A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular
impressions on the mind. By an early hour on Wednesday morning we
stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-lying
plateau in Nevada. The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot,
and learning that I was the same, he grew very friendly, and gave me some
advice on the country I was now entering. “You see,” said he, “I tell
you this, because I come from your country.” Hail, brither Scots!
His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the world.
There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is
revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon
strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental
arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred
halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for
complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer that no
longer exists—the _bit_, or old Mexican real. The supposed value of the
bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to
two bits, the quarter-dollar stands for the required amount. But how
about an odd bit? The nearest coin to it is a dime, which is, short by a
fifth. That, then, is called a _short_ bit. If you have one, you lay it
triumphantly down, and save two and a half cents. But if you have not,
and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders you a
dime by way of change; and thus you have paid what is called a _long
bit_, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by comparison with a short
bit, five cents. In country places all over the Pacific coast, nothing
lower than a bit is ever asked or taken, which vastly increases the cost
of life; as even for a glass of beer you must pay fivepence or
sevenpence-halfpenny, as the case may be. You would say that this system
of mutual robbery was as broad as it was long; but I have discovered a
plan to make it broader, with which I here endow the public. It is brief
and simple—radiantly simple. There is one place where five cents are
recognised, and that is the post-office. A quarter is only worth two
bits, a short and a long. Whenever you have a quarter, go to the
post-office and buy five cents worth of postage-stamps; you will receive
in change two dimes, that is, two short bits. The purchasing power of
your money is undiminished. You can go and have your two glasses of beer
all the same; and you have made yourself a present of five cents worth of
postage-stamps into the bargain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me
on the head for this discovery.
From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand,
horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier,
and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were standing, after our manner,
outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath the
cars, and take to their heels across country. They were tramps, it
appeared, who had been riding on the beams since eleven of the night
before; and several of my fellow-passengers had already seen and
conversed with them while we broke our fast at Toano. These land
stowaways play a great part over here in America, and I should have liked
dearly to become acquainted with them.
At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was coming out from supper,
when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two others
taller and ruddier than himself.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but do you happen to be going on?”
I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist from
that intention. He had a situation to offer me, and if we could come to
terms, why, good and well. “You see,” he continued, “I’m running a
theatre here, and we’re a little short in the orchestra. You’re a
musician, I guess?”
I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with “Auld Lang
Syne” and “The Wearing of the Green,” I had no pretension whatever to
that style. He seemed much put out of countenance; and one of his taller
companions asked him, on the nail, for five dollars.
“You see, sir,” added the latter to me, “he bet you were a musician; I
bet you weren’t. No offence, I hope?”
“None whatever,” I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I presume
the debt was liquidated.
This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers, who
thought they had now come to a country where situations went a-begging.
But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith. Indeed, I am more
than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide the bet.
Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all reasons,
that I remember no more than that we continued through desolate and
desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some time after I had
fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of my companions. It was
in vain that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm and whisky burned in his
eyes; and he declared we were in a new country, and I must come forth
upon the platform and see with my own eyes. The train was then, in its
patient way, standing halted in a by-track. It was a clear, moonlit
night; but the valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and
only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the
blackness of the pines. A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the
continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the
mountains. The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in the
nostrils—a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. I was dead sleepy, but I
returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at my heart.
When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it were
day or night, for the illumination was unusual. I sat up at last, and
found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed; and
suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the next
length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine
upon my left, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires
of dawn. I am usually very calm over the displays of nature; but you
will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting
one’s wife. I had come home again—home from unsightly deserts to the
green and habitable corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along the
hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more dear to
me than a blood relation. Few people have praised God more happily than
I did. And thenceforward, down by Blue Cañon, Alta, Dutch Flat, and all
the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain forests, dropping
thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we went, not I only, but
all the passengers on board, threw off their sense of dirt and heat and
weariness, and bawled like schoolboys, and thronged with shining eyes
upon the platform and became new creatures within and without. The sun
no longer oppressed us with heat, it only shone laughingly along the
mountain-side, until we were fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At every
turn we could see farther into the land and our own happy futures. At
every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air,
and crowing for the new day and the new country. For this was indeed our
destination; this was “the good country” we had been going to so long.
By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain of
corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying to upon the Oakland
side of San Francisco Bay. The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry;
the fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was
perfect—not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon its blue expanse; everything
was waiting, breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit first
upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened downward on its shapely
shoulder; the air seemed to awaken, and began to sparkle; and suddenly
“The tall hills Titan discovered,”
and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were lit
from end to end with summer daylight.
[1879.]
II
THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL