TWIN ROCK, SOUTH FORK OF THE PLATTE

I did not leave Mr. Thornton’s till ten, because of the slipperiness.  I rode four miles alone a back trail, and then was so tired that I stayed for two hours at a ranch, where I heard, to my dismay, that I must ride twenty-four miles farther before I could find any place to sleep at.  I did not enjoy yesterday’s ride.  I was both tired and rheumatic, and Birdie was not so sprightly as usual.  After starting again I came on a hideous place, of which I had not heard before, Hayden’s Divide, one of the great backbones of the region, a weary expanse of deep snow eleven miles across, and fearfully lonely.  I saw nothing the whole way but a mule lately dead lying by the road.  I was very nervous somehow, and towards evening believed that I had lost the road, for I came upon wild pine forests, with huge masses of rock from 100 to 700 feet high, cast here and there among them; beyond these pine-sprinkled grass hills; these, in their turn, were bounded by interminable ranges, ghastly in the lurid evening, with the Spanish Peaks quite clear, and the colossal summit of Mount Lincoln, the King of the Rocky Mountains, distinctly visible, though seventy miles away.  It seemed awful to be alone on that ghastly ridge, surrounded by interminable mountains, in the deep snow, knowing that a party of thirty had been lost here a month ago.  Just at nightfall the descent of a steep hill took me out of the forest and upon clean log cabin, where, finding that the proper halting place was two miles farther on, I remained.  A truly pleasing, superior-looking woman placed me in a rocking-chair; would not let me help her otherwise than by rocking the cradle, and made me “feel at home.”  The room, though it serves them and their two children for kitchen, parlor, and bedroom, is the pattern of brightness, cleanliness, and comfort.  At supper there were canned raspberries, rolls, butter, tea, venison,, and fried rabbit, and at seven I went to bed in a carpeted log room, with a thick feather-bed on a mattress, sheets, ruffled pillow slips, and a pile of warm white blankets!  I slept for eleven hours.  They discourage me much about the route which ex-Governor Hunt has projected for me.  They think that it is impassable, owing to snow, and that another storm is brewing.

I.L.B.