Ray Stannard Baker

Century/August, 1903

[THE account here offered of the aspects of Yellowstone Park, as it is now under government supervision, will be read with particular interest by those who remember the first magazine papers to bring the subject prominently before the public. They appeared in the early numbers of this periodical, within one and two years of the discovery of this remarkable region. Ex-Governor N. P. Langford’s two papers on “The Wonders of the Yellowstone” were printed in this magazine for May and June, 1871; in the November issue of the same year Truman C. Everts described the incidents of his “Thirty-seven Days of Peril” while lost in the Yellowstone, having become separated from the Langford company; and to the February number of the following year (1872) Dr. F. V. Hayden contributed a fully illustrated paper on his adventurous visit of the previous year.— THE EDITOR.]

AT first, approaching the Park, we felt the pressure of our desire to reach the ultra-natural attractions which have made this a place of marvels for all the world—the remnant volcanoes dying out in geysers, the strangely ebullient pots of mud, the thundering earth-rents discharging clouds of sulphurous steam, and the many other evidences of a world in the process of making. But as we proceeded—we had come in by the little-traveled south entrance of the Park, through Idaho and Wyoming, along the splendid Tetons, the wildest of wild country, desert basin, and mountain pass—we seemed to forget the objective point of our journey in the natural glory of this Rocky Mountain wilderness, the every-day joy of the road, sleeping underneath the trees, bathing in the noisy streams, tramping off alone through beguiling bypaths of desert and canon. Here the wilderness is so commanding and omnipotent that the dim, winding human trail among the rocks and sand seemed almost of yesterday’s making, giving us the feeling of the intrepid discoverer. Think of coming suddenly to an opening among the trees and, all unexpectedly, beholding a fine, brawling stream tumbling down a mountain-side, or a snow-clad mountain peak with the sun upon it, or an elk or a deer starting from the very road, pausing a moment with startled alertness, then bounding off, a flash of brown and white, through the woods!

So long we loitered among these beauties, common to all the Rocky Mountains, that we were slow in reaching the wonders of the Park itself. Perhaps these days of adjustment to the wild and natural prepared us the better for what we were now to see.

In the morning of our second day within the Park we beheld afar off a valley rolling full of steam. It was as if a city lay hidden there, with smoke rising through the bright, cool air from a hundred busy chimneys. For a moment, so vivid was the impression, we almost expected to hear the city noises and smell the city smells; then we felt again, not without a pleasant sense of recovery, the solemn quiet of the forest spreading illimitably before our eyes, the splendid mountain-tops, the glimpses of blue lake, the charm of the winding road.

But the populous and smoky city of the imagination was now the eager desire of the heart. Certain sulphurous odors, suggestive of volcanic activity, had come to our nostrils; we had already seen a number of smoking rivulets oozing out of the earth near the roadside and creeping down through varicolored mud to the brook, and we had dismounted to dabble our fingers in the tepid water of our first hot spring. Now we rode out of the forest, and there before us, on the shore of Yellowstone Lake, stretched the bare volcanic formation, a glaring white in the sunshine, steam rising from a score of grotesque mudcones and boiling pools—nature’s imitation of a smoky city.

Here is a veritable miniature volcano, crater and all; a wooden sign names it a paint-pot. We stoop over and look into the steamy crater: a lake of pink mud is slowly rising within, rumbling and emitting sulphurous smells. Opening suddenly, it hurls the hot mud in air, splashing it almost into our faces, and slowly subsides with much grumbling, to repeat the operation again in a few minutes, as it has been doing these fifty thousand years and more. Not beautiful, but mysterious, curious, uncanny.

Here is a placid hot pool a dozen feet wide, set like a white-rimmed basin in the hard formation, with water so clear that one can see the marvelously colored sides extending deep into the earth—evanescent blue, cream-color, pink, red—attractive because so strange. A Chinaman has planted his laundry where he can dip up water heated by the earth’s eternal fires for his washtubs. His clothes-line, with a brave array of new washing, cuts off a large portion of the volcanic landscape. Down at the lake-brink a number of girls are trying, with unaccustomed fishing-rods, to perform the feat, without which no visit to the Park would be quite successful, of catching a trout and cooking it, wriggling, in the hot pool behind them. A few rods away are the lunch-stations of the transportation companies, where the regular visitors in the big coaches stop for a meal, or possibly to stay for a night on their way around the Park. At each wonder-center such a station may be found, buzzing with visitors, every one in ecstasies over the geysers, setting up cameras, snapping buttons, filling little bottles with hot water or little boxes with pink mud, all very jolly, all expecting to be astonished, and all realizing their expectations. Indeed, a nameless exhilaration seems to affect every Park visitor, so that everything seems especially beautiful, especially marvelous—perhaps the effect of the clear, pure air, or the altitude: for we are here more than seven thousand feet above the level of the sea.

They tell one that the Thumb—this point of Yellowstone Lake is thus described—is nothing. “Wait until you reach the Upper Geyser Basin! Wait until you hear the Black Growler at Norris! And wait, oh, wait, until you see Old Faithful in eruption!”

And so one mounts his horse with a cheerful sense of pleasures to come, and half a day later rides into the fuming valley of the Upper Geyser Basin, the greatest of all the centers of volcanic activity. As one emerges from the forest, Old Faithful is just in the act of throwing its splendid column of hot water a hundred and fifty feet in air, the wind blowing out the top in white spray, until the geyser resembles a huge, sparkling, graceful plume set in the earth. The geyser holds its height much longer than one expects; but presently it falls away, rallies often, throws up lesser jets, and finally sinks, hissing and rumbling, into its brown cone, leaving all the rocky earth about it glistening, smoking with hot water. The little crowd of spectators on the convenient benches press the buttons of their kodaks once more, and hurry to the next geyser on the list. All this valley smokes with pools and hot rivulets flowing into the Firehole River; there are many curious, grotesque cone formations very appropriately named, each bearing its label on a white stake. And on the hill stand the big, ugly eating-house, swarming with tourists, and a store where one may buy photographs of the wonders, and souvenir spoons, which will help to convince the friends at home that no wonder has been missed.

Beyond the Upper Basin one cannot escape a veritable succession of marvels. At the Fountain there are many strange forms of geysers and hot springs, often gorgeous in coloring, surrounded by water-formed rocks in many curious and beautiful designs, and veritable caldrons of bubbling mud, and bears in the garbage-piles, and I know not how many other wonders. At Norris there are growling, jagged holes in the earth, belching forth huge volumes of hot steam, which, having killed and bleached all the verdure of the near mountain-side, has given the whole valley an indescribable air of desolation, as if the forces of nature had gone wrong—the very work of the devil, after whom so many of the marvels are named. Farther along one shudders under the brow of Roaring Mountain, makes a wry face while sipping water from the Apollinaris-spring, wonders at the Hoodoo rocks, or admires the gorgeous-colored pulpits and terraces of the Mammoth Hot Springs.

And yet after all these things, amazing as they are, one turns again to the road and the mountains and the trees. Undue emphasis may have been laid upon the odd, spectacular, bizarre—those things, dear to the heart of the American, which are the “biggest,’’ the “grandest,” the “most wonderful,” the “most beautiful” of their kind in the world. But the Park is far more than a natural hippodrome. The geysers appeal to one’s sense of the mysterious: one treads on the hollow earth not without an agreeable sense of danger, thrills with the volcanic rumblings underneath, waits with tense interest for the geyser, now boiling and bubbling, to hurl its fountain of hot water into the air; one is awed by these strange evidences of a living earth, guesses and conjectures, as the scientists have been doing for centuries, and then, somehow, unaccountably weary of these exhibitions, turns to the solemn, majestic hills, to waterfall and marshy meadow, to the wonderful trail through the forest. For, after all, the charm of the Park is the charm of the deep, untouched wilderness, the joy of the open road.

Indeed, the very name Park, associated as it is with smooth lawns and formal, man-guarded tree-groups and streamcourses, seems out of place when applied to these splendid mountain-tops. Here is a space nearly sixty miles square—a third larger than the State of Delaware, and, with its adjoining forest reserves, which are really a part of the public wilderness, nearly as large as Massachusetts or New Jersey. Visitors see only a narrow road-strip of its wonders, though the best; upon vast reaches of mountain and forest, lakes, rivers, geysers, canons, no man looks once a year; probably many areas have never been seen by human eyes. The United States regular soldiers who guard it keep mostly to the roads, the boundaries of the Park being for the most part so wild and rugged that even poaching hunters could not cross them if they would.

It was a carping German traveler who complained that this Park was no park.

“Look at your dead trees and burned stumps in the woods,” he said, thinking perhaps of the well-groomed, man-made forests of his native land, “and your streams, full of driftwood. It is not cared for.”

And Heaven help that it may never be cared for in that way! Not a park, but a wilderness, full of wild beauty and natural disorder, may we keep the place as nature left it, disturbing no land-slide where it lies, no natural dam of logs and stones heaped here by mountain freshet, no havoc of wind-storm or avalanche. The windfall, with its shaggy spreading roots full of matted earth and stone, rapidly being covered with grass and moss, and the river-bed full of bleached driftwood, each has its own rare quality of picturesqueness, its own fitting place in this wild harmony. There is beauty even in the work of the forest fire, which has left whole mountain-sides of freshly scorched pine foliage, a deep golden red smoldering in the sunshine; and many a blackened bit of forest, longer burned, leaves an impression of somber shadows, of silence and death, which cannot be forgotten. One even comes to begrudge this wilderness its telephone poles, its roads, and the excellent stone embankments which keep them from slipping down the mountainsides into the swift streams below; for they detract from its wild perfection.

We may behold nature in its softer and more comely aspects almost anywhere ; but every year, with the spread of population in our country, it becomes more difficult to preserve genuine wilderness places where hill and forest and stream have been left exactly as nature made them. Already our indomitable pioneers have driven the wilderness into the very fastnesses of the mountains, so that only remnants now remain. And this great Yellowstone Park remnant has been fortunately set aside by the government for the enjoyment and inspiration of the people forever.

And not only for the enjoyment of the people, but for practical use as well. Nothing gives the American keener joy than to plan a pleasure and then find that he has also developed a business opportunity. So Yellowstone Park, set aside for the wonders of its geysers and its great canon, turns out to be the very continental fountain of waters. Here in the tops of the Rockies, within the Park or near it, rise the greatest of American rivers. At one spot the traveler may stand squarely upon the backbone of North America, the continental divide: at his right hand a stream flows outward and downward, finding its way through the Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean; at his left a rivulet reaches the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and thence the Gulf of Mexico. And to the southward of the Park rise the headwaters of the Platte and the Colorado rivers, and to the northward the headwaters of the Missouri. Protecting these mountains, preserving the forest, excluding cattle and sheep, help to conserve and maintain the water-supply and keep the flow of all these rivers steady and sure, a need which grows greater with every year’s development in the irrigated desert land.

We come, at last, to the final glory of the Park, the splendid canon of the Yellowstone. Yellowstone Lake, a deep basin of snow-water, 7721 feet above sea-level, debouches at its northern end into the narrow Yellowstone River. Flowing for a dozen miles or more through a wild and rugged country, this turbulent stream comes suddenly to a rocky ledge, over which it leaps 112 feet downward into a resounding gorge. Gathering itself in a huge, swirling pool, foam-flecked, it flows onward a few hundred feet and takes another tremendous leap, this time 311 feet, straight into the awful depths of the Grand Canon. So great is the fall that most of the water, bending over the brink of the precipice, smooth, oily, and green, is dashed into spray, widening out at the base and drifting against the steep canon walls, which the constant moisture has clothed with soft green mosses and other minute water-growths. Thence it collects in a thousand gleaming rivulets, gathers in brooks and cascades, and gushes back into the river-channel. From the summit of the awful precipice above the fails one may trace the stream along the depths of the canon—seen at this distance a mere hand’s-breadth of foamy water broken by varied forms of cascades, pools, and rapids, and all of a limpid greenness unmatched elsewhere.

Niagara is greater, more majestic in the plenitude of its power, having twenty times the flow of water; but it cannot compare with these falls in the settings of canon and forest, in the coloring of rock, water, sky—all so indescribably grand, gorgeous, and overpowering.

Somehow I had thought of the canon as rock-colored, gray, somber, perhaps like the gorge of Niagara; and it was with a thrill that I first saw it in all its savage glory of reds and yellows, greens and blues. Surely never was there such a spectacle. Imagine, if you can—but you never can—a mighty cleft in the level earth a third of a mile wide, its brinks sharp, precipitous, reaching over twelve hundred feet downward, sometimes almost perpendicular, sometimes banked with huge heaps of talus or buttressed with spindling pinnacles and towers often surmounted with eagle-nests, and all painted, glowing with the richest color—vast patches of yellow and orange, streakings of red and blue, with here a towering abutment all of red, and there another all of yellow. At the bottom flows the gleaming green river, and at the top the dark green forest reaches to the canon-edge, and sometimes, even, rugged and gnarled pines, the vanguard of the wood, venture over the precipice, to find footing on some ledge, or to hang, half dislodged, with angular dead arms reaching out into the mighty depths, a resting place for soaring eagle or hawk. The sides of the canon, being not of solid rock, but of crumbling, soft formation, have furnished plastic material for the sculpturing of water and wind, which have tooled them into a thousand fantastic forms. One’s eye traces out gigantic castles, huge dog forms, bird forms, titanic faces—all adding to the awful impressiveness of the place.

For miles the canon stretches on northward from the lower falls. From numerous well-guarded outlooks the spectator, grasping hard upon the railing lest the dizziness of these heights unnerve him, may behold a hundred varied views of the grandeur, looking either toward the falls, which seem to fill the canon-end like a splendid white column of marble, or off to the northward, where the stupendous gorge widens out, loses some of its coloring, admits more of the forest, and finally disappears among rugged mountains.

Everywhere the view is one that places the seal of awed silence upon the lips; it never palls, never grows old. One soon sees all too much of geyser and paint-pot; of this, never. At first the sensation of savage immensity is so overpowering that the spectator gathers only a confused sense of bigness and barbaric color; but when he has made the perilous descent to the canon bottom below the falls, when he has seen the wonder from every point of view, he begins to grasp a larger part of the whole scene, to form a picture which will remain with him.

One turns away from the canon not with the feeling with which he left the geysers and the mud-pots, yet contented to go back to the simple, familiar beauties of the trail. Occasionally it is well to feast on a grand canon, but these hills and streams are much the  better steady living. These soothe and comfort.

Next to the natural wonders of the Park, one will be most interested in the human procession which passes constantly up and down within it. Gradually, after days spent steeping one’s self in the wild and lonely glory of the wilderness, he will come again to watch the people riding, tramping, all in ceaseless course, around the Park, each taking his wonders in accord with the eccentricities of his temperament.

It is hardly safe in these days to define a wilderness, it contains so much that is unexpected. We must refuse to be convinced by the unsatisfied one who finds incongruity in the ugly red hotels, the yellow coaches, the galloping tourists, the kodaks. After all, every age is entitled to its own sort of wilderness, and ours seems to include the tourist and the hotel; the traveler is to-day as much a part of the Rocky Mountains as the elk or the lodgepole pine. No picture of the modern wilderness would to-day be complete without the sturdy golf-skirted American girl with her kodak, the white-top wagon, the Eastern youth turned suddenly Western, with oddly worn sombrero and spurs. It was a shock to one traveler’s sensibilities (but it converted him) the day he went poetizing up a faint trail through the deep wood. “This,” he was thinking, “is the forest primeval; this is the far limit of the wilderness. Surely no human foot has ever before trod upon this soft timber grass!” I think he expected momentarily to see a deer or a bear spring from its secure resting-place, when, lo and behold, a party of girls! Here they were miles from their hotel, tramping alone in the woods, getting the real spirit of things, and as safe, bless them! as they would have been at home. He found he had yet to learn a few things about a modern wilderness.

But most of the tourists remain pretty snugly in their coach-seats or near the hotels. One meets them in great loads, some wrapped in long linen coats, some wearing black glasses, some broad, green-brimmed hats. Wherever they may come from, they soon acquire the breezy way of the West, and nod good-humoredly as they pass. Occasionally one sees them devouring their guidebooks and checking off the sights as they whirl by, so that they will be sure not to miss anything or see anything twice. Usually they come in trains, a dozen or twenty or even forty great coaches one after another, and when they have passed one sees no more of them until another day.

And such fun as they have, such acquaintances as they make, and such adventures as there are! One old gentleman, accompanied by his stenographer, after each excursion sat on the piazza, guide-book in hand, and dictated an account of what he had seen. And then there is the tourist who has brought a fine new pair of field-glasses through which he is constantly seeing more wonderful things than anyone else; the old lady with the lunch-basket; the young person who is absorbed in altitudes, and who wishes to be constantly informed how high up she is now.

And then there are the dusty campers with white-top wagons or pack-horses trailing slowly along the roads or making camp at the stream-sides. Many of them have been through before; many are from near-by Montana or Utah, and have come for their regular summer outing, turning their horses to graze in the natural meadows. We met one young married couple thus spending their honeymoon, looking from the front of their wagon, a picture of dusty joy.