by Jackson’s photographs of the same scenes, created a sensation back East, and at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. This incontrovertible documentation of the scenic marvels of Yellowstone played a significant part in the creation of our first National Park and the subsequent treasures of our National Park System.
Moran did not accompany the Hayden expedition’s foray into Jackson Hole, south of Yellowstone in 1872. He turned further south, to paint the Grand Canyon, but Hayden named Mount Moran in his honor. Moran himself did not see the Tetons until 1879, when, with a military escort, he approached, and painted the range from the western (Idaho) side.
Between the Jackson Lake road junction and the edge of the lake were the Willow Flats, a low and somewhat marshy area where a number of small streams threaded into Jackson Lake. Jackson Lake is, actually, just an extremely wide place in the Snake River, which enters its north end, and flows out through a small dam to the south-east. It was here that I got my first taste (or, more accurately, vice versa) of the big local mosquitoes, or as some called them, the Jackson Hole Canaries. In truth, the tiny no-see-um black flies were much worse, but they weren’t about at the moment. Fortunately, there was bright sun and a pretty good breeze, and the Canaries were a relatively minor nuisance for most of this day. Their specialty, like the Royal Air Force over Berlin, was after the sun went down.
We wandered down along one of the larger streams, lay down in the sun, had a smoke (Luckies and Camels for the locals, Marlboros for the wanna-be cowboys), watched the clouds roll by overhead, and then, when we were good and ready, got down to the serious business of fishing. Dick and Jim had, between them, in their pockets, a half-dozen fish hooks and about twelve feet of line—in six pieces of unequal lengths. The three of us dapped (British fancy fishing language for “dipped”) short lines in the water, baited with worms I dug up from the soft soggy ground with my pocket knife. But this was only a diversion from the main event, and we never did catch any trout that way that day.
What really was going on was this: Larry would sneak up to the stream bank, on his belly, absolutely silently. In slow motion he would push his arm over the bank, into the water, and underneath the grassy overhang. Then he would sort of wiggle his fingers in a motion I never was able to master, and that he called “tickling the trout.” Jim later told me that what he was actually doing was stroking their bellies, and mesmerizing them. In about 15 minutes he had flipped a half-dozen small brookies onto the bank, and that was all there was to it. I have heard of people catching fish with willow wand rods, reed-woven nets, bows and arrows, and fish spears, but I have never seen anything like that Flathead friend of mine that afternoon. The only thing I could compare it to was in my Western stories, where the young braves would slip in among the pony herd, and steal them silently away, while the enemy camp slept on, unawares.
We gutted and cleaned the trout with our small knives, spitted them on willow sticks, cooked them over a small, smokeless fire right on the stream bank, sucked our greasy fingers clean, and soon were lying, contented, on our backs again, smoking and talking, resting after all that hard work.
I already knew that Jim’s job for the summer was driving the garbage truck. Larry, it seemed, was just passing through for a few days, on his way to work on assignment with a fire-fighting crew based up in Yellowstone Park to the north of the Tetons. Dick, it turned out, was a major player on the real trail crew. These were the experienced hands who did not come back to Park Headquarters and the bunkhouse each night, but lived for days and weeks at a time high in the mountains, at tent camps or winter refuge cabins, or under the sky, working the back trails in the high country. Their year-round park staff supervisor, Buddy, who was in training to get his deer that next fall by running it down with a hunting knife (and he did it, too; his explanation was that it wasn’t so hard, all you had to do was to keep moving after it until the deer became exhausted and lay down), would drop in on them every once in awhile, but they were largely on their own, and had to really know what they were doing. The other trail crews, such as the one I would be joining, were regarded by that elite as sort of rear-echelon soldiers.
As we lay there, a little groggy from the sun and the trout, Jim began what I soon was to recognize as one of his school-master-type discourses.
‘The reason they call that bay up around the east side of the lake Colter Bay, is in honor of John Colter, probably the first white man, certainly the first American, to come through the Hole. That was in 1807. Colter was the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery, 19 years of age (same age as you said you are now, Steve) when he signed on in Missouri. He was kind of a hell-raiser, but also a superb hunter, and became, along with Pierre Drouillard, the main meat-getter and special assignment scout for the expedition.
“When they finally started down the Missouri River for home, in 1806, John decided he didn’t want to leave this shinin’ country. Guess he saw the mountains like we all did. So he came back upriver on the Missouri, and did a little exploring all by his lonesome. By 1807 a big Saint Louis trader, Manuel Lisa, was sending him out to spread the word to the Crows and other tribes that the Great White Father’s fur-trading supermarket was coming. Colter just moved around all this country by himself, with his long rifle and a thirty pound pack. Lived with the Indians in the winter, especially the Crows.
“Colter had a number of run-ins with the Blackfeet; in fact, some blame him for the intractable hostility of the Blackfeet to the Americans, though I guess they were just trying to keep hold of their way of life. The most famous story about John Colter and the Blackfeet is when, one time, the Indians captured Colter and a companion, butchered the other man alive in front of Colter, flung the bloody pieces in his face, and told John to run for his life. He outraced those Blackfeet for five miles or more, turning to kill the one brave that stayed close behind him, with the brave’s own spear. Then he hid in the icy-cold Jefferson River all day, poking his nose up beneath some drifting logs and reeds, until the Indians gave up looking for him and went home.
“After he came through the Hole in 1807, he went up north through Yellowstone Park, just like the tourists do today, and saw the steaming pots and geysers and hot springs. When he told about the marvels he had seen, nobody quite believed him, but for years Yellowstone was known to the Mountain Men as ‘Colter’s Hell’ Many took the stories to be tall tales, such as the one “Old Gabe,” Jim Bridger, a leader years later among the Mountain Men, liked to tell: “You could catch your trout in one pool, and boil it for dinner in the pool next door!” said Bridger, who was, of course, not exaggerating.
“What happened to John Colter, Jim,” I asked.
“Well, by 1810, this first, most indestructible, youngest, and maybe greatest of the Mountain Men had had enough. He went back to Missouri to farm (can you imagine that?), married, and died two years later of liver disease.”
Dick’s voice rose from the grass: “John Colter sure was something, but I don’t think you can call him the greatest. The greatest was undoubtedly Jedediah Smith, the Mountain Man’s Mountain Man. The beaver were a sidelight to him; what Jed Smith really was driven by was exploration—he discovered South Pass, down below the Wind Rivers, where the wagon trail was later to take settlers over the mountains; he was the first white man we know of to cross the Sierras; he blazed trails all up and down the Rockies, in the dry country beyond, over by the Great Salt Lake, and in California. Jed Smith did more than anyone to understand the geography of the Shining Mountains. What all those early guys were looking for were two things: beaver to trap, and an easy river route to the Pacific, to connect up with the Missouri. They never found that route. This area around the Hole is a kind of a hub from which the water spokes fan out, going east and west from the Continental Divide, but, as Lewis and Clark and many others found out, there is no direct, easy passage. But the idea died hard; for years they searched for the Bonneventura River, which was supposed to flow from the west side of the Rockies through the Sierras to the sea, but they didn’t find it, because it didn’t exist. They sure found beaver, though, and they trapped the mountain streams, hard, for twenty years or so, until the beaver were all but gone. Then the Mountain Men were all but gone, too. Their entire era lasted from the very early days of about 1810 to only about 1840, when the beaver streams began to be trapped out, and when changes in men’s fashions back East and in Europe created a disastrous decline in prices for pelts.
“Jedediah