6. CHAPTER VI.
OUR new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for
twenty hours. Such a thing was very frequent. From St. Joseph,
Missouri, to Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly
nineteen hundred miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen
days (the cars do it in four and a half, now), but the time specified
in the mail contracts, and required by the schedule, was eighteen
or nineteen days, if I remember rightly. This was to make fair
allowance for winter storms and snows, and other unavoidable
causes of detention. The stage company had everything under
strict discipline and good system. Over each two hundred and fifty
miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent, and invested
him with great authority. His beat or jurisdiction of two hundred
and fifty miles was called a "division." He purchased horses,
mules harness, and food for men and beasts, and distributed these
things among his stage stations, from time to time, according to his
judgment of what each station needed. He erected station
buildings and dug wells. He attended to the paying of the
station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and blacksmiths, and discharged
them whenever he chose. He was a very, very great man in his
"division"—a kind of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the Indies, in whose
presence common men were modest of speech and manner, and in
the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver
dwindled to a penny dip. There were about eight of these kings,
all told, on the overland route.
Next in rank and importance to the division-agent came the
"conductor." His beat was the same length as the agent's—two
hundred and fifty miles. He sat with the driver, and (when
necessary) rode that fearful distance, night and day, without other
rest or sleep than what he could get perched thus on top of the
flying vehicle. Think of it! He had absolute charge of the mails,
express matter, passengers and stage, coach, until he delivered
them to the next conductor, and got his receipt for them.
Consequently he had to be a man of intelligence, decision and
considerable executive ability. He was usually a quiet, pleasant
man, who attended closely to his duties, and was a good deal of a
gentleman. It was not absolutely necessary that the division-agent
should be a gentleman, and occasionally he wasn't. But he was
always a general in administrative ability, and a bull-dog in
courage and determination—otherwise the chieftainship over the
lawless underlings of the overland service would never in any
instance have been to him anything but an equivalent for a month
of insolence and distress and a bullet and a coffin at the end of it.
There were about sixteen or eighteen conductors on the overland,
for there was a daily stage each way, and a conductor on every
stage.
Next in real
and official rank and importance, after
the conductor, came my delight, the driver—next in real but not in
apparent importance—for we
have seen that in the eyes of the common herd
the driver was to the conductor as an admiral is to the captain of
the flag-ship. The driver's beat was pretty long, and his
sleeping-time at the stations pretty short,
sometimes; and so, but for the grandeur of his position his would
have been a sorry life, as well as a hard and a wearing one. We
took a new driver every day or every night (for they drove
backward and forward over the same piece of road all the time),
and therefore we never got as well acquainted with them as we did
with the conductors; and besides, they would have been above
being familiar with such rubbish as passengers, anyhow, as a
general thing. Still, we were always eager to get a sight of each
and every new driver as soon as the watch changed, for each and
every day we were either anxious to get rid of an unpleasant one,
or loath to part with a driver we had learned to like and had come
to be sociable and friendly with. And so the first question we
asked the conductor whenever we got to where we were to
exchange drivers, was always, "Which is him?" The grammar was
faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go into a
book some day. As long as everything went smoothly, the
overland driver was well enough situated, but if a fellow driver got
sick suddenly it made trouble, for the coach
must
go on, and so the potentate who was about to climb down and take
a luxurious rest after his long night's siege in the midst of wind and
rain and darkness, had to stay where he was and do the sick man's
work. Once, in the Rocky Mountains, when I found a driver sound
asleep on the box, and the mules going at the usual break-neck
pace, the conductor said never mind him, there was no danger, and
he was doing double duty—had driven seventy-five miles on one
coach, and was now going back over it on this without rest or
sleep. A hundred and fifty miles of holding back of six vindictive
mules and keeping them from climbing the trees! It sounds
incredible, but I remember the statement well enough.
The station-keepers, hostlers, etc., were low, rough characters,
as already described; and from western Nebraska to Nevada a
considerable sprinkling of them might be fairly set down as
outlaws—fugitives from justice, criminals whose best security was
a section of country which was without law and without even the
pretence of it. When the "division-agent"
issued an order to one of these parties he did it with the full
understanding that he might have to enforce it with a navy
six-shooter, and so he always went "fixed" to make things go along
smoothly.
Now and then a division-agent was really obliged to
shoot a hostler through the head to teach him some simple matter
that he could have taught him with a club if his circumstances and
surroundings had been different. But they were snappy, able men,
those division-agents, and when they tried to teach a subordinate
anything, that subordinate generally "got it through his head."
A great portion of this vast machinery—these hundreds of men
and coaches, and thousands of mules and horses—was in the hands
of Mr. Ben Holliday. All the western half of the business was in
his hands. This reminds me of an incident of Palestine travel
which is pertinent here, so I will transfer it just in the language in
which I find it set down in my Holy Land note-book:
No doubt everybody has heard of Ben Holliday—a man of
prodigious energy, who used to send mails and passengers flying
across the continent
in his overland stage-coaches like a very whirlwind—two thousand
long miles in fifteen days and a half, by the watch! But this
fragment of history is not about Ben Holliday, but about a young
New York boy by the name of Jack, who traveled with our small
party of pilgrims in the Holy Land (and who had traveled to
California in Mr. Holliday's overland coaches three years before,
and had by no means forgotten it or lost his gushing admiration of
Mr. H.) Aged nineteen. Jack was a good boy—a good-hearted and
always well-meaning boy, who had been reared in the city of New
York, and although he was bright and knew a great many useful
things, his Scriptural education had been a good deal neglected—to
such a degree, indeed, that all Holy Land history was fresh and
new to him, and all Bible names mysteries that had never disturbed
his virgin ear.
Also in our party was an elderly pilgrim who was the reverse of
Jack, in that he was learned in the Scriptures and an enthusiast
concerning them. He was our encyclopedia, and we were never
tired of listening to his speeches, nor he of making them. He never
passed a celebrated locality, from Bashan to Bethlehem, without
illuminating it with an oration. One day, when camped near the
ruins of Jericho, he burst forth with something like this:
"Jack, do you see that range of mountains over yonder that
bounds the Jordan valley? The mountains of Moab, Jack! Think
of it, my boy—the
actual mountains of Moab—renowned in Scripture history! We are
actually standing face to face with those illustrious crags and
peaks—and for all we know" [dropping his voice impressively], "
our eyes may be resting at this very moment
upon the spot
WHERE LIES THE MYSTERIOUS GRAVE OF MOSES! Think
of it, Jack!"
"Moses who?" (falling inflection).
"Moses who!
Jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself—you ought to be
ashamed of such criminal ignorance. Why, Moses, the great guide,
soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack, from this spot
where we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred
miles in extent—and across that desert that wonderful man brought
the children of Israel!—guiding them with unfailing sagacity for
forty years over the sandy desolation and among the obstructing
rocks and hills, and landed them at last, safe and sound, with
insight of this very spot; and where we now stand they entered the
Promised Land with anthems of rejoicing! It was a wonderful,
wonderful thing to do, Jack! Think of it!"
"Forty years?
Only three hundred miles?
Humph! Ben Holliday would have fetched them through in
thirty-six hours!"
The boy meant no harm. He did not know that he had said
anything that was wrong or irreverent. And so no one scolded him
or felt offended with him—and nobody
could but some ungenerous
spirit incapable of excusing the heedless
blunders of a boy.
At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the "Crossing of the
South Platte," alias "Julesburg,"
alias "Overland City,"
four hundred and seventy miles from St.
Joseph—the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our
untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with.