This lake affords royal sport. Here are the most beautiful fish in the world, the rainbow trout.
Through a pine-clad gorge flanked by high bluffs the impetuous Yellowstone River makes its way until it leaps the great falls and plunges down three hundred and fifty feet to the cañon below.
On the sides of the spray-washed walls grow mosses and algæ of every hue of green, ochre, orange, brown, scarlet, saffron and red. On rugged peaks are brown eagles’ nests.
The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone, would you describe this marvelous gorge, language is inadequate, words are poor.
Would you paint it, on your palette place all colors yet produced by the ingenuity of man. Mix them with rainbow drops. The pale faced moon will lend a shade, the stars another and the sun still another as he drops blood-red down through the mists of the sea. Stir and mix with matchless skill until you have of colors half a hundred and shades as many more. Now boldly dash the stupendous walls, castles, pinnacles, turrets, columns, and minarets where already they are gleaming a bright vermilion as they from Vulcan’s fiery furnace issued long ago.
When you have these colors fixed let Phaethon drive down the gorge in his chariot of fire leaving behind the gleam and the glow of it.
[Illustration: PAINT POTS ON SHORE OF YELLOWSTONE LAKE.]
Here, the Sioux chiefs, crouching by their camp fires muttered their griefs and their woes. Here Rain in the Face cried out in revenge, revenge on the White chief with the Yellow Hair.
Yonder lay Sitting Bull with his three thousand warriors hidden in cleft and cave. Into the fateful snare dashed the White chief with his pitiful three hundred men. Like a mountain torrent Sitting Bull and his braves swept down upon that gallant band, and but one was left to tell the story of the Little Big Horn, but one to tell of the gallant stand of Custer and his brave men.
Only two survived of all that noble band, one, Curly, the half-breed scout, and the other, “Comanche,” the horse of Captain Keogh. Comanche was found several miles from the battle field with seven wounds. He recovered and the secretary of war detailed a soldier as his attendant.
Here, too, the Crow took revenge when driven back by the white man. Here they peopled the boiling, hissing springs and the steaming geysers with evil spirits, while beyond the mountains lay the Happy Hunting Ground.