CHAPTER I.

Glimpses of a Mountain World.

Colorado--for thirty years no geographical name has been oftener written in connection with the phrases that express height, vastness, space, clearness and a colossal beauty that never wearies or changes or grows old. Hundreds of books, millions of words, have described its scenes. Many thousands have visited it. Endowed with a beauty of fascinating awfulness, and with still another beauty that underlies the magnitude and sits serene amid the grandeur, the inadequate, word-trammeled idea of it has found endless expression, and yet the scenes of Colorado have never been described. Whoever has visited her ever after turns aside from words; whoever has not, can obtain from them but a faint conception of that which in truth can be imagined only in actual presence--and hardly even then.

Yet it seems necessary that maps should be drawn, and details written out, and the camera be called upon to reproduce the stupendous microscopic detail, and that magnificence should find a biographer and be put into figures that in the presence of the reality are almost meaningless. For it is a work-a-day world. The questions of time, distance, convenience, cost, possibility, cannot be barred from their foreordained connection in the human mind with even the magnificence that was builded by the æons; the beauty whose mother was cosmos.

Imagine, to begin with, the extent of this piece of scenery. Colorado contains 104,500 square miles--66,880,000 acres. Of this vast area--as big as all New England with Illinois added--two-thirds is mountains. Not such as claim that name in Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia and the Carolinas, but Titanic. The height of the average Alleghanies and of the Blue Ridge is perhaps 2,500 feet. The famed peaks of the chain may rise sometimes to 5,000 feet. Katahdin is 5,385 feet high, and there are others 3,400, 2,800, etc. The thirteen peaks of Mount Desert Island and vicinity are from 1,000 to 2,800 feet high. Mount Agamenticus is a hill that claims 670 feet. Kearsarge, historic name, has only 3,250 feet. The Peaks of Otter, in Virginia, climb to 4,200 feet.

They might all be lost in this Colorado and never be found again. The state is traversed by the main chain of the Rockies, the oft-quoted "backbone of the continent," the huge rooftree of our republic, prolific mother of rivers, this great watershed gives rise to the Rio Grande, the two Plattes, the Arkansas, the rivers of central Kansas, the Colorado that in Arizona passes for two hundred miles between those sheer red walls that are the scenic wonder of the world, and flows at last into foreign seas.

Out of this mighty chain and its flanks rise the peaks beside which most of the serenest heights of the common world are as hillocks; Pike's, Gray's, Long's, Lincoln, Ouray, Grant, Sherman, Yale, Harvard, Dome, Spanish Peaks, the Wet Mountains; and scores of others whose heights range from 11,000 to 15,000 feet. To him who sees them first from afar, perhaps across eighty miles of plains-country, where the sudden rising against the sunset of the Rampart range seems impossible--to him afar these seem not mountains, but clouds. Thenceforth he is required to modify his views of elevation and to extend vaguely and indefinitely his notions of the picturesque. For these giants also he may come to know as familiar things. The flowers he may gather here also, and may place his hand within the clefts of those red cathedral towers that were not reared with hands. Here, too, has the human conquered, and up these vast defiles the railways climb. Puny they seem amid their strange environment, yet of the vast wonder they are become a part. Were there nothing else to appal or please, these alone would repay the journey from afar, for they illustrate once for all the unabashed capacities of that which amid nature's wonders, and everywhere is the wonder above all--the mighty human mind.

It is a strange country. The very name is a memento of the passing race that, first of Europeans, saw these serene pinnacles leaning against the blue. The name means red, light-brown, ruddy, florid, and may even be a synonym for joyousness. _A Dios con la Colorada_--go thou merrily with God--is a phrase one may hear in Seville when lovers part. Why red? Because the dizzy walls that fence the cataract are in Colorado oftenest of the rich, dull red-brown that even human architecture chooses for its stateliest spires. One may imagine the Spaniard who clanked his broken armor in the Cañon of the Arkansas for the first time, and looked stiffly up at those ruddy walls, and remembered ever afterward, as most men do, what he saw in the land that is red.

Sublimity and beauty are not usually convertible terms. They do not mean the same. Grandeur is austere. Yet here one finds the most singular combinations of these two incompatibilities. The grandeur is over all; the overpowering sentiment of the vast domain. Yet in all her nooks and corners nestles the other--beauty beyond compare. When one looks for the first time upon the Rampart range, fencing the western rim of that vast undulating plain like a wall, it is impossible for him to imagine Manitou and Ute Pass and Cheyenne Cañon and the road to the Garden of the Gods, nestling there so near at hand beneath the cold dome of Pike's Peak. When one is at Cañon City, a pretty town sleeping among its orchards in the sunshine, he does not think how soon his train will glide between the mighty jaws of the Arkansas Cañon. When one traverses drowsily the mesa lands, smooth and wide and given over to bees and gardens that lie west of Denver, he cannot by himself foresee the Clear Creek Cañon just ahead, or imagine the six parallel tracks and the windings and contortions that make the "loop" at its farther end above Silver Plume. And at Salida, at five o'clock in the morning, when the mountain world is filled with the turquoise blue--earth and air and sky, not merely tinted, but full of the strange solid color that heralds the mountain dawn--he cannot imagine the rare, sweet, thin air of the heights of the Marshall Pass that is just ahead, or imagine the rocky bosom of Ouray, bare, solemn, silent, changeless, serene in the vastness of the upper air, yet so near that one may almost count the stones that strew that gray summit where human toil and pain have never been.

So it is that beauty and grandeur have never been so nearly akin elsewhere as they are in Colorado. Of nooks and corners and little valleys and waterfalls grotesque shapes there are almost thousands. One may sit at a car window all day, not knowing precisely where he is, or caring, and catch them as they pass and come and go, until his soul is tired. Yet it is all on a scale of inconceivable immensity. Even the mesas and tablelands, where the grass grows as on a lowland farm, are 4,000 to 6,000 feet above the sea--more than twice as high as Mount Everett. There is nothing low. One cannot get down to the plane of all his life hitherto. The word "valley" is a relative expression; low and high have not their usual significance. Looking back as the train crawls up a mountain side in long doubling curves, one is surprised to see floating far below him a long and trailing film of silver lace; something so near and ethereal and beautiful that he cannot recognize it as that which he has looked up to all his life--a cloud. And on one side the valley sinks away, narrowing and lowering in distance that seems infinite. One was down there half an hour ago--down in those narrow depths, and they seemed high. But from the opposite window, whither one transfers himself to see the very roof of the world, sure that he has attained to such a height, as he looks out it is still up, up, up the slanting, narrow track, the world of mountains below, above, everywhere. Were he now far below he might look up and see this train as it actually is; see it as one sees the small brown worm crawling slowly in a slanting line high up on the face of the rugged, lichen-covered rock.

And if one will have it so, that is all there is to do in this world of mountains--sit still and be carried amid heights and pines and clouds, in a new air and an upper world that, save in respect of this railroad, has nothing in it of human things.

Will the reader kindly glance at the map and note this spiderish network of railways? When was it that the American engineer first discovered that his art was precisely the opposite of what it had been imagined to be--traditional--and that it was meant to make a locomotive climb where no sane and humane man would think of pushing the reluctant donkey, and amid heights and vastnesses where even the eagle was once, too, solitary? Before anyone knew it, except the capitalists, the idea had been absorbed by these unique brains, and the work was done. The result is one of the most singular that can be added to ordinary human experiences. Most travelers take it all for granted; it is there, and it works, and that is all. Utterly unknown to fame, the men who did these things have finished them and have gone away, but to them, nevertheless, is due, not one little railway line led on tall steel trestles across a few difficult places, but the most remarkable railway system of the world.

Queer experiences--small ones--occur at frequent intervals in the course of this elevated and tortuous tour. As one passes by he may see a cleft between the tawny walls that seems to him as narrow as a door--a gateway into a mass of peaks that appear to lie jumbled and unbroken and inaccessible for an unknown distance. But here as he looks back he may see dimly shining in the half light the two steel rails of another road; a branch, perhaps, but nevertheless leading somewhere into the heart of this unknown world, and occupying all the space between the opening walls with their narrow-gauge utilities. And then one wants to return to that place sometime, and take that disappearing line, and be trundled into this new kingdom to see what he may find there.

GUNNISON CITY SARGENT MARSHALL PASS PONCHA SALIDA SARGENT TO SALT LAKE BUXTON CHESTER SHAWANO MARSHALL PASS GRAY'S TO DENVER PONCHA MEARS SHIRLEY TO VILLA GROVE PONCHA PASS

Your train may stop at some little station like Mears, beyond Salida. Already you may have seen creeping up the mountain ahead of your train another like it. And here at Mears, looking out and upward from your window you again see this little train, this time directly above you two or three hundred feet, on another track, and snakily gliding away through a narrow gateway into the south. Reference to a map teaches you that this was not a happening, and that this narrow gateway, as unreal as a stage scene to the eye, and having a similar effect, is the opening of an extensive system covering Southern Colorado and extending into New Mexico.

Scores of times you see, away above or far below, another track. You may see only a section of it, cut off by rocks at each end, and manifestly having nothing to do with you and your travels. Then a person suggests that we were at that place half an hour ago, and asks if you think we have any connection with still another track, glimpses of which may be caught on the side of a mountain directly across, with a yawning chasm between that would make a crow dizzy if he looked down. And after awhile one is there also, looking across to where he once was, and in his heart not believing it.

All over this majestic mountain world, without a moment of weariness or hunger, without cold or heat or loss of rest, seeing all and realizing little; this is the material and artificial wonder of Colorado travel.

Mingled with these general sensations are the special wonders--the places and scenes that have been described in thousands of pages. In the case of most of them it was never of much avail to try to put them into words; with them all the camera reproduces in miniature scientifically exact, but failing utterly to convey any other meaning than that of prettiness, and there is not anything in Colorado that is merely pretty. When one says that the mountain torrent foams and tumbles among the rocks beside the track in the cañon for eight or ten miles, it is useless to say more. Then this camera comes; a wonderful and indispensable machine, it is true; and makes the white waterfall as big as one's thumb nail--a foamy spot in a suggested colossal setting--and that is all. The restlessness, the tinkle, the indescribable sound of breaking foam, the overhanging shadow, the glimpse of the far blue sky above and far beyond, the sense that this is nature, careless utterly of you and all your tribe--all these things are left out. To be amid these scenes is to live in a new way during the fleeting time that one is there, and going away again it is to remember more vividly after ten or twenty years than you did the day after you saw them first.

Scores of places are not in the guidebooks at all that strike the casual stranger as vividly as anything that is. Every man's Colorado is his own. Descriptions weary him. In them the words, however well chosen, illustrate only the orotund and the declamatory, not the thing described. All the guidebooks need much to be done again, and there does not live the man who can effectively rewrite them. Presence is required; presence undeterred by all that is merely written, here or elsewhere.

It might be not unprofitably remembered that much of the pleasure lies in the unmentioned things that lie between. One need not pass all the fourteen miles of the Black Cañon looking for the single towering red shaft that is called the Currecanti Needle. He need not wait and watch for Chipeta Falls--a little snow-born rivulet that commits ten thousand suicides in its tumble down the cliffs to die at last in the little tumbling river that never notices, and goes on forever. He need not shut his eyes because the guidebook gives him the impression that just ahead somewhere stands that special wonder that he is almost sure he came so far particularly to see. The entire endless, solemn, silent, chaotic mass that fills the view for days has all its entirely undescribable charm.

And amid it all live the plodding sons of men. Each little mountain nook where there is water has its occupant. Often there are ranch houses, and cattle and haystacks. Little mountain towns cling to the bench here and there. These things seem strange to us, but how must the wide Nebraska cornfield seem to the man who was born and reared amid scenes like these?

A man said he did not want any of that land; he thought it might pay, but he was not willing to undertake a Colorado farm with any hope of success. Would not a man, he inquired, go out in the morning with the best intentions, but with almost the certainty that he would sit down on the plow-beam and look at these mountains almost all day? And he was morally sure, besides, that he could never wait until Saturday, as they did in Michigan, to go a-fishing. Look at the river, he said, can a man stay away from that to farm?

These are but glimpses. They fail, too, just as the guidebooks do, and there is a vivid glimpse of but one fact--that a man can see and know, and yet utterly fail to convey to any other human his conception of anything beyond the merest commonplaces of a country that sends no messages, writes no embellished chapters, and talks to her visitors only as the sibyl did--personally and mysteriously or not at all.