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!

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.

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.

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:

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.