Seattle in 1891! In the morning, tram rides to the French market; at noon, luncheon in Limehouse; five o’clock tea in the Presidio; at night, baseball results, dinner music and the Dickens Hour.4
The day after the Inaugural Ball, my family started back east, leaving me at the hotel in lieu of a check. My next seven years, between my sixth and thirteenth birthdays, were spent up and down the Pacific Coast and I would not trade the experiences of that period for a passport picture of Bull Montana.
IV
Bright College Years
Alone in Seattle at the age of six, broke, and indebted to the hotel in the amount of $26.50 for board and room. How many kids would have faced a situation like this with equanimity! But I never lost confidence that I would find a way out. I forget just now what I did do; suffice it to say that inside of seven years I was in San Francisco, playing a cornet, evenings, at Tait’s on the beach, and in the daytime working in the park as a squirrel-tender. In those days there were no benches in the parks and a squirrel-tender’s job was to keep the squirrels out of the trees so the people would have some place to sit. Inasmuch as there were 186 squirrels in this particular park and I had only one assistant, you may imagine that I was kept hustling; squirrels get mighty tired of staying on the ground and would employ every imaginable subterfuge in their efforts to climb the tempting trees with which the park was plentifully supplied. Outwitting them and keeping them on terra firma developed both my brains and speed and ten years later, when my three runs of the length of the field won Yale a championship game, 4 to 2, an Associated Press commentator said “Harvard was beaten in the parks of San Francisco.”
In the fall of this year an SOS was broadcast from Chicago—that gargantuan metropolis was in flames as a result of a cow named O’Leary dropping a lighted cigarette in a roll of films.5
Every city of importance sent a volunteer fire company to the rescue. The company organized in San Francisco was composed of myself and Bill Lange, later to become famous as a ball player and dancing instructor. This, of course, was before horses or camels were thought of and Bill and I had to drag our hose cart east afoot. Bill was very little help and by the time we reached our destination, the fire was out and I was sixteen years of age.
It was now time to think of college. Stories of my all-around athletic prowess had appeared in all the papers and I received tempting offers from virtually every university of standing. I thought first of entering the Harvard Law School.6
Finally I decided to divide up my first year to the best advantage, going in the fall to Michigan, which needed a half back with a sextuple threat, spending the winter at Amherst, where a high class basketball guard was wanted, and winding up in the spring at Tulane, which was anxious to land a good pitcher who could also pole vault, hurdle, throw the javelin and run as anchor man in the relay. With a schedule thus outlined I had leisure to write and enjoy myself in a social way during the summer months.7
It was now that the Spanish war broke out and I enlisted as a general.
V
How Spanish War Ended
The chief difficulty about the Spanish war lay in finding out where it was being held. The censorship was so strict that even we who had enlisted as generals were kept in the dark as to the location of hostilities and there was some talk of mutiny unless the government came across and at least confided in us whether to march our divisions north, south, east or west.
It was all right to have some civilian come up to you and say “How is the war, General?” because then you could reply, “Fine, thank you,” but when they asked you “Where is it?” that was a horse with another collar. We all had to have two sets of uniforms, white for home and gray for traveling, because there was no telling if the battles were to take place at our park or on the road.
While we were still in this chaotic state, three big pieces of news reached Chicago on successive days—one that Grant had taken Vicksburg, the second that Admiral Farragut had vanquished the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, and the third that General Miles had surrendered to Lee Shubert at Appomattox. The war was over and there was such a divergence among the opinions of the fight experts that no historian has a right to say who win.
Excursion trains were now run from all points in the United States to Washington to accommodate the applicants for pensions. I will never forget my first ride on a sleeping car. In those days it was against the law to have berths run the length of the train; they had to be crosswise, and inasmuch as it was necessary for them to occupy the entire width of the car and also, on account of the uppers, extend from the floor to within a couple of inches from the roof, why you can see that both passengers and crew had their troubles when there was occasion to walk from end to end of one car or from one car to another.
As a rule, passengers gave it up entirely and from the time the berths were made up till they were taken down, why the best bet was to stay right in your berth; that is provided you were there when it was made up; otherwise there was no way for anybody but Houdini
