In the autumn of 1912 I stood on this historic spot, still bare of grass, and marked on two sides by remains of the walls, in some places a mere low mound, and in others a wall four feet high, in which the adobe bricks were still recognizable. Here and there were seen old bits of iron, the fragment of a rusted horseshoe, of a rake, and a bit of cast-iron which had been part of a stove and bore letters and figures which could be made out as portions of the words “St. Louis, 1859.”
The land on which the fort stood was owned by a public-spirited citizen, Mr. A. E. Reynolds, of Denver, Col., and here within the walls of the old fort he has placed a granite stone to mark its site and to commemorate its history. He has given the land over to the care of the Daughters of the American Revolution to be used as a public park for the counties of Otero and Bent, Colo.
William Bent, whose life was devoted to the upbuilding of the Southwest, will always be remembered as the one who placed on that fertile and productive empire the stamp “settled.”
GEORGE FREDERICK RUXTON, HUNTER
Some time about 1840 George Frederick Ruxton, a young Englishman, was serving in Canada as an officer in a British regiment. In 1837, when only seventeen years of age, he had left Sandhurst to enlist as a volunteer in the service of Spain, where he served with gallantry and distinction in the civil wars and received from Queen Isabella II the cross of the first class of the Order of San Fernando. The monotony of garrison duty in Canada soon palled on one who had taken part in more stirring scenes, and before long he resigned his commission in his regiment and sought new fields of adventure.
He was a man fond of action and eager to see new things. His earliest project was to cross Africa, and this he attempted, but without success.
He next turned toward Mexico as a field for adventure, and he has painted a fascinating picture, both of life there at the time of the Mexican War and of life in the mountains to the north. The two small volumes of his writings are now out of print, but they are well worth reading by those who desire to learn of the early history of a country that is now well known, and which within fifty years has changed from a region without population to one which is a teeming hive of industry.
In Ruxton’s Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains is a singularly vivid account of the author’s journeyings from England, by way of the Madeira Islands, Barbadoes and others of the Antilles, to Cuba, and so to Vera Cruz, more fully called the Rich City of the True Cross; or as often, and quite aptly—from the plague of yellow fever which so constantly ravaged it—the City of the Dead. From Vera Cruz he travelled north, passing through Mexico, whose coast was then blockaded by the gringoes of North America, then through the country ravaged by marauding Indians, and at last, leaving Chihuahua and crossing by way of El Paso into New Mexico, he reached what is now the Southwestern United States. Through this country he passed—in winter—north through the mountains, meeting the trappers and mountaineers of those days and the Indians as well, crossed the plains, and finally reached St. Louis, and from there passed east to New York.