Ascendent over the world grows the saffron dawn.
Still and dim is the prairie, -- dark is the sod,
And dewy the cool curling blades of the buffalo grass,
And low and faint in the glow the smoke-spirits rise,
Revealing the camp; and here by a mute-solid boulder
An empty buffalo skull, deep-staring and old;
Little birds twitter and flit in the rusty-stemmed willows,
As over the rim comes tremendous ascending day --
The day! The marvelous day, exalting and vast! --
And there as the sun flares up, life-lit in its glory
The red-naked Indian rides, free-chanting his trail song.
The town of Gardiner, small and somewhat bleak with a string of Pullman cars that came up in the morning and two Pullman porters coming down the street. Now away along the Valley of the Yellowstone, and at first the bleak denuded hills, the rushing river, the clear fast fish. Then the naked hills enlarging into rolling cliffs and forested (the timber deeper here than Utah—the maternal granite now, no longer limestone—and the valley greening with the widening and clean-watered River of Yellowstone). An enchanted valley now with upslope to the east and right and timbered Rockies going into snow and granite and the cliffs, nude spaciousness. The valley is not so green as Mormon land mayhaps—but thick with grasses yellowed somewhat from the teeth of steers. The nude ranges towards the timbered cliffs, and to the west the miracle of evening light and the celebrated river called the Yellowstone and trees most green and marvelous. It is a scene at once familiar and unknown, with elements like those before in Mormon land but here by some miracle transformed into this Itselfness. There are barns now painted red upon the upland rise of ranges to the east and fading light—and so to Livingston, like places known and come to before.
Supper at the U. P. station and the waitress with the tired face, and yet with charm, reticence, and intelligence. Outside, the walls of rain (the moaning of full rivers lapping at the rear) and the bald hills all about. So out and to the westward, the ripe greenery left behind now and the bald ridges closing in. The rise across the Bozeman Pass, and then the steep descent, the U. P. descending steeply with us, and ascending too, the double-header and then the lights of Bozeman—the broad main street ablaze with power of brightness and abundant light. The hotel, the cafe for hamburgers and milk, and so, bed.
Beyond Wolf Point there was only sky and sagebrush, and I began to realize the tremendous size of this country. As a game, I decided to time the distance between human beings; fourteen minutes elapsed between a boy standing beside a lonely ranchhouse and a man working on an oil derrick in what I assumed was the Williston Basin oilfield. Bars are the thing in Montana towns. On the main street of Glasgow I saw the Stockmen's Bar, the Mountain Bar, Starr's Bar, the Mint Bar, and Johnny's Cafe and Bar. Aside from a dry goods store, there was nothing else on the street. At Havre, Montana, where we stopped for twenty minutes, I dashed out for a bloody mary. The bar was like a stock setting from a western movie, the only incongruous note being a woman bartender. Cowboys, all wearing western hats, sat at the bar, and two young men were playing pool. "I don't know what I've done with the celery salt," the lady bartender said. "Leave it out," I said. "I haven't much time." She looked at me severely. "Don't come in here asking me to cut corners," she told me. When she finished making the drink I asked her to pour it into a paper cup, and I sped back to the train. "You've got one minute to spare," the conductor warned, glancing at his watch. "We're moving right on
schedule, and I'd hate to have left you."
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