but his position in the post is very much like that of a base-ball
umpire’s on the field, for he is never thanked if he does well, and is
abused by every one on principle. And he is never free. At the very
minute he is lifting the green mint to his lips, his host will say,
“By-the-way, my striker tells me that last piece of stove-pipe you
furnished us does not fit by two inches; I don’t believe you looked at
the dimensions;” and when he hastens to join the ladies for protection,
he is saluted with an anxious chorus of inquiries as to when he is
going to put that pane of glass in the second-story window, and where
are those bricks for the new chimney. His worst enemies, however, lie
far afield, for he wages constant war with those clerks at the Treasury
Department at Washington who go over his accounts and papers, and who
take keen and justifiable pride in making him answer for every fraction
of a cent which he has left unexplained. The Government, for instance,
furnishes his storehouse with a thousand boxes of baking-powder, valued
at seventy dollars, or seven cents a box. If he sells three boxes
for twenty-five cents--I am quoting an actual instance--the Treasury
Department returns his papers, requesting him to explain who got the
four cents, and is anxious to know what he means by it.
I once saw some tin roofs at a post; they had been broken in coming,
and the quartermaster condemned them. That was a year ago, and his
papers complaining about these tin roofs have been travelling back
and forth between contractor and express agent and the department at
Washington and the quartermaster ever since, and they now make up a
bundle of _seventy_ different papers. Sometimes the quartermaster
defeats the Treasury Department; sometimes it requires him to pay money
out of his own pocket. Three revolvers were stolen out of their rack
once, and the post quartermaster was held responsible for their loss.
He objected to paying the sum the Government required, and pointed out
that the revolvers should have been properly locked in the rack. The
Government replied that the lock furnished by it was perfect, and not
to be tampered with or scoffed at, and that his excuse was puerile.
This quartermaster had a mechanic in his company, and he sent for the
young man, and told him to go through the barracks and open all the
locks he could. At the end of an hour every rack and soldier’s box in
the post were burglarized, and the Government paid for the revolvers.
[Illustration: UNITED STATES MILITARY POST AT SAN ANTONIO]
The post quartermaster’s only pleasure lies in his storehouse, and in
the neatness and order in which he keeps his supplies. He dearly loves
to lead the civilian visitor through these long rows of shelves, and
say, while clutching at his elbow to prevent his escape, “You see,
there are all the shovels in that corner; then over there I have the
Sibley tents, and there on that shelf are the blouses, and next to them
are the overcoats, and there are the canvas shoes, and on that shelf we
keep matches, and down here, you see, are the boots. Everything is in
its proper place.” At which you are to look interested, and say, “Ah,
yes!” just as though you had expected to see the baking-powder mixed
with the pith helmets, and the axe-handles and smoking-tobacco grouped
together on the floor.
After the quartermaster, the adjutant, to the mind of the civilian
at least, is the most superior being in the post. He is a lieutenant
selected by the colonel to act as his conscience-keeper and
letter-writer, and to convey his commands to the other officers. It
is his proud privilege to sit in the colonel’s own room and sign
papers, and to dictate others to his assistant non-coms, and it is
one of his duties to oversee the guard-mount, and to pick out the
smartest-looking soldier to act as the colonel’s orderly for the day.
You must understand that as the colonel’s orderly does not have to
remain on guard at night, the men detailed for guard duty vie with each
other in presenting an appearance sufficiently brilliant to attract
the adjutant’s eye, and as they all look exactly alike, the adjutant
has to be careful. He sometimes spends five long minutes and much
mental effort in going from one end of the ranks to the other to see
if Number Three’s boots are better blacked than Number Two’s, and in
trying to decide whether the fact that Murphy’s gunbarrel is oilier
than Cronin’s should weigh against the fact that Cronin’s gloves are
new, while Murphy’s are only fresh from the wash, both having tied on
the condition of their cartridges, which have been rubbed to look like
silver, and which must be an entirely superfluous nicety to the Indian
who may eventually be shot with them. This is one of the severest
duties of an adjutant’s routine, and after having accompanied one of
them through one of these prize exhibitions, I was relieved to hear
him confess his defeat by telling the sergeant that Cronin and Murphy
could toss for it. Another perquisite of the adjutant’s is his right to
tell his brother officers at mess in a casual way that they must act as
officer of the day or officer of the guard, or relieve Lieutenant Quay
while he goes quail-hunting, or take charge of Captain Blank’s troop of
raw recruits until the captain returns to their relief. To be able to
do this to men who outrank you, and who are much older than yourself,
and just as though the orders came from you direct, must be a great
pleasure, especially as the others are not allowed the satisfaction of
asking, “Who says I must?” or, “What’s the matter with your doing it
yourself?” These are the officials of the post; the unofficials, the
wives and the children, make the social life whatever it is.
[Illustration: UNITED STATES CAVALRYMAN IN FULL DRESS]
There are many in the East who think life at an army post is one of
discomfort and more or less monotony, relieved by petty gossip and
flirtations. Of course one cannot tell in a short visit whether or
not the life might become monotonous, though one rather suspects it
would, but the discomforts are quite balanced by other things which we
cannot get in the city. Of jealousy and gossip I saw little. I was told
by one officer’s wife that to the railroads was due the credit of the
destruction of flirtations at garrisons; and though I had heard of many
great advances and changes of conditions and territories brought about
by the coming of the railroads, this was the first time I had ever
heard they had interfered with the course of more or less true love.
She explained it by saying that in the days when army posts lay afar
from the track of civilization the people were more dependent upon one
another, and that then there may have existed Mrs. Hauksbees and Mrs.
Knowles, but that to-day the railroads brought in fresh air and ideas
from all over the country, and that the officers were constantly being
exchanged, and others coming and going on detached service, and that
visitors from the bigger outside world were appearing at all times.
The life impresses a stranger as such a peaceful sort of an existence
that he thinks that must be its chief and great attraction, and that
which makes the army people, as they call themselves, so well content.
It sounds rather absurd to speak of an army post of all places in the
world as peaceful; but the times are peaceful now, and there is not
much work for the officers to do, and they enjoy that blessing which is
only to be found in the army and in the Church of Rome--of having one’s
life laid out for one by others, and in doing what one is told, and in
not having to decide things for one’s self. You are sure of your home,
of your income, and you know exactly what is going to be your work a
month or five years later. You are not dependent on the rise of a
certain stock, nor the slave of patients or clients, and you have more
or less responsibility according to your rank, and responsibility is
a thing every man loves. If he has that, and his home and children, a
number of congenial people around him, and good hunting and fishing, it
would seem easy for him to be content. It is different with his wife.
She may unconsciously make life very pleasant for her husband or very
uncomfortable, in ways that other women may not. If she leaves him and
visits the East to see the new gowns, or the new operas, or her own
people, she is criticised as not possessing a truly wifely spirit, and
her husband is secretly pitied; and he knows it, and resents it for
his wife’s sake. While, on the other hand, if she remains always at
the post, he is called a selfish fellow, and his wife’s people at home
in the East think ill of him for keeping her all to himself in _that_
wilderness.
[Illustration: UNITED STATES MILITARY POST--INFANTRY PARADE]
The most surprising thing about the frontier army posts, to my mind,
was the amount of comfort and the number of pretty trifles one
found in the houses, especially when one considered the distance
these trifles--such as billiard-tables for the club or canteen, and
standing-lamps for the houses on the line--had come. At several
dinners, at posts I had only reached after two days’ journey by stage,
the tables were set exactly as they would have been in New York City
with Sherry’s men in the kitchen. There were red candle-shades, and
salted almonds and ferns in silver centre-pieces, and more forks than
one ever knows what to do with, and all the rest of it. I hope the army
people will not resent this, and proudly ask, “What did he expect to
find?” but I am sure that is not the idea of a frontier post we have
received in the East. There was also something delightfully novel in
the table-talk, and in hearing one pretty, slight woman, in a smart
_décolleté_ gown, casually tell how her husband and his men had burned
the prairie grass around her children and herself, and turned aside
a prairie fire that towered and roared around them, and another of
how her first child had been seized with convulsions in a stage-coach
when they were snow-bound eighty miles from the post and fifty miles
from the nearest city, and how she borrowed a clasp-knife from one
of the passengers with which he had been cutting tobacco, and lanced
the baby’s gums, and so saved his life. There was another hostess who
startled us by saying, cheerfully, that the month of June at her last
post was the most unpleasant in the year, because it was so warm that
it sometimes spoiled the ice for skating, and that the snow in April
reached to the sloping eaves of the house; also the daughter of an
Indian fighter, while pouring out at a tea one day, told calmly of
an Indian who had sprung at her with a knife, and seized her horse’s
head, and whom she had shaken off by lashing the pony on to his hind
legs. She could talk the Sioux language fluently, and had lived for
the greater part of her life eight hundred miles from a railroad. Is
it any wonder you find all the men in an army post married when there
are women who can adapt themselves as gracefully to snow-shoes at Fort
Brady as to the serious task of giving dinners at Fort Houston?
Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio is one of the three largest posts in
the country, and is in consequence one of the heavens towards which the
eyes of the army people turn. It is only twenty minutes from the city,
and the weather is mild throughout the year, and in the summer there
are palm-trees around the houses; and white uniforms--which are unknown
to the posts farther north, and which are as pretty as they are hard
to keep clean--make the parade-ground look like a cricket-field.
They have dances at this post twice a month, the regimental band
furnishing the music, and the people from town helping out the sets,
and the officers in uniforms with red, white, and yellow stripes. A
military ball is always very pretty, and the dancing-hall at Houston
is decorated on such occasions with guidons and flags, and palms and
broad-leaved plants, which grow luxuriously everywhere, and cost
nothing. I went directly from this much-desired post to the little one
at Oklahoma City, which is a one-company post, and where there are no
semi-monthly dances or serenades by the band; but where, on the other
hand, the officers do not stumble over an enlisted man at every step
who has to be saluted, and who stands still before them, as though he
meant to “hold them up” or ask his way, until he is recognized. The
post at Oklahoma City is not so badly off, even though it is built of
logs and mud, for the town is near by, and the men get leave to visit
it when they wish. But it serves to give one an idea of the many other
one-company posts scattered in lonely distances along the borders of
the frontier, where there are no towns, and where every man knows what
the next man is going to say before he speaks--single companies which
the Government has dropped out there, and which it has apparently
forgotten, as a man forgets the book he has tucked away in his shelf
to read on some rainy day. They will probably find they are remembered
when the rainy days come. Fort Sill, in the Oklahoma Territory, is
one of the eight-company posts. I visited several of these, and liked
them better than those nearer the cities; but then I was not stationed
there. The people at these smaller isolated posts seem to live more
contentedly together. There is not enough of them to separate into
cliques or sets, as they did at the larger stations, and they were more
dependent one upon another. There was a night when one officer on the
line gave a supper, and another (one of his guests) said he wished to
contribute the cigars. There had not been an imported cigar in that
post for a year at least, and when Captain Ellis brought in a fresh
box with _two_ paper stamps about it, and the little steamer engraved
on the gray band met our eyes, and we knew they had paid the customs
duty, there was a most unseemly cheer and undignified haste to have
the box opened. And then each man laid his cigar beside his plate,
and gazed and sniffed at it, and said “Ah!” and beamed on every one
else, and put off lighting it as long as he possibly could. That was
a memorable night, and I shall never sufficiently thank Captain Ellis
for that cigar, and for showing me how little we of the East appreciate
the little things we have always with us, and which become so important
when they are taken away.
[Illustration: FORT HOUSTON, AT SAN ANTONIO--OFFICERS’ QUARTERS]
Fort Sill is really a summer resort; at least, that is what the
officers say. I was not there in summer, but it made a most delightful
winter resort. There is really no reason at all why people should
not go to these interior army posts, as well as to the one at Point
Comfort, and spend the summer or winter there, either for their
health or for their pleasure. They can reach Fort Sill, for instance,
in a three-days’ journey from New York, and then there are two days
of staging, and you are in a beautiful valley, with rivers running
over rocky beds, with the most picturesque Indians all about you,
and with red and white flags wigwagging from the parade to the green
mountain-tops, and good looking boy-officers to explain the new
regulations, and the best of hunting and fishing.
[Illustration: THE BARRACKS, FORT HOUSTON]
I do not know how the people of Fort Sill will like having their home
advertised in this way, but it seems a pity others should not enjoy
following Colonel Jones over the prairie after jack-rabbits. We started
four of them in one hour, and that is a very good sport when you have
a field of twenty men and women and a pack of good hounds. The dogs of
Colonel Jones were not as fast as the rabbits, but they were faster
than the horses, and so neither dogs nor rabbits were hurt; and that
is as it should be, for, as Colonel Jones says, if you caught the
rabbits, there would be no more rabbits to catch. Of the serious side
of the life of an army post, of the men and of the families of the men
who are away on dangerous field service, I have said nothing, because
there was none of it when I was there, nor of the privations of those
posts up in the far Northwest, where snow and ice are almost a yearly
accompaniment, and where the mail and the papers, which are such a
mockery as an exchange for the voices of real people, come only twice a
month.
It would be an incomplete story of life at a post which said nothing
of the visits of homesickness, which, many strong men in the West have
confessed to me, is the worst sickness with which man is cursed. And
it is an illness which comes at irregular periods to those of the men
who know and who love the East. It is not a homesickness for one home
or for one person, but a case of that madness which seized Private
Ortheris, only in a less malignant form, and in the officers’ quarters.
An impotent protest against the immutability of time and of space is
one of its symptoms--a sick disgust of the blank prairie, blackened by
fire as though it had been drenched with ink, the bare parade-ground,
the same faces, the same stories, the same routine and detailed life,
which promises no change or end; and with these a longing for streets
and rows of houses that seemed commonplace before, of architecture
which they had dared to criticise, and which now seems fairer than the
lines of the Parthenon, a craving to get back to a place where people,
whether one knows them or not, are hurrying home from work under the
electric lights, to the rush of the passing hansoms and the cries of
the “last editions,” and the glare of the shop-windows, to the life of
a great city that is as careless of the exile’s love for it as is the
ocean to one who exclaims upon its grandeur from the shore; a soreness
of heart which makes men while it lasts put familiar photographs out of
sight, which makes the young lieutenants, when the band plays a certain
waltz on the parade at sundown, bite their chin-straps, and stare ahead
more fixedly than the regulations require. Some officers will confess
this to you, and some will not. It is a question which is the happier,
he who has no other scenes for which to care, and who is content, or he
who eats his heart out for a while, and goes back on leave at last.
VIII
THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE
VIII
THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE
THE City of Denver probably does more to keep the Eastern man who is
mining or ranching from returning once a year to his own people, and
from spending his earnings at home, than any other city in the West.
It lays its charm upon him, and stops him half-way, and he decides
that the journey home is rather long, and puts it off until the next
year, and again until the next, until at last he buys a lot and builds
a house, and only returns to the East on his wedding journey. Denver
appeals to him more than do any of these other cities, for the reason
that the many other Eastern men who have settled there are turning it
into a thoroughly Eastern city--a smaller New York in an encircling
range of white-capped mountains. If you look up at its towering office
buildings, you can easily imagine yourself, were it not for the breadth
of the thoroughfare, in down-town New York; and though the glimpse
of the mountains at the end of the street in place of the spars and
mast-heads of the East and North rivers undeceives you, the mud at your
feet serves to help out the delusion. Denver is a really beautiful
city, but--and this, I am sure, few people in New York will believe--it
has the worst streets in the country. Their mud or their dust, as the
season wills it, is the one blot on the city’s fair extent; it is as
if the City Fathers had served a well-appointed dinner on a soiled
table-cloth. But they say they will arrange all that in time.
The two most striking things about the city to me were the public
schools and the private houses. Great corporations, insurance
companies, and capitalists erect twelve-story buildings everywhere.
They do it for an advertisement for themselves or their business, and
for the rent of the offices. But these buildings do not in any way
represent a city’s growth. You will find one or two of such buildings
in almost every Western city, but you will find the people who rent
the offices in them living in the hotels or in wooden houses on the
outskirts. In Denver there are not only the big buildings, but mile
after mile of separate houses, and of the prettiest, strictest, and
most proper architecture. It is a distinct pleasure to look at these
houses, and quite impossible to decide upon the one in which you would
rather live. They are not merged together in solid rows, but stand
apart, with a little green breathing-space between, each in its turn
asserting its own individuality. The greater part of these are built of
the peculiarly handsome red stone which is found so plentifully in the
Silver State. It is not the red stone which makes them so pleasantly
conspicuous, but the taste of the owner or the architect which has
turned it to account. As for the public schools, they are more like art
museums outside than school-houses; and if as much money and thought
in proportion are given to the instruction as have been put upon the
buildings, the children of Denver threaten to grow up into a most
disagreeably superior class of young persons. Denver possesses those
other things which make a city livable, but the public schools and the
private houses were to me the most distinctive features. The Denver
Club is quite as handsome and well ordered a club as one would find in
New York City, and the University Club, which is for the younger men,
brings the wanderers from different colleges very near and pleasantly
together. Its members can sing more different college songs in a given
space of time than any other body of men I have met. The theatres and
the hotels are new and very good, and it is a delight to find servants
so sufficiently civilized that the more they are ordered about and the
more one gives them to do, the more readily they do it, knowing that
this means that they are to be tipped. In the other Western cities,
where this pernicious and most valuable institution is apparently
unknown, a traveller has to do everything for himself.
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF THE GARDEN OF THE GODS, AND PIKE’S PEAK]
You will find that the people of a city always pride themselves on
something which the visitor within their gates would fail to notice.
They have become familiar with those features which first appeal to
him, have outgrown them, and have passed on to admire something else.
The citizen of Denver takes a modest pride in the public schools, the
private houses, and the great mountains, which seem but an hour’s walk
distant and are twenty miles away; but he is proudest before all of
two things--of his celery and his cable-cars. His celery is certainly
the most delicious and succulent that grows, and his cable-cars are
very beautiful white and gold affairs, and move with the delightfully
terrifying speed of a toboggan. Riding on these cable-cars is one of
the institutions of the city, just as in the summer a certain class
of young people in New York find their pleasure in driving up and
down the Avenue on the top of the omnibuses. But that is a dreary
and sentimental journey compared with a ride on the grip-seat of a
cable-car, and every one in Denver patronizes this means of locomotion
whether on business or on pleasure bent, and whether he has carriages
of his own or not. There is not, owing to the altitude, much air to
spare in Denver at any time, but when one mounts a cable-car, and
is swept with a wild rush around a curve, or dropped down a grade
as abruptly as one is dropped down the elevator shaft in the Potter
Building, what little air there is disappears, and leaves one gasping.
Still, it is a most popular diversion, and even in the winter some
of the younger people go cable-riding as we go sleighing, and take
lap-robes with them to keep them warm. There is even a “scenic route,”
which these cars follow, and it is most delightful.