Part 27

Ahead the green hills, marked with horizontal lines, that we suspect to indicate outcroppings of lava, shut quite across our path. Nevertheless we can detect a dark depression toward which the track points straight as an arrow, and we suppose that at that point an entrance exists. Behind it stood summits so lofty that this barrier did not seem imposing; but now that a gateway has opened (yet far enough only for our track to enter by encroaching on the river's highway), we are surprised at the altitude of the walls which momently rise higher and higher on each side, as though we were descending a steep incline into the earth. At what an abyss must the river lie in the middle of the range!

The early morning sun streams warm and rich into the cañon, dispelling the nocturnal chill and making the air delightful beyond expression. We are hurled along between close-shutting crags that are the type of solidity, yet seem to waver and topple at their summits as we gaze at them, cut strongly against the tremulous blue of the sky. Our ears are assaulted by the crashing of iron against iron and steam shrieking at the wind, and by the roar and dashing of enraged and baffled water. The lyric sweetness of the distant hill-picture caught in our backward glance as we entered the gates of the cañon, is gone; the poetry of this scene has the epic dignity and the stirring excitement of a war-story sung on the eve of righteous battle. This is the site and the monument of a struggle between forces such as we have no capacity to comprehend. Take a fragment of this shining rock not so large but that you may lift it, and you will find that studied ingenuity, and the vigorous application of power that men speak of as enormous, are required to break it into smaller pieces. Yet here are masses many hundreds of feet high and wide, that have been riven as I might halve a piece of clay. You may say it was done thus, or so. No matter, the impression of stupendous power remains and imprints itself deeply on the mind. Here for miles we pass between escarpments of rock, a thousand, fifteen hundred--ay, here and there more than two thousand feet high. This is not a valley between mountains with sloping sides slowly worn away. Here are vertical exposures that fit together like mortise and tenon; facing cliffs that might be shut against one another so tightly that almost no crevice would remain. To view this mighty chasm thoughtfully, is to receive a revelation of the immeasurable power pent up in the elements whose equilibrium alone forms and preserves our globe; and if we call it "awful," the word conveys not so much a dread of any harm that might happen to us there, as the vague and timorous appreciation of the dormant strength under our feet. If the gods we call dynamic can rive a pathway for a river through twenty miles of solid granite, of what use is any human safeguard against their anger?

But away with these serious thoughts! The cliffs are founded in unknown depths it is true, but their heads soar into the sunlight, and break into forms not too great for us to grasp. Straight from the liquid emerald frosted with foam which flecks their base--straight as a plummet's line, and polished like the jasper gates of the Eternal city, rise these walls of echoing granite to their dizzy battlements. Here and there a promontory stands as a buttress; here and there a protruding crag overhangs like a watch-tower on a castle-wall; anon you may fancy a monstrous profile graven in the angle of some cliff,--a gigantic Hermes rudely fashioned. In one part of the cañon where the cliffs are highest, measuring three thousand feet from the railway track to the crown of their haughty heads, faces of the red granite, hundreds of feet square, have been left by a split occurring along a natural cleavage-line; and these are now flat as a mirror and almost as smooth. On the other hand, you may see places where the rocks rise, not solid, sheer and smooth, but so crumpled and contorted that the partition-lines, instead of running at right angles, are curved, twisted and snarled in the most intricate manner, showing that violent and conflicting agitations of the rock must have occurred there at a time when the whole mass was heated to plasticity. In another place, the cliff on the southern side breaks down and slopes back in a series of interrupted and irregular terraces, every ledge and cranny having a shapely tree; while not far away another part of the long escarpment, the rocky layers, turned almost on edge, have been somewhat bent and broken, so that they lie in imbricated tiers upon the convex slopes, as if placed there shingle-fashion.

Just opposite, a stream whose source is invisible has etched itself a notched pathway from the heights above. It plunges down in headlong haste until there comes a time when there is no longer rock for it to flow upon, and it flings itself out into the quiet air, to be blown aside and made rainbows of, to paint upon the circling red cliffs a wondrous picture in flashing white, and then to fall with soft sibilancy into the river. The river has no chance to do so brave a thing as this leap of Chippeta falls from the lofty notch; but seeing a roughened and broken place ahead where the fallen bowlders have raised a barrier, it goes at it with a rush and hurls its plumes of foam high overhead, as, with swirl and tumult, and a swift shooting forth of eddies held far under its snowy breast, it bursts through and over the obstacle and sweeps on, conqueror to the last.

In the very center of the cañon, where its bulwarks are most lofty and precipitous, unbroken cliffs rising two thousand feet without a break, and shadowed by overhanging cornices,--just here stands the most striking buttress and pinnacle of them all,--Currecanti Needle. It is a conical tower standing out somewhat beyond the line of the wall, from which it is separated (so that from some points of view it looks wholly isolate,) on one side by a deep gash, and on the other by one of those narrow side-cañons which in the western part of the gorge occur every mile or two. These ravines are filled with trees and make a green setting for this massive monolith of pink stone whose diminishing apex ends in a leaning spire that seems to trace its march upon the sweeping clouds.

It was in the recesses of the rift beside Currecanti Needle, says a tradition which at least is poetic, that the red men used to light the midnight council-fires around which they discussed their plans of battle. Though judgment may refuse the fact, fancy likes to revel in such a scene as that council-fire would have made, deep in the arms of the rocky defile. How the fitful flashes of the pungent cedar-flame would have driven back the lurking darkness that pressed upon it from all sides! How, now and then starting up, the blaze-light would sally forth and suddenly disclose some captive of the gloom rescued from oblivion--perhaps a mossy bowlder, an aged juniper, a ghostly cottonwood stump, or a ledge of sleeping blossoms! How the bright and polished rocks would be re-reddened and sparkle at their angles under the glancing light; while the pretty soprano of the stream and the deep bass of the river's roar sang a duet to the narrow line of stars that could peep down between the cañon walls! Surely the time and place were suitable for planning the lurid warfare of a savage race; and as these untamed men, their muscular limbs and revengeful faces, disclosed uncertainly, like the creatures of a flitting fantasy, in the red firelight, enacted with terrifying gestures the fierce future of their plotting, a spectator might well think himself with fiends,

"On Night's plutonian shore,"

or else discard the whole picture as only the fantastic scenery of some disordered dream.

Opposite Currecanti Needle and cañon stand some very remarkable rocks, underneath the greatest of which the train passes. Then there is a long bridge to cross where the river bends a little; and perhaps the echoing chasm will be filled with the hoarsely repeated scream of a warning whistle. And so, past wonder after wonder, Pelion upon Ossa, buried in a huge rocky prison, yet always in the full sunlight, you suddenly swing round a sharp corner, leaving the Gunnison to go on through ten miles more of cañon, and crashing noisily through the zigzag cañon of the Cimmaron, which is so very narrow and dark it deserves no better name than crevice, quickly emerge into daylight and a busy station.

Thus I have tried to give the reader some trifling indication of what he may expect to see during his hour in the heart of the "Black" cañon, which is not black at all but the sunniest of places. I cannot understand how the name ever came to be applied to it. No Kobolds delving in darkness would make it their home; but rather troops of Oreades, darting down the swift green shutes of water between the spume-wet bowlders, dancing in the creamy eddies, struggling hand over hand up the lace ladders of Chippeta Falls, to tumble headlong down again, making the prismatic foam resound with the soft tinkling of their merry laughter. All the Sprites of the cañon are beings of brightness and joy. The place is full of gayety.

This sense of color and light is perhaps the strongest impression that remains. Though it is quite as deep and precipitous as the Royal gorge it is not so gloomy and frowning; though the cataracts are greater than those at Toltec, they are not so fear-inspiring. In place of dark and impenetrable walls, here are varied façades of lofty and majestic design, yet each unlike its neighbor and all of the most brilliant hue. The cliffs are architectural, suggestive of human kinship and more than marvelous--they are interesting.

Then there is the brilliant and resistless river. At Toltec it is only a murmuring cataract; in the Royal gorge a stream you may often leap across; the Rio de Las Animas is deep and quiet. But here rushes along its gigantic flume a great volume of hurried water, rolled over and over in headlong haste, hurled against solid abutments to recoil in showers of spray or to sheer off in sliding masses of liquid emerald. Now some quiet nook gives momentary rest. The water is still and deep. Small rafts of seedy foam swing slowly around the edges, tardy to dissolve. The rippled sand can be seen in wavy lines far underneath like the markings on a duck's breast. The surplus water curves like bent glass over the dam that rims the pool on its lower side, and beyond is a whirlpool of foam and the hissing tumult of shattered waves amid which rise the sharp crests of crimson bowlders flounced with snowy circles of foam.

Alternating with the vast pillars and the slick faces of red rock are the nooks and ravines where trees grow, flowers bloom and the eye can get a glimpse of a triangle of violet sky; while sometimes a silken skein of white water can be traced down the deepest recesses of the glen, and the gleam of swallow's wings flitting in colonies about their circular adobes bracketed against the wall.

These facts, noted like short hand memoranda upon the brain as they quickly flash by, slowly return to the memory and feed recollection, as the mind in after days elaborates the impression made by each, and summons a series of separated and leisurely pictures before the imagination; but no writer can depict for another what the form of these pictures shall be. I recite to you the elements--stupendous measurements, majestic forms, splendid colors, the gleaming green and white of water, the blue and gold of sun and sky, the crystalline sparkle of reddened rocks; but you must yourself receive these elements if you are to paint adequately to your fancy the pictures of the cañon. It is not literary cant, but the literal truth, when I say that to be understood, this marvelous pathway through the mountains must be seen. And having seen it, you have enriched your memory beyond anything you could have foretold.

XXVIII

THE UNCOMPAHGRE VALLEY.

The hills grow dark, On purple peaks a deeper shade descending; In twilight copse the glow-worm lights her spark, The deer, half-seen, are to the covert wending. --WALTER SCOTT.

The station at the western end of the cañon of the Gunnison is called Cimmaron after the river upon whose banks it stands. In the prehistoric days before the railway, this was Cline's ranch, where all the stages from the Gunnison to the San Miguel region stopped. He was one of the few pioneers who got on well with the Indians, and his monument stands in the name of a peak down by Ouray.

From Cimmaron upward stretches one of the steepest grades between Denver and Salt Lake, in order to surmount Squaw Hill in the Cedar range,--the water-shed between the Cimmaron and the lower drainage of the Gunnison. Two locomotives drag us at a snail's pace, struggling, puffing rapidly and spasmodically just as though their lungs were tortured by the rarity of the air. Their efforts suggest Pope's line, and seem to beat time to it,--

"When Ajax strives, some rock's vast weight to throw, The line, too, labors, and the words move slow."

There is nothing to be seen but great knolls of grass and sage brush, sometimes showing their rocky anatomy; and this nakedness is a relief after the strain upon our attention in the cañon. Finally we get high enough to look far away to a horizon full of hazy mesas and peaked mountains, with a touch of valley land down in the center of the picture. A cool breeze blows, and comes with refreshing.

The valley we see is our first view of the Uncompahgre; and in the middle of the afternoon we reach the town of Montrose,--a settlement of wooden houses.

Here we stopped. There were two reason: first, this was the point of departure for the upper valley of the Uncompahgre, and the mining region on the northern front of the San Juan mountains; second, we wanted to know the arguments that had induced some hundreds of people to make their homes in the midst of this white sahara.

The first of these objects required instant attention, for between our arrival at Montrose and the departure of the stage up the valley to the Uncompahgre Cantonment, and the town of Ouray, there was time only to get a hearty luncheon. Chum had said from the start that he was quite willing to concede all the attractions of Ouray, and declined positively to leave the comfort of home. I told him he was missing a good deal, but he said that he had lost all faith in good deals--didn't "gamble any more on that chance,"--and persisted in his "No, thank you."

The Madame felt both inclined and disinclined. She knew the horrors of staging, she said it was a fit punishment for malefactors, and she dreaded even forty miles of it, on a level road, worse than a fit of sickness. Then she looked unutterable sympathy at me, and began to reflect that possibly her duty as a wife required her to go (seeing that I couldn't escape it,) in order to share the discomforts her husband was obliged to undergo, and do what she could to alleviate his tortures.

Just at this juncture, for doubt had swayed her usually well-decided mind up to the last minute, she caught a glimpse of the big red coach coming from the hotel toward us. Its noise was as the thundering of "the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof." It swung from side to side like a fire steamer tearing over Baltimore cobble stones. It lunged into irrigating ditches and came pitching up out of them, while the hind boot dived in to be brought up with a frame-cracking jolt, and it rocked fore and aft like a Dutch lugger in a chop sea. Its great concavity was packed full of unfortunate Jonahs, swallowed "bag and breeches." Its capacious baggage receptacles before and behind were distended with trunks and valises, rolls of blankets, packages of newspapers, boxes of fruit and dozens of mail-sacks. Its roof was piled with a confused mass of luggage and sweltering humanity. There wasn't a lady to be seen. Chum looked at me as I buttoned my duster, and lifting a corner of the Madame's apron to his eye, choked back a sympathetic sob.

"Come on!" I called to the person who was anxious to alleviate my tortures, but she held back.

"I'm--thinking--whether--after all"--

"Oh, are you? Good--give us a kiss--good bye! Better do your thinking now than after you're tired out up the valley. I'll be back shortly, and expect you to know all about Montrose."

The big red coach came to a lurching anchorage close by the door and I climbed to the vacant seat beside the driver, for which, with the wisdom of experience, I had telegraphed a request the day before.

"Been a-keepin' this seat for you with a club," said Jehu, curtly, as he gathered up the reins of four grey horses and removed his foot from the brake.

There was the sensation of a geological upheaval, forward. I dug my heels hard into the mail-sacks heaped upon the foot-board, clutched the hand-rail of the seat, set my back against the knees of the man on the dicky seat, stiffened my neck to save my head from being snapped off,--and we were under way.

A whole chapter could be written about that stage ride and my fellow travelers, but it will keep. The road crossed the yellow Uncompahgre, and stretched like a chalk-mark athwart the sage green expanse of gravelly valley. One of the outside passengers was an Englishman who had spent seven years in the diamond fields of South Africa. He told us this region reminded him of that land, and entertained us by his accounts of it, and of the Caffres--especially the English habit of knocking one down (a Caffre-boy was always handy) whenever the aggrieved temper of a white man required any little relief. So, with umbrella overhead and green goggles to break the glare,--despite the purple-blue storms we could see stalking about the mountain-ranges ahead--the first seven miles passed speedily, and we drew up at the sutler's store of the pretty military cantonment, whose buildings had loomed mirage-like for more than half the way.

When the Utes were ready to be moved from this valley over to the new Uintah agency, a military post was established here. As its permanence was not decided upon, only a cantonment was founded, providing temporary quarters in log houses for six companies. It was called simply the Cantonment on the Uncompahgre, and was at first garrisoned by the Twenty-third Infantry. In 1882, however, this regiment was relieved by four companies of the Fourteenth Infantry. Its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Douglass is here, although the headquarters of the regiment are at Sidney, Nebraska.

The post, as I said, is not intended to be a permanent one. The visitor must not expect, therefore, the handsome buildings and grounds to be seen at Camp Douglass, Salt Lake City, where this regiment was domiciled for seven years, enduring meanwhile some hard service in Indian fighting.

We had already passed Ouray Farms, where Ouray, the fine old head-chief of all the Ute confederation, lived toward the end of his life in a good house built of adobe after the Mexican fashion, and cultivated the neighboring bottom-lands. His farm made the grand center of Ute interest, and from the pleasant groves near it radiated all the trails across mountain and plain. Many out-houses, of log and frame, surrounded the main building and testify that order was one of the great chief's good qualities. Here, after his death Chippeta, widow of Ouray, continued to live, raising farm products and pasturing sheep, and so attached had she become to the spot that she importuned the government to be granted the privilege of abandoning her race and returning to her farm home. The government refused this request, but decided to sell the farm for the personal benefit of Chippeta.

All along the river, which ran between thick belts of trees some distance at our left, we had seen spaces of meadow and a few ranches. At the old Agency--four miles above the post--we came to its lofty bank at a point where the river bent in so close to the foot of the bluff, that water for the station-stables was drawn up by means of a pulley mounted in a tall scaffolding of poles standing in front of the cliff, and reached by a bridge. It was a well, built some sixty feet out of ground, like that Nevada tunnel Mark Twain describes, which, having gone quite through the hill, was continued out upon a staging.

The road thence ran along the edge of the bluff and through the woods--a road upon which we rattled at a steady trot, although on the left there was nothing to break our fall for a hundred feet or so, should an accident tip us over. The river valley, thus sunken, was sometimes narrow and the stream turbulent among rocks; sometimes a mile or two wide with willow-covered bottoms; sometimes showing islands crowded with trees and thickets, or of great bends where lay spaces of rank meadow. Two or three little houses were pointed out where head men among the Indians had lived on small farms, and the driver, who had run a stage before the red men left, told us many interesting stories of their life in this favorite valley.

Leaving the river and the verdant gorge, its cottonwoods illumined with flaming light of the sunset, the road took to the higher ground and gave us many a good jolt in crossing the small acequias which watered the upper ranches on the edge of the mesa, and then came into view of Uncompahgre park, stretching away to the westward like a prairie, and the scene of some of the finest farming in Colorado. There are about thirty ranches where, half a dozen years ago was nothing but wild pasture. The ranchmen were all poor men when they came here; now they have pleasant houses, well fenced and irrigated farms and equipments in abundance. I heard of one ranch sold lately for ten thousand dollars, and was told of another where the owner cleared six thousand dollars for his last season's profits. Everything is raised except Indian corn, but wheat is not cultivated so extensively as it will be when milling facilities are better. Barley, oats, hay and vegetables are the principal crops, and potatoes probably offer the highest return of all. Prices have decreased to one-fifth the figures of five years ago, yet the ranchmen prosper and increase their acreage, putting surplus money into cattle which roam upon the adjacent uplands. The land is by no means all taken up, however, and improved property can be bought at reasonable prices. There is plenty of water, too, an important consideration.

In the center of the park we passed a copious spring of hot mineral water, carrying much iron, as we could tell by the circular tank of ferric oxide it had built around it, forming a bath large enough for a hundred persons at once. As yet there are few arrangements for making use of this fountain,--a fact due to the plentiful hot springs of iron and of sulphur (sulphate of lime, etc.), water close to Ouray, where a sanitarium and bath houses have been fitted up, and where persons suffering from rheumatism and kindred ailments find great benefit. So much warm water is poured into the Uncompahgre, in fact, that nothing more than a film of ice forms upon it in the coldest weather. Remembering all these varied advantages, it is no wonder the Utes loved the place and protested against its loss.