PART II

ACROSS THE PLAINS

_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 a 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 Depot 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[1]; 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, aerial 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 _diner 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!"

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Please pronounce _Arkansaw_, with the accent on the first.

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 cicadae, 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 canyon. 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 canyons, 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 L12 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._

_"Jerry is working in -------- It is a good country. You can get from 50

to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking. Tell me all about the affairs in the

States, and how all the folks get along."_

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

Canadas, and from the Canadas 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 Canyon, 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.

THE OLD AND NEW PACIFIC CAPITALS

THE OLD AND NEW PACIFIC CAPITALS

I

MONTEREY

The Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General

Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less important

than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for

topography. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouth of the

Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and Monterey itself is

cosily ensconced beside the barb. Thus the ancient capital of California

faces across the bay, while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low

hills and forest, bombards her left flank and rear with never-dying

surf. In front of the town, the long line of sea-beach trends north and

north-west, and then westward to enclose the bay. The waves which lap so

quietly about the jetties of Monterey grew louder and larger in the

distance; you can see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at

night, the outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the

moonlight and the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet

weather, the low, distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the

coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man. It would be hard to

find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to the

mind. Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. Sandpipers trot

in and out by troops after the retiring waves, trilling together in a

chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea-tangles, new to the European

eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes a whole whale's carcase, white

with carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there

along the sands. The waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their

translucent necks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing

and waning, up and down the long key-board of the beach. The foam of

these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis,

swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.

The interest is perpetually fresh. On no other coast that I know shall

you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's

greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of thunder in

the sound. The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep.

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach. Here and there a

lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and hunters. A rough,

spotty undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The crouching, hardy,

live oaks flourish singly or in thickets--the kind of wood for murderers

to crawl among--and here and there the skirts of the forest extend

downward from the hills with a floor of turf and long aisles of

pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard. Through this quaint desert the

railway cars drew near to Monterey from the junction at Salinas

City--though that and so many other things are now for ever altered--and

it was from here that you had the first view of the old township lying

in the sands, its white windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual

wind, and the first fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from

the sea.

The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of the

ocean. A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up into the

inland canyons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of

Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where you will, you have

but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific. You pass out

of the town to the south-west, and mount the hill among pine woods.

Glade, thicket, and grove surround you. You follow winding sandy tracks

that lead nowhither. You see a deer; a multitude of quail arises. But

the sound of the sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind

among the trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at

length you gain the summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened

vigour that same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for

now you are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer

only mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but

from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and from

down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river. The whole woodland

is begirt with thundering surges. The silence that immediately surrounds

you where you stand is not so much broken as it is haunted by this

distant, circling rumour. It sets your senses upon edge; you strain your

attention; you are clearly and unusually conscious of small sounds near

at hand; you walk listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the

Pacific is a sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.

When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn homeward.

All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those of Monterey it was the

surf that particularly invited me to prolong my walks. I would push

straight for the shore where I thought it to be nearest. Indeed, there

was scarce a direction that would not, sooner or later, have brought me

forth on the Pacific. The emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of

freedom and discovery in these excursions. I never in all my visits met

but one man. He was a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat,

and he carried an axe, though his true business at that moment was to

seek for straying cattle. I asked him what o'clock it was, but he seemed

neither to know nor care; and when he in his turn asked me for news of

his cattle, I showed myself equally indifferent. We stood and smiled

upon each other for a few seconds, and then turned without a word and

took our several ways across the forest.

One day--I shall never forget it--I had taken a trail that was new to

me. After a while the woods began to open, the sea to sound nearer hand.

I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile. A step or two farther,

and, without leaving the woods, I found myself among trim houses. I

walked through street after street, parallel and at right angles, paved

with sward and dotted with trees, but still undeniable streets, and each

with its name posted at the corner, as in a real town. Facing down the

main thoroughfare--"Central Avenue," as it was ticketed--I saw an

open-air temple, with benches and sounding-board, as though for an

orchestra. The houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no

sound but of the waves, no moving thing. I have never been in any place

that seemed so dream-like. Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and

its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this town had

plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps had been

deserted overnight. Indeed it was not so much like a deserted town as

like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with no one on the boards.

The barking of a dog led me at last to the only house still occupied,

where a Scots pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty

theatre. The place was "The Pacific Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside

Resort." Thither, in the warm season, crowds come to enjoy a life of

teetotalism, religion, and flirtation, which I am willing to think

blameless and agreeable. The neighbourhood at least is well selected.

The Pacific booms in front. Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse

in a wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the

piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise in

amateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits and

interests to surprise his brave old-country rivals. To the east, and

still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a hamlet, a haven

among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-gulls. Such scenes are

very similar in different climates; they appear homely to the eyes of

all; to me this was like a dozen spots in Scotland. And yet the boats

that ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design; and, if you

walk into the hamlet you will behold costumes and faces, and hear a

tongue, that are unfamiliar to the memory. The joss-stick burns, the

opium-pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured

paper--prayers, you would say, that had somehow missed their

destination--and a man guiding his upright pencil from right to left

across the sheet writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial

Empire.

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this seaboard

region. On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not smell salt

from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous tree-tops of

the other. For days together, a hot, dry air will overhang the town,

close as from an oven, yet healthful and aromatic in the nostrils. The

cause is not far to seek, for the woods are afire, and the hot wind is

blowing from the hills. These fires are one of the great dangers of

California. I have seen from Monterey as many as three at the same time,

by day a cloud of smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the

distance. A little thing will start them, and, if the wind be

favourable, they gallop over miles of country faster than a horse. The

inhabitants must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the

pleasant groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally

at stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry

up perennial fountains. California has been a land of promise in its

time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to perish, it

may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.

To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange piece

of experience. The fire passes through the underbrush at a run. Every

here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from root to summit,

scattering tufts of flame, and is quenched, it seems, as quickly. But

this last is only in semblance. For after this first squib-like

conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there remains behind a

deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very entrails of the tree. The

resin of the pitch-pine is principally condensed at the base of the bole

and in the spreading roots. Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing

flames, which are only as the match to the explosion, have already

scampered down the wind into the distance, the true harm is but

beginning for this giant of the woods. You may approach the tree from

one side, and see it, scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently

survivor of the peril. Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of

the column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer;

while underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are being

eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the fissures to the

surface. A little while and, without a nod of warning, the huge

pine-tree snaps off short across the ground, and falls prostrate with a

crash. Meanwhile the fire continues its silent business; the roots are

reduced to a fine ash; and long afterwards, if you pass by, you will

find the earth pierced with radiating galleries, and preserving the

design of all these subterranean spurs, as though it were the mould for

a new tree instead of the print of an old one. These pitch-pines of

Monterey are, with the single exception of the Monterey cypress, the

most fantastic of forest trees. No words can give an idea of the

contortion of their growth; they might figure without change in a circle

of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and at the rate at which trees

grow, and at which forest fires spring up and gallop through the hills

of California, we may look forward to a time when there will not be one

of them left standing in that land of their nativity. At least they

have not so much to fear from the axe, but perish by what may be called

a natural although a violent death; while it is man in his short-sighted

greed that robs the country of the nobler redwood. Yet a little while

and perhaps all the hills of seaboard California may be as bald as

Tamalpais.

I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so near

to lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have retained a

thrill from the experience. I wished to be certain whether it was the

moss, that quaint funereal ornament of Californian forests, which blazed

up so rapidly when the flame first touched the tree. I suppose I must

have been under the influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a

piece for my experiment, what should I do but walk up to a great pine

tree in a portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching,

strike a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The

tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a roaring

pillar of fire. Close by I could hear the shouts of those who were at

work combating the original conflagration. I could see the waggon that

had brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of open; I could even

catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood into the

sunlight. Had any one observed the result of my experiment my neck was

literally not worth a pinch of snuff; after a few minutes of passionate

expostulation I should have been run up to a convenient bough.

"To die for faction is a common evil;

But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil."

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. At night I went out

of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite distinct from the

other, and burning, as I thought, with even greater vigour.

But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious power

upon the climate. At sunset, for months together, vast, wet, melancholy

fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From the hill-top above

Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is always sad. The upper

air is still bright with sunlight; a glow still rests upon the Gabelano

Peak; but the fogs are in possession of the lower levels; they crawl in

scarves among the sandhills; they float, a little higher, in clouds of a

gigantic size and often of a wild configuration; to the south, where

they have struck the seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia,

they double back and spire up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow

touches, colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill and deadly as

they advance. The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh, and all

the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and filling their

cisterns with the brackish water of the sands. It takes but a little

while till the invasion is complete. The sea, in its lighter order, has

submerged the earth. Monterey is curtained in for the night in thick,

wet, salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain till day returns; and before

the sun's rays they slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to

the bosom of the sea. And yet often when the fog is thickest and most

chill, a few steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be

dry and warm and full of inland perfume.

MONTEREY

MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS

The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Founded by Catholic

missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of arms, a

Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from another, an

American capital when the first House of Representatives held its

deliberations, and then falling lower and lower from the capital of the

State to the capital of a county, and from that again, by the loss of

its charter and town lands, to a mere bankrupt village, its rise and

decline is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican

families in California.

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with which

the soil has changed hands. The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and

landless, like their former capital; and yet both it and they hold

themselves apart, and preserve their ancient customs and something of

their ancient air.

The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets,

economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were

water-courses in the rainy season, and at all times were rent up by

fissures four or five feet deep. There were no street lights. Short

sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers of the night, for

they were often high above the level of the roadway, and no one could

tell where they would be likely to begin or end. The houses were for the

most part built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old for so new a

country, some of very elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely

rooms, and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to

the heart. At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a

graveyard smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of

the chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either sex.

There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people sat

almost all day long playing cards. The smallest excursion was made on

horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse

or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican

housings. It struck me oddly to come across some of the _Cornhill_

illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's "Erema," and see all the characters

astride on English saddles. As a matter of fact, an English saddle is a

rarity even in San Francisco, and you may say a thing unknown in all the

rest of California. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you

saw not only Mexican saddles but true Vaquero riding--men always at the

hand-gallop up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner, urging

their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs,

checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a

square yard. The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly

un-American. The first ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to

something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian, although I do

not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all the country.

As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to find, in

that world of absolutely mannerless Americans, a people full of

deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing all things with grace and

decorum. In dress they ran to colour and bright sashes. Not even the

most Americanised could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose

into his hatband. Not even the most Americanised would descend to wear

the vile dress-hat of civilisation. Spanish was the language of the

streets. It was difficult to get along without a word or two of that

language for an occasion. The only communications in which the

population joined were with a view to amusement. A weekly public ball

took place with great etiquette, in addition to the numerous fandangoes

in private houses. There was a really fair amateur brass band. Night

after night serenaders would be going about the street, sometimes in a

company and with several instruments and voices together, sometimes

severally, each guitar before a different window. It was a strange thing

to lie awake in nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar

accompany, and one of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount

into the night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that

high-pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican

men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely

human, but altogether sad.

The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost all

the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was from the

same class, numerically so small, that the principal officials were

selected. This Mexican and that Mexican would describe to you his old

family estates, not one rood of which remained to him. You would ask him

how that came about, and elicit some tangled story back-foremost, from

which you gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing

men, and the Mexicans greedy like children, but no other certain fact.

Their merits and their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the

former landholders. It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled

with the sight of ready money; but they were gentle-folk besides, and

that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee craft.

Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it a reflection on

the other party to examine the terms with any great minuteness; nay,

suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it is ten to one they

would refuse from delicacy to object to it. I know I am speaking within

the mark, for I have seen such a case occur, and the Mexican, in spite

of the advice of his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb.

To have spoken in the matter, he said, above all to have let the other

party guess that he had seen a lawyer, would have "been like doubting

his word." The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been

brought up to understand all business as a competition in fraud, and

honesty itself to be a virtue which regards the carrying out, but not

the creation, of agreements. This single unworldly trait will account

for much of that revolution of which we are speaking. The Mexicans have

the name of being great swindlers, but certainly the accusation cuts

both ways. In a contest of this sort, the entire booty would scarcely

have passed into the hands of the more scrupulous race.

Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is not entirely seen how

far they have themselves been morally conquered. This is, of course, but

a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in the course of being

solved in the various States of the American Union. I am reminded of an

anecdote. Some years ago, at a great sale of wine, all the odd lots were

purchased by a grocer in a small way in the old town of Edinburgh. The

agent had the curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what

possible use he could have for such material. He was shown, by way of

answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to

imperial Tokay, were fermenting together. "And what," he asked, "do you

propose to call this?" "I'm no' very sure," replied the grocer, "but I

think it's going to turn out port." In the older Eastern States, I think

we may say that this hotch-potch of races is going to turn out English,

or thereabout. But the problem is the Territorial belt, and in the group

of States on the Pacific coast. Above all, in these last we may look to

see some singular hybrid--whether good or evil, who shall forecast? but

certainly original and all their own. In my little restaurant at

Monterey, we have sat down to table, day after day, a Frenchman, two

Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and a Scotsman: we had for common

visitors an American from Illinois, a nearly pure-blood Indian woman,

and a naturalised Chinese; and from time to time a Switzer and a German

came down from country ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific

coast is a foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each

race contributes something of its own. Even the despised Chinese have

taught the youth of California, none indeed of their virtues, but the

debasing use of opium. And chief among these influences is that of the

Mexicans.

The Mexicans, although in the State, are out of it. They still preserve

a sort of international independence, and keep their affairs snug to

themselves. Only four or five years ago, Vasquez the bandit, his troops

being dispersed and the hunt too hot for him in other parts of

California, returned to his native Monterey, and was seen publicly in

her streets and saloons, fearing no man. The year that I was there there

occurred two reputed murders. As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile

speakers of each other and of every one behind his back, it is not

possible for me to judge how much truth there may have been in these

reports; but in the one case every one believed, and in the other some

suspected, that there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for an

instant of taking the authorities into their counsel. Now this is, of

course, characteristic enough of the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy

feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a word in

this inaction. Even when I spoke to them upon the subject, they seemed

not to understand my surprise; they had forgotten the traditions of

their own race and upbringing, and become, in a word, wholly

Mexicanised.

Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost

entirely in their business transactions upon each other's worthless

paper. Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally

penniless Miguel. It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. Credit in

these parts has passed into a superstition. I have seen a strong,

violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and getting nothing

but an exchange of waste paper. The very storekeepers are averse to

asking for cash payments, and are more surprised than pleased when they

are offered. They fear there must be something under it, and that you

mean to withdraw your custom from them. I have seen the enterprising

chemist and stationer begging me with fervour to let my account run on,

although I had my purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness

of the case, partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican

tradition which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be

notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit for

the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey. Now this villainous

habit of living upon "tick" has grown into Californian nature. I do not

mean that the American and European storekeepers of Monterey are as lax

as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in many parts of the State

expect unlimited credit, and profit by it in the meanwhile without a

thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned the

advantage to be gained from this; they lead on the farmer into

irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave

hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its

revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you

may see Americans bound in the same chains with which they themselves

had formerly bound the Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies,

like certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather than to the

race that holds and tills it for the moment.

In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County. The new

county seat, Salinas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain under the

Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character. The land is

held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which are another

legacy of Mexican days, and form the present chief danger and disgrace

of California; and the holders are mostly of American or British birth.

We have here in England no idea of the troubles and inconveniences which

flow from the existence of these large landholders--land-thieves,

land-sharks, or land-grabbers, they are more commonly and plainly

called. Thus the townlands of Monterey are all in the hands of a single

man. How they came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and rightly

or wrongly the man is hated with a great hatred. His life has been

repeatedly in danger. Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was

stopped and examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen

thirsting for his blood. A certain house on the Salinas road, they say,

he always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter sent him

warning long ago. But a year since he was publicly pointed out for death

by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney is a man too well

known in California, but a word of explanation is required for English

readers. Originally an Irish drayman, he rose, by his command of bad

language, to almost dictatorial authority in the State; throned it there

for six months or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and

conflagrations; was first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed

by his San Francisco Vigilantes and three Gatling guns; completed his

own ruin by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-backer party;

and had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of the

hands of his rebellious followers. It was while he was at the top of his

fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his battle-cry against

Chinese labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land-thieves; and his

one articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to "hang David Jacks." Had

the town been American, in my private opinion, this would have been

done years ago. Land is a subject on which there is no jesting in the

West, and I have seen my friend the lawyer drive out of Monterey to

adjust a competition of titles with the face of a captain going into

battle and his Smith-and-Wesson convenient to his hand.

On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old

friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in

year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in

supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper

they will fall in debt--a burlesque injustice in a new country, where

labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which

explains the prevailing discontent and the success of the demagogue

Kearney.