Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 7 - Part IV - From Chicago to Denver

By no means were the demands of our work continuous.

Nearly every afternoon we had an hour or two or even three together, when there was little to be done.

I found a book-shop across the way from the stable, where second-hand books could be rented at the rate of six cents a week and the books exchanged as often as you pleased.

Then in the evenings, when we all had supped in turn, and the stalls had been made ready for the night, and the traps sent out in answer to the evening trade, Jake and Ed and I used to sit out in front, within easy hearing of the telephone-bell, with our chairs tilted against the stable-wall and our feet caught by the heels on the chair-rounds, and there we talked by the hour together, until Jake went home and left Ed and me to care for the outstanding horses and traps, and lock up the stable for the night.

I was at a disadvantage in these conversations.

Jake and Ed were Yankees, both of them shrewd, hard-headed, steady fellows.

Jake was the father of a family, and Ed an unmarried man of three-and-thirty, who was working with all his might to pay off the mortgage on his father’s farm back in Illinois.

Both of them had had some district-school training, but nothing beyond, and while they had a perfectly intelligent knowledge of affairs which concerned them as men and as citizens, their farther intellectual horizon was limited.

One evening as we sat under the stars the talk turned upon astronomy, and Ed began to comment disparagingly upon the claims of astronomers of an ability to weigh the heavenly bodies, and to measure their distances from one another and from the earth.

Jake heartily agreed with him, and insisted that not until a line could be carried from one to another, and each star weighed accurately in a scale, would he put any confidence in these pretended results.

My attempt to point out that there were methods of determining weight and distance other than the very direct ones which they insisted upon, was very damaging to my reputation for intelligence, and was set down as of a piece with the general ignorance which I had shown in the work of a livery-stable.

And when, later in the discussion, I stood out for the validity of the doctrine of the conservation of energy, against Ed’s immediate demonstration of its falsity in the heaps of refuse which he pointed out were thrown every day from our stable alone, and which must to some degree effect a variation in the totality of matter--I found that my position in the crew was threatened with unpleasantness.

But in reality both Jake and Ed were exceedingly friendly to me.

They were at pains from the first to teach me my work, and to give me a hint now and again, which counted for much, in the matter of getting the job well in hand.

Soon the days began to go by with astonishing rapidity.

I

had told Mr. Holden that I should not be with him very long, and at the end of two weeks I left the livery-stable with ten dollars and one cent in my pocket, minus the twelve cents which were due for book-hire, and which I felt had been well invested.

At Omaha I stopped for several days.

Like Minneapolis and Denver, of the Western towns which I have seen, it is a splendid type of the American city of a generation’s growth, where almost miraculous progress has been made in actual material development, and where the higher demands of civilization are responded to with an energy and enthusiasm which are inspiring, and which are prophetic of splendid results.

Then out I walked one perfect afternoon upon the level plains of Nebraska, with wild sunflowers in prolific bloom and square miles of Indian-corn fields standing lusty and stark to the very horizon with puffs of belated pollen powdering the warm red light, and the corn-silk turning black at the ends, and the long, drooping, cane-like blades beginning to show the ripe yellow of the autumn.

The mere writing down the bare fact of the journey stirs in one’s blood again the joy of that free life.

The boundlessness of the world and your boundless enjoyment of it, the multiplicity of abundant life and your blood-kinship with it all, some goal on the distant horizon and your “spirit leaping within you to be gone before you then!

” There is scarcely a recollection of all the tramp through Illinois and Minnesota and Iowa and eastern Nebraska which is without the charm of a free, wandering life through a rich, beautiful country.

What I saw of the wealth of a fertile region in central Illinois I found again enhanced in beauty and productiveness in southern Minnesota, and, varying in outward configuration but scarcely less attractive or fruitful, across the face of Iowa, losing only its variety as it modulates in Nebraska to the plains which slope upward gently for five hundred miles to the Rockies.

My mind throngs with the pictures of splendid cultivation, of leagues on leagues of farms which were had for the taking or were purchased from the Government at a dollar and a quarter an acre, and where I saw countless comfortable homes and fields white to the harvest, with no demand so strong as the one for laborers.

It was not wealth in the sense of opulence, but it was the plenty which is beyond the fear of want that marked the character of that broad domain.

The poor were there, and the suffering and the deeply discontented, and there were hard conditions of life and very sordid ones, but never the hopelessness which gives to town-bred destitution its quality of despair.

In the gradual development of actual resources about you appeared to be the remedies of most of the obvious ills.

“This is a rich region,” said a handsome young farmer who had offered me a lift one blistering hot day in Iowa--“this is a rich region, and it is more than rich, it is reliable.

We never know a total failure of crops here; we can always make a living.

This country, for hundreds of miles around, is a garden, and we live in the heart of it.

” And he was one of the discontented.

I only regret that I have not space here for his interesting account of the tyranny of capital under which, from his point of view, the farmers live and work, and the imperative need of monetary reform as a means of bringing about their emancipation.

It was the thing which I had heard many times from many farmers at the West, only never presented with quite equal cogency before.

The opposite views had been represented to me, and there was often a singular alternation of presentation within the course of a day or two, and I had come to recognize a comical uniformity between condition and views.

If I chanced upon a farmer who had no particular quarrel with the existing order of things, who was conservative and cautious and sceptical of the efficacy of change, I was quite sure to find that he was an admirable farmer, thrifty and energetic and industrious, with a thorough knowledge of his business down to a frugal care of minor details.

But if, on the other hand, I fell in with a farmer who was clamorous for radical economic change, on the ground that he and his class were being ruined by the injustices of existing economic conditions, I soon began to feel a suspicion, which all my observation deepened into a conviction, that the man of this type was fundamentally a poor farmer; his buildings and fences were sure to be out of repair, and his stock showed signs of suffering for want of proper care, and the weeds grew thick in his corn, and his machines were left unhoused and suffered more from rust than ever they did from wear.

This would be absurd as a generalization with any claim to wide applicability, as would be any generalization based upon my casual experimenting; it was the comical uniformity of my experience in this case as in some others that impressed me.

The real difficulties of the situation for many of the Western farmers one could not fail to see.

Apart from material misfortune and apart from sickness and ill-luck, there is the inexorableness of conditions which seem at times to hold them to a life of servitude with no escape from unprofitable drudgery, and from the carking care which burdens men who are hopelessly in the clutch of debt.

I grew impatient at times with the tone of Philistine patronage and superiority adopted by the sturdier farmers.

Theirs was the harder work no doubt and theirs the shrewder carefulness and the more provident handling of their instruments, but even hard-won success is sometimes so strangely blind to the obligations which arise from the fact that subjective difficulties are as real and are often far more difficult of mastering than those which are objective.

Often it appears at its worst as, with utter disregard of the duty of helpfulness, it chants its heartless creed in the terms of the fore-ordination which lightly dooms all the non-elect of high efficiency to the deep damnation of beggarly dependence or of endless failure in the struggle of life.

Two hundred miles west of Omaha the wages earned at the livery-stable in Council Bluffs were exhausted, and I was obliged to look for another job with which to replenish my store.

I was following the line of the Union Pacific Railway, and, having spent my last cent one mid-day for a dinner, I went up to the first section-boss whom I met in the afternoon’s walk and asked him for a job.

He was a burly Irishman of massive figure.

Without a moment’s hesitation he told me that he was in no need of a man, but that Osborn, the boss of the next westward section, the thirty-second, with head-quarters at Buda, he knew was looking for one.

About eight miles farther on I came upon Osborn and two men at work near the little station at Buda, a scant four miles east of Kearney, and it was as the Irishman had said, for instantly, upon my application, Osborn accepted me as a section-hand at wages of a dollar and a quarter a day for ten hours’ work, and offered me board and lodgings at his home for three dollars a week, an arrangement with which I instantly closed.

For the remaining afternoon and until six o’clock I lay resting in the tall prairie grass in the shade of the railway station, and at seven o’clock on the next morning I began a term of three weeks’ service as a section-hand under the orders of Osborn the boss, and with a strapping young Irishman, “Cuckoo” Sullivan by name, as my partner.

That was the last long stop before I reached Denver.

And now, as I am about to leave this city for the remaining thousand miles of my journey, I look back over a summer and autumn spent in the country and in towns and villages of the thousand miles from the seaboard to Chicago, and then a winter and a spring within the limits of the foremost city of the Middle West, and then a summer in the vast farming region between Chicago and Minneapolis and Denver.

A thousand miles remain, but with what eager anticipation do I look forward to them!

I shall strike in among the mountains, and then leave to the natural development of events the determining of my westward journey.

Whichever course it takes, my way must lie through the frontier, and by force of necessity I must come into contact with a life which is something other than the monotonous daily round of work.

There will be mining regions with the chances of prospecting, and the ranches with the wide range of their free living, and Indian reservations to be crossed, and many lonely mountain-trails to be followed.

It was never without interest and charm, this summer’s walk with its intervals of work, over a thousand miles of the mid-continent.

It varied in beauty with every day’s march, and even the dead level of the Nebraska prairies as the Indian-corn fields grew thinner and faded completely into boundless plains of sage-brush, where the alkali lay white on the glittering soil, and the bleaching skeletons of cattle joined their mute appeal to the cloudless sky for water to quench a burning thirst--even here was an attraction and an interest of its own.

Days ago I caught sight of the mountains rising from out the level plain, and, through the haze of distance and above the mists which shrouded their gaunt sides, I saw their “silent pinnacles of aged snow” appearing clear against the blue of high heaven.

Now, as I have drawn nearer in this marvellous air, a hundred miles of the range stand out in glorious vividness of color and of every detail of configuration, and my heart leaps again to the joy of their companionship, and I realize with a tingling of blood that the best of the journey, in any sense of adventure, lies before me in the life which they hold upon their slopes and fertile valleys, and in the gloomy depths of their vast cañons.

CHAPTER VIII FROM DENVER TO THE PACIFIC