HOTEL CARS, REAL FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGES—AN EDITOR ON HIS COUNTRYMEN’S
KNOWLEDGE—AMERICAN GRANDILOQUENCE—OF WHOM THIS IS SAID—NECESSARY
TO REPEAT SOME OF WHAT ONE HEARS—‘HAVE YOU SEEN OUR FOREST?’—‘THE
PACIFIC RAILS WILL CARRY THE COMMERCE OF THE WORLD’—LARGE ACQUAINTANCE
AMERICANS HAVE—AN AMERICAN ON LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION—NIAGARA—THE
AMERICAN AND CANADIAN FALLS—WHAT IS IN THE MIND MAGNIFIES WHAT ONE
SEES—THE STONE THOUGH IT HAS CHIPPED OUT—ICE-BRIDGE—HOW NIAGARA IS
PRONOUNCED—A WEEK OF CANADIAN WEATHER—A SNOW-BOUND PARTY AT NIAGARA.
On returning from the mountains, I left Chicago for the east in an
hotel car. This kind of carriage combines a sleeping-berth with a
travelling kitchen, and supplies you by day, just as the sleeping-cars
do, with a comfortable sofa to yourself. In front of this a table may
be placed when needed, on which you can have served in a few minutes
whatever you please. In this way you may without leaving the carriage
have all your meals for a journey of a thousand miles. No objection can
be made either to the materials or to the cooking of what is supplied.
These sleeping, hotel, and English cars are not merely devices for
diminishing the inconvenience of a long journey, and enabling one to
economise time, but they also act completely as first-class carriages.
After you have paid for your ticket at one uniform price with all the
rest of the passengers, you find in the train the steward of the
sleeping-car (sometimes there is an office in the town), and pay him
so many dollars more, and secure in this way a place to yourself,
for night and day, in the special kind of car. It would give offence
to call them first-class carriages; but from what has been said it
will be understood that they do at all events incidentally supply
this advantage. And as there is also a ladies’ carriage, into which
well-dressed gentlemen are admitted, and furthermore a caboose for
negroes, emigrants, and very dirty people, in which the wound that is
inflicted on their dignity is compensated for by a reduction of the
fare, American railway trains, although they profess to put all their
passengers on a footing of democratic equality, do in fact allow them
to classify themselves.
[Sidenote: _Tall Phrases Discounted._]
Strange as it may sound, the traveller sometimes finds it difficult
to carry on an argument with an American, on account of his complete
ignorance of the subject upon which he will go on arguing; or, worse
still, from his wonderful misconceptions, for some of which he may
possibly be indebted to rural orators and rural newspapers. I was in
this way myself often reminded of what a well-known American editor
said to me—of course very much exaggerating the fact; still, however,
his remark may have some grains of truth in it, ‘that his countrymen
were, and must long continue to be, in matters out of their own
business, and beyond their own country, the most ignorant people in the
civilised world.’
Another difficulty one occasionally meets with is that you do not know
how much you are to discount from the speaker’s grand phrases, in order
to arrive at his own meaning; for it sometimes happens that the ideas
that are in his own mind are very inadequate to the language he uses to
express them. I was, for instance, for several days thrown into close
contact with a very gentlemanly, well-spoken, well-mannered merchant,
who had seen something of the world, for his business had frequently
taken him to South America and to Europe. On one occasion he astonished
me by affirming ‘that the farmers, of all classes in the United States,
possessed the finest intellects.’ Anybody else would have meant by
these words, that among them were to be found the most powerful and
most cultivated intellects—minds great in imaginative power, or in the
power of apprehending political, or speculative, or scientific truth.
But of these uses of the intellect my companion had not so much as
the germ of a conception. To nothing of this kind had his sight ever
reached. What he meant by the finest intellect was just this: a mind
capable of giving a pretty correct practical judgment on the ordinary
occurrences of daily business. At another time the same gentleman
startled me by the announcement ‘that many of the blacks were very fine
scholars.’ After a time it became evident that he had no conception of
scholarship beyond the elements of reading and writing, and the power
of keeping accounts accurately. If a man had attained to the point
of doing these things with ease, he had achieved everything; for my
companion had caught no glimpse of anything beyond.
[Sidenote: _What one may Repeat._]
No one, I suppose, will so mistake my meaning as to imagine that I
mention anecdotes of this kind with any wish to raise a laugh at the
expense of the people I travelled among. It seems almost impertinent
to remark that there are plenty of people in America who are very
well informed, and plenty of people who express their ideas with
perfect correctness. Their system, however, of equal education, and
of equal chances to all, brings a great many to the front (and small
blame to them for such a result), who—this I suppose to have been
the history of the casual fellow-traveller whose expressions I have
just repeated—never had any education but that of the common primary
schools, and never afterwards had time for reading anything but
newspapers, and never attempted to master anything except the details
of their own business. This must be the case with many. Many others,
however, there are, as is very well known, who have used what was
acquired at the common primary school as a foundation for a solid and
extensive structure of after acquisitions.
My object is to give a correct idea of America, and of the different
kinds of Americans the traveller in the United States meets with, as
they were seen by myself. If omissions are made, this object cannot
be answered, and so what I might say would convey only erroneous
conceptions. One is generally precluded from making any reference to
what he saw or heard in private houses; but there are no reasons for
silence as to what took place at tables-d’hôte, and in railway cars,
on board steam-boats, and in coaches: all this was said and done in
public. And besides, most of the people who in America make laughable
observations would, considering the point from which they started, have
had no observations at all to make, had their lot been cast on this
side the water, or anywhere else excepting in the United States.
‘Sir,’ said a gentleman to me one morning at breakfast (we were seated
together at a small table in one of the large hotels of a great city
in the Valley of the Mississippi),—‘Sir, have you seen our Forest?’
‘Sir,’ I replied, ‘for the last thousand miles and more, since I left
Richmond, I have scarcely seen anything else.’
‘Sir,’ my interrogator responded with an indignant tone, ‘I am not
speaking of the material, but of the intellectual Forest—of our
Forest—the great Forest—the grandest delineator of the sublime and
of the ridiculous in the united world.’ I afterwards found that this
grand delineator of the ridiculous was the actor Forest, who is not
unknown professionally in this country, and who was playing in the town
I was then staying at. I also found that his admirer was a dealer in
ready-made clothes, who took his meals at the hotel.
‘Sir,’ observed to me a gentleman who was sitting next to me in a car
of the Pacific Railway, ‘these rails will carry the commerce of the
world.’ I requested him to repeat his remark. I then began to reply
by saying, that I thought it not improbable that as much of what was
used for tea in the United States as was grown in China would pass over
them, when he cut me short with, ‘Sir, it is not to be expected that
strangers should understand the grandeur of our country, but these
rails will carry the commerce of the world.’ This dealer in prophecy
was also a dealer in whisky.
[Sidenote: _Letters of Introduction._]
Wherever you may be in the United States, you will not find it
difficult to obtain letters of introduction to any town in the Union.
If an American traveller were to ask an English friend at Ipswich
for introductions to Exeter, Galway, Dundee, Carlisle, and Dover, his
friend would not find it easy to comply with the request. But if the
position of the two were reversed, and the Englishman were travelling
in America, and were to ask his American friend for introductions to
half-a-dozen places in the States, far more distant from each other
than the places I have mentioned in the United Kingdom, the American
would either be able to give them himself, or would easily find friends
who could. This implies a vast difference in our social system.
Ours is a system which isolates, theirs is a system which brings
everybody in contact with everybody. One is astonished at the number
of acquaintances an American has. For one acquaintance an English
gentleman has, an American gentleman will probably have fifty or a
hundred.
I will repeat here what an American gentleman at Washington said to
me on the subject of letters of introduction. ‘We Americans,’ he
remarked, ‘are a busy people. We have not time to attend to general
introductions. We gladly do what we can, but we cannot do what costs
time. Still, however, if the letter is brought to us by one who has
ideas, and who has the power of making us feel the magnetism of his
ideas, we will give to him our time, and everything we have to give.’
Niagara is seen to advantage in a severe winter. It is impossible for
ice to accumulate in front of the Canadian fall; but as vast masses are
formed all about the American, the contrast between the two becomes
far greater and more striking than in summer. According to the
figures usually given, the American is only one third the width of the
Canadian; but this measurement gives no idea of the difference between
the two, which lies chiefly in the fact that the sheet of water which
comes over the former is so thin that it is everywhere broken, and
white with foam; while in the Canadian fall it comes over in so deep
and solid a mass, that it is green throughout the whole Horse-shoe.
It is perfectly smooth, and there is not a bubble visible upon it.
Every piece of wood that comes over seems to glide down its surface;
the water itself being so unbroken as to appear almost as if it were
stationary and had no movement in it.
I do not know any other grand object of nature where the interest felt
at the moment in what is seen is so much heightened by what is not
seen, as in these great falls. They are grand in themselves to the eye;
but how much grander does the sight become, when it is accompanied by
the thought that what you see is the collected outflow of all those
vast lakes it has been taking you so many days to steam over and along,
lakes on all of which you lost sight of the land, just as if you had
been on the ocean itself, lakes larger than European kingdoms. Here you
have before you, gliding over that precipice, all the water these great
seas, fed by a thousand streams, are unable to retain in their own
basins.
[Sidenote: _Niagara._]
And behind you, in the seven miles from Queenston, you have in the deep
perpendicular-sided trough, cut in the solid limestone rock, a measure
of the excavating power of this descending flood, which has been for
so many ages, just like a chisel in a carpenter’s hand (the Horse-shoe
fall is now a gouge), chipping out this deep and wide channel. When
one reflects on the enormous weight of the falling water, surprise is
felt at its not working at a greater rate than, as is supposed, that of
twelve inches in twelve months.
When I was at Niagara there was what is called an ‘ice bridge’ a few
yards below the falls, and which, as it requires a continuance of
severe weather for its completion, does not occur, I was told, more
frequently than once in every nine or ten years.
I stayed at an hotel on the American side of the Suspension Bridge,
which is about a mile and a half from the falls. I was there three
days, and during that time I met two Canadians who had all their lives
been in the neighbourhood of the falls, and an American in business at
the place where I was staying, who had not yet seen the great sight,
and who felt no desire to see it.
I may here mention, that if we ought to pronounce Indian names in the
Indian fashion, we shall cease to talk about the falls of Niāgăra.
It was their practice to accent not the ante-penultimate, but the
penultimate syllable. For instance, they talked of Niăgāra, and
Ontărīo. In Ohīo, and Potōmac, if they are real Indian words, the true
Indian pronunciation has been retained.
I have already mentioned that during the time I was in the United
States I never found it uncomfortably cold. Nothing, however, of this
kind could be said of my experience of the climate of Canada. The only
ferry of those I had to cross, which had become impassable on account
of the accumulations of ice, was that into Canada at Detroit. This
was a bad beginning, and by it I lost a place I had paid for in an
hotel car. We had not gone far on Canadian soil before some of the
iron-work of the engine broke, in consequence of the intense cold of
the morning. At Niagara I was detained a day by a snow-storm. It was
so violent a storm that it put an end to all traffic for twenty-four
hours. The train I had intended using was to have left at 6.30 A.M. I
struggled to the station, through the snow, that had drifted during
the night to the depth of three feet, only to find that I had come to
no purpose. During the whole of the day you could not see ten yards
before you, the snow was driving and drifting so thickly. The next
morning when I left for Toronto, the thermometer was standing at
twelve degrees below zero; on the following morning, at Toronto it was
nineteen degrees below zero. I left Toronto for the east by the first
train that had been over the rails in that direction for some days.
While I was at Kingston there came on a second gale of wind, but this
time accompanied by blinding rain, every drop of which as it fell froze
on the zero-cold ground and snow. I was staying with the Bishop of
Ontario, and was to have been taken over the schools of the place, but
the day was such that the scholars were not able to leave their homes.
This rain continued all the next day, and, being a warm rain, it at
last turned the snow, which was unusually deep, into such an amount
of slush as one must see to believe. At last, after daily delays of
many hours each, and several mishaps on the road, to be attributed to
the mismanagement of the authorities of the bankrupt Canadian railway
companies, I reached Montreal at the end of the week, when the weather
suddenly, as in its other changes during the previous part of the
week, became calm, bright, and warm. But when I mention the changes I
experienced at the close of the winter in a single week, I must not
omit an instance of unchanging persistence the weather had exhibited
during the earlier part of the same winter. There had been forty-five
days at Montreal (but I was told that there was no record of any other
equal spell of cold), during which the markings of the thermometer had
been continuously below zero. This winter, however, of 1867-68 will be
memorable for its severity. In Minnesota thirty-six degrees, and in
Wisconsin thirty-one degrees below zero had been reached.
[Sidenote: _A Snow-bound Party._]
During the day that I was detained at the Niagara Suspension Bridge
Hotel, I had the company of about a dozen other travellers, snow-bound
like myself. The storm was too violent to admit of anyone going
outside; there was, therefore, nothing for us to do, except to sit
round the stove in front of the bar and talk away the time. Everybody
contributed what he could to the general stock of amusement, by making
or repeating jokes, or telling stories and adventures, the latter,
probably, sometimes participating in the nature of the former. I was
called upon to give a detailed account of my run to the Plains and
Rocky Mountains. When every other subject was exhausted, politics of
course came up. This, as is usual, led to loud denunciations of what is
called ‘the corruption’ of all the departments of the Government. ‘But,
Sir,’ said one of the party to me, in a determined and fierce voice,
‘the darndest corruption on this side creation is that of the British
Government. You give your Cabinet ministers very little, but they all
get rich. There are plenty of people who want their help. It was this
that enabled Lord Palmerston, during his long official life, to become
so enormously wealthy. We Americans keep ourselves well posted in these
matters. We have to transact too much business with your public men not
to know what we have to do.’ This was from the politician of the party.
‘Sir,’ said another to me, ‘no man can be blamed for travelling in this
weather, because no one would stir in it unless he had a big occasion.’
The theory was plausible, but no one present acknowledged that he had
himself been drawn away from home by ‘a big occasion.’
In the evening I went into the ladies’ drawing-room. I here found one
English and two American ladies. They were all young, and all appeared
to be on their wedding tour. One of the American ladies cried herself
to sleep because her husband had left her that he might play at cards
in the gentlemen’s drawing-room. The other took her husband’s absence
for the same purpose very philosophically, consoling herself with a
kind of dominoes she called ‘muggins.’