By motor to the Golden Gate

“Qui s’excuse s’accuse.” Which, I suppose, proves this a defence to start with! But having been a few times accused, there are a few explanations I want very much to make.

When this cross-continent story was first suggested, it seemed the simplest sort of thing to undertake. All that was necessary was to put down experiences as they actually occurred. No imagination, or plot or characterization—could anything be easier? But when the serial was published and letters began coming in, it became unhappily evident that writing fact must be one of the most unattainably difficult accomplishments in the world.

In the first place, only those who, having lived long in a particular locality and knowing it in all its varying seasons, are qualified truly to present its picture. The observations of a transient tourist are necessarily superficial, as of one whose experiences are merely a series of instantaneous impressions; at one time colored perhaps too vividly, at another fogged; according to the sun or rain at one brief moment of time.

It would be very pleasant to write nothing but eulogies of people and places, but after all if a personal narrative were written like an advertisement, praising everything, there would be no point in praising anything, would there?

Compared with crossing the plains in the fifties, the[x] worst stretch of our most uninhabited country is today the easiest road imaginable. There are no longer any dangers, any insurmountable difficulties. To the rugged sons of the original pioneers, comments upon “poor roads”—that are perfectly defined and traveled-over highways—or “poor hotels”—where you can get not only a room to yourself, but steam heat, electric light, and generally a private bath—must seem an irritatingly squeamish attitude. “Poor soft weaklings” is probably not far from what they think of people with such a point of view.

On the other hand if I, who after all am a New Yorker, were to pronounce the Jackson House perfect, the City of Minesburg beautiful, the Trailing Highway splendid, everyone would naturally suppose the Jackson House a Ritz, Minesburg an upper Fifth Avenue, and the Trailing Highway a duplicate of our own state roads, to say the least!

I am more than sorry if I offend anyone—it is the last thing I mean to do—at the same time I think it best to let the story stand as it was written; taking nothing back that seems to me true, but acknowledging very humbly at the outset, that after all mine is only one out of a possible fifty million other American opinions.

“Of course you are sending your servants ahead by train with your luggage and all that sort of thing,” said an Englishman.

A New York banker answered for me: “Not at all! The best thing is to put them in another machine directly behind, with a good mechanic. Then if you break down the man in the rear and your own chauffeur can get you to rights in no time. How about your chauffeur? You are sure he is a good one?”

“Surely you and your son are not thinking of going alone! Probably he could drive, but who is going to take care of the car?”

At that everyone interrupted at once. One thought we were insane to attempt such a trip; another that it was a “corking” thing to do. The majority looked upon our undertaking with typical New York apathy. “Why do anything so dreary?” If we wanted to see the expositions, then let us take the fastest train, with plenty of[2] books so as to read through as much of the way as possible. Only one, Mr. B., was enthusiastic enough to wish he was going with us. Evidently, though, he thought it a daring adventure, for he suggested an equipment for us that sounded like a relief expedition: a block and tackle, a revolver, a pickaxe and shovel, tinned food—he forgot nothing but the pemmican! However, someone else thought of hardtack, after which a chorus of voices proposed that we stay quietly at home!

“They’ll never get there!” said the banker, with a successful man’s finality of tone. “Unless I am mistaken, they’ll be on a Pullman inside of ten days!”

“Oh, you wouldn’t do that, would you?” exclaimed our one enthusiastic friend, B.

I hoped not, but I was not sure; for, although I had promised an editor to write the story of our experience, if we had any, we were going solely for pleasure, which to us meant a certain degree of comfort, and not to advertise the endurance of a special make of car or tires. Nor had we any intention of trying to prove that motoring in America was delightful if we should find it was not. As for breaking speed records—that was the last thing we wanted to attempt!

“Whatever put it into your head to undertake such a trip?” someone asked in the first pause.

“The advertisements!” I answered promptly.[3] They were all so optimistic, that they went to my head. “New York to San Francisco in an X— car for thirty-eight dollars!” We were not going in an X— car, but the thought of any machine’s running such a distance at such a price immediately lowered the expenditure allowance for our own. “Cheapest way to go to the coast!” agreed another folder. “Travel luxuriously in your own car from your own front door over the world’s greatest highway to the Pacific Shore.” Could any motor enthusiasts resist such suggestions? We couldn’t.

We had driven across Europe again and again. In fact I had in 1898 gone from the Baltic to the Adriatic in one of the few first motor-cars ever sold to a private individual. We knew European scenery, roads, stopping-places, by heart. We had been to all the resorts that were famous, and a few that were infamous, but our own land, except for the few chapter headings that might be read from the windows of a Pullman train, was an unopened book—one that we also found difficulty in opening. The idea of going occurred to us on Tuesday and on Saturday we were to start, yet we had no information on the most important question of all—which route was the best to take. And we had no idea how to find out!

The 1914 Blue Book was out of print, and the new one for this year not issued. I went to various information bureaus—some of those whose[4] advertisements had sounded so encouraging—but their personal answers were more optimistic than definite. Then a friend telegraphed for me to the Lincoln Highway Commission asking if road conditions and hotel accommodations were such that a lady who did not want in any sense to “rough it” could motor from New York to California comfortably.

We wasted a whole precious thirty-six hours waiting for this answer. When it came, a slim typewritten enclosure helpfully informed us that a Mrs. Somebody of Brooklyn had gone over the route fourteen months previously and had written them many glowing letters about it. As even the most optimistic prospectus admitted that in 1914 the road was as yet not a road, and hotels along the sparsely settled districts had not been built, it was evident that Mrs. Somebody’s idea of a perfect motor trip was independent of roads or stopping-places.

Meanwhile I had been told that the best information was to be had at the touring department of the Automobile Club. So I went there.

A very polite young man was answering questions with a facility altogether fascinating. He told one man about shipping his car—even the hours at which the freight trains departed. To a second he gave advice about a suit for damages; for a third he reduced New York’s traffic complications to simplicities in less than a minute; then it was my turn:

“This is the simplest thing in the world,” I thought, and opened my notebook to write down a list of towns and hotels and road directions. He returned with a stack of folders. But as I eagerly scanned them, I found they were all familiarly Eastern.

“Unfortunately,” he said suavely, “we have not all our information yet, and we seem to be out of our Western maps! But I can recommend some very delightful tours through New England and the Berkshires.”

His attention was fixed upon a map of the “Ideal Tour.” “The New England roads are very much better,” he said.

“But, you see, San Francisco is where I am going. Do you know which route is, if you prefer it, the least bad?”

“Oh, I see.” He looked sorry. “Of course if you must cross the continent, there is the Lincoln Highway!”

“Can you tell me how much work has been done on it—how much of it is finished? Might it not be better on account of the early season to take a Southern route? Isn’t there a road called the Santa Fé trail?”

“Why, yes, certainly,” said the nice young man. “The road goes through Kansas, New Mexico and Arizona. It would be warmer assuredly.”

“Perhaps we had better just start out and ask the people living along the road which is the best way farther on?”

The young man brightened at once. “That would have been my suggestion from the beginning.”

Once outside, however, the feasibility of asking our road as we came to it did not seem very practical, so I went to Brentano’s to buy some maps. They showed me a large one of the United States with four routes crossing it, equally black and straight and inviting. I promptly decided upon the one through the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh and St. Louis when two women I knew came in, one of them Mrs. O., a conspicuous hostess in the New York social world, and a Californian by birth. “The very person I need,” I thought. “She knows the country thoroughly and her idea of comfort and mine would be the same.”

Compared with her expression the worst skeptics I had encountered were enthusiasts. “Motor road to California!” She looked at me pityingly. “There isn’t any.”

“Nonsense! There are four beautiful ones and if you read the accounts of those who have crossed them you will find it impossible to make a choice of the beauties and comforts of each.”

She looked steadily into my face as though to force calmness to my poor deluded mind. “You!” she said. “A woman like you to undertake such a trip! Why, you couldn’t live through it! I have crossed the continent one hundred and sixty odd times. I know every stick and stone of the way. You don’t know what you are undertaking.”

“In an imaginary line like the equator!” She pointed at the map that was opened on the counter. “Once you get beyond the Mississippi the roads are trails of mud and sand. This district along here by the Platte River is wild and dangerous; full of the most terrible people, outlaws and ‘bad men’ who would think nothing of killing you if they were drunk and felt like it. There isn’t any hotel. Tell me, where do you think you are going to stop? These are not towns; they are only names on a map, or at best two shacks and a saloon! This place North Platte why, you couldn’t stay in a place like that!”

I began to feel uncertain and let down, but I said, “Hundreds of people have motored across.”

“Hundreds and thousands of people have done things that it would kill you to do. I have seen immigrants eating hunks of fat pork and raw onions. Could you? Of course people have gone across, men with all sorts of tackle to push their machines over the high places and pull them out of the deep places; men who themselves can sleep on the roadside or on a barroom floor. You may think ‘roughing it’ has an attractive sound, because you have never in your life had the slightest experience of what it can be. I was born and brought up out there and I know.” She quietly but firmly folded the map and handed it to the clerk. “I am sorry,” she said, “if you really wanted to go! By and by maybe if they ever build macadam roads and put up good hotels—but even then it would be deadly dull.”

For about five minutes I thought I had better give it up, and I called up my editor. “It looks as though we could not get much farther than the Mississippi.”

“All right,” he said, cheerfully, “go as far as the Mississippi. After all, your object is merely to find out how far you can go pleasurably! When you find it too uncomfortable, come home!”

No sooner had he said that than my path seemed to stretch straight and unencumbered to the Pacific Coast. If we could get no further information, we would start for Philadelphia, Pittsburgh[9] and St. Louis, as we had many friends in these cities, and get new directions from there, but as a last resort I went to the office of a celebrated touring authority and found him at his desk.

“I would like to know whether it will be possible for me to go from here to San Francisco by motor?”

He surveyed me from head to foot with about the same expression that he might have been expected to use if I had asked whether one could safely travel to Brooklyn.

“You won’t find Ritz hotels every few miles, and you won’t find Central Park roads all of the way. If you can put up with less than that, you can go—easy!” Whereupon he reached up over his head without even looking, took down a map, spread it on the table before him, and unhesitatingly raced his blue pencil up the edge of the Hudson River, exactly as the pencil of Tad draws cartoons at the movies.

“No, please!” I said. “I want to go by way of Pittsburgh and St. Louis.”

“Well, then, you had better take the train and go and see them!” Indifferently he took down another map and made a few casual blue marks on the mountains of Pennsylvania. “They’re rebuilding roads that will be fine later in the season, but at the moment [April, 1915] all of these places are detours. You’ll get bad grades and mud over your hubs! Of course, if you’re set on going that way, if you want to burn any amount of gasoline, cut your tires to pieces, and strain your engine—go along to St. Louis. It’s all the same to me; I don’t own the roads! But you said you wanted to take a motor trip.”

He did not wait for my agreement, but throwing aside the second map and turning again to the first, his pencil swooped down upon Buffalo and raced to Cleveland as though it fitted in a groove. He seemed to be in a mental aeroplane looking actually down upon the roads below.

“There is a detour you will have to take here. You turn left at a white church. This stretch is dusty in dry weather, but along here,” his pencil had now reached Iowa and Nebraska, “you will have no trouble at all—if it doesn’t rain.”

“For how long?” The vision of the sort of road it must be if that man thought it impassable was hard to imagine.

“Oh, I don’t know; a week or two, even three maybe. But when they are dry there are no faster roads in the country. What kind of a car are you going in?”

I told him proudly. Instead of being impressed by its make and power he remarked: “Humph! You’d better go in a Ford! But suit yourself! At any rate, you can open her wide along here, as wide as you like if the weather is right.” At the foot of the Rocky Mountains his pencil swerved far south.

“Way down there?” I asked. “That is all desert. Can we cross the desert?”

“Why can’t you?” He looked me over from head to foot. I had felt he held small opinion of me from the start. “I only wondered if the roads were passable,” I answered meekly.

“And what if there aren’t? Splendid open dry country; won’t hurt anyone to sleep out a night or two. It’d do you good! A doctor’d charge you money for that advice. I’m giving it to you free!”

“It is the only way,” and I imitated unconsciously[12] the voice of the oracle of the touring bureau.

One would have thought that we were starting for the Congo or the North Pole! Friends and farewell gifts poured in. It was quite thrilling, although myself in the rôle of a venturesome explorer was a miscast somewhere. Every little while Edwards, our butler, brought in a new package.

One present was a dark blue silk bag about twenty inches square like a pillow-case. At first sight we wondered what to do with it. It turned out afterward to be the most useful thing we had except a tin box, the story of which comes later. The silk bag held two hats without mussing, no matter how they were thrown in, clean gloves, veils, and any odd necessities, even a pair of slippers. The next friend of mine going on a motor trip is going to be sent one exactly like it!

By far the most resplendent of our presents was a marvel of a luncheon basket. Edwards staggered under its massiveness, and we all gathered around its silver-laden contents; bottles and jars, boxes and dishes, flat silver and cutlery, enamelware and glass, food paraphernalia enough to set before all the kings of Europe.

“I could not bear,” wrote the giver, “to think of your starving in the desert.”

Mr. B. brought us a block and tackle and two queer-looking canvas squares that he explained[13] were African water buckets. All we needed further, he told us, were fur sleeping-bags and we would be quite fixed!

Another thing sent us was an air cushion. Air cushions make me feel seasick, but the lady who traveled with us loved them. By the way, we added a passenger at the last moment. On Friday afternoon, a member of our family announced she was going with us to protect us.

“The only thing is,” we said, “there is no place for you to sit except in the back underneath the luggage.”

“I adore sitting under luggage; it is my favorite way of traveling,” she replied. And as we adore her, our party became three.

We had expected to leave New York about nine o’clock in the morning, but at eleven we were still making selections of what we most needed to take with us, and finally choosing the wrong things with an accuracy that amounted to a talent. Besides our regular luggage, the sidewalk was littered with all the entrancing-looking traveling equipment that had been sent us, and nowhere to stow it. By giving it all the floor space of the tonneau, we managed to get the big lunch basket in. Then we helped in the lady who traveled with us and added a collection of six wraps, two steamer rugs, and three dressing-cases, a typewriter, a best big camera and a little better one—with both of which we managed to take the highest possible percentage of worst pictures that anyone ever[14] brought home—a medicine chest, and various other paraphernalia neatly packed over and around her. Of this collection our passenger was allowed one of the dressing-cases, two wraps and a big bag. As there was not room for three bags on the back, my son and I divided a small motor trunk between us; I took the trays and he the bottom. It seemed at the time a simple enough arrangement.

On our way up Fifth Avenue, two or three times in the traffic stops, we found the motors of friends next to us. Seeing our quantity of luggage, each asked: “Where are you going?”

We had intended making Syracuse our first night’s stopping-place. It can easily be done, but as we were so late starting—it was nearly half-past one—we decided upon Albany instead. We felt very self-important; it even seemed that people ought to cheer us a little as we passed. A number of persons, especially boys, did look with curiosity at our unusually foreign type of car—solid wheels and exhaust tubes through the side of the hood always attract attention in America—but no one seemed to divine or care about the thrilling adventure we were setting out upon!

For about thirty miles outside of New York the road grew worse and worse. Through Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley the surface looked fairly good, but was full of brittle places. Our chauffeur says that the word brittle has no sense, but it is the only one I can think of to convey the sudden sharp flaked-off places that would snap the springs of a car going at fair speed.

I was rather perturbed; because if the road was as bad as this near home, what would it be[16] further along? But the further we went the better it became, and for the latter seventy or eighty miles it was perfect.

The Hudson River scenery, the lower end of it, always oppressed me; I can never think of anything but the favorite fiction descriptions of the “mansions where the wealthy reside.” Such overwhelmingly serious piles of solid masonry, each set squarely in the middle of a seed catalog painter’s dream of pictorial lawn! Steep hills, steep houses, steep expenditure, typify the lower Hudson, but the scenery a hundred miles above the river’s mouth is enchanting! Wide, beautiful views of rolling country; great comfortable-looking houses with hundreds of acres about them; here, though many are worth fortunes, one feels that they were built solely to answer the individual need of their owners, and as homes.

Out on a knoll, with the river spread like a great silver mirror in the distance, we christened our tea-basket. It took us five minutes to burrow down and unpile all the things we had on top of it, and five more to find in which compartment were huddled a few sandwiches and in which other box was the cake. For twenty minutes we boiled water in our beautiful little silver kettle, but as at the end of that time the boiling water was tepid, we gave it up and ate our sandwiches as recommended by the Red Queen in “Alice” who offered her dry biscuits for thirst. Then we spent fifteen minutes in putting everything away again.

“When we get out on the prairies, where can we get supplies enough to fill it?” I wondered. Our “chauffeur” mumbled something about “strain on tires” and “not driving a motor truck.”

“It is a most wonderfully magnificent basket,” said the lady who was traveling with us, rather wistfully, as she braced all the heaviest pieces of luggage between her and it.

Not counting the time out for tea, which we didn’t have, it took us five hours and a half from Fifty-ninth Street, New York, to the Ten Eyck at Albany.

The run should have been one hundred and fifty miles, but we made it one hundred and sixty because we lost our way at Fishkill. We had no Blue Book, but had been told we need only follow the river all the way. At Fishkill the road runs into the woods and the river disappears until it seems permanently lost! We wandered around and around a mountain in a wood for about ten miles before we discovered a signpost pointing the way to Albany!

Fortunately we had telegraphed ahead for rooms at the Ten Eyck, or they would not have been able to take us in. The hotel was filled to overflowing with senators and assemblymen, but we had very comfortable rooms and delicious coffee in the morning before we left for Syracuse.

Only two hundred miles from home and a breakdown! We had left Albany early in the morning and were running happily along over a road as smooth as a billiard table. Everything went beautifully until we were about twenty miles from Utica when our “chauffeur” said he heard a squeak. Gloom began to shadow his features. Half a mile further, the squeak became a knock and gloom deepened. He stopped the engine, got out and looked under the hood, lifted the cranking handle once or twice and threw his hands up in a gesture of abject despair. His lips framed all sorts of words but all he said aloud was: “It’s a bearing!” He looked so utterly dejected that in my sympathy for him (starting out on such a trip with a mother and a cousin and neither of us of the slightest use to him) I forgot that we were all equally concerned in whatever this misfortune about a “bearing” might be.

“Couldn’t we try to get to a garage?” timorously asked the one in the back.

Our “chauffeur” shook his head. “Not without wrecking the engine. There is nothing for it but to be towed to a machine shop.”

Is there anything more exhilarating than an automobile running smoothly along? Is there anything more dispiriting than the same automobile unable to go? The bigger and heavier it is, the worse the situation seems to be. You might get out and push a little one, but a big car standing stonily silent portends something of the inexorability of Fate.

And there we sat. Presently an old man came jogging along in a buggy. “Any trouble?” He grinned as the owner of a horse always does grin under such circumstances. But after a few further exasperating remarks, he offered kindly, “Say, son, I’ll drive you to a good garage down the road; there are others a mile nearer, but Hoffman and Adams’ place at Fort Plain is first class.”

There had been nothing in our informer’s conversation to give us great confidence in his recommendation but the garage turned out even better than he said. There was a first-rate machine shop with an expert mechanic in charge of it, who peered into our engine dubiously:

“If it was only a Ford or a Cadillac,” said he, “I could fix you up right away! But a bearing for that car of yours’ll like as not have to be made. Can you get one in New York, do you think?”

An unusual and “special” car may be very smart-looking and be particularly easy to trace[20] if stolen, but in a breakdown a make of popular type would be best—a Ford ideal. You could buy a whole new one at the first garage you came to, or maybe get a missing part at the first ten-cent store. We discovered the difficulty, or inconvenience rather, of repairing ours, within twenty-four hours of leaving home.

The telephone service at Fort Plain was hopeless. For over four hours we tried to get the agency in New York; even then it was doubtful whether they would have the part. Meantime the engine had been taken down and the cause of the burnt-out bearing discovered to be a broken oil pipe. They mended that and our “chauffeur” was a little more cheerful when he discovered that they had all necessary tools and things to make a new bearing by hand, which they started to do. The lady who was traveling with us and I walked round and round the town. We sent picture postals by the dozen quite as though we had arrived where we had intended to be. We discovered a restaurant where we could, if it should be necessary, return for lunch, and a news stand where we fortified ourselves with chocolate and magazines. After which reconnoitering we returned to the garage prepared to stay where we were indefinitely. Mr. Hoffman made us comfortable in the office, where I found excitement in the workings of a very gorgeous and complicated cash register. It had all sorts of knobs and buttons in every variety of color, and was altogether fascinating! I wonder[21] if anyone ever has opened a store for the mere joy of playing on the cash register. I wanted to set up a shop at once!

Finally New York telephoned they had a bearing, so we decided to go on to Utica by train. Someone told us—I can’t remember who it was—that beyond Albany the nearest good hotel was the Onondaga at Syracuse; but as we would surely have to stop at some poor hotels we thought we might as well get used to a lack of luxury first as last, so we took the train for Utica, to wait there until our car should be repaired.

Notwithstanding our altruistic intention to accept cheerfully whatever accommodations offered, our delighted surprise may be imagined when we entered the beautiful, wide, white marble lobby of the brand-new Hotel Utica! Our rooms were big and charmingly furnished. One had light blue damask hangings, and cane furniture; another mahogany and English chintz; each of them had its own bathroom with best sort of plumbing.

The food is very good and reasonable as to price. One dinner for instance was a dollar and thirty cents for each of us, including crêpes Suzette, which were delicious! There was music during dinner, and afterward dancing. As in most places outside of Broadway, they still call every sort of dance that is not a waltz the “tango.”

Sitting in the lobby for a little while in the evening, we noticed that the clerk at the desk, instead[22] of showing the blank indifference typical of hotels on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, greeted all arriving guests with a hearty “How do you do?” They also gave us souvenirs. A little gilt powder pencil, a leather change purse, and a gilt stamped leather cardcase. We felt as though we had been to a children’s party.

Our “chauffeur,” who went back to Fort Plain at daybreak, returned with the car in the late afternoon, so that we were able to go on again after a delay of only a day and a half.

Erie is a nice, homelike little city, full of business; and our hotel, the Lawrence, very good. There was an irate man at the desk this morning. “Say, what kind of a hotel do you run? That dancing went on until three o’clock this morning! It’s an outrage!” The clerk was sorry, and willingly arranged to have the guest put in a quiet room, but he bit off the end of a cigar viciously and went out still storming about the disgrace of allowing such a performance in a reputable hotel.

“He ought to take a trip to little old New York if he thinks dancing till three is late,” said a bystander.

“He’d better go back to the farm and go to roost with the chickens!” answered another.

From Albany the roads have been wonderful, wide and smooth as a billiard table all the way. There were stretches of long straight road as in France—much better than any in France since the first year theirs were built. One thing that we have already found out; we are seeing our own country for the first time! It is not alone that a train window gives one only a piece of whirling[24] view; but the tracks go through the ragged outskirts of the town, past the back doors and through the poorest land generally, while the roads become the best avenues of the cities, and go past the front entrances of farms. And such farms! We had expected the scenery to be uninteresting! No one with a spark of sentiment for his own country could remain long indifferent. Well-fenced fields under perfect cultivation; splendid-looking grazing pastures, splendid-looking cows, horses, houses, barns. And in every barn, a Ford. And fruits, fruits, fruits! Miles and miles and miles of grapevines as neatly trimmed and evenly set in rows as soldiers on parade.

So much for the country. The towns—only the humanizing genius of Julian Street could ever tell them apart. Small Utica dressed herself in taupe color, big Syracuse wore red with brown trimmings. The favorite hues were brown and red, though one or two were fond of gray, but all looked almost exactly alike. Each had a bustling and brown business center, with trolley cars swinging around the corners, pedestrians elbowing their way past big new dry-goods stores’ windows, and automobiles driving up to the curbs; each had a wide tree-bordered residence avenue, with block-shaped detached houses, garnished with cupolas and shelf-paper trimmings. The houses of Utica had deeper gardens than most, and there was a[25] stable at the rear of nearly every one on the proverbial Genesee Street. Syracuse, like the cities in Holland, was picturesquely crossed by canals and, like the thriving commercial center it is, by—this is just our personal opinion—all the freight trains of the world! It took us almost an hour to dodge between the continuous parade of box, refrigerator, and flat cars! Of the salt, for which Syracuse is so celebrated—the marshes were to the north of our road—we saw not an ounce. Perhaps those millions of freight cars were all full of it.

For a surprise we came upon Geneva, a perfect little Quaker, sitting on her own garden lawn at the edge of the road leading west. Facing an old Puritan church across a square of green, stood a row of little houses that suggested the setting of a play like “Pomander Walk.” To the moneyed magnates of the mansions of the lower Hudson, to the retired tradesmen residing in some of the red and brown residences of the various Genesee avenues, the demure little square of huddled houses of Geneva might seem contemptibly mean. Yet the mansions left us cold, while the little houses indescribably warmed our hearts. It was like the unexpected finding of a bit of fragile and beautiful old porcelain in a brickyard. We expected to see the counterpart of one of the heroines of Miss Austen’s novels come out of one of the quaint little doorways.

We would have liked to find a tea shop on the[26] square, for it was lunch time and we hated having to turn into Main Street and make our choice between several unprepossessing hotels. Geneva was certainly a town of unexpected contrasts. Although the little houses around the corner were so adorable, the Hotel Seneca from its façade of factory brick, sitting flat on the street, never for a moment warned us of an interior looking exactly like the illustrations in Vogue! White woodwork, French blue cut velvet, delicate spindly Adam furniture, a dining-room all white with little square-paned mirror doors, too attractive! Luncheon was delicious and well served by waitresses in white dresses, crisp and clean.

Our great surprise has been the excellence of the roads and the hotels, and our really beautiful and prosperous country. Going through these miles after miles of perfect vineyards and orchards, these wonderfully kept farms, it seems impossible to believe that in New York City are long bread lines, and that in other parts of our great country there is strife, hunger, poverty and waste.

In Buffalo we stopped at the Statler, a commercial hotel with a much advertised and really quite faultless service that carries the idea of personal attention to guests to its highest degree. When you register, the clerk reads your name and invariably thereafter everyone calls you by it. In fact they did even more than that. I had wired ahead for rooms and as soon as I went up to[27] register, the clerk, whose own name was printed and hung over the desk, said: “Your room is No. 355, Mrs. Post!” I had no idea where Room 355 was, but I felt as though I must have occupied it often before—as though in fact it in some personal way belonged to me. A decidedly pleasant contrast to a certain New York hotel where, after stopping four months under its roof, the clerks asked a guest her name!

The Buffalo hotel publishes a little pamphlet called the “Statler Service Codes.” It contains advice to employees, an explanation of what is meant by good service, a talk about tipping and a talk to patrons. A few of its sayings, copied at random, are:

“At rare intervals some perverse member of our force disagrees with a guest. He maintains that this sauce was ordered when the guest says the other. Or that the boy did go up to the room. Or that it was a room reserved and not dinner for six. Either may be right. But no employee of this hotel is allowed the privilege of arguing any point with a guest.”

“A door man can swing the door in a manner to assure the guest that he is in His Hotel, or he can sling it in a way that sticks in the guest’s crop and makes him expect to find at the desk a sputtery pen sticking in a potato.”

After giving every thought to the guest’s comfort, the end of the little book also asks fairness on the part of the guests. Such as, not to say you[28] waited fifteen minutes when you waited barely five; or not to object if the clerks can’t read your signature if you write in hieroglyphics.

In the morning at the Statler, a newspaper is pushed under your door and on it is a printed slip saying: “Good morning! This is your paper while you are in Buffalo.” And when you are ready to leave instead of calling, “Front! Get 355’s baggage!” the Statler clerk says, “Go up to Mrs. Post’s room and bring down her things!”

If the hotel tried to make us pleased with ourselves, we were not allowed to keep our self-complacence long. When we went to Niagara, we passed a sort of taxidermist’s museum; its windows at least were full of stuffed beasts. The proprietor, standing in front of it, tried his best to make us “step inside and see the mummied mermaid” and his museum of the greatest educational wonders of the world. When we showed no interest in his collection he burst out with:

“If you’re going to remain as ignorant about everything you come to, as you are about this wonderful museum, traveling won’t educate you any!”

Put a little differently, it might have hit a mark. We had ourselves been saying, only a little while before, that we were undoubtedly missing lots of interesting things because we did not quite know how or where to see them. Yet, though we are still[29] ignorant about the “wonders” of that particular museum, we are not always so indifferent. We have tried to look out for points of historical value and we have found many things of great diversion to ourselves. In Utica, for instance, we hung for hours over the railings of an exhibit of china making by the Syracuse pottery manufacturers. There is an irresistible fascination in watching the potter shaping pitchers, and the decorators putting decalcomania on plates and drawing fine gilt lines. The facility with which experts in any branch of industry use their hands is a marvel and a delight to me. I could stand indefinitely and watch a glass-blower, or a potter, or a blacksmith, or a paper hanger—anyone doing anything superlatively well.

I am not thinking of describing the world’s wonder of wonders, Niagara Falls, because everyone knows they are less than an hour’s run from Buffalo, with a splendid wide motor road leading out to them, and because their stupendous beauty has been described too often.

There were four bridal couples with us in the elevator that took us down to go under the Falls. One of the brides was apparently concerned about the unbecomingness of the black rubber mackintosh and hood that everyone puts on, for her evidently Southern husband said aloud:

“Don’t you fret about it, Nelly, you look real sweet in it, ’deed you do!” Whereupon each of the other three patted around the edge of the hood[30] where her hair ought to be, and glanced a little self-consciously at the arbiter of her own loveliness.

Later, the young Southerner linked his arm in that of his bride lest she go too close to that terrific torrent of drenching water. The other three pairs walked gingerly through the soaking rock galleries in three closely huddled units. And the rest of us looked at them with that smiling interest that one irresistibly feels for happy young couples on their honeymoon.

On Sunday evening in Buffalo a man who looked as though he had been lifted out of a yellow flour barrel had come into the lobby of the hotel. We could not tell whether he was black or white or even human. A clerk, seeing us staring, remarked casually: “Oh, he’s just a motorist who has come from Cleveland. Gives you some idea of the roads, doesn’t it?”

We started the next day therefore in a rather disturbed frame of mind, and soon saw how on a Sunday, when every motorist is out, he had looked as he did. Even on Monday the dust was so thick that the wind blew it in great yellow clouds, sometimes making it impossible to see ahead. But most of the way it blew to the left of us, leaving us fairly clean and not enveloping us unless we had to pass another car going our own way. As we had gone out to the Falls in the morning, we did not leave Buffalo until about two o’clock, but in spite of bumpy roads and dust so thick that it[31] made us swerve a little, we reached Erie easily at a little after six.

We left Erie the next day at two o’clock and arrived in Cleveland at seven—which was as fast as the Ohio speed limit of twenty miles an hour would allow. The road was much the same as it had been the day before. Forty miles of the whole distance was rather rough and very dusty; the rest was good, a little of it splendid.

At Mentor, about twenty-three miles before Cleveland, we came to a number of beautiful places that must have been the out-of-town homes of Cleveland people. The houses, many of them enormous, were long, low and white; not farmhouses and not Colonial manor houses, but a most happy adaptation of the qualities of both; dignified, homelike, imposing and enchanting.[2]

The remark of the man at the museum in Buffalo irresistibly recurs to me. We certainly won’t be “educated” if our chauffeur can help it! He is exactly like the time lock on a safe. Only instead of being set for an hour, he is set for distance. At Erie, for instance, he throws in his clutch, “Cleveland”? he asks, and snap! nothing can make him look to the left or the right of the road in front of him.

We are half a mile beyond! We arrive in Cleveland, when click goes the lock and he stops dead, and nothing will make him go further.

The food at the hotel in Cleveland, also a Statler, was so extraordinary good that I asked where the maître d’hôtel and his chefs had come from. I thought that possibly on account of the war they had secured the staff of Henri’s or Voisin’s or Paillard’s in Paris, and was really surprised to hear the head chef was from Chicago and the maître d’hôtel from New York.

The dining-room service was quite as good as the food. We did not wait more than a moment before they brought our first course, and as soon as we had finished that our plates were whisked away and the second put before us. Never, even in France, have we had better or more perfectly cooked chicken casserole, and the hollandaise sauce on the asparagus was of the exact smooth, golden consistency and flavor that it ought to be, instead of the various yellow acids, pastes, and eggy mixtures that too often masquerade under the name. Our waiter brought in crisp, fresh salad and expertly and quickly made his own dressing. He was in fact a paragon of his kind, serving all of our meals without that everlasting patting and fussing and fixing that most waiters go through with until what you have ordered is so shopworn and handled and cold that it is not fit to eat. Can[33] anything be more unappetizing than to have a waiter, or two of them, breathing over your food for half an hour?

Personally I hate hotel service. I hate to be helped. In our own houses even children of six resent it. I often wonder, why do we submit to having the piece we don’t want, in the amount we don’t want, put on the part of the plate we don’t want it on, covering it with sauce if we hate sauce, or giving us the dryest wisps if we like it otherwise, by a waiter who bends unpleasantly close? Why do we have everything we eat pinched between the fork and spoon in that one-handed lobster-claw fashion, and endure it in silence? All of this is no fault of the waiter who, after all, is trying to do the best he can in the way that has been taught him. But why is the service in a hotel so radically different from all good service in a private house?

Cleveland, “the Sixth City”—and she likes to have you know her rating—is certainly prosperous-looking and in many ways beautiful. She has wide, roomy streets with splendid lawns and trees and houses. A few of the older mansions are hideous but enormous, comfortable, and well built. They look like the homes of people with no end of money who are content to live in houses of American architecture’s darkest period because they are used to them and often because their fathers lived in them. There is no suggestion of the upstart in their ugliness. The whole city impresses one as[34] having a nice fat bank account and being in no hurry to spend it. The municipal buildings, however, are superb, and the newer dwelling houses all that money and taste can make them, but almost best of all, I liked the shops.

In a big new one on Euclid Avenue, two elderly ladies with much-befeathered bonnets were ensconced in a double rolling chair like those of the Atlantic City boardwalk. An attentive young man was pushing them about among bronzes and porcelains. Stopping before a shelf of samples he asked: “Are any of these at all like the coffee cups you are looking for, Mrs. Davis?”

Mrs. Davis was so absorbed in the conversation of her friend that the clerk had to repeat his question three times before her purple feathers bobbed toward the coffee cups casually.

“Coffee cups?” she added absently. “I don’t think I care about any today, thank you. But you might drive us through the linen department and the lamp shades. The lamp shades are always so pretty!” she added to her friend, exactly as though, after telling her coachman to drive around the east side of the park, she had remarked upon the beauty of the wistaria.

“Does that lady drive about town in a rolling chair?” I asked of the man waiting upon us.

“Oh, those chairs are ours,” he answered. “We have them so that customers can visit with each other and shop without getting tired. One of the clerks will be glad to push you about[35] in one. It is a very pleasant innovation,” he added, and out of courtesy he did not say for whom.

Cleveland is also the city of three-cent carfares—in fact three cents in Cleveland is almost as good as five cents in other cities. Lemonade three cents, moving pictures three cents, a ball of pop-corn three cents—a whole counter full of small articles in one of the big stores. Let’s all move to Cleveland!

One thing, though, struck us most particularly in the hotels of Utica and Cleveland; the people didn’t match the background. Dining in a white marble room quite faultlessly appointed, there was not a man in evening clothes and not a single woman smartly dressed or who even looked as though she had ever been! Men in unpressed business suits, women in black skirts and white shirtwaists are appropriate to the imitation wood or plaster walls of some of the eating places that we have been in, but in a beautiful hotel like the Statler in Cleveland, and especially in the evening, they spoil the picture.

From Cleveland to Toledo the roads are very like those of France, they have wonderful foundations but badly worn surfaces. Much the best hotel in Toledo is the Secor, and the restaurant, which made no attempt at imitating French cooking, was good.

There was a most beautiful art museum in Toledo, a small building pure Greek in style and set[36] like a jewel against pyramidal evergreens. It is quite the loveliest thing we have seen.

Because of Ohio’s speed restrictions, twenty miles fastest going and eight for villages, etc., one must either spend days in crawling across the state or break the law. As is usually the case with unreasonable laws, few keep them, or else the motoring Ohioans interpret their speed laws rather liberally. Of the hundreds of motors we met in Ohio, especially near Cleveland, which is one of the biggest automobile centers in the country, scarcely one, even within the city limits, was going less than twenty-five miles an hour.

However, as it is not courteous for the stranger to dash lawlessly through at faster than the twelve-mile average prescribed by law, the run from Toledo to South Bend, a distance of one hundred and sixty-two miles, will take from twelve to fourteen hours. The road is good, most of it, but sandwiched between occasional poor stretches.

We lunched at Bryan at the Christman Hotel. It was here that I heard a new retort courteous. I had dropped a veil; a youth picked it up. I said, “Thank you.” He replied politely, “Yours truly!”

The Oliver, “Indiana’s finest hotel,” at South Bend is good, clean, well run, with a Louis Quatorze dining-room in black and white. The black and white craze is raging here quite as much as in New York.

Never in the world did people have so much luggage with nowhere to put it and nothing in it when it is put! Each black piece is bursting! Yet everything we have with us is the wrong thing and just so much to take care of without any compensating comfort. We have gradually eliminated everything we could until now we have just enough for three hallboys on our arrival and three porters on our departure to stagger under. Then too, although possibly all right for a man and wife, sharing the motor trunk with a son is an inconvenience unimagined! If the trunk is put in my room, he finds himself somewhere on another floor or at the end of an interminable corridor unable to get his pajamas without entirely redressing. If the trunk is in his room I have to hunt for him, get his key, and bring the trays to my room. Packing one trunk in two rooms at once is even more difficult. Consequently, he has in desperation bought a “suitcase.” It is orange-colored, made of paper, I think, and it also makes one more lump of baggage to be carried up and down and packed on top of our traveling companion.

The thermometer was at about thirty when we left home, so I could think of nothing but serge coats of heavy weight, plaited skirts also nice and warm, sweaters of various thicknesses, and fur coats. There came almost a break in a heretofore happy family when I insisted that over the Rocky Mountains our “chauffeur” would need his heaviest coat. He refused to take a coonskin—Heaven praise his intuition on that!—but obligingly brought a huge ulster. We had not gone fifty miles from New York when the sun came out hot and has ever since then been trying to show how heat is produced in the tropics. Our car is loaded down with wraps for the Rockies, and in this sweltering heat not one thin dress have I brought.

In every way my clothes are a trial and disappointment. A taffeta afternoon dress that was intended to give me a smart appearance whenever I might want to look otherwise than as a bedraggled tripper comes out of the trunk looking like crinkled crepon. I thought of pretending that it was crinkled crepon, but its crinkle was somehow not quite right in evenness or design. There is also a coat and skirt of a basket weave material that I had made especially to be serviceable motoring. I don’t know what sort of dresses would have packed better, but I am sure none could be worse. In fact, I unhesitatingly challenge these two of mine against the most perishable clothes that anyone can produce, that mine[39] will wrinkle more and deeper and sooner than any others in existence.

I have, however, found one small article that I happen to have brought, a great success, and that is a lace veil with a good deal of pattern—one of those things that make you look as though something queer was the matter with your face—unless there is something the matter with your face, in which case it takes all the blame. In doing the same thing every day you find you shake down to a rather regular system. As we come into the outskirts of the city where we are to spend the night, I take off, in the car, my goggles and the swathing of veils that I wear touring, and put on the lace one. The transformation from blown-about hair and dusty face to a tidy disguise of all blemishes is quite miraculous. Dusters are ugly things, but as every woman who motors knows, there is nothing so practical. I don’t think personally that silk ones can be compared for sense and comfort with those of dust-colored linen or cotton. Silk sheds the dust perhaps a little better, but wrinkles more. At all events, I find that by putting my lace veil on and taking my duster off, I can walk up to the desk and register without being taken for a vagrant. The lady who was traveling with us is one of those aggravating women who stay tidy. She keeps her gloves on and her hands dustless. But even she saw the transforming possibilities of a lace veil and soon bought one too.

Hotels, however, are very lenient in the matter of the appearance of guests, because of all the begrimed-looking tramps, our “chauffeur” after driving ten hours or so in the sifting dust is the grimiest. The only reason why he is not taken for a professional driver is because no one would hire anyone so disreputable-looking.

In one hotel, though, a grimy working mechanic having gone up in the elevator and a strange, perfectly well turned out person having come down, the confused clerk asked where the chauffeur went and did the new gentleman want a room?

Sometimes we take luncheon with us and sometimes we don’t. If we do, we see nice, clean-looking places on the road, such as the Parmly at Plainsville between Erie and Cleveland and the Avelon at Norwalk between Cleveland and Toledo; if we don’t we find nothing but hotels of the saloon-front and ladies’-entrance-in-the-back variety.

Between South Bend and Chicago we had not intended to stop, but found ourselves rather hungry and unwilling to wait until about three o’clock to lunch in Chicago. We looked in the Blue Book and saw the advertisement of a restaurant a few miles ahead. “Mrs. Seth Brown. Chicken dinners a specialty.” That is not her real name.

The very words “chicken dinner” made us suddenly conscious that we were ravenous.

“Do you remember the chicken dinners at the different places near Bar Harbor?” reminisced the lady-who-was-traveling-with-us. I am not going to call her that any more! It is too long to say. I will call her “Celia” instead. It is not her name, but it is an anagram of it, which will do as well. Also a repetition of our “chauffeur” sounds[42] tiresome, and his own initials of E. M. would be much simpler.

Anyway, all three of us conjured up visions of the chicken that was in a little while going to be set before us.

“Country chickens are so much better than town ones!” said Celia. “They are never the same after they have been packed in ice and shipped, and I do wonder whether it will be broiled, with crisp fried potatoes, or whether it will be fried with corn fritters and bacon!”

“Couldn’t we drive a little faster?” I asked. For by now my imagination had conjured up not only the actual aroma of deliciously broiled chicken, but I was already putting fresh country butter on crisp hot pop-overs. But in my greediness for the delectable dinner that was awaiting us, I lost my place in the Blue Book. Nothing that I could find any longer tallied with the road we were on, and it took us at least half an hour to find ourselves again. By the time we finally reached the little town of delectable dinners we were so hungry we would have thought any kind of old fowl good. But search as we might we could not discover any place that looked even remotely like a restaurant. There was a saloon, and a factory, and some small frame tenements. Nothing else in the place. Inquiring of some men standing on a corner, one of them answered, “The ladies’ entrance of the saloon is Mrs. Seth Brown’s place,[43] and the eating’s all right.” We were very hungry and the lure of chicken being strong, also feeling that perhaps the interior might prove better than the entrance promised, we went in. In the rear of a bar was a dingy room smelling of fried fat and stale beer. There were three groups of perfectly respectable-looking people sitting at three tables. A barkeeper with a collarless shirt, ragged apron, and a cigar in his mouth, sat us at a fourth table with a coffee-stained cloth on it, rusty black-handled cutlery, and plates that were a little dusty.

“Y’ c’n have dinner,” he said as though he was obliged against his inclination to live up to his advertisement.

E. M. was drawing water out of the well to fill the radiator tank. Celia and I began wiping off the plates and forks on the corners of the tablecloth.

At the table nearest us were four men and a woman. One of the men kept hugging the woman, who paid no attention to him. Two of the others went continually back and forth to the bar, while the fourth was occupied solely with his food. At another table was a family motoring party, and at the third, a second family, with a baby that cried without stopping and a little child who screamed from time to time in chorus.

Our chicken dinner proved to be some greasy fried fish, cold bluish potatoes, sliced raw onions, pickled gherkins, bread and coffee.

We ate some bread and drank the coffee. If we had been blindfolded it wouldn’t have been so bad.

There is one consoling feature in such an incident, that although it is not especially enjoyable at the time, it is just such experiences and disappointments, of course, that make the high spots of a whole motor trip in looking back upon it. It is your troubles on the road, your bad meals in queer places, your unexpected stops at people’s houses; in short, your misadventures that afterwards become your most treasured memories. In fact, after years of touring, I have in a vague, ragged sort of way tried to hold to what might be called a motor philosophy. Anyway, I have found it a splendid idea when things go very uncomfortably to remember—if I can—what a very charming diplomat, who was also a great traveler, once told me: that in motoring, as in life, since trouble gives character, obstacles and misadventures are really necessary to give the trip character! The peaceful motorist who has no motor trouble or weather trouble or road trouble has a pleasant enough time, but after all he gets the least out of it in the way of recollections. Not that our one disappointment about our chicken dinner is meant to serve as a backbone of character for this trip, neither do I hope we shall run into any serious misadventure, but I really quite honestly hope[45] that everything will not be so easy as to be entirely colorless.

I was turning these thoughts over in my mind as we sped on to Chicago and they suggested a most discouraging possibility, which I immediately confided to Celia:

“Suppose so little happens that there will be nothing to write about? No one wants descriptions of scenery or too many details of directions as to roads or hotels, and supposing that is all we know?”

“Do you think that I could tell you a lot of things that never happened and that you would believe me?” I asked.

“No, I don’t suppose they would,” she agreed, but suddenly she suggested: “I tell you what we could do. We could stop over in little places and pass those where we mean to stop—and we can in many ways make ourselves uncomfortable, if you think it necessary for interesting material.”

But our conversation turned at that point into admiration of our surroundings; for we had come into a long drive through a park on the very edge of the Lake that is the beautiful, welcoming entrance to Chicago.

We arrived yesterday at “America’s most perfect hotel.” We are still a little overawed. So far we have only been in hotels that have prided themselves on being the “best hotel in the state” or the “best hotel in the Middle West,” but Chicago’s pride throws down the gauntlet to America, North and South, and coast to coast. I have never heard that Chicago did anything by halves! “The world will take you at your own valuation.” Maybe the maxim originated in Chicago.

America’s best hotel looks like a huge tower of chocolate cake covered with confectioner’s icing. If it were cake, it might easily be the biggest piece of chocolate in the world, but for “America’s best”—probably because the word “best” in America has come to mean also “biggest”—the Blackstone seems rather small. Still, I don’t think it boasts of being anything except the finest and foremost, most perfect and complete hotel in the Western Hemisphere.

The lobby as you enter it is very like the thick chocolate center of the cake and gives a slightly stuffy impression that is felt in no other part of[47] the really beautiful interior. The cerise and cream-colored dining-room, in which for afternoon tea they take up the center carpet and remove some tables, leaving a hollow square of gray marble tiling to dance on, is the most beautiful room that I have ever seen anywhere, not excepting Paris. The white marble simplicity of the second dining-room also appealed to me, and the upstairs halls are like those in a great private country house.

The restaurant we find for its standard of high prices not very good. The food at the Statler in Cleveland was the best we have had anywhere, and the prices were half. Perhaps we ordered, by luck, the Statler’s specialties and the dishes that the Blackstone prepares least well.

The room service, however, is well done, with a lamp under the coffee pot and a chafing dish for anything that ought to be kept hot. Yet my coffee this morning had a flavor not at all associated with memories of best hotels, but reminiscent of little inns that one stops at in motoring through France, Germany, or Italy. There should have been a sourish bread and fresh flower-flavored honey to go with it. It leaves a copperish taste in the mouth long afterward.

In defense of the management, I ought to add that we take our coffee at the abnormally early hour of seven, and the coffee for such as we is probably kept over in a copper boiler from the night before. Still, ought this to happen in the[48] best hotel, even if only of the Western Hemisphere?

Our rooms high up and overlooking the lake are lovely, perfectly appointed, and with an entrancing view of moonlight on the water. The furnishings of the bedrooms are very like those of the Ritz hotels, and the prices are reasonable considering the high quality of their accommodations. The three-dollar-and-a-half rooms are small, light, and completely comfortable; for seven dollars one can have a big room overlooking the lake, both of course including bathrooms with outside windows and all the latest Ritz-Carlton type of furnishings, and—I must not forget—linen sheets and pillow cases, the first real linen we have seen since we left home! Also the reading lamp by my bed has a shade, pink on the outside and lined with white and a generous flare, that I can read by.

At the Statler in Cleveland there was an exceedingly pretty bed table lamp with a silk shade on it of Alice blue and a little gold lace, but one might as well have tried to read by the light of a captured firefly tied up in blue tissue paper. I tried to get the shade off but it was locked on—to prevent guests from ironing or stealing the shade or the bulb? At any rate, since nothing could part the cover from the fixture, and reading in the blue, glimmering gloom was impossible, I was obliged to get to sleep by watching the members of a club in the building opposite smoking and lounging,[49] exactly like the drummers downstairs—downstairs in Cleveland, not here.

The ubiquitous drummer is not in evidence as he was in northern New York, Indiana, and Ohio. The people down these stairs are more like the people one sees in the hotels in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. In the other cities we have come through there were traveling men to the right of us and traveling men to the left of us, with hats on the backs of their heads and cigars—segars, looks more like it—tilted in the corners of their mouths. Traveling men standing and leaning, traveling men leaning and sitting, but always men in cigar smoke, talking and lounging and taking their rest in the lobbies.

Like the drummers, I shall soon have all the hotels in the country at my finger ends; the advantages, disadvantages, and peculiarities of each. Already I could write a treatise on plumbing apparatus! The Statler in Cleveland had an “anti-scald” device. I read about it in the “service booklet” afterward. The curious-looking handles and levers occupying most of a white-tiled wall at the head of the bathtub so fascinated me that I had to try and see how they worked. I pulled knobs and pushed buttons that seemingly were for ornament merely, until suddenly a harmless-looking handle let loose a roaring spray of water that came from every part of the amateur Niagara at once. My bath was over before I had meant it to begin, and I got undressed afterward instead[50] of before. But I like the bathrooms with running ice-water faucets, and I love to examine the wares in the automatic machines, also placed in the bathrooms. They look like a miniature row of nickel telephone booths, each displaying a bottle or box through the closed glass door, each with a slot to drop a quarter in and a knob to pull your chosen box or bottle out with. The tantalizing thing about them is that they hold very little of use to me. I don’t like the kind of cold cream they carry; the toothbrushes are usually sold out, and razors and shaving soap don’t really tempt me.

There are paper bags in the closets to send your laundry away in and a notice that all washing sent to the desk before nine in the morning will be returned by five in the afternoon. If only they could run an owl laundry, taking your things at nine in the evening and returning them at five in the morning, it would be much more convenient for people who arrive at night and leave in the early dawn.

I should like to make a collection of hotel signs, such as plates on the bedroom doors saying, “Stop! Have you forgotten something?” And in the bathroom the same sentiments and an additional “How about that razor strop?”

While waiting for my change in one of the big department stores I overheard the following conversation between two women directly beside me:

“Sure!” answered the other. “You can run into the stores as often as you feel like it, and if you get lonesome you can go to the movies or a vaudeville show, or you can walk up Michigan Avenue and see the styles—there’s always something going on in the city.”

“I dare say you get used to it and feel you couldn’t give it up, but what I never could get used to is one of them flats. Now out at home, we’ve got a fifteen-room house, all hardwood floors——”

“What d’you want all that room for? You’ve only got to spend money to furnish it and elbow grease to care for it. You need two girls or more. Now, we’ve got a flat all fixed up nice and cozy and one girl takes care of it easy.”

“Well, I guess it’s all right, but if I had to bring my babies out of the good country air and put them in a flat, I think they’d die!”

The disappointing and unsatisfactory thing about a motor trip is that unless you have unlimited time, which few people ever seem to have, you stop too short a while in each place to know anything at all about it. You arrive at night and leave early in the morning and all you see is one street driving in, and another going out, and the lobby, dining-room and a bedroom or two at the hotel.

Happily for us, we have been staying several days in Chicago, and, while we can scarcely be said to know the city well, we have had at least a few glimpses of her life and have met quite a few of her people.

Last evening at a dinner given for us, our hostess explained that she had asked the most typical Chicagoans she could think of, and that one of the most representative of them was to take me in to dinner. “He is so enthusiastic, he is what some people would call a booster,” she whispered just before she introduced him.

In books and articles I had read of persons called “boosters,” and had thought of them as persons slangy as their sobriquet; blustering,[53] noisy braggarts, disagreeable in every way. I think the one last night must have been a very superior quality. He was neither noisy nor disagreeable; on the contrary, he was most charming and seemed really trying not to be a booster at all if he could help it.

He began by asking me eagerly how we liked Chicago. Had we thought the Lake Shore Drive beautiful? Were we struck with Chicago’s smallness compared to New York? I told him we had, and we were not. He thereupon generously but reluctantly admitted—the list is his own—that probably New York had more tall buildings, more wholesale hat and ribbon houses, a bigger museum of art, a few more theaters, and yes, undoubtedly, more millionaires’ palaces, but—he suddenly straightened up—“Chicago has more real homes! And when it comes to beauty, has New York anything to compare with Chicago’s boulevard systems of parks edged by the lake and jeweled with lagoons? And yet she is the greatest railroad center in the whole world. And let me tell you this,” he paused. “New York can never equal Chicago commercially! How can she? Look on the map and see for yourself! From New York to San Francisco, north to the lakes and south to Mexico—that’s where Chicago’s trade reaches! What is there left for New York after that? She can, of course, trade north to Boston and south to Washington, but she can’t go west, because Chicago reaches all the way to New York herself, and[54] there is nothing on the east except the Atlantic Ocean!”

After dinner we were taken to the small dancing club, a one-storied pavilion containing only a ballroom with a service pantry in the back, that a few fashionables of Chicago built in a moment of dancing enthusiasm. Although we met comparatively few people and had little opportunity to talk to anyone, I noticed everywhere the same attitude as that of my companion at dinner. The women had it as much as the men. As soon as they heard we were from New York they began to laud Chicago.

Mrs. X., one of their most prominent hostesses and one of the most beautiful and faultlessly turned out people I have ever seen, instead of talking impersonalities as would a New York woman of like position, plunged immediately into the comparison of New York’s shoreline of unsightly docks with the view across her own lawn to the Lake. Imagine a typical hostess of Fifth Avenue greeting a stranger with: “How do you do, Mrs. Pittsburgh; our city is twice as clean as yours!” However, I felt I had to say something in defense of mine, so I remarked that the houses on Riverside Drive faced the Hudson, and across a green terrace, too.

“Oh, but the Palisades opposite are so hideously disfigured with signs,” she objected, “and besides none of your really fashionable world lives on your upper West Side.”

Having staked out our fashionable boundaries for us, she switched the topic to country clubs. Had we been to any of them?

We had been given a dinner at the Saddle and Cycle Club, and we had to admit it was quite true that New York had nothing in its immediate vicinity to compare with the terrace on which we had dined, directly on the Lake, and apparently in the heart of the wilderness, although the heart of Chicago was only a few minutes’ drive away.

“You must come out to Wheaton and lunch with us tomorrow!” Mrs. X. said. You could tell from her tone that she was now speaking of her particularly favorite club. “I think they will be playing polo, but anyway you must see what a beautiful spot we have made of it, and there wasn’t even a tree on the place when we started—we have done everything ourselves.”

Doing things themselves seemed to me chief characteristic of the Chicagoans. A “do-nothing” must be about the most opprobrious name that could be given a man. Nearly all of Chicago’s prominent citizens are self-made—and proud of it. Millionaire after millionaire will tell you of the day when he wore ragged clothes, ran barefooted, sold papers, cleaned sidewalks, drove grocers’ wagons, and did any job he could find to get along. And then came opportunity, not driving up in a golden chariot, either! But more often a trudging wayfarer to be accompanied long and wearily. You cannot but admire the straightforwardness—even[56] the pride with which these successful men recount their meager beginnings, as well as the ability that always underlies the success.

Another thing that impressed us was that cleverness is rather the rule than the exception, and the general topics of conversation are more worth listening to than average topics elsewhere. For instance, their city is a factor of vital interest to them, and therefore their keenness on the subject of politics and all municipal matters is equaled possibly in English society only. They are also interested in inventions, in science, in all real events and affairs, both at home and abroad. At least this is what we found there, and what I am told by many people who have spent much time in Chicago.

To compare Chicago with Boston is much like comparing a dynamo with a marble monument, yet paradoxically there is a strong similarity between the two. There is no public place where people congregate. Both are cities of homes, and hotel life has little part in the society of either. Boston society is possibly the most distinguished in America—and Boston front doors will never open to you unless you have cultivation and birth to the extent of proving satisfactorily who your grandparents were. Chicago, of course, cares not at all, in a Boston sense, who your grandfather was so long as he was not a half-wit who transferred his mental deficiency to you. Boston society[57] is distinguished and cultivated. Chicago society interesting and stimulating. At least that is what the people I have met in these two cities seem to me.

But to go back to the evening of our first dinner party in Chicago: the attitude of everyone rather puzzled and not a little amused me, and after I had gone to bed I lay awake, and their remarks, especially those of the man at dinner, recurred to me and I began to laugh—then suddenly stopped.

The mere bragging about the greatness and bigness of his city was not the point; the point was his caring. The Chicagoans love their city, not as though it were a city at all, but as though it were their actual flesh and blood. They look at it in the way a mother looks at her child, thinking it the brightest, most beautiful and wonderful baby in the whole world. Tell a mother that Mrs. Smith’s baby is the loveliest and cleverest prodigy you have ever seen, and her feelings will be those exactly of Chicagoans if you tell them anything that could be construed into an unfavorable comparison. They can’t bear New York any more than the mother can bear Mrs. Smith’s baby. At the very sight of a New Yorker they nettle and their minds flurry around and gather up quickly every point of possible advantage to their own beloved Chicago. Not for a second am I ridiculing them any more than I would ridicule the sacredness of a man’s belief in prayer. Their love of their city is something wonderful, glorious, sublime. They[58] don’t brag for the sake of bragging, but they champion her with every last red corpuscle in their heart’s blood because they so loyally and tremendously care.

I wonder, is it their attitude that has affected us, too? Otherwise why is the appeal of Chicago so much more personal than that of other cities we have come through, so that even we are feeling quite low-spirited because tomorrow we leave for good! To be sure, the Blackstone is a beautiful and luxurious hotel, and we are not likely to meet its double again between here and the Pacific Coast, but it is not that, neither is it that we have any sentiment for the city or those that dwell therein. We have no really close friends here, we have met only a few people—in fact, we are ordinary tourists merely passing through a strange city, running into a few acquaintances as people are sure to run into occasional acquaintances almost everywhere.

I don’t think I can explain this personal and sudden liking that I feel for Chicago. Once in a very great while one meets a rare person whom one likes and trusts at first sight, and about whom one feels that to know him better would be to love him much.

I don’t suppose a New Yorker ever wants to live anywhere else, but if sentence should be passed on me that I had to spend the rest of my life in Chicago I doubt if I would find the punishment[59] severe. There is something big, wholesome, and vitalizing out here. It is just the sort of place where one would choose to bring up one’s children, the ideal soil and sun and climate for young Americans to grow in. New York is a great exotic hothouse in which orchids thrive; but the question is this: in selecting a young plant for the garden of the world, is an orchid the best plant to choose?

If E. M. were put in charge of the commissary department we would be given hardtack and water—his suggestions as to food never go any further. I, on the other hand, feel impelled toward chocolate in the way a drunkard is impelled toward rum, and if the supplies were left to me I should fill every thermos with chocolate ice-cream soda water and the sandwich boxes with chocolate cake. But Celia, having little opinion of hardtack and still less of chocolate, which she declared was making me as fat as butter, suddenly took the matter of food supplies into her own hands. Although she acknowledged that she had invited herself upon the expedition in the first place, and that she had agreed to sit under the luggage in the back, she protested that a heavy hamper full of silver and crockery and nothing to eat in it was an inhumanly heavy weight to put her up against, and she would like to arrange things differently.

Of course we told her that if she felt like rising above her surroundings it was not for us to hold her down. So without any more ado she shipped the beautiful lunch basket home by freight and[61] dragged me out with her to buy a more practical substitute. Her first purchase was a large, white, tin breadbox—just an ordinary box with a padlock, neither lining nor fixtures.

“To put things in,” said she. “It is going to be padlocked and it is going to stand flat on the floor of the tonneau and stay there, and not tumble over on me! Also we won’t have to have it lugged up to our room at night or carted down in the morning.”

“Excellent!” I agreed enthusiastically. “Let’s have paper plates and five-cents-a-dozen spoons and throw them away and not have to fuss with anything to be washed.”

At a ten-cent store we bought only three knives, but dozens of plates and spoons and enough oiled paper to wrap sandwiches for an expedition. Then we went to a beautiful grocery store near the hotel and laid in a supply of everything imaginable that comes in china, glass, or tin! Chicken, ham, tongue, pheasant in tubes like tooth paste, pâté de foie gras in china, big pieces of chicken in glass, nuts, jam, marmalade, and honey.

One article of food that we had tried to find ever since leaving New York was still unobtainable. Neither brittle bread nor protopuffs had ever been heard of west of New York, and our Chicago grocer looked as blank as the rest. Either New York women are the only ones who worry about keeping their figures or else the women of[62] other cities stay slim naturally! Nothing but good, rich fat-producing bread and butter to be had, to say nothing of chocolate! And our waistbands getting tighter every day! Not E. M.—he being very young is as lathlike as ever.

Having bought everything else, we repeated our question, was he sure he had no gluten or Swedish bread, no dry, flourless bread of any kind! No, he had only hardtack, and then produced—round packages of brittle bread!

Wonderful! We were so delighted we fairly floundered in it. “Bring us more; we are going to cross the continent; we must have lots of it!” I said greedily. Then we hurried home and waited for our supplies to arrive.

First came a big basket, bulging. Had we really bought all that? But it was only the beginning. Bread, bread, and more bread! Bales of it! It was I who had ordered “lots of it.” Celia looked sorry for me.

“It looks like rain! We could shelter the car under it,” was all I, idiotically, could think of. And in my absent-mindedness I broke open one of the bales. It was certainly Swedish bread, the nicest, crispest imaginable, and then I took a bite. Caraway seeds!

In our family some ancestor must have been done to death on caraway seeds. The strongest of us becomes a queer green at even so much as a whiff of one. Celia ran out into the hall as though I had exclaimed “Snakes!” And I, like the one[63] who had just been bitten, followed unstably after her.

“Caraway seeds?” exclaimed the bewildered floor clerk. “Oh, but I like caraway seeds very much!”

“Do you?” we gasped. “Well, then if you will send a staff of porters into Room 2002, you can have enough to last all your life! You can stack a whole mountain of it around your desk and eat your way out.”

It rained all last night and drizzled off and on all morning. As everyone has warned us against muddy roads west of Chicago, we sat with our faces pressed to the windows overlooking the Lake, feeling alternately hopeful and downcast and asking each other questions in circles. Might we try to get on? Had we perhaps better unpack and stay? Twice the sun struggled out and we sent down for the porters to come for our luggage, but both times when they arrived it had begun to rain and we sent them away again. By twelve o’clock, having finally decided to stay over a day, E. M. went to the Saddle and Cycle Club to lunch with some friends. Celia and I were about to go[64] down to the restaurant for our own luncheon when the breadbox caught her attention. I saw her lift the cover and look wistfully at the two neatly tied white paper packages and three brightly shining thermos jars that were on top. Expecting to start early in the morning we had the night before ordered a luncheon put up. And now what were we to do with the food?

“It was so expensive!” she said wistfully. “The pâté sandwiches were sixty cents apiece and they will be horrid and dry tomorrow!”

“And the lobster salad was a dollar and a half—and that certainly won’t keep!”

“And we don’t even know whether it is good or not!” she almost wailed, but quite as quickly she exclaimed happily: “Let’s picnic here!”

“Here?” I said vaguely, looking about at the rose silk hangings and the velvet carpet.

“Why not? It is ever so much more comfortable here than it would have been out on a dusty roadside. Besides, we really ought to see how our commissary department works. We ought to be sure that we haven’t any more caraway seeds!” she shivered.

A few minutes later we had spread our picnic on the floor and were having a perfect time. Also while we were about it we thought we had better sample the various things we had bought the day before.

“There is no use,” said the food expert, “in carting about a lot of stuff that we don’t like!”[65] So we opened and tasted a tin of this and a jar of that until we were surrounded with what looked like the discards of a canning factory. Suppose our New York friends who had exclaimed at our going without any servants could see us now!

I was jabbing a hole in a can of condensed milk with a silver and tortoise-shell nail file when someone knocked at the door. Without a thought of the picture we were presenting to the probable chambermaid, I called, “Come in!” but was too busy to look up until I heard a sort of gasp and a man’s voice stammered:

“I only came to see—to see if Mrs. Post—if there was anything I could do to—serve——”

“Miller!” It was the head waiter of one of the dining-rooms downstairs—a man who had for several years been a second head waiter in a celebrated New York hotel and who had once been a butler for a member of our family. The expression on his face was one of such surprise, bewilderment, apology, shame and humility that I found myself explaining:

“We were to have picnicked along the road, but it rained. And so we have picnicked——! It is very simple!”

“Yes, madam,” he agreed, stoically. But it was not until I had assured him that we never picnicked more than once a day indoors and had given him permission to order our dinner at what time and wherever he pleased, and most particularly after I refused to allow him to send a[66] waiter to put the room in order and be a witness to the family’s eccentricities that he became his urbane, impassible self once more.

Tonight I suppose we will have to deck ourselves out in our best bibs and tuckers and sit through a conventionally complete dinner at the most prominent table in the dining-room so that Miller may suffer no loss to his proper pride.

It looks pretty much as though our motor trip to San Francisco were going to end in Rochelle, Illinois.

Thirty-six miles out of Chicago we met the Lincoln Highway and from the first found it a disappointment. As the most important, advertised and lauded road in our country, its first appearance was not engaging. If it were called the cross continent trail you would expect little, and be philosophical about less, but the very word “highway” suggests macadam at the least. And with such titles as “Transcontinental” and “Lincoln” put before it, you dream of a wide straight road like the Route Nationale of France, or state roads in the East, and you wake rather unhappily to the actuality of a meandering dirt road that becomes mud half a foot deep after a day or two of rain!

Still we went over it easily enough until we passed De Kalb.[3] After that the only “highway” attributes left were the painted red, white and blue signs decorating the telegraph poles along[68] the way. The highway itself disappeared into a wallow of mud! The center of the road was slightly turtle-backed; the sides were of thick, black ooze and ungaugeably deep, and the car was possessed, as though it were alive, to pivot around and slide backward into it. We had no chains with us, and had passed no places where we could get any. Apart from the difficulty of keeping going on chainless tires our only danger, except that of being bogged, was in getting over the bridges that had no railings to their approaches. The car chasséd up every one, swung over toward the embankment, slewed back on the bridge, went across that steadily, and dove into the mud again! It certainly was dampening to one’s ardor for motoring. If the Lincoln Highway was like this what would the ordinary road be after it branched away at Sterling?

A little car on ahead was slithering and sliding around too, although it had four chains on it, but it did not sink in very far and it was getting along much better than we were—so much better in fact, that at the end of a few miles it slowly wobbled beyond our sight.

Finally we turned a bend and there was a little car on ahead. Not the same one however. This one evidently had no chains and was coming toward us drunkenly staggering from side to side. Gradually the lower half of it was hidden by the incline of an intervening bridge, then suddenly it disappeared altogether. When we arrived at[69] the bridge ourselves we saw the car in a deep ditch almost over on its side. The occupants of it, a man and a small boy, were both out and nothing, apparently, was hurt. The small boy was having a heavenly time paddling around in mud way above his knees, and the man called up to us cheerfully:

“’Twas m’own fault; I hadn’t ought to ’a’ come without chains on! No use for you to stop, thank you! You couldn’t help any and we’d only block th’road between us. A team’ll be along before long!”

Regretfully we left them and slipped and slid and staggered on for some miles more.

“Oh,” said Celia in the back, “how are we ever going up that?” “That” was an awful embankment ahead which to look at made me feel as if I had eaten nothing for a week. It was steep, narrow, turtle-backed, with black slime, and had a terrifying drop at either side of its treacherous and unguarded edges. The car went snorting up the incline until, nearly at the top point where the drop was steepest, it balked and slid toward the edge——!

“This is the end,” I thought, wondering in the same second if any of us would fall clear. For one of those eternity-laden moments we seemed to hang poised on the brink. Then E. M. seemed almost to lift the huge weight of the machine around bodily and compel it in spite of its helplessness to crawl up, up, up on the bridge.

Glancing back at Celia, after we were safely over, she looked about as chalky and weak-kneed as I felt. A short distance further, however, we ran on the brick pavement of a town. The ragged red-brick buildings of the street we turned into were not very encouraging and we feared that again the Blue Book’s hotel description might be one of those “complimentary” ones, consisting of its paid advertisement. E. M. urged our trying to get chains and going on to Davenport, but Celia and I had all the motoring in the mud that we cared about. No matter how squalid the town, or how poor the accommodations, we meant to cross no more bridges like that last one until the roads dried! Then we made two turns like a letter Z and found ourselves in the sweetest, cleanest, newest little town imaginable. Its streets were all wide and smoothly paved with brick, and its houses, mostly white, were set each in a garden of trim and clipped green. There was a new post-office of marble magnificence and a shopping center of big-windowed, fresh-painted, enterprising stores, but no hotel except a dingy ramshackle tavern that we took for granted was the one mentioned in the guide book. We wondered if one of the neat, sweet little houses might perhaps take us to board instead.

In front of a garage was a man with a blue coat and brass buttons, and “Fire Chief” on them. We asked him if he knew anyone at whose house we could stay until the road dried. He[71] looked at us and then at the car in a quizzical sort of way.

We asked the way to Mrs. Blake’s and then happened to remark that it was curious a town as up-to-date as this one had no good hotel. He lost his drawl immediately: “No good hotel? Well, I just guess there is a good hotel! The Collier Inn is just across that street and around the corner. It’s a fine hotel.”

We cheered up instantly. But why hadn’t he told us that sooner? He thought that “considerin’ we had asked for a boarding-house, mebbe th’ hotel it was too high-priced for us, but it was a fine hotel if we didn’t mind the cost.”

I don’t know how we had missed it. It was a fair-sized yellow brick building on a corner, a rather typical small-town commercial hotel. I went in expecting dingy darkness. The lobby looked like the office in a Maine summer resort. I asked—not that I for a moment expected to get it—for rooms with baths. The proprietor said, “Certainly,” and showed me three new little rooms, each with a little new bathroom attached.

I returned to my companions grinning like a Cheshire cat. It seemed to us as though we had found a veritable Ritz!

Twenty-four hours in a town like this and we feel as though we knew it and the people intimately. In many ways it suggests a toy-land town. Its streets are so straight and evenly laid, its houses so white and shining, its gardens so green, its shops so freshly painted, its displays in the windows so new, and its people so friendly.

“Strangers in town!” they seem to say to themselves as they look at us, but instead of looking at us in a “wait until we know who you are before we take any notice of you,” they seem quite ready to smile and begin a conversation.

Our most particular friend, as well as our oldest acquaintance, is the fire chief. E. M. has, of course, one or two other particular friends in the garage. If he can only find a mechanic or two to talk to, he is perfectly happy. Celia’s and my chief diversion has been going to the moving picture theaters, which is evidently the fashionable thing to do here. In the evening we saw three real theater parties. One of them was a very important affair; they met in the lobby and went down the aisle two by two; the ladies all had many[73] diamonds, brand-new white-kid gloves quite tight, picture hats, corsage bouquets and boxes of candy.

Celia and I had neither gloves nor hats on, and when we ran into the theater parties, we felt almost like urchins that had been caught wandering into the foyer of the Metropolitan Opera House. Like our hatred of caraway seeds, our love of hatlessness must be a family failing. In Chicago two different papers took the trouble to mention E. M.’s carelessness in the matter of head-covering. “Scorning to wear a hat even on occasions when it is generally considered to be convenable,” said one. The other described him as “such a disciple of fresh air that he was seen driving a big racing machine on Michigan Avenue without a hat!” Yet isn’t it a popular supposition that the West is freer from conventions than the East?

The rain has finally stopped and this morning the sun is trying hard to shine. To do much good it will have to shine steadily for about three days. We walked to the end of the brick paving down one of the streets a little while ago and looked at the black wet Lincoln Highway leading to Sterling.

“Been to look at the mud?” asked he, cheerfully. “It isn’t a bit bad now. You ought to see it when it’s muddy! Why, it took me eight[74] hours to go twenty-one miles! I did have to get a team of horses to pull me out of one bog, but otherwise I got through all right.”

“Didn’t you strain your engine?” I asked him. “Oh, yes,” he said cheerfully; “I guess I did, but I couldn’t help that.”

“Well, maybe you couldn’t,” I agreed, then added with confidential finality, “but I tell you what we’re going to do! We’re going to put ours on a nice, dry, comfortable freight car tomorrow morning and ship it past the mud district—which is probably the width of the continent.”

His warmth of manner fell suddenly to zero. I feared we had in some way offended him because we thought his state muddy. “Of course it is a lovely country to grow things in,” I added quickly, “but you see we want particularly to get to San Francisco, and the surest way is by freight.”

But we could not put the broken conversation together again. In fact, our friend the fire chief doesn’t smile any more. Our other friends, the garage men, also look at us askance—in fact in some way we seem to have lost our popularity.

We know now what is the matter! They think we are quitters! They are so filled with a sense of shame for us that we are beginning to feel it ourselves. In spite of our original intention to go only so far as roads were good and accommodations were comfortable, we feel that we are somehow lacking in mettle, that we are sandless, to say the least!

To explain that we are not crossing the continent as a feat of endurance is useless; having started to motor to the West, our stopping this side of the place we set out for is to them incomprehensible.

“Why, that car ought to go through anything!” is all any of them can think of saying to us.

Our friend the fire chief stood glowering out in front of the garage all morning. I think he would have gone to great lengths to prevent our machine’s incarceration in a freight car. The proprietor of the garage gave us his opinion: “Of course we drive pretty light machines around here, and yours is heavy and your wheels are uncommon narrow, but that engine of yours sure[76] ain’t no toy! I’d go through if I was you! I wouldn’t quit for a little mud! No, sir!”

“And supposing we slide off one of those bridges, or turn turtle in a ditch?” asked we.

The chief scratched his head, but his determination was undaunted. “She’d be kind of heavy to fall on you,” he grinned. “All the same, if that car was mine, I’d go right on plumb across Hell itself, I would!”

To finish what you have begun, to see it through at whatever cost, that seems to be the spirit here; it is probably the spirit of the West, the spirit that has doubled and trebled these towns in a few years. The consideration as to whether it is the wisest and most expedient thing to do, has no part in their process of reasoning. That is exactly the point.

All the same, if this country of ours ever gets into the war there will be the making of a second Balaklava regiment in a town of Illinois beginning with an R and a certain fire chief should make a gallant captain.

But magnificent as is their indomitability as a[77] quality of character; for us, for instance, to wreck a valuable car, which we might never afford to replace, for the sake of saying that we were not stopped by any such trifle as mud seems more foolhardy than courageous. Nevertheless, they have in some way imbued us with their spirit to such a degree that we have countermanded the freight car, and although the mud is not a bit better, have put chains on and are going to start.

Enthusiasm was no name for it! The town turned out to see us off; the fire chief drove out his engine in all its brass and scarlet resplendency. The ban of our cowardly leanings toward freight cars was lifted and they saw us off on our muddy way rejoicing!

We are glad to have seen this little town. Maybe the contagion of its enthusiasm will remain with us permanently.

The mud, by the way, lasted only ten miles. The celebrated Lincoln Highway parted from us at Sterling and as soon as we left it, the ordinary, unadvertised River to River road that we had dreaded was splendid all the rest of the way to this beautiful hotel, the Black Hawk, in Davenport, Iowa.

I was in a perfect flutter of excitement about crossing the Mississippi though I have scarcely the courage to tell the unbelievably idiotic reason why! It was Mrs. Z., who had crossed the continent an uncountable number of times, who told[78] me in all seriousness that the middle of the United States was cut unbridgeably in two by the Mississippi! Nothing spanned this divide except a railroad bridge, and the only way motorists had ever crossed was on the trestles in the middle of the night, against the law and at the risk of their lives! The bridges, needless to say, are many and quite as crossable as Manhattan to Brooklyn. The river itself is yellow as the Tiber, but its banks, devoid of factories and refuse collections, were enchantingly lovely, sloping and vividly green; a little like the upper Hudson, or still more, Queenstown Harbor in Ireland.

Davenport is evidently a gay resort. A friendly elevator boy detained E. M. and whispered: “Say, mister, there’s a cabberay going on tonight on the island. They’ll be vaudeville, tangoing and a band!” He must have put E. M.’s lack of enthusiasm at our door, for he added: “The fun doesn’t start until late. You could easy take them,” pointing toward us, “to a movie first. The Princess is high class and refined. You take it from me and fix it to stay for a while. You’ll find we’re some lively town!”

The morning looked gray but having gone easily enough the day before with chains on, we no longer worried about a little rain. Nevertheless, we left our beautiful rooms at the Black Hawk in Davenport, Iowa, the best accommodations at the most reasonable rates that we have yet had, with a regret that has since been doubly intensified.

For seventy-five miles beyond Davenport the road was excellent; not macadam, but a wide dustless surface of natural clay. The country was very much like that in southern New York and eastern New Jersey—a rolling picturesque landscape of green fields, beautiful trees and streams. As there were black clouds gradually coming up behind us, and we had as usual forgotten to bring any food except our tinned collection, it seemed wiser when we got to Iowa City to buy some sandwiches rather than stop at the Hotel Jefferson, and give the black clouds a chance to catch up. At an eating-place that had a sign on it: “Every Sort of Sandwiches Ready,” a gum-chewing youth leaning against the shelves behind the counter pushed a greasy bill of fare toward me. From a[80] list of chicken, ham, tongue, and cheese sandwiches, I ordered three chicken—we could not do with less and I doubted if we’d care for more. They hadn’t any chicken! “Ham, then?” There wasn’t any ham! “Tongue?” The youth thought if we weren’t in a hurry he might be able to get some canned tongue at the grocer’s down the street; the only sandwiches he had ready were of cheese laid between huge hunks of bread and each garnished with a radish skewered on the top with a toothpick!

Celia meanwhile by chance discovered an apartment called “Woman’s Rest Room” where she got some delicious homemade coffee-cake and rolls. Those with our own potted meats or jams were, of course, all anyone could ask. That is always the difficulty—a stranger in town has no idea where to go for anything.

From a point about ten miles beyond Iowa City, the story of that dreadful day ought to be written in indigo of the darkest shade. It was such an experience as to dampen your enthusiasm as an adventuring motorist forever; but that leaves you at least a great appreciation of Pullman trains, or even old-fashioned stage coaches—any means of conveyance that can keep going, right end first.

Our delay in foraging had given the black clouds time to gain on us. But after observing them uneasily for a mile or two, we felt confident that we were keeping ahead of them, until about ten miles further, at which point we had a puncture—our[81] very first—and the rain caught us. We debated whether we had better go back to Iowa City or whether we should try to run one hundred and thirty miles in the rain to Des Moines.

E. M. was not at all enthusiastic about going on. In fact he had not wanted to leave Davenport. As he is certainly not apt to care about weather we ought to have paid exceptional attention to his dubiousness. But he only said something about a strain on his engine, to which I paid no great attention—as I feel perfectly confident that no matter what happens, he is not going to let that engine get hurt very much if it is in his power to prevent it. The engine is to him what Chicago is to the Chicagoans, the very child of his heart; its every little piece of steel or aluminum as personally precious to him as a baby’s tooth or curl is to its doting parent. We can all be tired and hungry, wet or cold, or broiling and thirsty, it means nothing to him so long as that engine is comfortably purring under its bonnet. But the slightest complaint on its part, its faintest squeak or grumble, the smallest thing that he feels may disagree with it, and he is unspeakably miserable.

However, the rain seemed to be only a drizzle and the roads looked so hard and splendid, we concluded it would surely take many hours of downpour to get them in a bad condition—if in fact they were likely to be much affected at all. So although as a precaution E. M. put on chains, we[82] went on in tranquil ignorance of the Nemesis that lurked in waiting.

As an illustration of what rain in Iowa can do, twenty-five minutes of drizzle turned the smooth, hard surface of the road into the consistency of gruel. Not only that, but as though it were made in layers, and the top layer slid off the under layers and the under layers slipped out between, or the reverse. Our wheels, even with chains on, had no more hold than revolving cakes of soap might have on slanting wet marble. The car not only zigzagged sideways, backwards, every way but forward, unless some unexpected obstacle or pitfall loomed or yawned in our path, in which case it was seized with an impetuous desire to plunge to destruction. We saw two unfortunate automobiles already landed in the ditch. One, luckily, was being hauled out by a team, but the second was on a lonely stretch of road, and embedded far above the hubs. Its occupants peered out at us sympathetically, as they saw we were utterly powerless to help. We were just balancing this way and that, and for a while it looked as though we were going to park ourselves beside them. We could only call out as we finally slithered by, that we would send back a team from a town ahead—if we ever got to one.

At the end of an hour of this swerving, crawling misery, we had a second puncture. There was a barn near by, and the farmer, a German, let us drive in and change the tire under cover. We[83] asked if there was any town nearer and less out of our course than Cedar Rapids. Or would he himself, or perhaps one of his neighbors, take us in? No, he did not want any boarders in his house; he said it with a quite surly manner; his neighbors had no liking for strangers, either. Cedar Rapids was our nearest place.

In contrast to the kindness with which he had motioned us to come into his barn in the first place, it struck us that he was on closer acquaintance, surprisingly curt. But it was not until afterwards, in the light of later experience, that we realized his manner had become intentionally unfriendly.

The tire changing went very quickly, and in a few minutes we were on the road again. Celia and I ate our luncheon, but E. M., struggling with the zigzagging car, had no thought for food and ate only a mouthful or two that I fed him as he drove. It was by now pouring hard and we seemed to be making less and less progress. One thing, we now quite understood what our friend the fire chief meant when he said the road around Rochelle was only a little muddy. Without hesitating a moment we would be willing to swear that the mud championship of the world belongs to Iowa. Illinois mud is slippery and slyly eager to push unstable tourists into the ditch, but in Iowa it lurks in unfathomable treachery, loath to let anything ever get out again that once ventures into it. Our progress through it became[84] hideously like that of a fly crawling through yellow flypaper—as though it were a question of time how soon we would be brought to an exhausted end, and sink into it forever!

At the end of two hours more, we had gone ten miles. Cedar Rapids was still nearly twenty miles away. Twenty miles! Could anyone in a lifetime go so far as that? Could any machine hold out so endlessly? In another hour we had gone only four miles further, and by no means sure of our road, and then came a third puncture! It was one of those last straws that seem to finish everything. You think you just can’t live through it and struggle more. Much better give up and lie down in the fly-paper and stay there. We were at the top of a fairly steep hill, so that we might perhaps be able to go on again, but to see E. M., already exhausted, and not a soul to help him, get out again into that drenching rain—he had no raincoat and the mud was over his shoetops—and we had started on the trip in the first place because he had been ill—I could easily have burst into tears. Which exhibition of courage would have helped the situation such a lot!

Meanwhile he was having a hopeless time trying to jack the car up. There was no foundation for the jack to stand on, so that it merely burrowed down into the clay. Some men lounged out of the one house near by. They were Germans. All the inhabitants seemed to be German. They approached with seeming friendliness, but on[85] closer inspection of us, their demeanor noticeably changed. There was something in our appearance they did not like. I thought possibly they resented our car’s waltzing, or thought that E. M.’s jack was harmfully puncturing the surface of their beautiful road. Two of them shrugged their shoulders and all of them looked at us in impassive silence that was neither friendly nor polite. Then a younger man appeared who came forward as though to offer to help, but stopping to look inquisitively at the radiator top, he too, grew sullen. And then we understood! The emblem of the Royal Automobile Club of London was put on when we were in England last year; and as it is very pretty, we happen never to have taken it off, and the men were Germans! That’s why they wouldn’t help us. We had asked for a piece of plank that one of them was holding; the man carried it away. Finally, when that dreadful tire was at last on, they would not even tell us the way until I asked in German. Then one of them laconically pointed it out.

Hot, tired, and soaked as a drowned rat, E. M. for three and a half hours longer guided the steaming, floundering and irresponsible machine until at last by supreme effort he got us to Cedar Rapids.

Somewhere we read a sign “Cedar Rapids suits me. It will suit you.” Of course after those last six hours of mud-wallowing agony C-e-d-a-r R-a-p-i-d-s simply spelled Heaven. But after we were dry and warm and fed—such is the ingratitude of human nature and tourists—we would very gladly have gone away again.

explains our feelings rather perfectly. We were tired; at least E. M. was exhausted, and Celia and I were tired probably in sympathy. Also it is always disappointing to start out for a place and not be able to get there, and little things sometimes sum up a feeling of depression quite out of proportion to their importance.

We went over bad pavement, and came to some more that was torn up, so that the city had an upheaved effect. It was all drenched in rain, and the little we saw of it looked ugly and brown, and finally our rooms were completely sapping to joyfulness of spirit. Perhaps if we had come from a hotel less attractive than the Black Hawk[87] in Davenport, we should not have so keenly felt the contrast, but the rooms we were in depressed us to the verge of melancholia. Dingy bottle-green paper, a stained carpet, a bathroom in which the plumbing wouldn’t work, a depressing view of a torn-up street! I wandered around the cow-path surrounding my big bed in my narrow room, looked out at the weeping sky, and wondered whether we were going to have this sort of thing all the way—these dust-filled hideous rooms, cleaned only with a carpet sweeper; these sooty, ugly, busy, noisy towns. And the meals—those anemic chilled potatoes, beans full of strings, everything slapped on plates any which way, and everything tasting as though it had come out of the same dishwater!

Whenever I am far away from home and uncomfortable, I think of the story Eleanor Hoyt Brainard once told me. After a long chapter of misadventures on one of those dreadful journeys where she missed the good boat and rocked about on a little one, failed to get accommodations at the places that she counted on, and as a last straw took a wrong continental train, and finally too exhausted to sleep was settling herself for the night in the corner of a third-class day coach, she began to cry. To her husband’s amazed and concerned questioning, “Oh, dear!” she sobbed, “it’s just come over me we have a perfectly good home! And I wonder why we don’t stay in it more!”

When my article appeared in Collier’s, a Cedar Rapids newspaper arose in wrath and said we must have put up at a third-rate hotel. I agree with its rating, but was told it was the best in town. I do realize, however, it is a very distorted judgment that appraises a town by a few rooms in an hotel. Unless you can stay in a city long enough to know some of its people, to learn something about its atmosphere and personality, your opinion of it is as valueless as your opinion of a play would be, after seeing only the posters on the outside of the theater. Yet if you are a transient tourist, it is the room you are shown into that necessarily colors your impression of that city. If your room is fresh and clean and comfortable, you give the attributes of newness, cleanness and up-to-dateness to the city itself. An ugly, down-at-heels, uncomfortable hotel makes you think the same of the city. You can’t help it, can you? Besides which we had come to see the country and not stop, rained in, for indefinite periods in towns that differed in no way from dozens of others in the East. It was the West, the real great, free, open West we had come to see. Ranches, cowboys, Indians, not little cities like sample New Yorks.

At the hotel there was a large Bakers’ Convention. A suggestively domestic affair in more ways than one, since many had brought their wives. As though in advertisement of the nourishing quality of a wheat diet, men and women[89] were nearly all pleasingly plump. We noticed also, that every man without exception had a solitaire diamond ring on his wedding-ring finger. Sometimes the wife had only a wide gold wedding-ring, but her husband was in diamonds. I don’t know whether bread is a specialty of Cedar Rapids, or whether an effort was made to do particular honor to the bakers, but bread was the one thing on the menu that proved to be really good.

There were two bakers and their wives, elderly couples, who sat at the next table to us. One of the wives had a wretched cough and the other was rather deaf; and to the combination we owe an anecdote that I hope they did not mind our overhearing, or my repeating.

It seems the husband of the wife who had the cough, sent for a doctor who had been out night after night on serious cases until the poor man was completely exhausted. In order to listen to the patient’s breathing he put his head on her chest and told her to “count four.” The husband came into the room and heard his wife counting, “One hundred and forty-six—one hundred and forty-seven——” and the doctor sound asleep!

It was in Cedar Rapids, too, that our waitress told us about an automobile she had just bought, to drive out in the evenings! As a newspaper afterwards printed in criticism of my above remark, “Tips in the West may be larger than the earnings of dyspeptic authoresses in the East!”

Just as the good roads turned into mud slides in a few minutes, a few hours of sun and wind transformed them into good ones again. After only two days’ delay we went back over the scene of all our misery and the distance out of our way that had taken us nearly six hours, we skimmed over in less than one, returning to our Des Moines road with a little delay and no misadventure. (Our non-interruptible chauffeur paying no attention to the suggestion of stopping to taste the famous springs at Colfax.)

When we arrived in Des Moines, as E. M. wanted to take the car to a garage to have some things fixed, Celia and I went out by ourselves on foot. The first vehicle we saw had a sign on it “Jitney, 5 cents.” Never having been in one, and not caring a bit where it took us, we promptly got in.

“Now, what are we going to see?” asked Celia, not addressing anybody in particular.

“Well, there’s the Capitol—I go right by that, and the finest buffaloes in the States are less’n a block further out. You could go see the buffaloes and then walk back to the Capitol.”

The buffaloes were stuffed in a case at the museum, but they must certainly have been among the finest in the world when they were alive. We also saw some stuffed prairie dogs. But out here you need not go in a museum to see them! After the museum we walked through the Capitol, a fine building splendidly situated on a height overlooking the city and its dome newly gleaming with gold. When we were descending the many steps of the Capitol’s terrace, we saw the same jitney driver who had brought us there, and his car being empty, he drew up expectantly at the curb. Not wanting, however, to return to the spot we had started from, we suggested that he take off his sign and drive us about by the hour.

He grinned broadly. Sure he would! Also he augmented his price with equal alacrity. Then rolling up his “5-cent” sign, and surveying his unplacarded machine in evident satisfaction, he said jauntily:

“I tell you! The cops’ll think I’m the showfer of a millionaire! When you’re nothing but a jitney you stay behind here, and you don’t go there! But you bet they’ll let me through now all right!”

As a jitney he had been trundling along briskly, but now assuming all the characteristics of those[92] who are hired by time instead of by distance, he never let the speedometer go above eight miles an hour; tried his best to keep it at six and stalled the engine about every hundred yards, until at the end of a very little while of halting and creeping we found his tin-kettle tramp machine acute punishment. We told him that if he would only go quickly, we would willingly pay for a second hour’s drive at the end of twenty minutes. But nothing we could say had any effect upon him. He kept on at the same dot-and-go-one creep. Finally, in desperation, Celia shrieked:

“If you don’t get us home at once, it will be too late! You will have to take us to the asylum!”

He looked around at Celia like a scared rabbit, and in her frenzied countenance found evidently no reassurance, for he took us home at a speed that broke the traffic regulations—even for the “showfers of millionaires!”

In a few of our impressions, Des Moines had an eccentric topsy-turviness as though we had stumbled into the pages of “Alice in Wonderland.” At the Chamberlain, an old-fashioned General Grant style of hotel, the elevator boys sit on chairs in the center of the elevator and the guests stand. When I asked to have a cup of coffee and toast sent up to my room the next morning at half-past seven, the head waitress raised her eyebrows and explained:

“If you will tell the clerk at the desk, he will have your room called at whatever hour you say.”

“I don’t want my room called,” I protested, “I want you to send my coffee up to me at seven-thirty.”

She looked vaguely puzzled. Then in a moment she said, with obvious intention to be kind: “Don’t you think you better just leave a rising call? Because maybe you will feel all right in the morning and’ll want to come down for your breakfast.”

We also found another original idea in hotel service. At the Chamberlain we were told our rooms would be two dollars and a half apiece, but our bill was two-fifty for one and five-fifty for the other two. When I asked why, the clerk said: “Didn’t you have the door open between?”

“Well, you see,” he explained, “that makes the room en suite, so it is fifty cents extra.”

The interest people take in population is very amazing to us. Ask any New Yorker the city’s population and two out of five will shrug their shoulders. Ask anyone out here—man, woman or child—you will get on the spot the figures of the last census—plus the imagined increase since!

At random I asked two young girls looking in a milliner’s window. In the midst of their exclamations about the “swellness” of a black and white hat they answered in unison, “Eighty-six thousand, three hundred and sixty-eight.”

“A Mrs. Simson had twins this morning—that[94] makes eighty-six thousand, three hundred and seventy, doesn’t it?”

For a moment they looked disconcerted, then the other answered brightly: “Oh, the deaths’ll come off the next census taking, and there’ll be ever so many births before that!”

Des Moines newspapers were full of the glory of their city. “Enterprise, confidence, civic pride are what make the citizenship of our city!” “Des Moines is ever going forward!” are sentences we read. “Nothing the matter with Des Moines!” was the title of a leader in one of them. What was the matter with Des Moines, we wondered. The article did not tell us. It only said: “With our new thirteen-story building and the new gilded dome of the Capitol, Des Moines towers above the other cities of the State like a lone cottonwood on the prairie.”

However, levity aside, when Des Moines has completed the parkway in front of the Capitol, and built up all of the embankment like the stretch that is already finished, the city with its civic center will be one of the most beautiful and perfect in the world. Already a community of beautiful buildings and houses, some day Des Moines will probably put up a last word in hotels. Maybe Des Moines, being a city of homes, doesn’t care about hotels!

Don’t think from this that the Chamberlain is[95] poor! It is a perfectly comfortable and well-run hotel, but not truly representative of this fine city.

In a little hotel the other day a waitress rushed out of the dining-room and shouted to the clerk behind the desk at which I was standing:

“Excuse me a minute,” said the clerk, as he went to look for Charlie, the proprietor, for Miss Higgins, the waitress!

Most of the hotels so far have been comfortable and nearly all clean. One of the exceptions has a story, and because of the story I cannot bear to tell its name. “A new house,” the clerk we left in the morning told us, “doing a big business. Yes, you had better telegraph ahead for rooms.”

Escorted by negro bellboys we entered a terra cotta and green lobby, the walls and ceilings of which protuberated with green and orange and brown and iron and gold and plaster, and all smudged with many wipings in of soot.

The clerk, or proprietor, was a ray of welcoming attentiveness. Yes, indeed, he had saved rooms with baths for each of us. He was the pink of personal neatness and we hoped the bellboys’ color had perhaps not been chosen with a purpose. Our rooms, however, were brown and sooty, and in my bathroom I wrote the word “dirt” on the washstand with my finger and it showed like[96] a rut in the road. We went down to dinner not expecting much. And, had surprisingly good food in a spotlessly clean dining-room!

When I went to bed the electric lights would not turn on, and as no one answered the bell I gave up ringing and went to bed in the dark. The thermometer was about ninety-five; everything felt gritty, and in front of my eyes blinked mockingly an intermittent electric sign which in letters six feet high flashed all through the night about a snow-white laundry!

I was awakened by a waiter with my breakfast, which couldn’t have been better; clean silver, unchipped china, and the best coffee and toast we had had anywhere! Evidently the man who ran the restaurant was good, and whoever ran the chambermaid was bad, and whoever decorated the place in terra cotta, green, bronze and crimson was criminal! The nice man at the desk was evidently the proprietor; we wondered whether to tell him about the electric light and the bells that did not work, and the good-for-nothing chambermaid, but decided that either he knew it and could not help it or that he did not know it and did not want to! When I went to the office to pay our bill he was so really attentively interested in our welfare that I found myself saying politely: “We have been very comfortable.”

The man’s look of wistfulness changed to one of pitying perplexity: “You have been comfortable! Here?” He smiled as one would smile[97] at a child who was trying to say it did not mind the splinter in its finger.

“I had a delicious breakfast,” I found myself saying enthusiastically. “Really I did. The best toast I have had since I left my home.”

His expressionless, dry tone and impersonal smile would have made Hodge in “The Man From Home” even more famous.

“Don’t you mind my feelings,” he said, “you needn’t try to pretend my house is first-class or even second! I’ve seen good hotels, and I know!” He leaned over the desk away from one of the “shoe men.” “It’s about fourth-class; that’s just about what it is.”

“Oh, they’re Polacks! Housekeeper can’t break them in! They are something like cats; they don’t take to water! No, ma’am, there is a big difference between this house and the ones in New York City, I know that; but all the same,” and the first look of pride crept into his face, “this hotel’s the best in the city. The others’d tumble to pieces if you stepped in ’em.”

A great deal of Iowa is uncultivated, picturesque, with grazing lands, many trees,—chiefly[98] beautiful cottonwood,—and streams, and much prettier than Illinois, although Illinois was to me more interesting because of the immense flat farms of grain, and the houses in groups, like being placed at the hub of a wheel, the farms spreading out like the spokes. The houses were like those in New England, white with green shutters and well built. All of this great Western country is rich on its face value, and it is little surprise to be told of the wealth reputed to these landowners.

Every town through the Middle West seems to have a little grill of brick-paved streets; a splendid post-office building of stone or brick or marble; a court-house, but of an older period generally; and one or two moving picture houses; two or three important-looking dry-goods stores, and some sort of hotel, and in it a lot of drummers in tilted-back chairs exhibiting the soles of their shoes to the street.

Where, Oh, where is the West that Easterners dream of—the West of Bret Harte’s stories, the West depicted in the moving pictures? Are the scenes no longer to be found except in the pages of a book, or on a cinematograph screen? We have gone half the distance across the continent and all this while we might be anywhere at home. Omaha is a big up-to-date and perfectly Eastern city, and the Fontanelle is a brand-new hotel where we are going to stay over a day in order to luxuriate in our rooms.

One act of cruelty, however, I hereby protest against; they sent to our rooms a tempting bill of fare—a special and delicious-sounding luncheon at only sixty cents! When we hurried down to order it, we were told it was served solely to the traveling men in their café, Celia and I not admitted. E. M. said it was as good as it sounded—much interest was that to us! Also that he sat at a table with a traveler for the Ansco Photographic Company. E. M. had some very poor films we had taken, and after luncheon his new friend made him some prints. The results were[100] little short of marvellous. If it was the paper,—why does anyone ever use any other? If it was the man, Oh, why doesn’t he open a hospital for the benefit of weak and decrepit amateur films.

On the subject of food, the cumulative effect of a traveling diet is queer. After many days of it you feel as though you had been interlined with a sort of paste. Everything you eat is made of flour, flour, and again flour. A friend of ours took a trip around the world going by slow stages. After a month or two her letters were nothing except dissertations on the state of the cleanliness of hotels and the quality of the food. Alas! We are getting the same attitude of mind. Ordinarily the advantage of motoring is that if you don’t like the appearance of the hotel you come to, you can go on. Out here where one stopping-place is fifty or a hundred miles away from the other, that is not possible, unless you are willing to drive nights and days without a pause, or sleep along the roadside and be independent of hotels altogether. We are not traveling that way—yet.

Omaha, as everyone knows, is divided from Council Bluffs by the coffee-colored Missouri. How can as much mud as that be carried down current all the time and leave any land above, or any river below?

It seemed to us that Council Bluffs and Omaha were comparatively not unlike Brooklyn and Manhattan. Council Bluffs is much the smaller[101] city and the Bluffs from which it takes its name are not steep river embankments as we had supposed, but a high residence-crowned hill behind and above its innumerable railroad stations. Nothing, by the way, seems more typical of American towns than to have a “residential district” on the“heights.”

Omaha, as I said before, is an impressively up-to-date city with many fine new buildings, important dwellings and beautiful avenues on which, last but not least, motors are made hospitably welcome. In nearly all Eastern cities automobiles are treated as though they were loitering tramps; continually ordered by the police to “keep moving along.” In Omaha the avenues are so splendidly wide that they can afford chalked-off parking-places in the center of the streets where motors can stand unmolested and indefinitely. If only New York and Boston had the space to follow their example!

Much as New Yorkers go to Sherry’s or the Ritz, Omaha society seems to come to the Fontanelle to dine. On Sunday evenings, we are told, it is impossible to secure a table unless ordered long in advance. Even on an ordinary evening, the dining-room of the Fontanelle looked like an “Importers’ Opening.” A few women looked smart, but a number suggested the probability of their having arrayed themselves to take part in tableau vivants, or an amateur fashion parade.

A young girl with pink tulle draped around the[102] lower half of her face bent the top edge down gingerly while she ate a few mouthfuls, and then carefully arranged it across the tip of her nose again. It seemed to be another example beside that of banting for thinness, of faut avoir faim pour etre belle.

A quite plump matron had on a high-necked dress of white satin hooped round the hips, and trimmed with black velvet; another wore black charmeuse, the neck and sleeves and picture hat outlined with three-quarter inch diameter pearl beads, but the prize for eccentricities of costumes belonged to a man in a black-and-white checked suit, black-and-white striped socks and tie, and a white stiff shirt with black mourning border on the collar and cuffs and down the front seam. You can’t get away from the black-and-white craze anywhere; people will paint the fronts of their houses in black-and-white stripes if the obsession goes any further.

Among the appropriately and well-dressed women one was superlatively smart. This one was really perfect, from the direction in which her hair was brushed to exactly suit the outline of her hat, to her perfectly shaped patent-leather shoes. Her costume is not much to describe: a severely simple gun-metal-colored taffeta one-piece dress with a white organdie collar and sleeves of self-colored chiffon, a wide-brimmed black straw hat turned up at one side of the back with a black bird. The distinctive effect was due[103] more to the way it was worn than to the costume. You felt that it belonged to her almost in the way that a collie’s fur belongs to him; it was as much a part of her, as her perfectly done hair or her polished fingernails. How few women pay attention to the effect or outline that their heads make! Nine women out of ten—more, forty-nine out of fifty—seemingly gather their hair up on a haphazard spot on their heads and fasten it there almost any way. Sit in any theater audience and look at them! And yet a paradox; a really chic woman never gives the appearance of having made an effort. Her hair suggests dexterity, not effort, and though she may have on a four-hundred-dollar creation of jet or white velvet she looks as though she happened to put on a black dress or a white one, but never as though she had put on the black or the white one! This dissertation, by the way, belongs by no means solely to Omaha, but to every city where women follow fashions. New York women are quite as prone to be content with being mannequins for the display of their clothes rather than take greater pains to select clothes that are a completion of their own personalities—the last leaf left for the American woman to take out of the book of her Parisian sister.

Quite by chance on our last evening, we ran across Mrs. K. in the corridor of the Fontanelle; and the next moment found ourselves in a little[104] fragment of Omaha Society—with a capital S. Had it not been for one topic of conversation I should probably not mention the incident, as we had merely a glimpse of a few well-bred people that offered little matter for comment. The topic was the famous cyclone of three years ago. Among the stories they told us, was one of Mrs. R., the one whose appearance I had so much admired earlier in the evening. Three years ago she arrived home from Paris with seventeen trunks full of trousseau, and as soon as her things could be unpacked she spread them around a big room, in imitation of a bazaar, so that her particular friends might view them. Instead of her friends, however, arrived the Cyclone! It tore off the entire bay window; caught up dresses, hats, lingerie, wraps; whisked them through the open space where the window had been, and festooned the topmost branches of the trees all down Farnum Avenue with fragments of French finery.

Scarcely a garment was ever worth rescuing, as each was pierced through and through by the branches that skewered it fast.

Mrs. K.’s own story of the cyclone, I give as she told it. “It did not seem very amusing at the time, but one of the funny things to look back upon was what happened to Father! The storm came from the south. Father started across the living-room, which has both north and south windows, just as the cyclone struck. The windows burst out, the furniture flew around the room and[105] literally out of the north window. Father made a sort of vortex in the middle and everything swirled like a whirlpool around him. When we got to him he was tightly bound up in the rugs, portières, and curtains, which completely prevented his moving; but also protected him snugly from flying glass. He was prostrate, of course, and lightly resting on his chest was a large picture of the Doge’s palace.”

Whatever damage the cyclone did has long been obliterated, and Omaha now presents a beautifully in order exterior and enjoys an evidently gay social life; two features of which are the new Hotel, and the Country Club—neither of them likely to grow much moss on their ballroom floors.

But to go from the triviality of the mere social side to the deeper characteristics of the Omahans. There is something very inspiring, very wonderful in the attitude of the West. The pride in their city, the personal caring, that we met first in Chicago, is also the underlying motive here. One hears much of the ambitious Western towns, but I think the word not quite right; it is not mere ambition, but aspiration, that is carrying them forward. One of the editors of a leading paper said yesterday:

“The making of a great city depends less on the men who are in office than on those who have no office, and who want none. It is the spirit of the people that makes a city go forward or leaves it standing still. The spirit that is essential to progress,[106] in Omaha as everywhere, is one of unity, harmony and good will. Combined with this there must be energy, enterprise, confidence in the future, civic pride and devotion. No city, however well favored otherwise, can make the progress its opportunities call for, if its people are forever quarreling among themselves, envious of one another’s good fortune, seeking each to build himself up by tearing some other down. It is shoulder to shoulder, in mass formation, that great armies advance. Rancor, hatred, suspicion, pettiness, that cause division in the ranks, are as deadly as the other extreme where indifference, greed, lack of respect for the other man’s rights, produce dry rot.”

Nor are these merely editorial embroideries of speech. They are the actual sentiments, not only thought, but for the most part lived up to.

North Platte might really be called “City of Ishmael.” For no reason that is discoverable except its mere existence, every man’s tongue seems to be against it. Time and time again—in fact the repetition is becoming monotonous—people say to us, “It is all very well, of course, you have had fine hotels and good roads so far, but wait until you come to North Platte!”

Why, I wonder, does everyone pick out North Platte as a sort of third degree place of punishment? Why not one of the other names through which our road runs? Why always set up that same unfortunate town as a target? It began with Mrs. O. in New York, who declared it so dreadful a place that we could never live through it. Her point of view being extremely fastidious, her opinion does not alarm us as much as it otherwise might, but in Chicago, too, the mention of our going to North Platte seemed to be the signal for people to look sorry for us. Now a drummer downstairs has just added his mite to our growing apprehension.

“Goin’ t’ th’ coast?” he queried. “Hmm—I[108] guess you won’t like th’ hotels at North Platte overmuch.”

“Me?” he said indignantly. “Not on your life! No one ever gets off at North Platte except the railroad men—they have to!” That is the one unexplained phase of the subject, no one of all those who have villified it has personally been there.

Just as I asked if he could perhaps tell me which of the hotels was least bad, a fellow drummer joined him. The usual expression of commiseration followed.

“Well,” said the second drummer, “it’s this way. Whichever hotel you put up at, you’ll wish you had put up at the other.”

“Suppose it turns out to be the very worst we can think of—what can that worst be?” I asked rather shakily of Celia.

“Dirty rooms over a saloon with drunken ‘bad men’ shooting in it,” she whispered with a shiver.

“Don’t you think—” we suggested to E. M., “it would be a good idea to buy a pistol, in case——”

“In case——?” he asked with the completely indifferent tranquillity of youth.

Celia prodded me. “Well, just in case——” I said lamely. I think Celia might have finished the sentence herself.

Of all the bogey stories, the one about North Platte is the most unfounded! Instead of a rip-roaring[109] town, rioting in red and yellow ribaldry, it is a serious railroad thoroughfare, self-respecting and above reproach and the home of no less a celebrity than Mr. Cody—Buffalo Bill. Of course if you imagine you are going to find a Blackstone or a Fontanelle, you will be disappointed, but in comparison to some of the other hotels along the Lincoln Highway, the Union Pacific in North Platte is a model of delectability!

As a matter of fact, it is an ocher-colored wooden railroad station, a rather bare dining-room, and lunch counter, and perfectly good, clean bedrooms upstairs. You cannot get a suite with a private bath, and if you are more or less spoiled by the supercomforts of luxurious living, you may not care to stay very long. But if in all of your journeying around the world, you never have to put up with any greater hardship than spending a night at the Union Pacific in North Platte, you will certainly not have to stay at home on that account. There are no drunkards or toughs or even loafers hanging about; the food is cleanly served and good; the rooms, although close to the railroad tracks, are as spotless as brooms and scrubbing-brushes can make them.[4]

There is a place, though, between the Missouri and the Rio Grande—there is no use in being more exact as to its locality—where, except in case of[110] accident—ours was a broken spring—you are not likely to stay. There our own particular horrors were pretty well realized: dirty rooms over a saloon and lounging toughs on the corner; uneatable hunks of food at a table in a barroom, our dinner put in front of us on a platter, and no plates used at all. And the bedrooms! I slept on top of my bed wrapped in an ulster with my head on the lining of my coat. And even so, I was seriously bitten by small but voracious prior inhabitants. The next day all the “bath” I had was a catlick with the corner of a handkerchief held reluctantly under a greasy spigot.

This experience was pretty unappetizing but also it was our only bad one, sent no doubt as a punishment for our lack of appreciation of one or two former stopping-places, which, as E. M. would say, “sounds fair enough.” Also in order to live consistently up to that motor philosophy I wrote about, we will in time be glad of the color it will give to our memory book. But at present its color seems merely a grease spot on the page, and all the motor philosophy in the world doesn’t seem potent enough to blot out the taste and smell, to say nothing of the stings.

By the way, I seem to have arrived at North Platte and possibly farther, on a magic carpet—a little difficult for anyone taking this as a guide to follow! Therefore to go back, merely on the subject of the roads, almost as far as Des Moines.[111] Taking the general average of luck in motoring, no matter how well things have gone for you, the chances are that you have had some delays. A day or two of rain that held you up, detours that made you lose your way, a run of tire trouble—something, no matter what it is, that has delayed you more than you expected. And whatever it is you find yourself thinking this does not matter very much because when we get to those Nebraska fast roads we can make up lost time easily.

The very sound “Nebraska” correlates “dragged roads” speed! While you are still gently running through the picturesque Sir Joshua Reynolds scenery of the River to River road in Iowa, you find that your mind is developing an anticipatory speed craze. So thoroughly imbued has your mind become with the “fast road” idea that the very ground has a speed gift in its dragged surface. What if your engine is barely capable of forty miles an hour, that miraculously fast stretch magically carries you at the easiest fifty. If you have a big powerful engine, you forget that ordinarily you dislike whizzing across the surface of the earth, and for just this once—even though you think of it more in terror than in joy—you are approaching the raceway of America, and you, too, are going to race!

“We must be sure that everything is in perfect running order,” you exclaim excitedly as you picture your car leaping out of Omaha and shooting to Denver while scarcely turning over its engine.[112] “Not many stopping-places,” you are told. What matter is that to you? You are not thinking of stopping at all. North Platte, perhaps, yes. Three hundred and thirty miles in a day is just a nice little fast road run.

“We’ll leave early,” you continue, unheeding, “and make a dash across the continental speedway——”

“See here, stranger,” says the garage man, “what state of fast circuits d’y think y’re in? This is Nebraska and the speed limit is twenty miles!”

The garage man half edges away from you. “Fr’m here t’ Denver is about thutty-five hours’ straight travelin’. You gutta slow down t’ eight miles through towns and y’ can’t go over twenty miles an hour nowheres!”

When you manage to get a little breath into your collapsed lungs you say dazedly, “But we’re going over the ‘fast dragged’ road.”

“Road’s fast enough! But the law’ll have you if you drive over it faster’n twenty miles an hour.”

If you can find the joke in all of this, you have a more humorous mental equipment and a sweeter disposition than we had.

Across Nebraska from the last good hotel in[113] Omaha to the first comfortable one in Denver or Cheyenne is over five hundred miles. At the prescribed “speed” of about seventeen miles an hour average, it means literally a pleasant little run of between thirty and forty hours along a road dead level, wide, straight, and where often as far as the eye can see, there is not even a shack in the dimmest distance, and the only settlers to be seen are prairie dogs.

If between Omaha and Cheyenne there were three or four attractive clean little places to stop, or if the Nebraska speed laws were abolished or disregarded and it didn’t rain, you could motor to the heart of the Rocky Mountains with the utmost ease and comfort.

In May, 1915, the road by way of Sterling to Denver was impassable; all automobiles were bogged between Big Spring and Julesburg, so on the advice of car owners that we met, we went by way of Chappell to Cheyenne. It is quite possible, of course, that we blindly passed comfortable stopping-places, but to us that whole vast distance from Omaha to Cheyenne was one to be crossed with as little stop-over as possible. Aside from questions of accommodations and speed laws, the interminable distance was in itself an unforgettably wonderful experience. It gave us an impression of the lavish immensity of our own country as nothing else could. Think of driving on and on and on and yet the scene scarcely changing, the flat road stretching as endlessly in[114] front of you as behind. The low yellow sand banks and flat sand islands scarcely vary on the Platte, which might as well be called the Flat, River. The road does gradually rise several thousand feet but the distance is so immense your engine does not perceive a grade. Once in a while you pass great herds of cattle fenced in vast enclosures and every now and then you come to a group of nesters’ shanties, scattered over the gray-green plain as though some giant child had dropped its blocks, or as though some Titans, playing dominoes, had left a few lying on the table.

At greater intervals you come to towns and you drive between two closely fitted rows of oddly assorted domino-shaped stores and houses, and then on out upon the great flat table again. For scores and scores of miles the scene is unvarying. On and on you go over that endless road until at last far, far on the gray horizon you catch the first faint glint of the white-peaked Rocky Mountains.

You have long ago turned away from the river’s yellow sand flats, and you watch that slowly rising snow-topped rim, until—it may be gradually, or it may be suddenly—your heart is thrilled by the sublimity of the amazing contrast of mountain upon plain.

Perhaps you may merely find dullness in the endlessly flat, unvarying monotonous land; perhaps you are unwilling to be enthralled by Titanic[115] cones of rock or snow. But steep your sight for days in flatness, until you think the whole width of the world has melted into a never-ending sea of land, and then see what the drawing close to those most sublime of mountains does to you!

And afterwards, when you have actually climbed to their knees or shoulders, and look back upon the endless plains, you forget the wearying journey and feel keenly the beauty of their very endlessness. The ever-changing effect of light and shadow over that boundless expanse weaves an enchanted spell upon your imagination that you can never quite recover from. Sometimes the prairies are a great sea of mist; sometimes they are a parched desert; sometimes they are blue like the waves of an enchanted sapphire sea; sometimes they melt into a plain of vaporous purple mystery, and then the clouds shift away from the sun and you see they are a width of the world, of land.

But however or whenever you look out upon them, you feel as though mean little thoughts, petty worries, or skulking gossip whispers, could never come into your wind-swept mind again. That if you could only live with such vastness of outlook before you, perhaps your own puny heart and mind and soul might grow into something bigger, simpler, worthier than is ever likely otherwise.

And now I am getting quite over my head, so[116] better climb down the mountains again and go back to the motor, which may be supposed to have reached Cheyenne.

If you think Cheyenne is a Buffalo Bill Wild West town, as we did, you will be much disappointed, though it may be well not to show the progressive citizens of that up-to-date city that you hoped they were still galloping along wooden sidewalks howling like coyotes!

I thought that Celia and E. M. looked distinctly grieved at the sight of smooth laid asphalt, wide-paved sidewalks, imposing capitol and modern buildings. Even the brand-new Plains Hotel was accepted by both of them in much the same spirit that a child who thought it was going to the circus and found itself at a museum of art, would accept the compensation of a nice hot supper instead of peanuts and red lemonade.

Unfortunately we had no friends in Cheyenne and therefore never got so far as even the threshold of society, but the following account taken from the morning paper is irrefutable evidence that Cheyenne, far from being a wild town of border outlawry, is a center of refined elegance and fashion:

“Governor and Mrs. K. tendered a beautiful courtesy to the Cheyenne and visiting cadets and their sponsors Sunday afternoon when they entertained them at an informal reception and luncheon at the executive mansion.

[117]

“This brilliant social function was scarcely second in the estimation of the guests to the wall-scaling tournament Saturday evening, when world records were smashed by the invincible cadet squad from Casper.

“The Governor’s mansion was exceedingly attractive with its luxurious furnishings, in artistic setting. One hundred and twenty voices mingled in chatter, laughter and song to the accompaniment of violin and piano. College songs and familiar popular airs in which everyone joined, made the ‘welkin ring’ as the exuberant spirits found vent in melody.

“To the hostess’ understanding of the needs of boys and girls was due the satisfactory nature and quantities of the salads, sandwiches, ice cream and candies served so generously in the dining-room.

“The cadets outnumbered the pretty sponsors eight to one, and every girl was a queen at whose shrine a circle of admiring youths was in constant attendance.”

In our ignorance we don’t know what a “sponsor” is further than that the paper tells us she is a young girl who is a queen of despotic fascination, but what, or whom, or why or how she sponsors, is a mystery too deep for our solving. Cadet, of course, makes an instantaneous picture of a straight, square-shouldered young human being of inflexibly rigid demeanor but with a quite[118] susceptible young human heart beating underneath his rigid exterior.

The object in quoting all this is merely to show our fellow Easterners that the West of yesterday was no longer to be found in Cheyenne!

On one day in the year though, they have a Frontier Days Celebration—when, like in the midnight hour of the Puppen Fée, the West that was, comes back to life. There are wonderful exhibits of “broncho busting” and rope throwing, and all the features of county fair, horse show, and wild west show in one.

From Cheyenne to Denver, and from Denver to Colorado Springs, the road was uneventfully excellent all the way.

Denver, where we stopped merely for luncheon, is far too important a city to mention in a brief paragraph or two, and is for that reason left out altogether.

“For West is West, and East is East, and never twain shall meet”—except in Colorado Springs!

Mountains, plains, squatters’ shanties, replicas of foreign palaces, cowboys, Indians, ranchers, New Yorkers, Londoners. The free open-air life and altitude of the plains, the sheltered luxurious manners and customs of the idle rich! Across the warp of Western characteristics is woven the woof of a cosmopolitan society.

Before coming here I had imagined the place a sort of huge sanatorium. I had expected long lines of invalid chairs on semi-enclosed verandas, even beds possibly, as in the outdoor wards of hospitals. I knew, of course, that there were good hotels and many private houses; and having friends who had come out here, I thought perhaps we might take luncheon or dinner with them in a quiet, semi-invalid sort of way—an early simple supper, and someone to tell us not to stay too long for fear of tiring Jim or Mary.

As a matter of fact Mary drove her own motor up to the hotel ten minutes after we arrived, and,[120] telling us of half a dozen engagements that she had made for us, including a dinner that she was giving that evening, wanted us to come out to polo then and there.

Instead of the invalid regimen that we expected to fall into, we were kept going at a pace we could scarcely catch up with. We dined in extravagantly appointed houses, lunched on terraces overlooking gardens, danced into the first hours of the morning, and led the life typical of any fashionable pleasure resort. Of invalidism there was, on the surface, not a trace. Mary herself had come out a few years ago very ill, and Jim and L——, two men who had been sent away from home in an almost dying condition, seemed quite as unlike invalids as Mary. L—— has a beautiful house, run exactly as his establishment in Newport used to be, and he leads much the same life that he used to lead there. Motoring takes the place of yachting; he plays poker, polo, and golf, and dines rather much, wines rather more, and has changed not at all.

Jim, not because he is different, but only because he is less rich, lives in a little bungalow in Broadmoor. Instead of three or four footmen standing in the hall, as in L.’s house, Jim lives alone with a Jap boy who is cook, butler, valet, housemaid and nurse combined, but he gave us a delicious luncheon to which he had asked a few of his neighbors.

“They all have t.b.,” he whispered, otherwise we should never have known it.

After lunch he showed me his sleeping-porch. Nothing unusual in that; everyone has a fad for sleeping out of doors nowadays. He did, however, happen to mention that his Jap boy was bully whenever he was ill, but it was only in his almost emotional gladness to see us, his wistful eagerness for every small detail of news from home that I caught a suspicion of what might once have been homesickness. Perhaps I only imagined that faint suspicion. Certainly he seemed cheerful and happy and spoke of himself as a “busted lunger” as lightly as he might have said he was six feet two inches tall! As a matter of fact, his “busted lungs” are pretty well mended—for so long as he stays out here. Later we heard that there was likely to be a wedding between Jim and the young quite-lately widow who sat opposite him at table. She happily is not a member of the t.b. fraternity, but came out some years ago with a dying husband.

“What an old fox you are! Why didn’t you tell me about her?” I said to him afterward. He grinned until he looked almost idiotically foolish; then he exclaimed:

“Isn’t she wonderful?” and he squeezed my hand as though I and not he had made the remark.

Besides the conspicuous and palatial homes that one associates instinctively with Broadmoor, there are a few little bungalows, each with its sleeping-porch,[122] a living-room, dining-room and a bedroom or two. There are also, in Colorado Springs itself, many boarding-houses, and in both of these the people do live very simply and follow more or less the prescribed life of a health resort. But in the general impression of Colorado Springs, one might imagine oneself in a second Newport, Monte Carlo, or Simla in India. Not that any of these places bear much physical resemblance to the heart of the Rocky Mountains, especially Simla, yet this last is suggested most of all. The conditions are much the same in that the people are there because they have been ordered to be, rather than because it is a home they have themselves chosen. In India the people can’t do very much because the climate is too enervating; in Colorado the people can’t do very much because their health is too uncertain. In both places there is an underlying recklessness of attitude, of wanting to get all the fun out of their enforced extradition that they can; and the “fun” consists in both places in riding, driving, playing, or watching polo or tennis, flirting and gambling. The latter two are the favorites, as they afford the most diversion for the least physical effort. The Anglo-Indians plunge into whatever form of amusement offers because the place would be deadly otherwise; the Coloradoites lead as gay a life as health will permit and ingenuity devise, because the deadliness may at any time be earnest. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow——” was never more thoroughly[123] lived up to, even in the time of the ancients who originated the adage. Anything for excitement, anything for amusement, anything not to realize that life is not as gay as it seems!

Death is the one word never mentioned. If by chance they speak of one who has gone, they say he has “crossed the great divide.” If someone leaves to go home hopelessly, the women say good-by as casually as they can; a few men at the club drink to him—once. That is all. They are people facing the grim specter always, yet never allowing their eyes to see. Personally I should have had no inkling of the sadder side; I should have taken everything at its happy face value had it not been for one awakening incident.

I was sitting in the wide, cheerfully homelike hall of the Antlers Hotel when the people from an arriving train came in. Among perhaps a dozen indiscriminate tourists one in particular attracted my attention and interest. He was little more than a boy—twenty-two perhaps or twenty-three—good-looking, well-bred, and well off if one might judge of these things by his manner and appearance, and the pigskin bags, golf clubs, polo mallets and other paraphernalia that two porters were carrying in his wake.

“There’s a lucky young person,” I thought, “evidently fond of sport and with the ability, wealth and leisure to gratify his taste.” I saw him register and give a stack of extra baggage checks to the clerk, and then on his way to the[124] elevator he passed close to me. He was moderately tall with a graceful, well-built frame, but his step lagged and his shoulders drooped, and in his drawn face I caught a lost, helpless, despairing expression that I recognized unmistakably. Near where I often go in the autumn is a boys’ school and I have seen little new boys on the first evening of their arrival look just so—livid and lost, poor little chaps—but you know that in a day or two they will be running about as happy as grigs in the excitement of school events and the exhilaration of football. But the look in my “fortunate” youth’s face went deeper and an illuminating word flashed to my mind: life termer! Homesick? He looked as though he would die of it.

A moment before the big splendidly kept hotel with its broad white hallways, wide verandas and sunny terrace under the very shoulder of Pike’s Peak, rising in snow-crowned glory above all the lesser glorious mountains, had seemed so beautiful. Suddenly, though, I saw it not merely with the eyes of one broken-hearted, homesick youth, but with some realization of the thousands of tear-filled eyes that have looked about its commonplace stations. What must it be like to be weak and ill, when the strongest clings like a little child to the ones he loves best, and then to be sent far away to live always, or to die, perhaps, among strangers?

After this I became more observing of the lives[125] about us, and people told me many things—quite simply, as though it were all in the day’s work. The greatest number who are sent out here are young, and strapping athletes are the most usual type. Sometimes they get well soon, and go back happily to their families; sometimes their families move out too, and in that way bring “home” with them, but the majority come and stay alone, and never leave again except for short annual furloughs. One of these latter lives here at the hotel. A friend of his told me that “Harry could never go home, poor chap,” but the adverb “poor” scarcely seemed to qualify that young man from what I saw of him. He is always laughing, always shoving his shoulders through the atmosphere; inquisitive as Ricki-ticki and quite as full of life and vim; he seems ready to seize every opportunity of hazard or engagement that the moment offers. He plays all games recklessly; the more dangerous as to stakes or excitement, the better. He drives a powerful motor-car and he is flirting outrageously with one of the prettiest women imaginable, whose invalid husband seems to care very little how much attention she accepts from her frivolous though ardent admirer.

But a little while ago I was in my window and he was on the terrace just below, close enough for me to see him without his seeing me. His face was turned toward the glory of the snow-capped mountains but his unseeing eyes too, had the exact look of the little homesick boys at school. I saw[126] then why his friend had called him “poor chap” and I also a little better understood the exaggeration of his recklessness, the over-swagger of his shoulders, the laugh and flippancy with which, like Jim, he speaks of “t.b.” I wonder if anywhere in the world the moon looks down upon more tear-stained pillows than here!

And this is enough of the black side of the picture—the blackest side there is. For by no means all of the people are homesick, unhappy or in any way ill. Families who have come out originally for the sake of a sick member have stayed because they loved the place and made it their home. And of the others, many who have been lonely and homesick at first have found the place an Eden because they have also found the “one in all the world.”

In fact, meeting the “one” is the almost inevitable thing they do. Supposing the newcomers live in little bungalows in Broadmoor; opportunity need go no further. He, for instance, sits on his little porch in the sunshine, and she sits on her little porch across the way. Hours and hours and days and days, they sit on their little porches in the sunshine. Then by and by they sit together on the same little porch. It is quite simple.

Often the story ends as it should. They get well and marry and live happy ever afterward. Sometimes, of course, it ends sadly. But nearly always love brings its compensation of joy, and nearly all who have ever lived out here keep afterward[127] in their hearts an unfading flower of romance.

Colorado Springs is a place unique in the world. Filled with people unhappy to come, deserted by people unwilling to go. And nearly always their coming and going is through no wish or will of their own. Sometimes their going is as sudden and tragic as their coming.

A friend of ours whom we had expected to find out here had only the week before been obliged to pack up on a few hours’ notice and go to California. She had just built a new house and had been in it hardly two months and now she has to begin in a new environment all over again. The great tragedy in this case is that the husband cannot stay long away from a high altitude and the wife must probably always live at a low one.

Of the fashionable element in the Springs a certain elderly lady told me with bated breath:

“It is the fastest society on earth! They just live for excitement, and they don’t attend church half as regularly as they go to each other’s houses to dance or gamble. If you see a woman out walking or driving with a man, it’s more likely another woman’s husband than her own. My dear, you may call such a state of affairs modern and up to date, but I call it shocking—that’s what I call it!”

She, dear soul, is from Salem, Massachusetts, and I can well believe that she thinks as she spoke. There is also a younger woman, the wife of a prosperous[128] manufacturer whose home is in Omaha. The old lady from Salem I had known in York Harbor, Maine, but the Omaha lady we “picked up an acquaintance with” through the offices of E. M. in saving the life of an attenuated specimen of a dog from the grip of one whose looks were more flattering to the species.

Apparently the old lady and the younger one sit and exchange opinions all day, a rather needless effort, as they share the same in the first place. At almost any hour that you pass them the old lady is saying:

And the younger, aghast, echoes, “Well, who’d have thot it!” (“Thot” is not a misprint, that is the way she pronounces it.) And then in unison they wonder where Mr. Smith can be and why Mrs. Baldwin is not out walking with her husband.

The point of view of the old lady and the younger one represent not unfairly the attitude of the majority of wives in the two thousand miles we had come through since leaving the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, New York. An opposed attitude jumps from Central Park East to Colorado Springs. Central Park West is curiously like the gap between. On Fifth Avenue and South and East and again in Colorado Springs a wife does not believe the happiness of family life dependent upon her husband’s never speaking to another woman but herself. More[129] often is the shoe on the other foot. The husband generally goes from his office to his club, the wife more than likely goes with an agreeable young man to a dancing tea. Parlor Snake is the New York vernacular for the ideal type of a five-o’clock young man! Once west of Fifth Avenue and for two thousand miles thereafter nothing like this at all! For Mr. X. to cross the threshold of Mrs. B.’s house unless accompanied by Mrs. X—and sometimes several little X.’s—would be just cause for storms and tears, if not for divorce. Even we as strangers could see wives trailing like veritable shadows behind their husbands. Let Mr. X. stop for a second to speak to any Mrs. W., Y. or Z. and Mrs. X. sidles up and clings to husband’s sleeve as though a few sentences uttered apart from a general conversation were affronts upon the security and dignity of a wife.

In the small circle of Chicago’s smart set this wifely attitude of “speak to him not; he is mine” is certainly not apparent. A very opposite attitude, however, is very noticeable in Colorado Springs where a perfectly adoring wife said to Celia, who is one of the most attractive women imaginable: “For Heaven’s sake, do take Fred out on the veranda and talk to him; he has been here two years without seeing a new face, and scarcely anyone to talk to about home but me!”

Just how the pioneers and cowboys affect the place is hard to define, and yet they undoubtedly do. Colorado people love the very name “cowboy”[130] with an almost personal sentiment, just as, in their love for them, they seem personally to appropriate the “mountains,” and from both, in spite of the luxury which many have brought from Europe or the Atlantic coast, and in contrast to their mere recklessness, they have acquired directness of outlook, fearless, open-air customs of living, and an unhampered freedom from unimportant trifles. The spirit of going through with what you undertake and not being stopped by a little mud that we first met with in Rochelle is here much intensified. In Illinois they prided themselves on surmounting obstacles; out here they are so imbued with the attitude of the men who live out on the plains and through the mountains—the pioneers whose adventures the most frivolous social leader knows by heart—that they don’t even recognize an obstacle when they see it.

Notwithstanding the luxury of his own house, L. goes off into the wilderness generally with one guide but sometimes entirely alone, sleeps on the ground, eats what he can kill and reverts to the primitive. And you can sit in a room the interior of which might be in the Palace of Versailles and hear your hostess in a two-hundred-dollar simplicity of chiffon and lace repeat to you by the hour stories beginning: “Bill Simpson, who was punching cattle on the staked plains——” or “The Apaches were on the warpath and Kit Carson——” Possibly even she may tell you of a[131] hold-up adventure of her own when as a child she was traveling in the Denver stage.

One amusing anecdote told us one afternoon at tea was of a celebrated plainsman who, carrying a large amount of money and realizing that he was about to be held up, quickly stuffed his roll of money down his trouser leg, but craftily left two dollars in his waistcoat pocket. The outlaws finding him so ill supplied with “grub money” made him a present of a dollar to show him that he had met with real gentlemen.

Perhaps from habit, just as when someone says, “How are you?” you say, “Very well, thank you,” though you may be feeling wretchedly, whenever anyone mentions the topic of motoring, I find myself saying:

“Can you tell me anything about the roads between here and ——?” Why I keep on asking about the roads I really don’t know! Hearing that they are good or bad is not going to help or hinder. I think I must do it for the sake of being sociable and making conversation. So, sitting next to one of the prominent members of the Automobile Club, yesterday, I found myself quite parrotlike asking for details of the road to Albuquerque.

“With good brakes, and an experienced chauffeur who won’t get flustered or light-headed, you oughtn’t to have much trouble. You will find teams nearly always available to pull you through dangerous fords,” he said casually.

Having ourselves withstood the mud of Iowa without injury and survived the perils of the Platte River Valley without meeting any, we find ourselves as commonplace as anyone who had crossed Long Island would be to New Yorkers. These people out here talk about being hauled through quicksand streams, or of clinging along shelf roads at the edge of a thousand-foot drop as though it were pleasant afternoon driving. I don’t like the sound of the word “shelf”—why not by calling them mountain-view roads let us keep our tranquillity at least until we get to them? And beyond the precipices is the desert, where there is no place to stop over and Heaven alone knows what fate awaiting us should anything happen to the car.

My companion at luncheon volunteered further that he had unluckily never been farther south than Pueblo himself, but he knew a drug clerk who was the highest authority on road information. Information and ice-cream soda at the same time was a combination too alluring to be resisted, and an hour later saw me thirsting at the fountain. The soda clerk called to another out of sight behind the drug screen:

“Say, Bill, there’s a lady here wants to start for Albuquerque tomorrow. Do you know anybody that’s gone over the Raton lately?”

A long, lanky, typical “Uncle Sam,” sauntered in eating a stick of peppermint.

“Why, yes,” he drawled, “Bullard went down.[133] I guess he went with a team though; it was about a month ago. But Tracey went last week and took his bride on their wedding-trip. Of course,” he turned to me, “Tracey is a big man. Used to work on the freight depot. He bought a good manila towline and he is as strong as an ox. He could haul his machine out of anything, I guess.”

At this point an outsider entered; he was labeled from head to toe with prosperity, expensive clothes, diamond rings—one on the third finger of each hand—a diamond scarfpin, a breezy air of “here-I-am” self-confidence. He seemed to be a friend of the drug clerk’s and he ordered a malted milk and sat on the stool next to me. Immediately the clerk who had been called “Bill” appealed to him.

“This lady is going down to New Mexico. Do you know anything about the Raton Pass?”

“Do I know anything about Raton? I was born there!” Then he laughed and turned to me: “You needn’t tell anybody though. Want to know about Raton? Well, I’ll tell you, they have no streets, and they have no drainage, and when it rains the mud is so soft you can go out in a boat and sail from house to house! There’s just a Santa Fé roundhouse and a bunch of cottages. Oh, it’s the road over the Pass you want to know about?” He stirred his baby beverage. “Well, they say they have fixed the road up some since I was down there but I guess the best thing you can do is to let your[134] chauffeur take the automobile down, and you walk behind it with the wreath!”

But somehow these alarms no longer terrify! Are we, too, being imbued with the spirit of the West? Forgetting that our original intention was to motor only so far as we could travel comfortably, we can now think of nothing but that we have arrived merely at the gateway of the land of adventure, where cowboys, prairie schooners, and Indians may possibly still be found!

The Honorable Geoffrey G., an Englishman whom we met in New York last year, says he is going with us as far as Santa Fé. He has just imported a brand-new little foreign car and is as proud as Punch over it. It is even lower hung than ours, and has a very delicate mechanism. He drives it apparently well, but from various remarks he has made I don’t believe he knows the first thing about machinery.

We might have been taking an unconscious part in some vast moving picture production, or, more easily still, if we overlooked the fact of our own motor car, we could have supposed ourselves crossing the plains in the days of the caravans and stage coaches, when roads were trails, and bridges were not!

To Pueblo by way of Canyon City and over the Royal Gorge loop, you go through great defiles between gigantic mountains, then out on a shelf road overlooking now vistas of mountains, now endless plains, now hanging over chasms two or three thousand feet deep, now dipping down, down to the brink of the river tearing along the base of the canyon walls. All of the mountain roads of Colorado are splendidly built—even though some of their railless edges are terrifying to anyone light of head, and by no means to be recommended to an inexpert driver. One famously beautiful drive has a turntable built at an otherwise impossibly sharp bend.

After Pueblo—which by the way is not in the least quaint or Indian as its name promised, but a smoky and smeltering industrious little Pittsburgh—you[136] come out upon the plains, plains that look as you imagined them, on which cattle and cowboys ranged and prairie schooners came slowly over the horizon. A few miles beyond Pueblo, exactly like a scene in the moving pictures, we passed three of the white-topped wagons, their hoods rocking and gleaming in the sun and little burros with saddles on them trotting on either side. A man walked at the head of the caravan and two others walked behind. One wagon was driven by a woman, while a man slept, and two children peered out at us from within. A young man drove the second wagon; by his side was a young woman holding a baby. All that was needed to make a frontier drama was a band of befeathered Indians on the warpath.

A little way farther we saw a cowboy galloping over the plains swinging a lariat. He laughed when we came up to him, as though he had been caught doing something foolish. In the next few miles we passed another caravan and through a herd of cattle driven by three cowboys, but not a sign of our friend, the Englishman, with whom we had planned to lunch. He, having taken the direct road, which was about sixty miles or so shorter than ours, had agreed to select an attractive spot and wait for us. We had about decided that he had either been lost or overlooked, when we saw a team coming toward us and behind it, being towed, his nice, new, little car. He had come to a ford through a wide, swift river which he so[137] mistrusted from the start that he made his valet wade across it first. But as the water came up only to the man’s knees, and the bottom was reported to be firm and pebbly, the Honorable Geoffrey plunged in—and, bang! she blew up! The water flooding his carburetor sucked into the hot cylinders and was changed so violently into steam that it blew off the cylinder heads!

Mixed with our very real sympathy with the Englishman was not a little doubt as to whether we had better risk a like fate. The driver of the team, seeing our doubt, explained: “The river’s a mite high just now, but when you come to the bank, just go in slow and steady, and if the water comes up too high, stop your engine quick, and fire a revolver! See! I’ll hear you and send someone to pull you through!”

The thought of luncheon had vanished. We parted with our unfortunate friend and approached with not a little trepidation the rushing waters that had wrecked him. The river looked formidable enough; wide, swift, bubbling, and opaque—like coffee with cream, exactly. We remembered that it had a gravel bottom and that its greatest depth was very little over the drenched valet’s knees.

We went in very cautiously, very slowly, the water came up and up, almost to the floor boards. The rest of the story is perfectly tame and flat; our car went through it like a duck!

Further on, we came to several fords, all small[138] and shallow, and we splashed through them gleefully. We passed great herds of cattle and any number of cowboys. We saw hundreds of gophers, ran our wheels over two rattlesnakes, and escaped—one skunk.

In Trinidad we ran across our first companion motor tourists. “Kansas City to Los Angeles” was written in letters six inches high with an American pennant on one side, and the name of a popular machine on the other. Another car, a Ford, announcing that it was bound from Lincoln, Nebraska, to San Francisco, had enough banners to decorate the room of a schoolboy. The owners of these two talked volubly on touring in general and the roads ahead in particular. The owner of the Ford, adjusting the vizor of his yachting cap and pulling on his gauntlets, looked at us doubtfully.

“Well,” said he, “everyone to his own liking! I myself prefer a shorter, lighter car!”

“Are you going to try to take that machine down the Bajada?” asked the other. “I’m glad I haven’t the job of driving her even over the Raton!”

“My, but she’s a peach!” exclaimed an enthusiastic mechanic. “Don’t you have no fear, mister!” he whispered to E. M. “The stage coaches they used to go over this road to Santa Fé; if they could get over, I guess you can!”

It had never occurred to us that we couldn’t, but the reminder of the lumbering caravans was[139] comforting, and we started tranquilly to climb the Colorado side of the Raton divide. We passed first one, and then the other of the two cars, whose owners had little opinion of ours. Did they believe their ugly snub-nosed tin kettles, panting and puffing and chug-chugging up the grade, like asthmatic King Charles spaniels, better hill-climbers than our beautiful, big, long engine, that took the ascent without the slightest loss of breath even in the almost nine thousand feet of altitude? We had looked at the two machines in much the same way that passengers in the cab of a locomotive might look at a country cart trundling along the road, for we had pulled smoothly by them in much the same way that the locomotive passes the cart.

We have all heard the story of the hare and the tortoise, and the old adage, “He who laughs last——” It was all very well as long as we remained in the state of Colorado! But the instant we crossed the Divide, our beautiful great, long, powerful machine lay down perfectly flat on its stomach and could not budge until one of these despised snub-nosed spaniels heaped coals of fire on our heads by kindly pulling us out.

Because of their highness—one of the chief attributes of their ugliness—the other two cars could under the present conditions travel along without hindrance, whereas we discovered to our chagrin that we had far too little clearance, and the first venturing into New Mexico ruts held us fast.

The road over the Raton Pass, by the way, was originally built by a famous character known as “Uncle” Dick Wooten. Having defrayed all the expenses out of his own pocket he established a tollgate so that he might somewhat reimburse himself. The American traders paid the toll without a murmur; the Mexicans paid only through the persuasion of a revolver, and the Indians would not pay at all. After going over the road we agreed with the Indians.

The rest of our story all the way to Santa Fé is one long wail. But in justice to the roads of New Mexico, it is necessary to go into some explanation of the wherefore of our particular difficulties. In the first place we went out there in the very early spring after the worst of the thaw, but before any repairs, which might have been made for the summer season, had been begun. As for equipment, ours could not by any possibility have been worse.

With a wheel base of one hundred and forty-four inches, our car has a center clearance of only eight inches! Furthermore, we have a big steel exhaust pipe that slants from ten inches above the ground under the engine to eight and one-half inches above the ground where it protrudes behind the left rear wheel. Therefore, where shorter, higher cars can go with perfect ease, it requires great skill and no little ingenuity for a very low and long one to keep clear of trouble. For instance, over deep-rutted roads we have[141] to stay balanced on the ridges on either side, like walking a sort of double tight rope; if we slide down into the rut, we have to be jacked up and a bridge of stones put under to lift us out again. On many of the sharp corners of the mountain passes we have to back and fill two and often four times, but our real difficulties are all because of that troublesome exhaust pipe.

Out on the cattle ranches they build a great many queer little ditch crossings; two planks of wood with edges like troughs, and a wheel-width apart. They are our particular horror. Again, right wheels went over perfectly, but the only way we can get the left ones over is to build up the hollows with pieces of wood—some barrel staves we found by luck and that we now always carry with us.

Another particular joy to us is sliding down into and clambering out of arroyos, on the edge of which the car loves to make believe it is a seesaw. Our only good fortune seems to be in having plenty of power, and the carburetor high enough not to be flooded—as yet—by any streams we have gone through. Once, in order to find a bank that we could crawl up on, we had to wade up the stream, with the possibility of quicksand, for nearly half a mile.

After three days of this sort of experience, you can’t help wincing at the very sight of ruts or rocks or river beds, in exactly the same way that[142] you wince at the close approach of dentist’s instruments.

Between Trinidad and Las Vegas we were overtaken by a blizzard. It rained, hailed, and finally snowed; and it all passed by us in less than an hour. But in the midst of it we lost our way and wandered for miles across the prairie. Finally, at the end of about twenty miles we saw an open wagon and two men resting under it, but they spoke only Spanish and we understood their directions so vaguely that when our road disappeared into hilly, roadless prairie, and we came to a new bridge without any tracks leading to it, and apparently uncrossable between it and us, it was snowing again, there were no shadows to tell the points of the compass by. As E. M. drove on at a snail’s pace, wondering which direction to turn, two Indians on ponies appeared over the edge of a nearby hill.

Again we had no language in common. But we repeated, “Las Vegas,” and they, gravely motioning us to follow, led us through a labyrinthian path between the hillocks to the mesa from which the bridge started. Although they helped us with greatest willingness, and accepted a coin with grave courtesy, their faces were as expressionless as wood-carvings and neither uttered a sound nor smiled.

Finally, because we were hungry and not by reason of any inviting charm at that particular point of the earth’s most dreary surface, we stopped[143] for luncheon. We had just about spread out our food paraphernalia when, turning at the sound of a galloping hoofed animal, we saw a horseman tearing across the plains toward us. He rode as a brigand might, and as only a Westerner can. Standing in his stirrups rather than sitting in his saddle, and seemingly unaffected by the rocking motion of his mount, his body was poised level with the horizon.

Was he a highwayman, one of those notorious bad men that the Southwest is said to be infested with, or was he just a cowboy? His outline fitted into any sort of a part your fear or delight might imagine. The wide-brimmed hat, bandanna handkerchief around his neck, leather cuffs on his shirt and murderous-looking cartridge belt and revolver, suited equally a make-up for good or bad.

My heart thumped with the excitement of a possible hold up, and yet I was far too fascinated to feel either fear or inclination to escape. As he came nearer, he came slower, and when quite close he brought his horse to a leisurely walk that had no longer any hold-up suggestion in it and I took a bite out of my hitherto untouched sandwich. When almost beside us, he leaned a little sideways in his saddle and glanced at our State license number, and then at us, with a manner as casual and unconcerned as though we might have been an inanimate hillock of the landscape.

Then, “Howdy, strangers!” he said. The tone of his voice was friendly enough, in spite of his[144] taciturn and utterly unsmiling expression. It has struck us all through the West how seldom anyone has smiled.

“How are you!” echoed E. M., matching manner for manner. His tone, too, had a friendly ring, but he went on opening a tin of potted meat as though no one else were present.

“Come all the way from back East in that machine?” the Westerner asked, with a little more interest. “How long you been comin’?”

E. M. glanced up from his tin-opening and the two exchanged a few remarks on the subject of roads and horses and motors and then, as nearly as I can remember, the Westerner said:

“It’d be a mighty long ride on a cayuse! Which them machines shorely disregards distance a whole lot.”

E. M. asked the Westerner, “Won’t you have some lunch with us? Awfully glad if you will!”

“Thank you,” but he moved a little away from us, as though for the first time embarrassed. “Thank you!” he said again. “I et dinner ’bout an hour ago!”

“We have only cold things,” I explained, not only thrilled at an encounter with a real live cowboy but attracted by his distinctly pleasing personality. He had no manner at all and yet in his absence of self-consciousness there was very real dignity. And in contrast to the copper-brown of his face his unsmiling eyes were so blue that their color was startling. I had been wrapped in admiration[145] of E. M.’s color, which I thought as brown as sun could make a man, but beside this other of the plains, E. M. looked almost pallid.

“Oh, we have lots of food!” said Celia. “Cold food, though, you know; nothing hot.”

“The grub we get is hot, which is most of the virchoos you can claim for it.”

Meanwhile E. M. had proffered an open box of eggs and sandwiches. The other dismounted, threw the reins forward over his horse’s neck, and accepted our hospitality. He turned a paper plate and a thin tin spoon in his hands as though dubious of such flimsy utility until he discovered it was to be used for ice cream. Hard frozen ice cream under the midday sun and fifty miles from where it could be bought, interested him.

“I’ve seen bottles for liquids, but I’ve never seen one like that for solids. It sure is cold!” he said. And with its coldness, he quite thawed. He did not look more than thirty, yet talked quite a while about the old times that he himself remembered, generalities for the most part, but with a lingering keenness in describing the qualifications that men on the range used to have.

Also he told us a string of yarns—that may have been true—or they may have been merely the type[146] of divertissement whereby Westerners love to entertain themselves at the expense of Eastern credulity. One amusing story, at any rate, was of the hold-up of a passenger stage by a single masked man. Afterwards when the sheriff and his men followed his horse’s tracks, they suddenly disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them. It had. They found the thief’s buried boots with horseshoes nailed on them on a path that had too many footprints to single out one to follow.

He added quite regretfully that cow-punching was not what it used to be. Cattle were getting tame and the ranches were enclosed in wire fences and life was so soft and easy, that cattle raising was no more exciting than raising sheep. Finally he volunteered:

When E. M. told him that he had come from Boston, as he was still a student at Harvard, the Westerner could neither understand how it was that E. M. did not know his brother, nor that a man of such an age and size could still be getting an education.

“Book learning” was a good thing, he thought, but twenty years of age was too late in his opinion to be still acquiring it. He himself had run away from home at the age of eleven. Not because of ill-treatment, but merely that it seemed the manly thing to do. In his opinion a boy was a no-account[147] specimen who would stay past his twelfth year “hangin’ round his womenfolks.”

To run away and never send a word home seems to be the commonplace behavior of Western boys. “I don’t know how your mothers stand the anxiety,” I said aloud, “not to know whether their sons are even alive.”

“I reckon that’s so. I never showed up nor wrote for six years. One evening I walks in on the old folks, and they didn’t recognize me; the old woman went plum’ over backwards when she saveys it was me. That was some years ago and I haven’t been back since.”

Having finished luncheon E. M. cranked the car, and our guest gathered up the trailing reins of his patiently standing horse. Once his rider was in the saddle, however, the broncho, as though to show what he could do, gave quite a gallery display of bucking, while his rider gave no less an exhibition of Western horsemanship, rolling a cigarette in tranquil disregard of his pony’s hump-backed leaps, which, however, soon settled down into a steady gallop that carried our friend across the plains. On the top of a nubble he waved to us and we waved back as we continued, on our side regretfully, our separate ways.

We have passed any number of little Mexican, or Indian, adobe villages. One house was surrounded by a picket fence painted bright laundry blue. Several had blue door and window frames.[148] The houses were all one-storied and the people looked more Mexican than Indian.

When we finally arrived, without further difficulty, at Las Vegas, it seemed rather questionable whether we would be able to go on next day or not. The barometer was down, several other motorists doleful and the outlook very glum.

“What did you start so early in the season for?” we heard one driver ask another.

“Well,” said the second, “I don’t mind a little speculation as to what you’re going to run into. If you know the road ahead of you is all fine and dandy, what’s to keep your interest up?”

Leaving Las Vegas early the next morning, we encountered the same erratic weather that we ran through the day before. When we happened to be under an unclouded area, we could see that all about us were separate storm clouds, black smudges against an otherwise clear sky. As we drove beneath one of the black areas, we were deluged with rain, or hail, or snow, and through it came into sunny weather again. It was the most curious sensation to run into a blinding storm, and being able to gauge beforehand how long it would take us to pass through it.

As we approached a ford some Mexicans standing beside it motioned us to make a wide sweep; it landed us in deep soft sand up to our hubs. Whereupon they attached their horses to us and pulled us through.

We had passed two cars, so I held up my fingers. “Two more are coming!” I said.

I rather wonder do they make all cars drive in that large circle to avoid the sand pile!

Washed-out roads, arroyos, rocky stretches, and nubbly hills. We just about smashed everything, cracked and broke the exhaust, lost bolts and screws, and scraped along on the pan all of the way.

And yet the dread Bajada Hill, in which we are to drop nine hundred feet in one mile and long cars are warned in every guidebook of the sharp and precipitous turns, is still ahead of us. One thing, if it is worse than from the top of the Raton we might as well be prepared to leave all that is left of us scattered in odd pieces along the road.

The next time we motor the trail to Santa Fé we are unanimously agreed that it is going to be in a very different type of car—or best of all, on the backs of little sure-footed burros!

With straight black Indian hair piled high under a lace mantilla, with necklaces of gold and silver and coral and turquoise as big as hens’ eggs, with her modern American dress barely showing under her Indian blanket of holiest red, her head pillowed against the mountains of the North, and her little pueblo feet in the high-heeled Spanish slippers stretched out upon the plains of the South, Santa Fé sits dreaming in the golden sunlight.

Sometimes she dreams idly of her girlhood when she ran about the mountains barefooted, her hair done in two squash-blossom whorls on either side of her dusky head, so long ago that no white man had ever set foot on the western continent. Or perhaps, half shutting her unfathomable eyes, she remembers the heroes who fought and died for her, or the pomp of her marriage with her Spanish first lord, Don Juan d’Onate—noble in estates rather than character, though he brought her a wedding-gift of white wooly animals, afterward called sheep, and furthermore, dressed her in fine clothes, put her in a palace, and made a lady of her. Her little bare feet were shod in scarlet[151] slippers, and she had many skirts of silk and velvet, though never a bodice to one of them, but her breast was strung with necklaces and her arms with bracelets, and she had shawls of silk and mantillas of lace to wrap most of her face and all of her bare brown shoulders in. The palace had walls six feet thick; some say the thick walls were to hide the true palace already built by her own Indian forefathers. All the same, nobles in broadcloth embroidered in silver and gold crowded her audience room when the Island of Manhattan was a wilderness, and the wood of which the Mayflower was to be built was still growing in the forest of England.

But then the dream becomes a sad one of injustice and cruelty; of long, long miserable years under the oppression of a dissipated gambling tyrant who put her family to the sword or made them slaves. Then came revolt and savage warfare; massacres that made her palace steps run red, vivid days of flame, black ones of darkness until——And this is her dream of dreams! She forgets it all happened in the long ago. The quick blood leaps again in her veins, her heart beats fast, her pulses quiver at the magic name of her hero, her conqueror, her lover, Don Diego de Vargas! Again she sees him, surrounded by his panoplied soldiers, lances flashing, banners waving, marching victorious across the plaza, and planting his cross at her palace door in the name of the Virgin, demanding her glad surrender!

“Ah, to love was to live!” says Santa Fé. “Yet in all the world there was only one De Vargas—and he has passed!” And she wraps herself in her Indian blanket and falls again to dreaming.

Her alliance with the American Republic is what one might call a marriage of arrangement. Foreign in race, in sentiment, in understanding, she has never adopted the customs or manners of her new lord, but lives tranquilly, uneventfully, dreaming always of the long ago.

And even though Don Diego de Vargas has lain for two centuries in the grave of his forefathers, though Indians no longer go on the warpath, though the eight-horse wagon mile-long caravans of the traders and travelers from the far East beyond the Mississippi no longer come clattering down over the mountains, to the excited and welcoming shouts of the populace of, “Los Americanos! La Caravana!” crowding into the Plaza to receive them, if the streets of Santa Fé no longer riot in tumult and bloodshed, they at least still riot in color and picturesqueness, kaleidoscopic enough to vie with anything in Constantinople or Cairo. You might think yourself in the Orient or in a city of old Spain transported upon a magic carpet, but nothing less like the United States can be imagined. Along the narrow crooked streets, dwellings hundreds of years old stand shoulder to shoulder with modern houses that have wedged themselves between. Down a[153] zigzag lane you may see an Indian woman hooded in a white cotton shawl, and balancing a jar of water on her head as in the Biblical pictures of Rebecca.

Besides big modern automobiles are Indians leading little burros so loaded down with firewood that their meek little faces are all there is to be seen protruding in front, little switching tails or kicking heels in the back, and the whole bundle supported by spindly tiny-footed legs. On a corner is an Indian wrapped in his bright blanket. Two Mexicans in high-crowned wide-brimmed sombreros lean against a door frame and smoke cigarettes. Cowboys in flannel shirts have vivid bandannas around their throats, and there is more color yet in women’s dresses, in flowers, in fruits, in awnings—color, color rioting everywhere. Over everything the sun bakes just as it does in Spain or Northern Africa, and the people all look as silent and dreamy as the town.

Only a few hundred miles away are typical striving American cities shouting to anyone who will hear, and assailing the ears of those who won’t, “Watch me grow—just watch me!” The big ones boom it, the little ones pipe it, but each and every one shouts to the earth at large, “Yesterday I was a community of nesters’ shanties; today I’m an up-to-date thriving town. Tomorrow—wait, and you shall see!”

Yet their little Indian and Spanish sister in the center of a vast domain of buried cities, of[154] unmined treasures, dozes in the sun and cares not a bit how much the world outside may strive, or teem or grow. Can anyone fancy her waking from her reverie, dropping her indolent soft Spanish accent and shouting in strident tones, that she, too, will be a bustling growing town? Sooner fancy the Sphinx on the African desert urging, “Votes for women!”

Imagine people living all their lives in Cairo never having seen the Pyramids. Imagine anyone living in Italy never having been to Pompeii. Yet we, ourselves, to whom the antiquities and wonders of far countries are perfectly familiar, did not even know that the wonders of our Southwest existed! We thought that Pueblo had a nice Indian sound, that Santa Fé must be an important railroad terminal. Arizona we pictured as a wide desert like the Sahara, with the Grand Canyon at the top of it, and a place called Phoenix, appropriately named as the only thing that could survive the heat, and another place called Tombstone, also fittingly named, in the middle of a vast area of sizzling sand.

Was there ever any place less like a railroad center than Santa Fé? The main line of the railroad which has taken its name does not even go there. A little branch runs to the terminal city from a junction called Lamy, where, by the way, there is a Harvey hotel, which means, of course, a good one. This is a word of advice to the tourist who finds the one in Santa Fé poor. Still, in a city that is old and colorful, and quaint,[156] one hardly expects wonderful accommodations. The hotel in Biskra, Africa, did not use to be much to boast about, either.

As for our ignorance about the country, we came across a woman today who was certainly, at least to us, a new type. She was traveling on mule-back and absolutely alone! At first it seemed the most daring and dangerous thing I had ever heard of, but a few minutes of her conversation convinced me that she was quite safe. Never did I believe a human being could so closely resemble a hornet. She looked us over as though we might have been figures in the Eden Musée. Then she asserted:

“Humph! You’re the English people! I saw a British emblem on a car outside, and it’s easy to see you are the ones it belongs to!”

“Well, if you aren’t English, you’re either from New York or Boston—it amounts to the same thing! Ever been to Europe?”

Like a phonograph she recited a long tirade on the topic of the “Americans who go spend money in Europe and neglect their own country.” She asserted the superiority of our own land over[157] that of every other in generalities and in detail, ending with a final thrust: “What can you get over there, I’d like to know, that you can’t get here?”

She asserted that a two-hundred-thousand-dollar collection of modern paintings was far more worth seeing than the incomparable masterpieces of Italy; she declared that Egypt and Pompeii held no treasures comparable with the New Mexican cliff-dwellings.

Our cliff-dwellings like little bird holes along the face of solid rock in which cave men lived hundreds—maybe thousands of years ago, are marvelously interesting, but to the spoiled globe-trotter, looking for profuse evidences of bygone manners and customs and beauty, such as you find in Alexandria or Pompeii, there are none.

There is, however, we had been told, an Arizona cave-dwelling that has a mural decoration that can rival in interest the frescoes in Italy or the hieroglyphics of Egypt. It is merely the imprint of a cave baby’s hand pressed thousands of years ago against the wall when the adobe was soft. You can also see cave-dwellings of a pigmy people that lived in the Stone Age and wore feather ruching around their necks; enchanted pools that have no bottoms; a lava river with a surface so sharp, brittle, like splintered glass, that nothing living can cross it and not be footless, actually, in the end. You can also find, to this day they say, a religious sect of Penitents[158] who, in Holy Week, practice every sort of flesh mortification, carry crosses, lie down on cactus needles, flay themselves with cat-o’-nine-tails, and they used, a few years ago, to crucify especially fervent members.

But why try to convince people that traveling in the byways of the Southwest is not a strenuous thing to do? Our hornet inquisitor told us, “What do you want better than a cave to sleep in? It’s as good as your European hotels any day!” We forgot to ask her how she got up the face of the cliffs to get into the caves—a feat far above any ability of Celia’s or mine. She also said she liked taking potluck with the Indians. I wonder does she like, as they do, the taste of prairie dogs, and they say, occasionally, mice and snakes?

Although she did her best to spoil it all for us, we took away an unforgettable picture of an enchanted land. Why, though, I wonder, did she want to speak of it or think of it as different from what it really is? Vast, rugged, splendidly desolate, big in size, big in thought, big in ideals, with a few threads of enchanting history like that of Santa Fé, or vividly colored romances of frontier life and Indian legends that vie with Kipling’s jungle books.

The best commentary on the road between Santa Fé and Albuquerque is that it took us less than three hours to make the sixty-six miles, whereas the seventy-three from Las Vegas to Santa Fé took us nearly six. The Bajada Hill, which for days Celia and I dreaded so much that we did not dare speak of it for fear of making E. M. nervous, was magnificently built. There is no difficulty in going down it, even in a very long car that has to back and fill at corners; there are low stone curbs at bad elbows, and the turns are all well banked so that you feel no tendency to plunge off. A medium length car with a good wheel cut-under would run down the dread Bajada as easily as through the driveways of a park! And the entire distance across Sandoval County, although a tract of desert desolation or bleak sand and hills and cactus, is an easy drive over a smooth road. In one place you go through a great cleft cut through an impeding ridge, but most of the way you can imagine yourself in a land of the earth’s beginning and where white man never was. Two Indian shepherds in fact were the only human beings we saw until our[160] road ran into the surprisingly modern city of Albuquerque.

Stopping at the various Harvey hotels of the Santa Fé system, yet not being travelers on the railroad, is very like being behind the scenes at a theater. The hotel people, curio-sellers, and Indians are the actors, the travelers on the incoming trains are the audience. Other people don’t count.

For instance, you enter a tranquilly ordered dining-room. The head waitress attentively seats you, your own waitress quickly fetches your first course, and starts towards the pantry for the second, when suddenly a clerk appears and says, “Twenty-six!” With the uniformity of a trained chorus every face turns towards the clock, and the whole scene becomes a flurry of white-starched dresses running back and forth. Back with empty trays and forth with buttered rolls, radishes, cups of soup, like a ballet of abundance. You wonder if no one is going to bring your second course, but you might as well try to attract the attention of a hive of bees when they are swarming. Having nothing else to do you discover the mystic words twenty-six to be twenty-six places to set. Finally you descry your own waitress dealing slices of toast to imaginary diners at a far table. Then you hear the rumble of the train, the door leading to the platform opens and in come the passengers. And you, having no prospect of[161] anything further to eat, watch the way the train supper is managed. Slices of toast and soup in cups are already at their places, then in files the white-aproned chorus carrying enormous platters of freshly grilled beefsteak, and such savory broiled chicken that you, who are so hungry, can scarcely wait a moment patiently for your own waitress to appear. You notice also the gigantic pots of aromatically steaming coffee, tea and chocolate being poured into everyone’s cup but your own, and ravenously you watch the pantry door for that long tarrying one who went once upon a time to get some of these delectable viands for you.

“Will you have broiled chicken?” asks the faithless She you have been watching for, bending solicitously over a group of strange tourists at the next table. At last when the train people are quite supplied, your speeding Hebe returns to you and apologizes sweetly, “I am sorry but I had to help get train Number Seven’s supper. They’ve eaten all the broiled chicken that was cooked, but I’ll order you some more if you don’t mind waiting twenty minutes.”

By and by the train people leave, your chicken arrives and you finish your supper in commonplace tranquillity. But let us look on at another comedy, for which the scene shifts to the railroad station at Albuquerque where the long stone platform is colorless and deserted. You have always on picture postcards seen it filled with[162] Indians. There is not one in sight. Wait though until ten minutes before the California limited is due. Out of the nowhere appear dozens of vividly costumed Navajos and Hopis; their blankets and long braids woven with red cloth, their headbands and beads and silver ornaments fill the platform with color like a flower display. Old squaws and a few young squat themselves in two rows, forming an aisle between the train and the station salesroom. Although you walk up and down between their forming lines watching them arrange their display of baskets and pottery, they are silent until the first passenger alights, and then unendingly they chorus two words:

“Tain cent!” “Tain cent!” The words sometimes sound like a question, sometimes a statement, but generally a monotonous drone. There is a nice old squaw—although I believe the Hopis don’t call their women squaws—sitting at the end. I tripped and almost fell into her lap. She looked up, smiled, and by her inflection, conveyed, “Oh, my dear, did you hurt yourself?” but what she said was, “Tain cent!”

The third Harvey scene is frankly a vaudeville performance of Indian dancing and singing. The stage the adobe floor of the Indian exhibit room, the walls of which are hung to the ceiling with blankets, beadwork, baskets, clay gods, leather costumes—everything conceivable in the way of Indian crafts. Immediately after supper the tourists take their places on benches ranged against[163] three sides of the apartment. Generally there is a big open fire on the fourth side, adding its flickering light as the last note to a setting worthy of Belasco.

The Indians dance most often in pairs but occasionally there are as many as eight or nine in a row or a circle, with an additional background of others beating time. The typical step is a sort of a shuffling hop; a little like the first step or two of a clog dancer before he gets going, or else just a bent kneed limp and stamp accompanied either by a droning chant or merely a series of sounds not unlike grunts. To our Anglo-Saxon ears and eyes it seemed very monotonous even after a little sample. Yet we are told they keep it up for eight or ten or twelve hours at a stretch, when they are dancing seriously and at home. Dancing to them is a religious ceremony, not merely an informal expression of gayety.

The women we saw wore heavy black American shoes and calico mother hubbards with a ruffle at the bottom, and generally a shawl or blanket around their shoulders. Only one wore the blanket costume as it is supposed to be worn: around her body and fastened on one shoulder leaving the other arm and shoulder bare and also bare feet.

The men were much more picturesque, in dark-colored velvet shirts, silver belts, necklaces of bright beads and white cross-bars that looked like teeth, huge turquoise square-cut earrings and red[164] head-bands. The “Castle cut” head-dress that has been the rage in New York for the last year or two is simply that of the Navajo Indians. Their head-band is a little wider and invariably of red, and the black straight hair ends as stiffly as a tassel.

In some places as at the Grand Canyon, there are Navajo huts and a Hopi communal house where the tourist can see something of the way the Indians live; the way they weave blankets or baskets, beat silver or make and paint pottery.

But to go back to Albuquerque, where although we saw less of the Indians than later in other places, we were lucky enough to hear a great deal about them. After dinner—there was no dancing—we were in the Indian Exhibit room—probably the most wonderful collection of their crafts that there is. As we were admiring an exceptionally beautiful blanket of red, black and white and closely woven as a fine Panama hat, a man—we thought him the proprietor at first—said:

“It took three years’ bargaining to get that blanket from a Navajo chief. You can’t get them made of that quality any more. They’d rather get ten or twelve dollars for a blanket they spend a few weeks on and get paid often, than work a year on a single blanket that they can sell for a hundred.”

He picked out various examples of pattern and weaving and explained relative values. The amount of red, for instance, in the one we had[165] been looking at added greatly to its price. We found out later that although not stationed at Albuquerque, he was one of the Harvey staff, and as we spent the whole evening talking with him, and he might not care to have his name taken in vain, I’ll call him Mr. X. He has lived for years among the Indians. We could have listened to his stories about them forever, but to remember the greater part would be a different matter.

On the subject of business dealings, an Indian, he said, has no idea of credit. No matter how well he knows and trusts you, he wants to be paid cash the moment he brings in his wares. To wait even an hour for his money will not satisfy him. A puzzling thing had happened on the platform that afternoon. I heard a lady say to an old squaw, “I’ll take these three baskets.” Whereupon instead of selling the baskets, the Indian hastily covered all of them with a blanket, got up and went away!

“That explains it!” Mr. X broke in. “No wonder she ran away. To an Indian violet is the color of evil. None but a witch would wear it. Red is holy; they love red above all colors. Also they love yellow, orange and turquoise.”

As we were talking a young Navajo who was[166] standing near us, suddenly covering his eyes with his arm, rushed from the room. Naturally we looked at our clothes for an evidence of violet but Mr. X. laughed.

“It wasn’t a case of color this time! Do you see that old squaw that just came in? She is his mother-in-law. Navajos won’t look at their wife’s mother; they think they will be bewitched if they do. He is going back to the Reservation tomorrow, because the old woman came down today. He is an intelligent Indian, too, but if he spies a stray cat or dog around tonight, he will probably think it is his mother-in-law having taken that shape. Their belief in witchcraft is impossible to break. At the same time they have an undeniable gift for necromancy, second sight or whatever it may be called, scarcely less wonderful than that of the Hindoos of India. The boy in the basket trick and the rope-climbing trick of Asia are not to be compared with things I have seen with my own eyes in New Mexico.

“I have seen a Shaman, or priest, sing over a bare adobe floor, and the floor slowly burst in one little place and a new shoot of corn appear. I have seen this grow before my eyes until it became a full-sized stalk with ripened corn. Instead of waving a wand, as European magicians do, the priest sings continually and as long as he sings the corn grows, when he stops the cornstalk stops.

“The same Shaman can pour seeds and kernels[167] of corn out of a hollow stalk until all about him are heaping piles of grain that could not be crowded into a thousand hollowed cornstalks. Medicine men of all tribes can cure the sick, heal the injured, get messages out of the air and do many seemingly impossible things.

“Navajos abhor snakes as much as we do, but Moquis hold them sacred. Before their famous snake dance, during which they hold living rattlesnakes in their mouths and bunches of them wriggling in each hand, they anoint their bodies with the juice of an herb, and drink an herb tea; both said to be medicine against snakebite. At all events they don’t seem to suffer more than a trifling indisposition even when they are bitten in the face. One theory is—and it certainly sounds reasonable—that from early childhood the snake priests are given infinitesimal doses of rattlesnake poison until by the time they reach manhood they are immune to any ill effects.”

We had by this time wandered out of the Indian room and seated ourselves in the big rocking-chairs on the veranda of the Alvarado, Mr. X. with us. Every now and then he stopped and said that he thought he had talked about enough, but we were insatiable and always begged him to tell us some more. Of the many things he told us, the most interesting of all were stories of the medicine men and the combination of articles that constitutes each individual’s own fetich or “medicine.” To this day not only medicine men, but[168] chiefs, would as soon be parted from their own scalp-locks, as from this talisman. Each has his own medicine that can never be changed, though upon occasion it may have a lucky article added to it. Most commonly the fetich is composed of a little bag made of the pelt of a small animal and filled with a curious assortment of articles such as bear’s claws, wolf’s teeth, things that are associated with the wearer’s early prowess in the world, or more likely a former existence. At all events, an Indian’s standing and power in his tribe is dependent upon this fetich, and to lose it is to lose not only power but caste—much more than life itself.

In the days past of the Redman’s war prowess, this sort of “medicine” worn by warriors most especially, was supposed to grant them supernatural powers to kill enemies and preserve their own life. If they were wounded or killed, it meant that the enemy’s medicine was even more powerful. But using the word “medicine” in our sense, their “medicine men”—healers—certainly know of mysteriously potent cures, the secrets of which no white man understands.

Their most usual way of effecting a cure is, apparently, to dance all night in a circle around the afflicted person, with curative results that are too uncannily like magic to be believable. One case that Mr. X. vouched for personally was that of a child that was dying of blood poison. Two white surgeons of high repute said that the child had[169] scarcely a chance of living even by amputating an arm that had mortified beyond any hope of saving; and that without the operation, its death was merely a question of hours. The Indian parents refused to have it done, and insisted upon taking the child to the Reservation. The white doctors declared the child could not possibly survive such a journey but as, in their opinion, it could not live long anyway, the parents might as well take it where they pleased. They started for the Reservation. It was Sunday. “Four sleeps we come back, all right,” said the father. On Thursday, the fourth day, exactly, back they came again with the child well, and its arm absolutely sound. That a mortified arm should get well, comes close to the unbelievable—even though vouched for, as in this case, by several reputable witnesses.

As a case of mental telepathy, Mr. X. told us that time and time again he had known Indians to get news out of the air. An old Navajo one day cried out suddenly that his squaw was “heap sick.” He was so excited that he would not wait for Mr. X. to telegraph and find out if there was any truth in his fear, nor would he wait for a train, but started on a pony to ride to the Reservation. After he had gone a telegram came saying that the squaw had been bitten by a rattlesnake and was dying.

After a while the topic turned upon our own trip. We had intended to ship the car at Albuquerque,[170] but the road from Santa Fé had been so good we were encouraged to go further and Mr. X.’s enthusiasm settled it.

“Having come down into this part of the country,” he said, “you really ought not to miss seeing some of the wonders of our Southwest. The Pueblo of Acoma is a little out of the way, but there is nothing like it anywhere. ‘The city of the sky’ they call it—I won’t tell you any more about it—you just go and look at it for yourselves. Isleta, a short distance south from here, is a pueblo that lots of tourists go to see, and Laguna is fairly well known, too. They are both on your road if you go to Gallup. Acoma is off the beaten track but you wait and send me a postcard if it is not worth considerable exertion, even to behold it from the desert. The Enchanted Mesa, the higher one that you come to first, is interesting chiefly because of its story. The truth of it I can’t vouch for, but it is said to have been inhabited once by people who reached its dizzy summit by a great ladder rock that leaned against its sides. One day in a terrific storm while the men were all plowing in the valley below, the rock ladder was blown down and the women and children were left in this unscalable height to perish. Laguna is about halfway between here and the continental divide, or about one-third of the distance to Gallup. Acoma is perhaps eighteen miles south of Laguna where you can get a guide and also more definite information.[171] Or you can just go south across the plain by yourselves, fairly near the petrified forest later—no, that not until you are on the way to Holbrook. You also skirt the edge of the lava river—I don’t think you’d know it was anything to look at unless you were told. At the time of the eruption, the lava on the surface cooled while that underneath it was still boiling, and the steam of the boiling mass burst through the hardened surface and splintered it like broken glass. Glass is in fact the substance it most resembles. The country is full of stories of men and animals that have tried to cross it, but neither hoofs nor cowhide boots have ever been made that can stay intact on its gashing surface.

“And of course you must get a glimpse of the painted forest. After that you can take a train when you please”—then with a laugh he corrected—“when you get where a train goes.”

“Well, you can sleep at the hotel in Gallup—it isn’t an Alvarado but it’ll shelter you. For my own part, if you have a fine night, I’d sleep out!”

Personally I felt a sort of half-shiver. Sleep out in this land he had been telling us about! Sleep out in the wildest, loneliest country in the world, surrounded by the very Redskins about whom he had earlier in the evening been reeling pretty grewsome stories! He seemed to divine my thoughts. “The Indians are as peaceful as house cats now. Navajos never gave us much trouble except when it came to horse-stealing.”

Then he looked at me in much the way our friend the fire chief had in Rochelle, Illinois.

“P-perhaps,” I said weakly. “Besides if we are starting early I’d better go in and see about ordering provisions and things.” Which last remark, I think, quite saved my face—at least it was meant to.

I did, of course, want to see Acoma, that exaltedly perched city of antiquity. I did want to get at least a glimpse of the Painted Desert, but my bravery of spirit was of a very halting quality.[173] The only thought that bolstered me up was the possibility that I was really very brave, because I was not telling anybody but myself that I was scared to death at the thought of a night of homelessness in the middle of an Indian reservation. When we started the next morning I thought Celia looked less sturdy than usual. She said, “We are not going to spend the night anywhere, are we?”

And I said with my best effort at spontaneous gladness, “No, won’t it be fun!”

Celia looked exactly as a beginner who is told to jump head foremost into the water in his first attempt to dive. E. M.’s attention was as usual entirely upon the car, and the probabilities of twistings and bumpings that the unknown roads might inflict upon his cherished engine. The question of nowhere to sleep was of little interest—still less importance. At all events we have seemingly enough provisions for ourselves and the machine to carry us to Alaska. Without doubt we can get motor supplies somewhere, but that is the one risk E. M. refuses to take and so we are starting off like a young Standard Oil agency, with forty-five gallons of gasoline, thirty-five in the tank and ten extra in cans. Also extra cans of oil. We have plenty of water for ourselves and some, too, for the car although we doubt whether alkali which ties the human stomach into a hard knot of agony at a taste would give the radiator a pain.

Our idea is to go, if we can, as far as Winslow. It seems rather funny that we, who nearly failed to stay intact over the well-worn Santa Fé trail, are branching into the unbeaten byway of the desert! We have taken our battered exhaust pipe off, and shipped it to Los Angeles, and our sensation without it is one of such freedom that we feel we can surmount all obstacles.

What has this land lived through? What sorrows have so terribly wasted, what cataclysms rent it, what courage exalted it! Stupendous in its desolation, sublime in its awfulness, it mystifies and dumbfounds at every turn. Smooth plains fall into an abyss, or rise in bleak rock spires. Firm, pebbled river-beds suddenly shift to greedy quicksands; pools that look cool and limpid are boiling, or poisonous alkali. It suggests a theme of sculpture conceived by an Olympian Rodin, splendidly and gigantically hewn and with all the mystery of things not brought to a finite shaping.

But like the Sleeping Beauty in the fairy-tale, the beauty sleeping in the Southwest is surrounded by a thorn hedge of hardships and discomfort that presents its most impenetrable thicket and sharpest spines to the motorist. To see this wonderland intelligently or well, you ought really to be equipped with a camping outfit and go through on horseback. However, if you are willing to turn away from the main travel and strike west from Albuquerque, you can get a few compensating glimpses.

For miles and miles after leaving Isleta, a quite large settlement where there are many Indians and also many tourists, you go on and on and on over an easy gradually ascending road not unlike the long Platte Valley drive, but much more uninhabited. The once dangerous fording of the Puerco River is no longer a barrier to motorists, as there is a splendid new bridge that takes you smoothly over. From time to time you come to a few adobe huts or a lonely little packing-box railroad station, but your road stretches uneventfully on, until Laguna.

There is no need of going by motor to get a glimpse of Laguna, for you have only to sit on the observation platform—or even look out of a window of any train in the Santa Fé Railroad. The pueblo of Laguna at a glance, is a collection of baked earth blocks piled steeply one behind the other against a sun-baked yellow hill at the side of the railroad track.

But to reach the Enchanted Mesa, and the sky-built city of Acoma, you must drive southward from Laguna across a stubbled prairie into a desert valley rimmed with distant cliffs like the walls of a vast garden. As you round a sand dune you come suddenly upon a gigantic round, flat-topped rock, like a titanic pink tree-stump—scarcely a reward for all those miles and miles of dreariness and intense heat, even though its flat-chopped top is a thousand feet clear above the surrounding plain. But when you visualize the[177] story of that terrible storm that washed the great rock ladder away and left a village of women and children marooned upon that dizzy height until they starved or plunged off to a quicker death, it certainly grips you in its appalling awe.

It is a little wonder that the Indians think it haunted and accursed! For my part it seems miracle enough that anyone ever got up there at all even with a leaning rock supplemented with a notched tree ladder. Scaling such a cliff would be a feat of horror beside which circus thrillers, looping gaps and dipping deaths would be a comparatively tame performance.

A little way beyond the Enchanted Mesa crowned upon ramparts of fantastic perpendicular crags arises Acoma, the skyland citadel of enchantment. You know you can’t be in such prosy place as Here, or within a thousand years of Now. You are standing before the shadowy citadel of some ancient Assyrian king, or more likely yet, you have journeyed into the land of fairy-tales and have come to the castle of the King of the Iron Mountain. Way, way above you, you see tiny figures of the sky inhabitants inquisitively peering down. Several Indians come down from their soaring citadel and look you over. Finally one of them, very solemn and serious, with his shirt-tail hanging out, motions, “Do you want to go up?”

You do, but how? There are only two paths, one hard and short, the other long and easy! The[178] easy one is as close to mountain climbing as the ordinary person would want to undertake, though Indian mules and burros make it without difficulty. A burro, and a mule, and a mountain goat must spring from the same species. You clamber, therefore, up the easy road—a stiff, winding defile like the rock-hewn causeway to Valhalla in a Metropolitan production of a Wagner opera, the trail narrowing as it ascends until finally it is nothing but a narrow shelf at a precipice edge. If you are rather light-headed and none too sure-footed you clutch tightly to a stronger, steadier hand and turn your face cliffward as you shakily venture the last of the ascent.

But your reward on top is a prehistoric Aztec citadel of communal houses and occupied by people living today exactly as their ancestors lived hundreds of years ago. An Indian communal house is really a honeycomb of adobe boxes like a flight of gigantic steps; the row on top set back from the one below so that the roof of the first floor makes the terrace in front of the second, and the roof of the second a piazza in front of the third. Against the wall of each story lean the typical ladders by which the Hopi Indian always enters his home. The ground-floor rooms are usually entered through a hatchway in the ceiling from a room or a terrace above.

Acoma is really the sister of Santa Fé, who has never changed her Indian ways. When the noble Spanish invader tried to make a conquest of the[179] whole family, Acoma met him at the top of her cliff-hewn staircase with a battle-ax! I should think after that climb—the so-called “easy” way had not been built then—one of her brown babies could have pushed him off with a small fore-finger!

To know anything at all about the lives or natures or customs of these people, you would have to see more than is possible to an average, ignorant tourist, who looks helplessly at their inscrutably serious faces. Even if by fortunate chance one of them invites you to mount a ladder and look into a dwelling or two, all you see is a small adobe room with bare walls, a bare floor and possibly a small high window. There is a fireplace in one corner and maybe a string stretched across another with some clothes or blankets hung over it, or piled against a wall on the floor, a water jar or two, and some primitive cooking utensils. Except a few younger members of the community who have been to Carlisle, no one speaks a word of English. Although in a few places such as the Grand Canyon or Albuquerque an Indian will let you take his picture for twenty-five cents, Mr. X. at Albuquerque had warned us not to photograph any Indians we might meet elsewhere. In such places as Acoma it might even be dangerous. Believing, as they do, that a photograph takes a portion of their life away from them, no wonder they object to a stranger’s helping himself to a little piece of their existence.

After leaving Acoma, you drive again long and tediously but without serious hindrance, all the way to Gallup. At Gallup there is a hotel, a small frame, frontier type of building. But by the time we reached it we agreed with Mr. X. that it would be more of an experience to spend the night under the stars. How much the beauty of the stars would have tempted us had the hotel been more inviting I am not very sure. Beyond Gallup you run into the Navajo Indian Reservation, your road having ascended rather steeply through parklike woods of cedars, and the altitude again affects both lungs and carburetor, but even if it makes you gasp a little it is an essence of deliciousness as reviving as an elixir of life. You go past the road that leads to the wonderful Canyon de Chelly, but it is impossible for a motor—any kind of a motor, even the littlest and lightest one—to go over it in the early spring, so you continue on until at last, coming out upon a mesa, you see spread below you the Painted Desert! It can be none other. You would be willing to take oath that a great city of palaces in all the colors of the rainbow lies spread before you. It is inconceivable that rock and sand and twilight alone create these turrets and ramparts and bastions of crimson, gold, blue, azure, indigo, purple, and the whole scene immersed in liquid mauve and gold, as though the atmosphere were made of billions and billions of particles of opalescent fluid. And as you stand in silent contemplation an Indian[181] with scarlet head-band rides by on a piebald pony so that there shall be no color unused.

At last when the vividness of colors begin to soften into vapory purples, deepening again to indigo, you gather a little brushwood and for the mere companionable cheerfulness make a campfire to eat your supper by. You probably heat a can of soup, roast potatoes, and finally, having nothing else to cook or heat for the present, hit upon the brilliant thought of boiling water, while the fire burns, for next morning’s coffee. At least this is what we did, and poured it into a thermos to keep hot. Also we climbed back into the car. Personally I have an abject terror of snakes, though there was very likely none within a hundred miles of us. For nothing on earth would I make myself a bed on the open ground. Also the seats of our car—there was at least one satisfactory thing about it—are only four or five inches from the floor, and sitting in it is like sitting in an upholstered steamer chair with the footrest up—a perfectly comfortable position to go to sleep in. So that bundled up in fur coats with steamer blankets over us we were just as snug as the proverbial bugs in a rug. For my own part, though, the night was too beautiful out under that star-hung sky willingly to shut my eyes and blot it out. My former fears of prowling Indians, strange animals, spooks, spirits—or perhaps just vast empty blackness—had vanished completely, and instead there was merely the consciousness of[182] an experience too beautiful to waste a moment of. I could not bear to go to sleep. The very air was too delicious in its sparkling purity to want to stop consciously breathing it. Overhead was the wide inverted bowl of purple blue made of an immensity of blues overlaid with blues that went through and through forever, studded with its myriad blinking lamps lit suddenly all together, and so close I felt that I could almost reach them with my hand.

I really don’t know whether I slept or not, but the thing I became conscious of was the beginning of the dawn. Overhead the heaven was still that deep unfathomable blue. In the very deepest of its color the crescent moon and single star glowed with a light rayless as it was dazzling. Over near the horizon the blue lightened gradually to pale azure and deepened where it rested on the brown purple rim of the desert to a band of reddish orange, very soft, very melting. Gradually the moon and star grew dim like turned-down lamps against a heaven turning turquoise. Down in the valley hung a mist of orchid against which the black branches of a nearby cedar were etched in Japanese silhouette. Far, far on the north horizon the clouds of day were herded, waiting. Then a single cloud advanced, dipped itself in rose color and edged itself with gold; a streak of red, as from a giant’s paint-brush, swept across the sky. A moment of waiting more and then the great blinding sun peered above the eastern mountains’[183] rim and the clouds broke and scattered like cotton-wool sheep across their pasture skies. The moon turned into a little curved feather dropped from a bird’s breast and the star a pinprick; yet in their hour, how glorious they were!

Celia and I tried to find a stream in which to wash our faces, but, failing in our search, we shared the water in our African bags with the radiator. The hot water in the thermos bottle poured over George Washington coffee did not delay us a moment in our breakfast-making, and it could not have been later than five o’clock when we were well off on our way.

It was an endlessly long day’s run and difficult in places. I’m sure we lost our way several times, a perfectly dispiriting thing to do, as it was much like being lost in a rowboat out in the middle of the ocean. Except while still in the Reservation where we passed occasional Navajos we saw no living person or thing the rest of the day. Sometimes we went over rolling, stubbled prairie, fringed again with cedars and pines; next through a veritable desert of desolation with nothing but rocks and sand. Sometimes the road wound tranquilly through timbered glades; again came a straight, monotonous stretch of sandy trail. Then suddenly it twisted itself over a path of washed-out rock, or suddenly fell into an arroyo. Over and over these symptoms were repeated in every variety of combination. Finally we reached Holbrook,[184] and we drove without any adventures over a traveled road to Winslow.

For nothing would I have missed the experience. It was wonderful, all of it, yet no hotel ever seemed so enchanting as the Harvey, nor was any supper ever so good as the one they so promptly put before us.

Of course, if we had had a breakdown we would have been marooned out in a wilderness! No living being knew our whereabouts and we might quite easily have been dust before anyone would have passed our way. If we had had different equipment we would certainly have gone further. Fortunately the most interesting (as well as most difficult) part of the desert was all behind us, and as we also wanted to motor through California, we had no choice. The car was in a seriously crippled condition; any more arroyos and there really would be no more motoring for us this trip. So, all things considered, we hailed our freight car resignedly, put the motor on it and sent it ahead of us to Los Angeles, while we ourselves took the train to the Grand Canyon.

By the way, a word about the Navajos whose dwellings in no way resemble the staired adobe pyramids in Acoma, Taos and Laguna. The Navajo huts—hogans they are called—are made of logs and twigs plastered with mud, not all over like an icing, but merely in between the logs as a mortar. They have no openings except a low door that you have to stoop to enter, and a smoke[185] hole in the center of the domelike roof. Inside, if the ones at the Grand Canyon are typical, as they are supposed to be, they are merely one room with a fire burning in the center and blankets spread around the edge of the floor close under the slanting walls. Personally I feel rather embarrassed on being told to look in upon a group of swarthy figures who contemplate the intrusion of their privacy in solemn silence. In one of them a mother was rolling her plump brown baby on its swaddling board. When it was securely tied in place, although the father carried it outside in order to allow me to take its picture, I nearly got into trouble about it. The shutter of my camera had to be set first and then released which made two clicks. When I paid the regulation quarter, he was furious and demanded double pay. I, on my side, thought I was being imposed upon as he had himself volunteered to hold the baby for me for twenty-five cents. E. M., who divined the difficulty, quickly took the film pack out, and holding it open against the light, explained to the Indian carefully, “Little click no picture.” And the Navajo, being quite satisfied with the quarter, I then gave him the second one—a senseless, but commonplace proceeding.

Meanwhile, comfortably lounging on the terrace overlooking this greatest of all great canyons, an old-timer is talking of “the good old days of Hance’s camp before this high-falutin’ hotel was built.” And at his mere suggestion I become[186] vividly aware that, after all, the way I like best to see anything is comfortably. Perhaps there might be an added awe if one stood alone at the brink of this yawning abyss, perhaps some of the gnarled roads and small clefts that seemed wonderful when we were crawling among them might have seemed dull little places from the terrace of a luxurious hotel, but being at heart—no matter how much I might pretend to be above the necessity of comfort—an effete Easterner, I very gratefully appreciate the genius of the man who built this hotel for such as I.

Laboriously E. M. wrote her name as she herself pronounced it, “Loas Ang-hell-less.” With the piece of paper before me I can say it glibly enough, but in coming upon it unprepared, my only hope is to follow his flippant but very helpful suggestion and mentally dive through it. First, get hell as the objective plunge fixed in mind, then start on loas (like a run-off), Ang (hit the springboard), hell (the dive), less (into the water).

I am not very certain, though, that I want to call her at all. Perhaps we had the spleen, but the meaning and beauty of the city was quite as obscured to us as her name is to those having no knowledge of Spanish. Another thing that is even more obscured is why Los Angeles calls herself the City of Hotels? New York might as well call herself the City of Mosques, or Chicago the Citadel of Fortifications, or Colorado Springs the Seaside Resort! All the way across the continent in the various illustrated information books that[188] are strewn for the edification of idle tourists around mezzanine writing-rooms, you read and read and read of Los Angeles hotels. Not a word does any one of these pamphlets say about the Southern capital’s gigantically growing industries, fertile surroundings, automobile interests, millionaire mansions, peerless parks, or even the height to which the June thermometer can soar. Each advertising line acclaims it solely as the City of Hotels.

“Which shall be your hotel?” reads one eulogy. “You have only to name your ideal, and choose whatever you like.” “If you care most for food there is the restaurant of the Van Nuys; if you want a homey place to stop at, you have a score of smaller hotels to choose from. But of course if you want to find the most luxurious metropolitan hostelry on the entire continent there is the Green and Gold lobby at the Alexandria.” How the lobby in itself is supposed to so much contribute to your happiness and comfort, you have no idea. But each and every advertisement either begins or ends with a description and a full-page picture of this imposing hallway. To test the peerless perfection of this Blackstone rival is naturally irresistible and into its overwhelming gorgeousness you go! The gorgeousness is there quite as in the pictures, also it is in every way a perfectly up-to-date and luxurious hotel. You wonder, though, is the cost of food inordinately high? Are wages prohibitive? Is it merely monopoly or forces of[189] circumstance beyond its control that allows the only strictly up-to-date hotel in the place to charge such prices? At Trouville, in the season, or Monte Carlo, your bill can be rather staggering, but at least you get the quintessence of exotic luxury and the most unlimited offerings in diversions that the purveyors to the spenders of the world can achieve. When, however, a commonplace city of extremest dullness asks you Monte Carlo prices, higher than the Ritz in New York or the Blackstone in Chicago, you find a certain much-advertised green with gold lobby illuminingly symbolical of the guests who would for any length of time stay there.

To find anywhere else to stay is more than difficult. You run around to “This” one and to “That,” and then to the whole advertised list, but your own “ideal” is not among them. So either you stay on where you are, and ignore the hole in your bank account or you go quickly on to the next place; or, better yet, move out to the beautiful suburb, for which one might say Los Angeles is famous and where half of the Los Angeles fashionables live. In other words, Pasadena. Pasadena, besides having many splendid hotels,[5] is a floral park of much beauty, a little too neat, perhaps, for real allure and possibly a little over-obviously rich. But its even squares of streets are splendidly bordered with palms or pepper-trees. Here and there the center of the street is[190] sentineled by a superb tree that you are glad the street builders had not the heart to cut down. Back of tropically verdant lawns are rows of homelike bungalows smothered in vines and there are many important and beautiful places that entirely compensate for the few crude garish ones that flaunt so much wealth and so little good taste.

The Country Club is most charming, and in it a big room so appealing in color and furnishing that you feel irresistibly like settling yourself in the corner of one of the chintz-covered sofas and staying indefinitely. Yet the same people whose own houses are so attractive will seriously take you to admire a horticultural achievement that, in its magentas and scarlets, purples and heliotrope, orange, Indian red and Paris green, lacks no element of discord except an out-of-tune German band to play among its glass globes. I don’t really remember whether I saw any glass globes or not, but the disturbed visions that come back to me are of silver globes, iron stags, sea-shell fountains amid a floral debauch.

They say that when people paint their faces they lose their eye and soon put the whole paint box on. In the same way it may be that the brilliancy of the sunshine has affected people’s sight and that they can’t perceive color discords. All through Southern California you see combinations of color that fairly set your teeth on edge. Scarlet and majenta are put together everywhere; Prussian blue next to cobalt; vermilion next to[191] old rose, olive-green next to emerald. Not only in flowers, but in homes and in clothes.

We dined the other night in a terra-cotta room hung with crimson curtains; one woman in a turquoise-colored dress wore slippers of French blue, another carried an emerald-colored fan with a sage-green frock!

The conversation—only some of it—was as queerly assembled as the colors. A Mr. Brown, to convince me of the high moral tone of Pasadena men, told me that, in Honolulu, a chief offered a friend of his two beautiful young wives. He laid special stress on their beauty of “form” and sweetness of disposition. Also he explained carefully that they were yellow in color, not black. “But my friend explained to the chief that he was married. The chief said, ‘What difference does that make? Do you want to insult my brotherly love for you?’” But the friend “insulted” and refused the little gold-colored wives. I waited for the rest of the story but there did not seem to be any rest. So I said, “And then——?”

“Well, that was just to show you,” he answered proudly, “the high type of men we have out here on the coast.”

I put this down as I heard it, although I myself don’t see much point to it, even yet!

I am trying not to say so much about hotels any more, but there is one I must mention—particularly after the failure we had with them in Los[192] Angeles. Wanting to see the most famous orange grove in the country, we drove to Riverside and found quite by accident the most ideal hotel imaginable—the really most lovely place that ever was! So I must tell you that the Mission Inn at Riverside is worth traveling miles to stop at; a hotel of pure delight, in which the beauty of a Spanish palace and the picturesqueness of an old mission is combined with the most perfect modern comfort and at fair and reasonable rates. I don’t believe anyone ever entered its hospitable doors without pleasure or left them without regret.

From Riverside we made a loop back to Los Angeles and drove to San Diego along the edge of the ocean all the way. The coast was one long succession of big ocean resort hotels on a boulevard that seemed too smooth and perfect to be true. We had forgotten that such road smoothness existed for our poor long-tortured engine to glide over.

The Fair at San Diego was a little Exposition Beautiful! The composite impression was of a garden of dense, shiny green. Great masses and profusions of orange-trees and vines against low one-storied buildings of gray-white. Across a long viaduct under an archway and down a long avenue, there was no other color except gray-white and green until you came into the central plaza filled with pigeons as in St. Mark’s in Venice, and saw over one portico of the quadrangle of white buildings a single blaze of orange and[193] blue striped awnings—stripes nearly a foot wide of blue the color of laundry blue, and orange the color of the most vivid fruit of that name that you can find! Against the unrelieved green and gray this one barbaric splash of color actually thrilled.

Down the next avenue hanging behind the balustrade of another building was the same vivid sweep of blue. Over a building around the corner was a climbing amber rose, and just beyond it some pinkish-purple bougainvillea, that beautiful but most difficult vine to put anywhere. There were gardens and gardens of flowers but each so separated and grouped that there was not a note of discord.

And how things did grow! Some of the buildings were already covered to their roofs with vines, and benches shaded by shrubs, that we treasure at home in little pots!

The San Diego Exposition was a pure delight. Its simplicity and faultless harmony of color brought out all its values startlingly.

A farmer—ought he be called a rancher?—said he thought it a “homey” exposition. I doubt if the sentiment could be better expressed. It was first and foremost designed to show by actual demonstration what could be accomplished in our own land of the West. The citrus groves were full sized; the fields of grain were big and real; instead of putting reapers and harvesters in a large machinery hall, they demonstrated them on a model[194] ranch, so that anyone likely to be interested could see how they were used.

The Indian exhibits were very complete—especially those of the Hopis. There was a life-size model of the pueblo of Taos and miniature models of the other more famous pueblos, and examples of their arts and crafts.

Otherwise the general impressions of the exhibits were much alike; bottles of fruit in alcohol, sheaves of grain, arches of oranges, and school children’s efforts in art.

Of all the buildings, we liked Kansas best. We liked it from its three stiff clay sunflowers raised and painted over its plain little front door to its unending varieties of grains. And all because the old Kansan—not that he was so old either—in charge of it so loved his state and was so unaffectedly proud of it, that we caught the infection from him. We couldn’t help it.

“Of course,” he said, “I’ve only samples here but there’s nothing that can grow in the soil that we can’t grow in Kansas! These people out here talk about beautiful California, the ‘ever-blooming garden of California,’ and her ‘sublime mountain scenery,’ ‘ocean-kissed shore’ and what not. Now, for my taste, give me a land that is as flat as the pa’m of your hand—give me Kansas!”

An old woman came in while we were there. She poked all around, sniffed at the kaffir corn, at every variety of grain that could be stored in glass-fronted bins or arched into sheaves.

“Land sakes!” she said. “Y’ain’t got nothin’ in here but chickin feed. Ain’t yuh got nothin’ t’eat?” And out she switched again.

“I suppose that old woman’d like me to keep a nice crock of doughnuts ready to give her, and a cup of tea, mebbe. Chickin feed, indeed! Well, when it comes to hens, I like the feathered kind. You can put them in a pot and boil ’em! Chickin feed! And it’s mighty fine chickin feed, I tell you, that a man can grow in the state of Kansas!”

Coronado Beach, the famous winter resort, is across the bay and reached in a few minutes by ferry from San Diego.

In San Diego itself a new apartment house, the Palomar, offers a novelty in automatic and economic living that is quite original. Single apartments, for instance, rent for $65.00 a month and consist of a large living-room, a small dressing-room, a bathroom, and a kitchenette. No bedroom! You dress in the dressing-room, and sleep in the living-room in a disappearing bed, not a folding one, that in the daytime is rolled into an air chamber large enough to hold it intact. You can rent a room for your personal maid, or valet, but all of the service is furnished as in a hotel. Only instead of ordering your food in a restaurant, you do your own marketing and have it prepared in your own kitchen. Instead of paying your cook by the month, you hire one at twenty-five cents an hour whenever you want a meal cooked. No meals at home, no cook!

From the point of view of the stranger glancing about the streets, the chief diversion in San Diego seems to be moving pictures. The square which appears to be the central point around which the city is built, is lined with electric arched doorways displaying every lure of lithograph. Besides the picture palaces are two drug-stores, and a funeral director’s window, proffering the latest novelties in caskets. But the most lingering memory of San Diego, outside of her harbor, is of her school buildings. They are the last word in construction and equipment, Tudor in design, and very imposing.

When we left San Diego and all along the ocean the weather was deliciously cool, but as we went inland toward Pasadena it became hotter than anything you can imagine. It was a case of 116° in the shade and there wasn’t any shade!

“How can the orange-trees remain so beautifully green?” I heard Celia muttering. Twenty miles north of Los Angeles I looked at the unburnt hills and crisply standing live-oaks in wonder and amazement. I could actually see blisters forming on E. M.’s nose. Finally we panted up a big winding hill, a branch of the Coast Range of mountains, I suppose it was, and as we dipped over on the other side, such a gust of cold sea wind greeted us that in five minutes, we, who had been gasping like dying fish, were wrapping our now shivering selves in coats!

Besides the life-giving coolness of the sea air,[197] never, never was there a more beautiful drive than the one to Santa Barbara. Not the Cornici of France—not even the Sorrento to Amalfi of Italy. Mountains on one side, the ocean on the other, curving in and out of bays each more lovely than the last, and on a road like linoleum. I thought I should like to live where I could drive up and down that road forever!

Light-hearted, happy, basking in the sunshine, her eyes not dreamily gazing into the past, nor avariciously peering into the future, but dancing with the joy of today—such is California! It is not only the sun of heaven shining upon California that makes her the garden-land of the world, but the sun radiating from the hearts of her people. Golden she certainly is—land of golden fruit, land of golden plenty, daughter of the golden sun.

If you have millions and want to learn a million ways to spend them; if you are a social climber and want to scale the Western Hemisphere’s most polished pinnacle; if you want to become worldly, cynical, effete, go to New York. New York is the princess of impersonality, the queen of indifference. Your riches do not impress her; without any, you do not exist. You can come or go, sink or swim, be brilliant, beautiful or charming, she cares not a whit. “What new extravagance do you bring to amuse me?” she asks, bored even before she has finished asking.

“What are you ambitious to do?” asks Chicago. “What are you trying to be? Can I help you?”

“Welcome to the land of sunshine!” says smiling California. “If your heart is young, then stay with me and play!”

There are plenty of reasons why they liken Santa Barbara to Nice, Cannes, or Monte Carlo. When we arrived in our rooms at the Hotel Potter we could hardly believe we were not on the Riviera, not merely because of the white enamel and shadow chintz furnishings of our rooms looking out upon the palm-bordered esplanade to the ocean just beyond, but because only in Continental watering places do friends send—or could they possibly find for you—bouquets of welcome like that. Against the gray wall above the writing-table a great sheaf bouquet of the big, pale-pink roses that you associate with France, combined with silver violet thistles, gladiolii in a chromatic scale of creams and corals, and in such profusion that they were standing in a tall vase on the floor. The third bouquet was of apricot-colored roses, heliotrope and white lilies.

As a matter of fact, the Riviera bears the same resemblance to Santa Barbara that artificial flowers bear to the real. The spirit of one is essentially artificial, insidiously demoralizing. The spirit of the other is the essence of naturalness, inevitably rejuvenating.

Instead of spending your every waking moment in electric-lighted restaurants and gambling rooms, you live in the sunshine, and in the open. Every house, nearly, has its patio or open court,[200] and no matter what your occupation may be, you seldom go indoors. Carrying the love of outdoors even to concerts and theatrical performances, the owner of a very beautiful garden has built a theater, of which the stage is a terrace of grass, and the scenery evenly planted trees. In spite of some of the pretentious villas, the keynote of the Pacific coast is still naturalness. Affectations have really no place.

One afternoon at a fruit ranch, we found ourselves next to a woman who for twenty minutes extolled the perfection of her long years of living in Italy. With her hands affectedly clasped and gazing at the feathery olive-trees, she exclaimed:

“Ah! that takes me so back to my beloved Sicily, and the mornings when I used to walk along the olive groves and eat ripe olives before breakfast.”

To offer strangers olives picked from the trees is a pet joke of Californians no less than the Italians. The uncured fruit is as bitterly uneatable as quinine.

“Oh, do you like fresh olives?” This gleefully from the host. “Let me pick you some!” In a few moments he returned with a fruit-laden branch. With bated breath, everyone watched as she plucked one and—gamely, ate it!

To look at the orange, lemon, walnut and olive groves out here you would think failure in crops an impossibility. Put any kind of a little shoot in the ground and you can almost stand beside it and[201] wait for it to be grown. But perhaps the land’s perfection is a proof of skilled industry after all. At least one of the greatest of the orange-growers in the State told us: “Come out and run a ranch for fifteen seasons and you will find fifteen reasons why you can fail.”

Ordinarily, though, in the conversation of people here, the personal equation is left out. Californians seldom if ever accentuate their own share in the success of anything.

Everywhere else the enthusiastic inhabitants speak of their state and of their city as a man speaks of his success in business, or a woman speaks of her new home—not only with pride in the thing accomplished but with a satisfaction that comes from their personal effort toward its accomplishment.

The Chicagoans, I remember, for instance, in their pride in the Wheaton Country Club, seemed to feel that their planting and building and making a beauty spot out of a sand heap was the most admirable thing about it.

The only parallel to the attitude of the Californians that I can think of is that of the Italians. Living in their land is merely a great privilege that God has given them, and the beauty of it is a thing that has always been—a thing with which mere man has had little to do.

The picture that the visitor remembers first, last and best in Santa Barbara is of a succession of low mountain ledges capped with white, pink,[202] gray or terra-cotta villas, surrounded by tropical gardens and overlooking a sapphire-colored ocean gleaming in perpetual sunlight. Nothing in all of Italy, not on the road from Sorrento to Amalfi, not even at Taormina in Sicily, is there any scene of land and water more beautiful. Of the villas, most are impressive, a few are admirable, and one, in particular, is like a fifteenth-century Italian gem of the first water transplanted by magic, gardens and all, from the heart of Italy. No other place has quite the atmosphere of this one—that sense of nobleness that we have been taught to believe is made only by centuries of mellowing on an already perfect foundation. It is not an imitation. Everything in it is real and everything is old except the garden, which looks the oldest of all. Perhaps, though, in a land where green things crowd an average year’s growth into every week, it is small wonder that an effect of centuries can be acquired in a decade.

I don’t know whether we missed them, but among all the glorious gardens of lawns and hedges and trees, we saw scarcely any flower gardens; and the few we saw screamed in hideous discords of magenta, scarlet and purple. As in Pasadena, the riot of sun and color seems to make people blind to color discord. An exception, however—the only one we saw—was in the gardens of the Mirasol, which reminds me, by the way, that the Mirasol Hotel is a sort of post-impressionist ne plus ultra, in hotel-keeping.

To begin with, its groups of little white bungalows neatly set within its white picket-fenced inclosure, is more like a toy village than any possible suggestion of hotel. Each little bungalow is low and white, with boxes of flowers under every window and a general smothered-in-vines appearance. So much for the outside. Inside each holds several bedrooms, one or two bathrooms, and perhaps a private sitting-room, all of them super-modern in their furnishings, and each room looking out upon a vista of garden that matches its own color scheme. A rose-chintz sitting-room, for instance, looks out on a rose garden; a lavender bedroom opens on a garden in which there are none but lavender flowers, and a yellow one looks into a vista of yellow. All of the decoration is rather over-stenciled and striped, but the bedroom bungalows are really enchanting. The public rooms, dining-room, public sitting-room and tearoom, are in a bigger house, the orange and blue interior of which suggests nothing so much as the setting of a Bakst ballet. The walls, curtains, table cloths, decorations, chairs, napkins and the waitresses’ aprons are all apricot orange, and the stenciling and stripes and floor and waitresses’ dresses are blue. There is a tearoom in which gorgeous cockatoos—live ones!—live in blaze of orange surroundings. The details are all carefully done, most of them are effective, and certainly unusual. For our own parts we thought the bedrooms lovely; the highly polished indigo floor paint an inspiration,[204] and the orange-colored table linens amusing; but when it came to filigreed silver breast-pins glued into the drawing-room mantel, it was the one touch too much!

An explosion shook the town, then came the fire engines. Everybody ran and of course we ran too. We saw a big, Colonial house in a blaze, then a second explosion! And a thick black mass of smoke blew off the roof. People ran hither and thither in wild excitement; a fireman dashed into the flames and carried out a dying girl; her face was bleeding and her clothes were in burnt shreds. More dying people were miraculously saved, then suddenly like a huge screen the whole house fell flat. It had no behind and no inside and the whole scene was only the “movies.” The injured face of the heroine was only red paint and the house a property one built for the purpose.

“This is nothing,” said a member of the company to me, “if you want to see something exciting, go to the chalk cliffs just on the road to Santa Maria tomorrow morning. We’re going to work on the ‘Diamond From the Sky.’ That’s our star over there! You don’t want to miss any pictures when he is in it.”

I saw a young man leaning against a telegraph[206] pole chewing a straw. He looked almost too lazy to be alive.

“He’s always like that!” said the member of the company. “You wouldn’t think there was an ounce of go in him! He’s always whittling a stick, or chewing a straw, and if he was to be killed, he’d never move a muscle!”

“He looks kind of comatose, doesn’t he?” said the manager, who overheard. “Well, you go out to the chalk cliffs at about eleven tomorrow if you think he’s comatose, and see him come to.”

Naturally we went. We found the place easily by the number of people gathered at the spot. A shelf road was cut on the face of the high chalk cliffs, above a seventy-foot sheer drop into the water. We saw the comatose one, looking just as indifferent as ever, get into a car and start for the narrow road up on the edge of the cliff. Then another followed him. At a word from the director, they raced across the high narrow shelf, the comatose one swerved to the very edge, toppled and plunged over the abyss! No stopping the picture at the brink and putting a dummy in his place. A feeling of such nausea caught me I could not look to see him land. How he escaped with his life he alone knew. The car struck the rocks and smashed to pieces, but they say he threw himself like an eel clear of the wheel and safely into the water. They then fished him out, he got into another car just as he was, and started home[207] as though nothing had happened. When we reached a railroad track where they were going to take another picture, the same actor was this time to drive so near the track that the locomotive might in the picture seem to hit the car. The camera man was ready to turn the crank of his camera, the locomotive was almost at the crossing, when dash! went the devil-driver toward the track. Stop? Nothing of the sort! He met it as a ram meets an enemy, head on. The locomotive carried his mangled self and wrecked machine up the track. The engineer, shaking as with the palsy, almost fell out of his cab. The company and we, too, rushed up to where the wrecked machine and injured man lay. Blood was streaming from his head, his arm distortedly twisted under him, and he was writhing in pain, but when the camera man reached him all he said was:

“This’ll be great stuff! Make a close-up quick!” They made the pictures and then he lost consciousness.

Although decorated with many bandages, he is up and about, looking as comatose as ever.

We went to a film rehearsal at the Flying A. In front of us sat the heroine, the hero, the villain, and all members of the company. The director read the words that would be printed between sections of the finished reel and the pictures were shown in negative only. Every now and then the actors made a few remarks such as, “That’s a fine action, Steve”; “Gee, Steve, that’s great!”[208] “I like Flora down by the brook”; “Nice scene, Flora!” Finally the heroine died.

“Nobody can die with so much sob stuff as Flora,” said our friend in a whisper.

Flora heard and answered: “Some time I’d like a part that I don’t have to die in. That’s the seventeenth time I’ve died this season.”

Of the many moving picture plants we saw, the Flying A was the smallest but most interesting. The difference between the Universal City and Flying A studio is that between Barnum’s Circus at the Madison Square Garden and the Little Theater—or better, the Grand Guignol in Paris. The Universal City is a gigantic organization that can produce anything from tiger-hunting in the jungle, to plays like “Quo Vadis.”

But why—Oh, why don’t the moving picture people have someone show them how the houses of the socially prominent really look? Where do they devise the manners, customs, and nightmare interiors that could not be found outside of the society atmosphere of Dingy Dunk or Splashville except in the “movies”?

Leaving Santa Barbara about two o’clock we arrived at Paso Robles long before dark. The next morning, however, we left early in order to spend part of the day with some friends who have a cattle and alfalfa ranch about midway to Monterey. I should think the cattle would all topple over dead and the alfalfa shrivel to cinders. Cool California? The thermometer was easily 120, and[209] that cloudless sky a blinding blaze of torture. Our friends were quite tranquil about it. “It is pretty hot here just now. You see we are pocketed in between the hill ranges, but it is beautifully mild all winter.”

To us the mild winter did not seem to compensate, since we could not understand anyone’s surviving so long as until then.

That afternoon’s drive was the hottest I hope ever to have to live through. To put your hand on unshaded metal was to burn it, as though on a hot flat-iron. The main road, El Camino Real, was good all the way to Salinas, but the branch road from there to Monterey was bumpy and bad until within a mile or so of our destination.

Of Monterey and its peerlessly beautiful seventeen-mile ocean and cedar drive, there is no need to write. Like Niagara and the Grand Canyon, it has been written about and photographed in every newspaper and periodical in the world. Also, as was the case further south, hot as it might be inland, the coast was deliciously cool. The weather changed fortunately by the time we again drove inland and up the perfect boulevard to San Francisco. They tell me, however, that so far as the neighborhood of San Francisco is concerned no one need ever dread heat, a scorching temperature being unknown. Wind you may have, and sometimes fog, but extremes of either heat or cold, never! Besides other blessings in this particular spot of this wonderful[210] land you can also choose your own temperature. If you like warm weather, walk in the sun. If you like cold weather, walk in the shade. On the former side of the street, you will find a muslin dress just right; on the latter you will be comfortable in a sealskin coat. This is not a joke, as I had always thought it to be, but quite true.

Just as it is often for their little tricks or failings that we love people best, so it is with San Francisco. You may find her beautiful as she rises tier on tier on her many hills above the dazzling waters of the bay, you must admire the resolution and courage with which, out of her annihilation, she has risen more beautiful than before; but you love her for a lot of human, foolish, adorable personalities of her own, such as the guileless way she stuccoes the front of her houses, leaving their wooden backs perfectly visible from behind or at the side—a pretense deliciously naïve, as though she said: “I am putting a lovely front of concrete where you will see it first, because I think it will please you!” And it does.

Her insistence upon loading your pockets with pounds of silver cartwheels, instead of few dollar bills, is not quite so enchanting—but maybe when your muscles and pocket linings become used to the strain, you learn to like her silver habits too.

And in her methods of building she has no “fashionable section,” but mixes smart and[212] squalid with a method of strange confusion peculiar to herself. The value and desirability of the land is entirely proportionate to the altitude or view, and not to convenience of location or neighborhood. On the top of each and every hill, on the “view side,” perches Mr. Millionaire. If the hill slopes down gently, the wealth of his neighbors decreases gently also, but as the descent is likely to be almost a cliff, Mr. Poorman’s shanty, often as not, clings to Mr. Richman’s cellar door.

And then there are her queer-looking cable-cars—with “outside” seats facing the sidewalk, as in an Irish jaunting car—pulled up and let down the terrific hills on their wire ropes. The cable-car was, in fact, originated on the hills of San Francisco.

Many streets are so steep that they have a stairway cut in the sidewalk, and in the center, the crevices between the cobblestones are green with grass. The streets are divided into those you can drive up and those you can’t. In motoring to an address ten blocks away, instead of driving there directly as in any other city in the world, you have to take a route not unlike the pattern of a wall of Troy.

Also, as there are scarcely any names posted up on any corners, and the traffic policemen order you about for no seeming reason but their own sweet will, it is just as well for a stranger to allow twice as much time to get anywhere as would ordinarily be necessary. We were trying to go to the Hotel[213] St. Francis for lunch. “You turn down Post Street,” said one policeman. We certainly made no mistake in the name of that street. When we got to it and tried to go down, another shouted at us, “What’s the matter with you! Don’t you know you can’t go down Post Street!” I don’t yet know the solution unless there is one section of Post Street you can go down, and another section that you can’t. But I do know, however, that at the end of a little while you get so confused turning around three times for every block that you go forward, that your sense of direction seems very like that of a waltzing mouse in a glass bowl.

One thing, though, delays are not as annoying as they would seem. Californians take life too tranquilly to begrudge you a little while spent in trying to solve the hill and traffic mysteries. In fact, nothing could harass or annoy anyone long in a land where the spirit of gladness is the first and only thing that counts.

Where giantism, self-inflation, or personal ambition plays a prominent part in the characteristics of other states, the Californians are merely happy—happy about everything, happy all the time. Their optimism is as unfailingly golden as their metal, their fruits, their grain, their poppies.

In a corner of the orange country, lava poured over the soil. Were they down-hearted? Not a bit.

“For all we know,” said they, “we may find we[214] can grow something new in it that we’ve never tried before.”

In Pasadena the heat was stifling. It required all the breath I could muster to ask weakly of a land owner:

“Yes. Oh, yes, indeed,” he beamed. “It is generally cool until the first of May, and then it gets pleasant just like this.”

In San Francisco it rained all through May without ceasing. “Too wonderful!” they said. “The Eastern tourists will see the country so beautifully washed.”

But we have heard that their gladness had one vulnerability, they could not bear to speak of earthquakes. Therefore, curious as I was to hear something about them, I did not dare to ask. Drinking my coffee one morning in San Mateo where we were stopping with the B.’s my bed suddenly shook so that my coffee spilled. In a moment Mrs. B. rushed into my room in joyful excitement:

“Did you feel the earthquake? Wasn’t it a wonderful one! I was afraid you would go back to New York and never know what they are like!”

All that day everyone we saw spoke of the earthquake in much the same way, as though some delightful happening had occurred for our special benefit. Instead of shying away from the subject they reveled in it; advised us if ever we felt a[215] severe one to run and stand in the doorframe. Even if the whole house comes down the doorways, it seems, are perfectly safe. Then they drove us to a beautiful estate that was directly over a fault and to prove what a real earthquake could do, they showed us a stone wall that had been shifted four feet, and an orchard of trees that had been picked up bodily and planted elsewhere. They added casually that the house, of course, was new, the other having been quaked to the ground.

But “How terrible,” exclaimed nearly everyone to us, “to live as you do in a country where they have thunderstorms!”

There is, however, one small matter that upsets them curiously. To us, it was a phenomenon not unlike the elephant’s terror of a mouse. Never call Californians Westerners. They get really excited and indignant if you do. They live on the Pacific Coast—not in the West. For my own part they are children of the golden sun; call them what you please!

I think it is a rather universal habit to dismiss any unusual features in the lives of others by saying: “Oh, but they are a different sort of people from us!”

When we first crossed the Rio Grande and heard of two women who had gone out camping in the Rocky Mountains alone, and when later we saw a group of unmistakably well-bred people—each riding astride of a little burro and each leading a[216] second burro laden with camping things, we thought, “What an extraordinary people Westerners are! We are brothers and yet it is impossible to believe that we spring from the same stock.” Later on, however, we learned the difference was geographical and not ethnological. And the realization came this way:

A Mrs. R. used to be the most nervous and timid woman I ever knew. Six years ago, living on Long Island with twelve servants in her house, she used to lock herself in her bedroom immediately after dinner if her husband was out, because she was too nervous to sit in the front part of the ground floor alone. I remember distinctly that she once left a dinner party at about half-past nine because, with her own coachman driving, she was afraid to go late at night through the woods. About four years ago her husband and she moved to California. Last year she bought a ranch ten miles from the nearest station, and seven miles from the nearest neighbor. And this same woman who used to be scared to death in a house full of people, with neighbors all around, now sleeps tranquilly in a ground-floor bungalow with every door unlocked, every window open, and her servants’ quarters half a mile away. She drives her own motor everywhere, and thinks nothing of dining with a neighbor fifteen or twenty miles distant, and coming home at midnight through Mexican settlements alone!

Another New York girl, Pauline M., who certainly[217] was as spoiled as pampering could make her, went once long ago to a Maine hotel and never stopped talking about how awful the rooms were and how starved she was because of the horrible food. Twenty years ago she married a Californian and her house in San Francisco is as luxurious as a house can well be, but when we arrived she had gone into the mountains to camp, and telegraphed us to join her. We did not do that, but we motored out to lunch. Having always associated her with Callot dresses and marble balustrades, I expected the make-believe “roughing it” of the big camps in the Adirondacks. As we arrived at a small collection of portable houses dumped in a clearing we saw our fastidious friend in heavy solid boots, a drill skirt, flannel shirt, kneeling beside a campfire cooking flapjacks. She used to be beautiful but rather anemic; her sauntering, languid walk seemed always to be dragging a five-yard train, and her face was set with a bored expression. The metamorphosis was startling. She looked younger than she had at twenty and she put more life and energy in her waving of her frying-pan in greeting than she would have put in a whole New York season of how-do-you-do’s.

Even the Orientals seem affected by the spirit of this land’s gladness. The Chinaman of San Francisco is a big, smiling and apparently gay-hearted individual—none the less complex and mysterious for all that.

Frankly, the people out here who fascinate me[218] most of all are the Chinese. From the two or three that we have seen in friends’ houses, a Chinese servant must be about as easy to manage as the wind of heaven; you might as well try to dig a hole in the surface of the sea as to make any impression on him. He is going to do exactly what he pleases and in the way he pleases. Of course, his way may be your way, in which case you are lucky. Also it must not be forgotten that his faithfulness and devotion, when he is devoted, is quite as unalterable as his way. Of the two or three individual ones that we have seen in friends’ houses, one at least will never be forgotten by any of us. His serene round face was the personification of docility, and he moved about in his costume of dull green brocade like some lovely animate figure of purely decorative value. Why have we nothing in our houses that are such a delight to the eye?

I have forgotten what we had for luncheon—caviare canapé, I think, and with it finger bowls.

“No, Chang, not finger bowls yet,” I heard Mr. K. say. So Chang removed them, only to bring them back again with the next course.

“There is no use,” laughed Mr. K. to me, “he will keep bringing them back no matter how often I tell him to take them away. He always does, and we just have to have them from the beginning through.”

Mr. K. carved on the table—Chang probably insisted on that too—and asking me whether I preferred dark or white, put the breast of a broiled[219] chicken on a plate. The Celestial one in green brocade instead of passing it to me, deftly picked up a fork, placed the chicken breast back on the platter, took a second joint instead, and saying severely:

“Him likee leg pliece!” carried the plate to Mr. K.’s mother. Company or no company, Chang served her always first.

Also the K.’s told me that Mrs. K., senior, was the only member of the family whose personal wishes he invariably respected. He is also the slave of the K. baby, but to the rest of the family he behaves exactly as a chow, or a Persian cat, or any other purely decorative independent household belonging.

China is the place for old women to live in! They receive all the attention and consideration that is shown in our own country only to the most young and beautiful.

Mrs. S., whose husband was for many years chargé d’affaires in the American legation in Pekin, is the most enthusiastic champion of everything Chinese. “If a Chinaman is staying under your roof, you need have no uneasiness on the subject of his good intentions,” she said this morning. “No Chinaman will stay in your employ if he does not like you.” As an example, she told us that while she was in Pekin the head boy of another legation was taken to task about something in front of some of the under servants—a situation of great indignity. The occurrence happened in the midst[220] of the serving of a meal. The Chinaman quietly laid down the dish he was holding and left the room and the house. In less than ten minutes he presented himself before Mrs. S. and announced that he had come to live with them. For nothing would he go back to the other legation, and having elected Mrs. S. as his tai tai (lady) in her particular service he stayed. One New Year’s he presented her with a miniature pig, stunted in the way that the Japanese stunt trees or else just a little freak. It was only a foot long, but full grown, and as black as though it had been dipped in shoe polish.

One day in San Francisco, I went out shopping in the Chinese quarter with Mrs. S. The sensation may be imagined of an American lady suddenly speaking perfectly fluent Manchu Chinese. Such a grinning and gesticulating and smiling as went on! And the whole neighborhood gathered suddenly into the discourse.

Understanding not a single syllable, I could only watch the others, but even more than ever, they fascinated me.

In San Francisco we rushed early each morning to the Exposition and spent no time anywhere else. Every now and then someone said to Pauline, with whom we were stopping, the mysterious sentence: “Have you taken them to Gump’s?” And her answer: “Why no, I haven’t!” was always uttered in that abashed apologetic tone that acknowledges a culpable forgetfulness. Finally one day[221] instead of driving out towards the Exposition grounds we turned towards the heart of the city.

“Our most celebrated shop. You really must not leave San Francisco without seeing their Japanese and Chinese things.”

Shades of dullness, thought I, as if there were not shops enough in New York! As for Oriental treasures, I was sure there were more on Fifth Avenue at home than there are left in Asia. But Pauline being determined, there was nothing for us to do but, as E.M. said, “to Gump it!”

Feeling very much bored at being kept away from the Exposition, I entered a store reminiscent of a dozen in New York, walked down an aisle lined on either side with commonplace chinaware. My first sensation of boredom was changing to irritability. Then we entered an elevator and in the next instant I took back everything I had been thinking. It was as though we had been transported, not only across the Pacific, but across centuries of time. Through the apartments of an ancient Chinese palace, we walked into a Japanese temple, and again into a room in a modern Japanese house. You do not need more than a first glance to appreciate why they lead visitors to a shop with the unpromising name of Gump. I am not sure that the name does not heighten the effect.[222] If it were called the Chinese Palace, or the Temple of Japan, or something like that, it would be like telling the answer before asking the conundrum. As in calling at a palace, too, strangers, distinguished ones only, are asked to write their names in the visitor’s book.

In this museum-shop each room has been assembled as a setting for the things that are shown in it. Old Chinese porcelains, blue and white, sang de bœuf, white, apple-green, cucumber-green and peacock-blue, are shown in a room of the Ming Period in ebony and gold lacquer.

The windows of all the rooms, whether in the walls or ceiling, are of translucent porcelain in the Chinese, or paper in the Japanese; which produces an indescribable illusion of having left the streets of San Francisco thousands of miles, instead of merely a few feet, behind you.

The room devoted to jades and primitives has night-blue walls overlaid with gold lacquer lattices and brass carvings and in it the most wonderful treasures of all. They are kept hidden away in silk-lined boxes, and are brought out and shown to you, Chinese fashion, one at a time, so that none shall detract from the other. We wanted to steal a small white marble statuette of a boy on a horse. A thing of beauty and spirit very Greek, yet pure Chinese that dated back to the oldest Tang Dynasty! There was also a silver, that was originally green, luster bronze of the Ham Period, two thousand years old, and a sacrificial[223] bronze pot belonging to the Chow Dynasty, B.C. 1125. The patina, or green rust of age, on these two pieces was especially beautiful. I also much admired a carved rhinoceros horn, but found it was merely Chien Lung, one hundred and fifty years old, which in that room was much too modern to be important.

In one of the Japanese rooms there were decorated paper walls held up by light bamboo frames, amber paper shoji instead of windows, and the floors covered with tatami, the Japanese floor mats, two inches thick. You sit on the floor as in Japan and drink tea, while silks of every variety are brought to you.

We saw three rugs of the Ming Dynasty that are probably the oldest rugs extant. The most lovely one was of yellow ground, with Ho birds in blue. And there was an ice-cooler of cloisonné, Ming Period. They brought the ice from the mountains and cooled the imperial palace—years ago. Yet to hear Europeans talk, you’d almost be led to believe that ice is an American invention.

We were shown old Chinese velvet wedding-skirts and a tapestry of blues, with silver storks and clouds of an embroidery so fine that its stitches could be seen only through a magnifying glass, and poison plates belonging to the Emperor Ming that were supposed to change color if any food injurious to His Majesty were served on them.

One of the most beautiful things was a Caramandel[224] screen of the Kang Hai Period, in a corridor that it shared only with an enormous lacquer image of the Buddha.

We were told that a rather famous collector went out to see the Fair. On his first day in San Francisco—he was stopping at the St. Francis Hotel which is only a stone’s throw across the square—he went idly into this most alluring of shops and became so interested he stayed all day. The next day he did the same, and the third morning found him there again. Finally he said with a sigh: “Having come to see the Exposition, I must go out there this afternoon and look at it, as I have to go back to New York tomorrow.”

I don’t know that this is an average point of view, but it is a fact that was vouched for, and also that his check to the detaining shop ran into very high figures.

Of the suburbs of San Francisco, Burlingame, I suppose, compares most nearly to Newport, of our Eastern coast, Sewickley of Pittsburgh or Broadmoore of Colorado Springs. It is a community of big handsome places occupied by the rich and fashionable. It strikes you, though, how much simpler people are in habits, in taste, in attitude, than in the East. Suggest anything on a house-party in Burlingame or San Mateo, or Ross, and instead of being answered: “What for?” or “Oh, not just now!” the response is a prompt and enthusiastic, “Fine! Come on!”

Young women and men in San Francisco, though many have more money to spend than they know what to do with, demand less in the way of provided entertainment than New York children in their earliest teens. A dozen of San Francisco’s most gilded youths stood around a piano and sang nearly all one evening. After a while someone played, and the rest danced. At Newport they would have danced, more likely than anything else, but the music, even if thought of at the last moment, would probably have been by an orchestra. One afternoon they pulled candy, and every day they swim in someone’s pool. Today at the J.’s, tomorrow at the H.’s. The girls play polo as well as the men and all of them, of course, drive their own cars.

In the J.’s garden, they have ladders against the cherry trees, and everyone wanders out there and eats and eats cherries—and such cherries! In the first place we haven’t any such cherries, and in the second, can you imagine a group of Newport women climbing up ladders and clinging to branches rather than let the gardeners gather them?

But it isn’t the standing on cherry-tree ladders, or the doing of any actual thing, that makes the essential difference between the people of the Atlantic and the Pacific Coast. It is the land itself, perhaps—the sunshine, the climate, that pours a rejuvenating radiance upon the spirit of resident and visitor alike.

Even at the end of a little while you find yourself beginning to understand something of the oppressive grayness that settles upon the spirit of every Californian when away from home. Which reminds me of a young Italian girl whom I found one day crying her heart out on a bench in the Public Gardens in Boston. To me Beacon Street is one of the most beautiful streets I have ever seen, especially where the old and most lovely houses face the green of the Public Gardens, and the figure of this sobbing girl was doubly woeful. To every question I could think of she shook her head and sobbed, “No.” She had not lost anyone, no one had deserted her, and she was not hungry, or cold, or houseless, or penniless. “But, my dear, what is the matter?” I implored. Finally, almost strangling with tears, she stammered: “B-boston is so u-ugly!”

Mrs. M., a Californian married to a New Yorker, had seemed to us rather negative, a listless silent figure who trailed through New York drawing-rooms more like a wraith than a live woman. We happened to be at her mother’s when this pale, frail, young person returned home for a visit and came very much to life! She hung cherries on her ears, covered her hat, and filled her belt with poppies, and came running up the terraces of their very wonderful gardens, her arms outstretched and shouting at the top of her voice:

Does anyone ever feel like that about New York? I wonder! Does anyone really love its millionaires’ palaces, its flashing Broadway, its canyon streets, its teeming thoroughfares, its subway holes-in-the-ground into which men dive like moles, emerging at the other end in an office burrow—sometimes without coming up into the outdoors at all? Or are the sentiments composed more truly of pride that has much egotism in the consciousness of more square feet of masonry crowded into fewer square feet of ground; more well-dressed women, more automobiles; bigger crowds—sprucer-looking crowds; more electric signs; more things going on; more business; more amusements; more making and spending; more losing and breaking, than, one might almost say, all the other cities of the world together?

All of which makes typical New Yorkers contemptuous of and dissatisfied with every other city. But as to whether they love it, as the people of Chicago or San Francisco do—do they? Do we?

For anyone to look out upon New York’s immensity and spread out his arms and say: “My city! My home!” would be almost like looking overhead and saying, “My sky, my stars!” Almost, wouldn’t it?

I wanted to lead up to the story of a California bride’s impression of New York. Instead of which I seem to have arrived in New York, but left the bride at home!

The story was told me by Mr. B., himself a New Yorker, but whose wife and stepson were Californians. Last winter the stepson brought his wife to New York on their wedding-trip. This is what Mr. B. told me:

“She had everything we could give her, but spent the afternoon at matinées and galleries and shopping; her evenings at the play or the opera and a cabaret afterward, and her mornings in bed. Finally I said: ‘Why don’t you want us to have some dinners for you, so that you can meet some people? You can’t know much about a city if you meet no one.’

“‘Why, so—so well-dressed and so horrid—their faces aren’t kind, and they don’t seem to smile at all.’

“But I insisted on taking her up Fifth Avenue to see the fine houses. No enthusiasm. Finally I said:

“‘I suppose so,’ she said,’but like all the rest, it is just stone and mortar stuck up in a crowded, noisy street, and the newspapers blow up around the door.’

“Then she stopped, and seeing how disappointed I was, patted me on the arm: ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I was born and grew up in an orange grove, and you people stifle me. I want to go home.’”

The Fair will be over when this account is published, but it was so dominant a part of San Francisco at the time we—and all the thousands of others—were there I haven’t the heart to cut the pages out.

With merely a phrase, you can make a picture of the little fair at San Diego; cloister-like gray buildings with clumps of dense green, and a vivid stroke of blue and orange. But to visualize the Pan-American Exposition in a few sentences is impossible. You could begin its description from a hundred different points and miss the best one, you can say one thing about it and the next moment find you were quite wrong. In the shade or fog, it was a city of baked earth color, oxydized with any quantity of terra cotta; in the sun it was deep cream glowing with light. If you thought of half the domes as brown, and others as faded green, you found, the next time you saw them, that they looked like a bit of the sky itself, and the brown ones glimmered a dull, yet living, rose.

Seeing it first from a distance, coming down upon it from the hill streets of San Francisco, you[230] saw a biscuit-colored city with terra-cotta roofs, green domes and blue. Beyond it the wide waters of a glorious bay, rimmed with far gray-green mountains. But you were luckiest if you saw it first when the sun was painting it for you, which was invariably unless there was a fog, or perhaps you looked down upon it at night when the scintillating central point, the Tower of Jewels, looked like a diamond and turquoise wedding-cake and behind it an aurora of prismatic-colored search-lights—the most thrilling illumination possible to imagine.

Or entering one of its many gates you wandered like an ant through bewildering chaos. Not that it lacked plan; its architectural balance was one of the most noteworthy things about it. But there were so many courts, so much detail. Gradually, you noticed that there were eight great exhibition palaces, and a ninth, the Palace of the Fine Arts, like a half-circle at the end. You perceived that the buildings of the separate States and foreign nations trailed off like a suburb at one end, and that the Zone was a straight street also by itself. Among the thousands of embellishments, you noticed perhaps the lovely statues of Borglum’s “Pioneer,” Fraser’s “End of the Trail,” Daniel Chester French’s “Genius of Creation,” the adventurous bowman on the top of the Column of Progress, nor could you miss the nations of the West and East, and the figures of the rising and the setting sun.

The murals of Brangwyn no chair boy would let you pass. Each one pushed you in front, and backing off to give you the proper distance, declared that they cost five thousand dollars “each one.”

We were admiring their vital animation, for they pulsated fairly with energy and life, as well as color, when suddenly from the sublime to the ridiculous, E. M. remarked: “That’s curious! The men have just taken their shirts off.” Then Celia and I wondered too, why every male figure was brown as a berry as high as a shirt sleeve would roll up, and white as a person always sheltered from the air over all the rest of his body?

We also wondered about the four women who clung to the corners of gigantic boxes on top of the beautiful Fine Arts colonnade. Each of the boxes suggested the coffin of a very fat Mormon and his four wives weeping for him. There was something hidden up there that the clinging women were afraid to take their gaze away from, but what it was we had no idea. All of which levity reminds me that in Paris I watched two tourists as they hurried eagerly down the long gallery toward the Venus de Milo. Arrived at its base one of them leaned over the guard rail, stared at the marble, and exclaimed:

My criticism of a work as notable as the Pan-American Exposition is probably much like the above. Beautiful as much of it is, I wish they had[232] left a few unfilled niches, a few plain surfaces, but they are filling them fuller every day. When we first came, the little kneeling figure on her peninsular front of the Fine Arts Temple and her reflection in the lagoon gave an impression of a dream. While we were there, they filled every archway with imposing sculptures until it looks merely like a museum.

I found myself driving around and mentally taking things away. The lovely old eucalyptus trees, the only planting that was on the grounds before the Fair, seemed almost to have heard me, for they were not to be kept from taking everything off that they could, and untidily strewing the ground with their discarded clothing.

One thing, however, was hard to understand or forgive; of all the courts, especially at night, the one which had the most imaginative appeal, was the Court of Abundance. At the four corners of a square pool were standards of erect green cobras holding brasiers filled with leaping flames of tongues of silk blown upward by concealed fans and red and yellow lights; in the center of the pool was the Fountain of the Earth, a work of highly imaginative beauty in which, above four panels of symbolic figures in high relief, the globe of the earth was set in a rose-colored glow surrounded by a mystic vapor, made by a gentle escapement of steam, and then at one side they had planted two huge Maltese cross standards of blatant electric lights!

On the subject of the exhibits, everyone has read about the Ford cars that are assembled on a conveyor. Beginning at one end as pieces of metal and running off at the other under their own power. That was undoubtedly the most interesting exhibit to the public in general, but to many others the Sperry Flour display was quite as ingenious and if anything more interesting. They had a whole row of little booth kitchens to show how all the nations of the world use flour.

A camper tossed flapjacks over a campfire; a Mexican made anchillades and tomales; a Swede, a Russian, a Chinaman, a Hindoo and four or five others made their national wafers and cakes—and gave samples away! In the center at a bigger oven was baked home-made American bread and cake and pies, of such deliciousness that everyone who passed by looked as longingly as the proverbial ragamuffin in front of a baker’s window.

There was always a crowd, too, watching the manufacture of white lead paint by the Fuller Company, and going through the staterooms of a section, full-sized, of an Atlantic steamer. Perhaps the greatest interest of all was shown in a model United States post-office, with bridges crossing above, so people could look down and see all the details of sorting and distributing.

One thing you noticed—nearly all San Franciscans were personally, or through some members of their family, interested in the Fair. Everyone gave dinners on the Zone, either on the balcony[234] of the Chinese restaurant—that had nothing Chinese about it except its Chinese ornamentation on the front of the building—or at the Old Faithful Inn of the Yellowstone. The illuminations at night were very soft and subdued, all the lanterns were turned dark side to the Concourse and light side to the buildings.

In the Zone there were few new attractions, and fewer worth seeing. The best were the Panama Canal, the Painted Desert, and Captain, the mind-reading horse. A woman mind reader, who took turns with the horse, was equally remarkable.

The queen of the Samoan village, clad literally in a short skirt, a Gaby Deslys head-dress, a string of beads and a dazzling smile, had not only great audacity but a fascinating personality that was literally bubbling over with the old Nick. We were crazy about her, a fact she saw perfectly well, for in the garden afterward, when she had discarded her gorgeous head-dress and donned a modest piece of sash tied around her chest, she came straight to us and shook hands as a child might, who, amidst a crowd of strangers, had singled out a friend. That is all there is to tell, as we couldn’t speak Samoan, nor she English.

A few months ago, in the midst of a daring flight, the wings of the famous Beachey’s aeroplane crumpled and plunged into the sea. The aviator was strapped into his machine in such a way that, if he still lived, he could not free himself.

And the new king was Art Smith. At eleven o’clock at night, the siren blew and thousands crowded about the open field to see him start. Up and up and up he went until, at several hundred feet up, a torch suddenly burned at the back of the machine which swept the sky, leaving a trail of fire like a comet’s tail, looped and double looped and curved and twisted and wrote “ZONE” across the sky.

But really to see the feats of this aeronaut who far exceeded Beachey’s daring, you had to go to the Aviation Field on a day when he flew at five. You saw, if you were early enough to stand near the ropes of the enormous enclosure, a young boy apparently, very small, but stockily built, walk casually out of the crowd standing back of the machine, wave good-bye to a young girl, his wife, and get on a sort of bicycle on the front of his biplane without any apparent strapping in, except the handle of the steering-wheel that he pulled close in front of him. Across the wide grass field he gradually arose, soared higher and higher, until at half a thousand feet or more, he dipped and swooped, then somersaulted round and round and round in a whirling ball, then flying upside down, dropped nearly over your head, then arose again, flying backwards, sideways, fell, arose, dipped—like a bird gone mad. At last he came swooping down and alit at the end of the great green field.

Very young and small, Art Smith walked the whole length of the field between fifty thousand[236] shouting, waving human beings. No hero of the Roman Stadium, no king coming to his own, has lived a greater moment than the young birdman lived every day. Boyishly his mouth broke into a wide smile, he doffed his cap, bowing to the right and to the left, and the applause followed him in a series of roars. At the hangar his young wife ran out and kissed him. He had been spared to her once again.

Of course you can’t see the Fair in a day, or two days, or three. And if you stay long in San Francisco, you won’t want to leave at all. Up and down and around the hills, you constantly see houses that you wish you could immediately go and live in. For in what other city can you sit on a hillside—only millionaires sit on hilltops—with a view of sea and mountains below and beyond you? Where else, outside of a Maxfield Parrish picture, is there a city rising gayly on steep sugar-loaf hills, and filled with people whose attitude of mind exactly matches their hilltops?

In many other cities people live in long narrow canyons called streets, under a blanket of soot, signifying industry, and they scurry around like ants carrying great mental loads, ten times as big as they are, up steep hills of difficulty, only to tumble down with them again. The people of countless other cities are valley people, their perception bounded by the high walls of the skyscrapers they have themselves erected in the name of progress. The San Franciscans, too, are building in the valley towering office buildings in which they work as earnestly for their living as any others elsewhere,[238] but in spirit they are still hill-people, and their horizon is rimmed not by acquisitive ambition, but by sea and sky.

When we started, I had an idea that, keen though we were to undertake the journey, we would find it probably difficult, possibly tiring, and surely monotonous—to travel on and on and on over the same American road, through towns that must be more or less replicas, and hearing always the same language and seeing the same types of people doing much the same things. Everyone who had never taken the trip assured us that our impression in the end would be of an unending sameness. Sameness! Was there ever such variety?

Beginning with New York, as that is the point we started from, New York was built, is building, will ever be building in huge blocks of steel and stone, and the ambitious of every city and country in the world will keep pouring into it and crowding its floor space and shoving it up higher and higher into towering cubes. New York dominates the whole of the Western Hemisphere and weights securely the Eastern coast of the map, and because of all this weight and importance, New Yorkers fancy they are the Americans of America, but New York is not half as typically American as Chicago; and that is where you come to your first real contrast.

Omnipotent New York, in contrast to ambitious Chicago. Chicago is American to her backbone—active,[239] alive and inordinately desiring, ceaselessly aspiring. Between New York and Chicago is strung a chain of cities that have many qualities, like mixed samples of these two terminal points. But beyond Chicago, no trace of New York remains. Every city is spunky and busy, ambitious and sometimes a little self-laudatory. (New York is not self-laudatory; she is too supremely self-satisfied to think any remarks on the subject necessary.) Leaving the country of fields and woods and streams, you traverse that great prairie land of vast spaces, and finally ascend the heights of the mighty Rocky Mountains.

The next contrast is in Colorado Springs, which is as unlike the rest of America as though St. Moritz itself had been grafted in the midst of our continent. All through New Mexico and Arizona you are in a strange land, far more like Asia than anything in the United States or Europe. A baked land of blazing sun, dynamic geological miracles, a land of terrible beauty and awful desolation, and then the sudden sharp ascent to the height of steep snow and conifer-covered mountains, looking even higher than the Rockies because of their abrupt needle-pointed heights. And finally, the greatest contrast climax of all, the sudden dropping down into the tropically blooming seacoast gardens of the California shore.

It goes without saying that only those who love motoring should ever undertake such a journey, nor is the crossing of our continent as smoothly[240] easy as crossing Europe. But given good weather, and the right kind of a machine, there are no difficulties, in any sense, anywhere.

There couldn’t be a worse tenderfoot than I am, there really couldn’t. I’m very dependent upon comfort, have little strength, less endurance, and hate “roughing it” in every sense of the word. Yet not for a moment was I exhausted or in any way distressed, except about the unfitness of our car and its consequent injuries, a situation which others, differently equipped, would not experience.

I suppose the metamorphosis has come little by little all across our wide spirit-awakening country, but I feel as though I had acquired from the great open West a more direct outlook, a simpler, less encumbered view of life. You can’t come in contact with people anywhere, without unconsciously absorbing a few of their habits, a tinge of their point of view, and in even a short while you find you have sloughed off the skin of Eastern hidebound dependence upon ease and luxury, and that hitherto indispensable details dwindle—at least temporarily—to unimportance.

For the benefit of those who are planning such a trip and in answer to the many questions that have been asked us since our return, we have compiled the following pages:

The subject of car equipment, driving suggestions, garage and road notes, I have left to E. M., who has written a part of this chapter.

At the end of the book is a small outline map of the United States and the route we took marked on it with divisions, each indicating a day’s run. On separate pages are enlarged, detailed diagrams of these divisions, drawn to uniform scale, giving general road surfaces, points of historical or topographical interest along the road, and thumbnail outlines that suggest the types and relative sizes of the hotels they represent. Each little symbol means a modernly, even a luxuriously equipped house; good food, good rooms and private baths. The mileage between all these best hotels is clearly indicated, so that a tourist can plan the distance he likes to run at a glance.

East of the Mississippi there are plenty of high-class hotels, and although fine ones are building in[242] every state of our country, in many sections of the West those dependent upon luxuries will still have to go occasionally long distances a day to get them.

From New York to San Francisco, by way of the Rocky Mountains and Los Angeles, is about 4,250 miles; which divides itself into about four weeks’ straight running, including the side trips to the Grand Canyon, to San Diego and Monterey, but not including extra days to stop over. To make it in less would be pretty strenuous, but perfectly feasible. Allowing no time out for sightseeing, accidents or weather delays, we arrived in San Francisco in four weeks’ running time, including the run to San Diego (two days), but we skipped a stretch of Arizona and Southeastern California, a distance that would have taken about three days, which would have made our own entire distance time twenty-nine days.

Some days we drove thirteen or fourteen hours, others we drove only three or four. We never ran on schedule, but went on further or stayed where we were as we happened to feel like it, excepting, of course, our one breakdown and the two times we were held over by rain. When roads were good and the country deserted, we went fast, but the highest the speedometer ever went for any length of time in the most uninhabited stretches was fifty miles an hour. At others it fell to six! For long, long distances, on account of the speed laws or road surfaces, we traveled at eighteen to[243] twenty. Between thirty-five and forty is the car’s easiest pace where surface and traffic conditions allow. East of Omaha we were never many hours a day on the road. Between Omaha and Cheyenne, and again between Albuquerque and Winslow, finding no stopping places that tempted, we drove on very long and far.

TO THE MAN WHO DRIVES

If I were starting again for the West, I should want an American car. A new car of almost any standard American make would be better for such a trip than the best foreign one.

In the first place, our own cars have sufficient clearance—ten inches. In the second place, spare parts are easy to get. Especially is this true of the moderate priced cars, which are sold in such large numbers that even the small country garages must carry supplies for them. But the important advantage is sufficient height. There are many places, particularly in New Mexico and Arizona, where with a low car you will have to fill in ruts so that your center can clear the middle of the road; and you will have to pile earth and stones on the slopes of some of the railroad crossings, so as not to “hang up” on the tracks.

Beyond the state of Colorado, which has magnificent mountain roads, if your car is a foreign[244] one, you should have extra-sized wheels put on it to lift the frame high enough. Of course, you can get through, by destroying your comfort and temper, in road building, and jacking the machine over places impossible to pass otherwise, and arriving in a very battered condition in the end. Another qualification besides height in favor of an American car, is endurance. American manufacturers have solved the problem of building machinery that needs little care and can be jolted without injury, where the more complicated European machinery under like treatment goes to pieces.

With a foreign car you are furthermore at a disadvantage in using metric tire sizes. You can always get the standard American sizes, which in the tubes will fit your metric casings all right, and for that matter you could probably at a pinch and temporarily use a standard casing. Metric size can be found in such places as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but shoes have a way of exhausting themselves without regard to your position on the map.

At Los Angeles or San Francisco you can get your metric equipment for the return trip so that if you start with new tires all around and two spares, you should have no need of buying tires on the road. Mine are, according to average American equipment, way under size for the weight of my car, and my six shoes carried me through easily. In fact there was New York air[245] in two of them when we arrived in San Francisco.

In the matter of what to carry: New tires, of course. For any but a very heavy car two spare shoes are plenty. Tubes you can buy anywhere. I only had five punctures all the way—and no blow-out. More than two extra shoes would be a hindrance because of their weight. A small shovel is sometimes convenient but not necessary east of New Mexico, and with a high car not necessary at all. African water bags are essential west of Albuquerque, but not before. Fifty or a hundred feet of thin rope may be very useful if you happen to strike mud or sand stretches, especially if two cars are making the trip together. In the way of spare parts, I should suggest a couple of spark plugs, extra valve and valve spring, fan belt, extra master links for a chain-drive car. Tire chains with extra heavy cross-pieces for all wheels are indispensable through the Middle West in case of rain. And see that the tools that have been “borrowed” from your tool kit have been replaced. Repairs on the road are aggravating enough, not to be made more so through lack of tools. Now that people carry spare rims and almost never seem to put in a new tube and pump it up on the road, they neglect to carry a pump and a spare tube, but if you should have three flat tires in one day, you will appreciate a spare tube and an old-fashioned tire pump that works!

I carried thirty-five gallons of gasoline in my[246] tank, which gave me a radius of three hundred and fifty miles on a tank full, with which I was never in any danger of running short. I should say that a two hundred-mile radius would be plenty, except across the desert. You can buy it even there, but at about three or four times the regular rate. You may go many miles before you come to a hotel, but gasoline you can buy anywhere. Good shock absorbers all around will probably save you a broken spring or two. It will pay to look over your springs after each day’s run and if a leaf is broken, have a new one put in before attempting to go on.

In the Middle West, automobile associations or highway commissioners do magnificent work. Roads are splendidly sign posted, and in the dragged roads districts, the rain no sooner stops than the big four- and six-horse drags are out. Follow a rainstorm in a few hours, and you will find every road ahead of you as smooth as a new-swept floor. Hence for the patient motorist, who can spare the time, there is always an eventual moment when there are good roads.

A few of the bad roads of the Southwest are so rocky that you have literally to clamber over them, but about seventy per cent of the road across New Mexico and Arizona, in which I include the road across the Mohave Desert that I covered later, is a fair, and occasionally fast, natural road. The streams are generally easy to get through, and at those that are sandy or too deep,[247] the automobile association keeps teams standing on purpose to see you through.

A FEW SUGGESTIONS ON DRIVING

Don’t try to drive from New York to San Francisco on high gear. You will often have used “first” by the time you strike the Rocky Mountains. Don’t, then, subject your bearings to an unnecessary strain by forcing your motor to labor as it must, if too steep a hill is taken on too high a gear. See that your hand brake can lock your wheels. On a five-mile grade one brake may burn out, and on most cars in this country the hand brake is next to worthless from lack of use and care. Letting the engine act as a brake is a good practice on long descents.

On going through sand or mud that looks as if it might stop you, change into a lower gear and don’t lose your forward momentum. It is easier to keep a car going than to start it again. Fording through streams instead of crossing on bridges is common in the Southwest and many of the streams have bottoms of quicksand character. Before fording a stream make sure that the water is not going to come above the height of your carburetor. Then start and stay in first until you are out on the other side. The idea is to go through at a constant speed with no jerk on the wheels.

In high altitude your carburetor will need more air, as there is less oxygen in a given volume of atmosphere[248] than at sea-level. This means also that a gasoline motor has considerably less power in Colorado than at sea-level. Don’t be discouraged and think your car is failing you when you find that you have to crawl up a long hill in “second,” upon which you think you ought to “pick up” on “high.” Not only is your motor less powerful than at home, but the hill is steeper than it looks. When you get back to sea-level it will run as well as ever.

The hardest thing for a stranger to guess seven or eight thousand feet up in the air, is height, grade or distance. You see a little hill, a nice little gentle incline about half a mile long at most; then gradually from the elevation of your own radiator out in front of you, you get some idea of the steepness of grade and you find from your speedometer when you get to the top, that it was a short little stretch of three miles.

One other point: on high altitudes you will have to fill your radiator often. Water boils more quickly, and this added to the long stiff grades, will cause a lot of your cooling water to waste in steam—even in a car that at normal altitude never overheats.

REPAIR WORK ON THE ROAD

You will find a few garages anxious to please, beautifully equipped and capable of the finest work. The garages of Europe are not to be compared[249] with our best ones. Garage equipment of the newest is to be found frequently, and all the way across the continent. The greater majority of garages are neither good nor bad; and again a few—a very few only—are incompetent, careless and lazy, the men having the attitude that they are doing you a favor in robbing you.

If you know enough about your car to do your own repairing, or know what should be done well enough to superintend others, you will have no trouble. Furthermore, if you actually oversee everything that is done—you know that your car is all right and you don’t have to hope that nothing has been forgotten by a man who knows that he is not going to be the one to suffer if his work is not what it should be. Also you know your car’s weaknesses and in driving can save them. I find garage men who take pride in their garages, glad and willing to serve an owner who takes that much interest in his machine.

On rare occasions, a first-class man resents your persistent superintendence, as though it were a slur on his ability or good intentions. There was a case in the Marksheffel garage in Colorado Springs—it was one of the best, by the way, that I have ever encountered. The car had been driven over 30,000 miles without ever being taken down, and without other care than my own. And before going into such an uninhabited country as the desert, there were several parts that I thought it safer to put in new.

Taking the crank case off and fitting new gaskets, two men worked on it until late into the night. I did not do any work myself this time, but stood watching the men, so interested in the efficient way they were doing the job, that I was unconsciously silent. At the end of about two hours, one of them burst out with:

“I guess you’ve had some pretty tough experience with dishonest garages—is that it?”

“No,” I told him, “that was not it, but that I always wanted to know the exact condition of my engine. Otherwise I might get into serious trouble on the road somewhere.” The situation being thus explained, his former resentment melted entirely, and a few hours later we parted warm friends.

In the case of this particular garage, as well as those whose names are listed in the garage expense accounts (pages 260-277), you can certainly leave the repairs to them, unless your engine is to you what a favorite horse is to a lover of animals—something whose welfare you do not want for a moment to be in doubt about.

On the whole, to a man who has had any driving experience at all, and who chooses a proper car, most particularly if it is a new one, the trip will not present any difficulties. And the experiences he may have will prove an incomparable school for his driving and for his ability to tackle new problems with the means at hand.

We had far too many! They were a perfect nuisance! Yet each traveler needs a heavy coat, a thin coat or sweater, a duster and a rug or two, and there is a huge bundle already. Then possibly a dressing-case for each, and surely a big valise of some sort, either suit-case or motor trunk. Added to this are innumerable necessities—Blue Books, a camera, food paraphernalia, an extra hat—most women want an extra hat, and men, too, for that matter—and though goggles and veils are worn most of the time, they have to be put somewhere. All of these last items go too wonderfully in a silk bag such as I described as having been given us. It was of taffeta, made exactly like an ordinary pillow-case with a running string at one end; it was about twenty inches wide and thirty inches long. E. M.’s straw hat, Celia’s extra hat, and mine all went in it, beside veils and gloves and other odds and ends. It weighed nothing; it went on top of everything else and, tied through the handle of a dressing-case by its own strings, was in no danger of blowing out. Why hats traveled in it without[252] crushing like broken eggshells, I don’t know, but they did.

Offering advice on clothes for a motor trip is much like offering advice on what to wear walking up the street. But on the chance that in a perfectly commonplace list there may be an item of use to someone, I have inventoried below a list of things that I personally should duplicate, if I were taking the trip over again:

First: A coat and pleated skirt of a material that does not show creases. Maltreat a piece first, to see. With this one suit, half a dozen easily washed blouses and a sleeveless overwaist of the material of the skirt, which, worn over a chiffon underblouse, makes a whole dress, instead of an odd shirtwaist and skirt. These underblouses are merely separate chiffon linings with sleeves and collars, and half a dozen can be put in the space of a pound candy-box—yet give the same service as six waists to your dress.

On an ordinary motoring trip such as over the various well-worn tours of Northeastern States or of the Pacific Coast or Europe, where you arrive in the early afternoon with plenty of time to rest for a while and dress for dinner, several restaurant or informal evening-dresses may be useful, but crossing the continent, unless you stop over several days in cities where you have friends, in which case you can send a trunk ahead, it is often late when you arrive, and any dressing further than getting clean and tidy does not strongly appeal[253] to you. Besides one suit and blouses, a very serviceable dress to take would be a simple house dress of some sort of uncreasable silk. There is a Chinese crêpe that nothing wrinkles—not to be confused with many varieties of crêpes de chine that crease like sensitive plants at a mere touch.

If I expected to go through towns where I might be dining out, I would add an evening dress of black jet or cream lace—two materials that stand uncreasingly any amount of packing. Otherwise my third and last would be a silk skirt and jacket—the skirt of black and white up and down stripes with white chiffon blouses, and the jacket black. The taffeta should be of the heavy soft variety that does not crack and muss. The skirt should be unlined and cut with straight seams gathered on a belt; a dress that folds in a second of time and in a few inches of space. With the coat on, it is a street dress; coat off (with a high girdle to match the skirt), it is whatever the top of the blouse you wear makes it.

A duster is, of course, indispensable. A taffeta one is very nice, especially when you want something better-looking, but on a long journey taffeta cracks, dirt constantly sifts through it and it can’t be washed as linen can. In the high altitudes of the Southwest, a day of tropical heat is followed by a penetratingly cold night. The thermometer may not be actually low and the air seem soft and delicious, but it sifts through fabrics in the way a biting wind can, and you are soon thankful if[254] you have brought a heavy wrap. When you need it, nothing is as comfortable as fur. I took an old sealskin coat and I don’t know what I should have done without it. On my personal list, a mackintosh has no place. If it rains, the top is up, and to keep wind out, I’d rather have fur.

Nor are shoes under ordinary fortunate circumstances important. But on my list are “velvet slippers.” Scarcely your idea of appropriate motoring footwear, but if your seat is the front one over the engine, you will find velvet the coolest material there is—cooler than buckskin, or suède, or kid or canvas—much! And if you want to walk, your luggage, after all, is with you.

Every woman knows the kind of hat she likes to wear. But does every woman realize, which Celia and I did not, that a hat to be worn nine or eleven hours across a wind-swept prairie must offer no more resistance than the helmet of a race driver? A helmet, by the way, made to fit your head and face is ideally comfortable. A hat that the wind catches very little won’t bother you in a few hours, but at the end of ten, your head will feel stone-bruised. An untrimmed toque, very small and close, and tied on with a veil is just about as comfortable as a helmet. It has the disadvantage of having no brim, but yellow goggles mitigate the glare, and it is the brim, even though it be of the inverted flower-pot turn-down, that is a pocket for wind that at the end of a few hours pulls uncomfortably.

A real suggestion to the woman who minds getting sunburnt, is an orange-colored chiffon veil. It must be a vivid orange that has a good deal of red in it. Even with the blazing sun of New Mexico and California shining straight in your face, a single thickness of orange-colored chiffon will keep you from burning at all. If you can’t see through chiffon, but mind freckling or burning, to say nothing of blistering, sew an orange-colored veil across the lower rims of your goggles and wear orange-colored glasses. Cut a square out of the top so as to leave no sun space on your temples, and put a few gathers over the nose to allow it to fit your face. Fasten sides over hat like any veil. The Southwestern sun will burn your arms through sleeves of heavy crêpe de chine, but the thinnest material of orange—red is next best—protects your skin in the same way that the ruby glass of a lantern in a photographer’s developing room protects a sensitive plate.

Wear the thinnest and least amount of underwear that you can feel decently clad in, so as to get as many fresh changes as possible in the least space, because of the difficulty in stopping often to have things laundered. What they put in the clothes in Southern California I don’t know, but[256] in any mixture of linen and silk, the silk has been apparently dipped in blue dye. A cream-colored silk-and-linen shirt of E. M.’s that happened to have the buttonholes worked in silk, is now a stippled green with buttonholes of navy blue. It is rather putting your belongings to the test of virtue—as those which are pure silk wash perfectly well. If I were going again I should take everything I could of thin crêpe de chine. It seems to be very easy to launder, and is everywhere returned in a clean and comfortably soft condition, whereas linen often comes back uncertain as to color and feeling like paper.

Although of more service on boats or trains, or in Europe where private baths are not often to be had, a black or dark silk kimono and a black lace bed-cap, if you ever wear bed-caps, are invaluable assets to anyone who dislikes walking through public corridors in obvious undress. My own especial treasures, acquired after many unsuccessful attempts, are a wrapper cut the pattern of an evening wrap, of very soft, black silk brocade. It rolls up as easily as any kimono, and takes scarcely any space. The cap is a very plain “Dutch” one, of thread lace with a velvet ribbon around it. A wrapper that isn’t obviously a wrapper, is sometimes very convenient. You could make believe it was an evening wrap, if you were very hard pressed.

And above everything, in traveling you want clothes that are uncomplicated. The ones that[257] you get into most easily are the ones you put on most often. Underblouses, such as I have described above, are a perfect traveler’s delight, because there is no basting in, or trying to clean collars, cuffs, etc. A fresh underblouse with lace trimming, rolled like a little bolster, measures one and a half inches by seven.

And remember: Plain skirts crease in half-moons across the back, pleated or very full ones don’t. An orange veil prevents sunburn. Western climate is very trying to the skin, so that you need cold cream even if you don’t use it at home. A lace veil of a rather striking pattern is at times of ugliness a great beautifier.

Clothes for men are a little out of my province. E. M. had some khaki flannel shirts, breeches and puttees that seemed to be very serviceable. At least he was able to spend any amount of time rolling on the road under the machine, and still brush off fairly well. He had a sweater and an ulster and two regular suits of clothes to change alternately at the end of the day. His evening clothes, tennis flannels, etc., were sent through by express.

To send one hundred and fifty pounds from New York to San Francisco costs fifteen dollars.

FOOD EQUIPMENT

Don’t take a big, heavy, elaborate lunch basket. If you want to know what perfect comfort is, get a tin breadbox with a padlock, and let it stay on the floor of the tonneau. In the bottom of it you[258] can keep tins of potted meats, jars of jam, and a box of crackers, some milk chocolate, or if you like better, nuts and raisins. And on top you can put everything you lay your hands on! Books, sweaters, medicine case, and a pack of oiled paper to wrap luncheons in. We had a solidified alcohol lamp, a ten-cent kettle, and thermos bottles, a big thermos food jar, which we filled with ice cream if the day was hot, and one of the bottles with cocoa if it was cool. Coffee (if you put cream in it) has always a corked, musty taste, but cocoa is not affected, neither is soup. Food tastes better if you don’t mix your bottles. Keep the jar for ice cream, if you like ice cream, a bottle for cocoa or soup, and two for ice or hot water. On long runs in the Far West, a canvas water bag is convenient. You can buy one at almost any garage, and it keeps water quite wonderfully fresh and cool.

On top of our permanent supplies we put the daily luncheons we took from the hotels: sandwiches, boiled eggs and fruit and the above-mentioned cocoa or ice cream. Cocoa we bought at the hotels, but our favorite place to buy ice cream was at a soda-water fountain.

The tins in our bread box we hoarded as a miser hoards gold—as a surplus that we might need to keep us alive; and, as is the common end of most misers, when we got to San Francisco and our journey was over, the greater part was still left—to give away.

EXPENSES

The following pages of actual expenses copied out of our diaries may be useful as a table of comparison by which other travelers can form an idea of what their own are likely to be.

For some the trip will cost more, but on the other hand, it can be done for very much less. In every case we had the kind of rooms that are assigned to those who, without questioning the price, asks for “good outside rooms with baths.” Undoubtedly, there were in many cases more expensive ones to be had, but in all cases there were cheaper ones.

Our restaurant bills, however, were comparatively light. We seldom ordered more than three dishes each, and the restaurant charges to people of very substantial appetite, will run more rather than less. On extras, of course, anyone could add or subtract indefinitely, but the details noted may serve as a scale of current charges.

The garage bills speak for themselves. Each man knows how far his own car can go on a gallon, and how often he wants it washed. No one can count his repairs in advance, but our garage bills, however, were certainly very much heavier than average. E. M.’s car is at best an expensive one to run, and on this trip it was at its worst, having been driven without overhauling for two years.

DAILY EXPENSE ACCOUNT

This was the original query that we started out to answer, and second “How long did it take you?” is the question that has been asked us more often than any other.

Interpreting “comfort” as really meaning “luxury,” you can go, so far as roads are concerned, only to Pueblo. So far as high-class hotels are concerned, there are two inhospitable distances. The first from Omaha, Nebraska, to Cheyenne, Wyoming; the second between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Winslow, Arizona, over three hundred miles.[7] Between Ash Fork, Arizona, and Needles, California, the distance is one hundred and ninety-one miles, which over those roads is a long distance, but perfectly possible to make in a day. Also it is by no means necessary to motor across any of these sections, unless you choose to. Putting a machine on a freight train is a very different matter from putting it on a boat and shipping it to Europe. In the latter case, you have to have a crate made as big and clumsy as a small house; then there are always delays and complications about catching boats, and altogether it is something of an ordeal. But to send a motor across[279] our own country, for as short or as long a distance as you please, is very simple. You have only to drive it to the railroad station, roll it on an automobile freight car with a door at the end, as in a small garage, take the next passenger train yourself and skip as many or as few miles as you choose. In America, automobile freight is wonderfully efficient, and is about as fast as ordinary express. (At least the Santa Fé service is.)

We spent only two days at the Grand Canyon and the car arrived in Los Angeles at the same time we did. There is only one deterrent to frequent freight shipments: the cost. Automobiles weigh a good deal and the freight charges are by the pound. From Winslow, Arizona, to Los Angeles—a distance of 613 miles—costs $151.20 for a car weighing 4,000 pounds. A 2,000-pound car would cost, of course, exactly half that amount. If you don’t want to go into the desert where hotels are great distances apart and roads are not the smoothest in the world, a 3,000-pound car costs $133.20 from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Barstow, California, after which there are plenty of good hotels and beautiful California roads. The above freight rates will be of interest to very few, as except in case of accident or some unseen conditions no one who can help it, will want to see their car, housed like a lonesome and abandoned dog, on a freight. If it is a very crippled car, that is different; it is more like leaving it in a nice cot in a hospital, where it can’t get hurt any more.

But on the subject of cross-continent freight, by which many people may want to ship their cars home, the Transcontinental Freight Company’s offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, etc., have a special rate for through shipment of automobiles that is a very good thing to know about. They ship three automobiles in one freight car, and for cars weighing 4,500 pounds and over, they charge a maximum rate of $225.00, or $5.50 a hundred pounds, from New York to San Francisco or vice versa. A car weighing 3,000 pounds would cost $165.00.

The sole objection to this consolidated car load shipment is that they only send out the cars when they have three auto consignments, and you may have to wait a few days for the other two car spaces to be filled. Also their service is only between the most important terminal points. If you live somewhere in the middle distance between these terminal cities, it might be cheaper, as well as more convenient, to ship by regular railroad freight.

SOME DAY

Some day we are going back. Celia, E. M., and I have planned it. We must have plenty of time, and take our whole families with us, so that she will not have to hurry home to a husband, and I will not have to rush on without pause, in order to get home to a younger son.[281] When we go again, we are going in two cars—one to help the other in case of need, and, if possible, a third car to carry a camping outfit—and camp! Celia and I both hate camping, so this proves the change that can come over you as you go out into the West. I say “out into,” because I don’t in the least mean being tunneled through on a limited train! The steel-walled Pullman carefully preserves for you the attitude you started with. Plunging into an uninhabited land is not unlike plunging into the surf. A first shock! To which you quickly become accustomed, and find invigoratingly delicious. Why difficulties seem to disappear; and why that magic land leaves you afterwards with a persistent longing to go back, I can’t explain; I only know that it is true.

The taste we had of the desert has something so appealing in the reminiscence of its harsh immensity by day, its velvet mystery at night—if only we might have gone further into it! We couldn’t then and now it is lost to us, three thousand miles away!

[282]

FOOTNOTES

[1] See Map No. 1, page 285.

[2] One of the lovely white ones is the Garfield house, where the President’s widow still lives.

[3] See Map No. 8, page 292.

[4] Since writing the above, the Union Pacific Hotel has unfortunately burned down—and still more unfortunately for tourists, the railroad is not building another, and will run a restaurant only.

[5] See Map No. 23, page 308.

[6] Only dinner and lunch we had in hotel.

[7] See Map No. 18. pp 302-303.

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CHAPTER		PAGE
I.	It Can’t Be Done—But Then, It Is Perfectly Simple	1
II.	Albany, First Stop	15
III.	A Breakdown	18
IV.	Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana	23
V.	Luggage and Other Luxuries	37
VI.	Did Anybody Say “Chicken”?	41
VII.	The City of Ambition	46
VIII.	A Few Chicagoans	52
IX.	Tins	60
X.	Mud!!	67
XI.	In Rochelle	72
XII.	The Weight of Public Opinion	75
XIII.	Muddier!	79
XIV.	One of the Fogged Impressions	86
XV.	A Few Ways of the West	90
XVI.	Halfway House	99
XVII.	Next Stop, North Platte!	107
XVIII.	The City of Recklessness	119
XIX.	A Glimpse of the West That Was	135
XX.	Our Little Sister of Yesterday	150
XXI.	Ignorance With a Capital I	155
XXII.	Some Indians and Mr. X	159
XXIII.	With Nowhere to Go But Out	172
XXIV.	Into the Desert	175 [xii]
XXV.	Through the City Unpronounceable to an Exposition Beautiful	187
XXVI.	The Land of Gladness	198
XXVII.	The Mettle of a Hero	205
XXVIII.	San Francisco	211
XXIX.	The Fair	229
XXX.	“Unending Sameness” Was What They Said	237
XXXI.	To Those Who Think of Following in Our Tire Tracks—To the Man Who Drives	241
XXXII.	On the Subject of Clothes—Food Equipment—Expenses—Daily Expense Account	251
XXXIII.	How Far Can You Go in Comfort?—Some Day	278

The Pacific at last!	Frontispiece
	FACING PAGE
What we finally carried	8
Stowing the luggage	12
Leaving Gramercy Park, New York	16
Still in New York State	20
The crowd in less than a minute. “Out of the window” in Cleveland	34
One of the exciting things in motoring is wondering what sort of a hotel you will arrive at for the night	44
Hours and hours, across land as flat and endless as the ocean	84
A bedroom in the Union Pacific Hotel, North Platte—not much of a hardship, is it?	108
A straight, wide road; not even a shack in sight—and a speed limit of twenty miles an hour	112
Wyoming in the ranch country	116
Cripple Creek	120
In the Garden of the Gods	124
Colorado. Pike’s Peak in the distance	128
First cowboys and cattle	132
Halfway across a thrilling ford, wide and deep, on the Huerfano River	136
A glimpse of the West of yesterday	140
Your route leads through many Mexican and Indian villages	148
The Indian pueblo of Taos	160 [xiv]
To see the sleeping beauty of the Southwest, the path is by no means a smooth one to the motorist	170
Across the real desert	180
Our chauffeur takes a day off at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado	184
This is not a gallery in a Spanish palace, but a gallery in the Mission Inn at Riverside, California	188
In a California garden	192
Under Santa Barbara skies	196
Ostrich Rock, Monterey, California	200
On the seventeen-mile drive at Monterey	208
On a beautiful ocean road of California	216
The portico of a California house	226
Sometimes we struck a bad road	244
In order to cross here, E. M. built a bridge with the logs at the right	248
On the famous “staked plains” of the Southwest	254

PREPARATORY EXPENSES
6 Repub. staggered tires, 6 tubes, and put on	$347.04
Warner speedometer	51.00

		PAGE
Map showing the entire route by days’ runs		284
1.	New York to Albany	285
2.	Albany—Fort Plain—Utica—Syracuse	286
3.	Syracuse to Buffalo	287
4.	Buffalo—Lake Erie—Cleveland	288
5.	Cleveland to Toledo	289
6.	Toledo to South Bend	290
7.	South Bend to Chicago	291
8.	Chicago—Rochelle—Davenport	292
9.	Davenport—Cedar Rapids—Des Moines	293
10.	Des Moines to Omaha	294
11.	Omaha to Grand Island	295
12.	Grand Island to North Platte	296
13.	North Platte to Cheyenne	297
14.	Cheyenne to Colorado Springs	298
15.	Colorado Springs to Trinidad	299
16.	Trinidad to Las Vegas	300
17.	Las Vegas to Albuquerque	301
18.	Albuquerque to Winslow	302-303
19.	Winslow to Grand Canyon	304
20.	Grand Canyon to Ash Fork	305
21.	Ash Fork to The Needles	306
22.	The Needles to Barstow	307
23.	Barstow—San Diego—Los Angeles	308
24.	Los Angeles to Santa Barbara	309
25.	Santa Barbara to Paso Robles	310
26.	Paso Robles to Monterey	311
27.	Monterey to San Francisco	312

First Day’s Run, New York to Albany (Map No. 1)
PERSONAL		MOTOR
New York.		New York. 49th Street Garage.
Lunched at home.		15 gals. gas	$2.70
		160 miles (should have been 150).
Albany. Ten Eyck Hotel.		Albany. Albany Garage Co.
2 hallboys carrying up luggage	$ .50	18 gals. gas	$2.70
Dinner, for three	4.60	Storage	1.00
Tip	.50	Washing	1.50
“Movies”	.30	1 gal. oil	.80
Postcards	.10
Stamps	.10
Soda water	.30
Telephone home	.90
Double room and bath (hotel full, couldn’t get three singles)	5.00
Single room (no bath)	2.00
Coffee and toast for two (in room)	.80
Tip	.20
Breakfast (E. M.)	.70
[261]Tip	.25
Luggage carried down	.50
Tip, chambermaid	.75
Second Day’s Run, Albany to Fort Plain (Map No. 2)
Fort Plain, N. Y.		Fort Plain.
Lunch, for three	$1.50	Broke bearing; towed to Hoffman & Adams’ garage	$3.00
Tip	.30	Hoffman & Adams’ garage at Fort Plain.
Chocolate, postcards, etc.	.40	New bearing valves	$9.09
		Time labor	12.30
		9 gals. oil	1.15
		Gaskets, telephone, etc.	3.00
		(A remarkably good garage; intelligent, efficient and good-natured men.)
Utica. Hotel Utica.		Utica. Hotel Utica garage.
3 fares Utica Hotel omnibus	$.45	10 gals. gas	$1.20
Telephone home	1.20	2 qts. oil	.40
Dinner (delicious) for three	3.50	Washing	1.50
Tip	.40	Storage	1.00
Tip, 1 hallboy (most of luggage left in the car)	.25	(Wind shield broken in garage.)
“Movies”	.30
Soda water	.30
[262]Double room (very big, and lovely; did not wire ahead and could not get three singles and baths)	$6.00
Single and bath (small but attractive)	2.50
Coffee for two (in room)	.90
Tip	.20
Breakfast (E. M.)	.90
Tip	.25
Telephone home	1.20
Lunch (for two)	1.60
Tip	.30
Valet, pressing one suit, E. M.	1.00
Hired motor	3.00
Tip	.50
Second night and morning Utica about same as above.
Third Day’s Run, Utica to Buffalo (Maps Nos. 2 and 3)
Lunched Geneva. Hotel Seneca.		Geneva.
Lunch for 3 (very good and beautifully served)	$3.00	2 gals. oil	$1.20
Tip	.35	(218 miles.)
Buffalo. Hotel Statler.		Buffalo. Hotel Statler garage.
2 hallboys carrying up luggage	.50	New glass in windshield	$4.00
[263]Dinner (for three)	$3.95	Storage	1.00
Tip	.40	2 gals. gas	2.60
3 single rooms (very nice and each with bath)	7.50
Tip, chambermaid	.75
Telegram to Erie	.26
Sundries	.80
Fourth Day. Buffalo to Cleveland. Broken by Stopover in Erie (Map No. 4)
Lunch at Niagara Falls.		Drove out to Niagara Falls, back after lunch, and to Erie, Pa., 93 miles.
(At R. R. lunch counter to save time)	$.50
Tip	.20
Erie, Pa. Hotel Lawrence.		Erie. Star Garage.
Hallboys up and down	1.00	Storage	$1.00
Chambermaid	.75	10 gals. gas	1.30
Dinner	4.95	2 gals. oil	1.20
Tip	.50	(Very nice garage.)
3 single rooms with baths	9.00
Coffee and toast (in room) for one	.65
Breakfast, C. and E. M.	1.60
Tip	.25
Telegrams and sundries	1.00
Lunch (for three)	3.15
Tip	.35
Cleveland. Hotel Statler.		Cleveland, 102 miles.
Dinner (three)	4.80
[264]Tip	$.50	Hotel’s Garage.
Theater (three)	6.00	Storage	$1.00
Ice-cream sodas	.30	10 gals. gas	1.30
3 rooms with baths (lovely)	13.50	1 qt. oil	.20
Coffee in room (2)	.80	Toledo, 120 miles.
Tip	.20
“Club” breakfast, E. M.	.75
Tip	.25
Valet, press two suits (E. M.)	2.00
All tips—2 boys up	.50
Down	.50
Chambermaid	.75
Fifth Day’s Run, Cleveland to Toledo (Map No. 5)
Cleveland
Lunched Statler	$3.75
Very reasonable! Most delicious food.
Toledo. Hotel Secor.		Toledo. United Garage.
Dinner	3.40	Storage	$.75
Tip	.40	12 gals. gas. (15c.)	1.80
“Movies”	.30	Wash and polish	1.50
Ice-cream soda	.30	Fill grease cups	.75
Telegrams, newspapers, etc.	.80	Pair of pliers	.50
3 rooms, 2 baths	10.50
Coffee and toast (for two)	.70
Tip	.20
Usual tips, hallboys	1.00
Chambermaid	.75
[265]Telegram to South Bend	.26
Sixth Day’s Run, Toledo to South Bend (Map No. 6)
Lunch Bryan
Christman Hotel (3)	$2.25
Tip	.25
South Bend. Hotel Oliver.		South Bend. Lincoln Garage.
Dinner	$4.10	Storage	$.75
Tip	.40	1 gal. oil	.80
3 rooms, 3 baths	9.00	17 gals. gas	2.38
Coffee and toast (2), breakfast (1)	1.90
Usual tips	1.75
Sundries	.80
Seventh Day’s Run, South Bend to Chicago (Map No. 7)
Chicken dinners and tip	$1.75
Chicago. The Blackstone.		Chicago. “Down Town” Garage.
4 bellboys (or porters) luggage up	$1.00	Storage, three days	$2.25
[6]Dinner for two (E. M. out) and tip	4.00	Ground valves	6.75
Theater (2)	5.00	2 spark plugs	2.00
Telegram	.52	Wash and polish (3 days)	6.00
Coffee (2) and tip	1.10	17 gals. gas (13c.)	2.21
Breakfast, E. M	.90	2 qts. oil	.40
Tip	.25	20 gals. gas	2.60
[6]Lunch	.80
Tip	.30
Beautiful big double twin beds and dressing room	7.00
[266]Lovely small, single room and bath (E. M.)	3.50
Laundry	4.75
Valet	2.00
Tailor, pressing two dresses	2.00
Average one day’s expenses, less extras than above.
Extras bought in Chicago:
Supply of potted meats, etc.	9.35
At Woolworth’s:
Kettle	.10
4 doz. plates	.20
Oiled paper	.10
2 doz. spoons	.10
Solid alcohol, lamp, saucepan (complete)	1.25
Bread box	3.45
Padlock	.30
Eighth Day’s Run, Chicago to Rochelle (Map No. 8)
		Stopped by mud at Rochelle, Ill., 77 miles, May 6-7.
Rochelle, Ill. Collier Inn.		Rochelle. Garage next door to Inn.
(Typical day.)		Storage, two days	$1.00
(No bellboys.)		Wash car	1.50
3 telegrams	$1.48[267]	Chains (2)	3.60
3 rooms with bath, one at $3, two at $2.50, including board	$8.00	8 gals. gas	1.20
Tips to waitress	.75
Tip to chambermaid	.50
“Movies,” etc.	.80
Left Rochelle, May 8
Eighth Day’s Run, Continued. Rochelle to Davenport (Map No. 8)
Lunched Rochelle.
Davenport, Iowa. Black Hawk Hotel.		Davenport. Black Hawk Hotel’s garage.
Dinner (3)	$3.40	10 gals. gas	$2.20
Tip	.40	1 gal. oil	.75
Hallboys, luggage up and down	1.00	Storage (night charge)	.50
(Went down to river bank and spent nothing.)		Wash car	1.50
Enormous twin-bed room and bath, very attractive furnishing	4.50	Started on road of mud to Des Moines. We went to Cedar Rapids, but as it is out of the course between Davenport and does not belong on this route, it is omitted. There was an A1 garage there, but our experience in mud cost:
Single room and bath	1.50	Vulcanizing 3 tires	$2.25
(Best rooms for least price of any hotel we encountered.)		Take off radiator, repair gear case	5.60
Breakfast	.60	Car in shop (no storage), wash	2.00
Tip	.25	20 gals. gas	4.40
Coffee and toast (2)	.80	1 gal. oil	.75
Tip	.20
[268] Ninth Day’s Run, Davenport to Des Moines via Cedar Rapids (Map No. 9)
Des Moines. Chamberlain Hotel.		Des Moines. Bernhard & Turner Auto Co.
Tips, bellboys, etc., as usual	$1.75	Vulcanizing tire	$.75
Drive in the converted jitney	5.00	Storage	.50
Dinner (3)	3.75	20 gals. gas. (22c.)	4.40
Tip	.35	2 qts. oil	.30
Breakfast, E. M.	.75
Tip	.25
Sundries	.80
Coffee and toast (in room) (2)	1.10
2 single rooms (bath between)	5.50
1 single room and bath	2.50
Lunch to take with us	2.25
Ice cream	.30
Tenth Day’s Run, Des Moines to Omaha (Map No. 10)
Omaha. Hotel Fontanelle.		Omaha. Guy L. Smith Garage.
(Typical day.)		Storage (2 days)	$1.50
Hallboys, porters, chambermaid	$1.75	20 gals. gas	4.40
Dinner (3)	3.80	1 gal. oil	.80
Tip	.40
3 single rooms and baths (at $3.50) (lovely)	10.50
[269]Coffee (1)	.30
Tip	.15
Breakfast (E. M.)	.50
Tip	.20
Lunch, ladies’ dining room (2)	2.70
Lunch (E. M.), club lunch, men’s café	.60
Tip	.25
“Movies,” magazines, soda water, etc.	1.30
Lunch to take with us	1.80
Ice cream	.40
Eleventh and Twelfth Days’ Run, Omaha to North Platte (Maps Nos. 11 and 12)
Lunch in car.		Independent Garage, Grand Island.
		15 gals. gas	$3.30
North Platte. Union Pacific Hotel.		North Platte. J. S. Davis Auto Co.
3 rooms (no baths), supper and breakfast for three	$7.50	Storage	.50
Tips, postcards, etc.	1.35	17 gals. gas. (22c.)	3.74
Lunch to take with us	1.60	1 gal. oil	.60
Thirteenth Day’s Run, North Platte to Cheyenne (Map No. 13)
Cheyenne, Wyo. Plains Hotel (brand new).		Cheyenne. Plains Hotel garage.
[270]Tips, as usual	$1.75	Storage	$.50
Dinner and tip	3.85	20 gals. gas	4.40
3 single rooms and bath	9.00	2 gals. oil	1.20
Coffee and toast (in room, for two)	.90
Breakfast (E. M.)	1.00
Fourteenth Day’s Run, Cheyenne to Colorado Springs (Map No. 14)
Lunch Denver. Brown’s Palace Hotel	$3.60
Colorado Springs. Antlers Hotel.		Colorado Springs. Mark Sheffel Motor Co. (highest class garage).
Usual tips	$1.75	Take off pan, stop leak, crank case and gaskets	$8.80
An average dinner (3)	4.80	Vulc. case	4.50
Drive over “high drive” (motors not allowed) (for 3)	6.00	Greasing and tightening bolts. 7 cups grease	1.40
Tip to driver	.50	1 pt. kerosene	.05
Enormous double room with dressing room, bath	6.00	1 pt. cylinder oil	.05
Single room and bath	3.50	3 days’ storage	1.50
Coffee and toast (in room)	.70	35 × 4 B. L. Republic red tube	7.35
Tip	.25	4½ B. O. patch	.90
(Especially attractively served.)		22 gals. gas	3.30
Breakfast (E. M.) (averaged)	.95	3 gals. oil	2.40
Tip	.25
Valet (pressing all our clothes)	8.00
Laundry	6.20
[271]Fifteenth Day’s Run, Colorado Springs to Trinidad (Map No. 15)
Lunched, Pueblo. Vail Hotel	$3.00
Trinidad. Hotel Cardenas (our first of the Harvard chain of hotels).		Trinidad Novelty Works Co.
Am. plan, 3 good rooms with 3 baths and good “American cooking” meals ($4.50)	$13.50	Storage	$.50
$1.50 deducted for lunch we were not to have.		14 gals. gas. (15c.)	2.10
Tips	1.75	2 qts. oil	.40
Incidentals, movies, etc.	1.30	Las Vegas, 145 miles.
Lunch to take with us	1.60
Las Vegas. The Castaneda. (Did not telegraph ahead, so could not get baths).		Las Vegas Auto Co.
3 rooms ($3.25)	$9.75	Storage	$.50
American plan (lunch deducted).		15 gals. gas.	2.50
Lunch to take with us	1.50
Tips	1.75
Telegrams, sundries	2.50
[272] Seventeenth Day’s Run, Las Vegas to Albuquerque (Map No. 17)
Lunched Santa Fé.
(Own lunch.)
Albuquerque. Hotel Alvarado.		Santa Fé Transcontinental Garage.
Usual tips	$1.75	2 men, 1½ hours, patching muffler and exhaust and tightening bolts, etc.	$2.25
Telegrams and sundries	2.80
3 delightful rooms, 3 baths, supper and breakfast ($4.25 each)	12.75
Extra amount of food to take:
Eggs	.60
Cake	.80
Sandwiches	2.10
Cocoa	.20
Ice cream	.30
Eighteenth Day’s Run, Albuquerque to Winslow (Map No. 18)
Leave Albuquerque. Out in desert.		Albuquerque. Coleman Blank Garage (A 1 garage).
		2 men, 4 hours each (night labor, double rate), mending leak in radiator, taking off exhaust, filling grease cups, etc.	$6.00
		[273] 1 front spring shackle bolt	.80
		18 gals. gas in tank	5.40
		10 gals. in cans	3.00
		4 gals. oil	2.80
		(First-class garage.)
Winslow, Ariz. Harvey Hotel.		Winslow.
Rooms, including meals	$10.50	Car shipped, via A. T. & S. F. R. R. Freight to Los Angeles. Perfect system for motor shipment, no crating and no delay.
Tips (most of luggage shipped with car)	1.25
3 tickets Winslow to Los Angeles	65.85	Freight charge	$151.20
Extra tickets Williams to Grand Canyon	22.50
By Train, Winslow to Grand Canyon (Map No. 19)
Lunch, Williams	$3.30	Car on freight.
Grand Canyon, Ariz. El Tovar Hotel.
2 rooms, bath between	$10.00
1 room and bath	5.00
Including meals.
Mule down Angel Trail (E. M.)	4.00
Moving pictures exhibited at studios of trip through Colorado river	3.00
[274]Tips, per day, about	$1.25
Sundries, etc.	1.80
By Train, Grand Canyon to Los Angeles
Drawing room, Pullman	$14.00	Car on freight.
Lower berth, E. M.	4.00
3 breakfasts	2.60
Tip	.30
3 lunches	3.15
Tip	.35
Los Angeles. Alexandria Hotel.		Los Angeles. Smith Bros.’ Garage (highest class garage).
1 hallboy (most luggage in car)	.25	Result of desert:
Dinner (very simple; for three)	7.80	1 front spring	$11.00
Theater	6.00	Tire and tube vulcanized	2.50
1 room and bath, inside and dark	7.00	Exhaust pipe brazed	6.10
1 very small outside room and bath, but perfectly good room	4.50	Exhaust pipe welded and repaired; install new gaskets and assemble; dismantle muffler, repair and assemble; paint muffler	21.50
Breakfasts and tips and luggage down	2.70		21.50
Hiring a motor to move to Pasadena (while ours being repaired)	10.00	2 gaskets	.90
Stopped with friends, but beautiful hotels in Pasadena.		Wash and polish	2.50
		21 gals. gas. (8c.!!)	1.68
		1 gal. oil	1.00
		To charge battery	.50
[275] Resumed Motoring. Short Run Late in Afternoon, Pasadena To Riverside
Riverside. Mission Inn. (The most enchanting hotel!)
3 rooms, baths, and food	$18.00
Tips and sundries	3.60
Twenty-third Day’s Run, Riverside to San Diego (Map No. 23)
San Diego. U. S. Grant Hotel.		White Star Motor Co.
Dinner	$3.00	Storage, 3 days	$1.50
Tip	.35	20 gals. gas	3.20
(Average day.)		1 gal. oil	.80
Hallboys, luggage up and down	1.75	Wash car	1.50
Chambermaid	.75
3 rooms and baths	14.00
3 entrances exposition (night)	1.50
Electric chair	2.00
Breakfast (3)	2.95
Exposition, 3 entrances (morning)	1.50
Electric chair (whole day and held all 3 of us)	4.00
Lunch at Exposition restaurant (3)	1.50
Tip	.30
Indian Village	.75
Panama Canal (3)	.75
Various side-shows, etc.	6.30
[276] Twenty-fourth Day’s Run, San Diego to Santa Barbara (Maps Nos. 23 and 24)
Lunched in car on road.
Santa Barbara. Hotel Potter.		Santa Barbara. El Camino Real Motor Co.
3 rooms and baths, a day, including meals (none of which we took; lunched and dined out every day)	$21.00	25 gals. gas	$2.50
Bringing coffee to room and tip	.45	Storage, 3 days	1.50
Lunch to take with us the day we left	1.50	Oil (1 gal.)	.80
Ice-cream at druggist’s in thermos jar	.30
Sundries and telegrams	3.10
Twenty-fifth Day’s Run, Paso Robles to Monterey (Map No. 26)
Paso Robles, Cal. Paso Robles Springs Hotel.		Paso Robles. Pioneer Garage.
Rooms with baths and two meals; no luncheon charged for	$12.75	15 gals. gas	$3.30
Rooms with baths and two meals; no luncheon charged for	$12.75	Storage	.50
Lunched at the R’s on our way. Much farther out of our way than we thought, and had[277] supper at Salinas; had cocoa, toast and omelette, plenty of it and very good for 75c. for three.
Twenty-sixth Day’s Run, Monterey to San Francisco
Monterey. Hotel Del Monte.		Monterey. Hotel Del Monte Garage.
Rooms (perfectly vast) and baths, American plan	$18.00	14 gals. gas	$3.08
Tips and breakfast tray	2.50	Storage	.50
Lunch to take with us	1.60	Oil	.90
Sundries	2.00

The Project Gutenberg eBook of By motor to the Golden Gate

BY MOTOR TO THE GOLDEN GATE

PREFACE

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

BY MOTOR TO THE GOLDEN GATE

CHAPTER I IT CAN’T BE DONE—BUT THEN, IT IS PERFECTLY SIMPLE

CHAPTER II ALBANY, FIRST STOP[1]

CHAPTER III A BREAKDOWN

CHAPTER IV PENNSYLVANIA, OHIO AND INDIANA

CHAPTER V LUGGAGE AND OTHER LUXURIES

CHAPTER VI DID ANYBODY SAY “CHICKEN”?

CHAPTER VII THE CITY OF AMBITION

CHAPTER VIII A FEW CHICAGOANS

CHAPTER IX TINS

CHAPTER X MUD!!

CHAPTER XI IN ROCHELLE

CHAPTER XII THE WEIGHT OF PUBLIC OPINION

CHAPTER XIII MUDDIER!

CHAPTER XIV ONE OF THE FOGGED IMPRESSIONS

CHAPTER XV A FEW WAYS OF THE WEST

CHAPTER XVI HALFWAY HOUSE

CHAPTER XVII NEXT STOP, NORTH PLATTE!

CHAPTER XVIII THE CITY OF RECKLESSNESS

CHAPTER XIX A GLIMPSE OF THE WEST THAT WAS

CHAPTER XX OUR LITTLE SISTER OF YESTERDAY

CHAPTER XXI IGNORANCE WITH A CAPITAL I

CHAPTER XXII SOME INDIANS AND MR. X.

CHAPTER XXIII WITH NOWHERE TO GO BUT OUT

CHAPTER XXIV INTO THE DESERT

CHAPTER XXV THROUGH THE CITY UNPRONOUNCEABLE TO AN EXPOSITION BEAUTIFUL

CHAPTER XXVI THE LAND OF GLADNESS

CHAPTER XXVII THE METTLE OF A HERO

CHAPTER XXVIII SAN FRANCISCO

CHAPTER XXIX THE FAIR

CHAPTER XXX “UNENDING SAMENESS” WAS WHAT THEY SAID

CHAPTER XXXI TO THOSE WHO THINK OF FOLLOWING IN OUR TIRE TRACKS

TO THE MAN WHO DRIVES

A FEW SUGGESTIONS ON DRIVING

REPAIR WORK ON THE ROAD

CHAPTER XXXII ON THE SUBJECT OF CLOTHES

FOOD EQUIPMENT

EXPENSES

DAILY EXPENSE ACCOUNT

CHAPTER XXXIII HOW FAR CAN YOU GO IN COMFORT?

SOME DAY

FOOTNOTES

LIST OF MAPS

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

BY MOTOR TO
THE GOLDEN GATE

BY MOTOR TO
THE GOLDEN GATE

CHAPTER I
IT CAN’T BE DONE—BUT THEN, IT IS PERFECTLY SIMPLE

CHAPTER II
ALBANY, FIRST STOP[1]

CHAPTER III
A BREAKDOWN

CHAPTER IV
PENNSYLVANIA, OHIO AND INDIANA

CHAPTER V
LUGGAGE AND OTHER LUXURIES

CHAPTER VI
DID ANYBODY SAY “CHICKEN”?

CHAPTER VII
THE CITY OF AMBITION

CHAPTER VIII
A FEW CHICAGOANS

CHAPTER IX
TINS

CHAPTER X
MUD!!

CHAPTER XI
IN ROCHELLE

CHAPTER XII
THE WEIGHT OF PUBLIC OPINION

CHAPTER XIII
MUDDIER!

CHAPTER XIV
ONE OF THE FOGGED IMPRESSIONS

CHAPTER XV
A FEW WAYS OF THE WEST

CHAPTER XVI
HALFWAY HOUSE

CHAPTER XVII
NEXT STOP, NORTH PLATTE!

CHAPTER XVIII
THE CITY OF RECKLESSNESS

CHAPTER XIX
A GLIMPSE OF THE WEST THAT WAS

CHAPTER XX
OUR LITTLE SISTER OF YESTERDAY

CHAPTER XXI
IGNORANCE WITH A CAPITAL I

CHAPTER XXII
SOME INDIANS AND MR. X.

CHAPTER XXIII
WITH NOWHERE TO GO BUT OUT

CHAPTER XXIV
INTO THE DESERT

CHAPTER XXV
THROUGH THE CITY UNPRONOUNCEABLE TO AN EXPOSITION BEAUTIFUL

CHAPTER XXVI
THE LAND OF GLADNESS

CHAPTER XXVII
THE METTLE OF A HERO

CHAPTER XXVIII
SAN FRANCISCO

CHAPTER XXIX
THE FAIR

CHAPTER XXX
“UNENDING SAMENESS” WAS WHAT THEY SAID

CHAPTER XXXI
TO THOSE WHO THINK OF FOLLOWING IN OUR TIRE TRACKS

CHAPTER XXXII
ON THE SUBJECT OF CLOTHES

CHAPTER XXXIII
HOW FAR CAN YOU GO IN COMFORT?