often done before, to lower a bar, and, on looking round, Birdie was
gone! I spent an hour in trying to catch her, but she had taken an
"ugly fit," and would not let me go near her; and I was getting tired
and vexed, when two passing trappers, on mules, circumvented and caught
her. I rode the twelve miles back to Twin Rock, and then went on, a
kindly teamster, who was going in the same direction, taking my pack.
I must explain that every mile I have traveled since leaving Colorado
Springs has taken me farther and higher into the mountains. That
afternoon I rode through lawnlike upland parks, with the great snow
mass of Pike's Peak behind, and in front mountains bathed in rich
atmospheric coloring of blue and violet, all very fine, but threatening
to become monotonous, when the wagon road turned abruptly to the left,
and crossed a broad, swift, mountain river, the head-waters of the
Platte. There I found the ranch to which I had been recommended, the
quarters of a great hunter named Link, which much resembled a good
country inn. There was a pleasant, friendly woman, but the men were
all away, a thing I always regret, as it gives me half an hour's work
at the horse before I can write to you. I had hardly come in when a
very pleasant German lady, whom I met at Manitou, with three gentlemen,
arrived, and we were as sociable as people could be. We had a splendid
though rude supper. While Mrs. Link was serving us, and urging her
good things upon us, she was orating on the greediness of English
people, saying that "you would think they traveled through the country
only to gratify their palates"; and addressed me, asking me if I had
not observed it! I am nearly always taken for a Dane or a Swede, never
for an Englishwoman, so I often hear a good deal of outspoken criticism.
In the evening Mr. Link returned, and there was a most vehement
discussion between him, an old hunter, a miner, and the teamster who
brought my pack, as to the route by which I should ride through the
mountains for the next three or four days--because at that point I was
to leave the wagon road--and it was renewed with increased violence the
next morning, so that if my nerves had not been of steel I should have
been appalled. The old hunter acrimoniously said he "must speak the
truth," the miner was directing me over a track where for twenty-five
miles there was not a house, and where, if snow came on, I should never
be heard of again. The miner said he "must speak the truth," the
hunter was directing me over a pass where there were five feet of snow,
and no trail. The teamster said that the only road possible for a
horse was so-and-so, and advised me to take the wagon road into South
Park, which I was determined not to do. Mr. Link said he was the
oldest hunter and settler in the district, and he could not cross any
of the trails in snow. And so they went on. At last they partially
agreed on a route--"the worst road in the Rocky Mountains," the old
hunter said, with two feet of snow upon it, but a hunter had hauled an
elk over part of it, at any rate. The upshot of the whole you shall
have in my next letter.
I. L. B.
Letter XI
Tarryall Creek--The Red Range--Excelsior--Importunate pedlars--Snow and
heat--A bison calf--Deep drifts--South Park--The Great Divide--Comanche
Bill--Difficulties--Hall's Gulch--A Lord Dundreary--Ridiculous fears.
HALL'S GULCH, COLORADO, November 6.
It was another cloudless morning, one of the many here on which one
awakes early, refreshed, and ready to enjoy the fatigues of another
day. In our sunless, misty climate you do not know the influence which
persistent fine weather exercises on the spirits. I have been ten
months in almost perpetual sunshine, and now a single cloudy day makes
me feel quite depressed. I did not leave till 9:30, because of the
slipperiness, and shortly after starting turned off into the wilderness
on a very dim trail. Soon seeing a man riding a mile ahead, I rode on
and overtook him, and we rode eight miles together, which was
convenient to me, as without him I should several times have lost the
trail altogether. Then his fine American horse, on which he had only
ridden two days, broke down, while my "mad, bad bronco," on which I had
been traveling for a fortnight, cantered lightly over the snow. He was
the only traveler I saw in a day of nearly twelve hours. I thoroughly
enjoyed every minute of that ride. I concentrated all my faculties of
admiration and of locality, for truly the track was a difficult one. I
sometimes thought it deserved the bad name given to it at Link's. For
the most part it keeps in sight of Tarryall Creek, one of the large
affluents of the Platte, and is walled in on both sides by mountains,
which are sometimes so close together as to leave only the narrowest
canyon between them, at others breaking wide apart, till, after winding
and climbing up and down for twenty-five miles, it lands one on a
barren rock-girdled park, watered by a rapid fordable stream as broad
as the Ouse at Huntingdon, snow fed and ice fringed, the park bordered
by fantastic rocky hills, snow covered and brightened only by a dwarf
growth of the beautiful silver spruce. I have not seen anything
hitherto so thoroughly wild and unlike the rest of these parts.
I rode up one great ascent where hills were tumbled about confusedly;
and suddenly across the broad ravine, rising above the sunny grass and
the deep green pines, rose in glowing and shaded red against the
glittering blue heaven a magnificent and unearthly range of mountains,
as shapely as could be seen, rising into colossal points, cleft by deep
blue ravines, broken up into sharks' teeth, with gigantic knobs and
pinnacles rising from their inaccessible sides, very fair to look
upon--a glowing, heavenly, unforgettable sight, and only four miles
off. Mountains they looked not of this earth, but such as one sees in
dreams alone, the blessed ranges of "the land which is very far off."
They were more brilliant than those incredible colors in which painters
array the fiery hills of Moab and the Desert, and one could not believe
them for ever uninhabited, for on them rose, as in the East, the
similitude of stately fortresses, not the gray castellated towers of
feudal Europe, but gay, massive, Saracenic architecture, the outgrowth
of the solid rock. They were vast ranges, apparently of enormous
height, their color indescribable, deepest and reddest near the
pine-draped bases, then gradually softening into wonderful tenderness,
till the highest summits rose all flushed, and with an illusion of
transparency, so that one might believe that they were taking on the
hue of sunset. Below them lay broken ravines of fantastic rocks, cleft
and canyoned by the river, with a tender unearthly light over all, the
apparent warmth of a glowing clime, while I on the north side was in
the shadow among the pure unsullied snow.
With us the damp, the chill, the gloom;
With them the sunset's rosy bloom.
The dimness of earth with me, the light of heaven with them. Here,
again, worship seemed the only attitude for a human spirit, and the
question was ever present, "Lord, what is man, that Thou art mindful of
him; or the son of man, that Thou visitest him?" I rode up and down
hills laboriously in snow-drifts, getting off often to ease my faithful
Birdie by walking down ice-clad slopes, stopping constantly to feast my
eyes upon that changeless glory, always seeing some new ravine, with
its depths of color or miraculous brilliancy of red, or phantasy of
form. Then below, where the trail was locked into a deep canyon where
there was scarcely room for it and the river, there was a beauty of
another kind in solemn gloom. There the stream curved and twisted
marvellously, widening into shallows, narrowing into deep boiling
eddies, with pyramidal firs and the beautiful silver spruce fringing
its banks, and often falling across it in artistic grace, the gloom
chill and deep, with only now and then a light trickling through the
pines upon the cold snow, when suddenly turning round I saw behind, as
if in the glory of an eternal sunset, those flaming and fantastic
peaks. The effect of the combination of winter and summer was
singular. The trail ran on the north side the whole time, and the snow
lay deep and pure white, while not a wreath of it lay on the south
side, where abundant lawns basked in the warm sun.
The pitch pine, with its monotonous and somewhat rigid form, had
disappeared; the white pine became scarce, both being displayed by the
slim spires and silvery green of the miniature silver spruce. Valley
and canyon were passed, the flaming ranges were left behind, the upper
altitudes became grim and mysterious. I crossed a lake on the ice, and
then came on a park surrounded by barren contorted hills, overtopped by
snow mountains. There, in some brushwood, we crossed a deepish stream
on the ice, which gave way, and the fearful cold of the water stiffened
my limbs for the rest of the ride. All these streams become bigger as
you draw nearer to their source, and shortly the trail disappeared in a
broad rapid river, which we forded twice. The trail was very difficult
to recover. It ascended ever in frost and snow, amidst scanty timber
dwarfed by cold and twisted by storms, amidst solitudes such as one
reads of in the High Alps; there were no sounds to be heard but the
crackle of ice and snow, the pitiful howling of wolves, and the hoot of
owls. The sun to me had long set; the peaks which had blushed were
pale and sad; the twilight deepened into green; but still "Excelsior!"
There were no happy homes with light of household fires; above, the
spectral mountains lifted their cold summits. As darkness came on I
began to fear that I had confused the cabin to which I had been
directed with the rocks. To confess the truth, I was cold, for my
boots and stockings had frozen on my feet, and I was hungry too, having
eaten nothing but raisins for fourteen hours. After riding thirty
miles I saw a light a little way from the track, and found it to be the
cabin of the daughter of the pleasant people with whom I had spent the
previous night. Her husband had gone to the Plains, yet she, with two
infant children, was living there in perfect security. Two pedlars,
who were peddling their way down from the mines, came in for a night's
shelter soon after I arrived--ill-looking fellows enough. They admired
Birdie in a suspicious fashion, and offered to "swop" their pack horse
for her. I went out the last thing at night and the first thing in the
morning to see that "the powny" was safe, for they were very
importunate on the subject of the "swop." I had before been offered
150 dollars for her. I was obliged to sleep with the mother and
children, and the pedlars occupied a room within ours. It was hot and
airless. The cabin was papered with the Phrenological Journal, and in
the morning I opened my eyes on the very best portrait of Dr. Candlish
I ever saw, and grieved truly that I should never see that massive brow
and fantastic face again.
Mrs. Link was an educated and very intelligent young woman. The
pedlars were Irish Yankees, and the way in which they "traded" was as
amusing as "Sam Slick." They not only wanted to "swop" my pony, but to
"trade" my watch. They trade their souls, I know. They displayed
their wares for an hour with much dexterous flattery and
persuasiveness, but Mrs. Link was untemptable, and I was only tempted
into buying a handkerchief to keep the sun off. There was another
dispute about my route. It was the most critical day of my journey.
If a snowstorm came on, I might be detained in the mountains for many
weeks; but if I got through the snow and reached the Denver wagon road,
no detention would signify much. The pedlars insisted that I could not
get through, for the road was not broken. Mrs. L. thought I could, and
advised me to try, so I saddled Birdie and rode away.
More than half of the day was far from enjoyable. The morning was
magnificent, but the light too dazzling, the sun too fierce. As soon
as I got out I felt as if I should drop off the horse. My large
handkerchief kept the sun from my neck, but the fierce heat caused soul
and sense, brain and eye, to reel. I never saw or felt the like of it.
I was at a height of 12,000 feet, where, of course, the air was highly
rarefied, and the snow was so pure and dazzling that I was obliged to
keep my eyes shut as much as possible to avoid snow blindness. The sky
was a different and terribly fierce color; and when I caught a glimpse
of the sun, he was white and unwinking like a lime-ball light, yet
threw off wicked scintillations. I suffered so from nausea,
exhaustion, and pains from head to foot, that I felt as if I must lie
down in the snow. It may have been partly the early stage of soroche,
or mountain sickness. We plodded on for four hours, snow all round,
and nothing else to be seen but an ocean of glistening peaks against
that sky of infuriated blue. How I found my way I shall never know,
for the only marks on the snow were occasional footprints of a man, and
I had no means of knowing whether they led in the direction I ought to
take. Earlier, before the snow became so deep, I passed the last great
haunt of the magnificent mountain bison, but, unfortunately, saw
nothing but horns and bones. Two months ago Mr. Link succeeded in
separating a calf from the herd, and has partially domesticated it. It
is a very ugly thing at seven months old, with a thick beard, and a
short, thick, dark mane on its heavy shoulders. It makes a loud grunt
like a pig. It can outrun their fastest horse, and it sometimes leaps
over the high fence of the corral, and takes all the milk of five cows.
The snow grew seriously deep. Birdie fell thirty times, I am sure.
She seemed unable to keep up at all, so I was obliged to get off and
stumble along in her footmarks. By that time my spirit for overcoming
difficulties had somewhat returned, for I saw a lie of country which I
knew must contain South Park, and we had got under cover of a hill
which kept off the sun. The trail had ceased; it was only one of those
hunter's tracks which continually mislead one. The getting through the
snow was awful work. I think we accomplished a mile in something over
two hours. The snow was two feet eight inches deep, and once we went
down in a drift the surface of which was rippled like sea sand, Birdie
up to her back, and I up to my shoulders!
At last we got through, and I beheld, with some sadness, the goal of my
journey, "The Great Divide," the Snowy Range, and between me and it
South Park, a rolling prairie seventy-five miles long and over 10,000
feet high, treeless, bounded by mountains, and so rich in sun-cured hay
that one might fancy that all the herds of Colorado could find pasture
there. Its chief center is the rough mining town of Fairplay, but
there are rumors of great mineral wealth in various quarters. The
region has been "rushed," and mining camps have risen at Alma and
elsewhere, so lawless and brutal that vigilance committees are forming
as a matter of necessity. South Park is closed, or nearly so, by snow
during an ordinary winter; and just now the great freight wagons are
carrying up the last supplies of the season, and taking down women and
other temporary inhabitants. A great many people come up here in the
summer. The rarefied air produces great oppression on the lungs,
accompanied with bleeding. It is said that you can tell a new arrival
by seeing him go about holding a blood-stained handkerchief to his
mouth. But I came down upon it from regions of ice and snow; and as
the snow which had fallen on it had all disappeared by evaporation and
drifting, it looked to me quite lowland and livable, though lonely and
indescribably mournful, "a silent sea," suggestive of "the muffled
oar." I cantered across the narrow end of it, delighted to have got
through the snow; and when I struck the "Denver stage road" I supposed
that all the difficulties of mountain travel were at an end, but this
has not turned out to be exactly the case.
A horseman shortly joined me and rode with me, got me a fresh horse,
and accompanied me for ten miles. He was a picturesque figure and rode
a very good horse. He wore a big slouch hat, from under which a number
of fair curls hung nearly to his waist. His beard was fair, his eyes
blue, and his complexion ruddy. There was nothing sinister in his
expression, and his manner was respectful and frank. He was dressed in
a hunter's buckskin suit ornamented with beads, and wore a pair of
exceptionally big brass spurs. His saddle was very highly ornamented.
What was unusual was the number of weapons he carried. Besides a rifle
laid across his saddle and a pair of pistols in the holsters, he
carried two revolvers and a knife in his belt, and a carbine slung
behind him. I found him what is termed "good company." He told me a
great deal about the country and its wild animals, with some hunting
adventures, and a great deal about Indians and their cruelty and
treachery. All this time, having crossed South Park, we were ascending
the Continental Divide by what I think is termed the Breckenridge Pass,
on a fairly good wagon road. We stopped at a cabin, where the woman
seemed to know my companion, and, in addition to bread and milk,
produced some venison steaks. We rode on again, and reached the crest
of the Divide (see engraving), and saw snow-born streams starting
within a quarter of a mile from each other, one for the Colorado and
the Pacific, the other for the Platte and the Atlantic. Here I wished
the hunter good-bye, and reluctantly turned north-east. It was not
wise to go up the Divide at all, and it was necessary to do it in
haste. On my way down I spoke to the woman at whose cabin I had dined,
and she said, "I am sure you found Comanche Bill a real gentleman"; and
I then knew that, if she gave me correct information, my intelligent,
courteous companion was one of the most notorious desperadoes of the
Rocky Mountains, and the greatest Indian exterminator on the
frontier--a man whose father and family fell in a massacre at Spirit
Lake by the hands of Indians, who carried away his sister, then a child
of eleven. His life has since been mainly devoted to a search for this
child, and to killing Indians wherever he can find them.
After riding twenty miles, which made the distance for that day fifty,
I remounted Birdie to ride six miles farther, to a house which had been
mentioned to me as a stopping place. The road ascended to a height of
11,000 feet, and from thence I looked my last at the lonely, uplifted
prairie sea. "Denver stage road!" The worst, rudest, dismallest,
darkest road I have yet traveled on, nothing but a winding ravine, the
Platte canyon, pine crowded and pine darkened, walled in on both sides
for six miles by pine-skirted mountains 12,000 feet high! Along this
abyss for fifty miles there are said to be only five houses, and were
it not for miners going down, and freight wagons going up, the solitude
would be awful. As it was, I did not see a creature. It was four when
I left South Park, and between those mountain walls and under the pines
it soon became quite dark, a darkness which could be felt. The snow
which had melted in the sun had re-frozen, and was one sheet of smooth
ice. Birdie slipped so alarmingly that I got off and walked, but then
neither of us could keep our feet, and in the darkness she seemed so
likely to fall upon me, that I took out of my pack the man's socks
which had been given me at Perry's Park, and drew them on over her
fore-feet--an expedient which for a time succeeded admirably, and which
I commend to all travelers similarly circumstanced. It was unutterably
dark, and all these operations had to be performed by the sense of
touch only. I remounted, allowed her to take her own way, as I could
not see even her ears, and though her hind legs slipped badly, we
contrived to get along through the narrowest part of the canyon, with a
tumbling river close to the road. The pines were very dense, and
sighed and creaked mournfully in the severe frost, and there were other
EERIE noises not easy to explain. At last, when the socks were nearly
worn out, I saw the blaze of a camp-fire, with two hunters sitting by
it, on the hill side, and at the mouth of a gulch something which
looked like buildings. We got across the river partly on ice and
partly by fording, and I found that this was the place where, in spite
of its somewhat dubious reputation, I had been told that I could put up.
A man came out in the sapient and good-natured stage of intoxication,
and, the door being opened, I was confronted by a rough bar and a
smoking, blazing kerosene lamp without a chimney. This is the worst
place I have put up at as to food, lodging, and general character; an
old and very dirty log cabin, not chinked, with one dingy room used for
cooking and feeding, in which a miner was lying very ill of fever; then
a large roofless shed with a canvas side, which is to be an addition,
and then the bar. They accounted for the disorder by the building
operations. They asked me if I were the English lady written of in the
Denver News, and for once I was glad that my fame had preceded me, as
it seemed to secure me against being quietly "put out of the way." A
horrible meal was served--dirty, greasy, disgusting. A celebrated
hunter, Bob Craik, came in to supper with a young man in tow, whom, in
spite of his rough hunter's or miner's dress, I at once recognized as
an English gentleman. It was their camp-fire which I had seen on the
hill side. This gentleman was lording it in true caricature fashion,
with a Lord Dundreary drawl and a general execration of everything;
while I sat in the chimney corner, speculating on the reason why many
of the upper class of my countrymen--"High Toners," as they are called
out here--make themselves so ludicrously absurd. They neither know how
to hold their tongues or to carry their personal pretensions. An
American is nationally assumptive, an Englishman personally so. He
took no notice of me till something passed which showed him I was
English, when his manner at once changed into courtesy, and his drawl
was shortened by a half. He took pains to let me know that he was an
officer in the Guards, of good family, on four months' leave, which he
was spending in slaying buffalo and elk, and also that he had a
profound contempt for everything American. I cannot think why
Englishmen put on these broad, mouthing tones, and give so many
personal details. They retired to their camp, and the landlord having
passed into the sodden, sleepy stage of drunkenness, his wife asked if
I should be afraid to sleep in the large canvas-sided, unceiled,
doorless shed, as they could not move the sick miner. So, I slept
there on a shake-down, with the stars winking overhead through the
roof, and the mercury showing 30 degrees of frost.
I never told you that I once gave an unwary promise that I would not
travel alone in Colorado unarmed, and that in consequence I left Estes
Park with a Sharp's revolver loaded with ball cartridge in my pocket,
which has been the plague of my life. Its bright ominous barrel peeped
out in quiet Denver shops, children pulled it out to play with, or when
my riding dress hung up with it in the pocket, pulled the whole from
the peg to the floor; and I cannot conceive of any circumstances in
which I could feel it right to make any use of it, or in which it could
do me any possible good. Last night, however, I took it out, cleaned
and oiled it, and laid it under my pillow, resolving to keep awake all
night. I slept as soon as I lay down, and never woke till the bright
morning sun shone through the roof, making me ridicule my own fears and
abjure pistols for ever.
I. L. B.
Letter XII
Deer Valley--Lynch law--Vigilance committees--The silver spruce--Taste
and abstinence--The whisky fiend--Smartness--Turkey creek Canyon--The
Indian problem--Public rascality--Friendly meetings--The way to the
Golden City--A rising settlement--Clear Creek
Canyon--Staging--Swearing--A mountain town.
DEER VALLEY, November.
To-night I am in a beautiful place like a Dutch farm--large, warm,
bright, clean, with abundance of clean food, and a clean, cold little
bedroom to myself. But it is very hard to write, for two free-tongued,
noisy Irish women, who keep a miners' boarding-house in South Park, and
are going to winter quarters in a freight wagon, are telling the most
fearful stories of violence, vigilance committees, Lynch law, and
"stringing," that I ever heard. It turns one's blood cold only to
think that where I travel in perfect security, only a short time ago
men were being shot like skunks. At the mining towns up above this
nobody is thought anything of who has not killed a man--i.e. in a
certain set. These women had a boarder, only fifteen, who thought he
could not be anything till he had shot somebody, and they gave an
absurd account of the lad dodging about with a revolver, and not
getting up courage enough to insult any one, till at last he hid
himself in the stable and shot the first Chinaman who entered. Things
up there are just in that initial state which desperadoes love. A man
accidentally shoves another in a saloon, or says a rough word at meals,
and the challenge, "first finger on the trigger," warrants either in
shooting the other at any subsequent time without the formality of a
duel. Nearly all the shooting affrays arise from the most trivial
causes in saloons and bar-rooms. The deeper quarrels, arising from
jealousy or revenge, are few, and are usually about some woman not
worth fighting for. At Alma and Fairplay vigilance committees have
been lately formed, and when men act outrageously and make themselves
generally obnoxious they receive a letter with a drawing of a tree, a
man hanging from it, and a coffin below, on which is written
"Forewarned." They "git" in a few hours.