As an officer, we
have not seen him yet, but we do know that he can be a most charming
host. He has already informed Faye that he intends to appoint him
adjutant and quartermaster of the post.
We are in a little valley almost surrounded by magnificent, heavily
timbered mountains, and Colonel Gardner says that at any time one can
find deer, mountain sheep, and bear in these forests, adding that
there are also mountain lions and wild cats! The scenery on the road
from Helena to Camp Baker was grand, but the roads were dreadful, most
of the time along the sides of steep mountains that seemed to be one
enormous pile of big boulders in some places and solid rock in others.
These roads have been cut into the rock and are scarcely wider than
the wagon track, and often we could look almost straight down
seventy-five feet, or even more, on one side, and straight up for
hundreds of feet on the other side.
And in the canons many of the grades were so steep that the wheels of
the wagons had to be chained in addition to the big brakes to prevent
them from running sideways, and so off the grade. I rode down one of
these places, but it was the last as well as the first. Every time
the big wagon jolted over a stone - and it was jolt over stones all the
time - it seemed as if it must topple over the side and roll to the
bottom; and then the way the driver talked to the mules to keep them
straight, and the creaking and scraping of the wagons, was enough to
frighten the most courageous.
In Confederate Gulch we crossed a ferry that was most marvelous. A
heavy steel cable was stretched across the river - the Missouri - and
fastened securely to each bank, and then a flat boat was chained at
each end to the cable, but so it could slide along when the ferryman
gripped the cable with a large hook, and gave long, hard pulls. Faye
says that the very swift current of the stream assisted him much.
The river runs through a narrow, deep canon where the ferry is, and at
the time we crossed everything was in dark shadow, and the water
looked black, and fathoms deep, with its wonderful reflections. The
grandeur of these mountains is simply beyond imagination; they have
to be seen to be appreciated, and yet when seen, one can scarcely
comprehend their immensity. We are five hundred miles from a railroad,
with endless chains of these mountains between. All supplies of every
description are brought up that distance by long ox trains - dozens of
wagons in a train, and eight or ten pairs of oxen fastened to the one
long chain that pulls three or four heavily loaded wagons.
