WHEN CHEYENNE WAS YOUNG.
Let us suppose this is the year 1872, and that we are taking a trip
across the continent on the first railroad from the Missouri River to
the Golden Gate. We have passed through western Nebraska and its
uninhabited hills and plains and we are entering Cheyenne, on a vast
plain, yet situated at the foot of a range of the Rocky Mountains known
as the lower Black Hills. We are in sight of Long's and other Colorado
peaks of the Rockies and while apparently on a wide prairie for several
hours we have nevertheless been climbing a steep grade all the way from
Sidney, the last division point.
Cheyenne is (in '72, remember) a city of boards, logs and canvas, but is
beginning to shake off the very first things of a "camp," and is
entering the brick age, with good prospects of acquiring fame as a
substantial city.
But there are some hundreds of things here that are strange to the eyes
of an Eastern man. For example, in all his life he has never seen a man,
outside a military encampment, with a revolver strapped in a holster to
a belt around his waist. Perhaps he has never seen a faro game in his
life, and chuck-a-luck is as mysterious to him as the lingo of the
broad-hatted men who recommend it to the fortune-seeker instead of a
gold mine or honest toil of any kind. He has never seen, much less heard
of, a hurdy-gurdy where the men and the scarlet women "waltz to the bar"
to the tune of the "Arkansaw Traveler."
He used to see his Uncle Cyrus plow with a slow-plodding team of oxen
among the cobble stones of a Vermont farm; but this is the first time in
his life that he ever saw seven yokes of oxen hitched together in front
of two big wagons and every team pacing a gait that would bring praise
from the judge's stand at a county fair.
He starts down the main street and he sees "The Gold Room" in big
letters on a big wooden building. "This is where they keep it," he
muses, and he goes in. It is where they sell it--"forty-rod," "squirrel"
and the rest. But that is not all we see in the "Gold Room," run by Jack
Allen. We also see a woman called Madam Moustache dealing the game of
"twenty-one," at which "Wild Bill" Hickok, Texas Jack and a lot more
celebrities are "sitting in." Then in another corner is a faro game. Men
here are so eager to get their money on the cards that some of them are
standing on the back rungs of chairs and reaching over sitting players
to put stacks of golden twenties on the table, either "calling the turn"
or betting that the nine-spot or some other card will win or lose as
the dealer slips the paste-boards out of his silver box.
It is night, of course, and after a while, when the gambling begins to
drag, the tables are shoved a little closer to the wall and the big
floor is given up to dancing, even though through it all--dancing and
gambling--a stage performance is going on. Some painted female person of
uncertain age, but positive reputation, is either shouting personalities
at characters in the crowd or bellowing and butchering a popular song in
a male voice. Smoke is thick and not fragrant to the nostrils of the
new-comer--the tenderfoot. The "Gold Room" roof is also occupied--that
is, the inside part of it--with boxes crowded with men and women, the
women being known as "beer jerkers." In the early hours of morning it is
difficult to find a sober man or woman.
The same thing is going on in "McDaniels' Variety," opposite Tim Dyer's
Tin Restaurant. McDaniels, bald-headed and also smooth of voice, is
circulating around among his top-booted guests like a pastor among his
flock, and you wonder that such a fine-looking, well-spoken man is not
in a pulpit instead of a dive.
But this is some of Cheyenne in 1872 to 1875. Go to Cheyenne today--and
what do you find? Nothing like this, that's certain. It is doubtful if
you will round up more than a handful of men who remember there ever was
such a place as Allen's "Gold Room" or the McDaniels' Variety, or even
Tim Dyer's Tin Restaurant--tin because the plates and cups were tin
when the big place was first opened. But see Cheyenne today. There isn't
a city 200 years old on the Atlantic coast that has more civilization, a
finer lot of railroad men, more culture and good order to the square
yard.
Cheyenne had a bad reputation, but it soon reformed when the natural
resources of Wyoming began to be developed, and today, while we who
pioneered it there so many years ago spoke of it as a "desert
metropolis," are witnessing every little while either in agricultural or
horticultural shows its progress in wheatfield and orchard.