The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches

by Benjamin F. Taylor

That yellow, mud-bespattered stage, with "E. Merriam, No. something," blazoned on the doors, was the one thing that linked the small village with the great world, brought tidings of wars, accidents and incidents, that had grown gray on the journey, and word from far-away friends whose graves might have waxed green while the letters they had written, and secured with a round red moon of a wafer, and sealed with a thumb or a thimble, were yet trampled beneath the driver's feet like grain on the threshing-floor. Think of that coach creeping like an insect, for sixpence a mile, and five miles to the hour, to and fro between East and West, the only established means of communication! Think of its nine passengers inside, knocked about like the unlucky ivories in a dice-box, between New York and Detroit, between Boston and Washington. They get in, all strangers; the ladies on the back seat, the man who is sea-sick, by one coach-window, the man that chews "the weed, it was the devil sowed the seed," at the other; somebody going to Congress, somebody going for goods, somebody going to be married. They are all packed in at last like sardines, with perhaps an urchin chucked into some crevice, to make all snug. There are ten sorts of feet, and two of a sort, dovetailed in a queer mosaic upon the coach-floor. The door closes with a bang, the driver fires a ringing shot or two from his whip-lash, and away they pitch and lurch. Think of them riding all day, all night, all day again, crushed hats and elbowed ribs, jumping up and bouncing down into each other's laps every little while with some plunge of the coach; butting at each other in a belligerent way, now and then, as if "Aries the ram" were the ruling sign for human kind; begging each other's pardon, laughing at each other's mishaps, strangers three hours ago, getting to know each other well and like each other heartily, and parting at last with a clasp of the hand and a sigh of regret. I think a fifty-mile battering in a stage-coach used to shake people out of the shell of their crustaceous proprieties, and make more lifelong friends than a voyage of five thousand miles by rail. The contemplation for a day or two of a woman's back-hair or a man's bumps of combativeness, is about as merry as a catacomb tea-party, and about as conducive to lively friendships.

All of us who have arrived at years of discretion—had Methuselah?—have had a suspicion for some time that this is not the same world we were born into. Such a looking-over-the-shoulder as the writer has just indulged in brightens the dim suspicion into certainty. It is a grander world, with grander needs and agencies to match. The little iron wheels have trundled the big wooden wheels out of the way. The dear old Concord coaches of the past are driven to the confines of civilization. Jehu has swung himself down from his box, thrust the butt end of his whip-stock into the tin horn's mouth, hung them up on a nail behind the door, and died. The swallows flash in and out at the diamond lights in the old stage barn, its only occupants.

I visited Fort Scott a while ago—Fort Scott, Kansas, that wonderful bit of metropolitan vigor in the wilderness. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad had reached it, and gone on to the Indian country. It had been a grand center for radiating stage lines, and the day the stages were to break up camp at Fort Scott and go deeper into Kansas, farther into Missouri, somebody, who had caught the sentiment of the thing, proposed that all the coaches should be grouped in one place, and a photographer should train his piece of small artillery upon them, and so they should be "taken." The picture is before me. The four-in-hands, the great coaches, the snug covered hacks for the cross cuts, the drivers in position, drivers and stages alike "all full inside," and a sprinkling of deck passengers. It was the work of an instant; the coaches were emptied and wheeled away, to be seen and heard and welcomed and looked after in Fort Scott no more.

CHAPTER III.
THE RAGING CANAL.

The world has certainly grown. Putting the period just in time, the statement is a safe one—"has certainly grown." When De Witt Clinton developed the Dutch idea in America, and made a line of poetry from tide-water to Lake Erie, which people vilified and christened "Clinton's Ditch," the world was not quite ready for it, and the Governor went ahead in a canal-boat! Fancy that world distanced by a three-horse-power tandem team at six miles an hour to-day.

But it was a stately affair then. There was a barrel of salt water standing at the bow of the packet-boat. There was the proud and portly Governor erect behind the barrel like Virgil's ears of attention—arrectis auribus. There were the horses rosetted and bespangled. There were the high and mighty dignitaries on deck, clustered like young bees on a hive's front door-step at swarming time. There were the enthusiastic crowds along the way. Arrived at Buffalo, amid surges of music and rattle of cannon, the Chief Executive poured that brackish Atlantic water into the fine indigo blue of Lake Erie. It was not quite so grand as the old ceremonial when the Doge of Venice wedded the Adriatic, but it meant a great deal more. It meant Bishop Berkely, who said something about a Westward-going star, of which some mention has been made once or twice. It meant Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, in that far future which is our instant present. It meant EMPIRE! You can count the acts that have meant more, within a hundred years, upon four fingers and a thumb—more than ladling out that barrel of sea-water in a strange place. Well, the boats began to slide along the thoroughfare of water, and go up stairs and down stairs in a strange way; and they multiplied like the sluggard's schoolma'am,—who was his aunt, also,—till there are boats in sight in summer days everywhere between Buffalo and tide-water; and they grow larger, till there are a thousand craft on the Erie Canal of greater tonnage than the vessel from whose deck Lawrence sent up the dying charge that made him as deathless as the Pleiades.

The cargoes of those boats, when they began to creep, was something wonderful: men, women and children, plows, axes and Bibles; teachers, preachers and Ramage presses, along with bedsteads that corded up and creaked like gates in high winds; big wheels, little wheels and reels, looms with timber enough in them for saw-mills and a log or two left to begin upon. So you see, when they went West in those days they packed up their homes and took them along. You were sure of their finding anchor-ground somewhere, for how could a man go adrift with a wife, five children, a brass kettle and a feather-bed tied to him? You were sure, too, that the world would not be wronged out of a home—perhaps a better and a happier one than the man set afloat on Clinton's Ditch for a place nearer sundown.

Thus it was that the grand westward drift of things received its first impulse. Churches with steeples to them, school-houses full of children, newspapers, farms, Christian homes, not one of which appeared on the bills of lading, were all tumbled aboard the canal-boat amidships or somewhere, though nobody seemed to know it. The mighty fleet of white-decked "liners," looking like Brobdignagian—that word won't hurt you if you don't go near it!—ants' eggs with windows in them, has had more to do with the march of civilization than all the aquatic armaments that ever thundered. Sometimes, scurrying along in the cars at thirty miles an hour, you catch glimpses of nests of these eggs adrift in the green fields, floating by the white villages, and advancing, by contrast, so wonderfully slow that they go backward. Now and then a chit of a girl, with a little market-basket of garden vegetables upside down on the top of her head, or a young fellow who parts his hair in the middle, and has nothing else to part with worth mentioning, catches a glimpse of the eggs, too, and tosses a sniff of contempt at them out of the window, never dreaming that he looks upon a letter or two of the alphabet of progress.

I never see one of those boats without a sigh of regret, not because I want to be captain or cook or anything, but because I took my first foreign voyage on one of them, and the boat was a "liner" at that! We "took ship" at Oneida, took water along the way, took soundings when we ran aground, took steamer at Buffalo. It was a taking trip. Of the passengers, one turned into Doctor of Divinity, another into Professor of Latin in the University of Michigan, a third into President of a Southern College, a fourth into the pastor of a Michigan church, two bright and pleasant young ladies into dust long ago, and the seventh and youngest into the writer of this sketch.

It was a merry, care-free party. Not one of the survivors can say that for himself to-day. We were clustered in the little forward cabin. We ran over the deck to the after-cabin for meals. We sat upon our baggage, and took something more than a bird's-eye view of the country. We told stories and sang songs and dreamed dreams. We went into cool locks where the water splashed and tumbled about the bows, and were glad. We suffocated ourselves with blankets when we crossed the Montezuma mosquitoes. Why not? Verily, there is but one Marsh there, but of mosquitoes there are several. I have heard of Montezuma's death. It was some time ago, but it would have been no wonder had he died young, not because of the love of the Gods, but of the mosquitoes. We sat on the deck and watched the steersman's intonations. When he cried, "Low bridge!" we merely ducked our heads; but when he said, "Low bridge!" down we went flat upon the floor like a parcel of undiscovered idolaters. The Palinurus slued the stern of the boat around, and we leaped off upon the "heel-path" and took a stroll. He drove bows on upon the opposite shore, and we took a walk on the "tow-path" with the "drive," who looked like a bundle of old clothes, was as smart as a whip, and profane as "our army in Flanders." He sang songs through the night and the rain as happy as a frog, and when, covered with mud and water, he came aboard to eat, he looked like a bewildered muskrat, and his tracks like a muskrat's also.