 Introduction to American Notes This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Tim Bulkley of BigBible.org American Notes by Rudyard Kipling Introduction In an issue of the London world in April 1890, there appeared the following paragraph Two small rooms connected by a tiny hall afford sufficient space to contain Mr. Rudyard Kipling, the literary hero of the present hour, the man who came from nowhere, as he says himself, and who a year ago was consciously nothing in the literary world. Six months previous to this, Mr. Kipling, then but twenty-four years old, had arrived in England from India to find that fame had preceded him. He had already gained fame in India where scores of cultured and critical people after reading departmental ditties, plain tales from the hills, and various other stories and verses had stamped him for a genius. Fortunately for everybody who reads, London interested and stimulated Mr. Kipling and he settled down to writing, the record of Bandalia Herod's foot, and his first novel, The Light That Failed, appeared in 1890 and 1891. Then a collection of verse, Life's Handicap, being stories of my own people, was published simultaneously in London and New York City. Then followed more verse, and so on through an unending series. In 1891 Mr. Kipling met the young author, Wilcox Balestia. At that time connected with the London publishing house. A strong attachment grew between the two and several months after their first meeting they came to Mr. Balestia's Vermont home, where they collaborated on The Nowlaka, a story of West and East, for which the century paid the largest price ever given by an American magazine for a story. The following year Mr. Kipling married Mr. Balestia's sister in London and brought her to America. The Balestias were of an aristocratic New York family. The grandfather of Mrs. Kipling was J. M. Balestia, a prominent lawyer in New York City and Chicago, who died in 1888, leaving a fortune of about a million. Her maternal grandfather was E. Peshine Smith of Rochester, New York, a noted author and jurist, who was selected in 1871 by Secretary Hamilton Fish to go to Japan as the Mikado's advisor in international law. The ancestral home of the Balestias was near Battleborough, Vermont. And here Mr. Kipling brought his bride. The young Englishman was so impressed by the Vermont scenery that he rented for a time the cottage on the Bliss Farm, in which Steele McKay, the playwright, wrote the well-known drama, Hazel Kirk. The next spring Mr. Kipling purchased from his brother-in-law, B. T. Balestia, a tract of land about three miles north of Battlesborough, Vermont, and on this erected a house at a cost of nearly $50,000, which he named the Nalaka. This was his home during his sojourn in America. Here he wrote when in the mood, and for recreation, tramped abroad over the hills. His social duties at this period were not arduous. For to his home he refused admittance to all but tried friends. He made a study of the Yankee country dialect and character for the walking delegate. And while Captain's Courageous, the story of New England Fisher Life, was before him, he spent some time among the Gloucester fishermen with an acquaintance who had access to the household gods of these people. He returned to England in August 1896, and did not visit America again until 1899, when he came with his wife and three children for a limited time. It is hardly fair to Mr. Kipling to call American Notes first impressions. For one reading them will readily see that the impressions are superficial, little thought being put upon the writing. They seem super-psychastic, and would lead one to believe that Mr. Kipling is antagonistic to America in every respect. This, however, is not true. These notes arouse much protest and severe criticism when they appeared in 1891, and are considered so far beneath Mr. Kipling's real work that they have been nearly suppressed and are rarely found in a list of his writings. Their very caustic style is of interest to a student and lover of Kipling, and for this reason the publishers believe them worthy of a good binding. The boardings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Tim Bulkley of BigBible.org This is what Brett Hart has written of the great city of San Francisco, and for the past fortnight I have been wondering what made him do it. There is neither serenity nor indifference to be found in these parts, and evil would it be for the continents whose wardship were entrusted to so reckless a guardian. Behold me, pitched neck and crop from twenty days of the high seas into the whirl of California, deprived of any guidance, and left to draw my own conclusions. Protect me from the wrath of an outraged community if these letters be ever read by American eyes. San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people, whose women are of remarkable beauty. When the city of Pekin steamed through the Golden Gate, I saw with great joy that the blockhouse which guarded the mouth of the finest harbor in the world, sir, could be silenced by two gunboats from Hong Kong with safety, comfort and dispatch. Also, there was not a single American vessel of war in the harbor. This may sound bloodthirsty, but remember that I come with a grievance upon me, the grievance of pirated English books. Then a reporter leaped aboard, and, ere I could gasp, held me in his toils. He pumped me exhaustively while I was getting ashore, reminding of all things in the world news about Indian journalism. It's an awful thing to enter a new land with a new lie on your lips. I spoke the truth to the evil-minded custom-house man who turned my most sacred raiment on a floor composed of stable refuse and pine-splinters. But the reporter overwhelmed me not so much by his poignant audacity as his beautiful ignorance. I am sorry now that I did not tell him more lies as I passed into a city of 300,000 white men. Think of it. 300,000 white men and women gathered in one spot, walking upon real pavements in front of plate-glass windowed shops, and talking something that at first hearing was not very different from English. It was only when I tangled myself up in the hopeless maze of small wooden houses, dust, street refuse and children who played with empty kerosene tins that I discovered the difference of speech. You want to go to the Palace Hotel? It's an amiable youth on a tray. What the hell are you doing here, then? This is about the lowest ward in the city. Go six-box north to the corner of Geary and Markey. Then walk around till you strike corner of Gutter and 16th. And that brings you there. I do not vouch for the literal accuracy of these directions, quoting, but from a disordered memory. Amen, I said. And who am I that I should strike the corners of such as you name? Per adventure they may be gentlemen of repute and might hit back. Bring it down to darts, my son. I thought he would have smitten me, but he didn't. He explained that no one ever used the word street and that everyone was supposed to know how streets ran. For sometimes the names were upon the lamps and sometimes they weren't. Fortified with these directions, I proceeded till I found a mighty street full of sumptuous buildings, four and five stories high, but paved with rude cobblestones, after the fashion of the year one. Here a tram-car, without any visible means of support, slid still fully behind me and nearly struck me in the back. This was the famous cable car of San Francisco, which runs by gripping an endless wire sunk into the ground, and of which I will tell you more anon. A hundred yards further there was a slight commotion in the street, a gathering together of three or four, something that glittered as it moved very swiftly. A ponderous Irish gentleman with priests' cords in his hat and a small nickel-plated badge on his fat bosom emerged from the knot supporting a Chinaman who had been stabbed in the eye and was bleeding like a pig. The bystanders went their ways and the Chinaman, assisted by the policeman, his own. Of course this was none of my business, but I rather wanted to know what had happened to the gentleman who had dealt the stab. It said a great deal for the excellence of the municipal arrangement of the town that a surging crowd did not once block the street to see what was going forward. I was the sixth man and the last to assist it at the performance, and my curiosity was six times the greatest. Indeed I felt ashamed of showing it. There were no more incidents till I reached the Palace Hotel, the seven-storied Warren of Humanity with a thousand rooms in it. All of the travel books will tell you about hotel arrangements in this country. They should be seen to be appreciated. Understand clearly, and this letter is written after a thousand miles of experiences, that money will not buy you service in the West. When the hotel clerk, the man who awards your room to you and who is supposed to give you information, when that resplendent individual stoops to attend to your wands, he does so whistling or humming or picking his teeth or pauses to converse with someone he knows. These performances I gather are to impress upon you that he is a free man and you're equal. From his general appearance and the size of his diamonds he ought to be your superior. There is no necessity for this swaggering self-consciousness of freedom. Business is business, and the man who is paid to attend to a man might reasonably devote his whole attention to the job. Out of office hours, he can take his coach in four and pervade society if he pleases. In a vast marble-paved hall, under the glare of an electric light, sat forty or fifty men, and for their use and amusement were provided spittoons of infinite capacity and generous gape. Most of the men wore frock coats and top hats. The things that we in India put on to wedding breakfast if we possess them. But they all spat. They spat on principle. The spittoons were on the staircases in each bedroom. Yay, in the chambers even more sacred than these. They chased one into retirement. But they blossomed in chiefest splendour around the bar. And they were all used, every wreaking one of them. Just before I began to feel deathly sick another reporter grappled me. What he wanted to know was the precise area of India in square miles. I referred him to Whittaker. He never heard of Whittaker. He wanted it from my own mouth, and I would not tell him. Then he swerved off just like the other man to details of journalism in our own country. I ventured to suggest that the interior economy of a paper most concerned the people who worked it. That's the very thing that interests us, he said. Have you got reporters anything like I reporters on Indian newspapers? We have not, I said, and suppressed the thank God rising to my lips. Why haven't you? said he. Because they would die, I said. It was exactly like talking to a child, a very rude little child. He would begin almost every sentence with now tell me something about India and would turn aimlessly from one question to the other without the least continuity. I was not angry but keenly interested. The man was a revelation to me. To his questions I returned answers mendacious and evasive. After all, it really did not matter what I said, he could not understand. I can only hope and pray that none of the readers of the pioneer will ever see that portentous interview. The man made me out to be an idiot, several sizes more driveling than my destiny intended, and the ragnous of his ignorance managed to distort the few poor facts with which I supplied him into large and elaborate lies. Then thought I, the matter of American journalism shall be looked into later on. At present I will enjoy myself. No man rose to tell me what were the lions of the place, no one volunteered any sort of conveyance. I was absolutely alone in this big city of white folk. By instinct I sought refreshment and came upon a bar room full of bad salon pictures in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the free lunch, I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day, a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if you are stranded in these parts. Later I began a vast but unsystematic exploration of the streets. I asked for no names. It was enough that the pavements were full of white men and women, the streets clanging with traffic, and that the restful roar of a great city rang in my ears. The cable cars glided to all points of the compass at once. I took them one by one till I could go no further. San Francisco has been pitched down on the sand bunkers of the Bicaneer Desert. About one-fourth of it is ground reclaimed from the sea. Any old-timers will tell you all about that. The remainder is just ragged, unthrifty sandhills, today pegged down by houses. From an English point of view, there has not been the least attempt at grading those hills, and indeed you might as well try to grade the hillocks of Sind. The cable cars have, for all practical purposes, made San Francisco a dead level. They take no count of rise or fall, but slide equibly on their appointed courses from one end to the other of a six-mile street. They turn corners almost at right angles, cross other lines, and, for all I know, may run up the sides of houses. There is no visible agency of their flight, but once in a while you shall pass a five-storied building humming with machinery that winds up an everlasting wire cable. And the initiator will tell you that here is the mechanism. I gave up asking questions. If it pleases Providence to make a car run up and down a slit in the ground for many miles, and if, for Tappan's hapeny, I can ride in that car, why should I seek the reasons of the miracle? Rather, let me look out the windows till the shops give place to thousands and thousands of little houses made of wood, to imitate stone, each house just big enough for a man at his family. Let me watch the people in the cars and try to find out in what manner they differ from us, their ancestors. Thieves me now that I cursed them in the matter of book piracy, because I perceived that my curse is working and that their speech is becoming a horror already. They delude themselves into the belief that they talk English. The English. And I have already been pitted for speaking with an English accent. The man who pitted me spoke as far as I was concerned in the language of thieves, and they all do. Where we put the accent forward, they throw it back. And vice versa, where we give a long A, they use the short. And words so simple as to be past mistaking, they pronounce somewhere up in the dome of their heads. How do these things happen? Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee school marm, the cider and the salt codfish of the eastern states, are responsible for what he calls a nasal accent. I know better. They sold books from across the water without paying for them. And the snort of delight was fixed in the nostrils forever by a just providence. That's why they talk a foreign tongue today. Cats is dogs and rabbits is dogs and sows parrots. But this here taught us as an insect. So there ain't no charge, as the old porter said. A Hindu is a Hindu and a brother to the man who knows his vernacular. And a Frenchman is French because he speaks his own language. But the American has no language. He is dialect, slang, provincialism, accent, and so forth. Now that I've heard their voices, all the beauty of Bret Hart is being ruined for me. Because I find myself catching through the role of his rhythmical prose the cadence of his peculiar fatherland. Get an American lady to read to you how Santa Claus came to Simpson's Bar and see how much is under her tongue left of the beauty of the original. But I'm sorry for Bret Hart. It happened this way. A reporter asked me what I thought of the city and I made answer swavely. That it was hallowed ground to me because of Bret Hart. That was true. Well said the reporter, Bret Hart claims California, but California don't claim Bret Hart. He's been so long in England that he's quite English. Have you ever seen our cracker factories or the new offices of the examiner? He could not understand that to the outside world the city was worth a great deal less than the man. I never intended to curse the people with a provincialism so vast as this. But let us return to our sheep, which means the sea lions of the Cliff House. They are the great show of San Francisco. You take a train which pulls up the middle of the street. It killed two people the day before yesterday being unbraked and driven absolutely regardless of consequences. And you pull up somewhere at the back of the city on the Pacific beach. Originally the cliffs and their approaches must have been pretty. But they've been so carefully defiled with advertisements that they are now one big blistered abomination. A hundred yards from the shores to the big rock covered with the carcasses of the sleek sea beasts who roared and rolled and walloped in the spouting surges. No bold man had painted the creatures sky blue or advertised newspapers on their backs. Wherefore they did not match the landscape which was chiefly hoarding. Someday perhaps whatever sort of government they obtain in this country will make a restoration of the place and keep it clean and neat. At present the sovereign people of whom I have heard so much already is in painting the virtues of little bile-beans all over it. Night fell over the Pacific and the white sea-fog whipped through the streets dimming the splendours of the electric lights. It is the use of this city, her men and women folk, to parade between the hours of eight and ten a certain street called Caen Street where the finest shops are situated. Here the click of high heels on the pavement is loudest. Here the lights are brightest the thunder of the traffic is most overwhelming. I watched young California and saw that it was at least expensively dressed cheerful in manner and self-asserting in conversation. Also, the women were very fair. Perhaps eighteen days aboard ship had something to do with my unreserved admiration. The maidens were of generous build, large, well-groomed and a tired enraiment that even to my inexperienced eyes must have cost much. Caen Street, at nine o'clock, levels all distinction of rank as impartially as the grave. Again and again I loitered at the heels of a couple of resplendent beings only to overhear when I expected the level voice of culture, the staccato, says he, says I, that's the mark of the white, servant girl all the world over. This was depressing because in spite of all that goes to the contrary fine feathers ought to make fine birds. There was wealth, unlimited wealth in the streets, but not an accent that would have been dear at fifty cents. Wherefore, revolving in my mind that these folk were barbarians, I was presently enlightened and made aware that they also were the heirs of all the ages and civilized after all. There appeared before me an affable stranger of prepossessing appearance with a blue and an innocent eye. Addressing me by name he came to have met me in New York at the Windsor and to this claim I gave a qualified ascent. I did not remember the fact but since he was so certain of it why then I waited developments. And what did you think of Indiana when you came through? Was the next question? It revealed the mystery of previous acquaintance and one or two other things. With reprehensible carelessness my friend of the light blue eye had looked up the name of his victim in the hotel register and read Indiana for India. The provincialism with which I had cursed his people extended to himself. He could not imagine an Englishman coming through the states from west to east instead of the regularly ordained route. My fear was that in his delight in finding me so responsive to make remarks about New York and the Windsor which I could not understand. And indeed he had ventured in this direction once or twice asking me what I thought of such and such streets which from his tone I gathered to be anything but respectable. It is trying to talk unknown New York in almost unknown San Francisco but my friend was merciful he protested that I was one after his own heart and pressed upon me rare and curious drinks at more than one bar. These drinks I accepted with gratitude and also the cigars with which his pockets were stored. He would show me the life of the city. Having no desire to watch a dreary old play again I evaded the offer and received in lieu of the devil's instruction much coarse flattery. Curiously constituted is the soul of man knowing how and where this man lied waiting idly for the finale I was distinctly conscious as he bubbled compliments in my ear of soft thrills of gratified pride stealing from hatrim to bootheels. I was wise, Kwathi anybody could see that with half an eye so gaseous versed in the ways of the world an acquaintance to be desired one who had tasted the cup of life with discretion. All this pleased me and in a measure numbed the suspicion that was thoroughly aroused. Eventually the blue-eyed one discovered, nay insisted that I had a taste for cards. This was clumsily worked him but it was my fault for in that I met him half way and allowed him no chance of good acting. Hereupon I laid my head on one side and simulated unholy wisdom quoting odds and ends of poker talk all ludicrously misapplied. My friend kept his countenance admirably five minutes later we arrived always by the purist of chance and a place where we could play cards and also frivol with Louisiana state lottery tickets. Would I play? Nay, said I. For to me cards have neither meaning nor continuity but let's assume that I am going to play. How would you and your friends get to work? Would you play a straight game or make me drunk or well the fact is I'm a newspaper man and I'd be much obliged if you'd let me know something about bunco steering. My blue-eyed friend erected himself into an obelisk of profanity. He cursed me by his guards the right and left bower he even cursed the very good cigars he had given me but the storm over he quieted down and explained. I apologized for causing him to waste an evening and we spent a very pleasant time together inaccuracy provincialism and the two hasty rushing to conclusions that he had split on but he got his revenge when he said how would I play with you from all the poppycock anglies bosh you talked about poker I'd have played a straight game and skinned you I wouldn't have taken the trouble to make you drunk you never knew anything of the game but how I was mistaken in going to work on you makes me sick he glared at me as though I had done him an injury today I know how it is that year after year week after week the bunco-steerer who is the confidence trick and card-sharper man of other climes secures his prey he clavours them over with flattery as a snake clavours the rabbit the incident depressed me because it showed that I had left the innocent east far behind and was come to a country where a man must look out for himself the very hotels bristled with notices about keeping my door locked and depositing my valuables in a safe the white man in a lump is bad weeping softly for otoyo little I knew then that my heart was to be torn afresh from my bosom I fell asleep in the clanging hotel next morning I had entered upon the deferred inheritance there are no princes in America at least with crowns on their heads but the generous-minded member of some royal family received me a letter of introduction air the day closed I was a member of the two clubs and booked for many engagements to dinner and party now this prince upon whose financial operations be continual increase had no reason nor had the others his friends to put themselves out for the sake of one Britain more or less but he rested not until he had accomplished all in my behalf that a mother could think of for her debutante daughter do you know the bohemian club of san francisco they say its fame extends over the world it was created somewhat on the lines of the savage by men who wrote or drew things and has blossomed into most unrepublican luxury the ruler of the place is an owl an owl standing upon a skull and crossbones showing forth grimly the wisdom of the man of letters and the end of his hopes for immortality the owl stands on the staircase the statue four feet high is carved in the woodwork flutters on the frescoed ceiling is stamped on the note paper hangs on the walls hears an ancient and honourable bird under his wing was my privilege to meet with white men whose lives were not chained down to routine of toil who wrote magazine articles instead of reading them hurriedly in the pauses of office work who painted pictures instead of contenting themselves with cheap etchings but another man's sale of effects mine were all the rites of social intercourse craft by craft that India stony-hearted stepmother of collectors has swindled us out of trading soft carpets and breathing the incense of superior cigars I wandered from room to room studying the paintings in which the members of the club had caricatured themselves their associates and their aims there was a slick French audacity about the workmanship of these men of toil unbending that went straight to the heart of the beholder and yet it was not altogether French a dry grimness of treatment almost dutch marked the difference the men painted as they spoke with certainty the club indulges in revelries which it calls a jinx high and low at intervals and each of these gatherings is faithfully portrayed in oils by hands that know their business in this club were no amateurs spoiling canvas because they fancied they could handle oils without knowledge of shadows or anatomy no gentleman of leisure ruining the temper of publishers and an already ruined market with attempts to write because everybody writes something these days my hosts were working or had worked for their daily bread with pen and or paint and their talk for the most part was of the shop shoppy that is to say they extended a large hand of welcome and were as brethren and I did homage to the owl and listened to their talk an Indian club about Christmas time will yield if properly worked an abundant harvest of queer tales but at a gathering of Americans from the uttermost ends of their own continent the tales are larger thicker, more spinous and even more azure than any Indian variety tales of war I heard told by an ex-officer of the south over his evening drink to a colonel of the northern army my introducer who had served as a trooper in the northern horse throwing in emendations from time to time tales of the law which in this country is an amazingly elastic affair followed from the lips of a judge forgive me for recording one tale that struck me as new it may interest the upcountry bar in India once upon a time there was Samuelson a young lawyer who feared not God neither regarded the bench name, age and town of the man were given at great length to him no case had ever come as a client partly because he lived in a district where lynched law prevailed and partly because the most desperate prisoner shrunk from entrusting himself to the mercies of a phenomenal stammerer but in time there happened an aggravated murder so bad indeed that by common consent the citizens decided as a prelude to lynching to give the real law a chance they could in fact gamble around that murder they met the court in its shirt sleeves and against the raw square of the courthouse window a temptingly suggestive branch of a tree fretted the sky no one appeared for the prisoner and partly ingest the court advised young Samuelson to take up the case the prisoner is undefended Sam said the court the square thing to do would be for you to take him aside and do the best you can for him court jury and witness then adjourned to the veranda while Samuelson let his client aside to the courthouse cells an hour passed and the lawyer returned alone mutely the audience questioned may it please the court said Samuelson my client's case is a bad one a damn bad one you told me to do the best I could for him judge so I've just given him your bebe gilding and told him to light out for healthier crimes my professional opinion being he ought to be hanged quicker in Hades if he did it here by this time my client's about 15 mile out yonder somewheres that was the best I could do for him may it please the court the young man escaping punishment in lieu of the prisoner made his fortune near five years other voices followed with equally wondrous tales of Riata throwing in Mexico and Arizona of gambling at army posts in Texas of newspaper wars waged in godless Chicago I couldn't help being interested but they were not pretty tricks of deaths sudden and violent in Montana and Dakota of the loves of half-breed maidens in the south and fantastic hunting for gold in mysterious Alaska above all they told the story of the building of old San Francisco when the finest collection of humanity on God's earth sir started this town and the water came up to the foot of Market Street very terrible were some of the tales grimly humorous the others and the men in broadcloth and fine linen who told them had played their parts in them and now and again when things got too bad they were told the city bell and the vigilance committee turned out and hanged the suspicious characters a man didn't begin to be suspected in those days to lead committed at least one unprovoked murder said a calm-eyed portly old gentleman I looked at the pictures around me the noiseless neat uniformed waiter behind me the oak-dribbed ceiling above the velvet carpet beneath it was hard to realize that even twenty years ago you could see a man hanged with great pomp later on I found reason to change my opinion the tales gave me a headache and set me thinking how in the world was it possible to take in even one-thousandth of this huge roaring many-sided continent in the tobacco-centred silence of the sumptuous library lay Professor Bryce's book on the American Republic it is an omen said I he has done all things in all seriousness and he may be purchased for half a guinea those who desire information of the most undoubted must refer to his pages for me is the daily round of vagabondage the recording of the incidents of the hour and the intercourse with the travelling companion of the day I will not do this country at all and I forgot all about India for ten days while I went out to dinners and watched the social customs of the people which are entirely different from our customs I was introduced to men of many millions these persons are harmless in their earlier stages that is to say a man worth three or four million dollars may be a good talker, clever, amusing and of the world a man with twice that amount is to be avoided and a twenty million man is just twenty millions take an instance I was speaking to a newspaper man about seeing the proprietor of his journal as in my innocence I suppose newspaper men occasionally did my friend snorted indignantly see him? great scot no if he happens to appear in the office I have to associate with him outside of that I move in circles where he cannot come and yet the first thing I have been taught to believe is that money was everything in America End of Chapter 1 I have been watching machinery in repose after reading about machinery in action an excellent gentleman who bears a name honoured in the magazine writes, as Disraeli or rated of the sublime instincts of an ancient people the certainty with which he was born is that he was born he was born he was born he was born the certainty with which they can be trusted to manage their own affairs in their own way and the speed with which they are making for all sorts of desirable goals is he called a statement or purview of American politics I went almost directly afterwards to a saloon where gentlemen interested in ward politics nightly congregate they were not pretty persons some of them were bloated and they all swore cheerfully till the heavy gold watch chains on their fat stomachs rose and fell again but they talked over their liquor as men who had power and unquestioned access to places of trust and profit the magazine writer discussed theories of government these men the practice they had been there they knew all about it they banged their fists on the table and spoke of political polls the vending of votes and so forth they spoke of village babblers reconstructing the affairs of the nation but of strong, coarse, lustful men fighting for spoil and thoroughly understanding the best methods of reaching it I listened long and intently to speech I could not understand or but in spots it was the speech of business however I had sense enough to know that and to do my laughing outside the door then I began to understand why my pleasant and well educated hosts in San Francisco spoke with a bitter scorn of such duties of citizenship as voting and taking an interest in the distribution of offices scores of men have told me without false pride that they would soon concern themselves with the public affairs of the city or state as rake muck with a steam shovel it may be that their lofty disdain covers selfishness but I should be very sorry habitually to meet the fat gentleman with the shiny top hats and plump cigars in whose society I have been spending the evening read about politics as a cultured writer of the magazine regards him and then, not until then pay your respects to the gentleman who run the grim reality I'm sick of interviewing night editors who lean their chair against the wall and in response to my demand for the record of a prominent citizen answer, well you see, he began by keeping a saloon, etc. I prefer to believe that my informants are treating me as in the old sinful days in India I used to treat the wandering globetrotter they declare that they speak the truth and the news of dog politics lately felt safe to me and groggery is inclined me to believe but I won't the people are much too nice to slang gander as recklessly as I have been doing besides, I'm hopelessly in love with about eight American maidens all perfectly delightful till the next one comes into the room Otoyo was a darling but she lacked several things, conversation for one you cannot live on giggles she shall remain unmarried at Nagasaki while I roast a battered heart before the shrine of a big Kentucky blonde who had for a nurse when she was little a Negro Mammy by consequence she has welded on California beauty Paris dresses, eastern culture, Europe trips and wild western originality the queer dreamy superstitions of the quarters and the result is soul shattering she is but one of many stars Item a maiden who believes in education and possesses it with a few hundred dollars to boot and a taste for slumming Item the leader of a sort of informal salon where girls congregate read papers and daringly discuss metaphysical problems and candy a slow-eyed black-browed imperious maiden she Item a very small maiden, absolutely without reverence who can in one swift sentence trample upon and leave gasping half a dozen young men Item a millionaires burdened with her money lonely caustic with a tongue keen as a sword yearning for a sphere but chained up to the rock of her vast possessions Item a typewriter maiden earning her own bread in this big city because she doesn't think a girl ought to be a burden on her parents who quotes Theophil Goutier and moves through the world manfully much respected for all her twenty inexperienced summers Item a woman from Cloudland who has no history in the past or future but is discreetly of the present and strives for the confidences of male humanity on the grounds of sympathy me thinks this is not altogether a new type Item a girl in a dive blessed with a Greek head and eyes that seem to speak all that is best and sweetest in the world but woe is me she has no ideas in this world or the next beyond the consumption of beer a commission on each bottle and protest that she sings the songs allotted to her nightly without more than the vaguest notion of their meaning sweet and comely are the maidens of Devonshire delicate and gracious seeming those who live in the pleasant places of London fascinating for all their demureness the damsels of France clean closely to their mothers with large eyes wondering at the wicked world excellent in her own place and to those who understand her is the Anglo-Indian spin in her second season but the girls of America are above and beyond them all they are clever they can talk yea it is said that they think certainly they have the appearance of doing so which is delightfully deceptive they are original and regard you between the brows with unabashed eyes as a sister might look at her brother they are instructed too and vanity of the male mind for they have associated with the boys from babyhood and can discerningly minister to both vices or pleasant listen of the possessor they possess moreover a life among themselves independent of any masculine associations they have societies and clubs and unlimited tea fights where all the guests are girls they are self-possessed without parting with any tenderness that is their sex right they understand they can take care of themselves they are superbly independent when you ask them what makes them so charming they say it is because we are better educated than your girls and and we are more sensible in regard to men we have good times all round but we aren't taught to regard every man as a possible husband nor is he expected to marry the first girl he calls on regularly yes they have good times their freedom is large they can go driving with young man and receive visits from young man to an extent that would make an English mother wink with horror neither driver nor drivee has a thought beyond the enjoyment of a good time as certain also of their own poets have said man is fire and woman is toe and the devil he comes and begins to blow in America the toe is soaked in a solution that makes it fireproof in absolute liberty and large knowledge consequently accidents do not exceed the regular percentage arranged by the devil for each class and climate under the skies but the freedom of the young girl has its drawbacks she is, I said with all reluctance, irreverent from her $40 bonnet to the buckles of her $18 shoes she talks flippantly to her parents and men old enough to be her grandfather she has a prescriptive right to the society of the man who arrives the parents admit it this is sometimes embarrassing especially when you call on a man and his wife for the sake of information the one being a merchant of vast knowledge the other a woman of the world in five minutes your host has vanished in another five his wife has followed him and you were left alone with a very charming maiden doubtless but certainly not the person you came to see she chatters and you grin but you leave with the very strong impression of a wasted morning this has been my experience once or twice I have even said as pointedly as I dared to a man I came to see you you better see me in my office then the house belongs to my womenfolk to my daughter that is to say he spoke the truth the American of wealth is owned by his family they exploit him for bullion the women get the haypence the kicks are all his own nothing is too good for an American's daughter here I speak of the money classes the girls take every gift as a matter of course and yet they develop greatly when a catastrophe arrives and the man of many millions goes up or goes down and his daughters take justinography or typewriting I've heard many tales of heroism from the lips of girls who counted the principles among their friends the crash came Mammy or Hattie or Sadie gave up their maid, their carriages and candy and with a number two Remington and a stout heart set about earning their daily bread and did I drop her from my list of friends? no sir said a scarlet-lipped vision in white lace that might happen to us any day it may be this sense of possible disaster in the air that makes San Francisco society go with so captivating a rush and whirl recklessness is in the air I can't explain where it comes from but there it is the roaring winds of the Pacific make you drunk to begin with the aggressive luxury on all sides helps out the intoxication and you spin forever down the ringing grooves of change there is no small change by the way west of the Rockies as long as money lasts they make greatly and they spend lavishly not only the rich but the artisans who pay nearly five pounds for a suit of clothes and for other luxuries in proportion the young men rejoice in the days of their youth they gamble, yacht, race enjoy prize fights and cock fights the one openly, the other in secret they establish luxurious clubs they break themselves over horse flash and other things and they are instant in a quarrel a 20 they are experienced in business embark in fast enterprises take partners as experienced as themselves and go to pieces with as much splendor as their neighbours remember that the men who stocked California in the 50s were physically and as far as regard certain tough virtues the pick of the earth the inept and the weakly died our root or went under in the days of construction to this were added all the races of the continent French, Italian, German and of course the Jew the result you can see in the large bone deep-chested delicate handed women and long elastic well-built boys it needs no little golden badge swinging from the watch chain to mark the native son of the golden west the country bread of California him I love because he is devoid of fear carries himself like a man and has a heart as big as his books and he too he knows how to enjoy the blessings of life that his province so abundantly bestows upon him at least I heard a little rat of a creature with hawk-bottle shoulders explaining that a man from Chicago could pull the eyed teeth of a Californian in business well if I lived in fairyland where cherries were as big as plums plums as big as apples and strawberries of no account where the procession of the fruits of the seasons was like a pageant in a dreary lane pantomime and the dry air was wine I should let business slide once in a way and kick up my heels with my fellows the tale of the resources of California vegetable and mineral is a fairy tale you can read it in books you'd never believe me all manner of nourishing food from sea fish to beef may be bought at the lowest prices and the people are consequently well-developed and of a high stomach they demand 10 shillings for tinkering a jam-lock of a trunk they receive 16 shillings a day for working as carpenters they spend many expenses on very bad cigars which the poorest of them smoke and they go mad over a prize fight when they disagree they do so fatally with firearms in their hands and on the public streets I was just clear of Mission Street when the trouble began between two gentlemen one of whom perforated the other when a policeman whose name I do not recollect fatally shot Ed Heaney for attempting to escape arrest I was in the next street for these things I am thankful it is enough to travel with a policeman in a tram car and what he arranges his coat-tels as he sits down to catch sight of a loaded revolver it is enough to know that 50% of the men in the public saloons carry pistols about them the Chinaman way lays his adversary and methodically chops him to pieces with his hatchet then the press roars about the brutal ferocity of the pagan the Italian reconstructs his friend with a long knife the press complains of the waywardness of the alien the Irishman and the native Californian in their hours of discontent use the revolver not once but six times the press records the fact and asks in the next column whether the world can parallel the progress of San Francisco the American who loves his country will tell you that this sort of thing is confined to the lower classes just a present, an ex-judge who was sent to jail by another judge upon my word I cannot tell whether these titles mean anything is breathing red hot vengeance against his enemy the papers have interviewed both parties and confidently expect a fatal issue now let me draw breath and curse the negro waiter and through him the negro in service generally he has been made a citizen with a vote consequently both political parties play with him but that is neither here nor there he will commit in one meal every bétis that a Sénillon fresh from the plow-tail is capable of and he will continue to repeat those faults he is as complete a heavy-fortied uncomprehending bungle-fisted fool as any mem-saib in the east ever took into her establishment but he is according to law a free and independent citizen consequently above reproof or criticism he and he alone in this insane city will wait at table the Chinaman doesn't count he is untrained, inept but he will fill the place and draw the pay God and his father's fate made him intellectually inferior to the Oriental he insists on pretending that he serves tables by accident as a sort of amusement he wishes you to understand this little fact you wish to eat your meals and if possible to have them properly served he is a big black vain baby and a man rolled into one a colored gentleman who insisted on getting me pie when I wanted something else demanded information about India I gave him some facts about wages oh hell! said he cheerfully that wouldn't keep me in cigars for a month then he formed on me for a ten-cent piece later he took it upon himself to pity the natives of India evens he called them this woolly one whose race has been the part of every comedy on the native stage since the beginning and I turned and saw by the head on his shoulders that he was a Yoruba man if there be any truth in ethnological casts he did his thinking in English but he was a Yoruba Negro and the race type had remained the same throughout his generations and the room was full of other races some that looked exactly like Garlas but the trade was never recruited from that side of Africa some duplicates of Cameroon heads some crewmen, if ever crewmen wore evening dress the American does not consider little matters of descent though by this time he ought to know all about damnable heredity as a general rule he keeps himself very far from the Negro and says things about him that are not pretty there are six million Negroes more or less in the states and they are increasing the American, once having made them citizens, cannot un-make them he says in his newspapers they ought to be elevated by education he's trying this but it's likely to be a long job because black blood is much more adhesive than white throws back with annoying persistence when the Negro gets religion he returns directly as a hiving bee to the first instinct of his people just now a wave of religion is sweeping over some of the southern states up to the present two messiahs and the Daniel have appeared and several human sacrifices have been offered up to these incarnations the Daniel managed to get three young men whom he insisted were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to walk into a blast furnace guaranteeing non-combustion they did not return I have seen nothing of this kind but I have attended a Negro church they pray or are caused to pray by themselves in this country the congregation were moved by the spirit to groans and tears and one of them danced up the aisle to the mourner's bench the motive may have been genuine the movements of the shaken body were those of a Zanzibar stick dance such as you can see at Aiden on the coal-boats and even as I watched the people the links that bound them to the white man snapped one by one and I saw before me the hubshi, woolly hair praying to a God he did not understand those neatly dressed folk on the benches and the grey-haired elder by the window were savages, neither more nor less what will America do with the Negro? the South will not consult with him in some states misgeneration is a penal offence the North is every year less and less in need of his services and he will not disappear he will continue as a problem his friends will urge that he is as good as the white man his enemies, well you can guess what his enemies will do from a little incident that followed on a recent appointment by the president he made a Negro an assistant in the post office where, think of it he had to work at the next desk to a white girl the daughter of a colonel one of the first families of Georgia's modern chivalry and all the weary weary rest of it the Southern chivalry howled and hanged or burned someone in effigy perhaps it was the president perhaps it was the Negro but the principal remains the same they said it was an insult it's not good to be a Negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave but this is nothing to do with San Francisco and her merry maidens her strong swaggering men and her wealth of golden pride they bore me to a banquet in honor of a brave lieutenant Carlin of the Vandalia who struck his ship in the great cyclone at Apia and comported himself as an officer should on that occasion it was at the Bohemian club I heard oratory with the roundest of o's and devoured a dinner the memory of which will descend with me into the hungry grave there were about forty speeches delivered and not one of them was average or ordinary it was my first introduction to the American eagle screaming for all its worth the lieutenant's heroism served as a peg from which the silver-tongued ones turned themselves loose and kicked they ransacked the clouds of sunset the thunderbolts of heaven the deeps of hell and the splendor of the resurrection for tropes and metaphors and hurled the result at the head of the guest of the evening never since the morning stars sung together for joy I learned had an amazed creation witnessed such superhuman bravery as that displayed by the American navy in the Samoan cyclone till earth rotted in the phosphorescent star the ripe of slime of a decayed universe that godlike gallantry would not be forgotten I grieve that I cannot give the exact words my attempt at reproducing their spirit is pale and inadequate I sat bewildered on a coruscating niagara of blatherum skyte it was magnificent, it was stupendous and I was conscious of a wicked desire to hide my face in a napkin and grin then according to rule they produced their dead and across the snowy tablecloths dragged the corpse of every man slain in the civil war and hurled defiance at our natural enemy England, so please you with her chain of fortresses across the world thereafter they glorified their nation afresh from the beginning in case any detail should have been overlooked and that made me uncomfortable for their sakes how in the world can a white man a sigh of our blood stand up and plaster praise on his own country he can think as highly as he likes but this open-mouthed vehemence of adoration struck me almost as indelicate my hosts talked for rather more than three hours and at the end seemed ready for three hours more but when the lieutenant such a big brave gentle giant rose to his feet and heard what seemed to me as the speech of the evening I remember nearly the whole of it and it ran something this way gentlemen it's very good of you to give me this dinner and to tell me all these pretty things but what I want you to understand the fact is what we want and what we ought to get at once is a navy more ships, lots of them then we howled the top of the roof off I for one fell in love with Carlin on the spot he is a man the prince among merchants bid me take no heed to the warlike sentiments of some of the old generals the skyrockets are thrown in for effect quoth he and whenever we get on our hind legs we always express a desire to chore up England it's a sort of family affair and indeed when you come to think of it there is no other country for the American public speaker to trample upon France has Germany we have Russia for Italy Austria is provided and the humblest Patern possesses an ancestral enemy only America stands out of the racket and therefore to be in the fashion makes a sandbag of the mother country and hangs her when the occasion requires the chain of fortresses man a fascinating talker explained to me after the affair that he was compelled to blow off steam everybody expected it and when we had chanted the star-spangled banner not more than eight times we adjourned America is a very great country but it is not yet heaven with electric lights and plush fittings as the speakers professed to believe my listening mind went back to the politicians in the saloon who wasted no time in talking about freedom but quietly made arrangements to impose their will on the citizens the judge is a great man but give thy presence to the clerk as the proverb says and what more remains to tell I cannot write connectedly because I'm in love with all those girls of foresaid and some others who do not want to be here in the invoice the typewriter is an institution of which the comic papers make much capital but she is vastly convenient she and a companion rent a room in a business quarter and aided by a typewriting machine copy manuscripts at the rate of six annas a page only a woman can operate a typewriting machine because she has served apprenticeship to the sewing machine she can earn as much as $100 a month and profess to regard this form of bread-winning as her natural destiny but oh how she hates it in a heart of hearts when I got over the surprise of doing business with and trying to give orders to a young woman of coldly-clarkly aspect entrenched behind gold-rimmed spectacles I made inquiries concerning the pleasures of this independence they liked it indeed they did it was the natural fate of almost all girls and recognized custom in America and I was a barbarian not to see it in that light well and after said I what happens we work for our bread and then what do you expect then we shall work for our bread till you die yes less less what this is your business you know a man works until he dies so shall we this without enthusiasm I suppose said the partner in the firm audaciously sometimes we marry our employees at least that's what the newspapers say and banged on half a dozen of the keys of the machine at once you know I don't care I hate it I hate it I hate it and you needn't look so the senior partner was regarding the rebel with grave-eyed reproach I thought you did said I I don't suppose American girls are much different from English ones in instinct isn't it Thelfield Gaultier who says the only difference between country and country lie in the slang and the uniform of the police now in the name of all the gods at once what is one to say to a young lady who in England would be a person who earns her own bread and very naturally hates the employee and slings out of the way quotations at your head that one falls in love with her goes without saying but that is not enough a mission should be established End of Chapter 2 American Politics Recording by Tim Bulkley of BigBible.org Chapter 3 of American Notes This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Tim Bulkley of BigBible.org American Notes by Rudyard Kipling Chapter 3 American Salmon The race is neither to the swift nor the battle to the strong but time and chance cometh to awe I have lived The American continent may now sink under the sea for I have taken the best that he yields and the best was neither dollars, love nor real estate Here now, gentlemen of the Punjab Fishing Club who whip the riches of the Tavi and you who painfully import trout over to Oktamund I will tell you how old man California and I went fishing and you shall envy We returned from the Dallas to Portland by the way we had come the steamer stopping our route to pick up a night's catch of one of the salmon wheels on the river and deliver it at a cannery downstream when the proprietor of the wheel announced that his take was 2230 pounds weight of fish and not a heavy catch neither I thought he lied but he sent the boxes aboard and I counted the salmon by the hundred huge 50 pounders, hardly dead scores of 20 and 30 pounders and a host of smaller fish They were all Chinook salmon as distinguished from the steelhead and the silver side that is to say they were royal salmon and California and I dropped a tear over them as monarchs who deserved a better fate but the lust of slaughter entered into our souls and we talked fish and forgot the mountain scenery that had so moved as the day before The steamer halted at a rude warehouse built on piles in a lonely reach of the river and sent in the fish I followed them up a scale strewn fishy incline that led to the cannery The crazy building was quivering with the machinery on its floors and a glittering bank of tin scraps 20 feet high showed where the waste was thrown after the cans had been punched Only Chinamen were employed in the work and they looked like blood-bismid yellow devils as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the floor When our consignment arrived the rough wooden boxes broke of themselves as they were dumped down under a jet of water and the salmon burst out in a stream of quicksilver A Chinamen jerked up a 20 pounder, beheaded it and detailed it in two swift strokes of a knife flicked out its internal arrangements with a third and cased it into a blood-died tank The headless fish leaped from under his hands as they were facing a rapid Other Chinamen pulled them from the vat and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter which, descending, hewed them into unseemly red gobbets fit for the can More Chinamen, with yellow crooked fingers jammed the stuff into the cans which slid down some marvellous machine forthwith soldering their own tops as they passed Each can was hastily tested for floors and then sunk with a hundred companions into a vat of boiling water there to be half-cooked for a few minutes The cans bulged slightly after the operation and were therefore slid in along by the trolley-full to man with needles and soldering irons who vented them and soldered the aperture Except for the label the finest Columbia salmon were ready for the market I was impressed not so much with the speed of the manufacture as the character of the factory Inside, on a floor or 90 by 40 the most civilized and murderous of machinery Outside, three footsteps the thick growing pines and the immense solitude of the hills Our steamer only stayed twenty minutes at that place but I counted 240 finished cans made from the catch of the previous night ere I left the slippery bloodstains scale-spangled oily floors and the awful smeared Chinamen We reached Portland, California and I crying for salmon and a real estate man to whom we had been entrusted by an insurance man met us in the street saying that fifteen miles away across the country we should come upon a place called Clackamas where we might, perchance, find what we desired and California his coattails flying in the wind ran to a livery stable and chartered a wagon and team forthwith I could push the wagon about with one hand so light was its structure the team was purely American that is to say almost human in its intelligence and docility someone said that the roads were not good on the way to Clackamas and warned us against smashing the springs Portland, who had watched the preparations finally reckoned he'd come along too under the heavenly skies we three companions of a day set forth California carefully lashing our rods into the carriage and the bystanders overwhelming us with directions as to the sawmills we were to pass the ferries we were to cross and the signposts we were to seek signs from half a mile from this city of 50,000 souls we struck and this must be taken literally a plank road that would have been a disgrace to an Irish village then six miles of macadamized road showed us that the team could move a railway ran between us and the banks of the Willamette and another above us through the mountains all the land was dotted with small townships and the roads were full of farmers in their town wagons bunches of tow-haired bogalide urchins sitting in the hay behind the men generally looked like loafers but their women were all well-dressed brown braiding on a tailor-made jacket does not, however, consort with hay wagons then we struck into the woods along what California called a Camino Reale a good road and Portland a fair track it wound in and out among fire-blackened stumps under pine trees along the corners of log fences through hollows which must be hopeless marsh in the winter at up-absurd gradients but nowhere throughout its length did I see any evidence of road-making there was a track you couldn't well get off it and it was all you could do to stay on it the dust lay afoot thick in blind ruts and under the dust we found bits of planking and bundles of brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the air the journey in itself was a delight sometimes we crashed through Bracken and on where the blackberries grew rankest we found a lovely little cemetery the wooden rails all awry and the pitiful stumpy headstones nodding drunkenly at the soft green mullions then with oaths in the sound of rent underwood a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a skid-road hauling a forty-foot log along a rudely made slide a valley full of wheat and cherry trees succeeded and halting at a house we bought ten-pound weight of luscious black cherries for something less than a rupee and got a drink of icy cold water for nothing while the untended team browsed sagaciously by the roadside once we found a wayside camp of horse-dealers lounging by a pool ready for a sail or a swap and once two suntanned youngsters shot down a hill on Indian ponies their full creels banging from the high-pommeled saddle they'd been fishing and were our brethren, therefore we shouted loud in chorus to scare a wildcat we squabbled over the reasons that had led a snake to cross the road we heaved bits of bark at a venturesome chipmunk it was really the little grey squirrel of India and had come to call on me we lost our way we got the wagon so beautifully fixed on a cudd-bound road that we had to tie the two hind-wheels to get it down above all, California told tales of Nevada and Arizona of lonely nights spent out prospecting the slaughter of deer and the chase of men of woman, lovely woman who is a fire-brand in a western city and leads to the popping of pistols and of the sudden changes and chances of fortune who delights in making the miner or the lumberman a quadruplicate millionaire and in busting the railroad king that was a day to be remembered and it had only begun when we drew rain at a tiny farmhouse on the banks of the Cluckamas and sought horse-feed and lodging air we hastened to the river that broke over a weir not a quarter of a mile away imagine a stream seventy yards broad divided by a pebbly island running over seductive riffles and swirling into deep quiet pools where the good salmon goes to smoke his pipe after meals get such a stream amid fields of breast-high crops surrounded by hills of pines thrown where you please, quiet water, long fence meadows and a hundred foot bluff just to keep the scenery from growing too monotonous and you will get some faint notion of the Cluckamas the weir had been erected to pen the Chinook salmon from going further upstream we could see them, twenty or thirty pounds by the score in the deep pools or flying madly against the weir and foolishly skinning their noses they were not our prey for they would not rise to a fly and we knew it all the same when one made his leap against the weir and landed on the foot-blank with a jar that shook the board I was standing on I would faint have claimed him for my own capture Portland had no rod he held the gaff and the whiskey California sniffed upstream and downstream across the racing water chose his ground and let the gaudy fly and drop in the tail of a riffle I was getting my rod together when I heard the joyous shriek of the reels and the yells of California and three feet of living silver leapt into the air far across the water the forces were engaged the salmon tore upstream the tense line cutting the water like a tide-rip behind him and the light bamboo bowed to breaking what happened thereafter I cannot tell California swore and prayed and Portland shouted advice and I did all three for what appeared to be half a day but was in reality a little over a quarter of an hour and sullenly our fish came home with spurts of temper dashes head-on and surabands in the air but home to the bank came he and the remorseless reel gathered up the thread of his life inch by inch we landed him in a little bay and the spring weight in his gorgeous gills checked at eleven and one-half pounds eleven and one-half pounds of fighting salmon we danced a war dance on the pebbles and California caught me round the waist and a hug that went near to breaking my ribs while he shouted partner partner this is glory now catch your fish twenty-four years I've waited for this I went into that icy cold river and made my cast just above the weir and all but foul hooked a blue and black water snake with a coral mouth who coiled himself on a stone and hissed maledictions the next cast are the pride of it the regal splendor of it the thrill that ran down from fingertip to toe then the water boiled he broke for the fly and got it the remained enough sense in me to give him all he wanted when he jumped not once but twenty times before the upstream flight that ran my line out to the last half-dozen turns and I saw the nickled real-bar glitter under the thinning green coils my thumb was burned deep when I strove to stop on the line I did not feel it till later for my soul was out in the dancing weir praying for him to turn he took my tackle away and the prayer was heard as I bowed back the butt of my rod on my left hip bone and the top joint dipping like into a weeping willow he turned and accepted every inch of slack that I could by any means get in as a favour from on high there lie several sorts of success in this world that taste well in the moment of enjoyment but I question whether the stealthy theft of line from an able-bodied salmon who knows exactly what you're doing and why you're doing it is not sweeter than any other victory within human scope like California's fish he ran at me head on and leaped against the line but the Lord gave me two hundred and fifty pairs of fingers in that hour the banks and the pine trees danced dizzily around me but I only reeled, reeled as for life reeled for hours and at the end of the reeling continued to give him the butt while he sulked in a pool of water up the reach and with the corner of my eye I could see him casting with long casts and much skill then he struck and my fish broke for the weir in the same instant and down the reach we came California and I reel answering reel even as the morning stars sing together the first wild enthusiasm of capture had died away we were both at work now in deadly earnest to prevent the lines fouling to stall off a downstream rush of water just above the weir and at the same time to get the fish into the shallow bay downstream that gave the best practicable landing Portland bid us both be of good heart and volunteered to take the rod from my hands I would rather have died among the pebbles than surrender my right to play and land a salmon, weight unknown with an eight ounce rod I heard California at my ear it seemed gasping he's a fighter from Fightersville shore as his fish made a fresh break across the stream I saw Portland fall off a log fence break the overhanging bank and clatter down to the pebbles all sand and landing net and I dropped on a log to rest for a moment as I drew Beth the weary hands slackened their hold and I forgot to give him the butt a wild scutter in the water a plunge and a break for the head waters of the Clackamas was my reward and the weary toil of reeling in lay under the water and the other on the top joint of the rod was renewed worst of all I was blocking California's path the little landing bay I foresaid and he had to halt and tire his prize where he was the father of all the salmon he shouted for the love of heaven get your trout to bank Johnny Bull but I could do no more even the insult failed to move me he suffered himself to be drawn skipping with pretended delight at getting to the haven where I would feign bring him yet no sooner did he feel shoal water under his ponderous belly than he backed like a torpedo boat and the snarl of the reel told me that my labor was in vain a dozen times at least this happened ere the line hinted he had given up the battle and would be towed in he was towed was useless for one his size and I would not have him gaffed I stepped into the shallows and heaved him out with a respectful hand under the gill for which kindness he battered me about the legs with his tail and I felt the strength of him and was proud California had taken my place in the shallows his fish hard held I was up the bank lying full length on the sweet scented grass and gasping in company with my first salmon caught played and landed on an eight ounce rod my hands were cut and bleeding I was dripping with sweat spangled like a harlequin with scales water from my waist down nose peeled by the sun but utterly supremely consumedly happy the beauty the darling the daisy my salmon bahadur weighed twelve pounds and I had been seven and thirty minutes bringing him to bank he had been lightly hooked from the angle of the right jaw and the hook had not wearied him that hour I sat among the princes and crowned heads greater than them all below the bank we heard California scuffling with his salmon and swearing Spanish oaths Portland and I assisted in the capture and the fish dragged the spring balance out by the roots it was only constructed to weigh up to fifteen pounds we stretched the three fish on the grass the eleven and a half the twelve and the fifteen pounder and we gave an oath that all who came after should merely be weighed and put back again how shall I tell the glories of that day so that you may be interested again and again did California and I prance down that reach to the little bay each with a salmon in tow and land him in the shallows then Portland took my rod and caught some ten pounders and my spoon was carried away by an unknown leviathan each fish for the merits of the three that had died so gamely was hastily hooked on the balance and flung back Portland recorded the weight in a pocket book for he was a real estate man each fish fought for all he was worth and none more savagely than the smallest the game little six pounder at the end of six hours we added up the list read it total sixteen fish aggregate weight one hundred and forty pounds the score in detail runs something like this it's only interesting to those concerned fifteen, eleven and a half twelve, ten nine and three quarters, eight and so forth as I have said nothing other six pounds and three ten pounders very solemnly and thankfully we put up our rods it was glory enough for all time and returned weeping in each other's arms weeping tears of pure joy to that simple bare-legged family in the packing-case house by the water side the old farmer recollected days and nights of fierce warfare with Indians way back in the fifties when every ripple of the Columbia river and her tributaries hid covert danger God had doubted him with a queer crooked gift of expression and a fierce anxiety for the welfare of his two little sons tanned and reserved children who attended school daily and spoke good English in a strange tongue his wife was an austere woman who had once been kindly and perhaps handsome very many years of toil had taken the elasticity out of step and voice she looked for nothing better than the exhausting work the chafing detail of housework and then a grave somewhere up the hill among the blackberries and the pines but in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter a small and silent maiden of eighteen who had thoughts very far from the meals she tended in the pans she scoured we stumbled into the household at a crisis there was a deal of downright humanity in that same a bad wicked dressmaker had promised the maiden a dress in time for her tomorrow's railway journey and though the barefooted Georgie who stood in very wholesome awe of his sister had scoured the woods on a pony in search that dress never arrived so with sorrow in her heart and a hundred sister Anne glances up the road she waited upon the strangers and I doubt not cursed them for the once that stood between her and her need for tears it was a genuine little tragedy the mother in a heavy, passionless voice rebuked her impatience yet sat up far into the night bowed over a heap of sewing for the daughter's benefit these things I beheld in the long, merry, old-scented twilight and the whispering night loafing round the little house with California who unfolded himself like a lotus to the moon or in the little red bunk that was our bedroom swapping tales with Portland and the old man most of the yarns began in this way Red Larry was a bull-puncher back of Lone County, Montana or there was a man riding the trail met a jackrabbit sitting in a cactus or about the time of the San Diego land-boom a woman from Monterrey, etc you can try to piece out for yourselves what sort of stories they were End of Chapter 3 American Salmon Recording by Tim Bulkeley of BigBible.org Once upon a time there was a Carter who brought his team and a friend into the Yellowstone Park without due thought presently they came upon a few of the natural beauties of the place and that Carter turned his team into his friend's team howling get out of this gym all hell's alight under our noses and they called the place Hell's Half Acre to this day to witness if the Carter lied we too from Chicago her husband Tom and the good little mayors came to Hell's Half Acre which is about 60 acres in extent when Tom said would you like to drive over it we said certainly not and if you do we shall report you to the park authorities there was a plane blistered, peeled and abominable and it was given over to the sportings and spoutings of devils who threw mud and steam at each other with whoops and halloos and bellowing curses the places smelled of the refuse of the pit and that odor mixed with the clean wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils throughout the day this Yellowstone Park is laid out like Ollendorf in exercises of progressive difficulty Hell's Half Acre was a prelude to 10 or 12 miles of geyser formation we passed hot streams boiling in the forest saw whiffs of steam beyond these and yet other whiffs breaking through the misty green hills in the far distance we trampled on sulphur in crystals and sniffed things much worse than any sulphur which is known to the upper world and so journeying bewildered with novelty came upon a really park like place where Tom suggested we should get out and play with the geysers on foot imagine mighty green fields littered with lime beds all of the flowers of the summer growing up to the very edge of the lime that was our first glimpse of the geyser basins the buggy had pulled up close to a rough broken blistered cone of spelt of stuff between 10 and 20 feet high there was trouble in that place moaning, splashing, gurgling and the clank of machinery a spurt of boiling water jumped into the air and a wash of water followed I removed swiftly the old lady from Chicago shrieked what a wicked waste said her husband I think they call it the riverside geyser its spout was torn and ragged like the mouth of a gun when the shell has burst there it grumbled madly for a moment or two and then was still I crept over the steaming lime it was a burning mile on which Satan lay and looked fearfully down its mouth you should never look a gift geyser in the mouth I beheld a horrible slippery slimy funnel with water rising and falling 10 feet at a time then the water rose up to lip level with a rush and an infernal bubbling troubled this devil's Bethesda before the sullen heave of the crest of a wave lapped over the edge and made me run mark the nature of the human soul I had begun with awe not to say terror for this was my first experience of such things I stepped back from the banks of the riverside geyser saying phew! is that all it can do yet for ought I knew the whole thing might have blown up at a minute's notice she he or it being an arrangement of uncertain temper we drifted on up that miraculous valley on either side of us were hills from a thousand to fifteen hundred feet high wooded from crest to heel as far as the eye could range forward there were columns of steam in the air misshapen lumps of lime mist like pre-adomite monsters still pools of turquoise blue stretches of blue cornflowers a river that coiled on itself twenty times pointed boulders of strange colors and ridges of glaring staring white a moon face trooper of german extraction never was parked so carefully patrolled came up to inform us that as yet we had not seen any of the real geysers that they were all a mile or so up the valley and tastefully scattered around the hotel in which we would rest for the night America is a free country but the citizens look down on the soldier I had to entertain that trooper the old lady from Chicago would have none of him so we loafed alone together across half-rotten pine logs sunk in swampy ground and on over the ringing geyser formation then pounding through river sand or brushing knee-deep through long grass why did you enlist? said I the moon-faced ones face began to work I thought he would have a fit but he told me a story instead such a nice tale of a naughty little girl who wrote pretty love letters to two men at once she was a simple village wife but her wicked family novelette Countess couldn't have accomplished her ends better she drove one man nearly wild with pretty little treachery and the other man abandoned her and came west to forget the trickery moon-face was that man we rounded and limped over a low spur of hill and came out upon a field of aching snowy lime rolled in sheets twisted into knots riven with wrenths and diamonds and stars stretching for more than half a mile in every direction on this place of despair lay most of the big bad geysers who know when there is trouble in Krakatoa who tell the pines when there is a cyclone on the Atlantic seaboard and who are exhibited to visitors under pretty and fanciful names the first man that I encountered belonged to a goblin who was splashing in his tub I heard him kick pull a shower bath on his shoulders gasp crack his joints and rub himself down with a towel then he let the water out of the bath as a thoughtful man should and it all sunk down out of sight till another goblin arrived so we looked and we wondered at the beehive whose mouth is built up exactly like a hive at the turban which is not in the least like a turban and at many, many other geysers hot holes and springs some of them rumbled some hissed some went off spasmodically others lay dead still in sheets of sapphire and barrel would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be guarded by the troopers to prevent the irreverent americans from chipping the cones to pieces or worse still making the geysers sick if you take a small barrel full of soft soap and drop it down a geyser's mouth that geyser will presently be forced to lay all before you and for days afterward will be of an irritated and inconstant stomach when they told me the tale I was filled with sympathy now I wished that I had soft soap and tried the experiment on some lonely little beast far away in the woods it sounded so probable and so human yet he would be a bold man who would have ministered emetics to the giantess she is flat lipped having her mouth she looks like a pool 50 feet long and 30 wide and there is no ornamentation about her at irregular intervals she speaks and sends up a volume of water over 200 feet high to begin with then she is angry for a day and a half sometimes for two days owing to her peculiarity of going mad in the night not many people have seen the giantess at her finest the clamour of her unrest men say shakes the wooden hotel and echoes like thunder among the hills the congregation returned to the hotel to put down their impressions in diaries and notebooks which they wrote up ostentatiously in the verandas it was a sweltering hot day albeit we stood somewhat higher than the level of Simla and I left that raw pine creaking caravanserai for the cool shade of a clump of pines between whose trunks glimmered tenth a batch of United States troopers came down the road and flung themselves across the country into their rough lines the Mexican cavalryman can ride though he keeps his accoutrement pig fashion that is horse cow fashion I was free of that camp in five minutes free to play with the heavy lumpy carbines have the saddle stripped and punch the horses knowingly in the ribs one of the men had been in the fight with wrap up his tail and he told me how the great chief his horses tail tied up in red calico swaggered in front of the United States cavalry challenging all to single combat the buff was slain and a few of his tribe with him there's no use in an Indian anyway concluded my friend a couple of cowboys real cowboys jingled through the camp wild chaff they were on their way to cook city I fancy and I know that they never washed but they were picturesque ruffians exceedingly with long spurs, hooded stirrups louch hats fur weather cloth over their knees and pistol butts just easy to hand cowboys going under before long said my friend as soon as the country's settled up he'll have to go what would we do without the cowboy that's how said I and the camp laughed he has the money we have the skill he comes in winter to play poker at the military posts we play poker a few when he's lost his money we make him drunk and let him go sometimes we get the wrong man and he told me a tale of an innocent cowboy who turned up cleaned out at an army post and played poker for 36 hours but it was the post that was cleaned out when that long-haired Caucasian removed himself heavy with everybody's pay and declining the profit liquor no said the historian I don't play with no cowboy unless he's a little bit drunk first air I departed I gathered from more than one man the significant fact that up to 100 yards he felt absolutely secure behind his revolver in England in England I understand quoth the limba youth from the south in England a man isn't allowed to play with no firearms he's got to be taught all that when he enlists I didn't want much teaching how to shoot straight for I served Uncle Sam and that's just where it is but you was talking about your horse guards now I explain briefly some peculiarities of equipment connected with our crackest crack cavalry I grief to say the camp roared I came over swampy ground let him run around a bit and work the starch out of him and then all mighty if we wouldn't plug him at ease I'd eat their horses there was a maiden a very little maiden who had just stepped out of one of James's novels she owned a delightful mother and an equally delightful father a heavy-eyed slow-voiced man of finance the parents thought that their daughter wanted change she lived in New Hampshire accordingly she had dragged them up to Alaska to the Yosemite Valley and was now returning leisurely via the Yellowstone just in time for the tail-end of the summer season at Saratoga we had met once or twice before in the park and I had been amazed and amused at her critical commendation of the wonders that she saw from that very resolute little mouth I received a lecture on American literature the nature and inwardness of Washington society the precise value of Cable's works as compared with his uncle Remus Harris and a few other things that had nothing whatever to do with geysers but were altogether pleasant now an English maiden who had stumbled on a dust-grimmed lime-washed, sun-peagled, colorless wanderer come from and going to goodness knows where Wood, her mother inciting her and her father brandishing an umbrella have regarded him as a disilute adventurer a person to be disregarded not so those delightful people from New Hampshire they were good enough to treat him it sounds almost incredible as a human being possibly respectable probably not an immediate need of financial assistance Papa talked pleasantly to the point the little maiden strove valiantly with the accent of her birth and that of her rearing and Mama smiled benignly in the background balanced this with the story of a young English idiot I met mooning about inside his high collar attended by a valet he condescended to tell me that you can't be too careful who you talk to in these parts and stalked on fearing, I suppose, every minute for his social chastity that man was a barbarian I took occasion to tell him so for he comported himself after the manner of the headhunters and hunted of a psalm who are a perpetual feud with one another you will understand that these foolish stories are introduced in order to cover the fact that this pen cannot describe the glories of the upper geyser basin the evening I spent under the lee of the castle geyser sitting on a log with some troopers and watching a baronial keep 40 feet high spouting hot water if the castle went off first they said the giantess would be quiet and vice versa and the two tales till the moon got up and a party of campers in the woods gave us all something to eat then came soft, turfy forest that deadened the wheels and two troopers on detachment duty stole noiselessly behind us one was the wrap up his tail, man and they talked merrily while the half broken horses bucked about among the trees and so a cavalry escort was with us for a mile till we got to a mighty hill with moss agates and everybody had to jump out and pant in that thin air but how intoxicating it was the old lady from Chicago ducked like an emancipated hen as she scuttled about the road cramming pieces of rock into her reticule she sent me 50 yards down the hillside to pick up a piece of broken bottle which she insisted was moss agate I summer that at home and they shine yes you go get it young man as we climbed the long path the road grew vile and vile till it became without disguise the beard of a torrent and just when things were at their rockiest we nearly fell into a little sapphire lake but never sapphire was so blue called Mary's Lake and that between 8 to 9,000 feet above the sea afterward grass downs all on a vehement slope so that the buggy following the new made road ran on the two off wheels mostly till we dipped head first into a ford climbed up a cliff raced along down dipped again and pulled up to shovel that Larry's for lunch and an hour's rest then we lay on the grass and laughed with sheer bliss of being alive this have I known once in Japan once on the banks of the Columbia that time the salmon came in and California howled and once again in the Yellowstone by the light of the eyes of the maiden from New Hampshire four little pools lay at my elbow one was of black water tepid one clear water cold one clear water boiling my newly washed handkerchief covered them all and we too marveled as children marvel this evening we shall do the grand canyon of the Yellowstone to the maiden together said I and she said yes the sun was beginning to sink when we heard the roar of falling waters and came to a broad river along whose banks we ran and then I might at a pinch describe the infernal regions but not the other place the Yellowstone River has occasion to run through a gorge about eight miles long to get to the bottom of the gorge it takes two leaps one of about 120 and the other 300 feet I investigated the upper or lesser fall which is close to the hotel up to that time nothing particular happens to the Yellowstone its banks being only rocky rather steep and plentifully adorned with pines at the falls it comes round a corner green solid ribbed with a little foam and not more than 30 yards wide then it goes over still green and rather more solid than before after a minute or two you sitting on a rock directly above the drop begin to understand that something has occurred that the river has jumped between solid cliff walls and that the gentle froth of water lapping the sides of the gorge below is really the outcome of great waves and the river yells aloud but the cliffs do not allow the yells to escape that inspection began with curiosity and finished in terror for it seemed that the whole world was sliding in chrysalite from under my feet I followed with the others round the corner to arrive at the brink of the canyon we had to climb up a nearly perpendicular ascent to begin to begin with for the ground rises more than the river drops stately pine woods fringe either lip of the gorge which is the gorge of the yellow stand you'll find all about it in the guide books all that I can say is that without warning or preparation I looked into a gulf 1700 feet deep with eagles and fishhawks circling far below the sides of that gulf for one wild welter of color an emerald cobalt, ochre, amber honey splashed with port wine snow white, vermilion lemon and silver grey in wide washes the sides do not fall sheer but were graven by time and water and air into monstrous heads of kings dead chiefs men and women of the old time so far below that no sound of its strife could reach us the Yellowstone River ran a finger-wide strip of jade-green the sunlight took those wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to those that nature had already laid there evening crept through the pines that shallowed us but the full glory of the day flamed in that canyon as we went out very cautiously to a jutting piece of rock blood-red or pink it was that overhung the deepest deeps of all now I know what it is to sit enthroned amid the clouds of sunset as the spirits sit in Blake's pictures Giddiness took away all sensation of touch or form but the sense of blinding color remained when I reached the mainland again I had swarmed that I had been floating the maid from New Hampshire said no word for a very long time then she quoted poetry it was perhaps the best thing she could have done and to think that this show place has been going on all these days and none of we ever saw it said the old lady from Chicago with an acid glance at her husband nope only the engines said he unmoved and the maiden and I laughed inspiration is fleeting beauty is vain and the power of the mind for wonder is limited though the shining hosts themselves had risen quiring from the bottom of the gorge they would not have prevented her papa and one baser than he from rolling stones down those stupendous rainbow washed slides 1700 feet of steepest pitch and rather more than 1700 colors for log or boulder to whirl through so we heaved things and saw them gather away and bound from white rock to red or yellow dragging behind them torrents of color till the noise of their descent ceased and they bounded 100 yards clear at the last into the Yellowstone it's easy to get down if you're careful just sit and slide but getting up is worse and I found down below two stones just marked with a picture of the canyon I wouldn't sell these rocks not for $15 and papa and I crawled down to the Yellowstone just above the first little fall to wet a line for good luck the round moon came up and turned the cliffs and pines into silver and a two pound trout came up also and we slew him among the rocks nearly tumbling into that wild river then out and away to Livingston once more the maiden from New Hampshire disappeared papa and mama with her disappeared to the old lady from Chicago and the others End of Chapter 4 The Yellowstone Recording by Tim Bulkley of BigBible.com