Frontier army sketches

Front matter

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Preface

flatter himself that he has accomplished it. He is only certain that it is not enough to reproduce the impressions made upon the eye and ear, and that if there be something more than that between the lines of these sketches, the public will discover it.

These scenes are not inventions, and these men and women not mere figments of the brain. During years of association with them, they j3roduced certain impressions that time has not dissipated, that have ripened with absence, and that, given in fragments imperfectly, and touched upon in transient articles, are now for the first time, but finally, given to the public in a form of some arrangement and compactness. They have been valuable as a private and personal possession. They have furnished food for pleasant thought amid the vicissitudes, labors, perplexities, and endless changes that come to every man. It may be a mistake to suppose that the aroma exhaled from such recollections may be conveyed to the reader's senses also; yet it is with something of that hope, that these legends of the camp-fire, and sketches of the soldier, the borderer, and the dumb denizens of the wilderness, are given to the reading world.

General Orders and the reports of district commanders are but dull reading, and there is no colder volume than the " Regulations." Officers of the army are not greatly given to the platform and the monthly magazine, and what they know and might so easily relate they seem purposely to be silent about. Yet they have had most to do with the development of Western civilization, have mingled with all the characters of the border, are themselves members of the unique community to which they do not seem to belong, and, leading lives

PREFACE.

apart, are 3^et intimate with all their surroundings. As a very unimportant member of the military brotherhood, the author gathered the impressions which, once written and arranged, seemed yet to lack the essential of a name. Many years of association with all classes, professions, and conditions have passed since then. All the impressions of the soldier have been modified, and have taken the form of conviction. And that conviction is, that, with all his little and great failings, the American regular oflficer is the most accomplished of his calling among all the varied uniforms of the world, and that he remains, through all vicissitudes, the most self-sacrificing and uncomplaining of all the life-long servants of the Republic. He is a frontiersman in the best sense of that word, and, unspoiled by association, he remains true to his untarnished record of a hundred years — a gentleman. He has been always respected, and not seldom loved, by the turbulent and impatient characters who have constantly surrounded him. As all the incidents and characters that go to make up these chapters have been seen and understood from the military standpoint and gathered from the inexhaustible fund of military narrative, while they are not stories of "battles, sieges, fortunes," they are yet what they are called — "Frontier Army Sketches."

I may add, finally, that it seems impossible to explain the interest that clings about lives that are the poorest and humblest that this world knows, except upon the hypothesis that poverty and hope have ever an unconscious pathos of their own. If it be true that men and women are ever and always the same — the helpless victims of circumstance that seems intention and of a fatality that seems a plan — still everything that this

PREFACE.

whirling' cinder bears upon lier wrinkled surface^ fades into insignificance when compared with the myriadminded being whose loves and hopes, whose toils and disappointments, make up the sum of life. These are all of that class whom the world might well spare, if by the world we mean only those who fill the largest places in life, but who at last do but take their places with all the rest, in tlie commingled dust of beggars and of heroes. It was humble life as the author knew it, in that terra incognita of the far Soutliwest. That land of dreams and shadows and disappointing realities has changed its superficial character by having been opened to the world hy radways that stretch their iron length through valleys that were voiceless when the material of these sketches was acquired, and beside reluctant streams that have crawled slowly over their leagues of sand since the soldier and the priest came together and encamped beside them. Yet not advancing civilization, nor anything, can materially change that realm of rainless years; of rivers without verdure; of brown mountains; of wide and silent deserts; of thorns, and cactus, and wind-blown sands;" of indolence, idleness, and peace; of cloud shadows and the brightness of a sky forever blue; of the hopeless sadness of perishing races stranded at last upon those tideless shores. As reminiscences born in such a land, touched here and there with the recollections wrought by a faded uniform and a rusty sword, this little volume is offered to the reader.

COTs^TENTS.

I. Cai'tain Jinks - - - - - 9

IT. Jornada Dkl Mitkkto - - - 24

III. Men of Till-: Bokdkr - - - - 43

lY. Brown's Revench.; - - - - 58

y. Coi'PER Distilled - - - - 80

VI. Joe's Pocket ----- 105

YII. New Mexican r\)MMox Life - - 143

YIII. " Peg,"— The Story OF A IKh; - 103

IX. A Good Indian - - - - - 183

X. Jack's Divorce - - - - 198

XL Coyotes - - - - - - 210

XII. A Guard-House Gentleman - - 220

XIII. Woman Under Difficulties - - 240

XIY. The Priest of El Paso - - - 254

XY. A Fight Bf^tween Buffaloes - - 272

XYL Chicquita ----- 282

XYII. Army Mules 301

XYIII. A Lonesome Christian - - - 314

FRONTIER ARMY SKETCHES.

I. Captai]^ Jinks

IT is necessary to caution the reader against misapprehension at the beginning. This chapter does not conteniphite a discussion of the merits or peculiarities of that ancient gem in tlie repertory of opera houffe^ whicli has sometime since been sung and acted to its death, but which may still linger in the recollections of some of the eklers. But there is a great deal of truth told in broad burlesque; if it makes a palpable impression upon the public there must always be truth as a basis. The genius, whoever he was, who wrote ''Captain Jinks," had in his mind a portrait, more or less truthful, when he concocted the atrocious jin*gle and called it a song. Yery few of those who have heard it, and still fewer of those who have sung it, ever saw anything in it beyond a little fun, and an op2:>ortunity for some stalwart actress, with startling physical development and a wonderful yellow wig, to mince before the footlights, and display her misconception of him who, even more than the lamented Dundreary, is the ideal of gentlemanly snobbery.

10 FROXTIER ARMY SKETCIIIJS.

As liintod, Captain Jinks is not entirely a myth; but there may have been many portraits of the professional soldier in more lasting literature that were scarcely nearer the truth. Thackeray must have watched him as he sauntered down the street, and gone home and made a sketch of him. Dickens liad an inkling of him, tliough he, too, knew liim only from affxr. It is more than probable that the large class of men who are apparently idle, careless, dressy, nonchalant, in time of peace, and brave, enduring and self-sacrificing in time of war, are much the same tlie world over. There has ever been among mankind a weakness for the sound of the drum, the strains of martial music, and the rustle of a banner that represented a common cause, whatever tliat cause might be ; for the glint of bullion and the measured tread of battalions, and the touch of that slender glittering thing that in all time has stood for justice ami honor, and not infrecpiently for that right which, with a change of its initial letter, means a very different thing. It is this common passion which makes the varied uniforms of the world cover hearts very nearly alike in what they love and hate.

But there is one individual of this type who is especially the present subject of discourse. Of all the soldiers of the world, he is least known on fashionable streets, and most seldom seen at select parties and in the choice seats at the opera. With civilization and its pleasures and occupations he has little to do. There are few gay seasons or long leaves-of-absence for him. Of all the homes along the far border of a growing republic, his is farthest and most isohited. Tie is the sohlier of a country that has the brightest and newest banner of all, dyed though it has been with the stains of many a desperate field; and those silken folds represent to him all there is of abstract devotion and love. It is that of a country which in its supreme struggle raised and sent to the iield the most intelligent, enduring, undaunted and brilliant armies the world lias ever seen; which in a single year, in the midst of divided sentiment, could rouse in her sons all the traditional skill, courage, valor and patriotism which lurked in the hearts of a long-peaceful but fighting and gloryloving race. But at the end they sank again into the office, the sliop, and the furrow, as mysteriously as sank the targe and plaid of the followers of Roderick Dliu upon the mountain side; and he, the last remainder of the host, thinks, not without cause, that his cold-shouldered country has almost forgotten him.

Under all these disadvantages, the United States army officer claims intimate kinship with his brethren of the buttons the world over. There are none who wear with more jauntiness a modest blue coat and the very nattiest trousers and boots, or whose caps are more perilously perched upon the forward right-hand corners of ambrosial heads. In the matter of mustaches he excels the German, and in vivacity of movement he is beyond the Frenchman. He is a rattling shot at billiards, and very cool and silent at whist. He has an eye to the points of horses, an acute judgment as to the qualities of liquors, and really and truly adores womankind with a devotion and strength that cavils at nothing they may do, think, or say, and which, had he no other virtue, is sufficient to keep him forever in the great brotherhood of gentlemen. He is isolated and utterly cut off from that world which is all there is to most of us, and his world comprises as its chiefest features only arms, orders, and duty, and the apt surroundings he has contrived for himself in the midst of a thousand difficulties and disadvantages.

But here, in mountain fastnesses and the dreary isolation of the wilderness, you strangely come upon the oidy genuine chivahy extant in American life. I may be taken to task for this wholesale statement ; for the over-busy, nervous, money-getting citizens of this great country claim all good qualities as their own. Therefore I will explain : Chivalry, in its essence, means not a careless but a careful regard for the opinions, feelings, and personal comfort of others, but more especially of women. Besides that, it means entire but polite candor, and no tricks in trade or anything else. It means that the affairs of life are conducted "on honor." Captain Jinks in the wilderness practises this code, and has done so for so long that while staid and respectable citizens might smile at his punctiliousness, they, together with their w4ves and daughters, would find him a very pleasant companion, and might do well to try to find time to imitate some of his very foolish airs.

Do the gentlemen who sit a-row at attractive loitering-places rise up en masse when one poor little woman passes bj ? And if tliey do not, and are excused from that, are tliej ever careful lest some masculine phrase should reach her ear, or the cigar smoke should blow in her face ? Is a woman's request a binding law if it be a possible thing ? Most of these questions must be answered in the negative. Yery often the American gentleman accosts his lady friend in the street with his hat over his eyes, his hands in his pockets, and with a lazy politeness which indicates that he is anxious she should not make the mistake of imagining she is any better than he.

We may go further, and, leaving out women, inquire how Captain Jinks possibly excels us. He takes off his hat in his own office or room, and does likewise when he comes into yours. He expects to be requested to seat himself, and if you allow him to stand he goes away and does not come back so long as he can avoid it. He does not often back-bite and insinuate, and you cannot always know upon your tirst acquaintance with him what and whom he especially dislikes and hates. Such things, with him, lead to rapid settlements of difficulties ; and Jinks is therefore, as we should all be, careful. There is no need of any action for slander where Jinks and his companions live, for words and opinions are supposed to be valuable, and are cautiously used. He will endeavor to lend or give you anything you ask, — but you must not ask. There are other things he will do upon proper invitation, which are not so much to his credit. A little sip of something out of a mahogany case is seldom offered at tlie wrong time o' day. A little sliuffiing of a clean deck, and an unimportant transfer of currency, is generally agreeable wlien lie is not busy, — and he never is. Jinks is somewhat friyoh)us, oyer-polite, and nonchalant, and carries a very high nose ; but he will fight. Any intimation that he would not, would hasten matters very fast in that direction. And the ugliest antagonist in the world is this same tender-handed fop, because it is in his line of business. He stands in the same relation to other men in this respect that the terrier does to other dogs ; he spends no time in carefully considering the size of his antagonist. Only of late years has the duello come to- be looked upon as wrong and foolish by the great majority of army officers. Elderly gentlemen, long since retired to office-chairs, have recollections of that sort which they sometimes mention ; and it appears that even in these instances death was more often bargained for than achieved.

Captain Jinks is a strictly professional man, and after some years of military life knows more of his specialty — which is a good deal to know — than he generally gets fair credit for. There is a common impression that to own a commission signed b}^ the President, and to wear a imiform, is to be a soldier. Many an inchoate hero has had this impression dissipated by a few months' association with the old ones. The traditional routine, the customs, the business, and the exact drill, require years in their mastery. The army is almost wholly governed by an unwritten code, which has, in its place, as much binding force as the common law. You would not suspect that Jinks was ever a business man ; jet the complicated system of accountability for public property requires something very little short of business talent for its proper comprehension. It is the most endless and intricate bundle of red tape imaginable, at least to the beginner ; but, if not clear, it is at least accurate, to the practised quartermaster. The government is an uncompromising creditor, and will stop Jinks's pay for an old campkettle, ten years after tlie loss occurred, if things come to the worst. Ke is accountable for all the houses, fuel, forage, animals, tools, wagons, and scattered odds and ends of a post as large as a respectable village, the residence of some hundreds of people. They are all on his "papers," and must \>Q cared for and kept straight. Every company commander must of necessity be a business man, and has a running account with a hundred men. Military efficiency means money, in the sense that there can be no efficiency without it ; and the iirst qualification of an officer of any grade or station is economy and good judgment in the care of property and the expenditure of funds.

ISTor is this all. Like an editor, Jinks must have a very varied and extensive fund of general information. He is alike autocrat and justice of the peace. He is the head and leader of a hundred careless, irresponsible men, who in time beconje human automatons, obeying orders and doing nothing more. He learns, through his intercourse with them, to know intimately each one, though at a distance.

He is often called upon to exercise the functions of physician, priest, and executor, to the same man. He must know how to exercise at once kindness and firmness, and to command the fullest respect with some degree of love. If there is a foible, a weakness, a want of courage or capacity, on the part of the commander, be sure the ranks will find it out. Jinks is a tyrant as well, and the fact need not be (lisiruised from a thousand who know at least that much of him. So are railroad managers, the heads of manufacturing establishments, and "bosses" the world over. But the even tenor of his tyranny is assured by those "regulations" under which the common soldier's rights and privileges are as fully guaranteed to him as are those of his commander. Jinks and his companions have made some of the most daring and careful explorations of modern times. They traversed the mountain passes of an unknown world more than fifty years ago, and mapped and described the routes of travel and immigration long before railways and immigration were thought of. They did it faithfully and skilfully, and without any reward. There is even at this late day a more accurate knowledge of the climates, characteristics, geography, and natural history of the world west of the Missouri, among the officers of the army, than among all the savaiis.

Perhaps it may not be uninteresting to know how Captain Jinks lives. The changeless empire of monotony and silence hedges him in. Nowhere witliin reaching distance are any of those things that the majority of mankind value most. He has but to go a little waj from the flag-staff to be utterly alone. Yet, so far as liis little acre of actual occupancy goes, he has transformed the desert. Here is a quadrangular space, as neatly kept as a parlor floor. In the centre floats always the sheeny representative of that for which the soldier lives. On every hand are the oddly-shaped houses, sometimes handsome and costly, often only log cabins or adobes. But you will find nothing like squalor within. There is comfort and neatness always, and not infrequently elegance, and a very successful attempt at luxury. As a rule. Jinks and his wife care little for the house itself, if only the furnishing reaches the proper standard of luxury and taste. There are books, music, curtains, carpets, a very well-furnished table, and a very fair display of china and silver. Jinks is something of an epicure, and frequently dines upon dainties which an alderman could not procure. He saves himself from an hour of inanity every afternoon by thinking what he will have for dinner, and then asks every disengaged person he can find to come and help him eat it. You wonder, as you watch this hospitable soldier in his wanderings, where lie obtains the spice of content. In these houses are to be found elegant and well-dressed women, though peradventure their gowns may not be in the latest fashion, and their social gossip not of the latest sensation.

Around this nucleus cluster the thousand belongings of military civilization. Horses neigh in populous stables, and mules perform their characteristic antics in the corral. The sound of hammer and file is heard, and the woodvard and warehouse are open. There is the trader's store — an immensely attractive spot, which may be called the club-room of the border. There the loafing instinct which Jinks has in common with the rest of mankind is gratified by the clatter of ivory balls and the aroma of tobacco. These are the only features of Jinks's life which make that life like that of the world to which he no longer pertains, and which, with all its enjoyable things, he has by no means forgotten, although it seems to have almost forgotten him. There is no danger that he will ever degenerate. The discipline of his daily life would keep him from that. His military ceremonies are performed in full dress, and midnight on the lonely guard-beat sees the untimely ceremony of "grand rounds" performed with as much punctiliousness as though in view of the commander-in-chief.

But the incorrigible Captain Jinks will swagger, will insist on regarding all professions below par in comparison with his, and will so persist in carrying an air of careless superiority with him wherever he goes that the more sombre-clad and fogyish portions of mankind will look slightly askance at him, and in some instances conceive quite a dislike to him. But we must be allowed to remark that he would be rather a poor soldier if he were not more or less guilty of these things. It is only when he is placed among civilians that they are noticeable; and they are the direct result of an isolated professional training. Is not the sailor known of all men at sight ? And did anyone ever think of it as strange that he was not ill all particulars like themselves ? A man who has spent years in the acquirement of certain unconscious personal traits and ways cannot be expected to divest himself of them as he would put off a garment. He is no soldier who is not proud of his uniform, and in nine cases in ten the American officer will be found to be an honest man, and in the strictest sense a gentleman. His life in peace is one long preparation for that hour of his country's need when he shall lead up to the battery the blue ranks he has so often drilled, and follow into the jaws of death the starry emblem he has so often gathered in his arms as it came down at the sunset gun. Every year he endures hardships at the camp-lire and upon the march, of which he gives no sign as you see him passing by. We cannot blame him if he be, or seem, a little proud of the slender blade which, after all, is not his but his country's. Let us not be too much mistaken in our Captain Jinks. Of such as he — just such foppish, careless fellows — have ere now been made great generals, lamented heroes, statesmen, and presidents. Useless ornament though he might be if the millennium were only come, and reminder of the strength of monarchies rather than of peaceful republics, the time has been when a few more available Jinkses would have saved the country many a life and many a million of treasure, when, in impending peril, we scarcely knew the equipment of a camp or the duties of a picket-guard.

It would be easy to discourse upon the lights and shadows of Jinks's life in a manner that, while it would do no harm, and might even be considered flattering to liim, he would resent as an unwarrantable intrusion into his private aifairs; for one of his characteristics is, that he has never seemed anxious to liave himself and his belongings — -his tastes, traits, loves, hates, and the details of liis private life — inquired into and discussed by mankind. He has, I think, seldom been lieard to complain that people do not understand him. If it is because he has long ceased to expect that they should, the conclusion has given him little pain, for he has also ceased to care. The army is, indeed, a little world by itself, tliat is unaffected by stocks and trade, by flood, fire, or disaster, by changes in politics or revivals of religion. In it the lines are drawn very straight, and are not often crossed. It has its own news, its own gossip, its own penalties, and its especial pleasures. One would not suppose that the element of domesticity had much place there; yet under singular difficulties this is one of its strongest features. Jinks, as a family man, seems capable of mingling with great skill the characters of pater familias and the occasional roisterer. He has a vivid conception and a keen appreciation of home for its own sake — a home that he never made and cannot own, that does not suit him and cannot be altered, and that he leaves, in his innumerable pilgrimages from post to post, without a sigh, cheered by the hope of a better. Yet one may recall, among his recollections of that frontier that is a thousand miles beyond the crudest civilization, homes that were bright with the refinements of the highest type of our social life, that were filled with cheerfulness and wanned bj the indescribable felicities that made the place restful and luxuriant with that rest and hixnry that do not depend upon the price of the furniture. Jinks has absorbed all the good there is in the peculiar form of aristocracy he affects. His dining-table possesses a social and material charm quite irresistible to all who are so fortunate as to get their legs under it. One goes away and asks himself where all these things came from, and ever after remembers that spot in the coyote-haunted desert which offered him so restful a glimpse of the beauty of woman and home, and a taste of the clean hos])itality of a gentleman about whom there was neither effort nor pretence.

Aladdin is a character of childish fable. There are no fairies; alchemy was a dream; men are oidy men. From whence does Jinks derive the mysterious quality that enables him to survive the crudest associations, the wildest surroundings, the hardest fare upon the weariest marches, the slenderest resources, the most thankless services, and still remain the inimitable Jinks — clean, quiet, nonchalant, transforming the spot where he is bidden to abide, changing all the sensations of the place where he has pitched his tents ? It seems a marked peculiarity of the American soldier. He is Jinks unconsciously. That celebrated charge of "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman," upon which the plumed and buttoned and intensely official court-martial assembles, hints at the deepest infamy of military life ; and that is a most damning specification, if proven, which asserts that "in this the said

Lieutenant So-and-so wilfallv lied." It is so arranged that Captain Jinks may be guilty of a thousand peccadilloes ; may spend his nights at poker, and his leisure hours at any gallantry that may be at hand; but he must do his whole duty in camp and field, and privately and officially must keep himself clear of any possible entanglement in sly deception or private crookedness. He does not always succeed in this; errare est hiimanum. But then he gets himself cashiered.

If Jinks were better known, he might travel long and far upon his character as "a good fellow." He may if he will, and often does, acquire an inexhaustible fund of anecdote and personal reminiscence, lie knows well the by-ways and corners, not of cities, but of the wide domain of the republic. The dews and damps of innumerable midnights, the grays of a thousand mornings, the shadows of mountain pines, the wide loneliness of trackless wastes, the vicissitudes of the camp and the march, the familiar tonch of earth and the companionship of nature, have all combined in liis education, and allied themselves with that imaginativeness of his without which he would be but a mere frontiersman like the rest. There are few reminiscences more charming tlian those he can call up when he will, and it seems to please him to clothe the most doleful and disappointing of his experiences in the garb ' of the ridiculous, and to burlesque the tragic element of all his adventures by flood and field.

There seems to be, in Jinks' s case, neither adequate incentive nor sufficient reward for the deeperate bravery in behalf of country and cause which he often displays. There are no spectators, no press bulletins, no medals or stars, not even promotion, as his reward. . Plain and mountain-pass have witnessed many a heroic death that was never mentioned in the newspapers, and that no one cared for but a wife, a mother, or a far-away sweetheart. Many a pallid face amid the grasses of the prairie, and many a bloody blue coat, have the stars looked down upon after a day of thirst and hopelessness and desperate defence. Unknown amid the eternal silences that are his battle-fields, there is many a mound unmarked by so much as an inscription, washed b}^ the rains and digged by the wolves, where some liero of the republic sleeps. He at least does his first and last great duty unhesitatingly and always. So long as there was a cartridge or a man, there is no instance of vacillation or surrender in the annals of far western warfare. As Custer died, with all his men around him, so are all the Jinkses expected to go when the occasion calls. The universal civilian should remember, and be no more than just, that his fair record of courage has never had a stain, that his life challenges the admiration of every man whose heart swells at the story of dauntless valor, and that he is, after all, as fair an example as our civilization can show of what, for want of a better name, we call a Gentleman.