1. Except, of course, General Kane.
DOWN THE ONTARIO MINE.
"Been down a mine! What on earth did you do that for?" said the elder Sheridan to the younger.
"Oh, just to say that I had done it," was the reply.
"To say that you had done it! Good gracious! Couldn't you have said that without going down a mine?"
No, Mr. Sheridan, you could not; at least not in these latter days. Too many people do it now for the impostor to remain undiscovered. Take my own case, for instance. I had often read descriptions of mine descents, and thought I knew how it happened, and how ore was got out. But no one ever told me that you had to go paddling about in water half the time, or that mines were excavated upwards. Now, then, if I had tried to pretend that I had been down a mine I should have been promptly found out, by my ignorance of the two first facts that strike one. Again, it is very simple work imagining the descent of a "shaft" in a "cage." But unfortunately a cage is only a platform to stand on without either sides or top, and not, therefore, such a cage as one would buy to keep a bird in, or as would keep a bird in if one did buy it. Nor, without actually experiencing it, could anybody guess that the first sensation of whizzing down a pipe, say 800 feet, is that of seeming to lose all your specific gravity, and that the next (after you had partially collected your faculties) is that you are stationary yourself, but that the dripping timbers that line the shaft are all flying upwards past you like sparks up a chimney.
Mines, of course, differ from one another just as the men who go down them do, but as far as I myself am concerned all mines are puddly places, and the sensations of descent are ridiculous—for I have only been down two in my life, and both "demned, damp, moist, unpleasant" places. But the mine to which I now refer is the "Ontario," in Utah, which may be said, in the preposterous vernacular of the West, to be a "terrible fine" mine, or, in other words, "a boss mine," that is to say, "a daisy."
As for daisies, anything that greatly takes the fancy or evokes especial admiration is called a daisy. Thus I heard a very much respected Mormon Bishop, who is also a director of a railway, described by an enthusiastic admirer as "a daisy!"
Finding myself in Park "City" one evening—it is a mining camp dependent chiefly upon the Ontario—I took a walk up the street with a friend. Every other house appeared to be a saloon, with a doctor's residence sandwiched in between—a significantly convenient arrangement perhaps in the days when there was no "Protective Committee" in Park City, but—so I am told—without much practical benefit to the public in these quiet days, when law-abiding citizens do their own hanging, without troubling the county sheriff, who lives somewhere on the other side of a distance. The result of this is that bad characters do not stay long enough in Park City now to get up free fights, and make work for the doctors. The Protective Committee invites them to "git" as soon as they arrive, and, to do them credit, they do "git."
However, as I was saying, I took a walk with a friend along the street, and presently became aware above me, high up on the hillside, of a great collection of buildings, with countless windows (I mean that I did not try to count them) lit up, and looking exactly like some theatrical night-scene. These were the mills of the Ontario, which work night and day, and seven days to the week, a perpetual flame like that of the Zoroastrians, and as carefully kept alive by stalwart stokers as ever was Vestal altar-fire by the girl-priestesses of Rome. It was a picturesque sight, with the huge hills looming up black behind, and the few surviving pine-trees showing out dimly against the darkening sky.
Next morning I went up to the mine—and down it.
Having costumed myself in garments that made getting dirty a perfect luxury, I was taken to the shaft. Now, I had expected to see an unfathomably black hole in the ground with a rope dangling down it, but instead of that I found myself in a spacious boarded shed, with a huge wheel standing at one end and a couple of iron uprights with a cross-bar standing up from the floor at the other. Round the wheel was coiled an enormous length of a six-inch steel-wire band, and the disengaged end of the band, after passing over a beam, was fastened to the cross-bar above mentioned. On the bridge of the wheel stood an engineer, the arbiter of fates, who is perpetually unwinding victims down from stage to stage of the Inferno, and winding up the redeemed from limbo to limbo. Having propitiated him by an affectation of intelligence as to the machinery which he controlled, we took our places under the cross-bar, between the stanchions, and suddenly the floor—as innocent-looking and upright-minded a bit of boarded floor as you could wish to stand on—gave way beneath us, and down we shot apud inferos, like the devils in "Der Freischütz." We had our lamps in our hands, and they gave just light enough for me to see the dripping wooden walls of the shaft flashing past, and then I felt myself becoming lighter and lighter—a mere butterfly—imponderable. But it doesn't take many seconds to fall down 800 feet, and long before I had expected it I found we were "at the bottom."
Our explorations then began; and very queer it all was, with the perpetual gushing of springs from the rock, and the bubble and splash of the waters as they ran along on either side the narrow tunnels; the meetings at corners with little cars being pushed along by men who looked, as they bent low to their work, like those load-rolling beetles that Egypt abounds in; the machinery for pumping, so massive that it seemed much more likely that it was found where it stood, the vestiges of a long-past subterranean civilization, than that it had been brought down there by the men of these degenerate days; the sudden endings of the tunnels which the miners were driving along the vein, with a man at each ending, his back bent to fit into the curve which he had made in the rock, and reminding one of the frogs that science tells us are found at times fitted into holes in the middle of stones; the climbing up hen-roost ladders from tunnel to tunnel, from one darkness into another; the waiting at different spots till "that charge had been blasted," and the dull, deadened roar of the explosion had died away; the watching the solitary miners at their work picking and thumping at the discoloured strips of dark rock that looked to the uninitiated only like water-stained, mildewy accidents in the general structure, but which, in reality, was silver, and yielding, it might be, $1600 to the ton!
"This is all very rich ore," said my guide, kicking a heap that I was standing on. I got off it at once, reverentially.
But reverence for the Mother of the Dollar gradually dies out, for everything about you, above you, beneath you, is silver or silverish—dreadful rubbish to look at, it is true, but with the spirit of the great metal in it all none the less; that fairy Argentine who builds palaces for men, and gives them, if they choose, all the pleasures of the world, and the leisure wherein to enjoy them. And there they stood, these latter-day Cyclops, working away like the gnomes of the Hartz Mountains, or the entombed artificers of the Bear-Kings of Dardistan, with their lanterns glowing at the end of their tunnels like the Kanthi gem which Shesh, the fabled snake-god, has provided for his gloomy empire of mines under the Nagas' hills. Useless crystals glittered on every side, as if they were jewels, and the water dripping down the sides glistened as if it was silver, but the pretty hypocrisy was of no avail. For though the ore itself was dingy and ugly and uninviting, the ruthless pick pursued it deeper and deeper into its retreat, and only struck the harder the darker and uglier it got. It reminded me, watching the miner at his work, of the fairy story where the prince in disguise has to kill the lady of his love in order to release her from the enchantments which have transformed her, and how the wicked witch makes her take shape after shape to escape the resolute blows of the desperate lover. But at last his work is accomplished, and the ugly thing stands before him in all the radiant beauty of her true nature.
And it is a long process, and a costly one, before the lumps of heavy dirt which the miner pecks out of the inside of a hill are transformed into those hundredweight blocks of silver bullion which the train from Park City carries every morning of the year into Salt Lake City. From first to last it is pretty much as follows. Remember I am not writing for those who live inside mines; very much on the contrary. I am writing for those who have never been down a mine in their lives, but who may care to read an unscientific description of "mining," and the Ontario mine in particular.
In 1872 a couple of men made a hole in the ground, and finding silver ore in it offered the hole for sale at $30,000. A clever man, R. C. Chambers by name, happened to come along, and liking the look of the hole, joined a friend in the purchase of it. The original diggers thus pocketed $30,000 for a few days' work, and no doubt thought they had done a good thing. But alas! that hole in the ground which they were so glad to get rid of ten years ago now yields every day a larger sum in dollars than they sold it for! The new owners of the hole, which was christened "The Ontario Mine," were soon at work, but instead of following them through the different stages of development, it is enough to describe what that hole looks like and produces to-day.
A shaft, then, has been sunk plumb down into the mountain for 900 feet, and from this shaft, at every 100 feet as you go down, you find a horizontal tunnel running off to right and left. If you stop in your descent at any one of these "stages" and walk through the tunnel—water rushing all the way over your feet, and the vaulted rock dripping over-head—you will find that a line of rails has been laid down along it, and that the sides and roofs are strongly supported by timbers of great thickness. These timbers are necessary to prevent, in the first place, the rock above from crushing down through the roof of the tunnel, and, in the next, from squeezing in its sides, for the rock every now and then swells and the sides of the tunnels bulge in. The rails are, of course, for the cars which the miners fill with ore, and push from the end of the tunnel to the "stage." A man there signals by a bell which communicates with the engineer at the big wheel in the shed I have already spoken of, and there being a regular code of signals, the engineer knows at once at which stage the car is waiting, and how far therefore he is to let the cage down. Up goes the car with its load of ore into the daylight,—and then its troubles begin.
But meanwhile let us stay a few minutes more in the mine. Walking along any one of the main horizontal tunnels, we come at intervals to a ladder, and going up one of them we find that a stope, or smaller gallery, is being run parallel with the tunnel in which we are walking, and of course (as it follows the same direction of the ore), immediately over that tunnel, so that the roof of the tunnel is the floor of the stope. The stopes are just wide enough for a man to work in easily, and are as high as he can reach easily with his pickaxe, about seven feet. If you walk along one of these stopes you come to another ladder, and find it leads to another stope above, and going up this you find just the same again, until you become aware that the whole mountain above you is pierced throughout the length of the ore vein by a series of seven-foot galleries lying exactly parallel one above the other, and separated only by a sufficient thickness of pine timber to make a solid floor for each. But at every hundred feet, as I have said, there comes a main tunnel, down to which all the produce of the minor galleries above it is shot down by "shoots," loaded into cars and pushed along to the "stage." But silver ore is not the only thing that the Company gets out of its mine, for unfortunately the mountain in which the Ontario is located is full of springs, and the miner's pick is perpetually, therefore, letting the water break into the tunnels, and in such volume, too, that I am informed it costs as much to rid the works of the water as to get out the silver! Streams gurgle along all the tunnels, and here and there ponderous bulkheads have been put up to keep the water and the loosened rock from falling in. Pumps of tremendous power are at work at several levels throwing the water up towards the surface—one of these at the 800-foot level throwing 1500 gallons a minute up to the 500-foot level.
Following a car-load of ore, we find it, having reached the surface, being loaded into waggons, in which it is carried down the hill to the mills, weighed, and then shot down into a gigantic bin—in which, by the way, the Company always keeps a reserve of ore sufficient to keep the mills in full work for two years. From this hour, life becomes a burden to the ore, for it is hustled about from machine to machine without the least regard to its feelings. No sooner is it out of the waggon than a brutal crusher begins smashing it up into small fragments, the result of this meanness being that the ore is able to tumble through a screen into cars that are waiting for it down below. These rush upstairs with it again and pour it into "hoppers," which, being in the conspiracy too, begin at once to spill it into gigantic drying cylinders that are perpetually revolving over a terrific furnace fire, and the ore, now dust, comes streaming out as dry as dry can be, is caught in cars and wheeled off to batteries where forty stampers, stamping like one, pound and smash it as if they took a positive delight in it. There is an intelligent, deliberate determination about this fearful stamping which makes one feel almost afraid of the machinery. Some pieces, however, actually manage to escape sufficient mashing up and slip away with the rest down into a "screw conveyor," but the poor wretches are soon found out, for the fiendish screw conveyor empties itself on to a screen, through which all the pulverized ore goes shivering down, but the guilty lumps still remaining are carried back by another ruthless machine to those detestable stamps again. They cannot dodge them. For these machines are all in the plot together. Or rather, they are the honest workmen of good masters, and they are determined that the work shall be thoroughly done, and that not a single lump of ore shall be allowed to skulk so without any one to look after them these cylinders and stampers, hoppers and dryers, elevators and screens go on with their work all day, all night, relentless in their duty and pitiless to the ore. Let a lump dodge them as it may, it gets no good by it, for the one hands it over to the other, just as constables hand over a thief they have caught, and it goes its rounds, again and again, till the end eventually overtakes it, and it falls through the screen in a fine dust.
For its sins it is now called "pulp," and starts off on a second tour of suffering—for these Inquisitors of iron and steel, these blind, brutal Cyclops-machines, have only just begun, as it were, their fun with their victim. Its tortures are now to be of a more searching and refined description. As it falls through the screen, another screw-conveyor catches sight of it and hurries it along a revolving tube into which salt is being perpetually fed from a bin overhead—this salt, allow me to say for the benefit of those as ignorant as myself, is "necessary as a chloridizer"—and thus mixed up with the stranger, falls into the power of a hydraulic elevator, which carries it up forty feet to the top of a roasting furnace and deliberately spills the mixture into it! Looking into the solid flame, I appreciated for the first time in my life the courage of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
The mixture which fell in at the top bluish-grey comes out at the bottom yellowish-brown—I only wonder at its coming out all—and is raked into heaps that have a wicked, lurid colour and give out such fierce short flames of brilliant tints, and such fierce, short blasts of a poisonous gas, that I could not help thinking of the place where bad men go to, and wondering if a Dante could not get a hint or two for improving his Inferno by a visit to the Ontario roasting-furnace. The men who stir these heaps use rakes with prodigious handles, and wear wet sponges over their mouths and noses, and as I watched them I remembered the poet's devils who keep on prodding up the damned and raking them about over the flames.
But the ore submits without any howling or gnashing of teeth, and is dragged off dumb, and soused into great churns, kept at a boiling heat, in which quicksilver is already lying waiting, and the ore and the quicksilver are then churned up together by revolving wheels inside the pans, till the contents look like huge caldrons of bubbling chocolate. After some hours they are drained off into settlers and cold water is let in upon the mess, and lo! silver as bright as the quicksilver with which it is mixed comes dripping out through the spout at the bottom into canvas bags.
Much of the quicksilver drips through the canvas back into the pans, and the residue, silver mixed with quicksilver, makes a cold, heavy, white paste called "amalgam," which is carried off in jars to the retorts. Into these it is thrown, and while lying there the quicksilver goes on dripping away from the silver, and after a time the fires are lighted and the retort is sealed up. The intense heat that is obtained volatilizes the quicksilver; but this mercurial vapour is caught as it is escaping at the top of the retort, again condensed into its solid form, and again used to mix with fresh silver ore. Its old companion, the silver, goes on melting inside the retort all the time, till at last when the fires are allowed to cool down, it is found in irregular lumps of a pink-looking substance. These lumps are then taken to the crucibles, and passing from them, molten and refined, fall into moulds, each holding about a hundred-weight of bullion.
And all this bother and fuss, reader, to obtain these eight or ten blocks of metal!
True, but then that metal is silver, and with one single day's produce from the Ontario Mine in the bank to his credit a man might live at his leisure in London, like a nobleman in Paris, or like a prince among the princes of Eulenspiegel-Wolfenbuttel-Gutfurnichts.
FROM UTAH INTO NEVADA.
Rich and ugly Nevada—Leaving Utah—The gift of the Alfalfa—Through a lovely country to Ogden—The great food-devouring trick—From Mormon to Gentile: a sudden contrast—The son of a cinder—Is the red man of no use at all?—The papoose's papoose—Children all of one family.
IT is a far cry from the City of the Saints to the city of the Celestials, for Nevada stretches all its hideous length between them, and thus keeps apart the two American problems of the day—pigtails and polygamy. But mere length in miles is not all that goes to make a journey seem long, for dreariness of landscape stretches every yard to six feet, and turns honest miles into rascally versts, or elongates them into the still more infamous "kos" of the East, the so-called mile, which seems to lengthen out at the other end as you travel along it, and about nightfall to lose the other end altogether. And Nevada is certainly dreary enough for anything. It is abominably rich, I know. There is probably more filthy lucre in it per acre (in a crude state, of course) than in any other state in the Union, and more dollars piled up in those ghastly mountains than in any other range in America. But, as a fellow-passenger remarked, "There's a pile of land in Nevada that don't amount to much," and it is just this part of Nevada that the traveller by railway sees.
"That hill over there is full of silver," said a stranger to me, by way of propitiating my opinion.
"Is it" I said, "the brute." I really couldn't help it. I had no ill-feeling towards the hill, and if it had asked a favour of me, I believe I should have granted it as readily as any one. But its repulsive appearance was against it, and the idea of its being full of silver stirred my indignation. I grudged so ugly a cloud its silver lining, and like the sailor in the Summer Palace at Pekin felt moved to insult it. The sailor I refer to was in one of the courts of the palace looking about for plunder. It did not occur to his weather-beaten, nautical intelligence that everything about him was moulded in solid silver. He thought it was lead. A huge dragon stood in the corner of the room, and the atrocity of its expression exasperated Jack so acutely that he smote it with his cutlass, and lo! out of the monster's wound poured an ichor of silver coinage.
"Who'd have thought it!" said Jack, "the ugly devil!"
Nevada, moreover, lies under the disadvantage of having on one side of it the finest portion of California, on the other the finest portion of Utah, and sandwiched between two such Beauties, such a Beast naturally looks its worst. For the northern angle of Utah is by far the most fertile part of the territory, possessing, in patches, some incomparable meadows, and corn-lands of wondrous fertility. As compared with the prodigious agricultural and pastoral wealth of such states as Missouri, Illinois, or Ohio, the Cache Valleys and Bear Valleys of Utah seem of course insignificant enough; but at present I am comparing them only with the rest of poor Utah, and with ugly, wealthy Nevada.
Starting from Salt Lake City northwards, the road lies through suburbs of orchards and gardens, many of them smothered in red and yellow roses, out on to the levels of the Great Valley. Here, beyond the magic circle of the Water-wizard, there are patches of fen-lands still delightful to wild-fowl, and patches of alkali blistering in the sun, but all about them stretch wide meadows of good grazing-ground, where the cattle, good Devon breed many of them, and here and there a Jersey, loiter about, and bright fields of lucerne, or alfalfa, just purpling into blossom and haunted by whole nations of bees and tribes of yellow butterflies. What a gift this lucerne has been to Utah! Indeed, as the Mormons say, the territory could hardly have held its own had it not been for this wonderful plant. Once get it well started (and it will grow apparently anywhere) the "alfalfa" strikes its roots ten, fifteen, twenty feet into the ground, and defies the elements. More than this, it becomes aggressive, and, like the white races, begins to encroach upon, dominate over, and finally extinguish the barbarian weeds, its wild neighbours.
Scientific experiments with other plants have taught us that vegetables wage war with each other, under principles and with tactics, curiously similar to those of human communities.
When a strong plant advancing its frontiers comes upon a nation of feeble folk, it simply falls upon it pell-mell, relying upon mere brute strength to crush opposition. But when two plants, equally hardy, come in contact, and the necessity for more expansion compels them to fight, they bring into action all the science and skill of old gladiators and German war-professors. They push out skirmishers, and draw them in, throw out flanking parties, plant outposts, race for commanding points, manoeuvre each other out of corners, cut off each others' communications with the water, sap and mine—in fact go through all the artifices of civilized war. If they find themselves well-matched, they eventually make an alliance, and mingle peacefully with each other, dividing the richer spots equally, and going halves in the water. But as a rule one gives way to the other, accepts its dominion, and gradually accepts a subordinate place or even extirpation.
Now this lucerne is one of the fightingest plants that grows. It is the Norwegian rat among the vegetables, the Napoleon of the weeds. Nothing stops it. If it comes upon a would-be rival, it either punches its head and walks over it, or it sits down to besiege it, drives its own roots under the enemy, and compels it to capitulate by starvation. Fences and such devices cannot of course keep it within bounds, so the lucerne overflows its limits at every point, comes down the railway bank, sprouts up in tufts on the track, and getting across into the Scythian barbarism of the opposite hill-side, advances as with a Macedonian phalanx to conquest and universal monarchy. Three times a year can the farmer crop it, and there is no fodder in the world that beats it. No wonder then that Utah encourages this admirable adventurer. In time it will become the Lucerne State.
And so, passing through fields of lucerne, we reach the Hot Springs. From a cleft in a rock comes gushing out an ample stream of nearly boiling water as clear as diamonds, and so heavily charged with mineral that the sulphuretted air, combined with the heat, is sometimes intolerable, while the ground over which the water pours becomes in a few weeks thickly carpeted with a lovely weed-like growth of purest malachite green. Passing across the road, from its first pool under the rock, the stream spreads itself out into the Hot Springs Lake, where the water soon assimilates in temperature to the atmosphere, but possesses, for some reason known to the birds, a peculiar attraction for wild-fowl, which congregate in great numbers about it. Where it issues from the rock no vegetable of course can grow in it, and there is a rim all round its edge about a foot in width where the grass and weeds lie brown and dead, suffocated by the fumes. The fungoid-like growth at the bottom of the pool exactly resembles a vegetable, but is as purely mineral, though sub-aqueous, as the stalactites on a cave-roof.
And so, on again through a wilderness of lucerne, with a broad riband of carnation-coloured phlox retreating before its advancing borders—past a perpetual succession of cottages coming at intervals to a head in delightful farming hamlets of the true Mormon type—past innumerable orchards, and here and there intervals of wild vegetation, willows, and cotton-wood, with beds of blue iris, and brakes of wild pink roses (such a confusion of beauty!) among which the birds and butterflies seem to hold perpetual holiday.
Then Salt Lake comes in sight, lying along under the mountains on the left, and on the right the Wasatch range closes in, with the upper slopes all misty with grey clouds of sage-brush, and the lower vivid with lusty lucerne. Each settlement is in turn a delightful repetition of its predecessor, meadow and orchard and corn-land alternating, with the same pleasant features of wild life, flocks of crimson-winged or yellow-throated birds wheeling round the willow copses, or skimming across the meadows, bitterns tumbling out from among the reeds, doves darting from tree to tree, butterflies of exquisite species fluttering among the beds of flowers, and overhead in the sky, floating on observant wings, the hawk—one of those significant touches of Nature that redeems a country-side from Arcadian mawkishness, and throws into an over-sweet landscape just that dash of sin and suffering that lemons it pleasantly to the taste.
Round the corner yonder lies Ogden, one of the most promising towns of all the West, and as we approach it the great expanses of meadow stretching down to the lake and the wide alfalfa levels give place to a barren sage veldt, where the sunflower still retains ancestral dominion, and the jackass rabbits flap their ears at each other undisturbed by agriculture or by grazing stock. Nestling back into a nook of the hills which rise up steeply behind it, and show plainly on the front their old water-line of "Lake Bonneville" (of which the Great Salt Lake is the shrunken miserable relict), lies a pretty settlement, cosily muffed up in clover and fruit trees, and then beyond it, across another interval of primeval sage, comes into view the white cupola of the Ogden courthouse.
Ogden is the meeting-point of the northern and southern Utah lines of rail, and, more important still, of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific also. As a "junction town," therefore, it enjoys a position which has already made it prosperous, and which promises it great wealth in the near future. Nature too has been very kind, for the climate is one of the healthiest (if statistics may be believed) in the world; and wood and water, and a fertile soil, are all in abundance. Fortunately also, the Mormons selected the site and laid it out so that the ground-plan is spacious, the roadways are ample, the shade-trees profuse, and the drainage good. Its central school is, perhaps, the leading one in the territory, while in manufactures and industry it will probably some day outstrip Salt Lake City. For the visitor who does not care about statistics, Ogden has another attraction as the centre of a very beautiful canyon country, and excursions can be made in a single day that will give him as exhaustive an idea of the beauties of western hill scenery, as he will ever obtain by far more extended trips. The Ogden and Weber canyons alone exhaust such landscapes, but if the tourist has the time and the will, he may wander away up into the Wasatch range, past Ogden valley and many lovely bits of scenery, towards Bear Valley. But for myself, having seen nearly all the canyons of Utah and many of Colorado, I confess that the Weber and Ogden would have sufficed for all mere sight-seeing purposes.
It was in the Ogden refreshment-room, waiting for the train for San Francisco, that I saw a performance that filled me with astonishment and dismay. It was a man eating his dinner. And let me here remark, with all possible courtesy, that the American on his travels is the most reprehensible eater I have ever seen. In the first place, the knives are purposely made blunt—the back and the front of the blade being often of the same "sharpness"—to enable him to eat gravy with it. The result is that the fork (which ought to be used simply to hold meat steady on the plate while being cut with the knife) has to be used with great force to wrench off fragments of food. The object of the two instruments is thus materially abused, for he holds the meat down with the knife and tears it into bits with his fork! Now, reader, don't say no. For I have been carefully studying travelling Americans at their food (all over the West at any rate), and what I say is strictly correct. This abuse of knife and fork then necessitates an extraordinary amount of elbow-room, for in forcing apart a tough slice of beef the elbows have to stick out as square as possible, and the consequence is, as the proprietor of a hotel told me, only four Americans can eat in a space in which six Englishmen will dine comfortably. The latter, when feeding, keep their elbows to their sides; the former square them out on the line of the shoulders, and at right angles to their sides. Having thus got the travelling American into position, watch him consuming his food! He has ordered a dozen "portions" of as many eatables, and the whole of his meal, after the detestable fashion of the "eating-houses" at which travellers are fed, is put before him at once. To eat the dozen or so different things which he has ordered, he has only one knife and fork and one tea-spoon. Bending over the table, he sticks his fork into a pickled gherkin, and while munching this casts one rapid hawk-like glance over the spread viands, and then proceeds to eat. Mehercule! what a sight it is! He dabs his knife into the gravy of the steak, picks up with his fork a piece of bacon, and while the one is going up to his mouth, the other is reaching out for something else. He never apparently chews his food, but dabs and pecks at the dishes one after the other with a rapidity which (merely as a juggling trick) might be performed in London to crowded houses every day, and with an impartiality that, considered as "dining," is as savage as any meal of Red Indians or of Basutos. Dab, dab, peck, peck, grunt, growl, snort! The spoon strikes in every now and then, and a quick sucking-up noise announces the disappearance of a mouthful of huckleberries on the top of a bit of bacon, or a spoonful of custard-pie on the heels of a radish. It is perfectly prodigious. It defies coherent description. But how on earth does he swallow? Every now and then he shuts his eyes, and strains his throat; this, I suppose, is when he swallows, for I have seen children getting rid of cake with the same sort of spasm. Yet the rapidity with which he shovels in his food is a wonder to me, seeing that he has not got any "pouch" like the monkey or the pelican. Does he keep his miscellaneous food in a "crop" like a pigeon, or a preliminary stomach like the cow, and "chew the cud" afterwards at his leisure? I confess I am beaten by it. The mixture of his food, if it pleases him, does not annoy me, for if a man likes to eat mouthfuls of huckleberries, bacon, apple-pie, pickled mackerel, peas, mutton, gherkins, oysters, radishes, tomatoes, custard, and poached eggs (this is a bona-fide meal copied from my note-book on the spot) in indiscriminate confusion, it has nothing to do with me. But what I want to know is, why the travelling American does not stop to chew his food; or why, as is invariably the case, he will despatch in five minutes a meal for which he has half an hour set specially apart? He falls upon his food as if he were demented with hunger, as if he were a wild thing of prey tearing victims that he hated into pieces; and when the hideous deed is done, he rushes out from the scene of massacre with a handful of toothpicks, and leans idly against the door-post, as if time were without limit or end! The whole thing is a mystery to me. When I first came into the country I used to waste many precious moments in gazing at "the fine confused feeding" of my neighbours at the table, and waiting to see them choke. But I have given that up now. I plod systematically and deliberately through my one dish, content to find myself always the last at the table, with a tumult of empty platters scattered all about me. Nothing can choke the travelling American. In the meantime, I wish that young man of Ogden would exhibit his great eating trick in London. It beats Maskelyne and Cook into fits.
From Ogden northwards the road lies past perpetual cottage-farms, separated only by orchards or fields, and clustering at intervals into pleasant villages, where the people are all busy gathering in their lucerne crops. The same profusion of wild-flowers, and exquisite rose-brakes, the same abundance of bird and insect life is conspicuous.
But gradually our road bears away westward from the hills, leaving cultivation and cottages to follow the line of irrigation along their lower slopes, and while to our right the narrow-gauge line runs northward up into the Cache Valley, the granary of Utah, we trend away to the left. The northern end of the Salt Lake comes in sight, and the track running for a while close to its side gives me a last look at this sheet of wonderful water.
I was sorry to see the last of it, for I was sorry to leave Utah and the kind-hearted, simple, hard-working Mormon people. But the Lake gradually comes to a point, dwindles out into a marsh, and is gone, and as we speed away across levels of dreary alkaline ground, we can only recall its site by the wild duck streaming across to settle for the night in the reeds that grow by its edges.
Away from Mormon industry, the sage-brush flourishes like green bay-trees. To the east, the line of white-walled cottages speaks of a civilization which we are leaving behind us. To the west, the dreary mountains of Nevada already herald a region of barren desolation. And so the sun begins to set, and in the dim moth-time, as the mists begin to blur the outlines of Antelope Island in the Salt Lake, the small round-faced owls come out upon the railway fencing and chuckle to each other, and crossing the Bear River, all ruddy with the sunset, we see the night-hawks skimming the water in chase of the creatures of the twilight.
And so to Corinne, ghastly Corinne, a Gentile failure on the very skirts of Mormon success. It had once a great carrying-trade, for being at the terminus of the Utah Railway, Montana depended upon it for its supplies, and bitterly had Montana cause to regret it, for the Corinne freight-carriers (I wish I could remember their expressive slang name) seemed to think that railway enterprise must always terminate at Corinne, and so they carried just what they chose, at the price they chose, and when they chose. But the railway ran past them one fine day, and so now there is Corinne, stranded high and dry, as discreditable a settlement as ever men put together. Without any plan, treeless and roadless, the scattered hamlet of crazy-looking shanties stands half the year in drifting dust and half the year in sticky mud, and the Mormons point the finger of scorn at the place the Gentiles used to boast of. And Corinne seems to strike the keynote of the succeeding country, for cultivation ceases and habitations are not on the desolate plain we enter. And so to Promontory and then darkness.
We awake to find ourselves still in calamitous Nevada. What heaps of British gold have been sunk in those ugly hills in the hope of getting up American silver!
But here is Halleck, a government post, and soldiers from the barracks are lounging about in uniforms that make them look like butcher-boys, and with a drowsy gait that makes one suspect them to be burthened with the saddening load of yesterday's whisky. Then, after an interval of desert, we cross the Humboldt river, thick with the mud of melting snows, and, snaking across a plain warted over with ant-hills, arrive at Elko.
It is possible that Allah in his mercy may forgive Elko the offal which it put before us for breakfast. For myself, mere humanity forbids me to forgive it. But Elko was otherwise of interest. A waiter, very black, and, in proportion to his nigritude, insolent, had triumphed over my unconcealed disgust with my food. Yet I turned to him civilly and said, "Isn't there a warm spring here which is worth going to see?"
"No," said the negro, "our spring been burned up!"
"Burned up!" I exclaimed in astonishment; "the spring been burned up!"
"Yes," said the abominable one, "burned up. Everybody know dat."
"Was your mother there?" I asked courteously, pretending not to be exasperated by the blackamoor.
"My mother? No. My mother's—"
"Ah!" I replied, "I thought she might have been burned up at the same time, for you look like the son of a cinder."
My sally—mean effort that it was—was a complete triumph, and I left Ham squashed. It proved, of course, that it was the wooden shanty at the spring that had been burned down, but in any case it was too far off for us to go to see. So we consoled ourselves with the Indians, who always gather on the platform at Elko, in the assurance of begging or showing their papooses to some purpose. Nor were they wrong. I paid a quarter to see "the papoose," and got more than my money's worth in hearing this poor brown woman talking to her child the same sweet nursery nonsense that my own wife talks to mine. And the papoose understood it all, and chuckled and smiled and looked happy, for all the world as if it were something better than a mere Indian baby. Poor little Lamanite! In a year or two it will be strutting about the camp with its mimic bow and arrows, striking its mother, and sneering at her as "a squaw," and ten years later (if the end of the race has not then arrived) may be riding with his tribe on some foul errand of murder, while his mother carries the lodge-poles and the cooking-pots on foot behind the young brave's horse. Imagine a life in which begging is the chief dissipation, and horse-stealing the only industry!
But I can feel a sympathy for the red man. It may be true that neither gunpowder nor the Gospel can reform him, that his code of morality is radically incurable, that he is, in fact, "the red-bellied varmint" that the Western man believes him to be. Yet all the same, remembering the miracles that British government has worked with the Gonds and other seemingly hopeless tribes of India, I entertain a lurking suspicion that under other and more kindly circumstances the Red Indian might have been to-day a better thing than he is.
At any rate, a people cannot be altogether worthless that in the deepest depths of their degradation still maintain a lofty wild-beast scorn of white men, and think them something lower than themselves. And is not pride the noblest and the easiest of all fulcrums for a government to work on?
Is it quite certain, for instance, that, given arms, and drilled as soldiers, detachments of the tribes, as auxiliaries of the regulars, might not do good service at the different military posts, in routine duty, of course, and that the prestige of such employment would not appeal to the military spirit of the tribes at large? What is there at Fort Halleck that Indians could not do as well as white men? It is a notorious fact, and as old as American history, that the red man holds sacred everything that his tribe is guarding. Why should not this chivalry, common to every savage race on earth, and largely utilized by other governments in Asia and in Africa, be turned to account in America too, and Indians be entrusted with the peace of Indian frontiers?
I know well enough that many will think my suggestion sentimental and absurd, but fortunately it is just the class who think in that way that have no real importance in this or in any other country. They are the men who think the "critturs" ought to be "used up," and who, when they are in the West, "would as soon shoot an Injun as a coyote." These men form a class of which America, when she is three generations older, will have little need for, and who, in a more settled community, will find that they must either conform to civilization or else "git." There are a great number of these coarse, thick-skinned, ignorant men floating about on the surface of Western America: for Western America still stands in need of men who will do the reckless preliminary work of settlement, and shoot each other off over a whisky bottle when that work is done. Now, these men, and those of a feebler kind who take their opinions from them, believe and preach that annihilation of the Indian is the only possible cure for the Indian evil. I have heard them say it in public a score of times that "the Indian should be wiped clean out." But a larger and more generous class is growing up very fast in the West, who are beginning to see that the red men are really a charge upon them: and that as a great nation they must take upon themselves the responsibilities of empire, and protect the weaker communities whom a rapidly advancing civilization is isolating in their midst.
But it is a pity that those in authority cannot see their way to giving practical effect to such sentiments, and devise some method for utilizing the Indian. For myself, seeing what has been done in Asia and in Africa with equally difficult tribes, I should be inclined to predict success for an experiment in military service, if the routine duties of barracks and outpost duty, in unnecessary places, can be called "military service."
For one thing, drilled and well-armed Indians would very soon put a stop to cow-boy disturbances in Arizona, or anywhere else. Or, again, if Indians had been on his track, James, the terror of Missouri, would certainly not have flourished so long as he did.
But by this time we have got far past Elko, and the train is carrying us through an undulating desert of rabbit-bush and greasewood, with dull, barren hills on either hand, and then we reach Carlin, another dreadful-looking hamlet of the Corinne type, and, alas! Gentile also, without a tree or a road, and nearly every shanty in it a saloon.
More Indians are on the platform. They are allowed, it appears, under the Company's contract with the government, to ride free of charge upon the trains, and so the poor creatures spend their summer days, when they are not away hunting or stealing, in travelling backwards and forwards from one station to the next, and home again. This does not strike the civilized imagination as a very exhilarating pastime, nor one to be contemplated with much enthusiasm of enjoyment. Yet the Indians, in their own grave way, enjoy it prodigiously.
Curiously enough, they cannot be persuaded to ride anywhere, except on the platforms between the baggage-cars. But here they cluster as thick as swarming bees, the in all the fantastic combination of vermilion, "bucks" tag-rag and nudity, the squaws dragging about ponderous bison robes and sheep-skins, and laden with papooses, the children, grotesque little imitations of their parents, with their playthings in their hands.
For the "papoose" is a human child after all, and the little Shoshonee girls nurse their dolls just as little girls in New York do, only, of course, the Red Indian's child carries on her back an imitation papoose in an imitation pannier, instead of wheeling an imitation American baby in an imitation American "baby-carriage." I watched one of these brown fragments of the great sex that gives the world its wives and its mothers, its sweethearts and its sisters, and it was quite a revelation to me to hear the wee thing crooning to her wooden baby, and hushing it to sleep, and making believe to be anxious as to its health and comforts. Yes, and my mind went back on a sudden to the nursery, on the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of miles away, where another little girl sits crooning over her doll of rags and wax, and on her face I saw just the same expression of troubled concern as clouded the little Shoshonee's brow, and the same affectation of motherly care.
So it takes something more than mere geographical distance to alter human nature.
FROM NEVADA INTO CALIFORNIA.
Of Bugbears—Suggestions as to sleeping-cars—A Bannack chief, his hat and his retinue—The oasis of Humboldt—Past Carson Sink—A reminiscence of wolves—"Hard places"—First glimpses of California—A corn miracle—Bunch-grass and Bison—From Sacramento to Benicia.
IS a bugbear most bug or bear? I never met one yet fairly face to face, for the bugbear is an evasive insect. Nor, if I did meet one, can I say whether I should prefer to find it mainly bug or mainly bear. The latter is of various sorts. Thus, one, the little black bear of the Indian hills, is about as formidable as a portmanteau of the same size. Another, the grizzly of the Rockies, is a very unamiable person. His temper is as short as his tail; and he has very little more sense of right and wrong than a Land-leaguer. But he is not so mean as the bug. You never hear of grizzly bears getting into the woodwork of bedsteads and creeping out in the middle of the night to sneak up the inside of your night-shirt. He does not go and cuddle himself up flat in a crease of the pillow-case, and then slip out edgeways as soon as it is dark, and bite you in the nape of the neck. It is not on record that a bear ever got inside a nightcap and waited till the gas was turned out, to come forth and feed like grief on the damask cheek of beauty. No, these are not the habits of bears, they are more manly than bugs. If you want to catch a bear between your finger and thumb, and hold it over a lighted match on the point of a pin, it will stand still to let you try. Or if you want to have a good fair slap at a bear with a slipper, it won't go flattening itself out in the crevices of furniture, in order to dodge the blow, but will stand up square in the road, in broad daylight, and let you do it. So, on the whole, I cannot quite make up my mind whether bugs or bears are the worst things to have about a house. You see you could shoot at the bear out of the window; but it would be absurd to fire off rifles at bugs between the blankets. Besides, bears don't keep you awake all night by leaving you in doubt as to whether they are creeping about the bed or not, or spoil your night's rest by making you sit up and grope about under the bed-clothes and try to see things in the dark. Altogether, then, there is a good deal to be said on the side of the bear.
I am led to these remarks by remembering that at Carlin, in Nevada, I found two bugs in my "berth" in the sleeping-car. The porter thought I must have "brought them with me." Perhaps I did, but, as I told him, I didn't remember doing so, and with his permission would not take them any further. Or perhaps the Shoshonees brought them. All Indians, whether red or brown, are indifferent to these insects, and carry them about with them in familiar abundance.
And this reminds me to say a little about sleeping-cars in general. During my travels in America I have used three kinds, the Pullman Palace, the Silver Palace, and the Baltimore and Ohio, and except in "high tone," and finish of ornament, where the Pullman certainly excels the rest, there is very little to choose between them. All are extremely comfortable as sleeping-cars. In the Silver Palace, however, there is a custom prevalent of not pulling down the upper berth when it is unoccupied, and this improvement on the Pullman plan is certainly very great. The two shelves, one at each end of the berth, are ample for one's clothes, while the sense of relief and better ventilation from not having the bottom of another bedstead suspended eighteen inches or so above your face is decidedly conducive to better rest. The general adoption of this practice, wherever possible, would, I am sure, be popular among passengers. As day-cars, the "sleepers" have one or two defects in common, which might very easily be remedied. For one thing, every seat should have a removable headrest belonging to it. As it is, the weary during the day become very weary indeed, and the attempts of passengers to rest their heads by curling themselves up on the seats, or lying crosswise in the "section," are as pathetic as they are often absurd, and give a Palace car the appearance, on a hot afternoon, of a ward in some Hospital for Spinal Complaints. Another point that should be altered is the hour for closing the smoking-room. When not required for berths for passengers (for the company's employees ought not to be considered when the convenience of the company's customers is in question) there is no reason whatever for closing the smoking-room at ten. As a rule it is not closed; but sometimes it is; and it should not be placed in the power of a surly conductor—and there are too many ill-mannered conductors on the railways—to annoy passengers by applying such a senseless regulation. A third point is the apple-and-newspaper-boy nuisance. This wretched creature, if of an enterprising kind, pesters you to purchase things which you have no intention of purchasing, and if you express any annoyance at his importunity, he is insolent. But apart from his insolence, he is an unmitigated nuisance. What should be done is this: a printed slip, such as the boy himself carries and showing what he sells, should be put on to the seats by the porter, and when any passenger wants an orange or a book, he could send for the vendor. But the vendor should be absolutely forbidden to parade his wares in the sleeping-cars, unless sent for. Anywhere else, except on a train, he would be handed over to the police for his importunities; but on the train he considers himself justified in badgering the public, and impertinently resents being ordered away. These are three small matters, no doubt, but changes in the direction I have suggested would nevertheless materially increase the comfort of passengers.
And now let me see. When I fell into these digressions I had just said good-bye to the Mormons and Mormonland, and had got as far into Nevada as Carlin. From there a dismal interval of wilderness brings the traveller to Palisade, a group of wooden saloons haunted by numbers of yellow Chinese. In the few minutes that the train stopped here, I saw a curious sight.
A number of our Shoshonee passengers—the "deadheads" on the platform between the baggage-cars—had got off, and one, of them was the squaw that had the papoose. As she sat down and unslung her infant from her back, a group gathered round her—one Englishman, one negro, three mulattoes, and a Chinaman. And they were all laughing at the Indian. Not one of them all, not even the negro, but thought himself entitled to make fun of her and her baby! The white man looks down on the mulatto, and the mulatto on the negro, and the negro and the Chinaman reciprocate a mutual disdain; yet here they were, all four together, on a common platform, loftily ridiculing the Shoshonee! It was a delightful spectacle for the cynic. But I am no cynic, and yet I laughed heartily at them all—at them all except the Shoshonee.
I cannot, for the life of me, help venerating these representatives of aprodigious antiquity, these relics of a civilization that dates back before our Flood.
Then we reach the Humboldt River, a broad and full-watered stream, lazily winding along among ample meadows. But not a trace of cultivation anywhere. And then on to the desert again with the surface of the alkali land curling up into flakes, and the lank grey greasewood sparsely scattered about it. The desolation is as utter as in Beluchistan or the Land of Goshen, and instead of Murrees there are plenty of Shoshonees to make the desolation perilous to travellers by waggon. At Battle Creek station they are mustered in quite a crowd, listless men with faces like masks and women burnished and painted and wooden as the figure-heads of English barges. I do not think that in all my travels, in Asia or in Africa, or in the islands of eastern or southern seas, I have ever met a race with such a baffling physiognomy. You can no more tell from his face what an Indian is thinking of than you can from a monkey's. Their eyes brighten and then glaze over again without a word being spoken or a muscle of the face moved, and they avert their glance as soon as you look at them. If you look into an Indian's eyes, they seem to deaden, and all expression dies out of them; but the moment you begin to turn your head away, at you. They are hieroglyphics altogether, and there is something "uncanny" about them.
At Battle Creek we note that (with irrigation) trees will grow, but in a few minutes we are out again on the wretched desert, the eternal greasewood being the only apology for vegetation, and little prairie owls the only representatives of wild life. And so to Winnemucca, where, being watered, a few trees are growing; but the desolation is nevertheless so complete that I could not help thinking of the difference a little Mormon industry would make! A company of Bannack Indians were waiting here for the train, and such a wonderful collection as they were! One of them was the chief who not long ago gave the Federal troops a good deal of trouble, and his retinue was the most delightful medley of curiosities—a long thin man with the figure of a lamppost, a short fat one with the expression of a pancake, a half-breed with a beard, and a boy with a squint. The chief, with a face about an acre in width, wore a stove-pipe hat with the crown knocked out and the opening stuffed full of feathers, but the rest of his wonderful costume, all flapping about him in ends and fringes of all colours and very dirty, is indescribable. His suite were in a more sober garb, but all were grotesque, their headgear being especially novel, and showing the utmost scorn of the hatter's original intentions. Some wore their hats upside down and strapped round the chin with a ribbon; others inside out, with a fringe of their own added on behind—but it was enough to make any hatter mad to look at them.
They travelled with us across the next interval of howling wilderness, and got out to promenade at Humboldt, where we got out to dine—and, as it proved, to dine well.
Humboldt is an exquisite oasis in the hideous Nevada waste. A fountain plays before the hotel door, and on either side are planted groves of trees, poplar and locust and willow, with the turf growing green beneath them, and roses scattered about.
No wonder that all the birds and butterflies of the neighbourhood collect at such a beautiful spot, or that travellers go away grateful, not only for the material benefits of a good meal, but the pleasures of green trees and running water and the song of birds. An orchard, with lucerne strong and thick beneath them, promises a continuance of cultivation, but on a sudden it stops, and we find ourselves out again on the alkali plain, as barren and blistered as the banks of the Suez Canal. A tedious hour or two brings us to the river again; but man here is not agricultural, so the desert continues in spite of abundant water. And so to Lovelocks, where girls board the train as if they were brigands, urging us to buy "sweet fresh milk—five cents a glass." Indians, as usual, are lounging about on the platform, and some more of them get on to the train, and away we go again into the same Sahara as before. Humboldt Lake, the "sink" where the river disappears from the surface of the earth, and a distant glimpse of Carson's "Sink," hardly relieve the desperate monotony, for they are hideous levels of water without a vestige of vegetation, and close upon them comes as honest a tract of desert as even Africa can show, and with no more "features" on it than a plate of cold porridge has. A wolf goes limping off in a three-legged kind of way, as much as to say that, having to live in such a place, it didn't much care whether we caught it or not; and what a contrast to the pair of wolves I remember meeting one morning in Afghanistan!
I was riding a camel and looking away to my right across the plain. I saw coming towards me, over the brushwood, in a series of magnificent leaps, a couple of immense wolves. I knew that wolves grew sometimes to a great size, but I had no idea that, even with their winter fur on, they could be so large as these were.
And there was a majesty about their advance that fascinated me, for every bound, though it carried them twelve or fifteen feet, was so free and light that they seemed to move by machinery rather than by prodigious strength of muscle. But it suddenly occurred to me that they were crossing my path, and I saw, moreover, that our relative speeds, if maintained, might probably bring us into actual collision at the point of intersection. But it was not for me to yield the road, and the wolves thought it was not for them. And so we approached, the wolves keeping exact time and leaping together, as if trained to do it, and then, without swerving a hair's-breadth from their original course they bounded across the path only a few feet behind my camel. It was superb courage on their part, and as an episode of wild-beast life, one of the most picturesque and dramatic I ever witnessed.
The next station we halted at was Wadsworth, a "hard place," so men say, where revolvers are in frequent use and Lynch is judge. Here the broad-faced Bannack chief got down, and, followed by his tag-rag retinue, disappeared into the cluster of wigwams which we saw pitched behind the station. I noticed a man standing here with a splendid cactus in his hand, covered with large magenta blossoms, and this reminded me to note the conspicuous change in the botany that about here takes place. The flowers that had borne us company all through Utah and now and then brightened the roadside in Nevada had disappeared, and were replaced by others of species nearly all new to me. I saw here for the first time a golden-flowered cactus and a tall lavender-coloured spiraea of singular beauty. A little beyond Wadsworth the change becomes even more marked, for striking the Truckee river, we exchange desolation for pretty landscape, and the desert for green bottom lands. The alteration was a welcome one, and some of the glimpses, even if we had not passed through such a melancholy region, would have claimed our admiration on their own merits. The full-fed river poured along a rapid stream, through low-lying meadow-lands fringed with tall cotton-wood, the valley sometimes narrowing so much that the river took up all the room, and then widening out so as to admit of large expanses of grass and occasional fields of corn. And so to Greeno, where we supped heartily off "Truckee trout," one of the best fish that ever wagged a fin. As we got back into the cars it was getting dark, for with the usual luck of travel the Central Pacific has to run its trains so as to give passengers ugly Nevada by day and beautiful California by night.
Awaking next morning was a wonderful surprise. We had gone to sleep in Nevada in early summer, and we awoke in California late in autumn! In Utah, two days ago, the crops had only just begun to flush the ground with green. Here, to-day, the corn-fields were the sun-dried stubble of crops that had been cut weeks ago!
And the first glimpses of it were fortunate ones, for when I awoke it was in a fine park-like, undulating country, studded with clumps of oak-trees, but one continuous cornfield. Great mounds of straw and stacks of corn dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see, and already the fields were alive with carts and men all busy with the splendid harvest. After a while came vast expanses of meadow, prettily timbered, in which great flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were grazing, ranches such as I had never seen before. And then we passed some houses, broad-eaved and verandahed, with capacious barns standing in echelon behind, and all the signs of an ample prosperity, deep shaded in walnut-trees laden with nuts, overrun by vines already heavy with clusters, and brightened by clumps of oleanders ruddy with blossom. And then came the corn-fields again, an unbroken expanse of stubble, yellow as the sea-sand, and seemingly as interminable. What a country! It is a kingdom in itself.
And its rivers! The American River soon came in sight, rolling its stately flood along between brakes of willow and elder, and aspen, and then the Sacramento, a noble stream. And the two conspire and join together to take liberties with the solid earth, swamp it into bulrush beds by the league together, and create such jungles as almost rival the great Himalaya Terai. And so to Sacramento.
Sacramento was en fete, for it was the race week. So bunting was flapping from every conspicuous point, and everything and everybody wore a whole holiday, morning-cocktail, go-as-you-please sort of look. This fact may account for the very ill-mannered conductor who boarded us here.
I am sitting in the smoking-car. Enter conductor with his mouth too full of tobacco to be able to speak. He points at me with his thumb. I take no notice of his thumb. He spits in the spittoon at my feet and jerks his thumb towards me again. I disregard his thumb. "Ticket!" he growls. I give him my ticket. He punches it and thrusts it back to me so carelessly and suddenly that it falls on the floor. He takes no notice, but passes on into the car. I take out my pocket-book and make a note;—
"Such a man as this goes some way towards discrediting the administration of a whole line. It seems a pity therefore to retain his services."
However, of Sacramento, I was very sorry not to be able to stay there, for next to the Los Angeles country I had been told that it was one of the finest "locations" in all California, and I can readily believe it, for the botany of the place is sub-tropical, and snow and sunstroke are equally unknown. Fruits of all kinds grow there in delightful abundance, and I cherish it therefore as a personal grudge against Sacramento that there was not even a blackberry procurable at breakfast.
Passing from Sacramento, and remarking as we go, the patronage which that vegetable impostor, the eucalyptus globulus (or "blue-gum" of Australia) has secured, both as an ornamental—save the mark!—and a shade-tree, two purposes for which by itself the eucalyptus is specially unfitted, we find ourselves once more in a world given up to harvesting. A monotonous panorama of stubble and standing crops, with clumps of pretty oak timber studding the undulating land, leads us to the diversified approaches to San Francisco.
It is old travellers' ground, but replete with the interest which attaches to variety of scenery, continual indications of vast wealth, and a rapidly growing prosperity. But one word, before we reach the town, for that wonderful natural crop—the "wild oats," which clothe every vacant acre of the country on this Pacific watershed with harvests as close and as regular as if the land had been tilled, and the ground sown, by human agency. This surprising plant is said to have been brought to California by the Spaniards, and to have run wild from the original fields. But whatever its origin, it is now growing in such vast prairies that whole tribes of Indians used to look to it as the staple of their food. But better crops are fast displacing it, and as for the Indian, California no longer belongs to him or his bison-herds. Further east, that is to say, from the Platte Valley to the Sierra Nevada, the "bunch grass" was the great natural provision for the wild herds of the wild man, and it still ranks as one of the most valuable features of otherwise barren regions in Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. To the student of Nature, however, it is far more interesting as one of the most beautiful examples of her kindly foresight, for the bunch grass grows where nothing else can find nourishment, and just when all other grasses are useless as fodder, it throws out young juicy shoots, thrives under the snow, and then in May, when other grasses are abundant, it dies! Somebodv has said that without the mule and the pig America would never have been colonized. That may be as it may be. But the real pioneer of the West was the bison, for the first emigrants followed exactly in the footsteps of the retiring herds, and these in their turn grazed their way towards the Pacific in the line of the bunch grass.
Mount Diavolo is the first "feature" that arouses the traveller's inquisitiveness, and then the Martines Straits with their yellow waters spread out at the feet of rolling, yellow hills, and then great mud flats on which big vessels lie waiting for the tide to come and float them on, and then a bay which, with its girdle of hills and its broad margin, reminds me of Durban in Natal. So to Benicia, the place of "the Boy," with the blacksmith's forge where Heenan used to work still standing near the water's edge, and where the hammer that the giant used to use is still preserved "in memoriam," and then on to the ferry-boat (train and all!) and across a bay of brown water and brown mud and brown hills—dismally remindful of Weston-super-Mare—and on to dry land again, past Berkley, with its college among the trees, Oakland, and other suburban resorts of the San Franciscan, to the fine new three-storeyed Station at the pier. Once more on to the ferry-boat, but this time leaving our train behind us and across another bay, and so into San Francisco. Outside the station stands a crowd of chariot-like omnibuses, as gorgeously coloured, some of them, as the equipages of a circus, and empanelled with gaudy pictures. In one of them we find our proper seats, and are soon bumping over the cobble-stones into "the most wonderful city, sir, of America."