The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

Captain Hardie rode his detachment into camp on the third day, with horses so tired that they tried to lie down whenever there was a halt; and a horse must be very tired before he will do that. Captain Hardie’s riding-breeches were held together by the yellow stripes at their sides, and his hands were raw and swollen with the marks of the cactus needles, and his face burned and seared to a dull red. I had heard of him through the papers and from the officers at headquarters as the “Riding Captain,” and as the one who had during the Garza campaign been most frequently in the saddle, and least given to sending in detailed reports of his own actions. He had been absolutely alone for the two months he had been in the field. He was the father of his men, as all troop commanders must be; he had to doctor them when they were ill, to lend them money when the paymaster lost his way in the brush, to write their letters, and to listen to their grievances, and explain that it was not because they were not good soldiers that they could not go out and risk being shot on this or that particular scouting party—he could do all this for them, but he could not talk to them. He had to sit in front of his own camp fire and hear them laughing around theirs, and consider the loneliness of south-western Texas, which is the loneliness of the ocean at night. 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. 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.” And then a little later: “And now it’s eight o’clock, and they are going to the theatres. What is there at the theatres now?” And when I recalled the plays running in New York when I left it, the officers would select which one they would go to, with much grave deliberation, and then crawl in between two blankets and find the most comfortable angle at which a McClellan saddle will make a pillow.

The Garza campaign is only of interest here as it shows the work of the United States troops who were engaged in it. As for Caterino E. Garza himself, he may, by the time this appears in print, have been made President of Mexico, which is most improbable; or have been captured in the brush, which is more improbable; or he may have disappeared from public notice altogether. It is only of interest to the Eastern man to know that a Mexican ranch-owner and sometime desperado and politician living in south-west Texas proclaimed a revolution against the Government of Mexico, and that that Government requested ours to see that the neutrality laws existing between the two countries were not broken by the raising of troops on our side of the Rio Grande River, and that followers of this Garcia should not be allowed to cross through Texas on their way to Mexico. This our Government, as represented by the Department of Texas, which has its headquarters at San Antonio, showed its willingness to do by sending at first two troops of cavalry, and later six more, into darkest Texas, with orders to take prisoners any bands of revolutionists they might find there; and to arrest all individual revolutionists with a warrant sworn to by two witnesses. The country into which these eight troops were sent stretches for three hundred and sixty miles along the Rio Grande River, where it separates Mexico from Texas, and runs back a hundred and more miles east, making of this so-called Garza territory an area of five hundred square miles.

This particular country is the back-yard of the world. It is to the rest of the West what the ash-covered lots near High Bridge are to New York. It is the country which led General Sheridan to say that if he owned both places, he would rent Texas and live in hell. It is the strip of country over which we actually went to war with Mexico, and which gave General Sherman the opportunity of making the epigramme, which no one who has not seen the utter desolateness of the land can justly value, that we should go to war with Mexico again, and force her to take it back.

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. It is a country where the sun blinds and scorches at noon, and where the dew falls like a cold rain at night, and where one shivers in an overcoat at breakfast, and rides without coat or waistcoat and panting with the heat the same afternoon. 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.

WATER

Into this foreign country of five hundred square miles the eight United States cavalry troops of forty men each and two companies of infantry were sent to find Garza and his followers. The only means by which a man or horses or cows can be tracked in this desert is by the foot or hoof prints which they may leave in the sandy soil as they follow the trails already made or make fresh ones. To follow these trails it is necessary to have as a guide a man born in the brush, who has trailed cattle for a livelihood. The Mexican Government supplied the troops with some of their own people, who did not know the particular country into which they were sent, but who could follow a trail in any country. One or two of these, sometimes none, went with each troop. What our Government should have done was to supply each troop commander with five or six of these men, who could have gone out in search of trails, and reported at the camp whenever they had found a fresh one. By this means the troops could have been saved hundreds of miles of unnecessary marching and countermarching on “false alarms,” and the Government much money, as the campaign in that event would have been brought much more rapidly to a conclusion.

But the troop commanders in the field had no such aids. They had to ride forth whenever so ordered to do by the authorities at headquarters, some two hundred miles from the scene of the action, who had in turn received their information from the Mexican general on the other side of the Rio Grande. This is what made doing their duty, as represented by obeying orders, such a difficult thing to the troops in the Garza territory. They knew before they saddled their horses that they were going out on a wild-goose chase to wear out their horses and their own patience, and to accomplish nothing beyond furnishing Garza’s followers with certain satisfaction in seeing a large body of men riding solemnly through a dense underbrush in a blinding sun to find a trait which a Mexican general had told an American general would be sure to lead them to Garza, and news of which had reached them a week after whoever had made the trail had passed over it. They could imagine, as they trotted in a long, dusty line through the chaparral, as conspicuous marks on the plain as a prairie-wagon, that Garza or his men were watching them from under a clump of cactus on some elevation in the desert, and that he would say:

“Ah! the troops are out again, I see. Who is it to-day—Hardie, Chase, or Hunter? Lend me your field-glass. Ah! it is Hardie. He is a good rider. I hope he will not get a sunstroke.”