I think Maw, sixty thousand of her, does sometimes get out of breath,
but not often and not for long. The superintendent, contrite because of
his past, is patient when he replies.
"Dear madam," he begins, the tips of his fingers together as he sits
back in his chair, "your inquiry regarding this national park is noted,
and in reply I beg to state that I will answer all your questions after
I have told the rangers where to let the hotels cut wood and where to
run their milk herd and how to feed the hay crews and where to send the
road crews and where to have the gravel crews sleep and where to get
four more good trucks and two more garage men and a steno and a new man
on the files and look after the Appropriations Committee and write my
annual report to the Secretary of the Interior and my weekly report to
the Director of the Parks and my daily report for the records and my
personal correspondence and see where the automobile blanks all have
gone and get the daily total of visitors classified and find a new site
for a camp and lay out twelve miles of new road and have the garbage
moved and get the elk counted again and the antelope estimated and stop
the sale of elk teeth and investigate the reasons why the bears don't
come in and look at a sick lady at the Fountain and wire the Shriners
that I will meet them at the train and write Congressman Jones that his
trip is all arranged for and pick out a camp site for the director's
Chicago friends and make my daily drive of five hundred miles round the
park to see if they haven't carried off the mountains and tell the
United States commissioner to soak that party who wrote six names on the
Castle Geyser and get in oats for the road teams and take up the
topographic maps with the U. S. engineers and send some photos to twelve
magazines and arrange for the last movie man to photograph the bears
and see about some colored prints of Old Faithful and have the bridal
chambers of the hotel renovated for the party of New York editors and
get a new collar for my wife's dog, and explain why there are so many
mosquitoes this year even under a Republican Administration--and a lot
more things that are on the daily tickler pad. Then I have to keep my
personal books and write my longhand letters until after midnight and
read up some more of the geology of the park and the times of
intermission for the geysers and the altitudes of all the peaks and
learn the personal names of all the geysers and woodchucks and----"
"That man wasn't right polite to me," said Maw in commenting upon some
of this. "He told me he was busy. I'd like to know what he's got to do,
just setting round."
Myself, I sometimes think the punishment of the superintendent is almost
too severe. He is obliged, for instance, to know everything in the
world that everyone else in the world does not know. He has pictures and
exact measurements of all the game animals in the park, all the flowers,
knows all the colors of the Grand Canyon and the location of every
sprinkling hose in fifty square miles. I have never been able to ask him
any questions that he cannot answer--except perhaps my favorite
question: "Why do they have this curio junk in all the park
stores--moccasins, leather Indian heads, and all that sort of thing?" He
sobbed when I asked him that, but I thought I could hear some muttered
word about there being a popular demand. As for me, I hold with Maw
that, if a person is being bitten on the elbow, better a bottle of
marmalade, a loaf of bread or a bottle of mosquito dope than a pair of
beef-hide moccasins with puckered toes. In my belief a few paintings by
Mr. Thomas Moran at a cost of fifteen thousand or twenty thousand
dollars, or sets of the works of some of our more popular authors, with
flexible backs, would be far more appropriate in the curio stores.
Maw is of the opinion that most of the merchants, storekeepers and
venders of commodities west of the Mississippi River are robbers. "Not
that I mean real robbers like used to hold up the stagecoaches here in
the park," she explained. "They don't do that no more since the cars has
come--I suppose because they go so fast that it ain't convenient for
robbers no more. But in the old times, they tell me, when they run
stagecoaches in here, and didn't have no railroad in on the west side,
there used to be a regular business of holding up the stagecoaches right
over where old man Dwelley used to have his eating house for lunch.
There's a clubhouse there now, instead of his old eating house, they
say. I heard that when they wanted to buy old man Dwelley out for a club
and asked him how much he wanted, he thought a while, and then did some
counting, and then allowed that about twelve thousand dollars would be
about right. The man that was buying the place, he set down and writ a
check right then for twelve thousand dollars. But old man Dwelley didn't
take it. 'I dunno what that thing is,' says he. 'When I say twelve
thousand dollars I mean twelve thousand dollars in real money.'"