True, but then that metal is silver, and with one single day's produce from the Ontario Mine in the bank to his credit a man might live at his leisure in London, like a nobleman in Paris, or like a prince among the princes of Eulenspiegel-Wolfenbuttel-Gutfurnichts.
CHAPTER XXI.
FROM UTAH INTO NEVADA.
Rich and ugly Nevada—Leaving Utah—The gift of the Alfalfa—Through a lovely country to Ogden—The great food-devouring trick—From Mormon to Gentile: a sudden contrast—The son of a cinder—Is the red man of no use at all?—The papoose's papoose—Children all of one family.
IT is a far cry from the City of the Saints to the city of the Celestials, for Nevada stretches all its hideous length between them, and thus keeps apart the two American problems of the day—pigtails and polygamy. But mere length in miles is not all that goes to make a journey seem long, for dreariness of landscape stretches every yard to six feet, and turns honest miles into rascally versts, or elongates them into the still more infamous "kos" of the East, the so-called mile, which seems to lengthen out at the other end as you travel along it, and about nightfall to lose the other end altogether. And Nevada is certainly dreary enough for anything. It is abominably rich, I know. There is probably more filthy lucre in it per acre (in a crude state, of course) than in any other state in the Union, and more dollars piled up in those ghastly mountains than in any other range in America. But, as a fellow-passenger remarked, "There's a pile of land in Nevada that don't amount to much," and it is just this part of Nevada that the traveller by railway sees.
"That hill over there is full of silver," said a stranger to me, by way of propitiating my opinion.
"Is it" I said, "the brute." I really couldn't help it. I had no ill-feeling towards the hill, and if it had asked a favour of me, I believe I should have granted it as readily as any one. But its repulsive appearance was against it, and the idea of its being full of silver stirred my indignation. I grudged so ugly a cloud its silver lining, and like the sailor in the Summer Palace at Pekin felt moved to insult it. The sailor I refer to was in one of the courts of the palace looking about for plunder. It did not occur to his weather-beaten, nautical intelligence that everything about him was moulded in solid silver. He thought it was lead. A huge dragon stood in the corner of the room, and the atrocity of its expression exasperated Jack so acutely that he smote it with his cutlass, and lo! out of the monster's wound poured an ichor of silver coinage.
"Who'd have thought it!" said Jack, "the ugly devil!"
Nevada, moreover, lies under the disadvantage of having on one side of it the finest portion of California, on the other the finest portion of Utah, and sandwiched between two such Beauties, such a Beast naturally looks its worst. For the northern angle of Utah is by far the most fertile part of the territory, possessing, in patches, some incomparable meadows, and corn-lands of wondrous fertility. As compared with the prodigious agricultural and pastoral wealth of such states as Missouri, Illinois, or Ohio, the Cache Valleys and Bear Valleys of Utah seem of course insignificant enough; but at present I am comparing them only with the rest of poor Utah, and with ugly, wealthy Nevada.
Starting from Salt Lake City northwards, the road lies through suburbs of orchards and gardens, many of them smothered in red and yellow roses, out on to the levels of the Great Valley. Here, beyond the magic circle of the Water-wizard, there are patches of fen-lands still delightful to wild-fowl, and patches of alkali blistering in the sun, but all about them stretch wide meadows of good grazing-ground, where the cattle, good Devon breed many of them, and here and there a Jersey, loiter about, and bright fields of lucerne, or alfalfa, just purpling into blossom and haunted by whole nations of bees and tribes of yellow butterflies. What a gift this lucerne has been to Utah! Indeed, as the Mormons say, the territory could hardly have held its own had it not been for this wonderful plant. Once get it well started (and it will grow apparently anywhere) the "alfalfa" strikes its roots ten, fifteen, twenty feet into the ground, and defies the elements. More than this, it becomes aggressive, and, like the white races, begins to encroach upon, dominate over, and finally extinguish the barbarian weeds, its wild neighbours.