John G. Neihardt - The River and I
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John G. Neihardt >> The River and I
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THE RIVER AND I
_Other Books by_
JOHN G. NEIHARDT
INDIAN TALES AND OTHERS
POETIC VALUES
THE QUEST
THE SONG OF HUGH GLASS
THE SONG OF THE INDIAN WARS
THE SONG OF THREE FRIENDS
THE SPLENDID WAYFARING
TWO MOTHERS
COLLECTED POEMS
[Illustration: NIGHT IN CAMP.]
THE
RIVER AND
I
BY
JOHN G. NEIHARDT
_Illustrated
New Edition_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1927
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1910,
BY JOHN G. NEIHARDT.
Set up and electrotyped.
Reissued in new format, October, 1927.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE CORNWALL PRESS
TO
MY MOTHER
NOTE
The following account of a youthful adventure was written during the
winter of 1908, ran as a serial in _Putnam's Magazine_ the following
year, and appeared as a book in 1910, five years before "The Song of
Hugh Glass," the first piece of my Western Cycle. Many who have cared
for my narrative poems, feeling the relation between those and this
earlier avowal of an old love, have urged that "The River and I" be
reprinted.
J.G.N.
St. Louis, 1927.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE RIVER OF AN UNWRITTEN EPIC 1
II. SIXTEEN MILES OF AWE 22
III. HALF-WAY TO THE MOON 40
IV. MAKING A GETAWAY 65
V. THROUGH THE REGION OF WEIR 84
VI. GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS 113
VII. ON TO THE YELLOWSTONE 137
VIII. DOWN FROM THE YELLOWSTONE 165
ILLUSTRATIONS
Night in Camp _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
"Off on the Perilous Floods" 6
Barriers Formed before Him 7
The Boats Wrecked in an Ice Gorge 7
After the Spring Break-Up 18
"Hole-in-the-Wall" Rock on the Upper Missouri 19
Palisades of the Upper Missouri 19
Great Falls from Cliff Above 30
Great Falls from the Front 31
"This was Benton" 52
Ruins of Old Fort Benton 52
The House of the Bourgeois 53
A Round-Up Outfit on the March 62
Joe 62
Montana Sheep 63
A Montana Wool-Freighter 63
The "Atom I" under Construction 74
The Cable Ferry Towed Us Out 74
Laid Up with a Broken Rudder 75
"Atom" Sailing Up-Stream in a Head Wind 86
Typical Rapids on Upper Missouri 87
Wolf Point, the First Town in 500 Miles 98
Entrance to the Bad Lands 99
Fresh Meat! 110
Supper! 111
"Walking" Boats over Shallows 126
Typical Upper Missouri River Reach 126
The Mouth of the James 127
Reveille! 142
The Pen and Key Ranch 143
Assiniboine Indian Chief 154
Assiniboine Indian Camp 155
On the Hurricane Deck of the "Expansion";
Capt. Marsh Third from the Left 166
Fort Union in 1837 167
Site of Old Fort Union 167
Boats Laid Up for the Winter at Washburn, N.D. 178
Washburn, N.D. 178
The Landing at Bismarck, N.D. 179
The Yankton Landing in the Old Days 192
"Atom II" Landing at Sioux City 193
THE RIVER AND I
THE RIVER AND I
CHAPTER I
THE RIVER OF AN UNWRITTEN EPIC
It was Carlyle--was it not?--who said that all great works produce an
unpleasant impression on first acquaintance. It is so with the Missouri
River. Carlyle was not, I think, speaking of rivers; but he was speaking
of masterpieces--and so am I.
It makes little difference to me whether or not an epic goes at a
hexameter gallop through the ages, or whether it chooses to be a flood
of muddy water, ripping out a channel from the mountains to the sea. It
is merely a matter of how the great dynamic force shall express itself.
I have seen trout streams that I thought were better lyrics than I or
any of my fellows can ever hope to create. I have heard the moaning of
rain winds among mountain pines that struck me as being equal, at least,
to _Adonais_. I have seen the solemn rearing of a mountain peak into the
pale dawn that gave me a deep religious appreciation of my significance
in the Grand Scheme, as though I had heard and understood a parable from
the holy lips of an Avatar. And the vast plains of my native country are
as a mystic scroll unrolled, scrawled with a cabalistic writ of infinite
things.
In the same sense, I have come to look upon the Missouri as something
more than a stream of muddy water. It gave me my first big boy dreams.
It was my ocean. I remember well the first time I looked upon my
turbulent friend, who has since become as a brother to me. It was from a
bluff at Kansas City. I know I must have been a very little boy, for the
terror I felt made me reach up to the saving forefinger of my father,
lest this insane devil-thing before me should suddenly develop an
unreasoning hunger for little boys. My father seemed as tall as
Alexander--and quite as courageous. He seemed to fear it almost not at
all. And I should have felt little surprise had he taken me in his arms
and stepped easily over that mile or so of liquid madness. He talked
calmly about it--quite calmly. He explained at what angle one should
hold one's body in the current, and how one should conduct one's legs
and arms in the whirlpools, providing one should swim across.
_Swim across!_ Why, it took a giant even to talk that way! For the
summer had smitten the distant mountains, and the June floods ran. Far
across the yellow swirl that spread out into the wooded bottom-lands, we
watched the demolition of a little town. The siege had reached the
proper stage for a sally, and the attacking forces were howling over the
walls. The sacking was in progress. Shacks, stores, outhouses suddenly
developed a frantic desire to go to St. Louis. It was a weird retreat in
very bad order. A cottage with a garret window that glared like the eye
of a Cyclops, trembled, rocked with the athletic lift of the flood, made
a panicky plunge into a convenient tree; groaned, dodged, and took off
through the brush like a scared cottontail. I felt a boy's pity and
sympathy for those houses that got up and took to their legs across the
yellow waste. It did not seem fair. I have since experienced the same
feeling for a jack-rabbit with the hounds a-yelp at its heels.
But--to _swim_ this thing! To fight this cruel, invulnerable, resistless
giant that went roaring down the world with a huge uprooted oak tree in
its mouth for a toothpick! This yellow, sinuous beast with hell-broth
slavering from its jaws! This dare-devil boy-god that sauntered along
with a town in its pocket, and a steepled church under its arm for a
moment's toy! Swim _this_?
For days I marvelled at the magnificence of being a fullgrown man,
unafraid of big rivers.
But the first sight of the Missouri River was not enough for me. There
was a dreadful fascination about it--the fascination of all huge and
irresistible things. I had caught my first wee glimpse into the
infinite; I was six years old.
Many a lazy Sunday stroll took us back to the river; and little by
little the dread became less, and the wonder grew--and a little love
crept in. In my boy heart I condoned its treachery and its giant sins.
For, after all, it sinned through excess of strength, not through
weakness. And that is the eternal way of virile things. We watched the
steamboats loading for what seemed to me far distant ports. (How the
world shrinks!) A double stream of "roosters" coming and going at a
dog-trot rushed the freight aboard; and at the foot of the gang-plank
the mate swore masterfully while the perspiration dripped from the point
of his nose.
And then--the raucous whistles blew. They reminded me of the lions
roaring at the circus. The gang-plank went up, the hawsers went in. The
snub nose of the steamer swung out with a quiet majesty. Now she feels
the urge of the flood, and yields herself to it, already dwindled to
half her size. The pilot turns his wheel--he looks very big and quiet
and masterful up there. The boat veers round; bells jangle. And now the
engine wakens in earnest. She breathes with spurts of vapor!
Breathed? No, it was sighing; for about it all clung an inexplicable
sadness for me--the sadness that clings about all strong and beautiful
things that must leave their moorings and go very, very far away. (I
have since heard it said that river boats are not beautiful!) My throat
felt as though it had smoke in it. I felt that this queenly thing really
wanted to stay; for far down the muddy swirl where she dwindled,
dwindled, I heard her sobbing hoarsely.
Off on the perilous flood for "faerie lands forlorn"! It made the world
seem almost empty and very lonesome.
And then the dog-days came, and I saw my river tawny, sinewy, gaunt--a
half-starved lion. The long dry bars were like the protruding ribs of
the beast when the prey is scarce, and the ropy main current was like
the lean, terrible muscles of its back.
In the spring it had roared; now it only purred. But all the while I
felt in it a dreadful economy of force, just as I have since felt it in
the presence of a great lean jungle-cat at the zoo. Here was a thing
that crouched and purred--a mewing but terrific thing. Give it an
obstacle to overcome--fling it something to devour; and lo! the crushing
impact of its leap!
And then again I saw it lying very quietly in the clutch of a bitter
winter--an awful hush upon it, and the white cerement of the snow flung
across its face. And yet, this did not seem like death; for still one
felt in it the subtle influence of a tremendous personality. It slept,
but sleeping it was still a giant. It seemed that at any moment the
sleeper might turn over, toss the white cover aside and, yawning,
saunter down the valley with its thunderous seven-league boots. And
still, back and forth across this heavy sleeper went the pigmy wagons of
the farmers taking corn to market!
[Illustration: "OFF ON THE PERILOUS FLOODS."]
[Illustration: BARRIERS FORMED BEFORE HIM.]
[Illustration: THE BOATS WRECKED IN AN ICE GORGE.]
But one day in March the far-flung arrows of the geese went over. _Honk!
honk!_ A vague, prophetic sense crept into the world out of
nowhere--part sound, part scent, and yet too vague for either. Sap
seeped from the maples. Weird mist-things went moaning through the
night. And then, for the first time, I saw my big brother win a fight!
For days, strange premonitory noises had run across the shivering
surface of the ice. Through the foggy nights, a muffled intermittent
booming went on under the wild scurrying stars. Now and then a staccato
crackling ran up the icy reaches of the river, like the sequent
bickering of Krags down a firing line. Long seams opened in the
disturbed surface, and from them came a harsh sibilance as of a line of
cavalry unsheathing sabres.
But all the while, no show of violence--only the awful quietness with
deluge potential in it. The lion was crouching for the leap.
Then one day under the warm sun a booming as of distant big guns began.
Faster and louder came the dull shaking thunders, and passed swiftly up
and down, drawling into the distance. Fissures yawned, and the sound of
the grumbling black water beneath came up. Here and there the surface
lifted--bent--broke with shriekings, groanings, thunderings. And
then----
The giant turned over, yawned and got to his feet, flinging his arms
about him! Barriers formed before him. Confidently he set his massive
shoulders against them--smashed them into little blocks, and went on
singing, shouting, toward the sea. It was a glorious victory. It made me
very proud of my big brother. And yet all the while I dreaded him--just
as I dread the caged tiger that I long to caress because he is so strong
and so beautiful.
Since then I have changed somewhat, though I am hardly as tall, and
certainly not so courageous as Alexander. But I have felt the sinews of
the old yellow giant tighen about my naked body. I have been bent upon
his hip. I have presumed to throw against his Titan strength the craft
of man. I have often swum in what seemed liquid madness to my boyhood.
And we have become acquainted through battle. No friends like fair foes
reconciled!
And I have been panting on his bars, while all about me went the lisping
laughter of my brother. For he has the strength of a god, the headlong
temper of a comet; but along with these he has the glad, mad,
irresponsible spirit of a boy. Thus ever are the epic things.
The Missouri is unique among rivers. I think God wished to teach the
beauty of a virile soul fighting its way toward peace--and His precept
was the Missouri. To me, the Amazon is a basking alligator; the Tiber is
a dream of dead glory; the Rhine is a fantastic fairy-tale; the Nile a
mummy, periodically resurrected; the Mississippi, a convenient
geographical boundary line; the Hudson, an epicurean philosopher.
But the Missouri--my brother--is the eternal Fighting Man!
I love things that yearn toward far seas: the singing Tennysonian brooks
that flow by "Philip's farm" but "go on forever"; the little Ik Walton
rivers, where one may "study to be quiet and go a-fishing"! The
Babylonian streams by which we have all pined in captivity; the
sentimental Danube's which we can never forget because of "that night in
June"; and at a very early age I had already developed a decent respect
for the verbose manner in which the "waters come down at Lodore."
But the Missouri is more than a sentiment--even more than an epic. It is
the symbol of my own soul, which is, I surmise, not unlike other souls.
In it I see flung before me all the stern world-old struggle become
materialized. Here is the concrete representation of the earnest desire,
the momentarily frustrate purpose, the beating at the bars, the
breathless fighting of the half-whipped but never-to-be-conquered
spirit, the sobbing of the wind-broken runner, the anger, the madness,
the laughter. And in it all the unwearying urge of a purpose, the
unswerving belief in the peace of a far away ocean.
If in a moment of despair I should reel for a breathing space away from
the fight, with no heart for battle-cries, and with only a desire to
pray, I could do it in no better manner than to lift my arms above the
river and cry out into the big spaces: "You who somehow
understand--behold this river! It expresses what is voiceless in me. It
prays for me!"
Not only in its physical aspect does the Missouri appeal to the
imagination. From Three Forks to its mouth--a distance of three thousand
miles--this zigzag watercourse is haunted with great memories. Perhaps
never before in the history of the world has a river been the
thoroughfare of a movement so tremendously epic in its human appeal, so
vastly significant in its relation to the development of man. And in the
building of the continent Nature fashioned well the scenery for the
great human story that was to be enacted here in the fullness of years.
She built her stage on a large scale, taking no account of miles; for
the coming actors were to be big men, mighty travelers, intrepid
fighters, laughers at time and space. Plains limited only by the rim of
sky; mountains severe, huge, tragic as fate; deserts for the trying of
strong spirits; grotesque volcanic lands--dead, utterly
ultra-human--where athletic souls might struggle with despair; impetuous
streams with their rapids terrible as Scylla, where men might go down
fighting: thus Nature built the stage and set the scenes. And that the
arrangements might be complete, she left a vast tract unfinished, where
still the building of the world goes on--a place of awe in which to feel
the mighty Doer of Things at work. Indeed, a setting vast and weird
enough for the coming epic. And as the essence of all story is struggle,
tribes of wild fighting men grew up in the land to oppose the coming
masters; and over the limitless wastes swept the blizzards.
I remember when I first read the words of Vergil beginning _Ubi tot
Simois_, "where the Simois rolls along so many shields and helmets and
strong bodies of brave men snatched beneath its floods." The far-seeing
sadness of the lines thrilled me; for it was not of the little stream of
the _AEneid_ that I thought while the Latin professor quizzed me as to
constructions, but of that great river of my own epic country--the
Missouri. Was I unfair to old Vergil, think you? As for me, I think I
flattered him a bit! And in this modern application, the ancient lines
ring true. For the Missouri from Great Falls to its mouth is one long
grave of men and boats. And such men!
It is a time-honored habit to look back through the ages for the epic
things. Modern affairs seem a bit commonplace to some of us. A horde of
semi-savages tears down a town in order to avenge the theft of a
faithless wife who was probably no better than she should have been--and
we have the _Iliad_. A petty king sets sail for his native land, somehow
losing himself ten years among the isles of Greece--and we have the
_Odyssey_. (I would back a Missouri River "rat" to make the distance in
a row boat within a few months!) An Argive captain returns home after an
absence of ten years to find his wife interested overmuch in a friend
who went not forth to battle; a wrangle ensues; the tender spouse
finishes her lord with an axe--and you have the _Agamemnon_. (To-day we
should merely have a sensational trial, and hysterical scareheads in the
newspapers.) Such were the ancient stories that move us all--sordid
enough, be sure, when you push them hard for fact. But time and genius
have glorified them. Not the deeds, but Homer and AEschylus and the
hallowing years are great.
We no longer write epics--we live them. To create an epic, it has been
said somewhere, the poet must write with the belief that the immortal
gods are looking over his shoulder.
We no longer prostrate ourselves before the immortal gods. We have long
since discovered the divinity within ourselves, and so we have flung
across the continents and the seas the visible epics of will.
The history of the American fur trade alone makes the Trojan War look
like a Punch and Judy show! and the Missouri River was the path of the
conquerors. We have the facts--but we have not Homer.
An epic story in its essence is the story of heroic men battling, aided
or frustrated by the superhuman. And in the fur trade era there was no
dearth of battling men, and the elements left no lack of superhuman
obstacles.
I am more thrilled by the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition than
by the tale of Jason. John Colter, wandering three years in the
wilderness and discovering the Yellowstone Park, is infinitely more
heroic to me that Theseus. Alexander Harvey makes AEneas look like a
degenerate. It was Harvey, you know, who fell out with the powers at
Fort Union, with the result that he was ordered to report at the
American Fur Company's office at St. Louis before he could be reinstated
in the service. This was at Christmas time--Christmas of a Western
winter. The distance was seventeen hundred miles, as the crow flies.
"Give me a dog to carry my blankets," said he, "and by God I'll report
before the ice goes out!" He started afoot through the hostile tribes
and blizzards. He reported at St. Louis early in March, returning to
Union by the first boat out that year. And when he arrived at the Fort,
he called out the man who was responsible for the trouble, and quietly
killed him. That is the stern human stuff with which you build realms.
What could not Homer do with such a man? And when one follows him
through his recorded career, even Achilles seems a bit ladylike beside
him!
The killing of Carpenter by his treacherous friend, Mike Fink, would
easily make a whole book of hexameters--with a nice assortment of gods
and goddesses thrown in. There was a woman in the case--a half-breed.
Well, this half-breed woman fascinates me quite as much as she whose
face "launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium"!
In ancient times the immortal gods scourged nations for impieties; and,
as we read, we feel the black shadow of inexorable fate moving through
the terrific gloom of things. But the smallpox scourge that broke out at
Fort Union in 1837, sweeping with desolation through the prairie tribes,
moves me more than the storied catastrophes of old. It was a Reign of
Terror. Even Larpenteur's bald statement of it fills me with the fine
old Greek sense of fate. Men sickened at dawn and were dead at sunset.
Every day a cartload or two of corpses went over the bluff into the
river; and men became reckless. Larpenteur and his friend joked daily
about the carting of the gruesome freight. They felt the irresistible,
and they laughed at it, since struggle was out of the question. Some
drank deeply and indulged in hysterical orgies. Some hollowed out their
own graves and waited patiently beside them for the hidden hand to
strike. At least fifteen thousand died--Audubon says one hundred and
fifty thousand; and the buffalo increased rapidly--because the hunters
were few.
Would not such a story--here briefly sketched--move old Sophocles?
The story of the half-breed woman--a giantess--who had a dozen sons, has
about it for me all the glamour of an ancient yarn. The sons were
free-trappers, you know, and, incidentally, thieves and murderers. (I
suspect some of our classic heroes were as much!) But they were
doubtless living up to the light that was in them, and they were game to
the finish. So was the old woman; they called her "the mother of the
devils." Trappers from the various posts organized to hunt them down,
and the mother and the sons barricaded their home. The fight was a hard
one. One by one the "devils" fell fighting about their mother. And then
the besieging party fired the house. With all her sons wounded or dead,
the old woman sallied forth. She fought like a grizzly and went down
like a heroine.
A sordid, brutal story? Ah, but it was life! Fling about this story of
savage mother-love the glamour of time and genius, and it will move you!
And the story of old Hugh Glass! Is it not fateful enough to be the
foundation of a tremendous AEschylean drama? A big man he was--old and
bearded. A devil to fight, a giant to endure, and an angel to forgive!
He was in the Leavenworth campaign against the Aricaras, and afterward
he went as a hunter with the Henry expedition. He had a friend--a mere
boy--and these two were very close. One day Glass, who was in advance of
the party, beating up the country for game, fell in with a grizzly; and
when the main party came up, he lay horribly mangled with the bear
standing over him. They killed the bear, but the old man seemed done
for; his face had all the features scraped off, and one of his legs went
wabbly when they lifted him.
It was merely a matter of one more man being dead, so the expedition
pushed on, leaving the young friend with several others to see the old
man under ground. But the old man was a fighter and refused to die,
though he was unconscious: held on stubbornly for several days, but it
seemed plain enough that he would have to let go soon. So the young
friend and the others left the old man in the wilderness to finish up
the job by himself. They took his weapons and hastened after the main
party, for the country was hostile.
But one day old Glass woke up and got one of his eyes open. And when he
saw how things stood, he swore to God he would live, merely for the sake
of killing his false friend. He crawled to a spring near by, where he
found a bush of ripe bull-berries. He waited day after day for strength,
and finally started out to _crawl_ a small matter of one hundred miles
to the nearest fort. And he did it, too! Also he found his friend after
much wandering--and forgave him.
Fancy AEschylus working up that story with the Furies for a chorus and
Nemesis appearing at intervals to nerve the old hero!
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