328 MY SPORTING HOLIDAYS 



' How are you getting on, Governor Huston ?' he 

 remarked. 



There was a moment's silence as the distinguished 

 assemblage looked with interested curiosity at this 

 to them new specimen of manhood from a distant 

 and then comparatively unknown part of the west. 



' Wai, President,' the new Governor calmly replied, 

 ' I like your cider, but damn your pickles !' And a 

 roar of following laughter shook the room. 



The probabilities were that the newly-acquired 

 State of Texas was not thought much of in Washing- 

 ton political circles thirty years ago. Its agricultural 

 and mineral resources were unknown and undeveloped 

 in those days. As a matter of fact, the State has 

 hardly emerged from its economic infancy yet. But 

 those were the lawless times when various Indian 

 tribes ran riot in this far western State, and when its 

 white population, on the fringe of civilization, con- 

 sisted mainly of that reckless, enterprising, wandering 

 class of men who, as trappers, scouts, or perhaps as 

 outlaws Rudyard Kipling's ' Lost Legion ' - - have 

 usually acted as the first pioneers, the world over, of 

 Anglo-Saxon evolution. 



One of Huston's first acts as the new Governor was 

 to organize the body of frontier mounted police, known 

 as Texas Rangers, to whom I have already alluded ; 

 and for the first few years of their existence the time 

 and energies of this force were mainly occupied in 

 protecting the scattered settlers and the sparse white 

 population generally from the native Red Indian 

 tribes, who, strangely enough, preferred their own 

 primitive ways to the new white civilization that was 

 being thrust upon them. 



I first visited the Panhandle in 1887. 'We've 



