111
NEVADA NOTES.
Eureka Sentinel: A chute of ore in the Silver Connor mine on Prospect mountain besides silver contents yields 50 per cent copper.
All hope of rescuing alive the imprisoned miners of the Comstock has been abandoned, but work to recover their bodies is prosecuted vigorously.
Madame Nevada-Palmer recently gave a breakfast at her London residence to Buffalo Bill and Mrs. James Brown Potter.
113
MARY JANE'S TRAVELS.
WITH DICKEY UNDER HER ARM SHE GOES ALL ABOUT LONDON.
Their Pilgrimage is Somewhat Out of the Ususal Line - They are More of the Modern Portion of the City Than the Ancient, and Mary Jane Tells About It.
[Special Correspondence.]
LONDON, June 18.- "Dickey," said I this morning as we started out, "have you got any pennies?"
"Nary a penny," said she, offbandedly. "What do you want with it? Where's your letter of credit?"
"Don't be so assualted, please," said I; "I've got to fee a lot of people today, and I want the money in small doses."
"You want it in a feeable amounts, as it were," said she, punning as usual.
"I want it," said I, sharply, "and that's enough."
"Oh." said she, sarcastically, "if that's enough, why do you ask for any more?"
We jowered a while longer, and then I compromised by taking all her pennies, and went out, Dickey remarking as she sat down on the top of the bus:
"They say the typical Englishman is only found in the bigger cirlces, and perhaps he is, but the typical American is found all over England, wherever there is a British subject touching his hat and waiting for something he hasn't earned."
The fee system, or rather fee sentiment, in England, I think, does more to degrade the lower classes than any other one thing this side of the remnant of feudalism in royalty. Men who, ismiliarly situated in America, would knock a man down for offering them a tip, take it gladly here, and do it with a servility that is painful to our independent ideas. We have the system in America, it is true, but there the recipient receives it with a certain air of right, which makes one feel that the laborer is worthy of his hire, while in England they fawn and crings and bow and touch their hats till you want to take a club and break a head or two. I don't know how high up they are foudn, but I know when I went to the queen's stables at Buckingham palace the liveried slave in the office told me I could not get in until I got a ticket, and I could only get that by writing a letter to the master of the horse. I started off back to my quarters to do that, whom be sidled around and told me it was against the rules, but he thought he could find me a ticket. I put up a shilling, and he went to the desk and fixed me in a few moments. The shilling cost more than an envelope and stamp, but it was more immediate in its effect. The policemen will also take anything ("except prisoner," suggested Dickey, looking over my shoulder) you offer, and they don't appear to feel any the less manly for it. Lots of waiters at hotels and restaurants get their pay that way, and it is so even in private houses. It is told that the Duke of Argyle, who is not rich (except in a long line of useless ancestry) wanted to employ a butler, and would not agree to pay the man more than half wages, because, as he told him, he had very many guests, and the butler always had his tips from. Many hotel and restaurant waiters pay the proprietors for the privilege of bleeding their guests, and the head porter of one of the best London hotels is reported as paying $2,000 a year for his place, besides a percent of a finer pair of horses to the landlord. A Pullman car porter, in comparison with this oriental magnificence, becomes but little better than a tramp. The whole business is legalized begary, pure and simple, and is a direct outgrowth of feudal aristocracty. But enough of this on paper. Come to England if you want to see what a terrible nuisance it is.
I met a woman the other day who made me feel good all over. She was not very pretty, and she wasn't very young, but she had sand in her craw, and I was glad of it. She happened to fall into a general conversation in a car, the subject being English women. I had said something about the meek look of submission so perceptible in their faces, and Dickey seconded my motion.
"I don t qure understand," said the lady.
"Why," said I, "all English women seem to hold men as superior beings. They defer to them in all things: they wait on them and for them: they coddle them and smile for them, and bear all sorts of burdens for them: they sit with folded hands, content to be disposed of as many suit the fancy of lordly man, and they make me tired. American women are not that way at all. They may not have the right to vote and make laws, but they make the men do a good deal of the submission business and keep things pretty evenly balanced."
"You are quite correct about the English women," she said, with a Susan B. Anthony snap to her voice, "but they will not be so always. They are beginning to appriciate woman's true position, and the time will come when English wimen will show to English men that Englishmen will have to go away from England to play the deity."
She went ahead at this rate for some time, and, though I didn't find out who she was, I have hopes the his leaven will leaven the whole lump and a female Magna Charta will some day be filed among the British archives.
In a line with this: I went over to the house of commons one day, thinking, of course, I could go in on the usual permit of the speaker, but, lo and behold, they stuck me in with the rest of the women in a nasty little dark cubby hold, with a wire screen shutting it off from the chamber, becuase, forsooth, women are not allowed in the sacred precincts of that legislative today. I peeped through those wires for about a minute, and feeling that the whole crowd was a lot of monkeys in a cage I left the place thoroughly disgusted.
London is not a city of parks, as Paris is, but it has many, and one may walk through several miled of shaded avenues from a point almost at Trafalgar square, throught the Mall, Green park, St. James and Hyde park to Kensington. Regent's park to Primrose hill is another stretch, but Hyde park is the limtum spot, and there the swells go to drive and die and walk, and there "a cat may look at a king" and "a dog may bay the moon," or words to that effect. Rotten row, famous in fashionable circles, is the road where they ride, and in the season it is full of men, women, and groomse on horseback. It is a mile or so in length, a hundred feet wide and is three or four inches deep in dirt, so the horses will have good, soft hoofing. The last riders usually are the grooms, next are the ladies, and lastle the men.
"Why do they call it Rotten row?" said Dickey, as we sat watching the riders one morning.
"It was the favorite place of Charles II," said I, "and was called Route en Rol (Rob King's road), whcih later became corrupted into Rotten row."
"Ugh!" said she with a shrug of disgust, "just like and Englishman. When a thing is corrupted it is rotten, so he calles the corruption of Route en Rol. 'Rotten row.' Well, it may be expressive, but he might have made it more euphoric by calling it '[word?] Avenue,' 'Putrescent Path,' or something like that, with a Bostonian twang to it."
Everybody, from Mrs. Wales down, finds Hyde Park plenty good enough, and they all get out there in pleasant weather. One usual feature about the park is, that a chair company has the privlege of putting chairs all allong the walks, and make the unsuspecting stranger pay a penny, or keep walking like a sentinel on duty.
There is a history connected with Hyde Park, which the reader may find in mose guide books, or for sale at news stands.
Speaking of news stands reminds me that London is virutally without a Sunday newspaper, and if some enterprising American with money to lose, until he can teach the peope more advances ideas, will invest it in that sort of property he will be rich before he dies, if he isn't too old when by begins.
I talked with my landlady about hired girls, and I find that a hired girl is a hired girl pretty much wherever you find her. The reliable ones can always find work with good pay, but they are not all reliable, though the average in England is bigger than elsewhere. One very pretty one I know gets $45 a year and found, but she doesn't do the cooking. I don't believe out American style of all around hired girl prevails in England. The girls usually call themselves "slaves," and they are very respectful, and their manners are good. Ten to twelve pounds a year and found is considered very food pay, and some I talked to about coming to America did not seem flattered by the inducements I held out. As a rule they know very little besides their business and their home gossip. One of my lodgings, not more than a mile from St. Paul's, saw a picture of the cathedral which I had bought, and she not only did not recognize it, but had never heard of it until I told her. She said she had only lived in London a few years and was not acquanited all over. In the same house they burned manufactured gas in the grates, as we use the natual variety in America, and not being posted, I asked the house girl where it came from.
"Out of the meter, miss," said she, and that was all she did say.
Buffal Bill is the biggest man in Engalnd at the present writing, and the boys on the street chase him around just as they do in America. He is also the companion of the high and might, and, if I am a judge of faces, B. B. is as square a man as the best of them. The queen, the prince, and all the fmaily have been out to see the Wild West show, and they have publicly expressed thier appreciation of it. This business of the queen and prince going to shows, opening exhibitions, etc., etc., has given the Radical papers a fine change to make sarcastic remarks with reference to the royal family as excellent advertising mediums. They are quite riht, too, I thik, and after I had read, day after day, of the queen opening this thing, the prince that, the princess the other, and another prince or princess something else, I cam to the conclusion that the toyal family should be called the national corkscrew, and hung up in a public place easy of access and no charge for corkage.
Dickey reminds me at this point that it is time to give the people a rest and go out with her to buy a pair of gloves. Gloves are so cheap in London woy wany yo buy a pair every day just because they are cheap.
"Have you written up any of the sights?" said she.
"A good many," saud I.
"The tower, museums, palaces, bridges, and all that?" said she.
"Not one," said I.
"Why not?" said she, in surprise.
"They are guide book sights," said I, "and I am not in the guide book line."
"Oh!" said she, turning up and already somewhat retrouses nasal organ; "you want to e considered a great original, do you? Well, go on; I am seeing it all as we go along, and I don't want to read you letters."
"You don't have to," said I, and quit.
MARY JANE.
114
MEN.
Mr. G. F. Buckle, the new editor of the London Times, was appointed in 1884. He has buckled to with good effect. Next to gallant Unser Fritz, Lord Buffalo Bill of the Wild West, was the handsomest looking horseman in London at the Jubilee. Dr. Anderson Critchett, of London, must be getting rich. He recently declined a fee of $7,000 ($35,000) to go and feel a native Prince of India's pulse. Lieutenant-Governor Macdonald, of Michi-gan was not born rich, but he has a neat lit-tle plum of $40,000 from a mining speck of $350 The Macdonalds are Scotch. Dentists would have a hard time of it in this country if all the men were like Mr. Al-exander, of Anthens, Ca, who had his first tooth pulled the other day at eighty-two.
115
MILLIONS OF BUFFALOES.
Recollectiong of the Time When Buffaloes Darkened the Western Plains.
A Herd of the Animals That Covered One Hundred Miles of Prairie.
Bones of Over Six Millions of Buffaloes Gathered by One Railroad.
GREAT BEND. Kan. July 2. Special Correspondence. -During Kendall's Santa Fe expedition in 1841 the party one evening while in camp on the bankd of the Arkansas, about three miles for the city in which this letter is written, were visited by an old trapper, and a discussion arose in rotation to the immense number of buffaloes that at that moment were in sight and grazing in the "bottom" of the "Big Bend" the river makes at this point, Kendall asked his guest:
"How many buffaloes did you ever see at one time?"
"Can't say, exactly; probably between two and three million," replied the old trapper with a cool, matter-of-fact indifference, as much as to say that we was keeping as near the truth as possible.
The writer has passed the last thirty years of his life west of Missouri, and does not declare that he has seen two or three millions of buffaloes at one time, but he has stood upon a high rill of the prairie frequently, where there was neither tree nor bush to obstruct the vision in any direction, and has seen these animals darkening the plains at every hand. And once, in the winter of 1867, I rode with a party of friends for four days through one continuos herd. It is a simple calculation - our journey averaging thirty miles per day, with a perspective whose radius was constantly a length of ten miles - and with only six animals to the square acre, and their number was even greater - that the hed contained over a million buffaloes.
At that time, as every old plainsman knows, there were more and larger herd in "Nothern Texas" than anywhere else on the Western prairies, becuase their then most poewrful enemies, the Indians, did not range so low down on account of the whites.
In the winter campaign against the Cheyennes, Klowas, and Arrapahoec, in 1868. I have frequently dismounted my cavalry to fire at the leaders of immense herds, numbering tens of thousands, to prevent them from
RUNNING OVER THE SUPPLY TRAIN
as they madly rushed by, making the very earth tremble.
General A. T. Smith has often told me that when he was a young officer crossing the plains - years before my time - the buffalo were so numerous they were compelled to use their howitzers at times to turn them from the trail.
It seems impossible, espeically to any one who, only twenty-fiver years ago, saw them on their natural pastures, apparently as numberless as the sands on the sea shore, that they could ever be destroyed, but when I look back only a lottle more than a decade and remember that right here, where I pen this letter, how they roamed in such numbers, and now how far away are the few hundred which remain, I am compelled to accept the sad fiat that in a very short period they will take their place with the dodo and freat auk, stuffed, and in a glass case in the halls of our museums, munuments of an extinct genus, annihilated by the wantonness of man.
Twelve or fifteen years since Congress made an attempt to preseve the buffalo, but it proved abortive because the law was not specific enough, and was a "dead letter" by its own insufficiency. If the railroads and express companies had been forbidden, under severe penalties, to transport hids, the wholesale slaughter that was inaugurated with the advent of the locomotive on the palins might have been prevented; but thousands entered the field then as butchers for the sake of the robes which the age demanded.
The Hon. William F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill"), who is not hobnobbing with roualty on the other side of the water, gained his world knwn sobriquet for his carnage among these monarch of the prairies in 1869.
Charlie Rath, one of our best citizens, prince of good fellows, and alarge band account to his credits today, can number the hids he has procured by the hundred thousand, for several years successively.
I have purchased many fine silk-ribe, smoke-tanned and beaded from the Indians in early days for half a loaf of bread or a pound of sugar; now $50 in cash would not procure me such a magnificent article - for it does not exist.
Last Nobermber an old plainsmand - a rare specimen of the genus home now - an expert hunger, and a friend of a quarter of a centry, started from the town of Omarron, on the Arkansas, on a buffalo hunt. I happened to be there, and offered him $20 to bring me
TWO GREEN HIDES OF ANY KIND.
I met him on his return six weeks afterward. he had been far south to the once famous haunt of the animals, but killed none - or, as he expressed it : "I never saw hide or hair of one."
To give an idea of the unpardonalbe slaughter of the buffalo from 1872 to the end of the succeding nine years, at which time they disappeaed from the Kansas plains, the following facts may be considered sufficiently explicit:
Mr. Woodruff, agent for an Eastern sugar refingery, paid out during the years above specificed to the early homesteaders of the "Upper Arkansas Valley" $2,500,000 for bones gathered on the prairie withing a distance of as much as fifty miles from the railroad.
When it is considered that it required twenty bleached carcasses to make a ton - the average price of which was $8 - an estimate can easily be made of the number of animals the large sum first quoted represent in round numbers 6,250,000, and this only on one line of railroad.
I have seen the rack of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe piled up on both sides with buffal bones for a distance of fifteen miles at a stretch.
These "bald blear" skeletons of the desert were the salvation of the primitive occupants of the rich and properous counties of the Kansas today. Then the whole region ws the "theater of the tornado and the race-course of the winds;" the locusts' habitas and the debatable ground of the continent. But for that demand of chemistry for animal charcoal in the purification of the product of the case our pioneers would have been driven away by the very sterility of their surroundings.
With the extinction of the desiccated remains of these once famous sovereigns of the plains, the phenomenal mutations of climate began, and the wilderness was redeemed - man subordinated pasture to his demands- and the "desert blossomed as the rose."
The first authentic record we have of the American buffalo-or, properly, bison - is found in the itinerary of the famous Spaniard Coronado of his
MARCH ACROSS THE PLAINS
of Colorado and Kansas, only forty-eight years after the discovery of America, by his historian Castenaco.
He says: "As Cicuyo, one of the indians told them of cows, and showed the picture of one painted on his body."
(They, the Spaniards, always wrote of the buffal as vacas (cows).]
Castenado says, in referring to this painted picture of the cow:
"We would never have guess it from seeing the skings of these animals, for they are covered with a frizzled hair which resembles wool."
The following quaint descriotion is given by Castenado of the Great Plains, over which the exhausted Spaniards wandered after the treachery of their guide, El Turco:
"All that way of plains are as full of crooked-back oxen as the mountain serrens in Spain is of sheep, but there is no such people as keep those cattle.
"The men clothe themselves with leather, and the women, which are esteemed for their long locks, cover their heads with the same.
"They have no bread of any kind of grain, as they say, which I accounted a very great matter.
"Their chief food is flesh and that often times they eat raw, either of custom or for lack of wood. They east the fat as they take it out of the ox, and drink the blood hot, and do not die withat, as Empecdocies and others affirmed."
The writer of this has seen the Cheyennes eat tje jpt amd quivering liver and fat torn from a freshly killed antelope when out hunting with them.
Castenado continues: "These oxen are of the bigness and color of our bulls, but their bones are not so great. They have a great bunch upon their fore shoulder, and more hair on the fore part than on the hinder part, and its like wool. They have, as it were, an horse mane upon the backbone, and much hair and very long from their knees downward.
"They have great tufts of hair handing down their foreheads, and it seemeth they have beards because of the great store of hair hanging down at their chins and throats.
"The males have very long tails, and a great knob or flock at the end, so that in some respects they resemble the lion, and in some other the camel.
"They push with their horns, they run, they overtake and kill an horse when they are in their rage and ager.
"Finally, it is a foul fierce beaste of countenance and form of body.
"The horses fled from them, either becuase of their deformed shape, or else becuase they have never seen them.
"Their masters have no other riches nor substance: of them they eat, they drink, they apparel, they shoe themselves and of their hides they make many things, as houses, shoes, apparl, and ropes; of their bones, they make bodkins; of their sinews and hair, thread; of their horns, mawes, and bladders vessels; of their dung, fire, and of their calves skins budgets wherein they draw and keep water. To be short, they make as many things of them as they have need of, or as many as suffice them in the use of this life."
Thus Castenado tells us, as quaintly translated in the Enlgish of the period (Hakiuyus's Voyages, vol. iii. London, 1600). how:
Came the restless Coronado
To the open Kansas Plain:"
and the Spaniard's impressions of the buffalo, whose utilitarian character contuned with the animal until his extinction in the nineteenth century.
From other authentic records it appears that the habitat of the buffalo at the date of the invasion of the "new world" by Europeans, extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the isthmus to Hudson's Bay.
What a sad retrospect. In a little less than four hundred years man has accomplished what would have required, without his effort, and acon of geological change.
TA-TO-KA.