CHAPTER X
MORE AMERICAN EXPERIENCES
Through the Great American Desert—A land of desolation—An adventure at Santa Fé—“Hands up!”—Railway strike methods in the wild and woolly West—At Kansas City—The Magicians’ Club—“Welcome to our city”—A disappointing show—In the land of the Mormons—Salt Lake City—Brigham Young’s seraglio—The Mormon Temple and Tabernacle—Something like an angel—Brigham Young’s statue—My worst Press notice—A journalistic tragedy—In New York—I am served a scurvy trick—Hammerstein’s—A row with the management—Sharp Yankee practice—I perform in the New York Synagogue in the presence of the Chief Rabbi—A unique honour—Rubber-neck cars—The almighty dollar—The Statue of Liberty—A suggestive pose—New York hotels—A tip as to boots.
Leaving Los Angeles for the East, we travelled by the Southern Pacific Railway, and plunged almost at a bound, so to speak, from one of the most lovely regions in the world into one of the most dreary and inhospitable.
This is the rightly named Great American Desert. For a thousand miles or so, practically all the way to Santa Fé in New Mexico, the railway runs through a wild and barren country—flat, dreary, and wholly uninteresting. Here and there patches of thorny “mesquite” bush alternate with vast stretches of grey and red sand and dazzling expanses of snow-white alkali. Other vegetation there is none, except that occasionally some gigantic cereus—emblem of barrenness—rears its contorted form into the thin clear air, and at night casts weird shadows athwart the moonlit level.
The first portion of the line, as far as Fort Yuma on the Arizona border, is the worst. For nearly two hundred miles the track runs over what was once in prehistoric times the bed of the Pacific Ocean, and which is now a wilderness of billowy shifting sand, devoid of either animal or vegetable life, and of course totally without permanent inhabitants. The greater portion of this horrible desert is below sea level. It is, as might be expected, entirely destitute of fresh water, and in the old pre-railroad days its ever-changing sand-dunes formed the only graves of many hundreds of poor wretches vainly seeking to reach California by what was then known as the “Southern Trail.”
At Santa Fé, where we arrived at ten o’clock at night after one of the dreariest journeys imaginable, there was a wait of two hours, and I got out of the train to stretch my legs a bit, and strolled down the line, taking with me for company my contortionist, Harry Cardoe. By the side of the track there was a kind of covered-in stall, kept by a Mexican, where liquor of a sort was dispensed, and we turned in for a chat and a drink.
From the proprietor of the shanty we heard that a big railroad strike was in progress, and it was said that the strikers had blown up the line in several places, and were threatening to dynamite the trains. This was lively news, and I thought I might as well return to my car, where were my wife and kiddies; which I did, leaving Cardoe still in conversation with the Mexican.
An hour or more passed, and I was half asleep, when I was aroused by our train being put in motion, and a minute or so later there was a big commotion, and Cardoe, livid, dishevelled, and in a half-fainting condition, came stumbling into the car, and sank, gasping and panting, into the first seat he came to. So exhausted was he that it was full five minutes before we could get anything out of him. Then, when at length recovered his speech, he unfolded the following remarkable story.
It appeared that he had stayed some time after I left, chatting with the Mexican keeper of the grog shop, when he was startled at hearing the warning clangour of a bell, and at the same time he saw a train drawing out of the station, or “depôt,” as the Americans prefer to call it. Imagining it to be our train, he made a bolt for it, and just managed to jump on the rear platform of the last coach, which he presently entered, after a brief pause to recover his breath.