It was a clear morning that we pulled out for the top of the Rocky Mountains and the scenery was grand as we looked out over the snow-capped peaks. It was only about a mile high when we crossed the continental divide. There is very little timber as you go up the east side but more on the western side and the scenery is rough and the railroad is steep and crooked and only a few little stations.

After we got down the mountain we struck the Kootenai River which is very swift and green; it is also very narrow and full of rocks. There are some mills along the valley and all the business seems to be lumbering. The conductor told us to watch out of the window and we could see the highest peaks in Glacier Park. They were covered with snow. We got pretty close to the British-American boundary and they told us there was plenty of fish in the streams and deer in the woods around here. There is a station they call Whitefish. There are some farms along the river but mostly lumber mills.

It was dark when we reached Spokane in Washington and there was a state convention of the Legion. Spokane is a sunshine city and is noted for its parks. There was a volcano here in early times and it erupted and the river flows over the old crater hole and makes a falls in it and the city is built on the old crater. There is a big water power plant at the falls used to make electricity and about everything there is run by it. There is a big railroad bridge that crosses over the falls built by Mr. Strahorn. He visited us this summer; he has one of the finest homes in Spokane. He is now building a big railroad in Oregon. We went to visit him but they were in Pennsylvania on an auto trip. Mr. Strahorn told me a story about his Indian fights. He said he went out into the Indian country in 1874 and helped build the Union Pacific railroad. He was with the Army and knew Buffalo Bill and Captain Jack well.

Captain Jack told me more about taking a message on a pony and that he rode all day and all night from the battle ground to the fort at Laramie in Wyoming. Mr. Strahorn was at the battle and was the fellow who sent Captain Jack with the message to the fort. It was strange to hear both of these stories from both of these men who were there and took part in it so many years ago. Dad says Buffalo Bill told him the same story so it must be true.

Spokane is like a big country town and has the finest electric lights. It is full of hotels and restaurants. We ate sometimes in the Outside Inn. Once we ate at a Chinese place and got hot tomales made of corn husks and red pepper. They are no good. The Legion had a show under the railroad bridge, they called it Happy Canyon or some name like it where they danced and gambled with phoney money you had to buy at the entrance. It was a wild place. There were three or four thousand people and they were dressed up as cowboys and miners and scouts and they had a good time. Dad went to Couer de Alene one day while Mother and I went to the park to take a swim but when we got there it was closed for the season. They had a fish hatchery there and from there we went to the bowling alley and played three games.

Next we went up the toboggan slide in a boat and slip down into the water and jumped like a fish out of water. We rode the merry-go-round awhile and got some ice cream and a lot of other things like loop-the-loop and the high dive. We got a pretty good day out of this.

We left Spokane on the morning train to see the country on the way Seattle for we had to cross the Cascade Mountains and go through a big tunnel. It was up hill for a long time and wheat farms. It is what they call it dry farming, for it hardly ever rains. Lots of this country is desert and is brown and dusty and nothing grows. When you get to a small stream the grass is green and they can raise some wheat and cattle if they irrigate. It was about dinner time when we struck the Columbia River. At this place the station is called Crater because there was a volcano and the river runs through it. It is a terrible sight and the roughest place I ever saw. Where the railroad crosses the river they had to cut through the center of a peak leaving a high wall on both sides of it.

A few miles up the Columbia River we came to Wenatchee, a town of about five thousand. This is one of the principle apple raising sections in the United States. It is a kind of narrow valley and is irrigated with the water from the Wenatchee river from the Cascade Mountains. They have big dams away up on the river and carry the water out of the dams in big iron pipes into ditches which run along the top of fences and at every orchard they would let some water out to cover the ground where the trees were planted. We ran through apple orchards for about two hours with orchards on both sides. Every tree was loaded with apples and the prices are from $500 to $2.000 an acre. They are average size of ten acres. They send some years 250 carloads to Australia from this one town and one firm sold 1000 carloads in one order sent to Europe.

The apple business is one of the biggest in the country. In 1920 the crop was 198,965,000 bushels in the United States a total of 35 billion apples. There were 348 apples for every person in the United States and if they were piled in a row close together they would reach one and one-half million miles. Washington raises 6,440,000 bushels and Pennsylvania raises 759,000 bushels. We have to go west to see how they do big things.

We ride up along the river and soon get into the mountains and the thick timber. The mountains are so close and so high that we cannot see the tops and the grade is very steep. Finally we came to the great Cascade tunnel which is 13,400 feet long. They stop and take off the locomotive and put on the Electric engine to take you through. It is so long they cannot run through with regular engines on account there is so much smoke it makes the passengers sick. When we got through we were above the clouds on the other side. They take off the electric engines again and put on the other kind to go down the mountain with and it is nine miles down all through snow sheds and tunnels. You could almost pitch a stone from the mouth of the tunnel to the place we are after a run nine miles down to the foot of the mountain. There is a little town at the mouth of the tunnel where the engine crews live and they have little snow tunnels built for the kids to go to school and to each other's houses as the snow gets very deep in the winter time and they have alalanches [sic]. One time there was a train going through the tunnel and 11 women fainted because they could not get air so the conductor told the engineer to back out and as he came to the end of tunnel a terrible avalanche happened to be coming down the mountain which took the whole train with it down the mountain and nearly all the people were killed. There is one spiral tunnel where you cross the big canyon and into the mountain and back out again on the way down. The scenery is wonderful also the engineering to build such a railroad.

We get into the big timber as we follow the Skykomish River down the valley. There is a fine macadam road and there are thousands of automobile tourists coming and going all the time. You will see parties of tourists camping all along the road. There are some ranches and a lot of lumber mill towns all along this section. We got to Everett where the biggest mills in the United States are located just about sun down. This was my first view of Puget Sound and the waters of the Pacific ocean and the sunset was beautiful. I had a good standing with the conductors all along for we had lots of time to get acquainted. One of them told us that we would hit a big tunnel just before we got to Seattle and to look out for pickpockets around the station and not to take a chance on walking to the hotels.

The next chapter will be about Seattle and Puget Sound country.