Traveling Across America: Hundreds of Tourists' Destinations

By Daniel Knowles and Sheila Kline

Picture this: its 1956 and a group of mice are inside the Grand Canyon. There is a deadly collision overhead between 2 commercial airliners and the mice assist at the site of the crash until human rescuers can reach the scene the following day. The mice religiously patrol the disaster area, keeping wild animals and snakes at bay. As a reward for their service, the mice receive a Presidential Declaration for a guided tour of America, lasting for however long it will take, with money being no object. Its signed by the humans President, who also adds the words: from a friendly and loving nation. Following the presentation, the mice turn to leave and hear the President say to all, as he wipes the tears away: These little guys, are good guys, dont ever forget it, please, you dig?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503541160

Daniel Knowles

The authors Danny and Sheila were both raised and educated in the DC Metropolitan area. Danny spent his career as a professional firefighter, while Sheila has retired from the Federal Government. They both have enjoyed owning many dogs all through their lives, especially the rescued one. The two in the picture are named Chance and Reebee. Missing from the picture is Snorkey, a rescued Dalmatian. Since the authors are avid animal lovers and supporters of many animal charities, they thought it would be a novel idea to write about their vast travels by introducing mice as their trip companions to lighten up the many facts and details of each visited historic site. Enjoy!

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Copyright © 2015 by Daniel Knowles & Sheila Kline.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015901826

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5035-4117-7

             Softcover    978-1-5035-4118-4

             eBook         978-1-5035-4116-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 07/20/2015

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Contents

Thirty Short Stories

The Fire at the One-Spot Flea Killer Building

The Multi-alarm Fire at the Pentagon in Virginia

The Sinking of the Wooden Schooner, the Levin J. Marvel, in the Chesapeake Bay

Sturgis, South Dakota—A Little Town Next to Deadwood, One of the Most Famous of All Western Towns

Other Books Written by Daniel S. Knowles:

History of Route 66 and the Mice that Traveled on It

List of Places that the Rodents Will Go or Have Already Gone

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Seven Natural Wonders of the World

Warning

The Story

The Shameful Treatment of Farm Animals

Questions and Answers from Drs. Thorndike Willowbee and Tom Pestilance

The Killing of the Whales

The State Capitals

Sedona, Arizona and the Pink Jeep Tours

The Plane Crash on Mount Weather, Virginia, Killing 91 Souls

The Big Oil Fire, the Worst Fire Ever in Montgomery County

The Town of Seligman in Arizona

The Salt Mines under Lake Erie and Some of the other lakes

Gambrinus

Trout Rock Cave in Pendleton County, Franklin, West Virginia

The Famous Narrow Head Tavern

Now is the time that you should pretend that you are a mouse, the size of a human, as you embark on this greatest journey of your life.

Ready? For a Quick Peek at Some of the Travel Destinations, Please Turn to Page 40

Some short stories to get started …

Thirty Short Stories

Bracken Cave in Texas, near San Antonio

Potato Head Johnny, Rat Terrier, Shanny Shoes, and Niles Sogratease just happened to be at the famous Bracken Cave in Texas, near San Antonio. You could always tell where the cave entrance was by the number of bats flying overhead, according to Dr. Thorndike Willowbee.

The cave is the summer home to the largest colony of bats in the world and has been since the end of the last ice age, some ten thousand years ago.

Fact: The great ice age was a period of recurring widespread glaciations.

Approximately twenty million Mexican free-tailed bats roost in the cave from March to October. Thus, this is the largest known concentration of mammals.

The rodents were there the same day that the President of the United States made his presence, visiting in between campaign appearances, and you can imagine his surprise when he saw the mice and vice-versa.

There were a lot of hugs and embraces and even slaps on the back. Rat Terrier slapped the president so hard on his back that he sent him flying into one of his Secret Service guys, but it was all in jest, and one of the guys gleefully fired his service revolver up into the air until there were no bullets left.

After all the antics, the rodents, the president and his guys sat down to watch the bats. There were almost twenty million of them that come out of the cave entrance and take flight; at dusk, they return.

The sight of all the bats emerging from the cave is one of nature’s most awesome wonders, and the sound of millions of wings flapping is like a tornado in progress.

While in the air, maybe several miles high, the bats consume tons of insects and their remains, and after going through the bats, it falls down in the form of guano. The president and his party, including many from the press, and all the mice were covered with bat guano from head to foot, and the entire party had to be taken to a nearby car wash and get rinsed over and over again with strong soap. Having spent a full day at the cave watching the bats’ shenanigans, all decided to call it a day and, without even batting an eye, prepared to leave the scene.

It is estimated that each summer, this colony of bats eats fifteen thousand tons of insects.

The Fire at the One-Spot Flea Killer Building

In the late 1950s in Howard County, Maryland, there used to be an amazing structure, long gone now, but it was a huge building shaped like a dog. It was also known as the world’s largest doghouse, a three-story building, not including the basement, between Washington, DC and Baltimore, Maryland.

The purpose of the building was to manufacture a substance to rid fleas from dogs; the words one-spot meant that you would apply the substance liberally in one spot and it would spread over the entire animal to kill all the fleas.

The substance also would kill ants, lice, and bedbugs, bean beetles, tobacco worms, crabs, ticks on dogs and cats, foxes, poultry, and head lice.

There is an instruction on the can of One-Spot that reads: Too strong for canaries as they sleep with their heads under their wings.

Unfortunately, the night that the mice arrived to visit the building, it was engulfed in flames, along with deafening explosions that sent thousands of metal cans full of One-Spot high into the sky. The cause of the fire revealed that some of the substance had been placed too close to a lit space heater and had caught fire. The whole building was destroyed, and the next day, the mice left the site, dejected and with tears in their eyes.

A busload of rodents arrived in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, to search for diamonds.

A lot of young rodents with shovels, explosives, and fuses arrived at the only diamond mine in North America to search for diamonds.

Because the mice were so beloved, the state of Arkansas had given the rodents special permission to use explosives, and all day, there were thunderous blasts that penetrated the earth, and rock and dirt were being thrown all over the park. Tourists gathered ten deep, just to see the mice blow things up, and at the end of the day, when the rodents left, they usually had a pickup truck full of diamonds.

A few days later, the mice donated the whole truck, filled with diamonds, to several animal charities. The lads did, however, take out enough money to purchase a head of cabbage and some diet sodas and a paw-full of bubble gum.

Dr. Quatravious Dudsmith, a noted baby pediatrician, also took out a small amount of change for some baby apes that he had in his home.

Mice had spread out all over the country, riding in buses, cars, and on airplanes, some even on horses or mules and a few walking. Hundreds of mice from every walk of life were engaged in the nationwide tour of America, which had been presented to them by the president of the United States for their good and unselfish work in the Grand Canyon, at the site of the air disaster that had killed so many.

The Mojave Desert in California

Out west, not far from Scotty’s Castle in the Death Valley region, Zye Champawat, Zeake Fedish, and Stonewall Cribbage, seeing a yellow sign alongside the road in the Mojave Desert with a picture of a skull on it, stopped their car to get a closer look, a more in-depth view.

The lads were thirsty, but not so thirsty that they were on the verge of death.

The skull represented death, usually from lack of water, and indicated to the mice that a lot of persons may have succumbed to such in the Mohave Desert back in the old days.

Red writing on the sign indicated that water bags, filled with ice and water, were directly ahead, but still considerable miles away, too many to walk if you were dehydrated.

Behind the sign, the guys found what they were not looking for, human bones; the guys, being slightly fainthearted and frail on seeing the human remains, were out of there in a flash. Jumping into their car, they roared back into the desert and headed west towards California.

The Grand Canyon in Arizona

Mat Nail, Dr. Dogpatch, Gebes Ratminster, and Wolf Jones (not really a wolf, but a mouse) were at the Grand Canyon on the South Rim.

The fellows specifically were at Yavapai Point, overlooking the mighty Colorado River with rocks below them that were nearly two billion years old.

At the same time that the mice were there, a young man decided to either commit suicide or just drive off the steep cliff with his vehicle and did so in front of the startled rodents and other bystanders standing around.

The bright red pickup truck the young man was in drove directly towards the mice, missing them by inches, then crashed through a stone wall, demolishing an area of about twenty-five feet of rock; the truck plunged downward hundreds of feet.

Dr. Dogpatch could have sworn that the fellow inside was grinning and waving to him as the red truck went over the cliff, and the good doctor had quick enough reflexes to return the wave, possibly due to the many years of hard and tedious work in the operating room and in the professional manner that he was trained in medical school. The mice were the first on the scene, although it took an hour to climb down to the wreckage. There they discovered that the driver was deceased, unfortunately.

The guys were of vast help to the park service, assisting the removal of the body and lending a paw in any way possible. Wolf was even bit by a rattlesnake during the climb back up the cliff, although he laughed about it and tried to keep a nonchalant attitude, even though his tail did swell up about three times its normal size.

That was the type of guy that Wolf was, although he managed to somewhat grin and clench his teeth as doctors removed the entire infected tail to curtail the further spread of poison. A new tail, of course, would be in order for Wolf, but first the swelling would have to recede, and that would tend to take days, at best.

The mice visit an area near Ely, Nevada, in an effort to dig up some dead aliens from a flying saucer that had crashed.

A number of mice were on Route 375, also known as the Extraterrestrial Highway, in a lonely area in Nevada. This sparsely traveled road by Nellis Air Force Base was ninety-eight miles long and went from Route 6 near the town of Tonopah down to Route 93, not far from Las Vegas.

The guys kept stopping for cows in the middle of the road and sometimes had to get out of the car so as to nudge them off the road.

One of the guys, Woot Wooterman, thought that he saw a UFO in the sky, but when the others looked, they could not see it.

Ferret Rugby and some of his friends were supposed to meet a Dr. Adolph Fignewton at an alien eating place in the tiny ghost town of Rachel, Nevada. The good doctor, for a substantial fee, of course, was giving the rodents some secret information about something that had happened a long time ago concerning a downed flying saucer.

A ghost town does not mean that ghosts live there, but simply that it is a closed-down, dusty, and cobwebbed town with only one or two places still open.

The Alien Diner was the place to go, a thriving place indeed, despite the fact that only about fourteen tourists or other visitors stopped by to eat there on a regular basis.

Dr. Fignewton was a man of few words, and when one of the mice slipped an envelope filled with greenbacks underneath the table to him, who in turn slipped the guys an envelope with the location of some seventeen buried aliens that once had been pulled from out of a burning flying saucer that had crashed in the desert southwest of the town of Ely, Nevada, no one batted an eye.

Apparently the US Air Force had a hand in discovering the downed saucer, and after a long and secret investigation, the dead dudes, possibly from another planet, were planted permanently in an undisclosed location.

Dr. Fignewton did not say how he was involved in the operation, but mentioned that the rodents should purchase some shovels and picks, go to the area on the map that he had given to them, and start digging.

With that being said, the doctor rose from his chair, cane in tow, and followed his seeing-eye dog, Butch, out of the diner towards his pickup truck, and the mice dug into their alien burgers and diet cokes.

Meanwhile, the doctor was crashing into other vehicles, trees, concrete barriers, and anything else that was in his way out in the parking lot, due to his worsening mental and physical condition.

After dragging part of a broken-off telephone pole out of the lot, it finally fell off his truck, and the doc, with his dog, drove down a section of the Extraterrestrial Highway and over the next hill and then was out of sight and out of mind.

Inside the eating place, there was a tiny, gray man who had a dinosaur-looking head and lizard-type arms and legs, eating and staring at the mice.

The mice noticed him and wondered if indeed he was an alien, but they were too embarrassed to ask him; perhaps the dude was just dressed up as one.

The rodents did purchase some tools to dig with, but when the fellows got to Ely, Nevada, to excavate the bodies, it seemed that someone had forgotten to bring the map showing where the seventeen aliens were located; thus, no digging took place. The dejected mice left the area and went home to pout privately.

Mice drive their car through a giant potato-shaped gas station and it goes up in flames.

A car packed with rodents had left the city of Spokane, Washington, and were winging it down the road in the state of Idaho. Kevin Peel had been peering out of the window and observed that there were a lot of potatoes growing everywhere, miles and miles of them.

Posiner Elk and Cambridge Cribbage noted that there were even potatoes in the street.

All of a sudden, the car veered to the right when it should have gone straight, and the lads drove right through a large building, an active gas station shaped like a large potato.

The guys drove right through the potato and out the other side. The next thing they knew was that the entire potato had collapsed and was on fire. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and all the mice walked away unscathed. One of the guys, Drew Carrot, had a slight bump on his head, which was not even worth talking about; hence, no one did.

The Fire Department arrived and put out the fire, and the police drove the rodents into the closest town so the boys could call their insurance company and request a new rental car so that they could continue on their journey.

A Truck Carrying Forty-six Million Bees Overturns on I-40, East of Oklahoma City

Homer Nip, Runny Goosefinder, and Drew Pollinator were on the interstate one day, and they saw a black hue in the sky ahead of them. As they neared, they observed an overturned tractor trailer in the roadway.

Above the truck, there was a mass of honey bees buzzing around, about the size of a football field, that had escaped from numerous hives that once had been loaded onto the truck. They were now spread out all over the highway.

The driver of the truck, a fellow named Newton Muttburger, was dressed as a beekeeper and screaming for the bees to get back into the hives, although most of them were lying all smashed up on the road. Many millions of bees had been crushed in their hives when the truck overturned, and mounds of honey lay all over the road.

It was not long before some of the local fire departments arrived on the scene, and the first thing they did was to lay out almost a mile of five-inch fire hoses and smaller hose lines with nozzles. The fire guys attacked the mass of bees in the air and pushed them well off the interstate and then some. The mice helped to hold the fire hoses and assisted in crowd control.

It was not the intent to hurt any of the bees, although many were killed in the wreck itself, but it was hoped that the remaining bees would regroup at some other place and wait for another truck to arrive and transport them to wherever they were supposed to go, in this case, to a noted bee farm in Arkansas.

The mice, in addition to working in the mass of bees, also had to contend with a large number of admirers in signing autographs, but they did not turn anyone away, even though many people were stung at the site. There was even a pet dog called Brutus that was stung in the tail.

Homer was bit 27 times, Runny 103 times, and Drew Pollinator 34 times, as well as some of the other bystanders, both standing and sitting.

Fact: If stung by a honeybee, the first thing one should do is to try and remove the stinger. Honey bees are only able to sting once and eventually die after they have released their stingers.

The three rodents, after completing their dangerous and important tasks, bade all the rescuers and police on the scene a fond good-bye and drove off to receive some medical attention at the local hospital for their many bites or stings.

The Multi-alarm Fire at the Pentagon in Virginia

Several mice were driving near the national airport one day in the Washington, DC area, when the driver, Monk Edwards, happened to glance up towards the sky and saw a giant cloud of smoke rising into the air from where the large five-sided Pentagon was closely located.

The mice were only a few minutes away and in no time were in the giant parking lot, which was fast filling up with fire trucks of all kinds and ambulances from all over the surrounding area.

Even though the building was large, you could not see it because of the heavy volume of fire and smoke that obliterated it from view.

The rodents, all volunteer firefighters in their own right, jumped out of the car and made a dash towards the closest door that already had almost a dozen fire hoses going through it into the building to where the source of the fire currently was.

The mice, all outfitted in boots and running coats, as all firefighters wear during firefighting operations, and on their heads, everyone was wearing a New York-style helmet, the best.

The mice, for the next several hours, battled the raging fire until finally it was out. At least forty firemen were injured during the fire, and the brave mice were seen everywhere, assisting where needed and lending a paw where a hand was needed or a paw.

Had it not been for the mice, the fire might have raged well into the night, and when the last spark was out, so were the mice.

There used to be a thriving snake ranch along Route 66.

Dubsbreath Skull, Jr. and some of his friends were driving on Route 66 near Alanreed, Texas, when he spotted a sign saying something about rattlesnakes along the side of the road. The alert rodent pulled into an area that seemed to be closed down. Stepping out of his car, Dubsbreath saw a lot of snake skins lying all over the parking lot.

He saw a giant statue of a cobra along with a sign advertising the closed-down snake ranch in the parking lot and realized that any snakes that had been in the vicinity were now gone, hopefully. The rodent was a little sad, as he was really into snakes, and he reached into his box of tissues in the car to wipe away the tears.

Seeing an old man sitting in a rocking chair nearby prompted the rodents to hasten over and engage the fellow in some small talk. Right away, they noticed that his legs had been amputated, although that did not prevent him from rocking.

The old man relayed to the mice that he used to work at the snake ranch, and it was his job to keep track of the snakes that slithered out on the highway and try to prevent them from being run over. As for his legs, he told the mice that he had been bit so many times by the snakes that his legs eventually needed to be removed.

This would make a great conversation piece, Gander Hightower thought.

The mice were noticing that a number of snakes were now crawling around the fellow, and he was referring to them as his pets. The rodents were feeling a little uncomfortable with all the reptiles hovering in the area and bade the fellow a fond good-bye and continued their journey down Route 66.

The mice go to the Salem Witch Trial Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

As a result of the trials, hundreds of people were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen persons were executed for crimes against the church, beliefs of demonism and evil spirits, including satanism.

Convicted persons were either hung, drowned, or stones were piled on them so they could not breathe.

If not a witch, God will save them was the saying, but God never did. If someone was thrown into a pool of water with a large stone that was tied to them, they inevitably drowned.

The trials were unfair, and it was a time of great superstition and myths.

The volume of accusations and convictions generated one of the most infamous examples of mass hysteria in American history.

Some of the mice were interested in witchcraft, devils, and black magic, and they decided to go to the famous witchcraft museum in the town of Salem. The three mice, all preachers of the cloth and all wearing their Sunday garbs, purchased several boxes of popcorn and went inside to experience whatever they were going to see.

Inside the museum, there were pictures of devils and witches hanging on the walls, and the mice of the cloth watched a movie. One great exhibit was a number of brooms that witches tend to carry with them on occasion and definitely while riding through the sky, when the need to ride through the sky arises from time to time.

There were a lot of devils and witches walking around the museum, and someone accidently stepped on Father Snarl’s foot, and he became very upset and leaped from out of his seat, grabbed one of the witches’ brooms from the stunning broom exhibit, and ran about the museum hitting everyone that he could with the broom, leaving pieces of straw all over the floor. It was unlike Father Snarl to act this way, but that’s precisely the way he felt, no less and no more.

Shortly afterwards, up to a dozen devils and witches were streaking out of the museum, fearing for their lives.

Note: Father Broom, Father Demon, and Father Snarl brought a total of sixty-five years of church sermons to the altar.

Fact: The witch trials took place between February 1692 and May 1693 in Salem, Massachusetts.

The Sinking of the Wooden Schooner, the Levin J. Marvel, in the Chesapeake Bay

A number of rodents were vacationing at North Beach on the Chesapeake Bay one summer; they had ridden their motorcycles down to North Beach, and along with other cyclists, the guys were partying and drinking adult beverages, just wolfing them down at the local tavern, indeed they were.

There was a storm brewing outside; a northeaster was passing by, along with Hurricane Connie, and if anything was not bolted down, it definitely would be blown away.

The wind was blowing so hard, but Butch Featherstone braved it and went outside to make sure that all the motorcycles were properly tied down.

However, when Butch did go outside, he saw that all the motorcycles had already been blown away, so he went back inside and ordered another brew.

About this time, word was received from a passing ship that a tour ship named the Levin J. Marvel, with a number of passengers on board, was floundering about a mile off shore in heavy seas and in extreme danger of sinking. The coast guard was apparently on its way.

Less than a mile away from North Beach, in Herring Bay, the ship in distress, a three-mast schooner, was lying on its side, being battered by the waves and splitting open like a watermelon.

By now, the mice and everyone else that had been in the drinking hole were out on the beach, still drinking, but now on the sand, just watching the giant waves roll in, the highest tide in twenty years.

The rodents could not see the ship from shore because of the storm, but soon the drowning victims started coming in with the waves. The first to reach the beach was a lively young man, and as soon as he was washed ashore, he jumped out of the water and took off running.

There had been twenty-four persons on the ship and fourteen of them were either washed in dead or recovered while out at sea; in all, there were ten persons that managed to either swim to shore or were rescued by the coast guard at sea.

The Fire Department was there trying to administer oxygen to the deceased, but to no avail. When the last victim was pulled from the water, the mice said a prayer for all of them and went back to the local tavern to wolf down some more brews.

Kidney Bean Picks on the Wrong Guy

Kidney Bean and other mice were on Route 66; they had stopped off at the Cozy Dog Drive-in in Springfield, Illinois, to visit the two large hot dog figures that were holding hands there. The mice took some pictures of the cozy dogs and then moved on.

Next, the mice found themselves standing outside of the Livingston County Courthouse, where they had come to view an important piece of art, also in Illinois. Kidney Bean was a mouse with a quick temper, and he would fight at the drop of a hat, if someone dared to drop a hat.

Kidney became irritated because a stranger next to the mice was leaning on a wooden section of fence and completely ignoring them, not showing the mice any respect at all. Kidney Bean, feeling like he had no choice, challenged the dude to a rumble.

When the dude remained motionless and seemingly refused to even look at the mice, Kidney struck the fellow on the nose, breaking his own hand or paw.

When the mice again looked, the fellow still had not moved, and it was then that Kidney and the other mice realized that the stranger was a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln, portrayed as a young man leaning against a split-rail fence, complete with his tall hat, sitting on a post.

There was a sign on the front of the courthouse that read: No loitering on courthouse property. The mice took it personally and vamoosed.

A bus full of mice stopped at the old Savage Mill one day in Savage, Maryland.

A historic textile mill complex was purchased by Santa Heim, a multi-rich CEO, and he turned the place into a shopping village; one store specifically was a Christmas fantasy. He would dress up as Saint Nick, also called Santa Claus, and he was called Santa Heim by all who visited the mill.

He imported hundreds of reindeer to graze both in the orchards and also inside the buildings.

The mice and the reindeer bonded well, and it was not unusual to see them riding around the streets of Savage.

The Bollman Truss semi-suspension bridge, which spans the Little Patuxent River by the mill and is made of wrought and cast iron, is recognized as a national treasure.

When one of the reindeer, sporting a saddle with a rodent in the saddle, fell off the bridge, a huge rescue effort was called for, and no less than a dozen fire engines responded, along with a hundred firefighters.

A tow truck arrived to pull the fallen mouse and the reindeer out of the water down by the dam behind the mill, and the two were lifted onto dry land.

Dr. Penrod goes into action on a moment’s notice.

Dr. Penrod Scroll happened to come across a woman having a baby at the same time that the good doctor was retrieving a diet coke from a coke machine. Without batting an eye, Dr. Penrod reached down and briefly pulled out the infant, smacked the fellow on the bottom as he regularly did, and then after placing the infant down on a place mat, extracted his coke and trotted away knowing that he had performed another good deed for the day.

A group of mice attend a knitting club function.

A number of mice were at the monthly meeting of the Knitting Club at Harriet Dubbler’s home, sewing away. Patti Wiggleworm, Leslie Sneerson, and Butrid Henpecker were there also, sewing up a storm and weaving as fast as they could. In fact, they were sewing so fast that smoke was settling in the room. All were wearing glasses so that they could thread more easily.

All of a sudden, a human-type person strutted into the room, and when Leslie spotted the subject, she leaped from an easy chair and screamed so loud that a number of light bulbs in that area of the house blew out. It was much as if a bunch of women were in a room chattering away and a lone mouse casually darted across the room in front of them, a small one.

Sturgis, South Dakota—A Little Town Next to Deadwood, One of the Most Famous of All Western Towns

In Sturgis, every August there is a big motorcycle rally there, and that year, there were a lot of mice attending along with their motorcycles.

Now there was a new roadhouse called The Old Drool, and it had the longest bar in town, almost as long as a football field.

Many of the mice, namely Joe Pendelton, Clad Cromwell, Clad Hairloom, and Bat Freemont, were at the bar sitting in one of the hundreds of western saddles used as bar stools.

There were a thousand customers in the place as well as over a hundred motorcycles, (unseemly so, motorcycles were allowed inside the roadhouse), and everyone was drinking brews and talking loud; it was not unusual for a brew or two, even more, to be thrown across the large smoky and fun-filled room.

It was hard to hear what the person next to you was saying because of all the noise, so all you had to do was nod your head and pretend to hear what was being said, and everyone did so.

What really made the bar outstanding, however, was the long fifteen-foot rattlesnake that lounged on top of the long bar and had the liberty to slither from one end to the other as it deemed fit.

The pet reptile, named John, had not bit anyone, unless it was hungry, and that is why everyone always fed John as it crawled by, and he was tossed a potato chip or two.

When there was a mouse in the house at the bar, it was routine for John to take a quick glance in their direction from out of the side of its eye, periodically, but there never was any unwanted problems.

Fact: Deadwood is a famous old Western town and obtained its name from all of the dead trees found in its gulch.

Most national parks require pets be kept on a leash. Pets are not allowed on trails, in the back country, or in public buildings such as the Visitors’ Center. Pets should be kept restrained at scenic overlooks.

This sign was the first thing that the rodents saw just before entering Yellowstone, and all the mice who had brought pets with them (mainly dogs) were glad that they had the foresight to bring dog leashes with them.

Yellowstone National Park

Most of the park is in Wyoming; some is in Idaho and Montana.

Earl the Pearl, Larry Spot, and Seed Washburn were visiting at perhaps the hottest hot spot on earth in Yellowstone National Park at the Norris Geyser Basin.

One third of the world’s hydrothermal features are in Yellowstone Park in the United States.

The lads were walking where they should not be, not where tourists should not be, mainly for the reason that they could be scalded to death by a sudden geyser eruption that could go off at any time and spew a 380-feet plume up into the air, about three times higher than the Old Faithful geyser.

When the ground started to shake and bake and puffs of steam rose from the ground, the mice thought that the whole place was going to blow to smithereens. An earthquake, or a volcano, was the ground going to sink, or would a sea of fire come out? These and other questions went through the mice’s minds. All animals in the area, including the mice, were fleeing for their lives, and the rodents did not stop running until they were quite a distance away.

When volcanos erupt, it is because the heat and pressure become too great for the crust to bear and the huge amounts of energy below the surface are released.

There were a number of the guys there in Yellowstone one summer during the fire season, and they were staying at the famous and historic Old Faithful Inn near the Old Faithful geyser, when a fast-moving firestorm cut across the southern side of the complex.

The mice joined forces with the Fire Department personnel in manning hose lines to help keep down flames as tall as one hundred feet high and helped save the inn from being burned.

Later, the mice used their medical skill in treating a black bear that had severely burned paws from the flames and, after wrapping the animal in bandages, helped transport the fellow to the closest hospital.

The Extermination of the American Buffalo

The primary cause of the buffalos’ extermination was the descent of civilization, with all of its elements of destructiveness, upon the whole of the country inhabited by that animal.

In the early 1800s, more than thirty to sixty million buffalo roamed the United States and Canada. By 1894, the number was believed to be twenty-five.

The herds were wiped out by stampeding them over cliffs, droughts, prairie fires, predation by wolves, limited hunting by the Indians, and mass hunting by the Europeans.

After the hunters were finished with their grisly work, the bone collectors moved in. It took one hundred buffalo skeletons to weigh a ton, and the price was eight dollars a ton.

There were mountains of buffalo carcasses in the West and bones littered the plains.

Grasshopper Glacier Near Yellowstone National Park

A fact: The mice liked to watch the hordes of grasshoppers frozen in ice at the entrance to the northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park.

The Great Salt Lake in Utah

Horace Antler, Jim Rarebite, and Happenstance Peterson were flying into Salt Lake City. When landing at the airport, it almost seems that the plane is headed for the lake. The pilot makes a hard left over the water, and if you were a betting guy or a mouse, you would guess that the plane would, for sure, crash into the water.

In the cockpit of the plane, the pilot had gone to the bathroom, leaving the copilot in charge. This pilot had taken over at the controls but at some point had forgotten that he was the guy in charge of flying the plane and fell asleep, while the plane started a downwards spiral. Fortunately, one of the flight attendants had felt a little uneasy when the plane started flying somewhat rough, and at one point, the plane was only a few feet above the water. Everyone on the plane was screaming, and the mice were hiding under their seats, reciting their prayers, when it happened.

Had the concerned flight attendant not entered the front of the plane and found that there was no one flying it, things might have turned out a little dicey, but as it were, the attendant took over the controls until the pilot completed his toiletry task and reentered the cockpit, easily guiding the plane down to a perfect and routine landing. For this talented pilot, it was just like old hat (a popular saying) in administering the landing of the plane, and coincidentally, the highly talented and veteran flyer was sporting a jacket with engraved words on the back of it: All Hat No Cattle, another famous saying mainly heard out West and even used sporadically by a famous first lady.

The Tower of the Americas in San Antonio, Texas

The spire rises 750 feet and symbolizes the desire for achievement. Tourists can view the city and the surrounding area for many miles, and there is a revolving restaurant at the top.

One day, some rodents visiting the tower were instrumental in stopping a deranged, mental patient from leaping off the tower. After throwing his wheelchair off the top of the structure, the crippled man stood on top of the railing and prepared to take the final plunge. However, a brave mouse managed to quickly apply a dog leash around the fellow’s neck, thus saving him from a tragic death below.

Note: From the top of the tower, you can see a fabulous view of the Alamo, so you really should have a camera with you.

Lone Duck Johnson (really a mouse) was on the way to Fresno and decided to take a shortcut through the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Lone Duck did not even know the name of the road that he was traveling on; it was just a narrow winding road that led straight up the side of the mountain.

The rodent had just left Death Valley after exploring Scotty’s Castle and admiring some of the tall sand dunes there and was on the way to Fresno, California. Also, he was concerned that he had seen a dead skunk in the middle of the road, and of course, he had stopped long enough to bury the fellow.

Lone Duck had driven up the mountain for about a half an hour when it started snowing. The road was turning into ice, and around one bend, the rodent lost control of the car and it skidded off the road and overturned in a snowbank.

Having managed to extract himself from his car, Lone Duck suddenly heard the noise of brakes being applied and looked up to see what was happening.

Horrified, he saw that a truck carrying oil or maybe flammable gas had turned over at the crest of the hill and was sliding down the mountain towards him.

Lone Duck took off running. The truck driver, a fellow by the name of Peter Peterson, tumbled from the out-of-control truck and, after landing on his backside, also took off running up the hill.

Both the mouse and the truck driver stood behind a stout oak tree and peered down the mountainside and watched as the truck exploded, throwing parts a half mile away; there was a ball of fire that reached 300 feet high, and an area half the size of a football field was burning and thick black smoke reached nearly a mile up in the sky.

It took a while but within an hour, there were at least a dozen fire engines there pouring water on the raging fire, which eventually destroyed 500 acres of woodland.

By the next morning, there was three feet of snow on the ground, and you could not even tell that there had been a fire there.

New Orleans, Louisiana

Also known as the Crescent City and only five feet above sea level …

Mathew Growpup was not the smartest guy around; so when Ted Stick and Walter Crumb asked him to go down to the closest place that sold ears of edible corn, he jumped at the chance of getting this task done in a fast and efficient manner.

Mathew knew that there were some metal ears of corn (non-edible) on a certain wrought-iron fence at a house in the French Quarter, so he went there with a saw able to cut through metal.

It took hours to cut all the metal ears of corn from the fence, hence, the rodent scampered off to deliver the metal ears to his friends as he had been instructed. Upon delivery, Mathew was delicately informed that real corn was desired instead of metallic corn.

Tornado Alley

A tornado is one of the most frightening events on the planet. The violent, funnel-shaped storm spins across the ground, destroying everything in its path.

The guys were in Tornado Alley in the Texas Panhandle when they noticed the weather changing; the skies behind them were getting dark, and it had started to rain.

Wild Bill Goosefeather, wearing his favorite cowboy hat, and the Autopsy brothers, Kim and Possum, were in Wild Bill’s car on the way to Wichita, Kansas, to purchase some bags of grain for a cow that the brothers owned.

Within seconds, a swirling black funnel appeared in the sky behind the lads, less than half a mile away and coming towards them at frightening speed.

Driver Wild Bill, realizing that they were in serious trouble and could very easily be swallowed up by what seemed to be a monster-like storm, stepped on the gas, and the rodents tried to outrun the half mile-wide funnel.

Seeing a bridge where I-10 crossed over the road that they were on, the lads drove under the bridge and parked; they then climbed up and under the steel girders and positioned themselves safely, where the wind from the tornado hopefully would not blow them away; they had already said good-bye to the car.

There were also several dozen buffalo that had gathered in the area under the bridge to escape the swirling winds from the tornado.

The funnel passed directly over the bridge and continued on down the interstate, blowing cars and tractor trailers over, but the mice were safe and sound and snug as a bug in a rug, even though their car was blown away and they had to call for a cab.

As the cab pulled away, the passengers noticed several overturned cars in the roadway or in fields near them, and after exiting the cab temporarily, they peered into the smashed-out windows of the destroyed vehicles and found that many of the cars contained dead corpses inside the twisted metal. This upset the mice so much that they called 911 and reported the wreckage. The dispatcher thanked the guys profusely for following through on their civic responsibility.

Some rodent doctors blew a hole in the wall of Stratosphere Balloon Cavern in Elkins, West Virginia, to check on the welfare of a large number of bats.

Dr. Bat, Dr. Roachfelter, and Dr. Smedly Goosefinder were on a field trip to check the welfare of a number of bats in a long-closed-down Stratosphere Balloon Cavern in the mountains of West Virginia.

The bats were last seen in 1940 when the cavern was last closed down, and at the time, it was thought that there were about a million bats there hanging from the walls and ceiling.

There were plenty of insects for the bats to munch on and some underground streams that the bats could use as their water-source.

All three doctors were guys with few words—the three doctors were highly trained to blow things up, and in their medical bags, instead of carrying Band-Aids, gauze, and pills, the three doctors carried sticks of dynamite.

When the physicians arrived at the cave, they founded the spot that all three of them deemed the best spot to place their explosives and did so without any further ado.

Dr. Bat lit the fuse and everyone took off running as fast as they could.

The closed-down cavern was the oldest cavern recorded in West Virginia. It was discovered by Bishop Francis Asbury in the year 1760; there was a natural opening in the cave wall all these years, so it was assumed that the bat population was doing just fine obtaining fresh air, and the rodents were there to confirm that.

The doctors were trouble-shooting for the state and were proud of it: All three were known for their no-nonsense style and go-for-broke ethics.

There was a tremendous explosion and the earth shook for up to a half a minute. Boulders the size of cars were blasted into the air, some falling on to the roof of a popular restaurant and destroying it, as the mice stood by and grimaced.

There was a huge hole in the side of the mountain, about the size of a house, and the three doctors proudly stepped forward, still grimacing, to view their handiwork and to peer into the large hole that they had created.

From out of the newly blown hole poured a windstorm of bats, rising high into the air.

For the next half hour, bats of all types, sizes, and shapes exited the gaping hole, until the last bat appeared, stopping in mid-air. The bat looked down at the three physicians, grinned, and then soon disappeared along with the rest of the guys, leaving an empty cavern.

If there had been a million bats in the cavern before the huge explosion, then that meant that now there were a million bats that were gone forever, every last bat. It was determined later that they had fled the coop, so to speak. In other words, there were no bats left in the large and spacious cavern.

The rodents realized that their job was done there, put their medical bags into the car, and left the area.

The Native Americans called Mount Rainier Tahoma or The Great Mountain.

Onhanapecosh Longmire, one restless night, dreamed that there had been a plane that had crashed somewhere on the top of Mount Rainier that very night. He could feel it in his bones.

The rodent leaned over, grabbed a tube of his Dr. Ben Gay muscle relaxer, and after squeezing out a substantial amount, proceeded to administer such to his body and rub it in.

Somewhere out there in the night on the moonless snow-covered mountain of Mount Rainier is the remains of a plane.

After making a few calls and arranging a private search party to meet at the base of the mountain, a group of several rodents and people, along with several well-known doctors, Drs. Abe Craneberry, Shoe Tree, and Red Redmunger, stepped lively and started up the site of the imposing cloud-shrouded, snow-covered mountain.

As if by some kind of magic or was it a magnet, whatever, the rescuers were drawn to the site of the ill-fated plane wreckage that crashed into the side of the mountain, less than a hundred feet from the summit.

Inside the plane and apparently uninjured was the pilot along with his pet owl, Attitude, both chewing bubble gum; plus, the owl was even blowing bubbles, good-sized ones at that, and both patiently waiting to be freed from the plane and helped down the side of the mountain.

The pilot later stated that the untrained owl had taken over the controls and accidently guided the plane in the wrong direction, thus satisfactorily explaining the reason why the plane crash-landed on the side of the mountain.

The mice thrill thousands of spectators at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

One of the most amazing memorable attractions that the mice had ever seen was when they were in Atlantic City one sunny day, and they saw a horse, with a nice-looking lady clinging to the back of the animal, jump from a sixty-foot-high tower into a pool of water.

The event was held at the famous Steel Pier on the Boardwalk, where fearless horses jump as many as four times a day. When the people that ran the function realized that the mice were visiting and wished to take part in riding on the back of the horse, that is exactly what happened the next time that the horse leaped off the tower with thousands of spectators watching and cheering. Dr. Fundlemental, along with Prof. Farnsworth Rugby and Dan Sparrow, made the successful plunge hanging onto the manes of each horse, into ten feet of water.

New Mandrid, Missouri

New Mandrid is a major seismic zone and a prolific source of inter-plate earthquakes.

Stonewall Quake Abe Chowder and Todd Lava were in their blue car driving on I-55 between Cape Girardeau and the area of earthquake-prone, the New Madrid, fault in Missouri, near Illinois, heading south.

The last time that an earthquake had struck the area was in 1811 and 1812, where one small town was nearly destroyed.

That day, as the mice pressed forward in a southerly direction, the ground started heaving and shaking like waves on the ocean, and all of a sudden, their car did a somersault or two or three, and then the lads were driving back north, unscathed and still listening to their music radio.

The area now behind the mice for about 300 feet was torn up, and hundreds of thousands of birds had been dislodged from the trees that they had been perched in at the time of the incident.

The mice visit the old Maryland Gold Mine in Great Falls.

Troll Sniffington, Guy Henpecker, and Othello Varmint were in the woods by the remains of the old Maryland Gold Mine. The lads wanted to see if there was any gold left or if it had been mined out years ago.

When the mice reached what was left of the mine, they saw that it was a mine operation in ruins. All the structures were rotted away, and there was a warning sign posted on a tree that told of a 100 to 200-foot mine shaft, which over the years had mostly caved in.

The notice revealed further that there were some skeletons buried at the bottom of the shaft and had never been recovered. When the rodents read that, they decided to evacuate the premises immediately and hightailed it out of there, never looking back.

The most famous song ever written about Route 66 was the song by Bobby Troup.

The Song

If you ever plan to motor west,

Travel my way, take the highway that is best,

Get your kicks on Route 66.

It winds from Chicago to L.A.,

More than 2,000 miles all the way, get your kicks on Route 66.

Now you go through St. Louis, Joplin, Missouri,

And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty.

You’ll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico, Flagstaff,

Arizona, don’t forget Winona, Kingman,

Barstow and San Bernardino.

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip: When you

Make that California trip and get your kicks on Route 66, Get your kicks on Route 66, Get your kicks on Route 66.

Warning: Various short stories in this book just may be too graphic for some people, so for those persons, please don’t continue to read them.

The authors have been to most of the locations mentioned in the book, sometimes with and sometimes without mouse companions.

Most of the events in this book occurred from 1956, with the fatal air disaster over the Grand Canyon, to sometime in 2015.

Cover Photos

Front cover: Mice at the Ubehebe Crater in Death Valley, California, London Bridge in Lake Havasu, Arizona.

Rear cover: The ghost town of Oatman, Arizona, a town full of burros.

Cover design by Rich Smith.

Rodent Adviser and Historian: Steve H. Eisen.

Index of over 200 separate tourist places that the mice and others would want to go to mostly in America, plus a few places overseas such as: the famed Taj Mahal in India, the Eiffel Tower of Paris, France, the Big Wheel of Vienna, the Great Sphinx in Egypt, the famous, over 400 feet high London Eye in London, and the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the Tiger Balm Gardens, also in Malaysia, near Singapore, and the tallest structure in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Mice even visit the Great Buddha in Japan, the handsome and fine-looking bronze Buddha of Kamakura that features Amida sitting down at the Kotokuin Temple.

Another great structure is the Singapore Flyer that rises 541 feet into the air, as high as a forty-two-story building. It is the world’s largest observation wheel.

The famous and historic Route 66 is one of the most popular roads that many US travelers would want to visit.

Route 66 is also known as the Mother Road and was first mentioned in the book The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. It traces the traumatic travels of the Joad family from Dust Bowl, Oklahoma, the elusive Promised Land of California, at the tail end of the Great Depression and was the source of Route 66’s appellation The Mother Road.

There’s no other place like this place, anywhere near this place, so this must be the place …

(A lyric very popular in Texola, Texas, on Route 66)

Historian Harold Rug Cleaner used to speak about the Great Depression to concerned mice, when the long-running drought affected the Great Plains; farmers in the Midwest had plowed the land without thought of erosion.

When the drought hit, there was not much grass left to keep the soil in place; thus, the region became a giant dust bowl. Hundreds of thousands of families, including many mouse households that had depended on agriculture, became jobless refugees, a situation immortalized in the novel The Grapes of Wrath.

The Dust Bowls from 1931 to 1939

Years of poor farming practices in the region had left the soil unprotected from heat, wind, and erosion.

The drought made everything worse. Without rain, the topsoil turned to dust that blew across the land in huge clouds, burying homes, roads, and fields, causing millions of people to leave their farms and look for work in other parts of the country.

The Dust Bowl was one of the worst sustained environmental crises that the United States has ever experienced.

Little Boo Putrid remembers as a kid living on the East Coast when the dust clouds blocked out the sun as they traveled from the Midwest. In fact, at the US capital, where he was working at the time, it was covered with almost an inch of dirt, and it was reported that multiple fire companies at the time were requested to wash various government buildings off with fire hoses, multiple times.

Dr. Glutus Cinchbug, who lived through the hard times, relates how he witnessed cracks in the earth an inch wide. Bugs were eating their way from field to field. Destructive swarms of grasshoppers visited the Great Plains.

Dr. Cinchbug remembers when he assisted digging out livestock that had been buried as a result of the dust storms.

In southwest Kansas, fiery winds blew so much shifting topsoil from the land that snowplows had to be used to clear the highways.

Prof. Hugh Pringle researched the effect that the dust storms had on the animals and found that there were dead animals found everywhere with two inches of dirt coating their stomach and lungs. Most cattle died of lung diseases.

Although the Dust Bowl affected the entire Midwest, the worst of it was concentrated in the Oklahoma panhandle.

The last dust storm ended in 1939.

Little Toddy Hen Pecker at the time was cutting grass at a house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, when he saw a huge cloud go by and fifty-dollar bills were falling from out of the sky.

The young lad forgot about the lawn that he had been cutting and took off running down the block to spend the money. He even left the lawn mower running until it ran out of gas.

Other Books Written by Daniel S. Knowles:

Passage to the Earth’s Surface

Return to Mousetown

Mousetown, One Hundred Short Stories

More Adventures from Mousetown

More Adventures from Mousetown 2

The Total Rodent

Rodent

Rodents on the Prowl

Mouse

Mouse 2

Fifty years of Firefighting and EMS in America

History of Route 66 and the Mice that Traveled on It

Compiled by Ardvark Goldburg and Shanny Shoensheen

In the 1800s, trails were etched all across the country. Folks from the East were on the move, including swarms of rodents, mostly to the West. These trails were the forerunners of the railroad system. Later, highways followed the alignment of the railways.

One mouse, Carlos P. Spaniel, with just an old weathered cane and a lunch box filled with berries and some chewing gum, walked across the country alone, while sporting a small bird on his left shoulder; the bird was recovering from a broken wing.

In the early 1900s, the federal government felt the need for a national highway system, and in 1927, the National Highway System was formally introduced. Officials from eight states formed a Route 66 Highway Association to expedite the construction of their highway. The name Main Street of America was adopted. By 1937, Route 66 was completely paved from Chicago, Illinois, to Santa Monica, California.

A fellow who went by the name of Hemp Witherspoon was the first person to walk the whole distance, and while walking back on the same route, he was run down by a hay wagon and then planted somewhere along the Mother Road in Arizona by fellow travelers.

The Dust Bowl years were 1934 to 1936. The enormous dust storms of this era ultimately caused the flight of the