Midnight Yarn

By Mayo Mohs

THE GRAND TETONS by Margaret Sanborn Putnam; 320 pages; $10.95

Seen from a distance, as the early French trappers saw them, the great peaks justify the name the voyageurs used: Les Trois Tetons, the three breasts. Close up, mirrored against Jackson Lake, they suggest nothing except themselves: one of the world's paradisiacal sights. Even now, as 3 million visitors pass through Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming each year, the mountains seem pristine in their remoteness, and most travelers go by knowing little of the rich mountain history. Margaret Sanborn corrects that ignorance with a book that spins out the story of the Tetons like a midnight yarn over a campfire.

The author has ransacked early travelers' journals and scholarly monographs with the diligence of a Pinkerton operative trailing an outlaw. She has interviewed oldtimers and trekked the Teton trails to give her book a vivid sense of place. As a writer, she keeps a low profile, telling her tales with understated care and deferring often and amply to the words of the pioneers. Mountain Man Moses Harris tells of his trip through a "putrified" forest where the grass snaps "like pipe stems." Sir William, Lord of Grand-tully, a Scottish laird who spent six summers in the Wyoming wilderness before inheriting his titles, writes plaintively from London: "Pray get me some young deer & Buffaloe & send them over." Chief Washakie of the Wind River Shoshonis concludes: "The white man, who possesses this whole vast country from sea to sea ... cannot know the cramp we feel in this little spot..."

Scores of such characters people this book, many of them heroes, others desperadoes, all of them singular. Even the outlaws possess a strange elan. Ed Trafton, for example, operating with one fellow bandit, robs 165 Yellowstone tourists in a strung-out caravan of 35 coaches one day in 1914, allowing his victims to photograph the crime with their cameras.

But the land exacts its toll. Sacajawea, the celebrated Shoshoni who proved so valuable on the Lewis and Clark expedition, dies of a fever at the age of 25. John Colter, survivor of Indian attacks and a 200-mile trek over parched prairie, succumbs to jaundice at 38. And after a spree of notoriety, Ed Trafton is run to earth and locked away in Leavenworth.

For the Tetons, though, there is a storybook ending. In 1926 John D. Rockefeller Jr. took his family to see Jackson Hole and was dismayed at what he saw: a landscape cluttered with tourist cabins, gas stations and billboards. Quietly, Rockefeller formed a company to buy up 30,000 acres, then offered this vital portion of Jackson Hole to the U.S. Government as parkland. It took more than a decade for Washington to accept the offer, and then only by executive order of F.D.R. Whatever other philanthropies the Rockefellers bestowed on their countrymen before or since, nothing else has been quite so grand. -- Mayo Mohs

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