The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

After the quartermaster, the adjutant, to the mind of the civilian at least, is the most superior being in the post. He is a lieutenant selected by the colonel to act as his conscience-keeper and letter-writer, and to convey his commands to the other officers. It is his proud privilege to sit in the colonel’s own room and sign papers, and to dictate others to his assistant non-coms, and it is one of his duties to oversee the guard-mount, and to pick out the smartest-looking soldier to act as the colonel’s orderly for the day. You must understand that as the colonel’s orderly does not have to remain on guard at night, the men detailed for guard duty vie with each other in presenting an appearance sufficiently brilliant to attract the adjutant’s eye, and as they all look exactly alike, the adjutant has to be careful. He sometimes spends five long minutes and much mental effort in going from one end of the ranks to the other to see if Number Three’s boots are better blacked than Number Two’s, and in trying to decide whether the fact that Murphy’s gunbarrel is oilier than Cronin’s should weigh against the fact that Cronin’s gloves are new, while Murphy’s are only fresh from the wash, both having tied on the condition of their cartridges, which have been rubbed to look like silver, and which must be an entirely superfluous nicety to the Indian who may eventually be shot with them. This is one of the severest duties of an adjutant’s routine, and after having accompanied one of them through one of these prize exhibitions, I was relieved to hear him confess his defeat by telling the sergeant that Cronin and Murphy could toss for it. Another perquisite of the adjutant’s is his right to tell his brother officers at mess in a casual way that they must act as officer of the day or officer of the guard, or relieve Lieutenant Quay while he goes quail-hunting, or take charge of Captain Blank’s troop of raw recruits until the captain returns to their relief. To be able to do this to men who outrank you, and who are much older than yourself, and just as though the orders came from you direct, must be a great pleasure, especially as the others are not allowed the satisfaction of asking, “Who says I must?” or, “What’s the matter with your doing it yourself?” These are the officials of the post; the unofficials, the wives and the children, make the social life whatever it is.

UNITED STATES CAVALRYMAN IN FULL DRESS

There are many in the East who think life at an army post is one of discomfort and more or less monotony, relieved by petty gossip and flirtations. Of course one cannot tell in a short visit whether or not the life might become monotonous, though one rather suspects it would, but the discomforts are quite balanced by other things which we cannot get in the city. Of jealousy and gossip I saw little. I was told by one officer’s wife that to the railroads was due the credit of the destruction of flirtations at garrisons; and though I had heard of many great advances and changes of conditions and territories brought about by the coming of the railroads, this was the first time I had ever heard they had interfered with the course of more or less true love. She explained it by saying that in the days when army posts lay afar from the track of civilization the people were more dependent upon one another, and that then there may have existed Mrs. Hauksbees and Mrs. Knowles, but that to-day the railroads brought in fresh air and ideas from all over the country, and that the officers were constantly being exchanged, and others coming and going on detached service, and that visitors from the bigger outside world were appearing at all times.

The life impresses a stranger as such a peaceful sort of an existence that he thinks that must be its chief and great attraction, and that which makes the army people, as they call themselves, so well content. It sounds rather absurd to speak of an army post of all places in the world as peaceful; but the times are peaceful now, and there is not much work for the officers to do, and they enjoy that blessing which is only to be found in the army and in the Church of Rome—of having one’s life laid out for one by others, and in doing what one is told, and in not having to decide things for one’s self. You are sure of your home, of your income, and you know exactly what is going to be your work a month or five years later. You are not dependent on the rise of a certain stock, nor the slave of patients or clients, and you have more or less responsibility according to your rank, and responsibility is a thing every man loves. If he has that, and his home and children, a number of congenial people around him, and good hunting and fishing, it would seem easy for him to be content. It is different with his wife. She may unconsciously make life very pleasant for her husband or very uncomfortable, in ways that other women may not. If she leaves him and visits the East to see the new gowns, or the new operas, or her own people, she is criticised as not possessing a truly wifely spirit, and her husband is secretly pitied; and he knows it, and resents it for his wife’s sake. While, on the other hand, if she remains always at the post, he is called a selfish fellow, and his wife’s people at home in the East think ill of him for keeping her all to himself in that wilderness.

UNITED STATES MILITARY POST—INFANTRY PARADE

The most surprising thing about the frontier army posts, to my mind, was the amount of comfort and the number of pretty trifles one found in the houses, especially when one considered the distance these trifles—such as billiard-tables for the club or canteen, and standing-lamps for the houses on the line—had come. At several dinners, at posts I had only reached after two days’ journey by stage, the tables were set exactly as they would have been in New York City with Sherry’s men in the kitchen. There were red candle-shades, and salted almonds and ferns in silver centre-pieces, and more forks than one ever knows what to do with, and all the rest of it. I hope the army people will not resent this, and proudly ask, “What did he expect to find?” but I am sure that is not the idea of a frontier post we have received in the East. There was also something delightfully novel in the table-talk, and in hearing one pretty, slight woman, in a smart décolleté gown, casually tell how her husband and his men had burned the prairie grass around her children and herself, and turned aside a prairie fire that towered and roared around them, and another of how her first child had been seized with convulsions in a stage-coach when they were snow-bound eighty miles from the post and fifty miles from the nearest city, and how she borrowed a clasp-knife from one of the passengers with which he had been cutting tobacco, and lanced the baby’s gums, and so saved his life. There was another hostess who startled us by saying, cheerfully, that the month of June at her last post was the most unpleasant in the year, because it was so warm that it sometimes spoiled the ice for skating, and that the snow in April reached to the sloping eaves of the house; also the daughter of an Indian fighter, while pouring out at a tea one day, told calmly of an Indian who had sprung at her with a knife, and seized her horse’s head, and whom she had shaken off by lashing the pony on to his hind legs. She could talk the Sioux language fluently, and had lived for the greater part of her life eight hundred miles from a railroad. Is it any wonder you find all the men in an army post married when there are women who can adapt themselves as gracefully to snow-shoes at Fort Brady as to the serious task of giving dinners at Fort Houston?

Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio is one of the three largest posts in the country, and is in consequence one of the heavens towards which the eyes of the army people turn. It is only twenty minutes from the city, and the weather is mild throughout the year, and in the summer there are palm-trees around the houses; and white uniforms—which are unknown to the posts farther north, and which are as pretty as they are hard to keep clean—make the parade-ground look like a cricket-field. They have dances at this post twice a month, the regimental band furnishing the music, and the people from town helping out the sets, and the officers in uniforms with red, white, and yellow stripes. A military ball is always very pretty, and the dancing-hall at Houston is decorated on such occasions with guidons and flags, and palms and broad-leaved plants, which grow luxuriously everywhere, and cost nothing. I went directly from this much-desired post to the little one at Oklahoma City, which is a one-company post, and where there are no semi-monthly dances or serenades by the band; but where, on the other hand, the officers do not stumble over an enlisted man at every step who has to be saluted, and who stands still before them, as though he meant to “hold them up” or ask his way, until he is recognized. The post at Oklahoma City is not so badly off, even though it is built of logs and mud, for the town is near by, and the men get leave to visit it when they wish. But it serves to give one an idea of the many other one-company posts scattered in lonely distances along the borders of the frontier, where there are no towns, and where every man knows what the next man is going to say before he speaks—single companies which the Government has dropped out there, and which it has apparently forgotten, as a man forgets the book he has tucked away in his shelf to read on some rainy day. They will probably find they are remembered when the rainy days come. Fort Sill, in the Oklahoma Territory, is one of the eight-company posts. I visited several of these, and liked them better than those nearer the cities; but then I was not stationed there. The people at these smaller isolated posts seem to live more contentedly together. There is not enough of them to separate into cliques or sets, as they did at the larger stations, and they were more dependent one upon another. There was a night when one officer on the line gave a supper, and another (one of his guests) said he wished to contribute the cigars. There had not been an imported cigar in that post for a year at least, and when Captain Ellis brought in a fresh box with two paper stamps about it, and the little steamer engraved on the gray band met our eyes, and we knew they had paid the customs duty, there was a most unseemly cheer and undignified haste to have the box opened. And then each man laid his cigar beside his plate, and gazed and sniffed at it, and said “Ah!” and beamed on every one else, and put off lighting it as long as he possibly could. That was a memorable night, and I shall never sufficiently thank Captain Ellis for that cigar, and for showing me how little we of the East appreciate the little things we have always with us, and which become so important when they are taken away.