ater, "it was a game of hide and
seek until rations on both sides got low. The Californians would push
through the brush, scatter, double backward on their trail, and then
camp in the most inaccessible places to be found, and it sometimes
puzzled us to locate and camp near enough to watch them."

Eventually the rivals united. A combination search-party was chosen
which included Hillman, and this party, while it found no gold-mine,
found Crater Lake.

[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred H. Kiser_

APPLEGATE CLIFF, CRATER LAKE]

[Illustration: _From a photograph by Fred H. Kiser_

PHANTOM SHIP FROM GARFIELD PEAK]

"While riding up a long sloping mountain," Hillman continued, "we
suddenly came in sight of water and were very much surprised as we did
not expect to see any lakes. We did not know but what we had come in
sight and close to Klamath Lake, and not until my mule stopped within a
few feet of the rim of Crater Lake did I look down, and if I had been
riding a blind mule I firmly believe I would have ridden over the edge
to death and destruction...."

"The finding of Crater Lake," he concludes, "was an accident, as we were
not looking for lakes; but the fact of my being the first upon its banks
was due to the fact that I was riding the best saddle mule in southern
Oregon, the property of Jimmy Dobson, a miner and packer with
headquarters at Jacksonville, who had furnished me the mule in
consideration of a claim to be taken in his name should we be
successful. Stranger to me than our discovery was the fact that after
our return I could get no acknowledgment from any Indian, buck or squaw,
old or young, that any such lake existed; each and every one denied any
knowledge of it, or ignored the subject completely."

The next development in Crater's history introduces Will G. Steel,
widely known as "the Father of Crater Lake National Park," a pioneer of
the highest type, a gold-seeker in the coast ranges and the Klondike, a
school-teacher for many years, and a public-spirited enthusiast. In
1869, a farmer's boy in Kansas, he read a newspaper account of an Oregon
lake with precipice sides five thousand feet deep. Moving to Oregon in
1871, he kept making inquiries for seven years before he verified the
fact of the lake's existence, and it was two years later before he found
a man who had seen it. This man's description decided him to visit it,
then an undertaking of some difficulty.

He got there in