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[4] 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.
an eastern man is apt to cross the continent for the first time with mixed sensations of pride at the size of his country, and shame at his ignorance concerning it. he remembers 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 himself and others nearer home.
his first practical surprise perhaps will be when he discovers 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. the 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 refreshments” to watching the conductor. but this minor and[5] merely nominal change will not distress him half so seriously as will the sudden and actual disarrangement of his dinner hour from seven at night to two in the afternoon, though even this will become 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 newspaper man. but they do not represent the feeling of their readers, and in that they give a wrong and unfortunate impression 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 difficult to explain away the books. they are too obvious and too much in evidence to be accidental. to judge from them, one would imagine that boccaccio, rabelais, zola, and such things as velvet vice and old sleuth, are all that is known to the south-west of literature. it may be that the booksellers only keep them for[6] 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 various 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 differences 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 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. 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 listless 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 dignitary say, complacently: “sho! that’s only ‘will’ scheeley practisin’! he’s a dep’ty sheriff.”
[7]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 broadway 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 explained 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 arrested 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 trigger,”[8] 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 persons unknown, and killed. a mexican brought the news of this to our camp the night after the murder, and described 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 considered it to be an unfortunate event of very common occurrence 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 indignation meeting, and passed resolutions condemning the county officials for not suppressing crime, and petitioning the governor of the 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-five 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 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.
the rangers enlist for a year under one of eight captains, and the state pays them a dollar a day and supplies them with rations and ammunition. they bring with them[12] 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 constabulary 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 detached 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 complete 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[13] general had 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, listening 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 something 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 off in the prairie, and sheriff 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[14] little one-penny sheriff get in the first shot on you.” he could afford to say this, because he had been a ranger himself, 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 instantaneous 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 dissatisfied 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[15] guessed, the trial was more to show captain brooks’s quickness rather than his marksmanship, and i paid no attention to the target, but devoted myself assiduously to manipulating 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 comparison, 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-office and the city hall, and ride on the cable road. but the missions which lie just outside of the city are what will bring the eastern man or woman to san antonio, and not the new water-works. there are four of these missions, the two largest and most interesting being the mission de la conception, of which the corner-stone was laid in 1730, and the mission san josé, the carving, or what remains of it, in the latter being wonderfully rich and effective. the spaniards were forced to abandon the missions on account of the hostility of the indians, and they have been occupied at different times since by troops and bats, and left to the mercies of the young men from “rochester, n. y.,” and[16] the young women from “dallas, texas,” who have carved their immortal names over their walls just as freely as though they were the pyramids of egypt or blarney castle. san antonio is a great place for invalids, on account of its moderate climate, and a most satisfactory place in which to spend a week or two in the winter whether one is an invalid or not. there is the third largest army post in the country at the edge of the city, where there is much to see and many interesting people to know, and there is a good club, and cock-fighting on sunday, and a first-rate theatre all the week. at night the men sit outside of the hotels, and the plazas are filled with mexicans and their open-air restaurants, and the lights of these and the brigandish appearance of those who keep them are very unlike anything one may see at home.
all that the city really needs now is a good hotel and a more proper pride in its history and the monuments to it. the man who seems to appreciate this best is william corner, whose book on san antonio is a most valuable historical authority.
a few years ago one would have said that san antonio was enjoying a boom. but you cannot use that expression now, for the western men have heard that a boom, no matter how quickly it rises, often comes down just as quickly, and so forcibly that it makes a hole in the ground where castles in the air had formerly stood. so if you wish to please a western man by speaking well of his city (and you cannot please him more in any other way), you must say that it is enjoying a “steady, healthy growth.” san antonio is enjoying a steady, healthy growth.
it is quite as impossible to write comprehensively of south-western texas in one article as it is to write such an[17] article and say nothing of the alamo. and the alamo, in the event of any hasty reader’s possible objection, is not ancient history. it is no more ancient history than love is an old story, for nothing is ancient and nothing is old which every new day teaches something that is fine and beautiful and brave. the alamo is to the south-west what independence hall is to the united states, and bunker hill to the east; but the pride of it belongs to every american, whether he lives in texas or in maine. the battle of the alamo was the event of greatest moment in the war between mexico and the texans, when santa anna was president, and the texans were fighting for their independence. and the stone building to which the mexicans laid siege, and in which the battle was fought, stands to-day facing a plaza in the centre of san antonio.
there are hideous wooden structures around it, and others not so hideous—modern hotels and the new post-office, on which the mortar is hardly yet dry. but in spite of these the grace and dignity which the monks gave it in 1774, raise it above these modern efforts that tower above it, and dwarf them. they are collecting somewhat slowly a fund to pay for the erection of a monument to the heroes of the alamo. as though they needed a monument, with these battered walls still standing and the marks of the bullets on the casements! no architect can build better than that. no architect can introduce that feature. the architects of the alamo were building the independence of a state as wide in its boundaries as the german empire.
the story of the alamo is a more than thrice-told one, and sidney lanier has told it so well that whoever would write of it must draw on him for much of their material, and[18] must accept his point of view. but it cannot be told too often, even though it is spoiled in the telling.
on the 23d of february, 1836, general santa anna himself, with four thousand mexican soldiers, marched into the town of san antonio. in the old mission of the alamo were the town’s only defenders, one hundred and forty-five men, under captain travis, a young man twenty-eight years old. with him were davy crockett, who had crossed over from his own state to help those who were freeing theirs, and colonel bowie (who gave his name to a knife, which name our government gave later to a fort), who was wounded and lying on a cot.
their fortress and quarters and magazine was the mission, their artillery fourteen mounted pieces, but there was little ammunition. santa anna demanded unconditional surrender, and the answer was ten days of dogged defence, and skirmishes by day and sorties for food and water by night. the mexicans lost heavily during the first days of the siege, but not one inside of the alamo was killed. early in the week travis had despatched couriers for help, and the defenders of the mission were living in the hope of re-enforcements; but four days passed, and neither couriers returned nor re-enforcements came. on the fourth day colonel fannin with three hundred men and four pieces of artillery started forth from goliad, but put back again for want of food and lack of teams. the garrison of the alamo never knew of this. on the 1st of march captain john w. smith, who has found teams, and who has found rations, brings an offering of thirty-two men from gonzales, and leads them safely into the fort. they have come with forced marches to their own graves; but they do not know that, and the garrison, now one hundred and seventy-two strong, against four thousand mexicans, continues its desperate sorties and its desperate defence.
on the 3d of march, 1836, there is a cessation in the bombardment, and captain travis draws his men up into single rank and takes his place in front of them.
he tells them that he has deceived them with hopes of re-enforcements—false hopes based on false promises of help from the outside—but he does not blame those who failed him; he makes excuses for them; they have tried to reach him, no doubt, but have been killed on the way. sidney lanier quotes this excusing of those who had deserted him at the very threshold of death as best showing the fineness of travis, and the poet who has judged the soldier so truly has touched here one of the strongest points of this story of great heroism.
captain travis tells them that all that remains to them is the choice of their death, and that they have but to decide in which manner of dying they will best serve their country. they can surrender and be shot down mercilessly, they can make a sortie and be butchered before they have gained twenty yards, or they can die fighting to the last, and killing their enemies until that last comes.
he gives them their choice, and then stooping, draws a line with the point of his sword in the ground from the left to the right of the rank.
“and now,” he says, “every man who is determined to remain here and to die with me will come to me across that line.”
tapley holland was the first to cross. he jumped it with a bound, as though it were a rubicon. “i am ready to die for my country,” he said.
and then all but one man, named rose, marched over to[22] the other side. colonel bowie, lying wounded in his cot, raised himself on his elbow. “boys,” he said, “don’t leave me. won’t some of you carry me across?”
and those of the sick who could walk rose from the bunks and tottered across the line; and those who could not walk were carried. rose, who could speak spanish, trusted to this chance to escape, and scaling the wall of the alamo, dropped into a ditch on the other side, and crawled, hidden by the cactus, into a place of safety. through him we know what happened before that final day came. he had his reward.
three days after this, on the morning of the 6th of march, santa anna brought forward all of his infantry, supported by his cavalry, and stormed the fortress. the infantry came up on every side at once in long, black solid rows, bearing the scaling-ladders before them, and encouraged by the press of great numbers about them.
but the band inside the mission drove them back, and those who held the ladders dropped them on the ground and ran against the bayonets of their comrades. a second time they charged into the line of bullets, and the second time they fell back, leaving as many dead at the foot of the ladders as there were standing at bay within the walls. but at the third trial the ladders are planted, and mexicans after mexicans scale them, and jump down into the pit inside, hundreds and hundreds of them, to be met with bullets and then by bayonet-thrusts, and at last with desperate swinging of the butt, until the little band grows smaller and weaker, and is driven up and about and beaten down and stamped beneath the weight of overwhelming and unending numbers. they die fighting on their knees, hacking up desperately as they are beaten and pinned down by[23] a dozen bayonets, bowie leaning on his elbow and shooting from his cot, crockett fighting like a panther in the angle of the church wall, and travis with his back against the wall to the west. the one hundred and seventy-two men who had held four thousand men at bay for two sleepless weeks are swept away as a dam goes that has held back a flood, and the mexicans open the church doors from the inside and let in their comrades and the sunshine that shows them horrid heaps of five hundred and twenty-two dead mexicans, and five hundred more wounded.
there are no wounded among the texans; of the one hundred and seventy-two who were in the alamo there are one hundred and seventy-two dead.
with an example like this to follow, it was not difficult to gain the independence of texas; and whenever sam houston rode before his men, crying, “remember the alamo!” the battle was already half won.
it was not a cry wholly of revenge, i like to think. it was rather the holding up of the cross to the crusaders, and crying, “by this sign we conquer.” it was a watchword to remind men of those who had suffered and died that their cause might live.
and so, when we leave texas, we forget the little things that may have tried our patience and understanding there, we forgive the desolation of the south-west, its cactus and dying cattle, we forget the dinners in the middle of the day and the people’s passing taste in literature, and we remember the alamo.
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.”
