Des Moines was desperate.  We lay in camp, made political speeches, held sacred concerts, pulled teeth, played baseball and seven-up, and ate our six thousand meals per day, and Des Moines paid for it.  Des Moines pleaded with the railroads, but they were obdurate; they had said we shouldn’t ride, and that settled it.  To permit us to ride would be to establish a precedent, and there weren’t going to be any precedents.  And still we went on eating.  That was the terrifying factor in the situation.  We were bound for Washington, and Des Moines would have had to float municipal bonds to pay all our railroad fares, even at special rates, and if we remained much longer, she’d have to float bonds anyway to feed us.

Then some local genius solved the problem.  We wouldn’t walk.  Very good.  We should ride.  From Des Moines to Keokuk on the Mississippi flowed the Des Moines River.  This particular stretch of river was three hundred miles long.  We could ride on it, said the local genius; and, once equipped with floating stock, we could ride on down the Mississippi to the Ohio, and thence up the Ohio, winding up with a short portage over the mountains to Washington.

Des Moines took up a subscription.  Public-spirited citizens contributed several thousand dollars.  Lumber, rope, nails, and cotton for calking were bought in large quantities, and on the banks of the Des Moines was inaugurated a tremendous era of shipbuilding.  Now the Des Moines is a picayune stream, unduly dignified by the appellation of “river.”  In our spacious western land it would be called a “creek.”  The oldest inhabitants shook their heads and said we couldn’t make it, that there wasn’t enough water to float us.  Des Moines didn’t care, so long as it got rid of us, and we were such well-fed optimists that we didn’t care either.

On Wednesday, May 9, 1894, we got under way and started on our colossal picnic.  Des Moines had got off pretty easily, and she certainly owes a statue in bronze to the local genius who got her out of her difficulty.  True, Des Moines had to pay for our boats; we had eaten sixty-six thousand meals at the stove-works; and we took twelve thousand additional meals along with us in our commissary—­as a precaution against famine in the wilds; but then, think what it would have meant if we had remained at Des Moines eleven months instead of eleven days.  Also, when we departed, we promised Des Moines we’d come back if the river failed to float us.

It was all very well having twelve thousand meals in the commissary, and no doubt the commissary “ducks” enjoyed them; for the commissary promptly got lost, and my boat, for one, never saw it again.  The company formation was hopelessly broken up during the river-trip.  In any camp of men there will always be found a certain percentage of shirks, of helpless, of just ordinary, and of hustlers.  There were ten men in my boat, and they were the cream of Company L. Every man was a hustler.  For two reasons I