Gigantic America--Of the treatment of strangers--The
wild-life world--Railway Companies' food-frauds--California
Felix--Prairie-dog history--The exasperation of wealth--Blessed
with good oil--The meek lettuce and judicious onion--Salads and
Salads--The perils of promiscuous grazing.
I HAD looked forward to my journey from San Francisco to St. Louis
with great anticipations, and, though I had no leisure to "stop off"
on the tour, I was not disappointed. Six continuous days and nights of
railway travelling carried me through such prodigious widths of land,
that the mere fact of traversing so much space had fascinations. And
the variations of scene are very striking--the corn and grape lands of
Southern California, that gradually waste away into a hideous cactus
desert, and then sink into a furnace-valley, several hundred feet below
the level of the sea; the wild pastures of Texas, that seem endless,
until they end in swamped woodlands; the terrific wildernesses of
Arkansas, that gradually soften down into the beautiful fertility of
Missouri. It was a delightful journey, and taught me in one week's
panorama more than a British Museum full of books could have done.
Visitors to America do not often make the journey. They are beguiled
off by way of Santa Fe and Kansas City. I confess that I should myself
have been very glad to have visited Santa Fe, and some day or other I
intend to pitch my tent for a while in San Antonio. But if I had to
give advice to a traveller, I would say:--
"Take the Southern Pacific to El Paso, and the Texan Pacific on to St.
Louis, and you will get such an idea of the spaciousness of America as
no other trip can give you." You will see prodigious tracts of country
that are still in aboriginal savagery and you will travel through whole
nations of hybrid people--Mexicans and mulattoes, graduated commixtures
of Red Indian, Spaniard, and Negro--that some day or another must
assume a very considerable political importance in the Union.
Nothing would do Americans more good than a tour through Upper India.
Nothing could do European visitors to America more good than the
journey from San Francisco to St. Louis by the Southern-and-Texas
route. The Gangetic Valley, the Western Ghats, the Himalayas, are all
experiences that would ameliorate, improve, and impress the American.
The Arizona cactus-plains, the Texan flower-prairies, the Arkansas
swamps, give the traveller from Europe a more truthful estimate of
America, as a whole, by their vastness, their untamed barbarism, their
contrast with the civilized and domesticated States, than years of
travel on the beaten tracks from city to city.
And here just a word or two to those American gentlemen to whom
it falls to amuse or edify the sight-seeing foreigner. Do not be
disappointed if he shows little enthusiasm for your factories, and
mills, and populous streets. Remember that these are just what he is
trying to escape from. The chances are, that he would much rather see a
prairie-dog city, than the Omaha smelting-works; an Indian lodge than
Pittsburg; one wild bison than all the cattle of Chicago; a rattlesnake
at home than all the legislature of New York in Albany assembled. He
prefers canyons to streets, mountain streams to canals; and when he
crosses the river, it is the river more than the bridge that interests
him. Of course it is well for him to stay in your gigantic hotels,
go down into your gigantic silver-mines, travel on your gigantic
river-steamers, and be introduced to your gigantic millionaires. These
are all American, and it is good for him, and seemly, that he should
add them to his personal experiences. So too, he should eat terrapin
and planked shad, clam-chowder, canvas-back ducks, and soft-shelled
crabs. For these are also American. But the odds are he may go mad
and bite thee fatally, if thou wakest him up at un-Christian hours to
go and see a woollen factory, simply because thou art proud of it--or
settest him down to breakfast before perpetual beefsteak, merely
because he is familiar with that food. The intelligent traveller, being
at Rome, wishes to be as much a Roman as possible. He would be as
aboriginal as the aborigines. And it is a mistake to go on thrusting
things upon him solely on the ground that he is already weary of them.
As I write, I remember many hours of bitter anguish which I have
endured--I who am familiar with Swansea, who have stayed in Liverpool,
who live in London--in loitering round smelting works and factories,
and places of business, trying to seem interested, and pretending to
store my memory with statistics. Sometimes it would be almost on my
tongue to say, "And now, sir, having shown off your possessions in
order to gratify your own pride in them, suppose you show me something
for my gratification." I never did, of course, but I groaned in the
spirit, at my precious hours being wasted, and at the hospitality
which so easily forgot itself in ostentatious display. I have perhaps
said more than I meant to have done. But all I mean is this, that when
a sojourner is at your mercy, throw him unreservedly upon his own
resources for such time as you are busy, and deny yourself unreservedly
for his amusement when you are at leisure. But do not spoil all his
day, and half your own, by trying to work your usual business habits
into his holiday, and take advantage of his foreign helplessness to
show him what an important person (when at home) you are yourself. Do
not, for instance, take him after breakfast to your office, and there
settling to your work with your clerks, ask him to "amuse himself"
with the morning papers--for three hours; and then, after a hurried
luncheon at your usual restaurant, take him back to the office for a
few minutes--another hour; and then, having carefully impressed upon
him that you are taking a half-holiday solely upon his account, and in
spite of all the overwhelming business that pours in upon you, do not
take him for a drive in the Mall--in order to show off your new horses
to your own acquaintances; and after calling at a few shops (during
which time your friend stays in the trap and holds the reins), do not,
oh do not, take him back to your house to a solitary dinner "quite
in the English style." No, sir; this is not the way to entertain the
wayfarer in such a land of wonders as this; and you ought not therefore
to feel surprise when your guest, wearied of your mistaken hospitality,
and wearied of your perpetual suggestions of your own self-sacrifice on
his behalf, suddenly determines not to be a burden upon you any longer,
and escapes the same evening to the most distant hotel in the town. Nor
when you read this ought you to feel angry. You did him a great wrong
in wasting a whole day out of his miserable three, and exasperated
him by telling his friends afterwards what a "good time" he had with
you. These few words are his retaliation--not written either in the
vindictive spirit of reprisal, but as advice to you for the future and
in the interests, of strangers who may follow him within your gates.
From San Francisco to Lathrop, back on the route we came by, to
Oakland, and over the brown waters of the arrogant Sacramento--swelling
out as if it would imitate the ocean, and treating the Pacific as if
it were merely "a neighbor,"--and out into thousands and thousands of
acres of corn, stubble, and mown hay-fields, the desolation worked by
the reaper-armies of peace-time with their fragrant plunder lying in
heaps all ready for the carts; and the camp-followers--the squirrels,
and the rats, and the finches--all busy gleaning in the emptied fields,
with owls sitting watchful on the fences, and vigilant buzzards sailing
overhead. What an odd life this is, of the squirrels and the buzzards,
the mice, and the owls! They used to watch each other in these fields,
just in the very same way, ages before the white men came. The
colonization of the Continent means to the squirrels and mice merely
a change in their food, to the hawks and the owls merely a slight
change in the flavour of the squirrels and mice! So, too, when the
Mississippi suddenly swelled up in flood the other day, and overflowed
three States, it lengthened conveniently the usual water-ways of the
frogs, and gave the turtles a more comfortable amplitude of marsh.
Hundreds of negroes narrowly escaped drowning, it is true; but what an
awful destruction there was of smaller animal life! Scores of hamlets
were doubtless destroyed, but what myriads of insect homes were ruined!
It does one good, I think, sometimes to remember the real aborigines
of our earth, the worlds that had their laws before ours, those
conservative antiquities with a civilization that was perfect before
man was created, and which neither the catastrophes of nature nor the
triumphs of science have power to abrogate.
Oak trees dot the rolling hills, and now and again we come to houses
with gardens and groves of eucalyptus, but for hours we travel through
one continuous corn-field, a veritable Prairie Of Wheat, astounding in
extent and in significance. And then we come upon the backwaters of the
San Joacquin, and the flooded levels of meadow, with their beautiful
oak groves, and herds of cattle and horses grazing on the lush grass
that grows between the beds of green tuilla reeds. It is a lovely reach
of country this, and some of the water views are perfectly enchanting.
But why should the company carefully board up its bridges so that
travellers shall not enjoy the scenes up and down the rivers which
they cross? It seems to me a pity to do so, seeing that it is really
quite unnecessary. As it was, we saw just enough of beauty to make us
regret the boards. Then, after the flooded lands, we enter the vast
corn-fields again, and so arrive at Lathrop.
Here we dined, and well, the service also being excellent, for half a
dollar. Could not the Union Pacific take a lesson from the Southern
Pacific, and instead of giving travellers offal at a dollar a head at
Green River and other eating-houses, give them good food of the Lathrop
kind for fifty cents? As I have said before, the wretched eating-houses
on the Union Pacific are maintained, confessedly, for the benefit
of the eating-houses, and the encouragement of local colonization;
but it is surely unfair on the "transient" to make him contribute,
by hunger, on the indigestion, and ill-temper, to the perpetration
of an imposition. On the Southern and the Texas Pacific there are
first-rate eating-places, some at fifty cents, some at seventy-five,
and, as we approach an older civilization, others at a dollar. But no
one can grudge a dollar for a good meal in a comfortable room with
civil attendance; while on the Union Pacific there is much to make
the passenger dissatisfied, besides the nature of the food, for it is
often served by ill-mannered waiters in cheerless rooms. Avery little
industry, or still less enterprise, might make other eating-places like
Humboldt.
It was at Lathrop that some Californians of a very rough type wished to
invade our sleeping-car. They wanted to know the "racket," didn't "care
if they had to pay fifty dollars," had "taken a fancy" to it, &c., &c.;
but the conductor, with considerable tact, managed to persuade them to
abandon their design of travelling like gentlemen, and so they got into
another car, where they played cards for drinks, fired revolvers out of
the window at squirrels between the deals, and got up a quarrel over it
at the end of every hand.
California Felix! Aye, happy indeed in its natural resources. For we
are again whirling along through prairies of corn-land, a monotony of
fertility that becomes almost as serious as the grassy levels of the
Platte, the sage-brush of Utah, or the gravelled sands of Nevada. And
so to Modesta, a queer, wide-streeted, gum-treed place, not the least
like "America," but a something between Madeira and Port Elizabeth.
It has not 2000 people in it altogether, yet walking across the dusty
square is a lady in the modes of Paris, and a man in a stove-pipe hat!
Another stretch of farm-lands brings us to Merced, and the county of
that name, a miracle of fertility even among such perpetual marvels
of richness. If I were to say what the average of grain per acre is,
English farmers might go mad, but if the printer will put it into some
very small type I will whisper it to you that the men of Merced grumble
at seventy bushels per acre. I should like to own Merced, I confess.
I am a person of moderate desires. A little contents me. And it is
only a mere scrap, after all, of this bewildering California. On the
counter at the hotel at Merced are fir-cones from the Big Trees and
fossil fragments and wondrous minerals from Yosemite, and odds and ends
of Spanish ornaments. The whole place has a Spanish air about it. This
used to be the staging-point for travellers to the Valley of Wonders,
but times have changed, and with them the Stage-route, so Merced is
left on one side by the tourist stream. Leaving it ourselves, we
traverse patches of wild sunflower, and then find ourselves out on wide
levels of uncultivated land, waiting for the San Joacquin (pronounced,
by the way, Sanwa-keen) canal, to bring irrigation to them. How the
Mormons would envy the Californians if they were their neighbours, and
the contrast is indeed pathetic, between the alkaline wastes of Utah
and the fat glebes of Merced!
At present, however, a nation of little owls possesses the uncultivated
acres, and ground squirrels hold the land from them on fief, paying,
no doubt, in their vassalage a feudal tribute of their plump,
well-nourished bodies. To right and left lies spread out an immense
prairie-dog settlement, deserted now, however; and beyond it, on
either side, a belt of pretty timbered land stretches to the coast
range, which we see far away on the right, and to the foot-hills--the
"Sewaliks" of the Sierra Nevada,--which rise up, capped and streaked
with snow, on the left.
Wise men read history for us backwards from the records left by ruins.
Why not do the same here with this vast City of the Prairie-Dogs
that continues to right and left of us, miles after miles? Once upon
a time, then, there was a powerful nation of prairie-dogs in this
place, and they became, in process of years, debauched by luxury, and
weakened by pride. So they placed the government in the hands of the
owls, whom they invited to come and live with them, and gave over the
protection of the country to the rattlesnakes, whom they maintained as
janissaries. But the owls and the rattlesnakes, finding all the power
in their own hands, and seeing that the prairie-dogs had grown idle
and fat and careless, conspired together to overthrow their masters.
Now there lived near them, but in subjection to the prairie-dogs, a
race of ground-squirrels, a hard-working, thick-skinned, bushy-tailed
folk; and the owls and the rattlesnakes made overtures to the ground
squirrels, and one morning, when the prairie-dogs were out feeding and
gambolling in the meadows, the conspirators rushed to arms, and while
the rattlesnakes and the ground-squirrels, their accomplices, seized
possession of the vacated city, the owls attacked the prairie-dogs
with their beaks and wings. And the end of it was disaster, utter and
terrible; and the prairie-dogs fled across the plains into the woodland
for shelter, but did not stay there, but passed on, in one desolating
exodus, to the foot-hills beyond the woodland. And then the owls and
the rattlesnakes and the ground-squirrels divided the deserted city
among them. And to this day the ground-squirrels pay a tribute of their
young to the owls and the rattlesnakes, as the price of possession and
of their protection. But they are always afraid that the prairie-dogs
may come back again some day (as the Mormons are going back to Jackson
County, Missouri), to claim their old homesteads; and so, whenever
the ground-squirrels go out to feed and gambol in the meadows, the
rattlesnakes remain at the bottom of the holes, and the owls sit on
sentry duty at the top. Isn't that as good as any other conjectural
history?
And then Madera, with its great canal all rafted over with floating
timber, and more indications, in the eating-house, of the neighbourhood
of the Big Trees and Yosemite. For this is the point of departure now
in vogue, the distance being only seventy miles, and the roads good.
But of the trip to Clark's, and thence on to "Yohamite" and to Fresno
Grove--hereafter. Meanwhile, grateful for the good meal at Madera, we
are again smoking the meditative pipe, and looking out upon Owl-land,
with the birds all duly perched at their posts, and their bushy-tailed
companions enjoying life immensely in family parties among the short
grass. Herds of cattle are seen here and there, and wonderful their
condition, too; and thus, through flat pastures all pimpled over
with old, fallen-in, "dog-houses," we reach Fresno. This monotony of
fertility is beginning to exasperate me. It is a trait of my personal
character, this objection to monotonous prosperity. I like to see
streaks of lean. Thus I begin to think of Vanderbilts as of men who
have done me an injury; and unless Jay Gould recovers his ground with
me, by conferring a share upon me, I shall feel called upon to take
personal exception to his great wealth. And now comes Fresno, a welcome
stretch of land that requires irrigation to be fruitful, a land that
only gives her favours to earnest wooers, and does not, like the rest
of California, smile on every vagabond admirer. Where the ground is
not cultivated, it forms fine parade-ground for the owls, and rare
pleasaunces for the squirrels. But what a nymph this same water is!
Look at this patch of greensward all set in a bezel of bright foliage
and bright with wild flowers! In mythology there is a goddess under
whose feet the earth breaks into blossoms and leaves. I forget her
name. But it should have been Hydore. And now, as the evening gathers
round, we see the outlines of the Sierras, away on the left, blurring
into twilight tints of blue and grey--and then to bed.
California is blest in the olive. It grows to perfection, and the
result is that the California is no stranger to the priceless luxury of
good oil, and can enjoy, at little cost, the delights of a good salad.
How often, in rural England, with acres of salad material growing
fresh and crisp all round me, have groaned at the impossibility of a
salad, by reason of the atrocious character of the local grocer's oil!
But in California all the oil is good, and the vegetable ingredients
of the fascinating bowl are superb. But in America there is a fatal
determination towards mayonnaise, and every common waiter considers
himself capable of mixing one. So that even in California your hopes
are sometimes blighted, and your good humour turned to gall, by fools
rushing in where even angels should have to pass an examination before
admission. A simpler salad, however, is better than any mayonnaise, and
once the proportions are mastered, a child may be entrusted with the
mixture.
The lettuce, by long familiarity, has come to be considered the true
basis of all salad, and in its generous expanse of faintly flavoured
leaf, so cool and juicy and crisp when brought in fresh from the
garden, it has certainly some claims to the proud position. But a
multitude of salads can be made without any lettuce at all, and it is
doubtful whether either Greece or Rome used it as an ingredient of
the bowl in which the austere endive and pungent onion always found a
place. Now-a-days however, lettuce is a deserving favourite, It has
no sympathies or antipathies, and no flavour strong enough to arouse
enthusiasm or aversion. It is not aggressive or self-assertive, but,
like those amiable people with whom no one ever quarrels, is always
ready to be of service, no matter what company may be thrust upon
it, or what treatment it has to undergo. Opinions of its own it has
none, so it easily adopts those of others, and takes upon itself--and
so distributes over the whole--any properties of taste or smell that
may be communicated to it by its neighbours. An onion might be rubbed
with lettuce for an indefinite period and betray no alteration in its
original nature, but the lettuce if only touched with onion becomes at
once a modified onion itself, and no ablution will remove from it the
suspicion of the contact. The gentle leaf is therefore often ill-used;
but, after all, even this, the meekest of vegetables, will turn upon
the oppressor, and if not eaten young and fresh, or if slaughtered with
a steel blade, will convert the salad that should have been short and
sharp in the mouth into a basin of limp rags, that cling together in
sodden lumps, and when swallowed conduce to melancholy and repentance.
The antithesis of the lettuce is the onion. Both are equally essential
to the perfect salad, but for most opposite reasons. The lettuce must
be there to give substance to the whole, to retain the oil and salt and
vinegar, to borrow fragrance and to look green and crisp. It underlies
everything else, and acts as conductor to all, like consciousness in
the human mind. It is the bulk of the salad so far as appearances go,
and yet it alone could be turned out without affecting the flavour of
the dish. It is only the canvas upon which the artist paints.
How different is the onion! It adds nothing to the amount, and
contributes nothing to the sight, yet it permeates the whole; not,
however, as an actual presence, but rather as a reflection, a shadow,
or a suspicion. Like the sunset-red, it tinges everything it falls
upon, and everywhere reveals new beauties. It is the master-mind in
the mixed assembly, allowing each voice to be heard, but guiding the
many utterances to one symmetrical result. It keeps a strong restraint
upon itself, helping out, with a judicious hint only, those who need
it, and never interfering with neighbours that can assert their own
individuality. I speak, of course, of the onion as it appears in the
civilized salad, and not the outrageous vegetable that the Prophet
condemned and Italy cannot do without. Some pretend to have a prejudice
against the onion, but as an American humourist--Dudley Warner--says,
"There is rather a cowardice in regard to it. I doubt not all men and
women love the onion, but few confess it."
In simplicity lies perfection. The endive and beetroot, fresh bean,
and potato, radish and mustard and cress, asparagus and celery,
cabbage-hearts and parsley, tomato and cucumber, green peppers and
capers, and all the other ingredients that in this salad or in that
find a place are, no doubt, well enough in their way; but the greatest
men of modern times have agreed in saying that, given three vegetables
and a master-mind, a perfect salad may be the result. But for the
making there requires to be present a miser to dole out the vinegar,
a spendthrift to sluice on the oil, a sage to apportion the salt,
and a maniac to stir. The household that can produce these four, and
has at command a firm, stout-hearted lettuce, three delicate spring
onions, and a handful of cress, need ask help from none and envy
none; for in the consumption of the salad thus ambrosially resulting,
all earth's cares may be for the while forgotten, and the consumer
snap his fingers at the stocks, whether they go up or down. There is
no need to go beyond these frugal ingredients. In Europe it is true
men range hazardously far afield for their green meat. They tell us,
for instance, of the fearful joy to be snatched from nettle-tops,
but it is not many who care thus to rob the hairy caterpillar of his
natural food; nor in eating the hawthorn buds, where the sparrows have
been before us, is there such prospect of satisfaction as to make us
hurry to the hedges. The dandelion, too, we are told, is a wholesome
herb, and so is wild sorrel; but who among us can find the time to
go wandering about the country grazing with the cattle, and playing
Nebuchadnezzar among the green stuff? In the Orient the native is never
at a loss for salad, for he grabs the weeds at a venture, and devours
them complacently, relying upon fate to work them all up to a good
end; and the Chinaman, so long as he can only boil it first, turns
everything that grows into a vegetable for the table.
But it would not be safe to send a public of higher organization into
the highways and ditches; for a rabid longing for vegetable food,
unballasted by botanical ledge, might conduce to the consumption Of
many unwholesome plants, with their concomitant insect evils. Dreadful
stories are told of the results arising from the careless eating of
unwashed watercress; and in country places the horrors that are said
to attend the swallowing of certain herbs without a previous removal
of the things that inhabit them are sufficient to deter the most
ravenously inclined from taking a miscellaneous meal off the roadside,
and from promiscuous grazing in hedge-rows.