mation and scenic peculiarities of the west side
of the park, which, as the tourist sees it to-day, is remarkably
different from those of the east side. Here, the great limestone ranges,
glaciered, cirqued, and precipiced as on the east side, suddenly give
place to broad, undulating plains which constitute practically the whole
of the great west side from the base of the mountains on the east to the
valley of the Flathead which forms the park's western boundary. These
plains are grown thickly with splendid forests. Cross ranges, largely
glacier-built, stretch west from the high mountains, subsiding rapidly;
and between these ranges lie long winding lakes, forest-grown to their
edges, which carry the western drainage of the continental divide
through outlet streams into the Flathead.

The inconceivable lapse of time covered in these titanic operations of
Nature and their excessive slowness of progress rob them of much of
their dramatic quality. Perhaps an inch of distance was an extraordinary
advance for the Lewis Overthrust to make in any ordinary year, and
doubtless there were lapses of centuries when no measurable advance was
made. Yet sometimes sudden settlings, accompanied by more or less
extended earthquakes, must have visibly altered local landscapes.

Were it possible, by some such mental foreshortening as that by which
the wizards of the screen compress a life into a minute, for imagination
to hasten this progress into the compass of a few hours, how
overwhelming would be the spectacle! How tremendously would loom this
advancing edge, which at first we may conceive as having enormous
thickness! How it must have cracked, crumbled, and fallen in frequent
titanic crashes as it moved forward. It does not need the imagination of
Dore to picture this advance, thus hastened in fancy, grim, relentless
as death, its enormous towering head lost in eternal snows, its feet
shaken by earthquakes, accumulating giant glaciers only to crush them
into powder; resting, then pushing forward in slow, smashing,
reverberating shoves. How the accumulations of all periods may be
imagined crashing together into the depths! Silurian gastropods, strange
Devonian fishes, enormous Triassic reptiles, the rich and varied shells
of the Jurassic, the dinosaurs and primitive birds of Cretaceous, the
little early horses of Eocene, and Miocene's camels and mastodons
mingling their fossil remnants in a democracy of ruin to defy the
eternal ages!