From the autumn through the spring of 1890–91, the recent English high-school graduate Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), of French and English parentage, took cheap transatlantic passage to the New World and ended up hiking about two-thirds of the way across the American continent to California in pursuit of an Irish-American girl, Elodie Hogan, with whom he had fallen in love in London, and whom he would marry several years later. In pre-automobile America, he occasionally rode the train or steamboats in the eastern third of the country but, lacking money, ultimately hiked most of the rest of it by foot until he reached San Francisco. On the way he often got room and board by sketching personal figures and landscapes or doing odd jobs. He found the Rockies particularly bleak and inhuman (as did my soldier-mountaineer father 50 years later when he helped establish Camp Hale for the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division).
