FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER.
Fathers of Waters--"Rich Lands lie Flat"--The Misery River--Council
Bluffs--A "Live" town, sir--Two murders: a contrast--Omaha--The
immorality of "writing up"--On the prairies--The modesty of
"Wish-ton-Wish"--The antelope's tower of refuge--Out of Nebraska
into Colorado--Man-eating Tiger.
FROM Chicago to Omaha by the Chicago and "Northwestern" route is not an
exhilarating journey. When Nature begins to make anything out here in
America she never seems to know when to stop. She can never make a few
of anything. For instance, it might have been thought that one or two
hundred miles of perfectly flat land was enough at a time. But Nature,
having once commenced flattening out the land, cannot leave off. So all
the way from Chicago to Omaha there is the one same pattern of country,
a wilderness of maize-stubble and virgin land, broken only for the
first half of the way by occasional patches of water-oak, and for the
second half of willows.
Just on the frontier-line of these two vegetable divisions of the
country lies a tract of bright turf-land. What a magician this same
turf is! It is Wendell Holmes, I think, who says that Anglo-Saxons
emigrate only "in the line of turf."
The better half of the journey passed on Sunday, and the people were
all out in loitering, well-dressed groups "to see the train pass," and
at the stations where we stopped, to see the passengers, too. Where
they came from it was not easy to tell, for the homesteads in sight
were very few and far between. Yet there they were, happy, healthy,
well-to-do contented-looking families, enjoying the Day of Rest--the
one dissipation of the hard-worked week. What a comfortable connecting
link with the outer world the railway must be to these scattered
dwellers on this prairie-land!
So through Illinois to the Mississippi. How wonderfully it resembles
the Indus where it flows past Lower Sind. A minaret or two, a
blue-tiled cupola and a clump of palms would make the resemblance of
the Mississippi at Clinton to the Indus below Rohri complete. And both
rivers claim to be "the Father of Waters." I would not undertake to
decide between them. In modern annals, of course, the American must
take pre-eminence; but what can surpass the historic grandeur that
dignifies the Indian stream?
And so into Iowa, just as flat, and as rich, and as monotonous as
Illinois, and with just the same leagues of maize-stubble, unbroken
soil, water-oaks and willows. And then, in the deepening twilight, to
Cedar Rapids, with the pleasant sound of rushing water and all the
townsfolk waiting "to see the train" on their way from church, standing
in groups, with their prayer-books and Bibles in their hands.
By the way, what an admirable significance there is in he care with
which these young townships discharge their duties to their religion
and the dead. The church or prayer-house seems to be always one of the
first and finest buildings. With only half-a-dozen homesteads in sight
in some places, there is the church and while all the rest are of the
humblest class of frame houses, the church is of brick. The cemeteries
again. Before even the plots round the living are set in order, "God's
acre" (often the best site in the neighbourhood) is neatly fenced and
laid out.
And I thought it somehow a beautiful touch of national character, this
reverent providence for the dead that are to come. And just before I
went to sleep, I saw out in the moonlit country a cemetery, and on the
crest of the rising ground stood one solitary tombstone, the pioneer
of the many--the first dead settler's grave. In this new country the
living are as yet in the majority!
Awakening, find myself still in Iowa, and Iowa still as flat as ever.
Not spirit enough in all these hundred miles of land to firk up even a
hillock, a mound, a pimple. But to make a new proverb, "Rich lands lie
flat;" and Iowa; in time, will be able to feed the world--aye, and to
clothe it too.
In the mean time we are approaching the Missouri, through levels in
which the jack-rabbit abounds, and every farmer, therefore, seems to
keep a greyhound for coursing the long-eared aborigines. The willows,
conscious of secret resources of water, are already in leaf, and
overhead the wild ducks and geese are passing to their feeding-grounds.
Here I saw "blue" grass for the first time, and I must say I am glad
that grass is usually green. Elsewhere in the States, English grass is
called "blue grass;" but in some parts, as here in this part of Iowa,
there is a native grass which is literally blue. And it is not an
improvement, so far as the effect on the landscape goes, upon the old
fashioned colour for grass. And then the Missouri, a muddy, shapeless,
dissipated stream. The people on its banks call it "treacherous," and
pronounce its name "Misery." It is certainly a most unprepossessing
river, with its ill-gotten banks of ugly sand, and its lazy brown
waters gurgling along in an overgrown, self-satisfied way. It is
a bullying stream; gives nobody peace that lives near it; and is
perpetually trying in an underhanded sort of way to "scour" out the
foundations of the hollow columns on which the bridges across it are
built. But the abundance of water-fowl upon its banks and side-waters
is a redeeming feature for all who care to carry a gun, and I confess
I should like to have had a day's leisure at Council Bluffs to go out
and have a shot. The inhabitants of the place, however, do not seem
to be goose-eaters, for, close season or not, I cannot imagine their
permitting flocks of these eminently edible birds to fly circling about
over their houses, within forty yards of the ground. The wild-goose
is proverbially a wary fowl, but here at Council Bluffs they have
apparently become from long immunity as impertinent and careless as
sparrows.
Council Bluffs, as the pow-wow place of the Red Men in the days when
Iowa was rolling prairie and bison used to browse where horses plough,
has many a quaint legend of the past; and in spite of the frame houses
that are clustered below them and the superb cobweb bridge--it has few
rivals in the world--that here spans the Missouri, the Bluffs, as the
rendezvous of Sagamore and Sachem, stand out from the interminable
plains eloquent of a very picturesque antiquity. And so to Omaha.
"But I guess, sir, Om'a's a live town. Yes, sir, a live town."
My experiences of Omaha were too brief for me to be just, too
disagreeable for me to be impartial. Before breakfast I saw a murder
and suicide, and between breakfast and luncheon a fire and several
dog-fights. Perhaps I might have seen something more. But a terrible
dust-storm raged in the streets all day. Besides, I went away.
I am beginning already to hate "live" towns.
I.
It was during the Afghan War. I had just ridden back from General
Roberts' camp in the Thull Valley, on the frontiers of Afghanistan, and
found myself stopped on my return at the Kohat Pass. "It is the orders
of Government," said the sentry: "the Pass is unsafe for travellers."
But I had to get through the Pass whether it was "safe" or not, for
through it lay the only road to General Browne's camp, to which I was
attached. So I dismounted, and after a great deal of palaver, partly of
bribes, partly of untruths, I not only got past the native sentries,
but got a guide to escort me, through the thirty miles of wild Afridi
defiles that lay before me. The scenery is, I think, among the finest
in the world, while, added to all is the strange fascination of the
knowledge that the people who live in the Pass have cherished from
generation to generation the most vindictive blood feuds. The villages
are surrounded by high walls, loopholed along the top, and the huts in
the inside are built against the wall, so that the roofs of them can
be used by the men of the village as lounges during the day, and as
ramparts for sentries during the night. Within these sullen squares
each clan lives in perpetual siege. The women and children are at all
times permitted to go to and fro; but for the men, woe to him who
happens to stray within reach of the jezails that lie all ready loaded
in the loopholes of the next village. The crops are sown and reaped by
men with guns slung on their backs, and in the middle of every field
stands a martello-tower, in which the peasants can take shelter if
neighbours sally out to attack them while at work. Rope-ladders hang
from a doorway half-way up the tower, and up this, like lizards, the
men scramble, one after the other, as soon as danger threatens, draw in
the ladder, and through the loop-holes overlook their menaced crops.
A wonderful country truly, and something in the air to day that makes
my guide ride as hard as the road will permit, with his sword drawn
across the saddle before him. My revolver is in my hand. And so we
clatter along, mile after mile, through the beautiful series of little
valleys, grim villages, and towers. Now and again a party of women will
step aside to let us pass, or a dog start up to bark at us, but not a
single man do we see. Yet I know very well that hundreds of men see us
ride by, and that a jezail is lying at every loophole, and covering the
very path we ride on.
We reach a sudden turn of the path; my guide gallops round it. He is
hardly out of my sight when Bang! bang! It is no use pulling up, and
the next instant I am round the corner too. A man, with his jezail
still smoking from the last shot, starts up from the undergrowth almost
under my horse's feet, and narrowly escapes being ridden down. Another
man comes running down the hillside towards him. In front of me, some
fifty yards off, is my guide, with his horse's head towards me and his
sword in his hand, and on the path, midway between us, lies a heap of
brightly-coloured clothing--a dead Afridi! For a second both guide
and I thought that it was we who had drawn the fire from the ambushed
men. But no, it the poor Afridi lad lying there in the path before
us, and the victim of a blood feud. He had tried, no doubt, to steal
across from his own village to some friendly hamlet close by, but his
lynx-eyed enemies had seen him, and, lying there on either side of his
path, had shot him as he passed.
But what a group we were! Myself, with my revolver in my hand, looking,
horror-stricken, now at the dead, and now at his murderers; my guide,
in the splendid uniform of the Indian irregular cavalry, emotionless as
only Orientals can be; the two murderers talking together excitedly; in
the middle of us the dead lad! But there was still another figure to be
added, for suddenly, along the very path by which the victim had come,
there came running an old woman--perhaps she had followed the lad with
a mother's tender anxiety for his safety--and in an instant she saw the
worst. Without a glance at any of us, she flung herself down with the
cry of a breaking heart, by the dead boys side, and as my guide turned
to ride on and I followed him, as the murderers slipped away into the
undergrowth, we all heard her crooning, between her sobs, over the body
of her murdered son.
II.
I was in Omaha. I had just crossed Thirteenth Street, and, turning to
look as I passed, at the Catholic church, had caught an idle glimpse of
the folk in the street. Among them was a woman at the wooden gateway of
a small house, hesitating, so it seemed to me afterwards, about pushing
it open, for though she had her hand upon the latch, yet she did not
lift it, but appeared to me, at the distance I passed and the cursory
glance I gave, to be listening to what somebody was saying to her
through the window. Had I been only a few yards nearer! At the moment
that I saw her, the wretched woman was gazing with fixed and horrified
eyes upon a face--a grim and cruel face--that glared at her from a
window, and at a gun that she saw was pointed full at her breast. And
the next instant, just as I had turned the corner, there was the report
of fire-arms. It did not occur to me to stop. But suddenly I heard a
cry, and then a second shot, and somehow there flashed upon my mind the
picture of that hesitating woman by the wicket, with her knitted shawl
over her head, and the wind blowing her light dress to one side.
I did not turn back, however. For the woman and the shots had only the
merest flash of a connexion in my mind. But after a few steps a man
came running past me, going perhaps for the doctor, or the police,
or the coroner, and the scared look on his face suddenly once more
wrenched back to my imagination the woman at the wicket.
So I turned back into Thirteenth Street, and there, in the middle of
the road, with a man stooping over her and two women, transfixed by
sudden terror into attitudes that were most tragic, I saw the woman
lying. Her face was turned up to the bright sunlit sky, her shawl had
fallen back about her neck, and her hair lay in the dust. She was
already dead. And her murderer? He too had gone to his last account;
and as I stood there in that dreary Omaha road, with the wind raising
wisps of dust about the horror-stricken group, and thought of the two
dead bodies lying there, one in the roadway, the other in the house
close by, my mind reverted involuntarily to the fancy that at that very
moment the two souls, man and wife, were standing before their Maker,
and that perhaps she, the poor mangled woman, was pleading for mercy
for the man, her husband, the lover of her youth--her murderer.
--
In the evening, when a cool breeze was blowing, and imagination
pictured the trees holding up screens of green foliage before the
hotel windows to shut out the ugly views of half-built streets, I
entertained feelings that were almost kindly towards Omaha; but the
memory of the day that was happily past, as often as it recurred to
me, changed them to gall again. All day long there had been a flaring,
glaring sun overhead and the wind that was blowing would have done
credit to the deserts through which I have since marched with the army
in Egypt. It went howling down the street with the voices of wild
beasts, and carried with it such simooms of sand as would probably
in a week overwhelm and bury in Ninevite oblivion the buildings of
this aspiring town. And not only sand, but whirlwinds of vulgar dust
also, with occasional discharges of cinders, that came rushing along
the road, picking up all the rubbish it could find, dodging up alleys
and coming out again with accumulations of straw, rampaging into
courtyards in search of paper and rags, standing still in the middle
of the roadway to whirl, and altogether behaving itself just as a
disreputable and aggressive vagabond may be always expected to behave.
Of course I was told it was a "very exceptional" day. It always is a
"very exceptional day" wherever a stranger goes. But I must confess
that I never saw any place--except Aden, and perhaps East London, in
South Africa--that struck me on short acquaintance as so thoroughly
undesirable for a lengthened abode. The big black swine rooting about
in the back yards, the little black boys playing drearily at "marbles"
with bits of stone, the multitude of dogs loafing on the sidewalks, the
depressing irregularity Of the streets, the paucity of shade-trees,
the sandy bluffs that dominate the town and hold over the heads of
the inhabitants the perpetual threat of siroccos, and the general
appearance (however false it may have been) of disorder--all combined
with various degrees of force to give the impression that Omaha is a
place that had from some cause or another been suddenly checked in its
natural expansion.
Its geographical position is indisputably a commanding one, and already
the great smelting works, with one exception the busiest in the States,
the splendid workshops of the Union Pacific Railway, and the thriving
distillery close by, give promise of the great industries which in the
future this town, with its wonderful advantages of communication, as
the meeting-point of great railway high-roads, will attract to itself.
Omaha has an admirable opera-house, and when its hotel is rebuilt it
will be able to offer visitors good accommodation. It has also an
imposing school-house imposingly advertised by being on top of a hill,
and the refining grace of gardens is not completely absent, while the
"stove-pipe" hat gives fragmentary evidence of advanced civilization.
But all this affords encouragement for the future only; at present
Omaha is a depressing spot. And so I left the town without regret; but
I did not make any effort to shake off the dust of Omaha. That was
impossible; it had penetrated the texture of my clothing so completely
that nothing but shredding my garments into their original threads
would have sufficed.
Now I had read something of Omaha before I went there, had seen it
called "a splendid Western city," and been invited to linger there
to examine its "dozens of noble monuments to invincible enterprise,"
which, with "the dozen or more church spires," are supposed to break
the sky-line of the view of this "metropolis of the North-western
States and Territories." It is possible, therefore, that my profound
disappointment with the reality, after reading such exaggerated
description, may have tinged my opinion of Omaha, and, combined with
the unfortunately "exceptional" day I spent there, have made me think
very poorly of the former capital of Nebraska. That it has a great
future before it, its position alone guarantees, and the enterprise
of Nebraska puts beyond all doubt; but the sight-seer going to Omaha,
and expecting to find it anything but a very new town on a very
unprepossessing site, will be as greatly disappointed as I was.
Equally unfortunate is the "writing up" which the Valley of the Platte
has received. Who, for instance, that has travelled on the railway
along that great void can read without annoyance of "beautiful valley
landscapes, in which thousands of productive farms, fine farm-houses,
blossoming orchards, and thriving cities" are features of the country
traversed? No one can charge me with a want of sympathy with the
true significance of this wonderful Western country. And I can say,
therefore, without hesitation that the dreariness of the country
between Omaha and Denver Junction is almost inconceivable. There is
hardly even a town worth calling such in sight, much less "thriving
cities." The original prairie lies there spread out, on either hand,
in nearly all its original barrenness. Interminable plains, that
occasionally roll into waves, stretch away to the horizon to right and
left, dotted with skeletons of dead cattle and widely scattered herds
of living ones. Here and there a cow-boy's shed, and here and there a
ranch of the ordinary primitive type, and here and there a dug-out,
are all the "features" of the long ride. An occasional emigrant waggon
perhaps breaks the dull, dead monotony of the landscape, and in one
place there is a solitary bush upon a mound. A hawk floats in the air
above a prairie-dog village. A plover sweeps past with its melancholy
cry.
No, the journey to North Platte--where a very bad breakfast was put
before us at a dollar a head--is not attractive. But here again it is
the Possible in the future that makes the now desolate scene so full
of interest and so splendidly significant. As a grazing country it
can never, perhaps, be very populous; but in time, of course, those
ranches, now struggling so bravely against terrible odds, will become
"fine farm-houses," and have "blossoming orchards" about them. But as
yet these things are not, and for good, all-round dreariness I would
not know where to send a friend with such confidence as to the pastures
between Omaha and North Platte.
Oh! when are we to have Pullman palace balloons? Condemned to travel,
my soul and my bones cry out for air-voyaging.
That some day man should fly like a bird has been, in spite of
superstition, an article of honest belief from the beginning of time,
and in the dove of Archytas alone we have proof enough that, even in
those days, the successful accomplishment of flight was accepted as a
fact of science. During the Middle Ages so common was this belief that
every man who dabbled in physics was pronounced a magician, and as such
was credited with the power of transporting himself through the air
at will. Some, indeed, actually claimed the enviable privilege, Friar
Bacon among others. But history records no practical illustration of
their control of the air, while more than one death is chronicled of
daring men who, with insufficient apparatus, launched themselves in
imitation of birds upon space, and fell, more or less precipitately, to
earth. The Italian who flapped himself off Stirling Castle trusted only
to a pair of huge feather wings, which he had tied on to his arms, and
got no farther on his way to France than the heads of the spectators
at the bottom of the wall; while the Monk of Tübingen started on his
journey from the top of his tower with apparatus that immediately
turned inside out, and increased by its weight the momentum with which
he came down plumb into the street.
Beyond North Platte the same melancholy expanses again commence, the
same rolling prairies, with the same dead cattle and the same herds of
live ones, an occasional waggon or a stock-yard or snow-fence being
all that interrupts the flat monotony. But approaching Sterling a
suspicion of verdure begins in places to steal over the grey prairie,
and flights of "larks," with a bright, pleasant note, give something
of an air of animation to isolated spots. Here is a plough at work,
the first we have passed, I think, since we left Omaha, and the plover
piping overhead seem to resent the novelty. Cattle continue to dot the
landscape, and all the afternoon the Platte rolls along a sluggish
stream parallel to the track.
The train happened to slacken pace at one point, and a man came up to
the cars. He was a beggar, and asked our help to get along the road
"eastward." One of his arms was in a sling from an accident, and his
whole appearance eloquent of utter destitution. And the very landscape
pleaded for him. Beggary at any time must be wretchedness, but here in
this bleak waste of pasturage it must almost be despair. And as the
train sped on, the one dismal figure creeping along by the side of the
track, with the dark clouds of a snowstorm coming up to meet him, was
strangely pathetic.
And then Sterling. May Sterling be forgiven for the dinner it set
before us!
And then on again, across long leagues of level plain, thickly studded
with prickly pear patches and seamed with the old bison and antelope
tracks leading down from the hills to the river. There are no bison
now. They cannot stand before the stove-pipe hat. The sombreroed
hunter, with his lasso, the necklace of death, was an annoyance to
them; they spent their lives dodging him. The befeathered Indian, "the
chivalry of the prairie," who pincushioned their hides full of arrows,
was a terror to them, and they fell by thousands. But before the
stove-pipe hat the bison fled incontinently by the herd, and have never
returned.
The prairie-dogs peep out of their holes at us as we passed. The
bashfulness of "Wish-ton-Wish," as the Red Man calls the prairie-dog,
is as nearly impudence as one thing can be another. It sits up perkily
on one end at the edge of its hole till you are close upon it, and
then, with a sudden affectation of being shocked at its own immodesty,
dives headlong into its hole; but its hind-legs are not out of sight
before the head is up again, and the next instant there is the
prairie-dog sitting exactly where you first saw it! Such a burlesque of
shyness I never saw in a quadruped before.
A solitary coyote was loitering in a hungry way along a gulch, and I
could not help thinking how the most important epochs of one's life
may often turn upon the merest trifles. Now, here was a coyote ambling
lazily up a certain gulch because it had happened to see some white
bones bleaching a little way up it. But in the very next gulch, which
the coyote had not happened to go up, were three half-bred greyhounds
idling about, just in the humour for something to run after. But they
could not see the coyote, though it was really only a few yards off,
nor could the coyote see them. So the dogs lounged about in a listless,
do-nothing, tired-of-life sort of way, thinking existence as dull
as ditch water, while the coyote, unconscious of the narrow escape
of its life that it ran, trotted slowly along--scrutinized the old
bones--scratched its head--yawned out of sheer ennui, and then trotted
along again. Now, what a difference it would have made to those three
dogs if they had only happened to loaf into the next gulch! And what
a prodigious difference it would have made to the coyote if it had
happened to loaf into the next gulch!
The prickly pear, that ugly, fleshy little cactus, with its sudden
summer glories of crimson and golden blossoms, fulfils a strange
purpose in the animal economy of the prairies. In itself it appears to
be one of the veriest outcasts among vegetables, execrated by man and
refused as food by beast. Yet if it were not for this plant the herds
of prairie antelope would have fared badly enough, for the antelope,
whenever they found themselves in straits from wolves or from dogs,
made straight for the prickly pear patches and belts, and there,
standing right out on the barren, open plain, defied their swift but
tender-footed pursuers to come near them. For the small, thick pads
of the cactus, though they lie so flat and insignificantly upon the
ground, are studded with tufts of strong, fierce spines, and woe to the
wolf or the dog that treads upon them. The antelope's hoofs, however,
are proof against the spines, and one leap across such a belt suffices
to place the horned folk in safety. These patches and belts, then, so
trivial to the eye, and in some places almost invisible to the cursory
glance, are in reality Towers of Refuge to the great edible division of
the wild prairie nations, and as impassable to the eaters as was that
girdle of fire and steel which Von Moltke buckled so closely round the
city of the Napoleons.
But here we are approaching Denver. The cottonwood has mustered into
clusters, a prototype of the future of these now scattered ranches.
Dotted about here and there in suitable corners, on river bank or under
sheltering bluff, single trees are growing side by side with single
stockyards or single cow-boys' huts, but every now and again, where
nature offers them a good site for a colony, the trees congregate,
select lots, and permanently locate. It is not very different after
all, with human beings.
Nature here is undoubtedly tempting, and Denver itself must surely be
one of the most beautiful towns in the States. Through great reaches
of splendid farm-land, with water in abundance and the cottonwood and
willow growing thickly, we pass to our destination as the twilight
settles on the country.
A whole day has again been spent in the train! We had awaked in the
morning to see from the car windows the people of Nebraska going out
to their day's work in the fields, and here in the evening we sit and
watch the Colorado folk coming home to their rest after the day's work
is over. Truly this steam is a Latter-Day apocalypse and this America a
land of magnificent distances.
I found out on this trip that my fellow-travellers (and the fact holds
good nearly all over America) took the greatest interest in British
India, and finding that I had spent so many years there, they plied me
with questions. On some journeys it would be the political aspect of
our government of Hindostan that interested, at others the commercial
or the social. But going through Colorado, one of the haunts of the
"grizzly" and the "mountain lion," I had to detail my experiences of
sport in India. Above all, the tiger interested them. It is the only
animal in the world that may be said to give the grizzly a point or
two. And there are some even who deny this; but I, who have shot the
tiger, and never seen a grizzly, naturally concede the first place in
perilous courage to Stripes, the raja of the jungle. In one particular
aspect, at any rate, the tiger is supreme among quadrupeds. It has the
splendid audacity to make man his regular food.
Now, it is generally supposed that the "man-eater" is a specially
formidable variety of the species; that it is only the boldest,
strongest, and fiercest of the tigers that preys on man. But the very
reverse is of course the truth. When hale and strong the tiger avoids
the vicinity of men, finding abundant food in the herds of deer and
other wild animals that share his jungles. But when strength and speed
of limb begin to fail, the brute has to look for easier prey than the
courageous bison or wind-footed antelope, and so skulks among the
ravines and waste patches of woodland that are to be found about nearly
every village. Then when twilight obscures the scene, he creeps out
noiseless as a shadow, and lies in ambush in a crop of standing grain
or bhair-tree brake, and watches the country folk go by from the fields
in twos and threes, driving their plough cattle before them. After a
while, there comes sauntering past alone, a man or a woman who has
lagged behind the company; yet not so far behind but that the friends
ahead can hear the scream which tells of the tiger's leap, though too
far for help to be of use. During four years 350 human beings and
24,000 head of cattle were killed by these animals in one district in
Bombay, while many single tigers have been known to destroy over a
hundred people before they were shot. One in the Mandla district caused
the desertion of thirteen villages and threw out of cultivation two
hundred and fifty square miles of country; while another, only one of
many similar cases, was credited with the appalling total of eighty
human victims per annum! The yearly loss in cattle and by decrease
of cultivation through the ravages of these fearful beasts has been
estimated at ten million pounds sterling!
No wonder, then, that even these doughty grizzly-slayers of the Rockies
respect the tiger's name.