A Summer’s Diversions

A SUMMER'S DIVERSIONS By Jean Brown Fonnesbeck In 1914 Jen and I decided to make Lake Chautauqua the Mecca of our summer pilgrimage — that original Chautauqua which Roosevelt characterized as "the most American thing in America." The season had not opened when we arrived. Householders were as busy as wrens in nesting time, such a sweeping, scrubbing, dusting, and rcfurnishment went on in those wooden cottages.. Then came the influx of summer visitors — a veritable army of celibate school teachers, with eager, straining, worried faces. Later came troops of youthful, comfortable looking matrons each with a rosy child or two ih tow. There had just been a wedding at the cottage where we found rooms. The very atmosphere was still charged with romance. Near us was a hotel. At all hours we could hear the rattle of dishes to the accompaniment of negro voices singing, "Go 'long HI' Moses, Go 'long, Go 'long, Go 'lo-o-o-ng." In a few days' time Chautauqua had become a maddening pursuit of culture for the strenuous ones, while scores of semi-idle women sat the summer long, pleasantly, half attentive, at lecture and concert, lazily knitting, tatting, crocheting numberless balls of thread into scallops and edges. Here were thirty or forty thousand women with three months of leisure at their command to be used for self-cultivation. Everybody was genial and interesting to converse with. Everybody was familiar with good magazines, good books, good music, beautiful pictures. Everyone had kind and conventionally correct manners — even at this summer camp in the woods. There was probably greater intellectual interest, more genuine cultivation in this Chautauqua crowd than in any other equally large group of people in America. The program was one of bright diversity. There were weeks when Chautauqua entertainment ranged from the Victor Herbert Orchestra and the Men's Glee Club from Schenectady to a discussion by John Purroy Mitchell, of the New York State Constitutional Convention, or from an irresistible appeal by the Little Mother of the Convicts to a dramatic reading of Calderon's Life is a Dream. A wild upheaval was caused by Scott Nearing's talks on the education of the American girl, when he, with vigorous insistence, declared that the girl who could not and did not work and earn her own living was a human parasite, should be regarded as such, and that society should be purged of such hindering nuisances. Doctor Earl Barnes caused another uproar when he scored, mercilessly, the unmar- ried woman — that type of woman who refuses marriage solely for the sake of earning and spending her own money, of being free from

622 IMPROVEMENT ERA responsibilities save during limited working hours, of possessing her own latch key. Such a woman, he stated, was immaculately efficient about her dress and person, but was neither charming nor lovely in appearance. In the forties, when it was too late, she always arrived at the conclusion that somehow she had missed the quintessence of life. Every woman should be either pretty, handsome, beautiful, or charm- ing, and it lies within the power of every woman to be one of these. She should acquire the charm to win and keep the love of one good man, if she is to be a normal, happy woman, living a normal, happy life. For his own part, Doctor Barnes said he would wish, rather than either fame or great riches for his children, that each one might marry well and have a long, happy, married life. Well, there followed diverse counter-attacks by very clever un- married women — said attacks delivered with much acerbity and bril- liance. Nevertheless, the whole army of celibate women looked lovelier after that week; wore fluffier dresses; dressed their hair more becomingly; were more carefully groomed; brought forth pins, rings, combs, necklaces that had lain by in neglect and disuse; adopted more sweetly gracious manners; refrained from dominant school-teaching arguments, and smiled as if it were less of an effort. Little good came of it, however, for aside from a few rather anaemic photographer's assistants, there was not an unmarried man in those woods, excepting, of course, callow youths snapped up at once by young girls. Even the Sunday husbands were so few in number as to form only a mild diversion in that over-feminized atmosphere. Sunday was the choice day of the week. This quiet, peaceful day was epitomized by the patron saint of Chautauqua, John H. Vincent, white haired, frail, beautifully spiritual, his very presence a benison. The holy calm, the reverence, and the serenity of a Chautau- qua Sunday live in one's heart forever, a memory of the blessedness of the day of rest, and of the religious fervor and devotion in the hearts of those thousands of Christian men and women. Their appearance was an inspiration. There were multitudes in white along the lake front or through the woods wherever one looked. Theirs was the charm of goodness, of cleanliness, of keen, eager, intelligent zest in living. Then came the war, and (unheard-of-conduct) the vast congre- gation in the amphitheater at Sunday morning service clapped deafen- ingly when war was decried and Napoleon denounced as the "colossal butcher of the ages." The summer's peace had vanished into thin air; excitement and feverous contention marred every class-room meeting. Scott Nearing, by a few mild words of praise for the industrial good wrought by the Emperor of Germany, brought upon himself a purple- faced, blustering storm of abuse from a German woman, a newly im- migrated socialist, who declared that all industrial good in Germany was due to the Socialist party, and not to the Kaiser whom she said was an irresponsible madman as the whole world should yet discovert

A SUMMER'S DIVERSIONS 623 Somehow, in a moment, the halcyon days had slipped into the past, one looked fearfully towards the future. I decided to come home to the valleys of the mountains. I planned to visit en-route a married sister who lived on a big ranch in Wyoming. Her husband, John O., was boss of this ranch which belonged to him and his five brothers. The station agent at Chautauqua advised me to buy a ticket through to Salt Lake City, then find out from the mail clerks where to get off to reach Rex's ranch. It was 3:30 in the morning, when the conductor told me my stop was Evanston. A few minutes later I was deposited, bag and baggage, from the rear end of the train, half a mile up the track. Through the darkness I lugged my suitcase and traveling bag down to the dingy station. Two women, ranchers' wives, were in the waiting room. They spent several hours before train time lamenting the "awful raise in the price of sugar, and just at fruit bottlin' time, too." That was the first echo of the war I heard in the West. After breakfast at a Chinese eating house, which was crowded with tall, sunburned men in chaps, spurs and sombreros, I took the stage for Randolph, Utah, where John O. was to meet me, and from thence we would drive twenty-five miles farther to the ranch. The stage was an automobile truck, heavily loaded. The one seat, perched high, was occupied by the driver, who smoked cigarettes incessantly, and a sick-looking fat woman who had just spent three weeks in a Salt Lake hospital where she had' had an operation of a serious and equally mysterious nature, to which she made sundry behind-her-hand references during the trip. I was tucked in tight between the smoke- stack and the patient. The road was a never-ending succession of deep ruts. We bounced out of one into the next for half a hundred miles. Clouds of fine dust encompassed us, smothering and blinding us. Several times I was able to snatch a glimpse of desolate sagebrush-covered country be- fore the curtain of dust obliterated it. Thirty miles from Evanston the fat woman was met at the road- side by her very tall, thin husband, who drove a wheezy, cantankerous Ford. He was genuinely glad to see his wife whom he greeted with a hearty, if dusty, smack. The driver and I went on with the whirlwind. John O., large, bronzed, handsome, was waiting at Randolph with a powerful car. He said we were following a road, but it seemed to me we took off through a trackless, sagebrush-covered stretch. It had just rained. The steaming air tingled with ozone and was redolent with the pungent smell of wet sagebrush. Prairie dogs, hundreds of them, popped up on either side of us as we drove past, barked sharply, and ducked into their holes again. A gaunt, mangy wolf stood sheer and clear on a little knoll, regarding us with a mournful indifference. Scores of jack rabbits scurried timidly to cover. Once we scared up a flock of sage hens, and we saw many coyotes as we bounded over the bushes and leaped the ditches.

624 IMPROVEMENT ERA Just at dusk we sighted the great, rambling ranch house. It looked as grim and grizzled and gray as the lone wolf we had passed. It- was the old Pritchard home; it belonged to a vivid and romantic past. The wind brought us savory odors of coffee and roast beef. A pack of hounds rushed from the porch to meet us. My sister came out. She looked slender and girlish and very tired. Her two years' of married life spent on this isolated ranch had sapped much of her former vivacity and bloom. Her four-months' old daughter was as exquisite as a wild flower, but a bit undernourished. The haying season was on. Twenty hired men were having supper at a long table in one end of the immense dining room. There was a single kerosene lamp on the table, its light showing dimly through a swarm of moths and mosquitoes. This circle of half light revealed a group of strangely cosmopolitan faces; a few young, clean-cut, wholesome looking; the greater number, gross, unshaven, grimy. There was a clatter and rattle of dishes against the oilcloth-covered board; the noise of hungry, careless men feeding and guzzling coffee, but not a word of conversation. As each man finished eating he scraped back his chair noisily and hulked to another house down the slope where the hired men bunked. Soon there floated back the twang of a banjo and men's voices singing — "Little Ikey's workin' on the railroad. Just to pass the time away." The house help cleared off the dishes with a bang and crash; scrubbed the oilcloth and served supper for themselves and us. The house help were two in number: Tom, a silent and bashful young Swede, who milked twelve cows night and morning, separated the milk, made butter, kept everything in the dairy spotlessly clean, peeled the potatoes — which was a task of no small magnitude — helped serve the meals to the hayers, helped wash the dishes afterwards, brought in kindling and coal, and with a creaking, groaning pump, brought up ice-cold, crystal-clear water from a well just south of the house. The other was Phebe, a black-eyed, lissome beauty toward whom Tom cast shy, adoring, covert glances as we ate. The dishes from which we ate were real Haviland china. To my startled inquiry, my sister answered apologetically, "These are just some old dishes that were here when we bought the ranch. They probably belonged to the Pritchards, who built the place." After supper, with much crashing and splashing, the help did the dishes; Tom washing with astounding dexterity; Phebe drying them with many a coquettish flirt and flourish of her towel in Tom's direction; she singing as gaily as a bird, and he whistling a jubilant outpouring of the joy in his heart. My interest in those Pritchards of long ago was unbounded when I discovered a white bath room with a porcelain bath tub. To be sure the water had to be carried in (obligingly Tom did it) , a boilerful

A SUMMER'S DIVERSIONS 623 piping hot from one of the kitchen ranges, and several buckets of cold from the pump. No bath was ever more luxurious than that one. Interesting people, those Pritchards! In the living room there were some lovely pieces of old upholstered mahogany, and the room in which I slept dreamlessly for twelve hours, was furnished in birds-eye maple. That was a house of surprises. The morning after my arrival, with neck and forehead covered with mosquito bites puffed out in knobs, I began a tour of investigation. There were twenty-two rooms, including a bath room and a ball room. The house had been built thirty years before by a New Yorker, John Pritchard, who had come West in quest of health and adventure. Health eluded him, but there can be no doubt he found the adventure. His wife and two beautiful young daughters had come with him, so said old settlers who lived down the river. Those long ago days were merry ones at the ranch when cowboys, bidden to one of the Pritchard dances, rode horseback a hundred miles to attend. On the doors and door frames of the ball room there are many odd signatures. Those written in pencil were al- most lost to time; but those carved flourishingly with a jack knife endured unchanged. Loco Tex had been a frequent visitor, possessed of an unusually sharp knife, as his many dated autographs attested. The Kid had carved his sobriquet out of all forgetfulness. Dan Kinney had used a pen to preserve his name from the onslaughts of the passing years. There was many a Joe and Jim and Bill whom dust and time had almost effaced. John Pritchard had died, one far away morning, of violent hem- orrhage of the lungs, out on the south porch, by the pump. After a quarter of a century, dull blood stains were yet discernible on the porch floor. The family had sold out and had gone East. The ranch had passed from one owner to another, who sometimes had lived on it, but oftener had not. At length the Rex brothers had bought it for $80,000, and their first cattle sale the following year had netted them $50,000. All the slopes and valleys along the Bear River were cov- ered with wire grass, wild hay which was now being harvested. The cattle, mostly pure bred Herefords and Holsteins, were pasturing at large. To look over the country one was reminded of "cattle that fed upon a thousand hills." That afternoon Phebe and I walked a mile down to the river. We passed several coyotes that eyed us curiously, almost insolently. A blue heron flew up from the rushy banks and flapped leisurely away. The sluggish pools and shallows were alive with frogs. The afternoon was cloudy and mosquitoes settled upon us in swarms, sounding their myriads of elfin trumpets in our ears. We were almost eaten alive before we got back to the ranch house. There was not a newspaper or magazine, to say nothing of a book, in all of those twenty-two rooms. "Nobody," my sister said, "ever finds time to read on this ranch." To beguile the time one must simply look like the time. Meal-time proved most diverting. When a

62 6 IMPROVEMENT ERA bell was rung announcing supper the men rushed up from the bunk house to the south porch to get first chance at the four tin basins and clean towels. Some washed head, neck, face, hands with many a splash and gurgle, thoroughly enjoying it. Others mildly dipped their hands and wiped off what grime they could onto the towel. One, who had given his name as Virtue, did not even dip. I watched him for ten days to see. Probably he thought the well water not sufficiently sacred to accord with his own unheard-of name. Virtue was an anomaly — lean and lank; his face, inert vacuity; his long, straw colored hair was spike-like; his hat, a canvas brim, had once possessed a silken crown, but that had been worn to shreds, only the frayed seams remaining; his outstanding hair escaped between these seams. Truly, Virtue crowned! Virtue had extraordinary long arms, and enormous, hairy hands that dangled loosely below short shirt sleeves. His overalls, stiff with grime, were suspended from his drooping shoulders by means of divers knotted strings, that fastened at the belt line with nails. He wore no socks, so a piece of each hairy ankle was ever visible. Listless and shambling at other times, Virtue was alert and vo- racious at the table. He fed ravenously. His arm would shoot out at prodigious length for more. Sage chicken fried in butter and served with cream gravy, was flattering unction to his soul. The only words I ever heard him utter were, "Gimme that chickun". Next Virtue sat young Austin, graduate of Harvard, fine and clean and cultivated, immaculate in khaki, and very politely amused as he passed plate after plate of chicken to meet Virtue's urgent demands. There were a number of young book keepers, clerks and high school boys from Salt Lake City, out for vacation. Their tender skins were blistered and peeling. The other men were gross, unshaven fellows who roamed from Canada to the Gulf with futile indifference, picking up a job when the pay and food were good, but more often "bumming" their way. There was no conversation at the table. I often won- dered what this nondescript crew talked about when they reached the bunk house. On each of the two Sundays which I spent at the Pritchard place, four automobile loads of company poured in upon us from neighboring ranches forty or fifty miles away. My sister, having fed only twenty hungry men, set about preparing dinner for this host with a rare and gentle hospitality. Phebe and I were invited by the men visitors and John O. to go chicken hunting. The wives and children remained at the house to talk. Our hunting party chortled forth in five big cars that did marvelous hurdling over gullies and sage brush. We found it savagely exhilarating to watch for the slender necks of the sage chicken as they ran among the bushes on the hillside. The men shot to kill almost every time. The hunting dogs brought the chickens to the cars — poor, limp things in their modest russet plumage. We soon had what the men termed a good "pot" of chickens. Two coyotes had been killed, besides a great many rabbits for the hounds. Home we

A SUMMER'S DIVERSIONS 627 raced, our cars filled with gory loot stripped from the wild, free life of the hills. The visitors returned to their ranches through the starlit night — such millions of stars shining through the clear air that there were shadows. By the middle of the second week of my visit, the haying was finished and the men all paid off. Among other careful entries made in John O.'s account book, this: $100., twenty-five days at $4 a day to Virtue. Each man took his bedding on his back and set out afoot, ten miles to Cokeville. Next day when we drove over for our mail we saw two of the ex-hayers lying drunk by the wayside. A third, his money all gone, hailed John O., as he chanced to pass the barred window of the jail, and begged for a dollar to buy some chewing tobacco. That afternoon John O. took me back to Evanston. This trip, the drive was cool and dustless and over somewhat better roads. We passed ranch after ranch where the haying had just been finished. It was estimated that more than $3,000,000 worth of wire grass had been harvested that season at the ranches between Cokeville and Evanston. Discharged haying hands lined the road, traveling afoot, their bedding on their backs, to the railway station. The summer's diversions were over for me. I had glimpsed the East — that section of which is over feminized, over cultivated, and that part of the West which is still as wild and woolly as imagination can picture. It was good to reach Salt Lake City, where East meets West in a happy combination of democracy and refinement. Logan, Utah A Tribute to Mother (Tune: Love's Old Sweet Song) There's none so dear in all the world to me, There's none so full of love and sympathy, You're always near to help and comfort, too: Mother, there's no one anywhere like you. When I am ill, you're always near. When I am sad, you drive away my tear. Chorus : Mother, how I love you, you're the world to me; You're the dearest mother that could ever be. Never leave me, mother, for I need you here. Heaven bless my mother, My mother dear, my darling mother dear. When mother prays as only mothers can, Asking the Lord to give a helping hand, To keep me always in the narrow way. O! mother, heaven hears you when you pray. I'll ask the Lord to ever keep you here. Life would be sad without my mother dear. Brigham City, Utah ARBA A. GLENN