Courting Carrie in Wonderland

by Carla Kelly

  She took the note with her name printed on it in almost childlike block letters. She opened it, read it, and couldn’t help her tears. Wordless, she handed it to the man she was going to marry, and watched his expression change. He let out a deep sigh and leaned back against the table. Then he looked at her.

  “I see yes in those pretty eyes.”

  She nodded, too overcome to speak. She watched his eyes this time, and knew she was looking at “yes.”

  He read the note silently, then out loud, as though he still didn’t think it would be real to either of them until he spoke the words on the page. “ ‘Miss McKay, I’m deeding this ranch to you and your whiner of a husband. I have no children. I know he likes it here. We’ll see how Ramsay likes it at three on a February morning when he’s pulling calves. He says you’re a Montana girl through and through, no matter how you got here. You decide and tell me soon. Jack.’ ”

  “It’s a deal, Ramsay Stiles,” she said. “You’d better propose to me.”

  “I know you have another year of college to finish,” he said, watching her eyes so closely.

  “Plans change,” she said firmly. “I’m not waiting a year to marry you.”

  “I need you too much to wait,” he said frankly. “Maybe you can finish college later.”

  “Our children will finish in my place,” she told him. “We need to get started on those children, Ram. You’re not precisely a young man.”

  “And she makes cherry pie, President Roosevelt,” he said to an imaginary audience. “I believe she had a pair of silk drawers too. Don’t tell anyone except your friend, Louise LaMarque, sir.”

  “Several pairs now, and a silk nightgown! Mrs. LaMarque has been taking care of me too,” Carrie said. “Well?”

  “Miss McKay, it has come to my attention that a man of property needs to marry to ease his lot in life. Would you, could you, consent to matrimony?”

  She kissed him. “Yes.” He was going to be a fun husband. She could tell already.

  “That blamed etiquette book that I studied at length earlier this summer says that you can refuse me once. Apparently young ladies are sometimes overcome with the idea of matrimony.”

  “I’m not overcome,” Carrie said, because she was practical and in love. She kissed him again. “I hope you threw away that stupid book.”

  “Threw it away at Canyon Hotel. Our children will have to wade through their own matrimonial waters without the advice of nincompoops.”

  She sat on his lap again, and ventured to slide a few fingers inside his uniform blouse. “What’s going to happen when wolves start to eye your newborn calves?”

  “I’ll figure it out.” His hand went to her head again in that protective gesture. “You’re buying into a hard life, my dearest Caroline.”

  She closed her eyes and thought of hard times in the Railroad Hotel, hard work earning nickels and dimes to scratch her way to a college education, hard labor from before dawn to after dusk at Willow Park. She balanced it on the scale of her love for Ramsay Stiles and smiled to herself as it tipped in his favor.

  “It would be infinitely harder without you,” she said. “Just take me to the Lower Falls now and then, and drive me across Captain Chittenden’s Melan Arch Bridge when I get grumpy or you start to whine.”

  “Done, my love.”

  They sat close together. The wind picked up and she heard the pines start to whisper. Winter was here. Her mind was at rest. Her heart was full. Whether Ramsay was aware of it or not, Carrie knew she had been courted by a master.

  Epilogue

  After a night of no sleep in Tent Twenty, wishing he were in Tent Twenty-Six cuddling Carrie, Ramsay returned to his office at Fort Yellowstone. He wrote a letter to President Roosevelt declining his generous offer and told him about the ranch in Paradise Valley near Yankee Jim Canyon where he would always be welcome. The next letter went to Colonel Frederick Ward, declining his unwillingly given promotion as command sergeant major. The third letter went down the hall to Major Pitcher, stating his intention of not reenlisting for another five years, and severing his ties with the US Army, effective in one week on the annual date of his original enlistment.

  The fourth letter took more time and thought. He wrote to Louise LaMarque, describing what had happened, thanking her for her role in all of it, and inviting her to visit them on the JBar81. He didn’t have to ponder long before he signed it, “With love, Ramsay.”

  Ramsay’s mother generally had a saying for most occasions. He recalled “Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” but he didn’t think his wedding to Carrie McKay in Major John Pitcher’s parlor four days later would fit that description. Time, tide, and the army wait for no man. They had to move fast because Captain Chittenden was escorting his family home to Sioux City in six days, and the best man really needed to be in that parlor.

  The Wylies brought their Presbyterian minister from Bozeman for the event, which Ramsay knew pleased Carrie to no end. Mrs. Pitcher scrounged silk flowers from somewhere to decorate an improvised altar, and her cook put together an impressive wedding cake on short notice.

  They were married in Major Pitcher’s parlor just as the first snow shower of the season pattered against the windows. Ramsay wore his dress uniform for the final time before it went into mothballs. His sweet Carrie had pinned the Medal of Honor in its accustomed place and kindly dabbed at the tears in his eyes.

  She came into the parlor on Mr. Wylie’s arm, looking charming in a blue traveling suit with a hat that tipped toward her forehead. Her hair was a mass of red and gold, carefully pinned. He thought about removing those pins one by one and brushing her hair, probably mere minutes after the ceremony, a little reception, and then a short walk to his house. He reconsidered; he could brush her hair later.

  He may have started to twitch and fidget at the thought (he knew his face was red), because his best man suggested in a whisper that a deep breath now and then was a good idea. Captain Chittenden was wise enough to say no more, but his lips kept twitching during the mercifully brief ceremony.

  To Ramsay’s satisfaction, Jack Strong arrived for the wedding. When they were man and wife, the old Mountain Crow rancher put his arms around Ramsay and Carrie and assured her they would begin building a new house in the spring. Ramsay had to laugh when his brand new bride kissed Jack Strong’s cheek and promised him that her brand new husband wouldn’t be whining so much now.

  Two days and two nights in noncommissioned officer’s quarters were not the stuff of romance that a newly minted wife probably dreamed of, though he heard no complaints from Mrs. Stiles. On Day Two, she insisted on singing “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” barely dressed in an amazing black lace brassiere and silk drawers that made him feel considerably younger than his thirty-four years.

  More snow held off long enough for a quick trip to the Upper Geyser Basin and Old Faithful, which Ramsay knew his wife wanted to see. He liked the way she leaned back against him as they watched the eruption. He had already learned how pleasant it was to rest his chin on her head, his arms around her.

  Work had begun on a new hotel near Old Faithful. When it was done next summer, he and Carrie might be able to abandon ranch life for a few days and pay a visit.

  On their return trip, he had no trouble convincing the Norris soldiers to let the Stiles commandeer the bathhouse. This led to the inexpressibly wonderful discovery that someone with gentle hands was willing to scrub his back.

  He wanted one thing more, and it happened on the last night before he put away his ordinary uniform, dressed in civilian clothes, and shut the door on his quarters, a rancher now.

  He lay awake, Carrie safely tucked close to him, asleep. At first he thought he imagined it, because he wanted so badly to hear from his wolves before his exile from permanent duty in Yellowstone began. No, there they were, howling their drawn-out lament to winter coming, and maybe their own demise. Hide, my friends, he silently ordered them. I can’t help you now.

  He only thought Carrie slept
. There she was, wiping his eyes with a corner of the sheet and kissing his chest.

  “You hear them, my love?” he asked, his heart breaking.

  “I do.” She rested her head on his chest, her arm tight across him. “They’ll be back some day.”

  “You’re certain?” He had to know.

  “Plans change. Give it time. Rules change. Can you live with that, Ram?”

  He could. He would.

  Afterword

  In his prediction to Carrie McKay, Sergeant Major Ramsay Stiles was not far off the mark on the extirpation of wolves in Yellowstone Park. By 1926, the last wolves were killed in the park.

  In a 1986 article, “The Wolf Mystery,” from Playing God in Yellowstone Park, the author states that the army didn’t begin a systematic destruction of wolves in Yellowstone until 1914. My research in the summer of 2016 found something different. A 1907 edition of The Red Book, given to all soldiers in the park and first issued a few years earlier, plainly states, “Scouts and non-commissioned officers in charge of stations throughout the park are authorized and directed to kill mountain lions, coyotes and timber wolves. They will do this themselves and will not delegate the authority to anyone else.”

  Ramsay Stiles was also right about what would happen when the park’s predators were gone. The elk population in particular proliferated to a degree that soon caused alarm among naturalists. The overgrazing of the range in the summer and the wintertime stripping of bark from trees and shrubs changed the entire landscape of Yellowstone National Park, and not for the better.

  For years, attempts were made to regulate the elk population, leaving no one happy. From the 1940s on, there was a steady, persistent drumbeat by conservationists, biologists, and environmentalists to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone Park. In 1995, it finally happened. By March, fourteen gray wolves imported from Canada were turned loose in the park’s remote Lamar Valley. A similar number from the same source came in the following year.

  Since then, the wolves have aligned themselves into some ten packs, numbering roughly ninety-five animals. These packs have distributed themselves over a wide area, with concentration still mainly in that north/northeast portion of the park. Wolves are protected in the park, but are subject to regulated hunting in nearby states, as their numbers have steadily grown. There are conflicts with ranchers, to be sure, but the wolves are back and destined to stay.

  The return of the wolf has considerably altered the number of coyotes, who had returned to the park of their own volition years earlier. They tend to cluster more cautiously now in steeper elevations. The elk population has declined as predicted, which has meant improved grassland and trees in Yellowstone. The beaver have gone from one colony to many, since the elk population which used to eat the willows that beaver require has diminished. This fact has improved the park’s streams and rivers.

  And so Nature goes. My comments here barely touch the surface of what has changed so dynamically since the wolves returned, but then, you didn’t read Courting Carrie in Wonderland for an environmentalist’s treatise, did you? And I didn’t write it for that either.

  Just as the wolves soothed Ramsay Stiles during a difficult time in his life, they have done the same for me. I suppose I should have known I would be writing a book that included wolves as characters since my own experience with one in October of 2010.

  In April of that year, my dear father died. Dad was from Cody, Wyoming, Yellowstone’s east entrance. As a family, we enjoyed Yellowstone vacations whenever Dad, a Navy man, had leave and we were not on the other side of the world or somewhere in between.

  I happened to be in Yellowstone that October, right before major portions of the park closed for winter. I had been visiting Bob Kisthart, a back country ranger in the Old Faithful District, and I was on my way east to Cody early that morning.

  I stopped at Fishing Bridge, one of Dad’s favorite places. I stood there and watched the Yellowstone River flowing north out of the lake. My heart was heavy when I got back in my car and continued east on an empty road.

  I can only credit kind Providence for what happened next. I was driving, thinking of Dad, when what should I see striding along in the westbound lane but a wolf. Let me tell you, that wolf owned the road. Once I realized I was staring at a wolf and not a coyote—wolves are a lot bigger, have different-shaped snouts, and really long legs—I smiled so big I thought my face would break.

  The sight of that wolf, no longer being hunted out of existence or driven away because of misguided ideas, put the heart back in my body. I have largely told this story from Ramsay Stiles’s viewpoint, because I know how he felt.

  The more I researched Yellowstone Park—tough work, but I did it so you don’t have to—the greater my appreciation grew for Lieutenant Dan Kingman and Captain Hiram Chittenden, US Army Corps of Engineers. In 1883, Kingman was first assigned to the park to survey for roads. He graduated second in his West Point class in 1874, which meant he was encouraged to go into the Corps of Engineers. Throughout the nineteenth century, West Point was the best engineering school in the United States.

  It was Kingman who envisioned what became the Grand Loop, the road still followed today by all visitors. He created it to move tourists in logical fashion past all of the park’s wonders, not necessitating any repetition. He also built the trestle viaduct in what became known as Kingman Canyon, on the road north from Norris to Mammoth and Fort Yellowstone, the park’s headquarters then and now.

  After Kingman moved on to other assignments, he was eventually followed by Captain Hiram M. Chittenden, US Army Corps of Engineers. Graduating third in his West Point class in 1884, Chittenden is arguably the most brilliant man to wear those distinctive Corps of Engineers turreted castles on his collar. In addition to stellar engineering in Yellowstone Park, he wrote the first major opus on the United States fur trade. An excellent scholarly work, The Yellowstone National Park, followed, as well as other books. Where he found the time, I have no idea.

  A persuasive man with some pull in Congress, Chittenden achieved what no other engineer in the park managed—a huge appropriation to get the park’s engineering on sound footing, instead of piecemeal dabs of funding.

  In remarkably few years, Captain Chittenden made the existing roads better. He replaced Kingman’s scary wooden trestle viaduct through the canyon that bears his name and turned it into a concrete wonder. His corkscrew road in the park’s steep east side was a marvel of nineteenth century engineering, as well.

  Nothing has ever surpassed the captain’s splendid Melan Arch Bridge, which spanned the Yellowstone River just above the Upper Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. It was a masterpiece of engineering, constructed faultlessly in the wilderness under difficult conditions.

  In 1961, the lovely arched bridge was torn down, despite protests, and replaced with another bridge more suited in width and structure for the park’s modern traffic. I doubt the National Park Service wanted to demolish Chittenden’s bit of poetry in concrete, but safety constraints necessitated it. The replacement bridge was fittingly named Chittenden Memorial Bridge. Other places in the park bear his name too.

  There is more to say about Captain Chittenden, who went on to built the famous Ballard Chittenden Locks in Seattle. His health was never good, and he drove himself hard, which possibly led to his early death in 1917 at age 58. Yellowstone National Park and all of its millions of visitors, whether they know it or not, owe him a huge debt.

  What about Thomas Moran, whom Louise LaMarque admired in devoted silence? He was an excellent landscape artist mostly known for his several views of the Lower Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The best tribute to Moran would be to go there and see what he saw. It is an amazing sight.

  As I read many nineteenth-century tourist accounts of Yellowstone Park, I was struck by the fact that nearly all of them mention the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone as their favorite place in Wonderland. Not the geysers. Not the hot springs.

  I can’t arg
ue with them. In October of 2016, I paid a visit to the canyon as I was writing this book. To my recollection, I hadn’t been there in sixty years. I remember being highly impressed with the view when I was a kid. I was equally impressed during my more recent visit.

  What a sight. What a place. What a park. In 2016, the National Park Service celebrated its centennial. August 25, 1916, was the official date, but rangering got off to a rocky start, plagued by a stingy Congress unwilling to adequately fund this new unit of the federal government. Some of the early rangers came from an existing group of Yellowstone civilian scouts, as well as troopers of the US Army who were allowed to transfer into the new Park Service.

  Hired, then disbanded, then hired again, the rangers eventually began to make their mark in the national parks. However, not until 1918 did the last cavalry troop ride out of Yellowstone Park, leaving behind a legacy of good management and careful stewardship, in accordance with ideas of the time. The Park Service continues to honor the US Army by wearing the distinctive flat hat typical of army campaign hats of that earlier era. (Let me add here that the informal ball caps rangers wear are a lot easier to keep in place in a high wind.)

  I was privileged to work in Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1965 as an employee of the Yellowstone Park Company, making beds in tourist cabins at Mammoth Hot Springs. I learned the fine art of tucking hospital corners, hot potting in the Gardner River, and tolerating the pungent odor of sulfur. I recall making $1.47 an hour, minimum wage plus seven cents.

  I might mention here that you’ve probably noticed the spellings of Gardner River and Gardiner, Montana. Both are correct. Blame some nineteenth century politician or mapmaker, if you wish.

  If you are interested in learning more about Yellowstone Park, or the National Park Service itself, there are many good books on the subject. For research purposes, my personal favorite is Chittenden’s impeccable work, The Yellowstone National Park. I also really enjoyed Haynes Official Guide: Yellowstone National Park.