Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Roughing It
    Roughing It
    Roughing It
    Ebook591 pages15 hours

    Roughing It

    By Mark Twain

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Roughing It follows the travels of young Mark Twain through the Wild West during the years 1861–1867. After a brief stint as a Confederate cavalry militiaman, he joined his brother Orion Clemens, who had been appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, on a stagecoach journey west. Twain consulted his brother's diary to refresh his memory and borrowed heavily from his active imagination for many stories in the novel.

    Roughing It illustrates many of Twain's early adventures, including a visit to Salt Lake City, gold and silver prospecting, real-estate speculation, and his beginnings as a writer.

    In this memoir, readers can see examples of Twain's rough-hewn humor, which would become a staple of his writing in his later books, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

    (Source: Wikipedia)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooklassic
    Release dateJun 22, 2015
    ISBN9789635247103
    Author

    Mark Twain

    Mark Twain's classic coming-of-age novel that captured the imagination of America!Generations of readers and listeners have enjoyed the ingenuous triumphs and feckless mishaps of boyhood days on the Mississippi. This classic of American wit and storytelling introduced Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, Aunt Polly, the Widow Douglas, and many other characters to the world, including, of course the boy who "was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town because he was idle and lawless and vulgar and bad-and because all their children admired him so": Huckleberry Finn.This novel is part of Brilliance Audio's extensive Classic Collection, bringing you timeless masterpieces that you and your family are sure to love.

    Read more from Mark Twain

    Related to Roughing It

    Related ebooks

    Travel For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Shasta to the Sea

      Feb 16, 2017

      Shasta to the Sea
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      This New Religion

      Jun 2, 2020

      He introduced himself as Captain Jack Lash Lannigan, and he said that he was an Irish pirate. “You don’t sound very Irish,” I told him, and he laughed. We—Maia, Gustav and I—had met Captain Jack outside the Nocturnem Draft Haus, a bar on Main Street

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      This Is Why We Do It

      Oct 21, 2019

      This Is Why We Do It
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On Travel Writing

      May 26, 2020

      On Travel Writing
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Where The Wilderness Is

      Jun 19, 2018

      Where The Wilderness Is
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Tom Cunliffe

      Nov 6, 2020

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Tom Cunliffe

      Nov 6, 2020

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Time Out

      May 31, 2019

      Now, if there was ever a book that deserved the label of “weighty tome” it’s this one. More than 500 pages of recollections from moderately famous explorer John Rae. Probably best remembered for delivering the news that fellow explorer Sir John Frank

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Pacific Passages

      Jul 16, 2019

      Pacific Passages
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Symposium on Deserts

      Mar 1, 2019

      A Symposium on Deserts
      24 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Following The Flow

      Aug 31, 2019

      Following The Flow
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      MY OLD MAN & THE SEA

      Feb 12, 2019

      MY OLD MAN & THE SEA
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Against The Flow

      Feb 10, 2021

      Against The Flow
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What’s In A Name?

      May 31, 2022

      What’s In A Name?
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Time Out

      Aug 30, 2019

      E.F Knight’s Cruise of the Alerte is one of those sailing books that has all the classic ingredients for a ripping yarn. A cruise in a small boat to an exotic location, a few rows along the way and a fruitless hunt for treasure at the end of it. Knig

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Because It’s There

      May 12, 2017

      Because It’s There
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Gringo Honeymoon

      May 17, 2021

      Gringo Honeymoon
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Gringo Honeymoon

      May 17, 2021

      Gringo Honeymoon
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Church OF THE Open Sky

      Sep 11, 2019

      Church OF THE Open Sky
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The RHUM DIARIES

      Aug 18, 2020

      The RHUM DIARIES
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Feels Like The First Time

      Sep 24, 2019

      Feels Like The First Time
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Put Your Nose In A Book

      Jun 14, 2024

      BY HENK BLANCKENBERG AND LIZET MEYER Struik, R200 The Fish River Canyon is one of those places firmly at the top of hikers’ bucket lists. But before we get into that, if you don’t intend to add hiking boots to your wardrobe, you can still be stunned

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A New Beginning

      May 27, 2021

      THE JOURNEYING MOON Shortly after the war I married and tried to settle down to a life in London. Like most of my generation, though, I was infected by restlessness. Early in our lives we had been given a taste for the world of action, and too much a

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      PUT YOUR NOSE IN A BOOK FACT & FICTION

      Oct 13, 2023

      BY DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY Jonathan Ball, RRP R280 For Heroic Age Explorers, ‘Antarctica was a katabasis: a journey beyond the limits of experience, a voyage beyond life to the underworld’. And for Ernest Henry Shackleton and his crew aboard Endurance,

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Roughing It

    4/5

    423 ratings18 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I’ve been Roughing It and have to say, if laughter is the best medicine, Mark Twain has saved me visits to the local sawbones. He amuses himself and us with many tall tales, plus tales that sound tall but may be true, tales that sound true but may be tall, and others one hopes surely can be trusted. I wouldn’t lay money on which are which.That said, among his talents is giving offense. The chapters on Brigham Young and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will not be agreeable to Mormons. Blacks and Chinese aren’t often mentioned but when they appear are called names most of us reject. The Indians always come off poorly, some being described with terrible contempt, and even when they do something that favorably impresses Twain, well, it’s regarded as something akin to the mysteries of the animal kingdom.The account is also rough on anyone believing that men of Twain’s time had better moral fiber than now. You’ll find plenty of stories here to refute the belief. The dishonesty of men assaying ore samples for gold or silver, and the scams conducted by mine speculators, were common examples. George Plimpton notes in his Intro to the Oxford edition that frontier sentiment held that “An honest judge is a son of a gun who will stay bought.” Must be a joke, one thinks, but then Twain calls policemen and politicians “the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum.” He’s not joking. Christians will find Twain’s rude disposition toward their religion exercised as well, especially in his extended visit to missionary-altered Hawaii. He writes about how lucky it was for Hawaiians to be converted to a religion that would “make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there…how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it…what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal Summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature.” Roughing It teems with incidents, adventures, personalities, and opinions. Not each is gold. Still, someone’s reaction to this book may be a serviceable assay for how much you’ll enjoy liquoring up together at the local Wild West saloon.
    • 3/5
      There were a lot of interesting parts in here - descriptions of various areas of Nevada, of San Francisco, and of many areas of Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands); also a sketch of how Twain came to be a public speaker. There were also a lot of really annoying bits - mostly attempts to be funny, by exaggerating things and spending half-pages swearing the tales were true - the first part of the book, about the stagecoach journey, was mostly that, and I slogged though only because my family had been enjoying the later parts, about Nevada (while we were there). Once he starts telling true(ish) stories, it gets more interesting. His voice does differ a lot throughout - I'm pretty sure the book was cobbled together over time (at a couple points, he quotes from his journal of the time, framing it in later commentary). During the stagecoach journey, he keeps switching from "boy excited to be traveling for the first time" to "experienced traveler referencing other trips" and back again - it's disconcerting. And much later, in the Hawaii segment, he keeps telling the same story twice - once in pious horror at the behavior of the savage non-Christians, once cynically dissecting the behavior of the Christians and their treatment of the natives. Usually one right after the other, which, again, is disconcerting. There's a lot of good stories and descriptions in here, but it's a huge book and mostly I felt like I was slogging through it. Glad I read it, I'll never read it again.
    • 3/5
      I had high hopes for this one, but I found that most of it lacked Twain’s incomparable wit. Much of it is a straight forward description of Twain’s travels out west in his youth during the mid-1800s. He travelled all over the west, even out to Hawaii. He describes gold and silver mining and the wild west in detail and has some incredibly strong feelings of dislike for Mormons. There were bits in the second half that I enjoyed more that the first half. Apparently the first half is based on this brother’s journals of the trip (I didn’t find that out until I’d finished the book) and that would explain why it comes across and a bit dull. If you can make it through those bits it picks up and fans will recognize Twain’s clever style. I loved his description of attempting to work as an editor. He has the job for only seven days before quitting. He decided it was much too hard to come up with something new to write about each day. Twain’s anecdotes about his travels are wonderful. I particularly loved a story about planning his first public lecture. He was so nervous he took every possible precaution to ensure he would receive some laughs. BOTTOM LINE: I would recommend only if you are a huge Mark Twain fan or if you love reading about the development of the west. Otherwise I would highly recommend most of Twain’s other work, including Huck Finn, Tow Sawyer, Prince and the Pauper, etc.  
    • 3/5
      Mark Twain's memoirs of his youthful travels straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction. Regardless of how accurate these stories are, they are fun to read.
    • 3/5
      I remember this book more from where I bought it than for the writing. I bought it from a free standing used book store on the road to my brother's home in Sterling, Massachusetts. The store was built along Route 12 in a rural setting and you could see it, "USED BOOKS", from the highway, big letters, 5 feet high on the walls. This was back in the 70's and even then the book looked old. After purchasing it, the only purchase I ever made at that store, I had occasion to notice that one edition of this book was considered rare, but I never tried to verify if that was the case with this dusty thing.
    • 4/5
      A memoir, with the author's caution, that "When young,i could remember it whether it happened or not.". It covers the period 1862 to 70, as he rattled around the West, trying his hand at mining and several other risky occupations, including dining with Jack Slade, a notorious gun-man. Well worth the read, but not an exacting history. He wrote the book in 1872.
    • 5/5
      The funniest book ever written. I howl each time I've read it. Side-splitting, all-out fun.
    • 4/5
      I bought this when I was travelling in Beijing a few years ago and the only English-language bookstore I could find was something churning out endless public domain texts, presumably for students. Mark Twain is by far the most readable of any 19th century author, so I picked this up, but didn’t get around to reading it until recently.Roughing It is an account of Twain’s journeys across America’s western frontier when he was a young man in his twenties; it was apparently written in 1872, but the actual journey took place in the 1860s, while the Civil War (rarely mentioned in this book) was raging in the east. His brother Orion had been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory, and Twain (or Clemens, at the time) went along with him as an assistant. He remained with his brother in Nevada for some time before, as youth are wont to do, he went gallivanting off on his own adventures. What was supposed to be a three-month journey ultimately ended up being seven years.Roughing It takes place, as I said, before the events of Twain’s more famous travelogue The Innocents Abroad, but it was written after the success of that volume, collated from various old diary entries, correspondence pieces and Twain’s imperfect memory. Apparently the first third of the book, detailing their journey to Nevada, is heavily based on Orion’s journals. This may be why I found it dull, dry and difficult going, since it lacked Twain’s personal spark.The book picks up a bit more as Twain begins his own travelling, and branches out into other work – prospecting, mining, real estate speculation, and eventually journalism, in the confusingly-named town of Virginia, which is where he first adopted his famous pen-name. (A recent theory suggests this didn’t come from riverboat slang, as originally thought, but was perhaps something Twain would cry out at the bar in Virginia when putting new drinks on his tab.) Towards the end it also details his time in San Francisco, and a trip to Hawaii – which would have seemed a bit tacked-on to the book in 1872, but now slots in with the theme of America’s West quite well.I mentioned earlier that Twain is the most readable of any 19th century writer, but that is of course a relative measure – his style is long, verbose and drawn-out, and to a 21st century reader it can often become tedious, especially when he’s taking you through the finer points of gold mining or relating a somewhat amusing 12-page-long shaggy dog story. But there are also moments which, even 150 years later, are quite amusing. My favourite anecdote comes when he and two friends become lost in a blizzard, their horses bolting into the blinding snowstorm. As they huddle together in the cold and await their certain death they pray to God to deliver them, swear off all their sins, apologise to each other for past grievances, and slowly come to accept their demise. In the morning, clinging to life, they wake to find the snowstorm has cleared – to reveal the inn from which they had departed a mere fifteen feet from where they sat.For two hours we sat in the station and ruminated in disgust. The mystery was gone, now, and it was plain enough why the horses had deserted us. Without a doubt they were under that shed a quarter of a minute after they had left us, and they must have overheard and enjoyed all our confessions and lamentations.It’s interesting to see the trace of humour, and Twain’s use of sarcasm and deadpan – he’s clearly not a man to let the truth stand in the way of a good yarn – mixed with overwrought 19th century prose. I always wonder whether people actually spoke like that in the 19th century (think the movies True Grit, or Lincoln), or whether they just wrote like that, and modern filmmakers interpret it as a speech pattern as well, based on reading letters and journals. (Westerns from the 1950s and ‘60s were pretty plain-talking, weren’t they?) And, if people did actually speak like that, when in the course of history they stopped.In any case, Twain’s non-fiction – as always – can be difficult and sometimes tedious for the modern reader to follow. The jokes and amusement sprinkled throughout the book are not a reward for effort, but rather a sweetener for a reader who wants an insight into the real Old West – not cowboys, Indians and train robberies, but rather mining, prospecting and the sheer majesty of an untouched wilderness. Roughing It is an excellent first-hand account of life around Nevada and California in the mid-19th century, but be warned that it can be difficult going.
    • 5/5
      This is, without a doubt, one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read. Like most other boys, I had read "Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in grammar school and loved them. They were, of course, written for young boys seeking adventure. However, I hadn't read any of Twains' work in many years but the accident of pickinig up "Roughing It" and reading a few pages had me laughing and thoroughly enjoying Twains' presentation style and self-effacing humor. His descriptions of the events, adventures, and places are priceless. Exaggerations all, of course, but told in a style that is distinctly his own. Humor doesn't get any better than this story. His version is humorous, but in reality, many of his stories are simply amplified versions of real events written in his own style. This book prompted me to read his other books. He was a talented author which we may not see again. For me, he was to American English, what Shakespeare was to Englands' English. His creativity is highlighted in "A Yankee iin King Arthur's Court." The "Prince and the Pauper" is another tal well told.
    • 5/5
      Funny stories and good insight into day to day life in Nevada and Hawaii circa 1861-70.
    • 4/5
      A very enjoyable look at the Old West through the eyes of one who lived there. A great picure of a greenhorn, yet through the eyes of an old hand, and they are one and the same man. He has an extraordinary talent for exploring serious subjects, yet in looking back at them, because of the distance, he is able to find humor in them. It is not a humor that is in jest or makes light of the problem, but the humor of experience and time. I have never wanted to visit Hawaii before, yet after reading this, I would like to. I might be hard-pressed to find the places he talks about though.
    • 1/5
      I know this is supposed to be one of the all-time classics in adventure literature... but I quit reading halfway through because I just couldn't take anymore of Twain's style, which I found stilted and painfully slow. The anecdotes were just so long and tedious that I was happy by the time even the interesting ones were over. I've never particularly enjoyed Mark Twain's work... making this book a poor fit for me.... but it disliked it more than his works of fiction.
    • 3/5
      Would rate 3.5 stars if I could, but went with three because the novel tends to go off on tangents and gets bogged down with tedious details at times.

      However, it was an entertaining history lesson from Twain's opinionated and unapologetic perspective. If written today, it would take the form of a highly popular social networking site and easily make YouTube's top ten most watched videos.

      Part autobiography and part travelogue, this novel is really a collection of short stories separated by chapters (79 in all). It encompasses time period from Mark Twain's teen to young adulthood years. The book is catalogued as non-fiction, but I wonder what the criteria is that separates fact from fiction? I estimate that about 50-60% of the author's recollections are true but interwoven with anecdotal hyperbole. Twain does stop at times to address the reader and admit these exaggerations or at least gives you a choice of how much of a particular story to believe. And it works!
    • 4/5
      The first American road novel is not only an entertaining read but a detailed account of an era long past. All American writers can (or should) point to Twain as a major influence; the following passages contain hints of what would later become Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson:"I never had been away from home, and that word 'travel' had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon we would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero.""We jumped into the stage[coach], the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left 'the States' behind us. It was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine. There was freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away."
    • 4/5
      Roughing It is semi-non-fiction travel literature about Mark Twains six-years "out west" from 1861-1867 in his late 20s and early 30s prospecting for gold and finding his way in life to become a writer. It was influential in the mythical creation of the Old West.It is a mixed bag of stories and anecdotes, but most importantly it is one of the most influential books of early American travel literature genre and captured the imagination of the "Old West". Much of it seems cliche now, but it was in part Twain who helped invent and popularize it. It is an authentic primary source that captures the feel and flavor of its time, including a few tall tales. Having traveled out west myself on a number of exploratory mis-adventures I could really visualize and understand Twains sense of awe and wonderment, in fact its part of the American psyche, a part of me, and this book was a key in that mythical creation.Gutenberg has a HTML version online which includes scans of the lithograph pictures from the original which is recommended since many books omit the pictures, which are otherwise numerous and good. It was originally released on a subscription-basis. Twain had difficulties completing it with deaths in the family and writers block (it was his 3rd book and by far his longest at 600 pages). It didn't sell well at first, his earlier book Innocents Abroad did much better, which takes place after the Roughing period, but was written before, and is also a travel narrative, about a trip to Europe and Asia Minor.
    • 4/5
      Another book I chose to read while on our California trip. Roughing It is an account of Twain’s life in the West. Twain travels with his brother to California and Nevada during the time of the Gold Rush. Twain looks for silver, has run-ins with bad guys, and observes the West in its early days with humor and cleverness. Lots of politically incorrectness that probably struck the readers of the day as hilariously funny.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed his descriptions of Hawaii of 1866. Very colorful tales of his trip and Hawaiian history.Some very funny lines that only Twain could write!
    • 5/5
      The works of Mark Twain are all published as classics, literature that finds new readers each generation. However, Roughing it is much thicker and detailed than many of Twain's popular, shorter works. Then, too, to the patient and attentive reader Roughing it will prove to be a highly entertaining and dazzling novel.During the 1860s, the United States of America was still largely unformed, and pioneers had shown to path to the West. Their trail was followed by fortune hunters, and a colourful, adventurous and lawless medley of immigrants, who settled in the new territories, and tried to carve out a livelihood. Samuel Clemens and his brother Orion Clemens were among them, and Roughing it is a semi-autobiographical novel based on their adventures, under the sole authorship of Mark Twain.Roughing it is the story of travelling and short-term jobs of a young man in the "Wild West". It is a kaleidoscopic work of fiction, which consists of numerous anecdotes, stories, true, perhaps, and fictional, experiences and descriptions of all youngman Clemens saw and experienced at that time. All is described with a remarkable degree of detail, which forces the reader to slow down in order to be able to take it all in.In the early 1870s, Mark Twain looked back on this period of his life, just five to ten years earlier, and realized he could remember hardly anything about it. With trhe help of his brother's diaries, and invention, he was able to recover the spirit of the times, and Twain's superior penmanship shines through on every page. Besides that, Twain was an excellent story teller, a quality that accounted for much of his early success, as much of the income of novelists in the Nineteenth century came from public readings. In some parts of the story, the reader can imagine the impact of "telling" the story to an audience, carefully timing jokes. Some stories are funnier than other stories, and probably drew laughter from different kinds of people. Some are difficult to appreciate by modern audiences, either because modern readers are out of tune with what would provoke laughter at the time, or because the written consumption of the book leads to less hilarity. The narrative of Roughing it is enlivened with a number of "nuggets" short episodes embedded in the story that capture the audience more intensely and create memorable vignettes of heightened observation. One of these stories is for example the story of surveyors spending the night in a barrack in pitch dark, when one of them upset and breaks the glass terrarium that contains 16 tarantulas. The fear of sixteen large, black, hairy spiders at large in a bedroom in the black of the night creates a tension that is at once horrifying and humourous: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. (...) Presently you would hear a gasping voice say:"Su—su—something's crawling up the back of my neck!"(...)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.The story is littered with several such gems, each entirely pleasing when read and many memorable. There are stories about outlaws, Indians, bandits and bravados, told in a jumble as Twain saw it, in the real or in his inner eye.The second part of the book, describing the narrator's travels to the Sandwich Islands, now better known as Hawaii, is a bit different in tone than the first part of the book. It is more descriptive, and less jocular, perhaps reflecting the more mature traveller.It is very likely that upon completing the reading of Roughing it the reader will feel exactly the same way as the writer felt when he embarked on the adventure of writing it, namely the inability to recall and remember all of it, or maybe even any of, or at most those sparkingly intense mini stories. If so, the reading would mirror the real life experience: living through a dazzlingly rich experience, and looking back with wonder.

    Book preview

    Roughing It - Mark Twain

    AUTHOR.

    Chapter 1

    My brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory—­an office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of State, and Acting Governor in the Governor’s absence.  A salary of eighteen hundred dollars a year and the title of Mr. Secretary, gave to the great position an air of wild and imposing grandeur.  I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother.  I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore.  He was going to travel!  I never had been away from home, and that word travel had a seductive charm for me.  Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and may be get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero.  And he would see the gold mines and the silver mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and pick up two or three pailfuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside.  And by and by he would become very rich, and return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and the ocean, and the isthmus as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face.  What I suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe.  And so, when he offered me, in cold blood, the sublime position of private secretary under him, it appeared to me that the heavens and the earth passed away, and the firmament was rolled together as a scroll!  I had nothing more to desire.  My contentment was complete.

    At the end of an hour or two I was ready for the journey.  Not much packing up was necessary, because we were going in the overland stage from the Missouri frontier to Nevada, and passengers were only allowed a small quantity of baggage apiece.  There was no Pacific railroad in those fine times of ten or twelve years ago—­not a single rail of it.  I only proposed to stay in Nevada three months—­I had no thought of staying longer than that.  I meant to see all I could that was new and strange, and then hurry home to business.  I little thought that I would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven uncommonly long years!

    I dreamed all night about Indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due time, next day, we took shipping at the St. Louis wharf on board a steamboat bound up the Missouri River.

    We were six days going from St. Louis to St. Jo.—­a trip that was so dull, and sleepy, and eventless that it has left no more impression on my memory than if its duration had been six minutes instead of that many days.  No record is left in my mind, now, concerning it, but a confused jumble of savage-looking snags, which we deliberately walked over with one wheel or the other; and of reefs which we butted and butted, and then retired from and climbed over in some softer place; and of sand-bars which we roosted on occasionally, and rested, and then got out our crutches and sparred over.

    In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Jo. by land, for she was walking most of the time, anyhow—­climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long.  The captain said she was a bully boat, and all she wanted was more shear and a bigger wheel.  I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but I had the deep sagacity not to say so.

    Chapter 2

    The first thing we did on that glad evening that landed us at St. Joseph was to hunt up the stage-office, and pay a hundred and fifty dollars apiece for tickets per overland coach to Carson City, Nevada.

    The next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast, and hurried to the starting-place.  Then an inconvenience presented itself which we had not properly appreciated before, namely, that one cannot make a heavy traveling trunk stand for twenty-five pounds of baggage —­because it weighs a good deal more.  But that was all we could take —­twenty-five pounds each.  So we had to snatch our trunks open, and make a selection in a good deal of a hurry.  We put our lawful twenty-five pounds apiece all in one valise, and shipped the trunks back to St. Louis again.  It was a sad parting, for now we had no swallow-tail coats and white kid gloves to wear at Pawnee receptions in the Rocky Mountains, and no stove-pipe hats nor patent-leather boots, nor anything else necessary to make life calm and peaceful.  We were reduced to a war-footing.  Each of us put on a rough, heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt and stogy boots included; and into the valise we crowded a few white shirts, some under-clothing and such things.  My brother, the Secretary, took along about four pounds of United States statutes and six pounds of Unabridged Dictionary; for we did not know—­poor innocents—­that such things could be bought in San Francisco on one day and received in Carson City the next.  I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson’s seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult.  But I thought it was grand.  It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon.  It only had one fault—­you could not hit anything with it.  One of our conductors practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about, and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief.  The Secretary had a small-sized Colt’s revolver strapped around him for protection against the Indians, and to guard against accidents he carried it uncapped.  Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable.  George Bemis was our fellow-traveler.

    We had never seen him before.  He wore in his belt an old original Allen revolver, such as irreverent people called a pepper-box.  Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol.  As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball.  To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an Allen in the world.  But George’s was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, If she didn’t get what she went after, she would fetch something else.  And so she did.  She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it.  Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow.  It was a cheerful weapon—­the Allen.  Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it.

    We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the mountains.  In the matter of luxuries we were modest—­we took none along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco.  We had two large canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we also took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the way of breakfasts and dinners.

    By eight o’clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side of the river.  We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left the States behind us.  It was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.  There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away.  We were spinning along through Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly abroad on the great Plains.  Just here the land was rolling—­a grand sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach—­like the stately heave and swell of the ocean’s bosom after a storm.  And everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this limitless expanse of grassy land.  But presently this sea upon dry ground was to lose its rolling character and stretch away for seven hundred miles as level as a floor!

    Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous description—­an imposing cradle on wheels.  It was drawn by six handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the conductor, the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his business to take charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers.  We three were the only passengers, this trip.  We sat on the back seat, inside.  About all the rest of the coach was full of mail bags—­for we had three days’ delayed mails with us.  Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof.  There was a great pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full.  We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver said—­a little for Brigham, and Carson, and ’Frisco, but the heft of it for the Injuns, which is powerful troublesome ’thout they get plenty of truck to read.  But as he just then got up a fearful convulsion of his countenance which was suggestive of a wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we guessed that his remark was intended to be facetious, and to mean that we would unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains and leave it to the Indians, or whosoever wanted it.

    We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the hard, level road.  We jumped out and stretched our legs every time the coach stopped, and so the night found us still vivacious and unfatigued.

    After supper a woman got in, who lived about fifty miles further on, and we three had to take turns at sitting outside with the driver and conductor.  Apparently she was not a talkative woman.  She would sit there in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a mosquito rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand till she had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that would have jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the corpse with tranquil satisfaction—­for she never missed her mosquito; she was a dead shot at short range.  She never removed a carcase, but left them there for bait.  I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill thirty or forty mosquitoes—­watched her, and waited for her to say something, but she never did.  So I finally opened the conversation myself.  I said: 

    The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam.

    You bet!

    What did I understand you to say, madam?

    "You bet!"

    Then she cheered up, and faced around and said: 

    Danged if I didn’t begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb.  I did, b’gosh.  Here I’ve sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust’n muskeeters and wonderin’ what was ailin’ ye.  Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin’, and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn’t think of nothing to say.  Wher’d ye come from?

    The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more!  The fountains of her great deep were broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation!

    How we suffered, suffered, suffered!  She went on, hour after hour, till I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start.  She never did stop again until she got to her journey’s end toward daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we were nodding, by that time), and said: 

    "Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o’ days, and I’ll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any good by edgin’ in a word now and then, I’m right thar.  Folks’ll tell you’t I’ve always ben kind o’ offish and partic’lar for a gal that’s raised in the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be, if she wants to be anything, but when people comes along which is my equals, I reckon I’m a pretty sociable heifer after all."

    We resolved not to lay by at Cottonwood.

    Chapter 3

    About an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly over the road—­so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle, lulling way, that was gradually soothing us to sleep, and dulling our consciousness—­when something gave away under us!  We were dimly aware of it, but indifferent to it.  The coach stopped.  We heard the driver and conductor talking together outside, and rummaging for a lantern, and swearing because they could not find it—­but we had no interest in whatever had happened, and it only added to our comfort to think of those people out there at work in the murky night, and we snug in our nest with the curtains drawn.  But presently, by the sounds, there seemed to be an examination going on, and then the driver’s voice said: 

    By George, the thoroughbrace is broke!

    This startled me broad awake—­as an undefined sense of calamity is always apt to do.  I said to myself:  Now, a thoroughbrace is probably part of a horse; and doubtless a vital part, too, from the dismay in the driver’s voice.  Leg, maybe—­and yet how could he break his leg waltzing along such a road as this?  No, it can’t be his leg.  That is impossible, unless he was reaching for the driver.  Now, what can be the thoroughbrace of a horse, I wonder?  Well, whatever comes, I shall not air my ignorance in this crowd, anyway.

    Just then the conductor’s face appeared at a lifted curtain, and his lantern glared in on us and our wall of mail matter.  He said:  Gents, you’ll have to turn out a spell.  Thoroughbrace is broke.

    We climbed out into a chill drizzle, and felt ever so homeless and dreary.  When I found that the thing they called a thoroughbrace was the massive combination of belts and springs which the coach rocks itself in, I said to the driver: 

    I never saw a thoroughbrace used up like that, before, that I can remember.  How did it happen?

    Why, it happened by trying to make one coach carry three days’ mail —­that’s how it happened, said he.  And right here is the very direction which is wrote on all the newspaper-bags which was to be put out for the Injuns for to keep ’em quiet.  It’s most uncommon lucky, becuz it’s so nation dark I should ‘a’ gone by unbeknowns if that air thoroughbrace hadn’t broke.

    I knew that he was in labor with another of those winks of his, though I could not see his face, because he was bent down at work; and wishing him a safe delivery, I turned to and helped the rest get out the mail-sacks.  It made a great pyramid by the roadside when it was all out.  When they had mended the thoroughbrace we filled the two boots again, but put no mail on top, and only half as much inside as there was before.  The conductor bent all the seat-backs down, and then filled the coach just half full of mail-bags from end to end.  We objected loudly to this, for it left us no seats.  But the conductor was wiser than we, and said a bed was better than seats, and moreover, this plan would protect his thoroughbraces.  We never wanted any seats after that.  The lazy bed was infinitely preferable.  I had many an exciting day, subsequently, lying on it reading the statutes and the dictionary, and wondering how the characters would turn out.

    The conductor said he would send back a guard from the next station to take charge of the abandoned mail-bags, and we drove on.

    It was now just dawn; and as we stretched our cramped legs full length on the mail sacks, and gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist, to where there was an expectant look in the eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy.  The stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses’ hoofs, the cracking of the driver’s whip, and his Hi-yi! g’lang! were music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us with interest, or envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the pipe of peace and compared all this luxury with the years of tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had found it.

    After breakfast, at some station whose name I have forgotten, we three climbed up on the seat behind the driver, and let the conductor have our bed for a nap.  And by and by, when the sun made me drowsy, I lay down on my face on top of the coach, grasping the slender iron railing, and slept for an hour or more.  That will give one an appreciable idea of those matchless roads.  Instinct will make a sleeping man grip a fast hold of the railing when the stage jolts, but when it only swings and sways, no grip is necessary.  Overland drivers and conductors used to sit in their places and sleep thirty or forty minutes at a time, on good roads, while spinning along at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour.  I saw them do it, often.  There was no danger about it; a sleeping man will seize the irons in time when the coach jolts.  These men were hard worked, and it was not possible for them to stay awake all the time.

    By and by we passed through Marysville, and over the Big Blue and Little Sandy; thence about a mile, and entered Nebraska.  About a mile further on, we came to the Big Sandy—­one hundred and eighty miles from St. Joseph.

    As the sun was going down, we saw the first specimen of an animal known familiarly over two thousand miles of mountain and desert—­from Kansas clear to the Pacific Ocean—­as the jackass rabbit.  He is well named.  He is just like any other rabbit, except that he is from one third to twice as large, has longer legs in proportion to his size, and has the most preposterous ears that ever were mounted on any creature but a jackass.

    When he is sitting quiet, thinking about his sins, or is absent-minded or unapprehensive of danger, his majestic ears project above him conspicuously; but the breaking of a twig will scare him nearly to death, and then he tilts his ears back gently and starts for home.  All you can see, then, for the next minute, is his long gray form stretched out straight and streaking it through the low sage-brush, head erect, eyes right, and ears just canted a little to the rear, but showing you where the animal is, all the time, the same as if he carried a jib.  Now and then he makes a marvelous spring with his long legs, high over the stunted sage-brush, and scores a leap that would make a horse envious.  Presently he comes down to a long, graceful lope, and shortly he mysteriously disappears.  He has crouched behind a sage-bush, and will sit there and listen and tremble until you get within six feet of him, when he will get under way again.  But one must shoot at this creature once, if he wishes to see him throw his heart into his heels, and do the best he knows how.  He is frightened clear through, now, and he lays his long ears down on his back, straightens himself out like a yard-stick every spring he makes, and scatters miles behind him with an easy indifference that is enchanting.

    Our party made this specimen hump himself, as the conductor said.  The secretary started him with a shot from the Colt; I commenced spitting at him with my weapon; and all in the same instant the old Allen’s whole broadside let go with a rattling crash, and it is not putting it too strong to say that the rabbit was frantic!  He dropped his ears, set up his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed which can only be described as a flash and a vanish!  Long after he was out of sight we could hear him whiz.

    I do not remember where we first came across sage-brush, but as I have been speaking of it I may as well describe it.

    This is easily done, for if the reader can imagine a gnarled and venerable live oak-tree reduced to a little shrub two feet-high, with its rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all complete, he can picture the sage-brush exactly.  Often, on lazy afternoons in the mountains, I have lain on the ground with my face under a sage-bush, and entertained myself with fancying that the gnats among its foliage were liliputian birds, and that the ants marching and countermarching about its base were liliputian flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer from Brobdignag waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him.

    It is an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature, is the sage-brush.  Its foliage is a grayish green, and gives that tint to desert and mountain.  It smells like our domestic sage, and sage-tea made from it taste like the sage-tea which all boys are so well acquainted with.  The sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and grows right in the midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing else in the vegetable world would try to grow, except bunch-grass. —­[Bunch-grass grows on the bleak mountain-sides of Nevada and neighboring territories, and offers excellent feed for stock, even in the dead of winter, wherever the snow is blown aside and exposes it; notwithstanding its unpromising home, bunch-grass is a better and more nutritious diet for cattle and horses than almost any other hay or grass that is known—­so stock-men say.]—­The sage-bushes grow from three to six or seven feet apart, all over the mountains and deserts of the Far West, clear to the borders of California.  There is not a tree of any kind in the deserts, for hundreds of miles—­there is no vegetation at all in a regular desert, except the sage-brush and its cousin the greasewood, which is so much like the sage-brush that the difference amounts to little.  Camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the friendly sage-brush.  Its trunk is as large as a boy’s wrist (and from that up to a man’s arm), and its crooked branches are half as large as its trunk—­all good, sound, hard wood, very like oak.

    When a party camps, the first thing to be done is to cut sage-brush; and in a few minutes there is an opulent pile of it ready for use.  A hole a foot wide, two feet deep, and two feet long, is dug, and sage-brush chopped up and burned in it till it is full to the brim with glowing coals.  Then the cooking begins, and there is no smoke, and consequently no swearing.  Such a fire will keep all night, with very little replenishing; and it makes a very sociable camp-fire, and one around which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and profoundly entertaining.

    Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure.  Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.  But their testimony to its nutritiousness is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for dinner.  Mules and donkeys and camels have appetites that anything will relieve temporarily, but nothing satisfy.

    In Syria, once, at the head-waters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it; and then, after he was done figuring on it as an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet.  He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life.  Then he smacked his lips once or twice, and reached after the other sleeve.  Next he tried the velvet collar, and smiled a smile of such contentment that it was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing about an overcoat.  The tails went next, along with some percussion caps and cough candy, and some fig-paste from Constantinople.  And then my newspaper correspondence dropped out, and he took a chance in that —­manuscript letters written for the home papers.  But he was treading on dangerous ground, now.  He began to come across solid wisdom in those documents that was rather weighty on his stomach; and occasionally he would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth; it was getting to be perilous times with him, but he held his grip with good courage and hopefully, till at last he began to stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity.  He began to gag and gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter’s work-bench, and died a death of indescribable agony.  I went and pulled the manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact that I ever laid before a trusting public.

    I was about to say, when diverted from my subject, that occasionally one finds sage-bushes five or six feet high, and with a spread of branch and foliage in proportion, but two or two and a half feet is the usual height.

    Chapter 4

    As the sun went down and the evening chill came on, we made preparation for bed.  We stirred up the hard leather letter-sacks, and the knotty canvas bags of printed matter (knotty and uneven because of projecting ends and corners of magazines, boxes and books).  We stirred them up and redisposed them in such a way as to make our bed as level as possible.  And we did improve it, too, though after all our work it had an upheaved and billowy look about it, like a little piece of a stormy sea.  Next we hunted up our boots from odd nooks among the mail-bags where they had settled, and put them on.  Then we got down our coats, vests, pantaloons and heavy woolen shirts, from the arm-loops where they had been swinging all day, and clothed ourselves in them—­for, there being no ladies either at the stations or in the coach, and the weather being hot, we had looked to our comfort by stripping to our underclothing, at nine o’clock in the morning.  All things being now ready, we stowed the uneasy Dictionary where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteens and pistols where we could find them in the dark.  Then we smoked a final pipe, and swapped a final yarn; after which, we put the pipes, tobacco and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail-bags, and then fastened down the coach curtains all around, and made the place as dark as the inside of a cow, as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque way.  It was certainly as dark as any place could be—­nothing was even dimly visible in it.  And finally, we rolled ourselves up like silk-worms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep.

    Whenever the stage stopped to change horses, we would wake up, and try to recollect where we were—­and succeed—­and in a minute or two the stage would be off again, and we likewise.  We began to get into country, now, threaded here and there with little streams.  These had high, steep banks on each side, and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up the other, our party inside got mixed somewhat.  First we would all be down in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture, and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads.  And we would sprawl and kick, too, and ward off ends and corners of mail-bags that came lumbering over us and about us; and as the dust rose from the tumult, we would all sneeze in chorus, and the majority of us would grumble, and probably say some hasty thing, like:  Take your elbow out of my ribs!—­can’t you quit crowding?

    Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged somebody.  One trip it barked the Secretary’s elbow; the next trip it hurt me in the stomach, and the third it tilted Bemis’s nose up till he could look down his nostrils—­he said.  The pistols and coin soon settled to the bottom, but the pipes, pipe-stems, tobacco and canteens clattered and floundered after the Dictionary every time it made an assault on us, and aided and abetted the book by spilling tobacco in our eyes, and water down our backs.

    Still, all things considered, it was a very comfortable night.  It wore gradually away, and when at last a cold gray light was visible through the puckers and chinks in the curtains, we yawned and stretched with satisfaction, shed our cocoons, and felt that we had slept as much as was necessary.  By and by, as the sun rose up and warmed the world, we pulled off our clothes and got ready for breakfast.  We were just pleasantly in time, for five minutes afterward the driver sent the weird music of his bugle winding over the grassy solitudes, and presently we detected a low hut or two in the distance.  Then the rattling of the coach, the clatter of our six horses’ hoofs, and the driver’s crisp commands, awoke to a louder and stronger emphasis, and we went sweeping down on the station at our smartest speed.  It was fascinating—­that old overland stagecoaching.

    We jumped out in undress uniform.  The driver tossed his gathered reins out on the ground, gaped and stretched complacently, drew off his heavy buckskin gloves with great deliberation and insufferable dignity—­taking not the slightest notice of a dozen solicitous inquires after his health, and humbly facetious and flattering accostings, and obsequious tenders of service, from five or six hairy and half-civilized station-keepers and hostlers who were nimbly unhitching our steeds and bringing the fresh team out of the stables—­for in the eyes of the stage-driver of that day, station-keepers and hostlers were a sort of good enough low creatures, useful in their place, and helping to make up a world, but not the kind of beings which a person of distinction could afford to concern himself with; while, on the contrary, in the eyes of the station-keeper and the hostler, the stage-driver was a hero—­a great and shining dignitary, the world’s favorite son, the envy of the people, the observed of the nations.  When they spoke to him they received his insolent silence meekly, and as being the natural and proper conduct of so great a man; when he opened his lips they all hung on his words with admiration (he never honored a particular individual with a remark, but addressed it with a broad generality to the horses, the stables, the surrounding country and the human underlings); when he discharged a facetious insulting personality at a hostler, that hostler was happy for the day; when he uttered his one jest—­old as the hills, coarse, profane, witless, and inflicted on the same audience, in the same language, every time his coach drove up there—­the varlets roared, and slapped their thighs, and swore it was the best thing they’d ever heard in all their lives.  And how they would fly around when he wanted a basin of water, a gourd of the same, or a light for his pipe!—­but they would instantly insult a passenger if he so far forgot himself as to crave a favor at their hands.  They could do that sort of insolence as well as the driver they copied it from—­for, let it be borne in mind, the overland driver had but little less contempt for his passengers than he had for his hostlers.

    The hostlers and station-keepers treated the really powerful conductor of the coach merely with the best of what was their idea of civility, but the driver was the only being they bowed down to and worshipped.  How admiringly they would gaze up at him in his high seat as he gloved himself with lingering deliberation, while some happy hostler held the bunch of reins aloft, and waited patiently for him to take it!  And how they would bombard him with glorifying ejaculations as he cracked his long whip and went careering away.

    The station buildings were long, low huts, made of sundried, mud-colored bricks, laid up without mortar (adobes, the Spaniards call these bricks, and Americans shorten it to ’dobies).  The roofs, which had no slant to them worth speaking of, were thatched and then sodded or covered with a thick layer of earth, and from this sprung a pretty rank growth of weeds and grass.  It was the first time we had ever seen a man’s front yard on top of his house.  The building consisted of barns, stable-room for twelve or fifteen horses, and a hut for an eating-room for passengers.  This latter had bunks in it for the station-keeper and a hostler or two.  You could rest your elbow on its eaves, and you had to bend in order to get in at the door.  In place of a window there was a square hole about large enough for a man to crawl through, but this had no glass in it.  There was no flooring, but the ground was packed hard.  There was no stove, but the fire-place served all needful purposes.  There were no shelves, no cupboards, no closets.  In a corner stood an open sack of flour, and nestling against its base were a couple of black and venerable tin coffee-pots, a tin teapot, a little bag of salt, and a side of bacon.

    By the door of the station-keeper’s den, outside, was a tin wash-basin, on the ground.  Near it was a pail of water and a piece of yellow bar soap, and from the eaves hung a hoary blue woolen shirt, significantly —­but this latter was the station-keeper’s private towel, and only two persons in all the party might venture to use it—­the stage-driver and the conductor.  The latter would not, from a sense of decency; the former would not, because did not choose to encourage the advances of a station-keeper.  We had towels—­in the valise; they might as well have been in Sodom and Gomorrah.  We (and the conductor) used our handkerchiefs, and the driver his pantaloons and sleeves.  By the door, inside, was fastened a small old-fashioned looking-glass frame, with two little fragments of the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it.  This arrangement afforded a pleasant double-barreled portrait of you when you looked into it, with one half of your head set up a couple of inches above the other half.  From the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a string—­but if I had to describe that patriarch or die, I believe I would order some sample coffins.

    It had come down from Esau and Samson, and had been accumulating hair ever since—­along with certain impurities.  In one corner of the room stood three or four rifles and muskets, together with horns and pouches of ammunition.  The station-men wore pantaloons of coarse, country-woven stuff, and into the seat and the inside of the legs were sewed ample additions of buckskin, to do duty in place of leggings, when the man rode horseback—­so the pants were half dull blue and half yellow, and unspeakably picturesque.  The pants were stuffed into the tops of high boots, the heels whereof were armed with great Spanish spurs, whose little iron clogs and chains jingled with every step.  The man wore a huge beard and mustachios, an old slouch hat, a blue woolen shirt, no suspenders, no vest, no coat—­in a leathern sheath in his belt, a great long navy revolver (slung on right side, hammer to the front), and projecting from his boot a horn-handled bowie-knife.  The furniture of the hut was neither gorgeous nor much in the way.  The rocking-chairs and sofas were not present, and never had been, but they were represented by two three-legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet long, and two empty candle-boxes.  The table was a greasy board on stilts, and the table-cloth and napkins had not come—­and they were not looking for them, either.  A battered tin platter, a knife and fork, and a tin pint cup, were at each man’s place, and the driver had a queens-ware saucer that had seen better days.  Of course this duke sat at the head of the table.  There was one isolated piece of table furniture that bore about it a touching air of grandeur in misfortune.  This was the caster.  It was German silver, and crippled and rusty, but it was so preposterously out of place there that it was suggestive of a tattered exiled king among barbarians, and the majesty of its native position compelled respect even in its degradation.

    There was only one cruet left, and that was a stopperless, fly-specked, broken-necked thing, with two inches of vinegar in it, and a dozen preserved flies with their heels up and looking sorry they had invested there.

    The station-keeper upended a disk of last week’s bread, of the shape and size of an old-time cheese, and carved some slabs from it which were as good as Nicholson pavement, and tenderer.

    He sliced off a piece of bacon for each man, but only the experienced old hands made out to eat it, for it was condemned army bacon which the United States would not feed to its soldiers in the forts, and the stage company had bought it cheap for the sustenance of their passengers and employees.  We may have found this condemned army bacon further out on the plains than the section I am locating it in, but we found it—­there is no gainsaying that.

    Then he poured for us a beverage which he called Slum gullion, and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it.  It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler.

    He had no sugar and no milk—­not even a spoon to stir the ingredients with.

    We could not eat the bread or the meat, nor drink the slumgullion.  And when I looked at that melancholy vinegar-cruet, I thought of the anecdote (a very, very old one, even at that day) of the traveler who sat down to a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of mustard.  He asked the landlord if this was all.  The landlord said: 

    All!  Why, thunder and lightning, I should think there was mackerel enough there for six.

    But I don’t like mackerel.

    Oh—­then help yourself to the mustard.

    In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor out of it.

    Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle.

    I tasted and smelt, and said I would take coffee, I believed.  The station-boss stopped dead still, and glared at me speechless.  At last, when he came to, he turned away and said, as one who communes with himself upon a matter too vast to grasp: 

    Coffee!  Well, if that don’t go clean ahead of me, I’m d—–­d!

    We could not eat, and there was no conversation among the hostlers and herdsmen—­we all sat at the same board.  At least there was no conversation further than a single hurried request, now and then, from one employee to another.  It was always in the same form, and always gruffly friendly.  Its western freshness and novelty startled me, at first, and interested me; but it presently grew monotonous, and lost its charm.  It was: 

    Pass the bread, you son of a skunk! No, I forget—­skunk was not the word; it seems to me it was still stronger than that; I know it was, in fact, but it is gone from my memory, apparently.  However, it is no matter—­probably it was too strong for print, anyway.  It is the landmark in my memory which tells me where I first encountered the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains.

    We gave up the breakfast, and paid our dollar apiece and went back to our mail-bag bed in the coach, and found comfort in our pipes.  Right here we suffered the first diminution of our princely state.  We left our six fine horses and took six mules in their place.  But they were wild Mexican fellows, and a man had to stand at the head of each of them and hold him fast while the driver gloved and got himself ready.  And when at last he grasped the reins and gave the word, the men sprung suddenly away from the mules’ heads and the coach shot from the station as if it had issued from a cannon.  How the frantic animals did scamper!  It was a fierce and furious gallop—­and the gait never altered for a moment till we reeled off ten or twelve miles and swept up to the next collection of little station-huts and stables.

    So we flew along all day.  At 2 P.M. the belt of timber that fringes the North Platte and marks its windings through the vast level floor of the Plains came in sight.  At 4 P.M. we crossed a branch of the river, and at 5 P.M. we crossed the Platte itself, and landed at Fort Kearney, fifty-six hours out from St. Joe—­three hundred miles!

    Now that was stage-coaching on the great overland, ten or twelve years ago, when perhaps not more than ten men in America, all told, expected to live to see a railroad follow that route to the Pacific.  But the railroad is there, now, and it pictures a thousand odd comparisons and contrasts in my mind to read the following sketch, in the New York Times, of a recent trip over almost the very ground I have been describing.  I can scarcely comprehend the new state of things: 

         "Across the continent.

    "At 4.20 P.M., Sunday, we rolled out of the station at Omaha, and started westward on our long jaunt.  A couple of hours out, dinner was announced—­an ‘event’ to those of us who had yet to experience what it is to eat in one of Pullman’s hotels on wheels; so, stepping into the car next forward of our sleeping palace, we found ourselves in the dining-car.  It was a revelation to us, that first dinner on Sunday.  And though we continued to dine for four days, and had as many breakfasts and suppers, our whole party never ceased to admire the perfection of the arrangements, and the marvelous results achieved.  Upon tables covered with snowy linen, and garnished with services of solid silver, Ethiop waiters, flitting about in spotless white, placed as by magic a repast at which Delmonico himself could have had no occasion to blush; and, indeed, in some respects it would be hard for that distinguished chef to match our menu; for, in addition to all that ordinarily makes up a first-chop dinner, had we not our antelope steak (the gormand who has not experienced this —­bah! what does he know of the feast of fat things?) our delicious mountain-brook trout, and choice fruits and berries, and (sauce piquant and unpurchasable!) our sweet-scented, appetite-compelling air of the prairies?

    You may depend upon it, we all did justice to the good things, and as we washed them down with bumpers of sparkling Krug, whilst we sped along at the rate of thirty miles an hour, agreed it was the fastest living we had ever experienced. (We beat that, however, two days afterward when we made twenty-seven miles in twenty-seven minutes, while our Champagne glasses filled to the brim spilled not a drop!) After dinner we repaired to our drawing-room car, and, as it was Sabbath eve, intoned some of the grand old hymns—­Praise God from whom," etc.; Shining Shore, Coronation, etc.—­the voices of the men singers and of the women singers blending sweetly in the evening air, while our train, with its great, glaring Polyphemus eye, lighting up long vistas of prairie, rushed into the night and the Wild.  Then to bed in luxurious couches, where we slept the sleep of the just and only awoke the next morning (Monday) at eight o’clock, to find ourselves at the crossing of the North Platte, three hundred miles from Omaha—­fifteen hours and forty minutes out."

    Chapter 5

    Another night of alternate tranquillity and turmoil.  But morning came, by and by.  It was another glad awakening to fresh breezes, vast expanses of level greensward, bright sunlight, an impressive solitude utterly without visible human beings or human habitations, and an atmosphere of such amazing magnifying properties that trees that seemed close at hand were more than three mile away.  We resumed undress uniform, climbed a-top of the flying coach, dangled our legs over the side, shouted occasionally at our frantic mules, merely to see them lay their ears back and scamper faster, tied our hats on to keep our hair from blowing away, and leveled an outlook over the world-wide carpet about us for things new and strange to gaze at.  Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings!

    Along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie-dog villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf.  If I remember rightly, this latter was the regular cayote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther deserts.  And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak with confidence.  The cayote is a long, slim, sick and

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1