Читать книгу The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches - Benjamin F. Taylor - Страница 7

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The world had to wait a weary time for its wheels, simply because the successors of Tubal and Jubal took something for granted. It is never safe, as every day's experience proves, to take anything or anybody for granted. The only safety in praising the average man is to hold on to your eulogy till he is dead, and done doing altogether. What the cunning artificers took for granted was this: an engine's pulling power is equal to its own weight. And so they made wheels with teeth, and rails with cogs, to help the thing along. They rigged an anomalous, pre-Adamite fowl's foot with a corrugated sole, on each side of the engine. These feet were set down one after the other upon the roughened rail, and pushed the awkward affair in a sort of dromedary way, monstrous to contemplate and tedious to wait for. Device followed device, all as vain as the achievement of perpetual motion, until some man, after a Columbus fashion when he played with a hen's egg, said: Is this true that we have all been taking for granted? Will not an engine pull more than its own weight? Let us try it. They did, and it did. It trailed long streets and great towns of cars—which were warehouses and dwellings and palatial mansions; which were sheep-folds and cattle-yards and coal mines—after it at twenty, forty, fifty miles an hour, as if real estate belonged to the ornithological kingdom, and had taken perpetual flight like Logan's cuckoo.

When you see a brace of iron bars laid parallel upon the ground, and a harp of wire strung along beside it, you see the fragment of a man that can never indulge in a soul without borrowing one. It is the line of a mighty muscle, and the thread of a fine nerve. On the one, thoughts fly—thoughts that are "up and dressed" in their verbal clothes. On the other, things. The one is seven-ninths of a Scriptural aspiration five-ninths realized: "O that I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly away—and be at rest." The other is the consolidated arm of Christendom, the common carrier of the movable world. But grand as it is, and priceless as are the treasures it is bearing, it was too late for the holiest burden of all time. There was no train to Jerusalem, and the Lord of Life rode into the city in the humblest guise, upon a donkey.

At Omaha, one day, I saw a steam caravan come in from what used to be a "forty years in the wilderness" region, direct from the Golden Gate. It was the tea-train from the Celestial Kingdom. It was nothing to look at—the dingy, battered cars, the engineer as if he had been wrestling with a coal-heaver—but it was much to think of. That cargo came right out of the West, straight from the "Drowsy East." The bars of the trans-continental railroad had careened the horizon with their mighty leverage, and let the cargo through—the very cargo for which they waited in the old days with their faces toward the rising sun, like a praying Israelite. The locomotive had wheeled the rolling globe a half revolution, brought the tide of commerce to the right-about, like a soldier upon his heel. It has proved to be anything but what it was suspected of being—the locomotive has—for, made to be a common carrier, a gigantic, quicktime dray-horse, it is a civilizer, a builder of cities; and if the three W's, Messrs. Wesley Brothers and Whitefield, will forgive me, a sort of—Methodist; in fact, an outright circuit-rider, and a missionary, withal! The preachers of flesh and blood denounced the seraglio and the harems of the American Desert, but nobody minded it. The law-makers frowned upon them, and they grew like a garden of cucumbers; were about as far beyond their jurisdiction as the household economy of "the man in the moon." The locomotive made for them at last, from Atlantic and Pacific; it brought the Gentiles and the "Saints" shoulder to shoulder; its mountain-eagle elocution rang through the valleys of Utah, and sooner or later it will whistle that barbarism of the Orient down the wind.

The locomotive is a civilizer. It happened to the writer to witness the splendid display of the Missouri State Fair at Kansas City, that young Chicago of the red Missouri. Altogether it was the most admirable display of agricultural products ever seen in the Far West. Than the artistic grouping of apples in vast variety, nothing finer was ever witnessed. They were literally "apples of gold in pictures of silver." Without spot or blemish, better than ever grew in the Garden of Eden, they were all from the orchards of the wilderness. But the most interesting and suggestive department, as having direct reference to the civilizing agency of the locomotive, was one surmounted with the legend, "The Great American Desert."

Not a thing in it that did not come from the once sterile plain or inaccessible mountain region; that was not grown in the very realm set down upon maps hardly twenty years old as a pathless and arid waste; and not a figure pictured in it, but a bewildered buffalo or a mounted savage; that was not made possible by the magic touch of railroad iron. What a maker of new and improved maps is the locomotive! That department was worthy to be the coat-of-arms of the Angel of Abundance. Above all, were the antlers of the elk, like the branches of a blasted tree; and the shaggy head of a buffalo, curly as the head of the heathen god of wine. Then there were stalks of corn that would amaze you, and as full of ears as Mr. Spurgeon's audiences. There were squashes and melons and pumpkin-pies in "the original package," in whose case the usual law of limitation had been suspended, and they had grown on without let or hindrance. Wheat that Illinois would have been proud of. Minerals of wonderful richness and beauty. Grapes in clusters of ideal symmetry and size. Apples as of a fresh and new creation that no blighting bug or worm had yet found out. Indeed, think of anything you like best that grows in a garden, and it was there, all from the Great American Desert. There was an address to the assembled thousands, but nothing so eloquent as this upon the power of the locomotive as a cultivator and civilizer. But for it, the products would never have been here in Kansas City, nor the producers there in the wilderness.

Take the Illinois Central Railway; it was to that splendid State what the rod of Moses was to the rock in the wilderness. It smote it into life and luxuriance. Down from Chicago to Cairo, just as many miles as there are days in a year, down from Dunleith to that same capital of modern Egypt, four hundred and fifty-six miles, it went—in its time the stateliest railway enterprise in the world. Had you been a passenger on a southward-bound train of that road, say sixteen years ago, you would have traversed a region of magnificent possibilities. True, the locomotive would have hurried you through unfenced corn-fields nine miles long, whose rows swung round as the cars flew on, like vast brigades on drill, but you would have struck out, at last, upon the untilled and almost untrodden pastures of God. You could never forget it. The month was September. The train had reached the center of a grand prairie. The few passengers debarked, and the train ran on a half mile and left us alone. Around on every side, the prairie curved up to the edge of the sky. It was a mighty bowl, and we, served up in the bottom of it, a very diminutive bill of fare for such a tremendous dish. The gaudy yellow and red Fall flowers ornamented the bowl like some quaint pattern for Chinese ware. Not a tree nor a living thing in sight; not a sign that man had ever been an occupant of the planet, but something that looked like a cigar-box high up the side of the bowl, and was, in fact, a human habitation. The great blue sky was set down exactly upon the edge of the dish, like the cover of a tureen, and there we were, pitifully belittled. The feeling was oppressive. We had nothing small or mean with which to compare ourselves and be somebody again, and were glad to have the train back once more, that we might clamber in and be safe out of the vastness.

On we went till the pleasant little village of Anna was reached. The country was full of peaches. They ripened and fell beside the roads. The swine were fattened upon them. The people had just begun to learn that peaches were money in disguise. The railroad had just taught them this lesson of finance. It had made Chicago, and Union County peaches possible combinations. But they were only beginners, and when you asked a man perched upon a wagon-load of Sunnysides the price, he said, "How many, stranger?" and when you replied, "A couple of dozen," the answer came back like the shutting of a jack-knife blade, "Take 'em along an' welcome!" The locomotive whistled us to quarters, and by-and-by the speed slackened to eight miles an hour. The windows were garnished with heads in a twinkling. There was a deer on the track, and bound south, like ourselves. The engineer crowded him a little, and throwing back his head, away he went over ties and culverts and little bridges, the cow-catcher turned into a deer-catcher for the moment. Again the engineer would let up a little to give the fellow a chance, and so for miles, till at last, as if he had wings to his heels, he bolted the track, bounded over a little knoll and was gone.

Now, find that big bowl of ours if you can! Farms checker the prairie. Villages dot the broad landscape like flocks of sheep. Cities with mayors to them have sprung up. The locomotive brought the builders, brought the buildings. In a word, the motive was the locomotive. Take the Chicago & Northwestern Railway across the States of Illinois and Iowa, across the Rock and the Mississippi to the banks of the Missouri, four hundred and eighty-eight miles to Council Bluffs. Seven years ago its western terminus was New Jefferson, Iowa. There you took private conveyance for a journey of one hundred and eighty miles to the Missouri. You launched out over the great swells of prairie, rising and falling, rising and falling, till you almost caught yourself listening for the wash of the heavy sea. Little hamlets at long intervals showed like unnamed islets. The wolf looked after you as you passed. The hawks sat in rows on the telegraph wire over which, that minute, a message was flashing to California, the little hawks all facing us with their aquiline countenances, like so many young Romans. The tall prairie grass waved desolately in the wind. The prairie poultry disputed the right of way with the advancing horses. The quick tick of the locusts, all winding their watches at once, sounded loud and clear in the silence. Dismantled stage barns roofed with prairie hay were sparsely sprinkled along the route. At last we struck out upon a thirty-mile stretch without a human habitation. The clouds and the sun played tricks with the landscape. Now you thought you saw a field of red wheat ripe for the sickle, and now a scraggy old orchard dwarfed in the distance. The one was a family of little oaks, the other the long tawny grass of the prairie slopes.

It was a virgin world. You had escaped from the clank of engines and the clamor of men. The air swept by without a taint of smoke or any human naughtiness. Your pulse played with an evener beat. You were not quite sure you ever wanted to get out of the wilderness at all. You meet now and then a "freighter," as the ox-expressmen of plain and prairie are called, with their noisy tongues and explosive whips, and their four, six, eight yokes of lumbering oxen trailing a yet more lumbering wagon. Then you come to Ida Grove, with a hospitable tavern in it. Then fifty miles down the Maple Valley, as unpeopled and peaceful as the Happy Valley of Rasselas. Seven years ago! And now it is farms and houses and villages all the way. Churches point their slender white fingers towards the sky. School-houses hum with the busy tongues of the disciples of "b, a, ba, k, e, r, ker, baker." Railway trains go scurrying along. The locomotive has brought the world to the wilderness, and took back for "return freight" the wilderness to the world. The old trick of the clouds and the sunshine has been played again. There are sweeps of ripened grain upon the slopes. There are orchards that are not oaks.