it is impossible to understand. One is a city, and the other a summer
or health resort; and we might as properly compare Boston and Newport,
or New York and Tuxedo. In both cities the Eastern man and woman and
the English cousin are much more in evidence than the born Western man.
These people are very fond of their homes at Denver and at the Springs,
but they certainly manage to keep Fifth Avenue and the Sound and the
Back Bay prominently in mind. Half of those women whose husbands are
wealthy--and every one out here seems to be in that condition--do the
greater part of their purchasing along Broadway below Twenty-third
Street, their letter-paper is stamped on Union Square, and their
husbands are either part or whole owners of a yacht. It sounds very
strange to hear them, in a city shut in by ranges of mountain peaks,
speak familiarly of Larchmont and Hell Gate and New London and “last
year’s cruise.” Colorado Springs is the great pleasure resort for the
whole State, and the salvation and sometimes the resting-place of a
great many invalids from all over the world. It lies at the base of
Pike’s Peak and Cheyenne Mountain, and is only an hour’s drive from the
great masses of jagged red rock known as the Garden of the Gods. Pike’s
Peak, the Garden of the Gods, and the Mount of the Holy Cross are the
proudest landmarks in the State. This last mountain was regarded for
many years almost as a myth, for while many had seen the formation
which gives it its name, no one could place the mountain itself, the
semblance of the cross disappearing as one drew near to it. But in 1876
Mr. Hayden, of the Government Survey, and Mr. W. H. Jackson, of Denver,
found it, climbed it, and photographed it, and since then artists and
others have made it familiar. But it will never become so familiar as
to lose aught of its wonderfully impressive grandeur.
There are also near Colorado Springs those mineral waters which give it
its name, and of which the people are so proud that they have turned
Colorado Springs into a prohibition town, and have made drinking the
waters, as it were, compulsory. This is an interesting example of
people who support home industries. There is a casino at the Springs,
where the Hungarian band plays in summer, a polo field, a manufactured
lake for boating, and hundreds of beautiful homes, fashioned after
the old English country-house, even to the gate-keeper’s lodge and
the sun dial on the lawn. And there are cañons that inspire one _not_
to attempt to write about them. There are also many English people
who have settled there, and who vie with the Eastern visitors in the
smartness of their traps and the appearance of their horses. Indeed,
both of these cities have so taken on the complexion of the East that
one wonders whether it is true that the mining towns of Creede and
Leadville lie only twelve hours away, and that one is thousands of
miles distant from the City of New York.
It is possible that some one may have followed this series of articles,
of which this is the last, from the first, and that he may have
decided, on reading them, that the West is filled with those particular
people and institutions of which these articles have treated, and that
one steps from ranches to army posts, and from Indian reservations
to mining camps with easy and uninterrupted interest. This would be,
perhaps it is needless to say, an entirely erroneous idea. I only
touched on those things which could not be found in the East, and said
nothing of the isolation of these particular and characteristic points
of interest, of the commonplace and weary distances which lay between
them, and of the difficulty of getting from one point to another.
For days together, while travelling to reach something of possible
interest, I might just as profitably, as far as any material presented
itself, have been riding through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Ohio.
Indians do not necessarily join hands with the cowboys, nor army
posts nestle at the feet of mountains filled with silver. The West is
picturesque in spots, and, as the dramatic critics say, the interest
is not sustained throughout. I confess I had an idea that after I had
travelled four days in a straight line due west, every minute of my
time would be of value, and that if each man I met was not a character
he would tell stories of others who were, and that it would merely be
necessary for me to keep my eyes open to have picturesque and dramatic
people and scenes pass obligingly before them. I was soon undeceived
in this, and learned that in order to reach the West we read about,
it would be necessary for me to leave the railroad, and that I
must pay for an hour of interest with days of the most unprofitable
travel. Matthew Arnold said, when he returned to England, that he had
found this country “uninteresting,” and every American was properly
indignant, and said he could have forgiven him any adjective but that.
If Matthew Arnold travelled from Pittsburg to St. Louis, from St.
Louis to Corpus Christi, and from Corpus Christi back through Texas to
the Indian Territory, he not only has my sympathy, but I admire him
as a descriptive writer. For those who find the level farm lands of
Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and the ranches of upper Texas,
and the cactus of Southern Texas, and the rolling prairie of the Indian
Territory interesting, should travel from Liverpool to London on either
line they please to select, and they will understand the Englishman’s
discontent. Hundreds of miles of level mud and snow followed by a hot
and sandy soil and uncultivated farm lands are not as interesting
as hedges of hawthorn or glimpses of the Thames or ivy-covered
country-houses in parks of oak. The soldiers who guard this land, the
Indians who are being crowded out of it, and the cowboys who gallop
over it and around their army of cattle, _are_ interesting, but they do
not stand at the railroad stations to be photographed and to exhibit
their peculiar characteristics.
[Illustration: WITHIN THE GATES, GARDEN OF THE GODS]
But after one leaves these different States and rides between the
mountain ranges of Colorado, he commits a sin if he does not sit day
and night by the car-window. It is best to say this as it shows the
other side of the shield.
You may, while travelling in the West, enjoy the picturesque excitement
of being held up by train robbers, but you are in much more constant
danger of being held up by commercial travellers and native Western
men, who demand that you stand and deliver your name, your past
history, your business, and your excuse for being where you are.
Neither did I find the West teeming with “characters.” I heard of them,
and indeed the stories of this or that pioneer or desperado are really
the most vivid and most interesting memories I have of the trip. But
these men have been crowded out, or have become rich and respectably
commonplace, or have been shot, as the case may be. I met the men who
had lynched them or who remembered them, but not the men themselves.
They no longer overrun the country; they disappeared with the buffalo,
and the West is glad of it, but it is disappointing to the visitor.
The men I met were men of business, who would rather talk of the new
court-house with the lines of the sod still showing around it than
of the Indian fights and the killing of the bad men of earlier days
when there was no court-house, and when the vigilance committee was a
necessary evil. These were “well-posted” and “well-informed” citizens,
and if there is one being I dread and fly from, it is a well-posted
citizen.
[Illustration: POLO ABOVE THE SNOW-LINE AT COLORADO SPRINGS]
The men who are of interest in the West, and of whom most curious
stories might be told, are the Eastern men and the Englishmen who have
sought it with capital, or who have been driven there to make their
fortunes. Some one once started a somewhat unprofitable inquiry as
to what became of all the lost pins. That is not nearly so curious
as what becomes of all the living men who drop suddenly out of our
acquaintanceship or our lives, and who are not missed, but who are
nevertheless lost. I know now what becomes of them; they all go West.
I met some men here whom I was sure I had left walking Fifth Avenue,
and who told me, on the contrary, that they had been in the West
for the last two years. They had once walked Fifth Avenue, but they
dropped out of the procession one day, and no one missed them, and they
are out here enjoying varying fortunes. The brakesman on a freight
and passenger train in Southern Texas was a lower-class man whom I
remembered at Lehigh University as an expert fencer; the conductor on
the same train was from the same college town; the part owner of a
ranch, whom I supposed I had left looking over the papers in the club,
told me he had not been in New York for a year, and that his partner
was “Jerry” Black, who, as I trust no one has forgotten, was one of
Princeton’s half-backs, and who I should have said, had any one asked
me, was still in Pennsylvania. Another man whom I remembered as a
“society” reporter on a New York paper, turned up in a white apron as
a waiter at a hotel in ----. I was somewhat embarrassed at first as to
whether or not he would wish me to recognize him, but he settled my
doubts by winking at me over his heavily-loaded tray, as much as to say
it was a very good joke, and that he hoped I was appreciating it to
its full value. We met later in the street, and he asked me with the
most faithful interest of those whose dances and dinners he had once
reported, deprecated a notable scandal among people of the Four Hundred
which was filling the papers at that time, and said I could hardly
appreciate the pity of such a thing occurring among people of his set.
Another man, whom I had known very well in New York, turned up in San
Antonio with an entirely new name, wife, and fortune, and verified
the tradition which exists there that it is best before one grows to
know a man too well, to ask him what was his name _before_ he came to
Texas. San Antonio seemed particularly rich in histories of those who
came there to change their fortunes, and who had changed them most
completely. The English gave the most conspicuous examples of these
unfortunates--conspicuous in the sense that their position at home had
been so good, and their habits of life so widely different.
The proportion of young English gentlemen who are roughing it in the
West far exceeds that of the young Americans. This is due to the fact
that the former have never been taught a trade or profession, and in
consequence, when they have been cheated of the money they brought with
them to invest, have nothing but their hands to help them, and so take
to driving horses or branding cattle or digging in the streets, as one
graduate of Oxford, sooner than write home for money, did in Denver.
He is now teaching Greek and Latin in one of our colleges. The manner
in which visiting Englishmen are robbed in the West, and the quickness
with which some of them take the lesson to heart, and practise it upon
the next Englishman who comes out, or upon the prosperous Englishman
already there, would furnish material for a book full of pitiful
stories. And yet one cannot help smiling at the wickedness of some of
these schemes. Three Englishmen, for example, bought, as they supposed,
thirty thousand Texas steers; but the Texans who pretended to sell them
the cattle drove the same three thousand head ten times around the
mountain, as a dozen supers circle around the backdrop of a stage to
make an army, and the Englishmen counted and paid for each steer ten
times over. There was another Texan who made a great deal of money by
advertising to teach young men how to become cowboys, and who charged
them ten dollars a month tuition fee, and who set his pupils to work
digging holes for fence-posts all over the ranch, until they grew wise
in their generation, and left him for some other ranch, where they were
paid thirty dollars per month for doing the same thing. But in many
instances it is the tables of San Antonio which take the greater part
of the visiting Englishman’s money. One gentleman, who for some time
represented the Isle of Wight in the Lower House, spent three modest
fortunes in the San Antonio gambling-houses, and then married his cook,
which proved a most admirable speculation, as she had a frugal mind,
and took entire control of his little income. And when the Marquis of
Aylesford died in Colorado, the only friend in this country who could
be found to take the body back to England was his first-cousin, who at
that time was driving a hack around San Antonio. We heard stories of
this sort on every side, and we met faro-dealers, cooks, and cowboys
who have served through campaigns in India or Egypt, or who hold
an Oxford degree. A private in G troop, Third Cavalry, who was my
escort on several scouting expeditions in the Garza outfit, was kind
enough and quite able to tell me which club in London had the oldest
wine-cellar, where one could get the best visiting-cards engraved,
and why the Professor of Ancient Languages at Oxford was the superior
of the instructor in like studies at Cambridge. He did this quite
unaffectedly, and in no way attempted to excuse his present position.
Of course, the value of the greater part of these stories depends on
the family and personality of the hero, and as I cannot give names, I
have to omit the best of them.
There was a little English boy who left San Antonio before I had
reached it, but whose name and fame remained behind him. He was
eighteen years of age, and just out of Eton, where he had spent all his
pocket-money in betting on the races through commissioners. Gambling
was his ruling passion at an age when ginger-pop and sweets appealed
more strongly to his contemporaries. His people sent him to Texas
with four hundred pounds to buy an interest in a ranch, and furnished
him with a complete outfit of London-made clothing. An Englishman who
saw the boy’s box told me he had noted the different garments packed
carefully away, just as his mother had placed them, and each marked
with his name. The Eton boy lost the four hundred pounds at roulette
in the first week after his arrival in San Antonio, and pawned his
fine clothes in the next to “get back.” He lost all he ventured. At
the end of ten days he was peddling fruit around the streets in his
bare feet. He made twenty-five cents the first day, and carried it to
the gambling-house where he had already lost his larger fortune, and
told one of the dealers he would cut the cards with him for the money.
The boy cut first, and the dealer won; but the other was enough of a
gambler to see that the dealer had stooped to win his last few pennies
unfairly. The boy’s eyes filled up with tears of indignation.
“You thief!” he cried, “you cheated me!”
The dealer took his revolver from the drawer of the table, and,
pointing it at his head, said: “Do you know what we do to people who
use that word in Texas? We kill them!”
The boy clutched the table with both hands and flung himself across it
so that his forehead touched the barrel of the revolver. “You thief!”
he repeated, and so shrilly that every one in the room heard him. “I
say you cheated me!”
The gambler lowered the trigger slowly and tossed the pistol back in
the drawer. Then he picked up a ten-dollar gold piece and shoved it
towards him.
[Illustration: MOUNT OF THE HOLY CROSS]
“Here,” he said, “that’ll help take you home. You’re too damned tough
for Texas!”
The other Englishmen in San Antonio filled out the sum and sent him
back to England. His people are well known in London; his father is a
colonel in the Guards.
The most notable Englishman who ever came to Texas was Ben Thompson;
but he arrived there at so early an age, and became so thoroughly
Western in his mode of life, that Texans claim him as their own. I
imagine, however, he always retained some of the traditions of his
birthplace, as there is a story of his standing with his hat off
to talk to an English nobleman, when Thompson at the time was the
most feared and best known man in all Texas. The stories of his
recklessness and ignorance of fear, and utter disregard of the value
of others’ lives as well as his own, are innumerable. A few of them
are interesting and worth keeping, as they show the typical bad man
of the highest degree in his different humors, and also as I have not
dared to say half as much about bad men as I should have liked to do.
Thompson killed eighteen men in different parts of Texas, and was for
this made marshal of Austin, on the principle that if he must kill
somebody, it was better to give him authority to kill other desperadoes
than reputable citizens. As marshal it was his pleasure to pull up his
buggy across the railroad track just as the daily express train was
about to start, and covering the engineer with his revolver, bid him
hold the train until he was ready to move on. He would then call some
trembling acquaintance from the crowd on the platform and talk with him
leisurely, until he thought he had successfully awed the engineer and
established his authority. Then he would pick up his reins and drive
on, saying to the engineer, “You needn’t think, sir, any corporation
can hurry me.” The position of the unfortunate man to whom he talked
must have been most trying, with a locomotive on one side and a
revolver on the other.
One day a cowboy, who was a well-known bully and a would-be desperado,
shot several bullet-holes through the high hat of an Eastern traveller
who was standing at the bar of an Austin hotel. Thompson heard of this,
and, purchasing a high hat, entered the bar-room.
“I hear,” he said, facing the cowboy, “that you are shooting plug-hats
here to-day; perhaps you would like to take a shot at mine.” He then
raised his revolver and shot away the cowboy’s ear. “I meant,” he said,
“to hit your ear; did I do it?” The bully showed proof that he had.
“Well, then,” said the marshal, “get out of here;” and catching the man
by his cartridge-belt, he threw him out into the street, and so put an
end to his reputation as a desperate character forever.
Thompson was naturally unpopular with a certain class in the community.
Two barkeepers who had a personal grudge against him, with no doubt
excellent reason, lay in ambush for him behind the two bars of the
saloon, which stretched along either wall. Thompson entered the room
from the street in ignorance of any plot against him until the two men
halted him with shot-guns. They had him so surely at their pleasure
that he made no effort to reach his revolver, but stood looking from
one to the other, and smiling grimly. But his reputation was so great,
and their fear of him so actual, that both men missed him, although not
twenty feet away, and with shot-guns in their hands. Then Thompson took
out his pistol deliberately and killed them.
A few years ago he became involved in San Antonio with “Jack” Harris,
the keeper of a gambling-house and variety theatre. Harris lay in wait
for Thompson behind the swinging doors of his saloon, but Thompson, as
he crossed the Military Plaza, was warned of Harris’s hiding-place, and
shot him through the door. He was tried for the murder, and acquitted
on the ground of self-defence; and on his return to Austin was met
at the station by a brass band and all the fire companies. Perhaps
inspired by this, he returned to San Antonio, and going to Harris’s
theatre, then in the hands of his partner, Joe Foster, called from the
gallery for Foster to come up and speak to him. Thompson had with him
a desperado named King Fisher, and against him every man of his class
in San Antonio, for Harris had been very popular. Foster sent his
assistant, a very young man named Bill Sims, to ask Thompson to leave
the place, as he did not want trouble.
“I have come to have a reconciliation,” said Thompson. “I want to shake
hands with my old friend, Joe Foster. Tell him I won’t leave till I see
him, and I won’t make a row.”
Sims returned with Foster, and Thompson held out his hand.
“Joe,” he said, “I have come all the way from Austin to shake hands
with you. Let’s make up, and call it off.”
“I can’t shake hands with you, Ben,” Foster said. “You killed my
partner, and you know well enough I am not the sort to forget it. Now
go, won’t you, and don’t make trouble.”
Thompson said he would leave in a minute, but they must drink together
first. There was a bar in the gallery, which was by this time packed
with men who had learned of Thompson’s presence in the theatre, but
Fisher and Thompson stood quite alone beside the bar. The marshal of
Austin looked up and saw Foster’s glass untouched before him, and said,
“Aren’t you drinking with me, Joe?”
Foster shook his head.
“Well, then,” cried Thompson, “the man who won’t drink with me, nor
shake hands with me, fights me.”
He reached back for his pistol, and some one--a jury of twelve
intelligent citizens decided it was not young Bill Sims--shot him
three times in the forehead. They say you could have covered the three
bullet-holes with a half-dollar. But so great was the desperate courage
of this ruffian that even as he fell he fired, holding his revolver
at his hip, and killing Foster, and then, as he lay on his back, with
every nerve jerking in agony, he emptied his revolver into the floor,
ripping great gashes in the boards about him. And so he died, as he
would have elected to die, with his boots on, and with the report of
his pistol the last sound to ring in his ears. King Fisher was killed
at the same moment; and the _Express_ spoke of it the next morning as
“A Good Night’s Work.”
I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Sims at the gambling palace, which
was once Harris’s, then Foster’s, and which is now his, and found him a
jolly, bright-eyed young man of about thirty, with very fine teeth, and
a most contagious laugh. He was just back from Dwight, and told us of
a man who had been cured there, and who had gone away with his mother
leaning on his arm, and what this man had said to them of his hopes
for the future when he left; and as he told it the tears came to his
eyes, and he coughed, and began to laugh over a less serious story. I
tried all the time to imagine him, somewhat profanely, I am afraid, as
a young David standing up before this English giant, who had sent
twoscore of other men out of the world, and to picture the glaring,
crowded gallery, with the hot air and smoke, and the voice of the
comic singer rising from the stage below, and this boy and the marshal
of Austin facing one another with drawn revolvers; but it was quite
impossible.
[Illustration: PIKE’S PEAK FROM COLORADO SPRINGS]
There are a great many things one only remembers to say as the train
is drawing out of the station, and which have to be spoken from the
car-window. And now that my train is so soon to start towards the East,
I find there are many things which it seems most ungracious to leave
unsaid. I should like to say much of the hospitality of the West. We
do not know such hospitality in the East. A man brings us a letter of
introduction there, and we put him up at the club we least frequently
visit, and regret that he should have come at a time when ours is so
particularly crowded with unbreakable engagements. It is not so here.
One might imagine the Western man never worked at all, so entirely is
his time yours, if you only please to claim it. And from the first
few days of my trip to the last, this self-effacement of my hosts and
eagerness to please accompanied me wherever I went. It was the same
in every place, whether in army posts or ranches, or among that most
delightful coterie of the Denver Club “who never sleep,” or on the
border of Mexico, where “Bob” Haines, the sheriff of Zepata County,
Texas, before he knew who I or my soldier escort might be, and while we
were still but dust-covered figures in the night, rushed into the house
and ordered a dinner and beds for us, and brought out his last two
bottles of beer. The sheriff of Zepata County, “who can shoot with both
hands,” need bring no letter of introduction with him if he will deign
to visit me when he comes to New York. And as for that Denver Club
coterie, they already know that the New York clubs are also supplied
with electric buttons.
And now that it is at an end, I find it hard to believe that I am not
to hear again the Indian girls laughing over their polo on the prairie,
or the regimental band playing the men on to the parade, and that I am
not to see the officers’ wives watching them from the line at sunset,
as the cannon sounds its salute and the flag comes fluttering down.
And yet New York is not without its good points.