But see, a visitor has arrived
From strange parts.
III. TAKING THE ROAD
We packed our knapsacks at Springfield, and stowed away blankets and socks, a coffee-pot, and a frying-pan. We bought at a ten-cent store knife and fork and spoon, skillet, towels which we sewed into sacks, mugs, and what was labelled “The Mystic Mit—the greatest discovery since soap for cleaning pots and pans.” Lindsay had hobnails put in his old boots and bought a handsome pair of corduroy breeches, which, together with his old black hat, made him look like a tramping violinist. Springfield bade us farewell. We were one night in the train to Chicago and travelled all day north to St. Paul. We were then two nights and a day crossing the great land ocean of Minnesota, North Dakota, and eastern Montana—what was once an unending stage-coach trail to the West.
“This is what I like,” said Lindsay—“the prairie to the horizon, no fences, no stone walls, as in New England. It is all broad and unlimited; that is why since the days of Andrew Jackson all the great politicians have come from the West—the unfenced West. I’d like to put all the Boston and New York people out here on the plains and let the plain men run the East.”
To me, however, it looked a land of endless toil as I saw it from train windows, and I thought of the toiling pioneers and the Russians in the Dakotas, the Swedes and the Germans content to live and toil and be swallowed up at last by the distances and the primitive. European life-rivers have flowed into these deserts and made them what they are. One day their children perhaps will have a Western consciousness, an American consciousness.
We stepped off the train at Glacier Park Station. Some dozen women in khaki riding breeches were waiting on the platform, and six or seven people got out from the tourist and Pullman cars to cross to the great log-built hotel opposite. Then the train started again and toiled onwards to the heights of the divide, whence, as Kipling put it:
They ride the iron stallions down to drink;