It looks like embedding the map on the blog page works fine there but the map doesn’t appear in the email notifications. Try clicking to the blog or directly to the maps – you’ll like them. He hasn’t gotten out of North America yet but he’s only twenty.
View All Segments Published to Date on Google Maps As the diary progresses, the entire journey becomes increasingly amazing.
View the First Ten Segments Without Popups This is a preview showing the path Hayes records in the diary up to age 22 without synopses. Look at it in Google Earth if you can.
Requested photo places (see About Photo Requests):
– Kansas City, KS
– Salt Lake City, UT
– Seattle, WA
– Cascade Range WA
– Revelstoke BC
– Arrow Lake
– Sandon, BC
– Payne Mountain
– Noble Five Mountains
– Argonaut Mountain
– Kaslo BC
– Kootaney lake
– Spokane, WA
Here and There diary Synopsis:
6.1 War with Spain
April 23, 1898
The Spanish Sunk the Maine! Or somebody did. War fever grips all of Kansas City. Every packinghouse, mill, and train in town ties its whistle or siren full open for an hour in sheer relief from the tension built over the past few weeks. “Everyone is like a child, talking to the stranger next to him and planning on going to the war, wherever that may be.” In an earlier entry Hayes had remarked that this war will help heal the lingering scars from the Civil war. For now, it has united Kansas City at least.
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All this comes to Hayes from outside as he lies in bed with the pneumonia shifted to his other lung. Having seen a doctor cure one side, he can save the fee and manage for himself this time: “A bella donna plaster, some aspirin and quinine seems to be working.”
6.2 Yellow Journalism
April 29, 1898
With the railways competing to undercut competitor’s fares, Hayes buys a ticket all the way to Seattle for $20. At one stopover in Kansas, farmers “swarmed over the train to get a paper telling of the war.” Hayes gathered up newspapers cast off by passengers inside the train to sell for 10¢ out the windows. He doesn’t mention which paper he sold, but quite likely its publisher was William Randolph Hearst, at whose San Simeon castle Hayes will manage the zoo in the 1930’s. The same frenzy rages across Colorado and Utah, “All want to annihilate the Spaniards who for so long have treated the Cubans as my father treated me.”
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The prairie bursts with “red, white, and blue” flowers “as far as the eye can see,” while would–be prospectors fill the train with congenial conversation about the fortunes they will uncover in the Yukon.
At Salt Lake City, “these Mormons … have worked hard and now farms and gardens bloom where once was sage and sand.” The long run of track stretching between Salt Lake and Seattle gives Hayes plenty of time to ponder “what then?” “Something always turns up, and will again.”
6.3 Gold Fever
May 3, 1898
War is only the secondary frenzy in Seattle; here GOLD is number one. “Several ships have recently entered the Seattle with tons of gold from the new Klondike mines,” stirring “the cupidity … to a crescendo of fury.” Mountains of mining gear and equipment block the streets and any boat that can float brings an inflated price from some soft-handed man senseless with the gold fever. With few Alaskan mines yet proven, Hayes wryly observes fortunes being made right here in Seattle by those selling boats and gear to greenhorn miners. With enthusiasm outpacing sense, “A lot of them will die before they reach the diggings, and more will perish after that.”
An inventory of the gambling houses in town includes, “Clancy’s, the Considine Brothers big Standard institution, and Billy The Mug’s.” He saw a croupier pull a lever in Clancy’s, got tossed out of the Standard for entering under age, and escaped a beating at Billy the Mug’s when he “demurred at being plucked.” Always the “girls, wan and fading,” to entice one inside.
6.4 Ranch Work with Wet Feet
May 9,1898
Ranch work in the rain for $20 a month. “An old chap named Mason … wants someone to do the hard work.” In May, in the foothills of the Cascades, one’s feet are always wet when chasing cows, plowing, planting – generally working as “a domestic animal.”
May 24, 1898
Three weeks in the rain and Hayes is ready to move on. Everyone in Seattle wants to go either North to the Yukon or enlist for the Spanish War. Hayes thinks maybe he’ll head up into Canada looking for a mining job in a dryer climate.
6.5 Canadian Pacific Railway
May 30, 1898
Rail fare just keeps getting cheaper: $10 from Seattle to St. Paul. But Hayes gets off at Revelstoke after seeing some gorgeous scenery. A quick look at the cedar stumps in Revelstoke, a change of trains, then down Arrow Lake on a steamer, one more rail jump and into Sandon.
“The mountains rise a full mile or more on every side,” with frequent avalanches that snap the trees like matches sometimes killing men in their path. “Many saloons and dance halls” cater to miners digging silver and lead – the only reason for the existence of a town in this remote place.
Some of these silver miners have left for the Klondike, “but most realize as I do that it is just another camp.” Gold prospecting has longer odds than roulette. Hayes estimates 500 will lose everything in the Klondike for every one with a real stake. At roulette, “the odds are only 38 to one against you.” And the one with a real stake will be “taken in hand by some gold digger in a dance hall.”
April 7, 1898
Unable to land a job, Hayes scouts the surrounding mountains, the Payne, the Nobel Five, and the Argonaut, often hiking a mile elevation gain then sliding down on the snow fields.
Variety theatres are the only alternative to bars in Sandon. Not much difference between the two really, “men lose their heads when an especially pretty face is looking into theirs.” Even the thrifty Scot Jock McCann waves handfuls of bills heading past the Maison Francaise – “so he will be broke by now.”
The minister and his wife here are “young and full of life.” They invite Hayes to stop in. He says, “I promised to, but backed out on it.” The bad experiences with church at “home” (Hayes’ quote) determine him never to enter a church again.
April 12, 1898
No job and funds are running low. His cousin Lewis, from California, sent some cash to keep him going for a few more days. As the prospects are not good here, Hayes plans to jump a train to Spokane where something is bound to turn up.
6.6 Canadian Grizzlies
April 14, 1898
Other than the beauty of its location beside the many waterfalls into Kootenay lake, Hayes can see no reason for the town of Kaslo – maybe as a trading post for the many mining towns around.
A prospector Hayes met near Kaslo startled two grizzly bears in the woods. “One ran from him, the other to him.” Slipping his pack, the man fought the one grizzly to a standstill with an axe. The bear died; the man survived. It took him “two or three hours to crawl a mile to a house,” and now he can be seen around town, “a mass of scars and bruises and walks on crutches.”
6.7 No Job in Spokane
April 19,1898
The grizzly attack in Sandon spooked Hayes from trying out a few mining camps near Nelson, so he rode Kootaney lake back down toward the US. Not much mining in Spokane proper but “gold to the west in Okanogan, and in the Coeur D’Alenes silver-lead.” Lead and zinc at other small towns all around support Spokane as a center for trade
And his customary report on the brothels: “at the Coeur D’Alene Dutch Jake has made his already large fortune bigger.” This place has it all, a gambling house, bars, variety show, and “hundreds of harlots plying their trade near this establishment.” His need to describe this scene in every new town evidences a fascination with the life, “But I’ve got to have a job; this easy money is not for me.”
Hayes Here and There 