Part 6 (1/2)

”Rising Wolf!” said Tom. ”That's a good name. It's Indian, I suppose?”

”It's Indian, but it was the name of a white man,” the first speaker replied. ”It was the name the Indians gave to Hugh Monroe. He's buried almost under the shadow of that mountain. Pretty good monument, eh?”

”I don't believe anybody'll move it,” Joe laughed. ”Who was Hugh Monroe?”

”Hugh Monroe,” said the man on the front seat, who evidently knew a lot about the Park, ”was probably the first white man who ever saw those mountains. He was born in Montreal in 1798. He entered the Hudson Bay Company when he was only seventeen, about as old as you boys, I guess, and was sent way out into the Blackfeet Indian country on the Saskatchewan River. Monroe was a.s.signed to live with the Indians, and learn their language, and the next winter--1816--he went southward with them, following along near the base of the range, crossed what's now the boundary line, and came here. He even went on farther, to the Yellowstone. Monroe stayed with the Blackfeet all the rest of his life.

He married a squaw, and got an Indian name--Makwiipowaksin--or Rising Wolf----”

”I guess I'll always say it in English,” Spider laughed.

”After a while,” the man went on, laughing too, ”the Blackfeet came down here to live. We are going through part of their reservation now, and the whole Park was bought from them by the government. This was all their hunting ground, and right here, in Two Medicine Valley that you see leading in beside Rising Wolf Mountain, and in the Cut Bank and St.

Mary's Valley we'll soon come to, Hugh Monroe hunted moose and elk and buffalo and silver tips, and he killed sheep and goats up on the slopes.

He used to tell me how he had a cabin by St. Mary Lake (we get there in an hour) once, and had to stand off a raid of hostile Indians for two days--he and his wife and children. He's often told me, too, how he and the Blackfeet used to drive the buffalo over the Cut Bank River cliffs.

The buffalo would stampede, and not seeing the cliffs ahead, would all go cras.h.i.+ng over.”

”_He_ told you?” cried Joe, incredulous. ”Say, how old are you, anyhow?

I thought you said he came here in 1816--that's a hundred years ago.”

Again the man laughed. ”Rising Wolf was buried in 1896,” he answered.

”He was ninety-eight years old. We folks out in the Montana mountains”

[he p.r.o.nounced Montana with the first _a_ short, as in _cat_] ”live a good while, son. It's the air. I can remember him well, and a fine old figure he was, a real pioneer, like Daniel Boone and the chaps you've read about in school. Yes sir, he's got a good monument.”

And the man looked up again at the great red dome of Rising Wolf Mountain, towering over them.

”Ask him about there being no foot-hills,” Joe whispered, nudging Tom.

”Can you tell us why there aren't any foot-hills to this range?” Tom asked. ”Of course, all this prairie here is rolling and high, but it's not really little mountains. The main range just jumps right up without any warning.”

”Yes, I've been wondering about that, too,” put in a man on the seat behind the boys. ”I wish you would explain it.”

The man on the front seat laughed. ”I seem to be the Park encyclopaedia,”

said he. ”Well, I hunted in these mountains before the government ever thought of making a park of 'em, and I'm glad to tell you all I can.

I'll tell you just as it was told to me by one of the government chaps that came out here--a scientist. He was looking for prehistoric animal fossils up in the Belly River Canon, and he sure knew a lot. It was this way--all the prairies, he said, and all the land west of here, was once the bottom of the sea, or a lake, or something, and finally it pushed up and became land, and then, as the earth crust went on contracting, it cracked.”

The man now put his hands together, spread flat side by side, and pushed them one against the other.

”The crack formed from north to south,” he said, ”and as the contraction went on something had to give, just as something has to give if I push my hands hard enough. See----”

He pushed harder yet, and his left hand slid up over the back of his right.

”That's what happened here. One edge of the earth crust, thousands of feet thick, rose right up and slid east a dozen miles or more, and then stopped. I believe the scientific fellers call that a fault. They call the eastern edge of this range the Lewis overthrust, because that's where the overlapping stopped. Look--you can see all along here the precipices where the crust stuck out over the prairie, and all those parallel lines of different colored rocks are the different layers in the old crust. They find the skeletons and fossils exposed in 'em, which would be buried two or three thousand feet if you had to dig down.”

”But what I don't see,” Joe said, ”is why the top isn't just level? Why are there any peaks and valleys?”