What They Did to Old Faithful

Mind your manners when you get to Old Faithful, because the crowd I'm about to tell you about did not. August of eighteen seventy seven. A little party from Radersburg, Montana, has come to see the wonders, same as you. There's Emma Cowan and her husband George, her brother Frank Carpenter, her small sister Ida, and a few friends. It's Sunday the nineteenth, they're camped in the Upper Basin, it's wash day, and somebody has a bright idea. Emma and Ida stuff their clothes in a pillow case. One of the men ties his blouse around a rock. Another peels off his jacket. The geyser starts to rumble, somebody gives the word, and in it all goes. It goes down, and it stays down. It stays down so long that the fellow who gave up his blouse starts mourning it out loud. Then she goes off, and the whole wash shoots a hundred feet in the air, comes down in the basins below, and they fish it out as clean as you please. Frank put it all in a book. Well, that went so nicely they got curious. They hauled in stones and trees and stumps, at least a thousand pounds of it by Frank's count, and chopped it into the crater till it was full to the top. Then they sat down to see what she'd do. She did what she does. Right on her time the ground shook, and up it all went, stumps and all, seventy five or eighty feet. Frank figured she'd been angered, because she gave them a longer show than usual. They had five days left of that kind of fun. On the morning of the twenty fourth they were packing for home in the Lower Basin when men walked up to their fire. These were Nez Perce, about seven hundred and fifty people, most of them not fighters, with two thousand horses and the United States Army behind them. Two weeks before, soldiers had come down on their camp at the Big Hole, and women and children had died there. A treaty the government forced on them had already taken most of their country. They needed food and fresh horses, and a camp of sightseers was in their road. One of the party started handing out flour and sugar until George Cowan ordered it stopped, and Emma wrote that it hurt his chances. Frank looked off to the side and saw more of them over by the geysers, just looking, the way he'd been doing all week. The wagons were wrecked, their good horses were swapped for worn out ones, and they were told they could go. Then a few men came after them, angry at past betrayals, as the park's own exhibit once put it, and shot George Cowan down in front of his wife. The chiefs, Emma wrote, sent a man called Poker Joe to stop it. She was let go within days, sure she'd left her husband dead on that hill. She hadn't. With a ball flattened on his forehead, he crawled about twelve miles in four days, and he lived. Twenty six years later Emma Cowan sat down and wrote it all out. She had watched that pistol go off. She had every reason in this world. And when she came to the business with the horses, she stopped, and wrote that the swap was a fair reflection of the lesson taught by the whites. Gold turns up on a reservation, she wrote, a treaty gets signed, and the tribe finds itself on poorer ground. The Indian, she wrote, has few rights the average white settler feels bound to respect. Old Faithful threw back every stick those folks ever put in her. Whenever she goes up, I look for a pillow case.