Part 3
This was considered a magnificent stroke by the men, who thought the captain in question rather too fond of sending in reports concerning himself to headquarters.
“‘Well,’ says he, ‘when do you think we’re going to catch this ---- ---- ---- ---- Garza? As for me,’ says he, ‘I’m that ---- ---- ---- ---- tired of the whole ---- ---- ---- business that I’m willing to give up my job to any ---- ---- ---- fool that will take it----’
“‘Well, old man,’ says I, ‘I’d be glad to relieve you,’ says I, ‘but I’d a ---- sight rather serve under Captain Hardie than captain such a lot of regular ---- ---- ---- coffee-coolers as you’ve got under you.’”
The audacity of this entirely fictitious conversation was what recommended it to the men. I only reproduce it here as showing their idea of humor. An even greater success was that of a stolid German, who related a true incident of life at Fort Clarke, where the men were singing one night around the fire, when the colonel passed by, and ordered them into the tents, and to stop that ---- noise.
“And den,” continued the soldier, “he come acrost Cabding----, sitting in front of his tent, and he says to him quick like that, ‘You ged into your tent, _too_.’ That’s what he said to him, ‘You ged into your tent, _too_.’”
It is impossible to imagine the exquisite delight that this simple narrative gave. The idea of a real troop commander having been told to get into his tent just like a common soldier brought the tears to the men’s eyes, and the success of his story so turned the German’s head that he continued repeating to himself and to any one he met for several days: “That’s what he said, ‘You ged into your tent, TOO.’ That’s what he said.”
Captain Hardie rode his detachment into camp on the third day, with horses so tired that they tried to lie down whenever there was a halt; and a horse must be very tired before he will do that. Captain Hardie’s riding-breeches were held together by the yellow stripes at their sides, and his hands were raw and swollen with the marks of the cactus needles, and his face burned and seared to a dull red. I had heard of him through the papers and from the officers at headquarters as the “Riding Captain,” and as the one who had during the Garza campaign been most frequently in the saddle, and least given to sending in detailed reports of his own actions. He had been absolutely alone for the two months he had been in the field. He was the father of his men, as all troop commanders must be; he had to doctor them when they were ill, to lend them money when the paymaster lost his way in the brush, to write their letters, and to listen to their grievances, and explain that it was not because they were not good soldiers that they could not go out and risk being shot on this or that particular scouting party--he could do all this for them, but he could not talk to them. He had to sit in front of his own camp fire and hear them laughing around theirs, and consider the loneliness of south-western Texas, which is the loneliness of the ocean at night. He could talk to his Mexican guides, because they, while they were under him, were not of his troop, and I believe it was this need to speak to some living soul that taught Captain Hardie to know Spanish as well as he did, and much more quickly than the best of tutors could have done in a year at the post.
The Eastern mind does not occupy itself much with these guardians of its borders; its idea of the soldier is the comfortable, clubable fellow they meet in Washington and New York, whose red, white, and blue button is all that marks him from the other clubable, likable men about him. But they ought to know more and feel more for these equally likable men of the border posts, whose only knowledge of club life is the annual bill for dues, one of which, with supreme irony, arrived in Captain Hardie’s mail at a time when we had only bacon three times a day, and nothing but alkali water to silence the thirst that followed. To a young man it is rather pathetic to see another young man, with a taste and fondness for the pleasant things of this world, pull out his watch and hold it to the camp fire and say, “Just seven o’clock; people in God’s country are sitting down to dinner.” And then a little later: “And now it’s eight o’clock, and they are going to the theatres. What is there at the theatres now?” And when I recalled the plays running in New York when I left it, the officers would select which one they would go to, with much grave deliberation, and then crawl in between two blankets and find the most comfortable angle at which a McClellan saddle will make a pillow.
The Garza campaign is only of interest here as it shows the work of the United States troops who were engaged in it. As for Caterino E. Garza himself, he may, by the time this appears in print, have been made President of Mexico, which is most improbable; or have been captured in the brush, which is more improbable; or he may have disappeared from public notice altogether. It is only of interest to the Eastern man to know that a Mexican ranch-owner and sometime desperado and politician living in south-west Texas proclaimed a revolution against the Government of Mexico, and that that Government requested ours to see that the neutrality laws existing between the two countries were not broken by the raising of troops on our side of the Rio Grande River, and that followers of this Garcia should not be allowed to cross through Texas on their way to Mexico. This our Government, as represented by the Department of Texas, which has its headquarters at San Antonio, showed its willingness to do by sending at first two troops of cavalry, and later six more, into darkest Texas, with orders to take prisoners any bands of revolutionists they might find there; and to arrest all individual revolutionists with a warrant sworn to by two witnesses. The country into which these eight troops were sent stretches for three hundred and sixty miles along the Rio Grande River, where it separates Mexico from Texas, and runs back a hundred and more miles east, making of this so-called Garza territory an area of five hundred square miles.
This particular country is the back-yard of the world. It is to the rest of the West what the ash-covered lots near High Bridge are to New York. It is the country which led General Sheridan to say that if he owned both places, he would rent Texas and live in hell. It is the strip of country over which we actually went to war with Mexico, and which gave General Sherman the opportunity of making the epigramme, which no one who has not seen the utter desolateness of the land can justly value, that we should go to war with Mexico again, and force her to take it back.
It is a country where there are no roses, but where everything that grows has a thorn. Where the cattle die of starvation, and where the troops had to hold up the solitary train that passes over it once a day, in true road-agent fashion, to take the water from its boilers that their horses might not drop for lack of it. It is a country where the sun blinds and scorches at noon, and where the dew falls like a cold rain at night, and where one shivers in an overcoat at breakfast, and rides without coat or waistcoat and panting with the heat the same afternoon. Where there are no trees, nor running streams, nor rocks nor hills, but just an ocean of gray chaparral and white, chalky cañons or red, dusty trails. If you leave this trail for fifty yards, you may wander for twenty miles before you come to water or a ranch or another trail, and by that time the chaparral and cactus will have robbed you of your clothing, and left in its place a covering of needles, which break when one attempts to draw them out, and remain in the flesh to fester and swell the skin, and leave it raw and tender for a week. This country, it is almost a pleasure to say, is America’s only in its possession. No white men, or so few that they are not as common as century-plants, live in it. It is Mexican in its people, its language, and its mode of life. The few who inhabit its wilderness are ranch-owners, and their shepherds and cowboys; and a ranch, which means a store and six or seven thatched adobe houses around it, is at the nearest three miles from the next ranch, and on an average twenty miles. As a rule, they move farther away the longer you ride towards them.
Into this foreign country of five hundred square miles the eight United States cavalry troops of forty men each and two companies of infantry were sent to find Garza and his followers. The only means by which a man or horses or cows can be tracked in this desert is by the foot or hoof prints which they may leave in the sandy soil as they follow the trails already made or make fresh ones. To follow these trails it is necessary to have as a guide a man born in the brush, who has trailed cattle for a livelihood. The Mexican Government supplied the troops with some of their own people, who did not know the particular country into which they were sent, but who could follow a trail in any country. One or two of these, sometimes none, went with each troop. What our Government should have done was to supply each troop commander with five or six of these men, who could have gone out in search of trails, and reported at the camp whenever they had found a fresh one. By this means the troops could have been saved hundreds of miles of unnecessary marching and countermarching on “false alarms,” and the Government much money, as the campaign in that event would have been brought much more rapidly to a conclusion.
But the troop commanders in the field had no such aids. They had to ride forth whenever so ordered to do by the authorities at headquarters, some two hundred miles from the scene of the action, who had in turn received their information from the Mexican general on the other side of the Rio Grande. This is what made doing their duty, as represented by obeying orders, such a difficult thing to the troops in the Garza territory. They knew before they saddled their horses that they were going out on a wild-goose chase to wear out their horses and their own patience, and to accomplish nothing beyond furnishing Garza’s followers with certain satisfaction in seeing a large body of men riding solemnly through a dense underbrush in a blinding sun to find a trait which a Mexican general had told an American general would be sure to lead them to Garza, and news of which had reached them a week after whoever had made the trail had passed over it. They could imagine, as they trotted in a long, dusty line through the chaparral, as conspicuous marks on the plain as a prairie-wagon, that Garza or his men were watching them from under a clump of cactus on some elevation in the desert, and that he would say:
“Ah! the troops are out again, I see. Who is it to-day--Hardie, Chase, or Hunter? Lend me your field-glass. Ah! it is Hardie. He is a good rider. I hope he will not get a sunstroke.”
And then they would picture how the revolutionists would continue the smoking of their cornstalk cigarettes and the drinking of the smuggled muscal.
This is not an exaggerated picture. A man could lie hidden in this brush and watch the country on every side of him, and see each of the few living objects which might pass over it in a day, as easily as he could note the approach of a three-masted schooner at sea. And even though troops came directly towards him, he had but to lie flat in the brush within twenty feet of them, and they would not know it. It would be as easy to catch Jack the Ripper with a Lord-Mayor’s procession as Garza with a detachment of cavalry, unless they stumbled upon him by luck, or unless he had with him so many men that their trail could be followed at a gallop. As a matter of fact and history, the Garza movement was broken up in the first three weeks of its inception by the cavalry and the Texas Rangers and the deputy sheriffs, who rode after the large bodies of men and scattered them. After that it was merely a chase after little bands of from three to a dozen men, who travelled by night and slept by day in their race towards the river, or, when met there by the Mexican soldiers, in their race back again. The fact that every inhabitant of the ranches and every Mexican the troops met was a secret sympathizer with Garza was another and most important difficulty in the way of his pursuers. And it was trying to know that the barking of the dogs of a ranch was not yet out of ear-shot before a vaquero was scuttling off through the chaparral to tell the hiding revolutionists that the troops were on their way, and which way they were coming.
And so, while it is no credit to soldiers to do their duty, it is creditable to them when they do their duty knowing that it is futile, and that some one has blundered. If a fire company in New York City were ordered out on a false alarm every day for three months, knowing that it was not a fire to which they were going, but that some one had wanted a messenger-boy, and rung up an engine by mistake, the alertness and fidelity of those firemen would be most severely tested. That is why I admired, and why the readers in the East should admire, the discipline and the faithfulness with which the cavalry on the border of Texas did their duty the last time Trumpeter Tyler sounded “Boots and Saddles,” and went forth as carefully equipped, and as eager and hopeful that _this_ time meant fighting, as they did the first.
Their life in the field was as near to nature, and, as far as comforts were concerned, to the beasts of the field, as men often come. A tramp in the Eastern States lives like a respectable householder in comparison. Suppose, to better understand it, that you were ordered to leave your house or flat or hall bedroom and live in the open air for two months, and that you were limited in your selection of what you wished to carry with you to the weight of eighty pounds. You would find it difficult to adjust this eighty pounds in such a way that it would include any comforts; certainly, there would be no luxuries. The soldiers of Troop G, besides the things before enumerated, were given for a day’s rations a piece of bacon as large as your hand, as much coffee as would fill three large cups, and enough flour to make five or six heavy biscuits, which they justly called “’dobes,” after the clay bricks of which Mexican adobe houses are made. In camp they received potatoes and beans. All of these things were of excellent quality and were quite satisfying, as the work supplies an appetite to meet them. This is not furnished by the Government, and costs it nothing, but it is about the best article in the line of sustenance that the soldier receives. He sleeps on a blanket with his “bunkie,” and with his “bunkie’s” blanket over him. If he is cold, he can build the fire higher, and doze in front of that. He rides, as a rule, from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon, without a halt for a noonday meal, and he generally gets to sleep by eight or nine. The rest of the time he is in the saddle. Each man carries a frying-pan about as large as a plate, with an iron handle, which folds over and is locked in between the pan and another iron plate that closes upon it. He does his own cooking in this, unless he happens to be the captain’s “striker,” when he has double duty. He is so equipped and so taught that he is an entirely independent organization in himself, and he and his horse eat and sleep and work as a unit, and are as much and as little to the rest of the troop as one musket and bayonet are to the line of them when a company salutes.
We had for a guide one of the most picturesque ruffians I ever met. He was a Mexican murderer to the third or fourth degree, as Captain Hardie explained when I first met him, and had been liberated from a jail in Mexico in order that he might serve his country on this side of the river as a guide, and that his wonderful powers as a trailer might not be wasted.
He rejoiced in his liberty from iron bars and a bare mud floor, and showed his gratitude in the most untiring vigilance and in the endurance of what seemed to the Eastern mind the greatest discomforts. He always rode in advance of the column, and with his eyes wandering from the trail to the horizon and towards the backs of distant moving cattle, and again to the trail at his feet. Whenever he saw any one--and he could discover a suspected revolutionist long before any one else--the first intimation the rest of the scouting party would get of it was his pulling out his Winchester and disappearing on a gallop into the chaparral. He scorned the assistance of the troop, and when we came up to him again, after a wild dash through the brush, which left our hats and portions of our clothing to mark our way, we would find him with his prisoner’s carbine tucked under his arm, and beaming upon him with a smile of wicked satisfaction.
As a trailer he showed, as do many of these guides, what seemed to be a gift of second-sight cultivated to a supernatural degree. He would say: “Five horses have passed ahead of us about an hour since. Two are led and one has two men on his back, and there is one on each of the other two;” which, when we caught up to them at the first watering-place, would prove to be true. Or he would tell us that troops or Rangers to such a number had crossed the trail at some time three or four days before, that a certain mark was made by a horse wandering without a rider, or that another had been made by a pony so many years old--all of which statements would be verified later. But it was as a would-be belligerent that he shone most picturesquely. When he saw a thin column of smoke rising from a cañon where revolutionists were supposed to be in camp, or came upon several armed men riding towards us and too close to escape, his face would light up with a smile of the most wicked content and delight, and he would beam like a cannibal before a feast as he pumped out the empty cartridges and murmured, “Buena! buena! buena!” with rolling eyes and an anticipatory smack of the lips.
But he was generally disappointed; the smoke would come from a shepherd’s fire, and the revolutionists would point to the antelope-skins under their saddles, which had been several months in drying, and swear they were hunters, and call upon the saints to prove that they had never heard of such a man as Garza, and that carbines, revolvers, and knives were what every antelope-hunter needed for self-protection. At which the Mexican would show his teeth and roll his eyes with such a cruel show of disbelief that they would beg the “good captain” to protect them and let them go, which, owing to the fact that one cannot get a warrant and a notary public in the brush, as the regulations require, he would, after searching them, be compelled to do.
And then the Mexican, who had expected to see them hung to a tree until they talked or died, as would have been done in his own free republic, would sigh bitterly, and trot off patiently and hopefully after more. Hope was especially invented for soldiers and fishermen. One thought of this when one saw the spirit of the men as they stole out at night, holding up their horses’ heads to make them step lightly, and dodging the lights of the occasional ranches, and startling some shepherd sleeping by the trail into the belief that a file of ghosts had passed by him in the mist. They were always sure that this time it meant something, and if the captain made a dash from the trail, and pounded with his fist on the door of a ranch where lights shone when lights should have been put out, the file of ghosts that had stretched back two hundred yards into the night in an instant became a close-encircling line of eager, open-eyed boys, with carbines free from the sling-belts, covering the windows and the grudgingly opened door. They never grew weary; they rode on many days from nine at night to five the next afternoon, with but three hours’ sleep. On one scouting expedition Tyler and myself rode one hundred and ten miles in thirty-three hours; the average, however, was from thirty to fifty miles a day; but the hot, tired eyes of the enlisted men kept wandering over the burning prairie as though looking for gold; and if on the ocean of cactus they saw a white object move, or a sombrero drop from sight, or a horse with a saddle on its back, they would pass the word forward on the instant, and wait breathlessly until the captain saw it too.
I asked some of them what they thought of when they were riding up to these wandering bands of revolutionists, and they told me that from the moment the captain had shouted “Howmp!” which is the only order he gives for any and every movement, they had made themselves corporals, had been awarded the medal of honor, and had spent the thirty thousand dollar reward for Garza’s capture. And so if any one is to take Garza, and the hunting of the Snark is to be long continued in Texas, I hope it will be G Troop, Third Cavalry, that brings the troublesome little wretch into camp; not because they have worked so much harder than the others, but because they had no tents, as did the others, and no tinned goods, and no pay for two months, and because they had such an abundance of enthusiasm and hope, and the good cheer that does not come from the commissariat department or the canteen.
III
AT A NEW MINING CAMP
III
AT A NEW MINING CAMP
MY only ideas of a new mining camp before I visited Creede were derived from an early and eager study of Bret Harte. Not that I expected to see one of his mining camps or his own people when I visited Creede, but the few ideas of miners and their ways and manners that I had were those which he had given me. I should have liked, although I did not expect it, to see the outcasts of Poker Flat before John Oakhurst, in his well-fitting frock-coat, had left the outfit, and Yuba Bill pulling up his horses in front of the Lone Star saloon, where Colonel Starbuckle, with one elbow resting on the bar, and with his high white hat tipped to one side, waited to do him honor. I do not know that Bret Harte ever said that Colonel Starbuckle had a white hat, but I always pictured him in it, and with a black stock. I wanted to hear people say, “Waal, stranger,” and to see auburn-haired giants in red shirts, with bags of gold-dust and nuggets of silver, and much should I have liked to meet Rose of Touloumme. But all that I found at Creede which reminded me of these miners and gamblers and the chivalric extravagant days of ’49 were a steel pan, like a frying-pan without a handle, which I recognized with a thrill as the pan for washing gold, and a pick in the corner of a cabin; and once when a man hailed me as “Pardner” on the mountain-side, and asked “What luck?” The men and the scenes in this new silver camp showed what might have existed in the more glorious sunshine of California, but they were dim and commonplace, and lacked the sharp, clear-cut personality of Bret Harte’s men and scenes. They were like the negative of a photograph which has been under-exposed, and which no amount of touching up will make clear. So I will not attempt to touch them up.