Coast to Coast (13 page)

T
hus we drove out of the South and into the West; from Louisiana into Texas; from one myth, as the cynics say, into another. The Old West (as we know it from the television screen) has long been dead, killed by the cars and the fencing of the open prairie; but often as we travelled through this great chunk of the American continent, from the Gulf to Montana, we detected a lingering spirit of frontier freedom, stronger in some parts than in others, sometimes spurious, sometimes artificially cherished, but still potent and agreeable, like a haunting echo of old jovial melodies, or a last wisp of smoke swirling around a deserted station. Taos, New Mexico (let us say) is a different world from Cheyenne, Wyoming; the one sunbaked and antique, colourful with Indians and Spaniards, the other a bold cow-capital, with memories of the famous plainsmen and buffalo hunters. But in both towns, and in a thousand others in the wide States of the West, there is still a feeling of deep-rooted individualism that is a relic, like the citizen of Cranbury and Mr. Price in Natchez, of the days of the old America.

The unifying factor of the West is space, and from the beginning communications were the foundation of its society. In the pioneer days parts of Nevada were supplied entirely by horseback over the Sierra Nevada. The passes were rugged. In winter they were so brutal that one group of pioneer travellers, finding themselves stranded and foodless on the Donner Pass, cast lots and ate each other. At Genoa, in Nevada, I visited the grave of “Snowshoes” Thompson, a heroic messenger who kept such isolated western stations supplied through many a harsh winter, moving alone with heavy loads over the snow-blocked passes. His grave, its inscription blessed with an endearing misspelling, is surmounted by crossed skis; nearby is an old barn where the most celebrated of western newspapers, the
Territorial
Enterprise‚
had its origins, sometimes subsisting entirely on the quota of paper brought by Thompson over the mountains from California. In the mountains above Salt Lake City you may still see the track beaten by the flying horses of the Pony Express, during their breakneck progression with the mails from Missouri to California. (In this service Buffalo Bill Cody once rode 320 miles in twenty-one hours, exhausting twenty
ponies during the excursion.) In the High Sierra west of Lake Tahoe a party of Oddfellow pioneers stopped for a rest at the top of a high pass and scratched their initials in the rocks. Being Oddfellows, they scratched nothing else, and you can still see their marks, a decorous memorial to the tenacity of the early American traveller.

But it was the railroads that made the West, and for me it is still the great trains, rushing by with their huge freights, or streaming past a level-crossing with a flash of white napkins and silver, that best represent the flavour of the place. We lodged one night at a small, cheap, cigar-stained hotel at a typical western railway town, within sight of the lines, and within sound of the hoarse and throaty voices of the station porters. During the afternoon the friendly landlord said to me: “If you like trains, don’t miss the Rocky Mountain Rocket. The Rocket comes through here every evening 8.19 on the minute, and if you like railroads, as I say, she’s a sight to see.” At 8.17 or so we crossed the road to the station. There was a little crowd waiting for the Rocket—a few travellers, with their bags and buttonholes; a few friends; and a motley collection of sightseers like ourselves, some with children, some with shopping bags, some lounging about chewing and sporadically expectorating. It was dusk, and the lights were coming on. Before long we heard a deep roar far in the distance, and the blast of a whistle, and then the clanging of a bell. Down the line we could see the beam of a powerful light. The travellers gathered their luggage, the children skipped, the loungers chewed the faster, a few extra passers-by dropped into the station; and suddenly the Rocket was with us, four huge shining diesel units, big as houses, with the engineer leaning grandly out of his window; and a string of flashing coaches, all steel and aluminium; and a glimpse of padded sleepers; and black-faced porters jumping from the high coaches and grabbing the bags; and travellers looking indolently out of diner windows, sipping their coffee; and a chink of light, here and there, as somebody moved a window-blind. The diesels roared, the conductors jumped aboard, the doors shut noiselessly, and off the great train went, like a long silver ship, cool, clean, glittering and powerful. Soon it would be out of the plains, and climbing into the Colorado mountains.

Several of the American railroads run trains clean across the Rockies—or through them; in the winter there must be constant snow-ploughing, and more than once a train has been stranded helplessly high in the mountains, and has had to be supplied with food by helicopter. Driving a train in the West is still no sinecure, despite the careful comfort of the cabs. In the winter there are blizzards and snowdrifts; in the summer the
long monotonous deadening hours across the plains and deserts, in oppressive heat. In Nevada once I drove my car parallel with a freight train travelling westward to the Pacific coast, and followed it for half an hour or so across the desert. Its progress seemed irresistible and automatic. When we were close enough I could hear the pulsing of its diesel engines and the rattle of its hundred big freight trucks; but in the distance it seemed like some sinewy desert creature, earnestly driving itself across the countryside, impelled by a dark and silent impulse. The heat was atrocious, and the train seemed to shimmer; sometimes I could just see, sitting impassive at their high windows, the engineer and his mate.

The railroads are still economically important to the West, for all their much-publicized decline, but they are also emotionally significant to nearly all Westerners. From childhood, and by heritage, their lives have been so closely linked with the arrival of the Rocket, for generations the only connection between these distant communities and the comfortable East. The almost-vanished steam train, in particular, is a cherished symbol of the Old West. When one western railroad replaced its steam locomotives by diesels, the company fitted to the new engines whistles especially designed to reproduce the old sad beloved wail of the steam trains, so melancholy a sound on a lonely evening, but so redolent with nostalgia and romance.

Everywhere in the West there are memories of the brave days of railroading. Thousands of Chinese coolies were employed in laying some of the first tracks eastwards from the Pacific (wearing their wide straw hats, they slung their panniers across their shoulders and carried the soil of California or Arizona for all the world as if they were toting rice in Sinkiang); many of their descendants are still in the West, and often you will find the grocer in some dry desert city deep in a Chinese newspaper from San Francisco. Many a shanty town beside the lines reminds the traveller of the old railway camps, brawniest of settlements, where lived those rough armies of Irishmen and Orientals who laid the first lines. I paused for coffee once at a little place called Imlay, in the Nevada desert. This used to be a stopping-place for the trans-continental trains, where passengers could stretch their legs and have a meal while the engine was refuelled. Now it is a freight station (there are tungsten mines nearby) and there is a club for railwaymen housed in one of its ornate and smoke-darkened Victorian buildings. As I sipped coffee there from a chipped china mug, talking to the buxom girl behind the counter and listening to the conversation of the railwaymen around me, I could all but smell the smoke of the big steam trains, and hear the puffing of the wood-burners outside the window. The legend of the
American railroads, still so powerful, pervades much of the national folk art, from “Casey Jones” to “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, and its fascination is infectious.

The West is also, of course, the land of the adventurer; not only the cowboy, and the Indian scout, but also the prospector—and the presence of the miner still contributes to the flavour of the place. I remember an inn in Utah, perched on the edge of a mountain valley, which was full of unshaven men in colourful shirts, some cleaning obscure bits of equipment, some examining documents, some washing their clothes on the balconies of their rooms, some in earnest conversation in the bar. They were uranium prospectors, all of them just on the point (if you believe their conversation) of finding deposits of simply unimaginable value. You can hardly drive through the West nowadays without seeing a couple of these men in a jeep, loaded down with sleeping bags, shovels, cookers and Geiger counters, bumping across a desert track, the dust flying behind them, in search of an atomic Klondyke.

Fortunes have in fact been made in this new gold rush, and all kinds of people have joined it; deep in an inaccessible canyon in Colorado, for example, two young women are working a claim, taking their stores in by pack train. All over the high Colorado Plateau such lonely adventurers are prospecting or extracting ore. It is the third time this barren region has been combed for minerals. First the search was for radium, after Madame Curie’s discoveries in the 1890’s. Then, during the First World War, prospectors looked for vanadium, a substance used in making steel alloys. Finally, in the last war, the uranium search began. The Atomic Energy Commission did much of the original prospecting, using a fleet of 200 trucks, 150 house trailers, 22 caterpillar tractors, water trucks, generators, air compressors, motor graders and aircraft. The United States Geological Survey operated with similar copious
matériel.
But the isolated prospectors I came across on the Plateau were nearly all working on their own account. Any American citizen can go prospecting for uranium, and many thousands do, selling their ore at fixed prices to Government buying stations. You can buy a Prospector’s Location Kit for 17 dollars—complete with boundary posts, and a stake to stick your claim on. There is a magazine devoted to the interests of these adventurers, and a prosperous airline—“Serving the Uranium Centres of the West”—has established its fortunes on the uranium rush.

All over the uranium regions you can see little one-horse uranium mines—a shaft-head and a hut or two, just like the shattered shanties that stand on the Comstock Lode as memorials to the gold bonanzas. For such operators, undaunted by the hideous legends of Hiroshima,
there are profitable if disconcerting sidelines. “When the human body is exposed to a bombardment of gamma rays, many of these rays pass completely through the body without any effect, but many collide with electrons of various cells of the body, knocking the electrons away from their atoms, thus ionizing those cells.” So says a brochure issued by one of the many uranium mines which invite sufferers from rheumatism and other afflictions to sit in their underground tunnels and be bombarded.

Miraculous cures are reported. One mine claims that a crippled Irish setter was totally restored to health. Many others publish grateful letters reporting instant cures, amazing reliefs, improvements when all hope had been abandoned, shattering experiences on the train home. Some of the more successful “health mines” seem to have given up the production of uranium altogether, and have installed hygienic waiting-rooms with chintz curtains, dainty rest rooms, and well-padded lifts. Most of the companies try to give their operations an air of scientific respectability. One pamphlet, signed by a qualified geologist, assures us (with a disarming lack of academic stodge) that millions of years before the advent of man into Jefferson County, Montana, Old Mother Nature was creating her uranium zones. “Not on graven tablets, or on written or printed page, did the Old Dame leave an indelible record of the location of those health-giving gases and radioactive zones of mineralization, but instead, she left it to Man of today to locate that which She left behind for this and future generations of the human race to use for their benefit. And Man in the dual role of Mr. E. C. Miles and Mr. Joseph Stoner of Helena, Montana, have been the medium of discovery of these rich deposits of radioactive minerals.… Following the deposition of the Madison formation which refers to the last deposits of sedimentaries, a land mass was in evidence, and finally the mountain masses and the outliers which you see today in the mine’s vicinity, appeared, and inside of this mass, there was entombed the rich, lifegiving gases and rays which today benefit those which seek their properties and relief-giving characteristics at the
MINERAL HILL URANIUM MINE
.”

There is something about all this that brings the wanderer very near the heyday of the West, when prospectors made their fortunes overnight in lonely gulches or squalid mining camps. At Deadwood, South Dakota (the home of Deadwood Dick, the Deadwood Gulch, the Deadwood Stage, Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane), I talked to an elderly woman in a shop about the town’s spacious days—when the miners were greedily working all down the gulch; when the stage left each week

with its cargo of gold for the perilous journey to Denver, through Buffalo Gap, Lame Johnny Creek, Red Canyon, Squaw Gap, past the threatening haunts of Peg-legged Bradley, Dunk Blackburn, Curley Grimes, and the other ruthless buccaneers of that legendary road. “How long ago it seems,” I said with a sigh, looking around me at the counters full of Colgate’s and home permanents, “it might almost be another world.” The woman seemed a trifle put out. “Well, I don’t know,” she said testily. “I don’t remember Wild Bill Hickock, but I remember Potato Creek Johnny well enough, and you wouldn’t call me an old woman, would you, or perhaps you would?” So saying, she opened her handbag and produced a snapshot. It was of old Johnny himself, one of the best-remembered of the Deadwood prospectors, who made strike after strike, but never acquired a fortune. There he was, staring at me from the picture with bright, bird-like eyes, his face enshrouded in a vast tangled beard, on his head a crumpled black hat, his old shirt open at the neck, in his hand a large gold nugget, a symbol of his fluctuating fortune. “He was as nice an old fellow as you could meet,” said the woman, replacing the photograph in her handbag with (I thought) the faint suspicion of a snuffle, “so don’t you go saying he was like something from another world.”