PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS.
They have discovered that our next-door neighbor, the moon, is about
the temperature of boiling water. What a splendid locomotive was
spoiled just to make a moon! Those of us who are forty years old have
been spending the last twenty in unlearning much they had persuaded us
to believe in the first ten. No Great African Desert. No Great American
Desert. No giants in Patagonia, except little ones. No William Tell, no
apple, no target practice. "G. Washington" never had a hatchet. No
Maelstrom off the Norwegian coast. No White Nile mystery. Homer never
wrote Homer, nor Ossian Ossian. There are two things, two blessed
doubts, that we know as little about as we ever did, to-wit: Who wrote
the Letters of Junius? and Is there an open Polar Sea? I sincerely hope
they will never find out.
The locomotive is aggressive. It assaults and captures and tames the
wilderness. You are a passenger on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas
Railway, that can swing you down through Missouri and the Indian
Territory and Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. You embark at Sedalia,
the most vigorous inland town in Missouri except Kansas City. The
cars are as elegant as any in America, the track smooth to a wonder,
and altogether the perfection of locomotive civilization. Away you
glide. Fort Scott is passed, and the train begins to show queer
characteristics. The men that get aboard are leaner and longer, with
a swinging stride like so many panthers. They carry brown rifles,
they are girt about with a small armament of revolvers. They are in
full blossom as to the brims of their hats, like sunflowers. They
talk deer, horse, bear, turkey. They brevet you, and you become
captain or colonel by the breath of their mouths, which is tobacco.
There are sleepy-looking dogs in the baggage-car, with ears like
little leather aprons. You see more flat women in sunbonnets than
you ever saw before in one place. Three or four exaggerated creatures
lie in a heap in a corner. They are the half-way station between a
large rabbit and a small donkey. They are ears with bodies to them.
It is your first sight of a buck-rabbit. You hear border talk and
see border manners, in cars finished to the last touch of pier-glass
polish. You look up, and lo, a Cherokee at your elbow! There he stands,
as if a fresh creation, and positively his first appearance anywhere.
His eyes, like black beads suddenly struck with intelligence, had
taken you all in before you saw him at all. You begin to realize
where you are--that old Fort Holmes is at your right and Little Rock
at your left; that you are in a country with such places in it as
Elk City, Panther, Yellville, Crockett and Waxahatchie.
Again, you are on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railway. You land
at Emporia, Kansas, one hundred and twenty-eight miles from Kansas
City. The locomotive breasts the prairie in panoply as glittering as
anywhere. You find a brisk and busy town, well-filled stores, elegant
houses, capital schools, a public library, and intelligent and
hospitable people. The railroad was Pharaoh's daughter to it. It found
the little Moses in the bulrushes, and made Emporia a marvel in the
wilderness. You see last week's New York fashions in the streets, the
latest works of literature upon the tables. The pretty dining-room girl
startles your left ear at breakfast with, "Buffalo-steak or antelope?"
You regard her in a dazed way, and ask "What?" "Buffalo-steak or
antelope?" and you say "_Both!_" A citizen, on hospitable thoughts
intent, promises to take you out antelope-hunting. You faintly enquire
"Where?" and the reply is, "O, ten or a dozen miles!" You begin to
understand things, and to see that the locomotive is trailing
civilization along after it wherever it goes.
Again on the train: A man enters the car who toes straight out the way
he is going. He has a red sash, silk, and Chinese at that, about his
waist. The glitter of a silver-mounted revolver at his left side, a
shady sombrero upon his head, an uncivilized nugget of gold for a
breastpin, a small log-chain of the same material a-swing upon his
breast, buttons up and down the side seams of his pantaloons,
square-shouldered, broader at the breast than equatorially. There you
have him, and _isn't_ he cool? He gives you a square look with
both eyes. He seats himself upon the crimson cushions as indifferently
as if he had never seen anything else. It is an American turned into a
Mexican herder, arrayed in his holiday clothes, and bound for St.
Louis. He is at home on horseback, is at home _any_where, and can
throw a lariat like a savage. He takes an apple out of one pocket, a
desperate-looking knife out of another; a little jerk of the wrist, and
about eight inches of steel blade flash out, he looks at you a second,
and--carves his apple! Then that cutlery becomes a toothpick of the
Arkansas patent. He will tell you it is a frog-sticker.
I should like to see the railroad-hog, a variety in the animal kingdom
of which there is something to be said by-and-by, get his seat while he
is in the baggage-car taking a smoke. If carved ox is beef, and
manufactured calf is veal, that hog would be in danger of turning into
pork. Though the herder is quiet, civil, self-reliant, yet he is a
peripatetic Bill of Rights. He is his own Legislature, and the first
law is self-defence. He answers your questions in a quaint, sententious
way. He will tell you that a great herd of those Southwestern cattle
look like a drove of horns with legs and tails to them; that they all
think a man has four feet, and is half horse. They seldom see him
except mounted, and when they do, that man must make "a right smart"
use of the two feet he has left, to escape being gored and trampled to
death. Those illogical cattle have no idea of the concrete. The herder
loves the free life, the swift motion, the abundant air, and the
elbow-room of the plains. He has not taken as much medicine as you can
put on a knife-blade in eight years. When he is "under the weather," he
just curls down somewhere, and sleeps it off like a dog.
Yonder are a couple of rough men, with Northeasterly voices, and shaggy
about the head as a couple of buffaloes. They have just come in from
killing two hundred of those "cattle upon a thousand hills." They
_think_ they are hunters. They are unacquainted with Webster, and
miss the right word, for they are unlicensed _butchers_, and ought
to be punished. They had slain the two hundred for their tongues alone,
and left the great carcasses a reckless waste upon the plains. If those
fellows could only have an Egyptian "lean year" all to themselves, I
should like to put them on a strictly vegetable diet, and turn them out
to graze with Nebuchadnezzar. Such touches of border-life give a Far
Western train a character of its own that is by no means unpleasant.
You feel something as you did when you entered the National
Conservatory at Washington, breathed the scented air of the home-made
tropic and saw the great-leafed palms, and waited a minute for an
elephant to come out.
But let nobody think that the world on wheels in Kansas, Nebraska,
Texas and the Plains essentially differs from the same world trundling
about in New England. Equal courtesy, heartier cordiality, just as much
intelligence as characterize the route from New York to Boston. Writing
of Boston: A certain publishing house in that city once sent a letter
to a Chicago citizen, and a man to bring it, asking for a list of
those places in the West where the people would be "_up_ to their
publications," for that is the way they put it. The Chicago citizen
referred them to a great fat Gazetteer, and the inquisition ended.