[Illustration: A BUCKING BRONCHO]
THE WEST
FROM A CAR-WINDOW
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
AUTHOR OF “VAN BIBBER AND OTHERS” ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1903
Copyright, 1892, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
TO
M. K. J.
OF
THE SEVENTH INFANTRY
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PAGE
FROM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI 3
OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER 27
AT A NEW MINING CAMP 59
A THREE-YEAR-OLD CITY 93
RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS 121
ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION 151
A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST 185
THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE 215
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
_A Bucking Broncho_ Frontispiece
_Head-piece_ 3
_Rangers in Camp_ 9
“_Remember the Alamo!_” 19
_Trumpeter Tyler_ 29
_Captain Francis H. Hardie, G Troop, Third United States Cavalry_ 37
_Water_ 43
_The Mexican Guide_ 49
_Third Cavalry Troopers--Searching a Suspected Revolutionist_ 53
_Mining Camp on the Range Above Creede_ 60
_Creede_ 63
_How Land is Claimed for Building--Planks Nailed Together and
Resting on Four Stumps_ 66
_The “Holy Moses” Mine_ 69
_Debatable Ground--A Warning to Trespassers_ 73
_A Mining Camp Court-house_ 75
_Shaft of a Mine_ 79
_Valuable Real Estate_ 83
_Upper Creede_ 87
_Oklahoma City on the Day of the Opening_ 94
_Five Days After the Opening_ 97
_Four Weeks After the Opening_ 101
_Captain D. F. Stiles_ 105
_Post-office, April 22, 1889_ 108
_Post-office, July 4, 1890_ 111
_Oklahoma City To-day--Main Broadway_ 115
_The Ranch-house on the King Ranch, the Largest Range Owned by
One Individual in the United States_ 123
_A Shattered Idol_ 127
_Snapping a Rope on a Horse’s Foot_ 130
_Hillingdon Ranch_ 133
_Fixing a Break in the Wire Fence_ 137
_Gathering the Rope_ 141
_Reaction Equals Action_ 145
_Tail-piece_ 148
_The Cheyenne Type_ 152
_Big Bull_ 155
_One of Williamson’s Stages_ 159
_The Beef Issue at Anadarko_ 163
_Indian Boy and Pinto Pony_ 169
_A Kiowa Maiden_ 175
_A One-company Post at Oklahoma City_ 187
_The Omnipotent Bugler_ 191
_United States Military Post at San Antonio_ 195
_United States Cavalryman in Full Dress_ 199
_United States Military Post--Infantry Parade_ 203
_Fort Houston, at San Antonio--Officers’ Quarters_ 207
_The Barracks, Fort Houston_ 210
_Gateway of the Garden of the Gods, and Pike’s Peak_ 217
_Within the Gates, Garden of the Gods_ 223
_Polo Above the Snow-line at Colorado Springs_ 227
_Mount of the Holy Cross_ 233
_Pike’s Peak from Colorado Springs_ 239
I
FROM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI
[Illustration: THE WEST FROM A CAR-WINDOW
By
Richard Harding Davis.]
I
FROM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI
IT is somewhat disturbing to one who visits the West for the first time
with the purpose of writing of it, to read on the back of a railroad
map, before he reaches Harrisburg, that Texas “is one hundred thousand
square miles larger than all the Eastern and Middle States, including
Maryland and Delaware.” It gives him a sharp sensation of loneliness,
a wish to apologize to some one, and he is moved with a sudden desire
to get out at the first station and take the next train back, before
his presumption is discovered. He might possibly feel equal to the fact
that Texas is “larger than all of the Eastern and Middle States,” but
this easy addition of one hundred thousand square miles, and the casual
throwing in of Maryland and Delaware like potatoes on a basket for good
measure, and just as though one or two States more or less did not
matter, make him wish he had sensibly confined his observations to that
part of the world bounded by Harlem and the Battery.
If I could travel over the West for three years, I might write of it
with authority; but when my time is limited to three months, I can
only give impressions from a car-window point of view, and cannot
dare to draw conclusions. I know that this is an evident and cowardly
attempt to “hedge” at the very setting forth. But it is well to
understand what is to follow. All that I may hope to do is to tell what
impressed an Eastern man in a hurried trip through the Western States.
I will try to describe what I saw in such a way that those who read may
see as much as I saw with the eyes of one who had lived in the cities
of the Eastern States, but the moral they draw must be their own, and
can differ from mine as widely as they please.
An Eastern man is apt to cross the continent for the first time with
mixed sensations of pride at the size of his country, and shame at his
ignorance concerning it. He remembers guiltily how he has told that
story of the Englishman who asks the American in London, on hearing he
is from New York, if he knows his brother in Omaha, Nebraska. And as
the Eastern man finds from the map of his own country that the letters
of introduction he has accepted from intelligent friends are addressed
to places one and two thousand miles apart, he determines to drop that
story about the Englishman, and tell it hereafter at the expense of
himself and others nearer home.
His first practical surprise perhaps will be when he discovers the
speed and ease with which numerous States are passing under him, and
that smooth road-beds and parlor-cars remain with him to the very
borders of the West. The change of time will trouble him at first,
until he gets nearer to Mexico, when he will have his choice of
three separate standards, at which point he will cease winding his
watch altogether, and devote his “twenty minutes for refreshments”
to watching the conductor. But this minor and merely nominal change
will not distress him half so seriously as will the sudden and actual
disarrangement of his dinner hour from seven at night to two in the
afternoon, though even this will become possible after he finds people
in south-western Texas eating duck for breakfast.
He will take his first lesson in the politics of Texas and of the rest
of the West when he first offers a ten-dollar bill for a dollar’s worth
of something, and is given nine large round silver dollars in change.
When he has twenty or more of these on his person, and finds that his
protests are met with polite surprise, he understands that silver is a
large and vital issue, and that the West is ready to suffer its minor
disadvantages for the possible good to come.
He will get his first wrong impression of the West through reading the
head-lines of some of the papers, and from the class of books offered
for sale on the cars and in the hotels and book-stores from St. Louis
to Corpus Christi. These head-lines shock even a hardened newspaper
man. But they do not represent the feeling of their readers, and in
that they give a wrong and unfortunate impression to the visiting
stranger. They told while I was in St. Louis of a sleighing party of
twenty, of whom nine were instantly killed by a locomotive, and told it
as flippantly as though it were a picnic; but the accident itself was
the one and serious comment of the day, and the horror of it seemed to
have reached every class of citizen.
It is rather more difficult to explain away the books. They are too
obvious and too much in evidence to be accidental. To judge from them,
one would imagine that Boccaccio, Rabelais, Zola, and such things as
_Velvet Vice_ and _Old Sleuth_, are all that is known to the South-west
of literature. It may be that the booksellers only keep them for their
own perusal, but they might have something better for their customers.
The ideas which the stay-at-home Eastern man obtains of the extreme
borderland of Texas are gathered from various sources, principally
from those who, as will all travellers, make as much of what they have
seen as is possible, this much being generally to show the differences
which exist between the places they have visited and their own home. Of
the similarities they say nothing. Or he has read of the bandits and
outlaws of the Garza revolution, and he has seen the Wild West show of
the Hon. William F. Cody. The latter, no doubt, surprised and delighted
him very much. A mild West show, which would be equally accurate, would
surprise him even more; at least, if it was organized in the wildest
part of Texas between San Antonio and Corpus Christi.
When he leaves this first city and touches at the border of Mexico,
at Laredo, and starts forth again across the prairie of cactus and
chaparral towards “Corpus,” he feels assured that at last he is
done with parlor-cars and civilization; that he is about to see the
picturesque and lawless side of the Texan existence, and that he has
taken his life in his hands. He will be the more readily convinced
of this when the young man with the broad shoulders and sun-browned
face and wide sombrero in the seat in front raises the car-window,
and begins to shoot splinters out of the passing telegraph poles with
the melancholy and listless air of one who is performing a casual
divertisement. But he will be better informed when the Chicago drummer
has risen hurriedly, with a pale face, and has reported what is going
on to the conductor, and he hears that dignitary say, complacently:
“Sho! that’s only ‘Will’ Scheeley practisin’! He’s a dep’ty sheriff.”
He will learn in time that the only men on the borders of Texas who
are allowed to wear revolvers are sheriffs, State agents in charge of
prisoners, and the Texas Rangers, and that whenever he sees a man so
armed he may as surely assume that he is one of these as he may know
that in New York men in gray uniforms, with leather bags over their
shoulders, are letter-carriers. The revolver is the Texan officer’s
badge of office; it corresponds to the New York policeman’s shield; and
he toys with it just as the Broadway policeman juggles his club. It is
quite as harmless as a toy, and almost as terrible as a weapon.
This will grieve the “tenderfoot” who goes through the West “heeled,”
and ready to show that though he is from the effete East, he is able to
take care of himself.
It was first brought home to me as I was returning from the border,
where I had been with the troops who were hunting for Garza, and was
waiting at a little station on the prairie to take the train for
Corpus Christi. I was then told politely by a gentleman who seemed of
authority, that if I did not take off that pistol I would be fined
twenty-five dollars, or put in jail for twenty days. I explained to
him where I had been, and that my baggage was at “Corpus,” and that I
had no other place to carry it. At which he apologized, and directed a
deputy sheriff, who was also going to Corpus Christi, to see that I was
not arrested for carrying a deadly weapon.
This, I think, illustrates a condition of things in darkest Texas
which may give a new point of view to the Eastern mind. It is possibly
something of a revelation to find that instead of every man protecting
himself, and the selection of the fittest depending on who is “quickest
on the trigger,” he has to have an officer of the law to protect him
if he tries to be a law unto himself.
While I was on the border a deputy sheriff named Rufus Glover, who was
acting as a guide for Captain Chase, of the Third Cavalry, was fired
upon from an ambush by persons unknown, and killed. A Mexican brought
the news of this to our camp the night after the murder, and described
the manner of the killing, as it had occurred, at great length and with
much detail.
Except that he was terribly excited, and made a very dramatic picture
as he stood in the fire-light and moon-light and acted the murder, it
did not interest me, as I considered it to be an unfortunate event of
very common occurrence in that part of the world. But the next morning
every ranchman and cowboy and Texas Ranger and soldier we chanced to
meet on the trail to Captain Hunter’s camp took up the story of the
murder of Rufus Glover, and told and retold what some one else had told
him, with desperate earnestness and the most wearying reiteration.
And on the day following, when the papers reached us, we found that
reporters had been sent to the scene of the murder from almost every
part of south-west Texas, many of whom had had to travel a hundred
miles, and then ride thirty more through the brush before they reached
it. How many city editors in New York City would send as far as that
for anything less important than a railroad disaster or a Johnstown
flood?
[Illustration: RANGERS IN CAMP]
On the fourth day after the murder of this in no way celebrated or
unusually popular individual, the people of Duval County, in which he
had been killed, called an indignation meeting, and passed resolutions
condemning the county officials for not suppressing crime, and
petitioning the Governor of the State to send the Rangers to put
an end to such lawlessness--that is, the killing of one man in an
almost uninhabited country. The committee who were to present this
petition passed through Laredo on the way to see the Governor. Laredo
is one hundred miles from the scene of the murder, and in an entirely
different county; but there the popular indignation and excitement were
so great that another mass-meeting was called, and another petition was
made to the Governor, in which the resolutions of Duval County were
endorsed. I do not know what his Excellency did about it. There were in
the Tombs in New York when I left that city twenty-five men awaiting
trial for murder, and that crime was so old a story in the Bend and
along the East Side that the most morbid newspaper reader skipped the
scant notice the papers gave of them. It would seem from this that the
East should reconstruct a new Wild West for itself, in which a single
murder sends two committees of indignant citizens to the State capital
to ask the Governor what he intends to do about it.
But the West is not wholly reconstructed. There are still the Texas
Rangers, and in them the man from the cities of the East will find the
picturesqueness of the Wild West show and its happiest expression. If
they and the sight of cowboys roping cattle do not satisfy him, nothing
else will. The Rangers are a semi-militia, semi-military organization
of long descent, and with the most brilliant record of border warfare.
At the present time their work is less adventurous than it was in the
day of Captain McNelly, but the spirit of the first days has only
increased with time.
The Rangers enlist for a year under one of eight captains, and the
State pays them a dollar a day and supplies them with rations and
ammunition. They bring with them their own horse, blanket, and rifle,
and revolver; they wear no regular uniform or badge of any sort, except
the belt of cartridges around the waist. The mounted police of the
gold days in the Australian bush, and the mounted constabulary of the
Canadian border are perhaps the only other organizations of a like
nature and with similar duties. Their headquarters are wherever their
captain finds water, and, if he is fortunate, fuel and shade; but as
the latter two are difficult to find in common in the five hundred
square miles of brush along the Rio Grande, they are content with a
tank of alkali water alone.
There are about twenty men in each of the eight troops, and one or two
of them are constantly riding away on detached service--to follow the
trail of a Mexican bandit or a horse-thief, or to suppress a family
feud. The Rangers’ camps look much like those of gypsies, with their
one wagon to carry the horses’ feed, the ponies grazing at the ends of
the lariats, the big Mexican saddles hung over the nearest barb fence,
and the blankets covering the ground and marking the hard beds of the
night before. These men are the especial pride of General Mabry, the
Adjutant-general of Texas, who was with them the first time I met them,
sharing their breakfast of bacon and coffee under the shade of the only
tree within ten miles. He told me some very thrilling stories of their
deeds and personal meetings with the desperadoes and “bad” men of the
border; but when he tried to lead Captain Brooks into relating a few of
his own adventures, the result was a significant and complete failure.
Significant, because big men cannot tell of the big things they do as
well as other people can--they are handicapped by having to leave out
the best part; and because Captain Brooks’s version of the same story
the general had told me, with all the necessary detail, would be:
“Well, we got word they were hiding in a ranch down in Zepata County,
and we went down there and took ’em--which they were afterwards hung.”
The fact that he had had three fingers shot off as he “took ’em” was
a detail he scorned to remember, especially as he could shoot better
without these members than the rest of his men, who had only lost one
or two.
Boots above the knee and leather leggings, a belt three inches wide
with two rows of brass-bound cartridges, and a slanting sombrero
make a man appear larger than he really is; but the Rangers were the
largest men I saw in Texas, the State of big men. And some of them were
remarkably handsome in a sun-burned, broad-shouldered, easy, manly
way. They were also somewhat shy with the strangers, listening very
intently, but speaking little, and then in a slow, gentle voice; and as
they spoke so seldom, they seemed to think what they had to say was too
valuable to spoil by profanity.
When General Mabry found they would not tell of their adventures, he
asked them to show how they could shoot; and as this was something
they could do, and not something already done, they went about it
as gleefully as school-boys at recess doing “stunts.” They placed
a board, a foot wide and two feet high, some sixty feet off in the
prairie, and Sheriff Scheeley opened hostilities by whipping out his
revolver, turning it in the air, and shooting, with the sights upside
down, into the bull’s-eye of the impromptu target. He did this without
discontinuing what he was saying to me, but rather as though he were
punctuating his remarks with audible commas.
Then he said, “I didn’t think you Rangers would let a little
one-penny sheriff get in the first shot on you.” He could afford to
say this, because he had been a Ranger himself, and his brother Joe
was one of the best captains the Rangers have had; and he and all of
his six brothers are over six feet high. But the taunt produced an
instantaneous volley from every man in the company; they did not take
the trouble to rise, but shot from where they happened to be sitting
or lying and talking together, and the air rang with the reports and a
hundred quick vibrating little gasps, like the singing of a wire string
when it is tightened on a banjo.
They exhibited some most wonderful shooting. They shot with both hands
at the same time, with the hammer underneath, holding the rifle in one
hand, and never, when it was a revolver they were using, with a glance
at the sights. They would sometimes fire four shots from a Winchester
between the time they had picked it up from the ground and before it
had nestled comfortably against their shoulder. They also sent one man
on a pony racing around a tree about as thick as a man’s leg, and were
dissatisfied because he only put four out of six shots into it. Then
General Mabry, who seemed to think I did not fully appreciate what they
were doing, gave a Winchester rifle to Captain Brooks and myself, and
told us to show which of us could first put eight shots into the target.
It seems that to shoot a Winchester you have to pull a trigger one way
and work a lever backward and forward; this would naturally suggest
that there are three movements--one to throw out the empty shell, one
to replace it with another cartridge, and the third to explode this
cartridge. Captain Brooks, as far as I could make out from the sound,
used only one movement for his entire eight shots. As I guessed, the
trial was more to show Captain Brooks’s quickness rather than his
marksmanship, and I paid no attention to the target, but devoted myself
assiduously to manipulating the lever and trigger, aiming blankly at
the prairie. When I had fired two shots into space, the captain had
put his eight into the board. They sounded, as they went off, like
fire-crackers well started in a barrel, and mine, in comparison, like
minute-guns at sea. The Rangers, I found, after I saw more of them,
could shoot as rapidly with a revolver as with a rifle, and had become
so expert with the smaller weapon that instead of pressing the trigger
for each shot, they would pull steadily on it, and snap the hammer
until the six shots were exhausted.
San Antonio is the oldest of Texan cities, and possesses historical and
picturesque show-places which in any other country but our own would
be visited by innumerable American tourists prepared to fall down and
worship. The citizens of San Antonio do not, as a rule, appreciate the
historical values of their city; they are rather tired of them. They
would prefer you should look at the new Post-office and the City Hall,
and ride on the cable road. But the missions which lie just outside of
the city are what will bring the Eastern man or woman to San Antonio,
and not the new water-works. There are four of these missions, the two
largest and most interesting being the Mission de la Conception, of
which the corner-stone was laid in 1730, and the Mission San José, the
carving, or what remains of it, in the latter being wonderfully rich
and effective. The Spaniards were forced to abandon the missions on
account of the hostility of the Indians, and they have been occupied
at different times since by troops and bats, and left to the mercies
of the young men from “Rochester, N. Y.,” and the young women from
“Dallas, Texas,” who have carved their immortal names over their walls
just as freely as though they were the pyramids of Egypt or Blarney
Castle. San Antonio is a great place for invalids, on account of its
moderate climate, and a most satisfactory place in which to spend a
week or two in the winter whether one is an invalid or not. There is
the third largest army post in the country at the edge of the city,
where there is much to see and many interesting people to know, and
there is a good club, and cock-fighting on Sunday, and a first-rate
theatre all the week. At night the men sit outside of the hotels, and
the plazas are filled with Mexicans and their open-air restaurants, and
the lights of these and the brigandish appearance of those who keep
them are very unlike anything one may see at home.
All that the city really needs now is a good hotel and a more proper
pride in its history and the monuments to it. The man who seems to
appreciate this best is William Corner, whose book on San Antonio is a
most valuable historical authority.
A few years ago one would have said that San Antonio was enjoying a
boom. But you cannot use that expression now, for the Western men have
heard that a boom, no matter how quickly it rises, often comes down
just as quickly, and so forcibly that it makes a hole in the ground
where castles in the air had formerly stood. So if you wish to please
a Western man by speaking well of his city (and you cannot please him
more in any other way), you must say that it is enjoying a “steady,
healthy growth.” San Antonio is enjoying a steady, healthy growth.
It is quite as impossible to write comprehensively of south-western
Texas in one article as it is to write such an article and say nothing
of the Alamo. And the Alamo, in the event of any hasty reader’s
possible objection, is not ancient history. It is no more ancient
history than love is an old story, for nothing is ancient and nothing
is old which every new day teaches something that is fine and beautiful
and brave. The Alamo is to the South-west what Independence Hall is to
the United States, and Bunker Hill to the East; but the pride of it
belongs to every American, whether he lives in Texas or in Maine. The
battle of the Alamo was the event of greatest moment in the war between
Mexico and the Texans, when Santa Anna was President, and the Texans
were fighting for their independence. And the stone building to which
the Mexicans laid siege, and in which the battle was fought, stands
to-day facing a plaza in the centre of San Antonio.
There are hideous wooden structures around it, and others not so
hideous--modern hotels and the new Post-office, on which the mortar
is hardly yet dry. But in spite of these the grace and dignity which
the monks gave it in 1774, raise it above these modern efforts that
tower above it, and dwarf them. They are collecting somewhat slowly a
fund to pay for the erection of a monument to the heroes of the Alamo.
As though they needed a monument, with these battered walls still
standing and the marks of the bullets on the casements! No architect
can build better than that. No architect can introduce that feature.
The architects of the Alamo were building the independence of a State
as wide in its boundaries as the German Empire.
The story of the Alamo is a more than thrice-told one, and Sidney
Lanier has told it so well that whoever would write of it must draw on
him for much of their material, and must accept his point of view. But
it cannot be told too often, even though it is spoiled in the telling.
On the 23d of February, 1836, General Santa Anna himself, with four
thousand Mexican soldiers, marched into the town of San Antonio. In the
old mission of the Alamo were the town’s only defenders, one hundred
and forty-five men, under Captain Travis, a young man twenty-eight
years old. With him were Davy Crockett, who had crossed over from his
own State to help those who were freeing theirs, and Colonel Bowie (who
gave his name to a knife, which name our government gave later to a
fort), who was wounded and lying on a cot.
[Illustration: “REMEMBER THE ALAMO!”]
Their fortress and quarters and magazine was the mission, their
artillery fourteen mounted pieces, but there was little ammunition.
Santa Anna demanded unconditional surrender, and the answer was ten
days of dogged defence, and skirmishes by day and sorties for food and
water by night. The Mexicans lost heavily during the first days of
the siege, but not one inside of the Alamo was killed. Early in the
week Travis had despatched couriers for help, and the defenders of
the mission were living in the hope of re-enforcements; but four days
passed, and neither couriers returned nor re-enforcements came. On the
fourth day Colonel Fannin with three hundred men and four pieces of
artillery started forth from Goliad, but put back again for want of
food and lack of teams. The garrison of the Alamo never knew of this.
On the 1st of March Captain John W. Smith, who _has_ found teams, and
who _has_ found rations, brings an offering of thirty-two men from
Gonzales, and leads them safely into the fort. They have come with
forced marches to their own graves; but they do not know that, and
the garrison, now one hundred and seventy-two strong, against four
thousand Mexicans, continues its desperate sorties and its desperate
defence.
On the 3d of March, 1836, there is a cessation in the bombardment, and
Captain Travis draws his men up into single rank and takes his place in
front of them.
He tells them that he has deceived them with hopes of
re-enforcements--false hopes based on false promises of help from the
outside--but he does not blame those who failed him; he makes excuses
for them; they have tried to reach him, no doubt, but have been
killed on the way. Sidney Lanier quotes this excusing of those who
had deserted him at the very threshold of death as best showing the
fineness of Travis, and the poet who has judged the soldier so truly
has touched here one of the strongest points of this story of great
heroism.
Captain Travis tells them that all that remains to them is the choice
of their death, and that they have but to decide in which manner of
dying they will best serve their country. They can surrender and be
shot down mercilessly, they can make a sortie and be butchered before
they have gained twenty yards, or they can die fighting to the last,
and killing their enemies until that last comes.
He gives them their choice, and then stooping, draws a line with the
point of his sword in the ground from the left to the right of the rank.
“And now,” he says, “every man who is determined to remain here and to
die with me will come to me across that line.”
Tapley Holland was the first to cross. He jumped it with a bound, as
though it were a Rubicon. “I am ready to die for my country,” he said.
And then all but one man, named Rose, marched over to the other side.
Colonel Bowie, lying wounded in his cot, raised himself on his elbow.
“Boys,” he said, “don’t leave me. Won’t some of you carry me across?”
And those of the sick who could walk rose from the bunks and tottered
across the line; and those who could not walk were carried. Rose, who
could speak Spanish, trusted to this chance to escape, and scaling the
wall of the Alamo, dropped into a ditch on the other side, and crawled,
hidden by the cactus, into a place of safety. Through him we know what
happened before that final day came. He had his reward.
Three days after this, on the morning of the 6th of March, Santa Anna
brought forward all of his infantry, supported by his cavalry, and
stormed the fortress. The infantry came up on every side at once in
long, black solid rows, bearing the scaling-ladders before them, and
encouraged by the press of great numbers about them.
But the band inside the mission drove them back, and those who held
the ladders dropped them on the ground and ran against the bayonets of
their comrades. A second time they charged into the line of bullets,
and the second time they fell back, leaving as many dead at the foot of
the ladders as there were standing at bay within the walls. But at the
third trial the ladders are planted, and Mexicans after Mexicans scale
them, and jump down into the pit inside, hundreds and hundreds of them,
to be met with bullets and then by bayonet-thrusts, and at last with
desperate swinging of the butt, until the little band grows smaller and
weaker, and is driven up and about and beaten down and stamped beneath
the weight of overwhelming and unending numbers. They die fighting on
their knees, hacking up desperately as they are beaten and pinned down
by a dozen bayonets, Bowie leaning on his elbow and shooting from
his cot, Crockett fighting like a panther in the angle of the church
wall, and Travis with his back against the wall to the west. The one
hundred and seventy-two men who had held four thousand men at bay for
two sleepless weeks are swept away as a dam goes that has held back a
flood, and the Mexicans open the church doors from the inside and let
in their comrades and the sunshine that shows them horrid heaps of five
hundred and twenty-two dead Mexicans, and five hundred more wounded.
There are no wounded among the Texans; of the one hundred and
seventy-two who were in the Alamo there are one hundred and seventy-two
dead.
With an example like this to follow, it was not difficult to gain the
independence of Texas; and whenever Sam Houston rode before his men,
crying, “Remember the Alamo!” the battle was already half won.
It was not a cry wholly of revenge, I like to think. It was rather the
holding up of the cross to the crusaders, and crying, “By this sign we
conquer.” It was a watchword to remind men of those who had suffered
and died that their cause might live.
And so, when we leave Texas, we forget the little things that may have
tried our patience and understanding there, we forgive the desolation
of the South-west, its cactus and dying cattle, we forget the dinners
in the middle of the day and the people’s passing taste in literature,
and we remember the Alamo.
II
OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER
II
OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER
A ROLLING, jerky train made up of several freight and one passenger
car, the latter equally divided, “For Whites” and “For Negroes”--which
in the south-west of Texas reads “Mexicans”--dropped my baggage at Pena
station, and rolled off across the prairie, rocking from side to side
like a line of canal-boats in a rough sea. It seemed like the last
departing link of civilization. There was the freight station itself;
beyond the track a leaky water-tank, a wooden store surrounded with
piles of raw, foul-smelling hides left in exchange for tobacco and
meal, a few thatched Mexican huts, and the prairie. That stretched on
every side to the horizon, level and desolate, and rising and falling
in the heat. Beneath was a red sandy soil covered with cactus and
bunches of gray, leafless brush, marked with the white skeletons of
cattle, and overhead a sun at white heat, and heavily moving buzzards
wheeling in circles or balancing themselves with outstretched wings
between the hot sky above and the hot, red soil below.
Across this desert came slowly Trumpeter Tyler, of Troop G, Third
Cavalry, mounted on the white horse which only trumpeters affect, and
as white as the horse itself from the dust of the trail. He did not
look like the soldiers I had seen at San Antonio. His blue shirt was
wide open at the breast, his riding-breeches were bare at the knee, and
the cactus and chaparral had torn his blouse into rags and ribbons. He
pushed his wide-brimmed hat back from his forehead and breathed heavily
with the heat. Captain Hardie’s camp, he panted, lay twenty-five miles
to the west. He had come from there to see if the field tents and extra
rations were ever going to arrive from the post, and as he had left,
the captain had departed also with a detachment in search of Garza on
a fresh trail. “And he means to follow it,” said Trumpeter Tyler, “if
it takes him into Mexico.” So it was doubtful whether the visitor from
the East would see the troop commander for several days; but if he
nevertheless wished to push on to the camp, Trumpeter Tyler would be
glad to show him the way. Not only would he show him the way, but he
would look over his kit for him, and select such things as the visitor
would need in the brush. Not such things as the visitor might want, but
such things as the visitor would need. For in the brush necessities
become luxuries, and luxuries are relics of an effete past and of
places where tradition tells of pure water and changes of raiment, and,
some say, even beds. Neither Trumpeter Tyler, nor Captain Francis H.
Hardie, nor any of the officers or men of the eight troops of cavalry
on field service in south-west Texas had seen such things for three
long months of heat by day and cold by night, besides a blizzard of
sleet and rain, that kept them trembling with cold for a fortnight.
And it was for this reason that the visitor from the East chose to see
the United States troops as they were in the field, and to tell about
the way they performed their duty there, rather than as he found them
at the posts, where there is at least a canteen and papers not more
than a week old.
[Illustration: TRUMPETER TYLER]
Trumpeter Tyler ran his hand haughtily through what I considered a very
sensibly-chosen assortment of indispensable things, and selected a
handful which he placed on one side.
“You think I had better not take those?” I suggested.
“That’s all you can take,” said the trooper, mercilessly. “You must
think of the horse.”
Then he led the way to the store, and pointed out the value of a tin
plate, a tin cup, and an iron knife and fork, saddle-bags, leather
leggings to keep off the needles of the cactus, a revolver, and a
blanket. It is of interest to give Trumpeter Tyler’s own outfit, as it
was that of every other man in the troop, and was all that any one of
them had had for two months. He carried it all on his horse, and it
consisted of a blanket, an overcoat, a carbine, a feed-bag, lariat and
iron stake, a canteen, saddle-bags filled with rations on one side and
a change of under-clothing on the other, a shelter-tent done up in a
roll, a sword, and a revolver, with rounds of ammunition for it and the
carbine worn in a belt around the waist. All of this, with the saddle,
weighed about eighty pounds, and when the weight of a man is added
to it, one can see that it is well, as Trumpeter Tyler suggested, to
think of the horse. Troop G had been ordered out for seven days’ field
service on the 15th of December, and it was then the 24th of January,
and the clothes and equipments they had had with them when they started
at midnight from Fort MacIntosh for that week of hard riding were all
they had had with them since. But the hard riding had continued.
Trumpeter Tyler proved that day not only my guide, but a philosopher,
and when night came on, a friend. He was very young, and came from
Virginia, as his slow, lazy voice showed; and he had played, in his
twenty-three years, the many parts of photographer, compositor, barber,
cook, musician, and soldier. He talked of these different callings
as we walked our horses over the prairie, and, out of deference to
myself and my errand, of writing. He was a somewhat general reader, and
volunteered his opinion of the works of Rudyard Kipling, Laura Jean
Libbey, Captain Charles King, and others with confident familiarity. He
recognized no distinctions in literature; they had all written a book,
therefore they were, in consequence, in exactly the same class.
Of Mr. Kipling he said, with an appreciative shake of the head, that
“he knew the private soldier from way back;” of Captain Charles King,
that he wrote for the officers; and of Laura Jean Libbey, that she was
an authoress whose books he read “when there really wasn’t nothing else
to do.” I doubt if one of Mr. Kipling’s own heroes could have made as
able criticisms.
When night came on and the stars came out, he dropped the soldier
shop and talked of religion and astronomy. The former, he assured me
earnestly, was much discussed by the privates around the fire at night,
which I could better believe after I saw how near the stars get and how
wide the world seems when there is only a blanket between you and the
heavens, and when there is a general impression prevailing that you are
to be shot at from an ambush in the morning. Of astronomy he showed a
very wonderful knowledge, and awakened my admiration by calling many
stars by strange and ancient names--an admiration which was lessened
abruptly when he confessed that he had been following some other than
the North Star for the last three miles, and that we were lost. It
was a warm night, and I was so tired with the twenty-five-miles ride
on a Mexican saddle--which is as comfortable as a soap-box turned
edges up--that the idea of lying out on the ground did not alarm me.
But Trumpeter Tyler’s honor was at stake. He had his reputation as
a trailer to maintain, and he did so ably by lighting matches and
gazing knowingly at the hoof-marks of numerous cattle, whose bones, I
was sure, were already whitening on the plain or journeying East in a
refrigerator-car, but which he assured me were still fresh, and must
lead to the ranch near which the camp was pitched. And so, after four
hours’ aimless trailing through the chaparral, when only the thorns of
the cactus kept us from falling asleep off our horses, we stumbled into
two smouldering fires, a ghostly row of little shelter-tents, and a
tall figure in a long overcoat, who clicked a carbine and cried, “Halt,
and dismount!”
I was somewhat doubtful of my reception in the absence of the captain,
and waited, very wide awake now, while they consulted together in
whispers, and then the sentry led me to one of the little tents and
kicked a sleeping form violently, and told me to crawl in and not to
mind reveille in the morning, but to sleep on as long as I wished.
I did not know then that I had Trumpeter Tyler’s bed, and that he
was sleeping under a wagon, but I was gratefully conscious of his
“bunkie’s” tucking me in as tenderly as though I were his son, and of
his not sharing, but giving me more than my share of the blankets. And
I went to sleep so quickly that it was not until the morning that I
found what I had drowsily concluded must be the roots of trees under
me, to be “bunkie’s” sabre and carbine.
The American private, as he showed himself during the three days in
which I was his guest, and afterwards, when Captain Hardie had returned
and we went scouting together, proved to be a most intelligent and
unpicturesque individual. He was intelligent, because he had, as a
rule, followed some other calling before he entered the service, and
he was not picturesque, because he looked on “soldiering” merely as
a means of livelihood, and had little or no patriotic or sentimental
feeling concerning it. This latter was not true of the older men.
They had seen real war either during the rebellion or in the Indian
campaigns, which are much more desperate affairs than the Eastern mind
appreciates, and they were fond of the service and proud of it. One of
the corporals in G Troop, for instance, had been honorably discharged
a year before with the rank of first sergeant, and had re-enlisted as
a private rather than give up the service, of which he found he was
more fond than he had imagined when he had left it. And in K Troop
was an even more notable instance in a man who had been retired on
three-fourths pay, having served his thirty years, and who had returned
to the troop to act as Captain Hunter’s “striker,” or man of all work,
and who bore the monotony of the barracks and the hardships of field
service rather than lose the uniform and the feeling of _esprit de
corps_ which thirty years’ service had made a necessity to him.
But the raw recruit, or the man in his third or fourth year, as he
expressed himself in the different army posts and among the companies
I met on the field, looked upon his work from a purely business point
of view. He had been before enlistment a clerk, or a compositor, a
cowboy, a day-laborer, painter, blacksmith, book-canvasser, almost
everything. In Captain Hardie’s troop all of these were represented,
and the average of intelligence was very high. Whether the most
intelligent private is the best soldier is a much-discussed question
which is not to be discussed here, but these men were intelligent and
were good soldiers, although I am sure they were too independent in
their thoughts, though not in their actions, to have suited an officer
of the English or German army. That they are more carefully picked men
than those found in the rank and file of the British army can be proved
from the fact that of those who apply for enlistment in the United
States but twenty per cent. are chosen, while in Great Britain they
accept eighty and in some years ninety per cent. of the applicants. The
small size of our army in comparison, however, makes this showing less
favorable than it at first appears.
In camp, while the captain was away, the privates suggested a lot of
college boys more than any other body of individuals. A few had the
college boy’s delight in shirking their work, and would rejoice over
having had a dirty carbine pass inspection on account of a shining
barrel, as the Sophomore boasts of having gained a high marking for
a translation he had read from a crib. They had also the college
boy’s songs, and his trick of giving nicknames, and his original and
sometimes clever slang, and his satisfaction in expressing violent
liking or dislike for those in authority over him--in the one case
tutors and professors, and in the other sergeants and captains. Their
one stupid hitch, in which the officers shared to some extent, was in
re-enforcing all they said with profanity; but as soldiers have done
this, apparently, since the time of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages, it must
be considered an inherited characteristic. Their fun around the camp
fire at night was rough, but it was sometimes clever, though it was
open to the objection that a clever story never failed of three or four
repetitions. The greatest successes were those in which the officers,
always of some other troop, were the butts. One impudent “cruitie” made
himself famous in a night by improvising an interview between himself
and a troop commander who had met him that day as he was steering a
mule train across the prairie.
“‘How are you?’ said he to me. ‘You’re one of Captain Hardie’s men,
ain’t you? I’m Captain----.’
“‘Glad to know you, captain,’ said I. ‘I’ve read about you in the
papers.’”
This was considered a magnificent stroke by the men, who thought the
captain in question rather too fond of sending in reports concerning
himself to headquarters.
“‘Well,’ says he, ‘when do you think we’re going to catch this ----
---- ---- ---- Garza? As for me,’ says he, ‘I’m that ---- ---- ----
---- tired of the whole ---- ---- ---- business that I’m willing to
give up my job to any ---- ---- ---- fool that will take it----’
“‘Well, old man,’ says I, ‘I’d be glad to relieve you,’ says I, ‘but
I’d a ---- sight rather serve under Captain Hardie than captain such a
lot of regular ---- ---- ---- coffee-coolers as you’ve got under you.’”
The audacity of this entirely fictitious conversation was what
recommended it to the men. I only reproduce it here as showing their
idea of humor. An even greater success was that of a stolid German,
who related a true incident of life at Fort Clarke, where the men were
singing one night around the fire, when the colonel passed by, and
ordered them into the tents, and to stop that ---- noise.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN FRANCIS H. HARDIE, G TROOP, THIRD UNITED STATES
CAVALRY]
“And den,” continued the soldier, “he come acrost Cabding----,
sitting in front of his tent, and he says to him quick like that, ‘You
ged into your tent, _too_.’ That’s what he said to him, ‘You ged into
your tent, _too_.’”
It is impossible to imagine the exquisite delight that this simple
narrative gave. The idea of a real troop commander having been told
to get into his tent just like a common soldier brought the tears to
the men’s eyes, and the success of his story so turned the German’s
head that he continued repeating to himself and to any one he met for
several days: “That’s what he said, ‘You ged into your tent, TOO.’
That’s what he said.”
Captain Hardie rode his detachment into camp on the third day, with
horses so tired that they tried to lie down whenever there was a halt;
and a horse must be very tired before he will do that. Captain Hardie’s
riding-breeches were held together by the yellow stripes at their
sides, and his hands were raw and swollen with the marks of the cactus
needles, and his face burned and seared to a dull red. I had heard of
him through the papers and from the officers at headquarters as the
“Riding Captain,” and as the one who had during the Garza campaign been
most frequently in the saddle, and least given to sending in detailed
reports of his own actions. He had been absolutely alone for the two
months he had been in the field. He was the father of his men, as all
troop commanders must be; he had to doctor them when they were ill, to
lend them money when the paymaster lost his way in the brush, to write
their letters, and to listen to their grievances, and explain that it
was not because they were not good soldiers that they could not go out
and risk being shot on this or that particular scouting party--he could
do all this for them, but he could not talk to them. He had to sit in
front of his own camp fire and hear them laughing around theirs, and
consider the loneliness of south-western Texas, which is the loneliness
of the ocean at night. He could talk to his Mexican guides, because
they, while they were under him, were not of his troop, and I believe
it was this need to speak to some living soul that taught Captain
Hardie to know Spanish as well as he did, and much more quickly than
the best of tutors could have done in a year at the post.