Rebel Souls by Justin Martin

Author:Justin Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2014-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

After the hunt, Ludlow and Bierstadt continued westward, now traveling by overland stage. They relied on the familiar Concord wagon, little more than a box on wheels, painted red, laden with mail for stops along the way. It was designed to seat six comfortably, but drivers were never inclined to turn away passengers. The pace was arduous, about four miles an hour.

Ludlow and Bierstadt traveled mostly at night; the painter required daylight to work. So the overland stage was also the overnight stage. Sleep was quite a challenge, though, while forced to remain upright and squeezed in tight on a hard wooden bench, jostling over rutted, uneven ground.

Using clothing and blankets, Ludlow fashioned a kind of halter that suspended him above his fellow passengers. In this way, he was able to assume a normal horizontal sleeping position, though he swung a bit with each bump of the stage. He described himself as an “Overland Mazeppa.” The contraption quickly proved as uncomfortable as it was ridiculous, and he abandoned it. Soon, Ludlow fell instead into a pattern of foregoing sleep at night and sitting up front beside the drivers: “This was a place where legs were stretchable and faculties wide awake.” Drivers had to remain alert through the long night, and Ludlow kept them company with what must have been a unique brand of jittery, insomniacal banter. During the day, often at one of the godforsaken way stations where the stages stopped, Ludlow would slip off, lie down, and try to catch a short nap.

Sleep became an obsession, and Ludlow filled his diary with references to it—or, rather, the lack of it. Very little about this hardship made it into the Post dispatches, however. Promotion-happy Bierstadt had once again cut a deal: free passage via overland stage all the way to California in exchange for a plug or two by Ludlow.

Eastern Colorado Territory looked no different from western Nebraska Territory. The landscape remained unrelievedly flat, the plains stretching endlessly in all directions, broken occasionally by a cottonwood tree or a lonely gravestone marking the final resting place of some unfortunate pioneer. But one day, just as dawn was breaking, a driver pointed into the distance and announced to Ludlow, “There are the Rocky Mountains.”

Ludlow was puzzled. Looking in the direction the driver indicated, the writer saw absolutely nothing. It was simply more of the same: flat land, vast sky, puffs of cloud on the horizon. But then he realized that the mountains were the sky, what he had mistaken for clouds—their snowcaps. Ludlow burst into tears. Perhaps it was sleep deprivation, but he was seized by an overwhelming sense of wonder: “Nature has dipped her pencil in the faintest solution of ultra-marine, and drawn it once across the western sky, with a hand as tender as Love’s.”

Using boomtown Denver as a base, Ludlow and Bierstadt made repeated day trips into the Rockies. Up close, Ludlow was able to get a sense of scale and could see how truly hulking and massive these mountains were.

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