FROM LEADVILLE TO SALT LAKE CITY.
What is the conductor of a Pullman Car?--Cannibalism fatal to
lasting friendships--Starving Peter to feed Paul--Connexion
between Irish cookery and Parnellism--Americans not smokers--In
Denver--"The Queen City of the Plains"--Over the Rockies--Pride in
a cow, and what came of it--Sage-brush--Would ostriches pay in the
West?--Echo canyon--The Mormons' fortifications--Great Salt Lake in
sight.
WHAT is the "conductor" of a Pullman car? Is he a private gentleman
travelling for his pleasure, a duke in disguise, or is he a servant
of the company placed on the cars to see to the comfort, &c., of the
company's customers? I should like to know, for sometimes I have been
puzzled to find out. The porter is an admirable institution, when he
is amenable to reason, and I have been fortunate enough to find myself
often entrusted to perfectly rational specimens. The experiences of
travellers have, as I know from their books, been sometimes very
different from mine--ladies, especially, complaining--but for myself I
consider the Union Pacific admirably manned.
But it is a great misfortune that the company do not run hotel cars.
I was told that the reason why we were made over helplessly to such
caterers as those at North Platte and Sterling for our food was, that
the custom of passengers is almost the only source of revenue the
"eating-houses" along the line can depend upon. Without the custom of
passengers they would expire--atrophise--become deceased. What I want
to know is why they should not expire. I, as a traveller, see no reason
whatever, no necessity, for their being kept alive at a cost of so
much suffering to the company's customers. Let them decease, or else
establish a claim to public support. During a long railway journey the
system is temporarily deranged and appetites are irregular, so that
some people can not eat when they have the opportunity, and when they
could eat, do not get it. Some day, no doubt, a horrible cannibalic
outrage on the cars will awaken the directors to the peril of carrying
starving passengers, and the luxury of the hotel-car will be instituted.
Not that I could censure the poor men of the South Seas or Central
Africa for eating each other. There seems to me something a trifle
admirable in this economy of their food. But cannibalism must, in the
very nature of it, be deterrent to the formation of lasting friendships
between strangers. So long as two men look upon each other as possible
side dishes, there can be no permanent cordiality between them. Mutual
confidence, the great charm of sincere friendship, must be wanting. You
could never be altogether at your ease in a company which discussed the
best stuffing for you.
Meanwhile, the custom of carrying their own provisions is increasing in
favour among passengers, so that, hotel cars or not, these Barmecide
"eating-houses" may yet expire from inanition. The waiting (done by
girls) is, I ought to say, admirable--but then so it was at Sancho
Panza's supper and at Duke Humphrey's dinner-table. And yet the hungry
went empty away.
Between Cheyenne and Ogden the commissariat is distinctly better, and
the unprovided traveller triumphs mildly over the more careful who have
carried their own provisions. But, striking a balance on the whole
journey, there is no doubt that the comfort of the trip, some sixty odd
hours, from Omaha to Ogden, is materially increased by starting with a
private stock of food. Bitter herbs without indigestion is better than
a stalled ox with dyspepsia.
An old Roman epicure gravely expressed his opinion that Africa could
never be a progressive country, inasmuch as its shrimps were so small.
And I think I may venture to say that if the cookery in the central
States does not improve, the country must gradually drift backwards
into barbarism. For there is a most intimate connexion between cookery
and civilization.
It is the duty of the historian, and not the task of the traveller,
to trace national catastrophes to their real causes--often to be
found concealed under much adventitious matter, and when found often
surprising from their insignificance--and I leave it, therefore, to
others to specify the particular feature of Irish cookery that tends to
create a disinclination to paying rent.
That the agitated demeanour of the after-dinner speakers during Irish
tenant-right meetings' was due solely to the infuriating and ferocious
course of food to which they had just submitted, is as certain as that
the extraordinary class of noises, cavernous and hollow-sounding,
produced by their applausive audiences was owing to the fact that they
had not dined at all. In the West of Ireland (where I travelled with
those "experts in constitutional treason" who were then organizing the
"No Rent" agitation), the agitators and conspirators had no time for
long dinners, as the mobs outside were as impatient as hunger, so they
sat down, invariably, to everything at once--mutton, bacon, sausages,
turkey and ham, with relays of hot potatoes every two minutes. While
one conspirator was addressing the peasantry, the upper half of his
body thrust out of the lower half of the window, and only his legs in
the dining-room, the rest were eating against time, and as soon as the
speaker's legs were seen to get up on tiptoe, which they always did for
the peroration, the next to speak had to rise from his food. The result
was of course incoherent violence. But a closer analysis is required to
detect the causes of Irish dislike to rent.
That it would be eventually found that potatoes and patriotism have
an occult affnity I have no doubt; but, as I have said above, such
research more properly belongs to the province of the historian. The
Spartan stirring his black broth with a spear revealed his nature at
once, and the single act of the Scythians, using their beefsteaks
for saddles until they wanted to eat them, gives at a glance their
character to the nation.
At any rate, it is as old as Athenaeus that "to cookery we owe
well-ordered States;" for States result from the congregation of
individuals in towns, and towns are the sum of agglomerated households,
and households, it is notorious, never combine except for the sociable
consumption of food. So long as, in the Dark Ages, every man cooked
for himself, or, in the primitive days of cannibalism, helped himself
to a piece of a raw neighbour, there could be no friendly heartiness
at meals; but, as soon as cooks appeared, men met fearlessly round a
common board, towns grew up round the dinner-table, and, as Athenaeus
remarks, well-ordered States grew up round the towns. But if we were
to judge of the prospects of the people who live, say, about Green
River or North Platte, by the character of the food (as supplied to
travellers) the opinion could not be very complimentary or encouraging.
It is a prevalent idea in England that Americans smoke prodigiously,
even as compared with "the average Britisher." Now, in America there
is very little smoking. You may perhaps think I am wrong. A great many
Americans, I allow, buy cigars in the most reckless fashion. But (apart
from the fact that cigars are not necessarily tobacco) I find that as
a rule they throw away more than they smoke. Speaking roughly, then, I
should say so-called "smokers" in this country might be divided into
three classes: those who buy cigars because they cost money; those
who buy them because cigars give them a decent excuse for spitting;
and those who buy them under the delusion that the friend who is with
them smokes, and that hospitality or courtesy requires that they
should humour his infatuation. Of the trifling residue, the men who
smoke because, as they put it, "they like it," it is not worth while
to speak. Now, one of the results of this general aversion to tobacco
is that when a foreigner addicted to the weed comes over and tries to
smoke, he is hunted about so, that (as I have often done myself) he
longs to be in his coffin, if only to get a quiet corner for a pipe. In
hotels they hunt you down, floor by floor, till they get you on to a
level with the street, and then from room to room till they get you out
on to the pavement. There is nowhere where you can read and smoke--or
write and smoke--or have a quiet chat with a friend over a pipe--or in
fact smoke at all, in the respectable, civilized, Christian sense of
the word. Of course, if you like, you can "smoke" in the public hall
of the hotel. But I would just as soon sit out on the kerbstone at the
corner of the street as among a crowd of men holding cigars in their
mouths and shouting business. Out on the kerbstone I should at any rate
find the saving grace of passing female society. In private houses
again, smokers are consigned to the knuckle end of the domicile and
the waste corners thereof, as if they snatched a fearful joy from some
secret fetish rites, or had to go apart into privacy to indulge in a
little surreptitious cannibalism. In the streets, friends do not like
you to smoke when with them, and there are very few public conveyances
in which tobacco is comfortably possible.
In trains there is a most conspicuous neglect of smokers. I found, for
instance, on my journey from New York to Chicago, that the only place I
could smoke in was the end compartment of the fourth car from my own.
That is to say, let it be as stormy and dark as it may, you have to
pass from other car to the other half the length of the train, and when
you do get to "the smoking compartment" you find it is only intended to
hold five passengers. I confess I am surprised that these palace cars,
otherwise so agreeable, should be such hovel cars for smokers. Nor, by
the way, seeing that the company specially notifies that the passage
from one car to the other is "dangerous" while the train is in motion,
do I think it fair that smokers should be encouraged, and indeed
compelled, to run bodily risks in order to arrive at their tobacco.
Some day no doubt there will be Pullman smoking cars, and when there
are--I will find something else to grumble at.
Imagine then my astonishment when arriving at the Windsor Hotel at
Denver, I was shown into a bona-fide smoking-room, with cosy chairs,
well carpeted, with a writing table properly furnished, all the
newspapers of the day, and a roaring fire in an open fireplace! Here
at last was civilization. Here was a room where a man might sit with
self-respect, and enjoy his pipe over a newspaper, smoke while he wrote
a letter, foregather over tobacco with a friend in a quiet corner! No
noise of loquacious strangers, no mob of outsiders to make the room
as common as the street, no fusillade of expectoration, no stove to
desiccate you--above all, no coloured "gentleman" to come in and say,
"Smoke nut 'lard here, sar!" I was delighted. But my curiosity, at such
an aberration into intelligence, led me to confide in the manager.
"How is it," I asked, "you have got what no other hotel in America that
I have stayed in has got--a comfortable smoking-room after the English
style?"
"Guess," said he, "because an English company built this hotel!"
And I went upstairs, at peace with myself and all English companies.
The first view of Denver is very prepossessing, and further
acquaintance begets better liking. Indeed on going into the streets of
"the Queen City of the Plains" I was astonished. The buildings are of
brick or stone, its roads are good and level, and well planted with
shade-trees, its suburbs are orderly rows of pretty villas, adorned
with lawn, and shrubs, and flowers. Though one of the very youngest
towns of the West, it has already an air of solidity and permanence
which is very striking, while on such a day as I saw it, it is also
one of the very cleanest and airiest. And the snow-capped hills are in
sight all round.
Particularly notable in Denver are its railway station--and yet,
with all its size, it is found too small for the rapidly increasing
requirements of the district--and the Tabor Opera-House. This is really
a beautiful building inside, with its lavish upholstery, its charming
"ladies' rooms," and smoking-rooms, its variety of handsome stone, its
carved cherry-wood fittings, its perfectly sumptuous boxes. The stage
is nearly as large as that at Her Majesty's, quite as large as any in
New York, while in general appointments and in novelty of ornaments,
it has very few rivals in all Europe. In one point, the beauty of the
mise-en-scene from the gallery, the Denver house certainly stands quite
alone, for whereas in all other theatres or opera-houses, "the gods"
find themselves up in the attics, as it were, with only white-washed
walls about them, and the sides of the stage shut out from view, here
they are in handsomely furnished galleries, with a clear view of the
whole stage over the tops of the pagoda-roofed boxes--these curious
"pepper-box" roofs being themselves a handsome ornament to the scene.
By having only a limited number of "stalls" on the level, sloping the
"pit" up to the "grand tier," and making the stage nearly occupy the
whole width of the house, everybody in the building gets an equally
good view of the stage. It is indeed an opera-house to be proud of; and
Denver is proud of it.
There is an idea sometimes mooted that Denver has been run on too fast;
that it has "seen its day," and may be as suddenly deserted as it has
been peopled. But there is absolutely no chance of this whatever.
Colorado is as yet only in its cradle, and the older it gets the more
substantial will Denver become, for this city--and very soon it will
be almost worthy of that name--is the Paris of "the Centennial State,"
the ultimate ambition of the moderately successful miner. It is not a
place to make your money in and leave. But having made your money, to
go to and live in. For a man or woman must be very fastidious indeed
who cannot be content to settle down in this, one of the prettiest and
healthiest towns I have ever visited. Denver accordingly is attracting
to it, year by year, a larger number of that class of citizens upon
which alone the permanent prosperity of a town can depend, the men of
moderate capital, satisfied with a fair return from sound investments,
who put their money into local concerns, and make the place their
"home."
I left Denver in the early morning. Outside the station were standing
five trains all waiting to be off, and one by one their doleful bells
began to toll, and one by one they sneaked away. Ours was the last to
be off; but at length we too got our signal: that is to say, the porter
picked up the stool which is placed on the platform for the convenience
of short-legged passengers stepping into the cars--and without a word
we crept off, as if the train was going to a funeral, or was ashamed
of something it had done. This silent, casual departure of trains
is a perpetually recurring surprise to me. Would it be contrary to
republican principles to ring a bell for the warning of passengers? One
result, however, of this surreptitious method of making off, is that
no one is ever left behind. Such is the perversity of human nature! In
England people are being perpetually "left behind" because they think
such a catastrophe to be impossible. In America they are never left
behind, because they are always certain they will be.
At first the country threatened a repetition of the old prairie, made
more dismal than ever by our recent experiences of the Switzerland of
Colorado. But the scene gradually picked up a feature here and there as
we went along, and knowing that we were climbing up "the Rockies," we
had always present with us the pleasures of hope. But if you wish to
see the Rocky Mountains so as to respect them, do not travel over them
in a train. They are a fraud, so far as they can be seen from a car
window. But in minor points of interest they abound. Curious boulders,
of immense size and wonderful shapes, lie strewn about the ground, all
water-worn by the torrents of a long-ago age, and some of them pierced
with holes--the work of primeval shell-fish. Beds of river gravel
cover the slopes, and on every side were abundant vestiges of deluges,
themselves antediluvian. And then we came upon isolated cliffs of red
sandstone, with kranzes running along their faces--exactly the same
kranzes as the Zulus made such good use of during the war--and showing
in their irregular bases how old-world torrents had washed away the
clay and softer materials that had once no doubt joined these isolated
cliffs together into a chain of hills, and had left the sandstone heart
of each hill bare and alone. And so on, up over "the Divide" into
Wyoming, still a paradise for the ride and the rod, past Cheyenne, a
town of many shattered hopes, and out into the region of snow again.
Our engine was perpetually screaming to the cattle to get off the
track, a series of short, sharp screams that ought to have sufficed
to have warned even cattle to get out of the way. As a rule they
recognized the advisability of leaving the rails, but one wretched
cow, whether she was deaf, or whether she was stupid, or whether, like
Cole's dog, she was too proud to move, I cannot say, but in spite of
the screams of the engine she held her ground and got the worst of the
collision. The cow-catcher struck her, and as we passed her, the poor
beast lay in the blood-mottled snow-drift at the bottom of the bank,
still breathing, but almost dead. As for the train, the cow might have
been only a fly.
And so we went on climbing--herds of cattle grazing on the slopes, and
in the splendid "parks" which lay stretched out beneath us wherever
the hills stood far apart--with frequent snow-sheds interrupting all
conversation or reading with their tunnel-like intervals, till we
reached the Red Granite canyon, with great masses of that splendid
stone fairly mobbing the narrow course of a mountain stream, and
beyond them snow--snow--snow, stretching away to the sky-line without
a break. And then Sherman, the highest point of the mountains
upon the whole line--only some 8000 feet though, all told--with a
half-constructed monument to Oakes Ames crowning the summit. When
finished, this massive cone of solid granite blocks will be sixty feet
high. And then on to the Laramie Plains, with some wonderful reaches
of grazing-ground, and almost fabulous records of ranching profits,
And here is Laramie itself, that will some day be a city, for timber
and minerals and stock will all combine to enrich it. But to-day it is
desolate enough, muffed up in winter, with snowbirds in great flights
flecking the white ground. And so out again into the snow wilderness,
here and there cattle snuffing about on the desolate hill-sides, and
snow-sheds--timber-covered ways to prevent the snow drifting on to the
track--becoming more frequent, and the white desolation growing every
mile more utter. And the moon got up to confuse the horizon of land
with the background of the sky. And so to sleep, with dreams of the
Arctic regions, and possibilities, the dreariest in the world, of being
snowed up on the line.
Awakening with snow still all round us, and snow falling heavily as we
reach Green River. And then out into a country, prodigiously rich, I
was told, in petroleum, but in which I could only see that sage-brush
was again asserting its claims to be seen above the snow-drift, and
that wonderful arrangements in red stone thrust themselves up from
the hill crests. Terraces reminding me of miniature table-mountains
such as South Africa affects; sharply scarped pinnacles jutting from
the ridges like the Mauritius peaks; plateaux with isolated piles
of boulders; upright blocks shaped into the semblance of chimneys;
crests broken into battlements, and--most striking mimicry of all snow
wildernesses--a reproduction in natural rock of the great fortress of
Deeg, in India. With snow instead of water, the imitation of that vast
buttressed pile was singularly exact, and if there had been only a
brazen sun overhead and a coppery sky flecked with circling kites, the
counterfeit would have been perfect. But Deeg would crumble to pieces
with astonishment if snow were to fall near it, while here there was
enough to content a polar bear.
What a pity sage brush--the "three-toothed artemisia" of science--has
no commercial value. Fortunes would be cheap if it had. But I heard at
Leadville that a local chemist had treated the plant after the manner
of cinchona, and extracted from its bark a febrifuge with which he
was about to astonish the medical world and bankrupt quinine. That it
has a valuable principle in cases of fever, its use by the Indians
goes a little way to prove, while its medicinal properties are very
generally vouched for by its being used in the West as an application
for the cure of toothache, as a poultice for swellings, and a lotion
("sage oil") for erysipelas, rheumatism, and other ailments. Some day,
perhaps, a fortune will be made out of it, but at present its chief
value seems to be as a moral discipline to the settler and as covert
for the sage-hen.
Would not the ostrich thrive upon some of these prodigious tracts of
unalterable land? Can all America not match the African karoo shrub,
which the camel-sparrow loves? Ostrich farming has some special
recommendations, especially for "the sons of gentlemen" and others
disinclined for arduous labour, who have not much of either money or
brains to start with. Is it not a matter of common notoriety that when
pursued this fowl buries its head in the sand, and thus, of course,
falls an easy prey to the intending farmer? If, on the other hand,
he does not want the whole of the bird, he has only to stand by and
pluck its feathers out, which, having its head buried, it cannot, of
course perceive. (These feathers fetch a high price in the market.)
Supposing, however, that the adventurous emigrant wishes to undertake
ostrich farming bona fide, he has merely to pull the birds out from the
sand, and drive them into an enclosure--which he will, of course, have
previously made--and sit on the gate and watch them lay their eggs.
When they lay eggs, ostriches--this is also notorious--bury them in the
sand and desert them, and the gentleman's son on the fence can then
go and pick them out of the sand. (Ostriches' eggs fetch five pounds
apiece.) These birds, moreover, cost very little for feeding, as they
prefer pebbles. They can, therefore, be profitably cultivated on the
sea beach. But I would remind intending farmers that ostriches are very
nimble on their feet. It is also notorious that they have a shrewd way
of kicking. A kick from an ostrich will break a cab-horse in two. The
intending farmer, therefore, when he has compelled the foolish bird to
bury its head in the sand and is plucking out its tail feathers, should
stand well clear of the legs. This is a practical hint.
We dined at Evanston, neat-handed abigails, as usual, handing round
dishes fearfully and wonderfully made out of old satchels and seasoned
with varnish. There is a Chinese quarter here, with its curious
congregation of celestial hovels all plastered over with, apparently,
the labels of tea-chests. I should think the Chinese were all self-made
men. At any rate they do not seem to me to have been made by any one
who knew how to do it properly.
However, we had not much time to look at them, for cows on the track
and one thing and another had made us rather late; so we were very soon
off again, the travellers, after their hurried and indigestible meal,
feeling very much like the jumping frog, after he couldn't jump, by
reason of quail shot.
The snow had been gradually disappearing, and as we approached Echo
canyon we found ourselves gliding into scenes that in summer are very
beautiful indeed, with their turf and willow-fringed streams and
abundant vegetation. And then, by gradual instalments of rock, each
grander than the next, the great canyon came upon us. What a superb
defile this is! It moves along like some majestic poem in a series of
incomparable stanzas. There is nothing like it in the Himalayas that I
know of, nor in the Suleiman range. In the Bolan Pass, on the Afghan
frontier, there are intervals of equal sublimity; and even as a whole
it may compare with it. But taken all for all--its length (some thirty
miles), its astonishing diversity of contour, its beauty as well as
its grandeur--I confess the Echo canyon is one of the masterpieces
of Nature. I can speak of course only of what I have seen. I do not
doubt that the Grand canyon in Arizona, which is said to throw all the
wonders of Colorado and the marvels of Yellowstone or Yosemite into
the shade, would dwarf the highway to Utah, but within my experience
the Echo is almost incomparable. It would be very difficult to convey
any idea of this glorious confusion of crags. But imagine some vast
city of Cyclopean architecture built on the crest and face of gigantic
cliffs of ruddy stone. Imagine, then, that ages of rain had washed away
all the minor buildings, leaving only the battlements of the city, the
steeples of its churches, its causeways and buttresses, and the stacks
of its tallest chimneys still standing where they had been built. If
you can imagine this, you can imagine anything, even Echo canyon--but I
must confess that my attempt at description does not recall the scene
to me in the least.
However, I passed through it and, up on the crest of a very awkward
cliff for troops to scale under fire, had pointed out to me the
stone-works which the Mormons built when they went out in 1857 to stop
the advance of the Federal army.
And there is no doubt of it that the passage of that defile, even with
such rough defences as the Saints had thrown up, would have cost the
army very dear. For these stone-works, like the Afghans' sunghums, and
intended, of course for cover against small arms only, were carried
along the crest of the cliffs for some miles, and each group was
connected with the next by a covered way, while in the bed of the
stream below, ditches had been dug (some six feet deep and twenty
wide), right across from cliff to cliff, and a dam constructed just
beyond the first ditch which in an hour or two would have converted
the whole canyon for a mile or so into a level sheet of water. On
this dam the Mormon guns were masked, and though, of course, the
Federal artillery would soon have knocked them off into the water, a
few rounds at such a range and raking the army--clubbed as it would
probably have been at the ditches--must have proved terribly effective.
This position, moreover, though it could be easily turned by a force
diverging to the right before it entered the canyon, could hardly be
turned by one that had already entered it. And to attempt to storm
those heights, with men of the calibre of the Transvaal Dutchmen
holding them, would have been splendid heroism--or worse.
And then Weber canyon, with its repetitions of castellated cliffs, and
its mimicry of buttress and barbican, bastion and demilune, tower and
turret, and moat and keep, and all the other feudal appurtenances of
the fortalice that were so dear to the author of "Kenilworth," with
pine-trees climbing up the slopes all aslant, and undergrowth that
in summer is full of charms. The stream has become a river, and fine
meadows and corn-land lie all along its bank; large herds of cattle
and companies of horses graze on the hill slopes, and wild life is
abundant. Birds are flying about the valley under the supervision of
buzzards that float in the air, half-mountain high, and among the
willowed nooks parties of moor-hens enjoy life. And so into Ogden.
Night was closing in fast, and soon the country was in darkness.
Between Ogden and the City of the Saints lay a two hours' gap of
dulness, and then on a sudden I saw out in front of me a thin white
line lying under the hills that shut in the valley.
"That, sir? That is Salt Lake."