The peak on which the captain had taken his stand commanded the whole Wind Riverchain; which, in fact, may rather be considered one immense mountain, broken intosnowy peaks and lateral spurs, and seamed with narrow valleys. Some of these valleysglittered with silver lakes and gushing streams; the fountain heads, as it were, of themighty tributaries to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Beyond the snowy peaks, to thesouth, and far, far below the mountain range, the gentle river, called the Sweet Water,was seen pursuing its tranquil way through the rugged regions of the Black Hills. In theeast, the head waters of Wind River wandered through a plain, until, mingling in onepowerful current, they forced their way through the range of Horn Mountains, and werelost to view. To the north were caught glimpses of the upper streams of theYellowstone, that great tributary of the Missouri. In another direction were to be seensome of the sources of the Oregon, or Columbia, flowing to the northwest, past thosetowering landmarks the Three Tetons, and pouring down into the great lava plain;while, almost at the captain's feet, the Green River, or Colorado of the West, set forthon its wandering pilgrimage to the Gulf of California; at first a mere mountain torrent,dashing northward over a crag and precipice, in a succession of cascades, andtumbling into the plain where, expanding into an ample river, it circled away to thesouth, and after alternately shining out and disappearing in the mazes of the vastlandscape, was finally lost in a horizon of mountains. The day was calm and cloudless,and the atmosphere so pure that objects were discernible at an astonishing distance.
The whole of this immense area was inclosed by an outer range of shadowy peaks,some of them faintly marked on the horizon, which seemed to wall it in from the rest ofthe earth.
It is to be regretted that Captain Bonneville had no instruments with him with which toascertain the altitude of this peak. He gives it as his opinion that it is the loftiest point ofthe North American continent; but of this we have no satisfactory proof. It is certain thatthe Rocky Mountains are of an altitude vastly superior to what was formerly supposed.
We rather incline to the opinion that the highest peak is further to the northward, and isthe same measured by Mr. Thompson, surveyor to the Northwest Company; who, bythe joint means of the barometer and trigonometric measurement, ascertained it to betwenty-five thousand feet above the level of the sea; an elevation only inferior to that ofthe Himalayas.
For a long time, Captain Bonneville remained gazing around him with wonder andenthusiasm; at length the chill and wintry winds, whirling about the snow-clad height,admonished him to descend. He soon regained the spot where he and his companions[companion] had thrown off their coats, which were now gladly resumed, and, retracingtheir course down the peak, they safely rejoined their companions on the border of thelake.
Notwithstanding the savage and almost inaccessible nature of these mountains, theyhave their inhabitants. As one of the party was out hunting, he came upon the solitarytrack of a man in a lonely valley. Following it up, he reached the brow of a cliff, whencehe beheld three savages running across the valley below him. He fired his gun to calltheir attention, hoping to induce them to turn back. They only fled the faster, anddisappeared among the rocks. The hunter returned and reported what he had seen.
Captain Bonneville at once concluded that these belonged to a kind of hermit race,scanty in number, that inhabit the highest and most inaccessible fastnesses. Theyspeak the Shoshonie language, and probably are offsets from that tribe, though theyhave peculiarities of their own, which distinguish them from all other Indians. They aremiserably poor; own no horses, and are destitute of every convenience to be derivedfrom an intercourse with the whites. Their weapons are bows and stone-pointed arrows,with which they hunt the deer, the elk, and the mountain sheep. They are to be foundscattered about the countries of the Shoshonie, Flathead, Crow, and Blackfeet tribes;but their residences are always in lonely places, and the clefts of the rocks.
Their footsteps are often seen by the trappers in the high and solitary valleys amongthe mountains, and the smokes of their fires descried among the precipices, but theythemselves are rarely met with, and still more rarely brought to a parley, so great istheir shyness, and their dread of strangers.
As their poverty offers no temptation to the marauder, and as they are inoffensive intheir habits, they are never the objects of warfare: should one of them, however, fallinto the hands of a war party, he is sure to be made a sacrifice, for the sake of thatsavage trophy, a scalp, and that barbarous ceremony, a scalp dance. These forlornbeings, forming a mere link between human nature and the brute, have been lookeddown upon with pity and contempt by the creole trappers, who have given them theappellation of "les dignes de pitie," or "the objects of pity.'; They appear more worthy tobe called the wild men of the mountains. [Return to Contents].
