CHAPTER II.

The Colorado of Reality.

There are two view-points for Colorado, as there are for a woman who has two great endowments; wealth and personal beauty. Colorado is like such a woman. Captivating all comers, she yet claims importance as an industrial entity; a country with vast resources. In 1897, for example, she produced something more than thirty millions in yellow gold. She feeds herself besides, and has fruit, beef, wheat, galore.

But, attracted first by beauty, it is not such statistical, and withal very pleasant, things as these the casual visitor cares most about. He wants rather to understand the qualities and characteristics of so unique a piece of God's creation.

For it will finally come to be understood that of all the mountain kingdoms she stands first, not even Switzerland and her Alps offering more than a fair comparison. That crescent chain which forms the chiefest attraction of Central Europe covers altogether an area of about 95,000 square miles. Its crowning peak, Mont Blanc, is 15,784 feet high, the most famous and most often named of the mountains of the modern world. But Colorado has many peaks lacking little of this height, and they stand amid others much higher than, but not nearly so bleak, as those the Alpine chain is made up of. The famous Jungfrau is 13,393 feet high. The Matterhorn is still lower. Vegetation ceases at a lesser height than it does in Colorado. The pass of the great St. Bernard is 8,170 feet high. Marshall Pass in Colorado is 10,850 feet, and is climbed every day by the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad and not much said about it. Veta Pass is over 9,000 feet high--another railway station. The town of Leadville, a familiar residence for twelve thousand people, is 10,200 feet above the sea. Some of the beautiful and famous parks of Colorado have their lowest depths higher than the average height of the Alpine chain.

Vegetation is less affected by the altitude here than it is in Europe. Cattle live all the year on indigenous grasses at elevations and in pastures that figures of height would relegate to the woodchuck and the mountain goat. Vegetables and fruits are raised in abundance in mountain valleys wherein in Central Europe the vast, slow-crawling glacier would lie. Timber line, and just above it eternal snow, mark 6,000 feet in the Northern Alps. In Colorado 10,000 is not in all cases the limit of vegetation, and the perpetual snow line is fixed at 11,000 feet, though on many heights almost unknown.

Nor is the impression correct that Colorado is all mountainous. It is all of the mountains, mountainlike, but at least one diversifying feature is the parks. It is a Colorado name for mountain-fenced enclosures. No other mountain country has it, neither has any other the especial feature. The Colorado "park" is distinctive and remarkable. Many of them are of small size, by which it must be understood that they are perhaps no bigger than Rhode Island or Delaware. Those four that are named on the map are at least as large as some of the more important of the New England states. These are North Park, Middle Park, South Park and San Luis Park in the extreme south.

North Park lies near the northern boundary of the state, and is the basin into which run the numerous small streams which gather to make a beginning for the North Platte River, which runs all the way across Nebraska and into the Missouri a few miles south of Omaha; a good twelve hundred miles as it turns. It was a famous game country, and now its streams abound in the dainty-tasting mountain fish. Its surface is alternatively meadow and forest. It is the highest in elevation of the four great parks, and one of the loveliest regions in the world.

Middle Park lies next this to the south, separated from it by a range of mountains; one of the numerous "Continental Divides," and big enough to be that, as are all others of the same name. Here rise the waters that finally flow into the Colorado of the West, and at last reach the Gulf of California; those that flow east, as the Platte, rising on the other side of the range. This park is fifty miles wide by about seventy long, and its floor is not a plane, but is traversed by ranges of hills of about the magnitude of the Alleghanies. There are several distinct and extensive valleys. But the rim is studded with some of the highest peaks of the state, among them Gray's Peak, Long's Peak and Mount Lincoln, rising to an elevation of 13,000 to 14,000 feet.

Beside it on the west lies the smaller basin, called Egerea Park, and on its northeast side is Estes Park. At its southeast corner lies the wee county of Gilpin, one of the oldest, longest-yielding and richest gold districts of the world.

South Park is thirty miles wide and about sixty long; a basin that furnishes the headwaters of the Arkansas and South Platte rivers. It is the best known of all the parks, as the discovery of rich mines in early times opened roads and established settlements. The scenery is charming, and fine pasturage and water offered superior inducements to those who were in Colorado at a time when a man could much more easily have what he fancied than he can now. The three hours' ride across the southern edge of this park on a clear afternoon, on the Colorado Midland road, is an event to one new to these scenes. Here the South Platte River loses entirely the character one learns to think is that of every mountain stream, and has not even banks. The clear stream, entirely unruffled, lies in innumerable bends--almost coils--along this level floor, without any willow fringes, or even tall grass, just bank-full and no more. But it makes up for this preternatural quietness when it breaks into its foreordained cañon at the eastern edge, and begins its journey of some hundreds of miles into Central Nebraska, where, in Lincoln County, it joins its twin, which rises in North Park. Looking at the map one wonders what mysterious affinity brings these two divergent branches together at last, across distance, high mountains, wide plains and every obstacle possible to running water.

The San Luis Park is the last and largest of these unique mountain amphitheaters, and lies in the southern portion of the state. It surrounds a beautiful lake of the same name, some sixty miles in length, and into which run nineteen streams. The San Luis Lake has no known outlet, but in the respect of being fresh and not salt it departs from the usual rule of lakes with no outflowing waters. This area of about 18,000 square miles, included in San Luis Park, is among the choicest known for the uses of civilization. It was the only portion of what is now Colorado that was to any great extent permanently occupied by the Mexicans. About 25,000 of them lived here when our occupancy began, and fully that number of their descendants are there still. It was into this region that one Lieut. Zebulon M. Pike, of the United States army, blindly wandered while he was surveying interior Louisiana--how strangely the matter-of-fact old story reads now--and was politely taken in and escorted to the capital, the opulent and ancient Santa Fe, and much further elsewhere. He died in battle at last, a soldier and the son of a soldier, and this little excursion into wilds absolutely unknown so short a time ago gave him the most colossal and enduring of monuments--Pike's Peak.

In this beautiful region--where, besides the nineteen streams that feed San Luis Lake, sixteen others flow into the Rio Grande, here a little white mountain stream newly born--it is surprising how little great elevation affects trees, grass and flowers. It is an all-the-year cattle country at almost any height. Big trees grow 10,000 feet above the sea. Cereals and the tender vegetables thrive at 7,000 feet, and potatoes at 8,000. Beautiful flowers and all the grasses are found at 11,000, and the pines and firs are of fair size at 11,500 feet.

It is singular the discriminating eye for a good thing the early Spaniard had, here and in California, especially the padres. They knew it when they saw it, and took it and kept it for a considerable time. And then we got it--always. And they accept us as neighbors and fellow-citizens and lawmakers without any ill-will, and keep on doing just as they always did, and as their ancestors did in Spain four hundred years ago.

When the reader has assimilated the idea of these Colorado parks he is left only one other mental task--to conceive of all the rest as a piled-up succession of panoramas. Behind each other, far into the purple distance, the ranges lie tier upon tier. The valleys that lie between, great and small, number thousands. There are in Colorado two hundred and sixty snow-born small streams, but large enough to have each a name. There are nine named lakes. There are sixty-three rivers. Besides some seventy peaks that are still unnamed there are about one hundred and fifty towering domes that have names already given.

Amid these general scenes lie half-hidden those that are particularly beautiful; the nooks and corners where one wonders grudgingly when one comes upon them if they have lain there through the ages, and have been as beautiful as they are to-day, wasted, so to speak, in a world where gems are so very rare. There is an impression, held without warrant, but natural, that these places have charms, yes, but that they are overrated and overwritten after the manner of western efflorescence and the frontier desire to surprise. The truth is that quite such scenes and places do not exist elsewhere in all the world; that when white men first saw some of them they were unable to convey to others any adequate idea of them by means of even their own picturesque vocabulary. Since then, and always, the same difficulty exists, because in the inadequacy of mere descriptive words the idea becomes confused, and exaggeration is taken for granted. There is a natural reason why hundreds of men and women should go to Colorado, should meet there a revelation of natural beauty that leaves them permanently affected, and yet should speak of their experiences only to each other. It is useless to talk, or, alas! to write.