As the sun went down and the evening chill came on, we made preparation
for bed. We stirred up the hard leather letter-sacks, and the knotty
canvas bags of printed matter (knotty and uneven because of projecting
ends and corners of magazines, boxes and books). We stirred them up and
redisposed them in such a way as to make our bed as level as possible. And
we did improve it, too, though after all our work it had an
upheaved and billowy look about it, like a little piece of a stormy sea.
Next we hunted up our boots from odd nooks among the mail-bags where they
had settled, and put them on. Then we got down our coats, vests,
pantaloons and heavy woolen shirts, from the arm-loops where they had been
swinging all day, and clothed ourselves in them—for, there being no
ladies either at the stations or in the coach, and the weather being hot,
we had looked to our comfort by stripping to our underclothing, at nine o’clock
in the morning. All things being now ready, we stowed the uneasy
Dictionary where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the
water-canteens and pistols where we could find them in the dark. Then we
smoked a final pipe, and swapped a final yarn; after which, we put the
pipes, tobacco and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the
mail-bags, and then fastened down the coach curtains all around, and made
the place as “dark as the inside of a cow,” as the conductor
phrased it in his picturesque way. It was certainly as dark as any place
could be—nothing was even dimly visible in it. And finally, we
rolled ourselves up like silk-worms, each person in his own blanket, and
sank peacefully to sleep.
Whenever the stage stopped to change horses, we would wake up, and try to
recollect where we were—and succeed—and in a minute or two the
stage would be off again, and we likewise. We began to get into country,
now, threaded here and there with little streams. These had high, steep
banks on each side, and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up
the other, our party inside got mixed somewhat. First we would all be down
in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture,
and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads.
And we would sprawl and kick, too, and ward off ends and corners of mail-
bags that came lumbering over us and about us; and as the dust rose from
the tumult, we would all sneeze in chorus, and the majority of us would
grumble, and probably say some hasty thing, like: “Take your elbow
out of my ribs!—can’t you quit crowding?”
Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the
Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged
somebody. One trip it “barked” the Secretary’s elbow;
the next trip it hurt me in the stomach, and the third it tilted Bemis’s
nose up till he could look down his nostrils—he said. The pistols
and coin soon settled to the bottom, but the pipes, pipe-stems, tobacco
and canteens clattered and floundered after the Dictionary every time it
made an assault on us, and aided and abetted the book by spilling tobacco
in our eyes, and water down our backs.
Still, all things considered, it was a very comfortable night. It wore
gradually away, and when at last a cold gray light was visible through the
puckers and chinks in the curtains, we yawned and stretched with
satisfaction, shed our cocoons, and felt that we had slept as much as was
necessary. By and by, as the sun rose up and warmed the world, we pulled
off our clothes and got ready for breakfast. We were just pleasantly in
time, for five minutes afterward the driver sent the weird music of his
bugle winding over the grassy solitudes, and presently we detected a low
hut or two in the distance. Then the rattling of the coach, the clatter of
our six horses’ hoofs, and the driver’s crisp commands, awoke
to a louder and stronger emphasis, and we went sweeping down on the
station at our smartest speed. It was fascinating—that old overland
stagecoaching.
We jumped out in undress uniform. The driver tossed his gathered reins out
on the ground, gaped and stretched complacently, drew off his heavy
buckskin gloves with great deliberation and insufferable dignity—taking
not the slightest notice of a dozen solicitous inquires after his health,
and humbly facetious and flattering accostings, and obsequious tenders of
service, from five or six hairy and half-civilized station-keepers and
hostlers who were nimbly unhitching our steeds and bringing the fresh team
out of the stables—for in the eyes of the stage-driver of that day,
station-keepers and hostlers were a sort of good enough low creatures,
useful in their place, and helping to make up a world, but not the kind of
beings which a person of distinction could afford to concern himself with;
while, on the contrary, in the eyes of the station-keeper and the hostler,
the stage-driver was a hero—a great and shining dignitary, the world’s
favorite son, the envy of the people, the observed of the nations. When
they spoke to him they received his insolent silence meekly, and as being
the natural and proper conduct of so great a man; when he opened his lips
they all hung on his words with admiration (he never honored a particular
individual with a remark, but addressed it with a broad generality to the
horses, the stables, the surrounding country and the human
underlings); when he discharged a facetious insulting personality at a
hostler, that hostler was happy for the day; when he uttered his one jest—old
as the hills, coarse, profane, witless, and inflicted on the same
audience, in the same language, every time his coach drove up there—the
varlets roared, and slapped their thighs, and swore it was the best thing
they’d ever heard in all their lives. And how they would fly around
when he wanted a basin of water, a gourd of the same, or a light for his
pipe!—but they would instantly insult a passenger if he so far
forgot himself as to crave a favor at their hands. They could do that sort
of insolence as well as the driver they copied it from—for, let it
be borne in mind, the overland driver had but little less contempt for his
passengers than he had for his hostlers.
The hostlers and station-keepers treated the really powerful conductor
of the coach merely with the best of what was their idea of civility, but
the driver was the only being they bowed down to and worshipped.
How admiringly they would gaze up at him in his high seat as he gloved
himself with lingering deliberation, while some happy hostler held the
bunch of reins aloft, and waited patiently for him to take it! And how
they would bombard him with glorifying ejaculations as he cracked his long
whip and went careering away.
The station buildings were long, low huts, made of sundried, mud-colored
bricks, laid up without mortar (adobes, the Spaniards call these
bricks, and Americans shorten it to ’dobies). The roofs,
which had no slant to them worth speaking of, were thatched and then
sodded or covered with a thick layer of earth, and from this sprung a
pretty rank growth of weeds and grass. It was the first time we had ever
seen a man’s front yard on top of his house. The building consisted
of barns, stable-room for twelve or fifteen horses, and a hut for an
eating-room for passengers. This latter had bunks in it for the
station-keeper and a hostler or two. You could rest your elbow on its
eaves, and you had to bend in order to get in at the door. In place of a
window there was a square hole about large enough for a man to crawl
through, but this had no glass in it. There was no flooring, but the
ground was packed hard. There was no stove, but the fire-place served all
needful purposes. There were no shelves, no cupboards, no closets. In a
corner stood an open sack of flour, and nestling against its base were a
couple of black and venerable tin coffee-pots, a tin teapot, a little bag
of salt, and a side of bacon.
By the door of the station-keeper’s den, outside, was a tin
wash-basin, on the ground. Near it was a pail of water and a piece of
yellow bar soap, and from the eaves hung a hoary blue woolen shirt,
significantly—but this latter was the station-keeper’s private
towel, and only two persons in all the party might venture to use it—the
stage-driver and the conductor. The latter would not, from a sense of
decency; the former would not, because he did not choose to encourage the
advances of a station-keeper. We had towels—in the valise; they
might as well have been in Sodom and Gomorrah. We (and the conductor) used
our handkerchiefs, and the driver his pantaloons and sleeves. By the door,
inside, was fastened a small old-fashioned looking-glass frame, with two
little fragments of the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it.
This arrangement afforded a pleasant double-barreled portrait of you when
you looked into it, with one half of your head set up a couple of inches
above the other half. From the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a
string—but if I had to describe that patriarch or die, I believe I
would order some sample coffins.
It had come down from Esau and Samson, and had been accumulating hair ever
since—along with certain impurities. In one corner of the room stood
three or four rifles and muskets, together with horns and pouches of
ammunition. The station-men wore pantaloons of coarse, country-woven
stuff, and into the seat and the inside of the legs were sewed ample
additions of buckskin, to do duty in place of leggings, when the man rode
horseback—so the pants were half dull blue and half yellow, and
unspeakably picturesque. The pants were stuffed into the tops of high
boots, the heels whereof were armed with great Spanish spurs, whose little
iron clogs and chains jingled with every step. The man wore a huge beard
and mustachios, an old slouch hat, a blue woolen shirt, no suspenders, no
vest, no coat—in a leathern sheath in his belt, a great long “navy”
revolver (slung on right side, hammer to the front), and projecting from
his boot a horn-handled bowie-knife.
The furniture of the hut was neither gorgeous nor much in the way. The
rocking-chairs and sofas were not present, and never had been, but they
were represented by two three-legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet
long, and two empty candle-boxes. The table was a greasy board on stilts,
and the table-cloth and napkins had not come—and they were not
looking for them, either. A battered tin platter, a knife and fork, and a
tin pint cup, were at each man’s place, and the driver had a
queens-ware saucer that had seen better days. Of course this duke sat at
the head of the table. There was one isolated piece of table furniture
that bore about it a touching air of grandeur in misfortune. This was the
caster. It was German silver, and crippled and rusty, but it was so
preposterously out of place there that it was suggestive of a tattered
exiled king among barbarians, and the majesty of its native position
compelled respect even in its degradation.
There was only one cruet left, and that was a stopperless, fly-specked,
broken-necked thing, with two inches of vinegar in it, and a dozen
preserved flies with their heels up and looking sorry they had invested
there.
The station-keeper upended a disk of last week’s bread, of the shape
and size of an old-time cheese, and carved some slabs from it which were
as good as Nicholson pavement, and tenderer.
He sliced off a piece of bacon for each man, but only the experienced old
hands made out to eat it, for it was condemned army bacon which the United
States would not feed to its soldiers in the forts, and the stage company
had bought it cheap for the sustenance of their passengers and employees.
We may have found this condemned army bacon further out on the plains than
the section I am locating it in, but we found it—there is no
gainsaying that.
Then he poured for us a beverage which he called “Slumgullion,”
and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really
pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old
bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler.
He had no sugar and no milk—not even a spoon to stir the ingredients
with.
We could not eat the bread or the meat, nor drink the “slumgullion.”
And when I looked at that melancholy vinegar-cruet, I thought of the
anecdote (a very, very old one, even at that day) of the traveler who sat
down to a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of
mustard. He asked the landlord if this was all. The landlord said:
“All! Why, thunder and lightning, I should think there was
mackerel enough there for six.”
“But I don’t like mackerel.”
“Oh—then help yourself to the mustard.”
In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but there
was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor out of
it.
Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle.
I tasted and smelt, and said I would take coffee, I believed. The
station-boss stopped dead still, and glared at me speechless. At last,
when he came to, he turned away and said, as one who communes with himself
upon a matter too vast to grasp:
“Coffee! Well, if that don’t go clean ahead of me, I’m
d——d!”
We could not eat, and there was no conversation among the hostlers and
herdsmen—we all sat at the same board. At least there was no
conversation further than a single hurried request, now and then, from one
employee to another. It was always in the same form, and always gruffly
friendly. Its western freshness and novelty startled me, at first, and
interested me; but it presently grew monotonous, and lost its charm. It
was:
“Pass the bread, you son of a skunk!” No, I forget—skunk
was not the word; it seems to me it was still stronger than that; I know
it was, in fact, but it is gone from my memory, apparently. However, it is
no matter—probably it was too strong for print, anyway. It is the
landmark in my memory which tells me where I first encountered the
vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains.
We gave up the breakfast, and paid our dollar apiece and went back to our
mail-bag bed in the coach, and found comfort in our pipes. Right here we
suffered the first diminution of our princely state. We left our six fine
horses and took six mules in their place. But they were wild Mexican
fellows, and a man had to stand at the head of each of them and hold him
fast while the driver gloved and got himself ready. And when at last he
grasped the reins and gave the word, the men sprung suddenly away from the
mules’ heads and the coach shot from the station as if it had issued
from a cannon. How the frantic animals did scamper! It was a fierce and
furious gallop—and the gait never altered for a moment till we
reeled off ten or twelve miles and swept up to the next collection of
little station-huts and stables.
So we flew along all day. At 2 P.M. the belt of timber that fringes the
North Platte and marks its windings through the vast level floor of the
Plains came in sight. At 4 P.M. we crossed a branch of the river, and at 5
P.M. we crossed the Platte itself, and landed at Fort Kearney, fifty-six
hours out from St. Joe—THREE HUNDRED MILES!
Now that was stage-coaching on the great overland, ten or twelve years
ago, when perhaps not more than ten men in America, all told, expected to
live to see a railroad follow that route to the Pacific. But the railroad
is there, now, and it pictures a thousand odd comparisons and contrasts in
my mind to read the following sketch, in the New York Times, of a recent
trip over almost the very ground I have been describing. I can scarcely
comprehend the new state of things:
“ACROSS THE CONTINENT.
“At 4.20 P.M., Sunday, we rolled out of the station at Omaha, and
started westward on our long jaunt. A couple of hours out, dinner was
announced—an “event” to those of us who had yet to
experience what it is to eat in one of Pullman’s hotels on wheels;
so, stepping into the car next forward of our sleeping palace, we found
ourselves in the dining-car. It was a revelation to us, that first
dinner on Sunday. And though we continued to dine for four days, and had
as many breakfasts and suppers, our whole party never ceased to admire
the perfection of the arrangements, and the marvelous results achieved.
Upon tables covered with snowy linen, and garnished with services of
solid silver, Ethiop waiters, flitting about in spotless white, placed
as by magic a repast at which Delmonico himself could have had no
occasion to blush; and, indeed, in some respects it would be hard for
that distinguished chef to match our menu; for, in addition to all that
ordinarily makes up a first-chop dinner, had we not our antelope steak
(the gormand who has not experienced this—bah! what does he know
of the feast of fat things?) our delicious mountain-brook trout, and
choice fruits and berries, and (sauce piquant and unpurchasable!) our
sweet-scented, appetite-compelling air of the prairies?
“You may depend upon it, we all did justice to the good things,
and as we washed them down with bumpers of sparkling Krug, whilst we
sped along at the rate of thirty miles an hour, agreed it was the
fastest living we had ever experienced. (We beat that, however, two days
afterward when we made twenty-seven miles in twenty-seven minutes, while
our Champagne glasses filled to the brim spilled not a drop!) After
dinner we repaired to our drawing-room car, and, as it was Sabbath eve,
intoned some of the grand old hymns—“Praise God from whom,”
etc.; “Shining Shore,” “Coronation,” etc.—the
voices of the men singers and of the women singers blending sweetly in
the evening air, while our train, with its great, glaring Polyphemus
eye, lighting up long vistas of prairie, rushed into the night and the
Wild. Then to bed in luxurious couches, where we slept the sleep of the
just and only awoke the next morning (Monday) at eight o’clock, to
find ourselves at the crossing of the North Platte, three hundred miles
from Omaha—fifteen hours and forty minutes out.”
