Emigrants West

The Gilded Age was embodied in the private railroad car-a baroque equipage of millionaires that today may be found in museums. But there is little trace of the carriages in which the masses were transported, only the memories of those who rode them. To Robert Louis Stevenson, the emigrant train on which he traveled West in 1879 resembled a series of long wooden boxes-a “Noah’s Ark on wheels.” Wooden benches were their only furniture, “far too short for anyone but a child,” and the atmosphere was stagnant with the smells of food and tobacco. Families and single men and women shared these rolling slums, cooking, washing perfunctorily, and at night sleeping on wooden boards stretched across benches. The rate for these “beds,” which included three straw- (and bug-) filled cushions, was $2.50. Except for rare acts of kindness, the poor emigrants met nothing but rudeness from train functionaries, who even refused to answer their anxious inquiries. “Civility is the main comfort you miss,” Stevenson remarked. “Equality, though very largely conceived in America, does not extend so low down as the emigrant.” I prefer the image of the emigrant as portrayed by William Holden in the movie Arizona. The movie centers around Phoebe Titus a tough, swaggering pioneer woman played by Jean Arthur, but her ways become decidedly more feminine when she falls for California bound Peter Muncie played by William Holden. But Peter won’t be distracted from his journey and Phoebe is left alone and plenty busy with villains Jefferson Carteret and Lazarus Ward plotting at every turn to destroy her freighting company. You just know William Holden will be changing his plans to stay and help Jean out of a jam. The bug Holden describes in the film is decidedly different from the ones emigrants had to sleep with on the way West. One of my favorite lines from the movie are as follows-Holden to Arthur: “I figure it sounds crazy to most people… going to California just to see it. But there’s a gallivanted bug in my blood and that’s the way I am.”