Overland journey

“ I see you now, away beyond the seas, beyond the lands where the sun goes down in the Pacific like some great ship of fire, resting still on the green hills, watching your herds, waiting
"Where rolls the Oregon,
And hears no sound save its own dashing."
Nearly a quarter of a century ago you took me the long and lonesome half-year's journey across the mighty continent, wild, and rent, and broken up, and sown with sand and ashes, viii and crossed by tumbling, wooded rivers that ran as if glad to get away, fresh and strange and new as if but half-fashioned from the hand of God. ”

“ The great continental journey to and fro, from ocean to ocean, across barren deserts, through dangerous waterways, over snow-clad mountains, among savage and unknown tribes, had been accomplished with a success unparalleled in the world of modern adventure and exploration. ”

“ But in every such trip one may discover a deeply hidden kernel of the voyages of the old Vikings. Every journey is a tour of conquest. Here at home we have found our level; our neighbours know us and have passed their irrevocable judgment on our person. To travel means to conquer the world anew, to make oneself respected and esteemed. Every new touring acquaintance must stand for a new conquest. ”

“ But unlike the captains and conquerors of the South, the explorers have {3} come and gone and left behind no trace of their passage. Their hopes of a land of gold, their vision of a new sea-way round the world, are among the forgotten dreams of the past. Robbed of its empty secret, the North still stretches silent and untenanted with nothing but the splendid record of human courage to illuminate its annals. ”

“ But, to make the narrative of my own journeys more intelligible, and to explain the motives for making them, it is necessary that I should briefly sketch the expeditions undertaken for the purpose of ascertaining the nature of the vast regions intervening between Western and the other Australian colonies, and determining the possibility of opening up direct overland communication. ”

“ The oversea voyage possesses a greater appeal to the imagination. Long distances, variation of the climes, storm and high ocean seas—a burthen of goods brought from a far country, all contribute to make an impression that the tale of a coasting voyage could not produce. Familiarity, perhaps, has robbed the short-carriers' sea-trip of what shreds of romance existed. In tide and out, the smaller vessels have grown to the sight as almost part of the familiar quays and wharves they frequent. ”

“ The men who went out to the North-west as voyageurs and servants in the employment of the rival companies from Canada and from Scotland hardly ever returned to their native lands. The wild roving life in the great prairie or the trackless pine forest, the vast solitudes of inland lakes and rivers, the chase, and the camp-fire had too much of excitement in them to allow the voyageur to return again to the narrow limits of civilization. ”

“ A squad of emigrants, just landed on the wharf and waiting to be transferred to the emigrant-train for another week's voyage by land to the ends of the continent, is one of the most pathetic sights in this world, especially if they are foreign to our speech and dress and modes of life. ”

“ Of travellers we meet but few, generally bullock-train parties, with soldiers, &c., return dâks, and an occasional old Mussulman, or other native, taking advantage of the early morning for his journey, and wrapped and swaddled up as if afraid of being congealed by the coolness of the morning air.
Every day’s journey leaves one more and more at a loss to discover the sources of the wealth of this enormous country. The soil, for miles and miles a dead flat, is now barren as a desert, and we meet hardly a sign of active traffic. ”

“ WHAT, THEN, WAS THE FIRST TRANSPORTATION OF THE WEST?
When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was the Alleghanies, how then did the West-bound travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation?
The answer would seem easy. They traveled in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters. ”

“ A journey over sea is a very different thing now to what it was when a voyage to Australia consumed more than six months, when emigrants were crowded by hundreds into sailing ships, and scenes of abominable sin and brutality were the normal incidents of the passage. ”

“ Such touches of border-life give a Far Western train a character of its own that is by no means unpleasant. You feel something as you did when you entered the National Conservatory at Washington, breathed the scented air of the home-made tropic and saw the great-leafed palms, and waited a minute for an elephant to come out. ”

“ By that time you will have grown to fifty millions, and will have subdued and settled those vast western regions, which now in the richness of their solitudes, broken only by the panting of the engine as it passes once a day over some new prairie line, startles the traveller from the Old World. ”

“ The Phoenicians coasting from harbour to harbour through the Mediterranean; the Romans marching from camp to camp, from country to country; the Jutes venturing in their frail craft into the stormy northern seas, making voyages a little longer and more daring every time, until they reached England; the captains of Prince Henry of Portugal feeling their way from voyage to voyage down the coast of Africa—there are no bold flights into the incredible here, but patient and business-like progress from one stepping-stone to another. ”

“ To him, a railway journey, short or long, appears an infinitely more terrible and risky undertaking than a voyage half round the globe; and he will enumerate the various dangers to which a landsman is exposed as vastly in excess of those which may happen to the mariner.
Life on board an emigrant-ship would, it might be thought, be somewhat dull and monotonous. As a matter of fact, it is scarcely ever found to be so. ”

“ We have no frontier now, we are told,—except a broken fragment, it may be, here and there in some barren corner of the western lands, where some inhospitable mountain still shoulders us out, or where men are still lacking to break the baked surface of the plains and occupy them in the very teeth of hostile nature. But at first it was all frontier,—a mere strip of settlements stretched precariously upon the sea-edge of the wilds: an untouched continent in front of them, and behind them an unfrequented sea that almost never showed so much as the momentary gleam of a sail. ”

“ After this expedition I thought of nothing but proceeding on my journey, and with that design I let the Red-men return home, and joined myself to those who inhabited more westward on the coast, with whom I travelled along the shore of the Great Water, which bends directly betwixt the north and the sun-setting. When I arrived at the villages of my fellow-travellers, where I found the days very long, and the nights very short, I was advised by the old men to give over all thoughts of continuing my journey. ”

“ It takes the fresh-faced young men down past the inner harbour to where lie the tall ships waiting. They and their cargo of exuberance, of hope, of energy, of thirst for the bubble adventure, the rainbow romance, sail away to where these wares have a market. And the quiet men glide away to the North. ”

“ From Central Africa, Iceland and Singapore, from New York, Harburg 87 and Lithuania, from Mauritius, Rio and Cape Town, from London and Aberdeen, and, seemingly, all the cities of the world, we’d drifted towards this restless speck now wallowing in the run of a South Atlantic sea, as a witness that the call of adventure can never overpass the widest limits of the world. ”

“ No one who has ever known the joy of hunting impressions of strange peoples and strange lands in the out-of-the-way corners of the world can ever feel quite free again, for he hears always a compelling voice that "calls him night and day" to go forth on the chase once more. Years ago, for a beginning, I pursued impressions and experiences in the Far West on the frontier,—there was a frontier then. ”

“ Once over the “portage,” and their canoes safely launched, nothing stood between them and the Atlantic Ocean. It is these portage paths for which we shall look as we proceed westward. As we pass, one by one, these slight roadways across the backbone of the continent, whether they be miles in length or only rods, they must speak to us as almost nothing else can, today, of the thousand dreams of conquest entertained by the first Europeans who traversed them, of the thousand hopes that were rising of a New France richer and more glorious than the old. ”

“ It fills the spirit with weariness to think of another nation following the old path, without thought or imagination of other roads leading to new and more beautiful life. Every now and then, when the world was still vast and full of undiscovered wonders, some adventurers would leave the harbor, and steer their galleys past the known coast and the familiar cities and over unraveled seas, seeking some new land where life might be freer and ampler than that they had known. ”

“ Our having opened an intercourse with them, is the first step toward their improvement. Who knows, but that our late voyages may be the means appointed by Providence, of spreading, in due time, the blessings of civilization amongst the numerous tribes of the South Pacific Ocean ”

“ Our endeavours to penetrate to the westward were so anxiously conducted, as to constitute a perfect voyage of discovery, and no navigator, in the endeavour to explore regions known only by conjecture, could have been kept in more watchful expectation than we were, or have suffered more disappointment than we now experienced. ”

“ Incredible things are brought every day to America in the luggage of emigrants—things often most cumbrous to carry and utterly useless in the new home. Families that went from our seaboard to the West a century ago, through an almost impenetrable wilderness, carried with them all their domestic pots and pans—even those, I should be willing to wager, that needed the tinker. I remember very well the starting of an expedition from my native town of Cambridge in 1831, for Oregon, under the lead of a captain of great energy and resource. ”

“ The voyage came to an end, much like other voyages to the home-land, the Mecca of Australian-born colonists, the ancestral isle—the sacred soil, hallowed by a thousand traditions with which all are chiefly familiar from early childhood, but on which not all are privileged to tread. ”

“ Little indeed are the public aware of the difficulties and responsibilities attached to the command of an expedition of exploration;—the incessant toil, the sleepless hours, the anxious thoughts that necessarily fall to the share of the leader of a party under circumstances of difficulty or danger, are but imperfectly understood and less appreciated by the world at large. ”

“ With what breathless eagerness will the first boat be watched careering through the foam, which at times separates, as a veil, the stream from the ocean! Intent as we, poor exiles, are upon every movement that affects the progress of operations, languishing for home, as well as interested in the welfare of the colony, we gaze earnestly on each convoy of waggons wending its slow, uncertain way up the hill “hard by,” on its way to the front. On the 22nd of March, we paused in our evening walk to observe the train of twenty-six waggons, en route for the Buffalo mouth. ”

“ Along these devious and dangerous routes, by junks, by strange Oriental craft, by river-boats, by caravans of camels, trains of mules, in wagons, on horses, or on human shoulders, the products of the East were brought within reach of the merchants of the West. ”

“ Railroads cheapened transport and annihilated distance. The ocean lost its terrors and became an easy and secure highway, and England, with her boundless resources, became more than ever the ocean’s lord. ”

“ The emigrant, the traveller, the sailor, all turn their thoughts homeward as the day approaches, and lament that their steps cannot follow their desires. Under sunny skies, amid the balmy gales and luscious fruits of the tropics, the wanderer yearns to cross the familiar threshold, and our bleak North in her wintry robe is dearer than Italy or the Indies. ”

“ I have seen too many evidences of wealth, natural and acquired, to doubt of the greatness of the future which is opening in the Far West to the citizens of the Republic; but I also have witnessed, even from the windows of a railway train, sufficient to make me aware of the great struggles which must be made by pioneers, and by the early colonists and settlers in 223 these distant regions, before the conditions of civilised life be fulfilled. ”

“ Such were the herculean difficulties of travel that it was commonly said, despite the dangers of life in the unconquered land, if pioneers could live to get into the West, nothing could, thereafter, daunt them. ”

“ Indeed, what is there not there,—which should make an Arctic winter endurable,—make a long night into day,—or while long days away?
The ship is stanch and sound. The "last voyage" which we have described will not, let us hope, be the last voyage of her career. But wherever she goes, under the English flag or under our own, she will scarcely ever crowd more adventure into one cruise than into that which sealed the discovery of the Northwest Passage; which gave new lands to England, nearest to the pole of all she has; which spent more than a year, no man knows where, self-governed and unguided ”

“ The East is patient, but even the East has its limits. Presently we began to be interviewed by dark men—camel-drivers and the like—who had a way of flinging up their hands, while from behind came a rising tide of what I assumed to be imprecation. ”