communion
with the fleeting clouds, and where the winds sing dismal songs among
the cedar boughs, there the forked lightnings at intervals light up the
panorama and a thousand beautiful springs and waterfalls sparkle like
myriads of diamonds. The mountain ash and the golden leaves of the
mountain quaking asp cast their shadows to make perfect this great
wonderland, whose colors are more splendid than the rainbow or the
golden setting of the western sun.

Among such scenery one could live away from the gilded vices and the
artificial lives of the crowded cities, and it was close to the god of
nature these people lived and carved their history on the mountains and
rocks, worshipped the sun because it was warm and bright, and because
it lighted the narrow trail through the defiles of the mountains, across
the streams and through the cool green forests, along the rugged cliffs
where the horny hoofs of the elk, deer, and mountain sheep had blazed a
trail so narrow and so steep that none but the Sheep Eaters dare travel
its rugged heights.

Along these trails could be seen at the four seasons of the year, all of
the Sheep Eaters, wending their way to the sacred shrine, the great
wheel, with its gates and its gods of plenty and light. Here on an
elevated spur a thousand feet above the Porcupine Basin, standing out to
the east, is a great look-out, where the great sun dial with its
twenty-eight spokes representing the twenty-eight tribes of the Sheep
Eaters, overlooking the great Grey Bull country, the Ten Sleep Mountains
and the Teton Peaks sweeping down toward the Big Horn Canyon. There the
Grey Bull and Wind River and Sage Creek are sweeping through Big Horn
Canyon, with its chiseled walls, more than a third of a mile in height,
and its serpentine trail fifty-two miles into the Big Horn River, and
thence into the Yellowstone and Missouri and on to the ocean.

Here nature's god had spread with lavish hand the richest and the
greatest blessings to the Sheep Eaters. The buffalo down in the valleys,
the antelope on the plains, the gazelle along the streams, and the elk,
black-tail and big horn on the mountains, the mountain grouse, and the
streams filled with trout, camas root for bread, cherries, raspberries,
and strawberries, made a Garden of Eden for these people until a
thousand years had passed, and the tribes increased to twenty-eight
before the onward march of the Sioux across and beyond the Mississippi
and Missouri b