spindle-tailed sorrel, with a sort of a vicious gait that boded a bad
temper and stubborn mind. Again the halter was deftly put on and made
into a bitless bridle, the hoodwink slipped on, the saddle gently
placed, and man and horse were furiously rushing, bucking, leaping,
rearing across the meadow, and right straight at the high board and
wire fence. The horse, if it couldn't throw him, would jam and scrape
him off if it ever reached that merciless mass of pine and barbed wire.
Could Grimsby turn him, and without a bit? Great riding that was, and
greater steering, for just before the seeming inevitable crash, the
horse swerved, turned and was bucking across and then around the field
again. Grimsby never failed to meet every wild movement, and sat in the
saddle as though in a rocking-chair. The horse, at last conquered, stood
quiet as a lamb, and the cheers for the sturdy rider quite equaled the
plaudits given his raven-maned predecessor.
Now the crowd had its blood up. Two native champions had proved their
grit, what could the Arizonian do against such as these? "He's too big
and awkward," said one onlooker. "He's not the cut for a King buster,"
grunted another. "The h--l he ain't. Ain't he the man who won that
Cheyenne race after his horse fell on him?" exclaimed one who knew, and
the scoffers became silent.
[Illustration: ARIZONA MOORE, UP.]
[Illustration: ARIZONA MOORE.]
Arizona Moore strode clumsily under the weight of his big saddle, but
his black eye shone clear and masterful, and I felt he was sure enough a
man. His horse was a dark blood bay, well knit, clean limbed,
short-barreled, full mane and tail, a fighter with the grit of a horse
that dies before it yields. I stood quite near with my camera. It was
difficult to get the rope bridle on, it was more difficult to put on
the hoodwink, it was nigh impossible to set and cinch the saddle. But
Moore did it all, easily, deftly, quietly. The hoodwink dropped, and
instantly the slouchy, awkward stranger was riding that furious,
leaping, cavorting, bucking, lunging creature as though horse and man
were one. I have never beheld such riding. He sat to his saddle and
every muscle and sinew kept perfect time to the fiery, furious movements
of the horse. And he plied his whip and used his spurs and laughed with
glee, as though he were on the velvet cushions of a Pullman car. The
horse was stronger, more active, more violent than the two before. It
whirled 'round and 'round until you were dizzy looking. It went up all
in a bunch, it came down spread out, it came down with stiff legs, it
reared, it plunged, it ran for the fence. Nothing could mar the joy of
the rider nor stir that even, easy, tenacious seat. "You've beat 'em
all." "Nor can the others beat you," roared the crowd, as he rode the
conquered animal on a gentle trot up to the judges' stand and leisurely
dismounted. It was the greatest horsemanship I have ever seen, nor shall
I again see the like for many a day.
Bunn rode next. His horse was in full and fine condition. It leaped, it
bucked, it raced for the fence, it reared, it even sat down and started
to roll backwards, a terrible thing to happen, and often bringing death
to an incautious rider. But Bunn never lost his seat, nor did the horse
stay long upon its haunches, for, stung by rawhide and spur, it sprang
to its feet and tore across the meadow, actually leaping clean and sheer
the impounding fence. And Bunn, vanquishing at last, walked his quiet
horse peacefully up and dismounted.
The Thompson boys each covered themselves with glory. Dick's first horse
was tamed so quickly--a big, bright bay--that they brought him a second
one to ride again--a long, lean, dun-colored, Roman-nosed cayuse, with
scant mane and tail. A mean beast, the sort of a horse that other horses
in the bunch scorn to keep company with and hate with natural good horse
sense. He stood very quiet through bridling, hoodwinking and saddling.
He had seen the others in the game. His mind was quite made up. And when
Dick vaulted into the saddle, he at first stood stock still, and then,
as I set my kodak, I could see nothing but one great cloud of
dun-colored dust and Thompson's head floating in the upper levels of the
haze. The horse was whirling and bucking all at the same instant, a
hump-buck, a flat buck, an iron-legged buck, a touch-ground-with-belly
buck, and a swirling-whirl and tail-and-neck twist at one and the same
moment. Enough to throw a tender seat a hundred feet and crack his bones
like pipe stems. And then, like the flight of an arrow from a bow, that
dun-colored devil bolted straight for the wickedest edge of the fence. I
thought Dick would be killed certain, but there he sat and drew that
horse down on its hams three feet from sure death. It was a long battle,
vicious, mean, fierce, merciless--the beast was bleeding, welts stood
out on flanks and shoulders, its dry, spare muscles trembled like leaves
shaken by wind.
[Illustration: THE CROWD AT THE BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH.]
[Illustration: THE DUN-COLORED DEVIL.]
The boy hero of Aspen was hero still, and the dun horse walked quietly
up to the judges' horses and allowed himself to be unsaddled without as
much as a flinch, and he, too, was drenching wet, as well as bloody.
I did not see the last rider, for my train was soon to leave, and I
barely had time to get aboard. But I got some fine kodak photographs,
and have promised to send a set to the old, gray-headed rancher who
stood near me and who almost cried for joy to see how these men rode.
"I've seven boys," he said, "and every one of 'em's a broncho buster;
even the gals can bust a broncho, that they can."
I have not learned who got the coveted prize belt, but I should divide
it between Arizona Moore and Dandy Dick.
EIGHTEENTH LETTER.
COLORADO AND DENVER.
DENVER, October 19th.
After leaving Glenwood Springs we wound up the gorge of the Grand River,
the castellated, crenelated, serrated, scarped and wind-worn cliffs
towering many thousand feet into the blue sky. The valley narrowed
sensibly and the sheer heights imposed themselves more and more upon us
as we approached the tunnel at the height of land 10,200 feet above the
sea, and where part the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from those of the
Pacific. On the Canadian Pacific Railway, the interoceanic divide
between the waters of Hudson Bay and the Pacific is only some 5,300 feet
above tide level, so now we were nearly a mile higher in the air. Yet
the long journey of 2,000 miles from San Francisco, the crossing of the
Sierra Nevada and Wasatch ranges, had brought us to this final ascent
almost unperceived.
Traversing the divide and coming out from the long tunnel which bows
above the continental height of land, we diverged from the main line and
crept yet higher right up into Leadville, where the air was thin and
keen and as chill as in December. Thence we descended through the
wonderful cañon of the Platte River that has made this journey on the
Denver and Rio Grande Railway famous the world round.
We came to Denver early in the morning; the metropolis of the middle
West, the chief railroad center west of the Missouri, the mining center
of all the Rocky Mountain mineral belt, and now claiming to be equally
the center of the great and rapidly growing irrigated agricultural
region of the inter and juxta mountain region of the continent.
Essentially a business place is Denver. Its buildings are as elegant as
those of New York City, many of them almost as pretentious as those of
Chicago, as solid as those of Pittsburg, and as new as the fine blocks
of Los Angeles. She is altogether a more modern city than San Francisco,
is Denver. Her residences are also up to date, handsome, substantial.
The homes of men who are making money. Her one hundred and eighty miles
of electric tramways are good, though not quite as good as the two
hundred miles of Los Angeles. Her schools are probably unexcelled in the
Union. Denver is new, and in the clear, translucent atmosphere looks yet
newer; she is neat, she is ambitious, and she is gathering to herself
the commerce, the trade, the manufacturing pre-eminence, the mining
supervision of all that vast section of our continent from Canada to
Mexico, from the great plains to the snowy summits of the Cascades and
Sierra Nevadas. All this is Denver, while at the same time she is the
capital of Colorado, a State four times as big as West Virginia, though
with only half the population. And Denver is so fast seated in the
saddle of state prosperity that no section of Colorado can prosper, no
interest can grow nor develop, neither the gold and silver mining with
its yield of forty millions a year, nor the iron and coal fields--30,000
square miles of coal fields--nor the agriculture and grazing interests,
worth eighty millions a year (now exceeding the value of the gold and
silver produced twice over), none of these can grow and gain, but they
immediately and permanently pay tribute to Denver.
Yet this very up-to-dateness of Denver robs it of a certain charm. You
might just as well be at home as be in Denver. The people look the same,
they dress the same, they walk the same, they talk the same. Just a few
more of them, that's all.
There are none of the lovely lawns and gardens of Los Angeles and Tacoma
in Denver, nor can there ever be. Roses do not bloom all the winter
through, nor in Denver does the turf grow thick and velvety green as in
Seattle, nor can they ever do so--only a few weakly roses in the
summer-time and grass--only grass when you water each blade with a hose
three times a day. And then, too, men do not go to Denver to make homes;
they go there the rather to make fortunes, and, if successful, then to
hurry away and live in a more congenial clime.
Denver is not laid out with the imposing regalness of Salt Lake City,
nor can it ever possess the dignity of that place. It is just a big,
hustling, commercial, manufacturing, mine-developing center, where the
well man comes to work and toil with feverish energy in the thin air;
and the sick man--the consumptive--comes to live a little while and
die--"One Lungers" do not here hold fast to life as in the more tender
climate of southern California--nor can they survive long in Denver's
harsh, keen air.
The loveliest, grandest part of Denver is that which it does not
possess. It is the splendid panorama of the Rocky Mountain chain that
stretches, a monstrous mass of snow-clad summits, along the western
horizon, eighteen to thirty miles away. Across a flat and treeless plain
you behold the long line of lesser summits, and then lifting behind
them, towering skyward, the splendid procession of snow-clad giants,
glittering and flashing in the translucent light of the full shining
sun. The panorama is sublime, as fine as anything in Switzerland, and of
a beauty worthy of a journey--a long journey--to behold. In Canada, the
Rockies come so slowly upon you that they seem almost insignificant
compared with their repute. But here, one realizes in fullest sense the
dignity of this stupendous backbone of the continent. And the pellucid
atmosphere of the mile-high altitude, gives renewed and re-enforced
vision to the eye. The gigantic mountains stand forth with such
distinctness that the old tale of the Englishman who set out to walk to
them before breakfast--thinking them three instead of thirty miles
away--is likely enough to have more than once occurred.
The great "Mountain Empire State" of Colorado is vastly rich in deposits
of gold and silver and lead and antimony and copper and coal and iron,
yet very few there are, or ever can be, who do or may amass fortunes
therefrom. Her coal beds exceed in area the entire State of West
Virginia nearly twice over, yet thousands of acres lie unworked and are
now practically unworkable. Her oil fields are promising, a paraffine
oil of high grade, yet no oil producer has made or can make any great
stake out of them. Her agriculture and grazing interests already exceed
the enormous values of her gold and silver, yet few farmers or cattle
men make more than a living. Colorado is rich, fabulously rich, yet the
wealth that is wrung from her rocks and her pastures and her tilled
fields passes most of it into hands other than those who produce it.
The great railroad corporations get the first whack. It has cost
enormously to build them; they are expensive to maintain; they are safe
from competition by reason of the initial cost of their construction.
They are entitled to consideration, and they demand it and enforce it to
the limit. The freight rates are appalling, and so adjusted as to
squeeze out of every natural product the cream of profit it may
yield--sometimes only very thin skim milk is left. The passenger fares
are high, usually four cents to ten cents per mile. The cost of living
is onerous in Colorado; all freights brought there pay excessive tribute
to the railways. So much for the general conditions. With mining it is
yet more serious. The Rockefeller-Gugenheim Smelter combine now controls
mercilessly all the smelting business of the State, and, as for that, of
the mining country. And unless you have an ore that "will yield more
than $20 per ton, you might as well not go into the mining business,"
experienced mining men repeatedly observed to me.
Colorado boasts enormous agricultural and grazing wealth. She claims
that the present values of her herds of cattle and horses, and flocks of
sheep, of her orchards and irrigated crops already exceed that of her
gold and silver and mineral production. This may be so, and yet after
the cattle and sheep and horses are transported to distant markets and
converted into cash, after her farmers have paid the enormous irrigation
charges to the private corporations that control the water springs, the
man on the soil makes little more than a bare living, the fat profits,
if any there be, having passed into the capacious pockets of the water
companies, of the transportation companies, of the great meat-packing
and horse-buying companies. The farmers and grazers with whom I have
talked tell me that if they come out even at the end of the year, with a
small and moderate profit, they count themselves fortunate. Here and
there, of course, a fortune may be amassed by an unusual piece of good
luck by the man who raises cattle or fruit, or crops, but as a rule the
undoubted profits of these industries are absorbed by the great
corporate interests at whose mercy they lie.
Just what will be the outcome of these crushing industrial conditions it
is difficult to forecast, but we already see the first expressions of
popular dissatisfaction in the extensive labor strikes now prevailing in
the Cripple Creek region, and threatening to spread to and include all
of the mining camps and operations of the State and adjoining States.
Corporate greed and unscrupulous selfishness arouse opposition, and then
ensues corresponding combination, and too often counter aggression quite
as unreasonable and quite as inconsiderate in scope and action. Men are
but mortal, and "an eye for an eye" is too ancient an adage to have lost
its force in this twentieth century.
Just how these transportation, mining, agricultural and industrial
problems will be finally solved I dare not predict, but we will trust
that the ultimate good sense of American manhood will work out a
reasonable solution.
NINETEENTH LETTER.
ACROSS NEBRASKA.
ON BURLINGTON ROUTE EXPRESS, }
October 20, 1903. }
We left Denver upon the night express over the Burlington Railway
system, and all day to-day are flying eastward across flat, flat
Nebraska.
At dawn the country looked parched and treeless; expanses of buffalo
grass and herds of cattle. Here and there the course of a dried-up
stream marked by straggling cottonwood trees and alders, their
leaves now turned a dull yellow brown. A drear land, but yet less
heart-sickening than the stretches of bleak and barren landscape we have
so often gazed upon through Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Despite the dry
and parched appearance of this immediate region, it is yet counted a
fine grazing country, and the cattle range and thrive all the year round
upon the tufted bunches of the sweet, nutritious buffalo-grass that
everywhere here naturally abounds.
By middle morning we are entering the more eastern farming section of
the State, though still in western Nebraska. The land is all fenced,
laid out in large farms, the fences and public roads running north and
south and east and west. The farmhouses are neat, mostly, and set in
tidy yards with groves of trees planted about. Large red barns, many
hay and wheat stacks, illimitable fields of thick-growing wheat stubble,
and miles of corn, the stalks bearing the large ears yet standing in the
hill, while, as a general thing, the roughness has all been gathered
in--the Southern way of handling the corn crops. No shocks standing like
wigwams in the fields.
Fall plowing is also under way. We have just passed a man sitting on a
sulky plow, driving four big horses abreast, his little six-year old
daughter on his knee. A pretty sight. There are many windmills, one near
each house and barn, some out in the wide fields, all pumping water,
turned by the prairie winds that forever blow.
We are passing many small towns. All just alike. The square-fronted
stores, the steepled churches, the neat residences, rows of trees
planted along either side of the streets. "That dreadful American
monotony," as foreign visitors exclaim!
The country looks just like the flat prairie section of Manitoba,
Assiniboia and Alberta, in Canada, that we traversed in August, except
that this is all occupied and intelligently tilled, while the most part
of that is yet open to the roaming coyote, and may be yet purchased from
the Canadian Government or from the Railway Company, as is rapidly being
done. And this country here looks longer settled than does northern
Minnesota and North Dakota through which we passed.
The planting of trees in Nebraska seems to have been very general, and
along the roadways, the farm division lines, and about the farmsteads
and in the towns are now multitudes of large and umbrageous trees. And
sometimes large areas have been planted, and are now become veritable
woodland.
At the town of Lincoln, Mr. W. J. Bryan's home city, we have stopped
quite awhile, and in the distance can see the tall, white, dome-hooded
cupola of the State Capitol through the yellow and brown foliage of
autumnal tinted cottonwood.
Sitting in the forward smoker and falling into conversation with a group
of Nebraska farmers, I found a number of substantial Democrats among
them, admirers but no longer adherents of Mr. Bryan--"Our crops have
never been so good and gold never so cheap and so plenty as during the
last few years," they said. And they were not surprised when they saw by
the quotation of silver in the Denver morning paper that silver had
never risen to so high a price in the open market as it holds to-day,
sixty-eight cents per ounce. And they spoke of Grover Cleveland with
profound respect. In Nebraska, they tell me, all possibility of a
recrudescence of the Bryan vagaries is now certainly dead, and that this
fine agricultural State is as surely Republican as is Ohio. The farmers
are all doing well, making money and saving money. They are fast paying
off such land mortgages as remain. Also, there are now few, very few,
unoccupied lands in Nebraska. The State is practically filled up, and
filled up with a permanent and contented population. As families grow,
and sons and daughters come to manhood and womanhood, the old farms must
be cut up and divided among them, or the surplus young folk must seek
homes elsewhere. And of this surplus some are among the great American
trek into the Canadian far north.
We reached Omaha, the chief city of Nebraska, late in the afternoon,
coming into the fine granite station of the Burlington Railway system.
While in the city we were delightfully taken care of by our old school
and college friends, to whom the vanished years were yet but a passing
breath. We were sumptuously entertained at a banquet at the Omaha Club.
We were dined and lunched and driven about with a warm-hearted
hospitality which may only have its origin in a heart-to-heart
friendship, which, beginning among young men at life's threshold, comes
down the procession of the years unchanged and as affectionately
demonstrative as though we were all yet boys again. It carried me back
to the days when we sat together and sang that famous German student
song: "Denkt Oft Ihr Brueder an Unserer Juenglingsfreudigheit, es Kommt
Nicht Wieder, Die Goldene Zeit."
Omaha, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, forms, together with Kansas City
on the south and St. Paul, and Minneapolis on the north, the middle of
the three chief population centers between St. Louis, Chicago and
Denver. It is the chief commercial center of Nebraska and of South
Dakota, southern Montana and Idaho, and controls an immense trade.
In old times it was the chief town on the Missouri above St. Louis and
still maintains the lead it then acquired. I was surprised to find it
situated on a number of hills, some quite steep, others once steeper,
now graded down to modern requirements. Its streets are wide and fairly
well paved, and its blocks of buildings substantial. The residence
streets we drove through contain many handsome houses, light yellow-buff
brick being generally used, while Denver is a red brick town. The parks,
enclosing hill and dale, are of considerable natural beauty, here again
having advantage over Denver, where the flattened prairie roll presents
few opportunities for landscape gardening.
The extensive stockyards and abattoirs of Armour, Swift and several
other companies have made Omaha even a greater center of the meat trade
than Kansas City. In company with W---- I spent the morning in
inspecting these extensive establishments. The volume of business here
transacted reaches out into all the chief grazing lands of the far West.
The stockyards are supposed to be run by companies independent of the
packing-houses, and to be merely hotels where the cattle brought in may
be lodged and boarded until sold, and the cattle brokers are presumed to
be the agents of the cattle owners who have shipped the stock, and to
procure for these owners the highest price possible. But, as a matter
of fact, the packing-houses control the stockyards, dominate the
brokers, who are constantly near to them and far from the cattle owners,
and the man on the range who once ships his cattle over the railroads,
forthwith places himself at the mercy of the packer--the stock having
been shipped must be fed and cared for either on the cars or in the
yards, and this takes money--so the quicker the sale of them is made the
better for the owner. Hence, inasmuch as the packer may refuse to buy
until the waiting stock shall eat their heads off--the owner, through
the broker, is compelled to sell as soon as he can, and is compelled to
accept whatsoever price the packer may choose to offer him. So the
packing companies grow steadily richer and their business spreads and
Omaha increases also.
The other chief industry of Omaha is the great smelter belonging to the
trust. Incorporated originally by a group of enterprising Omaha men as a
local enterprise, it was later sold out to the Gugenheim Trust, whose
influence with the several railroads centering in Omaha has been
sufficient to preserve the business there, though the smelter is really
far away from ores and fluxes.
These two enterprises, the cattle killing and packing and ore-reducing,
together with large railway shops, constitute the chief industrial
interests of Omaha, and, for the rest, the city depends upon the
extensive farming and grazing country lying for five hundred miles
between her and the Rocky Mountains. As they prosper, so does Omaha; as
they are depressed, so is she. And only one thing, one catastrophe does
Omaha fear, far beyond words to tell--the fierce, hot winds that every
few years come blowing across Nebraska from the furnace of the Rocky
Mountains' alkali deserts. They do not come often, but when they do, the
land dies in a night. The green and fertile country shrivels and
blackens before their breath, the cattle die, the fowls die, the things
that creep and walk and fly die. The people--the people flee from the
land or die upon it in pitiful collapse. Then it is that Omaha shrivels
and withers too. Twice, twice within the memory of living man have come
these devastating winds, and twice has Omaha suffered from their curse,
and even now Omaha is but recovering her activity of the days before the
plague, forgetful of a future that--well! men here say that such a
universal catastrophe may never again occur.
And the handsome city is prosperous and full of buoyant life.
We now go on to St. Louis and thence to Cincinnati and so home.
TWENTIETH LETTER.
ALONG IOWA AND INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS.
CHARLESTON, W. VA., October 23, 1903.