SINNERS AND SAINTS
A TOUR ACROSS THE STATES, AND ROUND THEM
WITH
THREE MONTHS AMONG THE MORMONS
BY PHIL ROBINSON
AUTHOR OF "IN MY INDIAN GARDEN," "UNDER THE PUNKAH," "NOAH'S ARK,'" ETC., ETC.
NEW AND CHEAPER EDITION
LONDON
1892
Inscribed,
WITH AUTHOR'S GRATITUDE, TO A FRIEND, JOHN STUART DOWNING.
CONTENTS.
—
FROM NEW YORK TO CHICAGO.
By the Pennsylvania Limited—Her Majesty's swine—Glimpses of Africa and India—"Eligible sites for Kingdoms"—The Phoenix city—Street scenes—From pig to pork—The Sparrow line—Chicago Mountain—Melancholy merry-makers.
FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER.
Fathers of Waters—"Rich Lands lie Flat"—The Misery River—Council Bluffs—A "Live" town, sir—Two murders: a contrast—Omaha—The immorality of "writing up"—On the prairies—The modesty of "Wish-ton-Wish"—The antelope's tower of refuge—Out of Nebraska into Colorado—Man-eating Tiger.
IN LEADVILLE.
The South Park line—Oscar Wilde on sunflowers as food—In a wash-hand basin—Anti-Vigilance Committees—Leadville the city of the carbonates—"Busted" millionaires—The philosophy of thick boots—Colorado miners—National competition in lions—Abuse of the terms "gentleman" and "lady"—Up at the mines—Under the pine-trees.
FROM LEADVILLE TO SALT LAKE CITY.
What is the conductor of a Pullman car?—Cannibalism fatal to lasting friendships—Starving Peter to feed Paul—Connexion between Irish cookery and Parnellism—Americans not smokers—In Denver—"The Queen City of the Plains"—Over the Rockies—Pride in a cow, and what came of it—Sage-brush—Would ostriches pay in the West?—Echo Canyon—The Mormons' fortifications—Great Salt Lake in sight.
THE CITY OF THE HONEY-BEE.
Zion—Deseret—A City Of Two Peoples—"Work" the watch-word of Mormonism—A few facts to the credit of the Saints—The text of the Edmunds Bill—In the Mormon Tabernacle—The closing scene of the Conference.
LEGISLATION AGAINST PLURALITY.
A people under a ban—What the Mormon men think of the Anti-Polygamy Bill—And what the Mormon women say of polygamy—Puzzling confidences—Practical plurality a very dull affair—But theoretically a hedge-hog problem—Matrimonial eccentricities—The fashionable milliner fatal to plurality—Absurdity of comparing Moslem polygamy with Mormon plurality—Are the women of Utah happy?—Their enthusiasm for Women's Rights.
SUA SI BONA NORINT.
A Special Correspondent's lot—Hypothecated wits—The Daughters of Zion—Their modest demeanour—Under the banner of Woman's Rights—The discoverer discovered—Turning the tables—"By Jove, sir, you shall have mustard with your beefsteak!"
COULD THE MORMONS FIGHT?
An unfulfilled prophecy—Had Brigham Young been still alive?—The hierarchy of Mormonism—The fighting Apostle and his colleagues—Plurality a revelation—Rajpoot infanticide: how it was stamped out—Would the Mormons submit to the process?—Their fighting capabilities—Boer and Mormon: an analogy between the Drakensberg and the Wasatch ranges—The Puritan fanaticism of the Saints—Awaiting the fulness of time and of prophecy.
THE SAINTS AND THE RED MEN.
Prevalent errors as to the red man—Secret treaties—The policy of the Mormons towards Indians—A Christian heathen—Fighting-strength of Indians friendly to Mormons.
REPRESENTATIVE AND UNREPRESENTATIVE MORMONISM.
Mormonism and Mormonism—Salt Lake City not representative—The miracles of water—How settlements grow—The town of Logan: one of the Wonders of the West—The beauty of the valley—The rural simplicity of life—Absence of liquor and crime—A police force of one man—Temple mysteries—Illustrations of Mormon degradation—Their settlement of the "local option" question.
THROUGH THE MORMON SETTLEMENTS.
Salt Lake City to Nephi—General similarity of the settlements—From Salt Lake Valley into Utah Valley—A lake of legends—Provo—Into the Juab valley—Indian reminiscences—Commercial integrity of the saints—At Nephi—Good work done by the saints—Type of face in rural Utah—Mormon "doctrine" and Mormon "meetings."
FROM NEPHI TO MANTI.
English companies and their failures—A deplorable neglect of claret cup—Into the San Pete Valley—Reminiscences of the Indians—The forbearance of the red man—The great temple at Manti—Masonry and Mormon mysteries—In a tithing-house.
FROM MANTI TO GLENWOOD.
Scandinavian Mormons—Danish ol—Among the orchards at Manti—On the way to Conference—Adam and Eve—The protoplasm of a settlement—Ham and eggs—At Mayfield—Our teamster's theory of the ground-hog—On the way to Glenwood—Volcanic phenomena and lizards—A suggestion for improving upon Nature—Primitive Art.
FROM GLENWOOD TO MONROE.
From Glenwood to Salina—Deceptiveness of appearances—An apostate Mormon's friendly testimony—Reminiscences of the Prophet Joseph Smith—Rabbit-hunting in a waggon—Lost in the sage-brush—A day at Monroe—Girls riding pillion—The Sunday drum—Waiting for the right man: "And what if he is married?"—The truth about apostasy: not always voluntary.
AT MONROE.
"Schooling" in the Mormon districts—Innocence as to whisky, but connoisseurs in water—"What do you think of that water, sir?"—Gentile dependents on Mormon charity—The one-eyed rooster—Notice to All!
JACOB HAMBLIN.
A Mormon missionary among the Indians—The story Of Jacob Hamblin's life—His spiritualism, the result of an intense faith—His good work among the Lamanites—His belief in his own miracles.
THROUGH MARYSVALE TO KINGSTON.
Piute County—Days of small things—A swop in the sage-brush; two Bishops for one Apostle—The Kings of Kingston—A failure in Family.
FROM KINGSTON TO ORDERVILLE.
On the way to Panguitch—Section-houses not Mormon homes—Through wild country—Panguitch and its fish—Forbidden pleasures—At the Source of the Rio Virgin—The surpassing beauty of Long Valley—The Orderville Brethren—A success in Family Communism.
MORMON VIRTUES.
Red ants and anti-Mormons—Ignorance of the Mormons among Gentiles in Salt Lake City—Mormon reverence for the Bible—Their struggle against drinking-saloons in the city—Conspicuous piety in the settlements—Their charity—Their sobriety (to my great inconvenience)—The literature of Mormonism utterly unreliable—Neglect of the press by the Saints—Explanation of the wide-spread misrepresentation of Mormonism.
DOWN THE ONTARIO MINE
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.
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.
San Franciscans, their fruits and their falsehoods—Their neglect of opportunities—A plague of flies—The pigtail problem—Chinamen less black than they are painted—The seal rocks—The loss of the Eurydice—A jeweller's fairyland—The mystery of gems.
Gigantic America—Of the treatment of strangers—The wild-life world—Railway Companies' food-frauds—California Felix—Prairie-dog history—The exasperation of wealth—Blessed with good oil—The meek lettuce and judicious onion—Salads and Salads—The perils of promiscuous grazing.
The Carlyle of vegetables—The moral in blight—Bee-farms—The city of Angels—Of squashes—Curious vegetation—The incompatibility of camels and Americans—Are rabbits "seals"?—All wilderness and no weather—An "infinite torment of flies."
THROUGH THE COWBOYS' COUNTRY.
The Santa Cruz valley—The cactus—An ancient and honourable pueblo—A terrible beverage—Are cicadas deaf?—A floral catastrophe—The secretary and the peccaries.
American neglect of natural history—Prairie-dogs again; their courtesy and colouring—Their indifference to science—A hard crowd—Chuckers out—Makeshift Colorado.
Nature's holiday—Through wonderful country—Brown negroes a libel on mankind—The Wild-flower State—The black problem—A piebald flirt—The hippopotamus and the flea—A narrow escape—The home of the swamp-goblin—Is the moon a fraud?
Frogs, in the swamp and as a side-dish—Negroids of the swamp age—Something like a mouth—Honour in your own country—The Land of Promise—Civilization again.
CHAPTER I.
FROM NEW YORK TO CHICAGO.
By the Pennsylvania Limited—Her Majesty's swine—Glimpses of Africa and India—"Eligible sites for Kingdoms"—The Phoenix city—Street scenes—From pig to pork—The Sparrow line—Chicago Mountain—Melancholy merry-makers.
"DOES the fast train to Chicago ever stop?" was the question of a bewildered English fellow-passenger, Westward-bound like myself, as I took my seat in the car of the Pennsylvania Limited mail that was to carry me nearly half the distance from the Atlantic to the Pacific. "Oh, yes," I replied, "it stops—at Chicago."
By this he recognized in me a fellow-innocent, and so we foregathered at once, breakfasted together, and then went out to smoke the calumet together.
—
To an insular traveller, it is a prodigiously long journey this, across the continent of America, but I found the journey a perpetual enjoyment. Even the dull country of the first hour's travelling had many points of interest for the stranger—scattered hamlets of wooden houses that were only joined together by straggling strings of cocks and hens; the others that seemed to have been trying to scramble over the hill and down the other side but were caught just as they got to the top and pinned down to the ground with lightning conductors; the others that had palings round them to keep them from running away, but had got on to piles as if they were stilts and intended (when no one was looking) to skip over the palings and go away; the others that had rows of dwarf fir-trees in front of them, through which they stared out of both their windows like a forward child affecting to be shy behind its fingers. These fir-trees are themselves very curious, for they give the country a half-cultivated appearance, and in some places make the hillsides and valleys look like immense cemeteries, and only waiting for the tombstones. Even the levels of flooded land and the scorched forests were of interest, as significant of a country still busy over its rudiments.
"All charcoal and puddles," said a fellow-traveller disparagingly; "I'm very glad we're going so fast through it."
Now for my own part I think it looks very uncivil of a train to go with a screech through a station without stopping, and I always wish I could say something in the way of an apology to the station-master for the train's bad manners. No doubt people who live in very small places get accustomed to trains rushing past their platforms without stopping even to say "By your leave." But at first it must be rather painful. At least I should think it was. On the other hand, the people "in the mofussil" (which is the Anglo-Indian for "all the country outside one's own town") did not pay much attention to our train. Everybody went about their several works for all the world as if we were not flashing by. Even the dogs trotted about indifferently, without even so much as noticing us, except occasionally some distant mongrel, who barked at the train as if it was a stray bullock, and smiled complacently upon the adjoining landscape when he found how thoroughly he had frightened it away.
There seemed to me a curious dearth of small wild life. The English "country" is so full of birds that all others seem, by comparison, birdles. Once, I saw a russet-winged hawk hovering over a copse of water-oak as if it saw something worth eating there; once, too, I saw a blue-bird brighten a clump of cedars. Now and again a vagabond crow drifted across the sky. But, as compared with Europe or parts of the East which I know best, bird-life was very scanty.
And presently Philadelphia came sliding along to meet us with a stately decorum of metalled roads and well-kept public grounds, and we stopped for the first of the twelve halts, worth calling such, which I had to make in the 3000 miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
How treacherously the trains in America start! There is no warning given, so far as an ordinary passenger can see, that the start is under contemplation, and it takes him by surprise. The American understands that "All aboard" means "If you don't jump up at once you'll be left behind." But to those accustomed to a "first" and a "second" and a "third" bell—and accustomed, too, not to get up even then until the guard has begged them as a personal favour to take their seats—the sudden departure of the American locomotive presents itself as a rather shabby sort of practical joke.
The quiet, unobtrusive scenery beyond Philadelphia is English in character, and would be still more so if there were hedges instead of railings. By the way, whenever reading biographical notices of distinguished Americans I have been surprised to find that so many of them at one time or other had "split rails" for a subsistence. But now that I have followed the "course of empire" West, I am not the least surprised. I only wonder that every American has not split rails, at one time or another, or, indeed, gone on doing it all his life. For how such a prodigious quantity of rails ever got split (even supposing distinguished men to have assisted in the industry in early life) passes my feeble comprehension. All the way from New York to Chicago there are on an average twenty lines of split rails running parallel with the railway track, in sight all at once! And after all, this is only one narrow strip across a gigantic continent. In fact, the two most prominent "natural features" of the landscape along this route are dwarf firs and split rails. But no writer on America has ever told me so. Nor have I ever been told of the curious misapprehension prevalent in the States as to the liberty of the subject in the British Isles.
In America, judging at any rate from the speech of "the average American," I find that there is a belief prevalent that the English nation "lies prostrate under the heel of a tyrant." What a shock to those who think thus, must have been that recent episode of the queen's pigs at Slough!
Six swine and a calf belonging to her Majesty found themselves, the other day, impounded by the Slough magistrates for coming to market without a licence. Slough, from geographical circumstances over which it has no control, happens to be in Buckinghamshire, and this country has been declared "an infected district," so that the bailiff who brought his sovereign's pigs to market, without due authority to do so, transgressed the law. Two majesties thus came into collision over the calf, and that of the law prevailed. Such a constitutional triumph as this goes far to clear away the clouds that appeared to be gathered upon the political horizon, and the shadows of a despotic dictatorship which seemed to be falling across England begin to vanish. The written law, contained probably in a very dilapidated old copy in the possession of these rural magistrates, a dogs'-eared and, it may be, even a ragged volume, asserted itself supreme over a monarch's farmyard stock, and dared to break down that divinity which doth hedge a Sovereign's swine. There are some who say that in the British Isles men are losing their reverence for the law, and that justice wears two faces, one for the rich and another for the poor. They would have us believe that only the parasites of princes sit in high place, and that the scales of justice rise or fall according to the inclinations of the sceptre, with the obsequious regularity of the tides that wait upon the humours of the moon. But such an incident as this, when the Justices of Slough, those intrepid Hampdens, sate sternly in their places, and, fearless of Royal frowns and all the displeasure of Windsor, dispensed to the pigs, born in the purple, and to the calf that had lived so near a throne, the impartial retribution of a fine—with costs—gives a splendid refutation to these calumnies. Where shall we look in Republican history for such another incident? or where search for dauntless magistrates like those of Slough, who shut their eyes against the reflected glitter of a Court, who fined the Royal calf for risking the health of Hodge's miserable herd, and gave the costs against the Imperial pigs for travelling into Buckinghamshire without a licence? Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. There was no truckling here to borrowed majesty, no sycophant adulation of Royal ownership; but that fine old English spirit of courageous independence which has made tyrants impossible in our island and our law supreme. It was of no use before such men as these, the stout-hearted champions of equal justice, for the bailiff to plead manorial privilege, or to threaten the thunders of the House of Brunswick. They were as implacable as a bench of Rhadamanthuses, and gave these distinguished hogs the grim choice between paying a pound or going to one. Nor, to their credit be it said, did either bailiff, calf, or pigs exhibit resentment. On the contrary, they accepted judgment with that respectful acquiescence which characterizes our law-abiding race, and the swine turned without a murmur from the scene of their repulse, and trotted cheerfully before the bailiff out of Buckinghamshire back to Windsor.
The bailiff, no doubt, bethought him of the past, and wished the good old days of feudalism were back, when a King's pig was a better man than a Buckinghamshire magistrate. But if he did, he abstained from saying so. On the contrary, he paid his fine like a loyal subject, and gathering his innocent charges round him went forth, more in sorrow than in anger, from the presence of the magisterial champions of the public interests. The punished pigs, too, may have felt, perhaps, just a twinge of regret for the days when they roamed at will over the oak-grown shires, infecting each other as they chose, without any thought of Contagious Diseases Acts or vigilant justices. But they said nothing; and the spectacle of an upright stipendiary dispensing impartial justice to a law-abiding aristocracy was thus complete.
To return to my car. Beyond Philadelphia the country was waking up for Spring. The fields were all flushed with the first bright promise of harvest; blackbirds—reminding me of the Indian king-crows in their sliding manner of flight and the conspicuous way in which they use their tails as rudders—were flying about in sociable parties; and flocks of finches went jerking up the hill-sides by fits and starts after the fashion of these frivolous little folk.
A mica-schist (it may be gneiss) abounds along the railway track, and it occurred to me that I had never, except in India, seen this material used for the ornamentation of houses. Yet it is very beautiful. In the East they beat it up into a powder—some is white, some yellow—and after mixing it with weak lime and water, wash the walls with it, the result being a very effective although subdued sparkle, in some places silvery, in others golden.
Nearing Harrisburg the country begins to resemble upper Natal very strongly, and when we reached the Susquehanna, I could easily have believed that we were on the Mooi, on the borders of Zululand. But the superior majesty of the American river soon asserted itself, and I forgot the comparison altogether as I looked out on this truly noble stream, with the finely wooded hills leaning back from it on either side, as if to give its waters more spacious way.
And then Harrisburg, and the same stealthy departure of the train. But outside the station our having started was evident enough, for a horse that had been left to look after a buggy for a few minutes, took fright, and with three frantic kangaroo-leaps tried to take the conveyance whole over a wall. But failing in this, it careered away down the road with the balance of the buggy dangling in a draggle-tail sort of way behind it.
Nature works with so few ingredients that landscape repeats itself in every continent. For there is a limit, after all, to the combinations possible of water, mountain, plain, valley, and vegetation. This is strictly true, of course, only when we deal with things generically. Specific combinations go beyond arithmetic. But even with her species, Nature delights in singing over old songs and telling the tales she has already told. For instance here, after passing Harrisburg, is a wonderful glimpse of Naini Tal in the Indian hills—memorable for a terribly fatal landslip three years ago—with its oaks and rhododendrons and scattered pines. In the valleys the streams go tumbling along with willows on either bank, and here and there on the hillsides, shine white houses with orchards about them.
The houses men build for themselves when they are thinking only of shelter are ugly enough. Elegance, like the nightingale, is a creature of summer-time, when the hard-working months of the year are over and Nature sits in her drawing-room, so to speak, playing the fine lady, painting the roses and sweetening the peaches. But, ugly though they are, these scattered homesteads are by far the finest lines in all the great poem of this half-wild continent, and lend a grand significance to every passage in which they occur. And the pathos of it! Look at those two horses and a man driving a plough through that scrap of ground yonder. There is not another living object in view, though the eye covers enough ground for a European principality. Yet that man dares to challenge all this tremendous Nature! It is David before Goliath, before a whole wilderness of Goliaths, with a plough for a sling and a ploughshare for a pebble.
Here all of a sudden is another man, all alone with some millions of trees and the Alleghanies. And he stands there with an axe in his hands, revolving in that untidy head of his what he shall do next to the old hills and their reverend forest growth. The audacity of it, and the solemnity!
It would be as well perhaps for sentiment if every man was quite alone. For I find that if there are two men together one immediately tries to sell the other something; and to inform him of its nature, he goes and paints the name of his disgusting commodities on the smooth faces of rocks and on tree-trunks. Now, any landscape, however grand, loses in dignity if you see "Bunkum's Patent" inscribed in the foreground in whitewash letters six feet high.
What a mercy it is these quacks cannot advertise on the sky—or on running water!
For the river is now at its grandest and it keeps with us all the afternoon, showing on either side splendid waterways between sloping spurs of the hills densely wooded and strewn with great boulders. But on a sudden the mountains are gone and the river with them, and we speed along through a region of green grass-land and abundant cultivation. Land agents might truthfully advertise it in lots as "eligible sites for kingdoms."
And so on, past townships, whose names running (at forty miles an hour) no man can read, and round the famous "horseshoe curve"—where it looks as if the train were trying to get its head round in order to swallow its tail—down into valleys already taking their evening tints of misty purple, and pink, and pale blue. And then Derry.
Just before we arrived there, two freight trains had selected Derry as an opportune spot for a collision, and had collided accordingly. There could have been very little reservation about their collision, for the wreck was complete, and when we got under way again we could just make out by the moonlight the scattered limbs of carriages lying heaped about on the bank. In some places it looked as if a clumsy apprentice had been trying to make packing-cases out of freight wagons, but had given up on finding that he had broken the pieces too small. And they were too big for matches. So it was rather a useless sort of collision, after all—and no one was hurt.
But "the Pennsylvania Limited" has very little leisure to think about other people's collisions, and so we were soon on our way again through the moonlit country, with the hills in the distance lying still and black, like round-backed monsters sleeping, and the stations going by in sudden snatches of lamplight, and every now and then a train, its bell giving a wail exactly like the sound of a shell as it passes over the trenches. And so to Pittsburg, and, our "five minutes" over, the train stole away like a hyena, snarling and hiccoughing, and we were again out in the country, with everything about us beautified by the gracious alchemy of the moonlight and the stars.
And the Ohio River rolled alongside, with its steamers ploughing up furrows of ghostly white froth, and unwinding as they went long streamers of ghostly black—and then I fell asleep.
When I awoke next morning I was in Indiana, and very sunny it looked without a hill in sight to make a shadow. The water stood in lakes on the dead level of the country, and horses, cattle, sheep, and here and there a pig—a pregustation of Chicago—grazed and rooted, very well satisfied apparently with pastures that had no ups and downs to trouble them as they loitered about. And as the morning wore on, the people woke up, and were soon as busy as their windmills. In the fields the teams were ploughing; in the towns, the children were trooping off to school. But the eternal level began at last, apparently, to weary the Pennsylvania Limited, for it commenced slackening speed and finding frivolous pretexts for coming nearly to a standstill—the climax being reached when we halted in front of a small, piebald pig. We looked at the pig and the pig looked at us, and the pig got the best of it, for we sneaked off, leaving the porker master of the situation and still looking.
But these great flats—what a paradise of snipe they are, and how golf-players might revel on them! Birds were abundant. Crows went about in bands recruiting "black marauders" in every copse; blackbirds flew over in flocks, and small things of the linnet kind rose in wisps from the sedges and osiers. And there was another bird of which I did not then know the name, that was a surprise every time it left the ground, for it sate all black and flew half scarlet. Could not these marsh levels be utilized for the Indian water-nut, the singhara? In Asia where it is cultivated it ranks almost as a local staple of food, and is delicious.
A noteworthy feature of the country, by the way, is the sudden appearance of hedge-rows. No detail of landscape that I know of makes scenery at once so English. And then we find ourselves steaming along past beds of osiers, with long waterways stretching up northwards, with here and there painted duck, like the European sheldrake, floating under the shadows of the fir-trees, and then I became aware of a great green expanse of water showing through the trees, and I asked "What is that? The water must be very deep to be such a colour." "That is Lake Michigan," was the answer, "and this is Chicago we are coming to now."
And very soon we found ourselves in the station of the great city by the lake, with the masts of shipping alongside the funnels of engines. But not a pig in sight!
I had thought that Chicago was all pigs.
And what a city it is, this central wonder of the States! As a whole, Chicago is nearly terrific. The real significance of this phoenix city is almost appalling. Its astonishing resurrection from its ashes and its tremendous energy terrify jelly-fishes like myself. Before they have got roads that are fit to be called roads, these Chicago men have piled up the new County Hall, to my mind one of the most imposing structures I have ever seen in all my wide travels.
Chicago does not altogether seem to like it, for every one spoke of it as "too solid-looking," but for my part I think it almost superb. The architect's name, I believe, is Egan; but whence he got his architectural inspiration I cannot say. It reminds me in part of a wing of the Tuileries, but why it does I could not make up my mind.
Then again, look at this Chicago which allows its business thoroughfares to be so sumptuously neglected—some of them are almost as disreputable-looking as Broadway—and goes and lays out imperial "boulevards" to connect its "system of parks." These boulevards, simply if left alone for the trees to grow up and the turf to grow thick, will before long be the finest in all the world. The streets in the city, however, if left alone much longer, would be a disgrace to—well, say Port Said. The local administration, they say, is "corrupt." But that is the standing American explanation for everything with which a stranger finds fault. I was always told the same in New York—and would you seriously tell me that the municipal administration of New York is corrupt?—to account for congestion of traffic, fat policemen, bad lamps, sidewalks blocked with packing-cases, &c., &c. And in Chicago it accounts for the streets being more like rolling prairie than streets, for cigar stores being houses of assignation, for there being so much orange peel and banana skin on the sidewalks, &c., &c. But I am not at all sure that "municipal corruption" is not a scapegoat for want of public spirit.
But let the public spirit be as it may, there can be no doubt as to the private enterprise in Chicago. Take the iron industry alone—what prodigious proportions it is assuming, and how vastly it will be increased when that circum-urban "belt line" of railways is completed! Take, again, the Pullman factories. They by themselves form an industry which might satisfy any town of moderate appetite. But Chicago is a veritable glutton for speculative trade.
The streets at all times abound with incident. Here at one corner was a Hansom cab, surely the very latest development of European science, with two small black children, looking like imps in a Drury Lane pantomime, trying to pin "April Fool" on to the cabman's dependent tails. Could anything be more incongruous? In the first place, what have negro children to do with April fooling? and in the next, imagine these small scraps in ebony taking liberties with a Hansom! A group of cowboy-and-miner looking men were grouped in ludicrous attitudes of sentimentality before a concertina-player, who was wheezing out his own version of "old country" airs. On the arm of one of the group languished a lady with a very dark skin, dressed in a rich black silk dress, with a black satin mantle trimmed with sumptuous fur, and half an ostrich on her head by way of bonnet and feathers. The men there, as in most of America, strike me as being very judicious in the arrangement of their personal appearance, especially in the trimming of their hair and moustachios; but many of the women—I speak now of Chicago—sacrificed everything to that awful American institution, the "bang."
I know of no female head-dress in Asia, Africa, or Europe so absurd in itself or so lunatic in the wearer as some of the Chicago bangs. Ugliness of face is intensified a thousandfold by "the ring-worm style" of head-dress with which they cover their foreheads and half their cheeks. Prettiness of face can, of course, never be hidden; but I honestly think that neither a black skin, nor lip-rings and nose-rings, nor red teeth, nor any other fantastic female fashion that I have ever seen in other parts of the world, goes so far towards concealing beauty of features as that curly plastering which, from ignorance of its real name, I have called "the ring worm style of bang."
Here, too, in Chicago I found a man selling "gophers." Now, I do not know the American name for this vanish-into-nothing sort of pastry, but I do know that there is one man in London who declares that he, and he alone in all the world, is aware of the secret of the gopher. And all London believes him. His is supposed to be a lost art—but for him—and I should not be surprised if some lover of the antique were to bribe him to bequeath the precious secret to an heir before he dies. But in Chicago peripatetic vendors of this cate are an every-day occurrence, and even the juvenile Ethiop sometimes compasses the gopher. What its American name is I cannot say; but it is a very delicate kind of pastry punched into small square depressions, and every mouthful you eat is so inappreciable in point of matter that you look down on your waistcoat to see if you have not dropped it, and when the whole is done you feel that you have consumed about as much solid nutriment as a fish does after a nibble at an artificial bait. Have you ever given a dog a piece of warm fat off your plate and seen him after he had swallowed it look on the carpet for it? So rapid is the transit of the delicious thing that the deluded animal fancies that he has as yet enjoyed only the foretaste of a pleasure still to be, the shadow only of the coming event, the promise of something good. It is just the same with yourself after eating a gopher.
Of course I went to see the stock-yards, and my visit, as it happened, had something of a special character, for I saw a pig put through its performances in thirty-five seconds. A lively piebald porker was one of a number grunting and quarrelling in a pen, and I was asked to keep my eye on him. And what happened to that porker was this.[[1]] He was suddenly seized by a hind leg, and jerked up on to a small crane. This swung him swiftly to the fatal door through which no pig ever returns. On the other side stood a man—
That two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more,
and the dead pig shot across a trough and through another doorway, and then there was a splash! He had fallen head first into a vat of boiling water. Some unseen machinery passed him along swiftly to the other end of the terrible bath, and there a water-wheel picked him up and flung him out on to a sloping counter. Here another machine seized him, and with one revolution scraped him as bald as a nut. And down the counter he went, losing his head as he slid past a man with a hatchet, and then, presto! he was up again by the heels. In one dreadful handful a man emptied him, and while another squirted him with fresh water, the pig—registering his own weight as he passed the teller's box—shot down the steel bar from which he hung, and whisked round the corner into the ice-house. One long cut of a knife made two sides of pork out of that piebald pig. Two hacks of a hatchet brought away his backbone. And there, in thirty-five seconds from his last grunt—dirty, hot-headed, noisy—the pig was hanging up in two pieces, clean, tranquil, iced!
The very rapidity of the whole process robbed it of all its horrors. It even added the ludicrous to it. Here one minute was an opinionated piebald pig making a prodigious fuss about having his hind leg taken hold of, and lo! before he had even made up his mind whether to squeal or only to squeak, he was hanging up in an ice-house, split in two! He had resented the first trifling liberty that was taken with him, and in thirty-five seconds he was ready for the cook!
That the whole process is virtually painless is beyond all doubt, for it is only for the first fraction of the thirty-odd seconds that the pig is sentient, and I doubt if even electricity could as suddenly and painlessly extinguish life as the lightning of that unerring poniard, "the dagger of mercy" and the instantaneous plunge into the scalding bath.
Of the Chicago stock-yards, a veritable village, laid out with its miniature avenues intersecting its mimic streets and numbered blocks, it is late in the day to speak. But it was very interesting in its way to see the poor doomed swine thoughtlessly grunting along the road, and inquisitively asking their way, as it seemed, of the sheep in Block 9 or of the sulky Texan steer looking out between the palings of Block 7; to watch the cattle, wild-eyed from distress and long journeying, snorting their distrust of their surroundings, and trying at every opportunity to turn away from the terribly straight road that leads to death, into any crossway that seemed likely to result in freedom; to see for the first time the groups of Western herdsmen lounging at the corners, while their unkempt ponies, guarded in most cases by drowsy shepherd-dogs, stood tethered in bunches against the palings. All day long the air is filled with porcine clamour, and some of the pens are scenes of perpetual riot. For the pig does not chant his "nunc dimittis" with any seemliness. His last canticles are frivolous. It is impossible to translate them into any "morituri te salutant," for they are wanting in dignity, and even self-respect. With the cattle it is very different. But few of them were in such good case as to make high spirits possible, and many were wretched objects to look at. Dead calves lay about in the pens, and there was a general air of distress that made the scene abundantly pathetic. But, after all, it does not pay to starve or overdrive cattle, and we may confidently expect therefore, that in Chicago, of all places in the world, they are neither starved nor overdriven systematically.
The English sparrow has multiplied with characteristic industry in Chicago, but further west I lost it. I saw none between Omaha and Salt Lake City. So the sparrow line, I take it, must be drawn for the present somewhere west of Clinton. I do not think it has crossed the Mississippi yet from the east. But it is steadily advancing its frontiers—this aggressive fowl—from both sea-boards, and just as it has pushed itself forward from the Atlantic into Illinois, so from the Pacific it has got already as far as Nevada. The tyranny of the sparrow is the price men pay for civilization. Only savages are exempt. Here in America, they have developed into a multitudinous evil, dispossessing with a high hand the children of the soil, thrusting their Saxon assumption of superiority upon the native feathered flock of grove and garden, and driving them from their birthright. They have no respect for authorities, and entertain no awe even for the Irish aldermen of New York. In Australia it is the same. Imported as a treasure, they have presumed upon the sentiment of exiled Englishmen until they have become a veritable calamity. So they have been publicly proclaimed as "vermin," and a price set upon their heads "per hundred." Indeed, legislatures threaten to stand or fall upon the sparrow question. Here in America, men and women began by putting nesting-boxes for the birds in the trees and at corners of houses; I am much mistaken if before long they do not end by putting up ladders against the trees to help the cats to get up to catch the sparrows.
I looked everywhere for "Chicago Mountain"—a New England joke against the Phoenix City—and at last found it behind a house at the corner of Pine and Colorado streets. They say (in Boston) that Chicago, being chaffed about having no high land near it, set to work to build itself a mountain, but that when it had reached its present moderate elevation of a few feet, the city abandoned the project. But I am inclined to think that this fiction is due to the spite of the New Englanders, who, it is notorious, have to sharpen the noses of their sheep to enable them to reach the grass that grows between the stones; for on looking at the mountain in question I perceived it to be merely a natural sand-dune which it has not been thought worth while to clear away. Further to acquaint myself with the city, I went into sundry "penny gaffs," or cafés chantants, and found them to my surprise patronized by groups of men sad almost to melancholy. It was the music, I think, that made them feel so. Its effect on me I know was very chastening. I felt inclined to lift up my voice and howl. But the intense gravity of the company restrained me, and I left. Yet I am told that inside these very places men stab each other with Bowie knives and shoot each other with revolvers, and are even sometimes quite disagreeable in their manners. But so far as my own experience goes I seldom saw a gathering so unanimously solemn. I might even say so tearful. It is possible, of course, that the music eventually maddens them, that it works them up about midnight into a homicidal melancholy. But there was no profligacy of blood-shedding while I was there.
They did not even offer to murder a musician.
Footnotes:
[1]. Need I say that I do not refer to the small field-rat of that name?
CHAPTER II.
FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER.
Fathers of Waters—"Rich Lands lie Flat"—The Misery River—Council Bluffs—A "Live" town, sir—Two murders: a contrast—Omaha—The immorality of "writing up"—On the prairies—The modesty of "Wish-ton-Wish"—The antelope's tower of refuge—Out of Nebraska into Colorado—Man-eating Tiger.
FROM Chicago to Omaha by the Chicago and "Northwestern" route is not an exhilarating journey. When Nature begins to make anything out here in America she never seems to know when to stop. She can never make a few of anything. For instance, it might have been thought that one or two hundred miles of perfectly flat land was enough at a time. But Nature, having once commenced flattening out the land, cannot leave off. So all the way from Chicago to Omaha there is the one same pattern of country, a wilderness of maize-stubble and virgin land, broken only for the first half of the way by occasional patches of water-oak, and for the second half of willows.
Just on the frontier-line of these two vegetable divisions of the country lies a tract of bright turf-land. What a magician this same turf is! It is Wendell Holmes, I think, who says that Anglo-Saxons emigrate only "in the line of turf."
The better half of the journey passed on Sunday, and the people were all out in loitering, well-dressed groups "to see the train pass," and at the stations where we stopped, to see the passengers, too. Where they came from it was not easy to tell, for the homesteads in sight were very few and far between. Yet there they were, happy, healthy, well-to-do contented-looking families, enjoying the Day of Rest—the one dissipation of the hard-worked week. What a comfortable connecting link with the outer world the railway must be to these scattered dwellers on this prairie-land!
So through Illinois to the Mississippi. How wonderfully it resembles the Indus where it flows past Lower Sind. A minaret or two, a blue-tiled cupola and a clump of palms would make the resemblance of the Mississippi at Clinton to the Indus below Rohri complete. And both rivers claim to be "the Father of Waters." I would not undertake to decide between them. In modern annals, of course, the American must take pre-eminence; but what can surpass the historic grandeur that dignifies the Indian stream?
And so into Iowa, just as flat, and as rich, and as monotonous as Illinois, and with just the same leagues of maize-stubble, unbroken soil, water-oaks and willows. And then, in the deepening twilight, to Cedar Rapids, with the pleasant sound of rushing water and all the townsfolk waiting "to see the train" on their way from church, standing in groups, with their prayer-books and Bibles in their hands.
By the way, what an admirable significance there is in he care with which these young townships discharge their duties to their religion and the dead. The church or prayer-house seems to be always one of the first and finest buildings. With only half-a-dozen homesteads in sight in some places, there is the church and while all the rest are of the humblest class of frame houses, the church is of brick. The cemeteries again. Before even the plots round the living are set in order, "God's acre" (often the best site in the neighbourhood) is neatly fenced and laid out.
And I thought it somehow a beautiful touch of national character, this reverent providence for the dead that are to come. And just before I went to sleep, I saw out in the moonlit country a cemetery, and on the crest of the rising ground stood one solitary tombstone, the pioneer of the many—the first dead settler's grave. In this new country the living are as yet in the majority!
Awakening, find myself still in Iowa, and Iowa still as flat as ever. Not spirit enough in all these hundred miles of land to firk up even a hillock, a mound, a pimple. But to make a new proverb, "Rich lands lie flat;" and Iowa; in time, will be able to feed the world—aye, and to clothe it too.
In the mean time we are approaching the Missouri, through levels in which the jack-rabbit abounds, and every farmer, therefore, seems to keep a greyhound for coursing the long-eared aborigines. The willows, conscious of secret resources of water, are already in leaf, and overhead the wild ducks and geese are passing to their feeding-grounds. Here I saw "blue" grass for the first time, and I must say I am glad that grass is usually green. Elsewhere in the States, English grass is called "blue grass;" but in some parts, as here in this part of Iowa, there is a native grass which is literally blue. And it is not an improvement, so far as the effect on the landscape goes, upon the old fashioned colour for grass. And then the Missouri, a muddy, shapeless, dissipated stream. The people on its banks call it "treacherous," and pronounce its name "Misery." It is certainly a most unprepossessing river, with its ill-gotten banks of ugly sand, and its lazy brown waters gurgling along in an overgrown, self-satisfied way. It is a bullying stream; gives nobody peace that lives near it; and is perpetually trying in an underhanded sort of way to "scour" out the foundations of the hollow columns on which the bridges across it are built. But the abundance of water-fowl upon its banks and side-waters is a redeeming feature for all who care to carry a gun, and I confess I should like to have had a day's leisure at Council Bluffs to go out and have a shot. The inhabitants of the place, however, do not seem to be goose-eaters, for, close season or not, I cannot imagine their permitting flocks of these eminently edible birds to fly circling about over their houses, within forty yards of the ground. The wild-goose is proverbially a wary fowl, but here at Council Bluffs they have apparently become from long immunity as impertinent and careless as sparrows.
Council Bluffs, as the pow-wow place of the Red Men in the days when Iowa was rolling prairie and bison used to browse where horses plough, has many a quaint legend of the past; and in spite of the frame houses that are clustered below them and the superb cobweb bridge—it has few rivals in the world—that here spans the Missouri, the Bluffs, as the rendezvous of Sagamore and Sachem, stand out from the interminable plains eloquent of a very picturesque antiquity. And so to Omaha.
"But I guess, sir, Om'a's a live town. Yes, sir, a live town."
My experiences of Omaha were too brief for me to be just, too disagreeable for me to be impartial. Before breakfast I saw a murder and suicide, and between breakfast and luncheon a fire and several dog-fights. Perhaps I might have seen something more. But a terrible dust-storm raged in the streets all day. Besides, I went away.
I am beginning already to hate "live" towns.
I.
It was during the Afghan War. I had just ridden back from General Roberts' camp in the Thull Valley, on the frontiers of Afghanistan, and found myself stopped on my return at the Kohat Pass. "It is the orders of Government," said the sentry: "the Pass is unsafe for travellers."
But I had to get through the Pass whether it was "safe" or not, for through it lay the only road to General Browne's camp, to which I was attached. So I dismounted, and after a great deal of palaver, partly of bribes, partly of untruths, I not only got past the native sentries, but got a guide to escort me, through the thirty miles of wild Afridi defiles that lay before me. The scenery is, I think, among the finest in the world, while, added to all is the strange fascination of the knowledge that the people who live in the Pass have cherished from generation to generation the most vindictive blood feuds. The villages are surrounded by high walls, loopholed along the top, and the huts in the inside are built against the wall, so that the roofs of them can be used by the men of the village as lounges during the day, and as ramparts for sentries during the night. Within these sullen squares each clan lives in perpetual siege. The women and children are at all times permitted to go to and fro; but for the men, woe to him who happens to stray within reach of the jezails that lie all ready loaded in the loopholes of the next village. The crops are sown and reaped by men with guns slung on their backs, and in the middle of every field stands a martello-tower, in which the peasants can take shelter if neighbours sally out to attack them while at work. Rope-ladders hang from a doorway half-way up the tower, and up this, like lizards, the men scramble, one after the other, as soon as danger threatens, draw in the ladder, and through the loop-holes overlook their menaced crops.
A wonderful country truly, and something in the air to day that makes my guide ride as hard as the road will permit, with his sword drawn across the saddle before him. My revolver is in my hand. And so we clatter along, mile after mile, through the beautiful series of little valleys, grim villages, and towers. Now and again a party of women will step aside to let us pass, or a dog start up to bark at us, but not a single man do we see. Yet I know very well that hundreds of men see us ride by, and that a jezail is lying at every loophole, and covering the very path we ride on.
We reach a sudden turn of the path; my guide gallops round it. He is hardly out of my sight when Bang! bang! It is no use pulling up, and the next instant I am round the corner too. A man, with his jezail still smoking from the last shot, starts up from the undergrowth almost under my horse's feet, and narrowly escapes being ridden down. Another man comes running down the hillside towards him. In front of me, some fifty yards off, is my guide, with his horse's head towards me and his sword in his hand, and on the path, midway between us, lies a heap of brightly-coloured clothing—a dead Afridi! For a second both guide and I thought that it was we who had drawn the fire from the ambushed men. But no, it the poor Afridi lad lying there in the path before us, and the victim of a blood feud. He had tried, no doubt, to steal across from his own village to some friendly hamlet close by, but his lynx-eyed enemies had seen him, and, lying there on either side of his path, had shot him as he passed.
But what a group we were! Myself, with my revolver in my hand, looking, horror-stricken, now at the dead, and now at his murderers; my guide, in the splendid uniform of the Indian irregular cavalry, emotionless as only Orientals can be; the two murderers talking together excitedly; in the middle of us the dead lad! But there was still another figure to be added, for suddenly, along the very path by which the victim had come, there came running an old woman—perhaps she had followed the lad with a mother's tender anxiety for his safety—and in an instant she saw the worst. Without a glance at any of us, she flung herself down with the cry of a breaking heart, by the dead boys side, and as my guide turned to ride on and I followed him, as the murderers slipped away into the undergrowth, we all heard her crooning, between her sobs, over the body of her murdered son.
II.
I was in Omaha. I had just crossed Thirteenth Street, and, turning to look as I passed, at the Catholic church, had caught an idle glimpse of the folk in the street. Among them was a woman at the wooden gateway of a small house, hesitating, so it seemed to me afterwards, about pushing it open, for though she had her hand upon the latch, yet she did not lift it, but appeared to me, at the distance I passed and the cursory glance I gave, to be listening to what somebody was saying to her through the window. Had I been only a few yards nearer! At the moment that I saw her, the wretched woman was gazing with fixed and horrified eyes upon a face—a grim and cruel face—that glared at her from a window, and at a gun that she saw was pointed full at her breast. And the next instant, just as I had turned the corner, there was the report of fire-arms. It did not occur to me to stop. But suddenly I heard a cry, and then a second shot, and somehow there flashed upon my mind the picture of that hesitating woman by the wicket, with her knitted shawl over her head, and the wind blowing her light dress to one side.
I did not turn back, however. For the woman and the shots had only the merest flash of a connexion in my mind. But after a few steps a man came running past me, going perhaps for the doctor, or the police, or the coroner, and the scared look on his face suddenly once more wrenched back to my imagination the woman at the wicket.
So I turned back into Thirteenth Street, and there, in the middle of the road, with a man stooping over her and two women, transfixed by sudden terror into attitudes that were most tragic, I saw the woman lying. Her face was turned up to the bright sunlit sky, her shawl had fallen back about her neck, and her hair lay in the dust. She was already dead. And her murderer? He too had gone to his last account; and as I stood there in that dreary Omaha road, with the wind raising wisps of dust about the horror-stricken group, and thought of the two dead bodies lying there, one in the roadway, the other in the house close by, my mind reverted involuntarily to the fancy that at that very moment the two souls, man and wife, were standing before their Maker, and that perhaps she, the poor mangled woman, was pleading for mercy for the man, her husband, the lover of her youth—her murderer.
—
In the evening, when a cool breeze was blowing, and imagination pictured the trees holding up screens of green foliage before the hotel windows to shut out the ugly views of half-built streets, I entertained feelings that were almost kindly towards Omaha; but the memory of the day that was happily past, as often as it recurred to me, changed them to gall again. All day long there had been a flaring, glaring sun overhead and the wind that was blowing would have done credit to the deserts through which I have since marched with the army in Egypt. It went howling down the street with the voices of wild beasts, and carried with it such simooms of sand as would probably in a week overwhelm and bury in Ninevite oblivion the buildings of this aspiring town. And not only sand, but whirlwinds of vulgar dust also, with occasional discharges of cinders, that came rushing along the road, picking up all the rubbish it could find, dodging up alleys and coming out again with accumulations of straw, rampaging into courtyards in search of paper and rags, standing still in the middle of the roadway to whirl, and altogether behaving itself just as a disreputable and aggressive vagabond may be always expected to behave. Of course I was told it was a "very exceptional" day. It always is a "very exceptional day" wherever a stranger goes. But I must confess that I never saw any place—except Aden, and perhaps East London, in South Africa—that struck me on short acquaintance as so thoroughly undesirable for a lengthened abode. The big black swine rooting about in the back yards, the little black boys playing drearily at "marbles" with bits of stone, the multitude of dogs loafing on the sidewalks, the depressing irregularity Of the streets, the paucity of shade-trees, the sandy bluffs that dominate the town and hold over the heads of the inhabitants the perpetual threat of siroccos, and the general appearance (however false it may have been) of disorder—all combined with various degrees of force to give the impression that Omaha is a place that had from some cause or another been suddenly checked in its natural expansion.
Its geographical position is indisputably a commanding one, and already the great smelting works, with one exception the busiest in the States, the splendid workshops of the Union Pacific Railway, and the thriving distillery close by, give promise of the great industries which in the future this town, with its wonderful advantages of communication, as the meeting-point of great railway high-roads, will attract to itself. Omaha has an admirable opera-house, and when its hotel is rebuilt it will be able to offer visitors good accommodation. It has also an imposing school-house imposingly advertised by being on top of a hill, and the refining grace of gardens is not completely absent, while the "stove-pipe" hat gives fragmentary evidence of advanced civilization. But all this affords encouragement for the future only; at present Omaha is a depressing spot. And so I left the town without regret; but I did not make any effort to shake off the dust of Omaha. That was impossible; it had penetrated the texture of my clothing so completely that nothing but shredding my garments into their original threads would have sufficed.
Now I had read something of Omaha before I went there, had seen it called "a splendid Western city," and been invited to linger there to examine its "dozens of noble monuments to invincible enterprise," which, with "the dozen or more church spires," are supposed to break the sky-line of the view of this "metropolis of the North-western States and Territories." It is possible, therefore, that my profound disappointment with the reality, after reading such exaggerated description, may have tinged my opinion of Omaha, and, combined with the unfortunately "exceptional" day I spent there, have made me think very poorly of the former capital of Nebraska. That it has a great future before it, its position alone guarantees, and the enterprise of Nebraska puts beyond all doubt; but the sight-seer going to Omaha, and expecting to find it anything but a very new town on a very unprepossessing site, will be as greatly disappointed as I was.
Equally unfortunate is the "writing up" which the Valley of the Platte has received. Who, for instance, that has travelled on the railway along that great void can read without annoyance of "beautiful valley landscapes, in which thousands of productive farms, fine farm-houses, blossoming orchards, and thriving cities" are features of the country traversed? No one can charge me with a want of sympathy with the true significance of this wonderful Western country. And I can say, therefore, without hesitation that the dreariness of the country between Omaha and Denver Junction is almost inconceivable. There is hardly even a town worth calling such in sight, much less "thriving cities." The original prairie lies there spread out, on either hand, in nearly all its original barrenness. Interminable plains, that occasionally roll into waves, stretch away to the horizon to right and left, dotted with skeletons of dead cattle and widely scattered herds of living ones. Here and there a cow-boy's shed, and here and there a ranch of the ordinary primitive type, and here and there a dug-out, are all the "features" of the long ride. An occasional emigrant waggon perhaps breaks the dull, dead monotony of the landscape, and in one place there is a solitary bush upon a mound. A hawk floats in the air above a prairie-dog village. A plover sweeps past with its melancholy cry.
No, the journey to North Platte—where a very bad breakfast was put before us at a dollar a head—is not attractive. But here again it is the Possible in the future that makes the now desolate scene so full of interest and so splendidly significant. As a grazing country it can never, perhaps, be very populous; but in time, of course, those ranches, now struggling so bravely against terrible odds, will become "fine farm-houses," and have "blossoming orchards" about them. But as yet these things are not, and for good, all-round dreariness I would not know where to send a friend with such confidence as to the pastures between Omaha and North Platte.
Oh! when are we to have Pullman palace balloons? Condemned to travel, my soul and my bones cry out for air-voyaging.
That some day man should fly like a bird has been, in spite of superstition, an article of honest belief from the beginning of time, and in the dove of Archytas alone we have proof enough that, even in those days, the successful accomplishment of flight was accepted as a fact of science. During the Middle Ages so common was this belief that every man who dabbled in physics was pronounced a magician, and as such was credited with the power of transporting himself through the air at will. Some, indeed, actually claimed the enviable privilege, Friar Bacon among others. But history records no practical illustration of their control of the air, while more than one death is chronicled of daring men who, with insufficient apparatus, launched themselves in imitation of birds upon space, and fell, more or less precipitately, to earth. The Italian who flapped himself off Stirling Castle trusted only to a pair of huge feather wings, which he had tied on to his arms, and got no farther on his way to France than the heads of the spectators at the bottom of the wall; while the Monk of Tübingen started on his journey from the top of his tower with apparatus that immediately turned inside out, and increased by its weight the momentum with which he came down plumb into the street.
Beyond North Platte the same melancholy expanses again commence, the same rolling prairies, with the same dead cattle and the same herds of live ones, an occasional waggon or a stock-yard or snow-fence being all that interrupts the flat monotony. But approaching Sterling a suspicion of verdure begins in places to steal over the grey prairie, and flights of "larks," with a bright, pleasant note, give something of an air of animation to isolated spots. Here is a plough at work, the first we have passed, I think, since we left Omaha, and the plover piping overhead seem to resent the novelty. Cattle continue to dot the landscape, and all the afternoon the Platte rolls along a sluggish stream parallel to the track.
The train happened to slacken pace at one point, and a man came up to the cars. He was a beggar, and asked our help to get along the road "eastward." One of his arms was in a sling from an accident, and his whole appearance eloquent of utter destitution. And the very landscape pleaded for him. Beggary at any time must be wretchedness, but here in this bleak waste of pasturage it must almost be despair. And as the train sped on, the one dismal figure creeping along by the side of the track, with the dark clouds of a snowstorm coming up to meet him, was strangely pathetic.
And then Sterling. May Sterling be forgiven for the dinner it set before us!
And then on again, across long leagues of level plain, thickly studded with prickly pear patches and seamed with the old bison and antelope tracks leading down from the hills to the river. There are no bison now. They cannot stand before the stove-pipe hat. The sombreroed hunter, with his lasso, the necklace of death, was an annoyance to them; they spent their lives dodging him. The befeathered Indian, "the chivalry of the prairie," who pincushioned their hides full of arrows, was a terror to them, and they fell by thousands. But before the stove-pipe hat the bison fled incontinently by the herd, and have never returned.
The prairie-dogs peep out of their holes at us as we passed. The bashfulness of "Wish-ton-Wish," as the Red Man calls the prairie-dog, is as nearly impudence as one thing can be another. It sits up perkily on one end at the edge of its hole till you are close upon it, and then, with a sudden affectation of being shocked at its own immodesty, dives headlong into its hole; but its hind-legs are not out of sight before the head is up again, and the next instant there is the prairie-dog sitting exactly where you first saw it! Such a burlesque of shyness I never saw in a quadruped before.
A solitary coyote was loitering in a hungry way along a gulch, and I could not help thinking how the most important epochs of one's life may often turn upon the merest trifles. Now, here was a coyote ambling lazily up a certain gulch because it had happened to see some white bones bleaching a little way up it. But in the very next gulch, which the coyote had not happened to go up, were three half-bred greyhounds idling about, just in the humour for something to run after. But they could not see the coyote, though it was really only a few yards off, nor could the coyote see them. So the dogs lounged about in a listless, do-nothing, tired-of-life sort of way, thinking existence as dull as ditch water, while the coyote, unconscious of the narrow escape of its life that it ran, trotted slowly along—scrutinized the old bones—scratched its head—yawned out of sheer ennui, and then trotted along again. Now, what a difference it would have made to those three dogs if they had only happened to loaf into the next gulch! And what a prodigious difference it would have made to the coyote if it had happened to loaf into the next gulch!
The prickly pear, that ugly, fleshy little cactus, with its sudden summer glories of crimson and golden blossoms, fulfils a strange purpose in the animal economy of the prairies. In itself it appears to be one of the veriest outcasts among vegetables, execrated by man and refused as food by beast. Yet if it were not for this plant the herds of prairie antelope would have fared badly enough, for the antelope, whenever they found themselves in straits from wolves or from dogs, made straight for the prickly pear patches and belts, and there, standing right out on the barren, open plain, defied their swift but tender-footed pursuers to come near them. For the small, thick pads of the cactus, though they lie so flat and insignificantly upon the ground, are studded with tufts of strong, fierce spines, and woe to the wolf or the dog that treads upon them. The antelope's hoofs, however, are proof against the spines, and one leap across such a belt suffices to place the horned folk in safety. These patches and belts, then, so trivial to the eye, and in some places almost invisible to the cursory glance, are in reality Towers of Refuge to the great edible division of the wild prairie nations, and as impassable to the eaters as was that girdle of fire and steel which Von Moltke buckled so closely round the city of the Napoleons.
But here we are approaching Denver. The cottonwood has mustered into clusters, a prototype of the future of these now scattered ranches. Dotted about here and there in suitable corners, on river bank or under sheltering bluff, single trees are growing side by side with single stockyards or single cow-boys' huts, but every now and again, where nature offers them a good site for a colony, the trees congregate, select lots, and permanently locate. It is not very different after all, with human beings.
Nature here is undoubtedly tempting, and Denver itself must surely be one of the most beautiful towns in the States. Through great reaches of splendid farm-land, with water in abundance and the cottonwood and willow growing thickly, we pass to our destination as the twilight settles on the country.
A whole day has again been spent in the train! We had awaked in the morning to see from the car windows the people of Nebraska going out to their day's work in the fields, and here in the evening we sit and watch the Colorado folk coming home to their rest after the day's work is over. Truly this steam is a Latter-Day apocalypse and this America a land of magnificent distances.
I found out on this trip that my fellow-travellers (and the fact holds good nearly all over America) took the greatest interest in British India, and finding that I had spent so many years there, they plied me with questions. On some journeys it would be the political aspect of our government of Hindostan that interested, at others the commercial or the social. But going through Colorado, one of the haunts of the "grizzly" and the "mountain lion," I had to detail my experiences of sport in India. Above all, the tiger interested them. It is the only animal in the world that may be said to give the grizzly a point or two. And there are some even who deny this; but I, who have shot the tiger, and never seen a grizzly, naturally concede the first place in perilous courage to Stripes, the raja of the jungle. In one particular aspect, at any rate, the tiger is supreme among quadrupeds. It has the splendid audacity to make man his regular food.
Now, it is generally supposed that the "man-eater" is a specially formidable variety of the species; that it is only the boldest, strongest, and fiercest of the tigers that preys on man. But the very reverse is of course the truth. When hale and strong the tiger avoids the vicinity of men, finding abundant food in the herds of deer and other wild animals that share his jungles. But when strength and speed of limb begin to fail, the brute has to look for easier prey than the courageous bison or wind-footed antelope, and so skulks among the ravines and waste patches of woodland that are to be found about nearly every village. Then when twilight obscures the scene, he creeps out noiseless as a shadow, and lies in ambush in a crop of standing grain or bhair-tree brake, and watches the country folk go by from the fields in twos and threes, driving their plough cattle before them. After a while, there comes sauntering past alone, a man or a woman who has lagged behind the company; yet not so far behind but that the friends ahead can hear the scream which tells of the tiger's leap, though too far for help to be of use. During four years 350 human beings and 24,000 head of cattle were killed by these animals in one district in Bombay, while many single tigers have been known to destroy over a hundred people before they were shot. One in the Mandla district caused the desertion of thirteen villages and threw out of cultivation two hundred and fifty square miles of country; while another, only one of many similar cases, was credited with the appalling total of eighty human victims per annum! The yearly loss in cattle and by decrease of cultivation through the ravages of these fearful beasts has been estimated at ten million pounds sterling!
No wonder, then, that even these doughty grizzly-slayers of the Rockies respect the tiger's name.
CHAPTER III.
IN LEADVILLE.
The South Park line—Oscar Wilde on sunflowers as food—In a wash-hand basin—Anti-Vigilance Committees—Leadville the city of the carbonates—"Busted" millionaires—The philosophy of thick boots—Colorado miners—National competition in lions—Abuse of the terms "gentleman" and "lady"—Up at the mines—Under the pine-trees.
STARTING from Denver for Leadville in the evening, it seemed as if we were fated to see nothing of the very interesting country through which the South Park line runs. At first there is nothing to look at but open prairie land sprinkled with the homesteads of agricultural pioneers, but as the moon got up there was gradually revealed a stately succession of mountain ridges, and in about two hours we found ourselves threading the spurs of the Sangre di Christi range and following the Platte River up toward its sources. Crossing and recrossing the cañon, with one side silvered, and the other thrown into the blackest shadow by the moon, and the noisy stream tumbling along beside us in its hurry to get down to the lazy levels of the great Nebraska Valley, I saw glimpses of scenery that can never be forgotten. It was fantastic in the extreme; for apart from the jugglery of moonlight, in itself so wonderful always, the ideas of relative distance and size, even of shape, were upset and ridiculed by the snowy peaks that here and there thrust themselves up into the sky and by the patches and streaks of snow that concealed and altered the contour of the nearer rocks in the most puzzling manner imaginable. And all this time the little train—for the line is narrow-gauge—kept twisting and wriggling in and out as if it were in collusion with the hills, and playing into their hands to disconcert the traveller.
I have seen at different times great curiosities of engineering, as in travelling over the Ghats in Western India, where everything is stupendous and at times even terrific, where danger seems perpetual and disaster often inevitable. In passing by train from Colombo to Kandy in Ceylon, and crossing Sensation Rock, the railway cars actually hang over the precipice, so that when you look out of the window the track on which you are running is invisible, and you can drop an orange plumb down the face of this appalling cliff on to the tops of the palm-trees, which look like little round bushes in the valley down below. From Durban to Pietermaritzburg again, on the line along which, when it was first opened, the engine-driver brought out from England refused to take his train, declaring it to be too dangerous, but along which, nevertheless, the British troops going up to Zululand were all safely carried. The South Park line, however, can compare with these, and must be accepted as one of the acknowledged triumphs of railway enterprise. For much of its length the rocks had to be fought inch by inch, and they died hard. The result to-day is a very picturesque and interesting ride, with a surprise in every mile and beauty all the way.
On the way to the "City of the Carbonates," I heard much of Leadville ways and life. That very morning the energetic police of the town had arrested two young ladies for parading the sunflower and the lily too conspicuously. One had donned a sunflower for a hat, the other walked along holding a tall lily in her hand. The Leadville youth had gathered in disorderly procession behind the aesthetic pair. So the police arrested the fair causes of the disturbance.
I told Oscar Wilde of this a few days later. "Poor sweet things!" said he; "martyrs in the cause of the Beautiful." He was on his way to Salt Lake City at the time, and I told him how the Mormon capital was par excellence "the city of sunflowers," and assured him that the poet's feeding on "gilliflowers rare" was not, after all, too violent a stretch of imagination, as whole tribes of Indians (and Longfellow himself has said that every Indian is a poem, which is very nearly the same thing as a poet) feed on the sunflower. The Apostle of Art Decoration was delighted.
"Poor sweet things!" said he; "feed on sunflowers! How charming! If I could only have stayed and dined with them! But how delightful to be able to go back to England and say that I have actually been in a country where whole tribes of men live on sunflowers! The preciousness of it!"
It is a fact, probably new to some of my readers: that the wild sunflower is the characteristic weed of Utah, and that the seeds of the plant supply the undiscriminating Red Man with an oil-cake which may agreeably vary a diet of grasshoppers and rattlesnakes, but has not intrinsically any flavour to recommend it. So South Kensington must not rush away with the idea that the noble savage who has the Crow for his "totem," feeds upon the blossoms of the vegetable they worship. It is the prosaic oil-cake that the Pi-ute eats.
But all I heard got mixed up eventually into a general idea that every man in the place who had not committed a murder was a millionaire, and all those who had not lost their lives had lost a fortune. The mines, too, got gradually sorted up into two kinds—those that had "five million now in sight, sir," or those whose "bottoms had fallen out." But one fact that pleased me particularly was the "Anti-Vigilance" Committee of Leadville. Every one knows that a "Vigilance Committee" consists of a certain number of volunteer guardians of the peace, who call (with a rope) upon strangers visiting their neighbourhood and offer them the choice of being hanged at once for the offences they purpose committing or of going elsewhere to commit them. The strangers, as it transpires in the morning, sometimes choose one course and sometimes the other. This is all very right and proper, and conduces to a general good understanding. But in Leadville, the citizens started an anti-vigilance committee and so the Vigilance Committee sent in their resignations to themselves—and accepted them. I do not think I ever heard of a fact so appalling in its significance. But the humour of it is that the Anti-Vigilance Committee managed somehow to keep the peace in Leadville as it had never been kept before.
It reminded me of an incident of the Afghan war. A certain tribe of hill-men persisted in killing the couriers who carried the post from one British camp to the other, and the generals were nearly at their wits' end for means of communication, when the murderers sent in word offering to carry the post themselves—and did so, faithfully!
It was in Leadville also that lived the barber who, going forth one night, was met by two men who told him peremptorily to take his hands out of his pockets, as they intended to take out all the rest. But he had nothing in his pockets except two Derringers, so he pulled his hands out and shot the two men dead where they stood. Next morning the citizens of Leadville placed the barber in a triumphal chair, and carried him round the town as a bright example to the public, presented him with a gold watch and chain as a testimonial of their esteem for his courage—and then escorted him the first stage out of the town, advising him never to return.
But this was in the Leadville of the very remote past—1880 or thereabouts—and not in the Carbonate City of the present, 1882. The town is now as quiet as such a town can be, a wonderfully busy place and a picturesque one.
And while my companions talked I sat in the wash-hand basin and smoked. Why the wash-hand basin? Because there was nowhere else to sit. The "smoking-car" of this particular train happened to be also the gentlemen's lavatory, a commodious snuggery measuring about eight feet by five. And as there were only eight smokers on board we were not so crowded as we should have been if there had been eighteen, and then, you see, we made more room still by two of the eight staying away. For the rest, two of us sat in the wash-hand basins, one on a stool between our legs, another on a stool with his knees against the gentlemen opposite, and the balance stood. We were an example of tight packing even to the proverbial sardine. But I found the water-tap at the edge of the basin an inconvenient circumstance. I would venture to suggest to American railway companies that for the comfort of smokers when sitting in the basins they should place these taps a little farther back.
I suppose I ought to give some mining statistics about Leadville. But the very fact that I shall be neglecting an obvious duty if I omit all statistics, nearly decides me to omit them. The deliberate neglect of an obvious duty is, however, a luxury which only the very virtuous can indulge in; and to compromise therefore with the situation, I would state that the mining output of Leadville is to-day about eleven times as great as it was two years ago, and that five years ago there was no output at all. That is to say, this town of Leadville, with a population, floating and permanent together, of some 40,000 souls, and yielding from its mines about a thousand dollars per head of the total population, was five years ago a camp of a few hundred miners, as a rule so disappointed with the prospect of the place that another year of the status quo would have seen Leadville deserted. But the secret of the carbonates being "ore-iferous" was discovered, and Tabor, like the fossil of some antediluvian giant, was gradually revealed by the pick of the miner, in all his Plutocratic bulk. A few years ago he was selling peanuts at the corner of a street. To-day he moves about, king of Denver, with Leadville for an appanage. His potentiality in cheques increases yearly by another cipher added to the total, and drags at each remove a lengthening chain of wealth. Why do men go on accumulating money when they are already masters of enough? Surely it is better to be rich than a pauper? But in Colorado this is not the general opinion. Men there prefer to be ruined rather than be merely rich. And the result is that you could hardly throw a boot out of the hotel window without hitting an ex-millionaire. Not that I would advise anybody to go throwing boots promiscuously out of hotel windows in Leadville. You would run a good chance of following your boots.
"Do you see that man there, paring his boot with a knife?" asked my companion.
"Yes," said I, "I see him; there is a good deal of him to see."
"Well," said he, "that's So-and-so. He sold so-and-so for $400,000 about a year ago. But he busted last Fall. And if you get into conversation with him, he'll be glad to borrow a dollar from you."
"Then I shall not get into conversation with him," I replied.
"And do you see that old fellow on the other side, leaning against the hitching post, outside the Post Office?"
"Well," said I, "they seem to be mostly leaning against the hitching-post, but I presume you mean the gentleman in the middle."
"Yes," was the reply. "That's So-and-so. He struck the so-and-so, got $80,000 for his share about six weeks ago—and is busted."
And so on ad infinitum. The problem was a very puzzling one to me at first—why do such men make fortunes if they take the first opportunity of throwing them away? But the solution, I fancy, is this—that these men do not care for money. It is to them what knowledge is to the philosopher, a means of acquiring more—worthless in itself, but, as leading to larger results, worthy of all eagerness in its pursuit. They do not put Wealth before themselves as an accumulation of current coins, capable of purchasing everything that makes life materially pleasant. They contemplate it merely in the bulk. Much in the same way a whaler never thinks of the number of candles in the spermaceti into which he has struck a harpoon. He looks at his quarry only as a "ten barrel" or a "fifteen barrel" whale, as the case may be. He does not content himself with the illuminating potentialities of the creature he pursues. He is only anxious as to how it will barrel off, and the barrels might be pork, or potatoes, or anything else. So with the man who goes out mine-hunting. He harpoons a lode, lays open so many "millions" of ore, sells it to a company for a "million" or two, and straightway goes and "busts" for so many "millions." It does not seem to concern such a one that a "million" of dollars is so many guineas, or roubles, or napoleons, or mohurs, and so forth, and that if he goes on to the end of his life, he can never achieve more than money. His arithmetic goes mad, and he begins computing from the wrong end of the line. Ten thousands of dollars make one 50-cent piece, two 50-cent pieces make one quarter, five quarters make one nickel, five nickels make one cent, and "quite a lot" of cents make one fortune. So at it he goes again, trying to foot up a satisfactory balance with thousands for units—and "busts" before he gets to the end of the sum.
Leadville itself as I first saw it, ringed in with snow-covered hills, a bright sun shining and a slight snow falling, remains in my memory as one of the prettiest scenes in my experience. In Switzerland even it could hold its own, and triumph. I wandered about its streets and into its shops and saloons, curious to see some of those men of whom I had heard so much; but whatever may have been their exercises with bowie-knife and pistol at a later hour of the day, I was never more agreeably disappointed than by the manners and bearing of the Leadville miners early in the morning.
There is nothing gives a man so much self-reliance as having thick boots on. This fact I have evolved out of my own consciousness, for when I was out in the Colonies I often tried to analyze a certain sense of "independence" which I found taking possession of me. The climate no doubt was exceptionally invigorating, and I was a great deal on horseback. But I had been subjected to the same conditions elsewhere without experiencing the same results. And after a great deal of severe mental inquiry, I decided that it was—my thick boots! And I was right. No man can feel properly capable of taking care of himself in slippers. In patent-leather boots he is little better, and in what are called "summer walking-shoes" he still finds himself fastidious about puddles, and at a disadvantage with every man he meets who does not mind a rough road. But once you begin to thicken the sole, self-reliance commences to increase, and by the time your boots are as solid as those of a Colorado miner you should find yourself his equal in "independence." And some of their boots are prodigious. The soles are over an inch thick, project in front of the toes perhaps half an inch, and form a ledge, as it were, all round the foot. What a luxury with such boots it must be to kick a man!
The rest of the costume was often in keeping with the shoe leather, and in every case where the wearers did not belong to the shops and offices of the town, there was a general attention to strength of material and personal comfort, at a sacrifice of appearance, which was refreshing and unconventional. They are a fine set, indeed, this miscellaneous congregation of nationalities which men call "Colorado diggers." There is hardly a stupid face among them, and certainly not a cowardly one. And then compare them with the population of their native places—the savages of the East of London, the outer barbarians of Scandinavia, the degraded peasantry of Western Ireland! The contrast is astonishing. Left in Europe they might have guttered along in helpless poverty relieved only by intervals of crime, till old age found them in a workhouse. But here they can insist on every one pretending to think them "as good as himself" (such is, I believe, the formula of this preposterous hypocrisy), and, at any rate, may hope for sudden wealth. Above all, a man here does not go about barefooted, like so many of his family "at home," or in ragged shoe-leather, like so many more of them; but stands, and it may even be sleeps, in boots of unimpeachable solidity. So he goes down the street as if it were his own, planting his feet firmly at every step, and, not having to trouble himself about the condition of the footway, keeps his head erect. Depend upon it, thick boots are one of the secrets of "independence" of character.
But Leadville, this wonderful town that in four years sprang up from 300 to 30,000 inhabitants, is not entirely a city of miners. On the day that I was there larger numbers than usual were in the streets, in consequence of an election then in progress holding out promises of unusual entertainment. Besides these there is, of course, the permanent population of commerce and ordinary business; and I was struck here, as I had not been before since I left Boston, with the natural phenomenon of a race reverting to an old type. Boston reminded me at times of some old English cathedral city. Leadville was like some thriving provincial town. The men would not have looked out of place in the street, say, of Reading; while the women, in their quiet and somewhat old-fashioned style of dressing, reminded me very curiously of rural England. Indeed, I do not think my anticipations have ever been so completely upset as in Leadville. All the way from New York I have been told to wait "till I got to Colorado" before I ventured to speak of rough life, and Leadville itself was sometimes particularized to me as the Ultima Thule of civilization, the vanishing-point of refinement.
But not only is Leadville not "rough;" it is even flirting with the refinements of life. It has an opera-house, a good drive for evening recreation, and a florist's shop. There were not many plants in it, it is true, but they were nearly all of them of the pleasant old English kinds—geraniums, pansies, pinks, and mignonette. Two other shops interested me, one stocked with mineral specimens—malachite, agate, amethyst, quartz, blood-stone, onyx, and an infinite variety of pieces of ore, gold, silver, lead, iron, copper, bismuth, and sulphur—with which pretty settings are made, of a quaint grotto-work kind, for clocks and inkstands. The other a naturalist's shop, in which, besides fossils, exquisite leaves in stone and petrified tree-fragments, I found the commencement of a zoological collection—the lynx with its comfortable snow-coat on, and the grey mountain wolf not less cozily dressed; squirrels, black and grey, "the creatures that sit in the shade of their tails," and the "friends of Hiawatha" with various birds—the sage hen and the prairie chicken, the magpie (very like the English bird), and the "lark,"—a very inadequate substitute indeed for the bird that "at Heaven's gate sings," that has been sanctified to all time by Shelley, and the idol of the poets of the Old World—and heads of large game, horned and antlered, and the skin of a "lion." It is a curious fact that every country should thus insist on having a lion. For the real African animal himself I entertain only a very qualified respect. For some of his substitutes, the panther of Sumatra and the Far East, the (now extinct) cat of Australia, and the puma of the United States, that respect is even more moderate in degree. "The American lion" is, in fact, about as much like the original article as the American "muffin" is like the seductive but saddening thing from which it takes its name. The puma, which is its proper name, is the least imposing of all the larger cats. It cannot compare even with the jaguar, and would not be recognized by the true lion, or by the tiger, as being a kinsman. It is just as true of lions as it is of Glenfield starch—"when you ask for it, see that you get it." I admit that it is very creditable to America that in the great competition of nations she should insist on not being left behind even in the matter of lions, but surely it would be more becoming to her vast resources and her undeniable enterprise if she imported some of the genuine breed, instead of, as at present, putting up with such a shabby compromise as the puma.
This tendency to exaggeration in terms has I know been very frequently commented upon. But I don't remember having heard it suggested that this grandiosity must in the long-run have a detrimental effect upon national advancement. Presuming for instance that an American understands the real meaning of the word "city," what gross and ridiculous notions of self-importance second-class villages must acquire by hearing themselves spoken of as "cities." Or supposing that one understands the real meaning of the word "lady," how comes it that an ill-bred, ill-mannered chambermaid is always spoken of as a "lady"? If the name is only given in courtesy, why not call them princesses at once and rescue the nobler word from its present miserable degradation?
I was in the Chicago Hotel and a coloured porter was unstrapping my luggage. I rang the bell for a message boy, and on another black servant appearing I gave him a written note to take down to the manager. But in that insolent manner so very prevalent among the blacker hotel servants in America, he said: "That other gentleman will take it down." "Other gentleman!" I gasped out in astonishment; "there is only one gentleman in this room, and two negro servants. And if," I continued, forgetting that I was in America, and rising from my chair, "you are not off as fast as you can go, I'll—" But the "gentleman" fled so precipitately with my message that I got no further.
Now could anything be more preposterous than this poor creature's attempt to vindicate his right to the flattering title conferred upon him by the Boots, and which he in turn conferred upon the Barman, until everybody in the hotel, from the Manager downwards, was involved in an absurd entanglement of mutual compliments? It may of course be laughed at as a popular humour. But a stranger like myself is perpetually recognizing the mischief which this absurd want of moral courage and self-respect in the upper classes is working in the country. Nor have Americans any grounds whatever to suppose that this sense of "courtesy" is peculiar to them. It is common to every race in the world, and most conspicuous in the lowest. The Kaffirs of Africa and the Red Indians address each other with titles almost as fulsome as "gentleman," while in India, the home of courtesy and good breeding, the natives of the higher castes address the very lowest by the title of Maharaj("great prince"). It is accepted by the recipient exactly in the spirit in which it is meant. He understands that the higher classes do not wish to offend him by calling him by his real name, and his Oriental good taste tells him that any intermediate appellation might be misconstrued. So he calls himself, as he is called, by the highest title in the land. There is no danger here of any mistake. Every one knows that the misfortune of birth or other "circumstances beyond his control" have made him a menial. But no one tells him so. He is "Maharaj."
For myself, I adopted the plan of addressing every negro servant as a "Sultan." It was not abusive and sounded well. He did not know what it meant any more than he knows the meaning of "gentleman," but I saved my self-respect by not pretending to put him on an equality with myself.
At Leadville the hotel servants are white men, and the result is civility. But I was in the humour at Leadville to be pleased with everything. The day was divine, the landscape enchanting, and the men with their rough riding-costumes, strange, home-made-looking horses, Mexican saddles (which I now for the first time saw in general use) and preposterous "stirrups," interested me immensely. Of course I went up to a mine, and, of course, went down it. And what struck me most during the expedition? Well, the sound of the wind in the pine-trees.
It was a delightful walk—away up out of the town, with its suburbs of mimic pinewood "chalets" and rough log-huts, and the hills all round sloping back from the plateau so finely, patched and powdered with snow-drifts, fringed and crowned with pine-trees, here darkened with a forest of them, there dotted with single trees, and over all, the Swiss magic of sunlight and shadow; away up the hill-side, through a wilderness of broken bottles and battered meat cans, a very paradise of rag-pickers, among which are scattered the tiny homes of the miners. Women were busy chopping wood and bringing in water. Children were romping in parties. But the men, their husbands and fathers, were all up at the mines at work, invisible, in the bowels of the mountain; keeping the kobolds company, and throwing up as they went great hillocks of rubbish behind them like some gigantic species of mole, or burrowing armadillo of the old glyptodon type. And so on, up the shingle-strewn hillside thickly studded with charred tree-stumps, desolation itself—a veritable graveyard of dead pine-trees. Above us, on the crest of the mountain, the forest was still standing, and long before we reached them we heard the wind-haunted trees of Pan telling their griefs to the hills. It is a wonderful music, this of the pine-trees, for it has fascinated every people among whom they grow, from the bear-goblin haunts of Asiatic Kurdistan through the elf-plagued forests of Germany to the spirit-land of the Canadian Indians. It is indeed a mystery, this voice in the tree-tops, with all the tones of an organ—the vox-humana stop wonderful—and in addition all the sounds of nature, from the sonorous diapason of the ocean to the whisperings of the reed-beds by the river. When I came upon them in Leadville the pines were rehearsing, I think, for a storm that was coming. Lower down the slope, the trees were standing as quiet as possible, and in the town itself at the bottom of the hill the smoke was rising straight. But up here, at the top, under the pine-trees, the first act of a tempest was in full rehearsal. And all this time wandering about, I had not seen one single living soul. There stood the sheds built over the mines. But no one was about. At the door of one of them was a cart with its horses. But no driver. This extraordinary absence of life gave the hill-top a strange solemnity—and though I knew that under my feet the earth was alive with human beings, and though every now and then a little pipe sticking out of a shed would suddenly snort and give about fifty little angry puffs at the rate of a thousand a minute, the utter solitude was so fascinating that I understood at once why pine-covered mountains, especially where mines are worked, should all the world over be such favourite sites in legend and ballad for the home of elfin and goblin folk.
The afternoon was passing before I set out homeward and I could hardly get along, so often did I turn round to look back at the views behind me. And in front, and on either side, were the hills, with their hidden hoards of silver and lead, watching the town, whence they know the miners will some day issue to attack them, and on their slopes lay mustered the shattered battalions of their pines, here looking as if invading the town, into which their skirmishers, dotted about among the houses, had already fought their way; there, as if they were retreating up the hillside with their ranks closed against the houses that pursued them, or straggling away up the slopes and over the crest in all the disorder of defeat.
And so, down on to the level of the plateau again, with its traffic and animation and all the busy life of a hardworking town.
CHAPTER IV.
FROM LEADVILLE TO SALT LAKE CITY.
What is the conductor of a Pullman Car?—Cannibalism fatal to lasting friendships—Starving Peter to feed Paul—Connexion between Irish cookery and Parnellism—Americans not smokers—In Denver—"The Queen City of the Plains"—Over the Rockies—Pride in a cow, and what came of it—Sage-brush—Would ostriches pay in the West?—Echo canyon—The Mormons' fortifications—Great Salt Lake in sight.
WHAT is the "conductor" of a Pullman car? Is he a private gentleman travelling for his pleasure, a duke in disguise, or is he a servant of the company placed on the cars to see to the comfort, &c., of the company's customers? I should like to know, for sometimes I have been puzzled to find out. The porter is an admirable institution, when he is amenable to reason, and I have been fortunate enough to find myself often entrusted to perfectly rational specimens. The experiences of travellers have, as I know from their books, been sometimes very different from mine—ladies, especially, complaining—but for myself I consider the Union Pacific admirably manned.
But it is a great misfortune that the company do not run hotel cars. I was told that the reason why we were made over helplessly to such caterers as those at North Platte and Sterling for our food was, that the custom of passengers is almost the only source of revenue the "eating-houses" along the line can depend upon. Without the custom of passengers they would expire—atrophise—become deceased. What I want to know is why they should not expire. I, as a traveller, see no reason whatever, no necessity, for their being kept alive at a cost of so much suffering to the company's customers. Let them decease, or else establish a claim to public support. During a long railway journey the system is temporarily deranged and appetites are irregular, so that some people can not eat when they have the opportunity, and when they could eat, do not get it. Some day, no doubt, a horrible cannibalic outrage on the cars will awaken the directors to the peril of carrying starving passengers, and the luxury of the hotel-car will be instituted.
Not that I could censure the poor men of the South Seas or Central Africa for eating each other. There seems to me something a trifle admirable in this economy of their food. But cannibalism must, in the very nature of it, be deterrent to the formation of lasting friendships between strangers. So long as two men look upon each other as possible side dishes, there can be no permanent cordiality between them. Mutual confidence, the great charm of sincere friendship, must be wanting. You could never be altogether at your ease in a company which discussed the best stuffing for you.
Meanwhile, the custom of carrying their own provisions is increasing in favour among passengers, so that, hotel cars or not, these Barmecide "eating-houses" may yet expire from inanition. The waiting (done by girls) is, I ought to say, admirable—but then so it was at Sancho Panza's supper and at Duke Humphrey's dinner-table. And yet the hungry went empty away.
Between Cheyenne and Ogden the commissariat is distinctly better, and the unprovided traveller triumphs mildly over the more careful who have carried their own provisions. But, striking a balance on the whole journey, there is no doubt that the comfort of the trip, some sixty odd hours, from Omaha to Ogden, is materially increased by starting with a private stock of food. Bitter herbs without indigestion is better than a stalled ox with dyspepsia.
An old Roman epicure gravely expressed his opinion that Africa could never be a progressive country, inasmuch as its shrimps were so small. And I think I may venture to say that if the cookery in the central States does not improve, the country must gradually drift backwards into barbarism. For there is a most intimate connexion between cookery and civilization.
It is the duty of the historian, and not the task of the traveller, to trace national catastrophes to their real causes—often to be found concealed under much adventitious matter, and when found often surprising from their insignificance—and I leave it, therefore, to others to specify the particular feature of Irish cookery that tends to create a disinclination to paying rent.
That the agitated demeanour of the after-dinner speakers during Irish tenant-right meetings' was due solely to the infuriating and ferocious course of food to which they had just submitted, is as certain as that the extraordinary class of noises, cavernous and hollow-sounding, produced by their applausive audiences was owing to the fact that they had not dined at all. In the West of Ireland (where I travelled with those "experts in constitutional treason" who were then organizing the "No Rent" agitation), the agitators and conspirators had no time for long dinners, as the mobs outside were as impatient as hunger, so they sat down, invariably, to everything at once—mutton, bacon, sausages, turkey and ham, with relays of hot potatoes every two minutes. While one conspirator was addressing the peasantry, the upper half of his body thrust out of the lower half of the window, and only his legs in the dining-room, the rest were eating against time, and as soon as the speaker's legs were seen to get up on tiptoe, which they always did for the peroration, the next to speak had to rise from his food. The result was of course incoherent violence. But a closer analysis is required to detect the causes of Irish dislike to rent.
That it would be eventually found that potatoes and patriotism have an occult affnity I have no doubt; but, as I have said above, such research more properly belongs to the province of the historian. The Spartan stirring his black broth with a spear revealed his nature at once, and the single act of the Scythians, using their beefsteaks for saddles until they wanted to eat them, gives at a glance their character to the nation.
At any rate, it is as old as Athenaeus that "to cookery we owe well-ordered States;" for States result from the congregation of individuals in towns, and towns are the sum of agglomerated households, and households, it is notorious, never combine except for the sociable consumption of food. So long as, in the Dark Ages, every man cooked for himself, or, in the primitive days of cannibalism, helped himself to a piece of a raw neighbour, there could be no friendly heartiness at meals; but, as soon as cooks appeared, men met fearlessly round a common board, towns grew up round the dinner-table, and, as Athenaeus remarks, well-ordered States grew up round the towns. But if we were to judge of the prospects of the people who live, say, about Green River or North Platte, by the character of the food (as supplied to travellers) the opinion could not be very complimentary or encouraging.
It is a prevalent idea in England that Americans smoke prodigiously, even as compared with "the average Britisher." Now, in America there is very little smoking. You may perhaps think I am wrong. A great many Americans, I allow, buy cigars in the most reckless fashion. But (apart from the fact that cigars are not necessarily tobacco) I find that as a rule they throw away more than they smoke. Speaking roughly, then, I should say so-called "smokers" in this country might be divided into three classes: those who buy cigars because they cost money; those who buy them because cigars give them a decent excuse for spitting; and those who buy them under the delusion that the friend who is with them smokes, and that hospitality or courtesy requires that they should humour his infatuation. Of the trifling residue, the men who smoke because, as they put it, "they like it," it is not worth while to speak. Now, one of the results of this general aversion to tobacco is that when a foreigner addicted to the weed comes over and tries to smoke, he is hunted about so, that (as I have often done myself) he longs to be in his coffin, if only to get a quiet corner for a pipe. In hotels they hunt you down, floor by floor, till they get you on to a level with the street, and then from room to room till they get you out on to the pavement. There is nowhere where you can read and smoke—or write and smoke—or have a quiet chat with a friend over a pipe—or in fact smoke at all, in the respectable, civilized, Christian sense of the word. Of course, if you like, you can "smoke" in the public hall of the hotel. But I would just as soon sit out on the kerbstone at the corner of the street as among a crowd of men holding cigars in their mouths and shouting business. Out on the kerbstone I should at any rate find the saving grace of passing female society. In private houses again, smokers are consigned to the knuckle end of the domicile and the waste corners thereof, as if they snatched a fearful joy from some secret fetish rites, or had to go apart into privacy to indulge in a little surreptitious cannibalism. In the streets, friends do not like you to smoke when with them, and there are very few public conveyances in which tobacco is comfortably possible.
In trains there is a most conspicuous neglect of smokers. I found, for instance, on my journey from New York to Chicago, that the only place I could smoke in was the end compartment of the fourth car from my own. That is to say, let it be as stormy and dark as it may, you have to pass from other car to the other half the length of the train, and when you do get to "the smoking compartment" you find it is only intended to hold five passengers. I confess I am surprised that these palace cars, otherwise so agreeable, should be such hovel cars for smokers. Nor, by the way, seeing that the company specially notifies that the passage from one car to the other is "dangerous" while the train is in motion, do I think it fair that smokers should be encouraged, and indeed compelled, to run bodily risks in order to arrive at their tobacco. Some day no doubt there will be Pullman smoking cars, and when there are—I will find something else to grumble at.
Imagine then my astonishment when arriving at the Windsor Hotel at Denver, I was shown into a bona-fide smoking-room, with cosy chairs, well carpeted, with a writing table properly furnished, all the newspapers of the day, and a roaring fire in an open fireplace! Here at last was civilization. Here was a room where a man might sit with self-respect, and enjoy his pipe over a newspaper, smoke while he wrote a letter, foregather over tobacco with a friend in a quiet corner! No noise of loquacious strangers, no mob of outsiders to make the room as common as the street, no fusillade of expectoration, no stove to desiccate you—above all, no coloured "gentleman" to come in and say, "Smoke nut 'lard here, sar!" I was delighted. But my curiosity, at such an aberration into intelligence, led me to confide in the manager.
"How is it," I asked, "you have got what no other hotel in America that I have stayed in has got—a comfortable smoking-room after the English style?"
"Guess," said he, "because an English company built this hotel!"
And I went upstairs, at peace with myself and all English companies.
The first view of Denver is very prepossessing, and further acquaintance begets better liking. Indeed on going into the streets of "the Queen City of the Plains" I was astonished. The buildings are of brick or stone, its roads are good and level, and well planted with shade-trees, its suburbs are orderly rows of pretty villas, adorned with lawn, and shrubs, and flowers. Though one of the very youngest towns of the West, it has already an air of solidity and permanence which is very striking, while on such a day as I saw it, it is also one of the very cleanest and airiest. And the snow-capped hills are in sight all round.
Particularly notable in Denver are its railway station—and yet, with all its size, it is found too small for the rapidly increasing requirements of the district—and the Tabor Opera-House. This is really a beautiful building inside, with its lavish upholstery, its charming "ladies' rooms," and smoking-rooms, its variety of handsome stone, its carved cherry-wood fittings, its perfectly sumptuous boxes. The stage is nearly as large as that at Her Majesty's, quite as large as any in New York, while in general appointments and in novelty of ornaments, it has very few rivals in all Europe. In one point, the beauty of the mise-en-scene from the gallery, the Denver house certainly stands quite alone, for whereas in all other theatres or opera-houses, "the gods" find themselves up in the attics, as it were, with only white-washed walls about them, and the sides of the stage shut out from view, here they are in handsomely furnished galleries, with a clear view of the whole stage over the tops of the pagoda-roofed boxes—these curious "pepper-box" roofs being themselves a handsome ornament to the scene. By having only a limited number of "stalls" on the level, sloping the "pit" up to the "grand tier," and making the stage nearly occupy the whole width of the house, everybody in the building gets an equally good view of the stage. It is indeed an opera-house to be proud of; and Denver is proud of it.
There is an idea sometimes mooted that Denver has been run on too fast; that it has "seen its day," and may be as suddenly deserted as it has been peopled. But there is absolutely no chance of this whatever. Colorado is as yet only in its cradle, and the older it gets the more substantial will Denver become, for this city—and very soon it will be almost worthy of that name—is the Paris of "the Centennial State," the ultimate ambition of the moderately successful miner. It is not a place to make your money in and leave. But having made your money, to go to and live in. For a man or woman must be very fastidious indeed who cannot be content to settle down in this, one of the prettiest and healthiest towns I have ever visited. Denver accordingly is attracting to it, year by year, a larger number of that class of citizens upon which alone the permanent prosperity of a town can depend, the men of moderate capital, satisfied with a fair return from sound investments, who put their money into local concerns, and make the place their "home."
I left Denver in the early morning. Outside the station were standing five trains all waiting to be off, and one by one their doleful bells began to toll, and one by one they sneaked away. Ours was the last to be off; but at length we too got our signal: that is to say, the porter picked up the stool which is placed on the platform for the convenience of short-legged passengers stepping into the cars—and without a word we crept off, as if the train was going to a funeral, or was ashamed of something it had done. This silent, casual departure of trains is a perpetually recurring surprise to me. Would it be contrary to republican principles to ring a bell for the warning of passengers? One result, however, of this surreptitious method of making off, is that no one is ever left behind. Such is the perversity of human nature! In England people are being perpetually "left behind" because they think such a catastrophe to be impossible. In America they are never left behind, because they are always certain they will be.
At first the country threatened a repetition of the old prairie, made more dismal than ever by our recent experiences of the Switzerland of Colorado. But the scene gradually picked up a feature here and there as we went along, and knowing that we were climbing up "the Rockies," we had always present with us the pleasures of hope. But if you wish to see the Rocky Mountains so as to respect them, do not travel over them in a train. They are a fraud, so far as they can be seen from a car window. But in minor points of interest they abound. Curious boulders, of immense size and wonderful shapes, lie strewn about the ground, all water-worn by the torrents of a long-ago age, and some of them pierced with holes—the work of primeval shell-fish. Beds of river gravel cover the slopes, and on every side were abundant vestiges of deluges, themselves antediluvian. And then we came upon isolated cliffs of red sandstone, with kranzes running along their faces—exactly the same kranzes as the Zulus made such good use of during the war—and showing in their irregular bases how old-world torrents had washed away the clay and softer materials that had once no doubt joined these isolated cliffs together into a chain of hills, and had left the sandstone heart of each hill bare and alone. And so on, up over "the Divide" into Wyoming, still a paradise for the ride and the rod, past Cheyenne, a town of many shattered hopes, and out into the region of snow again.
Our engine was perpetually screaming to the cattle to get off the track, a series of short, sharp screams that ought to have sufficed to have warned even cattle to get out of the way. As a rule they recognized the advisability of leaving the rails, but one wretched cow, whether she was deaf, or whether she was stupid, or whether, like Cole's dog, she was too proud to move, I cannot say, but in spite of the screams of the engine she held her ground and got the worst of the collision. The cow-catcher struck her, and as we passed her, the poor beast lay in the blood-mottled snow-drift at the bottom of the bank, still breathing, but almost dead. As for the train, the cow might have been only a fly.
And so we went on climbing—herds of cattle grazing on the slopes, and in the splendid "parks" which lay stretched out beneath us wherever the hills stood far apart—with frequent snow-sheds interrupting all conversation or reading with their tunnel-like intervals, till we reached the Red Granite canyon, with great masses of that splendid stone fairly mobbing the narrow course of a mountain stream, and beyond them snow—snow—snow, stretching away to the sky-line without a break. And then Sherman, the highest point of the mountains upon the whole line—only some 8000 feet though, all told—with a half-constructed monument to Oakes Ames crowning the summit. When finished, this massive cone of solid granite blocks will be sixty feet high. And then on to the Laramie Plains, with some wonderful reaches of grazing-ground, and almost fabulous records of ranching profits, And here is Laramie itself, that will some day be a city, for timber and minerals and stock will all combine to enrich it. But to-day it is desolate enough, muffed up in winter, with snowbirds in great flights flecking the white ground. And so out again into the snow wilderness, here and there cattle snuffing about on the desolate hill-sides, and snow-sheds—timber-covered ways to prevent the snow drifting on to the track—becoming more frequent, and the white desolation growing every mile more utter. And the moon got up to confuse the horizon of land with the background of the sky. And so to sleep, with dreams of the Arctic regions, and possibilities, the dreariest in the world, of being snowed up on the line.
Awakening with snow still all round us, and snow falling heavily as we reach Green River. And then out into a country, prodigiously rich, I was told, in petroleum, but in which I could only see that sage-brush was again asserting its claims to be seen above the snow-drift, and that wonderful arrangements in red stone thrust themselves up from the hill crests. Terraces reminding me of miniature table-mountains such as South Africa affects; sharply scarped pinnacles jutting from the ridges like the Mauritius peaks; plateaux with isolated piles of boulders; upright blocks shaped into the semblance of chimneys; crests broken into battlements, and—most striking mimicry of all snow wildernesses—a reproduction in natural rock of the great fortress of Deeg, in India. With snow instead of water, the imitation of that vast buttressed pile was singularly exact, and if there had been only a brazen sun overhead and a coppery sky flecked with circling kites, the counterfeit would have been perfect. But Deeg would crumble to pieces with astonishment if snow were to fall near it, while here there was enough to content a polar bear.
What a pity sage brush—the "three-toothed artemisia" of science—has no commercial value. Fortunes would be cheap if it had. But I heard at Leadville that a local chemist had treated the plant after the manner of cinchona, and extracted from its bark a febrifuge with which he was about to astonish the medical world and bankrupt quinine. That it has a valuable principle in cases of fever, its use by the Indians goes a little way to prove, while its medicinal properties are very generally vouched for by its being used in the West as an application for the cure of toothache, as a poultice for swellings, and a lotion ("sage oil") for erysipelas, rheumatism, and other ailments. Some day, perhaps, a fortune will be made out of it, but at present its chief value seems to be as a moral discipline to the settler and as covert for the sage-hen.
Would not the ostrich thrive upon some of these prodigious tracts of unalterable land? Can all America not match the African karoo shrub, which the camel-sparrow loves? Ostrich farming has some special recommendations, especially for "the sons of gentlemen" and others disinclined for arduous labour, who have not much of either money or brains to start with. Is it not a matter of common notoriety that when pursued this fowl buries its head in the sand, and thus, of course, falls an easy prey to the intending farmer? If, on the other hand, he does not want the whole of the bird, he has only to stand by and pluck its feathers out, which, having its head buried, it cannot, of course perceive. (These feathers fetch a high price in the market.) Supposing, however, that the adventurous emigrant wishes to undertake ostrich farming bona fide, he has merely to pull the birds out from the sand, and drive them into an enclosure—which he will, of course, have previously made—and sit on the gate and watch them lay their eggs. When they lay eggs, ostriches—this is also notorious—bury them in the sand and desert them, and the gentleman's son on the fence can then go and pick them out of the sand. (Ostriches' eggs fetch five pounds apiece.) These birds, moreover, cost very little for feeding, as they prefer pebbles. They can, therefore, be profitably cultivated on the sea beach. But I would remind intending farmers that ostriches are very nimble on their feet. It is also notorious that they have a shrewd way of kicking. A kick from an ostrich will break a cab-horse in two. The intending farmer, therefore, when he has compelled the foolish bird to bury its head in the sand and is plucking out its tail feathers, should stand well clear of the legs. This is a practical hint.
We dined at Evanston, neat-handed abigails, as usual, handing round dishes fearfully and wonderfully made out of old satchels and seasoned with varnish. There is a Chinese quarter here, with its curious congregation of celestial hovels all plastered over with, apparently, the labels of tea-chests. I should think the Chinese were all self-made men. At any rate they do not seem to me to have been made by any one who knew how to do it properly.
However, we had not much time to look at them, for cows on the track and one thing and another had made us rather late; so we were very soon off again, the travellers, after their hurried and indigestible meal, feeling very much like the jumping frog, after he couldn't jump, by reason of quail shot.
The snow had been gradually disappearing, and as we approached Echo canyon we found ourselves gliding into scenes that in summer are very beautiful indeed, with their turf and willow-fringed streams and abundant vegetation. And then, by gradual instalments of rock, each grander than the next, the great canyon came upon us. What a superb defile this is! It moves along like some majestic poem in a series of incomparable stanzas. There is nothing like it in the Himalayas that I know of, nor in the Suleiman range. In the Bolan Pass, on the Afghan frontier, there are intervals of equal sublimity; and even as a whole it may compare with it. But taken all for all—its length (some thirty miles), its astonishing diversity of contour, its beauty as well as its grandeur—I confess the Echo canyon is one of the masterpieces of Nature. I can speak of course only of what I have seen. I do not doubt that the Grand canyon in Arizona, which is said to throw all the wonders of Colorado and the marvels of Yellowstone or Yosemite into the shade, would dwarf the highway to Utah, but within my experience the Echo is almost incomparable. It would be very difficult to convey any idea of this glorious confusion of crags. But imagine some vast city of Cyclopean architecture built on the crest and face of gigantic cliffs of ruddy stone. Imagine, then, that ages of rain had washed away all the minor buildings, leaving only the battlements of the city, the steeples of its churches, its causeways and buttresses, and the stacks of its tallest chimneys still standing where they had been built. If you can imagine this, you can imagine anything, even Echo canyon—but I must confess that my attempt at description does not recall the scene to me in the least.
However, I passed through it and, up on the crest of a very awkward cliff for troops to scale under fire, had pointed out to me the stone-works which the Mormons built when they went out in 1857 to stop the advance of the Federal army.
And there is no doubt of it that the passage of that defile, even with such rough defences as the Saints had thrown up, would have cost the army very dear. For these stone-works, like the Afghans' sunghums, and intended, of course for cover against small arms only, were carried along the crest of the cliffs for some miles, and each group was connected with the next by a covered way, while in the bed of the stream below, ditches had been dug (some six feet deep and twenty wide), right across from cliff to cliff, and a dam constructed just beyond the first ditch which in an hour or two would have converted the whole canyon for a mile or so into a level sheet of water. On this dam the Mormon guns were masked, and though, of course, the Federal artillery would soon have knocked them off into the water, a few rounds at such a range and raking the army—clubbed as it would probably have been at the ditches—must have proved terribly effective. This position, moreover, though it could be easily turned by a force diverging to the right before it entered the canyon, could hardly be turned by one that had already entered it. And to attempt to storm those heights, with men of the calibre of the Transvaal Dutchmen holding them, would have been splendid heroism—or worse.
And then Weber canyon, with its repetitions of castellated cliffs, and its mimicry of buttress and barbican, bastion and demilune, tower and turret, and moat and keep, and all the other feudal appurtenances of the fortalice that were so dear to the author of "Kenilworth," with pine-trees climbing up the slopes all aslant, and undergrowth that in summer is full of charms. The stream has become a river, and fine meadows and corn-land lie all along its bank; large herds of cattle and companies of horses graze on the hill slopes, and wild life is abundant. Birds are flying about the valley under the supervision of buzzards that float in the air, half-mountain high, and among the willowed nooks parties of moor-hens enjoy life. And so into Ogden.
Night was closing in fast, and soon the country was in darkness. Between Ogden and the City of the Saints lay a two hours' gap of dulness, and then on a sudden I saw out in front of me a thin white line lying under the hills that shut in the valley.
"That, sir? That is Salt Lake."
CHAPTER V.
THE CITY OF THE HONEY-BEE.
Zion—Deseret—A City of Two Peoples—"Work" the watchword of Mormonism—A few facts to the credit of the Saints—The text of the Edmunds Bill—In the Mormon Tabernacle—The closing scene of the Conference.
I HAVE described in my time many cities, both of the east and west; but the City of the Saints puzzles me. It is the young rival of Mecca, the Zion of the Mormons, the Latter-Day Jerusalem. It is also the City of the Honey-bee, "Deseret," and the City of the Sunflower—an encampment as of pastoral tribes, the tented capital of some Hyksos, "Shepherd Kings"—the rural seat of a modern patriarchal democracy; the place of the tabernacle of an ancient prophet-ruled Theocracy—the point round which great future perplexities for America are gathering fast; a political storm centre—"a land fresh, as it were, from the hands of God;" a beautiful Goshen of tranquility in the midst of a troublous Egypt—a city of mystery, that seems to the ignorant some Alamut or "Vulture's Nest" of an Assassin sect; the eyrie of an "Old Man of the Mountains:"—to the well-informed the Benares of a sternly pious people; the templed city of an exacting God—a place of pilgrimage in the land of promise, the home of the "Lion of Judah," and the rallying-point in the last days of the Lost Tribes, the Lamanites, the Red Indians—the capital of a Territory in which the people, though "Americans," refuse to make haste to get rich; to dig out the gold and silver which they know abounds in their mountains; to enter the world's markets as competitors in the race of commerce—a people content with solid comfort; that will not tolerate either a beggar or a millionaire within their borders, but insist on a uniform standard of substantial well-being, and devote all the surplus to "building up of Zion," to the emigration of the foreign poor and the erection of splendid places of ceremonial worship—a Territory in which the towns are all filled thick with trees and the air is sweet with the fragrance of fruit and flowers, and the voices of birds and bees as if the land was still their wild birthright; in which meadows with herds of cattle and horses are gradually overspreading deserts hitherto the wild pashalik of the tyrant sage-brush—a land, alternately, of populous champaign and of desolate sand waste, with, as its capital, a City of Two Peoples between whom there is a bitterness of animosity, such as, in far-off Persia, even Sunni and Shea hardly know.
Indeed, there are so many sides to Salt Lake City, and so much that might be said of each, that I should perhaps have shirked this part of my experiences altogether were I not conscious of possessing, at any rate, one advantage over all my "Gentile" predecessors who have written of this Mecca of the West. For it was my good fortune to be entertained as a guest in the household of a prominent Mormon Apostle, a polygamist, and in this way to have had opportunities for the frankest conversation with many of the leading Mormons of the territory. My candidly avowed antipathy to polygamy made no difference anywhere I went, for they extended to me the same confidence that they would have done to any Gentile who cared to know the real facts.
In the ordinary way, I should begin by describing the City itself. But even then, so subtle is the charm of this place—Oriental in its general appearance, English in its details—that I should hesitate to attempt description. Its quaint disregard of that "fine appearance" which makes your "live" towns so commonplace; its extravagance in streets condoned by ample shade-trees; its sluices gurgling along by the side-walks; its astonishing quiet; the simple, neighbourly life of the citizens—all these, and much more combine to invest Salt Lake City with the mystery that is in itself a charm.
Speaking merely as a traveller, and classifying the towns which I have seen, I would place the Mormon Zion in the same genus as Benares on the Ganges and Shikarpoor in Sinde, for it attracts the visitor by interests that are in great part intellectual. The mind and eye are captivated together. It is a fascination of the imagination as well as of the senses. For the capital of Utah is not one of Nature's favourites. She has hemmed it in with majestic mountains, but they are barren and severe. She has spread the levels of a great lake, but its waters are bitter, Marah. There is none of the tender grace of English landscape, none of the fierce splendour of the tropics; and yet, in spite of Nature, the valley is already beautiful, and in the years to come may be another Palmyra. As yet, however, it is the day of small things. Many of the houses are still of adobe, and they overlook the trees planted to shade them. Wild flowers still grow alongside the track of the tram-cars, and wild birds perch to whistle on the telephone wires in the business thoroughfares.
But the future is full of promise, for the prosperity of the city is based upon the most solid of all foundations, agricultural wealth, and it is inhabited by a people whose religion is work. For it is a fact about Mormonism which I have not yet seen insisted upon, that the first duty it teaches is work, and that it inculcates industry as one of the supreme virtues.
The result is that there are no pauper Mormons, for there are no idle ones. In the daytime there are no loafers in the streets, for every man is afield or at his work, and soon after nine at night the whole city seems to be gone to bed. A few strangers of course are hanging about the saloon doors, but the pervading stillness and the emptiness of the streets is dispiriting to rowdyism, and so the Gentile damns the place as being "dull." But the truth is that the Mormons are too busy during the day for idleness to find companionship at night, and too sober in their pleasures for gaslight vices to attract them.
As a natural corollary to this life of hard work, it follows that the Mormons are in a large measure indifferent to the affairs of the world outside themselves. Minding their own business keeps them from meddling with that of others. They are, indeed, taught this from the pulpit. For it is the regular formula of the Tabernacle that the people should go about their daily work, attend to that, and leave everything else alone. They are never to forget that they are "building up Zion," that their day is coming in good time, but that meanwhile they must work "and never bother about what other people may be doing." In this way Salt Lake City has become a City of Two Peoples, and though Mormon and Gentile may be stirred up together sometimes, they do not mingle any more than oil and water.
There are no paupers among the Mormons, and 95 per cent of them live in their own houses on their own land; there is no "caste" of priesthood, such as the world supposes, inasmuch as every intelligent man is a priest, and liable at any moment to be called upon to undertake the duties of the priests of other churches—but without any pay.
Last winter there was a census taken of the Utah Penitentiary and the Salt Lake City and county prisons with the following result:—In Salt Lake City there are about 75 Mormons to 25 non-Mormons: in Salt Lake county there are about 80 Mormons to 20 non-Mormons. Yet in the city prison there were 29 convicts, all non-Mormons; in the county prison there were 6 convicts all non-Mormons. The jailer stated that the county convicts for the five years past were all anti-Mormons except three!
In Utah the proportion of Mormons to all others is as 83 to 17. In the Utah Penitentiary at the date of the census there were 51 prisoners, only 5 of whom were Mormons, and 2 of the 5 were in prison for polygamy, so that the 17 per cent "outsiders" had 46 convicts in the penitentiary, while the 83 per cent. Mormons had but 5!
Out of the 200 saloon, billiard, bowling alley and pool-table keepers not over a dozen even profess to be Mormons. All of the bagnios and other disreputable concerns in the territory are run and sustained by non-Mormons. Ninety-eight per cent of the gamblers in Utah are of the same element. Ninety-five per cent of the Utah lawyers are Gentiles, and 98 per cent of all the litigation there is of outside growth and promotion. Of the 250 towns and villages in Utah, over 200 have no "gaudy sepulchre of departed virtue," and these two hundred and odd towns are almost exclusively Mormon in population. Of the suicides committed in Utah ninety odd per cent are non-Mormon, and of the Utah homicides and infanticides over 80 per cent are perpetrated by the 17 per cent of "outsiders."
The arrests made in Salt Lake City from January 1, 1881, to December 8, 1881, were classified as follows:—
| Men | 782 |
| Women | 200 |
| Boys | 38 |
| Total | 1020 |
| Mormons—Men and boys | 163 |
| Mormons—Women | 6 |
| Anti-Mormon—Men and boys | 657 |
| Anti-Mormon—Women | 194 |
| Total | 1020 |
A number of the Mormon arrests were for chicken, cow, and water trespass, petty larceny, &c. The arrests of non-Mormons were 80 per cent for prostitution, gambling, exposing of person, drunkenness, unlawful dram-selling, assault and battery, attempt to kill, &c.
Now, if the 75 per cent Mormon population of Salt Lake City were as lawless and corrupt as the record shows the 25 per cent non-Mormons to be, there would have been 2443 arrests made from their ranks during the year 1881, instead of 169; while if the 25 per cent non-Mormon population were as law-abiding and moral as the 75 per cent Mormons, instead of 851 non-Mormon arrests during the year, there would have been but 56!
These are the kind of statistics that non-Mormons in Salt Lake City hate having published. But the world ought to know them, if only to put to shame the so-called Christian community of Utah, that is never tired of libelling, personally and even by name, the men and women whom Mormons have learned to respect from a lifetime's experience of the integrity of their conduct and the purity of their lives—the so-called "Christian" community that is afraid to hear itself contrasted with these same Mormons, lest the shocking balance of crime and immorality against themselves should be publicly known. But there is no appeal from these statistics. They are incontrovertible.
The time at which I arrived in Utah was a very critical one for the Latter-Day Saints. The States, exasperated into activity by sectarian agitation—and by the intrigues of a few Gentiles resident in Utah who were financially interested in the transfer of the Territorial Treasury from Mormon hands to their own—had just determined, once more, to extirpate polygamy, and the final passage of the long-dreaded "Edmunds Bill" had marked down Mormons as a proscribed people, and had indicted the whole community for a common offence.
The following is the text of this remarkable bill:—
"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That section 5352 of the Revised Statutes of the United States be, and the same is hereby, amended so as to read as follows, namely:
"Every person who has a husband or wife living who, in a territory or other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, hereafter marries another, whether married or single, and any man who hereafter simultaneously, or on the same day, marries more than one woman, in a territory or other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, is guilty of polygamy, and shall be punished by a fine of not more than $500 and by imprisonment for a term of not more than five years; but this section shall not extend to any person by reason of any former marriage whose husband or wife by such marriage shall have been absent for five successive years, and is not known to such person to be living, and is believed by such person to be dead, nor to any person by reason of any former marriage which shall have been dissolved by a valid decree of a competent court, nor to any person by reason of any former marriage which shall have been pronounced void by a valid decree of a competent court, on the ground of nullity of the marriage contract.
"SEC. 2—That the foregoing provisions shall not affect the prosecution or punishment of any offence already committed against the section amended by the first section of this act.
"SEC. 3—That if any male person, in a territory or other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, hereafter cohabits with more than one woman, he shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanour, and on conviction thereof, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $300, or by imprisonment for not more than six months, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
"SEC. 4—That counts for any or all of the offences named in sections one and two of this act may be joined in the same information or indictment.
"SEC. 5—That in any prosecution for bigamy, polygamy, or unlawful cohabitation, under any statute of the United States, it shall be sufficient cause of challenge to any person drawn or summoned as a juryman or talesman, first, that he is or has been living in the practice of bigamy, polygamy or unlawful cohabitation with more than one woman, or that he is or has been guilty of an offence punishable by either of the foregoing sections, or by section 5352 of the Revised Statutes of the United States, or the Act of July 1st, 1862, entitled, 'An Act to punish and prevent the practice of polygamy in the territories of the United States and other places, and disapproving and annulling certain Acts of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah;' or second, that he believes it right for a man to have more than one living and undivorced wife at the same time, or to live in the practice of cohabiting with more than one woman; and any person appearing or offered as a juror or talesman, and challenged on either of the foregoing grounds, may be questioned on his oath as to the existence of any such cause of challenge, and other evidence may be introduced bearing upon the question raised by such challenge; and this question shall be tried by the court. But as to the first ground of challenge before mentioned, the person challenged shall not be bound to answer if he shall say upon his oath that he declines on the ground that his answer may tend to criminate himself; and if he shall answer as to said first ground, his answer shall not be given in evidence in any criminal prosecution against him for any offence named in sections one or three of this Act; but if he declines to answer on any ground, he shall be rejected as incompetent.
"SEC. 6—That the President is hereby authorized to grant amnesty to such classes of offenders, guilty before the passage of this act of bigamy, polygamy, or unlawful cohabitation, on such conditions and under such limitations as he shall think proper; but no such amnesty shall have effect unless the conditions thereof shall be complied with.
"SEC. 7—That the issue of bigamous or polygamous marriages, known as Mormon marriages, in cases in which such marriages have been solemnized according to the ceremonies of the Mormon sect, in any territory of the United States, and such issue shall have been born before the 1st January, A.D. 1883, are hereby legitimated.
"SEC. 8—That no polygamist, bigamist, or any person cohabiting with more than one woman, and no woman cohabiting with any of the persons described as aforesaid in this section, in any territory or other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, shall be entitled to vote at any election held in any such territory or other place, or be eligible for election or appointment to or be entitled to hold any office or place of public trust, honour, or emolument in, under, or for any such territory or place, or under the United States.
"SEC. 9—That all the registration and election offices of every description in the Territory of Utah are hereby declared vacant, and each and every duty relating to the registration of voters, the conduct of elections, the receiving or rejection of votes, and the canvassing and returning of the same, and the issuing of certificates or other evidence of election in said territory, shall, until other provision be made by the Legislative Assembly of said territory as is hereinafter by this section provided, be performed under the existing laws of the United States and of said territory by proper persons, who shall be appointed to execute such offices and perform such duties by a board of five persons, to be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, not more than three of whom shall be members of one political party, a majority of whom shall be a quorum. The canvass and return of all the votes at elections in said territory for members of the Legislative Assembly thereof shall also be returned to said board, which shall canvass all such returns and issue certificates of election to those persons who, being eligible for such election, shall appear to have been lawfully elected, which certificates shall be the only evidence of the right of such persons to sit in such Assembly, provided said board of five persons shall not exclude any persons otherwise eligible to vote from the polls, on account of any opinion such person may entertain on the subject of bigamy or polygamy; nor shall they refuse to count any such vote on account of the opinion of the person casting it on the subject of bigamy or polygamy; but each house of such Assembly, after its organization, shall have power to decide upon the elections and qualifications of its members."
The day also on which I arrived in Salt Lake City was itself a memorable one, for it was the closing day of the fifty second annual conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—notable, beyond other conferences, as a public expression of the opinions of the leaders of the Mormon Church, at a crisis of great importance. The whole hierarchy of Utah took part in the proceedings, and it was fitly closed by an address from President Taylor himself, evoking such a demonstration of fervid and yet dignified enthusiasm as I have never seen equalled.
My telegram to the New York World on that occasion may still stand as my description of the scene.
"Acquainted though I am with displays of Oriental fanaticism and Western revivalism, I set this Mormon enthusiasm on one side as being altogether of a different character, for it not only astonishes by its fervour, but commands respect by its sincere sobriety. The congregation of the Saints assembled in the Tabernacle, numbering, by my own careful computation, eleven thousand odd, and composed in almost exactly equal parts of the two sexes, reminded me of the Puritan gatherings of the past as I imagined them, and of my personal experiences of the Transvaal Boers as I know them. There was no rant, no affectation, no straining after theatrical effect. The very simplicity of this great gathering of country-folk was striking in the extreme, and significant from first to last of a power that should hardly be trifled with by sentimental legislation. I have read, I can assert, everything of importance that has ever been written about the Mormons, but a single glance at these thousands of hardy men fresh from their work at the plough—at the rough vehicles they had come in, ranged along the street leading to the Tabernacle, at their horses, with the mud of the fields still upon them—convinced me that I knew nothing whatever of this interesting people. Of the advice given at this Conference it is easy to speak briefly, for all counselled alike. In his opening address, President Taylor said,—
"'The antagonism we now experience here has always existed, but we have also come out of our troubles strengthened. I say to you, be calm, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, and He will take care of us.'
"Every succeeding speaker repeated the same advice, and the outcome of the five days' Conference may therefore be said to have been an exhortation to the Saints 'to pay no attention whatever to outside matters, but to live their religion, leave the direction of affairs to their priesthood, and the result in the hands of God.'
"Bishops Sharp and Cluff challenged the Union to show more conspicuous examples of loyalty than those that 'brighten the records of Utah;' Bishop Hatch referred to a 'Revolutionary' ancestry; and Apostle Brigham Young (a son of the late President) alluded to the advocacy in certain quarters of warlike measures with which he was not himself in sympathy. 'I am not,' he said, 'altogether belligerent, and am not advocating warlike measures, but I do want to advocate our standing true and steadfast all the time. If I am to be persecuted for living my religion, why, I am to be persecuted. That is all. Dodging the issue will not change it. I have read the bill passed to injure us, but am satisfied that everything will come out all right, that the designs of our enemies will be frustrated, and confusion will come upon them.' Apostle Woodruff reminded the enemies of the Church that it 'costs a great deal to shed the blood of God's people;' and Apostle Lorenzo Snow said,—'I do not have any fear or trouble about fiery ordeals, but if any do come we should all be ready for them.'
"These and other references to possible trouble seem to show that the leaders of the Church consider the state of the public mind such as to make these allusions necessary. But loyalty to the Constitution was the text of every address, and even as regards the Edmunds Bill itself, Apostle Lorenzo Snow said,—'There is something good in it, for it legalizes every issue from plural marriages up to January 1, 1883. No person a few years ago could have ever expected such an act of Congress. But it has passed, and been signed by the President.' The expressions of the speakers with regard to polygamy were at times very explicit. The President yesterday said,—'Some of our kind friends have suggested that we cast our wives off, but our feelings are averse to that. We are bound to them for time and eternity—we have covenanted before high heaven to remain bound to them. And I declare, in the name of Israel's God, that we will keep the covenant, and I ask all to say to this Amen.' (Here, like the sound of a great sea-wave breaking in a cave, a vast Amen arose from the concourse.) 'We may have to shelter behind a hedge while the storm is passing over, but let us be true to ourselves, our wives, our families, and our God, and all will be well.' Again to-day he exhorted the Saints 'to keep within the law, but at the same time to live their religion and be true to their wives, and the principles Of their Church.' Several other speakers touched upon the fact of plurality being an integral doctrine of Mormonism, and not to be interfered with without committing an outrage against their religion. Retaliation was never suggested, unless the advice given to the congregation to make all their purchases at Mormon shops may be accepted as a tendency towards Boycotting. But the Church was exhorted to stand firm, to allow persecution to run its course, and above all, to be 'manly in their fidelity to their wives.' Nor could anything exceed the impressiveness of the response which the people gave instantaneously to the appeal of their President for the support of their voices. The great Tabernacle was filled with waves of sound as the 'Amens' of the congregation burst out. The shout of men going into battle was not more stirring than the closing words of this memorable conference spoken as if by one vast voice: 'Hosannah! for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth; He is with us now and will be for ever. Amen!'"