THE CITY OF DENVER—THE LADIES GIVE A BALL—MANNERS OF DENVER—‘QUITE
OUR FINEST GENTLEMAN’—THE PLAINS WILL BE TO AMERICA AN IMPROVED
AUSTRALIA—THE ADVANTAGES THEY OFFER FOR FLOCKS AND HERDS—WILL SOON BE
CLEAR OF INDIANS—MARKETS NOW OPENED TO THEM—SIZE OF THE RUNS—WEALTH OF
THE REGION.
[Sidenote: _The City of Denver._]
I expressed some of the surprise I felt at finding a place like Omaha,
500 miles beyond Chicago. But here, at Denver, is a busy, thriving
town, 600 miles beyond Omaha. It has almost completed its transition
from wood to brick. The stores and offices are now nearly all of the
latter material. So is the new church of the Methodists, which besides
has stained glass windows. In the church of the Episcopalians, the
primitive wood still maintains its ground in the greater part of the
building. The finest structure in the place is a seminary for young
ladies, which has just been erected by Bishop Randall. The Methodists
have a large seminary of the same kind, but externally it is very
inferior to the Bishop’s. The United States Government has also a Mint
here, for the gold and silver extracted from the mountains. I inspected
in the town three common schools; two for whites, one for boys, one for
girls, and one for coloured people of any age; for I saw several adults
in the room, seated on the same benches as the children. Denver, as
far as I could judge, is well provided with everything. On enquiry,
I found that a haunch of antelope venison sold for seventy-five
cents—about half-a-crown of our money. The mountains are close upon the
town, and present a view that is very grand. Golden City, which is in a
gap of the first range, is distant from Denver only ten miles.
In so new and remote a place one would not expect to find everything,
in the way of manners and customs, moving on precisely in the grooves
of the Old World. For instance, I was just too late for a ball which
the ladies of Denver, availing themselves of the fact that it was
leap-year, had given to the gentlemen. It had been, I understood,
a lively affair and a great success. The ladies selected their own
partners (one, however, has heard of other instances of this), and took
the gentlemen in to supper. As in all new settlements the fair sex must
always be in a minority, some of the gentlemen must on this occasion
have learnt, ‘with pangs unfelt before, unpitied and alone,’ what it is
to be a ball-room wall-flower.
I arrived at Denver at 4 A.M. A few hours afterwards, as I was passing
the door of the drawing-room of the hotel, a gentleman I had never seen
before came out to meet me, and, conducting a lady up to me, requested
me to take her down to breakfast. I afterwards became acquainted
with this gentleman, and found that he was an ex-judge, who on the
expiration of his term of office had resumed his practice at the bar.
[Sidenote: _‘Quite our Finest Gentleman.’_]
When breakfast was over, the manager of the hotel invited me to
accompany him up stairs to the ladies’ drawing-room, that he might
introduce me to the mistress of the house and some other ladies whom I
should find sitting with her.
These ceremonies having been got through, I took a letter of
introduction to the editor of the local news department of one of the
Denver dailies. With the overflowing good-nature of his countrymen, he
immediately placed himself at my service, showing me over the town,
and introducing me to its notabilities. Hospitality here is plainly
the order of the day; for wherever we went, invitations of one kind
or another were immediately given. In a place like Denver, where even
the tradition of social inequalities has been lost, and the idea and
practice of equality that rule society have, in their passage across
the continent, been distilled and redistilled a hundred times, you
find the article in its purest possible form; men are valued only
according to their personal qualities, such as their cleverness, their
_bonhomie_, and their ability to make money. I give this as a preface
to my Denver cicerone’s description of one of the persons to whom he
was about to introduce me. ‘You must now,’ he said, ‘let me take you to
Mr. A. He is quite our finest gentleman.’ I had not had many minutes’
conversation with ‘quite the finest gentleman in Denver,’ before I
had reason for coinciding with the estimate of his fellow-townsmen;
for among other offers of assistance and hospitality, he had given
me an invitation to be his companion and guest in a long tour he was
about to make in the mountains, but which, he explained, would on his
part combine business with exploration and pleasure. Of course it is
inconceivable that there could be any gentleman in Denver who was
not in some kind of business, and ‘quite the finest gentleman’ of the
place happened to be a grocer. But what of that? So is the senator for
the State of New York; and Denver grocers can and do possess many of
the personal qualities of gentlemen, though it may be supposed they
are quite unconscious of the sense in which Charles II. used the word,
when he replied to his foster-mother’s request that he would make his
foster-brother a gentleman, ‘that he could make him a lord, but that
God Almighty could not make him a gentleman.’ Meaning that the being,
or the not being a gentleman, was a matter of birth, and of birth only.
One who has seen anything of these enormous plains, cannot but
speculate on their future. I came to the conclusion that in a few years
they will be the Australia of North America. And as their soil and
climate are very much better, they will support, at a far cheaper rate,
a much greater number of millions of sheep and cattle. In the Valley
of the Platte, for 500 miles, and down as far as Denver, though the
climate is too dry for agricultural purposes, still the herbage is so
abundant and nutritious that even in winter, when it is all dried up
into the form of natural hay, herds of cattle are turned out to fatten
upon it, which they do readily, without any shelter or any help from
artificial food.
[Sidenote: _The Australia of America._]
As you go further south, you get some regions still better adapted
to grazing and sheep-farming, and some not so good, till you come to
Texas, in which enormous numbers of horned cattle are raised already.
That Nature does of herself supply everything that is needed, is proved
by this having been the home of the buffalo, which has ever been
covering these plains with numbers beyond belief. It becomes, then,
a kind of rule of three sum: if Nature, unaided, supported without
fail so many millions of large herbivorous animals, how many more will
she support when aided by the care and forethought of man? Convert
in your mind these countless herds of buffalo into sheep and oxen,
and then multiply the result twenty fold, for that amount may easily
be reached, when American flock-masters and herd-masters shall have
taken possession of the plains, and parcelled them out into manageable
ranches, turning the whole of the surface to account.
There are a great many streams, small and great, which carry the
drainage of the mountains across these plains to the Mississippi; and
in places where there are no streams, water may be obtained by sinking
wells. Wherever I went I made enquiries on this subject, and looked
myself into the wells; and I found that water was reached in the Valley
of the Platte, and on the plains from Shyenne to Denver, at a depth of
about thirty feet. Water for the stock might be pumped from such wells
by horse-engines or wind-mills.
In the northern part of the plains, in most winters there is a short
spell of very severe cold, and it is possible that the ground may
for several days continuously be covered with snow. Both of these
difficulties may be met. The first by enclosures that will keep the
cold wind from the stock, the walls being of wood, or of wood and
adobe, or of any material that is the cheapest on the spot; and the
second, by laying up a store of prairie hay. This is already done by
Wells, Fargo, and Company, on these very plains, for the purpose of
supplying provender for the horses of their numerous coaches. They
have it cut by the hay-cutting machine that is getting into use in
this country. The prairie hay looks hard and coarse, but in reality is
of very good quality, and has the great advantage that it will keep
for many years; so that what is cut this summer, if on account of the
openness of the season it be not needed in the ensuing winter, will
stand over for another year; in fact, it will remain good till it is
wanted.
Heretofore there have been two hindrances to stock-keeping on the
plains—the Indians, and the want of a market. Both of these are now in
course of removal. In a year or two the Indians to the north of Shyenne
and Denver will have ceased to give any more trouble. To the south of
Denver they have already been cleared off to a considerable distance.
With them, indeed, everywhere throughout the plains, as it has been
with them all the way up from the Atlantic coast, their disappearance
will only be a question of time. And the time is now at hand, for the
white man has begun to settle on the plains, and the two races cannot
exist together in the same region. And as to the want of a market,
that deficiency is being removed by the peopling of the Valley of the
Mississippi, and by the advance into the plains of the two branches
of the Pacific railway. These lines will carry mutton and beef to the
Eastern States, at a lower figure than that at which they can grow the
meat themselves. They will also carry away the tallow, hides, bones,
and wool. In the Eastern and Northern States stock has to be kept all
the winter on corn and artificial food, while here on the plains its
keep costs nothing, for it can be fattened very well for market on
the natural grasses. What, therefore, the wheat-growing States of the
North-west have done for those who were formerly the wheat-growers of
the East, these States on the plains will do for those who are now the
meat-growers of the East.
There will be this great difference between farming and
stock-keeping—that is, between the proprietors of arable land in the
old States, and the flock and herd masters of the plains—that it is
impossible to farm on a large scale; it has, with exceptions hardly
worth noticing, been so throughout the Union, a farmer seldom getting
beyond what he can manage with his own hands and the assistance of his
family; but here just the reverse will be the only thing possible. It
will be here as it has been in Australia: a man cannot keep a few head
of cattle, or a few hundred sheep. To make it pay, indeed, to keep his
animals alive, he must have a large tract of land, and do the thing on
a large scale. We hear of paddocks in Australia thirty miles square. I
suppose on the plains a third of this size will be a sufficiently large
run, and a much more profitable one.
As the tide of population has now reached the plains on their eastern
side, and in some degree on the western and northern sides also, and
as many have already got a footing upon them, I suppose, judging
from the rapidity with which everything that pays is carried out in
America, that in a few years this enormous district, twice as large
as France, will be occupied, and by a class of men such as the Union
does not now possess. They will be very numerous and very wealthy—quite
the wealthiest class in the Union; and even if there is to be no
resurrection for the South, which it is impossible to believe, they
will compensate, speaking from the wealth-of-nations point of view,
for its loss. I have seen some of the pioneers of the class, and,
prophesying of those who are to follow, from the way in which the
influences of the Plain have shaped those who have already come, I
would say that they will be characterised by hardihood, generosity, and
manliness. They will occupy with their flocks and herds a great part
of Texas on the south, and of Nebraska on the north, with the whole of
Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. This region will, like Australia
and the districts of the La Plata, export enormous quantities of wool,
tallow, and hides. But they will have a mighty advantage over those
two great stock-keeping regions, that they will not be themselves the
only consumers of their beef and mutton, but will have customers for
as much as they can produce, in the inhabitants of a rich and populous
continent, of which they will be the centre. In this way is some
new source of wealth, and always on the grandest scale, ever being
developed in the United States.