e post office is a beautiful
little building. We fraternized in Rawlins with fellow travelers, a lady
and her son who were going on from Colorado Springs to Pasadena in a
beautiful Stutz roadster.

In Rawlins as in most Western towns, we stayed at a hotel managed on the
European plan and ate our meals in a nearby restaurant. It is always a
surprise to me to see the number of people in the restaurants and
cafeterias of the West. Even in small towns these places are crowded.

As we came into Rawlins we saw Elk Mountain rising nobly on the horizon
beyond us. When we left Rawlins and traveled toward it, it grew more
imposing.

Instead of going on to Arlington, directly under the shadow of Elk
Mountain, we elected to turn off to Medicine Bow, made famous by Owen
Wister's book, "The Virginian." Elk Mountain rises 12000 feet, and
Medicine Bow is 6500 feet, above sea level. It is only a railroad
station, a tiny cluster of saloons, a still smaller cluster of shops, a
big shearing shed, and a substantial stone hotel called The Virginian.

The landlady of The Virginian told us that their hotel is always full of
guests.

It is a busy place. Here the woolmen come to trade and to export their
wool, here the sheepmen bring their sheep for the annual shearing.
Nearly sixty thousand sheep are shorn annually in the shearing shed, a
few minutes' walk from the hotel. Here the plainsmen come from time to
time to throw away in a few hours of drinking and gambling the money
earned in months spent in the open.

We had an excellent substantial lunch at the hotel and then went over to
see the shearing. How hot and uncomfortable the poor sheep looked in the
waiting pen, with their heavy fleeces weighing them down! They stood
panting in the sun, their broad backs making a thick rug, so tightly
were they wedged in together. And how half ashamed they looked when they
came out from the shearing, thin and bare!

In this establishment the shearing is all done by machinery. It takes a
skillful man to run these rapidly clicking shears over the animal's body
and make no serious wound. The overseer told us that in the case of an
inexperienced man the sheep would "fight him all over the pen." The
shearer reaches out his right hand and grasps one of the three or four
sheep that have been pushed into a little compartment from the main
pens. The beasts stand stupidly huddled together. The shearer takes one
by its left hind leg, and by a skillful twist