The Union Pacific Railway route across the Continent was the first
constructed, the Government giving large subsidies in money and land
grants. It was opened in 1869, and greatly encouraged travel to the
Pacific coast. The Union Pacific main line starts at Council Bluffs
and Omaha on the Missouri River and crosses Nebraska into Wyoming.
Here is Cheyenne, a leading cattle-dealers' town on the edge of the
Rockies, five hundred miles west of the Missouri, where there are
fifteen thousand people. Fort Russell, an Indian outpost at the verge
of the Black Hills, is to the northward. At Cheyenne, the main Union
Pacific line is joined by the Denver Pacific branch, which starts on
the Missouri River at Kansas City, traverses Kansas, passing Fort
Riley and the Ogden Monument there, marking the geographical centre of
the United States, and enters Colorado, and at Denver turns northward
to Cheyenne.
Denver is the great city of the Rockies, whose snow-capped summits are
seen to the westward in a magnificent and unbroken line, extending in
view for one hundred and seventy miles from Pike's Peak north to
Long's Peak, with many intervening summits, most of them rising over
fourteen thousand feet. Denver stands on a high plateau, through which
the South Platte River flows, and it is at nearly fifty-three hundred
feet elevation. This "Queen City of the Plains" was settled by
adventurous pioneers as a mining camp in 1858, and through the
wonderful development of mining the precious metals has had rapid
growth, so that now there is one hundred and seventy thousand
population. It has many manufactures and some of the most extensive
ore-smelting works in the world, the annual output of gold and silver
being enormous. The high elevation and healthy climate make it a
favorite resort for pulmonary patients. There are many fine buildings,
and a noble State Capitol with a lofty dome, erected at a cost of
$2,500,000, and standing on a high hill, so that it gives a superb
outlook. The city was named in honor of General James W. Denver, who
was an early Governor of Kansas and served in the Civil War. He first
suggested the name of Colorado for the Territory (now a State), and
thus his name was given its capital. Denver has built for its
water-works, forty-eight miles south of the city, the highest dam in
the world, two hundred and ten feet, enclosing a gorge on the South
Platte to make an enormous reservoir holding an ample supply.
Being so admirably located, Denver is a centre for excursions into one
of the most attractive mountain regions in America. The great Colorado
Front Range, or eastern ridge of the Rockies, stretches grandly across
the country and has behind it one range after another, extending far
westward to the Utah Basin. Towering behind the Front Range is the
Saguache Range, the chief ridge of the Rockies, which makes the
Continental Divide. Among these complicated Rocky Mountain ranges are
various extensive Parks or broad valleys, nestling amid the peaks and
ridges, which were originally the beds of inland lakes. Out of this
mountain region flow scores of rivers in all directions, the affluents
of the Mississippi to the east, the Rio Grande to the south, and the
Colorado and the Columbia westward. All of them have carved down deep
and magnificent gorges, two to five thousand feet deep, and in places
the wonderful results of ages of erosion are displayed in the peculiar
constructions of vast regions, and in special sections, where the
carvings by water, frost and wind-forces have made weird and fantastic
formations in the rocks on a colossal scale, as in the "Garden of the
Gods." These mountains and gorges are also filled with untold wealth,
and the mines, producing many millions of gold and silver, have
attracted the population chiefly since the Civil War, so that the
whole district around and beyond Denver is a region of mining towns,
which are reached by a network of railways disclosing the grandest
scenery, and in many parts the most startling and daring methods of
railroad construction. Whenever land can be reclaimed for agriculture
or grazing on the flanks of the mountains and in the protected valleys
and parks, it is done, so that the district has extensive irrigation
canals, in some parts diverting practically all the available flow of
water in the streams. This is particularly the case with the Upper
Arkansas River, such diversion of the headwaters in Colorado having
robbed the river of its water to such a degree that the people of
Kansas, whither it flows on its route to the Mississippi, are greatly
annoyed and have protracted litigation about it.