Boy Scouts in Glacier Park

by Walter Prichard Eaton

  CHAPTER V--The Scouts Learn Why the Rocky Mountains Have No Foot-Hillsand Arrive at Many Glacier

  They had about fifty miles to go, northward, straight away from therailroad. It was a clear, lovely day, the air so transparent that youcould apparently walk to the top of one of those mountains in an hour ortwo.

  "Gee, I know now how that Englishman felt," Joe laughed.

  The road was not what would be called a good road, or even a decentroad, in the East, as it was only a track in the grass, full of sand andsharp little stones; it did not lead into the mountains at all; it ranalong just to the east of the great range, over the bare, rolling hillsof the prairie, so that from the motor bus you could see the entiremountain wall, mile after mile. What a wonderful wall it was, too! Itsprang right up out of this rolling green prairie, a great procession ofpeaks, and now they were so near the boys could see they were not blueat all, but every color of the rainbow, with red predominating. Up theirsides for a way stretched timber--all evergreen, and not very big--andthen came the rocks--red rocks, yellow rocks, gray rocks, white rocks,in long horizontal strata, and in the ravines and hollows on the slopesgreat patches of snow stretching down from the snow caps on the summitslike vast white fingers.

  As they sped along, every eye in the motor fixed on the mountains, a manin the front seat pointed ahead to a huge red mountain which stood outeastward from the range, a noble mountain shaped like a tremendous dome.

  "That's old Rising Wolf," he said.

  "Rising Wolf!" said Tom. "That's a good name. It's Indian, I suppose?"

  "It's Indian, but it was the name of a white man," the first speakerreplied. "It was the name the Indians gave to Hugh Monroe. He's buriedalmost under the shadow of that mountain. Pretty good monument, eh?"

  "I don't believe anybody'll move it," Joe laughed. "Who was HughMonroe?"

  "Hugh Monroe," said the man on the front seat, who evidently knew a lotabout the Park, "was probably the first white man who ever saw thosemountains. He was born in Montreal in 1798. He entered the Hudson BayCompany when he was only seventeen, about as old as you boys, I guess,and was sent way out into the Blackfeet Indian country on theSaskatchewan River. Monroe was assigned to live with the Indians, andlearn their language, and the next winter--1816--he went southward withthem, following along near the base of the range, crossed what's now theboundary line, and came here. He even went on farther, to theYellowstone. Monroe stayed with the Blackfeet all the rest of his life.He married a squaw, and got an Indian name--Makwiipowaksin--or RisingWolf----"

  "I guess I'll always say it in English," Spider laughed.

  "After a while," the man went on, laughing too, "the Blackfeet came downhere to live. We are going through part of their reservation now, andthe whole Park was bought from them by the government. This was alltheir hunting ground, and right here, in Two Medicine Valley that yousee leading in beside Rising Wolf Mountain, and in the Cut Bank and St.Mary's Valley we'll soon come to, Hugh Monroe hunted moose and elk andbuffalo and silver tips, and he killed sheep and goats up on the slopes.He used to tell me how he had a cabin by St. Mary Lake (we get there inan hour) once, and had to stand off a raid of hostile Indians for twodays--he and his wife and children. He's often told me, too, how he andthe Blackfeet used to drive the buffalo over the Cut Bank River cliffs.The buffalo would stampede, and not seeing the cliffs ahead, would allgo crashing over."

  "_He_ told you?" cried Joe, incredulous. "Say, how old are you, anyhow?I thought you said he came here in 1816--that's a hundred years ago."

  Again the man laughed. "Rising Wolf was buried in 1896," he answered."He was ninety-eight years old. We folks out in the Montana mountains"[he pronounced Montana with the first _a_ short, as in _cat_] "live agood while, son. It's the air. I can remember him well, and a fine oldfigure he was, a real pioneer, like Daniel Boone and the chaps you'veread about in school. Yes sir, he's got a good monument."

  And the man looked up again at the great red dome of Rising WolfMountain, towering over them.

  "Ask him about there being no foot-hills," Joe whispered, nudging Tom.

  "Can you tell us why there aren't any foot-hills to this range?" Tomasked. "Of course, all this prairie here is rolling and high, but it'snot really little mountains. The main range just jumps right up withoutany warning."

  "Yes, I've been wondering about that, too," put in a man on the seatbehind the boys. "I wish you would explain it."

  The man on the front seat laughed. "I seem to be the Park encyclopaedia,"said he. "Well, I hunted in these mountains before the government everthought of making a park of 'em, and I'm glad to tell you all I can.I'll tell you just as it was told to me by one of the government chapsthat came out here--a scientist. He was looking for prehistoric animalfossils up in the Belly River Canon, and he sure knew a lot. It was thisway--all the prairies, he said, and all the land west of here, was oncethe bottom of the sea, or a lake, or something, and finally it pushed upand became land, and then, as the earth crust went on contracting, itcracked."

  The man now put his hands together, spread flat side by side, and pushedthem one against the other.

  "The crack formed from north to south," he said, "and as the contractionwent on something had to give, just as something has to give if I pushmy hands hard enough. See----"

  He pushed harder yet, and his left hand slid up over the back of hisright.

  "That's what happened here. One edge of the earth crust, thousands offeet thick, rose right up and slid east a dozen miles or more, and thenstopped. I believe the scientific fellers call that a fault. They callthe eastern edge of this range the Lewis overthrust, because that'swhere the overlapping stopped. Look--you can see all along here theprecipices where the crust stuck out over the prairie, and all thoseparallel lines of different colored rocks are the different layers inthe old crust. They find the skeletons and fossils exposed in 'em, whichwould be buried two or three thousand feet if you had to dig down."

  "But what I don't see," Joe said, "is why the top isn't just level? Whyare there any peaks and valleys?"

  "It happened a few million years ago, son," the man laughed. "I supposethings were some broken up at the first crack, and since then glaciershave come grinding down, and rains have fallen, and snows melted, andfrosts cracked, and the ice and water have washed out canyons and carvedthe peaks. The high point was right where the undercrust stopped, back adozen miles or more from the edge of the overthrust, so that became theDivide. That's pretty near level in places even to-day. But east andwest the running water has carved out long valleys and left harder rocksticking up as peaks. Up farther north old Chief Mountain sticks rightout into the prairie, a tower of limestone, with everything else aroundit carved right away."

  "I get you," said Joe. "I bet I'd have studied geography harder if I'dhad these mountains to look at while I was doing it!"

  The man in the seat behind laughed. "There must have been some shake upwhen the crack formed, and these six thousand feet of crust came upover."

  "I'd rather been some place else than standin' right on 'em," said theman in front.

  The motor presently rolled through rather thick pine timber, up over ahigh ridge, and down into a valley.

  "That's Divide Mountain to the left," said their guide. "Behind it isTriple Divide Peak. From the peak, the water flows to three oceans--westto the Pacific, east to the Missouri River, the Mississippi and the Gulfof Mexico, northeast to Canada and Hudson Bay. From here on all thebrooks we cross are bound for Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean."

  In a short time they came to the foot of a lovely lake, and stopped at agroup of buildings, built like Swiss chalets, on the shore.

  "St. Mary Lake," their impromptu guide said. "A lot of people think it'sthe most beautiful lake in the world, but you have to get to the upperend to see its full beauty. It runs twelve miles, right up to the footof the Great Divide. That's Going-to-the-Sun Mountain you can just seethe peak of on the right."

  The scouts looked far up the dancing, wonderfu
lly green-blue waters ofthe lake, to the tip of a vast pyramid of rock, blue with distance.

  "Is that an Indian name? It's pretty," said Joe.

  "No," the man answered. "A French missionary priest, who came here withHugh Monroe back in the 1830's named the lake St. Mary Lake, and then hewent on up it, and over the pass to the west, into the setting sun. SoMonroe named the mountain Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. But, of course, itwas really Indian in a way, because if Monroe hadn't lived with theIndians he wouldn't have thought of such a poetic name."

  The boys were still only half-way to their destination, and the bus soonstarted off again, still keeping on the prairie, along the eastern edgeof the range, and passing along the shore of Lower St. Mary Lake formany miles. At last the road turned sharp west, and began to climb. Itclimbed into a deep, narrow valley which led right up into the tumbledmass of red and gray and green peaks and rock precipices.

  "This is the last stage," said the man. "We are going up the SwiftCurrent Valley."

  The road was very narrow, and it swung around ledges where there was amassive wall above them on one side and a sheer drop, withoutprotection, on the other. The bus had a siren horn, which the driver setgoing three hundred yards before he reached one of these curves. As theyclimbed, the great mountainsides seemed to come nearer and nearer, andat last they towered over their heads, some of them almostperpendicular, and composed of layers of jagged red rock. It was notlong before they crossed the tumbling green water of Swift Current Riveron a bridge close to a foaming waterfall, and brought up in front of alarge hotel on the shore of a small green lake.

  This was the end of their journey. The scouts got out, and went aroundto the lake in front of the hotel. Here the full view was spread beforethem, and Tom whistled, while Joe gasped.

  Right in front of them lay Lake McDermott, perhaps a mile long and halfa mile wide, the water a beautiful green, for all the lakes in the Parkare fed from glaciers, and glacier water is green in color. This lakewas surrounded by a fringe of pines. Out of the farther side sprung up acone-shaped mountain, almost out of the water. To the left and right ofthis peak, called Sharp's Peak, and only two or three miles behind it,rose the abrupt head wall of the Continental Divide itself, a vast grayprecipice, with great peaks thrusting up from it, and gleaming whitesnow-fields lying like gigantic sheets spread out to dry wherever therewas a place for them to cling. Behind the hotel, on both sides, nearermountains went up precipitously.

  "It's some big!" Joe exclaimed. "Say--it--it kind of scares me! Think ofclimbing one of those cliffs!"

  "We'll get used to it," Tom declared. "And we're going to climb 'em!We're going to get photographs of a goat, and see this old Park, top andbottom."

  "Gosh, it looks all top to me," poor Joe replied.

  "Come on--we'll find our boss, and get our tent pitched, and some grubinto us--and we'll feel better," Tom cried cheerfully.