er we had left Tucson and had started on the
long and somewhat dreary journey across the desert that stretches from
the "Old Pueblo" to "San Berdoo," and said:

"Do you know, I actually used to believe all those stories about the
'wildness of the West.' I see how badly I was mistaken."

She had taken a half-hour stroll about Tucson while the train changed
crews and had been impressed by the--to the casual observer--sleepiness
of the ancient town. She told me that never again would she look on a
"wild West" moving picture without wanting to laugh. She would not
believe that there had ever been a "wild West"--at least, not in
Arizona. And yet it is history that the old Territory of Arizona in days
gone by was the "wildest and woolliest" of all the West, as any old
settler will testify.

There is no doubt that to the tourist the West is now a source of
constant disappointment. The "movies" and certain literature have
educated the Easterner to the belief that even now Indians go on the
war-path occasionally, that even now cowboys sometimes find an outlet
for their exuberant spirits in the hair-raising sport of "shooting up
the town," and that even now battles between the law-abiding cattlemen
and the "rustlers" are more or less frequent. When these people come
west in their comfortable Pullmans and discover nothing more interesting
in the shape of Indians than a few old squaws selling trinkets and
blankets on station platforms, as at Yuma; when they visit one of the
famous old towns where in days gone by white men were wont to sleep with
one eye and an ear open for marauding Indians, and find electric cars,
modern office buildings, paved streets crowded with luxurious motors,
and the inhabitants nonchalantly pursuing the even tenor of their ways
garbed in habiliments strongly suggestive of Forty-fourth street and
Broadway; when they come West and note these signs of an advancing and
all-conquering civilization, I say, they invariably are disappointed.
One lady I met even thought "how delightful" it would be "if the Apaches
would only hold up the train!" It failed altogether to occur to her
that, in the days when wagon-trains _were_ held up by Apaches, few of
those in them escaped to tell the gruesome tale. And yet this estimable
lady, fresh from the drawing-rooms of Upper-Radcliffe-on-the-Hudson and
the ballroom of Rector's, thought how "delightful" this would be! Ah,
fortunate indeed is it that the pluck and persistence