THROUGH GLACIER PARK, Seeing America First With Howard Eaton

FOREWORD



There are many to whom new places are only new pictures. But, after much wandering, this thing I have learned, and I wish I had learned it sooner: that travel is a matter, not only of seeing, but of doing.

It is much more than that. It is a matter of new human contacts. It is not of places, but of people. What are regions but the setting for life? The desert, without its Arabs, is but the place that God forgot.

To travel, then, is to do, not only to see. To travel best is to be of the sportsmen of the road. To take a chance, and win; to feel the glow of muscles too long unused; to sleep on the ground at night and find it soft; to eat, not because it is time to eat, but because one's body is clamoring for food; to drink where every stream and river is pure and cold; to get close to the earth and see the stars — this is travel.

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An excerpt from the beginning of:

I. THE ADVENTURERS

This is about a three-hundred mile trip across the Rocky Mountains on horseback with Howard Eaton. It is about fishing, and cool nights around a camp-fire, and long days on the trail. It is about a party of all sorts, from everywhere, of men and women, old and young, experienced folk and novices, who had yielded to a desire to belong to the sportsmen of the road. And it is by way of being advice also. Your true convert must always preach.

If you are normal and philosophical; if you love your country; if you like bacon, or will eat it anyhow; if you are willing to learn how little you count in the eternal scheme of things; if you are prepared, for the first day or two, to be able to locate every muscle in your body and a few extra ones that seem to have crept in and are crowding, go ride in the Rocky Mountains and save your soul.

If you are of the sort that must have fresh cream in its coffee, and its steak rare, and puts its hair up in curlers at night, and likes to talk gossip in great empty places, don't go. Don't read this. Sit in a moving-picture theater and do your traveling.

But if you go—!

It will not matter that you have never ridden before. The horses are safe and quiet. The Western saddle is designed to keep a cow-puncher in his seat when his rope is around an infuriated steer. Fall off! For the first day or two, dear traveler, you will have to be extracted! After that you will learn that swing of the right leg which clears the saddle, the slicker, a camera, night clothing, soap, towel, toothbrush, blanket, sweater, fishing-rod, fly-hook, comb, extra boots, and sunburn lotion, and enables you to alight in a vertical position and without jarring your spine up into your skull.

Now and then the United States Government does a very wicked thing. Its treatment of the Indians, for instance, and especially of the Blackfeet, in Montana. But that's another story. The point is that, to offset these lapses, there are occasional Government idealisms. Our National Parks are the expression of such an ideal.

I object to the word "park," especially in connection with the particular National Reserve in northwestern Montana known as Glacier Park. A park is a civilized spot, connected in all our minds with neat paths and clipped lawns. I am just old enough to remember when it meant "Keep-Off-the-Grass" signs also, and my childhood memories of the only park I knew are inseparably connected with a one-armed policeman with a cane and an exaggerated sense of duty.

There are no "Keep-Off-the-Grass" signs in Glacier Park, no graveled paths and clipped lawns. It is the wildest part of America. If the Government had not preserved it, it would have preserved itself. No homesteader would ever have invaded its rugged magnificence or dared its winter snows. But you and I would not have seen it.

True, so far most niggardly provision has been made. The Government offices are a two-roomed wooden cabin. The national warehouse is a barn. To keep it up, to build trails and roads, to give fire protection for its fourteen hundred square miles of great forest, with many millions of dollars worth of timber, are provided thirteen rangers! Thirteen rangers, and an annual allowance less than half of what is given to Yellowstone Park,—with this difference, too, that Yellowstone Park has had money spent on it for thirty-two years while Glacier Park is in the making! It is one of the merry little jests we put over now and then. For seventy-five miles in the north of the park there is no ranger. Government property, you see, and no protection.

But no niggardliness on the part of the Government can cloud the ideal which is the raison d'être for Glacier Park. Here is the last stand of the Rocky Mountain sheep, the Rocky Mountain goat. Here are antelope and deer, black and grizzly bears, mountain lions, trout...