PAGE
I. ACROSS THE PLAINS 1
II. THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 51
III. FONTAINEBLEAU 72
IV. EPILOGUE TO “AN INLAND VOYAGE” 95
V. RANDOM MEMORIES 112
VI. RANDOM MEMORIES CONTINUED 126
VII. THE LANTERN-BEARERS 138
VIII. A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 153
IX. BEGGARS 169
X. LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 182
XI. PULVIS ET UMBRA 193
XII. A CHRISTMAS SERMON 202
I
ACROSS THE PLAINS
LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN
FRANCISCO
_Monday_.—It was, if I remember rightly, five o’clock when we were all
signalled to be present at the Ferry Depôt of the railroad. An emigrant
ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night, another on the Sunday
morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early on Monday; and as
there is no emigrant train on Sunday a great part of the passengers from
these four ships was concentrated on the train by which I was to travel.
There was a babel of bewildered men, women, and children. The wretched
little booking-office, and the baggage-room, which was not much larger,
were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the
atmosphere of dripping clothes. Open carts full of bedding stood by the
half-hour in the rain. The officials loaded each other with
recriminations. A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to have been
an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full of brimstone,
blustering and interfering. It was plain that the whole system, if
system there was, had utterly broken down under the strain of so many
passengers.
My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish man, who preserved his
head in the midst of this turmoil, got my baggage registered, and
counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he should give me the word
to move. I had taken along with me a small valise, a knapsack, which I
carried on my shoulders, and in the bag of my railway rug the whole of
_Bancroft’s History of the United States_, in six fat volumes. It was as
much as I could carry with convenience even for short distances, but it
insured me plenty of clothing, and the valise was at that moment, and
often after, useful for a stool. I am sure I sat for an hour in the
baggage-room, and wretched enough it was; yet, when at last the word was
passed to me and I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was only to
exchange discomfort for downright misery and danger.
I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill from West
Street to the river. It was dark, the wind blew clean through it from
end to end; and here I found a great block of passengers and baggage,
hundreds of one and tons of the other. I feel I shall have a difficulty
to make myself believed; and certainly the scene must have been
exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily repetition. It was a
tight jam; there was no fair way through the mingled mass of brute and
living obstruction. Into the upper skirts of the crowd porters,
infuriated by hurry and overwork, clove their way with shouts. I may say
that we stood like sheep, and that the porters charged among us like so
many maddened sheep-dogs; and I believe these men were no longer
answerable for their acts. It mattered not what they were carrying, they
drove straight into the press, and when they could get no farther,
blindly discharged their barrowful. With my own hand, for instance, I
saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother’s knee, she sitting
on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I must suppose that there
were many similar interpositions in the course of the evening. It will
give some idea of the state of mind to which we were reduced if I tell
you that neither the porter nor the mother of the child paid the least
attention to my act. It was not till some time after that I understood
what I had done myself, for to ward off heavy boxes seemed at the moment
a natural incident of human life. Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition to
progress, such as one encounters in an evil dream, had utterly daunted
the spirits. We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the
conditions of the world. For my part, I shivered a little, and my back
ached wearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear, and all the
activities of my nature had become tributary to one massive sensation of
discomfort.
At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess, the crowd
began to move, heavily straining through itself. About the same time
some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden flare over the shed. We were
being filtered out into the river boat for Jersey City. You may imagine
how slowly this filtering proceeded, through the dense, choking crush,
every one overladen with packages or children, and yet under the
necessity of fishing out his ticket by the way; but it ended at length
for me, and I found myself on deck under a flimsy awning and with a
trifle of elbow-room to stretch and breathe in. This was on the
starboard; for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port
side, by which we had entered. In vain the seamen shouted to them to
move on, and threatened them with shipwreck. These poor people were
under a spell of stupor, and did not stir a foot. It rained as heavily
as ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not without
danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept over the river
in the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck,
and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated steamers running many
knots, and heralding their approach by strains of music. The contrast
between these pleasure embarkations and our own grim vessel, with her
list to port and her freight of wet and silent emigrants, was of that
glaring description which we count too obvious for the purposes of art.
The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede. I had a fixed sense
of calamity, and to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was common to
us all. A panic selfishness, like that produced by fear, presided over
the disorder of our landing. People pushed, and elbowed, and ran, their
families following how they could. Children fell, and were picked up to
be rewarded by a blow. One child, who had lost her parents, screamed
steadily and with increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit;
an official kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to remark
her distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest. I was
so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in the
hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station, so that I
was quite wet by the time that I got under cover. There was no
waiting-room, no refreshment room; the cars were locked; and for at least
another hour, or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the draughty, gaslit
platform. I sat on my valise, too crushed to observe my neighbours; but
as they were all cold, and wet, and weary, and driven stupidly crazy by
the mismanagement to which we had been subjected, I believe they can have
been no happier than myself. I bought half-a-dozen oranges from a boy,
for oranges and nuts were the only refection to be had. As only two of
them had even a pretence of juice, I threw the other four under the cars,
and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and children groping on the track
after my leavings.
At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, and far from
dry. For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed my trousers
as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my blood into the
bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour to whom I lent the
brush, appeared to take the least precaution. As they were, they
composed themselves to sleep. I had seen the lights of Philadelphia, and
been twice ordered to change carriages and twice countermanded, before I
allowed myself to follow their example.
_Tuesday_.—When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing idle;
I was in the last carriage, and, seeing some others strolling to and fro
about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as from a caravan
by the wayside. We were near no station, nor even, as far as I could
see, within reach of any signal. A green, open, undulating country
stretched away upon all sides. Locust trees and a single field of Indian
corn gave it a foreign grace and interest; but the contours of the land
were soft and English. It was not quite England, neither was it quite
France; yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes. And it was in
the sky, and not upon the earth, that I was surprised to find a change.
Explain it how you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the
sun rises with a different splendour in America and Europe. There is
more clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple,
brown, and smoky orange in those of the new. It may be from habit, but
to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter; it
has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to fit
some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as though America were in
fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the orient of Aurora and the
springs of day. I thought so then, by the railroad side in Pennsylvania,
and I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant parts of the
continent. If it be an illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in
which my eyesight is accomplice.
Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its passage by
the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the engine; and as it was
for this we had been waiting, we were summoned by the cry of “All
aboard!” and went on again upon our way. The whole line, it appeared,
was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having thrown all the traffic
hours into arrear. We paid for this in the flesh, for we had no meals
all that day. Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had
a few minutes at some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches
for sale; but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at
every opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow
my way to the counter.
Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer’s day. There was not
a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys among
which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness
till late in the afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety to
one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods, rivers, and the delved earth.
These, though in so far a country, were airs from home. I stood on the
platform by the hour; and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages,
carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and
cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining
blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his
light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface,
I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had
come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from
the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty
of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As
when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word
Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no
other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.
None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure
in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world where
nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as the
United States of America. All times, races, and languages have brought
their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with
Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its London associations
of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King’s Road, is own suburb to
stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat, translated
names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas;
{8} and both, while I was crossing the continent, lay, watched by armed
men, in the horror and isolation of a plague. Old, red Manhattan lies,
like an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory, below anglified New York.
The names of the States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet
and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota,
Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a
nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer
shall arise from the Western continent, his verse will be enriched, his
pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would
strike the fancy in a business circular.
Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg. I had
now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with her children;
these I was to watch over providentially for a certain distance farther
on the way; but as I found she was furnished with a basket of eatables, I
left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner for myself. I mention this
meal, not only because it was the first of which I had partaken for about
thirty hours, but because it was the means of my first introduction to a
coloured gentleman. He did me the honour to wait upon me after a
fashion, while I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture
marched me farther into the country of surprise. He was indeed
strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy
Minstrels of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but
of a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd
foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with manners so
patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their parallel in
England. A butler perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered, but then he
sets you right with a reserve and a sort of sighing patience which one is
often moved to admire. And again, the abstract butler never stoops to
familiarity. But the coloured gentleman will pass you a wink at a time;
he is familiar like an upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like
Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He makes himself at home and
welcome. Indeed, I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout
that supper much as, with us, a young, free, and not very self-respecting
master might behave to a good-looking chambermaid. I had come prepared
to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove in a thousand
condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice of race; but I
assure you I put my patronage away for another occasion, and had the
grace to be pleased with that result.
Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of
etiquette: if one should offer to tip the American waiter? Certainly
not, he told me. Never. It would not do. They considered themselves
too highly to accept. They would even resent the offer. As for him and
me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation; he, in particular, had
found much pleasure in my society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one
of those rare conjunctures.... Without being very clear seeing, I can
still perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly
pocketed a quarter.
_Wednesday_.—A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on
board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio. This had early been
a favourite home of my imagination; I have played at being in Ohio by the
week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my person
being still unbreeched. My preference was founded on a work which
appeared in _Cassell’s Family Paper_, and was read aloud to me by my
nurse. It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in
the last chapter, very obligingly washed the paint off his face and
became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him. The
idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a
baronet, was one which my mind rejected. It offended verisimilitude,
like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape from
uninhabited islands.
But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. We were now on those great
plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The country was
flat like Holland, but far from being dull. All through Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw of them from the train and in
my waking moments, it was rich and various, and breathed an elegance
peculiar to itself. The tall corn pleased the eye; the trees were
graceful in themselves, and framed the plain into long, aërial vistas;
and the clean, bright, gardened townships spoke of country fare and
pleasant summer evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise;
but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil. That morning dawned
with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not
perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the heart and
seemed to travel with the blood. Day came in with a shudder. White
mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as we see them more often
on a lake; and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them up,
leaving an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from horizon to
horizon, the mists had still been there, and we knew that this paradise
was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria. The fences along the line
bore but two descriptions of advertisement; one to recommend tobaccos,
and the other to vaunt remedies against the ague. At the point of day,
and while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the
state, who had got in at some way station, pronounced it, with a doctoral
air, “a fever and ague morning.”
The Dutch widow was a person of some character. She had conceived at
first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she was at no
pains to conceal. But being a woman of a practical spirit, she made no
difficulty about accepting my attentions, and encouraged me to buy her
children fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels, and even to sleep
upon the floor that she might profit by my empty seat. Nay, she was such
a rattle by nature, and, so powerfully moved to autobiographical talk,
that she was forced, for want of a better, to take me into confidence and
tell me the story of her life. I heard about her late husband, who
seemed to have made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on
Sundays. I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of her
fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and a variety of
particular matters that are not usually disclosed except to friends. At
one station, she shook up her children to look at a man on the platform
and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me she explained how she had
been keeping company with this Mr. Z., how far matters had proceeded, and
how it was because of his desistance that she was now travelling to the
West. Then, when I was thus put in possession of the facts, she asked my
judgment on that type of manly beauty. I admired it to her heart’s
content. She was not, I think, remarkably veracious in talk, but
broidered as fancy prompted, and built castles in the air out of her
past; yet she had that sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these
confidences, steadily aware of her aversion. Her parting words were
ingeniously honest. “I am sure,” said she, “we all _ought_ to be very
much obliged to you.” I cannot pretend that she put me at my ease; but I
had a certain respect for such a genuine dislike. A poor nature would
have slipped, in the course of these familiarities, into a sort of
worthless toleration for me.
We reached Chicago in the evening. I was turned out of the cars, bundled
into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the station of a
different railroad. Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city. I remember
having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards its restoration at the
period of the fire; and now when I beheld street after street of
ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers, I thought it would
be a graceful act for the corporation to refund that sixpence, or, at the
least, to entertain me to a cheerful dinner. But there was no word of
restitution. I was that city’s benefactor, yet I was received in a
third-class waiting-room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of
ham and eggs at my own expense.
I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in
Chicago. When it was time to start, I descended the platform like a man
in a dream. It was a long train, lighted from end to end; and car after
car, as I came up with it, was not only filled but overflowing. My
valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous tomes of Bancroft,
weighed me double; I was hot, feverish, painfully athirst; and there was
a great darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by
gas. When at last I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle
of rags, the world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my
consciousness dwindled within me to a mere pin’s head, like a taper on a
foggy night.
When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat down
beside me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman, somewhat gone in
drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the dozen, as they say. I
did my best to keep up the conversation; for it seemed to me dimly as if
something depended upon that. I heard him relate, among many other
things, that there were pickpockets on the train, who had already robbed
a man of forty dollars and a return ticket; but though I caught the
words, I do not think I properly understood the sense until next morning;
and I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad to hear it.
What else he talked about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of
words, his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was highly
explanatory: but no more. And I suppose I must have shown my confusion
very plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me like one who has
conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in German, supposing perhaps that I
was unfamiliar with the English tongue; and finally, in despair, he rose
and left me. I felt chagrined; but my fatigue was too crushing for
delay, and, stretching myself as far as that was possible upon the bench,
I was received at once into a dreamless stupor.
The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the suburbs
after a _diner fin_, and was bent on entertainment while the journey
lasted. Having failed with me, he pitched next upon another emigrant,
who had come through from Canada, and was not one jot less weary than
myself. Nay, even in a natural state, as I found next morning when we
scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy, uncommunicative man. After trying
him on different topics, it appears that the little German gentleman
flounced into a temper, swore an oath or two, and departed from that car
in quest of livelier society. Poor little gentleman! I suppose he
thought an emigrant should be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a
flask of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the moments
of digestion.
_Thursday_.—I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of travelling,
for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed in spirits and ate
a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk, and coffee and hot
cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi. Another long day’s ride
followed, with but one feature worthy of remark. At a place called
Creston, a drunken man got in. He was aggressively friendly, but,
according to English notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train. For
one stage he eluded the notice of the officials; but just as we were
beginning to move out of the next station, Cromwell by name, by came the
conductor. There was a word or two of talk; and then the official had
the man by the shoulders, twitched him from his seat, marched him through
the car, and sent him flying on to the track. It was done in three
motions, as exact as a piece of drill. The train was still moving
slowly, although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his
feet without a fall. He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his
cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand, while the
other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys. It was the first
indication that I had come among revolvers, and I observed it with some
emotion. The conductor stood on the steps with one hand on his hip,
looking back at him; and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the creature,
for he turned without further ado, and went off staggering along the
track towards Cromwell followed by a peal of laughter from the cars.
They were speaking English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign
land.
Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the Pacific
Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the Missouri
river. Here we were to stay the night at a kind of caravanserai, set
apart for emigrants. But I gave way to a thirst for luxury, separated
myself from my companions, and marched with my effects into the Union
Pacific Hotel. A white clerk and a coloured gentleman whom, in my plain
European way, I should call the boots, were installed behind a counter
like bank tellers. They took my name, assigned me a number, and
proceeded to deal with my packages. And here came the tug of war. I
wished to give up my packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish to go
to bed. And this, it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel.
It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my
unfamiliarity with the language. For although two nations use the same
words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the
dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set
phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification. Some
international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman
at Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which seemed very natural
to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency. He refused, and that with
the plainness of the West. This American manner of conducting matters of
business is, at first, highly unpalatable to the European. When we
approach a man in the way of his calling, and for those services by which
he earns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hired servant.
But in the American opinion, two gentlemen meet and have a friendly talk
with a view to exchanging favours if they shall agree to please. I know
not which is the more convenient, nor even which is the more truly
courteous. The English stiffness unfortunately tends to be continued
after the particular transaction is at an end, and thus favours class
separations. But on the other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses leave
an open field for the insolence of Jack-in-office.
I was nettled by the coloured gentleman’s refusal, and unbuttoned my
wrath under the similitude of ironical submission. I knew nothing, I
said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had no desire to give
trouble. If there was nothing for it but to get to bed immediately, let
him say the word, and though it was not my habit, I should cheerfully
obey.
He burst into a shout of laughter. “Ah!” said he, “you do not know about
America. They are fine people in America. Oh! you will like them very
well. But you mustn’t get mad. I know what you want. You come along
with me.”
And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the arm like an old
acquaintance, he led me to the bar of the hotel.
“There,” said he, pushing me from him by the shoulder, “go and have a
drink!”