NEXT STOP, NORTH PLATTE!
North Platte might really be called “City of Ishmael.” For no reason that
is discoverable except its mere existence, every man’s tongue seems to
be against it. Time and time again—in fact the repetition is becoming
monotonous—people say to us, “It is all very well, of course, you have
had fine hotels and good roads so far, but wait until you come to North
Platte!”
Why, I wonder, does everyone pick out North Platte as a sort of third
degree place of punishment? Why not one of the other names through which
our road runs? Why always set up that same unfortunate town as a target?
It began with Mrs. O. in New York, who declared it so dreadful a place
that we could never live through it. Her point of view being extremely
fastidious, her opinion does not alarm us as much as it otherwise might,
but in Chicago, too, the mention of our going to North Platte seemed to
be the signal for people to look sorry for us. Now a drummer downstairs
has just added his mite to our growing apprehension.
“Goin’ t’ th’ coast?” he queried. “Hmm—I guess you won’t like th’ hotels
at North Platte overmuch.”
“Do you go there often?” I returned.
“Me?” he said indignantly. “Not on your life! No one ever gets off at
North Platte except the railroad men—they _have_ to!” That is the one
unexplained phase of the subject, no one of all those who have villified
it has personally been there.
Just as I asked if he could perhaps tell me which of the hotels was least
bad, a fellow drummer joined him. The usual expression of commiseration
followed.
“Well,” said the second drummer, “it’s this way. Whichever hotel you put
up at, you’ll wish you had put up at the other.”
“Suppose it turns out to be the very worst we can think of—what _can_
that worst be?” I asked rather shakily of Celia.
“Dirty rooms over a saloon with drunken ‘bad men’ shooting in it,” she
whispered with a shiver.
“Don’t you think—” we suggested to E. M., “it would be a good idea to buy
a pistol, in case——”
“In case——?” he asked with the completely indifferent tranquillity of
youth.
Celia prodded me. “Well, just in case——” I said lamely. I think Celia
might have finished the sentence herself.
Of all the bogey stories, the one about North Platte is the most
unfounded! Instead of a rip-roaring town, rioting in red and yellow
ribaldry, it is a serious railroad thoroughfare, self-respecting and
above reproach and the home of no less a celebrity than Mr. Cody—Buffalo
Bill. Of course if you imagine you are going to find a Blackstone or a
Fontanelle, you will be disappointed, but in comparison to some of the
other hotels along the Lincoln Highway, the Union Pacific in North Platte
is a model of delectability!
[Illustration: A BEDROOM IN THE UNION PACIFIC HOTEL, NORTH PLATTE—NOT
MUCH OF A HARDSHIP, IS IT?]
As a matter of fact, it is an ocher-colored wooden railroad station, a
rather bare dining-room, and lunch counter, and perfectly good, clean
bedrooms upstairs. You cannot get a suite with a private bath, and if
you are more or less spoiled by the supercomforts of luxurious living,
you may not care to stay very long. But if in all of your journeying
around the world, you never have to put up with any greater hardship than
spending a night at the Union Pacific in North Platte, you will certainly
not have to stay at home on that account. There are no drunkards or
toughs or even loafers hanging about; the food is cleanly served and
good; the rooms, although close to the railroad tracks, are as spotless
as brooms and scrubbing-brushes can make them.[4]
There is a place, though, between the Missouri and the Rio Grande—there
is no use in being more exact as to its locality—where, except in case
of accident—ours was a broken spring—you are not likely to stay. There
our own particular horrors were pretty well realized: dirty rooms over a
saloon and lounging toughs on the corner; uneatable hunks of food at a
table in a barroom, our dinner put in front of us on a platter, and no
plates used at all. And the bedrooms! I slept on top of my bed wrapped
in an ulster with my head on the lining of my coat. And even so, I was
seriously bitten by small but voracious prior inhabitants. The next day
all the “bath” I had was a catlick with the corner of a handkerchief held
reluctantly under a greasy spigot.
This experience was pretty unappetizing but also it was our only bad one,
sent no doubt as a punishment for our lack of appreciation of one or two
former stopping-places, which, as E. M. would say, “sounds fair enough.”
Also in order to live consistently up to that motor philosophy I wrote
about, we will in time be glad of the color it will give to our memory
book. But at present its color seems merely a grease spot on the page,
and all the motor philosophy in the world doesn’t seem potent enough to
blot out the taste and smell, to say nothing of the stings.
* * * * *
By the way, I seem to have arrived at North Platte and possibly farther,
on a magic carpet—a little difficult for anyone taking this as a guide to
follow! Therefore to go back, merely on the subject of the roads, almost
as far as Des Moines. Taking the general average of luck in motoring, no
matter how well things have gone for you, the chances are that you have
had _some_ delays. A day or two of rain that held you up, detours that
made you lose your way, a run of tire trouble—something, no matter what
it is, that has delayed you more than you expected. And whatever it is
you find yourself thinking this does not matter very much because when we
get to those Nebraska fast roads we can make up lost time easily.
The very sound “Nebraska” correlates “dragged roads” speed! While you are
still gently running through the picturesque Sir Joshua Reynolds scenery
of the River to River road in Iowa, you find that your mind is developing
an anticipatory speed craze. So thoroughly imbued has your mind become
with the “fast road” idea that the very ground has a speed gift in its
dragged surface. What if your engine is barely capable of forty miles an
hour, that miraculously fast stretch magically carries you at the easiest
fifty. If you have a big powerful engine, you forget that ordinarily
you dislike whizzing across the surface of the earth, and for just this
once—even though you think of it more in terror than in joy—you are
approaching the raceway of America, and you, too, are going to race!
“We must be sure that everything is in perfect running order,” you
exclaim excitedly as you picture your car leaping out of Omaha and
shooting to Denver while scarcely turning over its engine. “Not many
stopping-places,” you are told. What matter is that to you? You are not
thinking of stopping at all. North Platte, perhaps, yes. Three hundred
and thirty miles in a day is just a nice little fast road run.
“A nice little which?” says the head of a garage in Omaha.
“We’ll leave early,” you continue, unheeding, “and make a dash across the
continental speedway——”
“See here, stranger,” says the garage man, “what state of fast circuits
d’y think y’re in? This is Nebraska and the speed limit is twenty miles!”
“Twenty miles a minute?” you gasp, “that certainly is speed!”
The garage man half edges away from you. “Fr’m here t’ Denver is about
thutty-five hours’ straight travelin’. You gutta slow down t’ eight miles
through towns and y’ can’t go over twenty miles an hour nowheres!”
When you manage to get a little breath into your collapsed lungs you say
dazedly, “But we’re going over the ‘fast dragged’ road.”
“Road’s fast enough! But the law’ll have you if you drive over it
faster’n twenty miles an hour.”
If you can find the joke in all of this, you have a more humorous mental
equipment and a sweeter disposition than we had.
[Illustration: A STRAIGHT, WIDE ROAD; NOT EVEN A SHACK IN SIGHT—AND A
SPEED LIMIT OF TWENTY MILES AN HOUR]
Across Nebraska from the last good hotel in Omaha to the first
comfortable one in Denver or Cheyenne is over five hundred miles. At the
prescribed “speed” of about seventeen miles an hour average, it means
literally a pleasant little run of between thirty and forty hours along
a road dead level, wide, straight, and where often as far as the eye can
see, there is not even a shack in the dimmest distance, and the only
settlers to be seen are prairie dogs.
If between Omaha and Cheyenne there were three or four attractive clean
little places to stop, or if the Nebraska speed laws were abolished or
disregarded _and it didn’t rain_, you could motor to the heart of the
Rocky Mountains with the utmost ease and comfort.
In May, 1915, the road by way of Sterling to Denver was impassable; all
automobiles were bogged between Big Spring and Julesburg, so on the
advice of car owners that we met, we went by way of Chappell to Cheyenne.
It is quite possible, of course, that we blindly passed comfortable
stopping-places, but to us that whole vast distance from Omaha to
Cheyenne was one to be crossed with as little stop-over as possible.
Aside from questions of accommodations and speed laws, the interminable
distance was in itself an unforgettably wonderful experience. It gave
us an impression of the lavish immensity of our own country as nothing
else could. Think of driving on and on and on and yet the scene scarcely
changing, the flat road stretching as endlessly in front of you as
behind. The low yellow sand banks and flat sand islands scarcely vary on
the Platte, which might as well be called the Flat, River. The road does
gradually rise several thousand feet but the distance is so immense your
engine does not perceive a grade. Once in a while you pass great herds
of cattle fenced in vast enclosures and every now and then you come to
a group of nesters’ shanties, scattered over the gray-green plain as
though some giant child had dropped its blocks, or as though some Titans,
playing dominoes, had left a few lying on the table.
At greater intervals you come to towns and you drive between two closely
fitted rows of oddly assorted domino-shaped stores and houses, and then
on out upon the great flat table again. For scores and scores of miles
the scene is unvarying. On and on you go over that endless road until at
last far, far on the gray horizon you catch the first faint glint of the
white-peaked Rocky Mountains.
You have long ago turned away from the river’s yellow sand flats, and you
watch that slowly rising snow-topped rim, until—it may be gradually, or
it may be suddenly—your heart is thrilled by the sublimity of the amazing
contrast of mountain upon plain.
Perhaps you may merely find dullness in the endlessly flat, unvarying
monotonous land; perhaps you are unwilling to be enthralled by Titanic
cones of rock or snow. But steep your sight for days in flatness, until
you think the whole width of the world has melted into a never-ending sea
of land, and then see what the drawing close to those most sublime of
mountains does to you!
And afterwards, when you have actually climbed to their knees or
shoulders, and look back upon the endless plains, you forget the wearying
journey and feel keenly the beauty of their very endlessness. The
ever-changing effect of light and shadow over that boundless expanse
weaves an enchanted spell upon your imagination that you can never quite
recover from. Sometimes the prairies are a great sea of mist; sometimes
they are a parched desert; sometimes they are blue like the waves of an
enchanted sapphire sea; sometimes they melt into a plain of vaporous
purple mystery, and then the clouds shift away from the sun and you see
they are a width of the world, of land.
But however or whenever you look out upon them, you feel as though mean
little thoughts, petty worries, or skulking gossip whispers, could never
come into your wind-swept mind again. That if you could only live with
such vastness of outlook before you, perhaps your own puny heart and mind
and soul might grow into something bigger, simpler, worthier than is ever
likely otherwise.
And now I am getting quite over my head, so better climb down the
mountains again and go back to the motor, which may be supposed to have
reached Cheyenne.
If you think Cheyenne is a Buffalo Bill Wild West town, as we did,
you will be much disappointed, though it may be well not to show the
progressive citizens of that up-to-date city that you hoped they were
still galloping along wooden sidewalks howling like coyotes!
I thought that Celia and E. M. looked distinctly grieved at the sight of
smooth laid asphalt, wide-paved sidewalks, imposing capitol and modern
buildings. Even the brand-new Plains Hotel was accepted by both of them
in much the same spirit that a child who thought it was going to the
circus and found itself at a museum of art, would accept the compensation
of a nice hot supper instead of peanuts and red lemonade.
[Illustration: WYOMING IN THE RANCH COUNTRY]
Unfortunately we had no friends in Cheyenne and therefore never got so
far as even the threshold of society, but the following account taken
from the morning paper is irrefutable evidence that Cheyenne, far from
being a wild town of border outlawry, is a center of refined elegance and
fashion:
“Governor and Mrs. K. tendered a beautiful courtesy to the
Cheyenne and visiting cadets and their sponsors Sunday
afternoon when they entertained them at an informal reception
and luncheon at the executive mansion.
“This brilliant social function was scarcely second in the
estimation of the guests to the wall-scaling tournament
Saturday evening, when world records were smashed by the
invincible cadet squad from Casper.
“The Governor’s mansion was exceedingly attractive with its
luxurious furnishings, in artistic setting. One hundred and
twenty voices mingled in chatter, laughter and song to the
accompaniment of violin and piano. College songs and familiar
popular airs in which everyone joined, made the ‘welkin ring’
as the exuberant spirits found vent in melody.
“To the hostess’ understanding of the needs of boys and girls
was due the satisfactory nature and quantities of the salads,
sandwiches, ice cream and candies served so generously in the
dining-room.
“The cadets outnumbered the pretty sponsors eight to one, and
every girl was a queen at whose shrine a circle of admiring
youths was in constant attendance.”
In our ignorance we don’t know what a “sponsor” is further than that
the paper tells us she is a young girl who is a queen of despotic
fascination, but what, or whom, or why or how she sponsors, is a mystery
too deep for our solving. Cadet, of course, makes an instantaneous
picture of a straight, square-shouldered young human being of inflexibly
rigid demeanor but with a quite susceptible young human heart beating
underneath his rigid exterior.
The object in quoting all this is merely to show our fellow Easterners
that the West of yesterday was no longer to be found in Cheyenne!
On one day in the year though, they have a Frontier Days
Celebration—when, like in the midnight hour of the Puppen Fée, the West
that was, comes back to life. There are wonderful exhibits of “broncho
busting” and rope throwing, and all the features of county fair, horse
show, and wild west show in one.
From Cheyenne to Denver, and from Denver to Colorado Springs, the road
was uneventfully excellent all the way.
Denver, where we stopped merely for luncheon, is far too important a city
to mention in a brief paragraph or two, and is for that reason left out
altogether.