Page 18
Our new conductor (just shipped) had been
without sleep for twenty hours. Such a thing was very frequent. From St.
Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly
nineteen hundred miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the
cars do it in four and a half, now), but the time specified in the mail
contracts, and required by the schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if I
remember rightly. This was to make fair allowance for winter storms and
snows, and other unavoidable causes of detention. The stage company had
everything under strict discipline and good system. Over each two hundred
and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent, and invested
him with great authority. His beat or jurisdiction of two hundred and fifty
miles was called a "division." He purchased horses, mules harness, and food
for men and beasts, and distributed these things among his stage stations,
from time to time, according to his judgment of what each station needed. He
erected station buildings and dug wells. He attended to the paying of the
station-keepers, hostlers, drivers, and blacksmiths, and discharged them
whenever he chose. He was a very, very great man in his "division" - a kind
of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the Indies, in whose presence common men were
modest of speech and manner, and in the glare of whose greatness even the
dazzling stage-driver dwindled to a penny dip. There were about eight of
these kings, all told, on the overland route.
Next in rank and importance to the
division-agent came the "conductor." His beat was the same length as the
agent's - two hundred and fifty miles. He sat with the driver, and (when
necessary) rode that fearful distance, night and day, without other rest or
sleep than what he could get perched thus on top of the flying vehicle.
Think of it! He had absolute charge of the mails, express matter, passengers
and stage, coach, until he delivered them to the next conductor, and got his
receipt for them.
Consequently he had to be a man of
intelligence, decision and considerable executive ability. He was usually a
quiet, pleasant man, who attended closely to his duties, and was a good deal
of a gentleman. It was not absolutely necessary that the division-agent
should be a gentleman, and occasionally he wasn't. But he was always a
general in administrative ability, and a bull-dog in courage and
determination - otherwise the chieftainship over the lawless underlings of
the overland service would never in any instance have been to him anything
but an equivalent for a month of insolence and distress and a bullet and a
coffin at the end of it. There were about sixteen or eighteen conductors on
the overland, for there was a daily stage each way, and a conductor on every
stage.
Next in real and official rank and
importance, after the conductor, came my delight, the driver - next in real
but not in apparent importance - for we have seen that in the eyes of the
common herd the driver was to the conductor as an admiral is to the captain
of the flag-ship. The driver's beat was pretty long, and his sleeping-time
at the stations pretty short, sometimes; and so, but for the grandeur of his
position his would have been a sorry life, as well as a hard and a wearing
one. We took a new driver every day or every night (for they drove backward
and forward over the same piece of road all the time), and therefore we
never got as well acquainted with them as we did with the conductors; and
besides, they would have been above being familiar with such rubbish as
passengers, anyhow, as a general thing. Still, we were always eager to get a
sight of each and every day we were either anxious to get rid of an
unpleasant one, or loath to part with a driver we had learned to like and
had come to be sociable and friendly with. And so the first question we
asked the conductor whenever we got to where we were to exchange drivers,
was always, "Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not
know, then, that it would go into a book some day. As long as everything
went smoothly, the overland driver was well enough situated, but if a fellow
driver got sick suddenly it made trouble, for the coach must go on, and so
the potentate who was about to climb down and take a luxurious rest after
his long night's siege in the midst of wind and rain and darkness, had to
stay where he was and do the sick man's work. Once, in the Rocky Mountains,
when I found a driver sound asleep on the box, and the mules going at the
usual break-neck pace, the conductor said never mind him, there was no
danger, and he was doing double duty - had driven seventy-five miles on one
coach, and was now going back over it on this without rest or sleep. A
hundred and fifty miles of holding back of six vindictive mules and keeping
them from climbing the trees! It sounds incredible, but I remember the
statement well enough.
Page 19
The station-keepers, hostlers, etc., were
low, rough characters, as already described; and from western Nebraska to
Nevada a considerable sprinkling of them might be fairly set down as outlaws
- fugitives from justice, criminals whose best security was a section of
country which was without law and without even the pretence of it. When the
"division-agent" issued an order to one of these parties he did it with the
full understanding that he might have to enforce it with a navy six-shooter,
and so he always went "fixed" to make things go along smoothly.
Now and then a division-agent was really
obliged to shoot a hostler through the head to teach him some simple matter
that he could have taught him with a club is his circumstances and
surroundings had been different. But they were snappy, able men, those
division-agents, and when they tried to teach a subordinate anything, that
subordinate generally "got it through his head."
A great portion of this vast machinery -
these hundreds of men and coaches, and thousands of mules and horses - was
in the hands of Mr. Ben HOLLIDAY. All the western half of the business was
in his hands. This reminds me of an incident of Palestine travel which is
pertinent here, so I will transfer it just in the language in which I find
it set down in my Holy Land note-book:
No doubt everybody has heard of Ben
Holliday - a man of prodigious energy, who used to send mails and passengers
flying across the continent in his overland stage-coaches like a very
whirlwind - two thousand long miles in fifteen days and a half, by the
watch! But this fragment of history is not about Ben Holliday, but about a
young New York boy by the name of Jack, who traveled with our small party of
pilgrims in the Holy Land (and who had traveled to California in Mr.
Holliday's overland coaches three years before, and had by no means
forgotten it or lost his gushing admiration of Mr. H.). Aged nineteen. Jack
was a good boy - a good-hearted and always well-meaning boy, who had been
and knew a great many useful things, his Scriptural education had been a
good deal neglected - to such a degree, indeed, that all Holy Land history
was fresh and new to him, and all Bible names mysteries that had never
disturbed his virgin ear.
Also in our party was an elderly pilgrim
who was the reverse of Jack, in that he was learned in the Scriptures and an
enthusiast concerning them. He was our encyclopedia, and we were never tired
of listening to his speeches, nor he of making them. He never passed a
celebrated locality, from Bashan to Bethlehem, without illuminating it with
an oration. One day, when camped near the ruins of Jericho, he burst forth
with something like this:
"Jack, do you see that range of mountains
over yonder that bounds the Jordan valley? The mountains of Moab, Jack!
Think of it, my boy - the actual mountains of Moab - renowned in Scripture
history! We are actually standing face to face with those illustrious crags
and peaks - and for all we know" [dropping his voice impressively], "our
eyes may be resting a this very moment upon the spot WHERE LIES THE
MYSTERIOUS GRAVE OF MOSES! Think of it, Jack!"
"Moses who?" (falling inflection).
"Moses who! Jack, you ought to be ashamed
of yourself - you ought to be ashamed of such criminal ignorance. Why,
Moses, the great guide, soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack,
from this spot where we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three
hundred miles in extent - and across that desert that wonderful man brought
the children of Israel! - guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty
years over the sandy desolation and among the obstructing rocks and hills,
and landed them at last, safe and sound, within sight of this very spot; and
where we now stand they entered the Promised Land with anthems of rejoicing!
It was a wonderful thing to do, Jack! Think of it!" Forty years? Only three
hundred miles? Humph! Ben Holliday would have fetched them through in
thirty-six hours!"
The boy meant no harm. He did not know
that he had said anything that was wrong or irreverent. And so no one
scolded him or felt offended with him - and nobody could but some ungenerous
spirit incapable of excusing the heedless blunders of a boy.
At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived
at the "Crossing of the South Platte," alias "Julesburg," alias "Overland
City," four hundred and seventy miles from St. Joseph - the strangest,
quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eye had ever stared at
and been astonished with.