Christmas In The Snows
by
Being Some Personal Adventures in the Far West[2]
The love of Christmas is as strong in the West as it is in any section of the country–perhaps, indeed, stronger, for people who have few pleasures cherish holidays more highly than those for whom many cheap amusements are provided. But when the manifestation of the Christmas spirit is considered, there is a great difference between the West and the East. There are vast sections of country in which evergreens do not grow and to which it would not pay to ship them; consequently Christmas trees are not common, and therefore they are the more prized when they may be had. There are no great rows nor small clusters of inviting shops filled with suggestive and fascinating contents at attractive prices. The distances from centres of trade are so great that the things which may be purchased even in the smallest towns in more favourable localities for a few cents have there almost a prohibitive price put upon them. The efforts of the people to give their children a merry Christmas in the popular sense, however, are strong and sometimes pitiful.
It must not be forgotten that the West is settled by Eastern people, and that no very great difference exists between them save for the advantages presented by life in the West for the higher development of character. Western people are usually brighter, quicker, more progressive and less conservative, and more liberal than those from whom they came. The survival of the fittest is the rule out there and the qualities of character necessary to that end are brought to the top by the strenuous life necessitated by the hardships of the frontier. If the people are not any better than they were, it is because they are still clinging to the obsolete ideas of the East.
The Eastern point of view always reminds me of the reply of the bishop to the layman who was deploring the poor quality of the clergy. “Yes,” said the bishop, “some of them are poor; but consider the stock from which they come. You see, we have nothing but laymen out of which to make them.”
The East never understands the West–the real West that is, which lies beyond the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Rocky Mountains. They know nothing of its ideas, its capacities, its possibilities, its educational facilities, its culture, its real power, in the East. And they do not wish to learn, apparently. The Easterners fatuously think, like Job, that they are the people, and wisdom will die with them. Some years since an article in the “Forum” on the theme, “Kansas more civilized than New York” conclusively proved the proposition to the satisfaction of the present writer at least.
Yet I know numberless dwellers in Gotham whose shibboleth is “nothing outside of New York City but scenery,” and they are a little dubious about admitting that. When one describes the Grand Canyon or the Royal Gorge they point to Nassau or Wall Street, and the Woolworth tower challenges Pike’s Peak!
I sat at a dinner table one day when the salted almonds were handed me with the remark: “I suppose you never saw anything like these out West. Try some.” And my wife has been quite gravely asked if we feared any raids by the Indians and if they troubled us by their marauding in Kansas. I have found it necessary to inform the curious that we did not live in tepees or wigwams when in Nebraska or Colorado.
Shortly after I came East to live I was talking with a man and a very stupid man at that, who informed me that he graduated from Harvard; to which surprising statement he added the startling information, for the benefit of my presumably untutored occidental mind, that it was a college near Boston! They have everything in the West that the East has so far as their sometimes limited means will provide them and when they have no money they have patience, endurance, grim determination, and courage, which are better than money in the long run.