Tramping With A Poet In The Rockies - free ebook by Stephen Graham

TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission of the publisher. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA...

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PREFACE

Vachel Lindsay is the poet. He is best known as the author of General William Booth Enters Heaven , The Congo and Johnny Appleseed . He also wrote a highly comical piece called The Daniel Jazz . He is a wonderful reciter, and is aided by a sonorous, heaven-reaching voice. All his poems are written to be read aloud, chanted, or declaimed; in some cases they are written to be danced also, and played as games. In many of his recitations the audience is called upon to take part in choruses and refra

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I. TRAMPING AGAIN

Well , it’s good to be going tramping again. I’ve been sitting in European cafés and reading newspapers half a year, from Constantinople to Berlin, and I’ve only stretched my legs when in strange cities I needed to find a hotel, beating it pleasurelessly on asphalt. Last autumn, yes, I was tramping over the ruins and wreck of the war in France, and the year before that walked across Georgia on the track of old Sherman. But with a purpose, and in lands where after all there are hotels, and one pu

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II. FINDING THE POET

Flora , Illinois, where one changes for Springfield, has a Main Street, and, like many a little town of the Middle West of America, looks rather self-consciously askance at visitors, like the village that voted the earth was flat in Kipling’s tale. For the novel of the hour is called Main Street and is sold to hundreds of thousands of people and read by every American who reads anything, and is bitterly or jocularly discussed at every tea-table. It sheds a bright light on the life of a typical l

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III. TAKING THE ROAD

We packed our knapsacks at Springfield, and stowed away blankets and socks, a coffee-pot, and a frying-pan. We bought at a ten-cent store knife and fork and spoon, skillet, towels which we sewed into sacks, mugs, and what was labelled “The Mystic Mit—the greatest discovery since soap for cleaning pots and pans.” Lindsay had hobnails put in his old boots and bought a handsome pair of corduroy breeches, which, together with his old black hat, made him look like a tramping violinist. Springfield ba

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IV. FIRST NIGHTS OUT

We spent our first night in a burned forest beside a sunken pink and grey rock. There was a green carpet of unblossoming flowers as green and romantic as ideal spring, and beside it in contrast the stark blackness of the charred trees all up and down the hill. Hidden from view but twenty yards away was a foaming rivulet with pools. We bathed and we cooked and we talked and we slept. A great mountain like God Almighty in the midst of His creation was visible to us through the trees. We made our b

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V. GOING UP TO THE SNOW

It cleared up before dawn, but it rained for three hours after dawn. Vachel got up in the night and relit the fire and made himself a hot rock. Coming back into our dark and gloomy thicket, he mistook my form for a bear, and his heart jumped. We lived in expectation of meeting bears. “There’ll just be one heading in the Illinois Register ,” says Vachel—“ Ate by Bears .” We placed our bacon twenty yards away from where we slept, and hoped tacitly that they would take the bacon and spare us. Our k

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VI. DIFFERENT WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD

For several days now we did not meet a human being or see evidence of the existence of one; nor, though continually imagining that we had found a bit of a trail, did we find either a footstep or a hoof-mark. “I’ve never been before in a place where you did not see tin cans,” said Lindsay. “Why, some of the popular canyons of the West are literally filled with cans. It is not only tourist parties that leave them, but the cowboys live on canned goods and fill the valley with their cans.” Another r

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VII. SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS

My companion’s secret thought is that he is a Virginian. But how, since he was born in Illinois and his parents in Kentucky? “I am a follower of Poe and Jefferson,” he answers. Kentucky was largely colonised from Virginia, and the poet is ready to claim allegiance to the chivalric, leisurely and flamboyant genius of the South. “If only as a protest against the drab, square-toed, dull, unimaginative America which is gaining on us all,” he adds. He has a passion for ideal democracy, and his great

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VIII. NIGHT AND NOTHING ON THE MOUNTAINS

My companion has a curious old-man-of-the-woods appearance. It is not his loose red handkerchief round his neck so much as his hanging, dead-branch-like arms. His face sleeps even when he is awake. He walks when he is tired in a patient, dog-like way, treading in my very steps. No ribald songs, now, of tramping days—but as if hushed by the hills he croons ever to himself— and in a sort of hymnal marching step, like way-worn pilgrims, we take the trackless way upward once again. And it is late tw

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IX. “WIFE, GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER”

“ I suffered forty-seven separate chills,” said the poet. “And forty-seven separate cramps,” said I. Did we sleep? Six hours passed somehow and it seemed not so long as waiting that time for a train or for a theatre to open. Lindsay lay in a sort of hole. I lay with my head half over the abyss. I watched the stars swim out of the clouds above. I saw the blackness of the bottomless below us become grey as the clouds formed there. Lindsay cried out once: “I’m getting up to light a fire.” “Impossib

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X. CLEAR BLUE

After telling me how he “ate down” the farmer, Vachel rested and passed into a halcyon mood. We had a heavenly day climbing towards a heaven of unclouded blue. Swinburne flowed more naturally from the poet’s lips than conversation: His thought soared with our steps. he declaimed to the streams. I promised to arrange a Swinburne recital for him next time he came to England. For I soon found that he knew as much Swinburne by heart as he did of his own poetry. Ellery Sedgwick wrote me from Boston t

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XI. NATIONAL WILDERNESSES

Glacier in Montana, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Sequoia and Yosemite in California, Grand Canyon in Arizona, besides Mount McKinley in Alaska and many minor reservations and national forests—they ought truly to be called by some name other than parks. The same also is true for Canada, which possesses its wonderful Dominion Parks such as those of Waterton and Lake Louise. The name “park” has evidently been given to popularise them. Such places in Russia are called “wildernesses,” and are resorted to

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XII. GOING WEST

We love inspirational phrases such as to “go West” which sprang on to men’s lips in the Great War, and was a way of saying “to die,” which was startlingly poetic, seeing that it came from the soul of those masses usually admitted to be so vulgar. “He’s gone West,” men said with a hushed voice, meaning that like so many who had passed before, he had gone—to another world, to beyond the setting sun. The phrase was not current among the American soldiers, but I have heard of an equally wonderful ex

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XIII. CLIMBING RED EAGLE

We journeyed through the primeval forest without a trail to guide us, through the jagged, thorny, tumultuous pine wilderness. It was not so easy for Lindsay, whose legs are shorter than mine, but he took it as a game of banter leader and moved forward doggedly into the openings I made. We were glad to take advantage of the thousands of wind-smitten trees which lay dead, piled at every angle and piled on one another. We climbed upward for miles on the white, smooth, dead timber of fallen trees, b

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XIV. DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE

Blessings for dawn and the rosy lights and for the cloudlessness of the morning! Had mist enshrouded us we should have had to have remained high up on the slippery knife-edge of the mountain till the mist had passed. We were able to descend, cautiously, cautiously, for three hours in a trackless precipitous zig-zag to the red peak of a lower mountain and a high snow-bound lake, where we made a good fire and made coffee with our last coffee, and lay down again and slept. Then we washed in the sno

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XV. PEOPLE IN CAMP

A day’s steady tramping brought us to a camp, and then we bathed in St. Mary’s Lake and washed every separate item of linen, even that which we wore, and we sun-baked ourselves on the hot beach while the clothes dried, and we made a clean appearance at last among fair women and brave men, and we took supplies on which to vagabondise for days on the slopes of Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. It was a curious experience to be absolutely alone on the mountains so long and then suddenly to come on a large

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XVI. VISITED BY BEARS

I retain very cheerily in mind from Russia the memory of the typical Russian saint who lived in the woods and was so holy that the bears approached without malice and took what the saint could spare of the store of crusts on which he lived. The unfortunate Tsarina when she desired so religiously a male heir, went to the shrine of Seraphim in the “empty place” of Arzamas to pray for one. And the most famous thing about St. Seraphim was his love of the bears. He is nearly always depicted in popula

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XVII. LINDSAY’S STONE COFFEE

The wind blew all night long, a wind that seemed to be cleaning up and burnishing all the spaces between the stars. The rock wall against which I leaned my back kept stealing away the warmth from my blanket. Vachel slept off the level on the ferns, at a forty-five degree tilt downward. We both looked out to the mountains and the stars, and it was an epical summer night on the Rockies. The mountains were compact and black and clear, and a dim light behind them glorified each. A young moon arose a

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XVIII. MAKING MAPS OF THE WORLD

After an era of drawing maps of the United States my companion took to drawing maps of the world, supporting them by mermaids and making them fly by north-westerly and north-easterly angels, and he wrote original couplets and hid them in hollow trees and under stones. As Shelley made paper boats in the Bay of Naples he made maps and hid them—his pet hobby for a number of days. One verse asked Atlas if he did not find the world heavier since the Treaty of Versailles. “I hope you made a copy of it

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XIX. A MOUNTAIN POINT OF VIEW

“ Wite man, you’s skeerin’ me to death,” cries Vachel playfully from behind me as we get out of forests and up among the naked rocks. “Wite man, you’s skeerin’ me to death,” or again, “You might as well kill a man as scare him to death.” “This is no place to bring ladies,” I ventured. “And no place to bring a poet, either,” says Vachel. “Look here, Stephen, I make one rule. I’ll only be scared out of my wits once a day.” The poet riveted his eyes on me, and I was a curious sight, being torn to t

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XX. BY THE CAMP FIRE

Many years ago one of the Springfield newspapers offered a prize to the reader who should send in the best answer to the question: What would you do with a million dollars? Young Vachel sent in an answer. His was: “I would change them to dimes and have them thrown into the State House yard and any one who wanted them could come and take as much as he liked.” The answer was printed in the paper with a lot of others and gave considerable offence. The telephone was kept busy that morning by those w

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XXI. DOWN CATARACT MOUNTAIN

Vachel told me once, to save his self-respect, he took a job in Chicago in a department store at seven dollars a week, and was employed in the wholesale toy department; a whole block of toys, where was to be found every imaginable plaything for young and old, from dolls as large as three-year-old children to family portrait albums that, having a musical box in their binding, played “The Old Folks at Home” and various hymn-tunes when you opened them. He told how a lad called Timmins wound up all

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XXII. “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”

“ Now , Horace Greeley——” said Vachel, opening his “morning strafe” of political conversation. “Who the —— was he?” “You don’t know? Why, you’ll be saying you don’t know Shakespeare next. That’s as if J. C. Squire had never heard of Edwin Booth.” “Well, who was he?” “He edited the Tribune throughout the Civil War.” “That all?” “He said, ‘The way to resume is to resume.’” “That all?” “He said, ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,’ and printed it at the head of his newspaper every da

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XXIII. THE SUN-WORSHIPPER

“ I drink to America as she was before 1492,” said Vachel, lifting high his coffee cup. “I drink to her as she was before the Red Man came.” “And I drink to her as she was before the Mound-builders came——” “And I drink to her as she was in the days of the mountain-top tribe when a man and his family lived together on a mountain-top and the rule was one peak to one family, and the eagles were tame and carried the mail.” “And I drink to Noah’s fourth son, who was so naughty he was not allowed to b

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XXIV. TWO VOICES

My companion has two voices: one is that of a politician, harsh and strident, the other is that of a Homeric harper and ballad-chanter of the days of old. The political voice does not please me much. It is the voice of the “hell-roarer” of the prairies. Lindsay loves a mighty shout, an exultant war-whoop for its own sake, like any Indian. And ... I’ve heard those “glacier boulders across the prairies rolled.” I have heard the “gigantic troubadour speaking like a siege-gun.” But there is another

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XXV. STOPPED BY THE CLOUDS

We scrambled through thickets to Mount Grinnell, which stands like a gigantic fortress, a bulwark of this world against others. Its impregnability seemed appalling. Fancy knocking at that door after it was shut! We stopped and looked up at it, and the sight of it relaxed our tense human energy and left us with very contrite souls. However, the nearer we got to it the less it was magnified. Its battlements receded and we soon had a fly’s view of the mountain, the view which the fly has when it is

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XXVI. LINDSAY ON ROOSEVELT

We decided to change our direction and make for the camp at the head of Lake McDermot. This we could hope to reach by nightfall, as it was downhill all the way. It was moreover a right-hand descent and suited me well. In an hour of diving and plunging downward we got out of the clouds and saw that there was fine weather away to the East. We had moreover found a foot-trail, and, “Bless de Lo’d I’se found de way,” cried Vachel. Downward, downward to the low pines, to the large pines, to the giant

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XXVII. THE WILLOWS

When I was at Springfield I was brought before the children of the High School, where in years past the poet went to school, two thousand children in a grand auditorium. I think we could show nothing of the kind in England, an assembly of nearly all the boys and girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen in the city—white children, black children, immigrant European children promiscuously grouped, bright-faced and vivacious and feeling all-together. I was to speak to them on Russia, but before

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XXVIII. JOHNNY APPLESEED

I built a fire by the roadside opposite the palatial hotel and made our coffee. “It’s like lighting a fire and making yourself a personal cup of coffee on Broadway,” said Lindsay, “but it’s fine.” It’s a dramatic act and startles the imagination. The coffee-pot could be made the emblem of revolt—“Go West, young man, with a coffee-pot. You can live on nothing a year with a coffee-pot. Figure it out, how little money you need to live in the wilds!” Vachel is all for giving the business man and cle

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XXIX. LOG-ROLLING

Vachel slipped near Heaven’s Peak and turned a double somersault downward, buffeting his head with his huge pack (crammed with canned goods, loaves, blankets, and what not) and then I picked him up and found he had sprained his ankle. “Don’t think I’m hurt,” said the poet. “I yelled because I was scared. I’ll be all right in a few minutes.” He didn’t mind the pain, but he loathed being beaten. Nevertheless he was down and out. “We’ll go on to-morrow,” said he. “We’ll go on next day.” “Here we ar

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XXX. TOWARD THE KOOTENAI

Summer began to give way to winter on the mountains. There were very cold nights, and frost. The full moon made the forest spacious, and the beautiful fir-trees, like candelabras, glittering with silver lights. The mornings were of an intense stillness as if ordained whilst God walked in the garden. We had stayed three days beside a grey rock wall which was eight feet high, and it began to have the light of home upon it, and one might have lived there long. Vachel soon began to feel much better,

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XXXI. AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD

We lunched on ham and peas and caramel cake, and lay in a natural cradle among the roots of giant firs, and slept for an hour of a perfect afternoon. After the ice-cold dip and scalding coffee and a good feed and a self-indulgent snooze, we knew ourselves to be well and certainly happy. What a thing is physical well-being—to be hard, to be fit, to be cool, to be clear-headed, to know there’s a live spring in every muscle, and then to be care-free and able to sleep in the afternoon! Vachel’s ankl

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XXXII. THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD

Next day, tramping to Flat Top Mountain, we talked of Springfield and Abraham Lincoln. We were in stately forests, and the ancient mould under the feet silenced our steps. We walked slowly, and stopped to pick the big black huckleberries, paused to climb over stricken trees, paused to eat the raspberries from the undergrowth of raspberry bushes. “I’d like you to think of Lincoln as a poor man,” said Vachel, “an eccentric—laughed at, sneered at a great deal, entirely underestimated, a man who was

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XXXIII. FLAT TOP MOUNTAIN

The fire burned sulkily at dawn, and the grass around it was white with frost. We had lain awake for an hour, silently meditating on the joys of coffee to be. We knew it was no use getting up before sunrise, for fuel was scarce and hard to find. It was a wonderful dreamy dawn, rising above the mists of an autumnal night. We looked to see antelopes perched on the crags above us, and mountain-goats. But the scene was bare on all hands. Our eyes lighted on the rusty foliage of some uprooted trees.

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XXXIV. CROSSING THE CANADIAN LINE

“ As we approach the British Empire,” says Vachel facetiously, “the huckleberries grow more plentiful, the raspberry bushes larger, the trees loftier, the air purer.” In the poet’s mind politics and hymns gave way to desire of huckleberries. I luxuriated in raspberries. He was Huckleberry Finn. I was a character in Russian folk-lore—the hare with the raspberry-coloured whiskers. “When we get to a Canadian hotel let us register as H. Finn and R. C. W. Hare,” said the poet. We had slept on the hoa

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XXXV. THE DIFFERENCE

So we entered the Dominion National Park of Waterton Lakes. We climbed the next mountain after Mount Bertha and saw on every hand the pinnacled and pillared tops of the Canadian mountains, crags surmounted by mighty teeth of stone blackly silhouetted against a radiant sky. Some Dominion officials came into these parts last year, cancelled the old names of the mountains, and gave them a new set—Mount Joffre, Mount Foch, and the rest, as if they were No. 1 and No. 2 of Great War villas. I see by o

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XXXVI. DUKHOBORS

We had not anticipated coming into the neighbourhood of the Dukhobors. It was an interesting surprise. I had promised myself I would make a special pilgrimage some day to Western Canada just to find out what the Dukhobors thought about life, and how they were getting on now. And then to come on them accidentally. The Dukhobors, or “Spirit wrestlers,” are a Russian religious community brought to Canada in 1898. They claim to have been in existence in Russia for over three hundred years. They are

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XXXVII. A VISIT TO THE MORMONS

We tramped from ranch to ranch by the rutty roads that skirt the sections, walked away from the mountain-walls, and ever as we went the terrain extended. The sky had become wider; no rocky walls closed us in. The backs of our necks became swollen from the unusual heat of the sun on them. We kicked up dust as we walked, dust again! Our eyes traversed the scene to light, not on cascades or possible camping-grounds, but on far-away farmhouses. We met the oats and wheat and barley fields striving ov

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XXXVIII. BLOOM FOR EVER, O REPUBLIC!

We crossed the line again and returned to the United States. And then we went to the city of St. Paul, and we saw the falls where Minnehaha and Hiawatha met. We stood on the high bank of the Mississippi and considered meditatively the mounds of the mound-builders there. What more impressive symbol for a world-traveller than these pre-historic mounds—there before the Indians came—emblems of the infinite forgotten past of man! Then we went to Chicago. We saw the beautiful Wrigley building which ha

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