d the wonderful canyon. Here at last is a crime in which all
will agree that the end justified the means.

How this piracy was accomplished is written on the rocks; even the
former lake outlet into the Snake River is plainly discernible to-day.
At the lake's north end, where the seeping waters of Sulphur Creek and
the edge of the lake nearly met on opposite sides of what was then the
low flat divide, it only required some slight disturbance indirectly
volcanic, some unaccustomed rising of lake levels, perhaps merely some
special stress of flood or storm to make the connection. Perhaps the
creek itself, sapping back in the soft lava soils, unaided found the
lake. Connection once made, the mighty body of lake water speedily
deepened a channel northward and Sulphur Creek became sure of its
posterity.

At that time, hidden under the lake's surface, two rhyolite dikes, or
upright walls of harder rock, extended crosswise through the lake more
than half a mile apart. As the lake-level fell, the nearer of these
dikes emerged and divided the waters into two lakes, the upper of which
emptied over the dike into the lower. This was the beginning of the
Great Fall. And presently, as the Great Fall cut its breach deeper and
deeper into the restraining dike, it lowered the upper-lake level until
presently the other rhyolite dike emerged from the surface carrying
another cataract. And thus began the Upper Fall.

Meantime the stream below kept digging deeper the canyon of Sulphur
Creek, and there came a time when the lower lake drained wholly away.
In its place was left a bottom-land which is now a part of the Hayden
Valley, and, running through it, a river. Forthwith this river began
scooping, from the Great Fall to Inspiration Point, the scenic ditch
which is world-celebrated to-day as the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

IV

Now imagine this whole superlative wilderness heavily populated with
wild animals in a state of normal living. Imagine thirty thousand elk,
for instance, roaming about in bands of half a dozen to half a thousand.
Imagine them not friendly, perhaps, but fearless, with that entire
indifference which most animals show to creatures which neither help nor
harm them--as indifferent, say, as the rabbits in your pasture or the
squirrels in your oak woods. Imagine all the wild animals, except the
sneaking, predatory kind, proportionally plentiful and similarly
fearless--bear, antelope, mountain-sheep, deer, bison,