FROM UTAH INTO NEVADA.

Rich and ugly Nevada—Leaving Utah—The gift of the Alfalfa—Through a lovely country to Ogden—The great food-devouring trick—From Mormon to Gentile: a sudden contrast—The son of a cinder—Is the red man of no use at all?—The papoose's papoose—Children all of one family.

IT is a far cry from the City of the Saints to the city of the Celestials, for Nevada stretches all its hideous length between them, and thus keeps apart the two American problems of the day—pigtails and polygamy. But mere length in miles is not all that goes to make a journey seem long, for dreariness of landscape stretches every yard to six feet, and turns honest miles into rascally versts, or elongates them into the still more infamous "kos" of the East, the so-called mile, which seems to lengthen out at the other end as you travel along it, and about nightfall to lose the other end altogether. And Nevada is certainly dreary enough for anything. It is abominably rich, I know. There is probably more filthy lucre in it per acre (in a crude state, of course) than in any other state in the Union, and more dollars piled up in those ghastly mountains than in any other range in America. But, as a fellow-passenger remarked, "There's a pile of land in Nevada that don't amount to much," and it is just this part of Nevada that the traveller by railway sees.

"That hill over there is full of silver," said a stranger to me, by way of propitiating my opinion.

"Is it" I said, "the brute." I really couldn't help it. I had no ill-feeling towards the hill, and if it had asked a favour of me, I believe I should have granted it as readily as any one. But its repulsive appearance was against it, and the idea of its being full of silver stirred my indignation. I grudged so ugly a cloud its silver lining, and like the sailor in the Summer Palace at Pekin felt moved to insult it. The sailor I refer to was in one of the courts of the palace looking about for plunder. It did not occur to his weather-beaten, nautical intelligence that everything about him was moulded in solid silver. He thought it was lead. A huge dragon stood in the corner of the room, and the atrocity of its expression exasperated Jack so acutely that he smote it with his cutlass, and lo! out of the monster's wound poured an ichor of silver coinage.

"Who'd have thought it!" said Jack, "the ugly devil!"

Nevada, moreover, lies under the disadvantage of having on one side of it the finest portion of California, on the other the finest portion of Utah, and sandwiched between two such Beauties, such a Beast naturally looks its worst. For the northern angle of Utah is by far the most fertile part of the territory, possessing, in patches, some incomparable meadows, and corn-lands of wondrous fertility. As compared with the prodigious agricultural and pastoral wealth of such states as Missouri, Illinois, or Ohio, the Cache Valleys and Bear Valleys of Utah seem of course insignificant enough; but at present I am comparing them only with the rest of poor Utah, and with ugly, wealthy Nevada.

Starting from Salt Lake City northwards, the road lies through suburbs of orchards and gardens, many of them smothered in red and yellow roses, out on to the levels of the Great Valley. Here, beyond the magic circle of the Water-wizard, there are patches of fen-lands still delightful to wild-fowl, and patches of alkali blistering in the sun, but all about them stretch wide meadows of good grazing-ground, where the cattle, good Devon breed many of them, and here and there a Jersey, loiter about, and bright fields of lucerne, or alfalfa, just purpling into blossom and haunted by whole nations of bees and tribes of yellow butterflies. What a gift this lucerne has been to Utah! Indeed, as the Mormons say, the territory could hardly have held its own had it not been for this wonderful plant. Once get it well started (and it will grow apparently anywhere) the "alfalfa" strikes its roots ten, fifteen, twenty feet into the ground, and defies the elements. More than this, it becomes aggressive, and, like the white races, begins to encroach upon, dominate over, and finally extinguish the barbarian weeds, its wild neighbours.

Scientific experiments with other plants have taught us that vegetables wage war with each other, under principles and with tactics, curiously similar to those of human communities.

When a strong plant advancing its frontiers comes upon a nation of feeble folk, it simply falls upon it pell-mell, relying upon mere brute strength to crush opposition. But when two plants, equally hardy, come in contact, and the necessity for more expansion compels them to fight, they bring into action all the science and skill of old gladiators and German war-professors. They push out skirmishers, and draw them in, throw out flanking parties, plant outposts, race for commanding points, manoeuvre each other out of corners, cut off each others' communications with the water, sap and mine—in fact go through all the artifices of civilized war. If they find themselves well-matched, they eventually make an alliance, and mingle peacefully with each other, dividing the richer spots equally, and going halves in the water. But as a rule one gives way to the other, accepts its dominion, and gradually accepts a subordinate place or even extirpation.

Now this lucerne is one of the fightingest plants that grows. It is the Norwegian rat among the vegetables, the Napoleon of the weeds. Nothing stops it. If it comes upon a would-be rival, it either punches its head and walks over it, or it sits down to besiege it, drives its own roots under the enemy, and compels it to capitulate by starvation. Fences and such devices cannot of course keep it within bounds, so the lucerne overflows its limits at every point, comes down the railway bank, sprouts up in tufts on the track, and getting across into the Scythian barbarism of the opposite hill-side, advances as with a Macedonian phalanx to conquest and universal monarchy. Three times a year can the farmer crop it, and there is no fodder in the world that beats it. No wonder then that Utah encourages this admirable adventurer. In time it will become the Lucerne State.

And so, passing through fields of lucerne, we reach the Hot Springs. From a cleft in a rock comes gushing out an ample stream of nearly boiling water as clear as diamonds, and so heavily charged with mineral that the sulphuretted air, combined with the heat, is sometimes intolerable, while the ground over which the water pours becomes in a few weeks thickly carpeted with a lovely weed-like growth of purest malachite green. Passing across the road, from its first pool under the rock, the stream spreads itself out into the Hot Springs Lake, where the water soon assimilates in temperature to the atmosphere, but possesses, for some reason known to the birds, a peculiar attraction for wild-fowl, which congregate in great numbers about it. Where it issues from the rock no vegetable of course can grow in it, and there is a rim all round its edge about a foot in width where the grass and weeds lie brown and dead, suffocated by the fumes. The fungoid-like growth at the bottom of the pool exactly resembles a vegetable, but is as purely mineral, though sub-aqueous, as the stalactites on a cave-roof.

And so, on again through a wilderness of lucerne, with a broad riband of carnation-coloured phlox retreating before its advancing borders—past a perpetual succession of cottages coming at intervals to a head in delightful farming hamlets of the true Mormon type—past innumerable orchards, and here and there intervals of wild vegetation, willows, and cotton-wood, with beds of blue iris, and brakes of wild pink roses (such a confusion of beauty!) among which the birds and butterflies seem to hold perpetual holiday.

Then Salt Lake comes in sight, lying along under the mountains on the left, and on the right the Wasatch range closes in, with the upper slopes all misty with grey clouds of sage-brush, and the lower vivid with lusty lucerne. Each settlement is in turn a delightful repetition of its predecessor, meadow and orchard and corn-land alternating, with the same pleasant features of wild life, flocks of crimson-winged or yellow-throated birds wheeling round the willow copses, or skimming across the meadows, bitterns tumbling out from among the reeds, doves darting from tree to tree, butterflies of exquisite species fluttering among the beds of flowers, and overhead in the sky, floating on observant wings, the hawk—one of those significant touches of Nature that redeems a country-side from Arcadian mawkishness, and throws into an over-sweet landscape just that dash of sin and suffering that lemons it pleasantly to the taste.

Round the corner yonder lies Ogden, one of the most promising towns of all the West, and as we approach it the great expanses of meadow stretching down to the lake and the wide alfalfa levels give place to a barren sage veldt, where the sunflower still retains ancestral dominion, and the jackass rabbits flap their ears at each other undisturbed by agriculture or by grazing stock. Nestling back into a nook of the hills which rise up steeply behind it, and show plainly on the front their old water-line of "Lake Bonneville" (of which the Great Salt Lake is the shrunken miserable relict), lies a pretty settlement, cosily muffed up in clover and fruit trees, and then beyond it, across another interval of primeval sage, comes into view the white cupola of the Ogden courthouse.

Ogden is the meeting-point of the northern and southern Utah lines of rail, and, more important still, of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific also. As a "junction town," therefore, it enjoys a position which has already made it prosperous, and which promises it great wealth in the near future. Nature too has been very kind, for the climate is one of the healthiest (if statistics may be believed) in the world; and wood and water, and a fertile soil, are all in abundance. Fortunately also, the Mormons selected the site and laid it out so that the ground-plan is spacious, the roadways are ample, the shade-trees profuse, and the drainage good. Its central school is, perhaps, the leading one in the territory, while in manufactures and industry it will probably some day outstrip Salt Lake City. For the visitor who does not care about statistics, Ogden has another attraction as the centre of a very beautiful canyon country, and excursions can be made in a single day that will give him as exhaustive an idea of the beauties of western hill scenery, as he will ever obtain by far more extended trips. The Ogden and Weber canyons alone exhaust such landscapes, but if the tourist has the time and the will, he may wander away up into the Wasatch range, past Ogden valley and many lovely bits of scenery, towards Bear Valley. But for myself, having seen nearly all the canyons of Utah and many of Colorado, I confess that the Weber and Ogden would have sufficed for all mere sight-seeing purposes.

It was in the Ogden refreshment-room, waiting for the train for San Francisco, that I saw a performance that filled me with astonishment and dismay. It was a man eating his dinner. And let me here remark, with all possible courtesy, that the American on his travels is the most reprehensible eater I have ever seen. In the first place, the knives are purposely made blunt—the back and the front of the blade being often of the same "sharpness"—to enable him to eat gravy with it. The result is that the fork (which ought to be used simply to hold meat steady on the plate while being cut with the knife) has to be used with great force to wrench off fragments of food. The object of the two instruments is thus materially abused, for he holds the meat down with the knife and tears it into bits with his fork! Now, reader, don't say no. For I have been carefully studying travelling Americans at their food (all over the West at any rate), and what I say is strictly correct. This abuse of knife and fork then necessitates an extraordinary amount of elbow-room, for in forcing apart a tough slice of beef the elbows have to stick out as square as possible, and the consequence is, as the proprietor of a hotel told me, only four Americans can eat in a space in which six Englishmen will dine comfortably. The latter, when feeding, keep their elbows to their sides; the former square them out on the line of the shoulders, and at right angles to their sides. Having thus got the travelling American into position, watch him consuming his food! He has ordered a dozen "portions" of as many eatables, and the whole of his meal, after the detestable fashion of the "eating-houses" at which travellers are fed, is put before him at once. To eat the dozen or so different things which he has ordered, he has only one knife and fork and one tea-spoon. Bending over the table, he sticks his fork into a pickled gherkin, and while munching this casts one rapid hawk-like glance over the spread viands, and then proceeds to eat. Mehercule! what a sight it is! He dabs his knife into the gravy of the steak, picks up with his fork a piece of bacon, and while the one is going up to his mouth, the other is reaching out for something else. He never apparently chews his food, but dabs and pecks at the dishes one after the other with a rapidity which (merely as a juggling trick) might be performed in London to crowded houses every day, and with an impartiality that, considered as "dining," is as savage as any meal of Red Indians or of Basutos. Dab, dab, peck, peck, grunt, growl, snort! The spoon strikes in every now and then, and a quick sucking-up noise announces the disappearance of a mouthful of huckleberries on the top of a bit of bacon, or a spoonful of custard-pie on the heels of a radish. It is perfectly prodigious. It defies coherent description. But how on earth does he swallow? Every now and then he shuts his eyes, and strains his throat; this, I suppose, is when he swallows, for I have seen children getting rid of cake with the same sort of spasm. Yet the rapidity with which he shovels in his food is a wonder to me, seeing that he has not got any "pouch" like the monkey or the pelican. Does he keep his miscellaneous food in a "crop" like a pigeon, or a preliminary stomach like the cow, and "chew the cud" afterwards at his leisure? I confess I am beaten by it. The mixture of his food, if it pleases him, does not annoy me, for if a man likes to eat mouthfuls of huckleberries, bacon, apple-pie, pickled mackerel, peas, mutton, gherkins, oysters, radishes, tomatoes, custard, and poached eggs (this is a bona-fide meal copied from my note-book on the spot) in indiscriminate confusion, it has nothing to do with me. But what I want to know is, why the travelling American does not stop to chew his food; or why, as is invariably the case, he will despatch in five minutes a meal for which he has half an hour set specially apart? He falls upon his food as if he were demented with hunger, as if he were a wild thing of prey tearing victims that he hated into pieces; and when the hideous deed is done, he rushes out from the scene of massacre with a handful of toothpicks, and leans idly against the door-post, as if time were without limit or end! The whole thing is a mystery to me. When I first came into the country I used to waste many precious moments in gazing at "the fine confused feeding" of my neighbours at the table, and waiting to see them choke. But I have given that up now. I plod systematically and deliberately through my one dish, content to find myself always the last at the table, with a tumult of empty platters scattered all about me. Nothing can choke the travelling American. In the meantime, I wish that young man of Ogden would exhibit his great eating trick in London. It beats Maskelyne and Cook into fits.

From Ogden northwards the road lies past perpetual cottage-farms, separated only by orchards or fields, and clustering at intervals into pleasant villages, where the people are all busy gathering in their lucerne crops. The same profusion of wild-flowers, and exquisite rose-brakes, the same abundance of bird and insect life is conspicuous.

But gradually our road bears away westward from the hills, leaving cultivation and cottages to follow the line of irrigation along their lower slopes, and while to our right the narrow-gauge line runs northward up into the Cache Valley, the granary of Utah, we trend away to the left. The northern end of the Salt Lake comes in sight, and the track running for a while close to its side gives me a last look at this sheet of wonderful water.

I was sorry to see the last of it, for I was sorry to leave Utah and the kind-hearted, simple, hard-working Mormon people. But the Lake gradually comes to a point, dwindles out into a marsh, and is gone, and as we speed away across levels of dreary alkaline ground, we can only recall its site by the wild duck streaming across to settle for the night in the reeds that grow by its edges.

Away from Mormon industry, the sage-brush flourishes like green bay-trees. To the east, the line of white-walled cottages speaks of a civilization which we are leaving behind us. To the west, the dreary mountains of Nevada already herald a region of barren desolation. And so the sun begins to set, and in the dim moth-time, as the mists begin to blur the outlines of Antelope Island in the Salt Lake, the small round-faced owls come out upon the railway fencing and chuckle to each other, and crossing the Bear River, all ruddy with the sunset, we see the night-hawks skimming the water in chase of the creatures of the twilight.

And so to Corinne, ghastly Corinne, a Gentile failure on the very skirts of Mormon success. It had once a great carrying-trade, for being at the terminus of the Utah Railway, Montana depended upon it for its supplies, and bitterly had Montana cause to regret it, for the Corinne freight-carriers (I wish I could remember their expressive slang name) seemed to think that railway enterprise must always terminate at Corinne, and so they carried just what they chose, at the price they chose, and when they chose. But the railway ran past them one fine day, and so now there is Corinne, stranded high and dry, as discreditable a settlement as ever men put together. Without any plan, treeless and roadless, the scattered hamlet of crazy-looking shanties stands half the year in drifting dust and half the year in sticky mud, and the Mormons point the finger of scorn at the place the Gentiles used to boast of. And Corinne seems to strike the keynote of the succeeding country, for cultivation ceases and habitations are not on the desolate plain we enter. And so to Promontory and then darkness.

We awake to find ourselves still in calamitous Nevada. What heaps of British gold have been sunk in those ugly hills in the hope of getting up American silver!

But here is Halleck, a government post, and soldiers from the barracks are lounging about in uniforms that make them look like butcher-boys, and with a drowsy gait that makes one suspect them to be burthened with the saddening load of yesterday's whisky. Then, after an interval of desert, we cross the Humboldt river, thick with the mud of melting snows, and, snaking across a plain warted over with ant-hills, arrive at Elko.

It is possible that Allah in his mercy may forgive Elko the offal which it put before us for breakfast. For myself, mere humanity forbids me to forgive it. But Elko was otherwise of interest. A waiter, very black, and, in proportion to his nigritude, insolent, had triumphed over my unconcealed disgust with my food. Yet I turned to him civilly and said, "Isn't there a warm spring here which is worth going to see?"

"No," said the negro, "our spring been burned up!"

"Burned up!" I exclaimed in astonishment; "the spring been burned up!"

"Yes," said the abominable one, "burned up. Everybody know dat."

"Was your mother there?" I asked courteously, pretending not to be exasperated by the blackamoor.

"My mother? No. My mother's—"

"Ah!" I replied, "I thought she might have been burned up at the same time, for you look like the son of a cinder."

My sally—mean effort that it was—was a complete triumph, and I left Ham squashed. It proved, of course, that it was the wooden shanty at the spring that had been burned down, but in any case it was too far off for us to go to see. So we consoled ourselves with the Indians, who always gather on the platform at Elko, in the assurance of begging or showing their papooses to some purpose. Nor were they wrong. I paid a quarter to see "the papoose," and got more than my money's worth in hearing this poor brown woman talking to her child the same sweet nursery nonsense that my own wife talks to mine. And the papoose understood it all, and chuckled and smiled and looked happy, for all the world as if it were something better than a mere Indian baby. Poor little Lamanite! In a year or two it will be strutting about the camp with its mimic bow and arrows, striking its mother, and sneering at her as "a squaw," and ten years later (if the end of the race has not then arrived) may be riding with his tribe on some foul errand of murder, while his mother carries the lodge-poles and the cooking-pots on foot behind the young brave's horse. Imagine a life in which begging is the chief dissipation, and horse-stealing the only industry!

But I can feel a sympathy for the red man. It may be true that neither gunpowder nor the Gospel can reform him, that his code of morality is radically incurable, that he is, in fact, "the red-bellied varmint" that the Western man believes him to be. Yet all the same, remembering the miracles that British government has worked with the Gonds and other seemingly hopeless tribes of India, I entertain a lurking suspicion that under other and more kindly circumstances the Red Indian might have been to-day a better thing than he is.

At any rate, a people cannot be altogether worthless that in the deepest depths of their degradation still maintain a lofty wild-beast scorn of white men, and think them something lower than themselves. And is not pride the noblest and the easiest of all fulcrums for a government to work on?

Is it quite certain, for instance, that, given arms, and drilled as soldiers, detachments of the tribes, as auxiliaries of the regulars, might not do good service at the different military posts, in routine duty, of course, and that the prestige of such employment would not appeal to the military spirit of the tribes at large? What is there at Fort Halleck that Indians could not do as well as white men? It is a notorious fact, and as old as American history, that the red man holds sacred everything that his tribe is guarding. Why should not this chivalry, common to every savage race on earth, and largely utilized by other governments in Asia and in Africa, be turned to account in America too, and Indians be entrusted with the peace of Indian frontiers?

I know well enough that many will think my suggestion sentimental and absurd, but fortunately it is just the class who think in that way that have no real importance in this or in any other country. They are the men who think the "critturs" ought to be "used up," and who, when they are in the West, "would as soon shoot an Injun as a coyote." These men form a class of which America, when she is three generations older, will have little need for, and who, in a more settled community, will find that they must either conform to civilization or else "git." There are a great number of these coarse, thick-skinned, ignorant men floating about on the surface of Western America: for Western America still stands in need of men who will do the reckless preliminary work of settlement, and shoot each other off over a whisky bottle when that work is done. Now, these men, and those of a feebler kind who take their opinions from them, believe and preach that annihilation of the Indian is the only possible cure for the Indian evil. I have heard them say it in public a score of times that "the Indian should be wiped clean out." But a larger and more generous class is growing up very fast in the West, who are beginning to see that the red men are really a charge upon them: and that as a great nation they must take upon themselves the responsibilities of empire, and protect the weaker communities whom a rapidly advancing civilization is isolating in their midst.

But it is a pity that those in authority cannot see their way to giving practical effect to such sentiments, and devise some method for utilizing the Indian. For myself, seeing what has been done in Asia and in Africa with equally difficult tribes, I should be inclined to predict success for an experiment in military service, if the routine duties of barracks and outpost duty, in unnecessary places, can be called "military service."

For one thing, drilled and well-armed Indians would very soon put a stop to cow-boy disturbances in Arizona, or anywhere else. Or, again, if Indians had been on his track, James, the terror of Missouri, would certainly not have flourished so long as he did.

But by this time we have got far past Elko, and the train is carrying us through an undulating desert of rabbit-bush and greasewood, with dull, barren hills on either hand, and then we reach Carlin, another dreadful-looking hamlet of the Corinne type, and, alas! Gentile also, without a tree or a road, and nearly every shanty in it a saloon.

More Indians are on the platform. They are allowed, it appears, under the Company's contract with the government, to ride free of charge upon the trains, and so the poor creatures spend their summer days, when they are not away hunting or stealing, in travelling backwards and forwards from one station to the next, and home again. This does not strike the civilized imagination as a very exhilarating pastime, nor one to be contemplated with much enthusiasm of enjoyment. Yet the Indians, in their own grave way, enjoy it prodigiously.

Curiously enough, they cannot be persuaded to ride anywhere, except on the platforms between the baggage-cars. But here they cluster as thick as swarming bees, the in all the fantastic combination of vermilion, "bucks" tag-rag and nudity, the squaws dragging about ponderous bison robes and sheep-skins, and laden with papooses, the children, grotesque little imitations of their parents, with their playthings in their hands.

For the "papoose" is a human child after all, and the little Shoshonee girls nurse their dolls just as little girls in New York do, only, of course, the Red Indian's child carries on her back an imitation papoose in an imitation pannier, instead of wheeling an imitation American baby in an imitation American "baby-carriage." I watched one of these brown fragments of the great sex that gives the world its wives and its mothers, its sweethearts and its sisters, and it was quite a revelation to me to hear the wee thing crooning to her wooden baby, and hushing it to sleep, and making believe to be anxious as to its health and comforts. Yes, and my mind went back on a sudden to the nursery, on the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of miles away, where another little girl sits crooning over her doll of rags and wax, and on her face I saw just the same expression of troubled concern as clouded the little Shoshonee's brow, and the same affectation of motherly care.

So it takes something more than mere geographical distance to alter human nature.