The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

You may, while travelling in the West, enjoy the picturesque excitement of being held up by train robbers, but you are in much more constant danger of being held up by commercial travellers and native Western men, who demand that you stand and deliver your name, your past history, your business, and your excuse for being where you are. Neither did I find the West teeming with “characters.” I heard of them, and indeed the stories of this or that pioneer or desperado are really the most vivid and most interesting memories I have of the trip. But these men have been crowded out, or have become rich and respectably commonplace, or have been shot, as the case may be. I met the men who had lynched them or who remembered them, but not the men themselves. They no longer overrun the country; they disappeared with the buffalo, and the West is glad of it, but it is disappointing to the visitor. The men I met were men of business, who would rather talk of the new court-house with the lines of the sod still showing around it than of the Indian fights and the killing of the bad men of earlier days when there was no court-house, and when the vigilance committee was a necessary evil. These were “well-posted” and “well-informed” citizens, and if there is one being I dread and fly from, it is a well-posted citizen.

POLO ABOVE THE SNOW-LINE AT COLORADO SPRINGS

The men who are of interest in the West, and of whom most curious stories might be told, are the Eastern men and the Englishmen who have sought it with capital, or who have been driven there to make their fortunes. Some one once started a somewhat unprofitable inquiry as to what became of all the lost pins. That is not nearly so curious as what becomes of all the living men who drop suddenly out of our acquaintanceship or our lives, and who are not missed, but who are nevertheless lost. I know now what becomes of them; they all go West. I met some men here whom I was sure I had left walking Fifth Avenue, and who told me, on the contrary, that they had been in the West for the last two years. They had once walked Fifth Avenue, but they dropped out of the procession one day, and no one missed them, and they are out here enjoying varying fortunes. The brakesman on a freight and passenger train in Southern Texas was a lower-class man whom I remembered at Lehigh University as an expert fencer; the conductor on the same train was from the same college town; the part owner of a ranch, whom I supposed I had left looking over the papers in the club, told me he had not been in New York for a year, and that his partner was “Jerry” Black, who, as I trust no one has forgotten, was one of Princeton’s half-backs, and who I should have said, had any one asked me, was still in Pennsylvania. Another man whom I remembered as a “society” reporter on a New York paper, turned up in a white apron as a waiter at a hotel in ——. I was somewhat embarrassed at first as to whether or not he would wish me to recognize him, but he settled my doubts by winking at me over his heavily-loaded tray, as much as to say it was a very good joke, and that he hoped I was appreciating it to its full value. We met later in the street, and he asked me with the most faithful interest of those whose dances and dinners he had once reported, deprecated a notable scandal among people of the Four Hundred which was filling the papers at that time, and said I could hardly appreciate the pity of such a thing occurring among people of his set. Another man, whom I had known very well in New York, turned up in San Antonio with an entirely new name, wife, and fortune, and verified the tradition which exists there that it is best before one grows to know a man too well, to ask him what was his name before he came to Texas. San Antonio seemed particularly rich in histories of those who came there to change their fortunes, and who had changed them most completely. The English gave the most conspicuous examples of these unfortunates—conspicuous in the sense that their position at home had been so good, and their habits of life so widely different.

The proportion of young English gentlemen who are roughing it in the West far exceeds that of the young Americans. This is due to the fact that the former have never been taught a trade or profession, and in consequence, when they have been cheated of the money they brought with them to invest, have nothing but their hands to help them, and so take to driving horses or branding cattle or digging in the streets, as one graduate of Oxford, sooner than write home for money, did in Denver. He is now teaching Greek and Latin in one of our colleges. The manner in which visiting Englishmen are robbed in the West, and the quickness with which some of them take the lesson to heart, and practise it upon the next Englishman who comes out, or upon the prosperous Englishman already there, would furnish material for a book full of pitiful stories. And yet one cannot help smiling at the wickedness of some of these schemes. Three Englishmen, for example, bought, as they supposed, thirty thousand Texas steers; but the Texans who pretended to sell them the cattle drove the same three thousand head ten times around the mountain, as a dozen supers circle around the backdrop of a stage to make an army, and the Englishmen counted and paid for each steer ten times over. There was another Texan who made a great deal of money by advertising to teach young men how to become cowboys, and who charged them ten dollars a month tuition fee, and who set his pupils to work digging holes for fence-posts all over the ranch, until they grew wise in their generation, and left him for some other ranch, where they were paid thirty dollars per month for doing the same thing. But in many instances it is the tables of San Antonio which take the greater part of the visiting Englishman’s money. One gentleman, who for some time represented the Isle of Wight in the Lower House, spent three modest fortunes in the San Antonio gambling-houses, and then married his cook, which proved a most admirable speculation, as she had a frugal mind, and took entire control of his little income. And when the Marquis of Aylesford died in Colorado, the only friend in this country who could be found to take the body back to England was his first-cousin, who at that time was driving a hack around San Antonio. We heard stories of this sort on every side, and we met faro-dealers, cooks, and cowboys who have served through campaigns in India or Egypt, or who hold an Oxford degree. A private in G troop, Third Cavalry, who was my escort on several scouting expeditions in the Garza outfit, was kind enough and quite able to tell me which club in London had the oldest wine-cellar, where one could get the best visiting-cards engraved, and why the Professor of Ancient Languages at Oxford was the superior of the instructor in like studies at Cambridge. He did this quite unaffectedly, and in no way attempted to excuse his present position. Of course, the value of the greater part of these stories depends on the family and personality of the hero, and as I cannot give names, I have to omit the best of them.

There was a little English boy who left San Antonio before I had reached it, but whose name and fame remained behind him. He was eighteen years of age, and just out of Eton, where he had spent all his pocket-money in betting on the races through commissioners. Gambling was his ruling passion at an age when ginger-pop and sweets appealed more strongly to his contemporaries. His people sent him to Texas with four hundred pounds to buy an interest in a ranch, and furnished him with a complete outfit of London-made clothing. An Englishman who saw the boy’s box told me he had noted the different garments packed carefully away, just as his mother had placed them, and each marked with his name. The Eton boy lost the four hundred pounds at roulette in the first week after his arrival in San Antonio, and pawned his fine clothes in the next to “get back.” He lost all he ventured. At the end of ten days he was peddling fruit around the streets in his bare feet. He made twenty-five cents the first day, and carried it to the gambling-house where he had already lost his larger fortune, and told one of the dealers he would cut the cards with him for the money. The boy cut first, and the dealer won; but the other was enough of a gambler to see that the dealer had stooped to win his last few pennies unfairly. The boy’s eyes filled up with tears of indignation.

“You thief!” he cried, “you cheated me!”

The dealer took his revolver from the drawer of the table, and, pointing it at his head, said: “Do you know what we do to people who use that word in Texas? We kill them!”

The boy clutched the table with both hands and flung himself across it so that his forehead touched the barrel of the revolver. “You thief!” he repeated, and so shrilly that every one in the room heard him. “I say you cheated me!”

The gambler lowered the trigger slowly and tossed the pistol back in the drawer. Then he picked up a ten-dollar gold piece and shoved it towards him.