The result is a hilarious blend of vaudevillian comedy, actual travel guide, and stinging satire, directed at both the complacency of his fellow American travelers and their reverence for European relics. Out of the book emerges the first full-dress portrait of Mark Twain himself, the breezy, shrewd, and comical manipulator of English idioms and America’s mythologies about itself and its relation to the past.
Roughing It (1872) is the light-hearted account of Mark Twain’s actual and imagined adventures when he escaped the Civil War and joined his brother, the recently appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. His accounts of stagecoach travel, Native Amer Mark Twain’s passage from tenderfoot to old-timer is accomplished through a long series of increasingly comical episodes.
The plot is relaxed enough to accommodate some immensely funny and random character sketches, animal fables, tall tales, and dramatic monologues. The result is an enduring picture of the old Western frontier in all its original vigor and variety.icans, frontier society, the Mormons, the Chinese, and the codes, dress, food, and customs of the West are interspersed with his own experiences as a prospector, miner, journalist, boon companion, and lecturer as he traveled through Nevada, Utah, California, and even to the Hawaiian Islands.The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works
PREFATORY.
This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or
a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of
variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting
reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad
him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information
concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about
which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in
person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude
to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada—a
curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind,
that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely to
occur in it.
Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the
book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped:
information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar
of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give
worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk up
the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I
can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification.
THE AUTHOR.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177-h/3177-h.htm#linkch02
CHAPTER I. My Brother appointed Secretary of Nevada—I Envy His Prospective Adventures—Am Appointed Private Secretary Under Him—My Contentment Complete—Packed in One Hour—Dreams and Visions—On the Missouri River—A Bully Boat
CHAPTER II. Arrive at St. Joseph—Only Twenty-five Pounds Baggage Allowed—Farewell to Kid Gloves and Dress Coats—Armed to the Teeth—The “Allen”—A Cheerful Weapon—Persuaded to Buy a Mule—Schedule of Luxuries—We Leave the “States”—“Our Coach”—Mails for the Indians—Between a Wink and an Earthquake—A Modern Sphynx and How She Entertained Us—A Sociable Heifer
The next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast, and hurried
to the starting-place. Then an inconvenience presented itself which we had
not properly appreciated before, namely, that one cannot make a heavy
traveling trunk stand for twenty-five pounds of baggage—because it
weighs a good deal more. But that was all we could take—twenty-five
pounds each. So we had to snatch our trunks open, and make a selection in
a good deal of a hurry. We put our lawful twenty-five pounds apiece all in
one valise, and shipped the trunks back to St. Louis again. It was a sad
parting, for now we had no swallow-tail coats and white kid gloves to wear
at Pawnee receptions in the Rocky Mountains, and no stove-pipe hats nor
patent-leather boots, nor anything else necessary to make life calm and
peaceful. We were reduced to a war-footing. Each of us put on a rough,
heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt and “stogy” boots
included; and into the valise we crowded a few white shirts, some
under-clothing and such things. My brother, the Secretary, took along
about four pounds of United States statutes and six pounds of Unabridged
Dictionary; for we did not know—poor innocents—that such
things could be bought in San Francisco on one day and received in Carson
City the next. I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith &
Wesson’s seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic
pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I
thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It only
had one fault—you could not hit anything with it. One of our “conductors”
practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and
behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about, and
he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief. The Secretary had a
small-sized Colt’s revolver strapped around him for protection
against the Indians, and to guard against accidents he carried it
uncapped. Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable. George Bemis was our
fellow-traveler.
We had never seen him before. He wore in his belt an old original “Allen”
revolver, such as irreverent people called a “pepper-box.”
Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the
trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn
over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the
ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a
feat which was probably never done with an “Allen” in the
world. But George’s was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as
one of the stage-drivers afterward said, “If she didn’t get
what she went after, she would fetch something else.” And so she
did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and
fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did
not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun
and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon—the
“Allen.” Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once,
and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind
it.
We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the
mountains. In the matter of luxuries we were modest—we took none
along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco. We had two large
canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we also
took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the
way of breakfasts and dinners.
By eight o’clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side
of the river. We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and
we bowled away and left “the States” behind us. It was a
superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.
There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of
emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost
made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling
and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away. We were spinning along
through Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly
abroad on the great Plains. Just here the land was rolling—a grand
sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach—like
the stately heave and swell of the ocean’s bosom after a storm. And
everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this
limitless expanse of grassy land. But presently this sea upon dry ground
was to lose its “rolling” character and stretch away for seven
hundred miles as level as a floor!
Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous
description—an imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn by six
handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the “conductor,”
the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his business to take
charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers. We
three were the only passengers, this trip. We sat on the back seat,
inside. About all the rest of the coach was full of mail bags—for we
had three days’ delayed mails with us. Almost touching our knees, a
perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof. There was a great
pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots
were full. We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver
said—“a little for Brigham, and Carson, and ’Frisco, but
the heft of it for the Injuns, which is powerful troublesome ’thout
they get plenty of truck to read.”
We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the
mountains. In the matter of luxuries we were modest—we took none
along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco. We had two large
canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we also
took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the
way of breakfasts and dinners.
By eight o’clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side
of the river. We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and
we bowled away and left “the States” behind us. It was a
superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.
There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of
emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost
made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling
and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away. We were spinning along
through Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly
abroad on the great Plains. Just here the land was rolling—a grand
sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach—like
the stately heave and swell of the ocean’s bosom after a storm. And
everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this
limitless expanse of grassy land. But presently this sea upon dry ground
was to lose its “rolling” character and stretch away for seven
hundred miles as level as a floor!
Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous
description—an imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn by six
handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the “conductor,”
the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his business to take
charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers. We
three were the only passengers, this trip. We sat on the back seat,
inside. About all the rest of the coach was full of mail bags—for we
had three days’ delayed mails with us. Almost touching our knees, a
perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof. There was a great
pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots
were full. We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver
said—“a little for Brigham, and Carson, and ’Frisco, but
the heft of it for the Injuns, which is powerful troublesome ’thout
they get plenty of truck to read.”
We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the
mountains. In the matter of luxuries we were modest—we took none
along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco. We had two large
canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we also
took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the
way of breakfasts and dinners.
By eight o’clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side
of the river. We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and
we bowled away and left “the States” behind us. It was a
superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.
There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of
emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost
made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling
and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away. We were spinning along
through Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly
abroad on the great Plains. Just here the land was rolling—a grand
sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach—like
the stately heave and swell of the ocean’s bosom after a storm. And
everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this
limitless expanse of grassy land. But presently this sea upon dry ground
was to lose its “rolling” character and stretch away for seven
hundred miles as level as a floor!
Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous
description—an imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn by six
handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the “conductor,”
the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his business to take
charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers. We
three were the only passengers, this trip. We sat on the back seat,
inside. About all the rest of the coach was full of mail bags—for we
had three days’ delayed mails with us. Almost touching our knees, a
perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof. There was a great
pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots
were full. We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver
said—“a little for Brigham, and Carson, and ’Frisco, but
the heft of it for the Injuns, which is powerful troublesome ’thout
they get plenty of truck to read.”
We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the
hard, level road. We jumped out and stretched our legs every time the
coach stopped, and so the night found us still vivacious and unfatigued.
After supper a woman got in, who lived about fifty miles further on, and
we three had to take turns at sitting outside with the driver and
conductor. Apparently she was not a talkative woman. She would sit there
in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a mosquito
rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand till she
had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that would have
jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the corpse with
tranquil satisfaction—for she never missed her mosquito; she was a
dead shot at short range. She never removed a carcase, but left them there
for bait. I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill thirty or forty
mosquitoes—watched her, and waited for her to say something, but she
never did. So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said:
“The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam.”
“You bet!”
“What did I understand you to say, madam?”
“You BET!”
Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:
“Danged if I didn’t begin to think you fellers was deef and
dumb. I did, b’gosh. Here I’ve sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust’n
muskeeters and wonderin’ what was ailin’ ye. Fust I thot you
was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin’,
and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that
couldn’t think of nothing to say. Wher’d ye come from?”
The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains of her great deep were
broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty
nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge
of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting
above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed
pronunciation!
How we suffered, suffered, suffered! She went on, hour after hour, till I
was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start. She
never did stop again until she got to her journey’s end toward
daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we
were nodding, by that time), and said:
“Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o’
days, and I’ll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any
good by edgin’ in a word now and then, I’m right thar. Folks’ll
tell you’t I’ve always ben kind o’ offish and partic’lar
for a gal that’s raised in the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and
bob-tail, and a gal has to be, if she wants to be anything, but when
people comes along which is my equals, I reckon I’m a pretty
sociable heifer after all.”
We resolved not to “lay by at Cottonwood.”
CHAPTER III.
About an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly
over the road—so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle,
lulling way, that was gradually soothing us to sleep, and dulling our
consciousness—when something gave away under us! We were dimly aware
of it, but indifferent to it. The coach stopped. We heard the driver and
conductor talking together outside, and rummaging for a lantern, and
swearing because they could not find it—but we had no interest in
whatever had happened, and it only added to our comfort to think of those
people out there at work in the murky night, and we snug in our nest with
the curtains drawn. But presently, by the sounds, there seemed to be an
examination going on, and then the driver’s voice said:
“By George, the thoroughbrace is broke!”
This startled me broad awake—as an undefined sense of calamity is
always apt to do. I said to myself: “Now, a thoroughbrace is
probably part of a horse; and doubtless a vital part, too, from the dismay
in the driver’s voice. Leg, maybe—and yet how could he break
his leg waltzing along such a road as this? No, it can’t be his leg.
That is impossible, unless he was reaching for the driver. Now, what can
be the thoroughbrace of a horse, I wonder? Well, whatever comes, I shall
not air my ignorance in this crowd, anyway.”
Just then the conductor’s face appeared at a lifted curtain, and his
lantern glared in on us and our wall of mail matter. He said: “Gents,
you’ll have to turn out a spell. Thoroughbrace is broke.”
We climbed out into a chill drizzle, and felt ever so homeless and dreary.
When I found that the thing they called a “thoroughbrace” was
the massive combination of belts and springs which the coach rocks itself
in, I said to the driver:
“I never saw a thoroughbrace used up like that, before, that I can
remember. How did it happen?”
“Why, it happened by trying to make one coach carry three days’
mail—that’s how it happened,” said he. “And right
here is the very direction which is wrote on all the newspaper-bags which
was to be put out for the Injuns for to keep ’em quiet. It’s
most uncommon lucky, becuz it’s so nation dark I should ’a’
gone by unbeknowns if that air thoroughbrace hadn’t broke.”
I knew that he was in labor with another of those winks of his, though I
could not see his face, because he was bent down at work; and wishing him
a safe delivery, I turned to and helped the rest get out the mail-sacks.
It made a great pyramid by the roadside when it was all out. When they had
mended the thoroughbrace we filled the two boots again, but put no mail on
top, and only half as much inside as there was before. The conductor bent
all the seat-backs down, and then filled the coach just half full of
mail-bags from end to end. We objected loudly to this, for it left us no
seats. But the conductor was wiser than we, and said a bed was better than
seats, and moreover, this plan would protect his thoroughbraces. We never
wanted any seats after that. The lazy bed was infinitely preferable. I had
many an exciting day, subsequently, lying on it reading the statutes and
the dictionary, and wondering how the characters would turn out.
The conductor said he would send back a guard from the next station to
take charge of the abandoned mail-bags, and we drove on.
It was now just dawn; and as we stretched our cramped legs full length on
the mail sacks, and gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes
of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist, to where there was an expectant
look in the eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a
tranquil and contented ecstasy. The stage whirled along at a spanking
gait, the breeze flapping curtains and suspended coats in a most
exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering
of the horses’ hoofs, the cracking of the driver’s whip, and
his “Hi-yi! g’lang!” were music; the spinning ground and
the waltzing trees appeared to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and
then slack up and look after us with interest, or envy, or something; and
as we lay and smoked the pipe of peace and compared all this luxury with
the years of tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that
there was only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we
had found it.
After breakfast, at some station whose name I have forgotten, we three
climbed up on the seat behind the driver, and let the conductor have our
bed for a nap. And by and by, when the sun made me drowsy, I lay down on
my face on top of the coach, grasping the slender iron railing, and slept
for an hour or more. That will give one an appreciable idea of those
matchless roads. Instinct will make a sleeping man grip a fast hold of the
railing when the stage jolts, but when it only swings and sways, no grip
is necessary. Overland drivers and conductors used to sit in their places
and sleep thirty or forty minutes at a time, on good roads, while spinning
along at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour. I saw them do it, often.
There was no danger about it; a sleeping man will seize the irons in time
when the coach jolts. These men were hard worked, and it was not possible
for them to stay awake all the time.
By and by we passed through Marysville, and over the Big Blue and Little
Sandy; thence about a mile, and entered Nebraska. About a mile further on,
we came to the Big Sandy—one hundred and eighty miles from St.
Joseph.
As the sun was going down, we saw the first specimen of an animal known
familiarly over two thousand miles of mountain and desert—from
Kansas clear to the Pacific Ocean—as the “jackass rabbit.”
He is well named. He is just like any other rabbit, except that he is from
one third to twice as large, has longer legs in proportion to his size,
and has the most preposterous ears that ever were mounted on any creature
but a jackass.
When he is sitting quiet, thinking about his sins, or is absent-minded or
unapprehensive of danger, his majestic ears project above him
conspicuously; but the breaking of a twig will scare him nearly to death,
and then he tilts his ears back gently and starts for home. All you can
see, then, for the next minute, is his long gray form stretched out
straight and “streaking it” through the low sage-brush, head
erect, eyes right, and ears just canted a little to the rear, but showing
you where the animal is, all the time, the same as if he carried a jib.
Now and then he makes a marvelous spring with his long legs, high over the
stunted sage-brush, and scores a leap that would make a horse envious.
Presently he comes down to a long, graceful “lope,” and
shortly he mysteriously disappears. He has crouched behind a sage-bush,
and will sit there and listen and tremble until you get within six feet of
him, when he will get under way again. But one must shoot at this creature
once, if he wishes to see him throw his heart into his heels, and do the
best he knows how. He is frightened clear through, now, and he lays his
long ears down on his back, straightens himself out like a yard-stick
every spring he makes, and scatters miles behind him with an easy
indifference that is enchanting.
Our party made this specimen “hump himself,” as the conductor
said. The secretary started him with a shot from the Colt; I commenced
spitting at him with my weapon; and all in the same instant the old
“Allen’s” whole broadside let go with a rattling crash,
and it is not putting it too strong to say that the rabbit was frantic! He
dropped his ears, set up his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed
which can only be described as a flash and a vanish! Long after he was out
of sight we could hear him whiz.
I do not remember where we first came across “sage-brush,” but
as I have been speaking of it I may as well describe it.
This is easily done, for if the reader can imagine a gnarled and venerable
live oak-tree reduced to a little shrub two feet-high, with its rough
bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all complete, he can picture the
“sage-brush” exactly. Often, on lazy afternoons in the
mountains, I have lain on the ground with my face under a sage-bush, and
entertained myself with fancying that the gnats among its foliage were
liliputian birds, and that the ants marching and countermarching about its
base were liliputian flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer from
Brobdignag waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him.
It is an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature, is the
“sage-brush.” Its foliage is a grayish green, and gives that
tint to desert and mountain. It smells like our domestic sage, and “sage-tea”
made from it taste like the sage-tea which all boys are so well acquainted
with. The sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and grows right in the
midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing else in the
vegetable world would try to grow, except “bunch-grass.”—[“Bunch-grass”
grows on the bleak mountain-sides of Nevada and neighboring territories,
and offers excellent feed for stock, even in the dead of winter, wherever
the snow is blown aside and exposes it; notwithstanding its unpromising
home, bunch-grass is a better and more nutritious diet for cattle and
horses than almost any other hay or grass that is known—so stock-men
say.]—The sage-bushes grow from three to six or seven feet apart,
all over the mountains and deserts of the Far West, clear to the borders
of California. There is not a tree of any kind in the deserts, for
hundreds of miles—there is no vegetation at all in a regular desert,
except the sage-brush and its cousin the “greasewood,” which
is so much like the sage-brush that the difference amounts to little.
Camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the
friendly sage-brush. Its trunk is as large as a boy’s wrist (and
from that up to a man’s arm), and its crooked branches are half as
large as its trunk—all good, sound, hard wood, very like oak.
When a party camps, the first thing to be done is to cut sage-brush; and
in a few minutes there is an opulent pile of it ready for use. A hole a
foot wide, two feet deep, and two feet long, is dug, and sage-brush
chopped up and burned in it till it is full to the brim with glowing
coals. Then the cooking begins, and there is no smoke, and consequently no
swearing. Such a fire will keep all night, with very little replenishing;
and it makes a very sociable camp-fire, and one around which the most
impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and profoundly
entertaining.
Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished
failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his
illegitimate child the mule. But their testimony to its nutritiousness is
worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or brass
filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes handy, and
then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for dinner.
Mules and donkeys and camels have appetites that anything will relieve
temporarily, but nothing satisfy.
In Syria, once, at the head-waters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of
my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a
critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of
getting one made like it; and then, after he was done figuring on it as an
article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet. He
put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and
chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening
and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never
tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life. Then he
smacked his lips once or twice, and reached after the other sleeve. Next
he tried the velvet collar, and smiled a smile of such contentment that it
was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing about an
overcoat. The tails went next, along with some percussion caps and cough
candy, and some fig-paste from Constantinople.
CHAPTER IV.
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.
“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.” CHAPTER IV. Making Our Bed—Assaults by the Unabridged—At a Station—Our Driver a Great and Shining Dignitary—Strange Place for a Frontyard—Accommodations—Double Portraits—An Heirloom—Our Worthy Landlord—“Fixings and Things”—An Exile—Slumgullion—A Well Furnished Table—The Landlord Astonished—Table Etiquette—Wild Mexican Mules—Stage-coaching and Railroading
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The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works
Edited by Shelley Fisher FishkinA century and a half of the best writing about America’s quintessential writer.
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