i have seen cities in many parts of the world, from the smoke-grimed, flame-crowned, cloud-canopied hives of industry of middle and northern england, of belgium, and northern france, to the marble palaces and broad-verandahed bungalows which sleep among the palm-groves by the white shores of tropic seas; but never—north, south, east, or west—have i seen a collection of human habitations and workshops so utterly hopeless, so irretrievably ugly as that portion of chicago about which i wandered during my three hours’ wait for the starting of the overland limited.
the roadways—really one cannot call them streets—would of themselves have been far inferior to similar streets in manchester or wolverhampton, because here at least the streets are paved. in chicago they are not.
[18]
many years ago an attempt seems to have been made to pave them, but the stones have sunk, and the mud and slush have come up, and every variety of filth covers them except about the lines over which the tramcars rush, hissing and clanging on their headlong way. but the roadways of chicago are also tunnels, for over them stretches the solid, continuous iron arch of the overhead railway whence come the roar of wheels, the snorting of steam-engines, the shriek of whistles, and the wailing groan of the brakes.
now and then you reach a crossing or open place where you emerge from the tunnel, out of semi-darkness into comparative light, and you see vast shapes of stiff-angled, steep-roofed buildings lifting their sixteenth or seventeenth storey up into the murky, smoke-laden sky. they are part and parcel of chicago—huge, ugly, dirty, and exceedingly useful.
there are big buildings in new york, but they are to the chicago buildings as palaces compared to factories. there are others in san francisco which are merely eccentricities and not altogether unpicturesque, but the chicago sky-scraper is a sort of architectural fungus, an insulting excrescence[19] from the unoffending earth, which makes you long to get big guns and shoot at it. still, it is useful, and serves the purpose for which it was built, and that is why chicago is not only content with it, but even proud of it.
believing many things that were said to me afterwards, i doubt not that chicago, elsewhere and other than i saw it, is one of the finest and most beautiful cities on earth. far be it from me to believe otherwise, since some day i hope to see it again; and he who thinks ill of chicago will have about as good a time there as a man who thinks well of new york.
still, common honesty obliges me to say that the impression which i took away with me in the overland limited was one of vastness, uncleanness, and ugliness, redeemed only by that sombre, plutonic magnificence which seems to be the one reward of an absolute and unhesitating sacrifice to blank utility.
and yet i did find one view in chicago which qualified this, and that was from the western end of the lake front. the ragged steamboat piers, the long rows of posts marking the shoals, the piles of the groynes, one or two dilapidated and almost[20] prehistoric steamboats, and blistered, out-of-date yachts laid up along the lake wall, the stately sweep of houses, the huge bulks of the factories in the east, with their towering chimneys pouring out clouds of smoke and steam—these, with the smooth water of the horizonless lake, made a pleasanter mental photograph to take away with one than the unlovely roaring streets and the hideous wealth-crammed stores and warehouses.
from chicago to ogden the route of the union pacific is about as uninteresting as the central section of the canadian pacific, only here the towns and villages are more frequent and the country is naturally far more advanced in cultivation.
cities, of course, are numerous. they vary in size from two to fifty thousand inhabitants; but structurally they are all the same—tin-roofed houses of weather-board, banks and offices, stores and factories, and elevators of brick ranged along wide and mostly unpaved roads with plank side-walks.
no apparent attempt has been made at order or uniformity. where a big building is wanted there it is put, and where a little wooden shanty serves its purpose there it remains.
there is plenty of elbow-room, and so the village[21] spreads itself into the city in a quite promiscuous fashion, something like a boy left to grow up into a man according to his own sweet will. but be it well noted that he becomes a man all the same, for every one of these cities, big or small, wood or brick, or both, was teeming with life and humming with business.
one of the many visible signs of this could be seen in the number of telegraph-wires slung on huge unsightly poles running up both sides of the unkempt streets; in fact, an american inland city of five thousand inhabitants seems to do a good deal more telegraphing and telephoning than an english town of fifty thousand.
one other feature of the villages, towns, and “cities” along the route struck me rather forcibly. nearly all of them, big and little, have very fine stations—i beg pardon, dep?ts. in fact, the practice seems to be to build a fine, big dep?t and let the city grow up to it. thus, for instance, at omaha city, where we had a half-hour’s wait changing horses and looking out for hot boxes, i found the dep?t built of grey granite, floored with marble, and entered by two splendid twin staircases curving down through a domed and pillared hall[22] to spacious waiting-rooms and offices opening on to a platform about a quarter of a mile long.
it was the sort of station you would expect to find in a go-ahead english or european city that possessed streets and squares and houses to match. now omaha is go-ahead, and big, and busy, but for all you can see of it from the train and station it is scattered promiscuously around hill and dale, and the palatial station itself stands in the midst of a waste of sloppy roads traversed as usual by the hurrying electric trams, and bordered by little, shabby, ill-assorted wooden houses which don’t look worth fifty pounds apiece. for all that, omaha is one of the busiest and wealthiest cities of the middle states.
at ogden, where the iron roads from every part of the continent seem to meet, and where big, high-shouldered engines from mexico and texas whistled their greetings to brother monsters from maine and california, i felt sorely tempted to stop off and take the thirty-mile run to salt lake city, but
“the steamer won’t wait for the train,”
and i should have risked missing my boat to honolulu—added to which i had made some[23] friends on the train who were going to show me round san francisco in case i had a day or so there, so i read my kipling instead, and saw the mormon city with keener eyes than mine.
by the way, american manners appear to have altered very much for the better since kipling made his journey “from sea to sea.” i traversed a good deal of the same ground, and stayed at some of the same hotels that he did, but i never met with more straight-spoken, dignified courtesy in any part of the world.
i never saw hotel clerks who blazed with diamonds, or who treated me like a worm. as a matter of fact i never met more polite, obliging, well-informed men in any similar position. certainly they could give many points to hotel managers and clerks in england and australia.
the waiters, too, both white and black, must have vastly improved. the white waiter in america, as i found him, is quite the smartest, most intelligent, and, in his own manly way, the most polite of his class—a class very well typified by the bugler of the st. louis. his coloured confrère does his work deftly, silently, and well.
kipling relates a conversation which took place[24] in the palace hotel between a coloured waiter and himself, in which george—every servant in america whose name you don’t know is george—made the remark:
“oh ——! wages like that wouldn’t keep me in cigars!”
i stayed at the palace in san francisco, and from what i heard and saw i should say that a waiter who made a remark like that nowadays would very soon find that cigars were an unattainable luxury to a man out of work. he would be “fired” on the spot.
my own experience certainly is that the americans are the politest people on earth, or, perhaps i ought to say, the most courteous, because any one can be polite if it pays him. only a gentleman can be courteous. they have learnt, apparently at the hands of mother nature herself, that subtle blending of politeness and dignity which we call courtesy.
for instance, an american waiter, or barber, or shoeblack says “sir” quite differently to anybody else in the world, except perhaps the american gentleman who may be worth his millions. there is no suspicion of cringing or inferiority about[25] it, whether it comes from the shoeblack or the millionaire. it seems to say equally from the one as from the other “our circumstances may be different, but we are both of us gentlemen in our way, and so we will behave to each other as gentlemen,” and politeness of that sort is the pleasantest of all politeness.
now, in australia—but australia is still seven thousand miles away across the broad pacific, so we will talk about that later on. meanwhile a couple of iron giants have been harnessed to the long line of palace-cars, the mails have been exchanged from train to train, the bells begin to swing and clang out soft musical warning notes, the mellow whistles sing good-bye from engine to engine; “all aboard” is the word, and the overland limited threads its way through the maze of shining metals, and heads away westward to where a long, gleaming line of silver backed by a black screen of mountains tipped with diamonds shows the position of the inland sea of the wilderness.
salt lake, the dead sea of the mormon land of promise, is smaller now by a good many scores of square miles than it was some thirty years ago,[26] when the southern pacific was connected up with the union pacific, and so completed the iron chain which links the hudson with the sacramento.
for three or four hours the train runs over embankments surrounded by vast salt mud-flats, which in those days were covered by the fast-shrinking waters. it is the old story, the story of nearly all these upland desert regions. every year less rain falls in the valleys and less snow on the mountains. as the clouds grow thinner and fewer the sun blazes hotter and sucks up more and more vapour, and so year by year the waters of the great salt lake are getting less great and more salt.
with all due deference to american susceptibility on such points, i must say that the scenery of the rockies which one sees from the windows of a car on the union pacific does not begin to compare with the scenery along the canadian pacific line. even echo ca?on and weber ca?on, the show places of the line, struck me as comparatively insignificant when i remembered the splendours of eagle pass and the grandeurs of bear ca?on.
but when the wilderness of nevada had been cast behind our flying wheels, and we began to[27] climb up the wooded foothills of the sierra nevada—that snow-crowned mountain wall which divides one of the dreariest from one of the most beautiful regions on earth, the great american desert from “god’s own country”—it was time to sit up and use both your eyes and do your best to look out at both sides of the car at once.
it was here that the last and most beautiful stretch of the thirty-two-hundred-mile run began. up the straight grades and round and round the twice and thrice-tiered loops the great train twined and circled; now skirting the shore of a still, pine-fringed lake, filling the bottom of a mountain valley; and now burrowing under the long snow-sheds, groaning under their weight of snow far away up the mountain-side, and so, mile by mile of distance, and yard by yard of height, the top of the great divide was reached.
the iron horses took a rest and a long drink at alta, the summit station, and then,
“down the valley with our guttering breaks a-squeal,”
we started on our way to that lovely land which lies between the mountains and the sea.
the snow vanished; first from the sides of[28] the track, and then from the gullies between the hills round which we twined. the mist-clouds rolled away behind us up the wooded slopes. the snow-peaks far beyond gleamed out above them, and ahead and below the dropping sun shone on a land of broken red hills, and, beyond them, over a vast level stretch of green grass and fruit-land, with a broad river flowing through it.
beyond this again it glimmered far and faintly on a long streak of flickering silver. the red hills were the native land of truthful james; the green plains below were the valley of the sacramento; and the shimmering silver in the far distance was the pacific ocean, whose character i propose hereafter to revise.
then we rushed down through the last ca?on out on to an open slope, and pulled up at red gulch. that is not its name on the time-tables, but it ought to be.
a freight truck had got off the line about two miles lower down. so, instead of a stop of ten minutes, we had to wait two hours, which i thankfully employed in making a little excursion through bret harte land, the land of red earth and yellow gold, of towering pines and flower-filled[29] valleys, of deliciously mingled beauty and ugliness; where the skies are as blue as they are above the isles of the south, and the air seems like what one would expect to breathe in paradise.
climbing down from the car was like getting out of the world of reality, as represented by the overland limited (which, remember, had brought me from chicago) into the garden of romance. i had left the comfortable but emphatically materialistic gorgeousness of the pulman palace-car, and i was actually standing on the same earth that jack hamlyn had trodden, and i was breathing the same air that he had inspired when he sang that famous song.
all around i could see gashes of red amid the green and brown of the slopes along the river banks—just such gulches as the one tennessee lived in with his immortal partner. somewhere up in the dark valleys through which the overland limited had just thundered the outcasts of poker flat had found their last refuge, and john oakhurst, after pinning that inscribed deuce of spades to the pine-tree with his bowie-knife, had passed in his checks like a gambler and a gentleman.
in just such a little schoolhouse as stood near[30] the dep?t, mliss had flung down her astronomy book and paralysed one part of her audience and ecstasied the other by that famous heresy of hers re the miracle of joshua.
“it’s a damned lie. i don’t believe a word of it.”
down yonder, in the lowlands across the river, not very far from its junction with a tributary, might have been north fork and poverty flat; and just such a red hole as i found a hundred yards or so from the track might have been the forty-foot grave into which dow descended “with a derringer hid in his breast,” making his last despairing search for water—and finding gold.
the clang of the bell and the soft “hoo-too” of the whistle called me back out of my dream as i was having a drink at just such a bar as the gallant colonel starbottle might have slaked his immortal thirst at. a few moments more and the tireless wheels had begun to revolve again, and we slid down the curving slopes leading to the broad vale of the sacramento.
two snapshots up and down the rio sacramento, taken as the train was crossing the bridge.
on the way to the golden land i had fallen into conversation with a young californian, a fine specimen of the western race, of whom his[31] country might well be proud, as he was proud of it.
“it’s god’s own country, sir. and when you’ve seen more of it you’ll think so,” he said, as we swept across the fat, fertile farmlands which lay beneath the foot-hills. “you’ve travelled a bit, you tell me; but i guess if you go from end to end of this country you’ll say you never struck one like it.”
“well,” i said, “i sha’n’t see much of it this time, i’m afraid; but if i ever do get the chance of seeing it right through i’ll tell you whether i think it’s better than england.”
“yes,” he replied reflectively, “i’ve an uncle who went to england, and he came back, right to home here, and said it was the most beautiful place god had ever made—but then, you see, it was new to him. he hadn’t been over there before.”
i thought that this wasn’t a bad place to change the subject, so i asked him to have a drink, and switched off on to purely local topics. we crossed the big bridge over the sacramento river, stopped a few minutes in sacramento city, and then rolled on to porta costa station.
i have heard people say that they have gone from[32] new york to san francisco by rail. this is one of those sayings which are wanting in certain qualifications of fact to make them unimpeachable. it is nearly true, but not quite.
the train, weighing i am afraid to say how many tons, ran into porta costa, which is a sort of detachable dep?t on the estuary of the sacramento river. when it stopped i got out of the car to have a look round. there was a “local” and a freight train lying alongside of us. there was also a vast superstructure running over the station, and in these i noticed two huge engine-beams slowly swinging.
shortly after this i became aware of the fact that this piece of the dep?t had gone adrift, and was, calmly and without any perceptible motion, carrying our train and the two others across the river to the dep?t on the oakland side.
i had been four and a half days in america and so i didn’t feel surprised. all the same, it was sufficiently wonderful for admiration even there. i climbed back into the car and enjoyed the sensation of travelling by rail and sea at the same time, and then i got out again to see how the thing was done.
the piece of the porta costa station on which we[33] were floating steered into another station. the rails on the steam-driven platform were fitted on to other rails on terra firma; the engine-bell clanged; the whistle tooted in its soft, melodious way; and the overland limited steamed from sea to land in the most commonplace fashion possible.
the next stop was at oakland, on the eastern shore of the bay. opposite glittered the lights of the golden city. here we detrained, and, having crossed on the biggest ferry in the world, we embarked on the biggest ferry-boat in the world—california, like the rest of the states, is great on big things—and an hour or so later i found myself installed at the palace hotel, which is also believed by all good californians to be the biggest hotel in the world.
