layground. In America, the playground
exists, the most wonderful, the most beautiful playground in the whole
world--and the most accessible; but we haven't yet discovered it.

* * * * *

Of the three or four million people who have attended the Pacific Coast
Expositions of the past ten years, it is a safe wage that half went, not
to see the Exposition (for people from a radius round Chicago and
Jamestown and Buffalo had already seen a great Exposition) but they went
to see the Exposition as an exponent of the Great West. How much of the
Great West did they really see? They saw the Alaska Exhibit. Well--the
Alaska Exhibit was afterwards shown in New York. They saw the special
buildings assigned to the special Western States. Well--the special
Western States had special buildings at the other expositions. What
else of the purely West they saw, I shall give in the words of three
travelers:

"Been a great trip" (Two Chicagoans talking in duet). "We've seen
everything and stopped off everywhere. We stopped at Denver and Salt
Lake and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Portland and Seattle!"

"What did you do at these places?"

"Took a taxi and saw the sights, drove through the parks and so on. Saw
all the residences and public buildings. Been a great trip. Tell you the
West is going ahead."

"It has been a detestable trip" (A New Yorker relieving surcharged
feelings). "It has been a skin game from start to finish, pullman,
baggage, hotels, everything. And how much of the West have we really
seen? Not a glimpse of it. We had all seen these Western cities before.
They are not the West. They are bits of the East taken up and set down
in the West. How is the Easterner to see the West? It isn't seeing it to
go flying through these prairie stations. Settlement and real life and
wild life are always back from the railroad. How are we to get out and
see that unless we can pay ten dollars a day for guides? I don't call it
_seeing_ the mountains to ride on a train through the easiest passes and
sleep through most of them. Tell us how we are to get out and see and
experience the real thing?"

"H'm, talk about seeing the West" (This time from a Texas banker). "Only
time we got away from the excursion party was when a land boomster took
us up the river to see an irrigation project. That wasn't seeing the
West. That was a buy-and-sell proposition same as we have at home. What
I want to know is how to