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Brackettville
Texas
Army Booze by
Mike Cox | |
Living
amid the skyscraper canyons of New York City in the waning days of Prohibition,
Lt. Col. Jasper Ewing Brady Sr. reflected on his days as a young enlisted man
on the Texas border.
Hoping to make a point about temperance movements,
Brady wrote a letter to the New York Herald Tribune on Oct. 26, 1933.
He had been in Co. D, 19th Infantry, he told the newspaper, when his regiment
got orders to relocate to Fort Clark in 1889. By then, both sides of the Rio Grande
had become fairly tame in comparison to earlier days. While bandits and hostile
Indian incursions remained a mostly theoretical threat, the young soldier soon
learned that John Barleycorn posed a much greater danger to soldiers and the civilians
they were supposed to protect.
Across
Las Moras Creek from Fort Clark lay Brackettville,
seat of Kinney County. Brady saw it as "a non-descript frontier town, ten miles
from the railroad…and about the worst place on the map."
In fairness to
Brackettville, any Texas town adjacent to a military post had no shortage of businesses
catering to thirsty, lonely soldiers. But being only half-a-day's horseback ride
from the border, it may have been a bit rowdier than other places.
Saloons
there did a flourishing business at every corner "and plenty in between," as Brady
wrote. "Dance halls, brothels… let your imagination run riot and you may approximate
what this town was in those hectic days."
The Blue Goose and Gray Mule
dance halls stood out particularly in the old soldier's memory. "There were several
kinds of dances indulged in that are not seen on stage or ballroom floor," he
continued. "There were cheap liquor, cards, all kinds of gambling, women and no
legal restraints."
Income
at these establishments ebbed and flowed with the Army's pay schedule. As Brady
remembered, soldiers got their money every three months -- $13 a month for privates,
$15 for corporals, $18 for sergeants.
"The first day after our arrival
at Clark will linger in my memory as long as I shall live," he wrote. "It was
wild - not a revel, but an orgy, such as would have made Nero look like a piker."
The
next morning, Brady recalled, 110 soldiers woke up in the post guardhouse "charged
with every crime in the calendar, from drunkenness and A.W.O.L. up to and including
attempted murder." Three months later, following the next payday, the military
counted 112 of its own behind bars.
Though the Army could not control
free enterprise in Brackettville,
it could make it harder for soldiers to get booze on the military reservation.
Brady did not go into specifics, but either the post commander or someone higher
up decreed that the post trader's store, which sold soldiers liquor, would be
no more.
The Army set up a canteen for its soldiers so they could have
a place on post to drink beer and wine, though the hard stuff was banned. A soldier
could buy no more than five glasses of beer - "so light it would not stand alone"
- per day.
The elimination of readily available spirituous beverages on
post presumably went hand in hand with placing the saloons of Brackettville off
limits to soldiers, but Brady did not mention that in his letter. He did say that
the new canteen had been open only a month when the next pay day rolled around.
"Here was the test and here is the answer," Brady wrote. "The day following
found 8 men out of 1100 confined in the guardhouse. The next day there were 10,
and the following one there were six. Never were there over a dozen."
Looking back on the Fort Clark cleanup, Brady characterized it as "the finest
example of controlled temperance I have ever seen."
When the New York daily
published the old soldier's letter, America's worst example of "controlled temperance"
was nearing its end. National prohibition, in effect since Jan. 16, 1920, ended
in 1933 when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment repealing
prohibition. | |
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