Part 2

It is great to see the threshing machines out here. They mow down those wheat heads just as the great machine guns across the sea mow down the armies. Some of these machines are drawn by twenty or thirty horses, and it takes as good a horseman to handle all of those horses as to do chariot races at a circus. One of these threshers comes along through the grain like a great giant, and with its huge claws and arms and feet, it cuts the wheat, threshes it, puts it into bags, and weighs it.

The grain is shipped to some city and stored in enormous elevators until it is sold to the millers to be made into flour.

Uncle Silas says that the life of the modern farmer is far from "slow." There is something doing every minute, and when he looks out over those fields of waving wheat and realizes that he is growing enough food there to keep thousands of people happy and healthy, he would not exchange places with anyone.

Most boys and girls think of a park as a little plot of ground with a fountain in its center and neat little flower beds arranged primly around. The Yellowstone Park is almost as large as Connecticut, and Uncle Sam has given it to America so that no one can ever spoil its beauty by building factories or cities there. Think of a park containing mountains two miles high, cataracts higher than Niagara, great canyons, and geysers which are the wonder of the world. There are hundreds of these geysers which are huge natural fountains spouting mud, boiling water, steam, and minerals. They burst out of the ground and then sink back leaving pools where wonderful colors seem to be painted on the rock. Each geyser has its own name and its own habits. Old Faithful used to spout every sixty minutes to the very second, but lately takes a little more time. He is getting old, but he still sends up a column of boiling water and steam 150 feet high, which is "going some." The Giant deserves its name for it spouts 200 feet, while the Black Growler fusses and mutters a lot but does very little real work. The Constant sends up a spout every minute with only a few seconds for rest in between.

You would not think that with all this boiling water there could be any lakes of cold water, but the Yellowstone Lake is as clear and cold and its fish as fine as any you could find in the world. People claim that they have caught fish in the lake and then without moving a foot have cooked them in a pool of boiling water. We could believe this only we do not think the soldiers would let anyone fish there. Soldiers are stationed all around the park to keep tourists from carrying off souvenirs. Some tourists would run away with everything but the geysers if they had a chance. A geyser would be pretty hard to carry in ones suitcase.

This great park has plains where bison run wild, great cliffs where the eagles rear their young, and forests where Mr. Grizzly makes himself quite at home. He even comes up to the hotels and carries off garbage and though he seems quite tame, we boys did not feel like getting too familiar with him.

Glacier Park is way up at the northern edge of Montana. If it were a little farther north, it would be a Canadian citizen instead of being subject to Uncle Sam. It was the favorite hunting ground of the Blackfeet Indians but about 27 years ago copper was discovered there and Uncle Sam thought that the mines should be properly opened so he bought the land. There was not enough copper to make mining pay, but there was a stock of scenery so large that it would last forever, so Uncle Sam gave the land to his big family for another playground and the Blackfeet Indians now live on a reservation east of the park.

There is lots of big game among the mountains, and the Rocky Mountain sheep and mountain goats seem able to climb up the steep sides of the rocks as easily as a fly goes up a wall.

The park is named from its 60 glaciers, but is even more famous for its 250 lakes. People used to think that they had to go to Switzerland to see the most beautiful lakes in the world, but before long the Swiss will get the habit of "Seeing America First," for the lakes of Glacier Park are as fine as those in the Alps. There are tiny little ones high up among the mountains and large ones in the valleys and they are so deep and clear and still that they are like mirrors. The streams are wonderful, too. At the Triple Divide, the water separates and goes in three directions. One stream flows to the Pacific, another to Hudson Bay, and the third to the Gulf of Mexico.

Perhaps you think that tourists have to endure a lot of hardship to visit this wild spot, but if you could see some of these hotels (built like Swiss chalets), and could eat some of the meals they serve, you would change your mind. The fish from these mountain lakes have a flavor that beats anything we have ever tasted, and we have lived beside the Great Lakes all our lives. If we could stay here longer we should join a camping party, for they have great fun living in tents, fishing, hunting, tramping over the trails, and climbing glaciers. We will do our glacier climbing when we get to Ranier Park.

Uncle Sam has given the American people eleven national parks covering over seven thousand square miles of the finest scenery in the world, and Rainier Park in the State of Washington, is one of the most wonderful of these. Think of a park containing one mountain nearly three miles high, and having 28 rivers of ice or "glaciers" flowing down its sides. Thousands of years ago Mount Rainier was a hot-tempered old fellow and he and the smaller peaks in his range spent their time belching out fire, but at last in a frightful fit of passion, Mount Rainier blew off his entire head and where his brains were is now a huge crater filled with thousands of feet of ice. The other volcanoes put out their fires long ago, too, and now they all have snowy beards on their wrinkled old cheeks.

We climbed up one of the glaciers and it surely was "some climb." Everyone in the party used an alpine stock and it gave us fellows a kind of shaky feeling in our knees when we could look down a wall of ice a thousand feet deep into a great crevasse or crack. We were glad to stand pretty close to the guide who was big and strong and who knows these glaciers as we boys know the streets of Detroit. We never knew before that ice can flow like water only much more slowly. The center of a glacier moves down the mountain about 16 inches a day. There are tiny little insects living in this ice. We saw them through the microscope and they were hopping around as though their feet were cold. There are wee pink plants growing in the ice in some places and they make the ice look rose colored. They are so small that you cannot see them without a microscope.

Rainier Park is one of the famous wild flower gardens of the world. Blooming at the very edge of the snow fields are miles and miles of wonderful flowers. There are daisies, columbine, larkspur, and many others and they are much taller and finer than those in common gardens. Grown-ups tell us boys that if we associate with great people we shall grow to be like them, and perhaps these flowers grow so big and tall from living so near Mount Rainier and the great cedars and firs. We do not wonder that this part of the park is called "Paradise Valley."

Fishing here on the Columbia River is not just a sport. It is a business which brings in millions of dollars a year. There are single factories where a half a million cans of salmon are put up in one day, and over a hundred million dollars worth of salmon have been taken from the Columbia river since the white man first came here.

The large salmon are called chinook, and one of these fish weighing eighty pounds is not an unknown thing, though their average weight is about twenty pounds. There are many small kinds of salmon, so the chinook is called "the King of Salmon."

The baby fish are hatched way up in the mountain streams and as they grow friskier and larger, they swim down the stream into the Columbia river and on to the ocean where they stay about four years till they are quite grown up. Then they get homesick for the scenes of their childhood, and, choosing their mates, they start back to a sort of "home-coming." It takes a long time, for the current is strong, but if they are lucky enough to miss getting caught and canned, they arrive at the "spawning place" after several months, and lay their eggs, and soon their little fish children are starting out to see the world as their parents did before them.

The salmon are caught with traps, nets, and water wheels, and ninety thousand fish have been caught at once in one of the large netted traps while one wheel has caught fifteen thousand fish in a day. These wheels are covered with netting and are turned by the swift current of the river, which raises the fish into the air and tosses them into the boat.

When the boat is full, it is unloaded at the canning factory at the edge of the river. The Chinese men who kill the fish are very swift, and the machines which clean the salmon can handle about forty-five a minute. They are then cut into pieces by machinery before being packed into cans, and in these cans the salmon is steamed till thoroughly cooked.

We went through the warehouse of a great canning factory, and it seemed as though there could not be enough people to eat all that fish, but Columbia river salmon always finds a market. It is famous everywhere.

There is no country in the world which has kept for its people such playgrounds as we have in the United States. Probably that is because we are the only people who have an Uncle Sam. A king or an emperor would never dream of putting great tracts of land aside for his subjects to enjoy without paying a cent of toll or a penny of taxes, but our Uncle Sam has given his nephews and nieces hundreds of miles of the most wonderful land in the world and these huge parks belong to you and to us just as much as they do to the Astors and Vanderbilts.

The Yosemite Park is one of the finest of our National Parks. It is nearly in the center of the state of California. Here you would almost forget whether it is summer or winter for up on the mountains you are in the land of perpetual snow, while down in the valley it is like the finest summer day and birds and flowers are as plentiful as on a June morning. There are all sorts of trees, too. Some of them are giant redwood trees, cousins of the big sequoias. As you go higher and higher in a mountainous country, the trees grow smaller and smaller until they become dwarfs. Our guide showed us trees fully sixty years old whose trunks were no larger than a pencil.

The largest mass of solid rock in the world is in Yosemite Park. The Indians used to worship it as the great chief of the valley and the early Spaniards named it El Capitan which means "The Captain." On a clear day the people in the San Joaquin valley sixty miles away can see this giant rock.

The cascades of the Yosemite Park are among the finest on earth. The Bridal Veil is like a shower of lace or mist and is called "the birthplace of the rainbow," because there are so many rainbows playing in the spray. One of the cascades is called by the queer Indian name of Lung-oo-too-koo-ya. The Yosemite Falls would make Niagara seem like a dwarf so far as height is concerned, though a much larger volume of water flows over the rocks at Niagara than at Yosemite Falls.

Today we Berry Wagon Boys have seen the oldest living thing. It began to grow at least 2000 years before Christ was born, and will probably be living thousands of years from now. If it could talk, it could tell wonderful stories of things it saw when the world was young, but it can only stand and wave its arms gently when the wind blows, for it is just a tree. It stands with many other giant cedar trees in Sequoia Park, California, and until a hunter discovered it in 1879, probably no white man had ever seen it. This hunter named the tree "General Sherman," and it surely looks like the commanding officer of this huge tree regiment. It is a sequoia tree 279 feet high and so large that twenty men standing with outstretched arms can just reach around it.

The Grizzly Giant, the biggest sequoia in Yosemite Park, is much more shaggy-looking and battered than the general, and its heart has been eaten out by fire, but it is a brave old giant and keeps right on living in spite of that painful accident.

The sequoias are named after Sequoyah, a Cherokee Indian who invented an alphabet and a written language for his tribe. These trees will surely "keep his name green" long after any other monument would have turned to dust. The sequoias are sometimes called "the Methuselahs of the forest," but that old Bible character only lived to be 969 years old, and these giant trees are mere babies at that age.

We boys think the sequoia forest the most solemn place we were ever in. The trees tower up so high above you and make you feel so sort of small and new and useless! Then there is scarcely a sound, and you cannot hear your own footsteps on the soft carpet of pine needles.

It seems dreadful to cut down trees which have been growing so long, yet occasionally one is made into lumber. After standing for a thousand years or more in the forest, it must seem strange to be cut into sections, loaded on flat cars, and started on a journey to some distant place to be made into ship masts or furniture or some other thing of which the tree never dreamed when it stood in its home on the slope of the Sierras.

The Grand Canyon of Arizona does not look like a real place. It seems like a place for giants, everything is so huge and wonderful. It is as though some great giant had dug his house out of solid rock. He did not make the walls smooth, but chiseled them out in strange shapes like castles and towers and temples, and he made the sides so steep that for thousands of years no human being dared to go down into his cellar. Instead of leaving the walls gray, he stained them with purples and pinks and browns and reds, and yellows, so that Joaquin Miller, the California poet, called the Grand Canyon a "paint pot 218 miles long and 15 miles wide." Our giant was a thirsty old fellow, so he let the Colorado river flow through his cellar. When you stand on the rim of the canyon, the river looks like a little thread of silver ribbon, but if you were to descend 6000 feet, you would discover that the Colorado is a wild, dashing, terrible river—so wild that only a few men have ever tried to launch their boats on it, and some of those few have lost their lives in the attempt.

The Indians found several trails leading into the canyon, but they did not tell their secret to the pale-face. However, when the white men =did= discover the trails, they spread the good news and now you can go to the very rim of the canyon in a Pullman car, can stay at a splendid hotel, and can make the descent to the bottom of the canyon in perfect safety, for there are guides to lead the way and sure-footed little donkeys to carry you. The "hurricane deck" of one of these mules is not the most comfortable place to spend a day, but the views one gets on the trip are worth all the trouble. These pictures can only give you a faint idea of the wonders of the Grand Canyon.

It would be foolish for us to try to describe the scenery because grown-ups have tried it and failed, but we would like to tell about the Hopi Indians who live in their funny little huts near the hotel and who may be seen weaving baskets, making jewelry and pottery, and dancing their queer dances, but this page will not hold any more words.

It must have been a pretty dark old world before people found out about making kerosene from petroleum, for candles and queer little lamps burning lard, sperm-oil, or camphine, furnished all the light there was at night. All that time there were great lakes of petroleum down deep in the earth, but when it oozed out to the surface, people thought it was a nuisance and often abandoned their greasy farms. Later these same farms were worth a fortune.

It was a Pennsylvania man who first decided to bore for oil, and people thought him a little bit flighty to do such an unheard-of thing. When his oil well began to spurt out 35 barrels of oil a day, and people learned how valuable this oil was, the whole country got excited and in almost every neighborhood someone bored for oil. Of course in many states they were disappointed, but vast fortunes have been made from the oil wells of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, California, and Texas.

The Texas oil fields we visited were interesting although very greasy and smelly. The great derricks made the fields look as though a lot of war vessels were lying at anchor, for they resemble the masts of modern battle ships. These derricks hold the heavy steam drills which bore down into the earth. When a big gusher is struck, it sometimes spurts out a thousand barrels of oil a day, and you may be sure that no one is allowed to be careless with matches on the oil fields, for if a gusher or an oil tank gets afire, it is almost impossible to stop it, and immense damage is done.

The oil is piped from the oil fields or taken in huge tanks to some city to be made into kerosene, gasoline, benzine, and scores of other useful articles. Nothing is wasted, for from the left-overs, perfumes, chewing-gum, and lots of other surprising things are made. These are called by-products.

On some of the railroads oil is used instead of coal in the engines, and oil is also used in large quantities to keep the roadbed hard and free from dust. In many parts of the country there are fine oiled auto pikes. All of these things take a lot of petroleum, and it is a lucky thing for America that she is the oiliest country in the world.

Among all the sights that Columbus and his men saw in the new world, nothing amazed them more than to see the Indians "eating fire and breathing smoke from the nostrils," but evidently the explorers were not very much afraid to learn the trick from the Indians. When they went back to Spain they took a lot of tobacco with them, and the Spanish men and women soon had the smoking habit. It was Sir Walter Raleigh who started the fashion in the court of Queen Elizabeth in England. It seems as though he might have found something more useful to do. The custom grew and spread all over the world. It is lucky for us that the early explorers did not get the scalping habit along with the tobacco habit or by this time we Americans would be a scalpless race!

The settlers learned from the Indians how to grow the tobacco and before long the great plantations of Maryland and Virginia were bringing a lot of wealth to the colonists, and people even paid their taxes in tobacco. Today it is grown in many states and almost every land, but the United States raises more than any other country, and when we speak of the wealth of our nation, we must include tobacco because its sale here and abroad brings in vast sums of money.

Tobacco seeds are as small as grains of sand, and we BERRY WAGON BOYS have held in our hands enough seeds to furnish plants for a large plantation. A field of tobacco is a beautiful sight, for the plants grow quite high and have huge, smooth, dark green leaves. When the leaves grow yellow, the farmers cut off the stalks and hang them on sticks or wires, and when the leaves are stripped from the stems they are hauled to the "curing barn" to be "cured" or dried. These barns are kept hot all of the time, until the leaves are cured when they are started off to market.

In many places tobacco is grown under great tents which make the fields look like an army encampment.

A cotton field is a great sight. The plants come up about to our waists and the fluffy tufts of white cotton pop out of the green pods or bolls just as chestnuts burst out of their burrs. The negro cotton pickers go up and down the rows many times, for the cotton does not all ripen at the same time.

We saw loads and loads of cotton being taken to the ginhouse where the cotton gin picks out all the seeds and leaves the snowy cotton ready to be pressed into bales. The seeds are not wasted for the oil is pressed out and sold to be used, as olive oil is used in cooking and salad. Sometimes this oil is sold to men who get mixed in putting on the labels and instead of marking the bottles of oil with American labels, they get marked as fancy olive oil from Italy. This must be very humiliating to the cottonseed oil, for it cannot speak a word of Italian and is ashamed of the lie that is printed on its front.

When the cotton is taken out of the gin, it is ready to go to the compress and be pressed into bales or huge bundles. A bale is about the size of a traveling man's sample trunk and the cotton is squeezed in so tightly that the bales have to be wrapped in burlap and bound with iron bands to keep the cotton from bursting out. These great bales weigh about five hundred pounds and we have seen the river boats loaded down to the water's edge and railroad stations piled high with them. They are sent to the cotton mills in various parts of our own country and in foreign lands to be made into cloth. People all over the world use cloth that once grew on our southern plantations. When we learned this, we looked at the fluffy tufts with new interest. Perhaps this tuft would be woven into a Kimona for a Japanese girl. Maybe that one would someday be in the sail of a fishing boat off New Foundland or a tent on the Sahara Desert, or a sheet on a hospital cot in San Francisco or New York.

Cotton is grown some in other countries, but American cotton is considered the best and brings in great wealth to our Uncle Sam.