The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

The Rangers enlist for a year under one of eight captains, and the State pays them a dollar a day and supplies them with rations and ammunition. They bring with them their own horse, blanket, and rifle, and revolver; they wear no regular uniform or badge of any sort, except the belt of cartridges around the waist. The mounted police of the gold days in the Australian bush, and the mounted constabulary of the Canadian border are perhaps the only other organizations of a like nature and with similar duties. Their headquarters are wherever their captain finds water, and, if he is fortunate, fuel and shade; but as the latter two are difficult to find in common in the five hundred square miles of brush along the Rio Grande, they are content with a tank of alkali water alone.

There are about twenty men in each of the eight troops, and one or two of them are constantly riding away on detached service—to follow the trail of a Mexican bandit or a horse-thief, or to suppress a family feud. The Rangers’ camps look much like those of gypsies, with their one wagon to carry the horses’ feed, the ponies grazing at the ends of the lariats, the big Mexican saddles hung over the nearest barb fence, and the blankets covering the ground and marking the hard beds of the night before. These men are the especial pride of General Mabry, the Adjutant-general of Texas, who was with them the first time I met them, sharing their breakfast of bacon and coffee under the shade of the only tree within ten miles. He told me some very thrilling stories of their deeds and personal meetings with the desperadoes and “bad” men of the border; but when he tried to lead Captain Brooks into relating a few of his own adventures, the result was a significant and complete failure. Significant, because big men cannot tell of the big things they do as well as other people can—they are handicapped by having to leave out the best part; and because Captain Brooks’s version of the same story the general had told me, with all the necessary detail, would be: “Well, we got word they were hiding in a ranch down in Zepata County, and we went down there and took ’em—which they were afterwards hung.”

The fact that he had had three fingers shot off as he “took ’em” was a detail he scorned to remember, especially as he could shoot better without these members than the rest of his men, who had only lost one or two.

Boots above the knee and leather leggings, a belt three inches wide with two rows of brass-bound cartridges, and a slanting sombrero make a man appear larger than he really is; but the Rangers were the largest men I saw in Texas, the State of big men. And some of them were remarkably handsome in a sun-burned, broad-shouldered, easy, manly way. They were also somewhat shy with the strangers, listening very intently, but speaking little, and then in a slow, gentle voice; and as they spoke so seldom, they seemed to think what they had to say was too valuable to spoil by profanity.

When General Mabry found they would not tell of their adventures, he asked them to show how they could shoot; and as this was something they could do, and not something already done, they went about it as gleefully as school-boys at recess doing “stunts.” They placed a board, a foot wide and two feet high, some sixty feet off in the prairie, and Sheriff Scheeley opened hostilities by whipping out his revolver, turning it in the air, and shooting, with the sights upside down, into the bull’s-eye of the impromptu target. He did this without discontinuing what he was saying to me, but rather as though he were punctuating his remarks with audible commas.

Then he said, “I didn’t think you Rangers would let a little one-penny sheriff get in the first shot on you.” He could afford to say this, because he had been a Ranger himself, and his brother Joe was one of the best captains the Rangers have had; and he and all of his six brothers are over six feet high. But the taunt produced an instantaneous volley from every man in the company; they did not take the trouble to rise, but shot from where they happened to be sitting or lying and talking together, and the air rang with the reports and a hundred quick vibrating little gasps, like the singing of a wire string when it is tightened on a banjo.

They exhibited some most wonderful shooting. They shot with both hands at the same time, with the hammer underneath, holding the rifle in one hand, and never, when it was a revolver they were using, with a glance at the sights. They would sometimes fire four shots from a Winchester between the time they had picked it up from the ground and before it had nestled comfortably against their shoulder. They also sent one man on a pony racing around a tree about as thick as a man’s leg, and were dissatisfied because he only put four out of six shots into it. Then General Mabry, who seemed to think I did not fully appreciate what they were doing, gave a Winchester rifle to Captain Brooks and myself, and told us to show which of us could first put eight shots into the target.

It seems that to shoot a Winchester you have to pull a trigger one way and work a lever backward and forward; this would naturally suggest that there are three movements—one to throw out the empty shell, one to replace it with another cartridge, and the third to explode this cartridge. Captain Brooks, as far as I could make out from the sound, used only one movement for his entire eight shots. As I guessed, the trial was more to show Captain Brooks’s quickness rather than his marksmanship, and I paid no attention to the target, but devoted myself assiduously to manipulating the lever and trigger, aiming blankly at the prairie. When I had fired two shots into space, the captain had put his eight into the board. They sounded, as they went off, like fire-crackers well started in a barrel, and mine, in comparison, like minute-guns at sea. The Rangers, I found, after I saw more of them, could shoot as rapidly with a revolver as with a rifle, and had become so expert with the smaller weapon that instead of pressing the trigger for each shot, they would pull steadily on it, and snap the hammer until the six shots were exhausted.

San Antonio is the oldest of Texan cities, and possesses historical and picturesque show-places which in any other country but our own would be visited by innumerable American tourists prepared to fall down and worship. The citizens of San Antonio do not, as a rule, appreciate the historical values of their city; they are rather tired of them. They would prefer you should look at the new Post-office and the City Hall, and ride on the cable road. But the missions which lie just outside of the city are what will bring the Eastern man or woman to San Antonio, and not the new water-works. There are four of these missions, the two largest and most interesting being the Mission de la Conception, of which the corner-stone was laid in 1730, and the Mission San José, the carving, or what remains of it, in the latter being wonderfully rich and effective. The Spaniards were forced to abandon the missions on account of the hostility of the Indians, and they have been occupied at different times since by troops and bats, and left to the mercies of the young men from “Rochester, N. Y.,” and the young women from “Dallas, Texas,” who have carved their immortal names over their walls just as freely as though they were the pyramids of Egypt or Blarney Castle. San Antonio is a great place for invalids, on account of its moderate climate, and a most satisfactory place in which to spend a week or two in the winter whether one is an invalid or not. There is the third largest army post in the country at the edge of the city, where there is much to see and many interesting people to know, and there is a good club, and cock-fighting on Sunday, and a first-rate theatre all the week. At night the men sit outside of the hotels, and the plazas are filled with Mexicans and their open-air restaurants, and the lights of these and the brigandish appearance of those who keep them are very unlike anything one may see at home.

All that the city really needs now is a good hotel and a more proper pride in its history and the monuments to it. The man who seems to appreciate this best is William Corner, whose book on San Antonio is a most valuable historical authority.