A STORY WITHOUT A MORAL.
On my return journey from Washington City in 1863, when traveling in the stage coach with driver and two other passengers, we halted for supper and a change of animals at a village seventy miles north of Fort Craig, where, falling in with some officers who had served with me during the then recent campaign, I accompanied them to their tents and there became so interested in telling and hearing stories that I forgot all about time and the stage went forward without me. I was the more to blame for this thoughtlessness because I was at the time bearing important official dispatches.
With many regrets and self-reproaches and good resolutions for the future, I procured a Government horse and started alone for Fort Craig, riding all night. I arrived at Fort Craig in due time safe and well, but learned that the stage coach had been attacked by Indians and that the driver and two passengers had been killed. It is certainly right to teach schoolboys (as I did forty years ago) that promptness, perseverance, diligence and watchfulness will greatly increase their chances for success, but is it right to teach them that by these means or by any other means they can command success? But I am not writing moral philosophy or solving riddles.
BENJAMIN S. DOWELL.
On previous pages I have mentioned this character as “Uncle Ben” Dowell, the postmaster. He was a Kentuckian, who served through the war with Mexico, and at its close settled at El Paso in the “forties” and married at Ysleta.
He was an illiterate man, but of great force of character. One day in the early “fifties” he did good work by killing, in a street fight, a desperado who was known to have broken into the Customs House and robbed the safe and who, with a party of men like himself, was defying the authorities. Dowell and I became friends, but when the question of secession arose he went wild on that subject and was, in part, responsible for my arrest as an “abolitionist,” and we were bitter enemies for several years.
He left El Paso with the retreating Texans just before we (the Union troops) took possession of that place in 1862. He returned to Juarez, and we met there several times but did not speak to each other. Finally Dowell wrote me a letter (printed below) which led to a renewal of our friendship, which continued till his death:
“Paso Del Norte (Juarez), Mexico, October 12th, 1864.