Castle Mountain, 1884

Monday [June] 23rd. Mr. Grier & I went somewhat late to prospect a creek some 4 mls. down the river, nearly opposite 15 ml. creek. We rode Pinto & Billy down the trail to the creek crossing. I rode Billy with only a blanket, since Severin has my saddle, dreadful experience of jolting. Hard to keep on going down hill, well enough up hill. Stream proved barren, Mr. Grier panned out several times with the shovel without a color, though the stream looked very promising. Plenty of the right kind of slate filled with white veins (of calcite generally, not quartz). Other prospectors had been before us. The calcite veins had misled them. It rained on our way back & we took shelter under some thick spruces & thus kept dry. ...

It is strange to see these restless migrations out here in wildernesses with no roads but wretched pack trails. The Brit. Col.[British Colonial] Government has a party at work improving the trail here. They make little bridges over streams with swampy margins & muddy bottoms and cut away trees which interfere with the trail. Yesterday we found fallen trees across several parts of the trail. Yesterdays tempest of wind had thrown them down. We had often to make detours into the bush to get round them.

Tuesday, June 24th, 1884.

Rained all night heavily and till late this morning. Got breakfast under difficulties. No easy matter to light a fire & cook bacon and bread under pouring rain. Some reflections, — A walk and musing fit on the bench is worth recording perhaps. Life is made up of impressions and sensations connected by memories and reasonings. Impressions ought to be noted at times just as well as occurrences. They have often even more value than facts. Away above the ranch & camp & out of sight of man & all his works seated the the [sic] brow of the high bench overlooking valley & river and mountains all under the blue sky and pouring sun, the air almost breezeless, and most living things dumb, it comes strangely over one that nature has a slow, calm life of her own, a subanimate, unconscious life whose slow, regular current surrounds and encloses your life and sweeps it on with it as the evenly flowing Columbia bears the prospector’s canoe or raft. The voyager may paddle manfully against it, but the current influences every motion of his craft, and if he rests, takes full charge of it, not in a violent, reasonless way, but steadily & with a relentless purpose. Gravity is at work.

The feeling, sitting there alone under the still sky and the passionless green of the Douglas fir, with all the valley spread out in front, is that the unconscious life far

over balances the conscious. Is the conscious life of ourselves and other animals not the transient eddying of the ever flowing stream? Our life a passing eddy which ends as the river sweeps past the curve, and another eddy takes its place! Then we are drawn down restfully into the deep, restful river. The unconscious life is the wider, the fuller, the unending; conscious life the fleeting, the less important.

I see even in them, massive & enduring as they look, and in the grand old pines that shroud their flanks with trunks that during a generation of men have added but an inch or two to their bulk, and in the river that has swelled with spring rains and shrunk with summer drought and reflected pines and mountains for untold ages; in all only a phase – a passing phase. To the geologist the Rockies are young, perhaps have not yet reached their full stature. The moulding process still goes on. There is nothing permanent! Our valley — our earth, are but eddies in the sublime flow of the deep current of the universe. As I sit musing, the streaming sunshine and the blue have given place to clouds and the stillness to gusty wind. The gusts grow violent and a tree or two crash to the ground which the rest sway like reeds in the storm. How pitiless is this all pervading life! Men with their conscious intelligence may be the flower & bloom of the world life, but their mother has no fondness for her offspring. She has too no aversion. The world life moves on as smoothly as ever though my spark of intelligence be crushed out by the falling tree. Truly a hard, a cruel universe that spares not its choicest offspring.

At another time I sit apart and the feeling of this awful unconscious life comes over me till I am almost appalled. Except an uncertain, faltering twitter of birds or the hum of an insect no sound reaches one but the soft moaning of the pines and the subdued roar of the waterfall a little way off. It is a terrible thing to feel alone, to think that other sentient beings are

gone or dormant, and the mute, blind, feelingless life of tree & rock and water are all ones companionship. What sort of life can the passionless snow have high above me on the mountain side? But look! A spec of snow far across the valley on the bare opposite peaks has moved! It is not an avalanche, its motion is too slow & uneven. A look through my glass shows me a flock of white mountain goats moving down for shade at mid day. There is life, companionship and affection even on the bleak mountainside. I go down into the thicket below the bench, by the river side, among tangled bushes and moss and rank growing equiseta, all under the dank shade of thick set trees. There are mosquitoes and flies in myriads, emblems of life’s pitilessness – others must bleed that they may life [sic]. A snake wriggles over a log rotting near by. Cold blooded cruelty incarnate! But now I hear a clucking sound. I jump up and follow it. A hen partridge bustles along in front of me as if wounded and off into the bushes scamper her lively brood. When they are safe she takes a circuit away from me to rejoin them. Mother’s love! She risks her life for her young! Nature is not all hard and cruel! ...