THE WESTERN AVERNUS.*
WHY Avernus P The characteristic of that classical limbo was surely hopelessness and stagnation. Moreover, no one could get into or out of it without the golden bough, which the Sibyl helped the pious Trojan to acquire. Now, there is less stagna- tion in Farther North America at this moment than in any other corner of the globe ; and every man there, drunk or sober, believes that he is bound to strike oil, or gold, or something that will make his "pile," to-morrow morning, if not to-day. No doubt the golden bough, converted into United States or Dominion currency, is as potent in British Columbia or Manitoba as of old in Avernus ; but then, this was precisely what Mr. Roberts (if that be his real name) was wholly without when he introduces himself to us in the spring of 1884 and during the two years or thereabouts of the toil and travel of which he gives us no vivid and useful a sketch in this book. The only answer we could find to this question, occurred to us when —towards the end of his wanderings, and after parting with his only surviving book companion, Sartor Resartus, to a hospitable English sailor who had entertained him for some days on his rancho—he buys a Virgil at New Westminster, being for the moment unusually solvent, and reads the 6th Zneid in a fit of the blues on his last tramp across the coast- range towards San Francisco. And yet, in spite of want of shekels of either currency, he has come out of Avernus, and is, we hope, well and enjoying himself (ruminatively, as seems to be his wont) within the sound of Bow bells, and perhaps meditating another such tramp on the Congo or in Central Asia, of which, in due time, we may get the record in a volume as bright and piquant as the present.
For this book is likely, unless we are mistaken, to take a high place in that characteristically English class of travels of which it is the latest specimen. At the head of these sits &then --sedet ceternum qua eedebit—with Warburton's Crescent and Cross, and other well-known wanderings as good seconds. The key-note of them all is to be found, we take it, in the picture of a highly educated and refined Englishman holding his own in surroundings however wild, and amongst all companies, from learned pundits to cow-boys and Chinamen. The wanderer must show himself "able to hold up his end," as they phrase it in Manitoba, in a free fight or an argument on free-will; and he mast do it quietly, and without swagger, and with some artistic and humorous appreciation of the strange conditions in which he finds himself. These granted, he is sure of wide appreciation by the reading public at home, which we look for confidently for Mr. Roberts. Without a page of beating the bush, we find our- selves sitting with him on the prairie of North-West Texas, herding sheep under an English " boss," by name Jones, at $25 a month, in the spring of 1884.- We learn incidentally that he is only four weeks from "the crowded desolation of unnatural London," though now arrayed in the wide-brimmed felt hat and high boots of an orthodox cow-boy, without a dollar except what he can earn, and rejoicing to find himself in the great West, of which he has formed an ideal, "in which red-shirted miners, pistolling cow-boys, reckless stage-drivers, gentlemanly gamblers, and self-sacrificing women figured in a kind of kaleidoscopic harlequinade, ending up in a snowstorm, or the stroke of a gun- powder massacre." Six weeks of herding, up before sunrise, in at sundown, proved enough for him; long enough, however, to enable him to give us a graphic picture of the life, in- cluding the shearing, for which "Boss Jones" brought up a mixed crowd of Mexicans, Texans, and an Indian. On his return to Colorado City, where, while the 29 earned on the ranche lasted, he spent a careless, novel-reading time, he saw his Mexican friends marching from the " calabosa," or gaol, to work on the road, the consequence of a drunken row, in charge of a warder armed with a six-shooter. "They shouted to me and waved their hands, looking not unhappy, and doubtless thinking it was destiny, and not to be made matter of too much thought. I waved my hat to them and saw them no more." His next experience was that of a "bull-puncher," in which capacity he reached Chicago, in charge of seven cars of cattle,
• The Western Avernus, or, Toil and Trawl in Further North America. By Morley Roberts. London Smith and Rider.
under "a rough-looking young Englishman, whose greatest pleasure was in being taken for a native Texan." Bull-punching he found a wearisome and dangerous business, the duty being to keep all the beasts on their legs for a journey of more than 1,000 miles. For the methods we must refer to the book, and also for the description of the route,—crossing the Missouri and Mississippi, and stopping at occasional stations, round which loafed the inhabitants all armed. " It seemed strange to see boys of 11 or 12 strutting round with revolvers in their belts. Little desperadoes in training, I thought." He found himself in Chicago with $1 in cash, and his bundle, containing his blankets, a flannel shirt, and copies of Emerson's essays and Barter Resartus. After some days of bootless search for work, during which he was glad to sleep in empty trucks, and ran serious risk of starvation, he hired himself to work on a railway in North-West Iowa, at $125 a day, and from thence drifted on, living from hand to mouth, to St. Paul's, Minnesota. On the way, Emerson's essays went in exchange for a parcel of food. Sartor only was left to him. "Do you read it ?" asked Boss Cooke, his temporary employer. "Do you suppose I carry it for the sake of carrying it ?" "Well, I'm surprised at a man who can read such a book as this seems to be tramping in Iowa." " So am I, Mr. Cooke,' I replied; and bidding him good day, Ray and I marched off, a little better in spirits, as we had now $71- between us." They arrived at St. Paul's "dead broke," and took the first work that came to hand at the waterworks, "with as rough and as mixed a crowd as it has ever been my lot to come in contact with." They slept fifty in a tent, and one of his nearest neighbours was Jack Dann, a big-boned, courageous, and desperate char- acter, who soon distinguished our wanderer by his friendship. Jack Dunn had come recently from gaol, where he had been sentenced to eighteen months' hard labour for the manslaughter of a Negro on a Mississippi steamer ; and the story of how he obtained his discharge from the Governor by fetching the body of a prisoner, four days dead, out of a water-pipe two feet in diameter, in which that impatient person had been smothered in an attempt to escape, is one of the most graphic and gruesome we have ever read. It would spoil in extracts, but any one who goes to the book for it will be well rewarded.
At St. Paul's, the report of good wages on the Canadian Pacific Railway, then being graded through the Rockies, tempted him to the further North-West with a new partner, Pat McCormick, a bard drinker, perfectly reckless, but very good- tempered when sober. In the description of the run in amongst the Rockies, otherwise a fine piece of word-painting, there is, we think, some deliberate fine-writing, almost the only instances we have noted in which the author has indulged in that fatal habit. For instance:—" If I can say, 'That rosy peak no eye has ever viewed but mine who can reverence its glory,' then that place is indeed sacred, though an awe may be on me that at first pre- cludes passionate love, permitting only adoration." Surely there is a false, Byronic ring here, quite unusual to the author, and not worthy of him. They came to the end of the track in the Kicking-Horse Pass, and there went to work on a "low down job " of " picking on the slope," but paid at the rate of $2.25 for ten hours. Here he remained till the end of September, and became a sort of arbiter elegantiarum amongst the rough crowd. At nights they eat round the camp-fire and sang songs and told stories, our author being a leading performer, and giving them Mozart's "L'Addio," or "Tom Bowling," as the spirit moved him. Indeed, before leaving, be wrote them a song of the C.P.R., which was much admired. "All I remember of it is the chorus, which ran :-
'For some of as are bummers for whom work has no charms, And some of us are farmers, a.working for our farms ; But all are jolly fellows, who come from near and far, To work up in the Rookies on the C.P.R.'"
In the first days of October, he resolved not to winter in the Rockies, and with $18 in his pocket, started on the trail for British Columbia, with a German, Fritz by name. As they passed the camps, the men sang out, "Goodbye, bye, Texas, take care of yourself." " Well, old man," one said, " if you really mean going, you most have lots of grit ; but I'll bet you a dollar you'll soon turn back." The tramp across the Selkirks, a dangerous and difficult feat at the best of times, was made worse to the author by chafed heels, which made walking an agony ; but they got through at last without exhausting the small stock of flour, bacon, and tea with which they started. British Columbia he found strikingly free from violent crime, "Sedge Begbie being a hanging Judge," as any one who remembers that stalwart barrister in Lincoln's Inn a quarter of a century back can well believe. At New Westminster he spent the winter in a saw-mill. " What kind of a man is that long fellow in the big hat?" asked the boss of his partner, a day or two after he went to work. " Well, he don't know much about
but I just tell you he is a rustler. He gets round quicker 'n any man in the mill, spite of his long legs." " Why,. I nearly fired him the first morning ; thought he wasn't any good." After which conversation there was no more trouble, and he stayed live months, working all day, and in the evenings reading and playing chess in the town library. He shared a cabin with one Pete, a German, from California,. who had been seven years at work "just to make $20 and a suit. of clothes to go back to California in." But from a habit of sitting blandly in front of the hotel and inviting all passers-by to take a drink whenever he was in cash," though he was always dressed well enough, he couldn't get that new suit and the dollars both at the same time. Pete was a great favourite of mine." In April Roberts was " fired" for thrashing a Chinaman. The men went to the office and asked if the Chinaman was to. be " fired " too. " No," said the boss. " Well, if he ain't," said Mac, the spokesman," we'll all go too, and shut the mill down.' "So the Chinaman went too, and the book-keeper, a very good friend of mine, actually charged him with two cups, a plate, and a tin dipper, which bad been smashed when we were in the thick of the fight, and what's more, made him pay for them." We have no space to follow our wanderer back to Eagle Pass,. and thence to Vancouver's Island, Victoria, and across Oregon and the coast-range on foot, to Crescent City, earning a bare subsistence by work on farms by the way. Here he shipped for San Francisco, in which city be landed with 25 c. in his pocket. There he found no work, and learnt as he had never done before, "the misery of cities and the perpetual war- fare and bitter strife of life," till money for which he had written home came, and he started, resartus, and a wiser, if not a sadder man, for England.
We have already expressed a wish that Mr. Roberts may make more tramps and write more books of toil and travel. This, however, on second thoughts, we feel to be a purely selfish wish on our parts, and feeling as we do a friendly interest in him, will at parting remind him of a notable chapter in his favourite book. It is that on "Getting under Way," in which. Teufelsdrockh moralises over that hardest problem, "to find by study of yourself and of the ground you stand on, what your combined inward and outward capability specially is." In this work of groping about amongst a whole imbroglio of capabilities, must in any case some years of our small term be spent. " Nay, many so spend their whole term, and, in ever new expectation, ever new disappointment, shift from enterprise to enterprise, and from side to side : till at length, as exasperated striplings of three score and ten, they shift into their last enterprise, that of getting buried." That living and describing such a life as he has photographed for us in the North-West, is altogether his highest inward and outward capability—high as we are inclined to reckon it in these distracting days—is by no means clear to us ; but whatever it may be, we wish him hearty and speedy success in his search for it.
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