The Chicago Colony

Yesterday was perfect.  The sun was brilliant and the air cool and bracing.  I felt better, and after a hard day’s work and an evening stroll with my fiends in the glorious afterglow, I went to bed cheerful and hopeful as to the climate and its effect on my health.  This morning I awoke with a sensation of extreme lassitude, and on going out, instead of the delicious atmosphere of yesterday, I found intolerable suffocating heat, a blazing (not brilliant) sun, and a sirocco like a Victorian hot wind.  Neuralgia, inflamed eyes, and a sense of extreme prostration followed, and my acclimatized hosts were somewhat similarly affected.  The sparkle, the crystalline atmosphere, and the glory of color of yesterday, had all vanished.  We had borrowed a wagon, but Dr.  H.’s strong but lazy horse and a feeble hired one made a poor span; and through the distance here is only twenty-two miles very level prairie, our tired animal, and losing the way three times, have kept us eight and a half hours in the broiling sun.  All notions of locality fail me on the prairie, and Dr.  H.  was not much better.  We took wrong tracks, got entangled among fences, plunged through the deep mud of irrigation ditches, and were despondent.  It was a miserable drive, sitting on a heap of fodder under the angry sun.  Half-way here we camped at a river, now only a series of mud holes and I fell asleep under the imperfect shade of a cotton-wood tree, dreading the thought of waking and jolting painfully along over the dusty prairie in the dust-laden, fierce sirocco, under the ferocious sun.  We never saw man or beast the whole day.

This is the “Chicago Colony,” and it is said to be prospering, after some preliminary land swindles.  It is as uninviting as Fort Collins.  We first came upon dust-colored frame-houses set down at interval, on the dusty buff plain, each with its dusty wheat of barley field adjacent, the crop, not the product of the rains of heaven, but of the muddy overflow of “Irrigation Ditch No.  2.”  Then comes a road made up of many converging wagon tracks, which stiffen into a wide straggling street, in which glaring farmhouses and a few shops stand opposite to each other.  A two-story house, one of the whitest and most glaring, and without a verandah like all the others, is the “St.  Vrain Hotel,” called after the St.  Vrain river, out of which the ditch is taken which enables Longmount to exist.  Everything was broiling in the heat of the slanting sun, which all day long had been beating on the unshaded wooden rooms.  The heat within was more sickening than outside, and black flies covered everything, one’s face included.  We all sat fighting the flies in my bedroom, which was cooler than elsewhere, till a glorious sunset over the Rocky Range, some ten miles off, compelled us to go out and enjoy it.  Then followed supper, Western fashion, without table-cloths, and all the “unattached” men of Longmount came in and fed silently and rapidly.  It was a great treat to have tea to drink, as I had not tasted any for a fortnight.  The landlord is a jovial, kindly man.  I told him how my plans had failed, and how I wag reluctantly going on tomorrow to Denver and New York, being unable to get to Estes Park, and he said there might yet be a chance of some one coming in tonight who would be going up.  He soon came to my room and asked definitely what I could do-if I feared cold, if I could “rough it,” if I could “ride horseback and lope.”  Estes Park and its surroundings are, he says, “the most beautiful scenery in Colorado,” and “it’s a real shame,” he added, “for you not to see it.”  We had hardly sat down to tea when he came, saying, “You’re in luck this time; two young men have just come in and are going up tomorrow morning.”  I am rather pleased, and have hired a horse for three days; but I am not very hopeful, for I am almost ill of the smothering heat, and still suffer from my fall, and not having been on horseback since, twenty-five and a half miles will be a long ride.  Then I fear that the accommodation is as rough as Chalmers’s, and that solitude will be impossible.  We have been strolling in the street ever since it grew dark to get the little air which is moving.

I.LB.