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.

The next morning he packed and was off. Ten days later he again stood on a summit and looked round him; what he saw . was not black forests but the plains of the upper Sweetwater where it left the mountains. He was looking at the Oregon Trail about eighty miles west of Independence Rock, and at a wagon train creaking and squealing in six inches of snow. Another batch of greenhorns would be caught in the mountains, as the Donner party and others had been caught; or they would be if the sky suddenly opened and dropped a couple of feet of winter. Was it more Mormons down there? He wondered why any man was fool  enough to want more than one wife. These people were still two or three hundred miles from the polygamous saints, and a thousand from the Dalles or Sacramento. They might have to eat their leather caps and their harness before they got through.

He felt an impulse to ride down and ask these people why they hadn’t stayed back east where they belonged. Did they believe, as so many had, that out west there were gold nuggets as big as melons lying up and down the canyons and streams? And soil so rich that cabbages would grow as large as kitchen stoves? What tales the jokers had told, who had been out west and gone back east! Two years ago Sam had ridden over to a train, and a woman, sitting in a covered wagon, had wiped at her eyes with a wrist gray with alkali dust, peered at him over red eyelids, and asked if all the men out here wore skins and married squaws. None of the immigrants seemed to have the slightest sense of the kind of world this was. What they sought was not the scented valleys, the clean sky the majesties and grandeurs, but a spot where they could all huddle together as neighbors and poison the earth. They made him think of the marching army ants and the seven-year locusts. There they had been, three hundred of them, with their beds and tables and crying children and bawling cattle, and their foolish notion that they would soon be rich and well on their way to heaven. Astride his horse, Sam looked at the long wavering line, like pencil markings against the white. Now and then he would turn his gaze from the half-frozen beasts, the cold wagon tires, the stiff dust-saturated canvas flapping. in the wind, and look north and west at the immense world of valleys, mountains, rivers, and sky. Soon there would be no trails left, no forests with berry gardens in their cool depths, no water ouzels dipping and diving at the feet of cascades, no larks singing their arias, no prairie movements that from a distance looked like dark flowing waters but were herds of buffalo, no wolf song, no cougar cry, no horn call of the loons. Over on the Big Snake not many hundreds of years ago there had been stupendous eruptions of boiling lava that flowed over the plains south and west for more than a hundred miles—a red-hot hissing and steaming death flow that had killed everything it touched, and made utter desolation, black and grotesque and dead, of hundreds of square miles. For Sam and men like him the immigrant trains were another kind of death How: looking east, he saw in fancy a thousand miles of them, as broad as a buffalo emigration, dust-gray and plodding and exsanguine and inexorable, coming in from the east to cover the earth. He recalled what old Bill had said: "Shore as shootin they’ll shove us up the peaks and offen the peaks into the ocean, and cover this whole land with their privies."

Laramie had become an expanding assemblage of log huts and tents, surrounded by piles of buffalo hides as large as haystacks. By July 5 in only one season, 37,171 men, 803 women, 1,094 children, 7,474 mules, 30,615 oxen, 22,742 horses, 8,998 wagons, and 5,720 cows had passed this fort on their way west. In the past two years scores or hundreds of people and beasts had drowned while trying to cross the North Platte in their shrunken and rickety wagon beds used as boats. He hoped the Almighty knew what He was doing. It was not for a mere man to say that a thing was good or bad, which lay farther than he could see; but men like Sam would have preferred to join an Indian tribe and move north than live where neighbors made life a hell all around them.