Toward dusk we passed through Beaumont, the famous oil town. This is the fateful place where millions of dollars have been made and lost within a few months. Ten years ago a group of our own Kanawha tenderfeet drilled here a four-hundred-foot dry hole, and abandoned the project, finding no oil within a stone’s throw of the spot where, a few years later, Dan Lucas drilled down eight hundred feet, and struck his seventy-thousand-barrel gusher. There was an excited “boom” throng at the station, and the travelers entering our car fairly buzzed thrilling talk of oil. Among them were a number of ladies, more bediamonded, bejeweled and begolded than any group of femininity I ever saw before. The men, too, wore flashing jewels and bore that distinct stamp which marks those who, with nonchalance, win or lose a fortune in a night. They were by all odds the toughest-looking lot of elegantly clad men and women I ever yet beheld.
THE ALAMO
We passed Houston near midnight, and in the morning by eight o’clock were at San Antonio, a city of wide streets, and spacious parks adorned everywhere with palms and palmettoes and semitropical shrubs. We entered a ’bus and drove a mile to the station of the International and Great Northern Railway, which comes down from St. Louis and runs south seventy miles to Laredo, on the Rio Grande and the Mexican border. We passed the bullet-battered walls of the famous Alamo, the hallowed shrine of every loyal Texan, then a large Roman Catholic Cathedral with Spanish roof and bell tower, a huge convent and several stately public buildings. San Antonio is a city of forty thousand people and the last American town of magnitude north of Mexico. At the station, where we waited half an hour, I saw my first Mexican greasers, in their prodigious sombreros and began to feel myself nearing a strange land.
Our train from the North drew in at nine o’clock, on time, all vestibuled, lighted with electricity, with a dining car attached, and all its equipment greatly superior to that of the Southern Pacific. It was one of the Gould trains from St. Louis to the far South.
Leaving San Antonio, we traversed a country still flat, always flat, covered with sand and mesquit for miles and miles and miles. As far as the eye could see in every direction, hour after hour stretched this illimitable monotonous wilderness. The mesquit trees looked like ill-grown peach trees. To my unaccustomed eye, we seemed to be passing through endless barren orchards, the trees standing generally thirty or forty feet apart. Here is the home of the jack rabbit, and toward the Mexican border and within reach of the waters of the Rio Grande, deer abound. Quail are also common, but of other life there is little or none. Here and there the mesquit trees were cut away, and wide, sandy fields were planted with cotton. Cattle also were cropping the short, dry native grass. As we traveled south the grass diminished, the sand increased and the prickly cactus became increasingly plentiful. At one of the stations where we stopped for the engine to take water, I talked with a tall white-bearded planter, who stood holding his horse, the horse accoutered with Mexican saddle and lariat, the man in high Mexican sombrero. “The labor hereabouts is all Mexican,” he said. “Mexican peons you can import in unlimited numbers, who are glad to work for thirty cents per day and board themselves. Hence there are no negroes south of San Antonio, for no negro will work and live on such small pay. Moreover, the soil is so poor and water is so scarce that neither cotton nor cattle could here be raised with profit, if it were not for the low wage the Mexican is glad to accept.”
OLD SPANISH CONVENT
We reached Laredo, a city of some five thousand inhabitants, about six o’clock, P. M., where I sent the following telegram, “Cane, cotton, cattle, mesquit, sand and cactus, O. K.,” which, though brief, sums up the country I have been traversing for the last two days. Laredo is upon the American side of the Rio Grande, which is crossed by a long bridge to Nuevo Laredo, in the State of Nuevo Leon. Here smartly uniformed Mexican customs officers examined my baggage and passed me through.