The Two Great Canyons: Excerpts From Letters Written on a Western Journey

Yellowstone National Park, Mammoth Springs Hotel, August 14, 1908: We have reached the first hotel station on the tour of the Yellowstone National Park, which, according to the legend on the arch over the entrance, has been set aside “For the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” We left Minneapolis on the night train and found ourselves the next morning in the wheat country, on the state lines of Minnesota and North Dakota. In the wheat country there is nothing impressive, except the magnificent distances. As far as the eye can reach, and that is very far, one sees a level expanse, covered with wheat, some in the shock and some still on the stalk. The towns, also, lack impressiveness. Most of them are mere wheat stations. Fargo and Bismarck and Mandan are, however, not without commercial and historic interest.

At Bismarck, I recalled what Mr. Bryce wrote in “The American Commonwealth.” He was present, in 1883, when the corner stone of the state house was laid, with imposing ceremonies, General U. S. Grant and “Sitting Bull” being among the honored guests. Mr. Bryce records that one of the orators upon that occasion remarked that Bismarck was destined to “be the metropolitan hearth of the world’s civilization.” Mr. Bryce says he asked why the state house was “not in the city,” but “a mile off, on the top of a hill in the brown and dusty prairie,” and he was told, by the enthusiastic spirits of the place, that in a few years that hill would be the center of the city that was to be. But the state house still stands out of town. Many hopes in real estate are unrealized, but let us hope they have only been deferred. A hundred years from now all the open country may be teeming with populations. In much of the wheat country there are no country homes, only places in which the wheat growers live long enough to plant and to gather their crops. The wheat fields end in the Bad Lands, and these would not be so interesting, were they not so dreary. On the Little Missouri one begins to see patches of alfalfa. It was on this river that Theodore Roosevelt ranched, equipped with a college diploma and his indomitable spirit. One ascends gradually into the mountains, up the Yellowstone River, to Livingston, where they break the transcontinental journey for the Yellowstone National Park trip. It is fifty-five miles from Livingston to Gardner and five or six miles from Gardner to the Mammoth Springs Hotel, the last five miles being covered by stages.