Thank you very much for the kind words.
Some day I will share with you more imagery from the same area, which is still very like it was a hundred, two hundred, or even more centuries ago.
Here's a little preface to a work in progress, copyright by ManyMoose.
If mountains could speak, what stories would they tell? Would they brag about how high they are, or the fame of climbers who stood at their summit? Or climbers they dashed to death on their slopes? Would they boast of their beauty, would they pride themselves on the richness of their minerals, the sweetness of their waters, or the sweep of their view?
As mountains go, this one isn’t much. Within seven or eight miles there are three higher mountains, each with a better view. The Bitterroot Range—almost all of it more glorious--is hardly visible from its summit, because of the trees.
Few peaks great or small can match its history and drama.
Indigenous peoples passed by for hundreds of years on their way to the buffalo. Nobody knows for sure, but they probably rested on the mountain long before the Vikings or Columbus ever cast eyes on North America. If there were a written history of their travels, their adventures would fill libraries.
The first missionary to cross the Rocky Mountains, a man named Parker, rested here. He and others declared that nobody should take a woman over that trail if they had any regard for human life. He was probably more aware of his own discomfort than the generations of indigenous women who had gone there before him.
In 1853, an obscure engineer named A. W. Tinkham sat back on his snowshoes, set up his instruments on the mountain and sketched out a rough map and sketched out rough notes on late season snow depths. His mission, under orders from Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, was to ascertain whether the route was suitable for a railroad. It was one of several explored by Lt. John Mullan’s men and others under the direction of Isaac Stevens. Tinkham faded into obscurity because of the routes surveyed, his was the least suitable for a railroad. He was forced to sue for payment for his service, which is well documented in the heavy volume published just before the Civil War broke out.
Gold seekers, merchants, horse thieves, mail carriers, and others passed the mountain going back and forth between Elk City and the Bitterroot Valley, and later to the rich placer fields in the Beaverhead country in what was to become the State of Montana.
A map published in 1905 shows more detail than Tinkham’s. The peak, as yet unnamed, shows as a mere pimple near the dotted trace depicting the approximate location of the trail they and all those before them had traveled.
The United States Forest Service built a fire lookout and maintained it for a time. This structure has been razed to the last nail, and only a sharp eye can detect where it once stood.
Today a single lane dirt road traverses a narrow corridor between the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness and the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. This road is the longest segment of undeveloped motor way in the entire United States.
In our own times, this area was the scene of a tremendous political battle that culminated in cancellation of plans to develop the corridor for timber and other resources. For this reason, and the underlying ruggedness of the mountain itself, the mountain is hardly different from what it was before Columbus’ time.
Fires periodically sweep through, perpetuating an age-old cycle that predates even the earliest forays of the Indigenous Nations in the area. Perhaps they will someday expose more remnants of the massacre that occurred on here on October 8, 1863.
Nine men rode up precipitous slopes out of the Selway River that day; only four rode away.
Five men, hacked or shot to death for their gold, left their lives in a great pool of blood on the mountain. One of them left his name—Magruder Mountain.
Bloody Mountain.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus wrote that “time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong as its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.”
If mountains could speak, they might say time means nothing to them, though the river of time wears them down too on a scale no human can truly fathom.
We can fathom a day, the interval of time measured by one revolution of the earth about its axis. We understand a month, about thirty days, the interval of time measured by one revolution of the moon around the earth during which it exposes a perfect full moon, and the dark faced new moon. We understand a year, the interval of time measured by a full revolution of the earth about the sun. Human events linked in time and space become stories.
Most stories have a beginning, a middle--in which daily events rise to a climax and then subside, and an end--like the profile of a one-humped camel. This mountain’s bloody story doesn’t fit that mold. It is more like a two-humped camel.
And you have to read the rest of the story to find out why.
Copyright, ManyMoose. |
