Daily Yellowstone Journal

BILL NYE BUYS A TREE SECTION FOR COSMETIC PURPOSES.

The Woman Who Sat Next to Him in the Train--His Among the Shoes--He Got Fired Up Toward the Last and Has a Rude Shock.

[Copyright, 1892, by Edgar W. Nye.]

There is a peculiar industry at Sioux Falls, S. D. It is the only one of the kind I know of. It consists in cutting and polishing the beautiful chalcedony, as it is called, from the petrified forests of Arizona. The material is sent to Sioux Falls in the form of stumps or broken tree trunks, and there the slabs are cut across the grain and polished for ornamental purposes.

Nothing can be more beautiful than a slice cut from the butt of a big tree and polished till its surface is like plate glass, while every fiber of the beautiful and softly tinted wood seems frozen into a lasting picture by the patient hand of time.

You can get one of these slabs for from $10 to $100. I bought one of the latter to hold the door open in my new and costly villa at Buck Shoals, N. C. Some of these slabs are two feet across, and none of them seems to represent any kind of tree existing at the present time. They afford, therefore, a wonderful field for the active mind to stroll about in. Perhaps over this beautiful slab, while yet it was in the heart of a sapling, some belated pterodactyl sprawled on his way to his damp home. Possibly the ichthyosaurus crawled out of a hole in this tree on groundhog day. Who can tell what has happened in the early history of this petrified forest? Nobody can. Away back yonder in the misty past, long before the climate got so that the hired girl could bear her hand in it, while yet the hot land boiled with the mighty heat of a new laid world and the air was filled with disagreeable odors, and the evening and the morning indicated that workmen on the foundation of the earth had blown out the gas at night, and the angels went about over the face of the earth flying high and holding their noses, this tree was sprouting.

Those, fellow citizens, were times when the country was new. Those were days when the hot mist from the seething earth came back at once as warm rain, only to be immediately utilized as mist again; when mammoth forests, like gigantic asparagus beds, sprang forth in a few months and overshadowed the silent and slimy home of the saurian monster.

It was under those circumstances, we are told by old settlers whose memory is yet good, that these early forests grew. Then Nature, with a long, rainy day on her hands, one time decided that she would try preserving a forest for future use. Thus we have here, surrounded by electric lights and high livers in society, along with the telephone and artificial ice, a slab of wood whose bark has been abraded here and there where the ichthyosaurus has scratched his warty back against it in the mellow millions of years that left no other history.

Becoming somewhat excited over this great thought, I bought another beautiful $50 specimen to pound steak on. We may not always have steak at our house, but we propose to have something to pound it on whenever we do have steak.

The railroad agent at Billings, A. T., near where this petrified forest is situated, gets thirteen to seventeen letters per week from people who want specimens of this petrified wood. Here is one:

Station Agent, Billings, A. T.

DEAR SIR--May I ask you to write me regarding "Natural Curiosity," the petrified forest of Arizona? Is it a fact, and how large an area does it cover? I would be pleased to have you send by express some specimens of red moss agate, amethyst and smoky topaz. I would love to visit this place if the article in St. Nicholas is true. Yours truly,

J. D. CLARE.

This name is not the correct one, but a little conceit of my own. The agent has many of these letters, and wishes me to put an ad. in the paper begging the public not to write to him any more regarding petrified matter, as it is breaking him down.

It is that elderly maiden ladies, who brought the war to a speedy close by making prune pie for the soldiers, now write to him for agates, forgetting that he is getting forty dollars per month from the railroad, not specially for the purpose of gathering moss agates or petrified trees for others. Sometimes he is not sure that the freight will be paid or he would be more prompt to send things. Sometimes an unknown man who cannot spell, to say nothing of paying the freight, orders a quart of Indian arrowheads and 100 feet of petrified lumber to build a house of. This bothers the agent, who is also telegraph operator, line repairer, ticket and baggage agent and the head of a family. He wishes to notify the public by this means that hereafter it will be impossible for him to supply petrified sills for those who are building in Ohio, especially as the petrified forest is owned by other parties, who threaten to prosecute people who girdle the trees or cut the timber without paying stumpage.

Yesterday I rode most all day in a seat just back of a lady who was traveling with a large gooseberry bush. Why do women feel better while traveling if they can convey a large, thorny parrot, or a young plum tree, or a jug of buttermilk? It certainly cannot enhance the pleasure of travel either for themselves or others. Every time I would get sleepy and droop forward I would bury my face in this gooseberry bush. It moved me very much, but she kept on carrying it, and even reproved me for knocking a young thorn loose with my eye.

She was on the way home to plant a new kind of stud potato and her third husband. He was in the express car, where it was sort of quiet. I envy him. One of the neighbors said that he was killed by being run over by a train because he could not hear it coming. Poor man! He lost his hearing most mercifully just after he was married.

She is a plain woman, but firm, with grim determination and set teeth. She set them several weeks ago, and expects them to come off the next now in a few days. She says that this is the Are de Triumph gooseberry which she has. It is superior to the Polled Angus gooseberry, running more to jam and less to worm than the Angus or the Isabella.

She wears a white flannel yachting cap with catskin earmuffs to it, and a seal plush cloak that is prematurely bald on the shoulders. I judge also by the front of the cloak that she got her wraps on before she ate her breakfast, and then only hurriedly ate a soft fried egg and some buckwheat cakes with real Vermont maple syrup on them.

When she reads this in her quiet little home near Fort Dodge she will be sorry that she wore out all the foliage of her gooseberry bush on a great coarse man who is not fond of shrubbery.

Tama, Ia., is not a large place, but the center of a rich farming country and the social center of a large colony of Indians, numbering 150, I believe. These red men demonstrate the fact that the Indian may be made self supporting, for these Indians own their lands, on which they raise much grass. The government gives each Indian about $12 annually as a reward for being neither absent nor tardy on pay day. With this the Indian is enabled to buy lemon extract, by means of which he is enabled to get drunk.

These Indians are Sacs and Foxes mostly. What work is done is done by the wife. She has a low, groveling streak in her nature, and so she works. The husband has nobility of character and other things also which he is willing to impart to those near and dear to him.

While I was at Tama the Indians were just cleaning house. House cleaning among the Sacs and Foxes is attended to very much as it is done among the other Indian tribes. It is done by moving the house.

The Sacs and Foxes need a thorough renovating and a Keeley institute. They were the first to ascertain that lemon extract and cologne taken in sufficient quantities would intoxicate, and it is said that one of these Indians will drain the life blood from an alcohol stove at one sitting.

There was considerable sickness among these Indians last spring. It was caused in a singular way. All the cigar stores in Tama had alcohol cigar lighters, and the Indians got to lighting their pipes at these, and while ostensibly lighting a refractory pipe they did, then and there, suck the juice out of the alcohol retort by means of a straw. Dealers then put some foreign substance into the alcohol reservoir, and most all the men folks of the tribe staid at home for quite awhile and complained of not feeling first rate.

Tama has streets which in spring are composed mostly of adhesive copying ink. There is no bottom to the mud. It is impossible to drive over it when the frost is coming out of the ground.

At Fairfield we found the same state of affairs. There was no use for omnibus or baggage wagon. They could not make the trip, and had long ago given it up, so we walked from the depot half a mile to the hotel. It is called the Leggett House.

At 1 o'clock a. m. we also legged it from the Leggett House to the depot to catch an early train. Early rising is
what has caused me where I am today
Some think it was pure accident, and that I am greatly overestimated, and that my wonderful popularity is largely assumed, but such is not the case I assure you. Early rising has done it.
This makes twice I have lost an early riser within two weeks,
Before closing; let me say a word regarding the question of prohibition in Iowa. Many do not believe that it is a success. Cynics may revile prohibition as much as they like, but it is one of the most delightful things, if not carried to excess, that I have ever pulled the cork out of. In Marshalltown, a very thriving and prosperous city of Iowa, a young man who had never sat up so late before in his life concluded to sit up one night till midnight and see if there were any evidences of drinking. I counted sixty-one gents who did not know whether Iowa was in Marshalltown or vice versa.
At Cedar Falls the sheriff made a raid on the men who kept spirits, and poured nineteen kinds of liquor into the river just above Waterloo. Waterloo gets her water supply from the river, and all one day she got punch from the hydrant. Business was at a standstill, it is said, and teams ran into each other from morning till night. Even the horses seemed to be exhilarated. Possibly this is not true, but it was told to me by our advance agent, and if a man cannot believe his own advance agent whom, oh, whom can he believe?
As I am closing this letter a cold squirt of water strikes me in the face, and looking up to see whence it comes I discover a large man with a nozzle in his clinched hand. He is a fireman, and has assumed the custom and stands by my open window trying to put me out.
It seems that the hotel is on fire. It is difficult to write with the same degree of care in a hotel that is on fire, I find. One cannot pause to paint such wonderful word pictures where the roof is blazing, as this one is I am told. So I will close now and wring some of the water out of my shoes and pockets. A fire department ought to knock on the window before it turns the hose on a literary man that way. They are brave men, but they are often uncouth.
Once the hotel where I was caught on fire and a rude fire laddie burst in on me while I was taking my tub. I did not know what it was. I was shocked. I did not even know that it was a man. I dove to the bottom of the tub like a frightened deer, and would have remained there if he had not gone out.
I will now close this letter and rescue one of the dining room girls. I noticed her yesterday at table, and I thought then that if a fire should break out she would be the first one I would rescue.