XXVIIITHE UNCOMPAHGRE VALLEY.

GUNNISON’S BUTTE.

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.

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.

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.”

“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 ourarrival 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.”

BUTTES OF THE CROSS.

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 andbreeches.” 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 aboutthirty 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.

The mountains ahead came into plainer view, as we left the park; we caught a glimpse of the curious Sawtooth range off at the left, saw that the rounded outlines of the bluffs on each side were changing to abrupt walls, and trending inward, and then the hush of night and the quiet of weariness came to still our conversation and turn our thoughts into meditative channels. Darkness enveloped the world and we pulled slowly through it by the light of a thousand brilliant stars—the same stars that shone on the Madame and Chum; that, beyond the Range, shed soft light on the shepherds and herdsmen of the great plains; that trembled in the eddies of the Mississippi; that were watched by wakeful people on the slopes of laurel-crowned Alleghanian hills; that caught faintly the eye of revelers—for it must now be after the opera—in New York; that spoke a mysterious language to the watcher upon the far ocean; and, oh, best of all! that looked in at a curtained New England window and saw a child in peaceful slumbers. Little daughter under the ancient elms,—planet in the far sky,—father passing under the massive shadow of gigantic cliffs whose pine-fringed bulwarks are lost in the thick gloom above! What an immeasurable triangle, yet how swiftly does the mercury of thought compass it and link its points together?

Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance,Tinted and shadowed by pencils of air,Thy battlements hang o’er the slopes and the forests,Seats of the gods in the limitless ether,Looming sublimely aloft and afar.Above them, like folds of imperial ermine,Sparkle the snowfields that furrow thy forehead,—Desolate realms, inaccessible, silent,Chasms and caverns where Day is a stranger,Garners where storeth his treasures the Thunder,The Lightning his falchion, his arrows the Hail.

Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance,

Tinted and shadowed by pencils of air,

Thy battlements hang o’er the slopes and the forests,

Seats of the gods in the limitless ether,

Looming sublimely aloft and afar.

Above them, like folds of imperial ermine,

Sparkle the snowfields that furrow thy forehead,—

Desolate realms, inaccessible, silent,

Chasms and caverns where Day is a stranger,

Garners where storeth his treasures the Thunder,

The Lightning his falchion, his arrows the Hail.

—Bayard Taylor.

Ouray is—what shall I say? The prettiest mountain town in Colorado? That wouldn’t do. A dozen other places would deny it, and the cynics who never saw anything different from a rough camp of cabins in some quartz gulch, would sneer that this was faint praise. Yet that it is among the most attractive in situation, in climate, in appearance, and in the society it affords, there can be no doubt. There are few western villages that can boast so much civilization.

Ouray stands in a bowl-shaped valley—a sort of broad pit in fact—hollowed out of the northern flank of that mass of mountains which holds the fountains of so many widely destined rivers. A narrow notch in the bowl southward lets the Uncompahgre break through to the lowlands, and furnishes us with a means of ingress; otherwise the most toilsome climbing would be the only way to get into or out of town. From this point diverge three or four short but exceedingly lofty, and several lesser ranges, like the spokes of a wheel from its hub. Eastward stretches the continental divide of the Sierra San Juan proper; southward the Needles and the circling heights that enclose Baker’s park; westward the Sierra San Miguel; northward the spurs of Uncompahgre; and the diminishing foothills and mesas that sink gradually into the Gunnison valley.

MARBLE CAÑON.

Yet the first comers—it is only seven years ago, but the mists of antiquity seem to gather about it—did not enter that way, but came over the range from the south. Prospectors for precious metals, they ascended the Rio Las Animas from Baker’s park, until they found itshead, and stood upon the dividing crest of the range. Here a streamlet trickled northward, and they followed its broadening current down the unknown gorges into which it sank. The walls were often too steep to allow any foothold for them, and then they would wade in the icy water and stumble over the slippery bowlders that had fallen from above. When a dozen miles of this work had been accomplished, they found themselves entering a cañon so narrow, that by stretching out their arms they could almost touch both of its walls; and so irregular that a few rods before and behind was all the distance that ever could be seen at once. Uncertain when they would be brought to a standstill by some pool or precipitous fall, and compelled to struggle back against a torrent which scarcely allowed them to move downstream in safety, they pushed on until they suddenly emerged into a beautiful round valley, filled with copses of trees and sunny glades. In this haven the chilled and weary prospectors rested for the night. While one man—there were no more than three, I believe,—built the fire, sliced the fat bacon and molded the bread; the second went to the river with his fishing-line,and the third started out with his gun. By the time the bread was baked the angler came back with eighteen trout and the hunter returned for help to bring in a bear he had killed within a couple of hundred yards. So runs the tradition, and there is no reason to discredit it.

Now, where the bear was shot and the trout caught, stands a town of fifteen hundred people, which forms the center for supplying a wide circuit of mining localities, including Red Mountain, Mt. Sneffles, Mineral Point and Mineral Farm, Bear Creek, and half a dozen other places of lesser note; and which affords a good market for the agriculturists of the lower valleys, and the cattle breeders of neighboring mesas. Prosperity, comfort, and even much luxury prevail now; but some of the trials of the earliest settlers, beset by isolation, winter, famine, and the fear of Indians, would be worth recounting could I have unlimited space.

This is not a miner’s guide, and nothing could be drier reading for a stranger than a catalogue of diggings and minerals. The ores abound in a thousand ledges which run up and down, and here and there, all through the mountains, from the metamorphic limestones of the outer ledges to the storm-hewn trachyte that caps the hoary summits. What I have said concerning the ore of the opposite (southern) side of the San Juan system of mountains, and the way in which it occurs, applies well enough to this side also. It could not well be otherwise, for the age and general geology of the two regions is as nearly alike as the two sides of the same mountain-chain are very likely to be. In a word the ores are varied, but chiefly ores of galena and copper, occurring in fissure veins and carrying a “high grade” proportion of silver (in various forms) and a considerable quantity of gold. The extraordinary variety of minerals, and the vast bulk of the ore deposits are the two noteworthy features of the region. These ores, moreover, as a rule, are not “refractory” though containing antimonial elements which in an excess would make them so. Works for their concentration,i.e., the sifting out (after pulverization) of the worthless vein-matter, in order to save the expenses of transportation, are run to great advantage.

Ouray’s principal claim to our notice as sightseers lay in its beautiful situation, and the attractive bits of mountain scenery in its neighborhood,—a collection of pictures which it would be hard to duplicate in an equally limited space anywhere else in the whole Rocky mountains.

The valley in which the town is built is at an elevation of about 7,500 feet above the sea, and is pear-shaped, its greatest width being not more than half a mile while its length is about twice that down to the mouth of the cañon. Southward—that is toward the heart of the main range,—stand the two great peaks Hardin and Hayden. Between is the deep gorge down which the Uncompahgre finds its way; but this is hidden from view by a ridge which walls in the town and cuts off all the farther view from it in the direction, save where the triangular top ofMt. Abrams peers over. Westward are grouped a series of broken ledges, surmounted by greater and more rugged heights. Down between these and the western foot of Mt. Hayden struggles Cañon creek to join the Uncompahgre; while Oak creek leaps down a line of cataracts from a notch in the terraced heights through which the quadrangular head of White House mountain becomes grandly discernible,—the easternmost buttress of the wintry Sierra San Miguel.

All of these mountains, though extremely rugged, precipitous, and adorned with spurs and protruding shoulders of naked rock, yet slope backward somewhat, and through one of these depressions passes a most remarkable and picturesque wagon road to Silverton, constructed at immense cost and displaying wonderful engineering skill. But at the lower side of the little basin, where the path of the river is beset with close cañon-walls, the cliffs rise vertical from the level of the village, and bear their forest-growth many hundreds of feet above. These mighty walls, two thousand feet high in some places, are of metamorphic rock, and their even stratification simulates courses of well-ordered masonry. Stained by iron and probably also by manganese, they are a deep red-maroon; this color does not lie uniformly, however, but is stronger in some layers than in others, so that the whole face of the cliff is banded horizontally in pale rust color, or dull crimson, or deep and opaque maroon. The western cliff is bare, but on the more frequent ledges of the eastern wall scattered spruces grow, and add to its attractiveness. Yet, as though Nature meant to teach that a bit of motion,—a suggestion of glee was needed to relieve the sombreness of utter immobility and grandeur however shapely, she has led to the sunlight by a crevice in the upper part of the eastern wall that we cannot see, a brisk torrent draining the snowfields of some distant plateau. This little stream, thus beguiled by the fair channel that led it through the spruce woods above, has no time to think of its fate, but is flung out over the sheer precipice eighty feet into the valley below. We see the white ghost of its descending, and always to our ears is murmured the voice of the Naiads who are taking the breathless plunge. Yet by what means the stream reaches that point from above, cannot be seen, and the picture is that of a strong jet of water bursting from an orifice through the crimson wall and falling into rainbow-arched mist and a tangle of grateful foliage, that hides its further flowing.

As Mr. Weston well says, and as I have insisted in my chapters upon the southern side of the San Juan range, the indescribable charm of this scenery is due not so much to its gigantic proportions, its grotesque and massively-grand outlines, or its variety of composition, as to the contrasts of color and condition. “Even now (May) while I write,” he says, “it is warm and summery in town, the side hills are covered with flowers and the whistle of the humming bird’s wing is heard in the air; yet I can look up at White House peak and see the snow banners blowing from its summit, as in the coldest day in winter. In the autumn, more especially, are the contrasts of color seen, and the landscape, as it then appears, if painted on canvas, would, I believe, be laughed at, if shown in Europe or the Eastern States, as an impossibility. I have climbed the heights above Ouray, and looked down on it, when the atmosphere of the valley seemed of a hazy blue, the sloping sides of the surrounding mountains being clothed with the golden yellow and the red brown of the quaking aspen and the dwarf oak, the varied greens of the spruce, balsam, cedar and yellow pine, and above that the brown gray of the trachyte peaks, their snow-capped summits forming a charming contrast against the lovely violet blue of the evening sky.”

This valley alone, with its everchanging panorama of summer and winter, of verdurous spring and the noise of gushing waters, of flaming autumn and the drapery of haze etherializing the world, presenting under always novel aspect the forms and colors so lavishly displayed—this nook alone would satisfy a generation of artists. But the enchantment of the half hidden gorges, the allurement of the beckoning peaks urge us to explore beauties beyond.

I cannot redescribe the way in which these bristling peaks of purple and green trachyte cut the tremulous sky, nor try to make you understand anew the abysses that sink narrowly between the closely crowded mountains. If the reader will kindly turn back to where I have endeavored to convey to him some idea of the Alps that lie about Baker’s park and at the head of the Rio Dolores and the Rio de La Plata, he will learn what I might repeat of scenes this side of the divide; for some of those former peaks can be seen from here, and this, too, equally with the southern slope, “is Silver San Juan.”

The ride across the hills towards Red mountain was something to be remembered. The great walls of maroon rock and the precipices that rose in terraced grandeur upon their shoulders, coming into view one by one as we ascended from the basin to the foothills, were all wet with the night dews, and gleamed like mirrors under the morning sun. The foothills themselves were rugged jumbles of rocks heaped about the base of the mountains, and full of deep crevices where the streams coursed far out of sight and hearing. They were covered with a mingled growth of spruces, cedars, small oaks and several other shrubby trees. There were open spaces where a dense chapparal or heather of small thorny bushes of various kinds hid the ground; and other slopes where tall grass and innumerable flowers formed favorite pastures for sedate groups of donkeys. Passing the dizzy brink of the chasm into which Bear creek makes its awful leap, snatching a beauty beyond portrayal from the very jaws of terror, we enter a rank forest of aspens and spruces. One might fire a pistol-ball across to the side of Mt. Hayden, which rises an almost sheer wall of indigo-gray from a gulf betweenus and it, whose creviced-bottom is out of sight below. Deep and varied shadows lie in the little ravines that seam its almost vertical slopes, and streaks of dusty snow lurk in the higher crannies feeding trickling cascades of sunbright water that drop like tears into the unfathomed cañon.

GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO.

Through the trees southward, to the right of the triangular peak of Engineer mountain, and the great barrier of Abrams, we could now catch a glimpse of a rounded summit as gaudy as the hat of a cardinal. This was the Red mountain, of which so much has been heard. The road there follows the course of Red Mountain creek from its mouth for two miles through dense pine timber. At this point, four miles from Ouray, and two thousand feet higher, it enters a flat valley or park two miles long, which is covered with willows and with prairies of long grass that every autumn is mowed for hay. This park contains many ponds and miry places, and is said to be underlaid everywhere with bog iron-ore. On either side of the park is a high range of mountains and trachyte peaks, that on the west being the divide between the Red Mountain district and Imogene basin in the Sneffels district, and that on the east being the divide between the Red Mountain district and the Uncompahgre district and Poughkeepsie gulch. At the upper end of the park commences the chain of scarlet peaks, from twelve to thirteen thousand feet in altitude, which are regarded as the volcanic center toward which all the lodes of the surrounding region seem to converge.

The history of this new “camp,” Red Mountain, is a short one. In the summer of 1881 three men discovered the Guston mine, but as the ore was low grade it was worked only because it gave an excess of lead which was just then in demand at the Pueblo smelter. In August, 1882, John Robinson, one of the owners, was hunting deer, and while resting, carelessly picked up a small bowlder, after the manner of prospectors who never stop a moment anywhere but they scrutinize every bit of stone within reach, out of pure habit. Astonished at the weight of this piece he broke it in two and found it to be solid galena. This clue led to the discovery of the Yankee Girl lead close by. A month later the owners had sold the prospect-hole for $125,000, but retained two other apparently equally valuable mines near at hand. In the Yankee Girl rich ore was found only a dozen feet below the surface; and though it had to be packed upon mules and burros all the way down to Silverton, it yielded a profit of over fifty dollars a ton.

Upon the heels of this discovery there was a great rush of miners and speculators toward the scarlet heights, and several large settlements—principally Ironton and Red Mountain Town—sprang up on the rough and forested hillside. Claim stakes dotted the mountain as thick as the poles in a hop-field, and astonishing success attended nearly every digging. Among them all the first lode opened, the Yankee Girl, held supremacy, as is so often the case; but a few months later a neighboring property, the National Belle, leaped far to the front at a single bound.

This occurred by the accident of a workman breaking through the tunnel wall into a cavity. Hollow echoes came back from the blows of his pick, and stones thrown were heard to roll a long distance. Takinga candle, one of the men descended and found himself in an immense natural chamber, the flickering rays of the light showing him the vaulted roof far above, seamed with bright streaks of galena and interspersed with masses of soft carbonates, chlorides and pure white talc. On different sides of this remarkable chamber were small openings leading to other rooms or chambers, showing the same wonderful rich formation. Returning from this brief reconnoisance a party began a regular exploration. They crept through the narrow opening into an immense natural tunnel running above and across the route of their working drift for a hundred feet or more, in which they clambered over great bowlders of pure galena, and mounds of soft gray carbonates, while the walls and roof showed themselves a solid mass of chloride and carbonate ores of silver. Returning to the starting point they passed through another narrow tunnel of solid and glittering galena for a distance of forty feet, and found indications of other large passages and chambers beyond. “It would seem,” cries the local editor in his account of this romantic disclosure, “as though Nature had gathered her choice treasures from her inexhaustible storehouse, and wrought these tunnels, natural stopping places and chambers, studded with glittering crystals and bright mineral to dazzle the eyes of man in after ages, and lure him on to other treasures hidden deeper in the bowels of the earth.... The news of the discovery spread like wildfire, and crowds came to see the sight, and to many of them it was one never to be forgotten.”

This was only the first of these surprises, for many cavities have since been divulged, great and small, in each of which crude wealth had been locked up since the world was made. The character of the ores, the occurrence of these cavities, and the extremely short distances beneath the turf at which rich ore is struck, have combined to cause much discussion among geologists as to the true history of the district.

One of the most striking scenes in the neighborhood of Ouray is the passage through which Cañon creek makes its way down to join the Uncompahgre just above the village. A wild and interesting gorge leads upward toward the western foot of Mt. Hayden, the trail carrying one along the edge of a little cliff, and the walls rapidly contracting so that little room is left even for the foot-trail. A quarter of a mile, perhaps less, above the village, these walls suddenly close together, and the steep, brush-grown slope, is lost in a lofty crag, towering far above the tallest spruces, and standing squarely across the gorge. In this escarpment a zigzag crevice shows itself extending from top to bottom: at the top you may look some distance within it, but at the foot the protruding masses on one side, the sharp curve on the opposite, and the deep shadows, never illumined by the highest sun, shut off all searching by the eye. Out of this narrow, upright, cave-like crevice, as though from its original strong fountains, gushes the deep and turbulent stream,cold as ice and sparkling with a million imprisoned bubbles of air. Get as near as you can to its aperture—crane your head around the very corner of these mountain water-gates, and you can see nothing but darkness, in which only the outlines of the nearest irregularities in the rocky walls are dimly defined, while the beetling ledges above shut out the narrow line of sky that might be seen were the sides of the cañon smooth. Retreating down stream a little way, you look past bright pillars of rosy quartzite, across the glittering pathway of foam flecked water, glorying in its escape, up to the lofty gates and the shadowy crevice between, whence the river comes ceaselessly and with singing; you note the color-touches of the flowers and blossoming vines; the soft hangings of the ferns under the damp ledges, the emerald foliage of the poplar standing bravely beneath the shadow of the cliffs and the darker forms of giant spruces—you see this contrast of brightness and color and sunshine just without the damp gloom of the mysterious portals; and you tell yourself that there are few scenes in the Rockies that can equal it.

There is a roundabout way to get to the top of these cliffs and look down into the chasm; and at one point, where it is much more than one hundred feet in depth, a person may easily step across from edge to edge. Though it would probably be impossible in the lowest stage of water to make one’s way up from below against the swift flood that fills the whole width of the chasm, yet by going above it is possible to work your way down stream for a long distance into the crevice. A cave exists there, entered at the surface of the water, and occasional picnic parties are made up to go to it. These consist mainly of young people whom age has not sobered, for during the latter part of the way it is needful that the gentlemen wading should carry the ladies across frequent portages—to borrow a word from a reverse custom. The cave entrance at the water side is only an ante-chamber to the real cavern. To reach that a ladder and rope is required, by which the men first ascend to a second higher chamber and then draw the ladies up. The entrance is a hatchway so narrow that portly persons have been known to express fears as to their getting through.

GRAND CAÑON, FROM TO-RO-WASP.

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 forcloudbursts 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 thatUncompahgrein 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.

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 allThat grows within the woodland.

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 probableennuiendured 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 figurein 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 upFelix Holtand 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.

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