The first thing we did on that glad evening that landed us at
St. Joseph was to hunt up the stage-office, and pay a hundred and
fifty dollars apiece for tickets per overland coach to Carson
City, Nevada.
The next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast,
and hurried to the starting-place. Then an inconvenience
presented itself which we had not properly appreciated before,
namely, that one cannot make a heavy traveling trunk stand for
twenty-five pounds of baggage—because it weighs a good deal
more. But that was all we could take—twenty-five pounds each.
So we had to snatch our trunks open, and make a selection in a
good deal of a hurry. We put our lawful twenty-five pounds apiece
all in one valise, and shipped the trunks back to St. Louis
again. It was a sad parting, for now we had no swallow-tail coats
and white kid gloves to wear at Pawnee receptions in the Rocky
Mountains, and no stove-pipe hats nor patent-leather boots, nor
anything else necessary to make life calm and peaceful. We were
reduced to a war-footing. Each of us put on a rough, heavy suit
of clothing, woolen army shirt and “stogy” boots included; and
into the valise we crowded a few white shirts, some
under-clothing and such things. My brother, the Secretary, took
along about four pounds of United States statutes and six pounds
of Unabridged Dictionary; for we did not know—poor
innocents—that such things could be bought in San Francisco on
one day and received in Carson City the next. I was armed to the
teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson’s seven-shooter, which
carried a ball like a homoeopathic pill, and it took the whole
seven to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It
appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It only had one
fault—you could not hit anything with it. One of our
“conductors” practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as
she stood still and behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as
she went to moving about, and he got to shooting at other things,
she came to grief. The Secretary had a small-sized Colt’s
revolver strapped around him for protection against the Indians,
and to guard against accidents he carried it uncapped. Mr. George
Bemis was dismally formidable. George Bemis was our
fellow-traveler.
We had never seen him before. He wore in his belt an old
original “Allen” revolver, such as irreverent people called a
“pepper-box.” Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired
the pistol. As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to
rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop
the hammer, and away would speed the ball. To aim along the
turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was
probably never done with an “Allen” in the world. But George’s
was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the
stage-drivers afterward said, “If she didn’t get what she went
after, she would fetch something else.” And so she did. She went
after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched
a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did
not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled
shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful
weapon—the “Allen.” Sometimes all its six barrels would go off
at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round
about, but behind it.
We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty
weather in the mountains. In the matter of luxuries we were
modest—we took none along but some pipes and five pounds of
smoking tobacco. We had two large canteens to carry water in,
between stations on the Plains, and we also took with us a little
shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the way of
breakfasts and dinners.
By eight o’clock everything was ready, and we were on the
other side of the river. We jumped into the stage, the driver
cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left “the States” behind
us. It was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was
brilliant with sunshine. There was a freshness and breeziness,
too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of
cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the
years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving,
had been wasted and thrown away. We were spinning along through
Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly
abroad on the great Plains. Just here the land was rolling—a
grand sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the
eye could reach—like the stately heave and swell of the ocean’s
bosom after a storm. And everywhere were cornfields, accenting
with squares of deeper green, this limitless expanse of grassy
land. But presently this sea upon dry ground was to lose its
“rolling” character and stretch away for seven hundred miles as
level as a floor!
Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most
sumptuous description—an imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn
by six handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the
“conductor,” the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his
business to take charge and care of the mails, baggage, express
matter, and passengers. We three were the only passengers, this
trip. We sat on the back seat, inside. About all the rest of the
coach was full of mail bags—for we had three days’ delayed mails
with us. Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail
matter rose up to the roof. There was a great pile of it strapped
on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full.
We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver
said—"a little for Brigham, and Carson, and ‘Frisco, but the
heft of it for the Injuns, which is powerful troublesome ‘thout
they get plenty of truck to read.”
But as he just then got up a
fearful convulsion of his countenance which was suggestive of a
wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we guessed that his remark
was intended to be facetious, and to mean that we would unload
the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains and leave it
to the Indians, or whosoever wanted it.
We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly
flew over the hard, level road. We jumped out and stretched our
legs every time the coach stopped, and so the night found us
still vivacious and unfatigued.
After supper a woman got in, who lived about fifty miles
further on, and we three had to take turns at sitting outside
with the driver and conductor. Apparently she was not a talkative
woman. She would sit there in the gathering twilight and fasten
her steadfast eyes on a mosquito rooting into her arm, and slowly
she would raise her other hand till she had got his range, and
then she would launch a slap at him that would have jolted a cow;
and after that she would sit and contemplate the corpse with
tranquil satisfaction—for she never missed her mosquito; she was
a dead shot at short range. She never removed a carcase, but left
them there for bait. I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her
kill thirty or forty mosquitoes—watched her, and waited for her
to say something, but she never did. So I finally opened the
conversation myself. I said:
“The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam.”
“You bet!”
“What did I understand you to say, madam?”
“You BET!”
Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:
“Danged if I didn’t begin to think you fellers was deef and
dumb. I did, b’gosh. Here I’ve sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust’n
muskeeters and wonderin’ what was ailin’ ye. Fust I thot you was
deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin’, and
then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools
that couldn’t think of nothing to say. Wher’d ye come from?”
The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains of her great
deep were broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech
forty days and forty nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried
us under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a
crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting above the tossing waste
of dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation!
How we suffered, suffered, suffered! She went on, hour after
hour, till I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and
gave her a start. She never did stop again until she got to her
journey’s end toward daylight; and then she stirred us up as she
was leaving the stage (for we were nodding, by that time), and
said:
“Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a
couple o’ days, and I’ll be along some time to-night, and if I
can do ye any good by edgin’ in a word now and then, I’m right
thar. Folks’ll tell you’t I’ve always ben kind o’ offish and
partic’lar for a gal that’s raised in the woods, and I am, with
the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be, if she wants to be
anything, but when people comes along which is my equals, I
reckon I’m a pretty sociable heifer after all.”
We resolved not to “lay by at Cottonwood.”
