Roughing It eBook

I am aware, now, that I ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen of all that region, what I asked of that mere shadow of a man; for, after seven years’ residence on the Pacific coast, I know that no passenger or driver on the Overland ever corked that anecdote in, when a stranger was by, and survived.  Within a period of six years I crossed and recrossed the Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times by stage and listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eighty-one or eighty-two times.  I have the list somewhere.  Drivers always told it, conductors told it, landlords told it, chance passengers told it, the very Chinamen and vagrant Indians recounted it.  I have had the same driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon.  It has come to me in all the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed to earth, and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont, tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers—­everything that has a fragrance to it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the sons of men.  I never have smelt any anecdote as often as I have smelt that one; never have smelt any anecdote that smelt so variegated as that one.  And you never could learn to know it by its smell, because every time you thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with a different smell.  Bayard Taylor has written about this hoary anecdote, Richardson has published it; so have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Browne, and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon the great overland road anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco; and I have heard that it is in the Talmud.  I have seen it in print in nine different foreign languages; I have been told that it is employed in the inquisition in Rome; and I now learn with regret that it is going to be set to music.  I do not think that such things are right.

Stage-coaching on the Overland is no more, and stage drivers are a race defunct.  I wonder if they bequeathed that bald-headed anecdote to their successors, the railroad brakemen and conductors, and if these latter still persecute the helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as did many a tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the Pacific coast are not Yo Semite and the Big Trees, but Hank Monk and his adventure with Horace Greeley. [And what makes that worn anecdote the more aggravating, is, that the adventure it celebrates never occurred.  If it were a good anecdote, that seeming demerit would be its chiefest virtue, for creative power belongs to greatness; but what ought to be done to a man who would wantonly contrive so flat a one as this?  If I were to suggest what ought to be done to him, I should be called extravagant—­but what does the sixteenth chapter of Daniel say?  Aha!]

CHAPTER XXI.

We were approaching the end of our long journey.  It was the morning of the twentieth day.  At noon we would reach Carson City, the capital of Nevada Territory.  We were not glad, but sorry.  It had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still and settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not agreeable, but on the contrary depressing.