Our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for
twenty hours. Such a thing was very frequent. From St. Joseph,
Missouri, to Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly
nineteen hundred miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen
days (the cars do it in four and a half, now), but the time
specified in the mail contracts, and required by the schedule,
was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember rightly. This was to
make fair allowance for winter storms and snows, and other
unavoidable causes of detention. The stage company had everything
under strict discipline and good system. Over each two hundred
and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent,
and invested him with great authority. His beat or jurisdiction
of two hundred and fifty miles was called a “division.” He
purchased horses, mules harness, and food for men and beasts, and
distributed these things among his stage stations, from time to
time, according to his judgment of what each station needed. He
erected station buildings and dug wells. He attended to the
paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and blacksmiths,
and discharged them whenever he chose. He was a very, very great
man in his “division”—a kind of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the
Indies, in whose presence common men were modest of speech and
manner, and in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling
stage-driver dwindled to a penny dip. There were about eight of
these kings, all told, on the overland route.
Next in rank and importance to the division-agent came the
“conductor.” His beat was the same length as the agent’s—two
hundred and fifty miles. He sat with the driver, and (when
necessary) rode that fearful distance, night and day, without
other rest or sleep than what he could get perched thus on top of
the flying vehicle. Think of it! He had absolute charge of the
mails, express matter, passengers and stage, coach, until he
delivered them to the next conductor, and got his receipt for
them.
Consequently he had to be a man of intelligence, decision and
considerable executive ability. He was usually a quiet, pleasant
man, who attended closely to his duties, and was a good deal of a
gentleman. It was not absolutely necessary that the
division-agent should be a gentleman, and occasionally he wasn’t.
But he was always a general in administrative ability, and a
bull-dog in courage and determination—otherwise the
chieftainship over the lawless underlings of the overland service
would never in any instance have been to him anything but an
equivalent for a month of insolence and distress and a bullet and
a coffin at the end of it. There were about sixteen or eighteen
conductors on the overland, for there was a daily stage each way,
and a conductor on every stage.
Next in real and official rank and importance, after the
conductor, came my delight, the driver—next in real but not in
apparent importance—for we have seen that in the eyes of the
common herd the driver was to the conductor as an admiral is to
the captain of the flag-ship. The driver’s beat was pretty long,
and his sleeping-time at the stations pretty short, sometimes;
and so, but for the grandeur of his position his would have been
a sorry life, as well as a hard and a wearing one. We took a new
driver every day or every night (for they drove backward and
forward over the same piece of road all the time), and therefore
we never got as well acquainted with them as we did with the
conductors; and besides, they would have been above being
familiar with such rubbish as passengers, anyhow, as a general
thing. Still, we were always eager to get a sight of each and
every new driver as soon as the watch changed, for each and every
day we were either anxious to get rid of an unpleasant one, or
loath to part with a driver we had learned to like and had come
to be sociable and friendly with. And so the first question we
asked the conductor whenever we got to where we were to exchange
drivers, was always, “Which is him?” The grammar was faulty,
maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go into a book
some day. As long as everything went smoothly, the overland
driver was well enough situated, but if a fellow driver got sick
suddenly it made trouble, for the coach must go on, and so the
potentate who was about to climb down and take a luxurious rest
after his long night’s siege in the midst of wind and rain and
darkness, had to stay where he was and do the sick man’s work.
Once, in the Rocky Mountains, when I found a driver sound asleep
on the box, and the mules going at the usual break-neck pace, the
conductor said never mind him, there was no danger, and he was
doing double duty—had driven seventy-five miles on one coach,
and was now going back over it on this without rest or sleep. A
hundred and fifty miles of holding back of six vindictive mules
and keeping them from climbing the trees! It sounds incredible,
but I remember the statement well enough.
The station-keepers, hostlers, etc., were low, rough
characters, as already described; and from western Nebraska to
Nevada a considerable sprinkling of them might be fairly set down
as outlaws—fugitives from justice, criminals whose best security
was a section of country which was without law and without even
the pretence of it. When the “division-agent” issued an order to
one of these parties he did it with the full understanding that
he might have to enforce it with a navy six-shooter, and so he
always went “fixed” to make things go along smoothly.
Now and then a division-agent was really obliged to shoot a
hostler through the head to teach him some simple matter that he
could have taught him with a club if his circumstances and
surroundings had been different. But they were snappy, able men,
those division-agents, and when they tried to teach a subordinate
anything, that subordinate generally “got it through his
head.”
A great portion of this vast machinery—these hundreds of men
and coaches, and thousands of mules and horses—was in the hands
of Mr. Ben Holliday. All the western half of the business was in
his hands. This reminds me of an incident of Palestine travel
which is pertinent here, so I will transfer it just in the
language in which I find it set down in my Holy Land
note-book:
No doubt everybody has heard of Ben Holliday—a man of
prodigious energy, who used to send mails and passengers flying
across the continent in his overland stage-coaches like a very
whirlwind—two thousand long miles in fifteen days and a half, by
the watch! But this fragment of history is not about Ben
Holliday, but about a young New York boy by the name of Jack, who
traveled with our small party of pilgrims in the Holy Land (and
who had traveled to California in Mr. Holliday’s overland coaches
three years before, and had by no means forgotten it or lost his
gushing admiration of Mr. H.) Aged nineteen. Jack was a good
boy—a good-hearted and always well-meaning boy, who had been
reared in the city of New York, and although he was bright and
knew a great many useful things, his Scriptural education had
been a good deal neglected—to such a degree, indeed, that all
Holy Land history was fresh and new to him, and all Bible names
mysteries that had never disturbed his virgin ear.
Also in our party was an elderly pilgrim who was the reverse
of Jack, in that he was learned in the Scriptures and an
enthusiast concerning them. He was our encyclopedia, and we were
never tired of listening to his speeches, nor he of making them.
He never passed a celebrated locality, from Bashan to Bethlehem,
without illuminating it with an oration. One day, when camped
near the ruins of Jericho, he burst forth with something like
this:
“Jack, do you see that range of mountains over yonder that
bounds the Jordan valley? The mountains of Moab, Jack! Think of
it, my boy—the actual mountains of Moab—renowned in Scripture
history! We are actually standing face to face with those
illustrious crags and peaks—and for all we know” [dropping his
voice impressively], “our eyes may be resting at this very moment
upon the spot WHERE LIES THE MYSTERIOUS GRAVE OF MOSES! Think of
it, Jack!”
“Moses who?” (falling inflection).
“Moses who! Jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself—you
ought to be ashamed of such criminal ignorance. Why, Moses, the
great guide, soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack,
from this spot where we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful
desert three hundred miles in extent—and across that desert that
wonderful man brought the children of Israel!—guiding them with
unfailing sagacity for forty years over the sandy desolation and
among the obstructing rocks and hills, and landed them at last,
safe and sound, within sight of this very spot; and where we now
stand they entered the Promised Land with anthems of rejoicing!
It was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, Jack! Think of
it!”
“Forty years? Only three hundred miles? Humph! Ben Holliday
would have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!”
The boy meant no harm. He did not know that he had said
anything that was wrong or irreverent. And so no one scolded him
or felt offended with him—and nobody could but some ungenerous
spirit incapable of excusing the heedless blunders of a boy.
At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the “Crossing of
the South Platte,” alias “Julesburg,” alias “Overland City,” four
hundred and seventy miles from St. Joseph—the strangest,
quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eyes had
ever stared at and been astonished with.
