Squares. After all the other memories of San Antonio are gone--the
narrow streets twisting and turning their tortuous ways through the very
heart of the old town, the missions strung out along the Concepcion road
like faded and broken bits of bric-a-brac, the brave and militant show
of arsenal and fort--then shall the fragrance of those open plazas long
remain. The Military Plaza, with its great bulk of a City Hall facing
it, the Main Plaza, where the grave towers of the little cathedral look
down upon the palm-trees and the beggars, the newer, open
squares--always plazas in San Antonio--and then, best of all, the Alamo
Plaza, with that squat namesake structure facing it--_the_ lion of a
town of many lions. These open places are the distinctive features of
the oldest and the best of the Texas towns. They lend to it the Latin
air that renders it different from most other cities in America. They
help to make San Antonio seem far more like Europe than America.
[Illustration: One of the little squares--and the big cathedral--San
Antonio]
To this old town come the Texans, always in great numbers for it
is their great magnet--the focusing point that has drawn them
and before them, their fathers, their grandfathers and their
great-grandfathers--far reaching generations of Texans who have
gone before. For here is the distinct play-ground of the Lone Star
State. Its other cities are attractive enough in their several ways,
but at the best their fame is distinctly commercial--Fort Worth as a
packing-house town, Dallas as a distributing point for great wholesale
enterprises, Houston as a banking center, Galveston as the great
water-gate of Texas and the second greatest ocean port of the whole
land. San Antonio is none of these things. While the last census showed
her to be the largest of all Texas cities in point of population, it is
said by her jealous rivals and it probably is true, that nearly half of
that population is composed of Mexicans; and here is a part of our
blessed land where the Mexican, like his dollar, must be accepted at far
less than his nominal value.
But if it were not for these Mexicans--that delicate strain of the fine
old Spanish blood that still runs in her veins--San Antonio would have
lost much of her naïve charm many years ago. The touch of the old
grandees is everywhere laid upon the city. In the narrow streets, the
architecture of the solid stone structures that crowd in upon them in a
tremendously neighborly fashion shows the touch of the Spaniard in every
corner; it appears again and again--in the iron traceries of some
high-sprung fence or second-story balcony rail, or perhaps in the
lineaments of some snug little church, half hidden in a quiet place. The
Cathedral of San Fernando, standing there in the Main Plaza, looks as if
it might have been stolen from the old city of Mexico and moved bodily
north without ever having even disturbed its fortress-like walls or the
crude frescoes of its sanctuary. The four missions out along the
Concepcion road are direct fruit of Spanish days--and remember that each
of the little squares of San Antonio is a plaza, so dear to the heart of
a Latin when he comes to build a real city.
But the impress of those troublous years when Spain, far-seeing and in
her golden age, was dreaming of Texas as a mighty principality, is not
alone in the wood and the stone of San Antonio, not even in the
delirious riot of narrow streets and little squares. The impress of a
Latin nation still not three hundred miles distant, is in the bronzed
faces of the Mexicans who fill her streets. Some of them are the old men
who sit emotionless hours in the hot sun in the narrow highways, and
vend their unspeakable sweets, or who come to affluence perhaps and
maintain the marketing of _tamales_ and _chile con carne_ at one of the
many little outdoor stands that line the business streets of San
Antonio, and make it possible for a stranger to eat a full-course
dinner, if he will, without passing indoors. These are the Mexicans of
San Antonio who are most in evidence--the men still affecting in
careless grandeur their steeple-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, even if the
rest of their clothing remain in the docile humility of blue jeans; the
women scorning such humility and running to the brilliancy of red and
yellow velvets, although of late years the glories of the American-made
hat have begun to tell sadly upon the preëminence of the mantilla. These
are the Mexicans who dominate the streets of the older part of the
town--they are something more than dominant factors in the West end of
the city, long ago known as the Chihuahua quarter.
But there is another sort--less often seen upon the streets of San
Antonio. This sort is the Mexican of class, who has come within recent
years in increasing numbers to dwell in a city where unassuming soldiery
afford more real protection for him and for his than do all of the
brilliantly uniformed regiments with which Diaz once illuminated his gay
capital. Since our neighbor to the south entered fully upon its
troublous season these refugees have multiplied. You could see for
yourself any time within the past two years sleeping cars come up from
Laredo filled with nervous women and puzzled children. These were the
families of prosperous citizens from the south of Mexico, who in their
hearts showed no contempt for the comfortable protection of the American
flag.
* * * * *
A man plucks you by the sleeve as you are passing through the corridors
of one of the great modern hotels of San Antonio, hotels which, by the
way, have been builded with the profits of the cattle-trade in Texas.
"That _hombre_," he says, "he is the uncle of Madero."
But a mere uncle of the former Mexican President hardly counts in a town
which has the reputation of fairly breeding revolutions for the sister
land to the south; whose streets seem to whisper of rumors and
counter-rumors, the vague details of plot and counterplot. There is a
whole street down in the southwestern corner of San Antonio lined with
neat white houses, and the town will know it for many years as
"Revolutionary Row." For in the first of these houses General Bernardo
Reyes lived, and in the second of them this former governor of Nuevo
Leon planned his _coup d'etat_ by which he was to march into Mexico City
with all the glory of the Latin, bands playing, flags flying, a display
of showy regimentals. Reyes had read English history, and he remembered
that one Prince Charlie had attempted something of the very sort. In the
long run the difference was merely that Prince Charlie succeeded while
Reyes landed in a dirty prison in Mexico City.
Here then is the very incubator of Mexican revolution. There is not an
hour in San Antonio when the secret agents of the United States and all
the governments and near-governments of our southern neighbor are not
fairly swarming in the town and alive to their responsibilities. The
border is again passing through historic days--and it fully realizes
that. It is twenty-four hours of steady riding from San Antonio over to
El Paso--the queer little city under the shadows of the mountains and
perched hard against the "silver Rio Grande," this last often so
indistinguishable that a young American lieutenant marched his men right
over and into Mexican soil one day without knowing the difference--until
he was confronted by the angry citizens of Ciudad Juarez and an _affaire
nationale_ almost created. Every mile of that tedious trip trouble is in
the air.
And yet El Paso does not often take the situation very seriously. It is
almost an old story, and if the revolutionists will only be kind enough
to point their guns away from the U.S.A. they can blaze away as long as
they like and the ammunition lasts. In fact El Paso feels that as long
as the Mexican frontier battles have proper stage management they are
first-rate advertising attractions for the town--quite discounting mere
Mardi Gras or Portola or flower celebrations, Frontier or Round-up Days,
as well as its own simpler joys of horse-racing and bull-fighting. On
battle-days El Paso can ascend to its house-tops and get a rare thrill.
But when the atrocious marksmanship of ill-trained Mexicans does its
worst, and a few stray bullets go whistling straight across upon
American soil, El Paso grows angry. It demands of Washington if it
realizes that the U.S.A. is being bombarded--the fun of fighting dies
out in a moment.
San Antonio is a safer breeding ground for insurrection than is El Paso.
For one thing it is out of careless rifle-shot, and for another--well at
El Paso some Mexican troopers might come right across the silver Rio
Grande in a dry season, never wetting their feet or dreaming that they
were crossing the majestic river boundary, and pick up a few erring
citizens without much effort. There is a risk at El Paso that is not
present in San Antonio. Hence the bigger town--in its very atmosphere
emitting a friendly comfort toward plottings and plannings--is chosen.
You wish to come closer to the inner heart of the town. Very well then,
your guide leads you to the International Club which perches between the
narrow and important thoroughfare of Commerce street and one of the
interminable windings of the gentle San Antonio river. It was on the
roof of the International Club that Secretary Root was once given a
famous dinner. It is an institution frankly given "to the encouragement
of a friendly feeling between Mexico and the United States." It is
something more than that, however. It is a refuge and sort of harbor for
storm-tossed hearts and weary minds that perforce must do their thinking
in a tongue that, to us, is alien. Most of the time the newspaper men of
the town sit in the rear room of the club and look down across the tiny
river on to the quiet grounds of an oldtime monastery. They play their
pool and dominoes--two arts that seem hopelessly wedded throughout all
Texas. The International Club nods.
Suddenly a tall bronzed man, with _mustachios_, perhaps a little group
of Mexicans will come into the place. The pool and the dominoes stop
short. There are whisperings, flashy papers from Mexico city are
suddenly produced, maps are studied. One man has "inside information"
from Washington, another lays claim to mysterious knowledge up from the
President's palace of the southern capital, perhaps from the
constitutionalists along the frontier. There is a great deal of talk,
much mystery--after all, not much real information.
But when some real situation does develop, San Antonio has glorious
little thrills. To be the incubator of revolution is almost as exciting
as to have bull-fights or a suburban battle-field, the treasures for
which San Antonio cannot easily forgive her rival, El Paso. Each new
plot-hatching of this sort gives the big Texas town fresh thrills.
Gossip is revived in the hotel lobbies and restaurants, the cool and
lofty rooms of the International Club are filled with whisperers in an
alien tongue, out at Fort Sam Houston the cavalrymen rise in their
stirrups at the prospect of some real excitement. San Antonio does not
want war--of course not--but if it must have war--well it is already
prepared for the shock. And it talks of little else.
"Within ten years the United States will have annexed Mexico and San
Antonio will have become a second Chicago," says one citizen in his
enthusiasm. "And what a Chicago--railroads, manufactories and the best
climate of any great city in the world."
Even in war-times your true San Antonian cannot forget one of the chief
assets of his lovely town.
The others say little. One is a junior officer from out at the post. He
can say nothing. But he is hoping. There is not much for an army man in
inaction and the best of drills are not like the real thing. For him
again--the old slogan--"a fight or a frolic."
* * * * *
Not all of San Antonio is Spanish--although very little of it is negro.
An astonishing proportion of its population is of German descent. These
are largely gathered in the east end of the town, that which was
formerly called the Alamo quarter, and like all Germans they like their
beer. The brewing industry is one of the great businesses of San
Antonio--and the most famous of all these breweries is the smallest of
them. On our first trip to "San Antone" we heard about that beer; all
the way down through Texas--"the most wonderful brew in the entire
land."
[Illustration: San Juan Mission--a bid of faded bric-a-brac outside of
San Antonio]
The active force of this particular Los Angeles brewery consisted of but
one man, the old German who carried his recipe with him in the top of
his head, and who had carefully kept it there throughout the years. In
the cellar of the little brewery he made the beer, upstairs and in the
garden he served it. In the mornings he worked at his cellar kettles,
in the late afternoon and the early evening he stood behind his bar
awaiting his patrons. If they wished to sit out in the shady garden they
must serve themselves. There were no waiters in the place. If a man
could not walk straight up to the bar and get his beer he was in no
condition for it. The old German was as proud of the respectability of
his place as he was of the secret recipe for the beer, which had been
handed down in his family from generation to generation.
Only once was that secret given--and then after much tribulation and in
great confidence to an agent of the government. But he had his reward.
For the government at Washington in its turn pronounced his the purest
beer in all the land. Men then came to him with proposals that he place
it upon the market. They talked to him in a tempting way about the
profits in the business, but he shook his head. His beer was never to be
taken from the brewery. It was a rule from which San Antonians and
tourists alike had tried to swerve him, to no purpose. Of course, every
rule has its exceptions but there was only a single exception to this.
Each Saturday night Mr. Degen used to send a small keg over with his
compliments to a boyhood friend--he believed that friendship of a
certain sort can break all rules and precedents.
All the way down through dry Texas we smacked our lips at the thought of
Degen's beer. Before we had been in San Antonio a dozen hours we found
our way to the brewery; in a quiet side street down back of the historic
Alamo. But we had no beer.
The brewer was dead. In a neighboring street his friends were quietly
gathering for his funeral, and rumor was rife as to whether or no he had
confided his recipe to his sons. It was a great funeral, according to
the local newspapers, the greatest in the recent history of San
Antonio. It was a tribute from the chief citizens of a town to a simple
man who had lived his life simply and honestly--who in his quiet way had
builded up one of the most distinctive institutions of the place.
Rumor was soon satisfied. The secret of the recipe of the beer had not
died. In a few days the brisk little brewery in the side street was in
action once again. The stout Germans in their shirt-sleeves were again
tramping with their paddles round and round the great vat while their
foaming product was being handed to patrons in the adjoining room. But,
alas, the traditions of the founder are gone. The beer is now bottled
and sold on the market--in a little while is will be emblazoned in
electric lights along the main streets of New York and Chicago. We are
in a commercial and a material age. Even in San Antonio they are
threatening to widen Commerce street--that narrow but immensely
distinctive thoroughfare that cuts through the heart of the
town--threatening, also, to tear down the old convent walls next the
Alamo and there erect a modern park and monument. By the time these
things are done and San Antonio is thoroughly "modernized" she will be
ready for an awakening--she is apt to find with her naïve charm gone the
golden flood of tourists has ceased to stop within her walls. Truly she
will have killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
* * * * *
You will like to think of it as the City of the Little Squares. After
all the other memories of San Antonio are gone you will revert to
these--gay open places, filled with palms and other tropical growths,
and flanked by the crumbling architecture of yesterday elbowing the
newer constructions of today. You will like to think of those squares in
the sunny daytime with the deep shadows running aslant across the faces,
there is delight in the memory of them at eventide, when the cluster
lights burn brightly and the narrow sidewalks are filled with gaily
dressed crowds, typical Mexicans, tall Texans down from the ranches for
a really good time in "old San Antone," natives of the cosmopolitan
town, tourists of every sort and description. Then comes the hour when
the crowds are gone, the town asleep, its noisy clocks speaking midnight
hours to mere emptiness--San Antonio breathes heavily, dreams of the
days when she was a Spanish town of no slight importance, and then looks
forward to the morrow. She believes that her golden age is not yet come.
Her plans for the future are ambitious, her opportunity is yet to come.
In so far as those dreams involve the passing of the old in San Antonio
and the coming of the new, God grant that they will never come true.
17
THE AMERICAN PARIS
A great bronze arch spans Seventeenth street and bids you welcome to
Denver. For the capital of Colorado seems only second to the Federal
capital as a mecca for American tourists. She has advertised her charms,
her climate, her super-marvelous scenery cleverly and generously. The
response must be all that she could possibly wish. All summer and late
into the autumn her long stone station is crowded with travelers--she is
the focal point of those who come to Colorado and who find it the ideal
summer playground of America.
To that great section known as the Middle West, beginning at an
imaginary line drawn from Chicago south through St. Louis and so to the
Gulf, there is hardly a resort that can even rival Colorado in popular
favor. Take Kansas, for a single instance. Kansas comes scurrying up
into the Colorado mountains every blessed summer. It grows fretfully hot
down in the Missouri bottoms by the latter part of July, and the Kansans
begin to take advantage of the low rates up to Denver and Colorado
Springs and Pueblo. And with the Kansans come a pretty good smattering
of the folk of the rest of the Middle West. They crowd the trains out of
Omaha and Kansas City night after night; at dawn they come trooping out
through the portal of the Denver Union station and pass underneath that
bronze arch of welcome.
They find a clean and altogether fascinating city awaiting them, a city
solidly and substantially built. Eighteen years ago Denver decided that
she must discontinue the use of wooden buildings within her limits. She
came to an expensive and full realization of that. For Colorado is an
arid country nominally, and water is a precious commodity within her
boundaries. The irrigation ditches are familiar parts of the landscapes
and ever present needs of her cities. To put out fire takes water, and
Denver sensibly begins her water economy by demanding that every
structure that is within her be built of brick or stone or concrete. And
yet her parks are a constant reproach to towns within the regions of
bountiful water. They are wonderfully green, belying that arid country,
and the water that goes to make them green comes from the fastnesses of
the wonderful Rockies, a full hundred miles away.
The brick buildings make for a substantial city, but Denver herself has
a solidity that you do not often see in a Western city. Giant office
buildings in her chief streets do not often shoulder against ill-kempt
open lots, have as unbidden neighbors mere shanties or hovels. Moreover,
she is not a "one-street town." Sixteenth and Seventeenth streets vie
for supremacy--the one with the great retail establishments, the other
with the hotels, banks and railroad offices. There are other streets of
business importance--no one street not even as a _via sacre_ of this
bustling town for the best of her homes.
* * * * *
The Paris of America, is what she likes to call herself and when you
come to know her, the comparison is not bad. But Paris, with all of her
charms, has not the location of Denver--upon the crest of a rolling,
treeless plain, with the Rocky Mountains, jagged and snow-capped, to
serve as a garden-wall. Belasco might have staged Denver--and then been
proud of his work. But hers is a solitary grandeur and a very great
isolation. She is isolated agriculturally and industrially, and before
long we shall see how difficult all this makes it for her commercial
interests. It makes things difficult in her social life, and Denver
must, and does, have a keen social life.
The isolation and the altitude, constantly tending to make humans
nervous and unstrung, demands amusement, self-created amusement of
necessity. If Denver is not amused she quarrels; you can see that in her
unsettled and troubled politics, and her endless battles with the
railroads. So she is wiser when she laughs and it is that faculty of
much laughing, much fun, expressed in a variety of amusements that have
led magazine writers to call the town, the Paris of America, although
there is little about her, save the broad streets and her many open
squares and parks to suggest the real Paris. But, on the other hand, the
Seine is hardly to be compared to the majesty of the backbone of the
continent, Denver's greatest glory.
In winter Denver society has a fixed program. On Monday night it
religiously attends the Broadway Theater, a playhouse which on at least
one night of the week blossoms out as gayly as the Metropolitan Opera
House. Denver assumes to prove herself the Paris of America by the
gayness of its gowns and its hats and a Denver restaurant on Monday
night after the play only seems like a bit of upper Broadway, Manhattan,
transplanted. On Tuesday afternoon society attends the vaudeville at the
Orpheum and perhaps the Auditorium or one of the lesser theaters that
night. By Wednesday evening at the latest the somewhat meager theater
possibilities of the place are exhausted and one wealthy man from New
York who went out there used to go to bed on Wednesday until Monday,
when the dramatic program began anew. For him it was either bed or the
"movies," and he seemed to prefer bed.
In summer the Broadway is closed, and Elitch's Gardens, one of the
distinctive features of the town, takes its place as a Monday
rendezvous. It is a gay place, Elitch's, with a quaint foreign touch. A
cozy theater stands in the middle of an apple orchard--part of the
one-time farm of the proprietress' father. Good taste and the delicate
skill of architect and landscape gardener have gone hand in hand for its
charm. You go out there and dine leisurely, and then you cross the long
shady paths under the apples to the theater. And even if the play in
that tiny playhouse were not all that might be expected--although the
best of actors play upon its stage--one would be in a broadly generous
mood, at having dined and spent the evening in so completely charming a
spot.
But the Parisians of Colorado are not blind to the summer joys of the
wonderful country that lies aroundabout them. They quickly become
mountaineers, in the full sense of the word. They can ride--and read
riding not as merely cantering in the park but as sitting all day in the
saddle of some cranky broncho--they can build fires, cook and live in
the open. A Denver society woman is as particular about her _khakias_ as
about her evening frocks. When these folk, experienced and
well-schooled, go off up into the great hills, they are the envy of all
the tourists.
Do not forget that we started by showing Denver as a mecca for these
folk. When you come to see how very well the Paris of America takes care
of them you do not wonder that they return to her--many times; that they
are with her more or less the entire year round. Her hotels are big and
they are exceedingly well run. There are more side trips than a tourist
can take, using the city as a base of operations, than a man might
physically use in a month. The most of these run off into the mountains
that have been standing sentinel over Denver since first she was born.
In a day you can leave the bustling capital town, pass the foothills of
the Rockies and climb fourteen thousand feet aloft to the very backbone
of the continent. Indeed, it seems to be the very roof of the world when
you stand on a sentinel peak and look upon timber line two thousand feet
below, where the trees in another of Nature's great tragedies finally
cease their vain attempts to climb the mountain tops.
A man recommended one of the mountain trips over a wonderfully
constructed railroad, poetically called the "Switzerland Trail."
"You'll like that trip," he said, with the enthusiasm of the real
Denverite. "It's wonderful, and such a railroad! Why, there are
thirty-two tunnels between here and the divide."
The tourist to whom this suggestion was made looked up--great scorn upon
his countenance.