Chapter XVIII: Picket Wire and Kicking Horse

There are no more beautiful valleys anywhere than those cut by the waters of primeval floods through the foothills of the great snow-covered Rocky Mountains. The erosions and washings of untold centuries have flung out in front of the granite ramparts a succession of lower elevations like the bastions of a fortress. At first scarcely to be distinguished from the main range in height and ruggedness these ravelins and escarpments gradually decrease in altitude and size until they turn into a series of more or less disconnected, softly rounded hills, like outflung earthworks, finally merging themselves by gradual slopes into the distant plains overlooked by the great peaks of the mountains.

The monotony of these pine-clad, wind-swept slopes is broken even in the low hills by out-thrustings of stone, sometimes the hard igneous rock, the granite of the mountains, more frequently the softer red sandstone of a period later, yet ineffably old. These cliffs, buttes, hills, and mesas have been weathered into strange and fantastic shapes which diversify the landscape and add charm to the country.

The narrow cañons in which the snow-fed streams take their rise gradually widen as the water follows its tortuous course down the mountains through the subsiding ranges and out among the foothills to the sandy, arid, windy plains beyond. At the entrance of one of the loveliest of these broad and verdant valleys, a short distance above its confluence with a narrower, more rugged ravine through the hills, lay the thriving little town of Coronado.

Some twenty miles back from the town at a place where the valley was narrowed to a quarter of a mile, and separating it from the paralleling ravine, rose a huge sandstone rock called Spanish Mesa. Its top, some hundreds of feet higher than the tree-clad base of the hills, was mainly level. From its high elevation the country could be seen for many miles, mountains on one hand, plains on the other. It stood like an island in a sea of verdure. Little spurs and ridges ran from it. Toward the range it descended and contracted into a narrow saddle, vulgarly known as a "Hog-back," where the granite of the mountains was hidden under a deep covering of grass-grown earth, which formed the only division between the valley and the gorge or ravine, before the land, widening, rose into the next hill.

And people came from miles away to see that interesting and curious mesa, much more striking in its appearance than Baldwin's Knob, the last foothill below it. Transcontinental travelers even broke journey to visit it. The town prospered accordingly, especially as it was admirably situated as a place of departure for hunters, explorers, prospectors, and adventurers, who sought what they craved in the wild hills. There were one or two good hotels for tourists, unusually extensive general stores of the better class, where hunting and prospecting parties could be outfitted, and the high-living, extravagant cattle ranchers could get what they demanded. Besides all these there were the modest homes of the lovers of the rough but exhilarating and health-giving life of the Rocky Mountains. Of course there were numerous saloons and gambling halls, and the town was the haunt of cowboys, hunters, miners, Indians--the old frontier with a few touches of civilization added!

What was left of the river, which had made the valley--and during the infrequent periods of rain too brief to be known as the rainy season, it really lived up to the name of river--flowed merrily through the town, when it flowed at all, under the name of Picket Wire. Singular lack of ability to bestow a poetic nomenclature upon nature might at first seem to be exhibited by the pioneer in this nondescript title. Not so the truth.

The pioneer was a poet unconsciously and filled with a spirit of romance. No man adventures, unless under the pressure of some inexorable necessity, into unknown lands as the pioneers did, without imagination, romance; vision, if you will. Plain though he may appear, the pioneer is the real dreamer of dreams. In the bleak and arid present, rough, wild, and unpromising, he can see the future, his the eyes of the seer and prophet. But when he tries to translate what he feels and sees, even in the simplest ways by exercising the privilege of Adam in naming the places he passes or stays by, he seems to lack expression to fit his soul.

For instance one of the most beautiful and romantic mountain streams, ever fresh and clear, ever dashing madly through one of the most stupendous cañons of Colorado, is known as the Big Thompson! Shades of Poseidon! What has water ever done to be so called? Another example is a great swelling peak, which strives to hold up its head when people point out that it is called Mount Bill Williams! Bill it might have stood, or Williams, but the combination!

Well, there were romance and appositeness about the silver stream that came dashing down from the snow-line, and in the springtime it might fairly be said to dash, called the Picket Wire. Into that very valley and at the base of that mesa in which the four centuries since had effected so little change had come, in the following of Coronado, for whom the town was named, a little party of Spanish explorers. Why they ascended the valley over which the mesa stood sentry and why they camped there rather than on the other side is not told in the tradition which alone sets forth their fate. That does not enter into this story. Suffice it, therefore, to say that a cloudburst in the hills, a thing which seems to have been as old as the hills themselves, wiped them out entirely. All unprepared, unblest, unshriven, they were swept away. Battered bodies, torn garments below the mesa told the story to those that hunted for tidings afterward. The valley was a place of horror. The river of lost souls, "_Rio de las Animas_," the Spaniards named it.

Somehow or other the name stuck to it until a restless French "coureur-de-bois," ranging far southward from the Great Lakes, came upon it and its name. Promptly identifying lost soul with purgatory he called it in turn "_La Rivière-de-la-Purgatoire_," the river of purgatory, as if to say, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." In turn the name supplanted the other and abided.

When the cowboy followed the pioneer, knowing neither French nor Spanish, he onomatopoetized the last appellation into "_The Picket Wire_," which was as near as he could come to the pronunciation of Purgatoire. The Spanish passed, the French disappeared, the cowboy and his like remained. Picket Wire it became and Picket Wire it will remain to the end of the chapter. There is no natural descent from lost souls to Picket Wire, though many lost souls may have been lost because of picket wires, but that is how it came to be. And the original disaster was not entirely forgotten either. It was perpetuated in the butte which became "Spanish Mesa." France, alas, coming between, had no memorial.

Well, not being a purgatorial Styx, after a time the valley and the ravine were both explored. The hills were tapped in fruitless search for precious metals, which were not found, and then it was abandoned to the hunter. When the railroad came the Picket Wire had been first studied in the hope of finding a practicable way over the mountains, but the ravine on the other side of the mesa had been found to offer a shorter and more practicable route. And, by the way, this ravine, taking its name from the little brook far down in its narrows, was known as the "Kicking Horse"; so named, no one knew why, by the Indians and freely translated by the white men. At any rate there was at least some association between Picket Wire and Kicking Horse, as the experienced know!

So the railroad ran up the ravine and the Picket Wire was left still virgin to the assaults of man. But the day came when it was despoiled of its hitherto long standing, unravished innocence. Axes were laid to the roots of the trees, drills were driven into the rocks of the hills. Crashed down were the pines of the centuries, crushed were paleocosmic rocks with new and strange fires. Scarred and gashed and torn and ripped were the grass-covered hills. Huge expanses of yellow clay were revealed beneath the richer deposits whereon the sod had flourished.

Shouts of men, cracking of whips, trampling of horses, groaning of wheels, wordless but vocal protests of beasts of burden mingled with the ringing of axes, the detonations of dynamite. The whistle of engines and the roar of steam filled the valley. Under the direction of engineers, a huge mound of earth arose across its narrowest part, nearest a shoulder, or spur, of the mesa reaching westward. No more should the silver Picket Wire flow unvexed on its way to the sea. It was to be dammed.

All that the huge, hot inferno of baked plain, where sage brush and buffalo grass alone grow, needed to make it burgeon with wheat and corn was water. The little Picket Wire, which had meandered and sparkled and chattered on at its own sweet will was now to be held until it filled a great lake-like reservoir in the hills back of the new earth dam. Then through skillfully located irrigation ditches the water was to be given to the millions of hungry little wheatlets and cornlets, which would clamor for a drink. The fierce sun was no longer to work its unthwarted will in burning up the prairie.

The sage brush and buffalo grass were to go like the Indian before the march of civilization. Nature is more refined than man. The liquid that settled the Indian was accurately known as "firewater." Incidentally, the same compound took a great many whites, not all the baser sort either. But that which was to sweep away the greasy sage brush and the coarse, rank grass, there being no longer any buffalo, was the water of life which came down from heaven. At least the snow caps of the range whence the Picket Wire flowed, and the great clouds that once in a long time swept over the peaks and dropped their burden on the bluff shoulders of the mountains, were as near heaven as it is possible to get on this earth.

With the promise of water on the plain beyond, Coronado sprang into sudden recrudescence of newer and more vigorous life. In the language of the West it "boomed." The railroad had been a forlorn branch running up into the mountains and ending nowhere. Its first builders had been daunted by difficulties and lack of money, but as soon as the great dam was projected, which would open several hundred thousand acres for cultivation and serve as an inspiration in its practical results to other similar attempts, people came swarming into the country buying up the land, the price for acreage steadily mounting. The railroad accordingly found it worth while to take up the long-abandoned construction work of mounting the range and crossing it. Men suddenly observed that it was the shortest distance between two cardinal points, and one of the great transcontinental railways bought it and began improving it to replace its original rather unsatisfactory line.

The long wooden trestle which crossed the broad, sandy depression in front of the town, the bed of the ancient river, through which the Picket Wire and further down its affluent, the Kicking Horse, flowed humbly and modestly, was being replaced by a great viaduct of steel. Far up the gorge past the other side of the Spanish Mesa another higher trestle had already been replaced by a splendid steel arch. A siding had been built near the ravine, a path made to the foot of the mesa, and arrangements were being made to run a local train up from the town when all was completed to give the people an opportunity to ride up the gorge and see the great pile of rock, on which enterprise was already planning the desecration of a summer hotel, the blasphemy of an amusement park!