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 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 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 revolvers, 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's 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!
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