Читать книгу The Sheep Eaters - Allen William Alonzo - Страница 3

On the apex of Medicine Mountain, whose rugged cliffs hold communion with the fleeting clouds, and where the winds sing dismal songs among the cedar boughs, there the forked lightnings at intervals light up the panorama and a thousand beautiful springs and waterfalls sparkle like myriads of diamonds. The mountain ash and the golden leaves of the mountain quaking asp cast their shadows to make perfect this great wonderland, whose colors are more splendid than the rainbow or the golden setting of the western sun.

Among such scenery one could live away from the gilded vices and the artificial lives of the crowded cities, and it was close to the god of nature these people lived and carved their history on the mountains and rocks, worshipped the sun because it was warm and bright, and because it lighted the narrow trail through the defiles of the mountains, across the streams and through the cool green forests, along the rugged cliffs where the horny hoofs of the elk, deer, and mountain sheep had blazed a trail so narrow and so steep that none but the Sheep Eaters dare travel its rugged heights.

Along these trails could be seen at the four seasons of the year, all of the Sheep Eaters, wending their way to the sacred shrine, the great wheel, with its gates and its gods of plenty and light. Here on an elevated spur a thousand feet above the Porcupine Basin, standing out to the east, is a great look-out, where the great sun dial with its twenty-eight spokes representing the twenty-eight tribes of the Sheep Eaters, overlooking the great Grey Bull country, the Ten Sleep Mountains and the Teton Peaks sweeping down toward the Big Horn Canyon. There the Grey Bull and Wind River and Sage Creek are sweeping through Big Horn Canyon, with its chiseled walls, more than a third of a mile in height, and its serpentine trail fifty-two miles into the Big Horn River, and thence into the Yellowstone and Missouri and on to the ocean.

Here nature's god had spread with lavish hand the richest and the greatest blessings to the Sheep Eaters. The buffalo down in the valleys, the antelope on the plains, the gazelle along the streams, and the elk, black-tail and big horn on the mountains, the mountain grouse, and the streams filled with trout, camas root for bread, cherries, raspberries, and strawberries, made a Garden of Eden for these people until a thousand years had passed, and the tribes increased to twenty-eight before the onward march of the Sioux across and beyond the Mississippi and Missouri brought them into the Sheep Eaters' country.

Around the base of these mountains were many alluring deposits of gold, and small gold camps had started at Fire Springs, Bear Creek and on the east and west forks of the historical Little Big Horn, all in or near the beautiful Porcupine Basin. But the alluring grains of the precious metal could not be found in paying quantities and the miners had quietly packed their plunder and "hiked the trail" to more plentiful paying "diggins."