York--live in Harlem, to be more like it, and work down in Wall
street--use the subway twelve times a week. I don't have to come to
Colorado to ride in tunnels."
[Illustration: A broad arch spans Seventeenth Street and bids you
welcome to Denver]
Tourists form no small portion of Denver industry. She has restaurants
and souvenir shops, three to a block; seemingly enough high-class hotels
for a town three times her size. Yet the restaurants and the hotels are
always filled, the little shops smile in the sunshine of brisk
prosperity. And as for "rubberneck wagons," Denver has as many as New
York or Washington. They are omnipresent. The drivers take you to the
top of the park system, to the Cheesman Memorial, to see the view.
All the time you are letting your eyes revel in the glories of those
great treeless mountains, the megaphone man is dinning into your ears
the excellence of his company's trips in Colorado Springs, in Manitou,
in Salt Lake City. He assumes that you are a tourist and that you will
have never had enough.
Tourists become a prosperous industry in a town that has no particular
manufacturing importance. Great idle plants, the busy smelters of other
days, bespeak the truth of that statement. Denver, as far as she has any
commercial importance, is a distributing center. Her retail shops are
excellent and her wholesale trade extends over a dozen great western
states. Her banks are powers, her influence long reaching. But she is
not an industrial city.
That has worried her very much, is still a matter of grave concern to
her business men. Their quarrels with the railroads have been many and
varied. Denver realizes, although she rarely confesses it, that she has
disadvantages of location. These same mountains that the tourist comes
to love from the bottom of his heart, just as the Coloradians have loved
them all these years, are a real wall hemming her in, barriers to the
growth of their capital. When the Union Pacific--the first of all the
transcontinental railroads--was built through to the coast it was
forced, by the mountains, to carry its line far to the north--a bitter
pill to the ambitious town that was just then beginning to come into its
own. Denver sought reprisals by building the narrow-gauge Denver & Rio
Grande, a most remarkable feat of railroad engineering; bending far to
the south and then to the north and west through the narrow niches of
the high mountains. But hardly had the Denver & Rio Grande assumed any
real importance in a commercial fashion and the mistake of its first
narrow-gauge tracks corrected, before it was joined at Pueblo by direct
routes to the east and Denver was again isolated from through
transcontinental traffic. She was then and still is reached by
side-lines.
This was a source of constant aggravation to the man who was until his
death two or three years ago, Denver's first citizen--David H. Moffat.
Mr. Moffat's interest and pride in the town were surpassing. He had
grown up with it--in the later years of his life he used to boast that
he once had promoted its literature, for he had come to Denver when it
was a mere struggling mining-camp as a peddler, selling to the miners
who wanted to write home a piece of paper and a stamped envelope, for
five cents.
Moffat saw that a number of important lines were making Denver their
western terminal--particularly the Burlington and the Kansas stems of
the Union Pacific and the Rock Island. He felt that he might pick up
traffic from these roads and carry it straight over the mountains to
Salt Lake City, a railroad center suffering the same disadvantages as
Denver. He sent surveyors up into the deep canyons and the _impasses_ of
the Rockies. When they brought back the reports of their
_reconnoissances_, practical railroad men laughed at Mr. Moffat.
The big bankers of the East also laughed at him when he came to them
with the scheme, but the man was of the sort who is never daunted by
ridicule. He had a sublime faith in his project, and when men told him
that the summit of 10,000 feet above the sea level where he proposed to
cross the divide was an impossibility, he would retort about the number
of long miles he was going to save between the capital of Colorado and
the capital of Utah and he would tell of the single Routt county
stretch, a territory approximating the size of the state of
Massachusetts and estimated to hold enough coal to feed the furnace
fires of the United States for three hundred years. When he was refused
money in New York and Chicago he would return to Denver and somehow
manage to raise some there. The Moffat road was begun, despite the
scoffers. Its promoter made repeated trips across the continent to
secure money, and each time when he was home again he would raise the
dollars in his own beloved Denver and move the terminal of his road west
a few miles. He was at it until the day of his death and he lived long
enough to see his railroad within short striking reach of the treasures
of Routt county.
At his death it passed into the hands of a receiver, and Denver seemed
to have awakened from its dream of being upon the trunk-line of a
transcontinental railroad. But there were hands to take up the lines
where Moffat had dropped them. Times might have been hard and loan money
scarce around Colorado, but the men who were taking up what seemed to be
the deathless project of Denver's own railroad were hardly daunted.
Instead, they boldly revised Moffat's profile and prepared to cut two
thousand feet off the backbone of the continent and shorten their line
many miles by digging a tunnel six miles long and costing some four
millions of dollars. Now a tunnel six miles long and costing $4,000,000
is quite an enterprise, even to a road which has boasted thirty-two of
them in a single day's trip up to the divide; a particularly difficult
enterprise to a road still in the shadows of bankruptcy. But the men who
were directing the fortunes of the Denver & Salt Lake--as the Moffat
road is now known--had a plan. Would not the city of Denver lend its
credit to an enterprise so fraught with commercial possibilities for it?
Would not the city of Denver arrange a bond issue for the digging of
that tunnel--incidentally finding therein a good investment for its
spare dollars?
Would Denver do that? Ask this man over there. He is well acquainted
with the Paris of America.
"Of course it would," he answers. "If some one was to come along with a
scheme to expend five million dollars in building a statue to Jupiter
atop of Pikes Peak, he would find plenty of supporters and enthusiasm in
Denver. The only scheme that does not succeed out there is the one that
is practical."
The gentleman is sarcastic--and yet not very far from the truth. For
last year when the bond issue for the railroad tunnel went to a vote it
was carried--with enthusiasm. Thereafter Denver was upon the trunk-line
railroad map. The mere facts that the nine miles of tunnel were yet to
be bored and many additional miles of the most difficult railroad
construction of the land builded to its portals were mere details. The
thin air of the Mile-High city lifts its citizens well over details. And
they are far too broad, far too generous to trouble with such minute
things.
For in them dwells the real spirit of the West--by this time no mere
gateway--and it is a rare spirit, indeed. The town, as we have already
intimated, has a strong social tendency. She has sent her men and women,
her sons and her daughters to the East and they have won for themselves
on their own merits. The Atlantic seaboard has paid full tribute to the
measure of her training--and why not? Her schools are as good as the
best, her fine homes and her little homes together would be a credit to
any town in the land, her big clubs would grace Fifth avenue. Her whole
social organism from bottom to top is well fibered. It is charmingly
exclusive in one way, warmly democratic in many others.
A girl tourist from Cleveland, a recent summer, essayed to make the
ascent of the capitol dome between two connecting trains. She
miscalculated distances during the hour and a half that was at her
disposal and almost missed her outbound train. She surely would have
missed it, if it had not been for the courtesy of a well-dressed Denver
woman. The girl stood at the corner of Seventeenth street and Broadway,
where a group of large hotels center, waiting for a trolley car to take
her to the station. She could see its sightly tower a long way down
Seventeenth street, but there were no cars in sight at that instant. She
spoke to the woman, who was coming out of a drug store, and asked about
the car service to the station. In the East she might have had a
perfunctory answer, if she received an answer at all. The Denver woman
began explaining, then she checked herself:
"Better yet," she smiled, "I have my automobile here and I'll take you
down there while we are talking about it."
The car was a big imported fellow and the girl made her train. Some time
after, she discovered that the woman who had been of such courteous
attention was one of the very biggest of Denver society leaders.
Imagine, if you can, such a thing coming to pass upon the Atlantic
seaboard--in New York, in Boston, in Philadelphia--or in Charleston!
* * * * *
There is still another phase of life in Denver--and that is the fact
that most of her residents, for one reason or another, have drifted out
to her from the East. Once in a long while, if you loaf over your
morning newspaper on a shady bench in the Capitol grounds, you will
become acquainted with some whiskered old fellow who will tell you that
he chased antelope where the big and showy City Park today stands, that
he remembers clearly when a nearby street was the Santa Fé Trail and
then a country road, and that two generations after him are living in
Denver; or sometimes if you go down into Larimer street, which is old
Denver, you can find a veteran who likes to prate of other days--of the
time when he used to pack down to the capital from his mountain claim,
one hundred and twenty-five miles over the mountain snows, for his
winter's bacon. But the majority of these Denverites have come from the
East. There is some old town in New England with avenues of giant trees
that is still home to them, and yet they all have a heap of affection
for the city of their adoption.
Some of them have gone to Denver against their will, and that is the
tragic shadow of Colorado. They are expatriates--exiles, if you
please--for Colorado is the American Siberia. This dread thing, this
thing that is impartial to all low altitudes--the white plague--marks
the victims, who go shuffling their way to die among the hills--in the
gay Paris of North America. It is the gaunt tragedy of Denver, and even
though the Denverites speak lightheartedly of the "T. B.'s" who have
come to dwell among them, they themselves know best the bitter tragedy
of it all.
Here were two girls, sisters, who worked in a restaurant. A customer
held his home newspaper spread as he supped alone. Its title, after the
fashion of country weeklies, was emblazoned that all might read; the
widespread eagle has been its feature for three-quarters of a century
now. One of the waitresses made bold to speak.
"So you are from near Syracuse?" she said.
It was affirmed. She beckoned to her sister to come over. The little
restaurant--Denver fashion, it made specialities of "short orders,"
cream waffles and T-bone steaks--was almost deserted. She spoke to her
sister.
"He's from Syracuse," she said. The sister was a delicate, colorless
little thing, but the blood flushed up into her pale cheeks for an
instant.
"We're from Syracuse," she said proudly. "We used to live up on the
hill, just around the corner from the college. It was great fun to see
the students go climbing up around Mount Olympus there. It was twice as
great fun in winter, when the north wind was blowing the snow right up
into our faces."
Exiles these. They had left their nice, comfortable home there in the
snug, New York state city to make the long dreary trek to Denver. They
were clever girls, and it seemed certain that they might find work in
some nice office in the big and growing Colorado city. They were fairly
competent stenographers, and it seemed to them that they might live in
peace and comfort in the new home. It was a change from their big
Syracuse house to a narrow hallroom in a Denver boarding house. Then
upon that came the fruitless search for a "nice place." Hundreds of
other girl stenographers, driven on the long trip West, were pressing
against them. The two Syracusans held their heads high--for a time. Then
they were glad to get the menial places as waitresses.
The man who checks trunks at one of the biggest transfer companies
confessed that he was an exile, too.
"Came out here a dozen years ago with a busted lung," he admitted with a
quizzical smile. "Guess I'll stay for a while longer. But I want to go
back to Baltimore. Before I am done with it I am going back to
Baltimore. I'm going to walk down Charles street once again and breathe
the fragrance of the flowers in the gardens, if it kills me."
A girl in a boarding house leaned up against the wall of the broad and
shady piazza and said she liked Denver "really, truly, immensely."
"Do you honestly?"
"Honestly," she drawled gravely. "God knows, I've got to. I'm a lunger,
although they don't know it here. I've only got one lung, but it's a
good lung," she ended with a little hysterical laugh.
Another exile. The American Siberia, in truth, save that this Siberia is
a near Paradise--a kingdom for exiles where the grass is as green as it
is back in the old East, where the trees cast welcome shade and the
strange new flowers blossom out smiles of hope. But a Siberia none the
less. The big sanitariums all about the city tell that. The keeper of
the Denver Morgue will tell it, too. The suicide rate in Denver runs
high. Desperate folk go out to Colorado to shut the door in the face of
death--and go too late. They are far from home, alone, friendless,
penniless in despair--the figures of the statisticians cannot lie.
The East has this as a debt to pay Denver, and generally she pays it
royally. Denver does not forget the times when the Atlantic seaboard has
come to her assistance--despite the troubles of David H. Moffat in
raising capital for his railroad. Once in a business council there while
the East was getting some rather hard knocks for its "fool
conservatism"--perhaps it had been refusing to buy the bonds of the
mountain-climbing railroad--a big Denver banker got the floor. He was a
man who could demand attention--and receive it.
"I want you to remember one thing," he said; "fifteen years ago we were
laying out and selling town-lots for a dozen miles east of Denver; we
were selling them to Easterners--for their good money. When they came
out and looked for their land what did they see? They saw plains--mile
after mile of plains--peopled by what? They were peopled by jackrabbits,
and the jackrabbits were bald from bumping their heads against the
surveyors' stakes. Until we have redeemed those lots and built our city
out to them and upon them, gentlemen, we have not redeemed our promise
to the East."
And no one who knows Denver doubts that the time will yet come when she
will redeem that promise. Her railroad may or may not come to be a
transcontinental route of importance, manufacturing may or may not
descend upon her with its grime and industry and wealth, but her
magnificent situation there at the base of the Rockies will continue to
make her at least a social factor in the gradually lengthening roll of
really vital American cities.
18
TWO RIVALS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC--AND A THIRD
"When you get to Portland you will see New England transplanted. You
will see the most American town on the continent, bar only
Philadelphia."
The man on the train shrieking westward down through the marvelous
valley of the Columbia spoke like an oracle. He had a little group of
oddly contorted valises that bespoke him as a traveling salesman, and
hence a person of some discrimination and judgment. He was ready to talk
politics, war to the death on railroads, musical comedy and the
condition of the markets with an equally uncertain knowledge, a fund of
priceless information that never permitted itself to undergo even the
slightest correction.
But he was right, absolutely right, about Portland. From the cleanest
railroad station that we have ever seen, even though the building is
more than twenty years old, to the very crests of the fir-lined hills
that wall her in, here is a town that is so absolutely American, that it
seems as if she might even boast one of the innumerable George
Washington headquarters somewhere on her older streets. Her downtown
streets are conservatively narrow, her staunch Post Office suggests a
public building in one of the older cities on the Atlantic coast, and
her shops are a medley of delights, with apparently about thirty percent
of them given over to the retail vending of chocolate. Our Portland
guide was grieved when we made mention of this last fact.
"I once went to Boston," said he, "and found it an almost continuous
piano store."
Which was, of course, a mere evasion of the truth of our suggestion as
to the chocolate propensities of the maids of Portland. They are very
much like the girls in Hartford or Indianapolis or St. Paul or any other
bustling town across this land, attending the Saturday matinées with an
almost festal regularity; rollicking, flirting girls, grave and gay,
girls dancing and girls driving their big six-cylinder automobiles with
almost unerring accuracy up the tremendous hills of the town.
Hills they really are and well worth the tall climb to Council Crest,
the showiest of them all. If your host does not mind tire expense and
the wear and tear on his engine, he may take you up there in his
automobile. The street car makes the same ascent, and the managers of
the local traction system who have to pay for all the repairs and
renewals to the cars do not hesitate to say that it is the least
profitable line in creation. But the final result at Council Crest is
worth a set of tires, or a six-months' ageing of a trolley car.
You have climbed up from the heart of the busy town, past the business
section, spreading itself out as business sections of all successful
towns must continue to do, past the trim snug little white Colonial
houses--that must have been stolen from old Salem or Newburyport--all
set among the dark greens of the cedars and the firs, and belying the
Northland tales of the tree foliage by the great rose-bushes that bloom
all the year round, up on to the place where tradition says the silent
chiefs of red men used to gather.... Below you from Council Crest the
town--the town, at dusk, if you please. The arcs are showing the regular
pattern of trim streets, the shops and the big office buildings are
aglow for the night with the brilliancy of artificial illumination. It
is dark down in the town--night has closed in upon it.
Now lift your eyes and let them carry past the town and the black gloom
of the river, over the nearest encirclings of the fir-clad hills and see
the day die in the most high place. You see it now--a peculiar pink
cloud, which is not a cloud at all, but a snow-capped cone-shaped peak
rising into the darkening heavens. Mount Hood is an asset for Portland,
because for any habitation of man it would be an inspiration. And beyond
Mount Hood--fifty miles distant--but further to the north are Mount
Adams, Mount St. Helen's and sometimes on a fine clear evening Rainier
bidding alike brilliant farewells to the dying day.
[Illustration: Belasco might have staged Seattle]
This then is the city into which a traveler may enter on an autumn day
to find the innumerable cedars and firs, the changing brilliancy of the
maple leaves proclaiming it North, with the gaily blossoming rose-bushes
and the home-grown strawberries of October telling a paradoxical story
and locating the Oregon metropolis to the South. The publicity experts
of the town can--and do--sound its praises in no faint terms. They will
tell you of a single day when twenty-two wheat vessels were at Portland
docks gathering the food-stuffs for a hungry Orient, they will reel off
statistics as to the shipping powers of the great lumber port in all the
world and then, without a lessening of the pride, will go further and
explain Portland's hopes for the further inland navigation of the
streams that make her an important ocean port although fifty miles
distant from the sight of the sea. The Columbia river is already
navigable for four hundred miles inland and Portland is today
coöperating with the Canadian authorities in British Columbia for
extending the waterway's availability as a carrier for another four
hundred miles. A great work has been performed in pulling the teeth of
the mighty Columbia where it meets the sea--in building jetties at the
mouth of the river. The government with unusual energy is making new
locks at the impressive Cascades. Portland has good reason for her faith
in the future. Her railroad systems are in their infancy; a part of
Central Oregon as large as the state of Ohio is just now being reached
by through routes from Portland. What future they shall bring her no man
dares to predict.
But we, for ourselves, shall like to continue to think of Portland as a
gentle American town set between guardian fir-clad hills and sentineled
by snow-capped peaks; we shall enjoy remembering the yellow and red
leaves of Autumn, the luxuriant roses, the strawberries and the crisp
October nights in one delightful paradoxical jumble.
* * * * *
To make a great seaport city out of a high-springing ridge of volcanic
origin was a truly herculean task, but Seattle sprang to it with all the
enthusiasm of her youth. "Re-grading" is what she has called it, and
because even armies of men with pick and with shovel could not work fast
enough for her own satisfaction, she borrowed a trick from the old-time
gold miners and put hose-men at work. Hydraulic science supplanted men
and teams and picks and even the big steam shovels. The splashing hose
wore down the crest of the great hills until sturdy buildings teetered
on their foundations and late moving tenants had to come and go up and
down long ladders.
In 1881 President Hayes came to this strange little lumbering town and
spoke from the platform of the two-storied Occidental Hotel in the
center of the village to its entire population--some five hundred
persons. The Occidental Hotel was gone within ten years, to be replaced
by a hostelry that in 1890 was big and showy for any town and that in
1912, Seattle regarded almost as a relic of past ages. And stranger
still, the hills--the eternal hills, if you please--that looked upon the
Occidental Hotel only yesterday, have gone. Not that Seattle will not
always be a side-hill town, that the cable cars will not continue to
climb up Madison street from the waterfront like flies upon a
window-glass, but that a tremendous reformation has been wrought, with
the aid of engineers' skill and the famous "hard money" of the Pacific
coast.
For here was a town that decided almost overnight to be a seaport of
world-wide reputation. She looked at her high hills ruefully. Then she
called for the hose-men. The hills were doomed.
There was Denny hill, with a park of five acres capping it. The
surveyors set their rival stakes five hundred feet below the lowest
level of the little park and a matter of almost a million cubic yards of
earth went sploshing down the long hydraulic sluices to make the
tide-water flats at the bottom of the hills into solid footing for
future factories and warehouses. And when the "regraders" were done the
architects and the builders were upon their heels.
Denny hill had boasted a hotel upon its summit, which in the late
eighties Seattle regarded as an architectural triumph, a wooden thing of
angles and shingles and queer Queen Anne turrets and dormers. The name
of the old hotel went to a new one which supplanted it at a proper
altitude for a city that was determined to be metropolitan--and the new
hotel was a dignified structure worthy of the best town in all this
land.