INTRODUCTORY
April 22, 1922.
My Dear Friend:
You will be interested to know that I am again back from my five months trip to the North and Northwest. While away I covered, according to the railroad time tables, about twelve thousand miles. This took me through most of the Northern States and the New England States and in the Western States.
I left Chicago the 21st of January and visited and stopped at the following places: St. Paul and Minneapolis in Minnesota; Aberdeen in South Dakota; Marmarth in North Dakota; Miles City, Three Forks, Butte and Gerson Hot Springs in Montana; crossing Idaho into Spokane, Washington. We crossed the Continental Divide a few miles east of Butte in four or five feet of snow in an elevation of six thousand feet above sea level. This train was pulled by powerful electrical engines for six hundred miles over the most picturesque mountains in the world. We crossed the tributaries of the great Missouri River more than a score of times, and scaled many mountains, from the highest elevations and glided down into Seattle, Washington, into an elevation of fifteen feet on Puget Sound. Trees were budding and many flowers were already in bloom. After a few days we went to Tacoma in Washington and Portland in Oregon. Then we were off to Sacramento, San Francisco in California. The course took us from the beginning of the Sacramento River in the Siskiyou and Shasta Mountains to its mouth at San Francisco Bay or to the Straits of Carquinez, landing us at Port Costa for Richmond, Berkley and Oakland in Alameda County. At the fine Oakland pier we disembarked from the train and took the ferry boat four miles to San Francisco, passing the Government Island to the left looking right into the setting sun through the Golden Gate.
A few days here in this beautiful setting and we were off for Los Angeles, five hundred miles to the south still. Fresno, Bakersfield, Tehachapi, across the snow-clad Sierra Madre ten thousand feet elevation and in sight of Mount Whitney four thousand feet higher. Down a mountain incline for fifty or more miles to Mojave Desert into Death Valley and to San Fernando and Burbank and Los Angeles. Then to the Orange Show at San Bernardino, passing on our way Pomona, San Gabriel, Claremont and Garrett & Co.’s grape vineyards, one of the homes of the Virginia Dare Extracts. Mr. Garrett is an Enfield man. We could spend only a few days at Los Angeles, then we were off the Coast Route to San Francisco again. Santa Barbara, Ventura, Guadaloupe, San Luis Obispo, Delmonte, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Santa Clara, Red Wood Cities are familiar names. It took three steam engines to pull the train over the mountains coming north. A few days later we were off again for Sacramento, and Salt Lake City in Utah, and Glenwood Hot Springs in Colorado. Passing Florence we came into sight of Pike’s Peak more than a hundred miles east of us, and passing the water-swept city of Pueblo and Colorado Springs into Denver the mile high city. A few days spent here and I was off again for Phillipsburg and Des Moines and to Chicago, coming through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Illinois. I spent a few days in Chicago, was held up on my arrival from the station to my stopping place in Chicago, but was not robbed. My outcry for “Police and help!” thwarted their plans. Then I was off to Washington City and home on the 22nd of March. At the station I was overwhelmed by the students, teachers and friends in the community who had come to welcome me home with school yells and band music.
I traveled two thousand miles in California alone. I gave twenty-eight addresses, attended eight recitals, fourteen lectures, four theaters where persons of color were the stars, three ministers’ meetings, one annual conference, the meeting of the American Missionary Association, the annual meeting of the Connecticut Congregational Association, visited ten colleges and schools, nine state capitals, seventeen city, state and municipal and school museums, twenty public markets. In addition I talked with Japanese and Chinese farmers, fruit growers, cattle men, sheep men, miners, negro ranchmen. I met them on the trains, on the farms, in the hotels and restaurants, on the boats, on the streets, in the stores, markets, and everywhere. I came back with a few pounds less in weight, but with a vision that money could not buy.
I am very truly, T. S. Inborden.