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“Dry,
hot, scorching weather! Everyone is vainly endeavoring to keep cool, and struggling
to prevent the grass, plants, and even weeds from disappearing entirely.”
While
those 24 words read like someone’s recent Facebook post, they were written on
June 18, 1882 at Fort
Clark, then a cavalry post across Las Moras Creek from Brackettville,
about 140 miles by horse or stagecoach southwest of San
Antonio. They show that no matter how many years may pass, some things stay
pretty much the same. Like drought.
The writer, a correspondent for the
San Antonio Evening Light who used the pen name “Readjuster,” went on:
“Morning and evening, heavy draughts are made upon the water tanks by those who
are bound to keep alive the precious vines, flowers and shade trees; and while
the water wagon gives down its life-saving element to the trees around the parade
[ground], all along the line [of officer’s quarters] in every yard may be seen
coming from the hose sprinklers miniature showers bedewing the parched and thirsty
vegetation.”
(Water may have been scarce in South
Texas that summer, but the writer clearly had enough ink for ample, ok, excessive,
comma use. Some of the more intrusive commas have been removed from these quotes
for readability.)
Beyond punctuation issues, while universal in its theme,
the writing is as flowery as the landscaping on officer’s row must have been.
Still, who would have thought that military officers guarding the U.S. border
from hostile incursions by Mexican bandits or Indians would be worried about their
yards? Not only that, who would have believed that a frontier military garrison
out in the middle of nowhere would have water hoses, much less sprinkers, in 1882?
“Ollas [Mexican-made water jugs] swing in nearly every hallway or porch,” the
writer continued, “and smoked eye glasses [what we would call sunglasses today]
are all the rage. Yet, in the evening as the sun nears the horizon, and his burning
rays fall more aslant, the garrison awakes from its lethargy; the band commence
their evening concert; ball-players throng the practice grounds; promenaders pass
up and down, enjoying the sweet music and the delicious, cool gulf breeze that
has arisen.”
Concluding his description of the already 30-year-old fort,
the anonymous writer painted a nice word picture of a remote military installation
in the cool of a long ago summer evening:
“Retreat sounds; the sharp report
of the sunset gun echoes from hill to hill, and from bank to bank along the Las
Moras, and many [soldiers] take up the line of march Brackett-wards, to pass the
while till tattoo.”
It’s
not hard to picture the author of this report sitting on the porch in front of
one of the stone officer’s quarters, taking in the scene and enjoying that gulf
breeze as he wrote. Of course, it could have been a she. Whatever gender, the
correspondent dropped the Victorian prose and got down to business, reporting
the news of the day:
The
post’s officers and non-commissioned officers had met to appoint judges and committees
in preparation for the coming Fourth of July festivities at the fort.The
8th Cavalry rifle team had “commenced practice.”Arthur
Campt of Luling had taken a job at W.E. Friedlander’s trader store at the post.A
soldier identified only as Private Hays had died that morning at the post hospital
after an illness of only 48 hours. He was buried with military honors in the post
cemetery that evening.The
Las Moras Masonic Lodge in Brackettville had elected new officers the night before.
“Two [railroad] car loads of flour and one of sundries arrived at the station
[Spofford Junction, 10 miles south of the fort] yesterday for Clark. Ice is brought
in daily, but like vegetables, it is a dear luxury.”
In
the summer of 1926, nearly a half-century after “Readjuster” filed that report,
it came to light in San Antonio’s
other newspaper, the Express, that someone at some unknown time had planted something
other than flowers in one Brackettville
yard.
“Skeleton Found in Brackettville
Yard,” read the one-column headline on an inside page of the morning newspaper.
A man cleaning a yard had picked up what he thought was a rock only to discover
he held a skull in his hand. Then he found the other bones in a small, shallow
grave.
“An inquest revealed that the individual buried there was in all
probability a female, and either Indian or Mexican,” the newspaper reported. “The
position of the bones and the smallness of the grave indicated that after death
arms and portions of the body had been chopped up and crammed into a small hole.”
The
doctor who examined the bones found the skull had been crushed and pronounced
it “a crime,” declaring it had happened decades earlier “when frontier days were
in full sway.”
The brief story concluded: “Old settlers could not recall
any special crime or disappearance to mind in connection with the finding of the
remains.”
© Mike
Cox - September
22, 2011 column
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