John G. Neihardt

“ Not only in its physical aspect does the Missouri appeal to the imagination. From Three Forks to its mouth—a distance of three thousand miles—this zigzag watercourse is haunted with great memories. Perhaps never before in the history of the world has a river been the thoroughfare of a movement so tremendously epic in its human appeal, so vastly significant in its relation to the development of man. And in the building of the continent Nature fashioned well the scenery for the great human story that was to be enacted here in the fullness of years. ”

“ I can contract an indefinable sort of heartache from the blue sputter of a city light that snuffs out moon and stars for tired scurrying folks: but the opalescent mist-drift of the Rainbow Falls wove heavens for me in its sheen, and through its whirlwind rifts and crystal flaws, far reaches opened up with all the heart's desire at the other end. You shut your eyes with that thunder in your ears and that gusty mist on your face, and you see it very plainly—more plainly than ever so many arc lights could make you see it—the ultimate meaning of things. ”

“ I have known men who felt dwarfed in the presence of vast and awful things. I never felt bigger than when I first looked upon the ocean. The skyward lift of a mountain peak makes me feel very, very tall. And when a thunderstorm comes down upon the world out of the northwest, with jagged blades of fire ripping up the black bellies of the clouds, I know all about the heart of Attila and the Vikings and tigers and Alexander the Great! So I think I grew a bit out there talking to that water-giant who does nothing at all—not even a vaudeville stunt—and does it so masterfully. ”

“ All about us was the sacred silence of the wilderness dawn. The coming sun had smitten the chill night air into a ghostly fog that lay upon the valley like a fairy lake.
We were at the rim of the Bad Lands and there were no birds to sing; but crows, wheeling about a sandstone summit, flung doleful voices downward into the morning hush—the spirit of the place grown vocal.
Cloaked with the fog, our breakfast fire of driftwood glowed ruddily. What is there about the tang of wood-smoke in a lonesome place that fills one with glories that seem half memory and half dream? ”

“ With a wild burst of scarlet, the sunset flashed out. Black clouds darkened the visible idyll. A chill gust swept across the stream, showering rain and darkness. Each at an oar, we forged on, until we lost the channel in the gloom. At the first peep of day we were off again, after a breakfast of pancakes, bacon, and coffee.
We were gradually becoming accustomed to the strain of constant rowing. For at least sixteen hours a day we fought the wind, during which time the oars were constantly dipping; and very often our day lengthened out to twenty hours. ”

“ We knew it to be the mourning voice of the Eagle Rapids; but far as we could see, the river was quiet as a lake. We jogged on for a mile, with the invisible moaning presence about us. It was somewhat like the intangible something you feel about a powerful but sinister personality. The golden morning was saturated with it.
Suddenly, turning a sharp bend about the wall of rock that flanked the channel, a wind of noise struck us. It was like the hissing of innumerable snakes against a tonal background of muffled continuous thunder. ”

“ A haggard, eerie fragment of moon slinked westward. Stars glinted in the flawless chilly blue. The surface of the river was like polished ebony—a dream-path wrought of gloom and gleam. The banks were lines of dusk, except where some lone cottonwood loomed skyward like a giant ghost clothed with a mantle that glistered and darkled in the chill star-sheen.
There was the feel of moving in eternity about it all. The very limitation of the dusk gave the feeling of immensity. There was no sense of motion, yet we moved. The sky seemed as much below as above. We seemed suspended in a hollow globe. ”

“ It was a swinging, loose, cavalry-horse sort of pace—the kind that rubs the blue off the distance and paints the back trail gray. Goodale was a sort of Mecca. I thought of it with something like a religious awe. How far was Goodale, would you suppose? Not far, certainly, once we found the railroad.
We made the last steep climb breathlessly, and came out on the level. A great, monotonous, heartachy prairie lay before us—utterly featureless in the twilight. Far off across the scabby land a thin black line swept out of the dusk into the dusk—straight as a crow's flight. It was the railroad. ”

“ What you seek is at the end of the rainbow; it is in the azure of distance; it is just behind the glow of the sunset, and close under the dawn. And the glorious thing about it is that you know you'll never find it until you reach that lone, ghostly land where the North Star sets, perhaps. You're merely glad to know that you're not a vegetable—and that the trail never really ends anywhere.
Just now, however, the longing for the abstract had the semblance of a longing for the concrete. It always has that semblance, for that matter. You never really want what you think you are seeking. ”

“ When one looks upon his own country as from a height of years, old tales lose something of their wonder for him. It is owing to this attitude that the prospect of descending the great river in a power canoe from the head of navigation gave me delight.
Days and nights filled with the singing and muttering of my big brother! And I would need only to close my eyes, and all about me would come and go the ghosts of the mighty doers—who are my kin. Big men, bearded and powerful, pushing up stream with the cordelle on their shoulders! Voyageurs chanting at the paddles! ”

“ The Atom, with bellying sail, leaped forward down the roughening water, swung about a bend, raced with a quartering wind down the next reach, shot across another bend—and lay drifting in a golden calm. Still above us the great wind buzzed in the crags like a swarm of giant bees, and the waters about us lay like a sheet of flawless glass.
With paddles we pushed on lazily for an hour. At the next bend, where the river turned into the west, the great gale that had been roaring above us, suddenly struck us full in front. ”

“ In the history of the Missouri River there were hundreds of these heroes, these builders of the epic West. Some of them were violent at times; some were good men and some were bad. But they were masterful always. They met obstacles and overcame them. They struck their foes in front. They thirsted in deserts, hungered in the wilderness, froze in the blizzards, died with the plagues, and were massacred by the savages. Yet they conquered. Heroes of an unwritten epic! And their pathway to defeat and victory was the Missouri River. ”

“ If those old cordelle men could only come back for a while from their Walhalla, how they would crowd about that wind-splitting, fire-eating, iron beast, panting from its long run, and catching its breath for another plunge into the waste places and the night! And I? I would be gazing wide-mouthed at the cordelle men. It's only the human curiosity about the other side of the moon. ”

“ As we swung along, kicking up the acrid alkali dust from the cattle-trail that snaked its way through the cactus and sagebrush, the roar behind us died; and before us, far away, dull muffled thunders grew up in the hush of the burning noon. Thunders in a desert, and no cloud! For an hour we swung along the trail, and ever the thunders increased—like the undertone of the surf when the sea whitens. We were approaching the Great Falls of the Missouri. ”

“ Philosophy proceeds backward, and points out errors of thought and action chiefly when it has become too late to mend them. But it is possible to be poor in the possession of erstwhile prospective wealth, and rich in retrospective poverty. Oh, blessed is he who is negatively rich!
Being a bit stunned by the death of the hope conceived in weariness, we did not put off that night, but huddled up in our blankets close to the log fire; for this midsummer night had in it a tang of frost.
Day came—cloudy and cold—blown over the wilderness by a wind that made the cottonwoods above us groan and pop. ”

“ There are no 'busses running and you can't buy a sandwich or a peanut or a glass of beer within ten miles of its far-flung thunders. For twentieth century America, that is doing rather well!
Skirting the slippery rocks at the lip of the mad flood, we swung ourselves about a ledge, dripping with the cool mist-drift; descended to the level of the lower basin, where a soaking fog made us shiver; pushed through a dripping, oozing, autumnal sort of twilight, and came out again into the beat of the desert sun, to look squarely into the face of the giant. ”

“ But the great flood of the spring had swept the valley clean. Where the year before there were prosperous ranch establishments with gasoline pumping plants, there was only desolation now. It was as though we traveled in the path of a devastating army. Perhaps the summer of 1908 was the most unfavorable season for such a trip in the last fifty years. Steamboating on the upper river is only a memory. There are now no wood-yards as formerly. We found ourselves with no certainty of procuring grub and oil; our engine became more and more untrustworthy; our paddles had been lost. ”

“ Plains limited only by the rim of sky; mountains severe, huge, tragic as fate; deserts for the trying of strong spirits; grotesque volcanic lands—dead, utterly ultra-human—where athletic souls might struggle with despair; impetuous streams with their rapids terrible as Scylla, where men might go down fighting: thus Nature built the stage and set the scenes. And that the arrangements might be complete, she left a vast tract unfinished, where still the building of the world goes on—a place of awe in which to feel the mighty Doer of Things at work. ”

“ An ordinary skiff would have capsized early in the day, but the Atom II could carry a full cargo of water and still float.
By sunset the wind fell, the river smoothed as a wrinkled brow at the touch of peace. Aided by a fair current, we skulled along in the hush of evening through a land of vast green pastures with "cattle upon a thousand hills." The great wind had spread the heavens with ever deepening clouds. ”

“ I can conceive of heaven only as an improbable condition in which all men would be willing and able to work for nothing at all. I had read in the Dane's face the meaning of a price. Heaving coal, I built Utopias.
When the boat was under way, I sat in the pilot-house with the Captain, watching the yellow flood and the yellow cliffs drift past like a vision. And little by little, this old man who has followed the river for over sixty years, pieced out the wonderful story of his life—a story fit for Homer. ”

“ For the Missouri from Great Falls to its mouth is one long grave of men and boats. And such men!
It is a time-honored habit to look back through the ages for the epic things. Modern affairs seem a bit commonplace to some of us. A horde of semi-savages tears down a town in order to avenge the theft of a faithless wife who was probably no better than she should have been—and we have the Iliad. A petty king sets sail for his native land, somehow losing himself ten years among the isles of Greece—and we have the Odyssey. ”

“ And all for a spiteful little engine that might prove ungrateful in the end!
It rained all night—a cold, insistent downpour. Our log fire was drowned out; the tent dripped steadily; our blankets got soppy; and three of us were so stiff that the least movement gave keen pain.
Soppy dawn—wet wood—bad grub for breakfast—and bad humor concealed with difficulty; but through it all ran a faint note of victory at the thought of the gasoline, and the way that engine would go! We lay in camp all day—soppy, sore—waiting for the rain to let up. ”

“ We no longer write epics—we live them. To create an epic, it has been said somewhere, the poet must write with the belief that the immortal gods are looking over his shoulder.
We no longer prostrate ourselves before the immortal gods. We have long since discovered the divinity within ourselves, and so we have flung across the continents and the seas the visible epics of will.
The history of the American fur trade alone makes the Trojan War look like a Punch and Judy show! and the Missouri River was the path of the conquerors. We have the facts—but we have not Homer. ”

“ In ancient times the immortal gods scourged nations for impieties; and, as we read, we feel the black shadow of inexorable fate moving through the terrific gloom of things. But the smallpox scourge that broke out at Fort Union in 1837, sweeping with desolation through the prairie tribes, moves me more than the storied catastrophes of old. It was a Reign of Terror. Even Larpenteur's bald statement of it fills me with the fine old Greek sense of fate. Men sickened at dawn and were dead at sunset. Every day a cartload or two of corpses went over the bluff into the river; and men became reckless. ”

“ For a half-hour, as we proceeded, the sound increased, until it seemed close under our prow. We knew there was no cataract in the entire lower portion of the river; and yet, only from a waterfall had I ever heard a sound like that. We pulled for the shore, and went to bed with the sinister booming under our bow.
Waking in the gray dawn, we found ourselves at the mouth of the Niobrara River. Though a small stream compared with the Missouri, so great is its speed, and so tremendous the impact of its flood, that the mightier, but less impetuous Missouri is driven back a quarter of a mile. ”

“ It is so with the Missouri River. Carlyle was not, I think, speaking of rivers; but he was speaking of masterpieces—and so am I.
It makes little difference to me whether or not an epic goes at a hexameter gallop through the ages, or whether it chooses to be a flood of muddy water, ripping out a channel from the mountains to the sea. It is merely a matter of how the great dynamic force shall express itself.
I have seen trout streams that I thought were better lyrics than I or any of my fellows can ever hope to create. ”

“ For the first hard stage of the journey was done; all had left me but a brave lad who would take his share of the hardships with a light heart. (All boys are instinctively true sportsmen!) And before us lay the great winding stretch of a savage river that I had loved long—the real Missouri of my boyhood.
A new spirit had come upon us with the possession of the Atom II—the spirit of the forced march. For nearly a month we had floundered, trusting to a sick engine and inefficient paddles. Now we had a staunch, dry boat, and eight-foot oars. ”