Kitabı oku: «Remarks», sayfa 26
The Warrior’s Oration
Warriors! We are met here to-day to celebrate the white man’s Fourth of July. I do not know what the Fourth of July has done for us that we should remember his birthday, but it matters not. Another summer is on the wane, and so are we. We are the walleyed waners from Wanetown. We have monopolized the wane business of the whole world.
Autumn is almost here, and we have not yet gone upon the war path. The pale face came among us with the corn planter and the Desert Land Act, and we bow before him.
What does the Fourth of July signify to us? It is a hollow mockery! Where the flag of the white man now waves in the breeze, a few years ago the scalp of our foe was hanging in the air. Now my people are seldom. Some are dead and others drunk.
Once we chased the deer and the buffalo across the plains, and lived high. Now we eat the condemned corned beef of the oppressor, and weep over the graves of our fallen braves. A few more moons and I, too, shall cross over to the Happy Reservation.
Once I could whoop a couple of times and fill the gulch with warlike athletes. Now I may whoop till the cows come home and only my sickly howl comes back to me from the hillsides. I am as lonely as the greenback party. I haven’t warriors enough to carry one precinct.
Where are the proud chieftains of my tribe? Where are Old Weasel Asleep and Orlando the Hie Jacet Promoter? Where are Prickly Ash Berry and The Avenging Wart? Where are The Roman-nosed Pelican and Goggle-eyed Aleck, The-man-who-rides-the-blizzard-bareback?
They are extremely gone. They are extensively whence. Ole Blackhawk, in whose veins flows the blood of many chiefs, is sawing wood for the Belle of the West deadfall for the whiskey. He once rode the war pony into the fray and buried his tomahawk in the phrenology of his foe. Now he straddles the saw-buck and yanks the woodsaw athwart the bosom of the basswood chunk.
My people once owned this broad land; but the Pilgrim Fathers (where are they?) came and planted the baked bean and the dried apple, and my tribe vamoosed. Once we were a nation. Now we are the tin can tied to the American eagle.
Warriors! This should be a day of jubilee, but how can the man rejoice who has a boil on his nose? How can the chief of a once proud people shoot firecrackers and dance over the graves of his race? How can I be hilarious with the victor, on whose hands are the blood of my children?
If we had known more of the white man, we would have made it red hot for him four hundred years ago when he came to our coast. We fed him and clothed him as a white-skinned curiosity then, but we didn’t know there were so many of him. All he wanted then was a little smoking tobacco and love. Now he feeds us on antique pork, and borrows our annuities to build a Queen Anne wigwam with a furnace in the bottom and a piano in the top.
Warriors! My words are few. Tears are idle and unavailing. If I had scalding tears enough for a mill site, I would not shed a blamed one. The warrior suffers, but he never squeals. He accepts the position and says nothing. He wraps his royal horse blanket around his Gothic bones and is silent.
But the pale face cannot tickle us with a barley straw on the Fourth of July and make us laugh. You can kill the red man, but you cannot make him hilarious over his own funeral. These are the words of truth, and my warriors will do well to paste them in their plug hats for future reference.
The Holy Terror
While in New England trying in my poor, weak way to represent the “rowdy west,” I met a sad young man who asked me if I lived in Chi-eene. I told him that if he referred to Cheyenne, I had been there off and on a good deal.
He said he was there not long ago, but did not remain. He bought some clothes in Chicago, so that he could appear in Chi-eene as a “holy terror” when he landed there, and thus in a whole town of “holy terrors” he would not attract attention.
I am not, said he, by birth or instinct, a holy terror, but I thought I would like to try it a little while, anyhow. I got one of those Chicago sombreros with a gilt fried cake twisted around it for a band. Then I got a yellow silk handkerchief on the ten cent counter to tie around my neck. Then I got a suit of smoke-tanned buckskin clothes and a pair of moccasins. I had never seen a bad, bad man from Chi-eene, but I had seen pictures of them and they all wore moccasins. The money that I had left I put into a large revolver and a butcher knife with a red Morocco sheath to it. The revolver was too heavy for me to hold in one hand and shoot, but by resting it on a fence I could kill a cow easy enough if she wasn’t too blamed restless.
I went out to the stock yards in Chicago one afternoon and practiced with my revolver. One of my thumbs is out there at the stock yards now.
At Omaha I put on my new suit and sent my human clothes home to my father. He told me when I came away that when I got out to Wyoming, probably I wouldn’t want to attract attention by wearing clothes, and so I could send my clothes back to him and he would be glad to have them.
At Sidney I put on my revolver and went into the eating house to get my dinner. A tall man met me at the door and threw me about forty feet in an oblique manner. I asked him if he meant anything personal by that and he said not at all, not at all. I then asked him if he would not allow me to eat my dinner and he said that depended on what I wanted for my dinner. If I would lay down my arms and come back to the reservation and remain neutral to the Government and eat cooked food, it would be all right, but if I insisted on eating raw dining-room girls and scalloped young ladies, he would bar me out.
We landed at Chi-eene in the evening. They had hacks and ‘busses and carriages till you couldn’t rest, all standing there at the depot, and a large colored man in a loud tone of voice remarked: “INTEROCEAN HO-TEL!!!!”
I went there myself. It had doors and windows to it, and carpets and gas. The young man who showed me to my room was very polite to me. He seemed to want to get acquainted. He said:
“You are from New Hampshire, are you not?”
I told him not to give it away, but I was from New Hampshire. Then I asked him how he knew.
He said that several New Hampshire people had been out there that summer, and they had worn the same style of revolver and generally had one thumb done up in a rag. Then he said that if I came from New Hampshire he would show me how to turn off the gas.
He also took my revolver down to the office with him and put it in the safe, because he said someone might get into my room in the night and kill me with it if he left it here. He was a perfect gentleman.
They have a big opera house there in Chi-eene, and while I was there they had the Eyetalian opera singers, Patty and Nevady there. The streets were lit up with electricity, and people seemed to kind of politely look down on me, I thought. Still, they acted as if they tried not to notice my clothes and dime museum hat.
They seemed to look at me as if I wasn’t to blame for it, and as if they felt sorry for me. If I’d had my United States clothes with me, I could have had a good deal of fun in Chi-eene, going to the opera and the lectures, and concerts, et cetera. But finally I decided to return, so I wrote to my parents how I had been knocked down and garroted, and left for dead with one thumb shot off, and they gladly sent the money to pay funeral expenses.
With this I got a cut-rate ticket home and surprised and horrified my parents by dropping in on them one morning just after prayers. I tried to get there prior to prayers, but was side-tracked by my father’s new anti-tramp bull dog.
Boston Common and Environs
Strolling through the Public Garden and the famous Boston Common, the untutored savage from the raw and unpolished West is awed and his wild spirit tamed by the magnificent harmony of nature and art. Everywhere the eye rests upon all that is beautiful in nature, while art has heightened the pleasing effect without having introduced the artistic jim-jams of a lost and undone world.
It is a delightful place through which to stroll in the gray morning while the early worm is getting his just desserts. There, in the midst of a great city, with the hum of industry and the low rumble of the throbbing Boston brain dimly heard in the distance, nature asserts herself, and the weary, sad-eyed stranger may ramble for hours and keep off the grass to his heart’s content.
Nearly every foot of Boston Common is hallowed by some historical incident. It is filled with reminiscences of a time when liberty was not overdone in this new world, and the tyrant’s heel was resting calmly on the neck of our forefathers.
In the winter of 1775-6, over 110 years ago, as the ready mathematician will perceive, 1,700 redcoats swarmed over Boston Common. Later on the local antipathy to these tourists became so great that they went away. They are still fled. A few of their descendants were there when I visited the Common, but they seemed amicable and did not wear red coats. Their coats this season are made of a large check, with sleeves in it. Their wardrobe generally stands a larger check than their bank account.
The fountains in the Common and the Public Garden attract the eye of the stranger, some of them being very beautiful. The Brewer fountain on Flagstaff hill, presented to the city by the late Gardner Brewer, is very handsome. It was cast in Paris, and is a bronze copy of a fountain designed by Lienard of that city. At the base there are figures representing Neptune with his fabled pickerel stabber, life size; also Amphitrite, Acis and Galatea. Surviving relatives of these parties may well feel pleased and gratified over the life-like expression which, the sculptor has so faithfully reproduced.
But the Coggswell fountain is probably the most eccentric squirt, and one which at once rivets the eye of the beholder. I do not know who designed it, but am told that it was modeled by a young man who attended the codfish autopsy at the market daytimes and gave his nights to art.
The fountain proper consists of two metallic bullheads rampart. They stand on their bosoms, with their tails tied together at the top. Their mouths are abnormally distended, and the water gushes forth from their tonsils in a beautiful stream.
The pose of these classical codfish or bullheads is sublime. In the spirited Graeco-Roman tussle which they seem to be having, with their tails abnormally elevated in their artistic catch-as-catch-can or can-can scuffle, the designer has certainly hit upon a unique and beautiful impossibility.
Each bullhead also has a tin dipper chained to his gills, and through the live-long day, till far into the night, he invites the cosmopolitan tramp to come and quench his never-dying thirst.
The frog pond is another celebrated watering place. I saw it in the early part of May, and if there had been any water in it, it would have been a fine sight. Nothing contributes to the success of a pond like water.
I ventured to say to a Boston man that I was a little surprised to find a little frog pond containing neither frogs or pond, but he said I would find it all right if I would call around during office hours.
While sitting on one of the many seats which may be found on the Common one morning, I formed the acquaintance of a pale young man, who asked me if I resided in Boston. I told him that while I felt flattered to think that I could possibly fool anyone, I must admit that I was only a pilgrim and a stranger.
He said that he was an old resident, and he had often noticed that the people of the Hub always Spoke to a Felloe till he was tired. I afterward learned that he was not an actual resident of Boston, but had just completed his junior year at the State asylum for the insane. He was sent there, it seems, as a confirmed case of unjustifiable Punist. Therefore the governor had Punist him accordingly. This is a specimen of our capitalized joke with Queen Anne do-funny on the corners. We are shipping a great many of them to England this season, where they are greedily snapped up and devoured by the crowned heads. It is a good hot weather joke, devoid of mental strain, perfectly simple and may be laughed at or not without giving the slightest offense.
Drunk in a Plug Hat
This world is filled with woe everywhere you go. Sorrow is piled up in the fence corners on every road. Unavailing regret and red-nosed remorse inhabit the cot of the tie-chopper as well as the cut-glass cage of the millionaire. The woods are full of disappointment. The earth is convulsed with a universal sob, and the roads are muddy with tears. But I do not call to mind a more touching picture of unavailing misery and ruin, and hopeless chaos, than the plug hat that has endeavored to keep sober and maintain self-respect while its owner was drunk. A plug hat can stand prosperity, and shine forth joyously while nature smiles. That’s the place where it seems to thrive. A tall silk hat looks well on a thrifty man with a clean collar, but it cannot stand dissipation.
I once knew a plug hat that had been respected by everyone, and had won its way upward by steady endeavor. No one knew aught against it till one evening, in an evil hour, it consented to attend a banquet, and all at once its joyous career ended. It met nothing but distrust and cold neglect everywhere, after that.
Drink seems to make a man temporarily unnaturally exhilarated. During that temporary exhilaration he desires to attract attention by eating lobster salad out of his own hat, and sitting down on his neighbor’s.
The demon rum is bad enough on the coatings of the stomach, but it is even more disastrous to the tall hat. A man may mix up in a crowd and carry off an overdose of valley tan in a soft hat or a cap, but the silk hat will proclaim it upon the house-tops, and advertise it to a gaping, wondering world. It has a way of getting back on the rear elevation of the head, or over the bridge of the nose, or of hanging coquettishly on one ear, that says to the eagle-eyed public: “I am chockfull.”
I cannot call to mind a more powerful lecture on temperance, than the silent pantomime of a man trying to hang his plug hat on an invisible peg in his own hall, after he had been watching the returns, a few years ago. I saw that he was excited and nervously unstrung when he came in, but I did not fully realize it until he began to hang his hat on the smooth wall.
At first he laughed in a good-natured way at his awkwardness, and hung it up again carefully; but at last he became irritated about it, and almost forgot himself enough to swear, but controlled himself. Finding, however, that it refused to hang up, and that it seemed rather restless, anyhow, he put it in the corner of the hall with the crown up, pinned it to the floor with his umbrella, and heaved a sigh of relief. Then he took off his overcoat and, through a clerical error, pulled off his dress-coat also. I showed him his mistake and offered to assist him back into his apparel, but he said he hadn’t got so old and feeble yet that he couldn’t dress himself.
Later on he came into the parlor, wearing a linen ulster with the belt drooping behind him like the broken harness hanging to a shipwrecked and stranded mule. His wife looked at him in a way that froze his blood. This startled him so that he stepped back a pace or two, tangled his feet in his surcingle, clutched wildly at the empty gas-light, but missed it and sat down in a tall majolica cuspidor.
There were three games of whist going on when he fell, and there was a good deal of excitement over the playing, but after he had been pulled out of the American tear jug and led away, everyone of the twelve whist-players had forgotten what the trump was.
They say that he has abandoned politics since then, and that now he don’t care whether we have any more November elections or not. I asked him once if he would be active during the next campaign, as usual, and he said he thought not. He said a man couldn’t afford to be too active in a political campaign. His constitution wouldn’t stand it.
At that time he didn’t care much whether the American people had a president or not. If every public-spirited voter had got to work himself up into a state of nervous excitability and prostration where reason tottered on its throne, he thought that we needed a reform.
Those who wished to furnish reasons to totter on their thrones for the National Central Committee at so much per tot, could do so; he, for one, didn’t propose to farm out his immortal soul and plug hat to the party, if sixty million people had to stand four years under the administration of a setting hen.
Spring
Spring is now here. It has been here before, but not so much so, perhaps, as it is this year. In spring the buds swell up and bust. The “violets” bloom once more, and the hired girl takes off the double windows and the storm door. The husband and father puts up the screen doors, so as to fool the annual fly when he tries to make his spring debut. The husband and father finds the screen doors and windows in the gloaming of the garret. He finds them by feeling them in the dark with his hands. He finds the rafters, also, with his head. When he comes down, he brings the screens and three new intellectual faculties sticking out on his brow like the button on a barn door.
Spring comes with joyous laugh, and song, and sunshine, and the burnt sacrifice of the over-ripe boot and the hoary overshoe. The cowboy and the new milch cow carol their roundelay. So does the veteran hen. The common egg of commerce begins to come forth into the market at a price where it can be secured with a step-ladder, and all nature seems tickled.
There are four seasons—spring, summer, autumn and winter. Spring is the most joyful season of the year. It is then that the green grass and the lavender pants come forth. The little robbins twitter in the branches, and the horny-handed farmer goes joyously afield to till the soil till the cows come home.—Virgil.
We all love the moist and fragrant spring. It is then that the sunlight waves beat upon the sandy coast, and the hand-maiden beats upon the sandy carpet. The man of the house pulls tacks out of himself and thinks of days gone by, when you and I were young, Maggie. Who does not leap and sing in his heart when the dandelion blossoms in the low lands, and the tremulous tail of the lambkin agitates the balmy air?
The lawns begin to look like velvet and the lawn-mower begins to warm its joints and get ready for the approaching harvest. The blue jay fills the forest with his classical and extremely au revoir melody, and the curculio crawls out of the plum-tree and files his bill. The plow-boy puts on his father’s boots and proceeds to plow up the cunning little angle worm. Anon, the black-bird alights on the swaying reeds, and the lightning-rod man alights on the farmer with great joy and a new rod that can gather up all the lightning in two States and put it in a two-gallon jug for future use.
Who does not love spring, the most joyful season of the year? It is then that the spring bonnet of the workaday world crosses the earth’s orbit and makes the bank account of the husband and father look fatigued. The low shoe and the low hum of the bumble-bee are again with us. The little striped hornet heats his nose with a spirit lamp and goes forth searching for the man with the linen pantaloons. All nature is full of life and activity. So is the man with the linen pantaloons. Anon, the thrush will sing in the underbrush, and the prima donna will do up her voice in a red-flannel rag and lay it away.
I go now into my cellar to bring out the gladiola bulb and the homesick turnip of last year. Do you see the blue place on my shoulder? That is where I struck when I got to the foot of the cellar stairs. The gladiola bulbs are looking older than when I put them away last fall. I fear me they will never again bulge forth. They are wrinkled about the eyes and there are lines of care upon them. I could squeeze along two years without the gladiola and the oleander in the large tub. If I should give my little boy a new hatchet and he should cut down my beautiful oleander, I would give him a bicycle and a brass band and a gold-headed cane.
