This would be absurd as a generalization with any claim to wide applicability, as would be any generalization based upon my casual experimenting; it was the comical uniformity of my experience in this case as in some others that impressed me.
The real difficulties of the situation for many of the Western farmers one could not fail to see. Apart from material misfortune and apart from sickness and ill-luck, there is the inexorableness of conditions which seem at times to hold them to a life of servitude with no escape from unprofitable drudgery, and from the carking care which burdens men who are hopelessly in the clutch of debt.
I grew impatient at times with the tone of Philistine patronage and superiority adopted by the sturdier farmers. Theirs was the harder work no doubt and theirs the shrewder carefulness and the more provident handling of their instruments, but even hard-won success is sometimes so strangely blind to the obligations which arise from the fact that subjective difficulties are as real and are often far more difficult of mastering than those which are objective. Often it appears at its worst as, with utter disregard of the duty of helpfulness, it chants its heartless creed in the terms of the fore-ordination which lightly dooms all the non-elect of high efficiency to the deep damnation of beggarly dependence or of endless failure in the struggle of life.
Two hundred miles west of Omaha the wages earned at the livery-stable in Council Bluffs were exhausted, and I was obliged to look for another job with which to replenish my store. I was following the line of the Union Pacific Railway, and, having spent my last cent one mid-day for a dinner, I went up to the first section-boss whom I met in the afternoon’s walk and asked him for a job. He was a burly Irishman of massive figure. Without a moment’s hesitation he told me that he was in no need of a man, but that Osborn, the boss of the next westward section, the thirty-second, with head-quarters at Buda, he knew was looking for one.
About eight miles farther on I came upon Osborn and two men at work near the little station at Buda, a scant four miles east of Kearney, and it was as the Irishman had said, for instantly, upon my application, Osborn accepted me as a section-hand at wages of a dollar and a quarter a day for ten hours’ work, and offered me board and lodgings at his home for three dollars a week, an arrangement with which I instantly closed.
For the remaining afternoon and until six o’clock I lay resting in the tall prairie grass in the shade of the railway station, and at seven o’clock on the next morning I began a term of three weeks’ service as a section-hand under the orders of Osborn the boss, and with a strapping young Irishman, “Cuckoo” Sullivan by name, as my partner.
That was the last long stop before I reached Denver. And now, as I am about to leave this city for the remaining thousand miles of my journey, I look back over a summer and autumn spent in the country and in towns and villages of the thousand miles from the seaboard to Chicago, and then a winter and a spring within the limits of the foremost city of the Middle West, and then a summer in the vast farming region between Chicago and Minneapolis and Denver. A thousand miles remain, but with what eager anticipation do I look forward to them! I shall strike in among the mountains, and then leave to the natural development of events the determining of my westward journey. Whichever course it takes, my way must lie through the frontier, and by force of necessity I must come into contact with a life which is something other than the monotonous daily round of work. There will be mining regions with the chances of prospecting, and the ranches with the wide range of their free living, and Indian reservations to be crossed, and many lonely mountain-trails to be followed.
It was never without interest and charm, this summer’s walk with its intervals of work, over a thousand miles of the mid-continent. It varied in beauty with every day’s march, and even the dead level of the Nebraska prairies as the Indian-corn fields grew thinner and faded completely into boundless plains of sage-brush, where the alkali lay white on the glittering soil, and the bleaching skeletons of cattle joined their mute appeal to the cloudless sky for water to quench a burning thirst—even here was an attraction and an interest of its own.
Days ago I caught sight of the mountains rising from out the level plain, and, through the haze of distance and above the mists which shrouded their gaunt sides, I saw their “silent pinnacles of aged snow” appearing clear against the blue of high heaven. Now, as I have drawn nearer in this marvellous air, a hundred miles of the range stand out in glorious vividness of color and of every detail of configuration, and my heart leaps again to the joy of their companionship, and I realize with a tingling of blood that the best of the journey, in any sense of adventure, lies before me in the life which they hold upon their slopes and fertile valleys, and in the gloomy depths of their vast cañons.