Roughing It
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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!”
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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!”
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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.
CHAPTER XXII.
It was the end of August, and the skies were cloudless and the weather
superb. In two or three weeks I had grown wonderfully fascinated with
the curious new country and concluded to put off my return to “the
States” awhile. I had grown well accustomed to wearing a damaged slouch
hat, blue woolen shirt, and pants crammed into boot-tops, and gloried in
the absence of coat, vest and braces. I felt rowdyish and “bully,” (as
the historian Josephus phrases it, in his fine chapter upon the
destruction of the Temple). It seemed to me that nothing could be so
fine and so romantic. I had become an officer of the government, but
that was for mere sublimity. The office was an unique sinecure. I had
nothing to do and no salary. I was private Secretary to his majesty the
Secretary and there was not yet writing enough for two of us. So Johnny
K——and I devoted our time to amusement. He was the young son of an Ohio
nabob and was out there for recreation. He got it. We had heard a world
of talk about the marvellous beauty of Lake Tahoe, and finally curiosity