GREAT PLATTE CANYON

My letters on this tour will, I fear, be very dull, for after riding all day, looking after my pony, getting super, hearing about various routes, and the pastoral, agricultural, mining, and hunting gossip of the neighborhood, I am so sleepy and wholesomely tired that I can hardly write.  I left Longmount pretty early on Tuesday morning, the day being sad, with the blink of an impending snowstorm in the air.  The evening before I was introduced to a man who had been a colonel in the rebel army, who made a most unfavorable impression upon me, and it was a great annoyance to me when he presented himself on horseback to guide me “over the most intricate part of the journey.”  Solitude is infinitely preferable to uncongeniality, and is bliss when compared with repulsiveness, so I was thoroughly glad when I got rid of my escort and set out upon the prairie alone.  It is a dreary ride of thirty miles over the low brown plains to Denver, very little settled, and with trails going in all directions.  My sailing orders were “steer south, and keep to the best beaten track,” and it seemed like embarking on the ocean without a compass.  The rolling brown waves on which you see a horse a mile and a half off impress one strangely, and at noon the sky darkened up for another storm, the mountains swept down in blackness to the Plains, and the higher peaks took on a ghastly grimness horrid to behold.  It was first very cold, then very hot, and finally settled down to a fierce east-windy cold, difficult to endure.  It was free and breezy, however and my horse was companionable.  Sometimes herds of cattle were browsing on the sun-cured grass, then herds of horses Occasionally I met a horseman with a rifle lying across his saddle, or a wagon of the ordinary sort, but oftener I saw a wagon with a white tilt, of the kind known a “Prairie Schooner,” laboring across the grass, or a train of them, accompanied by herds, mules, and horsemen, bearing emigrants and their household goods in dreary exodus from the Western States to the much-vaunted prairies of Colorado.  The host and hostess of one of these wagons invited me to join their mid-day meal, I providing tea (which they had not tasted for four weeks) and they hominy.  They had been three months on the journey from Illinois, and their oxen were so lean and weak that they expected to be another month in reaching Wet  Mountain Valley.  They had buried a child en route, had lost several oxen, and were rather out of heart.  Owing to their long isolation and the monotony of the march they had lost count of events, and seemed like people of another planet.  They wanted me to join them, but their rate of travel was too slow, so we parted with mutual expressions of goodwill, and as their white tilt went “hull down” in the distance on the lonely prairie sea, I felt sadder than I often feel on taking leave of old acquaintances.  That night they must have been nearly frozen, camping out in the deep snow in the fierce wind.  I met afterwards 2,000 lean Texan cattle, herded by three wild-looking en on horseback, followed by two wagons containing women, children, and rifles.  They had travelled 1,000 miles.  Then I saw two prairie wolves, like jackals, with gray fur, cowardly creatures, which fled from me with long leaps.

The windy cold became intense, and for the next eleven miles I rode a race with the coming storm.  At the top of every prairie roll I expected to see Denver, but it was not till nearly five that from a considerable height I looked down upon the great “City of the Plains,” the metropolis of the Territories There the great braggart city lay spread out, brown and treeless, upon the brown and treeless plain, which seemed to nourish nothing but wormwood and the Spanish bayonet.  The shallow Platte, shriveled into a narrow stream with a shingly bed six times too large for it, and fringed by shriveled cottonwood, wound along by Denver, and two miles up its course I saw a great sand-storm, which in a few minutes covered the city, blotting it out with a dense brown cloud.  Then with gusts of wind the snowstorm began, and I had to trust entirely to Birdie’s sagacity for finding Evans’ shanty.  She had been there once before only, but carried me direct to it over rough ground and trenches.  Gleefully Mrs. Evans and the children ran out to welcome the pet pony, and I was received most hospitably, and made warm and comfortable, though the house consists on]y of a kitchen and two bed-closets My budget of news from “the Park” had to be brought out constantly, and I wondered how much I had to tell.  It was past eleven when we breakfasted the next morning.  It was cloudless and an intense frost, with six inches of snow on the ground, and everybody thought it too cold to get up and light the fire.  I had intended to leave Birdie at Denver but ex-Governor Hunt and Mr. Byers of the Rocky Mountain News both advised me to travel on horseback rather than by train and stage, telling me that I should be quite safe, and ex-Governor Hunt drew out a route for me and gave me a circula letter to the settlers along it.

Denver is no longer the Denver of Hepworth Dixon.  A shooting affray in the street is as rare as in Liverpool and one no longer sees men dangling to the lamp-posts when one looks out in the morning!  It is a busy place, the entrepot and distributing-point for an immense district, with good shops, some factories, fair hotels, and the usual deformities and refinements of civilization.  Peltry shops abound, and sportsman, hunter, miner, teamster, emigrant, can be completely rigged out at fifty different stores.  At Denver, people who come from the east to try the “camp cure” now so fashionable, get their outfit of wagon, driver, horses, tent, bedding, and stove, and start for the mountains.  Asthmatic people are there in such numbers as to warrant the holding of an “asthmatic convention” of patients cured and benefited.  Numbers of invalids who cannot bear the rough life of the mountains fill its hotels and boarding houses, and others who have been partially restored by a summer of camping out, go into the city in the winter to complete the cure.  It stands at a height of 5,000 feet, on an enormous plain, and has a most glorious view of the Rocky Range.  I should hate even to spend a week there.  The sight of those glories so near and yet out of reach would make me nearly crazy.  Denver is at present the terminus of the  Kansas Pacific Railroad.  It has a line connecting it with the Union Pacific Railroad at Cheyenne, and by means of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, open for about 200 miles, it is expecting to reach into Mexico.  It has also had the enterprise, by means of another narrow-gauge railroad, to push its way right up into the mining districts near Gray’s Peak.  The number of “saloons” in the streets impresses one, and everywhere one meets the characteristic loafers of a frontier town, who find it hard even for a few days or hours to submit to the restraints of civilization, as hard as I did to ride sidewise to ex-Governor Hunt’s office.  To Denver men go to spend the savings of months of hard work in the maddest dissipation, and there such characters as “Comanche Bill,” “Buffalo Bill,” “Wild Bill,” and “Mountain Jim,” go on the spree, and find the kind of notoriety they seek.  A large number of Indians added to the harlequin appearance of the Denver streets the day I was there.  They belonged to the Ute tribe, through which I had to pass, and ex-Governor Hunt introduced me to a fine-looking young chief, very well dressed in beaded hide, and bespoke his courtesy for me if I needed it.  The Indian stores and fur stores and fur depots interested me most.  The crowds in the streets, perhaps owing to the snow on the ground, were almost solely masculine.  I only saw five women the whole day.  There were men in every rig: hunters and trappers in buckskin clothing; men of the Plains with belts and revelers, in great blue cloaks, relics of the war; teamsters in leathern suits; horsemen in fur coats and caps and buffalo-hide boots with the hair outside, and camping blankets behind their huge Mexican saddles; Broadway dandies in light kid gloves; rich English sporting tourists, clean, comely, and supercilious-looking; and hundreds of Indians on their small ponies, the men wearing buckskin suits sewn with beads, and red blankets, with faces painted vermilion, and hair hanging lank and straight, and squaws much bundled up, riding astride with furs over their saddles.

Town tired and confused me, and in spite of Mrs. Evans’ kind hospitality, I was glad when a man brought Birdie at nine yesterday morning.  He said she was a little demon, she had done nothing but buck, and had bucked him off on the bridge!  I found that he had put a curb on her, and whenever she dislikes anything she resents it by bucking.  I rode sidewise till I was well through the town, long enough to produce a severe pain in my spine, which was not relieved for some time even after I had changed my position.  It was a lovely Indian summer day, so warm that the snow on the ground looked an incongruity.  I rode over the Plains for some time, then gradually reached the rolling country along the base of the mountains, and a stream with cotton-woods along it, and settlers’ houses about every half-mile.  I passed and met wagons frequently, and picked up a muff containing a purse with five hundred dollars in it, which I afterwards had the great pleasure of restoring to the owner.  Several times I crossed the narrow track of the quaint little Rio Grande Railroad, so that it was a very cheerful ride.

I.L.B.