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.