A Civilian at an Army Post

Richard Harding Davis

Harpers Weekly/May 28, 1892

THE army posts of the United States are as different one from another as the stations along the line of a great railroad system. There is the same organization for all, and the highest officers govern one as well as the other; but in appearance and degree of usefulness and local rule they are as independent and yet as dependent, and as far apart in actual miles, as the Grand Central Depot in New York, with its twenty tracks and as many ticket-windows and oak-bound offices and greatest after-dinner orator, is distant from the section-house at the unfinished end of a road somewhere on the prairie. The commanding officer’s quarters alone at Fort Sheridan cost thirty thousand dollars, and more than a million and a half has been spent on Fort Riley; but there are many other posts where nature supplied the mud and logs for the whole station, and the cost to the Government could not have been more than three hundred dollars at the most. It is consequently difficult to write in a general way of army posts. What is true of one is by no means true of another, and it will be better, perhaps, to first tell of those army posts which possess many features in common—eight-company posts, for instance, which are not too large nor too small, not too near civilization, and yet not too far removed from the railroad. An eight-company post is a little town or community of about three hundred people living in a quadrangle around a parade-ground. The scenery surrounding the quadrangle may differ as widely as you please to imagine it; it may be mountainous and beautiful, or level, flat, and unprofitable, but the parade-ground is always the same. It has a flag-pole at the entrance to the quadrangle, and a base-ball diamond marked out on the side on which the men live, and tennis-courts towards the officers’ quarters. When you speak of the side of the square where the enlisted men live, you say “barracks,” and you refer to the officers’ share of the quadrangle as “the line.” In England you can safely say that an officer is living in barracks, but you must not say this of a United States officer; he lives in the third or fourth house up or down “the line.”

The barracks are a long continuous row of single-story buildings with covered porches facing the parade. They are generally painted an uncompromising brown, and are much more beautiful inside than out, especially the messrooms, where all the wood-work has been scrubbed so hard that the tables are worn almost to a concave surface. The architectural appearance of the officers’ quarters on the line differs in different posts; but each house of each individual post, whether it is a double or single house, is alike to the number of bricks in the walls and in the exact arrangement of the rooms. The wives of the officers may change the outer appearance of their homes by planting rose-bushes and ivy about the yards, but whenever they do, some other officer’s wife is immediately transferred from another post and “outranks” them, and they have to move farther down the line, and watch the new-comer plucking their roses, and reaping the harvest she has not sown. This rule also applies to new wall-paper, and the introduction at your own expense of open fireplaces, with blue and white tiles which will not come off or out when the newcomer moves in. In addition to the officers’ quarters and the barracks, there is an administration building, which is the executive mansion of this little community, a quartermaster’s storehouse, a guardhouse, and the hospital. The stables are back of the barracks, out of sight of those who live facing the parade, and there is generally a rear-guard of little huts and houses occupied by sergeants’ wives, who do the washing for the posts, and do it very well. This is, briefly, the actual appearance of an army post—a quadrangle of houses, continuous and one-story high on two sides, and separate and two stories high on the other two sides, facing the parade, and occasionally surrounded by beautiful country.

The life of an army post, its internal arrangements, its necessary routine, and its expedients for breaking this routine pleasantly, cannot be dealt with so briefly; it is a delicate and extensive subject. It is impossible to separate the official and social life of an army post. The commanding officer does not lose that dignity which doth hedge him in when he and his orderly move from the administration building to his quarters, and it would obviously confuse matters if a second lieutenant bet him in the morning he could not put the red ball into the right-corner pocket, and in the evening at dress parade he should order the same lieutenant and his company into the lower right-hand corner of the parade at double-quick. This would tend to destroy discipline. And so, as far as the men of the post are concerned, the official and social life touch at many points. With the women, of course, it is different, although there was a colonel’s wife not long ago who said to the officers’ wives assisting her to receive at a dance, “You will take your places, ladies, in order of rank.” I repeat this mild piece of gossip because it was the only piece of gossip I heard at any army post, which is interesting when one remembers the reputation given the army posts by one of their own people for that sort of thing.

The official head of the post is the commanding officer, he has under him eight “companies,” if they are infantry, or “troops” if they are cavalry, each commanded in turn by a captain, who has under him a first and second lieutenant, who rule in their turn numerous sergeants and corporals. There is also a major or two, two or three surgeons, who rank with the captains, and a quartermaster and an adjutant, who are selected from among the captains or lieutenants of the post, and who perform, in consequence, double duty. The majority of the officers are married; this is not a departmental regulation nor a general order, but it happens to be so. I visited one very large post in which everyone was married except one girl, and a second lieutenant, who spoiled the natural sequel by being engaged to a girl somewhere else. And at the post I had visited before this there were ten unmarried and unengaged lieutenants, and no young women. It seems to me that this presents an unbalanced condition of affairs, which should be considered and adjusted by Congress even before the question of lineal promotion.

It is true that the commanding officer is supposed to be the most important personage in an army post, but that is not so. He, as well as everyone else in it, is ruled by a young person with a brass trumpet, who apparently never sleeps, eats, or rests, and who spends his days tooting on his bugle in the middle of the parade in rainy and in sunny weather and through good and evil report. He sounds in all thirty-seven “calls” a day, and the garrison gets up and lies down, and eats, and waters the horses, and goes to church and school, and to horse exercise, and mounts guard, and drills recruits, and parades in full dress whenever he thinks they should. His prettiest call is reveille, which is sounded at half-past six in the morning. It is bright and spirited, and breathes promise and hope for the new day, and I personally liked it best because it meant that while I still had an hour to sleep, three hundred other men had to get up and clean cold guns and things in the semi-darkness. Next to the bugler in importance is the quartermaster. He is a captain or a first lieutenant with rare executive ability, and it is he who supplies the garrison with those things which make life bearable or luxurious, and it is he who is responsible to the government for every coat of whitewash on the stables, and for the new stove-lid furnished the cook of N Troop, Thirteenth Cavalry. He is the hardest-worked man in the post, although that would possibly be denied by every other officer in it; and he is supposed to be an authority on architecture, sanitary plumbing, veterinary surgery, household furnishing from the kitchen range to the electric button on the front door, and to know all things concerning martial equipments from a sling-belt to an ambulance.

He is a wonderful man, and possessed of a vast and intricate knowledge, but his position in the post is very much like that of a baseball umpire’s on the field, for he is never thanked if he does well, and is abused by everyone on principle. And he is never free. At the very minute he is lifting the green mint to his lips, his host will say, “By-the-way, my striker tells me that last piece of stove-pipe you furnished us does not fit by two inches; I don’t believe you looked at the dimensions;” and when he hastens to join the ladies for protection, he is saluted with an anxious chorus of inquiries as to when he is going to put that pane of glass in the second-story window, and where are those bricks for the new chimney. His worst enemies, however, lie far afield, for he wages constant war with those clerks at the Treasury Department at Washington who go over his accounts and papers, and who take keen and justifiable pride in making him answer for every fraction of a cent which he has left unexplained. The government, for instance, furnishes his storehouse with a thousand boxes of baking-powder, valued at seventy dollars, or seven cents a box. If he sells three boxes for twenty-five cents—I am quoting an actual instance—the Treasury Department returns his papers, requesting him to explain who got the four cents, and is anxious to know what he means by it.

I once saw some tin roofs at a post; they had been broken in coming, and the quartermaster condemned them. That was a year ago, and his papers complaining about these tin roofs have been travelling back and forth between contractor and express agent and the department at Washington and the quartermaster ever since, and they now make up a bundle of seventy different papers. Sometimes the quartermaster defeats the Treasury Department; sometimes it requires him to pay money out of his own pocket. Three revolvers were stolen out of their rack once, and the post quartermaster was held responsible for their loss. He objected to paying the sum the government required, and pointed out that the revolvers should have been properly locked in the rack. The government replied that the lock furnished by it was perfect, and not to be tampered with or scoffed at, and that his excuse was puerile. This quartermaster had a mechanic in his company, and he sent for the young man, and told him to go through the barracks and open all the locks he could. At the end of an hour every rack and soldier’s box in the post were burglarized, and the Government paid for the revolvers.

The post quartermaster’s only pleasure lies in his storehouse, and in the neatness and order in which he keeps his supplies. He dearly loves to lead the civilian visitor through these long rows of shelves, and say, while clutching at his elbow to prevent his escape, “You see, there are all the shovels in that corner; then over there I have the Sibley tents, and there on that shelf are the blouses, and next to them are the overcoats, and there are the canvas shoes, and on that shelf we keep matches, and down here, you see, are the boots. Everything is in its proper place.” At which you are to look interested, and say, “Ah, yes!” just as though you had expected to see the baking-powder mixed with the pith helmets, and the axe-handles and smoking-tobacco grouped together on the floor.

After the quartermaster, the adjutant, to the mind of the civilian at least, is the most superior being in the post. He is a lieutenant selected by the colonel to act as his conscience-keeper and letter-writer, and to convey his commands to the other officers. It is his proud privilege to sit in the colonel’s own room and sign papers, and to dictate others to his assistant non-coms, and it is one of his duties to oversee the guard-mount, and to pick out the smartest-looking soldier to act as the colonel’s orderly for the day. You must understand that as the colonel’s orderly does not have to remain on guard at night, the men detailed for guard duty vie with each other in presenting an appearance sufficiently brilliant to attract the adjutant’s eye, and as they all look exactly alike, the adjutant has to be careful. He sometimes spends five long minutes and much mental effort in going from one end of the ranks to the other to see if Number Three’s boots are better blacked than Number Two’s, and in trying to decide whether the fact that Murphy’s gun barrel is oilier than Cronin’s should weigh against the fact that Cronin’s gloves are new, while Murphy’s are only fresh from the wash, both having tied on the condition of their cartridges, which have been rubbed to look like silver, and which must be an entirely superfluous nicety to the Indian who may eventually be shot with them. This is one of the severest duties of an adjutant’s routine, and after having accompanied one of them through one of these prize exhibitions, I was relieved to hear him confess his defeat by telling the sergeant that Cronin and Murphy could toss for it. Another perquisite of the adjutant’s is his right to tell his brother officers at mess in a casual way that they must act as officer of the day or officer of the guard, or relieve Lieutenant Quay while he goes quail-hunting, or take charge of Captain Blank’s troop of raw recruits until the captain returns to their relief. To be able to do this to men who outrank you, and who are much older than yourself, and just as though the orders came from you direct, must be a great pleasure, especially as the others are not allowed the satisfaction of asking, “Who says I must?” or, “What’s the matter with your doing it yourself?” These are the officials of the post; the unofficials, the wives and the children, make the social life whatever it is.

There are many in the East who think life at an army post is one of discomfort and more or less monotony, relieved by petty gossip and flirtations. Of course one cannot tell in a short visit whether or not the life might become monotonous, though one rather suspects it would, but the discomforts are quite balanced by other things which we cannot get in the city. Of jealousy and gossip I saw little. I was told by one officer’s wife that to the railroads was due the credit of the destruction of flirtations at garrisons; and though I had heard of many great advances and changes of conditions and territories brought about by the coming of the railroads, this was the first time I had ever heard they had interfered with the course of more or less true love. She explained it by saying that in the days when army posts lay afar from the track of civilization the people were more dependent upon one another, and that then there may have existed Mrs. Hauksbees and Mrs. Knowles, but that to-day the railroads brought in fresh air and ideas from all over the country, and that the officers were constantly being exchanged, and others coming and going on detached service, and that visitors from the bigger outside world were appearing at all times.

The life impresses a stranger as such a peaceful sort of an existence that he thinks that must be its chief and great attraction, and that which makes the army people, as they call themselves, so well content. It sounds rather absurd to speak of an army post of all places in the world as peaceful; but the times are peaceful now, and there is not much work for the officers to do, and they enjoy that blessing which is only to be found in the army and in the Church of Rome—of having one’s life laid out for one by others, and in doing what one is told, and in not having to decide things for one’s self. You are sure of your home, of your income, and you know exactly what is going to be your work a month or five years later. You are not dependent on the rise of a certain stock, nor the slave of patients or clients, and you have more or less responsibility according to your rank, and responsibility is a thing every man loves. If he has that, and his home and children, a number of congenial people around him, and good hunting and fishing, it would seem easy for him to be content. It is different with his wife. She may unconsciously make life very pleasant for her husband or very uncomfortable, in ways that other women may not. If she leaves him and visits the East to see the new gowns, or the new operas, or her own people, she is criticized as not possessing a truly wifely spirit, and her husband is secretly pitied; and he knows it, and resents it for his wife’s sake. While, on the other hand, if she remains always at the post, he is called a selfish fellow, and his wife’s people at home in the East think ill of him for keeping her all to himself in that wilderness.

The most surprising thing about the frontier army posts, to my mind, was the amount of comfort and the number of pretty trifles one found in the houses, especially when one considered the distance these trifles—such as billiard-tables for the club or canteen, and standing-lamps for the houses on the line—had come. At several dinners, at posts I had only reached after two days’ journey by stage, the tables were set exactly as they would have been in New York City with Sherry’s men in the kitchen. There were red candle-shades, and salted almonds and ferns in silver centre-pieces, and more forks than one ever knows what to do with, and all the rest of it. I hope the army people will not resent this, and proudly ask, “What did he expect to find?” but I am sure that is not the idea of a frontier post we have received in the East. There was also something delightfully novel in the table-talk, and in hearing one pretty, slight woman, in a smart décolleté gown, casually tell how her husband and his men had burned the prairie grass around her children and herself, and turned aside a prairie fire that towered and roared around them, and another of how her first child had been seized with convulsions in a stage-coach when they were snow-bound eighty miles from the post and fifty miles from the nearest city, and how she borrowed a clasp-knife from one of the passengers with which he had been cutting tobacco, and lanced the baby’s gums, and so saved his life. There was another hostess who startled us by saying, cheerfully, that the month of June at her last post was the most unpleasant in the year, because it was so warm that it sometimes spoiled the ice for skating, and that the snow in April reached to the sloping eaves of the house; also the daughter of an Indian fighter, while pouring out at a tea one day, told calmly of an Indian who had sprung at her with a knife, and seized her horse’s head, and whom she had shaken off by lashing the pony on to his hind legs. She could talk the Sioux language fluently, and had lived for the greater part of her life eight hundred miles from a railroad. Is it any wonder you find all the men in an army post married when there are women who can adapt themselves as gracefully to snowshoes at Fort Brady as to the serious task of giving dinners at Fort Houston?

Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio is one of the three largest posts in the country, and is in consequence one of the heavens towards which the eyes of the army people turn. It is only twenty minutes from the city, and the weather is mild throughout the year, and in the summer there are palm-trees around the houses; and white uniforms—which are unknown to the posts farther north, and which are as pretty as they are hard to keep clean—make the parade-ground look like a cricket-field. They have dances at this post twice a month, the regimental band furnishing the music, and the people from town helping out the sets, and the officers in uniforms with red, white, and yellow stripes. A military ball is always very pretty, and the dancing-hall at Houston is decorated on such occasions with guidons and flags, and palms and broad-leaved plants, which grow luxuriously everywhere, and cost nothing. I went directly from this much-desired post to the little one at Oklahoma City, which is a one-company post, and where there are no semi-monthly dances or serenades by the band; but where, on the other hand, the officers do not stumble over an enlisted man at every step who has to be saluted, and who stands still before them, as though he meant to “hold them up” or ask his way, until he is recognized. The post at Oklahoma City is not so badly off, even though it is built of logs and mud, for the town is nearby, and the men get leave to visit it when they wish. But it serves to give one an idea of the many other one-company posts scattered in lonely distances along the borders of the frontier, where there are no towns, and where every man knows what the next man is going to say before he speaks—single companies which the Government has dropped out there, and which it has apparently forgotten, as a man forgets the book he has tucked away in his shelf to read on some rainy day. They will probably find they are remembered when the rainy days come. Fort Sill, in the Oklahoma Territory, is one of the eight-company posts. I visited several of these, and liked them better than those nearer the cities; but then I was not stationed there. The people at these smaller isolated posts seem to live more contentedly together. There is not enough of them to separate into cliques or sets, as they did at the larger stations, and they were more dependent one upon another. There was a night when one officer on the line gave a supper, and another (one of his guests) said he wished to contribute the cigars. There had not been an imported cigar in that post for a year at least, and when Captain Ellis brought in a fresh box with two paper stamps about it, and the little steamer engraved on the gray band met our eyes, and we knew they had paid the customs duty, there was a most unseemly cheer and undignified haste to have the box opened. And then each man laid his cigar beside his plate, and gazed and sniffed at it, and said “Ah!” and beamed on everyone else, and put off lighting it as long as he possibly could. That was a memorable night, and I shall never sufficiently thank Captain Ellis for that cigar, and for showing me how little we of the East appreciate the little things we have always with us, and which become so important when they are taken away.

Fort Sill is really a summer resort; at least, that is what the officers say. I was not there in summer, but it made a most delightful winter resort. There is really no reason at all why people should not go to these interior army posts, as well as to the one at Point Comfort, and spend the summer or winter there, either for their health or for their pleasure. They can reach Fort Sill, for instance, in a three-days’ journey from New York, and then there are two days of staging, and you are in a beautiful valley, with rivers running over rocky beds, with the most picturesque Indians all about you, and with red and white flags wigwagging from the parade to the green mountain-tops, and good-looking boy-officers to explain the new regulations, and the best of hunting and fishing.

I do not know how the people of Fort Sill will like having their home advertised in this way, but it seems a pity others should not enjoy following Colonel Jones over the prairie after jack-rabbits. We started four of them in one hour, and that is a very good sport when you have a field of twenty men and women and a pack of good hounds. The dogs of Colonel Jones were not as fast as the rabbits, but they were faster than the horses, and so neither dogs nor rabbits were hurt; and that is as it should be, for, as Colonel Jones says, if you caught the rabbits, there would be no more rabbits to catch. Of the serious side of the life of an army post, of the men and of the families of the men who are away on dangerous field service, I have said nothing, because there was none of it when I was there, nor of the privations of those posts up in the far Northwest, where snow and ice are almost a yearly accompaniment, and where the mail and the papers, which are such a mockery as an exchange for the voices of real people, come only twice a month.

It would be an incomplete story of life at a post which said nothing of the visits of homesickness, which, many strong men in the West have confessed to me, is the worst sickness with which man is cursed. And it is an illness which comes at irregular periods to those of the men who know and who love the East. It is not a homesickness for one home or for one person, but a case of that madness which seized Private Ortheris, only in a less malignant form, and in the officers’ quarters. An impotent protest against the immutability of time and of space is one of its symptoms—a sick disgust of the blank prairie, blackened by fire as though it had been drenched with ink, the bare parade-ground, the same faces, the same stories, the same routine and detailed life, which promises no change or end; and with these a longing for streets and rows of houses that seemed commonplace before, of architecture which they had dared to criticise, and which now seems fairer than the lines of the Parthenon, a craving to get back to a place where people, whether one knows them or not, are hurrying home from work under the electric lights, to the rush of the passing hansoms and the cries of the “last editions,” and the glare of the shop-windows, to the life of a great city that is as careless of the exile’s love for it as is the ocean to one who exclaims upon its grandeur from the shore; a soreness of heart which makes men while it lasts put familiar photographs out of sight, which makes the young lieutenants, when the band plays a certain waltz on the parade at sundown, bite their chin-straps, and stare ahead more fixedly than the regulations require. Some officers will confess this to you, and some will not. It is a question which is the happier, he who has no other scenes for which to care, and who is content, or he who eats his heart out for a while, and goes back on leave at last.