to the Irish fund when he could; but the outcome of the fight in
Committee Boom No. 15 had been too much for him, and he would stoutly
maintain that never again, so long as the “traitors” who had turned
against Parnell were in the ascendant, would he interest himself in
furthering Home Rule—threads of vital connection which were a little
strange, I thought, between points so widely severed as St. Stephen’s
and the deserts of Arizona.
Elsewhere I have already sketched in outline our trip as we walked south
together from Durango to the San Juan, then through the Navajo
Reservation to the high plateau of northern New Mexico, where, utterly
deserted by fair weather, we camped for a week, while a cold wave swept
over us, forcing the thermometer down to ten and twelve degrees below
zero, and nearly freezing us and our animals in the still cold of the
winter nights.
Even after we got under way again and were making progress southward in
the direction of the “rimrock” of the Mogollon Mountains, persistent
ill-luck followed us in the shape of almost nightly falls of snow and
rain, which added nothing to the comfort of sleeping on the ground or
walking across an almost trackless waste. But if we were disappointed
here, Price’s promise of Indian summer was abundantly fulfilled when
once we had waded through the snow in the great primeval forests that
cover the northern slopes of the Mogollons, and made the abrupt descent
of the “rimrock.” It was like the contrast of Florida with our Northern
winter. The live-oak and budding cottonwood and the warm sun and
sprouting grass gave us royal welcome from the cold and snow beyond;
and, at the end of the first day’s journey in this region, we came out
upon a ranch. It was thirty miles to the nearest neighbor, and the
ranchman and his wife were glad to see anyone, even casual
“burro-punchers,” like Price and me. There chanced to be a considerable
company at the ranch that night. An outfit of three men who were hunting
mountain lion through the range for the sake of the bounty on their
scalps had come there to camp, bringing with them the carcass of a bear.
And the postman, whose beat took him from the Santa Fé line southward
through some Mormon settlements and on to scattered ranches north of the
Tonto Basin, was also quartered there. So that we sat down more than a
dozen strong to dine on bear steak and potatoes and bread and coffee;
and when dinner was over, Price and I again had the good fortune to find
that our tobacco suited well the taste of the company. We were gathered
now in the living-room of the cabin. Some of the men were seated on the
floor and others in rough, hand-made chairs about a wood fire in a
large, open fireplace. The talk ranged at random over phases of hard
living known to such men as these. It was varied and rich and sometimes
racy. In it Price shone as a bright, particular star. None had travelled
the Southwest so thoroughly as he, or experienced so much of its
characteristic life. Then his native readiness at narrative stood him in
good stead, and, penniless prospector that he was, he held unchallenged
the centre of the stage.
The door of the dining-room stood open, and, when I had finished my
pipe, I joined the ranchman’s wife, who sat beside the table in a
rocking-chair, holding in her arms her oldest child, a boy of five or
six. She seemed glad to have someone to talk to. The conversation at
table had swept from end to end in a manner diverting to her, but in
which she as little dreamed of joining as a bird would venture with
untried wings into a high wind. She was too delicately reared to be at
home in the thickening tobacco-smoke of the living-room and so she was
alone with the child, the hired woman being in the kitchen. I praised
the country side which she and her husband had chosen as their home, and
told her how well it contrasted with a region only a few miles to the
north; but, if I found a way to her heart at all, it was in genuine
admiration of the boy, whose light hair rested in moist curls about his
glowing face, as he lay sleeping in his mother’s arms. She was not a
discontented woman—far from it; she was young, and her eyes shone with
health and with vital interest in the things about her. But it was
rarely that she saw anyone from the world outside, and I was a stranger,
and when I owned to having been in the Northwest, she told me eagerly
that her own people and her husband’s lived “back east in Minnesota,”
where they both were born and bred.
How can I suggest the pathos of it? She was not complaining and yet, as
she went on telling me of an earlier time, it was almost as a captive
might have spoken of the wide range of living when he was free. Life in
constant contact with her friends and the breadth of their many
interests was in such striking contrast to existence on a ranch, with
the nearest neighbor thirty miles in the offing, and with never a look
from year to year over the rugged hills that formed the horizon.
One could see at a glance the opposite effects of the change upon the
two natures. Her husband, native-born and country-bred, like herself,
and schooled as a man must be whose bringing up is in a community which
draws its blood and traditions pure from New England, yet had become
more a frontiersman every year, in whom the memories of earlier things
faded fast before the dominant realities of his new surroundings. She,
on the contrary, cherished these memories of her own—her home and
friends and church associations and Chautauqua circle (she told me
particularly of that) until they were enshrined within her, and one
could but see that, however loneliness might oppress her, she had an
escape which must have furnished at times an enjoyment keener, perhaps,
than any which real experience would have brought.
I have forgotten its name, but I think that it was known as “Young’s
Valley,” a region some distance south of the “rimrock” and north of the
hills which hem in the Tonto Basin. There were several ranches there,
and a well-defined trail led on, by way of San Reno Pass, to Phœnix.
When we entered the valley Price was all for veering off to the
southwest and reaching Phœnix by the Natural Bridge, which he wished me
to see. We left the trail near the first cabin which we passed in the
valley, a deserted cabin for the time, and struck across the grass-grown
hills in search of another way. Soon we were in a maze of trails; they
were leading in every direction, but they were cattle-paths, and we came
upon herds feeding over the winter-brown hills. It was a gently rolling
country at the first, where Price had not the smallest difficulty in
steering a course; for, although he had never been there before, yet the
way had been described to him and he had no fear of losing it. Our only
danger lay, apparently, in exhausting our provisions before reaching an
inhabited region beyond. But we thought little of that, and entered
light-heartedly enough upon an exploration that was new and attractive
to us both.
Trouble began with the weakening of our burros. We had very little grain
when we left the Tonto trail, and we counted upon fodder enough from a
grazing country. But the grass grew thinner as we went, and the leanness
of the cattle attested the leanness of the land, until we began to fear
that our beasts would not have strength enough to pull through.
Moreover, the country became increasingly rough, so that the effort of
travel was the greater. Soon there came a day when our animals were weak
and tottering under their loads, and we ourselves had to begin the march
on a breakfast of tea and a few boiled beans, which exhausted our store.
Still Price was confident of getting through, and, if the burros could
hold out, there was prospect of plenty by night.
In the middle of the morning we found lying beside the trail a cow that
was plainly dying. For an hour we worked over her, trying to discover
evidences of a wound or of a broken leg, and trying, too, to ease her
pain. I left her alive regretfully, but Price advised against shooting
her.
Matters grew serious that afternoon. The trail became hopelessly lost,
so that not even Price, with his developed instinct, could find it
again. We were in the heart of the hills now, with cañons opening in
strange confusion about us. One after another we explored them, only to
find each a “box-cañon” at the end. Price was sure that our desired
country lay just beyond, and it was maddening, late in the day, to
acknowledge that he could find no way out but the one by which we
entered. It was a sorry retreat; hungry and worn we went supperless into
camp. By rare good luck, however, we hit upon camping-ground where there
was more grass than we had seen for some time, and in the morning our
burros and the pony were comparatively revived, fit again for a hard
journey. And we gave it them.
Price and I had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, and very
little then. Meanwhile we had been working hard in keen mountain air,
and I was so hungry by the time that we got back to the cow, now dead
beside the trail, that I proposed our eating some of her. Price quickly
put an end to the plan, however, not on hygienic grounds, but by
explaining that the cattlemen, if they found her mutilated, would
conclude that she had been killed, and would make matters lively for us
in consequence, hanging being the not uncommon penalty for this offence.
One does not keep close count of days in wandering over a frontier, and
it was only an aggravation of our plight to remember that it was not
Sunday merely but Christmas-day as well. But if Christmas heightened the
sense of hardship, it furnished an admirable setting to its end. By
trusting his instinct for a short cut, Price brought us out in the
middle of the afternoon upon open hills, from which we not only saw a
section of Young’s Valley, but, rising clear from the middle of it, a
column of blue smoke from the chimney of a ranchman’s cabin. We wasted
no time in covering the intervening miles and then we lifted,
light-heartedly, the latch of the road-gate and, with the easy assurance
of the frontier, drove our animals into the yard beside the corral. For
some reason we had not been seen from the cabin, so Price walked on to
the door, while I mounted guard over the burros. From a seat in the sun
on an old hen-coop I could watch them as they nibbled the short grass,
while from the cabin came peals of laughter, denoting that Price had
fallen among friends who were keeping Christmas festival.
I was willing enough to rest outside, knowing that we had reached a
hospitable roof and that a dinner was assured. Sitting there for some
time, I presently began to question what was keeping Price, when the
cabin-door opened and two women appeared. As they walked down the
footpath to the gate, I gathered that they were neighbors returning from
a Christmas call. But this was the least interesting inference, and I
was totally at a loss for others. The wonder grew as they came nearer.
They were young and faultlessly dressed, and one of them was beautiful.
Their dress was of the kind that charms with its perfect simplicity and
the air of natural distinction with which it is worn. They rested frank
eyes on me for a moment as they passed and nodded pleasantly, speaking
their thanks with sweet voices, as I stood holding open the gate. Who
they were remained a mystery, and I was content to have it so, for they
left me not without a sense of Christmas visitation, which stirred again
the memories of my own “God’s country.”
The ranchman was a Virginian, tall, fair-eyed, and soft of speech, and
when he and Price came out together they were stanch friends on the
strength of an earlier acquaintance, and we had the freedom of the
ranch. We unpacked and corralled the animals and then made ready for
dinner. Not for two days had we tasted food, and now we were seated with
our host and hostess and their two sons at a table which groaned under
sweet potatoes and roast corn and piles of bread and great dishes full
of steaming “hog and hominy,” and with it all, the best of Christmas
cheer. For two days we stayed at the Virginian’s ranch and then, having
purchased from him a fresh store of food, we resumed the march by way of
the Tonto Basin and Fort McDowell to Phœnix.
On New-year’s-day we were camped at Fort McDowell; and, when we set out
early on the next morning, there remained but about thirty miles to
Phœnix, so we resolved to cover it in a single march. Night found us
still some miles from the city, but the night was clear and flooded with
moonlight. The moon made plain the way, yet played fantastically over
the face of the country. Long reaches of white sand were converted into
Arabian deserts, with pilgrim caravans moving across them; the irrigated
ranches were transformed into tropical gardens, whose luxuriance was
heightened by the exquisite softness of the night, and then there were
stretches of uncompromising Arizona desert, dusty and cactus-grown and
redolent of alkali.
It was nearing midnight when we entered the town. Price directed the way
to a corral where he was known, and where we left the animals feasting
on fresh alfalfa, while we fared forth to see his friends. It was
precisely as though Price had invited me around to his club. He led the
way to a saloon, and as we entered it, I saw at once its typical
character. At the left of the entrance was a bar, gorgeous with mirrors
and cut glass, while down the deep recesses of the room were faro and
roulette tables and tables for poker. The groups about them were formed
of “cow-punchers,” and prospectors and “Greasers” and Chinamen, and even
Indians, all mingling and intermingling with a freedom that suggested
that in gambling there is a touch of nature that makes the whole world
kin.
But more immediately interesting to us was a group which stood beside
the bar. It was made up, as I found, of politicians, high in territorial
office, all of whom knew Price and hailed him cordially while asking
after his luck. For some time we stood talking with them, then one of
their number, himself not a politician but a business man, proposed our
joining him at supper. We accepted, I the more delightedly because he,
of all the group, had most attracted me. Tall and very handsome, he had
the bearing of a gentleman, and what he told me of himself confirmed my
own impression of a richly varied past. Far into the night we talked,
and I could well believe him when he said that the fascination of the
life which he had led on the frontier had so far grown upon him that,
while he was glad to go back at times to his former home in New York, he
could no longer remain contented there, hearing as he always did after a
few months, at most, the call back to the wild freedom of the plains. It
was under the spell of what he said, enforced by my little experience as
a “burro-puncher,” that I went to sleep that night on a bed of alfalfa
in the corral; and when I wakened in the morning and found letters
urging my return to the East, I was conscious of an indifference to the
idea which was wholly new to my experience.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS
If anything is wanting to darken the picture of life in city slums, it
is a sense of the needlessness of much of the suffering. And this is the
sense which I cannot escape in looking back upon a winter in Chicago,
from the vantage point of nearly a year of walking and working through
regions west of that city. I left Chicago in May of 1892, and entered
San Francisco in February of the following year, having gone on foot, in
the meantime, through Illinois and southern Minnesota and western Iowa,
and almost from end to end of Nebraska and Colorado and through some of
New Mexico and much of Arizona and California. It was not in the
character of a tramp, but as a wage-earner, that I made the journey; and
the only notable fact about it was that I not only never lacked for
labor, but I almost never had to ask for it, having scores of
opportunities of work pressed upon me by employers hard up for hands. I
am well aware of the abnormal in my experiment and of its little worth
apart from the value of experience to myself, and I know how slight a
connection with the deeper causes which give rise to congestion in labor
centres the fact of ready employment in the country may have. Yet, as
one result of personal contact, I cannot help seeing much of the misery
of the mass in the light of individuals suffering wretchedly for want of
knowledge of a better chance.
We speak in old-fashioned phrase of a city’s slums as though they were a
local evil in the town, quite remote in connection with the rest of the
corporate whole, while in truth we know, in our haunting, new-found
knowledge of social solidarity, that they form a sore which denotes
disease in every part of the body politic. The conviction grows upon us
that it is often at the cost of much suffering to our kind that we have
food to eat and raiment to put on, and the immunity from personal
responsibility which once we felt in paying high prices for our wares is
fast being undermined by increased acquaintance with the ramifications
of the “sweating system.” Indeed, we seem to see that, from the very
frame of things, if one enjoys, another suffers, and that the unwitting
oppressors of the poor are often the poor themselves, while the
destruction of the poor is their poverty. Men tell us that things were
growing worse, and that hope lies that way, because it points to
ultimate dissolution and a new order. I find it impossible to share this
form of optimism, and I cannot see that things are really getting worse,
but rather incomparably better as measured, for example, by the standard
of the last century of industrial progress. And so far from seeing hope
in a belief that matters are getting worse, I find it rather in the view
that much that is worst in modern life is fast becoming intolerable in a
society which grows increasingly conscious of vital interdependence and
relationship. Meanwhile the concrete facts remain, and here is a glimpse
of some of them as they appear in a partial record of fragments of two
days’ experience in Chicago.
I was working as a hand-truckman in a factory far out on Blue Island
Avenue. My wages were $1.50 a day, and I was paying for board and
lodging, in a tenement across the way, $4.25 a week. As one result, I
was saving money and would soon be able to leave the job and write up my
notes, while widening my acquaintance with the town before looking for
other work. Already I had a little knowledge of the city. For two weeks
after entering it I had been among its unemployed and had suffered some
and had seen the real suffering among others of my class, before I found
occupation in a West-side factory.
It was during those two weeks that I came to know a widow, with whom
this tale is first concerned. I met her early in December; it was now
nearing the end of January, and we factory hands were marking with
delight the lengthening of the days, for we were beginning to have a
little daylight left when work was over. At last one afternoon the
setting sun came pouring through the kitchen window while we were
washing up for supper at Mrs. Schultz’s boarding-house. That was because
it was Saturday, and we had quit at five o’clock, being given, as was
the custom in the factory, a half hour on Saturday afternoons.
The usual week’s end excitement was running high among the men. Gibes
and louder talk than common were rife, as black hands and faces came
white from soap and successive basins of hot water. Some of the men were
going in the evening to a “show,” others to a “fancy-dress ball,” and a
few were saying nothing. We scattered widely after supper, leaving the
house to the family, which must have been a welcome change to them, for
generally, through the week, we all foregathered in the sitting-room at
night and romped with the children and played cards until bed-time.
Mrs. Stone will serve as the widow’s name, and my first errand that
evening took me to her home, which was in the basement of a building on
Boston Avenue. We were both concerned in pressing a claim which she had
upon her husband’s people, a highly just claim, I thought; for he had
deserted her some time before his death, leaving her alone in the
support of herself and their two children. Why she had ever come to the
city, I could never make clearly out, beyond what had seemed to be to
her a strong appeal to her reason that, if she must make her own living
and the children’s, she could hope to do it better in town than in the
country where she was born and bred. And the marvel was that she had
succeeded in keeping them all alive. The city had, of course, furnished
an awful disillusionment. The children proved an insuperable barrier to
employment at domestic service, and, failing to find any other labor,
she was rescued finally from starvation by getting a job from a
“sweater.” She deserved success, for she was an heroic creature. To hear
her describe the struggle, you would gather that hers had been the best
of luck. She merely wanted a chance to work, so that they might live;
and had she not found it, just when she thought, for lack of it, that
they must starve?
From the sweater’s shop she would carry the goods two miles to her home,
walking both ways, for she could not afford car-fare. Then all day and
through much of the night she made the garments. They were boys’ waists,
and the materials, ready cut, besides the necessary thread and buttons,
were furnished her. There was left for her to do all the remaining work,
down to sewing on the buttons and making the button-holes, and she was
paid for the finished waists at the rate of thirty-five cents a dozen.
It was hard, she did admit, to feed and clothe her family and pay the
rent on a wage-rate like that, and she was near to going under when
another and a crowning stroke of fortune fell. In answer to a notice
tacked on her door, two women, who worked in a neighboring book-bindery,
applied for board, and each agreed to pay two dollars a week. The five
then lived together in the basement-room, whose furniture consisted
chiefly of dry-goods boxes, but the boarders took kindly to the home and
the children, and things had gone comfortably ever since. Gradually the
children, a boy of nine and a girl two years younger, were learning to
help at some of the simpler forms of sewing and in the housework.
This, I beg to interpolate, was the small beginning of Mrs. Stone’s
success. Haying shrewdness as well as energy, she soon discovered that
keeping boarders was more profitable than making waists, and so she
developed that side of her enterprise. When I saw her last, in the
following May, she was mistress of a well-appointed mechanics’
boarding-house on Milwaukee Avenue, but her troubles had taken new form,
for the contamination of the slums had begun to appear in her son, who
was fast developing into an incorrigible, and she had sent for me in
order to consult about a plan of placing him in a reformatory.
But to return to the February evening, on which I called to talk with
Mrs. Stone about a claim upon her husband’s people: I found her at home.
One ran little risk of failing to find Mrs. Stone at home, her
engagements abroad being confined to trips to the sweater’s shop for
materials. I heard the swift clatter of her sewing-machine as I walked
down the steps from the filthy pavement to the door of the basement
where she lived. The room had always to me an effect of being
brilliantly lighted. It was due to the illumination of two large lamps
which were kept faultlessly clean and were burning often in the day as
well as night, and in part to the general cleanliness of the room, not
to mention the cheerfulness which radiated from Mrs. Stone. She turned
from her machine as I drew up an empty soap-box and sat down in front of
her, and one would have thought, from the contagion of her manner, that
she never knew any mood but one of hopeful courage. But she had no time
to spare, and when our talk was ended, she turned again to work, while I
went over to another corner and chatted with the children and the
boarders.