Letters from Yellowstone

by Diane Smith

  I would like to think that it is those in the East who do not understand what it means to own a national resource in common for the benefit of us all, and it is these easterners who are leading the charge to buy up and sell off our country’s heritage in Yellowstone National Park. But I am sad to report that it is my fellow Montanans who are right up there at the front of the line, negotiating leases for every possible money-making scheme. There is a man who wants to construct an electric elevator to transport visitors, for a hefty fee of course, up and down the Yellowstone canyon and, to demonstrate its feasibility, he has constructed a working model which he has on display in the hotel lobby. Another is negotiating a lifetime lease on Dot Island where he plans to deposit a small herd of domesticated bison, which he has purchased for this purpose from Charles Goodnight, a Texas rancher. The beasts are already on their way and are to be corralled by the lake in the morning. And then there is an architect proposing to build a large log and stone lodge on the grounds adjoining the Old Faithful geyser. Yet another is looking to lease the rights to a hot springs where he will construct a private swimming pool. All sorts of harebrained schemes are being considered. There is even some foreigner bargaining for the right to personally eliminate from the Park cougars, wolves, and other vermin as he calls them. I fear avarice and greed do not recognize state or even national boundaries.

  Of course the railroad is right there in the middle of it all. In the lobby, surveys have been mounted along with artists’ sketches to prove that, by damming the Yellowstone River, the railroad can generate more than adequate power to fuel all sorts of improvements, including their proposed electric rail line which will carry passengers from the northern entrance and through the Park as it stops at each major attraction. That it will also be used to carry ore from Cooke City is seldom discussed.

  If there were any doubt about the need for such a service, the railroad has made a practice of transporting the dignitaries in great style and comfort by private car to the Cinnabar station, at which point they are herded like cattle into the worst wagons in the fleet and plunged down narrow canyon roads, brakes shrieking, horses stumbling, and then back up the steepest hills. One such incline has been dubbed the Devil’s Stairway, since all are forced to get out and walk, even the women, because the horses cannot manage the climb with both the passengers and their luggage on board. Those with wives in attendance are now particularly well disposed to the railroad’s plans I am told. It is all very sad.

  Forgive me for only corresponding when I am full of bad news and trouble but I so badly need someone to whom I can confide. If Bill Gleick were here I would talk to him, but so far I have had little luck getting his attention, much less gaining his assurances that he will join us in the Park upon his return, which should be any day now. Perhaps he knows I would simply burden him with my sorrows if he were in the Park to hear them.

  I can only hope that President Healey has not also learned of our setbacks here. If he discovers them, he might insist that we all travel back to campus under his command. That most certainly would be more than I could withstand.

  Please put in a good word for me to whomever it is you pray. I am desperate and need all the help that you can muster.

  All my love,

  Howard

  Lester King

  Lake Hotel

  Yellowstone National Park

  July 4, 1898

  Dear Jessica,

  I am writing to you this morning, rather than to the Bartrams, to avoid any misunderstandings or concerns. If I were to write to Alexandria’s family at this point in time, I would either overwhelm them with the truth or lie to them with such transparency that they would fear the worst. Alex’s situation here is nothing for them to fear. It is loathsome, perhaps, but not, I think, perilous.

  I arrived at the hotel near Alex’s camp late in the day. It had been raining, a steady downpour, but since I was anxious to see Alex, I ventured out. As I set forth, the rain let up, but still the sky and trees and ground were damp and cold and the muck underfoot clumped to my boots, making it difficult to walk.

  I trudged along a well-worn path from the hotel until I came to a muddy clearing, at the center of which a man, huddled under a greasy tarpaulin, struggled to start a fire. The man did not look up as I entered the clearing, but arranged and rearranged the wood in a futile attempt to find just the right configuration to foil the dampness.

  To his left, a large hospital tent, missing half of its hardware, slumped against the side of a tree. In front of the tent, a small, filthy Chinaman stirred dishes in a pot, upon the surface of which floated the greasy remains of the previous meal. The Chinaman kept careful watch of me through narrow, suspicious eyes but otherwise did not acknowledge my approach.

  Under a camp table next to the Chinaman, a raven scavenged for crumbs until it, too, saw me, at which point it let out a brief shrill alarm and disappeared into a fly tent pitched off to one side of the clearing. From this tent yet another man, wrapped in a thin woolen blanket, emerged.

  It was to this man that I announced myself, and asked after Alex. He, too, was suspicious, and queried me about my business. I explained that I was a friend, and he pointed me to a small cavalry shelter tent on the opposite side of the campsite. I could sense him watching as I mucked through the clearing, lifted the flap, and stooped down to peer into its dark confines. The tent was empty except for a simple cot, blanket, and tattered buffalo hide, upon which were stacked, almost to the low ceiling, Alex’s books and supplies to keep them out of the rain.

  It was then that I addressed myself to the man at the fire, which had now started to sizzle and smoke if not outright burst into flame. This man’s indifferent stare turned on me from behind a cloud of tobacco smoke. I explained I was looking for Alex. Miss Bartram. I was a friend.

  Like the other man, he did not have any idea where she might be. Someone had mentioned at dinner that bears were feeding on fish where the river spills into the lake, and our Miss B, he referred to her thus, might be down there observing them. Miss B, as he insisted on calling her, is determined to see bears in the wild, outside of those which habituate the hotel dump site, he informed me.

  Is it any wonder that Alex claims to be happy here! No one is paying a bit of attention to her, or in any way tracking her activities. She was forever complaining about the restrictions of the university and the routine of the laboratories. Here she has complete freedom of movement. That alone should be reason for concern, given the conditions under which she is living.

  I never did locate her that evening. It was getting dark and the rain was starting up again in cold, heavy sheets, so rather than venture into unknown territory, I resigned myself to the hotel, and returned to her camp the next morning. When I re-entered the clearing, I again saw the fat man by the fire, which sizzled and popped against a thin but persistent rain. Next to him sat another figure, wrapped in a blanket. I assumed this was the gentleman I had spoken to the day before. When I approached, the figure turned and looked in my direction.

  Alex peered out from under the blanket, first confused and then surprised to see me. No one had bothered to inform her of my arrival the night before, and she had no reason to be expecting me. But when she realized I was indeed standing there, asking after her, she was pleased, not so much to see me, I admit it, but for me to see her there, huddled next to a damp fire with a fat man smoking a pipe in the rain.

  I must tell you, Jessica, she looked terrible. Thin, brown, weary, her hair unkempt and hanging in limp ringlets around her face and down her back. And she was filthy, smelling of grease, pine, and woodsmoke. Everyone talks about the warm bathing holes in Yellowstone National Park. I could not help at that moment but wonder when she has had an opportunity to partake of them. And yet, in spite of the grime and weariness, when she saw me looking down at her, her eyes, her mouth, her cheeks glowed with such pride and pleasure, even I was happy to see her there, in spite of the primitive conditions in which she was living.

&
nbsp; Of course, I took her at once to the hotel. She did not resist, claiming that, given the weather, my visit was convenient. She used that word. But before we could leave, she went out of her way to secure permission from the other man, the one in the tent. He consented, citing not my visit but the weather. He then suggested she stay for the weekend, and enjoy the holiday and the planned celebrations. It was clear he made the offer with some reluctance, but he again mentioned the weather and he, too, used the word convenient.

  I booked Alex a room, arranged for some clean, dry clothes, ordered a bath and toiletries for her personal use, and waited for her in the lobby, where I was joined by the cavalryman who had befriended me upon my arrival in the Park. Joining us as well was Philip Aber, a scientist from the Smithsonian, who is providing the financial support for the botanical expedition and its activities. When I mentioned my short visits to the camp, Aber did not even try to conceal his contempt for the conditions under which the field work is being conducted, and his professional reservations about its leadership. In fact, once his wife and family arrive in the Park, Aber told me he is planning to end support for the expedition. When I asked him when he was expecting his family, he ignored the question, asking instead about my work at Cornell.

  We sat there, the three of us, talking and smoking and watching the black squall advance across the lake and rage against the windows of the hotel. Outside, travellers hurried up the hill and huddled under the hotel’s covered entry way, as their bags were unloaded from wagons and from a steamboat which docked at a landing on the lake. But even under the portico, these exhausted travellers found little relief since the wind whipped the rain and cold all around them, following them into the lobby and past the heavy hotel doors which, against the wind, were difficult to close. The travellers were all wet and weary and cold from their journeys, but they were shouting and laughing and joking and stomping the water and mud from their feet, excited to be in the midst of nature in such a wild and uncontrollable state.

  A red, two-wheeled buggy appeared outside the door, and a foreign count, who I met in passing when I first arrived in the Park, entered the hotel, followed by an entourage of men with trunks and boxes and other personal effects which were carried up the stairs to his rooms. Outside, the count’s pack of hunting dogs yapped and howled while two men fought to keep a piano, tied to the back of one of the wagons, erect in spite of the wind.

  With all the ensuing confusion and noise, I did not see Alex enter the lobby, nor did I see her join us at the table overlooking the lake until she was right there upon us. She greeted Captain Craighead and Philip Aber with a casual familiarity, and then took my hand for but a minute before joining us without the slightest hesitation or modesty.

  She looked better after bathing, changing, and cleaning and brushing her hair, but still you would be hard pressed to recognize her. It is not that she has lost weight so much as that she has become more sinewy, roughened or perhaps even toughened by the conditions under which she is living here. There seems to be an air of detachment, too, from common courtesies and civilities, which have been replaced by a wildness in her demeanor. It is as if she has been held captive against her wishes while living in the East and now that she is here in the Park, she has been released from civilization, and has returned to her true, wild nature.

  My companions excused themselves, Philip Aber more gracious in the excusing than Captain Craighead, I noticed, at which point Alex turned without a word and watched the rain beat against the windows. After a moment or two, she turned to me again, her face radiant. With the wind and rain wailing outside the glass, she asked if I did not think it beautiful.

  To be honest, I found the question distracting. I told her of our worry, her parents’ worry, of our concern for her life and her reputation. I wanted to tell her, too, that, based on what I had seen in her camp and the conditions there, our concerns were well founded. But she interrupted me with a laugh.

  She wants to have a reputation like Meriwether Lewis, Charles Darwin, and all the other Bartrams before her, she told me. She wants to understand this small piece of the world as well or better than they had understood theirs. The botanical specimens she had sent to me for safekeeping were but a small piece of the knowledge she had collected while in the Park, she informed me, and an even smaller fraction of what she planned to master before coming home in the fall.

  She told of just yesterday seeing a dragonfly dipping through the misty spray of a waterfall, the water on its wings reflecting the sunlight. She crept out onto the rocks to view it closer, and saw not one but two insects, one atop the other, dipping in and out of the sunlight. They alighted on a plant, at which point her watching startled them so one flew off, leaving the other to sit alone, drying its wings in the sun. The wings were gossamer, she used that word, and had one red spot on each corner. She laughed again and said that for the first time in her naturalizing career she felt a bit like a voyeur. She used that word, too. Then she told me that there was so much to do and see and learn and experience, and so little time left in the season in which to do it all. And then she surprised me again by taking both my hands into her own and telling me how good it was to see me.

  In her enthusiasm, a strand of hair had broken loose from its pins and had strayed across her cheek and mouth. I reached out and brushed it back away from her face. She grabbed my hand and kissed it on the palm, like a man would do to a woman in private. And then she laughed again, and proclaimed to anyone within hearing distance—we were, remember, sitting in the middle of a busy hotel lobby—that she was so happy and it was so good to be alive.

  Before I could respond, a tall cowboy walked up with the same casual familiarity with which Alex had joined my party earlier. He knew how anxious Alex was to see buffalo, he said, and he was helping a friend transport a small herd from the rail station in Cinnabar to Yellowstone Lake, where the animals will be barged to start a private reserve on an island. There is a half a dozen head, he informed us, and they will be unloading them into corrals down by the lake in the morning. He had horses if we were interested in riding down with him to see the beasts.

  Without hesitation and without consultation, Alex volunteered us both in spite of my protests. I have never been on a horse, and am not about to start now. And the back of a horse is no place for a lady. But Alex was resolute, and arranged for us to meet the cowboy and his friends before breakfast the next morning.

  At dinner, Alex’s good humor grew, buoyed by the bath, the warmth of the hotel, and, I would like to think, my unexpected company. She ate and drank with an insatiable ardor, and relayed story after story about the things she had seen, the people she had met, and the discoveries she had made about the world of science and about herself and other people.

  She told of a party of women she met at their first camp in Mammoth and, as she related the story, the women arrived at our table as if on cue, delighted to see Alex at the hotel, and intent on making sure she planned to attend the Independence Day ball and other planned festivities. Again, Alex volunteered us both, saying we would not miss it, in spite of the fact that her wardrobe was limited. The older woman, a Miss Zwinger, responded that she should not worry about such trifles. She used that word. Something suitable would be found for Alex to wear. The woman was certain of it.

  Alex looked at me, triumphant in her new friendships and full of passion for a world that, she claimed, she is experiencing for the first time. As the evening drew on, Alex’s enthusiasm for her new life continued to grow. At the same time I could sense my own passions retreating. I felt overwhelmed. Diminished somehow. By the end of the evening, I can admit to you alone, I was at a loss as to how to respond to her.

  This morning, rather than join me for breakfast, Alex has ventured off to see the buffalo unloaded at the steamboat harbor on the lake. She asked if I would like to join her and, when I declined, she kissed me, again in public, and clambered onto a horse in her skirts without the slightest hesitation or regret. She would be back, she
informed me, her hair already beginning to loosen and fall onto her shoulders as she rode away.

  So I am waiting for her here, uncertain what demands I will make of her, but more confident than ever that I need to make my demands known. It may be difficult to get her attention with all the activity here at the hotel, but I am resolute. Once I know her answer, I will then correspond with her parents. But not before. You may, in the meantime, want to let them know I have written to you and that I am in contact with their daughter.

  I thank you in advance for your discretion. You have been a good friend to us both, and we both need your friendship now more than ever.

  Yours,

  Lester King

  H. G. Merriam

  c/o Yellowstone Lake Hotel

  Yellowstone National Park

  July 4, 1898

  Mother:

  I am beginning to believe that you have supernatural powers or the ear of some divine entity. Either way, I am so grateful I may yet become a true believer! It is hard to imagine that it has only been a day since I last wrote, a mere 24 hours. But how the world has changed in that short period of time! Not only has the rain let up, and the sun come out bright and full of summer, but with the early morning sunlight came word that Bill Gleick has arrived at the Yellowstone Lake Hotel. And he has brought along Philip Aber’s wife who is here, I hope, to lure him back home. This is such excellent news that I have thrown financial caution to the wind and booked a room at the hotel for myself, at least for one night, so that I might spend time with Gleick strategizing how to best salvage our expedition in the Park.

  It is a perfect time to be in residence here, with the hotel staff and even the guests bustling here and there in preparation for the evening’s entertainment. Just a few hours before, such excitement and joviality would have only served to mock my own sense of despair about the future of our expedition, even my future in general, but now I find the commotion stimulating, even rejuvenating, and am committed to enjoying each and every one of the day’s activities to their fullest. Gleick has sent word that he cannot meet with me until after dinner, and I have just seen Philip Aber ride off on horseback to points unknown, so he is mercifully out of the way. I have, therefore, agreed to take part in a pre-celebration picnic planned by Miss Zwinger and her companions. They will be setting forth for some “secret place” they know of within the hour.