All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might meet
with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table. I had been
but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once more, and put apart
with my fellows. It was about two in the afternoon of Friday that I
found myself in front of the Emigrant House, with more than a hundred
others, to be sorted and boxed for the journey. A white-haired official,
with a stick under one arm, and a list in the other hand, stood apart in
front of us, and called name after name in the tone of a command. At
each name you would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run
for the hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon
concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children. The
second or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men travelling
alone, and the third to the Chinese. The official was easily moved to
anger at the least delay; but the emigrants were both quick at answering
their names, and speedy in getting themselves and their effects on board.
The families once housed, we men carried the second car without ceremony
by simultaneous assault. I suppose the reader has some notion of an
American railroad-car, that long, narrow wooden box, like a flat-roofed
Noah’s ark, with a stove and a convenience, one at either end, a passage
down the middle, and transverse benches upon either hand. Those destined
for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme
plainness, nothing but wood entering in any part into their constitution,
and for the usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed
but a dying glimmer even while they burned. The benches are too short
for anything but a young child. Where there is scarce elbow-room for two
to sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie. Hence the
company, or rather, as it appears from certain bills about the Transfer
Station, the company’s servants, have conceived a plan for the better
accommodation of travellers. They prevail on every two to chum together.
To each of the chums they sell a board and three square cushions stuffed
with straw, and covered with thin cotton. The benches can be made to
face each other in pairs, for the backs are reversible. On the approach
of night the boards are laid from bench to bench, making a couch wide
enough for two, and long enough for a man of the middle height; and the
chums lie down side by side upon the cushions with the head to the
conductor’s van and the feet to the engine. When the train is full, of
course this plan is impossible, for there must not be more than one to
every bench, neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree. It
was to bring about this last condition that our white-haired official now
bestirred himself. He made a most active master of ceremonies,
introducing likely couples, and even guaranteeing the amiability and
honesty of each. The greater the number of happy couples the better for
his pocket, for it was he who sold the raw material of the beds. His
price for one board and three straw cushions began with two dollars and a
half; but before the train left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I had
purchased mine, it had fallen to one dollar and a half.
The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some ladies, I
showed myself too eager for union at any price; but certainly the first
who was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined the honour without
thanks. He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man, I think from Yankeeland,
looked me all over with great timidity, and then began to excuse himself
in broken phrases. He didn’t know the young man, he said. The young man
might be very honest, but how was he to know that? There was another
young man whom he had met already in the train; he guessed he was honest,
and would prefer to chum with him upon the whole. All this without any
sort of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent. I began to
tremble lest every one should refuse my company, and I be left rejected.
But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed, small-headed,
curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly smartness in his
manner. To be exact, he had acquired it in the navy. But that was all
one; he had at least been trained to desperate resolves, so he accepted
the match, and the white-haired swindler pronounced the connubial
benediction, and pocketed his fees.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train. I am afraid
to say how many baggage-waggons followed the engine, certainly a score;
then came the Chinese, then we, then the families, and the rear was
brought up by the conductor in what, if I have it rightly, is called his
caboose. The class to which I belonged was of course far the largest,
and we ran over, so to speak, to both sides; so that there were some
Caucasians among the Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families.
But our own car was pure from admixture, save for one little boy of eight
or nine who had the whooping-cough. At last, about six, the long train
crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri river to
Omaha, westward bound.
It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars. There was thunder
in the air, which helped to keep us restless. A man played many airs
upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to, until he came to
“Home, sweet home.” It was truly strange to note how the talk ceased at
that, and the faces began to lengthen. I have no idea whether musically
this air is to be considered good or bad; but it belongs to that class of
art which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the feelings.
Pathos must be relieved by dignity of treatment. If you wallow naked in
the pathetic, like the author of “Home, sweet home,” you make your
hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are moved,
they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their weakness. It did
not come to tears that night, for the experiment was interrupted. An
elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard and about as much
appearance of sentiment an you would expect from a retired slaver, turned
with a start and bade the performer stop that “damned thing.” “I’ve
heard about enough of that,” he added; “give us something about the good
country we’re going to.” A murmur of adhesion ran round the car; the
performer took the instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded, and then
struck into a dancing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled
immediately the emotion he had raised.
The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off
next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform,
singing “The Sweet By-and-bye” with very tuneful voices; the chums began
to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at
an end. But it was not so; for, the train stopping at some station, the
cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young
men and maidens, some of them in little more than nightgear, some with
stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale. Their charge began with
twenty-five cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went on again, to
fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of what I had
paid for mine at the Transfer. This is my contribution to the economy of
future emigrants.
A great personage on an American train is the newsboy. He sells books
(such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant
journeys, soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee pitchers, coffee,
tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early
next morning the newsboy went around the cars, and chumming on a more
extended principle became the order of the hour. It requires but a
copartnery of two to manage beds; but washing and eating can be carried
on most economically by a syndicate of three. I myself entered a little
after sunrise into articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of
Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque. Shakespeare was my own nickname
on the cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of
a place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going west
to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or
smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together. I have never seen
tobacco so sillily abused. Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish,
Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of soap. The partners used
these instruments, one after another, according to the order of their
first awaking; and when the firm had finished there was no want of
borrowers. Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the
stove, and retired with the whole stock in trade to the platform of the
car. There he knelt down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the
woodwork or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash
his face and neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the train
is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.
On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare,
and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary
vessels; and their operations are a type of what went on through all the
cars. Before the sun was up the stove would be brightly burning; at the
first station the natives would come on board with milk and eggs and
coffee cakes; and soon from end to end the car would be filled with
little parties breakfasting upon the bed-boards. It was the pleasantest
hour of the day.
There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside: a breakfast in the
morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven and two, and supper from five
to eight or nine at night. We had rarely less than twenty minutes for
each; and if we had not spent many another twenty minutes waiting for
some express upon a side track among miles of desert, we might have taken
an hour to each repast and arrived at San Francisco up to time. For
haste is not the foible of an emigrant train. It gets through on
sufferance, running the gauntlet among its more considerable brethren;
should there be a block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they
cannot, in consequence, predict the length of the passage within a day or
so. Civility is the main comfort that you miss. Equality, though
conceived very largely in America, does not extend so low down as to an
emigrant. Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of “All aboard!”
recalls the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as I was alone
with emigrants, and from the Transfer all the way to San Francisco, I
found this ceremony was pretermitted; the train stole from the station
without note of warning, and you had to keep an eye upon it even while
you ate. The annoyance is considerable, and the disrespect both wanton
and petty.
Many conductors, again, will hold no communication with an emigrant. I
asked a conductor one day at what time the train would stop for dinner;
as he made no answer I repeated the question, with a like result; a third
time I returned to the charge, and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly
in the face for several seconds and turned ostentatiously away. I
believe he was half ashamed of his brutality; for when another person
made the same inquiry, although he still refused the information, he
condescended to answer, and even to justify his reticence in a voice loud
enough for me to hear. It was, he said, his principle not to tell people
where they were to dine; for one answer led to many other questions, as
what o’clock it was? or, how soon should we be there? and he could not
afford to be eternally worried.
As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities, a great deal of
your comfort depends on the character of the newsboy. He has it in his
power indefinitely to better and brighten the emigrant’s lot. The
newsboy with whom we started from the Transfer was a dark, bullying,
contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs. Indeed, in
his case, matters came nearly to a fight. It happened thus: he was going
his rounds through the cars with some commodities for sale, and coming to
a party who were at _Seven-up_ or _Cascino_ (our two games), upon a
bed-board, slung down a cigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking
one man’s hand to the floor. It was the last straw. In a moment the
whole party were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, and he was
ordered to “get out of that directly, or he would get more than he
reckoned for.” The fellow grumbled and muttered, but ended by making off,
and was less openly insulting in the future. On the other hand, the lad
who rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento made himself
the friend of all, and helped us with information, attention, assistance,
and a kind countenance. He told us where and when we should have our
meals, and how long the train would stop; kept seats at table for those
who were delayed, and watched that we should neither be left behind nor
yet unnecessarily hurried. You, who live at home at ease, can hardly
realise the greatness of this service, even had it stood alone. When I
think of that lad coming and going, train after train, with his bright
face and civil words, I see how easily a good man may become the
benefactor of his kind. Perhaps he is discontented with himself, perhaps
troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a hero of the old
Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few
cents, and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a man’s work, and
bettering the world.
I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy. I tell it
because it gives so good an example of that uncivil kindness of the
American, which is perhaps their most bewildering character to one newly
landed. It was immediately after I had left the emigrant train; and I am
told I looked like a man at death’s door, so much had this long journey
shaken me. I sat at the end of a car, and the catch being broken, and
myself feverish and sick, I had to hold the door open with my foot for
the sake of air. In this attitude my leg debarred the newsboy from his
box of merchandise. I made haste to let him pass when I observed that he
was coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once or twice he came upon
me unawares. On these occasions he most rudely struck my foot aside; and
though I myself apologised, as if to show him the way, he answered me
never a word. I chafed furiously, and I fear the next time it would have
come to words. But suddenly I felt a touch upon my shoulder, and a large
juicy pear was put into my hand. It was the newsboy, who had observed
that I was looking ill, and so made me this present out of a tender
heart. For the rest of the journey I was petted like a sick child; he
lent me newspapers, thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on
their sale, and came repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up.