Roughing It
pathos that was in his voice as he told, in simple language, the story
of his people’s wanderings and unpitied sufferings. No pulpit eloquence
was ever so moving and so beautiful as this outcast’s picture of the
first Mormon pilgrimage across the plains, struggling sorrowfully onward
to the land of its banishment and marking its desolate way with graves
and watering it with tears. His words so wrought upon us that it was a
relief to us all when the conversation drifted into a more cheerful
channel and the natural features of the curious country we were in came
under treatment. One matter after another was pleasantly discussed, and
at length the stranger said:
“I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to
listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was
leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an
engagement to lecture in Placerville, and was very anxious to go through
quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The
coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the
buttons all off of Horace’s coat, and finally shot his head clean
through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and
begged him to go easier—said he warn’t in as much of a hurry as he was
awhile ago. But Hank Monk said, ‘Keep your seat, Horace, and I’ll get
you there on time!’—and you bet you bet you he did, too, what was left
of him!”
Ten miles out of Ragtown we found a poor wanderer who had lain down to
die. He had walked as long as he could, but his limbs had failed him at
last. Hunger and fatigue had conquered him. It would have been inhuman
to leave him there. We paid his fare to Carson and lifted him into the
coach. It was some little time before he showed any very decided signs
of life; but by dint of chafing him and pouring brandy between his lips
we finally brought him to a languid consciousness. Then we fed him a
little, and by and by he seemed to comprehend the situation and a
grateful light softened his eye. We made his mail-sack bed as
comfortable as possible, and constructed a pillow for him with our
coats. He seemed very thankful. Then he looked up in our faces, and said
in a feeble voice that had a tremble of honest emotion in it:
“Gentlemen, I know not who you are, but you have saved my life; and
although I can never be able to repay you for it, I feel that I can at
least make one hour of your long journey lighter. I take it you are
strangers to this great thorough fare, but I am entirely familiar with
it. In this connection I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if
you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley——”
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I said, impressively:
“Suffering stranger, proceed at your peril. You see in me the melancholy
wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood. What has brought me to
this? That thing which you are about to tell. Gradually but surely, that
tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my
constitution, withered my life. Pity my helplessness. Spare me only just
this once, and tell me about young George Washington and his little
hatchet for a change.”
We were saved. But not so the invalid. In trying to retain the anecdote
in his system he strained himself and died in our arms.
I am aware, now, that I ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen
of all that region, what I asked of that mere shadow of a man; for,
after seven years’ residence on the Pacific coast, I know that no
passenger or driver on the Overland ever corked that anecdote in, when a
stranger was by, and survived. Within a period of six years I crossed
and recrossed the Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times
by stage and listened to that deathless incident four hundred and
eighty-one or eighty-two times. I have the list somewhere. Drivers
always told it, conductors told it, landlords told it, chance passengers
told it, the very Chinamen and vagrant Indians recounted it. I have had
the same driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon.
It has come to me in all the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed
to earth, and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont,
tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers—everything that has a fragrance to
it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the
sons of men. I never have smelt any anecdote as often as I have smelt
that one; never have smelt any anecdote that smelt so variegated as that
one. And you never could learn to know it by its smell, because every
time you thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with
a different smell. Bayard Taylor has written about this hoary anecdote,
Richardson has published it; so have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Browne,
and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot
upon the great overland road anywhere between Julesburg and San
Francisco; and I have heard that it is in the Talmud. I have seen it in
print in nine different foreign languages; I have been told that it is
employed in the inquisition in Rome; and I now learn with regret that it
is going to be set to music. I do not think that such things are right.
Stage-coaching on the Overland is no more, and stage drivers are a race
defunct. I wonder if they bequeathed that bald-headed anecdote to their
successors, the railroad brakemen and conductors, and if these latter
still persecute the helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as
did many a tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the Pacific
coast are not Yo Semite and the Big Trees, but Hank Monk and his
adventure with Horace Greeley.
[And what makes that worn anecdote the more aggravating, is, that the
adventure it celebrates never occurred. If it were a good anecdote, that
seeming demerit would be its chiefest virtue, for creative power belongs
to greatness; but what ought to be done to a man who would wantonly
contrive so flat a one as this? If I were to suggest what ought to be
done to him, I should be called extravagant—but what does the sixteenth
chapter of Daniel say? Aha!]
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CHAPTER XXI.
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.
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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.
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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