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 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, depôts. In fact, the practice seems to be to build a fine, big depôt 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 depôt built of grey granite, floored with marble, and entered by two splendid twin staircases curving down through a domed and pillared hall 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 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.