It must have been close to twenty years ago that I first started to boat from the head of the Yellowstone to the Gulf of Mexico. On that occasion I covered something over a hundred miles from the source of the Yellowstone—a good part of it on the i ... Read more

It must have been close to twenty years ago that I first started to boat from the head of the Yellowstone to the Gulf of Mexico. On that occasion I covered something over a hundred miles from the source of the Yellowstone—a good part of it on the ice, on the bank, or floundering in the water. As a start it was not auspicious, nor was it destined to be anything more than a start. Shrouded in the mists of comparative antiquity, the reason for my embarking on this voyage is only less obscure than my reason for failing to continue it. As nearly as I can figure it today, it was a series of tennis tournaments in Washington and British Columbia that lured me to the North-west in the first place. Then a hunting trip in eastern Washington merged into an enchanting interval of semi-vagabondage through the silver-lead mining camps of the Cœur d'Alene and the copper camps of Montana, at that time in the hey-day of their glory. From Butte to the Yellowstone was only a step. That it was still winter at those altitudes, and that the Park, under from ten to forty feet of snow, would not be opened to tourists for another two months, were only negligible incidentals. That deep snow, far from being a hindrance, actually facilitated travel over a rough country, I had learned the previous year in Alaska. I should have known better than to expect that permission would be granted me to make a tour of the Park out of season, and, as a matter of fact, it doubtless would not have been had I proceeded by the proper official channels via Washington. Knowing nothing of either propriety or officialdom at my then immature age (would that I could say the same today!), I simply journeyed jauntily up to Fort Yellowstone and told the U. S. Army officer in command that I was a writer on game protection, and that I wanted the loan of a pair of ski in order to fare forth and study the subject at first hand. When he asked me if I knew how to use ski, adding that he could not let me proceed if I did not, I replied that I did. Now each of these confident assertions was made with a mental reservation. I was really only a potential writer on game protection, just as I was only a potential ski-runner. I knew that I could write something about game protection, just as surely as I knew I could do something with the ski. As to just what I should write about game protection I was in some doubt, never having written about anything at all up to that time. Similarly, in the matter of the ski, never having seen a ski before. But I knew I could use them, for something, and hoped it would be as aids to linear progression over snow. Thanks to some previous experience with web snowshoes, I came through fairly well with the ski, but at the cost of many bumps and bruises and strained muscles. What it cost me to make good that game protection scribe boast would require some figuring. I recall that there was one old shark of an editor of a yellow-covered outdoor magazine in New York who quoted me advertising rates for the article I submitted him, but I believe we compromised by my taking twenty paid-in-advance subscriptions. Another editor sent me a bill for the cost of the cuts, and offered to include my own photograph—in evening clothes if desired—for five dollars extra. I still have several game protection articles on hand. It must have been sometime previous to the two or three weeks that I spent mushing about the valleys of the upper Yellowstone on the ice and snow that the idea came to me that it would be a nice thing to float down on the spring rise to the Missouri, the Mississippi and the Gulf. In any event, I knew that the thought came to me before arriving at the Park. I have a distinct recollection of pre-empting for my own use a big iron staple which some soldier had put in the mineral-charged water of Mammoth Hot Springs to acquire a frosty coating. I purposed driving it into the bow of my boat to bend the painter to. The boat I secured about ten miles down river from the Park boundary. The famous "Yankee Jim" gave it to me. This may sound generous on Jim's part, but seeing the boat didn't belong to him it wasn't especially so. Nor was the craft really a boat, either. It had been built by a coal miner from Aldridge, with the intention of using it to float down the Yellowstone, Missouri and Mississippi to his childhood home in Hickman, Kentucky. It had done such strange things in the comparatively quiet ten-mile stretch below Gardiner that the miner abandoned it a good safe distance above "Yankee Jim's" Canyon, went back to Cinnabar and bought a ticket to Hickman by rail. I knocked the top-heavy house off the queer contraption, and in, under and round about the shell-like residue bumped and battered my way through the Canyon, and about twenty miles beyond. The last five miles were made astride of the only three remaining planks. I walked the ties the intervening fifteen miles to Livingston. It was undoubtedly my intention to build a real boat in Livingston and proceed on my voyage before the spring rise went down. Just why I came to falter in my enterprise I can't quite remember, but I am almost certain it was because the local semi-pro baseball team of the Montana League needed a first baseman the same day that the editor of the local paper was sent to the Keeley Institute with delirium tremens. Never having been an editor before, there was a glamour about the name that I must confess hardly surrounds it in my mind today. I can see now, therefore, how I came to fall when a somewhat mixed delegation waited upon me with the proposal that I edit the Enterprise five days of the week and play ball Saturdays and Sundays. I would fall for the same thing again today, that is, without the editor stuff. At any rate, summer and the tide of the Yellowstone waxed and began to wane without my boating farther seaward than the timberless bluffs of Big Timber, to where, with a couple of companions, I went slap-banging in a skiff one Sunday morning when the team was scheduled for a game there in the afternoon. Finally, it seems to me, it was tennis and some challenge mugs that had to be defended that took me back to Washington, and so to California. I was destined to form more or less intimate boating acquaintance with practically every one of the great rivers of South America, Asia, and Africa before returning to resume my interrupted voyage down the Yellowstone. Less