view. First there were

the plains, represented by a brown haze of heat; then, very remote, the foothills, the brushhills, the pine

mountains, the upper timber, the tremendous granite peaks, and finally the barrier of the main crest with its

glittering snow. From the plains to that crest was over seventy miles. I should not dare say how far we could

see down the length of the range; nor even how distant was the other wall of the cañon over which we rode.

It is useless to multiply instances. The principle is well enough established by these. Whatever impression of

your trail you carry away will come from the little common occurrences of every day. That is true of all trails;

and equally so, it seems to me, of our Trail of Life sketched at the beginning of this essay.

But the trail of the mountains means more than wonder; it means hard work. Unless you stick to the beaten

path, where the freighters have lost so many mules that they have finally decided to fix things up a bit, you

are due for lots of trouble. Bad places will come to be a nightmare with you and a topic of conversation with

whomever you may meet. We once enjoyed the company of a prospector three days while he made up his

mind to tackle a certain bit of trail we had just descended. Our accounts did not encourage him. Every

morning he used to squint up at the cliff which rose some four thousand feet above us. ``Boys,'' he said finally

as he started, ``I may drop in on you later in the morning.'' I am happy to say he did not.

The most discouraging to the tenderfoot, but in reality the safest of all bad trails, is the one that skirts a

precipice. Your horse possesses a laudable desire to spare your inside leg unnecessary abrasion, so he walks

on the extreme outer edge. If you watch the performance of the animal ahead, you will observe that every few

moments his outer hind hoof slips off that edge, knocking little stones down into the abyss. Then you

conclude that sundry slight jars you have been experiencing are from the same cause. Your peace of mind

deserts you. You stare straight ahead, sit very light indeed, and perhaps turn the least bit sick. The horse,

however, does not mind, nor will you, after a little. There is absolutely nothing to do but to sit steady and

give your animal his head. In a fairly extended experience I never got off the edge but once. Then somebody

shot a gun immediately ahead; my horse tried to turn around, slipped, and slid backwards until he overhung

the chasm. Fortunately his hind feet caught a tiny bush. He gave a mighty heave, and regained the trail.

Afterwards I took a look and found that there were no more bushes for a hundred feet either way.

Next in terror to the unaccustomed is an ascent by lacets up a very steep side hill. The effect is cumulative.

Each turn brings you one stage higher, adds definitely one more unit to the test of your hardihood. This last

has not terrified you; how about the next? or the next? or the one after that? There is not the slightest danger.

You appreciate this point after you have met headon some oldtimer. After you have speculated frantically

how you are to pass him, he solves the problem by calmly turning his horse off the edge and sliding to the

next lacet below. Then you see that with a mountain horse it does not much matter whether you get off such a

The real bad places are quite as likely to be on the level as on the slant. The tremendous granite slides, where

the cliff has avalanched thousands of tons of loose jagged rockfragments across the passage, are the worst.

There your horse has to be a goat in balance. He must pick his way from the top of one fragment to the other,

and if he slips into the interstices he probably breaks a leg. In some parts of the granite country are also

smooth rock aprons where footing is especially difficult, and where often a slip on them means a toboggan

chute off into space. I know of one spot where such an apron curves off the shoulder of the mountain. Your

horse slides directly down it until his hoofs encounter a little crevice. Checking at this, he turns sharp to the

left and so off to the good trail again. If he does not check at the little crevice, he slides on over the curve of

Loose rocks in numbers on a very steep and narrow trail are always an abomination, and a numerous

abomination at that. A horse slides, skates, slithers. It has always seemed to me that luck must count largely

in such a place. When the animal treads on a loose round stone as he does every step of the way that

stone is going to roll under him, and he is going to catch himself as the nature of that stone and the little gods

of chance may will. Only furthermore I have noticed that the really good horse keeps his feet, and the poor

one tumbles. A judgmatical rider can help a great deal by the delicacy of his riding and the skill with which

Another mean combination, especially on a slant, is six inches of snow over loose stones or small boulders.

There you hope for divine favor and flounder ahead. There is one compensation; the snow is soft to fall on.

Boggy areas you must be able to gauge the depth of at a glance. And there are places, beautiful to behold,

where a horse clambers up the least bit of an ascent, hits his pack against a projection, and is hurled into outer

Some of the mountain rivers furnish pleasing afternoons of sport. They are deep and swift, and below the ford

are rapids. If there is a fallen tree of any sort across them, remember the length of California trees, and do

not despise the rivers, you would better unpack, carry your goods across yourself, and swim the

packhorses. If the current is very bad, you can splice riatas, hitch one end to the horse and the other to a tree

on the farther side, and start the combination. The animal is bound to swing across somehow. Generally you

can drive them over loose. In swimming a horse from the saddle, start him well upstream to allow for the

current, and never, never, never attempt to guide him by the bit. The Tenderfoot tried that at Mono Creek and

nearly drowned himself and Old Slob. You would better let him alone, as he probably knows more than you

do. If you must guide him, do it by hitting the side of his head with the flat of your hand.

Sometimes it is better that you swim. You can perform that feat by clinging to his mane on the downstream

side, but it will be easier both for you and him if you hang to his tail. Take my word for it, he will not kick

Once in a blue moon you may be able to cross the whole outfit on logs. Such a log bridge spanned Granite

Creek near the North Fork of the San Joaquin at an elevation of about seven thousand feet. It was suspended a

good twenty feet above the water, which boiled white in a most disconcerting manner through a gorge of

rocks. If anything fell off that log it would be of no further value even to the curiosity seeker. We got over all

the horses save Tunemah. He refused to consider it, nor did peaceful argument win. As he was more or less of

a fool, we did not take this as a reflection on our judgment, but culled cedar clubs. We beat him until we were

ashamed. Then we put a slipnoose about his neck. The Tenderfoot and I stood on the log and heaved while

Wes stood on the shore and pushed. Suddenly it occurred to me that if Tunemah made up his silly mind to

come, he would probably do it all at once, in which case the Tenderfoot and I would have about as much

show for life as fossil formations. I did 't say anything about it to the Tenderfoot, but I hitched my

sixshooter around to the front, resolved to find out how good I was at wingshooting horses. But Tunemah

declared he would die for his convictions. ``All right,'' said we, ``die then,'' with the embellishment of

profanity. So we stripped him naked, and stoned him into the raging stream, where he had one chance in three

of coming through alive. He might as well be dead as on the other side of that stream. He won through,

Of such is the Trail, of such its wonders, its pleasures, its little comforts, its annoyances, its dangers. And

when you are forced to draw your sixshooter to end mercifully the life of an animal that has served you

faithfully, but that has fallen victim to the leg breaking hazard of the way, then you know a little of its

tragedy also. May you never know the greater tragedy when a man's life goes out, and you unable to help!

May always your trail lead through fine trees, green grasses, fragrant flowers, and pleasant waters!

ONCE I happened to be sitting out a dance with a tactful young girl of tender disposition who thought she

should adapt her conversation to the one with whom she happened to be talking. Therefore she asked

questions concerning outofdoors. She knew nothing whatever about it, but she gave a very good imitation

of one interested. For some occult reason people never seem to expect me to own evening clothes, or to know

how to dance, or to be able to talk about anything civilized; in fact, most of them appear disappointed that I

This young girl selected deer as her topic. She mentioned liquid eyes, beautiful form, slender ears; she said

``And I don't see how you can ever bear to shoot them, Mr. White,'' she concluded.

`` You quarter the onions and slice them very thin,'' said I dreamily. ``Then you take a little bacon fat you had

left over from the flapjacks and put it in the fryingpan. The fryingpan should be very hot. While the

onions are frying, you must keep turning them over with a fork. It's rather difficult to get them all browned

without burning some. I should broil the meat. A broiler is handy, but two willows, peeled and charred a little

so the willow taste won't penetrate the meat, will do. Have the steak fairly thick. Pepper and salt it

thoroughly. Sear it well at first in order to keep the juices in; then cook rather slowly. When it is done, put it

``Don't you?'' said I. ``Well; suppose you've been climbing a mountain late in the afternoon when the sun is

on the other side of it. It is a mountain of big boulders, loose little stones, thorny bushes. The slightest

misstep would send pebbles rattling, brush rustling; but you have gone all the way without making that

misstep. This is quite a feat. It means that you've known all about every footstep you've taken. That would be

business enough for most people, would 't it? But in addition you've managed to see everything on that side

of the mountain especially patches of brown. You've seen lots of patches of brown, and you've examined

each one of them. Besides that, you've heard lots of little rustlings, and you've identified each one of them. To

do all these things well keys your nerves to a high tension, does 't it? And then near the top you look up from

your last noiseless step to see in the brush a very dim patch of brown. If you had 't been looking so hard, you

surely would 't have made it out. Perhaps, if you're not humbleminded, you may reflect that most people

would 't have seen it at all. You whistle once sharply. The patch of brown defines itself. Your heart gives one

big jump. You know that you have but the briefest moment, the tiniest fraction of time, to hold the white bead

of your rifle motionless and to press the trigger. It has to be done very steadily, at that distance, and you

``Oh, did 't I mention it?'' I asked, surprised. ``I was telling you why I could bear to shoot deer.''

``Of course not,'' I reassured her. ``After all, it's very simple. The reason I can bear to kill deer is because, to

My young lady was evidently afraid of being considered stupid; and also convinced of her inability to

Now of course she did not see. Nobody could see the force of that last remark without the grace of further

explanation, and yet in the elimination of the obvious rests the whole secret of seeing deer in the woods.

In traveling the trail you will notice two things: that a tenderfoot will habitually contemplate the horn of his

saddle or the trail a few yards ahead of his horse's nose, with occasionally a look about at the landscape; and

the oldtimer will be constantly searching the prospect with keen understanding eyes. Now in the occasional

glances the tenderfoot takes, his perceptions have room for just so many impressions. When the number is

filled out he sees nothing more. Naturally the obvious features of the landscape supply the basis for these

impressions. He sees the configuration of the mountains, the nature of their covering, the course of their

ravines, first of all. Then if he looks more closely, there catches his eye an odd shaped rock, a burned black

stub, a flowering bush, or some such matter. Anything less striking in its appeal to the attention actually has

not room for its recognition. In other words, supposing that a man has the natural ability to receive x visual

impressions, the tenderfoot fills out his full capacity with the striking features of his surroundings. To be able

to see anything more obscure in form or color, he must naturally put aside from his attention some one or

another of these obvious features. He can, for example, look for a particular kind of flower on a side hill only

If this is plain, then, go one step further in the logic of that reasoning. Put yourself in the mental attitude of a

man looking for deer. His eye sweeps rapidly over a side hill; so rapidly that you cannot understand how he

can have gathered the main features of that hill, let alone concentrate and refine his attention to the seeing of

an animal under a bush. As a matter of fact he pays no attention to the main features. He has trained his eye,

not so much to see things, as to leave things out. The oddshaped rock, the charred stub, the bright flowering

bush do not exist for him. His eye passes over them as unseeing as yours over the patch of brown or gray that

represents his quarry. His attention stops on the unusual, just as does yours; only in his case the unusual is not

the obvious. He has succeeded by long training in eliminating that. Therefore he sees deer where you do not.

As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificially obvious, then you too will see

These animals are strangely invisible to the untrained eye even when they are standing ``in plain sight.'' You

can look straight at them, and not see them at all. Then some old woodsman lets you sight over his finger

exactly to the spot. At once the figure of the deer fairly leaps into vision. I know of no more perfect example

of the instantaneous than this. You are filled with astonishment that you could for a moment have avoided

seeing it. And yet next time you will in all probability repeat just this ``puzzle picture'' experience.

The Tenderfoot tried for six weeks before he caught sight of one. He wanted to very much. Time and again

one or the other of us would hiss back, ``See the deer! over there by the yellow bush!'' but before he could

bring the deliberation of his scrutiny to the point of identification, the deer would be gone. Once a fawn

jumped fairly within ten feet of the packhorses and went bounding away through the bushes, and that fawn

he could not help seeing. We tried conscientiously enough to get him a shot; but the Tenderfoot was unable to

move through the brush less majestically than a Pullman car, so we had ended by becoming apathetic on the

Finally, while descending a very abrupt mountain side I made out a buck lying down perhaps three hundred

feet directly below us. The buck was not looking our way, so I had time to call the Tenderfoot. He came.

With difficulty and by using my riflebarrel as a pointer I managed to show him the animal. Immediately he

began to pant as though at the finish of a mile race, and his rifle, when he leveled it, covered a good half acre

The deer was now on his feet and facing us, so the Tenderfoot had the entire length of the animal to allow for

lineal variation. He fired. The deer dropped. The Tenderfoot thrust his hat over one eye, rested hand on hip in

We descended. The bullet had broken the deer's back about six inches from the tail. The Tenderfoot had

You will see many deer thus from the trail, in fact, we kept up our meat supply from the saddle, as one

might say, but to enjoy the finer savor of seeing deer, you should start out definitely with that object in

view. Thus you have opportunity for the display of a certain finer woodcraft. You must know where the

objects of your search are likely to be found, and that depends on the time of year, the time of days their age,

their sex, a hundred little things. When the bucks carry antlers in the velvet, they frequent the inaccessibilities

of the highest rocky peaks, so their tender horns may not be torn in the brush, but nevertheless so that the

advantage of a lofty viewpoint may compensate for the loss of cover. Later you will find them in the open

slopes of a lower altitude, fully exposed to the sun, that there the heat may harden the antlers. Later still, the

heads in fine condition and tough to withstand scratches, they plunge into the dense thickets. But in the mean

time the fertile does have sought a lower country with patches of small brush interspersed with open

passages. There they can feed with their fawns, completely concealed, but able, by merely raising the head, to

survey the entire landscape for the threatening of danger. The barren does, on the other hand, you will find

through the timber and brush, for they are careless of all responsibilities either to offspring or headgear.

These are but a few of the considerations you will take into account, a very few of the many which lend the

deer countries strange thrills of delight over new knowledge gained, over crafty expedients invented or well

utilized, over the satisfactory matching of your reason, your instinct, your subtlety and skill against the

reason, instinct, subtlety, and skill of one of the wariest of large wild animals.

Perversely enough the times when you did not see deer are more apt to remain vivid in your memory than the

times when you did. I can still see distinctly sundry wide jumpmarks where the animal I was tracking had

evidently caught sight of me and lit out before I came up to him. Equally, sundry little thin disappearing

clouds of dust; cracklings of brush, growing ever more distant; the tops of bushes waving to the steady

passage of something remaining persistently concealed, these are the chief ingredients often repeated

which make up deerstalking memory. When I think of seeing deer, these things automatically rise.

A few of the deer actually seen do, however, stand out clearly from the many. When I was a very small boy

possessed of a 3220 rifle and large ambitions, I followed the advantage my father's footsteps made me in the

deep snow of an unused loggingroad. His attention was focused on some very interesting fresh tracks. I,

being a small boy, cared not at all for tracks, and so saw a big doe emerge from the bushes not ten yards

away, lope leisurely across the road, and disappear, wagging earnestly her tail. When I had recovered my

breath I vehemently demanded the sense of fooling with tracks when there were real live deer to be had. My

In the spring of 1900 I was at the head of the Piant River waiting for the logdrive to start. One morning,

happening to walk over a slashing of many years before in which had grown a strong thicket of white

popples, I jumped a band of nine deer. I shall never forget the bewildering impression made by the glancing,

But most wonderful of all was a great buck, of I should be afraid to say how many points, that stood

silhouetted on the extreme end of a ridge high above our camp. The time was just after twilight, and as we

THE tenderfoot is a queer beast. He makes more trouble than ants at a picnic, more work than a trespassing

goat; he never sees anything, knows where anything is, remembers accurately your instructions, follows them

if remembered, or is able to handle without awkwardness his large and pathetic hands and feet; he is always

lost, always falling off or into things, always in difficulties; his articles of necessity are constantly being

burned up or washed away or mislaid; he looks at you beamingly through great innocent eyes in the most

chuckleheaded of manners; he exasperates you to within an inch of explosion, and yet you love him.

I am referring now to the real tenderfoot, the fellow who cannot learn, who is incapable ever of adjusting

himself to the demands of the wild life. Sometimes a man is merely green, inexperienced. But give him a

chance and he soon picks up the game. That is your greenhorn, not your tenderfoot. Down near Monache

meadows we came across an individual leading an old packmare up the trail. The first thing, he asked us to

tell him where he was. We did so. Then we noticed that he carried his gun muzzleup in his hippocket,

which seemed to be a nice way to shoot a hole in your hand, but a poor way to make your weapon accessible.

He unpacked near us, and promptly turned the mare into a boghole because it looked green. Then he stood

around the rest of the evening and talked deprecating talk of a garrulous nature.

The stranger gave us a hazy account of misnamed cañons, by which we gathered that he had come directly

``But if you wanted to get to Monache, why did 't you go around to the eastward through that pass, there, and

``Yes, perhaps so,'' he hesitated. ``Still I got lots of time I can take all summer, if I want to and I'd

rather stick to a straight line then you know where you are if you get off the straight line, you're likely

We knew well enough what ailed him, of course. He was a tenderfoot, of the sort that always, to its dying

day, unhobbles its horses before putting their halters on. Yet that man for thirtytwo years had lived almost

constantly in the wild countries. He had traveled more miles with a packtrain than we shall ever dream of

traveling, and hardly could we mention a famous camp of the last quarter century that he had not blundered

into. Moreover he proved by the indirections of his misinformation that he had really been there and was not

making ghost stories in order to impress us. Yet if the Lord spares him thirtytwo years more, at the end of

that time he will probably still be carrying his gun upside down, turning his horse into a boghole, and

blundering through the country by main strength and awkwardness. He was a beautiful type of the tenderfoot.

The redeeming point of the tenderfoot is his humbleness of spirit and his extreme good nature. He

exasperates you with his fool performances to the point of dancing cursing wild crying rage, and then accepts

your well, reproofs so meekly that you come off the boil as though some one had removed you from

Suppose your particular tenderfoot to be named Algernon. Suppose him to have packed his horse loosely

they always do so that the pack has slipped, the horse has bucked over three square miles of assorted

mountains, and the rest of the train is scattered over identically that area. You have run your saddlehorse to

a lather heading the outfit. You have sworn and dodged and scrambled and yelled, even fired your

sixshooter, to turn them and bunch them. In the mean time Algernon has either sat his horse like a park

policeman in his leisure hours, or has ambled directly into your path of pursuit on an average of five times a

minute. Then the trouble dies from the landscape and the baby bewilderment from his eyes. You slip from

``My dear fellow,'' you remark, ``did you not see that the thing for you to do was to head them down by the

bottom of that little gulch there? Don't you really think anybody would have seen it? What in hades do you

think I wanted to run my horse all through those boulders for? Do you think I want to get him lame 'way up

here in the hills? I don't mind telling a man a thing once, but to tell it to him fiftyeight times and then have it

do no good Have you the faintest recollection of my instructing you to turn the bight over instead of under

when you throw that packhitch? If you'd remember that, we should 't have had all this trouble.''

This is just the utterly fool reply that upsets your artificial and elaborate courtesy. You probably foam at the

mouth, and dance on your hat, and shriek wild imploring imprecations to the astonished hills. This is not

because you have an unfortunate disposition, but because Algernon has been doing precisely the same thing

``Listen to him!'' you howl. ``Did 't tell him! Why you ganglelegged bugeyed softhanded pop eared

tenderfoot, you! there are some things you never think of telling a man. I never told you to open your mouth

to spit, either. If you had a hired man at five dollars a year who was so allaround hopelessly thickheaded

Then Algernon looks truly sorry, and does 't answer back as he ought to in order to give occasion for the

relief of a really soulsatisfying scrap, and utters the soft answer humbly. So your wrath is turned and there

It is rather good fun to relieve the bitterness of the heart. Let me tell you a few more tales of the tenderfoot,

premising always that I love him, and when at home seek him out to smoke pipes at his fireside, to yarn over

the trail, to wonder how much rancor he cherishes against the maniacs who declaimed against him, and by

way of compensation to build up in the mind of his sweetheart, his wife, or his mother a fearful and

wonderful reputation for him as the Terror of the Trail. These tales are selected from many, mere samples of

a varied experience. They occurred here, there, and everywhere, and at various times. Let no one try to lay

them at the door of our Tenderfoot merely because such is his title in this narrative. We called him that by

Once upon a time some of us were engaged in climbing a mountain rising some five thousand feet above our

startingplace. As we toiled along, one of the packhorses became impatient and pushed ahead. We did not

mind that, especially, as long as she stayed in sight, but in a little while the trail was closed in by brush and

Algernon disappeared. We continued to climb. The trail was steep and rather bad. The labor was strenuous,

and we checked off each thousand feet with thankfulness. As we saw nothing further of Algernon, we

naturally concluded he had headed the mare and was continuing on the trail. Then through a little opening we

saw him riding cheerfully along without a care to occupy his mind. Just for luck we hailed him.

``Well, you'd better push on a little faster. She may leave the trail at the summit.''

Then one of us, endowed by heaven with a keen intuitive instinct for tenderfeet, no one could have a

We stared at each other, then at the trail. Only one horse had preceded us, that of the tenderfoot. But of

``What in the name of seventeen little dickybirds did you think you were up to!'' we howled. ``Were you

going to ride ahead until dark in the childlike faith that that mare might show up somewhere? Here's a nice

state of affairs. The trail is all tracked up now with our horses, and heaven knows whether she's left tracks

We tied the animals savagely, and started back on foot. It would be criminal to ask our saddlehorses to

``And don't stir from them no matter what happens, or you'll get lost,'' we commanded out of the wisdom of

We climbed down the four thousand odd feet, and then back again, leading the mare. She had turned off not

Your Algernon never does get down to little details like tracks his scheme of life is much too magnificent.

To be sure he would not know fresh tracks from old if he should see them; so it is probably quite as well. In

the morning he goes out after the horses. The bunch he finds easily enough, but one is missing. What would

you do about it? You would naturally walk in a circle around the bunch until you crossed the track of the

truant leading away from it, would 't you? If you made a wide enough circle you would inevitably cross that

track, would 't you? provided the horse started out with the bunch in the first place. Then you would follow

the track, catch the horse, and bring him back. Is this Algernon's procedure? Not any. ``Ha!'' says he, ``old

Brownie is missing. I will hunt him up.'' Then he maunders off into the scenery, trusting to high heaven that

he is going to blunder against Brownie as a prominent feature of the landscape. After a couple of hours you

He has a horrifying facility in losing himself. Nothing is more cheering than to arise from a hard earned

couch of ease for the purpose of trailing an Algernon or so through the gathering dusk to the spot where he

has managed to find something a very real despair of ever getting back to food and warmth. Nothing is

I traveled once in the Black Hills with such a tenderfoot. We were off from the base of supplies for a ten

days' trip with only a saddlehorse apiece. This was near first principles, as our total provisions consisted of

two pounds of oatmeal, some tea, and sugar. Among other things we climbed Mt. Harney. The trail, after we

left the horses, was as plain as a strip of Brussels carpet, but somehow or another that tenderfoot managed to

get off it. I hunted him up. We gained the top, watched the sunset, and started down. The tenderfoot, I

thought, was fairly at my coattails, but when I turned to speak to him he had gone; he must have turned off

at one of the numerous little openings in the brush. I sat down to wait. By and by, away down the west slope

of the mountain, I heard a shot, and a faint, a very faint, despairing yell. I, also, shot and yelled. After various

signals of the sort, it became evident that the tenderfoot was approaching. In a moment he tore by at full

speed, his hat off, his eye wild, his sixshooter popping at every jump. He passed within six feet of me, and

never saw me. Subsequently I left him on the prairie, with accurate and simple instructions.

``There's the mountain range. You simply keep that to your left and ride eight hours. Then you'll see Rapid

Two days later he drifted into Rapid City, having wandered off somewhere to the east. How he had done it I

The tenderfoot is always in hard luck. Apparently, too, by all tests of analysis it is nothing but luck, pure

chance, misfortune. And yet the very persistence of it in his case, where another escapes, perhaps indicates

that much of what we call good luck is in reality unconscious skill in the arrange ment of those elements

which go to make up events. A persistently unlucky man is perhaps sometimes to be pitied, but more often to

But lucky or unlucky, the tenderfoot is human. Ordinarily that does 't occur to you. He is a malevolent engine

of destruction quite as impersonal as heat or cold or lack of water. He is an unfortunate article of personal

belonging requiring much looking after to keep in order. He is a credulous and convenient response to

practical jokes, huge tales, misinformation. He is a laudable object of attrition for the development of your

character. But somehow, in the woods, he is not as other men, and so you do not come to feel yourself in

But Algernon is real, nevertheless. He has feelings, even if you do not respect them. He has his little

enjoyments, even though he does rarely contemplate anything but the horn of his saddle.

``Algernon,'' you cry, ``for heaven's sake stick that saddle of yours in a glass case and glut yourself with the

sight of its ravishing beauties next winter. For the present do gaze on the mountains. That's what you came

He has, doubtless, a full range of all the appreciative emotions, though from his actions you'd never suspect

Algernon always overdoes the equipment question. If it is birdshooting, he accumulates leggings and canvas

caps and belts and dogwhistles and things until he looks like a picture from a departmentstore catalogue. In

the cow country he wears Stetson hats, snake bands, red handkerchiefs, sixshooters, chaps, and huge spurs

that do not match his face. If it is yachting, he has a chronometer with a gong in the cabin of a fiveton

sailboat, possesses a nickleplated machine to register the heel of his craft, sports a brassbound

yachtingcap and all the regalia. This is merely amusing. But I never could understand his insane desire to

get sunburned. A man will get sunburned fast enough; he could not help it if he would. Algernon usually

starts out from town with out a hat. Then he dares not take off his sweater for a week lest it carry away his

entire face. I have seen men with deep sores on their shoulders caused by nothing but excessive burning in

the sun. This, too, is merely amusing. It means quite simply that Algernon realizes his inner deficiencies and

wants to make up for them by the outward seeming. Be kind to him, for he has been raised a pet.

ONE day we tied our horses to three bushes, and walked on foot two hundred yards. Then we looked down.

It was nearly four thousand feet down. Do you realize how far that is? There was a river meandering through

olivecolored forests. It was so distant that it was light green and as narrow as a piece of tape. Here and there

were rapids, but so remote that we could not distinguish the motion of them, only the color. The white

resembled tiny dabs of cotton wool stuck on the tape. It turned and twisted, following the turns and twists of

the cañon. Somehow the level at the bottom resembled less forests and meadows than a heavy and sluggish

fluid like molasses flowing between the cañon walls. It emerged from the bend of a sheer cliff ten miles to

eastward: it disappeared placidly around the bend of another sheer cliff an equal distance to the westward.

The time was afternoon. As we watched, the shadow of the cañon wall darkened the valley. Whereupon we

Now the upper air, of which we were dwellers for the moment, was peopled by giants and clear atmo sphere

and glittering sunlight, flashing like silver and steel and precious stones from the granite domes, peaks,

minarets, and palisades of the High Sierras. Solid as they were in reality, in the crispness of this mountain air,

under the tangible blue of this mountain sky, they seemed to poise light as so many balloons. Some of them

rose sheer, with hardly a fissure; some had flung across their shoulders long trailing pine draperies, fine as

fur; others matched mantles of the whitest white against the bluest blue of the sky. Towards the lower country

were more pines rising in ridges, like the fur of an animal that has been alarmed.

We dangled our feet over the edge and talked about it. Wes pointed to the upper end where the sluggish

For this cañon lies in the heart of the mountains. Those who would visit it have first to get into the country

a matter of over a week. Then they have their choice of three probabilities of destruction.

The first route comprehends two final days of travel at an altitude of about ten thousand feet, where the snow

lies in midsummer; where there is no feed, no comfort, and the way is strewn with the bones of horses. This

is known as the ``Basin Trail.'' After taking it, you prefer the others until you try them.

The finish of the second route is directly over the summit of a mountain. You climb two thousand feet and

then drop down five. The ascent is heart breaking but safe. The descent is hairraising and unsafe: no

profanity can do justice to it. Out of a packtrain of thirty mules, nine were lost in the course of that five

thousand feet. Legend has it that once many years ago certain prospectors took in a Chinese cook. At first the

Mongolian bewailed his fate loudly and fluently, but later settled to a single terrified moan that sounded like

``tunemah! tune mah!'' The trail was therefore named the ``Tune mah Trail.'' It is said that

``tunemah'' is the very worst single vituperation of which the Chinese language is capable.

Thus like paradise the cañon is guarded; but like paradise it is wondrous in delight. For when you descend

you find that the tapewide trickle of water seen from above has become a river with profound darkling pools

and placid stretches and swift dashing rapids; that the dark green sluggish flow in the cañonbed has

disintegrated into a noble forest with great pinetrees, and shaded aisles, and deep dank thickets, and brush

openings where the sun is warm and the birds are cheerful, and groves of cottonwoods where all day long

softly, like snow, the flakes of cotton float down through the air. Moreover there are meadows, spacious

lawns, opening out, closing in, winding here and there through the groves in the manner of spilled naphtha,

actually waist high with green feed, sown with flowers like a brocade. Quaint tributary little brooks babble

and murmur down through these trees, down through these lawns. A blessed warm sun hums with the joy of

innumerable bees. To right hand and to left, in front of you and behind, rising sheer, forbidding, impregnable,

the cliffs, mountains, and ranges hem you in. Down the river ten miles you can go: then the gorge closes, the

river grows savage, you can only look down the tumbling fierce waters and turn back. Up the river five miles

you can go, then interpose the sheer snowclad cliffs of the Palisades, and them, rising a matter of fourteen

thousand feet, you may not cross. You are shut in your paradise as completely as though surrounded by iron

But, too, the world is shut out. The paradise is yours. In it are trout and deer and grouse and bear and lazy

happy days. Your horses feed to the fatness of butter. You wander at will in the ample though definite limits

of your domain. You lie on your back and examine dispassionately, with an interest entirely detached, the

huge cliffwalls of the valley. Days slip by. Really, it needs at least an angel with a flaming sword to force

We turned away from our view and addressed ourselves to the task of finding out just when we were going to

get there. The first day we bobbed up and over innumerable little ridges of a few hundred feet elevation,

crossed several streams, and skirted the wide bowllike amphitheatre of a basin. The second day we climbed

over things and finally ended in a small hanging park named Alpine Meadows, at an elevation of eight

thousand five hundred feet. There we restedover a day, camped under a single pine tree, with the

quickgrowing mountain grasses thick about us, a semicircle of mountains on three sides, and the plunge into

the cañon on the other. As we needed meat, we spent part of the day in finding a deer. The rest of the time we

Bears are great travelers. They will often go twenty miles overnight, apparently for the sheer delight of being

on the move. Also are they exceedingly loath to expend unnecessary energy in getting to places, and they

hate to go down steep hills. You see, their fore legs are short. Therefore they are skilled in the choice of easy

routes through the mountains, and once having made the choice they stick to it until through certain narrow

places on the route selected they have worn a trail as smooth as a gardenpath. The old prospectors used

quite occasionally to pick out the horsepasses by trusting in general to the bear migrations, and many a

welltraveled route of today is superimposed over the waythrough picked out by old bruin long ago.

Of such was our own trail. Therefore we kept our rifles at hand and our eyes open for a straggler. But none

came, though we baited craftily with portions of our deer. All we gained was a rattlesnake, and he seemed a

Mount Tunemah stood over against us, still twentytwo hundred feet above our elevation. We gazed on it

sadly, for directly by its summit, and for five hours beyond, lay our trail, and evil of reputation was that trail

beyond all others. The horses, as we bunched them in preparation for the packing, took on a new interest, for

it was on the cards that the unpacking at evening would find some missing from the ranks.

``Lily's a goner, sure,'' said Wes. ``I don't know how she's got this far except by drunken man's luck. She'll

``And Tunemah himself,'' pointed out the Tenderfoot, naming his own fool horse; ``I see where I start in to

We climbed the two thousand two hundred feet, leading our saddlehorses to save their strength. Every

twenty feet we rested, breathing heavily of the rarified air. Then at the top of the world we paused on the

brink of nothing to tighten cinches, while the cold wind swept by us, the snow glittered in a sunlight become

silvery like that of early April, and the giant peaks of the High Sierras lifted into a distance inconceivably

To our left lay a windrow of snow such as you will see drifted into a sharp crest across a corner of your yard;

only this windrow was twenty feet high and packed solid by the sun, the wind, and the weight of its age. We

climbed it and looked over directly into the eye of a round Alpine lake seven or eight hundred feet below. It

was of an intense cobalt blue, a color to be seen only in these glacial bodies of water, deep and rich as the

mantle of a merchant of Tyre. White ice floated in it. The savage fierce granite needles and knifeedges of

But this was temporizing, and we knew it. The first drop of the trail was so steep that we could flip a pebble

to the first level of it, and so rough in its waterandsnowgouged knuckles of rocks that it seemed that at

the first step a horse must necessarily fall end over end. We made it successfully, however, and breathed

When we ``got busy'' we took our guns in our hands to preserve them from a fall, and started in. Two more

miracles saved Dinkey at two more places. We spent an hour at one spot, and finally built a new trail around

it. Six times a minute we held our breaths and stood on tiptoe with anxiety, powerless to help, while the horse

did his best. At the especially bad places we checked them off one after another, congratulating ourselves on

so much saved as each came across without accident. When there were no bad places, the trail was so

extraordinarily steep that we ahead were in constant dread of a horse's falling on us from behind, and our legs

did become wearied to incipient paralysis by the constant stiff checking of the descent. Moreover every

second or so one of the big loose stones with which the trail was cumbered would be dislodged and come

bouncing down among us. We dodged and swore; the horses kicked; we all feared for the integrity of our

legs. The day was full of an intense nervous strain, an entire absorption in the precise present. We promptly

forgot a difficulty as soon as we were by it: we had not time to think of those still ahead. All outside the

insistence of the moment was blurred and unimportant, like a specialized focus, so I cannot tell you much

about the scenery. The only outside impression we received was that the cañon floor was slowly rising to

Our watches said halfpast three. We had made five miles in a little under seven hours.

Remained only the crossing of the river. This was no mean task, but we accomplished it lightly, searching out

a ford. There were high grasses, and on the other side of them a grove of very tall cottonwoods, clean as a

park. First of all we cooked things; then we spread things; then we lay on our backs and smoked things, our

hands clasped back of our heads. We cocked ironical eyes at the sheer cliff of old Mount Tunemah, very

Already the meathawks, the fluffy Canada jays, had found us out, and were prepared to swoop down boldly

on whatever offered to their predatory skill. We had nothing for them yet, there were no remains of the

lunch, but the fireirons were out, and ribs of venison were roasting slowly over the coals in preparation

for the evening meal. Directly opposite, visible through the lattice of the trees, were two huge mountain

peaks, part of the wall that shut us in, over against us in a height we had not dared ascribe to the sky itself. By

and by the shadow of these mountains rose on the westerly wall. It crept up at first slowly, extinguishing

color; afterwards more rapidly as the sun approached the horizon. The sunlight disappeared. A moment's gray

intervened, and then the wonderful golden afterglow laid on the peaks its enchantment. Little by little that too

faded, until at last, far away, through a rift in the ranks of the giants, but one remained gilded by the glory of

a dream that continued with it after the others. Heretofore it had seemed to us an insignificant peak,

apparently overtopped by many, but by this token we knew it to be the highest of them all.

Then ensued another pause, as though to give the invisible sceneshifter time to accomplish his work,

followed by a shower of evening coolness, that seemed to sift through the trees like a soft and gentle rain. We

ate again by the flicker of the fire, dabbing a trifle uncertainly at the food, wondering at the distant mountain

on which the Day had made its final stand, shrinking a little before the stealthy dark that flowed down the

In the notch between the two huge mountains blazed a star, accurately in the notch, like the front sight of

First we knew of it when it touched the crest of our two mountains. The night has strange effects on the hills.

A moment before they had menaced black and sullen against the sky, but at the touch of the moon their very

substance seemed to dissolve, leaving in the upper atmosphere the airiest, most nebulous, fragile, ghostly

simulacrums of themselves you could imagine in the realms of fairyland. They seemed actually to float, to

poise like cloudshapes about to dissolve. And against them were cast the inky silhouettes of three firtrees

Down over the stones rolled the river, crying out to us with the voices of old accustomed friends in another

AS I have said, a river flows through the cañon. It is a very good river with some riffles that can be waded

down to the edges of black pools or white chutes of water; with appropriate big trees fallen slantwise into it to

form deep holes; and with hurrying smooth stretches of some breadth. In all of these various places are

There is no use fishing until late afternoon. The clear sun of the high altitudes searches out mercilessly the

bottom of the stream, throwing its miniature boulders, mountains, and valleys as plainly into relief as the

buttes of Arizona at noon. Then the trout quite refuse. Here and there, if you walk far enough and climb hard

enough over all sorts of obstructions, you may discover a few spots shaded by big trees or rocks where you

can pick up a half dozen fish; but it is slow work. When, however, the shadow of the two huge mountains

feels its way across the stream, then, as though a signal had been given, the trout begin to rise. For an hour

The stream fairly swarmed with them, but of course some places were better than others. Near the upper

reaches the water boiled like seltzer around the base of a tremendous tree. There the pool was at least ten feet

deep and shot with bubbles throughout the whole of its depth, but it was full of fish. They rose eagerly to

your gyrating fly, and took it away with them down to subaqueous chambers and passages among the

roots of that tree. After which you broke your leader. Royal Coachman was the best lure, and therefore

valuable exceedingly were Royal Coachmen. Whenever we lost one we lifted up our voices in lament, and

went away from there, calling to mind that there were other pools, many other pools, free of obstruction and

with fish in them. Yet such is the perversity of fishermen, we were back losing more Royal Coachmen the

very next day. In all I managed to disengage just three rather small trout from that pool, and in return

decorated their ancestral halls with festoons of leaders and the brilliance of many flies.

Now this was foolishness. All you had to do was to walk through a grove of cottonwoods, over a brook,

through another grove of pines, down a sloping meadow to where one of the gigantic pinetrees had

obligingly spanned the current. You crossed that, traversed another meadow, broke through a thicket, slid

down a steep grassy bank, and there you were. A great many years before a pinetree had fallen across the

current. Now its whitened skeleton lay there, opposing a barrier for about twentyfive feet out into the

stream. Most of the water turned aside, of course, and boiled frantically around the end as though trying to

catch up with the rest of the stream which had gone on without it, but some of it dived down under and came

up on the other side. There, as though bewildered, it paused in an uneasy pool. Its constant action had

excavated a very deep hole, the débris of which had formed a bar immediately below. You waded out on the

If you were methodical, you first shortened your line, and began near the bank, gradually working out until

you were casting fortyfive feet to the very edge of the fast current. I know of nothing pleasanter for you to

do. You see, the evening shadow was across the river, and a beautiful grass slope at your back. Over the way

was a grove of trees whose birds were very busy because it was near their sunset, while towering over them

were mountains, quite peaceful by way of contrast because their sunset was still far distant. The river was in a

great hurry, and was talking to itself like a man who has been detained and is now at last making up time to

his important engagement. And from the deep black shadow beneath the pine skeleton, occasionally flashed

white bodies that made concentric circles where they broke the surface of the water, and which fought you to

a finish in the glory of battle. The casting was against the current, so your flies could rest but the briefest

possible moment on the surface of the stream. That moment was enough. Day after day you could catch your

I might inform you further of the gorge downstream, where you lie flat on your stomach ten feet above the

river, and with one hand cautiously extended over the edge cast accurately into the angle of the cliff. Then

when you get your strike, you tow him downstream, clamber precariously to the water's level still playing

your fish and there land him, if he has accommodatingly stayed hooked. A threepound fish will make

We lived on fish and venison, and had all we wanted. The beartrails were plenty enough, and the signs were

comparatively fresh, but at the time of our visit the animals themselves had gone over the mountains on some

sort of a picnic. Grouse, too, were numerous in the popple thickets, and flushed much like our ruffed grouse

of the East. They afforded firstrate wingshooting for SurePop, the little shotgun.

But these things occupied, after all, only a small part of every day. We had loads of time left. Of course we

explored the valley up and down. That occupied two days. After that we became lazy. One always does in a

permanent camp. So did the horses. Active or rather restless interest in life seemed to die away. Neither

we nor they had to rustle hard for food. They became fastidious in their choice, and at all times of day could

be seen sauntering in Indian file from one part of the meadow to the other for the sole purpose apparently of

cropping a half dozen indifferent mouthfuls. The rest of the time they roosted under trees, one hind leg

relaxed, their eyes half closed, their ears wabbling, the pictures of imbecile content. We were very much the

Of course we had our outbursts of virtue. While under their influence we undertook vast works. But after

their influence had died out, we found ourselves with said vast works on our hands, and so came to cursing

For instance, Wes and I decided to make buckskin from the hide of the latest deer. We did not need the

buckskin we already had two in the pack. Our ordinary procedure would have been to dry the hide for

future treatment by a Mexican, at a dollar a hide, when we should have returned home. But, as I said, we

We began with great ingenuity by constructing a grainingtool out of a tableknife. We bound it with

rawhide, and encased it with wood, and wrapped it with cloth, and filed its edge square across, as is proper.

After this we hunted out a very smooth, barkless log, laid the hide across it, straddled it, and began graining.

Graining is a delightful process. You grasp the tool by either end, hold the square edge at a certain angle, and

push away from you mightily. A half dozen pushes will remove a little patch of hair; twice as many more

will scrape away half as much of the sealbrown grain, exposing the white of the hide. Then, if you want to,

you can stop and establish in your mind a definite proportion between the amount thus exposed, the area

remaining unexposed, and the muscular fatigue of these dozen and a half of mighty pushes. The proportion

will be wrong. You have left out of account the fact that you are going to get almighty sick of the job; that

your arms and upper back are going to ache shrewdly before you are done; and that as you go on it is going to

be increasingly difficult to hold down the edges firmly enough to offer the required resistance to your knife.

Besides if you get careless you'll scrape too hard: hence little holes in the completed buckskin. Also

if you get careless you will probably leave the finest, tiniest shreds of grain, and each of them means a

hard transparent spot in the product. Furthermore, once having started in on the job, you are like the little boy

who caught the trolley: you cannot let go. It must be finished immediately, all at one heat, before the hide

Be it understood, your first enthusiasm has evap orated, and you are thinking of fifty pleasant things you

Next you revel in grease, lard oil, if you have it; if not, then lard, or the product of boiled brains. This you

must rub into the skin. You rub it in until you suspect that your fingernails have worn away, and you glisten

By the merciful arrangement of those who invented buckskin, this entitles you to a rest. You take it for

Then you transport gingerly that slippery, clammy, soggy, snaky, cold bundle of greasy horror to the bank of

the creek, and there for endless hours you wash it. The grease is more reluctant to enter the stream than you

are in the early morning. Your hands turn purple. The others go by on their way to the troutpools, but you

By and by you straighten your back with creaks, and walk home like a stiff old man, carrying your hide rid of

all superfluous oil. Then if you are just learning how, your instructor examines the result.

``That's all right,'' says he cheerfully. ``Now when it dries, it will be buckskin.''

That encourages you. It need not. For during the process of drying it must be your pastime constantly to pull

and stretch at every square inch of that boundless skin in order to loosen all the fibres. Otherwise it would dry

as stiff as whalebone. Now there is nothing on earth that seems to dry slower than buckskin. You wear your

fingers down to the first joints, and, wishing to preserve the remainder for future use, you carry the hide to

You go back and do it some more, putting the entire strength of your body, soul, and religious convictions

into the stretching of that buckskin. It looks as white as paper; and feels as soft and warm as the turf on a

But at this point your outraged soul arches its back and bucks. You sneak off and roll up that piece of

buckskin, and thrust it into the alforja. You know it is dry. Then with a deep sigh of relief you come out of

``Do you mean to tell me that there is any one chump enough to do that for a dollar a hide?'' you inquire.

About a week later one of your companions drags out of the alforja something crumpled that resembles in

general appearance and texture a rusted fivegallon coaloil can that has been in a wreck. It is only

Then quietly you go out and sit on a high place before recognition brings inevitable and sickening

Along about the middle of that century an old prospector with four burros descended the Basin Trail and went

I sincerely wish I could sketch this man for you just as he came down through the firelit trees. He was about

six feet tall, very leanly built, with a weatherbeaten face of mahogany on which was superimposed a

sweeping mustache and beetling eye brows. These had originally been brown, but the sun had bleached

them almost white in remarkable contrast to his complexion. Eyes keen as sunlight twinkled far down

beneath the shadows of the brows and a floppy old sombrero hat. The usual flannel shirt, waistcoat,

mountainboots, and sixshooter completed the outfit. He might have been forty, but was probably nearer

``Howdy, boys,'' said he, and dropped to the fireside, where he promptly annexed a coal for his pipe.

We all greeted him, but gradually the talk fell to him and Wes. It was commonplace talk enough from one

point of view: taken in essence it was merely like the inquiry and answer of the civilized man as to another's

itinerary ``Did you visit Florence? Berlin? St. Petersburg?'' and then the comparing of impressions.

Only here again that old familiar magic of unfamiliar names threw its glamour over the terse sentences.

``Over beyond the Piute Monument,'' the old prospector explained, ``down through the Inyo Range, a leetle

That was all there was to it, with long pauses for drawing at the pipes. Yet somehow in the aggregate that

catalogue of names gradually established in the minds of us two who listened an impression of long years, of

wide wilderness, of wandering far over the face of the earth. The old man had wintered here, summered a

thousand miles away, made his strike at one end of the world, lost it somehow, and cheerfully tried for a

repetition of his luck at the other. I do not believe the possibility of wealth, though always of course in the

background, was ever near enough his hope to be considered a motive for action. Rather was it a dream,

remote, something to be gained tomorrow, but never today, like the mediæval Christian's idea of heaven.

His interest was in the search. For that one could see in him a real enthusiasm. He had his smattering of

theory, his very real empirical knowledge, and his superstitions, like all prospectors. So long as he could keep

in grub, own a little train of burros, and lead the life he loved, he was happy.

Perhaps one of the chief elements of this remarkable interest in the game rather than the prizes of it was his

desire to vindicate his guesses or his conclusions. He liked to predict to himself the outcome of his solitary

operations, and then to prove that prediction through laborious days. His life was a gigantic game of solitaire.

In fact, he mentioned a dozen of his claims many years apart which he had developed to a certain point,

``so I could see what they was,'' and then abandoned in favor of fresher discoveries. He cherished the

illusion that these were properties to whose completion some day he would return. But we knew better; he

had carried them to the point where the result was no longer in doubt and then, like one who has no interest in

playing on in an evidently prescribed order, had laid his cards on the table to begin a new game.

This man was skilled in his profession; he had pursued it for thirty odd years; he was frugal and industrious;

undoubtedly of his long series of discoveries a fair percentage were valuable and are producingproperties

today. Yet he confessed his bank balance to be less than five hundred dollars. Why was this? Simply and

solely because he did not care. At heart it was entirely immaterial to him whether he ever owned a dollar

above his expenses. When he sold his claims, he let them go easily, loath to bother himself with business

details, eager to get away from the fuss and nuisance. The few hundred dollars he received he probably sunk

in unproductive mining work, or was fleeced out of in the towns. Then joyfully he turned back to his beloved

mountains and the life of his slow deep delight and his pecking away before the open doors of fortune. By

and by he would build himself a little cabin down in the lower pine mountains, where he would grow a white

beard, putter with occult wilderness crafts, and smoke long contemplative hours in the sun before his door.

For tourists he would braid rawhide reins and quirts, or make buckskin. The jays and woodpeckers and

Douglas squirrels would become fond of him. So he would be gathered to his fathers, a gentle old man whose

life had been spent harmlessly in the open. He had had his ideal to which blindly he reached; he had in his

indirect way contributed the fruits of his labor to mankind; his recompenses he had chosen according to his

desires. When you consider these things, you perforce have to revise your first notion of him as a useless sort

of old ruffian. As you come to know him better, you must love him for the kindliness, the simple honesty, the

modesty, and charity that he seems to draw from his mountain environment. There are hundreds of him

Our prospector was a little uncertain as to his plans. Along toward autumn he intended to land at some

reputed placers near Dinkey Creek. There might be something in that district. He thought he would take a

look. In the mean time he was just poking up through the country he and his jackasses. Good way to

spend the summer. Perhaps he might run across something 'most anywhere; up near the top of that mountain

opposite looked mineralized. Did 't know but what he'd take a look at her tomorrow.

He camped near us during three days. I never saw a more modest, selfeffacing man. He seemed genuinely,

childishly, almost helplessly interested in our flyfishing, shooting, our bearskins, and our travels. You

would have thought from his demeanor which was sincere and not in the least ironical that he had

never seen or heard anything quite like that before, and was struck with wonder at it. Yet he had cast flies

before we were born, and shot even earlier than he had cast a fly, and was a very Ishmael for travel. Rarely

could you get an account of his own experiences, and then only in illustration of something else.

``If youall likes bearhunting,'' said he, ``you ought to get up in eastern Oregon. I summered there once.

The only trouble is, the brush is thick as hair. You 'most always have to bait them, or wait for them to come

and drink. The brush is so small you ain't got much chance. I run onto a she bear and cubs that way once.

He prospected the mountain opposite, loafed with us a little, and then decided that he must be going. About

eight o'clock in the morning he passed us, hazing his burros, his tall, lean figure elastic in defiance of years.

He plunged into the river without hesitation, emerged dripping on the other side, and disappeared in the

brush. From time to time during the rest of the morning we heard the intermittent tinkling of his bellanimal

In the person of this man we gained our first connection, so to speak, with the Golden Trout. He had caught

Few fishermen west of the Rockies have not heard of the Golden Trout, though, equally, few have much

definite information concerning it. Such information usually runs about as follows:

It is a medium size fish of the true trout family, resembling a rainbow except that it is of a rich golden color.

The peculiarity that makes its capture a dream to be dreamed of is that it swims in but one little stream of all

the round globe. If you would catch a Golden Trout, you must climb up under the very base of the end of the

High Sierras. There is born a stream that flows down from an elevation of about ten thousand feet to about

eight thousand before it takes a long plunge into a branch of the Kern River. Over the twenty miles of its

course you can cast your fly for Golden Trout; but what is the nature of that stream, that fish, or the method

To be sure, there are legends. One, particularly striking, claims that the Golden Trout occurs in one other

stream situated in Central Asia! and that the fish is therefore a remnant of some preglacial period,

like Sequoia trees, a sort of granddaddy of all trout, as it were. This is but a sample of what you will hear

Of course from the very start we had had our eye on the Golden Trout, and intended sooner or later to work

``It's about four weeks south, the way you and me travels,'' said he. ``You don't want to try Harrison's Pass;

it's chock full of tribulation. Go around by way of the Giant Forest. She's pretty good there, too, some sizable

timber. Then over by Redwood Meadows, and Timber Gap, by Mineral King, and over through Farewell

Gap. You turn east there, on a new trail. She's steeper than straight upan'down, but shorter than the other.

When you get down in the cañon of Kern River, say, she's a fine cañon, too, you want to go

downstream about two mile to where there's a sort of natural over flowed lake full of stubs stickin' up.

You'll get some awful big rainbows in there. Then your best way is to go right up Whitney Creek Trail to a

big high meadows mighty nigh to timberline. That's where I camped. They's lots of them little yaller fish

So in that guise as the desire for new and distant things did our angel with the flaming sword finally

We caught reluctant horses reluctantly. All the first day was to be a climb. We knew it; and I suspect that they

knew it too. Then we packed and addressed ourselves to the task offered us by the Basin Trail.

ONE morning I awoke a little before the others, and lay on my back staring up through the trees. It was not

my day to cook. We were camped at the time only about sixtyfive hundred feet high, and the weather was

warm. Every sort of green thing grew very lush all about us, but our own little space was held dry and clear

for us by the needles of two enormous red cedars some four feet in diameter. A variety of thoughts sifted

through my mind as it followed lazily the shimmering filaments of loose spider web streaming through

space. The last thought stuck. It was that that day was a holiday. Therefore I un limbered my sixshooter,

The outfit boiled out of its blankets. I explained the situation, and after they had had some breakfast they

agreed with me that a celebration was in order. Unanimously we decided to make it gastronomic.

``We will ride till we get to good feed,'' we concluded, ``and then we'll cook all the afternoon. And nobody

It was agreed. We rode until we were very hungry, which was eleven o'clock. Then we rode some more. By

and by we came to a log cabin in a wide fair lawn below a high mountain with a ducal coronet on its top, and

around that cabin was a fence, and inside the fence a man chopping wood. Him we hailed. He came to the

fence and grinned at us from the elevation of highheeled boots. By this token we knew him for a

``Howdy, boys,'' he roared. Roared is the accurate expression. He was not a large man, and his hair was

sandy, and his eye mild blue. But undoubtedly his kinsmen were dumb and he had as birthright the voice for

the entire family. It had been subsequently developed in the shouting after the wild cattle of the hills. Now his

ordinary conversational tone was that of the announcer at a circus. But his heart was good. Can we camp

``Sure thing,'' he bellowed. ``Turn your horses into the meadow. Camp right here.''

But with the vision of a rounded wooded knoll a few hundred yards distant we said we'd just get out of his

way a little. We crossed a creek, mounted an easy slope to the top of the knoll, and were delighted to observe

just below its summit the peculiar fresh green hump which indicates a spring. The Tenderfoot, however,

knew nothing of springs, for shortly he trudged a weary way back to the creek, and so returned bearing kettles

of water. This performance hugely astonished the cowboy, who subsequently wanted to know if a ``critter

Wes departed to borrow a big Dutch oven of the man and to invite him to come across when we raised the

Now camp cooks are of two sorts. Anybody can with a little practice fry bacon, steak, or flapjacks, and boil

coffee. The reduction of the raw material to its most obvious cooked result is within the reach of all but the

most hopeless tenderfoot who never knows the saltsack from the sugarsack. But your true artist at the

business is he who can from six ingredients, by permutation, combination, and the genius that is in him turn

out a full score of dishes. For simple example: Given, rice, oatmeal, and raisins. Your expert accomplishes

Item Rice boiled until soft, then stiffened by the addition of quarter as much oatmeal.

Item Oatmeal in which is boiled almost to the dissolving point a third as much rice.

These latter two dishes taste entirely unlike each other or their separate ingredients. They are moreover great

Some people like to cook and have a natural knack for it. Others hate it. If you are one of the former, select a

propitious moment to suggest that you will cook, if the rest will wash the dishes and supply the wood and

water. Thus you will get first crack at the fire in the chill of morning; and at night you can squat on your heels

In a mountain trip small stout bags for the provisions are necessary. They should be big enough to contain,

say, five pounds of cornmeal, and should tie firmly at the top. It will be absolutely labor lost for you to mark

them on the outside, as the outside soon will become uniform in color with your marking. Tags might do, if

occasionally renewed. But if you have the instinct, you will soon come to recognize the appearance of the

different bags as you recognize the features of your family. They should contain small quantities for

immediate use of the provisions the main stock of which is carried on another pack animal. One tin plate

apiece and ``one to grow on''; the same of tin cups; half a dozen spoons; four knives and forks; a big spoon;

two fryingpans; a broiler; a coffeepot; a Dutch oven; and three light sheetiron pails to nest in one another

was what we carried on this trip. You see, we had horses. Of course in the woods that outfit would be

For the same reason, since we had our carrying done for us, we took along two flat iron bars about

twentyfour inches in length. These, laid across two stones between which the fire had been built, we used to

support our cookingutensils stovewise. I should never carry a stove. This arrangement is quite as effective,

and possesses the added advantage that wood does not have to be cut for it of any definite length. Again, in

the woods these iron bars would be a senseless burden. But early you will learn that while it is foolish to

carry a single ounce more than will pay in comfort or convenience for its own transportation, it is equally

foolish to refuse the comforts or conveniences that modified circumstance will permit you. To carry only a

forest equipment with packanimals would be as silly as to carry only a packanimal outfit on a Pullman car.

Even if you do not intend to wash dishes, bring along some ``Gold Dust.'' It is much simpler in getting at odd

corners of obstinate kettles than any soap. All you have to do is to boil some of it in that kettle, and the

That's about all you, as expert cook, are going to need in the way of equipment. Now as to your fire.

There are a number of ways of building a cooking fire, but they share one first requisite: it should be small. A

blaze will burn everything, including your hands and your temper. Two logs laid side by side and slanted

towards each other so that small things can go on the narrow end and big things on the wide end; flat rocks

arranged in the same manner; a narrow trench in which the fire is built; and the flat irons just described

these are the best known methods. Use dry wood. Arrange to do your boiling first in the flame; and your

So much in general. You must remember that openair cooking is in many things quite different from indoor

cooking. You have different utensils, are exposed to varying temperatures, are limited in resources, and

pursued by a necessity of haste. Pre conceived notions must go by the board. You are after results; and if

you get them, do not mind the feminines of your household lifting the hands of horror over the unorthodox

means. Mighty few women I have ever seen were good campfire cooks; not because campfire cookery is

especially difficult, but because they are temperamentally incapable of ridding themselves of the notion that

certain things should be done in a certain way, and because if an ingredient lacks, they cannot bring

themselves to substitute an approximation. They would rather abandon the dish than do violence to the sacred

Most campcookery advice is quite useless for the same reason. I have seen many a recipe begin with the

words: ``Take the yolks of four eggs, half a cup of butter, and a cup of fresh milk '' As if any one really

Now here is something I cooked for this particular celebration. Every woman to whom I have ever described

it has informed me vehemently that it is not cake, and must be ``horrid.'' Perhaps it is not cake, but it looks

First I took two cups of flour, and a half cup of cornmeal to make it look yellow. In this I mixed a lot of

bakingpowder, about twice what one should use for bread, and topped off with a cup of sugar. The

whole I mixed with water into a light dough. Into the dough went raisins that had previously been boiled to

swell them up. Thus was the cake mixed. Now I poured half the dough into the Dutch oven, sprinkled it with

a good layer of sugar, cinnamon, and unboiled raisins; poured in the rest of the dough; repeated the layer of

sugar, cinnamon, and raisins; and baked in the Dutch oven. It was gorgeous, and we ate it at one fell swoop.

While we are about it, we may as well work backwards on this particular orgy by describing the rest of our

dessert. In addition to the cake and some stewed apricots, I, as cook of the day, constructed also a pudding.

The basis was flour two cups of it. Into this I dumped a handful of raisins, a tablespoonful of baking

powder, two of sugar, and about a pound of fat salt pork cut into little cubes. This I mixed up into a mess by

means of a cup or so of water and a quantity of larrupydope.3 Then I dipped a flour sack in hot water,

wrung it out, sprinkled it with dry flour, and half filled it with my pudding mixture. The whole outfit I boiled

for two hours in a kettle. It, too, was good to the palate, and was even better sliced and fried the following

This brings us to the suspension of kettles. There are two ways. If you are in a hurry, cut a springy pole,

sharpen one end, and stick it perpendicular in the ground. Bend it down towards your fire. Hang your kettle

on the end of it. If you have jabbed it far enough into the ground in the first place, it will balance nicely by its

own spring and the elasticity of the turf. The other method is to plant two forked sticks on either side your

fire over which a strong crosspiece is laid. The kettles are hung on hooks cut from forked branches. The

On this occasion we had deer, grouse, and ducks in the larder. The best way to treat them is as follows. You

When your deer is fresh, you will enjoy greatly a dish of liver and bacon. Only the liver you will discover to

be a great deal tenderer and more delicate than any calf's liver you ever ate. There is this difference: a deer's

liver should be parboiled in order to get rid of a green bitter scum that will rise to the surface and which you

Next in order is the ``back strap'' and tenderloin, which is always tender, even when fresh. The hams should

be kept at least five days. Deersteak, to my notion, is best broiled, though occasionally it is pleasant by way

of variety to fry it. In that case a brown gravy is made by thoroughly heating flour in the grease, and then

stirring in water. Deersteak threaded on switches and ``barbecued'' over the coals is delicious. The outside

will be a little blackened, but all the juices will be retained. To enjoy this to the utmost you should take it in

your fingers and *gnaw. The only permissible implement is your hunting knife. Do not forget to peel and

char slightly the switches on which you thread the meat, otherwise they will impart their freshwood taste.

By this time the ribs are in condition. Cut little slits between them, and through the slits thread in and out

long strips of bacon. Cut other little gashes, and fill these gashes with onions chopped very fine. Suspend the

ribs across two stones between which you have allowed a fire to die down to coals.

There remain now the hams, shoulders, and heart. The two former furnish steaks. The latter you will make

into a ``bouillon.'' Here inserts itself quite naturally the philosophy of boiling meat. It may be stated in a

If you want boiled meat, put it in hot water. That sets the juices. If you want soup, put it in cold water and

Now you start your bouillon cold. Into a kettle of water put your deer hearts, or your fish, a chunk of pork,

and some salt. Bring to a boil. Next drop in quartered potatoes, several small whole onions, a half cupful of

rice, a can of tomatoes if you have any. Boil slowly for an hour or so until things pierce easily under

the fork. Add several chunks of bread and a little flour for thickening. Boil down to about a chowder

consistency, and serve hot. It is all you will need for that meal; and you will eat of it until there is no more.

I am supposing throughout that you know enough to use salt and pepper when needed.

So much for your deer. The grouse you can split and fry, in which case the brown gravy described for the

fried deersteak is just the thing. Or you can boil him. If you do that, put him into hot water, boil slowly,

skim frequently, and add dumplings mixed of flour, bakingpowder, and a little lard. Or you can roast him in

Perhaps it might be well here to explain the Dutch oven. It is a heavy iron kettle with little legs and an iron

cover. The theory of it is that coals go among the little legs and on top of the iron cover. This heats the inside,

In practice you will have to remember a good many things. In the first place, while other affairs are

preparing, lay the cover on the fire to heat it through; but not on too hot a place nor too long, lest it warp and

so fit loosely. Also the oven itself is to be heated through, and well greased. Your first baking will

undoubtedly be burned on the bottom. It is almost impossible without many trials to understand just how little

heat suffices underneath. Sometimes it seems that the warmed earth where the fire has been is enough. And

on top you do not want a bonfire. A nice even heat, and patience, are the proper ingredients. Nor drop into the

error of letting your bread chill, and so fall to unpalatable heaviness. Probably for some time you will

alternate between the extremes of heavy crusts with doughy insides, and white weighty boilerplate with no

distinguishable crusts at all. Above all, do not lift the lid too often for the sake of taking a look. Have faith.

There are other ways of baking bread. In the North Country forests, where you carry everything on your back,

you will do it in the fryingpan. The mixture should be a rather thick batter or a rather thin dough. It is turned

into the fryingpan and baked first on one side, then on the other, the pan being propped on edge facing the

fire. The whole secret of success is first to set your pan horizontal and about three feet from the fire in order

that the mixture may be thoroughly warmed not heated before the pan is propped on edge. Still another

way of baking is in a reflector oven of tin. This is highly satisfactory, provided the oven is built on the

scientific angles to throw the heat evenly on all parts of the breadpan and equally on top and bottom. It is

not so easy as you might imagine to get a good one made. These reflectors are all right for a permanent camp,

As for bread, try it unleavened once in a while by way of change. It is really very good, just salt, water,

flour, and a very little sugar. For those who like their bread ``all crust,'' it is especially toothsome. The usual

camp bread that I have found the most successful has been in the proportion of two cups of flour to a

teaspoonful of salt, one of sugar, and three of bakingpowder. Sugar or cinnamon sprinkled on top is

sometimes pleasant. Test by thrusting a splinter into the loaf. If dough adheres to the wood, the bread is not

done. Biscuits are made by using twice as much bakingpowder and about two tablespoonfuls of lard for

shortening. They bake much more quickly than the bread. Johnnycake you mix of cornmeal three cups,

flour one cup, sugar four spoonfuls, salt one spoonful, bakingpowder four spoonfuls, and lard twice as much

The flapjack is first cousin to bread, very palatable, and extremely indigestible when made of flour, as is

ordinarily done. However, the selfraising buckwheat flour makes an excellent flapjack, which is likewise

good for your insides. The batter is rather thin, is poured into the piping hot greased pan, ``flipped'' when

When you come to consider potatoes and beans and onions and such matters, remember one thing: that in the

higher altitudes water boils at a low temperature, and that therefore you must not expect your boiled food to

cook very rapidly. In fact, you'd better leave beans at home. We did. Potatoes you can sometimes tease along

Rolled oats are better than oatmeal. Put them in plenty of water and boil down to the desired consistency. In

Put your coffee into cold water, bring to a boil, let boil for about two minutes, and immediately set off. Settle

by letting a half cup of cold water flow slowly into the pot from the height of a foot or so. If your utensils are

clean, you will surely have good coffee by this simple method. Of course you will never boil your tea.

The sun was nearly down when we raised our long yell. The cowpuncher promptly responded. We ate. Then

we smoked. Then we basely left all our dishes until the morrow, and followed our cow puncher to his log

By now it was dark, and a bitter cold swooped down from the mountains. We built a fire in a huge stone

fireplace and sat around in the flickering light telling ghoststories to one another. The place was rudely

furnished, with only a hard earthen floor, and chairs hewn by the axe. Rifles, spurs, bits, revolvers,

brandingirons in turn caught the light and vanished in the shadow. The skin of a bear looked at us from

hollow eyesockets in which there were no eyes. We talked of the Long Trail. Outside the wind, rising,

THE winds were indeed abroad that night. They rattled our cabin, they shrieked in our eaves, they puffed

down our chimney, scattering the ashes and leaving in the room a balloon of smoke as though a shell had

burst. When we opened the door and stepped out, after our goodnights had been said, it caught at our hats

To our eyes, firedazzled, the night seemed very dark. There would be a moon later, but at present even the

stars seemed only so many pinpoints of dull metal, lustreless, without illumination. We felt our way to camp,

At camp the remains of the fire crouched beneath the rating of the storm. Its embers glowed sullen and red,

alternately glaring with a halfformed resolution to rebel, and dying to a sulky resignation. Once a feeble

flame sprang up for an instant, but was immediately pounced on and beaten flat as though by a vigilant

We, stumbling, gathered again our tumbled blankets. Across the brow of the knoll lay a huge pine trunk. In

its shelter we respread our bedding, and there, standing, dressed for the night. The power of the wind tugged

at our loose garments, hoping for spoil. A towel, shaken by accident from the interior of a sweater, departed

whitewinged, like a bird, into the outer blackness. We found it next day caught in the bushes several

hundred yards distant. Our voices as we shouted were snatched from our lips and hurled lavishly into space.

The very breath of our bodies seemed driven back, so that as we faced the elements, we breathed in gasps,

At once the prostrate treetrunk gave us its protection. We lay in a little backwash of the racing winds, still

as a night in June. Over us roared the battle. We felt like sharpshooters in the trenches; as though, were we to

raise our heads, at that instant we should enter a zone of danger. So we lay quietly on our backs and stared at

The first impression thence given was of stars sailing serene and unaffected, remote from the turbulence of

what until this instant had seemed to fill the universe. They were as always, just as we should see them when

the evening was warm and the tree toads chirped clearly audible at half a mile. The importance of the

tempest shrank. Then below them next we noticed the mountains; they too were serene and calm.

Immediately it was as though the storm were an hallucination; something not objective; something real, but

within the soul of him who looked upon it. It claimed sudden kinship with those blackest days when

nevertheless the sun, the mere external unimportant sun, shines with superlative brilliancy. Emotions of a

power to shake the foundations of life seemed vaguely to stir in answer to these their hollow symbols. For

after all, we were contented at heart and tranquil in mind, and this was but the outer gorgeous show of an

intense emotional experience we did not at the moment prove. Our nerves responded to it automatically. We

became excited, keyed to a high tension, and so lay rigid on our backs, as though fighting out the battles of

It was all so unreal and yet so plain to our senses that perforce automatically our experience had to conclude

it psychical. We were in air absolutely still. Yet above us the trees writhed and twisted and turned and bent

and struck back, evidently in the power of a mighty force. Across the calm heavens the murk of flying

atmosphere I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could *see the wind the

dim, hardlymadeout, fine débris fleeing high in the air; these faintly hinted at intense movement

rushing down through space. A roar of sound filled the hollow of the sky. Occasionally it intermitted, falling

abruptly in volume like the mysterious rare hushings of a rapid stream. Then the familiar noises of a summer

night became audible for the briefest instant, a horse sneezed, an owl hooted, the wild call of birds came

down the wind. And with a howl the legions of good and evil took up their warring. It was too real, and yet it

For hours we lay thus in all the intensity of an inner storm and stress, which it seemed could not fail to

develop us, to mould us, to age us, to leave on us its scars, to bequeath us its peace or remorse or despair, as

would some great mysterious dark experience direct from the sources of life. And then abruptly we were

exhausted, as we should have been by too great emotion. We fell asleep. The morning dawned still and clear,

and garnished and set in order as though such things had never been. Only our white towel fluttered like a

ONCE upon a time I happened to be staying in a hotel room which had originally been part of a suite, but

which was then cut off from the others by only a thin door through which sounds carried clearly. It was about

eleven o'clock in the evening. The occupants of that next room came home. I heard the door open and close.

Then the bed shrieked aloud as somebody fell heavily upon it. There breathed across the silence a deep restful

``Mary,'' said a man's voice, ``I'm mighty sorry I did 't join that Association for Artificial Vacations. They

guarantee to get you just as tired and just as mad in two days as you could by yourself in two weeks.''

We thought of that one morning as we descended the Glacier Point Trail in Yosemite.

The contrast we need not have made so sharp. We might have taken the regular wagonroad by way of

Chinquapin, but we preferred to stick to the trail, and so encountered our first sign of civilization within an

hundred yards of the brink. It, the sign, was tourists. They were male and female, as the Lord had made them,

but they had improved on that idea since. The women were freckled, hatted with alpines, in which edelweiss

artificial, I think flowered in abundance; they sported severely plain flannel shirts, bloomers of an

aggressive and unnecessary cut, and enormous square boots weighing pounds. The men had on hats just off

the sunbonnet effect, pleated Norfolk jackets, bloomers ditto ditto to the women, stockings whose tops rolled

over innumerable times to help out the size of that which they should have contained, and also enormous

square boots. The female children they put in skintight blue overalls. The male children they dressed in

bloomers. Why this should be I cannot tell you. All carried toy hatchets with a spike on one end built to

They looked businesslike, trod with an assured air of veterans and a seeming of experience more extended

than it was possible to pack into any one human life. We stared at them, our eyes bulging out. They painfully

and evidently concealed a curiosity as to our packtrain. We wished them goodday, in order to see to what

language heaven had fitted their extraordinary ideas as regards raiment. They inquired the way to something

or other I think Sentinel Dome. We had just arrived, so we did not know, but in order to show a friendly

spirit we blandly pointed out a way. It may have led to Sentinel Dome for all I know. They departed uttering

Now this particular bunch of tourists was evidently staying at the Glacier Point, and so was fresh. But in the

course of that morning we descended straight down a drop of, is it four thousand feet? The trail was steep and

long and without water. During the descent we passed first and last probably twoscore of tourists, all on foot.

A good half of them were delicate women, young, middleaged, a few gray haired and evidently

upwards of sixty. There were also old men, and fat men, and men otherwise out of condition. Probably nine

out of ten, counting in the entire outfit, were utterly unaccustomed, when at home where grow streetcars and

hansoms, to even the mildest sort of exercise. They had come into the Valley, whose floor is over four

thousand feet up, without the slightest physical preparation for the altitude. They had submitted to the fatigue

of a long and dusty stage journey. And then they had merrily whooped it up at a gait which would have

appalled seasoned old stagers like ourselves. Those blessed lunatics seemed positively unhappy unless they

climbed up to some new point of view every day. I have never seen such a universally tired out, frazzled,

vitally exhausted, whitefaced, nervous community in my life as I did during our four days' stay in the

Valley. Then probably they go away, and take a month to get over it, and have queer residual impressions of

Not but that Nature has done everything in her power to oblige them. The things I am about to say are heresy,

Yosemite is not as interesting nor as satisfying to me as some of the other big box cañons, like those of the

Tehipite, the Kings in its branches, or the Kawweah. I will admit that its waterfalls are better. Otherwise it

possesses no features which are not to be seen in its sister valleys. And there is this difference. In Yosemite

everything is jumbled together, apparently for the benefit of the tourist with a linen duster and but three days'

time at his disposal. He can turn from the cliffheadland to the dome, from the dome to the half dome, to the

glacier formation, the granite slide and all the rest of it, with hardly the necessity of stirring his feet. Nature

has put samples of all her works here within reach of his cataloguing vision. Everything is crowded in

together, like a row of houses in fortyfoot lots. The mere things themselves are here in profusion and

wonder, but the appropriate spacing, the approach, the surrounding of subordinate detail which should lead in

artistic gradation to the supreme feature these things, which are a real and essential part of esthetic effect,

are lacking utterly for want of room. The place is not natural scenery; it is a junkshop, a storehouse, a

sampleroom wherein the elements of natural scenery are to be viewed. It is not an arrangement of effects in

accordance with the usual laws of landscape, but an abnormality, a freak of Nature.

All these things are to be found elsewhere. There are cliffs which to the naked eye are as grand as El Capitan;

domes, half domes, peaks as noble as any to be seen in the Valley; sheer drops as breathtaking as that from

Glacier Point. But in other places each of these is led up to appropriately, and stands the central and satisfying

feature to which all other things look. Then you journey on from your cliff, or whatever it happens to be,

until, at just the right distance, so that it gains from the presence of its neighbor without losing from its

proximity, a dome or a pinnacle takes to itself the right of prominence. I concede the waterfalls; but in other

That is not to say that one should not visit Yosemite; nor that one will be disappointed. It is grand beyond any

possible human belief; and no one, even a nervefrazzled tourist, can gaze on it without the strongest

emotion. Only it is not so intimately satisfying as it should be. It is a show. You do not take it into your heart.

``Whew!'' you cry. ``Is 't that a wonder!'' then after a moment, ``Looks just like the photographs. Up to

As we descended the trail, we and the tourists aroused in each other a mutual interest. One husband was

trying to encourage his young and handsome wife to go on. She was beautifully dressed for the part in a

marvelous, becoming costume of whipcord short skirt, high laced elkskin boots and the rest of it; but in all

her magnificence she had sat down on the ground, her back to the cliff, her legs across the trail, and was so

tired out that she could hardly muster interest enough to pull them in out of the way of our horses' hoofs. The

man inquired anxiously of us how far it was to the top. Now it was a long distance to the top, but a longer to

the bottom, so we lied a lie that I am sure was immediately forgiven us, and told them it was only a short

climb. I should have offered them the use of Bullet, but Bullet had come far enough, and this was only one of

a dozen such cases. In marked contrast was a jolly white haired clergyman of the bishop type who climbed

The horses were decidedly unaccustomed to any such sights, and we sometimes had our hands full getting

them by on the narrow way. The trail was safe enough, but it did have an edge, and that edge jumped pretty

straight off. It was interesting to observe how the tourists acted. Some of them were perfect fools, and we had

more trouble with them than we did with the horses. They could not seem to get the notion into their heads

that all we wanted them to do was to get on the inside and stand still. About half of them were terrified to

death, so that at the crucial moment, just as a horse was passing them, they had little fluttering panics that

called the beast's attention. Most of the remainder tried to be bold and help. They reached out the hand of

assist ance toward the halter rope; the astonished animal promptly snorted, tried to turn around, cannoned

against the next in line. Then there was a mixup. Two tall cleancut wellbred looking girls of our slim

patrician type offered us material assistance. They seemed to understand horses, and got out of the way in the

proper manner, did just the right thing, and made sensible suggestions. I offer them my homage.

They spoke to us as though they had penetrated the disguise of long travel, and could see we were not

necessarily members of Burt Alvord's gang. This phase too of our descent became increasingly interesting to

us, a species of gauge by which we measured the perceptions of those we encountered. Most did not speak to

us at all. Others responded to our greetings with a reserve in which was more than a tinge of distrust. Still

others patronized us. A very few overlooked our faded flannel shirts, our soiled trousers, our floppy old hats

with their rattlesnake bands, the wear and tear of our equipment, to respond to us heartily. Them in return we

We found the floor of the Valley well sprinkled with campers. They had pitched all kinds of tents; built all

kinds of fancy permanent conveniences; erected all kinds of banners and signs advertising their identity, and

were generally having a nice, easy, healthful, jolly kind of a time up there in the mountains. Their outfits they

had either brought in with their own wagons, or had had freighted. The store near the bend of the Merced

supplied all their needs. It was truly a pleasant sight to see so many people enjoying themselves, for they

were mostly those in moderate circumstances to whom a trip on tourist lines would be impossible. We saw

bakers' and grocers' and butchers' wagons that had been pressed into service. A man, his wife, and little baby

had come in an ordinary buggy, the one horse of which, led by the man, carried the woman and baby to the

We reported to the official in charge, were allotted a camping and grazing place, and proceeded to make

During the next two days we rode comfortably here and there and looked at things. The things could not be

spoiled, but their effect was very materially marred by the swarms of tourists. Sometimes they were silly, and

cracked inane and obvious jokes in ridicule of the grandest objects they had come so far to see; sometimes

they were detestable and left their insignificant callingcards or their unimportant names where nobody could

ever have any object in reading them; sometimes they were pathetic and helpless and had to have assistance;

sometimes they were amusing; hardly ever did they seem entirely human. I wonder what there is about the

traveling public that seems so to set it apart, to make of it at least a subspecies of mankind?

Among other things, we were vastly interested in the guides. They were typical of this sort of thing. Each

morning one of these men took a pleasantly awestricken band of tourists out, led them around in the brush

awhile, and brought them back in time for lunch. They wore broad hats and leather bands and exotic raiment

and fierce expressions, and looked dark and mysterious and extracompetent over the most trivial of

Nothing could be more instructive than to see two or three of these imitation bad men starting out in the

morning to ``guide'' a flock, say to Nevada Falls. The tourists, being about to mount, have outdone

themselves in weird and awesome clothes especially the women. Nine out of ten wear their stirrups too

short, so their knees are hunched up. One guide rides at the head great deal of silver spur, clanking chain,

and the rest of it. Another rides in the rear. The third rides up and down the line, very gruff, very preoccupied,

very careworn over the dangers of the way. The cavalcade moves. It proceeds for about a mile. There arise

sudden cries, great but subdued excitement. The leader stops, raising a commanding hand. Guide number

three gallops up. There is a consultation. The cinchstrap of the brindle shavetail is taken up two inches. A

catastrophe has been averted. The noble three look volumes of relief. The cavalcade moves again.

Now the trail rises. It is a nice, safe, easy trail. But to the tourists it is made terrible. The noble three see to

that. They pass more dangers by the exercise of superhuman skill than you or I could discover in a summer's

close search. The joke of the matter is that those fortyodd saddleanimals have been over that trail so many

times that one would have difficulty in heading them off from it once they got started.

Very much the same criticism would hold as to the popular notion of the Yosemite stagedrivers. They drive

well, and seem efficient men. But their wonderful reputation would have to be upheld on rougher roads than

those into the Valley. The tourist is, of course, encouraged to believe that he is doing the hairbreadth escape;

This that I have been saying is not by way of depreciation. But it seems to me that the Valley is wonderful

enough to stand by itself in men's appreciation without the unreality of sickly sentimentalism in regard to

imaginary dangers, or the histrionics of playing wilderness where no wilderness exists.

As we went out, this time by the Chinquapin wagonroad, we met one stageload after another of tourists

coming in. They had not yet donned the outlandish attire they believe proper to the occasion, and so showed

for what they were, prosperous, wellbred, welldressed travelers. In contrast to their smartness, the

brilliancy of newpainted stages, the dash of the horses maintained by the Yosemite Stage Company, our

own dusty travelworn outfit of mountain ponies, our own rough clothes patched and faded, our

sheathknives and firearms seemed out of place and curious, as though a knight in medieval armor were to

I do not know how many stages there were. We turned our packhorses out for them all, dashing back and

forth along the line, coercing the diabolical Dinkey. The road was too smooth. There were no obstructions to

surmount; no dangers to avert; no difficulties to avoid. We could not get into trouble, but proceeded as on a

county turnpike. Too tame, too civilized, too representative of the tourist element, it ended by getting on our

nerves. The wilderness seemed to have left us forever. Never would we get back to our own again. After a

long time Wes, leading, turned into our old trail branching off to the high country. Hardly had we traveled a

We understood what he meant. By this we knew that the tourist zone was crossed, that we had left the show

THE traveler in the High Sierras generally keeps to the west of the main crest. Sometimes he approaches

fairly to the foot of the last slope; sometimes he angles away and away even down to what finally seems to

him a lower country, to the pine mountains of only five or six thousand feet. But always to the left or right

of him, according to whether he travels south or north, runs the rampart of the system, sometimes glittering

with snow, sometimes formidable and rugged with splinters and spires of granite. He crosses spurs and

tributary ranges as high, as rugged, as snowclad as these. They do not quite satisfy him. Over beyond he

thinks he ought to see something great, some wide outlook, some space bluer than his trail can offer him.

One day or another he clamps his decision, and so turns aside for the simple and only purpose of standing on

We were bitten by that idea while crossing the Granite Basin. The latter is some ten thousand feet in the air, a

cup of rock five or six miles across, surrounded by mountains much higher than itself. That would have been

sufficient for most moods, but, rest ing on the edge of a pass ten thousand six hundred feet high, we

We got out the map. It became evident, after a little study, that by descending six thousand feet into a box

cañon, proceeding in it a few miles, and promptly climbing out again, by climbing steadily up the long

narrow course of another box cañon for about a day and a half's journey, and then climbing out of that to a

high ridge country with little flat valleys, we would come to a wide lake in a meadow eleven thousand feet

up. There we could camp. The mountain opposite was thirteen thousand three hundred and twenty feet, so the

climb from the lake became merely a matter of computation. This, we figured, would take us just a week,

which may seem a considerable time to sacrifice to the gratification of a whim. But such a glorious whim!

We descended the great box cañon, and scaled its upper end, following near the voices of a cascade. Cliffs

thousands of feet high hemmed us in. At the very top of them strange crags leaned out looking down on us in

the abyss. From a projection a colossal sphinx gazed solemnly across at a dome as smooth and symmetrical

The trail labored up to the brink of the cascade. At once we entered a long narrow aisle between regular

The formation was exceedingly regular. At the top the precipice fell sheer for a thousand feet or so; then the

steep slant of the débris, like buttresses, down almost to the bed of the river. The lower parts of the buttresses

were clothed with heavy chaparral, which, nearer moisture, developed into cottonwoods, alders, tangled

vines, flowers, rank grasses. And away on the very edge of the cliffs, close under the sky, were pines,

belittled by distance, solemn and aloof, like Indian warriors wrapped in their blankets watching from an

We caught rainbow trout in the dashing white torrent of the river. We followed the trail through delicious

thickets redolent with perfume; over the roughest granite slides, along still dark aisles of forest groves,

between the clefts of boulders so monstrous as almost to seem an insult to the credulity. Among the

chaparral, on the slope of the buttress across the river, we made out a bear feeding. Wes and I sat ten minutes

waiting for him to show sufficiently for a chance. Then we took a shot at about four hundred yards, and hit

him somewhere so he angled down the hill furiously. We left the Tenderfoot to watch that he did not come

out of the big thicket of the river bottom where last we had seen him, while we scrambled upstream nearly a

mile looking for a way across. Then we trailed him by the blood, each step one of suspense, until we fairly

had to crawl in after him; and shot him five times more, three in the head, before he gave up not six feet from

us; and shouted gloriously and skinned that bear. But the meat was badly bloodshot, for there were three

bullets in the head, two in the chest and shoulders, one through the paunch, and one in the hind quarters.

Since we were much in want of meat, this grieved us. But that noon while we ate, the horses ran down toward

us, and wheeled, as though in cavalry formation, looking toward the hill and snorting. So I put down my tin

plate gently, and took up my rifle, and without rising shot that bear through the back of the neck. We took his

By the third day from Granite Basin we reached the end of the long narrow cañon with the high cliffs and the

dark pinetrees and the very blue sky. Therefore we turned sharp to the left and climbed laboriously until we

had come up into the land of big boulders, strange spare twisted little trees, and the singing of the great wind.

The country here was mainly of granite. It out cropped in dikes, it slid down the slopes in aprons, it strewed

the prospect in boulders and blocks, it seamed the hollows with kniferidges. Soil gave the impression of

having been laid on top; you divined the granite beneath it, and not so very far beneath it, either. A fine

hairgrass grew close to this soil, as though to produce as many blades as possible in the limited area.

But strangest of all were the little thick twisted trees with the rich shaded umber color of their trunks. They

occurred rarely, but still in sufficient regularity to lend the impression of a scattered grove cohesiveness.

Their limbs were sturdy and reaching fantastically. On each trunk the colors ran in streaks, patches, and

gradations from a sulphur yellow, through browns and redorange, to a rich redumber. They were like the

earthdwarfs of German legend, come out to view the roof of their workshop in the interior of the hill; or,

We camped that night at a lake whose banks were pebbled in the manner of an artificial pond, and whose

setting was a thin meadow of the fine hair grass, for the grazing of which the horses had to bare their teeth.

All about, the granite mountains rose. The timberline, even of the rare shrublike gnome trees, ceased

It was just before dusk, and in the lake the fish were jumping eagerly. They took the fly well, and before the

fire was alight we had caught three for supper. When I say we caught but three, you will understand that they

were of good size. Firewood was scarce, but we dragged in enough by means of Old Slob and a riata to build

us a good fire. And we needed it, for the cold descended on us with the sharpness and vigor of eleven

For such an altitude the spot was ideal. The lake just below us was full of fish. A little stream ran from it by

our very elbows. The slight elevation was level, and covered with enough soil to offer a fairly good

substructure for our beds. The flat in which was the lake reached on up narrower and narrower to the foot of

the last slope, furnishing for the horses an admirable natural corral about a mile long. And the view was

First of all there were the mountains above us, towering grandly serene against the sky of morning; then all

about us the tumultuous slabs and boulders and blocks of granite among which daredevil and hardy little

trees clung to a footing as though in defiance of some great force exerted against them; then below us a sheer

drop, into which our brook plunged, with its suggestion of depths; and finally beyond those depths the giant

peaks of the highest Sierras rising lofty as the sky, shrouded in a calm and stately peace.

Next day the Tenderfoot and I climbed to the top. Wes decided at the last minute that he had 't lost any

The ascent was accompanied by much breathlessness and a heavy pounding of our hearts, so that we were

forced to stop every twenty feet to recover our physical balance. Each step upward dragged at our feet like a

leaden weight. Yet once we were on the level, or once we ceased our very real exertions for a second or so,

The air itself was of a quality impossible to describe to you unless you have traveled in the high countries. I

know it is trite to say that it had the exhilaration of wine, yet I can find no better simile. We shouted and

The immediate surroundings of that mountain peak were absolutely barren and absolutely still. How it was

accomplished so high up I do not know, but the entire structure on which we moved I cannot say walked

was composed of huge granite slabs. Sometimes these were laid side by side like exaggerated paving

flags; but oftener they were up ended, piled in a confusion over which we had precariously to scramble. And

the silence. It was so still that the very ringing in our ears came to a prominence absurd and almost terrifying.

The wind swept by noiseless, because it had nothing movable to startle into noise. The solid eternal granite

lay heavy in its statics across the possibility of even a whisper. The blue vault of heaven seemed emptied of

But the wind did stream by unceasingly, weird in the unaccustomedness of its silence. And the sky was blue

as a turquoise, and the sun burned fiercely, and the air was cold as the water of a mountain spring.

We stretched ourselves behind a slab of granite, and ate the luncheon we had brought, cold venison steak and

bread. By and by a marvelous thing happened. A flash of wings sparkled in the air, a brave little voice

challenged us cheerily, a pert tiny rock wren flirted his tail and darted his wings and wanted to know what

we were thinking of anyway to enter his especial territory. And shortly from nowhere appeared two Canada

Jays, silent as the wind itself, hoping for a share in our meal. Then the Tenderfoot discovered in a niche some

strange, hardy alpine flowers. So we established a connection, through these wondrous brave children of the

After we had eaten, which was the very first thing we did, we walked to the edge of the main crest and looked

over. That edge went straight down. I do not know how far, except that even in contemplation we entirely lost

our breaths, before we had fallen half way to the bottom. Then intervened a ledge, and in the ledge was a

round glacier lake of the very deepest and richest ultramarine you can find among your painttubes, and on

Next we leaped at one bound direct down to some brown hazy liquid shot with the tenderest filaments of

white. After analysis we discovered the hazy brown liquid to be the earth of the plains, and the filaments of

white to be roads. Thus instructed we made out specks which were towns. That was all. The rest was too

And afterwards, across those plains, oh, many, many leagues, were the Inyo and Panamit mountains, and

beyond them Nevada and Arizona, and blue mountains, and bluer, and still bluer rising, rising, rising higher

and higher until at the level of the eye they blended with the heavens and were lost somewhere away out

We said nothing, but looked for a long time. Then we turned inland to the wonderful great titans of

mountains clearcut in the crystalline air. Never was such air. Crystalline is the only word which will

describe it, for almost it seemed that it would ring clearly when struck, so sparkling and delicate and fragile

was it. The crags and fissures across the way two miles across the way were revealed through it as

through some medium whose transparence was absolute. They challenged the eye, stereoscopic in their relief.

Were it not for the belittling effects of the distance, we felt that we might count the frost seams or the glacial

scorings on every granite apron. Far below we saw the irregular outline of our lake. It looked like a pond a

few hundred feet down. Then we made out a pinpoint of white moving leisurely near its border. After a

while we realized that the pinpoint of white was one of our packhorses, and immediately the flat little

scene shot backwards as though moved from behind and acknowledged its due number of miles. The

miniature crags at its back became gigantic; the peaks beyond grew thousands of feet in the establishment of

a proportion which the lack of ``atmosphere'' had denied. We never succeeded in getting adequate

photographs. As well take pictures of any eroded little arroyo or granite cañon. Relative sizes do not exist,

``See that speck there?'' we explain. ``That's a big pinetree. So by that you can see how tremendous those

There was snow, of course, lying cold in the hot sun. This phenomenon always impresses a man when first he

sees it. Often I have ridden with my sleeves rolled up and the front of my shirt open, over drifts whose edges,

even, dripped no water. The direct rays seem to have absolutely no effect. A scientific explanation I have

never heard expressed; but I suppose the cold nights freeze the drifts and pack them so hard that the short

noon heat cannot penetrate their density. I may be quite wrong as to my reason, but I am entirely correct as to

Another curious thing is that we met our mosquitoes only rarely below the snowline. The camping in the

Sierras is ideal for lack of these pests. They never bite hard nor stay long even when found. But just as sure as

we approached snow, then we renewed acquaintance with our old friends of the north woods. It is analogous

to the fact that the farther north you go into the fur countries, the more abundant they become.

By and by it was time to descend. The camp lay directly below us. We decided to go to it straight, and so

stepped off on an impossibly steep slope covered, not with the great boulders and granite blocks, but with a

fine loose shale. At every stride we stepped ten feet and slid five. It was gloriously near to flying. Leaning far

back, our arms spread wide to keep our balance, spying alertly far ahead as to where we were going to land,

utterly unable to check until we encountered a halfburied ledge of some sort, and shouting wildly at every

plunge, we fairly shot downhill. The floor of our valley rose to us as the earth to a descending balloon. In

There we halted to puzzle over the trail of a mountain lion clearly printed on the soft ground. What had the

great cat been doing away up there above the hunting country, above cover, above everything that would

appeal to a wellregulated cat of any size whatsoever? We theorized at length, but gave it up finally, and

went on. Then a familiar perfume rose to our nostrils. We plucked curiously at a bed of catnip and wondered

whether the animal had journeyed so far to enjoy what is always such a treat to her domestic sisters.

It was nearly dark when we reached camp. We found Wes contentedly scraping away at the bearskins.

``Hello,'' said he, looking up with a grin. ``Hello, you dam fools! I've been having a good time. I've been

EVERY one is familiar, at least by reputation and photograph, with the Big Trees of California. All have seen

pictures of stagecoaches driving in passageways cut through the bodies of the trunks; of troops of cavalry

ridden on the prostrate trees. No one but has heard of the dancingfloor or the dinner table cut from a single

crosssection; and probably few but have seen some of the fibrous bark of unbelievable thickness. The

The public at large, I imagine, meaning by that you and me and our neighbors, harbor an idea that the Big

Tree occurs only as a remnant, in scattered little groves carefully fenced and piously visited by the tourist.

What would we have said to the information that in the very heart of the Sierras there grows a thriving forest

of these great trees; that it takes over a day to ride throughout that forest; and that it comprises probably over

Yet such is the case. On the ridges and high plateaus north of the Kaweah River is the forest I describe; and

of that forest the trees grow from fifteen to twentysix feet in diameter. Do you know what that means? Get

up from your chair and pace off the room you are in. If it is a very big room, its longest dimension would just

It must be a columnar tree straight and true as the supports of a Greek façade. The least deviation from the

perpendicular of such a mass would cause it to fall. The limbs are sturdy like the arms of Hercules, and grow

out from the main trunk direct instead of dividing and leading that main trunk to themselves, as is the case

with other trees. The column rises with a true taper to its full height; then is finished with the conical effect of

the top of a monument. Strangely enough the frond is exceedingly fine, and the cones small.

When first you catch sight of a Sequoia, it does not impress you particularly except as a very fine tree. Its

proportions are so perfect that its effect is rather to belittle its neighbors than to show in its true magnitude.

Then, gradually, as your experience takes cognizance of surroundings, the size of a sugarpine, of a

boulder, of a stream flowing near, the giant swells and swells before your very vision until he seems at the

last even greater than the mere statistics of his inches had led you to believe. And after that first surprise over

finding the Sequoia something not monstrous but beautiful in proportion has given place to the full

realization of what you are beholding, you will always wonder why no one who has seen has ever given any

Perhaps the most insistent note, besides that of mere size and dignity, is of absolute stillness. These trees do

not sway to the wind, their trunks are constructed to stand solid. Their branches do not bend and murmur, for

they too are rigid in fiber. Their fine threadlike needles may catch the breeze's whisper, may draw together

and apart for the exchange of confidences as do the leaves of other trees, but if so, you and I are too far below

to distinguish it. All about, the other forest growths may be rustling and bowing and singing with the voices

of the air; the Sequoia stands in the hush of an absolute calm. It is as though he dreamed, too wrapt in still

great thoughts of his youth, when the earth itself was young, to share the worldlier joys of his neighbor, to be

aware of them, even himself to breathe deeply. You feel in the presence of these trees as you would feel in

the presence of a kindly and benignant sage, too occupied with larger things to enter fully into your little

This combination of dignity, immobility, and a certain serene detachment has on me very much the same

effect as does a mountain against the sky. It is quite unlike the impression made by any other tree, however

We entered the Giant Forest by a trail that climbed. Always we entered desirable places by trails that climbed

or dropped. Our access to paradise was never easy. About halfway up we met five packmules and two men

coming down. For some reason, unknown, I suspect, even to the god of chance, our animals behaved

themselves and walked straight ahead in a beautiful dignity, while those weakminded mules scattered and

bucked and scraped under trees and dragged back on their halters when caught. The two men cast on us

malevolent glances as often as they were able, but spent most of their time swearing and running about. We

helped them once or twice by heading off, but were too thankfully engaged in treading lightly over our own

phenomenal peace to pay much attention. Long after we had gone on, we caught bursts of rumpus ascending

from below. Shortly we came to a comparatively level country, and a little meadow, and a rough sign which

We entered it toward the close of the afternoon, and rode on after our wonted time looking for feed at less

than twenty cents a night. The great trunks, fluted like marble columns, blackened against the western sky. As

they grew huger, we seemed to shrink, until we moved fearful as prehistoric man must have moved among

the forces over which he had no control. We discovered our feed in a narrow ``stringer'' a few miles on. That

night, we, pigmies, slept in the setting before which should have stridden the colossi of another age. Perhaps

eventually, in spite of its magnificence and wonder, we were a little glad to leave the Giant Forest. It held us

too rigidly to a spiritual standard of which our normal lives were incapable; it insisted on a loftiness of soul, a

dignity, an aloofness from the ordinary affairs of life, the ordinary occupations of thought hardly compatible

with the powers of any creature less noble, less aged, less wise in the passing of centuries than itself.

YOUR cowboy is a species variously subdivided. If you happen to be traveled as to the wild countries, you

will be able to recognize whence your chance acquaintance hails by the kind of saddle he rides, and the

rigging of it; by the kind of rope he throws, and the method of the throwing; by the shape of hat he wears; by

his twist of speech; even by the very manner of his riding. Your California ``vaquero'' from the Coast Ranges

is as unlike as possible to your Texas cowman, and both differ from the Wyoming or South Dakota article. I

should be puzzled to define exactly the habitat of the ``typical'' cowboy. No matter where you go, you will

find your individual acquaintance varying from the type in respect to some of the minor details.

Certain characteristics run through the whole tribe, however. Of these some are so well known or have been

so adequately done elsewhere that it hardly seems wise to elaborate on them here. Let us assume that you and

I know what sort of human beings cowboys are, with all their taciturnity, their surface gravity, their keen

sense of humor, their courage, their kindness, their freedom, their lawlessness, their foulness of mouth, and

their supreme skill in the handling of horses and cattle. I shall try to tell you nothing of all that.

If one thinks down doggedly to the last analysis, he will find that the basic reason for the differences between

a cowboy and other men rests finally on an individual liberty, a freedom from restraint either of society or

convention, a lawlessness, an accepting of his own standard alone. He is absolutely self poised and

sufficient; and that selfpoise and that sufficiency he takes pains to assure first of all. After their assurance he

is willing to enter into human relations. His attitude toward everything in life is, not suspicious, but watchful.

This evidences itself most strikingly in his terseness of speech. A man dependent on himself naturally does

not give himself away to the first comer. He is more interested in finding out what the other fellow is than in

exploiting his own importance. A man who does much promiscuous talking he is likely to despise, arguing

Yet when he does talk, he talks to the point and with a vivid and direct picturesqueness of phrase which is as

refreshing as it is unexpected. The delightful remodeling of the English language in Mr. Alfred Lewis's

``Wolfville'' is exaggerated only in quantity, not in quality. No cowboy talks habitually in quite as original a

manner as Mr. Lewis's Old Cattleman; but I have no doubt that in time he would be heard to say all the good

things in that volume. I myself have notebooks full of just such gorgeous language, some of the best of

This vividness manifests itself quite as often in the selection of the apt word as in the construction of

elaborate phrases with a halfhumorous intention. A cowboy once told me of the arrival of a tramp by saying,

``He sifted into camp.'' Could any verb be more expressive? Does not it convey exactly the lazy, careless,

outatheels shuffling gait of the hobo? Another in the course of description told of a saloon scene, ``They

all bellied up to the bar.'' Again, a range cook, objecting to purposeless idling about his fire, shouted: ``If you

fellows come moping around here any more, I'll sure make you hard to catch!'' ``Fish in that pond, son? Why,

there's some fish in there big enough to rope,'' another advised me. ``I quit shoveling,'' one explained the story

of his life, ``because I could 't see nothing ahead of shoveling but dirt.'' The same man described ploughing

as, ``Looking at a mule's tail all day.'' And one of the most succinct epitomes of the motifs of fiction was

offered by an old fellow who looked over my shoulder as I was reading a novel. ``Well, son,'' said he, ``what

Nor are the complete phrases behind in aptness. I have space for only a few examples, but they will illustrate

what I mean. Speaking of a companion who was ``putting on too much dog,'' I was informed, ``He walks like

a man with a new suit of wooden underwear!'' Or again, in answer to my inquiry as to a mutual acquaintance,

``Jim? Oh, poor old Jim! For the last week or so he's been nothing but an insignificant atom of humanity

But to observe the riot of imagination turned loose with the bridle off, you must assist at a burst of anger on

the part of one of these men. It is mostly unprintable, but you will get an entirely new idea of what profanity

means. Also you will come to the conclusion that you, with your trifling damns, and the like, have been a

very good boy indeed. The remotest, most obscure, and unheard of conceptions are dragged forth from earth,

heaven, and hell, and linked together in a sequence so original, so gaudy, and so utterly blasphemous, that

Of course I can give you no idea here of what these truly magnificent oaths are like. It is a pity, for it would

liberalize your education. Occasionally, like a trickle of clear water into an alkali torrent, a straight English

``If your brains were all made of dynamite, you could 't blow the top of your head off.''

``I would 't speak to him if I met him in hell carrying a lump of ice in his hand.''

``That little horse'll throw you so high the black birds will build nests in your hair before you come down.''

These are ingenious and amusing, but need the blazing settings from which I have ravished them to give them

In Arizona a number of us were sitting around the feeble campfire the desert scarcity of fuel permits,

smoking our pipes. We were all contemplative and comfortably silent with the exception of one very youthful

person who had a lot to say. It was mainly about himself. After he had bragged awhile without molestation,

one of the older cowpunchers grew very tired of it. He removed his pipe deliberately, and spat in the fire.

``Say, son,'' he drawled, ``if you want to say something big, why don't you say `elephant'?''

Down near the Chiracahua Range in southeastern Arizona, there is a butte, and halfway up that butte is a

cave, and in front of that cave is a ramshackle porchroof or shed. This latter makes the cave into a

dwellinghouse. It is inhabited by an old ``alkali'' and half a dozen bear dogs. I sat with the old fellow one

day for nearly an hour. It was a sociable visit, but economical of the English language. He made one remark,

outside our initial greeting. It was enough, for in terseness, accuracy, and compression, I have never heard a

``Son,'' said he, ``in this country thar is more cows and less butter, more rivers and less water, and you kin see

Now this peculiar directness of phrase means but one thing, freedom from the influence of convention.

The cowboy respects neither the dictionary nor usage. He employs his words in the manner that best suits

him, and arranges them in the sequence that best expresses his idea, untrammeled by tradition. It is a phase of

the same lawlessness, the same reliance on self, that makes for his taciturnity and watchfulness.

In essence, his dress is an adaptation to the necessities of his calling; as a matter of fact, it is an elaboration on

that. The broad heavy felt hat he has found by experience to be more effective in turning heat than a lighter

straw; he further runs to variety in the shape of the crown and in the nature of the band. He wears a silk

handkerchief about his neck to turn the sun and keep out the dust, but indulges in astonishing gaudiness of

color. His gauntlets save his hands from the rope; he adds a fringe and a silver star. The heavy wide ``chaps''

of leather about his legs are necessary to him when he is riding fast through brush; he indulges in such

frivolities as stamped leather, angora hair, and the like. High heels to his boots prevent his foot from slipping

through his wide stirrup, and are useful to dig into the ground when he is roping in the corral. Even his

sixshooter is more a tool of his trade than a weapon of defense. With it he frightens cattle from the heavy

brush; he slaughters old or diseased steers; he ``turns the herd'' in a stampede or when rounding it in; and

especially is it handy and loose to his hip in case his horse should fall and commence to drag him.

So the details of his appearance spring from the practical, but in the wearing of them and the using of them he

Now in civilization you and I entertain a double respect for firearms and the law. Firearms are dangerous, and

it is against the law to use them promiscuously. If we shoot them off in unexpected places, we first of all

alarm unduly our families and neighbors, and in due course attract the notice of the police. By the time we are

grown up we look on shooting a revolver as something to be accomplished after an especial trip for the

But to the cowboy shooting a gun is merely what lighting a match would be to us. We take reasonable care

not to scratch that match on the wall nor to throw it where it will do harm. Likewise the cow boy takes

reasonable care that his bullets do not land in some one's anatomy nor in too expensive brica brac.

The picture comes to me of a bunkhouse on an Arizona range. The time was evening. A halfdozen

cowboys were sprawled out on the beds smoking, and three more were playing poker with the Chinese cook.

A misguided rat darted out from under one of the beds and made for the empty fireplace. He finished his

journey in smoke. Then the four who had shot slipped their guns back into their holsters and resumed their

On another occasion I stopped for noon at the Circle I ranch. While waiting for dinner, I lay on my back in

the bunkroom and counted three hundred and sixtytwo bulletholes in the ceiling. They came to be there

because the festive cowboys used to while away the time while lying as I was lying, waiting for supper, in

This beautiful familiarity with the pistol as a parlor toy accounts in great part for a cowboy's propensity to

The average cowboy is only a fair targetshot with the revolver. But he is chain lightning at getting his gun

off in a hurry. There are exceptions to this, however, especially among the older men. Some can handle the

Colts 45 and its heavy recoil with almost uncanny accuracy. I have seen individuals who could from their

saddles nip lizards darting across the road; and one who was able to perforate twice before it hit the ground a

tomatocan tossed into the air. The cowboy is prejudiced against the doubleaction gun, for some reason or

His sense of humor takes the same unexpected slants, not because his mental processes differ from those of

other men, but because he is unshackled by the subtle and unnoticed nothingnesses of precedent which

deflect our action toward the common uniformity of our neighbors. It must be confessed that his sense of

The J. H. outfit had been engaged for ten days in busting broncos. This the Chinese cook, Sang, a newcomer

in the territory, found vastly amusing. He liked to throw the ropes off the prostrate broncos, when all was

ready; to slap them on the flanks; to yell shrill Chinese yells; and to dance in celestial delight when the

terrified animal arose and scattered out of there. But one day the range men drove up a little bunch of

fullgrown cattle that had been bought from a smaller owner. It was necessary to change the brands.

Therefore a little fire was built, the stampbrand put in to heat, and two of the men on horseback caught a

cow by the horns and one hind leg, and promptly upset her. The old brand was obliterated, the new one burnt

in. This irritated the cow. Promptly the brandingmen, who were of course afoot, climbed to the top of the

corral to be out of the way. At this moment, before the horsemen could flip loose their ropes, Sang appeared.

``Hol' on!'' he babbled. ``I take him off;'' and he scrambled over the fence and approached the cow.

Now cattle of any sort rush at the first object they see after getting to their feet. But whereas a steer makes a

blind run and so can be avoided, a cow keeps her eyes open. Sang approached that wild eyed cow, a bland

A dead silence fell. Looking about at my companions' faces I could not discern even in the depths of their

Sang loosened the rope from the hind leg, he threw it from the horns, he slapped the cow with his hat, and

The cow staggered to her feet, her eyes blazing fire. She took one good look, and then started for Sang.

What followed occurred with all the briskness of a tune from a circus band. Sang darted for the corral fence.

Now, three sides of the corral were railed, and so climbable, but the fourth was a solid adobe wall. Of course

Sang went for the wall. There, finding his nails would not stick, he fled down the length of it, his queue

streaming, his eyes popping, his talons curved toward an ideal of safety, gibbering strange monkey talk,

pursued a scant arm's length behind by that infuriated cow. Did any one help him? Not any. Every man of

that crew was hanging weak from laughter to the horn of his saddle or the top of the fence. The preternatural

solemnity had broken to little bits. Men came running from the bunkhouse, only to go into spasms outside,

to roll over and over on the ground, clutching handfuls of herbage in the agony of their delight.

At the end of the corral was a narrow chute. Into this Sang escaped as into a burrow. The cow came too.

Sang, in desperation, seized a pole, but the cow dashed such a feeble weapon aside. Sang caught sight of a

little opening, too small for cows, back into the main corral. He squeezed through. The cow crashed through

after him, smashing the boards. At the crucial moment Sang tripped and fell on his face. The cow missed him

by so close a margin that for a moment we thought she had hit. But she had not, and before she could turn,

Sang had topped the fence and was halfway to the kitchen. Tom Waters always maintained that he spread his

Chinese sleeves and flew. Shortly after a tremendous smoke arose from the kitchen chimney. Sang had gone

Now that Mongolian was really in great danger, but no one of the outfit thought for a moment of any but the

humorous aspect of the affair. Analogously, in a certain small cowtown I happened to be transient when the

postmaster shot a Mexican. Nothing was done about it. The man went right on being postmaster, but he had

to set up the drinks because he had hit the Mexican in the stomach. That was considered a poor place to hit a

The entire town of Willcox knocked off work for nearly a day to while away the tedium of an enforced wait

there on my part. They wanted me to go fishing. One man offered a team, the other a saddlehorse. All

expended much eloquence in directing me accurately, so that I should be sure to find exactly the spot where I

could hang my feet over a bank beneath which there were ``a plumb plenty of fish.'' Somehow or other they

raked out miscellaneous tackle. But they were a little too eager. I excused myself and hunted up a map. Sure

enough the lake was there, but it had been dry since a previous geological period. The fish were undoubtedly

there too, but they were fossil fish. I borrowed a pickaxe and shovel and announced myself as ready to start.

Outside the principal saloon in one town hung a gong. When a stranger was observed to enter the saloon, that

gong was sounded. Then it behooved him to treat those who came in answer to the summons.

But when it comes to a case of real hospitality or helpfulness, your cowboy is there every time. You are

welcome to food and shelter without price, whether he is at home or not. Only it is etiquette to leave your

name and thanks pinned somewhere about the place. Otherwise your intrusion may be considered in the light

Contrary to general opinion, the cowboy is not a dangerous man to those not looking for trouble. There are

occasional exceptions, of course, but they belong to the universal genus of bully, and can be found among

any class. Attend to your own business, be cool and goodnatured, and your skin is safe. Then when it is

The Sierras, especially towards the south where the meadows are wide and numerous, are full of cattle in

small bands. They come up from the desert about the first of June, and are driven back again to the arid

countries as soon as the autumn storms begin. In the very high land they are few, and to be left to their own

Below Farewell Gap and the volcanic regions one's surroundings change entirely. The meadows become high

flat valleys, often miles in extent; the mountains while registering big on the aneroid are so little

elevated above the plateaus that a few thousand feet is all of their apparent height; the passes are low, the

slopes easy, the trails good, the rock outcrops few, the hills grown with forests to their very tops. Altogether

it is a country easy to ride through, rich in grazing, cool and green, with its eight thousand feet of elevation.

Consequently during the hot months thousands of desert cattle are pastured here; and with them come many

Our first intimation of these things was in the volcanic region where swim the golden trout. From the

advantage of a hill we looked far down to a hairgrass meadow through which twisted tortuously a brook,

and by the side of the brook, belittled by distance, was a miniature man. We could see distinctly his every

movement, as he approached cautiously the stream's edge, dropped his short line at the end of a stick over the

bank, and then yanked bodily the fish from beneath. Behind him stood his pony. We could make out in the

clear air the coil of his raw hide ``rope,'' the glitter of his silver bit, the metal points on his saddle skirts, the

polish of his six shooter, the gleam of his fish, all the details of his costume. Yet he was fully a mile distant.

After a time he picked up his string of fish, mounted, and jogged loosely away at the cowpony's little

Spanish trot toward the south. Over a week later, having caught golden trout and climbed Mount Whitney, we

Imagine an islanddotted lake of grass four or five miles long by two or three wide to which slope regular

shores of stony soil planted with trees. Imagine on the very edge of that lake an especially fine grove perhaps

a quarter of a mile in length, beneath whose trees a dozen different outfits of cowboys are camped for the

summer. You must place a herd of ponies in the foreground, a pine mountain at the back, an unbroken ridge

across ahead, cattle dotted here and there, thousands of ravens wheeling and croaking and flapping

everywhere, a marvelous clear sun and blue sky. The camps were mostly open, though a few possessed tents.

They differed from the ordinary in that they had racks for saddles and equipments. Especially well laid out

were the cooking arrangements. A dozen accommodating springs supplied fresh water with the conveniently

Towards evening the men jingled in. This summer camp was almost in the nature of a vacation to them after

the hard work of the desert. All they had to do was to ride about the pleasant hills examining that the cattle

did not stray nor get into trouble. It was fun for them, and they were in high spirits.

Our immediate neighbors were an old man of seventytwo and his grandson of twentyfive. At least the old

man said he was seventytwo. I should have guessed fifty. He was as straight as an arrow, wiry, lean,

cleareyed, and had, without food, ridden twelve hours after some strayed cattle. On arriving he threw off his

saddle, turned his horse loose, and set about the construction of supper. This consisted of boiled meat, strong

tea, and an incredible number of flapjacks built of water, bakingpowder, salt, and flour, warmed through

not cooked in a frying pan. He deluged these with molasses and devoured three platefuls. It would have

killed an ostrich, but apparently did this decrepit veteran of seventytwo much good.

After supper he talked to us most interestingly in the dry cowboy manner, looking at us keenly from under

the floppy brim of his hat. He confided to us that he had had to quit smoking, and it ground him he'd

The dark fell, and all the little campfires under the trees twinkled bravely forth. Some of the men sang. One

had an accordion. Figures, indistinct and formless, wandered here and there in the shadows, suddenly

emerging from mystery into the clarity of firelight, there to disclose themselves as visitors. Out on the plain

the cattle lowed, the horses nickered. The red firelight flashed from the metal of suspended equipment,

crimsoned the bronze of men's faces, touched with pink the high lights on their gracefully recumbent forms.

After a while we rolled up in our blankets and went to sleep, while a band of coyotes wailed like lost spirits

from a spot where a steer had died. [4] See especially Jackson Himes in The Blazed Trail; and The Rawhide.

AFTER Farewell Gap, as has been hinted, the country changes utterly. Possibly that is why it is named

Farewell Gap. The land is wild, weird, full of twisted trees, strangely colored rocks, fantastic formations,

bleak mountains of slabs, volcanic cones, lava, dry powdery soil or loose shale, closegrowing grasses, and

strong winds. You feel yourself in an upper world beyond the normal, where only the freakish cold things of

nature, elsewhere crowded out, find a home. Camp is under a lonely tree, none the less solitary from the fact

that it has companions. The earth beneath is characteristic of the treeless lands, so that these seem to have

been stuck alien into it. There is no shelter save behind great fortuitous rocks. Huge marmots run over the

boulders, like little bears. The wind blows strong. The streams run naked under the eye of the sun, exposing

clear and yellow every detail of their bottoms. In them there are no deep hidingplaces any more than there is

shelter in the land, and so every fish that swims shows as plainly as in an aquarium.

We saw them as we rode over the hot dry shale among the hot and twisted little trees. They lay against the

bottom, transparent; they darted away from the jar of our horses' hoofs; they swam slowly against the current,

delicate as liquid shadows, as though the clear uniform golden color of the bottom had clouded slightly to

produce these tenuous ghostly forms. We examined them curiously from the advantage our slightly elevated

All that day our route followed in general the windings of this unique home of a unique fish. We crossed a

solid natural bridge; we skirted fields of red and black lava, vivid as poppies; we gazed marveling on perfect

volcano cones, long since extinct: finally we camped on a side hill under two tall branchless trees in about as

bleak and exposed a position as one could imagine. Then all three, we jointed our rods and went forth to find

I soon discovered a number of things, as follows: The stream at this point, near its source, is very narrow I

could step across it and flows beneath deep banks. The Golden Trout is shy of approach. The wind blows.

Combining these items of knowledge I found that it was no easy matter to cast forty feet in a high wind so

accurately as to hit a threefoot stream a yard below the level of the ground. In fact, the proposition was

distinctly sporty; I became as interested in it as in accurate targetshooting, so that at last I forgot utterly the

intention of my efforts and failed to strike my first rise. The second, however, I hooked, and in a moment had

He was a little fellow of seven inches, but mere size was nothing, the color was the thing. And that was

indeed golden. I can liken it to nothing more accurately than the twentydollar goldpiece, the same satin

finish, the same pale yellow. The fish was fairly molten. It did not glitter in gaudy burnishment, as does our

aquarium goldfish, for example, but gleamed and melted and glowed as though fresh from the mould. One

would almost expect that on cutting the flesh it would be found golden through all its substance. This for the

basic color. You must remember always that it was a true trout, without scales, and so the more satiny.

Furthermore, along either side of the belly ran two broad longitudinal stripes of exactly the color and burnish

I thought then, and have ever since, that the Golden Trout, fresh from the water, is one of the most beautiful

fish that swims. Unfortunately it fades very quickly, and so specimens in alcohol can give no idea of it. In

fact, I doubt if you will ever be able to gain a very clear idea of it unless you take to the trail that leads up,

The Golden Trout lives only in this one stream, but occurs there in countless multitudes. Every little pool,

depression, or riffles has its school. When not alarmed they take the fly readily. One afternoon I caught an

even hundred in a little over an hour. By way of parenthesis it may be well to state that most were returned

unharmed to the water. They run small, a twelveinch fish is a monster, but are of extraordinary

Now the following considerations seem to me at this point worthy of note. In the first place, the Golden Trout

occurs but in this one stream, and is easily caught. At present the stream is comparatively inaccessible, so that

the natural supply probably keeps even with the season's catches. Still the trail is on the direct route to Mount

Whitney, and year by year the ascent of this ``top of the Republic'' is becoming more the proper thing to do.

Every camping party stops for a try at the Golden Trout, and of course the fishhog is a sure occasional

migrant. The cowboys told of two who caught six hundred in a day. As the certainly increasing tide of

summer immigration gains in volume, the Golden Trout, in spite of his extraordinary numbers at present, is

Therefore, it seems the manifest duty of the Fisheries to provide for the proper protection and distribution of

this species, especially the distribution. Hundreds of streams in the Sierras are without trout simply because

of some natural obstruction, such as a waterfall too high to jump, which prevents their ascent of the current.

These are all well adapted to the planting of fish, and might just as well be stocked by the Golden Trout as by

the customary Rainbow. Care should be taken lest the two species become hybridized, as has occurred

So far as I know but one attempt has been made to transplant these fish. About five or six years ago a man

named Grant carried some in pails across to a small lake near at hand. They have done well, and curiously

enough have grown to a weight of from one and a half to two pounds. This would seem to show that their

small size in Volcano Creek results entirely from conditions of feed or opportunity for development, and that

a study of proper environment might result in a game fish to rival the Rainbow in size and certainly to surpass

A great many wellmeaning people who have marveled at the abundance of the Golden Trout in their natural

habitat laugh at the idea that Volcano Creek will ever become ``fished out.'' To such it should be pointed out

that the fish in question is a voracious feeder, is without shelter, and quickly landed. A simple calculation will

show how many fish a hundred moderate anglers, camping a week apiece, would take out in a season. And in

a short time there will be many more than a hundred, few of them moderate, coming up into the mountains to

camp just as long as they have a good time. All it needs is better trails, and better trails are under way.

Wellmeaning people used to laugh at the idea that the buffalo and wild pigeons would ever disappear. They

THE last few days of your stay in the wilderness you will be consumedly anxious to get out. It does not

matter how much of a savage you are, how good a time you are having, or how long you have been away

from civilization. Nor does it mean especially that you are glad to leave the wilds. Merely does it come about

that you drift unconcernedly on the stream of days until you approach the brink of departure: then irresistibly

the current hurries you into haste. The last day of your week's vacation; the last three of your month's or your

summer's or your year's outing, these comprise the hours in which by a mighty but invisible

transformation your mind forsakes its savagery, epitomizes again the courses of social evolution, regains the

poise and cultivation of the world of men. Before that you have been content; yes, and would have gone on

being content for as long as you please until the approach of the limit you have set for your wandering.

In effect this transformation from the state of savagery to the state of civilization is very abrupt. When you

leave the towns your clothes and mind are new. Only gradually do they take on the color of their

environment; only gradually do the subtle influences of the great forest steal in on your dulled faculties to

flow over them in a tide that rises imperceptibly. You glide as gently from the artificial to the natural life as

do the forest shadows from night to day. But at the other end the affair is different. There you awake on the

appointed morning in complete resumption of your old attitude of mind. The tide of nature has slipped away

Then you arise and do the most wonderful of your wilderness traveling. On those days you look back fondly,

of them you boast afterwards in telling what a rapid and enduring voyager you are. The biggest day's journey

I ever undertook was in just such a case. We started at four in the morning through a forest of the early

springtime, where the trees were glorious overhead, but the walking ankle deep. On our backs were

thirtypound burdens. We walked steadily until three in the afternoon, by which time we had covered thirty

miles and had arrived at what then represented civilization to us. Of the nine who started, two Indians

finished an hour ahead; the half breed, Billy, and I staggered in together, encouraging each other by words

concerning the bottle of beer we were going to buy; and the five white men never got in at all until after nine

o'clock that night. Neither thirty miles, nor thirty pounds, nor ankle deep slush sounds formidable when

In your first glimpse of the civilized peoples your appearance in your own eyes will undergo the same

instantaneous and tremendous revulsion that has already taken place in your mental sphere. Heretofore you

have considered yourself as a decently well appointed gentleman of the woods. Ten to one, in contrast to the

voluntary or enforced simplicity of the professional woodsman you have looked on your little luxuries of

carved leather hatband, fancy knife sheath, pearlhandled sixshooter, or khaki breeches as giving you

slightly the air of a forest exquisite. But on that depot platform or in presence of that staring group on the

steps of the Pullman, you suddenly discover yourself to be nothing less than a disgrace to your bringing up.

Nothing could be more evident than the flop of your hat, the faded, dusty appearance of your blue shirt, the

beautiful black polish of your khakis, the grime of your knuckles, the three days' beard of your face. If you

are a fool, you worry about it. If you are a sensible man, you do not mind; and you prepare for amusing

The realization of your external unworthiness, however, brings to your heart the desire for a hot bath in a

porcelain tub. You gloat over the thought; and when the dream comes to be a reality, you soak away in as

voluptuous a pleasure as ever falls to the lot of man to enjoy. Then you shave, and array yourself minutely

and preciously in clean clothes from head to toe, building up a new respectability, and you leave scornfully in

a heap your camping garments. They have heretofore seemed clean, but now you would not touch them, no,

not even to put them in the soiledclothes basket, let your feminines rave as they may. And for at least two

But before you can reach this blissful stage you have still to order and enjoy your first civilized dinner. It

tastes good, not because your camp dinners have palled on you, but because your transformation demands its

proper aliment. Fortunate indeed you are if you step directly to a transcontinental train or into the streets of a

modern town. Otherwise the transition through the smallhotel provender is apt to offer too little contrast for

the fullest enjoyment. But aboard the diningcar or in the café you will gather to yourself such illassorted

succulence as thick, juicy beefsteaks, and creamed macaroni, and sweet potatoes, and pie, and red wine, and

In their acquisition your appearance will tell against you. We were once watched anxiously by a nervous

female head waiter who at last mustered up courage enough to inform me that guests were not allowed to eat

without coats. We politely pointed out that we possessed no such garments. After a long consultation with the

proprietor she told us it was all right for this time, but that we must not do it again. At another place I had to

identify myself as a re sponsible person by showing a picture in a magazine bought for the purpose.

The public never will know how to take you. Most of it treats you as though you were a twodollar a day

laborer; some of the more astute are puzzled. One February I walked out of the North Country on snowshoes

and stepped directly into a Canadian Pacific transcontinental train. I was clad in fur cap, vivid blanket coat,

corded trousers, German stockings and moccasins; and my only baggage was the pair of snowshoes. It was

the season of light travel. A single Englishman touring the world as the crow flies occupied the car. He

looked at me so askance that I made an opportunity of talking to him. I should like to read his ``Travels'' to

see what he made out of the riddle. In similar circumstances, and without explanation, I had fun talking

French and swapping boulevard reminiscences with a member of a Parisian theatrical troupe making a long

jump through northern Wisconsin. And once, at six of the morning, letting myself into my own house with a

latchkey, and sitting down to read the paper until the family awoke, I was nearly brained by the butler. He

supposed me a belated burglar, and had armed himself with the poker. The most flattering experience of the

kind was voiced by a small urchin who plucked at his mother's sleeve: ``Look, mamma!'' he exclaimed in

Our last camp of this summer was built and broken in the full leisure of at least a three weeks' expectation.

We had traveled south from the Golden Trout through the Toowah range. There we had viewed wonders

which I cannot expect you to believe in, such as a spring of warm water in which you could bathe and

from which you could reach to dip up a cup of carbonated water on the right hand, or cast a fly into a trout

stream, on the left. At length we entered a high meadow in the shape of a maltese cross, with pine slopes

about it, and springs of water welling in little humps of green. There the long pineneedles were

extraordinarily thick and the pine cones exceptionally large. The former we scraped together to the depth of

three feet for a bed in the lea of a fallen trunk; the latter we gathered in arm fuls to pile on the campfire.

Next morning we rode down a mile or so through the grasses, exclaimed over the thousands of mountain

quail buzzing from the creek bottoms, gazed leisurely up at our well known pines and about at the grateful

coolness of our accustomed green meadows and leaves; and then, as though we had crossed a threshold,

we emerged into chaparral, dry loose shale, yucca, Spanish bayonet, heated air and the bleached burnedout

furnacelike country of arid California in midsummer. The trail dropped down through sagebrush, just as it

always did in the California we had known; the mountains rose with the furlike darkolive effect of the

The trail was very steep and very long, and took us finally into the country of dry brown grasses, gray brush,

waterless stony ravines, and dust. Others had traveled that trail, headed the other way, and evidently had not

liked it. Empty bottles blazed the path. Somebody had sacrificed a pack of playing cards, which he had

stuck on thorns from time to time, each inscribed with a blasphemous comment on the discomforts of such

travel. After an apparently interminable interval we crossed an irrigating ditch, where the horses were glad to

water, and so came to one of those green flowering lush California villages so startlingly in contrast to their

By this it was two o'clock and we had traveled on horseback since four. A variety of circumstances learned at

the village made it imperative that both the Tenderfoot and myself should go out without the delay of a single

hour. This left Wes to bring the horses home, which was tough on Wes, but he rose nobly to the occasion.

When the dust of our rustling cleared, we found we had acquired a team of wild broncos, a buckboard, an

elderly gentleman with a white goatee, two bottles of beer, some crackers and some cheese. With these we

The elevation was five thousand feet, the road dusty and hot, the country uninteresting in sage brush and

alkali and rattlesnakes and general dryness. Constantly we drove, checking off the landmarks in the good old

fashion. Our driver had immigrated from Maine the year before, and by some chance had drifted straight to

the arid regions. He was vastly disgusted. At every particularly atrocious dusthole or unlovely cactus strip

Towards sunset we ran up into rounded hills, where we got out at every rise in order to ease the horses, and

where we hurried the old gentleman beyond the limits of his Easterner's caution at every descent.

It grew dark. Dimly the road showed gray in the twilight. We did not know how far exactly we were to go,

but imagined that sooner or later we would top one of the small ridges to look across one of the broad plateau

plains to the lights of our station. You see we had forgotten, in the midst of flatness, that we were still over

five thousand feet up. Then the road felt its way between two hills; and the blackness of night opened

below us as well as above, and from some deep and tremendous abyss breathed the winds of space.

It was as dark as a cave, for the moon was yet two hours below the horizon. Somehow the trail turned to the

right along that tremendous cliff. We thought we could make out its direction, the dimness of its glimmering;

but equally well, after we had looked a moment, we could imagine it one way or another, to right and left. I

went ahead to investigate. The trail to left proved to be the faint reflection of a clump of ``old man'' at least

five hundred feet down; that to right was a burned patch sheer against the rise of the cliff. We started on the

There were turnsin where a continuance straight ahead would require an airship or a coroner; again

turnsout where the direct line would telescope you against the state of California. These we could make out

by straining our eyes. The horses plunged and snorted; the buckboard leaped. Fire flashed from the impact of

steel against rock, momentarily blinding us to what we should see. Always we descended into the velvet

blackness of the abyss, the cañon walls rising steadily above us shutting out even the dim illumination of the

stars. From time to time our driver, desperately scared, jerked out cheering bits of information.

``Them brakes don't hold fer sour peanuts. I been figgerin' on tackin' on a new shoe for a week.''

``I never was over this road but onct, and then I was headed th' other way. I was driving of a corpse.''

Then, after two hours of it, bing! bang! smash! our tongue collided with a sheer black wall, no blacker than

the atmosphere before it. The trail here took a sharp V turn to the left. We had left the face of the precipice

and henceforward would descend the bed of the cañon. Fortunately our collision had done damage to nothing

The walls of the crevice rose thousands of feet above us. They seemed to close together, like the sides of a

tent, to leave only a narrow pale lucent strip of sky. The trail was quite invisible, and even the sense of its

existence was lost when we traversed groves of trees. One of us had to run ahead of the horses, determining

its general direction, locating the sharper turns. The rest depended on the instinct of the horses and pure luck.

It was pleasant in the cool of night thus to run down through the blackness, shouting aloud to guide our

followers, swinging to the slope, bathed to the soul in mysteries of which we had no time to take cognizance.

By and by we saw a little spark far ahead of us like a star. The smell of fresh wood smoke and stale damp fire

came to our nostrils. We gained the star and found it to be a log smouldering; and up the hill other stars red as

blood. So we knew that we had crossed the zone of an almost extinct forest fire, and looked on the scattered

The moon rose. We knew it by touches of white light on peaks infinitely far above us; not at all by the

relieving of the heavy velvet blackness in which we moved. After a time, I, running ahead in my turn, became

aware of the deep breathing of animals. I stopped short and called a warning. Immediately a voice answered

When within five feet I made out the huge freight wagons in which were lying the teamsters, and very dimly

``A dark night,'' I agreed, and plunged on. Behind me rattled and banged the abused buckboard, snorted the

Then at once the abrupt descent ceased. We glided out to the silvered flat, above which sailed the moon.

The hour was seen to be half past one. We had missed our train. Nothing was visible of human habitations.

The land was frosted with the moonlight, enchanted by it, etherealized. Behind us, huge and formidable,

loomed the black mass of the range we had descended. Before us, thin as smoke in the magic lucence that

flooded the world, rose other mountains, very great, lofty as the sky. We could not understand them. The

descent we had just accomplished should have landed us on a level plain in which lay our town. But here we

found ourselves in a pocket valley entirely surrounded by mountain ranges through which there seemed to be

``I don't see how it can be,'' said I. ``We've certainly come far enough. It would take us four hours at the very

least to cross that range, even if the railroad should happen to be on the other side of it.''

``I been through here only once,'' repeated the driver, ``going the other way. Then I drew a corpse.'' He

We stared at the mountains that hemmed us in. They rose above us sheer and forbidding. In the bright

moonlight plainly were to be descried the brush of the foothills, the timber, the fissures, the cañons, the

granites, and the everlasting snows. Almost we thought to make out a thread of a waterfall high up where the

``Well, we're on a road, anyway,'' I pointed out. ``It's bound to go somewhere. We might as well give up the

``It can't be far,' encouraged the Tenderfoot; ``this valley can't be more than a few miles across.''

We moved forward down the white wagon trail approaching the mountains. And then we were witnesses of

the most marvelous transformation. For as we neared them, those impregnable mountains, as though

panicstricken by our advance, shrunk back, dissolved, dwindled, went to pieces. Where had towered

tenthousandfoot peaks, perfect in the regular succession from timber to snow, now were little flat hills on

which grew tiny bushes of sage. A passage opened between them. In a hundred yards we had gained the open

Before us gleamed red and green lights. The mass of houses showed half distinguishable. A feeble glimmer

illuminated part of a white sign above the depot. That which remained invisible was evidently the name of the

town. That which was revealed was the supplementary information which the Southern Pacific furnishes to

its patrons. It read: ``Elevation 482 feet.'' We were definitely out of the mountains.

THE trail's call depends not at all on your common sense. You know you are a fool for answering it; and yet

you go. The comforts of civilization, to put the case on its lowest plane, are not lightly to be renounced: the

ease of having your physical labor done for you; the joy of cultivated minds, of theatres, of books, of

participation in the world's progress; these you leave behind you. And in exchange you enter a life where

there is much long hard work of the hands work that is really hard and long, so that no man paid to labor

would consider it for a moment; you undertake to eat simply, to endure much, to lie on the rack of anxiety;

you voluntarily place yourself where cold, wet, hunger, thirst, heat, monotony, danger, and many discomforts

will wait upon you daily. A thousand times in the course of a woods life even the stoutesthearted will tell

himself softly very softly if he is really stouthearted, so that others may not be annoyed that if ever

These times come when long continuance has worn on the spirit. You beat all day to windward against the

tide toward what should be but an hour's sail: the sea is high and the spray cold; there are sunken rocks, and

food there is none; chill gray evening draws dangerously near, and there is a foot of water in the bilge. You

have swallowed your tongue twenty times on the alkali; and the sun is melting hot, and the dust dry and

pervasive, and there is no water, and for all your effort the relative distances seem to remain the same for

days. You have carried a pack until your every muscle is strung whitehot; the woods are breathless; the

black flies swarm persistently and bite until your face is covered with blood. You have struggled through

clogging snow until each time you raise your snowshoe you feel as though some one had stabbed a little

sharp knife into your groin; it has come to be night; the mercury is away below zero, and with aching fingers

you are to prepare a camp which is only an anticipation of many more such camps in the ensuing days. For a

week it has rained, so that you, pushing through the dripping brush, are soaked and sodden and comfortless,

and the bushes have become horrible to your shrinking gooseflesh. Or you are just plain tired out, not from

a single day's fatigue, but from the gradual exhaustion of a long hike. Then in your secret soul you utter these

``You are a fool. This is not fun. There is no real reason why you should do this. If you ever get out of here,

Then after a time you do get out, and are thankful. But in three months you will have proved in your own

experience the following axiom I should call it the widest truth the wilderness has to teach:

In memory the pleasures of a camping trip strengthen with time, and the disagreeables weaken.''

I don't care how hard an experience you have had, nor how little of the pleasant has been mingled with it, in

three months your general impression of that trip will be good. You will look back on the hard times with a

I remember one trip I took in the early spring following a long drive on the Pine River. It rained steadily for

six days. We were soaked to the skin all the time, ate standing up in the driving downpour, and slept wet. So

cold was it that each morning our blankets were so full of frost that they crackled stiffly when we turned out.

Dispassionately I can appraise that as about the worst I ever got into. Yet as an impression the Pine River trip

So after you have been home for a little while the call begins to make itself heard. At first it is very gentle.

But little by little a restlessness seizes hold of you. You do not know exactly what is the matter: you are

aware merely that your customary life has lost savor, that you are doing things more or less perfunctorily, and

And gradually it is borne in on you exactly what is the matter. Then say you to yourself:

``My son, you know better. You are no tenderfoot. You have had too long an experience to admit of any

glamour of indefiniteness about this thing. No use bluffing. You know exactly how hard you will have to

work, and how much tribulation you are going to get into, and how hungry and wet and cold and tired and

generally frazzled out you are going to be. You've been there enough times so it's pretty clearly impressed on

you. You go into this thing with your eyes open. You know what you're in for. You're pretty well off right

``That's right,'' says yourself to you. ``You're dead right about it, old man. Do you know where we can get