Part 13

Here, you perceive, is the error, appearing simultaneously with the goat.

These sheep “live,” says the text in another place, “in greater numbers on that chain of mountains which forms the commencement of the woody country on the coast and passes the Columbia between the falls and rapids.” Accurate in everything save the name.

Next comes the observation (William Dunbar and Dr. Hunter) written on the Columbia River near the Dalles: “We here saw the skin of a mountain sheep, which they say lives among the rocks in the mountains; the skin was covered with white hair; the wool was long, thick, and coarse, with long, coarse hair on the top of the neck and on the back, resembling somewhat the bristles of a goat.”

This time, you see, they are on the very edge of getting the thing straight. But no; they recede again, after the following which seems to promise complete clearing up:--

“A Canadian, who had been much with the Indians to the westward, speaks of a wool-bearing animal larger than a sheep, the wool much mixed with hair, which he had seen in large flocks.”

April ten, 1806, the party is on its return journey. It has successfully wintered on the coast, and has now come up the Columbia again, fifty miles above Vancouver.

“While we were at breakfast one of the Indians offered us two sheepskins for sale; … the second was smaller … with the horns remaining.… The horns of the animal were black, smooth, and erect; they rise from the middle of the forehead, a little above the eyes, in a cylindrical form, to the height of four inches, where they are pointed.”

Here there is no mistake about the mistake; he describes a goat and calls it a sheep. Why he should do this when he had seen the bighorn constantly during his journey up the Missouri may possibly be thus explained: He says that he did not think the bighorn much like a sheep, and so, perhaps, the goat did not strike him as much like a goat; we know it happens to be an antelope. But however we account for this original mixing of names, it is easy to perceive how good a start the mixing got; and after reading the text of the old confusion, is it not odd and interesting to trace it down through the years, down through Yancey, to the front hall of the club? to find it cropping up among all sorts and conditions of men, now in a city and now on top of the Wind River Mountains, where it used to perplex me?

And this is only the popular side of it; the scholars have been just as mixed as Yancey. The scientific side of the story is picturesquely seen through the dynasty of Latin names successively lavished upon the goat.

The country at large first heard of the goat in 1806, when Thomas Jefferson accompanied his message to Congress about Lewis and Clark’s exploration with various documents, and among these the observations of William Dunbar and Dr. Hunter. Nine years later the eminent George Ord gave to the animal his first academic baptism, and he appeared as Ovis montana. Pretty soon M. de Blainville seems to have called him Antilope americana, and Rupicapra americana. By 1817 he was known as Mazama Sericea--which is wandering pretty wide of the family. Four years more, and he is plain Rocky Mountain sheep. Next follow Capra montana, Antilope lanigera, Capra Americana, and Haplocerus montanus. This last was beginning to look permanent, when it was discovered that somebody had for some time been styling the goat by a well-devised appellation, to wit, Oreamnus montanus. He goes by that now; and it may be doubted if any thief has more frequently employed an alias than this probably blameless animal. Such is the story of the confusion begun--we can only guess why--by Lewis and Clark, and not cleared up until our own day.

The goat is an animal far less wary than the sheep. His watch is concentrated upon approaches from below. All the hunter has to do is to get above him, to make at once for the summit of the ridge which he proposes to hunt, and the unsuspecting creature will never give you a thought. Upon my word, it is inexcusable to kill him, except for a specimen in a collection; he is so handsome, so harmless, and so stupid! And in his remoter haunts, where the nature of man is still a closed book to him, he “thinketh no evil”; he will stand looking at the hunter with a sedate interest in his large, deep brown eyes. The tenderfoot sportsman, it seems, will generally make his beginnings as a maniac. Suddenly confronted with a herd of wild animals, he frantically pumps his repeating rifle, hypnotized by the glut of destruction. Luckily, he is apt, in his excitement, to miss. His desire is for no one special trophy, but for a hot killing of all in sight. If we are not to blame him for this flare of blind brute instinct, for heaven’s sake don’t let us praise the performance! The best that can possibly be said for it is to call it the seamy side of masculinity; and the seamy side of masculinity fits cowardice like a glove. I am speaking from the sinner’s bench; and long back in the years (not so long materially, but miles and miles every other way) I see one or two spots of shame. To-day, my wish is to photograph the game, and let him go his way in peace.

With my rifle I carried a kodak among the goats. The kodak and the rifle made a discomfortable pair now and then. For instance:--

“Saturday twelfth (November) four and one-half hours’ climb up opposite ridge, so as to get above goat seen yesterday. Snow six and eight inches deep on top.” This was a day that I carried both instruments, and the rocks continually required the use of both hands. Well, I got the goat that I wanted with my rifle. I took the kodak home with one hundred pictures of my very long, hard, interesting journey. It was the year that the company’s films were bad, and I drew one hundred blanks; there was not the semblance of an image upon a single one. The same mischance had attended the Greely expedition, and I had not travelled as far as they did; so you see my mouth must utter no complaints. No; my mileage fell short of the Greely expedition; but no goat will ever tempt me through such adventures again. Alas, that a man should come to shrink from discomforts which once--but let me tell you about some of them.

Because nothing but good fellowship and kindness were shown me there, I suppress the name of the town at the railroad’s end where I waited from Saturday till Monday for the north-bound stage. It was Saturday, October ninth, my journal reminds me.

“They gave me a room.… I was glad to see as little of it as possible. I washed in the public trough and basin which stood in the office between the saloon and the dining room; and I spent my time either in the saloon watching a game of poker that never ceased, or in wandering about in the world outside. A Chinaman named Madden … played poker and of course lost to his American friends, … swearing in the most ludicrous jargon.… Yet he was good-natured … the men seemed to like him … at night he returned to the never ending game and lost some more.… I went to my room to go to bed, turned down the bed clothes, and saw there, not what I feared, but cockroaches to the number of several thousand, I should think. They scampered frantically, jostling each other like any other crowd. Then I lifted one pillow and watched more cockroaches hurry under the neighboring pillow for shelter. Then I saw that the walls, ceiling, and floor were all quivering and sparkling with cockroaches. So I told the landlord downstairs. I said that if he had no other room, I would throw my camp blankets on the office table and sleep there if he had no objection. He was sympathetic, and explained that the cockroaches must have come up from the kitchen which was below my room. This was Saturday night, and every Saturday night the cook put powder in the kitchen; so that must have sent them up. This explanation was given me in a voice full of condolence. And I replied that very likely this was how they came and that sleeping in bed with so many at a time would be impossible. He entirely agreed with me. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘cockroaches is hell.’ …

“So I unrolled my blankets and the landlord helped me make my bed on his office table, lifting the inkstands and newspapers for me.… I went to sleep, hearing the game of poker in the adjoining room, the gobbling of Madden when he lost, and the hoarse merriment of the other men at his gibberish.

“Sunday.… This morning the game was still going on, but Madden had retired about four o’clock a loser. The bar-tender, sweeping the office, waked me, and I arose and made a toilet, as usual, in the public trough.”

The retrospect fills me with merriment--and regret that it’s all over for ever and ever; and the goat does not live for whose sake I would do it again.

It is hard not to yield to further temptation, not to transcribe from that diary of 1892 much more about the appearance and customs of the strange wild country through which I now passed on my way to the goat. Some of the landscape was the worst, the forlornest, the most worthless that I know, far outstripping Nevada in sheer meanness, and as desolate as Arizona, without Arizona’s magic splendor and fascination. Great deserts without grandeur, great valleys without charm, great rocks without dignity, mere lonely ugliness everywhere; that is the Big Bend country; and the river Columbia itself, when you finally descend to it from the parched bare dust and the strewn black boulders of the table-land, is a sweeping, sullen, shadeless flood, the most unlovely river that ever I have seen.

I like, when I can, to bring support to my opinions. On a later day, in the middle of the Big Bend, I came upon a desolate sign-post, placed there no doubt to cheer up the wayfarer’s discouraged heart. This post announced that Central Ferry was thirty-five miles distant; and below this a wayfarer had scrawled his personal comment:--

Forty-five miles to water.

And a subsequent wayfarer had added:--

Seventy-five miles to wood.

And a final wayfarer:--

Two and one-half miles to hell.

Ah, the dauntless, invaluable spirit of man! Those few words scrawled by a hand that I should like to shake, made the desert blossom with humor, and I continued on my journey with a smiling heart.

Three nights out from the cockroaches, and I was sleeping in the open, among pleasant hills. An old ragged fiddler, with hair hanging grizzled to his shoulders, had kept me listening late to all sorts of old-fashioned tunes and dances. He had fiddled his way across our continent, and had taken his lifetime to do so. Here he was, with silvering hair, up in the Cascade Mountains. I spread my blankets a hundred yards from his cabin, where he lived alone. He was perfectly blithe-hearted and perfectly penniless. I don’t know his name; I never saw him but that once; I suppose he is dead; but his discourse and his fiddle gave me an evening of entertainment over which I still sometimes dwell. Had I found no goat, the characters that I met, such as he, would have rewarded my excursion. But all things came to me. After some vain trips, whence I returned empty handed from fairly rough camping, on Wednesday, November 2, the diary reads, “One of my particular long-cherished wishes is accomplished, and I have seen and killed a mountain goat.” On the next day a second head and hide hung in our very snug camp. These first two were males, and they served as a basis for the description that I have attempted to draw earlier in this chapter. It was while we sat, my companionable guide and I, skinning the second goat, that we held a conversation which I must here record.

How we ever fell upon such a subject as the royal family of England, I do not remember; but camping in the wilderness uses up subjects, and leaves you with a steadily narrowing choice each day; and T--, who took an illustrated paper, observed to me that he had always rather liked “that chap Lorne.” This was how he phrased it; his language about some of the others held less of compliment.