Neighbors and their children that were all energy and shrieks; debts and mortgages and policemen and funerals and taxes; out here, thank God, there were no funerals: a man died, the wolves and buzzards cleaned his bones, and that was the end of him.
Bill had brought news from Bridger’s post and it had depressed all the mountain men. This magnificent untamed country was rapidly filling with people. The immigrant trains came all summer now, headed for Oregon and California; the valleys would be poisoned by smoke-belching cities, and a man wouldn’t dare lie on his belly and drink from a stream. East of the Great Salt Lake were thousands of Mormons now; Bill said they professed to want only to get away from their persecutors and take as many wives as a man could use, but the basin would fill with them and overflow, and there would be only Mormon wives where today there were beaver, wild fruits, and peace. The polygamous dames would tramp down all the berry bushes and hack down all the trees; and at last all the Indians and all the elk and buffalo would be gone. There would be, Bridger said, only what was called civilization and the thought of it made him sick in his innards. How many wives did Brigham have now? Fifty at least, and five hundred children, Jim said.
The truth was that Sam Minard had been born too late and had come west too late. He had been here only a few years when Brigham came creaking and crawling across the prairies with his Mormon hordes; and now after him came people by the thousands, itching all over to find gold or tear up the country with plows; and to build jails, impose taxes, vote politicians into office, and play like children at being elegant and civilized. Good God, he guessed he ought to push north.
In Colter’s hell with its clean sharp odors of sulphur pot and steaming geyser, of vast black forests of spruce and pine and fir, Sam looked round him and wondered what it would be like after men with gold pans, axes, and plows were done with it. He tried to imagine it fifty or a hundred years hence. Why was the Creator putting so many people on the earth, anyway? Doggone it, there were hundreds of millions now; Sam thought a few hundred thousand would be enough. There were too many red people, so many that the sites of their old villages gave off foul odors for years and were stains of death on the earth. Let the red people settle for a year or two in a spot and everything under them and around them began to die and smell bad, like flowers soaked with wolf urine, until you could say, there on the Rosebud, there on the Bighorn, there on the Belle Fourche, the Chugwater, the Teton, the Snake, the Colorado, the Green—there and everywhere are the death stains where people blighted what they touched, and Nature no longer could do its housekeeping and replace stink with fragrance. There was something about people, Sam decided, and sniffed his hands. There were millions of buffalo, whole seas and oceans of them, and in twenty-four hours they dropped millions of their dung piles; but in no time at all the dung became odorless chips that were much like a handful of dried prairie grass. But a site on which people, white or red, camped for a few weeks stunk a man out of the area and over the tallest peaks. Man was, for a fact, such an ill-smelling critter that every beast and bird on earth was afraid of him because of his stink. This fancy made Sam chuckle. The Creator was slipping somewhere. To Sam it seemed that the time would come when all over the earth there wouldn’t be an unpolluted stream or a fragrant dell left; or a scented thicket where a man needn’t look round him before he sat; or a valley not littered and stricken with human ugliness. Sam would have been grimly amused if told that in another hundred years there would be agitation for wilderness areas, in these very lands around him, where persons from the swarming and overcrowded masses could for an hour or two fill their lungs with clean air, hear a bird sing, sense the meaning of peace.
In the primitive edens and gardens where deer looked at him with their soft eyes, where birds peered through spruce foliage and talked to him, and the highest peaks wore on their shoulders cloaks of white that the sun never drew away; or where on the south flanks he could lie in berry thickets and spill luscious juices down his throat—where he could gather the orange radiance of thimbleberries by the double handful and feed on them while the exquisite soul-scents of mountain fruits filled his nostrils and senses; where he could gather the gold-and-bronze gum of the big fir trees and chew its wood-and-l peak flavors while studhugging the tree to him, to saturate his leather clothing with its smell of mountains and eternity, drawn up from the deep earth and down from the tall skies; where he could climb with the aid of leather halters sixty feet up the golden wall of a yellow pine, taking only his rifle and harp, and find, high up, two or three big branches across which he could lie, and look up through a lacework of loveliness at pools of blue and piles of cotton, and play the waltz of the vineyard to the marvelous handiwork of God; where in a deep forest a hundred thousand or a million years old he could dig round him like a bear or badger, in the leaf-and-cone depths down through a foot or maybe two feet of it, feeling the clean earth-wonder of it in his hands and getting it all over him and breathing into his soul the earth-smells and infinite time of it, until he was filled with all the good unspoiled ancientness of the earth, forest, sky, mountains, and snows; and where he could stretch out full length in the hole he had made and cover himself over with the centuries-old accumulation of humus mold made of needles and cones and twigs, old bark, bird nests, snows, and rains, with only his face and arms out, his being enfolded by the ancientness and the peace, until at last he dozed and slept; and where with hot biscuits, an elk roast garnished with wild onions, a pot of coffee, a quart of blue-purple huckleberries he could feast not only on food that was free and divine but on the image of eternal beauty in everything around him, and then fill his pipe and smoke, and hum a few bars from Handel’s "Messiah," and strain to hear a few faint notes from the infinite orchestras that he thought must be playing in the infinite blue capsule that enveloped the earth; and where at last when the day was done he could lie on the fur-soft of a buffalo robe, under the jewels that men called stars, with a cover of tanned elkskin over him, drawn up to his chin so that its scent would mingle with that of fir, red osier, mountain laurel, wild grape, and juniper smoke, and with the odors wafted in from the hot mineral pots, geyser steam, and the sky and the night ....
He would have remained in the haven until October if he had not seen signs of an abnormally deep winter. After years in the mountains whitemen knew almost as well as the red, or the wolf, beaver, and mourning dove, Nature’s moods and auguries. Snow began to fall in the geyser basin in early September. That, for Sam, was warning enough. When a foot of snow fell in thirty-six hours he climbed the nearest peak to have a look around him, examining for omens all the things of the forest on his way up. He could not see across to the Bighorns east of him, or the Gallatin Mountains north. Where, he wondered, would he trap this winter? The Uintahs were still good but far away, and Bill Williams had been killed down there. There were spots on Bear River, the Snake, the Teton, but soon there would be ranches everywhere, and men building fences to keep their neighbors out. When there were no more open areas to go to, a man who loved freedom more than life would have to settle down, with a neighbor within twenty feet on the left, and on the right, and a whole row of them facing him across the street. Yonder, away down there, late immigrant trains were crawling along.