|GUNNISON CITY is one of the peculiarities of a mining boom. It spreads
out and slops over the plain like a huge camp meeting, but without shape
or beauty.
The plains there are red and sandy; the trees are not nearer than the
foot-hills; and the city, which claims 5,000 inhabitants, though 3,000
would, no doubt, be more accurate, is composed of a wide area of ground,
with scattering houses that look lonely in the midst of the desolation.
Mining in Colorado, this season, has not advanced with the wonderful
impetus which characterized it in previous years. Wherever you go, you
hear first one reason, and then another, why good mines are not being
worked. There is trouble among the stock-holders; a game of freeze
out; lack of capital to put in proper machinery, or excessive railroad
freights, to pay which virtually paralyzes the reduction of ore owned by
men too poor to erect the expensive works necessary to the realization
of profit from the mines.
Returning from Gunnison City, now, you rise at a rate of over 200 feet
to the mile, zig-zagging up the almost perpendicular mountain, near the
summit of which is the Alpine tunnel. As you near the tunnel, there is
a perpendicular and sometimes even a jutting wall above you, hundreds
of feet at your right, while far below you, on your left, is a yellow
streak, which at first you take to be an old mountain trail, but which
you soon discover is the circuitous track over which you have just come.
Near here, while the road was being built, a fine span of horses balked
on the grade, and like all balky horses, proceeded to back off the road.
The owner got out of the wagon, and told them they could keep that thing
up if they wanted to, but he could not endorse their policy. They kept
backing off until the wagon went over the brink, and then there was a
little scratching of loose stones, the kaleidoscope of legs and hoofs,
a little rush and rumble, and the world was wealthier by one less balky
team. The owner never went down to see where they went to, or how they
lit. He was afraid they would not survive their injuries, so he did not
go down there. Later, the carrion crows and turkey buzzards indicated
where the refractory team had landed; and deep in the mountain gorge the
white bones lie amid the wreck of a lumber wagon, as monuments of equine
folly.
On Saturday evening we had the pleasure of riding down the dizzy grade
from Hancock, a distance of eighteen miles, at which time we descended
a mile perpendicularly in a push car, with Superintendent Wilbur as
conductor and engineer. A push car is a plain flat-car, about as big as
a dining-table, with four wheels, and nothing to propel it but gravity,
and nothing to stop it but a sharpened piece of two-by-four scantling.
Hancock is near the Alpine tunnel, at the summit of the mountains,
about 11,000 feet high. Secretary Morgan, Mrs. Morgan, with their
little daughter Gertrude; E. A. Slack, of the _Sun_, Frank Clark, of the
_Leader_, Superintendent Wilbur and ourself, constituted the party.
At first everybody was a little nervous with the accumulating velocity
of the car, and the yawning abyss below us; but later we got more
accustomed to it, and the solemn grandeur of the green pine-covered
canons, the lofty snow-covered peaks, apparently so near us; and the
rushing, foaming torrent far below us, were all we saw. Like lightning
we rounded the sharp curves where the road seemed to hang over instant
destruction, and we held our breath as we thought that, like Dutch
Charlie and other great men, only a piece of two-by-four scantling stood
between us and death.
Again and again the abrupt curve loomed up ahead, and below us, while we
flew along the narrow gauge at such a pace that we were almost sure the
car would, leave the track before it would round such a point, and each
time the two-by-four went down on the drive wheel with a pressure that
sent up volumes of blue smoke.
It was a wild, grand ride--so wild and grand in fact that even yet we
wake up at night with a start from a dream in which the same party
is riding down that canon at lightning speed, and Mr. Wilbur, in a
thoughtless moment, has dropped his pine brake overboard!
Shades of Sam Patch, but wouldn't it scatter the average excurter over
southern Colorado if such a thing should happen some day! Why, the woods
would be full of them, and for years to come, the prospector along Chalk
Creek Canon would find pyrites of editorial poverty, and indications of
collar buttons, and fragments of Archimedean levers, and other mementoes
of the great editorial hegira of 1882.