FROM UTAH INTO NEVADA.
Rich and ugly Nevada--Leaving Utah--The gift of the
Alfalfa--Through a lovely country to Ogden--The great
food-devouring trick--From Mormon to Gentile: a sudden
contrast--The son of a cinder--Is the red man of no use at
all?--The papoose's papoose--Children all of one family.
IT is a far cry from the City of the Saints to the city of the
Celestials, for Nevada stretches all its hideous length between them,
and thus keeps apart the two American problems of the day--pigtails
and polygamy. But mere length in miles is not all that goes to make a
journey seem long, for dreariness of landscape stretches every yard to
six feet, and turns honest miles into rascally versts, or elongates
them into the still more infamous "kos" of the East, the so-called
mile, which seems to lengthen out at the other end as you travel along
it, and about nightfall to lose the other end altogether. And Nevada is
certainly dreary enough for anything. It is abominably rich, I know.
There is probably more filthy lucre in it per acre (in a crude state,
of course) than in any other state in the Union, and more dollars piled
up in those ghastly mountains than in any other range in America. But,
as a fellow-passenger remarked, "There's a pile of land in Nevada that
don't amount to much," and it is just this part of Nevada that the
traveller by railway sees.
"That hill over there is full of silver," said a stranger to me, by way
of propitiating my opinion.
"Is it" I said, "the brute." I really couldn't help it. I had no
ill-feeling towards the hill, and if it had asked a favour of me,
I believe I should have granted it as readily as any one. But its
repulsive appearance was against it, and the idea of its being full of
silver stirred my indignation. I grudged so ugly a cloud its silver
lining, and like the sailor in the Summer Palace at Pekin felt moved to
insult it. The sailor I refer to was in one of the courts of the palace
looking about for plunder. It did not occur to his weather-beaten,
nautical intelligence that everything about him was moulded in solid
silver. He thought it was lead. A huge dragon stood in the corner
of the room, and the atrocity of its expression exasperated Jack so
acutely that he smote it with his cutlass, and lo! out of the monster's
wound poured an ichor of silver coinage.
"Who'd have thought it!" said Jack, "the ugly devil!"
Nevada, moreover, lies under the disadvantage of having on one side of
it the finest portion of California, on the other the finest portion
of Utah, and sandwiched between two such Beauties, such a Beast
naturally looks its worst. For the northern angle of Utah is by far
the most fertile part of the territory, possessing, in patches, some
incomparable meadows, and corn-lands of wondrous fertility. As compared
with the prodigious agricultural and pastoral wealth of such states as
Missouri, Illinois, or Ohio, the Cache Valleys and Bear Valleys of Utah
seem of course insignificant enough; but at present I am comparing them
only with the rest of poor Utah, and with ugly, wealthy Nevada.
Starting from Salt Lake City northwards, the road lies through suburbs
of orchards and gardens, many of them smothered in red and yellow
roses, out on to the levels of the Great Valley. Here, beyond the
magic circle of the Water-wizard, there are patches of fen-lands still
delightful to wild-fowl, and patches of alkali blistering in the sun,
but all about them stretch wide meadows of good grazing-ground, where
the cattle, good Devon breed many of them, and here and there a Jersey,
loiter about, and bright fields of lucerne, or alfalfa, just purpling
into blossom and haunted by whole nations of bees and tribes of yellow
butterflies. What a gift this lucerne has been to Utah! Indeed, as the
Mormons say, the territory could hardly have held its own had it not
been for this wonderful plant. Once get it well started (and it will
grow apparently anywhere) the "alfalfa" strikes its roots ten, fifteen,
twenty feet into the ground, and defies the elements. More than this,
it becomes aggressive, and, like the white races, begins to encroach
upon, dominate over, and finally extinguish the barbarian weeds, its
wild neighbours.
Scientific experiments with other plants have taught us that vegetables
wage war with each other, under principles and with tactics, curiously
similar to those of human communities.
When a strong plant advancing its frontiers comes upon a nation of
feeble folk, it simply falls upon it pell-mell, relying upon mere brute
strength to crush opposition. But when two plants, equally hardy, come
in contact, and the necessity for more expansion compels them to fight,
they bring into action all the science and skill of old gladiators
and German war-professors. They push out skirmishers, and draw them
in, throw out flanking parties, plant outposts, race for commanding
points, manoeuvre each other out of corners, cut off each others'
communications with the water, sap and mine--in fact go through all the
artifices of civilized war. If they find themselves well-matched, they
eventually make an alliance, and mingle peacefully with each other,
dividing the richer spots equally, and going halves in the water.
But as a rule one gives way to the other, accepts its dominion, and
gradually accepts a subordinate place or even extirpation.
Now this lucerne is one of the fightingest plants that grows. It is the
Norwegian rat among the vegetables, the Napoleon of the weeds. Nothing
stops it. If it comes upon a would-be rival, it either punches its head
and walks over it, or it sits down to besiege it, drives its own roots
under the enemy, and compels it to capitulate by starvation. Fences and
such devices cannot of course keep it within bounds, so the lucerne
overflows its limits at every point, comes down the railway bank,
sprouts up in tufts on the track, and getting across into the Scythian
barbarism of the opposite hill-side, advances as with a Macedonian
phalanx to conquest and universal monarchy. Three times a year can the
farmer crop it, and there is no fodder in the world that beats it. No
wonder then that Utah encourages this admirable adventurer. In time it
will become the Lucerne State.
And so, passing through fields of lucerne, we reach the Hot Springs.
From a cleft in a rock comes gushing out an ample stream of nearly
boiling water as clear as diamonds, and so heavily charged with mineral
that the sulphuretted air, combined with the heat, is sometimes
intolerable, while the ground over which the water pours becomes in a
few weeks thickly carpeted with a lovely weed-like growth of purest
malachite green. Passing across the road, from its first pool under
the rock, the stream spreads itself out into the Hot Springs Lake,
where the water soon assimilates in temperature to the atmosphere, but
possesses, for some reason known to the birds, a peculiar attraction
for wild-fowl, which congregate in great numbers about it. Where it
issues from the rock no vegetable of course can grow in it, and there
is a rim all round its edge about a foot in width where the grass and
weeds lie brown and dead, suffocated by the fumes. The fungoid-like
growth at the bottom of the pool exactly resembles a vegetable, but
is as purely mineral, though sub-aqueous, as the stalactites on a
cave-roof.
And so, on again through a wilderness of lucerne, with a broad
riband of carnation-coloured phlox retreating before its advancing
borders--past a perpetual succession of cottages coming at intervals
to a head in delightful farming hamlets of the true Mormon type--past
innumerable orchards, and here and there intervals of wild vegetation,
willows, and cotton-wood, with beds of blue iris, and brakes of wild
pink roses (such a confusion of beauty!) among which the birds and
butterflies seem to hold perpetual holiday.
Then Salt Lake comes in sight, lying along under the mountains on the
left, and on the right the Wasatch range closes in, with the upper
slopes all misty with grey clouds of sage-brush, and the lower vivid
with lusty lucerne. Each settlement is in turn a delightful repetition
of its predecessor, meadow and orchard and corn-land alternating, with
the same pleasant features of wild life, flocks of crimson-winged or
yellow-throated birds wheeling round the willow copses, or skimming
across the meadows, bitterns tumbling out from among the reeds, doves
darting from tree to tree, butterflies of exquisite species fluttering
among the beds of flowers, and overhead in the sky, floating on
observant wings, the hawk--one of those significant touches of Nature
that redeems a country-side from Arcadian mawkishness, and throws into
an over-sweet landscape just that dash of sin and suffering that lemons
it pleasantly to the taste.
Round the corner yonder lies Ogden, one of the most promising towns
of all the West, and as we approach it the great expanses of meadow
stretching down to the lake and the wide alfalfa levels give place
to a barren sage veldt, where the sunflower still retains ancestral
dominion, and the jackass rabbits flap their ears at each other
undisturbed by agriculture or by grazing stock. Nestling back into a
nook of the hills which rise up steeply behind it, and show plainly on
the front their old water-line of "Lake Bonneville" (of which the Great
Salt Lake is the shrunken miserable relict), lies a pretty settlement,
cosily muffed up in clover and fruit trees, and then beyond it, across
another interval of primeval sage, comes into view the white cupola of
the Ogden courthouse.
Ogden is the meeting-point of the northern and southern Utah lines of
rail, and, more important still, of the Union Pacific and the Central
Pacific also. As a "junction town," therefore, it enjoys a position
which has already made it prosperous, and which promises it great
wealth in the near future. Nature too has been very kind, for the
climate is one of the healthiest (if statistics may be believed) in the
world; and wood and water, and a fertile soil, are all in abundance.
Fortunately also, the Mormons selected the site and laid it out so that
the ground-plan is spacious, the roadways are ample, the shade-trees
profuse, and the drainage good. Its central school is, perhaps, the
leading one in the territory, while in manufactures and industry
it will probably some day outstrip Salt Lake City. For the visitor
who does not care about statistics, Ogden has another attraction as
the centre of a very beautiful canyon country, and excursions can
be made in a single day that will give him as exhaustive an idea of
the beauties of western hill scenery, as he will ever obtain by far
more extended trips. The Ogden and Weber canyons alone exhaust such
landscapes, but if the tourist has the time and the will, he may wander
away up into the Wasatch range, past Ogden valley and many lovely bits
of scenery, towards Bear Valley. But for myself, having seen nearly all
the canyons of Utah and many of Colorado, I confess that the Weber and
Ogden would have sufficed for all mere sight-seeing purposes.
It was in the Ogden refreshment-room, waiting for the train for San
Francisco, that I saw a performance that filled me with astonishment
and dismay. It was a man eating his dinner. And let me here remark,
with all possible courtesy, that the American on his travels is the
most reprehensible eater I have ever seen. In the first place, the
knives are purposely made blunt--the back and the front of the blade
being often of the same "sharpness"--to enable him to eat gravy with
it. The result is that the fork (which ought to be used simply to
hold meat steady on the plate while being cut with the knife) has to
be used with great force to wrench off fragments of food. The object
of the two instruments is thus materially abused, for he holds the
meat down with the knife and tears it into bits with his fork! Now,
reader, don't say no. For I have been carefully studying travelling
Americans at their food (all over the West at any rate), and what I say
is strictly correct. This abuse of knife and fork then necessitates
an extraordinary amount of elbow-room, for in forcing apart a tough
slice of beef the elbows have to stick out as square as possible,
and the consequence is, as the proprietor of a hotel told me, only
four Americans can eat in a space in which six Englishmen will dine
comfortably. The latter, when feeding, keep their elbows to their
sides; the former square them out on the line of the shoulders, and at
right angles to their sides. Having thus got the travelling American
into position, watch him consuming his food! He has ordered a dozen
"portions" of as many eatables, and the whole of his meal, after the
detestable fashion of the "eating-houses" at which travellers are fed,
is put before him at once. To eat the dozen or so different things
which he has ordered, he has only one knife and fork and one tea-spoon.
Bending over the table, he sticks his fork into a pickled gherkin, and
while munching this casts one rapid hawk-like glance over the spread
viands, and then proceeds to eat. Mehercule! what a sight it is! He
dabs his knife into the gravy of the steak, picks up with his fork a
piece of bacon, and while the one is going up to his mouth, the other
is reaching out for something else. He never apparently chews his food,
but dabs and pecks at the dishes one after the other with a rapidity
which (merely as a juggling trick) might be performed in London to
crowded houses every day, and with an impartiality that, considered as
"dining," is as savage as any meal of Red Indians or of Basutos. Dab,
dab, peck, peck, grunt, growl, snort! The spoon strikes in every now
and then, and a quick sucking-up noise announces the disappearance of a
mouthful of huckleberries on the top of a bit of bacon, or a spoonful
of custard-pie on the heels of a radish. It is perfectly prodigious.
It defies coherent description. But how on earth does he swallow?
Every now and then he shuts his eyes, and strains his throat; this,
I suppose, is when he swallows, for I have seen children getting rid
of cake with the same sort of spasm. Yet the rapidity with which he
shovels in his food is a wonder to me, seeing that he has not got any
"pouch" like the monkey or the pelican. Does he keep his miscellaneous
food in a "crop" like a pigeon, or a preliminary stomach like the cow,
and "chew the cud" afterwards at his leisure? I confess I am beaten by
it. The mixture of his food, if it pleases him, does not annoy me, for
if a man likes to eat mouthfuls of huckleberries, bacon, apple-pie,
pickled mackerel, peas, mutton, gherkins, oysters, radishes, tomatoes,
custard, and poached eggs (this is a bona-fide meal copied from my
note-book on the spot) in indiscriminate confusion, it has nothing to
do with me. But what I want to know is, why the travelling American
does not stop to chew his food; or why, as is invariably the case, he
will despatch in five minutes a meal for which he has half an hour set
specially apart? He falls upon his food as if he were demented with
hunger, as if he were a wild thing of prey tearing victims that he
hated into pieces; and when the hideous deed is done, he rushes out
from the scene of massacre with a handful of toothpicks, and leans idly
against the door-post, as if time were without limit or end! The whole
thing is a mystery to me. When I first came into the country I used to
waste many precious moments in gazing at "the fine confused feeding" of
my neighbours at the table, and waiting to see them choke. But I have
given that up now. I plod systematically and deliberately through my
one dish, content to find myself always the last at the table, with a
tumult of empty platters scattered all about me. Nothing can choke the
travelling American. In the meantime, I wish that young man of Ogden
would exhibit his great eating trick in London. It beats Maskelyne and
Cook into fits.
From Ogden northwards the road lies past perpetual cottage-farms,
separated only by orchards or fields, and clustering at intervals
into pleasant villages, where the people are all busy gathering in
their lucerne crops. The same profusion of wild-flowers, and exquisite
rose-brakes, the same abundance of bird and insect life is conspicuous.
But gradually our road bears away westward from the hills, leaving
cultivation and cottages to follow the line of irrigation along their
lower slopes, and while to our right the narrow-gauge line runs
northward up into the Cache Valley, the granary of Utah, we trend away
to the left. The northern end of the Salt Lake comes in sight, and the
track running for a while close to its side gives me a last look at
this sheet of wonderful water.
I was sorry to see the last of it, for I was sorry to leave Utah and
the kind-hearted, simple, hard-working Mormon people. But the Lake
gradually comes to a point, dwindles out into a marsh, and is gone, and
as we speed away across levels of dreary alkaline ground, we can only
recall its site by the wild duck streaming across to settle for the
night in the reeds that grow by its edges.
Away from Mormon industry, the sage-brush flourishes like green
bay-trees. To the east, the line of white-walled cottages speaks of a
civilization which we are leaving behind us. To the west, the dreary
mountains of Nevada already herald a region of barren desolation. And
so the sun begins to set, and in the dim moth-time, as the mists begin
to blur the outlines of Antelope Island in the Salt Lake, the small
round-faced owls come out upon the railway fencing and chuckle to each
other, and crossing the Bear River, all ruddy with the sunset, we see
the night-hawks skimming the water in chase of the creatures of the
twilight.
And so to Corinne, ghastly Corinne, a Gentile failure on the very
skirts of Mormon success. It had once a great carrying-trade, for being
at the terminus of the Utah Railway, Montana depended upon it for its
supplies, and bitterly had Montana cause to regret it, for the Corinne
freight-carriers (I wish I could remember their expressive slang name)
seemed to think that railway enterprise must always terminate at
Corinne, and so they carried just what they chose, at the price they
chose, and when they chose. But the railway ran past them one fine day,
and so now there is Corinne, stranded high and dry, as discreditable
a settlement as ever men put together. Without any plan, treeless and
roadless, the scattered hamlet of crazy-looking shanties stands half
the year in drifting dust and half the year in sticky mud, and the
Mormons point the finger of scorn at the place the Gentiles used to
boast of. And Corinne seems to strike the keynote of the succeeding
country, for cultivation ceases and habitations are not on the desolate
plain we enter. And so to Promontory and then darkness.
We awake to find ourselves still in calamitous Nevada. What heaps of
British gold have been sunk in those ugly hills in the hope of getting
up American silver!
But here is Halleck, a government post, and soldiers from the barracks
are lounging about in uniforms that make them look like butcher-boys,
and with a drowsy gait that makes one suspect them to be burthened
with the saddening load of yesterday's whisky. Then, after an interval
of desert, we cross the Humboldt river, thick with the mud of melting
snows, and, snaking across a plain warted over with ant-hills, arrive
at Elko.
It is possible that Allah in his mercy may forgive Elko the offal which
it put before us for breakfast. For myself, mere humanity forbids me to
forgive it. But Elko was otherwise of interest. A waiter, very black,
and, in proportion to his nigritude, insolent, had triumphed over my
unconcealed disgust with my food. Yet I turned to him civilly and said,
"Isn't there a warm spring here which is worth going to see?"
"No," said the negro, "our spring been burned up!"
"Burned up!" I exclaimed in astonishment; "the spring been burned up!"
"Yes," said the abominable one, "burned up. Everybody know dat."
"Was your mother there?" I asked courteously, pretending not to be
exasperated by the blackamoor.
"My mother? No. My mother's--"
"Ah!" I replied, "I thought she might have been burned up at the same
time, for you look like the son of a cinder."
My sally--mean effort that it was--was a complete triumph, and I left
Ham squashed. It proved, of course, that it was the wooden shanty at
the spring that had been burned down, but in any case it was too far
off for us to go to see. So we consoled ourselves with the Indians,
who always gather on the platform at Elko, in the assurance of begging
or showing their papooses to some purpose. Nor were they wrong. I
paid a quarter to see "the papoose," and got more than my money's
worth in hearing this poor brown woman talking to her child the same
sweet nursery nonsense that my own wife talks to mine. And the papoose
understood it all, and chuckled and smiled and looked happy, for all
the world as if it were something better than a mere Indian baby. Poor
little Lamanite! In a year or two it will be strutting about the camp
with its mimic bow and arrows, striking its mother, and sneering at her
as "a squaw," and ten years later (if the end of the race has not then
arrived) may be riding with his tribe on some foul errand of murder,
while his mother carries the lodge-poles and the cooking-pots on foot
behind the young brave's horse. Imagine a life in which begging is the
chief dissipation, and horse-stealing the only industry!
But I can feel a sympathy for the red man. It may be true that neither
gunpowder nor the Gospel can reform him, that his code of morality is
radically incurable, that he is, in fact, "the red-bellied varmint"
that the Western man believes him to be. Yet all the same, remembering
the miracles that British government has worked with the Gonds and
other seemingly hopeless tribes of India, I entertain a lurking
suspicion that under other and more kindly circumstances the Red Indian
might have been to-day a better thing than he is.
At any rate, a people cannot be altogether worthless that in the
deepest depths of their degradation still maintain a lofty wild-beast
scorn of white men, and think them something lower than themselves.
And is not pride the noblest and the easiest of all fulcrums for a
government to work on?
Is it quite certain, for instance, that, given arms, and drilled as
soldiers, detachments of the tribes, as auxiliaries of the regulars,
might not do good service at the different military posts, in routine
duty, of course, and that the prestige of such employment would not
appeal to the military spirit of the tribes at large? What is there
at Fort Halleck that Indians could not do as well as white men? It is
a notorious fact, and as old as American history, that the red man
holds sacred everything that his tribe is guarding. Why should not this
chivalry, common to every savage race on earth, and largely utilized
by other governments in Asia and in Africa, be turned to account
in America too, and Indians be entrusted with the peace of Indian
frontiers?
I know well enough that many will think my suggestion sentimental and
absurd, but fortunately it is just the class who think in that way that
have no real importance in this or in any other country. They are the
men who think the "critturs" ought to be "used up," and who, when they
are in the West, "would as soon shoot an Injun as a coyote." These men
form a class of which America, when she is three generations older,
will have little need for, and who, in a more settled community, will
find that they must either conform to civilization or else "git."
There are a great number of these coarse, thick-skinned, ignorant men
floating about on the surface of Western America: for Western America
still stands in need of men who will do the reckless preliminary work
of settlement, and shoot each other off over a whisky bottle when that
work is done. Now, these men, and those of a feebler kind who take
their opinions from them, believe and preach that annihilation of the
Indian is the only possible cure for the Indian evil. I have heard
them say it in public a score of times that "the Indian should be
wiped clean out." But a larger and more generous class is growing up
very fast in the West, who are beginning to see that the red men are
really a charge upon them: and that as a great nation they must take
upon themselves the responsibilities of empire, and protect the weaker
communities whom a rapidly advancing civilization is isolating in their
midst.
But it is a pity that those in authority cannot see their way to
giving practical effect to such sentiments, and devise some method for
utilizing the Indian. For myself, seeing what has been done in Asia
and in Africa with equally difficult tribes, I should be inclined to
predict success for an experiment in military service, if the routine
duties of barracks and outpost duty, in unnecessary places, can be
called "military service."
For one thing, drilled and well-armed Indians would very soon put a
stop to cow-boy disturbances in Arizona, or anywhere else. Or, again,
if Indians had been on his track, James, the terror of Missouri, would
certainly not have flourished so long as he did.
But by this time we have got far past Elko, and the train is carrying
us through an undulating desert of rabbit-bush and greasewood, with
dull, barren hills on either hand, and then we reach Carlin, another
dreadful-looking hamlet of the Corinne type, and, alas! Gentile also,
without a tree or a road, and nearly every shanty in it a saloon.
More Indians are on the platform. They are allowed, it appears, under
the Company's contract with the government, to ride free of charge
upon the trains, and so the poor creatures spend their summer days,
when they are not away hunting or stealing, in travelling backwards
and forwards from one station to the next, and home again. This does
not strike the civilized imagination as a very exhilarating pastime,
nor one to be contemplated with much enthusiasm of enjoyment. Yet the
Indians, in their own grave way, enjoy it prodigiously.
Curiously enough, they cannot be persuaded to ride anywhere, except on
the platforms between the baggage-cars. But here they cluster as thick
as swarming bees, the in all the fantastic combination of vermilion,
"bucks" tag-rag and nudity, the squaws dragging about ponderous bison
robes and sheep-skins, and laden with papooses, the children, grotesque
little imitations of their parents, with their playthings in their
hands.
For the "papoose" is a human child after all, and the little Shoshonee
girls nurse their dolls just as little girls in New York do, only, of
course, the Red Indian's child carries on her back an imitation papoose
in an imitation pannier, instead of wheeling an imitation American
baby in an imitation American "baby-carriage." I watched one of these
brown fragments of the great sex that gives the world its wives and its
mothers, its sweethearts and its sisters, and it was quite a revelation
to me to hear the wee thing crooning to her wooden baby, and hushing
it to sleep, and making believe to be anxious as to its health and
comforts. Yes, and my mind went back on a sudden to the nursery, on
the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of miles away, where another
little girl sits crooning over her doll of rags and wax, and on her
face I saw just the same expression of troubled concern as clouded the
little Shoshonee's brow, and the same affectation of motherly care.
So it takes something more than mere geographical distance to alter
human nature.