YELLOWSTONE Early History of Yellowstone National Park and Its Relation to National Park Policies

To the Editor of the Herald:

Please allow me, through your columns, to relate an incident connected with the recent trip of the Yellowstone party, to which subsequent events have added melancholy interest. It occurred at our first camp on the south shore of Yellowstone Lake, where we bivouacked on the evening of September 7. On that day, by a long detour through tangled thickets and fallen timber, through swampy fiats surrounding the inlet of the Yellowstone River into the lake of the same name, we had reached a point but little farther east than we had made the day before, and been compelled to retrace our steps by reason of impassable sloughs. We no longer had any sort of trail, and the difficulties of traveling were multiplying upon us; besides, the southern lake shore is very irregular—long promontories or points jutting out from the mainland for miles into the lake. It became to all of us a matter of first importance to curtail our route by making cuts across the necks of these points. With that object in view, General Washburn and myself, after pitching camp and disposing of supper, took a ramble to spy out a route for our next day's drive. At about a mile from camp, in nearly a due-east course, we came upon a game trail, passed an old Indian tepee at least a year old, skirted a little lake about 50 feet above the main lake, snugly tucked up about the foot of a high, bold, bluffy point partly open and partly covered with standing and fallen timber. At that time we only ascended a short distance, as the sun had already set and we were not altogether fresh after the scratching and floundering of the day's journey. We were anxious to know what could be seen from the top of that mountain, and Mr. Everts proposed to me that I should go with him as soon as breakfast was over in the morning, September 8. Accordingly we went. He manifested much eagerness to go and seemed in more than usual good spirits. The point reached the night before was soon passed, and we stood upon what appeared as the top seen from the base, but we found it but one step to a much bolder point, whose base was concealed from our view below. Not knowing the persistency of the man, I asked him if we had better go to the top, and his quick response was, "By all means." The sides of this mountain were in places so nearly perpendicular that we made slow and labored progress. Sometimes losing our foothold, we would slide back several feet, in one instance I lost ground about 4 rods and was indebted to a dwarf pine for not losing more distance and perhaps even worse consequences. Thrice we halted on what seemed from below to be the summit, and still we found the top beyond us, which we reached by a final desperate attempt, making the last 50 feet by drawing ourselves up, grasping projecting rocks along the face of an almost perpendicular ledge of dark, coarse, conglomerate rock. Here we stood on a broad, level, rocky rim to a high plateau, pine covered as it receded, which commands a most magnificent view of the whole lake and the dark-green piney basin in which it nestles, in admiration of the pluck and perseverance of my companion, I told him that point should be named Mount Everts. During the half hour that we remained on this mountain, probably 12,000 feet above the lake's surface, we traced almost its entire outline, as well the part that we proposed to traverse as that over which we had already come. We could even see through a gap in the easternmost of the southern promontories the blue waters of the southeast arm of the lake, near which we expected to take our departure for the headwaters of the Madison. I then noticed, with some surprise, that with his glasses he could see such distant features as I called to his notice. We examined, as minutely as time allowed, the intervening space, tracing out what we thought the most practicable route across the necks of several points reaching miles away into the lake. This was only the day before he got separated from us, and so strong was my faith that he knew our course and would appear at some point in our advance that I scarcely entertained a fear till we finally reached the farthest point where we left the lake.

In descending the mountains Mr. Everts took a shorter line to camp than that by which we came, while I was unwilling to take any chances of missing my way, and returned as I went. I found Mr. Everts in camp when I reached it. It increased greatly my confidence in his good judgment as a woodsman.

The company, of course, assented to my proposed name for the mountain we had visited, and let future tourists respect this monumental record. What more fitting monument can transmit to future generations the name of our lamented companion? As it towers in self-complacent grandeur above the beautiful lake, and serenely marks the passage of storms, and seasons, and centuries, Mount Everts seems a fitting type of that noble, self-reliant spirit, destined, as we fear, so soon after to be quenched by a dismal fate in the wooded wilderness near its base.

The hope of his rescue so long deferred makes the heart sicken with gloom. Baffled in all our hopes, we incline to believe that he became a victim to the gang of desperadoes that, flying from hot pursuit by way of Snake River, found their refuge in the impenetrable forests and swamps of the south shore of Yellowstone Lake, it is some melancholy satisfaction, should the mystery of his fate never be cleared up, that I had some instrumentality in providing for him so fitting a monument as Mount Everts.

Yours truly,

CORNELIUS HEDGES.

HELENA, October 8, 1870.
(Helena (Mont.) Daily Herald, October 8, 1870.)