grind it. There is one now at Montrose which will make from seventy-five
to one hundred barrels of flour per day, and when the crops get ahead of
it other mills will be built. This is not poetry and fancy and talk; it
is a settled fact, for the soil has been tried in more places than one,
and--but, hello! there's our train!"
Precipitately retreating to our "parlor," we don our dusters and go
steaming down toward Grand Junction.
The mountains whence I have just come lift their snow-embroidered
heights grandly to the sky, and I can point out nearly all the separate
peaks though they are fifty miles away.
"You should have seen that long hill-range
With gaps of brightness riven--
How through each pass and hollow streamed
The purpling lights of heaven--
"Rivers of golden-mist flowing down
From far celestial fountains,--
The great sun flaming through the rifts
Beyond the wall of mountains."
On the right, extended a long line of bluffs, close at hand, sprinkled
with cedars between which the brick-red soil showed queerly. The strata
in the base of these bluffs were yellowish white and had been cut by
water into a series of little knolls and spurs like sand-dunes and
equally bare of vegetation. They were hot, desolate, and glaring.
The train ran along the edge of the bottom-lands of which these bluffs
were the boundary, and on the left stretched a continuous line of farms
watered from the river which was hidden in a distant grove of
cottonwoods. That the land was rich was shown not only by the
flourishing fields of grain, and of Indian corn, but by the luxuriance
of sagebrush and greasewood in the uncultivated spaces. This was the
Uncompahgre we were following, and at Delta, where the bottom-lands
spread out into a spacious plain, we reached its junction with the
Gunnison, and passed to its right bank over a long bridge.
Dominating everything here to the northward is that vast plateau,
protected from decay by its roofing of lava over the softer substances
that make its bulk, which forms the watershed between the Gunnison and
the Grand rivers, and is called the Grand Mesa. We know that its surface
is hilly and rough, but from here and everywhere else, its edge, as far
as can be seen, cuts the sky with a perfectly straight and even line as
though it were as level on top as a table. In color it appears dark
crimson above the brown and green of mingled forest and exposed rocks
that cover its lower front. Looking past it, up the river, we can see
the snowy Elks, and a line of rails is surveyed from Crested Butte right
down to this point through a series of cañons. There is little
opportunity for farming below the mouth of the Uncompahgre, where abrupt
walls of red sandstone shut in the river, and sometimes hem it so
closely that a road bed had to be blasted out of the cliff. The river
has grown, since we saw it last in the Black cañon, to be a hundred
yards wide. It still flows deeply and swiftly, but has lost the
cataracts. Its color, too, after so much contact with loose earth, has
changed from green to turbid yellow. The run along its banks is straight
and swift. Generally the track is laid just at the brink, upon the solid
rock, and the river is occasionally crossed upon admirable bridges. One
of these bridges, I remember, is at a place where enormous cliffs of
carmine-tinted sandstone most curiously worn full of little pits and
round holes as though moth-eaten, rise sheer from the water to a great
height. The strata of these cliffs--which also have bands of
yellow--wear away unequally but always in a rounded shape, so that you
can see them edgewise, as at a bend, the protuberances take the form of
"volutes;" and this will continue for long distances unchanged, as if
the cliff had been adorned with gigantic beads of molding. It is one of
the most interesting stages of the whole journey.
Just east of the Grand are the finest cliffs of all,--great piles of
ponderous masonry, fit for the bulwarks of a world, each massive block,
a hundred feet or so square, set firmly upon its underlying tier, and
the whole rising two or three thousand feet in majestic proportions and
colors that please by their softness and harmony. Past these we roll
slowly out upon the longest bridge in the state--950 feet--spanning the
swift yellow flood of the Grand river just above where the Gunnison
enters, and find ourselves at Grand Junction.
XXXI
THE GRAND RIVER VALLEY.
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in Paradise
was more favorably situated, on the whole, than a backwoodsman in this
country.
--THOREAU.
A very honest little circular--quite a phenomenon among
prospectuses--had come into our hands, which gave in terse language the
claims that Grand Junction made to the notice of the world and upon the
attention of the man who was looking for a place of residence in western
Colorado. This honest little circular, toward its end, contains the
following paragraph:
We desire, however, to inform all eastern people who may be thinking
of coming west, that, while this is one of the most productive valleys
in Colorado, it is anything but this in appearance now. Excepting
along the banks of the streams or near them, there is probably not a
tree to be seen in the valley, unless it was planted since the valley
was settled, or within the past eighteen months. The soil has a dull
grayish appearance, with hardly a blade of grass growing in it for
several miles back from the river, and it produces naturally only
sagebrush and greasewood. It is uninviting and desolate looking in the
extreme, and yet it is far from being so in reality. We are thus
explicit in speaking of the desolate appearance of the country, so
that no homesick wanderer in this far-off western land will say when
his heart fails him in looking over our valley, that he has been
deceived, and that all that has been said of Grand Junction and its
surrounding country is a delusion and a snare. If the reader of this
lives in the east, he will almost surely be disappointed at first, if
he comes out here. It will be the disappointment of ignorance though,
for it is only a man who is ignorant of the productiveness of this
country who will refuse to believe what is said of it in this respect.
That paragraph put us upon our metal. We were eastern people
undoubtedly, but then we had seen "a heap" of Colorado, and the word
"ignorance," we would not confess applied in our case. It was therefore
with no little curiosity, and something of a resolution to be pleased
anyhow (since we had been told we might not be,) that we detached our
peripatetic home and slipped into a resting-place upon the customary
siding. The glow of the sunset filled the valley with a blaze of yellow
light, and the mesas wore chevrons of indigo shadow and pink light to
the northward, while the scarred bluffs across the Grand reflected the
last rays from burning crests of red sandstone. Weary with travel we
threw open our doors, brushed and dusted and bathed, while the kitchen
was busy, and then sat down to dinner in the cool soft air of the
twilight. When it was over a multitude of twinkling lights alone showed
where the town lay, and so we left until morning learning more about it.
[Illustration: CASTLE GATE.]
* * * * *
When we came to the learning, there were persons enough to teach us,
besides all the explicit information Mr. William E. Pabor and others
have put into type about the new town--the western Denver, the
metropolis of--
"Didn't we hear Gunnison called that, too? and Montrose? and--?" asks
the Madame, whose serious mind can never quite become accustomed to
local flowers of speech.
Undoubtedly we had; but who shall say which one of them, a century from
now, shall not deserve the name? Describe it? That would be merely
repetition. Situated, as I have said, in the midst of a level
sage-plain, utterly treeless, it is an orderly jumble of brick
buildings, frame buildings, log cabins, tents, and vacant spaces. It is
South Pueblo or Salida or Durango, or Gunnison of two years ago over
again. The more important question to be answered, is, why is a town
built here at all? It is here in anticipation of the agricultural
productions of the valley by which it is surrounded, water for the
irrigation of which is supplied by the largest river in Colorado, and
therefore inexhaustible.
A year before the railway came, speculators, chiefly from Ruby and
Irwin, who had no dread of loneliness, went to this point and started
the town. "They staked off several ranches," says the report, "and
located one irrigating ditch and a town site." This town, which they
called Granville, is situated across the Grand from the mouth of the
Gunnison. A town site was afterwards staked by the Crawford party, and
given the name of Grand Junction.
That is the way these marvelously new and flourishing towns are started
out here. They reverse the proverb and may be said to be _made_ not
_born_; or, as Chum puts it, _fititur non nasce_. I couldn't have done
that, but it was easy enough for Chum who has been to college; he don't
mind a little gymnastics in Latin like that.
In the mountains dividing Middle park from North park the clustering
streamlets pour steadily into Grand lake, whose surface is rarely free
from gusts of chilling wind or the shadow of gathering storms. Hidden in
heavy forests, it occupies a basin scooped out by the mighty plow of a
glacier and held back by moraines and _montonnes_ that record a
geological history of the utmost interest to the student. About this
solitary lake gather gloomy traditions of fierce warfare between Ute and
Arapahoe, and since the Indian owners have yielded it to the white men,
one of the darkest crimes in the history of the Rockies has happened
upon its shores.
From this dark mountain-tara flows a strong outlet fed by the snows. Its
whole youth lies in the depths and gloom of cañons, for range after
range open their gates to let it pass, but the gates are narrow and the
pathway rough. Thus this river, constantly recruited, more and more the
_Grand_, fights its way from the center almost to the western edge of
the state. There, when its labor is fairly done, and aid is no longer
needed, comes the help of the powerful Gunnison, and doubly strong it
rolls westward to the Utah line, and then southwestward till it meets
the flood of the Green and both become the Rio Colorado.
Where the Gunnison now empties into the larger stream was once a wide
lake embanked by the abrupt and lofty bluffs that now bound the plain,
and whose mesa-top indicates the ancient level of the whole country, out
of which the valleys, cañons and lake-beds were eroded.
Into this old expansion of the rivers, had been poured the freight of
soil brought down from the mountain-sides, where the varied rocks were
being ground to powder under the feet of glaciers, and swept along by
gigantic torrents fed with endless meltings. Hither was carried by the
swift waters the mingled dust and pebbles of primeval granite, volcanic
overflows and sedimentary sands, lime, and argillaceous rock. It was the
latest mixture of all that before this had been handled again and again
through the fires that upheaved the inner ranges, and the waters that
laid down the rocky tables, leaning against their flanks. Into the
river-lakes went all this mixture to sink into mud upon the bottom of
the quiet sea,--a union of the best elements in all the composition of
the western slope of the Rockies. In the whole world you could not find
a soil made after a better recipe. Slow changes in the climate
proceeded, and the lake drained away and left a valley twenty-five miles
long and half as wide, waiting to nourish the farmer's grain and the
children's flowers.
The first requisite to adapt it to human service, however, was that the
valley should be watered. Thousands of acres of good land in the Rocky
mountains from Kootenai to Chihuahua remain worthless because there is
not enough water available to spread over them, but at Grand Junction
there is no such deficiency. The great drainage of the Grand would not
miss all the water that could possibly be used. Already along its margin
miles of ranches have been begun, by men digging small and temporary
ditches bringing water to irrigate a single farm or a small group of
fields in the bottom. These were the first comers who had choice of the
whole area. Later two or three larger ditches were made having a greater
scope, and now there has just been finished a waterway, led for
twenty-five miles along the benches at the base of the Roan or Little
Book Cliffs, bounding the plain on the north, which will bring under
cultivation thirty thousand acres of valley heretofore unwatered, and
may be extended when the population demands. This ditch comes out twelve
miles above town. It is fifty feet wide across the top, and is
thirty-five feet at the bottom; the depth is five feet, and it delivers
seven hundred cubic feet of water each second, at a speed of two miles
an hour, though there is only twenty-two inches of slope in each mile of
length. A ditch like this costs $200,000, yet dividends are confidently
expected. If anybody can invent a steamer which will not wash the banks,
pleasure yachts and freight barges will be put upon it, for it is of
considerably greater dimensions than the Erie Canal when first opened.
There is no lack of water, therefore. Competent observers say the supply
is sufficient for half a million acres, so that the intricate and
expensive lawsuits vexing the farmers of the eastern slope can hardly
arise here. This abundance is a matter of vital importance, and an
inestimable advantage. Water has a value above that of land everywhere
in Colorado. Where land, in the valley of the Cache la Poudre, is valued
at ten dollars per acre, a water right carries a cash valuation of
fifteen dollars per acre and is more easily disposed of. The blessing
attending the cultivation of the soil where the water-supply exceeds the
area of land, can only be appreciated by those who have seen their crops
wither for want of it.
[Illustration: IN SPANISH FORK CAÑON.]
It is only recently that this water-supply has become available,
however, through the medium of the canals, for any extended farming.
Large crops, therefore, cannot be expected until next year, but enough
has been learned to make it sure that when the peculiarities of this
adobe soil and the looser mesa soil are understood, so that the farmers
may know exactly how to supply their irrigation to the best advantage,
the most plentiful crops of all the cereals can be produced. We were
told that the experiments right here at Grand Junction already, had
yielded corn-stalks eleven feet seven inches high; a bunch of wheat
having seventy-four stalks in one stool; barley with seventy-six stalks
in a stool; oats five and a half feet high; Egyptian millet, one hundred
and five stalks from a single seed, weighing thirty-six pounds; four
cuttings of alfalfa; Irish potatoes weighing from two to four pounds
apiece; cabbages from five to twenty-three pounds apiece; beets,
carrots, parsnips, and all the vegetables of equally prodigious
dimensions. There can be no question of the extraordinary productivity
of this region, and that its agricultural future is to be a very
prosperous one.
Equally large expectations are held at Grand Junction, Delta, Montrose
on the North Fork, and in all the adjacent lowlands, that this whole
region will prove a great fruit-bearing country. The plentitude and
excellence of the wild fruits along the streams and in the foothills is
remarkable, and formed one of the attractions of the reservation in the
eyes of the Indian. The similarity in soil, climate and altitude to the
fruit-growing region of Utah is adduced, and, in respect to grapes,
peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, and all the small fruits,
successful experiments have justified all the arguments. Just below
Ouray, last year, a ranchman raised seven thousand quarts of
strawberries for market. I saw watermelons and muskmelons growing finely
on Surface creek at the foot of the Grand Mesa near Delta, and
everywhere you will find young fruit trees doing well and uninjured by
winter, which is always mild so far as known, the thermometer rarely
indicating cold below zero, and the snowfall in the valleys being light.
"This new Colorado has a climate essentially different from that of old
Colorado and the country east of the Continental Divide. It is the
climate of the Pacific coast modified only by altitude and latitude. The
air currents come up over the valleys, plateaus, hills and mountain
sides, fresh from the ocean currents that wash the Pacific shores. These
ocean streams are heated under an equatorial sun and sweeping north
around the circle of the earth, temper the whole western slope."
In this neighborhood, too, are splendid grazing regions, which are
rapidly filling with cattle. I have before me a trustworthy scrap from
the _Colorado Farmer_ on this point: "The face of the country," says the
writer, referring to the hill regions of the Uncompahgre and the grand
plateaus, "is gently sloping but cut by gulches, ravines and cañons;
grass grows luxuriantly from the creek and river bottom to the very tops
of the highest plateaus; on the higher uplands there are plenty of pine
and piñon trees, in many places interspersed with cedars and aspens;
many small brooks and springs course their way down the hillsides;
natural shelter is found in every neighborhood from storms when they
come, which is seldom. Game abounds in the greatest plenty and taken all
in all, it is probably the finest stock range in the state. The quality
of the grass is excellent and cures completely. It is different from the
plains grass, grows tall with an abundant wealth of leaf, stem and
seed. This country is to be the great cattle country of the state. The
Rio Grande railway runs through it and will carry the fattened beeves to
the market of the mountains and to Denver and even start them on their
way to the great markets of the East. There are already cattle there and
they are but forerunners of the thousands yet to come."
The important point is, that the wide mountain areas insure summer
pasturage without driving to great distances; while the valleys afford
good winter grazing. I have been in every cattle region in the United
States, and I never saw anywhere such magnificent grass as I have ridden
through for miles and miles along the upper part of Surface creek in
Delta county. When the herds have so increased that the winter pasturage
falls short--some years must elapse before that--the valley lands will
furnish an abundance of millet, oats, alfalfa and other grasses, by
means of the inexhaustible supply of water which is possible for
irrigation.
As further aids to her progress, Grand Junction has easy access to coal,
both hard and soft; has limestone in great abundance, and excellent
white sandstone for building purposes; while the soil is adapted for
making sun-dried adobes or for being made into burned brick, of which
material most of the buildings and many of the sidewalks in town are now
constructed. Game is common in the neighboring mountains, especially
throughout the great wilderness which stretches northwest, and the
rivers abound in edible fishes.
At length there comes a day when we are ready to leave Grand Junction
and "go West." It is a long ride that lies ahead and we turn our parlor
car into a sleeper by setting up the cots and curtains that have not
been needed for several weeks. It is late in the afternoon, and when the
morrow's light dawns we shall be out of Colorado and among the lakes and
deserts, the mountains and Mormons of Utah.
XXXII
GREEN RIVER.
And then the moon like a goddess came
Over the mountains far,
Wrapping her mantle of silver light
Over each golden star;
And the cliffs grew grand in the dazzling light,
High as the skies, and still and white.
--FANNIE I. SHERRICK.
The sweet clear twilight was fading from the cliffs, and had long since
left the valley, when it came time to leave Grand Junction. The rising
moon beckoned us on, however, and we look forward with eagerness to our
journey, for to-night we are to cross "the desert," to span the
cañon-begirt current of Green river, and beheld the mountains of Utah.
Doubtless the silent hours of the dog watch would finally close our
eyelids; but now we bade Bert be sure that the lamps in the parlor car
were well filled and trimmed, for none of us would confess the least
desire for sleep.
In a short time the valley of Grand Junction had been left behind, and
we quickly passed through the gravelly, grass-covered hills that lie
between the river and the cliffs in this region. It was not quite dark,
therefore, when all this had disappeared, and our train ran in a swift
straight course across an open and level, though by no means smooth
plain. Northward it was bounded at a few miles distant by the frowning
and banded wall of the Book cliffs, colorless now in the wan light, but
distinct in their majestic outline; southward it stretched to the
horizon, save where it was broken by the splendid file of the Sierra La
Sal--an isolated group of eruptive mountains singularly graceful in
contours. The surface of the ground was drab or blue or yellow in color,
nowhere quite flat, but divided into low, rounded ridges and conical
mounds, by the shallow dry channels, down which have coursed the waters
of the powerful storms that at long intervals burst over the desert.
Stimulated by the occasional moisture in these channels, a few spears of
grass and twigs of wormwood are thrust up through the soil, along their
depressions; but between--over the general face of the country,--not a
sign of water, vegetation, or animal life appears. It is the repose of
utter silence and quietude, a netherworld only half lighted by the
worn-out moon. Yet it has a fearful beauty, found in the magnitude of
the space--the grandeur of the huge rocky masses faintly but
continuously outlined against the bright sky north of us--the wide
realms of gray darkness southward--the marvelous brilliance of the
moon--the luminous glory of the overspreading dome, unbroken from
horizon to horizon, almost as at sea, and so seeming really a part of
the globe and not an external thing. These things impress us greatly and
emphasize the sense of loneliness and remoteness. No other railway
journey in the country, I believe, could reproduce as this does the
impressions of an ocean-voyage.
At Grand Junction we leave the Grand river, though our course for some
miles is parallel with it and not far remote. Skirting the edge of the
great Uncompahgre plateau which lies between the Uncompahgre and
Gunnison rivers and the Rio Dolores, the river flows west and southwest
through deep gorges in the Jurassic and Triassic rocks as far as the
mouth of the Dolores. This river comes in from the southeast, taking its
origin in the Sierra de La Plata, and running a most picturesque course.
Through its mouth it is supposed the Gunnison, before it was deflected
toward its more northern outlet by the slow upheaval of the plateau,
once flowed by the way of a cañon which connects the present valleys of
the two rivers. This deserted cañon was called by the Utes Unaweep (Red
Rock), describing the scenery it presents. The granite rises vertically
from the bottom of the valley, in narrow, bas-relief columns, for some
hundreds of feet; above, the beds of red sandstone cap it in broken
precipices. In some places massive promontories of the granite, whose
slow elevation has raised the whole breadth of the plateau upon its
shoulders, juts out into the valley worn down through it. The scenery
reminds one strongly of the Yosemite.