Part 4
Western people in the same walk of life as your friends at home are traveled, cultured, broad-minded, most interesting people. I was especially impressed by the women. They think for themselves on the public questions of the hour, and voice their opinions in no uncertain terms. As Philip Gibbs said in his article in _Harper’s_ (“Some People I met in America”), “Desperately earnest about the problems of Peace, intrigued to the point of passion about the policy of President Wilson, divided hopelessly in ideals and convictions, so that husbands and wives had to declare a No Man’s Land between their conflicting views.” It is so in our family. My brother has expressed it aptly: “President Wilson is a state of mind. You are all for him, or not at all.” But Heaven help me to keep politics out of this peaceful narrative!
We found many golfers ahead of us. Mrs. W., the chairman of the house committee, and especial hostess of the day, played with us. She played, as all Western women enter into everything, with enthusiasm. The course was flat, easy, and of nine holes.
But the grasshoppers! I had seen plenty of them on the trip while going through the farming country. They would jump into the car, take a ride on the hood or windshield, get on your veil or down your neck, or collect in family parties on the luggage or in your lap; but that was utter isolation compared to the crop on those links. The seventeen-year locust had _nothing_ on these grasshoppers! On the fairway, when you hit your ball, hundreds would fly up in a cloud and your ball was lost to sight. You walked on a carpet of them. It reminded you of “the slaughter of the innocents.” Your clothes were covered with them. When I sat down at the third tee, I heard a crunching noise, unlike anything I ever experienced. Mrs. W. called out--alas! too late--“Oh, you mustn’t sit down until you shake the grasshoppers out of your skirts. You will ruin your clothes.” That white satin skirt has been boiled, parboiled, dry-cleaned, and hung in the sun, but the back looks bilious and pea-green in spots! When I got back to the hotel, I found them inside of my blouse and under-linen, and even in my hair and shoes. It is fortunate that they did not bite, or someone else would be writing this tale.
After real afternoon tea, with toast, hot biscuits, and sandwiches (not our ice-cream cones), we drove back to the city and dined and talked until the lights were put out in the hotel and the elevator man had gone to sleep. We were told of the fine roads through North Dakota, “but not in bad weather; then you will have to reckon with the gumbo.” “Gumbo” is described by Webster as “soup, composed of okra, tomatoes, etc.” But that learned gentleman never drove after a rainstorm in North Dakota.
The next morning the sky looked threatening, but we started out for Jamestown, one hundred miles away. All went well until noon, when a gentle drizzle set in, and we put up the top, stopped under a big tree, had our lunch, and waited until the supposed shower was over. Farther west it had poured; we noticed that the cars coming in were covered with mud, and concluded that they had come over country roads. Surely not the National Parks Highway! So down went the top, and off we started in a _wet_ atmosphere, but not really raining. The chains had not been disturbed since they were comfortably stowed away on leaving New York. One man advised us to put them on, but with a superior don’t-believe-we-will-need-them air we left our tree shelter. He called out after us, “Say, strangers, you don’t know what you all are getting into.” We didn’t, but we jolly soon found out! In ten minutes we had met gumbo, and were sliding, swirling, floundering about in a sea of mud! I will try to describe it. A perfectly solid (apparently) clay road can become as soft as melted butter in an hour. Try to picture a narrow road, with deep ditches, and just one track of ruts, covered with flypaper, vaseline, wet soap, molasses candy (hot and underdone), mire, and any other soft, sticky, slippery, hellish mess that could be mixed--and even that would not be gumbo!
“Thank God for the ruts!” we devoutedly exclaimed. If you once got out of the ruts, your car acted as if it were drunk. It slid, zigzagged, slithered, first headed for one ditch, and then slewed across the road. It acted as if bewitched. We had passed several cars abandoned in the ditch, and those ahead of us, even with chains on, were doing a new version of a fox trot. The road grew worse, the mire deeper. The ruts were now so deep that we just crawled along, and, to prevent getting stalled, we pulled out of them. In a shorter time than it takes to write it, our left front wheel was down in the ditch and the car lying across the road, and stuck fast. That was all that prevented us from being ditched. There we were, unable to move. We had not tried to walk in gumbo. That was an added experience. All three of us got out to see what _could_ be done. It would be impossible to jack the car up there and put on the chains; the jack would have sunk out of sight. And no car could pass us. Your feet stuck in the gumbo so that when you pulled up one foot a mass of mire as large as a market-basket stuck to it, or your shoe came off, and you frantically slid and floundered around until you got it on again. We thought of a dozen clever things to do, _if_ we could only have walked. There was a farmhouse half a mile ahead where no doubt we could have hired a team to pull us out. But how could we get there? My sympathies are all with the fly caught on sticky flypaper! In a short time, a Dodge car came up back of us, a man driving it, with his wife, his son, a boy of fifteen, and a small girl. Being a light car in comparison, and having chains on, they fared better; but they could not pass. They offered to pull us back onto the road. Fortunately we had brought a wire cable with us. This was attached to both cars, and then both tried to back. Did we budge? No such luck! All hands got to work, sliding around like drunken sailors, and filled in back of our wheels with stones, sticks, cornstalks, and dry grass. After being stuck there just one hour, we got back onto the road and into the ruts, and slowly we crawled up to the top of a hill, where some guiding angel had scattered ashes and sand. We got to a dry, grassy spot, where a sadder and wiser driver put on the chains. How did we get there, Toodles and I? Those blessed Dodge people _invited_ us to stand on their running-boards while they crawled up the hill. Later we overtook them having tire troubles, and we were glad to be able to return their kindness. The next lovely job was to clean our shoes. Nothing can stick worse than gumbo, and we had been soaked in it. Needless to say that our shoes were ruined, but we were lucky it was not the car.
So, with care, and crawling about five miles an hour, still slipping and sliding like eels, we covered the forty miles into Jamestown. The hotel dining-room was closed, and we had supper in a Chinese restaurant, then went to have our shoes cleaned in what had been before July 1st a typical Western saloon. It was filled with miners and cowboys playing billiards, and a villainous automatic piano playing rag-time. We sat up in the chairs while a “China-boy” dug at the gumbo, now hard as stone. One Westerner stood there taking us all in, and drawled, “You folks must have struck gumbo.” We had; but then again--“It might have been worse.”
IX
THE BAD LANDS--“NATURE’S FREAKIEST MOOD”
From now on we experienced the real thrills, the discomforts, and the wonders of our trip. Will the Eastern people (or the rest of our country) ever realize the debt of gratitude that we owe to those early pioneers--the men who blazed the trails across the wilderness, suffering every privation, facing inconceivable dangers, and many dying of cold and starvation? As we studied our map and saw those hundreds of miles ahead of us, through the bad lands, over the dry Montana plains, through the desert, and over the Rocky Mountains, I admit that it seemed like the end of the world, and a million miles from home--almost a foolhardy undertaking! Then we felt ashamed of ourselves. With a good car, and all of us in prime condition, we left old gumbo and fears behind, and made a fresh start. The big towns are one hundred miles apart. Governor H. had told us not to stop in Bismarck, a fine big city, but to go across the Little Missouri River to Mandan, sixteen miles farther on. Bismarck’s fine hotels and cement pavements were a great temptation to stop, but our hopes were more than realized. This river, like all of these Western rivers, once navigable by big boats, was so low that teams were driving across in many places. When we reached the ferry we found a tiny steamer with paddle-wheels at the stern waiting for us. It held two small cars beside ours. On the other side a corduroy road had been built out over what had been the bed of the river at least a quarter of a mile, so that the ferry could land. The rest of the way was through pine woods.
Mandan is a beautiful city, with the new Lewis and Clark Hotel, owned by Governor H. It was crowded, but when we showed the clerk Governor H.’s signature we were given his private suite. Remember that we had been coming over the plains for a hundred miles, and you can share our joy to walk into a Fifth Avenue hotel, with a Ritz-Carlton suite to revel in. This was where extremes met. It was wonderful that it was so beautiful. It was really more wonderful that it was there at all.
The next day we went through another hundred miles of cattle and grain ranches. We were told that these towns, a hundred miles apart, had been trading-posts and stage-stops in the early days. Dickinson, Glendive, Miles City, and Billings, Montana, are all fine, thriving cities--excellent modern hotels, wide paved streets, fine churches, stores, office buildings, and theaters, not overlooking the movie houses. In passing, I wish to speak of the movies--a national, educational institution, to be reckoned with. If we were not too dead tired after a scrub, change of clothes, and dinner, we went to a movie and saw excellent pictures and the world’s doings to date. Usually there were plenty of electric fans, and always one big “paddle” fan _outside_ the front entrance. This we found the case with banks, office buildings, and shops. (Solve that if you can!) In many dozens of canaries were singing a jubilee. There was always a large clock in full view of the audience--another sensible idea. These cities were equipped with every modern device and invention. They claimed your admiration and deserved your unstinted praise. It was almost impossible to believe that the next morning, ten minutes after you left the pavements, you would again be out on the prairies, and perhaps meet no one for hours.
At Dickinson, North Dakota, we found the St. Charles Hotel very good. We had been told to have lunch the next day in Medora, at the Rough Riders Hotel, one of the few buildings left of the early cowboy days. The town is nothing--a new school and store and a handful of old buildings. It is quite near the ranch where Colonel Roosevelt lived for two years. They instantly tell you that with real pride, for these people loved the man as they knew him. Like the buffalo, the picturesque cowboy is almost extinct. On the big cattle ranches we saw _near_ cowboys--boys in their teens herding the cattle, and some ordinary, dirty-looking men on horses. There were half a dozen men eating noon dinner at the hotel(?), a tumble-down old building about as romantic as any old woodshed. One grizzly old fellow was pointed out as having been a guide for the Colonel. The place was dirty, the food impossible, greasy and cold, and the few bullet-holes in the far-famed bar were not sufficient to make this member of the party rave over the place. It seemed like a travesty, or a ghost of some former existence. You _may_ infer that we did not care for Medora!
For the next hour we climbed steadily up, the roads growing narrow and rocky and full of chuck-holes. Everything that is rough and bad going in the Far West is “chucky,” and we were soon to get acquainted with _real_ chuck-holes. Presently we came out on a plateau, and before us lay the Bad Lands of North Dakota. You may read of them, see pictures of them, or see them from a train, but you have never really seen their wonder, their grotesquely beautiful grandeur, until you stand in their midst as we did. High cliffs, deep canyons, queer formations of stone and earth that look like great castles or human heads. Again they resemble mushrooms of mammoth size, in all colors--gray, pink, orange, black, greens of a dull hue (not from the verdure, for there is none to speak of), yellows, and even purplish and chalky white. Here again you can see the outline of some giant creature, as if it had been carved in a prehistoric age. We are told that the sea once covered these lands. You can plainly see the ridges, like a rock on the ocean shore where the water has receded. I suppose they are called the Bad Lands because they are arid and nothing will grow. They are the wonderlands of this country--geological wonders, left from some glacial period before the foot of man trod the earth. No pen can adequately describe that scene; no brush could do justice to its weird beauty. The stillness of death reigned. Not a bird or a living creature did we see. The way winds around these strange cliffs, now up a steep incline, where you look down at the road below, again in the bottom of a ravine or chuck-hole, and you wonder how you could drive the car either down or up again.
“Did you ever see anything like this, anywhere?”
“No, but it looks like what I imagine the bottom of hell must look like.”
All that day we drove in and out, with an ever-changing panorama of fantastic shapes and colors. We were awed, thrilled to our very marrow, and even now, weeks later, as I write of it, I realize that my hands are cold. Believe me, my friends, this is the acid test of driving. If you qualified, well and good; but if you lost your nerve or your head--a long good-night, and a perfectly good funeral! Glendive, Montana, and the comfortable Jordan Annex looked human and mighty good to us that night. We all admitted that we were scared half to death. But, oh, the wonder and majesty of that sight! We blessed our good car, we blessed our Maker, and we slept as if we had been drugged.
X
THE DUST OF MONTANA
Poor Montana! Burned, scorched to ashes from four summers of drought, and no rain in six months! Everywhere the people told us the same story. The rivers and streams were dry as bones. “Don’t stop here for water” was a familiar sign. We met hundreds of families driving out, in old “prairie-schooners,” with all their household furniture and their cattle. These poor souls had to find water for their cattle and themselves. They had tried to raise crops, and were literally driven out. The children looked pinched and starved. The women and men were the color of leather, tanned by the scorching sun of the plains, the dust, and the dry, hot winds. They had lost everything. Their faces were pathos personified. It wrung your heart to see them. We always slowed down and waved to them, and often stopped and talked. It was rare to get a smile from even the children. When we would give some little kiddie an orange, it was the pathetic mother who tried to smile. Before we had covered the four hundred miles across the state, our faces were burned, our lips so dry and cracked that they bled, and our eyes nearly burned out of our heads. Yet we had but a few days of it, and they had suffered for four summers! At night we would soak our hands and faces in cold cream, but the next night they were quite as bad. The dust was from six to eight inches deep, and the roads were either through sand or chucky. We know now why Lohr named his song “My Little Gray Home in the West.” It could not possibly have been any other color. A dozen times we thought our springs were gone. The road looked like a level stretch of dust; then down you would go to the bottom of a chuck-hole with a thud that made your teeth chatter.
The cattle looked as starved as the people. We came to one valley that had been irrigated, and for a mile or so the crops were green. The ditch was full of water--real _wet_ water. Horses and cows, dogs and people were standing in it. We filled our radiator and bottles and laved our hands and faces. Germs or no germs, we drank our fill. In half an hour or less your throat and mouth would be as dry as ashes, and your thirst was insatiable. We found that fruit, especially oranges and pears, quenched the thirst better than water; so we always kept plenty of fruit in the car. The going was so bad that we did not reach Miles City until late. After leaving Fargo, each morning we had taken the precaution to wire ahead for reservations, always adding “driving,” so, if we were belated, the rooms would still be held for us. We had been told that the Olive Hotel at Miles City was the only poor hotel on the route. Everyone had given it a black eye. We had mentioned it to the manager at the Jordan Annex in Glendive. “I think you will find it very comfortable. Our company has taken it over and refurnished it.” When we were sending our usual morning wire, he very politely said that it would be _his_ pleasure to notify them of our coming.
To digress for a moment--the people of Montana pride themselves on their universal courtesy to strangers. Time and again, we had people say, “You have found our people polite and obliging?”--“Yes; they are kindness itself”--and they were.
When we reached the Olive Hotel we were agreeably surprised. Everything was clean and comfortable, looking like Paradise after the dust and scorching sun of the plains. We were having our lunches put up by the hotel each morning, as there was absolutely nothing decent en route (shades of Medora!). I asked for the manager, Mr. Murphy.
“We shall be glad to put you up a lunch,” he said. “What would you like?”
“Anything but _ham_ sandwiches. We have been so fed up on them that we can’t look a pig in the face for fear we will see a family resemblance.” Then I added, “May the bread be cut thin, and buttered?”
He laughed and assured us that it would be “all right.” Right! Ye gods, we had a feast! Oh, how we have blessed dear Mr. Murphy! May his shadow never grow less! As we were starting in the morning the head waitress came out with the lunch neatly done up, saying, “Mr. Murphy has had some extras put in. We like Easterners and try to please tourists.” We paid the modest price of $2.50 (for three people) and decided to curb our curiosity until noon. This was a _real_ occasion, and just the proper spot must be found for our party. Some days we had driven many miles to find a clump of trees to lunch under. Today we went ten miles and never even saw a tree--the deadly monotony of the endless plains--heat, dust, sand, sagebrush the color of ashes, and only a jolly little prairie-dog scurrying to his hole or a hawk flying overhead. Not a tree--not even a big bush to give shade! We asked some ranchers where they got wood for fuel. “There ain’t no wood. Every fellow digs his coal in his own backyard.” It sounded simple, and I was glad to hear that nature had provided some compensations for the farmer, whose life at the best is not all “beer and skittles.”
On we drove until one o’clock--and still no trees! A wail from Toodles: “What about having lunch in the car?” There was a bend in the road over the top of a hill. “I have a hunch that there will be a tree around the bend,” ventured the bird-man. There was!--just one big, glorious cottonwood tree that would shelter a drove of cattle, and the only tree in sight on those plains as far as the eye could see. Out came the faithful old rug and the hamper--and then we unpacked the lunch! Three juicy melons, a whole broiled chicken for each one, thin bread and butter, a jar of potato salad, fresh tomatoes, three jars of marmalade, eggs, crisp lettuce, pickles, and the best chocolate-cake I ever tasted, besides peaches, pears, and hot coffee. You may think we were a lot of greedy pigs, but that was the banner lunch of the trip. May Mr. Murphy never go hungry! He has made three friends for life.
Miles City is the last and best of the representative “cow-towns” of early days. The annual “round-up,” a celebration of frontier days, is usually held on the 4th of July. Here our watches went back an hour. We were now in the land of silver dollars. It had been some years since we had seen them in New York. Out here, when you had a bill changed, you received nothing but silver dollars. A bit heavy, but all right, if you had enough of them.
That night we reached Billings. We had gone through some fertile ranches where the irrigation system had turned an arid waste of sand into fields of green crops. The country improved, as we neared this “Metropolis of Midland Empire,” as they term it, the center of the sugar-beet industry. Wherever we saw crops, there the sugar-beet flourished. They must raise many thousands of tons of them. The fair grounds and elaborate buildings are of interest. It is a real city rising out of the plains, like a living monument to the pioneers, men and women. The Northern Hotel was the finest we had seen since leaving the Twin Cities. We rested up for a day, had the car cleaned and oiled, and had ourselves laundered, shampooed, and manicured, starting refreshed and full of expectations on our last lap to the Yellowstone. In contrast to the Olive Hotel, our lunch here was the one real “hold-up” in any hotel. Six eggs, six tongue sandwiches, and four cups of coffee were $3.75. We protested, and they deducted seventy-five cents.
We had heard pleasing reports of Hunter’s Hot Springs being the French Lick of the West; anything that spelled _water_ sounded good to us, although we had crossed the upper Yellowstone River only to see a little stream so low that the cattle were standing in the middle. There is nothing but the hotel--not even a garage. All the cars were parked in front and stood there all night. The place was crowded with tourists from all over the country. “Hello there!” greeted us, and to our surprise and great pleasure we found our cousins, Mr. and Mrs. H., of Fargo, with the glad tidings that she would go through the park with us. This place is unique--a low, rambling building, with a quarter of a mile of porches, a very large swimming pool of mineral water, hot from the springs, and private baths of all descriptions. The big plunge had been emptied and scrubbed, and the hot water was pouring in, but would not be sufficiently cool to swim in for another day.
Many charming people were here, taking the course of baths, resting, or just stopping en route, as we were. One celebrity was presented to us, the youthful editor of “Jim Jam Jems,” Mr. Sam H. Clark, of Bismarck, North Dakota, and his attractive wife. There were other ladies in his party, all going to the park. They were attired in the costume of khaki breeches, puttees, and coats, looking very Western and comfortable.