We were approaching the end of our long journey. It was the
morning of the twentieth day. At noon we would reach Carson City,
the capital of Nevada Territory. We were not glad, but sorry. It
had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every
day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of
it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still and settling down to a
humdrum existence in a village was not agreeable, but on the
contrary depressing.
Visibly our new home was a desert, walled in by barren,
snow-clad mountains. There was not a tree in sight. There was no
vegetation but the endless sage-brush and greasewood. All nature
was gray with it. We were plowing through great deeps of powdery
alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and floated across the
plain like smoke from a burning house.
We were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the
mules, the mail-bags, the driver—we and the sage-brush and the
other scenery were all one monotonous color. Long trains of
freight wagons in the distance envelope in ascending masses of
dust suggested pictures of prairies on fire. These teams and
their masters were the only life we saw. Otherwise we moved in
the midst of solitude, silence and desolation. Every twenty steps
we passed the skeleton of some dead beast of burthen, with its
dust-coated skin stretched tightly over its empty ribs.
Frequently a solemn raven sat upon the skull or the hips and
contemplated the passing coach with meditative serenity.
By and by Carson City was pointed out to us. It nestled in the
edge of a great plain and was a sufficient number of miles away
to look like an assemblage of mere white spots in the shadow of a
grim range of mountains overlooking it, whose summits seemed
lifted clear out of companionship and consciousness of earthly
things.
We arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on. It was a
“wooden” town; its population two thousand souls. The main street
consisted of four or five blocks of little white frame stores
which were too high to sit down on, but not too high for various
other purposes; in fact, hardly high enough. They were packed
close together, side by side, as if room were scarce in that
mighty plain.
The sidewalk was of boards that were more or less loose and
inclined to rattle when walked upon. In the middle of the town,
opposite the stores, was the “plaza” which is native to all towns
beyond the Rocky Mountains—a large, unfenced, level vacancy,
with a liberty pole in it, and very useful as a place for public
auctions, horse trades, and mass meetings, and likewise for
teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of the plaza were faced by
stores, offices and stables.
The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering.
We were introduced to several citizens, at the stage-office
and on the way up to the Governor’s from the hotel—among others,
to a Mr. Harris, who was on horseback; he began to say something,
but interrupted himself with the remark:
“I’ll have to get you to excuse me a minute; yonder is the
witness that swore I helped to rob the California coach—a piece
of impertinent intermeddling, sir, for I am not even acquainted
with the man.”
Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a
six-shooter, and the stranger began to explain with another. When
the pistols were emptied, the stranger resumed his work (mending
a whip-lash), and Mr. Harris rode by with a polite nod, homeward
bound, with a bullet through one of his lungs, and several in his
hips; and from them issued little rivulets of blood that coursed
down the horse’s sides and made the animal look quite
picturesque. I never saw Harris shoot a man after that but it
recalled to mind that first day in Carson.
This was all we saw that day, for it was two o’clock, now, and
according to custom the daily “Washoe Zephyr” set in; a soaring
dust-drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise
came with it, and the capital of Nevada Territory disappeared
from view.
Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly
uninteresting to new comers; for the vast dust cloud was thickly
freckled with things strange to the upper air—things living and
dead, that flitted hither and thither, going and coming,
appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of
dust—hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the remote heavens;
blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade lower;
door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal
scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children
on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies and
wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet
above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant
lots.
It was something to see that much. I could have seen more, if
I could have kept the dust out of my eyes.
But seriously a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter.
It blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally,
rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stage
coach over and spills the passengers; and tradition says the
reason there are so many bald people there, is, that the wind
blows the hair off their heads while they are looking skyward
after their hats. Carson streets seldom look inactive on Summer
afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around
their escaping hats, like chambermaids trying to head off a
spider.
The “Washoe Zephyr” (Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevada) is a
peculiar Scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth “whence it
cometh.” That is to say, where it originates. It comes right over
the mountains from the West, but when one crosses the ridge he
does not find any of it on the other side! It probably is
manufactured on the mountain-top for the occasion, and starts
from there. It is a pretty regular wind, in the summer time. Its
office hours are from two in the afternoon till two the next
morning; and anybody venturing abroad during those twelve hours
needs to allow for the wind or he will bring up a mile or two to
leeward of the point he is aiming at. And yet the first complaint
a Washoe visitor to San Francisco makes, is that the sea winds
blow so, there! There is a good deal of human nature in that.
We found the state palace of the Governor of Nevada Territory
to consist of a white frame one-story house with two small rooms
in it and a stanchion supported shed in front—for grandeur—it
compelled the respect of the citizen and inspired the Indians
with awe. The newly arrived Chief and Associate Justices of the
Territory, and other machinery of the government, were domiciled
with less splendor. They were boarding around privately, and had
their offices in their bedrooms.
The Secretary and I took quarters in the “ranch” of a worthy
French lady by the name of Bridget O’Flannigan, a camp follower
of his Excellency the Governor. She had known him in his
prosperity as commander-in-chief of the Metropolitan Police of
New York, and she would not desert him in his adversity as
Governor of Nevada.
Our room was on the lower floor, facing the plaza, and when we
had got our bed, a small table, two chairs, the government
fire-proof safe, and the Unabridged Dictionary into it, there was
still room enough left for a visitor—may be two, but not without
straining the walls. But the walls could stand it—at least the
partitions could, for they consisted simply of one thickness of
white “cotton domestic” stretched from corner to corner of the
room. This was the rule in Carson—any other kind of partition
was the rare exception. And if you stood in a dark room and your
neighbors in the next had lights, the shadows on your canvas told
queer secrets sometimes! Very often these partitions were made of
old flour sacks basted together; and then the difference between
the common herd and the aristocracy was, that the common herd had
unornamented sacks, while the walls of the aristocrat were
overpowering with rudimental fresco—i.e., red and blue mill
brands on the flour sacks.
Occasionally, also, the better classes embellished their
canvas by pasting pictures from Harper’s Weekly on them. In many
cases, too, the wealthy and the cultured rose to spittoons and
other evidences of a sumptuous and luxurious taste. [Washoe
people take a joke so hard that I must explain that the above
description was only the rule; there were many honorable
exceptions in Carson—plastered ceilings and houses that had
considerable furniture in them.—M. T.]
We had a carpet and a genuine queen’s-ware washbowl.
Consequently we were hated without reserve by the other tenants
of the O’Flannigan “ranch.” When we added a painted oilcloth
window curtain, we simply took our lives into our own hands. To
prevent bloodshed I removed up stairs and took up quarters with
the untitled plebeians in one of the fourteen white pine
cot-bedsteads that stood in two long ranks in the one sole room
of which the second story consisted.
It was a jolly company, the fourteen. They were principally
voluntary camp-followers of the Governor, who had joined his
retinue by their own election at New York and San Francisco and
came along, feeling that in the scuffle for little territorial
crumbs and offices they could not make their condition more
precarious than it was, and might reasonably expect to make it
better. They were popularly known as the “Irish Brigade,” though
there were only four or five Irishmen among all the Governor’s
retainers.
His good-natured Excellency was much annoyed at the gossip his
henchmen created—especially when there arose a rumor that they
were paid assassins of his, brought along to quietly reduce the
democratic vote when desirable!
Mrs. O’Flannigan was boarding and lodging them at ten dollars
a week apiece, and they were cheerfully giving their notes for
it. They were perfectly satisfied, but Bridget presently found
that notes that could not be discounted were but a feeble
constitution for a Carson boarding-house. So she began to harry
the Governor to find employment for the “Brigade.” Her
importunities and theirs together drove him to a gentle
desperation at last, and he finally summoned the Brigade to the
presence. Then, said he:
“Gentlemen, I have planned a lucrative and useful service for
you—a service which will provide you with recreation amid noble
landscapes, and afford you never ceasing opportunities for
enriching your minds by observation and study. I want you to
survey a railroad from Carson City westward to a certain point!
When the legislature meets I will have the necessary bill passed
and the remuneration arranged.”
“What, a railroad over the Sierra Nevada Mountains?”
“Well, then, survey it eastward to a certain point!”
He converted them into surveyors, chain-bearers and so on, and
turned them loose in the desert. It was “recreation” with a
vengeance! Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and
sage-brush, under a sultry sun and among cattle bones, cayotes
and tarantulas.
“Romantic adventure” could go no further. They surveyed very
slowly, very deliberately, very carefully. They returned every
night during the first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry,
but very jolly. They brought in great store of prodigious hairy
spiders—tarantulas—and imprisoned them in covered tumblers up
stairs in the “ranch.” After the first week, they had to camp on
the field, for they were getting well eastward. They made a good
many inquiries as to the location of that indefinite “certain
point,” but got no information. At last, to a peculiarly urgent
inquiry of “How far eastward?” Governor Nye telegraphed back:
“To the Atlantic Ocean, blast you!—and then bridge it and go
on!”
This brought back the dusty toilers, who sent in a report and
ceased from their labors. The Governor was always comfortable
about it; he said Mrs. O’Flannigan would hold him for the
Brigade’s board anyhow, and he intended to get what entertainment
he could out of the boys; he said, with his old-time pleasant
twinkle, that he meant to survey them into Utah and then
telegraph Brigham to hang them for trespass!
The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so
we had quite a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room.
Some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with
their hairy, muscular legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or
their dignity offended, they were the wickedest-looking
desperadoes the animal world can furnish. If their glass
prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up and
spoiling for a fight in a minute. Starchy?—proud? Indeed, they
would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of
Congress. There was as usual a furious “zephyr” blowing the first
night of the brigade’s return, and about midnight the roof of an
adjoining stable blew off, and a corner of it came crashing
through the side of our ranch. There was a simultaneous
awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the brigade in the dark,
and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the
narrow aisle between the bedrows. In the midst of the turmoil,
Bob H——sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a
shelf with his head. Instantly he shouted:
“Turn out, boys—the tarantulas is loose!”
No warning ever sounded so dreadful. Nobody tried, any longer,
to leave the room, lest he might step on a tarantula. Every man
groped for a trunk or a bed, and jumped on it. Then followed the
strangest silence—a silence of grisly suspense it was,
too—waiting, expectancy, fear. It was as dark as pitch, and one
had to imagine the spectacle of those fourteen scant-clad men
roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a thing could be
seen. Then came occasional little interruptions of the silence,
and one could recognize a man and tell his locality by his voice,
or locate any other sound a sufferer made by his gropings or
changes of position. The occasional voices were not given to much
speaking—you simply heard a gentle ejaculation of “Ow!” followed
by a solid thump, and you knew the gentleman had felt a hairy
blanket or something touch his bare skin and had skipped from a
bed to the floor. Another silence. Presently you would hear a
gasping voice say:
“Su—su—something’s crawling up the back of my neck!”
Every now and then you could hear a little subdued scramble
and a sorrowful “O Lord!” and then you knew that somebody was
getting away from something he took for a tarantula, and not
losing any time about it, either. Directly a voice in the corner
rang out wild and clear:
“I’ve got him! I’ve got him!” [Pause, and probable change of
circumstances.] “No, he’s got me! Oh, ain’t they never going to
fetch a lantern!”
The lantern came at that moment, in the hands of Mrs.
O’Flannigan, whose anxiety to know the amount of damage done by
the assaulting roof had not prevented her waiting a judicious
interval, after getting out of bed and lighting up, to see if the
wind was done, now, up stairs, or had a larger contract.
The landscape presented when the lantern flashed into the room
was picturesque, and might have been funny to some people, but
was not to us. Although we were perched so strangely upon boxes,
trunks and beds, and so strangely attired, too, we were too
earnestly distressed and too genuinely miserable to see any fun
about it, and there was not the semblance of a smile anywhere
visible. I know I am not capable of suffering more than I did
during those few minutes of suspense in the dark, surrounded by
those creeping, bloody-minded tarantulas. I had skipped from bed
to bed and from box to box in a cold agony, and every time I
touched anything that was furzy I fancied I felt the fangs. I had
rather go to war than live that episode over again. Nobody was
hurt. The man who thought a tarantula had “got him” was
mistaken—only a crack in a box had caught his finger. Not one of
those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again. There were ten or
twelve of them. We took candles and hunted the place high and low
for them, but with no success. Did we go back to bed then? We did
nothing of the kind. Money could not have persuaded us to do it.
We sat up the rest of the night playing cribbage and keeping a
sharp lookout for the enemy.
