1865.]

STARTING WESTWARD AGAIN.

327

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THERE is a permanent westerly current in our social and political atmosphere like that which carries westward all material atoms after they rise to a certain hight. In 1865 I found myself again borne along upon it. The mail companies had proffered to the Hon. Schuyler Colfax, speaker of the national House of Representatives, special coaches for crossing the continent, and unusual facilities for studying the vast and varied interests of the West, yet in their infancy. He invited Mr. William Bross of the Chicago Tribune, lieutenant-governor of Illinois, and myself, to join him in the long journey to the Pacific by land and back again by

water.

We met at Atchison Kansas, then the western terminus of the railroad. A few days before, Indians had captured a coach coming in from Denver, and killed two passengers. The morning after our arrival another stage reached Atchison, having engaged in a running musketry fight for several miles. Two of the passengers were ladies whom I had formerly known in Colorado. Five years' residence on the frontier had made them so familiar with the horrors which captured women suffer among savages, that they peremptorily instructed their younger brother to shoot them in the coach, rather than permit them to be made prisoners. But after the danger was over, they regarded it with that curious pleasure which the contemplation of perils past always affords.

Our prospects were not alluring; but the telegraph diminished the risk, and we were promised an escort when needed. Beside, our coach was to take out Gen. P. E. Conner, commandant of that military district—a sort of hostage for the safety of the rest, as Punch suggested that the president or a director of a railway

328

INDIAN MURDERS AND DEPREDATIONS.

[1865. fruitful of fatal accidents, be compelled to ride upon the locomotive of each passenger train.

Sixteen years before, Conner started from Fort Leavenworth for Mexico, a private soldier. Now he had visited the fort a second time, wearing the star of brigadier general, and in charge of the entire region for twelve hundred miles between the Missouri and Salt Lake.

On the twenty-second of May we left Atchison. I wonder if the Almighty ever made a more beautiful country than Kansas! The eye revels in this wide expanse of softest green. Gemmed with innumerable flowers, and darkened by long lines of forest, the prairies are a joy forever.

At Big Sandy, one hundred and forty miles out, we entered upon the track of the Indian depredations of August, 1864. For three hundred miles west of the Sandy, every house and barn along the road was burned, eighty settlers murdered, and all the stock stolen.

Four cavalry-men accompanied us. We found no women or children at the ranches; but a few soldiers on duty at each mail station. At one was an ingenious mimic cannon-a piece of stove

LIGHT ARTILLERY.

pipe mounted upon old cartwheels. This 'light artillery' had frightened the Indians as effectually as the rebel wooden guns, at Manassas in 1862, appalled the commander of the Army of the Potomac.

Near Kearney a fierce, sudden tornado overturned emigrant wagons, threw up vast sheets of water from the Platte, and blew several teamsters

We were hardly able to

into and across the shallow stream. appreciate its ludicrousness, for we had barely leaped to the ground when great hail-stones pelted us like a hot musketry fire. As we cowered to the ground our horses reared and ran, dragging by their bits for a hundred yards the men who attempted to hold them. Near us a terrified mule, having thrown his rider, stood with per

1865.]

TORNADO NEAR FORT KEARNEY.

329

pendicular ears, expanded nostrils, and braced legs, facing the tornado, a very concentration of mulish obstinacy. He seemed to declare that a hundred tornadoes and a thousand men should never persuade him to budge an inch. George K. Otis, superintendent of the mail line, who accompanied us, nodding toward the animal, in a little lull of the blasts asked:

'Did you ever see a more perfect picture of whoa (woe?')

I had always wondered before who originated the conundrum which likens the roof of a house to a lame dog, 'because it is a slope up' (slow pup;) but now I knew. Only one man in the world could have

the last six weeks, nine hundred of them within three days. On the road from the Missouri to New Mexico, for six months of the same year, a toll-bridge keeper made a record of the teams passing, with this result:

For the same period the commissary at Fort Leavenworth scnt Government supplies westward to the various plains and mountain

330

PRESS DISPATCHES ON THE WING.

[1865.

A single Salt Lake merchant paid one hundred and fifty thou sand dollars for hauling his year's supply of goods from the Mis. souri.

These items give some faint idea of the commerce of the plains. Government expenditures alone for hauling freights and for Indian wars during the last twenty years, would have built a firstclass, double-track railway from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

Ten years ago, adventurous overland travelers crossing the continent, were sometimes compelled to journey three or four hundred miles without seeing a human habitation save Indian wigwams. Now, leaving the cars in eastern Kansas or Nebraska, one passes a settler's dwelling in every eight miles, until he gains the slowclimbing Pacific locomotive, toiling up the western walls of the Sierra Nevadas.

We passed much heavy quartz machinery, including a boiler drawn by sixteen oxen. The ranches forty or fifty miles apart where passengers take meals, are termed 'home stations;' those where the coach only stops to exchange teams, 'swing stations.' By a droll conceit, the drivers call the pebbles which they gather in these treeless regions, to fling at their lazy mules, 'stone whiplashes.'

The daily coaches, each carrying several passengers and about half a ton of mail, now made the trip from Atchison and Omaha to the Placerville railway in California (Shinkle Springs station) in less than three weeks.

We met the California papers daily in the coaches coming east, and were permitted to read the dispatches for the Associated Press, at telegraph stations. The breakfast of ham, biscuits, and coffee, on the great desert, was the more palatable, when the New York bulletins of the same morning were spread upon the board -literally the board-in the hurried handwriting of the operator, who caught and transfixed them flying on the lightning's wing to San Francisco.

'To the weary, way worn emigrant, journeying with slow teams through these dreary wastes, the mail coach coming in sight imparts new life. It is the connecting link between the desert and the world. To him it represents home, government, civilization, Saratoga, Bunker Hill, the American Flag, and the Fourth of

1865.]

ONE DOLLAR FOR A NEWSPAPER.

331

July!' Emigrants and ranch-men besieged us for papers. One night, when we rolled up to a lonely station, miles from any other human habitation, the stock-tender, ragged, shaggy, sunburnt and unkempt, put his lantern up to our coach window and implored:

'Gentlemen, can you spare me a newspaper? I have not seen one for a week and can't endure it much longer. I will give a dollar for any newspaper in the United States not more than ten days old.'

He was a representative American. No other nation so subsists upon the daily journals as our own.

In the summer of 1864, Ben Holladay, proprietor of the overland stage line, rode by special coach from Folsom California, to Atchison Kansas, (almost two thousand miles,) in twelve days and two hours. It cost him twenty thousand dollars in wear and tear of stock and vehicles.

That was a trip worth the taking a history of the last generation a prophecy of the coming Pacific railroad, the grandest material enterprise of all time. The very thought of it is inspiring. Whirling over the Sierra Nevadas, along the perilous edge of many a dizzy precipice-spinning through the all-enveloping dust of the Great Basin, with its endless alkaline wastes-rattling along frowning canyons of the Rocky Mountains-shooting across the sands of the measureless desert, and then rolling merrily over the gentle swells of the flower-spangled prairie! Night and day, through storm and sunshine, shivering in bitter frost, panting in tropical heat, shrinking under pelting hail, cowering in the lightning's fiery track-across the continent, from the serene ocean to the turbid river!

Many years ago, F. X. Aubrey galloped from Santa Fe New Mexico, to Independence Missouri, eight hundred and forty miles, in less than seven days. He changed horses three or four times, and won his wager of one thousand dollars; but at the end of the journey he was so stiff that he had to be lifted from the saddle.

The soldiers who accompanied us and guarded the stations were all rebel prisoners or deserters who had taken the oath of allegiance and enlisted in the United States service. They styled themselves