Tony Weller tells us of a friend he had, who, becoming misanthrope, went
for revenge and kept a “pike,” in this country, commonly called a
toll-gate. The frequency of toll-roads and the rates of toll in Colorado
would make the state a paradise for misanthropes. One gate may be
located every ten miles, so the law provides, and you are sure to find
them if you travel ten miles on any road. Some fellow has said that all
roads lead to Rome, but in this country all roads lead to turnpikes. It
was a delightful conceit of old Tony’s, but if I wanted to reach the
seventh heaven of revenge I’d hunt out a location on any road five miles
from a toll-gate and open a house of entertainment for man and beast.
The entertainment for the beast would be a mere poetic license, a sort
of wild fancy, and consist of illimitable acres of rocks and pine brush;
a picket pin and a lariat, if the beast was to grow gaunt. Leave out the
picket pin and the beast would entertain himself by running away; but it
would be my custom, nevertheless, to charge fifty cents per head “all
the same,” and get it, because no one in this country ever thinks of
disputing the landlord’s demands. I’d say to you, “Thar was the pastur;
you turned your hoss in thar; ef he’s strayed, that’s your lookout, not
mine; I’ll claim a lien on the one that’s left, for the feed of both.”
The law allows it and the court awards it. No use to suggest that the
horse may not have been in the “pastur” half an hour; “the pastur was
thar, prepared for the hoss, and ef the hoss strayed, that’s your
lookout, not mine.” If you were reasonable I would give the remaining
horse the run of the “pastur” and charge you for it while you hunted up
the stray. If you’d “kick” there might be trouble, and trouble under the
circumstances in this country might be serious. But the cream of the
business of wayside entertainment would be in the cooking, and the
results of it thrown together for the man. I’d fry everything; would
rack my ingenuity for a method of frying the chicory. Two dishes for
flitch and potatoes, rolling-prairie-dried-apple-pie and griddle cakes
would be a red-letter day in the calendar of any tenderfoot who chanced
my way. If a man hinted at a teaspoon to eat his blasted blackberries,
I’d wither him with a glance of my frontier eye, and ask him if he
thought I kept a Denver restaurant. Tony Weller’s friend no doubt did
the best “according to his lights,” and opportunities, but the
capabilities of my plan, with study, are boundless. Imagination runs
riot on the theme, and the only wonder to me is that some fellow,
misanthropically inclined, has never adopted this method of making his
fellows happy. Perhaps there are no misanthropes in Colorado. At least I
am away from them, toll-roads and wayside houses; in the land of the
mosquito and the trout; and the meadow larks perch upon my tent top and
“give salutation to the morn,” by conjugating the to them familiar Greek
verb—at least it strikes me so.
Mosquitoes are among the blessings of this life; they prepare us for the
robes of immortality, by teaching us patience under affliction. If there
is anything I love better than a mule, it is a mosquito. There is poetry
in his flight and music in his song. Never having concealed my love, I
think it got abroad and preceded me this trip. I found him and his
family here, on the banks of the Troublesome; there is quite a number of
him, so to speak, and he keeps one’s five senses actively employed at
once, while he inculcates prudence and fortitude. I met a man from the
mouth of Troublesome, and he told me he had seen but one mosquito, and
“he was very wild.” That is the one I have been looking for; I long to
cultivate him, on the same principle that a fellow wants the girl, not
the whole family. The Mississippi gallinipper is adolescent compared to
the Troublesome mosquito. Yesterday I saw one stick his bill into a
gallon jar and take a drink without any apparent effort. If I had
anticipated the pleasure, I would have borrowed some foils and got up a
few fencing matches. I wouldn’t under any consideration suggest
broadswords or cavalry sabres, for that might prove dangerous. I am
maturing a plan to submit to the Secretary of War, whereby I think the
mosquitoes of this immediate vicinity may be advantageously organized in
a campaign against the Utes. Judiciously maneuvered, they’d exterminate
the Indian. West Point can boast of no such natural drill-masters. Their
individual proficiency in this regard makes me itch to present my
project to the department at Washington. All they need for effective
service is regimental discipline, and I have no doubt our
representatives in Congress can find some of their unemployed military
constituents at the Capital who would prove excellent and willing
disciplinarians. Salary, of course, would be of no consequence; love of
country, something to do except turning up their toes in her service,
would be ample pay. The more I reflect upon this project of mine, the
better I think of its possibilities, and, but that this world is given
to ingratitude, the debt that Belford and our two Senators would owe me
for thus opening one channel for their relief would be great. I believe
“there’s millions in it.”
But how about the trout fishing? you ask. Well, the trout fishing is
good. I have met the usual tourist, with cod hooks, chalk lines and
wagon poles, with an occasional hatful of highly colored flies; the
fellow with the hundred dollar rig and helmet hat, apparently all “fly,”
and I have seen them belabor the beautiful Grand for a mile at a
stretch, my mind dwelling on murder. The “swish” of their poles through
the air sounds like the sough of an amateur cyclone, and the fall of the
lines upon the water as though some indignant father were having an
interview in the woodshed with his first born, and nothing handy but a
quarter strap. Could the fishing be otherwise than good? Good for the
fishermen because it gives them plenty of exercise, and as half at least
of the pleasure of this life is made up of anticipation, these fellows
keep thinking all the time that they are going to catch something, and
they do—cold. Good for the trout because they are never caught, and
good for the sportsman who knows their ways, though they be like the
“way of the serpent upon the rock”—past finding out. The instinct of
the trout is akin to the sense of the human sucker, and I have sometimes
wondered if they did not entertain a pretty fair idea of our lunatic
asylums, and gain the impression that at certain seasons there was an
exodus; that the inmates escaped into the wilderness and deployed along
the mountain streams; that these people were the descendants of farmers
and laborers opposed to the probable innovations of threshing machines,
and esteeming the ancient flail above all other methods, thus expressed
their hallucination. It requires no stretch of the imagination to thus
consider.
There is no genuine enjoyment in the easy achievement of any purpose;
there is no bread so sweet as the hard-earned loaf of the man who works
for it. The rule holds good in the school of the sportsman. The fellows
I have been writing of, had they their way, would become mere engines of
destruction; they would catch, not for the pleasure of catching, but
because they could, and a universe of trout would not satiate them.
Sportsmen are not made of that kind of material. A little horse sense
goes a great way in all things, trouting not excepted; it is an
indispensable foundation to success. Avarice must be ruled out; your
genuine angler has none of it, but will insist on his neighbor having at
least as good as he, if not better.
I said awhile ago that I was away from toll roads and wayside houses of
entertainment. I’m stopping with a friend, a genuine angler, whom I have
seen walk in the wake of one of those threshing machines, with a rod
light as a buggy whip, and with a twist of the wrist drop a fly upon the
water thirty or fifty feet away, and as it settled gently down, as falls
the snowflake upon the bosom of the stream, there would come a rush and
struggle that denoted the fishing was really good to him who had
achieved the art of casting a fly. He is no seeker after distinction,
and I shall not give you his name. He does not read Horace, nor does he
understand the thirty-nine articles of the established church, as some
of our amateur Christians do, but he knows how to treat his friends,
which is better. I had been tickling my vanity with the belief that I
knew something about trout fishing, but I have found out that my
acquirements were, by way of comparison, merely with the escaped
lunatics. He sends me out to “take the cream off” a pool, or out of it,
and when I’d be ready to swear there was not another left, he’ll make me
bear witness to my own lack of faith by striking as many, if not more,
than I had brought to creel. He thinks I’ll learn to handle a fly rod
after awhile, and I have hope; besides I am learning to cultivate all
the virtues. Think of me with the mercury at seventy or more at high
noon, rubber boots with tops to my hips, thick breeches, woolen shirts
and a duck coat, my intellectual head swathed in a net and my horny
hands encased in buckskin gauntlets, a ten-ounce fly rod, and ten pounds
of trout brought to basket at my back, perspiration exuding in streams;
outside that net nine thousand mosquitoes to the square inch, yet I’m
happy—going to school, and have the best of the vermin.
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