Camp Hooker was an astonishing and spectacular growth, suggesting "A Mining Town in 1870--The Second Week." It was a thing of wooden shacks and whitish-gray tents, connected by a pattern of roads, with hard tan drill-grounds fringed with trees. Here and there stood green Y. M. C. A. houses, unpromising oases, with their muggy odor of wet flannels and closed telephone-booths--and across from each of them there was usually a canteen, swarming with life, presided over indolently by an officer who, with the aid of a side-car, usually managed to make his detail a pleasant and chatty sinecure.