A Mountain Town

I fear you will grow tired of the details of those journal letters.  To a person sitting quietly at home, Rocky Mountain traveling, like Rocky Mountain scenery, must seem very monotonous; but not so to me, to whom the pure, dry mountain air is the elixir of life.  At Golden City I parted for a time from my faithful pony, as Clear Creek Canyon, which leads from it to Idaho, is entirely monopolized by a narrow-gauge railroad, and is inaccessible for horses or mules.  To be without a horse in these mountains is to be reduced to complete helplessness.  My great wish was to see Green Lake, situated near the timber line above Georgetown (said to be the highest town in the United States), at a height of 9,000 feet.  A single day took me from the heat of summer into the intense cold of winter.  Golden City by daylight showed its meanness and belied its name.  It is ungraded, with here and there a piece of wooden sidewalk, supported on posts, up to which you ascend by planks.  Brick, pine, and log houses are huddled together, every other house is a saloon, and hardly u woman is to be seen.  My landlady apologized for the very exquisite little bedroom which she gave me by saying “it was not quite as she would like it, but she had never had a lady in her house before.”  The “young lady” who waited at breakfast said, “We’ve been thinking about you, and I’m certain sure you’re an authoress.”  The day, as usual, was glorious.  Think of November half through and scarcely even a cloud in the sky, except the vermilion cloudlets which accompany the sun at his rising and setting!  They say that winter never “sets in” there in the Foot Hills, but that there are spells of cold, alternating with bright, hot weather, and that the snow never lies on the ground so as to interfere with the feed of cattle.  Golden City rang with oaths and curses, especially at the depot.  Americans are given over to the most atrocious swearing, and the blasphemous use of our Savior’s name is peculiarly revolting.  Golden City stands at the mouth of Toughcuss, otherwise Clear Creek Canyon, which many people think the grandest scenery in the mountains, as it twists and turns marvelously, and its stupendous sides are nearly perpendicular, while farther progress is to all appearance continually blocked by great masses of rock and piles of snow covered mountains.  Unfortunately, its sides have been almost entirely denuded of timber, mining operations consuming any quantity of it.  The narrow-gauge, steep-grade railway, which runs up the canyon for the convenience of the rich mining districts of Georgetown, Black Hawk, and Central City, is a curiosity of engineering.  The track has partly been blasted out of the sides of the canyon, and has partly been “built” by making a bed of stones in the creek itself, and laying the track across them.  I have never seen such churlishness and incivility as in the officials of that railroad and the stage-lines which connect with it, or met with such preposterous charges.  They have handsome little cars on the route, but though the passengers paid full fare, they put us into a baggage-car because the season was over, and in order to see anything I was obliged to sit on the floor at the door.  The singular grandeur cannot be described.  It is a mere gash cut by the torrent, twisted, walled, chasmed, weather-stained, with the most brilliant coloring, generally dark with shadow, but its utter desolation occasionally revealed by a beam of intense sunshine.  A few stunted pines and cedars, spared because of their inaccessibility, hung here and there out of the rifts.  Sometimes the walls of the abyss seemed to meet overhead, and then widening out, the rocks assumed fantastic forms, all grandeur, sublimity, and almost terror.  After two hours of this, the track came to an end, and the canyon widened sufficiently for a road, all stones, holes, and sidings.  There a great “Concord coach” waited for us, intended for twenty passengers, and a mountain of luggage in addition, and the four passengers without any luggage sat on the seat behind the driver, so that the huge thing bounced and swung upon the straps on which it was hung so as to recall the worst horrors of New Zealand staging.  The driver never spoke without an oath, and though two ladies were passengers, cursed his splendid horses the whole time.  Formerly, even the most profane men intermitted their profanity in the presence of women, but they “have changed all that.”  Every one  I saw up there seemed in a bad temper.  I suspect that all their “smart tricks” in mining shares had gone wrong.

The road pursued the canyon to Idaho Springs, a fashionable mountain resort in the summer, but deserted now, where we took a superb team of six horses, with which we attained a height of 10,000 feet, and then a descent of 1,000 took us into Georgetown, crowded into as remarkable a gorge as was ever selected for the site of a town, the canyon beyond apparently terminating in precipitous and inaccessible mountains, sprinkled with pines up to the timber-line, and thinly covered with snow.  The area on which it is possible to build is so circumscribed and steep, and the unpainted gable-ended houses are so perched here and there, and the water rushes so impetuously among them, that it reminded me slightly of a Swiss town.  All the smaller houses are shored up with young pines on one side, to prevent them from being blown away by the fierce gusts which sweep the canyon.  It is the only town I have seen in America to which the epithet picturesque could be applied.  But truly, seated in that deep hollow in the cold and darkness, it is in a terrible situation, with the alpine heights towering round it.  I arrived at three, but its sun had set, and it lay in deep shadow.  In fact, twilight seemed coming on, and as I had been unable to get my circular notes cashed at Denver, I had no money to stay over the next day, and much feared that I should lose Green Lake, the goal of my journey.  We drove through the narrow, piled-up, irregular street, crowded with miners standing in groups, or drinking and gaming under the verandahs, to a good hotel declivitously situated where I at once inquired if I could get to Green Lake.  The landlord said he thought not; the snow was very deep, and no one had been up for five weeks, but for my satisfaction he would send to a stable and inquire.  The amusing answer came back, “If it’s the English lady traveling in the mountains, she can have a horse, but not any one else.”

I.L B.