Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/255

Rh ments so blithely passed out. Hundreds of these private letters were printed: as letters from the front were printed during the war. And they carried great weight because the writers were "disinterested," save the mark!

But the railroads went much further in their bid for custom than mere propaganda. Propaganda might stimulate travel, but it would not necessarily stimulate travel over your particular road. Naturally we are not considering maps where your own blood-red line darts straight as an arrow to its objective, while your rival's thin black thread goes all around Robin Hood's barn and finally snarls itself up so badly you can't tell it from a state boundary line. Everybody can have them. The road had to do something the other roads could not do. For example, sell cheaper tickets.

Thus began the great rate war of the 'eighties. It is now forgotten by the public, but at the time it attracted a lot of attention. The thought seemed to be that if you got people to going on your line, at no matter what present cost, they would forever after continue to do so, and your rival would always run dark trams. It was a nice spirited contest while it lasted. We have not space to go into details. Suffice it to say that it took six months to hammer its futility into the heads of the railroad chiefs; that fares went down to five dollars for a round trip from Missouri River points, and on one day only it could be had at one dollar.

They travelled by thousands, people who had never been a hundred miles from home in their lives. They packed the carpet bags, and put up cooked provisions in boxes and hied them forth. If the railroads really wanted volume of traffic, they got it. Most of these new tourists did the usual tourist things; but a certain proportion looked upon the land and found it so much better than they had known back home that they raked and they scraped and they bought. Indeed, so large was the crop of investors this year that away back in Chicago the professional "boomers" heard of it. And as the Chicago boom of that period was on the ebb, they in turn packed their grips and their methods and came west. Undoubtedly they hoped, and expected, to make a tidy little clean-up on a carefully nursed