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 intervals on the dusty buff plain, each with its dusty
wheat or barley field adjacent, the crop, not the product of the
rains of heaven, but of the muddy overflow of "Irrigating Ditch
No.2." Then comes a road made up of many converging wagon
tracks, which stiffen into a wide straggling street, in which
glaring frame houses and a few shops stand opposite to each
other. A two-storey house, one of the whitest and most glaring,
and without a veranda 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.
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