IfllJ 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 
 
 BY 
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MANHATTAN PRESS 
 474 WEST BROADWAY 
 
itf 
 
 j. 
 
 ft 
 
NOTE. 
 
 THE following letters were written by ME. 
 Kipling in 1889, while on a trip from India 
 to England by way of the United States. 
 
 They were published as special correspond 
 ence in the Pioneer of India at the time. 
 
 THE PUBLISHERS. 
 
AMERICAN NOTES. 
 
 i. 
 
 * Then spoke der Captain Stossenkeim 
 Who had theories of God, 
 * Oh, Breitmann, this is judgment on 
 Der ways dot you have trod. 
 You only lifs to enjoy yourself 
 While you yourself agree 
 Dot self -development requires 
 Der religious Idee. " 
 
 THIS is America. 
 
 They call her the City of Peking, and she 
 belongs to the Pacific Mail Company, but for 
 all practical purposes she is the United States. 
 
 We are divided between missionaries and 
 generals generals who were at Vicksburg 
 and Shiloh, and German by birth, but more 
 American than the Americans, who in confi 
 dence tell you that they are not generals at 
 all, but only brevet majors of militia corps. 
 The missionaries are perhaps the queerest 
 portion of the cargo. Did you ever hear an 
 English minister lecture for half an hour on 
 the freight-traffic receipts and general working 
 7 
 
8 American Notes. 
 
 of , let $s : say, the Midland ? The Professor 
 has been sitting at the feet of a keen-eyed, 
 close-bearded, swarthy man who expounded 
 unto him kindred mysteries with a fluency 
 and precision that a city leader-writer might 
 have envied. "Who s your financial friend 
 with the figures at his fingers ends ? " I 
 asked. " Missionary Presbyterian Mission 
 to the Japs," said the Professor. I laid my 
 hand upon my mouth and was dumb. 
 
 As a counterpoise to the missionaries, we 
 carry men from Manila lean Scotchmen who 
 gamble once a month in the Manila State 
 lottery and occasionally turn up trumps. One, 
 at least, drew a ten-thousand-dollar prize last 
 December and is away to make merry in the 
 New World. Everybody on the staff of an 
 American steamer this side the Continent 
 seems to gamble steadily in that lottery, and 
 the talk of the smoking-room runs almost 
 entirely on prizes won by accident or lost 
 through a moment s delay. The tickets are 
 sold more or less openly at Yokohama 
 and Hong-Kong, and the drawings losers 
 and winners both agree here are above re 
 proach. 
 
 We have resigned ourselves to the infinite 
 monotony of a twenty days voyage. The 
 Pacific Mail advertises falsely. Only under 
 the most favorable circumstances of wind and 
 steam can their under-engined boats cover 
 the distance in fifteen days. Our City of 
 
American Notes. 9 
 
 Peking, for instance, had been jogging along 
 at a gentle ten knots an hour, a pace out of 
 all proportion to her bulk. " When we get a 
 wind," says the Captain, " we shall do better." 
 She is a four-master and can carry any 
 amount of canvas. It is not safe to run 
 steamers across this void under the poles of 
 Atlantic liners. The monotony of the sea is 
 paralyzing. We have passed the wreck of a 
 little sealing-schooner lying bottom up and 
 covered with gulls. She weltered by in the 
 chill dawn, unlovely as the corpse of a man ; 
 and the wild birds piped thinly at us as they 
 steered her across the surges. The pulse of 
 the Pacific is no little thing even in the quieter 
 moods of the sea. It set our bows swinging 
 and nosing and ducking ere we were a day 
 clear of Yokohama, and yet there was never 
 swell nor crested wave in sight. " We ride 
 very high," said the Captain, " and she s a 
 dry boat. She has a knack of crawling over 
 things somehow ; but we shan t need to put 
 her to the test this journey." 
 
 The Captain was mistaken. For four days 
 we have endured the sullen displeasure of the 
 North Pacific, winding up with a night of dis 
 comfort. It began with a gray sea, flying 
 clouds, and a head-wind that smote fifty knots 
 off the day s run. Then rose from the south 
 east a beam sea warranted by no wind that 
 
io American Notes. 
 
 was abroad upon the waters in our neighbor 
 hood, and we wallowed in the trough of it for 
 sixteen mortal hours. In the stillness of the 
 harbor, when the newspaper man is lunching 
 in her saloon and the steam-launch is crawling 
 round her sides, a ship of pride is a " stately 
 liner." Out in the open, one rugged shoulder 
 of a sea between you and the horizon, she be 
 comes " the old hooker," a " lively boat," and 
 other things of small import, for this is nec 
 essary to propitiate the Ocean. " There s 
 a storm to the southeast of us," explained 
 the Captain. " That s what s kicking up this 
 sea." 
 
 The City of Peking did not belie her repu 
 tation. She crawled over the seas in liveliest 
 wise, never shipping a bucket till she was 
 forced to. Then she took it green over the 
 bows to the vast edification of, at least, one 
 passenger who had never seen the scuppers 
 full before. 
 
 Later in the day the fun began. " Oh, 
 she s a daisy at rolling," murmured the chief 
 steward, flung starfish-wise on a table among 
 his glassware. " She s rolling some," said a 
 black apparition new risen from the stoke 
 hold. " Is she going to roll any more ? " de 
 manded the ladies grouped in what ought to 
 have been the ladies saloon, but, according to 
 American custom, was labeled " Social Hall." 
 
 Passed in the twilight the chief officer a 
 dripping, bearded face. " Shall I mark out 
 
American Notes. n 
 
 the bull-board ? " said he, and lurched aft, 
 followed by the tongue of a wave. " She ll 
 roll her guards under to-night," said a man 
 from Louisiana, where their river-steamers do 
 not understand the meaning of bulwarks. 
 We dined to a dashing accompaniment of 
 crockery, the bounds of emancipated beer- 
 bottles livelier than their own corks, and the 
 clamor of the ship s gong broken loose and 
 calling to meals on its own account. 
 
 After dinner the real rolling began. She 
 did roll " guards under," as the Louisiana 
 man had prophesied. At thirty-minute inter 
 vals to the second arrived one big sea, when 
 the electric lamps died down to nothing, and 
 the screw raved and the blows of the sea made 
 the decks quiver. On those occasions we 
 moved from our chairs, not gently, but dis 
 courteously. At other times we were merely 
 holding on with both hands. 
 
 It was then that I studied Fear Terror 
 bound in black silk and fighting hard with 
 herself. For reasons which will be thoroughly 
 understood, there was a tendency among the 
 passengers to herd together and to address in 
 quiries to every officer who happened to stagger 
 through the saloon. No one was in the least 
 alarmed, oh dear, no, but all were keenly 
 anxious for information. This anxiety re 
 doubled after a more than usually vicious roll. 
 Terror was a large, handsome, and cultured 
 lady who knew the precise value of human 
 
12 American Notes. 
 
 life, the inwardness of Robert Elsmere, th 
 latest poetry everything in fact that a clever 
 woman should know. When the rolling was 
 near its worst, she began to talk swiftly. I do 
 not for a moment believe that she knew what 
 she was talking about. The rolling increased. 
 She buckled down to the task of making con 
 versation. By the heave of the laboring 
 bust, the restless working of the fingers on the 
 tablecloth, and the uncontrollable eyes that 
 turned always to the companion stairhead, I 
 was able to judge the extremity of her fear. 
 Yet her words were frivolous and common 
 place enough ; they poured forth unceasingly, 
 punctuated with little laughs and giggles, as a 
 woman s speech should be. Presently, a mem 
 ber of her group suggested going to bed. 
 No, she wanted to sit up ; she wanted to go 
 on talking, and as long as she could get a soul 
 to sit with her she had her desire. When for 
 sheer lack of company she was forced to get 
 to her cabin, she left reluctantly, looking 
 back to the well-lighted saloon over her 
 shoulder. The contrast between the flowing 
 triviality of her speech and the strained in- 
 tentness of eye and hand was a quaint thing 
 to behold. I know now how Fear should be 
 painted. 
 
 No one slept very heavily that night. Both 
 arms were needed to grip the berth, while the 
 trunks below wound the carpet slips into knots 
 and battered the framing of the cabins. Once 
 
American Notes. 13 
 
 it seemed to me that the whole of the laboring 
 fabric that cased our trumpery fortunes stood 
 on end and in this undignified posture hopped 
 a mighty hop. Twice I know I shot out of my 
 berth to join the adventurous trunks on the 
 floor. A hundred times the crash of the wave 
 on the ship s side was followed by the roar of 
 the water, as it swept the decks and raved 
 round the deckhouses. In a lull I heard the 
 flying feet of a man, a shout, and a far-away 
 chorus of lost spirits singing somebody s 
 requiem. 
 
 May 24 (Queen s Birthday). If ever you 
 meet an American, be good to him. This 
 day the ship was dressed with flags from stem 
 to stern, and chiefest of the bunting was the 
 Union-Jack. They had given no word of 
 warning to the English, who were proportion 
 ately pleased. At dinner up rose an ex-Com 
 missioner of the Lucknow Division (on my 
 honor, Anglo-India extends to the ends of the 
 earth !) and gave us the health of Her Majesty 
 and the President. It was afterwards that the 
 trouble began. A small American penned 
 half a dozen English into a corner and lectured 
 them soundly on their want of patriotism ! 
 
 " What sort of Queen s Birthday do you 
 call this ? " he thundered. " What did you 
 drink our President s health for ? What s the 
 President to you on this day of all others ? 
 Well, suppose you are in the minority, all the 
 more reason for standing by your country. 
 
14 American Notes. 
 
 Don t talk to me. You Britishers made a 
 mess of it a mighty bungle of the whole 
 thing. I m an American of the Americans ; 
 but if no one can propose Her Majesty s 
 health better than by just throwing it at your 
 heads, I m going to try." 
 
 Then and there he delivered a remarkably 
 neat little oration pat, well put together, and 
 clearly delivered. So it came to pass that the 
 Queen s health was best honored by an Amer 
 ican. We English were dazed. I wondered 
 how many Englishmen not trained to address 
 ing their fellows would have spoken half so 
 fluently as the gentleman from Frisco. 
 
 " Well, you see," said one of us feebly, 
 " she s our Queen, anyhow, and and she s 
 been ours for fifty years, and not one of us 
 here has seen England for seven years, and 
 we can t enthuse over the matter. We ve lived 
 to be hauled over the coals for want of patriot 
 ism by an American I We ll be more careful 
 next time." 
 
 And the conversation drifted naturally into 
 the question of the government of men Eng 
 lish, Japanese (we have several traveled Jap 
 anese aboard), and Americans throwing the 
 ball from one to another. We bore in mind 
 the golden rule : " Never agree with a man 
 who abuses his own country," and got on well 
 enough. 
 
 " Japan," said a little gentleman who was a 
 rich man there, " Japan is divided into two 
 
American Notes. 15 
 
 administrative sides. On the one the remains 
 of a very strict and quite Oriental despotism ; 
 on the other a mass of what do you call it ? 
 red-tapeism which is not understood even 
 by the officials who handle it. We copy the 
 red tape, and when it is copied we believe 
 that we administer. That is a vice of all Ori 
 ental nations. We are Orientals." 
 
 " Oh no, say the most westerly of the west 
 erns," purred an American, soothingly. 
 
 The little man was pleased. " Thanks. 
 That is what we hope to believe, but up to 
 the present it is not so. Look now. A farmer 
 in my country holds a hillside cut into little 
 terraces. Every year he must submit to his 
 Government a statement of the size and reve 
 nue paid, not on the whole hillside, but on each 
 terrace. The complete statement makes a 
 pile three inches high, and is of no use when 
 it is made except to keep in work thousands 
 of officials to check the returns. Is that ad 
 ministration ? By God 1 we call it so, but we 
 multiply officials by the twenty, and they are 
 not administration. What country is such a 
 fool ? Look at our Government offices eaten 
 up with clerks ! Some day, I tell you, there 
 will be a smash." 
 
 This was new to me, but I might have 
 guessed it. In every country where swords 
 and uniforms accompany civil office there is 
 a natural tendency towards an ill-considered 
 increase of officialdom. 
 
16 American Notes. 
 
 " You might pay India a visit some day," I 
 said. " I fancy that you would find that our 
 country shares your trouble." 
 
 Thereupon a Japanese gentleman in the 
 Educational Department began to cross-ques 
 tion me on the matters of his craft in India, 
 and in a quarter of an hour got from me the 
 very little that I knew about primary schools, 
 higher education, and the value of an M. A. 
 degree. He knew exactly what he wanted to 
 ask, and only dropped me when the tooth of 
 desire had clean picked the bone of igno 
 rance. 
 
 Then an American held forth, harping on a 
 string that has already been too often twanged 
 in my ear. " What will it be in America it 
 self ? " 
 
 " The whole system is rotten from top to 
 bottom," he said. " As rotten as rotten can 
 be." 
 
 " That s so," said the Louisiana man, with 
 an affirmative puff of smoke. 
 
 " They call us a Republic. We may be. I 
 don t think it. You Britishers have got the 
 only republic worth the name. You choose to 
 run your ship of state with a gilt figurehead ; 
 but I know, and so does every man who has 
 thought about it, that your Queen doesn t cost 
 you one-half what our system oi pure democ 
 racy costs us. Politics in America ? There 
 aren t any. The whole question of the day is 
 spoils. That s all. We fight our souls out 
 
American Notes. 17 
 
 over tram-contracts, gas-contracts, road-con 
 tracts, and any darned thing that will turn a 
 dishonest dollar, and we call that politics. No 
 one but a low-down man will run for Congress 
 and the Senate the Senate of the freest 
 people on earth are bound slaves to some 
 blessed monopoly. If I had money enough, I 
 could buy the Senate of the United States, the 
 Eagle, and the Star-Spangled Banner com 
 plete." 
 
 " And the Irish vote included ? " said some 
 cue a Britisher, I fancy. 
 
 " Certainly, if I chose to go yahooing down 
 the street at the tail of the British lion. Any 
 thing dirty will buy the Irish vote. That s 
 why our politics are dirty. Some day you 
 Britishers will grant Home Rule to the vermin 
 in our blankets. Then the real Americans 
 will invite the Irish to get up and git to where 
 they came from. Wish you d hurry up that 
 time before we have another trouble. We re 
 bound hand and foot by the Irish vote ; or at 
 least that s the excuse for any unusual theft 
 that we perpetrate. I tell you there s no good 
 in an Irishman except as a fighter. He doesn t 
 understand work. He has a natural gift of 
 the gab, and he can drink a man blind. These 
 three qualifications make him a first-class 
 politician." 
 
 With one accord the Americans present 
 commenced to abuse Ireland and its people as 
 they had met them, and each man prefaced 
 
 2 
 
i8 American Notes. 
 
 his commination service with : " I am an 
 American by birth an American from way 
 back." 
 
 It must be an awful thing to live in a coun 
 try where you have to explain that you really 
 belong there. Louder grew the clamor and 
 crisper the sentiments. 
 
 " If we weren t among Americans, I should 
 say we were consorting with Russians," said a 
 fellow-countryman in my ear. 
 
 " They can t mean what they say," I whis 
 pered. " Listen to this fellow." 
 
 " And I know, for I have been three times 
 round the world and resided in most countries 
 on the Continent, that there was never people 
 yet could govern themselves." 
 
 " Allah 1 This from an American 1 " 
 
 " And who should know better than an 
 American ? " was the retort. " For the igno 
 rant that is to say for the majority there is 
 only one argument fear ; the fear of Death. 
 In our case we give any scallawag who comes 
 across the water all the same privileges that 
 we have made for ourselves. There we make 
 a mistake. They thank us by playing the 
 fool. Then we shoot them down. You can t 
 persuade the mob of any country to become 
 decent citizens. If they misbehave them 
 selves, shoot them. I saw the bombs thrown 
 at Chicago when our police were blown to bits. 
 I saw the banners in the procession that threw 
 the bombs. All the mottoes on them were in 
 
American Notes. 19 
 
 German. The men were aliens in our midst, 
 and they were shot down like dogs. I ve been 
 in labor riots and seen the militia go through 
 a crowd like a ringer through tissue paper." 
 
 " I was in the riots at New Orleans," said 
 the man from Louisiana. " We turned the 
 Gatling on the other crowd, and they were 
 sick." 
 
 " Whew ! I wonder what would have hap 
 pened if a Gatling had been used when the 
 West End riots were in full swing ? " said an 
 Englishman. " If a single rioter were killed 
 in an English town by the police, the chances 
 are that the policeman would have to stand 
 his trial for murder and the Ministry of the 
 day would go out." 
 
 " Then you ve got all your troubles before 
 you. The more power you give the people, 
 the more trouble they will give. With us our 
 better classes are corrupt and our lower classes 
 are lawless. There are millions of useful, law- 
 abiding citizens, and they are very sick of this 
 thing. We execute our justice in the streets. 
 The law courts are no use. Take the case of 
 the Chicago Anarchists. It was all we could 
 do to get em hanged ; whereas the dead in 
 the streets had been punished offhand. We 
 were sure of them. Guess that s the reason 
 we are so quick to fire on a mob. But it s 
 unfair, all the same. We receive all these 
 cattle Anarchists, Socialists, and ruffians of 
 every sort and then we shoot them. The 
 
2O American Notes. 
 
 States are as republican as they make em. \Ve 
 have no use for a man who wants to try any 
 more experiments on the Constitution. We 
 are the biggest people on God s earth. All 
 the world knows that. We ve been shouting 
 that we are also the greatest people. No one 
 cares to contradict us but ourselves ; and we 
 are now wondering whether we are what we 
 claim to be. Never mind ; you Britishers will 
 have the same experiences to go through. 
 You re beginning to rot now. Your County 
 Councils will make you more rotten because 
 you are putting power into the hands of un 
 trained people. When you reach our level, 
 every man with a vote and the right to sell it ; 
 the right to nominate fellows of his own kidney 
 to swamp out better men, you ll be what we 
 are now rotten, rotten, rotten ! " 
 
 The voice ceased, and no man rose up to 
 contradict. 
 
 " We ll worry through it somehow," said the 
 man from Louisiana. " What would do us a 
 world of good now would be a big European 
 war. We re getting slack and sprawly. Now 
 a war outside our borders would make us all 
 pull together. But that s a luxury we shan t 
 get." 
 
 "Can t you raise one within your own 
 borders ? " I said flippantly, to get rid of the 
 thought of the great blind nation in her unrest 
 putting out her hand to the Sword. Mine was 
 a most unfortunate remark. 
 
American Notes. 21 
 
 " 1 nope not," said an American, very 
 seriously. " We have paid a good deal to keep 
 ourselves together before this, and it is not 
 likely that we shall split up without protest. 
 Yet some say we are too large, and some say 
 that Washington and the Eastern States are 
 running the whole country. If ever we do 
 divide, God help us when we do, it will be 
 East and West this time." 
 
 " We built the old hooker too long in the 
 run. Put the engine-room aft. Break her 
 back," said an American who had not yet 
 spoken. " Wonder if our forebears knew how 
 she was going to grow." 
 
 " A very large country." The speaker 
 sighed as though the weight of it from New 
 York to Frisco lay upon his shoulders. " If 
 ever we do divide, it means that we are done 
 for. There is no room for four first-class 
 empires in the States. One split will lead to 
 another if the first is successful. What s the 
 use of talking ? " 
 
 What was the use ? Here s our conversa* 
 tion as it ran, the night of the Queen s Birth 
 day. What do you think ? 
 
American Notes. 
 
 II. 
 
 * Serene, indifferent to fate, 
 Thou sittest at the western gate, 
 Thou seest the white sea* fold their tents. 
 Oh warder of two Continents. 
 Thou drawest all things small and great 
 To thee beside the Western Gate." 
 
 THIS is what Bret Harte has written of the 
 great city of San Francisco, and for the past 
 fortnight I have been wondering what made 
 him do it. 
 
 There is neither serenity nor indifference 
 to be found in these parts ; and evil would it 
 be for the Continent whose wardship were in 
 trusted to so reckless a guardian. 
 
 Behold me pitched neck-and-crop from 
 twenty days of the High Seas, into the whirl 
 of California, deprived of any guidance, and 
 left to draw my own conclusions. Protect me 
 from the wrath of an outraged community if 
 these letters be ever read by American eyes. 
 San Francisco is a mad city inhabited for 
 the most part by perfectly insane people 
 whose women are of a remarkable beauty. 
 
 When the City of Peking steamed through 
 the Golden Gate I saw with great joy that the 
 block-house which guarded the mouth of the 
 " finest harbor in the world. Sir," could be 
 
American Notes. 23 
 
 silenced by two gunboats from Hong-Kong 
 with safety, comfort, and despatch. 
 
 Then a reporter leaped aboard, and ere I 
 could gasp held me in his toils. He pumped 
 me exhaustively while I was getting ashore, 
 demanding, of all things in the world, news 
 about Indian journalism. It is an awful thing 
 to enter a new land with a new lie on your 
 lips. I spoke the truth to the evil-minded 
 Custom-house man who turned my most 
 sacred raiment on a floor composed of stable- 
 refuse and pine-splinters ; but the reporter 
 overwhelmed me not so much by his poignant 
 audacity as his beautiful ignorance. I am 
 sorry now that I did not tell him more lies as 
 I passed into a city of three hundred thou 
 sand white men. Think of it ! Three hun 
 dred thousand white men and women gathered 
 in one spot, walking upon real pavements in 
 front of real plate-glass windowed shops, and 
 talking something that was not very different 
 from English. It was only when I had 
 tangled myself up in a hopeless maze of 
 small wooden houses, dust, street-refuse, and 
 children who play with empty kerosene tins, 
 that I discovered the difference of speech. 
 
 "You want to go to the Palace Hotel?" 
 said an affable youth on a dray. " What in 
 hell are you doing here, then ? This is about 
 the lowest place in the city. Go six blocks 
 north to the corner of Geary and Market ; 
 then walk around till you strike corner of 
 
24 American Notes. 
 
 Gutter and Sixteenth, and that brings you 
 there." 
 
 I do not vouch for the literal accuracy of 
 these directions, quoting but from a dis 
 ordered memory. 
 
 " Amen," I said. " But who am I that I 
 should strike the corners of such as you 
 name ? Peradventure they be gentlemen of 
 repute, and might hit back. Bring it down 
 to dots, my son." 
 
 I thought he would have smitten me, but 
 he didn t. He explained that no one ever 
 used the word " street," and that every one 
 was supposed to know how the streets run : 
 for sometimes the names were upon the lamps 
 and sometimes they weren t. Fortified with 
 these directions I proceeded till I found a 
 mighty street full of sumptuous buildings four 
 or five stories high, but paved with rude 
 cobble-stones in the fashion of the Year One. 
 A cable-car without any visible means of 
 support slid stealthily behind me and nearly 
 struck me in the back. A hundred yards 
 further there was a slight commotion in the 
 street a gathering together of three or four 
 and something glittered as it moved very 
 swiftly. A ponderous Irish gentleman with 
 priest s cords in his hat and a small nickel- 
 plated badge on his fat bosom emerged from 
 the knot, supporting a Chinaman who had 
 been stabbed in the eye and was bleeding 
 like a pig. The bystanders went their ways, 
 
American Notes. 25 
 
 and the Chinaman, assisted by the policeman, 
 his own. Of course this was none of my 
 business, but I rather wanted to know what 
 had happened to the gentleman who had 
 dealt the stab. It said a great deal for the 
 excellence of the municipal arrangements of 
 the town that a surging crowd did not at once 
 block the street to see what was going for 
 ward. I was the sixth man and the last who 
 assisted at the performance, and my curiosity 
 was six times the greatest. Indeed, I felt 
 ashamed of showing it. 
 
 There were no more incidents till I reached 
 the Palace Hotel, a seven-storied warren of 
 humanity with a thousand rooms in it. All the 
 travel-books will tell you about hotel arrange 
 ments in this country. They should be seen 
 to be appreciated. Understand clearly and 
 this letter is written after a thousand miles of 
 experiences that money will not buy you 
 service in the West. 
 
 When the hotel clerk the man who awards 
 your room to you and who is supposed to give 
 you information when that resplendent indi 
 vidual stoops to attend to your wants, he does 
 so whistling or humming, or picking his teeth, 
 or pauses to converse with some one he knows. 
 These performances, I gather, are to impress 
 upon you that he is a free man and your equal. 
 From his general appearance and the size of 
 his diamonds he ought to be your superior. 
 There is np necessity for this swaggering 
 
26 American Notes. 
 
 self-consciousness of freedom, Business is 
 business, and the man who is paid to attend 
 to a man might reasonably devote his whole 
 attention to the job. 
 
 . / In a vast marble-paved hall under the glare 
 of an electric light sat forty or fifty men ; and 
 for their use and amusement were provided 
 spittoons of infinite capacity and generous 
 gape. Most of the men wore frock-coats and 
 top-hats, the things that we in India put on 
 at a wedding breakfast if we possessed them, 
 but they all spat. They spat on principle. 
 The spittoons were on the staircases, in each 
 bedroom yea, and in chambers even more 
 sacred than these. They chased one into 
 retirement, but they blossomed in chiefest 
 splendor round the Bar, and they were all 
 used, every reeking one of em. 
 
 Just before I began to feel deathly sick, 
 another reporter grappled me. What he 
 wanted to know was the precise area of India 
 in square miles. I referred him to Whittaker. 
 He had never heard of Whittaker. He wanted 
 it from my own mouth, and I would not tell 
 him. Then he swerved off, like the other 
 man, to details of journalism in our own 
 country. I ventured to suggest that the inte 
 rior economy of a paper most concerned the 
 people who worked it. " That s the very 
 thing that interests us," he said. " Have you 
 got reporters anything like our reporters on 
 Indian newspapers ? " " We have not," I said, 
 
American Notes. 27 
 
 and suppressed the " thank God " rising to my 
 lips. " Why haven t you ? " said he. " Be 
 cause they would die," I said. It was exactly 
 like talking to a child a very rude little 
 child. He would begin almost every sentence 
 with: "Now tell me something about India," 
 and would turn aimlessly from one question to 
 another without the least continuity. I was 
 not angry, but keenly interested. The man 
 was a revelation to me. To his questions I 
 returned answers mendacious and evasive. 
 After all, it really did not matter what I said. 
 He could not understand. I can only hope 
 and pray that none of the readers of the Pioneer 
 will ever see that portentous interview. The 
 man made me out to be an idiot several sizes 
 more driveling than my destiny intended, and 
 the rankness of his ignorance managed to 
 distort the few poor facts with which I sup 
 plied him into large and elaborate lies. Then 
 thought I : " The matter of American journal 
 ism shall be looked into later on. At present 
 I will enjoy myself." 
 
 No man rose to tell me what were the lions 
 of the place. No one volunteered any sort of 
 conveyance. I was absolutely alone in this 
 big city of white folk. By instinct I sought 
 refreshment and came upon a bar-room, full 
 of bad Salon pictures, in which men with hats 
 on the backs of their heads were wolfing food 
 from a counter. It was the institution of the 
 " Free Lunch " that I had struck. You paid 
 
28 American Notes. 
 
 for a drink and got as much as you wanted to 
 eat. For something less than a rupee a day 
 a man can feed himself sumptuously in San 
 Francisco, even though he be bankrupt. Re 
 member this if ever you are stranded in these 
 parts. 
 
 Later, I began a vast but unsystematic ex 
 ploration of the streets. I asked for no names. 
 It was enough that the pavements were full of 
 white men and women, the streets clanging 
 with traffic, and that the restful roar of a great 
 city rang in my ears. The cable-cars glided 
 to all points of the compass. I took them 
 one by one till I could go no farther. San 
 Francisco has been pitched down on the sand 
 bunkers of the Bikaneer desert. About one- 
 fourth of it is ground reclaimed from the sea 
 any old-timer will tell you all about that. 
 The remainder is ragged, unthrifty sand-hills, 
 pegged down by houses. 
 
 From an English point of view there has 
 not been the least attempt at grading those 
 hills, and indeed you might as well try to grade 
 the hillocks of Sind. The cable-cars have for 
 all practical purposes made San Francisco a 
 dead level. They take no count of rise or fall, 
 but slide equably on their appointed courses 
 from one end to the other of a six-mile street. 
 They turn corners almost at right angles ; cross 
 other lines, and, for aught I know, may run 
 up the sides of houses. There is no visible 
 agency of their flight ; but once in a while 
 
American Notes. 29 
 
 you shall pass a five-storied building, humming 
 with machinery that winds up an everlasting 
 wire-cable, and the initiated will tell you that 
 here is the mechanism. I gave up asking 
 questions. If it pleases Providence to make a 
 car run up and down a slit in the ground for 
 many miles, and if for twopence-halfpenny I 
 can ride in that car, why shall I seek the rea 
 sons of the miracle ? Rather let me look out 
 of the windows till the shops give place to 
 thousands and thousands of little houses made 
 of wood each house just big enough for a 
 man and his family. Let me watch the peo 
 ple in the cars, and try to find out in what 
 manner they differ from us, their ancestors. 
 
 They delude themselves into the belief that 
 they talk English, the English, and I have 
 already been pitied for speaking with "an 
 English accent." The man who pitied me 
 spoke, so far as I was concerned, the language 
 of thieves. And they all do. Where we put 
 the accent forward, they throw it back, and 
 vice versa ; where we use the long a, they use 
 the short ; and words so simple as to be past 
 mistaking, they pronounce somewhere up in 
 the dome of their heads. How do these things 
 happen ? 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes says that Yankee 
 schoolmarms, the cider, and the salt codfish 
 of the Eastern States are responsible for what 
 he calls a nasal accent. A Hindu is a Hindu, 
 and a brother to the man who knows his ver- 
 
30 American Notes. 
 
 nacular ; and a Frenchman is French because 
 he speaks his own language ; but the Ameri 
 can has no language. He is dialect, slang, 
 provincialism, accent, and so forth. Now that 
 I have heard their voices, all the beauty of 
 Bret Harte is being ruined for me, because I 
 find myself catching through the roll of his 
 rhythmical prose the cadence of his peculiar 
 fatherland. Get an American lady to read to 
 you " How Santa Glaus came to Simpson s 
 Bar," and see how much is, under her tongue, 
 left of the beauty of the original. 
 
 But I am sorry for Bret Harte. It hap 
 pened this way. A reporter asked me what I 
 thought of the city, and I made answer suavely 
 that it was hallowed ground to me because of 
 Bret Harte. That was true. 
 
 " Well," said the reporter, " Bret Harte 
 claims California, but California don t claim 
 Bret Harte. He s been so long in England 
 that he s quite English. Have you seen our 
 cracker-factories and the new offices of the 
 Examiner ? " He could not understand that 
 to the outside world the city was worth a great 
 deal less than the man. 
 
 Night fell over the Pacific, and the white 
 sea-fog whipped through the streets, dimming 
 the splendors of the electric lights. It is the 
 use of this city, her men and women, to parade 
 between the hours of eight and ten a certain 
 
American Notes. 31 
 
 street, called Kearney Street, where the finest 
 shops are situated. Here the click of heels 
 on the pavement is loudest, here the lights are 
 brightest, and here the thunder of the traffic is 
 most overwhelming. I watched Young Cali 
 fornia and saw that it was at least expensively 
 dressed, cheerful in manner, and self-asserting 
 in conversation. Also the women are very 
 fair. The maidens were of generous build, 
 large, well-groomed, and attired in raiment 
 that even to my inexperienced eyes must have 
 cost much. Kearney Street, at nine o clock, 
 levels all distinctions of rank as impartially as 
 the grave. Again and again I loitered at the 
 heels of a couple of resplendent beings, only 
 to overhear, when I expected the level voice 
 of culture, the staccato " Sez he," Sez I," 
 that is the mark of the white servant-girl all 
 the world over. 
 
 This was depressing because, in spite of all 
 that goes to the contrary, fine feathers ought 
 to make fine birds. There was wealth un 
 limited wealth in the streets, but not an ac 
 cent that would not have been dear at fifty 
 cents. Wherefore, revolving in my mind that 
 these folk were barbarians, I was presently en 
 lightened and made aware that they also were 
 the heirs of all the ages, and civilized after all. 
 There appeared before me an affable stranger 
 of prepossessing appearance, with a blue and 
 an innocent eye. Addressing me by name, 
 he claimed to have met me in New York at 
 
32 American Notes. 
 
 the Windsor, and to this claim I gave a quali 
 fied assent. I did not remember the fact, but 
 since he was so certain of it, why then I 
 waited developments. 
 
 " And what did you think of Indiana when 
 you came through ? " was the next question. 
 
 It revealed the mystery of previous ac 
 quaintance, and one or two other things. 
 With reprehensible carelessness, my friend of 
 the light-blue eye had looked up the name 
 of his victim in the hotel register and read 
 " India " for Indiana. 
 
 He could not imagine an Englishman com 
 ing through the States from West to East in 
 stead of by the regularly ordained route. My 
 fear was that in his delight at finding me so 
 responsive he would make remarks about New 
 York and the Windsor which I could not 
 understand. And indeed, he adventured in 
 this direction once or twice, asking me what I 
 thought of such and such streets, which, from 
 his tone, I gathered were anything but re 
 spectable. It is trying to talk unknown New 
 York in almost unknown San Francisco. But 
 my friend was merciful. He protested that I 
 was one after his own heart, and pressed upon 
 me rare and curious drinks at more than one 
 bar. These drinks I accepted with gratitude, 
 as also the cigars with which his pockets were 
 stored. He would show me the Life of the 
 city. Having no desire to watch a weary old 
 play again, I evaded the offer, and received in 
 
American Notes. 33 
 
 lieu of the Devil s instruction much coarse 
 flattery. Curiously constituted is the soul of 
 man. Knowing how and where this man lied ; 
 waiting idly for the finale ; I was distinctly 
 conscious, as he bubbled compliments in my 
 ear, of soft thrills of gratified pride. I was 
 wise, quoth he, anybody could see that with 
 half an eye ; sagacious ; versed in the affairs 
 of the world ; an acquaintance to be desired - r 
 one who had tasted the cup of Life with dis 
 cretion. 
 
 All this pleased me, and in a measure 
 numbed the suspicion that was thoroughly 
 aroused Eventually the blue-eyed one dis 
 covered, nay insisted, that I had a taste for 
 cards (this was clumsily worked in, but it was 
 my fault, in that I met him half-way, and al 
 lowed him no chance of good acting). Here 
 upon, I laid my head to one side, and simulated 
 unholy wisdom, quoting odds and ends of 
 poker-talk, all ludicrously misapplied. My 
 friend kept his countenance admirably; and 
 well he might, for five minutes later we ar 
 rived, always by the purest of chances, at 
 a place where we could play cards, and also 
 frivol with Louisiana State Lottery tickets. 
 Would I play ? 
 
 " Nay," said I, " for to me cards have 
 neither meaning nor continuity ; but let us 
 assume that I am going to play. How would 
 you and your friends get to work ? Would 
 you play a straight game or make me drunk, 
 3 
 
34 American Notes. 
 
 or well, the fact is I m a newspaper man, 
 and I d be much obliged if you d let me know 
 something about bunco-steering." 
 
 My blue-eyed friend cursed me by his gods, 
 the Right and the Left Bower ; he even 
 cursed the very good cigars he had given me. 
 But, the storm over, he quieted down and ex 
 plained. I apologized for causing him to 
 waste an evening, and we spent a very pleasant 
 time together. 
 
 Inaccuracy, provincialism, and a too hasty 
 rushing to conclusions were the rocks that he 
 had split on ; but he got his revenge when he 
 said : 
 
 " How would I play with you ? From all 
 the poppycock " (Anglice, bosh) " you talked 
 about poker, I d ha played a straight game 
 and skinned you. I wouldn t have taken the 
 trouble to make you drunk. You never knew 
 anything of the game; but the way I was 
 mistaken in you makes me sick." 
 
 He glared at me as though I had done him 
 an injury. To-day I know how it is that, year 
 after year, week after week, the bunco-steerer, 
 who is the confidence-trick and the card-sharper 
 man of other climes, secures his prey. He 
 slavers them over with flattery, as the snake 
 slavers the rabbit. The incident depressed 
 me because it showed I had left the innocent 
 East far behind, and was come to a country 
 where a man must look out for himself. The 
 very hotel glistened with notices about keep* 
 
American Notes. 35 
 
 ing my door locked, and depositing my valu 
 ables in a safe. The white man in a lump is 
 bad. Weeping softly for O-Toyo (little I 
 knew then that my heart was to be torn 
 afresh from my bosom !), I fell asleep in the 
 clanging hotel. 
 
 Next morning I had entered upon the De 
 ferred Inheritance. { There are no princes in 
 America, at least with crowns on their heads, 
 but a generous-minded member of some 
 royal family received my letter of introduc 
 tion. Ere the day closed I was a member of 
 the two clubs and booked for many engage 
 ments to dinner and party. Now this prince, 
 upon whose financial operations be continual 
 increase, had no reason, nor had the others, his 
 friends, to put himself out for the sake of one 
 Briton more or less ; but he rested not till he 
 had accomplished all in my behalf that a 
 mother could think of for her debutante daugh 
 ter. Do you know the Bohemian Club of San 
 Francisco ? They say its fame extends over 
 the world. It was created somewhat on the 
 lines of the Savage by men who wrote or drew 
 things, and it has blossomed into most unre- 
 publican luxury. The ruler of the place is an 
 owl an owl standing upon a skull and cross- 
 bones, showing forth grimly the wisdom of the 
 man of letters and the end of his hopes for 
 immortality. The owl stands on the stair 
 case, a statue four feet high, is carved in the 
 woodwork, flutters on the frescoed ceilings, is 
 
36 American Notes, 
 
 stamped on the note-paper, and hangs on the 
 walls. He is an Ancient and Honorable Bird. 
 Under his wing twas my privilege to meet 
 with white men whose lives were not chained 
 down to routine of toil, who wrote magazine 
 articles instead of reading them hurriedly in 
 the pauses of office-work, who painted pictures 
 instead of contenting themselves with cheap 
 etchings picked up at another man s sale of 
 effects. Mine were all the rights of social in 
 tercourse that India, stony-hearted stepmother 
 of Collectors, has swindled us out of. Tread 
 ing soft carpets and breathing the incense of 
 superior cigars, I wandered from room to 
 room studying the paintings in which the 
 members of the club had caricatured them 
 selves, their associates, and their aims. There 
 was a slick French audacity about the work 
 manship of these men of toil unbending that 
 went straight to the heart of the beholder. 
 And yet it was not altogether French. A dry 
 grimness of treatment, almost Dutch, marked 
 the difference. The men painted as they 
 spoke with certainty. The club indulges in 
 revelries which it calls " jinks " high and 
 low, at intervals, and each of these gather 
 ings is faithfully portrayed in oils by hands 
 that know their business. In this club were 
 no amateurs spoiling canvas because they 
 fancied they could handle oils without knowl 
 edge of shadows or anatomy no gentleman 
 of leisure ruining the temper of publishers and 
 
American Notes. 37 
 
 an already ruined market with attempts to 
 write " because everybody writes something 
 these days." 
 
 My hosts were working, or had worked, for 
 their daily bread with pen or paint, and their 
 talk for the most part was of the shop shoppy 
 that is to say, delightful. They extended a 
 large hand of welcome and were as brethren, 
 and I did homage to the Owl and listened to 
 their talk. An Indian Club about Christmas 
 time will yield, if properly worked, an abun 
 dant harvest of queei tales ; but at a gathering 
 of Americans from the uttermost ends of their 
 own continent the tales are larger, thicker, 
 more spinous, and even more azure than any 
 Indian variety. Tales of the War I heard 
 told by an ex-officer of the South over his 
 evening drink to a Colonel of the Northern 
 army ; my introducer, who had served as a 
 trooper in the Northern Horse, throwing in 
 emendations from time to time. 
 
 Other voices followed with equally won 
 drous tales of riata-throwing in Mexico or 
 Arizona, of gambling at army posts in Texas, 
 of newspaper wars waged in godless Chicago, 
 of deaths sudden and violent in Montana and 
 Dakota, of the loves of half-breed maidens in 
 the South, and fantastic huntings for gold in 
 mysterious Alaska. Above all, they told the 
 story of the building of old San Francisco, 
 when the " finest collection of humanity on 
 God s earth, Sir, started this town, and the 
 
38 American Notes. 
 
 water came up to the foot of Market Street.* 
 Very terrible were some of the tales, grimly 
 humorous the others, and the men in broad 
 cloth and fine linen who told them had played 
 their parts in them. 
 
 " And now and again when things got too 
 bad they would toll the city bell, and the 
 Vigilance Committee turned out and hanged 
 the suspicious characters. A man didn t 
 begin to be suspected in those days till he had 
 committed at least one unprovoked murder," 
 said a calm-eyed, portly <old gentleman. 
 
 I looked at the pictures around me, the 
 noiseless, neat-uniformed waiter behind me, 
 the oak-ribbed ceiling above, the velvety car 
 pet beneath. It was hard to realize that even 
 twenty years ago you could see a man hanged 
 with great pomp. Later on I found reason to 
 change my opinion. The tales gave me a 
 headache and set me thinking. How in the 
 world was it possible to take in even one- 
 thousandth of this huge, roaring, many-sided 
 continent ? In the silence of the sumptuous 
 library lay Professor Bryce s book on the 
 American Republic. 
 
 " It is an omen," said I. " He has done 
 all things in all seriousness, and he may be 
 purchased for half a guinea. Those who 
 desire information of the most undoubted 
 must refer to his pages. For me is the daily 
 round of vagabondage, the recording of the 
 incidents of the hour, and talk with the trav* 
 
American Notes. 39 
 
 eling companion of the day. I will not do 
 this country at all." 
 
 And I forgot all about India for ten daya 
 while I went out to dinners and watched the 
 social customs of the people, which are entirely 
 different from our customs, and was introduced 
 to the men of many millions. These persons 
 are harmless in their earlier stages ; that is to 
 say, a man worth three or four million dollars 
 may be a good talker, clever, amusing, and of 
 the world ; a man with twice that amount is to 
 be avoided ; and a twenty-million man is 
 just twenty millions. Take an instance. I 
 was speaking to a newspaper man about seeing 
 the proprietor of his journal. My friend 
 snorted indignantly : 
 
 " See him ! Great Scott ! No ! If he hap 
 pens to appear in the office, I have to asso 
 ciate with him ; but, thank Heaven, outside 
 of that I move in circles where he cannot 
 come." 
 
 And yet the first thing I have been taught 
 to believe is that money was everything in 
 America 1 
 
American Notes. 
 
 III. 
 
 * Poor men -God made, and all for that ! * 
 
 IT was a bad business throughout, and the 
 only consolation is that it was all my fault. 
 
 A man took me round the Chinese quarter 
 of San Francisco, which is a ward of the city 
 of Canton set down in the most eligible busi 
 ness-quarter of the place. 
 
 The Chinaman with his usual skill has pos 
 sessed himself of good brick fire-proof build 
 ings and, following instinct, has packed each 
 tenement with hundreds of souls, all living in 
 filth and squalor not to be appreciated save 
 by you in India. That cursory investigation 
 ought to have sufficed ; but I wanted to know 
 how deep in the earth the Pig-tail had taken 
 root. Therefore I explore the Chinese quar 
 ter a second time and alone, which was fool 
 ishness. No one in the filthy streets (but fot 
 the blessed sea breezes San Francisco would 
 enjoy cholera every season) interfered with 
 my movements, though many asked for cum- 
 shaw. I struck a house about four stories 
 high full of celestial abominations, and began 
 to burrow down ; having heard that these tene 
 ments were constructed on the lines of ice 
 bergs two-thirds below sight level. Down- 
 
American Notes. 41 
 
 stairs I crawled past Chinamen in bunks, 
 opium-smokers, brothels, and gambling hells, 
 till I had reached the second cellar was, in 
 fact, in the labyrinths of a warren. Great is 
 the wisdom of the Chinaman. In time of 
 trouble that house could be razed to the 
 ground by the mob, and yet hide all its inhab 
 itants in brick-walled and wooden-beamed 
 subterranean galleries, strengthened with iron- 
 framed doors and gates. On the second 
 underground floor a man asked for cumshaw 
 and took me down-stairs to yet another cellar, 
 where the air was as thick as butter, and the 
 lamps burned little holes in it not more than 
 an inch square. In this place a poker club 
 had assembled and was in full swing. The 
 Chinaman loves " pokel," and plays it with 
 great skill, swearing like a cat when he loses. 
 Most of the men round the table were in semi- 
 European dress, their pig-tails curled up under 
 billy-cock hats. One of the company looked 
 like a Eurasian, whence I argued that he was 
 a Mexican a supposition that later inquiries 
 confirmed. They were a picturesque set of 
 fiends and polite, being too absorbed in their 
 game to look at the stranger. We were all 
 deep down under the earth, and save for the 
 rustle of a blue gown sleeve and the ghostly 
 whisper of the cards as they .were shuffled 
 and played, there was no sound. The heat 
 was almost unendurable. There was some 
 dispute between the Mexican and the man on 
 
42 American Notes. 
 
 his left. The latter shifted his place to put 
 the table between himself and his opponent, 
 and stretched a lean yellow hand towards the 
 Mexican s winnings. 
 
 Mark how purely man is a creature of in 
 stinct. Rarely introduced to the pistol, I saw 
 the Mexican half rise in his chair and at the 
 same instant found myself full length on the 
 floor. None had told me that this was the 
 best attitude when bullets are abroad. I was 
 there prone before I had time to think drop 
 ping as the room was filled with an intolerable 
 clamor like the discharge of a cannon. In those 
 close quarters the pistol report had no room to 
 spread any more than the smoke then acrid 
 in my nostrils. There was no second shot, but 
 a great silence in which I rose slowly to my 
 knees. The Chinaman was gripping the table 
 with both hands and staring in front of him at 
 an empty chair. The Mexican had gone, and 
 a little whirl of smoke was floating near the 
 roof. Still gripping the table, the Chinaman 
 said : " Ah 1 " in the tone that a man would 
 use when, looking up from his work suddenly, 
 he sees a well-known friend in the doorway. 
 Then he coughed and fell over to his own 
 right, and I saw that he had been shot in the 
 stomach. 
 
 I became aware that, save for two men 
 leaning over the stricken one, the room was 
 empty ; and all the tides of intense fear, hith 
 erto held back by intenser curiosity, swept 
 
American Notes. 43 
 
 over my soul. I ardently desired the outside 
 air. It was possible that the Chinamen would 
 mistake me for the Mexican, everything 
 horrible seemed possible just then, and it 
 was more than possible that the stairways 
 would be closed while they were hunting for 
 the murderer. The man on the floor coughed 
 a sickening cough. I heard it as I fled, and 
 one of his companions turned out the lamp. 
 Those stairs seemed interminable, and to add 
 to my dismay there was no sound of commo 
 tion in the house. No one hindered, no one 
 even looked at me. There was no trace of 
 the Mexican. I found the doorway and, my 
 legs trembling under me, reached the protec 
 tion of the clear cool night, the fog, and the 
 rain. I dared not run, and for the life of me 
 I could not walk. I must have effected a 
 compromise, for I remember the light of a 
 street lamp showed the shadow of one half 
 skipping caracoling along the pavements in 
 what seemed to be an ecstasy of suppressed 
 happiness. But it was fear deadly fear. 
 Fear compounded of past knowledge of the 
 Oriental only other white man available 
 witness three stories underground and the 
 cough of the Chinaman now some forty feet 
 under my clattering boot-heels. It was good 
 to see the shop-fronts and electric lights again. 
 Not for anything would I have informed the 
 police, because I firmly believed that the 
 Mexican had been dealt with somewhere down 
 
44 American Notes. 
 
 there on the third floor long ere I had reached 
 the air; and, moreover, once clear of the 
 place, I could not for the life of me tell where 
 it was. My ill-considered flight brought me 
 out somewhere a mile distant from the hotel ; 
 and the clank of the lift that bore me to a bed 
 six stories above ground was music in my 
 ears. Wherefore I would impress it upon you 
 who follow after, do not knock about the 
 Chinese quarters at night and alone. You 
 may stumble across a picturesque piece of 
 human nature that will unsteady your nerves 
 lor half a day. 
 
 And this brings me by natural sequence to 
 the great drink question. As you know, of 
 course, the American does not drink at meals 
 as a sensible man should. Indeed, he has no 
 meals. He stuffs for ten minutes thrice a day. 
 Also he has no decent notions about the sun 
 being over the yard-arm or below the horizon. 
 He pours his vanity into himself at unholy 
 hours, and indeed he can hardly help it. You 
 have no notion of what " treating " means on 
 the Western slope. It is more than an insti 
 tution ; it is a religion, though men tell me that 
 it is nothing to what it was. Take a very com 
 mon instance. At 10.30 A. M. a man is smit 
 ten with a desire for stimulants. He is in 
 the company of two friends. All three ad 
 journ to the nearest bar, seldom more than 
 
American Notes. 45 
 
 twenty yards away, and take three straight 
 whiskies. They talk for two minutes. The 
 second and third man then treats in order ; and 
 thus each walks into the street, two of them 
 the poorer by three goes of whisky under their 
 belt and one with two more liquors than he 
 wanted. It is not etiquette yet to refuse a 
 treat. The result is peculiar. I have never 
 yet, I confess, seen a drunken man in the 
 streets, but I have heard more about drunken 
 ness among white men, and seen more decent 
 men above or below themselves with drink, 
 than I care to think about. And the vice 
 runs up into all sorts of circles and societies. 
 Never was I more astonished than at one 
 pleasant dinner party to hear a pair of pretty 
 lips say casually of a gentleman friend then 
 under discussion, " He was drunk." The 
 fact was merely stated without emotion. That 
 was what startled me. But the climate of 
 California deals kindly with excess, and 
 treacherously covers up its traces. A man 
 neither bloats nor shrivels in this dry air. 
 He continues with the false bloom of health 
 upon his cheeks, an equable eye, a firm 
 mouth, and a steady hand till a day of reckon 
 ing arrives, and suddenly breaking up, about 
 the head, he dies, and his friends speak his 
 epitaph accordingly. Why people who in 
 most cases cannot hold their liquor should 
 play with it so recklessly I leave to others to 
 decide. This unhappy state of affairs has, 
 
46 American Notes. 
 
 however, produced one good result which I 
 will confide to you. In the heart of the busi 
 ness quarter, where banks and bankers are 
 thickest, and telegraph wires most numerous t 
 stands a semi-subterranean bar tended by a 
 German with long blond locks and a crystal 
 line eye. Go thither softly, treading on the 
 tips of your toes, and ask him for a Button 
 Punch. Twill take ten minutes to brew, but 
 the result is the highest and noblest product 
 of the age. No man but one knows what is 
 in it. I have a theory it is compounded of 
 the shavings of cherubs wings, the glory of a 
 tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and 
 fragments of lost epics by dead masters. But 
 try you for yourselves, and pause a while to 
 bless me, who am always mindful of the 
 truest interests of my brethren. 
 
 But enough of the stale spilth of bar-rooms. 
 Turn now to the august spectacle of a Gov 
 ernment of the people, by the people, for the 
 people, as it is understood in the city of San 
 Francisco. Professor Bryce s book will tell 
 you that every American citizen over twenty- 
 one years of age possesses a vote. He may 
 not know how to run his own business, con 
 trol his wife, or instil reverence into his chil 
 dren, may be pauper, half-crazed with drink, 
 bankrupt, dissolute, or merely a born fool ; 
 but he has a vote. If he likes, he can be 
 voting most of his time voting for his State 
 Governor, his municipal officers, local option, 
 
American Notes. 47 
 
 sewage contracts, or anything else of which 
 he has no special knowledge. 
 
 Once every four years he votes for a new 
 President. In his spare moments he votes 
 for his own judges the men who shall 
 give him justice. These are dependent on 
 popular favor for re-election inasmuch as they 
 are but chosen for a term of years two or 
 three, I believe. Such a position is mani 
 festly best calculated to create an independ 
 ent and unprejudiced administrator. Now 
 this mass of persons who vote is divided into 
 two parties Republican and Democrat. They 
 are both agreed in thinking that the other 
 part is running creation (which is America) 
 into red flame. Also the Democrat as a party 
 drinks more than the Republican, and when 
 drunk may be heard to talk about a thing 
 called the Tariff, which he does not under 
 stand, but which he conceives to be the bul 
 wark of the country or else the surest power 
 for its destruction. Sometimes he says one 
 thing and sometimes another, in order to 
 contradict the Republican, who is always con 
 tradicting himself. And this is a true and 
 lucid account of the forepart of American 
 politics. The behind-part is otherwise. 
 
 Since every man has a vote and may vote 
 on every conceivable thing, it follows that 
 there exist certain wise men who understand 
 the art of buying up votes retail, and vending 
 them wholesale to whoever wants them most 
 
48 American Notes. 
 
 urgently. Now an American engaged ia 
 making a home for himself has not time to 
 vote for turncocks and district attorneys and 
 cattle of that kind, but the unemployed have 
 much time because they are always on hand 
 somewhere in the streets. They are called 
 " the boys," and form a peculiar class. The 
 boys are young men ; inexpert in war, un 
 skilled in labor ; who have neither killed a 
 man, lifted cattle, or dug a well. In plain 
 English, they are just the men in the streets 
 who can always be trusted to rally round any 
 cause that has a glass of liquor for a visible 
 heart. They wait they are on hand ; and 
 in being on hand lies the crown and the glory 
 of American politics. The wise man is he 
 who, keeping a liquor saloon and judiciously 
 dispensing drinks, knows how to retain within 
 arm s reach a block of men who will vote for 
 or against anything under the canopy of 
 Heaven. Not every saloon-keeper can do 
 this. It demands careful study of city poli 
 tics, tact, the power of conciliation, and infi 
 nite resources of anecdote to amuse and keep 
 the crowd together night after night, till the 
 saloon becomes a salon. Above all, the 
 liquor side of the scheme must not be worked 
 for immediate profit. The boys who drink so 
 freely will ultimately pay their host a thou 
 sandfold. An Irishman, and an Irishman 
 pre-eminently, knows how to work such a 
 saloon parliament. Observe for a moment 
 
American Notes. 49 
 
 the plan of operations. The rank and file 
 are treated to drink and a little money and 
 they vote. He who controls ten votes re 
 ceives a proportionate reward ; the dispenser 
 of a thousand votes is worthy of reverence, 
 and so the chain runs on till we reach the 
 most successful worker of public saloons the 
 man most skilful in keeping his items to 
 gether and using them when required. Such 
 a man governs the city as absolutely as a 
 king. And you would know where the gain 
 comes in ? The whole of the public offices of 
 a city (with the exception of a very few w r here 
 special technical skill is required) are short-term 
 offices distributed accordingto " political " lean 
 ings. What would you have ? A big city re 
 quires many officials. Each office carries a sal 
 ary and influence worth twice the pay. The 
 offices are for the representatives of the men 
 who keep together and are on hand to vote. 
 The Commissioner of Sewage, let us say, is a 
 gentleman who has been elected to his office by 
 a Republican vote. He knows little and cares 
 less about sewage, but he has sense enough 
 to man the pumping-works and the street- 
 sweeping - machines with the gentlemen 
 who elected him. The Commissioner of 
 Police has been helped to his post very 
 largely by the influence of the boys at such 
 and such a saloon. He may be the guardian 
 of city morals, but he is not going to allow 
 his subordinates to enforce early closing or 
 
5o American Notes. 
 
 abstention from gambling in that saloon. 
 Most offices are limited to four years, conse 
 quently he is a fool who does not make his 
 office pay him while he is in it. 
 
 The only people who suffer by this happy 
 arrangement are, in fact, the people who de 
 vised the lovely system. And they suffer 
 because they are Americans. Let us explain. 
 As you know, every big city here holds at 
 least one big foreign vote generally Irish, 
 frequently German. In San Francisco, the 
 gathering place of the races, there is a distinct 
 Italian vote to be considered, but the Irish 
 vote is more important. For this reason the 
 Irishman does not kill himself with overwork. 
 He is made for the cheery dispensing of 
 liquors, for everlasting blarney, and possesses 
 a wonderfully keen appreciation of the weak 
 nesses of lesser human nature. Also he has 
 no sort of conscience, and only one strong 
 conviction that of deep-rooted hatred toward 
 England. He keeps to the streets, he is on 
 hand, he votes joyously, spending days lavish 
 ly, and time is the American s dearest com 
 modity. Behold the glorious result. To-day 
 the city of San Francisco is governed by the 
 Irish vote and the Irish influence, under the 
 rule of a gentleman whose sight is impaired, 
 and who requires a man to lead him about the 
 streets. He is called officially " Boss Buck 
 ley," and unofficially the " Blind White Devil." 
 I have before me now the record of his 
 
American Notes. 51 
 
 amiable career in black and white. It occupies 
 four columns of small print, and perhaps you 
 would think it disgraceful. Summarized, it is 
 as follows : Boss Buckley, by tact and deep 
 knowledge of the seamy side of the city, won 
 himself a following of voters. He sought no 
 office himself, or rarely : but as his following 
 increased he sold their services to the highest 
 bidder, himself taking toll of the revenues of 
 every office. He controlled the Democratic 
 party in the city of San Francisco. The 
 people appoint their own judges. Boss Buck 
 ley s people appointed judges. These judges 
 naturally were Boss Buckley s property. I 
 have been to dinner parties and heard edu 
 cated men, not concerned with politics, telling 
 stories one to another of " justice, both civil 
 and criminal, being bought with a price from 
 the hands of these judges. Such tales they 
 told without heat, as men recording facts. 
 Contracts for road-mending, public buildings, 
 and the like are under the control of Boss 
 Buckley, because the men whom Buckley s 
 following sent to the City Council adjudicate 
 on these contracts ; and on each and every one 
 of these contracts Boss Buckley levies his 
 percentage for himself and his allies. 
 
 The Republican party in San Francisco also 
 have their boss. He is not so great a genius 
 as Boss Buckley, but I decline to believe that 
 he is any whit more virtuous. He has a 
 smaller number of votes at his command. 
 
$2 American Notes. 
 
 IV. 
 
 I HAVE been watching machinery in repose 
 after reading about machinery in action. 
 
 An excellent gentleman who bears a name 
 honored in the magazines writes, much as 
 Disraeli orated, of " the sublime instincts of 
 an ancient people," the certainty with which 
 they can be trusted to manage their own af 
 fairs in their own way, and the speed with 
 which they are making for all sorts of desir 
 able goals. This he called a statement or 
 purview of American politics. 
 
 I went almost directly afterwards to a saloon 
 where gentlemen interested in ward politics 
 nightly congregate. They were not pretty 
 persons. Some of them were bloated, and 
 they all swore cheerfully till the heavy gold 
 watch-chains on their fat stomachs rose and 
 fell again ; but they talked over their liquor as 
 men who had power and unquestioned access 
 to places of trust and profit. 
 
 The magazine-writer discussed theories of 
 government ; these men the practice. They 
 had been there. They knew all about it. 
 They banged their fist on the table and spoke 
 of political " pulls," the vending of votes, and 
 so forth. Theirs was not the talk of village 
 babblers reconstructing the affairs of the na- 
 
American Notes. 53 
 
 tion, but of strong, coarse, lustful men lighting 
 for spoil and thoroughly understanding the 
 best methods of reaching it. I listened long 
 and intently to speech I could not understand, 
 or only in spots. It was the speech of busi 
 ness, however. I had sense enough to know 
 that, and to do my laughing outside the door. 
 Thei\ I began to understand why my pleasant 
 and well-educated hosts in San Francisco 
 spoke with a bitter scorn of such duties of 
 citizenship as voting and taking an interest in 
 the distribution of offices. Scores of men 
 have told me with no false pride that they 
 would as soon concern themselves with the 
 public affairs of the city or State as rake 
 inuck. Read about politics as the cultured 
 writer of the magazines regards em, and then, 
 and not till then, pay your respects to the 
 gentlemen who run the grimy reality. 
 
 I m sick of interviewing night-editors, who, 
 in response to my demand for the record of a 
 prominent citizen, answers : " Well, you see, he 
 began by keeping a saloon," etc. I prefer to 
 believe that my informants are treating me as 
 in the old sinful days in India I was used to 
 treat our wandering Globe-trotters. They 
 declare that they speak the truth, and the 
 news of dog-politics lately vouchsafed to me in 
 groggeries incline me to believe but I won L 
 ^Fhe people are much too nice to slangander 
 as recklessly as I have been doing. Besides, 
 I am hopelessly in love with about eight 
 
54 American Notes. 
 
 American maidens all perfectly delightful 
 till the next one comes into the room. 
 O-Toyo was a darling, but she lacked sev 
 eral things ; conversation, for one. You can 
 not live on giggles. She shall remain un 
 moved at Nagasaki while I roast a battered 
 heart before the shrine of a big Kentucky 
 blonde who had for a nurse, when she was 
 little, a negro "mammy." By consequence 
 she has welded on to Californian beauty, Paris 
 dresses, Eastern culture, Europe trips, and 
 wild Western originality, the queer dreamy 
 superstitions of the negro quarters, and the 
 result is soul-shattering. And she is but one 
 of many stars. Item, a maiden who believes 
 in education and possesses it, with a few hun 
 dred thousand dollars to boot, and a taste for 
 slumming. Item, the leader of a sort of in 
 formal salon where girls congregate, read 
 papers, and daringly discuss metaphysical 
 problems and candy a sloe-eyed, black- 
 browed imperious maiden. Item, a very small 
 maiden, absolutely without reverence, who can 
 in one swift sentence trample upon and leave 
 gasping half a dozen young men. Item, a 
 millionairess, burdened with her money, lonely, 
 caustic, with a tongue keen as a sword, 
 yearning for a sphere, but chained up to the 
 rock of her vast possessions. Item, a type 
 writer-maiden earning her own bread in this 
 big city, because she doesn t think a girl ought 
 to be a burden on her parents. She quotes 
 
American Notes. 55 
 
 Theophile Gautier, and moves through the 
 world manfully, much respected, for all her 
 twenty inexperienced summers. Item, a 
 woman from Cloudland who has no history in 
 the past, but is discreetly of the present, and 
 strives for the confidences of male humanity on 
 the grounds of " sympathy." (This is not al 
 together a new type.) Item, a girl in a " dive " 
 blessed with a Greek head and eyes that seem 
 to speak all that is best and sweetest in the 
 world. But wo is me ! she has no ideas in 
 this world or the next, beyond the consumption 
 of beer (a commission on each bottle), and 
 protests that she sings the songs allotted to 
 her nightly with no more than the vaguest 
 notion of their meaning. 
 
 f Sweet and comely are the maidens of Dev 
 onshire ; delicate and of gracious seeming 
 those who live in the pleasant places of Lon 
 don ; fascinating for all their demureness the 
 damsels of France clinging closely to their 
 mothers, and with large eyes wondering at the 
 wicked world ; excellent in her own place and 
 to those who understand her is the Anglo-t 
 Indian " spin " in her second season ; but the 
 girls of America are above and beyond them 
 all. They are clever ; they can talk. Yea, it 
 is said that they think. Certainly they have 
 an appearance of so doing. They are original, 
 and look you between the brows with un 
 abashed eyes as a sister might look at her 
 brother. They are instructed in the folly and 
 
56 American Notes. 
 
 ^vanity of the male mind, for they have associ 
 ated with " the boys " from babyhood, and can 
 discerningly minister to both vices, or pleas 
 antly snub the possessor. They possess, 
 moreover, a life among themselves, independ 
 ent of masculine associations. They have 
 societies and clubs and unlimited tea-fights 
 where all the guests are girls. They are self- 
 possessed without parting with any tenderness 
 that is their sex-right ; they understand ; they 
 can take care of themselves ; they are superbly 
 independent. When you ask them what 
 makes them so charming, they say : " It is be 
 cause we are better educated than your girls 
 and and we are more sensible in regard to 
 men. We have good times all around, but 
 we aren t taught to regard every man as a 
 possible husband. Nor is he expected to 
 marry the first girl he calls on regularly." Yes, 
 they have good times, their freedom is large, 
 and they do not abuse it. They can go driv 
 ing with young men, and receive visits from 
 young men to an extent that would make an 
 English mother wink with horror ; and neither 
 driver nor drivee have a thought beyond the 
 enjoyment of a good time. As certain also of 
 their own poets have said : 
 
 " Man is fire and woman is to\v, 
 And the devil he comes and begins to blow." 
 
 In America the tow is soaked in a solution 
 that makes it fireproof, in absolute liberty 
 
American Notes. 57 
 
 and large knowledge : consequently accidents 
 do not exceed the regular percentage arranged 
 by the Devil for each class and climate under 
 the skies. But the freedom of the young girl 
 has its drawbacks. She is I say it with all 
 reluctance irreverent, from her forty-dollarV 
 bonnet to the buckles in her eighteen-dollar ! 
 shoes. She talks flippantly to her parents 
 and men old enough to be her grandfather. 
 She has a prescriptive right to the society of 
 the Man who Arrives. The parents admit it. 
 This is sometimes embarrassing, especially 
 when you call on a man and his wife for the 
 sake of information ; the one being a mer 
 chant of varied knowledge, the other a woman 
 of the world. In five minutes your host has 
 vanished. In another five his wife has fol 
 lowed him, and you are left with a very charm 
 ing maiden doubtless, but certainly not the 
 person you came to see. She chatters and 
 you grin ; but you leave with the very strong 
 impression of a wasted morning. This has 
 been my experience once or twice. I have 
 even said as pointedly as I dared to a man : 
 " I came to see you." " You d better see me^ 
 in my office, then. The house belongs to my; 
 women-folk to my daughter, that is to say."] , 
 He spoke with truth. The American of( 
 wealth is owned by his family. They exploit 
 him for bullion, and sometimes it seems to me 
 that his lot is a lonely one. The women get 
 the ha pence; the kicks are all his own. 
 
58 American Notes 
 
 Nothing is too good for an American s 
 daughter (I speak here of the moneyed 
 classes). The girls take every gift as a mat 
 ter of course. Yet they develop greatly when 
 a catastrophe arrives and the man of many 
 millions goes up or goes down and his 
 daughters take to stenography or typewriting. 
 I have heard many tales of heroism from the 
 lips of girls who counted the principals among 
 their friends. The crash came ; Mamie or 
 Hattie or Sadie gave up their maid, their car 
 riages and candy, and with a No. 2 Reming 
 ton and a stout heart set about earning their 
 daily bread. 
 
 " And did I drop her from the list of my 
 friends? No, sir," said a scarlet-lipped vision 
 in white lace. " That might happen to me 
 any_day." 
 
 /it may be this sense of possible disaster 
 in the air that makes San Franciscan society 
 go with so captivating a rush and whirl. 
 Recklessness is in the air. I can t explain 
 where it comes from, but there it is. The 
 roaring winds off the Pacific make you drunk 
 to begin with. The agressive luxury on all 
 sides helps out the intoxication, and you spin 
 for ever " down the ringing groves of change " 
 (there is no small change, by the way, west of 
 the Rockies) as long as money lasts. They 
 make greatly and they spend lavishly ; not only 
 the rich but the artisans, who pay nearly five 
 pounds for a suit of clothes and for other lux 
 
American Notes 59 
 
 nries in proportion. The young men rejoice 
 in the days of their youth. They gamble, 
 yacht, race, enjoy prize-fights and cock-fights 
 the one openly, the other in secret they estab 
 lish luxurious clubs; they break themselves 
 over horse-flesh and other things ; and they 
 are instant in quarrel. At twenty they are 
 experienced in business ; embark in vast en 
 terprises, take partners as experienced as them 
 selves, and go to pieces with as much splen 
 dor as their neighbors. Remember that the men 
 who stocked California in the Fifties were 
 physically, and as far as regards certain tough 
 virtues, the pick of the earth. The inept and the 
 weakly died en route or went under in the days 
 of construction. To this nucleus were added 
 all the races of the Continent French, Italian, 
 German, and, of course, the Jew. The result 
 you shall see in large-boned, deep-chested, 
 delicate-handed women, and long, elastic, 
 well-built boys. It needs no little golden badge 
 swinging from his watch-chain to mark the 
 Native Son of the Golden West the country- 
 bred of California. Him I love because he is 
 devoid of fear, carries himself like a man, and 
 has a heart as big as his boots. I fancy, too, 
 he knows how to enjoy the blessings of life 
 that his world so abundantly bestows upon 
 him. At least I heard a little rat of a creature 
 with hock-bottle shoulders explaining that a 
 man from Chicago could pull the eye-teeth of 
 a Californian in business. Well, if I lived in 
 
60 American Notes 
 
 Fairyland, where cherries were as big as plums, 
 plums as big as apples, and strawberries of no 
 account ; where the procession of the fruits 
 of the seasons was like a pageant in a Drury 
 Lane pantomime and where the dry air was 
 wine, I should let business slide once in a way 
 and kick up my heels with my fellows. (The" 
 tale of the resources of California vegetable 
 and mineral is a fairy tale. You can read 
 it in books. You would never believe me. 
 All manner of nourishing food from sea-fish to 
 beef may be bought at the lowest prices ; and 
 the people are well developed and of a high 
 stomach. They demand ten shillings for tin 
 kering a jammed lock of a trunk ; they receive 
 sixteen shillings a day for working as carpen 
 ters ; they spend many sixpences on very bad 
 cigars, and they go mad over a prize-fight 
 When they disagree, they do so fatally, with 
 fire-arms in their hands, and on the public 
 streets. I was just clear of Mission Street 
 when the trouble began between two gentle 
 men, one of whom perforated the other. When 
 a policeman, whose name I do not recollect, 
 " fatally shot Ed. Kearney," for attempting to 
 escape arrest, I was in the next street. For 
 these things I am thankful. It is enough to 
 travel with a policeman in a tram-car and while 
 he arranges his coat-tails as he sits down, to 
 catch sight of a loaded revolver. It is enough 
 \ to know that fifty per cent, of the men in the 
 public saloons carry pistols about them. The 
 
American Notes 61 
 
 Chinaman waylays his adversary and methodi 
 cally chops him to pieces with his hatchet. 
 Then the Press roar about the brutal ferocity 
 of the Pagan. The Italian reconstructs his 
 friend with a long knife. The Press com 
 plains of the waywardness of the alien. The 
 Irishman and the native Californian in their 
 hours of discontent use the revolver, not once, 
 but six times. The Press records the fact, and 
 asks in the next column whether the world can 
 parallel the progress of San Francisco. The 
 American who loves this country will tell you 
 that this sort of thing is confined to the lower 
 classes. Just at present an ex-judge who was 
 sent to jail by another judge (upon my word, 
 I cannot tell whether these titles mean any 
 thing) is breathing red-hot vengeance against 
 his enemy. The papers have interviewed both 
 parties and confidently expect a fatal issue. 
 
 Now let me draw breath and curse the negro 
 waiter and through him the negro in service 
 generally. He has been made a citizen with 
 a vote ; consequently both political parties 
 play with him. But that is neither here nor 
 there. He will commit in one meal every 
 betise that a scullion fresh from the plow- 
 tail is capable of, and he will continue to re 
 peat those faults. He is as complete a heavy- 
 footed, uncomprehending, bungle-fisted fool as 
 any memsahib in the East ever took into hei 
 establishment. But he is according to law a 
 free and independent citizen consequently 
 
4)2 American Notes 
 
 above reproof or criticism. He, and he alone, 
 in this insane city will wait at table (the 
 -Chinaman doesn t count). He is untrained, 
 inept, but he will fill the place and draw the 
 pay. Now God and his father s Kismet made 
 him intellectually inferior to the Oriental. He 
 insists on pretending that he serves tables by 
 accident as a sort of amusement. He wishes 
 you to understand this little fact. You wish 
 to eat your meals, and if possible to have them 
 properly served. He is a big, black, vain 
 baby and a man rolled into one. A colored 
 ^gentleman who insisted on getting me pie 
 when I wanted something else, demanded 
 information about India. I gave him some 
 facts about wages. " Oh hell," said he, cheer- 
 iully, " that wouldn t keep me in cigars for a 
 month." Then he fawned on me for a ten- 
 cent piece. Later he took it upon himself to 
 pity the natives of India " heathen " he 
 called them, this Woolly One whose race has 
 been the butt of every comedy on the Asiatic 
 stage since the beginning. And I turned and 
 saw by the head upon his shoulders that he 
 was a Yoruba man, if there be any truth in 
 ethnological castes. He did his thinking in 
 English, but he was a Yoruba negro, and the 
 race type had remained the same throughout 
 his generations. And the room was full of 
 other races some that looked exactly like 
 iGallas (but the trade was never recruited 
 from that side of Africa), some duplicates of 
 
American Notes 63 
 
 Cameroon heads, and some Kroomen, if ever 
 Kroomen wore evening dress. The American 
 does not consider little matters of descent, 
 though by this time he ought to know all 
 about " damnable heredity." As a general 
 rule he keeps himself very far from the negro 
 and says unpretty things about him. There 
 are six million negroes more or less in the 
 States, and they are increasing. The Amer 
 icans once having made them citizens cannot 
 unmake them. He says, in his newspapers, 
 they ought to be elevated by education. He 
 is trying this : but it is like to be a long job, 
 because black blood is much more adhesive 
 than white, and throws back with annoying 
 persistence. When the negro gets a religion 
 he returns directly as a hiving bee, to the 
 first instincts of his people. Just now a wave 
 of religion is sweeping over some of the 
 Southern States. Up to the present, two 
 Messiahs and one Daniel have appeared ; and 
 several human sacrifices have been offered up 
 to these incarnations. The Daniel managed 
 to get three young men, who he insisted were 
 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, to walk 
 into a blast furnace; guaranteeing non- 
 combustion. They did not return. I have 
 seen nothing of this kind, but I have attended 
 a negro church. The congregation were 
 moved by the spirit to groans and tears, and 
 one of them danced up the aisle to the 
 mourners bench. The motive may have been 
 
04 American Notes 
 
 genuine. The movements of the shaken body 
 were those of a Zanzibar stick-dance, such as 
 you see at Aden on the coal boats ; and even 
 as I watched the people, the links that bound 
 them to the white man snapped one by one, 
 and I saw before me the hubshi (the Woolly 
 One) praying to the God he did not under 
 stand. Those neatly dressed folk on the 
 benches, the gray-headed elder by the window, 
 were savages neither more nor less. What 
 will the American do with the negro ? The 
 South will not consort with him. In some 
 States miscegenation is a penal offense. The 
 North is every year less and less in need of 
 his services. And he will not disappear. He 
 will continue as a problem. His friends will 
 urge that he is as good as the white man. 
 His enemies ... it is not good to be a negro 
 in the land of the free and the home of the 
 brave. 
 
 But this has nothing to do with San Fran 
 cisco and her merry maidens, her strong, 
 swaggering men, and her wealth of gold and 
 pride. They bore me to a banquet in honor 
 of a brave Lieutenant Carlin, of the Van- 
 dalia who stuck by his ship in the great 
 cyclone at Apia and comported himself as an 
 officer should. On that occasion twas at 
 the Bohemian Club I heard oratory with the 
 roundest of # s ; and devoured a dinner the 
 memory of which will descend with me into 
 the hungry grave. There were about forty 
 
American Notes 65 
 
 speeches delivered ; and not one of them was 
 average or ordinary. It was my first intro 
 duction to the American Eagle screaming for 
 all it was worth. The Lieutenant s heroism 
 served as a peg from which those silver- 
 tongued ones turned themselves loose and 
 kicked. They ransacked the clouds of sunset. 
 the thunderbolts of Heaven, the deeps of Hell, 
 and the splendors of the Resurrection, for 
 tropes and metaphors, and hurled the result at 
 the head of the guest of the evening. Never 
 since the morning stars sang together for joy, 
 I learned, had an amazed creation witnessed 
 such superhuman bravery as that displayed by 
 the American navy in the Samoa cyclone. 
 Till earth rotted in the phosphorescent star- 
 and-stripe slime of a decayed universe that 
 Godlike gallantry would not be forgotten. I 
 grieve that I cannot give the exact words. 
 My attempt at reproducing their spirit is pale 
 and inadequate. I sat bewildered on a corus 
 cating Niagara oi blatherumskite. It was 
 magnificent it was stupendous ; and I was 
 conscious of a wicked desire to hide my face 
 in a napkin and grin. Then, according to 
 rule, they produced their dead, and across the 
 snowy tablecloths dragged the corpse of every 
 man slain in the Civil War, and hurled defiance 
 at " our natural enemy " (England, so please 
 you !) " with her chain of fortresses across the 
 world." Thereafter they glorified their nation 
 afresh, from the beginning, in case any detail 
 
 5 
 
66 American Notes 
 
 should have been overlooked, and that made 
 me uncomfortable for their sakes. How in 
 the world can a white man, a Sahib of Our 
 blood, stand up and plaster praise on his own 
 country ? He can think as highly as he likes, 
 but his open-mouthed vehemence of adoration 
 struck me almost as indelicate. My hosts 
 talked for rather more than three hours, and 
 at the end seemed ready for three hours more. 
 But when the Lieutenant such a big, brave, 
 gentle giant ! rose to his feet, he delivered 
 what seemed to me as the speech of the even 
 ing. I remember nearly the whole of it, and 
 it ran something in this way : " Gentlemen- 
 it s very good of you to give me , this dinner 
 and to tell me all these pretty things, but 
 what I want you to understand the fact is > 
 what we want and what we ought to get at 
 once is a navy more ships lots of em " 
 Then we howled the top of the roof off, and I, 
 for one, fell in love with Carlin on the spot. 
 Wallah I He was a man. 
 
 The Prince among merchants bade me take 
 no heed to the warlike sentiments of some of 
 the old Generals. " The sky-rockets are 
 thrown in for effect," quoth he, " and when 
 ever we get on our hind legs we always ex 
 press a desire to chaw up England. It s a 
 sort of family affair." 
 
 And indeed, when you come to think of it, 
 there is no other country for the American 
 public speaker to trample upon. 
 
American Notes 67 
 
 France has Germany ; we have Russia ; tot 
 Italy, Austria is provided ; and the humblest 
 Pathan possesses an ancestral enemy. Only 
 America stands out of the racket ; and there 
 fore, to be in fashion, makes a sand-bag of 
 the mother-country, and bangs her when oc 
 casion requires. " The chain of fortresses " 
 man, a fascinating talker, explained to me 
 after the affair that he was compelled to blow 
 off steam. Everybody expected it. When we 
 had chanted " The Star-Spangled Banner " not 
 more than eight times, we adjourned. America 
 is a very great country, but it is not yet Heaven 
 with electric lights and plush fittings, as the 
 speakers professed to believe. My listening 
 mind went back to the politicians in the saloon 
 who wasted no time in talking about freedom, 
 but quietly made arrangements to impose their 
 will on the citizens. " The Judge is a great 
 man, but give thy presents to the Clerk," as 
 the proverb saith. 
 
 And what more remains to tell ? I cannot 
 write connectedly, because I am in love with 
 all those girls aforesaid and some others who 
 do not appear in the invoice. The type-writer 
 girl is an institution of which the comic papers 
 make much capital, but she is vastly conven 
 ient. She and a companion rent a room in a 
 business quarter, and copy manuscript at the 
 rate of six annas a page. Only a woman can 
 manage a type-writing machine, because she 
 has served apprenticeship to the sewing* 
 
68 American Notes 
 
 machine. She can earn as much as a hundred 
 dollars a month, and professes to regard this 
 form of bread-winning as her natural destiny. 
 But oh how she hates it in her heart of hearts 1 
 When I had got over the surprise of doing 
 business and trying to give orders to a young 
 woman of coldly clerkly aspect, intrenched be 
 hind gold-rimmed spectacles, I made inquiries 
 concerning the pleasures of this independ 
 ence. They liked it indeed, they did. 
 "Twas the natural fate of almost all girls, 
 the recognized custom in America, and 
 I was a barbarian not to see it in that 
 light 
 
 " Well, and after ? " said I. " What hap- 
 pens ? " 
 
 " We work for our bread." 
 
 " And then what do you expect ? n 
 
 " Then we shall work for our bread.* 
 
 " Till you die ? " 
 
 " Ye-es unless " 
 
 " Unless what ? A man works till he 
 dies." 
 
 " So shall we." This without enthusiasm 
 " I suppose." 
 
 Said the partner in the firm audaciously ? 
 " Sometimes we marry our employers at least 
 that s what the newspapers say." The hand 
 banged on half a dozen of the keys of the 
 machine at once. " Yes, I don t care. I 
 hate it I hate it I hate it, and you needn t 
 look so ! " 
 
American Notes 69 
 
 The senior partner was regarding the rebel 
 with grave-eyed reproach. 
 
 " I thought you did," said I. " I don t sup 
 pose American girls are much different from 
 English ones in instinct." 
 
 " Isn t it The ophile Gautier who says that 
 the only differences between country and 
 country lie in the slang and the uniform of the 
 police ? " 
 
 Now in the name of all the Gods at once, 
 what is one to say to a young lady (who in 
 England would be a Person) who earns her 
 own bread, and very naturally hates the em 
 ploy, and slings out-of-the-way quotations at 
 your head ? That one falls in love with her 
 goes without saying ; but that is not enough. 
 
 A mission should be established. 
 
70 American Notes 
 
 v. 
 
 * I walked in the lonesome even, 
 
 And who so sad as I, 
 As I saw the young men and maidens 
 Merrily passing by ? " 
 
 v / SAN FRANCISCO has only one drawback. 
 Tis hard to leave. When like the pious Hans 
 Breitmann I " cut that city by the sea " it was 
 with regrets for the pleasant places left be 
 hind, for the men who were so clever, and the 
 women who were so witty, for the " dives," 
 the beer-halls, the bucket-shops, and the poker- 
 hells where humanity was going to the Devil 
 with shouting and laughter and song and the 
 rattle of dice-boxes. I would fain have stayed, 
 but I feared that an evil end would come to 
 me when my money was all spent and I de 
 scended to the street corner. A voice inside 
 me said : "Get out of this. Go north. Strike 
 for Victoria and Vancouver. Bask for a day 
 under the shadow of the old flag." So I set 
 forth from San Francisco to Portland in 
 Oregon, and that was a railroad run of thirty- 
 six hours. 
 
 The Oakland railway terminus, whence all 
 the main lines start, does not own anything 
 approaching to a platform. A yard with a 
 dozen or more tracks is roughly asphalted, 
 
American Notes 71 
 
 and the traveler laden with handbags skips 
 merrily across the metals in search of his own 
 particular train. The bells of half a dozen 
 shunting engines are tolling suggestively in 
 his ears. If he is run down, so much the 
 worse for him. " When the bell rings, look 
 out for the locomotive." Long use has made 
 the nation familiar and even contemptuous to 
 wards trains to an extent which God never 
 intended. Women who in England would 
 gather up their skirts and scud timorously 
 over a level crossing in the country, here talk 
 dress and babies under the very nose of the 
 cow-catcher, and little children dally with the 
 moving car in a manner horrible to behold. 
 We pulled out at the wholly insignificant speed 
 of twenty-five miles an hour through the streets 
 of a suburb of fifty thousand, and in our prog 
 ress among the carts and the children and 
 shop fronts slew nobody ; at which I was not 
 a little disappointed. 
 
 When the negro porter bedded me up for 
 the night and I had solved the problem of 
 undressing while lying down, I was much 
 cheered by the thought that if anything hap 
 pened I should have to stay where I was and 
 wait till the kerosene lamps set the overturned 
 car alight and burned me to death. It is 
 easier to get out of a full theater than to 
 leave a Pullman in haste. 
 
 % By the time I had discovered that a profu 
 sion of nickel-plating, plush, and damask doe* 
 
72 American Notes 
 
 not compensate for closeness and dust, the 
 train ran into the daylight on the banks of 
 the Sacramento River. A few windows were 
 gingerly opened after the bunks had been re 
 converted into seats, but that long coffin-car 
 was by no means ventilated, and we were a 
 gummy, grimy crew who sat there. At six in 
 the morning the heat was distinctly unpleas 
 ant, but seeing with the eye of the flesh 
 that I was in Bret Harte s own country, I 
 rejoiced. There were the pines and madrone- 
 clad hills his miners lived and fought among ; 
 there was the heated red earth that showed 
 whence the gold had been washed ; the dry 
 gulch, the red, dusty road where Hamblin 
 was used to stop the stage in the intervals of 
 his elegant leisure and superior card-play; 
 there was the timber felled and sweating resin 
 in the sunshine ; and, above all, there was 
 the quivering pungent heat that Bret Harte 
 drives into your dull brain with the magic of 
 his pen. When we stopped at a collection of 
 packing-cases dignified by the name of a 
 town, my felicity was complete. The name 
 of the place was something offensive, Am- 
 berville or Jacksonburgh, but it owned a 
 cast-iron fountain worthy of a town of thirty 
 thousand. Next to the fountain was a 
 " hotel," at least seventeen feet high including 
 the chimney, and next to the hotel was the 
 forest the pine, the oak, and the untra"m- 
 melled undergrowth of the hillside. A cinna- 
 
American Notes 73 
 
 mon-bear cub Baby Sylvester in the very 
 fur was tied to the stump of a tree opposite 
 the fountain ; a pack-mule dozed in the dust- 
 haze, a red-shirted miner in a slouch hat 
 supported the hotel, a blue-shirted miner 
 swung round the corner, and the two went 
 indoors for a drink. A girl came out of the 
 only other house but one, and shading her 
 eyes with a brown hand stared at the panting 
 train. She didn t recognize me, but I knew 
 her had known her for years. She was 
 M liss. She never married the schoolmaster, 
 after all, but stayed, always young and always 
 fair, among the pines. I knew Red-Shirt 
 too. He was one of the bearded men who 
 stood back when Tennessee claimed his 
 partner from the hands of the Law. The 
 Sacramento River, a few yards away, shouted 
 that all these things were true. The train 
 went on while Baby Sylvester stood on his 
 downy head, and M liss swung her sun-bonnet 
 by the strings. 
 
 " What do you think ? " said a lawyer who 
 was traveling with me. " It s a new world 
 to you ; isn t it ? " 
 
 " No. It s quite familiar. I was never 
 out of England ; it s as if I saw it all." 
 
 Quick as light came the answer : " Yes, 
 they lived once thus at Venice when the 
 miners were the kings. " 
 
 I loved that lawyer on the spot. We drank 
 to Bret Harte who, you remember, " claimed 
 
74 American Notes 
 
 California, but California never claimed him, 
 He s turned English." 
 
 Lying back in state, I waited for the flying 
 miles to turn over the pages of the book I 
 knew. They brought me all I desired from 
 Man of no Account sitting on a stump and 
 playing with a dog, to " that most sarcastic 
 man, the quiet Mister Brown." He boarded 
 the train from out of the woods, and there 
 was venom and sulphur on his tongue. He 
 had just lost a lawsuit. Only Yuba Bill 
 failed to appear. The train had taken his 
 employment from him. A nameless ruffian 
 backed me into a corner and began telling me 
 about the resources of the country, and what 
 it would eventually become. All I remember 
 of his lecture was that you could catch trout 
 in the Sacramento River the stream that we 
 followed so faithfully. 
 
 Then rose a tough and wiry old man with 
 grizzled hair and made inquiries about the 
 trout. To him was added the secretary of a 
 life-insurance company. I fancy he was 
 traveling to rake in the dead that the train 
 killed. But he, too, was a fisherman, and the 
 two turned to meward. The frankness of a 
 X Westerner is delightful. They tell me that in 
 the Eastern States I shall meet another type 
 of man and a more reserved. The Califor- 
 nian always speaks of the man from the New 
 England States as a different breed. It is 
 our Punjab and Madras over again, but more 
 
American Notes 75 
 
 so. The old man was on a holiday in search 
 oi fish. When he discovered a brother-loafer 
 he proposed a confederation of rods. Quoth 
 the insurance-agent, "I m not staying any 
 time in Portland, but I will introduce you to 
 a man there who ll tell you about fishing." 
 The two told strange tales as we slid through 
 the forests and saw afar off the snowy head 
 of a great mountain. There were vineyards, 
 fruit orchards, and wheat fields where the 
 land opened out, and every ten miles or so, 
 twenty or thirty wooden houses and at least 
 three churches. A large town would have a 
 population of two thousand and an infinite 
 belief in its own capacities. Sometimes a 
 flaring advertisement flanked the line, calling 
 for men to settle down, take up the ground, 
 and make their home there. At a big town 
 we could pick up the local newspaper, narrow 
 as the cutting edge of a chisel and twice as 
 keen a journal filled with the prices of 
 stock, notices of improved reaping and bind 
 ing machines, movements of eminent citizens 
 " whose fame beyond their own abode ex 
 tends for miles along the Harlem road." 
 There was not much grace about these 
 papers, but all breathed the same need for 
 good men, steady men who would plow, 
 and till, and build schools for their children, 
 and make a township in the hills. Once only 
 I found a sharp change in the note and a 
 very pathetic one. I think it was a young 
 
76 American Notes 
 
 soul in trouble who was writing poetry. The 
 editor had jammed the verses between the 
 flamboyant advertisement of a real-estate 
 agent a man who sells you land and lies 
 about it and that of a Jew tailor who dis 
 posed of " nobby " suits at " cut-throat 
 prices." Here are two verses ; I think they 
 tell their own story : 
 
 " God made the pine with its root in the earth, 
 
 Its top in the sky ; 
 
 They have burned the pine to increase the worth 
 Of the wheat and the silver rye. 
 
 ** Go weigh the cost of the soul of the pine 
 
 Cut off from the sky ; 
 
 And the price of the wheat that grows so fine 
 And the worth of the silver rye I " 
 
 The thin-lipped, keen-eyed men who boarded 
 the train would not read that poetry, or, if 
 they did, would not understand. Heaven 
 guard that poor pine in the desert and keep 
 1 its top in the sky ! " 
 
 When the train took to itself an extra 
 engine and began to breathe heavily, some 
 one said that we were ascending the Siskiyou 
 Mountains. We had been climbing steadily 
 from San Francisco, and at last won to over 
 four thousand feet above sea-level, always 
 running through forest. Then, naturally 
 enough, we came down, but we dropped two 
 thousand two hundred feet in about thirteen 
 miles. It was not so much the grinding of 
 the brakes along the train, or the sight of 
 
American Notes 77 
 
 three curves of track apparently miles below 
 us, or even the vision of a goods-train appar 
 ently just under our wheels, or even the tun 
 nels, that made me reflect ; it was the trestles 
 over which we crawled, trestles something 
 over a hundred feet high and looking like 
 collection of match-sticks. 
 
 " I guess our timber is as much a curse as 
 a blessing," said the old man from Southern 
 California. " These trestles last very well for 
 five or six years ; then they get out of repair, 
 and a train goes through em, or else a forest 
 fire burns em up." 
 
 This was said in the middle of a groaning, 
 shivering trestle. An- occasional plate-layer 
 took a look at us as we went down, but that 
 railway didn t waste men on inspection duty. 
 Very often there were cattle on the track, 
 against which the engine used a diabolical 
 form of whistling. The old man had been a 
 driver in his youth, and beguiled the way with 
 cheery anecdotes of what might be expected if 
 we fouled a young calf. 
 
 " You see, they get their legs under the 
 cow-catcher, and that ll put an engine off the 
 line. I remember when a hog wrecked an 
 excursion-train and killed sixty people. Guess 
 the engineer will look out, though." 
 
 There is considerably too much guessing 
 about this large nation. As one of them put 
 it rather forcibly : " We guess a trestle will 
 stand forever, and we guess that we can 
 
78 American Notes 
 
 patch up a washout on the track, and we 
 guess the road s clear, and sometimes we 
 guess ourselves into the deepot, and some 
 times we guess ourselves into Hell." 
 
 ***** 
 
 The descent brought us far into Oregon 
 and a timber and wheat country. We drove 
 through wheat and pine in alternate slices, but 
 pine chiefly, till we reached Portland, which 
 is a city of fifty thousand, possessing the 
 electric light of course, equally, of course, 
 devoid of pavements, and a port of entry 
 about a hundred miles from the sea at which 
 big steamers can load. It is a poor city that 
 cannot say it has no equal on the Pacific 
 coast. Portland shouts this to the pines 
 which run down from a thousand-foot ridge 
 clear up to the city. You may sit in a be 
 dizened bar-room furnished with telephone 
 and clicker, and in half an hour be in the 
 woods. 
 
 Portland produces lumber and jig-saw fit 
 tings for houses, and beer and buggies, and 
 bricks and biscuit ; and, in case you should 
 miss the fact, there are glorified views of the 
 town hung up in public places with the value 
 of the products set down in dollars. All this 
 is excellent and exactly suitable to the opening 
 of a new country ; but when a man tells you 
 it is civilization, you object. The first thing 
 that the civilized man learns to do is to keep 
 the dollars in the background, because they 
 
American Notes 79 
 
 are only the oil of the machine that makes life 
 go smoothly. 
 
 Portland is so busy that it can t attend to its 
 own sewage or paving, and the four-story 
 brick blocks front cobble-stones and plank 
 sidewalks and other things much worse. I 
 saw a foundation being dug out. The sewage 
 of perhaps twenty years ago, had thoroughly 
 soaked into the soil, and there was a familiar 
 and Oriental look about the compost that flew 
 up with each shovel-load. Yet the local 
 papers, as was just and proper, swore there 
 was no place like Portland, Oregon, U. S. A., 
 chronicled the performances of Oregonians, 
 " claimed " prominent citizens elsewhere as 
 Oregonians, and fought tooth and nail for 
 dock, rail, and wharfage projects. And you 
 could find men who had thrown in their lives 
 with the city, who were bound up in it, and 
 worked their life out for what they conceived 
 to be its material prosperity. Pity it is to 
 record that in this strenuous, laboring town 
 there had been, a week before, a shooting-case. 
 One well-known man had shot another on the 
 street, and was now pleading self-defense, 
 because the other man had, or the murderer 
 thought he had, a pistol about him. Not 
 content with shooting him dead, he squibbed 
 off his revolver into him as he lay. I read 
 the pleadings, and they made rne ill. So far 
 as I could judge, if the dead man s body had 
 been found with a pistol on it, the shooter 
 
8o American Notes 
 
 would have gone free. Apart from the mere 
 murder, cowardly enough in itself, there was a 
 refinement of cowardice in the plea. Here in 
 this civilized city the surviving brute was afraid 
 he would be shot fancied he saw the other 
 man make a motion to his hip-pocket, and so 
 on. Eventually the jury disagreed. And the 
 degrading thing was that the trial was reported 
 by men who evidently understood all about 
 the pistol, was tried before a jury who were 
 versed in the etiquette of the hip-pocket, and 
 was discussed on the streets by men equally 
 initiate. 
 
 But let us return to more cheerful things. 
 The insurance-agent introduced us as friends 
 to a real-estate man, who promptly bade us go 
 up the Columbia River for a day while he 
 made inquiries about fishing. There was no 
 overwhelming formality. The old man was 
 addressed as " California," I answered indif 
 ferently to " England " or " Johnny Bull," and 
 the real-estate man was " Portland." This 
 was a lofty and spacious form of address. 
 
 So California and I took a steamboat, and 
 upon a sumptuous blue and gold morning 
 steered up the Willamette River, on which 
 Portland stands, into the great Columbia the 
 river that brings the salmon that goes into the 
 tin that is emptied into the dish when the ex 
 tra guest arrives in India. California intro 
 duced me to the boat and the scenery, showed 
 me the " texas," the difference between a " tow 
 
American Notes 81 
 
 head " and a " sawyer," and the precise nature 
 of a " slue." All I remember is a delightful 
 feeling that Mark Twain s Huckleberry Finn 
 and Mississippi Pilot were quite true, and that 
 I could almost recognize the very reaches 
 down which Huck and Jim had drifted. We 
 were on the border line between Oregon State 
 and Washington Territory, but that didn*t 
 matter. The Columbia was the Mississippi so 
 far as I was concerned. We ran along the 
 sides of wooded islands whose banks were 
 caving in with perpetual smashes, and we 
 skipped from one side to another of the mile- 
 wide stream in search of a channel, exactly 
 like a Mississippi steamer, and when we 
 wanted to pick up or set down a passenger we 
 chose a soft and safe place on the shore and 
 ran our very snub nose against it. California 
 spoke to each new passenger as he came 
 aboard and told me the man s birthplace. A 
 long-haired tender of kine crashed out of the 
 underwood, waved his hat, and was taken 
 aboard forthwith. " South Carolina," said 
 California, almost without looking at him. 
 " When he talks you will hear a softer dialect 
 than mine." And it befell as he said : where 
 at I marveled, and California chuckled. 
 Every island in the river carried fields of rich 
 wheat, orchards, and a white, wooden-house ; 
 or else, if the pines grew very thickly, a saw 
 mill, the tremulous whine of whose saws flick 
 ered across the water like the drone of a tired 
 6 
 
82 American Notes 
 
 bee. From remarks he let fall I gathered that 
 California owned timber ships and dealt in 
 lumber, had ranches too, a partner, and every 
 thing handsome about him ; in addition to a 
 checkered career of some thirty-five years. 
 But he looked almost as disreputable a loafer 
 as I. 
 
 " Say, young feller, we re going to see 
 scenery now. You shout and sing," said 
 California, when the bland wooded islands 
 gave place to bolder outlines, and the steamer 
 ran herself into a hornet s nest of black-fanged 
 rocks not a foot below the boiling broken 
 water. We were trying to get up a slue, or 
 back channel, by a short cut, and the stern- 
 wheel never spun twice in the same direction. 
 Then we hit a floating log with a jar that ran 
 through our system, and then, white-bellied, 
 open-gilled, spun by a dead salmon a lordly 
 twenty-pound Chinook salmon who had per 
 ished in his pride. " You ll see the salmon- 
 wheels fore long," said a man who lived " way 
 back on the Washoogle," and whose hat was 
 spangled with trout-flies. " Those Chinook 
 salmon never rise to the fly. The canneries 
 take them by the wheel." At the next bend 
 we sighted a wheel an infernal arrangement 
 of wire-gauze compartments worked by the 
 current and moved out from a barge in shore 
 to scoop up the salmon as he races op the 
 river. California swore long and fluently at 
 the sight, and the more fluently when he was 
 
American Notes 8*3 
 
 told of the weight of a good night s catch- 
 some thousands of pounds. Think of the 
 black and bloody murder of it ! But you out 
 yonder insist in buying tinned salmon, and 
 the canneries cannot live by letting down lines. 
 About this time California was struck with 
 madness. I found him dancing on the fore- 
 deck shouting, " Isn t she a daisy ? Isn t she 
 a darling ? " He had found a waterfall a 
 blown thread of white vapor that broke from 
 the crest of a hill a waterfall eight hundred 
 and fifty feet high whose voice was even 
 louder than the voice of the river. " Bridal 
 Veil," jerked out the purser. " D n that 
 purser and the people who christened her ! 
 Why didn t they call her Mechlin lace Falls at 
 fifty dollars a yard while they were at it ? " 
 said California. And I agreed with him. 
 There are many " bridal veil " falls in this 
 country, but few, men say, lovelier than those 
 that come down to the Columbia River. 
 Then the scenery began poured forth with 
 the reckless profusion of Nature, who when 
 she wants to be amiable succeeds only in be 
 ing oppressively magnificent. The river was 
 penned between gigantic stone walls crowned 
 with the ruined bastions of Oriental palaces. 
 The stretch of green water widened and was 
 guarded by pine-clad hills three thousand feet 
 high. A wicked devil s thumb nail of rock 
 shot up a hundred feet in midstream. A 
 sand-bar of blinding white sand gave prom 
 
84 American Notes 
 
 ise of flat country that the next bend denied ; 
 for, lo ! we were running under a triple tier 
 of fortifications, lava-topped, pine-clothed, and 
 terrible. Behind them the white dome of 
 Mount Hood ran fourteen thousand feet into 
 the blue, and at their feet the river threshed 
 ^among a belt of cottonwood trees. There I 
 sat down and looked at California half out of 
 the boat in his anxiety to see both sides of the 
 river at once. He had seen my note-book, 
 and it offended him. " Young feller, let her 
 go and you shut your head. It s not you 
 nor anybody like you can put this down. 
 Black, the novelist, he could. He can de 
 scribe salmon-fishing, he can." And he glared 
 at me as though he expected me to go and 
 do likewise. 
 
 " I can t. I know it," I said humbly. 
 
 " Then thank God that you came along this 
 way." 
 
 We reached a little railway, on an island, 
 which was to convey us to a second steamer, 
 because, as the purser explained, the river 
 was a " trifle broken." We had a six-mile 
 run, sitting m the sunshine on a dummy- 
 wagon, whirled just along the edge of the 
 river-bluffs. Sometimes we dived into the 
 fragrant pine woods, ablaze with flowers ; but 
 we generally watched the river now narrowed 
 into a turbulent millrace. Just where the 
 whole body of water broke in riot over a 
 series of cascades, the United States Govern- 
 
American Notes 85 
 
 ment had chosen to build a lock for steamers, 
 and the stream was one boiling, spouting 
 mob of water. A log shot down the race, 
 struck on a rock, split from end to end, and 
 rolled over in white foam. I shuddered be 
 cause my toes were not more than sixty feet 
 above the log, and I feared that a stray 
 splinter might have found me. But the train 
 ran into the river on a sort of floating trestle, 
 and I was upon another steamer ere I fully 
 understood why. The cascades were not two 
 hundred yards below us, and when we cast 
 off to go upstream, the rush of the river, ere 
 the wheel struck the water, dragged us as 
 though we had been towed. Then the country- 
 opened out, and California mourned for his 
 lost bluffs and crags, till we struck a rock 
 wall four hundred feet high, crowned by the 
 gigantic figure of a man watching us. On a 
 rocky island we saw the white tomb of an 
 old-time settler who had made his money in 
 San Francisco, but who had chosen to be 
 buried in an Indian burying-ground. A de 
 cayed wooden " wickyup," where the bones of 
 the Indian dead are laid, almost touched the 
 tomb. The river ran into a canal of basaltic 
 rock, painted in yellow, vermilion, and green 
 by Indians and, by inferior brutes, adorned 
 with advertisements of " bile beans." We 
 had reached The Dalles the center of a 
 great sheep and wool district, and the head 
 of navigation. 
 
86 American Notes 
 
 When an American arrives at a new town 
 it is his bounden duty to " take it in." Cali 
 fornia swung his coat over his shoulder with 
 the gesture of a man used to long tramps, and 
 together, at eight in the evening, we explored 
 The Dalles. The sun had not yet set, and it 
 would be light for at least another hour. All 
 the inhabitants seemed to own a little villa and 
 one church apiece. The young men were out 
 walking with the young maidens, the old folks 
 were sitting on the front steps, not the ones 
 that led to the religiously shuttered best draw 
 ing-room, but the side-front steps, and the 
 husbands and wives were tying back pear trees 
 or gathering cherries. A scent of hay reached 
 me, and in the stillness we could hear the 
 cattle bells as the cows came home across the 
 lava-sprinkled fields. California swung down 
 the wooden pavements, audibly criticising the 
 housewives hollyhocks and the more perfect 
 ways of pear-grafting, and, as the young men 
 and maidens passed, giving quaint stories of 
 his youth. I felt that I knew all the people 
 aforetime, I was so interested in them and 
 their life. A woman hung over a gate talk 
 ing to another woman, and as I passed I 
 heard her say, " skirts," and again, "skirts," 
 and " I ll send you over the pattern " ; and I 
 knew they were talking dress. We stumbled 
 upon a young couple saying good-by in the 
 twilight, and " When shall I see you again ? " 
 quoth he ; and I understood that to the doubt- 
 
American Notes 87 
 
 ing heart the tiny little town we paraded in 
 twenty minutes might be as large as all Lon 
 don and as impassable as an armed camp. I 
 gave them both my blessing, because " When 
 shall I see you again ? " is a question that 
 lies very near to hearts of all the world. The 
 last garden gate shut with a click that traveled 
 far down the street, and the lights of the 
 comfortable families began to shine in the 
 confidingly uncurtained windows. 
 
 " Say, Johnny Bull, doesn t all this make 
 you feel lonesome ? " said California. " Have 
 you got any folks at home ? SoVe I a wife 
 and five children and I m only on a holiday." 
 
 " And I m only on a holiday," I said, and 
 we went back to the Spittoon-wood Hotel. 
 Alas ! for the peace and purity of the little 
 town that I had babbled about. At the back 
 of a shop, and discreetly curtained, was a 
 room where the young men who had been 
 talking to the young maidens could play poker 
 and drink and swear, and on the shop were 
 dime novels of bloodshed to corrupt the mind 
 of the little boy, and prurient servant-girl-slush 
 yarns to poison the mind of the girl. Cali 
 fornia only laughed grimly, He said that all 
 these little one-house towns were pretty much 
 the same all over the States. 
 
 That night I dreamed I was back in India 
 with no place to sleep in ; tramping up and 
 down the Station mall and asking everybody, 
 " When shall I see you again ? " 
 
88 American Notes 
 
 VI. 
 
 ** The race is neither to the swift nor the battle to 
 the strong ; but time and chance cometh to all." 
 
 I HAVE lived ! 
 
 The American Continent may now sink 
 under the sea, for I have taken the best that 
 it yields, and the best was neither dollars, 
 love, nor real estate. 
 
 Hear now, gentlemen of the Punjab Fishing 
 Club, who whip the reaches of the Tavi, and 
 you who painfully import trout to Ootacamund, 
 and I will tell you how " old man California " 
 and I went fishing, and you shall envy. 
 
 We returned from the Dalles to Portland 
 by the way we had come, the steamer stopping 
 en route to pick up a night s catch of one of 
 the salmon wheels on the river, and to deliver 
 it at a cannery down-stream. 
 
 When the proprietor of the wheel announced 
 that his take was two thousand two hundred 
 and thirty pounds weight of fish, " and not a 
 heavy catch, neither," I thought he lied. But 
 he sent the boxes aboard, and I counted the 
 salmon by the hundred huge fifty-pounders, 
 hardly dead, scores of twenty and thirty- 
 pounders, and a host of smaller fish. 
 
 The steamer halted at a rude wooden ware* 
 
American Notes 89 
 
 house built on piles in a lonely reach of the 
 river, and sent in the fish. I followed them 
 up a scale-strewn, fishy incline that led to the 
 cannery. The crazy building was quivering 
 with the machinery on its floors, and a glit 
 tering bank of tin-scraps twenty feet high 
 showed where the waste was thrown after the 
 cans had been punched. Only Chinamen 
 were employed on the work, and they looked 
 like blood-besmeared yellow devils, as they 
 crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the 
 floor. When our consignment arrived, the 
 rough wooden boxes broke of themselves as 
 they were dumped down under a jet of water, 
 and the salmon burst out in a stream of quick 
 silver. A Chinaman jerked up a twenty- 
 pounder, beheaded and detailed it with two 
 swift strokes of a knife, flicked out its internal 
 arrangements with a third, and cast it into a 
 bloody-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped 
 from under his hands as though they were 
 facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them 
 from the vat and thrust them under a thing 
 like a chaff-cutter, which, descending, hewed 
 them into unseemly red gobbets fit for the can. 
 More Chinamen with yellow, crooked fingers, 
 jammed the stuff into the cans, which slid 
 down some marvelous machine forthwith, 
 soldering their own tops as they passed. Each 
 can was hastily tested for flaws, and then sunk, 
 with a hundred companions, into a vat oi 
 boiling water, there to be half cooked for 3 
 
9o American Notes 
 
 few minutes. The cans bulged slightly after 
 the operation, and were therefore slidden 
 along by the trolleyful to men with needles 
 and soldering irons, who vented them, and 
 soldered the aperture. Except for the label, 
 the " finest Columbia salmon " was ready for 
 the market. I was impressed, not so much 
 with the speed of the manufacture, as the 
 character of the factory. Inside, on a floor 
 ninety by forty, the most civilized and mur 
 derous of machinery. Outside, three foot 
 steps, the thick-growing pines and the im 
 mense solitude of the hills. Our steamer only 
 stayed twenty minutes at that place, but I 
 counted two hundred and forty finished cans, 
 made from the catch of the previous night, 
 -ere I left the slippery, blood-stained, scale- 
 spangled, oily floors, and the offal-smeared 
 Chinamen. 
 
 We reached Portland, California and I, 
 crying for salmon, and the real-estate man, to 
 whom we had been intrusted by " Portland " 
 the insurance man, met us in the street saying 
 that fifteen miles away, across country, we 
 should come upon a place called Clackamas 
 where we might perchance find what we 
 desired. And California, his coat-tails flying 
 in the wind, ran to a livery stable and char 
 tered a wagon and team forthwith. I could 
 push the wagon about with one hand, so light 
 was its structure. The team was purely 
 American that is to say, almost human in its 
 
American Notes 91 
 
 intelligence and docility. Some one said that 
 the roads were not good on the way to Clack- 
 amas and warned us against smashing the 
 springs. " Portland," who had watched the 
 preparations, finally reckoned " he d come 
 along too," and under heavenly skies we three 
 companions of a day set forth ; California 
 carefully lashing our rods into the carriage, 
 and the bystanders overwhelming us with 
 directions as to the sawmills we were to pass, 
 the ferries we were to cross, and the sign-posts 
 we were to seek signs from. Half a mile 
 from this city of fifty thousand souls we struck 
 (and this must be taken literally) a plank-road 
 that would have been a disgrace to an Irish 
 village. 
 
 Then six miles of macadamized road showed 
 us that the team could move. A railway ran 
 between us and the banks of the Willamette, 
 and another above us through the mountains. 
 All the land was dotted with small townships, 
 and the roads were full of farmers in their 
 town wagons, bunches of tow-haired, boggle- 
 eyed urchins sitting in the hay behind. The 
 men generally looked like loafers, but their 
 women were all well dressed. Brown hussar- 
 braiding on a tailor-made jacket does not, 
 however, consort with hay-wagons. Then we 
 Struck into the woods along what California 
 called a " camina rcale" a good road, and 
 Portland a " fair track." It wound in and out 
 among fire-blackened stumps, under pine 
 
92 American Notes 
 
 trees, along the corners of log-fences, through 
 hollows which must be hopeless marsh in the 
 winter, and up absurd gradients. But no 
 where throughout its length did I see any evi 
 dence of road-making. There was a track, 
 you couldn t well get off it, and it was all you 
 could do to stay on it. The dust lay a foot 
 thick in the blind ruts, and under the dust we 
 found bits of planking and bundles of brush 
 wood that sent the wagon bounding into the 
 air. Sometimes we crashed through bracken ; 
 anon where the blackberries grew rankest we 
 found a lonely little cemetery, the wooden 
 rails all awry, and the pitiful stumpy headstones 
 nodding drunkenly at the soft green mulleins. 
 Then with oaths and the sound of rent under 
 wood a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down 
 a " skid " road, hauling a forty-foot log along 
 a rudely made slide. A valley full of wheat 
 and cherry trees succeeded, and halting at a 
 house we bought ten pound weight of luscious 
 black cherries for something less than a rupee 
 and got a drink of icy-cold water for nothing, 
 while the untended team browsed sagaciously 
 by the roadside. Once we found a wayside 
 camp of horse-dealers lounging by a pool, 
 ready for a sale or a swap, and once two 
 sun-tanned youngsters shot down a hill on 
 Indian ponies, their full creels banging from 
 the high-pommeled saddles. They had been 
 fishing, and were our brethren therefore. We 
 shouted aloud in chorus to scare a wild-cat ; 
 
American Notes 93 
 
 we squabbled over th$ reasons that had led a 
 snake to cross a road ; we heaved bits of bark 
 at a venturesome chipmunk, who was really 
 the little gray squirrel of India and had come 
 to call on me ; we lost our way and got the 
 wagon so beautifully fixed on a steep road 
 that we had to tie the two hind-wheels to get 
 it down. Above all, California told tales of 
 Nevada and Arizona, of lonely nights spent 
 out prospecting, of the slaughter of deer and 
 the chase of men ; of woman, lovely woman, 
 who is a firebrand in a Western city, and 
 leads to the popping of pistols, and of the sud 
 den changes and chances of Fortune, who de 
 lights in making the miner or the lumberman 
 a quadruplicate millionaire, and in " busting " 
 the railroad king. That was a day to be re 
 membered, and it had only begun when we 
 drew rein at a tiny farmhouse on the banks of 
 the Clackamas and sought horse-feed and 
 lodging ere we hastened to the river that 
 broke over a weir not a quarter of a mile 
 away. 
 
 Imagine a stream seventy yards broad 
 divided by a pebbly island, running over 
 seductive riffles, and swirling into deep, quiet 
 pools where the good salmon goes to smoke 
 his pipe after meals. Set such a stream amid 
 fields of breast-high crops surrounded by hills 
 of pine, throw in where you please quiet 
 water, log-fenced meadows, and a hundred- 
 foot bluff just to keep the scenery from grow 
 
94 American Notes 
 
 ing too monotonous, and you will get some 
 faint notion of the Clackamas. 
 
 Portland had no rod. He held the gaff and 
 the whisky. California sniffed, upstream and 
 downstream across the racing water, chose 
 his ground, and let the gaudy spoon drop in 
 the tail of a riffle. I was getting my rod to 
 gether when I heard the joyous shriek of the 
 reel and the yells of California, and three feet 
 of living silver leaped into the air far across 
 the water. The forces were engaged. The 
 salmon tore up stream, the tense line cutting 
 the water like a tide-rip behind him, and the 
 light bamboo bowed to breaking. What hap 
 pened after I cannot tell. California swore 
 and prayed, and Portland shouted advice, and 
 I did all three for what appeared to be half a 
 day, but was in reality a little over a quarter 
 of an hour, and sullenly our fish came home 
 with spurts of temper, dashes head-on, and 
 sarabands in the air ; but home to the bank 
 came he, and the remorseless reel gathered up 
 the thread of his life inch by inch. We 
 landed him in a little bay, and the spring- 
 weight checked at eleven and a half pounds. 
 Eleven and one-half pounds of fighting sal 
 mon 1 We danced a war-dance on the pebbles, 
 and California caught me round the waist in 
 a hug that went near to breaking my ribs 
 while he shouted : " Partner ! Partner I 
 This is glory ! Now you catch your fish 1 
 Twenty-four years I ve waited for this I " 
 
American Notes 95 
 
 I went into that icy-cold river and made my 
 cast just above a weir, and all but foul-hooked 
 a blue and black water-snake with a coral 
 mouth who coiled herself on a stone and hissed 
 maledictions. The next cast ah, the pride 
 of it, the regal splendor of it I the thrill that 
 ran down from finger-tip to toe 1 The water 
 boiled. He broke for the fly and got it I 
 There remained enough sense in me to give 
 him all he wanted when he jumped not once 
 but twenty times before the upstream flight 
 that ran my line out to the last half-dozen 
 turns, and I saw the nickled reel-bar glitter 
 under the thinning green coils. My thumb 
 was burned deep when I strove to stopper the 
 line, but I did not feel it till later, for my soul 
 was out in the dancing water praying for him 
 to turn ere he took my tackle away. The 
 prayer was heard. As I bowed back, the butt 
 of the rod on my left hip-bone and the top 
 joint dipping like unto a weeping willow, he 
 turned, and I accepted each inch of slack that 
 I could by any means get in as a favor from 
 on High. There be several sorts of success 
 in this world that taste well in the moment 
 of enjoyment, but I question whether the 
 stealthy theft of line from an able-bodied 
 salmon who knows exactly what you are 
 doing and why you are doing it is not sweeter 
 than any other victory within human scope. 
 Like California s fish, he ran at me head-on 
 and leaped against the line, but the Lord 
 
96 American Notes 
 
 gave me two hundred and fifty pairs of fingers 
 in that hour. The banks and the pine trees 
 danced dizzily round me, but I only reeled 
 reeled as for life reeled for hours, and at 
 the end of the reeling continued to give him 
 the butt while he sulked in a pool. California 
 was farther up the reach, and with the corner 
 of my eye I could see him casting with long 
 casts and much skill. Then he struck, and 
 my fish broke for the weir at the same in 
 stant, and down the reach we came, Cali 
 fornia and I ; reel answering reel, even as the 
 morning stars sung together. 
 
 The first wild enthusiasm of capture had 
 died away. We were both at work now in 
 deadly earnest to prevent the lines fouling, to 
 stall off a downstream rush for deep water 
 just above the weir, and at the same time to 
 get the fish into the shallow bay downstream 
 that gave the best practicable landing. Port 
 land bade us both be of good heart, and vol 
 unteered to take the rod from my hands. 1 
 would rather have died among the pebbles 
 than surrender my right to play and land my 
 first salmon, weight unknown, on an eight- 
 ounce rod. I heard California, at my ear it 
 seemed, gasping : " He s a fighter from Fight- 
 ersville, sure ! " as his fish made a fresh break 
 across the stream. I saw Portland fall off a 
 log fence, break the overhanging bank, and 
 clatter down to the pebbles, all sand and 
 landing-net, and I dropped on a log to rest for 
 
American Notes 97 
 
 a moment. As I drew breath the weary 
 hands slackened their hold, and I forgot to 
 give him the butt. A wild scatter in the 
 water, a plunge and a break for the head 
 waters of the Clackamas was my reward, and 
 the hot toil of reeling-in with one eye under 
 the water and the other on the top joint of 
 the rod, was renewed. Worst of all, I was 
 blocking California s path to the little landing- 
 bay aforesaid, and he had to halt and tire his 
 prize where he was. " The Father of all 
 Salmon ! " he shouted. " For the love of 
 Heaven, get your trout to bank, Johnny Bull. 7 
 But I could no more. Even the insult failed 
 to move me. The rest of the game was with 
 the salmon. He suffered himself to be drawn, 
 skipping with pretended delight at getting to 
 the haven where I would fain have him. Yet 
 no sooner did he feel shoal water under his 
 ponderous belly than he backed like a tor 
 pedo-boat, and the snarl of the reel told me 
 that my labor was in vain. A dozen times at 
 least this happened ere the line hinted 
 he had given up that battle and would 
 be towed in. He was towed. The land 
 ing-net was useless for one of his size, and 
 I would not have him gaffed. I stepped 
 into the shallows and heaved him out with a 
 respectful hand under the gill, for which kind 
 ness he battered me about the legs with his 
 tail, and I felt the strength of him and was 
 proud. California had taken my place in the 
 7 
 
98 American Notes 
 
 shallows, his fish hard held. I was up the 
 bank lying full length on the sweet-scented 
 grass, and gasping in company with my first 
 salmon caught, played and landed on an eight- 
 ounce rod. My hands were cut and bleeding. 
 I was dripping with sweat, spangled like har 
 lequin with scales, wet from the waist down, 
 nose peeled by the sun, but utterly, supremely, 
 and consummately happy. He, the beauty, 
 the darling, the daisy, my Salmon Bahadur, 
 weighed twelve pounds, and I had been seven 
 and thirty minutes bringing him to bankl 
 He had been lightly hooked on the angle of 
 the right jaw, and the hook had not wearied 
 him. That hour I sat among princes and 
 crowned heads greater than them all. Be 
 low the bank we heard California scuffling 
 with his salmon, and swearing Spanish oaths. 
 Portland and I assisted at the capture, and 
 the fish dragged the spring-balance out by the 
 roots. It was only constructed to weigh up to 
 fifteen pounds. We stretched the three fish 
 on the grass, the eleven and a half, the 
 twelve, and fifteen pounder, and we swore 
 an oath that all who came after should merely 
 be weighed and put back again. 
 
 How shall I tell the glories of that day so 
 that you may be interested ? Again and 
 again did California and I prance down that 
 reach to the little bay, each with a salmon in 
 tow, and land him in the shallows. Then 
 Portland took my rod, and caught some ten- 
 
American Notes 99 
 
 pounders, and my spoon was carried away by 
 an unknown leviathan. Each fish, for the 
 merits of the three that had died so gamely, 
 was hastily hooked on the balance and flung 
 back, Portland recording the weight in a 
 pocket-book, for he was a real-estate man. 
 Each fish fought for all he was worth, and none 
 more savagely than the smallest a game little 
 six-pounder. At the end of six hours we 
 added up the list. Total : 16 fish, aggregate 
 weight 142 Ibs. The score in detail runs 
 something like this it is only interesting to 
 those concerned: 15, n^, 12, 10,9^,8, 
 and so forth ; as I have said, nothing under 
 six pounds, and three ten-pounders. 
 
 Very solemnly and thankfully we put up our 
 rods it was glory enough for all time and 
 returned weeping in each other s arms weep 
 ing tears of pure joy to that simple bare 
 legged family in the packing-case house by 
 the waterside. 
 
 The old farmer recollected days and nights 
 of fierce warfare with the Indians " way back 
 in the Fifties," when every ripple of the 
 Columbia River and her tributaries hid covert 
 danger. God had dowered him with a queer 
 crooked gift of expression, and a fierce anxiety 
 for the welfare of his two little sons tanned and 
 reserved children who attended school daily, 
 and spoke good English in a strange tongue. 
 
 His wife was an austere woman who had 
 once been kindly and perhaps handsome. 
 
loo American Notes 
 
 Many years of toil had taken the elasticity 
 out of step and voice. She looked for nothing 
 better than everlasting work the chafing de 
 tail of housework, and then a grave somewhere 
 up the hill among the blackberries and the 
 pines. But in her grim way she sympathized 
 with her eldest daughter, a small and silent 
 maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very 
 far from the meals she tended or the pans she 
 scoured. 
 
 We stumbled into the household at a crisis ; 
 and there was a deal of downright humanity in 
 that same. A bad, wicked dressmaker had 
 promised the maiden a dress in time for a to 
 morrow s railway journey, and, though the 
 barefooted Georgie, who stood in very whole 
 some awe of his sister, had scoured the woods 
 on a pony in search, that dress never arrived. 
 So with sorrow in her heart, and a hundred 
 Sister Anne glances up the road, she waited 
 upon the strangers, and, I doubt not, cursed 
 them for the wants that stood between her 
 and her need for tears. It was a genuine little 
 tragedy. The mother in a heavy, passionless 
 voice rebuked her impatience, yt sat bowed 
 over a heap of sewing for the daughter s 
 benefit. 
 
 These things I beheld in the long marigold- 
 scented twilight and whispering night, loaf 
 ing round the little house with California, who 
 unfolded himself like a lotus to the moon ; or 
 in the little boarded bunk that was our bed- 
 
American Notes 101 
 
 room, swapping tales with Portland and the 
 old man. Most of the yarns began in this 
 way: 
 
 " Red Larry was a bull-puncher back of 
 Lone County, Montana," or " There was a 
 man riding the trail met a jack-rabbit sitting 
 in a cactus," or " Bout the time of the San 
 Diego land boom, a woman from Monterey," 
 etc. 
 
 You can try to piece out for yourselves what 
 sort of stories they were. 
 
 And next day California took me under 
 his wing and told me we were going to see a 
 city smitten by a boom, and catch trout. So 
 we took a train and killed a cow she 
 wouldn t get out of the way, and the loco 
 motive " chanced " her and slew and cross 
 ing into Washington Territory won the town 
 of Tacoma, which stands at the head of Puget 
 Sound upon the road to Alaska and Van 
 couver. 
 
 California was right. Tacoma was literally 
 staggering under a boom of the boomiest. I 
 do not quite remember what her natural 
 resources were supposed to be, though every 
 second man shrieked a selection in my ear. 
 They included coal and iron, carrots, potatoes, 
 lumber, shipping, and a crop of thin news 
 papers all telling Portland that her days were 
 numbered. California and I struck the place 
 at twilight. The rude boarded pavements of 
 the main streets rumbled under the heels of 
 
IC2 American Notes 
 
 hundreds of furious men all actively engaged 
 in hunting drinks and eligible corner-lots. 
 They sought the drinks first. The street it 
 self alternated five-story business blocks of 
 the later and more abominable forms of archi 
 tecture with board shanties. Overhead the 
 drunken telegraph, telephone, and electric 
 light wires tangled on the tottering posts 
 whose butts were half-whittled through by the 
 knife of the loafer. Down the muddy, grimy, 
 unmetaled thoroughfare ran a horse-car line 
 the metals three inches above road leval. 
 Beyond this street rose many hills, and the 
 town was thrown like a broken set of domi 
 noes over all. A steam tramway it left the 
 track the only time I used it was nosing 
 about the hills, but the most prominent fea 
 tures of the landscape were the foundations 
 in brick and stone of a gigantic opera house 
 and the blackened stumps of the pines. 
 California sized up the town with one com 
 prehensive glance. " Big boom," said he ; 
 and a few instants later: "About time to 
 step off, / think," meaning thereby that the 
 boom had risen to its limit, and it would be 
 expedient not to meddle with it. We passed 
 down ungraded streets that ended abruptly in 
 a fifteen-foot drop and a nest of brambles; 
 along pavements that beginning in pine-plank 
 ended in the living tree ; by hotels with Turk 
 ish mosque trinketry on their shameless tops, 
 and the pine stumps at their very doors ; by 
 
American Notes 103 
 
 a female seminary, tall, gaunt and red, which 
 a native of the town bade us marvel at, and 
 we marveled ; by houses built in imitation of 
 the ones on Nob Hill, San Francisco, after 
 the Dutch fashion ; by other houses plente- 
 ously befouled with jig-saw work, and others 
 flaring with the castlemented, battlemented 
 bosh of the wooden Gothic school. 
 
 " You can tell just about when those fellers 
 had their houses built," quoth California. 
 " That one yonder wanted to be /talian, and 
 his architect built him what he wanted. The 
 new houses with the low straddle roofs and 
 windows pitched in sideways and red brick 
 walls are Dutch. That s the latest idea. I 1 
 can read the history of the town." I had na 
 occasion so to read. The natives were only 
 too glad and too proud to tell me. The hotel 
 walls bore a flaming panorama of Tacoma in 
 which by the eye of faith I saw a faint resem 
 blance to the real town. The hotel stationary- 
 advertised that Tacoma bore on its face alf 
 the advantages of the highest civilization, and 
 the newspapers sang the same tune in a 
 louder key. The real-estate agents were sell 
 ing house-lots on unmade streets miles away 
 for thousands of dollars. On the streets the 
 rude, crude streets, where the unshaded elec 
 tric light was fighting with the gentle northern^ 
 twilight men were babbling of money, town 
 lots, and again money how Alf or Ed had! 
 done such and such a thing that had brought 
 
104 American Notes 
 
 him so much money ; and round the corner 
 in a creaking boarded hall the red-jersey ed 
 Salvationists were calling upon mankind to 
 renounce all and follow their noisy God. The 
 men dropped in by twos and threes, listened 
 silently for a while, and as silently went their 
 way, the cymbals clashing after them in vain. 
 I think it was the raw, new smell of fresh 
 sawdust everywhere pervading the air that 
 threw upon me a desolating homesickness. 
 It brought back in a moment all remem 
 brances of that terrible first night at school 
 when the establishment has been newly white 
 washed, and a soft smell of escaping gas 
 mingles with the odor of trunks and wet 
 overcoats. I was a little boy, and the school 
 was very new. A vagabond among collarless 
 vagabonds, I loafed up the street, looking into 
 the fronts of little shops where they sold slop 
 shirts at fancy prices, which shops I saw later 
 described in the papers as "great." Cali 
 fornia had gone off to investigate on his own 
 account, and presently returned, laughing 
 noiselessly. " They are all mad here," he 
 said, " all mad. A man nearly pulled a gun 
 on me because I didn t agree with him that 
 Tacoma was going to whip San Francisco on 
 the strength of carrots and potatoes. I asked 
 him to tell me what the town produced, and I 
 couldn t get anything out of him except those 
 two darned vegetables. Say, what do you 
 think ? " 
 
American Notes 105 
 
 I responded firmly, " I m going into Brit 
 ish territory a little while to draw breath." 
 
 " I m going up the Sound, too, for a while," 
 said he, " but I m coming back coming back 
 to our salmon on the Clackamas. A man 
 has been pressing me to buy real estate 
 here. Young feller, don t you buy real 
 estate here." 
 
 California disappeared with a kindly wave 
 of his overcoat into worlds other than mine, 
 good luck go with him, for he was a true 
 sportsman 1 and I took a steamer up Puget 
 Sound for Vancouver, which is the terminus 
 of the Canadian Pacific Railway. That was a 
 queer voyage. The water, landlocked among 
 a thousand islands, lay still as oil under 
 our bows, and the wake of the screw broke 
 up the unquivering reflections of pines and 
 cliffs a mile away. Twas as though we were 
 trampling on glass. No one, not even the 
 Government, knows the number of islands in 
 the Sound. Even now you can get one 
 almost for the asking; can build a house, 
 raise sheep, catch salmon, and become a king 
 on a small scale your subjects the Indians 
 of the reservation, who glide among the islets 
 in their canoes and scratch their hides monkey- 
 wise by the beach. A Sound Indian is un 
 lovely, and only by accident picturesque. 
 His wife drives the canoe, but he himself is 
 so thorough a mariner that he can spring up 
 in his cockle-craft and whack his wife ovef 
 
106 American Notes 
 
 the head with a paddle without tipping the 
 whole affair into the water. This I have seen 
 him do unprovoked. I fancy it must have 
 been to show off before the whites. 
 
 Have I told you anything about Seattle 
 the town that was burned out a few weeks ago 
 when the insurance men at San Francisco took 
 their losses with a grin ? In the ghostly twi 
 light, just as the forest fires were beginning to 
 glare from the unthrifty islands, we struck it 
 struck it heavily, for the wharves had all 
 been burned down, and we tied up where we 
 could, crashing into the rotten foundations of 
 a boat house as a pig roots in high grass. 
 The town, like Tacoma, was built upon a hill. 
 In the heart of the business quarters there 
 was a horrible black smudge, as though a 
 Hand had come down and rubbed the place 
 smooth. I know now what being wiped out 
 means. The smudge seemed to be about a 
 mile long, and its blackness was relieved by 
 tents in which men were doing business with 
 the wreck of the stock they had saved. 
 There were shouts and counter-shouts from 
 the steamer to the temporary wharf, which 
 was laden with shingles for roofing, chairs, 
 trunks, provision-boxes, and all the lath and 
 string arrangements out of which a western 
 town is made. This is the way the shouts 
 ran : 
 
 " Oh, George 1 What s the best witlt 
 you ? " 
 
American Notes 107 
 
 " Nawthin . Got the old safe out. She s 
 burned to a crisp. Books all gone." 
 
 "Save anythin ?" 
 
 " Bar l o crackers and my wife s bonnet. 
 Coin to start store on them though." 
 
 " Bully for you. Where s that Emporium ? 
 I ll drop in." 
 
 " Corner what used to be Fourth and Main 
 little brown tent close to militia picquet 
 Sa-ay I We re under martial law, an all the 
 saloons are shut down." 
 
 "Best for you, George. Some men gets 
 crazy with a fire, an liquor makes em crazier." 
 
 " Spect any creator-condemned son of a 
 female dog who has lost all his fixin s in a 
 conflagration is going to put ice on his head 
 an* run for Congress, do you ? How d you 
 like us act ? " 
 
 The Job s comforter on the steamer retired 
 into himself. 
 
 " Oh, George " dived into the bar for a 
 drink. 
 
 P. S. Among many curiosities I have un 
 earthed one. It was a Face on a steamer a 
 face above a pointed straw-colored beard, a 
 face with thin lips and eloquent eyes. We 
 conversed, and presently I got at the ideas of 
 the Face. It was, though it lived for nine 
 months of the year in the wilds of Alaska and 
 British Columbia, an authority on the canon 
 law of the Church of England a zealous and 
 bitter upholder of the supremacy of the afore* 
 
io8 American Notes 
 
 said Church. Into my amazed ears, as the 
 steamer plodded through the reflections of the 
 stars, it poured the battle-cry of the Church 
 Militant here on earth, and put forward as a 
 foul injustice that in the prisons of British 
 Columbia the Protestant chaplain did not al 
 ways belong to the Church. The Face had 
 no official connection with the august body, 
 and by force of his life very seldom attended 
 service. 
 
 " But," said he, proudly, " I should think 
 it direct disobedience to the orders of my 
 Church if I attended any other places of wor 
 ship than those prescribed. I was once for 
 three months in a place where there was only 
 a Wesleyan Methodist chapel, and I never set 
 ,foot in it once, Sir. Never once. Twould 
 have been heresy. Rank heresy." 
 
 And as I leaned over the rail methought that 
 all the little stars in the water were shaking 
 with austere merriment! But it may have 
 been only the ripple of the steamer, after all 
 
 Si ,. 
 
 sW, 
 
:;; 
 
 * But who bhall chronicle the ways 
 Of common folk, the nights and days 
 Spent with rough goatherds on the snows^ 
 And travelers come whence no man knows ? ** 
 
 THIS day I know how a deserter feels. Here 
 in Victoria, a hundred and forty miles out o 
 America, the mail brings me news from our 
 Home the land of regrets. I was enjoying 
 myself by the side of a trout-stream, and I feel 
 inclined to apologize for every rejoicing breath 
 I drew in the diamond clear air. The sick 
 ness, they said, is heavy with you ; from 
 Rewari to the south good men are dying. 
 Two names come in by the mail of two strong 
 men dead men that I dined and jested with 
 only a little time ago, and it seems unfair that 
 I should be here, cut off from the chain-gang 
 and the shot-drill of our weary life. After all, 
 there is no life like it that we lead over yon 
 der. Americans are Americans, and there 
 are millions of them ; English are English ; 
 but we of India are Us all the world over, 
 knowing the mysteries of each other s lives 
 and sorrowing for the death of a brother. 
 How can I sit down and write to you of the 
 mere joy of being alive ? The news has 
 killed the pleasure of the day for me, and I 
 
 109 
 
no American Notes 
 
 am ashamed of myself. There are seventy 
 brook trout lying in a creel, fresh drawn from 
 Harrison Hot Springs, and they do not con- 
 gole me. They are like the stolen apples that 
 dinch the fact of a bad boy s playing truant. 
 I would sell them all, with my heritage in the 
 Woods and air and the delight of meeting new 
 and strange people, just to be back again in 
 the old galling harness, the heat and the dust, 
 the gatherings in the evenings by the flooded 
 tennis-courts, the ghastly dull dinners at the 
 Club when the very last woman has been 
 packed off to the hills and the four or five sur 
 viving men ask the doctor the symptoms of 
 incubating smallpox. I should be troubled in 
 body, but at peace in the soul. O excellent 
 and toil-worn public of mine men of the 
 brotherfiood, griffins new joined from the 
 February troopers, and gentlemen waiting for 
 your off reckonings take care of yourselves 
 and keep well ! It hurts so when any die. 
 There are so few of Us, and we know one 
 another too intimately. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Vancouver three years ago was swept off by 
 fire in sixteen minutes, and only one house was 
 left standing. To-day it has a population of 
 fourteen thousand people, and builds its houses 
 out of brick with dressed granite fronts. But 
 a great sleepiness lies on Vancouver as com 
 pared with an American town ; men don t fly 
 
American Notes in 
 
 up and down the streets telling lies, and the 
 spittoons in the delightfully comfortable hotel 
 are unused ; the baths are free and their doors 
 are unlocked. You do not have to dig up the 
 hotel clerk when you want to bathe, which 
 shows the inferiority of Vancouver. An 
 American bade me notice the absence of bustle, 
 and was alarmed when in a loud and audible 
 voice I thanked God for it. " Give me granite 
 hewn granite and peace," quoth I, " and 
 keep your deal boards and bustle for your 
 selves." 
 
 The Canadian Pacific terminus is not a very 
 gorgeous place as yet, but you can be shot 
 directly from the window of the train into the 
 liner that will take you in fourteen days from 
 Vancouver to Yokohama. The Parthia, of 
 some five thousand tons, was at her berth 
 when I came, and the sight of the ex-Cunard 
 on what seemed to be a little lake was curious. 
 Except for certain currents which are not much 
 mentioned, but which make the entrance 
 rather unpleasant for sailing-boats, Vancouver 
 possesses an almost perfect harbor. The 
 town is built all round and about the harbor,, 
 and young as it is, its streets are better than 
 those of western America. Moreover, the old 
 flag waves over some of the buildings, and 
 this is cheering to the soul. The place is full 
 of Englishmen who speak the English tongue 
 correctly and with clearness, avoiding more 
 blasphemy than is necessary, and taking a 
 
ii2 American Notes 
 
 respectable length of time to getting outside 
 their drinks. These advantages and others 
 that I have heard about, such as the construc 
 tion of elaborate workshops and the like by 
 the Canadian Pacific in the near future, moved 
 me to invest in real estate. He that sold it me 
 was a delightful English Boy who, having tried 
 for the Army and failed, had somehow mean 
 dered into a real-estate office, where he was 
 doing well. I couldn t have bought it from an 
 American. He would have overstated the 
 case and proved me the possessor of the origi 
 nal Eden. All the Boy said was : " I give 
 you my word it isn t on a cliff or under water, 
 and before long the town ought to move out 
 that way. I d advise you to take it." And I 
 took it as easily as a man buys a piece of 
 tobacco. Me void, owner of some four hun 
 dred well-developed pines, a few thousand 
 tons of granite scattered in blocks at the roots 
 of the pines, and a sprinkling of earth. That s 
 a town-lot in Vancouver. You or your agent 
 hold to it till property rises, then sell out and 
 buy more land further out of town and repeat 
 the process. I do not quite see how this sort 
 of thing helps the growth of a town, but the 
 English Boy says that it is the " essence of 
 speculation," so it must be all right. But I 
 wish there were fewer pines and rather less 
 granite on my ground. Moved by curiosity 
 and the lust of trout, I went seventy miles up 
 the Canadian Pacific in one of the cross-Con- 
 
American Notes 113 
 
 tinent cars, which are cleaner and less stuffy 
 than the Pullman. A man who goes all the 
 way across Canada is liable to be disappointed 
 not in the scenery, but in the progress of 
 the country. So a batch of wandering politi 
 cians from England told me. They even 
 went so far as to say that Eastern Canada was 
 a failure and unprofitable. The place didn t 
 move, they complained, and whole counties 
 they said provinces lay under the rule of the 
 Roman Catholic priests, who took care that 
 the people should not be over-cumbered with 
 the good things of this world to the detriment 
 of their souls. My interest was in the line 
 the real and accomplished railway which is to 
 throw actual fighting troops into the East some 
 day when our hold of the Suez Canal is tem 
 porarily loosened. 
 
 All that Vancouver wants is a fat earthwork 
 fort upon a hill, there are plenty of hills to 
 choose from, a selection of big guns, a couple 
 of regiments of infantry, and later on a big 
 arsenal. The raw self-consciousness of Amer 
 ica would be sure to make her think these 
 arrangements intended for her benefit, but she 
 could be enlightened. It is not seemly to 
 leave unprotected the head-end of a big rail 
 way ; for though Victoria and Esquimalt, our 
 naval stations on Vancouver Island, are very 
 near, so also is a place called Vladivostok, and 
 though Vancouver Narrows are strait, they 
 allow room enough for a man-of-war. The 
 
H4 American Notes 
 
 people I did not speak to more than two 
 hundred of them do not know about Russia 
 or military arrangements. They are trying to 
 open trade with Japan in lumber, and are 
 raising fruit, wheat, and sometimes minerals. 
 All of them agree that we do not yet know the 
 resources of British Columbia, and all joyfully 
 bade me note the climate, which was distinctly 
 warm. " We never have killing cold here. 
 It s the most perfect climate in the world." 
 Then there are three perfect climates, for 
 I have tasted em California, Washington 
 Territory, and British Columbia. I cannot say 
 which is the loveliest. 
 
 When I left by steamer and struck across 
 the Sound to our naval station at Victoria, 
 Vancouver Island, I found in that quite English 
 town of beautiful streets quite a colony of old 
 men doing nothing but talking, fishing, and loaf 
 ing at the Club. That means that the retired go 
 to Victoria. On a thousand a year pension a 
 man would be a millionaire in these parts, and 
 for four hundred he could live well. It was at 
 Victoria they told me the tale of the fire in 
 Vancouver. How the inhabitants of New 
 Westminster, twelve miles from Vancouver, saw 
 a glare in the sky at six in the evening but 
 thought it was a forest fire ; how later bits of 
 burnt paper flew about their streets, and they 
 guessed that evil had happened ; how an hour 
 later a man rode into the city crying that 
 there was no Vancouver left. All had been 
 
American Notes 115 
 
 <wiped out by the flames in sixteen minutes. 
 How, two hours later, the Mayor of New West 
 minster having voted nine thousand dollars 
 from the Municipal funds, relief-wagons with 
 food and blankets were pouring into where 
 Vancouver stood. How fourteen people were 
 supposed to have died in the fire, but how 
 even now when they laid new foundations the 
 workmen unearthed charred skeletons, many 
 more than fourteen. " That night," said the 
 teller, "all Vancouver was houseless. The 
 wooden town had gone in a breath. Next 
 day they began to build in brick, and you have 
 seen what they have achieved." 
 
 The sight afar off of three British men-of- 
 war and a torpedo-boat consoled me as I re 
 turned from Victoria to Tacoma and discovered 
 *n route that I was surfeited with scenery. 
 There is a great deal in the remark of a dis 
 contented traveler : " When you have seen a 
 fine forest, a bluff, a river, and a lake you have 
 seen all the scenery of western America. 
 Sometimes the pine is three hundred feet high, 
 and sometimes the rock is, and sometimes the 
 iake is a hundred miles long. But it s all the 
 same, don t you know. I m getting sick of 
 it." I dare not say getting sick. I m only 
 tired. If Providence could distribute all this 
 beauty in little bits where people most wanted 
 it among you in India, it would be well. 
 But it is en masse, overwhelming, with nobody 
 but the tobacco-chewing captain of a river 
 
n6 American Notes 
 
 steamboat to look at it. Men said if I went 
 to Alaska I should see islands even more 
 wooded, snow-peaks loftier, and rivers more 
 lovely than those around me. That decided 
 me not to go to Alaska. I went east east to 
 Montana, after another horrible night in Ta- 
 coma among the men who spat. Why does 
 the Westerner spit ? It can t amuse him, and 
 it doesn t interest his neighbor. 
 
 But I am beginning to mistrust. Every* 
 thing good as well as everything bad is sup 
 posed to come from the East. Is there a 
 shooting-scrape between prominent citizens ? 
 Oh, you ll find nothing of that kind in the 
 East. Is there a more than usually revolting 
 lynching ? They don t do that in the East. 
 I shall find out when I get there whether this 
 unnatural perfection be real. 
 
 Eastward then to Montana I took my way 
 for the Yellowstone National Park, called in 
 the guide-books " Wonderland." But the real 
 Wonderland began in the train. We were a 
 merry crew. One gentleman announced his 
 intention of paying no fare and grappled the 
 conductor, who neatly cross-buttocked him 
 through a double plate-glass window. His 
 head was cut open in four or five places. A 
 doctor on the train hastily stitched up the 
 biggest gash, and he was dropped at a way 
 side station, spurting blood at every hair a 
 scarlet-headed and ghastly sight. The con 
 ductor guessed that he would die, and volun* 
 
American Notes 117 
 
 teered the information that there was no profit 
 in monkeying with the North Pacific Railway. 
 
 Night was falling as we cleared the forests 
 and sailed out upon a wilderness of sage brush. 
 The desolations of Montgomery, the wilderness 
 of Sind, the hummock-studded desert of Bika- 
 neer, are joyous and homelike compared to the 
 impoverished misery of the sage. It is blue, it 
 is stunted, it is dusty. It wraps the rolling hills 
 as a mildewed shroud w r raps the body of a 
 long-dead man. It makes you weep for sheer 
 loneliness, and there is no getting away from 
 it. When Childe Roland came to the dark 
 Tower he traversed the sage brush. 
 
 Yet there is one thing worse than sage un 
 adulterated, and that is a prairie city. We 
 stopped at Pasco Junction, and a man told me 
 that it was the Queen City of the Prairie. I 
 wish Americans didn t tell such useless lies. I 
 counted fourteen or fifteen frame-houses, and 
 a portion of a road that showed like a bruise 
 on the untouched surface of the blue sage, 
 running away and away up to the setting sun. 
 The sailor sleeps with a half-inch plank be 
 tween himself and death. He is at home be 
 side the handful of people who curl themselves 
 up o nights with nothing but a frail scantling, 
 almost as thin as a blanket, to shut out the 
 unmeasurable loneliness of the sage. 
 
 When the train stopped on the road, as it 
 did once or twice, the solid silence of the sage 
 got up and shouted at us. It was like a 
 
1 1 8 American Notes 
 
 nightmare, and one not in the least improved 
 by having to sleep in an emigrant-car; the 
 regularly ordained sleepers being full. There 
 was a row in our car toward morning, a man 
 having managed to get querulously drunk in 
 the night. Up rose a Cornishman with a red 
 head full of strategy, and strapped the obstre 
 perous one, smiling largely as he did so, and 
 a delicate little woman in a far bunk watched 
 the fray and called the drunken man a 
 " damned hog," which he certainly was, 
 though she needn t have put it quite so 
 coarsely. Emigrant cars are clean, but the 
 accommodation is as hard as a plank bed. 
 . Later we laid our bones down to crossing 
 the Rockies. An American train can climb 
 up the side of a house if need be, but it is not 
 pleasant to sit in it. We clomb till we struck 
 violent cold and an Indian reservation, and 
 the noble savage came to look at us. He was 
 a Flathead and unlovely. Most Americans 
 are charmingly frank about the Indian. " Let 
 us get rid of him as soon as possible," they 
 say. " We have no use for him." Some of 
 the men I meet have a notion that we in India 
 are exterminating the native in the same 
 fashion, and I have been asked to fix a date 
 for the final extinguishment of the Aryan. 
 I answer that it will be a long business. 
 Very many Americans have an offensive habit 
 of referring to natives as " heathen." Ma 
 hometans and Hindus are heathen alike in 
 
American Notes 119 
 
 their eyes, and they vary the epithet with 
 " pagan " and " idolater." But this is beside 
 the matter, which is the Stampede Tunnel 
 our actual point of crossing the Rockies. 
 Thank Heaven, I need never take that tunnel 
 again ! It is about two miles long, and in 
 effect is nothing more than the gallery of a 
 mine shored with timber and lighted with 
 electric lamps. Black darkness would be pref 
 erable, for the lamps just reveal the rough 
 cutting of the rocks, and that is very rough in 
 deed. The train crawls through, brakes down, 
 and you can hear the water and little bits of 
 stone falling on the roof of the car. Then- 
 you pray, pray fervently, and the air gets 
 stiller and stiller, and you dare not take your 
 unwilling eyes off the timber shoring, lest a 
 prop should fall, for lack of your moral sup 
 port. Before the tunnel was built you crossed 
 in the open air by a switch-back line. A 
 watchman goes through the tunnel after each 
 train, but that is no protection. He just 
 guesses that another train will pull through,, 
 and the engine-driver guesses the same thing. 
 Some day between the two of them there wilt 
 be a cave in the tunnel. Then the enterpris 
 ing reporter will talk about the shrieks and 
 groans of the buried and the heroic efforts of 
 the Press in securing first information, and 
 that will be all. Human life is of small ac 
 count out here. 
 
 I was listening to yarns in the smoking- 
 
J2o American Notes 
 
 compartment of the Pullman, all the way to 
 Helena, and with very few exceptions, each 
 had for its point, violent, brutal, and ruffianly 
 \ murder murder by fraud and the craft of the 
 savage murder unavenged by the law, or at 
 the most by an outbreak of fresh lawlessness. 
 At the end of each tale I was assured that the 
 old days had passed away, and that these 
 were anecdotes of five years standing. One 
 man in particular distinguished himself by 
 holding up to admiration the exploits of some 
 cowboys of his acquaintance, and their skill in 
 the use of the revolver. Each tale of horror 
 wound up with " and that s the sort of man he 
 was," as who should say : " Go and do like 
 wise." Remember that the shootings, the 
 cuttings, and the stabbings were not the out 
 come of any species of legitimate warfare ; the 
 heroes were not forced to fight for their lives. 
 Far from it. The brawls were bred by liquor 
 in which they assisted in saloons and gam 
 bling-hells they were wont to " pull their guns " 
 on a man, and in the vast majority of cases 
 without provocation. The tales sickened me, 
 but taught one thing. A man who carries a 
 pistol may be put down as a coward a person 
 to be shut out from every decent mess and 
 club, and gathering of civilized folk. There 
 is neither chivalry nor romance in the weaponj 
 for all that American authors have seen fit t$ 
 write. I would I could make you understand 
 the full measure of contempt with which ce> 
 
American Notes 121 
 
 tain aspects of Western life have inspired me, 
 Let us try a comparison. Sometimes it hap 
 pens that a young, a very young, man, whose 
 first dress-coat is yet glossy, gets slightly 
 flushed at a dinner-party among his seniors. 
 After the ladies are gone, he begins to talk, 
 He talks, you will remember, as a " man oi 
 the world " and a person of varied experiences, 
 an authority on all things human and divine. 
 The gray heads of the elders bow assentingly 
 to his wildest statement ; some one tries to 
 turn the conversation when what the youngster 
 conceives to be wit has offended a sensibility ; 
 and another deftly slides the decanters beyond 
 him as they circle round the table. You know 
 the feeling of discomfort pity mingled with 
 aversion over the boy who is making an 
 exhibition of himself. The same emotion 
 came back to me, when an old man who ought 
 to have known better appealed from time to 
 time for admiration of his pitiful sentiments. 
 It was right in his mind to insult, to maim, and 
 to kill ; right to evade the law where it was 
 strong and to trample over it where it was 
 weak; right to swindle in politics, to lie in 
 affairs of State, and commit perjury in matters 
 of municipal administration. The car was 
 full of little children, utterly regardless of their 
 parents, fretful, peevish, spoilt beyond any* 
 thing I have ever seen in Anglo-India. They 
 in time would grow up into men such as sat irt 
 the smoker, and had no regard for the law, 
 
122 American Notes 
 
 men who would conduct papers siding " with 
 defiance of any and every law." But it s of 
 no consequence, as Mr. Toots says. 
 
 During the descent of the Rockies we jour 
 neyed for a season on a trestle only two hun 
 dred and eighty-six feet high. It was made of 
 iron, but up till two years ago a wooden struc 
 ture bore up the train, and was used long after 
 it had been condemned by the civil engineers. 
 Some day the iron one will come down, just 
 as Stampede Tunnel will, and the results will 
 be even more startling. 
 
 Late in the night we ran over a skunk 
 ran over it in the dark. Everything that has 
 been said about the skunk is true. It is an 
 Awesome Stink. 
 
American Notes 123 
 
 VIII. 
 
 LIVINGSTONE is a town of two thousand 
 people, and the junction for the little side-line 
 that takes you to the Yellowstone National 
 Park. It lies in a fold of the prairie, and be 
 hind it is the Yellowstone River and the gate 
 of the mountains through which the river 
 flows. There is one street in the town, where 
 the cowboy s pony and the little foal of the 
 brood-mare in the buggy rest contentedly ire 
 the blinding sunshine while the cowboy gets 
 himself shaved at the only other barber s shop, 
 and swaps lies at the bar. I exhausted the 
 town, including the saloons, in ten minutes, 
 and got away on the rolling grass downs where 
 I threw myself to rest. Directly under the 
 hill I was on, swept a drove of horses in charge 
 of two mounted men. That was a picture I 
 shall not soon forget. A light haze of dust 
 went up from the hoof-trodden green, scarcely 
 veiling the unfettered deviltries of three hun 
 dred horses who very much wanted to stop 
 and graze. " Yow 1 Yow ! Yow ! " yapped 
 the mounted men in chorus like coyotes. The 
 column moved forward at a trot, divided as it 
 met a hillock and scattered into fan shape att 
 among the suburbs of Livingstone, I heard 
 the " snick " of a stock whip, half a dozer* 
 
124 American Notes 
 
 " Yow, yows," and the mob had come together 
 again, and, with neighing and wickering and 
 squealing and a great deal of kicking on the 
 part of the youngsters, rolled like a wave of 
 brown water toward the uplands. 
 
 I was within twenty feet of the leader, a 
 gray stallion lord of many brood-mares 
 all deeply concerned for the welfare of their 
 fuzzy foals. A cream-colored beast I knew 
 him at once for the bad character of the 
 troop broke back, taking with him some 
 frivolous fillies. I heard the snick of the 
 whips somewhere in the dust, and the fillies 
 came back at a canter, very shocked and in 
 dignant. On the heels of the last rode both 
 the stockmen picturesque ruffians who 
 wanted to know " what in hell " I was doing 
 there, waved their hats, ard swept down the 
 slope after their charges. When the noise of 
 the troop had died ther* came a wonderful 
 silence on all the prairie that silence, they 
 say, which enters into the heart of the old- 
 time hunter and trapper and marks him off 
 from the rest of his race. The town disap 
 peared in the darkness, and a very young 
 moon showed herself over a bald-headed, 
 snow-flecked peak. Then the Yellowstone, 
 hidden by the water-willows, lifted up its voice 
 and sang a little song to the mountains, and 
 an pld horse that had crept up in the dusk 
 breathed inquiringly on the back of my neck. 
 When I reached the hotel I found all manner 
 
American Notes 125 
 
 of preparation under way for the 4th of July, 
 and a drunken man with a Winchester rifle 
 over his shoulder patrolling the sidewalk. I 
 do not think he wanted any one. He carried 
 the gun as other folk carry walking-sticks*. 
 None the less I avoided the direct line of fire 
 and listened to the blasphemies of miners and 
 stockmen till far into the night. In every 
 bar-room lay a copy of the local paper, and 
 every copy impressed it upon the inhabitants 
 of Livingstone that they were the best, finest,, 
 bravest, richest, and most progressive town of 
 the most progressive nation under Heaven ; 
 even as the Tacoma and Portland papers had 
 belauded their readers. And yet, all my pur 
 blind eyes could see was a grubby little hamlet 
 full of men without clean collars and perfectly 
 unable to get through one sentence unadorned 
 by three oaths. They raise horses and min 
 erals round and about Livingstone, but they 
 behave as though they raised cherubims with 
 diamonds in their wings. 
 
 From Livingstone the National Park train 
 follows the Yellowstone River through the 
 gate of the mountains and over arid volcanic 
 country. A stranger in the cars saw me look 
 at the ideal trout-stream below the windows 
 and murmured softly : " Lie off at Yankee 
 Jim s if you want good fishing." They halted 
 the train at the head of a narrow valley, and I 
 leaped literally into the arms of Yankee Jirn, 
 sole owner of a log hut and an indefinite 
 
126 American Notes 
 
 amount of hay-ground, and constructor of 
 twenty-seven miles of wagon-road over which 
 he held toll right. There was the hut the 
 river fifty yards away, and the polished line of 
 metals that disappeared round a bluff. That 
 was all. The railway added the finishing 
 touch to the already complete loneliness of 
 the place. Yankee Jim was a picturesque old 
 man with a talent for yarns that Annanias 
 might have envied. It seemed to me, pre 
 sumptuous in my ignorance, that I might 
 hold my own with the old-timer if I judi 
 ciously painted up a few lies gathered in the 
 course of my wanderings. Yankee Jim saw 
 every one of my tales and went fifty better on 
 the spot. He dealt in bears and Indians 
 never less than twenty of each ; had known 
 the Yellowstone country for years^ and bore 
 upon his body marks of Indian arrows ; and 
 his eyes had seen a squaw of the Crow 
 Indians burned alive at the stake. He said 
 she screamed considerable. In one point did 
 he speak the truth as regarded the merits of 
 that particular reach of the Yellowstone. He 
 said it was alive with trout. It was. I fished 
 it from noon till twilight, and the fish bit at 
 the brown hook as though never a fat trout- 
 fly had fallen on the water. From pebbly 
 reaches, quivering in the heat-haze where the 
 ioot caught on stumps cut four-square by 
 the chisel-tooth of the beaver ; past the fringe 
 of the water-willow crowded with the breeding 
 
American Notes 127 
 
 trout-fly and alive with toads and water- 
 snakes ; over the drifted timber to the grate 
 ful shadow of big trees that darkened the 
 holes where the fattest fish lay, I worked for 
 seven hours. The mountain flanks on either 
 side of the valley gave back the heat as the 
 desert gives it, and the dry sand by the rail 
 way track, where I found a rattlesnake, was 
 hot-iron to the touch. But the trout did not 
 care for the heat. They breasted the boiling 
 river for my fly and they got it. I simply 
 dare not give my bag. At the fortieth trout 
 I gave up counting, and I had reached the 
 fortieth in less than two hours. They were 
 small fish, not one over two pounds, but 
 they fought like small tigers, and I lost three 
 flies before I could understand their methods 
 of escape. Ye gods 1 That was fishing, 
 though it peeled the skin from my nose in 
 strips. 
 
 At twilight Yankee Jim bore me off, pro 
 testing, to supper in the hut. The fish had 
 prepared me for any surprise, wherefore when 
 Yankee Jim introduced me to a young woman 
 of five-and-twenty, with eyes like the deep- 
 fringed eyes of the gazelle, and " on the neck 
 the small head buoyant, like a bell-flower in 
 its bed," I said nothing. It was all in the 
 day s events. She was California-raised, the 
 wife of a man who owned a stock-farm " up 
 the river a little ways," and, with her husband, 
 tenant of Yankee Jim s shanty. I know she 
 
128 American Notes 
 
 wore list slippers, and did not wear stays ; 
 but I know also that she was beautiful by any 
 standard of beauty, and that the trout she 
 cooked were fit for a king s supper. And 
 after supper strange men loafed up in the dim 
 delicious twilight, with the little news of the 
 day how a heifer had "gone strayed" from 
 Nicholson s ; how the widow at Grant s Fork 
 wouldn t part with a little hayland nohow, 
 though " she an her big brothers can t man 
 age more than ha-af of their land now. She s 
 so darned proud." Diana of the Crossways 
 entertained them in queenly wise, and her 
 husband and Yankee Jim bade them sit right 
 down and make themselves at home. Then did 
 Yankee Jim uncurl his choicest lies on Indian 
 warfare aforetime ; then did the whisky-flask 
 circle round the little crowd ; then did Diana s 
 husband low that he was quite handy with the 
 lariat, but had seen men rope a steer by any 
 foot or horn indicated ; then did Diana un 
 burden herself about her neighbors. The 
 nearest house was three miles away, " but the 
 women aren t nice, neighborly folk. They 
 talk so. They haven t got anything else to 
 do, seemingly. If a woman goes to a dance 
 and has a good time, they talk, and if she 
 wears a silk dress, they want to know how 
 jest ranchin folks folk on a ranche come 
 by such things ; and they make mischief 
 down all the lands here from Gardiner City 
 way back up to Livingstone. They re mostly 
 
American Notes 129 
 
 Montana raised, and they haven t been no- 
 wheres. Ah, how they talk ! " " Were things 
 like this," demanded Diana, " in the big world 
 outside, whence I had come ? " " Yes," I 
 said, " things were very much the same all 
 over the world," and I thought of a far-away 
 station in India, where new dresses and the 
 having of good times at dances raised cackle 
 more grammatical perhaps, but no less veno 
 mous than the gossip of the " Montana-raised " 
 folk on the ranches of the Yellowstone. 
 
 Next morn I fished again and listened to 
 Diana telling the story of her life. I forget 
 what she told me, but I am distinctly aware 
 that she had royal eyes and a mouth that the 
 daughter of a hundred earls might have envied 
 so small and so delicately cut it was. " An 
 you come back an see us again," said the 
 simple-minded folk. " Come back an we ll 
 show you how to catch six-pound trout at the 
 head of the canon." 
 
 To-day I am in the Yellowstone Park, and I 
 wish I were dead. The train halted at Cin 
 nabar station, and we were decanted, a howl 
 ing crowd of us, into stages, variously horsed, 
 for the eight-mile drive to the first spectacle of 
 the Park a place called the Mammoth Hot 
 Springs. " What means this eager, anxious 
 throng ? " I asked the driver. " You ve struck 
 one of Rayment s excursion parties that s 
 all a crowd of creator-condemned fools 
 mostly. Aren t you one of em ? " " No," I 
 9 
 
130 American Notes 
 
 said. " May I sit up here with you, great chief 
 and man with a golden tongue ? I do not 
 know Mister Rayment. I belong to T. Cook 
 and Son." The other person, from the quality 
 of the material he handles, must be the son 
 of a sea-cook. He collects masses of Down- 
 Easters from the New England States and 
 elsewhere and hurls them across the Continent 
 and into the Yellowstone Park on tour. A 
 brake-load of Cook s Continental tourists tra- 
 pezing through Paris (I ve seen em) are angels 
 of light compared to the Rayment trippers. 
 It is not the ghastly vulgarity, the oozing, 
 rampant Bessemer-steel self-sufficiency and 
 ignorance of the men that revolts me, so much 
 as the display of these same qualities in the 
 women-folk. I saw a new type in the coach, 
 and all my dreams of a better and more per 
 fect East died away. " Are these um per 
 sons here any sort of persons in their own 
 places ? " I asked a shepherd w r ho appeared 
 to be herding them. 
 
 " Why, certainly. They include very many 
 prominent and representative citizens from 
 seven States of the Union, and most of them 
 are wealthy. Yes, sir. Representative and 
 prominent." 
 
 We ran across bare hills on an unmetaled 
 road under a burning sun in front of a volley 
 of playful repartee from the prominent citizens 
 inside. It was the 4th of July. The horses 
 had American flags in their headstalls, some 
 
American Notes 131 
 
 of the women wore flags and colored hand 
 kerchiefs in their belts, and a young German 
 on the box-seat with me was bewailing the loss 
 of a box of crackers. He said he had been 
 sent to the Continent to get his schooling and so 
 had lost his American accent; but no Conti 
 nental schooling writes German Jew all over a 
 man s face and nose. He was a rabid American 
 citizen one of a very difficult class to deal 
 with. As a general rule, praise unsparingly, 
 and without discrimination. That keeps most 
 men quiet ; but some, if you fail to keep up a 
 continuous stream of praise, proceed to revile 
 the Old Country Germans and Irish who 
 are more Americans than the Americans are 
 the chief offenders. This young American 
 began to attack the English army. He had 
 seen some of it on parade and he pitied the 
 men in bearskins as " slaves." The citizen, 
 by the way, has a contempt for his own army 
 which exceeds anything you meet among the 
 most illiberal classes in England. I admitted 
 that our army was very poor, had done noth 
 ing, and had been nowhere. This exasper 
 ated him, for he expected an argument, and 
 he trampled on the British Lion generally. 
 Failing to move me, he vowed that I had no 
 patriotism like his own. I said I had not, and 
 further ventured that very few Englishmen 
 had ; which, when you come to think of it, is 
 quite true. By the time he had proved con 
 clusively that before the Prince of Wales camf 
 
132 American Notes 
 
 to the throne we should be a blethering re 
 public, we struck a road that overhung a river, 
 and my interest in " politics " was lost in ad 
 miration of the driver s skill as he sent his 
 four big horses along that winding road. 
 There was no room for any sort of accident 
 a shy or a swerve would have dropped us 
 sixty feet into the roaring Gardiner River. 
 Some of the persons in the coach remarked 
 that the scenery was " elegant." Wherefore, 
 even at the risk of my own life, I did urgently 
 desire an accident and the massacre of some 
 of the more prominent citizens. What " ele 
 gance " lies in a thousand-foot pile of honey- 
 colored rock, riven into peak and battlement, 
 the highest peak defiantly crowned by an 
 eagle s nest, the eaglet peering into the gulf 
 and screaming for his food, I could not for 
 the life of me understand. But they speak a 
 strange tongue. 
 
 En route we passed other carriages full of 
 trippers, who had done their appointed five 
 days in the Park, and yelped at us fraternally 
 as they disappeared in clouds of red dust 
 When we struck the Mammoth Hot Spring 
 Hotel a huge yellow barn a sign-board in 
 formed us that the altitude was six thousand 
 two hundred feet. The Park is just a howling 
 wilderness of three thousand square miles, 
 full of all imaginable freaks of a fiery nature. 
 An hotel company, assisted by the Secretary 
 of State for the Interior, appears to control it; 
 
American Notes 133 
 
 there are hotels at all the points of interest, 
 guide-books, stalls for the sale of minerals, and 
 so forth, after the model of Swiss summer 
 places. 
 
 The tourists may their master die an evil 
 death at the hand of a mad locomotive ! 
 poured into that place with a joyful whoop, 
 and, scarce washing the dust from themselves, 
 began to celebrate the 4th of July. They 
 called it " patriotic exercises " ; elected a 
 clergyman of their own faith as president, and, 
 sitting on the landing of the first floor, began 
 to make speeches and read the Declaration of 
 Independence. The clergyman rose up and 
 told them they were the greatest, freest, sub- 
 limest, most chivalrous, and richest people on 
 the face of the earth, and they all said Amen. 
 Another clergyman asserted in the words of 
 the Declaration that all men were created 
 equal, and equally entitled to Life, Liberty, 
 and the pursuit of Happiness. I should like 
 to know whether the wild and woolly West 
 recognizes this first right as freely as the 
 grantors intended. The clergyman then bade 
 the world note that the tourists included rep 
 resentatives of seven of the New England 
 States; whereat I felt deeply sorry for the 
 New England States in their latter days. He 
 opined that this running to and fro upon the 
 earth, under the auspices of the excellent 
 Rayment, would draw America more closely 
 together, especially when the Westerners re- 
 
134 American Notes 
 
 membered the perils that they of the East had 
 surmounted by rail and river. At duly ap 
 pointed intervals the congregation sang " My 
 country, tis of thee " to the tune of " God 
 save the Queen " (here they did not stand up), 
 and the " Star-Spangled Banner " (here they 
 did), winding up the exercise with some dog- 
 grel of their own composition to the tune of 
 "John Brown s body," movingly setting forth 
 the perils before alluded to. They then ad 
 journed to the verandas and watched fire 
 crackers of the feeblest, exploding one by one, 
 for several hours. 
 
 What amazed me was the calm with which 
 these folks gathered together and commenced 
 to belaud their noble selves, their country, 
 and their " institootions " and everything else 
 that was theirs. The language was, to these 
 bewildered ears, wild advertisement, gas, 
 bunkum, blow, anything you please beyond 
 the bounds of common sense. An archangel, 
 selling town-lots on the Glassy Sea, would 
 have blushed to the tips of his wings to de 
 scribe his property in similar terms. Then 
 they gathered round the pastor and told him 
 his little sermon was " perfectly glorious," 
 really grand, sublime, and so forth, and he 
 bridled ecclesiastically. At the end a per 
 fectly unknown man attacked me and asked 
 me what I thought of American patriotism. I 
 said there was nothing like it in the Old 
 Country. By the way, always tell an Ameri 
 can this. It soothes him. 
 
American Notes 135 
 
 Then said he : " Are you going to get out 
 your letters your letters of naturalization ? " 
 
 Why ? " I asked. 
 
 " I presoom you do business in this coun 
 try, and make money out of it, and it seems 
 to me that it would be your dooty." 
 
 " Sir," said I, sweetly, " there is a forgot 
 ten little isle across the seas called England. 
 It is not much bigger than the Yellowstone 
 Park. In that island a man of your country 
 could work, marry, make his fortune or 
 twenty fortunes, and die. Throughout his 
 career not one soul would ask him whether 
 he were a British subject or a child of the 
 Devil. Do you understand ? " 
 
 I think he did, because he said something 
 about " Britishers " which wasn t compli 
 mentary. 
 
136 American Notes 
 
 IX. 
 
 " That desolate land and lone 
 Where the Big Horn and Yellowstone 
 Roar down their mountain path." 
 
 TWICE have I written this letter from end 
 to end. Twice have I torn it up, fearing lest 
 those across the water should say that I had 
 gone mad on a sudden. Now we will begin 
 for the third time quite solemnly and soberly. 
 I have been through the Yellowstone National 
 Park in a buggy, in the company of an ad 
 venturous old lady from Chicago and her 
 husband, who disapproved of scenery as being 
 " ongodly." I fancy it scared them. 
 
 We began, as you know, with the Mam 
 moth Hot Springs. They are only a gigantic 
 edition of those pink and white terraces not 
 long ago destroyed by earthquake in New 
 Zealand. At one end of the little valley in 
 which the hotel stands the lime-laden springs 
 that break from the pine-covered hillsides 
 have formed a frozen cataract of white, lemon, 
 and palest pink formation, through and over 
 and in which water of the warmest bubbles 
 and drips and trickles from pale-green lagoon 
 to exquisitely fretted basin. The ground 
 rings hollow as a kerosene-tin, and some day 
 the Mammoth Hotel, guests and all, will sink 
 
American Notes 137 
 
 into the caverns below and be turned into a 
 stalactite. When I set foot on the first of 
 the terraces, a tourist-trampled ramp of scabby 
 gray stuff, I met a stream of iron-red hot 
 water which ducked into a hole like a rabbit. 
 Followed a gentle chuckle of laughter, and 
 then a deep, exhausted sigh from nowhere in 
 particular. Fifty feet above my head a jet of 
 stream rose up and died out in the blue. It was 
 worse than the boiling mountain at Myano- 
 shita. The dirty white deposit gave place to 
 lime whiter than snow ; and I found a basin 
 which some learned hotel-keeper has christ 
 ened Cleopatra s pitcher, or Mark Antony s 
 whisky-jug, or something equally poetical. 
 It was made of frosted silver ; it was filled 
 with water as clear as the sky. I do not 
 know the depth of that wonder. The eye 
 looked down beyond grottoes and caves of 
 beryl into an abyss that communicated directly 
 with the central fires of earth. And the pool 
 was in pain, so that it could not refrain from 
 talking about it; muttering and chattering 
 and moaning. From the lips of the lime- 
 ledges, forty feet under water, spurts of silver 
 bubbles would fly up and break the peace of 
 the crystal atop. Then the whole pool would 
 shake and grow dim, and there were noises. 
 I removed myself only to find other pools 
 all equally unhappy, rifts in the ground, full 
 of running, red-hot water, slippery sheets of 
 deposit overlaid with greenish gray hot water, 
 
138 American Notes 
 
 and here and there pit-holes dry as a rifled 
 tomb in India, dusty and waterless. Else 
 where the infernal waters had first boiled dead 
 and then embalmed the pines and under 
 wood, or the forest trees had taken heart and 
 smothered up a blind formation with green- 
 ery, so that it was only by scraping the earth 
 you could tell what fires had raged beneath. 
 Yet the pines will win the battle in years to 
 come, because Nature, who first forges all 
 her work in her great smithies, has nearly- 
 finished this job, and is ready to temper it in 
 the soft brown earth. The fires are dying 
 down ; the hotel is built where terraces have 
 overflowed into flat wastes of deposits ; the 
 pines have taken possession of the high 
 ground whence the terraces first started. 
 Only the actual curve of the cataract stands 
 clear, and it is guarded by soldiers who patrol 
 it with loaded six-shooters, in order that the 
 tourist may not bring up fence-rails and sink 
 them in a pool, or chip the fretted tracery of 
 the formations with a geological hammer, or, 
 walking where the crust is too thin, foolishly 
 cook himself. 
 
 I maneuvered round those soldiers. They 
 were cavalry in a very slovenly uniform, dark- 
 blue blouse, and light-blue trousers unstrapped, 
 cut spoon-shape over the boot; cartridge 
 belt, revolver, peaked cap, and worsted gloves 
 black buttons ! By the mercy of Allah I 
 opened conversation with a spectacled Scot- 
 
American Notes 139 
 
 He had served the Queen in the Marines and 
 a Line regiment, and the " go-fever " being in 
 his bones, had drifted to America, there to 
 serve Uncle Sam. We sat on the edge of an 
 extinct little pool, that under happier circum 
 stances would have grown into a geyser, and 
 began to discuss things generally. To us 
 appeared yet another soldier. No need to ask 
 his nationality or to be told that the troop 
 called him " The Henglishman." A cockney 
 was he, who had seen something of warfare in 
 Egypt, and had taken his discharge from a 
 Fusilier regiment not unknown to you. 
 
 " And how do things go ? " 
 
 " Very much as you please," said they. 
 " There s not half the discipline here that 
 there is in the Queen s service not half nor 
 the work either, but what there is, is rough 
 work. Why, there s a sergeant now with 
 black eye that one of our men gave him* 
 They won t say anything about that, of course. 
 Our punishments ? Fines mostly, and then if 
 you carry on too much you go to the cooler 
 that s the clink. Yes, Sir. Horses ? Oh, 
 they re devils, these Montana horses. Bron 
 chos mostly. We don t slick em up for 
 parade not much. And the amount of 
 schooling that you put into one English troop- 
 horse would be enough for a whole squadron 
 of these creatures. You ll meet more troopers 
 further up the Park. Go and look at their 
 horses and their turnouts. I fancy it ll startle 
 
140 American Notes 
 
 you. I m wearing a made tie and a breastpin 
 under my blouse ? Of course I am ! I can 
 wear anything I darn please. We aren t par 
 ticular here. I shouldn t dare come on parade 
 no, nor yet fatigue duty in this condition 
 in the Old Country ; but it don t matter here. 
 But don t you forget, Sir, that it s taught me 
 how to trust to myself, and my shooting irons. 
 I don t want fifty orders to move me across 
 the Park, and catch a poacher. Yes, they 
 poach here. Men come in with an outfit and 
 ponies, smuggle in a gun or two, and shoot 
 the bison. If you interfere, they shoot at 
 you. Then you confiscate all their outfit and 
 their ponies. We have a pound full of them 
 now down below. There s our Captain over 
 yonder. Speak to him if you want to know 
 anything special. This service isn t a patch 
 on the Old Country s service ; but you look, if 
 it was worked up it would be just a Hell of a 
 service. But these citizens despise us, and 
 they put us on to road-mending, and such like. 
 Nough to ruin any army." 
 
 To the Captain I addressed myself after my 
 friends had gone. They told me that a good 
 many American officers dressed by the French 
 army. The Captain certainly might have been 
 mistaken for a French officer of light cavalry, 
 and he had more than the courtesy of a 
 Frenchman. Yes, he had read a good deal 
 about our Indian border warfare, and had 
 been much struck with the likeness it bore to 
 
American Notes 141 
 
 Red Indian warfare. I had better, when \ 
 reached the next cavalry post, scattered be 
 tween two big geyser basins, introduce myself to 
 a Captain and Lieutenant. They could show 
 me things. He himself was devoting all his 
 time to conserving the terraces, and surrep 
 titiously running hot water into dried-up basins 
 that fresh pools might form. " I get very in 
 terested in that sort of thing. It s not duty, 
 but it s what I m put here for." And then he 
 began to talk of his troop as I have heard his 
 brethren in India talk. Such a troop ! Built 
 up carefully, and watched lovingly : "not a 
 man that I d wish to exchange, and, what s 
 more, I believe not a man that would wish to 
 leave on his own account. We re different, I 
 believe, from the English. Your officers value 
 the horses ; we set store on the men. We 
 train them more than we do the horses." 
 
 Of the American trooper I will tell you 
 more hereafter. He is not a gentleman to be 
 trifled with. 
 
 Next dawning, entering a buggy of fragile 
 construction, with the old people from Chicago, 
 I embarked on my perilous career. We ran 
 straight up a mountain till we could see, sixty 
 miles away, the white houses of Cook City on 
 another mountain, and the whiplash-like trail 
 leading thereto. The live air made me drunk. 
 If Tom, the driver, had proposed to send the 
 mares in a bee-line to the city, I should have 
 assented, and so would the old lady, who 
 
142 American Notes 
 
 dhewed gum and talked about her symptoms. 
 The tub-ended rock-dog, which is but the 
 translated prairie-dog, broke across the road 
 under our horses feet, the rabbet and the chip 
 munk danced with fright ; we heard the roar 
 of the river, and the road went round a corner. 
 On one side piled rock and shale, that en 
 joined silence for fear of a general slide-down ; 
 on the other a sheer drop, and a fool of a noisy 
 river below. Then, apparently in the middle 
 of the road, lest any should find driving too 
 easy, a post of rock. Nothing beyond that 
 save the flank of a cliff. Then my stomach 
 departed from me, as it does when you swing, 
 for we left the dirt, which was at least some 
 guarantee of safety, and sailed out round the 
 curve, and up a steep incline, on a plank-road 
 built out from the cliff. The planks were 
 nailed at the outer edge, and did not shift or 
 creak very much but enough, quite enough. 
 That was the Golden Gate. I got my stomach 
 back again when we trotted out on to a vast 
 upland adorned with a lake and hills. Have 
 you ever seen an untouched land the face o 
 virgin Nature ? It is rather a curious sight, 
 because the hills are choked with timber that 
 has never known an ax, and the storm has 
 rent a way through this timber, so that a hun 
 dred thousand trees lie matted together in 
 swathes ; and, since each tree lies where it 
 falls, you may behold trunk and branch return- 
 ing to the earth whence they sprang exactly 
 
American Notes 143 
 
 as the body of man returns each limb making 
 its own little grave, the grass climbing above 
 the bark, till at last there remains only the 
 outline of a tree upon the rank undergrowth. 
 
 Then we drove under a cliff of obsidian, 
 which is black glass, some two hundred feet 
 high ; and the road at its foot was made of 
 black glass that crackled. This was no great 
 matter, because half an hour before Tom had 
 pulled up in the woods that we might suffi 
 ciently admire a mountain who stood all by 
 himself, shaking with laughter or rage. 
 
 The glass cliff overlooks a lake where the 
 beavers built a dam about a mile and a half 
 long in a zig-zag line, as their necessities 
 prompted. Then came the Government and 
 strictly preserved them, and, as you shall learn 
 later on, they be damn impudent beasts. The 
 old lady had hardly explained the natural his 
 tory of beavers before we climbed some hills 
 it really didn t matter in that climate, because 
 we could have scaled the stars and (this 
 mattered very much indeed) shot down a 
 desperate, dusty slope, brakes shrieking on 
 the wheels, the mares clicking among unseen 
 rocks, the dust dense as a fog, and a wall of 
 trees on either side. " How do the heavy 
 four-horse coaches take it, Tom ? " I asked, 
 remembering that some twenty-three souls had 
 gone that way half an hour before. " Take it 
 at the run I " said Tom, spitting out the dust. 
 Of course there was a sharp curve, and a bridge* 
 
144 American Notes 
 
 at the bottom, but luckily nothing met us, and 
 we came to a wooden shanty called an hotel, 
 in time for a crazy tiffin served by very gor 
 geous handmaids with very pink cheeks. 
 When health fails in other and more exciting 
 pursuits, a season as " help " in one of the 
 Yellowstone hotels will restore the frailest 
 constitution. 
 
 Then by companies after tiffin we walked 
 chattering to the uplands of Hell. They call 
 it the Norris Geyser Basin on Earth. It was 
 as though the tide of desolation had gone out, 
 but would presently return, across innumerable 
 acres of dazzling white geyser formation. 
 There were no terraces here, but all other 
 horrors. Not ten yards from the road a blast 
 of steam shot up roaring every few seconds, a 
 mud volcano spat filth to Heaven, streams of 
 hot water rumbled under foot, plunged through 
 the dead pines in steaming cataracts and died 
 on a waste of white where green-gray, black- 
 yellow, and link pools roared, shouted, bub 
 bled, or hissed as their wicked fancies prompt 
 ed. By the look of the eye the place should 
 have been frozen over. By the feel of the feet 
 it was warm. I ventured out among the pools, 
 carefully following tracks, but one unwary 
 foot began to sink, a squirt of water followed, 
 and having no desire to descend quick into 
 Tophet I returned to the shore where the mud 
 and the sulphur and the nameless fat ooze- 
 vegetation of Lethe lay. But the very road 
 
American Notes 145 
 
 rang as though built over a gulf ; and besides, 
 how was I to tell when the raving blast of steam 
 would find its vent insufficient and blow the 
 whole affair into Nirvana ? There was a po 
 tent stench of stale eggs everywhere, and 
 crystals of sulphur crumbled under the foot, 
 and the glare of the sun on the white stuff 
 was blinding. Sitting under a bank, to me 
 appeared a young trooper ex-Cape mounted 
 Rifles, this man : the real American seems to 
 object to his army mounted on a horse half- 
 maddened by the noise and steam and smelL 
 He carried only the six-shooter and cartridge- 
 belt. On service the Springfield carbine 
 (which is clumsy) and a cartridge-belt slung 
 diagonally complete equipment. The sword 
 is no earthly use for Border warfare and, ex 
 cept at state parades, is never worn. The 
 saddle is the McClellan tree over a four- 
 folded blanket. Sweat-leathers you must pay 
 for yourself. And the beauty of the tree is 
 that it necessitates first very careful girthing 
 and a thorough knowledge of tricks with the 
 blanket to suit the varying conditions of the 
 horse a broncho will bloat in a night if he 
 can get at a bellyful and, secondly, even 
 more careful riding to prevent galling. Crup 
 per and breast-band do not seem to be used, 
 but they are casual about their accouterments, 
 and the bit is the single, jaw-breaking curb 
 which American war-pictures show us. That 
 young man was very handsome, and the gray 
 10 
 
146 American Notes 
 
 service hat most like the under half of a 
 seedy terai shaded his strong face admirably 
 as his horse backed and shivered and sidled 
 and plunged all over the road, and he lectured 
 from his saddle, one foot out of the heavy- 
 hooded stirrup, one hand on the sweating 
 neck. " He s not used to the Park, this brute, 
 and he s a confirmed bolter on parade ; but 
 we understand each other." Whoosh! went 
 the steam-blast down the road with a dry roar. 
 Round spun the troop horse prepared to bolt, 
 and, his momentum being, suddenly checked, 
 reared till I thought he would fall back on his 
 rider. " Oh, no ; we settled that little mat 
 ter when I was breaking him," said Centaur. 
 " He used to try to fall back on me. Isn t he 
 a devil ? I think you d laugh to see the way 
 our regiments are horsed. Sometimes a big 
 Montana beast like mine has a thirteen-two 
 broncho pony for neighbor, and it s annoying 
 if you re used to better things. And oh, how 
 you have to ride your mount ! It s necessary ; 
 but I can tell you at the end of a long day s 
 march, when you d give all the world to ride 
 like a sack, it isn t sweet to get extra drill for 
 slouching. When we re turned out, we re 
 turned out for anything not a fifteen-mile 
 trot, but for the use and behoof of all the 
 Northern States. I ve been in Arizona. A 
 trooper there who had been in India told me 
 that Arizona was like Afghanistan. There s 
 nothing under Heaven there except horned 
 
American Notes 147 
 
 toads and rattlesnakes and Indians. Our 
 trouble is that we only deal with Indians and 
 they don t teach us much, and of course the 
 citizens look down on us and all that. As a 
 matter of fact, I suppose we re really only 
 mounted infantry, but remember we re the 
 best mounted infantry in the world." And 
 the horse danced a fandango in proof. 
 
 " My faith I " said I, looking at the dusty 
 blouse, gray hat, soiled leather accouterments, 
 and whalebone poise of the wearer. " If they 
 are all like you, you are." 
 
 " Thanks, whoever you may be. Of course 
 if we were turned into a lawn-tennis court and 
 told to resist, say, your heavy cavalry, we d 
 be ridden off the face of the earth if we 
 couldn t get away. We have neither the 
 weight nor the drill for a charge. My horse, 
 for instance, by English standards, is half- 
 broken, and like all the others, he bolts when 
 we re in line. But cavalry charge against 
 cavalry charge doesn t happen often, and if it 
 did, well all our men know that up to a hun 
 dred yards they are absolutely safe behind 
 this old thing." He patted his revolver pouch. 
 " Absolutely safe from any shooting of yours. 
 What man do you think would dare to use a 
 pistol at even thirty yards, if his life depended 
 on it ? Not one of your men. They can t 
 shoot We can. You ll hear about that down 
 the Park further up." 
 
 Then he added, courteously : " Just now it 
 
148 American Notes 
 
 seems that the English supply all the men to 
 the American Army. That s what makes 
 them so good perhaps." And with mutual 
 expressions of good-will we parted he to an 
 outlying patrol fifteen miles away, I to my 
 buggy and the old lady, who, regarding the 
 horrors of the fire-holes, could only say, 
 " Good Lord ! " at thirty-second intervals. 
 Her husband talked about " dreffel waste of 
 steam-power," and we went on in the clear, 
 crisp afternoon, speculating as to the forma 
 tion of geysers. 
 
 " What I say," shrieked the old lady apropos 
 of matters theological, " and what I say more, 
 after having seen all that, is that the Lord has 
 ordained a Hell for such as disbelieve His 
 gracious works." 
 
 Nota bene. Tom had profanely cursed the 
 near mare for stumbling. He looked straight 
 in front of him and said no word, but the left 
 corner of his left eye flickered in my direction. 
 
 * And if," continued the old lady, " if we 
 find a thing so dreffel as all that steam and 
 sulphur allowed on the face of the earth, 
 mustn t we believe that there is something ten 
 thousand times more terrible below prepared 
 untoe our destruction ? " 
 
 Some people have a wonderful knack of 
 extracting comfort from things. I am 
 ashamed to say I agreed ostentatiously with 
 the old lady. She developed the personal 
 view of the matter. 
 
American Notes 149 
 
 " Now I shall be able to say something to 
 Anna Fincher about her way of living. 
 Shan t I, Blake ? " This to her husband. 
 
 " Yes," said he, speaking slowly after a 
 heavy tiffin. " But the girl s a good girl ; " 
 and they fell to arguing as to whether the luck 
 less Anna Fincher really stood in need of 
 lectures edged with Hell fire (she went to 
 dances, I believe) , while I got out and walked 
 in the dust alongside of Tom. 
 
 " I drive blame cur ous kinder folk through 
 this place," said he. " Blame cur ous. Seems 
 a pity that they should ha come so far just to 
 liken Norris Basin to Hell. Guess Chicago 
 %vould ha served em, speaking in comparison, 
 jest as good." 
 
 We curved the hill and entered a forest of 
 spruce, the path serpentining between the 
 tree-boles, the wheels running silent on in> 
 memorial mold. There was nothing alive in 
 the forest save ourselves. Only a river was 
 speaking angrily somewhere to the right. For 
 miles we drove till Tom bade us alight and 
 look at certain falls. Wherefore we stepped 
 out of that forest and nearly fell down a cliff 
 which guarded a tumbled river and returned 
 demanding fresh miracles. If the water had 
 run up-hill, we should perhaps have taken 
 more notice of it ; but twas only a waterfall, 
 and I really forget whether the water was 
 warm or cold. There is a stream here called 
 Firehole River. 1; is fed by the overflow 
 
150 American Notes 
 
 from the various geysers and basins, a warm 
 and deadly river wherein no fish breed. I 
 think we crossed it a few dozen times in the 
 course of a day. 
 
 Then the sun began to sink, and there was 
 a taste of frost about, and we went swiftly 
 from the forest into the open, dashed across 
 a branch of the Firehole River and found a 
 wood shanty, even rougher than the last at 
 which, after a forty-mile drive, we were to dine 
 and sleep. Half a mile from this place stood, 
 on the banks of the Firehole River, a " beaver- 
 lodge," and there were rumors of bears and 
 other cheerful monsters in the woods on the 
 hill at the back of the building. 
 
 In the cool, crisp quiet of the evening I 
 sought that river, and found a pile of newly 
 gnawed sticks and twigs. The beaver works 
 with the cold-chisel, and a few clean strokes 
 suffice to level a four-inch bole. Across the 
 water on the far bank glimmered, with the 
 ghastly white of peeled dead timber, the 
 beaver-lodge a mass of disheveled branches. 
 The inhabitants had dammed the stream lower 
 down and spread it into a nice little lake. 
 The question was would they come out for 
 their walk before it got too dark to see. 
 They came blessings on their blunt muzzles, 
 they came as shadows come, drifting down 
 the stream, stirring neither foot nor tail. There 
 were three of them. One went down to in 
 vestigate the state of the dam ; the other two 
 
American Notes 151 
 
 began to look for supper. There is only one 
 thing more startling than the noiselessness of 
 a tiger in the jungle, and that is the noiseless- 
 ness of a beaver in the water. The straining 
 ear could catch no sound whatever till they 
 began to eat the thick green river-scudge that 
 they call beaver-grass. I, bowed among the 
 logs, held my breath and stared with all my 
 eyes. They were not ten yards from me, and 
 they would have eaten their dinner in peace 
 so long as I had kept absolutely still. They 
 were dear and desirable beasts, and I was just 
 preparing to creep a step nearer when that 
 wicked old lady from Chicago clattered down 
 the bank, an umbrella in her hand, shrieking : 
 " Beavers, beavers ! Young man, whurr are 
 those beavers ? Good Lord ! What was that 
 now ? " 
 
 The solitary watcher might have heard a 
 pistol shot ring through the air. I wish it had 
 killed the old lady, but it was only the beaver 
 giving warning of danger with the slap of his 
 tail on the water. It was exactly like the 
 " phink" of a pistol fired with damp powder. 
 Then there were no more beavers not a whis 
 ker-end. The lodge, however, was there, and a 
 beast lower than any beaver began to throw 
 stones at it because the old lady from Chicago 
 said : " P raps, if you rattle them up they ll 
 come out. I do so want to see a beaver." 
 
 Yet it cheers me to think I have seen the 
 beiver in his wilds. Never will I go to the 
 
152 American Notes 
 
 Zoo. That even, after supper twere flattery 
 to call it dinner a Captain and a Subaltern 
 of the cavalry post appeared at the hotel 
 These were the officers of whom the Mam 
 moth Springs Captain had spoken. The 
 Lieutenant had read everything that he could 
 lay hands on about the Indian army, espe 
 cially our cavalry arrangements, and was very 
 full of a scheme for raising the riding Red 
 Indians it is not every noble savage that will 
 make a trooper into frontier levies a sort 
 of Khyber guard. " Only," as he said rue 
 fully, " there is no frontier these days, and all 
 our Indian wars are nearly over. Those 
 beautiful beasts will die out, and nobody will 
 ever know what splendid cavalry they can 
 make." 
 
 The Captain told stories of Border warfare 
 of ambush, firing on the rear-guard, heat 
 that split the skull better than any tomahawk, 
 cold that wrinkled the very liver, night- 
 stampedes of baggage-mules, raiding of cattle, 
 and hopeless stern-chases into inhospitable 
 hills, when the cavalry knew that they were 
 not only being outpaced but outspied. Then 
 he spoke of one fair charge when a tribe gave 
 battle in the open and the troopers rode in 
 swordless, firing right and left with their re 
 volvers and it was excessively uncomfy for 
 that tribe. And I spoke of what men had 
 told me of huntings in Burma, of hill-climbing 
 in the Black Mountain affair, and so forth. 
 
American Notes 153 
 
 "Exactly!" said the Captain. "Nobody 
 knows and nobody cares. What does it mat 
 ter to the Down-Easter who Wrap-up-his-Tail 
 was ? " 
 
 "And what does the fat Briton know or 
 care about Boh Hla-Oo ? " said I. Then both 
 together : " Depend upon it, my dear, Sir, the 
 army in both Anglo-Saxon countries is a mis 
 chievously underestimated institution, and it s 
 a pleasure to meet a man who," etc., etc. 
 And we nodded triangularly in all good will, 
 and swore eternal friendship. The Lieuten 
 ant made a statement which rather amazed 
 me. He said that, on account of the scarcity 
 of business, many American officers were to 
 be found getting practical instruction from 
 little troubles among the South American Re 
 publics. When the need broke out they 
 would return. " There is so little for us to 
 do, and the Republic has a trick of making us 
 hedge and ditch for our pay. A little road- 
 making on service is not a bad thing, but 
 continuous navvying is enough to knock the 
 heart out of any army." 
 
 I agreed, and we sat up till two in the morn 
 ing swapping the lies of East and West. As 
 that glorious chief Man-afraid-of-Pink-Rats 
 once said to the Agent on the Reservation : 
 " Melican officer good man. Heap good 
 man. Drink me. Prink he. Drink me. 
 Drink he. Drink he. Me blind, 
 man 1 " 
 
154 American Notes 
 
 X. 
 
 " What man would read and read the selfsame faces 
 And like the marbles which the windmill grinds, 
 Rub smooth forever with the same smooth minds, 
 This year retracing last year s every year s dull 
 
 traces, 
 
 Where there are woods and unmanstifled places ? " 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 ONCE upon a time there was a carter who 
 brought his team and a friend into the Yellow 
 stone Park without due thought. Presently 
 they came upon a few of the natural beauties 
 of the place, and that carter turned his team 
 into his friend s team howling : " Get back o* 
 this, Jim. All Hell s alight under our noses." 
 And they call the place Hell s Half-acre to 
 this day. We, too, the old lady from Chicago, 
 her husband, Tom, and the good little mares 
 came to Hell s Half-acre, which is about sixty 
 acres, and when Tom said : " Would you like 
 to drive over it?" we said: "Certainly no, 
 and if you do, we shall report you to the 
 authorities. * There was a plain, blistered 
 and peeled and abominable, and it was given 
 over to the sportings and spoutings of devils 
 who threw mud and steam and dirt at each 
 other with whoops and halloos and bellowing 
 curses. The place smelt of the refuse of the 
 Pit, and that odor mixed with the clean. 
 
American Notes 155 
 
 wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils 
 throughout the day. Be it known that the 
 Park is laid out, like Ollendorf, in exercises 
 of progressive difficulty. Hell s Half-acre 
 was a prelude to ten or twelve miles of geyser 
 formation. We passed hot streams boiling in 
 the forest ; saw whiffs of steam beyond these, 
 and yet other whiffs breaking through the 
 misty green hills in the far distance ; we 
 trampled on sulphur, and sniffed things much 
 worse than any sulphur which is known to the 
 upper world ; and so came upon a parklike 
 place where Tom suggested we should get out 
 and play with the geysers. 
 
 Imagine mighty green fields splattered with 
 lime beds : all the flowers of the summer 
 growing up to the very edge of the lime. 
 That was the first glimpse of the geyser 
 basins. The buggy had pulled up close to a 
 rough, broken, blistered cone of stuff between 
 ten and twenty feet high. There was trouble 
 in that place moaning, splashing, gurgling, 
 and the clank of machinery. A spurt of boil 
 ing water jumped into the air and a wash 
 of water followed. I removed swiftly. The 
 old lady from Chicago shrieked. "What a 
 wicked waste ! " said her husband. I think 
 they call it the Riverside Geyser. Its spout 
 was torn and ragged like the mouth of a gun 
 when a shell has burst there. It grumbled 
 madly for a moment or two and then was 
 still. I crept over the steaming lime it was 
 
156 American Notes 
 
 the burning marl on which Satan lay and 
 looked fearfully down its mouth. You should 
 never look a gift geyser in the mouth. I be 
 held a horrible slippery slimy funnel with 
 water rising and falling ten feet at a time. 
 Then the water rose to lip level with a rush 
 and an infernal bubbling troubled this Devil s 
 Bethesda before the sullen heave of the crest 
 of a wave lapped over the edge and made me 
 run. Mark the nature of the human soul! 
 I had begun with awe, not to say terror. I 
 stepped back from the flanks of the Riverside 
 Geyser saying : " Pooh ! Is that all it can 
 do ? " Yet for aught I knew the whole thing 
 might have blown up at a minute s notice; 
 she, he, or it being an arrangement of uncer 
 tain temper. 
 
 We drifted on up that miraculous valley. 
 On either side of us were hills from a thou 
 sand to fifteen feet high and wooded from 
 heel to crest. As far as the eye could range 
 forward were columns of steam in the air, 
 misshapen lumps of lime, most like pre- 
 adamite monsters, still pools of turquoise 
 blue, stretches of blue cornflowers, a river 
 that coiled on itself twenty times, boulders of 
 strange colors, and ridges of glaring, staring 
 white. 
 
 The old lady from Chicago poked with her 
 parasol at the pools as though they had been 
 alive. On one particularly innocent-looking 
 little puddle she turned her back for a mo- 
 
American Notes 157 
 
 ment, and there rose behind her a twenty- 
 foot column of water and steam. Then she 
 shrieked and protested that " she never 
 thought it would ha done it," and the old 
 man chewed his tobacco steadily, and 
 mourned for steam power wasted. I em 
 braced the whitened stump of a middle-sized 
 pine that had grown all too close to a hot 
 pool s lip, and the whole thing turned over 
 under my hand as a tree would do in a night 
 mare. From right and left came the trurn- 
 petings of elephants at play. I stepped into 
 a pool of old dried blood rimmed with the 
 nodding cornflowers ; the blood changed to 
 ink even as I trod ! and ink and blood were 
 washed away in a spurt of boiling sulphurous 
 water spat out from the lee of a bank of flow 
 ers. This sounds mad, doesn t it ? 
 
 A moonfaced trooper of German extraction 
 never was Park so carefully patrolled 
 came up to inform us that as yet we had not 
 seen any of the real geysers, that they were 
 all a mile or so up the valley, tastefully scat 
 tered round the hotel in which we would rest 
 for the night. America is a free country, but 
 the citizens look down on the soldier. I had 
 to entertain that trooper. The old lady from 
 Chicago would have none of him ; so we 
 loafed along together, now across half-rotten 
 pine logs sunk in swampy ground, anon over 
 the ringing geyser formation, then knee-deep 
 through long grass. 
 
158 American Notes 
 
 And why did you list ? " said I. 
 
 The moonfaced one s face began to work. 
 I thought he would have a fit, but he told me 
 a story instead such a nice tale of a naughty 
 little girl who wrote love letters to two men at 
 once. She was A simple village wife, but a 
 wicked " Family Novelette " countess couldn t 
 have accomplished her ends better. She 
 drove one man nearly wild with her pretty 
 little treachery ; and the other man abandoned 
 her and came West to forget. Moonface was 
 that man. We rounded a low spur of hill, 
 and came out upon a field of aching snowy 
 lime, rolled in sheets, twisted into knots, riven 
 with rents and diamonds and stars, stretching 
 for more than half a mile in every direction. 
 In this place of despair lay most of the big 
 geysers who know when there is trouble in 
 Krakatoa, who tell the pines when there is 
 a cyclone on the Atlantic seaboard, and who 
 are exhibited to visitors under pretty and 
 fanciful names. The first mound that I en 
 countered belonged to a goblin splashing in 
 his tub. I heard him kick, pull a shower- 
 bath on his shoulders, gasp, crack his joints, 
 and rub himself down with a towel ; then he 
 let the water out of the bath, as a thoughtful 
 man should, and it all sank down out of sight 
 till another goblin arrived. Yet they called 
 this place the Lioness and the Cubs. It lies 
 not very far from the Lion, which is a sullen, 
 roaring beast, and they say that when it is 
 
American Notes 159 
 
 very active the other geysers presently follow 
 suit. After the Krakatoa eruption all the 
 geysers went mad together, spouting, spurting, 
 and bellowing till men feared that they would 
 rip up the whole field. Mysterious sympa 
 thies exist among them, and when the Giant 
 ess speaks (of her more anon) they all hold 
 their peace. 
 
 I was watching a solitary spring, when, far 
 across the fields, stood up a plume of spun 
 glass, iridescent and superb, against the sky. 
 "That," said the trooper, "is Old Faithful. 
 He goes off every sixty-five minutes to the 
 minute, plays for five minutes, and sends up 
 a column of water a hundred and fifty feet 
 high. By the time you have looked at all the 
 other geysers he will be ready to play." 
 
 So we looked and we wondered at the Bee 
 hive, whose mouth is built up exactly like a hive; 
 at the Turban (which is not in the least like a 
 turban) ; and at many, many other geysers, 
 hot holes, and springs. Some of them 
 rumbled, some hissed, some went off spas 
 modically, and others lay still in sheets of 
 sapphire and beryl. 
 
 Would you believe that even these terrible 
 creatures have to be guarded by the troopers 
 to prevent the irreverent American from chip 
 ping the cones to pieces, or worse still, mak 
 ing the geysers sick? If you take of soft- 
 soap a small barrelful and drop it down a 
 geyser s mouth, that geyser will presently be 
 
160 American Notes 
 
 forced to lay all before you and for days after 
 wards will be of an irritated and inconsistent 
 stomach. When they told me the tale I was 
 filled with sympathy. Now I wish that I had 
 stolen soap and tried the experiment on some 
 lonely little beast of a geyser in the woods. 
 It sounds so probable and so human. 
 
 Yet he would be a bold man who would ad 
 minister emetics to the Giantess. She is flat- 
 lipped, having no mouth, she looks like a 
 pool, fifty feet long and thirty wide, and there 
 is no ornamentation about her. At irregular 
 intervals she speaks, and sends up a column 
 of water over two hundred feet high to begin 
 with ; then she is angry for a day and a half 
 sometimes for two days. Owing to her 
 peculiarity of going mad in the night not 
 many people have seen the Giantess at her 
 finest ; but the clamor of her unrest, men say, 
 shakes the wooden hotel, and echoes like 
 thunder among the hills. When I saw her 
 trouble was brewing. The pool bubbled seri 
 ously, and at five-minute intervals, sank a 
 foot or two, then rose, washed over the rim, 
 and huge steam bubbles broke on the top. 
 Just before an eruption the water entirely dis 
 appears from view. Whenever you see the 
 water die down in a geyser-mouth get away 
 as fast as you can. I saw a tiny little geyser 
 suck in its breath in this way, and instinct 
 made me retire while it hooted after me. 
 
 Leaving the Giantess to swear, and spit, 
 
American Notes 161 
 
 and thresh about, we went over to Old Faith 
 ful, who by reason of his faithfulness has 
 benches close to him whence you may com 
 fortably watch. At the appointed hour we 
 heard the water flying up and down the 
 mouth with the sob of waves in a cave. 
 Then came the preliminary gouts, then a roar 
 and a rush, and that glittering column of 
 diamonds rose, quivered, stood still for a 
 minute. Then it broke, ana the rest was a 
 confused snarl of water not thirty feet high. 
 All the young ladies not more than twenty 
 in the tourist band remarked that it was 
 " elegant," and betook themselves to writing 
 their names in the bottoms of shallow pools. 
 Nature fixes the insult indelibly, and the 
 after-years will learn that " Hattie," " Sadie," 
 " Mamie," " Sophie," and so forth, have taken 
 out their hairpins, and scrawled in the face 
 of Old Faithful. 
 
 The congregation returned to the hotel to 
 put down their impressions in diaries and 
 note-books which they wrote up ostentatiously 
 in the verandas. It was a sweltering hot 
 day, albeit we stood somewhat higher than 
 the summit of Jakko, and I left that raw pine- 
 creaking caravanserai for the cool shade of a 
 clump of pine between whose trunks glimmered 
 tents. A batch of troopers came down the 
 road, and flung themselves across country 
 into their rough lines. Verily the Melican 
 cavalry-man can ride, though he keeps his 
 II 
 
i62 American Notes 
 
 accouterments pig, and his horse cow- 
 fashion. 
 
 I was free of that camp in five minutes- 
 free to play with the heavy lumpy carbines, 
 to have the saddles stripped, and punch the 
 horses knowingly in the ribs. One of the 
 men had been in the fight with ** Wrap-up-his- 
 Tail " before alluded to, and he told me how 
 that great chief, his horse s tail tied up in red 
 calico, swaggered in front of the United 
 States cavalry, challenging all to single com 
 bat. But he was slain, and a few of his tribe 
 with him. " There s no use in an Indian, 
 anyway," concluded my friend. 
 
 A couple of cowboys real cowboys, not the 
 Buffalo Bill article jingled through the camp 
 amid a shower of mild chaff. They were on 
 their way to Cook City, I fancy, and I know 
 that they never washed. But they were pic 
 turesque ruffians with long spurs, hooded stir 
 rups, slouch hats, fur weather-cloths over their 
 knees, and pistol-butts easy to hand. 
 
 " The cowboy s goin under before long," 
 said my friend. " Soon as the country s 
 settled up he ll have to go. But he s mighty 
 useful now. What should we do without the 
 cowboy ? " 
 
 " As how ? " said I, and the camp laughed. 
 
 " He has the money. We have the know- 
 how. He comes in in winter to play poker at 
 the military posts. We play poker a few. 
 When he s lost his money we make him drunk 
 
American Notes 163 
 
 and let him go. Sometimes we get the wrong 
 man." And he told a tale of an innocent 
 cowboy who turned up, cleaned out, at a post, 
 and played poker for thirty-six hours. But it 
 was the post that was cleaned ouc when that 
 long-haired Caucasian Ah Sin removed him 
 self, heavy with everybody s pay, and declin 
 ing the proffered liquor. " Naow," said the 
 historian, " I don t play with no cowboy unless 
 he s a little bit drunk first." 
 
 Ere I departed I gathered from more than 
 one man that significant fact that up to one 
 hundred yards he felt absolutely secure behind 
 his revolver. 
 
 " In England, I understand," quoth a lim 
 ber youth from the South, " in England a man 
 aren t allowed to play with no firearms. He s 
 .got to be taught all that when he enlists. I 
 didn t want much teaching how to shoot 
 straight fore I served Uncle Sam. And that s 
 just where it is. But you was talking about 
 your horseguards now ? " 
 
 I explained briefly some peculiarities of 
 equipment connected with our crackest crack 
 cavalry. I grieve to say the camp roared. 
 
 " Take em over swampy ground. Let em 
 run around a bit an work the starch out of 
 em, an then, Almighty, if we wouldn t plug 
 em at ease I d eat their horses 1 " 
 
 " But suppose they engaged in the open ? " 
 said I. 
 
 " Engage the Hades. Not if there was a 
 
164 American Notes 
 
 tree-trunk within twenty miles they couldn t 
 engage in the open 1 " 
 
 Gentlemen, the officers, have you ever 
 seriously considered the existence on ^arth of 
 a cavalry who by preference would fight in 
 timber ? The evident sincerity of the proposi 
 tion made me think hard as I moved over to 
 the hotel and joined a party exploration, 
 which, diving into the woods, unearthed a pit 
 pool of burningest water fringed with jet 
 black sand all the ground near by being 
 pure white. But miracles pall when they ar 
 rive at the rate of twenty a day. A flaming 
 dragon-fly flew over the pool, reeled and 
 dropped on the water, dying without a quiver 
 of his gorgeous wings, and the pool said noth 
 ing whatever, but sent its thin steam wreaths 
 up to the burning sky. I prefer pools that 
 talk. 
 
 There was a maiden a very trim maiden 
 who had just stepped out of one of Mr. 
 James s novels. She owned a delightful 
 mother and an equally delightful father, a 
 heavy-eyed, slow-voiced man of finance. The 
 parents thought that their daughter wanted 
 change. She lived in New Hampshire. Ac 
 cordingly, she had dragged them up to Alaska, 
 to the Yosemite Valley, and was now returning 
 leisurely via the Yellowstone just in time for 
 the tail-end of the summer season at Saratoga. 
 We had met once or twice before in the Park, 
 and I had been amazed and amused at her 
 
American Notes 165 
 
 critical commendation of the wonders that she 
 saw. From that very resolute little mouth I 
 received a lecture on American literature, the 
 nature and inwardness of Washington society, 
 the precise value of Cable s works as com 
 pared with " Uncle Remus " Harris, and a few 
 other things that had nothing whatever to do 
 with geysers, but were altogether delightful. 
 Now an English maiden who had stumbled on 
 a dust-grimed, lime-washed, sun-peeled, collar- 
 less wanderer come from and going to good 
 ness knows where, would, her mother inciting 
 her and her father brandishing his umbrella, 
 have regarded him as a dissolute adventurer. 
 Not so those delightful people from New 
 Hampshire. They were good enough to treat 
 me it sounds almost incredible as a human 
 being, possibly respectable, probably not in 
 immediate need of financial assistance. Papa 
 talked pleasantly and to the point. The little 
 maiden strove valiantly with the accent of her 
 birth and that of her reading, and mama 
 smiled benignly in the background. 
 
 Balance this with a story of a young Eng 
 lish idiot I met knocking about inside his 
 high collars, attended by a valet. He con 
 descended to tell me that " you can t be too 
 careful who you talk to in these parts," and 
 stalked on, fearing, I suppose, every minute 
 for his social chastity. Now that man was a 
 barbarian (I took occasion to tel) him so), for 
 he comported himself after the manner of the 
 
1 66 American Notes 
 
 head-hunters of Assam, who are at perpetual 
 feud one with another. 
 
 You will understand that these foolish tales 
 are introduced in order to cover the fact that 
 this pen cannot describe the glories of the 
 Upper Geyser basin. The evening I spent 
 under the lee of the Castle Geyser sitting on 
 a log with some troopers and watching a 
 baronial keep forty feet high spouting hot 
 water. If the Castle went off first, they said 
 the Giantess would be quiet, and vice versa ; 
 and then they told tales till the moon got up 
 and a party of campers in the woods gave us 
 all something to eat. 
 
 Next morning Tom drove us on, promising 
 new wonders. He pulled up after a few miles 
 at a clump of brushwood where an army was 
 drowning. I could hear the sick gasps and 
 thumps of the men going under, but when I 
 broke through the brushwood the hosts had 
 fled, and there were only pools of pink, black, 
 and white lime, thick as turbid honey. They 
 shot up a pat of mud every minute or two, 
 choking in the effort. It was an uncanny 
 sight. Do you wonder that in the old days 
 the Indians were careful to avoid the Yellow 
 stone ? Geysers are permissible, but mud is 
 terrifying. The old lady from Chicago took 
 a piece of it, and in half an hour it dried into 
 lime-dust and blew away between her fingers. 
 All may a, illusion, you see ! Then we 
 clinked over sulphur in crystals ; there was a 
 
American Notes 167 
 
 waterfall of boiling water ; and a road across 
 a level park hotly contested by the beavers. 
 Every winter they build their dam and flood 
 the low-lying land ; every summer that dam is 
 torn up by the Government, and for half a 
 mile you must plow axle-deep in water, the 
 willows brushing into the buggy, and little 
 waterways branching off right and left. The 
 road is the main stream just like the Bolan 
 line in flood. If you turn up a byway, there 
 is no more of you, and the beavers work your 
 buggy into next year s dam. 
 
 Then came soft, turfy forest that deadened 
 the wheels, and two troopers on detachment 
 duty came noiselessly behind us. One was 
 the Wrap-up-his-Tail man, and we talked mer 
 rily while the half-broken horses bucked about 
 among the trees till we came to a mighty hill 
 all strewn with moss agates, and everybody 
 had to get out and pant in that thin air. But 
 how intoxicating it was ! The old lady from 
 Chicago clucked like an emancipated hen as 
 she scuttled about the road cramming pieces 
 of rock into her reticule. She sent me fifty 
 yards down the hill to pick up a piece of bro 
 ken bottle which she insisted was moss agate. 
 " I ve some o that at home an* they shine. 
 You go get it, young feller." 
 
 As we climbed the long path the road grew 
 viler and viler till it became without disguise 
 the bed of a torrent ; and just when things 
 were at their rockiest we emerged into a little 
 
i68 American Notes 
 
 sapphire lake but never sapphire was so 
 blue called Mary s lake ; and that between 
 eight and nine thousand feet above the sea. 
 Then came grass downs, all on a vehement 
 slope, so that the buggy following the new- 
 made road ran on to the two off-wheels most 
 ly, till we dipped head-first into a ford, climbed 
 up a cliff, raced along a down, dipped again 
 and pulled up disheveled at "Larry s" for 
 lunch and an hour s rest. Only " Larry " 
 could have managed that school-feast tent on 
 the lonely hillside. Need I say that he was 
 an Irishman ? His supplies were at their 
 lowest ebb, but Larry enveloped us all in the 
 golden glamour of his speech ere we had de 
 scended, and the tent with the rude trestle-table 
 became a palace, the rough fare, delicacies of 
 Delmonico, and we, the abashed recipients of 
 Larry s imperial bounty. It was only later 
 that I discorered I had paid eight shillings 
 for tinned beef, biscuits, and beer, but on the 
 other hand Larry had said : " Will I go out 
 an kill a buffalo ? " And I felt that for me 
 and for me alone would he have done it. 
 Everybody else felt that way. Good luck go 
 with Larry ! 
 
 " An* now you ll all go an* wash your 
 pocket-handkerchiefs in that beautiful hot 
 spring round the corner," said he. " There s 
 soap an a washboard ready, an tis not every 
 day that ye can get hot water for nothing." 
 He waved UG large-handedly to the open 
 
American Notes 169 
 
 downs while he put the tent to rights. There 
 was no sense of fatigue on the body or distance 
 in the air. Hill and dale rode on the eyeball. 
 I could have clutched the far-off snowy peaks 
 by putting out my hand. Never was such 
 maddening air. Why we should have washed 
 pocket-handkerchiefs Larry alone knows. It 
 appeared to be a sort of religious rite. In a 
 little valley overhung with gay painted rocks 
 ran a stream of velvet brown and pink. It 
 was hot hotter than the hand could bear 
 and it colored the boulders in its course. 
 
 There was the maiden from New Hampshire, 
 the old lady from Chicago, papa, mama, the 
 woman who chewed gum, and all the rest of 
 them, gravely bending over a washboard and 
 soap. Mysterious virtues lay in that queer 
 stream. It turned the linen white as driven 
 snow in five minutes, and then we lay on the 
 grass and laughed with sheer bliss of being 
 alive. This have I known once in Japan, 
 once on the banks of the Columbia, what time 
 the salmon came in and " California " howled, 
 and once again in the Yellowstone by the light of 
 the eyes of the maiden from New Hampshire. 
 Four little pools lay at rny elbow : one was of 
 black water (tepid), one clear water (cold), 
 one clear water (hot) , one red water (boiling); 
 my newly washed handkerchief covered them 
 all We marveled as children marvel. 
 
 " This evening we shall do the grand canon 
 of the Yellowstone ? " said the maiden. 
 
170 American Notes 
 
 " Together ? " said I ; and she said yes. 
 
 The sun was sinking when we heard the 
 roar of falling waters and came to a broad 
 river along whose banks we ran. And then 
 oh, then ! I might at a pinch describe the 
 infernal regions, but not the other place. Be 
 it known to you that the Yellowstone River 
 has occasion to run through a gorge about 
 eight miles long. To get to the bottom of the 
 gorge it makes two leaps, one of about one 
 hundred and twenty and the other of three 
 hundred feet. I investigated the upper or 
 lesser fall, which is close to the hotel. Up to 
 that time nothing particular happens to the 
 Yellowstone, its banks being only rocky, rather 
 steep, and plentifully adorned with pines. At 
 the falls it comes round a corner, green, solid, 
 ribbed with a little foam and not more than 
 thirty yards wide. Then it goes over still 
 green and rather more solid than before. 
 After a minute or two you, sitting upon a rock 
 directly above the drop, begin to understand 
 that something has occurred ; that the river 
 has jumped a huge distance between solid 
 cliff walls and what looks like the gentle froth 
 of ripples lapping the sides of the gorge below 
 is really the outcome of great waves. And 
 the river yells aloud ; but the cliffs do not al 
 low the yells to escape. 
 
 That inspection began with curiosity and 
 finished in terror, for it seemed that the whole 
 world was sliding in chrysolite from under my 
 
American Notes 171 
 
 feet I followed with the others round the 
 corner to arrive at the brink of the canon : we 
 had to climb up a nearly perpendicular ascent 
 to begin with, for the ground rises more than 
 the river drops. Stately pine woods fringe 
 either lip of the gorge, which is the Gorge of 
 the Yellowstone. 
 
 All I can say is that without warning or 
 preparation I looked into a gulf seventeen 
 hundred feet deep with eagles and fish-hawks 
 circling far below. And the sides of that gulf 
 were one wild welter of color crimson, em 
 erald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed 
 with port-wine, snow-white, vermilion, lemon, 
 and silver-gray, in wide washes. The sides 
 did not fall sheer, but were graven by time and 
 water and air into monstrous heads of kings, 
 dead chiefs, men and women of the old time. 
 So far below that no sound of its strife could 
 reach us, the Yellowstone River ran a finger- 
 wide strip of jade-green. The sunlight took 
 those wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to 
 those that nature had already laid there. Once 
 I saw the dawn break over a lake in Rajputana 
 and the sun set over the Oodey Sagar amid a 
 circle of Holman Hunt hills. This time I was 
 watching both performances going on below me 
 upside down you understand and the colors 
 were real 1 The canon was burning like Troy 
 town ; but it would burn forever, and, thank 
 goodness, neither pen nor brush could ever 
 portray its splendors adequately. The Acad- 
 
172 American Notes 
 
 emy would reject the picture for a chromolith 
 ograph. The public would scoff at the letter 
 press for Daily Telegraphese. " I will leave 
 this thing alone," said I ; " tis my peculiar 
 property. Nobody else shall share it with 
 me." Evening crept through the pines that 
 shadowed us, but the full glory of the day 
 flamed in that canon as we went out very 
 cautiously to a jutting piece of rock blood- 
 red or pink it was that overhung the deepest 
 deeps of all. Now I know what it is to sit 
 enthroned amid the clouds of sunset. Gid 
 diness took away all sensation of touch or form ; 
 but the sense of blinding color remained. 
 When I reached the mainland again I had 
 sworn that I had been floating. The maid 
 from New Hamsphire said no word for a very 
 long time. She then quoted poetry, which 
 was perhaps the best thing she could have 
 done. 
 
 " And to think that this show-place has been 
 going on all these days an none of we ever 
 saw it," said the old lady from Chicago, with 
 an acid glance at her husband. 
 
 " No, only the Injuns," said he, unmoved ; 
 and the maiden and I laughed long. Inspi 
 ration is fleeting, beauty is vain, and the power 
 of the mind for wonder limited. Though the 
 shining hosts themselves had risen choiring 
 from the bottom cf the gorge they would not 
 have prevented her papa and one baser than 
 himself from rolling stones down those stupen- 
 
American Notes 173 
 
 dous rainbow-washed slides. Seventeen hun 
 dred feet of steepest pitch and rather more 
 than seventeen hundred colors for log or 
 boulder to whirl through ! So we heaved 
 things and saw them gather way and bound 
 from white rock to red or yellow, dragging 
 behind them torrents of color, till the noise of 
 their descent ceased and they bounded a hun 
 dred yards clear at the last into the Yellow 
 stone. 
 
 " I ve been down there," said Tom that 
 evening. " It s easy to get down if you re 
 careful just sit and slide ; but getting up is 
 worse. An I found, down below there, two 
 rocks just marked with a pictur of the canon. 
 I wouldn t sell those rocks not for fifteen 
 dollars," 
 
 And papa and I crawled down to the Yellow 
 stone just .above the first little fall to -wet a 
 line for .good luck. The round moon came up 
 and turned the cliffs and pines into silver ; a 
 two-pormd tout came up also, and we slew 
 him among the rocks, nearly tumbling into that 
 
 wild river. 
 
 # * * # * 
 
 Then out and away to Livingstone once 
 more. The maiden from New Hampshire 
 disappeared ; papa and mama with her 
 disappeared. Disappeared, too, the old lady 
 from Chicago and all the rest, while I thought 
 of all that I had not seen the forest of petri 
 fied trees with amethyst crystals in their black 
 
174 American Notes 
 
 hearts ; the great Yellowstone Lake where 
 you catch your trout alive in one spring and 
 drop him into another to boil him ; and most 
 of all of that mysterious Hoodoo region where 
 all the devils not employed in the geysers live 
 and kill the wandering bear and elk, so that 
 the scared hunter finds in Death Gulch piled 
 carcasses of the dead whom no man has 
 smitten. Hoodoo-land with the overhead 
 noises, the bird and beast and devil rocks, the 
 mazes and the bottomless pits, all these things 
 I missed. On the return road Yankee Jim 
 and Diana of the Crossways gave me kindly 
 greeting as the train paused an instant before 
 their door, and at Livingstone whom should I 
 see but Tom the driver ? 
 
 " I ve done with the Yellowstone and decided 
 to clear out East somewheres," said he, 
 " Your talkin about movin round so gay an 
 careless made me kinder restless ; I m movin 
 out." 
 
 Lord forgive us for our responsibility one to 
 another 1 
 
 " And your partner ? " said I. 
 
 " Here s him," said Tom, introducing a 
 gawky youth with a bundle ; and I saw those 
 two young men turn their faces to the East 
 
American Notes 175 
 
 XI. 
 
 * A fool also is full of words : a man cannot tell what 
 shall be ; and what shall be after him who can tell ? " 
 
 IT has just occurred to me with great force 
 that delightful as these letters are to myself 
 their length and breadth and depth may be 
 just the least little bit in the world wearisome 
 to you over there. I will compress myself 
 rigorously, though I should very much like to 
 deliver a dissertation on the American Army 
 and the possibilities of its extension. 
 
 The American Army is a beautiful little 
 army. Some day, when all the Indians arc 
 happily dead or drunk, it ought to make the 
 finest scientific and survey corps that the 
 world has ever seen. It does excellent work 
 now, but there is this defect in its nature ; it 
 is officered, as you know, from West Point, but 
 the mischief of it is that West Point seems to 
 be created for the purpose of spreading a 
 general knowledge of military matters among 
 the people. A boy goes up to that institution, 
 gets his pass, and returns to civil life, so they 
 tell me, with a dangerous knowledge that he is 
 a sucking Moltke, and may apply his learning 
 when occasion offers. Given trouble, that 
 man will be a nuisance, because he is a 
 
176 American Notes 
 
 hideously versatile American to begin with, as 
 cock-sure of himself as a man can be, and 
 with all the racial disregard for human life to 
 back him through his demi-semi-professional 
 generalship. 
 
 In a country where, as the records of the 
 daily papers show, men engaged in a conflict 
 with police or jails are all too ready to adopt 
 a military formation, and get heavily shot in a 
 sort of cheap, half-instructed warfare instead 
 of being decently scared by the appearance of 
 the military, this sort of arrangement does not 
 seem wise. 
 
 The bond between the States is of amazing 
 tenuity. So long as they do not absolutely 
 march into the District of Columbia, sit on 
 the Washington statues, and invent a flag 
 of their own, they can legislate, lynch, hunt 
 negroes through swamps, divorce, railroad, 
 and rampage as much as ever they choose. 
 They do not need knowledge of their own 
 military strength to back their genial law 
 lessness. 
 
 That Regular Army, which is a dear little 
 army, should be kept to itself, blooded on de 
 tachment duty, turned into the paths of 
 science, and now and again assembled at 
 feasts of Freemasons and so forth. 
 
 It s too tiny to be a political power. The 
 immortal wreck of the Grand Army of the 
 Republic is a political power of the largest 
 and most unblushing description. 
 
American Notes 177 
 
 It ought not to help to lay the foundations 
 of an amateur military power that is blind 
 and irresponsible. . . . 
 
 Be thankful that the balance of this lecture 
 is suppressed, and with it the account of a 
 " shiveree " which I attended in Livingstone 
 City : and the story of the editor and the sub 
 editor (the latter w r as a pet cougar, or moun 
 tain lion, who used, they said, skilfully to 
 sub-edit disputants in the office) of the Liv 
 ingstone daily paper. 
 
 Omitting a thousand matters of first im 
 portance, let me pick up the thread of things 
 on a narrow-gauge line that took me down to- 
 Salt Lake. The run between Delhi and 
 Ahmedabad on a May day would have been 
 bliss compared to this torture. There was 
 nothing but glare and desert and alkali dust. 
 There was no smoking-accommodation. I 
 sat in the lavatory with the conductor and a 
 prospector who told stories about Indian 
 atrocities in the voice of a dreaming child 
 oath following oath as smoothly as clotted 
 cream laps the mouth of the jug. I don t 
 think he knew he was saying anything out of 
 the way, but nine or ten of those oaths were 
 new to me, and one even made the conductor 
 raise his eyebrows. 
 
 " And when a man s alone mostly, leadin* 
 
 his horse across the hills, he gets to talk aloud 
 
 to himself as it was," said the weather-worn 
 
 retailer of tortures. A vision rose before me 
 
 12 
 
178 American Notes 
 
 of this man trampling the Bannack City trail 
 under the stars swearing, always swearing. 
 
 Bundles of rags that were pointed out as 
 Red Indians, boarded the train from time to 
 time. Their race privileges allow them free 
 transit on the platforms of the cars. They 
 mustn t come inside of course, and equally of 
 course the train never thinks of pulling up 
 for them. I saw a squaw take us flying and 
 leave us in the same manner when we were 
 spinning round a curve. Like the Punjabi, 
 the Red Indian gets out by preference on the 
 trackless plain and walks stolidly to the 
 horizon. He never says where he is 
 going. . . . 
 
 Salt Lake. I am concerned for the sake 
 of Mr. Phil Robinson, his soul. You will 
 remember that he wrote a book called Saints 
 and Sinners in which he proved very prettily 
 that the Mormon was almost altogether an 
 estimable person. Ever since my arrival at 
 Salt Lake I have been wondering what made 
 him write that book. On mature reflection, 
 and after a long walk round the city, I am 
 inclined to think it was the sun, which is very 
 powerful hereabouts. 
 
 By great good luck the evil-minded train 
 already delayed twelve hours by a burnt 
 bridge, brought me to the city on a Saturday 
 by way of that valley which the Mormons 
 aver their efforts had caused to blossom 
 like the rose. Some hours previously I 
 
American Notes 179 
 
 had entered a new world where, in conver 
 sation, every one was either a Mormon or 
 a Gentile. It is not seemly for a free and 
 independent citizen to dub himself a Gentile, 
 but the Mayor of Ogden which is the Gen 
 tile city of the valley told me that there must 
 be some distinction between the two flocks. 
 
 Long before the fruit orchards of Logan or 
 the shining levels of the Salt Lake had been 
 reached that Mayor himself a Gentile, and 
 one renowned for his dealings with the Mor 
 mons told me that the great question of the 
 existence of the power within the power was 
 being gradually solved by the ballot and by 
 education. 
 
 " We have/* quoth he, " hills round and 
 about here, stuffed full of silver and gold and 
 lead, and all Hell atop of the Mormon church 
 can t keep the Gentile from flocking in when 
 that s the case. At Ogden, thirty miles from 
 Salt Lake, this year the Gentile vote swamped 
 the Mormon at the Municipal elections, and 
 next year we trust that we shall be able to 
 repeat our success in Salt Lake itself. In 
 that city the Gentiles are only one-third of 
 the total population, but the mass of em are 
 grown men, capable of voting. Whereas the 
 Mormons are cluttered up with children. I 
 guess as soon as we have purely Gentile offi 
 cers in the township, and the control of the 
 policy of the city, the Mormons will have to 
 back down considerable. They re bound to 
 
180 American Notes 
 
 go before long. My own notion is that it * 
 the older men who keep alive the opposition 
 to the Gentile and all his works. The younger 
 ones, spite of all the elders tell em, -wiff mix 
 with the Gentile, and read Gentile books, 
 and you bet your sweet life there s a holy in 
 fluence working toward conversion in the kiss 
 of an average Gentile specially when the 
 girl knows that he won t think it necessary 
 for her salvation to load the house up with 
 other women-folk. I guess the younger gen 
 eration are giving sore trouble to the elders. 
 What s that you say about polygamy ? It s a 
 penal offense now under a Bill passed not 
 long ago. The Mormon has to elect one wife 
 and keep to her. If he s caught visiting any 
 of the others do you see that cool and rest 
 ful brown stone building way over there 
 against the hillside ? That s the penitentiary. 
 He is sent there to consider his sins, and he 
 pays a fine, too. But most of the police in 
 Suit Lake are Mormons, and I don t suppose 
 they are too hard on their friends. I presoom 
 there s a good deal of polygamy practised on 
 the sly. But the chief trouble is to get the 
 Mormon to see that the Gentile isn t the 
 doubly-damned beast that the elders repre 
 sent. Only get the Gentiles well into the 
 State, and the whole concern is bound to go 
 to pieces in a very little time. 5 
 
 And the wish being father to the thought, 
 ** Why, certainly," said I, and began to take 
 
American Notes 181 
 
 in the valley of Deseret, the home of the 
 latter-day saints, and the abode perhaps of as 
 much misery as has ever been compressed 
 into forty years. The good folk at home will 
 not understand, but you will, what follows. 
 You know how in Bengal to this day the 
 child-wife is taught to curse her possible co- 
 wife, ere yet she has gone to her husband s 
 house ? And the Bengali woman has been 
 accustomed to polygamy for a few hundred 
 years. You know, too, the awful jealousy be 
 tween mother wife and barren behind the 
 purdah the jealousy that culminates some 
 times in the poisoning of the well-beloved 
 son ? Now and again, an Englishwoman 
 employs a high-caste Mussulman nurse, and 
 in the offices of that hire women are apt to 
 forget the differences of color, and to speak 
 unreservedly as twin daughters under Eve s 
 curse. The nurse tells very strange and 
 awful things. She has, and this the Mor 
 mons count a privilege, been born into poly 
 gamy ; but she loathes and detests it from 
 the bottom of her jealous soul. And to the 
 lot of the Bengali co-wife " the cursed of the 
 cursed the daughter of the dunghill the 
 scald-head and the barren-mute " (you know 
 the rest of that sweet commination-service) 
 one creed, of all the White creeds to-day, 
 deliberately introduces the white woman taken 
 from centuries of training, which have taught 
 her that it is right to control the undivided 
 
1 82 American Notes 
 
 heart of one man. To quench her most 
 natural rebellion, that amazing creed and fan 
 tastic jumble of Mahometanism, the Mosaic 
 law, and imperfectly comprehended fragments 
 of Freemasonry, calls to its aid all the powers 
 of a hell conceived and elaborated by coarse- 
 minded hedgers and ditchers. A sweet view, 
 isn t it ? 
 
 All the beauty of the valley could not make 
 me forget it. But the valley is very fair. 
 Bench after bench of land, flat as a table 
 against the flanks of the ringing hills, marks 
 where the Salt Lake rested for a while as it 
 sunk from an inland sea to a lake fifty miles 
 long and thirty broad. Before long the 
 benches will be covered with houses. At 
 present these are hidden among the green 
 trees on the dead flat of the valley. You 
 have read a hundred times how the streets of 
 Salt Lake City are very broad, furnished with 
 rows of shade trees and gutters of fresh water. 
 This is true, but I struck the town in a 
 season of great drouth that same drouth 
 which is playing havoc with the herds of 
 Montana. The trees were limp, and the rills 
 of sparkling water that one reads about were 
 represented by dusty, paved courses. Main 
 Street appears to be inhabited by the com 
 mercial Gentile, who has made of it a busy, 
 bustling thoroughfare, and, in the eye of the 
 sun, swigs the ungodly lager and smokes the 
 improper cigar all day long. For which I 
 
American Notes 183 
 
 like him. At the head of Main Street stand 
 the lions of the place ; the Temple and the 
 Tabernacle, the Tithing House, and the 
 houses of Brigham Young, whose portrait is 
 on sale in most of the booksellers shops. 
 Incidentally it may be mentioned that the 
 late Amir of Utah does not unremotely re 
 semble His Highness the Amir of Afghanis 
 tan, whom these fortunate eyes have seen. 
 And I have no desire to fall into the hands 
 of the Amir. The first thing to be seen was, 
 of course, the outward exponent of a creed. 
 Armed with a copy of the Book of Mormon, 
 for better comprehension, I went to form 
 rash opinions. Some day the Temple will be 
 finished. It was begun only thirty years 
 ago, and up to date rather more than three 
 million dollars and a half have been expended 
 in its granite bulk. The walls are ten feet 
 thick; the edifice itself is about a hundred 
 feet high ; and its towers will be nearly two 
 hundred. And that is all there is of it, unless 
 you choose to inspect more closely; always 
 reading the Book of Mormon as you walk. 
 Then the wondrous puerility, of what I sup 
 pose we must call the design, becomes ap 
 parent. These men, directly inspired from 
 on High, heaped stone on stone and pillar on 
 pillar, without achieving either dignity, relief, 
 or interest. There is, over the main door, 
 some pitiful scratching in stone representing 
 the all-seeing eye, the Masonic grip, the sun, 
 
184 American Notes 
 
 moon, and stars, and, perhaps, other skittles. 
 The flatness and meanness of the thing al 
 most makes you weep when you look at the 
 magnificent granite in blocks strewn abroad^ 
 and think of the art that three million dollars 
 might have called in to the aid of the church. 
 It is as though a child had said : " Let us 
 draw a great, big, fine house finer than any 
 house that ever was," and in that desire had 
 laboriously smudged along with a ruler and 
 pencil, piling meaningless straight lines on 
 compass-drawn curves, with his tongue fol 
 lowing every movement of the inept hand. 
 Then sat I down on a wheelbarrow and read 
 the Book of Mormon, and behold the spirit of 
 the book was the spirit of the stone before 
 me. The estimable Joseph and Hyrum Smith 
 struggling to create a new Bible, when they 
 knew nothing of the history of Old and New 
 Testament, and the inspired architect mud 
 dling with his bricks they were brothers. 
 But the book was more interesting than the 
 building. It is written, and all the world has 
 read, how to Joseph Smith an angel came 
 down from Heaven with a pair of celestial 
 gig-lamps, whereby he was marvelously en 
 abled to interpret certain plates of gold scrib 
 bled over with dots and scratches, and dis 
 covered by him in the ground. Which plates 
 Joseph Smith did translate only he spelt 
 the mysterious characters " caractors " and 
 out of the dots and scratches produced a 
 
American Notes 185 
 
 volume of six hundred closely printed pages, 
 containing the books of Nephi, first and sec 
 ond, Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, Mormon, 
 Mosiah, the Record of Zeniff, the book of 
 Alma Helaman, the third of Nephi, the book 
 of Ether (the whole thing is a powerful 
 anaesthetic, by the way), and the final book of 
 Mononi. Three men, of whom one I believe 
 is now living, bear solemn witness that the 
 angel with the spectacles appeared unto them ; 
 eight other men swear solemnly that they 
 have seen the golden plates of the revelation ; 
 and upon this testimony the book of Mormon 
 stands. The Mormon Bible begins at the 
 days of Zedekiah, King of Judah, and ends in 
 a wild and weltering quagmire of tribal fights, 
 bits of revelation, and wholesale cribs from 
 the Bible. Very sincerely did I sympathize 
 with the inspired brothers as I waded through 
 their joint production. As a humble feilow- 
 worker in the field of fiction, I knew what it 
 was to get good names for one s characters. 
 But Joseph and Hyrum were harder bestead 
 than ever I have been ; and bolder men to 
 boot. They created Teancum and Corian- 
 tumy Pahoran, Kishkumen, and Gadianton, 
 and other priceless names which the memory 
 does not hold ; but of geography they wisely 
 steered clear, and were astutely vague as 
 to the locality of places, because you see 
 they were by no means certain what lay 
 in the next county to their own. They 
 
1 86 American Notes 
 
 marched and countermarched bloodthirsty 
 armies across their pages ; and added new and 
 amazing chapters to the records of the New 
 Testament, and reorganized the heavens and 
 the earth as it is always lawful to do in print. 
 But they could not achieve style, and it was 
 foolish of them to let into their weird Mosaic 
 pieces of the genuine Bible whenever the 
 laboring pen dropped from its toilsome parody 
 to a sentence or two of vile, bad English or 
 downright " penny dreadfulism." " And 
 Moses said unto the people of Israel: 
 1 Great Scott 1 what air you doing ? There 
 is no sentence in the Book of Mormon word 
 for word like the foregoing ; but the -general 
 tone is not widely different. 
 
 There are the makings of a very fine creed 
 about Mormonism. To begin with, the 
 Church is rather more absolute than that of 
 Rome. Drop the polygamy plank in the plat 
 form, but on the other hand deal lightly with 
 certain forms of excess. Keep the quality of 
 the recruits down to a low mental level and 
 see that the best of the agricultural science 
 available is in the hands of the Elders, and 
 you have there a first-class engine for pioneer 
 work. The tawdry mysticism and the bor 
 rowings from Freemasonry serve the low-caste 
 Swede and the Dane, the Welshman and the 
 Cornish cottar, just as well as a highly organ 
 ized Heaven. 
 
 I went about the streets and peeped into 
 
American Notes 187 
 
 people s front windows, and the decorations 
 upon the tables were after the manner of the 
 year 1850. Main Street was full of country 
 folk from the outside come in to trade with 
 the Zion Mercantile Co-operative Institute. 
 The Church, I fancy, looks after the finances 
 of this thing, and it consequently pays good 
 dividends. The faces of the women were not 
 lovely. Indeed, but for the certainty that 
 ugly persons are just as irrational in the mat 
 ter of undivided love as the beautiful, it 
 seemed that polygamy was a blessed institu 
 tion for the women, and that only the spiritual 
 power could drive the hulking, board-faced 
 men into it. The women wore hideous gar 
 ments, and the men seemed to be tied up 
 with string. They would market all that 
 afternoon, and on Sunday go to the praying- 
 place. I tried to talk to a few of them, but 
 they spoke strange tongues and stared and 
 behaved like cows. Yet one woman, and not 
 an altogether ugly one, confided to me that 
 she hated the idea of Salt Lake City being 
 turned into a show-place for the amusement 
 of the Gentile. 
 
 " If we ave our own institutions, that ain t 
 no reason why people should come ere and 
 stare at us, his it ? " 
 
 The dropped " h " betrayed her. 
 
 " And when did you leave England ? " I 
 said. 
 
 " Summer of 84. I am from Dorset," sh* 
 
1 88 American Notes 
 
 said " The Mormon agents was very good 
 to us, and we was very poor. Now we re 
 better off my father an mother an me." 
 
 " Then you like the State ? " 
 
 She misunderstood at first " Oh, I ain t 
 livin in the state of polygamy. Not me yet. 
 I ain t married. I like where I am. I ve got 
 things o my own and some land." 
 
 " But I suppose you will " 
 
 " Not me. I ain t like them Swedes an* 
 Danes. I ain t got nothing to say for or 
 against polygamy. It s the Elders business, 
 an between you an me I don t think it s 
 going on much longer. You ll ear them in 
 the J ouse to-morrer talkin as if it was 
 spreadin all over America. The Swedes 
 they think it his. I know it hisn t." 
 
 " But you ve got your land all right." 
 
 " Oh, yes, we ve got our land an we never 
 say aught against polygamy o course father 
 an mother an me." 
 
 It strikes me that there is a fraud some 
 where. You ve never heard of the rice- 
 Christians, have you ? 
 
 I should have liked to have spoken to the 
 maiden at length, but she dived into the Zion 
 Co-op, and a man captured me, saying that it 
 was my bounden duty to see the sights of Salt 
 Lake. These comprised the egg-shaped 
 Tabernacle, the Beehive, and town houses of 
 Brigham Young ; the same great ruffian s 
 tomb with assorted samples of his wives sleep- 
 
American Notes 189 
 
 ing round him (just as the eleven faithful ones 
 sleep round the ashes of Runjit Singh outside 
 Fort Lahore), and one or two other curiosi 
 ties. But all these things have been de 
 scribed by abler pens than mine. The animal- 
 houses where Brigham used to pack his wives 
 are grubby villas; the Tabernacle is a 
 shingled fraud, and the Tithing House where 
 all the revenue returns seem to be made, much 
 resembles a stable. The Mormons have a 
 paper currency of their own ecclesiastical 
 bank-notes which are exchanged for local pro 
 duce. But the little boys of the place prefer 
 the bullion of the Gentiles. It is not pleasant 
 to be taken round a township with your guide 
 stopping before every third house to say: 
 " That s where Elder so and so kept Amelia 
 Bathershins, his fifth wife no, his third. 
 Amelia she was took on after Keziah, but 
 Keziah was the Elder s pet, an he didn t dare 
 to let Amelia come across Keziah for fear of 
 her spilin Keziah s beauty." The Mussul 
 mans are quite right. The minute that all the 
 domestic details of polygamy are discussed in 
 the mouths of the people, that institution is 
 ready to fall. I shook off my guide when he 
 had told me his very last doubtful tale, and 
 went on alone. An ordered peace and a per 
 fection of quiet luxury is the note of the city 
 of Salt Lake. The houses stand in generous 
 and well-groomed grass-plots, none very much 
 worse or better than their neighbors. 
 
190 American Notes 
 
 Creepers grow over the house fronts, and 
 .there is a very pleasant music of wind among 
 the trees in the vast empty streets bringing a 
 smell of hay and the flowers of summer. 
 
 On a tableland overlooking all the city 
 stands the United States garrison of infantry 
 and artillery. The State of Utah can do 
 -nearly anything it pleases until that much-to- 
 be-desired hour when the Gentile vote shall 
 quietly swamp out Mormonism ; but the gar 
 rison is kept there in case of accidents. The 
 big, shark-mouthed, pig-eared, heavy-boned 
 farmers sometimes take to their creed with 
 wildest fanaticism, and in past years have 
 made life excessively unpleasant for the Gen 
 tile when he was few in the land. But to 
 day, so far from killing openly or secretly, or 
 burning Gentile farms, * it is all the Mormon 
 <dares do to feebly try to boycott the inter 
 loper. His journals preach defiance to the 
 United States Government, and in the Taber 
 nacle of a Sunday the preachers follow suit. 
 When I went down there the place was full of 
 people who would have been much better for 
 a washing. A man rose up and told them 
 that they were the chosen of God, the elect of 
 Israel, that they were to obey their priest, and 
 that there was a good time coming. I fancy 
 that they had heard all this before so many 
 times it produced no impression whatever ; 
 even as the sublimest mysteries of another 
 Faith lost salt through constant iteration, 
 
American Notes 191 
 
 They breathed heavily through their noses and 
 stared straight in front of them impassive as 
 flatfish. 
 
 And that evening I went up to the garrison 
 post one of the most coveted of all the army 
 commands and overlooked the City cf the 
 Saints as it lay in the circle of its forbidding 
 hills. You can speculate a good deal about the 
 mass of human misery, the loves frustrated, 
 the gentle hearts broken, and the strong souls 
 twisted from the law of life to a fiercer fol 
 lowing of the law of death, that the hills have 
 seen. How must it have been in the old days 
 when the footsore emigrants broke through 
 into the circle and knew that they were cut off 
 from hope of return or sight of friends were 
 handed over to the power of the friends that 
 called themselves priests of the Most High ? 
 " But for the grace of God there goes Richard 
 Baxter." as the eminent divine once said. It 
 seemed good that fate did not order me to be 
 a brick in the up-building of the Mormon 
 church, that has so aptly established herself 
 by the borders of a lake bitter, salt, and hope 
 less. 
 
 
IQ2 American Notes 
 
 XII. 
 
 " Much have I seen, 
 Cities and men." 
 
 LET there be no misunderstanding about 
 the matter. I love this People, and if any 
 contemptuous criticism has to be done, I will 
 do it myself. My heart has gone out to them 
 beyond all other peoples ; and for the life of 
 me I cannot tell why. They are bleeding- 
 raw at the edges, almost more conceited than 
 the English, vulgar with a massive vulgarity 
 which is as though the Pyramids were coated 
 with Christmas-cake sugar-works. Cocksure 
 they are, lawless and as casual as they are 
 cocksure ; but I love them, and I realized it 
 when I met an Englishman who laughed at 
 them. He proved conclusively that they 
 were all wrong, from their tariff to their go- 
 as-you-please Civil Service, and beneath the 
 consideration of a true Briton. 
 
 " I admit everything/ said I. " Their 
 Government s provisional ; their law s the 
 notion of the moment; their railways are 
 made of hairpins and match-sticks, and most 
 of their good luck lives in their woods and 
 mines and rivers and not in their brains ; but 
 for all that, they be the biggest, finest, and 
 best people on the surface of the globe! 
 
American Notes 193 
 
 Just you wait a hundred years and see how 
 they ll behave when they ve had the screw put j 
 on them and have forgotten a few of the 
 patriarchal teachings of the late Mister George 
 Washington. Wait till the Anglo-American- 
 German-Jew the Man of the Future is 
 properly equipped. He ll have just the least 
 Lttle kink in his hair now and again ; he ll 
 carry the English lungs above the Teuton feet 
 that can walk forever ; and he will wave long, 
 thin, bony Yankee hands with the big blue 
 veins on the wrist, from one end of the earth to 
 the other. He ll be the finest writer, poet, and 
 dramatist, specially dramatist, that the world 
 as it recollects itself has ever seen. By virtue 
 of his Jew blood just a little, little drop 
 he ll be a musician and a painter too. At 
 present there is too much balcony and too 
 little Romeo in the life-plays of his fellow- 
 citizens. Later on, when the proportion is 
 adjusted and he sees the possibilities of his 
 land, he will produce things that will make the 
 effete East stare. He will also be a complex 
 and highly composite administrator. There 
 is nothing known to man that he will not be, 
 and his country will sway the world with one 
 foot as a man tilts a seesaw plank ! " 
 
 " But this is worse than the Eagle at its 
 worst. Do you seriously believe all that ? " 
 said the Englishman. 
 
 " If I believe anything seriously, all this I 
 most firmly believe. You wait and see, 
 
194 American Notes 
 
 Sixty million people, chiefly of English in 
 stincts, who are trained from youth to believe 
 that nothing is impossible, don t slink through 
 the centuries like Russian peasantry. They 
 are bound to leave their mark somewhere, and 
 don t you forget it." 
 
 But isn t it sad to think that with all Eter 
 nity behind and before us we cannot, even 
 though we would pay for it with sorrow, filch 
 from the Immensities one hundred poor years 
 of life, wherein to watch the two Great Exper 
 iments ? A hundred years hence India and 
 America will be worth observing. At present 
 the one is burned out and the other is only just 
 stoking up. When I left my opponent there 
 was much need for faith, because I fell into 
 the hands of a perfectly delightful man whom 
 I had met casually in the street, sitting in a 
 chair on the pavement, smoking a huge cigar. 
 He was a commercial traveler, and his beat 
 lay through Southern Mexico, and he told me 
 tales, of forgotten cities, stone gods up to their 
 sacred eyes in forest growth, Mexican priests, 
 rebellions, and dictatorships, that made my hair 
 curl. It was he who dragged me forth to 
 bathe in Salt Lake, which is some fifteen miles 
 away from the city, and reachable by many 
 trains which are but open tram-cars. The 
 track, like all American tracks, was terrifying 
 in its roughness ; and the end of the journey 
 disclosed the nakedness of the accommoda 
 tion. There were piers and band houses aad 
 
American Notes 195 
 
 refreshment stalls built over the solid gray 
 levels of the lake, but they only accentuated 
 the utter barrenness of the place. Americans 
 don t mix with their scenery as yet. 
 
 And " Have faith," said the commercial 
 traveler as he walked into water heavy as 
 quicksilver. " Walk ! " I walked, and I walked 
 till my legs flew up and I had to walk as one 
 struggling with a high wind, but still I rode 
 head and shoulders above the water. It was 
 a horrible feeling, this inability to sink. 
 Swimming was not much use. You couldn t 
 get a grip of the water, so I e en sat me down 
 and drifted like a luxurious anemone among 
 the hundreds that were bathing in that place. 
 You could wallow for three-quarters of an 
 hour in that warm, sticky brine and fear no 
 evil consequences ; but when you came out 
 you were coated with white salt from top to 
 toe. And if you accidentally swallowed a 
 mouthful of the water, you died. This is true, 
 because I swallowed half a mouthful and was 
 half-dead in consequence. 
 
 The commercial traveler on our return 
 journey across the level flats that fringe the 
 lake s edge bade me note some of the customs 
 of his people. The great open railway car 
 held about a hundred men and maidens, 
 " coming up with a song from the sea." They 
 sang and they shouted and they exchanged 
 witticisms of the most poignant, and com 
 ported themselves like their brothers and sis- 
 
196 American Notes 
 
 ters over the seas the Arries and Arriets of 
 the older world. And there sat behind me 
 two modest maidens in white, alone and 
 unattended. To these the privileged youth of 
 the car a youth of a marvelous range of 
 voice proffered undying affection. They 
 laughed, but made no reply in words. The 
 suit was renewed, and with extravagant im 
 agery ; the nearest seats applauding. When 
 we arrived at the city the maidens turned and 
 went their way up a dark tree-shaded street, 
 and the boys elsewhere. Whereat, recollect 
 ing what the London rough was like, I mar 
 veled that they did not pursue. " It s all 
 right," said the commercial traveler. " If 
 they had followed well, I guess some one 
 would ha shot em." The very next day on 
 those very peaceful cars returning from the 
 Lake some one was shot dead. He was 
 what they call a " sport," which is American 
 for a finished " leg," and he had an argument 
 with a police officer, and the latter slew him. 
 I saw his funeral go down the main street 
 There were nearly thirty carriages, filled with 
 doubtful men, and women not in the least 
 doubtful, and the local papers said that de 
 ceased had his merits, but it didn t much 
 matter, because if the Sheriff hadn t dropped 
 him he would assuredly have dropped the 
 Sheriff. Somehow this jarred on my sensitive 
 feelings, and I went away, though the commer 
 cial traveler would fain have entertained me 
 
American Notes 197 
 
 in his own house, he knowing not my name. 
 Twice through the long hot nights we talked, 
 tilting up our chairs on the sidewalk, of the 
 future of America. 
 
 You should hear the Saga of the States 
 reeled off by a young and enthusiastic citizen 
 who had just carved out for himself a home, 
 filled it with a pretty little wife, and is prepar 
 ing to embark on commerce on his own 
 account. I was tempted to believe that pistol- 
 shots were regrettable accidents and lawless 
 ness only the top scum on the great sea of 
 humanity. I am tempted to believe that still, 
 though baked and dusty Utah is very many 
 miles behind me. 
 
 Then chance threw me into the arms of 
 another and very different commercial trav 
 eler, as we pulled out of Utah on our way to 
 Omaha via the Rockies. He traveled in 
 biscuits, of which more anon, and Fate had 
 smitten him very heavily, having at one stroke 
 knocked all the beauty and joy out of his poor 
 life. So he journeyed with a case of samples 
 as one dazed, and his eyes took no pleasure 
 in anything that he saw. In his despair he 
 had withdrawn himself to his religion, he 
 was a Baptist, and spoke of its consolation 
 w r ith the artless freedom that an American 
 generally exhibits when he is talking about his 
 most sacred private affairs. There was a 
 desert beyond Utah, hot and barren as Mian 
 Mir in May. The sun baked the car-roof, and 
 
198 American Notes 
 
 the dust caked the windows, and through the 
 dust and the glare the man with the biscuits 
 bore witness to his creed, which seems to in 
 clude one of the greatest miracles in the world 
 the immediate unforeseen, self-conscious 
 redemption of the soul by means very similar 
 to those which turned Paul to the straight 
 path. 
 
 " You must experience religion," he repeated, 
 his mouth twitching and his eyes black-ringed 
 with his recent loss. "You must experience 
 religion. You can t tell when you re goin* to 
 get, or haow ; but it will come it will come, 
 Sir, like a lightning stroke, an* you will wrestle 
 with yourself before you receive full conviction 
 and assurance." 
 
 " How long does that take ? " I asked rev 
 erently. 
 
 " It may take hours. It may take days. I 
 knew a man in San Jo who lay under convic 
 tion for a month an the he ^ot the sperrit 
 as you must git it." 
 
 " And then ? " 
 
 " And then you are saved. You feel that, 
 an* you kin endure anything," he sighed. 
 " Yes, anything. I don t care what it is, though 
 I allow that some things are harder than 
 others." 
 
 " Then you have to wait for the miracle to 
 be worked by powers outside yourself. And 
 if the miracle doesn t work ? " 
 
 " But it must. I tell you it must. It comes 
 to all who profess with faith." 
 
American Notes 199 
 
 I learned a good deal about that creed as 
 the train fled on ; and I wondered as I learned. 
 It was a strange thing to watch that poor hu 
 man soul, broken and bowed by its loss, nerving 
 itself against each new pang of pain with the 
 iterated assurance that it was safe against the 
 pains of Hell. 
 
 The heat was stifling. We quitted the 
 desert and launched into the rolling green 
 plains of Colorado. Dozing uneasily with 
 every removable rag removed, I was roused 
 by a blast of intense cold and the drumming 
 of a hundred drums. The train had stopped. 
 Far as the eye could range the land was white 
 under two feet of hail each hailstone as big 
 as the top of a sherry-glass. I saw a young 
 colt by the side of the track standing with his 
 poor little fluffy back to the pitiless pelting. 
 He was pounded to death. An old horse met 
 his doom on the run. He galloped wildly 
 towards the train, but his hind legs dropped 
 into a hole half water and half ice. He beat 
 the ground with his fore-feet for a minute and 
 then rolling over on his side submitted quietly 
 to be killed. 
 
 When the storm ceased, we picked our way 
 cautiously and crippledly over a track that 
 might give way at any moment. The Western 
 driver urges his train much as does the Subal 
 tern the bounding pony, and twould seem 
 with an equal sense of responsibility. If a 
 foot does go wrong, why there you are, don t 
 
2oo American Notes 
 
 you know, and if it is all right, why all right 
 it is, don t you know. But I would sooner be 
 on the pony than the train. 
 
 This seems a good place wherein to preach 
 X on American versatility. When Mr. Howells 
 writes a novel, when a reckless hero dams a 
 flood by heaving a dynamite-shattered moun 
 tain into it, or when a notoriety-hunting 
 preacher marries a couple in a balloon, you 
 shall hear the great American press rise on its 
 hind legs and walk round mouthing over the 
 versatility of the American citizen. And he 
 is versatile horribly so. The unlimited ex 
 ercise of the right of private judgment (which, 
 by the way, is a weapon not one man in ten is 
 competent to handle), his blatant cocksure- 
 ness, and the dry-air-bred restlessness that 
 makes him crawl all over the furniture when 
 he is talking to you, conspire to make him 
 versatile. But what he calls versatility the 
 impartial bystander of Anglo-Indian extraction 
 is apt to deem mere casualness, and dangerous 
 casualness at that. No man can grasp the 
 inwardness of an employ by the light of pure 
 reason even though that reason be republican. 
 He must serve an apprenticeship to one craft 
 and learn that craft all the days of his life if 
 he wishes to excel therein. Otherwise he 
 merely " puts the thing through somehow ; " 
 and occasionally he doesn t. But wherein lies 
 the beauty of this form of mental suppleness ? 
 Old man California, whom I shall love and 
 
American Notes 201 
 
 respect always, told me one or two anecdotes 
 about American versatility and its conse 
 quences that came back to my mind with dire 
 ful force as the train progressed. We didn t 
 upset, but I don t think that that was the 
 fault of the driver or the men who made the 
 track. Take up you can easily find them 
 the accounts of ten consecutive railway catas 
 trophes not little accidents, but first-class 
 fatalities, when the long cars turn over, take 
 fire, and roast the luckless occupants alive. 
 To seven out of the ten you shall find appended 
 the cheerful statement : " The accident is 
 supposed to have been due the rails spreading." 
 That means the metals were spiked down to 
 the ties with such versatility that the spikes or 
 the tracks drew under the constant vibration 
 of the traffic, and the metals opened out. No 
 one is hanged for these little affairs. 
 
 We began to climb hills, and then we 
 stopped at night in darkness, while men 
 threw sand under the wheels and crowbarred 
 the track and then " guessed " that we might 
 proceed. Not being in the least anxious to 
 face my Maker half asleep and rubbing my 
 eyes, I went forward to a common car, and 
 was rewarded by two hours conversation with 
 the stranded, broken-down, husband-aban 
 doned actress of a fourth-rate, stranded, 
 broken-down, manager-bereft company. She 
 was muzzy with beer, reduced to her last 
 dollar, fearful that there would be no one to 
 
2O2 American Notes 
 
 meet her at Omaha, and wept at intervals be 
 cause she had given the conductor a five- 
 dollar bill to change, and he hadn t come back. 
 He was an Irishman, so I knew he couldn t 
 steal, and I addressed myself to the task of 
 consolation. I was rewarded, after a decent 
 interval, by the history of a life so wild, so 
 mixed, so desperately improbable, and yet so 
 simply probable, and above all so quick not 
 fast in its kaleidoscopic changes that the 
 Pioneer would reject any summary of it. And 
 so you will never know how she, the beery 
 woman with the tangled blond hair, was once 
 a girl on a farm in far-off New Jersey. 
 How he, a traveling actor, had wooed and 
 won her, " but Paw he was always set 
 against Alf," and how he and she embarked 
 all their little capital on the word of a faith 
 less manager who disbanded his company a 
 hundred miles from nowhere, and how she 
 and Alf and a third person who had not 
 yet made any noise in the world, had to 
 walk the railway-track and beg from the farm 
 houses ; how that third person arrived and 
 went away again with a wail, and how Alf 
 took to the whisky and other things still more 
 calculated to make a wife unhappy ; and how 
 after barn-stormings, insults, shooting-scrapes, 
 and pitiful collapses of poor companies she 
 had once won an encore. It was not a cheer 
 ful tale to listen to. There was a real ac 
 tress in the Pullman, such an one as travels 
 
American Notes 203 
 
 sumptuously with a maid and dressing-case, 
 and my draggle-tail thought of appealing to 
 her for help, but broke down after several at 
 tempts to walk into the car jauntily as befitted 
 a sister in the profession. Then the con 
 ductor reappeared, the five-dollar bill hon 
 estly changed, and she wept by reason of 
 beer and gratitude together, and then fell 
 asleep waveringly, alone in the car, and be 
 came almost beautiful and quite kissable ; 
 while the Man with the Sorrow stood at 
 the door between actress and actress and 
 preached grim sermons on the certain end of 
 each if they did not mend their ways and 
 find regeneration through the miracle of the 
 Baptist creed. Yes, we were a queer com 
 pany going up to the Rockies together. I 
 was the luckiest, because when a breakdown 
 occurred, and we were delayed for twelve 
 hours, I ate all the Baptist s sample-biscuits. 
 They were various in composition, but nour 
 ishing. Always travel with a " drummer." 
 
204 American Notes 
 
 XIII. 
 
 AFTER much dallying and more climbing 
 we came to a pass like all the Bolan Passes in 
 the world, and the Black Canon of the Gun- 
 nison called they it. We had been climbing 
 for very many hours, and attained a modest 
 elevation of some seven or eight thousand 
 feet above the sea, when we entered a gorge, 
 remote from the sun, where the rocks were 
 two thousand feet sheer, and where a rock- 
 splintered river roared and howled ten feet 
 below a track which seemed to have been 
 built on the simple principle of dropping mis 
 cellaneous dirt into the river and pinning a 
 few rails a-top. There was a glory and a won 
 der and a mystery about that mad ride which 
 I felt keenly (you will find it properly dressed 
 up in the guide-books), until I had to offer 
 prayers for the safety of the train. There 
 was no hope of seeing the track two hundred 
 yards ahead. We seemed to be running into 
 the bowels of the earth at the invitation of an 
 irresponsible stream. Then the solid rock 
 would open and disclose a curve of awful 
 twistfulness. Then the driver put on all 
 steam, and we would go round that curve on 
 one wheel chiefly, the Gunnison River gnash 
 ing its teeth below. The cars overhung the 
 
American Notes 205 
 
 edge of the water, and if a single one of the 
 rails had chosen to spread, nothing in the 
 wide world could have saved us from drown 
 ing. I knew we should damage something in 
 the end the somber horrors of the gorge, the 
 rush of the jade-green water below, and the 
 cheerful tales told by the conductor made me 
 certain of the catastrophe. 
 
 We had just cleared the Elack Canon and 
 another gorge, and were sailing out into open 
 country nine thousand feet above the level of 
 the sea, when we came most suddenly round 
 a corner upon a causeway across a waste 
 water half dam and half quarry-pool. The 
 locomotive gave one wild " Hoo ! Hoo I 
 Hoo ! " but it was too late. He was a beauti 
 ful bull, and goodness only knows why he had 
 chosen the track for a constitutional with his 
 wife. She was flung to the left, but the cow 
 catcher caught him, and turning him round, 
 heaved him shoulder deep into the pool. The 
 expression of blank, blind bewilderment on 
 his bovine, jovine face was wonderful to be 
 hold. He was not angry. I don t think he 
 was even scared, though he must have flown 
 ten yards through the air. All he wanted to 
 know was : " Will somebody have the good 
 ness to tell a respectable old gentleman what 
 in the world, or out of it, has occurred?" 
 And five minutes later the stream that had 
 been snapping at our heels in the gorges split 
 itself into a dozen silver threads on a breezy 
 
206 American Notes 
 
 upland, and became an innocent trout beck, 
 and we halted at a half-dead city, the name of 
 which does not remain with me. It had 
 originally been built on the crest of a wave of 
 prosperity. Once ten thousand people had 
 walked its street ; but the boom had collapsed. 
 The great brick houses and the factories were 
 empty. The population lived in little timber 
 shanties on the fringes of the deserted town. 
 There were some railway workshops and 
 things, and the hotel (whose pavement formed 
 the platform of the railway) contained one 
 hundred and more rooms empty. The 
 place, in its half-inhabitedness, was more 
 desolate than Amber or Chitor. But a man 
 said : " Trout six pounds two miles away," 
 and the Sorrowful Man and myself went in 
 search of em. The town was ringed by a 
 circle of hills all alive with little thunder 
 storms that broke across the soft green of the 
 plain in wisps and washes of smoke and 
 amber. 
 
 To our tiny party associated himself a 
 lawyer from Chicago. We foregathered on 
 the question of flies, but I didn t expect to 
 meet Elijah Pogram in the flesh. He de 
 livered orations on the future of England and 
 America, and of the Great Federation that 
 the years will bring forth when America and 
 England will belt the globe with their linked 
 hands. According to the notions of the 
 British, he made an ass of himself, but for al! 
 
American Notes 207 
 
 his high-falutin he talked sense. I might 
 knock through England on a four months 
 tour and not find a man capable of putting 
 into words the passionate patriotism that 
 possessed the little Chicago lawyer. And he 
 was a man with points, for he offered me 
 three days shooting in Illinois, if I would 
 step out of my path a little. I might travel 
 for ten years up and down England ere I 
 found a man who would give a complete 
 stranger so much as a sandwich, and for 
 twenty ere I squeezed as much enthusiasm 
 out of a Britisher. He and I talked politics 
 and trout-flies all one sultry day as we wan 
 dered up and down the shallows of the stream 
 aforesaid. Little fish are sweet. I spent 
 two hours whipping a ripple for a fish that I 
 knew was there, and in the pasture-scented 
 dusk caught a three-pounder on a ragged old 
 brown hackle and landed him after ten min 
 utes excited argument. He was a beauty. 
 If ever any man works the Western trout- 
 streams, he would do well to bring out with 
 him the dingiest flies he possesses. The na 
 tives laugh at the tiny English hooks, but they 
 hold, and duns and drabs and sober grays 
 seem to tickle the aesthetic tastes of the trout. 
 For salmon (but don t say that I told you) 
 use the spoon gold on one side, silver on the 
 other. It is as killing as is a similar article with 
 fish of another calibre. The natives seem to 
 use much too coarse tackle. 
 
208 American Notes 
 
 It was a search for a small boy who should 
 know the river that revealed to me a new 
 phase of life slack, slovenly, and shiftless, 
 but very interesting. There was a family in 
 a packing-case hut on the outskirts of the 
 town. They had seen the city when it was on 
 the boom and made pretense of being the 
 metropolis of the Rockies ; and when the 
 boom was over, they did not go. She was 
 affable, but deeply coated with dirt ; he was 
 grim and grimy, and the little children were 
 simply caked with filth of various descriptions. 
 But they lived in a certain sort of squalid 
 luxury, six or eight of them in two rooms ; 
 and they enjoyed the local society. It was 
 their eight-year-old son whom I tried to take 
 out with me, but he had been catching trout 
 all his life and " guessed he didn t feel like 
 coming," though I proffered him six shillings 
 for what ought to have been a day s pleasuring. 
 " I ll stay with Maw," he said, and from that 
 attitude I could not move him. Maw didn t 
 attempt to argue with him. " If he says he 
 won t come, he won t," she said, as though 
 he were one of the elemental forces of nature 
 instead of a spankable brat ; and " Paw," 
 lounging by the store, refused to interfere. 
 Maw told me that she had been a school 
 teacher in her not-so-distant youth, but did 
 not tell me what I was dying to know how 
 she arrived at this mucky tenement at the 
 back of beyond, and why. Though preserv- 
 
American Notes 209 
 
 ing the prettiness of her New England speech, 
 she had come to regard washing as a luxury. 
 Paw chewed tobacco and spat from time to 
 time. Yet, when he opened his mouth for 
 other purposes, he spoke like a well-educated 
 man. There was a story there, but I couldn t 
 get at it. 
 
 Next day the Man with the Sorrow and 
 myself and a few others began the real ascent 
 of the Rockies ; up to that time our climbing 
 didn t count. The train ran violently up a 
 steep place and was taken to pieces. Five 
 cars were hitched on to two locomotives, and 
 two cars to one locomotive. This seemed to 
 be a kind and thoughtful act, but I was idiot 
 enough to go forward and watch the coupling- 
 on of the two rear cars in which Caesar and 
 his fortunes were to travel. Some one had lost 
 or eaten the regularly ordained coupling, and a 
 man picked up from the tailboard of the engine 
 a single iron link about as thick as a fetter- 
 link watch-chain, and "guessed it would do." 
 Get hauled up a Simla cliff by the hook of a 
 lady s parasol if you wish to appreciate my 
 sentiments when the cars moved uphill and 
 the link drew tight. Miles away and two 
 thousand feet above our heads rose the 
 shoulder of a hill epauletted with the long line 
 of a snow-tunnel. The first section of the 
 cars crawled a quarter of a mile ahead of us, 
 the track snaked and looped behind, and 
 there was a black drop to the left. So vre 
 
2io American Notes 
 
 went up and up and up till the thin air grew 
 thinner and the chunk-chunk-chunk of the 
 laboring locomotive was answered by the 
 oppressed beating of the exhausted heart. 
 Through the checked light and shade of the 
 snow tunnels (horrible caverns of rude tim 
 bering) we ground our way, halting now and 
 again to allow a down-train to pass. One 
 monster of forty mineral cars slid past, scarce 
 held by four locomotives, their brakes scream 
 ing and chortling in chorus ; and in the end, 
 after a glimpse at half America spread map- 
 wise leagues below us, we halted at the head 
 of the longest snow tunnel of all, on the crest 
 of the divide, between ten and eleven thou 
 sand feet above the level of the sea. The 
 locomotive wished to draw breath, and the 
 passengers to gather the flowers that nodded 
 impertinently through the chinks of the board 
 ing. A lady passenger s nose began to bleed, 
 and other ladies threw themselves down on 
 the seats and gasped with the gasping train, 
 while a wind as keen as a knife-edge rioted 
 down the grimy tunnel. 
 
 Then, despatching a pilot-engine to clear 
 the way, we began the downward portion of 
 the journey with every available brake on, 
 and frequent shrieks, till after some hours we 
 reached the level plain, and later the city of 
 Denver, where the Man with the Sorrow went 
 his way and left me to journey on to Omaha 
 alone, after one hasty glance at Denver. The 
 
American Notes 211 
 
 pulse of that town was too like the rushing 
 mighty wind in the Rocky Mountain tunneL 
 It made me tired because complete strangers 
 desired me to do something to mines which 
 were in mountains, and to purchase building 
 blocks upon inaccessible cliffs ; and once, a 
 woman urged that I should supply her with 
 strong drinks. I had almost forgotten that 
 such attacks were possible in any land, for 
 the outward and visible signs of public mor 
 ality in American towns are generally safe 
 guarded. For that I respect this people, 
 Omaha, Nebraska, was but a halting-place on 
 the road to Chicago, but it revealed to me 
 horrors that I would not willingly have missed. 
 The city to casual investigation seemed to be 
 populated entirely by Germans, Poles, Slavs, 
 Hungarians, Croats, Magyars, and all the 
 scum of the Eastern European States, but it 
 must have been laid out by Americans. No 
 other people would cut the traffic of a main 
 street with two streams of railway lines, each 
 some eight or nine tracks wide, and cheer- 
 fully drive tram-cars across the metals. Every 
 now and again they have horrible railway 
 crossing accidents at Omaha, but nobody 
 seems to think of building an overhead- 
 bridge. That would interfere with the vested 
 interests of the undertakers. 
 
 Be blessed to hear some details of one oi 
 that class. 
 
 There was a shop the like of which I hawf 
 
212 American Notes 
 
 never seen before : its windows were filled 
 with dress-coats for men, and dresses for 
 women. But the studs of the shirts were 
 made of stamped cloth upon the shirt front, 
 and there were no trousers to those coats 
 nothing but a sweep of cheap black cloth 
 falling like an abbe s frock. In the doorway 
 $at a young man reading Pollock s Course of 
 Time, and by that I knew that he was an 
 undertaker. His name was Gring, which is a 
 beautiful name, and I talked to him on the mys- 
 . teries of his Craft. He was an enthusiast and 
 an artist. I told him how corpses were burnt 
 in India. Said he : " We re vastly superior. 
 We hold that is to say, embalm our dead. 
 So ! " Whereupon he produced the horrible 
 weapons of his trade, and most practically 
 showed me how you " held " a man back from 
 that corruption which is his birthright. " And 
 I wish I could live a few generations just to 
 see how my people keep. But I m sure it s 
 all right. Nothing can touch em after / ve 
 embalmed em." Then he displayed one of 
 those ghastly dress-suits, and when I laid a 
 shuddering hand upon it, behold it crumpled 
 to nothing, for the white linen was sewn on to 
 the black cloth and there was no back to it! 
 That was the horror. The garment was a 
 shell. " We dress a man in that," said Gring, 
 laying it out tastily on the counter. " As you 
 see here, our caskets have a plate-glass win 
 dow in front " (Oh me, but that window in 
 
American Notes 213 
 
 t.he coffin was fitted with plush like a brough 
 am-window !), " and you don t see anything 
 below the level of the man s waistcoat. Con 
 sequently. . . ." He unrolled the terrible 
 cheap black cloth that falls down over the 
 stark feet, and I jumped back. " Of course 
 a man can be dressed in his own clothes if he 
 likes, but these are the regular things : and 
 for women look at this ! " He took up the 
 body of a high-necked dinner-dress in sub 
 dued lilac, slashed and puffed and bedeviled 
 with black, but, like the dress-suit, backless, 
 and below the waist turning to shroud. 
 " That s for an old maid. But for a young 
 girl we give white with imitation pearls round 
 the neck. That looks very pretty through 
 the window of the casket you see there s a 
 cushion for the head with flowers banked all 
 round. * Can you imagine anything more 
 awful than to take your last rest as much of a 
 dead fraud as ever you were a living lie to 
 go into the darkness one-half of you shaved, 
 trimmed and dressed for an evening party, 
 while the other half the half that your friends 
 cannot see is enwrapped in a flapping black 
 sheet ? 
 
 I know a little about burial customs in 
 various places in the world, and I tried hard 
 to make Mr. Gring comprehend dimly the 
 awful heathendom that he was responsible for 
 the grotesquerie the giggling horror of it 
 all But he couldn t see it. Even when he 
 
214 American Notes 
 
 showed me a little boy s last suit, he 
 couldn t see it. He said it was quite 
 right to embalm and trick out and hypo 
 critically bedizen the poor innocent dead in 
 their superior cushioned and pillowed caskets 
 with the window in front. 
 
 Bury me cased in canvas like a fishing-rod, 
 in the deep sea ; burn me on a back-water of 
 the Hugli with damp wood and no oil ; pin 
 me under a Pullman car and let the lighted 
 stove do its worst; sizzle me with a fallen 
 electric wire or whelm me in the sludge of a 
 broken river dam ; but may I never go down 
 to the Pit grinning out of a plate-glass win 
 dow, in a backless dress-coat, and the front 
 half of a black stuff dressing-gown ; not 
 though I were " held " against the ravage of 
 the grave for ever and ever. Amen 1 
 
American Notes 21$ 
 
 XIV. 
 
 44 I know thy cunning and thy greed, 
 Thy hard, high lust and wilful deed, 
 And all thy glory loves to tell 
 Of specious gifts material." 
 
 I HAVE struck a city, a real city, and they 
 call it Chicago. The other places do not 
 count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort 
 as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phe 
 nomenon. This place is the first American 
 city I have encountered. It holds rather 
 more than a million people with bodies, and 
 stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. 
 Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see 
 it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its 
 water is the water of the Hugli, and its air is 
 dirt. Also it says that it is the " boss " town 
 of America. 
 
 I do not believe that it has anything to do 
 with this country. They told me to go to the 
 Palmer House, which is a gilded and mirrored 
 rabbit-warren, and there I found a huge hall 
 of tessellated marble, crammed with people 
 talking about money and spitting about every 
 where. Other barbarians charged in and out 
 of this inferno with letters and telegrams in 
 their hands, and yet others shouted at each 
 other. A man. who had drunk quite as much 
 
216 American Notes 
 
 as was good for him told me that this was 
 " the finest hotel in the finest city on God Al 
 mighty s earth." By the way, when an 
 American wishes to indicate the next county 
 or State he says, " God A mighty s earth." 
 This prevents discussion and flatters his 
 vanity. 
 
 Then I went out into the streets, which are 
 long and flat and without end. And verily it 
 is not a good thing to live in the East for any 
 length of time. Your ideas grow to clash 
 with those held by every right-thinking white 
 man. I looked down interminable vistas 
 flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen storied 
 houses, and crowded with men and women, 
 and the show impressed me with a great hor 
 ror. Except in London and I have forgot 
 ten what London is like I had never seen so 
 many white people together, and never such a 
 collection of miserables. There was no color 
 in the street and no beauty only a maze of 
 wire-ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging 
 underfoot. A cab-driver volunteered to show 
 me the glory of the town for so much an hour, 
 and with him I wandered far. He conceived 
 that all this turmoil and squash was a thing to 
 be reverently admired ; that it was good to 
 huddle men together in fifteen layers, one 
 atop of the other, and to dig holes in the 
 ground for offices. He said that Chicago 
 was a live town, and that all the creatures 
 hurrying by me were engaged in business. 
 
American Notes 217 
 
 That is to say, they were trying to make 
 some money, that they might not die 
 through lack of food to put into their bel 
 lies. He took me to canals, black as ink, 
 and filled with untold abominations, and bade 
 me watch the stream of traffic across the 
 bridges. He then took me into a saloon, and, 
 while I drank, made me note that the floor was 
 covered with coins sunk into cement. A 
 Hottentot would not have been guilty of this 
 sort of barbarism. The coins made an effect 
 pretty enough, but the man who put them 
 there had no thought to beauty, and therefore 
 he was a savage. Then my cab-driver showed 
 me business-blocks, gay with signs and studded 
 with fantastic and absurd advertisements of 
 goods, and looking down the long street so 
 adorned it was as though each vender stood 
 at his door howling : " For the sake of money, 
 employ or buy of me and me only ! " Have 
 you ever seen a crowd at our famine relief 
 distributions ? You know then how men leap 
 into the air, stretching out their arms above 
 the crowd in the hope of being seen ; while 
 the women dolorously slap the stomachs of 
 their children and whimper. I had sooner 
 watch famine-relief than the white man en 
 gaged in what he calls legitimate competition. 
 The one I understand. The other makes me 
 ill. And the cabman said that these things 
 were the proof of progress ; and by that I 
 knew he had been reading his newspaper, 
 
218 American Notes 
 
 as every intelligent American should. Thu 
 papers tell their readers in language fitted to 
 their comprehension that the snarling together 
 of telegraph wires, the heaving up of houses, 
 and the making of money is progress. 
 
 I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, 
 wandering through scores of miles of these 
 terrible streets, and jostling some few hundred 
 thousand of these terrible people who talked 
 money through their noses. The cabman left 
 me : but after a while I picked up another man 
 who was full of figures, and into my ears he 
 poured them as occasion required or the big 
 blank factories suggested. Here they turned 
 out so many hundred thousand dollars worth 
 of such and such an article ; there so many 
 million other things ; this house was worth so 
 many million dollars ; that one so many mil 
 lion more or less. It was like listening to a 
 child babbling of its hoard of shells. It was 
 like watching a fool playing with buttons. But 
 I was expected to do more than listen or 
 watch. He demanded that I should admire ; 
 and the utmost that I could say was : " Are 
 these things so ? Then I am very sorry for 
 you." That made him angry, and he said 
 that insular envy made me unresponsive. So 
 you see I could not make him understand. 
 
 About four and a half hours after Adam was 
 turned out of the garden of Eden he felt hun 
 gry, and so, bidding Eve take care that her 
 head was not broken by the descending fruit, 
 
American Notes 219 
 
 shinned up a cocoanut palm. That hurt his 
 legs, cut his breast, and made him breathe 
 heavily, and Eve was tormented with fear lest 
 her lord should miss his footing and so bring 
 the tragedy of this world to an end ere the 
 curtain had fairly risen. Had I met Adam 
 then, I should have been sorry for him. To 
 day I find eleven hundred thousand of his 
 sons just as far advanced as their father in the 
 art of getting food, and immeasurably inferior 
 to him in that they think that their palm-trees 
 lead straight to the skies. Consequently I am 
 sorry in rather more than a million different 
 ways. In our East bread comes naturally 
 ven to the poorest by a little scratching or 
 the gift of a friend not quite so poor. In less 
 favored countries one is apt to forget. Then 
 I went to bed. And that was on a Saturday 
 night. 
 
 Sunday brought me the queerest experience 
 of all a revelation of barbarism complete. I 
 iound a place that was officially described as 
 a church. It was a circus really, but that the 
 ^worshipers did not know. There were flow 
 ers all about the building, which was fitted up 
 with plush and stained oak and much luxury, 
 including twisted brass candlesticks of severest 
 Gothic design. To these things, and a con- 
 ;gregation of savages, entered suddenly a 
 wonderful man completely in the confidence of 
 their God, whom he treated colloquially and 
 exploited very much as a newspaper reporter 
 
22O American Notes 
 
 would exploit a foreign potentate. But, un 
 like the newspaper reporter, he never allowed 
 his listeners to forget that he and not He was 
 the center of attraction. With a voice of silver 
 and with imagery borrowed from the auction- 
 room, he built up for his hearers a heaven on 
 the lines of the Palmer House (but with all 
 the gilding real gold and all the plate-glass 
 diamond) and set in the center of it a loud- 
 voiced, argumentative, and very shrewd crea 
 tion that he called God. One sentence at this 
 point caught my delighted ear. It was apro 
 pos of some question of the Judgment Day and 
 ran : " No ! I tell you God doesn t do business 
 that way." He was giving them a deity whom 
 they could comprehend, in a gold and jewel 
 heaven in which they could take a natural in 
 terest. He interlarded his performance with 
 the slang of the streets, the counter, and the 
 Exchange, and he said that religion ought to 
 enter into daily life. Consequently I presume 
 he introduced it as daily life his own and the 
 life of his friends. 
 
 Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring 
 no benediction at such hands. But the per 
 sons who listened seemed to enjoy themselves, 
 and I understood that I had met with a popu 
 lar preacher. Later on when I had perused 
 the sermons of a gentleman called Talmage 
 and some others, I perceived that I had been 
 listening to a very mild specimen. Yet that 
 man, with his brutal gold and silver idols, his 
 
American Notes. 221 
 
 hands-in-pocket, cigar-in-mouth, and hat-on- 
 the-back-of-the-head style of dealing with the 
 sacred vessels would count himself spiritually 
 quite competent to send a mission to convert 
 the Indians. All that Sunday I listened to 
 people who said that the mere fact of spiking 
 down strips of iron to wood and getting a 
 steam and iron thing to run along them was 
 progress. That the telephone was progress, 
 and the network of wires overhead was prog 
 ress. They repeated their statements again 
 and again. One of them took me to their 
 city hall and board of trade works and pointed 
 it out with pride. It was very ugly, but very 
 big, and the streets in front of it were narrow 
 and unclean. When I saw the faces of the 
 men who did business in that building I felt 
 that there had been a mistake in their billet 
 ing. 
 
 By the way, tis a consolation to feel that I 
 am not writing to an English audience. Then 
 should I have to fall into feigned ecstasies 
 over the marvelous progress of Chicago since 
 the days of the great fire, to allude casually to 
 the raising of the entire city so many feet 
 above the level of the lake which it faces, and 
 generally to grovel before the golden calf. 
 But you, who are desperately poor, and there 
 fore by these standards of no account, know 
 things, and will understand when I write that 
 they have managed to get a million of men 
 together on flat land, and that the bulk o 
 
222 American Notes 
 
 these men appear to be lower than mahajans 
 and not so companionable as a punjabi/0/ 
 after harvest. But I don t think it was the 
 blind hurry of the people, their argot, and their 
 grand ignorance of things beyond their imme 
 diate interests that displeased me so much as 
 a study of the daily papers of Chicago. Im 
 primis, there was some sort of dispute between 
 New York and Chicago as to which town 
 should give an exhibition of products to be 
 hereafter holden, and through the medium of 
 their more dignified journals the two cities 
 were ya-hooing and hi-yi-ing at each other like 
 opposition newsboys. They called it humor, 
 but it sounded like something quite different. 
 That was only the first trouble. The second 
 lay in the tone of the productions. Leading 
 articles which include gems such as : " Back 
 of such and such a place," or " We noticed, 
 Tuesday, such an event," or " don t " for 
 " does not " are things to be accepted with 
 thankfulness. All that made me want to cry 
 was that, in these papers, were faithfully re 
 produced all the war-cries ind " back-talk "of 
 the Palmer House bar, the slang of the bar 
 bers shops, the mental elevation and integrity 
 of the Pullman-car porter, the dignity of the 
 Dime Museum, and the accuracy of the ex 
 cited fishwife. I am sternly forbidden to be 
 lieve that the paper educates the public ? 
 Just when the sense of unreality and op 
 
America! Notes 223 
 
 pression were strongest upon me, and when I 
 most wanted help, a man sat at my side and 
 began to talk what he called politics. I had 
 chanced to pay about six shillings for a 
 traveling-cap worth eighteen pence, and he 
 made of the fact a text for a sermon. He said 
 that this was a rich country and that the peo 
 ple liked to pay two hundred per cent, on the 
 value of a thing. They could afford it. He 
 said that the Government imposed a protective 
 duty of from ten to seventy per cent, on foreign- 
 made articles, and that the American manu 
 facturer consequently could sell his goods for 
 a healthy sum. Thus an imported hat would, 
 with duty, cost two guineas. The American 
 manufacturer would make a hat for seventeen 
 shillings and sell it for one pound fifteen. In 
 these things, he said, lay the greatness of 
 America and the effeteness of England. 
 Competition between factory and factory kept 
 the prices down to decent limits, but I was 
 never to forget that this people were a rich 
 people, not like the pauper Continentals, and 
 that they enjoyed paying duties. To my weak 
 intellect this seemed rather like Juggling with 
 counters. Everything that I have yet pur 
 chased costs about twice as much as it would 
 in England, and when native-made is of inferior 
 quality. Moreover, since these lines were 
 first thought of I have visited a gentleman 
 who owned a factory which used to produce 
 things. He owned the factory still. Not a 
 
224 American Notes 
 
 man was in it, but he was drawing a handsome 
 income from a syndicate of firms for keeping 
 it closed in order that it might not produce 
 things. This man said that if protection were 
 abandoned, a tide of pauper labor would 
 flood the country, and as I looked at his 
 factory I thought how entirely better it was to 
 have no labor of any kind whatever, rather 
 than face so horrible a future. Meantime, do 
 you remember that this peculiar country enjoys 
 paying money for value not received. I am 
 an alien, and for the life of me cannot see 
 why six shillings should be paid for eighteen- 
 penny caps, or eight shillings for half-crown 
 cigar-cases. When the country fills up to a 
 decently populated level a few million people 
 who are not aliens will be smitten with the 
 same sort of blindness. 
 
 But my friend s assertion somehow 
 thoroughly suited the grotesque ferocity of 
 Chicago. See now and judge ! In the village 
 of Isser Jang on the road to Montgomery 
 there be four changar women who winnow 
 corn some seventy bushels a year. Beyond 
 their hut lives Puran Dass, the money-lender, 
 who on good security lends as much as five 
 thousand rupees in a year. Jowala Singh, 
 the lohar, mends the village plow some 
 thirty, broken at the share, in three hundred 
 and sixty-five days ; and Hukm Chund, who 
 is letter-writer and head of the little club under 
 the travelers tree, generally keeps the village 
 
American Notes 225 
 
 posted in such gossip as the barber and the 
 midwife have not yet made public property. 
 Chicago husks and winnows her wheat by the 
 million bushels, a hundred banks lend hun 
 dreds of millions of dollars in the year, and 
 scores of factories turn out plow gear and 
 machinery by steam. Scores of daily papers 
 do work which Hukm Chund and the barber 
 and the midwife perform, with due regard ict 
 public opinion, in the village of Isser Jang. 
 So far as manufactures go, the difference be 
 tween Chicago on the lake and Isser Jang on 
 the Montgomery road is one of degree only, 
 and not of kind. As far as the understanding 
 of the uses of life goes Isser Jang, for all its 
 seasonal cholera, has the advantage over 
 Chicago. Jowala Singh knows and takes care 
 to avoid the three or four ghoul-haunted fields 
 on the outskirts of the village ; but he is not 
 urged by millions of devils to run about all day 
 in the sun and swear that his plowshares 
 are the best in the Punjab ; nor does Puran 
 Dass fly forth in a cart more than once or 
 twice a year, and he knows, on a pinch, how 
 to use the railway and the telegraph as well as 
 any son of Israel in Chicago. But this is 
 absurd. The Blast is not the West, and these 
 men must continue to deal with the machinery 
 of life, and to call it progress. Their very 
 preachers dare not rebuke them. They gloss 
 over the hunting for money and the twice- 
 sharpened bitterness of Adam s curse by saying 
 
226 American Notes 
 
 that such things dower a man with a larger 
 range of thoughts and higher aspirations. 
 They do not say : " Free yourself from your 
 own slavery," but rather, " If you can possibly 
 manage it, do not set quite so much store 
 on the things of this world." And they 
 do not know what the things r>i this world 
 are. 
 
 I went off to see cattle killed by way of 
 clearing my head, which, as you will perceive, 
 was getting muddled. They say every 
 Englishman goes to the Chicago stock-yards. 
 You shall find them about six miles from the 
 city ; and once having seen them will never 
 forget the sight. As far as the eye can reach 
 stretches a township of cattle-pens, cunningly 
 divided into blocks so that the animals of any 
 pen can be speedily driven out close to an 
 inclined timber path which leads to an elevated 
 covered way straddling high above the pens. 
 These viaducts are two-storied. On the upper 
 story tramp the doomed cattle, stolidly for 
 the most part. On the lower, with a scuffling 
 of sharp hooves and multitudinous yells, run 
 the pigs. The same end is appointed for each. 
 Thus you will see the gangs of cattle waiting 
 their turn as they wait sometimes for days ; 
 and they need not be distressed by the sight 
 of their fellows running about in the fear of 
 death. All they know is that a man on horse 
 back causes their next-door neighbors to 
 move by means of a whip. Certain bars and 
 
American Notes 227 
 
 fences are unshipped, and, behold, that crowd 
 have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel 
 and return no more. It is different with the 
 pigs. They shriek back the news of the 
 exodus to their friends, and a hundred pens 
 skirl responsive. It was to the pigs I first 
 addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct which 
 was full of them, as I could hear though I 
 could not see, I marked a somber building 
 whereto it ran, and went there, not unalarmed 
 by stray cattle who had managed to escape 
 from their proper quarters. A pleasant smell 
 of brine warned me of what was coming. I 
 entered the factory and found it full of pork 
 in barrels, and on another story more pork 
 unbarreled, and in a huge room, the halves of 
 swine for whose use great lumps of ice 
 were being pitched in at the window. That 
 room was the mortuary, chamber where the 
 pigs lie for a little while in state ere they be 
 gin their progress through such passages as 
 kings may sometimes travel. Turning a 
 corner and not noting an overhead arrange 
 ment of greased rail, wheel, and pulley, I ran 
 into the arms of four eviscerated carcasses, all 
 pure white and of a human aspect, being 
 pushed by a man clad in vehement red. 
 When I leaped aside, the floor was slippery 
 under me. There was a flavor of farmyard in 
 my nostrils and the shouting of a multitude in 
 my ears. But there was no joy in that shout 
 ing. Twelve men stood in two lines six 
 
228 American Notes 
 
 aside. Between them and overhead ran the 
 railway of death that had nearly shunted me 
 through the window. Each man carried a 
 knife, the sleeves of his shirt were cut off 
 at the elbows, and from bosom to heel he was 
 blood-red. The atmosphere was stifling as a 
 night in the Rains, by reason of the steam and 
 the crowd. I climbed to the beginning of 
 things and, perched upon a narrow beam, 
 overlooked very nearly all the pigs ever bred 
 in Wisconsin. They had just been shot out 
 of the mouth of the viaduct and huddled to 
 gether in a large pen. Thence they were 
 flicked persuasively, a few at the time, into a 
 smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle 
 on their hinder legs so that they rose in the 
 air suspended from the railway of death. Oh ! 
 it was then they shrieked and called on their 
 mothers and made promises of amendment, 
 till the tackle-man punted them in their backs, 
 and they slid head down into a brick-floored 
 passage, very like a big kitchen sink that was 
 blood-red. There awaited them a red man 
 with a knife which he passed jauntily through 
 their throats, and the full-voiced shriek be 
 came a sputter, and then a fall as of heavy 
 tropical rain. The red man who was backed 
 against the passage wall stood clear of the 
 wildly kicking hoofs and passed his hand over 
 his eyes, not from any feeling of compassion, 
 but because the spurted blood was in his eyes 
 and he had barely time to stick the next 
 
American Notes 229 
 
 arrival. Then that first stuck swine dropped, 
 still kicking, into a great vat of boiling water, 
 and spoke no more words, but wallowed in 
 obedience to some unseen machinery, and 
 presently came forth at the lower end of the 
 vat and was heaved on the blades of a blunt 
 paddle-wheel-thing which said, " Hough ! 
 Hough ! Hough ! " and skelped all the hair 
 off him except what little a couple of men 
 with knives could remove. Then he was 
 again hitched by the heels to that said rail 
 way and passed down the line of the twelve 
 men each man with a knife leaving with 
 each man a certain amount of his individual 
 ity which was taken away in a wheelbarrow, 
 and when he reached the last man he was 
 very beautiful to behold, but immensely un- 
 stuffed and limp. Preponderance of individ 
 uality was ever a bar to foreign travel. That 
 pig could have been in no case to visit you in 
 India had he not parted with some of his 
 most cherished notions. 
 
 The dissecting part impressed me not so 
 mech as the slaying. They were so excess 
 ively alive, these pigs. And then they were 
 so excessively dead, and the man in the drip 
 ping, clammy, hot passage did not seem to 
 care, and ere the blood of such an one had 
 ceased to foam on the floor, such another, and 
 four friends with him, had shrieked and died. 
 But a pig is only the Unclean animal for 
 bidden by the Prophet. 
 
230 American Notes 
 
 I was destined to make rather a queer dis 
 covery when I went over to the cattle- 
 slaughter. All the buildings here were on a 
 much larger scale, and there was no sound of 
 trouble, but I could smell the salt reek of 
 blood before I set foot in the place. The 
 cattle did not come directly through the via 
 duct as the pigs had done. They debouched 
 into a yard by the hundred, and they were 
 big red brutes carrying much flesh. In the 
 center of that yard stood a red Texan steer 
 with a headstall on his wicked head. No 
 man controlled him. He was, so to speak, 
 picking his teeth and whistling in an open 
 byre of his own when the cattle arrived. As 
 soon as the first one had fearfully quitted the 
 viaduct, this red devil put his hands in his 
 pockets and slouched across the yard, no man 
 guiding him. Then he lowed something to 
 the effect that he was the regularly appointed 
 guide of the establishment and would show 
 them round. They were country folk, but 
 they knew how to behave ; and so followed 
 Judas some hundred strong, patiently, and 
 with a look of bland wonder in their faces. I 
 saw his broad back jogging in advance of 
 them, up a lime-washed incline where I was 
 forbidden to follow. Then a door shut, and 
 in a minute back came Judas with the air of 
 a virtuous plow-bullock and took up his 
 place in his byre. Somebody laughed across 
 the yard, but I heard no sound of cattle from 
 
American Notes 231 
 
 the big brick building into which the mob had 
 disappeared. Only Judas chewed the cud 
 with a malignant satisfaction, and so I knew 
 there was trouble, and ran round to the front 
 of the factory and so entered and stood 
 aghast. 
 
 Who takes count of the prejudices which we 
 absorb through the skin by way of our sur 
 roundings ? It was not the spectacle that im 
 pressed me. The first thought that almost 
 spoke itself aloud was : " They are killing 
 kine ; " and it was a shock. The pigs were 
 nobody s concern, but cattle the brothers of 
 the Cow, the Sacred Cow were quite other 
 wise. The next time an M. P. tells me that 
 India either Sultanzies or Brahminizes a man, 
 I shall believe about half what he says. It is 
 unpleasant to watch the slaughter of cattle 
 when one has laughed at the notion for a few 
 years. I could not see actually what was done 
 in the first instance, because the row of stalls 
 in which they lay was separated from me by 
 fifty impassable feet of butchers and slung 
 carcasses. All I know is that men swung 
 open the doors of a stall as occasion re 
 quired, and there lay two steers already 
 stunned, and breathing heavily. These two 
 they pole-axed, and half raising them by tackle 
 they cut their throats. Two men skinned 
 each carcass, somebody cut off the head, and 
 in half a minute more the overhead rail car 
 ried two sides of beef to their appointed place. 
 
232 American Notes 
 
 There was ciamor enough in the operating 
 room, but from the waiting cattle, invisible on 
 the other side of the line of pens, never a 
 sound. They went to their death, trusting 
 Judas, without a word. They were slain at 
 the rate of five a minute, and if the pig men 
 were spattered with blood, the cow butchers 
 were bathed in it. The blood ran in mutter 
 ing gutters. There was no place for hand or 
 foot that was not coated with thicknesses of 
 dried blood, and the stench of it in the nos 
 trils bred fear. 
 
 And then the same merciful Providence 
 that has showered goods things on my path 
 throughout sent me an embodiment of the 
 city of Chicago, so that I might remember it 
 forever. Women come sometimes to see the 
 slaughter, as they would come to see the 
 slaughter of men. And there entered that 
 vermilion hall a young woman of large mold, 
 with brilliantly scarlet lips, and heavy eye 
 brows, and dark hair that came in a " widow s 
 peak" on the forehead. She was well and 
 healthy and alive, and she was dressed in 
 flaming red and black, and her feet (know 
 you that the feet of American women are like 
 unto the feet of fairies ?) her feet, I say, were 
 cased in red leather shoes. She stood in a 
 patch of sunlight, the red blood under her 
 shoes, the vivid carcasses tacked round her, a 
 bullock bleeding its life away not six feet 
 away from her, and the death factory roaring 
 
American Notes 233 
 
 all round her. She looked curiously, with 
 hard, bold eyes, and was not ashamed. 
 
 Then said I : " This is a special Sending. 
 I have seen the City of Chicago." And I 
 went away to get peace and rest 
 
234 American Notes 
 
 XV. 
 
 IT is a mean thing and an unhandsome to 
 " do " a continent in five-hundred-mile jumps. 
 But after those swine and bullocks at Chicago 
 I felt that complete change of air would be 
 good. The United States at present hinge in 
 or about Chicago, as a double-leaved screen 
 hinges. To be sure, the tiny New England 
 States call a trip to Pennsylvania "going 
 west," but the larger-minded citizen seems to 
 reckon his longitude from Chicago. Twenty 
 years hence the center of population that 
 shaded square on the census map will have 
 shifted, men say, far west of Chicago. 
 Twenty years later it will be on the Pacific 
 slope. Twenty years after that America will 
 begin to crowd up, and there will be some 
 trouble. People will demand manufactured 
 goods for their reduced-establishment house 
 holds at the cheapest possible rates, and the 
 cry that the land is rich enough to afford pro 
 tection will cease with a great abruptness. 
 At present it is the farmer who pays most 
 dearly for the luxury of high prices. In the 
 old days, when the land was fresh and there 
 was plenty of it and it cropped like the garden 
 of Eden, he did not mind paying. Now there 
 is not so much free land, and the old acres 
 
American Notes 235 
 
 are needing stimulants, which cost money, 
 and the farmer, who pays for everything, is 
 beginning to ask questions. Also the great 
 American nation, which individually never 
 shuts a door behind its noble self, very sel 
 dom attempts to put back anything that it 
 has taken from Nature s shelves. It grabs 
 all it can and moves on. But the moving-on 
 is nearly finished and the grabbing must 
 stop, and then the Federal Government will 
 have to establish a Woods and Forests De 
 partment the like of which was never seen in 
 the world before. And all the people who 
 have been accustomed to hack, mangle, and 
 burn timber as they please will object, with 
 shots and protestations, to this infringement 
 of their rights. The nigger will breed boun 
 teously, and he will have to be reckoned with ; 
 and the manufacturer will have to be con 
 tented with smaller profits, and he will have 
 to be reckoned with ; and the railways will 
 no longer rule the countries through which 
 they run, and they will have to be reckoned 
 with. And nobody will approve of it in the 
 least. 
 
 Yes ; it will be a spectacle for all the world 
 to watch, this big, slashing colt of a nation, 
 that has got off with a flying start on a freshly 
 littered course, being pulled back to the ruck 
 by that very mutton-fisted jockey Necessity. 
 There will be excitement in America when a 
 few score millions of " sovereigns " discover 
 
236 American Notes 
 
 that what they considered the outcome of 
 their own Government is but the rapidly di 
 minishing bounty of Nature ; and that if they 
 want to get on comfortably they must tackle 
 every single problem from labor to finance 
 humbly, without gasconade, and afresh. But 
 at present they look " that all the to-morrows 
 shall be as to-day," and if you argue with 
 them they say that the Democratic Idea will 
 keep things going. They believe in that 
 Idea, and the less well-informed fortify them 
 selves in their belief by curious assertions as 
 to the despotism that exists in England. This 
 is pure provincialism, of course; but it is 
 very funny to listen to, especially when you 
 compare the theory with the practise (pistol, 
 chiefly) as proven in the newspapers. I 
 have striven to find out where the central 
 authority of the land lies. It isn t at Wash 
 ington, because the Federal Government can t 
 do anything to the States save run the mail 
 and collect a Federal tax or two. It isn t in 
 the States, because the townships can do as 
 they like ; and it isn t in the townships, be 
 cause these are bossed by alien voters or 
 rings of patriotic homebred citizens. And it 
 certainly is not in the citizens, because they 
 are governed and coerced by despotic power 
 of public opinion as represented by their 
 papers, preachers, or local society. I found 
 one man who told me that if anything went 
 Wrong in this huge congress of kings, il 
 
American Notes 237 
 
 there was a split or an upheaval or a smash, 
 the people in detail would be subject to 
 the Idea of the sovereign people in mass. 
 This is a survival from the Civil War, when, 
 you remember, the people in a majority did 
 with guns and swords slay and wound the 
 people in detail. All the same, the notion 
 seems very much like the worship by the 
 savage of the unloaded rifle as it leans against 
 the wall. 
 
 But the men and women set Us an example f- 
 in patriotism. They believe in their land and / 
 its future, and its honor, and its glory, andj 
 they are not ashamed to say so. From the j 
 largest to the least runs this same proud, pas-j 
 sionate conviction to which I take off my hat; 
 and for which I love them. An average Eng 
 lish householder seems to regard his country 
 as an abstraction to supply him with police 
 men and fire-brigades. The cockney cad 
 cannot understand what the word means. 
 The bloomin toffs he knows, and the law, 
 and the soldiers that supply him with a spec 
 tacle in the Parks ; but he would laugh in 
 your face at the notion of any duty being 
 owed by himself to his land. Pick an Ameri 
 can of the second generation anywhere you 
 please from the cab-rank, the porter s room, 
 or the plow-tail specially the plow-tail, 
 and that man will make you understand in 
 five minutes that he understands what manner 
 of thing his Republic is. He might laugh at 
 
238 American Notes 
 
 a law that didn t suit his convenience, dra* 
 your eye-teeth in a bargain, and applaud 
 cuteness on the outer verge of swindling ; but 
 you should hear him stand up and sing : 
 
 * My country tis of thee, 
 Sweet land of liberty, 
 Of thee I sing ! " 
 
 I have heard a few thousand of them engaged 
 in that employment. I respect him. There is 
 too much Romeo and too little balcony about 
 our National Anthem. With the American 
 article it is all balcony. There must be born 
 a poet who shall give the English the song of 
 their own, own country which is to say, of 
 about half the world. Remains then only to 
 compose the greatest song of all The Saga 
 of the Anglo-Saxon all round the earth a 
 paean that shall combine the terrible slow 
 swing of the Battle Hymn of the Republit 
 (which, if you know not, get chanted to you) 
 with Britannia needs no Bulwarks, the skirl of 
 the British Grenadiers with that perfect quick 
 step, Marching through Georgia, and at the 
 end the wail of the Dead March. For We, 
 even We who share the earth between us as 
 no gods have ever shared it, we also are mop 
 tal in the matter of our single selves. Will 
 any one take the contract ? 
 
 It was with these rambling notions that I 
 arrived at the infinite peace of the tiny town 
 ship of Musquash on the Monongahela River. 
 The clang and tumult of Chicago belonged to 
 
American Notes 239 
 
 another world. Imagine a rolling, wooded, 
 English landscape, under softest of blue skies, 
 dotted at three-mile intervals with fat little, 
 quiet little villages, or aggressive little manu 
 facturing towns that the trees and the folds of 
 the hills mercifully prevented from betraying 
 their presence. The golden-rod blazed in 
 the pastures against the green of the mulleins, 
 and the cows picked their way home through 
 the twisted paths between the blackberry 
 bushes. All summer was on the orchards, 
 and the apples such apples as we dream of 
 when we eat the woolly imitations of Kashmir 
 were ripe and toothsome. It was good to 
 lie in a hammock with half-shut eyes, and, in 
 the utter stillness, to hear the apples dropping 
 from the trees, and the tinkle of the cowbells 
 as the cows walked statelily down the main 
 road of the village. Everybody in that rest 
 ful place seemed to have just as much as he 
 wanted; a house with all comfortable ap 
 pliances, a big or little veranda wherein to 
 spend the day, a neatly shaved garden with a 
 wild wealth of flowers, some cows, and an 
 orchard. Everybody knew everybody else 
 intimately, and what they did not know, the 
 local daily paper a daily for a village of 
 twelve hundred people! supplied. There 
 was a courthouse where justice was done, 
 and a jail where some most enviable prisoners 
 lived, and there were four or five churches of 
 four or five denominations. Also it was im- 
 
240 American Notes 
 
 possible to buy openly any liquor in that little 
 paradise. But and this is a very serious but 
 you could by procuring a medical certifi 
 cate get strong drinks from the chemist. 
 That is the drawback of prohibition. It 
 makes a man who wants a drink a shirker and 
 a contriver, which things are not good for the 
 soul of a man, and presently, specially if he 
 be young, causes him to believe that he may 
 just as well be hanged for a sheep as for a 
 lamb ; and the end of that young man is not 
 pretty. Nothing except a rattling fall will 
 persuade an average colt that a fence is not 
 meant to be jumped over ; whereas if he be 
 turned out into the open he learns to carry 
 himself with discretion. One heard a good 
 deal of this same dread of drink in Musquash, 
 and even the maidens seemed to know too 
 much about its effects upon certain unregen- 
 erate youths, who, if they had been once 
 made thoroughly, effectually, and persistently 
 drunk with a tepid brandy and soda thrust 
 before their goose-fleshed noses on the terrible 
 Next Morning would perhaps have seen the 
 futility of their ways. It was a sin by village 
 canons to imbibe lager, though experto crede 
 you can get dropsy on that stuff long be 
 fore you can get drunk. " But what man 
 knows his mind ? " Besides, it was all their 
 own affair. 
 
 The little community seemed to be as self- 
 contained as an Indian village. Had the rest 
 
American Notes 241 
 
 of the land sunk under the sea, Musquash 
 would have gone on sending its sons to school 
 ia order to make them "good citizens," 
 which is the constant prayer of the true 
 American father, settling its own road-making,, 
 local cesses, town-lot arbitrations, and internal 
 government by ballot and vote and due re 
 spect to the voices of the headmen (which is 
 the salvation of the ballot), until such time as 
 all should take their places in the cemetery 
 appointed for their faith. Here were Ameri 
 cans and no aliens men ruling themselves 
 by themselves and for themselves and their 
 wives and their children in peace, order, 
 and decency. 
 
 But what went straightest to this heart, 
 though they did not know it, was that they were 
 Methody folk for the most part aye, Methody 
 as ever trod a Yorkshire Moor, or drove on a 
 Sunday to some chapel of the Faith in the 
 Dales. The old Methody talk was there, with 
 the discipline whereby the souls of the Just are, 
 sometimes to their intense vexation, made 
 perfect on this earth in order that they may 
 " take out their letters and live and die in 
 good standing." If you don t know the talk, 
 you won t know what that means. The dis 
 cipline, or dis^line, is no thing to be trifled 
 with, and its working among a congregation 
 depends entirely upon the tact, humanity, and 
 sympathy of the leader who works it. He, 
 knowing what youth s desires are, can turn 
 16 
 
242 American Notes 
 
 the soul in the direction of good, gently, in* 
 stead of wrenching it savagely towards the 
 right path only to see it break away quivering 
 and scared. The arm of the Disr/^line is 
 long. A maiden told me, as a new and 
 strange fact and one that would interest a 
 foreigner, of a friend of hers who had once 
 been admonished by some elders somewhere 
 not in Musquash for the heinous crime of 
 dancing. She, the friend, did not in the least 
 like it. She would not. Can t you imagine 
 the delightful results of a formal wigging ad 
 ministered by a youngish and austere elder 
 who was not accustomed to make allowances 
 for the natural dancing instincts of the young 
 of the human animal ? The hot irons that are 
 held forth to scare may also sear, as those 
 who have ever lain under an unfortunate ex 
 position of the old Faith can attest. 
 
 But it was all immensely interesting the 
 absolutely fresh, wholesome, sweet life that 
 paid due reverence to the things of the next 
 world, but took good care to get enough 
 tennis in the cool of the evening ; that con 
 cerned itself as honestly and thoroughly wfth 
 the daily round, the trivial task (and that same 
 task is anything but trivial when you are 
 " helped " by an American " help ") as with 
 the salvation of the soul. I had the honor of 
 meeting in the flesh, even as Miss Louisa 
 Alcott drew them, Meg and Joe and Beth and 
 Amy, whom you ought to know. There was 
 
American Notes 243 
 
 no affectation of concealment in their lives 
 who had nothing to conceal. There were 
 many " little women " in that place, because, 
 even as is the case in England, the boys had 
 gone out to seek their fortunes. Some were 
 working in the thundering, clanging cities, 
 others had removed in the infinite West, 
 and others had disappeared in the languid, 
 lazy South ; and the maidens waited their re 
 turn, which is the custom of maidens all over 
 the world. Then the boys would come back 
 in the soft sunlight, attired in careful raiment, 
 their tongues cleans-ed of evil words and dis 
 courtesy. They had just come to call bless 
 their carefully groomed heads, so they had, 
 and the maidens in white dresses glimmered 
 like ghosts on the stoop and received them 
 according to their merits. Mama had noth 
 ing to do with this, nor papa either, for he 
 was down-town trying to drive reason into the 
 head of a land surveyor ; and all along the 
 shaded, lazy, intimate street you heard the 
 garden-gates click and clash, as the mood of 
 the man varied, and bursts of pleasant laugh 
 ter where three or four be sure the white 
 muslins were among them, discussed a pic 
 nic past or a buggy-drive to come. Then the 
 couples went their ways and talked together 
 till the young men had to go at last on ac 
 count of the trains, and all trooped joyously 
 down to the station and thought no harm of 
 it. And,, indeed, why should they? From 
 
244 American Notes 
 
 her fifteenth year the American maiden 
 moves among " the boys " as a sister among 
 brothers. They are her servants to take her 
 out riding, which is driving, to give her 
 flowers and candy. The last two items are 
 expensive, and this is good for the young man, 
 as teaching him to value friendship that costs 
 a little in cash and may necessitate economy 
 on the cigar side. As to the maiden, she is 
 taught to respect herself, that her fate is in 
 her own hands, and that she is the more 
 stringently bound by the very measure of the 
 liberty so freely accorded to her. Wherefore, 
 in her own language, " she has a lovely time " 
 with about two or three hundred boys who 
 have sisters of their own, and a very accurate 
 perception that if they were unworthy of their 
 trust a syndicate of other boys would probably 
 pass them into a world where there is neither 
 marrying nor giving in marriage. And so 
 time goes till the maiden knows the other side 
 of the house, knows that a man is not a 
 demi-god nor a mysteriously veiled monster, 
 but an average, egotistical, vain, gluttonous, 
 but on the whole, companionable sort of per 
 son, to be soothed, fed, and managed knowl 
 edge that does not come to her sister in Eng 
 land till after a few years of matrimony. And 
 then she makes her choice. The Golden 
 Light touches eyes that are full of comprehen 
 sion ; but the light is golden none the less, for 
 she makes just the same sweet, irrational 
 
American Notes 245 
 
 choices that an English girl does. With this 
 advantage: she knows a little more, has ex 
 perience in entertaining, insight into the busi 
 nesses, employ, and hobbies of men, gathered 
 from countless talks with the boys, and talks 
 with the other girls who find time at those 
 mysterious conclaves to discuss what Tom, 
 Ted, Stuke, or Jack have been doing. Thus 
 it happens that she is a companion, in the 
 fullest sense of the word, of the man she 
 weds, zealous for the interest of the firm, to be 
 consulted in time of stress and to be called 
 upon for help and sympathy in time of dan 
 ger. Pleasant it is that one heart should beat 
 for you ; but it is better when the head above 
 that heart has been thinking hard on your be 
 half, and when the lips, that are also very 
 pleasant to kiss, give wise counsel. 
 
 When the American maiden I speak now 
 for the rank and file of that noble army is 
 once married, why, it is finished. She has 
 had her lovely time. It may have been five, 
 seven, or ten years according to circum 
 stances. She abdicates promptly with start 
 ling speed, and her place knows her no more 
 except as with her husband. The Queen is 
 dead, or looking after the house. This same 
 household work seems to be the thing that 
 ages the American woman. She is infamously 
 " helped " by the Irish trollop and the negress 
 alike. It is not fair upon her, because she 
 has to do three parts of the housework her- 
 
246 American Notes 
 
 self, and in dry, nerve-straining air the 
 " chores " are a burden. Be thankful, oh my 
 people, for Mauz Baksh, Kadir Baksh, and 
 the ayah while they are with you. They are 
 twice as handy as the unkempt slatterns of 
 the furnished apartments to which you will re 
 turn, Commissioners though you be ; and five 
 times as clever as the Amelia Araminta Re- 
 bellia Secessia Jackson (colored) under whose 
 ineptitude and insolence the young American 
 housewife groans. But all this is far enough 
 from peaceful, placid Musquash, and its 
 boundless cordiality, its simple, genuine hos 
 pitality, and its what s the French word that 
 just covers all ? gra gracieuseness, isn t it ? 
 Oh, be good to an American wherever you 
 meet him. Put him up for the club, and he 
 will hold you listening till three in the morn 
 ing ; give him the best tent, and the gram-fed 
 mutton. I have incurred a debt of salt that I 
 can never repay, but do you return it piece 
 meal to any of that Nation, and the account 
 will be on my head till our paths in the world 
 cross again. He drinks iced water just as we 
 do ; but he doesn t quite like our cigars. 
 
 And how shall I finish the tale ? Would it 
 interest you to learn of the picnics in the hot, 
 still woods that overhang the Monongahela, 
 when those idiotic American buggies that 
 can t turn round got stuck among the bram 
 bles and all but capsized ; of boating in the 
 blazing sun on the river that but a little time 
 
American Notes 247 
 
 before had cast at the feet of the horrified 
 village the corpses of the Johnstown tragedy ? 
 I saw one, only one, remnant of that terrible 
 wreck. He had been a minister. House, 
 church, congregation, wife, and children had 
 been swept away from him in one night of 
 terror. He had no employment ; he could 
 have employed himself at nothing. But God 
 had been very good to him. He sat in the 
 sun and smiled a little weakly. It was in his 
 poor blurred mind that something had hap 
 pened he was not sure what it was, but un 
 doubtedly something had occurred. One 
 could only pray that the light would never 
 return. 
 
 But there be many pictures on my mind. 
 Of a huge manufacturing city of three hundred 
 thousand souls lighted and warmed by natural 
 gas, so that the great valley full of flaming 
 furnaces sent up no smoke wreaths to the clear 
 sky. Of Musquash itself lighted by the same 
 mysterious agency, flares of gas eight feet long, 
 roaring day and night at the corners of the 
 grass-grown streets because it wasn t worth 
 while to turn them out ; of fleets of coal-flats 
 being hauled down the river on an intermin 
 able journey to St. Louis ; of factories nest 
 ling in woods where all the ax-handles and 
 shovels in the world seemed to be manufac 
 tured daily ; and last, of that quaint forgotten 
 German community, the Brotherhood of Per 
 petual Separation who founded themselves 
 
248 American Notes 
 
 when the State was yet young and land cheap, 
 and are now dying out because they will neither 
 marry nor give in marriage and their recruits 
 are very few. The advance in the value of 
 land has almost smothered these poor old 
 people in a golden affluence that they never 
 desired. They live in a little village where the 
 houses are built old Dutch fashion, with their 
 front doors away from the road, and cobbled 
 paths all about. The cloistered peace of Mus 
 quash is a metropolitan riot beside the hush 
 of that village. And there is, too, a love-tale 
 tucked away among the flowers. It has taken 
 seventy years in the telling, for the brother 
 and sister loved each other well, but they loved 
 their duty to the brotherhood more. So they 
 have lived and still do live, seeing each other 
 daily, and separated for all time. Any trouble 
 that might have been is altogether wiped out 
 of their faces, which are as calm as those of 
 very little children. To the uninitiated those 
 constant ones resemble extremely old people 
 in garments of absurd cut. But they love each 
 other, and that seems to bring one back quite 
 naturally to the girls and the boys in Mus 
 quash. The boys were nice boys graduates 
 of Yale of course ; you mustn t mention Har 
 vard here but none the less skilled in bus 
 iness, in stocks and shares, the boring for oil, 
 and the sale of everything that can be sold by 
 one sinner to another. Skilled, too, in base 
 ball, big-shouldered, with straight eyes and 
 
American Notes 249 
 
 square chins but not above occasional diver 
 sion and mild orgies. They will make good 
 citizens and possess the earth, and eventually 
 wed one of the nice white muslin dresses. 
 There are worse things in this world than 
 being " one of the boys " in Musquash. 
 
250 American Notes 
 
 XVI. 
 
 You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. 
 Some of you are Commissioners, and some 
 Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. 
 C., and a few are privileged to walk about the 
 Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy ; but /have 
 seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have 
 shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar no, two 
 cigars with him, and talked with him for 
 more than two hours ! Understand clearly 
 that I do not despise you ; indeed, I don t. I 
 am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy 
 downward. To soothe your envy and to prove 
 that I still regard you as my equals, I will tell 
 you all about it. 
 
 They said in Buffalo that he was in Hart 
 ford, Conn. ; and again they said " perchance 
 he is gone upon a journey to Portland ; " and 
 a big, fat drummer vowed that he knew the 
 great man intimately, and that Mark was 
 spending the summer in Europe which in 
 formation so upset me that I embarked upon 
 the wrong train, and was incontinently turned 
 out by the conductor three-quarters of a mile 
 from the station, amid the wilderness of rail 
 way tracks. Have you ever, encumbered with 
 great-coat and valise, tried to dodge diversely- 
 minded locomotives when the sun was shining 
 
American Notes 251 
 
 in your eyes ? But I forgot that you have not 
 seen Mark Twain, you people of no account 1 
 
 Saved from the jaws of the cowcatcher, me 
 wandering devious a stranger met. 
 
 " Elmira is the place, Elmira in the State 
 of New York this State, not two hundred: 
 miles away ; " and he added, perfectly un 
 necessarily, " Slide, Kelley, slide." 
 
 I slid on the West Shore line, I slid till 
 midnight, and they dumped me down at the 
 door of a frowzy hotel in Elmira. Yes, they 
 knew all about " that man Clemens," but reck 
 oned he was not in town ; had gone East 
 somewhere. I had better possess my soul in* 
 patience till the morrow, and then dig up the 
 " man Clemens " brother-in-law, who was in 
 terested in coal. 
 
 The idea of chasing half a dozen relatives 
 in addition to Mark Twain up and down a city 
 of thirty thousand inhabitants kept me awake. 
 Morning revealed Elmira, whose streets were 
 desolated by railway tracks, and whose suburbs- 
 were given up to the manufacture of door- 
 sashes and window-frames. It was surrounded 
 by pleasant, fat, little hills, rimmed with tim 
 ber and topped with cultivation. The Che- 
 mung River flowed generally up and down the 
 town, and had just finished flooding a few of 
 the main streets. 
 
 The hotel-man and the telephone man. 
 assured me that the much-desired brother-in- 
 law was out of town, and no one seemed to 
 
252 American Notes 
 
 know where " the man Clemens " abode. 
 Later on I discovered that he had not sum 
 mered in that place for more than nineteen 
 seasons, and so was comparatively a new arri 
 val. 
 
 A friendly policeman volunteered the news 
 that he had seen Twain or " some one very 
 like him " driving a buggy the day before. 
 This gave me a delightful sense of nearness. 
 Fancy living in a town where you could see 
 the author of Tom Sawyer, or " some one very 
 like him," jolting over the pavements in a 
 buggy ! 
 
 " He lives out yonder at East Hill," said 
 the policeman ; " three miles from here." 
 
 Then the chase began in a hired hack, up 
 an awful hill, where sunflowers blossomed by 
 the roadside, and crops waved, and Harper s 
 Magazine cows <itood in eligible and com 
 manding attitudes knee-deep in clover, all 
 ready to be transferred to photogravure. The 
 great man must have been prosecuted by out- 
 siders aforetime, and fled up the hill for 
 refuge. 
 
 Presently the driver stopped at a miserable, 
 little white wood shanty, and demanded 
 " Mister Clemens." 
 
 " I know he s a big-bug and all that," he 
 explained, " but y^u can never tell what sort 
 of notions those sort of men take into their 
 heads to live in, anyways." 
 
 There rose up a young lady who was sketch- 
 
American Notes 253 
 
 ing thistletops and golaen rod, amid a plentiful 
 supply of both, and set the pilgrims on the 
 right path. 
 
 " It s a pretty Gothic house on the left- 
 hand side a little way farther on." 
 
 " Gothic h ," said the driver. " Very 
 
 few of the city hacks take this drive, specially 
 if they know they are coming out here," and 
 he glared at me savagely. 
 
 It was a very pretty house, anything but 
 Gothic, clothed with ivy, standing in a very 
 big compound, and fronted by a veranda full 
 of chairs and hammocks. The roof of the 
 veranda was a trellis-work of creepers, and 
 the sun peeping through moved on the shin 
 ing boards below. 
 
 Decidedly this remote place was an ideal 
 one for work, if a man could work among these 
 soft airs and the murmur of the long-eared 
 crops. 
 
 Appeared suddenly a lady used to dealing 
 with rampageous outsiders. " Mr. Clemens 
 has just walked downtown. He is at his 
 brother-in-law s house." 
 
 Then he was within shouting distance, 
 after all, and the chase had not been in vain. 
 With speed I fled, and the driver, skidding 
 the wheel and swearing audibly, arrived at 
 the bottom of that hill without accidents. It 
 was in the pause that followed between ring 
 ing the brother-in-law s bell and getting an 
 answer that it occurred to me for the first time 
 
254 American Notes 
 
 Mark Twain might possibly have other en 
 gagements than the entertainment of escaped 
 lunatics from India, be they never so full of 
 admiration. And in another man s house 
 anyhow, what had I come to do or say? 
 Suppose the drawing-room should be full of 
 people, suppose a baby was sick, how was I 
 to explain that I only wanted to shake hands 
 with him ? 
 
 Then things happened somewhat in this 
 order. A big, darkened drawing-room ; a 
 huge chair ; a man with eyes, a mane of griz 
 zled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth 
 as delicate as a woman s, a strong, square 
 hand shaking mine, and the slowest calmest, 
 levellest voice in all the world saying : 
 
 " Well, you think you owe me something, 
 and you ve come to tell me so. That s what 
 I call squaring a debt handsomely." 
 
 "Piff!" from a cob-pipe (I always said 
 that a Missouri meerschaum was the best smok 
 ing in the world), and, behold ! Mark Twain 
 had curled himself up in the big armchair, 
 and 1 was smoking reverently, as befits one 
 in the presence of his superior. 
 
 The thing that struck me first was that he 
 was an elderly man ; yet, after a minute s 
 thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, 
 and in five minutes, the eyes looking at me, 
 I saw that the gray hair was an accident of 
 the most trivial. He was quite young. I 
 was shaking his hand. I was smoking his 
 
American Notes 255 
 
 , and I was hearing him talk this man 
 I had learned to love and admire fourteen 
 thousand miles away. 
 
 Reading his books, I had striven to get an 
 ; dea of his personality, and all my precon 
 ceived notions were wrong and beneath the 
 reality. Blessed is the man who finds no dis 
 illusion when he is brought face to face with a 
 revered writer. That was a moment to be 
 remembered ; the landing of a twelve-pound 
 salmon was nothing to it. I had hooked 
 Mark Twain, and he was treating me as 
 though under certain circumstances I might 
 be an equal. 
 
 About this time I became aware that he 
 was discussing the copyright question. Here, 
 so far as I remember, is what he said. 
 Attend to the words of the oracle through 
 this unworthy medium transmitted. You will 
 never be able to imagine the long, slow surge 
 of the drawl, and the deadly gravity of the 
 countenance, the quaint pucker of the body, 
 one foot thrown over the arm of the chair, 
 the yellow pipe clinched in one corner of the 
 mouth, and the right hand casually caressing 
 the square chin : 
 
 " Copyright ? Some men hare morals, and 
 some men have other things. I presume a 
 publisher is a man. He is not born. He is 
 created by circumstances. Some publishers 
 have morals. Mine have. They pay me for 
 the English productions of my books. When 
 
256 American Notes 
 
 you hear men talking of Bret Harte s works 
 and other works and my books being pirated, 
 ask them to be sure of their facts. I think 
 they ll find the books are paid for. It was 
 ever thus. 
 
 " I remember an unprincipaled and for 
 midable publisher. Perhaps he s dead now. 
 He used to take my short stories I can t 
 call it steal or pirate them. It was beyond 
 these things altogether. He took my stories 
 one at a time and made a book of it. If I 
 wrote an essay on dentistry or theology or any 
 little thing of that kind just an essay that 
 long (he indicated half an inch on his finger), 
 any sort of essay that publisher would 
 amend and improve my essay. 
 
 " He would get another man to write some 
 more to it or cut it about exactly as his needs 
 required. Then he would publish a book 
 called Dentistry by Mark Twain, that little 
 essay and some other things not mine added. 
 Theology would make another book, and so on. 
 I do not consider that fair. It s an insult. 
 But he s dead now, I think. I didn t kill him. 
 
 " There is a great deal of nonsense talked 
 about international copyright. The proper 
 way to treat a copyright is to make it exactly 
 like real estate in every way. 
 
 " It will settle itself under these con 
 ditions. If Congress were to bring in a law 
 that a man s life was not to extend over a 
 hundred and sixty years, somebody would 
 
American Notes 257 
 
 laugh. That law wouldn t concern anybody. 
 The man would be out of the jurisdiction of 
 the court. A term of years in copyright 
 comes to exactly the same thing. No law 
 can make a book live or cause it to die before 
 the appointed time. 
 
 " Tottletown, Cal., was a new town, with a 
 population of three thousand banks, fire- 
 brigade, brick buildings, and all the modern 
 improvements. It lived, it flourished, and it 
 disappeared. To-day no man can put his 
 foot on any remnant of Tottletown, Cal. It s 
 dead. London continues to exist. Bill Smith, 
 author of a book read for the next year or so 
 is real estate in Tottletown. William Shake 
 speare, whose works are extensively read, is 
 real estate in London. Let Bill Smith, equally 
 with Mr. Shakespeare now deceased, have as 
 complete a control over his copyright as he 
 would over his real estate. Let him gamble 
 it away, drink it away, or give it to the 
 church. Let his heirs and assigns treat it in 
 the same manner. 
 
 " Every now and again I go up to Washing 
 ton, sitting on a board to drive that sort of 
 view into Congress. Congress takes its ar 
 guments against international copyright de 
 livered ready made, and Congress isn t very 
 strong. I put the real-estate view of the case 
 before one of the Senators. 
 
 " He said : * Suppose a man has written a 
 book that will live forever ? 
 
258 American Notes 
 
 " I said : * Neither you nor I will ever live 
 to see that man, but we ll assume it. What 
 then ? 
 
 " He said : * I want to protect the world 
 against that man s heirs and assigns, working 
 under your theory. 
 
 " I said : You think that all the world has 
 no commercial sense. The book that will live 
 forever can t be artificially kept up at inflated 
 prices. There will always be very expensive 
 editions of it and cheap ones issuing side by 
 side. 
 
 " Take the case of Sir Walter Scott s novels," 
 Mark Twain continued, turning to me. 
 " When the copyright notes protected them, I 
 bought editions as expensive as I could afford, 
 because I liked them. At the same time the 
 same firm were selling editions that a cat might 
 buy. They had their real estate, and not 
 being fools, recognized that one portion of the 
 plot could be worked as a gold mine, another 
 as a vegetable garden, and another as a marble 
 quarry. Do you see ? " 
 
 What I saw with the greatest clearness was 
 Mark Twain being forced to fight for the sim 
 ple proposition that a man has as much right 
 to the work of his brains (think of the heresy 
 of it !) as to the labor of his hands. When the 
 old lion roars, the young whelps growl. I 
 growled assentingly, and the talk ran on from 
 books in general to his own in particular. 
 
 Growing bold, and feeling that I had a few 
 
American Notes 259 
 
 hundred thousand folk at my back, I demanded 
 whether Tom Sawyer married Judge Thatcher s 
 daughter and whether we were ever going to 
 hear of Tom Sawyer as a man. 
 
 " I haven t decided," quoth Mark Twain, 
 getting up, filling his pipe, and walking up 
 and down the room in his slippers. " I have 
 a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer 
 in two ways. In one I would make him rise 
 to great honor and go to Congress, and in the 
 other I should hang him. Then the friends and 
 enemies of the book could take their choice." 
 
 Here I lost my reverence completely, and 
 protested against any theory of the sort, be 
 cause to me at least, Tom Sawyer was real. 
 
 " Oh, he is real," said Mark Twain. " He s 
 all the boy that I have known or recollect , 
 but that would be a good way of ending the 
 book " ; then, turning round, " because, when 
 you come to think of it, neither religion, train 
 ing, nor education avails anything against the 
 force of circumstances that drive a man. 
 Suppose we took the next four and twenty 
 years of Tom Sawyer s life, and gave a little 
 joggle to the circumstances that controlled 
 him. He would, logically^ and according to 
 the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel." 
 
 " Do you believe that, then ? " 
 
 " I think so. Isn t it what you call Kismet ? " 
 
 " Yes ; but don t give him two joggles and 
 show the result, because he isn t your property 
 any more. He belongs to us." 
 
 \ 
 
260 American Notes 
 
 He laughed a large, wholesome laugh 
 and this began a dissertation on the rights of 
 a man to do what he liked with his own crea 
 tions, which being a matter of purely profes 
 sional interest, I will mercifully omit. 
 
 Returning to the big chair, he, speaking of 
 truth and the like in literature, said that an 
 autobiography was the one work in which a 
 man, against his own will and in spite of his 
 utmost striving to the contrary, revealed him 
 self in his true light to the world. 
 
 " A good deal of your life on the Mississipi 
 is autobiographical, isn t it ? " I asked. 
 
 " As near as it can be when a man is 
 writing to a book and about himself. But in 
 genuine autobiography, I believe it is impos 
 sible for a man to tell the truth about himself 
 or to avoid impressing the reader with the 
 truth about himself. 
 
 " I made an experiment once. I got a 
 friend of mine a man painfully given to 
 speak the truth on all occasions a man who 
 wouldn t dream of telling a lie and I made 
 him write his autobiography for his own 
 amusement and mine. He did it. The man 
 uscript would have made an octavo volume, 
 but good, honest man that he was in every 
 single detail of his life that I knew about he 
 turned out, on paper, a formidable liar. He 
 could not help himself. 
 
 " It is not in human nature to write the 
 truth about itself. None the less the reader 
 
American Notes 261 
 
 gets a general impression from an autobiog 
 raphy whether the man is a fraud or a good 
 man. The reader can t give his reasons any 
 more than a man can explain why a woman 
 struck him as being lovely when he doesn t 
 remember her hair, eyes, teeth, or figure. 
 And the impression that the reader gets is a 
 correct one." 
 
 " Do you ever intend to write an autobiog 
 raphy ?" 
 
 " If I do, it will be as other men have done 
 with the most earnest desire to make myself 
 out to be the better man in every little business 
 that has been to my discredit; and I shall 
 fail, like the others, to make my readers be 
 lieve anything except the truth." 
 
 This naturally led to a discussion on con 
 science. Then said Mark Twain, and his 
 words are mighty and to be remembered : 
 
 " Your conscience is a nuisance. A con 
 science is like a child. If you pet it and play 
 with it and let it have everything that it wants, 
 it becomes spoiled and intrudes on all your 
 amusements and most of your griefs. Treat 
 your conscience as you would treat anything 
 else. When it is rebellious, spank it be 
 severe with it, argue with it, prevent it from 
 coming to play with you at all hours, and you 
 will secure a good conscience ; that is to say, 
 a properly trained one. A spoiled one simply 
 destroys all the pleasure in life. I think I 
 have reduced mine to order. At least, I 
 
262 American Notes 
 
 haven t heard from it for some time. Per* 
 haps I have killed it from over-severity. It s 
 wrong to kill a child, but, in spite of all I 
 have said, a conscience differs from a child 
 in many ways. Perhaps it s best when it s 
 dead." 
 
 Here he told me a little such things as a 
 man may tell a stranger of his early life and 
 upbringing, and in what manner he had been 
 influenced for good by the example of his 
 parents. He spoke always through his eyes, 
 a light under the heavy eyebrows ; anon 
 crossing the room with a step as light as a 
 girl s, to show me some book or other ; then 
 resuming his walk up and down the room, 
 puffing at the cob pipe. I would have given 
 much for nerve enough to demand the gift of 
 that pipe value, five cents when new. I 
 understood why certain savage tribes ardently 
 desired the liver of brave men slain in com 
 bat. That pipe would have given me, per 
 haps, a hint of his keen insight into the souls 
 of men. But he never laid it aside within 
 stealing reach. 
 
 Once, indeed, he put his hand on my shoul 
 der. It was an investiture of the Star of 
 India, blue silk, trumpets, and diamond-stud 
 ded jewel, ail complete. If, hereafter, in the 
 changes and chances of this mortal life, I fall 
 to cureless ruin, I will tell the superintendent 
 of the workhouse that Mark Twain once put 
 his hand on my shoulder ; and he shall give 
 
American Notes 263 
 
 me a room to myself and a double allowance 
 of paupers tobacco. 
 
 " I never read novels myself," said he, " ex 
 cept when the popular persecution forces me 
 to when people plague me to know what I 
 think of the last book that every one is read 
 ing." 
 
 " And how did the latest persecution affect 
 you ? " 
 
 " Robert ? " said he, interrogatively. 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 " I read it, of course, for the workmanship. 
 That made me think I had neglected novels 
 too long that there might be a good many 
 books as graceful in style somewhere on the 
 shelves ; so I began a course of novel read 
 ing. I have dropped it now; it did not 
 amuse me. But as regards Robert, the effect 
 on me was exactly as though a singer of 
 street ballads were to hear excellent music 
 from a church organ. I didn t stop to ask 
 whether the music was legitimate or necessary. 
 I listened, and I liked what I heard. I am 
 speaking of the grace and beauty of the style." 
 
 " You see," he went on, " every man has 
 his private opinion about a book. But that is 
 my private opinion. If I had lived in the be 
 ginning of things I should have looked around 
 the township to see what popular opinion 
 thought of the murder of Abel before I openly 
 condemned Cain. I should have had my 
 private opinion, of course, but I shouldn t 
 
264 American Notes 
 
 have expressed it until I had felt the way, 
 You have my private opinion about that book. 
 I don t know what my public ones are ex 
 actly. They won t upset the earth." 
 
 He recurled himself into the chair and 
 talked of other things. 
 
 " I spend nine months of the year at Hart 
 ford. I have long ago satisfied myself that 
 there is no hope of doing much work during 
 those nine months. People come in and call. 
 They call at all hours, about everything in the 
 world. One day I thought I would keep a 
 list of interruptions. It began this way : 
 
 " A man came and would see no one but 
 Mr. Clemens. He was an agent for photo 
 gravure reproductions of Salon pictures. I 
 very seldom use Salon pictures in my books. 
 
 " After that man another man, who refused 
 to see any one but Mr. Clemens, came to 
 make me write to Washington about some 
 thing. I saw him. I saw a third man, then a 
 fourth. By this time it was noon. I had grown 
 tired of keeping the list. I wished to rest. 
 
 " But the fifth man was the only one of the 
 crowd with a card of his own. He sent up 
 his card. Ben Koontz, Hannibal, Mo,* I 
 was raised in Hannibal. Ben was an old 
 schoolmate of mine. Consequently I threw 
 the house wide open and rushed with both 
 hands out at a big, fat, heavy man, who was 
 not the Ben I had ever known nor anything 
 like him. 
 
American Notes 265 
 
 But is it you, Ben ? I said. You ve 
 altered in the last thousand years. 
 
 " The fat man said : Well, I m not Koontz 
 exactly, but I met him down in Missouri, and 
 he told me to be sure and call on you, and he 
 gave me his card, and here he acted the 
 little scene for my benefit * if you can wait a 
 minute till I can get out the circulars I m 
 not Koontz exactly, but I m traveling with the 
 fullest line of rods you ever saw. 
 
 " And what happened ? " I asked breath 
 lessly. 
 
 " I shut the door. He was not Ben Koontz 
 exactly not my old schoolfellow, but I had 
 shaken him by both hands in love, and . . . 
 I had been bearded by a lightning-rod man in 
 my own house. 
 
 " As I was saying, I do very little work in 
 Hartford. I come here for three months 
 every year, and I work four or five hours a 
 day in a study down the garden of that little 
 house on the hill. Of course, I do not object 
 to two or three interruptions. When a man is 
 in the full swing of his work these little things 
 do not affect him. Eight or ten or twenty in 
 terruptions retard composition." 
 
 I was burning to ask him all manner of im 
 pertinent questions, as to which of his works 
 he himself preferred, and so forth ; but, stand 
 ing in awe of his eyes, I dared not. He spoke 
 on, and I listened, groveling. 
 
 It was a question of mental equipment that 
 
266 American Notes 
 
 was on the carpet, and I am still wondering 
 whether he meant what he said. 
 
 " Personally, I never care for fiction or 
 story-books. What I like to read about are 
 facts and statistics of any kind. If they are 
 only facts about the raising of radishes, they 
 interest me. Just now, for instance, before 
 you came in " he pointed to an encyclopaedia 
 on the shelves " I was reading an article 
 about Mathematics.* Perfectly pure mathe 
 matics. 
 
 " My own knowledge of mathematics stops 
 at twelve times twelve, but I enjoyed that 
 article immensely. I didn t understand a 
 word of it ; but facts, or what a man believes 
 to be facts, are always delightful. That 
 mathematical fellow believed in his facts. So 
 do I. Get your facts first and " the voice dies 
 away to an almost inaudible drone " then 
 you can distort em as much as you please." 
 
 Bearing this precious advice in my bosom, 
 I left ; the great man assuring me with gentle 
 kindness that I had not interrupted him in 
 the least. Once outside the door, I yearned 
 to go back and ask some questions it was 
 easy enough to think of them now but his 
 time was his own, though his books belonged 
 to me. 
 
 I should have ample time to look back to 
 that meeting across the graves of the days. 
 But it was sad to think of the things he had 
 not spoken about. 
 
American Notes 267 
 
 In San Francisco the men of The Call told 
 me many legends of Mark s apprenticeship in 
 their paper five and twenty years ago ; how 
 he was a reporter delightfully incapable of 
 reporting according to the needs of the day. 
 He preferred, so they said, to coil himself 
 into a heap and meditate until the last minute. 
 Then he would produce copy bearing no 
 sort of relationship to his legitimate work 
 copy that made the editor swear horribly, and 
 the readers of The Call ask for more. 
 
 I should like to have heard Mark s version 
 of that, with some stories of his joyous and 
 variegated past. He has been journeyman 
 printer (in those days he wandered from the 
 banks of the Missouri even to Philadelphia), 
 pilot cub and full-blown pilot, soldier of the 
 South (that was for three weeks only), pri 
 vate secretary to a Lieutenant-Governor of 
 Nevada (that displeased him), miner, editor, 
 special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands, 
 and the Lord only knows what else. If so 
 experienced a man could by any means be 
 made drunk, it would be a glorious thing to 
 fill him up with composite liquors, and, in the 
 language of his own country, " let him retro 
 spect." But these eyes will never see that 
 orgy fit for the gods 1 
 

 
 HJE7I=aHHHMMM&-^^^^HIHiVMH^HMBBB r -^^^^H 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 r~ 
 " f 
 
 
 10 
 
 i! 
 
 -HPO 
 
 og 
 
 li 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 > 5 
 
 
 _ ? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ?l 
 
 
 So 
 
 m c 3 
 
 s 
 
 K3 ^3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 s 
 
 
 
 
 ^P 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 > m 
 
 C/i 
 
 ro 
 
 >c 
 
 Q r- 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 r~ 
 
 
 
 -^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ffl 
 D 
 
 -n 
 
 -4 
 m 
 30 
 
 
 
 P 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 " O 
 
 
 
 < ^ 
 ^ m 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 > 
 
 
 
 no 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3 
 
 
 
 > 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 CO 
 
 20 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 -H 
 
 m 
 
 Z 
 
 -< 
 
YA 05787