We were approaching the end of our long journey. It was the morning of the
twentieth day. At noon we would reach Carson City, the capital of Nevada
Territory. We were not glad, but sorry. It had been a fine pleasure trip;
we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage
life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still and
settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not agreeable, but
on the contrary depressing.
Visibly our new home was a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad
mountains. There was not a tree in sight. There was no vegetation but the
endless sage-brush and greasewood. All nature was gray with it. We were
plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick
clouds and floated across the plain like smoke from a burning house.
We were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the mules, the
mail-bags, the driver—we and the sage-brush and the other scenery
were all one monotonous color. Long trains of freight wagons in the
distance enveloped in ascending masses of dust suggested pictures of
prairies on fire. These teams and their masters were the only life we saw.
Otherwise we moved in the midst of solitude, silence and desolation. Every
twenty steps we passed the skeleton of some dead beast of burthen, with
its dust-coated skin stretched tightly over its empty ribs. Frequently a
solemn raven sat upon the skull or the hips and contemplated the passing
coach with meditative serenity.
By and by Carson City was pointed out to us. It nestled in the edge of a
great plain and was a sufficient number of miles away to look like an
assemblage of mere white spots in the shadow of a grim range of mountains
overlooking it, whose summits seemed lifted clear out of companionship and
consciousness of earthly things.
We arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on. It was a “wooden”
town; its population two thousand souls. The main street consisted of four
or five blocks of little white frame stores which were too high to sit
down on, but not too high for various other purposes; in fact, hardly high
enough. They were packed close together, side by side, as if room were
scarce in that mighty plain.
The sidewalk was of boards that were more or less loose and inclined to
rattle when walked upon. In the middle of the town, opposite the stores,
was the “plaza” which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky
Mountains—a large, unfenced, level vacancy, with a liberty pole in
it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass
meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of the
plaza were faced by stores, offices and stables.
The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering.
We were introduced to several citizens, at the stage-office and on the way
up to the Governor’s from the hotel—among others, to a Mr.
Harris, who was on horseback; he began to say something, but interrupted
himself with the remark:
“I’ll have to get you to excuse me a minute; yonder is the
witness that swore I helped to rob the California coach—a piece of
impertinent intermeddling, sir, for I am not even acquainted with the man.”
Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter, and
the stranger began to explain with another. When the pistols were emptied,
the stranger resumed his work (mending a whip-lash), and Mr. Harris rode
by with a polite nod, homeward bound, with a bullet through one of his
lungs, and several in his hips; and from them issued little rivulets of
blood that coursed down the horse’s sides and made the animal look
quite picturesque. I never saw Harris shoot a man after that but it
recalled to mind that first day in Carson.
This was all we saw that day, for it was two o’clock, now, and
according to custom the daily “Washoe Zephyr” set in; a
soaring dust-drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise
came with it, and the capital of Nevada Territory disappeared from view.
Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting to
new comers; for the vast dust cloud was thickly freckled with things
strange to the upper air—things living and dead, that flitted hither
and thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the
rolling billows of dust—hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the
remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade
lower; door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles
on the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next;
disrupted lumber yards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and
down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of
emigrating roofs and vacant lots.
It was something to see that much. I could have seen more, if I could have
kept the dust out of my eyes.
But seriously a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter. It blows
flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones
like sheet music, now and then blows a stage coach over and spills the
passengers; and tradition says the reason there are so many bald people
there, is, that the wind blows the hair off their heads while they are
looking skyward after their hats. Carson streets seldom look inactive on
Summer afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around
their escaping hats, like chambermaids trying to head off a spider.
The “Washoe Zephyr” (Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevada) is a
peculiar Scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth “whence it cometh.”
That is to say, where it originates. It comes right over the
mountains from the West, but when one crosses the ridge he does not find
any of it on the other side! It probably is manufactured on the
mountain-top for the occasion, and starts from there. It is a pretty
regular wind, in the summer time. Its office hours are from two in the
afternoon till two the next morning; and anybody venturing abroad during
those twelve hours needs to allow for the wind or he will bring up a mile
or two to leeward of the point he is aiming at. And yet the first
complaint a Washoe visitor to San Francisco makes, is that the sea winds
blow so, there! There is a good deal of human nature in that.
We found the state palace of the Governor of Nevada Territory to consist
of a white frame one-story house with two small rooms in it and a
stanchion supported shed in front—for grandeur—it compelled
the respect of the citizen and inspired the Indians with awe. The newly
arrived Chief and Associate Justices of the Territory, and other machinery
of the government, were domiciled with less splendor. They were boarding
around privately, and had their offices in their bedrooms.
The Secretary and I took quarters in the “ranch” of a worthy
French lady by the name of Bridget O’Flannigan, a camp follower of
his Excellency the Governor. She had known him in his prosperity as
commander-in-chief of the Metropolitan Police of New York, and she would
not desert him in his adversity as Governor of Nevada.
Our room was on the lower floor, facing the plaza, and when we had got our
bed, a small table, two chairs, the government fire-proof safe, and the
Unabridged Dictionary into it, there was still room enough left for a
visitor—may be two, but not without straining the walls. But the
walls could stand it—at least the partitions could, for they
consisted simply of one thickness of white “cotton domestic”
stretched from corner to corner of the room. This was the rule in Carson—any
other kind of partition was the rare exception. And if you stood in a dark
room and your neighbors in the next had lights, the shadows on your canvas
told queer secrets sometimes! Very often these partitions were made of old
flour sacks basted together; and then the difference between the common
herd and the aristocracy was, that the common herd had unornamented sacks,
while the walls of the aristocrat were overpowering with rudimental fresco—i.e.,
red and blue mill brands on the flour sacks.
Occasionally, also, the better classes embellished their canvas by pasting
pictures from Harper’s Weekly on them. In many cases, too,
the wealthy and the cultured rose to spittoons and other evidences of a
sumptuous and luxurious taste. [Washoe people take a joke so hard that I
must explain that the above description was only the rule; there were many
honorable exceptions in Carson—plastered ceilings and houses that
had considerable furniture in them.—M. T.]
We had a carpet and a genuine queen’s-ware washbowl. Consequently we
were hated without reserve by the other tenants of the O’Flannigan
“ranch.” When we added a painted oilcloth window curtain, we
simply took our lives into our own hands. To prevent bloodshed I removed
up stairs and took up quarters with the untitled plebeians in one of the
fourteen white pine cot-bedsteads that stood in two long ranks in the one
sole room of which the second story consisted.
It was a jolly company, the fourteen. They were principally voluntary
camp-followers of the Governor, who had joined his retinue by their own
election at New York and San Francisco and came along, feeling that in the
scuffle for little territorial crumbs and offices they could not make
their condition more precarious than it was, and might reasonably expect
to make it better. They were popularly known as the “Irish Brigade,”
though there were only four or five Irishmen among all the Governor’s
retainers.
His good-natured Excellency was much annoyed at the gossip his henchmen
created—especially when there arose a rumor that they were paid
assassins of his, brought along to quietly reduce the democratic vote when
desirable!
Mrs. O’Flannigan was boarding and lodging them at ten dollars a week
apiece, and they were cheerfully giving their notes for it. They were
perfectly satisfied, but Bridget presently found that notes that could not
be discounted were but a feeble constitution for a Carson boarding-house.
So she began to harry the Governor to find employment for the “Brigade.”
Her importunities and theirs together drove him to a gentle desperation at
last, and he finally summoned the Brigade to the presence. Then, said he:
“Gentlemen, I have planned a lucrative and useful service for you—a
service which will provide you with recreation amid noble landscapes, and
afford you never ceasing opportunities for enriching your minds by
observation and study. I want you to survey a railroad from Carson City
westward to a certain point! When the legislature meets I will have the
necessary bill passed and the remuneration arranged.”
“What, a railroad over the Sierra Nevada Mountains?”
“Well, then, survey it eastward to a certain point!”
He converted them into surveyors, chain-bearers and so on, and turned them
loose in the desert. It was “recreation” with a vengeance!
Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sage-brush, under a
sultry sun and among cattle bones, cayotes and tarantulas.
“Romantic adventure” could go no further. They surveyed very
slowly, very deliberately, very carefully. They returned every night
during the first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly.
They brought in great store of prodigious hairy spiders—tarantulas—and
imprisoned them in covered tumblers up stairs in the “ranch.”
After the first week, they had to camp on the field, for they were getting
well eastward. They made a good many inquiries as to the location of that
indefinite “certain point,” but got no information. At last,
to a peculiarly urgent inquiry of “How far eastward?” Governor
Nye telegraphed back:
“To the Atlantic Ocean, blast you!—and then bridge it and go
on!”
This brought back the dusty toilers, who sent in a report and ceased from
their labors. The Governor was always comfortable about it; he said Mrs. O’Flannigan
would hold him for the Brigade’s board anyhow, and he intended to
get what entertainment he could out of the boys; he said, with his
old-time pleasant twinkle, that he meant to survey them into Utah and then
telegraph Brigham to hang them for trespass!
The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite
a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room. Some of these spiders
could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular legs, and
when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the
wickedest-looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish. If their glass
prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up and spoiling for a
fight in a minute. Starchy?—proud? Indeed, they would take up a
straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress. There was as usual a
furious “zephyr” blowing the first night of the brigade’s
return, and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew off, and a
corner of it came crashing through the side of our ranch. There was a
simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the brigade in the
dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the narrow
aisle between the bedrows. In the midst of the turmoil, Bob H——sprung
up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf with his head. Instantly
he shouted:
“Turn out, boys—the tarantulas is loose!”
No warning ever sounded so dreadful. Nobody tried, any longer, to leave
the room, lest he might step on a tarantula. Every man groped for a trunk
or a bed, and jumped on it. Then followed the strangest silence—a
silence of grisly suspense it was, too—waiting, expectancy, fear. It
was as dark as pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those
fourteen scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a
thing could be seen. Then came occasional little interruptions of the
silence, and one could recognize a man and tell his locality by his voice,
or locate any other sound a sufferer made by his gropings or changes of
position. The occasional voices were not given to much speaking—you
simply heard a gentle ejaculation of “Ow!” followed by a solid
thump, and you knew the gentleman had felt a hairy blanket or something
touch his bare skin and had skipped from a bed to the floor. Another
silence. Presently you would hear a gasping voice say:
“Su-su-something’s crawling up the back of my neck!”
Every now and then you could hear a little subdued scramble and a
sorrowful “O Lord!” and then you knew that somebody was
getting away from something he took for a tarantula, and not losing any
time about it, either. Directly a voice in the corner rang out wild and
clear:
“I’ve got him! I’ve got him!” [Pause, and probable
change of circumstances.] “No, he’s got me! Oh, ain’t
they never going to fetch a lantern!”
The lantern came at that moment, in the hands of Mrs. O’Flannigan,
whose anxiety to know the amount of damage done by the assaulting roof had
not prevented her waiting a judicious interval, after getting out of bed
and lighting up, to see if the wind was done, now, up stairs, or had a
larger contract.
The landscape presented when the lantern flashed into the room was
picturesque, and might have been funny to some people, but was not to us.
Although we were perched so strangely upon boxes, trunks and beds, and so
strangely attired, too, we were too earnestly distressed and too genuinely
miserable to see any fun about it, and there was not the semblance of a
smile anywhere visible. I know I am not capable of suffering more than I
did during those few minutes of suspense in the dark, surrounded by those
creeping, bloody-minded tarantulas. I had skipped from bed to bed and from
box to box in a cold agony, and every time I touched anything that was
furzy I fancied I felt the fangs. I had rather go to war than live that
episode over again. Nobody was hurt. The man who thought a tarantula had
“got him” was mistaken—only a crack in a box had caught
his finger. Not one of those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again. There
were ten or twelve of them. We took candles and hunted the place high and
low for them, but with no success. Did we go back to bed then? We did
nothing of the kind. Money could not have persuaded us to do it. We sat up
the rest of the night playing cribbage and keeping a sharp lookout for the
enemy.
