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 either as an adventurer or a sort of a "wandering Jew" and shrank from the ordeal. My hair had grown long on the trip across; my boots were some the worse for wear and my old-fashioned suit (understood well enough by pioneers along the Trail) that showed dilapidation all combined, made me not the most presentable in every sort of company. Coupled with that had I not already been compelled to say that I was not a "corn doctor" or any kind of a doctor; that I did not have patent medicine or any other sort of medicine to sell, and that I was neither soliciting or receiving contributions to support the expedition? I had early in the trip realized the importance of disarming criticism or suspicion that there was graft or speculation in the work. And yet, day after day, there would come questions, pointed or otherwise, evidently to probe to the bottom to find out if there was lurking somewhere or somehow an ulterior object not appearing on the surface. There being none, the doubters would be disarmed only to make way for a new crop, maybe the very next hour.
But the press, with but one exception, had been exceedingly kind, and understood the work. It remained for one man [25] of the thousand or more who wrote of the work, at a later date to write of his "suspicions." I wrote that gentleman that "suspicions as to one's motives were of the same cloth as the 'breath of scandal' against a fair lady's character, leaving the victim helpless without amende honorable from the party himself," and gave him full information, but he did not respond nor so far as I know publish any explanation of the article in his paper.
March 1st, 1907, found me on the road going eastward from Indianapolis. I had made up my mind that Washington City should be the objective point, and that Congress would be a better field to work in than out on the hopelessly wide stretch of the Trail where one man's span of life would certainly run before the work could be accomplished.
But, before reaching Congress, it was well to spend a season or campaign of education or manage somehow to get the work before the general public so that the Congress might know about it, or at least that many members might have heard about it. So a route was laid out to occupy the time until the first of December, just before Congress would again assemble, and be with them "in the beginning." The route lay from Indianapolis, through Hamilton, Ohio; Dayton, Columbus, Buffalo, then Syracuse, Albany, New York City, Trenton, N. J.; Philadelphia., Pa.; Baltimore, Md., thence to Washington, visiting intermediate points along the route outlined. This would seem to be quite a formidable undertaking with one yoke of oxen and a big "prairie schooner" wagon that weighed 1,400 pounds, a wooden axle, that would speak at times if not watched closely with tar bucket in hand; and a load of a thousand pounds or more of camp equipage, etc. And so it was, but the reader may recall the fable of the "tortoise and the hare" and find the lesson of persistence that gave the race, not to the swiftest afoot. Suffice it to say that on the 29th of November, 1907, twenty-two months to a day after leaving home at Puyallup, I drew up in front of the White House in Washington City, was kindly received by President Roosevelt, and encouraged to believe my labor had not been lost.
The general reader may not be interested in the details of my varied experiences in the numerous towns and cities through which I passed, nevertheless there were incidents in some of the cities well worth recording.
As noted before, the press, from the beginning, seemed to understand the object, and enter into the spirit of the work. It remained for one paper during the whole trip (Hamilton, Ohio) to solicit pay for a notice. My look of astonishment or something, it seems, wrought a change, and the notice appeared, and I am able to record that not one cent was paid to the press during the whole trip, and I think fully a thousand articles have been published outlining and commending the work. Had it not been for the press, no such progress as has been made could have been accomplished, and if the appropriation be made by Congress to mark the Trail, the press did it, not, however, forgetting the patient oxen who did their part so well.
An interesting incident, to me at least, occurred in passing through the little town of Huntsville, ten miles east of Hamilton, Ohio, where I was born, and had not seen for more than seventy years. A snap shot of the old house where I was born did me no good, for at Dayton some vandal stole my kodak, film and all, containing the precious impression.
Dayton treated me nicely, bought a goodly number of my books and sent me on my way rejoicing with no further feeling of solicitude toward financing the expedition. I had had particularly bad luck in the loss of my fine ox; then when the cows were bought and one of them wouldn't go at all, and I was compelled to ship the outfit to Omaha, more than a hundred miles; and was finally forced to buy the unbroken steer Dandy, out of the stockyards at Omaha, and, what was more, pay out all the money I could rake and scrape, save seven dollars. Small wonder I should leave Dayton with a feeling of relief brought about by the presence in my pocket of some money not drawn from home. I had had other experiences of discouragement as well: when I first put the "Ox Team" in print, it was almost "with fear and trembling"—would the public buy it? I could not know without trying, and so a thousand copies only were printed, which of course brought them up to a high price per copy. But these sold, and two thousand more copies printed and sold, and I was about even on the expense, when, lo and behold, my plates and cuts were burned and a new beginning had to be made.
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 he did.