1859.] INSPIRING PRESENCE OF THE MOUNTAINS.

177

of ominous black clouds which rising slowly left behind them a scattered trail, dark and wild as the locks of the storm-god.

What solemn influences descend to us from these mountain summits! Year after year, upon their echoless heads has rested the finger of Silence. Around their feet are wrapped the dark pine forests. Rigid and unimpressible, yielding neither to summer's gentle ministry nor winter's despotic strength, to the soft touch of caressing winds and light-dropping showers, nor the fierce assault of warring blasts, they stand stately and undisturbed.

But now human voices made musical the solitudes. The unac customed air responded in glad echoes, and before us smiled a bright little valley, dotted with white tents and gleaming with many camp fires.

Supping at Station Twenty-six we made a comfortable bed in the coach, and rolling on at the rate of seven miles an hour, slept quietly through the night.

June 6.-Woke at five, still in motion, and obtained a glorious view of the mountains, their hoary peaks covered with snow and their base, thirty miles across the valley into which we were de scending, seeming not more than two miles away.

At last we struck the old trail from Santa Fe to Salt Lake, rode a mile along the dry bed of Cherry Creek, and at eight this eleventh morning reached Denver City. Day-and-night's travel one hundred and thirty miles. During our journey from Leavenworth we have doubtless passed ten thousand emigrants.

-Making governments and building towns are the natural employments of the migratory Yankee. He takes to them as instinctively as a young duck to water. Congregate a hundred Americans anywhere beyond the settlements, and they immedi ately lay out a city, frame a State constitution and apply for admission into the Union, while twenty-five of them become candidates for the United States Senate.

True to this instinct, the people of this unfledged community, nominally in Kansas but practically as far from government and civilization as central Africa, were already making a State constitution; and months before, they had laid out Denver City.

It was a most forlorn and desolate-looking metropolis. If my

178

DENVER CITY IN ITS INFANCY.

[1859. memory is faithful, there were five women in the whole gold region; and the appearance of a bonnet in the street was the signal for the entire population to rush to the cabin doors and gaze upon its wearer as at any other natural curiosity. The men who gathered about our coach on its arrival were attired in slouched hats, tattered woolen shirts, buckskin pantaloons and moccasins; and had knives and revolvers suspended from their belts.

We took lodgings at the Denver House. True to the national instinct, the occupants of its great drinking and gambling saloon demanded a speech. On one side the tipplers at the bar silently sipped their grog; on the other the gamblers respectfully suspended the shuffling of cards and the counting of money from their huge piles of coin, while Mr. Greeley standing between them, made a strong anti-drinking and anti-gambling address, which was received with perfect good humor.

Thus far no gold had been discovered within sixty miles of Pike's Peak; but the first reports located the diggings near that mountain, and 'Pike's Peak'-one of those happy alliterations which stick like burs in the public memory-was now the general name for this whole region.

The first extravagant statements had all been based upon supposition. Prospectors found 'the color'-infinitesimal quantities of the shining dust-and nothing more, chiefly in the bed of the Platte. The mountains had not been searched to any extent. So little confidence was felt in the mines, that in Denver, picks commanded only ten or fifteen cents apiece, and town lots and log houses were bartered for revolvers, or sold for ten or twenty dollars. Of the few men engaged in mining, not half-a-dozen were realizing one dollar per day.

But on the sixth of May-just one month before our arrivalJohn H. Gregory, an old Georgia miner, struck rich deposits of gold in the mountains among the head-waters of Clear creek; and from that discovery dates the history of Pike's Peak as an ascertained gold region.

1859.] STARTING FOR THE GREGORY DIGGINGS. 179

CHAPTER XV.

ON the morning after reaching Denver we started for the Gregory Diggings, forty miles to the northwest. Along the bank of the Platte which bounds the town on the north, immigrant wagons extended for a quarter of a mile, waiting to be ferried across for two dollars and fifty cents each. The boat was propelled by the current, and its daily receipts were from two to three hundred dollars.

Immediately beyond, stretched a succession of low sandy hills, entirely destitute of trees, and with thin ashen grass, dreary enough to eyes familiar with the rich green prairies of Kansas and Missouri. But we passed several ranches where idle cattle and horses, whose owners were in the diggings, were kept and guarded by the month at from one to two dollars per head. By day they grazed on the desert and really fattened upon its unpromising diet. At night they were corraled-driven into enclosures to prevent them from stampeding and protect them against the cattle-thieves, which infest all our frontier regions until exterminated or frightened away by the sudden, decisive administration of lynch law.

From Denver to the foot of the range seemed only a stone's throw, but we found it fifteen miles. The only well-defined spur is Table Mountain; which rises five or six hundred feet from the valley, with symmetric stone walls. It looked down upon two little tents, then the only dwellings for miles; but in the intervening years it has seen a thriving and promising manufacturing town spring up under the broad mountain-shadow.

At its base we found Clear creek, greatly swollen so we left the coach, saddled our mules and rode them through the stream

180

OUR WEARY AND WINDING WAY.

[1859. amid a crowd of emigrants who sent up three hearty cheers for Horace Greeley. The road was swarming with travelers. In the

distance they were clambering right up a hill as abrupt as the roof of a cottage.

It seemed incredible that any animal less agile than a mountain goat could reach the summit; yet this road only five weeks old, was beaten like a turnpike; and far above us toiled men mules and cattle pigmies upon Alps. Wagons carrying less than half a ton were drawn up by twenty oxen, while those descending dragged huge trees in full branch and leaf behind them, as brakes. We all dismounted to ascend except Mr. Greeley, still so lame that his overtaxed mule was compelled to carry him. The astonished brute yielded to destiny and climbed vigorously, experiencing

painfully the climax of Ossa upon Pelion.