Part 29

Both cave and cañon are eaten out of the limestone, and several chasms of the same sort occur upon this and neighboring streams, where the water flowing along the strike of the upturned strata, has cut into it a narrow channel between walls of more resisting rock. Along Portland creek, just above the village, such a cañon is to be visited, containing many beautiful cascades, where the cañon walls do not rise vertically but at a considerable slant, one leaning over the other, and the stream ever edging sidewise as it cuts deeper and deeper. The erosion in these cases is not accomplished so much by attrition, as by a chemical decomposition of the limestone. Yet attrition must do a great work at times; for now and then these purling brooks become the channels for cloudbursts at their sources, and then a mighty and impetuous flood hurls itself down the gorge and chokes the bursting cañons with an unmeasured mass of water and detritus, whose weight and velocity are so great, however, that the flood of water not only, but thousands of tons of bowlders and rocky fragments are forced through and spread out in the valley below. Every such a deluge leaves its marks plainly upon the sides of the cañons, as well as upon the softer banks outside.

It was in the afternoon that I mounted the coach homeward bound, and bade good bye to a host of pleasant acquaintances. I felt rather guilty. I had stayed longer than I intended, and had had a much better time than I had anticipated. I felt somehow, therefore, as though I defrauded the Madame and Chum out of a pleasurable opportunity; and I resolved to note more carefully whatever I might see that was delightful.

The gap in the great red cliffs which lets the river and us out to the lowlands is only two or three hundred yards in width, and is filled with a dense growth of trees. The river trickles as a narrow, winding stream through a broad swath of pebbles that it has swept down, and which annually it overflows. The lofty cliffs stand on each side, erect and imposing. Theirs were the massive forms seen dimly in the darkness and enveloping us in inky shadows when we came up at midnight. Their irregularities break into new forms of picturesqueness as we roll past, enchanting our eyes. Three or four miles below town the thick growth of trees in the bottom and on the ledges thins out, while the valley grows wider, and ranches begin to appear. Pleasant houses, surrounded by trees, stand in the midst of wide fields of grain and low-lying meadows of natural hay. The cliffs still rise hundreds of feet high and are redder even than those above,--as brightly vermillioned as the crest of the treasure-mountain I have compared to a cardinal's hat. Those on the eastern side (we are heading squarely northward) are sparsely wooded with spruces and cedars that get a foothold on the rocky shelves and lean outward craving the light; those on the left are almost bare, even of herbage.

It is said that _Uncompahgre_ in the Ute tongue, means "red stream," and, if so, it is easy to understand the application. The water is not red (though it might sometimes look so when roiled by freshets,) but the whole cañon is crimson and blood-stained. The color shines between bushes and trees, stands out in great upright masses, tinges the dust underfoot, and intensifies both the green of the heathery hills and the azure of mountain and sky.

At Dallas Station, where the Dallas river comes down from the west into the Uncompahgre, we stopped to get supper and wait for the stage from Telluride, Rico, Ames, and the other mining towns in the San Miguel range, whose outlet is this way. Those mountains were in plain view--Sneffles, Potosi, and all their peers,--glorified in the sunset; while away in the eastward could be seen the gashed and splintered peaks of that quartzite group (here called the Sawtooth, but reckoned on the maps as part of the Uncompahgre range) the outline of which I can only compare to the jagged confusion of the broken bottles set along the top of a stone wall.

It is dark when we leave Dallas and darker in the gloom of the mesa shadows and under the shrubbery that overhangs the road along the high river bank. Out of the blackness below came up the sound of the river's fretting as from a nether world, for we could only now and then get a glimpse of the shaded water. When this had been passed, however, and we were going at a steady trot across the wide-reaching and starlit uplands, it was very delightful. The air was cool and soft and drowsy. The stars shone with that brilliance which long ago suggested to the savage mind that they were pin-holes in the canopy through which beamed the ineffable refulgence of an endless clay to be attained when the probation of this life was over. Every moment or two a meteor would leap out, flash with pale brilliance across the firmament, eclipsing the steady stars for an instant, and then disappear as though behind a veil. Sleepy cattle, resting in the dust, would rise with heavy lurchings to get out of our way and stupidly stare at us as we swung past. The "watch dog's honest bark" came to our ears from ranches, whose position we knew by a dot of yellow light; ghostly forms would quickly resolve themselves into the white hoods of freight wagons, their poles piled with harness and their crews asleep underneath; faint rustlings in the sage-bush told of disturbed birds and rabbits; and so, peacefully and enjoyably, midnight brought us to our journey's end.

XXX

MONTROSE AND DELTA.

My father left a park to me, But it is wild and barren, A garden too with scarce a tree, And waster than a warren; Yet say the neighbors when they call, It is not bad but good land, And in it is the germ of all That grows within the woodland. --TENNYSON.

The compassion I had been feeling for probable _ennui_ endured by the two who had been left behind at Montrose was quite unnecessary. They had amused themselves very well during my prolonged absence.

"Montrose is better than it looks," they told me.

"But what did you do?" I asked.

"Well, we studied the situation," said Chum, who is becoming thirsty for knowledge in these latter days. "And we got acquainted with some very pleasant people, who told us good stories, and took us out riding and lent us books."

"Yes," said the Madame, "in one of our rides we went up to the camp."

"Eh!"

"And heard how you spent a whole day there doing nothing but playing billiards with the officers. Do you call that being industrious?"

"Well," I began.

"No, it is not well at all; at any rate you might have told me, and not made believe you only saw the camp by passing through. And we heard all about that hop in Ouray. You forgot that, too, didn't you? The people were greatly surprised to learn you were not a gay young bachelor. It was three o'clock in the morning before you went home."

"Oh, Oh-h!" groans Chum.

"'Pon honor, it wasn't," I protest. "It was only two."

"Only two! Well, the next time you go to Ouray I'm going with you."

Chum sings:

"Now is the time for disappearing," and takes a header out of the side door. It is my cue to follow suit, but instead the Madame picks up her parasol and sails out with dignity. She wouldn't make a bad figure in the Lancers, I think, as she closes the door. I had intended to do some writing before the time came to pursue our journey, but I don't feel like it now and pick up _Felix Holt_ and a cigar. Presently the two return in high good humor over some joke, and luncheon is ordered and eaten amid a fusilade of chattered nonsense.

Betweentimes I extract bits of information in regard to Montrose and its neighborhood. The town is the center of a very large agricultural district. It supplies all of the valley of the Uncompahgre as far south as Dallas creek, and westward nearly to Delta; while northward its bailiwick extends over to widely scattered but numerous settlers on the North Fork of the Gunnison and its tributaries. A glance at the map will show the reader that a great number of small streams come down from the mountains lying north of the Gunnison, and of its North Fork, to feed those trunk-streams. The mountains themselves, and the spurs that stretch down between the creeks are rocky, sterile, and too cold for farming; but in the valleys where the descent is always rapid, water is easily led aside in irrigating ditches, and the soil is invariably found to be rich and responsive. Throughout these remote creek-sides, then, a large farming and stock-raising population has already settled itself; and though out of sight, it forms a large element in the class of buyers for whom the merchant at the railway station must provide. Those living on the lower part of the North Fork trade at Delta.

Lately coal has been found within half a dozen miles of town, and veins of great thickness and soundness are being opened in several places by Montrose men, who can sell it much cheaper than it has hitherto been brought from Crested Butte. At Cimmaron, about twelve miles from Montrose, coal of very good quality occurs in great abundance, and is being mined. On the mesas, surrounding Montrose, grows timber of unusual size and importance, and nearly all the large sticks--some forty-four feet in length,--used by the railway in the construction of bridges on this half of the line, were derived from those forests of yellow pine. Several sawmills, each a nucleus of small settlements, buy and sell at Montrose. Local cattle-owners make the town their headquarters, the herds ranging on the upland pastures within a few miles. The cattle business in this region has just begun, but everything proves so favorable that great expectations are entertained of it as a source of wealth. The object is to raise fat beef for local markets, and Durham blood is being introduced to raise the grade of the native stock. The Cimmaron range, the heights beyond the North Fork and the Uncompahgre mesa, supply the chief ranges at present. A good many people are employed at Montrose, also, in the forwarding business,--that is, the re-loading of merchandise and other goods into the huge trailed wagons which they used to call "prairie schooners" on the plains, to be dragged away to the mountain mining camps. Finally, the town is the county seat.

While these resources are all of importance Montrose depends mainly upon the farming which she says is to make her valley and the dun-colored mesas, "blossom as the rose."

"They tell me," says Chum, "and they prove it, too, that there is nothing you cannot raise here short of tropical fruits, and they're not quite sure about that, for they propose peaches, nectarines, and apricots. And as for grain, great Injuns! why I saw stalks of oats as big as a walking-stick, and stems of barley that looked like gun-barrels."

The Madame raises her eyebrows and coughs slightly, but I take no notice.

"And as for wheat, sir,--wheat? why it's immense! Thirty-five and forty bushels to the acre is the regular yield, and of oats they will produce fifty or sixty bushels, and of barley eighty or ninety. As for corn, I forget the figures, but when we go down the road this afternoon you'll see great green fields of it that'll make you think you're back on the banks of the Wabash. There isn't anything they can't raise in these bottoms, where they have more water than they know what to do with, and it'll be only a few years before this whole great patch of greasewood and chalk will be verdant with--with potatoes and corn."

It was a bit of a break, but when this young man gets a fair grip upon poetry he don't let go so easy. He frowned down the suspicion of a smile round the corner of our eyes, and rising to his feet, continued:

"I tell you, sir, in five years from now the people of this favored spot can say in the words of the immortal singer--speaking historically, of course, you understand--can say,

"Behind, they saw the snow-cloud tossed By many an icy horn"

* * * * *

"Before, warm valleys, wood-embossed And green with vines--

(watermelons, squashes, pumpkins, hops, morning glories, grapes, strawberries, parsley, honeysuckles--I've seen 'em all!)

"--and corn."

We exploded with laughter, and even the enthusiastic orator smiled grimly as he sat down.

"May be Mr. Whittier wouldn't have seen so much poetry in the way I used his words, but I tell you Montrose knows there's a heap of truth in it."

"Yes, no doubt. But how about the 'icy horn'--these high and dry benches up here?"

"Well, they say the very strongest and most productive soil of all is on those same gravelly mesas. It's lighter and different from the saline clays of the bottoms. Now, over there"--pointing to the great upland, which lay elevated a hundred feet or so above the river on the southern side of the Uncompahgre--"lies a mesa that contains about twenty-two thousand acres. Then down below, at the mouth of the river, is another stretch just twice as large. All that is needful to make that productive farming land is water. A company here is building a canal which will be twenty-seven miles long and will cost a hundred thousand dollars. It takes the water out of the Uncompahgre away up by the Cantonment, leads it along the foot of the wooded bluffs behind the mesa, and can furnish enough to water the whole expanse. If you have a farm there, all you have to do is to select half a mile square or so--there's heaps of it left untouched as yet,--pay $1.25 an acre, dig side ditches and draw as much water as you need at so much an inch rental from the company. That's going to make one vast wheat-field."

"I see, but what next?"

"Well, by the time your wheat is grown there will be mills here to grind it. There is one now at Montrose which will make from seventy-five to one hundred barrels of flour per day, and when the crops get ahead of it other mills will be built. This is not poetry and fancy and talk; it is a settled fact, for the soil has been tried in more places than one, and--but, hello! there's our train!"

Precipitately retreating to our "parlor," we don our dusters and go steaming down toward Grand Junction.

The mountains whence I have just come lift their snow-embroidered heights grandly to the sky, and I can point out nearly all the separate peaks though they are fifty miles away.

"You should have seen that long hill-range With gaps of brightness riven-- How through each pass and hollow streamed The purpling lights of heaven--

"Rivers of golden-mist flowing down From far celestial fountains,-- The great sun flaming through the rifts Beyond the wall of mountains."

On the right, extended a long line of bluffs, close at hand, sprinkled with cedars between which the brick-red soil showed queerly. The strata in the base of these bluffs were yellowish white and had been cut by water into a series of little knolls and spurs like sand-dunes and equally bare of vegetation. They were hot, desolate, and glaring.

The train ran along the edge of the bottom-lands of which these bluffs were the boundary, and on the left stretched a continuous line of farms watered from the river which was hidden in a distant grove of cottonwoods. That the land was rich was shown not only by the flourishing fields of grain, and of Indian corn, but by the luxuriance of sagebrush and greasewood in the uncultivated spaces. This was the Uncompahgre we were following, and at Delta, where the bottom-lands spread out into a spacious plain, we reached its junction with the Gunnison, and passed to its right bank over a long bridge.

Dominating everything here to the northward is that vast plateau, protected from decay by its roofing of lava over the softer substances that make its bulk, which forms the watershed between the Gunnison and the Grand rivers, and is called the Grand Mesa. We know that its surface is hilly and rough, but from here and everywhere else, its edge, as far as can be seen, cuts the sky with a perfectly straight and even line as though it were as level on top as a table. In color it appears dark crimson above the brown and green of mingled forest and exposed rocks that cover its lower front. Looking past it, up the river, we can see the snowy Elks, and a line of rails is surveyed from Crested Butte right down to this point through a series of cañons. There is little opportunity for farming below the mouth of the Uncompahgre, where abrupt walls of red sandstone shut in the river, and sometimes hem it so closely that a road bed had to be blasted out of the cliff. The river has grown, since we saw it last in the Black cañon, to be a hundred yards wide. It still flows deeply and swiftly, but has lost the cataracts. Its color, too, after so much contact with loose earth, has changed from green to turbid yellow. The run along its banks is straight and swift. Generally the track is laid just at the brink, upon the solid rock, and the river is occasionally crossed upon admirable bridges. One of these bridges, I remember, is at a place where enormous cliffs of carmine-tinted sandstone most curiously worn full of little pits and round holes as though moth-eaten, rise sheer from the water to a great height. The strata of these cliffs--which also have bands of yellow--wear away unequally but always in a rounded shape, so that you can see them edgewise, as at a bend, the protuberances take the form of "volutes;" and this will continue for long distances unchanged, as if the cliff had been adorned with gigantic beads of molding. It is one of the most interesting stages of the whole journey.

Just east of the Grand are the finest cliffs of all,--great piles of ponderous masonry, fit for the bulwarks of a world, each massive block, a hundred feet or so square, set firmly upon its underlying tier, and the whole rising two or three thousand feet in majestic proportions and colors that please by their softness and harmony. Past these we roll slowly out upon the longest bridge in the state--950 feet--spanning the swift yellow flood of the Grand river just above where the Gunnison enters, and find ourselves at Grand Junction.

XXXI

THE GRAND RIVER VALLEY.

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in Paradise was more favorably situated, on the whole, than a backwoodsman in this country. --THOREAU.

A very honest little circular--quite a phenomenon among prospectuses--had come into our hands, which gave in terse language the claims that Grand Junction made to the notice of the world and upon the attention of the man who was looking for a place of residence in western Colorado. This honest little circular, toward its end, contains the following paragraph:

We desire, however, to inform all eastern people who may be thinking of coming west, that, while this is one of the most productive valleys in Colorado, it is anything but this in appearance now. Excepting along the banks of the streams or near them, there is probably not a tree to be seen in the valley, unless it was planted since the valley was settled, or within the past eighteen months. The soil has a dull grayish appearance, with hardly a blade of grass growing in it for several miles back from the river, and it produces naturally only sagebrush and greasewood. It is uninviting and desolate looking in the extreme, and yet it is far from being so in reality. We are thus explicit in speaking of the desolate appearance of the country, so that no homesick wanderer in this far-off western land will say when his heart fails him in looking over our valley, that he has been deceived, and that all that has been said of Grand Junction and its surrounding country is a delusion and a snare. If the reader of this lives in the east, he will almost surely be disappointed at first, if he comes out here. It will be the disappointment of ignorance though, for it is only a man who is ignorant of the productiveness of this country who will refuse to believe what is said of it in this respect.

That paragraph put us upon our metal. We were eastern people undoubtedly, but then we had seen "a heap" of Colorado, and the word "ignorance," we would not confess applied in our case. It was therefore with no little curiosity, and something of a resolution to be pleased anyhow (since we had been told we might not be,) that we detached our peripatetic home and slipped into a resting-place upon the customary siding. The glow of the sunset filled the valley with a blaze of yellow light, and the mesas wore chevrons of indigo shadow and pink light to the northward, while the scarred bluffs across the Grand reflected the last rays from burning crests of red sandstone. Weary with travel we threw open our doors, brushed and dusted and bathed, while the kitchen was busy, and then sat down to dinner in the cool soft air of the twilight. When it was over a multitude of twinkling lights alone showed where the town lay, and so we left until morning learning more about it.

* * * * *

When we came to the learning, there were persons enough to teach us, besides all the explicit information Mr. William E. Pabor and others have put into type about the new town--the western Denver, the metropolis of--

"Didn't we hear Gunnison called that, too? and Montrose? and--?" asks the Madame, whose serious mind can never quite become accustomed to local flowers of speech.

Undoubtedly we had; but who shall say which one of them, a century from now, shall not deserve the name? Describe it? That would be merely repetition. Situated, as I have said, in the midst of a level sage-plain, utterly treeless, it is an orderly jumble of brick buildings, frame buildings, log cabins, tents, and vacant spaces. It is South Pueblo or Salida or Durango, or Gunnison of two years ago over again. The more important question to be answered, is, why is a town built here at all? It is here in anticipation of the agricultural productions of the valley by which it is surrounded, water for the irrigation of which is supplied by the largest river in Colorado, and therefore inexhaustible.

A year before the railway came, speculators, chiefly from Ruby and Irwin, who had no dread of loneliness, went to this point and started the town. "They staked off several ranches," says the report, "and located one irrigating ditch and a town site." This town, which they called Granville, is situated across the Grand from the mouth of the Gunnison. A town site was afterwards staked by the Crawford party, and given the name of Grand Junction.

That is the way these marvelously new and flourishing towns are started out here. They reverse the proverb and may be said to be _made_ not _born_; or, as Chum puts it, _fititur non nasce_. I couldn't have done that, but it was easy enough for Chum who has been to college; he don't mind a little gymnastics in Latin like that.

In the mountains dividing Middle park from North park the clustering streamlets pour steadily into Grand lake, whose surface is rarely free from gusts of chilling wind or the shadow of gathering storms. Hidden in heavy forests, it occupies a basin scooped out by the mighty plow of a glacier and held back by moraines and _montonnes_ that record a geological history of the utmost interest to the student. About this solitary lake gather gloomy traditions of fierce warfare between Ute and Arapahoe, and since the Indian owners have yielded it to the white men, one of the darkest crimes in the history of the Rockies has happened upon its shores.