Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

During the summer the Missouri had been crossed by a steam-ferry. But to save a little time in the transit, and the trouble of keeping a passage for the ferry free from ice during the winter, the railway had been carried across the river, as soon as the frost became severe, on two rows of piles, which rose only a few inches above the surface of the ice. This was merely intended for the three or four months during which it would be buttressed and strengthened by the ice. As soon as that should begin to break up, it would be swept away. In going westward, the train I was in was made to traverse it at a snail’s pace, for fear of shaking it to pieces, but even with this caution it wavered and groaned alarmingly. On returning some weeks afterwards, when the ice was hourly expected to break up, the train I recrossed it in was the last that used it. Again we traversed it, at a snail’s pace, feeling our way as we went; again we heard the creaking, and saw the bending and swaying of the rickety fabric, many fearing that this last journey would be the one too many, and that it would not be swept away by the ice, but shaken to pieces by use. In no other country would so reckless a disregard of risks, imperilling life, be tolerated. But here neither the public, nor the contrivers of these risks, nor the possible or actual sufferers by them, appear to give these matters a thought; or, if they do, they probably regard them from the commercial point of view—that it would be hard to interfere with anyone who was endeavouring to make money, and that the public ought to be left to decide for themselves whether it is, or is not, worth their while to run the risks to which they are invited. The day after I left Cincinnati, the ‘Magnolia’ steamer blew up, and more than eighty lives were lost. About the same time some terrific railway accidents occurred; but, as far as I could judge, no one seemed to think that on these occasions blame could attach to anyone.

Prairie Fires.

At a distance of about sixty miles from Omaha, on the second night of my journeying through the prairie, I saw it on fire. It was on the right-hand side to one going westward, and did not reach up to the rails within a mile or two. The front of the fire, as we passed along it, was a line of five or six miles. The flames had not an uniform appearance. In slight depressions, where moisture hung longer, and therefore the grass and prairie plants were thick and high, the flames rose about fifteen feet; but where the blazing had subsided, the smouldering remains of plants that had more substance than the rest, appeared like rows of stars. There was smoke visible only where there was much flame, and the lazy masses of smoke were illuminated by the glare of the flames beneath. As in one place there was something burning above the general level, we supposed that it was the dwelling-house of some prairie settler that was being destroyed.

I also, during four days, saw the pine and poplar forest, on the mountain above the town of Boulder, on fire. I was not so near to this as I had been to the prairie fire; but it did not strike me, judging however from a distance, that its effects were grander. There seemed a great deal more smoke than flame, which streamed off down the wind like large bodies of cloud. I heard, however, that sometimes the appearance of the forest burning on the mountains was very grand. I observed, wherever I penetrated into the Rocky Mountains, that a great part of the wood had been destroyed in this way. The fire generally occurs through the carelessness of persons who are camping out. The waste of valuable timber is thus enormous.

As one passes over the prairie, the conviction becomes irresistible that fire is the sole cause of the absence of trees. The prairie was once covered with trees, because when fire is kept off by cultivation, and the earth loosened by the plough, so as to admit light and air to a greater depth than before, young trees at once appear. Of course the parent trees must, at some time or other, have grown on the spot. All the seeds that were sufficiently near the undisturbed surface to germinate had germinated, and the young plants that issued from them had been destroyed by fire. Those seeds which chance had buried more deeply waited for the aid of man to give proof of their presence in the soil.

Animal Life on the Plains.

Again, both forest and fruit trees, when planted by the hand of man, thrive well in the prairie, if only fire be kept from them. And wherever in the prairie, as on the rocky faces of bluffs, or the banks of streams, fire cannot reach, on account of the absence of sufficient grass and undergrowth to convey it, trees—as pines, oaks, willows, and poplars—abound. The great accumulations of black vegetable mould are to be accounted for in the same way; they are formed out of the burnt and half-burnt vegetable matter left by the annual fires of no one can tell how long a period. In the valley of the Platte, this vegetable mould appears to have been carried away by the stream, which has ever been shifting its channel from side to side, between the bluffs which bound the valley—in so doing floating off the lighter portions of the soil, and leaving sand and gravel only in its deserted beds.

On the dry prairie between Omaha and the mountains I saw, for the first time, some of the feræ naturæ of America in abundance. Hitherto I had frequently observed that there was almost a total absence of animal life from the roadside. I could count up the rare occasions on which I had seen either bird or beast. I had twice seen colonies of a social crow resembling our rook. In Georgia I had seen two birds, one about the size of a thrush, and the other rather smaller than a sparrow. In Alabama I had seen some wild deer and wild ducks. In a journey of several thousand miles I had seen no other wild four-footed or feathered creature. I had attributed the deficiency of the latter partly to the severity of American winters, which had taught them migratory habits, and partly to the sparseness of the population in the Southern States; for though it is true that the presence of civilised man is incompatible with the existence of some species, yet there are other species to which man, by his cultivation of the ground, and as it were by the crumbs that fall from his table, becomes the chief purveyor, and whose numbers therefore increase almost in proportion to the degree in which a country becomes settled. But here, on this arid plain, and in mid-winter, neither naturalist nor sportsman could have had anything to complain of. Animal life was in abundance. In the course of one day I saw from the windows of the car three herds of antelopes (in one of which I counted thirty-eight), two wolves, prairie-fowl in great numbers, plenty of a species of bird resembling our English lark, several hawks, and innumerable colonies of prairie-dogs. As their villages are frequently at a distance from water, these agile and amusing little animals are supposed to be capable of living without drinking. I saw nothing of the owls and rattlesnakes who have been admitted by the prairie-dogs to a joint tenancy of their subterranean homes. Doubtless, if one were to examine on foot the banks of the river, and the rocky bluffs that bound the valley, my small list might easily be made a large one. The valley was strewed for hundreds of miles with the bones of the buffalo, and marked with the still unobliterated basins which showed the spot in which he had rolled himself in the dry sandy soil on coming up out of the water of the Platte. Experience corrects the common error that animal life in any district will be found in proportion to the vigour of its vegetable life. Nowhere is vegetation more vigorous than in the mighty forests of South America and Western Africa, but they are very far from abounding in animal life. On the contrary, vegetable life is poor and scanty in Southern Africa, and nowhere in the world is there so great a number of species and of individuals of the larger quadrupeds. Something similar is observable in the dry valley of the Platte, the obvious requirement being not abundance of vegetation, but enough of that kind of vegetation the animals require, and either that kind of covert, or such an absence of covert, as shall most conduce to their security.

‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’

Frequently, when I had mentioned my intention of going to the Rocky Mountains by way of Omaha and Denver, I had been cautioned against Shyenne city—‘Sir, it is the hardest place on this continent;’ by which was meant that it contained a choicer collection of hardened villains, and a larger proportion of them to its population, than any other place, and that, in consequence, it was harder there than anywhere else to keep out of a scrape. It is called Shyenne, because nine months before I was there, at which time it had three thousand inhabitants, the Chien or Dog Indians had scalped a white man on what was then the open prairie, but is now the site of the city. Nine months had sufficed for building and peopling the city. City on the Plains may mean a single house. At a place called ‘La Park,’ where there was but one wooden shanty, I heard a gentleman ask its proprietor ‘if anyone was then talking about building a second house in that city?’ Shyenne city is built entirely of wood. There is no company that will insure any goods or houses in the place. What so suddenly called it into existence was the opening of the Pacific Railway to this point. Here, then, everyone coming from the Pacific and Ultramontane States takes the rail for the East, and everyone leaving the rail for one of those States takes his place in one of Wells and Fargo’s coaches. There are therefore people always arriving from both directions, with plenty of money. It is also the natural rendezvous (as there is nothing behind it for five hundred miles back to Omaha) for all those who are employed beyond it in the construction of the railway through the mountains, to spend their money at, and for many too of the gold-washers and gold-miners from the mountains. All these are the birds of passage of the place; but they it is who attract the two classes of permanent inhabitants, if such a word is suitable to any residents in a town only nine months old. Of these two classes one is respectable, the other not. The respectable class is that of the tradesmen; the one that is not consists of the rowdies, gamblers, and desperadoes, who have always formed the scum and dirt on the top of the foremost wave of advancing civilisation in America, and which that wave has now borne on to this place, and thrown them into it all together.