I meant to have written you before this but I have been very much
occupied and your mother has been wrestling with her house. She has
gotten down to the kitchen with her cleaning. She has hired a woman who
is to come next week and she wants to get the house in order for her.
I have had company. On Friday afternoon "Teddy Roosevelt Jr" came and
stayed until Monday morning. He is his father in miniature. He kept
me on the stretch all the time. On Saturday we went up the Shataca and
cooked our dinner on the little island where you and I did. We had a
good time. He climbed trees and rocks like a squirrel. He was all the
time looking for something difficult to do.
May 19. I was choked off here and now I am in a pickle. We began to fix
the cistern yesterday and got it half finished when the rain came--an
inch and a half of water and your mother is furious--cried all night
and is crying and storming yet this morning. Of course the blame is all
mine. I wanted to fix it ten days ago but she said no, she wanted the
water to clean house. If I and you had both died she could not have
shed more tears than she has over this petty matter. I shall take to
Slabsides to escape this tearful deluge. It has been very dry, no rain
and no tears for six weeks. I was glad to see it come, cistern or no
cistern. It has saved the hay crop and the strawberries.
The leaves are all out here and the apple blossoms fallen. Mr. and Mrs.
Johnson of N. Y. came Sunday and left Monday night. Clifton Johnson
came Tuesday morning and left Wednesday. Some Vassar people were coming
to-day but it rains from the N. E.
Of course you can pick up no decent girl on the street and I should keep
aloof from them. A decent girl would resent the advances of a stranger.
The birds are very numerous this spring.
Your loving father J. B.
In the spring of '99 Father was asked to join the E. H. Harriman
Alaska Expedition, and though very reluctant he consented to go--he
was historian of the expedition and his account of it appeared in the
_Century_ and in his book, "Far and Near." Mother had always said that
"his folks" were afraid to go out of sight of the smoke of the home
chimney. Something of this was in Father. He had to make himself go.
He was always unhappy when leaving home and home ties. He made many new
friends on this trip--John Muir, whom he liked immensely in spite of the
fact that he sometimes called him a "cross-grained Scotchman"; Fuertes,
the nature artist; Dallenbaugh, one of those who made the trip through
the Grand Canyon with Major Powell and who wrote "A Canyon Voyage";
Charles Keeler, the poet, and many others.
Near Fort Wrangell, Alaska June 5 {1899}.