A Hospitable Welcome Awaited Me At This Inn, And An
English Friend Came In And Spent The Evening With Me.
GREAT PLATTE CANYON, October 23.
My letters on this tour will, I fear, be very dull, for after
riding all day, looking after my pony, getting supper, 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 snow-storm 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 horse-back
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 as 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 good will, 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 men on horseback, followed
by two wagons containing women, children, and rifles. They had
traveled 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 cotton-wood, wound along by Denver,
and two miles up its course I saw a great sandstorm, 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's
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 only 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 with an
intense frost, and 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 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 Governor Hunt drew out a route for me and gave
me a circular 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.
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