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
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 loghouse 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 bet you he did, too, what was left of
him!"
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 thorough fare, 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 magnificent 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.*
[*]
And what makes that worn anecdote
the more aggravating, is, that the adventure it
celebrates never occurred.
If it were a good anecdote, that seeming demerit would be its
chiefest virtue, for creative power belongs to greatness; but what
ought to be done to a man who would wantonly contrive so flat a
one as this? If I were
to suggest what ought to be done to him, I should be called
extravagant—but what does the sixteenth chapter of Daniel say?
Aha