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Show I td adttton DUPLICATES RIP VAN WINKLE IN MOUNT RAINIER tauntingly. Blackness closed around him. "When he awoke he lay under an arbutus tree in a meadow of camas. lie was shockingly shock-ingly stiff and every movement pained him. But he managed to gather and smoke some dry arbutus leaves and eat a few camas bulbs. He was astonished to rind his hair very long and matted and himself bent and feeble. "Tamanous," he muttered. Nevertheless, Never-theless, he was calm and happy. Strangely, he did not regret his lost strings of hiaqua. Fear was gone and his heart was filled with love. Slowly and painfully he made his way home. Everything was strangely altered. Ancient trees grew where shrubs had grown four days before. Cedars under whose shade he used to sleep lay rotting on the ground. Where his lodpre had stood now he saw a new and handsome lodge, and presently out of it came a very old decrepit squaw -who, nevertheless, through her wrinkles, had a look that seemed strangely familiar to him. Her shoulders were hung thick with hiaqua strings. She bent over a pot of boiling salmon sal-mon and crooned : 'My old man has gone, ffone, gone. My old man to Tacoma has gone. To hunt the elk he went long ao. TFien will he come down, down, down To salmon pot and met" "He has come down," quavered the re turned traveler, at last recognizing his wifa. He asked no questions. Charging it all to the wrath of Tamanous, he accepted fate as he found it. After all, it was a happy fat enough in the end, for the old man becam tbe Great Medicine-Man of his tribe, by whom he was greatly revered. The name of this Rip Van "Winkle o Mount Rainier is not mentioned in Mj Winthrop's narrative. : i in -- P)IP TAN WINKLE is popularly asso-V asso-V elated with the Catskill Mountains "I through Washington Irving's classic bit ot : fiction that for long has been a fixture o :" English literature in our schools, yet there Is another Rip Van Winkle of omvt" orid has little heard. It is the Rip " tinkle of the Pacific coast every w as Itteresting as the poor old Rip of New x -:: at(-.n.l the story has a much more ; basing finale, since the westerner became famous medicine man after his long sleep-" sleep-" ;; Mount Rainier, the great icy octopus '. , . rising 14.408 feet above sea level In itate of Washington, its great bulk rat m mile, away, is the scene of th wander-logs wander-logs and the great long "snooze or i . . estern Rip Van Winkle. The story, written writ-ten more than half a century ago, is bru egain to light by Robert Sterling W j ehief the educational division, nations. Park service, Department of the Interior, in his latest volume on the great national pa." of America. The story runs in this ' (aihion : According to Theodore Winthrop, wbo -.I- viEited the Northwest in 1S33 nd published , . 1 'hook entitled "The Canoe and tbe Saddle, , 1 Mch had wide vogue at the time and is -.''! Resulted today, Mount Rainier had its l!ian Rip Van Winkle. The story was told . : ' him in great detail by Hamitcbou, a l"'wsy ancient of the Squallyamish." The k"o was a wise and wily fisherman and I oter. Also, as his passion was gain, be became an excellent business man. He always al-ways had salmon and berries when food be came scarce and prices high. Gradually he amassed large savings in hiaqua, the little Zt "atcd shell which was the most value form of wampum, the Indian's money The richer he got the stronger his passion grew or hiaqua and when a spirit told him m a dream of vast hoards at the summit ot RaTnTer he determined to climb the moun-fat moun-fat The spirit was Tamanous which, Winthrop explains, is the vague Indian personification per-sonification of the supernatural. So threaded the forests and climbed fountain's glistening side. At the sum-mlt sum-mlt he looked over the rim Into a large basin in the bottom of which was a black ?k. . surrounded by purple rock. At the Uke's eastern end stood three monument The first was as tall as a man and had antlers in velvet. At the foot of this menu- behind him caused him Suddenly clambered over the edge '? then'lakt and struck the snow with its Eleven others followed. Each was "ice as big as any otter he had ever seen their' chief was four times as big. The eleven sat themselves in a circle around him ; leader climbed upon the stone eik "'it first the treasure ecctVr s hashed, but he had come to find hiaqua and he went on digging. At every thirteenth stroke the leader of the otters tapped the stone elk with his tail and the eleven flolowers tapped the snow with their tails. Once they all gathered closer and whacked the digger good and hard with their tails, but, though astonished aston-ished and badly bruised, he went on working. work-ing. Presently he broke his elkhorn pick, but the biggest otter seized another in his teeth and handed it to hira. Finally his pick struck a flat rock with a hollow sound, and the otters all drew near and gazed into the hole, breathing excitedly. He lifted the rock and under it found a cavity filed to the brim with pure white hiaqua, every shell unbroken and beautiful. Never was treasure -quest so successful! The otters, recognizing him as the favorite of Tamanous, retired to a distance and gazed upon him respectfully. "But the miser," writes the narrator, "never thought of gratitude, never thought to hang a string from the buried treasure about the salmon and camas Tamanous stones and two strings around the elk's head ; no, all must be his own, all he could carry now and the rest for the future." Greedily he loaded himself with the booty and laboriously climbed to the rim of the bowl prepared for the descent of the mountain. moun-tain. The otters, puffing in concert, plunged again into the lake, which at once disappeared disap-peared under a black cloud. Straightway a terrible storm arose through vihich the voice of Tiinninous screamed |
