I LAND IN NEW YORK AND TAKE A HAND IN THE GAME
The steamer _Iowa_, from Glasgow, made port, after a long and stormy
voyage, on Whitsunday, 1870. She had come up during the night, and
cast anchor off Castle Garden. It was a beautiful spring morning,
and as I looked over the rail at the miles of straight streets, the
green heights of Brooklyn, and the stir of ferryboats and pleasure
craft on the river, my hopes rose high that somewhere in this
teeming hive there would be a place for me. What kind of a place
I had myself no clear notion of. I would let that work out as it
could. Of course I had my trade to fall back on, but I am afraid
that is all the use I thought of putting it to. The love of change
belongs to youth, and I meant to take a hand in things as they
came along. I had a pair of strong hands, and stubbornness enough
to do for two; also a strong belief that in a free country, free
from the dominion of custom, of caste, as well as of men, things
would somehow come right in the end, and a man get shaken into the
corner where he belonged if he took a hand in the game. I think I
was right in that. If it took a lot of shaking to get me where I
belonged, that was just what I needed. Even my mother admits that
now. To tell the truth, I was tired of hammer and saw. They were
indissolubly bound up with my dreams of Elizabeth that were now
gone to smash. Therefore I hated them. And straightway, remembering
that the day was her birthday, and accepting the fact as a good
omen, I rebuilt my air-castles and resolved to try on a new tack.
So irrational is human nature at twenty-one, when in love. And
isn't it good that it is?
In all of which I have made no account of a factor which is at
the bottom of half our troubles with our immigrant population, so
far as they are not of our own making: the loss of reckoning that
follows uprooting; the cutting loose from all sense of responsibility,
with the old standards gone, that makes the politician's job so
profitable in our large cities, and that of the patriot and the
housekeeper so wearisome. We all know the process. The immigrant
has no patent on it. It afflicts the native, too, when he goes to
a town where he is not known. In the slum it reaches its climax in
the second generation, and makes of the Irishman's and the Italian's
boys the "toughs" who fight the battles of Hell's Kitchen and Frog
Hollow. It simply means that we are creatures of environment, that
a man everywhere is largely what his neighbors and his children
think him to be, and that government makes for our moral good
too, dreamers and anarchists to the contrary notwithstanding. But,
simple as it is, it has been too long neglected for the safety of
the man and of the State. I am not going to discuss here plans for
mending this neglect, but I can think of three that would work; one
of them does work, if not up to the top notch--the public school.
In its ultimate development as the neighborhood centre of things,
I would have that the first care of city government, always and
everywhere, at whatever expense. An efficient parish districting is
another. I think we are coming to that. The last is a rigid annual
enrolment--the school census is good, but not good enough--for
vaccination purposes, jury duty, for military purposes if you
please. I do not mean for conscription, but for the ascertainment
of the fighting strength of the State in case of need--for anything
that would serve as an excuse. It is the enrolment itself that I
think would have a good effect in making the man feel that he is
counted on for something; that he belongs as it were, instead of
standing idle and watching a procession go by, in which there is
no place for him; which is only another way of saying that it is
his right to harass it and levy tribute as he can. The enrolment
for voting comes too late. By that time he may have joined the
looters' army.
So as properly to take my own place in the procession, if not in
the army referred to, as I conceived the custom of the country to
be, I made it my first business to buy a navy revolver of the largest
size, investing in the purchase exactly one-half of my capital. I
strapped the weapon on the outside of my coat and strode up Broadway,
conscious that I was following the fashion of the country. I knew
it upon the authority of a man who had been there before me and had
returned, a gold digger in the early days of California; but America
was America to us. We knew no distinction of West and East. By
rights there ought to have been buffaloes and red Indians charging
up and down Broadway. I am sorry to say that it is easier even
to-day to make lots of people over there believe that, than that
New York is paved, and lighted with electric lights, and quite as
civilized as Copenhagen. They will have it that it is in the wilds.
I saw none of the signs of this, but I encountered a friendly
policeman, who, sizing me and my pistol up, tapped it gently with
his club and advised me to leave it home, or I might get robbed of
it. This, at first blush, seemed to confirm my apprehensions; but
he was a very nice policeman, and took time to explain, seeing
that I was very green. And I took his advice and put the revolver
away, secretly relieved to get rid of it. It was quite heavy to
carry around.
I had letters to the Danish Consul and to the President of the
American Banknote Company, Mr. Goodall. I think perhaps he was not
then the president, but became so afterward. Mr. Goodall had once
been wrecked on the Danish coast and rescued by the captain of
the lifesaving crew, a friend of my family. But they were both in
Europe, and in just four days I realized that there was no special
public clamor for my services in New York, and decided to go West.
A missionary in Castle Garden was getting up a gang of men for the
Brady's Bend Iron Works on the Allegheny River, and I went along.
We started a full score, with tickets paid, but only two of us
reached the Bend. The rest calmly deserted in Pittsburg and went
their own way. Now here was an instance of what I have just been
saying. Not one of them, probably, would have thought of doing it
on the other side. They would have carried out their contract as
a matter of course. Here they broke it as a matter of course, the
minute it didn't suit them to go on. Two of them had been on our
steamer, and the thought of them makes me laugh even now. One was
a Dane who carried an immense knapsack that was filled with sausages,
cheese, and grub of all kinds when he came aboard. He never let
go of it for a moment on the voyage. In storm and sunshine he was
there, shouldering his knapsack. I think he slept with it. When I
last saw him hobbling down a side street in Pittsburg, he carried
it still, but one end of it hung limp and hungry, and the other was
as lean as a bad year. The other voyager was a jovial Swede whose
sole baggage consisted of an old musket, a blackthorn stick, and
a barometer glass, tied up together. The glass, he explained, was
worth keeping; it might some day make an elegant ruler. The fellow
was a blacksmith, and I mistrust that he could not write.
Adler and I went on to Brady's Bend. Adler was a big, explosive
German who had been a reserve officer, I think, in the Prussian
army. Fate had linked us together when on the steamer the meat
served in the steerage became so bad as to offend not only our
palates, but our sense of smell. We got up a demonstration, marching
to see the captain in a body, Adler and I carrying a tray of the
objectionable meat between us. As the spokesman, I presented the
case briefly and respectfully, and all would have gone well had not
the hot blood of Adler risen at the wrong moment, when the captain
was cautiously exploring the scent of the rejected food. With
a sudden upward jerk he caused that official's nose to disappear
momentarily in the dish, while he exploded in voluble German. The
result was an instant rupture of diplomatic relations. Adler was
put in the lock-up, but set fiee again immediately. He spent the
rest of the voyage in his bunk shouting dire threats of disaster
impending from the "Norddeutsche Consul," once he reached New York.
But we were all too glad to get ashore to think of vengeance then.
[Illustration: Brady's Bend as I knew it]
Adler found work at the blast-furnace, while I was set to building
huts for the miners on the east bank of the river where a clearing
had been made and called East Brady. On the other side of the
Allegheny the furnaces and rolling mills were hidden away in a
narrow, winding valley that set back into the forest-clad hills,
growing deeper and narrower with every mile. It was to me, who had
been used to seeing the sun rise and set over a level plain where
the winds of heaven blew as they listed, from the first like
a prison. I climbed the hills only to find that there were bigger
hills beyond--an endless sea of swelling billows of green without
a clearing in it. I spent all Sunday roaming through it, miles
and miles, to find an outlook from which I might see the end; but
there was none. A horrible fit of homesickness came upon me. The
days I managed to get through by working hard and making observations
on the American language. In this I had a volunteer assistant in
Julia, the pretty, barefooted daughter of a coal-miner, who hung
around and took an interest in what was going on. But she disappeared
after I had asked her to explain what setting one's cap for any
one meant. I was curious because I had heard her mother say to
a neighbor that Julia was doing that to me. But the evenings were
very lonesome. The girl in our boarding-house washed dishes always
to one tune, "The Letter that Never Came." It was not a cheerful
tune and not a cheerful subject, for I had had no news from home
since I left. I can hear her yet, shrieking and clattering her
dishes, with the frogs yelling accompaniment in the creek that
mumbled in the valley. I never could abide American frogs since.
There is rest in the ko-ax, ko-ax! of its European brother, but
the breathless yi! yi! of our American frogs makes me feel always
as if I wanted to die--which I don't.
In making the clearing, I first saw an American wood-cutter swing
an axe, and the sight filled me with admiration for the man and
the axe both. It was a "double-bitter," and he a typical long-armed
and long-limbed backwoodsman. I also had learned to use the axe,
but anything like the way he swung it, first over one, then over
the other shoulder, making it tell in long, clean cuts at every
blow, I had never dreamt of. It was splendid. I wished myself back
in Copenhagen just long enough to tell the numskulls there, who
were distrustful of American tools, which were just beginning to
come into the market, that they didn't know what they were talking
about. Of course it was reasonable that the good tools should come
from the country where they had good use for them.
There was a settlement of honest Welshmen in the back hills, and
the rumor that a Dane had come into the valley reached it in due
course. It brought down a company of four sturdy miners, who trudged
five miles over bad land of a Sunday to see what I was like. The
Danes who live in Welsh song and story must have been grievous
giants, for they were greatly disgusted at sight of me, and spoke
their minds about it without reserve, even with some severity, as
if I were guilty of some sort of an imposition on the valley.
It could hardly have been this introduction that tempted me to try
coal-mining. I have forgotten how it came about--probably through
some temporary slackness in the building trade; but I did try, and
one day was enough for me. The company mined its own coal. Such as
it was, it cropped out of the hills right and left in narrow veins,
sometimes too shallow to work, seldom affording more space to the
digger than barely enough to permit him to stand upright. You did
not go down through a shaft, but straight in through the side of
a hill to the bowels of the mountain, following a track on which a
little donkey drew the coal to the mouth of the mine and sent it
down the incline to run up and down a hill a mile or more by its own
gravity before it reached the place of unloading. Through one of
these we marched in, Adler and I, one summer morning with new pickaxes
on our shoulders and nasty little oil lamps fixed in our hats to
light us through the darkness where every second we stumbled over
chunks of slate rock, or into pools of water that oozed through from
above. An old miner whose way lay past the fork in the tunnel where
our lead began showed us how to use our picks and the timbers to
brace the slate that roofed over the vein, and left us to ourselves
in a chamber perhaps ten feet wide and the height of a man.
We were to be paid by the ton, I forget how much, but it was very
little, and we lost no time getting to work. We had to dig away
the coal at the floor with our picks, lying on our knees to do it,
and afterward drive wedges under the roof to loosen the mass. It
was hard work, and, entirely inexperienced as we were, we made but
little headway. As the day wore on, the darkness and silence grew
very oppressive, and made us start nervously at the least thing.
The sudden arrival of our donkey with its cart gave me a dreadful
fright. The friendly beast greeted us with a joyous bray and rubbed
its shaggy sides against us in the most companionable way. In the
flickering light of my lamp I caught sight of its long ears waving
over me--I don't believe I had seen three donkeys before in my
life; there were none where I came from--and heard that demoniac
shriek, and I verily believe I thought the evil one had come for
me in person. I know that I nearly fainted.
That donkey was a discerning animal. I think it knew when it first
set eyes on us that we were not going to overwork it; and we didn't.
When, toward evening, we quit work, after narrowly escaping being
killed by a large stone that fell from the roof in consequence of
our neglect to brace it up properly, our united efforts had resulted
in barely filling two of the little carts, and we had earned, if
I recollect aright, something like sixty cents each. The fall of
the roof robbed us of all desire to try mining again. It knocked
the lamps from our hats, and, in darkness that could almost be felt,
we groped our way back to the light along the track, getting more
badly frightened as we went. The last stretch of way we ran, holding
each other's hands as though we were not men and miners, but two
frightened children in the dark.
As we emerged from the damp gap in the mountain side, the sunset
was upon the hills. Peaceful sounds came up from the valley where
the shadows lay deep. Gangs of men were going home from the day's
toil to their evening rest It seemed to me that I had been dead
and had come back to life. The world was never so wondrous fair.
My companion stood looking out over the landscape with hungry eyes.
Neither of us spoke, but when the last gleam had died out in the
window of the stone church we went straight to the company's store
and gave up our picks. I have never set foot in a coal mine since,
and have not the least desire to do so.
I was back in the harness of the carpenter-shop when, in the
middle of July, the news struck down in our quiet community like
a bombshell that France had declared war on Prussia; also that
Denmark was expected to join her forces to those of her old ally
and take revenge for the great robbery of 1864. I dropped my tools
the moment I heard it, and flew rather than ran to the company's
office to demand my time; thence to our boarding-house to pack.
Adler reasoned and entreated, called it an insane notion, but,
when he saw that nothing would stop me, lent a hand in stuffing
my trunk, praying pathetically between pulls that his countrymen
would make short work of me, as they certainly would of France. I
heeded nothing. All the hot blood of youth was surging through me.
I remembered the defeat, the humiliation of the flag I loved,--aye!
and love yet, for there is no flag like the flag of my fathers,
save only that of my children and of my manhood,--and I remembered,
too, Elizabeth, with a sudden hope. I would be near her then, and
I would earn fame and glory. The carpenter would come back with
shoulder-straps. Perhaps then, in the castle...I shouldered my
trunk and ran for the station. Such tools, clothes, and things as
it would not hold I sold for what they would fetch, and boarded
the next train for Buffalo, which was as far as my money would take
me.
[Illustration: "I found the valley deserted and dead."]
I cannot resist the temptation at this point to carry the story
thirty years forward to last winter, in order to point out one of
the queer happenings which long ago caused me to be known to my
friends as "the man of coincidences." I have long since ceased to
consider them as such, though in this one there is no other present
significance than that it decided a point which I had been turning
over in my own mind, of moment to me and my publisher. I was
lecturing in Pittsburg at the time, and ran up to take another look
at Brady's Bend. I found the valley deserted and dead. The mills
were gone. Disaster had overtaken them in the panic of 1873, and
all that remained of the huge plant was a tottering stump of the
chimney and clusters of vacant houses dropping to pieces here and
there. Young trees grew out of the cold ashes in the blast-furnace.
All about was desolation. Strolling down by the river with the
editor of the local paper in East Brady, which had grown into a
slow little railroad town, my eye fell upon a wrecked hut in which
I recognized the company's office. The shutters were gone, the door
hung on one hinge, and the stairs had rotted away, but we climbed
in somehow. It was an idle quest, said my companion; all the books
and papers had been sold the summer before to a Pittsburg junkman,
who came with a cart and pitchforked them into it as so much waste
paper. His trail was plain within. The floor was littered with torn
maps and newspapers from the second term of President Grant. In a
rubbish heap I kicked against something more solid and picked it
up. It was the only book left in the place: the "draw-book" for
the years 1870-72; and almost the first name I read was my own,
as having received, on July 19, 1870, $10.63 in settlement of my
account with the Brady's Bend Company when I started for the war.
My companion stared. I wrapped up the book and took it away with
me. I considered that I had a moral right to it; but if anybody
questions it, it is at his service.
Buffalo was full of Frenchmen, but they did not receive me with a
torchlight procession. They even shrugged their shoulders when good
old Pater Bretton took up my cause and tried to get me forwarded
at least to New York. The one patriot I found to applaud my high
resolve was a French pawnbroker, who, with many compliments and
shoulder pattings, took my trunk and all its contents, after I had
paid my board out of it, in exchange for a ticket to New York. He
took my watch, too, but that didn't keep time. I remember seeing
my brush go with a grim smile. Having no clothes to brush, I had
no need of it any longer. That pawnbroker was an artist. The year
after, when I was in Buffalo again, it occurred to me to go in
and see if I could get back any of my belongings. I was just a bit
ashamed of myself, and represented that I was a brother of the
young hothead who had gone to the war. I thought I discovered a
pair of trousers that had been mine hanging up in his store, but
the Frenchman was quicker than I. His eyes followed mine, and he
took instant umbrage:--
"So your brother vas one shump, vas he?" he yelled. "Your brother
vas a long sight better man zan you, mine frient. He go fight for
la France. You stay here. Get out!" And he put me out, and saved
the day and the trousers.
It was never a good plan for me to lie. It never did work out right,
not once. I have found the only safe plan to be to stick to the
truth and let the house come down if it must. It will come down
anyhow.
I reached New York with just one cent in my pocket, and put up at
a boarding-house where the charge was one dollar a day. In this
no moral obliquity was involved. I had simply reached the goal for
which I had sacrificed all, and felt sure that the French people
or the Danish Consul would do the rest quickly. But there was
evidently something wrong somewhere. The Danish Consul could only
register my demand to be returned to Denmark in the event of war.
They have my letter at the office yet, he tells me, and they will
call me out with the reserves. The French were fitting out no
volunteer army that I could get on the track of, and nobody was
paying the passage of fighting men. The end of it was that, after
pawning my revolver and my top-boots, the only valuable possessions
I had left, to pay for my lodging, I was thrown on the street,
and told to come back when I had more money. That night I wandered
about New York with a gripsack that had only a linen duster and
a pair of socks in it, turning over in my mind what to do next.
Toward midnight I passed a house in Clinton Place that was lighted
up festively. Laughter and the hum of many voices came from within.
I listened. They spoke French. A society of Frenchmen having their
annual dinner, the watchman in the block told me. There at last
was my chance. I went up the steps and rang the bell. A flunkey in
a dress-suit opened, but when he saw that I was not a guest, but
to all appearances a tramp, he tried to put me out. I, on my part,
tried to explain. There was an altercation, and two gentlemen of
the society appeared. They listened impatiently to what I had to
say, then, without a word, thrust me into the street and slammed
the door in my face.
It was too much. Inwardly raging, I shook the dust of the city
from my feet, and took the most direct route out of it, straight
up Third Avenue. I walked till the stars in the east began to pale,
and then climbed into a wagon that stood at the curb to sleep.
I did not notice that it was a milk-wagon. The sun had not risen
yet when the driver came, unceremoniously dragged me out by the
feet, and dumped me into the gutter. On I went with my gripsack,
straight ahead, until toward noon I reached Fordham College, famished
and footsore. I had eaten nothing since the previous day, and had
vainly tried to make a bath in the Bronx River do for breakfast.
Not yet could I cheat my stomach that way.
The college gates were open, and I strolled wearily in, without
aim or purpose. On a lawn some young men were engaged in athletic
exercises, and I stopped to look and admire the beautiful shade-trees
and the imposing building. So at least it seems to me at this distance.
An old monk in a cowl, whose noble face I sometimes recall in my
dreams, came over and asked kindly if I was not hungry. I was in
all conscience fearfully hungry, and I said so, though I did not
mean to. I had never seen a real live monk before, and my Lutheran
training had not exactly inclined me in their favor. I ate of the
food set before me, not without qualms of conscience, and with a
secret suspicion that I would next be asked to abjure my faith, or
at least do homage to the Virgin Mary, which I was firmly resolved
not to do. But when, the meal finished, I was sent on my way with
enough to do me for supper, without the least allusion having been
made to my soul, I felt heartily ashamed of myself. I am just as
good a Protestant as I ever was. Among my own I am a kind of heretic
even, because I cannot put up with the apostolic succession; but I
have no quarrel with the excellent charities of the Roman Church,
or with the noble spirit that animates them. I learned that lesson
at Fordham thirty years ago.
Up the railroad track I went, and at night hired out to a truck-farmer,
with the freedom of his haymow for my sleeping quarters. But when
I had hoed cucumbers three days in a scorching sun, till my back
ached as if it were going to break, and the farmer guessed that he
would call it square for three shillings, I went farther. A man is
not necessarily a philanthropist, it seems, because he tills the
soil. I did not hire out again. I did odd jobs to earn my meals,
and slept in the fields at night, still turning over in my mind
how to get across the sea. An incident of those wanderings comes to
mind while I am writing. They were carting in hay, and when night
came on, somewhere about Mount Vernon, I gathered an armful of
wisps that had fallen from the loads, and made a bed for myself
in a wagon-shed by the roadside. In the middle of the night I was
awakened by a loud outcry. A fierce light shone in my face. It was
the lamp of a carriage that had been driven into the shed. I was
lying between the horse's feet unhurt. A gentleman sprang from the
carriage, more frightened than I, and bent over me. When he found
that I had suffered no injury, he put his hand in his pocket and
held out a silver quarter.
"Go," he said, "and drink it up."
"Drink it up yourself!" I shouted angrily. "What do you take me
for?"
They were rather high heroics, seeing where I was, but he saw
nothing to laugh at. He looked earnestly at me for a moment, then
held out his hand and shook mine heartily. "I believe you," he said;
"yet you need it, or you would not sleep here. Now will you take
it from me?" And I took the money.
The next day it rained, and the next day after that, and I footed
it back to the city, still on my vain quest. A quarter is not a
great capital to subsist on in New York when one is not a beggar
and has no friends. Two days of it drove me out again to find at
least the food to keep me alive; but in those two days I met the
man who, long years after, was to be my honored chief, Charles
A. Dana, the editor of the Sun. There had been an item in the Sun
about a volunteer regiment being fitted out for France. I went up
to the office, and was admitted to Mr. Dana's presence. I fancy
I must have appealed to his sense of the ludicrous, dressed in
top-boots and a linen duster much the worse for wear, and demanding
to be sent out to fight. He knew nothing about recruiting. Was I
French? No, Danish; it had been in his paper about the regiment.
He smiled a little at my faith, and said editors sometimes did not
know about everything that was in their papers. I turned to go,
grievously disappointed, but he called me back.
"Have you," he said, looking searchingly at me, "have you
had your breakfast?"
No, God knows that I had not: neither that day nor for many days
before. That was one of the things I had at last learned to consider
among the superfluities of an effete civilization. I suppose I had
no need of telling it to him, for it was plain to read in my face.
He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a dollar.
"There," he said, "go and get your breakfast; and better give up
the war."
Give up the war! and for a breakfast. I spurned the dollar hotly.
"I came here to enlist, not to beg money for breakfast," I said,
and strode out of the office, my head in the air but my stomach
crying out miserably in rebellion against my pride. I revenged
myself upon it by leaving my top-boots with the "uncle," who was
my only friend and relative here, and filling my stomach upon the
proceeds. I had one good dinner anyhow, for when I got through there
was only twenty-five cents left of the dollar I borrowed upon my
last article of "dress." That I paid for a ticket to Perth Amboy,
near which place I found work in Pfeiffer's clay-bank.
Pfeiffer was a German, but his wife was Irish and so were his
hands, all except a giant Norwegian and myself. The third day was
Sunday, and was devoted to drinking much beer, which Pfeiffer,
with an eye to business, furnished on the premises. When they
were drunk, the tribe turned upon the Norwegian, and threw him out.
It seems that this was a regular weekly occurrence. Me they fired
out at the same time, but afterward paid no attention to me. The
whole crew of them perched on the Norwegian and belabored him with
broomsticks and bale-sticks until they roused the sleeping Berserk
in him. As I was coming to his relief, I saw the human heap heave and
rock. From under it arose the enraged giant, tossed his tormentors
aside as if they were so much chaff, battered down the door of the
house in which they took refuge, and threw them all, Mrs. Pfeiffer
included, through the window. They were not hurt, and within two
hours they were drinking more beer together and swearing at one
another endearingly. I concluded that I had better go on, though
Mr. Pfeiffer regretted that he never paid his hands in the middle
of the month. It appeared afterward that he objected likewise to
paying them at the end of the month, or at the beginning of the
next. He owes me two days' wages yet.