University of Virginia Library

20. CHAPTER XX.

ON the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain
peaks we had yet seen, and although the day was very
warm the night that followed upon its heels was wintry cold
and blankets were next to useless.

On the eighteenth day we encountered the eastward-bound
telegraph-constructors at Reese River station and sent a message
to his Excellency Gov. Nye at Carson City (distant one
hundred and fifty-six miles).

On the nineteenth day we crossed the Great American
Desert—forty memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which
the coach wheels sunk from six inches to a foot. We worked
our passage most of the way across. That is to say, we got
out and walked. It was a dreary pull and a long and thirsty
one, for we had no water. From one extremity of this desert
to the other, the road was white with the bones of oxen and
horses. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we
could have walked the forty miles and set our feet on a bone
at every step! The desert was one prodigious graveyard.
And the log-chains, wagon tyres, and rotting wrecks of vehicles
were almost as thick as the bones. I think we saw log-chains
enough rusting there in the desert, to reach across any
State in the Union. Do not these relics suggest something of
an idea of the fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants
to California endured?

At the border of the Desert lies Carson Lake, or The
“Sink” of the Carson, a shallow, melancholy sheet of water

[ILLUSTRATION]

GREELEY'S RIDE.

[Description: 504EAF. Page 151. In-line image of a carriage, with a man's head popping out of the top of it. There is a wagon driver as well, dress all in black.] some eighty or a hundred miles in circumference. Carson
River empties into it and is lost—sinks mysteriously into the
earth and never appears in the light of the sun again—for the
lake has no outlet whatever.

There are several rivers in Nevada, and they all have this
mysterious fate. They end in various lakes or “sinks,” and
that is the last of them. Carson Lake, Humboldt Lake,
Walker Lake, Mono Lake, are all great sheets of water without
any visible outlet. Water is always flowing into them;
none is ever seen
to flow out of them,
and yet they remain
always level
full, neither receding
nor overflowing.
What they do with
their surplus is
only known to the
Creator.

On the western
verge of the Desert
we halted a moment
at Ragtown. It consisted
of one log-house
and is not set
down on the map.

This reminds me
of a circumstance. Just after we left Julesburg, on the Platte,
I was sitting with the driver, and he said:

“I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you
would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road
once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver,
Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at Placerville
and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk
cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach
bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the
buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean

through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank
Monk and begged him to go easier—said he warn't in as much
of a hurry as he was awhile ago. But Hank Monk said,
`Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time'—
and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!”

A day or two after that we picked up a Denver man at
the cross roads, and he told us a good deal about the country
and the Gregory Diggings. He seemed a very entertaining
person and a man well posted in the affairs of Colorado. By
and by he remarked:

“I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would
like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once.
When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank
Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at Placerville
and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk
cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach
bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the
buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean
through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank
Monk and begged him to go easier—said he warn't in as much
of a hurry as he was awhile ago. But Hank Monk said,
`Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time!'—
and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!”

At Fort Bridger, some days after this, we took on board a
cavalry sergeant, a very proper and soldierly person indeed.
From no other man during the whole journey, did we gather
such a store of concise and well-arranged military information.
It was surprising to find in the desolate wilds of our country
a man so thoroughly acquainted with everything useful to
know in his line of life, and yet of such inferior rank and unpretentious
bearing. For as much as three hours we listened
to him with unabated interest. Finally he got upon the subject
of trans-continental travel, and presently said:

“I can tell you a very laughable thing indeed, if you would
like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once.
When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank
Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at Placerville and

was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk cracked
his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced
up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons
all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through
the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and
begged him to go easier—said he warn't in as much of a hurry
as he was awhile ago. But Hank Monk said, `Keep your
seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time!'—and you bet you
he did, too, what was left of him!”

When we were eight hours out from Salt Lake City a
Mormon preacher got in with us at a way station—a gentle,
soft-spoken, kindly man, and one whom any stranger would
warm to at first sight. I can never forget the pathos that was
in his voice as he told, in simple language, the story of his
people's wanderings and unpitied sufferings. No pulpit eloquence
was ever so moving and so beautiful as this outcast's
picture of the first Mormon pilgrimage across the plains,
struggling sorrowfully onward to the land of its banishment
and marking its desolate way with graves and watering it with
tears. His words so wrought upon us that it was a relief to
us all when the conversation drifted into a more cheerful channel
and the natural features of the curious country we were in
came under treatment. One matter after another was pleasantly
discussed, and at length the stranger said:

“I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would
like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once.
When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank
Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture in Placerville,
and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk
cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach
bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the
buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean
through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank
Monk and begged him to go easier—said he warn't in as much
of a hurry as he was awhile ago. But Hank Monk said,
`Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time!'—
and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!”

[ILLUSTRATION]

BOTTLING AN ANECDOTE.

[Description: 504EAF. Page 154. In-line image of four men fighting. All of the men are wearing hats and look mad.]

Ten miles out of Ragtown we found a poor wanderer who
had lain down to die. He had walked as long as he could,
but his limbs had failed him at last. Hunger and fatigue
had conquered him. It would have been inhuman to leave
him there. We paid his fare to Carson and lifted him
into the coach. It was some little time before he showed any
very decided signs of life; but by dint of chafing him and
pouring brandy between his lips we finally brought him to a
languid consciousness. Then we fed him a little, and by and
by he seemed to comprehend the situation and a grateful
light softened his eye. We made his mail-sack bed as comfortable
as possible, and constructed a pillow for him with our
coats. He seemed very thankful. Then he looked up in our
faces, and said in a feeble voice that had a tremble of honest
emotion in it:

“Gentlemen, I know not who you are, but you have saved
my life; and although I can never be able to repay you for it, I
feel that I can
at least make
one hour of your
long journey
lighter. I take
it you are strangers
to this great
thoroughfare,
but I am entirely
familiar with
it. In this connection
I can
tell you a most
laughable thing
indeed, if you
would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley—”

I said, impressively:

“Suffering stranger, proceed at your peril. You see in me
the melancholy wreck of a once stalwart and mangnificent manhood.
What has brought me to this? That thing which you

are about to tell. Gradually but surely, that tiresome old
anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my constitution,
withered my life. Pity my helplessness. Spare me
only just this once, and tell me about young George Washington
and his little hatchet for a change.”

We were saved. But not so the invalid. In trying to
retain the anecdote in his system he strained himself and
died in our arms.

I am aware, now, that I ought not to have asked of the
sturdiest citizen of all that region, what I asked of that mere
shadow of a man; for, after seven years' residence on the Pacific
coast, I know that no passenger or driver on the Overland
ever corked that anecdote in, when a stranger was by, and survived.
Within a period of six years I crossed and recrossed the
Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times by stage
and listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eighty-one
or eighty-two times. I have the list somewhere. Drivers
always told it, conductors told it, landlords told it, chance
passengers told it, the very Chinamen and vagrant Indians
recounted it. I have had the same driver tell it to me two
or three times in the same afternoon. It has come to me in
all the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed to earth,
and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont,
tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers—everything that has a fragrance
to it through all the long list of things that are gorged
or guzzled by the sons of men. I never have smelt any anecdote
as often as I have smelt that one; never have smelt any
anecdote that smelt so variegated as that one. And you never
could learn to know it by its smell, because every time you
thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with
a different smell. Bayard Taylor has written about this hoary
anecdote, Richardson has published it; so have Jones, Smith,
Johnson, Ross Browne, and every other correspondence-inditing
being that ever set his foot upon the great overland road
anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco; and I have
heard that it is in the Talmud. I have seen it in print in
nine different foreign languages; I have been told that it is

employed in the inquisition in Rome; and I now learn with
regret that it is going to be set to music. I do not think that
such things are right.

Stage-coaching on the Overland is no more, and stage
drivers are a race defunct. I wonder if they bequeathed that
bald-headed anecdote to their successors, the railroad brakemen
and conductors, and if these latter still persecute the
helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as did many a
tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the Pacific coast
are not Yo Semite and the Big Trees, but Hank Monk and
his adventure with Horace Greeley.[1]