The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

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.

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 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 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.”