.WIS Conservation Resources Gass r Book M y^ " eAmerica First OENVln JllQ. CCiANDr y ^ ^ ^k This should be the war- cry of every true American. The phrase has the real patriotic ring that thrills the heart. It fires the blood like the appeal of a modern Paul Revere, exhorting all ^^g citizens to rally to the ban- ner that leads them to the canons, crags, lakes and rivers of their own country. Don't be hypnotized by weird tales of European travel. There is not an attrac- tion in the Old World that cannot be dupli- cated and discounted by the phenomena of America. Facilities for travel are superior and cheaper at home than anything you may expect in foreign lands. Accommodations for the affluent, and others in more moderate circumstances, await the tourist at every turn of the road. You get what you want, and pay for what you get, and are not hounded to death by a horde of mendicants. You encounter the frank-faced business-like Amer- ican who intuitively knows your wants and sees that they are supplied. 4 SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL THEREFORE come with mc into the recesses of the Rocky Mountains, view- ing enroute the masterpieces of the Creator's handiwork from the wondrous Niagara, through the stupendous chasm of the Royal Gorge, over the Great Continental Divide to the renowned groves of the Yose- mite, the thrilling scenes of the Yellowstone, the pastoral quaintness of the California missions nestling in real Arcadian simplicity in rich colored orange groves, the giant ice- clad peaks that fringe Puget Sound, or the balmy shades of the Columbia. Come and commune with Nature. Steep your senses in the gladness and sweetness of an outing where the defiling hands of vandals have not left their foul imprint. Get into the open where you can observe the achievements of the Great Archi- tect and worship his handiwork by mountain torrents and traverse silent paths that for centuries have been untrodden by foot of man. Come by rail, come in your auto-car, come afoot if you like, but come I Enterprise has paved the way to the very heart of the mountains and the old cry of BUT SEE AMERICA FIRST 5 remoteness and inaccessibility has been ban- ished by the pioneers of travel who have made the most distant points within easy reach of the principal resorts of the West. Millions of Americans have visited this pan- theon and countless thousands of Europeans have added their praises to the constantly ascending anthem. SEE AMERICA FIRST: See her in her grandest moods where phenomenal forces are engaged in their constructive and destructive work. Penetrate the wilds where the workshop of Nature invites you to revel in the abandon and grotesquerie of undisturbed creation. Go with bounding heart and tingling brain to absorb the grandeur of scenery and worship at the shrine of Nature where your heart offerings of gratitude will arise like incense into the spires and recesses, into the cathe- dral-like crags and sky-vaulted spaces resounding with the echo of never ceasing cascades whose tumultuous chorus swells in constant diapason, soaring and receding in obedience to the gentle breezes that fan these sylvan cloisters. 6 SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL WITH a stroke that resounded across the continent, the keynote of Amer- ican travel was launched at a con- vention held at Salt Lake City, January 25, attended by two hundred patriotic delegates representing the leading communities and commercial organizations of the Empire bounded by the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean. The governors of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Idaho, Ore- gon, Nebraska and Kansas, were most enthusiastic in their endorsement of the prop- osition, which, after three days of unselfish labor, was incorporated in a concrete pro- gramme of action calculated to bring about results in harmony with the suggestions offered by the best orators and publicists of the Nation. Hon. Heber M. Wells, former governor of Utah and president of the Salt Lake Com- mercial Club, in a brilliant address of wel- come electrified the convention and evoked a wave of enthusiasm that only subsided after the orator had repeatedly bowed his thanks. The address is as follows: BUT SEE AMERICA FIRST 7 ellowAmericans: "As chairman of the committee that has called this conference, I am proud of the results thus far achieved. We have here today an assembly of dis- tinguished men who represent every section of our great country. It is with special pride that we greet the governors of states. They have committed for a time the impor- tant interests of the people who elected them, into the care of others, and have journeyed to this city to take part in a conference hav- ing for its object interests of even greater consequence to their citizens than those they left behind. If it shall happen that success shall crown our efforts, these governors will be the great generals in our patriotic fight for greater America — for this movement, if it means anything at all, means that America is to be immensely prospered by its fruition. 8 SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL 'w A ttE are pleased to welcome the ^y^y mayors of our great cities who have w w scented from atar the battle which is to be waged for their constituents, for that which benefits the whole country must neces- sarily benefit each individual of each muni- cipality. "The representatives of our great trans- portation lines — those chief arteries of com- merce that pulsate with the good, red blood of our industrial life and without which our country would speedily return to its primi- tive inertia — they are the wise men of our conference, upon whose beneficent counsels the success or failure of all our hopes must largely depend. I make my obeisance to the wise men. "We extend the right hand of fellowship to the envoys of other commercial organiza- tions who, like ourselves, are soldiers in the cause of promoting the material welfare of their respective communities. "The newspaper men, like the poor, are always with us, and let me say if they were not 'with us' in this enterprise our chances for success would be slim indeed. BUT SEE AMERICA FIRST 9 '■nu^HOUGH it is the province of others I who will follow me to extend to you -■- that special and official welcome which becomes our city and our state, I will be pardoned, perhaps, if I admit in advance that we are downright glad to have you all within our gates, and if I assure you that it will be one of the greatest pleasures of its life for the organization which I represent — the Salt Lake City Commercial Club — to make you feel you are at home. "The movement which has emblazoned upon its banners, the motto: 'See Europe if you will, but see America first,' was con- ceived in no sordid spirit of local self adver- tisement. Its object is to exploit the special resources and attractions of Salt Lake City or of Utah or of the Rocky Mountains or even of western America. Indeed, the great- est care has been exercised in all our propa- ganda to have it well understood that its object was bigger and grander than any mere locality, but that it was conceived in the interests and for the benefit of all America. No thought, or word, or suggestion has ever emanated from the committee who sum- moned you here that these delegates were to lo SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL be assembled for any less purpose than to devise a plan to divert at least a portion of the travel of Americans which now goes to Europe and other foreign countries, to their own country first. That is the aim of this conference, and it is its only aim. When that object is accomplished, we who dwell in these mountains will be content with such proportionate benefits as may accrue to our city and our state, the same as you who represent the other parts of America. ' f^ PEAKING personally, I have never ^^ been to Europe. But I have bathed ^^ in the buoyant waters of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, have gazed through southern mists out upon the Gulf of Mexico and have traversed the Great Lakes and the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence. I have heard the great Niagara roar, and have stood spell-bound upon the brink of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado amid that death-like stillness of nature described by Mark Twain as 'So still you can hear the microbes gnaw.' "I have stalked elk in Jackson's Hole and caught fish in the streams of Yellow- BUT SEE AMERICA FIRST ri Stone Park and boiled them hard by in a geyser without taking them off the hook. I have floated on the briny surface of the Great Salt Lake and shot the chutes on Sutro Heights. I have looped the loop on Coney Island and breathed the fragrant sighs of orange groves in Southern California. I have perspired in the humid atmosphere of the Mississippi valley, and thrown snow balls at the altitudes of Pikes Peak. I have stood at the bottom of the Royal Gorge and mar- veled at the stupendous cleft, and tobog- ganed down the slopes of Marshall Pass in a railroad train. I have traversed the Great Plains of the 'bounding west' and have tarried wonder-bound amid the majestic beauties of the Yosemite Valley. I have gazed in rapt wonder at the mighty Missouri rolling down to the sea and have visited the Great Northwest where flows the beautiful Columbia. Yet I am not ready for Europe. I admit that Paris offers its allurements, but I have not yet beheld the natural bridges of San Juan County, of my own fair state, and so the Champs Elysee will have to wait. 12 SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL W J PON a trip to New York some years I I ago I became acquainted with a man ^^ from Albany — a young druggist — who had acquired a competency and was setting off for a vacation. I asked him where he was going, and wreathed in ecstatic smiles, he blurted the one word, 'Europe.' I asked him if he had ever visited a place called Niagara Falls, which lay a hundred or two miles to the west of him, and he said : ' It's nothing but a lot of water/ "Now gentlemen, I submit that that is the type of fellow we are after. If we can but spread the gospel of 'See America First' so that some of these easterners who now spend their good American money at Monte Carlo can be induced to come up and take higher ground and visit some of the suburbs of their home towns, I feel that our mission will not have been in vain. 'w TS promoters admit that this is no new I conception. For years patriotic Ameri- -"- can newspapers and magazines, and elo- quent American speakers have sought to stem the tide of foreign travel, and figures have been compiled and quoted showing the BUT SEE UMERICA FIRST 13, enormity of the volume of money our citi- zens have been pouring into the lap of the old world. But the warning voice of these watchmen on the towers of our land have gone unheeded, and year by year in ever increasing hordes our countrymen have swarmed to Europe, and come back again in the fall smelling of Eau de Cologne, with their pants rolled up and a large monocle in their right eye. ' ^^O THAT while experience has seemed ^Jp to demonstrate that the protest we voice at this conference is but as a cry in the wilderness, it has today this added significance, that it has taken root — that the loud reveille sounded from so many mountain tops has been heard in the valleys, and east and west and north and south have answered back the call until a band of intrepid spirits not con- structed on the European plan has assembled beneath this roof, who will proclaim to their neighbors throughout America that we have some scenery at home and that $200,000,000 a year cannot be taken out of our people's hands and put into hands across the sea with- out at least a good, vigorous American kick. 14 SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL "It is for you, delegates of this conference to put this protest in plain EngHsh so that he who runs to the continent every year may read. It may not be necessary to frame a new declaration of independence, although we do hold these truths to be self- evident — that when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one portion of our people to dissolve a pernicious prac- tice which compels them to pay tribute to another, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to see America first. And for this we are met." BUT SEE AMERICA FIRST 15 Curecand Needle on the Marshall Pass Line Denver and Rio Grande Redlroad THIS little book is NOT COPYRIGHTED, in the hope that it will be of greater aid in spreading the gospel of "SEE AMERICA FIRST." Any person has permission to use it in whole or in part, including the eagle design on page 2, electrotypes of which may be had of Carson-Harper Co., Denver, at 50c each. Imprint: Carson-Harper, Denver LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 016 092 148 U m I ,V^ -/ .^,r Mi x; ^ Conservation Resources \ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 016 092 148 1