I Mention These Little Incidents To
Indicate The Habit Of Respectful Courtesy To Women Which Prevails
In That Region.
These men might have been excused for speaking
in a somewhat free-and-easy tone to a lady riding alone, and in
an unwonted fashion.
Womanly dignity and manly respect for women
are the salt of society in this wild West.
My horse was so excitable that I avoided the center of Truckee,
and skulked through a collection of Chinamen's shanties to the
stable, where a prodigious roan horse, standing seventeen hands
high, was produced for my ride to the Donner Lake. I asked the
owner, who was as interested in my enjoying myself as a West
Highlander might have been, if there were not ruffians about who
might make an evening ride dangerous. A story was current of a
man having ridden through Truckee two evenings before with a
chopped-up human body in a sack behind the saddle, and hosts of
stories of ruffianism are located there, rightly or wrongly.
This man said, "There's a bad breed of ruffians, but the ugliest
among them all won't touch you. There's nothing Western folk
admire so much as pluck in a woman." I had to get on a barrel
before I could reach the stirrup, and when I was mounted my feet
only came half-way down the horse's sides. I felt like a fly on
him. The road at first lay through a valley without a river, but
some swampishness nourished some rank swamp grass, the first
GREEN grass I have seen in America; and the pines, with their red
stems, looked beautiful rising out of it.
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