The River and I

walk up river from Benton, the head of Missouri River navigation, to w

old you that these were not rain clouds. The very thought of rain came to you with the vagueness of some birth-surviving memory of a former time. You looked far up and out to the westward and caught the glint of snow on the higher peaks. But the sight was unconvincing; it w

nism with the idyllic, and the idyllic nourishes only in a land of frequent showers. Theocritus and prickly pears are not compatible. Yet

lls, wherein one might lounge and dawdle over Hazlitt, yet we knew how crisscro

tical plunge of sixty feet. This is the Black Eagle Falls, presumably named so

dragging silly little trolley cars about a straggling town. Also, he hobnobs continually with a sprawling, brawling, bad-breathed smelter, as no respectable Titan should do. And on top of it all-and this was the straw that broke the back of my sentimental camel-he allows them to maintain a park on the cliffs above him, where the merest white-skinned, counter-jumping pigmy may come of a Sun

e was made-four hundred yards of writhing, liquid sinew, strenuously idle, magnificently worthless, flinging meaningless thunders over the vast arid plain, splendidly empty under sun and stars! I saw him as La Verendrye must have seen him-busy only at the divine business of being a giant. And for a moment

nders for a moment: "Don't you worry about me, little man. It's all a joke, and I don't mind. Only to-morrow and then another to-morrow, and there w

d descended from the summit of the cliff (as well as from my point of view) to th

eems too bad, and I have long bewailed it almost as a personal g

ouldn't color one Easter egg with all the gorgeous sunsets of the w

wide and two feet deep would deserve a little exploitation. Down East they would have a great white sprawling hotel built close by it wherein one could drink spring water (at a quarter the quart), with half a pathology pasted on the bottle as a label. But nobody s

. Incidentally, this stretch of river is said to be capable

here a thousand feet of river takes a drop of fifty feet over a precipice regular as a wall of

to get acquainted with this weaver of iridescent nothings who knew so well the divine art of doing n

r of a city light that snuffs out moon and stars for tired scurrying folks: but the opalescent mist-drift of the Rainbow Falls wove heavens for me in its sheen, and through its whirlwind rifts and crystal flaws, far reaches opened up with all the heart's desire at the other end. You shut your ey

the right bank almost opposite the place of first observation, this fall is nearly a mile in length, being an unbroken sheet for that distance. This one, also, does nothing at all, and in a beautifully

p in the hush of the burning noon. Thunders in a desert, and no cloud! For an hour we swung along the trail, and ever the thunders increased-like the undertone of the surf when the sea whitens. We were appr

ledge with the thunders beneath us. Damp gusts beat upward over the blistering scarp of the cliff. I lay down, and crawling to the edge, looked over. Two hundred feet below me-s

saw the long bent crest-shimmering with the changing colors of a peacock's back-smooth as a lake when all winds sleep; and then the mighty river was snuffed out in gulfs of angry gray. Capriciou

ls from C

ls from t

untain, or a flower, or a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, or an ocean, or a thunderstorm has to do in this world. And it was doing it right out in the middle of a desert, bleak, sun-leprosied, forbidding, with only the stars and the moon and the sun and a cliff-swallow or two to behold. Thundering out its message into the waste places, careless of audiences-like a Master! Bully, grizzled old Master-Bard singing-as m

Sophocles when Bill, the little Cornishman, ran in betwe

It's the difference between poetry and horse-power, dithyrambics and dynamos, Keats and Kipling! What is the energy exerted by the Great Falls of the Missouri? How many horse-

pe to the edge of the crystal broil. There was a strange exhilaration about it-a novel sense of discovering a natur

rail. There are no 'busses running and you can't buy a sandwich or a peanut or a glass of beer wi

ift; descended to the level of the lower basin, where a soaking fog made us shiver; pushed through a dripping, oozing, au

notice how a lone coyote on a snow-heaped prairie gives you a heartache, whereas the empty waste would only have exhilarated you? Always, it seem

xity; and, after all, it seemed much greater to be even a very little man, living largely, dying, some

very tall. And when a thunderstorm comes down upon the world out of the northwest, with jagged blades of fire ripping up the black bellies of the clouds, I know all about the heart of Attila

mfortably sitting in a willow chair on the broad veranda, one will read the signs on those cliffs-all about the best shoes to wear, and what particular pill o

steep trail, inaccessible for vehicles, leading upward in the direction of Benton. It was getting that time of day when even

us of a place called Goodale, theoretically existing on the Great Northern Railroad between Gr

the brakeman put me off there-by the name of Forest City. I remembered with misgivings how there wasn't a tree within something like four hundred miles. But I pushed that memory aside as a lying prophet. I believed in Goodale and beefsteak. Goodale would be a neat, quiet little town, set snugly in a verdant valley. We would come into it by sta

rd is cosier somehow)-right in the middle of the village there would b

e off the distance and paints the back trail gray. Goodale was a sort of Mecca. I thought of it with somethin

k-straight as a crow's flight. It was the railroad. We made a cross-cut for it, tumbling over gopher holes, plunging through sagebrush, scrambling over gullies that told the incredible tale of torrents having been there once. I ate quantities

t down for a moment and a shiver went up your spine. At noon I thought about all the lime-kilns I had e

memory system. So, as we put the ties behind us, I increased my order at that restaurant in the sweet little pedestrian's village of Goodale. "A couple of eggs on the side, waiter," I said half audibly to the petite woman in the white apron who served

said aloud, "lies Goodale." We went faster. We rounded t

ose of guiding hungry folks to the hospitable little village. We plunged on for an hour. Meanwhile my orders to the trim little woman in the white apron incr

. We went up to it, struck a matc

. Goodale was a sw

beside

uot

d the

al wreck, boun

evel sands str

dy with the white teeth and

me-it seemed a very brilliant one at the moment. I sat down and delivered myself of it to my companions, who also had lusted after the flesh-pots. "We have wronged that man with the information,"

m the T-bone portion of an unborn steer, served by the trim little lady of a hundred years hence, there in that potenti

at front bedroom, the ceiling of