Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/254

242 to fight each other. Within the past two or three years, as has been shown, the passenger traffic had greatly increased. The railroad heads began to see possibilities on an unhoped for scale. Naturally each wanted to hog it all. And as naturally each began to cut into his rivals by every means in his power. The word propaganda had not yet come into general use; but the thing itself was done to the limit. In every wayside station, almost in every country corner-store of the blizzard-ridden East hung vivid lithographs showing mammoth clusters of fruit, a dazzle of flowers to put your eyes out, and invariably a young lady of rich glowing complexion, toothful smile, and a redundant figure. Small circular inserts around the border depicted bathing in January and the ocean at the same time; showed small snapshots of the future life labelled "ranching in California"; and invariably offered a snowscape with a muffled, shivering, red nosed, belly-deep person shovelling a path to the barn. This last labelled in large type YOURSELF!, and you were urged to come to California where perpetual summer reigns. These vivid posters were backed up by tons of patent insides distributed gratis to the country newspapers. They were of course a balderdash of super-optimism. Read to-day in the light of our accurate knowledge of what is possible and what is not; what the country will do, and what it will not; what the climate is, and what it is not, these perfervid booster articles sound ridiculous enough. But it must be remembered that then California was considered so remote as almost to be outside the United States. It carried over an overload of romance from the times of the 'Forty-niners, Vigilante days, the period of the bonanza kings. People will believe anything that is far enough away. Beside which this advertising was helped by the constant publication of silly letters. Most people had in those days never been far from home. California was so different, her winter climate offered so heavenly a contrast, her beauties were so unbelievable to one accustomed only to sober landscapes that the visitor became rhapsodical. He—or she—wrote reams of silly, sloppy, sentimental stuff, mostly adjectives and adverbs. Probably he—or she—had rarely before left a pavement, and certainly had no basis on which to found the enthusiastic judg-