I was out there too early in the year to meet the justly celebrated San Francisco flea. He's a Native Son, too; but there isn't so much bragging being done on his account.
LOOKING FOR LO
Looking for Lo
If it is your desire to observe the Red Indian of the Plains engaged in his tribal sports and pastimes wait for the Wild West Show; there is sure to be one coming to your town before the season is over. Or if you are bloodthirsty by nature and yearn to see him prancing round upon the warpath, destroying the hated paleface and strewing the soil with his shredded fragments, restrain your longings until next fall and then arrange to take in the football game between Carlisle and Princeton. But, whatever you do, do not go journeying into the Far West in the hope of finding him in great number upon his native heath, for the chances are that you won't find him there in great number; and if you do he will probably be a considerable disappointment to you; because, unless he is paid for it, the red brother absolutely declines to be picturesque.
I am reliably informed that he is still reasonably numerous in Oklahoma, in North and South Dakota, and in Montana and Washington; but my itinerary did not include those states. I did not see a live Indian—that is to say, a live Indian recognizable as such—in Nevada or in Colorado or in Utah, or in a four-hour run across one corner of Wyoming.
In upward of a thousand miles of travel through California I saw just one Indian—a bronze youth of perhaps twenty summers and, I should say, possibly half that many baths. He was wearing the scenario of a pair of overalls and a straw hat in an advanced state of decrepitude, and he was working in a truckpatch; if a native had not told me what he was I would have passed him by for a sunburnt hired hand.