The Rocky Mountain Locomotive
TAY I get on with you?” I asked an engi-
JL neer on the Pacific Railroad, at a station six or seven thousand feet above the level of the sea
“Certainly he said: u but hold fast tight, or you may fall off
•Toot! toot!” went the whistle, and the long anaconda of a rail-train first went crawling along” the rocks, but soon took on fearful momentum. Sittinq- in “Pullman’s Palace Car,” looking out of the window, the passenger gets no idea oi the speed of the train: but close by the engineer, and feeling the nervous quiver and jump of the iron
,:rser. you see the “mountains skip like rams, and the little hills like lambs.”
The door of the locomotive furnace clangs open, and the flames rave as though they would leap out to devour, and the fireman jars the coal into the racing jaws o( the monster. The engineer: his hand on the iron bit that controls the speed, and seems to use no more exertion than a doctor feeling the pulse of a child. Indeed, the locomotive, to the engineer, is not a mere machine, but animate. He talks to it, seems almost to pat it lovingly on the neck. He is proud of it. There is a warm understanding between the two, and in occasional spurts of steam the locomotive seems to take voice and answer its rider. An engine never hurts its master, save in the effort to throw the passengers.
But the engineer, though sitting so placid, is wide awake. He is kept on duty only four hours in the day, and all the energies of body and soul cluster in his vigilant eye and quick thumb. Two hundred lives hang on his wrist.
We plunge into a snow-shed with infinite clatter, every board and beam beating back the deafening roar of the Pacific express. As we rush on, the prairie-dogs skulk into their holes, or sit on their hind-quarters, with fore-feet lifted, as much as to say, “What next!” The antelopes scamper over the plain. We ride unimpeded where less than two years ago the buffaloes stopped the train as the herds stampeded across the track; and along here the savages careered on their ponies.
You see here and there groups of red men, with long hair, and cheeks dashed with war-paint, ringed ears, and a superfluity of dirt that buries your last romantic notion about the “noble red man of the forest.” The air is laden with the breath
of the cedar, madrona, manzanita and buckeye. Here we are passing through what seem the ruins of castles, and temples, and cities, and calling up to mind Petra, and Pompeii,, and Nineveh, and Thebes; but these ruins on either side our track must have been vast abodes, where giants might have lived, till the Titans began here to play leap-frog and turn somersault.
Now the whistle lets off a wild scream; a cow and calf on the track. The cow we cut into halves, and the calf with broken leo;s tumbles over into the ditch. I wonder if that man just ahead will get off in time? Perhaps he is deaf! Perhaps he is crazy, and wants to be run over! Neither. In time to save himself he switches off and robs the coroner.
Hold your breath! Ravine a thousand feet deep on this side! Embankment a thousand feet up on the other! As we turn the curve the engineer pulls the steam-valve, and the silence that chiefly reigned here for six thousand vears lets slip all its hounds of echo and reverberation.
Whew! how we fly! If a bolt break, or a truck fall, or a rock dislodge, we are in eternity! Innumerable varieties of flower break their alabaster at the feet of the cliffs; but yonder the mountain tops are blooming into the white lily of
THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN LOCOMOTIVE.
everlasting snow. Bridges, high, narrow, tremendous, that creak and tremble under the pressure of the train.
A tunnel! Ink-black, midnight doubled, dampness that never saw the sun; while far ahead is a hint of sunlight peering through a hole that looks about the size of the arch of a mouse-trap, but which widens till at last it is large enough to let a whole train escape into the golden day.
Out there is the old emigrant road, with occasionally the skeleton of a cow or horse, or the wreck of a wagon that hopelessly broke down on the way; and here a mound, and a rough stone at the head of it, that show where some worn traveler finished his journey in those times when in one year across these heights went five thousand wagons, pulled by seven thousand mules and thirty thousand yoke of oxen.
More rocks heave in sight, and at the point where all the grandeurs converge, in white paint splashed on the granite boulders, is inscribed
drake’s plantation bitters.
s. t. — 1860 — X.;
leaving room enough for Helmbold’s Buchu, and the popular announcement, “We all take Hobensack’s Worm-Syrup!” After the Indians have seen this advertisement on the rocks they will have no more to say about their “Big Medicine.”
Now we come along by bluffs where the red man could not make a trail, and where laborers in constructing the rail-track were held from the overhanging cliffs by ropes. No fear of the track breaking, for the Chinese are busy all along the road — happy, industrious, more cleanly than the Irish or American laborers by the track. Capital railroad builders are these Chinese, first-rate cooks, and their coming all through the land will deliver housekeepers from their slavery to the present tyranny of the kitchen. They are the princes of the smoothing-iron.
We shall be a cleaner nation when the Chinese wash for us. They do not send back your shirts melancholy with “blueing,” and minus buttons torn off, and with bosoms stiff as a shingle. They use no watering-pot to sprinkle the clothes on the grass; but taking the water in their mouth, till their cheeks stand out with bloat, they let the liquid fly over the linen with astounding ingenuity of squirt. Clear the track! Ching-Chang, Wo-Hong, Fu-Choo and Sing-Hi, with your long pig-tails! We cannot afford to run over you!
And now the night begins to fall, and the train goes ploughing through the darkness. The great burning eye of the locomotive peers through, and flashes far ahead upon the wild scene.
The grizzly bear, the panther, the nighthawk, the cormorant, the pelican, the grosbeak, the eagle, that kept aloof while the day shone, may venture nearer now, if they dare. Oh how we fly! The rush of the wind, the jamming of the car-coupling, the clang of the wheels, the steam hiss, the fierce shower of sparks that set the night on fire, the shooting past of rocks five hundred feet high, followed by a precipice a thousand feet deep, make the breath short, and the heart thump, and the very scalp lift.
How the shadows shuffle! How the crags shiver! How the echoes rave! An express train at night on the Rocky Mountains! The irresistible trampling the immovable I Yet the way smoothed down by human engineering. Then it will not be so difficult to prepare the way for a grander coming when the mountains shall be made low, and the crooked straight, and rough places plain, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together!
“I guess I will get off now,” I said to the engineer. “All rio-ht!” said he; “but look out and not break your neck over that switch out yonder r With my mind full of the rush and thunder of the day, I went to sleep, and dreamt of the scenes into which we were being introduced. The land of big trees, three hundred and twenty feet high, one hundred and twelve around (see Hutchins); big waterfalls, two thousand six hundred feet down (see Whitney); big bears, of two thousand pounds’ weight (see the hunters); big onions, a foot across the top, and beets of a hundred and twenty-seven pounds each (see Dr. Todd); big rocks, big prophecies and bigger hearts. Golden-footed, vinecrowned California!