Going-to-the-Sun

This book is a sequel and a reply to a book by Stephen Graham, explorer-poet, and Vernon Hill, artist.

I had a splendid six weeks tramping with my lifetime friend, Stephen Graham, in the Rockies. We climbed northwest through Glacier Park, Montana, across the Canadian line into Alberta, Canada. There it is in two sentences.

It would take more than the Encyclopædia Britannica to tell on how many points I differ from Stephen, and on how many points I agree with him. I had not the least idea that so much Lindsay was going into Graham’s fireside notes—while I was asleep at noon, often recovering in an hour from ten hours of restless, sleepless freezing by night. I do not hold myself liable in court for any opinions of mine then recorded by Graham. My daytime strength was not all given to thought, however, but often to trying to keep Graham in sight when he was a quarter of a mile ahead of me climbing mountains absolutely perpendicular. As I remember our first fireside discussions, they were as to whether there was actually such a person as Patrick Henry. Graham had an idea he was a perverse invention of my own fancy. But he looked him up afterwards and found there was such a man. As I remember our conversations after that provocation, I kept trying to deliver to him from memory Bryce’s American Commonwealth, unabridged, two volumes, one thousand pages each. I remember those volumes well. I read every page in lonely country hotels and on slow local trains while a Sunday field-worker for the Anti-Saloon League. And now invisible leaves of Bryce often made the chief ingredient of our tea. So I have indicated in the design.

I did not tell Graham I was quoting the great ambassador, and so many unsupported, heavy and formidable statements he quite properly hesitated to write out, without further confirmation, though he drank them down quite cheerfully. In the great blank spaces in Graham’s narrative where he skips really splendid scenery, I was quoting Bryce—not always singing hymns!

The most authentic part of my book, the part Mr. Vernon Hill has left out, is that the mountains were as steep as I have drawn them. His mountains, otherwise quite correct, are not sufficiently perpendicular. Vernon Hill, of course, was not physically with us on the expedition. He was in London, drawing beautiful and famous Arcadian Calendars. When later he came to illustrate Graham’s book in London, with Graham bending over him, no one mentioned the fact that the mountains were all like church steeples. Graham had not noticed it, and it did not occur to Vernon Hill by wireless. Otherwise Vernon Hill was in excellent communication with us, and every picture in Graham’s book expresses exactly what Graham was talking to me about to make me forget the tumbles and the briers, and to drown out the Bryce.

After I had hunted for years and years to find an explorer-poet who would take a long walk with me, and had scared every one off by the elaborateness of the proposal, the first troubadour that took me up on it almost broke my neck. It was a grand and awful time. The sensible reviews of Graham’s book have been by Walter Prichard Eaton. He does not discuss Graham’s opinions or mine. But he is very plain about the fact that we almost slid into eternity. He has tried those mountains himself, and he knows. He should write several more reviews.