Chapter 7

Our excitement this week has been a cricket match with Boyle's Farm; four of their men we challenged. It really was too amusing. They had a bat and ball, stumps, but no bales, and played on the prairie, which was so fearfully rough that it was almost dangerous, the ball shot in such various directions after hitting the tufts of grass. Everybody fielded, but a ball going into the wheat-field behind the wickets was not counted as a lost ball. The total score of the two innings was only ten, and in one our opponents went out without a single run; so you may fancy the howls of either applause or derision at every ball.

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August 17th.

The Farm with all its toils and pleasures is a thing of the past; we were both very low when we turned our backs upon it and its inhabitants just a week ago. We have been in such robust health the whole of our three months, hardly a headache or finger-ache. Our maid-of-all-work life has suited us, and we have acquired such an immense deal of practical knowledge that for those reasons alone, we might be gratified and pleased we came. Since then we have been staying with Mike in Minnesota, where we were either riding or driving (anything to do with horses) all day long. Driving four miles, jumping the horses over a pole, taking them down to water, having a mule race (which was truly amusing as the course was just in front of the house and several bolted home), and driving, a gang plough, were a few of the "diversions" found for us. Our host was most kind and anxious to make us comfortable; he worked heaven and earth to get his house ready, the contractors having taken so much more time than they said; anyhow, he turned the carpenters out of the house the day previous to our arrival, carried in the furniture, nailed up mosquito blinds, and did many things himself, so that everything should be in spick and span order.

As these men, Mike having two partners, are farming thirteen thousand acres, they are on a much larger scale as regards buildings, numbers of horses, etc., to anything we have seen before. Their living-houses are about double the size of C---- Farm; they have also huge stables, which A---- fancies will be cold in winter, but have a most imposing appearance, as have also their implement house, sheds, etc. The land seemed much the same as ours, a rich black loam, but very much wetter, marshes everywhere. They have broken two thousand acres since the beginning of June, and were busy, whilst we were there, cutting hay, Mike hoping he had already got over five hundred ton up!

We drove one day to see a neighbouring farm which is said to be the "boss" one in all the country, belonging to a man who has been out five years. He was just starting to cut his two square miles of wheat, and we watched the seven self-binding machines with great interest. They seem as light as a reaper, and the machinery comparatively not intricate.

We were driven through some standing corn, which was rather agonizing to our British ideas, but he thought nothing of it. The straw was four and a half feet high, and he hopes to get forty-two bushels to the acre. His farm being on the Snake River, and having many creeks running through as drainage, is a great advantage. His vats were pronounced no better, if so good, as ours at C---- Farm.

We remained at Warren a day longer than we had intended, as we got to the station just in time to see our train move off. We accused Mike's Irish groom, who is quite a character, of bringing round the carriage too late on purpose. If he did, I think all the party forgave him; we were very happy, it gave us another night of A----'s society. Mike was low at our going. Poor man! one cannot be much surprised at his liking to keep us, as, besides the fascinations of ladies' society, he has no neighbours whatsoever, and, excepting the two men he has in the house, there is not a gentleman nearer than Winnipeg. He offered me seventy-two dollars a month to be his housekeeper. E---- was to have two dollars a week as parlour-maid, which she considers an insult; or she might have seventy-five cents a day if she would drive the ploughs.

Servants and labourers get higher wages there than in Manitoba, all the men were averaging thirty-five to forty dollars a month and their keep. They were all Swedes and Germans, of whom there is an enormous colony in the state.

We are now trying to spend our day at Council Bluff, a large junction of the Grand Pacific Railway, having come in here at 8 o'clock this morning, and our train to Denver not leaving till 7 o'clock this evening. The hotel is right on the station. The weather is so hot, that as yesterday, at St. Paul's, where we also had to spend a whole day, we have never summoned up courage to go beyond the door. It was suggested we might take the tram and go up into the City; but E---- has a notion that one city is much like another, particularly on a hot day.

It is curious how Americans live in hotels; there are several families in this, and if my letter is not very intelligible you must forgive me, as I am writing in the grand corridor to try and catch the slight draughts of air blowing through, at the same time that half a dozen children are playing up and down.

The scenery yesterday from St. Paul's all along the banks of the Missouri was very pretty. We both of us sat outside the Pullman as long as daylight lasted, feasting our eyes oh the water, trees, etc. The height and luxuriance of the latter seemed quite incomprehensible after the total absence of forest scenery for so many months. It is pretty round here; and by the time we get to the Rocky Mountains we shall have got beyond the stage of thinking a hillock a mountain, and fairish-sized trees not so wonderful after all; but at the present moment we are in that pleasing state, ready to admire anything and everything. We hope to get to Denver on Saturday night, and rest there Sunday and part of Monday, and we also hope to get to Church there. Mike offered to drive us into Warren last Sunday; but as the service was a Swedish Presbyterian, we didn't think we should be much edified.

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DENVER, August 2lst.

We arrived here Saturday evening, very tired and not at all sorry to exchange the Pullman for a comfortable room and bed, which we had telegraphed for, and therefore not, like so many of our fellow-passengers, obliged to seek shelter elsewhere. The Pullman's are most comfortable, and for a long journey like ours nothing could be so good; but I am glad that in England we don't have either these or the ordinary American car in general use. The publicity is so odious, and one does get bored by the passengers constantly wandering up and down the train, and the boys who pass and repass every ten minutes selling books, newspapers, cigars, candy, and the unripest of fruit, which they are always pressing you to buy; to say nothing of chewing, spitting Americans one has to countenance all day long. The last four-and-twenty hours of our journey have been very tiring. The scenery has been so monotonous; endless long undulating plains like the waves of the sea, covered with grass quite dried up, a few flowers, and a bee-shaped cactus. The heat was very oppressive, a hot sirocco, wind blowing which; obliged us to keep our windows shut on account of the fine alkaline dust. E---- had her window open last night, and awoke this morning to find herself in a layer of ashes.

We skirted the South Platte River most of the time; it was only a bed of shingles, wide and shallow, with not a drop of water in it. These plains, extending for thousands of miles in all directions, are the great "ranching," or cattle-farming districts, formerly the favourite breeding-grounds and pastures of the buffalo, which, alas! have all disappeared. We only saw a few tame ones amongst the herds of cattle; they have been killed in the most ruthless, indiscriminate way for their furs, and will soon be "things of the past."

We wondered much, with the river and every visible stream so dry, how the large herds of cattle and horses were watered; but have since been told that water is so near the surface the herdsmen have no great depth to dig to procure any quantity. We thought we could have made a good pick or two amongst the horses, but we didn't care for long-legged ugly big-horned cattle brutes. Here and there was a herdsman mounted on a small Indian pony with a high Mexican saddle, enormous spurs, and a long lasso, galloping and dexterously turning his animals.

Our train had to pull up several times and whistle loudly to turn the animals off the track, there being, as usual, no rail or protection; but pulling up for them was not half as exciting as on Thursday night, when we stopped repeatedly to turn a man off the train who, not having paid his fare, nor apparently intending to do so, had swung himself in some marvellous way under the cars, hanging on by the break. Whenever we slackened speed he jumped off, walking quite unconcernedly alongside; but the moment we moved on he got on again. We never knew how far he continued his perilous ride, I fancy that even the officials gave up remonstrating; anyhow, as long as daylight lasted and we could watch the men, no efforts on their part seemed to make the smallest impression.

Three hours before getting into Denver we had our first glimpse of the Rockies, and although they were then only in the blue distance we were quite excited about them; and at Greely Station (much impressed on our minds by having read Miss Bird's book just before coming here), we came in full view of Long's Peak,--almost wishing "Mountain Jim" might still be alive to ascend it with us,--and the whole of the gorgeous range; and quite one of the loveliest sights I ever saw was watching two thunder-storms on either side of the Peak break and disperse, whilst the reflections from the sunset-glow lit up the rest of the heavens. The railway and Denver City itself is about thirty miles distant from the mountains, but the atmosphere is so clear that they look as if quite within an easy gallop.

It is difficult to understand why the town has been built so far from the mountains, situated as it is on a sandy, treeless plain. It is growing, like most of the western towns, at a tremendous pace, and we are lodging in a luxurious hotel, our room on the fourth floor numbers 454. We found the avenues of trees lining every street an immense boon this morning in going to church at the cathedral.

The heat, though great, is not so oppressive as either at St. Paul's or Omaha, but then we are at the height of 5,000 feet; and this afternoon the air has been cleared by a thunderstorm preceded by a great sand-storm, which we watched from our windows encircling the town, so thick that mountains and all view was obliterated for the time being.

Denver is a great resort for invalids, chiefly those suffering with asthma.

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August 22.

Before leaving Denver we went to a gunsmith and invested in a fishing-rod and numberless flies, with which we intend to do great execution. We also went to the exhibition, opened a month ago and still unfinished; one of the leading men, to whom we had a letter of introduction, showed us everything. It is chiefly interesting to miners, as the display of minerals from Western America is unrivalled. There seemed, in the specimens, enough gold and silver to make us rich for ever; unfortunately our ignorance on the subject of ore is too great to thoroughly appreciate it.

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OURAY, August 24.

It is not easy to sit down and write after forty-eight hours travelling, as we have been doing since leaving Denver on Monday night at 7 o'clock; but in such scenery and air so exhilarating we do not feel as tired as we expected. You should have seen the omnibus, stage-coach, charridon, or any other name you please to give the lumbering vehicle in which we performed our last twelve hours' drive; it looked truly frightening when it drove up to Cimarron depot, one tent, last night, to pick us up, intended for twenty passengers and any amount of luggage, and swung on great straps. It was wonderfully well horsed, and we changed our teams every ten miles; but only then came at the rate of five miles an hour. We both of us started for our sixty-four miles' drive on the box-seat with the driver, who happened to be an extremely nice man and an experienced whip; in former days he had driven the stage-coaches across from Omaha to San Francisco, a journey of three weeks. But he took up much room on the seat, and every time he had to pull up his horses his left elbow ran into me, until "he guessed my ribs would be pretty-well bruised."

About midnight, when our only other fellow-passenger turned out from the inside of the coach, I entered it, though I expected nearly every moment would be my last, the bumping was so fearful. I managed to get a few winks of sleep towards morning. E---- sat outside all night, finding it very difficult not to drop off the coach from drowsiness. The early hours of the morning, after the moon went down until dawn, were truly wretched, what between the outer darkness, the flickering of our lamps, the unevenness of the road, and the clouds of dust, and one almost began to wonder if the journey was worth so much trouble.

But with daylight we quite altered our opinions; as really I do not think, if you searched the whole world over, you would find anything more beautiful than the Uncompahgre valley and park looked in the morning light.

Mr. W---- met us at 5 o'clock A.M. at the "Hot Springs," so called from the boiling water that gushes out of the ground, and which is said to give the name of "Uncompahgre" to the district, that being the Indian word for hot water. He brought us out hot coffee and food to refresh us, and drove us the last nine miles up the valley. We came slowly, thoroughly enjoying the scenery. On either side of the road are well-cultivated farms. Within two miles of Ouray the park narrows into a magnificent gorge, bounded on each side by precipitous cliffs of red sandstone, covered with pines and quaking aspen, the whole crowned by arid peaks. From this gorge you suddenly come upon the town, situated in an amphitheatre of grand gray, trachyte rocks.

Our house is in Main Street. The ground floor is an office; our four rooms are on the first floor, to which we ascend by a wooden staircase outside.

Every nook and corner is filled with some curiosity or mineral specimen. Our host being a great sportsman, there are various trophies of the chase--a mountain lion, wild sheeps' heads, bears, cranes, even to a stuffed donkey's head; there are also cabinets of fossils, specimens of ore, etc., and great blocks of the same piled on the floor.

Our family consists of our two hosts, Messrs. W---- and B----, two Indian ponies, a mule, two setters, and two prairie dogs, which are reddish-buff marmots. We are only to remain here one night, and, if thoroughly rested after our journey, go up to the log cabin in the Imogene Basin, 3,000 feet higher. We are both looking forward to it immensely. It is right in the heart of the mountains, 10,600 feet, and with no one near us, as all the mines surrounding the cabin belong to a company which had to suspend its works last month for want of funds, so that they are not being worked. The air is glorious, and we feel already perfectly restored to our usual health, though we are warned that strangers cannot walk much at first, the air is so rarefied, that one is soon out of breath. Anyhow the atmosphere has been so clear that it much added to our enjoyment in seeing the ever varying beauties and distant mountain view all along our journey from Denver here.

We unfortunately came through the "Grand Canyon" at night. Had it been clear the porter on the car was to awake us to see it; we could quite picture to ourselves its beauties by the scenery in the Black Canyon we came through yesterday by daylight. The engineering all along the line is marvellous, the way we rose nearly 7,000 feet by a zigzag over the Marshall Pass, or the Great Divide, going down nearly as many feet on the other side and then through these canyons, which are only narrow gorges for a raging torrent to rush through on its headlong career.

Our train was a very narrow gauge with bogie wheels, and we twisted so, in and out of the bends of the river, that the engine often looked as if it might easily come into contact with our carriage which happened to be the last. It is the great advantage of the Pullmans they are always on last to the train when passing through any pretty country, and when there are no other carriages of the same, so that one can sit on the rear platform and see all the scenery.

We entered into conversation with two Germans, and were amused by one of them surreptitiously bringing us two pink trout from his luncheon at the wayside hotel, we having remained in the carriage for our frugal meal; and though we had got to the "Sweets" stage felt hound to begin again, and much enjoyed our fish. The food provided at these wayside inns is generally so bad and dear, a dollar a head charged for sixteen to eighteen dishes, of almost uneatable messes, that we prefer the tinned meats and fruits we have, in our luncheon basket; and for drinks we have beautifully iced water in all the carriages, the ice being replenished at every big station.

The last forty miles of our railroad journey was over a line only opened ten days ago, by which, I am thankful to say, we avoided twelve hours more of the stage-coach and a night in a Colorado inn, which, we are told, is anything but pleasant, there always being many more bed fellows than what one bargains for; and we should not have seen the Black Canyon and its thirteen miles of grandeur and sublimity. The railway track is cut out of the sides of the over-hanging rocks, and in places is built on a bed of stones in the creek itself.

The rocks at times almost seemed to meet overhead, then widened, we crossing and re-crossing the torrent by wooden bridges which shortly are to be replaced by iron ones. The colouring was so beautiful, the chasm being generally in shade with the mountains above standing out in glorious sunshine, covered as they were in many places, even as far down as the water's edge, with pines. Nature is marvellous in its productions, but the ingenuity of man is also wonderful, and we quite came to the conclusion that the scenery of that canyon was worth coming all these thousands of miles to see.

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OURAY, August 27th.

The name of Ouray, given to this town, is from the last chief of the Utes, who, with his tribe, lived to within a couple of years on a reserve down in the Park. The first stake is said to have been struck by white men in 1865, but no cabin was built until 1874, and from that time the town has been growing rapidly, having now about 1,000 inhabitants. In the south-west portion of the basin in which it stands, and where the waters of Canyon Creek flow into those of the Uncompaghre, there are some lovely canyons and picturesque gorges, and here, in places where the hot springs overflow the banks of the main stream, the rocks are covered with maiden-hair and other ferns. These hot springs serve to keep the river unfrozen even in the severest weather.

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MOUNTAIN BAT'S NEST, IMOGENE BASIN,

August 29th.

This is a glorious region, and we send you the enclosed sketch to show our picture of comfort and perfection. I assure you, nightly as we sit down to our evening repast, or later round our wood fire in our "parlour," we congratulate each other, and fancy we would not change places with the highest of the land, the air and life are so intoxicating.

After twenty-four hours in Ouray we came up here, sending the darkie Henry and our luggage on before us in a waggon. We have brought nothing but the bare necessaries of life--all our heavy boxes are gone to Chicago to await our return--being warned to bring as little as possible, on account of the difficulties of transport in the mountains, also of only being allowed 50 lbs. weight on the coach, every extra lb. charged ten cents. We ourselves rode up here, arriving about 6 o'clock, and found poor Henry waiting outside, not having been able to get into the cabin, the door-key being carefully in Mr. W----'s pocket; but as everything is always left in order it didn't take us long to make ourselves comfortable; and as at sunset the cold had been piercing, a fire soon lit was very acceptable.

This cabin is quite unique. It consists of two rooms on each side of the front door, with a tiny passage used as larder, wood-hole, saddle-room, &c.

Our room is our bed and drawing-room combined, which is hung all round with every imaginable skin, wolf, skunks, lynx, &c., stuffed animals and birds, guns and traps, to say nothing of shelves covered with different specimens of ore taken out of the adjoining mines. It was quite creepy, the first night, having to sleep with a bear's head at the foot of our bed, with a stuffed fox just over our head, which has the most awful squint, and is the first object that catches the eye on awaking, and a dried root, the fibres of which so much resemble a man's beard that it looks horridly like a scalp. The hay-mattress on our bed has to be; shaped into grooves for our poor bones to rest comfortably. In the day-time it is covered up with skins, and then is called the "lounge."

Our washing-stand is primitive, a box standing on end, in which our tin bason and cans are concealed, so that we can consider our "parlour" quite correct. Our other room is the kitchen, and fitted up with four bunks against the wall, which Mr. W---- and Henry occupy. We breakfast and dine out of doors, at a table placed just outside the cabin, and on the only bit of flat ground we have near, as we are situated on the slope of a mountain, and a most beautiful stream of water runs about forty feet below us with the clearest and coldest of water. One of our first occupations in the morning is to take the animals down to water, and afterwards to picket them in amongst the long grass, growing in great profusion and height during the short summer on all the foot hills and wherever there is an open space. The first afternoon we were up here we went for a ride round Imogene basin, and were delighted with the wild flowers, which are quite innumerable--columbine, phloxes, blue gentian, dandelions, harebells, vetches, and fifty other species. E---- picked a good many, and hopes to draw them for the benefit of you all at home. The flowers shoot up almost before the snow has melted, and make the most of their short existence which lasts about two months and a half. We tasted the "bear berry," which grows as a bush and has a round brown berry, quite bitter, but, as its name shows, is much appreciated by the bears, who come any distance to get it.

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September 4th.

We are enjoying this mountain life; the weather is all we can desire, and we are in the most robust of health. We live almost entirely out of doors, sketching all the morning, in the afternoons making expeditions either into some of the mines, or over a mountain-pass; and for "tender-feet" the name given to all new-comers, are pronounced to be good mountaineers; but our ponies and mules are so sure-footed and pleasant that we follow any trail, however narrow and uneven, with the greatest confidence.