Davis The West from A Car Window

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-98744-942-0
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 130 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

Excerpt: It 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 railroad 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 loneliness, 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. If I could travel over the West for three years, I might write of it with authority; but when my time is limited to 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 in the cities of the Eastern States, but the moral they draw must be their own, and can differ from mine as widely as they please.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Davis, Richard Harding

Leseproben

II
OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER
A ROLLING, jerky train made up of several freight and one passenger car, the latter equally divided, “For Whites” and “For Negroes”—which in the south-west of Texas reads “Mexicans”—dropped my baggage at Pena station, and rolled off across the prairie, rocking from side to side like a line of canal-boats in a rough sea. It seemed like the last departing link of civilization. There was the freight station itself; beyond the track a leaky water-tank, a wooden store surrounded with piles of raw, foul-smelling hides left in exchange for tobacco and meal, a few thatched Mexican huts, and the prairie. That stretched on every side to the horizon, level and desolate, and rising and falling in the heat. Beneath was a red sandy soil covered with cactus and bunches of gray, leafless brush, marked with the white skeletons of cattle, and overhead a sun at white heat, and heavily moving buzzards wheeling in circles or balancing themselves with outstretched wings between the hot sky above and the hot, red soil below. Across this desert came slowly Trumpeter Tyler, of Troop G, Third Cavalry, mounted on the white horse which only trumpeters affect, and as white as the horse itself from the dust of the trail. He did not look like the soldiers I had seen at San Antonio. His blue shirt was wide open at the breast, his riding-breeches were bare at the knee, and the cactus and chaparral had torn his blouse into rags and ribbons. He pushed his wide-brimmed hat back from his forehead and breathed heavily with the heat. Captain Hardie’s camp, he panted, lay twenty-five miles to the west. He had come from there to see if the field tents and extra rations were ever going to arrive from the post, and as he had left, the captain had departed also with a detachment in search of Garza on a fresh trail. “And he means to follow it,” said Trumpeter Tyler, “if it takes him into Mexico.” So it was doubtful whether the visitor from the East would see the troop commander for several days; but if he nevertheless wished to push on to the camp, Trumpeter Tyler would be glad to show him the way. Not only would he show him the way, but he would look over his kit for him, and select such things as the visitor would need in the brush. Not such things as the visitor might want, but such things as the visitor would need. For in the brush necessities become luxuries, and luxuries are relics of an effete past and of places where tradition tells of pure water and changes of raiment, and, some say, even beds. Neither Trumpeter Tyler, nor Captain Francis H. Hardie, nor any of the officers or men of the eight troops of cavalry on field service in south-west Texas had seen such things for three long months of heat by day and cold by night, besides a blizzard of sleet and rain, that kept them trembling with cold for a fortnight. And it was for this reason that the visitor from the East chose to see the United States troops as they were in the field, and to tell about the way they performed their duty there, rather than as he found them at the posts, where there is at least a canteen and papers not more than a week old. TRUMPETER TYLER Trumpeter Tyler ran his hand haughtily through what I considered a very sensibly-chosen assortment of indispensable things, and selected a handful which he placed on one side. “You think I had better not take those?” I suggested. “That’s all you can take,” said the trooper, mercilessly. “You must think of the horse.” Then he led the way to the store, and pointed out the value of a tin plate, a tin cup, and an iron knife and fork, saddle-bags, leather leggings to keep off the needles of the cactus, a revolver, and a blanket. It is of interest to give Trumpeter Tyler’s own outfit, as it was that of every other man in the troop, and was all that any one of them had had for two months. He carried it all on his horse, and it consisted of a blanket, an overcoat, a carbine, a feed-bag, lariat and iron stake, a canteen, saddle-bags filled with rations on one side and a change of under-clothing on the other, a shelter-tent done up in a roll, a sword, and a revolver, with rounds of ammunition for it and the carbine worn in a belt around the waist. All of this, with the saddle, weighed about eighty pounds, and when the weight of a man is added to it, one can see that it is well, as Trumpeter Tyler suggested, to think of the horse. Troop G had been ordered out for seven days’ field service on the 15th of December, and it was then the 24th of January, and the clothes and equipments they had had with them when they started at midnight from Fort MacIntosh for that week of hard riding were all they had had with them since. But the hard riding had continued. Trumpeter Tyler proved that day not only my guide, but a philosopher, and when night came on, a friend. He was very young, and came from Virginia, as his slow, lazy voice showed; and he had played, in his twenty-three years, the many parts of photographer, compositor, barber, cook, musician, and soldier. He talked of these different callings as we walked our horses over the prairie, and, out of deference to myself and my errand, of writing. He was a somewhat general reader, and volunteered his opinion of the works of Rudyard Kipling, Laura Jean Libbey, Captain Charles King, and others with confident familiarity. He recognized no distinctions in literature; they had all written a book, therefore they were, in consequence, in exactly the same class. Of Mr. Kipling he said, with an appreciative shake of the head, that “he knew the private soldier from way back;” of Captain Charles King, that he wrote for the officers; and of Laura Jean Libbey, that she was an authoress whose books he read “when there really wasn’t nothing else to do.” I doubt if one of Mr. Kipling’s own heroes could have made as able criticisms. When night came on and the stars came out, he dropped the soldier shop and talked of religion and astronomy. The former, he assured me earnestly, was much discussed by the privates around the fire at night, which I could better believe after I saw how near the stars get and how wide the world seems when there is only a blanket between you and the heavens, and when there is a general impression prevailing that you are to be shot at from an ambush in the morning. Of astronomy he showed a very wonderful knowledge, and awakened my admiration by calling many stars by strange and ancient names—an admiration which was lessened abruptly when he confessed that he had been following some other than the North Star for the last three miles, and that we were lost. It was a warm night, and I was so tired with the twenty-five-miles ride on a Mexican saddle—which is as comfortable as a soap-box turned edges up—that the idea of lying out on the ground did not alarm me. But Trumpeter Tyler’s honor was at stake. He had his reputation as a trailer to maintain, and he did so ably by lighting matches and gazing knowingly at the hoof-marks of numerous cattle, whose bones, I was sure, were already whitening on the plain or journeying East in a refrigerator-car, but which he assured me were still fresh, and must lead to the ranch near which the camp was pitched. And so, after four hours’ aimless trailing through the chaparral, when only the thorns of the cactus kept us from falling asleep off our horses, we stumbled into two smouldering fires, a ghostly row of little shelter-tents, and a tall figure in a long overcoat, who clicked a carbine and cried, “Halt, and dismount!” I was somewhat doubtful of my reception in the absence of the captain, and waited, very wide awake now, while they consulted together in whispers, and then the sentry led me to one of the little tents and kicked a sleeping form violently, and told me to crawl in and not to mind reveille in the morning, but to sleep on as long as I wished. I did not know then that I had Trumpeter Tyler’s bed, and that he was sleeping under a wagon, but I was gratefully conscious of his “bunkie’s” tucking me in as tenderly as though I were his son, and of his not sharing, but giving me more than my share of the blankets. And I went to sleep so quickly that it was not until the morning that I found what I had drowsily concluded must be the roots of trees under me, to be “bunkie’s” sabre and carbine. The American private, as he showed himself during the three days in which I was his guest, and afterwards, when Captain Hardie had returned and we went scouting together, proved to be a most intelligent and unpicturesque individual. He was intelligent, because he had, as a rule, followed some other calling before he entered the service, and he was not picturesque, because he looked on “soldiering” merely as a means of livelihood, and had little or no patriotic or sentimental feeling concerning it. This latter was not true of the older men. They had seen real war either during the rebellion or in the Indian campaigns, which are much more desperate affairs than the Eastern mind appreciates, and they were fond of the service and proud of it. One of the corporals in G Troop, for instance, had been honorably discharged a year before with the rank of first sergeant, and had re-enlisted as a private rather than give up the service, of which he found he was more fond than he had imagined when he had left it. And in K Troop was an even more notable instance in a man who had been retired on three-fourths pay, having served his thirty years, and who had returned to the troop to act as Captain Hunter’s “striker,” or man of all work, and who bore the monotony of the barracks and the hardships of field service rather than lose the uniform and the...