Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Two Great Canyons: Excerpts From Letters Written on a Western Journey
At Bismarck, I recalled what Mr. Brycewrote in The American Commonwealth.
He was present, in 1883, when the corner stone of the state house was laid, with im posing 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 metro politan 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 riverthat 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 trans continental 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.
The hotel is crowded. People are com ing and going. They jostle each other and rush about frantically, looking for baggage and worried about many things. Those who have done the Park are anxious to get away, and those who are about to do it are as anxious to be on their way. All sorts and conditions of people are here, the aged and the young, the rich and the poor, women always predominating in numbers and in activity. The postal card fad is at its height here. The postage that is paid on these tri?es ought to pay the government a dividend on the money it has invested in the Park.
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