Our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for twenty hours.
Such a thing was very frequent. From St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento,
California, by stage-coach, was nearly nineteen hundred miles, and the
trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in four and a half,
now), but the time specified in the mail contracts, and required by the
schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember rightly. This was
to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows, and other unavoidable
causes of detention. The stage company had everything under strict
discipline and good system. Over each two hundred and fifty miles of road
they placed an agent or superintendent, and invested him with great
authority. His beat or jurisdiction of two hundred and fifty miles was
called a “division.” He purchased horses, mules harness, and
food for men and beasts, and distributed these things among his stage
stations, from time to time, according to his judgment of what each
station needed. He erected station buildings and dug wells. He attended to
the paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and blacksmiths, and
discharged them whenever he chose. He was a very, very great man in his
“division”—a kind of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the
Indies, in whose presence common men were modest of speech and manner, and
in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver dwindled to
a penny dip. There were about eight of these kings, all told, on the
overland route.
Next in rank and importance to the division-agent came the “conductor.”
His beat was the same length as the agent’s—two hundred and
fifty miles. He sat with the driver, and (when necessary) rode that
fearful distance, night and day, without other rest or sleep than what he
could get perched thus on top of the flying vehicle. Think of it! He had
absolute charge of the mails, express matter, passengers and stage-coach,
until he delivered them to the next conductor, and got his receipt for
them.
Consequently he had to be a man of intelligence, decision and considerable
executive ability. He was usually a quiet, pleasant man, who attended
closely to his duties, and was a good deal of a gentleman. It was not
absolutely necessary that the division-agent should be a gentleman, and
occasionally he wasn’t. But he was always a general in
administrative ability, and a bull-dog in courage and determination—otherwise
the chieftainship over the lawless underlings of the overland service
would never in any instance have been to him anything but an equivalent
for a month of insolence and distress and a bullet and a coffin at the end
of it. There were about sixteen or eighteen conductors on the overland,
for there was a daily stage each way, and a conductor on every stage.
Next in real and official rank and importance, after the
conductor, came my delight, the driver—next in real but not in apparent
importance—for we have seen that in the eyes of the common herd the
driver was to the conductor as an admiral is to the captain of the
flag-ship. The driver’s beat was pretty long, and his sleeping-time
at the stations pretty short, sometimes; and so, but for the grandeur of
his position his would have been a sorry life, as well as a hard and a
wearing one. We took a new driver every day or every night (for they drove
backward and forward over the same piece of road all the time), and
therefore we never got as well acquainted with them as we did with the
conductors; and besides, they would have been above being familiar with
such rubbish as passengers, anyhow, as a general thing. Still, we were
always eager to get a sight of each and every new driver as soon as the
watch changed, for each and every day we were either anxious to get rid of
an unpleasant one, or loath to part with a driver we had learned to like
and had come to be sociable and friendly with. And so the first question
we asked the conductor whenever we got to where we were to exchange
drivers, was always, “Which is him?” The grammar was faulty,
maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go into a book some day.
As long as everything went smoothly, the overland driver was well enough
situated, but if a fellow driver got sick suddenly it made trouble, for
the coach must go on, and so the potentate who was about to climb
down and take a luxurious rest after his long night’s siege in the
midst of wind and rain and darkness, had to stay where he was and do the
sick man’s work. Once, in the Rocky Mountains, when I found a driver
sound asleep on the box, and the mules going at the usual break-neck pace,
the conductor said never mind him, there was no danger, and he was doing
double duty—had driven seventy-five miles on one coach, and was now
going back over it on this without rest or sleep. A hundred and fifty
miles of holding back of six vindictive mules and keeping them from
climbing the trees! It sounds incredible, but I remember the statement
well enough.
The station-keepers, hostlers, etc., were low, rough characters, as
already described; and from western Nebraska to Nevada a considerable
sprinkling of them might be fairly set down as outlaws—fugitives
from justice, criminals whose best security was a section of country which
was without law and without even the pretence of it. When the “division-
agent” issued an order to one of these parties he did it with the
full understanding that he might have to enforce it with a navy
six-shooter, and so he always went “fixed” to make things go
along smoothly.
Now and then a division-agent was really obliged to shoot a hostler
through the head to teach him some simple matter that he could have taught
him with a club if his circumstances and surroundings had been different.
But they were snappy, able men, those division-agents, and when they tried
to teach a subordinate anything, that subordinate generally “got it
through his head.”
A great portion of this vast machinery—these hundreds of men and
coaches, and thousands of mules and horses—was in the hands of Mr.
Ben Holliday. All the western half of the business was in his hands. This
reminds me of an incident of Palestine travel which is pertinent here, so
I will transfer it just in the language in which I find it set down in my
Holy Land note-book:
No doubt everybody has heard of Ben Holliday—a man of prodigious
energy, who used to send mails and passengers flying across the
continent in his overland stage-coaches like a very whirlwind—two
thousand long miles in fifteen days and a half, by the watch! But this
fragment of history is not about Ben Holliday, but about a young New
York boy by the name of Jack, who traveled with our small party of
pilgrims in the Holy Land (and who had traveled to California in Mr.
Holliday’s overland coaches three years before, and had by no
means forgotten it or lost his gushing admiration of Mr. H.) Aged
nineteen. Jack was a good boy—a good-hearted and always
well-meaning boy, who had been reared in the city of New York, and
although he was bright and knew a great many useful things, his
Scriptural education had been a good deal neglected—to such a
degree, indeed, that all Holy Land history was fresh and new to him, and
all Bible names mysteries that had never disturbed his virgin ear.
Also in our party was an elderly pilgrim who was the reverse of Jack, in
that he was learned in the Scriptures and an enthusiast concerning them.
He was our encyclopedia, and we were never tired of listening to his
speeches, nor he of making them. He never passed a celebrated locality,
from Bashan to Bethlehem, without illuminating it with an oration. One
day, when camped near the ruins of Jericho, he burst forth with
something like this:
“Jack, do you see that range of mountains over yonder that bounds
the Jordan valley? The mountains of Moab, Jack! Think of it, my boy—the
actual mountains of Moab—renowned in Scripture history! We are
actually standing face to face with those illustrious crags and peaks—and
for all we know” [dropping his voice impressively], “our
eyes may be resting at this very moment upon the spot WHERE LIES THE
MYSTERIOUS GRAVE OF MOSES! Think of it, Jack!”
“Moses who?” (falling inflection).
“Moses who! Jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself—you
ought to be ashamed of such criminal ignorance. Why, Moses, the great
guide, soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack, from this spot
where we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred miles
in extent—and across that desert that wonderful man brought the
children of Israel!—guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty
years over the sandy desolation and among the obstructing rocks and
hills, and landed them at last, safe and sound, within sight of this
very spot; and where we now stand they entered the Promised Land with
anthems of rejoicing! It was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, Jack!
Think of it!”
“Forty years? Only three hundred miles? Humph! Ben Holliday would
have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!”
The boy meant no harm. He did not know that he had said anything that
was wrong or irreverent. And so no one scolded him or felt offended with
him—and nobody could but some ungenerous spirit incapable of
excusing the heedless blunders of a boy.
At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the “Crossing of the
South Platte,” alias “Julesburg,” alias
“Overland City,” four hundred and seventy miles from St.
Joseph—the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our
untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with.
