Chapter LV: Part II: Excelsior! (3)

Encouragement also came from other official sources. His next step was taken in the direction of Lucknow, “where he was assured that houses could at once be obtained by the assistance of Sir Robert Montgomery,” Governor of Oude, and thither he bent his steps, “escorted by relays of _sowars_ (cavalry), the general considering the precaution necessary.” Of the subsequent history of the missions established in that city, Meradabad, near Nynee Tal, and the old one at Bareilly, the book before us relates little. War, famine, and pestilence, the three great scourges of mankind, seem to have been more effectual proselytizing agencies than the Bible and preaching. The first child in the orphanage established at the latter place was, as we have seen, a waif from the rebellion, and when, in 1860, a dreadful famine occurred in Northern India, “so decided and quick was the calamity, that before the English Government ascertained its extent, and could originate public works to arrest its severity, large numbers of the people had died of want,” and their children were left an easy prey to whoever cared to snatch them up. This specious excuse for the government brings to our mind the history of another famine which happened some years previously nearer home, and which the same rulers failed to alleviate even to the extent of affording free transport for the food provided for the sufferers by the generous people of this country. Though in the latter-mentioned case the victims were Catholics, not Hindoos, the advantage sought to be taken of the calamity by a similar class of men was the same. “The idea came to us,” says Dr. Butler, “that this emergency might be turned to good account by our missionaries seizing on the opportunity thus presented,” and it was therefore agreed among them to solicit the bodily possession of three hundred boys and girls. “I wrote,” he continues, “to the Government; they were only too glad to consent and have the children off their hands.” Of course they were, and doubtless if he had asked for as many thousands, he would have got them as readily. Nor was money wanting for the support of these new _protégés_. “Responses came pouring in from schools and individuals in America.... Individuals in India also, and government itself,” says the doctor, “came to our help.” Even the Nawab of Rampore, “a Mohammedan sovereign in the vicinity”--who, by the way, owed his position to the English authorities--was put under contribution to the amount of five hundred dollars. Still it was found difficult to introduce Methodism even among these destitute children; for elsewhere he acknowledges that out of nearly one hundred and fifty girls, only about forty have been “soundly converted.” But no effect whatever could be produced on the children not actually starving, even by the free use of money. Here is his own emphatic acknowledgment of the fact, on page 520:

“Every effort was made by our missionary ladies to obtain even
day-scholars from among the people, but such was then their
bitter prejudice against educating girls that they generally
treated the proposal with scorn. The ladies of our Bareilly
mission made a vigorous effort in that city to obtain even a few
scholars. They went from house to house, hired a suitable place
in which to hold a school, bought mats and necessary equipments,
offered even to _pay the girls_ some compensation for the time
expended, if they would only attend; but at the end of three
months they had only succeeded in inducing two children to come,
and one of these was unreliable. At length, tired out, they had
to abandon the effort as hopeless, until some change would come
over the minds of the people in favor of female education.”

The system adopted towards the adult population was more questionable, though equally unsuccessful. Rohilcund and Oude, the scenes of the labors of the American Methodists, were also, it appears, great recruiting depots for the company’s officers, who, as the term of their sepoys expired, formerly allowed them to return home and enjoy liberal pensions, so that a large portion of the male population of those provinces were actually dependent on the company for the necessaries of life. The failure of the rebellion not only caused the breaking up of the sepoy army, but the innocent were made to suffer with the guilty, for the allowance that was paid to the superannuated soldiers for past services ceased and general destitution prevailed. Of this circumstance, the result of base ingratitude, the worthy missionaries were not slow in taking advantage, hoping that, since prayer and exhortation had failed, the more tangible arguments of meat and dollars might at least partially succeed. Previous to the war the “converted” native held, and as we shall presently see for good reasons, a very unenviable position in the community. According to the author, “he was cut off and proscribed by his friends, looked down upon too often by European officials,” and “refused all employment under government.” But this was all changed by Montgomery, the local ruler of Oude, and Governor-General Lawrence, who were favorable to the encouragement of native Christians. “Other officials,” we are told, “did the same. Merchants and traders also sought them, for they saw they could be trusted. _Their value rose at once._” “And,” adds Dr. Butler, “the rapid growth of the Christian church in India since that time, and especially of the native ministry, will be fully exhibited in the statistical tables which follow the next chapter.”

We regret that he has not favored us with the details of this astonishing increase in the number of the faithful which so closely followed the distribution of government patronage and pecuniary rewards; but to our chagrin the indefatigable and sanguine missionary, whom we have followed from Boston to the Himalayas, prayed with, in spirit, in the “dark jungles,” and moaned with in unison over the combined sins of the heathen and the _Romanist_, parts from us abruptly, leaving us the prey of a cruel suspicion that, notwithstanding the generous donations of American friends, the efficient aid of British officials, and, above all, his own sanctified character and wonderful intrepidity, his mission, like so many others undertaken in the same spirit, was, after all, a melancholy failure. In winding up his long history, he tells us:

“The organization of the missions into an annual conference,
at the close of 1864, terminated my superintendency, while the
toil and care to which body and mind were subject during these
scenes, and in such a climate, were so exhausting that release
from further service there became indispensable. This release was
kindly granted by the bishop and the missionary board.”

Now, what were our reverend friend and his co-laborers doing during the six years that followed the establishment of the three missions which still manage to exist in India? Surely a lively and scriptural account of those toils and cares of which he speaks would, particularly when told in his glowing style, be highly interesting to the public. Chapters of his voluminous book are devoted to descriptions of temples and tombs of the past ages, and some hundreds of pages to a detailed account of the massacres, battles and disasters incident to the civil war, but not a line do we find in which may be traced the efficacy of the gospel as preached by such pious expounders, nor is mention made of a single grown-up convert won to Methodism during the whole time, save through the agency of filthy lucre, the root of all evil. For our further information, it is true, he refers us to certain tables with which he supplements his work, but that is small consolation, for, though we believe in the old saying that figures cannot lie, we are satisfied from an examination of the tables referred to that this veracious character does not strictly apply to those who collated them.

From Table I. we gather that the Methodist Episcopal Church in India, in 1872, had no less than eighteen male and nineteen female missionaries of foreign birth in Rohilcund and Oude, and eighty-six native assistants, with church-members, amounting in the aggregate to five hundred and forty-one, so that every fourteen and a half members had one foreign missionary, or, counting the local preachers and exhorters, every _four_ converts may now enjoy the sole solicitude of one spiritual guide at least! But in Table II., on the next page, the foreign missionaries are increased to forty-six, or one to every dozen actual Christians, and, taking the entire force of foreign missionaries, native pastors, local preachers, exhorters, and teachers, the whole number of “laborers,” more or less dependent on the missionary fund for a livelihood, are reported at the handsome figure of _three hundred and sixty-six_, two laborers for every three members! But if we deduct the number of teachers returned at two hundred and thirty-four in Table II. from the whole number of members, we find that for every _thirty_ members who are not laborers, and consequently derive no official benefit from the church connection, there are _twenty-three_ who do. Should matters go on as prosperously as they seem to have done for a few years more, we hope to hear that every native convert who is not a pastor, exhorter, or teacher himself will be able to have the sole and separate use of a missionary or an assistant for his own benefit. We expect, also, to find that the exhausting duties of the foreign missionaries in taking charge each of at least one dozen of converts, including the native preachers, exhorters, and teachers aforesaid, will be duly considered by the board, and that reinforcements will be sent to them forthwith. What the eighty-six native pastors and catechists, as returned in Table II., find to do except to preach to each other, we are at a loss to surmise. Perhaps, however, they look after certain individuals classified as probationers and non-communicant adherents, and by the help of which, and the children of the schools, the compiler endeavors to make out a show of figures. The former class he counts at five hundred and twenty, and the latter at seven hundred and thirty-five, which, with nearly twelve hundred children and the helpers, make the sum-total of the officers and rank and file of the church three thousand and sixty-five, “all won for Christ since the rebellion closed.” Now, taking these figures as correct in every particular, we arrive at the following curious calculation, to which we respectfully call the attention of the admirers of Protestant, and particularly Methodist, missions. According to their own showing, there is in India one missionary for every _seventy-seven_ men, women, and children in the remotest degree connected with the Methodist Church; leaving out the children, there is a foreign missionary for every forty native adults, and taking the _bona-fide_ church-members there is one duly commissioned American missionary for every _twelve_ converts! Taking the whole number of Christians at three thousand, we find the annual conversions to have averaged two hundred and thirty, which amount being divided by forty-six makes the exact number of _five_ persons converted every year by each of our countrymen in India. If we leave out the children who as we have already seen, are simply given away by the authorities,[192] we reduce the whole number of yearly gains to one hundred and forty-five, or an average of _three_ annual converts for each foreign missionary; but when we only count the actual church-members, we discover that forty-two native persons are actually converted every year by forty-six American missionaries, and this calculation agrees very nearly with the statement of Dr. Butler, who says in a note to the very table to which he calls our attention, “Conversions during last year, 56.” How many years, missionaries, native pastors, and catechists would be required at this rate to christianize the two hundred millions of heathens in Hindostan is a problem too difficult for our solution.

So much for the wonderful progress of Methodism in India. Let us now glance for a moment at the _personelle_ of the brands thus snatched from the burning.

The ingenious attempt to make the public believe that any form of Protestantism has at length gained a foothold in Asia is more common than honest, and has been repeatedly exposed and censured by sectarian writers of all classes and degrees, many of whom have lived as missionaries in India, and know the truth by painful experience. A few extracts from their works and speeches will suffice to show at once the deficiencies of the would-be apostles, the character of their neophytes, and the absolute falsity of such statistics as we find in Butler’s tables:

“Missionaries have gone out from this country (England) who have
dishonored their great cause, and rather confirmed than shaken
the superstitions of the people they visited.”--Cunningham’s
_Christianity in India_, p. 147.

“From the want of superintendence, it is painful to observe
that the characters of too many of the clergy are by no means
creditable to the doctrines they profess, which, together with
the unedifying contests that prevail among them even in the
pulpit, tend to lower the religion and its followers in the eyes
of the natives of every description.”--Lord Valentia’s _Travels_,
vol. i. p. 199.

“A large portion of the sterility of our missions may be
attributed to that discord which Christianity (Protestantism)
exhibits in the very sight of the unbeliever.”--Rev. Dr. Grant’s
_Brompton Lectures_.

“The numerous missionaries, although they waste years and words,
and even money, have converted very few; yet when they have
induced one or two apparently to adopt their particular tenets,
it is their fashion to make a clamor in the newspapers and by
pamphlets, although too frequently they are not sure of their new
converts for any length of time.”--Mackenna’s _Ancient and Modern
India_, p. 516.

“Missionaries announcing the conversion of a solitary Hindoo
among thousands of unbelievers are themselves frequently members
of some straggling sect, and too often the instruments of
fanatical bigotry.”--_Travels in India and Kashmir_, p. 195.

It is needless to multiply further such sketches of the unfitness of the shepherds, for the reader will easily find them, and generally much more strongly drawn, in any impartial work on British India. Let us, however, take a glance at the moral and social status of the spiritual flocks, whose members, before the arrival of Montgomery and Lawrence, found it so difficult to obtain situations. Captain Hervey, in his _Ten Years in India_, tells us that, whenever a native convert wishes employment as a servant, “he is not taken, because all Christians, with but few exceptions, are looked upon as great vagabonds, drunkards, thieves, and reprobates.” A writer in the _Edinburgh Review_, vol. xii., assures us that “whoever has seen much of Christian Hindoos must perceive that the man who bears that name is very commonly nothing more than a drunken reprobate who conceives himself at liberty to eat or drink anything he pleases.” The Baptist “converts,” we are assured by Rev. John Bowen, in his _Missionary Incitement_, etc., are accused of wallowing in every crime that “degrades human nature,” and deserve the accusation. The Rev. Mr. Schneider, writing from Agra, in Dr. Butler’s neighborhood, assures us that the “motives of the Hindoos for embracing Christianity were chiefly the desire of employment and to have their bodily wants provided for.” “It is a fact,” he adds, “that many new converts have, after their baptism, not adorned their Christian profession, and so have ever proved great offences and stumbling-blocks to the cause of Christ.” Of the Baptist converts in the same place, we learn from their _seventieth report_ (1862), that “what with members who have left the station, and others (including paid catechists) who have been cut off for immoral conduct, our loss has been heavy; while in the city of Delhi in the same year sixty-six persons were baptized and _seventy-five_ excluded from the churches.” The author of _India and the Gospel_, a Protestant missionary of Central India, candidly says: “I have met with native Christians who have been baptized, some on the eastern, some on the western coast, and others at some southern stations--lamentable to say, they were not to be known from the heathen but in name.” Mr. Marsh declared some years ago in the English House of Commons, speaking of Indian converts generally: “They are drawn from the Chandalahs, or Pariahs, or outcasts--a portion of the population who are shut out from the Hindoo religion, and who, being condemned to the lowest poverty and most sordid occupations, are glad to procure by what the missionaries call conversion whatever pittance they are enabled to dole out for their subsistence.” But it appears that the bad character of the Protestant converts has even a more disastrous effect than that produced on the reputation of their sponsors. Mr. David Hopkins, of the Bengal Medical Establishment, in his work on India, asserts, in reply to some overzealous advocate of Protestantism, “the outcasts have indeed joined the missionaries, and have appeared as of their faith; but the conduct of these outcasts has generally proved that they professed what they did not feel, and has considerably influenced the higher orders in their prejudices against Christianity.”

If we proceed still further, we will find from these reiterated complaints of the influence of Protestantism in the East, how much it perverts whatever sense of natural justice may remain in the heathen, and, by appealing to his basest passions, renders him an object of contempt and mistrust even to his less enlightened fellows--for there are few of the Indian population so mentally obtuse as not to recognize the rankest hypocrisy and mendacity, though they be covered with the garb of religion. How far such men as Dr. Butler is justified in claiming three hundred and fifty thousand native _Christians_ (Protestants) as the result of sectarian teaching and zeal in India is not easily determined. In 1850, General Briggs noticed that the missionaries reckoned but one in every six nominal converts as church members; the Rev. Mr. Ward, a missionary, states that of the number of converts of every sort reported to the home societies not one in ten is actually converted.[193] A writer in the _United Service Gazette_, who had served as an officer in India in 1856, declared that, though the missionaries reported their disciples by thousands, an omnibus would hold all the sincere native Protestants then in the peninsula, while a later authority, Rev. E. Storrow, in his book on _Indian Missions, etc._, is not willing to claim more than one-fifth of all the so-called converts as Christians even in his indefinite sense of that term. Following the Storrow method of computation, therefore, and applying it to the doctor’s tables, we arrive at the following results: There are at the present day three hundred and fifty thousand men, women, and children in India claimed to belong to the various denominations, seventy thousand of whom Mr. Minturn, in his _From New York to Delhi_, emphatically says “are mostly of the most degraded classes,” and no less than two hundred and eighty thousand who disgrace the name of Christianity by debauchery, theft, hypocrisy, and immorality of every sort in its most degrading shapes. Of the former we freely accord to Methodism six hundred, and of the latter four times the number.

But Dr. Butler has many arrows in his quiver to be discharged against that target of sectarian animosity, _Romanism_, and other claims to public sympathy and patronage broadly set forth in his manifold tables. It is the question of education, and on this his figures assume a prodigious magnitude. The Methodist day-schools in India, he tells us, number one hundred and sixteen, the teachers two hundred and thirty-four, and the pupils four thousand four hundred and sixty-two. If these children were all Protestants, it might indeed be a source of some congratulation to his friends, but unfortunately only a little over a thousand of them attend Sunday-school, and the balance, considerably over three thousand, are being “educated” to stigmatize the Methodists themselves as infidels, and to deny the first principles upon which all religion is founded. That this, though a startling view to some persons, is nevertheless a correct one, we have the most indisputable Protestant evidence, and what applies to the Methodists in particular, is general to all the sects in Hindostan; who, collectively, are said in Table II. to be educating one hundred and thirty-seven thousand children, of whom more than _one hundred thousand_ are not brought up in any form of faith known to Christianity. “The colleges of India,” says Major H. Bevan, “receive fanatical idolaters, they disgorge only hypocrites.”[194] The author of _Tropical Sketches_ avers, in allusion to the same institutions, “the results have been great intellectual acuteness and total want of moral principle; utter infidelity in religion, etc.” According to the Parliamentary reports, out of over seventeen thousand pupils educated at the public expense, only three hundred even professed the religion of the state. At Benares, where there are fourteen missionary schools, not one conversion is reported; and the Rev. Mr. Percival, in his _Land of the Veda_, goes the length of saying that “in almost every part of India the spread of the English language and literature is rapidly altering the phases of the Hindoo mind, giving it a sceptical, infidel cast,” while the Rev. Mr. Clarkson goes further, and adds: “Some have argued that the Indians, by receiving an education which undermines their superstitions, are being prepared for the reception of Christianity. We believe that they are being prepared for occupying a position directly antagonistic to it. Several documents from missionaries at Bombay, Poonah, Surat, Calcutta, Delhi, Madras, and Benares _corroborate all that I have stated_.... None can doubt that infidelity in its most absolute sense is on the increase. There is no connection between the natives ceasing to be Hindoos and becoming Christians.”[195] Dr. Grant also gives his testimony of the effects of missionary schools: “It is the universal confession,” he says, speaking for his brother missionaries, “that but very few of the children so educated embrace the Christian faith”; and even the orphans, we are told by Count Warren, “when they grow up, all return to the religion of their ancestors.” Lastly, the Indian correspondent of the leading organ of public opinion in England thus sums up the whole question:

“Missionary schools do not make more converts to Christianity
than Government schools. A most zealous missionary in India
assured me, with tears in his eyes, that, after twenty-five
years’ experience, he looked upon the conversion of the Hindoos
under present circumstances to be hopeless, without the
interposition of a miracle.”[196]

We pause here, for the subject becomes too deeply painful for contemplation, even at a distance. To think that, in this age of boasted civilization and religious progress, one of the fairest portions of the habitable globe, filled with millions and millions of our fellow-men, in many respects at least our equals in natural gifts, should still not only be ignorant of the worship of the true God, but that, through the instrumentality of the ministers of the discordant, jarring Protestant sects, and from their desire to forward their own selfish ends, the natives, instead of being taught the beauties of Christianity, are actually led to deny even the existence of a superior power, and by the miserable examples set before them, are forced to despise and hate the very name of Christ’s followers. We arraign Protestantism of this great crime, and we ask the serious attention of every candid man, no matter what may be his religious opinions, to the authorities above cited in support of our indictment. The British Government, through its armed mercenaries and no less corrupt civil officials, have doubtless inflicted dire and manifold cruelties on the Indians, but the evils perpetrated by the sectarian missionaries of this country and Europe on those unfortunate people are beyond all comparison greater, for they are more far-searching and permanent. Human laws and agencies may strip a conquered nation of its wealth and liberties, but it requires the aid of the missionary and _colporteur_ to rob it of even the semblance of religion and morality, and by the means of what is so falsely called “education,” to plunge it into the depths of unbelief and complete spiritual degradation. This is what Protestant England is endeavoring, and, as we have seen, with some success, to do in Hindostan, and in what the generous but easily-duped people of America are endeavoring to rival it. To christianize, in any sense, the Hindoos has been found an impossibility by the well-paid and well-fed sectarian missionaries, so they are now trying to earn their salaries by utterly demoralizing the people they have failed to convert.

They are aided in this by the active countenance of the dominant power, by no less than twenty-seven distinct societies, and have at their disposal unlimited funds; a great portion of which is made up of the annual contributions of the people of the United States. Of the five and a quarter millions subscribed by the various Protestant societies of the world in 1871, considerably over a million and a half of dollars came out of the pockets of Americans, as we learn from Table IV., and doubtless money will continue to flow into the coffers of these organizations as long as they can continue to delude the charitable by false hopes and bombastic reports of missionary successes. We are not of those who are disposed to consider the conversion of souls from a commercial point of view; on the contrary, we are rather in favor even of the lavish expenditure of money, if by that means we can win men to Christ and to the inheritance of his kingdom; but when it becomes an instrument to rob the parent of his child, to convert the heathen not through his mind but his stomach, to bring Christianity into disrepute by sustaining the dissolute and degraded, to pervert the mental gifts of Providence by teaching the heathen that all religion is imposture,[197] and by supporting and sustaining thousands of lay and clerical officials who are as destitute of real sympathy for the pagan as they are ignorant of the first principles of Christian charity and responsibility--all of which it has done and is doing in India--we consider that it may justly be asserted that what was meant for a blessing becomes a curse to the donor as well as the recipient.

Dr. Butler in one of his tables shows that the Catholic Church missions, embracing nearly nine millions of Christians, expend less than a million dollars annually, while those of the Protestant sects, ostensibly counting about a third of that number, cost five and a half times that amount, and would have us believe from this that Protestantism exhibits more vitality and zeal in the cause of religion than does the church. But the contrary is the fact. Unlike the sectarian, whose inducement arises out of and is in proportion to the amount of his salary, the Catholic missionary goes forth into the pagan world, without money, friends, or family encumbrances; he forsakes all comforts and material pleasures to preach Christ crucified; his energy is not of the earth, earthy, his inspiration is from a power higher than that of man, and as his life is one long-continued sermon on temperance, forgiveness, and self-abnegation, his success is always in proportion, not to the money employed, but to the sanctity of the preacher. He does not distribute badly translated and often unreadable copies of the Word of God, “in thirty-seven languages” as claimed for the Protestants by Dr. Butler, to persons who can neither read nor appreciate them; but, living sparingly, dressing humbly, and conforming in all respects his daily practice to his clerical professions, he wins to the standard of Christ the rich as well as the poor, the ignorant _pariah_ as well as the learned and disputatious pundit. Even Protestants, missionaries at that, have seen through their prejudices, the uniform success of the Catholic teachers, and while their system does not allow them to imitate their example, they have nevertheless borne unwilling testimony, and therefore more valuable, to the superiority in point of morality and ability of the servants of the church. In India to-day, even Dr. Butler is forced to admit there are close on a million actual practical Catholics, with hundreds of churches, and a ministry of foreign and native priests amounting to seven hundred and seventy-nine, who are supported at an expense to the Society _de Propaganda Fide_ of twenty-eight thousand dollars, while their schools, numbering according to the _Catholic Register_ of 1869 one thousand, contain over thirty thousand native pupils. Dr. Butler has called our attention to his tables, we have given them serious attention, and have even taken his own figures as thoroughly exact, and we have come to the conclusion that he must either have had a very limited appreciation of the perspicacity of his readers, or recklessness of character in thus exposing the hollowness of Protestant professions of progress, superinduced by the complete failure of himself and his co-laborers to vitalize in the far East the decaying body of Protestantism, which is so fast degenerating into materialism and scepticism in the West.

There are one or two points more, overlooked in passing, of which we wish to take note. Dr. Butler has included that part of Farther India in his tables, which will help him to swell the number of his converts, and excluded that part of it in which the Catholic religion flourishes. Include the whole, and you add 500,000 to the number of native Catholics in India. Again, he repeats the unmeaning, silly twaddle which we hear without ceasing from writers of the same sort, that Protestant missionaries make real Christians, Catholic missionaries only nominal ones. Methodist religion consists in emotion and excitement, the most unreal of all things. So far as it is worth anything, there is far more sensible devotion, although of a more quiet and sober kind, among Catholics than among any class of Protestants. But this is not the essence of religion. To be a Christian is to believe the revelation and keep the commandments of God. Whoever says that Catholic missionaries do not carefully instruct their converts in the doctrines of the faith and in sound morals, and endeavor to make them both pious and virtuous, is either a slanderer or the dupe of some slanderer. Let every one who wishes to know the truth read the work of Dr. Marshall, and ponder the evidence he has collected. Dr. Butler’s effort to weaken its influence, like every other attempt of the same sort, has proved abortive.

FOOTNOTES:

[190] _The Land of the Veda._ Being Personal Reminiscences of India, etc. By Rev. William Butler, D.D. New York: Carlton & Lanahan. 1872.

[191] _The_ (London) _Times_, March 17, 1859.

[192] Alluding to the famine season, Baron von Schonberg says: “Six hundred children were purchased for eighteen hundred rupees, which certainly was not an exorbitant price.”--_Travels in India and Kashmir_, vol. i. p. 193. This was at the rate of a dollar and a half a head.

[193] _India and the Hindoos_, p. 337.

[194] _Thirty Years in India_, p. 239.

[195] _India and the Gospel_, p. 279.

[196] _The_ (London) _Times_, 1858.

[197] “They [the pupils of the secular and missionary schools] have no more faith in Jesus Christ than in their own religion. They believe the Jesus of the English and the Krishna of the Hindoos to be alike impostors.”--_Six Years in India_, vol. iii. p. 277.

ON THE MISTY MOUNTAIN.

ROUTE I.

It was in the by-gone days of the Misty Mountain Stage and Express Company--only a few years ago by actual chronological computation, it is true; but at least a half a century by the change effected in the less than demi-decade which has passed.

Do you know that at times, when I contemplate this change, I can scarcely realize that I have lived long enough to have lived through it? I often feel as if the memory of the things that were is the reflection of experiences in a former state of existence, so different is the _what is_ from the _what was_. I feel burdened by great personal antiquity, and cannot help considering myself a sort of Methusalem le Petit. I have seen the great plains spanned by the rail and the wire. The smoking, shrieking steed of steam drinks the waters of the fork of the Misty Mountain, sacred but a year or two ago to the pony of the red man. The journey which occupied weeks to accomplish ten years past is now made in a few hours, and lightning whispers are interchanged between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

My good old Uncle Joe, an old-time leather-dealer in the “Swamp” in New York City--who, a bachelor, had adopted me, an orphan, and, having educated me, had assigned me a desk in the dingy old office with the leathery smell--told me one day, without any previous warning, that he wished me to start without delay for the Stony Sierra to look after some of his business interests in that region. That was my Uncle Joe’s way of doing things. His engagements did not permit his leaving New York at the time. Besides, he had crossed the great plains more than twice or thrice, and had had enough of them. But as I had not had any of them, a little, he thought, would do me good, and he proposed to give it me.

My journey to the (then) end of railroad communication was remarkable only for the general railway decadence which, commencing at Chicago, increased “in inverse ratio to the square of the distance from our objective point,” as the elegant English of the telegraph would phrase it. The conductor grew familiar with the passengers, who grew fewer. The various characters of the “newspaper boy,” the vegetable-ivory notion vender, the “ice-cold lemonade” boy, the candy-seller, the cigar boy, the bookseller, the apple and orange boy, were all performed by one and the same protean youngster. The passengers had dwindled so that it would not pay to invest two boys in that dramatic business. At length, the Thespian youth, tired of playing a dozen different characters to empty cars, threw off all his disguises at once, and subsided into a mere passenger like the rest of us.

A sudden shock brought a slight nap in which I was indulging to a timely end. The train had stopped. The pitiful account of passengers were on their feet, some leaving the car, others looking about them with an expression of interrogative imbecility, when the brakeman shouted out:

“Devil’s Landing--end o’ track!”

No danger of taking a wrong train now. So we passengers, four in number, left the car. We concluded a hasty agreement to stick to each other as fellow-men and fellow-passengers, we four waifs washed on the shore of barbarism by the advancing tide of civilization. A fellow-feeling of lost-sheepiness made us wondrous kind to each other.

I accosted a small, dried-up, hard-featured old fellow of eighteen or nineteen:

“Any hotels here?”

Answer (in an intensely contemptuous manner): “No!”

“Any restaurants--eating-houses?”

“Yes, four on ’em: the ’Merik’n House, the Mansh’n House, the Pacific S’loon, and Jack Langford’s dug-out.”

Finding the old juvenile so communicative, and having more questions to propound, we propitiate him by offering a cigar in recognition of his social and chronological equality, and in proof that we are not “stuck-up snobs from the East.” He takes the cigar brusquely without oral signification of acceptance or expression of thanks. He bites the end off wolfishly, and places the cigar as near his ear as possible. We offer him a match. He takes it, puts it into his vest-pocket, saying:

“Guess I’ll take a dry smoke.”

“Which is the best of the hotels or eating-houses?”

“All doggoned bad.”

“Which is the cleanest?”

“All doggoned dirty.”

“Which is the cheapest?”

“All doggoned dear.”

“Which is the quietest?”

“Doggoned row goin’ on in all of ’em most o’ the time. Man killed at some one on ’em ’most every night, and a brace or more on dance-nights.”

We requested him to direct us to the “American” or the “Mansion House.”

“Don’t need to go far. That,” said he, indicating by a movement of his cigar and his lower jaw a partially finished “balloon-frame” house about thirty yards to the right, “is the ’Merik’n; and that,” indicating in like manner a canvas shed to the left, “is the Mansh’n House.”

Devil’s Landing consisted of about a dozen mushroom edifices and about as many “dug-outs.” On reflection, we concluded to try the “American House.”

A small space cut off by an unpainted counter served for an office, but no “register” was displayed. The establishment had only very recently been moved up, the official behind the counter informed us, from the last resting-place by the way of runners with the rails.

A look at the “sleeping apartments” was sufficient for me. I determined not to sleep in any of them if I could possibly help it.

I went back to the functionary at the counter, and asked the time of departure of the Misty Mountain coach, and learned that a coach left the same afternoon, and that there was one place vacant. I engaged the seat at once, glad to escape the horrors of a night in the American House and Devil’s Landing. My fellow-passengers wished me to wait for the next day’s coach, but I declined. When we agreed to stick together, I knew nothing of the American House.

We had dinner. It consisted of very fat and very rusty bacon, putty biscuits, and mud coffee without milk.

“The cows have not come in,” said one of the greasy waiters, when I asked for milk.

“The cows never do come home here,” whispered a neighbor, evidently an _habitué_.

It was toward the close of August, and the heat was excessive. The sun shone mercilessly on us through the partially glazed and wholly uncurtained windows. Yet we ate and perspired, and perspired and drank mud coffee, with a persistency which astonished me when after thinking on these matters.

The flies were terrible. They swept around the room in buzzing clouds. Some of them were nearly large enough to offer a fair mark for a shot-gun; the smaller ones insinuated themselves everywhere--into your nose, ears, eyes--aye, even into your mouth. They immolated themselves in the frowzy, oily butter; and their remains studded the reeking mass like currants in a pudding.

Such a wonderful effect has the pure prairie air--it doth so whet the edge of appetite--that, though our eyes were shocked, we ate and ate, and our sense of taste was not offended. The meal only cost us two dollars apiece.

After dinner, I lit a fifty-cent Devil’s Landing cigar, and walked (literally) around town--a perambulation which did not quite occupy five minutes. As I finished my walk, a shot was fired at the other end of town--that is, within fifteen or twenty rods. Other shots followed. A long-haired, slouched-hatted, and red-legginged individual dashed past on a pretty good horse. Evidently he was the mark at which the firing was directed. As he passed, an armed man or two rushed out of every house and shot at him. The proprietor of the Oriental Saloon came forth, armed with a Henry rifle, and deliberately blazed away at the long-haired fugitive. The latter, finding bullets in front of him, bullets to left of him, bullets behind him, after several miraculous escapes from close shots, had no course open but to turn to right of him, around the corner of the American House, which would afford him some cover. But just as he turned, his horse was hit in the off fore-leg and brought to in a moment. Immediately he was hemmed in by the muzzles of twenty repeating-rifles. He had emptied his six-shooter. Flight was impossible. There was no course but surrender--not even suicide--left. He jumped from his horse, and sat down cross-legged on the ground. He was quickly seized and pinioned. His horse was taken in charge by a citizen. No words were wasted on either side. His lariat of horse-hair furnished a deadly loop, which was placed around his neck. He was marched about a mile to the only tree in sight--an old cottonwood.

While the crowd was going to the tree, the clerk of the American House told me in a few words the history of the long-haired victim. He was a half-breed Choctaw, frequently employed as a scout by the government. There were several of these scouts in the region. They called themselves “wolves,” and prided themselves on their destruction of human life. When any of them came into town citizens were sure to be shot at. Their favorite way of leaving town was, having first filled themselves with “fighting whiskey,” to dash through at full speed, discharging their revolvers at anything human that chanced to appear in their path. The citizens had determined not to stand this sort of thing any longer. “Johnny Henshaw”--so our “wolf” was called--had been drinking rather freely of late. He had declared his intention of shooting three prominent men of the town, mentioning them by name. Hence the measures about to be taken.

Johnny Henshaw seemed to be about twenty years old--indeed rather under than over that age. There was nothing in his features to show a trace of Indian blood. His hair was light brown, his eyes a soft, light blue, his skin fair, and his cheeks rosy. The expression of his face was gentle and pleasing. It made me heart-sick to look at the young fellow, even though he was a wolf and deserved a wolf’s fate, and to think that in the midst of health and strength and youth he was marching to a speedy death. As we came near the fatal tree, I tried to imagine what thoughts were passing in the outlaw’s mind by mentally putting myself in his place. The effort made me dizzy and sick. I felt as if I were about to fall senseless.

When we had reached the cottonwood tree, the cortége halted. A wagon was hauled up to the tree, and Johnny caused to mount it. One end of his lariat was made fast to a branch of the tree. Three or four men jumped on the wagon. Some confusion occurred in properly adjusting the noose about the victim’s neck. Johnny pushed the men from him, saying:

“Get out o’ here! I’ll show ye how a man can die!” And, fixing with his own hands the noose about his neck, he jumped into eternity!

ROUTE II.

Poor wolf! His time to howl was over.

I felt sick and faint from witnessing the scene, and had to take some of the “fighting whiskey” of Devil’s Landing to keep me from fainting. It did so. It was as good--or as bad--as a galvanic shock. I was glad, therefore, when the Misty Mountain coach drove in front of the American Hotel to take up its passengers. The stage had seven inside: a congressman, a divine, an Indian agent, three ladies, and a small boy. The gentlemen looked at me in such a dog-in-the-mangerish fashion when I popped my head in at the door to see what prospect there was of an inside seat, that I immediately withdrew it and took my seat on the box between the driver and the conductor.

“Passengers for the Stony Sierra! All aboard!” And off we go behind six good mules.

The country we travelled through was flat and uninteresting. Not a tree or shrub within the circular boundary of the horizon. Little of life, animal or vegetable, to be seen; only a stray hare--vulgo, jackass rabbit--a prairie-dog, with its sentinel owl, a prairie wolf or coyote, and an occasional hawk.

After a run of nine or ten miles, we stopped at a “dug-out” to change animals. While the change was being effected, a man in a red buggy with a white horse arrived from the west. He was evidently excited, and his horse was covered with foam.

“How d’e do, general? You seem kinder flurried. Anything happened?” asked the stage-driver.

“Well,” said the person addressed as “general” (by the way, you could have bought generals there as they buy hobnails) “I have had a pretty sharp run. Ten or fifteen Indians began running me after crossing the Blue Fork. They fired three or four shots at me. Here’s the mark of one,” he continued, pointing to a bullet-hole in the body of the red buggy. “They came mighty near getting me. And they would have got me were it not for Old Whity here.” And he patted the white horse affectionately.

Thus the INDIAN QUESTION, at the very outset, was brought home to the bosoms of the passengers by the Misty Mountain coach. They asked many questions of the “general.” The Indian agent--who had never seen an Indian of the wild tribes in his life--made a pretence of experience, and offered a few suggestions. But a few remarks from the stock-tenders at the dug-out stable raised a laugh at his expense, and he “was squelched for the rest of the trip,” as the conductor expressed it.

The conductor and the driver looked to their Henry rifles, and hurriedly inventoried the arms in the party. The Indian agent had a double-barrelled shot-gun--both barrels unloaded--no ammunition; the congressman had a diminutive five-shooter which would scarcely have tickled a papoose--five barrels unloaded, one round of cartridges on hand, no reserve ammunition; the divine, the ladies, and the small boy were unarmed; the reader’s humble servant had one six-shooter--Colt’s navy pattern--with half-a-dozen rounds of ammunition for the same. This weapon he had never yet used. He was not fully enlightened as to the _modus_ of loading it. It was in the reader’s humble servant’s trunk at the bottom of the pile of baggage which towered behind the coach. Of course, he didn’t wish to give the conductor or the driver the trouble of changing the luggage. With remarkable good nature, he preferred going out defenceless to troubling these gentlemen. Like most human feelings, however, this one was perhaps not quite pure. It must be owned the idea crossed his mind that it was as well not to introduce the factor of premature explosion into the quantity of danger to which he was about to be exposed.

We changed mules and started. Everybody saw Indians for the first few miles. But the objects appearing as Indians to our excited vision had been so often pronounced by the conductor to be “soap-weeds,” “old buffalo carcasses,” etc., that the number seen began greatly to diminish. Once we thought there was no doubt about it. They came dashing along in “Indian file,” fifteen or twenty in number, directly toward us. I felt “very queer.” Here were Indians now, not a doubt about it. I was seized by a sudden desire to have something to shoot with. I mentally resolved, if I got out of this scrape alive, never again to travel unarmed in an Indian country.

“Antelope,” remarked the conductor.

Antelope it was; a herd of fifteen or twenty. They crossed the road a few hundred yards in front of us.

We had travelled about five miles without an incident or a sight to break the monotony of the waste around us, when above a rising ground before us the Stars and Stripes, relieved against the sky, gladdened our eyes. How that sight revived us! We remembered that “the home of the brave” was our home; and I think that, if Indians had appeared at that moment, or within five minutes thereafter, we would have received them in heroic attitudes. But they did not appear.

As we ascended the ridge between us and Fort Jones, that post came gradually into view. It looked to us like a collection of very miserable “shanties” dropped down haphazard on the prairie.

A large stone building--the hospital, the conductor informed me--was in course of erection. It seemed larger than all the rest of the post put together. The officers’ quarters were such constructions as we have seen inhabited by the squatters on the vacant lots up-town in New York or in “Jackson’s Hollow” in Brooklyn.

The “Fort” disappointed me very much. I expected to enter the guarded precincts over a drawbridge and under an arched portcullis. But Fort Jones was destitute of ditch, rampart, or parapet, and uninclosed by stockade, palisade, or even by a common board fence. The coach drove up to the sutler’s store--there the post-office was established--without let or hindrance from warder or sentinel.

Some half-dozen officers were in the store awaiting the distribution of the mail. The congressman, the Indian agent, and the divine soon discovered who was the officer in command of the fort. They immediately approached him on the subject of an escort.

The officer said he had comparatively few men; his small force was scattered along the stage-road for two hundred miles; he had only twenty men present for duty; but he would try to furnish three or four men. “An officer and a sergeant,” he said, “were going up on the coach to see to the defences of the station-guards along the road.” The conductor here put in his oar, and said it would be impossible for him to take four men more. This settled the question of an escort. The congressman, the divine, and the Indian agent, having ascertained that they could be accommodated with bed and board at the sutler’s, concluded “to stay over for the present.”

The conductor and the driver did not seem to regret this determination. The former remarked that this lightening of our load helped us much, and we should now be able “to pull through” in good time.

While we were waiting to have the mail made up, a mounted man came in at full speed with news that a government wagon train had been attacked by Indians on one of the roads leading to the post--that the teams were very much scattered--that some of the mules were already in the hands of the Indians. This caused a flutter among the officers. A company of infantry was ordered at once to the relief of the train.

As we left the fort we could see the infantry going over the rise at a double-quick and in skirmish order.

We stopped for a moment, in rear of the officers’ quarters, to take up the officer and the sergeant. The officer’s wife and little child came out to see him off. He kissed them both affectionately, and took his seat with us on top of the coach. The sergeant, also, rode on the roof. Both were well armed. Much to my delight, the officer, finding me unarmed, furnished me with a spare musket he had brought with him.

At first, I was rather disappointed in this officer. He was very plainly dressed. He had just enough gold lace about him to indicate his rank, and no more. I had supposed that regular officers always wore epaulets and white kid gloves. However, the lieutenant--for such was our new passenger’s rank--was evidently a gentleman. He had a certain quiet, unobtrusive affability which charmed me very much. I was glad he had come. His easy self-possession inspired me with confidence.

“If we meet any Indians, lieutenant,” said the conductor, an old hand who had driven stage for ten years along the Great Sandy, “we’ll have to do the work from out here; there’s nobody below (pointing downwards) to help us.”

“Do you think we may be attacked by Indians?” I ventured to ask.

“Think it most probable we shall see some, at the least,” answered the officer. “They have shown themselves at several points along the line. The Great Alamos, which we have to pass, is a favorite crossing-place, when they go south in the spring or north in the fall.”

“It is about as bad a place for Injuns as there is in the whole route,” said the conductor.

“Yes,” said George, the driver; “and though I’m a white man, an’ agin an Injun all the time, I must say that we owe the badness of that there place to a white man.”

“How?” I asked.

“The Great Alamos,” answered the driver, “was a great buryin’-place of the Flat Noses. It was quite a large grove once--considerable of a rarity on these here plains. You know,” he continued, “that the Flat Noses bury their dead high up in the trees, or, where there are no trees, stick ’em up on trestles made with long poles.”

“They bury them in the air instead of in the ground,” I said, intending the remark as a sort of semi-joke, at which I designed smiling if any one else smiled, and, if not, to let it go for a serious observation. It was probably not new in either phase to my companions, who took no notice of it. So to break silence, I asked why the Indians of the plains sought these elevated resting-places for their dead.

“To keep ’em from being eaten up by the ki-o-tees.”

“Do the ki-o-tees devour the dead of other tribes?” I asked, horrified at the thought.

“The ki-o-tees is the wolves,” the conductor explained.

The lieutenant informed me of the orthography of the word--coyote.

About sunset we reached a house built of loose stones, and therefore known as “The Stone Ranch.” There were fifteen or twenty men about the ranch--all of them armed.