Description
In 1879, just ten years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad and publication of Watson’s map, Scottish author Robert Lewis Stevenson made a journey from New York to San Francisco by train as if he were a settler—or an emigrant, as they were called—moving west. His essay “Across the Plains” provides a literary peek into what it was like to travel at that time:
It was, if I remember rightly, five o’clock when we were all signaled to the present at the Ferry Depot of the railroad… There was a babel of bewildered men, women, and children. The wretched little booking office, and the baggage-room, which was not much larger, were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the atmosphere of dripping clothes. The officials loaded each other with recriminations. A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to have been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full of brimstone, blustering and interfering. It was plain that the whole system, if system there was, had utterly broken down under the strain of so many passengers. (p. 1-2)
We reached Chicago in the evening. I was turned out of the cars, bundled into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the station of a different railroad. Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city… When it was time to start, I descended the platform like a man in a dream. It was a long train, lighted from end to end; and car after car, as I came up with it, was not only filled but overflowing… When at last I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle of rags… (p. 18-20)
Twenty minutes before nine [on the third day of travel], we were deposited at the Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the Missouri river [sic]… I found myself in front of the Emigrant House, with more than a hundred others, to be sorted and boxed for the journey. A white-haired official, with a stick under one arm, and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front of us, and called name after name in the tone of a command. At each name you would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run for the hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children. The second or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men travelling along, and the third to the Chinese. (p. 23-27)
I suppose the reader has some notion of an American railroad-car, that long, narrow wooden box, like a flat-roofed Noah’s ark, with a stove and a convenience, one at either end, a passage down the middle, and transverse benches upon either hand. Those destined for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme plainness, nothing but wood entering in any part into their constitution, and for the usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned. The benches are too short for anything but a young child. Where there is scarce elbow-room for two to sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie. Hence the company…have conceived a plan for the better accommodation of travellers. They prevail on every two to chum together. To each of the chums they sell a board and three square cushions stuffed with straw, and covered with thin cotton. The benches can be made to face each other in pairs, for the backs are reversible. On the approach of night the boards are laid from bench to bench, making a couch wide enough for two, and long enough for a man of the middle height; and the chums lie down side by side upon the cushions with the head to the conductor’s van and the feet to the engine. (p. 27-28)
A great personage on an American train is the newsboy. He sells books (such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant journeys, soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon. (p. 33)
At Ogden we changed from the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific line of railroad. The change was doubly welcome; for, first, we had better cars on the new line; and, second, those in which we had been cooped for more than ninety hours had begun to stink abominably. … But one thing I must say, the car of the Chinese was notably the least offensive… The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, and so proportionally airier; they were freshly varnished…the seats drew out and joined in the centre, so that there was no more need for bed boards; and there was an upper tier of berths which could be closed by day and opened at night. (p. 54-55)
Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow-Caucasians towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst. They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought of them, but hated them a priori. The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of money. They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle for the Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe. (p. 62)
Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavor of the Chinese…was the noble red man of old story—he over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all these days. … If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back, step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the States extended westward, until at length they are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre—and even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The eviction of the Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith of all…make up a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget. (p. 66-68)
Read Stevenson’s full essay in Across the Plains with Other Memories and Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892). Members can find it shelved in Drum 1 Up with Cutter call number VE3 .St46 .a.