Bracing against one another for support, these remarkable peaks
lift their granite spires from 12,000 to nearly 14,000 feet into the
blue dome that arches the crest of the continent. Their sides, and
especially those of their chief, the Grand Teton, are streaked with
glaciers, which shine like silver trappings when the morning sun comes
up above the wilderness of mountains stretching away eastward from the
hole.
When the first white men penetrated this wonderful region, and one of
them bestowed his wife's name upon Jenny's Lake, they were intimidated
by the Grand Teton. It made their flesh creep, accustomed though they
were to rough scrambling among mountain gorges and on the brows of
immense precipices, when they glanced up the face of the peak, where
the cliffs fall, one below another, in a series of breathless
descents, and imagined themselves clinging for dear life to those
skyey battlements.
But when, in 1872, Messrs. Stevenson and Langford finally reached the
top of the Grand Teton--the only successful members of a party of nine
practised climbers who had started together from the bottom--they
found there a little rectangular enclosure, made by piling up rocks,
six or seven feet across and three feet in height, bearing evidences
of great age, and indicating that the red Indians had, for some
unknown purpose, resorted to the summit of this tremendous peak long
before the white men invaded their mountains.
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