Chapter I: LOOK to a time when national wildernesses will have an acknowledged

significance in our public life, when men and women of all classes of life will naturally retire to them for recreation--as naturally as people used to go to church on Sundays and for a similar reason. All praise to the foresight and energy of Franklin Lane, the late American Minister of the Interior, that enterprising Canadian who did so much to bring the people’s heritage before their eyes!

The “See America First” is a poor slogan. It is like “Do Everything Once” and “Buy him a Fountain Pen.” The question should be raised to a higher level. People need not visit Glacier as they visit Switzerland, in a spirit of curiosity. Even in this sophisticated age they can come as pilgrims of Nature as easily as they can come as tourists. “Triangular trips,” “Four-day tours,” are not in the right spirit. Time is immaterial.

But there is virtue in shoe-leather, virtue in the saddle of the horse. Not much virtue in guides, in hotels. You come to these places to be alone with Nature or you do not arrive.

* * * * *

SO much for the idea and possibilities of the national parks. Lindsay showed me a portfolio of descriptions of them when he was in London, and he did much to persuade young Englishmen interested in America to visit them, go tramp in them. And though of course we had heard in a dim way of Yellowstone Park and of the Indian reservations both in the United States and in Canada it was a novelty for us. But Englishmen are born trampers and lovers of the wilderness, and are ready to reverse the American proverb--Why walk if you can ride?--and put it, Why ride when you can walk? And I shall not be the first Englishman to seek refreshment hiking through the wild places of the West.

We talked of this exuberantly as we clambered through the forests on the side of Little Chief Mountain, and it was still our theme in the evening when we lighted our fires in a vast rock temple and chasm down into which tumbled dark water, glittering and hastening as it flowed downward to the valleys. How to say a word for national wildernesses in this sedentary era of the world’s history, how to say a word for true religion and quiet and the things of the spirit! Vachel Lindsay will no doubt dramatise the subject in one fine Western epic some day, and I make my appeal, as I have done before, in prose, as for the wildernesses of Europe, so also for the wildernesses of America. But whether we write or sing of what we feel or see, one thing is sure when we are done--we shall have lived apart and tramped and meditated upon the mountains and far in the wilderness and it will mean something in our lives.

_What wish you to-day, dear tramp?
What wish you for brother-man?
Why, just this:--
The quality of mountain-sides in the colour of his eyes,
The deep of stars in the lake of his soul,
Feet that have learned to leap,
And a spirit that longs to fly.
That’s what I wish, dear brother, to-day,
Said the tramp._