A SLANDERER AND A WEATHER MAKER.
The Railroad is a slanderer. It maligns cities. With few exceptions it
_sneaks_ into town; enters it by the cheapest end, as politicians
say of candidates, the most "available" way. By-the-by, is the
"available" aspirant for office always the cheapest? It comes in by
people's backdoors; it sees mops swinging like "banners on the outer
wall;" it overlooks hen-houses; it flanks pig-pens; it manufactures
dead ducks and gone geese; it commands barnyards. Take La Porte, on the
Lake Shore Railroad--one of the most beautiful little cities in the
whole West, _nothing_ excepted. Its streets are pictures. Its
shade is luxuriant. Its lakes are lovely as any classic water that ever
inspired a poet's song. Ask the world that flits by on the Lake Shore,
and never halts at all, about La Porte, and it says, a straggling
Hoosier village, out at the elbows and the heels withal, fringed with
shanties, mopsticks and swill-pails. And on he plunges in his
ignorance, knowing as little of the Gem of the Prairie as if he had
been born, like a Mammoth Cave fish, without any eyes at all. The
Michigan Central and the Illinois Central Roads, in their approach to
Chicago, are splendid exceptions. Running on the water side and out at
sea, if you please, they pass along the city front, with its stately
structures, its spires and towers, as if it were a magnificent
painting. By night, when garlanded with lights, it is as gorgeous as
some Eastern queen arrayed in all her jewels.
There are in America at least six hundred and forty railroads, without
counting the branches. Of the latter there are hundreds, and it is
curious to observe how certain trunk roads resemble trees in putting
out their branches and getting their growth. Thus the iron arms of the
Michigan Central spread like a larch, the Chicago & Northwestern like a
fern, while the Hudson River takes a straight shoot as limbless as a
liberty-pole. We are apt to crowd the rhetoric sometimes, and say that
railroads have taken America, and the continent is as full of fibres of
iron as an oak leaf is of fibres of wood. I saw a letter the other day
written by a Bishop of the Episcopal Church from his home here in
America. That letter traveled a thousand miles before it struck a
railroad! His diocese is in the Hudson's Bay Company's country, and is
no dooryard diocese either, for it is larger than many empires.
But the locomotive ventures into improbable places for all that. Think
of a ponderous engine, fashioned to grind miles under its wheels like a
grist in a mill, being drawn, as one was a short time ago, under the
Arch of Constantine at Rome, along the very road whereon the robe of
Cicero trailed, if he didn't lift it, and the weak-eyed poet strolled!
Classic ground or Holy ground, it stands a poor chance with the
locomotive, for with the steam comes the newsboy, the boot-black,
modern slang, irreverence, and--peanuts.
No piece of mechanism has affected so widely, diversely and powerfully,
the globe and its inhabitants, as the locomotive. That a railroad
should influence the weather is the very last thing that would be
suspected, but it must plead guilty to the charge, for in certain
regions it is almost _climatarchic_--a presider over climate. That
being the only _hard_ word used, the offence should be easily forgiven.
Let some recording angel, like Uncle Toby's, be found to drop a tear
upon it, if need be, and blot it out.
Everybody knows how the rains have descended and the floods come in
regions of the continent and in seasons where and when little ever fell
but dew. Number the facts from Utah to California that are being washed
down into human understandings by heavy showers. There is no danger of
our being claimed by Sydney Smith's genuine Mrs. Partington, if we say
that somehow--and we are not bound to tell how--the railroad brings
rain. Would it not be wonderful if that brace of iron bars across the
continent should literally interpret the pleasant Scripture, "And the
desert shall blossom as the rose"? And it looks like it. The old
devices for artificial irrigation are growing useless, and territory
hitherto unproductive, is beginning to do something for man. And this,
not because of the pioneers to whom the railroad has made the desert
possible and accessible, but because of its direct influence upon the
climate. Rain-clouds west of the Rockies, that have never spoken a
loud word within the memory of man, are now talking as audibly and
emphatically as if thunder had been their mother-tongue from babyhood,
and rank vegetation is springing where nothing was ever before sown but
fire.
The vast system of iron net-work and the hair-lines of telegraphy,
about enough to make a snare to catch the planet, have disturbed the
electrical equilibrium, and the results are seen in the new and novel
phenomena of thunder and shower. By the way, did you ever know any part
of a train to be struck by lightning? There are three or four accounts
on record of such an occurrence, but the testimony is doubtful and
obscure. Running in what are generally deemed the most dangerous
places, along the tall fences of telegraph-poles, so often shattered by
lightning, and throwing up such volumes of heat, smoke and steam, all
of which are supposed to be favorite thoroughfares of the mysterious
agent, it seems strange that, if our scientific facts are facts at all,
many accidents by lightning do not occur upon the railway. But the
direction of the bolt is determined before it leaves the cloud, and a
train is nothing but a slender thread trailed along the earth's
surface. What the locomotive will yet do for all kinds of man--mechanic,
agricultural, scientific, moral--is an unsolved problem! A glance at
the initial chapter of its history assures us that it will be as
marvelous in the future as it was unlooked for in the past.