The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

PIKE’S PEAK FROM COLORADO SPRINGS

There are a great many things one only remembers to say as the train is drawing out of the station, and which have to be spoken from the car-window. And now that my train is so soon to start towards the East, I find there are many things which it seems most ungracious to leave unsaid. I should like to say much of the hospitality of the West. We do not know such hospitality in the East. A man brings us a letter of introduction there, and we put him up at the club we least frequently visit, and regret that he should have come at a time when ours is so particularly crowded with unbreakable engagements. It is not so here. One might imagine the Western man never worked at all, so entirely is his time yours, if you only please to claim it. And from the first few days of my trip to the last, this self-effacement of my hosts and eagerness to please accompanied me wherever I went. It was the same in every place, whether in army posts or ranches, or among that most delightful coterie of the Denver Club “who never sleep,” or on the border of Mexico, where “Bob” Haines, the sheriff of Zepata County, Texas, before he knew who I or my soldier escort might be, and while we were still but dust-covered figures in the night, rushed into the house and ordered a dinner and beds for us, and brought out his last two bottles of beer. The sheriff of Zepata County, “who can shoot with both hands,” need bring no letter of introduction with him if he will deign to visit me when he comes to New York. And as for that Denver Club coterie, they already know that the New York clubs are also supplied with electric buttons.

And now that it is at an end, I find it hard to believe that I am not to hear again the Indian girls laughing over their polo on the prairie, or the regimental band playing the men on to the parade, and that I am not to see the officers’ wives watching them from the line at sunset, as the cannon sounds its salute and the flag comes fluttering down.

And yet New York is not without its good points.

If any one doubts this, let him leave it for three months, and do one-night stands at fourth-rate hotels, or live on alkali water and bacon, and let him travel seven thousand miles over a country where a real-estate office, a Citizen’s Bank, and Quick Order Restaurant, with a few surrounding houses, make, as seen from the car-window, a booming city, where beautiful scenery and grand mountains are separated by miles of prairie and chaparral, and where there is no Diana of the Tower nor bronze Farragut to greet him daily as he comes back from work through Madison Square. He will then feel a love for New York equal to the Chicagoan’s love for his city, and when he sees across the New Jersey flats the smoke and the tall buildings and the twin spires of the cathedral, he will wish to shout, as the cowboys do when they “come into town,” at being back again in the only place where one can both hear the Tough Girl of the East Side ask for her shoes, and the horn of the Country Club’s coach tooting above the roar of the Avenue.

The West is a very wonderful, large, unfinished, and out-of-doors portion of our country, and a most delightful place to visit. I would advise every one in the East to visit it, and I hope to revisit it myself. Some of those who go will not only visit it, but will make their homes there, and the course of empire will eventually Westward take its way. But when it does, it will leave one individual behind it clinging closely to the Atlantic seaboard.

Little old New York is good enough for him.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.