American Forestry 



VOL. XX 



DECEMBER, 1914 



No. 12 



THE SWITZERLANDS IN AMERICA 



By Agnes C. Laut 



•JEW "> 



FOR twenty years geologists and 

 explorers have sung the beauties 

 of mountain scenery in America 

 to an unheeding world. Ameri- 

 cans have been told and retold how 

 you could lose a Switzerland in the ice 

 fields of the Canadian Rockies, or count 

 more unclimbed peaks in Glacier Na- 

 tional Park than there are climbed peaks 

 in Switzerland, or drop the Alps into 

 the bottom of Grand Canyon and see 

 only peaks come above the rim of the 

 deep gorge — Americans have been told 

 and retold all this. They would have 

 none of it. They cither did not believe 

 it, or did not want to believe it. For one 

 person who bought a round trip ticket 

 to the American West, two bought 

 round trip tickets to Europe. 



That was until the War broke out. 



Until the War broke out, America had 

 lacked the human, lacked the historic, 

 lacked the picturesque. Suddenly, 

 American tourists found they were suf- 

 fering from a European brand of too 

 much human, too much historic, too 

 much picturesque. Their own land took 

 on instantaneous roseate hues. Never 

 was such an immediate cure of the 

 foreign mania witnessed that everybody 

 wanted to see America first. Said an 

 American woman, who landed bedrag- 

 gled in London without a hat but carry- 

 ing a bird cage and a band box — "Never 

 again! I'm cured of Europe! Terra 

 cotta, or terra firma, or any old Ameri- 

 can terra is good enough for me!" 



Within a week of the declaration of 

 War, American railroads were over- 

 whelmed with enquiries for accommo- 

 dations West. At first, they thought it 

 a backwave of tourists from Europe ; but 



as enquiries continued, it became ap- 

 parent that American tourists for the 

 first time in history were going to ex- 

 plore their own land. One heard no 

 more of the fustian nonsense about 

 America lacking human interest. All 

 the pseudo-culture of chasing over 

 Europe with a club for the unattainable 

 in one's own soul, all the tinsel glamor of 

 Paris fashions and European art, sud- 

 denly sloughed off and revealed the 

 primitive monster horrors of blood-lust 

 and rapine and ruthlessness. Culture 

 and art and glamor went down under 

 the feet of a Great Blonde Beast rampant 

 that Americans had not dreamed could 

 exist under the mask of a civilization 

 top heavy mth learning and mellow 

 with centuries. Raw, crude, rude, new 

 America seemed a mighty good place 

 to be. American cowboys might shoot 

 up saloons and jingle their spurs and 

 give extemporized "neck-tie" parties to 

 murderers and thieves; but they didn't 

 bayonet babies and shoot priests and 

 rob women and loot tourists. Also, the 

 spectacle of every nation in Europe 

 wooing America, kow-towing to Uncle 

 Sam of stripod pants and prunella 

 gaiters — must have stiffened up a good 

 many flabby tourists back bones. Any- 

 way, for the first time, the tide of 

 American travel has turned back on 

 itself. For the f^rst time, America is 

 going to tour her own lake country, and 

 visit her own battlefields, and climb 

 her own mountains, and parade her 

 own Rivieras — of which she has dis- 

 tinctly four. It will be a surprise for 

 the most of Americans to learn that 

 four lake sections exist on their own 

 continent equal in beauty to the Tros- 



839 



