Part 5

"The officer of the signal service, who lives in that lofty house, stood in his doorway shooting at a tin can on a pole, and in that thin open air the pop of the pistol was a short, faint little noise without crash or echo. The red ball of the sun sinking down behind the snowy edges of the mountains beyond Leadville sent strange lights and mists across the tossed and uneven stretch of mountains and parks that lay between it and the gaunt old Peak. The seventy acres of wildly scattered rock-fragments that crown the top afford a vantage ground for views to every point of the compass. Eastward across the vast prairie land there seems no limit to the vision, and beyond the green lines of the Platte and Arkansas rivers we amused ourselves by imagining the steeples of St. Louis in the rose and purple vapors of the horizon. The clouds, mists, shadows and faint opalescent lights on the plains, shifting, changing and fading each moment, are more fascinatingly beautiful than the dark, upheaved and splintered ridges of the mountains. Stretching out over the plains, at first in a blue cone upon the grass, and then sweeping outward and upward to the sky-line, the vast shadow of the mountain was thrown sharply against the sky.

"Wrapped in furs and bundled in all the woolen warmth of heaviest winter clothes, the chill air of evening penetrated like a knife-edge, and we sat shivering on the rocks with pitiable, pinched and purple faces and chattering teeth. The afterglow in the east, when the sky and the plains melted in one purple line and a band of rose-color went up higher and higher, was more lovely even than the pure crimson and gold and blue of the sunset clouds.

"Around the crackling fire in the station we thawed our benumbed fingers and watched the observations taken from the various instruments and sent clicking off on the telegraph wires to Washington headquarters. The sergeant wound the alarm-clock to rouse us at four o'clock the next morning, and, giving up the one sleeping-room to the ladies, retired with the gentlemen of the party to a bed of buffalo-robes in the kitchen. The awful stillness, the stealthy puffs of wind, and the sense of isolation and remoteness, were distressing at first; but the tobacco-laden air dulled us to sleep. As the fire died out, dreams of Greenland--glaciers and giddy snow-banks on impossible summits--seized and held us, until a shivering voice gave the alarm: 'It is all red in the east.'

"We had climbed all those miles purposely to see the spectacle of dawn, but there was unhappiness among the pinched and pallid enthusiasts who crept out on the rocks and watched the half-light on the plains deepen. A pale and withered moon hung overhead, and miles away on the plain lay a vast white cloud like a lake, until the rising sun touched it and sent it rolling and tossing like angry waves. A crimson ball sprang suddenly from the outermost rim of the earth, glared with a red and sleepy eye upon the world, and pulled the cover of a cloud above it for a second nap before it came forth in full splendor. The shadow of the Peak projected westward fell this time on the uneven mountains, whose sides and clefts were filled and floating with faint pearl, lilac and roseate mists. The black patch where Denver lay on the plains, the snowy top of Gray's Peak, the green basin of South Park, and seemingly everything from end to end of the State, could be seen. Shivering, freezing, on that mountain top, with a fur cloak about me, besides all the other wraps, it seemed that there never was a winter day half as cold.

"In all the crevices of the rocks, wherever there was enough powdered granite to form a soil for their roots, were tiny little white blossoms, fairy stars or flowers, with just their heads above the ground, and an exquisite perfume breathing from them. Bidding the guide to sinch up quickly for the down trip, we partook of the signal sergeant's coffee, and listened to his anecdotes of his lonesome life of two weeks on the mountain and two weeks in town.

"'You are the best crowd that's been up,' said the brave man of barometers. 'They all get sick when they stay over night. It took me a month to get used to it. You ought to stay until noon and see the tender-feet come up and get sick. Oh, Lord! there was an old lady up here the other day, and she says to me: "Sergeant, don't people ever die of this sickness up here?" "Oh, yes, ma'am," says I, "a lady died the other day, and as there wasn't any one to identify her we just put her over in that snow-bank there."'

"With a lot more of such mountain horrors he kept his rafters ringing, and then bade us climb the ladder to the top of his house, which would make up the difference of fifteen feet between his abode and Gray's Peak. We looked at the grave of the imaginary child destroyed by mountain rats, gave a last glance at the enchanted view, and left the chilling region."

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Another entertaining jaunt is a couple of miles or less up the Ute Pass wagon-road to Rainbow Falls, one of the finest cascades in the West--where such things are more of a curiosity than in wetter regions of the world. The water comes down here with a more than ordinarily desperate plunge, and it is great sport to climb about the angular rocks that hem it in.

Ute Pass leads over into South Park, and before the days of railways it was greatly traveled by passengers and by freight wagons to Leadville and Fairplay. There is less transit there now, but in summer pleasure-parties constantly traverse the Pass, partly for its own sake and partly to enjoy a sight of Manitou Park on the opposite side, whence a magnificent array of the snowy interior ranges is to be seen, northward and westward, while Pike's Peak presents itself to superior advantage from that point of view. In the park is a good little hotel and dairy, and a trout stream and pond where the Eastern brook-trout has been assiduously cultivated. In the fall Manitou Park is the resort of deer hunters and grouse shooters.

Then there is the already mentioned Garden of the Gods, hidden behind those garish walls of red and yellow sandstone, so stark and out of place in the soberly-toned landscape that they travesty nature, converting the whole picture into a theatrical scene, and a highly spectacular one at that. Passing behind these sensational walls, one is not surprised to find a sort of gigantic peep-show in pantomime. The solid rocks have gone masquerading in every sort of absurd costume and character. The colors of the make-up, too, are varied from black through all the browns and drabs to pure white, and then again through yellows and buffs and pinks up to staring red. Who can portray adequately these odd forms of chiseled stone? I have read a dozen descriptions, and so have you, no doubt. But one I have just seen, in a letter by a Boston lady, is so pertinent you should have the pleasure of reading it:

"The impression is of something mighty, unreal and supernatural. Of the gods surely--but the gods of the Norse Walhalla in some of their strange outbursts of wild rage or uncouth playfulness. The beauty-loving divinities of Greece and Rome could have nothing in common with such sublime awkwardness. Jove's ambrosial curls must shake in another Olympia than this. Weird and grotesque, but solemn and awful at the same time, as if one stood on the confines of another world, and soon the veil would be rent which divided them. Words are worse than useless to attempt such a picture. Perhaps if one could live in the shadow of its savage grandeur for months until his soul were permeated, language would begin to find itself flowing in proper channels, but in the first stupor of astonishment one must only hold his breath. The Garden itself, the holy of holies, as most fancy, is not so overpowering to me as the vast outlying wildness.

"To pass in between massive portals of rock of brilliant terra-cotta red, and enter on a plain miles in extent, covered in all directions with magnificent isolated masses of the same striking color, each lifting itself against the wonderful blue of a Colorado sky with a sharpness of outline that would shame the fine cutting of an etching; to find the ground under your feet, over the whole immense surface, carpeted with the same rich tint, underlying arabesques of green and gray, where grass and mosses have crept; to come-upon masses of pale velvety gypsum, set now and again as if to make more effective by contrast the deep red which strikes the dominant chord of the picture; and always, as you look through or above, to catch the stormy billows of the giant mountain range tossed against the sky, with the regal snow-crowned massiveness of Pike's Peak rising over all, is something, once seen, never to be forgotten. Strange, grotesque shapes, mammoth caricatures of animals, clamber, crouch, or spring from vantage points hundreds of feet in air. Here a battlemented wall is pierced by a round window; there a cluster of slender spires lift themselves; beyond, a leaning tower slants through the blue air, or a cube as large as a dwelling-house is balanced on a pivot-like point at the base, as if a child's strength could upset it. Imagine all this scintillant with color, set under a dazzling sapphire dome, with the silver stems and delicate frondage of young cottonwoods in one space, or a strong young hemlock lifting green symmetrical arms from some high rocky cleft in another. This can be told, but the massiveness of sky-piled masonry, the almost infernal mixture of grandeur and grotesqueness, are beyond expression. After the first few moments of wild exclamation one sinks into an awed silence."

The reader must see for himself these grotesque monuments, these relics of ruined strata, these sportive, wind-cut ghosts of the old _regime_ here, these fanciful images of things seen and unseen, which stand thickly over hundreds of acres like the moldering ruins of some half-buried city of the desert, if he would fully understand.

Out of the many other sources of enjoyment near Manitou, the visitor will by no means neglect the Cave of the Winds. Though you may ride, if you wish, it is just a pleasant walk up Williams' Cañon, one of the prettiest of the gorges that seam the rugged base of the great Peak. The walls are limestone, stained bright red and Indian yellow, lofty, vertical, and broken into a multitude of bastions, turrets, pinnacles and sweeping, hugely carved façades, whose rugged battlements tower hundreds of feet overhead against a sky of violet. At their bases these upright walls are so close together that much of the way there is not room for one carriage to pass another, and the track lies nearly always in the very bed of the sparkling brook. You seem always in a cul de sac among the zigzags of this irregular chasm, and sometimes the abundant foliage, rooted in the crevices above, meets in an arch across the brightly-painted but narrow space you are tortuously threading.

Half a mile up the cañon, at the end of the roadway, a trail goes by frequent turnings up the precipitous sides of the ravine to where a sheer cliff begins, about three hundred feet higher. Floundering up this steep and slippery goat-path, we arrived breathless at a stairway leading through an arch of native rock into a great chimney, opening out to the sunlight above, and found opposite us a niche which served as ante-room and entrance to the cave.

The history of this cave is entertaining, for it was the discovery, in June, 1880, of two boys of Colorado Springs, who were members of an "exploring society," organized by the pastor of the Congregational Church there to provide the boys of his Sunday-school with some safe and healthful outlet for their adventurous spirits.

The cave, as we saw it, is a labyrinth of narrow passages, occasionally opening out into chambers of irregular size (and never with very high ceilings), into which protrude great ledges and points of rock from the stratified walls, still further limiting the space. These passages are often very narrow, and in many cases you must stoop in crowding through, or, if you insist upon going to the end, squirm along, Brahmin-like, on your stomach. The avenues and apartments are not all upon the same level, but run over and under each other, and constantly show slender fox holes branching off, which the guide tells you lead to some stygian retreat you have visited or are about to see. In remote portions of the cave there are very large rooms, like Alabaster Hall, some of which are encumbered with fallen masses and with pillars of drip stone.

The cave is not remarkable for large stalactites and stalagmites, but excels in its profusion of small ornaments, produced by the solution of the rock and its re-deposition in odd and pretty forms. From many of the ledges hang rows of small stalactites like icicles from wintry eaves, and often these have fine musical tones, so that by selecting a suitable number, varied in their pitch, simple tunes can easily and very melodiously be played by tapping. In some parts of the cave, the stalactites are soldered together into a ribbed mass, like a cascade falling over the ledges. Elsewhere the "ribbon" or "drapery" form of flattened stalactites recalls to you the Luray Caves, though here it is carried out on a smaller scale; while in this particular, as in many others, reminding one of the magnificent Virginia caverns only by small suggestions, in one respect this cave far surpasses in beauty its Eastern prototype. The floors of many rooms are laid, several inches deep, with incrustations of lime-work, which is embroidered in raised ridges of exquisite carving. Again, where water has been caught in depressions, these basins have been lined with a continuous, crowding plush of minute lime crystals,--like small tufted cushions of yellow and white moss. Such depressed patches occur frequently; moreover, the rapid evaporation of these pools, in confined spaces, has so surcharged the air with carbonated moisture, that particles of lime have been deposited on the walls of the pocket in a thousand dainty and delicate forms,--tiny stalactites and bunches of stone twigs,--until you fancy the most airy of milleporic corals transferred to these recesses. Here often the air seems foggy as your lamp-rays strike it, and the growing filigree-work gleams alabaster-white under the spray that is producing its weird and exquisite growth. In this form of minute and frost-like ornamentation, the cave excels anything I know of anywhere, and is strangely beautiful.

This cavern, however, is sadly deficient in a proper amount of legendary interest. No human bones have been found, and no lover's leap has been designated. This misfortune must be remedied; and I have selected a dangerous kind of a place at which, hereafter, the following touching tradition will cause the tourist to drop a tear: Many, many years ago an Indian maiden discovered this cave while eagerly pursuing a woodchuck to its long home; the home proving longer than she thought, she crept quite through into the unsuspected enlargement of a cave-chamber, and a startled congregation of pensive bats. She told no one of her discovery, because she had not, after all, caught the woodchuck, and went without meat for supper. A noble warrior, who had done marvelous deeds of valor, loved the maiden. He wooed and she would but the swarthy papa wouldn't. Sadness, anger, surreptitious trysting where the fleecy cottonwood waves melodiously above the crystal streamlet, etc., etc. The irate old warrior brings an aged brave, who has spent his whole life in doing nothing of more account than cronifying with the heart-sick girl's father. This man she must marry, and the young suitor must go. Refusals by the maiden, loud talk by the youth, sneers from the old cronies, flight of the lovers to the woodchuck's hole, vermicular but affectionate concealment, like another Æneas and Dido. The woodchuck, stealing forth, sees a wolf outside, trying to make him pay his poll-tax; so he sits quietly just inside his safe doorway, obscuring the light. Endeavoring to find their way about in the consequent darkness, the imprisoned lovers pitch headlong over the precipice I have referred to. Guide-books please copy.

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Our train bore a pensive party down the valley of the Fontaine, as it headed for Pueblo. The Musician drew a plaintive air from his violin, and as the friendly mountain range receded and dipped away in the West, we fell to wondering when, if ever, we should tread those vales again.

IV

PUEBLO AND ITS FURNACES

In Steyermark--old Steyermark, The mountain summits are white and stark; The rough winds furrow their trackless snow, But the mirrors of crystal are smooth below; The stormy Danube clasps the wave That downward sweeps with the Drave and Save, And the Euxine is whitened with many a bark, Freighted with ores of Steyermark.

In Steyermark--rough Steyermark, The anvils ring from dawn till dark; The molten streams of the furnace glare, Blurring with crimson the midnight air; The lusty voices of forgemen chord, Chanting the ballad of Siegfried's Sword, While the hammers swung by their arms so stark Strike to the music of Steyermark! --BAYARD TAYLOR.

It is a fortunate introduction the traveler, fresh from the Eastern States and weary with his long plains journey, gets at Pueblo to the lively, progressive, _booming_ spirit of Colorado. Here are the oldest and the newest in the Centennial State--the fragments of tradition that go back to the thrilling, adventurous days of fur-trapping and Indian wars; the concentrated essence of later improvements; and the most practical present, mingled in a single tableau, for a telephone line crosses the ruins of the old adobe fort or Spanish "pueblo," which gave to the locality its name when it was an outpost for the traders from New Mexico.

In its modern shape the town is one of the longest settled in the State, and a great flurry began and ended there years ago. Then, neglected by men of money, Pueblo languished and was spoken chidingly of by its sister cities in embryo. Now all this has changed, and, perhaps aroused by the prosperity of Leadville, Pueblo began about three years ago to assert herself, and to-day stands next to Denver in rank both as a populous and as a money-making center. No business man or statistician could find a more deeply entertaining study than the investigation of how this rejuvenation has arisen and been made to produce so striking results. Such an inquirer would find several large industries claiming to have furnished the turning point; but it is evident that the few who faithfully stood by the comatose town, and steadily struggled toward its commercial revival, were prompt to seize upon the altered flood and take advantage of the tide which led to fortune. The impression once advertised that Pueblo was shaking off her lethargy and about to become a second Pittsburgh, a thousand men of business were quick to catch the idea and make the "boom" a fact. Thus from 5,000 inhabitants in 1875 she has come to over 15,000 in 1883.

It is undoubtedly true that the Denver and Rio Grande railway has done more to aid this advancement than any other one agency; but an important impetus was given to Pueblo in 1878, when a company of gentlemen decided to build a smelter here. The work was put under the charge of its present superintendent, and ninety days from breaking ground the furnace was in operation. There was only a single small one at first; but fourteen are running now. Then there was a diminutive shed to cover the whole affair; now there are acres of fine buildings. Then a dozen men did all the work; now from 380 to 400 are employed, and the pay-roll reaches $375,000 per annum. That's the way they do things in Pueblo.

This smelter is on the northern bank of the river, just under the bluff. From a distance, all that you can discern over the trees is a collection of lofty brick and iron chimney-stacks, and wide black roofs. Coming nearer, the enormous slag-dump discloses the nature of the industry, and testifies to the quantity of ore that has passed through the furnaces. Though on the banks of a swift river, the works are run by steam, which can be depended upon for steady service, and on which winter makes no impression. A thousand tons of coal and seven hundred tons of coke a month are used, the cheapness and proximity of this fuel forming one of the inducements to place the smelter here. Cañon City and El Moro coals are mixed, but the coke all comes from the latter point. At the start an engine of 60-horse power supplied all needs, but a new one of 175-horse power has been found necessary, and Denver was able to manufacture it. As for the machinery, it is not essentially different from that in other smelters, except in small details, where the most approved modern methods are made use of. There are great rooms full of roasting-ovens, immense bins where the pulverized and roasted ore cools off, elevators that hoist it to the smelting furnaces, and all the usual appliances, in great perfection, for charging the furnaces, drawing off and throwing aside the slag, and for casting the precious pigs of bullion. All walls and floors are stone and brick; everywhere order and neatness prevail. This plant has already cost the firm $200,000, and they have enough more money constantly put into ore and bullion to make $750,000 invested at the works. The ore is bought outright, according to a scale of prices which is about as follows: Gold, $18.00 per ounce; silver, $1.00 per ounce; and copper, $1.50 per unit.