The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches

by Benjamin F. Taylor

There is a picture of the first railroad train in the State of New York. It was taken by a man with no hands. Their proverbial cunning had slipped down into his toes. The faces of the passengers are portraits. One of them is the venerable Thurlow Weed, of New York. The car is strictly a coach. They call a sixty-soul car a coach now. It is a vicious misuse, for a railway-car is as much like a coach as a rope-walk is like a German flute. The vehicle is bodied like a coach, backed like a coach, doored like a coach, and has a little railing around the roof to keep the baggage from going overboard. And there is baggage. It is not a carpet-bag, nor a valise, nor a Saratoga, but a leather portmanteau, an Old World cloak-carrier. There may be a pair of flapped saddle-bags under somebody's feet inside. Modern satchels were not.

There are three seats, and Mr. Weed sits upon the middle one. Before this coach is the engine. The cylinder is trained like a Washington gun, at an angle of about thirty-three and a third degrees, and seems to have gotten the range pretty accurately of the engineer's head. The engineer has no house, no seat, but stands upon a platform much like a man about to be hanged. A wine-cask, small at both ends and big in the middle, is perched on end within easy reach, filled with oven-wood; to-wit, wood split axe-helve size, such as our fathers were wont to manufacture for heating the egg-shaped brick oven on baking days. With this fuel he provokes the patient water to boiling point. No bell, no whistle, no means of communicating with him, except the conductor catches him by the coat-skirt.

The conductor is a "captain." He has more dignity than a modern railway superintendent. They go ten miles an hour, and they do well. Being in the picture business, I may as well say that the Harpers once presented a picture of an old-time iron tea-kettle, with a crooked spout and a jingling lid. I saw it jingle, and that's direct testimony. From the vexed spout rolled little volumes of steam. Below it was the portrait of a great locomotive, all ready to run. The twain were relatives, for the tea-kettle was the shriveled, far away, nasal grandfather of the engine, and beneath it were the words, "In the beginning." That told the story, as far as the story had gone. These bits of fine art are suggestive. They mean that we have made wonderful progress in the art of being common carriers, and that one-half the world must keep very busy in thinking things and doing things worth transporting by the other half. It is an axiom that no city can achieve permanent prosperity simply by an immense carrying trade. How about the world?

CHAPTER X.
RACING AND PLOWING.

Two rates of motion are racing and plowing, but, as you shall see, wonderfully alike. An Agricultural Fair has come to mean a Race-Track with a variety of vegetables ranged around on the outside, and a great crowd between the ring of track and the ring of vegetables. There appears to be much doubt as to the propriety of horse-races, but I have never seen a conscientious man who happened by chance to witness a race, that did not make up his mind in a minute which horse he wanted to be the winner. He did not believe in that kind of four-footed gambling, but then——. You tell him the gray will be whipped—gray is his color—and he wants to back up his opinion with something—let you know what that judgment is worth to him; and were it not for some restraining grace, he would produce his pocketbook and flourish the estimated value of his opinion full in your face.

That's the way betting comes. It is not a mere invention, like a Yankee nutmeg. It is human nature. One man argues, another sneers, a third gets angry, a fourth fights, and a fifth bets. Five ways of doing the same thing. The writer knew a young man—not so young as he was—who happened to be in New York when the great running-race between Fashion and Peytona occurred on the Union Course, Long Island. That individual, boy and man, never saw but that one race, never played a game of cards, or bet a penny upon anything; but no sooner were the horses brought up to the Grand Stand than he had his favorite, and he could not have told why, to save his life. He would have endowed that horse's prospect of winning with all his earthly possessions, which were twenty-seven dollars and a half, if he could have found a taker to accept of such a trifle. How he watched every jump the creature made! How he admired her as she flew close to the ground from landing-place to landing-place again, and clapped his hands and cheered like a maniac! He was a full-grown sporting-man in a minute, though he did not know a horse's hock from the Rhenish wine of that name.

Now to put the race upon wheels instead of heels: the tracks of those two great lines of travel, the Michigan Southern and the Pittsburg & Fort Wayne, run side by side for several miles after they leave Chicago—sometimes so near that you can toss an apple from one train to the other. When the workmen laid the tracks they thought about the races, for they knew that races must come from such a neighborhood of railways, and each gang shouted across to the other, and bet on its own road.

They did come. You are on the Michigan Southern. The train has worked slowly out of the city on to the open prairie. The Pittsburg train has done the same thing. There at your right, and half a mile away, you can see the puffs of white steam. The trembling clangor of the bell has ceased. The shackly-jointed gait of the train ceases. It tightens up, and runs with a humming sound. The landscape slips out from under your feet like a skipping-rope. Pittsburg is coming. She laps the last car of your train. Now is your time to run alongside, and see how an engine acts when the throttle-valve is wide open. Watch the flash of that steel arm as it brings the wheels about. She is doing her best. The two engines are neck and neck. They scream at each other like Comanches. The bells clang. The trains are running forty-five miles an hour. It is a small inspiration.

Now for the passengers. The windows are open. Heads out, handkerchiefs waving. Everybody alive. Everybody anxious. Nobody afraid. Rivalry has run away from fear. Our engineer puts on a little more speed. The train draws slowly out from the even race, like the tube of a telescope. It is the poetry of motion—power spurning the ground without leaving it. Good-by, palaces! good-by, coaches! good-bye baggage-cars! good-by, engine! good-by, Pittsburg! We have shown that train a clean pair of heels. There is nothing left of it but black and white plumes of steam and smoke. Look around you. The car is all smiles and congratulations. "Grave and gay," they are as lively as a nest of winning gamblers.

This racing is all wrong. Superintendents have forbidden it, travelers have denounced it, but they want to see what can be gotten out of "Achilles" or "Whirling Thunder," as much as anybody. And they do not want to be beat! Make them engineers, and every man of them would pull out and put things through their best paces. We believe in horses, we believe in locomotives, but we lack faith in balloons. They are large toys for big children. "The earth hath bubbles as the water has, and these are of them."