THE DESERT OF WYOMING


To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for the mountains.  I 
longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to 
enter, like an ice-bound whaler for the spring.  Alas! and it was a 
worse country than the other.  All Sunday and Monday we travelled 
through these sad mountains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies, 
which is a fair match to them for misery of aspect.  Hour after 
hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward 
path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of 
monuments and fortifications - how drearily, how tamely, none can 
tell who has not seen them; not a tree, not a patch of sward, not 
one shapely or commanding mountain form; sage-brush, eternal sage-
brush; over all, the same weariful and gloomy colouring, grays 
warming into brown, grays darkening towards black; and for sole 
sign of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes; here and 
there, but at incredible intervals, a creek running in a canon.  
The plains have a grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing 
but a contorted smallness.  Except for the air, which was light and 
stimulating, there was not one good circumstance in that God-
forsaken land.

I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way; and at 
last, whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some 
wayside eating-house, the evening we left Laramie, I fell sick 
outright.  That was a night which I shall not readily forget.  The 
lamps did not go out; each made a faint shining in its own 
neighbourhood, and the shadows were confounded together in the 
long, hollow box of the car.  The sleepers lay in uneasy attitudes; 
here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs like dead folk; 
there a man sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his arm; 
there another half seated with his head and shoulders on the bench.  
The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the 
movement of the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out 
their arms like children; it was surprising how many groaned and 
murmured in their sleep; and as I passed to and fro, stepping 
across the prostrate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a 
half-formed word, it gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest 
in that unresting vehicle.  Although it was chill, I was obliged to 
open my window, for the degradation of the air soon became 
intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life.  
Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills 
shoot by unweariedly into our wake.  They that long for morning 
have never longed for it more earnestly than I.

And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and 
unsightly quarter of the world.  Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a 
bird, or a river.  Only down the long, sterile canons, the train 
shot hooting and awoke the resting echo.  That train was the one 
piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one 
spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature.  
And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this 
unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear 
an emigrant for some 12 pounds from the Atlantic to the Golden 
Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu 
cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died 
away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in 
these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side 
with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together 
in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling 
and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all 
America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the "bad 
medicine waggon" charioting his foes; and then when I go on to 
remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in 
frock coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a 
fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as 
if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in 
which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends 
of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to 
some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most 
varied subject for an enduring literary work.  If it be romance, if 
it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy 
town to this?  But, alas! it is not these things that are necessary 
- it is only Homer.

Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts 
us swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils.  
Thirst, hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more 
feared, so lightly do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull, 
who wings safely through the hurricane and past the shark.  Yet we 
should not be forgetful of these hardships of the past; and to keep 
the balance true, since I have complained of the trifling 
discomforts of my journey, perhaps more than was enough, let me add 
an original document.  It was not written by Homer, but by a boy of 
eleven, long since dead, and is dated only twenty years ago.  I 
shall punctuate, to make things clearer, but not change the 
spelling.

"My dear Sister Mary, - I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when 
you read my letter.  If Jerry" (the writer's eldest brother) "has 
not written to you before now, you will be surprised to heare that 
we are in California, and that poor Thomas" (another brother, of 
fifteen) "is dead.  We started from - in July, with plenly of 
provisions and too yoke oxen.  We went along very well till we got 
within six or seven hundred miles of California, when the Indians 
attacked us.  We found places where they had killed the emigrants.  
We had one passenger with us, too guns, and one revolver; so we ran 
all the lead We had into bullets (and) hung the guns up in the 
wagon so that we could get at them in a minit.  It was about two 
o'clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel a little way; when a 
prairie chicken alited a little way from the wagon.

"Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and told Tom drive the 
oxen.  Tom and I drove the oxen, and Jerry and the passenger went 
on.  Then, after a little, I left Tom and caught up with Jerry and 
the other man.  Jerry stopped Tom to come up; me and the man went 
on and sit down by a little stream.  In a few minutes, we heard 
some noise; then three shots (they all struck poor Tom, I suppose); 
then they gave the war hoop, and as many as twenty of the redskins 
came down upon us.  The three that shot Tom was hid by the side of 
the road in the bushes.

"I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot; so I told the other man 
that Tom and Jerry were dead, and that we had better try to escape, 
if possible.  I had no shoes on; having a sore foot, I thought I 
would not put them on.  The man and me run down the road, but We 
was soon stopped by an Indian on a pony.  We then turend the other 
way, and run up the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar 
trees, and stayed there till dark.  The Indians hunted all over 
after us, and verry close to us, so close that we could here there 
tomyhawks Jingle.  At dark the man and me started on, I stubing my 
toes against sticks and stones.  We traveld on all night; and next 
morning, just as it was getting gray, we saw something in the shape 
of a man.  It layed Down in the grass.  We went up to it, and it 
was Jerry.  He thought we ware Indians.  You can imagine how glad 
he was to see me.  He thought we was all dead but him, and we 
thought him and Tom was dead.  He had the gun that he took out of 
the wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was the load 
that was in it.

"We traveld on till about eight o'clock, We caught up with one 
wagon with too men with it.  We had traveld with them before one 
day; we stopt and they Drove on; we knew that they was ahead of us, 
unless they had been killed to.  My feet was so sore when we caught 
up with them that I had to ride; I could not step.  We traveld on 
for too days, when the men that owned the cattle said they would 
(could) not drive them another inch.  We unyoked the oxen; we had 
about seventy pounds of flour; we took it out and divided it into 
four packs.  Each of the men took about 18 pounds apiece and a 
blanket.  I carried a little bacon, dried meat, and little quilt; I 
had in all about twelve pounds.  We had one pint of flour a day for 
our alloyance.  Sometimes we made soup of it; sometimes we (made) 
pancakes; and sometimes mixed it up with cold water and eat it that 
way.  We traveld twelve or fourteen days.  The time came at last 
when we should have to reach some place or starve.  We saw fresh 
horse and cattle tracks.  The morning come, we scraped all the 
flour out of the sack, mixed it up, and baked it into bread, and 
made some soup, and eat everything we had.  We traveld on all day 
without anything to eat, and that evening we Caught up with a sheep 
train of eight wagons.  We traveld with them till we arrived at the 
settlements; and know I am safe in California, and got to good 
home, and going to school.

"Jerry is working in - .  It is a good country.  You can get from 
50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking.  Tell me all about the affairs 
in the States, and how all the folks get along."

And so ends this artless narrative.  The little man was at school 
again, God bless him, while his brother lay scalped upon the 
deserts.


FELLOW-PASSENGERS


At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the Central 
Pacific line of railroad.  The change was doubly welcome; for, 
first, we had better cars on the new line; and, second, those in 
which we had been cooped for more than ninety hours had begun to 
stink abominably.  Several yards away, as we returned, let us say 
from dinner, our nostrils were assailed by rancid air.  I have 
stood on a platform while the whole train was shunting; and as the 
dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a whiff of pure 
menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of monkeys.  I 
think we are human only in virtue of open windows.  Without fresh 
air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the 
Queen's English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of 
leering, human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of 
offence.  I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look for 
the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of 
the emigrant train.  But one thing I must say, the car of the 
Chinese was notably the least offensive.

The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, and so 
proportionally airier; they were freshly varnished, which gave us 
all a sense of cleanliness an though we had bathed; the seats drew 
out and joined in the centre, so that there was no more need for 
bed boards; and there was an upper tier of berths which could be 
closed by day and opened at night.

I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was 
among.  They were in rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had 
met on board ship while crossing the Atlantic.  They were mostly 
lumpish fellows, silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat 
sad, I should say, with an extraordinary poor taste in humour, and 
little interest in their fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap 
and merely external curiosity.  If they heard a man's name and 
business, they seemed to think they had the heart of that mystery; 
but they were as eager to know that much as they were indifferent 
to the rest.  Some of them were on nettles till they learned your 
name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but beyond that, 
whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce or 
friendly, was all one to them.  Others who were not so stupid, 
gossiped a little, and, I am bound to say, unkindly.  A favourite 
witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of  "All aboard!" 
while the rest of us were dining, thus contributing his mite to the 
general discomfort.  Such a one was always much applauded for his 
high spirits.  When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was 
astonished - fresh from the eager humanity on board ship - to meet 
with little but laughter.  One of the young men even amused himself 
by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill-
nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to think, for he expected me 
to join the laugh.  I did so, but it was phantom merriment.  Later 
on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though, 
of course, there were not wanting some to help him, it was rather 
superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his 
fellow-passengers.  "Oh, I hope he's not going to die!" cried a 
woman; "it would be terrible to have a dead body!"  And there was a 
very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station.  
This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived.

There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters; in others, 
little but silence.  In this society, more than any other that ever 
I was in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the 
narrative.  It was rarely that any one listened for the listening.  
If he lent an ear to another man's story, it was because he was in 
immediate want of a hearer for one of his own.  Food and the 
progress of the train were the subjects most generally treated; 
many joined to discuss these who otherwise would hold their 
tongues.  One small knot had no better occupation than to worm out 
of me my name; and the more they tried, the more obstinately fixed 
I grew to baffle them.  They assailed me with artful questions and 
insidious offers of correspondence in the future; but I was 
perpetually on my guard, and parried their assaults with inward 
laughter.  I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for 
the secret.  He owed me far more, had he understood life, for thus 
preserving him a lively interest throughout the journey.  I met one 
of my fellow-passengers months after, driving a street tramway car 
in San Francisco; and, as the joke was now out of season, told him 
my name without subterfuge.  You never saw a man more chapfallen.  
But had my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he 
had still been disappointed.

There were no emigrants direct from Europe - save one German family 
and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one 
reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, 
the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world, 
mysterious race.  Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make 
something great of the Cornish; for my part, I can make nothing of 
them at all.  A division of races, older and more original than 
that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart from 
neighbouring Englishmen.  Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign 
in my eyes.  This is one of the lessons of travel - that some of 
the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.

The rest were all American born, but they came from almost every 
quarter of that Continent.  All the States of the North had sent 
out a fugitive to cross the plains with me.  From Virginia, from 
Pennsylvania, from New York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from 
Maime that borders on the Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves 
- some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better land and better 
wages.  The talk in the train, like the talk I heard on the 
steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons, and hope that moves 
ever westward.  I thought of my shipful from Great Britain with a 
feeling of despair.  They had come 3000 miles, and yet not far 
enough.  Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to 
welcome them at Sandy Hook.  Where were they to go?  Pennsylvania, 
Maine, Iowa, Kansas?  These were not places for immigration, but 
for emigration, it appeared; not one of them, but I knew a man who 
had lifted up his heel and left it for an ungrateful country.  And 
it was still westward that they ran.  Hunger, you would have 
thought, came out of the east like the sun, and the evening was 
made of edible gold.  And, meantime, in the car in front of me, 
were there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite quarter?  
Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their gates in 
search of provender, had here come face to face.  The two waves had 
met; east and west had alike failed; the whole round world had been 
prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till 
one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently 
at home.  Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more 
picturesque and more disheartening; for, as we continued to steam 
westward toward the land of gold, we were continually passing other 
emigrant trains upon the journey east; and these were as crowded as 
our own.  Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the 
mines?  Were they all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter?  
It would seem not, for, whenever we met them, the passengers ran on 
the platform and cried to us through the windows, in a kind of 
wailing chorus, to "come back."  On the plains of Nebraska, in the 
mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my 
heart, "Come back!"  That was what we heard by the way "about the 
good country we were going to."  And at that very hour the Sand-lot 
of San Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from 
the other side of Market Street was repeating the rant of 
demagogues.

If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate, 
how many thousands would regret the bargain!  But wages, indeed, 
are only one consideration out of many; for we are a race of 
gipsies, and love change and travel for themselves.


DESPISED RACES


Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians 
towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and 
the worst.  They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to 
them, or thought of them, but hated them A PRIORI.  The Mongols 
were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of 
money.  They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred 
industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle for the 
Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe.  They declared them 
hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when 
they beheld them.  Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man 
is so like a large class of European women, that on raising my head 
and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I 
have for an instant been deceived by the resemblance.  I do not say 
it is the most attractive class of our women, but for all that many 
a man's wife is less pleasantly favoured.  Again, my emigrants 
declared that the Chinese were dirty.  I cannot say they were 
clean, for that was impossible upon the journey; but in their 
efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us to shame.  We all 
pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a 
minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed.  But the Chinese 
never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing their 
feet - an act not dreamed of among ourselves - and going as far as 
decency permitted to wash their whole bodies.  I may remark by the 
way that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate 
is their sense of modesty.  A clean man strips in a crowded 
boathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without 
uncovering an inch of skin.  Lastly, these very foul and malodorous 
Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the 
Chinese waggon, and that alone, which stank.  I have said already 
that it was the exceptions and notably the freshest of the three.

These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America.  
The Chinese are considered stupid, because they are imperfectly 
acquainted with English.  They are held to be base, because their 
dexterity and frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious 
Caucasian.  They are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no 
monopoly of that.  They are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the 
cheerful Irishman may each reflect before he bears the accusation.  
I am told, again, that they are of the race of river pirates, and 
belong to the most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial 
Empire.  But if this be so, what remarkable pirates have we here! 
and what must be the virtues, the industry, the education, and the 
intelligence of their superiors at home!

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go.  
Such is the cry.  It seems, after all, that no country is bound to 
submit to immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the 
knife, and resistance to either but legitimate defence.  Yet we may 
regret the free tradition of the republic, which loved to depict 
herself with open arms, welcoming all unfortunates.  And certainly, 
as a man who believes that he loves freedom, I may be excused some 
bitterness when I find her sacred name misused in the contention.  
It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand-
lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for arms and 
butchery.  "At the call of Abraham Lincoln," said the orator, "ye 
rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye not 
rise and liberate yourselves from a few dirty Mongolians?"

For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on 
the Chinese.  Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had 
begun to keep pigs.  Gun-powder and printing, which the other day 
we imitated, and a school of manners which we never had the 
delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-
past antiquity.  They walk the earth with us, but it seems they 
must be of different clay.  They hear the clock strike the same 
hour, yet surely of a different epoch.  They travel by steam 
conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and 
superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course.  
Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the 
wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round 
Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfing boy 
alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find 
things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for 
thousands of miles over plain and mountain.  Heaven knows if we had 
one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our eyes, 
which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world 
out of the railway windows.  And when either of us turned his 
thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must 
there not have been in these pictures of the mind - when I beheld 
that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with 
the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over 
all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks 
and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same 
affection, home.

Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of 
the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble 
red man of old story - over whose own hereditary continent we had 
been steaming all these days.  I saw no wild or independent Indian; 
indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but 
now and again at way stations, a husband and wife and a few 
children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of 
civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants.  The silent 
stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their 
appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my 
fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney 
baseness.  I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation.  We 
should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our 
forefathers' misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.

If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the 
hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back, 
step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one 
after another as the States extended westward, until at length they 
are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre - and 
even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by 
ruffianly diggers?  The eviction of the Cherokees (to name but an 
instance), the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of the 
wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such 
poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up a chapter 
of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base 
if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget.  These old, well-
founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the 
independent.  That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the 
Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the 
thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man; 
rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like 
the race, and not personal to him who cherishes the indignation.


TO THE GOLDEN GATES


A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular 
impressions on the mind.  By an early hour on Wednesday morning we 
stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-
lying plateau in Nevada.  The man who kept the station eating-house 
was a Scot, and learning that I was the same, he grew very 
friendly, and gave me some advice on the country I was now 
entering.  "You see," said he, "I tell you this, because I come 
from your country."  Hail, brither Scots!

His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the 
world.  There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage 
which is revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small 
affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a 
spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, 
or even a hundred halfpence.  In the Pacific States they have made 
a bolder push for complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin 
that no longer that no longer exists - the BIT, or old Mexican 
real.  The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents, 
eight to the dollar.  When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar 
stands for the required amount.  But how about an odd bit?  The 
nearest coin to it is a dime, which is, short by a fifth.  That, 
then, is called a SHORT bit.  If you have one, you lay it 
triumphantly down, and save two and a half cents.  But if you have 
not, and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly 
tenders you a dime by way of change; and thus you have paid what is 
called a LONG BIT, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by 
comparison with a short bit, five cents.  In country places all 
over the Pacific coast, nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or 
taken, which vastly increases the cost of life; as even for a glass 
of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny, as the case 
may be.  You would say that this system of mutual robbery was as 
broad as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to make it 
broader, with which I here endow the public.  It is brief and 
simple - radiantly simple.  There is one place where five cents are 
recognised, and that is the post-office.  A quarter is only worth 
two bits, a short and a long.  Whenever you have a quarter, go to 
the post-office and buy five cents worth of postage-stamps; you 
will receive in change two dimes, that is, two short bits.  The 
purchasing power of your money is undiminished.  You can go and 
have your two glasses of beer all the same; and you have made 
yourself a present of five cents worth of postage-stamps into the 
bargain.  Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head for 
this discovery.

From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand, 
horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little 
kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko.  As we were standing, 
after our manner, outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly 
from underneath the cars, and take to their heels across country.  
They were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on the beams 
since eleven of the night before; and several of my fellow-
passengers had already seen and conversed with them while we broke 
our fast at Toano.  These land stowaways play a great part over 
here in America, and I should have liked dearly to become 
acquainted with them.

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me.  I was coming out from 
supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed 
by two others taller and ruddier than himself.

"Excuse me, sir," he said, "but do you happen to be going on?"

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist 
from that intention.  He had a situation to offer me, and if we 
could come to terms, why, good and well.  "You see," he continued, 
"I'm running a theatre here, and we're a little short in the 
orchestra.  You're a musician, I guess?"

I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with "Auld 
Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension 
whatever to that style.  He seemed much put out of countenance; and 
one of his taller companions asked him, on the nail, for five 
dollars.

"You see, sir," added the latter to me, "he bet you were a 
musician; I bet you weren't.  No offence, I hope?"

"None whatever," I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I 
presume the debt was liquidated.

This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers, 
who thought they had now come to a country where situations went a-
begging.  But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith.  
Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide 
the bet.

Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all 
reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued through 
desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary.  But some 
time after I had fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of 
my companions.  It was in vain that I resisted.  A fire of 
enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes; and he declared we were 
in a new country, and I must come forth upon the platform and see 
with my own eyes.  The train was then, in its patient way, standing 
halted in a by-track.  It was a clear, moonlit night; but the 
valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and only a 
diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness 
of the pines.  A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the 
continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the 
mountains.  The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in 
the nostrils - a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere.  I was dead 
sleepy, but I returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at 
my heart.

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it 
were day or night, for the illumination was unusual.  I sat up at 
last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long 
snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were 
swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse 
of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a 
sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.  I am usually very 
calm over the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe how 
my heart leaped at this.  It was like meeting one's wife.  I had 
come home again - home from unsightly deserts to the green and 
habitable corners of the earth.  Every spire of pine along the 
hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more 
dear to me than a blood relation.  Few people have praised God more 
happily than I did.  And thenceforward, down by Blue Canon, Alta, 
Dutch Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain 
forests, dropping thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we 
went, not I only, but all the passengers on board, threw off their 
sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like schoolboys, 
and thronged with shining eyes upon the platform and became new 
creatures within and without.  The sun no longer oppressed us with 
heat, it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side, until we 
were fain to laugh ourselves for glee.  At every turn we could see 
farther into the land and our own happy futures.  At every town the 
cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air, and 
crowing for the new day and the new country.  For this was indeed 
our destination; this was "the good country" we had been going to 
so long.

By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain 
of corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying to upon the 
Oakland side of San Francisco Bay.  The day was breaking as we 
crossed the ferry; the fog was rising over the citied hills of San 
Francisco; the bay was perfect - not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon 
its blue expanse; everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun.  
A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and 
then widened downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed to 
awaken, and began to sparkle; and suddenly

"The tall hills Titan discovered,"

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were 
lit from end to end with summer daylight.

[1879.]



CHAPTER II - THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL



THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC


THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than 
General Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less 
important than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a 
soldier for topography.  Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the 
mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and 
Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb.  Thus the 
ancient capital of California faces across the bay, while the 
Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forest, bombards her 
left flank and rear with never-dying surf.  In front of the town, 
the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-west, and then 
westward to enclose the bay.  The waves which lap so quietly about 
the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance; you 
can see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at night, the 
outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the 
moonlight and the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet 
weather, the distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the 
coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man.  It would be hard 
to find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to 
the mind.  Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea.  
Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves, 
trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song.  Strange sea-
tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes 
a whole whale's carcase, white with carrion-gulls and poisoning the 
wind, lie scattered here and there along the sands.  The waves come 
in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst 
with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and down 
the long key-board of the beach.  The foam of these great ruins 
mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly 
fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.  The 
interest is perpetually fresh.  On no other coast that I know shall 
you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's 
greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of 
thunder in the sound.  The very air is more than usually salt by 
this Homeric deep.

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach.  Here and 
there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and 
hunters.  A rough, undergrowth partially conceals the sand.  The 
crouching, hardy live-oaks flourish singly or in thickets - the 
kind of wood for murderers to crawl among - and here and there the 
skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills with a floor of 
turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard.  
Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near to Monterey 
from the junction at Salinas City - though that and so many other 
things are now for ever altered - and it was from here that you had 
the first view of the old township lying in the sands, its white 
windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the first 
fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.

The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of 
the ocean.  A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up 
into the inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, 
empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where 
you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the 
Pacific.  You pass out of the town to the south-west, and mount the 
hill among pine-woods.  Glade, thicket, and grove surround you.  
You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither.  You see a 
deer; a multitude of quail arises.  But the sound of the sea still 
follows you as you advance, like that of wind among the trees, only 
harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you gain the 
summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened vigour that 
same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for now you 
are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only 
mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but 
from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and 
from down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river.  The whole 
woodland is begirt with thundering surges.  The silence that 
immediately surrounds you where you stand is not so much broken as 
it is haunted by this distant, circling rumour.  It sets your 
senses upon edge; you strain your attention; you are clearly and 
unusually conscious of small sounds near at hand; you walk 
listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the Pacific is a 
sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.

When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn 
homeward.  All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those of 
Monterey it was the surf that particularly invited me to prolong my 
walks.  I would push straight for the shore where I thought it to 
be nearest.  Indeed, there was scarce a direction that would not, 
sooner or later, have brought me forth on the Pacific.  The 
emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and discovery in 
these excursions.  I never in all my visits met but one man.  He 
was a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat, and he 
carried an axe, though his true business at that moment was to seek 
for straying cattle.  I asked him what o'clock it was, but he 
seemed neither to know nor care; and when he in his turn asked me 
for news of his cattle, I showed myself equally indifferent.  We 
stood and smiled upon each other for a few seconds, and then turned 
without a word and took our several ways across the forest.

One day - I shall never forget it - I had taken a trail that was 
new to me.  After a while the woods began to open, the sea to sound 
nearer hand.  I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile.  A 
step or two farther, and, without leaving the woods, I found myself 
among trim houses.  I walked through street after street, parallel 
and at right angles, paved with sward and dotted with trees, but 
still undeniable streets, and each with its name posted at the 
corner, as in a real town.  Facing down the main thoroughfare - 
"Central Avenue," as it was ticketed - I saw an open-air temple, 
with benches and sounding-board, as though for an orchestra.  The 
houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound but 
of the waves, no moving thing.  I have never been in any place that 
seemed so dreamlike.  Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and 
its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this 
town had plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps 
had been deserted overnight.  Indeed, it was not so much like a 
deserted town as like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with 
no one on the boards.  The barking of a dog led me at last to the 
only house still occupied, where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass 
the winter alone in this empty theatre.  The place was "The Pacific 
Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort."  Thither, in the warm 
season, crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism, religion, and 
flirtation, which I am willing to think blameless and agreeable.  
The neighbourhood at least is well selected.  The Pacific booms in 
front.  Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse in a 
wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the 
piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise 
in amateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits 
and interests to surprise his brave, old-country rivals.  To the 
east, and still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a 
hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-
gulls.  Such scenes are very similar in different climates; they 
appear homely to the eyes of all; to me this was like a dozen spots 
in Scotland.  And yet the boats that ride in the haven are of 
strange outlandish design; and, if you walk into the hamlet, you 
will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are 
unfamiliar to the memory.  The joss-stick burns, the opium pipe is 
smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured paper - 
prayers, you would say, that had somehow missed their destination - 
and a man guiding his upright pencil from right to left across the 
sheet, writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial Empire.

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this 
seaboard region.  On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not 
smell salt from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the 
resinous tree-tops of the other.  For days together a hot, dry air 
will overhang the town, close as from an oven, yet healthful and 
aromatic in the nostrils.  The cause is not far to seek, for the 
woods are afire, and the hot wind is blowing from the hills.  These 
fires are one of the great dangers of California.  I have seen from 
Monterey as many as three at the same time, by day a cloud of 
smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance.  A 
little thing will start them, and, if the wind be favourable, they 
gallop over miles of country faster than a horse.  The inhabitants 
must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant 
groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally at 
stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry 
up perennial fountains.  California has been a land of promise in 
its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to 
perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.

To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange 
piece of experience.  The fire passes through the underbrush at a 
run.  Every here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from 
root to summit, scattering tufts of flame, and is quenched, it 
seems, as quickly.  But this last is only in semblance.  For after 
this first squib-like conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, 
there remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very 
entrails of the tree.  The resin of the pitch-pine is principally 
condensed at the base of the bole and in the spreading roots.  
Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing flames, which are only as 
the match to the explosion, have already scampered down the wind 
into the distance, the true harm is but beginning for this giant of 
the woods.  You may approach the tree from one side, and see it 
scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently survivor of the 
peril.  Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of the 
column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer; 
while underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are 
being eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the 
fissures to the surface.  A little while, and, without a nod of 
warning, the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground and 
falls prostrate with a crash.  Meanwhile the fire continues its 
silent business; the roots are reduced to a fine ash; and long 
afterwards, if you pass by, you will find the earth pierced with 
radiating galleries, and preserving the design of all these 
subterranean spurs, as though it were the mould for a new tree 
instead of the print of an old one.  These pitch-pines of Monterey 
are, with the single exception of the Monterey cypress, the most 
fantastic of forest trees.  No words can give an idea of the 
contortion of their growth; they might figure without change in a 
circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and at the rate at 
which trees grow, and at which forest fires spring up and gallop 
through the hills of California, we may look forward to a time when 
there will not be one of them left standing in that land of their 
nativity.  At least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but 
perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death; 
while it is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of 
the nobler redwood.  Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills 
of seaboard California may be as bald as Tamalpais.

I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so 
near to lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have 
retained a thrill from the experience.  I wished to be certain 
whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal ornament of 
Californian forests, which blazed up so rapidly when the flame 
first touched the tree.  I suppose I must have been under the 
influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my 
experiment what should I do but walk up to a great pine-tree in a 
portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching, strike 
a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels.  The 
tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a 
roaring pillar of fire.  Close by I could hear the shouts of those 
who were at work combating the original conflagration.  I could see 
the waggon that had brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of 
open; I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through 
the underwood into the sunlight.  Had any one observed the result 
of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff; 
after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been 
run up to convenient bough.

To die for faction is a common evil;
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day.  At night I 
went out of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite 
distinct from the other, and burning as I thought with even greater 
vigour.

But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious 
power upon the climate.  At sunset, for months together, vast, wet, 
melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean.  From the 
hill-top above Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is 
always sad.  The upper air is still bright with sunlight; a glow 
still rests upon the Gabelano Peak; but the fogs are in possession 
of the lower levels; they crawl in scarves among the sandhills; 
they float, a little higher, in clouds of a gigantic size and often 
of a wild configuration; to the south, where they have struck the 
seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they double back 
and spire up skyward like smoke.  Where their shadow touches, 
colour dies out of the world.  The air grows chill and deadly as 
they advance.  The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh, 
and all the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and 
filling their cisterns with the brackish water of the sands.  It 
takes but a little while till the invasion is complete.  The sea, 
in its lighter order, has submerged the earth.  Monterey is 
curtained in for the night in thick, wet, salt, and frigid clouds, 
so to remain till day returns; and before the sun's rays they 
slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom of the 
sea.  And yet often when the fog is thickest and most chill, a few 
steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be dry and 
warm and full of inland perfume.


MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS


The history of Monterey has yet to be written.  Founded by Catholic 
missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of 
arms, a Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from 
another, an American capital when the first House of 
Representatives held its deliberations, and then falling lower and 
lower from the capital of the State to the capital of a county, and 
from that again, by the loss of its charter and town lands, to a 
mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is typical of that of 
all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families in California.

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with 
which the soil has changed-hands.  The Mexicans, you may say, are 
all poor and landless, like their former capital; and yet both it 
and they hold themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs 
and something of their ancient air.

The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets, 
economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which 
were watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent 
up by fissures four or five feet deep.  There were no street 
lights.  Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the 
dangers of the night, for they were often high above the level of 
the roadway, and no one could tell where they would be likely to 
begin or end.  The houses were, for the most part, built of unbaked 
adobe brick, many of them old for so new a country, some of very 
elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls 
so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to the heart.  At 
the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard 
smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the 
chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either 
sex.