He soon discovered that he was travelling through territory entirely new to him. The little towns he had known had grown into cities, and the further west we travelled, the greater and more impressive were the changes.
Omaha and Kansas City he did not recognize at all. Not only was there this new growth, "rank growth," he called it, of sky-scrapers, post-offices and railroad stations with Doric pillars--the men and women he met had a new outlook upon life. While they still boasted of this and that thing in which their city was like Chicago or was unlike some lesser city than their own, they were critical of themselves and eager to learn; they had grown more masterful and at the same time were more refined.
The prairies were not at all what the Frau Directorin had imagined them to be. She was chagrined to find nothing but farm lands and great fields, not so well groomed as those we had seen in the East, but with no Indians or buffaloes, no wild horses or wilder looking men.
She saw no trace of the toil, the struggle and the brave resistance through which these farms had been rescued from the prairies. She could not know of the loneliness of women and the hardihood of men, of the season's drought and famine, of bitter disappointment, the pangs of bearing and rearing children in utter isolation, and the struggle for education.
No trace of all this was apparent in the sort of settled, middle class prosperity which stretched out in the unvaried, thousand mile panorama through which we journeyed.
In a town of about four thousand inhabitants we stopped; the name of the place is of no significance, for there are hundreds of just such towns in the West. We were met by the superintendent of schools, himself a product of the prairies. Having grown up among the cattle, he is consequently shy of men. He drove his automobile as if it were a broncho, and we all uttered a prayer of thanksgiving when he deposited us, with no bones broken, at the hotel. In a short time we were ready to go with him to his school, which was the objective point of our visit.
It goes without saying that the superintendent boasted of the youth of the town, even as under like circumstances in the East, he would have boasted of its age.