plains everywhere, plains generally level, but elsewhere rolling in
long undulations, like the waves of a sea which had fallen asleep.
They are covered thinly with buff grass, the withered stalks of
flowers, Spanish bayonet, and a small beehive-shaped cactus. One could
gallop all over them.
They are peopled with large villages of what are called prairie dogs,
because they utter a short, sharp bark, but the dogs are, in reality,
marmots. We passed numbers of villages, which are composed of raised
circular orifices, about eighteen inches in diameter, with sloping
passages leading downwards for five or six feet. Hundreds of these
burrows are placed together. On nearly every rim a small furry
reddish-buff beast sat on his hind legs, looking, so far as head went,
much like a young seal. These creatures were acting as sentinels, and
sunning themselves. As we passed, each gave a warning yelp, shook its
tail, and, with a ludicrous flourish of its hind legs, dived into its
hole. The appearance of hundreds of these creatures, each eighteen
inches long, sitting like dogs begging, with their paws down and all
turned sunwards, is most grotesque. The Wish-ton-Wish has few enemies,
and is a most prolific animal. From its enormous increase and the
energy and extent of its burrowing operations, one can fancy that in
the course of years the prairies will be seriously injured, as it
honeycombs the ground, and renders it unsafe for horses. The burrows
seem usually to be shared by owls, and many of the people insist that a
rattlesnake is also an inmate, but I hope for the sake of the harmless,
cheery little prairie dog, that this unwelcome fellowship is a myth.
After running on a down grade for some time, five distinct ranges of
mountains, one above another, a lurid blue against a lurid sky,
upheaved themselves above the prairie sea. An American railway car,
hot, stuffy and full of chewing, spitting Yankees, was not an ideal way
of approaching this range which had early impressed itself upon my
imagination. Still, it was truly grand, although it was sixty miles
off, and we were looking at it from a platform 5,000 feet in height.
As I write I am only twenty-five miles from them, and they are
gradually gaining possession of me.
I can look at and FEEL nothing else. At five in the afternoon frame
houses and green fields began to appear, the cars drew up, and two of
my fellow passengers and I got out and carried our own luggage through
the deep dust to a small, rough, Western tavern, where with difficulty
we were put up for the night. This settlement is called the Greeley
Temperance Colony, and was founded lately by an industrious class of
emigrants from the East, all total abstainers, and holding advanced
political opinions. They bought and fenced 50,000 acres of land,
constructed an irrigating canal, which distributes its waters on
reasonable terms, have already a population of 3,000, and are the most
prosperous and rising colony in Colorado, being altogether free from
either laziness or crime. Their rich fields are artificially
productive solely; and after seeing regions where Nature gives
spontaneously, one is amazed that people should settle here to be
dependent on irrigating canals, with the risk of having their crops
destroyed by grasshoppers. A clause in the charter of the colony
prohibits the introduction, sale, or consumption of intoxicating
liquor, and I hear that the men of Greeley carry their crusade against
drink even beyond their limits, and have lately sacked three houses
open for the sale of drink near their frontier, pouring the whisky upon
the ground, so that people don't now like to run the risk of bringing
liquor near Greeley, and the temperance influence is spreading over a
very large area. As the men have no bar-rooms to sit in, I observed
that Greeley was asleep at an hour when other places were beginning
their revelries. Nature is niggardly, and living is coarse and rough,
the merest necessaries of hardy life being all that can be thought of
in this stage of existence.
My first experiences of Colorado travel have been rather severe. At
Greeley I got a small upstairs room at first, but gave it up to a
married couple with a child, and then had one downstairs no bigger than
a cabin, with only a canvas partition. It was very hot, and every
place was thick with black flies. The English landlady had just lost
her "help," and was in a great fuss, so that I helped her to get supper
ready. Its chief features were greasiness and black flies. Twenty men
in working clothes fed and went out again, "nobody speaking to nobody."
The landlady introduced me to a Vermont settler who lives in the "Foot
Hills," who was very kind and took a great deal of trouble to get me a
horse. Horses abound, but they are either large American horses, which
are only used for draught, or small, active horses, called broncos,
said to be from a Spanish word, signifying that they can never be
broke. They nearly all "buck," and are described as being more "ugly"
and treacherous than mules. There is only one horse in Greeley "safe
for a woman to ride." I tried an Indian pony by moonlight--such a
moonlight--but found he had tender feet. The kitchen was the only
sitting room, so I shortly went to bed, to be awoke very soon by
crawling creatures apparently in myriads. I struck a light, and found
such swarms of bugs that I gathered myself up on the wooden chairs, and
dozed uneasily till sunrise. Bugs are a great pest in Colorado. They
come out of the earth, infest the wooden walls, and cannot be got rid
of by any amount of cleanliness. Many careful housewives take their
beds to pieces every week and put carbolic acid on them.
It was a glorious, cool morning, and the great range of the Rocky
Mountains looked magnificent. I tried the pony again, but found he
would not do for a long journey; and as my Vermont acquaintance offered
me a seat in his wagon to Fort Collins, twenty-five miles nearer the
Mountains, I threw a few things together and came here with him. We
left Greeley at 10, and arrived here at 4:30, staying an hour for food
on the way. I liked the first half of the drive; but the fierce,
ungoverned, blazing heat of the sun on the whitish earth for the last
half, was terrible even with my white umbrella, which I have not used
since I left New Zealand; it was sickening. Then the eyes have never
anything green to rest upon, except in the river bottoms, where there
is green hay grass. We followed mostly the course of the River
Cache-a-la-Poudre, which rises in the Mountains, and after supplying
Greeley with irrigation, falls into the Platte, which is an affluent of
the Missouri. When once beyond the scattered houses and great ring
fence of the vigorous Greeley colonists, we were on the boundless
prairie. Now and then horsemen passed us, and we met three wagons with
white tilts. Except where the prairie dogs have honeycombed the
ground, you can drive almost anywhere, and the passage of a few wagons
over the same track makes a road. We forded the river, whose course is
marked the whole way by a fringe of small cotton-woods and aspens, and
traveled hour after hour with nothing to see except some dog towns,
with their quaint little sentinels; but the view in front was glorious.
The Alps, from the Lombard Plains, are the finest mountain panorama I
ever saw, but not equal to this; for not only do five high-peaked
giants, each nearly the height of Mont Blanc, lift their dazzling
summits above the lower ranges, but the expanse of mountains is so
vast, and the whole lie in a transparent medium of the richest blue,
not haze--something peculiar to the region. The lack of foreground is
a great artistic fault, and the absence of greenery is melancholy, and
makes me recall sadly the entrancing detail of the Hawaiian Islands.
Once only, the second time we forded the river, the cotton-woods formed
a foreground, and then the loveliness was heavenly. We stopped at a
log house and got a rough dinner of beef and potatoes, and I was amused
at the five men who shared it with us for apologizing to me for being
without their coats, as if coats would not be an enormity on the Plains.
It is the election day for the Territory, and men were galloping over
the prairie to register their votes. The three in the wagon talked
politics the whole time. They spoke openly and shamelessly of the
prices given for votes; and apparently there was not a politician on
either side who was not accused of degrading corruption. We saw a
convoy of 5,000 head of Texas cattle traveling from southern Texas to
Iowa. They had been nine months on the way! They were under the
charge of twenty mounted vacheros, heavily armed, and a light wagon
accompanied them, full of extra rifles and ammunition, not unnecessary,
for the Indians are raiding in all directions, maddened by the reckless
and useless slaughter of the buffalo, which is their chief subsistence.
On the Plains are herds of wild horses, buffalo, deer, and antelope;
and in the Mountains, bears, wolves, deer, elk, mountain lions, bison,
and mountain sheep. You see a rifle in every wagon, as people always
hope to fall in with game.
By the time we reached Fort Collins I was sick and dizzy with the heat
of the sun, and not disposed to be pleased with a most unpleasing
place. It was a military post, but at present consists of a few frame
houses put down recently on the bare and burning plain. The settlers
have "great expectations," but of what? The Mountains look hardly
nearer than from Greeley; one only realizes their vicinity by the loss
of their higher peaks. This house is freer from bugs than the one at
Greeley, but full of flies. These new settlements are altogether
revolting, entirely utilitarian, given up to talk of dollars as well as
to making them, with coarse speech, coarse food, coarse everything,
nothing wherewith to satisfy the higher cravings if they exist, nothing
on which the eye can rest with pleasure. The lower floor of this inn
swarms with locusts in addition to thousands of black flies. The
latter cover the ground and rise buzzing from it as you walk.
I. L. B.
Letter IV
A plague of flies--A melancholy charioteer--The Foot Hills--A mountain
boarding-house--A dull life--"Being agreeable"--Climate of
Colorado--Soroche and snakes.
CANYON, September 12.
I was actually so dull and tired that I deliberately slept away the
afternoon in order to forget the heat and flies. Thirty men in working
clothes, silent and sad looking, came in to supper. The beef was tough
and greasy, the butter had turned to oil, and beef and butter were
black with living, drowned, and half-drowned flies. The greasy
table-cloth was black also with flies, and I did not wonder that the
guests looked melancholy and quickly escaped. I failed to get a horse,
but was strongly recommended to come here and board with a settler,
who, they said, had a saw-mill and took boarders. The person who
recommended it so strongly gave me a note of introduction, and told me
that it was in a grand part of the mountains, where many people had
been camping out all the summer for the benefit of their health. The
idea of a boarding-house, as I know them in America, was rather
formidable in the present state of my wardrobe, and I decided on
bringing my carpet-bag, as well as my pack, lest I should be rejected
for my bad clothes.
Early the next morning I left in a buggy drawn by light broncos and
driven by a profoundly melancholy young man. He had never been to the
canyon; there was no road. We met nobody, saw nothing except antelope
in the distance, and he became more melancholy and lost his way,
driving hither and thither for about twenty miles till we came upon an
old trail which eventually brought us to a fertile "bottom," where hay
and barley were being harvested, and five or six frame houses looked
cheerful. I had been recommended to two of these, which professed to
take in strangers, but one was full of reapers, and in the other a
child was dead. So I took the buggy on, glad to leave the glaring,
prosaic settlement behind. There was a most curious loneliness about
the journey up to that time. Except for the huge barrier to the right,
the boundless prairies were everywhere, and it was like being at sea
without a compass. The wheels made neither sound nor indentation as we
drove over the short, dry grass, and there was no cheerful clatter of
horses' hoofs. The sky was cloudy and the air hot and still. In one
place we passed the carcass of a mule, and a number of vultures soared
up from it, to descend again immediately. Skeletons and bones of
animals were often to be seen. A range of low, grassy hills, called
the Foot Hills, rose from the plain, featureless and monotonous, except
where streams, fed by the snows of the higher regions, had cut their
way through them. Confessedly bewildered, and more melancholy than
ever, the driver turned up one of the wildest of these entrances, and
in another hour the Foot Hills lay between us and the prairie sea, and
a higher and broken range, with pitch pines of average size, was
revealed behind them. These Foot Hills, which swell up uninterestingly
from the plains on their eastern side, on their western have the
appearance of having broken off from the next range, and the break is
abrupt, and takes the form of walls and terraces of rock of the most
brilliant color, weathered and stained by ores, and, even under the
grey sky, dazzling to the eyes. The driver thought he had understood
the directions given, but he was stupid, and once we lost some miles by
arriving at a river too rough and deep to be forded, and again we were
brought up by an impassable canyon. He grew frightened about his
horses, and said no money would ever tempt him into the mountains
again; but average intelligence would have made it all easy.
The solitude was becoming somber, when, after driving for nine hours,
and traveling at the least forty-five miles, without any sign of
fatigue on the part of the broncos, we came to a stream, by the side of
which we drove along a definite track, till we came to a sort of
tripartite valley, with a majestic crooked canyon 2,000 feet deep
opening upon it. A rushing stream roared through it, and the Rocky
Mountains, with pines scattered over them, came down upon it. A little
farther, and the canyon became utterly inaccessible. This was
exciting; here was an inner world. A rough and shaky bridge, made of
the outsides of pines laid upon some unsecured logs, crossed the river.
The broncos stopped and smelt it, not liking it, but some encouraging
speech induced them to go over. On the other side was a log cabin,
partially ruinous, and the very rudest I ever saw, its roof of
plastered mud being broken into large holes. It stood close to the
water among some cotton-wood trees. A little higher there was a very
primitive saw-mill, also out of repair, with some logs lying about. An
emigrant wagon and a forlorn tent, with a camp-fire and a pot, were in
the foreground, but there was no trace of the boarding-house, of which
I stood a little in dread. The driver went for further directions to
the log cabin, and returned with a grim smile deepening the melancholy
of his face to say it was Mr. Chalmers', but there was no accommodation
for such as him, much less for me! This was truly "a sell." I got
down and found a single room of the rudest kind, with the wall at one
end partially broken down, holes in the roof, holes for windows, and no
furniture but two chairs and two unplaned wooden shelves, with some
sacks of straw upon them for beds. There was an adjacent cabin room,
with a stove, benches, and table, where they cooked and ate, but this
was all. A hard, sad-looking woman looked at me measuringly. She said
that they sold milk and butter to parties who camped in the canyon,
that they had never had any boarders but two asthmatic old ladies, but
they would take me for five dollars per week if I "would make myself
agreeable." The horses had to be fed, and I sat down on a box, had
some dried beef and milk, and considered the matter. If I went back to
Fort Collins, I thought I was farther from a mountain life, and had no
choice but Denver, a place from which I shrank, or to take the cars for
New York. Here the life was rough, rougher than any I had ever seen,
and the people repelled me by their faces and manners; but if I could
rough it for a few days, I might, I thought, get over canyons and all
other difficulties into Estes Park, which has become the goal of my
journey and hopes. So I decided to remain.
September 16.
Five days here, and I am no nearer Estes Park. How the days pass I
know not; I am weary of the limitations of this existence. This is "a
life in which nothing happens." When the buggy disappeared, I felt as
if I had cut the bridge behind me. I sat down and knitted for some
time--my usual resource under discouraging circumstances. I really did
not know how I should get on. There was no table, no bed, no basin, no
towel, no glass, no window, no fastening on the door. The roof was in
holes, the logs were unchinked, and one end of the cabin was partially
removed! Life was reduced to its simplest elements. I went out; the
family all had something to do, and took no notice of me. I went back,
and then an awkward girl of sixteen, with uncombed hair, and a painful
repulsiveness of face and air, sat on a log for half an hour and stared
at me. I tried to draw her into talk, but she twirled her fingers and
replied snappishly in monosyllables. Could I by any effort "make
myself agreeable"? I wondered. The day went on. I put on my Hawaiian
dress, rolling up the sleeves to the elbows in an "agreeable" fashion.
Towards evening the family returned to feed, and pushed some dried beef
and milk in at the door. They all slept under the trees, and before
dark carried the sacks of straw out for their bedding. I followed
their example that night, or rather watched Charles's Wain while they
slept, but since then have slept on blankets on the floor under the
roof. They have neither lamp nor candle, so if I want to do anything
after dark I have to do it by the unsteady light of pine knots. As the
nights are cold, and free from bugs, and I do a good deal of manual
labor, I sleep well. At dusk I make my bed on the floor, and draw a
bucket of ice-cold water from the river; the family go to sleep under
the trees, and I pile logs on the fire sufficient to burn half the
night, for I assure you the solitude is eerie enough. There are
unaccountable noises, (wolves), rummagings under the floor, queer
cries, and stealthy sounds of I know not what. One night a beast (fox
or skunk) rushed in at the open end of the cabin, and fled through the
window, almost brushing my face, and on another, the head and three or
four inches of the body of a snake were protruded through a chink of
the floor close to me, to my extreme disgust. My mirror is the
polished inside of my watchcase. At sunrise Mrs. Chalmers comes in--if
coming into a nearly open shed can be called IN--and makes a fire,
because she thinks me too stupid to do it, and mine is the family room;
and by seven I am dressed, have folded the blankets, and swept the
floor, and then she puts some milk and bread or stirabout on a box by
the door. After breakfast I draw more water, and wash one or two
garments daily, taking care that there are no witnesses of my
inexperience. Yesterday a calf sucked one into hopeless rags. The
rest of the day I spend in mending, knitting, writing to you, and the
various odds and ends which arise when one has to do all for oneself.
At twelve and six some food is put on the box by the door, and at dusk
we make up our beds. A distressed emigrant woman has just given birth
to a child in a temporary shanty by the river, and I go to help her
each day.
I have made the acquaintance of all the careworn, struggling settlers
within a walk. All have come for health, and most have found or are
finding it, even if they have not better shelter than a wagon tilt or a
blanket on sticks laid across four poles. The climate of Colorado is
considered the finest in North America, and consumptives, asthmatics,
dyspeptics, and sufferers from nervous diseases, are here in hundreds
and thousands, either trying the "camp cure" for three or four months,
or settling here permanently. People can safely sleep out of doors for
six months of the year. The plains are from 4,000 to 6,000 feet high,
and some of the settled "parks," or mountain valleys, are from 8,000
to 10,000. The air, besides being much rarefied, is very dry. The
rainfall is far below the average, dews are rare, and fogs nearly
unknown. The sunshine is bright and almost constant, and three-fourths
of the days are cloudless. The milk, beef, and bread are good. The
climate is neither so hot in summer nor so cold in winter as that of
the States, and when the days are hot the nights are cool. Snow rarely
lies on the lower ranges, and horses and cattle don't require to be
either fed or housed during the winter. Of course the rarefied air
quickens respiration. All this is from hearsay.[8] I am not under
favorable circumstances, either for mind or body, and at present I feel
a singular lassitude and difficulty in taking exercise, but this is
said to be the milder form of the affliction known on higher altitudes
as soroche, or "mountain sickness," and is only temporary. I am
forming a plan for getting farther into the mountains, and hope that my
next letter will be more lively. I killed a rattlesnake this morning
close to the cabin, and have taken its rattle, which has eleven joints.
My life is embittered by the abundance of these reptiles--rattlesnakes
and moccasin snakes, both deadly, carpet snakes and "green racers,"
reputed dangerous, water snakes, tree snakes, and mouse snakes,
harmless but abominable. Seven rattlesnakes have been killed just
outside the cabin since I came. A snake, three feet long, was coiled
under the pillow of the sick woman. I see snakes in all withered
twigs, and am ready to flee at "the sound of a shaken leaf." And
besides snakes, the earth and air are alive and noisy with forms of
insect life, large and small, stinging, humming, buzzing, striking,
rasping, devouring!
[8] The curative effect of the climate of Colorado can hardly be
exaggerated. In traveling extensively through the Territory afterwards
I found that nine out of every ten settlers were cured invalids.
Statistics and medical workers on the climate of the State (as it now
is) represent Colorado as the most remarkable sanatorium in the world.
I. L. B.
Letter V
A dateless day--"Those hands of yours"--A Puritan--Persevering
shiftlessness--The house-mother--Family worship--A grim Sunday--A
"thick-skulled Englishman"--A morning call--Another atmosphere--The
Great Lone Land--"Ill found"--A log camp--Bad footing for
horses--Accidents--Disappointment.
CANYON, September.