TO THE GOLDEN GATES
A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular
impressions on the mind. By an early hour on Wednesday morning we
stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-
lying plateau in Nevada. The man who kept the station eating-house
was a Scot, and learning that I was the same, he grew very
friendly, and gave me some advice on the country I was now
entering. "You see," said he, "I tell you this, because I come
from your country." Hail, brither Scots!
His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the
world. There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage
which is revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small
affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a
spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five,
or even a hundred halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made
a bolder push for complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin
that no longer that no longer exists - the BIT, or old Mexican
real. The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents,
eight to the dollar. When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar
stands for the required amount. But how about an odd bit? The
nearest coin to it is a dime, which is, short by a fifth. That,
then, is called a SHORT bit. If you have one, you lay it
triumphantly down, and save two and a half cents. But if you have
not, and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly
tenders you a dime by way of change; and thus you have paid what is
called a LONG BIT, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by
comparison with a short bit, five cents. In country places all
over the Pacific coast, nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or
taken, which vastly increases the cost of life; as even for a glass
of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny, as the case
may be. You would say that this system of mutual robbery was as
broad as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to make it
broader, with which I here endow the public. It is brief and
simple - radiantly simple. There is one place where five cents are
recognised, and that is the post-office. A quarter is only worth
two bits, a short and a long. Whenever you have a quarter, go to
the post-office and buy five cents worth of postage-stamps; you
will receive in change two dimes, that is, two short bits. The
purchasing power of your money is undiminished. You can go and
have your two glasses of beer all the same; and you have made
yourself a present of five cents worth of postage-stamps into the
bargain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head for
this discovery.
From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand,
horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little
kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were standing,
after our manner, outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly
from underneath the cars, and take to their heels across country.
They were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on the beams
since eleven of the night before; and several of my fellow-
passengers had already seen and conversed with them while we broke
our fast at Toano. These land stowaways play a great part over
here in America, and I should have liked dearly to become
acquainted with them.
At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was coming out from
supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed
by two others taller and ruddier than himself.
"Excuse me, sir," he said, "but do you happen to be going on?"
I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist
from that intention. He had a situation to offer me, and if we
could come to terms, why, good and well. "You see," he continued,
"I'm running a theatre here, and we're a little short in the
orchestra. You're a musician, I guess?"
I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with "Auld
Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension
whatever to that style. He seemed much put out of countenance; and
one of his taller companions asked him, on the nail, for five
dollars.
"You see, sir," added the latter to me, "he bet you were a
musician; I bet you weren't. No offence, I hope?"
"None whatever," I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I
presume the debt was liquidated.
This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers,
who thought they had now come to a country where situations went a-
begging. But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith.
Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide
the bet.
Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all
reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued through
desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some
time after I had fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of
my companions. It was in vain that I resisted. A fire of
enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes; and he declared we were
in a new country, and I must come forth upon the platform and see
with my own eyes. The train was then, in its patient way, standing
halted in a by-track. It was a clear, moonlit night; but the
valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and only a
diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness
of the pines. A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the
continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the
mountains. The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in
the nostrils - a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. I was dead
sleepy, but I returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at
my heart.
When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it
were day or night, for the illumination was unusual. I sat up at
last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long
snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were
swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse
of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a
sky already coloured with the fires of dawn. I am usually very
calm over the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe how
my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I had
come home again - home from unsightly deserts to the green and
habitable corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along the
hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more
dear to me than a blood relation. Few people have praised God more
happily than I did. And thenceforward, down by Blue Canon, Alta,
Dutch Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain
forests, dropping thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we
went, not I only, but all the passengers on board, threw off their
sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like schoolboys,
and thronged with shining eyes upon the platform and became new
creatures within and without. The sun no longer oppressed us with
heat, it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side, until we
were fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At every turn we could see
farther into the land and our own happy futures. At every town the
cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air, and
crowing for the new day and the new country. For this was indeed
our destination; this was "the good country" we had been going to
so long.
By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain
of corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying to upon the
Oakland side of San Francisco Bay. The day was breaking as we
crossed the ferry; the fog was rising over the citied hills of San
Francisco; the bay was perfect - not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon
its blue expanse; everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun.
A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and
then widened downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed to
awaken, and began to sparkle; and suddenly
"The tall hills Titan discovered,"
and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were
lit from end to end with summer daylight.
[1879.]
