After finding that farming and railroad engineering were not exactly the employments he had fancied them to be, young Lockwood resumed his studies under the direction of his father. Not long afterward, however, he was seized with the idea of entering the army, and, at the very outset of this venture for a useful life, he was met with a blending of good and bad fortune. Securing the influence of many friends, he made a successful appeal to the President and the War Department. He received orders for an examination before the proper tribunal, and, out of thirty-eight young men who were examined in Washington, he passed No. 1. He also had a higher mark than any of those examined in other places at the same time; hence he was entitled to the highest commission as second lieutenant, and at one time it was resolved to give it to him; but, as the examinations were conducted in different places and before different boards, it was decided to settle the rank of the applicants by lot, and Lockwood’s number was forty, instead of one to which he was justly entitled. He was, however, promised a crack regiment, and hence became second lieutenant in the Twenty-third Infantry, then commanded by two officers who had gained distinction in the late war—Colonel Jefferson C. Davis and Lieutenant-Colonel George Crook. He soon after joined the recruiting station at New York for instruction. The few letters that Lieutenant Lockwood wrote home from New York contained very graphic pictures of what he there observed. His reception at the recruiting-station was most cordial, one of the first things done there by the recruiting-officers, to his surprise, being to bring forth a demijohn of whisky; but from this hospitality he begged to be excused, only one or two other young men following his example. After a service of several weeks at the recruiting-station in New York, he conducted recruits to the Territory of Arizona by the way of Panama. The party left New York in November, 1873, and, on reaching San Francisco, went by steamer to Fort Yuma, near the mouth of the Colorado River, and thence marched over the rugged and dusty plains of Arizona to McDowell Post, a distance of more than one hundred and fifty miles in the interior. From the few letters that he wrote respecting his trip from New York to San Francisco, we gather the following items: