Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/188

178 Besides these, there are almost innumerable falls in the smaller streams and brooks, but of them we take no account. When it is remembered that nearly all these falls are within the limits of an area fifty-five by sixty-five miles, one can get some idea of the grandeur and beauty of the Yellowstone National Park. It is doubtful if any other similar area in the world affords so many magnificent waterfalls, beautiful cascades, seething torrents, and abysmal gorges as are found here. But these are among the least of the strange and wonderful things in this wonderland, where geysers great and small, mud springs and boiling paint-pots, and petrified forests so abound. With scarcely an exception all these streams and lakes are of the best of pure, clear, cold water, well supplied with insect larvæ, the smaller crustacea, and various other kinds of the smaller animal and plant forms sufficient in amount to support an immense fish life. But it is a strange and interesting fact that, with the exception of Yellowstone Lake and River, these waters were wholly barren of fish life until recently stocked by the United States Fish Commission. The river and lake just named are well filled with the Red-throated trout (Salmo mykiss lewisi), and this fact is the more remarkable when it is remembered that the falls in the lower Yellowstone River are one hundred and nine and three hundred and eight feet, respectively—by far the greatest found in the park.

The total absence of fish from Lewis and Shoshone Lakes and the numerous other small lakes and streams of the park is certainly due to the various falls in their lower courses, which have proved impassable barriers to the ascent of fishes from below; for in every one of these streams, just below the falls, trout and in some cases other species of fishes are found in abundance. But to account for the presence of trout in Yellowstone Lake was a matter of no little difficulty. If a fall of thirty to fifty feet in Lewis River has prevented trout from ascending to Lewis and Shoshone Lakes, why have not the much greater falls in the Yellowstone proved a barrier to the ascent of trout to Yellowstone Lake? Certainly no fish can ascend these falls, and we must look elsewhere for the explanation.

Many years ago the famous old guide, Jim Bridger, told his incredulous friends that he had found, on the divide west of the upper Yellowstone, a creek which flowed in both directions one end flowing east into the Yellowstone, the other west into Snake River. But, as he also told about many other strange and to them impossible things which he had seen—among which were a glass mountain, and a river which ran down hill so fast that the water was made boiling hot—they were not disposed to acknowledge the existence of his "Two-Ocean Creek." Subsequent events