Twenty-four hours later we were in the midst of a wide, sunny prairie, across which, in white-topped prairie schooners, settlers were moving just as they had passed our door in Iowa thirty years before. Plowmen were breaking the sod as my father had done in '71, and their women washing and cooking in the open air, offered familiar phases of the immemorial American drama,—only the stations on the railway broke the spell of the past with a modern word.
Swarms of bearded, slouchy, broad-hatted men filled the train and crowded the platforms of the villages. Cow-boys, Indians in white men's clothing, negroes (black and brown), and tall, blonde Tennessee mountaineers made up this amazing population—a population in which libraries were of small value, a tobacco-chewing, ceaselessly spitting unkempt horde, whose stage of culture was almost precisely that which Dickens and other travelers from the old world had found in the Central West in the forties.
How these scenes affected my young wife I will not undertake to say; but I remember that she kept pretty close to my elbow whenever we mingled with the crowd, and the deeper we got into this raw world the more uneasy she became. "Where shall we spend the night?" she asked.
Had I been alone I would not have worried about a hotel, but with a young wife who knew nothing of roughing it, I became worried. To the conductor I put an anxious question, "Is there a decent hotel in Reno?"
His answer was a bit contemptuous, "Sure," he exclaimed. "What do you think you're doing—exploring?"
This was precisely what I feared we were doing. I said no more about it, although I hadn't much confidence in his notions of a first class hotel. There was nothing for it but to rest upon his assurance and go hopefully forward to the end of the line.
It must have been about ten of a dark warm night as we came to a final halt beside a low station marked "Reno," and at the suggestion of the brakeman I called for "the Palace Hotel Bus," although none of the waiting carriages or drivers seemed even remotely related to a palace. My wife, filled with a high sense of our adventure, took her seat in the muddy and smelly carriage, with touching trust in me.
The Palace Hotel, with its doorway brightly lighted with electricity, proved a pleasant surprise. It looked clean and bright and new, and the proprietor, a cheerful and self-respecting citizen, was equally reassuring. We went to our rooms with restored confidence in Oklahoma.
The next morning, before we had finished our breakfast, a messenger from the Agency came in to say that a carryall was at the door, and soon we were on our way toward the Fort.
The roads were muddy, but the plain was vividly, brilliantly green, and the sky radiantly blue. The wind, filled with delicious spring odors, came out of the west; larks were whistling and wild ducks were in flight. To my wife it was as strange as it was beautiful. It was the prairie at its best—like the Jim River in 1881.