LAWRENCE AND TOPEKA, KANSAS
We thought of stopping in Kansas City, but when we got there we found a train ready and a crowd of hospitable Kansians to take us on to Lawrence, to which I proceeded. I shall not soon forget my good days in L., in company with Judge Usher and his sons, (especially John and Linton,) true westerners of the noblest type. Nor the similar days in Topeka. Nor the brotherly kindness of my RR. friends there, and the city and State officials. Lawrence and Topeka are large, bustling, half-rural, handsome cities. I took two or three long drives about the latter, drawn by a spirited team over smooth roads.
THE PRAIRIES (_and an Undeliver'd Speech_)
At a large popular meeting at Topeka--the Kansas State Silver Wedding, fifteen or twenty thousand people--I had been erroneously bill'd to deliver a poem. As I seem'd to be made much of, and wanted to be good-natured, I hastily pencill'd out the following little speech. Unfortunately, (or fortunately,) I had such a good time and rest, and talk and dinner, with the U. boys, that I let the hours slip away and didn't drive over to the meeting and speak my piece. But here it is just the same:
"My friends, your bills announce me as giving a poem; but I have no poem--have composed none for this occasion. And I can honestly say I am now glad of it. Under these skies resplendent in September beauty--amid the peculiar landscape you are used to, but which is new to me--these interminable and stately prairies--in the freedom and vigor and sane enthusiasm of this perfect western air and autumn sunshine--it seems to me a poem would be almost an impertinence. But if you care to have a word from me, I should speak it about these very prairies; they impress me most, of all the objective shows I see or have seen on this, my first real visit to the West. As I have roll'd rapidly hither for more than a thousand miles, through fair Ohio, through bread-raising Indiana and Illinois--through ample Missouri, that contains and raises everything; as I have partially explor'd your charming city during the last two days, and, standing on Oread hill, by the university, have launch'd my view across broad expanses of living green, in every direction--I have again been most impress'd, I say, and shall remain for the rest of my life most impress'd, with that feature of the topography of your western central world--that vast Something, stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined, which there is in these prairies, combining the real and ideal, and beautiful as dreams.
"I wonder indeed if the people of this continental inland West know how much of first-class _art_ they have in these prairies--how original and all your own--how much of the influences of a character for your future humanity, broad, patriotic, heroic and new? how entirely they tally on land the grandeur and superb monotony of the skies of heaven, and the ocean with its waters? how freeing, soothing, nourishing they are to the soul?
"Then is it not subtly they who have given us our leading modern Americans, Lincoln and Grant?--vast-spread, average men--their foregrounds of character altogether practical and real, yet (to those who have eyes to see) with finest backgrounds of the ideal, towering high as any. And do we not see, in them, foreshadowings of the future races that shall fill these prairies?
"Not but what the Yankee and Atlantic States, and every other part--Texas, and the States flanking the south-east and the Gulf of Mexico--the Pacific shore empire--the Territories and Lakes, and the Canada line (the day is not yet, but it will come, including Canada entire)--are equally and integrally and indissolubly this Nation, the _sine qua non_ of the human, political and commercial New World. But this favor'd central area of (in round numbers) two thousand miles square seems fated to be the home both of what I would call America's distinctive ideas and distinctive realities."
ON TO DENVER--A FRONTIER INCIDENT
The jaunt of five or six hundred miles from Topeka to Denver took me through a variety of country, but all unmistakably prolific, western, American, and on the largest scale. For a long distance we follow the line of the Kansas river, (I like better the old name, Kaw,) a stretch of very rich, dark soil, famed for its wheat, and call'd the Golden Belt--then plains and plains, hour after hour--Ellsworth county, the centre of the State--where I must stop a moment to tell a characteristic story of early days--scene the very spot where I am passing--time 1868. In a scrimmage at some public gathering in the town, A. had shot B. quite badly, but had not kill'd him. The sober men of Ellsworth conferr'd with one another and decided that A. deserv'd punishment. As they wished to set a good example and establish their reputation the reverse of a Lynching town, they open an informal court and bring both men before them for deliberate trial. Soon as this trial begins the wounded man is led forward to give his testimony. Seeing his enemy in durance and unarm'd, B. walks suddenly up in a fury and shoots A. through the head--shoots him dead. The court is instantly adjourn'd, and its unanimous members, without a word of debate, walk the murderer B. out, wounded as he is, and hang him.
In due time we reach Denver, which city I fall in love with from the first, and have that feeling confirm'd, the longer I stay there. One of my pleasantest days was a jaunt, via Platte cañon, to Leadville.
AN HOUR ON KENOSHA SUMMIT
Jottings from the Rocky Mountains, mostly pencill'd during a day's trip over the South Park RR., returning from Leadville, and especially the hour we were detain'd, (much to my satisfaction,) at Kenosha summit. As afternoon advances, novelties, far-reaching splendors, accumulate under the bright sun in this pure air. But I had better commence with the day.
The confronting of Platte cañon just at dawn, after a ten miles' ride in early darkness on the rail from Denver--the seasonable stoppage at the entrance of the cañon, and good breakfast of eggs, trout, and nice griddle-cakes--then as we travel on, and get well in the gorge, all the wonders, beauty, savage power of the scene--the wild stream of water, from sources of snows, brawling continually in sight one side--the dazzling sun, and the morning lights on the rocks--such turns and grades in the track, squirming around corners, or up and down hills--far glimpses of a hundred peaks, titanic necklaces, stretching north and south--the huge rightly-named Dome-rock--and as we dash along, others similar, simple, monolithic, elephantine.
AN EGOTISTICAL "FIND"
"I have found the law of my own poems," was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass'd, hour after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon--this plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel'd play of primitive Nature--the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream, repeated scores, hundreds of miles--the broad handling and absolute uncrampedness--the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high--at their tops now and then huge masses pois'd, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible. ("In Nature's grandest shows," says an old Dutch writer, an ecclesiastic, "amid the ocean's depth, if so might be, or countless worlds rolling above at night, a man thinks of them, weighs all, not for themselves or the abstract, but with reference to his own personality, and how they may affect him or color his destinies.")
NEW SENSES: NEW JOYS
We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed, with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the cañon we fly--mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us--every rood a new view flashing, and each flash defying description--on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass--but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead. New senses, new joys, seem develop'd. Talk as you like, a typical Rocky Mountain cañon, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest element-emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen--all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even music, probably never can.
STEAM-POWER, TELEGRAPHS, ETC
I get out on a ten minutes' stoppage at Deer creek, to enjoy the unequal'd combination of hill, stone and wood. As we speed again, the yellow granite in the sunshine, with natural spires, minarets, castellated perches far aloft--then long stretches of straight-upright palisades, rhinoceros color--then gamboge and tinted chromos. Ever the best of my pleasures the cool-fresh Colorado atmosphere, yet sufficiently warm. Signs of man's restless advent and pioneerage, hard as Nature's face is--deserted dug-outs by dozens in the side-hills--the scantling-hut, the telegraph-pole, the smoke of some impromptu chimney or outdoor fire--at intervals little settlements of log-houses, or parties of surveyors or telegraph builders, with their comfortable tents. Once, a canvas office where you could send a message by electricity anywhere around the world! Yes, pronounc'd signs of the man of latest dates, dauntlessly grappling with these grisliest shows of the old kosmos. At several places steam saw-mills, with their piles of logs and boards, and the pipes puffing. Occasionally Platte cañon expanding into a grassy flat of a few acres. At one such place, toward the end, where we stop, and I get out to stretch my legs, as I look skyward, or rather mountain-topward, a huge hawk or eagle (a rare sight here) is idly soaring, balancing along the ether, now sinking low and coming quite near, and then up again in stately-languid circles--then higher, higher, slanting to the north, and gradually out of sight.