The weekly chronicle. (Bozeman, Mont.) 1883-1883, 1883-04-18
PARK CHRONICLES.
Why do Men Chronicle 2

Why do Men Chronicle 2
There are doubtless many answers to
1 the question, why do men chronicle?
Il The materialist would ~ that man
co1scious Of being but IN exanesent sub
[ stanceis eager to cast his shaddow on
I some hef moss permanent substance
/ 60 that egen a. . shadow he might
exist after he material substance of biz
( body is decomposed and vanished.
The spiritualist would say, that man
conscious of his immortality, Of course
dating the beginning Of his immortal life
& from his birth on earth, makes every ef-
fort to leave His foot prints ON the
sands Of time" to indicate the import
ance and direction of hisjourney through
eternity.
There is also possible shrill answer
to this question. More material than
the materialists and more spiritual than
the spiritualists.
This answer is at once religious and
scientific. Pascal gives the answer in
his immortal aphorism: "The entire
succession Of men through the whole
course of ages, must be regarded as one
man, always living and necessarily
learning"
Humbolt, in his great work, the Sos
mos" compares the man of science to .
child gathering shells upon an ocean
shore. He works diligently to build up
little heap Of knowledge when death
like an ocean wave sweeps him QUITO
sea but another child takes up the
work, and another, and another in turn,
until the little heap becomes q vast
pyrimid, reaching from the earth to the
clouds.
Tennyson, whom I call the poet Of des-
pair, leaves not even the shadow of q
chance FORAGE Immortality:
II stretch lame hands OF faith, and grope,
And gather chafY and dust, and call
To what feel is Lord Of all.
And family trust the larger hope.
So careful OF the typef but no
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
ss csr s'e er notsnx al ahs gone
The new scientific doctrine of evolution
has destroyed the old dogma of the per-
manency Of either the individual or the
species but it gives us the hope Of an in
finetly higher order of both.
But even low and grovelling as human
; ity has been it has done something to be
worth chronicling on "Scarped cliff and
quarried stone."
Leaving the solution ofthis question to
those whose peculiar turn of mind may
lead them to accept as true any one Of
these notions of personal, impersonal or
social Immortality, and as a reason for
chronicling.
There is one fact upon which all will
agree, and that is, that men, all men, do
chronicle. Men chronicle in many ways,
by poems, by paintings, by palaces, by
pyramids.
The desire to chronicle is limited only
by the opportunities, facilities and posi-
bilities. A letter is chronicle of the
writer's views, feelings, actions and de-
sires at the time it is written.
A newspaper lie a chronicle of the loca-
lily where it is printed and circulated
1t is a picture of society, its activities,
thoughts, aspirations, grievances, needs
and moral sentiments at the time Of
issue. Men once chronicled on papyrus,on
skins and on stones, as they now do on
paper, vellum, linen and bronze.
But no where in all the wide world is
there such an opportunity to chronicle
as in the National Park. Here man con-
fronts nature in her most varied aspects.
1t is not single park but thousand
parks, each fenced in by mountains and
all peopled by the denizens Of the air, Of
the fcod and Of the forest.
You ascend two thousand feet and are
astonished to find yourself on q level
plateau in the midst of which runs the
mountain brook, clear as crystal and cold
as ice, and with millions of speckled
trout, dazzlingly beautiful and deliciously
sweet, darting hither and thither with
an energy and speed that delights and
astonishes you.
The mountain fora is as marvellous as
the mountain fish. Their variety bewil-
ders the botanlst; their beauty surpasses
the widest dream of the florist, and
their odor would have made Cleopatra
turn from the perfumes of Arabia with
DISCUS: in comparison.
These mountain parks are new worlds
for the botanist, the florist and the per-
filmer. In June the mountain parks are
covered with white carpet as spotless
as snow and more delicate in texture
than any fabric that Persia or India ever
produced.
These white flowers, called the Indian |
pink, when crushed emit an odor that |
literally makes one drunk with joy, and
one dreams while he walks, and his |
dream is that he is in paradise; that the |
distant hills are at his feet; that time |
and space are annihilated; that he existed |
before the hills and the heavens that |
cover them, and the flowers that adorn
them. This intoxication becomes an
agony, and the delirium compels one to
write, to indite, to chronicle.
4 One fills his memorandum book and
every loose scrap Of paper that he can
beg, steal or borrow, and when these fail
he looks around and behold nature in
vites him to write, and has prepared
seemingly for his especial use, a painted
terrace, more beautiful than the floors of
the famed Alhambra, and extensive
enough to contain the history Of human
ity from before the time that our brutal
ancestors could Lift their heads to gaze
upon star, up to the times when Homer
created the gods and peopled the two
abodes, one with objects of alteration, the
other with the souls of the damned.
These terraces are at the Middle Geyser
Basin, and completely surround the Lake
Of Paradise. This Lake is well named,