Across The Plains

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Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson
Scanned and proofed by David Price
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Second proof by Margaret Price.

Contents

I. Across The Plains
II. The Old Pacific Capital
III. Fontainebleau
IV. Epilogue to "An Inland Voyage"
V. Random Memories
VI. Random Memories Continued
VII. The Lantern-bearers
VIII. A Chapter on Dreams
IX. Beggars
X. Letter to a Young Gentleman
XI. Pulvis et Umbra
XII. A Christmas Sermon

CHAPTER 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 Depot 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; 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, aerial 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.

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