II.
ARMY-LIFE IN ARIZONA.
After finding that farming and railroad engineering were not exactly the employments he had fancied them to be, young Lockwood resumed his studies under the direction of his father. Not long afterward, however, he was seized with the idea of entering the army, and, at the very outset of this venture for a useful life, he was met with a blending of good and bad fortune. Securing the influence of many friends, he made a successful appeal to the President and the War Department. He received orders for an examination before the proper tribunal, and, out of thirty-eight young men who were examined in Washington, he passed No. 1. He also had a higher mark than any of those examined in other places at the same time; hence he was entitled to the highest commission as second lieutenant, and at one time it was resolved to give it to him; but, as the examinations were conducted in different places and before different boards, it was decided to settle the rank of the applicants by lot, and Lockwood’s number was forty, instead of one to which he was justly entitled. He was, however, promised a crack regiment, and hence became second lieutenant in the Twenty-third Infantry, then commanded by two officers who had gained distinction in the late war—Colonel Jefferson C. Davis and Lieutenant-Colonel George Crook. He soon after joined the recruiting station at New York for instruction.
The few letters that Lieutenant Lockwood wrote home from New York contained very graphic pictures of what he there observed. His reception at the recruiting-station was most cordial, one of the first things done there by the recruiting-officers, to his surprise, being to bring forth a demijohn of whisky; but from this hospitality he begged to be excused, only one or two other young men following his example.
After a service of several weeks at the recruiting-station in New York, he conducted recruits to the Territory of Arizona by the way of Panama. The party left New York in November, 1873, and, on reaching San Francisco, went by steamer to Fort Yuma, near the mouth of the Colorado River, and thence marched over the rugged and dusty plains of Arizona to McDowell Post, a distance of more than one hundred and fifty miles in the interior.
From the few letters that he wrote respecting his trip from New York to San Francisco, we gather the following items:
“Aspinwall is a dirty, sandy town, of no architectural pretensions. I cannot better describe it than by asking you to imagine Lockwoodville[1] with a lot of palm- and cocoanut-trees growing in the vacant lots, plenty of the sand and filth aforesaid, all the darkies of Annapolis sauntering around, plenty of children and many dogs, pigs, etc. However, I must do Aspinwall justice—it has a neat little church, a marble monument erected to some of its chief benefactors, and, what I should call, a remarkably fine statue of Columbus, in bronze. It has an enormous trade passing through it, from one ocean to the other, and is really a place of great importance to the mercantile world.”
“We reached Panama between four and five in the afternoon, after a very interesting ride across the country, and were immediately embarked for the Constitution—which lay two miles from shore—so that I had no opportunity of seeing Panama, except from the water. The ship left during the evening, and ever since has been ‘plowing the angry main’ toward San Francisco, excepting when stopping at some of the towns along the coast. We have seen several of these, and they are all of one type, that of Aspinwall, though on a much smaller scale. Some that I saw had not half a dozen wooden houses, but consisted merely of reed-huts covered with straw. One of these—Mazatlan—claims to have twenty thousand inhabitants, but does not appear to have more than one tenth of that number. All the tropical fruits were abundant at these places, and could be purchased for a trifle. The Constitution is a side-wheeler of four thousand tons, and has little motion, and, while sea-sickers are abundant, I am not one of them. I have gained ten pounds, and now weigh one hundred and sixty-one.”
Lockwood’s stay in San Francisco was too brief to afford him much opportunity for observation, but here is what he said of the Chinese: “I visited Chinatown this evening, and saw the Celestials in all their glory. I saw many strange and amusing sights in their stores and shops and along their streets, as they are very slow in adopting civilized customs. I send along with this some Chinese pictures which I purchased. I am very much pleased with San Francisco, and shall leave it with many regrets. A walk through the Chinese quarter is like a visit to some Chinese city on the other side of the Pacific.”
The few events of his trip along the coast to Yuma were to this effect: Soon after leaving the Golden Gate, he experienced a storm that was far from pacific in its character, far worse than any he had witnessed since leaving New York; he visited Magdalena Bay, which impressed him as a barren, miserable place, chiefly noted for its want of houses, and yet of some importance as the shipping port of a dye-wood found in that region; he also stopped at Carmen Island, where large quantities of salt were found in the dry bed of a lake, and at Cape St. Lucas, but brought away no favorable impressions from any of these remote places. With Yuma City he was better pleased, describing its houses as small, one-story affairs, built of adobe, more Mexican than American in character, and its streets as far more dusty than those of Washington City; and the mountains surrounding the city as very imposing. The Colorado reminded him of the Red River—the channel winding and running between great mud-flats and islands, all constantly changing, and abounding in many kinds of water-fowl. He was interested in the Indian inhabitants, whom he pitied for their poverty and degradation; occasionally seeing a number of squaws reclining like quadrupeds on the mud-flats or in front of their tiny oval huts.
The sojourn of Lieutenant Lockwood in Arizona lasted into the summer of 1874, and from the letters which he wrote home from Post McDowell may be gathered some interesting particulars, illustrating his habits of close observation in regard to men and events.