115 
March, 1923 
N 
his fellow tourists in the camp grounds, 
, information is interchanged and the hon- 
jj est dealers in all lines, garages, gro- 
i ceries, restaurants, hotels and the rest 
are named. We hear in Omaha which 
: towns in Colorado to avoid—the places 
where business organizations permit out¬ 
rageous overcharging, short - weighting 
and double-dealing. If for no other 
reason it is worth while to be sociable 
and trade information with those one 
meets. Tourist trade is making countless 
by-way businesses. That same trade is 
being withheld from the diminishing 
number of petty or major swindlers. 
The main traveled routes of the coun¬ 
try, which by preference tourists select 
in picking destinations, are the Lincoln 
Highway, The National Old Trails (in¬ 
cluding Sante Fe Trail), roads to the 
Yellowstone Park, to Florida, to New 
England, to Chicago, to Washington, to 
or from California and to the Northwest. 
Then there are regional centers, too nu¬ 
merous to mention, but of which exam¬ 
ples may be selected: White Mountains, 
Montreal, Adirondacks, to northern Min¬ 
nesota, to The Blue Ridge, to Houston, 
Texas, or the Davis Mountains, or Dela¬ 
ware Water Gap, Maine, Richmond, Va. 
Certain trips are essayed, as Pike’s 
Peak or Bust, The Transcontinental (the 
wonder of them all), St. Louis, Ozarks, 
Upper Peninsula of Michigan, St. Law¬ 
rence River, etc. A hundred painted- 
blaze trails offer as many fascinating— 
and in present road conditions baffling- 
routes. 
My own experiences in the round trip 
from Coast to 
Coast, from Can¬ 
ada to M e x i c o, 
hither and yon do 
not enable me to 
pick something bet¬ 
ter than others. 
For those who 
have never seen an 
ocean, a sunrise on 
the Atlantic or a 
sunset on the Pa¬ 
cific will repay any 
price paid to wit¬ 
ness the m. The 
Rockies, or Sierras, 
the deserts, the 
significance 
of weeks spent in 
crossing Uncle 
Sam’s farm, from 
the Hudson to the 
Republican River 
breaks, the sight of 
Texas cattle herds, 
or Iowa hogs, a 
noonday or twilight hour, or moonlight 
or starlight hour beside the Grand 
Canyon, or overlooking the Painted 
Desert, a dinner cooked beside Lake 
Erie, or a Lake Superior Bay, or a 
dream-song of a mocking bird in the 
Cumberlands, or a day watching the 
\ Lower Mississippi at Memphis (a fine 
camp ground here!)—there are a thou¬ 
sand single views which are worth seek¬ 
ing. 
Nor can one go amiss. The main thing 
is to go slow enough—for reasons to be 
discussed later. The great thing is to 
leave one’s own accustomed environment, 
to see how the people in the thousand 
other environments live. The city man 
should go to the wilderness, and the 
farmer of the wheat or corn country 
should drive into the great cities, and 
manufacturing districts. 
I1IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIH 
For many years Mr. Spears has been 
traveling up and down and back and 
forth throughout the United States, 
on foot, awheel and by auto. He 
has learned much concerning the 
modus operandi of the wanderer and 
we are fortunate in being able to 
present to our readers a number of 
papers by him on the subject of 
auto-touring. He tells you where to 
go—the kind of roads to expect— 
the daily routine of driving—what 
equipment to take and treats of a 
thousand and one things that will 
facilitate your journey. 
iininiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiM 
W HERE should sportsmen go ? Well, 
that is a fair question. Automo¬ 
bile touring is a great sport in itself. 
Carrying firearms, I seldom shoot them 
till I settle down somewhere for a sea¬ 
son. On the road many things intervene 
to prevent shooting or fishing. One has 
a natural reluctance against taking local 
game away from local hunters—and this 
is a good reluctance, in view of hunting 
license and game law restrictions. The 
hunting season is pretty late for touring, 
generally speaking. Fishing can often 
be had, but only by stopping over when 
inquiry reveals chance of local bait, fly 
or other fishing. 
Many states require fishing licenses. 
All require hunting licenses. The tour 
to the hunting country is one thing; the 
hunting or fishing is another thing, gov¬ 
erned by the rules of the play. Local 
shooters and fishermen more and more 
resent intruding. A practiced tourist 
will find game pockets, where fine shoot¬ 
ing is to be had, and shoals of fish where 
delicate tackle serves to land fine, gamy 
fish. The fringes of Uncle Sam’s work¬ 
shops and farms have many a patch of 
hunting which one hears about or dis¬ 
covers as he rolls over the divides be¬ 
tween regions. 
Wild - fowl, on the great migration 
routes, offer the most universal shooting 
—down the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, 
down the Mississippi, down the arid 
Lake Bonneville Basin, etc. But daily 
thousands of acres of land are being 
posted, and this posting will be the sal¬ 
vation of wild turkey, deer, prairie chick¬ 
ens, and other famous game, against the 
time when the scandal of wild life 
butchering and reckless and wanton 
shooting ceases to be a major vice of 
vandals who ride the trails in their au¬ 
tomobiles and waste the priceless game 
as they are doing. 
I’ll not soon forget an Iowa car I saw 
below Santa Barbara in California. We 
came upon it in mid-road. The young 
man at the wheel had stopped there. He 
had caught up his 12-gauge and let go 
into a flock of beautiful tufted quail 
which was dusting in the highway—kill¬ 
ing five or six, I think. 
This automobile hunting drives the 
wild life from the highways. I suppose 
hundreds of thousands practice it. Shoot¬ 
ing woodchucks, prairie dogs, jackrab- 
bits, cottontails (in infested regions), 
crows and other vermin animals can do 
no harm, I suppose, but this same shoot¬ 
ing is closing the hunting country to 
sportsmen who 
would be careful, 
and who have car¬ 
ried the burden of 
game preservation 
from the wanton 
slaughter for mar¬ 
ket that swept the 
prairies and moun¬ 
tains to these days 
of No Sale of 
Game, and en¬ 
forcement of bag 
limits. 
Automobile 
touring and good 
roads have in the 
past two or three 
years closed Texas 
against promiscu¬ 
ous hunting. In 
the Pecos valley it 
has locked the 
gates against wild 
turkey killing. 
For twenty or 
thirty miles out from most great cities, 
“POSTED” glares one in the face at 
most farms. Even unposted farms, under 
many trespass laws, are dangerous to the 
shooting and fishing tourist. 
But probably most of the land thus 
forbidden becomes immediately a breed¬ 
ing ground for wild life. The harried 
quail, squirrels, rabbits, and even larger 
game become quieted and live in relative 
safety. What the migratory law did for 
wild-fowl, the trespass signs are doing 
for local non-migratory game. 
(Continued on page 146) 
A pair of desert ruts is often called a road in the West 
