TO PAUL BOURGET
Traveller and student and curious
as you are, you will never have heard the name of
Vailima, most likely not even that of Upolu, and Samoa
itself may be strange to your ears. To these barbaric
seats there came the other day a yellow book with
your name on the title, and filled in every page with
the exquisite gifts of your art. Let me take and
change your own words: “J’ai beau
admirer les autres de toutes mes forces, c’est
avec vous que je me complais à vivre."
R.
L. S
Vailima,
Upolu,
Samoa.
LETTER TO THE AUTHOR
MY DEAR STEVENSON,
You have trusted me with the choice
and arrangement of these papers, written before you
departed to the South Seas, and have asked me to add
a preface to the volume. But it is your prose
the public wish to read, not mine; and I am sure they
will willingly be spared the preface. Acknowledgments
are due in your name to the publishers of the several
magazines from which the papers are collected, viz.
Fraser’s, Longman’s, the
Magazine of Art, and Scribner’s.
I will only add, lest any reader should find the tone
of the concluding pieces less inspiriting than your
wont, that they were written under circumstances of
especial gloom and sickness. “I agree with
you the lights seem a little turned down,” so
you write to me now: “the truth is I was
far through, and came none too soon to the South Seas,
where I was to recover peace of body and mind.
And however low the lights, the stuff is true....”
Well, inasmuch as the South Sea sirens have breathed
new life into you, we are bound to be heartily grateful
to them, though as they keep you so far removed from
us, it is difficult not to bear them a grudge; and
if they would reconcile us quite, they have but to
do two things more to teach you new tales
that shall charm us like your old, and to spare you,
at least once in a while in summer, to climates within
reach of us who are task-bound for ten months in the
year beside the Thames.
Yours
ever,
SIDNEY
COLVIN.
February, 1892.
NOTES BY THE WAY
TO COUNCIL BLUFFS
Monday. It was,
if I remember rightly, five o’clock when we were
all signalled to be present at the Ferry Depôt of
the railroad. An emigrant ship had arrived at
New York on the Saturday night, another on the Sunday
morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early
on Monday; and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday,
a great part of the passengers from these four ships
was concentrated on the train by which I was to travel.
There was a babel of bewildered men, women, and children.
The wretched little booking office, and the baggage-room,
which was not much larger, were crowded thick with
emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the atmosphere
of dripping clothes. Open carts full of bedding
stood by the half-hour in the rain. The officials
loaded each other with recriminations. A bearded,
mildewed little man, whom I take to have been an emigrant
agent, was all over the place, his mouth full of brimstone,
blustering and interfering. It was plain that
the whole system, if system there was, had utterly
broken down under the strain of so many passengers.
My own ticket was given me at once,
and an oldish man, who preserved his head in the midst
of this turmoil, got my baggage registered, and counselled
me to stay quietly where I was till he should give
me the word to move. I had taken along with me
a small valise, a knapsack, which I carried on my
shoulders, and in the bag of my railway rug the whole
of “Bancroft’s History of the United States”
in six fat volumes. It was as much as I could
carry with convenience even for short distances, but
it insured me plenty of clothing, and the valise was
at that moment, and often after, useful for a stool.
I am sure I sat for an hour in the baggage-room, and
wretched enough it was; yet, when at last the word
was passed to me, and I picked up my bundles and got
under way, it was only to exchange discomfort for
downright misery and danger.
I followed the porters into a long
shed reaching downhill from West Street to the river.
It was dark, the wind blew clean through it from end
to end; and here I found a great block of passengers
and baggage, hundreds of one and tons of the other.
I feel I shall have a difficulty to make myself believed;
and certainly the scene must have been exceptional,
for it was too dangerous for daily repetition.
It was a tight jam; there was no fairway through the
mingled mass of brute and living obstruction.
Into the upper skirts of the crowd, porters, infuriated
by hurry and overwork, clove their way with shouts.
I may say that we stood like sheep, and that the porters
charged among us like so many maddened sheep-dogs;
and I believe these men were no longer answerable
for their acts. It mattered not what they were
carrying, they drove straight into the press, and
when they could get no farther, blindly discharged
their barrowful. With my own hand, for instance,
I saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother’s
knee, she sitting on a box; and since I heard of no
accident, I must suppose that there were many similar
interpositions in the course of the evening.
It will give some idea of the state of mind to which
we were reduced if I tell you that neither the porter
nor the mother of the child paid the least attention
to my act. It was not till some time after that
I understood what I had done myself, for to ward off
heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural incident
of human life. Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition
to progress, such as one encounters in an evil dream,
had utterly daunted the spirits. We had accepted
this purgatory as a child accepts the conditions of
the world. For my part I shivered a little, and
my back ached wearily; but I believe I had neither
a hope nor a fear, and all the activities of my nature
had become tributary to one massive sensation of discomfort.
At length, and after how long an interval
I hesitate to guess, the crowd began to move, heavily
straining through itself. About the same time
some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden flare over
the shed. We were being filtered out into the
river boat for Jersey City. You may imagine how
slowly this filtering proceeded, through the dense,
choking crush, every one overladen with packages or
children, and yet under the necessity of fishing out
his ticket by the way; but it ended at length for
me, and I found myself on deck, under a flimsy awning,
and with a trifle of elbow-room to stretch and breathe
in. This was on the starboard; for the bulk of
the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port side, by
which we had entered. In vain the seamen shouted
to them to move on, and threatened them with shipwreck.
These poor people were under a spell of stupor, and
did not stir a foot. It rained as heavily as
ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls,
not without danger to a boat so badly ballasted as
ours; and we crept over the river in the darkness,
trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck,
and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated steamers
running many knots, and heralding their approach by
strains of music. The contrast between these
pleasure embarkations and our own grim vessel, with
her list to port and her freight of wet and silent
emigrants, was of that glaring description which we
count too obvious for the purposes of art.
The landing at Jersey City was done
in a stampede. I had a fixed sense of calamity,
and, to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was common
to us all. A panic selfishness, like that produced
by fear, presided over the disorder of our landing.
People pushed, and elbowed, and ran, their families
following how they could. Children fell, and were
picked up, to be rewarded by a blow. One child,
who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and with
increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a
fit; an official kept her by him, but no one else seemed
so much as to remark her distress; and I am ashamed
to say that I ran among the rest. I was so weary
that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles
in the hundred yards or so between the pier and the
railway station, so that I was quite wet by the time
that I got under cover. There was no waiting-room,
no refreshment-room; the cars were locked; and for
at least another hour, or so it seemed, we had to
camp upon the draughty, gas-lit platform. I sat
on my valise, too crushed to observe my neighbours;
but as they were all cold, and wet, and weary, and
driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to which
we had been subjected, I believe they can have been
no happier than myself. I bought half a dozen
oranges from a boy, for oranges and nuts were the only
refection to be had. As only two of them had
even a pretence of juice, I threw the other four under
the cars, and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and
children groping on the track after my leavings.
At last we were admitted into the
cars, utterly dejected, and far from dry. For
my own part, I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed
my trousers as hard as I could, till I had dried them
and warmed my blood into the bargain; but no one else,
except my next neighbour, to whom I lent the brush,
appeared to take the least precaution. As they
were, they composed themselves to sleep. I had
seen the lights of Philadelphia, and been twice ordered
to change carriages and twice countermanded, before
I allowed myself to follow their example.
Tuesday. When I
awoke, it was already day; the train was standing
idle; I was in the last carriage, and, seeing some
others strolling to and fro about the lines, I opened
the door and stepped forth, as from a caravan by the
wayside. We were near no station, nor even, as
far as I could see, within reach of any signal.
A green, open, undulating country stretched away upon
all sides. Locust trees and a single field of
Indian corn gave it a foreign grace and interest;
but the contours of the land were soft and English.
It was not quite England, neither was it quite France;
yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes.
And it was in the sky, and not upon the earth, that
I was surprised to find a change. Explain it
how you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at
all, the sun rises with a different splendour in America
and Europe. There is more clear gold and scarlet
in our old country mornings; more purple, brown, and
smoky orange in those of the new. It may be from
habit, but to me the coming of day is less fresh and
inspiriting in the latter; it has a duskier glory,
and more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to fit
some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as
though America were in fact, and not merely in fancy,
farther from the orient of Aurora and the springs
of day. I thought so then, by the railroad-side
in Pennsylvania, and I have thought so a dozen times
since in far distant parts of the continent.
If it be an illusion, it is one very deeply rooted,
and in which my eyesight is accomplice.
Soon after a train whisked by, announcing
and accompanying its passage by the swift beating
of a sort of chapel-bell upon the engine; and as it
was for this we had been waiting, we were summoned
by the cry of “All aboard!” and went on
again upon our way. The whole line, it appeared,
was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having thrown
all the traffic hours into arrear. We paid for
this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that day.
Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now and then
we had a few minutes at some station with a meagre
show of rolls and sandwiches for sale; but we were
so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at every
opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before
I could elbow my way to the counter.
Our American sunrise had ushered in
a noble summer’s day. There was not a cloud;
the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys
among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved
a sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon.
It had an inland sweetness and variety to one newly
from the sea; it smelt of woods, rivers, and the delved
earth. These, though in so far a country, were
airs from home. I stood on the platform by the
hour; and, as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages,
carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and
heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance,
and beheld the sun no longer shining blankly on the
plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills
and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand
accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with
myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come
into a rich estate. And when I had asked the
name of the river from the brakesman, and heard that
it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name
seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the
land. As when Adam with divine fitness named
the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once
accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as
no other could be, for that shining river and desirable
valley.
None can care for literature in itself
who do not take a special pleasure in the sound of
names; and there is no part of the world where nomenclature
is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as
the United States of America. All times, races,
and languages have brought their contribution.
Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with Bellefontaine,
and with Sansdusky. Chelsea, with its London associations
of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King’s Road,
is own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there
they have their seat, translated names of cities,
where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas;
and both, while I was crossing the continent, lay,
watched by armed men, in the horror and isolation
of a plague. Old, red Manhattan lies, like an
Indian arrowhead under a steam factory, below anglified
New York. The names of the States and Territories
themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic
vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida,
Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas;
there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear:
a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall
arise from the Western continent, his verse will be
enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names
of states and cities that would strike the fancy in
a business circular.
Late in the evening we were landed
in a waiting-room at Pittsburg. I had now under
my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with her
children; these I was to watch over providentially
for a certain distance farther on the way; but as
I found she was furnished with a basket of eatables,
I left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner for
myself.
I mention this meal, not only because
it was the first of which I had partaken for about
thirty hours, but because it was the means of my first
introduction to a coloured gentleman. He did me
the honour to wait upon me after a fashion, while
I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture
marched me farther into the country of surprise.
He was indeed strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs.
Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels of my youth.
Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but
of a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight
and rather odd foreign accent, every inch a man of
the world, and armed with manners so patronisingly
superior that I am at a loss to name their parallel
in England. A butler perhaps rides as high over
the unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a
reserve and a sort of sighing patience which one is
often moved to admire. And again, the abstract
butler never stoops to familiarity. But the coloured
gentleman will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar
like an upper-form boy to a fag; he unbends to you
like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff.
He makes himself at home and welcome. Indeed,
I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout
that supper much as, with us, a young, free, and not
very self-respecting master might behave to a good-looking
chambermaid. I had come prepared to pity the
poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove in a
thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the
prejudice of race; but I assure you I put my patronage
away for another occasion, and had the grace to be
pleased with that result.
Seeing he was a very honest fellow,
I consulted him upon a point of etiquette: if
one should offer to tip the American waiter? Certainly
not, he told me. Never. It would not do.
They considered themselves too highly to accept.
They would even resent the offer. As for him and
me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation; he,
in particular, had found much pleasure in my society;
I was a stranger; this was exactly one of those rare
conjunctures.... Without being very clear-seeing,
I can still perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured
gentleman deftly pocketed a quarter.
Wednesday. A little
after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on
board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio.
This had early been a favourite home of my imagination;
I have played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed
some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my person
being still unbreeched. My preference was founded
on a work which appeared in Cassell’s Family
Paper, and was read aloud to me by my nurse.
It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, an Indian
brave, who, in the last chapter, very obligingly washed
the paint off his face and became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other;
a trick I never forgave him. The idea of a man
being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be
a baronet, was one which my mind rejected. It
offended verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety
of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape from uninhabited
islands.
But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured
it. We were now on those great plains which stretch
unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The country was
flat like Holland, but far from being dull. All
through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or for
as much as I saw of them from the train and in my
waking moments, it was rich and various, and breathed
an elegance peculiar to itself. The tall corn
pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in themselves,
and framed the plain into long, aërial vistas; and
the clean, bright, gardened townships spoke of country
fare and pleasant summer evenings on the stoop.
It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am afraid,
not unfrequented by the devil. That morning dawned
with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a
chill that was not perhaps so measurable by instrument,
as it struck home upon the heart and seemed to travel
with the blood. Day came in with a shudder.
White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain,
as we see them more often on a lake; and though the
sun had soon dispersed and drunk them up, leaving
an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from
horizon to horizon, the mists had still been there,
and we knew that this paradise was haunted by killing
damps and foul malaria. The fences along the
line bore but two descriptions of advertisement; one
to recommend tobaccos, and the other to vaunt remedies
against the ague. At the point of day, and while
we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native
of the State, who had got in at some way station,
pronounced it, with a doctoral air, “a fever
and ague morning.”
The Dutch widow was a person of some
character. She had conceived at first sight a
great aversion for the present writer, which she was
at no pains to conceal. But, being a woman of
a practical spirit, she made no difficulty about accepting
my attentions, and encouraged me to buy her children
fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels, and even
to sleep upon the floor that she might profit by my
empty seat. Nay, she was such a rattle by nature,
and so powerfully moved to autobiographical talk,
that she was forced, for want of a better, to take
me into confidence and tell me the story of her life.
I heard about her late husband, who seemed to have
made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring
on Sundays. I could tell you her prospects, her
hopes, the amount of her fortune, the cost of her
housekeeping by the week, and a variety of particular
matters that are not usually disclosed except to friends.
At one station, she shook up her children to look at
a man on the platform and say if he were not like
Mr. Z.; while to me she explained how she had been
keeping company with this Mr. Z., how far matters
had proceeded, and how it was because of his desistance
that she was now travelling to the west. Then,
when I was thus put in possession of the facts, she
asked my judgment on that type of manly beauty.
I admired it to her heart’s content. She
was not, I think, remarkably veracious in talk, but
broidered as fancy prompted, and built castles in
the air out of her past; yet she had that sort of candour,
to keep me, in spite of all these confidences, steadily
aware of her aversion. Her parting words were
ingeniously honest. “I am sure,” said
she, “we all ought to be very much obliged
to you.” I cannot pretend that she put
me at my ease; but I had a certain respect for such
a genuine dislike. A poor nature would have slipped,
in the course of these familiarities, into a sort
of worthless toleration for me.
We reached Chicago in the evening.
I was turned out of the cars, bundled into an omnibus,
and driven off through the streets to the station of
a different railroad. Chicago seemed a great
and gloomy city. I remember having subscribed,
let us say sixpence, towards its restoration at the
period of the fire; and now when I beheld street after
street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable
burghers, I thought it would be a graceful act for
the corporation to refund that sixpence, or, at the
least, to entertain me to a cheerful dinner. But
there was no word of restitution. I was that
city’s benefactor, yet I was received in a third-class
waiting-room, and the best dinner I could get was a
dish of ham and eggs at my own expense.
I can safely say, I have never been
so dog-tired as that night in Chicago. When it
was time to start, I descended the platform like a
man in a dream. It was a long train, lighted
from end to end; and car after car, as I came up with
it, was not only filled, but overflowing. My
valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous
tomes of Bancroft, weighed me double; I was hot, feverish,
painfully athirst; and there was a great darkness
over me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled
by gas. When at last I found an empty bench,
I sank into it like a bundle of rags, the world seemed
to swim away into the distance, and my consciousness
dwindled within me to a mere pin’s head, like
a taper on a foggy night.
When I came a little more to myself,
I found that there had sat down before me a very cheerful,
rosy little German gentleman, somewhat gone in drink,
who was talking away to me, nineteen to the dozen,
as they say. I did my best to keep up the conversation;
for it seemed to me dimly as if something depended
upon that. I heard him relate, among many other
things, that there were pickpockets on the train,
who had already robbed a man of forty dollars and
a return ticket; but though I caught the words, I
do not think I properly understood the sense until
next morning; and I believe I replied at the time
that I was very glad to hear it. What else he
talked about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling
sound of words, his profuse gesticulation, and his
smile, which was highly explanatory; but no more.
And I suppose I must have shown my confusion very
plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me
like one who has conceived a doubt; next, he tried
me in German, supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar
with the English tongue; and finally, in despair,
he rose and left me. I felt chagrined; but my
fatigue was too crushing for delay, and, stretching
myself as far as that was possible upon the bench,
I was received at once into a dreamless stupor.
The little German gentleman was only
going a little way into the suburbs after a dîner
fin, and was bent on entertainment while the journey
lasted. Having failed with me, he pitched next
upon another emigrant, who had come through from Canada,
and was not one jot less weary than myself. Nay,
even in a natural state, as I found next morning when
we scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy, uncommunicative
man. After trying him on different topics, it
appears that the little German gentleman flounced
into a temper, swore an oath or two, and departed from
that car in quest of livelier society. Poor little
gentleman! I suppose he thought an emigrant should
be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a flask
of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile
the moments of digestion.
Thursday. I suppose
there must be a cycle in the fatigue of travelling,
for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed
in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge,
with sweet milk, and coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington
upon the Mississippi. Another long day’s
ride followed, with but one feature worthy of remark.
At a place called Creston, a drunken man got in.
He was aggressively friendly, but, according to English
notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train.
For one stage he eluded the notice of the officials;
but just as we were beginning to move out of the next
station, Cromwell by name, by came the conductor.
There was a word or two of talk; and then the official
had the man by the shoulders, twitched him from his
seat, marched him through the car, and sent him flying
on to the track. It was done in three motions,
as exact as a piece of drill. The train was still
moving slowly, although beginning to mend her pace,
and the drunkard got his feet without a fall.
He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his
cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with
one hand, while the other stole behind him to the
region of the kidneys. It was the first indication
that I had come among revolvers, and I observed it
with some emotion. The conductor stood on the
steps with one hand on his hip, looking back at him;
and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the creature,
for he turned without further ado, and went off staggering
along the track towards Cromwell, followed by a peal
of laughter from the cars. They were speaking
English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign
land.
Twenty minutes before nine that night,
we were deposited at the Pacific Transfer Station
near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the Missouri
river. Here we were to stay the night at a kind
of caravanserai, set apart for emigrants. But
I gave way to a thirst for luxury, separated myself
from my companions, and marched with my effects into
the Union Pacific Hotel. A white clerk and a coloured
gentleman whom, in my plain European way, I should
call the boots, were installed behind a counter like
bank tellers. They took my name, assigned me a
number, and proceeded to deal with my packages.
And here came the tug of war. I wished to give
up my packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish
to go to bed. And this, it appeared, was impossible
in an American hotel.
It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding,
and sprang from my unfamiliarity with the language.
For although two nations use the same words and read
the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the
dictionary. The business of life is not carried
on by words, but in set phrases, each with a special
and almost a slang signification. Some international
obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman
at Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which
seemed very natural to me, appeared to him a monstrous
exigency. He refused, and that with the plainness
of the West. This American manner of conducting
matters of business is, at first, highly unpalatable
to the European. When we approach a man in the
way of his calling, and for those services by which
he earns his bread, we consider him for the time being
our hired servant. But in the American opinion,
two gentlemen meet and have a friendly talk with a
view to exchanging favours if they will agree to please.
I know not which is the more convenient, nor even which
is the more truly courteous. The English stiffness
unfortunately tends to be continued after the particular
transaction is at an end, and thus favours class separations.
But on the other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses
leave an open field for the insolence of Jack-in-office.
I was nettled by the coloured gentleman’s
refusal, and unbuttoned my wrath under the similitude
of ironical submission. I knew nothing, I said,
of the ways of American hotels; but I had no desire
to give trouble. If there was nothing for it
but to get to bed immediately, let him say the word,
and though it was not my habit, I should cheerfully
obey.
He burst into a shout of laughter.
“Ah!” said he, “you do not know about
America. They are fine people in America.
Oh! you will like them very well. But you mustn’t
get mad. I know what you want. You come along
with me.”
And issuing from behind the counter,
and taking me by the arm like an old acquaintance,
he led me to the bar of the hotel.
“There,” said he, pushing
me from him by the shoulder, “go and have a
drink!”
THE EMIGRANT
TRAIN
All this while I had been travelling
by mixed trains, where I might meet with Dutch widows
and little German gentry fresh from table. I had
been but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded
once more, and put apart with my fellows. It
was about two in the afternoon of Friday that I found
myself in front of Emigrant House, with more than a
hundred others, to be sorted and boxed for the journey.
A white-haired official, with a stick under one arm
and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front
of us, and called name after name in the tone of a
command. At each name you would see a family
gather up its brats and bundles and run for the hindmost
of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon
concluded that this was to be set apart for the women
and children. The second, or central car, it
turned out, was devoted to men travelling alone, and
the third to the Chinese. The official was easily
moved to anger at the least delay; but the emigrants
were both quick at answering their names, and speedy
in getting themselves and their effects on board.
The families once housed, we men carried
the second car without ceremony by simultaneous assault.
I suppose the reader has some notion of an American
railroad car, that long, narrow wooden box, like a
flat-roofed Noah’s ark, with a stove and a convenience,
one at either end, a passage down the middle, and
transverse benches upon either hand. Those destined
for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable
for their extreme plainness, nothing but wood entering
in any part into their constitution, and for the usual
inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and
shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned.
The benches are too short for anything but a young
child. Where there is scarce elbow-room for two
to sit, there will not be space enough for one to
lie. Hence the company, or rather, as it appears
from certain bills about the Transfer Station, the
company’s servants, have conceived a plan for
the better accommodation of travellers. They prevail
on every two to chum together. To each of the
chums they sell a board and three square cushions
stuffed with straw, and covered with thin cotton.
The benches can be made to face each other in pairs,
for the backs are reversible. On the approach
of night the boards are laid from bench to bench,
making a couch wide enough for two, and long enough
for a man of the middle height; and the chums lie
down side by side upon the cushions with the head
to the conductor’s van and the feet to the engine.
When the train is full, of course this plan is impossible,
for there must not be more than one to every bench,
neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree.
It was to bring about this last condition that our
white-haired official now bestirred himself. He
made a most active master of ceremonies, introducing
likely couples, and even guaranteeing the amiability
and honesty of each. The greater the number of
happy couples the better for his pocket, for it was
he who sold the raw material of the beds. His
price for one board and three straw cushions began
with two dollars and a half; but before the train left,
and, I am sorry to say, long after I had purchased
mine, it had fallen to one dollar and a half.
The match-maker had a difficulty with
me; perhaps, like some ladies, I showed myself too
eager for union at any price; but certainly the first
who was picked out to be my bedfellow declined the
honour without thanks. He was an old, heavy,
slow-spoken man, I think from Yankeeland, looked me
all over with great timidity, and then began to excuse
himself in broken phrases. He didn’t know
the young man, he said. The young man might be
very honest, but how was he to know that? There
was another young man whom he had met already in the
train; he guessed he was honest, and would
prefer to chum with him upon the whole.
All this without any sort of excuse, as though I had
been inanimate or absent. I began to tremble
lest every one should refuse my company, and I be left
rejected. But the next in turn was a tall, strapping,
long-limbed, small-headed, curly-haired Pennsylvania
Dutchman, with a soldierly smartness in his manner.
To be exact, he had acquired it in the navy.
But that was all one; he had at least been trained
to desperate resolves, so he accepted the match, and
the white-haired swindler pronounced the connubial
benediction, and pocketed his fees.
The rest of the afternoon was spent
in making up the train. I am afraid to say how
many baggage-waggons followed the engine certainly
a score; then came the Chinese, then we, then the
families, and the rear was brought up by the conductor
in what, if I have it rightly, is called his caboose.
The class to which I belonged was of course far the
largest, and we ran over, so to speak, to both sides;
so that there were some Caucasians among the Chinamen,
and some bachelors among the families. But our
own car was pure from admixture, save for one little
boy of eight or nine, who had the whooping-cough.
At last, about six, the long train crawled out of
the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri
river to Omaha, westward bound.
It was a troubled uncomfortable evening
in the cars. There was thunder in the air, which
helped to keep us restless. A man played many
airs upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended
to, until he came to “Home, sweet home.”
It was truly strange to note how the talk ceased at
that, and the faces began to lengthen. I have
no idea whether musically this air is to be considered
good or bad; but it belongs to that class of art which
may be best described as a brutal assault upon the
feelings. Pathos must be relieved by dignity of
treatment. If you wallow naked in the pathetic,
like the author of “Home, sweet home,”
you make your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion;
and even while yet they are moved, they despise themselves
and hate the occasion of their weakness. It did
not come to tears that night, for the experiment was
interrupted. An elderly, hard-looking man, with
a goatee beard and about as much appearance of sentiment
as you would expect from a retired slaver, turned
with a start and bade the performer stop that “damned
thing.” “I’ve heard about enough
of that,” he added; “give us something
about the good country we’re going to.”
A murmur of adhesion ran round the car; the performer
took the instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded,
and then struck into a dancing measure; and, like a
new Timotheus, stilled immediately the emotion he
had raised.
The day faded; the lamps were lit;
a party of wild young men, who got off next evening
at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform,
singing “The Sweet By-and-bye” with very
tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds;
and it seemed as if the business of the day were at
an end. But it was not so; for, the train stopping
at some station, the cars were instantly thronged
with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and
maidens, some of them in little more than nightgear,
some with stable lanterns, and all offering beds for
sale. Their charge began with twenty-five cents
a cushion, but fell, before the train went on again,
to fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than
one-fifth of what I had paid for mine at the Transfer.
This is my contribution to the economy of future emigrants.
A great personage on an American train
is the newsboy. He sells books (such books!),
papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant
journeys, soap, towels, tin washing-dishes, tin coffee-pitchers,
coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash
or beans and bacon. Early next morning the newsboy
went round the cars, and chumming on a more extended
principle became the order of the hour. It requires
but a copartnery of two to manage beds; but washing
and eating can be carried on most economically by
a syndicate of three. I myself entered a little
after sunrise into articles of agreement, and became
one of the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and
Dubuque. Shakespeare was my own nickname on the
cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque,
the name of a place in the State of Iowa, that of
an amiable young fellow going west to cure an asthma,
and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or
smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together.
I have never seen tobacco so sillily abused.
Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish, Dubuque a towel,
and Pennsylvania a brick of soap. The partners
used these instruments, one after another, according
to the order of their first awaking; and when the
firm had finished there was no want of borrowers.
Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite
the stove, and retired with the whole stock in trade
to the platform of the car. There he knelt down,
supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork,
or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made a
shift to wash his face and neck and hands, a
cold, an insufficient, and, if the train is moving
rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.
On a similar division of expense,
the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque
supplied themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary
vessels; and their operations are a type of what went
on through all the cars. Before the sun was up
the stove would be brightly burning; at the first
station the natives would come on board with milk and
eggs and coffee cakes; and soon from end to end the
car would be filled with little parties breakfasting
upon the bed-boards. It was the pleasantest hour
of the day.
There were meals to be had, however,
by the wayside; a breakfast in the morning, a dinner
somewhere between eleven and two, and supper from
five to eight or nine at night. We had rarely
less than twenty minutes for each; and if we had not
spent many another twenty minutes waiting for some
express upon a side track among many miles of desert,
we might have taken an hour to each repast and arrived
at San Francisco up to time. For haste is not
the foible of an emigrant train. It gets through
on sufferance, running the gauntlet among its more
considerable brethren; should there be a block, it
is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they cannot, in
consequence, predict the length of the passage within
a day or so. Civility is the main comfort that
you miss. Equality, though conceived very largely
in America, does not extend so low down as to an emigrant.
Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of “All
aboard!” recalls the passengers to take their
seats; but as soon as I was alone with emigrants,
and from the Transfer all the way to San Francisco,
I found this ceremony was pretermitted; the train
stole from the station without note of warning, and
you had to keep an eye upon it even while you ate.
The annoyance is considerable, and the disrespect both
wanton and petty.
Many conductors, again, will hold
no communication with an emigrant. I asked a
conductor one day at what time the train would stop
for dinner; as he made no answer I repeated the question,
with a like result; a third time I returned to the
charge, and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly in
the face for several seconds and turned ostentatiously
away. I believe he was half ashamed of his brutality;
for when another person made the same inquiry, although
he still refused the information, he condescended
to answer, and even to justify his reticence in a voice
loud enough for me to hear. It was, he said, his
principle not to tell people where they were to dine;
for one answer led to many other questions, as what
o’clock it was? or, how soon should we be there?
and he could not afford to be eternally worried.
As you are thus cut off from the superior
authorities, a great deal of your comfort depends
on the character of the newsboy. He has it in
his power indefinitely to better and brighten the
emigrant’s lot. The newsboy with whom we
started from the Transfer was a dark, bullying, contemptuous,
insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs.
Indeed, in his case, matters came nearly to a fight.
It happened thus: he was going his rounds through
the cars with some commodities for sale, and coming
to a party who were at Seven-up or Cascino
(our two games) upon a bed-board, slung down a cigar-box
in the middle of the cards, knocking one man’s
hand to the floor. It was the last straw.
In a moment the whole party were upon their feet,
the cigars were upset, and he was ordered to “get
out of that directly, or he would get more than he
reckoned for.” The fellow grumbled and muttered,
but ended by making off, and was less openly insulting
in the future. On the other hand, the lad who
rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento
made himself the friend of all, and helped us with
information, attention, assistance, and a kind countenance.
He told us where and when we should have our meals,
and how long the train would stop; kept seats at table
for those who were delayed, and watched that we should
neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily hurried.
You, who live at home at ease, can hardly realise
the greatness of this service, even had it stood alone.
When I think of that lad coming and going, train after
train, with his bright face and civil words, I see
how easily a good man may become the benefactor of
his kind. Perhaps he is discontented with himself,
perhaps troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew
it, he is a hero of the old Greek stamp; and while
he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few cents,
and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a man’s
work, and bettering the world.
I must tell here an experience of
mine with another newsboy. I tell it because
it gives so good an example of that uncivil kindness
of the American, which is perhaps their most bewildering
character to one newly landed. It was immediately
after I had left the emigrant train; and I am told
I looked like a man at death’s door, so much
had this long journey shaken me. I sat at the
end of a car, and the catch being broken, and myself
feverish and sick, I had to hold the door open with
my foot for the sake of air. In this attitude
my leg debarred the newsboy from his box of merchandise.
I made haste to let him pass when I observed that
he was coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once
or twice he came upon me unawares. On these occasions
he most rudely struck my foot aside; and though I
myself apologised, as if to show him the way, he answered
me never a word. I chafed furiously, and I fear
the next time it would have come to words. But
suddenly I felt a touch upon my shoulder, and a large
juicy pear was put into my hand. It was the newsboy,
who had observed that I was looking ill, and so made
this present out of a tender heart. For the rest
of the journey I was petted like a sick child; he
lent me newspapers, thus depriving himself of his
legitimate profit on their sale, and came repeatedly
to sit by me and cheer me up.
THE PLAINS
OF NEBRASKA
It had thundered on the Friday night,
but the sun rose on Saturday without a cloud.
We were at sea there is no other adequate
expression on the plains of Nebraska.
I made my observatory on the top of a fruit-waggon,
and sat by the hour upon that perch to spy about me,
and to spy in vain for something new. It was a
world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty
earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched
from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board;
on either hand, the green plain ran till it touched
the skirts of heaven. Along the track innumerable
wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed
in a continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen
upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution;
and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside
the railroad which grew more and more distinct as
we drew nearer, till they turned into wooden cabins,
and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they
melted into their surroundings, and we were once more
alone upon the billiard-board. The train toiled
over this infinity like a snail; and being the one
thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions
it began to assume in our regard. It seemed miles
in length, and either end of it within but a step
of the horizon. Even my own body or my own head
seemed a great thing in that emptiness. I note
the feeling the more readily as it is the contrary
of what I have read of in the experience of others.
Day and night, above the roar of the train, our ears
were kept busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers a
noise like the winding up of countless clocks and
watches, which began after a while to seem proper
to that land.
To one hurrying through by steam there
was a certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy,
this greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole
arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line
of the horizon. Yet one could not but reflect
upon the weariness of those who passed by there in
old days, at the foot’s pace of oxen, painfully
urging their teams, and with no landmark but that unattainable
evening sun for which they steered, and which daily
fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing,
it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon
their advance; no sight for repose or for encouragement;
but stage after stage, only the dead green waste under
foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon. But
the eye, as I have been told, found differences even
here; and at the worst the emigrant came, by perseverance,
to the end of his toil. It is the settlers, after
all, at whom we have a right to marvel. Our consciousness,
by which we live, is itself but the creature of variety.
Upon what food does it subsist in such a land?
What livelihood can repay a human creature for a life
spent in this huge sameness? He is cut off from
books, from news, from company, from all that can
relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs.
A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that
he can hope for. He may walk five miles and see
nothing; ten, and it is as though he had not moved;
twenty, and still he is in the midst of the same great
level, and has approached no nearer to the one object
within view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with
his advance. We are full at home of the question
of agreeable wall-papers, and wise people are of opinion
that the temper may be quieted by sedative surroundings.
But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler?
His is a wall-paper with a vengeance one
quarter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness.
His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming
concave of the visible world; it quails before so
vast an outlook, it is tortured by distance; yet there
is no rest or shelter, till the man runs into his
cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at
hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision
peculiar to these empty plains.
Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadæ,
summer and winter, cattle, wife and family, the settler
may create a full and various existence. One
person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in
every way superior to her lot. This was a woman
who boarded us at a way station, selling milk.
She was largely formed; her features were more than
comely; she had that great rarity a fine
complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind,
dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal
grace. There was not a line in her countenance,
not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spoke
of an entire contentment with her life. It would
have been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman.
Yet the place where she lived was to me almost ghastly.
Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and
all nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway
lines. Each stood apart in its own lot.
Each opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it
were a billiard-board indeed, and these only models
that had been set down upon it ready made. Her
own, into which I looked, was clean but very empty,
and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire.
This extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat
a country, gives a strong impression of artificiality.
With none of the litter and discoloration of human
life; with the paths unworn, and the houses still
sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems
purely scenic. The mind is loth to accept it for
a piece of reality; and it seems incredible that life
can go on with so few properties, or the great child,
man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom.
And truly it is as yet an incomplete
society in some points; or at least it contained,
as I passed through, one person incompletely civilised.
At North Platte, where we supped that evening, one
man asked another to pass the milk-jug. This
other was well dressed and of what we should call
a respectable appearance; a darkish man, high-spoken,
eating as though he had some usage of society; but
he turned upon the first speaker with extraordinary
vehemence of tone
“There’s a waiter here!” he cried.
“I only asked you to pass the milk,” explained
the first.
Here is the retort verbatim
“Pass! Hell! I’m
not paid for that business; the waiter’s paid
for it. You should use civility at table, and,
by God, I’ll show you how!”
The other man very wisely made no
answer, and the bully went on with his supper as though
nothing had occurred. It pleases me to think that
some day soon he will meet one of his own kidney;
and perhaps both may fall.
THE DESERT
OF WYOMING
To cross such a plain is to grow homesick
for the mountains. I longed for the Black Hills
of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter, like
an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas! and
it was a worse country than the other. All Sunday
and Monday we travelled through these sad mountains,
or over the main ridge of the Rockies, which is a fair
match to them for misery of aspect. Hour after
hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about
our onward path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that drearily
imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications how
drearily, how tamely, none can tell who has not seen
them; not a tree, not a patch of sward, not one shapely
or commanding mountain form; sage-brush, eternal sage-brush;
over all the same weariful and gloomy colouring, greys
warming into brown, greys darkening towards black;
and for sole sign of life, here and there a few fleeing
antelopes; here and there, but at incredible intervals,
a creek running in a cañon. The plains have
a grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing
but a contorted smallness. Except for the air,
which was light and stimulating, there was not one
good circumstance in that God-forsaken land.
I had been suffering in my health
a good deal all the way; and at last, whether I was
exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside
eating-house, the evening we left Laramie I fell sick
outright. That was a night which I shall not
readily forget. The lamps did not go out; each
made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood, and
the shadows were confounded together in the long,
hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay in uneasy
attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat upon their
backs like dead folk; there a man sprawling on the
floor, with his face upon his arm; there another half
seated with his head and shoulders on the bench.
The most passive were continually and roughly shaken
by the movement of the train; others stirred, turned,
or stretched out their arms like children; it was
surprising how many groaned and murmured in their
sleep; and as I passed to and fro, stepping across
the prostrate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp,
now a half-formed word, it gave me a measure of the
worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle.
Although it was chill, I was obliged to open my window,
for the degradation of the air soon became intolerable
to one who was awake and using the full supply of
life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the
black, amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our
wake. They that long for morning have never longed
for it more earnestly than I.
And yet when day came, it was to shine
upon the same broken and unsightly quarter of the
world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird,
or a river. Only down the long, sterile cañons,
the train shot hooting, and awoke the resting echo.
That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly
land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to
be observed in this paralysis of man and nature.
And when I think how the railroad has been pushed
through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage
tribes, and now will bear an emigrant for some £12
from the Atlantic to the Golden Gates; how at each
stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu cities,
full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then
died away again, and are now but wayside stations in
the desert; how in these uncouth places pig-tailed
Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians
and broken men from Europe, talking together in a
mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling,
and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary
lord of all America heard, in this last fastness,
the scream of the “bad medicine waggon”
charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember
that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen
in frock-coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary
than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it
seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the one
typical achievement of the age in which we live, as
if it brought together into one plot all the ends
of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and
offered to some great writer the busiest, the most
extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring
literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast,
if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town
to this? But, alas! it is not these things that
are necessary it is only Homer.
Here also we are grateful to the train,
as to some god who conducts us swiftly through these
shades and by so many hidden perils. Thirst,
hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians, are all
no more feared, so lightly do we skim these horrible
lands; as the gull, who wings safely through the hurricane
and past the shark. Yet we should not be forgetful
of these hardships of the past; and to keep the balance
true, since I have complained of the trifling discomforts
of my journey, perhaps more than was enough, let me
add an original document. It was not written by
Homer, but by a boy of eleven, long since dead, and
is dated only twenty years ago. I shall punctuate,
to make things clearer, but not change the spelling.
“My dear Sister Mary, I
am afraid you will go nearly crazy when you read my
letter. If Jerry” (the writer’s eldest
brother) “has not written to you before now,
you will be surprised to heare that we are in California,
and that poor Thomas” (another brother, of fifteen)
“is dead. We started from -------- in July,
with plenty of provisions and too yoke oxen.
We went along very well till we got within six or seven
hundred miles of California, when the Indians attacked
us. We found places where they had killed the
emigrants. We had one passenger with us, too
guns, and one revolver; so we ran all the lead We had
into bullets (and) hung the guns up in the wagon so
we could get at them in a minit. It was about
two o’clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel
a little way; when a prairie chicken alited a little
way from the wagon.
"Jerry took out one of the guns
to shoot it, and told Tom drive the oxen. Tom
and I drove the oxen, and Jerry and the passenger went
on. Then, after a little, I left Tom and caught
up with Jerry and the other man. Jerry stopped
for Tom to come up; me and the man went on and sit
down by a little stream. In a few minutes we heard
some noise; then three shots (they all struck poor
Tom, I suppose); then they gave the war hoop, and
as many as twenty of the red skins came down upon us.
The three that shot Tom was hid by the side of the
road in the bushes.
"I thought the Tom and Jerry were
shot; so I told the other man that Tom and Jerry were
dead, and that we had better try to escape, if possible.
I had no shoes on; having a sore foot, I thought I
would not put them on. The man and me run down
the road, but We was soon stopt by an Indian on a
pony. We then turend the other way, and run up
the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar
trees, and stayed there till dark. The Indians
hunted all over after us, and verry close to us, so
close that we could here there tomyhawks Jingle.
At dark the man and me started on, I stubing my toes
against sticks and stones. We traveld on all
night; and next morning, Just as it was getting gray,
we saw something in the shape of a man. It layed
Down in the grass. We went up to it, and it was
Jerry. He thought we ware Indians. You can
imagine how glad he was to see me. He thought
we was all dead but him, and we thought him and Tom
was dead. He had the gun that he took out of the
wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was
the load that was in it.
"We traveld on till about eight
o’clock, We caught up with one wagon with too
men with it. We had traveld with them before one
day; we stopt and they Drove on; we knew that they
was ahead of us, unless they had been killed to.
My feet was so sore when we caught up with them that
I had to ride; I could not step. We traveld on
for too days, when the men that owned the cattle said
they would (could) not drive them another inch.
We unyoked the oxen; we had about seventy pounds of
flour; we took it out and divided it into four packs.
Each of the men took about 18 pounds apiece and a
blanket. I carried a little bacon, dried meat,
and little quilt; I had in all about twelve pounds.
We had one pint of flour a day for our alloyance.
Sometimes we made soup of it; sometimes we (made)
pancakes; and sometimes mixed it up with cold water
and eat it that way. We traveld twelve or fourteen
days. The time came at last when we should have
to reach some place or starve. We saw fresh horse
and cattle tracks. The morning come, we scraped
all the flour out of the sack, mixed it up and baked
it into bread, and made some soup, and eat everything
we had. We traveld on all day without anything
to eat, and that evening we caught up with a sheep
train of eight wagons. We traveld with them till
we arrived at the settlements; and know I am safe in
California, and got to good home, and going to school.
And so ends this artless narrative.
The little man was at school again, God bless him,
while his brother lay scalped upon the desert.
FELLOW PASSENGERS
At Ogden we changed cars from the
Union Pacific to the Central Pacific line of railroad.
The change was doubly welcome; for, first, we had
better cars on the new line; and, second, those in
which we had been cooped for more than ninety hours
had begun to stink abominably. Several yards
away, as we returned, let us say from dinner, our nostrils
were assailed by rancid air. I have stood on
a platform while the whole train was shunting; and
as the dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a
whiff of pure menagerie, only a little sourer, as from
men instead of monkeys. I think we are human
only in virtue of open windows. Without fresh
air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable
command of the Queen’s English, to become such
another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering human goat,
leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of offence.
I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look
for the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like
business of the emigrant train. But one thing
I must say, the car of the Chinese was notably the
least offensive.
The cars on the Central Pacific were
nearly twice as high, and so proportionally airier;
they were freshly varnished, which gave us all a sense
of cleanliness as though we had bathed; the seats drew
out and joined in the centre, so that there was no
more need for bed-boards; and there was an upper tier
of berths which could be closed by day and opened
at night.
I had by this time some opportunity
of seeing the people whom I was among. They were
in rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had met
on board ship while crossing the Atlantic. They
were mostly lumpish fellows, silent and noisy, a common
combination; somewhat sad, I should say, with an extraordinary
poor taste in humour, and little interest in their
fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap and merely
external curiosity. If they heard a man’s
name and business, they seemed to think they had the
heart of that mystery; but they were as eager to know
that much as they were indifferent to the rest.
Some of them were on nettles till they learned your
name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but beyond
that, whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or
clever, fierce or friendly, was all one to them.
Others who were not so stupid, gossiped a little,
and, I am bound to say, unkindly. A favourite
witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of “All
aboard!” while the rest of us were dining, thus
contributing his mite to the general discomfort.
Such a one was always much applauded for his high spirits.
When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was astonished fresh
from the eager humanity on board ship to
meet with little but laughter. One of the young
men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then
very easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere
clodlike incapacity to think, for he expected me to
join the laugh. I did so, but it was phantom
merriment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three
violent epileptic fits, and though, of course, there
were not wanting some to help him, it was rather superstitious
terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his
fellow-passengers. “Oh, I hope he’s
not going to die!” cried a woman; “it
would be terrible to have a dead body!” And there
was a very general movement to leave the man behind
at the next station. This, by good fortune, the
conductor negatived.
There was a good deal of story-telling
in some quarters; in others, little but silence.
In this society, more than any other that ever I was
in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the
narrative. It was rarely that any one listened
for the listening. If he lent an ear to another
man’s story, it was because he was in immediate
want of a hearer for one of his own. Food and
the progress of the train were the subjects most generally
treated; many joined to discuss these who otherwise
would hold their tongues. One small knot had no
better occupation than to worm out of me my name;
and the more they tried, the more obstinately fixed
I grew to baffle them. They assailed me with
artful questions and insidious offers of correspondence
in the future; but I was perpetually on my guard,
and parried their assaults with inward laughter.
I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for
the secret. He owed me far more, had he understood
life, for thus preserving him a lively interest throughout
the journey. I met one of my fellow-passengers
months after, driving a street tramway car in San
Francisco; and, as the joke was now out of season,
told him my name without subterfuge. You never
saw a man more chap-fallen. But had my name been
Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he had still
been disappointed.
There were no emigrants direct from
Europe save one German family and a knot
of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one
reading the New Testament all day long through steel
spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets
of their old-world, mysterious race. Lady Hester
Stanhope believed she could make something great of
the Cornish; for my part, I can make nothing of them
at all. A division of races, older and more original
than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family
apart from neighbouring Englishmen. Not even a
Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This
is one of the lessons of travel that some
of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.
The rest were all American born, but
they came from almost every quarter of that Continent.
All the States of the North had sent out a fugitive
to cross the plains with me. From Virginia, from
Pennsylvania, from New York, from far western Iowa
and Kansas, from Maine that borders on the Cañadas,
and from the Cañadas themselves some
one or two were fleeing in quest of a better land
and better wages. The talk in the train, like
the talk I heard on the steamer, ran upon hard times,
short commons, and hope that moves ever westward.
I thought of my shipful from Great Britain with a
feeling of despair. They had come 3,000 miles,
and yet not far enough. Hard times bowed them
out of the Clyde, and stood to welcome them at Sandy
Hook. Where were they to go? Pennsylvania,
Maine, Iowa, Kansas? These were not places for
immigration, but for emigration, it appeared; not
one of them, but I knew a man who had lifted up his
heel and left it for an ungrateful country. And
it was still westward that they ran. Hunger,
you would have thought, came out of the east like
the sun, and the evening was made of edible gold.
And, meantime, in the car in front of me, were there
not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite quarter?
Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from
their gates in search of provender, had here come face
to face. The two waves had met; east and west
had alike failed; the whole round world had been prospected
and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and
till one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as
well to stay patiently at home. Nor was there
wanting another sign, at once more picturesque and
more disheartening; for, as we continued to steam westward
towards the land of gold, we were continually passing
other emigrant trains upon the journey east; and these
were as crowded as our own. Had all these return
voyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were they
all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter?
It would seem not, for, whenever we met them, the
passengers ran on the platform and cried to us through
the windows, in a kind of wailing chorus, to “come
back.” On the plains of Nebraska, in the
mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and
dismal to my heart, “Come back!” That
was what we heard by the way “about the good
country we were going to.” And at that very
hour the Sand-lot of San Francisco was crowded with
the unemployed, and the echo from the other side of
Market Street was repeating the rant of demagogues.
If, in truth, it were only for the
sake of wages that men emigrate, how many thousands
would regret the bargain! But wages, indeed, are
only one consideration out of many; for we are a race
of gipsies, and love change and travel for themselves.
DESPISED
RACES
Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment
of my fellow-Caucasians towards our companions in
the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst.
They seemed never to have looked at them, listened
to them, or thought of them, but hated them a priori.
The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel
and treacherous battlefield of money. They could
work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries,
and hence there was no calumny too idle for the Caucasians
to repeat and even to believe. They declared
them hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking
in the throat when they beheld them. Now, as a
matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so like a
large class of European women, that on raising my
head and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable
distance, I have for an instant been deceived by the
resemblance. I do not say it is the most attractive
class of our women, but for all that many a man’s
wife is less pleasantly favoured. Again, my emigrants
declared that the Chinese were dirty. I cannot
say they were clean, for that was impossible upon
the journey; but in their efforts after cleanliness
they put the rest of us to shame. We all pigged
and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and faces
for half a minute daily on the platform, and were
unashamed. But the Chinese never lost an opportunity,
and you would see them washing their feet an
act not dreamed of among ourselves and
going as far as decency permitted to wash their whole
bodies. I may remark by the way that the dirtier
people are in their persons the more delicate is their
sense of modesty. A clean man strips in a crowded
boathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out
of bed without uncovering an inch of skin. Lastly,
these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained
the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese waggon,
and that alone, which stank. I have said already
that it was the exception, and notably the freshest
of the three.
These judgments are typical of the
feeling in all Western America. The Chinese are
considered stupid because they are imperfectly acquainted
with English. They are held to be base because
their dexterity and frugality enable them to underbid
the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They are said
to be thieves; I am sure they have no monopoly of that.
They are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful
Irishman may each reflect before he bears the accusation.
I am told, again, that they are of the race of river
pirates, and belong to the most despised and dangerous
class in the Celestial Empire. But if this be
so, what remarkable pirates have we here! and what
must be the virtues, the industry, the education,
and the intelligence of their superiors at home!
Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it
is the Chinese that must go. Such is the cry.
It seems, after all, that no country is bound to submit
to immigration any more than to invasion; each is
war to the knife, and resistance to either but legitimate
defence. Yet we may regret the free tradition
of the republic, which loved to depict herself with
open arms, welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly,
as a man who believes that he loves freedom, I may
be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred
name misused in the contention. It was but the
other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot,
the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for
arms and butchery. “At the call of Abreham
Lincoln,” said the orator, “ye rose in
the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye
not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dhirty
Mongolians?”
For my own part, I could not look
but with wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their
forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun
to keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which the
other day we imitated, and a school of manners which
we never had the delicacy so much as to desire to
imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity.
They walked the earth with us, but it seems they must
be of different clay. They hear the clock strike
the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch.
They travel by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage
of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might
check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is
thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what
the wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the
hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that our language
looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so wise
that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder
at; all this travelled alongside of me for thousands
of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows
if we had one common thought or fancy all that way,
or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the
same design, beheld the same world out of the railway
windows. And when either of us turned his thoughts
to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity
must there not have been in these pictures of the mind when
I beheld that old, grey, castled city, high throned
above the firth, with the flag of Britain flying,
and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man
in the next car to me would conjure up some junks and
a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with
the same affection, home.
Another race shared among my fellow-passengers
in the disfavour of the Chinese; and that, it is hardly
necessary to say, was the noble red man of old story he
over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming
all these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian;
indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of
the train; but now and again at way stations, a husband
and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed
out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth
and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism
of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of
their appearance, would have touched any thinking
creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested
round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I was
ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We
shall carry upon our consciences so much, at least,
of our forefathers’ misconduct as we continue
to profit by ourselves.
If oppression drives a wise man mad,
what should be raging in the hearts of these poor
tribes, who have been driven back and back, step after
step, their promised reservations torn from them one
after another as the States extended westward, until
at length they are shut up into these hideous mountain
deserts of the centre and even there find
themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly
diggers? The eviction of the Cherokees (to name
but an instance), the extortion of Indian agents,
the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay,
down to the ridicule of such poor beings as were here
with me upon the train, make up a chapter of injustice
and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base
if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget.
These old, well-founded, historical hatreds have a
savour of nobility for the independent. That
the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the Irishman
love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the
thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the
nature of man; rather, indeed, honourable, since it
depends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not personal
to him who cherishes the indignation.
TO THE GOLDEN
GATES
A little corner of Utah is soon traversed,
and leaves no particular impressions on the mind.
By an early hour on Wednesday morning we stopped to
breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-lying
plateau in Nevada. The man who kept the station
eating-house was a Scot, and learning that I was the
same, he grew very friendly, and gave me some advice
on the country I was now entering. “You
see,” said he, “I tell you this, because
I come from your country.” Hail, brither
Scots!
His most important hint was on the
moneys of this part of the world. There is something
in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is revolting
to the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs,
reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve,
by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two,
forty-five, or even a hundred halfpence. In the
Pacific States they have made a bolder push for complexity,
and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer
exists the bit, or old Mexican real.
The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half
cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to two
bits, the quarter-dollar stands for the required amount.
But how about an odd bit? The nearest coin to
it is a dime, which is short by a fifth. That,
then, is called a short bit. If you have
one, you lay it triumphantly down, and save two and
a half cents. But if you have not, and lay down
a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders
you a dime by way of change; and thus you have paid
what is called a long bit, and lost two and
a half cents, or even, by comparison with a short bit,
five cents. In country places all over the Pacific
coast, nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or taken,
which vastly increases the cost of life; as even for
a glass of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny,
as the case may be. You will say that this system
of mutual robbery was as broad as it was long; but
I have discovered a plan to make it broader, with
which I here endow the public. It is brief and
simple radiantly simple. There is
one place where five cents are recognised, and that
is the post-office. A quarter is only worth two
bits, a short and a long. Whenever you have a
quarter, go to the post office and buy five cents’
worth of postage-stamps; you will receive in change
two dimes, that is, two short bits. The purchasing
power of your money is undiminished. You can
go and have your two glasses of beer all the same;
and you have made yourself a present of five cents’
worth of postage-stamps into the bargain. Benjamin
Franklin would have patted me on the head for this
discovery.
From Toano we travelled all day through
deserts of alkali and sand, horrible to man, and bare
sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier, and
came by supper-time to Elko. As we were standing,
after our manner, outside the station, I saw two men
whip suddenly from underneath the cars, and take to
their heels across country. They were tramps,
it appeared, who had been riding on the beams since
eleven of the night before; and several of my fellow-passengers
had already seen and conversed with them while we
broke our fast at Toano. These land stowaways
play a great part over here in America, and I should
have liked dearly to become acquainted with them.
At Elko an odd circumstance befell
me. I was coming out from supper, when I was
stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two
others taller and ruddier than himself.
“Ex-cuse me, sir,” he
said, “but do you happen to be going on?”
I said I was, whereupon he said he
hoped to persuade me to desist from that intention.
He had a situation to offer me, and if we could come
to terms, why, good and well. “You see,”
he continued, “I’m running a theatre here,
and we’re a little short in the orchestra.
You’re a musician, I guess?”
I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary
acquaintance with “Auld Lang Syne” and
“The Wearing of the Green,” I had no pretension
whatever to that style. He seemed much put out
of countenance; and one of his taller companions asked
him, on the nail, for five dollars.
“You see, sir,” added
the latter to me, “he bet you were a musician;
I bet you weren’t. No offence, I hope?”
“None whatever,” I said,
and the two withdrew to the bar, where I presume the
debt was liquidated.
This little adventure woke bright
hopes in my fellow-travellers, who thought they had
now come to a country where situations went a-begging.
But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith.
Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was but a
feeler to decide the bet.
Of all the next day I will tell you
nothing, for the best of all reasons, that I remember
no more than that we continued through desolate and
desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But
some time after I had fallen asleep that night, I
was awakened by one of my companions. It was
in vain that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm
and whisky burned in his eyes; and he declared we
were in a new country, and I must come forth upon
the platform and see with my own eyes. The train
was then, in its patient way, standing halted in a
by-track. It was a clear, moonlit night; but
the valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct,
and only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks
and relieved the blackness of the pines. A hoarse
clamour filled the air; it was the continuous plunge
of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the mountains.
The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous
in the nostrils a fine, dry, old mountain
atmosphere. I was dead sleepy, but I returned
to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at my heart.
When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled
for a while to know if it were day or night, for the
illumination was unusual. I sat up at last, and
found we were grading slowly downward through a long
snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before
we were swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel,
I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine upon
my left, a foaming river and a sky already coloured
with the fires of dawn. I am usually very calm
over the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe
how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting
one’s wife. I had come home again home
from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable
corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along
the hilltop, every trouty pool along that mountain
river, was more dear to me than a blood relation.
Few people have praised God more happily than I did.
And thenceforward, down by Blue Cañon, Alta, Dutch
Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea
of mountain forests, dropping thousands of feet toward
the far sea-level as we went, not I only, but all
the passengers on board, threw off their sense of dirt
and heat and weariness, and bawled like schoolboys,
and thronged with shining eyes upon the platform,
and became new creatures within and without. The
sun no longer oppressed us with heat, it only shone
laughingly along the mountain-side, until we were
fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At every turn
we could see farther into the land and our own happy
futures. At every town the cocks were tossing
their clear notes into the golden air, and crowing
for the new day and the new country. For this
was indeed our destination; this was “the good
country” we had been going to so long.
By afternoon we were at Sacramento,
the city of gardens in a plain of corn; and the next
day before the dawn we were lying-to upon the Oakland
side of San Francisco Bay. The day was breaking
as we crossed the ferry; the fog was rising over the
citied hills of San Francisco; the day was perfect not
a ripple, scarce a stain, upon its blue expanse; everything
was waiting, breathless, for the sun. A spot of
cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais,
and then widened downward on its shapely shoulder;
the air seemed to awaken and began to sparkle; and
suddenly
“The tall hills
Titan discovered,”
and the city of San Francisco, and
the bay of gold and corn, were lit from end to end
with summer daylight.