Richard Harding Davis

“ It is no more ancient history than love is an old story, for nothing is ancient and nothing is old which every new day teaches something that is fine and beautiful and brave. The Alamo is to the South-west what Independence Hall is to the United States, and Bunker Hill to the East; but the pride of it belongs to every American, whether he lives in Texas or in Maine. The battle of the Alamo was the event of greatest moment in the war between Mexico and the Texans, when Santa Anna was President, and the Texans were fighting for their independence. ”

“ The cowboys do not ride over its range with both legs at right angles to the saddle and shooting joyfully into the air with both guns at once. Neither do they offer 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 thoroughbred 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 finding his dearest illusions abruptly dispelled. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This reservation is in the Oklahoma Territory, but the Government has bought it from the Indians for a half-dollar an acre, and it is to be opened to white settlers. 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 intimately through the illustrated papers. ”

“ There are men who are just big enough to be leading citizens of a town of six thousand inhabitants, who are meant for nothing 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 morning and goes to bed with them at night. ”

“ 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 silence 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 cañon. ”

“ It is a country where there are no roses, but where everything that grows has a thorn. Where the cattle die of starvation, and where the troops had to hold up the solitary train that passes over it once a day, in true road-agent fashion, to take the water from its boilers that their horses might not drop for lack of it. ”

“ The cowboy cannot be overestimated as a picturesque figure; all that has been written about him and all the illustrations 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. ”

“ But they ought to know more and feel more for these equally likable men of the border posts, whose only knowledge of club life is the annual bill for dues, one of which, with supreme irony, arrived in Captain Hardie’s mail at a time when we had only bacon three times a day, and nothing but alkali water to silence the thirst that followed. To a young man it is rather pathetic to see another young man, with a taste and fondness for the pleasant things of this world, pull out his watch and hold it to the camp fire and say, “Just seven o’clock; people in God’s country are sitting down to dinner.” ”

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

“ Where there are no trees, nor running streams, nor rocks nor hills, but just an ocean of gray chaparral and white, chalky cañons or red, dusty trails. If you leave this trail for fifty yards, you may wander for twenty miles before you come to water or a ranch or another trail, and by that time the chaparral and cactus will have robbed you of your clothing, and left in its place a covering of needles, which break when one attempts to draw them out, and remain in the flesh to fester and swell the skin, and leave it raw and tender for a week. ”

“ This country, it is almost a pleasure to say, is America’s only in its possession. No white men, or so few that they are not as common as century-plants, live in it. It is Mexican in its people, its language, and its mode of life. The few who inhabit its wilderness are ranch-owners, and their shepherds and cowboys; and a ranch, which means a store and six or seven thatched adobe houses around it, is at the nearest three miles from the next ranch, and on an average twenty miles. As a rule, they move farther away the longer you ride towards them. ”

“ When you have seen a particular national costume only in pictures and photographs, it is always something 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 accustomed 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The post at Oklahoma City is not so badly off, even though it is built of logs and mud, for the town is near by, and the men get leave to visit it when they wish. But it serves to give one an idea of the many other one-company posts scattered in lonely distances along the borders of the frontier, where there are no towns, and where every man knows what the next man is going to say before he speaks—single companies which the Government has dropped out there, and which it has apparently forgotten, as a man forgets the book he has tucked away in his shelf to read on some rainy day. ”

“ Capitalists came every day, and were carried off 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 mountains 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 parchment sealed and signed. ”

“ San Antonio is the oldest of Texan cities, and possesses historical and picturesque show-places which in any other country but our own would be visited by innumerable American tourists prepared to fall down and worship. The citizens of San Antonio do not, as a rule, appreciate the historical values of their city; they are rather tired of them. They would prefer you should look at the new Post-office and the City Hall, and ride on the cable road. But the missions which lie just outside of the city are what will bring the Eastern man or woman to San Antonio, and not the new water-works. ”

“ A mild West show, which would be equally accurate, would surprise him even more; at least, if it was organized in the wildest part of Texas between San Antonio and Corpus Christi.
When he leaves this first city and touches at the border of Mexico, at Laredo, and starts forth again across the prairie of cactus and chaparral towards “Corpus,” he feels assured that at last he is done with parlor-cars and civilization; that he is about to see the picturesque and lawless side of the Texan existence, and that he has taken his life in his hands. ”

“ In the summer 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 Rio 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. ”

“ For those who find the level farm lands of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and the ranches of upper Texas, and the cactus of Southern Texas, and the rolling prairie of the Indian Territory interesting, should travel from Liverpool to London on either line they please to select, and they will understand the Englishman’s discontent. Hundreds of miles of level mud and snow followed by a hot and sandy soil and uncultivated farm lands are not as interesting as hedges of hawthorn or glimpses of the Thames or ivy-covered country-houses in parks of oak. ”

“ He could talk to his Mexican guides, because they, while they were under him, were not of his troop, and I believe it was this need to speak to some living soul that taught Captain Hardie to know Spanish as well as he did, and much more quickly than the best of tutors could have done in a year at the post.
The Eastern mind does not occupy itself much with these guardians of its borders; its idea of the soldier is the comfortable, clubable fellow they meet in Washington and New York, whose red, white, and blue button is all that marks him from the other clubable, likable men about him. ”

“ It is impossible to separate the official and social life of an army post. The commanding officer does not lose that dignity which doth hedge him 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 bail into the right-corner pocket, and in the evening at dress parade he should order the same lieutenant and his company into the lower right-hand corner of the parade at double-quick. ”