Bad Lands

“ As he plunged into books to extract from them whatever facts or philosophy they might hold which he needed to enrich his personality and his usefulness, so he plunged into the life of the Bad Lands seeking to comprehend the emotions and the mental processes, the personalities and the social conditions that made it what it was. With a warm humanity on which the shackles of social prejudice already hung loose, he moved with open eyes and an open heart among the men and women whom the winds of chance had blown together in the valley of the Little Missouri. ”

“ None but a crazy despot, some moonstruck Oriental such as the world has known, striving to impress his dreams upon a recalcitrant nature. No facilities for trade or commerce, no scenic beauty of landscape, no harbour, no defence against enemies, no drinking water, no mineral wealth, no food-supplying hinterland, no navigable river--a dangerous river, indeed, a perpetual menace to the place--every drawback, or nearly so, which a town may conceivably possess, and all of them huddled into a fatally unhealthy environment, compressed in a girdle of fire and poison. ”

“ This stratum was built entirely of men who had at one time been incriminated in shady dealings of one sort and another. It included lawbreakers from every part of the world, men who had fled first of all to the shelter of the mountain desert and who had lived there until their past was even forgotten in the lands from which they came. ”

“ The vile air of the low lands will float over into and contaminate the pure air of the guarded pleasure gardens, and the evil germs will carry disease, crime and death, no matter how many fountains and white statutes and posies you may set up between. Envy, Discontent and Revenge will break through the walls and meet Oppression, Insolence and Injustice, and they will tear and rend each other. They always have and always will. ”

“ These mounds had something to do with the evil world down there—they were probably ancient closed-up passages to it, for once the Old Ones below had had colonies on the surface and had traded with men everywhere, even in the lands that had sunk under the big waters. It was when those lands had sunk that the Old Ones closed themselves up below and refused to deal with surface people. ”

“ The rugged defiles and deep valleys of this vast chain form sheltering places for restless and ferocious bands of savages, many of them the remnants of tribes once inhabitants of the prairies, but broken up by war and violence, and who carry into their mountain haunts the fierce passions and reckless habits of desperadoes.
Such is the nature of this immense wilderness of the far West; which apparently defies cultivation, and the habitation of civilized life. ”

“ Through his half-bewildered brain flashed the accounts given by the coast tribes, members of which he had so frequently interviewed concerning this unknown land, one and all of whom had more or less to say in regard to a strange people, terrible fighters, mighty hunters, one burning glance from whose eyes carried death and decay unto all who were foolhardy enough even to attempt to pass those mighty barriers, built up by a beneficent nature. Only for that nearly impassable wall, the entire earth would be overrun and dominated by these monsters in human guise. ”

“ Immured behind their walls of sandstone, they have lived ignorantly—and fiercely.
Their peaks are heaped against the skies, and their fields are tilled with the hoe when mules and plows might fall down to destruction. With nature itself they pursue a constant and desperate quarrel for subsistence, and through generations of battle they have grown morose and sullen and vengeful and have lost all sense of life's humor. ”

“ Even although they had now overpassed that dreary region covered with coarse gravel, black flints, and drifting sand, "the great and terrible wilderness," what hope was there that northward they should reach a land of olives, vineyards, and flowing streams? The report of the spies would answer this question.
Now in like manner the future state of existence may seem dim and unreal, scarcely credible, to many. Our life is like a series of marches hither and thither through the desert. Neither as individuals nor as communities do we seem to approach any state of blessedness and rest. ”

“ Discord and ill will had sown their seeds even in that secluded colony of the Mississippi swamp, or rather the seed which had been long sown had sprung up, and ripened its evil crop, and those expectations which had filled the hearts of the better sort with cheerful confidence, and for which they had quitted their native land and everything dear, had there dissolved away into an evil, painful dream, and yonder stood the ruins, cold and bleak, staring towards Heaven, as though they would testify to the hateful, evil disposition of mankind. ”

“ And so, year after year, the misery grows, and every great city has on its womb a cancer; sapping its vitality, poisoning its life-blood. Every great city is breeding in its slums a race which is reverting through the savage to the brute—a brute more dangerous in that degraded humanity has possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast. ”

“ Wagging his grey beard, he talks and talks, until I begin to think that he must be an evil wizard, and master of this remote, barren, swampy, ravine-pitted region—that he it is who originally planted the town in this uncomfortable, clayey hollow, and has thrown the houses into heaps, and entangled the streets, and wantonly created the town's unaccountably rude and rough and deadly existence, and addled men's brains with disconnected nonsense, and consumed their hearts with a fear of life. ”

“ Now if man is so blinded in his folly as to go on, ages on ages, doing harm chiefly to himself, there is the same reason to think that he has wrought his evil here as in the countries you call so old. Look about you, man; where are the multitudes that once peopled these prairies; the kings and the palaces; the riches and the mightinesses of this desert?"
"Where are the monuments that would prove the truth of so vague a theory?" ”

“ Mad with the lust of Gold, they burrow in the beds of streams, tear and claw at mountain-gulch and slope. Tented towns rise like night-grown fungi, and wither away, to spring again into existence, lawless, in a land where law is not, in a land that no man owns. Through days that are full of sweating toil and nights that cover vigils of lust and death, the ferment of hell grows in the blood of human beings who have left their God with their country. ”

“ It was a grim picture of depravity and desolation, the environment dull, gloomy, forlorn; all that was worthy the eye or thought being the pulsing human element. All about extended the barren plains, except where on one side a ravine cut through an overhanging ridge. From the seething street one could look up to the summit, and see there the graves of the many who had died deaths of violence, and been borne thither in “their boots.” ”

“ Reasons inexplicable to humanity held them to the ancient city and their doom. And as that once rich and mighty land sank deeper and deeper into the black mire of the sunless jungle, so into the chaos of squalling jungle life sank the people of the city. ”

“ For they lead through regions that lie far above the ordinary haunts of the devil, and of the pestilence that walks in darkness. True, there are innumerable places where the careless step will be the last step; and a rock falling from the cliffs may crush without warning like lightning from the sky; but what then! Accidents in the mountains are less common than in the lowlands, and these mountain mansions are decent, delightful, even divine, places to die in, compared with the doleful chambers of civilization. Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. ”

“ Destruction and the destructive spirit may prepare the way for new things under the sun, new forms of life. As mighty glaciers hollow out valleys and in time leave meadows and woods and brooks in their track, so frightful human energies—what we commonly sum up as evil (das Böse) —may be cyclopean architects and road-builders of humanity. ”

“ The Dark Continent can show no lower depth of degradation than that sounded by the dwellers of the dark alleys in Cherry Hill. There isn't a vice missing in that quarter. Every sin in the Decalogue flourishes in that feeder of penitentiaries and prisons. And even as its moral foulness permeates and poisons the veins of our social life so the malarial filth with which the locality reeks must sooner or later spread disease and death. ”

“ They who had been winged gods became pinioned demons, with all that remained of their ancestors’ vast knowledge distorted and perverted and twisted into ghastly paths. As they had risen higher than mankind might dream, so they sank lower than man’s maddest nightmares reach. They died fast, by cannibalism, and horrible feuds fought out in the murk of the midnight jungle. And at last among the lichen-grown ruins of their city only a single shape lurked, a stunted abhorrent perversion of nature. ”

“ But when the savage hunters of the north became too numerous to subsist on their deer and fish, and too warlike to dread the conflict with troops more regularly armed, they rushed down, like a cataract, on their enfeebled and voluptuous neighbours; destroyed the monuments of art, and seemed, for a time, to change the very face of nature. Yet dreadful as were the devastations of this flood, let forth by divine vengeance to punish and to renovate, it had its use in sweeping away the hoarded mass of corruption, with which the dregs of mankind had polluted the earth. ”

“ When an epidemic is raging on the Gold Coast of West Africa, the people will sometimes turn out, armed with clubs and torches, to drive the evil spirits away. At a given signal the whole population begin with frightful yells to beat in every corner of the houses, then rush like mad into the streets waving torches and striking frantically in the empty air. ”

“ For, not far removed from the region of our human life is another region where float the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower magic. ”

“ Whole forests are laid low; houses, villages, and towns are swept into ruin; men, women, and children lie dead beneath the stone and timber that sheltered them; the pride and labour of years are destroyed in a moment, and terror and desolation stalk the land. ”

“ In contrast to them, a discontinuous or scattered location characterizes the sparse distribution of primitive hunting and pastoral tribes; or the shattered fragments of a conquered people, whose territory has been honeycombed by the land appropriation of the victors; or a declining, moribund people, who, owing to bad government, poor economic methods, and excessive competition in the struggle for existence, have shrunk to mere patches. ”

“ We are not concerned with repeating thrilling tales, bloody almost beyond belief, and indicative of an incomprehensible depravity in human nature, so much as we are with the causes and effects of this wild civilization which raged here quite alone in the midst of one of the wildest of the western mountain regions. It will best serve our purpose to retain in mind the twofold character of this population, and to remember that the frontier caught to itself not only ruffians and desperadoes, men undaunted by any risk, but also men possessed of a yet steadier personal courage and hardihood. ”

“ Every time I shut my eyes I see all those awful things they told about: cities in ruins, and dead people lying around in piles, and the yellow fevah camps, and floods and fiah. It is a dreadful world, Betty. No one knows what awful thing is goin' to happen next. ”

“ Ruins in a land are, like most of the signs of decay in the human form, sad evidences of abuses and passions, which have hastened the inroads of time. These provinces are like yourself, my Gertrude, in their freshness and their youth, and, comparatively, in their innocence also. ”

“ Just as in Darkest Africa it is only a part of the evil and misery that comes from the superior race who invade the forest to enslave and massacre its miserable inhabitants, so with us, much of the misery of those whose lot we are considering arises from their own habits. Drunkenness and all manner of uncleanness, moral and physical, abound. Have you ever watched by the bedside of a man in delirium tremens? ”

“ It is so vile and terrible, alas, so horrible, that few would credit it. The few imperfect glimpses of life in that region which we have already given are sad enough and painful enough, but they only hint at the real truth. ”

“ In fact, "times were bad enough" among the men so suddenly thrown upon their own resources among the mountains, at a time when that little creature, which had made mountain life tolerable, or possible, was fast being exterminated. ”

“ It is true there are dark streaks in western life, as well as light ones, as where in human society exists the one without the other; but, in their relation, the future historian of the wilds should be careful to distinguish between the actual settler and the border harpy. The acts of this latter class have often thrilled the refined mind with horror, and brought condemnation upon the pioneer, while a wide distinction exists between the two characters. ”

“ Everywhere in the remotest lands and provinces, in towns, villages, settlements, and unapproachable wildernesses, the awful war of revenge and retaliation raised its flaming head. The lower the people had fallen before, the higher they raised their heads now ”