A Snow Storm

We sat up till eleven last night, so confident were we that Edwards would leave Denver the day after Thanksgiving and get up here.  This morning we came to the resolution that we must break up.  Tea, coffee, and sugar are done, the venison is turning sour, and the men have only one month left for the hunting on which their winter living depends.  I cannot leave the Territory till I get money, but I can go to Longmount for the mail and hear whether the panic is abating.  Yesterday I was alone all day, and after riding to the base of Long’s Peak, made two roly-poly pudding for supper, having nothing else.  The men, however, came back perfectly loaded with trout, and we had a feast.  Epicures at home would have envied us.  Mr. Kavan kept the frying-pan with boiling butter on the stove, butter enough thoroughly to cover the trout, rolled them in coarse corn-meal, plunged them into the butter, turned them once, and took them out, thoroughly done, fizzing, and lemon-colored.  For once young Lyman was satisfied, for the dish was replenished as often as it was emptied.  They caught 40 lbs., and have packed them in ice until they can be sent to Denver for sale.  The winter fishing is very rich.  In the hardest frost, men who fish not for sport, but gain, take their axes and camping blankets, and go up to the hard frozen waters which lie in fifty places round the Park, and choosing a likely spot, a little sheltered from the wind, hack a hole in the ice, and fastening a foot-link to a cotton-wood-tree, bait the hook with maggots or bits of easily-gotten fresh meat.  Often the trout are caught as fast as the hook can be baited, and looking through the ice-hole in the track of a sunbeam, you see a mass of tails, silver fins, bright eyes, and crimson spots, a perfect shoal of fish, and truly beautiful the crimson-spotted creatures look, lying still and dead on the blue ice under the sunshine.  Sometimes two men bring home 60 lbs. of trout as the result of one day’s winter fishing.  It is a cold and silent sport, however.  How a cook at home would despise our scanty appliances, with which we turn out luxuries.  We have only a cooking stove, which requires incessant feeding with wood, a kettle, a frying-pan, a six-gallon brass pan, and a bottle for a rolling-pin.  The cold has been very severe, but I do not suffer from it even in my insufficient clothing.  I take a piece of granite made very hot to bed, draw the blankets over my head and sleep eight hours though the snow often covers me.  One day of snow, mist, and darkness wag rather depressing, and yesterday a hurricane began about five in the morning, and the whole Park was one swirl of drifting snow, like stinging wood smoke.  My bed and room were white, and the frost was so tense that water brought in a kettle hot from the fire froze as I poured it into the basin.  Then the snow ceased, and a fierce wind blew most of it out of the Park, lifting it from the mountains in such clouds as to make Long’s Peak look like a smoking volcano.  Today the sky has resumed its delicious blue, and the Park its unrivaled beauty.  I have cleaned all the windows, which, ever since I have been here, I supposed were of discolored glass, so opaque and dirty they were; and when the men came home from fishing they found a cheerful new world.  We had a great deal of sacred music and singing on Sunday.  Mr. Buchan asked me if I knew a tune called “America” and began the grand roll of our National Anthem to the words:

“My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,” etc.

I.L.B.