descents, and imagined themselves clinging for dear life to those
skyey battlements.

But when, in 1872, Messrs. Stevenson and Langford finally reached the
top of the Grand Teton--the only successful members of a party of nine
practised climbers who had started together from the bottom--they
found there a little rectangular enclosure, made by piling up rocks,
six or seven feet across and three feet in height, bearing evidences
of great age, and indicating that the red Indians had, for some
unknown purpose, resorted to the summit of this tremendous peak long
before the white men invaded their mountains. Yet neither the Indians
nor the whites ever really conquered the Teton, for above the highest
point that they attained rises a granite buttress, whose smooth
vertical sides seemed to them to defy everything but wings.

Winding across the sage-covered floor of Jackson's Hole runs the
Shoshone, or Snake River, which takes its rise from Jackson's Lake at
the northern end of the basin, and then, as if shrinking from the
threatening brows of the Tetons, whose fall would block its progress,
makes a detour of one hundred miles around the buttressed heights of
the range before it finds a clear way across Idaho, and so on to the
Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean.

On a July morning, about a month after the visit of Dr. Max Syx to the
assembled financiers in New York, a party of twenty horsemen,
following a mountain-trail, arrived on the eastern margin of Jackson's
Hole, and pausing upon a commanding eminence, with exclamations of
wonder, glanced across the great depression, where lay the shining
coils of the Snake River, at the towering forms of the Tetons, whose
ice-striped cliffs flashed lightnings in the sunshine. Even the