Through Glacier Park: Seeing America First with Howard Eaton

In 1902, a nation still young in its love affair with the West sent a party of riders into the wild heart of Montana aboard horses named for the very mountains they traversed. Mary Roberts Rinehart, who would become one of the most celebrated American writers of her era, chronicles that 300-mile journey through Glacier National Park in prose that still crackles with discovery. Guided by the legendary Howard Eaton, whose wilderness wisdom runs through the narrative like a river through valley grass, Rinehart captures a version of America that existed only briefly: the teeming meadows before the hotels came, the rivers still heavy with trout, the passes where a rider could feel the first breath of the continent rising to meet her. This is travel writing stripped of irony or knowingness, full instead of genuine awe at what lay beyond the settled edge of the map. The party argues about camp coffee, loses themselves in alpine meadows, and sits around fires swapping stories while the stars wheel overhead in configurations city dwellers had never seen. A document of wonder, preserved in amber.