But as the boats are made for Americans, and as
Americans like hot air, I do not put it forward with any idea that
a change ought to be effected.
My second complaint is equally
unreasonable, and is quite as incapable of a remedy as the first.
Nine-tenths of the travelers carry children with them. They are
not tourists engaged on pleasure excursions, but men and women
intent on the business of life. They are moving up and down
looking for fortune and in search of new homes. Of course they
carry with them all their household goods. Do not let any critic
say that I grudge these young travelers their right to locomotion.
Neither their right to locomotion is grudged by me, nor any of
those privileges which are accorded in America to the rising
generation. The habits of their country and the choice of their
parents give to them full dominion over all hours and over all
places, and it would ill become a foreigner to make such habits and
such choice a ground of serious complaint. But, nevertheless, the
uncontrolled energies of twenty children round one's legs do not
convey comfort or happiness, when the passing events are producing
noise and storm rather than peace and sunshine. I must protest
that American babies are an unhappy race. They eat and drink just
as they please; they are never punished; they are never banished,
snubbed, and kept in the background as children are kept with us,
and yet they are wretched and uncomfortable. My heart has bled for
them as I have heard them squalling by the hour together in agonies
of discontent and dyspepsia. Can it be, I wonder, that children
are happier when they are made to obey orders, and are sent to bed
at six o'clock, than when allowed to regulate their own conduct;
that bread and milk are more favorable to laughter and soft,
childish ways than beef-steaks and pickles three times a day; that
an occasional whipping, even, will conduce to rosy cheeks? It is
an idea which I should never dare to broach to an American mother;
but I must confess that, after my travels on the Western Continent,
my opinions have a tendency in that direction. Beef-steaks and
pickles certainly produce smart little men and women. Let that be
taken for granted. But rosy laughter and winning, childish ways
are, I fancy, the produce of bread and milk. But there was a third
reason why traveling on these boats was not so pleasant as I had
expected. I could not get my fellow-travelers to talk to me. It
must be understood that our fellow-travelers were not generally of
that class which we Englishmen, in our pride, designate as
gentlemen and ladies. They were people, as I have said, in search
of new homes and new fortunes. But I protest that as such they
would have been, in those parts, much more agreeable as companions
to me than any gentlemen or any ladies, if only they would have
talked to me. I do not accuse them of any incivility. If
addressed, they answered me. If application was made by me for any
special information, trouble was taken to give it me. But I found
no aptitude, no wish for conversation - nay, even a disinclination
to converse. In the Western States I do not think that I was ever
addressed first by an American sitting next to me at table.
Indeed, I never held any conversation at a public table in the
West. I have sat in the same room with men for hours, and have not
had a word spoken to me. I have done my very best to break through
this ice, and have always failed. A Western American man is not a
talking man. He will sit for hours over a stove, with a cigar in
his mouth and his hat over his eyes, chewing the cud of reflection.
A dozen will sit together in the same way, and there shall not be a
dozen words spoken between them in an hour. With the women one's
chance of conversation is still worse. It seemed as though the
cares of the world had been too much for them, and that all talking
excepting as to business - demands, for instance, on the servants
for pickles for their children - had gone by the board. They were
generally hard, dry, and melancholy. I am speaking, of course, of
aged females - from five and twenty, perhaps, to thirty - who had
long since given up the amusements and levities of life. I very
soon abandoned any attempt at drawing a word from these ancient
mothers of families; but not the less did I ponder in my mind over
the circumstances of their lives. Had things gone with them so
sadly - was the struggle for independence so hard - that all the
softness of existence had been trodden out of them? In the cities,
too, it was much the same. It seemed to me that a future mother of
a family, in those parts, had left all laughter behind her when she
put out her finger for the wedding ring.
For these reasons I must say that life on board these steamboats
was not as pleasant as I had hoped to find it; but for our
discomfort in this respect we found great atonement in the scenery
through which we passed. I protest that of all the river scenery
that I know that of the Upper Mississippi is by far the finest and
the most continued. One thinks, of course, of the Rhine; but,
according to my idea of beauty, the Rhine is nothing to the Upper
Mississippi. For miles upon miles - for hundreds of miles - the
course of the river runs through low hills, which are there called
bluffs. These bluffs rise in every imaginable form, looking
sometimes like large, straggling, unwieldy castles, and then
throwing themselves into sloping lawns which stretch back away from
the river till the eye is lost in their twists and turnings.
Landscape beauty, as I take it, consists mainly in four attributes -
in water; in broken land; in scattered timber, timber scattered as
opposed to continuous forest timber; and in the accident of color.
In all these particulars the banks of the Upper Mississippi can
hardly be beaten.
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