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




Contents

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



CHAPTER I - ACROSS THE PLAINS



LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN 
FRANCISCO


MONDAY. - It was, if I remember rightly, five o'clock when we were 
all signalled to be present at the Ferry Depot of the railroad.  An 
emigrant ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night, 
another on the Sunday morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a 
fourth early on Monday; and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday 
a great part of the passengers from these four ships was 
concentrated on the train by which I was to travel.  There was a 
babel of bewildered men, women, and children.  The wretched little 
booking-office, and the baggage-room, which was not much larger, 
were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the 
atmosphere of dripping clothes.  Open carts full of bedding stood 
by the half-hour in the rain.  The officials loaded each other with 
recriminations.  A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to 
have been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full 
of brimstone, blustering and interfering.  It was plain that the 
whole system, if system there was, had utterly broken down under 
the strain of so many passengers.

My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish man, who 
preserved his head in the midst of this turmoil, got my baggage 
registered, and counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he 
should give me the word to move.  I had taken along with me a small 
valise, a knapsack, which I carried on my shoulders, and in the bag 
of my railway rug the whole of BANCROFT'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED 
STATES, in six fat volumes.  It was as much as I could carry with 
convenience even for short distances, but it insured me plenty of 
clothing, and the valise was at that moment, and often after, 
useful for a stool.  I am sure I sat for an hour in the baggage-
room, and wretched enough it was; yet, when at last the word was 
passed to me and I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was 
only to exchange discomfort for downright misery and danger.

I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill from West 
Street to the river.  It was dark, the wind blew clean through it 
from end to end; and here I found a great block of passengers and 
baggage, hundreds of one and tons of the other.  I feel I shall 
have a difficulty to make myself believed; and certainly the scene 
must have been exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily 
repetition.  It was a tight jam; there was no fair way through the 
mingled mass of brute and living obstruction.  Into the upper 
skirts of the crowd porters, infuriated by hurry and overwork, 
clove their way with shouts.  I may say that we stood like sheep, 
and that the porters charged among us like so many maddened sheep-
dogs; and I believe these men were no longer answerable for their 
acts.  It mattered not what they were carrying, they drove straight 
into the press, and when they could get no farther, blindly 
discharged their barrowful.  With my own hand, for instance, I 
saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother's knee, she 
sitting on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I must suppose 
that there were many similar interpositions in the course of the 
evening.  It will give some idea of the state of mind to which we 
were reduced if I tell you that neither the porter nor the mother 
of the child paid the least attention to my act.  It was not till 
some time after that I understood what I had done myself, for to 
ward off heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural incident of 
human life.  Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition to progress, such 
as one encounters in an evil dream, had utterly daunted the 
spirits.  We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the 
conditions of the world.  For my part, I shivered a little, and my 
back ached wearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear, 
and all the activities of my nature had become tributary to one 
massive sensation of discomfort.

At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess, the 
crowd began to move, heavily straining through itself.  About the 
same time some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden flare over 
the shed.  We were being filtered out into the river boat for 
Jersey City.  You may imagine how slowly this filtering proceeded, 
through the dense, choking crush, every one overladen with packages 
or children, and yet under the necessity of fishing out his ticket 
by the way; but it ended at length for me, and I found myself on 
deck under a flimsy awning and with a trifle of elbow-room to 
stretch and breathe in.  This was on the starboard; for the bulk of 
the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port side, by which we had 
entered.  In vain the seamen shouted to them to move on, and 
threatened them with shipwreck.  These poor people were under a 
spell of stupor, and did not stir a foot.  It rained as heavily as 
ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not 
without danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept 
over the river in the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water 
like a wounded duck, and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated 
steamers running many knots, and heralding their approach by 
strains of music.  The contrast between these pleasure embarkations 
and our own grim vessel, with her list to port and her freight of 
wet and silent emigrants, was of that glaring description which we 
count too obvious for the purposes of art.

The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede.  I had a fixed 
sense of calamity, and to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was 
common to us all.  A panic selfishness, like that produced by fear, 
presided over the disorder of our landing.  People pushed, and 
elbowed, and ran, their families following how they could.  
Children fell, and were picked up to be rewarded by a blow.  One 
child, who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and with 
increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit; an official 
kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to remark her 
distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest.  I was 
so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in 
the hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station, 
so that I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover.  There 
was no waiting-room, no refreshment room; the cars were locked; and 
for at least another hour, or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the 
draughty, gaslit platform.  I sat on my valise, too crushed to 
observe my neighbours; but as they were all cold, and wet, and 
weary, and driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to which we 
had been subjected, I believe they can have been no happier than 
myself.  I bought half-a-dozen oranges from a boy, for oranges and 
nuts were the only refection to be had.  As only two of them had 
even a pretence of juice, I threw the other four under the cars, 
and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and children groping on the 
track after my leavings.

At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, and far 
from dry.  For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed 
my trousers as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my 
blood into the bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour 
to whom I lent the brush, appeared to take the least precaution.  
As they were, they composed themselves to sleep.  I had seen the 
lights of Philadelphia, and been twice ordered to change carriages 
and twice countermanded, before I allowed myself to follow their 
example.

TUESDAY. - When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing 
idle; I was in the last carriage, and, seeing some others strolling 
to and fro about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as 
from a caravan by the wayside.  We were near no station, nor even, 
as far as I could see, within reach of any signal.  A green, open, 
undulating country stretched away upon all sides.  Locust trees and 
a single field of Indian corn gave it a foreign grace and interest; 
but the contours of the land were soft and English.  It was not 
quite England, neither was it quite France; yet like enough either 
to seem natural in my eyes.  And it was in the sky, and not upon 
the earth, that I was surprised to find a change.  Explain it how 
you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the sun rises 
with a different splendour in America and Europe.  There is more 
clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple, 
brown, and smoky orange in those of the new.  It may be from habit, 
but to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the 
latter; it has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset; 
it seems to fit some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as 
though America were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from 
the orient of Aurora and the springs of day.  I thought so then, by 
the railroad side in Pennsylvania, and I have thought so a dozen 
times since in far distant parts of the continent.  If it be an 
illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in which my eyesight is 
accomplice.

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its 
passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the 
engine; and as it was for this we had been waiting, we were 
summoned by the cry of "All aboard!" and went on again upon our 
way.  The whole line, it appeared, was topsy-turvy; an accident at 
midnight having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear.  We paid 
for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that day.  Fruit we 
could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at 
some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale; 
but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at every 
opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow 
my way to the counter.

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day.  There 
was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river 
valleys among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a 
sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon.  It had an inland 
sweetness and variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods, 
rivers, and the delved earth.  These, though in so far a country, 
were airs from home.  I stood on the platform by the hour; and as I 
saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway 
and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in 
the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the 
plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light 
dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface, 
I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who 
had come into a rich estate.  And when I had asked the name of a 
river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the 
Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of 
the beauty of the land.  As when Adam with divine fitness named the 
creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the 
fancy.  That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining 
river and desirable valley.

None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special 
pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world 
where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque 
as the United States of America.  All times, races, and languages 
have brought their contribution.  Pekin is in the same State with 
Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky.  Chelsea, with its 
London associations of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King's 
Road, is own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there they 
have their seat, translated names of cities, where the Mississippi 
runs by Tennessee and Arkansas; and both, while I was crossing the 
continent, lay, watched by armed men, in the horror and isolation 
of a plague.  Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrowhead 
under a steam factory, below anglified New York.  The names of the 
States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most 
romantic vocables:  Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, 
Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a 
nobler music for the ear:  a songful, tuneful land; and if the new 
Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his verse will be 
enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states 
and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.

Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg.  
I had now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with 
her children; these I was to watch over providentially for a 
certain distance farther on the way; but as I found she was 
furnished with a basket of eatables, I left her in the waiting-room 
to seek a dinner for myself.  I mention this meal, not only because 
it was the first of which I had partaken for about thirty hours, 
but because it was the means of my first introduction to a coloured 
gentleman.  He did me the honour to wait upon me after a fashion, 
while I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture marched 
me farther into the country of surprise.  He was indeed strikingly 
unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels 
of my youth.  Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but of 
a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd 
foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with 
manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their 
parallel in England.  A butler perhaps rides as high over the 
unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort of 
sighing patience which one is often moved to admire.  And again, 
the abstract butler never stoops to familiarity.  But the coloured 
gentleman will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar like an 
upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like Prince Hal with 
Poins and Falstaff.  He makes himself at home and welcome.  Indeed, 
I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout that supper 
much as, with us, a young, free, and not very self-respecting 
master might behave to a good-looking chambermaid.  I had come 
prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove 
in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice 
of race; but I assure you I put my patronage away for another 
occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that result.

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of 
etiquette:  if one should offer to tip the American waiter?  
Certainly not, he told me.  Never.  It would not do.  They 
considered themselves too highly to accept.  They would even resent 
the offer.  As for him and me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant 
conversation; he, in particular, had found much pleasure in my 
society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one of those rare 
conjunctures....  Without being very clear seeing, I can still 
perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly 
pocketed a quarter.

WEDNESDAY. - A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and 
orphans on board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio.  
This had early been a favourite home of my imagination; I have 
played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport 
there with a dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched.  My 
preference was founded on a work which appeared in CASSELL'S FAMILY 
PAPER, and was read aloud to me by my nurse.  It narrated the 
doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter, 
very obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir 
Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him.  The idea 
of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a 
baronet, was one which my mind rejected.  It offended 
verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and 
others to escape from uninhabited islands.

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it.  We were now on those 
great plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains.  The 
country was flat like Holland, but far from being dull.  All 
through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw 
of them from the train and in my waking moments, it was rich and 
various, and breathed an elegance peculiar to itself.  The tall 
corn pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in themselves, and 
framed the plain into long, aerial vistas; and the clean, bright, 
gardened townships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer 
evenings on the stoop.  It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am 
afraid, not unfrequented by the devil.  That morning dawned with 
such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not 
perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the 
heart and seemed to travel with the blood.  Day came in with a 
shudder.  White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as 
we see them more often on a lake; and though the sun had soon 
dispersed and drunk them up, leaving an atmosphere of fever heat 
and crystal pureness from horizon to horizon, the mists had still 
been there, and we knew that this paradise was haunted by killing 
damps and foul malaria.  The fences along the line bore but two 
descriptions of advertisement; one to recommend tobaccos, and the 
other to vaunt remedies against the ague.  At the point of day, and 
while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the 
state, who had got in at some way station, pronounced it, with a 
doctoral air, "a fever and ague morning."

The Dutch widow was a person of some character.  She had conceived 
at first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she 
was at no pains to conceal.  But being a woman of a practical 
spirit, she made no difficulty about accepting my attentions, and 
encouraged me to buy her children fruits and candies, to carry all 
her parcels, and even to sleep upon the floor that she might profit 
by my empty seat.  Nay, she was such a rattle by nature, and, so 
powerfully moved to autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for 
want of a better, to take me into confidence and tell me the story 
of her life.  I heard about her late husband, who seemed to have 
made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays.  
I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of her 
fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and a variety of 
particular matters that are not usually disclosed except to 
friends.  At one station, she shook up her children to look at a 
man on the platform and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me 
she explained how she had been keeping company with this Mr. Z., 
how far matters had proceeded, and how it was because of his 
desistance that she was now travelling to the West.  Then, when I 
was thus put in possession of the facts, she asked my judgment on 
that type of manly beauty.  I admired it to her heart's content.  
She was not, I think, remarkably veracious in talk, but broidered 
as fancy prompted, and built castles in the air out of her past; 
yet she had that sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these 
confidences, steadily aware of her aversion.  Her parting words 
were ingeniously honest.  "I am sure," said she, "we all OUGHT to 
be very much obliged to you."  I cannot pretend that she put me at 
my ease; but I had a certain respect for such a genuine dislike.  A 
poor nature would have slipped, in the course of these 
familiarities, into a sort of worthless toleration for me.

We reached Chicago in the evening.  I was turned out of the cars, 
bundled into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the 
station of a different railroad.  Chicago seemed a great and gloomy 
city.  I remember having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards 
its restoration at the period of the fire; and now when I beheld 
street after street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable 
burghers, I thought it would be a graceful act for the corporation 
to refund that sixpence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a 
cheerful dinner.  But there was no word of restitution.  I was that 
city's benefactor, yet I was received in a third-class waiting-
room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of ham and eggs at 
my own expense.

I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in 
Chicago.  When it was time to start, I descended the platform like 
a man in a dream.  It was a long train, lighted from end to end; 
and car after car, as I came up with it, was not only filled but 
overflowing.  My valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six 
ponderous tomes of Bancroft, weighed me double; I was hot, 
feverish, painfully athirst; and there was a great darkness over 
me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by gas.  When at last 
I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle of rags, the 
world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my consciousness 
dwindled within me to a mere pin's head, like a taper on a foggy 
night.

When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat 
down beside me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman, 
somewhat gone in drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the 
dozen, as they say.  I did my best to keep up the conversation; for 
it seemed to me dimly as if something depended upon that.  I heard 
him relate, among many other things, that there were pickpockets on 
the train, who had already robbed a man of forty dollars and a 
return ticket; but though I caught the words, I do not think I 
properly understood the sense until next morning; and I believe I 
replied at the time that I was very glad to hear it.  What else he 
talked about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of words, 
his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was highly 
explanatory:  but no more.  And I suppose I must have shown my 
confusion very plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me 
like one who has conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in German, 
supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar with the English tongue; 
and finally, in despair, he rose and left me.  I felt chagrined; 
but my fatigue was too crushing for delay, and, stretching myself 
as far as that was possible upon the bench, I was received at once 
into a dreamless stupor.

The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the 
suburbs after a DINER FIN, and was bent on entertainment while the 
journey lasted.  Having failed with me, he pitched next upon 
another emigrant, who had come through from Canada, and was not one 
jot less weary than myself.  Nay, even in a natural state, as I 
found next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy, 
uncommunicative man.  After trying him on different topics, it 
appears that the little German gentleman flounced into a temper, 
swore an oath or two, and departed from that car in quest of 
livelier society.  Poor little gentleman!  I suppose he thought an 
emigrant should be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a flask 
of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the moments 
of digestion.

THURSDAY. - I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of 
travelling, for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed 
in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk, 
and coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi.  
Another long day's ride followed, with but one feature worthy of 
remark.  At a place called Creston, a drunken man got in.  He was 
aggressively friendly, but, according to English notions, not at 
all unpresentable upon a train.  For one stage he eluded the notice 
of the officials; but just as we were beginning to move out of the 
next station, Cromwell by name, by came the conductor.  There was a 
word or two of talk; and then the official had the man by the 
shoulders, twitched him from his seat, marched him through the car, 
and sent him flying on to the track.  It was done in three motions, 
as exact as a piece of drill.  The train was still moving slowly, 
although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his feet 
without a fall.  He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his 
cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand, 
while the other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys.  It 
was the first indication that I had come among revolvers, and I 
observed it with some emotion.  The conductor stood on the steps 
with one hand on his hip, looking back at him; and perhaps this 
attitude imposed upon the creature, for he turned without further 
ado, and went off staggering along the track towards Cromwell 
followed by a peal of laughter from the cars.  They were speaking 
English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign land.

Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the 
Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank 
of the Missouri river.  Here we were to stay the night at a kind of 
caravanserai, set apart for emigrants.  But I gave way to a thirst 
for luxury, separated myself from my companions, and marched with 
my effects into the Union Pacific Hotel.  A white clerk and a 
coloured gentleman whom, in my plain European way, I should call 
the boots, were installed behind a counter like bank tellers.  They 
took my name, assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with my 
packages.  And here came the tug of war.  I wished to give up my 
packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish to go to bed.  And 
this, it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel.

It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my 
unfamiliarity with the language.  For although two nations use the 
same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by 
the dictionary.  The business of life is not carried on by words, 
but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang 
signification.  Some international obscurity prevailed between me 
and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs; so that what I was 
asking, which seemed very natural to me, appeared to him a 
monstrous exigency.  He refused, and that with the plainness of the 
West.  This American manner of conducting matters of business is, 
at first, highly unpalatable to the European.  When we approach a 
man in the way of his calling, and for those services by which he 
earns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hired 
servant.  But in the American opinion, two gentlemen meet and have 
a friendly talk with a view to exchanging favours if they shall 
agree to please.  I know not which is the more convenient, nor even 
which is the more truly courteous.  The English stiffness 
unfortunately tends to be continued after the particular 
transaction is at an end, and thus favours class separations.  But 
on the other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses leave an open 
field for the insolence of Jack-in-office.

I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's refusal, and unbuttoned 
my wrath under the similitude of ironical submission.  I knew 
nothing, I said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had no 
desire to give trouble.  If there was nothing for it but to get to 
bed immediately, let him say the word, and though it was not my 
habit, I should cheerfully obey.

He burst into a shout of laughter.  "Ah!" said he, "you do not know 
about America.  They are fine people in America.  Oh! you will like 
them very well.  But you mustn't get mad.  I know what you want.  
You come along with me."

And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the arm like 
an old acquaintance, he led me to the bar of the hotel.

"There," said he, pushing me from him by the shoulder, "go and have 
a drink!"


THE EMIGRANT TRAIN


All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might 
meet with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table.  
I had been but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once 
more, and put apart with my fellows.  It was about two in the 
afternoon of Friday that I found myself in front of the Emigrant 
House, with more than a hundred others, to be sorted and boxed for 
the journey.  A white-haired official, with a stick under one arm, 
and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front of us, and 
called name after name in the tone of a command.  At each name you 
would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run for the 
hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon 
concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children.  
The second or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men 
travelling alone, and the third to the Chinese.  The official was 
easily moved to anger at the least delay; but the emigrants were 
both quick at answering their names, and speedy in getting 
themselves and their effects on board.

The families once housed, we men carried the second car without 
ceremony by simultaneous assault.  I suppose the reader has some 
notion of an American railroad-car, that long, narrow wooden box, 
like a flat-roofed Noah's ark, with a stove and a convenience, one 
at either end, a passage down the middle, and transverse benches 
upon either hand.  Those destined for emigrants on the Union 
Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme plainness, nothing 
but wood entering in any part into their constitution, and for the 
usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed but a 
dying glimmer even while they burned.  The benches are too short 
for anything but a young child.  Where there is scarce elbow-room 
for two to sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie.  
Hence the company, or rather, as it appears from certain bills 
about the Transfer Station, the company's servants, have conceived 
a plan for the better accommodation of travellers.  They prevail on 
every two to chum together.  To each of the chums they sell a board 
and three square cushions stuffed with straw, and covered with thin 
cotton.  The benches can be made to face each other in pairs, for 
the backs are reversible.  On the approach of night the boards are 
laid from bench to bench, making a couch wide enough for two, and 
long enough for a man of the middle height; and the chums lie down 
side by side upon the cushions with the head to the conductor's van 
and the feet to the engine.  When the train is full, of course this 
plan is impossible, for there must not be more than one to every 
bench, neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree.  It 
was to bring about this last condition that our white-haired 
official now bestirred himself.  He made a most active master of 
ceremonies, introducing likely couples, and even guaranteeing the 
amiability and honesty of each.  The greater the number of happy 
couples the better for his pocket, for it was he who sold the raw 
material of the beds.  His price for one board and three straw 
cushions began with two dollars and a half; but before the train 
left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I had purchased mine, it 
had fallen to one dollar and a half.

The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some 
ladies, I showed myself too eager for union at any price; but 
certainly the first who was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined 
the honour without thanks.  He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man, 
I think from Yankeeland, looked me all over with great timidity, 
and then began to excuse himself in broken phrases.  He didn't know 
the young man, he said.  The young man might be very honest, but 
how was he to know that?  There was another young man whom he had 
met already in the train; he guessed he was honest, and would 
prefer to chum with him upon the whole.  All this without any sort 
of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent.  I began to 
tremble lest every one should refuse my company, and I be left 
rejected.  But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed, 
small-headed, curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly 
smartness in his manner.  To be exact, he had acquired it in the 
navy.  But that was all one; he had at least been trained to 
desperate resolves, so he accepted the match, and the white-haired 
swindler pronounced the connubial benediction, and pocketed his 
fees.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train.  I am 
afraid to say how many baggage-waggons followed the engine, 
certainly a score; then came the Chinese, then we, then the 
families, and the rear was brought up by the conductor in what, if 
I have it rightly, is called his caboose.  The class to which I 
belonged was of course far the largest, and we ran over, so to 
speak, to both sides; so that there were some Caucasians among the 
Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families.  But our own car 
was pure from admixture, save for one little boy of eight or nine 
who had the whooping-cough.  At last, about six, the long train 
crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri 
river to Omaha, westward bound.

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars.  There was 
thunder in the air, which helped to keep us restless.  A man played 
many airs upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to, 
until he came to "Home, sweet home."  It was truly strange to note 
how the talk ceased at that, and the faces began to lengthen.  I 
have no idea whether musically this air is to be considered good or 
bad; but it belongs to that class of art which may be best 
described as a brutal assault upon the feelings.  Pathos must be 
relieved by dignity of treatment.  If you wallow naked in the 
pathetic, like the author of "Home, sweet home," you make your 
hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are 
moved, they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their 
weakness.  It did not come to tears that night, for the experiment 
was interrupted.  An elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard 
and about as much appearance of sentiment an you would expect from 
a retired slaver, turned with a start and bade the performer stop 
that "damned thing."  "I've heard about enough of that," he added; 
"give us something about the good country we're going to."  A 
murmur of adhesion ran round the car; the performer took the 
instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded, and then struck into 
a dancing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled immediately 
the emotion he had raised.

The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who 
got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern 
platform, singing "The Sweet By-and-bye" with very tuneful voices; 
the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the 
business of the day were at an end.  But it was not so; for, the 
train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged 
with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens, some of 
them in little more than nightgear, some with stable lanterns, and 
all offering beds for sale.  Their charge began with twenty-five 
cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went on again, to 
fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of what 
I had paid for mine at the Transfer.  This is my contribution to 
the economy of future emigrants.

A great personage on an American train is the newsboy.  He sells 
books (such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on 
emigrant journeys, soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee 
pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or 
beans and bacon.  Early next morning the newsboy went around the 
cars, and chumming on a more extended principle became the order of 
the hour.  It requires but a copartnery of two to manage beds; but 
washing and eating can be carried on most economically by a 
syndicate of three.  I myself entered a little after sunrise into 
articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of Pennsylvania, 
Shakespeare, and Dubuque.  Shakespeare was my own nickname on the 
cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of a 
place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going 
west to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly 
chewing or smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together.  I 
have never seen tobacco so sillily abused.  Shakespeare bought a 
tin washing-dish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of 
soap.  The partners used these instruments, one after another, 
according to the order of their first awaking; and when the firm 
had finished there was no want of borrowers.  Each filled the tin 
dish at the water filter opposite the stove, and retired with the 
whole stock in trade to the platform of the car.  There he knelt 
down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork or one 
elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash his face 
and neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the train is 
moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.

On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania, 
Shakespeare, and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar, 
and necessary vessels; and their operations are a type of what went 
on through all the cars.  Before the sun was up the stove would be 
brightly burning; at the first station the natives would come on 
board with milk and eggs and coffee cakes; and soon from end to end 
the car would be filled with little parties breakfasting upon the 
bed-boards.  It was the pleasantest hour of the day.

There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside:  a breakfast 
in the morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven and two, and 
supper from five to eight or nine at night.  We had rarely less 
than twenty minutes for each; and if we had not spent many another 
twenty minutes waiting for some express upon a side track among 
miles of desert, we might have taken an hour to each repast and 
arrived at San Francisco up to time.  For haste is not the foible 
of an emigrant train.  It gets through on sufferance, running the 
gauntlet among its more considerable brethren; should there be a 
block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they cannot, in 
consequence, predict the length of the passage within a day or so.  
Civility is the main comfort that you miss.  Equality, though 
conceived very largely in America, does not extend so low down as 
to an emigrant.  Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of  "All 
aboard!" recalls the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as 
I was alone with emigrants, and from the Transfer all the way to 
San Francisco, I found this ceremony was pretermitted; the train 
stole from the station without note of warning, and you had to keep 
an eye upon it even while you ate.  The annoyance is considerable, 
and the disrespect both wanton and petty.

Many conductors, again, will hold no communication with an 
emigrant.  I asked a conductor one day at what time the train would 
stop for dinner; as he made no answer I repeated the question, with 
a like result; a third time I returned to the charge, and then 
Jack-in-office looked me coolly in the face for several seconds and 
turned ostentatiously away.  I believe he was half ashamed of his 
brutality; for when another person made the same inquiry, although 
he still refused the information, he condescended to answer, and 
even to justify his reticence in a voice loud enough for me to 
hear.  It was, he said, his principle not to tell people where they 
were to dine; for one answer led to many other questions, as what 
o'clock it was? or, how soon should we be there? and he could not 
afford to be eternally worried.

As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities, a great deal 
of your comfort depends on the character of the newsboy.  He has it 
in his power indefinitely to better and brighten the emigrant's 
lot.  The newsboy with whom we started from the Transfer was a 
dark, bullying, contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us 
like dogs.  Indeed, in his case, matters came nearly to a fight.  
It happened thus:  he was going his rounds through the cars with 
some commodities for sale, and coming to a party who were at SEVEN-
UP or CASCINO (our two games), upon a bed-board, slung down a 
cigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking one man's hand to 
the floor.  It was the last straw.  In a moment the whole party 
were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, and he was ordered to 
"get out of that directly, or he would get more than he reckoned 
for." The fellow grumbled and muttered, but ended by making off, 
and was less openly insulting in the future.  On the other hand, 
the lad who rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento 
made himself the friend of all, and helped us with information, 
attention, assistance, and a kind countenance.  He told us where 
and when we should have our meals, and how long the train would 
stop; kept seats at table for those who were delayed, and watched 
that we should neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily 
hurried.  You, who live at home at ease, can hardly realise the 
greatness of this service, even had it stood alone.  When I think 
of that lad coming and going, train after train, with his bright 
face and civil words, I see how easily a good man may become the 
benefactor of his kind.  Perhaps he is discontented with himself, 
perhaps troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a 
hero of the old Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning 
a profit of a few cents, and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a 
man's work, and bettering the world.

I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy.  I 
tell it because it gives so good an example of that uncivil 
kindness of the American, which is perhaps their most bewildering 
character to one newly landed.  It was immediately after I had left 
the emigrant train; and I am told I looked like a man at death's 
door, so much had this long journey shaken me.  I sat at the end of 
a car, and the catch being broken, and myself feverish and sick, I 
had to hold the door open with my foot for the sake of air.  In 
this attitude my leg debarred the newsboy from his box of 
merchandise.  I made haste to let him pass when I observed that he 
was coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once or twice he 
came upon me unawares.  On these occasions he most rudely struck my 
foot aside; and though I myself apologised, as if to show him the 
way, he answered me never a word.  I chafed furiously, and I fear 
the next time it would have come to words.  But suddenly I felt a 
touch upon my shoulder, and a large juicy pear was put into my 
hand.  It was the newsboy, who had observed that I was looking ill, 
and so made me this present out of a tender heart.  For the rest of 
the journey I was petted like a sick child; he lent me newspapers, 
thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on their sale, and 
came repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up.


THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA


It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday 
without a cloud.  We were at sea - there is no other adequate 
expression - on the plains of Nebraska.  I made my observatory on 
the top of a fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to 
spy about me, and to spy in vain for something new.  It was a world 
almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and 
back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a 
cue across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran 
till it touched the skirts of heaven.  Along the track innumerable 
wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed in a 
continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at 
all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and again we might 
perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more 
distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, and 
then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their 
surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board.  
The train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one 
thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to 
assume in our regard.  It seemed miles in length, and either end of 
it within but a step of the horizon.  Even my own body or my own 
head seemed a great thing in that emptiness.  I note the feeling 
the more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in 
the experience of others.  Day and night, above the roar of the 
train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of 
grasshoppers - a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and 
watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that land.

To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration 
in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery 
of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line 
of the horizon.  Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness 
of those who passed by there in old days, at the foot's pace of 
oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that 
unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily 
fled them by an equal stride.  They had nothing, it would seem, to 
overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for 
repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, only the dead 
green waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon.  But the 
eye, as I have been told, found differences even here; and at the 
worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of his toil.  
It is the settlers, after all, at whom we have a right to marvel.  
Our consciousness, by which we live, is itself but the creature of 
variety.  Upon what food does it subsist in such a land?  What 
livelihood can repay a human creature for a life spent in this huge 
sameness?  He is cut off from books, from news, from company, from 
all that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs.  
A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that he can hope.  
He may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and it is as though he 
had not moved; twenty, and still he is in the midst of the same 
great level, and has approached no nearer to the one object within 
view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with his advance.  We are 
full at home of the question of agreeable wall-papers, and wise 
people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative 
surroundings.  But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler?  
His is a wall-paper with a vengeance - one quarter of the universe 
laid bare in all its gauntness.

His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of 
the visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it is 
tortured by distance; yet there is no rest or shelter till the man 
runs into his cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at 
hand.  Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these 
empty plains.

Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadae, summer and winter, cattle, 
wife and family, the settler may create a full and various 
existence.  One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in 
every way superior to her lot.  This was a woman who boarded us at 
a way station, selling milk.  She was largely formed; her features 
were more than comely; she had that great rarity - a fine 
complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind, dark, and 
steady.  She sold milk with patriarchal grace.  There was not a 
line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, 
but spoke of an entire contentment with her life.  It would have 
been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman.  Yet the place where 
she lived was to me almost ghastly.  Less than a dozen wooden 
houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted 
along the railway lines.  Each stood apart in its own lot.  Each 
opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it were a billiard-
board indeed, and these only models that had been set down upon it 
ready made.  Her own, into which I looked, was clean but very 
empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire.  This 
extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a 
strong impression of artificiality.  With none of the litter and 
discoloration of human life; with the paths unworn, and the houses 
still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely 
scenic.  The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of reality; and 
it seems incredible that life can go on with so few properties, or 
the great child, man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom.

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at 
least it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely 
civilised.  At North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man 
asked another to pass the milk-jug.  This other was well-dressed 
and of what we should call a respectable appearance; a darkish man, 
high spoken, eating as though he had some usage of society; but he 
turned upon the first speaker with extraordinary vehemence of tone 
-

"There's a waiter here!" he cried.

"I only asked you to pass the milk," explained the first.

Here is the retort verbatim -

"Pass!  Hell!  I'm not paid for that business; the waiter's paid 
for it.  You should use civility at table, and, by God, I'll show 
you how!"

The other man very wisely made no answer, and the bully went on 
with his supper as though nothing had occurred.  It pleases me to 
think that some day soon he will meet with one of his own kidney; 
and that perhaps both may fall.