FROM NEVADA INTO CALIFORNIA.
Of Bugbears--Suggestions as to sleeping-cars--A Bannack chief,
his hat and his retinue--The oasis of Humboldt--Past Carson
Sink--A reminiscence of wolves--"Hard places"--First glimpses of
California--A corn miracle--Bunch-grass and Bison--From Sacramento
to Benicia.
IS a bugbear most bug or bear? I never met one yet fairly face to face,
for the bugbear is an evasive insect. Nor, if I did meet one, can I
say whether I should prefer to find it mainly bug or mainly bear. The
latter is of various sorts. Thus, one, the little black bear of the
Indian hills, is about as formidable as a portmanteau of the same size.
Another, the grizzly of the Rockies, is a very unamiable person. His
temper is as short as his tail; and he has very little more sense of
right and wrong than a Land-leaguer. But he is not so mean as the bug.
You never hear of grizzly bears getting into the woodwork of bedsteads
and creeping out in the middle of the night to sneak up the inside of
your night-shirt. He does not go and cuddle himself up flat in a crease
of the pillow-case, and then slip out edgeways as soon as it is dark,
and bite you in the nape of the neck. It is not on record that a bear
ever got inside a nightcap and waited till the gas was turned out, to
come forth and feed like grief on the damask cheek of beauty. No, these
are not the habits of bears, they are more manly than bugs. If you
want to catch a bear between your finger and thumb, and hold it over
a lighted match on the point of a pin, it will stand still to let you
try. Or if you want to have a good fair slap at a bear with a slipper,
it won't go flattening itself out in the crevices of furniture, in
order to dodge the blow, but will stand up square in the road, in broad
daylight, and let you do it. So, on the whole, I cannot quite make
up my mind whether bugs or bears are the worst things to have about
a house. You see you could shoot at the bear out of the window; but
it would be absurd to fire off rifles at bugs between the blankets.
Besides, bears don't keep you awake all night by leaving you in doubt
as to whether they are creeping about the bed or not, or spoil your
night's rest by making you sit up and grope about under the bed-clothes
and try to see things in the dark. Altogether, then, there is a good
deal to be said on the side of the bear.
I am led to these remarks by remembering that at Carlin, in Nevada, I
found two bugs in my "berth" in the sleeping-car. The porter thought I
must have "brought them with me." Perhaps I did, but, as I told him,
I didn't remember doing so, and with his permission would not take
them any further. Or perhaps the Shoshonees brought them. All Indians,
whether red or brown, are indifferent to these insects, and carry them
about with them in familiar abundance.
And this reminds me to say a little about sleeping-cars in general.
During my travels in America I have used three kinds, the Pullman
Palace, the Silver Palace, and the Baltimore and Ohio, and except
in "high tone," and finish of ornament, where the Pullman certainly
excels the rest, there is very little to choose between them. All are
extremely comfortable as sleeping-cars. In the Silver Palace, however,
there is a custom prevalent of not pulling down the upper berth when it
is unoccupied, and this improvement on the Pullman plan is certainly
very great. The two shelves, one at each end of the berth, are ample
for one's clothes, while the sense of relief and better ventilation
from not having the bottom of another bedstead suspended eighteen
inches or so above your face is decidedly conducive to better rest.
The general adoption of this practice, wherever possible, would, I am
sure, be popular among passengers. As day-cars, the "sleepers" have
one or two defects in common, which might very easily be remedied. For
one thing, every seat should have a removable headrest belonging to
it. As it is, the weary during the day become very weary indeed, and
the attempts of passengers to rest their heads by curling themselves
up on the seats, or lying crosswise in the "section," are as pathetic
as they are often absurd, and give a Palace car the appearance, on
a hot afternoon, of a ward in some Hospital for Spinal Complaints.
Another point that should be altered is the hour for closing the
smoking-room. When not required for berths for passengers (for the
company's employees ought not to be considered when the convenience of
the company's customers is in question) there is no reason whatever
for closing the smoking-room at ten. As a rule it is not closed;
but sometimes it is; and it should not be placed in the power of
a surly conductor--and there are too many ill-mannered conductors
on the railways--to annoy passengers by applying such a senseless
regulation. A third point is the apple-and-newspaper-boy nuisance.
This wretched creature, if of an enterprising kind, pesters you to
purchase things which you have no intention of purchasing, and if you
express any annoyance at his importunity, he is insolent. But apart
from his insolence, he is an unmitigated nuisance. What should be done
is this: a printed slip, such as the boy himself carries and showing
what he sells, should be put on to the seats by the porter, and when
any passenger wants an orange or a book, he could send for the vendor.
But the vendor should be absolutely forbidden to parade his wares in
the sleeping-cars, unless sent for. Anywhere else, except on a train,
he would be handed over to the police for his importunities; but on
the train he considers himself justified in badgering the public,
and impertinently resents being ordered away. These are three small
matters, no doubt, but changes in the direction I have suggested would
nevertheless materially increase the comfort of passengers.
And now let me see. When I fell into these digressions I had just
said good-bye to the Mormons and Mormonland, and had got as far into
Nevada as Carlin. From there a dismal interval of wilderness brings the
traveller to Palisade, a group of wooden saloons haunted by numbers of
yellow Chinese. In the few minutes that the train stopped here, I saw a
curious sight.
A number of our Shoshonee passengers--the "deadheads" on the platform
between the baggage-cars--had got off, and one, of them was the squaw
that had the papoose. As she sat down and unslung her infant from
her back, a group gathered round her--one Englishman, one negro,
three mulattoes, and a Chinaman. And they were all laughing at the
Indian. Not one of them all, not even the negro, but thought himself
entitled to make fun of her and her baby! The white man looks down
on the mulatto, and the mulatto on the negro, and the negro and the
Chinaman reciprocate a mutual disdain; yet here they were, all four
together, on a common platform, loftily ridiculing the Shoshonee! It
was a delightful spectacle for the cynic. But I am no cynic, and yet I
laughed heartily at them all--at them all except the Shoshonee.
I cannot, for the life of me, help venerating these representatives of
aprodigious antiquity, these relics of a civilization that dates back
before our Flood.
Then we reach the Humboldt River, a broad and full-watered stream,
lazily winding along among ample meadows. But not a trace of
cultivation anywhere. And then on to the desert again with the
surface of the alkali land curling up into flakes, and the lank grey
greasewood sparsely scattered about it. The desolation is as utter as
in Beluchistan or the Land of Goshen, and instead of Murrees there are
plenty of Shoshonees to make the desolation perilous to travellers by
waggon. At Battle Creek station they are mustered in quite a crowd,
listless men with faces like masks and women burnished and painted and
wooden as the figure-heads of English barges. I do not think that in
all my travels, in Asia or in Africa, or in the islands of eastern or
southern seas, I have ever met a race with such a baffling physiognomy.
You can no more tell from his face what an Indian is thinking of than
you can from a monkey's. Their eyes brighten and then glaze over again
without a word being spoken or a muscle of the face moved, and they
avert their glance as soon as you look at them. If you look into an
Indian's eyes, they seem to deaden, and all expression dies out of
them; but the moment you begin to turn your head away, at you. They are
hieroglyphics altogether, and there is something "uncanny" about them.
At Battle Creek we note that (with irrigation) trees will grow, but
in a few minutes we are out again on the wretched desert, the eternal
greasewood being the only apology for vegetation, and little prairie
owls the only representatives of wild life. And so to Winnemucca,
where, being watered, a few trees are growing; but the desolation
is nevertheless so complete that I could not help thinking of the
difference a little Mormon industry would make! A company of Bannack
Indians were waiting here for the train, and such a wonderful
collection as they were! One of them was the chief who not long ago
gave the Federal troops a good deal of trouble, and his retinue was
the most delightful medley of curiosities--a long thin man with the
figure of a lamppost, a short fat one with the expression of a pancake,
a half-breed with a beard, and a boy with a squint. The chief, with
a face about an acre in width, wore a stove-pipe hat with the crown
knocked out and the opening stuffed full of feathers, but the rest
of his wonderful costume, all flapping about him in ends and fringes
of all colours and very dirty, is indescribable. His suite were in
a more sober garb, but all were grotesque, their headgear being
especially novel, and showing the utmost scorn of the hatter's original
intentions. Some wore their hats upside down and strapped round the
chin with a ribbon; others inside out, with a fringe of their own added
on behind--but it was enough to make any hatter mad to look at them.
They travelled with us across the next interval of howling wilderness,
and got out to promenade at Humboldt, where we got out to dine--and, as
it proved, to dine well.
Humboldt is an exquisite oasis in the hideous Nevada waste. A fountain
plays before the hotel door, and on either side are planted groves
of trees, poplar and locust and willow, with the turf growing green
beneath them, and roses scattered about.
No wonder that all the birds and butterflies of the neighbourhood
collect at such a beautiful spot, or that travellers go away grateful,
not only for the material benefits of a good meal, but the pleasures
of green trees and running water and the song of birds. An orchard,
with lucerne strong and thick beneath them, promises a continuance of
cultivation, but on a sudden it stops, and we find ourselves out again
on the alkali plain, as barren and blistered as the banks of the Suez
Canal. A tedious hour or two brings us to the river again; but man
here is not agricultural, so the desert continues in spite of abundant
water. And so to Lovelocks, where girls board the train as if they were
brigands, urging us to buy "sweet fresh milk--five cents a glass."
Indians, as usual, are lounging about on the platform, and some more of
them get on to the train, and away we go again into the same Sahara as
before. Humboldt Lake, the "sink" where the river disappears from the
surface of the earth, and a distant glimpse of Carson's "Sink," hardly
relieve the desperate monotony, for they are hideous levels of water
without a vestige of vegetation, and close upon them comes as honest a
tract of desert as even Africa can show, and with no more "features"
on it than a plate of cold porridge has. A wolf goes limping off in a
three-legged kind of way, as much as to say that, having to live in
such a place, it didn't much care whether we caught it or not; and what
a contrast to the pair of wolves I remember meeting one morning in
Afghanistan!
I was riding a camel and looking away to my right across the plain. I
saw coming towards me, over the brushwood, in a series of magnificent
leaps, a couple of immense wolves. I knew that wolves grew sometimes to
a great size, but I had no idea that, even with their winter fur on,
they could be so large as these were.
And there was a majesty about their advance that fascinated me, for
every bound, though it carried them twelve or fifteen feet, was so
free and light that they seemed to move by machinery rather than by
prodigious strength of muscle. But it suddenly occurred to me that they
were crossing my path, and I saw, moreover, that our relative speeds,
if maintained, might probably bring us into actual collision at the
point of intersection. But it was not for me to yield the road, and the
wolves thought it was not for them. And so we approached, the wolves
keeping exact time and leaping together, as if trained to do it, and
then, without swerving a hair's-breadth from their original course they
bounded across the path only a few feet behind my camel. It was superb
courage on their part, and as an episode of wild-beast life, one of the
most picturesque and dramatic I ever witnessed.
The next station we halted at was Wadsworth, a "hard place," so
men say, where revolvers are in frequent use and Lynch is judge.
Here the broad-faced Bannack chief got down, and, followed by his
tag-rag retinue, disappeared into the cluster of wigwams which we
saw pitched behind the station. I noticed a man standing here with a
splendid cactus in his hand, covered with large magenta blossoms, and
this reminded me to note the conspicuous change in the botany that
about here takes place. The flowers that had borne us company all
through Utah and now and then brightened the roadside in Nevada had
disappeared, and were replaced by others of species nearly all new
to me. I saw here for the first time a golden-flowered cactus and a
tall lavender-coloured spiraea of singular beauty. A little beyond
Wadsworth the change becomes even more marked, for striking the Truckee
river, we exchange desolation for pretty landscape, and the desert for
green bottom lands. The alteration was a welcome one, and some of the
glimpses, even if we had not passed through such a melancholy region,
would have claimed our admiration on their own merits. The full-fed
river poured along a rapid stream, through low-lying meadow-lands
fringed with tall cotton-wood, the valley sometimes narrowing so much
that the river took up all the room, and then widening out so as to
admit of large expanses of grass and occasional fields of corn. And so
to Greeno, where we supped heartily off "Truckee trout," one of the
best fish that ever wagged a fin. As we got back into the cars it was
getting dark, for with the usual luck of travel the Central Pacific
has to run its trains so as to give passengers ugly Nevada by day and
beautiful California by night.
Awaking next morning was a wonderful surprise. We had gone to sleep in
Nevada in early summer, and we awoke in California late in autumn! In
Utah, two days ago, the crops had only just begun to flush the ground
with green. Here, to-day, the corn-fields were the sun-dried stubble of
crops that had been cut weeks ago!
And the first glimpses of it were fortunate ones, for when I awoke
it was in a fine park-like, undulating country, studded with clumps
of oak-trees, but one continuous cornfield. Great mounds of straw
and stacks of corn dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see,
and already the fields were alive with carts and men all busy with
the splendid harvest. After a while came vast expanses of meadow,
prettily timbered, in which great flocks of sheep and herds of cattle
were grazing, ranches such as I had never seen before. And then we
passed some houses, broad-eaved and verandahed, with capacious barns
standing in echelon behind, and all the signs of an ample prosperity,
deep shaded in walnut-trees laden with nuts, overrun by vines already
heavy with clusters, and brightened by clumps of oleanders ruddy with
blossom. And then came the corn-fields again, an unbroken expanse of
stubble, yellow as the sea-sand, and seemingly as interminable. What a
country! It is a kingdom in itself.
And its rivers! The American River soon came in sight, rolling its
stately flood along between brakes of willow and elder, and aspen, and
then the Sacramento, a noble stream. And the two conspire and join
together to take liberties with the solid earth, swamp it into bulrush
beds by the league together, and create such jungles as almost rival
the great Himalaya Terai. And so to Sacramento.
Sacramento was en fete, for it was the race week. So bunting was
flapping from every conspicuous point, and everything and everybody
wore a whole holiday, morning-cocktail, go-as-you-please sort of look.
This fact may account for the very ill-mannered conductor who boarded
us here.
I am sitting in the smoking-car. Enter conductor with his mouth too
full of tobacco to be able to speak. He points at me with his thumb. I
take no notice of his thumb. He spits in the spittoon at my feet and
jerks his thumb towards me again. I disregard his thumb. "Ticket!" he
growls. I give him my ticket. He punches it and thrusts it back to me
so carelessly and suddenly that it falls on the floor. He takes no
notice, but passes on into the car. I take out my pocket-book and make
a note;--
"Such a man as this goes some way towards discrediting the
administration of a whole line. It seems a pity therefore to retain his
services."
However, of Sacramento, I was very sorry not to be able to stay there,
for next to the Los Angeles country I had been told that it was one of
the finest "locations" in all California, and I can readily believe it,
for the botany of the place is sub-tropical, and snow and sunstroke
are equally unknown. Fruits of all kinds grow there in delightful
abundance, and I cherish it therefore as a personal grudge against
Sacramento that there was not even a blackberry procurable at breakfast.
Passing from Sacramento, and remarking as we go, the patronage which
that vegetable impostor, the eucalyptus globulus (or "blue-gum" of
Australia) has secured, both as an ornamental--save the mark!--and
a shade-tree, two purposes for which by itself the eucalyptus is
specially unfitted, we find ourselves once more in a world given up to
harvesting. A monotonous panorama of stubble and standing crops, with
clumps of pretty oak timber studding the undulating land, leads us to
the diversified approaches to San Francisco.
It is old travellers' ground, but replete with the interest which
attaches to variety of scenery, continual indications of vast wealth,
and a rapidly growing prosperity. But one word, before we reach the
town, for that wonderful natural crop--the "wild oats," which clothe
every vacant acre of the country on this Pacific watershed with
harvests as close and as regular as if the land had been tilled, and
the ground sown, by human agency. This surprising plant is said to have
been brought to California by the Spaniards, and to have run wild from
the original fields. But whatever its origin, it is now growing in such
vast prairies that whole tribes of Indians used to look to it as the
staple of their food. But better crops are fast displacing it, and as
for the Indian, California no longer belongs to him or his bison-herds.
Further east, that is to say, from the Platte Valley to the Sierra
Nevada, the "bunch grass" was the great natural provision for the wild
herds of the wild man, and it still ranks as one of the most valuable
features of otherwise barren regions in Colorado, Utah, and Nevada.
To the student of Nature, however, it is far more interesting as one
of the most beautiful examples of her kindly foresight, for the bunch
grass grows where nothing else can find nourishment, and just when
all other grasses are useless as fodder, it throws out young juicy
shoots, thrives under the snow, and then in May, when other grasses are
abundant, it dies! Somebodv has said that without the mule and the pig
America would never have been colonized. That may be as it may be. But
the real pioneer of the West was the bison, for the first emigrants
followed exactly in the footsteps of the retiring herds, and these in
their turn grazed their way towards the Pacific in the line of the
bunch grass.
Mount Diavolo is the first "feature" that arouses the traveller's
inquisitiveness, and then the Martines Straits with their yellow
waters spread out at the feet of rolling, yellow hills, and then great
mud flats on which big vessels lie waiting for the tide to come and
float them on, and then a bay which, with its girdle of hills and its
broad margin, reminds me of Durban in Natal. So to Benicia, the place
of "the Boy," with the blacksmith's forge where Heenan used to work
still standing near the water's edge, and where the hammer that the
giant used to use is still preserved "in memoriam," and then on to the
ferry-boat (train and all!) and across a bay of brown water and brown
mud and brown hills--dismally remindful of Weston-super-Mare--and on
to dry land again, past Berkley, with its college among the trees,
Oakland, and other suburban resorts of the San Franciscan, to the
fine new three-storeyed Station at the pier. Once more on to the
ferry-boat, but this time leaving our train behind us and across
another bay, and so into San Francisco. Outside the station stands a
crowd of chariot-like omnibuses, as gorgeously coloured, some of them,
as the equipages of a circus, and empanelled with gaudy pictures. In
one of them we find our proper seats, and are soon bumping over the
cobble-stones into "the most wonderful city, sir, of America."