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“At Ogden (Utah) we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific line of railroad. The change was doubly welcome; for, first we had better cars on the new line; and, second, those in which we had been cooped for more than ninety hours had begun to stink abominably…But one thing I must say: the car of the Chinese was notably the least offensive, and that of the women and children by a good way the worst. A stroke of nature’s satire.”

So wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in his travel book, The Amateur Emigrant. It was August 1879, and this young invalid writer from Scotland was at the beginning of the last leg of his journey across the Atlantic Ocean and North America to reach California. Destiny, in the person of his girlfriend, Mrs. Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, awaited him there. Fanny was separated from her husband, Sam Osbourne, a court stenographer in San Francisco who was using their home in Oakland to accommodate his favorite girlfriends. Meanwhile, Fanny and her kids, Lloyd and Isobel, were staying in Monterey with Fanny’s sister, Nellie Vandegrift. For some reason, the story of Louis and Fanny survived. Subsequent writers have profited from it by artfully exploiting the subject with books like Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan being the latest example, 2014.

“I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was among. They were in rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had met on board ship…The talk in the train, like the talk I heard on the steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons, and hope that moves ever westward. … Hunger, you would have thought, came out of the east like the sun and the evening was made of edible gold. And, meantime, in the car in front of me, were there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite quarter? Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their gates in search of provender, had here come face to face. The two waves had met; east and west had alike failed; the whole round world had been prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently at home.”

Apparently it took a little less than three weeks for Stevenson to become an expert on 19th century emigration from an emigrant point of view though his immediate purpose set him apart from his fellow travelers. His opinion suggests a certain futility to the whole exercise like the dog chasing his tail. This notion was probably supported by “another sign at once more picturesque and more disheartening; for as we continued to steam westward toward the land of gold, we were continuously passing other emigrant trains upon the journey east; and these were as crowded as our own.” The implication was that people were failing out here, too, in the ‘promised land.’ “Wherever we met them, the passengers ran onto the platform and cried to us through the windows, in a kind of wailing chorus, to ‘go back … go back.’ That was what we heard by the way about ‘the good country we were going to.'”

Emigration, immigration — today the latter word is heard more often, atavistically speaking. The sewer the orange man and his defenders want to suck us into is the same old reptilian mindset that brought on Charlottesville, even WWII, there on the telly every day, seeping down. RLS got an eyeful while he crossed the plains on his emigrant train:

“Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst. They seemed never to have looked at them, or thought of them, listened to them, but hated them ‘a priori.’ The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of money. They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle for the Caucasians to repeat and even to believe. They declared them hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when they beheld them,” etc.