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 archaeology 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" me