Maw is of the opinion that most of the merchants, storekeepers and venders of commodities west of the Mississippi River are robbers. “Not that I mean real robbers like used to hold up the stagecoaches here in the park,” she explained. “They don't do that no more since the cars has come—I suppose because they go so fast that it ain't convenient for robbers no more. But in the old times, they tell me, when they run stagecoaches in here, and didn't have no railroad in on the west side, there used to be a regular business of holding up the stagecoaches right over where old man Dwelley used to have his eating house for lunch. There's a clubhouse there now, instead of his old eating house, they say. I heard that when they wanted to buy old man Dwelley out for a club and asked him how much he wanted, he thought a while, and then did some counting, and then allowed that about twelve thousand dollars would be about right. The man that was buying the place, he set down and writ a check right then for twelve thousand dollars. But old man Dwelley didn't take it. 'I dunno what that thing is,' says he. 'When I say twelve thousand dollars I mean twelve thousand dollars in real money.'”
When Bozeman Was Riled
They told him he had for to wait a few days and they went over to Livingston and got twelve thousand dollars in five-dollar bills, and brung it to Dwelley, and told him to count it. He counted a little of it, and then said it was all right; he'd take their word for it that there was twelve thousand dollars there. So then he put it in a sack where he had some beaver hides. They told me he sent it all by express to a fur buyer in Salt Lake after a while, and told him to put it in a bank. He had one thousand five hundred dollars saved out, so they told me, and he put that in the bank over to Bozeman. It riled them people at Bozeman a good deal to think that anybody not from Bozeman should have one thousand five hundred dollars inaccessible in their town. So one day when old man Dwelley was there they fined him one thousand five hundred dollars for killing a elk out of season, or something. That made him mad. Still and all, he had his twelve thousand dollars left, not mentioning what he got for his beaver hides.
“One thing with another,” continued Maw after a period of rumination, “you can't say but what this park is a fine place. Of course there's always a wonder in my mind where they get all the hot water for the geysers. It looks to me like a industrial waste. If the geysers could be used for laundries, that would be something like. Then, again, they're all the same color. If they'd throw in some bluing now and then, or some red or green, they'd look prettier—that'd give more variety, like. Yet they say these geysers has been running for years and no let-up. Ain't it funny the things you see, away from home?
“If the geysers could be used for laundries, that would be something like.”—Maw—p. 48
“I like to ride along these roads up in the mountains, and look down at the rivers. You get way up above a river and it looks like a long washboard, down below, here in the mountains. And I'll have to say the roads is crooked. I say to Paw: 'We're all church members except Cynthy, which went to college, and if we go we go.' And even if we do—why, we've all had a vacation, and I'll tell it to the world that a vacation trip once in a lifetime is something no family ought to be without, no matter what the preacher says about idleness. I'm strong for vacations from this time on. Fact is, I believe Paw and me has got to have them, though this is our first. And to think we was afraid to buy ice cream once, except on the Fourth of July! Now, Paw goes right up to one of them stands and buys five dollars of gasoline like it was nothing. Times has changed, like I said. Lookit at our car now. I can remember back—not so far, neither—when if I got a ride in a side-bar buggy I thought I was a mighty lucky girl. And here we are, traveling with every sort of comfort anybody could ask.”
There were many appliances which Maw gradually had installed for facilitating housekeeping in her day-to-day camps—folding beds, a cracker-box pantry, a planed board for table, racks for groceries and the like, all strung alongside the car, so numerous and extensive that by the time the Hickory Bend Outing Club's great wall tent had been added you barely could see the wheels underneath the moving mass. From the midst of all projected the steering wheel, which Paw grasped as he sat, with only the top of his hat visible to the naked eye. Maw rode beside him somewhere. I never was able satisfactorily to determine where Cynthy, Hattie and Rowena rode. Danny, the family dog, had his seat outside on the fender, against the hood. I presume Danny's feet got hot sometimes on the up grades, but Maw said he ought to be used to it by now.