The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

“You think I had better not take those?” I suggested.

“That’s all you can take,” said the trooper, mercilessly. “You must think of the horse.”

Then he led the way to the store, and pointed out the value of a tin plate, a tin cup, and an iron knife and fork, saddle-bags, leather leggings to keep off the needles of the cactus, a revolver, and a blanket. It is of interest to give Trumpeter Tyler’s own outfit, as it was that of every other man in the troop, and was all that any one of them had had for two months. He carried it all on his horse, and it consisted of a blanket, an overcoat, a carbine, a feed-bag, lariat and iron stake, a canteen, saddle-bags filled with rations on one side and a change of under-clothing on the other, a shelter-tent done up in a roll, a sword, and a revolver, with rounds of ammunition for it and the carbine worn in a belt around the waist. All of this, with the saddle, weighed about eighty pounds, and when the weight of a man is added to it, one can see that it is well, as Trumpeter Tyler suggested, to think of the horse. Troop G had been ordered out for seven days’ field service on the 15th of December, and it was then the 24th of January, and the clothes and equipments they had had with them when they started at midnight from Fort MacIntosh for that week of hard riding were all they had had with them since. But the hard riding had continued.

Trumpeter Tyler proved that day not only my guide, but a philosopher, and when night came on, a friend. He was very young, and came from Virginia, as his slow, lazy voice showed; and he had played, in his twenty-three years, the many parts of photographer, compositor, barber, cook, musician, and soldier. He talked of these different callings as we walked our horses over the prairie, and, out of deference to myself and my errand, of writing. He was a somewhat general reader, and volunteered his opinion of the works of Rudyard Kipling, Laura Jean Libbey, Captain Charles King, and others with confident familiarity. He recognized no distinctions in literature; they had all written a book, therefore they were, in consequence, in exactly the same class.

Of Mr. Kipling he said, with an appreciative shake of the head, that “he knew the private soldier from way back;” of Captain Charles King, that he wrote for the officers; and of Laura Jean Libbey, that she was an authoress whose books he read “when there really wasn’t nothing else to do.” I doubt if one of Mr. Kipling’s own heroes could have made as able criticisms.

When night came on and the stars came out, he dropped the soldier shop and talked of religion and astronomy. The former, he assured me earnestly, was much discussed by the privates around the fire at night, which I could better believe after I saw how near the stars get and how wide the world seems when there is only a blanket between you and the heavens, and when there is a general impression prevailing that you are to be shot at from an ambush in the morning. Of astronomy he showed a very wonderful knowledge, and awakened my admiration by calling many stars by strange and ancient names—an admiration which was lessened abruptly when he confessed that he had been following some other than the North Star for the last three miles, and that we were lost. It was a warm night, and I was so tired with the twenty-five-miles ride on a Mexican saddle—which is as comfortable as a soap-box turned edges up—that the idea of lying out on the ground did not alarm me. But Trumpeter Tyler’s honor was at stake. He had his reputation as a trailer to maintain, and he did so ably by lighting matches and gazing knowingly at the hoof-marks of numerous cattle, whose bones, I was sure, were already whitening on the plain or journeying East in a refrigerator-car, but which he assured me were still fresh, and must lead to the ranch near which the camp was pitched. And so, after four hours’ aimless trailing through the chaparral, when only the thorns of the cactus kept us from falling asleep off our horses, we stumbled into two smouldering fires, a ghostly row of little shelter-tents, and a tall figure in a long overcoat, who clicked a carbine and cried, “Halt, and dismount!”

I was somewhat doubtful of my reception in the absence of the captain, and waited, very wide awake now, while they consulted together in whispers, and then the sentry led me to one of the little tents and kicked a sleeping form violently, and told me to crawl in and not to mind reveille in the morning, but to sleep on as long as I wished. I did not know then that I had Trumpeter Tyler’s bed, and that he was sleeping under a wagon, but I was gratefully conscious of his “bunkie’s” tucking me in as tenderly as though I were his son, and of his not sharing, but giving me more than my share of the blankets. And I went to sleep so quickly that it was not until the morning that I found what I had drowsily concluded must be the roots of trees under me, to be “bunkie’s” sabre and carbine.

The American private, as he showed himself during the three days in which I was his guest, and afterwards, when Captain Hardie had returned and we went scouting together, proved to be a most intelligent and unpicturesque individual. He was intelligent, because he had, as a rule, followed some other calling before he entered the service, and he was not picturesque, because he looked on “soldiering” merely as a means of livelihood, and had little or no patriotic or sentimental feeling concerning it. This latter was not true of the older men. They had seen real war either during the rebellion or in the Indian campaigns, which are much more desperate affairs than the Eastern mind appreciates, and they were fond of the service and proud of it. One of the corporals in G Troop, for instance, had been honorably discharged a year before with the rank of first sergeant, and had re-enlisted as a private rather than give up the service, of which he found he was more fond than he had imagined when he had left it. And in K Troop was an even more notable instance in a man who had been retired on three-fourths pay, having served his thirty years, and who had returned to the troop to act as Captain Hunter’s “striker,” or man of all work, and who bore the monotony of the barracks and the hardships of field service rather than lose the uniform and the feeling of esprit de corps which thirty years’ service had made a necessity to him.

But the raw recruit, or the man in his third or fourth year, as he expressed himself in the different army posts and among the companies I met on the field, looked upon his work from a purely business point of view. He had been before enlistment a clerk, or a compositor, a cowboy, a day-laborer, painter, blacksmith, book-canvasser, almost everything. In Captain Hardie’s troop all of these were represented, and the average of intelligence was very high. Whether the most intelligent private is the best soldier is a much-discussed question which is not to be discussed here, but these men were intelligent and were good soldiers, although I am sure they were too independent in their thoughts, though not in their actions, to have suited an officer of the English or German army. That they are more carefully picked men than those found in the rank and file of the British army can be proved from the fact that of those who apply for enlistment in the United States but twenty per cent. are chosen, while in Great Britain they accept eighty and in some years ninety per cent. of the applicants. The small size of our army in comparison, however, makes this showing less favorable than it at first appears.

In camp, while the captain was away, the privates suggested a lot of college boys more than any other body of individuals. A few had the college boy’s delight in shirking their work, and would rejoice over having had a dirty carbine pass inspection on account of a shining barrel, as the Sophomore boasts of having gained a high marking for a translation he had read from a crib. They had also the college boy’s songs, and his trick of giving nicknames, and his original and sometimes clever slang, and his satisfaction in expressing violent liking or dislike for those in authority over him—in the one case tutors and professors, and in the other sergeants and captains. Their one stupid hitch, in which the officers shared to some extent, was in re-enforcing all they said with profanity; but as soldiers have done this, apparently, since the time of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages, it must be considered an inherited characteristic. Their fun around the camp fire at night was rough, but it was sometimes clever, though it was open to the objection that a clever story never failed of three or four repetitions. The greatest successes were those in which the officers, always of some other troop, were the butts. One impudent “cruitie” made himself famous in a night by improvising an interview between himself and a troop commander who had met him that day as he was steering a mule train across the prairie.