FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER.

Fathers of Waters—"Rich Lands lie Flat"—The Misery River—Council Bluffs—A "Live" town, sir—Two murders: a contrast—Omaha—The immorality of "writing up"—On the prairies—The modesty of "Wish-ton-Wish"—The antelope's tower of refuge—Out of Nebraska into Colorado—Man-eating Tiger.

FROM Chicago to Omaha by the Chicago and "Northwestern" route is not an exhilarating journey. When Nature begins to make anything out here in America she never seems to know when to stop. She can never make a few of anything. For instance, it might have been thought that one or two hundred miles of perfectly flat land was enough at a time. But Nature, having once commenced flattening out the land, cannot leave off. So all the way from Chicago to Omaha there is the one same pattern of country, a wilderness of maize-stubble and virgin land, broken only for the first half of the way by occasional patches of water-oak, and for the second half of willows.

Just on the frontier-line of these two vegetable divisions of the country lies a tract of bright turf-land. What a magician this same turf is! It is Wendell Holmes, I think, who says that Anglo-Saxons emigrate only "in the line of turf."

The better half of the journey passed on Sunday, and the people were all out in loitering, well-dressed groups "to see the train pass," and at the stations where we stopped, to see the passengers, too. Where they came from it was not easy to tell, for the homesteads in sight were very few and far between. Yet there they were, happy, healthy, well-to-do contented-looking families, enjoying the Day of Rest—the one dissipation of the hard-worked week. What a comfortable connecting link with the outer world the railway must be to these scattered dwellers on this prairie-land!

So through Illinois to the Mississippi. How wonderfully it resembles the Indus where it flows past Lower Sind. A minaret or two, a blue-tiled cupola and a clump of palms would make the resemblance of the Mississippi at Clinton to the Indus below Rohri complete. And both rivers claim to be "the Father of Waters." I would not undertake to decide between them. In modern annals, of course, the American must take pre-eminence; but what can surpass the historic grandeur that dignifies the Indian stream?

And so into Iowa, just as flat, and as rich, and as monotonous as Illinois, and with just the same leagues of maize-stubble, unbroken soil, water-oaks and willows. And then, in the deepening twilight, to Cedar Rapids, with the pleasant sound of rushing water and all the townsfolk waiting "to see the train" on their way from church, standing in groups, with their prayer-books and Bibles in their hands.

By the way, what an admirable significance there is in he care with which these young townships discharge their duties to their religion and the dead. The church or prayer-house seems to be always one of the first and finest buildings. With only half-a-dozen homesteads in sight in some places, there is the church and while all the rest are of the humblest class of frame houses, the church is of brick. The cemeteries again. Before even the plots round the living are set in order, "God's acre" (often the best site in the neighbourhood) is neatly fenced and laid out.

And I thought it somehow a beautiful touch of national character, this reverent providence for the dead that are to come. And just before I went to sleep, I saw out in the moonlit country a cemetery, and on the crest of the rising ground stood one solitary tombstone, the pioneer of the many—the first dead settler's grave. In this new country the living are as yet in the majority!

Awakening, find myself still in Iowa, and Iowa still as flat as ever. Not spirit enough in all these hundred miles of land to firk up even a hillock, a mound, a pimple. But to make a new proverb, "Rich lands lie flat;" and Iowa; in time, will be able to feed the world—aye, and to clothe it too.

In the mean time we are approaching the Missouri, through levels in which the jack-rabbit abounds, and every farmer, therefore, seems to keep a greyhound for coursing the long-eared aborigines. The willows, conscious of secret resources of water, are already in leaf, and overhead the wild ducks and geese are passing to their feeding-grounds. Here I saw "blue" grass for the first time, and I must say I am glad that grass is usually green. Elsewhere in the States, English grass is called "blue grass;" but in some parts, as here in this part of Iowa, there is a native grass which is literally blue. And it is not an improvement, so far as the effect on the landscape goes, upon the old fashioned colour for grass. And then the Missouri, a muddy, shapeless, dissipated stream. The people on its banks call it "treacherous," and pronounce its name "Misery." It is certainly a most unprepossessing river, with its ill-gotten banks of ugly sand, and its lazy brown waters gurgling along in an overgrown, self-satisfied way. It is a bullying stream; gives nobody peace that lives near it; and is perpetually trying in an underhanded sort of way to "scour" out the foundations of the hollow columns on which the bridges across it are built. But the abundance of water-fowl upon its banks and side-waters is a redeeming feature for all who care to carry a gun, and I confess I should like to have had a day's leisure at Council Bluffs to go out and have a shot. The inhabitants of the place, however, do not seem to be goose-eaters, for, close season or not, I cannot imagine their permitting flocks of these eminently edible birds to fly circling about over their houses, within forty yards of the ground. The wild-goose is proverbially a wary fowl, but here at Council Bluffs they have apparently become from long immunity as impertinent and careless as sparrows.

Council Bluffs, as the pow-wow place of the Red Men in the days when Iowa was rolling prairie and bison used to browse where horses plough, has many a quaint legend of the past; and in spite of the frame houses that are clustered below them and the superb cobweb bridge—it has few rivals in the world—that here spans the Missouri, the Bluffs, as the rendezvous of Sagamore and Sachem, stand out from the interminable plains eloquent of a very picturesque antiquity. And so to Omaha.

"But I guess, sir, Om'a's a live town. Yes, sir, a live town."

My experiences of Omaha were too brief for me to be just, too disagreeable for me to be impartial. Before breakfast I saw a murder and suicide, and between breakfast and luncheon a fire and several dog-fights. Perhaps I might have seen something more. But a terrible dust-storm raged in the streets all day. Besides, I went away.

I am beginning already to hate "live" towns.

I.

It was during the Afghan War. I had just ridden back from General Roberts' camp in the Thull Valley, on the frontiers of Afghanistan, and found myself stopped on my return at the Kohat Pass. "It is the orders of Government," said the sentry: "the Pass is unsafe for travellers."

But I had to get through the Pass whether it was "safe" or not, for through it lay the only road to General Browne's camp, to which I was attached. So I dismounted, and after a great deal of palaver, partly of bribes, partly of untruths, I not only got past the native sentries, but got a guide to escort me, through the thirty miles of wild Afridi defiles that lay before me. The scenery is, I think, among the finest in the world, while, added to all is the strange fascination of the knowledge that the people who live in the Pass have cherished from generation to generation the most vindictive blood feuds. The villages are surrounded by high walls, loopholed along the top, and the huts in the inside are built against the wall, so that the roofs of them can be used by the men of the village as lounges during the day, and as ramparts for sentries during the night. Within these sullen squares each clan lives in perpetual siege. The women and children are at all times permitted to go to and fro; but for the men, woe to him who happens to stray within reach of the jezails that lie all ready loaded in the loopholes of the next village. The crops are sown and reaped by men with guns slung on their backs, and in the middle of every field stands a martello-tower, in which the peasants can take shelter if neighbours sally out to attack them while at work. Rope-ladders hang from a doorway half-way up the tower, and up this, like lizards, the men scramble, one after the other, as soon as danger threatens, draw in the ladder, and through the loop-holes overlook their menaced crops.

A wonderful country truly, and something in the air to day that makes my guide ride as hard as the road will permit, with his sword drawn across the saddle before him. My revolver is in my hand. And so we clatter along, mile after mile, through the beautiful series of little valleys, grim villages, and towers. Now and again a party of women will step aside to let us pass, or a dog start up to bark at us, but not a single man do we see. Yet I know very well that hundreds of men see us ride by, and that a jezail is lying at every loophole, and covering the very path we ride on.

We reach a sudden turn of the path; my guide gallops round it. He is hardly out of my sight when Bang! bang! It is no use pulling up, and the next instant I am round the corner too. A man, with his jezail still smoking from the last shot, starts up from the undergrowth almost under my horse's feet, and narrowly escapes being ridden down. Another man comes running down the hillside towards him. In front of me, some fifty yards off, is my guide, with his horse's head towards me and his sword in his hand, and on the path, midway between us, lies a heap of brightly-coloured clothing—a dead Afridi! For a second both guide and I thought that it was we who had drawn the fire from the ambushed men. But no, it the poor Afridi lad lying there in the path before us, and the victim of a blood feud. He had tried, no doubt, to steal across from his own village to some friendly hamlet close by, but his lynx-eyed enemies had seen him, and, lying there on either side of his path, had shot him as he passed.

But what a group we were! Myself, with my revolver in my hand, looking, horror-stricken, now at the dead, and now at his murderers; my guide, in the splendid uniform of the Indian irregular cavalry, emotionless as only Orientals can be; the two murderers talking together excitedly; in the middle of us the dead lad! But there was still another figure to be added, for suddenly, along the very path by which the victim had come, there came running an old woman—perhaps she had followed the lad with a mother's tender anxiety for his safety—and in an instant she saw the worst. Without a glance at any of us, she flung herself down with the cry of a breaking heart, by the dead boys side, and as my guide turned to ride on and I followed him, as the murderers slipped away into the undergrowth, we all heard her crooning, between her sobs, over the body of her murdered son.

II.

I was in Omaha. I had just crossed Thirteenth Street, and, turning to look as I passed, at the Catholic church, had caught an idle glimpse of the folk in the street. Among them was a woman at the wooden gateway of a small house, hesitating, so it seemed to me afterwards, about pushing it open, for though she had her hand upon the latch, yet she did not lift it, but appeared to me, at the distance I passed and the cursory glance I gave, to be listening to what somebody was saying to her through the window. Had I been only a few yards nearer! At the moment that I saw her, the wretched woman was gazing with fixed and horrified eyes upon a face—a grim and cruel face—that glared at her from a window, and at a gun that she saw was pointed full at her breast. And the next instant, just as I had turned the corner, there was the report of fire-arms. It did not occur to me to stop. But suddenly I heard a cry, and then a second shot, and somehow there flashed upon my mind the picture of that hesitating woman by the wicket, with her knitted shawl over her head, and the wind blowing her light dress to one side.

I did not turn back, however. For the woman and the shots had only the merest flash of a connexion in my mind. But after a few steps a man came running past me, going perhaps for the doctor, or the police, or the coroner, and the scared look on his face suddenly once more wrenched back to my imagination the woman at the wicket.

So I turned back into Thirteenth Street, and there, in the middle of the road, with a man stooping over her and two women, transfixed by sudden terror into attitudes that were most tragic, I saw the woman lying. Her face was turned up to the bright sunlit sky, her shawl had fallen back about her neck, and her hair lay in the dust. She was already dead. And her murderer? He too had gone to his last account; and as I stood there in that dreary Omaha road, with the wind raising wisps of dust about the horror-stricken group, and thought of the two dead bodies lying there, one in the roadway, the other in the house close by, my mind reverted involuntarily to the fancy that at that very moment the two souls, man and wife, were standing before their Maker, and that perhaps she, the poor mangled woman, was pleading for mercy for the man, her husband, the lover of her youth—her murderer.

—

In the evening, when a cool breeze was blowing, and imagination pictured the trees holding up screens of green foliage before the hotel windows to shut out the ugly views of half-built streets, I entertained feelings that were almost kindly towards Omaha; but the memory of the day that was happily past, as often as it recurred to me, changed them to gall again. All day long there had been a flaring, glaring sun overhead and the wind that was blowing would have done credit to the deserts through which I have since marched with the army in Egypt. It went howling down the street with the voices of wild beasts, and carried with it such simooms of sand as would probably in a week overwhelm and bury in Ninevite oblivion the buildings of this aspiring town. And not only sand, but whirlwinds of vulgar dust also, with occasional discharges of cinders, that came rushing along the road, picking up all the rubbish it could find, dodging up alleys and coming out again with accumulations of straw, rampaging into courtyards in search of paper and rags, standing still in the middle of the roadway to whirl, and altogether behaving itself just as a disreputable and aggressive vagabond may be always expected to behave. Of course I was told it was a "very exceptional" day. It always is a "very exceptional day" wherever a stranger goes. But I must confess that I never saw any place—except Aden, and perhaps East London, in South Africa—that struck me on short acquaintance as so thoroughly undesirable for a lengthened abode. The big black swine rooting about in the back yards, the little black boys playing drearily at "marbles" with bits of stone, the multitude of dogs loafing on the sidewalks, the depressing irregularity Of the streets, the paucity of shade-trees, the sandy bluffs that dominate the town and hold over the heads of the inhabitants the perpetual threat of siroccos, and the general appearance (however false it may have been) of disorder—all combined with various degrees of force to give the impression that Omaha is a place that had from some cause or another been suddenly checked in its natural expansion.

Its geographical position is indisputably a commanding one, and already the great smelting works, with one exception the busiest in the States, the splendid workshops of the Union Pacific Railway, and the thriving distillery close by, give promise of the great industries which in the future this town, with its wonderful advantages of communication, as the meeting-point of great railway high-roads, will attract to itself. Omaha has an admirable opera-house, and when its hotel is rebuilt it will be able to offer visitors good accommodation. It has also an imposing school-house imposingly advertised by being on top of a hill, and the refining grace of gardens is not completely absent, while the "stove-pipe" hat gives fragmentary evidence of advanced civilization. But all this affords encouragement for the future only; at present Omaha is a depressing spot. And so I left the town without regret; but I did not make any effort to shake off the dust of Omaha. That was impossible; it had penetrated the texture of my clothing so completely that nothing but shredding my garments into their original threads would have sufficed.

Now I had read something of Omaha before I went there, had seen it called "a splendid Western city," and been invited to linger there to examine its "dozens of noble monuments to invincible enterprise," which, with "the dozen or more church spires," are supposed to break the sky-line of the view of this "metropolis of the North-western States and Territories." It is possible, therefore, that my profound disappointment with the reality, after reading such exaggerated description, may have tinged my opinion of Omaha, and, combined with the unfortunately "exceptional" day I spent there, have made me think very poorly of the former capital of Nebraska. That it has a great future before it, its position alone guarantees, and the enterprise of Nebraska puts beyond all doubt; but the sight-seer going to Omaha, and expecting to find it anything but a very new town on a very unprepossessing site, will be as greatly disappointed as I was.

Equally unfortunate is the "writing up" which the Valley of the Platte has received. Who, for instance, that has travelled on the railway along that great void can read without annoyance of "beautiful valley landscapes, in which thousands of productive farms, fine farm-houses, blossoming orchards, and thriving cities" are features of the country traversed? No one can charge me with a want of sympathy with the true significance of this wonderful Western country. And I can say, therefore, without hesitation that the dreariness of the country between Omaha and Denver Junction is almost inconceivable. There is hardly even a town worth calling such in sight, much less "thriving cities." The original prairie lies there spread out, on either hand, in nearly all its original barrenness. Interminable plains, that occasionally roll into waves, stretch away to the horizon to right and left, dotted with skeletons of dead cattle and widely scattered herds of living ones. Here and there a cow-boy's shed, and here and there a ranch of the ordinary primitive type, and here and there a dug-out, are all the "features" of the long ride. An occasional emigrant waggon perhaps breaks the dull, dead monotony of the landscape, and in one place there is a solitary bush upon a mound. A hawk floats in the air above a prairie-dog village. A plover sweeps past with its melancholy cry.

No, the journey to North Platte—where a very bad breakfast was put before us at a dollar a head—is not attractive. But here again it is the Possible in the future that makes the now desolate scene so full of interest and so splendidly significant. As a grazing country it can never, perhaps, be very populous; but in time, of course, those ranches, now struggling so bravely against terrible odds, will become "fine farm-houses," and have "blossoming orchards" about them. But as yet these things are not, and for good, all-round dreariness I would not know where to send a friend with such confidence as to the pastures between Omaha and North Platte.

Oh! when are we to have Pullman palace balloons? Condemned to travel, my soul and my bones cry out for air-voyaging.

That some day man should fly like a bird has been, in spite of superstition, an article of honest belief from the beginning of time, and in the dove of Archytas alone we have proof enough that, even in those days, the successful accomplishment of flight was accepted as a fact of science. During the Middle Ages so common was this belief that every man who dabbled in physics was pronounced a magician, and as such was credited with the power of transporting himself through the air at will. Some, indeed, actually claimed the enviable privilege, Friar Bacon among others. But history records no practical illustration of their control of the air, while more than one death is chronicled of daring men who, with insufficient apparatus, launched themselves in imitation of birds upon space, and fell, more or less precipitately, to earth. The Italian who flapped himself off Stirling Castle trusted only to a pair of huge feather wings, which he had tied on to his arms, and got no farther on his way to France than the heads of the spectators at the bottom of the wall; while the Monk of TÜbingen started on his journey from the top of his tower with apparatus that immediately turned inside out, and increased by its weight the momentum with which he came down plumb into the street.

Beyond North Platte the same melancholy expanses again commence, the same rolling prairies, with the same dead cattle and the same herds of live ones, an occasional waggon or a stock-yard or snow-fence being all that interrupts the flat monotony. But approaching Sterling a suspicion of verdure begins in places to steal over the grey prairie, and flights of "larks," with a bright, pleasant note, give something of an air of animation to isolated spots. Here is a plough at work, the first we have passed, I think, since we left Omaha, and the plover piping overhead seem to resent the novelty. Cattle continue to dot the landscape, and all the afternoon the Platte rolls along a sluggish stream parallel to the track.

The train happened to slacken pace at one point, and a man came up to the cars. He was a beggar, and asked our help to get along the road "eastward." One of his arms was in a sling from an accident, and his whole appearance eloquent of utter destitution. And the very landscape pleaded for him. Beggary at any time must be wretchedness, but here in this bleak waste of pasturage it must almost be despair. And as the train sped on, the one dismal figure creeping along by the side of the track, with the dark clouds of a snowstorm coming up to meet him, was strangely pathetic.

And then Sterling. May Sterling be forgiven for the dinner it set before us!

And then on again, across long leagues of level plain, thickly studded with prickly pear patches and seamed with the old bison and antelope tracks leading down from the hills to the river. There are no bison now. They cannot stand before the stove-pipe hat. The sombreroed hunter, with his lasso, the necklace of death, was an annoyance to them; they spent their lives dodging him. The befeathered Indian, "the chivalry of the prairie," who pincushioned their hides full of arrows, was a terror to them, and they fell by thousands. But before the stove-pipe hat the bison fled incontinently by the herd, and have never returned.

The prairie-dogs peep out of their holes at us as we passed. The bashfulness of "Wish-ton-Wish," as the Red Man calls the prairie-dog, is as nearly impudence as one thing can be another. It sits up perkily on one end at the edge of its hole till you are close upon it, and then, with a sudden affectation of being shocked at its own immodesty, dives headlong into its hole; but its hind-legs are not out of sight before the head is up again, and the next instant there is the prairie-dog sitting exactly where you first saw it! Such a burlesque of shyness I never saw in a quadruped before.

A solitary coyote was loitering in a hungry way along a gulch, and I could not help thinking how the most important epochs of one's life may often turn upon the merest trifles. Now, here was a coyote ambling lazily up a certain gulch because it had happened to see some white bones bleaching a little way up it. But in the very next gulch, which the coyote had not happened to go up, were three half-bred greyhounds idling about, just in the humour for something to run after. But they could not see the coyote, though it was really only a few yards off, nor could the coyote see them. So the dogs lounged about in a listless, do-nothing, tired-of-life sort of way, thinking existence as dull as ditch water, while the coyote, unconscious of the narrow escape of its life that it ran, trotted slowly along—scrutinized the old bones—scratched its head—yawned out of sheer ennui, and then trotted along again. Now, what a difference it would have made to those three dogs if they had only happened to loaf into the next gulch! And what a prodigious difference it would have made to the coyote if it had happened to loaf into the next gulch!

The prickly pear, that ugly, fleshy little cactus, with its sudden summer glories of crimson and golden blossoms, fulfils a strange purpose in the animal economy of the prairies. In itself it appears to be one of the veriest outcasts among vegetables, execrated by man and refused as food by beast. Yet if it were not for this plant the herds of prairie antelope would have fared badly enough, for the antelope, whenever they found themselves in straits from wolves or from dogs, made straight for the prickly pear patches and belts, and there, standing right out on the barren, open plain, defied their swift but tender-footed pursuers to come near them. For the small, thick pads of the cactus, though they lie so flat and insignificantly upon the ground, are studded with tufts of strong, fierce spines, and woe to the wolf or the dog that treads upon them. The antelope's hoofs, however, are proof against the spines, and one leap across such a belt suffices to place the horned folk in safety. These patches and belts, then, so trivial to the eye, and in some places almost invisible to the cursory glance, are in reality Towers of Refuge to the great edible division of the wild prairie nations, and as impassable to the eaters as was that girdle of fire and steel which Von Moltke buckled so closely round the city of the Napoleons.

But here we are approaching Denver. The cottonwood has mustered into clusters, a prototype of the future of these now scattered ranches. Dotted about here and there in suitable corners, on river bank or under sheltering bluff, single trees are growing side by side with single stockyards or single cow-boys' huts, but every now and again, where nature offers them a good site for a colony, the trees congregate, select lots, and permanently locate. It is not very different after all, with human beings.

Nature here is undoubtedly tempting, and Denver itself must surely be one of the most beautiful towns in the States. Through great reaches of splendid farm-land, with water in abundance and the cottonwood and willow growing thickly, we pass to our destination as the twilight settles on the country.

A whole day has again been spent in the train! We had awaked in the morning to see from the car windows the people of Nebraska going out to their day's work in the fields, and here in the evening we sit and watch the Colorado folk coming home to their rest after the day's work is over. Truly this steam is a Latter-Day apocalypse and this America a land of magnificent distances.

I found out on this trip that my fellow-travellers (and the fact holds good nearly all over America) took the greatest interest in British India, and finding that I had spent so many years there, they plied me with questions. On some journeys it would be the political aspect of our government of Hindostan that interested, at others the commercial or the social. But going through Colorado, one of the haunts of the "grizzly" and the "mountain lion," I had to detail my experiences of sport in India. Above all, the tiger interested them. It is the only animal in the world that may be said to give the grizzly a point or two. And there are some even who deny this; but I, who have shot the tiger, and never seen a grizzly, naturally concede the first place in perilous courage to Stripes, the raja of the jungle. In one particular aspect, at any rate, the tiger is supreme among quadrupeds. It has the splendid audacity to make man his regular food.

Now, it is generally supposed that the "man-eater" is a specially formidable variety of the species; that it is only the boldest, strongest, and fiercest of the tigers that preys on man. But the very reverse is of course the truth. When hale and strong the tiger avoids the vicinity of men, finding abundant food in the herds of deer and other wild animals that share his jungles. But when strength and speed of limb begin to fail, the brute has to look for easier prey than the courageous bison or wind-footed antelope, and so skulks among the ravines and waste patches of woodland that are to be found about nearly every village. Then when twilight obscures the scene, he creeps out noiseless as a shadow, and lies in ambush in a crop of standing grain or bhair-tree brake, and watches the country folk go by from the fields in twos and threes, driving their plough cattle before them. After a while, there comes sauntering past alone, a man or a woman who has lagged behind the company; yet not so far behind but that the friends ahead can hear the scream which tells of the tiger's leap, though too far for help to be of use. During four years 350 human beings and 24,000 head of cattle were killed by these animals in one district in Bombay, while many single tigers have been known to destroy over a hundred people before they were shot. One in the Mandla district caused the desertion of thirteen villages and threw out of cultivation two hundred and fifty square miles of country; while another, only one of many similar cases, was credited with the appalling total of eighty human victims per annum! The yearly loss in cattle and by decrease of cultivation through the ravages of these fearful beasts has been estimated at ten million pounds sterling!

No wonder, then, that even these doughty grizzly-slayers of the Rockies respect the tiger's name.