People who thought their farms had been spoiled by oil found that the oil was worth a fortune, worth much more than what they could make out of chickens and pigs, or corn and wheat. Some wells had to be dug and the oil pumped up, but others sprouted up like fountains—these were called gushers.

This oil that comes out of the rock underneath the ground is called petroleum, which means rock oil. Some of the petroleum companies are nicknamed “Pete” for short, which is a pretty good name because Pete means “rock.”

If you take a train by the middle route you cross Iowa, the Corn State, passing through endless fields of corn. You next cross Nebraska and gradually rise higher and higher as the ground slopes gently upward, until you reach the State called Colorado. Colorado means “color red.” Colorado is at the foot of the highest mountains in America—they are called the Rocky Mountains. The capital of Colorado is Denver and Denver is just about half-way from Chicago to the Pacific Ocean.

Not so far from Denver you can climb to the top of a Rocky Mountain peak, if you want to and if you have a good heart. The first man who tried to climb this mountain was named Pike, but he gave it up, so ever since it has been called “Pike’s Peak.” When I was in school we used to try to say this “tongue-twister”: “Speak Pike, Speak Pike, Speak Pike” over and over as fast as we could without saying “Pike’s Peak.” We couldn’t do it—neither can you! Pike couldn’t climb to the top of his mountain, but nowadays thousands of people climb to the top each year just as a “stunt” to see in how many hours they can do it. Pike’s Peak is so high that there is snow on the top in the summer as well as in the winter, and it is so high in the air that there is very little air to breathe when you are at the top. A great many people cannot stand it at the top; they have to sit down. They gasp for breath as if they had been running, or like a fish out of water; their hearts beat fast and so hard they can hear it drumming in their ears, and they feel faint and weak. There are now an auto road and a railway up to the top, so that you don’t have to climb Pike’s Peak if you don’t want to. The railway track, however, is so steep that an ordinary railway car would slide down like a sled, so the track has small iron steps between the rails, and the car has a wheel that catches into the steps so that it cannot slip backward or run away down-hill—it walks up and down the steps.