Across The Plains
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> Across The Plains
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I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way; and at
last, whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some
wayside eating-house, the evening we left Laramie, I fell sick
outright. That was a night which I shall not readily forget. The
lamps did not go out; each made a faint shining in its own
neighbourhood, and the shadows were confounded together in the
long, hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay in uneasy attitudes;
here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs like dead folk;
there a man sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his arm;
there another half seated with his head and shoulders on the bench.
The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the
movement of the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out
their arms like children; it was surprising how many groaned and
murmured in their sleep; and as I passed to and fro, stepping
across the prostrate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a
half-formed word, it gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest
in that unresting vehicle. Although it was chill, I was obliged to
open my window, for the degradation of the air soon became
intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life.
Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills
shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for morning
have never longed for it more earnestly than I.
And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and
unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a
bird, or a river. Only down the long, sterile canons, the train
shot hooting and awoke the resting echo. That train was the one
piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one
spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature.
And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this
unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear
an emigrant for some 12 pounds from the Atlantic to the Golden
Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu
cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died
away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in
these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side
with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together
in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling
and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all
America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the "bad
medicine waggon" charioting his foes; and then when I go on to
remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in
frock coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a
fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as
if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in
which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends
of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to
some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most
varied subject for an enduring literary work. If it be romance, if
it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy
town to this? But, alas! it is not these things that are necessary
- it is only Homer.
Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts
us swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils.
Thirst, hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more
feared, so lightly do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull,
who wings safely through the hurricane and past the shark. Yet we
should not be forgetful of these hardships of the past; and to keep
the balance true, since I have complained of the trifling
discomforts of my journey, perhaps more than was enough, let me add
an original document. It was not written by Homer, but by a boy of
eleven, long since dead, and is dated only twenty years ago. I
shall punctuate, to make things clearer, but not change the
spelling.
"My dear Sister Mary, - I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when
you read my letter. If Jerry" (the writer's eldest brother) "has
not written to you before now, you will be surprised to heare that
we are in California, and that poor Thomas" (another brother, of
fifteen) "is dead. We started from - in July, with plenly of
provisions and too yoke oxen. We went along very well till we got
within six or seven hundred miles of California, when the Indians
attacked us. We found places where they had killed the emigrants.
We had one passenger with us, too guns, and one revolver; so we ran
all the lead We had into bullets (and) hung the guns up in the
wagon so that we could get at them in a minit. It was about two
o'clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel a little way; when a
prairie chicken alited a little way from the wagon.
"Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and told Tom drive the
oxen. Tom and I drove the oxen, and Jerry and the passenger went
on. Then, after a little, I left Tom and caught up with Jerry and
the other man. Jerry stopped Tom to come up; me and the man went
on and sit down by a little stream. In a few minutes, we heard
some noise; then three shots (they all struck poor Tom, I suppose);
then they gave the war hoop, and as many as twenty of the redskins
came down upon us. The three that shot Tom was hid by the side of
the road in the bushes.
"I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot; so I told the other man
that Tom and Jerry were dead, and that we had better try to escape,
if possible. I had no shoes on; having a sore foot, I thought I
would not put them on. The man and me run down the road, but We
was soon stopped by an Indian on a pony. We then turend the other
way, and run up the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar
trees, and stayed there till dark. The Indians hunted all over
after us, and verry close to us, so close that we could here there
tomyhawks Jingle. At dark the man and me started on, I stubing my
toes against sticks and stones. We traveld on all night; and next
morning, just as it was getting gray, we saw something in the shape
of a man. It layed Down in the grass. We went up to it, and it
was Jerry. He thought we ware Indians. You can imagine how glad
he was to see me. He thought we was all dead but him, and we
thought him and Tom was dead. He had the gun that he took out of
the wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was the load
that was in it.
"We traveld on till about eight o'clock, We caught up with one
wagon with too men with it. We had traveld with them before one
day; we stopt and they Drove on; we knew that they was ahead of us,
unless they had been killed to. My feet was so sore when we caught
up with them that I had to ride; I could not step. We traveld on
for too days, when the men that owned the cattle said they would
(could) not drive them another inch. We unyoked the oxen; we had
about seventy pounds of flour; we took it out and divided it into
four packs. Each of the men took about 18 pounds apiece and a
blanket. I carried a little bacon, dried meat, and little quilt; I
had in all about twelve pounds. We had one pint of flour a day for
our alloyance. Sometimes we made soup of it; sometimes we (made)
pancakes; and sometimes mixed it up with cold water and eat it that
way. We traveld twelve or fourteen days. The time came at last
when we should have to reach some place or starve. We saw fresh
horse and cattle tracks. The morning come, we scraped all the
flour out of the sack, mixed it up, and baked it into bread, and
made some soup, and eat everything we had. We traveld on all day
without anything to eat, and that evening we Caught up with a sheep
train of eight wagons. We traveld with them till we arrived at the
settlements; and know I am safe in California, and got to good
home, and going to school.
"Jerry is working in - . It is a good country. You can get from
50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking. Tell me all about the affairs
in the States, and how all the folks get along."
And so ends this artless narrative. The little man was at school
again, God bless him, while his brother lay scalped upon the
deserts.
FELLOW-PASSENGERS
At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the Central
Pacific line of railroad. The change was doubly welcome; for,
first, we had better cars on the new line; and, second, those in
which we had been cooped for more than ninety hours had begun to
stink abominably. Several yards away, as we returned, let us say
from dinner, our nostrils were assailed by rancid air. I have
stood on a platform while the whole train was shunting; and as the
dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a whiff of pure
menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of monkeys. I
think we are human only in virtue of open windows. Without fresh
air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the
Queen's English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of
leering, human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of
offence. I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look for
the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of
the emigrant train. But one thing I must say, the car of the
Chinese was notably the least offensive.
The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, and so
proportionally airier; they were freshly varnished, which gave us
all a sense of cleanliness an though we had bathed; the seats drew
out and joined in the centre, so that there was no more need for
bed boards; and there was an upper tier of berths which could be
closed by day and opened at night.
I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was
among. They were in rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had
met on board ship while crossing the Atlantic. They were mostly
lumpish fellows, silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat
sad, I should say, with an extraordinary poor taste in humour, and
little interest in their fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap
and merely external curiosity. If they heard a man's name and
business, they seemed to think they had the heart of that mystery;
but they were as eager to know that much as they were indifferent
to the rest. Some of them were on nettles till they learned your
name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but beyond that,
whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce or
friendly, was all one to them. Others who were not so stupid,
gossiped a little, and, I am bound to say, unkindly. A favourite
witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of "All aboard!"
while the rest of us were dining, thus contributing his mite to the
general discomfort. Such a one was always much applauded for his
high spirits. When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was
astonished - fresh from the eager humanity on board ship - to meet
with little but laughter. One of the young men even amused himself
by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill-
nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to think, for he expected me
to join the laugh. I did so, but it was phantom merriment. Later
on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though,
of course, there were not wanting some to help him, it was rather
superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his
fellow-passengers. "Oh, I hope he's not going to die!" cried a
woman; "it would be terrible to have a dead body!" And there was a
very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station.
This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived.
There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters; in others,
little but silence. In this society, more than any other that ever
I was in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the
narrative. It was rarely that any one listened for the listening.
If he lent an ear to another man's story, it was because he was in
immediate want of a hearer for one of his own. Food and the
progress of the train were the subjects most generally treated;
many joined to discuss these who otherwise would hold their
tongues. One small knot had no better occupation than to worm out
of me my name; and the more they tried, the more obstinately fixed
I grew to baffle them. They assailed me with artful questions and
insidious offers of correspondence in the future; but I was
perpetually on my guard, and parried their assaults with inward
laughter. I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for
the secret. He owed me far more, had he understood life, for thus
preserving him a lively interest throughout the journey. I met one
of my fellow-passengers months after, driving a street tramway car
in San Francisco; and, as the joke was now out of season, told him
my name without subterfuge. You never saw a man more chapfallen.
But had my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he
had still been disappointed.
There were no emigrants direct from Europe - save one German family
and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one
reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles,
the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world,
mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make
something great of the Cornish; for my part, I can make nothing of
them at all. A division of races, older and more original than
that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart from
neighbouring Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign
in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel - that some of
the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.
The rest were all American born, but they came from almost every
quarter of that Continent. All the States of the North had sent
out a fugitive to cross the plains with me. From Virginia, from
Pennsylvania, from New York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from
Maime that borders on the Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves
- some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better land and better
wages. The talk in the train, like the talk I heard on the
steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons, and hope that moves
ever westward. I thought of my shipful from Great Britain with a
feeling of despair. They had come 3000 miles, and yet not far
enough. Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to
welcome them at Sandy Hook. Where were they to go? Pennsylvania,
Maine, Iowa, Kansas? These were not places for immigration, but
for emigration, it appeared; not one of them, but I knew a man who
had lifted up his heel and left it for an ungrateful country. And
it was still westward that they ran. Hunger, you would have
thought, came out of the east like the sun, and the evening was
made of edible gold. And, meantime, in the car in front of me,
were there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite quarter?
Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their gates in
search of provender, had here come face to face. The two waves had
met; east and west had alike failed; the whole round world had been
prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till
one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently
at home. Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more
picturesque and more disheartening; for, as we continued to steam
westward toward the land of gold, we were continually passing other
emigrant trains upon the journey east; and these were as crowded as
our own. Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the
mines? Were they all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter?
It would seem not, for, whenever we met them, the passengers ran on
the platform and cried to us through the windows, in a kind of
wailing chorus, to "come back." On the plains of Nebraska, in the
mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my
heart, "Come back!" That was what we heard by the way "about the
good country we were going to." And at that very hour the Sand-lot
of San Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from
the other side of Market Street was repeating the rant of
demagogues.
If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate,
how many thousands would regret the bargain! But wages, indeed,
are only one consideration out of many; for we are a race of
gipsies, and love change and travel for themselves.
DESPISED RACES
Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians
towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and
the worst. They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to
them, or thought of them, but hated them A PRIORI. The Mongols
were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of
money. They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred
industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle for the
Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe. They declared them
hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when
they beheld them. Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man
is so like a large class of European women, that on raising my head
and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I
have for an instant been deceived by the resemblance. I do not say
it is the most attractive class of our women, but for all that many
a man's wife is less pleasantly favoured. Again, my emigrants
declared that the Chinese were dirty. I cannot say they were
clean, for that was impossible upon the journey; but in their
efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us to shame. We all
pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a
minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed. But the Chinese
never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing their
feet - an act not dreamed of among ourselves - and going as far as
decency permitted to wash their whole bodies. I may remark by the
way that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate
is their sense of modesty. A clean man strips in a crowded
boathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without
uncovering an inch of skin. Lastly, these very foul and malodorous
Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the
Chinese waggon, and that alone, which stank. I have said already
that it was the exceptions and notably the freshest of the three.
These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America.
The Chinese are considered stupid, because they are imperfectly
acquainted with English. They are held to be base, because their
dexterity and frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious
Caucasian. They are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no
monopoly of that. They are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the
cheerful Irishman may each reflect before he bears the accusation.
I am told, again, that they are of the race of river pirates, and
belong to the most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial
Empire. But if this be so, what remarkable pirates have we here!
and what must be the virtues, the industry, the education, and the
intelligence of their superiors at home!
Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go.
Such is the cry. It seems, after all, that no country is bound to
submit to immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the
knife, and resistance to either but legitimate defence. Yet we may
regret the free tradition of the republic, which loved to depict
herself with open arms, welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly,
as a man who believes that he loves freedom, I may be excused some
bitterness when I find her sacred name misused in the contention.
It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand-
lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for arms and
butchery. "At the call of Abraham Lincoln," said the orator, "ye
rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye not
rise and liberate yourselves from a few dirty Mongolians?"
For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on
the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had
begun to keep pigs. Gun-powder and printing, which the other day
we imitated, and a school of manners which we never had the
delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-
past antiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it seems they
must be of different clay. They hear the clock strike the same
hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel by steam
conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and
superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course.
Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the
wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round
Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfing boy
alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find
things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for
thousands of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had
one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our eyes,
which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world
out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his
thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must
there not have been in these pictures of the mind - when I beheld
that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with
the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over
all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks
and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same
affection, home.
Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of
the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble
red man of old story - over whose own hereditary continent we had
been steaming all these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian;
indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but
now and again at way stations, a husband and wife and a few
children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of
civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent
stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their
appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my
fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney
baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We
should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our
forefathers' misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.
If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the
hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back,
step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one
after another as the States extended westward, until at length they
are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre - and
even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by
ruffianly diggers? The eviction of the Cherokees (to name but an
instance), the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of the
wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such
poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up a chapter
of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base
if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget. These old, well-
founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the
independent. That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the
Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the
thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man;
rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like
the race, and not personal to him who cherishes the indignation.
TO THE GOLDEN GATES
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.
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