Through the long-lingering half-light of the most superb of evenings
we return'd to Denver, where I staid several days leisurely exploring,
receiving impressions, with which I may as well taper off this
memorandum, itemizing what I saw there. The best was the men,
three-fourths of them large, able, calm, alert, American. And cash! why
they create it here. Out in the smelting works, (the biggest and most
improv'd ones, for the precious metals, in the world,) I saw long rows
of vats, pans, cover'd by bubbling-boiling water, and fill'd with pure
silver, four or five inches thick, many thousand dollars' worth in a
pan. The foreman who was showing me shovel'd it carelessly up with a
little wooden shovel, as one might toss beans. Then large silver bricks,
worth $2000 a brick, dozens of piles, twenty in a pile. In one place
in the mountains, at a mining camp, I had a few days before seen rough
bullion on the ground in the open air, like the confectioner's pyramids
at some swell dinner in New York. (Such a sweet morsel to roll over with
a poor author's pen and ink--and appropriate to slip in here--that
the silver product of Colorado and Utah, with the gold product of
California, New Mexico, Nevada and Dakota, foots up an addition to the
world's coin of considerably over a hundred millions every year.)
A city, this Denver, well-laid out--Laramie street, and 15th and 16th
and Champa streets, with others, particularly fine--some with tall
storehouses of stone or iron, and windows of plate-glass--all the
streets with little canals of mountain water running along the
sides--plenty of people, "business," modernness--yet not without a
certain racy wild smack, all its own. A place of fast horses, (many
mares with their colts,) and I saw lots of big greyhounds for antelope
hunting. Now and then groups of miners, some just come in, some starting
out, very picturesque.
One of the papers here interview'd me, and reported me as saying
off-hand: "I have lived in or visited all the great cities on the
Atlantic third of the republic--Boston, Brooklyn with its hills, New
Orleans, Baltimore, stately Washington, broad Philadelphia, teeming
Cincinnati and Chicago, and for thirty years in that wonder, wash'd by
hurried and glittering tides, my own New York, not only the New World's
but the world's city--but, newcomer to Denver as I am, and threading
its streets, breathing its air, warm'd by its sunshine, and having what
there is of its human as well as aerial ozone flash'd upon me now for
only three or four days, I am very much like a man feels sometimes
toward certain people he meets with, and warms to, and hardly knows why.
I, too, can hardly tell why, but as I enter'd the city in the slight
haze of a late September afternoon, and have breath'd its air, and
slept well o' nights, and have roam'd or rode leisurely, and watch'd the
comers and goers at the hotels, and absorb'd the climatic magnetism of
this curiously attractive region, there has steadily grown upon me a
feeling of affection for the spot, which, sudden as it is, has become so
definite and strong that I must put it on record."
So much for my feeling toward the Queen city of the plains and peaks,
where she sits in her delicious rare atmosphere, over 5000 feet above
sea-level, irrigated by mountain streams, one way looking east over
the prairies for a thousand miles, and having the other, westward,
in constant view by day, draped in their violet haze, mountain tops
innumerable. Yes, I fell in love with Denver, and even felt a wish to
spend my declining and dying days there.