RACING AND PLOWING.
Two rates of motion are racing and plowing, but, as you shall see,
wonderfully alike. An Agricultural Fair has come to mean a Race-Track
with a variety of vegetables ranged around on the outside, and a great
crowd between the ring of track and the ring of vegetables. There
appears to be much doubt as to the propriety of horse-races, but I have
never seen a conscientious man who happened by chance to witness a
race, that did not make up his mind in a minute which horse he wanted
to be the winner. He did not believe in that kind of four-footed
gambling, but then----. You tell him the gray will be whipped--gray is
his color--and he wants to back up his opinion with something--let you
know what that judgment is worth to him; and were it not for some
restraining grace, he would produce his pocketbook and flourish the
estimated value of his opinion full in your face.
That's the way betting comes. It is not a mere invention, like a Yankee
nutmeg. It is human nature. One man argues, another sneers, a third
gets angry, a fourth fights, and a fifth bets. Five ways of doing the
same thing. The writer knew a young man--not so young as he was--who
happened to be in New York when the great running-race between Fashion
and Peytona occurred on the Union Course, Long Island. That individual,
boy and man, never saw but that one race, never played a game of cards,
or bet a penny upon anything; but no sooner were the horses brought up
to the Grand Stand than he had his favorite, and he could not have told
why, to save his life. He would have endowed that horse's prospect of
winning with all his earthly possessions, which were twenty-seven
dollars and a half, if he could have found a taker to accept of such a
trifle. How he watched every jump the creature made! How he admired her
as she flew close to the ground from landing-place to landing-place
again, and clapped his hands and cheered like a maniac! He was a
full-grown sporting-man in a minute, though he did not know a horse's
hock from the Rhenish wine of that name.
Now to put the race upon wheels instead of heels: the tracks of those
two great lines of travel, the Michigan Southern and the Pittsburg &
Fort Wayne, run side by side for several miles after they leave
Chicago--sometimes so near that you can toss an apple from one train
to the other. When the workmen laid the tracks they thought about the
races, for they knew that races must come from such a neighborhood of
railways, and each gang shouted across to the other, and bet on its own
road.
They did come. You are on the Michigan Southern. The train has worked
slowly out of the city on to the open prairie. The Pittsburg train has
done the same thing. There at your right, and half a mile away, you
can see the puffs of white steam. The trembling clangor of the bell has
ceased. The shackly-jointed gait of the train ceases. It tightens up,
and runs with a humming sound. The landscape slips out from under your
feet like a skipping-rope. Pittsburg is coming. She laps the last car
of your train. Now is your time to run alongside, and see how an engine
acts when the throttle-valve is wide open. Watch the flash of that
steel arm as it brings the wheels about. She is doing her best. The two
engines are neck and neck. They scream at each other like Comanches.
The bells clang. The trains are running forty-five miles an hour. It is
a small inspiration.
Now for the passengers. The windows are open. Heads out, handkerchiefs
waving. Everybody alive. Everybody anxious. Nobody afraid. Rivalry has
run away from fear. Our engineer puts on a little more speed. The train
draws slowly out from the even race, like the tube of a telescope. It
is the poetry of motion--power spurning the ground without leaving it.
Good-by, palaces! good-by, coaches! good-bye baggage-cars! good-by,
engine! good-by, _Pittsburg!_ We have shown that train a clean pair of
heels. There is nothing left of it but black and white plumes of steam
and smoke. Look around you. The car is all smiles and congratulations.
"Grave and gay," they are as lively as a nest of winning gamblers.
This racing is all wrong. Superintendents have forbidden it, travelers
have denounced it, but they want to see what can be gotten out of
"Achilles" or "Whirling Thunder," as much as anybody. And they do not
want to be beat! Make them engineers, and every man of them would pull
out and put things through their best paces. We believe in horses, we
believe in locomotives, but we lack faith in balloons. They are large
toys for big children. "The earth hath bubbles as the water has, and
these are of them."
Old Nantucket salts used to spin their fireside yarns about doubling
the Cape. There was such a mingling of peril and excitement; the foamy
seas boarding the ship by the bows; the flying rack; the visible storm;
the orders lost in the thunder of the waves, or swept away by the wind;
it was such man's work to get about that headland in the Pacific seas,
that no wonder boys leaped from bedroom windows in the night and ran
away to try it. I think there is one railway experience you may have,
that is much like going around the Horn.
Did you ever ride on a snow-plow? Not the pet and pony of a thing that
is attached to the front of an engine, sometimes, like a pilot, but a
great two-storied monster of strong timbers, that runs upon wheels of
its own, and that boys run after and stare at, as they would after,
and at, an elephant. You are snow-bound at Buffalo. The Lake Shore
Line is piled with drifts like a surf. Two passenger trains have been
half-buried for twelve hours somewhere in snowy Chautauqua. The storm
howls like a congregation of Arctic bears. But the Superintendent at
Buffalo is determined to release his castaways and clear the road to
Erie. He permits you to be a passenger on the great snow-plow, and
there it is, all ready to drive. Harnessed behind it is a tandem team
of three engines. It does not occur to you that you are going to ride
upon a steam-drill, and so you get aboard.
It is a spacious and timbered room, with one large bull's-eye
window--an overgrown lens. The thing is a sort of Cyclops. There are
ropes and chains and a windlass. There is a bell by which the engineer
of the first engine can signal the plowman, and a cord whereby the
plowman can talk back. There are two sweeps or arms, worked by
machinery on the sides. You ask their use, and the Superintendent
replies, "when, in a violent shock, there is danger of the monster's
upsetting, an arm is put out on one side or the other, to keep the
thing from turning a complete somerset." You get one idea, and an
inkling of another. So you take out your Accident Policy for three
thousand dollars, and examine it. It never mentions battles nor duels
nor snow-plows. It names "public conveyances." _Is_ a snow-plow a
public conveyance? You are inclined to think it is neither that, nor
any other kind that you should trust yourself to, but it is too late
for consideration.
You roll out of Buffalo in the teeth of the wind, and the world is
turned to snow. All goes merrily. The machine strikes little drifts,
and they scurry away in a cloud. The three engines breathe easily, but
by-and-by the earth seems broken into great billows of dazzling white.
The sun comes out of a cloud, and touches it up till it outsilvers
Potosi. Houses lie in the trough of the sea everywhere, and it requires
little imagination to think they are pitching and tossing before your
eyes. The engines' respiration is a little quickened. At last there is
no more road than there is in the Atlantic. A great breaker rises right
in the way. The monster, with you in it, works its way up and feels of
it. It is packed like a ledge of marble. Three whistles! The machine
backs away and keeps backing, as a gymnast runs astern to get sea-room
and momentum for a big jump; as a giant swings aloft a heavy sledge
that it may come down with a heavy blow. One whistle! You have come to
a halt. Three pairs of whistles one after another, and then, putting on
all steam, you make for the drift. The Superintendent locks the door,
you do not quite understand why, and in a second the battle begins. The
machine rocks and creaks in all its joints. There comes a tremendous
shock. The cabin is as dark as midnight. The clouds of flying snow put
out the day. The labored breathing of the locomotives behind you, the
clouds of smoke and steam that wrap you as in a mantle, the noon-day
eclipse of snow, the surging of the ship, the rattling of chains, the
creak of timbers as if the craft were aground, and the sea getting out
of its bed to whelm you altogether, the doubt as to what will come
next--all combine to make a scene of strange excitement for a
land-lubber. You have made some impression upon the breaker, and again
the machine backs for a fair start, and then altogether another plunge
and shock and heavy twilight. And so, from deep cut to deep cut, as if
the season had packed all his winter clothes upon the track, until the
stalled trains are reached and passed, and then with alternate storm
and calm and halt and shock, till the way is cleared to Erie.
It is Sunday afternoon, and Erie--"Mad Anthony Wayne's" old
head-quarters--has donned its Sunday clothes, and turned out by
hundreds to see the great plow come in--its first voyage over the line.
The locomotives set up a crazy scream, and you draw slowly into the
depot. The door opened at last, you clamber down, and gaze up at the
uneasy house in which you have been living. It looks as if an avalanche
had tumbled down upon it--white as an Alpine shoulder. Your first
thought is, gratitude that you have made a landing alive. Your second,
a resolution that if again you ride a hammer, it will not be when three
engines have hold of the handle!