Remarks Part 49

Mr. Dempsey is not a college graduate, as many suppose. He is a self-made man. This should be a great encouragement to our boys who are now unknown, and whose portraits have not as yet appeared in the sporting papers.

But Mr. Dempsey's great force as a debater is less, perhaps, in the matter than in the manner. His delivery is good and his gestures cannot fail to convince the most skeptical. Striking in appearance, aggressive in his nature, and happy in his gestures, he is certain to attract the attention of the police, and he cannot fail to rivet the eye of his adversary. I saw one of his adversaries, not long ago, whose eye had been successfully riveted in that way.

And yet, John E. Dempsey was once a poor boy. He had none of the advantages which wealth and position bring. But, confident of his latent ability as a middle-weight convincer, he toiled on, ever on, sitting up until long after other people had gone to bed, patiently knocking out those who might be brought to him for that purpose. He never hung back because the way looked long and lonely. And what is the result? To-day, in the full vigor of manhood, he is sought out and petted by everyone who takes an interest in the onward march of pugilism.

It is a wonderful record, though brief. It shows what patient industry will accomplish unaided. Had John E. Dempsey hesitated to enter the ring and said that he would rather go to school, where he would be safe, he might to-day be an educated man; but what does that amount to here in America, where everybody can have an education? He would have lost his talent as a slugger, and drifted steadily downward, perhaps, till he became a school-teacher or a narrow-chested editor, writing things day after day just to gratify the morbid curiosity of a sin-cursed world.

In closing, I would like to say that I hope I have not expressed an opinion in the above that may hereafter be used against me. Do not understand me to be the foe of education. Education and refinement are good enough in their places, but how shall we attract attention by trying to become refined and educated in a land where, as I say, education and refinement seem almost to run rampant.

Heretofore, in America, pugilism has been made subservient to the common schools. Pugilism and polygamy have both been crowded to the wall. Now pugilism is about to a.s.sert itself. The tin ear and the gory nose will soon come to the front, and the day is not far distant when progressive pugilism and the prize-ring will take the place of the poorly ventilated common school and the enervating prayer meeting.

The Snake Indian.

There are about 5,000 Snake or Shoshone Indians now extant, the greater part being in Utah and Nevada, though there is a reservation in Idaho and another in Wyoming.

The Shoshone Indian is reluctant to accept of civilization on the European plan. He prefers the ruder customs which have been handed down from father to son along with other hairlooms. I use the word hairlooms in its broadest sense.

There are the Shoshones proper and the Utes or Utahs, to which have been added by some authorities the Comanches, and Moquis of New Mexico and Arizona, the Netelas and other tribes of California. The Shoshone, wherever found, is clothed in buckskin and blanket in winter, but dressed more lightly in summer, wearing nothing but an air of intense gloom in August. To this he adds on holidays a necklace made from the store teeth of the hardy pioneer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOLIDAY COSTUME.]

The Snake or Shoshone Indian is pa.s.sionately fond of the game known as poker among us, and which, I learn, is played with cards. It is a game of chance, though skill and a thorough knowledge of firearms are of great use. The Indians enter into this game with great zeal, and lend to it the wonderful energy which they have preserved from year to year by abstaining from the debilitating effects of manual labor. All day long the red warrior sits in his skin boudoir, nursing the sickly and reluctant "flush," patient, silent and hopeful. Through the cold of winter in the desolate mountains, he continues to

"Hope on, hope ever,"

that he will "draw to fill." Far away up the canyon he hears the st.u.r.dy blows of his wife's tomahawk as she slaughters the grease wood and the sage brush for the fire in his gilded h.e.l.l where he sits and woos the lazy G.o.ddess of Fortune.

With the Shoshone, poker is not alone a relaxation, the game wherewith to wear out a long and listless evening, but it is a pa.s.sion, a duty and a devotion. He has a face designed especially for poker. It never shows a sign of good or evil fortune. You might as well try to win a smile from a railroad right of way. The full hand, the fours, threes, pairs and bob-tail flushes are all the same to him, if you judge by his face.

When he gets hungry he cinches himself a little tighter and continues to "rastle" with fate. You look at his smoky, old copper cent of a face, and you see no change. You watch him as he coins the last buckshot of his tribe and later on when he goes forth a pauper, and the corners of his famine-breeding mouth have never moved, His little black, smoke-inflamed eyes have never lighted with triumph or joy. He is the great aboriginal stoic and sylvan dude. He does not smile. He does not weep. It certainly must be intensely pleasant to be a wild, free, lawless, irresponsible, natural born fool.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOING AWAY BROKE.]

The Shoshones proper include the Bannocks, which are again subdivided into the Koolsitakara or Buffalo Eaters, on Wind River, the Tookarika or Mountain Sheep Eaters, on Salmon or Suabe Eivers, the Shoshocas or White Knives, sometimes called Diggers, of the Humbolt Eiver and the Great Salt Lake basin. Probably the Hokandikahs, Yahooskins and the Wahlpapes are subdivisions of the Digger tribe. I am 'not sure of this, but I shall not suspend my business till I can find out about it. If I cannot get at a great truth right off I wait patiently and go right on drawing my salary.

The Shoshones live on the government and other small game. They will eat anything when hungry, from a buffalo down to a woodtick. The Shoshone does not despise small things. He loves insects in any form. He loves to make pets of them and to study their habits in his home life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HOME CIRCLE.]

Formerly, when a great Shoshone warrior died, they killed his favorite wife over his grave, so that she could go to the happy hunting grounds with him, but it is not so customary now. I tried to impress on an old Shoshone brave once that they ought not to do that. I tried to show him that it would encourage celibacy and destroy domestic ties in his tribe. Since then there has been quite a stride toward reform among them. Instead of killing the widow on the death of the husband, the husband takes such good care of his health and avoids all kinds of intellectual strain or physical fatigue, that late years there are no widows, but widowers just seem to swarm in the Shoshone tribe. The woods are full of them.

Now, if they would only kill the widower over the grave of the wife, the Indian's future would a.s.sume a more definite shape.

Roller Skating.

I have once more tried to ride a pair of roller skates. That is the reason I got down on the rink and down on roller skates. That is the reason several people got down on me. That is also the reason why I now state in a public manner, to a lost and undone race, that unless the roller-rink is at once abolished, the whole civilized race will at once be plunged into arnica.

I had tried it once before, but had not carried my experiments to a successful termination. I made a trip around the rink last August, but was ruled out by the judges for incompetency, and advised to skate among the people who were hostile to the government of the United States, while the proprietors repaired the rink.

On the 9th of June I nestled in the bosom of a cyclone to excess, and it has required the bulk of the succeeding months for nature to glue the bone of my leg together in proper shape. That is the reason I have not given the attention to roller-skating that I should.

A few weeks ago I read what Mr. Talmage said about the great national vice. It was his opinion that, if we skated in a proper spirit, we could leave the rink each evening with our immortal souls in good shape.

Somehow it got out that on Thursday evening I would undertake the feat of skating three rounds in three hours with no protection to my scruples, for one-half the gate money, Talmage rules. So there was quite a large audience present with opera gla.s.ses. Some had umbrellas, especially on the front rows. These were worn spread, in order to ward off fragments of the rink which might become disengaged and set in motion by atmospheric disturbances.

In obedience to a wild, Wagnerian snort from the orchestra, I came into the arena with my skates in hand. I feel perfectly at home before an audience when I have my skates in hand. It is a morbid desire to wear the skates on my feet that has always been my bete noire. Will the office boy please give me a bra.s.s check for that word so that I can get it when I go away?

My first thought, after getting myself secured to the skates, was this: "Am I in the proper frame of mind? Am I doing this in the right spirit? Am I about to skate in such a way as to lift the fog of unbelief which now envelopes a sinful world, or shall I deepen the opaque night in which my race is wrapped?"

Just then that end of the rink erupted in a manner so forthwith and so tout ensemble that I had to push it back in place with my person. I never saw anything done with less delay or less languor.

The audience went wild with enthusiasm, and I responded to the encore by writing my name in the air with my skates.

This closed the first seance, and my trainer took me in the dressing-room to attend a consultation of physicians. After the rink carpenter had jacked up the floor a little I went out again. I had no fears about my ability to perform the mechanical part a.s.signed me, but I was still worried over the question of whether it would or would not be of lasting benefit to mankind.

Those who have closely scrutinized my frame in repose have admitted that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Students of the human frame say that they never saw such a wealth of looseness and limberness lavished upon one person. They claim that nature bestowed upon me the hinges and joints intended for a whole family, and therefore when I skate the air seems to be perfectly lurid with limbs. I presume that this is true; though I have so little leisure while skating in which to observe the method itself, the plot or animus of the thing, as it were, that my opinion would be of little value to the scientist.

I am led to believe that the roller skate is certainly a great civilizer and a wonderful leveler of mankind. If we so skate that when the summons comes to seek our ward in the general hospital, where each shall heal his busted cuticle within the walls where rinkists squirm, we go not like the moral wreck, morally paralyzed, but like a hired man taking his medicine, and so forth-we may skate with perfect impunity, or anyone else to whom we may be properly introduced by our cook.

No More Frontier.

The system of building railroads into the wilderness, and then allowing the wilderness to develop afterward, has knocked the essential joy out of the life of the pioneer. At one time the hardy hewer of wood and drawer of water gave his lifetime willingly that his son might ride in the "varnished cars." Now the Pullman palace car takes the New Yorker to the threshold of the sea, or to the boundary line between the United States and the British possessions.

It has driven out the long handled frying pan and the flapjack of twenty years ago, and introduced the condensed milk and canned fruit of commerce. Along the highways, where once the hopeful hundreds marched with long handled shovel and pick and pan, cooking by the way thin salt pork and flapjacks and slumgullion, now the road is lined with empty beer bottles and peach cans that have outlived their usefulness. No landscape can be picturesque with an empty peach can in the foreground any more than a lion would look grand in a red monogram horse blanket and false teeth.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The modern camp is not the camp of the wilderness. It wears the half-civilized and shabby genteel garments of a sawed-off town. You know that if you ride a day you will be where you can get the daily papers and read them under the electric light. That robs the old canyons of their solemn isolation and peoples each gulch with the odor of codfish b.a.l.l.s and civilization. Civilization is not to blame for all this, and yet it seems sad.

Civilization could not have done all this alone. It had to call to its aid the infernal fruit can that now desolates the most obscure trail in the heart of the mountains. You walk over chaos where the "hydraulic" has plowed up the valley like a convulsion, or you tread the yielding path across the deserted dump, and on all sides the rusty, neglected and humiliated empty tin can stares at you with its monotonous, dude-like stare.

An old timer said to me once: "I've about decided, Bill, that the West is a matter of history. When we cooked our grub over a sage brush fire we could get fat and fight Indians, but now we fill our digesters with the cold pizen and pewter of the canned peach; we go to a big tavern and stick a towel under our chins and eat pie with a fork and heat up our carkisses with antichrist coal, and what do we amount to? Nuthin! I used to chase Injuns all day and eat raw salt pork at night, bekuz I da.s.sent build a fire, and still I felt better than I do now with a wad of tin-can solder in my stummick and a homesick feeling in my weather-beaten breast.

"No, we don't have the fun we used to. We have more swarrees and sciatica and one bloomin' thing and another of that kind, but we don't get one snort of pure air and appet.i.te in a year. They're bringin' in their blamed telephones now and malaria and aigue and old sledge, and fun might as well skip out. There ain't no frontier any more. All we've got left is the old-fashioned trantler joos and rhumatiz of '49."

Behind the red squaw's cayuse plug, The hand-car roars and raves, And pie-plant pies are now produced Above the Indian graves.

I hear the oaths of pioneers, The caucus yet to be, The first low hum where soon will The fuzzy b.u.mble bee.

A Letter of Regrets.

My dear Princess Beatrice-I received your kind invitation to come up to Whippingham on the 23d inst. and see you married, but I have not been able to get there. The weather has been so hot this month, that, to tell you the truth, Beatrice, I haven't been going anywhere to speak of. At first I thought I would go anyhow, and even went so far as to pick out a nice corner bracket to take along for a wedding present. Not so much for its intrinsic value, of course, but so you would have something with my name to it on a card that you could show to those English dudes, and let them know that you had influential friends, even in America. But when I thought what a long, hard trip it would be, and how I would probably mash that bracket on the cars before I got half way there, I gave it up.

I am not personally acquainted with your inamorato, if that's all right, never having met him in our set; but I understand you have done well, and that your husband is a rising young man of good family, and that he will never allow you to put your hands into dishwater. I hope this is true and that he does not drink. Rum has certainly paralyzed more dukes and such things than war has. I attribute this to the fact that princes and dukes are generally more reckless about exposing themselves to the demon rum than to the rude alarums and one thing another of war.

If you keep a girl I hope you will get a good one who knows her business. A green girl in the house of a newly-married princess is a great source of annoyance. A friend of mine who got married last winter got a girl whose mind had been eaten by cut-worms and she had not discovered it. All the faculty that had been spared her was that power of the mind which enabled her to charge $3 a week. She lubricated the buckwheat pancake griddle for a week with soap grease and a dash of castor oil, and when she was discharged she wept bitterly because capital with the iron heel ground the poor servant girl into the dust.

Probably you will take a little tour after the wedding is over. They are doing that way a good deal in Boston this season. I thought you would like a pointer in the very lum-tumest thing to do, and so I write this. So long as you have the means to do this thing right, I think you ought to do so. You may never be married again, princess, and now is the time to paint the British Isles red.

You can also get more concessions from your husband now, while he is a little rattled, and temporarily knocked silly by the pomp and pageant of marrying into your family, and if you work it right you can maintain this supremacy for years. Treat him with a gentle firmness, and do not weep on his bosom if you detect the aroma of beer and bologna sausage on his young breath. Bologna and royalty do not seem to harmonize first-rate, but remember you can hara.s.s your husband if you choose, so that he will fall to even lower depths than bologna and Milwaukee beer. Do not aggravate him when he comes home tired, but help him do the ch.o.r.es and greet him with a smile.