Yes, we had learned in Salt Lake to be charged great prices without
letting the inward shudder appear on the surface–for even already we had
overheard and noted the tenor of conversations among drivers, conductors,
and hostlers, and finally among citizens of Salt Lake, until we were well
aware that these superior beings despised “emigrants.” We permitted no
tell-tale shudders and winces in our countenances, for we wanted to seem
pioneers, or Mormons, half-breeds, teamsters, stage-drivers, Mountain
Meadow assassins–anything in the world that the plains and Utah
respected and admired–but we were wretchedly ashamed of being
“emigrants,” and sorry enough that we had white shirts and could not
swear in the presence of ladies without looking the other way.
And many a time in Nevada, afterwards, we had occasion to remember with
humiliation that we were “emigrants,” and consequently a low and inferior
sort of creatures. Perhaps the reader has visited Utah, Nevada, or
California, even in these latter days, and while communing with himself
upon the sorrowful banishment of these countries from what he considers
“the world,” has had his wings clipped by finding that he is the one to
be pitied, and that there are entire populations around him ready and
willing to do it for him–yea, who are complacently doing it for him
already, wherever he steps his foot.
Poor thing, they are making fun of his hat; and the cut of his New York
coat; and his conscientiousness about his grammar; and his feeble
profanity; and his consumingly ludicrous ignorance of ores, shafts,
tunnels, and other things which he never saw before, and never felt
enough interest in to read about. And all the time that he is thinking
what a sad fate it is to be exiled to that far country, that lonely land,
the citizens around him are looking down on him with a blighting
compassion because he is an “emigrant” instead of that proudest and
blessedest creature that exists on all the earth, a “FORTY-NINER.”
The accustomed coach life began again, now, and by midnight it almost
seemed as if we never had been out of our snuggery among the mail sacks
at all. We had made one alteration, however. We had provided enough
bread, boiled ham and hard boiled eggs to last double the six hundred
miles of staging we had still to do.
And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the
majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat
ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures revelled alternately
in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery
like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe–an old, rank,
delicious pipe–ham and eggs and scenery, a “down grade,” a flying coach,
a fragrant pipe and a contented heart–these make happiness. It is what
all the ages have struggled for.
CHAPTER XVIII.
At eight in the morning we reached the remnant and ruin of what had been
the important military station of “Camp Floyd,” some forty-five or fifty
miles from Salt Lake City. At four P.M. we had doubled our distance and
were ninety or a hundred miles from Salt Lake. And now we entered upon
one of that species of deserts whose concentrated hideousness shames the
diffused and diluted horrors of Sahara–an “alkali” desert. For sixty-
eight miles there was but one break in it. I do not remember that this
was really a break; indeed it seems to me that it was nothing but a
watering depot in the midst of the stretch of sixty-eight miles. If my
memory serves me, there was no well or spring at this place, but the
water was hauled there by mule and ox teams from the further side of the
desert. There was a stage station there. It was forty-five miles from
the beginning of the desert, and twenty-three from the end of it.
We plowed and dragged and groped along, the whole live-long night, and at
the end of this uncomfortable twelve hours we finished the forty-five-
mile part of the desert and got to the stage station where the imported
water was. The sun was just rising. It was easy enough to cross a