The River and I | Page 7

own country as from a height of years, old
tales lose something of their wonder for him. It is owing to this attitude
that the prospect of descending the great river in a power canoe from
the head of navigation gave me delight.

Days and nights filled with the singing and muttering of my big brother!
And I would need only to close my eyes, and all about me would come
and go the ghosts of the mighty doers--who are my kin. Big men,
bearded and powerful, pushing up stream with the cordelle on their
shoulders! Voyageurs chanting at the paddles! Mackinaws descending
with precious freights of furs! Steamboats grunting and snoring up
stream! Old forts sprung up again out of the dusk of things forgotten,
with all the old turbulent life, where in reality to-day the plough of the
farmer goes or the steers browse! Forgotten battles blowing by in the
wind! And from a bluff's summit, here and there, ghostly war parties
peering down upon me--the lesser kin of their old enemies--taking a
summer's outing where of old went forth the fighting men, the builders
of the unwritten epic!
CHAPTER II
SIXTEEN MILES OF AWE
Our party of three left the railroad at Great Falls, a good two-days' walk
up river from Benton, the head of Missouri River navigation, to which
point our boat material had been shipped and our baggage checked.
A vast sun-burned waste of buffalo-grass, prickly pears, and sagebrush
stretched before us to the north and east; and on the west the filmy blue
contour of the Highwoods Mountains lifted like sun-smitten thunder
clouds in the July swelter. One squinting far look, however, told you
that these were not rain clouds. The very thought of rain came to you
with the vagueness of some birth-surviving memory of a former time.
You looked far up and out to the westward and caught the glint of snow
on the higher peaks. But the sight was unconvincing; it was like a story
told without the "vital impulse." Always had these plains blistered
under this July sun; always had the spots of alkali made the only
whiteness; and the dry harsh snarl and snap of the grasshoppers' wings
had pricked this torrid silence through all eternity.
A stern and pitiless prospect for the amateur pedestrian, to be sure; for
devotees of the staff and pack have come to associate pedestrianism

with the idyllic, and the idyllic nourishes only in a land of frequent
showers. Theocritus and prickly pears are not compatible. Yet it was
not without a certain thrill of exaltation that we strapped on our packs
and stretched our legs after four days on the dusty plush.
And though ahead of us lay no shady, amiably crooked country roads
and bosky dells, wherein one might lounge and dawdle over Hazlitt, yet
we knew how crisscross cattle-trails should take us skirting down the
river's sixteen miles of awe.
Five hundred miles below its source, the falls of the Missouri begin
with a vertical plunge of sixty feet. This is the Black Eagle Falls,
presumably named so by Lewis and Clark and other explorers, because
of the black eagles found there.
With all due courtesy to my big surly grumbling friend, the Black
Eagle Falls, I must say that I was a bit disappointed in him. Oh! he is
quite magnificent enough, and every inch a Titan, to be sure; but of late
years it seems he has taken up with company rather beneath him. First
of all, he has gone to work in a most plebeian, almost slave-like fashion,
turning wheels and making lights and dragging silly little trolley cars
about a straggling town. Also, he hobnobs continually with a sprawling,
brawling, bad-breathed smelter, as no respectable Titan should do. And
on top of it all--and this was the straw that broke the back of my
sentimental camel--he allows them to maintain a park on the cliffs
above him, where the merest white-skinned, counter-jumping pigmy
may come of a Sunday for his glass of pop and a careless squint at the
toiling Titan. Puny Philistines eating peanuts and watching Samson at
his Gaza stunt! I like it not. Rather would I see the Muse Clio pealing
potatoes or Persephone busy with a banana cart! Encleadus wriggling
under a mountain is well enough; but Enceladus composedly turning a
crank for little men--he seemed too heavy for that light work.
Leaning on the frame observation platform, I closed my eyes, and in
the dull roar that seemed the voices of countless ages, the park and the
smelter and the silly bustling trolley cars and the ginger-ale and the
peanuts and my physical self--all but my own soul--were swallowed up.
I saw my Titan brother as he was made--four hundred yards of writhing,

liquid sinew,