Denver, Col.,
September 21, 1892.
It is a long cry from Mr. Barton’s farm to this beautiful Western city, but the story of the journey can easily be shortened to a few pages, which will serve to picture its salient incidents. Even at this distance of time and space I cannot touch in passing upon my parting with the Barton family without feeling again the sense of homesickness which accompanied me as, in the glory of an early July morning, I walked down the garden-path to the road, with her good-by and a gentle “God bless you!” from Mrs. Barton sounding in my ear, and a last repeated generous offer from Mr. Barton of a permanent home, if I would stay with them, almost following me to the gate. It was the best of the many chances which I have found open to men who are honestly in search of work and willing to work their way industriously and patiently to advancement. I have found many jobs thus far, and in scarcely one of them have I failed to see the means of winning promotion and improved position, while not a few have seemed to me to open a way to considerable business success to a man shrewd enough to seize it and persistent enough to develop it. Often, as I look back upon two thousand miles of country crossed—apart from the splendor of it—the almost overwhelming impression that it leaves of boundless empire wherein a growing, intelligent, industrious, God-fearing people are slowly working out great ends in industrial achievement and personal character and in national life, an impression which thrills one with a new-found knowledge and love of one’s country, with her “glorious might of heaven-born freedom” and the resistless resurgence of her boundless energies, and, notwithstanding all waywardness, a deep-seated, unalterable consciousness of national responsibility to the most high God; apart from all this, the strongest sense which possesses one in any retrospect of a long, laborious expedition like mine, is that of a wide land, which teems with opportunities open to energy and patient toil. Local labor markets there are which are terribly crowded, as I found in Chicago to my cost. Awful suffering there is among workers who are in the clutch of illness, or, bound by ties which they cannot break, are unable to move to more favorable regions; pitiful degradation there is among many who lack imagination to see a way and the energy to pursue it, and who, without the congenital qualities which make for successful struggle, sink into the slough of purposeless idleness; deep depravity and unutterable misery there are in the great congested labor-centres, many of whose conditions are the price which we pay for our economic freedom. But the broad fact remains, that the sun never shone upon a race of civilized men whose responsibilities were greater and whose problems were more charged with the welfare of mankind, among whom energy and thrift and perseverance and ability were surer of their just rewards, and where there were so many and such various chances of successful and honorable career.
In leaving Mr. Barton’s farm I found much the same external conditions as those with which I had grown familiar ever since I left Chicago. It was a rich agricultural region, and was inhabited throughout this section in curious, clearly defined communities. In one quarter was a German settlement, and in another a Norwegian, and a Swedish settlement in a third, while I heard of a French colony as a curiosity in another direction, and even an organization of Quakers. But there were native-born Americans in plenty, and chiefly of New England antecedents, as I found in my chance acquaintance with farmers by the way, and from observations of such a charming town as Algona, in northern Iowa, where I spent several days. On every hand it was borne in upon one, not merely from what appeared but from the invariable assurances of those who have lived long in the region, that among the foreign population no fact is more thoroughly established than that of its swift assimilation. So swift and sure a process is this said to be that the children born upon the soil, of immigrant parentage, seem to lose certain physical characteristics which would link them to an alien ancestry, and to take on others which approximate to recognized American types. Their children, in turn, are said to be natives of established character; but of them all none surpasses the first-comers, when once they are settled and grown familiar with our institutions, in a stanch, honest conservatism and in a loyal, patriotic devotion to their adopted country.
It was nearly the end of July when I reached Council Bluffs. I was well worn with walking, for the last two hundred miles I had covered in six days’ march, and I was glad enough to stop for a time. But I did not wish to stop there, for my letters for several weeks past had been forwarded to Omaha, and were now awaiting me across the river. Unluckily for me, there was a five-cent toll for foot-passengers on the bridge, and I had only one cent left.
It was the middle of an intensely hot afternoon. I was too tired to begin an immediate search for work, and so I took a seat on a bench in the shade of the public square, near to a fountain which played with a delicious sound of coolness under the trees. The park walks converged toward the fountain as a centre, and thither came the people who wished to rest in the shade or whose errands carried them through the public square. Presently a sharer of my bench got up and walked on, leaving behind him a copy of a local paper, which I eagerly seized upon and read and re-read until I became conscious of the dimming light of early evening. I was stiff and sore with the long, hot, dusty march, and uncomfortable at failing to get the letters upon which I had long counted, and I lacked utterly the energy to surmount even so slight a difficulty. But with the cool of the early evening came the natural hunger bred of a day’s march, and the necessity of providing for that and a shelter for the night.
One of the streets of the city through which I had walked to the central square was named Fifth Avenue, and from one point on its pavement I could see through the open windows of a cheap hotel the tables in the dining-room spread for supper. There were screens at the windows and light cotton curtains, and the table-linen appeared clean and the shaded depth of the room looked to me, from the blistering pavement, like the subdued, fragrant coolness of real luxury.
I retraced my steps to the hotel and asked for work, but there was none for me. I found the way to the stables and applied there, but an old man with a long nose and a white, patriarchal beard told me that they were in no need of more men. This was very different from my experience in the country, where everyone was in need of men and one had not to ask for employment but was everywhere urged to accept it, and I began to wonder whether for the sake of work I should be forced out again to the farms.
Near this “Fifth Avenue” hotel I had noticed a livery-stable which fronted on one street and extended through to another bordering the public square. I went there next, and found its keeper seated comfortably in the wide, open doorway. Taciturn and non-committal at first, he confessed eventually to his needing a man in addition to the two already at work in the stable, and, after some questioning, he told me to come back at nine o’clock that evening and receive his decision.
I was supperless and without the means of securing anything to eat, and there remained an hour and a half before nine o’clock. In this predicament I had the good fortune to chance upon a delightful public library on the second floor of a building overlooking the square. It was like the library at Wilkesbarre in its charming accessibility; and, without a trace of the feeling of weariness or hunger left, I was reading ravenously, when, by some happy chance, I caught sight of a clock that was almost on the stroke of nine. With thanks, which were exceedingly short and abrupt, I returned the books to an attendant in the library and then bolted for Mr. Holden’s livery-stable. He was standing in the door when I came up, and, without preliminary remarks,