Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

5. HEAT, DUST, AND BOREDOM

+5+ HEAT, DUST, AND BOREDOM SIN C E E VERY O NE in Fort Davis volunteers for something, I decided shortly after we moved here to put my training as a historian to good use and volunteer at the fort, which is a National Park Service Historic Site. The historian there, Mary Williams, put me to work indexing the microfilmed documents in the library. I worked on the daily records of the fort for the 1880s, microfilmed from the originals in the Library of Congress. If you were ever in the armed forces, you know that Napoleon was wrong when he said that an army marches on its stomach. An army marches on paper- reams of it. Even in the nineteenth century no soldier could move half a mile, nor could the ordinary business of a military post be carried on, without some sort of form or document being prepared in triplicate. There is nothing like reading hundreds of original documents to get the flavor of a time and place. The flavor of Fort Davis in the I880s was hot, dusty, and suffused with boredom. I learned a lot about how the army worked in those days. I learned that the soldiers at Fort Davis didn't worry about fighting Indians. They worried about keeping track of government property. Every third document that I read was a request for a board of survey-a committee of three officers-to be appointed in order to "investigate and fix responsibility for" the loss of a saddle blanket, or damage to a firearm, or a discrepancy between an invoice for peas and the number of sacks delivered. Hours and hours of military time was spent literally counting beans, and the person responsible for the missing beans had their cost deducted from his pay. A private back then earned thirteen dollars a month. Privates could supplement their pay by doing extra duty as blacksmiths, tailors , carpenters, teamsters, stonemasons, hospital stewards, or laborers in the quartermaster deparhnent. Each month the company commanders were required to turn in a list of "mechanics and clerks" in their companies in order to identify men who might qualify for these jobs. Skilled men got an additional thirty-five cents a day for extra duty; laborers were paid twenty cents extra a day. The papers at the fort record weekly assignments to and relief from extra duty. Sometimes the personality of a soldier can be glimpsed behind the formal military language. In 1887 a private was relieved of extra duty as a teamster "due to the constant surveillance to which his intemperate habits require him to be subjected." A year earlier , an officer vetoed an extra duty assignment by noting on the document that the man "was entirely worthless as a soldier and appears to be incapable of reformation." Extra duty not only added to a private's income, it helped to relieve boredom, which was a big factor in life at the fort in the 1880s. In the previous decade, bands of Apaches occasionally raided remote ranches and held up stagecoaches in the Big Bend, keeping the soldiers on their toes. But the Victorio Campaign of 1881 marked the end of Indian fighting here, and for the next ten years, until the post was closed in 1891, the army pretty much twiddled its thumbs. The depth of the boredom is revealed in a series of documents at the fort dated in September of 1889. The fort had a steam-powered ice machine, which was fired with pine logs cut on the slopes of Mount Livermore at a place called The Pinery. In early September 1889, someone decided that someone else was stealing wood from the fort's woodpile and charging it up to the ice machine. The case assumed the dimensions of Captain Queeg's missing strawberry ice cream. An order came down from the post commander, Lt. Col. Melville A. Cochran, that a board of review should be formed to determine exactly how much wood the ice machine burned each day. For two weeks, a captain and two lieutenants met every day to consider the ice machine. They ran it from six thirty in the morning until nine at night for three days straight. They weighed and measured the wood that went into its engine and the cans of ice that came out of it. They interviewed the men who loaded the wood wagon, the man...