Chapter VII (8)

But a mere uncle of the former Mexican President hardly counts in a town which has the reputation of fairly breeding revolutions for the sister land to the south; whose streets seem to whisper of rumors and counter-rumors, the vague details of plot and counterplot. There is a whole street down in the southwestern corner of San Antonio lined with neat white houses, and the town will know it for many years as "Revolutionary Row." For in the first of these houses General Bernardo Reyes lived, and in the second of them this former governor of Nuevo Leon planned his _coup d'etat_ by which he was to march into Mexico City with all the glory of the Latin, bands playing, flags flying, a display of showy regimentals. Reyes had read English history, and he remembered that one Prince Charlie had attempted something of the very sort. In the long run the difference was merely that Prince Charlie succeeded while Reyes landed in a dirty prison in Mexico City.

Here then is the very incubator of Mexican revolution. There is not an hour in San Antonio when the secret agents of the United States and all the governments and near-governments of our southern neighbor are not fairly swarming in the town and alive to their responsibilities. The border is again passing through historic days--and it fully realizes that. It is twenty-four hours of steady riding from San Antonio over to El Paso--the queer little city under the shadows of the mountains and perched hard against the "silver Rio Grande," this last often so indistinguishable that a young American lieutenant marched his men right over and into Mexican soil one day without knowing the difference--until he was confronted by the angry citizens of Ciudad Juarez and an _affaire nationale_ almost created. Every mile of that tedious trip trouble is in the air.

And yet El Paso does not often take the situation very seriously. It is almost an old story, and if the revolutionists will only be kind enough to point their guns away from the U.S.A. they can blaze away as long as they like and the ammunition lasts. In fact El Paso feels that as long as the Mexican frontier battles have proper stage management they are first-rate advertising attractions for the town--quite discounting mere Mardi Gras or Portola or flower celebrations, Frontier or Round-up Days, as well as its own simpler joys of horse-racing and bull-fighting. On battle-days El Paso can ascend to its house-tops and get a rare thrill. But when the atrocious marksmanship of ill-trained Mexicans does its worst, and a few stray bullets go whistling straight across upon American soil, El Paso grows angry. It demands of Washington if it realizes that the U.S.A. is being bombarded--the fun of fighting dies out in a moment.

San Antonio is a safer breeding ground for insurrection than is El Paso. For one thing it is out of careless rifle-shot, and for another--well at El Paso some Mexican troopers might come right across the silver Rio Grande in a dry season, never wetting their feet or dreaming that they were crossing the majestic river boundary, and pick up a few erring citizens without much effort. There is a risk at El Paso that is not present in San Antonio. Hence the bigger town--in its very atmosphere emitting a friendly comfort toward plottings and plannings--is chosen.

You wish to come closer to the inner heart of the town. Very well then, your guide leads you to the International Club which perches between the narrow and important thoroughfare of Commerce street and one of the interminable windings of the gentle San Antonio river. It was on the roof of the International Club that Secretary Root was once given a famous dinner. It is an institution frankly given "to the encouragement of a friendly feeling between Mexico and the United States." It is something more than that, however. It is a refuge and sort of harbor for storm-tossed hearts and weary minds that perforce must do their thinking in a tongue that, to us, is alien. Most of the time the newspaper men of the town sit in the rear room of the club and look down across the tiny river on to the quiet grounds of an oldtime monastery. They play their pool and dominoes--two arts that seem hopelessly wedded throughout all Texas. The International Club nods.

Suddenly a tall bronzed man, with _mustachios_, perhaps a little group of Mexicans will come into the place. The pool and the dominoes stop short. There are whisperings, flashy papers from Mexico city are suddenly produced, maps are studied. One man has "inside information" from Washington, another lays claim to mysterious knowledge up from the President's palace of the southern capital, perhaps from the constitutionalists along the frontier. There is a great deal of talk, much mystery--after all, not much real information.

But when some real situation does develop, San Antonio has glorious little thrills. To be the incubator of revolution is almost as exciting as to have bull-fights or a suburban battle-field, the treasures for which San Antonio cannot easily forgive her rival, El Paso. Each new plot-hatching of this sort gives the big Texas town fresh thrills. Gossip is revived in the hotel lobbies and restaurants, the cool and lofty rooms of the International Club are filled with whisperers in an alien tongue, out at Fort Sam Houston the cavalrymen rise in their stirrups at the prospect of some real excitement. San Antonio does not want war--of course not--but if it must have war--well it is already prepared for the shock. And it talks of little else.

"Within ten years the United States will have annexed Mexico and San Antonio will have become a second Chicago," says one citizen in his enthusiasm. "And what a Chicago--railroads, manufactories and the best climate of any great city in the world."

Even in war-times your true San Antonian cannot forget one of the chief assets of his lovely town.

The others say little. One is a junior officer from out at the post. He can say nothing. But he is hoping. There is not much for an army man in inaction and the best of drills are not like the real thing. For him again--the old slogan--"a fight or a frolic."

* * * * *

Not all of San Antonio is Spanish--although very little of it is negro. An astonishing proportion of its population is of German descent. These are largely gathered in the east end of the town, that which was formerly called the Alamo quarter, and like all Germans they like their beer. The brewing industry is one of the great businesses of San Antonio--and the most famous of all these breweries is the smallest of them. On our first trip to "San Antone" we heard about that beer; all the way down through Texas--"the most wonderful brew in the entire land."

The active force of this particular Los Angeles brewery consisted of but one man, the old German who carried his recipe with him in the top of his head, and who had carefully kept it there throughout the years. In the cellar of the little brewery he made the beer, upstairs and in the garden he served it. In the mornings he worked at his cellar kettles, in the late afternoon and the early evening he stood behind his bar awaiting his patrons. If they wished to sit out in the shady garden they must serve themselves. There were no waiters in the place. If a man could not walk straight up to the bar and get his beer he was in no condition for it. The old German was as proud of the respectability of his place as he was of the secret recipe for the beer, which had been handed down in his family from generation to generation.

Only once was that secret given--and then after much tribulation and in great confidence to an agent of the government. But he had his reward. For the government at Washington in its turn pronounced his the purest beer in all the land. Men then came to him with proposals that he place it upon the market. They talked to him in a tempting way about the profits in the business, but he shook his head. His beer was never to be taken from the brewery. It was a rule from which San Antonians and tourists alike had tried to swerve him, to no purpose. Of course, every rule has its exceptions but there was only a single exception to this. Each Saturday night Mr. Degen used to send a small keg over with his compliments to a boyhood friend--he believed that friendship of a certain sort can break all rules and precedents.

All the way down through dry Texas we smacked our lips at the thought of Degen's beer. Before we had been in San Antonio a dozen hours we found our way to the brewery; in a quiet side street down back of the historic Alamo. But we had no beer.

The brewer was dead. In a neighboring street his friends were quietly gathering for his funeral, and rumor was rife as to whether or no he had confided his recipe to his sons. It was a great funeral, according to the local newspapers, the greatest in the recent history of San Antonio. It was a tribute from the chief citizens of a town to a simple man who had lived his life simply and honestly--who in his quiet way had builded up one of the most distinctive institutions of the place.

Rumor was soon satisfied. The secret of the recipe of the beer had not died. In a few days the brisk little brewery in the side street was in action once again. The stout Germans in their shirt-sleeves were again tramping with their paddles round and round the great vat while their foaming product was being handed to patrons in the adjoining room. But, alas, the traditions of the founder are gone. The beer is now bottled and sold on the market--in a little while is will be emblazoned in electric lights along the main streets of New York and Chicago. We are in a commercial and a material age. Even in San Antonio they are threatening to widen Commerce street--that narrow but immensely distinctive thoroughfare that cuts through the heart of the town--threatening, also, to tear down the old convent walls next the Alamo and there erect a modern park and monument. By the time these things are done and San Antonio is thoroughly "modernized" she will be ready for an awakening--she is apt to find with her naïve charm gone the golden flood of tourists has ceased to stop within her walls. Truly she will have killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

* * * * *

You will like to think of it as the City of the Little Squares. After all the other memories of San Antonio are gone you will revert to these--gay open places, filled with palms and other tropical growths, and flanked by the crumbling architecture of yesterday elbowing the newer constructions of today. You will like to think of those squares in the sunny daytime with the deep shadows running aslant across the faces, there is delight in the memory of them at eventide, when the cluster lights burn brightly and the narrow sidewalks are filled with gaily dressed crowds, typical Mexicans, tall Texans down from the ranches for a really good time in "old San Antone," natives of the cosmopolitan town, tourists of every sort and description. Then comes the hour when the crowds are gone, the town asleep, its noisy clocks speaking midnight hours to mere emptiness--San Antonio breathes heavily, dreams of the days when she was a Spanish town of no slight importance, and then looks forward to the morrow. She believes that her golden age is not yet come. Her plans for the future are ambitious, her opportunity is yet to come. In so far as those dreams involve the passing of the old in San Antonio and the coming of the new, God grant that they will never come true.

17

THE AMERICAN PARIS

A great bronze arch spans Seventeenth street and bids you welcome to Denver. For the capital of Colorado seems only second to the Federal capital as a mecca for American tourists. She has advertised her charms, her climate, her super-marvelous scenery cleverly and generously. The response must be all that she could possibly wish. All summer and late into the autumn her long stone station is crowded with travelers--she is the focal point of those who come to Colorado and who find it the ideal summer playground of America.

To that great section known as the Middle West, beginning at an imaginary line drawn from Chicago south through St. Louis and so to the Gulf, there is hardly a resort that can even rival Colorado in popular favor. Take Kansas, for a single instance. Kansas comes scurrying up into the Colorado mountains every blessed summer. It grows fretfully hot down in the Missouri bottoms by the latter part of July, and the Kansans begin to take advantage of the low rates up to Denver and Colorado Springs and Pueblo. And with the Kansans come a pretty good smattering of the folk of the rest of the Middle West. They crowd the trains out of Omaha and Kansas City night after night; at dawn they come trooping out through the portal of the Denver Union station and pass underneath that bronze arch of welcome.

They find a clean and altogether fascinating city awaiting them, a city solidly and substantially built. Eighteen years ago Denver decided that she must discontinue the use of wooden buildings within her limits. She came to an expensive and full realization of that. For Colorado is an arid country nominally, and water is a precious commodity within her boundaries. The irrigation ditches are familiar parts of the landscapes and ever present needs of her cities. To put out fire takes water, and Denver sensibly begins her water economy by demanding that every structure that is within her be built of brick or stone or concrete. And yet her parks are a constant reproach to towns within the regions of bountiful water. They are wonderfully green, belying that arid country, and the water that goes to make them green comes from the fastnesses of the wonderful Rockies, a full hundred miles away.

The brick buildings make for a substantial city, but Denver herself has a solidity that you do not often see in a Western city. Giant office buildings in her chief streets do not often shoulder against ill-kempt open lots, have as unbidden neighbors mere shanties or hovels. Moreover, she is not a "one-street town." Sixteenth and Seventeenth streets vie for supremacy--the one with the great retail establishments, the other with the hotels, banks and railroad offices. There are other streets of business importance--no one street not even as a _via sacre_ of this bustling town for the best of her homes.

* * * * *

The Paris of America, is what she likes to call herself and when you come to know her, the comparison is not bad. But Paris, with all of her charms, has not the location of Denver--upon the crest of a rolling, treeless plain, with the Rocky Mountains, jagged and snow-capped, to serve as a garden-wall. Belasco might have staged Denver--and then been proud of his work. But hers is a solitary grandeur and a very great isolation. She is isolated agriculturally and industrially, and before long we shall see how difficult all this makes it for her commercial interests. It makes things difficult in her social life, and Denver must, and does, have a keen social life.

The isolation and the altitude, constantly tending to make humans nervous and unstrung, demands amusement, self-created amusement of necessity. If Denver is not amused she quarrels; you can see that in her unsettled and troubled politics, and her endless battles with the railroads. So she is wiser when she laughs and it is that faculty of much laughing, much fun, expressed in a variety of amusements that have led magazine writers to call the town, the Paris of America, although there is little about her, save the broad streets and her many open squares and parks to suggest the real Paris. But, on the other hand, the Seine is hardly to be compared to the majesty of the backbone of the continent, Denver's greatest glory.

In winter Denver society has a fixed program. On Monday night it religiously attends the Broadway Theater, a playhouse which on at least one night of the week blossoms out as gayly as the Metropolitan Opera House. Denver assumes to prove herself the Paris of America by the gayness of its gowns and its hats and a Denver restaurant on Monday night after the play only seems like a bit of upper Broadway, Manhattan, transplanted. On Tuesday afternoon society attends the vaudeville at the Orpheum and perhaps the Auditorium or one of the lesser theaters that night. By Wednesday evening at the latest the somewhat meager theater possibilities of the place are exhausted and one wealthy man from New York who went out there used to go to bed on Wednesday until Monday, when the dramatic program began anew. For him it was either bed or the "movies," and he seemed to prefer bed.

In summer the Broadway is closed, and Elitch's Gardens, one of the distinctive features of the town, takes its place as a Monday rendezvous. It is a gay place, Elitch's, with a quaint foreign touch. A cozy theater stands in the middle of an apple orchard--part of the one-time farm of the proprietress' father. Good taste and the delicate skill of architect and landscape gardener have gone hand in hand for its charm. You go out there and dine leisurely, and then you cross the long shady paths under the apples to the theater. And even if the play in that tiny playhouse were not all that might be expected--although the best of actors play upon its stage--one would be in a broadly generous mood, at having dined and spent the evening in so completely charming a spot.

But the Parisians of Colorado are not blind to the summer joys of the wonderful country that lies aroundabout them. They quickly become mountaineers, in the full sense of the word. They can ride--and read riding not as merely cantering in the park but as sitting all day in the saddle of some cranky broncho--they can build fires, cook and live in the open. A Denver society woman is as particular about her _khakias_ as about her evening frocks. When these folk, experienced and well-schooled, go off up into the great hills, they are the envy of all the tourists.

Do not forget that we started by showing Denver as a mecca for these folk. When you come to see how very well the Paris of America takes care of them you do not wonder that they return to her--many times; that they are with her more or less the entire year round. Her hotels are big and they are exceedingly well run. There are more side trips than a tourist can take, using the city as a base of operations, than a man might physically use in a month. The most of these run off into the mountains that have been standing sentinel over Denver since first she was born. In a day you can leave the bustling capital town, pass the foothills of the Rockies and climb fourteen thousand feet aloft to the very backbone of the continent. Indeed, it seems to be the very roof of the world when you stand on a sentinel peak and look upon timber line two thousand feet below, where the trees in another of Nature's great tragedies finally cease their vain attempts to climb the mountain tops.

A man recommended one of the mountain trips over a wonderfully constructed railroad, poetically called the "Switzerland Trail."

"You'll like that trip," he said, with the enthusiasm of the real Denverite. "It's wonderful, and such a railroad! Why, there are thirty-two tunnels between here and the divide."

The tourist to whom this suggestion was made looked up--great scorn upon his countenance.

"That doesn't hit me," he growled, "not even a little bit. I live in New York--live in Harlem, to be more like it, and work down in Wall street--use the subway twelve times a week. I don't have to come to Colorado to ride in tunnels."

Tourists form no small portion of Denver industry. She has restaurants and souvenir shops, three to a block; seemingly enough high-class hotels for a town three times her size. Yet the restaurants and the hotels are always filled, the little shops smile in the sunshine of brisk prosperity. And as for "rubberneck wagons," Denver has as many as New York or Washington. They are omnipresent. The drivers take you to the top of the park system, to the Cheesman Memorial, to see the view. All the time you are letting your eyes revel in the glories of those great treeless mountains, the megaphone man is dinning into your ears the excellence of his company's trips in Colorado Springs, in Manitou, in Salt Lake City. He assumes that you are a tourist and that you will have never had enough.

Tourists become a prosperous industry in a town that has no particular manufacturing importance. Great idle plants, the busy smelters of other days, bespeak the truth of that statement. Denver, as far as she has any commercial importance, is a distributing center. Her retail shops are excellent and her wholesale trade extends over a dozen great western states. Her banks are powers, her influence long reaching. But she is not an industrial city.

That has worried her very much, is still a matter of grave concern to her business men. Their quarrels with the railroads have been many and varied. Denver realizes, although she rarely confesses it, that she has disadvantages of location. These same mountains that the tourist comes to love from the bottom of his heart, just as the Coloradians have loved them all these years, are a real wall hemming her in, barriers to the growth of their capital. When the Union Pacific--the first of all the transcontinental railroads--was built through to the coast it was forced, by the mountains, to carry its line far to the north--a bitter pill to the ambitious town that was just then beginning to come into its own. Denver sought reprisals by building the narrow-gauge Denver & Rio Grande, a most remarkable feat of railroad engineering; bending far to the south and then to the north and west through the narrow niches of the high mountains. But hardly had the Denver & Rio Grande assumed any real importance in a commercial fashion and the mistake of its first narrow-gauge tracks corrected, before it was joined at Pueblo by direct routes to the east and Denver was again isolated from through transcontinental traffic. She was then and still is reached by side-lines.

This was a source of constant aggravation to the man who was until his death two or three years ago, Denver's first citizen--David H. Moffat. Mr. Moffat's interest and pride in the town were surpassing. He had grown up with it--in the later years of his life he used to boast that he once had promoted its literature, for he had come to Denver when it was a mere struggling mining-camp as a peddler, selling to the miners who wanted to write home a piece of paper and a stamped envelope, for five cents.

Moffat saw that a number of important lines were making Denver their western terminal--particularly the Burlington and the Kansas stems of the Union Pacific and the Rock Island. He felt that he might pick up traffic from these roads and carry it straight over the mountains to Salt Lake City, a railroad center suffering the same disadvantages as Denver. He sent surveyors up into the deep canyons and the _impasses_ of the Rockies. When they brought back the reports of their _reconnoissances_, practical railroad men laughed at Mr. Moffat.

The big bankers of the East also laughed at him when he came to them with the scheme, but the man was of the sort who is never daunted by ridicule. He had a sublime faith in his project, and when men told him that the summit of 10,000 feet above the sea level where he proposed to cross the divide was an impossibility, he would retort about the number of long miles he was going to save between the capital of Colorado and the capital of Utah and he would tell of the single Routt county stretch, a territory approximating the size of the state of Massachusetts and estimated to hold enough coal to feed the furnace fires of the United States for three hundred years. When he was refused money in New York and Chicago he would return to Denver and somehow manage to raise some there. The Moffat road was begun, despite the scoffers. Its promoter made repeated trips across the continent to secure money, and each time when he was home again he would raise the dollars in his own beloved Denver and move the terminal of his road west a few miles. He was at it until the day of his death and he lived long enough to see his railroad within short striking reach of the treasures of Routt county.

At his death it passed into the hands of a receiver, and Denver seemed to have awakened from its dream of being upon the trunk-line of a transcontinental railroad. But there were hands to take up the lines where Moffat had dropped them. Times might have been hard and loan money scarce around Colorado, but the men who were taking up what seemed to be the deathless project of Denver's own railroad were hardly daunted. Instead, they boldly revised Moffat's profile and prepared to cut two thousand feet off the backbone of the continent and shorten their line many miles by digging a tunnel six miles long and costing some four millions of dollars. Now a tunnel six miles long and costing $4,000,000 is quite an enterprise, even to a road which has boasted thirty-two of them in a single day's trip up to the divide; a particularly difficult enterprise to a road still in the shadows of bankruptcy. But the men who were directing the fortunes of the Denver & Salt Lake--as the Moffat road is now known--had a plan. Would not the city of Denver lend its credit to an enterprise so fraught with commercial possibilities for it? Would not the city of Denver arrange a bond issue for the digging of that tunnel--incidentally finding therein a good investment for its spare dollars?

Would Denver do that? Ask this man over there. He is well acquainted with the Paris of America.

"Of course it would," he answers. "If some one was to come along with a scheme to expend five million dollars in building a statue to Jupiter atop of Pikes Peak, he would find plenty of supporters and enthusiasm in Denver. The only scheme that does not succeed out there is the one that is practical."

The gentleman is sarcastic--and yet not very far from the truth. For last year when the bond issue for the railroad tunnel went to a vote it was carried--with enthusiasm. Thereafter Denver was upon the trunk-line railroad map. The mere facts that the nine miles of tunnel were yet to be bored and many additional miles of the most difficult railroad construction of the land builded to its portals were mere details. The thin air of the Mile-High city lifts its citizens well over details. And they are far too broad, far too generous to trouble with such minute things.

For in them dwells the real spirit of the West--by this time no mere gateway--and it is a rare spirit, indeed. The town, as we have already intimated, has a strong social tendency. She has sent her men and women, her sons and her daughters to the East and they have won for themselves on their own merits. The Atlantic seaboard has paid full tribute to the measure of her training--and why not? Her schools are as good as the best, her fine homes and her little homes together would be a credit to any town in the land, her big clubs would grace Fifth avenue. Her whole social organism from bottom to top is well fibered. It is charmingly exclusive in one way, warmly democratic in many others.

A girl tourist from Cleveland, a recent summer, essayed to make the ascent of the capitol dome between two connecting trains. She miscalculated distances during the hour and a half that was at her disposal and almost missed her outbound train. She surely would have missed it, if it had not been for the courtesy of a well-dressed Denver woman. The girl stood at the corner of Seventeenth street and Broadway, where a group of large hotels center, waiting for a trolley car to take her to the station. She could see its sightly tower a long way down Seventeenth street, but there were no cars in sight at that instant. She spoke to the woman, who was coming out of a drug store, and asked about the car service to the station. In the East she might have had a perfunctory answer, if she received an answer at all. The Denver woman began explaining, then she checked herself:

"Better yet," she smiled, "I have my automobile here and I'll take you down there while we are talking about it."

The car was a big imported fellow and the girl made her train. Some time after, she discovered that the woman who had been of such courteous attention was one of the very biggest of Denver society leaders. Imagine, if you can, such a thing coming to pass upon the Atlantic seaboard--in New York, in Boston, in Philadelphia--or in Charleston!

* * * * *

There is still another phase of life in Denver--and that is the fact that most of her residents, for one reason or another, have drifted out to her from the East. Once in a long while, if you loaf over your morning newspaper on a shady bench in the Capitol grounds, you will become acquainted with some whiskered old fellow who will tell you that he chased antelope where the big and showy City Park today stands, that he remembers clearly when a nearby street was the Santa Fé Trail and then a country road, and that two generations after him are living in Denver; or sometimes if you go down into Larimer street, which is old Denver, you can find a veteran who likes to prate of other days--of the time when he used to pack down to the capital from his mountain claim, one hundred and twenty-five miles over the mountain snows, for his winter's bacon. But the majority of these Denverites have come from the East. There is some old town in New England with avenues of giant trees that is still home to them, and yet they all have a heap of affection for the city of their adoption.

Some of them have gone to Denver against their will, and that is the tragic shadow of Colorado. They are expatriates--exiles, if you please--for Colorado is the American Siberia. This dread thing, this thing that is impartial to all low altitudes--the white plague--marks the victims, who go shuffling their way to die among the hills--in the gay Paris of North America. It is the gaunt tragedy of Denver, and even though the Denverites speak lightheartedly of the "T. B.'s" who have come to dwell among them, they themselves know best the bitter tragedy of it all.

Here were two girls, sisters, who worked in a restaurant. A customer held his home newspaper spread as he supped alone. Its title, after the fashion of country weeklies, was emblazoned that all might read; the widespread eagle has been its feature for three-quarters of a century now. One of the waitresses made bold to speak.

"So you are from near Syracuse?" she said.

It was affirmed. She beckoned to her sister to come over. The little restaurant--Denver fashion, it made specialities of "short orders," cream waffles and T-bone steaks--was almost deserted. She spoke to her sister.

"He's from Syracuse," she said. The sister was a delicate, colorless little thing, but the blood flushed up into her pale cheeks for an instant.

"We're from Syracuse," she said proudly. "We used to live up on the hill, just around the corner from the college. It was great fun to see the students go climbing up around Mount Olympus there. It was twice as great fun in winter, when the north wind was blowing the snow right up into our faces."

Exiles these. They had left their nice, comfortable home there in the snug, New York state city to make the long dreary trek to Denver. They were clever girls, and it seemed certain that they might find work in some nice office in the big and growing Colorado city. They were fairly competent stenographers, and it seemed to them that they might live in peace and comfort in the new home. It was a change from their big Syracuse house to a narrow hallroom in a Denver boarding house. Then upon that came the fruitless search for a "nice place." Hundreds of other girl stenographers, driven on the long trip West, were pressing against them. The two Syracusans held their heads high--for a time. Then they were glad to get the menial places as waitresses.

The man who checks trunks at one of the biggest transfer companies confessed that he was an exile, too.

"Came out here a dozen years ago with a busted lung," he admitted with a quizzical smile. "Guess I'll stay for a while longer. But I want to go back to Baltimore. Before I am done with it I am going back to Baltimore. I'm going to walk down Charles street once again and breathe the fragrance of the flowers in the gardens, if it kills me."

A girl in a boarding house leaned up against the wall of the broad and shady piazza and said she liked Denver "really, truly, immensely."

"Do you honestly?"

"Honestly," she drawled gravely. "God knows, I've got to. I'm a lunger, although they don't know it here. I've only got one lung, but it's a good lung," she ended with a little hysterical laugh.

Another exile. The American Siberia, in truth, save that this Siberia is a near Paradise--a kingdom for exiles where the grass is as green as it is back in the old East, where the trees cast welcome shade and the strange new flowers blossom out smiles of hope. But a Siberia none the less. The big sanitariums all about the city tell that. The keeper of the Denver Morgue will tell it, too. The suicide rate in Denver runs high. Desperate folk go out to Colorado to shut the door in the face of death--and go too late. They are far from home, alone, friendless, penniless in despair--the figures of the statisticians cannot lie.

The East has this as a debt to pay Denver, and generally she pays it royally. Denver does not forget the times when the Atlantic seaboard has come to her assistance--despite the troubles of David H. Moffat in raising capital for his railroad. Once in a business council there while the East was getting some rather hard knocks for its "fool conservatism"--perhaps it had been refusing to buy the bonds of the mountain-climbing railroad--a big Denver banker got the floor. He was a man who could demand attention--and receive it.

"I want you to remember one thing," he said; "fifteen years ago we were laying out and selling town-lots for a dozen miles east of Denver; we were selling them to Easterners--for their good money. When they came out and looked for their land what did they see? They saw plains--mile after mile of plains--peopled by what? They were peopled by jackrabbits, and the jackrabbits were bald from bumping their heads against the surveyors' stakes. Until we have redeemed those lots and built our city out to them and upon them, gentlemen, we have not redeemed our promise to the East."

And no one who knows Denver doubts that the time will yet come when she will redeem that promise. Her railroad may or may not come to be a transcontinental route of importance, manufacturing may or may not descend upon her with its grime and industry and wealth, but her magnificent situation there at the base of the Rockies will continue to make her at least a social factor in the gradually lengthening roll of really vital American cities.

18

TWO RIVALS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC--AND A THIRD

"When you get to Portland you will see New England transplanted. You will see the most American town on the continent, bar only Philadelphia."

The man on the train shrieking westward down through the marvelous valley of the Columbia spoke like an oracle. He had a little group of oddly contorted valises that bespoke him as a traveling salesman, and hence a person of some discrimination and judgment. He was ready to talk politics, war to the death on railroads, musical comedy and the condition of the markets with an equally uncertain knowledge, a fund of priceless information that never permitted itself to undergo even the slightest correction.

But he was right, absolutely right, about Portland. From the cleanest railroad station that we have ever seen, even though the building is more than twenty years old, to the very crests of the fir-lined hills that wall her in, here is a town that is so absolutely American, that it seems as if she might even boast one of the innumerable George Washington headquarters somewhere on her older streets. Her downtown streets are conservatively narrow, her staunch Post Office suggests a public building in one of the older cities on the Atlantic coast, and her shops are a medley of delights, with apparently about thirty percent of them given over to the retail vending of chocolate. Our Portland guide was grieved when we made mention of this last fact.

"I once went to Boston," said he, "and found it an almost continuous piano store."

Which was, of course, a mere evasion of the truth of our suggestion as to the chocolate propensities of the maids of Portland. They are very much like the girls in Hartford or Indianapolis or St. Paul or any other bustling town across this land, attending the Saturday matinées with an almost festal regularity; rollicking, flirting girls, grave and gay, girls dancing and girls driving their big six-cylinder automobiles with almost unerring accuracy up the tremendous hills of the town.

Hills they really are and well worth the tall climb to Council Crest, the showiest of them all. If your host does not mind tire expense and the wear and tear on his engine, he may take you up there in his automobile. The street car makes the same ascent, and the managers of the local traction system who have to pay for all the repairs and renewals to the cars do not hesitate to say that it is the least profitable line in creation. But the final result at Council Crest is worth a set of tires, or a six-months' ageing of a trolley car.

You have climbed up from the heart of the busy town, past the business section, spreading itself out as business sections of all successful towns must continue to do, past the trim snug little white Colonial houses--that must have been stolen from old Salem or Newburyport--all set among the dark greens of the cedars and the firs, and belying the Northland tales of the tree foliage by the great rose-bushes that bloom all the year round, up on to the place where tradition says the silent chiefs of red men used to gather.... Below you from Council Crest the town--the town, at dusk, if you please. The arcs are showing the regular pattern of trim streets, the shops and the big office buildings are aglow for the night with the brilliancy of artificial illumination. It is dark down in the town--night has closed in upon it.

Now lift your eyes and let them carry past the town and the black gloom of the river, over the nearest encirclings of the fir-clad hills and see the day die in the most high place. You see it now--a peculiar pink cloud, which is not a cloud at all, but a snow-capped cone-shaped peak rising into the darkening heavens. Mount Hood is an asset for Portland, because for any habitation of man it would be an inspiration. And beyond Mount Hood--fifty miles distant--but further to the north are Mount Adams, Mount St. Helen's and sometimes on a fine clear evening Rainier bidding alike brilliant farewells to the dying day.

This then is the city into which a traveler may enter on an autumn day to find the innumerable cedars and firs, the changing brilliancy of the maple leaves proclaiming it North, with the gaily blossoming rose-bushes and the home-grown strawberries of October telling a paradoxical story and locating the Oregon metropolis to the South. The publicity experts of the town can--and do--sound its praises in no faint terms. They will tell you of a single day when twenty-two wheat vessels were at Portland docks gathering the food-stuffs for a hungry Orient, they will reel off statistics as to the shipping powers of the great lumber port in all the world and then, without a lessening of the pride, will go further and explain Portland's hopes for the further inland navigation of the streams that make her an important ocean port although fifty miles distant from the sight of the sea. The Columbia river is already navigable for four hundred miles inland and Portland is today coöperating with the Canadian authorities in British Columbia for extending the waterway's availability as a carrier for another four hundred miles. A great work has been performed in pulling the teeth of the mighty Columbia where it meets the sea--in building jetties at the mouth of the river. The government with unusual energy is making new locks at the impressive Cascades. Portland has good reason for her faith in the future. Her railroad systems are in their infancy; a part of Central Oregon as large as the state of Ohio is just now being reached by through routes from Portland. What future they shall bring her no man dares to predict.

But we, for ourselves, shall like to continue to think of Portland as a gentle American town set between guardian fir-clad hills and sentineled by snow-capped peaks; we shall enjoy remembering the yellow and red leaves of Autumn, the luxuriant roses, the strawberries and the crisp October nights in one delightful paradoxical jumble.

* * * * *

To make a great seaport city out of a high-springing ridge of volcanic origin was a truly herculean task, but Seattle sprang to it with all the enthusiasm of her youth. "Re-grading" is what she has called it, and because even armies of men with pick and with shovel could not work fast enough for her own satisfaction, she borrowed a trick from the old-time gold miners and put hose-men at work. Hydraulic science supplanted men and teams and picks and even the big steam shovels. The splashing hose wore down the crest of the great hills until sturdy buildings teetered on their foundations and late moving tenants had to come and go up and down long ladders.

In 1881 President Hayes came to this strange little lumbering town and spoke from the platform of the two-storied Occidental Hotel in the center of the village to its entire population--some five hundred persons. The Occidental Hotel was gone within ten years, to be replaced by a hostelry that in 1890 was big and showy for any town and that in 1912, Seattle regarded almost as a relic of past ages. And stranger still, the hills--the eternal hills, if you please--that looked upon the Occidental Hotel only yesterday, have gone. Not that Seattle will not always be a side-hill town, that the cable cars will not continue to climb up Madison street from the waterfront like flies upon a window-glass, but that a tremendous reformation has been wrought, with the aid of engineers' skill and the famous "hard money" of the Pacific coast.

For here was a town that decided almost overnight to be a seaport of world-wide reputation. She looked at her high hills ruefully. Then she called for the hose-men. The hills were doomed.

There was Denny hill, with a park of five acres capping it. The surveyors set their rival stakes five hundred feet below the lowest level of the little park and a matter of almost a million cubic yards of earth went sploshing down the long hydraulic sluices to make the tide-water flats at the bottom of the hills into solid footing for future factories and warehouses. And when the "regraders" were done the architects and the builders were upon their heels.

Denny hill had boasted a hotel upon its summit, which in the late eighties Seattle regarded as an architectural triumph, a wooden thing of angles and shingles and queer Queen Anne turrets and dormers. The name of the old hotel went to a new one which supplanted it at a proper altitude for a city that was determined to be metropolitan--and the new hotel was a dignified structure worthy of the best town in all this land.

"We had to do it," the Seattle man will tell you, without smiling. "We have got to be ready for a population of a million or more. Our house has got to be in order."

It is not every day that one can see an American metropolitan city in the making.

* * * * *

Back of the high-crested hills that have been suffered to remain as a part of the topography of this remarkable town--for its residents still like to perch their smart new houses where they may command a view of Puget Sound or the snow-capped Rainier--is as lovely a chain of lakes as was ever given to an American city. Boston would have made the edges of these the finest suburbs in the land; she is trying some sort of an experiment of that kind with her dirty old Charles river. Seattle saw in the great bowl of Lake Washington something more.

"We can crowd into Portland a little more," said the shrewdest of her citizens, "by making this lake into a fresh-water harbor."

Just what the advantages of a fresh-water harbor may be to Seattle which already possesses one of the finest deep-water harbors on the North Pacific, may be obscure to you for the moment. Then the Seattle man informs you that Portland has a fresh-water harbor, that the masters of ships, still thirty days' sailing from port, make for its haven, knowing that in fresh water the barnacles that make so great a drag upon a vessel's progress will fall away from the hull. A fresh-water bath for a salt-water hull is better than a drain-off in a dry dock--and a great sight cheaper.

Here, then, is a masterful new town seeking new points of advantage over its rivals, piercing canals through to its backyard lakes so that it may eventually be as completely surrounded by docks and shipping as are New York and Boston. It is impossible to think of Seattle ever hesitating. Seattle proceeds to accomplish. Before she has a real opportunity to count the cost, the improvements which she has undertaken are rolling in revenue to her coffers.

* * * * *

Tacoma is smaller than either Seattle or Portland--and not one whit less vigorous than either of them. She has not undergone the wholesale transformations of her sister to the north and still retains all the aspects of a busy port of the Far North--long reaching wharves, busy, dirty railroad yards reaching and serving them, fir-clad hills rising from the water, the smell and industry of lumber--and back of all these her mountain. It is her mountain--"The Mountain that was God" as the Indians used to say--and if for long weeks it may stay modestly hidden behind fog-banks, there do come days when its great snow-capped peak gazes serenely down upon the little city.

Do not dare to come into this town and call her mountain Rainier, after the fashion of government "map sharps" and railroad advertisements. It is Mount Tacoma, if you please, and woe be to any man who calls it anything else. Former President Taft once shouldered the question upon reaching the northwestern corner of the land like a true diplomat. At the dinners in both Seattle and Tacoma he referred to the great guardian peak of Washington as "the mountain" thereby offending no one and leaving a pleasant "lady or the tiger" mystery as to which of the two names he would use in private conversation.

But whether the mountain be Rainier or Tacoma, it is going to be one of the great playgrounds of the nation--and that within very few years. Think of starting out from a brisk American city of a hundred thousand population and within two hours standing at the foot of a giant glacier grinding down from the heavens, a cold, dead, icy thing but still imbued with the stubborn sort of life that stunted vegetable growths possess, a life that makes the frozen river travel toward the sea every day of the year. A man living in Tacoma, or Seattle, or Portland, for that matter, can have both the dangers and the joys of Swiss mountain climbing but a few hours distant. It takes knowledge and courage to make the ascent of Rainier--a tedious trip which starts through the three summer months in which it is possible at five o'clock in the morning so as to reach the summit before the snows begin to melt to the danger point. And yet, in the hands of skilled guides, so many women cross the crevices and climb the steep upward trails, that the record of their ascents is no longer kept.

This great Swiss mountain--higher than Blanc, and vastly more impressive from the fact that its fourteen thousand foot summit rises almost directly from the sea--is the central feature of the newest of all the government parks. It is in the stages of early development and already the tourists are coming to it in increasing numbers. Given a few years and Rainier will vie in popularity with the Yellowstone, the Yosemite and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. In scenic beauty of its own inimitable sort it already ranks with these.

The man who makes the ascent of Rainier--if poetry and imagination rest within his soul--may truly feel that he has come near to God. He can feel the ardor and the inspiration of the red men who gave the mountain its mystic symbolism. He can look up into the clouds and feel that he is at the dome of the world. He can look down, down past the timber line off across miles of timber land and catch the silver of Puget Sound and the distant horizon flash of the Pacific. He can see smoke to the south--Portland--smoke to the north and west--Seattle--and nearer than these--the brisk Tacoma that hugs this mountain to herself.

If imagination rest within him he can now know that these cities, at the northwest corner of America, are barely adult, just beginning to come into their own. A great measure of growth and strength is yet to be given to them.

19

SAN FRANCISCO--THE NEWEST PHOENIX

We came upon it in the still of an early Sunday evening--the wonderful city of Saint Francis. Throughout that cloudless Sabbath we had journeyed southward through California. At dawn the porter of the sleeping car had informed us that we were in the Golden State, not to be distinguished in its northern reaches from Oregon. Men were talking of the wonders of the Klamath country into which the civilizing rails of steel are being steadily pushed, the breath of tomorrow was upon the lips of every one who boarded the train, but the land itself was wild, half-timbered, rugged to the last degree. Through the morning grays the volcanic cone of Shasta was showing ever and ever so faintly, and if an acquaintance of two hours with the peak that Joaquin Miller has made so famous did not enthuse the man behind the car-window, it must have been that he was still a bit dazed, not surfeited, with the wonders of Rainier.