I borrowed a rope from him to use in pulling the tail back to a normal position and we started back to the swamp.
Meanwhile it seems that two boys had seen me land, and when I did not emerge from the cockpit immediately, had run to Savage with the news that “an aviator had landed upside down in the swamp” and that they had “gone up and felt of his neck and that it was stiff and he was stone dead.”
I had flown over the town in the rain only a few minutes before, and as in those days it was not difficult for anyone to believe anything about an airplane, the town promptly locked its doors and came crawling and wading through the swamp. The older inhabitants followed the railroad track around its edge and by the time I returned with the farmer and a rope there were enough townspeople to solve my problem by carrying the ship back onto solid ground.
They were undoubtedly much disappointed at having come so far on a false alarm but turned to willingly to help me get the ship out of the swamp.
The next edition of one of the Minneapolis papers carried the following item which typically exemplifies what has been the average man’s knowledge of aeronautics.
AIRPLANE CRASHES NEAR SAVAGE
Charles A. Lindbergh, son of ex-Congressman Lindbergh, crashed near Savage, Minnesota, this morning. He was flying in his plane three hundred feet above the ground when it suddenly went into a nose dive and landed on its propeller in a swamp. Lindbergh says he will be flying again in three days.
After reading this and similar accounts of equally minor accidents of flight, it is little wonder that the average man would far rather watch someone else fly and read of the narrow escapes from death when some pilot has had a forced landing or a blowout, than to ride himself. Even in the post-war days of now obsolete equipment, nearly all of the serious accidents were caused by inexperienced pilots who were then allowed to fly or to attempt to fly—without license or restriction about anything they could coax into the air—and to carry anyone who might be beguiled into riding with them.
My next move was to wire to Little Falls for a propeller which Wyche had expressed from Americus and two days later joined my father in his campaign at Marshall.
My father had been opposed to my flying from the first and had never flown himself. However, he had agreed to go up with me at the first opportunity, and one afternoon he climbed into the cockpit and we flew over Redwood Falls together. From that day on I never heard a word against my flying and he never missed a chance to ride in the plane.