Transcription:
Martinez, July 30, 1912 Dear Katharine Hooker, I don't believe you half know how glad good tidings from you make me. Your
interesting excursion to the edge of Mexico is so full of good things it might easily be be enlarged to a magazine article
that would be more readable than anything I could write on Africa or South America. Motoring with a crowd of admiring friends
and a shovel and coffee pot, drowning the engine in a small San Diego Amazon, scrambling down precipices etc must have been
picturesque exciting and not altogether dangerless. But it's well known nothing can stop you in love-work for friends. I
too have been in a crooked high low gasoline trip, from Los Angeles to San Robles, the giant forest of the Kaweah, and Yosemite,
a long journey which accounts for delay in reply to your letter. A trip to Alaska or anywhere with Ellie and Maude would
be according to my own heart. Fate however seldom allows hearts to have their own way. Just now from every direction