Part 21

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."

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.

"That doesn't hit me," he growled, "not even a little bit. I live in New York--live in Harlem, to be more like it, and work down in Wall street--use the subway twelve times a week. I don't have to come to Colorado to ride in tunnels."

Tourists form no small portion of Denver industry. She has restaurants and souvenir shops, three to a block; seemingly enough high-class hotels for a town three times her size. Yet the restaurants and the hotels are always filled, the little shops smile in the sunshine of brisk prosperity. And as for "rubberneck wagons," Denver has as many as New York or Washington. They are omnipresent. The drivers take you to the top of the park system, to the Cheesman Memorial, to see the view. All the time you are letting your eyes revel in the glories of those great treeless mountains, the megaphone man is dinning into your ears the excellence of his company's trips in Colorado Springs, in Manitou, in Salt Lake City. He assumes that you are a tourist and that you will have never had enough.

Tourists become a prosperous industry in a town that has no particular manufacturing importance. Great idle plants, the busy smelters of other days, bespeak the truth of that statement. Denver, as far as she has any commercial importance, is a distributing center. Her retail shops are excellent and her wholesale trade extends over a dozen great western states. Her banks are powers, her influence long reaching. But she is not an industrial city.

That has worried her very much, is still a matter of grave concern to her business men. Their quarrels with the railroads have been many and varied. Denver realizes, although she rarely confesses it, that she has disadvantages of location. These same mountains that the tourist comes to love from the bottom of his heart, just as the Coloradians have loved them all these years, are a real wall hemming her in, barriers to the growth of their capital. When the Union Pacific--the first of all the transcontinental railroads--was built through to the coast it was forced, by the mountains, to carry its line far to the north--a bitter pill to the ambitious town that was just then beginning to come into its own. Denver sought reprisals by building the narrow-gauge Denver & Rio Grande, a most remarkable feat of railroad engineering; bending far to the south and then to the north and west through the narrow niches of the high mountains. But hardly had the Denver & Rio Grande assumed any real importance in a commercial fashion and the mistake of its first narrow-gauge tracks corrected, before it was joined at Pueblo by direct routes to the east and Denver was again isolated from through transcontinental traffic. She was then and still is reached by side-lines.

This was a source of constant aggravation to the man who was until his death two or three years ago, Denver's first citizen--David H. Moffat. Mr. Moffat's interest and pride in the town were surpassing. He had grown up with it--in the later years of his life he used to boast that he once had promoted its literature, for he had come to Denver when it was a mere struggling mining-camp as a peddler, selling to the miners who wanted to write home a piece of paper and a stamped envelope, for five cents.

Moffat saw that a number of important lines were making Denver their western terminal--particularly the Burlington and the Kansas stems of the Union Pacific and the Rock Island. He felt that he might pick up traffic from these roads and carry it straight over the mountains to Salt Lake City, a railroad center suffering the same disadvantages as Denver. He sent surveyors up into the deep canyons and the _impasses_ of the Rockies. When they brought back the reports of their _reconnoissances_, practical railroad men laughed at Mr. Moffat.

The big bankers of the East also laughed at him when he came to them with the scheme, but the man was of the sort who is never daunted by ridicule. He had a sublime faith in his project, and when men told him that the summit of 10,000 feet above the sea level where he proposed to cross the divide was an impossibility, he would retort about the number of long miles he was going to save between the capital of Colorado and the capital of Utah and he would tell of the single Routt county stretch, a territory approximating the size of the state of Massachusetts and estimated to hold enough coal to feed the furnace fires of the United States for three hundred years. When he was refused money in New York and Chicago he would return to Denver and somehow manage to raise some there. The Moffat road was begun, despite the scoffers. Its promoter made repeated trips across the continent to secure money, and each time when he was home again he would raise the dollars in his own beloved Denver and move the terminal of his road west a few miles. He was at it until the day of his death and he lived long enough to see his railroad within short striking reach of the treasures of Routt county.