Part 2
San Antonio is the oldest of Texan cities, and possesses historical and picturesque show-places which in any other country but our own would be visited by innumerable American tourists prepared to fall down and worship. The citizens of San Antonio do not, as a rule, appreciate the historical values of their city; they are rather tired of them. They would prefer you should look at the new Post-office and the City Hall, and ride on the cable road. But the missions which lie just outside of the city are what will bring the Eastern man or woman to San Antonio, and not the new water-works. There are four of these missions, the two largest and most interesting being the Mission de la Conception, of which the corner-stone was laid in 1730, and the Mission San José, the carving, or what remains of it, in the latter being wonderfully rich and effective. The Spaniards were forced to abandon the missions on account of the hostility of the Indians, and they have been occupied at different times since by troops and bats, and left to the mercies of the young men from “Rochester, N. Y.,” and the young women from “Dallas, Texas,” who have carved their immortal names over their walls just as freely as though they were the pyramids of Egypt or Blarney Castle. San Antonio is a great place for invalids, on account of its moderate climate, and a most satisfactory place in which to spend a week or two in the winter whether one is an invalid or not. There is the third largest army post in the country at the edge of the city, where there is much to see and many interesting people to know, and there is a good club, and cock-fighting on Sunday, and a first-rate theatre all the week. At night the men sit outside of the hotels, and the plazas are filled with Mexicans and their open-air restaurants, and the lights of these and the brigandish appearance of those who keep them are very unlike anything one may see at home.
All that the city really needs now is a good hotel and a more proper pride in its history and the monuments to it. The man who seems to appreciate this best is William Corner, whose book on San Antonio is a most valuable historical authority.
A few years ago one would have said that San Antonio was enjoying a boom. But you cannot use that expression now, for the Western men have heard that a boom, no matter how quickly it rises, often comes down just as quickly, and so forcibly that it makes a hole in the ground where castles in the air had formerly stood. So if you wish to please a Western man by speaking well of his city (and you cannot please him more in any other way), you must say that it is enjoying a “steady, healthy growth.” San Antonio is enjoying a steady, healthy growth.
It is quite as impossible to write comprehensively of south-western Texas in one article as it is to write such an article and say nothing of the Alamo. And the Alamo, in the event of any hasty reader’s possible objection, is not ancient history. It is no more ancient history than love is an old story, for nothing is ancient and nothing is old which every new day teaches something that is fine and beautiful and brave. The Alamo is to the South-west what Independence Hall is to the United States, and Bunker Hill to the East; but the pride of it belongs to every American, whether he lives in Texas or in Maine. The battle of the Alamo was the event of greatest moment in the war between Mexico and the Texans, when Santa Anna was President, and the Texans were fighting for their independence. And the stone building to which the Mexicans laid siege, and in which the battle was fought, stands to-day facing a plaza in the centre of San Antonio.
There are hideous wooden structures around it, and others not so hideous--modern hotels and the new Post-office, on which the mortar is hardly yet dry. But in spite of these the grace and dignity which the monks gave it in 1774, raise it above these modern efforts that tower above it, and dwarf them. They are collecting somewhat slowly a fund to pay for the erection of a monument to the heroes of the Alamo. As though they needed a monument, with these battered walls still standing and the marks of the bullets on the casements! No architect can build better than that. No architect can introduce that feature. The architects of the Alamo were building the independence of a State as wide in its boundaries as the German Empire.
The story of the Alamo is a more than thrice-told one, and Sidney Lanier has told it so well that whoever would write of it must draw on him for much of their material, and must accept his point of view. But it cannot be told too often, even though it is spoiled in the telling.
On the 23d of February, 1836, General Santa Anna himself, with four thousand Mexican soldiers, marched into the town of San Antonio. In the old mission of the Alamo were the town’s only defenders, one hundred and forty-five men, under Captain Travis, a young man twenty-eight years old. With him were Davy Crockett, who had crossed over from his own State to help those who were freeing theirs, and Colonel Bowie (who gave his name to a knife, which name our government gave later to a fort), who was wounded and lying on a cot.
Their fortress and quarters and magazine was the mission, their artillery fourteen mounted pieces, but there was little ammunition. Santa Anna demanded unconditional surrender, and the answer was ten days of dogged defence, and skirmishes by day and sorties for food and water by night. The Mexicans lost heavily during the first days of the siege, but not one inside of the Alamo was killed. Early in the week Travis had despatched couriers for help, and the defenders of the mission were living in the hope of re-enforcements; but four days passed, and neither couriers returned nor re-enforcements came. On the fourth day Colonel Fannin with three hundred men and four pieces of artillery started forth from Goliad, but put back again for want of food and lack of teams. The garrison of the Alamo never knew of this. On the 1st of March Captain John W. Smith, who _has_ found teams, and who _has_ found rations, brings an offering of thirty-two men from Gonzales, and leads them safely into the fort. They have come with forced marches to their own graves; but they do not know that, and the garrison, now one hundred and seventy-two strong, against four thousand Mexicans, continues its desperate sorties and its desperate defence.
On the 3d of March, 1836, there is a cessation in the bombardment, and Captain Travis draws his men up into single rank and takes his place in front of them.
He tells them that he has deceived them with hopes of re-enforcements--false hopes based on false promises of help from the outside--but he does not blame those who failed him; he makes excuses for them; they have tried to reach him, no doubt, but have been killed on the way. Sidney Lanier quotes this excusing of those who had deserted him at the very threshold of death as best showing the fineness of Travis, and the poet who has judged the soldier so truly has touched here one of the strongest points of this story of great heroism.
Captain Travis tells them that all that remains to them is the choice of their death, and that they have but to decide in which manner of dying they will best serve their country. They can surrender and be shot down mercilessly, they can make a sortie and be butchered before they have gained twenty yards, or they can die fighting to the last, and killing their enemies until that last comes.
He gives them their choice, and then stooping, draws a line with the point of his sword in the ground from the left to the right of the rank.
“And now,” he says, “every man who is determined to remain here and to die with me will come to me across that line.”
Tapley Holland was the first to cross. He jumped it with a bound, as though it were a Rubicon. “I am ready to die for my country,” he said.
And then all but one man, named Rose, marched over to the other side. Colonel Bowie, lying wounded in his cot, raised himself on his elbow. “Boys,” he said, “don’t leave me. Won’t some of you carry me across?”
And those of the sick who could walk rose from the bunks and tottered across the line; and those who could not walk were carried. Rose, who could speak Spanish, trusted to this chance to escape, and scaling the wall of the Alamo, dropped into a ditch on the other side, and crawled, hidden by the cactus, into a place of safety. Through him we know what happened before that final day came. He had his reward.
Three days after this, on the morning of the 6th of March, Santa Anna brought forward all of his infantry, supported by his cavalry, and stormed the fortress. The infantry came up on every side at once in long, black solid rows, bearing the scaling-ladders before them, and encouraged by the press of great numbers about them.
But the band inside the mission drove them back, and those who held the ladders dropped them on the ground and ran against the bayonets of their comrades. A second time they charged into the line of bullets, and the second time they fell back, leaving as many dead at the foot of the ladders as there were standing at bay within the walls. But at the third trial the ladders are planted, and Mexicans after Mexicans scale them, and jump down into the pit inside, hundreds and hundreds of them, to be met with bullets and then by bayonet-thrusts, and at last with desperate swinging of the butt, until the little band grows smaller and weaker, and is driven up and about and beaten down and stamped beneath the weight of overwhelming and unending numbers. They die fighting on their knees, hacking up desperately as they are beaten and pinned down by a dozen bayonets, Bowie leaning on his elbow and shooting from his cot, Crockett fighting like a panther in the angle of the church wall, and Travis with his back against the wall to the west. The one hundred and seventy-two men who had held four thousand men at bay for two sleepless weeks are swept away as a dam goes that has held back a flood, and the Mexicans open the church doors from the inside and let in their comrades and the sunshine that shows them horrid heaps of five hundred and twenty-two dead Mexicans, and five hundred more wounded.
There are no wounded among the Texans; of the one hundred and seventy-two who were in the Alamo there are one hundred and seventy-two dead.
With an example like this to follow, it was not difficult to gain the independence of Texas; and whenever Sam Houston rode before his men, crying, “Remember the Alamo!” the battle was already half won.
It was not a cry wholly of revenge, I like to think. It was rather the holding up of the cross to the crusaders, and crying, “By this sign we conquer.” It was a watchword to remind men of those who had suffered and died that their cause might live.
And so, when we leave Texas, we forget the little things that may have tried our patience and understanding there, we forgive the desolation of the South-west, its cactus and dying cattle, we forget the dinners in the middle of the day and the people’s passing taste in literature, and we remember the Alamo.
II
OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER
II
OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER
A ROLLING, jerky train made up of several freight and one passenger car, the latter equally divided, “For Whites” and “For Negroes”--which in the south-west of Texas reads “Mexicans”--dropped my baggage at Pena station, and rolled off across the prairie, rocking from side to side like a line of canal-boats in a rough sea. It seemed like the last departing link of civilization. There was the freight station itself; beyond the track a leaky water-tank, a wooden store surrounded with piles of raw, foul-smelling hides left in exchange for tobacco and meal, a few thatched Mexican huts, and the prairie. That stretched on every side to the horizon, level and desolate, and rising and falling in the heat. Beneath was a red sandy soil covered with cactus and bunches of gray, leafless brush, marked with the white skeletons of cattle, and overhead a sun at white heat, and heavily moving buzzards wheeling in circles or balancing themselves with outstretched wings between the hot sky above and the hot, red soil below.
Across this desert came slowly Trumpeter Tyler, of Troop G, Third Cavalry, mounted on the white horse which only trumpeters affect, and as white as the horse itself from the dust of the trail. He did not look like the soldiers I had seen at San Antonio. His blue shirt was wide open at the breast, his riding-breeches were bare at the knee, and the cactus and chaparral had torn his blouse into rags and ribbons. He pushed his wide-brimmed hat back from his forehead and breathed heavily with the heat. Captain Hardie’s camp, he panted, lay twenty-five miles to the west. He had come from there to see if the field tents and extra rations were ever going to arrive from the post, and as he had left, the captain had departed also with a detachment in search of Garza on a fresh trail. “And he means to follow it,” said Trumpeter Tyler, “if it takes him into Mexico.” So it was doubtful whether the visitor from the East would see the troop commander for several days; but if he nevertheless wished to push on to the camp, Trumpeter Tyler would be glad to show him the way. Not only would he show him the way, but he would look over his kit for him, and select such things as the visitor would need in the brush. Not such things as the visitor might want, but such things as the visitor would need. For in the brush necessities become luxuries, and luxuries are relics of an effete past and of places where tradition tells of pure water and changes of raiment, and, some say, even beds. Neither Trumpeter Tyler, nor Captain Francis H. Hardie, nor any of the officers or men of the eight troops of cavalry on field service in south-west Texas had seen such things for three long months of heat by day and cold by night, besides a blizzard of sleet and rain, that kept them trembling with cold for a fortnight. And it was for this reason that the visitor from the East chose to see the United States troops as they were in the field, and to tell about the way they performed their duty there, rather than as he found them at the posts, where there is at least a canteen and papers not more than a week old.
Trumpeter Tyler ran his hand haughtily through what I considered a very sensibly-chosen assortment of indispensable things, and selected a handful which he placed on one side.
“You think I had better not take those?” I suggested.
“That’s all you can take,” said the trooper, mercilessly. “You must think of the horse.”
Then he led the way to the store, and pointed out the value of a tin plate, a tin cup, and an iron knife and fork, saddle-bags, leather leggings to keep off the needles of the cactus, a revolver, and a blanket. It is of interest to give Trumpeter Tyler’s own outfit, as it was that of every other man in the troop, and was all that any one of them had had for two months. He carried it all on his horse, and it consisted of a blanket, an overcoat, a carbine, a feed-bag, lariat and iron stake, a canteen, saddle-bags filled with rations on one side and a change of under-clothing on the other, a shelter-tent done up in a roll, a sword, and a revolver, with rounds of ammunition for it and the carbine worn in a belt around the waist. All of this, with the saddle, weighed about eighty pounds, and when the weight of a man is added to it, one can see that it is well, as Trumpeter Tyler suggested, to think of the horse. Troop G had been ordered out for seven days’ field service on the 15th of December, and it was then the 24th of January, and the clothes and equipments they had had with them when they started at midnight from Fort MacIntosh for that week of hard riding were all they had had with them since. But the hard riding had continued.
Trumpeter Tyler proved that day not only my guide, but a philosopher, and when night came on, a friend. He was very young, and came from Virginia, as his slow, lazy voice showed; and he had played, in his twenty-three years, the many parts of photographer, compositor, barber, cook, musician, and soldier. He talked of these different callings as we walked our horses over the prairie, and, out of deference to myself and my errand, of writing. He was a somewhat general reader, and volunteered his opinion of the works of Rudyard Kipling, Laura Jean Libbey, Captain Charles King, and others with confident familiarity. He recognized no distinctions in literature; they had all written a book, therefore they were, in consequence, in exactly the same class.
Of Mr. Kipling he said, with an appreciative shake of the head, that “he knew the private soldier from way back;” of Captain Charles King, that he wrote for the officers; and of Laura Jean Libbey, that she was an authoress whose books he read “when there really wasn’t nothing else to do.” I doubt if one of Mr. Kipling’s own heroes could have made as able criticisms.
When night came on and the stars came out, he dropped the soldier shop and talked of religion and astronomy. The former, he assured me earnestly, was much discussed by the privates around the fire at night, which I could better believe after I saw how near the stars get and how wide the world seems when there is only a blanket between you and the heavens, and when there is a general impression prevailing that you are to be shot at from an ambush in the morning. Of astronomy he showed a very wonderful knowledge, and awakened my admiration by calling many stars by strange and ancient names--an admiration which was lessened abruptly when he confessed that he had been following some other than the North Star for the last three miles, and that we were lost. It was a warm night, and I was so tired with the twenty-five-miles ride on a Mexican saddle--which is as comfortable as a soap-box turned edges up--that the idea of lying out on the ground did not alarm me. But Trumpeter Tyler’s honor was at stake. He had his reputation as a trailer to maintain, and he did so ably by lighting matches and gazing knowingly at the hoof-marks of numerous cattle, whose bones, I was sure, were already whitening on the plain or journeying East in a refrigerator-car, but which he assured me were still fresh, and must lead to the ranch near which the camp was pitched. And so, after four hours’ aimless trailing through the chaparral, when only the thorns of the cactus kept us from falling asleep off our horses, we stumbled into two smouldering fires, a ghostly row of little shelter-tents, and a tall figure in a long overcoat, who clicked a carbine and cried, “Halt, and dismount!”
I was somewhat doubtful of my reception in the absence of the captain, and waited, very wide awake now, while they consulted together in whispers, and then the sentry led me to one of the little tents and kicked a sleeping form violently, and told me to crawl in and not to mind reveille in the morning, but to sleep on as long as I wished. I did not know then that I had Trumpeter Tyler’s bed, and that he was sleeping under a wagon, but I was gratefully conscious of his “bunkie’s” tucking me in as tenderly as though I were his son, and of his not sharing, but giving me more than my share of the blankets. And I went to sleep so quickly that it was not until the morning that I found what I had drowsily concluded must be the roots of trees under me, to be “bunkie’s” sabre and carbine.
The American private, as he showed himself during the three days in which I was his guest, and afterwards, when Captain Hardie had returned and we went scouting together, proved to be a most intelligent and unpicturesque individual. He was intelligent, because he had, as a rule, followed some other calling before he entered the service, and he was not picturesque, because he looked on “soldiering” merely as a means of livelihood, and had little or no patriotic or sentimental feeling concerning it. This latter was not true of the older men. They had seen real war either during the rebellion or in the Indian campaigns, which are much more desperate affairs than the Eastern mind appreciates, and they were fond of the service and proud of it. One of the corporals in G Troop, for instance, had been honorably discharged a year before with the rank of first sergeant, and had re-enlisted as a private rather than give up the service, of which he found he was more fond than he had imagined when he had left it. And in K Troop was an even more notable instance in a man who had been retired on three-fourths pay, having served his thirty years, and who had returned to the troop to act as Captain Hunter’s “striker,” or man of all work, and who bore the monotony of the barracks and the hardships of field service rather than lose the uniform and the feeling of _esprit de corps_ which thirty years’ service had made a necessity to him.
But the raw recruit, or the man in his third or fourth year, as he expressed himself in the different army posts and among the companies I met on the field, looked upon his work from a purely business point of view. He had been before enlistment a clerk, or a compositor, a cowboy, a day-laborer, painter, blacksmith, book-canvasser, almost everything. In Captain Hardie’s troop all of these were represented, and the average of intelligence was very high. Whether the most intelligent private is the best soldier is a much-discussed question which is not to be discussed here, but these men were intelligent and were good soldiers, although I am sure they were too independent in their thoughts, though not in their actions, to have suited an officer of the English or German army. That they are more carefully picked men than those found in the rank and file of the British army can be proved from the fact that of those who apply for enlistment in the United States but twenty per cent. are chosen, while in Great Britain they accept eighty and in some years ninety per cent. of the applicants. The small size of our army in comparison, however, makes this showing less favorable than it at first appears.
In camp, while the captain was away, the privates suggested a lot of college boys more than any other body of individuals. A few had the college boy’s delight in shirking their work, and would rejoice over having had a dirty carbine pass inspection on account of a shining barrel, as the Sophomore boasts of having gained a high marking for a translation he had read from a crib. They had also the college boy’s songs, and his trick of giving nicknames, and his original and sometimes clever slang, and his satisfaction in expressing violent liking or dislike for those in authority over him--in the one case tutors and professors, and in the other sergeants and captains. Their one stupid hitch, in which the officers shared to some extent, was in re-enforcing all they said with profanity; but as soldiers have done this, apparently, since the time of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages, it must be considered an inherited characteristic. Their fun around the camp fire at night was rough, but it was sometimes clever, though it was open to the objection that a clever story never failed of three or four repetitions. The greatest successes were those in which the officers, always of some other troop, were the butts. One impudent “cruitie” made himself famous in a night by improvising an interview between himself and a troop commander who had met him that day as he was steering a mule train across the prairie.
“‘How are you?’ said he to me. ‘You’re one of Captain Hardie’s men, ain’t you? I’m Captain----.’
“‘Glad to know you, captain,’ said I. ‘I’ve read about you in the papers.’”