The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

He will learn in time that the only men on the borders of Texas who are allowed to wear revolvers are sheriffs, State agents in charge of prisoners, and the Texas Rangers, and that whenever he sees a man so armed he may as surely assume that he is one of these as he may know that in New York men in gray uniforms, with leather bags over their shoulders, are letter-carriers. The revolver is the Texan officer’s badge of office; it corresponds to the New York policeman’s shield; and he toys with it just as the Broadway policeman juggles his club. It is quite as harmless as a toy, and almost as terrible as a weapon.

This will grieve the “tenderfoot” who goes through the West “heeled,” and ready to show that though he is from the effete East, he is able to take care of himself.

It was first brought home to me as I was returning from the border, where I had been with the troops who were hunting for Garza, and was waiting at a little station on the prairie to take the train for Corpus Christi. I was then told politely by a gentleman who seemed of authority, that if I did not take off that pistol I would be fined twenty-five dollars, or put in jail for twenty days. I explained to him where I had been, and that my baggage was at “Corpus,” and that I had no other place to carry it. At which he apologized, and directed a deputy sheriff, who was also going to Corpus Christi, to see that I was not arrested for carrying a deadly weapon.

This, I think, illustrates a condition of things in darkest Texas which may give a new point of view to the Eastern mind. It is possibly something of a revelation to find that instead of every man protecting himself, and the selection of the fittest depending on who is “quickest on the trigger,” he has to have an officer of the law to protect him if he tries to be a law unto himself.

While I was on the border a deputy sheriff named Rufus Glover, who was acting as a guide for Captain Chase, of the Third Cavalry, was fired upon from an ambush by persons unknown, and killed. A Mexican brought the news of this to our camp the night after the murder, and described the manner of the killing, as it had occurred, at great length and with much detail.

Except that he was terribly excited, and made a very dramatic picture as he stood in the fire-light and moon-light and acted the murder, it did not interest me, as I considered it to be an unfortunate event of very common occurrence in that part of the world. But the next morning every ranchman and cowboy and Texas Ranger and soldier we chanced to meet on the trail to Captain Hunter’s camp took up the story of the murder of Rufus Glover, and told and retold what some one else had told him, with desperate earnestness and the most wearying reiteration. And on the day following, when the papers reached us, we found that reporters had been sent to the scene of the murder from almost every part of south-west Texas, many of whom had had to travel a hundred miles, and then ride thirty more through the brush before they reached it. How many city editors in New York City would send as far as that for anything less important than a railroad disaster or a Johnstown flood?

RANGERS IN CAMP

On the fourth day after the murder of this in no way celebrated or unusually popular individual, the people of Duval County, in which he had been killed, called an indignation meeting, and passed resolutions condemning the county officials for not suppressing crime, and petitioning the Governor of the State to send the Rangers to put an end to such lawlessness—that is, the killing of one man in an almost uninhabited country. The committee who were to present this petition passed through Laredo on the way to see the Governor. Laredo is one hundred miles from the scene of the murder, and in an entirely different county; but there the popular indignation and excitement were so great that another mass-meeting was called, and another petition was made to the Governor, in which the resolutions of Duval County were endorsed. I do not know what his Excellency did about it. There were in the Tombs in New York when I left that city twenty-five men awaiting trial for murder, and that crime was so old a story in the Bend and along the East Side that the most morbid newspaper reader skipped the scant notice the papers gave of them. It would seem from this that the East should reconstruct a new Wild West for itself, in which a single murder sends two committees of indignant citizens to the State capital to ask the Governor what he intends to do about it.

But the West is not wholly reconstructed. There are still the Texas Rangers, and in them the man from the cities of the East will find the picturesqueness of the Wild West show and its happiest expression. If they and the sight of cowboys roping cattle do not satisfy him, nothing else will. The Rangers are a semi-militia, semi-military organization of long descent, and with the most brilliant record of border warfare. At the present time their work is less adventurous than it was in the day of Captain McNelly, but the spirit of the first days has only increased with time.