That coaching is a grand sport I cannot deny, for I know almost nothing of it beyond an impression that there is a tremendous amount of mystery connected with its rites. As a sport I have never participated in it, but while travelling the waste places of the earth I have used it as a means on occasion. I never will again. There is no place to which I desire to go badly enough to go in a coach, and such points of interest as are inaccessible except by coach are off my trail. I am not in the least superstitious, and am prone to scout such tendencies; but I’m a Jonah in a stage-coach, and that is not a superstition, but a fact amply proven by many trials. I remember as a boy in Montana having been so hopelessly mixed up with a sage-bush on a dark night when the stage overturned that it left an impression on me. Later in life I was travelling in Arizona, and we were bowling along about ten miles an hour down a great “hog-back” to the plains below. A “swing mule” tripped up a “lead mule,” and the stage—with myself on the box—ran over the whole six, and when the driver and I separated ourselves from the mules, shreds of harness, splinters, hair, hide, cargo, and cactus plants I began to formulate the intelligence that stage-coaching was dangerous.

While riding in an army ambulance with Major Viele, of the First Cavalry, and the late Lieutenant Clark, of the Tenth, the brake-beam broke on the descent of a hill, and we only hit the ground in the high places for about a mile. I will not insist that every man can hold his breath for five consecutive minutes, but I did it. Thereupon I formulated vows and pledges. But like the weak creature I am, I ignored all this and got into one at Chihuahua last winter, and first and last did five hundred miles of jolting, with all the incident and the regulation accident which [151]
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[153]goes to make up that sort of thing. Now I like to think that I have been through it all, and am alive and unmaimed; and I take a great deal of comfort in knowing that, however I may meet my end, a stage-coach will be in no way connected with it.

On the trip out we had mules. They were black and diminutive. To me a Mexican mule seems to be the Chinaman of the dumb animals. They are enduring beyond comprehension, and they have minds which are patient, yet alert and full of guile. The Mexican coacheros have their mules trained, as bankers do their depositors in our land. They back up against a wall and stand in line while one by one they are harnessed. In the early morning I liked to see the lantern-light glorify the little black creatures against the adobe wall, and hear the big coachero talk to his beasts in that easy, familiar way and with that mutual comprehension which is lost to those of the human race who have progressed beyond the natural state. This coachman was an enormous man—big, bony, and with Sullivanesque shoulders, gorilla hands, and a blue-black buccaneer beard; and but for a merry brown eye and a mouth set in perpetual readiness to grin he would have belonged to the “mild-mannered” class, to which, as a matter of fact, he did not. It is written in the lease of his land that he shall drive the Bavicora ranche coach—it’s fief-service, it’s feudal, and it carries one back. If the little mules and ponies did not stand in the exact six feet of ground where he wanted them, he grabbed hold of them and moved them over to the place without a word, and after being located they never moved until he yanked or lifted them to their place at the pole. The guards were Mexican Indians—hair cut À la Cosaques, big straw hats, serapes, and munitions of war. William, whose ancestors had emigrated from the Congo region before the war, was to cook. He was also guide, philosopher, and friend to Mr. H. and myself in this strange land, and he made all things possible by his tact and zeal in our behalf. William knows every one in the State of Chihuahua, and he is constantly telling us of the standing and glittering position of the inhabitants of the mud huts which we pass, until it sounds like that ghastly array of intelligence with which a society reporter quickens the social dead in a Sunday newspaper.

At night we stay at the different ranches, and, rolling ourselves up in our blankets, we lie down on the mud floors to sleep. It’s not so bad after one becomes used to it, albeit the skin wears off one’s femur joint. The Mexican hen is as conscientious here as elsewhere, and we eat eggs. The Mexican coffee is always excellent in quality, but the people make it up into a nerve-jerking dose, which will stand hot-water in quantities. Nearly all travellers are favorably impressed with the frejoles and tortillas of the country. The beans are good, but as old General Taylor once said, “They killed more men than did bullets in the Mexican War.” Of the tortillas I will say, as my philosophical friend, Mr. Poultney Bigelow, says of the black bread of the Russian soldier, “It’s a good strong food to march and fight on,” which can in no way be a recommendation of its palatability.

The coach starts by gray dawn, and we are aroused at an early hour. The white men take sponge-baths in a wash-basin, and the native who stands about deep in the folds of his serape fails utterly to comprehend. He evidently thinks a lot, but he doesn’t say anything. I suppose it seems like “clay-eating” or penitent mutilations to him—not exactly insanity, but a curious custom, at any rate. On the return trip we have a half-broken team of buckskin broncos, which have to be “hooked up” with [155]
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[157]great stealth. And when the coachman had climbed quietly on to the box and we were inside, the guards let go of the team, and the coachman cracked his whip, while we looked out of the window and held our breath. Then there were Horse Pyrotechniques! Ground and Lofty Tumbling! Greatest Show on Earth! for about a minute, when we made a start down the big road—or didn’t, as the case might be. After the first round we often had to get out, and, two ponies having got themselves into the same collar, we would then rearrange them for better luck next time.

In Mexico they drive four mules abreast in the lead and two on the pole, which seems to be an excellent way. Mexican coachmen generally keep “belting” their stock and yelling “Underlay-nula!” which is both picturesque and unintelligible. Our man was, however, better educated. Forty or fifty miles is a day’s journey, but the exact distance is so dependent on the roads, the load, and the desire to “get thar” that it varies greatly.

We pass the Guerrero stage as it bowls along, and hundreds of heavy, creeking ox-carts, as they draw slowly over the yellow landscape, with their freight to and from the mines. Bunches of sorrowful burros, with corn, wood, pottery, and hay, part as we sweep along through and by them.

We have the inspiring vista of Chihuahua before us all the time. It is massive in its proportions and opalescent in color. There are torquois hills, dazzling yellow foregrounds—the palette of the “rainbow school” is everywhere. There are little mud houses, ranches, and dirty little adobe towns to pass, which you must admire, though you may not like them. Gaunt cattle wander in their search for grass and water, and women squat by the riverbed engaged in washing or filling their ollas.

The people are enchanting. It is like reading the Bible to look at them, because it is so unreal; yet there they are before one, strange and mysterious, and, like other things which appeal to one’s imagination, it would be a sad thing if one were to understand them. One is tempted to think that the people of our Northern races know too much for their own good. It seems remorseless, but it is so. When I heard the poor Mexican asked why he thought it had not rained in eighteen months, he said, “Because God wills it, I suppose;” we were edified by the way they shifted the responsibility which Farmer Dunn in our part of the world so cheerfully assumes.

One afternoon we were on a down-grade, going along at a fair pace, when a wheel struck a stone, placed there by some freighter to block his load. It heaved the coach, pulled out the king-pin, and let the big Concord down and over on its side. The mules went on with the front wheels, pulling Jack off the box, while we who were on top described a graceful parabolic curve and landed with three dull thuds. I was caught under the coach by one leg and held there. A guard inside made all haste to crawl out through a window, and after a bit I was released. We were all pretty badly bruised up, and Mr. H. had his foot broken. The mules were recovered, however, the coach righted, and we were again off. We made the town of Tamochica that night, and the town-folks were kind and attentive. They made crutches, heated water, and sent a man to the creek to catch leeches to put on our wounds. Two men were shot in a house near by during the night, and for a few minutes there was a lively fusillade of pistol shots. It was evident that life in Tamochica would spoil a man’s taste for anything quiet, and so as soon as we could move we did it.

We passed an old church, and were shown two Jesuits who had been dead over a hundred years. They were [159]
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[161]wonderfully preserved, and were dressed in full regalia. I wondered by what embalmer’s art it had been accomplished.

A guard of punchers met us to conduct us over a mountain-pass. They were dressed in terra-cotta buckskin trimmed with white leather, and were armed for the largest game in the country. The Bavicora coach has never been robbed, and it is never going to be—or, at least that is the intention of the I-F folks. One man can rob a stage-coach as easily as he could a box of sardines, but with outriders before and behind it takes a large party, and even then they will leave a “hot trail” behind them.

One morning as I was lolling out of the window I noticed the wheel of the coach pass over a long, blue Roman candle. I thought it was curious that a long, blue Roman candle should be lying out there on the plains, when with a sudden sickening it flashed upon me—“giant powder!” The coach was stopped, and we got out. The road was full of the sticks of this high explosive. A man was coming down the road leading a burro and picking up the things, and he explained that they had dropped out of a package from his bull-wagon as he passed the night before. We didn’t run over any more pieces. If the stick had gone off there would have been a little cloud of dust on the Guerrero road, and, I hope, some regrets in various parts of the world. The incident cannot be made startling, but it put the occupants of the Bavicora coach in a quiet train of reflection that makes a man religious.

Now, as I ponder over the last stage-coach ride which I shall ever take on this earth, I am conscious that it was pleasant, instructive, and full of incident. All that might have happened did not, but enough did to satiate my taste.