Part 10

Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio is one of the three largest posts in the country, and is in consequence one of the heavens towards which the eyes of the army people turn. It is only twenty minutes from the city, and the weather is mild throughout the year, and in the summer there are palm-trees around the houses; and white uniforms--which are unknown to the posts farther north, and which are as pretty as they are hard to keep clean--make the parade-ground look like a cricket-field. They have dances at this post twice a month, the regimental band furnishing the music, and the people from town helping out the sets, and the officers in uniforms with red, white, and yellow stripes. A military ball is always very pretty, and the dancing-hall at Houston is decorated on such occasions with guidons and flags, and palms and broad-leaved plants, which grow luxuriously everywhere, and cost nothing. I went directly from this much-desired post to the little one at Oklahoma City, which is a one-company post, and where there are no semi-monthly dances or serenades by the band; but where, on the other hand, the officers do not stumble over an enlisted man at every step who has to be saluted, and who stands still before them, as though he meant to “hold them up” or ask his way, until he is recognized. The post at Oklahoma City is not so badly off, even though it is built of logs and mud, for the town is near by, and the men get leave to visit it when they wish. But it serves to give one an idea of the many other one-company posts scattered in lonely distances along the borders of the frontier, where there are no towns, and where every man knows what the next man is going to say before he speaks--single companies which the Government has dropped out there, and which it has apparently forgotten, as a man forgets the book he has tucked away in his shelf to read on some rainy day. They will probably find they are remembered when the rainy days come. Fort Sill, in the Oklahoma Territory, is one of the eight-company posts. I visited several of these, and liked them better than those nearer the cities; but then I was not stationed there. The people at these smaller isolated posts seem to live more contentedly together. There is not enough of them to separate into cliques or sets, as they did at the larger stations, and they were more dependent one upon another. There was a night when one officer on the line gave a supper, and another (one of his guests) said he wished to contribute the cigars. There had not been an imported cigar in that post for a year at least, and when Captain Ellis brought in a fresh box with _two_ paper stamps about it, and the little steamer engraved on the gray band met our eyes, and we knew they had paid the customs duty, there was a most unseemly cheer and undignified haste to have the box opened. And then each man laid his cigar beside his plate, and gazed and sniffed at it, and said “Ah!” and beamed on every one else, and put off lighting it as long as he possibly could. That was a memorable night, and I shall never sufficiently thank Captain Ellis for that cigar, and for showing me how little we of the East appreciate the little things we have always with us, and which become so important when they are taken away.

Fort Sill is really a summer resort; at least, that is what the officers say. I was not there in summer, but it made a most delightful winter resort. There is really no reason at all why people should not go to these interior army posts, as well as to the one at Point Comfort, and spend the summer or winter there, either for their health or for their pleasure. They can reach Fort Sill, for instance, in a three-days’ journey from New York, and then there are two days of staging, and you are in a beautiful valley, with rivers running over rocky beds, with the most picturesque Indians all about you, and with red and white flags wigwagging from the parade to the green mountain-tops, and good looking boy-officers to explain the new regulations, and the best of hunting and fishing.

I do not know how the people of Fort Sill will like having their home advertised in this way, but it seems a pity others should not enjoy following Colonel Jones over the prairie after jack-rabbits. We started four of them in one hour, and that is a very good sport when you have a field of twenty men and women and a pack of good hounds. The dogs of Colonel Jones were not as fast as the rabbits, but they were faster than the horses, and so neither dogs nor rabbits were hurt; and that is as it should be, for, as Colonel Jones says, if you caught the rabbits, there would be no more rabbits to catch. Of the serious side of the life of an army post, of the men and of the families of the men who are away on dangerous field service, I have said nothing, because there was none of it when I was there, nor of the privations of those posts up in the far Northwest, where snow and ice are almost a yearly accompaniment, and where the mail and the papers, which are such a mockery as an exchange for the voices of real people, come only twice a month.

It would be an incomplete story of life at a post which said nothing of the visits of homesickness, which, many strong men in the West have confessed to me, is the worst sickness with which man is cursed. And it is an illness which comes at irregular periods to those of the men who know and who love the East. It is not a homesickness for one home or for one person, but a case of that madness which seized Private Ortheris, only in a less malignant form, and in the officers’ quarters. An impotent protest against the immutability of time and of space is one of its symptoms--a sick disgust of the blank prairie, blackened by fire as though it had been drenched with ink, the bare parade-ground, the same faces, the same stories, the same routine and detailed life, which promises no change or end; and with these a longing for streets and rows of houses that seemed commonplace before, of architecture which they had dared to criticise, and which now seems fairer than the lines of the Parthenon, a craving to get back to a place where people, whether one knows them or not, are hurrying home from work under the electric lights, to the rush of the passing hansoms and the cries of the “last editions,” and the glare of the shop-windows, to the life of a great city that is as careless of the exile’s love for it as is the ocean to one who exclaims upon its grandeur from the shore; a soreness of heart which makes men while it lasts put familiar photographs out of sight, which makes the young lieutenants, when the band plays a certain waltz on the parade at sundown, bite their chin-straps, and stare ahead more fixedly than the regulations require. Some officers will confess this to you, and some will not. It is a question which is the happier, he who has no other scenes for which to care, and who is content, or he who eats his heart out for a while, and goes back on leave at last.

VIII

THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE

VIII

THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE

THE City of Denver probably does more to keep the Eastern man who is mining or ranching from returning once a year to his own people, and from spending his earnings at home, than any other city in the West. It lays its charm upon him, and stops him half-way, and he decides that the journey home is rather long, and puts it off until the next year, and again until the next, until at last he buys a lot and builds a house, and only returns to the East on his wedding journey. Denver appeals to him more than do any of these other cities, for the reason that the many other Eastern men who have settled there are turning it into a thoroughly Eastern city--a smaller New York in an encircling range of white-capped mountains. If you look up at its towering office buildings, you can easily imagine yourself, were it not for the breadth of the thoroughfare, in down-town New York; and though the glimpse of the mountains at the end of the street in place of the spars and mast-heads of the East and North rivers undeceives you, the mud at your feet serves to help out the delusion. Denver is a really beautiful city, but--and this, I am sure, few people in New York will believe--it has the worst streets in the country. Their mud or their dust, as the season wills it, is the one blot on the city’s fair extent; it is as if the City Fathers had served a well-appointed dinner on a soiled table-cloth. But they say they will arrange all that in time.

The two most striking things about the city to me were the public schools and the private houses. Great corporations, insurance companies, and capitalists erect twelve-story buildings everywhere. They do it for an advertisement for themselves or their business, and for the rent of the offices. But these buildings do not in any way represent a city’s growth. You will find one or two of such buildings in almost every Western city, but you will find the people who rent the offices in them living in the hotels or in wooden houses on the outskirts. In Denver there are not only the big buildings, but mile after mile of separate houses, and of the prettiest, strictest, and most proper architecture. It is a distinct pleasure to look at these houses, and quite impossible to decide upon the one in which you would rather live. They are not merged together in solid rows, but stand apart, with a little green breathing-space between, each in its turn asserting its own individuality. The greater part of these are built of the peculiarly handsome red stone which is found so plentifully in the Silver State. It is not the red stone which makes them so pleasantly conspicuous, but the taste of the owner or the architect which has turned it to account. As for the public schools, they are more like art museums outside than school-houses; and if as much money and thought in proportion are given to the instruction as have been put upon the buildings, the children of Denver threaten to grow up into a most disagreeably superior class of young persons. Denver possesses those other things which make a city livable, but the public schools and the private houses were to me the most distinctive features. The Denver Club is quite as handsome and well ordered a club as one would find in New York City, and the University Club, which is for the younger men, brings the wanderers from different colleges very near and pleasantly together. Its members can sing more different college songs in a given space of time than any other body of men I have met. The theatres and the hotels are new and very good, and it is a delight to find servants so sufficiently civilized that the more they are ordered about and the more one gives them to do, the more readily they do it, knowing that this means that they are to be tipped. In the other Western cities, where this pernicious and most valuable institution is apparently unknown, a traveller has to do everything for himself.

You will find that the people of a city always pride themselves on something which the visitor within their gates would fail to notice. They have become familiar with those features which first appeal to him, have outgrown them, and have passed on to admire something else. The citizen of Denver takes a modest pride in the public schools, the private houses, and the great mountains, which seem but an hour’s walk distant and are twenty miles away; but he is proudest before all of two things--of his celery and his cable-cars. His celery is certainly the most delicious and succulent that grows, and his cable-cars are very beautiful white and gold affairs, and move with the delightfully terrifying speed of a toboggan. Riding on these cable-cars is one of the institutions of the city, just as in the summer a certain class of young people in New York find their pleasure in driving up and down the Avenue on the top of the omnibuses. But that is a dreary and sentimental journey compared with a ride on the grip-seat of a cable-car, and every one in Denver patronizes this means of locomotion whether on business or on pleasure bent, and whether he has carriages of his own or not. There is not, owing to the altitude, much air to spare in Denver at any time, but when one mounts a cable-car, and is swept with a wild rush around a curve, or dropped down a grade as abruptly as one is dropped down the elevator shaft in the Potter Building, what little air there is disappears, and leaves one gasping. Still, it is a most popular diversion, and even in the winter some of the younger people go cable-riding as we go sleighing, and take lap-robes with them to keep them warm. There is even a “scenic route,” which these cars follow, and it is most delightful.

Denver and Colorado Springs pretend to be jealous of one another; why, 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.

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.

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.