Abroad At Home Part 32

In the department of entomology there is also great activity. Professor S. J. Hunter has, among other researches, been conducting for the last three years elaborate experiments designed to prove or disprove the Sambon theory with regard to pellagra.

"Pellagra," Professor Hunter explained to me, "has been known in Italy since 1782, but has existed in the United States for less than thirty years, although it is now found in nearly half our States and has become most serious in the South. Its cause, character, and cure are unknown, although there are several theories. One theory is that it is caused by poisoning due to the excessive use of corn products; another attributes it to cottonseed products; and the Sambon theory, dating from 1910, attributes it to the sand fly, the theory being that the fly becomes infected through sucking the blood of a victim of pellagra, and then communicates the infection by biting other persons. In order to ascertain the truth or untruth of this contention, we have bred uncontaminated sand flies, and after having allowed them to bite infected persons, have let them bite monkeys. The result of these experiments is not yet complete. One monkey is, however, sick, at this time, and his symptoms are not unlike certain symptoms of pellagra."

The university's Museum of Natural History contains the largest single panoramic display of stuffed animals in the world. This exhibition is contained in one enormous case running around an extensive room, and shows, in suitable landscape settings, American animals from Alaska to the tropics. The collection is valued at $300,000, and was made, almost entirely, by members of the faculty and students.

The Department of Physical Education is in charge of Dr. James Naismith, who can teach a man to swim in thirty minutes, and who is famous as the inventor of the game of basketball. Dr. Naismith devised basketball as a winter subst.i.tute for football, and gave the game its name because, originally, he used peach baskets as his goals.

A very complete system of university extension is operated, covering an enormous field, reaching schools, colleges, clubs, and individuals, and a.s.sisting them in almost all branches of education; also a Department of Correspondence Study, covering about 150 courses. Likewise, in the Department of Journalism a great amount of interesting and practical work is being done on the editorial, business, and mechanical sides of newspaper publishing. Following the general practice of other departments of the university, the Department of Journalism places its equipment and resources at the service of Kansas editors and publishers.

A clearing house is maintained where buyers and sellers of newspaper properties may be brought together, printers are a.s.sisted in making estimates, cost-system blanks are supplied, and job type is cast and furnished free to Kansas publishers in exchange for their old worn-out type.

These are but a few scattered examples of the inner and outer activities of the University of Kansas, as I noted them during the course of an afternoon and evening spent there. For me the visit was an education. I wish that all Americans might visit such a university. But more than that, I wish that some system might be devised for the exchange of students between great colleges in different parts of the country.

Doubtless it would be a good thing for certain students at western colleges to learn something of the more elaborate life and the greater sophistication of the great colleges of the East, but more particularly I think that vast benefits might accrue to certain young men from Harvard, Yale, and similar inst.i.tutions, by contact with such universities as that of Kansas. Unfortunately, however, the eastern students, who would be most benefited by such a shift, would be the very ones to oppose it. Above all others, I should like to see young eastern aristocrats, spenders, and disciples of false culture shipped out to the West. It would do them good, and I think they would be amazed to find out how much they liked it. However, this idea of an exchange is not based so much on the theory that it would help the individual student as on the theory that greater mutual comprehension is needed by Americans.

We do not know our country or our fellow countrymen as we should. We are too localized. We do not understand the United States as Germans understand Germany, as the French understand France, or as the British understand Great Britain. This is partly because of the great distances which separate us, partly because of the heterogeneous nature of our population, and partly because, being a young civilization, we flock abroad in quest of the ancient charm and picturesqueness of Europe. The "See America First" idea, which originated as the advertising catch line of a western railroad, deserves serious consideration, not only because of what America has to offer in the way of scenery, but also because of what she has to offer in the way of people. I found that a great many thoughtful persons all over the United States were considering this point.

In Detroit, for example, the Lincoln National Highway project is being vigorously pushed by the automobile manufacturers, and within a short time streams of motors will be crossing the continent. As a means of making Americans better acquainted with one another the automobile has already done good work, but its service in that direction has only begun.

Mr. Charles C. Moore, president of the Panama-Pacific Exposition, whom I met, later, in San Francisco, told me that the authorities of the exposition had been particularly interested in the idea of promoting friendliness between Americans.

"We Americans," said Mr. Moore, "are still wondering what America really is, and what Americans really are. One of the greatest benefits of a fair like ours is the opportunity it gives us to form friendly ties with people from all over the country. We shall have a great series of congresses, conferences, and conventions, and will provide the use of halls without charge. The railroads are cooperating with us by making low round-trip rates which enable the visitor to come one way and return by another route, so that, besides seeing the fair, they can see the country. The more Americans there are who become interested in seeing the country, the better it is for us and for the United States.

Any one requiring proof of the absolute necessity of a closer mutual understanding between the people of this country has but to look at the condition which exists in national politics. What do the Atlantic Coast Congressmen and the Pacific Coast Congressmen really know of one another's requirements? Little or nothing as a rule. They reach conclusions very largely by exchanging votes: 'I'll vote for your measure if you'll vote for mine.' That system has cost this country millions upon millions. If I had my way, there would be a law making it necessary for each Congressman to visit every State in the Union once in two years."

In an earlier chapter I mentioned Quantrell's gang of border ruffians, of which Frank and Jesse James were members, and referred to the Lawrence ma.s.sacre conducted by the gang.

In all the border trouble, from 1855-6 to the time of the Civil War, Lawrence figured as the antislavery center. That and the ill feeling engendered by differences of opinion along the Missouri border with regard to slavery, caused the ma.s.sacre. It occurred on August 21, 1863.

Lawrence had been expecting an attack by Quantrell for some time before that date, and had at one period posted guards on the roads leading to the eastward. After a time, however, this precaution was given up, enabling Quantrell to surprise the town and make a clean sweep. He arrived at Lawrence at 5.30 in the morning with about 450 men. Frank James told me that he himself was not present at the ma.s.sacre, as he had been shot a short time before and temporarily disabled.

Lawrence, which then had a population of about 1,200, was caught entirely unawares, and was absolutely at the mercy of the ruffians. A good many of the latter got drunk, which added to the horror, for these men were bad enough when sober. They burned down almost the entire business section of the town, as well as a great many houses, and going into the homes, dragged out 163 men, unarmed and defenseless, and cold-bloodedly slaughtered them in the streets, before the eyes of their wives and children. Very few men who were in the town at the time, escaped, but among the survivors were twenty-five men who were in the Free State Hotel, the proprietor of which had once befriended Quantrell, and was for that reason spared together with his guests. Some forty or fifty persons living in Lawrence at the present time remember the ma.s.sacre, most of these being women who saw their husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons killed in the midst of the general orgy. Many stories of narrow escapes are preserved. In one instance a woman whose house had been set on fire, wrapped her husband in a rug, and dragged him, thus enveloped, in the yard as though attempting to save her rug from the conflagration. There he remained until, on news that soldiers were on the way to the relief of the stricken town, the Quantrell gang withdrew.

CHAPTER XXIX

MONOTONY

We left Lawrence late at night and went immediately to bed upon the train. When I awoke in the morning the car was standing still. In the ventilators overhead, I heard the steady monotonous whistling of the wind. As I became more awake I began to wonder where we were and why we were not moving. Presently I raised the window shade and looked out.

How many things there are in life which we think we know from hearsay, yet which, when we actually encounter them, burst upon us with a new and strange significance! I had believed, for example, that I realized the vastness of the United States without having actually traveled across the country, yet I had not realized it at all, and I do not believe that any one can possibly realize it without having felt it, in the course of a long journey. So too, with the interminable rolling desolation of the prairies, and the likeness of the prairies to the sea: I had imagined that I understood the prairies without having laid eyes upon them, but when I raised my window shade that morning, and found the prairies stretching out before me, I was as surprised, as stunned, as though I had never heard of them before, and the idea came to me like an original thought: How perfectly _enormous_ they are! And how like the sea!

I had discovered for myself the truth of another plat.i.tude.

For a long time I lay comfortably in my berth, gazing out at the appalling spread of land and sky. Even at sea the great bowl of the sky had never looked so vast to me. The land was nothing to it. In the foreground there was nothing; in the middle distance, nothing; in the distance, nothing--nothing, nothing, nothing, met the eye in all that treeless waste of brown and gray which lay between the railroad line and the horizon, on which was discernible the faint outlines of several ships--ships which were in reality a house, a windmill and a barn.

Presently our craft--for I had the feeling that I was on a ship at anchor--got under way. On we sailed over the ocean of land for mile upon mile, each mile like the one before it and the one that followed, save only when we pa.s.sed a little fleet of houses, like fishing boats at sea, or crossed an inconsequential wagon road, resembling the faintly discernible wake of some ship, long since out of sight.

Presently I arose and joining my companion, went to the dining car for breakfast. He too had fallen under the spell of the prairies. We sat over our meal and stared out of the window like a pair of images. After breakfast it was the same: we returned to our car and continued to gaze out at the eternal s.p.a.ces. Later in the morning, we became restless and moved back to the observation car as men are driven by boredom from one room to another on an ocean liner.

Now and then in the distance we would see cattle like dots upon the plain, and once in a long time a horseman ambling along beneath the sky.

The little towns were far apart and had, like the surrounding scenery, an air of sadness and of desolation. The few buildings were of primitive form, most of them one-story structures of wood, painted in raw color.

But each little settlement had its wooden church, and each church its steeple--a steeple crude and pathetic in its expression of effort on the part of a poor little hamlet to embellish, more than any other house, the house of G.o.d.

Even our train seemed to have been affected by this country. The observation car was deserted when we reached it. Presently, however, a stranger joined us there, and after a time we fell into conversation with him as we sat and looked at the receding track.

He proved to be a Kansan and he told us interesting things about the State.

Aside from wheat, which is the great Kansas crop, corn is grown in eastern Kansas, and alfalfa in various parts of the State. Alfalfa stays green throughout the greater part of the year as it goes through several sowings. Fields of alfalfa resemble clover fields, save that the former grows more densely and is of a richer, darker shade of green. After alfalfa has grown a few years the roots run far down into the ground, often reaching the "underflow" of western Kansas. This underflow is very characteristic of that part of the State, where it is said, there are many lost rivers flowing beneath the surface, adding one more to the list of Kansas phenomena. Some of these rivers flow only three or four feet below the ground, I am told, while others have reached a depth of from twenty to a hundred feet. Alfalfa roots will go down twenty feet to find the water. The former bed of the Republican River in northwestern Kansas is, with the exception of a narrow strip in the middle where the river runs on the surface in flood times, covered with rich alfalfa fields. Excepting at the time of spring and summer rains, this river is almost dry. The old bridges over it are no longer necessary except when the rains occur, and the river has piled sand under them until in some places there is not room for a man to stand beneath bridges which, when built, were ten and twelve feet above the river bed. Now, I am told, they don't build bridges any more, but lay cement roads through the sand, clearing their surfaces after the freshets.

The Arkansas River once a mighty stream, has held out with more success than the Republican against the winds and drifting sands, but it is slowly and certainly disappearing, burying itself in the sand and earth it carries down at flood times--a work in which it is a.s.sisted by the strong, persistent prairie winds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Even at sea the great bowl of the sky had never looked to me so vast]

The great wheat belt begins somewhere about the middle of the State and continues to the west. In the spring the wheat is light green in color and is flexible in the wind so that at that time of year, the resemblance of the prairies to the sea is much more marked, and travelers are often heard to declare that the sight of the green billows makes them seasick. The season in Kansas is about a month earlier than in the eastern states; in May and June the wheat turns yellow, and in the latter part of June it is harvested, leaving the prairies brown and bare again.

The prairie land which is not sown in wheat or alfalfa, is covered with prairie gra.s.s--a long, wiry gra.s.s, lighter in shade than blue gra.s.s, which waves in the everlasting wind and glistens like silver in the sun.

Rain, sun, wind! The elements rule over Kansas. People's hearts are light or heavy according to the weather and the prospects as to crops.

My Kansan friend in the observation car pointed out to me the fact that at every railroad siding the railroad company had paid its respects to the Kansas wind by the installation of a device known as a "derailer,"

the purpose of which is to prevent cars from rolling or blowing from a siding out onto the main line. If a car starts to blow along the siding, the derailer catches it before it reaches the switch, and throws one truck off the track.

"I suppose you've seen cyclones out here, too?" I asked the Kansan.

"Oh, yes," he said.

"Do the people out in this section of the State all have cyclone cellars?"

"Oh, some," he said. "Some has 'em. But a great many folks don't pay no attention to cyclones."

Last year, during a bad drought in western Kansas, the wind performed a new feat, adding another item to Kansas tradition. A high wind came in February and continued until June, actually blowing away a large portion of the top-soil of Thomas County, denuding a tract of land fifteen by twenty miles in extent. It was not a mere surface blow, either. In many places two feet of soil would be carried away; roads were obliterated, houses stood like dreary, deserted little forts, the earth piled up breast high around their wire-enclosed dooryards, and fences fell because the supporting soil was blown away from the posts. During this time the air was full of dust, and after it was over the country had reverted to desert--a desert not of sand, but of dust.

This story sounded so improbable that I looked up a man who had been in Thomas County at the time. He told me about it in detail.

"I have spent most of my life in the Middle West," he said, "but that exhibition was a revelation to me of the power of the wind. A quarter of the county was stripped bare. The farmers had, for the most part, moved out of the district because they couldn't keep the wheat in the ground long enough to raise a crop. But they were camped around the edges, making common cause against the wind. You couldn't find a man among them, either, who would admit that he was beaten. The kind of men who are beaten by things like that couldn't stand the racket in western Kansas. The fellows out there are the most outrageously optimistic folks I ever saw. They will stand in the wind, eating the dirt that blows into their mouths, and telling you what good soil it is--they don't mean good to eat, either--and if you give them a kind word they are up in arms in a minute trying to sell you some of the cursed country.

"The men I talked to attributed the trouble to too much harrowing; they said the surface soil was scratched so fine that it simply wouldn't hold. There were wild theories, too, of meteorological disturbances, but I think those were mostly evolved in the brains of Sunday editors.

"The farmers fought the thing systematically by a process they called 'listing': a turning over of the top-soil with plows. And after a while the listing, for some reason known only to the Almighty and the Department of Agriculture, actually did stop the trouble and the land stayed put again. Then the farmers planted Kaffir corn because it grows easily, and because they needed a network of roots to hold down the soil. Most of that land was reclaimed by the end of last summer."

The little towns along the line are almost all alike. Each has a watering tank for locomotives, a grain elevator, and a cattle pen, beside the track. Each has a station made of wide vertical boards, their seams covered by wooden strips, and the whole painted ochre. Then there is usually a wide, sandy main street with a few brick buildings and more wooden ones, while on the outskirts of the town are shanties, covered with tar paper, and beyond them the eternal prairie. You can see no more reason why a town should be at that point on the prairie than at any other point. And it is a fact, I believe, that, in many instances, the railroad companies have simply created towns, arbitrarily, at even distances. The only town I recall that looked in any way different from every other town out there, was Wallace, where a storekeeper has made a lot of curious figures, in twisted wire, and placed them on the roof of his store, whence they project into the air for a distance of twenty or thirty feet.

I think, though I am not sure, that it was before we crossed the Colorado line when we saw our first 'dobe house, our first sage brush, and our first tumbleweed. Mark Twain has described sagebrush as looking like "a gnarled and venerable live oak tree reduced to a little shrub two feet high, with its rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all complete." In "Roughing It" he writes two whole pages about sagebrush, telling how it gives a gray-green tint to the desert country, how hardy it is, and how it is used for making camp fires on the plains and he winds up with this characteristic paragraph:

"Sagebrush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jacka.s.s and his illegitimate child, the mule. But their testimony to its nutritiousness is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or bra.s.s filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for dinner."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The little towns of Western Kansas are far apart and have, like the surrounding scenery, an air of sadness and desolation]

Though Mark Twain tells about coyotes and prairie dogs--animals which I looked for, but regret to say I did not see--he ignores the tumbleweed, the most curious thing, animal, vegetable, or mineral, that crossed my vision as I crossed the plains. I cannot understand why Mark Twain did not mention this weed, because he must have seen it, and it must have delighted him, with its comical gyrations.