I HAD looked forward to my journey from San Francisco to St. Louis with great anticipations, and, though I had no leisure to "stop off" on the tour, I was not disappointed. Six continuous days and nights of railway travelling carried me through such prodigious widths of land, that the mere fact of traversing so much space had fascinations. And the variations of scene are very striking—the corn and grape lands of Southern California, that gradually waste away into a hideous cactus desert, and then sink into a furnace-valley, several hundred feet below the level of the sea; the wild pastures of Texas, that seem endless, until they end in swamped woodlands; the terrific wildernesses of Arkansas, that gradually soften down into the beautiful fertility of Missouri. It was a delightful journey, and taught me in one week's panorama more than a British Museum full of books could have done.
Visitors to America do not often make the journey. They are beguiled off by way of Santa Fe and Kansas City. I confess that I should myself have been very glad to have visited Santa Fe, and some day or other I intend to pitch my tent for a while in San Antonio. But if I had to give advice to a traveller, I would say:—
"Take the Southern Pacific to El Paso, and the Texan Pacific on to St. Louis, and you will get such an idea of the spaciousness of America as no other trip can give you." You will see prodigious tracts of country that are still in aboriginal savagery and you will travel through whole nations of hybrid people—Mexicans and mulattoes, graduated commixtures of Red Indian, Spaniard, and Negro—that some day or another must assume a very considerable political importance in the Union.
Nothing would do Americans more good than a tour through Upper India. Nothing could do European visitors to America more good than the journey from San Francisco to St. Louis by the Southern-and-Texas route. The Gangetic Valley, the Western Ghats, the Himalayas, are all experiences that would ameliorate, improve, and impress the American. The Arizona cactus-plains, the Texan flower-prairies, the Arkansas swamps, give the traveller from Europe a more truthful estimate of America, as a whole, by their vastness, their untamed barbarism, their contrast with the civilized and domesticated States, than years of travel on the beaten tracks from city to city.
And here just a word or two to those American gentlemen to whom it falls to amuse or edify the sight-seeing foreigner. Do not be disappointed if he shows little enthusiasm for your factories, and mills, and populous streets. Remember that these are just what he is trying to escape from. The chances are, that he would much rather see a prairie-dog city, than the Omaha smelting-works; an Indian lodge than Pittsburg; one wild bison than all the cattle of Chicago; a rattlesnake at home than all the legislature of New York in Albany assembled. He prefers canyons to streets, mountain streams to canals; and when he crosses the river, it is the river more than the bridge that interests him. Of course it is well for him to stay in your gigantic hotels, go down into your gigantic silver-mines, travel on your gigantic river-steamers, and be introduced to your gigantic millionaires. These are all American, and it is good for him, and seemly, that he should add them to his personal experiences. So too, he should eat terrapin and planked shad, clam-chowder, canvas-back ducks, and soft-shelled crabs. For these are also American. But the odds are he may go mad and bite thee fatally, if thou wakest him up at un-Christian hours to go and see a woollen factory, simply because thou art proud of it—or settest him down to breakfast before perpetual beefsteak, merely because he is familiar with that food. The intelligent traveller, being at Rome, wishes to be as much a Roman as possible. He would be as aboriginal as the aborigines. And it is a mistake to go on thrusting things upon him solely on the ground that he is already weary of them. As I write, I remember many hours of bitter anguish which I have endured—I who am familiar with Swansea, who have stayed in Liverpool, who live in London—in loitering round smelting works and factories, and places of business, trying to seem interested, and pretending to store my memory with statistics. Sometimes it would be almost on my tongue to say, "And now, sir, having shown off your possessions in order to gratify your own pride in them, suppose you show me something for my gratification." I never did, of course, but I groaned in the spirit, at my precious hours being wasted, and at the hospitality which so easily forgot itself in ostentatious display. I have perhaps said more than I meant to have done. But all I mean is this, that when a sojourner is at your mercy, throw him unreservedly upon his own resources for such time as you are busy, and deny yourself unreservedly for his amusement when you are at leisure. But do not spoil all his day, and half your own, by trying to work your usual business habits into his holiday, and take advantage of his foreign helplessness to show him what an important person (when at home) you are yourself. Do not, for instance, take him after breakfast to your office, and there settling to your work with your clerks, ask him to "amuse himself" with the morning papers—for three hours; and then, after a hurried luncheon at your usual restaurant, take him back to the office for a few minutes—another hour; and then, having carefully impressed upon him that you are taking a half-holiday solely upon his account, and in spite of all the overwhelming business that pours in upon you, do not take him for a drive in the Mall—in order to show off your new horses to your own acquaintances; and after calling at a few shops (during which time your friend stays in the trap and holds the reins), do not, oh do not, take him back to your house to a solitary dinner "quite in the English style." No, sir; this is not the way to entertain the wayfarer in such a land of wonders as this; and you ought not therefore to feel surprise when your guest, wearied of your mistaken hospitality, and wearied of your perpetual suggestions of your own self-sacrifice on his behalf, suddenly determines not to be a burden upon you any longer, and escapes the same evening to the most distant hotel in the town. Nor when you read this ought you to feel angry. You did him a great wrong in wasting a whole day out of his miserable three, and exasperated him by telling his friends afterwards what a "good time" he had with you. These few words are his retaliation—not written either in the vindictive spirit of reprisal, but as advice to you for the future and in the interests, of strangers who may follow him within your gates.
From San Francisco to Lathrop, back on the route we came by, to Oakland, and over the brown waters of the arrogant Sacramento—swelling out as if it would imitate the ocean, and treating the Pacific as if it were merely "a neighbor,"—and out into thousands and thousands of acres of corn, stubble, and mown hay-fields, the desolation worked by the reaper-armies of peace-time with their fragrant plunder lying in heaps all ready for the carts; and the camp-followers—the squirrels, and the rats, and the finches—all busy gleaning in the emptied fields, with owls sitting watchful on the fences, and vigilant buzzards sailing overhead. What an odd life this is, of the squirrels and the buzzards, the mice, and the owls! They used to watch each other in these fields, just in the very same way, ages before the white men came. The colonization of the Continent means to the squirrels and mice merely a change in their food, to the hawks and the owls merely a slight change in the flavour of the squirrels and mice! So, too, when the Mississippi suddenly swelled up in flood the other day, and overflowed three States, it lengthened conveniently the usual water-ways of the frogs, and gave the turtles a more comfortable amplitude of marsh. Hundreds of negroes narrowly escaped drowning, it is true; but what an awful destruction there was of smaller animal life! Scores of hamlets were doubtless destroyed, but what myriads of insect homes were ruined! It does one good, I think, sometimes to remember the real aborigines of our earth, the worlds that had their laws before ours, those conservative antiquities with a civilization that was perfect before man was created, and which neither the catastrophes of nature nor the triumphs of science have power to abrogate.
Oak trees dot the rolling hills, and now and again we come to houses with gardens and groves of eucalyptus, but for hours we travel through one continuous corn-field, a veritable Prairie Of Wheat, astounding in extent and in significance. And then we come upon the backwaters of the San Joacquin, and the flooded levels of meadow, with their beautiful oak groves, and herds of cattle and horses grazing on the lush grass that grows between the beds of green tuilla reeds. It is a lovely reach of country this, and some of the water views are perfectly enchanting. But why should the company carefully board up its bridges so that travellers shall not enjoy the scenes up and down the rivers which they cross? It seems to me a pity to do so, seeing that it is really quite unnecessary. As it was, we saw just enough of beauty to make us regret the boards. Then, after the flooded lands, we enter the vast corn-fields again, and so arrive at Lathrop.
Here we dined, and well, the service also being excellent, for half a dollar. Could not the Union Pacific take a lesson from the Southern Pacific, and instead of giving travellers offal at a dollar a head at Green River and other eating-houses, give them good food of the Lathrop kind for fifty cents? As I have said before, the wretched eating-houses on the Union Pacific are maintained, confessedly, for the benefit of the eating-houses, and the encouragement of local colonization; but it is surely unfair on the "transient" to make him contribute, by hunger, on the indigestion, and ill-temper, to the perpetration of an imposition. On the Southern and the Texas Pacific there are first-rate eating-places, some at fifty cents, some at seventy-five, and, as we approach an older civilization, others at a dollar. But no one can grudge a dollar for a good meal in a comfortable room with civil attendance; while on the Union Pacific there is much to make the passenger dissatisfied, besides the nature of the food, for it is often served by ill-mannered waiters in cheerless rooms. Avery little industry, or still less enterprise, might make other eating-places like Humboldt.
It was at Lathrop that some Californians of a very rough type wished to invade our sleeping-car. They wanted to know the "racket," didn't "care if they had to pay fifty dollars," had "taken a fancy" to it, &c., &c.; but the conductor, with considerable tact, managed to persuade them to abandon their design of travelling like gentlemen, and so they got into another car, where they played cards for drinks, fired revolvers out of the window at squirrels between the deals, and got up a quarrel over it at the end of every hand.
California Felix! Aye, happy indeed in its natural resources. For we are again whirling along through prairies of corn-land, a monotony of fertility that becomes almost as serious as the grassy levels of the Platte, the sage-brush of Utah, or the gravelled sands of Nevada. And so to Modesta, a queer, wide-streeted, gum-treed place, not the least like "America," but a something between Madeira and Port Elizabeth. It has not 2000 people in it altogether, yet walking across the dusty square is a lady in the modes of Paris, and a man in a stove-pipe hat! Another stretch of farm-lands brings us to Merced, and the county of that name, a miracle of fertility even among such perpetual marvels of richness. If I were to say what the average of grain per acre is, English farmers might go mad, but if the printer will put it into some very small type I will whisper it to you that the men of Merced grumble at seventy bushels per acre. I should like to own Merced, I confess. I am a person of moderate desires. A little contents me. And it is only a mere scrap, after all, of this bewildering California. On the counter at the hotel at Merced are fir-cones from the Big Trees and fossil fragments and wondrous minerals from Yosemite, and odds and ends of Spanish ornaments. The whole place has a Spanish air about it. This used to be the staging-point for travellers to the Valley of Wonders, but times have changed, and with them the Stage-route, so Merced is left on one side by the tourist stream. Leaving it ourselves, we traverse patches of wild sunflower, and then find ourselves out on wide levels of uncultivated land, waiting for the San Joacquin (pronounced, by the way, Sanwa-keen) canal, to bring irrigation to them. How the Mormons would envy the Californians if they were their neighbours, and the contrast is indeed pathetic, between the alkaline wastes of Utah and the fat glebes of Merced!