Roughing It
and vain of both—it is a descent to little coins and cheap prices that
is hardest to bear and slowest to take hold upon one’s toleration. After
a month’s acquaintance with the twenty-five cent minimum, the average
human being is ready to blush every time he thinks of his despicable
five-cent days. How sunburnt with blushes I used to get in gaudy Nevada,
every time I thought of my first financial experience in Salt Lake. It
was on this wise (which is a favorite expression of great authors, and a
very neat one, too, but I never hear anybody _say_ on this wise when
they are talking). A young half-breed with a complexion like a yellow-
jacket asked me if I would have my boots blacked. It was at the Salt
Lake House the morning after we arrived. I said yes, and he blacked
them. Then I handed him a silver five-cent piece, with the benevolent
air of a person who is conferring wealth and blessedness upon poverty
and suffering. The yellow-jacket took it with what I judged to be
suppressed emotion, and laid it reverently down in the middle of his
broad hand. Then he began to contemplate it, much as a philosopher
contemplates a gnat’s ear in the ample field of his microscope. Several
mountaineers, teamsters, stage-drivers, etc., drew near and dropped into
the tableau and fell to surveying the money with that attractive
indifference to formality which is noticeable in the hardy pioneer.
Presently the yellow-jacket handed the half dime back to me and told me
I ought to keep my money in my pocket-book instead of in my soul, and
then I wouldn’t get it cramped and shriveled up so!
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What a roar of vulgar laughter there was! I destroyed the mongrel
reptile on the spot, but I smiled and smiled all the time I was
detaching his scalp, for the remark he made _was_ good for an “Injun.”
Yes, we had learned in Salt Lake to be charged great prices without
letting the inward shudder appear on the surface—for even already we had
overheard and noted the tenor of conversations among drivers,
conductors, and hostlers, and finally among citizens of Salt Lake, until
we were well aware that these superior beings despised “emigrants.” We
permitted no tell-tale shudders and winces in our countenances, for we
wanted to seem pioneers, or Mormons, half-breeds, teamsters, stage-
drivers, Mountain Meadow assassins—anything in the world that the plains
and Utah respected and admired—but we were wretchedly ashamed of being
“emigrants,” and sorry enough that we had white shirts and could not
swear in the presence of ladies without looking the other way.
And many a time in Nevada, afterwards, we had occasion to remember with
humiliation that we were “emigrants,” and consequently a low and
inferior sort of creatures. Perhaps the reader has visited Utah, Nevada,
or California, even in these latter days, and while communing with
himself upon the sorrowful banishment of these countries from what he
considers “the world,” has had his wings clipped by finding that _he_ is
the one to be pitied, and that there are entire populations around him
ready and willing to do it for him—yea, who are complacently doing it
for him already, wherever he steps his foot.
Poor thing, they are making fun of his hat; and the cut of his New York
coat; and his conscientiousness about his grammar; and his feeble
profanity; and his consumingly ludicrous ignorance of ores, shafts,
tunnels, and other things which he never saw before, and never felt
enough interest in to read about. And all the time that he is thinking
what a sad fate it is to be exiled to that far country, that lonely
land, the citizens around him are looking down on him with a blighting
compassion because he is an “emigrant” instead of that proudest and
blessedest creature that exists on all the earth, a “FORTY-NINER.”
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The accustomed coach life began again, now, and by midnight it almost
seemed as if we never had been out of our snuggery among the mail sacks
at all. We had made one alteration, however. We had provided enough
bread, boiled ham and hard boiled eggs to last double the six hundred
miles of staging we had still to do.
And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate
the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and
eat ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures revelled
alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing
helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe—an
old, rank, delicious pipe—ham and eggs and scenery, a “down grade,” a
flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart—these make
happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for.
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CHAPTER XVIII.
At eight in the morning we reached the remnant and ruin of what had been
the important military station of “Camp Floyd,” some forty-five or fifty
miles from Salt Lake City. At four P.M. we had doubled our distance and
were ninety or a hundred miles from Salt Lake. And now we entered upon
one of that species of deserts whose concentrated hideousness shames the
diffused and diluted horrors of Sahara—an “_alkali_” desert. For sixty-
eight miles there was but one break in it. I do not remember that this
was really a break; indeed it seems to me that it was nothing but a
watering depot _in the midst_ of the stretch of sixty-eight miles. If my
memory serves me, there was no well or spring at this place, but the
water was hauled there by mule and ox teams from the further side of the
desert. There was a stage station there. It was forty-five miles from
the beginning of the desert, and twenty-three from the end of it.
We plowed and dragged and groped along, the whole live-long night, and
at the end of this uncomfortable twelve hours we finished the forty-five
mile part of the desert and got to the stage station where the imported
water was. The sun was just rising. It was easy enough to cross a desert
in the night while we were asleep; and it was pleasant to reflect, in
the morning, that we in actual person _had_ encountered an absolute
desert and could always speak knowingly of deserts in presence of the
ignorant thenceforward. And it was pleasant also to reflect that this
was not an obscure, back country desert, but a very celebrated one, the
metropolis itself, as you may say. All this was very well and very
comfortable and satisfactory—but now we were to cross a desert in
_daylight_. This was fine—novel—romantic—dramatically
adventurous—_this_, indeed, was worth living for, worth traveling for!
We would write home all about it.
This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the
sultry August sun and did not last above one hour. One poor little
hour—and then we were ashamed that we had “gushed” so. The poetry was
all in the anticipation—there is none in the reality. Imagine a vast,
waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn
waste tufted with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine the lifeless silence
and solitude that belong to such a place; imagine a coach, creeping like
a bug through the midst of this shoreless level, and sending up tumbled
volumes of dust as if it were a bug that went by steam; imagine this
aching monotony of toiling and plowing kept up hour after hour, and the
shore still as far away as ever, apparently; imagine team, driver, coach
and passengers so deeply coated with ashes that they are all one
colorless color; imagine ash-drifts roosting above moustaches and
eyebrows like snow accumulations on boughs and bushes. This is the
reality of it.
The sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the
perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a
sign of it finds its way to the surface—it is absorbed before it gets
there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a
merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a
living creature visible in _any_ direction whither one searches the
blank level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is
not a sound—not a sigh—not a whisper—not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or
distant pipe of bird—not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless
people that dead air. And so the occasional sneezing of the resting
mules, and the champing of the bits, grate harshly on the grim
stillness, not dissipating the spell but accenting it and making one
feel more lonesome and forsaken than before.
The mules, under violent swearing, coaxing and whip-cracking, would make
at stated intervals a “spurt,” and drag the coach a hundred or may be
two hundred yards, stirring up a billowy cloud of dust that rolled back,
enveloping the vehicle to the wheel-tops or higher, and making it seem
afloat in a fog. Then a rest followed, with the usual sneezing and bit-
champing. Then another “spurt” of a hundred yards and another rest at
the end of it. All day long we kept this up, without water for the mules
and without ever changing the team. At least we kept it up ten hours,
which, I take it, is a day, and a pretty honest one, in an alkali
desert. It was from four in the morning till two in the afternoon. And
it was so hot! and so close! and our water canteens went dry in the
middle of the day and we got so thirsty! It was so stupid and tiresome
and dull! and the tedious hours did lag and drag and limp along with
such a cruel deliberation! It was so trying to give one’s watch a good
long undisturbed spell and then take it out and find that it had been
fooling away the time and not trying to get ahead any! The alkali dust
cut through our lips, it persecuted our eyes, it ate through the
delicate membranes and made our noses bleed and _kept_ them bleeding—and
truly and seriously the romance all faded far away and disappeared, and
left the desert trip nothing but a harsh reality—a thirsty, sweltering,
longing, hateful reality!
Two miles and a quarter an hour for ten hours—that was what we
accomplished. It was hard to bring the comprehension away down to such a
snail-pace as that, when we had been used to making eight and ten miles
an hour. When we reached the station on the farther verge of the desert,
we were glad, for the first time, that the dictionary was along, because
we never could have found language to tell how glad we were, in any sort
of dictionary but an unabridged one with pictures in it. But there could
not have been found in a whole library of dictionaries language
sufficient to tell how tired those mules were after their twenty-three
mile pull. To try to give the reader an idea of how _thirsty_ they were,
would be to “gild refined gold or paint the lily.”
Somehow, now that it is there, the quotation does not seem to fit—but no
matter, let it stay, anyhow. I think it is a graceful and attractive
thing, and therefore have tried time and time again to work it in where
it _would_ fit, but could not succeed. These efforts have kept my mind
distracted and ill at ease, and made my narrative seem broken and
disjointed, in places. Under these circumstances it seems to me best to
leave it in, as above, since this will afford at least a temporary
respite from the wear and tear of trying to “lead up” to this really apt
and beautiful quotation.
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CHAPTER XIX.
On the morning of the sixteenth day out from St. Joseph we arrived at
the entrance of Rocky Canyon, two hundred and fifty miles from Salt
Lake. It was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any
habitation of white men, except the stage stations, that we came across
the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. I
refer to the Goshoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could
learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger