Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 December 1894 — Things Were Different Then. [ARTICLE]

Things Were Different Then.

“The traveling men of to-day don’t know what hard lines are,” said Thomas L. Martin, who runs a bookstore at the corner of 12th and Locust streets, to me the other day. I was a traveling man myself way back yonder in the ’6os, and I think we had about as hard a row to hoe as the next fellow. We used to start from Kansas City in wagons and drive around on those Kansas prairies for six or eight weeks at a time. Tb didn’t have hotels out there in those days, either, and we thought ourselves in luck to get to sleep in the hay in some man’s barn. On other nights we would camp in our wagon. We did our own cooking, and sometimes washed our own clothes. I tell you, the traveling man of to-day hat a reguJaf snap.” [Kansas City Time*.