CHAPTER XVII.
THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS—GOLDEN CITY—GOLDEN GATES—MINING TOWNS—NEIGHBOURING MOUNTAINS STRIPPED OF EVERY TREE—WHAT GROWS ON THE MOUNTAINS—AMERICAN HORSES—ROADS AND BRIDGES THEY HAVE TO PASS—HOW, SIX-IN-HAND, WE WENT DOWN A HILL SIDE IN THE MOUNTAINS—A NICE DISTINCTION AS TO ACCIDENTS ON THIS HILL—CLIMATE-WIND-STORMS—BIRDS—DOGS.
THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS—GOLDEN CITY—GOLDEN GATES—MINING TOWNS—NEIGHBOURING MOUNTAINS STRIPPED OF EVERY TREE—WHAT GROWS ON THE MOUNTAINS—AMERICAN HORSES—ROADS AND BRIDGES THEY HAVE TO PASS—HOW, SIX-IN-HAND, WE WENT DOWN A HILL SIDE IN THE MOUNTAINS—A NICE DISTINCTION AS TO ACCIDENTS ON THIS HILL—CLIMATE-WIND-STORMS—BIRDS—DOGS.
The Rocky Mountains.
I entered the Rocky Mountains at a place called Golden City. It lies in a gap of the first range. Till lately it was the capital of Colorado, which honour has now been transferred to Denver. It is chiefly of brick—the proof, in this part of the world, of mature age in a town. I counted three churches in the place; the best of the three belongs, as I was told, to the Episcopalians. The population appeared to be about three thousand. A thick seam of good coal is exposed just at the foot of the hill close to the town. I had heard that I should find a place of this name, but I was not at all prepared for the brick, and the churches, and the population. There is a good hotel here, kept by an Englishman; but, judging from those I fell in with, the well-to-do people of the place were mostly New Englanders.
Just beyond Golden City the road passes through a grand defile, between precipitous mountains of dark rock; this, as it leads to the auriferous regions up in the mountains, is called the Golden Gates.
Up in the mountains I visited the three mining towns of Black Hawk, Central City, and Nevada. The district to which these towns belong had a population of fifteen thousand persons engaged in mining, but I found several of the mills not at work, and was told that the population had lately fallen off considerably. In the neighbourhood of these towns all the timber has been cut down for building and mining; and as everything that would burn has also been cleared off for fuel, every accessible mountain has been made as bare as a ploughed field. Their sides are covered with what appear to be gigantic mole-hills, but which in reality are the heaps of earth the miners have thrown up in prospecting—that is, examining the ground for auriferous veins, which is done by digging holes ten or twelve feet deep. It will be a long time before the forest appears again, for at this altitude it was composed entirely of pine, and I could nowhere, on exposed places, find any young trees: I could find plenty of little seedlings, but they all were dead or dying, I supposed from their inability to bear without protection the wind, or the cold, or the drought. I saw some magnificent trees of, I believe, a kind of spruce, and a kind of silver fir, on the hills, from which it would have been difficult to have removed them if cut down. They were of great height, and very straight, though of course nothing like what we hear of as growing on the western slopes, and down to the Pacific coast. On the lower hills I saw abundance of a white-barked poplar, of a kind of alder, of birch, and of willow. Gooseberry bushes in places covered the ground. I heard that currants, raspberries, blueberries, andsome other small edible fruit were to be found in equal plenty. I saw large spaces on the hill sides, where the undergrowth was chiefly Berberis aquifolium. In the valleys of the outer ranges there was a great deal of the small cactus I had seen in the plains, clothing the surface for miles together. This species must be capable of bearing very severe cold, for 20° below zero is a point that is occasionally reached here.
American Horses.
American horses are, speaking generally, better than ours. Their average character is higher. Though we probably in most classes have some animals that are more showy, and even better adapted to their work, yet certainly they have fewer poor brutes. With us everything that is in the form of a horse fetches money, from the stylish pair which everybody notices in the Park, down to the costermonger’s pony. Manifestly inferior animals do not appear to be bred at all in America. There is a point they do not fall below, and that point admits of bone and blood enough to be noticed.
Their horses have another merit also. As a general rule, they do just what is required of them, and nothing more. It is rare to see one that jibs, or shies, or stumbles, or misbehaves himself in any way. I cannot say whether it is that, being sounder in body, they are sounder also in mind; or whether it is to be attributed to some superiority in the American method of breaking in their horses; or whether the moral effects of maize are superior to those of oats; though indeed I see from the returns that in some parts of the country a large quantity of the latter kind of grain is raised.
As American drivers have more confidence in themselves and their fortune than any drivers in the world, and are ready at any moment to run any risks, this rationality and docility of their horses is a valuable quality. One frequently does not know which to admire most, the skill and nerve of the driver, or the intelligence and training of the horses. In passing over the plains you find that only some of the streams are bridged. The bridges, however, appear to one who is new to the country to be very inadequate to what is required of them. They generally consist of two long pine trees laid from bank to bank, or, if the stream is wide, from pier to pier, and then covered with a corduroy of cross pieces, sometimes a little dressed; the interstices are filled up with prairie hay, which is strewed over the whole structure. To save material and cartage, these bridges are made just wide enough for the wheels of the coach. I do not think there could have been a foot to spare on either side. There is no side railing of any kind. The driver, with four or six horses as it may happen, generally takes them at his best pace. Any hesitation, or a false step, or any kind of misconduct in any of the horses, would lead to a mishap. But then, mishaps never occur, or only so seldom as just to show that such things are not impossible. This, however, is a momentary affair, and by the time that one has noticed that the cross pieces are not fastened, but are starting and dancing under the feet of the horses and the wheels of the coach, the other side is reached.
Six-in-hand through the Mountains.
In the mountains I saw a specimen of American driving that would have astonished our old stagers of the Exeter, or the north road. We were crossingone of the inner ranges, and had been slowly toiling up a long hill, at a rate I suppose of not more than four miles an hour. At last we reached the summit of almost naked rock. The descent on the opposite side was very rapid—seven hundred feet in little more than half a mile. This has been accomplished by a series of zigzags constructed on the face of the hill, in the rudest possible way. The trunks of pine trees were laid longitudinally on what was to be the outside of the road. On the inner side some of the rock was picked down and blasted, and laid on the pine trees; and thus a road was made, as in the case of the bridges I have mentioned, to a very little greater width than that of the coach. The zigzags were short, and consequently the angles were close together. In the middle of the roadway the rock everywhere obtruded to a height sometimes of five or six inches. Any other people would have made the road more carefully, and of more durable materials, in the worst places would have put some kind of parapet to it, and would probably have used mules for the coach, making those sure-footed animals walk down the hill. But an American would consider it insufferable that the safety of the public should be ensured at a loss of a few minutes’ time daily, and that a dollar more than was absolutely necessary should be spent on a road which might in a year or two be superseded by something better, or not wanted at all. And so the way they manage it is to construct a road of the narrow scantling and in the rude fashion I have mentioned, and then to drive down it, with six fine horses, at a rate of not less than eleven miles an hour. As soon as we got to the top of the hill,the horses were put under the whip, and away we went. As we turned the corners at full speed the team appeared to be coming back on the coach; and as we rattled down the inclines the sides of the hill looked like precipices. If one horse had stumbled on the pieces of rock projecting through the road, or got frightened, or become unruly in any way, or if a piece of harness had broken, or the brake had given way, a capsize would have been inevitable, and we should have rolled over to the valley beneath.
There was an hotel at the bottom of the hill, and while we sat down to dinner (I think people must sometimes arrive at the hotel without much appetite), another team was put in for another stage, through ravines and along the edges of precipices, which would require American horses and American driving.
The hill we had just come down is called the Guy Hill. At Central City, where I was staying the next day, I asked the landlord of the hotel if anyone had been killed lately on the Guy Hill. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘no one had been killed, he was glad to say, for two or three years, but every year several persons had died of accidents on the hill.’ These accidents happen when snow is on the ground, and the horses cannot see their way, or when it is covered with ice, and they cannot get a foothold. I afterwards walked up this road, and a closer acquaintance with it only increased the respect the way in which I had been brought down it had made me feel for American horses, drivers, and coaches. I also went over the old road that had preceded it, and which was nothing but a gully of smooth rock down the side of thehill. I was unable to conceive how any vehicle could ever have been got up it or down it.
Climate in the Mountains.
The fame of these American whips is not confined to their own country; for I am told by an Australian friend, that in that part of the world it is the custom to engage the services of one of them where the roads are unusually difficult.
Though it was February when I was in the mountains, the climate was so bright and warm, that it did not appear strange to see the gold-washers at work in slush and water. And yet there had been so severe a frost in the previous month, that the gulch was still thickly frozen over, and these hardy men had to break through the ice to get water for washing the dirt in which the gold is found. But though there is here a great deal of open fine weather in winter, yet at this season very severe frost, though generally of short duration, may be expected, and also extremely violent storms of wind, often accompanied with snow. A storm of this kind drove me out of the mountains, as I was afraid, which actually did happen, that it would bring enough snow to block the roads for some days. I made a run for the plains, and when I reached them, I found the storm still raging, and saw the dust it raised looking like a dark haze several yards high. As the wind blew from the mountains, I did not suffer much inconvenience in running before it for twelve miles, till I reached shelter. But the next day, when it was over, I saw teamsters who told me that they had found it impossible to move on across it, and that they had been obliged to anchor their waggons to moorings driven firmly into the ground, sheltering their cattleand themselves on the lee-side. These wind storms on the plains are not so bad for man as for beast, for the nostrils, mouths, and eyes of the horses and bullocks suffer much from the sharp sand.
Three species of the crow tribe are, I found, common by the road side in the mountains in winter: the blue jay, which is seen frequently in flocks; the magpie, which is marked very similarly to our own—it appears, however, to be a somewhat larger bird, and to have a larger tail; and the raven. In the summer, as there is then an inexhaustible supply of small fruit of different kinds in the valleys, and on the hill sides, I should expect to see a great variety of birds.
Almost in every house I entered in the mountains and in the contiguous plains I found an enormous dog. Some were pure mastiffs; others of mixed breed, in which the Newfoundland blood predominated. The mastiffs were larger and more powerful animals than I ever saw at dog-shows in London or elsewhere. Their size, however, imparted no air of nobility to their appearance and bearing, but much of savage brutality. The motive, I suppose, for keeping these Cerberuses is protection from wolves, and from the two-legged assailants of life and property.