Part 1

Chapter 13,554 wordsPublic domain

THE WEST FROM A CAR-WINDOW

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS AUTHOR OF “VAN BIBBER AND OTHERS” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1903

_All rights reserved._

TO M. K. J. OF THE SEVENTH INFANTRY

CONTENTS

PAGE

FROM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI 3

OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER 27

AT A NEW MINING CAMP 59

A THREE-YEAR-OLD CITY 93

RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS 121

ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION 151

A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST 185

THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE 215

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

_A Bucking Broncho_ Frontispiece

_Head-piece_ 3

_Rangers in Camp_ 9

“_Remember the Alamo!_” 19

_Trumpeter Tyler_ 29

_Captain Francis H. Hardie, G Troop, Third United States Cavalry_ 37

_Water_ 43

_The Mexican Guide_ 49

_Third Cavalry Troopers--Searching a Suspected Revolutionist_ 53

_Mining Camp on the Range Above Creede_ 60

_Creede_ 63

_How Land is Claimed for Building--Planks Nailed Together and Resting on Four Stumps_ 66

_The “Holy Moses” Mine_ 69

_Debatable Ground--A Warning to Trespassers_ 73

_A Mining Camp Court-house_ 75

_Shaft of a Mine_ 79

_Valuable Real Estate_ 83

_Upper Creede_ 87

_Oklahoma City on the Day of the Opening_ 94

_Five Days After the Opening_ 97

_Four Weeks After the Opening_ 101

_Captain D. F. Stiles_ 105

_Post-office, April 22, 1889_ 108

_Post-office, July 4, 1890_ 111

_Oklahoma City To-day--Main Broadway_ 115

_The Ranch-house on the King Ranch, the Largest Range Owned by One Individual in the United States_ 123

_A Shattered Idol_ 127

_Snapping a Rope on a Horse’s Foot_ 130

_Hillingdon Ranch_ 133

_Fixing a Break in the Wire Fence_ 137

_Gathering the Rope_ 141

_Reaction Equals Action_ 145

_Tail-piece_ 148

_The Cheyenne Type_ 152

_Big Bull_ 155

_One of Williamson’s Stages_ 159

_The Beef Issue at Anadarko_ 163

_Indian Boy and Pinto Pony_ 169

_A Kiowa Maiden_ 175

_A One-company Post at Oklahoma City_ 187

_The Omnipotent Bugler_ 191

_United States Military Post at San Antonio_ 195

_United States Cavalryman in Full Dress_ 199

_United States Military Post--Infantry Parade_ 203

_Fort Houston, at San Antonio--Officers’ Quarters_ 207

_The Barracks, Fort Houston_ 210

_Gateway of the Garden of the Gods, and Pike’s Peak_ 217

_Within the Gates, Garden of the Gods_ 223

_Polo Above the Snow-line at Colorado Springs_ 227

_Mount of the Holy Cross_ 233

_Pike’s Peak from Colorado Springs_ 239

FROM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI

IT is somewhat disturbing to one who visits the West for the first time with the purpose of writing of it, to read on the back of a railroad map, before he reaches Harrisburg, that Texas “is one hundred thousand square miles larger than all the Eastern and Middle States, including Maryland and Delaware.” It gives him a sharp sensation of loneliness, a wish to apologize to some one, and he is moved with a sudden desire to get out at the first station and take the next train back, before his presumption is discovered. He might possibly feel equal to the fact that Texas is “larger than all of the Eastern and Middle States,” but this easy addition of one hundred thousand square miles, and the casual throwing in of Maryland and Delaware like potatoes on a basket for good measure, and just as though one or two States more or less did not matter, make him wish he had sensibly confined his observations to that part of the world bounded by Harlem and the Battery.

If I could travel over the West for three years, I might write of it with authority; but when my time is limited to three months, I can only give impressions from a car-window point of view, and cannot dare to draw conclusions. I know that this is an evident and cowardly attempt to “hedge” at the very setting forth. But it is well to understand what is to follow. All that I may hope to do is to tell what impressed an Eastern man in a hurried trip through the Western States. I will try to describe what I saw in such a way that those who read may see as much as I saw with the eyes of one who had lived in the cities of the Eastern States, but the moral they draw must be their own, and can differ from mine as widely as they please.

An Eastern man is apt to cross the continent for the first time with mixed sensations of pride at the size of his country, and shame at his ignorance concerning it. He remembers guiltily how he has told that story of the Englishman who asks the American in London, on hearing he is from New York, if he knows his brother in Omaha, Nebraska. And as the Eastern man finds from the map of his own country that the letters of introduction he has accepted from intelligent friends are addressed to places one and two thousand miles apart, he determines to drop that story about the Englishman, and tell it hereafter at the expense of himself and others nearer home.

His first practical surprise perhaps will be when he discovers the speed and ease with which numerous States are passing under him, and that smooth road-beds and parlor-cars remain with him to the very borders of the West. The change of time will trouble him at first, until he gets nearer to Mexico, when he will have his choice of three separate standards, at which point he will cease winding his watch altogether, and devote his “twenty minutes for refreshments” to watching the conductor. But this minor and merely nominal change will not distress him half so seriously as will the sudden and actual disarrangement of his dinner hour from seven at night to two in the afternoon, though even this will become possible after he finds people in south-western Texas eating duck for breakfast.

He will take his first lesson in the politics of Texas and of the rest of the West when he first offers a ten-dollar bill for a dollar’s worth of something, and is given nine large round silver dollars in change. When he has twenty or more of these on his person, and finds that his protests are met with polite surprise, he understands that silver is a large and vital issue, and that the West is ready to suffer its minor disadvantages for the possible good to come.

He will get his first wrong impression of the West through reading the head-lines of some of the papers, and from the class of books offered for sale on the cars and in the hotels and book-stores from St. Louis to Corpus Christi. These head-lines shock even a hardened newspaper man. But they do not represent the feeling of their readers, and in that they give a wrong and unfortunate impression to the visiting stranger. They told while I was in St. Louis of a sleighing party of twenty, of whom nine were instantly killed by a locomotive, and told it as flippantly as though it were a picnic; but the accident itself was the one and serious comment of the day, and the horror of it seemed to have reached every class of citizen.

It is rather more difficult to explain away the books. They are too obvious and too much in evidence to be accidental. To judge from them, one would imagine that Boccaccio, Rabelais, Zola, and such things as _Velvet Vice_ and _Old Sleuth_, are all that is known to the South-west of literature. It may be that the booksellers only keep them for their own perusal, but they might have something better for their customers.

The ideas which the stay-at-home Eastern man obtains of the extreme borderland of Texas are gathered from various sources, principally from those who, as will all travellers, make as much of what they have seen as is possible, this much being generally to show the differences which exist between the places they have visited and their own home. Of the similarities they say nothing. Or he has read of the bandits and outlaws of the Garza revolution, and he has seen the Wild West show of the Hon. William F. Cody. The latter, no doubt, surprised and delighted him very much. A mild West show, which would be equally accurate, would surprise him even more; at least, if it was organized in the wildest part of Texas between San Antonio and Corpus Christi.

When he leaves this first city and touches at the border of Mexico, at Laredo, and starts forth again across the prairie of cactus and chaparral towards “Corpus,” he feels assured that at last he is done with parlor-cars and civilization; that he is about to see the picturesque and lawless side of the Texan existence, and that he has taken his life in his hands. He will be the more readily convinced of this when the young man with the broad shoulders and sun-browned face and wide sombrero in the seat in front raises the car-window, and begins to shoot splinters out of the passing telegraph poles with the melancholy and listless air of one who is performing a casual divertisement. But he will be better informed when the Chicago drummer has risen hurriedly, with a pale face, and has reported what is going on to the conductor, and he hears that dignitary say, complacently: “Sho! that’s only ‘Will’ Scheeley practisin’! He’s a dep’ty sheriff.”

He will learn in time that the only men on the borders of Texas who are allowed to wear revolvers are sheriffs, State agents in charge of prisoners, and the Texas Rangers, and that whenever he sees a man so armed he may as surely assume that he is one of these as he may know that in New York men in gray uniforms, with leather bags over their shoulders, are letter-carriers. The revolver is the Texan officer’s badge of office; it corresponds to the New York policeman’s shield; and he toys with it just as the Broadway policeman juggles his club. It is quite as harmless as a toy, and almost as terrible as a weapon.

This will grieve the “tenderfoot” who goes through the West “heeled,” and ready to show that though he is from the effete East, he is able to take care of himself.

It was first brought home to me as I was returning from the border, where I had been with the troops who were hunting for Garza, and was waiting at a little station on the prairie to take the train for Corpus Christi. I was then told politely by a gentleman who seemed of authority, that if I did not take off that pistol I would be fined twenty-five dollars, or put in jail for twenty days. I explained to him where I had been, and that my baggage was at “Corpus,” and that I had no other place to carry it. At which he apologized, and directed a deputy sheriff, who was also going to Corpus Christi, to see that I was not arrested for carrying a deadly weapon.

This, I think, illustrates a condition of things in darkest Texas which may give a new point of view to the Eastern mind. It is possibly something of a revelation to find that instead of every man protecting himself, and the selection of the fittest depending on who is “quickest on the trigger,” he has to have an officer of the law to protect him if he tries to be a law unto himself.

While I was on the border a deputy sheriff named Rufus Glover, who was acting as a guide for Captain Chase, of the Third Cavalry, was fired upon from an ambush by persons unknown, and killed. A Mexican brought the news of this to our camp the night after the murder, and described the manner of the killing, as it had occurred, at great length and with much detail.

Except that he was terribly excited, and made a very dramatic picture as he stood in the fire-light and moon-light and acted the murder, it did not interest me, as I considered it to be an unfortunate event of very common occurrence in that part of the world. But the next morning every ranchman and cowboy and Texas Ranger and soldier we chanced to meet on the trail to Captain Hunter’s camp took up the story of the murder of Rufus Glover, and told and retold what some one else had told him, with desperate earnestness and the most wearying reiteration. And on the day following, when the papers reached us, we found that reporters had been sent to the scene of the murder from almost every part of south-west Texas, many of whom had had to travel a hundred miles, and then ride thirty more through the brush before they reached it. How many city editors in New York City would send as far as that for anything less important than a railroad disaster or a Johnstown flood?

On the fourth day after the murder of this in no way celebrated or unusually popular individual, the people of Duval County, in which he had been killed, called an indignation meeting, and passed resolutions condemning the county officials for not suppressing crime, and petitioning the Governor of the State to send the Rangers to put an end to such lawlessness--that is, the killing of one man in an almost uninhabited country. The committee who were to present this petition passed through Laredo on the way to see the Governor. Laredo is one hundred miles from the scene of the murder, and in an entirely different county; but there the popular indignation and excitement were so great that another mass-meeting was called, and another petition was made to the Governor, in which the resolutions of Duval County were endorsed. I do not know what his Excellency did about it. There were in the Tombs in New York when I left that city twenty-five men awaiting trial for murder, and that crime was so old a story in the Bend and along the East Side that the most morbid newspaper reader skipped the scant notice the papers gave of them. It would seem from this that the East should reconstruct a new Wild West for itself, in which a single murder sends two committees of indignant citizens to the State capital to ask the Governor what he intends to do about it.

But the West is not wholly reconstructed. There are still the Texas Rangers, and in them the man from the cities of the East will find the picturesqueness of the Wild West show and its happiest expression. If they and the sight of cowboys roping cattle do not satisfy him, nothing else will. The Rangers are a semi-militia, semi-military organization of long descent, and with the most brilliant record of border warfare. At the present time their work is less adventurous than it was in the day of Captain McNelly, but the spirit of the first days has only increased with time.

The Rangers enlist for a year under one of eight captains, and the State pays them a dollar a day and supplies them with rations and ammunition. They bring with them their own horse, blanket, and rifle, and revolver; they wear no regular uniform or badge of any sort, except the belt of cartridges around the waist. The mounted police of the gold days in the Australian bush, and the mounted constabulary of the Canadian border are perhaps the only other organizations of a like nature and with similar duties. Their headquarters are wherever their captain finds water, and, if he is fortunate, fuel and shade; but as the latter two are difficult to find in common in the five hundred square miles of brush along the Rio Grande, they are content with a tank of alkali water alone.

There are about twenty men in each of the eight troops, and one or two of them are constantly riding away on detached service--to follow the trail of a Mexican bandit or a horse-thief, or to suppress a family feud. The Rangers’ camps look much like those of gypsies, with their one wagon to carry the horses’ feed, the ponies grazing at the ends of the lariats, the big Mexican saddles hung over the nearest barb fence, and the blankets covering the ground and marking the hard beds of the night before. These men are the especial pride of General Mabry, the Adjutant-general of Texas, who was with them the first time I met them, sharing their breakfast of bacon and coffee under the shade of the only tree within ten miles. He told me some very thrilling stories of their deeds and personal meetings with the desperadoes and “bad” men of the border; but when he tried to lead Captain Brooks into relating a few of his own adventures, the result was a significant and complete failure. Significant, because big men cannot tell of the big things they do as well as other people can--they are handicapped by having to leave out the best part; and because Captain Brooks’s version of the same story the general had told me, with all the necessary detail, would be: “Well, we got word they were hiding in a ranch down in Zepata County, and we went down there and took ’em--which they were afterwards hung.”

The fact that he had had three fingers shot off as he “took ’em” was a detail he scorned to remember, especially as he could shoot better without these members than the rest of his men, who had only lost one or two.

Boots above the knee and leather leggings, a belt three inches wide with two rows of brass-bound cartridges, and a slanting sombrero make a man appear larger than he really is; but the Rangers were the largest men I saw in Texas, the State of big men. And some of them were remarkably handsome in a sun-burned, broad-shouldered, easy, manly way. They were also somewhat shy with the strangers, listening very intently, but speaking little, and then in a slow, gentle voice; and as they spoke so seldom, they seemed to think what they had to say was too valuable to spoil by profanity.

When General Mabry found they would not tell of their adventures, he asked them to show how they could shoot; and as this was something they could do, and not something already done, they went about it as gleefully as school-boys at recess doing “stunts.” They placed a board, a foot wide and two feet high, some sixty feet off in the prairie, and Sheriff Scheeley opened hostilities by whipping out his revolver, turning it in the air, and shooting, with the sights upside down, into the bull’s-eye of the impromptu target. He did this without discontinuing what he was saying to me, but rather as though he were punctuating his remarks with audible commas.

Then he said, “I didn’t think you Rangers would let a little one-penny sheriff get in the first shot on you.” He could afford to say this, because he had been a Ranger himself, and his brother Joe was one of the best captains the Rangers have had; and he and all of his six brothers are over six feet high. But the taunt produced an instantaneous volley from every man in the company; they did not take the trouble to rise, but shot from where they happened to be sitting or lying and talking together, and the air rang with the reports and a hundred quick vibrating little gasps, like the singing of a wire string when it is tightened on a banjo.

They exhibited some most wonderful shooting. They shot with both hands at the same time, with the hammer underneath, holding the rifle in one hand, and never, when it was a revolver they were using, with a glance at the sights. They would sometimes fire four shots from a Winchester between the time they had picked it up from the ground and before it had nestled comfortably against their shoulder. They also sent one man on a pony racing around a tree about as thick as a man’s leg, and were dissatisfied because he only put four out of six shots into it. Then General Mabry, who seemed to think I did not fully appreciate what they were doing, gave a Winchester rifle to Captain Brooks and myself, and told us to show which of us could first put eight shots into the target.

It seems that to shoot a Winchester you have to pull a trigger one way and work a lever backward and forward; this would naturally suggest that there are three movements--one to throw out the empty shell, one to replace it with another cartridge, and the third to explode this cartridge. Captain Brooks, as far as I could make out from the sound, used only one movement for his entire eight shots. As I guessed, the trial was more to show Captain Brooks’s quickness rather than his marksmanship, and I paid no attention to the target, but devoted myself assiduously to manipulating the lever and trigger, aiming blankly at the prairie. When I had fired two shots into space, the captain had put his eight into the board. They sounded, as they went off, like fire-crackers well started in a barrel, and mine, in comparison, like minute-guns at sea. The Rangers, I found, after I saw more of them, could shoot as rapidly with a revolver as with a rifle, and had become so expert with the smaller weapon that instead of pressing the trigger for each shot, they would pull steadily on it, and snap the hammer until the six shots were exhausted.