Indian Tales and Others Poetic Values The Quest The Song of Hugh Glass The Song of the Indian Wars The Song of Three Friends The Splendid Wayfaring Two Mothers Collected Poems...

Illustrated New Edition New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1927 All rights reserved Copyright, 1910, By JOHN G. NEIHARDT. Set up and electrotyped. Reissued in new format, October, 1927. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE CORNWALL PRESS TO MY MOTHER...

The following account of a youthful adventure was written during the winter of 1908, ran as a serial in Putnam's Magazine the following year, and appeared as a book in 1910, five years before "The Song of Hugh Glass," the first piece of my Western Cycle. Many who have cared for my narrative poems, feeling the relation between those and this earlier avowal of an old love, have urged that "The River and I" be reprinted. J.G.N. St. Louis, 1927....

I T was Carlyle—was it not?—who said that all great works produce an unpleasant impression on first acquaintance. It is so with the Missouri River. Carlyle was not, I think, speaking of rivers; but he was speaking of masterpieces—and so am I. It makes little difference to me whether or not an epic goes at a hexameter gallop through the ages, or whether it chooses to be a flood of muddy water, ripping out a channel from the mountains to the sea. It is merely a matter of how the great dynamic forc

O UR party of three left the railroad at Great Falls, a good two-days' walk up river from Benton, the head of Missouri River navigation, to which point our boat material had been shipped and our baggage checked. A vast sun-burned waste of buffalo-grass, prickly pears, and sagebrush stretched before us to the north and east; and on the west the filmy blue contour of the Highwoods Mountains lifted like sun-smitten thunder clouds in the July swelter. One squinting far look, however, told you that t

A T last the sinuous yellow road dropped over the bluff rim and, to all appearances, dissolved into the sky—a gray-blue, genius-colored sky. It was sundown, and this was the end of the trail for us. Beneath the bluff rim lay Benton. We flung ourselves down in the bunch-grass that whispered dryly in a cool wind fresh from the creeping night-shade. Now that Benton lay beneath us, I was in no hurry to look upon it. Fort Benton? What a clarion cry that name had been to me! Old men—too old for voyage

T ELL a Teuton that he can't, and very likely he will show you that he can. It's in the blood. Between the prophecy of the snag-boat captain and my vainglorious answer at the Cheyenne crossing, I learned to respect the words of the man who invented the eccentric old river. In the face of heavy head winds, I quoted the words, "You'll never get down"—and they bit deep like whip lashes. On many a sand-bar and gravel reef, with the channel far away, I heard the words, "Plenty of water, yes, but you

W E awoke with light hearts on the second morning of the voyage. All about us was the sacred silence of the wilderness dawn. The coming sun had smitten the chill night air into a ghostly fog that lay upon the valley like a fairy lake. We were at the rim of the Bad Lands and there were no birds to sing; but crows, wheeling about a sandstone summit, flung doleful voices downward into the morning hush—the spirit of the place grown vocal. Cloaked with the fog, our breakfast fire of driftwood glowed

I T all came back there by the smoldering fires—the wonder and the beauty and the awe of being alive. We had eaten hugely—a giant feast. There had been no formalities about that meal. Lying on our blankets under the smoke-drift, we had cut with our jack-knives the tender morsels from a haunch as it roasted. When the haunch was at last cooked to the bone, only the bone was left. Heavy with the feast, I lay on my back watching the gray smoke brush my stars that seemed so near. My stars! Soft and g

A T last one evening (shall I confess it?) we had blue-crane soup for supper! Now a flight of gray-blue cranes across a pearl-gray sky, shot with threads of evening scarlet, makes a masterly picture: indeed, an effect worthy of reproduction in Art. You see a Japanese screen done in heroic size; and it is a sight to make you long exquisitely for things that are not—like a poet. But—— Let us have no illusions about this matter! Crane soup is not satisfactory. It looks gray-blue and tastes gray-blu

T HE geographer tells us that the mouth of the Missouri is about seventeen miles above St. Louis, and that the mouth of the Yellowstone is near Buford, North Dakota. It appeared to me that the fact is inverted. The Missouri's mouth is near Buford, and the Yellowstone empties directly into the Mississippi! I find that I am not alone in this opinion. Father de Smet and other early travelers felt the truth of it; and Captain Marsh, who has piloted river craft through every navigable foot of the ent