Chapter 3

_CONCERNING CITIES, WITH A PARENTHESIS ON MANNERS_

I have seen cities in many parts of the world, from the smoke-grimed,
flame-crowned, cloud-canopied hives of industry of middle and Northern
England, of Belgium, and Northern France, to the marble palaces and
broad-verandahed bungalows which sleep among the palm-groves by the white
shores of tropic seas; but never—north, south, east, or west—have I seen
a collection of human habitations and workshops so utterly hopeless, so
irretrievably ugly as that portion of Chicago about which I wandered
during my three hours’ wait for the starting of the Overland Limited.

The roadways—really one cannot call them streets—would of themselves have
been far inferior to similar streets in Manchester or Wolverhampton,
because here at least the streets are paved. In Chicago they are not.

Many years ago an attempt seems to have been made to pave them, but the
stones have sunk, and the mud and slush have come up, and every variety
of filth covers them except about the lines over which the tramcars rush,
hissing and clanging on their headlong way. But the roadways of Chicago
are also tunnels, for over them stretches the solid, continuous iron arch
of the overhead railway whence come the roar of wheels, the snorting
of steam-engines, the shriek of whistles, and the wailing groan of the
brakes.

Now and then you reach a crossing or open place where you emerge from the
tunnel, out of semi-darkness into comparative light, and you see vast
shapes of stiff-angled, steep-roofed buildings lifting their sixteenth or
seventeenth storey up into the murky, smoke-laden sky. They are part and
parcel of Chicago—huge, ugly, dirty, and exceedingly useful.

There are big buildings in New York, but they are to the Chicago
buildings as palaces compared to factories. There are others in
San Francisco which are merely eccentricities and not altogether
unpicturesque, but the Chicago sky-scraper is a sort of architectural
fungus, an insulting excrescence from the unoffending earth, which makes
you long to get big guns and shoot at it. Still, it is useful, and serves
the purpose for which it was built, and that is why Chicago is not only
content with it, but even proud of it.

Believing many things that were said to me afterwards, I doubt not that
Chicago, elsewhere and other than I saw it, is one of the finest and most
beautiful cities on earth. Far be it from me to believe otherwise, since
some day I hope to see it again; and he who thinks ill of Chicago will
have about as good a time there as a man who thinks well of New York.

Still, common honesty obliges me to say that the impression which I took
away with me in the Overland Limited was one of vastness, uncleanness,
and ugliness, redeemed only by that sombre, Plutonic magnificence which
seems to be the one reward of an absolute and unhesitating sacrifice to
blank utility.

And yet I did find one view in Chicago which qualified this, and that
was from the western end of the Lake Front. The ragged steamboat piers,
the long rows of posts marking the shoals, the piles of the groynes, one
or two dilapidated and almost prehistoric steamboats, and blistered,
out-of-date yachts laid up along the lake wall, the stately sweep of
houses, the huge bulks of the factories in the east, with their towering
chimneys pouring out clouds of smoke and steam—these, with the smooth
water of the horizonless lake, made a pleasanter mental photograph to
take away with one than the unlovely roaring streets and the hideous
wealth-crammed stores and warehouses.

From Chicago to Ogden the route of the Union Pacific is about as
uninteresting as the central section of the Canadian Pacific, only here
the towns and villages are more frequent and the country is naturally far
more advanced in cultivation.

Cities, of course, are numerous. They vary in size from two to fifty
thousand inhabitants; but structurally they are all the same—tin-roofed
houses of weather-board, banks and offices, stores and factories, and
elevators of brick ranged along wide and mostly unpaved roads with plank
side-walks.

No apparent attempt has been made at order or uniformity. Where a big
building is wanted there it is put, and where a little wooden shanty
serves its purpose there it remains.

There is plenty of elbow-room, and so the village spreads itself into
the city in a quite promiscuous fashion, something like a boy left to
grow up into a man according to his own sweet will. But be it well noted
that he becomes a man all the same, for every one of these cities, big
or small, wood or brick, or both, was teeming with life and humming with
business.

One of the many visible signs of this could be seen in the number of
telegraph-wires slung on huge unsightly poles running up both sides of
the unkempt streets; in fact, an American inland city of five thousand
inhabitants seems to do a good deal more telegraphing and telephoning
than an English town of fifty thousand.

One other feature of the villages, towns, and “cities” along the route
struck me rather forcibly. Nearly all of them, big and little, have very
fine stations—I beg pardon, depôts. In fact, the practice seems to be
to build a fine, big depôt and let the city grow up to it. Thus, for
instance, at Omaha City, where we had a half-hour’s wait changing horses
and looking out for hot boxes, I found the depôt built of grey granite,
floored with marble, and entered by two splendid twin staircases curving
down through a domed and pillared hall to spacious waiting-rooms and
offices opening on to a platform about a quarter of a mile long.

It was the sort of station you would expect to find in a go-ahead English
or European city that possessed streets and squares and houses to match.
Now Omaha is go-ahead, and big, and busy, but for all you can see of it
from the train and station it is scattered promiscuously around hill and
dale, and the palatial station itself stands in the midst of a waste
of sloppy roads traversed as usual by the hurrying electric trams, and
bordered by little, shabby, ill-assorted wooden houses which don’t look
worth fifty pounds apiece. For all that, Omaha is one of the busiest and
wealthiest cities of the Middle States.

At Ogden, where the iron roads from every part of the continent seem
to meet, and where big, high-shouldered engines from Mexico and Texas
whistled their greetings to brother monsters from Maine and California, I
felt sorely tempted to stop off and take the thirty-mile run to Salt Lake
City, but

“The steamer won’t wait for the train,”

and I should have risked missing my boat to Honolulu—added to which I
had made some friends on the train who were going to show me round San
Francisco in case I had a day or so there, so I read my Kipling instead,
and saw the Mormon city with keener eyes than mine.

By the way, American manners appear to have altered very much for the
better since Kipling made his journey “From Sea to Sea.” I traversed a
good deal of the same ground, and stayed at some of the same hotels that
he did, but I never met with more straight-spoken, dignified courtesy in
any part of the world.

I never saw hotel clerks who blazed with diamonds, or who treated me
like a worm. As a matter of fact I never met more polite, obliging,
well-informed men in any similar position. Certainly they could give many
points to hotel managers and clerks in England and Australia.

The waiters, too, both white and black, must have vastly improved. The
white waiter in America, as I found him, is quite the smartest, most
intelligent, and, in his own manly way, the most polite of his class—a
class very well typified by the bugler of the _St. Louis_. His coloured
_confrère_ does his work deftly, silently, and well.

Kipling relates a conversation which took place in the Palace Hotel
between a coloured waiter and himself, in which George—every servant in
America whose name you don’t know is George—made the remark:

“Oh ——! Wages like that wouldn’t keep me in cigars!”

I stayed at the Palace in San Francisco, and from what I heard and saw I
should say that a waiter who made a remark like that nowadays would very
soon find that cigars were an unattainable luxury to a man out of work.
He would be “fired” on the spot.

My own experience certainly is that the Americans are the politest people
on earth, or, perhaps I ought to say, the most courteous, because any
one can be polite if it pays him. Only a gentleman can be courteous.
They have learnt, apparently at the hands of Mother Nature herself, that
subtle blending of politeness and dignity which we call courtesy.

For instance, an American waiter, or barber, or shoeblack says “Sir”
quite differently to anybody else in the world, except perhaps the
American gentleman who may be worth his millions. There is no suspicion
of cringing or inferiority about it, whether it comes from the shoeblack
or the millionaire. It seems to say equally from the one as from the
other “our circumstances may be different, but we are both of us
gentlemen in our way, and so we will behave to each other as gentlemen,”
and politeness of that sort is the pleasantest of all politeness.

Now, in Australia—but Australia is still seven thousand miles away
across the broad Pacific, so we will talk about that later on. Meanwhile
a couple of iron giants have been harnessed to the long line of
palace-cars, the mails have been exchanged from train to train, the bells
begin to swing and clang out soft musical warning notes, the mellow
whistles sing good-bye from engine to engine; “all aboard” is the word,
and the Overland Limited threads its way through the maze of shining
metals, and heads away westward to where a long, gleaming line of silver
backed by a black screen of mountains tipped with diamonds shows the
position of the Inland Sea of the Wilderness.

Salt Lake, the Dead Sea of the Mormon Land of Promise, is smaller now by
a good many scores of square miles than it was some thirty years ago,
when the Southern Pacific was connected up with the Union Pacific, and so
completed the iron chain which links the Hudson with the Sacramento.

For three or four hours the train runs over embankments surrounded
by vast salt mud-flats, which in those days were covered by the
fast-shrinking waters. It is the old story, the story of nearly all these
upland desert regions. Every year less rain falls in the valleys and
less snow on the mountains. As the clouds grow thinner and fewer the sun
blazes hotter and sucks up more and more vapour, and so year by year the
waters of the Great Salt Lake are getting less great and more salt.

With all due deference to American susceptibility on such points, I must
say that the scenery of the Rockies which one sees from the windows of
a car on the Union Pacific does not begin to compare with the scenery
along the Canadian Pacific line. Even Echo Cañon and Weber Cañon, the
show places of the line, struck me as comparatively insignificant when I
remembered the splendours of Eagle Pass and the grandeurs of Bear Cañon.

But when the wilderness of Nevada had been cast behind our flying wheels,
and we began to climb up the wooded foothills of the Sierra Nevada—that
snow-crowned mountain wall which divides one of the dreariest from one
of the most beautiful regions on earth, the Great American Desert from
“God’s own country”—it was time to sit up and use both your eyes and do
your best to look out at both sides of the car at once.

It was here that the last and most beautiful stretch of the
thirty-two-hundred-mile run began. Up the straight grades and round
and round the twice and thrice-tiered loops the great train twined
and circled; now skirting the shore of a still, pine-fringed lake,
filling the bottom of a mountain valley; and now burrowing under the
long snow-sheds, groaning under their weight of snow far away up the
mountain-side, and so, mile by mile of distance, and yard by yard of
height, the top of the Great Divide was reached.

The iron horses took a rest and a long drink at Alta, the summit station,
and then,

“Down the valley with our guttering breaks a-squeal,”

we started on our way to that lovely land which lies between the
mountains and the sea.

The snow vanished; first from the sides of the track, and then from the
gullies between the hills round which we twined. The mist-clouds rolled
away behind us up the wooded slopes. The snow-peaks far beyond gleamed
out above them, and ahead and below the dropping sun shone on a land of
broken red hills, and, beyond them, over a vast level stretch of green
grass and fruit-land, with a broad river flowing through it.

Beyond this again it glimmered far and faintly on a long streak of
flickering silver. The red hills were the native land of Truthful
James; the green plains below were the Valley of the Sacramento; and
the shimmering silver in the far distance was the Pacific Ocean, whose
character I propose hereafter to revise.

Then we rushed down through the last cañon out on to an open slope, and
pulled up at Red Gulch. That is not its name on the time-tables, but it
ought to be.

A freight truck had got off the line about two miles lower down. So,
instead of a stop of ten minutes, we had to wait two hours, which I
thankfully employed in making a little excursion through Bret Harte
Land, the land of red earth and yellow gold, of towering pines and
flower-filled valleys, of deliciously mingled beauty and ugliness; where
the skies are as blue as they are above the Isles of the South, and the
air seems like what one would expect to breathe in Paradise.

Climbing down from the car was like getting out of the world of reality,
as represented by the Overland Limited (which, remember, had brought me
from Chicago) into the Garden of Romance. I had left the comfortable but
emphatically materialistic gorgeousness of the Pulman Palace-car, and I
was actually standing on the same earth that Jack Hamlyn had trodden,
and I was breathing the same air that he had inspired when he sang that
famous song.

All around I could see gashes of red amid the green and brown of the
slopes along the river banks—just such gulches as the one Tennessee lived
in with his immortal partner. Somewhere up in the dark valleys through
which the Overland Limited had just thundered the Outcasts of Poker
Flat had found their last refuge, and John Oakhurst, after pinning that
inscribed Deuce of Spades to the pine-tree with his bowie-knife, had
passed in his checks like a gambler and a gentleman.

In just such a little schoolhouse as stood near the depôt, Mliss had
flung down her astronomy book and paralysed one part of her audience
and ecstasied the other by that famous heresy of hers re the Miracle of
Joshua.

“It’s a damned lie. I don’t believe a word of it.”

Down yonder, in the lowlands across the river, not very far from its
junction with a tributary, might have been North Fork and Poverty Flat;
and just such a red hole as I found a hundred yards or so from the track
might have been the forty-foot grave into which Dow descended “with a
derringer hid in his breast,” making his last despairing search for
water—and finding gold.

The clang of the bell and the soft “hoo-too” of the whistle called me
back out of my dream as I was having a drink at just such a bar as the
gallant Colonel Starbottle might have slaked his immortal thirst at. A
few moments more and the tireless wheels had begun to revolve again,
and we slid down the curving slopes leading to the broad vale of the
Sacramento.

On the way to the Golden Land I had fallen into conversation with a young
Californian, a fine specimen of the Western race, of whom his country
might well be proud, as he was proud of it.

“It’s God’s own country, sir. And when you’ve seen more of it you’ll
think so,” he said, as we swept across the fat, fertile farmlands which
lay beneath the foot-hills. “You’ve travelled a bit, you tell me; but
I guess if you go from end to end of this country you’ll say you never
struck one like it.”

“Well,” I said, “I sha’n’t see much of it this time, I’m afraid; but if I
ever do get the chance of seeing it right through I’ll tell you whether I
think it’s better than England.”

“Yes,” he replied reflectively, “I’ve an uncle who went to England, and
he came back, right to home here, and said it was the most beautiful
place God had ever made—but then, you see, it was new to him. He hadn’t
been over there before.”

I thought that this wasn’t a bad place to change the subject, so I asked
him to have a drink, and switched off on to purely local topics. We
crossed the big bridge over the Sacramento river, stopped a few minutes
in Sacramento City, and then rolled on to Porta Costa station.

I have heard people say that they have gone from New York to San
Francisco by rail. This is one of those sayings which are wanting in
certain qualifications of fact to make them unimpeachable. It is nearly
true, but not quite.

The train, weighing I am afraid to say how many tons, ran into Porta
Costa, which is a sort of detachable depôt on the estuary of the
Sacramento river. When it stopped I got out of the car to have a look
round. There was a “local” and a freight train lying alongside of us.
There was also a vast superstructure running over the station, and in
these I noticed two huge engine-beams slowly swinging.

Shortly after this I became aware of the fact that this piece of the
depôt had gone adrift, and was, calmly and without any perceptible
motion, carrying our train and the two others across the river to the
depôt on the Oakland side.

I had been four and a half days in America and so I didn’t feel
surprised. All the same, it was sufficiently wonderful for admiration
even there. I climbed back into the car and enjoyed the sensation of
travelling by rail and sea at the same time, and then I got out again to
see how the thing was done.

The piece of the Porta Costa station on which we were floating steered
into another station. The rails on the steam-driven platform were fitted
on to other rails on _terra firma_; the engine-bell clanged; the whistle
tooted in its soft, melodious way; and the Overland Limited steamed from
sea to land in the most commonplace fashion possible.

The next stop was at Oakland, on the eastern shore of the bay. Opposite
glittered the lights of the Golden City. Here we detrained, and, having
crossed on the biggest ferry in the world, we embarked on the biggest
ferry-boat in the world—California, like the rest of the States, is great
on big things—and an hour or so later I found myself installed at the
Palace Hotel, which is also believed by all good Californians to be the
biggest hotel in the world.