CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BEQUEST 
 
 OF 
 
 STEWART HENRY BURNHAM 
 1943 
 
The original of tiiis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030995926 
 
Cornell University Library 
 F595 .D26 1892 
 
 The West from a car window. 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 030 995 926 
 
1, 
 
A BUCKING BEONCHO 
 
THE WEST 
 FROM A CAR-WINDOW 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD HARDING DAVIS 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 < m^ 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
 HARPER &- BROTHERS 
 
 PUBLISHERS 190^ 
 
 
Copyright, i8q2, by Harper & Brothers. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
TO 
 
 M. K. J. 
 
 OF 
 
 THE SEVENTH INFANTEY 
 
 ^ 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 FHOM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI 
 
 OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER 
 
 AT A NEW MINING CAMP . 
 
 A THREE-TEAR-OLD CITY 
 
 RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS 
 
 ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION . 
 
 A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST 
 
 THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE 
 
 PAOB 
 3 
 
 ax 
 
 59 
 93 
 121 
 151 
 185 
 215 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTKATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A Bucking Brmtcho Frontispiece 
 
 Head-piece 3 
 
 Rangers in Camp 9 
 
 " Remember the Alamo P' 19 
 
 Trumpeter Tyler 29 
 
 Captain Francis H. Hardie, O IVoop, Third United States Cavalry 37 
 
 Water 43 
 
 The Mexican Guide 49 
 
 Third Cavalry Troopers — Searching a Suspected Revolutionist . , 53 
 
 Mining Camp on the Range A bove 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 IS 
 
 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-ojice, April 22, 1889 108 
 
List of Illustrations 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Post-office, July 4, 1S90 Ill 
 
 Oklahoma City To-day — Main Broadway 115 
 
 The Ranch-house on the King Ranch, the Largest Range Owned by 
 
 One Individual in (he United States 123 
 
 A Shattered Idol 127 
 
 Snapping a Rope on a Horse's Foot 130 
 
 milhigdon Ranch 133 
 
 Fixing a Break in the Wire Fence '137 
 
 Gathering the Rope 141 
 
 Reaction Fgnals Action c . . . . 145 
 
 Tail-piece 148 
 
 7'lie Cheyenne Type 152 
 
 Big Bull 155 
 
 One of Willi avtson*s Stages 159 
 
 77ie Beef Is>iue at Anadnrko 163 
 
 Indian Boy and Pinto Pony 169 
 
 A Kiowa Maiden 1*75 
 
 A One-company Post at Oklahoma City ......... 187 
 
 The Omnipntpnf, Bngler . 191 
 
 IJjiited Stiites Military Post at San Antonio 195 
 
 United States Ctivnlrynuin in Full Dress 199 
 
 United States Military Post — Infantry Parade 203 
 
 Fort Hounton, 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 Snovi-lihe at Colorado Springs . 227 
 
 Mmnil of the Holy Cross 233 
 
 Pike's Peak from Colorado Springs 239 
 
I 
 
 FROM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI 
 
it i 2 i_: a^_^ 
 
 ichard Harding Davis 
 
 FROM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI 
 
 * T 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 rail- 
 road 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 loneli- 
 ness, 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. 
 
 K I could travel over the West for three years, I might 
 write of it with authority ; but when my time is limited to 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 m the cities of the Eastern 
 States, but the moral they draw must be their own, and can 
 difEer 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 coun- 
 try, and shame at his ignorance concerning it. He remem- 
 bers 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 him- 
 self and others nearer home. 
 
 His first practical surprise perhaps will be when he dis- 
 covers 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. I'he 
 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 refresh- 
 ments " to watching the conductor. But this minor and 
 
From San Antonio to Corpus Christi 
 
 merely nominal change will not distress him half so seri- 
 ously as will the sudden and actual disarrangement of his 
 dinner hour from seven at night to two in the afternoon, 
 though even this will hecome 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 news- 
 paper man. But they do not represent the feeling of their 
 readers, and in that they give a wrong and unfortunate im- 
 pression 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 diSicult to explain away the books. 
 They are too obvious and too much in evidence to be acci- 
 dental. To judge from them, one would imagine that Boc- 
 caccio, Eabelais, Zola, and such things as Velvet Vice and 
 Old Sleuth, are all that is known to the South-west of lit- 
 erature. It may be that the booksellers only keep them for 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 vari- 
 ous 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 diflEerences 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 sur- 
 prise him even more ; at least, if it was organized in the wild- 
 est 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 prai- 
 rie of cactus and chaparral towards "Corpus," he feels as- 
 sured that at last he is done with parlor-oars and civiliza- 
 tion ; 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 list- 
 less 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 digni- 
 tary say, complacently : " Sho ! that's only ' Will ' Scheeley 
 practisin' ! He's a dep'ty sheriff." 
 
From San Antonio to Corpus Christi 
 
 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 Broad- 
 way 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 ex- 
 plained 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 ar- 
 rested 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 trig- 
 
The West from a Car -Window 
 
 ger," 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 per- 
 sons unknown, and killed. A Mexican brought the news 
 of this to our camp the night after the murder, and de- 
 scribed 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 con- 
 sidered it to be an unfortunate event of very common oc- 
 currence 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 indig- 
 nation meeting, and passed resolutions condemning the 
 county officials for not suppressing crime, and petitioning 
 
^ 
 
From San Antonio to Corpus Christi 
 
 the Governor of tlie 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-tive 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 or- 
 ganization of long descent, and with the most brilliant rec- 
 ord 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 cap- 
 tains, and the State pays them a dollar a day and supplies 
 them with rations and ammunition. They bring with them 
 
 U 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 con- 
 stabulary 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 de- 
 tached 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 com- 
 plete 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 
 
 18 
 
From San Antonio to Corpus Christi 
 
 general bad 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, lis- 
 tening 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 some- 
 thing 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 ofE in the 
 prairie, and SherifE 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 
 13 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 little one-penny sheriff get in the first shot on you." He 
 could afford to say this, because he had been a Ranger him- 
 self, 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 instantane- 
 ous 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 dis- 
 satisfied 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 
 
 U 
 
From. San Antonio to Corpus Ghristi 
 
 guessed, the trial was more to show Captain Brooks's quick- 
 ness rather than his marksmanship, and I paid no attention to 
 the target, but devoted myself assiduously to manipulat- 
 ing 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 com- 
 parison, 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. 
 
 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-ofEce 
 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 Jose, 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 
 
 15 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 in- 
 valid 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 ap- 
 pearance of those who keep them are very unlike, any thing 
 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 Cor- 
 ner, whose book on San Antonio is a most valuable histori- 
 cal 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 mat- 
 ter 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 
 
 16 
 
From San Antonio to Corpus Christi 
 
 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 Inde- 
 pendence 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 independ- 
 ence. 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 oth- 
 ers not so hideous — modern hotels and the new Post-ofiice, 
 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 efEorts 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 Em- 
 pire. 
 
 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 
 
 B '17 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 him- 
 self, with four thousand Mexican soldiers, marched into 
 the town of San Antonio. In the old mission of the Ala- 
 mo 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 surren- 
 der, 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 de- 
 fenders of the mission were living in the hope of re-enforce- 
 ments ; 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 
 
 18 
 
Fram San Antonio to Corpus Christi 
 
 strong, against four thousand Mexicans, continues its des- 
 perate 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 
 bim 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 de- 
 cide in which manner of dying they will best serve their 
 country. They can surrender and be shot down merciless- 
 ly, 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 Eubicon. " I am ready 
 to die for my country," he said. 
 
 And then all but one man, named Rose, marched over to 
 
 21 
 
The Went from a Car - Window 
 
 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. Eose, 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 encour- 
 aged 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 in- 
 side, hundreds and hundreds of them, to be met with bul- 
 lets 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 un- 
 ending numbers. They die fighting on their knees, hack- 
 ing up desperately as they are beaten and pinned down by 
 
From San Antonio to Corpus Chris ti 
 
 a dozen bayonets, Bowie leaning on Lis 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 in- 
 side 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 Hous- 
 ton 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 re- 
 member the Alamo, 
 
n 
 
 OUR TROOPS ON THE BOEDEK 
 
Our Trooj)S on the Border 
 
 n 
 
 OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER 
 
 EOLLING, jerty train made up of several 
 freight and one passenger car, the latter equal- 
 ly divided, "For Whites" and "P'or Negroes" 
 — which in the south-west of Texas reads 
 " Mexicans " — dropped my baggage at Pena station, and 
 rolled ofE 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 cac- 
 tus 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 bal- 
 ancing 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 
 
 27 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 rib- 
 bons. 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 fol- 
 low it," said Trumpeter Tyler, " if it takes him into Mex- 
 ico." 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, Trumpet- 
 er 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 rel- 
 ics 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 ofiicers 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 
 

 TRUMPKTEa TYLER 
 
Our Troops on the Border 
 
 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 indispensa- 
 ble 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 owu 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 sad- 
 dle, 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 or- 
 dered out for seven days' field service on the 15th of Decem- 
 ber, 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 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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, mu- 
 sician, and soldier. He talked of these different callings as 
 we walked our horses over the prairie, and, out of defer- 
 ence to myself and my errand, of writing. He was a some- 
 what general reader, and volunteered his opinion of the 
 works of Rudyard Kipling, Laura Jean Libbey, Captain 
 Charles King, and others with confident familiariiy. He 
 recognized no distinctions in literature ; they had all writ- 
 ten 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 be- 
 lieve 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 prevail- 
 ing that you are to be shot at from an ambush in the morn- 
 ing. Of astronomy he showed a very wonderful knowl- 
 edge, 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 fol- 
 lowing some other than the North Star for the last three 
 
 32 
 
Our Troops on the Border 
 
 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 
 ine. Bat Trumpeter Tyler's honor was at state. He had 
 Ms 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 con- 
 scious 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 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 three days in which I was his guest, and afterwards, when 
 Captain Hardie had returned and we went scouting togeth- 
 er, proved to be a most intelligent and unpicturesque indi- 
 vidual. He was intelligent, because he had, as a rule, fol- 
 lowed 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 patri- 
 otic 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 appre- 
 ciates, 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 Hunt- 
 er's " striker," or man of all work, and who bore the mo- 
 notony 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 1 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 Captaiu Hardie's troop all of these were 
 
 34 
 
Our Troops on the Border 
 
 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 
 ofBcer 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 ap- 
 plicants. The small size of our army in comparison, how- 
 ever, makes this showing less favorable than it at first 
 appears. 
 
 In camp, while the captain was away, the privates sug- 
 gested a lot of college boys more than any other body of 
 individuals. A few had the college boy's delight in shirk- 
 ing 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 some 
 
 35 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 times 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 oflBcers, always 
 of some other troop, were the butts. One impudent " crui- 
 tie " made himself famous in a night by improvising an in- 
 terview 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 ma. ' You're one of Cap- 
 tain Hardie's men, ain't you ? I'm Captain .' 
 
 " ' Glad to know yon, captain,' said I. ' I've read about 
 you in the papers.' " 
 
 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 vqv tq got under you.' " 
 
 The audacity of this entirely fictitious conversation was 
 what recommended it tc 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 colciel passed by, and ordered 
 them into the tents, and to stop hat noise. 
 
 "And den," continued the soldier, "he come acrost Cab- 
 
 36 
 
■^^\: 
 
 CAPTAIN FKANCIS II. HAKDIE, G TROOP, THIRD UNITED STATES CAVALRY 
 
Our Troops on the Border 
 
 ding , sitting in frond 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 command- 
 er 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 cac- 
 tus 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 " Eiding 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 doc- 
 tor 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 !iot 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 
 
 . 39 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 hear them laughing around theirs, and consider the loneli- 
 ness of south-western Texas, which is the loneliness of the 
 ocean at night. He could talk to his Mexican guides, he- 
 cause they, while they were under him, were not of his 
 troop, and I believe it was this need to speak to some liv- 
 ing soul that taught Captain Hardie to know Spanish as 
 well as he did, and much more quickly than the best of tu- 
 tors 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 com- 
 fortable, 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 su- 
 preme 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 sit- 
 ting 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 delib- 
 eration, 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 
 
 40 
 
Our Troops on the Border 
 
 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 disap- 
 peared 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 Mex- 
 ico. This our Government, as represented by the Depart- 
 ment 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 or- 
 ders 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, 
 
 41 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 aud wLich gave General Sherman the opportunity of mat- 
 ing 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 every- 
 thing that grows has a thorn. Where the cattle die of star- 
 vation, and where the troops had to hold up the solitary 
 train that passes over it once a day, in true road-agent fash- 
 ion, 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 over- 
 coat 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 canons 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 at- 
 tempts 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 Mex- 
 ican 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 
 pearest three miles from the next ranch, and on an average 
 
 4? 
 
Vv'-^-*-vi>-y»-aaiir,'_iji s 
 
Our Troops on the Border 
 
 twenty miles. As a rule, they move farther away the long- 
 er 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 fol- 
 low the trails already made or mate 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 Gov- 
 ernment much money, as the campaign in that event 
 would have been brought much more rapidly to a con- 
 clusion. 
 
 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 in- 
 formation 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 
 
 45 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 pati- 
 ence, 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 trail 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 prai- 
 rie-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 Eipper with a 
 Lord-Mayor's procession as Garza with a detachment of cav- 
 alry, unless they stumbled upon him by luck, or unless he 
 
 16 
 
Our Troops on the Border 
 
 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 in- 
 ception by the cavalry and the Texas Eangers and the dep- 
 uty 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 Gar- 
 za 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 ofi 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 mis- 
 take, 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. 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 re- 
 spectable 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 difBcult to adjust this eighty pounds in 
 such a way that it would include any comforts ; certainly, 
 there woald be no luxuries. The soldiers of Troop G, be- 
 sides the things before enumerated, were given for a day's 
 rations a piece of bacon as large as your hand, as much cof- 
 fee as would fill three large cups, and enough fiour 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 satisfy- 
 ing, 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 gen- 
 erally 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, un- 
 less he happens to be the captain's " striker," when he has 
 
 48 
 
TIIK JiJiXICAN iiUlDE, 
 
Our Troops on the Border 
 
 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 bay- 
 onet are to the line of them when a company salutes. 
 
 We had for a guide one of the most picturesque rnflBans 
 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 vigil- 
 ance 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 
 Ms arm, and beaming upon him with a smile of wicked sat- 
 isfaction. 
 
 As a trailer he showed, as do many of these guides, what 
 seemed to be a gift of second-sight cultivated to a super- 
 natural degree. He would say : " Five horses have passed 
 
 61 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 wa- 
 tering-place, would prove to be true. Or he would tell us 
 that troops or Eangers 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 canon 
 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 can- 
 nibal 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 hunt- 
 ers, 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. 
 
 S2 
 
Our 7)-ooj>s oil the Border 
 
 And then the Mexican, who had expected to see them 
 huni;- to a tree until they talked or died, as would have been 
 done in Ins own free vepuhlic, would sigh bitterly, and trot 
 
 THIRD CAVALFiy TROOPERS — SEARCHING A SUSPECTED REVOLUTIONIST 
 
 off patiently and liopefully after more. Hope was especial- 
 ly 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 tile 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 af- 
 ternoon, with but three hours' sleep. On one scouting ex- 
 pedition Tyler and myself rode one hundred and ten miles 
 in thirty-three hours ; the average, however, was from thir- 
 ty to fifty miles a day ; but the hot, tired eyes of the en- 
 listed 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 breathless- 
 ly 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 cor- 
 porals, 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 
 
Our Troops on the Border 
 
 did the others, and no tinned goods, and no pay for two 
 months, and because they had such an abundance of enthu- 
 siasm and hope, and the good cheer that does not come 
 from the commissariat department or the canteen. 
 
Ill 
 
 AT A NEW MINING CAMP 
 
At a New Mining Camp 
 
 III 
 
 AT A NEW MINING CAMP 
 
 )Y only ideas of a new mining camp before I 
 visited Greede were derived from an early and 
 eager study of Bret Harte. Not that I ex- 
 pected 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 be h-ad given me. I should have liked, al- 
 though I did not expect it, to see the outcasts of Poker 
 Flat before John Oakhurst, in his weJl-htting 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, stran- 
 ger," 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 Kose 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 rec- 
 ognized with a thrill as the pan for washing gold, and a 
 
 59 
 
The Wi'Sl from n Cur ■ Window 
 
 pick in the corner of a cabin ; and once when a man hailed 
 me as "Pardner" on the mountain-side, and asked "What 
 hick?" Tlie men and the scenes in tliis new sihxT camp 
 showed what migljt liave existed in tlie more glorious sun- 
 shine of California, but they were dim and commonplace, 
 and lacked the sharp, clear-cut personality of Bret Ilartc's 
 men and scenes. They were like the negative of a photo- 
 
 vi4^;^^ 
 
 -^2?S??fc- 
 
 MINING CAMP ON THE RANGE ABOVE CKEEDE 
 
 graph which has been under-exposed, and which no amount 
 of touching up will make clciir. So I will not attempt to 
 touch them up. 
 
 When I first read of Oreede, when I was so ignorant con- 
 cerning it that I pronounced the final e, it was on the date 
 line of a newspaper, and made no more impression upon 
 me then than though it were printed simply Creede. But 
 after I had reached Denver, and even before, when I had 
 begun to find my way about the Western newspapers, it 
 seemed to be spelled Creede. In Denver it faced you 
 
At a New Mining Camp 
 
 everywhere from bill-boards, flaunted at you from canvas 
 awnings stretched across the streets, and stared at you from 
 daily papers in type an inch long; the shop-windows, ac- 
 cording to their several uses, advertised " Photographs of 
 Creede," " The only correct map of Creede," " Specimen 
 ore from the Holy Moses Mine, Creede," " Only direct route 
 to Creede," " Scalp tickets to Creede," " Wanted, $500 to 
 start drug-store in Creede," " You will need boots at Creede, 
 
 and you can get them at 's." The gentlemen in the 
 
 Denver Club talk Creede ; the people in the hotels dropped 
 the word so frequently that you wondered if they were not 
 all just going there, or were not about to write Creede on 
 the register. It was a common language, starting-point, 
 and interest. It was as momentous as the word Johnstown 
 during the week after the flood. 
 
 The train which carried me there held stern, important- 
 looking old gentlemen, who, the porter toid me in an awed 
 whisper, were one-third or one-fifteenth owners of the Pot- 
 luck Mine ; young men in Astrakhan fur coats and new 
 top boots laced at the ankles, trying to look desperate and 
 rough ; grub-stake prospectors, with bedding, pick, and ra- 
 tions in a roll on the seat beside them ; more young men, 
 who naively assured me when they found that I, too, was 
 going to Creede, and not in iop-boots and revolvers and a 
 flannel shirt, that they had never worn such things before, 
 and really had decent clothes at home ; also women who 
 smoked with the men and passed their flasks down the 
 length of the car, and two friendless little girls, of whom 
 every one except the women, who seemed to recognize a 
 certain fitness of things, took unremitting care. Every one 
 on the crowded train showed the effect of the magnet that 
 was drawing him — he was restless, impatient, and excited. 
 
 61 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 Half of them did not know what they were going to find ; 
 and the other half, who had already taken such another 
 journey to Leadville, Aspen, or Cripple Creek, knew only 
 too well, and yet hoped that this time — 
 
 Creede lies in a gully between two great mountains. In 
 the snmmer the mountain streams wash down into this gully 
 and turn it into a little river ; but with the recklessness of 
 true gamblers, the people who came to Creede built theii 
 stores, houses, and saloons as near the base of the great 
 sides of the valley as they could, and if the stream comes 
 next summer, as it has done for hundreds of years before, 
 it will carry with it fresh pine houses and log huts instead 
 of twigs and branches. 
 
 The train stopped at the opening of this gully, and its 
 passengers jumped out into two feet of mud and snow. 
 The ticket and telegraph office on one side of the track 
 were situated in a freight car with windows and doors 
 cut out of it, and with the familiar blue and white sign of 
 the Western Union nailed to one end ; that station was 
 typical of the whole town in its rawness, and in the tem- 
 porary and impromptu air of its inhabitants. If you looked 
 back at the road over which you had just come, you saw 
 the beautiful circle of the Wagon Wheel Gap, a chain of 
 magnificent mountains white with snow, picked, with hun- 
 dreds of thousands of pine-trees so high above one that 
 they looked like little black pins. The clouds, less white 
 than the snow, lay packed in between the peaks of the 
 range, or drifted from one to another to find a resting- 
 place, and the sun, beating down on both a blinding glare, 
 showed other mountains and other snow-capped ranges for 
 fifty miles beyond. This is at the opening of Willow 
 Gulch into which Creede has hurried and the sides of which 
 
 62 
 
At a New Mining Camp 
 
 it has tramped into mud and covered with hundreds of lit- 
 tle pine boxes of houses and log -cabins, and the simple 
 quadrangles of four planks which mark a building site. In 
 front of you is a village of fresh pine. There is not a 
 brick, a painted front, nor an awning in the whole town. It 
 is like a city of fresh card-board, and the pine shanties 
 seem to trust for support to the rocky sides of the gulch 
 into which they have squeezed themselves. In the street 
 are ox -teams, mules, men, and donkeys loaded with ore, 
 crowding each other familiarly, and sinking knee-deep in 
 the mud. Furniture and kegs of beer, bedding and canned 
 provisions, clothing and half-open packing-cases, and piles 
 of raw lumber are heaped up in front of the new stores — 
 or those still to be built — stores of canvas only, stores with 
 canvas tops and foundations of logs, and houses with the 
 Leadville front, where the upper boards have been left 
 square instead of following the sloping angle of the roof. 
 
 It is more like a circus-tent, which has sprung up over- 
 night and which may be removed on the morrow, than a 
 town, and you cannot but feel that the people about you 
 are a part of the show. A great shaft of rock that rises 
 hundreds of feet above the lower town gives the little village 
 at its base an absurdly pushing, impudent air, and the si- 
 lence of the mountains around from ten to fourteen thousand 
 feet high, makes the confusion of hammers and the cries of 
 the drivers swearing at their mules in the mud and even 
 the random blasts from the mines futile and ridiculous. It 
 is more strange and fantastic at night, when it appears to 
 one looking down from half-way up the mountain like a 
 camp of gypsies at the foot of a canon. On the raw pine 
 fronts shine electric lights in red and blue globes, mixing 
 with the hot, smoky glare rising from the saloons and gam- 
 
 B 66 
 
The West from a Cur - ]Vindrju< 
 
 bling-hoiises, ami striking upward far enongli to show the 
 signs 'of Tlie Holy Moses Saloon, TIjc Theatre Comique, 
 The Keno, and The Little LVdnionieo against the face of 
 the great rock at tlieir hack doors, hut only suggesting the 
 greater mass of it which towers majestically above, hidden 
 somewhere in the night. It is as incongruous as an excur- 
 sion boat covered with colored lights, and banging out 
 popular airs at the base of the Palisades. 
 
 The town of Creede is in what is known as the King 
 
 HOW LAND IS CLAIMED FOR BCILDING PLANKS NAILED TOGETHER AND 
 
 EESIING ON FOUR STCMI'S 
 
At a New Mining Camp 
 
 Solomon district; it is three hundred and twenty miles 
 from Denver, and lies directly in the pathway of the Great 
 Divide. Why it was not discovered sooner, why, indeed, 
 there is one square foot of land in Colorado containing 
 silver not yet discovered, is something which the Eastern 
 mind cannot grasp. Colorado is a State, not a country, 
 and in that State the mines of Leadville, Aspen, Ouray, 
 Clear Creek County, Telluride, Boulder, Silverton, and 
 Cripple Creek, have yielded up in the last year forty mill- 
 ion dollars. If the State has done that much, it can do 
 more ; and I could not understand why any one in Colorado 
 should remain contentedly at home selling ribbons when 
 there must be other mines to be had for the finding. A 
 prospector is, after all, very much like a tramp, but with a 
 knowledge of minerals, a pick, rations, a purpose, and — 
 hope. We know how many tramps we have in the East ; 
 imagine, then, all of these, instead of wandering lazily and 
 purposelessly from farm-house to farm-house, stopping in- 
 stead to hammer at a bit of rock, or stooping to pick up 
 every loose piece they find. One would think that with a 
 regular army like this searching everywhere in Colorado 
 no one acre of it would by this time have remained un- 
 claimed. But this new town of Creede, once known only 
 as Willow Gap, was discovered but twenty months ago, 
 and it was not until December last that the railway reached 
 it, and, as I have said, there is not a station there yet. 
 
 N. C. Creede was a prospector who had made some 
 money in the Monarch district before he came to Willow 
 Gap ; he began prospecting there on Campbell, now Moses 
 Mount, with G. L. Smith, of Salida. One of the two picked 
 up a piece of rock so full of quartz that they sunk a shaft 
 immediately below the spot where they had found the 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 stone. According to all known laws, they should have 
 sunk the shaft at the spot from which the piece of rock 
 had become detached, or from whence it had presumably 
 rolled. It was as absurd to dig for silver where they did 
 dig as it would be to sink a shaft in Larimer Street, in Den- 
 ver, because one had found a silver quarter lying in the 
 roadway. But they dug the shaft ; and when they looked 
 upon the result of the first day's work, Smith cried, " Great 
 God !" and Creede said, " Holy Moses !" and the Holy 
 Moses Mine was named. While I was in Creede that gen- 
 tleman was offered one million two hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand dollars for his share of this mine, and declined it. 
 After that my interest in him fell away. Any man who 
 will live in a log house at the foot of a mountain, and drink 
 melted snow any longer than he has to do so, or refuse that 
 much money for anything, when he could live in the Knick- 
 erbocker Flats, and drive forth in a private hansom with 
 rubber tires, is no longer an object of public interest. 
 
 But his past history is the history of the town. Creede 
 and his partner knew iney had a mine, but had no money 
 to work it. So they applied to David S. Moffatt, the presi- 
 dent of the Rio Grande Eailroad, which has a track to 
 Wagon Wheel Gap only ten miles away, and Moffatt and 
 others formed the Holy Moses Mining Company, and se- 
 cured a bond on the property at seventy thousand dollars. 
 As soon as this was known, the invasion of Willow Gap be- 
 gan. It was the story of Columbus and the egg. Pros- 
 pectors, and provisions with which to feed them, came in 
 on foot and on stages, and Creede began to grow. But 
 no more mines were found at once, and the railroad into 
 the town was slow in coming, and many departed, leaving 
 
 their posts and piles of rock to mark their claims. But 
 
 as 
 
THE ■HOLY MOSKS Mi.Nii 
 
At a New Mining Camp 
 
 last June Creede received a second boom, and in a manner 
 whicli heaps ridicule and scorn upon the scientific knowl- 
 edge of engineers and mining experts, and which shows 
 that luck, chance, and the absurd vagaries of fate are fac- 
 tors of success upon which a prospector should depend. 
 
 Ralph Granger and Eri Buddenbock ran a butcher shop 
 at Wagon Wheel Gap. " The " Eenninger, of Patiro, a 
 prospector with no tools or provisions, asked them to grub- 
 stake him, as it is called when a man of capital furnishes a 
 man of adventure with bacon, flour, a pick, and three or 
 four donkeys, and starts him ofE prospecting, with the un- 
 derstanding that he is to have one-tenth of what he finds. 
 Eenninger asked Jule Haas to join him, and they de- 
 parted together. One day the three burros disappeared, 
 and wandered off many miles, with Eenninger in hot and 
 profane pursuit until they reached Bachelor Mountain, 
 where he overtook them. But they liked Bachelor Mount- 
 ain, and Eenninger, failing to dislodge them with either 
 rocks or kicks, seated himself to await their pleasure, and 
 began to chip casually at the nearest rock. He struck a 
 vein showing mineral in such rich quantities that he asked 
 Creede to come up and look at it. Creede looked at it, and 
 begged Eenninger to define his claim at once. Eenninger, 
 offering up thanks to the three donkeys, did so, and named 
 it the " Last Chance." Then Creede located next to this 
 property, shoulder to shoulder, and named his claim the 
 " Amethyst." These names are merely names to you ; 
 they mean nothing ; in Colorado you speak them in a whis- 
 per, and they sound like the Standard Oil Company or the 
 Koh-i-noor diamond. Haas was bought off for ten thou- 
 sand dollars. He went to Germany to patronize the peo- 
 ple in the little German village from which he came with 
 
 71 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 his great wealth ; four months later Renninger, and Bud- 
 denbock, who had staked him, sold their thirds for seventy 
 thousand dollars each ; a few days later Granger was of- 
 fered one hundred thousand dollars for his third, and said 
 he thought he would hold on to it. When I was there, the 
 Chance was putting out one hundred and eighty thousand 
 dollars per month. This shows that Granger was wiser in 
 his generation than Haas. 
 
 At the time I visited Creede it was quite impossible to 
 secure a bed in any of the hotels or lodging-houses. The 
 Pullman cars were the only available sleeping-places, and 
 rented out their berths for the night they laid over at the 
 mining camp. But even in these, sleeping was precarious, 
 as one gentleman found the night after my arrival. He 
 was mistaken for another man who had picked up a bag of 
 gold-dust from a faro table at Little Delmonjco's, and who 
 had fled into the night. After shooting away the pine- 
 board fagade in the Mint gambling-house in which he was 
 supposed to have sought shelter, several citizens followed 
 him on to the sleeping-car, and, of course, pulled the wrong 
 man out of his berth, and stood him up in the aisle in front 
 of four revolvers, while the porter and the other wrong 
 men shivered under their blankets, and begged them from 
 behind the closed curtains to take him outside before they 
 began shooting. The camp was divided in its opinion on 
 the following morning as to whether the joke was on the 
 passenger or on the hasty citizens. 
 
 A colony of younger sons from the East took pity upon 
 me, and gave me a bunk in their Grub Stake cabin, where 
 I had the satisfaction of watching the son of a president of 
 the Somerset Club light the fire with kerosene while the 
 rest of us remained under the blankets and asked him to 
 
 72 
 
At a JVeiv Mining Camp 
 
 
 
 
 
 DEBATABLE GROUND A WARNING TO TRESPASSERS 
 
 be careful. They were a most hospitable, cheerful lot. 
 \\ hen it was so cold that the ice was frozen in the tin 
 basin, tljey would elect to remain in bed all day, and would 
 mark up the piices they intended to ask for their lots and 
 claims one hundred dollars each ; and then, considerino- 
 this a fair day's wag-es fiu- a hard day's work, would go 
 warmly to sleep again. It is interesting, chiefly to mothers 
 and sisters — for the fathers and brothers have an unsympa- 
 thetic way of saying, "It is the best thing for him" — to 
 discover how quickly such carefully bred youths as one con- 
 stantly meets in the mining camps and ranches of the West 
 can give up the comforts and habits of years and tit into 
 their surroundings. It is instructive and hopeful to watch 
 
 73 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 a young man who can and has ordered numerous dinners 
 at Bignon's, composing a dessert of bread and molasses, 
 or to see how neatly a Yale graduate of one year's standing 
 can sweep the mud from the cabin floor without spreading 
 it. If people at home could watch these young exiles 
 gorge themselves with their letters, a page at a time, and 
 then go over them again word by word, they would write 
 early and often ; and if the numerous young women of 
 New York and Boston could know that their photographs 
 were the only bright spots in a log-cabin filled with cart- 
 ridge-belts, picks, saddles, foot-ball sweaters, patent-medi- 
 cine bottles, and three-months-old magazines, they would 
 be moved with great content. 
 
 One cannot always discern the true character of one's 
 neighbors in the West. " Dress," as Bob Acres says, 
 " does make a difference." There were four very rough- 
 looking men of different ages sitting at a table near me in 
 one of the restaurants or " eating-houses " of Creede. They 
 had marked out a map on the soiled table-cloth with the 
 point of an iron fork, and one of them was laying down 
 the law concerning it. There seemed to be a dispute con- 
 cerning the lines of the claim or the direction in which the 
 vein ran. It was no business of mine, and there was so 
 much of that talk that I should not have been attracted to 
 them, except that I expected from their manner they might 
 at any moment come to blows or begin shooting. I fin- 
 ished before they did, and as I passed the table over which 
 they leaned scowling excitedly, the older man cried, with 
 his finger on the map : 
 
 " Then Thompson passed the ball back to me — no, not 
 your Thompson; Thompson of '79 I mean — and I carried 
 it down the field all the way to the twenty-five-yard line. 
 
 T4 
 
At a Niw Mining Camp 
 
 Canfield, who was playing full, tackled me ; but I shook 
 him off, and — " 
 
 I should have liked to wait and hear whether or not he 
 made his touch-down. 
 
 The shaft of the Last Chance Mine is at the top of the 
 Bachelor Mountain, and one has to climb and slip for an 
 hour and a half to reach it. A very nice Yale boy guided 
 me there, and seemed as willing as myself to sit down in 
 the snow every ten minutes and look at the scenery. But 
 we saw much more of the scenery than of the mine, be- 
 cause there was more of it to see, and there was no general 
 manager to prevent us from looking as long as we liked. The 
 trail led over fallen logs and up slippery rocks caked with 
 ice and through drifts of snow higher than one's head, and 
 the pines accompanied us all the way with branches bent 
 to the mountain-side with the weight of the snow, and a 
 cold, cheery mountain stream appeared and disappeared 
 from under long bridges of ice and mocked at us for our 
 slow progress. But we gave it a very close race coming 
 down. Sometimes we walked in the cold, dark shadows 
 of the pines, where hardly a ray of sunlight came, and 
 again the trail would cross a landslide, and the wind 
 brought strong odors of the pine and keen, icy blasts from 
 the snow-capped ranges which stretched before us for fifty 
 miles, and we could see Creede lying at our feet like a box 
 of spilled jackstraws. Every now and then we met long 
 lines of burros carrying five bags of ore each, with but 
 twenty dollars' worth of silver scattered through each load, 
 and we could hear the voice of the driver from far up 
 above and the tinkle of the bell as they descended upon 
 us. Sometimes they made way for us or halted timidly 
 with curious, patient eyes, and sometimes they shouldered 
 
 77 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 us promptly backward into three feet of snow. It was a 
 lonely, impressive journey, and the wonderful beauty and 
 silence of the mountain made words impertinent. And, 
 again, we would come upon a solitary prospector tapping 
 at the great rock in front of him, and only stopping to dip 
 his hot face and blistered hands into the snow about him, 
 before he began to drive the steel bar again with the help 
 which hope gave him. His work but for this ingredient 
 would seem futile, foolish, and impossible. Why, he would 
 ask himself, should I work against this stone safe day after 
 day only to bore a hole in its side as minute as a nail's 
 point in the front of a house, and a thousand rods, prob- 
 ably, from where the hole should be? And then hope 
 tells him that perhaps the very next stroke will make him 
 a millionaire like Creede, and so he makes the next stroke, 
 and the next, and the next. 
 
 If ever I own a silver mine, I am going to have it situ- 
 ated at the base of a mountain, and not at the top. I would 
 not care to take that journey we made to the Chance every 
 day. I would rather sit in the office below and read re- 
 ports. After one gets there, the best has been seen ; for 
 the general manager of the Last Chance Mine, to whom I 
 had a letter of introduction, and indeed all the employes, 
 guarded their treasure with the most praiseworthy and 
 faithful vigilance. It was evident that they were quietly 
 determined among themselves to resist any attempt on the 
 part of the Yale man and myself to carry away the shaft 
 with us. We could have done so only over their dead 
 bodies. The general manager confounded me with the 
 editor of the Saturday Night, which he said he reads, and 
 which certainly ought to account for several things. I ex- 
 pected to be led into a tunnel, and to be shown delicate 
 
At a New Mining Camp 
 
 veins of white silver running aronnd the sides, which one 
 could cut out with a penknife and make into scarf-pins 
 and watch guards. If not, from whence, then, do the nug- 
 gets come that the young and disappointed lover sends as 
 a wedding present to the woman who should have married 
 him, when she marries some other man who has sensibly 
 remained in the East — a present, indeed, which has always 
 struck me as extremely economical, and much cheaper than 
 standing-lamps. But I saw no silver nuggets. One of the 
 workmen showed us a hole in the side of the mountain 
 which he assured us was the Last Chance Mine, and that 
 out of this hole one hundred and eighty thousand dollars 
 came every month. He then handed us a piece of red 
 stone and a piece of black stone, and said that when these 
 two stones were found together silver was not far o£E. To 
 one thirsting for a sight of the precious metal this was 
 about as satisfying as being told that after the invitations 
 had been sent out and the awning stretched over the side- 
 walk there was a chance of a dance in the neighborhood. 
 I was also told that the veins lie between walls of porphyry 
 and trachyte, but that there is not a distinctly marked dif- 
 ference, as the walls resemble each other closely. This 
 may or may not be true ; it is certainly not interesting, and 
 I regret that I cannot satisfy the mining expert as to the 
 formation of the mine, or tell him whether or not the 
 vein is a heavy galena running so much per cent, of 
 lead, or a dry silicious ore, or whether the ore bodies 
 were north and south, and are or are not true fissures, 
 and at what angle the contact or body veins cut these 
 same fissures. All of this I should have ascertained had 
 the general manager been more genial ; but we cannot ex- 
 pect one man to combine the riches of Montezuma and 
 
 81 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 the graces of Chesterfield. One is sure to destroy the 
 other. 
 
 The social life of Creede is much more interesting than 
 outputs and ore values. There were several social func- 
 tions while I was there which tend to show the happy 
 spirit of the place. There was a prize-fight at Billy 
 Woods', a pie-eating match at Kernan's, a Mexican circus 
 in the bottom near Wagon Wheel Gap, a religious service 
 at Watrous and Bannigan's gambling-house, and the first 
 wedding in the history of the town. I was sorry to miss 
 this last,, especially as three prominent citizens, misunder. 
 standing the purpose of my visit to Creede, took the trouble 
 to scour the mountain-side for me in order that I might 
 photograph the wedding party in a group, which I should 
 have been delighted to do. The bride was the sister of 
 Billy Woods's barkeeper, and " Stony " Sargeant, a faro- 
 dealer at " Soapy " Smith's, was the groom. The Justice 
 of the Peace, whose name I forget, performed the cere- 
 mony, and Edward De Vinne, the Tramp Poet, offered a 
 few appropriate and well - chosen remarks, after which 
 Woods and Smith, who run rival gambling-houses, outdid 
 each other in the extravagant practice of " opening wine." 
 All of these are prominent citizens, and the event was 
 memorable. 
 
 I met several of these prominent citizens while in 
 Creede, and found them afEable. Billy Woods fights, or 
 used to fight, at two hundred and ten pounds, and rejoices 
 in the fact that a New York paper once devoted five col- 
 umns to his personality. His reputation saves him the ex- 
 pense of paying men to keep order. Bob Ford, who shot 
 Jesse James, was another prominent citizen of my acquaint- 
 ance. He does not look like a desperado, but has a loutish 
 
VALUABLE HEAL ESTATE 
 
At a New Mining Camp 
 
 apologetic air, wliicli is explained by the fact that he shot 
 Jesse James ia the back, when the latter was engaged in 
 the innocent work of hanging a picture on the wall. Ford 
 never quite recovered from the fright he received when 
 he found out who it was that he had killed. " Bat " Mas- 
 terden was of an entirely difEerent class. He dealt for 
 Watrous, and has killed twenty-eight men, once three to- 
 gether. One night when he was off duty I saw a drunken 
 man slap his face, and the silence was so great that we 
 could hear the electric light sputter in the next room ; but 
 Masterden only laughed, and told the man to come back 
 and do it again when he was sober. " Troublesome Tom " 
 Cady acted as a capper for "Soapy" Smith, and played the 
 shell game during the day. He was very grateful to me 
 for teaching him a much superior method in which the 
 game is played in the eSete East. His master, " Soapy " 
 Smith, was a very bad man indeed, and hired at least 
 twelve men to lead the prospector with a little money, or 
 the tenderfoot who had just arrived, up to the numerous 
 tables in his gambling-saloon, where they were robbed in 
 various ways so openly that they deserved to lose all that 
 was taken from them. 
 
 There were also some very good shots at Creede, and 
 some very bad ones. Of these latter was Mr. James Pow- 
 ers, who emptied his revolver and Eab Brothers' store at 
 the same time without doing any damage. He explained 
 that he was crowded and wanted more room. The most 
 delicate shooting was done by the Louisiana Kid — I don't 
 know what his other name was — who was robbed in 
 Soapy Smith's saloon, and was put out when he expost- 
 ulated. He waited patiently until one of Smith's men 
 named Farnham, appeared, and then, being more intent 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 in showing his skill than on killing Farnham, shot the 
 thumb ofi his right hand as it rested on the trigger. Farn- 
 ham shifted his pistol to his left hand, with which he shot 
 equally well, but before he could fire the Kid shot the 
 thumb off that hand too. 
 
 This is, of course, Creede at night. It is not at all a dan- 
 gerous place, and the lawlessness is scattered and mild. 
 There was only one street, and as no one cared to sit on 
 the edge of a bunk in a cold room at night, the gambling- 
 houses were crowded in consequence every evening. It 
 was simply because there was nowhere else to go. The 
 majority of the citizens used them as clubs, and walked 
 from one to the other talking claims and corner lots, and 
 dived down into their pockets for specimens of ore which 
 they passed around for examination. Others went there to 
 keep warm, and still others to sleep in the corner until 
 they were put out. The play was never high. There was 
 so much of it, though, that it looked very bad and wicked 
 and rough, but it was quite harmless. There were no sud- 
 den oaths, nor parting of the crowd, and pistol - shots or 
 gleaming knives — or, at least, but seldom. The women 
 who frequented these places at night, in spite of their som- 
 breros and flannel shirts and belts, were a most unpictu- 
 resque and unattractive element. They were neither dash- 
 ing and bold, nor remorseful and repentant. 
 
 They gambled foolishly, and laughed when they won, 
 and told the dealer he cheated when they lost. The men 
 occasionally gave glimpses of the life which Bret Harte 
 made dramatic and picturesque — the women, never. The 
 most uncharacteristic thing of the place, and one which 
 was -Bret Hartish in every detail, was the service held in 
 Watrous and Bannigan's gambling-saloon. The hall is a 
 
 86 
 
At a New Mining Camp 
 
 very long one with a saloon facing the street, and teno 
 tables, and a dozen other games in the gambling-room be- 
 yond. When the doors between the two rooms are held 
 back they make a very large hall. A clergyman asked Wat- 
 rous if he could have the use of the gambling-hall on Sunday 
 night. The house was making about three hundred dollars 
 an hour, and Watrous calculated that half an hour would 
 be as much as he could afford towards the coHectioH. He 
 mounted a chair and said, " Boys, this gentleman wants 
 to make a few remarks to you of a religious nature. All 
 the games at that end of the hall will stop, and you want 
 to keep still." 
 
 The clergyman stood on the platform of the keno outfit, 
 and the greater part of the men took the seats around it, 
 toying with the marking cards scattered over the table 
 in front of them, while the men in the saloon crowded the 
 doorway from the swinging-doors to the bar, and looked on 
 with curious and amused faces. At the back of the room 
 the roulette wheel clicked and the ball rolled. The men 
 in this part of the room who were playing lowered their 
 voices, but above the voice of the preacher one could 
 hear the clinking of the silver and the chips, and the voice 
 of the boy at the wheel calling, " seventeen and black, and 
 twenty-eight and black again and — keep the ball rolling, 
 gentlemen — and four and red." There are two electric 
 lights in the middle of the hall and a stove ; the men were 
 crowded closely around this stove, and the lamps shone 
 through the smoke on their tanned upturned faces and on 
 the white excited face of the preacher above them. There 
 was the most excellent order, and the collection was very 
 large. I asked Watrous how much he lost by the interrup- 
 tion. 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 " Nothing," lie said, quickly, anxious to avoid the ap- 
 pearance of good ; " I got it all back at the bar." 
 
 Of the inner life of Creede I saw nothing ; I mean the 
 real business of the place — the speculation in real estate 
 and in mines. Capitalists came every day, and were car- 
 ried ofE up the mountains to look at a hole in the ground, 
 and down again to see the assay tests of the ore taken 
 from it. Prospectors scoured the sides of the mountains 
 from sundawn to sunset, and at night their fires lit up the 
 range, and their little heaps of stone and their single stick, 
 with their name scrawled on it in pencil, made the mount- 
 ains look like great burying -grounds. All of the land 
 within two miles of Creede was claimed by these simple 
 proofs of ownership — simple, yet as effectual as a parch, 
 ment sealed ana signed. When the snow has left the 
 mountains, and these claims can be worked, it will be time 
 enough to write the real history or tne rise or fall cf 
 Creede. 
 
IV 
 
 A THREE-YEAR-OLD CITY 
 
A Three- Year. Old City 
 
 IV 
 
 A THEEE-TEAE-OLD CITY 
 
 DHE only interest ■which the East can tate in 
 Oklahoma City for some time to come must 
 be the same as that with which one regards a 
 portrait finished by a lightning crayon artist, 
 " with frame complete," in ten minutes. We may have 
 seen better portraits and more perfect coloring, but we 
 have never watched one completed, as it were, " while 
 you wait." People long ago crowded to see Master Bet- 
 ty act, not because there were no better actors in those 
 days, but because he was so very young to do it so very 
 well. It was as a freak of nature, a Josef HoflEman of the 
 drama, that they considered him, and Oklahoma City must 
 content itself with being only of interest as yet as a freak 
 of our civilization. 
 
 After it has decided which of the half-dozen claimants to 
 each of its town sites is the only one, and the others have 
 stopped appealing to higher and higher courts, and have 
 left the law alone and have reduced their attention strictly 
 to business, and the city has been burned down once or 
 twice, and had its Treasurer default and its Mayor im- 
 peached, and has been admitted to the National Baseball 
 League, it may hope to be regarded as a full-grown rival 
 city ; but at present, as far as it concerns the far East, it 
 
 93 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 OKLAHOMA CITY ON THE DAT OF THE OPENING 
 
 is interesting chiefly as a city that grew up overnight, and 
 did in three years or less what other towns have accom- 
 plished only after half a century. 
 
 The history of its pioneers and their invasion of their 
 undiscovered country not only shows how far the "West is 
 from the East, but how much we have changed our ways of 
 doing things from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers to those 
 of the modern pilgrims, the " boomers " and " sooners " of 
 the end of the century. We have seen pictures in our 
 school-books, and pictures which Mr. Bough ton has made 
 for us, of the Mayflower's people kneeling on the shore, the 
 long, anxious voyage behind them, and the " rock-bound 
 coast" of their new home before them, with the Indians 
 looking on doubtfully from behind the pine-trees. It makes 
 a very interesting picture — those stern-faced pilgrims in 
 their knickerbockers and broad white collars ; each man 
 strong in the consciousness that he has resisted persecution 
 
A Three-Year-Old City 
 
 and overcome the perils of the sea, and is ready to meet 
 the perils of an unknown land. I should like you to place 
 in contrast with this the opening of Oklahoma Territory to 
 the new white settlers three years ago. These modern pil- 
 grims stand in rows twenty deep, separated from the prom- 
 ised land not by an ocean, but by a line scratched in the 
 earth with the point of a soldier's bayonet. The long row 
 toeing this line are bending forward, panting with excite- 
 ment, and looking with greedy eyes towards the new 
 Canaan, the women with their dresses tucked up to their 
 knees, the men stripped of coats and waistcoats for the 
 coming race. And then, a trumpet call, answered by a 
 thousand hungry yells from all along the line, and hundreds 
 of men and women on foot and on horseback break away 
 across the prairie, the stronger pushing down the weak, and 
 those on horseback riding over and in some cases killing 
 those on foot, in a mad, unseemly race for something which 
 they are getting for nothing. These pilgrims do not drop 
 on one knee to give thanks decorously, as did Columbus 
 according to the twenty-dollar bills, but fall on both knees, 
 and hammer stakes into the ground and pull them up again, 
 and drive them down somewhere else, at a place which 
 they hope will eventually become a corner lot facing the 
 post-office, and drag up the next man's stake, and threaten 
 him with a Winchester because he is on their land, which 
 they have owned for the last three minutes. And there 
 are no Indians in this scene. They have been paid one 
 dollar and twenty -five cents an acre for the lanl, which is 
 worth five dollars an acre as it lies, before a spade has 
 been driven into it or a bit of timber cut, and they are 
 safely out of the way. 
 
 Oklahoma Territory, which lies in the most fertile part 
 
 96 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 of the Indian Territory, equally distant from Kansas and 
 Texas, was thrown open to white settlers at noon on the 
 22d of April, 1889. To appreciate the Oklahoma City of 
 this day, it is necessary to go back to the Oklahoma of 
 three years ago. The city at that time consisted of a rail- 
 road station, a section house and water-tank, the home of 
 the railroad agent, and four other small buildings. The rest 
 was prairie-land, with low curving hills covered with high 
 grass and bunches of thick timber ; this as far as the eye 
 could see, and nothing else. This land, which is rich and 
 black and soft, and looks like chocolate where the plough 
 has turned the sod, was thrown open by the proclamation 
 of the President to white settlers, who could on such a day, 
 at such an hour, " enter and occupy it " for homestead 
 holdings. A homestead holding is one hundred and sixty 
 acres of land. The proclamation said nothing about town 
 sites, or of the division of town sites into " lots " for stores, 
 or of streets and cross-streets. But several bodies of men 
 in different parts of Kansas prepared plans long before the 
 opening, for a town to be laid out around the station, the 
 water-tank, and the other buildings where Oklahoma City 
 now stands, and had their surveyors and their blue prints 
 hidden away in readiness for the 22d of April. All of those 
 who intended to enter this open-to-all-comers race for land 
 knew that the prairie around the station would be laid out 
 into lots. Hence that station and other stations which in 
 time would become cities were the goals for which over 
 forty thousand people raced from the borders of the new 
 Territory. So many of these " beat the pistol " on the 
 start and reached the goal first that, in consequence, the 
 efforts ever since to run this race over again through 
 the law courts has kept Oklahoma City from growing 
 
 96 
 
A Three -Tear -Old City 
 
 with even more iriarvellous rapidity than it already has 
 done. 
 
 The Sunday before the 22d was a warm bright day, and 
 promised well for the morrow. Soldiers and deputy mar- 
 shals were the only living beings in sight around the station, 
 and those who tried to descend from passing trains were 
 pushed bact again at the point of the bayonet. The course 
 was being kept clear for the coming race. But freight cars 
 loaded with raw lumber and furniture and all manner of 
 household goods, as well as houses themselves, ready to be 
 put together like the joints of a trout rod, were allowed free 
 entry, and stood for a mile along the side-track awaiting 
 their owners, who were hugging the border lines from fifteen 
 to thirty miles away. Captain D. F. Stiles, of the Tenth 
 Infantry, who had been made provost marshal of the new 
 Territory, and whose soldiers guarded the land before and 
 maintained peace after the invasion, raised his telescope at 
 two minutes to twelve on the eventful 22d of April, and saw 
 nothing from the station to the horizon but an empty green 
 prairie of high waving grass. It would take the first horse 
 (so he and General Merritt and his staff in their private car 
 on the side-track decided) at least one hour and a quarter 
 to cover the fifteen miles from the nearest border. They ac- 
 cordingly expected to catch the first glimpse of the leaders 
 in the race with their glasses in about half an hour. The 
 signal on the border was a trumpet call given by a cavalry- 
 man on a white horse, which he rode in a circle in order 
 that those who were too far away to hear the trumpet 
 might see that it had been sounded. A like signal was 
 given at the station; but before it had died away, and not 
 half an hour later, five hundred men sprang from the long 
 grass, dropped from the branches of trees, crawled from 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 under freight cars and out of canons and ditclies, and the 
 blank prairie became alive with men running and racing 
 about like a pack of beagles that have suddenly lost a hot 
 trail. 
 
 Fifteen minutes after twelve the men of the Seminole 
 Land and Town Company were dragging steel chains up the 
 street on a run, the red and white barber poles and the 
 transits were in place all over the prairie, and neat little 
 rows of stakes stretched out in regular lines to mark where 
 they hoped the town might be. At twenty minutes after 
 twelve over forty tents were in position, and the land around 
 them marked out by wooden pegs. This was the work of 
 the " sooners," as those men were called who came into the 
 Territory too soon, not for their own interests, but for the 
 interests of other people. At a quarter past one the Rev. 
 James Murray and a Mr. Kincaid, who represented the Ok- 
 lahoma Colony, stopped a sweating horse and creaking 
 buggy and hammered in their first stakes. They had left 
 the border line exactly at noon, and had made the fifteen 
 miles at the rate of five minutes per mile. Four minutes later 
 J. H. McCortney and Colonel Harrison, of Kansas, arrived 
 from the Canadian Eiver, having whipped their horses for 
 fifteen miles, and the mud from the river was over the hubs 
 of the wheels. The first train from the south reached the 
 station at five minutes past two, and unloaded twenty- 
 five hundred people. They scattered like a stampeded herd 
 over the prairie, driving in their little stakes, and changing 
 their minds about it and driving them in again at some 
 other point. There were already, even at this early period 
 of the city's history, over three different men on each lot 
 of ground, each sitting by the stake bearing his name, and 
 each calling the other a " sooner," and therefore one ineli- 
 
 100 
 
A Three -Year -Old City 
 
 gible to hold land, and many other names of more ancient 
 usage. 
 
 But there was no blood shed even during the greatest 
 excitement of that feverish afternoon. This was in great 
 part due to the fact that the provost marshal confiscated 
 all the arms he saw. At three o'clock the train from the 
 north arrived with hundreds more hanging from the steps 
 and crowding the aisles. The sight of so many others who 
 had beaten them m the race seemed to drive these late- 
 comers almost frantic, and they fell over one another in 
 their haste, and their race for the choicest lots was like a 
 run on a bank when no one knows exactly where the bank 
 is. One young woman was in such haste to alight that she 
 crawled out of the car window, and as soon as she reached 
 the solid earth beneath, drove in her stake and claimed all 
 the land around it. This was part of the military reserva- 
 tion, and the soldiers explained this to her, or tried to, 
 but she was suspicious of every one, and remained seated 
 by her wooden peg until nightfall. She could just as 
 profitably have driven it into the centre of Union Square. 
 Another woman stuck up a sign bearing the words, " A 
 Soldier's Widow's Land," and was quite confident that the 
 chivalry of the crowd would respect that title. Captain 
 Stiles told her that he thought it would not, and showed 
 her a lot of ground still unclaimed that she could have, but 
 she refused to move. The lot he showed her is now on the 
 main street, in the centre of the town, and the lot she was 
 finally forced to take is three miles out of the city in the 
 prairie. Another woman drove her stake between the rail- 
 road ties, and said it would take a locomotive and a train 
 of cars to move her. One man put his stake m the very 
 centre of the lot sites laid out by the surveyors, and claimed 
 
 103 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 the one hundred and sixty acres around for his homestead 
 holding. They explained to him that he could only have 
 as much land as would make a lot in the town site, and that 
 if he wanted one hundred and sixty acres, must locate it 
 outside of the city limits. He replied that the proclamation 
 said nothing about town sites. 
 
 " But, of course," he went on, " if you people want to 
 build a city around my farm, I have no objections. I don't 
 care for city life myself, and I am going to turn this into a 
 vegetable garden. Maybe, though, if you want it very bad, 
 I might sell it." 
 
 He and the city fought it out for months, and, for all I 
 know, are at it still. At three o'clock, just three hours after 
 the Territory was invaded, the Oklahoma Colony declc^d 
 the polls open, and voting began for Mayor and City Clerk. 
 About four hundred people voted. Other land companies 
 at once held public meetings and protested against this 
 election. Each land company was mapping out and sur- 
 veying the city to suit its own interests, and every man and 
 woman was more or less of a land company to himself or her- 
 self, and the lines and boundaries and streets were inter- 
 secting and crossing like the lines of a dress pattern. 
 Night came on and put a temporary hush to this bedlam, 
 and six thousand people went to sleep in the open air, the 
 greater part of them without shelter. There was but one 
 well in the city, and word was brought to Captain Stiles 
 about noon of the next day that the water from this was 
 being sold by a speculative gentleman at five cents per pint, 
 and that those who had no money were suffering. Captain 
 Stiles found the well guarded by a faro-dealer with a re- 
 volver. He had a tin basin between his knees filled with 
 nickels. He argued that he owned the lot on which the 
 
 104 
 
A Three -Year -Old Cittj 
 
 CAPTAIN D. F. STILES 
 
 water stood, and bad as mucli private right to the well as 
 to a shaft that led down to a silver or an iron mine. Cap- 
 tain Stiles threw him and his basin out at some distance on 
 to the prairie, ami detailed a corporal's guard to see that 
 every one should get as much water as he wanted. 
 
 During the morning there was an attempt made to in- 
 duce the surveyors of the different land companies to com- 
 bine and readjust their different plans, but without success. 
 Finally, at three o'clock, the people came together in des- 
 peration to decide what was to be done, and, after an 
 amusing and exciting mass-meeting, fourteen unhappy and 
 
 105 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 prominent citizens were selected to agree upon an entirely- 
 new site. The choosing of this luckless fourteen was ac- 
 complished by general nomination, each nominee having 
 first to stand upon a box that he might be seen and con- 
 sidered by the crowd. They had to submit to such em- 
 barrassing queries as, "Where are you from, and why did 
 you have to leave ?" " Where did you get that hat ?" 
 ''What IS your excuse for living?" "Do you live with 
 your folks, or does your wife support you ?" " What was 
 your other name before you came here ?" The work of this 
 committee began on the morrow, and as they slowly pro- 
 ceeded along the new boundary lines which they had 
 mapped out, they were followed by all of those of the 
 population, which now amounted to ten thousand souls, 
 who thought it safe to leave their claims. As a rule, they 
 found three men on each lot, and it was their pleasant duty 
 to decide to which of these the lot belonged. They did 
 this on the evidence of those who had lots near by. In 
 many cases, each member of each family had selected a lot 
 for himself, and this complicated matters still farther. The 
 crowd at last became so importunate and noisy that the 
 committee asked for a military guard, which was given 
 them, and the crowd after that was at least kept off the lot 
 they were considering. The committee met with no real 
 opposition until it reached Main Street on Saturday, the 
 fifth day of the city's life, where those who had settled 
 along the lines laid down by the Seminole Land Company 
 pulled up the stakes of the citizens' committee as soon as 
 they were driven down. For a time it looked very much 
 as though the record of peace was about to be broken 
 along with other things, but a committee of five men from 
 each side of the street decided the matter at a meeting held 
 
 106 
 
A Three-Year -Old City 
 
 that afternoon. At this same public meeting articles of 
 confederation were adopted, and a temporary Mayor, Re- 
 corder, Police Judge, and other city officials were appointed, 
 who were to receive one dollar for their services. This 
 meeting closed with cheers and with the singing of the 
 doxology. 
 
 The next day was Sunday, and was more or less observed. 
 Captain Stiles visited the gamblers, who swarmed about 
 the place in great numbers, and asked them to close their 
 tables, which they did, although he had no power to stop 
 them if they had not wished to do so. In the afternoon 
 two separate religious services were held, to which the 
 people were called by a trumpeter from the infantry camp. 
 
 This is, in brief, the history of the first week of this new 
 city. There were, considering the circumstances, but few 
 disturbances, and there was no drunkenness. This is dis- 
 appointing, but true. Both came later. But at the first no 
 one cared to shoot the gentleman on the other end of his 
 lot, lest the man on the next lot might prove to be a rela- 
 tive of his, and begin to shoot too. Later on, when every- 
 body became better acquainted, the shooting was more 
 general. They could not easily get anything to drink, as 
 Captain Stiles seized all the liquor, and when it came in 
 vessels of unmanageable size that could not be stored away, 
 spilled it over the prairie. In two weeks over one thousand 
 buildings were enclosed, and there would have been more 
 if there had been more lumber. 
 
 It would be interesting to follow the course of this sky- 
 rocket among cities up to the present day, and tell how 
 laws were evolved and courts established, and the complex- 
 ities of the situation disentangled ; but that is work for one 
 of the many bright young men who write monographs on 
 
 107 
 
Tlit Wnst from a Car - Wiiidoiv 
 
 economic subjects at the JuliQS Hopkins University. It is 
 just the sort of work in wliicli they delig'lit, and whicli they 
 do well, and they will hud many "oldest inhabitants" of 
 this three-year-old city to talvc equal delight in telling tlicm 
 of these early days, and in explaining the rights and wrongs 
 of their individual lawsuits against their city and their 
 neighbors. 
 
 It is inipossii>le, in considering the founding of <Jklalio- 
 nia, to overi'ate the services of Captain Stiles. Seldom has 
 the case of the right man in the right place been so happily 
 demonstrated. lie was particularly fitted to the work, al- 
 though I doubt if the Governirient knew of it before he was 
 sent there, so apt is it to get the square peg in the round 
 hole, unless the square peg's uncle is a Senator. But Cap- 
 
 POST-OFFICE, APRIL 22, 1S89 
 
A Three -Year -Old City 
 
 tain Stiles, when he was a lieutenant, had ruled at Waco, 
 Texas, during the reconstruction period, and the questions 
 and difficulties that arose after the war in that raw com- 
 munity fitted him to deal with similar ones in the con- 
 struction of Oklahoma. He was and is intensely unpopular 
 with the worst element in Oklahoma, and the better element 
 call him blessed, and have presented him with a three-hun- 
 dred dollar gold cane, which is much too fine for him to 
 carry except in clear weather. This is the way public senti- 
 ment should be adjusted. Personal bravery had, I think, as 
 much to do with his success as the readiness with which 
 he met the difficulties he had to solve at a moment's con- 
 sideration. Several times he walked up to the muzzles of re- 
 volvers with which desperadoes covered him and wrenched 
 them out of their owners' hands. He never interfered 
 between the people and the civil law, and resisted the 
 temptation of misusing his authority in a situation where a 
 weaker man would have lost his head and abused his power. 
 He was constantly appealed to to settle disputes, and his 
 invariable answer was, " I am not here to decide which of 
 you owns that lot, but to keep peace between you until it 
 is decided." In September of 1889 a number of disaffected 
 citizens announced an election which was to overthrow 
 those then in power, and Captain Stiles was instructed by 
 his superior officers to prevent its taking place. This he 
 did with a small force of men in the face of threats from 
 the most dangerous element in the community of dynamite 
 bombs and of a body of men armed with Winchesters who 
 were to shoot him first and his men later. But in spite of 
 this he visited and broke all the voting booths, wrested a 
 Winchester from the hands of the man who pointed it at his 
 heart through one of the windows of the polling-place, and 
 
 109 . 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 finally charged the mob of five hundred men with twenty- 
 five soldiers and his fighting surgeon, young Dr. Ives, and 
 dispersed them uttterly. I heard these stories of him on 
 every side, and I was rejoiced to think how well o£E our 
 army must be in majors, that the people at Washington 
 can allow one who has served through the war and on the 
 border and in this unsettled Territory, and whose hair has 
 grown white in the service, to still wear two bars on his 
 shoulder-strap. 
 
 It is much more pleasant to write of these early days of 
 Oklahoma City than of the Oklahoma City of the present, 
 although one of its citizens would not find it so, for he re- 
 gards his adopted home with a fierce local pride and jeal- 
 ousy almost equal to a Chicagoan's love for Chicago, which 
 is saying a very great deal. But to the transient visitor 
 Oklahoma City of to-day, after he has recovered from the 
 shock its extent and solidity give him, is dispiriting and 
 unprofitable to a degree. This may partly be accounted 
 for by the circumstance that his only means of entering it 
 from the south by train is, or was at the time I visited it, 
 at four o'clock in the morning. No one, after having been 
 iragged out of his berth and dropped into a cold misty 
 well of darkness, punctured only by the light from the 
 brakeman's lantern and a smoking omnibus lamp, is in a 
 mood to grow enthusiastic over the city about him. And 
 the fact that the hotel is crowded, and that he must sleep 
 with the barkeeper, does not tend to raise his spirits. I 
 can heartily recommend this method of discouraging im- 
 migration to the authorities of any already overcrowded 
 city. 
 
 But as the sun comes up, one sees the remarkable growth 
 gf this city — remarkable not only for its extent in so short 
 
 no 
 
POST-OFFICE, JOLV 4, 1890 
 
 a period, but for tlie come-to-Ktay air about man)- of its 
 buildings. There are stone banks and stores, and an opera- 
 house, and rows of brick building's with dwelling-rooms 
 above, and in the part of the city where the people go 
 to sleep hundreds of wooden houses, fashioned after the 
 architecture of the sea-shore cottages of the Jersey coast ; 
 for the climate is mild the best part of the year. There are 
 also churches of stone and brick and stained glass, and a 
 tlour-mill, and three or four newspapers, and courts of law, 
 
 and boards of trade. But with all of these things, which 
 
 111 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 show a steadily improving growth after the mushroom nature 
 of its birth, Oklahoma City cannot or has not yet shaken off 
 the attributes with which it was born, and which in a com- 
 munity founded by law and purchase would not exist. For 
 speculation in land, whether in lots on the main street or 
 in homestead holdings on the prairie, and the excitement 
 of real estate transfers, and the battle for rights in the 
 courts, seem to be the prevailing and ruling passion of the 
 place. Gambling in real estate is as much in the air as is 
 the spirit of the Louisiana State Lottery in New Orleans. 
 Every one in Oklahoma City seems to live, in part at least, 
 by transferring real estate to some one else, and the lawyers 
 and real-estate agents live by helping them to do it. It 
 reminded me of that happy island in the Pacific seas where 
 every one took in every one else's washing. This may 
 sound unfair, but it is not in the least exaggerated. The 
 town swarms with lawyers, and is overrun with real-estate 
 oflBces. The men you meet and the men you pass in the 
 street are not discussing the weather or the crops or the 
 news of the outside world, but you hear them say : " I'll 
 appeal it, by God 1" " I'll spend every cent I've got, sir !" 
 " They're a lot of ' sooners,' and I can prove it !" or, " Ted 
 Hillman's lot on Prairie Avenue, that he sold for two hun- 
 dred dollars, rose to three hundred in one week, and Abner 
 Brown says he won't take six hundred for it now." 
 
 This is only the natural and fitting outcome of the bun- 
 gling, incomplete bill which, rushed through at the hot, 
 hurried end of a session, authorized the opening of this 
 territory. The President might with equal judgment have 
 proclaimed that " The silver vaults of the United States 
 Treasury will be opened on the 22d of April, when citizens 
 can enter in and take ^way one hundred and sixty silver 
 
 m 
 
A Three -Tear -Old City 
 
 dollars each," without providing laws to prevent or punish 
 those who entered before that date, or those who snatched 
 more than their share. One would think that some dis- 
 tinction might have been made, in opening this new land, 
 between those who came with family and money and stock, 
 meaning to settle permanently, and those who took the 
 morning train from Kansas in order to rush in and snatch a 
 holding, only to sell it again in three hours and to return 
 to their homes that night ; between those who brought 
 capital, and desperadoes and " boot-leggers " who came to 
 make capital out of others. If the land was worth giving 
 away, it was worth giving to those who would make the 
 best use of it, and worth surrounding with at least as much 
 order as that which distinguishes the iight of the Harvard 
 Seniors for the flowers on Class day. They are going to 
 open still more territory this spring, and in all probability 
 the same confusion will arise and continue, and it is also 
 probable that many persons in the East may be attracted 
 by the announcements and advertisements of the " boom- 
 ers " to this new land. 
 
 The West is always full of hope to the old man as well 
 as to the young one, and the temptation to " own your own 
 home " and to gain land for the asking is very great. But 
 the Eastern man should consider the question very care- 
 fully. There is facing the passenger who arrives on the 
 New York train at Sedalia a large black and white sign on 
 which some philanthropist has painted " Go East, Young 
 Man, Go East." One might write pages and not tell more 
 than that sign does, when one considers where it is placed 
 and for what purpose it is placed there. 
 
 A man in Oklahoma City when the day's work is done 
 has before him a prospect of broad red clayey streets, 
 
 n 113 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 muddy after rain, bristling with dust after a drought, with 
 the sun setting at one end of them into the prairie. He can 
 go to his cottage, or to " The Turf," where he can lose some 
 money at faro, or he can sit in one of the hotels, which are 
 the clubs of the city, and talk cattle to strangers and real 
 estate to citizens, or he can join a lodge and talk real estate 
 there. Once or twice a week a "show " makes a one-night 
 stand at the opera-house. The schools are not good for his 
 children as yet, and the society that he is willing his wife 
 should enjoy is limited. On Sunday he goes to church, 
 and eats a large dinner in the middle of the day, and walks 
 up to the top of the hill to look over the prairie where he 
 and many others would like to build, but which must re- 
 main empty until the twelve different disputants for each 
 holding have stopped appealing to higher .--ourts. This is 
 actually the case, and the reason the city has not spread as 
 others around it have done. As the Eomans shortened 
 their swords to extend their boundaries, so the people of 
 Oklahoma City might cut down some of their higher courts 
 and increase theirs. 
 
 I have given this sketch of Oklahoma City as it impressed 
 itself on me, because I think any man who can afEord a 
 hall bedroom and a gas-stove in New York City is better 
 off than he would be as the owner of one hundred and sixty 
 acres on the prairie, or in one of these small so-called cities. 
 
 And the men who are at the head of affairs, who rose out 
 of the six thousand in a week, and who have kept at the 
 head ever since, if they had exerted the same energy, and 
 showed the same executive ability and the same cleverness 
 in a real city, would be real mayors, real merchants, and 
 real " prominent citizens." They are now as men playing 
 with children's toys or building houses of cards. Every 
 
 114 
 
rr^^^mpS}/, 
 
A Three-Tear-Old City 
 
 now and then a Roger Q. Mills or a Henry W. Grady comes 
 out of the South and West, and among these politicians 
 and first citizens of Oklahoma City are men who only need 
 a broader canvas and a greater opportunity to show what 
 they can do. There are as many of these as there are un- 
 couth " Sockless " Simpsons, or noisy Ingallses, and it is 
 pathetic and exasperating to see men who would excel in 
 a great metropolis, and who could live where they could 
 educate their children and themselves, and be in touch 
 with the world moving about them, even though they were 
 not of it, wasting their energies in a desert of wooden 
 houses in the middle of an ocean of prairie, where their 
 point of view is bounded by the railroad tank and a barb- 
 wire fence. It depends altogether on the man. There are 
 men who are just big enough to be leading citizens of a 
 town of six thousand inhabitants, who are meant for noth- 
 ing else, and it is just as well they should be satisfied with 
 the unsettled existence around them ; but it would be better 
 for these others to be small men in a big city than big men 
 on a prairie, where the organ in the front room is their art 
 gallery, book-store, theatre, church, and school, and where 
 the rustling grass of the prairie greets them in the morn- 
 ing and goes to bed with them at night. 
 
Y 
 KANCH LIFE IN TEXAS 
 
Ranch Life in Texas 
 
 RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS 
 
 ^^^&®HE inhabited part of a ranch, the part of it on 
 which the people who own it live, bears about 
 the same proportion to the rest of the ranch 
 ^© as a light-house does to the ocean around it. 
 
 And to an Eastern man it appears almost as lonely. 
 Some light- houses are isolated in the ocean, some stand 
 in bays, and some in harbors ; and in the same propor- 
 tion the ranches in Texas differ in size, from principali- 
 ties to farms no larger than those around Jersey City. The 
 simile is not altogether exact, as there are small bodies of 
 men constantly leaving the " ranch-house " and wandering 
 about over the range, sleeping wherever night catches them, 
 and in this way different parts of the ranch are inhabited 
 as well as the house itself. It is as if the light -house- 
 keeper sent out a great number of row-boats to look after 
 the floating buoys or to catch fish, and the men in those 
 boats anchored whenever it grew dark, and returned to the 
 light -house variously as best suited their convenience or 
 their previous orders. 
 
 But it is the loneliness of the life that will most certainly 
 first impress the visitor from closely built blocks of houses. 
 Those who live on the ranches will tell you that they do 
 not find it lonely, and that they grow so fond of the great 
 
 121 
 
The West from a Car -Window 
 
 breezy pastures about them that they become independent 
 of the rest of mankind, and that a trip to the city once a 
 year to go to the play and to " shop " is all they ask from 
 the big world lying outside of the barb-wire fences. I am 
 speaking now of those ranch-owners only who live on the 
 range, and not of those who hire a foreman, and spend 
 their time and money in the San Antonio Club. They are 
 no more ranchmen than the absentee landlord who lives in 
 his London house is a gentleman farmer. 
 
 The largest ranch in the United States, and probably in 
 the world, owned by one person, is in Texas, and belongs 
 to Mrs. Eichard King, the widow of Captain Eichard King. 
 It lies forty-five miles south of Corpus Christi. 
 
 The ladies who come to call on Mrs. King drive from 
 her front gate, over as good a road as any in Central Park, 
 for ten miles before they arrive at her front door, and the 
 butcher and baker and iceman, if such existed, would have 
 to drive thirty miles from the back gate before they reached 
 her kitchen. This ranch is bounded by the Corpus Christi 
 Bay for forty miles, and by barb-wire for three hundred 
 miles more. It covers seven hundred thousand acres in 
 extent, and one hundred thousand head of cattle and three 
 thousand broodmares wander over its different pastures. 
 
 This property is under the ruling of Eobert J. Kleberg, 
 Mrs. King's son-in-law, and he has under him a superinten- 
 dent, or, as the Mexicans call one who holds that office, a 
 major-domo, which is an unusual position.for a major-domo, 
 as this major-domo has the charge of three hundred cow- 
 boys and twelve hundred ponies reserved for their use. 
 The " Widow's " ranch, as the Texans call it, is as care- 
 fully organized and moves on as conservative business prin- 
 ciples as a bank. The cowboys do not ride over its range 
 
 122 
 
Ranch Life in Texas 
 
 with both legs at right angles to the saddle and shooting 
 joyfully into the air with both guns at once. Neither do 
 they oflEer the casual visitor a bucking pony to ride, and 
 then roll around on the prairie with glee when he is shot 
 up into the air and comes down on his collar-bone ; they 
 are more likely to bring him as fine a Kentucky thorough- 
 bred as ever wore a blue ribbon around the Madison Square 
 Garden. Neither do they shoot at his feet to see if he 
 can dance. In this way the Eastern man is constantly find- 
 ing his dearest illusions abruptly dispelled. It is also try- 
 ing when the cowboys stand up and take off their sombreros 
 when one is leaving their camp. There are cowboys and 
 cowboys, and I am speaking now of those that I saw on 
 the King ranch. 
 
 The thing that the wise man from the East cannot at 
 first understand is how the one hundred thousand head of 
 cattle wandering at large over the range are ever collected 
 together. He sees a dozen or more steers here, a bunch of 
 horses there, and a single steer or two a mile off, and even 
 as he looks at them they disappear in the brush, and as 
 far as his chance of finding them again would be, they 
 might as well stand forty miles away at the other end of 
 the ranch. But this is a very simple problem to the ranch- 
 man. 
 
 Mr. Kleberg, for instance, receives an order from a firm 
 in Chicago calling for one thousand head of cattle. The 
 breed of cattle which the firm wants is grazing in a corner of 
 the range fenced in by barb-wire, and marked pale blue for 
 convenience on a beautiful map blocked out in colors, like 
 a patch -work quilt, which hangs in Mr. Kleberg's office. 
 When the order is received, he sends a Mexican on a pony to 
 tell the men near that particular pale blue pasture to round 
 
 126 
 
The West from a Car Window 
 
 up one thousand head of cattle, and at the same time directs 
 his superintendent to send in a few days as many cowboys 
 to that pasture as are needed to " hold " one thousand head 
 of cattle on the way to the railroad station. The boys on 
 the pasture, which we will suppose is ten miles square, will 
 take ten of their number and five extra ponies apiece, which 
 one man leads, and from one to another of which they 
 shift their saddles as men do in polo, and go directly to 
 the water-tanks in the ten square miles of land. A cow 
 will not often wander more than two and a half miles from 
 water, and so, with the water -tank (which on the King 
 ranch may be either a well with a wind-mill or a dammed 
 canon full of rain-water) as a rendezvous, the finding of the 
 cattle is comparatively easy, and ten men can round up one 
 thousand head iii a day or two. When they have them all 
 together, the cowboys who are to drive them to the station 
 arrive, and take them off. 
 
 At the station the agent of the Chicago firm and the 
 agent of the King ranch ride through the herd together, 
 and if ghey disagree as to the fitness of any one or more of 
 the cattle, an outsider is called in, and his decision is final. 
 The cattle are then driven on to the cars, and Mr. Kleberg's 
 responsibility is at an end. 
 
 In the spring there is a general rounding up, and thou- 
 sands and thousands of steers are brought in from the dif- 
 ferent pastures, and those for which contracts have been 
 made during the winter are shipped off to the markets, and 
 the calves are branded. 
 
 Texas is the great breeding State from which the cattle 
 are sent north to the better pasture land of Kansas, Mon- 
 tana, and Wyoming Territory, to be fattened up for the 
 markets. The breeding goes on throughout the year, five 
 
A SHATTERED fDOL 
 
Ranch Life in Texas 
 
 bulls being pastured with every three hundred cows, in 
 pastures of from one thousand to ten thousand acres in ex- 
 tent. About ninety per cent, of the cows calve, and the 
 branding of these calves is one of the most important duties 
 of the spring work. They are driven into a pen through a 
 wooden chute, and as they leave the chute are caught by 
 the legs and thrown over on the side, and one of a dozen 
 hot irons burning in an open fire is pressed against the 
 flank, and, on the King ranch, on the nose. 
 
 An animal bearing one of the rough hall-marks of the 
 ranchman is more respected than a dog with a silver collar 
 around his neck, and the number of brands now registered 
 in the State capital runs up to the thousands. On some 
 ranches each of the family has his or her especial brand ; 
 and one young girl who came out in New York last winter 
 is known throughout lower Texas only as " the owner of 
 the Triangle brand," and is much respected in consequence, 
 as it is borne by thousands of wandering cattle. The sep- 
 arating of the cattle at the spring round-up is accomplished 
 on the King ranch by means of a cutting pen, a somewhat 
 ingenious trap at the end of a chute. One end of this 
 chute opens on the prairie, and the other runs into four 
 different pens guarded by a swinging gate, so hung that by 
 a movement of the foot by the man sitting over the gate 
 the chute can be extended into any one of the four pens. 
 With this mules, steers, horses, and ponies can be fed into 
 the chute together, and each arrive in his proper pen until 
 the number for which the different orders call is filled. 
 
 It is rather difficult to imagine one solitary family oc- 
 cupying a territory larger than some of the Eastern States 
 — an area of territory that would in the East support a 
 State capital, with a Governor and Legislature, and numer- 
 
 I 129 
 
The Wisl from a Car - Window 
 
 oiis small towns, with competing railroad systems and rival 
 baseball nines. And all that ma)' bo said of this side of 
 the question of ranch life is that when we are within Mrs. 
 King's house we would imagine it was one of twenty 
 others touching shoulder to shoulder on Madison Avenne, 
 and that the distant cry of the coyotes at night is ail that 
 tells us that tlie hansoms are not rushing up and down be- 
 fore the door. 
 
 .,f^ 
 
 4 
 
 SNAPPING A ROPE ON A HORSE S FOOT 
 
Ranch Life in Texas 
 
 In the aiimmer this ranch is covered with green, and little 
 yellow and pink flowers carpet the range for miles. It is 
 at its best then, and is as varied and beautiful in its 
 changes as the ocean. 
 
 The ranches that stretch along and away from the Eio 
 Grande River are very different from this ; they are owned 
 by Mexicans, and every one on the ranch is a Mexican ; the 
 country is desolate here, and dead and dying cattle are 
 everywhere. 
 
 No ranch - owner, whether he has fifty thousand or five 
 hundred head of cattle, will ever attempt to help one that 
 may be ailing or dying. This seems to one who has been 
 taught the value of " three acres and a cow " the height of 
 extravagance, and to show lack of feeling. But they will 
 all tell you it is useless to try to save a starving or a sick 
 animal, and also that it is not worth the trouble, there are 
 so many more. In one place I saw where a horse had fallen 
 on the trail, and the first man who passed had driven 
 around it, and the next, and the next, until a new trail was 
 made, and at the time I passed over this new trail, I 
 could see the old one showing through the ribs of the horse's 
 skeleton. In the East, I think, they would have at least 
 pulled the horse out of the road. 
 
 But a live horse or steer is just as valuable in Texas as 
 in the East — even more so. 
 
 The conductor on the road from Corpus Christ! sprang 
 from his chair in the baggage car one day, and shouted to 
 the engineer that he must be careful, for we were on Major 
 Fenton's range, and must look out for the major's prize bull ; 
 and the train continued at half speed accordingly until the 
 conductor espied the distinguished animal well to the left, and 
 shouted : "All right. Bill ! We've passed him, let her out." 
 
The West from a Car 'Window 
 
 The Kandado ranch is typical of the largest of the Mex- 
 ican ranches which lie within the five hundred miles along 
 the Rio Grande. It embraces eighty thousand acres, with 
 twenty-five thousand head of cattle, and it has its store, its 
 little mission, its tank, twenty or more adobe houses with 
 thatched roofs, and its little graveyard. There is a post- 
 office here, and a school, where very pretty little Mexicans 
 recited proudly in English words of four letters. Around 
 them lie the cactus and dense chaparral cut up with dusky 
 trails, and^ the mail comes but twice a week. But every 
 Saturday the vaqueros come in from the range, and there 
 is dancing on the bare clay floor of one of the huts, and 
 the school-master postmaster sings to them every evening 
 on his guitar, and once a month the priest comes on horse- 
 back to celebrate mass in the adobe mission. 
 
 Around San Antonio are many ranches. These are more 
 like large farms, and there are high trees and hills and a 
 wonderful variety of flowers. There are also antelope and 
 wild fowl for those who love to hunt, and the scalp of a 
 coyote brings fifty cents to those who care for money ; for 
 the coyotes pull down the young calves. The life on the 
 range is not at all lonely here, for the women on the ranch 
 do not mind riding in twelve miles to a dance in San An- 
 tonio, and there are always people coming out from town 
 to remain a day or two. The more successful of these 
 ranches are like English country-houses in their free hos- 
 pitality and in the constant changing of the guests. 
 
 Many of these about San Antonio are owned, in fact, by 
 Englishm-en, although a record of the failures of the Eng- 
 lish colonists of good family and of well-known youths 
 from New York would make a book, and a very sad one. 
 There was a whole colony of English families and unatr 
 
 182 
 

 '. ni?m^ 
 
Ranch Life in Texas 
 
 tached younger sons at Boerne, just outside of San Antonio, 
 a few years ago ; but they preferred cutting to leg to cut- 
 ting out cattle, and used the ponies to chase polo balls, and 
 their money soon went, and they followed. Some went to 
 England as prodigal sons, some to driving hacks and dealing 
 faro, and others into the army. A few succeeded, and are 
 still at Boerne, notably a cousin of Thomas Hughes, who 
 founded the ill-fated English colony of Rugby, in Tennessee. 
 
 Of the New York men who came on to San Antonio, the 
 two Jacob boys are more frequently and more heartily 
 spoken of by the Texans than almost any other Eastern 
 men who have been there. They did not, as the others so 
 often do, hire a foreman, and spend their days in the San 
 Antonio Club, but rode the ranch themselves, and could 
 cut out and brand and rope with any of those born on a 
 range. Their ranch, the Santa Marta, still flourishes, al- 
 though they have become absentee landlords, and have 
 given up chasing wild steers in Texas in favor of the foxes 
 at Rockaway. 
 
 A ranch which marks the exception in the rule of failures 
 of our English cousins is that of Alfred Giles in Kendal 
 and Kerr counties. It covers about thirteen thousand acres, 
 and a very fine breed of polled Angus cattle are bred on it. 
 Indeed, the tendency all over Texas at present is to cultivate 
 certain well-known breeds, and not, as formerly, to be con- 
 tent with the famous long-horned steer and the Texan pony. 
 Mr. Giles's ranch, the Hillingdon, looks in the summer, 
 when the imported Scotch cattle are grazing over it, like a 
 bit out of the Lake country. Walnut, cherry, ash, and oak 
 grow on this ranch, and the maidenhair-fern is everywhere, 
 and the flowers are boundless in profusion and variety. 
 
 The coming of the barb-wire fence and the railroad killed 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 the cowboy as a picturesque element of recklessness and 
 lawlessness in south-west Texas. It suppressed him and 
 localized him and limited him to his own range, and made 
 his revolver merely an ornament. Before the barb -wire 
 fence appeared, the cattle wandered from one range to an- 
 other, and the man of fifteen thousand acres would over- 
 stock, knowing that when his cattle could not find enough 
 pasturage on his range they would move over to the range 
 of his more prosperous neighbor. Consequently, when the 
 men who could afford it began to fence their ranges, the 
 smaller owners who had over- bred, saw that their cattle 
 would starve, and so cut the fences in order to get back 
 to the pastures which they had used so long. This, and 
 the shutting ofi of water-tanks and of long-used trails 
 brought on the barb-wire fence wars which raged long and 
 fiercely between the cowboys and fence men of rival ranches 
 and the Texas Rangers. The barb-wire fences did more 
 than this ; they shut off the great trails that stretched from 
 Corpus Christi through the Pan Handle of Texas, and on 
 up through New Mexico and Colorado and through the 
 Indian Territory to Dodge City. The coming of the rail- 
 road also made this trailing of cattle to the markets super- 
 fluous, and almost destroyed one of the most remarkable 
 features of the West. This trail was not, of course, an 
 actual trail, and marked as such, but a general driveway 
 forty miles wide and thousands of miles long. The herds 
 of cattle that were driven over it numbered from three 
 hundred to three thousand head, and were moving con- 
 stantly from the early spring to the late fall. 
 
 No caravan route in the far Eastern countries can equal 
 this six months' journey through three different States, and 
 through all changes of weather and climate, and in the 
 
Ranch Life in Texas 
 
 face of constant danger and anxiety. This procession of 
 countless cattle on their slow march to the north was one 
 of the most interesting and distinctive features of the West. 
 An " outfit " for this expedition would consist of as 
 many cowboys as were needed to hold the herd together, a 
 wagon, with the cook and the tents, and extra ponies for 
 the riders. In the morning the camp -wagon pushed on 
 ahead to a suitable resting-place for the night, and when 
 the herd arrived later, moving, on an average, fifteen miles 
 a day, and grazing as it went, the men would find the sup- 
 per ready and the tents pitched. And then those wbo 
 were to watch that night would circle slowly around the 
 great army of cattle, driving them in closer and closer to- 
 gether, and singing as they rode, to put them to sleep. 
 This seems an absurdity to the Eastern mind, but the fa- 
 miliar sounds quieted and satisfied these great stupid ani- 
 mals that can be soothed like a child with a nursery rhyme, 
 and when frightened cannot be stopped by a river. The 
 boys rode slowly and patiently until one and then an- 
 other of the herd would stumble clumsily to the ground, 
 and others near would follow, and at last the whole great 
 herd would be silent and immovable in sleep. But the 
 watchfulness of the sentries could never relax. Some 
 chance noise — the shaking of a saddle, some cry of a wild 
 animal, or the scent of distant water carried by a chance 
 breeze across the prairie, or nothing but sheer blind wan- 
 tonness — would start one of the sleeping mass to his feet 
 with a snort, and in an instant the whole great herd would 
 go tearing madly over the prairie, tossing their horns and 
 bellowing, and filled with a wild, unreasoning terror. And 
 then the skill and daring of the cowboy was put to its 
 severest test, as he saw his master's income disappearing 
 
The West from a Car -Window 
 
 towards a canon or a river, or to lose itself in the brush. 
 And the cowboy who tried to head off and drive back 
 this galloping army of frantic animals had to ride a race 
 that meant his life if his horse made a misstep ; and as the 
 horse's feet often did slip, there would be found in the 
 morning somewhere in the trail of the stampeding cattle a 
 horrid mass of blood and flesh and leather. 
 
 Do you wonder, then, after this half-year of weary, rest- 
 less riding by day, and sleepless anxiety and watching 
 under the stars by night, that when the lights of Dodge 
 City showed across the prairie, the cowboy kicked his feet 
 out of his stirrups, drove the blood out of the pony's sides, 
 and " came in to town " with both guns going at once, and 
 yelling as though the pent-up speech of the past six months 
 of loneliness was striving for proper utterance? 
 
 The cowboy cannot be overestimated as a picturesque 
 figure ; all that has been written about him and all the il- 
 lustrations that have been made of him fail to familiarize 
 him, and to spoil the picture he makes when one sees him 
 for the first time racing across a range outlined against the 
 sky, with his handkerchief flying out behind, his sombrero 
 bent back by the wind, and his gauntlets and broad leather 
 leggings showing above and at the side of his galloping 
 pony. And his deep seat in the saddle, with his legs hang- 
 ing straight to the long stirrups, the movement of his body 
 as it sways and bends, and his utter unconsciousness of 
 the animal beneath him would make a German riding-master, 
 an English jockey, or the best cross-country rider of a Long 
 Island hunting club shake his head in envy and despair. 
 
 He is a fantastic-looking individual, and one suspects he 
 wears the strange garments he affects because he knows 
 they are most becoming. But there is a reason for each 
 
 J40 
 
Ranch Life in Texas 
 
 of the diflferent parts of his apparel, in spite of rather than 
 on account of their picturesqueness. The sombrero shades 
 his face from the rain and sun, the rattlesnake-skin around 
 it keeps it on his head, the broad kerchief that he wears 
 knotted around his throat protects his neck from the heat, 
 and the leather leggings which cover the front of his legs 
 protect them from the cactus in Texas, and in the North, 
 where the fur and hair are left on the leather, from the 
 sleet and rain as he rides against them. The gauntlets 
 certainly seem too military for such rough service, but any 
 one who has had a sheet rope run through his hands, can 
 imagine how a lasso cuts when a wild horse is pulling on 
 the other end of it. His cartridge-belt and his revolver are 
 on some ranches superfluous, but cattle-men say they have 
 found that on those days when they took this toy away 
 from their boys, they sulked and fretted and went about 
 their work half-heartedly, so that they believe it pays better 
 to humor them, and to allow them to relieve the monotony 
 of the day's vigil by popping at jack-rabbits and learning 
 to twirl their revolver around their first finger. Of the 
 many compliments I have heard paid by officers and privates 
 and ranch-owners and cowboys to Mr. Frederic Kemington, 
 the one which was sure to follow the others was that he 
 never made the mistake of putting the revolver on the left 
 side. But as I went North, his anonymous admirers would 
 make this same comment, but with regret that he should 
 be guilty of such an error. I could not understand this at 
 first until I found that the two sides of the shield lay in 
 the Northern cowboy's custom of wearing his pistol on the 
 left, and of the Texan's of carrying it on the right. The 
 Northern man argues on this important matter that the 
 sword has always been worn on the left, that it is easier to 
 
 143 
 
The West from a Oar - Window 
 
 reach across and sweep the pistol to either the left or rigbt, 
 and that with this motioti it is at once in position. The 
 Texan says this is absurd, and quotes the fact that the 
 pistol-pocket has always been on the right, and that the 
 lasso and reins are in the way of the left hand. It is too 
 grave a question of etiquette for any one who has not at 
 least six notches on his pistol-butt to decide. 
 
 Although Mr. Kleberg's cowboys have been shorn of 
 their pistols, their prowess as ropers still remains with 
 them. They gave us an exhibition of this feature of their 
 calling which was as remarkable a performance in its way 
 as I have ever seen. The audience seated itself on the top 
 of a seven -rail fence, and thrilled with excitement. At 
 least a part of it did. I fancy Mr. Kleberg was slightly 
 bored, but he was too polite to show it. Sixty wild horses 
 were sent into a pen eighty yards across, and surrounded 
 by the seven -rail fence. Into this the cowboys came, 
 mounted on their ponies, and at Mr. Kleberg's word lassoed 
 whichever horse he designated. They threw their ropes 
 as a man tosses a quoit, drawing it back at the instant it 
 closed over the horse's head, and not, as the beginner does, 
 allowing the noose to settle loosely, and to tighten through 
 the horse's effort to move forward. This roping was not 
 so impressive as what followed, as the ropes were short, 
 owing to the thick undergrowth, which prevents long 
 throws, such as are made in the North, and as the pony was 
 trained to suit its gait to that of the animal it was pursuing, 
 and to turn and dodge with it, and to stop with both fore- 
 feet planted firmly when the rope had settled around the 
 other horse's neck. 
 
 But when they had shown us how very simple a matter 
 this was, they were told tQ dismount and to rope the horses 
 
 144 
 
Ranch Life in Texas 
 
 by whichever foot Mr. Kleberg choose to select. This was 
 a real combat, and was as intensely interesting a contest 
 between a thoroughly wild and terrified animal and a per- 
 fectly cooJ man as one can see, except, perhaps, at a bull- 
 fight. There is something in a contest of this sort that 
 has appealed to something in all human beings who have 
 blood in their veins from the days when one gladiator fol- 
 lowed another with a casting-net and a trident around the 
 arena down to the present, when " Peter " Poe drops on 
 one knee and tries to throw Hefflefinger over his shoulder. 
 In this the odds were in favor of the horse, as a cowboy 
 on the ground is as much out of his element as a sailor on 
 a horse, and looks as strangely. The boys moved and ran 
 and backed away as quickly as their heavy leggings would 
 permit ; but the horses moved just twice as quickly, turn- 
 ing and jumping and reaxing, and then racing away out of 
 reach again at a gallop. But whenever they came within 
 range of the ropes, they feii. The roping around the neck 
 had seemed simple. The rope then was cast in a loop with 
 a noose at one end as easily as one throws a trout line. 
 Br„ now the rope had to be hurled as quickly and as surely 
 as a man sends a ball to first base when the batsman is 
 running, except that the object at which the cowboy aims 
 is moving at a gallop, and one of a galloping horse's four 
 feet is a most uncertain bull's-eye. 
 
 It is almost impossible to describe the swiftness with 
 which the rope moved. It seemed to skim across the 
 ground as a skipping-rope does when a child holds one end 
 of it and shakes the rope up and down to make it look like 
 a snake coiling and undulating over the pavement. 
 
 One instant the rope would hang coiled from the thrower's 
 right hand as he ran forward to meet the horse, moving it 
 
 147 
 
The Wrtil from ft Car -Window 
 
 slowly, with a twist of liis wrist, to keep it from snarling, 
 and the next it would spin out along the ground, with the 
 noose rolling like a hoop in the front, and would close with 
 a snap over the horse's hoof, and the cowboy would throw 
 himself back to take the shock, and the horse would come 
 down on its side as though the ground had slipped from 
 under it. 
 
 The roping around the nock was the easy tossing of a 
 (juoit ; the roping around the leg was the angry snapping 
 of a whip. 
 
 There arc thousands of other ranches in the United States 
 besides those in Texas, .and other cowbovs, but the general 
 characteristics are the same in all, and it is only general 
 characteristics that one can attempt to give. 
 
VI 
 
 ON AN INDIAN EESERVATION 
 
On an Indian Reservaiiuu 
 
 VI 
 
 ON AN INDIAN EESERVATION 
 
 HE American Indian may be considered either 
 seriously or lightly, according to one's incli- 
 nation and opportunities. He may be taken 
 seriously, like the Irish question, by politi- 
 cians and philanthropists ; or lightly, as a picturesque 
 and historic relic of the past, as one regards the beef-eaters, 
 the Tower, or the fishwives at Scheveningen. There are 
 a great many Indians and a great many reservations, and 
 some are partly civilized and others are not, and the diiler- 
 ent tribes differ in speech and manner of life as widely as 
 in the South the clay-eater of Alabama differs from a gen- 
 tleman of one of the first families of Virginia. Any one 
 who wishes to speak with authority on the American Indian 
 must learn much more concerning him than the names of 
 the tribes and the agencies. 
 
 The Indian will only be considered here lightly and as a 
 picturesque figure of the West. 
 
 Many years ago the people of the East took their idea of 
 the Indian from Cooper's novels and " Hiawatha," and pict- 
 ured him shooting arrows into herds of buffalo, and sitting 
 in his wigwam with many scalp-locks drying on his shield 
 in the sun outside. But they know better than that now. 
 Travellers from the West have told them that this picture 
 
 161 
 
The West from a Car -Window 
 
 \. 
 
 THE CHEYENNE TYPE 
 
 belongs to the past, and tlicy have been taught to look 
 upon the Indian as a " problem," and to consider him as 
 either a national nuisance or as a much-cheated and ill-used 
 brother. They think of him, if they think of him at all, as 
 one who has fallen from his high estate, and who is a dirty 
 individual hanging around agencies in a high hat and a red 
 shirt with a whiskey-bottle under his arm, waiting a chance 
 
 152 
 
On an Indian Reservation 
 
 to beg or steal. The Indian I saw was not at all like this, 
 but was still picturesque, not only in what he wore, but in 
 what he did and said, and was full of a dignity that came 
 up at unexpected moments, and was as suspicious or trust- 
 ful as a child. 
 
 It is impossible when one sees a blanket Indian walk- 
 ing haughtily about in his buckskin, with his face painted 
 in many colors and with feathers in his hair, not to think 
 that he has dressed for the occasion, or goes thus equipped 
 because his forefathers did so, and not because he finds it 
 comfortable. When you have seen a particular national cos- 
 tume only in pictures and photographs, it is always sorae- 
 thiug of a surprise to find people wearing it with every-day 
 matter-of-course ease, as though they really preferred kilts 
 or sabots or moccasins to the gear to which we are accus- 
 tomed at home. And the Indians in their fantastic mixture 
 of colors and beads and red flannel and feathers seemed so 
 theatrical at first that I could not understand why the army 
 officers did not look back over their shoulders when one of 
 these young braves rode by. The first Indians I saw were 
 at Fort Reno, where there is an agency for the Cheyennes 
 and Arapahoes. This reservation is in the Oklahoma Ter- 
 ritory, but the Government has bought it from the Indians 
 for a half-dollar an acre, and it is to be opened to white set- 
 tlers. The country is very beautiful, and the tall grass of 
 the prairie, which hides a pony, and shows only the red 
 blanketed figure on his back, and over which in the clear 
 places the little prairie-dogs scamper, and where the red 
 buttes stand out against the sky, and show an edge as 
 sharp and curving as the prow of a man-of-war, gives one a 
 view of a West one seems to have visited and known inti- 
 mately through the illustrated papers. 
 
 153 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 I had gone to Fort Reno to see the beef issue which 
 takes place there every two weeks, when the steers and the 
 other things which make up the Indian's rations are dis- 
 tributed by the agent. I missed the issue by four hours, 
 and had to push on to AnadarI<:o, where another beef issue 
 was to come oS three days later, which was trying, as I had 
 met few men more interesting and delightful than the of- 
 ficers at the post-trader's mess. But I was fortunate, in the 
 short time in which I was at Fort Reno, in stumbling upon 
 an Indian council. Two lieutenants and a surgeon and I 
 had ridden over to the Indian agency, and although they 
 allow no beer on an Indian reservation, the surgeon had 
 hopes. It had been a long ride — partly through water, 
 partly over a dusty trail — and it was hot. But if the agent 
 had a private store for visitors, he was not in a position to 
 offer it, for his room was crowded with chiefs of renown 
 and high degree. They sat in a circle around his desk 
 on the floor, or stood against the wall smoking solemnly. 
 When they approved of what the speaker said, they grunted; 
 and though that is the only word for it, they somehow 
 made that form of " hear, hear," impressive. Those chiefs 
 who spoke talked in a spitting, guttural fashion, far down 
 the throat, and without gestures ; and the son of one of 
 them, a boy from Carlisle, in a gray ready-made suit and 
 sombrero, translated a five-minutes' speech, which had all 
 the dignity of Salvini's address to the Senators, by : "And 
 Red Wolf he says he thinks it isn't right." Cloud-Shield 
 rose and said the chiefs were glad to see that the officers 
 from the fort were in the room, as that meant that the 
 Indian would have fair treatment, and that the ofiicers were 
 always the Indians' best friends, and were respected in 
 times of peace as friends, and in times of war as enemies. 
 
 154 
 
On an Indian Reservation 
 
 After wticli, the officers, considering guiltily the real object 
 of their visit, and feeling properly abashed, took oS their 
 hats and tried to look as though they deserved it, vfhich, as 
 a rule, they do. It may be of interest, in view of an Indian 
 outbreak, to know that this council of the chiefs was to 
 protest against the cutting down of the rations of the 
 Cheyennes and the Arapahoes. Last year it cost the Gov- 
 ernment one hundred and thirteen thousand dollars to feed 
 them, and this year Commissioner Martin, with a fine spirit 
 of economy, proposes to reduce this by just one-half. This 
 means hunger and illness, and in some cases death. 
 
 " He says," translated the boy interpreter, gazing at the 
 ceiling, " that they would like to speak to the people at 
 Washington about this thing, for it is not good." 
 
 The agent traced figures over his desk with his pen. 
 
 " Well, I can't do anything," he said, at last. " All I can 
 do is to let the people at Washington know what they say. 
 But to send a commission all the way to Washington will 
 take a great deal of money, and the cost of it will have to 
 come out of their allowance. Tell them that. Tell them 
 I'll write on about it. That's all I can do." 
 
 That night the chiefs came solemnly across parade, and 
 said "How !" grimly to the orderly in front of the colonel's 
 headquarters. 
 
 "You see," said the ofiicers, "they have come to com-- 
 plain, but the colonel cannot help them. If Martin wants 
 a war, he is going just the best way in the world to get it, 
 and then we shall have io go out and shoot them, poor 
 devils !" 
 
 I was very sorry to leave Fort Reno, not only on account 
 of the officers there, but because the ride to Anadarko must 
 be made in stages owned by a Mr. Williamson. This is not 
 
 157 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 intended as an advertisement for Mr. Williamson's stages. 
 He does not need it, for he is, so his drivers tell me, very 
 rich indeed, and so economical that he makes them buy 
 their own vt'hips. Every one who has travelled through the 
 Indian Territory over Mr. AVilliamson's routes wishes that 
 sad things may happen to him; but no one, I believe, would 
 be so wicked as to hope he may ever have to ride in one of 
 his own stages. The stage-coach of the Indian Territory 
 lacks the romance of those that Dick Turpin stopped, or of 
 the Deadwood coach, or of those that Yuba Bill drives for 
 Bret Harte with four horses, with gamblers on top and 
 road-agents at the horses' heads. They are only low four- 
 wheeled vragons with canvas sides and top, and each revo- 
 lution of the wheels seems to loosen every stick and nail, 
 and throws you sometimes on top of the driver, and some- 
 times the driver on top of you. They hold together, 
 though, and float bravely through creeks, and spin down 
 the side of a canon on one wheel, and toil up the other 
 side on two, and at such an angle that you see the sun 
 bisected by the wagon-tongue. At night the stage seems 
 to plunge a little more than in the day, and you spend it in 
 trying to sleep with your legs under the back seat and your 
 head on the one in front, while the driver, who wants to 
 sleep and cannot, shouts profanely to his mules and very 
 near to your ear on the other side of the canvas. 
 
 Anadarko is a town of six stores, three or four frame 
 houses, the Indian agent's store and office, and the City 
 Hotel. Seven houses in the West make a city. I said I 
 thought this was the worst hotel in the Indian Territory, 
 but the officers at Fort Sill, who have travelled more than 
 I, think it is the worst in the United States. It is possible 
 that they are right. There are bluffs and bunches of timber 
 
^^- 
 
On an Indian Reservation 
 
 around Anadarko, but the prairie stretches towards the 
 west, and on it is the pen from which the cattle are issued. 
 The tepees and camp-fires sprang up overnight, and when 
 we came out the next morning the prairie was crowded 
 with them, and more Indians were driving in every minute, 
 with the family in the wagon and the dogs under it, as the 
 country people in the East flock into town for the circus. 
 The men galloped oflE to the cattle-pen, and the women 
 gathered in a long line in front of the agent's store to wait 
 their turn for the rations. It was a curious line, with very 
 young girls in it, very proud of the little babies in beaded 
 knapsacks on their backs — dirty, bright-eyed babies that 
 looked like mummies suddenly come to life again at the 
 period of their first childhood — and wrinkled, bent old 
 squaws, even more like mummies, with coarse white hair, 
 and hands worn almost out of shape with work. Each of 
 these had a tag, such as those that the express companies 
 use, on which was printed the number in each family, and 
 the amount of grain, flour, baking-powder, and soap to which 
 the family was entitled. They passed in at one door and in 
 front of a long counter, and out at another. They crowded 
 and pushed a great deal, almost as much as their fairer 
 sisters do in front of the box-ofiice at a Patti matinee, and 
 the babies blinked stoically at the sun, and seemed to wish 
 they could get their arms out of the wrappings and rub 
 away the tears. A man in a sombrero would look at the 
 tag and call out, " One of flour, two of sugar, one soap, and 
 one baking-powder," and his Indian assistants delved into 
 the barrels behind the line of the counter, and emptied the 
 rations into the squaw's open apron. She sorted them when 
 she reached the outside. By ten o'clock the distribution 
 was over, and the women followed the men to the cattle- 
 
 161 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 pen on the prairie. There were not over three hundred 
 Indians there, although they represented 'several thousand 
 others, who remained in the different camps scattered over 
 the reservation, wherever water and timber, and bluffs to 
 shield them best from the wind, were to be found in com- 
 mon. Each steer is calculated to supply twenty-five Indians 
 with beef for two weeks, or from one and a half to two 
 pounds of beef a day ; this is on the supposition that the 
 steers average from one thousand to one thousand and two 
 hundred pounds. The steers that I saw issued weighed 
 about five hundred pounds, and when they tried to run, 
 stumbled with the weakness of starvation. They were noth- 
 ing but hide and ribs and two horns. They were driven 
 four at a time through a long chute, and halted at the gate 
 at the end of it until their owner's names were marked off 
 the list. The Indians were gathered in front of the gate in 
 long rows, or in groups of ten or twelve, sitting easily in 
 their saddles, and riding off leisurely in bunches of four as 
 their names were called out, and as their cattle were started 
 off with a parting kick into the open prairie. 
 
 The Apaches, Comanches, Delawares, and Towacomies 
 drove their share off towards their camps ; the Caddoes 
 and the Kiowas, who live near the agency, and who were 
 served last, killed theirs, if they chose to do so, as soon as 
 they left the pen. A man in charge of the issue held a 
 long paper in his hand, and called out, " Eck-hoos-cho, 
 Pe-an-voon-it, Hoos-cho, and Cho-noo-chy," which meant 
 that Red-Bird, Large -Looking -Glass, The Bird, and Deer- 
 Head were to have the next four steers. His assistant, an 
 Indian policeman, with " God helps them who help them- 
 selves" engraved on his brass buttons, with the figure of 
 an Indian toiling at a plough in the centre, repeated these 
 
 162 
 
On an Indian Reservation 
 
 « 
 
 names aloud, and designated which steer was to go to which 
 Indian. 
 
 A beef issue is not a pretty thing to watch. Why the 
 Government does not serve its meat with the throats cut, 
 as any reputable butcher would do, it is not possible to 
 determine. It seems to prefer, on the contrary, that the 
 Indian should exhibit his disregard for the suffering of 
 animals and his bad marksmanship at the same time. 
 When the representatives of the more distant tribes had 
 ridden off, chasing their beef before them, the Caddoes 
 and Kiowas gathered close around the gate of the pen, 
 with the boys in front. They were handsome, mischievous 
 boys, with leather leggings, colored green and blue and with 
 silver buttons down the side, and beaded buckskin shirts. 
 They sat two on each pony, and each held his bow and 
 arrows, and as the steers came stumbling blindly out into 
 the open, they let the arrows drive from a distance of 
 ten feet into the animal's flank and neck, where they stuck 
 quivering. Then the Indian boys would yell, and their 
 fathers, who had hunted buffaloes with arrows, smiled ap- 
 provingly. The arrows were not big enough to kill, they 
 merely hurt, and the steer would rush off into a clumsy 
 gallop for fifty. yards, when its owner would raise his Win- 
 chester, and make the dust spurt up around, it until one 
 bullet would reach a leg, and the steer would stop for an 
 instant, with a desperate toss of its head, and stagger for- 
 ward again on three. The dogs to the number of twenty 
 or more were around it by this time in a snarling, leaping 
 pack, and the owner would try again, and wound it perhaps 
 in the flank, and it would lurch over heavily like a drunken 
 man, shaking its head from side to side and tossing its 
 horns at the dogs, who bit at the place where the blood 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 ran, and snapped at its legs. Sometimes it would lie there 
 for an hour, until it bled to death, or, again, it would 
 scramble to its feet, and the dogs would start ofE in a panic 
 of fear after a more helpless victim. 
 
 The field grew thick with these miniature butcheries, the 
 Winchesters cracking, and the spurts of smoke rising and 
 drifting away, the dogs yelping, and the Indians wheeling 
 in quick circles around the steer, shooting as they rode, 
 and hitting the mark once in every half-dozen shots. It 
 was the most unsportsmanlike and wantonly cruel exhibi- 
 tion I have ever seen. A bull in a ring has a fighting 
 chance and takes it, but these animals, who were too weak 
 to stand, and too frightened to run, staggered about until 
 the Indians had finished torturing them, and then, with 
 eyes rolling and blood spurting from their mouths, would 
 pitch forward and die. And they had to be quick about 
 it, before the squaws began cutting o£E the hide while the 
 flanks were still heaving. 
 
 This is the view of a beef issue which the friend of the 
 Indian does not like to take. He prefers calling your at- 
 tention to the condition of the cattle served the Indian, and 
 in showing how outrageously he is treated in this respect. 
 The Government either purchases steers for the Indians a 
 few weeks before an issue, or three or four months previous 
 to it, feeding them meanwhile on the Government reserva- 
 tion. The latter practice is much more satisfactory to the 
 contractor, as it saves him the cost and care of these cattle 
 during the winter, and the inevitable loss which must ensue 
 in that time through illness and starvation. Those I saw 
 had been purchased in October, and had been weighed and 
 branded at that time with the Government brand. They 
 were then allowed to roam over the Government reservation 
 
 166 
 
On an Indian Reservation 
 
 until the spring, when they had fallen o£E in weight from 
 one-half to one-third. They were then issued at their orig- 
 inal weight. That is, a steer which in October was found 
 to weigh eleven hundred pounds, and which would supply 
 twenty or more people with meat, was supposed to have 
 kept this weight throughout the entire winter, and was 
 issued at eleven hundred although it had not three hun- 
 dred pounds of flesh on its bones. The agent is not to 
 blame for this. This is the fault of the Government, and 
 it is quite fair to suppose that some one besides the con- 
 tractor benefits by the arrangement. When the beef is 
 issued two weeks after the contract has been made, it can 
 and frequently is rejected by the army ofiicer in charge of 
 the issue if he thinks it is unfit. But the oflScers present at 
 the issue that I saw were as helpless as they were indignant, 
 for the beef had weighed the weight credited to it once 
 when it was paid for, and the contractor had saved the ex- 
 pense of keeping it, and the Indian received just one-fourth 
 of the meat due him, and for which he had paid in land. 
 
 Fort Sill, which is a day's journey in a stage from Ana- 
 darko, is an eight-company post situated on the table-land 
 of a hill, with other hills around it, and is, though some- 
 what inaccessible, as interesting and beautiful a spot to 
 visit as many others which we cross the ocean to see. I 
 will be able to tell why this is so when I write something 
 later about the army posts. There are any number of 
 Indians here, and they add to the post a delightfully pictu- 
 resque and foreign element. L Troop of the Seventh cav- 
 alry, which is an Indian troop, is the nucleus around which 
 the other Indians gather. The troop is encamped at the foot 
 of the hill on which the post stands. It shows the Indian 
 civilized by uniform, and his Indian brother uncivilized in 
 
 167 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 his blanket and war-paint ; and althougb I should not like 
 to hurt the feelings of the patient, enthusiastic officers who 
 have enlisted the Indians for these different troops for 
 which the Government calls, I think the blanket Indian is a 
 much more warlike-looking and interesting individual. But 
 you mustn't say so, as George the Third advised. The 
 soldier Indians live in regulation tents staked out in rows, 
 and with the ground around so cleanly kept that one could 
 play tennis on it, and immediately back of these are the 
 conical tepees of their wives, brothers, and grandmothers ; 
 and what Lieutenant Scott is going to do with all these 
 pretty young squaws and beautiful children and withered 
 old witches, and their two or three hundred wolf-dogs, when 
 he marches forth to war with his Indian troop, is one of 
 the questions his brother officers find much entertainment 
 in asking. 
 
 The Indian children around this encampment were the 
 brightest spot in my entire Western trip. They are the 
 prettiest and most beautifully barbaric little children I have 
 ever seen. They grow out of it very soon, but that is no 
 reason why one should not make the most of it while it 
 lasts. And they are as wild and fearful of the white visi- 
 tor, unless he happens to be Lieutenant Scott or Second 
 Lieutenant Quay, as the antelope in the prairie around him. 
 It required a corporal's guard, two lieutenants, and three 
 squaws to persuade one of them to stand still and be photo' 
 graphed, and whenever my camera and I appeared together 
 there was a wild stampede of Indian children, which no num- 
 ber of looking-glasses or dimes or strings of beads could 
 allay. Not that they would not take the bribes, but they 
 would run as soon as they had snatched them. It was very 
 distressing, for I did not mean to hurt them very much. 
 
LNMAN BOY AKll I'liMO I'ONY 
 
On an Indian Reservation 
 
 The older people were kinder, and would let me sit inside 
 the tepees, which were very warm on tiie coldest days, and 
 watch them cook, and play their queer games, and work 
 moccasins, and gamble at monte for brass rings if they were 
 women, or for cartridges if they were men. And for ways 
 that are dark and tricks that are vain, I think the Indian 
 monte-dealer can instruct a Chinese poker-player in many 
 things. What was so fine about them was their dignity, 
 hospitality, and strict suppression of all curiosity. They 
 always received a present as though they were doing you a 
 favor, and you felt that you were paying tribute. This 
 makes them difficult to deal with as soldiers. They cannot 
 be treated as white men, and put in the guard -house for 
 every slight offence. Lieutenant Scott has to explain 
 things to them, and praise them, and excite a spirit of 
 emulation among them by commending those publicly who 
 have done well. For instance, they hate to lose their long- 
 hair, and Lieutenant Scott did not order them to have it 
 cut, but told them it would please him if they did ; and so 
 one by one, and in bunches of three and four, they tramped 
 up the hill to the post barber, and back again with their 
 locks in their hands, to barter them for tobacco with the 
 post trader. The Indians at Fort Sill were a temperate 
 lot, and Lieutenant Harris, who has charge of the can- 
 teen, growled because they did not drink enough to pay 
 for their share of the dividend which is returned to each 
 troop at the end of the month. 
 
 Lieutenant Scott obtained his ascendency over his troop 
 in several ways — first, by climbing a face of rock, and, 
 with the assistance of Lieutenant Quay, taking an eagle 
 from the nest it had built there. Every Indian in the reser- 
 vation knew of that nest, and had long wanted the eagle's 
 
 in 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 feathers for a war-bonnet, but none of them had ever dared 
 to climb the mirrorlike surface of the cliff, with the rooks 
 below. The fame of this exploit spread, by what means it 
 is hard to understand among people who have no news- 
 papers or letters, but at beef issues, perhaps, or Messiah 
 dances, or casual meetings on the prairie, which help to 
 build up reputations and make the prowess of one chief 
 known to those of all the other tribes, or the beauty of an 
 Indian girl familiar. Then, following this exploit, three 
 little Indian children ran away from school because they 
 had been flogged, and tried to reach their father's tent 
 fifteen miles off on the reservation, and were found half- 
 buried in the snow and frozen to death. One of them was 
 without his heavier garments, which he had wrapped around 
 his younger brother. The terrified school-teacher sent a 
 message to the fort begging for two troops of cavalry to 
 protect him from the wrath of the older Indians, and the 
 post commander sent out Lieutenant Scott alone to treat 
 with them. His words were much more effective than two 
 troops of cavalry would have been, and the threatened out- 
 break was stopped. The school-master fled to the woods, 
 and never came back. What the Indians saw of Lieuten- 
 ant Scott at this crisis made them trust him for the future, 
 and this and the robbery of the eagle's nest explain partly, 
 as do his gentleness and consideration, the remarkable hold 
 he has over them. Some one was trying to tell one of the 
 chiefs how the white man could bring lightning down from 
 the sky, and make it talk for him from one end of the 
 country to the other. 
 
 " Oh yes," the Indian said, simply, " that is quite true. 
 Lieutenant Scott says so." 
 
 But what has chiefly contributed to make the lieuten- 
 
 172 
 
On an Indian Reservation 
 
 ant's work easy for him is his knowledge of the sign lan- 
 guage, with which the different tribes, though speaking 
 difierent languages, can communicate one with the other. 
 He is said to speak this more correctly and fluently than 
 any other officer in the army, and perhaps any other white 
 man. It is a very curious language. It is not at all like 
 the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, which is an alphabet, and is 
 not pretty to watch. It is just what its name implies — a 
 language of signs. The first time I saw the lieutenant 
 speaking it, I confess I thought, having heard of his skill 
 at Fort Reno, that he was only doing it because he could 
 do it, as young men who speak French prefer to order their 
 American dinners in that language when the waiter can 
 understand English quite as well as themselves. I regarded 
 it as a pleasing weakness, and was quite sure that the lieu- 
 tenant was going to meet the Indian back of the canteen 
 and say it over again in plain every-day words. In this I 
 wronged him ; but it was not until I had watched his Irish 
 sergeant converse in this silent language for two long hours 
 with half a dozen Indians of different tribes, and had seen 
 them all laugh heartily at his witticisms delivered in sema- 
 phoric gestures, that I really believed in it. It seems that 
 what the lieutenant said was, " Tell the first sergeant that I 
 wish to see the soldiers drill at one o'clock, and, after that, 
 go to the store and ask Madeira if there is to be a beef 
 issue to-day." It is very difficult to describe in writing 
 how he did this; and as it is a really pretty thing to watch, 
 it seems a pity to spoil it. As well as I remember it, he 
 did something like this. He first drew his hand over his 
 sleeve to mark the sergeant's stripes; then he held his 
 fingers upright in front of him, and moved them forward 
 to signify soldiers ; by holding them in still another posi- 
 
 173 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 tion, he represented soldiers drilling ; then te made a spy- 
 glass out of his thumb and first finger, and looked up 
 through it at the sky — this represented the sun at one 
 o'clock. " After that " was a quick cut in the air ; the 
 " store" was an interlacing of the fingers, to signify a place 
 where one thing met or was exchanged for another ; " Ma- 
 deira" he named; beef was a turning up of the fingers, to rep- 
 resent horns; and how he represented issue I have no idea. 
 It is a most curious thing to watch, for they change from 
 one sign to the other with the greatest rapidity. I always 
 regarded it with great interest as a sort of game, and tried 
 to guess what the different gestures might mean. Some of 
 the signs are very old, and their origin is as much in dis- 
 pute as some of the lines in the first folios of Shakespeare, 
 and have nearly as many commentators. All the Indians 
 know these signs, but very few of them can tell how they 
 came to mean what they do. " To go to war," for instance, 
 is shown by sweeping the right arm out with the thumb 
 and first finger at right angles ; this comes from an early 
 custom among the Indians of carrying a lighted pipe before 
 them when going on the war-path. The thumb and finger 
 in that position are supposed to represent the angle of the 
 bowl of the pipe and the stem. 
 
 I visited a few of the Indian schools when I was in the 
 Territory, and found the pupils quite learned. The teachers 
 are not permitted to study the Indian languages, and their 
 charges in consequence hear nothing but English, and so 
 pick it up the more quickly. The young women who teach 
 them seem to labor under certain disadvantages; one of 
 them was reading the English lesson from a United States 
 history intended for much older children — grown-up chil- 
 dren, in fact — and explained that she had to order and 
 
 174 
 
A KIOWA MAIDEN 
 
On an Indian Reservation 
 
 select the school-books she used from a list furnished by 
 the Government, and could form no opinion of its appropri- 
 ateness until it arrived. 
 
 Some of the Indian parents are very proud of their chil- 
 dren's progress, and on beef-issue days visit the schools, 
 and listen with great satisfaction to their children speaking 
 in the unknown tongue. There were several in one of the 
 school-rooms while I was there, and the teacher turned them 
 out of their chairs to make room for us, remarking pleas- 
 antly that the Indians were accustomed to sitting around 
 on the ground. She afterwards added to this by telling us 
 that there was no sentiment in her, and that she taught 
 Indians for the fifty dollars there was in it. The mother of 
 one of the little boys was already crouching on the floor as 
 we came in, or squatting on her heels, as they seem to be 
 able to do without fatigue for any length of time. During 
 the half-hour we were there, she never changed her position 
 or turned her head to look at us, but kept her eyes fixed 
 only on her son sitting on the bench above her. He was a 
 very plump, clean, and excited little Indian, with his hair 
 cut short, and dressed in a very fine pair of trousers and 
 jacket, and with shoes and stockings. He was very keen 
 to show the white visitors how well he knew their talk^ and 
 read his book with a masterful shaking of the head, as 
 though it had no terrors for him. His mother, kneeling at 
 his side on the floor, wore a single garment, and over that a 
 dirty blanket strapped around her waist with a beaded belt. 
 Her feet were bare, and her coarse hair hung down over 
 her face and down her back almost to her waist in an un- 
 kempt mass. She supported her chin on one hand, and 
 with the other hand, black and wrinkled, and with nails 
 broken by cutting wood and harnessing horses and plough- 
 
 M ITT 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 ing in the fields, brushed her hair back from before her 
 eyes, and then touched her son's arm wistfully, as a dog 
 tries to draw his master's eyes, and as though he were 
 something fragile and fine. But he paid no attention to 
 her whatsoever ; he was very much interested in the lesson. 
 She was the only thing I saw in the school-room. I won- 
 dered if she was thinking of the days when she carried 
 his weight on her back as she went about her cooking or 
 foraging for wood, or swung him from a limb of a tree, 
 and of the first leather leggings she made for him when he 
 was able to walk, and of the necklace of elk teeth, and the 
 arrows which he used to fire bravely at the prairie-dogs. 
 He was a very different child now, and very far away 
 from the doglike figure crouching by his side and gazing 
 up patiently into his face, as if looking for something she 
 had lost. 
 
 It is quite too presumptuous to suggest any opinion on 
 the Indian question when one has only lived with them for 
 three weeks, but the experience of others who have lived 
 with them for thirty years is worth repeating. You will 
 find that the individual point of view regarding the Indian 
 is much biassed by the individual interests. A man told me 
 that in his eyes no one under heaven was better than a 
 white man, and if the white man had to work for his living, 
 he could not see why the Indian should not work for his. 
 I asked him if he thought of taking up Indian land in the 
 Territory when it was open in the spring, and he said that 
 was his intention, " and why ?" 
 
 The officers are the only men who have absolutely noth- 
 ing to gain, make, or lose by the Indians, and their point of 
 view is accordingly the fairest, and they themselves say it 
 would be a mistake to follow the plan now under consid- 
 
On an Indian Reservation 
 
 eration — of placing ofBcers in charge of the agencies. This 
 would at once strip them of their present neutral position, 
 and, as well, open to them the temptation which the control 
 of many thousands of dollars' worth of property entails 
 where the recipients of this property are as helpless and 
 ignorant as children. They rather favor raising the salary 
 of the Indian agent from two thousand to ten thousand dol- 
 lars, and by so doing bring men of intelligence and probity 
 into the service, and destroy at the same time the temptation 
 to " make something " out of the office. It may have been 
 merely an accident, but I did not meet with one officer in 
 any of the army posts who did not side with the Indian in 
 his battle for his rights with the Government. As for the 
 agents, as the people say in the West, " they are not here 
 for their health." The Indian agents of the present day 
 are, as every one knows, political appointments, and many 
 of them — not all — are men who at home would keep their 
 corner grocery or liquor store, and who would flatter and 
 be civil to every woman in the neighboring tenement who 
 came for a pound of sugar or a pitcher of beer. These 
 men are suddenly placed in the control of hundreds of sen- 
 sitive, dangerous, semi -civilized people, whom they are as 
 capable of understanding as a Bowery boy would be of 
 appreciating an Arab of the desert. 
 
 The agents are not the only people who make mistakes. 
 Some friend mailed me a book the other day on Indian 
 reservations, in order that I might avoid writing what has 
 already been written. I read only one page of the book, 
 in which the author described his manner of visiting the 
 Indian encampments. He would drive to one of these in 
 his ambulance, and upon being informed that the chiefs 
 were waiting to receive him in their tents, would bid them 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 meet him at the next camp, to which he would drive rapid- 
 ly, and there make the same proposition. He would then 
 stop his wagon three miles away on the prairie, and wait 
 for the chiefs to follow him to that point. What his ob- 
 ject was in this exhibition, with which he seemed very well 
 satisfied, he only knows. "Whether it was to teach the 
 chiefs they were not masters in their own camps, or that he 
 was a most superior person, I could not make out ; but he 
 might just as effectively have visited Washington, and sent 
 the President word he could not visit him at the White 
 House, but that he would grant him an interview at his 
 hotel. I wonder just how near this superior young man 
 got to the Indians, and just how wide they opened their 
 hearts to him. 
 
 There was an Indian agent once — it was not long ago, 
 but there is no need to give dates or names, for the man is 
 dead — who when the Indians asked him to paint the wag- 
 ons (with which the Government furnished them through 
 him in return for their land) red instead of green, answered 
 that he would not pander to their absurdly barbaric tastes. 
 Only he did not say absurdly. He was a man who had his 
 own ideas about things, and who was not to be fooled, and 
 he was also a superior person, who preferred to trample on 
 rather than to understand the peculiarities of his wards. 
 So one morning this agent and his wife and children were 
 found hacked to pieces by these wards with barbaric tastes, 
 and the soldiers were called out, and shot many of tlie 
 Indians ; and many white women back of the barracks, 
 and on the line itself, are now wearing mourning, and 
 several officers got their first bar. It would seem from 
 this very recent incident, as well as from many others 
 of which one hears, that it would be cheaper in the end 
 
 180 
 
On an Indian Reservation 
 
 to place agents over the Indians with sufficient intelli- 
 gence to know just when to be firm, and when to com- 
 promise in a matter ; for instance, that of painting a wag- 
 on red. 
 
VII 
 
 A CIVILIAN AT AN AEMY POST 
 
A Civilian at an Army Post 
 
 va 
 
 A CIVILIAN AT AN ARJ^T -POST 
 
 JHE army posts of the United States are ,^s dif- 
 ereint one frO|m finotljer as the stations a,l9,ng 
 the line of a great railroad sy^eip. T^ejrc is 
 tlie same .organization for ^.ll, and the ^i^hest 
 oflScers govern one as well as l^e other ; but in appearance 
 and degree of u^efulne.^s ^i. local rule ,1^ey are ^s iii^e- 
 pendent and yet ^s d,epe.ndent, ,^d .^s far .a,p^i;t ^ ^qtujil 
 miles, .as ,the .^iT^nd Centra,l Depot in ^ew York, ^with 
 its twenty tracks a,Ad as many ticket- .■windows and oa.k- 
 bou,nd offices a^i^ ^eatest after-dinner <?rator, is distant 
 from the .seqtip,n-ho)Use .at the u,(ijfi]p^sl\ed qnd of a i;9a,d 
 somewhere on ,t,he prairie. 'J^p.e .C9ip;ima:pding officer's .quar- 
 ters alone at Port Sheridan cpst tih\r,ty thousand dollars, 
 a,nd more than a ipoillioin ^ni a half h^s bee^ spent ,9|iji F.oit 
 Riley ; bu,t there are many cither po.sts w^ere n^tu^e si^- 
 plied the mud ar^d logs for t^he wh,ole station, and t^he cost 
 to the Government could not have bee^ jnore l^^n three 
 hundred dpl^ajTS at the most. It is consec[uently (difficult 
 to write in a general .-yvay of army posts. What is true <?f 
 ojae is .by no means true of another, a^(\ fi .vvUl be better, 
 perhaps, to first tell of ,1^se a^my posts W.^cji possess 
 jcnajiy fea.tures in cpmtnon — eigh,t - cojiUpany posts, fpr i,n- 
 .stance, which are i;i9it too large flor tpo .si;i;i^|l,l, .r^pt too 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 near civilization, and yet not too far removed from the rail- 
 road. An eight - company post is a little town or com- 
 munity of about three hundred people living in a quad- 
 rangle around a parade-ground. The scenery hurrounding 
 the quadrangle may differ as widely as you please to im- 
 agine it ; it may be mountainous and beautiful, or level, 
 flat, and unprofitable, but the parade-ground is always the 
 same. It has a flag-pole at the entrance to the quadrangle, 
 and a base-ball diamond marked out on the side on which 
 the men live, and tennis-courts towards the officers' quar- 
 ters. When you speak of the side of the square where the 
 enlisted men live, you say " barracks," and you refer to the 
 officers' share of the quadrangle as " the line." In England 
 you can safely say that an officer is living in barracks, but 
 you must not say this lc a United States officer; he lives 
 in the third or fourth house up or down " the line." 
 
 The barracks are a long continuous row of single-story 
 buildings with covered porches facing the parade. They 
 are generally painted an uncompromising brown, and are 
 much more beautiful inside than out, especially the mess- 
 rooms, where all the wood-work has been scrubbed so hard 
 that the tables are worn almost to a concave surface. The 
 architectural appearance of the officers' quarters on the line 
 differs in different posts ; but each house of each individual 
 post, whether it is a double or single house, is alike to the 
 number of bricks in the walls and in the exact arrangement 
 of the rooms. The wives of the officers may change the 
 outer appearance of their homes by planting rose-bushes 
 and ivy about the yards, but whenever they do, some other 
 officer's wife is immediately transferred from another post 
 and " outranks " them, and they have to move farther down 
 the line, and watch the new-comer plucking their roses, and 
 
 186 
 

A Civilian at an Army Post 
 
 reaping the harvest she has not sown. This rule alsp ap- 
 plies to new w.all-paper, and t,he introduction at your own 
 expense of open fireplaces, with blue and white tiles 
 which will not come ofi or out when the new-comer moves 
 in. In addition to .the officers' quarters and the barracl^s, 
 there is an administration building, which is the executive 
 mansion of this little community, a (juartermaster's store- 
 house, a guard-house, and the hospita,!. The stables are 
 back of the barracks, out of sight of those wh9 live facing 
 the parade, and there is generally a rear-guard of little huts 
 and houses occupied by sergeants' wives, who do the wash- 
 ing for the posts, and do it very well. This is, briefly, the 
 actual appearance of an army post — a quadrangle of houses, 
 continuous and one-story high on two sides, ancj separate 
 and two stories high on the other two sides, facing the 
 parade, and occasionally surrounded by beautiful country. 
 
 The life of an army post, its internal arrangements, its 
 necessary routine, and its expedients for breaking this rou- 
 tine pleasantly, cannot be deal,t with so briefly ; it is a deli- 
 cate and extensive subject. It is impossible to separate the 
 ofBcial and social life of an army post. The commanding 
 oflScer does not lose that dignity which doth hedge hina in 
 when he and his orderly move from the administration 
 building to his quarters, and it would obviously confuse 
 matters if a second lieutenant bet him in the morning he 
 could not put the red ball into the right-corner pocket, and 
 in the evening at dress parade he should order the same 
 lieutenant and his company into the Jower right-hand 
 corner of the parade at double-quick. This woul^ tend to 
 deS|troy discip'line. And so, as far as the nien of the post 
 are concerned, the official and social life touch at many 
 points. With the women, of course, it is difierent, although 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 there was a colonel's wife not long ago who said to the 
 officers' wives assisting her to receive at a dance, " You will 
 take your places, ladies, in order of rank." I repeat this 
 mild piece of gossip because it was the only piece of gossip 
 1 heard at any army post, which is interesting when one 
 remembers the reputation given the army posts by one of 
 their own people for that sort of thing. 
 
 The official head of the post is the commanding officer. 
 He has under him eight " companies," if they are infantry, 
 or " troops " if they are cavalry, each commanded in turn 
 by a captain, who has under him a first and second lieuten- 
 ant, who rule in their turn numerous sergeants and cor- 
 porals. There is also a major or two, two or three surgeons, 
 who rank with the captains, and a quartermaster and an 
 adjutant, who are selected from among the captains or 
 lieutenants of the post, and who perform, in consequence, 
 double duty. The majority of the officers are married ; this 
 is not a departmental regulation nor a general order, but it 
 happens to be so. I visited one very large post in which 
 every one was married except one girl, and a second lieuten- 
 ant, who spoiled the natural sequel by being engaged to a 
 girl somewhere else. And at the post I had visited before 
 this there were ten unmarried and unengaged lieutenants, 
 and no young women. It seems to me that this presents an 
 unbalanced condition of afEairs, which should be considered 
 and adjusted by Congress even before the question of lineal 
 promotion. 
 
 It is true that the commanding officer is supposed to be 
 the most important personage in an army post, but that is 
 not so. He, as well as every one else in it, is ruled by a 
 young person with a brass trumpet, who apparently never 
 sleeps, eats, or rests, and who spends his days tooting on his 
 
 190 
 
THE OMXTPOTKNT BUfU/KB 
 
A CU'ilian ai an ArffCy Post 
 
 biig5^ in the ihiddW of ftfe parade in' rain>^ Aiid in' sunny 
 weather and' through good and eVil r'epoi't. He soiihds in' all 
 thirty-seven "ckll^" a'da^j and* the garrison gets up and lies 
 down,'aii(i eats, aidd' waters the horses, and goeS to church 
 atid school,' and to' hbrSe exercise, and mounts guard, and 
 dt'iUS' recruit's, ahd' par'ades ih full' dress' whenever he t'hiiiks 
 tHey shoTild. His p^ettibBl; call" is' reVeille, which is sounded 
 d,t half -past six in' the mcirning. It is bright arid spirited, 
 aiid' breathes promise and hope for the rie\^ day^ and I' per- 
 sonally liked it hest hecause it nieant that while I still' had 
 ah hoTii" to sleep, thtee hundred other mbn had to'get upand 
 cleah cdld gniiS' alid things in the semi-darkness. Next to 
 the bugler iii' inipoi*tance is the qiiartermaster. He iS a cap- 
 tain or a first lieutenant with fafe executive ability, and it is 
 he who supplies the '^IfrlSoii' with those things which make 
 life' bearable or luxurioiiS, arid it is'he v4'ho is resjionisible to 
 the Goveinment for every coat (JF^hiteTv'ash' ori the stables, 
 ahd' for the hew stove-lid furitbTled the cook of If" Troop, 
 Thirteenth Cavalry. He is" the hardest-worked man in tlie 
 post; although that woiild jibssibly be denied by every other 
 officer iri it; and hb is' supposed to be ah aiithority oil' archi- 
 tecture, sanitary jllnihbing, -N^etbriiiary surgery, household 
 f urriifehitig froifa the kitcheil'rahge tO the electric button oh 
 the front door,' and" to know all things concerning iriartial 
 eqtiiptnentk froiii'a sling-belt to ah airibulance. 
 
 He' is a vvohdei^ul' riiah, and pJissessed of a' ■vast and in- 
 tricate kno^ edge", biit'hls position in the post is very much 
 like that ■of' a' base-ball' lindpire's oh' the field, for he is never 
 thankdd' if he does' well, and' is abused by every one on 
 principle. And he is never free. At' the very rhirlute' he is 
 lifting the gredii^mint to hts lips, his host will say, "By- 
 thd-i#ay, tiiy striker t'ellS md that last piece of stove -pipe 
 
 » 183 
 
The West from a Car • Window 
 
 you furnished us does not fit by two inches ; I don't believe 
 you looked at the dimensions;" and when he hastens to 
 join the ladies for protection, he is saluted with an anxious 
 chorus of inquiries as to when he is going to put that pane 
 of glass in the second-story window, and where are those 
 bricks for the new chimney. His worst enemies, however, 
 lie far afield, for he wages constant war with those clerks 
 at the Treasury Department at Washington who go over his 
 accounts and papers, and who take keen and justifiable 
 pride in making him answer for every fraction of a cent 
 which he has left unexplained. The Government, for in- 
 stance, furnishes his storehouse with a thousand boxes of 
 baking-powder, valued at seventy dollars, or seven cents a 
 box. If he sells three boxes for twenty-five cents — I am 
 quoting an actual instance — the Treasury Department re- 
 turns his papers, requesting him to explain who got the 
 four cents, and is anxious to know what he means by it. 
 
 I once saw some tin roofs at a post ; they had been 
 broken in coming, and the quartermaster condemned them. 
 That was a year ago, and his papers complaining about 
 these tin roofs have been travelling back and forth between 
 contractor and express agent and the department at Wash- 
 ington and the quartermaster ever since, and they now make 
 up a bundle of seventy different papers. Sometimes the 
 quartermaster defeats the Treasury Department ; sometimes 
 it requires him to pay money out of his own pocket. Three 
 revolvers were stolen out of their rack once, and the post 
 quartermaster was held responsible for their loss. He ob- 
 jected to paying the sum the Government required, and 
 pointed out that the revolvers should have been properly 
 locked in the rack. The Government replied that the lock 
 furnished by it was perfect, and not to be tampered with or 
 
 194 
 
rT 1= 
 
A Civilian at an Army Post 
 
 scoffed at, and that his excuse was puerile. This quarter- 
 master had a mechanic in his company, and he sent for the 
 young man, and told him to go through the barracks and 
 open all the locks he could. At the end of an hour every 
 rack and soldier's box in the post were burglarized, and the 
 Government paid for the revolvers. 
 
 The post quartermaster's only pleasure lies in his store- 
 house, and in the neatness and order in which he keeps his 
 supplies. He dearly loves to lead the civilian visitor through 
 these long rows of shelves, and say, while clutching at his 
 elbow to prevent his escape, "You see, there are all the 
 shovels in that corner ; then over there I have the Sibley 
 tents, and there on that shelf are the blouses, and next to 
 them are the overcoats, and there are the canvas shoes, and 
 on that shelf we keep matches, and down here, you see, are 
 the boots. Everything is in its proper place." At which 
 you are to look interested, and say, "Ah, yes!" just as 
 though you had expected to see the baking-powder mixed 
 with the pith helmets, and the axe-handles and smoking- 
 tobacco grouped together on the floor. 
 
 After the quartermaster, the adjutant, to the mind of the 
 civilian at least, is the most superior being in the post. He is 
 a lieutenant selected by the colonel to act as his conscience- 
 keeper and letter-writer, and to convey his commands to the 
 other oflBcers. It is his proud privilege to sit in the colonel's 
 own room and sign papers, and to dictate others to his as- 
 sistant non-coms, and it is one of his duties to oversee the 
 guard-mount, and to pick out the smartest-looking soldier 
 to act as the colonel's orderly for the day. You must un- 
 derstand that as the colonel's orderly does not have to 
 remain on guard at night, the men detailed for guard duty 
 vie with each other in presenting an appearance suflSciently 
 
 197 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 brilliant to attract the adjutant's eye, and as they all look 
 exactly alike, the adjutant has to be careful. He sometimes 
 spends five long minutes and much mental effort in going 
 from one end of the ranks to the other to see if Number 
 Three's boots are better blacked than Number Two's, and 
 in trying to decide whether the fact that Murphy's gun- 
 barrel is oilier than Cronin's should weigh against the fact 
 that Cronin's gloves are new, while Murphy's are only fresh 
 from the wash, both having tied on the condition of their 
 cartridges, which have been rubbed to look like silver, and 
 which must be an entirely superflous nicety to the Indian 
 who may eventually be shot with them. This is one of the 
 severest duties of an adjutant's routine, and after having 
 accompanied one of them through one of these prize exhibi- 
 tions, I was relieved to hear him confess his defeat by tell- 
 ing the sergeant that Cronin and Murphy could toss for it. 
 Another perquisite of the adjutant's is his right to tell his 
 brother officers at mess in a casual way that they must act 
 as officer of the day or officer of the guard, or relieve Lieu- 
 tenant Quay while he goes quail-hunting, or take charge of 
 Captain Blank's troop of raw recruits until the captain re- 
 turns to their relief. To be able to do this to men who 
 outrank you, and who are much older than yourself, and 
 just as though the orders came from you direct, must be a 
 great pleasure, especially as the others are not allowed the 
 satisfaction of asking, " Who says I must ?" or, " What's 
 the matter with your doing it yourself ?" These are the 
 officials of the post ; the unofficials, the wives and the 
 children, make the social life whatever it is. 
 
 There are many in the East who think life at an army 
 post is one of discomfort and more or less monotony, re- 
 lieved by petty gossip and flirtations. Of course one cannot 
 
UNITED STATES CAVALRYMAN IN FULL DRESS 
 
A Civilian at an Army Post 
 
 tell in a short visit whether or not the life might become 
 monotonous, though one rather suspects it would, but the 
 discomforts are quite balanced by other things which 
 we cannot get in the city. Of jealousy and gossip I saw 
 little. I was told by one officer's wife that to the rail- 
 roads was due the credit of the destruction of flirtations 
 at garrisons ; and though I had heard of many great ad- 
 vances and changes of conditions and territories brought 
 about by the coming of the railroads, this was the first 
 time I had ever heard they had interfered with the course 
 of more or less true love. She explained it by saying that 
 in the days when army posts lay afar from the track of 
 civilization the people were more dependent upon one an- 
 other, and that then there may have existed Mrs. Hauksbees 
 and Mrs. Knowles, but that to-day the railroads brought in 
 fresh air and ideas from all over the country, and that the 
 officers were constantly being exchanged, and others coming 
 and going on detached service, and that visitors from the 
 bigger outside world were appearing at all times. 
 
 The life impresses a stranger as such a peaceful sort of an 
 existence that he thinks that must be its chief and great 
 attraction, and that which makes the army people, as they 
 call themselves, so well content. It sounds rather absurd 
 to speak of an army post of all places in the world as peace- 
 ful ; but the times are peaceful now, and there is not much 
 work for the officers to do, and they enjoy that blessing 
 which is only to be found in the army and in the Church 
 of Rome — of having one's life laid out for one by others, 
 and in doing what one is told, and in not having to decide 
 things for one's self. You are sure of your home, of your 
 income, and you know exactly what is going to be your 
 work a month or five years later. You are not dependent 
 
 201 
 
The West from a Car -Window 
 
 on tlie rise of a certain stock, nor the slave of patients or 
 clients, and you have more or less responsibility according 
 to your rank, and responsibility is a thing every man loves. 
 If he has that, and his home and children, a number of 
 congenial people around him, and good hunting and fishing, 
 it would seem easy for him to be content. It is different 
 with his wife. She may unconsciously make life very 
 pleasant for her husband or very uncomfortable, in ways 
 that other women may not. If she leaves him and visits 
 the East to see the new gowns, or the new operas, or her 
 own people, she is criticised as not possessing a truly wife- 
 ly spirit, and her husband is secretly pitied ; and he knows 
 it, and resents it for his wife's sake. While, on the other 
 hand, if she remains always at the post, he is called a selfish 
 fellow, and his wife's people at home in the East think ill 
 of him for keeping her all to himself in that wilderness. 
 
 The most surprising thing about the frontier army posts, 
 to my mind, was the amount of comfort and the number 
 of pretty trifles one found in the houses, especially when 
 one considered the distance these trifles — such as billiard- 
 tables for the club or canteen, and standing-lamps for the 
 houses on the line — had come. At several dinners, at 
 posts I had only reached after two days' journey by stage, 
 the tables were set exactly as they would have been in New 
 York City with Sherry's men in the. kitchen. There were 
 red candle-shades, and salted almonds and ferns in silver 
 centre-pieces, and more forks than one ever knows what to 
 do with, and all the rest of it. I hope the army people 
 will not resent this, and proudly ask, " What did he expect 
 to find ?" but I am sure that is not the idea of a frontier 
 post we have received- in the East. There was also some- 
 thing delightfully novel in the table-talk, and in hearing 
 
 202 
 
\ijy< 
 
A Civilian at an Army Post 
 
 one pretty, slight woman, in a smart decollete gown, casually 
 tell liow her husband and his men had burned the prairie 
 grass around her children and herself, and turned aside a 
 prairie fire that towered and roared around them, and an- 
 other of how her first child had been seized with convul- 
 sions in a stage-coach when they were snow-bound eighty 
 miles from the post and fifty miles from the nearest city, 
 and how she borrowed a clasp-knife from one of the pas- 
 sengers with which he had been cutting tobacco, and lanced 
 the baby's gums, and so saved his life. There was another 
 hostess who startled us by saying, cheerfully, that the 
 month of June at her last post was the most unpleasant in 
 the year, because it was so warm that it sometimes spoiled 
 the ice for skating, and that the snow in April reached 
 to the sloping eaves of the house ; also the daughter of 
 an Indian fighter, while pouring out at a tea one day, 
 told calmly of an Indian who had sprung at her with a 
 knife, and seized her horse's head, and whom she had 
 shaken ofE by lashing the pony on to his hind legs. She 
 could talk the Sioux language fluently, and had lived for 
 the greater part of her life eight hundred miles from a rail- 
 road. Is it any wonder you find all the men in an army 
 post married when there are women who can adapt them- 
 selves as gracefully to snow-shoes at Fort Brady as to the 
 serious task of giving dinners at Fort Houston ? 
 
 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 uni- 
 forms — which are unknown to the posts farther north, and 
 
 205 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 fur- 
 nishing the music, and the people from town helping out 
 the sets, and the oflBcers 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 oflBcers 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 fron- 
 tier, where there are no towns, and where every man knows 
 what the next man is going to say before he speaks — sin- 
 gle 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 re- 
 membered 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 
 
 206 
 
A Civilian at an Army Post 
 
 contentedly together. There is not enough of them to 
 separate into cliques or sets, as they did at the larger sta- 
 tions, and they were more dependent one upon another. 
 There was a night when one officer on the line gave a sup- 
 per, and another (one of his guests) said he wished to con- 
 tribute 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 ofE 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 sum- 
 mer 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 Ind- 
 ians all about you, and with red and white flags wigwagging 
 from the parade to the green mountain - tops, and good- 
 
 O 209 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 THE BARRACKS, FORT BODSTON 
 
 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 hav- 
 ing 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 
 
 210 
 
A Civilian at an Army Post 
 
 lite 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 North- 
 west, where snow and ice are almost a yearly accompani- 
 ment, 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 symp- 
 toms — 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 hurry- 
 ing 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 
 
 211 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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. 
 
YIII 
 THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE 
 
The Heart of the Great Divide 
 
 VIII 
 
 THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE 
 
 f^^^^ HE 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 ofE 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 
 
 215 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 corpora- 
 tions, 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 oflBces. 
 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 to- 
 gether 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 pro- 
 portion 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 liv- 
 able, but the public schools and the private houses were to 
 
 216 
 
The Heart of the Great Divide 
 
 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 suflSciently 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 per- 
 nicious and most valuable institution is apparently un- 
 known, 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 thc' 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- 
 
 219 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 car, and every one in Denver patronizes this means of lo- 
 comotion 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 ab- 
 ruptly 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 cer- 
 tainly 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 pur- 
 chasing along Broadway below Twenty-third Street, their 
 letter-paper is stamped on Union Square, and their hus- 
 bands 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 
 
The Heart of the Great Divide 
 
 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 Jack- 
 son, 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 wa- 
 ters which give it its name, and of which the people are so 
 proud that they have turned Colorado Springs into a pro- 
 hibition town, and have made drinking the waters, as it 
 were, compulsory. This is an interesting example of peo- 
 ple 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 canons 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 
 
 821 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 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 mterest. This would 
 be, perhaps it is needless to say, an entirely erroneous 
 idea. I only touched on those things which could not he 
 found in the East, and said nothing of the isolation of these 
 particular and characteristic points of interest, of the com- 
 monplace and weary distances which lay between them, and 
 of the difliculty of getting from one point to another. For 
 days together, while travelling to reach something of pos- 
 sible interest, I might just as profitably, as far as any ma- 
 terial 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 
 
 222 
 
The Heart of the Great Divide 
 
 me to leave the railroad, and that I must pay for an hour 
 of interest with days of the most unprofitable travel. Mat- 
 thew Arnold said, when he returned to England, that he 
 had found this country " uninteresting," and every Ameri- 
 can 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 dis- 
 content. Hundreds of miles of level mud and snow fol- 
 lowed 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 photo- 
 graphed and to exhibit their peculiar characteristics. 
 
 But after one leaves these different States and rides be- 
 tween 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 pictu- 
 resque 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 de- 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 mand that you stand and deliver your name, your past his- 
 tory, your business, and your excuse for being where you 
 are. Neither did I find the West teeming with "charac- 
 ters." 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 over- 
 run 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 tilling 
 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 " cit- 
 izens, 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 Heart of the Great Divide 
 
 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 enjoy- 
 ing 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 sup- 
 posed 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 for- 
 gotten, 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 " re- 
 porter 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 oo its full 
 value. We met later in the street, and he asked me with 
 the most faithful interest of those whose dances and din- 
 ners 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. 
 A.nother man, whom I had known very well in New York, 
 turned up in San Antonio with an entirely new name, wife, 
 aod 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 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 came there to change their fortunes, and who had changed 
 them most completely. The English gave the most con- 
 spicuous 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. 
 
 The proportion of young English gentlemen who are 
 roughing it in the West far exceeds that of the young 
 Americans. This is due to the fact that the former have 
 never been taught a trade or profession, and in conse- 
 quence, when they have been cheated of the money they 
 brought with them to invest, have nothing but their hands 
 to help them, and so take to driving horses or branding 
 cattle or digging in the streets, as one graduate of Oxford, 
 sooner than write home for money, did in Denver. He is 
 now teaching Greek and Latin in one of our colleges. The 
 manner in which visiting Englishmen are robbed in the 
 West, and the quickness with which some of them take the 
 lesson to heart, and practise it upon the next Englishman 
 who comes out, or upon the prosperous Englishman al- 
 ready there, would furnish material for a book full of piti- 
 ful stories. And yet one cannot help smiling at the wick- 
 edness of some of these schemes. Three Englishmen, for 
 example, bought, as they supposed, thirty thousand Texas 
 steers ; but the Texans who pretended to sell them the cat- 
 tle drove the same three thousand head ten times around 
 the mountain, as a dozen supers circle around the back- 
 drop of a stage to make an army, and the Englishmen 
 counted and paid for each steer ten times over. There was 
 another Texan who made a great deal of money by ad- 
 vertising to teach young men how to become cowboys, and 
 who charged them ten dollars a month tuition fee, and who 
 set his pupils to work digging holes for fence-posts all over 
 
The Heart of the Great Divide 
 
 the ranch, until they grew wise in their generation, and left 
 him for some other ranch, where they were paid thirty dol- 
 lars per month for doing the same thing. But in many in- 
 stances it is the tables of San Antonio which take the great- 
 er part of the visiting Englishman's money. One gentleman, 
 who for some time represented the Isle of Wight in the 
 Lower House, spent three modest fortunes in the San Anto- 
 nio gambling -houses, and then married his cook, which 
 proved a most admirable speculation, as she had a frugal 
 mind, and took entire control of his little income. And 
 when the Marquis of Aylesford died in Colorado, the only 
 friend in this country who could be found to take the body 
 back to England was his first-cousin, who at that time was 
 driving a hack around San Antonio. We heard stories of 
 this sort on every side, and we met faro-dealers, cooks, and 
 cowboys who have served through campaigns in India or 
 Egypt, or who hold an Oxford degree. A private in G 
 troop, Third Cavalry, who was my escort on several scout- 
 ing expeditions in the Garza outfit, was kind enough and 
 quite able to tell me which club in London had the oldest 
 wine-cellar, where one could get the best visiting-cards en- 
 graved, and why the Professor of Ancient Languages at 
 Oxford was the superior of the instructor in like studies at 
 Cambridge. He did this quite unaffectedly, and in no way 
 attempted to excuse his present position. Of course, the 
 value of the greater part of these stories depends on the 
 family and personality of the hero, and as I cannot give 
 names, I have to omit the best of them. 
 
 There was a little English boy who left San Antonio be- 
 fore I had reached it, but whose name and fame remained 
 behind him. He was eighteen years of age, and just out 
 of Eton, where he had spent all his pocket-money in betting 
 
 231 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 on the races through commissioners. Gambling was his 
 ruling passion at an age when ginger-pop and sweets ap- 
 pealed more strongly to his contemporaries. His people 
 sent him to Texas with four hundred pounds to buy an in- 
 terest in a ranch, and furnished him with a complete outfit 
 of London -made clothing. An Englishman who saw the 
 boy's box told me he had noted the different garments 
 packed carefully away, just as his mother had placed them, 
 and each marked with his name. The Eton boy lost the 
 four hundred pounds at roulette in the first week after his 
 arrival in San Antonio, and pawned his fine clothes in the 
 next to " get back." He lost all he ventured. At the end 
 of ten days he was peddling fruit around the streets in his 
 bare feet. He made twenty-five cents the first day, and car- 
 ried it to the gambling-house where he had already lost his 
 larger fortune, and told one of the dealers he would cut the 
 cards with him for the money. The boy cut first, and the 
 dealer won ; but the other was enough of a gambler to see 
 that the dealer had stooped to win his last few pennies un- 
 fairly. The boy's eyes filled up with tears of indignation. 
 
 " You thief !" he cried, " you cheated me !" 
 
 The dealer took his revolver from the drawer of the ta- 
 ble, and, pointing it at his head, said : " Do you know what 
 we do to people who use that word in Texas? We kill 
 them !" 
 
 The boy clutched the table with both hands and flung 
 himself across it so that his forehead touched the barrel of 
 the revolver. " You thief !" he repeated, and so shrilly that 
 every one in the room heard him. " I say you cheated me !" 
 
 The gambler lowered the trigger slowly and tossed the 
 pistol back in the drawer. Then he picked up a ten-dollar 
 gold piece and shoved it towards him. 
 
The Heart of the Great Divide 
 
 " Here," he said, " that '11 help take you home. You're 
 too damned tough for Texas !" 
 
 The other Englishmen in San Antonio filled out the sum 
 and sent him back to England. His people are well known 
 in 'London ; his father is a colonel in the Guards. 
 
 The most notable Englishman who ever came to Texas 
 was Ben Thompson ; but he arrived there at so early an age, 
 and became so thoroughly Western in his mode of life, that 
 Texans claim him as their own. 1 imagine, however, he 
 always retained some of the traditions of his birthplace, as 
 there is a story of his standing with his hat off to talk to 
 an English nobleman, when Thompson at the time was the 
 most feared and best known man in all Texas. The stories 
 of his recklessness and ignorance of fear, and utter disre- 
 gard of the value of others' lives as well as his own, are 
 innumerable. A few of them are interesting and worth 
 keeping, as they show the typical bad man of the highest 
 degree in his difierent humors, and also as I have not dared 
 to say half as much about bad men as I should have liked 
 to do. Thompson killed eighteen men in different parts of 
 Texas, and was for this made marshal of Austin, on the 
 principle that if he must kill somebody, it was better to 
 give him authority to kill other desperadoes than reputa- 
 ble citizens. As marshal it was his pleasure to pull up his 
 buggy across the railroad track just as the daily express 
 train was about to start, and covering the engineer with his 
 revolver, bid him hold the train until he was ready to move 
 on. He would then call some trembling acquaintance from 
 the crowd on the platform and talk with him leisurely, un- 
 til he thought he had successfully awed the engineer and 
 established. his authority. Then he would pick up his reins 
 and drive on, saying to the engineer, " You needn't think, 
 
 235 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 sir, any corporation can hurry me." The position of the 
 unfortunate man to whom he talked must have been most 
 trying, with a locomotive on one side and a revolver on the 
 other. 
 
 One day a cowboy, who was a well-known bully and a 
 would-be desperado, shot several bullet-holes through the 
 high hat of an Eastern traveller who was standing at the 
 bar of an Austin hotel. Thompson heard of this, and, pur- 
 chasing a high hat, entered the bar-room. 
 
 " I hear," he said, facing the cowboy, " that you are shoot- 
 ing plug-hats here to-day ; perhaps you would like to take a 
 shot at mine." He then raised his revolver and shot away 
 the cowboy's ear. " I meant," he said, "to hit your ear; did 
 I do it ?" The bully showed proof that he had. " Well, 
 then," said the marshal, " get out of here ;" and catching 
 the man by his cartridge-belt, he threw him out into the 
 street, and so put an end to his reputation as a desperate 
 character forever. 
 
 Thompson was naturally unpopular with a certain class 
 in the community. Two barkeepers who had a personal 
 grudge against him, with no doubt excellent reason, lay in 
 ambush for him behind the two bars of the saloon, which 
 stretched along either wall. Thompson entered the room 
 from the street in ignorance of any plot against him until 
 the two men halted him with shot-guns. They had him so 
 surely at their pleasure that he made no efEort to reach his 
 revolver, but stood looking from one to the other, and smil- 
 ing grimly. But his reputation was so great, and their fear 
 of him so actual, that both men missed him, although not 
 twenty feet away, and with shot-guns in their hands. Then 
 Thompson took out his pistol deliberately and killed them. 
 
 A few years ago he became involved in San Antonio with 
 
 236 
 
The Heart of the Great Divide 
 
 " Jack " Harris, the keeper of a gambling-house and variety 
 theatre. Harris lay in wait for Thompson behind the swing- 
 ing doors of his saloon, but Thompson, as he crossed the 
 Military Plaza, was warned of Harris's hiding-place, and 
 shot him through the door. He was tried for the murder, 
 and acquitted on the ground of self-defence ; and on his re- 
 turn to Austin was met at the station by a brass band and 
 all the fire companies. Perhaps inspired by this, he re- 
 turned to San Antonio, and going to Harris's theatre, then 
 in the hands of his partner, Joe Foster, called from the gal- 
 lery for Foster to come up and speak to him. Thompson 
 had with him a desperado named King Fisher, and against 
 him every man of his class in San Antonio, for Harris had 
 been very popular. Foster sent his assistant, a very young 
 man named Bill Sims, to ask Thompson to leave the place. 
 
 as he did not want trouble. 
 
 " I have come to have a reconciliation," said Thompson. 
 
 " I want to shake hands with my old friend, Joe Foster. 
 
 Tell him I won't leave till I see him, and I won't make a 
 
 row." 
 
 Sims returned with Foster, and Thompson held out his 
 
 hand. 
 
 " Joe," he said, " I have come all the way from Austin to 
 
 shake hands with you. Let's make up, and call it off." 
 " I can't shake hands with you, Ben," Foster said. "You 
 
 killed my partner, and you know well enough I am not the 
 
 sort to forget it. Now go, won't you, and don't make 
 
 trouble." 
 
 Thompson said he would leave in a minute, but they 
 
 must drink together first. There was a bar in the gallery, 
 
 which was by this time packed with men who had learned 
 
 of Thompson's presence in the theatre, but Fisher and 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 Thompson stood quite alone beside the bar. The marshai 
 of Austin looked up and saw Foster's glass untouched 
 before him, and said, 
 
 "Aren't you drinking- with me, Joe ?" 
 
 Foster shook his head. 
 
 " Well, then," cried Thompson, " the man who won't 
 drink with me, nor shake hands with me, fights me." 
 
 He reached back for his pistol, and some one — a jury of 
 twelve intelligent citizens decided it was not young Bill 
 Sims — shot him three times in the forehead. They say you 
 could have covered the three bullet-holes with a half-dollar. 
 But so great was the desperate courage of this ruffian that ' 
 even as he fell he fired, holding his revolver at his hip, and 
 killing Foster, and then, as he lay on his back, with every 
 nerve jerking in agony, he emptied his revolver into the 
 floor, ripping great gashes in the boards about him. And 
 so he died, as he would have elected to die, with his boots 
 on, and with the report of his pistol the last sound to ring 
 in his ears. King Fisher was killed at the same moment ; 
 and the Express spoke of it the next morning as " A Good 
 Night's Work." 
 
 I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Sims at the gambling 
 palace, which was once Harris's, then Foster's, and which is 
 BOW his, and found hin. a jolly, bright-eyed young man of 
 about thirty, with very fine teeth, and a most contagious 
 laugh. He was just back from Dwight, and told us of a 
 man who had been cured there, and who had gone away 
 with his mother leaning on his arm, and what this man had 
 said to them of his hopes for the future when he left ; and 
 as he told it the tears came to his eyes, and he coughed, 
 and began to laugh over a less serious story. I tried all the 
 time to imagine him, somewhat profanely, I am afraid, as n 
 
The Heart of the Or eat Divide 
 
 young David standing up before this English giant, who 
 had sent twoscore of other men out of the world, and to 
 picture the glaring, crowded gallery, with the hot air and 
 smoke, and the voice of the comic singer rising from the 
 stage below, and this boy and the marshal of Austin facing- 
 one another with drawn revolvers ; but it was quite impos- 
 sible. 
 
 There are a great many things one only remembers to 
 say as the train is drawing out of the station, and which 
 have to be spoken from the car window. And now that 
 my train is so soon to start towards the East, I find there 
 are many things which it seems most ungracious to leave 
 unsaid. I should like to say much of the hospitality of the 
 West. We do not know such hospitality in the East. A 
 man brings us a letter of introduction there, and we put 
 him up at the club we least freqiiently visit, and regret that 
 he should have come at a time when ours is so particularly 
 crowded with unbreakable engagements. It is not so here. 
 One might imagine the Western man never worked at all, 
 so entirely is his time yours, if vou only please to claim it. 
 And from the first few days of my trip to the last, this 
 self-effacement of my hosts and eagerness to please accom- 
 panied me wherever I went. It was the same in every 
 place, whether in army posts or ranches, or among that 
 most delightful coterie of the Denver Club " who never 
 sleep," or on the border of Mexico, where " Bob " Haines, 
 the sheriff of Zepata County, Texas, before he knew who I 
 or my soldier escort might be, and while we were still but 
 dust -covered figures in the night, rushed into the house 
 and ordered a dinner and beds for us, and brought out his 
 last two bottles of beer. The sheriff of Zepata County, 
 " who can shoot with both hands," need bring no letter of 
 
 241 
 
The West from a Car - Window 
 
 introduction with him if he will deign to visit me when he 
 comes to New York. And as for that Denver Club coterie, 
 they already know that the New York ckibs are also sup- 
 plied with electric buttons. 
 
 And now that it is at an end, I find it hard to believe 
 that I am not to hear again the Indian girls laughing over 
 their polo on the prairie, or the regimental band playing 
 the men on to the parade, and that I am not to see tlie 
 officers' wives watching them from the line at sunset, as 
 the cannon sounds its salute and the flag comes fluttering 
 down. 
 
 And yet New York is not without its good points. 
 
 If any one doubts this, let him leave it for three months, 
 and do one-night stands at fourth-rate hotels, or live on al- 
 kali water and bacon, and let him travel seven thousand miles 
 over a country where a real-estate ofiice, a Citizen's Bank, 
 and Quick Order Restaurant, with a few surrounding houses, 
 make, as seen from the car window, a booming city, where 
 beautiful scenery and grand mountains are separated by 
 miles of prairie and chaparral, and where there is no Diana 
 of the Tower nor bronze Farragut to greet him daily as he 
 comes back from work through Madison Square. He will 
 then feel a love for New York equal to the Chicagoan's love 
 for his city, and when he sees across the New Jersey flats 
 the smoke and the tall buildings and the twin spires of the 
 cathedral, he will wish to shout, as the cowboys do when 
 they " come into town," at being back again in the only 
 place where one can both hear the Tough Girl of the East 
 Side ask for her shoes, and the horn of the Country Club's 
 coach tooting above the roar of the Avenue. 
 
 The West is a very wonderful, large, unfinished, and out- 
 of-doors portion of our country, and a most delightful place 
 
The Heart of the Great Divide 
 
 to visit. I would advise every one in the East to visit it, 
 and I hope to revisit it myself. Some of those who go will 
 not only visit it, but will make their homes there, and the 
 course of empire will eventually Westward take its way. 
 But when it does, it will leave one individual behind it 
 clinging closely to the Atlantic seaboard. 
 
 Little old New York is good enough for him. 
 
 THE Biro