It seems to come every sixty-five minutes, to a dot, and the great white column rises with a roar from one to two hundred feet into the air, continuing for possibly the space of five minutes. New beauties are to be discovered with almost every eruption, according to the weather, and the hour of the day or night. Sunrise, sunset, moonlight sway the great steaming column into a thousand fantastic forms. When the geyser is quiet one may approach the crater, an oblong opening about two by six feet, with a quiet pool of crystal water. Some say the deposits around the crater indicate an age of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years. When Columbus discovered America this great column played at regular intervals in the primal solitude; when Lief Erickson landed it was unspeakably old, but glorious as ever; when Christ was on earth its strange beauty fell on the eye of the infrequent savage who gazed on it with superstitious awe; long before the reputed date of creation it played and coruscated in the sunlight. No wonder, then, that those, who stop to think, gaze with wonder on Old Faithful and that the Indians, at the time the Lewis and Clark expedition crossed the continent, held it in awe and reverence. NOTE 4 (PAGE 162) The grizzly bear has never been found east of a certain line marked by spurs of the mighty Rocky Mountains. At the time the Lewis and Clark expedition penetrated the wilderness lying between the settlements along the lower Missouri and the far distant Coast Range of mountains, in what is now known as California, very little was known of this most terrible of all the wild animals native to North America; indeed, some big game hunters put the grizzly ahead of the African lion or the tiger of the Indian jungle so far as ferocity and toughness goes. Vague stories drifted to the ears of white hunters about a monster bear which terrified the red men of the West. They had even seen the claws strung around the neck of some chief who had won his high position after having killed one of these fearful creatures in a hand-to-hand fight. When the explorers finally returned to civilization they brought with them the most amazing stories of things they had seen; but undoubtedly nothing surpassed their descriptions of the grizzly bear's ten lives, and the fearful strength which the animal possessed. In these modern days of soft-nosed bullets, and the exploding kind that do such fearful execution upon striking the game, it may not be so difficult to bring down old "Eph," as Western men call the grizzly; but a score or more of years ago men declared that they had known such an animal to be hit with twenty shots, and yet seem to mind his wounds no more than if they were flea-bites.