Pilgrimage on Wheels

PILGRIMAGE ON WHEELS

BY WILLIAM E. OLIVER

NEVADA STATE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT - Lincoln Highway outside the ghost town of Hamilton, Nevada.

Forty-one years ago one Sunday afternoon, in Salt Lake City, I clambered into an old Packard Roadster beside its driver, Robert E. Knowlden. He let in the clutch, and we headed west across Nevada bound for San Francisco and the fall semester at the University of California.

We were two young college students out for adventure and an inexpensive trip to the Pacific Coast. Our route was the historic Lincoln Highway, America's first transcontinental automobile road. In 1919 a young, unknown officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower rode over this same highway from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to the Golden Gate as part of the first U.S. Army truck convoy to cross the continent. In 1920, at the height of summer travel, hardly more than 20 cars a day were passing over this new route through Salt Lake City. Thus, when we drove over it in 1921, we seemed to be the only automobile on the road, except for one old prospector we saw bumping over the Nevada desert in a battered Model-T Ford.

The Lincoln Highway in those days, over much of its route, was little more than a jagged scar cutting through desert salt flats, barren valleys, and mountain passes; the road ran by dying communities, ghost towns, lonely dry farms, and decaying roadside settlements. The only clue that the ruts in the sagebrush and washes were a highway was the handsome red, white, and blue Lincoln Highway markers that guided us west. After 10 days of hard driving, detours, and tire and engine troubles, often spending the night out in the desert, we arrived in San Francisco, where the Lincoln Highway ended in Lincoln Park.

I kept a descriptive diary during that nearly 1,000-mile trip and in June of this year, 1962, 41 years later, decided to drive again from Salt Lake City to San Francisco over as much of the same route as was humanly possible. The Lincoln Highway has long since disappeared. It was doomed in 1925, along with more than 250 other "name routes," when the numbering system was adopted for national and state highways. The Lincoln Highway markers have gone, and in their place are the business-like signs of U.S. Highway 50.

When I made the drive this year, more than time stood between me and the sense of frontier life I felt in 1921. The old wandering dirt road has become a fine concrete highway that got me from Salt Lake City to the Golden Gate in two short, easy driving days. The speed of such modern travel insulates one from history, from the country, and from the aromatic green of the old watering places. The choking alkali dust of the desert and the rain-rutted gashes in the sagebrush plains over which in years gone by the Indians, Mormons, overland wagon trains, forty-niners, and Pony Express riders traveled on a dim track that wavered over bone-dry valleys and around the shoulders of sun-baked mountain ranges are unknown to the traveler of today.

Hardly a bird's song is now heard over the rushing sound of the modern automobile. The eye scarcely has time for the blur of a coyote slipping away into the desert gray. In the old days his desolate cry could be heard at night in the dusk outside your roadside camp. The only signs of desert wildlife today are the corpses on the highway of hares, birds, and other small creatures that have become the victims of an out-speeded ecology.

With the vanished feeling of the past has also gone most of the sense of the old frontier. In some places only the ghosts of the ghost towns remain. Many historic places our old Packard chugged through in 1921 have disappeared completely. From the new highway are seen only a few tumbled heaps of brick, the scar of a mining excavation still livid on the mountainside, or an indistinct outline of a right-of-way where ore trains once rattled through the lonely valleys.

The names of some towns and settlements have disappeared from the maps. From other towns almost every beam and brick have been hauled away. Even the wooden rails and headstones in pioneer grave yards have been looted, leaving forgotten mounds to be obliterated by the ubiquitous sagebrush.

In August 1921, the salt flats on Lincoln Highway west of Salt Lake City were impassable for our car. To reach Ely, Nevada, we drove south through Provo and Fillmore to Kanosh, where we struck into the desert for Milford. From here we drove over the state line and reached the Lincoln Highway north of Baker.

Just west of Milford in 1921, the ruins of a once fabulously rich mining town called Frisco lay beside the highway. Today all that can be seen is an historical marker. Newhouse, a few miles farther west, was a large town with blocks of well-built miners' family homes when I went through 41 years ago. It is now abandoned, except for a general store which caters to passing travelers or occasional ranchhands.

Outside of the bustling town of Ely are Riepetown and Kimberly, in the old days booming mining settlements. Practically nothing is left of Kimberly but bare, empty paved streets lying directly in the path of the excavating machines of the copper mining operation centered at Ruth. In Riepetown, once the home of a lusty group of gambling, drinking, and dancing halls, the only sign of life I could find was a sedate oldtimer who came out of the dim recesses of his general store to sell me a dust-covered package of cookies.

The town of Hamilton, which in 1868 was the center of a community of 15,000 miners working properties valued at $70 million, has virtually disappeared. Up to a few years ago, the ruins of its famous Withington Hotel still proudly stood two stories high with a roofless front wall of gaping arches and empty windows. Today that ruin has eroded down to piles of broken masonry and sandstone blocks. Not a sign of life remains in Hamilton. All that stirs in the wind blowing off the looted mountain are wisps of shredded wallpaper fluttering like ghosts on the walls of a few sagging houses or rusty sheets of tin clanging dismally in the quiet desolation.

Even from those towns that have held their own or have increased their population, the bluff atmosphere of the old West has departed. Among the historic mining towns still viable along U.S. Highway 50, Austin has kept most of its old-time flavor. A restaurant, gasoline station, or motel here and there give evidence of some capitulation to tourism, but most of its storied buildings still stand untampered with if not completely intact. Even here, however, as in the city of Fallon farther west, which in 1921 was a booming farming center with a friendly sheriff who enthusiastically expanded on the future of Nevada, the hearty spirit of old times is felt no more. Today, you are another tourist passing through.

Traveling today between Salt Lake City and San Francisco at 60 miles per hour along broad, smooth Highway 50, gives you the feeling of being lost to the past. Perhaps the story of what the man said at Frenchman's Station, a highway stop about 40 miles east of Fallon, best illustrates the point. When we halted there for food 41 years ago, the proprietor was Emil Bermond, an hospitable Frenchman with a friendly smile, a generous way with victuals, and a fund of stories about old Nevada. When I asked the present proprietor what had happened to Monsieur Bermond, he answered with matter-of-fact impersonality, "Bermond? Oh, he's gone. They planted him a good many years ago!" That is the feeling I had when I retraced that earlier journey at the swift tempo of 1962, "The old West is gone; it has been planted a good many years!"

A TRUTHFUL ACCOUNT OF THE PEREGRINATIONS OF THE PACKARD FOUR (4) AS CONDUCTED BY BILL ONIONS AND BOB KNOWLDEN DURING THEIR MEMORABLE TRIP FROM SALT LAKE CITY TO SAN FRANCISCO

VIA THE ARROWHEAD TRAIL AND THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY AND SUNDRY OTHER TRAILS.

BY WILLIAM ELLWELL ONIONS.

SUNDAY EVENING AUG 14 TO TUESDAY AFTERNOON, AUG 24, 1921

(MILFORD TO SAN FRANCISCO)

Alameda, [California] Aug 25, 1921

Dear Yoshi —

1 have just been marking the map of our trip, and now I will tell you of our trip.

We left Milford [Utah] about 11 a.m. and began one of the hardest, slowest and hottest days of the whole trip. At first, the road was fine. We roared over this stretch and felt that if such roads continued we would beat our schedule into "Frisco" [San Francisco] (as Bob persisted in misnaming it.)

We soon passed Frisco [Utah] — a little abandoned skeleton of a town with false fronts to the stores, and with decayed and wooden sides propped up, — a worn out mining town. We past it and left the lizards rustling in the dead grass. We next ran into Newhouse — a modern milling town like Garfield is, with row and row of fine houses. The houses are built of cool plaster, most of them too much alike. The windows were denuded of glass and boarded up to keep out the wild folks. Under a few trees whose green bravely defied the arid brown of the desert, the company store lay, haunted by a melancholy proprietor and two sheep herding youths, who sadly agreed with him that "the place ain't what it wus!"

There was nothing to drink there but water, so we left, and began the passage of the first desert valley.

Before we reached the Eastern slopes of the Sierras we passed through scores of such desolate voids, each divided from the other by the inevitable canyon summit of broken hills, washed gullies, and rock strewn roads.

The first valley, however, will always impress my memory the most, due, no doubt, to the fact that it was our first real desert. The ground was harsh dry and grey, and the tinder-like sage-brush had thrust through to cause uneven, gnarled bumps everywhere, so that whenever we rode off the deep rutted trail because of our low hung flywheel, we were shook and pounded almost to insensibility. The crust of the earth was loose, puffed up and mottled, and marked by the innumerable drops of rain that had fallen each winter, for a short space of time, since the world began. So unvisited by man, untouched by foot or tool, was the land!

Seen from a distance the valley was that same dreary grey mottled mono-color that one sees flashing past the pullman window when one is travelling on the train through Nevada.

Most of our valleys run due north and south, you know, Ruth and all the valleys which we traversed lay in that line. Sometimes the south end of a valley would be melted of[f] into indistinctness in the sweltering, rolling heat waves of the far north, while its south end ran up gently, or abruptly into the bare sides of a wall of hills. Sometimes it was the northern end of the valley we crossed, while sometimes, too, as in the case of the great Stepto[e] Valley, in which Ely and McGill lie, and which is one hundred and sixty five miles long, we cut through the middle of the valley's length and the two ends were lost in the blue welter of the sun on sand or the indistinct illusion of mirage lakes.

To return to our first valley, into which we descended, after leaving Newhouse. The dead, brown hills stood around it like mute giants standing around the open grave of some great kin. No trees were on these hills to relieve the grim monotony. Just sheer, dry, greyish brown rocks and sand, piled thousands of feet into the clear air to brood over this Land that God Unfinished.

Our road lay before us like a thin livid scar on the dead grey valley floor, and over on the western side we could see it zigzagging up the hill to the next summit which we knew would lead into another such valley and so on and on until Nevada was behind our gasoline tank.

After crossing that summit, with a way strewn with steers' bones and horned skulls, we dropped into a lower, wider valley, whose awful desolation was only lessened by the sense of repetition. We had some tire trouble here — our first, — and passed in the valley floor two teams, a water wagon and a group of sun wearied, heat baked men who were travelling the desert stretches of the "Highway" to repair the washouts.

This one stretch from Milford until we drove through the dusty dusk that night into Garrison, was the hardest bit of going that we encountered throughout the entire trip, due chiefly to the slow speed we were forced to travel because of the deep ruts and high road centers. We intended reaching Ely this day but night fell and found us sneaking down the Narrows towards Garrison, which lay at the south-east end of one of the arm like canyons leading into the Stepto Valley, and at a distance of but seventy five miles from Milford.

The fall of darkness on the desert lands is very beautiful, Ruth. I couldn't appreciate Harold Bell Wright's God's Great Out-of-Doors in the sweltering face of the mid-day sun; but when the same sun, chastened and shame-red has sunk behind the hills it has tortured all thro the day, and the stars glimmer whimsically through the blue mists of the canyon end, then the magic of it wipes out the harshness of day, and touches the twisted Junipers to life, and transmutes the wail of a coyote into the echo of a long lost tribesman, crying through the valleys a thousand years before the Hollanders settled on the mud flats at Manhatten. Then one feels what neither Harold Bell Wright nor any other author has ever been able to make one feel.

In spite of the aridity of these places cattle seem to be able to live, and their leaders can be heard tinkling along the foot-hills to some water-hole, as they come stumbling down the slopes in the dusk. Occasionally, a range-free horse strikes his hoof on a rock, and a swift flash of dun, dappled grey, white and brown is seen as the horses gallop into a fold of the hill. When the moon slips up, grey and anxious looking, the world is an entirely different world: all the difference between hot gold and cool silver. The road loses its "gashy" appearance and becomes smooth — a dangerous change, for one is tempted to speed, and to hit a "chuck" hole filled with soft, grey, powdery dust is as unpleasant in the moonlight as at any other time. And beside that, tires have a magnetic attraction for nails at night. You know that from experience, for it seems that one nail on a road ten miles long will roll, point up in the path of your tires at night just as you come by; and it is a pleasant job to change tires in the dark!

For ten miles we drove through the deep dusk to Garrison, past a very pretty lake, alive with jumping fish and plaintively calling waterfowl. We woke up the little village when we slowed down before the "hotel." The dinners had all been eaten and the stories had all been told over again and Garrison with its full strength of four families and two travellers (like ourselves, we found later) had begun to settle into the somnolence which precedes sleep. Then we stamped onto the porch of the hotel. So they all came to life again, and while our supper was being prepared we lounged by the car and answered the questions of the few villagers who gathered around the "lil ole Packard-four."

That night, before going to bed upstairs in a room the wall paper of which transformed the scene into a violet-hung bower, the owner of the Hotel told of his Tungsten Mine, and the fabulous wealth he hoped to enjoy when the metal went up again. His wife and daughter had evidently heard this story before, or else its realization had no meaning to them, for they rattled and splashed their dishes in the kitchen sink the louder, the louder he talked and waxed enthusiastic. Bob wanted to form a stock company immediately and begin making shipments of ore, via parcel post to save freightage costs, but an undeniable yawn from me suggested the same thing to him, and yawning both, we stumbled upstairs.

Next morning, about 6 a.m. I got Bob out of bed, and then got out myself. I did it by the simple expedient of telling him that the freezing night must certainly have harmed the radiator of the Peregrinating Packard. The hot sun came rolling down the canyon, however, and dispelled my foreboding and the rattling of a cracked bell dispelled any thoughts he may have had of climbing "back in." We had a very good home raised steak for breakfast, with, however, atrocious oatmeal. It was about 8 a.m. when we coughed away from Garrison, with its Tungsten Millionaire, its home cooking hotel and its sleepy dogs.

I was eagerly watching for some change in the scenary or the topography, for better or for worse, to indicate when we should pass hors de Utah and into the "Silver State." It was not until Baker sprang like a rattlesnake out of a browngrey vista ahead that I found myself suddenly in Nevada. Evidently the border inhabitants of Utah and Nevada don't believe in signs!

Baker was a fitting omen, as I discovered later. It had all the qualities of what I should say is a good-natured Nevada town. It had been deserted long ago. It had a defunct saloon that sold innocous Budweiser and real whiskey when one said confidentially, "Have you got anything to drink?" Several of its houses had been and now weren't. A few little brightly painted cottages told of high-hoping newcomers, who not knowing its days of old, were untroubled by its traditions, broken and un-maintained, and being ignorant of its once pulsating expansiveness when silver was pouring out of the hills around it, believed they were "in on the ground floor" of a boom which was bound to come since breched and puttied [breeched and putteed] autoists came through and marked the road with red, white and blue L [Lincoln Highway] signs.

I am reminded here of a sign I saw gliding down the Foothill Boulevard, into Oakland. It read something like this, "Richmond will grow! The Lincoln Highway has brought the United States to her doors. Tourists Paradise!" Still, I know that some of those ranch people accomplish their intensest enjoyments from the cosmopolitan crowd which keeps the dust whirling outside their picket fences.

The most of the morning's ride after we left Baker, was spent in dropping in easy stages down a valley that had been cut to pieces in its trough by cloud-bursts. After hours of straddling the deep ruts, we caught sight of a large valley in which poplar lined waters lay. For the little patch of green we saw, even at a distance of ten miles, as we swung around North, and up the great Stepto valley, we were grateful. Green can be the most vital color in the world. It is like salt to the taste.

A long stretch of newly constructed grade road lay between us and Ely. There must be some hidden virtue in dust, just plain dust, — a rock powder, fine mud, or dried soil, either for the tires or for the lungs of the travellers, because the road builders carefully scrape up the loose dirt removed by the wind and dump it down on the road again. We moved on to Ely, flanked it and thundered through its undefended gates concealed in a dust curtain.

After we put the boat in a garage and had our tires worked on by one of the brood of Vulcan, we sought eats and then, while we waited for the car to be fixed we called around the town to see the sights. And sights they were!

Ely is something like Bingham, in as much as it is strung along the bottom of a canyon. McGill, paralleling Garfield, lies across the valley on a hill, a grey-white block of mill buildings and concentration plants. It was still and silent! The compact mass of tin roofs blinked idly in the sun.

There is a really very good Main street in Ely. A number of large stores, cafes, candy shops and garages compose this thoroughfare. The garages and vulcanizing shops entirely outnumber the other places of business, by proportion, and immediately suggest an amendment to Sinclair Lewis's description of Gopher Prairie.

Bob and I had dinner at a cafe that had seen better and livelier days. Its oaken (or were they imitation?) panels were dumbly eloquent of the days that used to be when Ely, as a metal exporting camp, was a red spot on the map o' things. A suave, carefully combed dapper little man waited on us, and in his deft scooping up of the empty dishes I saw the practised gesture of a roulette king. The price of copper played havoc with his destiny, evidently. Two pale, loose lipped men came in with that nauseate expression of the never-hungry on their pasty faces. Their front hair was combed into a low hung meticulous curve, reminiscent of our family photograph album. I judged they were card sharks, or pool professionals. Perhaps they were barbers.

Now I am going to describe something to you that I saw with my own eyes and which heretofore, although I had heard of, I had not believed to exist.

Bob, who had sold candy in Ely when there was gold and silver flowing through her veins, asked me if I should like to look at "The Row."

Not being exactly sure of what the Row was, or whether I had seen it anywhere, I assented, and we walked off the main street a block until we came to a residential section, the general appearance of which suggested Arthur, near the Arthur Milling Plant, at Garfield.

One street, about a block in length, was completely lined on both sides by "cribs," the common name for the hovel which the common woman of the mining camps inhabit. Each crib was stuck to the side of the other, so that they formed a continuous line of small, wooden, box-like rooms, each with a door and a window opening on the street. The line on one side of the street was unbroken except for an establishment that had the air of a saloon, with its wide doors and brass fixings here and there.

The saloon place was O'niels Place, and its wide mouth was egress to twenty five or thirty other cribs situated, or rather, hidden in its rear. There must have been about one hundred and fifty of these places. As I walked up the wooden side walk, wondering about the feet and the folly and the tragedy that had passed over these same boards, I saw that each little window had a card hung in it. These cards had the names of the occupants on them: Mary, Rose, Helen, Doll, were some of the names I remember. Over each door was an electric meter, and somehow that spinning disc measured more than kilowatts — it measured life for each one of those strange, fallen creatures who lived in her wooden box like cell.

Through the windows, I saw a deal table, a chair or two and a plain, iron bedstead. Erotic pictures on the walls and the remnent of a colored shirtwaist, or discarded powder box gave a clue to the personalities who had gone.

I asked Bob if there were any of these women left and he suggested that we walk to the end to see if there was any sign of life.

At the open entrance of O'niels through which the flies and the sunbeams went in promiscuous company, a washed out, wizened old man sat, with the impassive face of a Chinese. He was waiting for the fools who never came and he had been waiting for a long time, I should judge, and furthermore, I should judge he will wait a long time again before Ely will light up with the old, easy lights again.

Another row of cribs faced the Street and as we hesitated on the corner, I saw a woman behind a screen door, watching us. When she saw she had been detected she called out. "Boys come on over!" Bob asked me whether I wanted to go there and I said yes; so we strolled up. She was about twenty five, I should estimate, and her features had a hard complacency that I have only seen once before. That was in the face of a cadaver at the University of Utah, — a criminal who had been shot in a gun battle.

Her voice had this same hard quality and made the "Honey," with which she addressed us, a mockery.

She asked us if we wanted a drink of beer — of whiskey; and on our refusal, sat down and began a rapid appraisal of us. I could see it going on in her eyes. She crossed her legs, and under her short skirts hideous red garters flamed out. I felt amused at those garters and wondered what primitive aestheticism they were intended to satisfy.

We learned that when "business was good" there were over two hundred girls on the "row;" but that at that time there were but thirteen and they were starving to death.

Bob and I left the door step from which we had been talking to her through the screen, and walked out of the little desolate corner of Hell to the main street again.

I couldn't realize that there were decent people in the city, and that they could tolerate such a place. And I wondered what crime, filth, disease, misery, madness, despair and ruin had come out of that hole.

Isn't that amazing? I would not have dwelt on it so long, but that it impressed me so much. I have seen and sensed such conditions in other countries and places but never have I dreamed that close to the heart of a prosperous city such a terrible place would be tolerated.

We left Ely about 3 p.m. and started for Eureka, intending to reach that town the same night. We reached Eureka thirty hours later.

It was evident that an itinerant preacher had been along the route for on posts and saloon doors, and even on the doors of cribs themselves were painted such signs as "Jesus Loves." "Jesus Saves." "Repent Acts 2:33." "Obey!" etc. There was an air of mockery about those new signs on old, empty places. And then I imagined a sardonic monster doing this at night and chuckling to himself as he hid among the dark canyons during the day.

We passed Riepetown and then Kimberly. Riepetown, Bob told me is known as "The Town that God Forgot," and [h]as the wickedest collection of tumble down abodes in Nevada. Kimberly has been a great copper and silver mining camp. Now it is dead and empty.

We found ourselves immediately among a series of winding canyons and foothills, with dangerously high road centers. There were stiff grades too, and treacherous rocks embedded in the center of the trail. Such rocks are as fatal to us as are sunken rocks to a ship. If we hit one at high speed our fly-wheel and shaft would probably be bent, and the car laid up a month for repairs. That is why much of the road was navigated at eight miles per hour.

Dusk rolled down the hillsides and found us picking our way up White Pine pass. We had a puncture almost immediately and in the fifteen minutes that were consumed in changing tires, the dark night came completely on us. So we drove on until we heard a dog barking and saw a light gleaming from a cabin door. Only our winning ways secured us hospitality here, for the people really were crowded. They fixed us supper however and made up a bed in the other shack. The name of the man and his wife was Caputin, and since Nevada is full of old French emigrants, I judge they were originally of that nationality.

Mr. Caputin was drilling for oil. The next morning we walked over to the drill and by the aid of a mirror were able to look down the narrow bore for four hundred feet.

We said goodbye to the Oil drillers about eight o'clock and continued up the pass. Bob fell in love with Caputin's dog, a fine thoroughbred setter. He kept talking about Spike, whom he had left in Salt Lake City!

I learned quite a lot of things from those oil-drillers. The discussion of the "shale formations" and the probable flow of oil raised our enthusiasm to such an extent that we forgot our proposed Tungsten Company and wanted to promote an oil company. But the cool announcement from Mr. Caputin that he and his partners had already sunk seventeen thousand dollars in that slender hole calmed us down and saved the day for a college education.

A dome is a strata formation and is arranged in the shape of a bowl turned upside down. It is under such domes that oil is usually found. The Caputins were drilling through such a dome. For three days my keen eyes searched Nevada for domes. But I saw none! I only saw sage brush and prospect holes. A sin cline is a dip in the strata of the earth similar to one side of the cross section of a saucer. . . .An anti cline is the reverse. . . . Two anticlines extending 360° form a dome. A monocline is one single curve in the strata when there are a series of undulations. . . . Faults of course you are familiar with. They are breaks or interruptions in the continuity of a cline where the broken ends are displaced by subsidence... . It is these faults that give so much trouble to mines, for you can see, if a vein of ore, or a bed of coal is being followed in a strata and a fault is reached, it may require months of exploration tunnelling before the other end of the fault is found. Sometimes, as in the case of the Comstock lode, I believe, it is never found and the mine is finished.

I mentioned that oil was generally found under domes. That is because the water, seeping through the earth and running down the strata, is heavier than the oil and forces it up into, and underneath these domes. The existence of a rocky layer of shale in the dome prevents the oil from escaping until a drill cuts through, and the oil, with thousands of tons of water pressure behind it, goes up with a spout, and the midgets on the earth's surface shout, "She gushes! She gushes! We're rich!" Isn't it all interesting?

White Pine Summit is covered with twisted Junipers and the way lay up the dry bed of a mountain torrent until we reached the top.

It wasn't necessary to go into Hamilton, but we wanted to get some tobacco for Mr. Caputin and some candy for his wife, to be taken down to them by the stage; and we wanted to see the relics of what was one of the earliest and greatest of Nevada's silver mines. The mines of Hamilton are in a great high hill called Treasure Hill. An old Indian discovered the silver, it is said, and would inflame the miners down in the towns by coming in with sacks of silver nuggets. A miner bought his secret from him, and for fifty years, Treasure Hill was ripped and hacked and battered at. Now it lies again in its age old silence, despoiled and useless!

An old German lady who had kept a store there since '73 told us how the twelve mule stages would come thundering up the street with the driver cracking his whip and shouting fire to get the people out of the cabins. There were real stone buildings then. Then the big fire came and burned Hamilton out. She never recovered from this, and when the silver gave out the sound of cracking whips and heavy miners' boots departed for ever from Hamilton.

After another drive through the canyons and over two more dead valleys, we drove into Eureka, the town that used to control the world's silver market. The world has gone on; Eureka has gone back. We got gas here at 45 cents a gallon; and had some tire work done. While that was being attended to; I sent those postcards away. Bob and I had a soda drink in the dreary ice-cream-soda store. The proprietor stung Bob to wrath by charging him forty five cents for an ice cream soda and a plain drink. We were glad to leave this bemeaned relic of another day. The only life in Eureka is the life brought in by the Lincoln Highway tourists and sheep herders who ride in for supplies.

Eureka has a Chinese section. It is small, consisting of but five or six places, but these few abodes are picturesque and Chinese enough to color the whole town. Each ramshackle place is built pagoda style, with furtive windows and secretive doors. That is the one thing about "choses chinoises" that antagonizes me. I cannot see the reason for all the furtiveness. Each place was plastered over with red and yellow sheets of Chinese characters. Faded black and tarnished gilt with red and yellow paper pasted on was my impression of them.

Eureka is unique in another way. There are no more than three hundred people living in the town I should judge; and yet on seven of the score of hills surrounding her are cemetaries. Seven graveyards for such a little town! Things must have had a lively tempo in the good old days!

Out of Eureka we ran on to another sage brush valley, starting rabbits up at almost every turn of the wheel. The comparative security of these rabbits, which was manifested in their fat and lazy escape, contrasted with the seven cemetaries on the seven hills back at Eureka.

Just at this time the engine began to cough nervously. It was about 6 oclock and no time for a respectable engine to misbehave. Engines, however, when they do go bad, do so at a time and place which leave no doubt as to their moral collapse. With the moral collapse of the Packard Nine (one always remembers the age of a car at such times) our morale collapsed.

Bob and I lifted both sides of the hood simultaneously and peered in and about the rods, pipes, valves and what ever else goes to make the front end of an automobile fascinating. We took out the spark plugs and polished them, drained some oil from the crank case. She still limped and since the plain was getting spooky and dark, we decided to hobble along into the mountains where we hoped to find a ranch house. While Bob was lying on his back soulfully surveying the transmission case I saw two coyotes sneaking around the sage brush at a distance of two hundred yards. They moved like grey shadows in the dusk. I believe this was the only thing that saved Bob from the unholy joy of tearing out the transmission case; for although he didn't believe I had seen coyotes, he got up and threw the tools into the side pocket.

We stuttered through the gloomy portals of "Devil's Gate" and found ourselves winding along a dugway. It was pitch dark when we reached "Hay Ranch." Mrs. Fox, there, gave us lodging for the night. I found in the course of the conversation that she was the aunt of a Miss Kitchen who was a sophomore at the University of California.

I didn't sleep well, for I was beginning to doubt our ability to reach Berkeley in four days and I knew I wanted to be at school as soon as possible. So next morning about four oclock I was up and getting the car ready: — filling the radiator and waterbags, oiling and tightening, etc. Bob swore that I had never been to bed at all. We had breakfast and left about 6:30 a.m. Miss Fox had given me some mail to take to a ranch "just a little ways down the road." It turned out to be Grimes Ranch, almost thirty miles away! We were ready for dinner when we reached that place.

Mrs. Grimes was one of the Dickens' characters misplaced in time. She was extremely voluble and volatile, and while she boiled potatoes and fried bacon, kept up a running stream of gossip from the kitchen. I soon found a book in which to interest myself, —- Laurence Hope's "Indian Love Lyrics." But Bob was idle — and helpless. He endured it by keeping behind a screen of smoke from his corn-cob pipe.

Mrs. Grimes was evidently yearning for some one to talk to, for she sat while we ate and kept us both supplied with questions, bacon, potatoes and coffee. I asked her how she came to have Hope's "Indian Love Lyrics" and intimated that I should like to take it with me. She looked through it with the expression of one who anticipates the discovery of a great masterpiece hidden in his own home. But the lyrics seemed to baffle her. She said, "I don't know what it's all about. It seems to be love or something." I offered her half a dollar and the anticipation came to maturity in her face. Some one had paid her fifty cents for that old book!

The first song in the book is "Less than the Dust." "Till I Awake" is also contained in the volume, and "Kashmiri Song." There are some beautiful verses in it. [Verses deleted.]

We left "Grimes" under a shower of thanks for the mail we had delivered. Bob was lusting after a real well-cooked meal; I, after a bath. The roads were good, however, and we spun along in good spirits.

And now I must retrace my steps back a distance of twenty miles. This is proof of that theory in psychology that the mind forgets and ignores the incidents that are not pleasing. I had completely forgotten our near-breakdown.

About ten miles out of the "Hay Ranch," something began to thrash itself thunderously in the gear case. We stopped and emptied that complicated box of iniquity of oil and began fishing with our fingers. Bob drew out several pieces of broken teeth, — gear teeth. We discovered that almost the entire length of two teeth in the Master Gear and three teeth in the large Ring Guard had been chewed off. That was serious, for a new gear of that sort would mean a rest for two weeks, at least, while a new part came from San Francisco. When we had cleared the casing of all the broken pieces of steel, we put the covers on again and drove very cautiously on. The car ran all right and continued to do so. But we stopped every ten or fifteen miles and fished out of that case more broken pieces of steel. For a day we were in sad anxiety!

After leaving Mrs. Grimes, we forgot the broken gears, — the car ran smoothly and well. The sky was a little overcast and the day bearably cool. This made the trip more enjoyable.

Mrs. Grimes had told us that the "Willows" where we stopped for water had a lady dentist who was ranching. I remembered seeing a little, shrivelled up, pinchskinned man in breeches and brown shirt and realized that it had been the "Lady Dentist !'' Poor neuralgic cow-punchers!

Soon after this, we dropped out of a group of broken hills over the first summit into a low valley, and began the ascent of Toyiabe Range. There was a beautifully constructed Government road here and the Packard flew at it like a hungry grey-hound. As we ascended, the country became greener and the trees untwisted, until at the Toyiabe Summit we found ourselves among pines for the first time. The grey-mud hills had vanished with the sage brush and good, clean red rock and granite met our eyes.

From the summit to Austin, which nestles on the west side of the Toyiabe Range, we dropped almost a thousand feet in three miles. The road was beautiful, — a series of perfectly graded curves and macadam. The pleasure I got out of this stretch of road made me speculate on whether our aesthetic taste produced the curve or whether the need of curves produced the pleasure we derive from them.

Austin came in sight, far below us, long before we reached it. It is a compact little mining town, cleanly and tidy. Its roofs are red and green and its houses are white walled. There are three Churches here, Catholic, Episcopal and Presbyterian. The main street lies at an incline of about twenty degrees.

It was just dusk again, Friday evening when we pulled up to a Garage and walked down to the International Hotel. We met the Sheriff on the way down. He had seen us come in and, like almost all of his fellow citizens, wanted to know the make, year and the number of cylinders in the car. These mountain dwellers, miners, sheepherders, since the Lincoln Highway was completed, have developed a fanatical interest in "Affaires de l'Essence et de l'automobile."

The Sheriff was a tall, stout wholesome looking man with a red face, yellow whiskers, large sombrero, and two guns. He asked us to come up to his office and have a talk after supper and I, who had had "little talks" with sundry other sheriffs, was for continuing on to Carson City that night. But the T-bone steak we each consumed was resist-less. After getting a room, we went to the Sheriff's office and talked roads, cars and Carson City with him. It seemed that every Sheriff we met, — and somehow we met 'em all -— from Austin to Carson City, was on the pay roll of the Boosters' Club of that latter city. The Sheriff showed us the hand cuffs, leg irons, manacles and chains that Austin had used on her criminals since the earliest days. His descriptions were no doubt very interesting to Bob; but I could hardly fully enjoy them. I returned to my room while Bob played pool awhile. After writing a little and reading a little I went to sleep and didn't wake up until 5 oclock the next morning.

We left Austin about 6 a.m. with instructions from the Sheriff concerning a detour, which, he said, would save us many miles of very bad roads. This detour was from Austin to lone and thence to Westgate, & took us out of our road twenty miles through some of the wildest and most gorgeous mountain scenary I have ever seen. However, if the regular road was worse than the detour it must have been unimaginably bad.

We stopped at Welche's Ranch for breakfast and then continued to lone. From Austin to lone the road is very good; but from lone to Westgate, poor. lone is an abandoned quicksilver camp. There is one store there, ionic in its uniquity; it is the store, post office, town hall, and trading post for the Indians. When we went in there were several squaws and bucks and papooses in there. They left immediately for some reason when they saw us.

The store keeper, who looked like a superannuated librarian, had become so accustomed to the Indians that he spoke in grunts.

"Have you any crackers?" "Ugh!" "What does gasoline cost here?" "Ugh!" We found it cost 55 cents a gallon. "Is the road from here to lone good?" "Ugh!" "Is it bad?" "Ugh!" We gave up the game and came away.

The country we ran into now was a enigmatical as the old man's speech had been. Once we passed a prospector, not the old fashioned kind, but one of the moderns. He was prospecting with a Ford!

When we entered the mountains again, we saw strange hills of red, green, or blue rock and shale. Every mountain was jagged and broken off. The land seemed to be filled with gigantic broken teeth, bleeding red and bleached white. Several mining plants we discerned perched like gulls' nests at the ragged tops. A sign board at a crossing read Lodi, and at another place, in an abrupt canyon, we found the ruined dirt hovels of what must have been the miners of the days of "forty nine."

The hills were alternately red rock, grey granite, green silicate, and white soda mud. After two hours of this wandering about through these terrible, silent staring canyons, we climbed a ridge and dropped through the foothills to Westgate. At Westgate one may buy water at five cents a gallon & also gasoline! God knows what the gasoline would cost!

From Westgate to Sand Springs, the roads were fine. In fact, just before we reached Frenchman's Ranch, we passed a dried up salt lake, smooth and slick from packed-in crystals. We opened up a little here, forgot our broken gears and with the throttle only half open, flashed through about three miles in less than three minutes.

Frenchman's Station had the appearance of a place constructed for "parties." Bob said, "I'll bet there have been a few good ones staged there." I astounded the proprietor by talking French to him. He is from Grenoble, and Bob had to pry him away before we could leave. He gave us a lot of cheese to eat with the last box of those crackers — these were short-bread and were awfully good.

At Sand Springs, we were cursorily inspected for bed bugs, etc, and allowed to proceed. We intended to reach Fallon that night, but struck the worst road in the whole world and night found us ten miles from Fallon.

We found a barn at a Ranch and ate some raisons I had bought at lone. Bob was very tired and I was feeling a little discouraged at our slow progress. But we were both immensely philosophical as we lay beneath that hay stack.

When morning came, we lost no time in starting for Fallon. We were both hungry and dirty and hardly fit objects to be seen by the Church crowds. Our way lay through beautiful farming land, all of it reclaimed, irrigated and drained.

We had a little trouble with the gasoline feed, but eventually arrived in Fallon. Our tank was just about empty and drank in twenty gallons without taking a breath.

Then Bob and I went to the "Barrel House" and had breakfast. This place was tamed! The only bottle in the place was a ketchup bottle and the only barrel was a pickle barrel. Several good sized, he-man poker games and Euchre were going on, however. I heard that Euchre is legal in Nevada because it is interpreted as a game of skill.

We tasted some Fallon cantaloupes and took some along with us. The people seemed proud of their place, and their farms and the Fallon Cantaloupe. I learned that much of the land had been alkali, swampy and as bad as the black alkali salt spring morass we had plowed across the previous night, but that drainage and water from a government dam had changed the face of nature, so to speak, and made many rich farmers in that community. I felt, from seeing this, that the transformation of the West side lands in Salt Lake City was absolutely feasible and likely.

There are quite a few oil derricks and considerable oil exploration here. Practically the entire Salt Spring district is leased to oil companies. I don't think much oil is flowing, however. It is still a gamble.

Almost the first person we met in Fallon was the town marshall. He asked us where we came from and whither we were bound, and in true Carson City patriotism told us to be sure and pass thro Carson City.

We left about 11 a.m. for Carson City, and after an interesting ride, because the country was green and flourishing, reached that place.

It was evident that with the Rockies behind us, the stark part of Nevada was passed, and California was coming near. Rivers ran in the valley bottoms, trees lined the lush fields of lucerne, and villages were more numerous.

Racing down the hill into Carson City we had a blow out, and stopped twenty minutes to change tires, while an individual whom we had passed several miles up the road drove by us with a smirk of self-satisfaction on his face. That thing is galling!

However, we reached historic Carson City, named in honor of the great scout Kit Carson. Our car in the garage, we walked around the town, and then had ice-cream in a real store. It was Sunday afternoon, and the girls certainly did look good to us, who had been looking on Indians so long.

Since we left Payson, Utah, we had not seen a sign of paved road. Now, here in Carson City we had the unqualified luxury of rolling smoothly up and down the main street on pavement several times before we left the town and began to climb King's Canyon.

We were now tackling the Sierras, the mighty snow-mountains which barred the road of the early emigrants on their way to the Pacific Ocean. From Carson City to to the Summit of the Sierras is about 2500 feet and we covered that on a twelve mile grade mostly in "high." The canyon is beautiful. The pines became larger as we ascended, and the fir trees lost their dwarfish, twisted appearance and became noble. Each wind of the road opened up a new vista of valleys in blue haze, of far away countryside, golden in the afternoon sun, and covered with painted barns and dot-like cattle. So precipitous were the sides that the tips of pine trees, whose roots were buried in the splintered rocks far below, were close to and level with the edge of the road around which our car swung dizzily. At one place we were stopped by a Traffic "control" who held us with several other cars while a group of tourists came down from the Californian side.

We got away first, and were soon roaring up the rocky trail, "exhausting" a great cloud of blue smoke behind us. Bob looked back and seemed pleased to find that we had apparently left everything behind.

To have made one mistake on that grade would have landed us down a thousand or so feet among the pines, and we drove rather fast, due, no doubt, to the exhileration of such wonderful scenary.

A big Hudson roared past us at a bend in the road, where we slowed to avoid a rock in the road. Its driver gave us a peculiar look of disgust as he went ahead of us and Bob was enraged at his disdain. When I looked back, however, and saw the great cloud of choking acrid gasses our exhaust was emitting, I knew immediately why the fellow had looked so displeased.

We reached the top of the grade and at once burst into full view of glorious Lake Tahoe, which lay with the sun on its waters.

Nothing can equal the wonder of that sight! To us, who had been travelling for days through dead, parched lands, the sight of God holding that blue flood in the cupped palm of his hand was a miracle. The deep rooted mountains crowd and shoulder together and hold this clear body of crystal like a full goblet in offering to the skies. The firs and the pines troop down to the edges of the Lake where huge rocks lie where the hand of creation hurled them.

The sun, I said, was resting full on the Lake as we ran "silently down from the mountain's crown." It distilled gold into the blue, and its red light ricochetted into the windows of the hotels and cabins that stood on the east shore of the lake.

We stopped outside Glenbrook Hotel and walked out on the pier to drink in the vastness of the great place. The water was perfectly clear, and cool blue, with white sand gleaming up from the bottom. Here and there, around the Lake's edge, lazy spirals of smoke floated from the tips of the trees. Here and there a call, or a peal of laughter echoed from the woods, or the faint drumming sound of an automobile drifted down a hidden trail.

When we came back from the Pier, the autoists whom we had left were there. They, too, were spelled by the wonder in the scene. After they had looked about them awhile, however, they jumped on us and told us laughingly that we had almost gassed everybody. They said that they had to wait until the Canyon cleared up before they could breathe. That made Bob roar, and when we went back to the Packard, he patted his darling before he climbed in as if he had found in her an added virtue to be proud of!

We motored on through these lovely woods with the Lake at our right elbow, passing campers in the side trails cooking supper, and autoists going on up to Glenbrook to dance, and, at last, came to Lakeside, where we stopped for the night.

At Lakeside Hotel, we were assigned to a dear little log cabin in which to sleep, and then, after cleaning ourselves as much as possible, went in the great log dining room of the Hotel where we had a grand supper.

There were tasteful pictures on the white walls, fir cones, and pine branches, and heads and skins of deer, pumas, badgers and coyotes. The floor was waxed and highly polished and I was sorry that the college crowd had left, for I would have liked to have danced here.

A Miss Gorman from Sacramento was staying there with Mrs. Cox, who managed the Hotel. I played some college songs, Bob sang, and then she sang, too. She had a nice voice. When it was dark, a great log fire was made inside a circle of rocks and easy chairs were set outside the Hotel. Here we sat, and talked under the stars. All the little cabins had lights and the night was filled with a blue beauty and star-silver magic. I was reluctant to go to bed; but did, and slept fine in that little log cabin. We left Lakeside about six the next morning and continued on down the wonderland of Tahoe. Soon we passed over the state line into California. I could feel the electric thrill of it! There was a different golden glamour in the air. I was in California! Not until then, did I realize the hold the sunny California had got on me. I was glad to leave Nevada, the Land that God Swept in a Heap and Left There!

Every mile of the trail now was signed with moving and stirring bits of early Californian history. The early emigrants; the tragic Donner expedition, the old wayside inns and hotels; Bullock yokes, with the horned skulls of oxen in them, swinging from the trees to mark historic spots; the sites of famous but vanished hostelries; the staging points of the mountain pony-express; Observation Point, where the weary emigrants with the yoked oxen straining up the rocky trail paused and saw the wonderland of the Pacific open up to them. It is a tremendous experience.

Coming down from Camino that morning, Tuesday, we were astonished to run suddenly on to a paved highway. We were in Placerville, and we almost fainted in disbelief when we learned that from then on until we reached San Francisco we would not have occasion to touch a dirt road.

After spending a few moments in Placerville we drove out in ectasy for Sacramento. The road was intoxicating, and once Bob let her out to seventy! But that was playing with Fate. I glanced apprehensively at our tires. The air was getting hot now and our tires I knew had never been used to such hot roads. True enough, coming out of the golden hills of Placerville and El Dorado, we blew out a tire. This happened almost in the center of the old placer diggings of early California history, where whole hills of gravel had been washed out, and whole river beds dredged up for gold.

We soon changed our tire, and held our breath as we continued over the hot road to Sacramento. About ten miles from the Capital, another tire blew out and we were "checked." Our spare tire had been used, so I caught a ride into Sacramento with the blown out tube in order to get it vulcanized, while Bob was coming in on the rim.

The man I rode in with was a rancher from San Bernadino. His name was Davis, and he had his wife and a boy and girl with him. The whole family were just completing a thorough tour of California, and were enthusiastic and happy and bursting with tales of their experiences. Mr. Davis had lost money farming the year before this, and in order not to lose money this year he had sold a bit of land to pay his taxes and finance his trip, and had taken his family out to see "what God hath wrought." That was rather far sighted and fine of him, wasn't it? Incidentally, this case is an index of what is happening over the country.

I found a vulcanizing shop in Sacramento, and, by the time Bob came trundling in, the tire was ready to go on.

This delay, however, prevented us from reaching Stockton before dark as we had hoped to do. We used up all our money, to the cent, in getting a supper, and after unsuccessfully trying to get a check cashed, we started out in the late afternoon for Stockton, feeling thankful our gasoline tank was replete, if not our pocket books.

Night came down and our lights were not strong enough to drive by, so we drew into the side and waited for the moon to come up.

The moon came up about 12, midnight, and we essayed to drive by her beams. But fair Cynthia was not bright enough and we gave up in disgust.

We had hoped to reach Stockton, where we could cash a check and get accomodations; but we were fourteen miles away on a dark road, with no money and no place to sleep. So we ambled along and peered towards the side for a likely looking barn. We passed several side roads and finally, coming to one around which were clustered some white buildings of uncertain shape, but which, I judged, were ranch buildings. We drove in. I got out the coats etc. and started for the largest of the white buildings to find some hay with which to make our bed. I fell over a tombstone. We were in a graveyard. The white objects were mausoleums!

The news was galvanic. Bob backed the car out with a whoop and we drove down the road two miles before we stopped. Then, under a tree, Bob slept in the car and I slept on a table, until the pale morning came and the birds began to stir among the leaves over me.

We started for Stockton — Bob had been up an hour around a fire he had built at the roadside — and 7:30 a.m. saw us looking for Vera's home. We eventually located the Keltons. They were enthusiastic over us, and fixed us up a nice breakfast. After a short rest and a little music, we said goodbye and went down town where we found Mr. Kelton, who helped us get the check cashed. Mr. Kelton looked fine. He has a good position in the offices of "The Stockton Record." Vera looks well, but considerably changed. She seems very happy. Mrs. Kelton seems just a little mite older, but her tremendous vivacity keeps her youthful.

As we came closer to the coast — the country became more beautiful — golden hills and blue skies, with white buildings and red-tiled, Spanish roofs. It seemed as though Stockton was a few minutes ride to Alameda, so excited was I. Bob kept remarking on the beauty of the countryside, and the bungalows everywhere.

Just before we reached Haywards, while we were climbing to the top of the hills that make Niles Canyon, we saw an automobile turned upside down at the side of the road. The accident had just occured, and the occupants of the car, a man, his wife, and his daughter, had by some miracle escaped death.

It seems that they were descending the steep grade and the car became uncontrollable. We helped to put the badly wrecked machine right side up and continued on our way at a slower speed.

Soon we were descending the Foothill Boulevarde and how the people stared at this low, long, mud-spattered, dust-covered car that came roaring through Oakland with packages roped on the rear!

Bob was excited to see the Bay — it was too misty to see San Francisco, but the shipping and traffic and buildings amazed him.

With a loud honking of the horn and an additional roar from the exhaust, we swung around the little park before our house. Dad was just going up the steps and he turned in startled surprise. Mother was sitting in the window — I saw her look up — jump and then she came running down the steps and flung her arms around me and scolded me for not sending word before.

I told her I had tried to phone from Stockton — but couldn't raise the house. Then Dick, Marie and Albert came from school, and we had a grand re-union.

After lunch, Bob, Albert and I drove to the Ferry, took the Auto Ferry to San Francisco and drove around that marvelous city just as we came in, bag and baggage, dust and dirt. I was certainly proud to show off San Francisco to Bob. He was thrilled, too. Especially by the Bay and the great liners and warships riding there; and the great ship yards!

We met two of the autoists whom we almost asphixiated in Kings Canyon, on the Ferry. They had just come in, too.

We returned about six oclock and put the Peregrinating Packard away to rest after her trip of almost a thousand miles.

It was some trip!

Finis.

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