GREAT GORGE OF THE MANITOU

This is a highly picturesque place, with several springs, still and effervescing, the virtues of which were well known to the Indians.  Near it are places, the names of which are familiar to everyone — the Garden of the Gods, Glen Eyrie, Pike’s Peak, Monument Park, and the Ute Pass.  It has two or three immense hotels, and a few houses picturesquely situated.  It is thronged by thousands of people in the summer who come to drink the waters, try the camp cure, and make mountain excursions; but it is all quiet now, and there are only a few lingerers in this immense hotel.  There is a rushing torrent in a valley, with mountains, covered with snow and rising to a height of nearly 15,000 feet, overhanging it.  It is grand and awful, and has a strange, solemn beauty like death.  And the Snowy Mountains are pierced by the torrent which has excavated the Ute Pass, by which, tomorrow, I hope to go into the higher regions.  But all may be “lost for want of a horseshoe-nail.”  One of Birdie’s shoes is loose, and not a nail is to be got here, or can be got till I have ridden for ten miles up the Pass.  Birdie amuses every one with her funny ways.  She always follows me closely, and today got quite into a house and pushed the pallor door open.  She walks after me with her head laid on my shoulder, licking my face and teasing me for sugar, and sometimes, when any one else takes hold of her, she rears and kicks, and the vicious broncho soul comes into her eyes.  Her face is cunning and pretty, and she makes a funny, blarneying noise when I go up to her.  The men at all the stables make a fuss with her, and call her “Pet.”  She gallops up and down hill, and never stumbles even on the roughest ground, or requires even a touch with a whip.

The weather is again perfect, with a cloudless sky and a hot sun, and the snow is all off the plains and lower valleys.  After lunch, the ——s in a buggy, and I on Birdie, left Colorado Springs, crossing the Mess, a high hill with a table top, with a view of extraordinary laminated rocks, leaves of rock a bright vermilion color, against a background of snowy mountains, surmounted by Pike’s Peak.  Then we plunged into cavernous Glenn Eyrie, with its fantastic needles of colored rock, and were entertained at General Palmer’s “baronial mansion,” a perfect eyrie, the fine hall filled with buffalo, elk, and deer heads, skins of wild animals, stuffed birds, bear robes, and numerous Indian and other weapons and trophies.  Then, through a gate of huge red rocks, we passed into the valley, called fantastically, Garden of the Gods, in which, were I a divinity, I certainly would not choose to dwell.  Many places in this neighbor hood are also vulgarized by grotesque names.  From this we passed into a ravine, down which the Fountain river rushed, and there I left my friends with regret, and rode into this chill and solemn gorge, from which the mountains, reddening in the sunset, are only seen afar off.  I put Birdie up at a stable, and as there was no place to put myself up but this huge hotel, I came here to have a last taste of luxury.  They charge six dollars a day in the season, but it is now half-price; and instead of four hundred fashionable guests there are only fifteen, most of whom are speaking in the weak, rapid accents of consumption, and are coughing their hearts out.  There are seven medicinal springs.  It is strange to have the luxuries of life in my room.  It will be only the fourth night in Colorado that I have slept on anything better than hay or straw I am glad that there are so few inns.  As it is, I get a good deal of insight into the homes and modes of living of the settlers.

I.L.B.