Brown Bros.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
DRIVING ON TO THE CAPITAL
After passing the Missouri, and leaving the trail behind me, I somehow had a foreboding that I might be mistaken for a faker and looked upon as an adventurer, and I shrank from the ordeal. My hair had grown long on the trip across; my boots were somewhat the worse for wear, and my old-fashioned clothes (understood well enough by pioneers along the trail) were dilapidated. I was not the most presentable specimen for every sort of company. Already I had been compelled to say that I was not a "corn doctor" or any kind of doctor; that I did not have patent medicine to sell; and that I was not soliciting contributions to support the expedition.
The first of March, 1907, found me on the road going eastward from Indianapolis. I had made up my mind that Washington should be the objective point. For my main purpose—to secure the building of a memorial highway—Congress, I felt, would be a better field to work in than out on the hopelessly long stretch of the trail, where one man's span of life would certainly pass before the work could be accomplished. But I thought it well to make a campaign of education to get the work before the general public so that Congress might know about it. Therefore a route was laid out to occupy the time until the first of December, just before Congress would again assemble. The route lay through Indianapolis, Dayton, Cleveland, Columbus, Buffalo, Albany, New York, Trenton, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, to Washington.
For the most part I received a warm welcome all along the route. Dayton treated me generously. Mayor Badger of Columbus wrote giving me the freedom of the city; and Mayor Tom Johnson wrote to his chief of police to "treat Mr. Meeker as the guest of the city of Cleveland," which was done.
At Buffalo, a benefit performance for one of the hospitals, in the shape of a circus, was in preparation. A part of the elaborate program was an attack by Indians on an emigrant train, the "Indians" being representative young men of the city. At this juncture I arrived in the city, and was besought to go and represent the train, for which they would pay me.