'We' - Charles A. Lindbergh

CURTISS FIELD, L. I.—POLICE GUARDING “THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS” ON ITS WAY TO THE RUNWAY FOR THE TAKE-OFF

CURTISS FIELD, L. I.—CAPTAIN RENÉ FONCK WISHES ME THE BEST OF LUCK

The greatest damage to the plane was a broken propeller, although from that time on it always carried left rudder. We wired for a new propeller and a can of dope from Houston and in a few days were hedgehopping the mountain tops in true Canuck fashion on our way west.

A Canuck, or J.N.4C is nothing more or less than a Canadian Jenny and while it is lighter and performs a little better than a Jenny, it is subject to the same characteristic of being able to just miss most everything it passes over.

We passed over the Rio Grande and cut through a corner of Mexico, then landed on one of the Army emergency fields at Pumpville and induced the section boss to sell us enough gasoline to continue our flight.

Dusk overtook us near Maxon, Texas, and we landed between the cactus and Spanish dagger west of the town, which consisted of a section house and three old box cars of the type used throughout the Southwest for housing the Mexican section hands.

The section boss was living alone. He was soon to be relieved and stationed in some more populated locality. We spent the night with him and in the morning cleared a runway for the ship. Maxon was quite a distance above sea level and as the air was less dense, an airplane required a longer distance to take-off in. There was a small mountain on the east end of the field and the land sloped upwards toward the west. We worked until midday cutting sagebrush and cactus. There was a light breeze from the west and the air was hot and rough. After using three-quarters of the runway the Canuck rose about four feet above the ground but stopped there, and when the end of the runway was passed the wings and landing gear scraped along on the sagebrush. As soon as we picked up a little extra flying speed, another clump of sagebrush would slow the ship down again until, after we had gone about two hundred yards, a large Spanish dagger plant passed through the front spar of the lower left wing. After being cut off by the internal brace wires, it remained firmly planted in the center of the outer bay. We landed immediately and found the plane to be undamaged except for a fourteen inch gap in the spar and a number of rips in the wing fabric.