Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1883-10-21
ACROSS TEE PLAINS.
Leaves from the Notebook Of an
Emigrant Passenger.
The Train t7,e Ono Piece OF Life in
the BHendiy -.aIsCt--I'he Roy Who
Went Overland Twenty
Years Before.

LR. l. Stelrneonin LOngnan's Magazine.1
To cross the desert of Wyoming is to grow
homesick for the mountains. longed for
the Black Hills which l knew we were soon
to enter, like an ice-bound Whaler for the
spring Alas! and it was @ worse country
than the other. Al Sunday and Monday we
Travelled through these sad mountains, or
over the main ridge Of the Rockies, which is
fair match to them for misery Of aspect
Hour after hour it was the same honely
and unEindly world about our on
ward path; tunbled boulders; cliffs that
dreaTly initiate the shape of monuments and
fortifcations-hJw drearily, how tamely,
none can tell who has Got seen them; not a
tree, not a patch of swar1, not one shapely or
commanding mountain form; sage brush
eternal sage brush; over all the same weari-
full and gloomy coloring, grays warming into
brown, gTays daIlening toward black; and
for sole sign Of life, here and there a few flee
ing antelOpas, here and there, but at incred-
ible intervals, a creek running in q canyon.
The plains have grandeur of their own; but
here there is nothing but q contOrted small
ness. Except for the air, which was light
and stimulating, there was not one good cir
cumstance in that God-forsaken land.
l had been suffering in my health good
deal all the way; and at last, whether was
exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in
some wayside eating house, the evening we
left Laramie fell sick outright That was
night which shall not readily forget The
lamps did not go out; each made faint
shining in its own Reighborhood; and the
shadows were COMPOUNDED together in the
long hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay
side, fat upon their hacks like dead folk;
there man sprawling on the floor, with his
face upon his arm; there another half seated,
with his head and shoulders on the bench.
The most passive were continually and
roughly shaken by the movement of the
train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out
their arms Ike children; it was sur
prising how many groaned and murrnured
in their sleep, and as I passed to and fro,
stepping across the prostrate, and caught
now a snOTe, now n grasp now @ halfformed
word, it gave me a measure of the worthless
ness Of rest in that unresting vehicle. Al
though It was chill, was obliged to open
my window; for the degradation of the air
soon became intOlerable to one who was
awake and using the full supply of life.
Outside, iii Il glimmeling night. saw the
black, amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly
into or wake. They that long for morning
have never longed for it more earnestly
than l.
And yet, when day came, it was to shine
upon the same broken and unsightly quarter
of the world Mile upon mile, and not a
tree. bird, or a river. Only down the long,
sterile canyons the train shot hooting and
awoke the resting echo. That train was the
one piece of life il all the deadly land; it was
the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be OBJ
served in this paralysis OF man and nature.
And when l think how the railroad has been
pushed through this unwatered wilderness
and haunt of savage tribes, and now will
bear an emigrant for some e12 from the At
lantiC to the Golden Gates; how at each stage
of the construction, roaring, inpromptu
cities, full OF gold and lust and DEATH sprang
up and then died away again, and are now
but wayside stations in the desert: how
i'll these uncouth places pigtailed Chinese
pirates worked side by side with border
ruffians and broken men from
\ Europe, talking together in mixed dialect,
mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarreling
and numbering like wolves; how the plumed
hereditary lord of all America heard in this
last fastuess, the scream Of the dad medicine
wagon charioting his foes; and then, when
60 on to remember that al this epical turmoil
was conducted by gentlemen N frocked coats,
and with view of nothing more extraorii-
pa1y than Il fortune and subsequent visit to
Paris. it seems to me, own, as if this rail
way were the Onlytypical achievement of
the age in which we live, as fit brought TO-
gether into one plot ali the ends of the world
and all the degrees of social rank, and offered
to some great writer the busiest and most ex-
tended, and the most varied subject for an
enduring literary work If it be romance, if
it be contrast, If it be heroisln that we re-
quire, what was Troy town to thisa But
alas. il is not these things that are necessary;
1t Is only Homer.
Here also we were grateful TO the train, as
to some god who conducts US swiftly through
these shades and by SO many hidden perils,
Thirst. hunger, the sleight and ferocity of
Indians, are all no more feared, so lightly do
we skim these horrible lands; as the gull,
who wings safely through the hurricane and
past the shark. Yet we should not be forget
full of these hardships OF the past; and to
keep the balance true, since l have COM
planned OF the trfting discomforts of nv
journey, perhaps more than was enouch. let
me add an original document. 1t was not
written by Homer, but by a boy of eleven
tOhS H1iO0 0C"t, ''iio 10 NlaOSo oniy twenty
years ago. Ishall punctuate, to make things
clearer, but not change the SWELLING.
my dear Sister Mary: I am afraid YOU
viii go nearly crazy when you read my let
ter. If Jerry" (the writer's eldest brother
''has not written to you before row, you viii
be surprised to heare that weere in Califor-
mia, and that poor Thomas" another brother,
of 15) sis dead We started from - in
July, with pleanty of provisions and too yoke