The Living Age, December 11, 1897; The Living Age Company, Boston
by Charles M. Skinner
Skinner published collections of myths, legends and folklore found inside the United States and across the world. – Wikipedia
People who go through the Yellowstone country nowaday know little of what that trip meant before the time of the railroad. Four of us made the journey: the Parson, Old Silurian, the Unsalted, and the Tramp; in other words, a city clergyman, a professor of geology, a young collegian, and myself. There was but an apology for a road, and we had to get down and pull logs out of the way to get through. At one point we had no road but a river-bed, and followed it through a cañon. At night we camped wherever there was tent room, and the frost nipped our toes through our blankets. “Toot,” our factotum, and “Al,” his brother, keeper, also, of the Coyote saloon in Bozeman, were famous hunters, fishermen, and cooks, steady drivers, astonishing drinkers, and they liked to use bad language and relate unseemly narratives in order to see the clergyman and the professor wince. They claimed to have committed many sins, but they never worried over them. It was different with a “rustler” we met out there.
Continued at Haw Creek Destinations.
Photo: The Natural Bridge, Yellowstone National Park – by F. Jay Haynes
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Mike .. love the names they used – so descriptive … I often think of charting the lands … in Africa the people who set out from the Cape … and taming the wild west … just glad I live in the today! Cheers .. Hilary
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Hi Hilary — I’d rather live today, too. This story was interesting because I recognized many of the places mentioned or described. I didn’t remember a natural bridge in Yellowstone, though, so I had to research it. Turns out it’s 1.5 miles down a trail off a road we’ve traveled many times.
I am reading an epic novel (http://www.amazon.com/Oregon-Country-Story-Trail-Migration/dp/1592992358) primarily to get a feel for the kind of life that the pioneers led during the settlement of the USA. Some really fascinating anecdotes feature in that besides vivid descriptions of the landscape. This story of the rustler resonates as something that could well have happened to one of the settlers.
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I hadn’t seen that book before, so I went ahead and got it on Kindle. I grew up — til age 15 — in North Platte, Nebraska, which is along the old emigrant trails between the North and South Platte Rivers just above where they join. We’ve traveled on or near most of the Oregon Trail all the way out to the Willamette Valley in Oregon and lived near one branch of the trail in Idaho for a time.