It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday
without a cloud. We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression—on
the plains of Nebraska. I made my observatory on the top of a
fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to spy about me, and to
spy in vain for something new. It was a world almost without a feature;
an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway
stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on
either hand, the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven.
Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a
crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen
upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and
again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more
and more distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins,
and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their
surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board. The
train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one thing
moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to assume in our
regard. It seemed miles in length, and either end of it within but a
step of the horizon. Even my own body or my own head seemed a great
thing in that emptiness. I note the feeling the more readily as it is
the contrary of what I have read of in the experience of others. Day and
night, above the roar of the train, our ears were kept busy with the
incessant chirp of grasshoppers—a noise like the winding up of countless
clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that
land.
To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in this
spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole
arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line of the horizon. Yet
one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there
in old days, at the foot’s pace of oxen, painfully urging their teams,
and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they
steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing,
it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no
sight for repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, only the
dead green waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon. But the
eye, as I have been told, found differences even here; and at the worst
the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of his toil. It is the
settlers, after all, at whom we have a right to marvel. Our
consciousness, by which we live, is itself but the creature of variety.
Upon what food does it subsist in such a land? What livelihood can repay
a human creature for a life spent in this huge sameness? He is cut off
from books, from news, from company, from all that can relieve existence
but the prosecution of his affairs. A sky full of stars is the most
varied spectacle that he can hope. He may walk five miles and see
nothing; ten, and it is as though he had not moved; twenty, and still he
is in the midst of the same great level, and has approached no nearer to
the one object within view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with his
advance. We are full at home of the question of agreeable wall-papers,
and wise people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative
surroundings. But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler? His is a
wall-paper with a vengeance—one quarter of the universe laid bare in all
its gauntness.
His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the
visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it is tortured by
distance; yet there is no rest or shelter till the man runs into his
cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at hand. Hence, I am
told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains.
Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadæ, summer and winter, cattle, wife
and family, the settler may create a full and various existence. One
person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in every way superior to
her lot. This was a woman who boarded us at a way station, selling milk.
She was largely formed; her features were more than comely; she had that
great rarity—a fine complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind,
dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a
line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but
spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have been fatuous
arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to me
almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and all
nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines. Each stood
apart in its own lot. Each opened direct off the billiard-board, as if
it were a billiard-board indeed, and these only models that had been set
down upon it ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was clean but
very empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire. This
extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a strong
impression of artificiality. With none of the litter and discoloration
of human life; with the paths unworn, and the houses still sweating from
the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely scenic. The mind is loth
to accept it for a piece of reality; and it seems incredible that life
can go on with so few properties, or the great child, man, find
entertainment in so bare a playroom.
And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at least
it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely civilised. At
North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man asked another to pass
the milk-jug. This other was well-dressed and of what we should call a
respectable appearance; a darkish man, high spoken, eating as though he
had some usage of society; but he turned upon the first speaker with
extraordinary vehemence of tone—
“There’s a waiter here!” he cried.
“I only asked you to pass the milk,” explained the first.