The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

FORT HOUSTON, AT SAN ANTONIO—OFFICERS’ QUARTERS

Fort Sill is really a summer resort; at least, that is what the officers say. I was not there in summer, but it made a most delightful winter resort. There is really no reason at all why people should not go to these interior army posts, as well as to the one at Point Comfort, and spend the summer or winter there, either for their health or for their pleasure. They can reach Fort Sill, for instance, in a three-days’ journey from New York, and then there are two days of staging, and you are in a beautiful valley, with rivers running over rocky beds, with the most picturesque Indians all about you, and with red and white flags wigwagging from the parade to the green mountain-tops, and good looking boy-officers to explain the new regulations, and the best of hunting and fishing.

THE BARRACKS, FORT HOUSTON

I do not know how the people of Fort Sill will like having their home advertised in this way, but it seems a pity others should not enjoy following Colonel Jones over the prairie after jack-rabbits. We started four of them in one hour, and that is a very good sport when you have a field of twenty men and women and a pack of good hounds. The dogs of Colonel Jones were not as fast as the rabbits, but they were faster than the horses, and so neither dogs nor rabbits were hurt; and that is as it should be, for, as Colonel Jones says, if you caught the rabbits, there would be no more rabbits to catch. Of the serious side of the life of an army post, of the men and of the families of the men who are away on dangerous field service, I have said nothing, because there was none of it when I was there, nor of the privations of those posts up in the far Northwest, where snow and ice are almost a yearly accompaniment, and where the mail and the papers, which are such a mockery as an exchange for the voices of real people, come only twice a month.

It would be an incomplete story of life at a post which said nothing of the visits of homesickness, which, many strong men in the West have confessed to me, is the worst sickness with which man is cursed. And it is an illness which comes at irregular periods to those of the men who know and who love the East. It is not a homesickness for one home or for one person, but a case of that madness which seized Private Ortheris, only in a less malignant form, and in the officers’ quarters. An impotent protest against the immutability of time and of space is one of its symptoms—a sick disgust of the blank prairie, blackened by fire as though it had been drenched with ink, the bare parade-ground, the same faces, the same stories, the same routine and detailed life, which promises no change or end; and with these a longing for streets and rows of houses that seemed commonplace before, of architecture which they had dared to criticise, and which now seems fairer than the lines of the Parthenon, a craving to get back to a place where people, whether one knows them or not, are hurrying home from work under the electric lights, to the rush of the passing hansoms and the cries of the “last editions,” and the glare of the shop-windows, to the life of a great city that is as careless of the exile’s love for it as is the ocean to one who exclaims upon its grandeur from the shore; a soreness of heart which makes men while it lasts put familiar photographs out of sight, which makes the young lieutenants, when the band plays a certain waltz on the parade at sundown, bite their chin-straps, and stare ahead more fixedly than the regulations require. Some officers will confess this to you, and some will not. It is a question which is the happier, he who has no other scenes for which to care, and who is content, or he who eats his heart out for a while, and goes back on leave at last.

VIII
THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE

VIII
THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE

THE City of Denver probably does more to keep the Eastern man who is mining or ranching from returning once a year to his own people, and from spending his earnings at home, than any other city in the West. It lays its charm upon him, and stops him half-way, and he decides that the journey home is rather long, and puts it off until the next year, and again until the next, until at last he buys a lot and builds a house, and only returns to the East on his wedding journey. Denver appeals to him more than do any of these other cities, for the reason that the many other Eastern men who have settled there are turning it into a thoroughly Eastern city—a smaller New York in an encircling range of white-capped mountains. If you look up at its towering office buildings, you can easily imagine yourself, were it not for the breadth of the thoroughfare, in down-town New York; and though the glimpse of the mountains at the end of the street in place of the spars and mast-heads of the East and North rivers undeceives you, the mud at your feet serves to help out the delusion. Denver is a really beautiful city, but—and this, I am sure, few people in New York will believe—it has the worst streets in the country. Their mud or their dust, as the season wills it, is the one blot on the city’s fair extent; it is as if the City Fathers had served a well-appointed dinner on a soiled table-cloth. But they say they will arrange all that in time.