know; but do you know this wonder-world is
in America, your own land? It is less than forty miles from the regular
line of continental travel; $6 a single rig out, $14 a double; $1 to $2
a day at the ranch house where you can board as you explore the amazing
ancient civilization of our own American Southwest. This particular ruin
is in the Frijoles Canyon; but there are hundreds, thousands, of such
ruins all through the Southwest in Colorado and Utah and Arizona and New
Mexico. By joining the Archaeological Society of Santa Fe, you can go out
to these ruins even more inexpensively than I have indicated.

* * * * *

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