its borders; its idea of the soldier is the comfortable, clubable
fellow they meet in Washington and New York, whose red, white, and
blue button is all that marks him from the other clubable, likable men
about him. But they ought to know more and feel more for these equally
likable men of the border posts, whose only knowledge of club life is
the annual bill for dues, one of which, with supreme irony, arrived in
Captain Hardie’s mail at a time when we had only bacon three times a
day, and nothing but alkali water to silence the thirst that followed.
To a young man it is rather pathetic to see another young man, with a
taste and fondness for the pleasant things of this world, pull out his
watch and hold it to the camp fire and say, “Just seven o’clock; people
in God’s country are sitting down to dinner.” And then a little later:
“And now it’s eight o’clock, and they are going to the theatres. What
is there at the theatres now?” And when I recalled the plays running
in New York when I left it, the officers would select which one they
would go to, with much grave deliberation, and then crawl in between
two blankets and find the most comfortable angle at which a McClellan
saddle will make a pillow.
The Garza campaign is only of interest here as it shows the work
of the United States troops who were engaged in it. As for Caterino
E. Garza himself, he may, by the time this appears in print, have
been made President of Mexico, which is most improbable; or have
been captured in the brush, which is more improbable; or he may have
disappeared from public notice altogether. It is only of interest
to the Eastern man to know that a Mexican ranch-owner and sometime
desperado and politician living in south-west Texas proclaimed a
revolution against the Government of Mexico, and that that Government
requested ours to see that the neutrality laws existing between the
two countries were not broken by the raising of troops on our side of
the Rio Grande River, and that followers of this Garcia should not
be allowed to cross through Texas on their way to Mexico. This our
Government, as represented by the Department of Texas, which has its
headquarters at San Antonio, showed its willingness to do by sending at
first two troops of cavalry, and later six more, into darkest Texas,
with orders to take prisoners any bands of revolutionists they might
find there; and to arrest all individual revolutionists with a warrant
sworn to by two witnesses. The country into which these eight troops
were sent stretches for three hundred and sixty miles along the Rio
Grande River, where it separates Mexico from Texas, and runs back a
hundred and more miles east, making of this so-called Garza territory
an area of five hundred square miles.
This particular country is the back-yard of the world. It is to the
rest of the West what the ash-covered lots near High Bridge are to
New York. It is the country which led General Sheridan to say that if
he owned both places, he would rent Texas and live in hell. It is the
strip of country over which we actually went to war with Mexico, and
which gave General Sherman the opportunity of making the epigramme,
which no one who has not seen the utter desolateness of the land can
justly value, that we should go to war with Mexico again, and force her
to take it back.
It is a country where there are no roses, but where everything that
grows has a thorn. Where the cattle die of starvation, and where the
troops had to hold up the solitary train that passes over it once a
day, in true road-agent fashion, to take the water from its boilers
that their horses might not drop for lack of it. It is a country
where the sun blinds and scorches at noon, and where the dew falls
like a cold rain at night, and where one shivers in an overcoat at
breakfast, and rides without coat or waistcoat and panting with the
heat the same afternoon. Where there are no trees, nor running streams,
nor rocks nor hills, but just an ocean of gray chaparral and white,
chalky cañons or red, dusty trails. If you leave this trail for fifty
yards, you may wander for twenty miles before you come to water or a
ranch or another trail, and by that time the chaparral and cactus will
have robbed you of your clothing, and left in its place a covering of
needles, which break when one attempts to draw them out, and remain in
the flesh to fester and swell the skin, and leave it raw and tender
for a week. This country, it is almost a pleasure to say, is America’s
only in its possession. No white men, or so few that they are not as
common as century-plants, live in it. It is Mexican in its people, its
language, and its mode of life. The few who inhabit its wilderness are
ranch-owners, and their shepherds and cowboys; and a ranch, which means
a store and six or seven thatched adobe houses around it, is at the
nearest three miles from the next ranch, and on an average twenty
miles. As a rule, they move farther away the longer you ride towards
them.
[Illustration: WATER]
Into this foreign country of five hundred square miles the eight United
States cavalry troops of forty men each and two companies of infantry
were sent to find Garza and his followers. The only means by which a
man or horses or cows can be tracked in this desert is by the foot or
hoof prints which they may leave in the sandy soil as they follow the
trails already made or make fresh ones. To follow these trails it is
necessary to have as a guide a man born in the brush, who has trailed
cattle for a livelihood. The Mexican Government supplied the troops
with some of their own people, who did not know the particular country
into which they were sent, but who could follow a trail in any country.
One or two of these, sometimes none, went with each troop. What our
Government should have done was to supply each troop commander with
five or six of these men, who could have gone out in search of trails,
and reported at the camp whenever they had found a fresh one. By this
means the troops could have been saved hundreds of miles of unnecessary
marching and countermarching on “false alarms,” and the Government much
money, as the campaign in that event would have been brought much more
rapidly to a conclusion.
But the troop commanders in the field had no such aids. They had
to ride forth whenever so ordered to do by the authorities at
headquarters, some two hundred miles from the scene of the action, who
had in turn received their information from the Mexican general on the
other side of the Rio Grande. This is what made doing their duty, as
represented by obeying orders, such a difficult thing to the troops in
the Garza territory. They knew before they saddled their horses that
they were going out on a wild-goose chase to wear out their horses
and their own patience, and to accomplish nothing beyond furnishing
Garza’s followers with certain satisfaction in seeing a large body of
men riding solemnly through a dense underbrush in a blinding sun to
find a trait which a Mexican general had told an American general would
be sure to lead them to Garza, and news of which had reached them a
week after whoever had made the trail had passed over it. They could
imagine, as they trotted in a long, dusty line through the chaparral,
as conspicuous marks on the plain as a prairie-wagon, that Garza or his
men were watching them from under a clump of cactus on some elevation
in the desert, and that he would say:
“Ah! the troops are out again, I see. Who is it to-day--Hardie, Chase,
or Hunter? Lend me your field-glass. Ah! it is Hardie. He is a good
rider. I hope he will not get a sunstroke.”
And then they would picture how the revolutionists would continue the
smoking of their cornstalk cigarettes and the drinking of the smuggled
muscal.
This is not an exaggerated picture. A man could lie hidden in this
brush and watch the country on every side of him, and see each of the
few living objects which might pass over it in a day, as easily as he
could note the approach of a three-masted schooner at sea. And even
though troops came directly towards him, he had but to lie flat in the
brush within twenty feet of them, and they would not know it. It would
be as easy to catch Jack the Ripper with a Lord-Mayor’s procession as
Garza with a detachment of cavalry, unless they stumbled upon him by
luck, or unless he had with him so many men that their trail could
be followed at a gallop. As a matter of fact and history, the Garza
movement was broken up in the first three weeks of its inception by the
cavalry and the Texas Rangers and the deputy sheriffs, who rode after
the large bodies of men and scattered them. After that it was merely a
chase after little bands of from three to a dozen men, who travelled by
night and slept by day in their race towards the river, or, when met
there by the Mexican soldiers, in their race back again. The fact that
every inhabitant of the ranches and every Mexican the troops met was a
secret sympathizer with Garza was another and most important difficulty
in the way of his pursuers. And it was trying to know that the barking
of the dogs of a ranch was not yet out of ear-shot before a vaquero was
scuttling off through the chaparral to tell the hiding revolutionists
that the troops were on their way, and which way they were coming.
And so, while it is no credit to soldiers to do their duty, it is
creditable to them when they do their duty knowing that it is futile,
and that some one has blundered. If a fire company in New York City
were ordered out on a false alarm every day for three months, knowing
that it was not a fire to which they were going, but that some one had
wanted a messenger-boy, and rung up an engine by mistake, the alertness
and fidelity of those firemen would be most severely tested. That is
why I admired, and why the readers in the East should admire, the
discipline and the faithfulness with which the cavalry on the border
of Texas did their duty the last time Trumpeter Tyler sounded “Boots
and Saddles,” and went forth as carefully equipped, and as eager and
hopeful that _this_ time meant fighting, as they did the first.
Their life in the field was as near to nature, and, as far as comforts
were concerned, to the beasts of the field, as men often come. A
tramp in the Eastern States lives like a respectable householder in
comparison. Suppose, to better understand it, that you were ordered
to leave your house or flat or hall bedroom and live in the open air
for two months, and that you were limited in your selection of what
you wished to carry with you to the weight of eighty pounds. You would
find it difficult to adjust this eighty pounds in such a way that it
would include any comforts; certainly, there would be no luxuries. The
soldiers of Troop G, besides the things before enumerated, were given
for a day’s rations a piece of bacon as large as your hand, as much
coffee as would fill three large cups, and enough flour to make five or
six heavy biscuits, which they justly called “’dobes,” after the clay
bricks of which Mexican adobe houses are made. In camp they received
potatoes and beans. All of these things were of excellent quality
and were quite satisfying, as the work supplies an appetite to meet
them. This is not furnished by the Government, and costs it nothing,
but it is about the best article in the line of sustenance that the
soldier receives. He sleeps on a blanket with his “bunkie,” and with
his “bunkie’s” blanket over him. If he is cold, he can build the fire
higher, and doze in front of that. He rides, as a rule, from seven in
the morning to five in the afternoon, without a halt for a noonday
meal, and he generally gets to sleep by eight or nine. The rest of the
time he is in the saddle. Each man carries a frying-pan about as large
as a plate, with an iron handle, which folds over and is locked in
between the pan and another iron plate that closes upon it. He does his
own cooking in this, unless he happens to be the captain’s “striker,”
when he has double duty. He is so equipped and so taught that he is an
entirely independent organization in himself, and he and his horse eat
and sleep and work as a unit, and are as much and as little to the rest
of the troop as one musket and bayonet are to the line of them when a
company salutes.
[Illustration: THE MEXICAN GUIDE]
We had for a guide one of the most picturesque ruffians I ever met. He
was a Mexican murderer to the third or fourth degree, as Captain Hardie
explained when I first met him, and had been liberated from a jail in
Mexico in order that he might serve his country on this side of the
river as a guide, and that his wonderful powers as a trailer might not
be wasted.
He rejoiced in his liberty from iron bars and a bare mud floor,
and showed his gratitude in the most untiring vigilance and in the
endurance of what seemed to the Eastern mind the greatest discomforts.
He always rode in advance of the column, and with his eyes wandering
from the trail to the horizon and towards the backs of distant moving
cattle, and again to the trail at his feet. Whenever he saw any
one--and he could discover a suspected revolutionist long before any
one else--the first intimation the rest of the scouting party would get
of it was his pulling out his Winchester and disappearing on a gallop
into the chaparral. He scorned the assistance of the troop, and when we
came up to him again, after a wild dash through the brush, which left
our hats and portions of our clothing to mark our way, we would find
him with his prisoner’s carbine tucked under his arm, and beaming upon
him with a smile of wicked satisfaction.
As a trailer he showed, as do many of these guides, what seemed to be a
gift of second-sight cultivated to a supernatural degree. He would say:
“Five horses have passed ahead of us about an hour since. Two are led
and one has two men on his back, and there is one on each of the other
two;” which, when we caught up to them at the first watering-place,
would prove to be true. Or he would tell us that troops or Rangers to
such a number had crossed the trail at some time three or four days
before, that a certain mark was made by a horse wandering without a
rider, or that another had been made by a pony so many years old--all
of which statements would be verified later. But it was as a would-be
belligerent that he shone most picturesquely. When he saw a thin column
of smoke rising from a cañon where revolutionists were supposed to be
in camp, or came upon several armed men riding towards us and too close
to escape, his face would light up with a smile of the most wicked
content and delight, and he would beam like a cannibal before a feast
as he pumped out the empty cartridges and murmured, “Buena! buena!
buena!” with rolling eyes and an anticipatory smack of the lips.
But he was generally disappointed; the smoke would come from
a shepherd’s fire, and the revolutionists would point to the
antelope-skins under their saddles, which had been several months in
drying, and swear they were hunters, and call upon the saints to prove
that they had never heard of such a man as Garza, and that carbines,
revolvers, and knives were what every antelope-hunter needed for
self-protection. At which the Mexican would show his teeth and roll his
eyes with such a cruel show of disbelief that they would beg the “good
captain” to protect them and let them go, which, owing to the fact
that one cannot get a warrant and a notary public in the brush, as the
regulations require, he would, after searching them, be compelled to
do.
[Illustration: THIRD CAVALRY TROOPERS--SEARCHING A SUSPECTED
REVOLUTIONIST]
And then the Mexican, who had expected to see them hung to a tree
until they talked or died, as would have been done in his own free
republic, would sigh bitterly, and trot off patiently and hopefully
after more. Hope was especially invented for soldiers and fishermen.
One thought of this when one saw the spirit of the men as they stole
out at night, holding up their horses’ heads to make them step lightly,
and dodging the lights of the occasional ranches, and startling some
shepherd sleeping by the trail into the belief that a file of ghosts
had passed by him in the mist. They were always sure that this time
it meant something, and if the captain made a dash from the trail,
and pounded with his fist on the door of a ranch where lights shone
when lights should have been put out, the file of ghosts that had
stretched back two hundred yards into the night in an instant became
a close-encircling line of eager, open-eyed boys, with carbines free
from the sling-belts, covering the windows and the grudgingly opened
door. They never grew weary; they rode on many days from nine at
night to five the next afternoon, with but three hours’ sleep. On one
scouting expedition Tyler and myself rode one hundred and ten miles
in thirty-three hours; the average, however, was from thirty to fifty
miles a day; but the hot, tired eyes of the enlisted men kept wandering
over the burning prairie as though looking for gold; and if on the
ocean of cactus they saw a white object move, or a sombrero drop from
sight, or a horse with a saddle on its back, they would pass the word
forward on the instant, and wait breathlessly until the captain saw it
too.
I asked some of them what they thought of when they were riding up to
these wandering bands of revolutionists, and they told me that from
the moment the captain had shouted “Howmp!” which is the only order he
gives for any and every movement, they had made themselves corporals,
had been awarded the medal of honor, and had spent the thirty thousand
dollar reward for Garza’s capture. And so if any one is to take Garza,
and the hunting of the Snark is to be long continued in Texas, I hope
it will be G Troop, Third Cavalry, that brings the troublesome little
wretch into camp; not because they have worked so much harder than
the others, but because they had no tents, as did the others, and no
tinned goods, and no pay for two months, and because they had such an
abundance of enthusiasm and hope, and the good cheer that does not come
from the commissariat department or the canteen.
III
AT A NEW MINING CAMP
III
AT A NEW MINING CAMP
MY only ideas of a new mining camp before I visited Creede were derived
from an early and eager study of Bret Harte. Not that I expected to
see one of his mining camps or his own people when I visited Creede,
but the few ideas of miners and their ways and manners that I had were
those which he had given me. I should have liked, although I did not
expect it, to see the outcasts of Poker Flat before John Oakhurst,
in his well-fitting frock-coat, had left the outfit, and Yuba Bill
pulling up his horses in front of the Lone Star saloon, where Colonel
Starbuckle, with one elbow resting on the bar, and with his high white
hat tipped to one side, waited to do him honor. I do not know that Bret
Harte ever said that Colonel Starbuckle had a white hat, but I always
pictured him in it, and with a black stock. I wanted to hear people
say, “Waal, stranger,” and to see auburn-haired giants in red shirts,
with bags of gold-dust and nuggets of silver, and much should I have
liked to meet Rose of Touloumme. But all that I found at Creede which
reminded me of these miners and gamblers and the chivalric extravagant
days of ’49 were a steel pan, like a frying-pan without a handle, which
I recognized with a thrill as the pan for washing gold, and a pick
in the corner of a cabin; and once when a man hailed me as “Pardner”
on the mountain-side, and asked “What luck?” The men and the scenes
in this new silver camp showed what might have existed in the more
glorious sunshine of California, but they were dim and commonplace,
and lacked the sharp, clear-cut personality of Bret Harte’s men and
scenes. They were like the negative of a photograph which has been
under-exposed, and which no amount of touching up will make clear. So I
will not attempt to touch them up.
[Illustration: MINING CAMP ON THE RANGE ABOVE CREEDE]
When I first read of Creede, when I was so ignorant concerning it that
I pronounced the final _e_, it was on the date line of a newspaper, and
made no more impression upon me then than though it were printed simply
_Creede_. But after I had reached Denver, and even before, when I had
begun to find my way about the Western newspapers, it seemed to be
spelled CREEDE. In Denver it faced you everywhere from bill-boards,
flaunted at you from canvas awnings stretched across the streets, and
stared at you from daily papers in type an inch long; the shop-windows,
according to their several uses, advertised “Photographs of Creede,”
“The only correct map of Creede,” “Specimen ore from the Holy Moses
Mine, Creede,” “Only direct route to Creede,” “Scalp tickets to
Creede,” “Wanted, $500 to start drug-store in Creede,” “You will need
boots at Creede, and you can get them at ----’s.” The gentlemen in the
Denver Club talk Creede; the people in the hotels dropped the word so
frequently that you wondered if they were not all just going there,
or were not about to write Creede on the register. It was a common
language, starting-point, and interest. It was as momentous as the word
Johnstown during the week after the flood.
The train which carried me there held stern, important-looking old
gentlemen, who, the porter told me in an awed whisper, were one-third
or one-fifteenth owners of the Potluck Mine; young men in Astrakhan fur
coats and new top-boots laced at the ankles, trying to look desperate
and rough; grub-stake prospectors, with bedding, pick, and rations in
a roll on the seat beside them; more young men, who naïvely assured me
when they found that I, too, was going to Creede, and not in top-boots
and revolvers and a flannel shirt, that they had never worn such things
before, and really had decent clothes at home; also women who smoked
with the men and passed their flasks down the length of the car, and
two friendless little girls, of whom every one except the women, who
seemed to recognize a certain fitness of things, took unremitting care.
Every one on the crowded train showed the effect of the magnet that was
drawing him--he was restless, impatient, and excited. Half of them
did not know what they were going to find; and the other half, who had
already taken such another journey to Leadville, Aspen, or Cripple
Creek, knew only too well, and yet hoped that _this_ time--
Creede lies in a gully between two great mountains. In the summer the
mountain streams wash down into this gully and turn it into a little
river; but with the recklessness of true gamblers, the people who came
to Creede built their stores, houses, and saloons as near the base of
the great sides of the valley as they could, and if the stream comes
next summer, as it has done for hundreds of years before, it will carry
with it fresh pine houses and log huts instead of twigs and branches.
[Illustration: CREEDE]
The train stopped at the opening of this gully, and its passengers
jumped out into two feet of mud and snow. The ticket and telegraph
office on one side of the track were situated in a freight car with
windows and doors cut out of it, and with the familiar blue and white
sign of the Western Union nailed to one end; that station was typical
of the whole town in its rawness, and in the temporary and impromptu
air of its inhabitants. If you looked back at the road over which you
had just come, you saw the beautiful circle of the Wagon Wheel Gap, a
chain of magnificent mountains white with snow, picked with hundreds
of thousands of pine-trees so high above one that they looked like
little black pins. The clouds, less white than the snow, lay packed
in between the peaks of the range, or drifted from one to another to
find a resting-place, and the sun, beating down on both a blinding
glare, showed other mountains and other snow-capped ranges for fifty
miles beyond. This is at the opening of Willow Gulch into which Creede
has hurried and the sides of which it has tramped into mud and
covered with hundreds of little pine boxes of houses and log-cabins,
and the simple quadrangles of four planks which mark a building site.
In front of you is a village of fresh pine. There is not a brick, a
painted front, nor an awning in the whole town. It is like a city of
fresh card-board, and the pine shanties seem to trust for support to
the rocky sides of the gulch into which they have squeezed themselves.
In the street are ox-teams, mules, men, and donkeys loaded with ore,
crowding each other familiarly, and sinking knee-deep in the mud.
Furniture and kegs of beer, bedding and canned provisions, clothing and
half-open packing-cases, and piles of raw lumber are heaped up in front
of the new stores--or those still to be built--stores of canvas only,
stores with canvas tops and foundations of logs, and houses with the
Leadville front, where the upper boards have been left square instead
of following the sloping angle of the roof.