THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER

WHEN the penniless younger son of the English society play is jilted by the luxury-loving heroine, he invariably packs his portmanteau and betakes himself to Rhodesia to make his fortune. Fifty years ago he sought the golden fleece in California; thirty years ago he took passage by P. & O. boat for the Australian diggings; ten years ago he helped to swell the mad rush to the Yukon; to-day his journey's end is the newest of the great, new nations—Rhodesia. He returns in the fourth act, broad-hatted, bronzed, and boisterous, to announce that he is the owner of a ten-thousand-acre farm, or a diamond field, or a gold mine, or all of them, and that he has come home to find a girl to share his farm-house on the Rhodesian veldt, where good cooking is more essential in a wife than good clothes and a good complexion.

Now, beyond having a vague idea that Rhodesia is a frontier country somewhere at the back of beyond, there is only about one in every fifty of the audience who has any definite notion where or what it really is. Picture, then, if you can, a territory about the size of all the Atlantic States, from Florida to Maine, put together, with the dry, dusty, sunny climate of southern California and the fertile, rolling, well-watered, and well-wooded surface of Indiana; picture such a country dropped down in the heart of equatorial Africa—that is Rhodesia. It lies a little above and to the right of that speckled yellow patch on the map of Africa which was labelled in our school geographies the Kalahari Desert. Bearing the name of the great empire-builder is the whole of that region which is bounded on the north by the Congo and the sleeping-sickness, on the east by Mozambique and the black-water fever, on the west by Angola and the cocoa atrocities, and on the south by the Transvaal and the discontented Dutch. It is watered by the Limpopo, which forms its southernmost boundary; by the Zambezi, which separates Southern Rhodesia from the northeast and northwest provinces; and by the innumerable streams which unite to form the Congo.

When the railway which English concessionaires are now pushing inland from the coast of Angola to the Zambezi is completed, the front door to Rhodesia will be Lobito Bay, thus bringing Bulawayo within sixteen days of the Strand by boat and rail. At present, however, the country must be entered through the cellar, which means Cape Town and a railway journey of fourteen hundred miles; or by the side door at Beira, a fever-stricken Portuguese town on the East Coast, which is fortunate in being but a night's journey by rail from the Rhodesian frontier and is, in consequence, the gateway through which British jams, American harvesters, and German jack-knives are opening up inner Africa to foreign exploitation.

The Rhodesia-bound traveller who escapes landing at Beira in a basket is fortunate, for it has a poorly sheltered harbour and neither dock, jetty, nor wharf, so that in the monsoon months, when the great combers come roaring in from the Indian Ocean mountain-high, there is about as much chance of getting the steam tender alongside the rolling liner as there is of getting a frightened horse alongside a panting automobile. If a dangerous sea is running, the disembarking passenger is put into a cylindrical, elongated basket, a sort of enlarged edition of those used for soiled towels in the lavatories of hotels; a wheezing donkey-engine swings it up and outward and, if the man at the lever calculates the roll of the ship correctly, drops it with a thud on the deck of the tender plunging off-side.

Built on a stretch of sun-baked sand, between a miasmal jungle and the sea, Beira is the hottest and unhealthiest place in all East Africa. “It is one of the places that the Lord has overlooked,” remarked a sallow-faced resident, as he took his hourly dose of quinine. Even the paid-to-be-enthusiastic author of the steamship company's glowing booklet hesitates at depicting this fever-haunted, sun-baked, sand-suffocated seaport of Mozambique, contenting himself with the noncommittal statement that “it is indescribable; it is just Beira.” The town has but three attractions: a broad-verandaed hotel where they charge you forty cents for a lemonade with no ice in it; a golf course, laid out by a newly arrived Englishman, who died of sunstroke the first day he played on it; and a trolley system which makes every resident the owner of his own street-car. The heat in Beira being too great to permit of walking—a shaded thermometer not infrequently climbs to one hundred and twenty degrees; the streets being too deep in sand for the use of vehicles; and the tsetse-fly killing off horses in a few days, those European traders and officials who are condemned to dwell in Beira get about in “trolleys” of their own. These two-seated, hooded conveyances, which are a sort of cross between a hand-car, a baby-carriage, and the wheeled chairs on the board walk at Atlantic City, are pushed by half-naked and perspiring natives over a track which extends from one end of the town to the other and with sidings into every man's front yard. It struck me, however, that the most interesting things in Beira were the corrugated-iron shanty and the stretch of wooden platform which mark the terminus of the railway, and from which, in answer to my anxious queries, I was assured that a train departed twice weekly for Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. I used to sit on the veranda of the hotel and stare across the stretch of burning sand at that wretched station as longingly as the small boy stares at the red numeral on the calendar which indicates the Fourth of July.

A temperature of one hundred and eighteen degrees in my compartment of the sleeping-car; miasma rising in cloud wreaths from the jungle; a station platform, alive with slovenly Portuguese soldiers with faces as yellow as their uniforms; helmeted, gaunt-cheeked traders and officials, and cotton-clad Swahilis, comprised my last recollection of Beira and the terrible East Coast. The next morning I awoke in my compartment shivering, not from fever but from cold. Gone, as though in a bad dream, were the glaring sands, the steaming jungle, and the sallow, fever-racked men. Instead, my car window framed a picture of rolling, grass-covered uplands, dotted here and there with herds of grazing cattle and substantial, whitewashed farm-houses, while back of all was the gray-blue of distant mountains. As I looked at the transformed landscape incredulously, the train halted at a way-station swarming with broad-hatted, flannel-shirted, sun-tanned men with clean-cut Anglo-Saxon faces. A row of saddle-horses were tied to the station fence, while their owners stamped up and down the platform impatiently, awaiting the sorting of the infrequent mail from home; a democrat wagon and a clumsy Cape cart were drawn up in the roadway; and at a house close by a woman in a sunbonnet was feeding chickens. “Where are we?” I inquired of the guard, as he passed through the train. “We're just into Rhodesia now, sir,” said he, touching his cap. “This is Umtali, in Mashonaland.” (Now, if I had asked that same question of a brakeman on one of our own railways, he would probably have answered, with the independence of his kind: “Can't you read the sign on the station for yourself?”) “Surely there must be some mistake,” I said to myself. “This cannot be Central Africa, for where are the impenetrable jungles through which Livingstone cut his way, the savage animals which Du Chaillu shot, and the naked savages with whom Stanley alternately battled and bartered? This is not Africa; this is our own West, with its men in corduroy and sombreros and its women in gingham, with its open, rolling prairies and its air like dry champagne.” Indeed, throughout my stay in Rhodesia I could not rid myself of the impression that I was back in the American West of thirty years ago, before the pioneer, the prospector, and the cow-puncher had retreated before the advance of the railway, the harvester, and the motor-car.

The story of the taking and making of Rhodesia forms one of the most picturesque and thrilling chapters in the history of England's colonial expansion. About the time that the nineteenth century had reached its turning-point, a strange tale, passing by word of mouth from native kraal to native kraal, came at last to the ears of a Scotch worker in the mission field of Bechuanaland. It was a tale of a waterfall somewhere in the jungles of the distant north; a waterfall so mighty, declared the natives, that the spray from it looked like a storm cloud on the horizon and the thunder of its waters could be heard four days' trek away. So the missionary, wearied with the tedium of proselyting amid a peaceful people and restless with the curiosity of the born explorer, set out on a long and lonely march to the northward, through a country which no white man's eyes had ever seen. It took him three years to reach the falls for which he started, but when at last he stood upon the brink of the canyon and looked down upon the waters of the Zambezi as they hurtled over four hundred feet of sheerest cliff, he was so awed by their majesty and their beauty that he named them after Victoria, the young English queen. Before he left the missionary-explorer carved his name on the trunk of a near-by tree, where it can be seen to-day; the name is David Livingstone.

For a quarter of a century the regions adjacent to the Zambezi were disturbed only by migratory bands of natives and marauding animals. Then Stanley came with his mile-long caravan of porters, halting long enough to explore and map the region, on his historic march from coast to coast. In the middle eighties a young English prospector, trekking through the country with a single wagon, found that for which he was seeking—gold. Likewise he saw that its verdure-clad prairies would support many cattle and that its virgin soil was adapted for many kinds of crops; that it was, in short, a white man's country. Unarmed and unaccompanied, he penetrated to the kraal of Lobenguela, the chief of the warlike Matabele, who occupied the region, and induced him to sign a treaty placing his country under British protection. The price paid him was five hundred dollars a month and a thousand antiquated rifles; cheap enough, surely, for a territory three times the size of Texas and as rich in natural resources as California. A year later the British South Africa Company, a corporation capitalised at thirty million dollars, under a charter granted by the Imperial Government, began the work of exploiting the concession; naming it, properly enough, after Cecil John Rhodes, the lone prospector who, with the vision of a prophet, had foreseen its possibilities and by whose unaided efforts it had been obtained. Such was the first step in Rhodes's policy of British expansion northward—a policy so successful that in his own lifetime he saw the frontiers of British Africa pushed from the Orange River to the Nile.

To hand over a colonial possession, its inhabitants and its resources, to be administered and exploited by a private corporation, sounds like a strange proceeding to American ears. Imagine turning the Philippines over to the Standard Oil Company and giving that corporation permission to appoint its own officials, make its own laws, assess its own taxes, and maintain its own military force in those islands. That, roughly speaking, was about what England did when she turned Rhodesia over to the chartered company. It should be remembered, however, that, beginning when the European nations were entering upon an era of economic exploration of hitherto virgin territories, these chartered companies have played a large part in the history of colonisation in general and in the upbuilding of the British Empire in particular, though in the great majority of cases it was trade, not empire, at which they aimed. Warned, however, by the fashion in which the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company abused their power, the British Government keeps a jealous eye on the activities of the Rhodesian concessionaires, their charter, while conferring broad trading privileges and great administrative powers, differing from earlier instruments in neither delegating sovereignty nor granting an exclusive monopoly.

The Rhodesia protectorate is the result of the consolidation of four great native kingdoms: Mashonaland in the southeast, Matabeleland in the southwest, Barotseland in the northwest, and in the northeast a portion of the now separately administered protectorate of Nyasaland. Practically the whole country is an elevated veldt, or plateau, ranging from three thousand five hundred to five thousand feet above sea-level; studded with granite kopjes which in the south attain to the dignity of a mountain chain; well watered by tributaries of the Congo, the Zambezi, and the Limpopo; and covered with a luxuriant vegetation. Like California, Southern Rhodesia has a unique and hospitable climate, free from the dangerous heats of an African summer and from cold winds in winter. Though the climate of nearly all of Southern Rhodesia is suitable for Europeans, much of the trans-Zambezi provinces, especially along the river valleys and in the low-lying, swampy regions near the great equatorial lakes, reeks with malaria, while in certain other areas, now carefully delimited and guarded by governmental regulation, the tsetse-fly commits terrible ravages among cattle and horses and the sleeping-sickness among men. The climate as a whole, however, is characterised by a rather remarkable equability of temperature, especially when it is remembered that Rhodesia extends from the borders of the temperate zone to within a few degrees of the equator. At Salisbury, the capital, for example, the mean July temperature is 57.5° and for January 70.5°, the extremes for the year ranging from 34° to 93°. It is a significant fact, however, that the glowing prospectuses of the chartered company touch but lightly on the climatic conditions which prevail north of the Zambezi, a region from which, it struck me, the European settler who does not possess a system that is proof against every form of tropical fever, a head that is proof against sunstroke, and a mind which is proof against that oftentimes fatal form of homesickness which the army surgeons call nostalgia, is much more likely to go home in a coffin than in a cabine de luxe.

In mines of gold, of silver, and of diamonds Rhodesia is very rich; agriculturally it is very fertile, for in addition to the native crops of rice, tobacco, cotton, and india-rubber, the fruits, vegetables, and cereals of Europe and America are profitably grown. The great fields of maize, or “mealies,” as all South Africans call it, through which my train frequently passed, constantly reminded me of scenes in our own “corn belt”; but in the watch-towers which rise from every corn-field, atop of which an armed Kaffir sits day and night to protect the crops from the raids of wild pigs and baboons, Rhodesia has a feature which she is welcome to consider exclusively her own.

Though Rhodesia is distinctly a frontier country, with many of a frontier's defects, her towns—Salisbury, Bulawayo, Umtali, and the rest—are not frontier towns as we knew them in Butte, Cheyenne, Deadwood, and Carson City. There are saloons, of course, but they are not of the “gin palace” variety, nor did it strike me that intoxication was particularly common; certainly nothing like what it used to be during the gold-rush days in Alaska or in our own West. This may be due to the fantastic prices charged for liquor—a whiskey-and-soda costs sixty cent—and then again it maybe due to the fact that most of the settlers have brought their families with them, so that, instead of spending their evenings leaning over green tables or polished bars, they devote them to cricket, gardening, or a six-weeks-old English paper. Though nearly every one goes armed, the streets of the Rhodesian towns are as peaceable as Commonwealth Avenue, in Boston, on a Sunday morning. Indeed, the commandant of police in Bulawayo assured me that he had had only one shooting affray during his term of office. In Rhodesia, should a man draw his gun as the easiest means of settling a quarrel, his companions, instead of responding by drawing theirs, would probably call a constable and have him bound over to keep the peace. Even the rights of the natives are rigidly safeguarded by law, an American settler in Umtali complaining to me most bitterly that “it's more dangerous for a white man to kick a nigger down here than it is for him to kill one in the States.” Now, all this was rather disappointing for one who, like myself, was on the lookout for the local colour and picturesqueness and whoop-her-up-boys excitement which one naturally associates with life on a frontier; but I might have expected just what I found, for wherever the flag of England flies, whether over the gold-miners of the Yukon, the ivory-traders of Uganda, or the settlers of Rhodesia, there will be found the deep-seated respect of the Englishman for English order and English law.

In my opinion the country club, more than any other single factor, has contributed most to the making, socially and morally, of Rhodesia. Though the American West is dotted with just such towns as Salisbury, Bulawayo, Gwelo, and Umtali, with the same limitations, pitfalls, and possibilities, the men's centre of interest, after the day's work is over, is the saloon, the dance-hall, or the barber-shop with a pool-room in the rear. They do things differently in central Africa. In every Rhodesian town large enough to support one—and the same is true of all Britain's colonial possessions—I found that a “sports club” had been established on the edge of the town. Often it was nothing but a ramshackle shed or cottage that had been given a coat of paint and had a veranda added, but files of the English newspapers and illustrated weeklies were to be found inside, while from the tea tables on the veranda one overlooked half a dozen tennis courts, a cricket ground, and a foot-ball field. It is here that the settlers—men, women, and children—congregate toward evening, to discuss the crop prospects, the local taxes, the latest gold discoveries, and, above all else, the news contained in the weekly mail from home. Why have not our own progressive prairie towns some simple social system like this? It was in speaking of this very thing that the mayor of Salisbury—himself an American-remarked: “In the little, every-day things which make for successful colonisation of a new country, you fellows in the States are twenty years behind us.”

Living is expensive in Rhodesia, the prices of necessaries usually being high and of luxuries ofttimes fantastic. To counterbalance this, however, wages are extraordinarily high. It is useless to attempt to quote wages, for the farther up-country a man gets the higher pay he can command, so I will content myself with the bare statement that for the skilled workman, be he carpenter, blacksmith, mason, or wheelwright, larger wages are to be earned than in any part of the world that I know. The same is true of the man who has had practical experience in agriculture or stock-raising, there being a steady demand for men conversant with dairying, cattle-breeding, and irrigation. Let me drive home and copper-rivet the fact, however, that in Rhodesia, as in nearly all new countries, where there is a considerable native population to draw upon, there is no place for the unskilled labourer.

For the man with resource and a little capital there are many roads to wealth in British Africa. I know of one, formerly a laundry employee in Chicago, who landed in Rhodesia with limited capital but unlimited confidence. Recognising that the country had arrived at that stage of civilisation where the people were tired of wearing flannel shirts, but could not afford to have white ones ruined by Kaffir washermen, he started a chain of sanitary up-to-date laundries, and is to-day one of the wealthy men of the colony. If you ever had to pay one of his laundry bills you would understand why. Another American, starting business as a hotel-keeper in Salisbury, soon perceived that the people were ripe for some form of amusement other than that provided by the cricket fields and saloons; so he built a string of cinematograph and vaudeville theatres combined, and to-day, on the very spot where Lobenguela's medicine-men performed their bloody rites a dozen years ago, you can hear the whir of the moving-picture machine and see on the canvas screen a military review at Aldershot or a bathing scene at Asbury Park. Still another American whom I met has increased the thickness of his wallet by supplying prospectors and settlers with sectional houses which are easily portable and can be erected in an hour. Taking the circular, conical-roofed hut of the Matabele as his model, he evolved an affair of corrugated iron which combines simplicity, portability, and practicability with a low price, so that to-day, as you travel through Rhodesia, you will see these American-made imitations of Kaffir huts dotting the veldt.

Though Rhodesia has a black population of one million six hundred thousand, as against twenty thousand whites, there has thus far been no such thing as race troubles or a colour question, due in large measure, no doubt, to the firm and just supervision exercised by the British resident commissioners. Arms, ammunition, and liquor excepted, natives and Europeans are under the same conditions. Land has been set apart for tribal settlements, the mineral rights being reserved to the company, but, if the native occupation is disturbed, new lands must immediately be assigned, all disputes being ultimately referrible to the British high commissioner. Those natives living near the towns are segregated in settlements of their own, a native under no circumstances being permitted to remain within the town limits after nightfall, or to enter them in the day-time without a pass signed by the commandant of police. Though possessing many of the temperamental characteristics of the American negro, and in particular his aversion for manual work, the Rhodesian native is, on the whole, honest and trustworthy, a well-disciplined and efficient force of native constabulary having been recruited from the warlike Barotse and Matabele.

Highways of steel bisect Rhodesia in both directions. From Plumtree, on the borders of Bechuanaland, the Rhodesian section of the great Cape-to-Cairo system stretches straight across the country to Bwana M'kubwa, on the Congo frontier, while another line, the Rhodesia, Mashonaland, and Beira, links up, as its name indicates, the transcontinental system with the East Coast. Though the much-advertised Zambezi Express is scarcely the “veritable train de luxe” which the railway folders call it, it is a comfortable enough train nevertheless, with electric-lighted dining and sleeping cars, the latter being fitted, as befits a dusty country, with baths. The dining-car tariff is on a sliding scale; the farther up-country you travel the higher the prices ascend. Between Cape Town and Mafeking the charges for meals seemed to me exceedingly reasonable (fifty cents for breakfast, sixty cents for luncheon, and seventy-five cents for dinner); between Mafeking and Bulawayo they are only moderate; between Bulawayo and the Zambezi they are high; and north of the Zambezi—when you can get any food at all—the charges for it are exorbitant. When the section to Lake Tanganyika is completed only a millionaire can afford to enter the dining-car. It speaks volumes for the development of British South Africa, however, that one can get into a sleeping-car in Cape Town and get out of it again, six days later, on the navigable head-waters of the Congo, covering the distance of nearly two thousand five hundred miles at a total cost of eighty dollars—and much of it through a country which has been opened to the white man scarcely a dozen years.

Just as every visitor to the United States heads straight for Niagara, so every visitor to South Africa purchases forthwith a ticket to the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, the mighty cataract in the heart of Rhodesia which is the greatest natural wonder in the Dark Continent and, perhaps, in the world. The natives call the falls Mosi-oa-tunya, which means “Thundering Smoke,” and you appreciate the name's significance when your train halts at daybreak at a wayside station, sixty miles away, and you see above the tree-tops a cloud of smoky vapour and hear a low humming like a million sewing-machines. It is so utterly impossible for the eye, the mind, and the imagination to grasp the size, grandeur, and beauty of the Victoria Falls that it is futile to attempt to describe them. If you can picture an unbroken sheet of water forty city blocks in width, or as long as from the Grand Central Station, in New York, to Washington Square, hurtling over a precipice twice as high as the Flatiron Building, you will have the best idea that I can give you of what the Victoria Falls are like. They are unique in that the level of the land above the falls is the same as that below, the entire breadth of the second greatest river in Africa falling precipitately into a deep and narrow chasm, from which the only outlet is an opening in the rock less than one hundred yards wide. From the Boiling Pot, as this seething caldron of waters is called, the contents of the Zambezi rush with unbridled fury through a deep and narrow gorge of basaltic cliffs, which, nowhere inferior to the rapids at Niagara, extends with many zigzag windings for more than forty miles. My first glimpse of the falls was in the early morning, and the lovely, reeking splendour of the scene, as the great, placid river, all unconscious of its fate, rolls out of the mysterious depths of Africa, comes suddenly to the precipice's brink, and plunges in one mighty torrent into the obscurity of the cavern below, the rolling clouds of spray, the trembling earth, the sombre rain-forest on the opposite bank, and a rainbow stealing over all, made a picture which will remain sharp and clear in my memory as long as I live.

The Outer Lands are almost all exploited; the work of the pioneer and the frontiersman is nearly finished, and in another decade or so we shall see their like no more. Rhodesia is the last of the great new countries open to colonisation under Anglo-Saxon ideals of government and climatically suitable for the propagation of the Anglo-Saxon race. Though the handful of hardy settlers who have already made it their home speak with the burr of the shires instead of the drawl of the plains; though they wear corded riding-breeches instead of leather “chaps”; and stuff Cavendish into their pipes instead of rolling their cigarettes from Bull Durham, they and the passing plainsmen of our own West are, when all is said and done, brothers under their skins.

With the completion of the Cape-to-Cairo trunk line and its subsidiary systems to either coast, with the exploitation of the mineral deposits which constitute so much of Rhodesia's wealth, and with the harnessing of the great falls and the utilisation of the limitless power which will be obtainable from them, this virgin territory in the heart of Africa bids fair to be to the home and fortune seekers of to-morrow what the American West was to those of yesterday, and what northwestern Canada is to those of to-day. A few years more and it will be a developed and prosperous nation. To-day it is the last of the world's frontiers, where the hardy and adventurous of our race are still fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation.