A general passenger agent for one of the largest transcontinental lines in the Northwest told me that for 1911, where 60,000 people bought round-trip tickets to our own West and back—pleasure, not business—over 120,000 people bought tickets for Europe and Egypt. I don't know whether his figures covered only the Northwest of which he was talking, or the whole continental traffic association; but the amazing fact to me was the proportion he gave—one to our own wonders, to two for abroad. I talked to another agent about the same thing. He thought that the average tourist who took a trip to our own Pacific Coast spent from $300 to $500, while the average tourist who went to Europe spent from $1,000 to $2,000. Many European tourists went at $500; but so many others spent from $3,000 to $5,000, that he thought the average spendings of the tourist to Europe should be put at $1,000 to $2,000. That puts your proportion at a still more disastrous discrepancy—thirty million dollars versus one hundred and twenty million. The Statist of London places the total spent by Americans in Europe at nearer three hundred million dollars than one hundred and twenty million.
Of the 3,700,000 people who went to the Seattle Exposition, it is a pretty safe guess that not 100,000 Easterners out of the lot saw the real West. What did they see? They saw the Exposition, which was like any other exposition; and they saw Western cities, that are imitations of Eastern cities; and they patronized Western hotel rotundas and dining places, where you pay forty cents for Grand Junction and Hood River fruit, which you can buy in the East for twenty-five; and they rode in the rubberneck cars with the gramophone man who tells Western variations of the same old Eastern lies; and they came back thoroughly convinced that there was no more real West.
And so 120,000 Americans yearly go to Europe spending a good average of $1,000 apiece. We scour the Alps for peaks that everybody has climbed, though there are half a dozen Switzerlands from Glacier Park in the north to Cloudcroft, New Mexico, with hundreds of peaks which no one has climbed and which you can visit for not more than fifty dollars for a four weeks' holiday. We tramp through Spain for the picturesque, quite oblivious of the fact that the most picturesque bit of Spain, about 10,000 years older than Old Spain, is set right down in the heart of America with turquoise mines from which the finest jewel in King Alphonso's crown was taken. We rent a "shootin' box in Scotland" at a trifling cost of from $1,200 to $12,000 a season, because game is "so scarce out West, y' know." Yet I can direct you to game haunts out West where you can shoot a grizzly a week at no cost at all but your own courage; and bag a dozen wild turkeys before breakfast; and catch mountain trout faster than you can string them and pose for a photograph; and you won't need to lie about the ones that got away, nor boast of what it cost you; for you can do it at two dollars a day from start to finish. It would take you a good half-day to count up the number of tourist and steamboat agencies that organize sightseeing excursions to go and apostrophize the Sphinx, and bark your shins and swear and sweat on the Pyramids. Yet it would be a safe wager that outside official scientific circles, there is not a single organization in America that knows we have a Sphinx of our own in the West that antedates Egyptian archæology by 8,000 years, and stone lions older than the columns of Phrygia, and kings' palaces of 700 and 1,000 rooms. Am I yarning; or dreaming? Neither! Perfectly sober and sane and wide awake and just in from spending two summers in those same rooms and shaking hands with a corpse of the Stone Age.
A young Westerner, who had graduated from Harvard, set out on the around-the-world tour that was to give him that world-weary feeling that was to make him live happy ever afterwards. In Nagasaki, a little brown Jappy-chappie of great learning, who was a prince or something or other of that sort, which made it possible for Harvard to know him, asked in choppy English about "the gweat, the vely gweat anti-kwatties in y'or Souf Wes'." When young Harvard got it through his head that "anti-kwatties" meant antiquities, he rolled a cigarette and went out for a smoke; but it came back at him again in Egypt. They were standing below the chin of an ancient lady commonly called the Sphinx, when an English traveler turned to young America. "I say," he said; "Yankeedom beats us all out on this old dame, doesn't it? You've a carved colossus in your own West a few trifling billion years older than this, haven't you?" Young America, with a weakness somewhere in his middle, "guessed they had." Then looking over the old jewels taken from the ruins of Pompeii, he was asked, "how America was progressing excavating her ruins;" and he heard for the first time in his life that the finest crown jewel in Europe came from a mine just across the line from his own home State. The experience gave him something to think about.
The incident is typical of many of the 120,000 people who yearly trek to Europe for holiday. We have to go abroad to learn how to come home. We go to Europe and find how little we have seen of America. It is when you are motoring in France that you first find out there is a great "Camino Real" almost 1,000 miles long, much of it above cloud line, from Wyoming to Texas. It's some European who has "a shootin' box" out in the Pecos, who tells you about it. Of course, if you like spending $12,000 a year for "a shootin' box" in Scotland, that is another matter. There are various ways of having a good time; but when I go fishing I like to catch trout and not be a sucker.
Spite of the legend, "Why go to Europe? See America first," we keep on going to Europe to see America. Why? For a lot of reasons; and most of them lies.
Some fool once said, and we keep on repeating it—that it costs more to go West than it does to go to Europe. So it does, if "going West" means staying at hotels that are weak imitations of the Waldorf and the Plaza, where you never get a sniff of the real West, nor meet anyone but traveling Easterners like yourself; but if you strike away from the beaten trail, you can see the real West, and have your holiday, and go drunk on the picturesque, and break your neck mountain climbing, and catch more trout than you can lie about, and kill as much bear meat as you have courage, at less expense than it will cost you to stay at home. From Chicago to the backbone of the Rockies will cost you something over $33 or $50 one way. You can't go halfway across the Atlantic for that, unless you go steerage; and if you go West "colonist," you can go to the backbone of the Rockies for a good deal less than thirty dollars. Now comes the crucial point! If you land in a Western city and stay at a good hotel, expenses are going to out-sprint Europe; and you will not see any more of the West than if you had gone to Europe. Choose your holiday stamping ground, Sundance Cañon, South Dakota; or the New Glacier Park; or the Pecos, New Mexico; or the White Mountains, Arizona; or the Indian Pueblo towns of the Southwest; or the White Rock Cañon of the Rio Grande, where the most important of the wonderful prehistoric remains exist; and you can stay at a ranch house where food and cleanliness will be quite as good as at the Waldorf for from $1.50 to $2 a day.
You can usually find the name of the ranch house by inquiries from the station agent where you get off. The ranch house may be of adobe and look squatty; but remember that adobe squattiness is the best protection against wind and heat; and inside, you will find hot and cold water, bathroom, and meals equal to the best hotels in Chicago and New York. In New York or Chicago, that amount would afford you mighty chancy fare and only a back hall room. I know of hundreds of such ranch houses all along the backbone of the Rockies.
Next comes the matter of horses and rigs. If you stay at one of the big hotels, you will pay from $5 to $10 a day for a rig, and $20 for a motor. Out at the ranch house, you can rent team, driver and double rig at $4; or a pony at $20 for a month, or buy a burro