294

A SUMMER DAY IN DENVER.

[1860.

CHAPTER XXV.

NOVEL phases of life were exhibited in Denver during this sec ond summer of its settlement. Let reader play the visitor and author the cicerone.

Weeks ago you left the locomotive on the Missouri. The weary journey since has taught you how the railway condenses life. After starting by horse-power, two hundred miles out you left the last farming settlement. Another hundred miles, and you struck the Platte, following it to a point eighty miles from Denver, where you took the great 'cut-off' across the barren, alkaline desert-the unkindest cut-off of all. You have felt the wild pleasure of buffalo hunting, shaken a rattlesnake from your blanket at night, dived into the occult mysteries of cooking, to bring forth biscuits and flapjacks, frolicked among prairie dogs, hob-nobbed with Indians, been drenched by rain-storms, and hungered and thirsted after the newspapers of civilization.

After six hundred miles of naked prairie and monotonous desert, the resinous odor of the pine greeted your nostrils and the distant mountains towered grandly before your charmed and astonished eyes. Last night you again saw the shining Platte, and this morning you rose upon the outskirts of Denver before the sun. But your journey was not yet ended; for this city with its additions embraces five thousand acres of building lots. Blake street is as lively as Broadway. But Saint Charles street, with no devices except the surveyors' stakes and no inhabitants save prairie dogs, is as desolate and uninviting as the Sahara.

The first city you struck was a city of the dead. Denver is but two years old, yet graves are thick in its new cemetery on the

1860.] BEST HOUSE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

295

bare hill; and of their inmates a large majority met violent deaths. You descended a gentle slope among a few log-cabins and scattered board houses; and now you stand upon our threshold, looking as if you had not loved the world nor the world you-ragged but rejoicing, dilapidated but not downcast. Half an hour for ablu

tions and toilet.

In New York, our one-story house, fourteen feet by twenty with eight feet of shed for a kitchen, would be an indifferent

stable; here it is a palace.

Walls of rough upright

boards, with cracks battened to keep out rain and dust; chief external features: a square, clapboarded front, three doors, three windows, and a stove-pipe protruding from the kitchen-roof. It cost three hundred dollars, and has all the mod ern improvements' of this longitude-kitchen and cellar. We occupy a better house than any of our neighbors, and what more could human nature ask? The interior boasts neither partition, ceiling nor plastering. Here is a decrepit desk which once did duty in a Cincinnati editorial room and afterward in a Kansas cottage. The one shelf contains the only two 'Unabridged' dic

296

A BREAKFAST PARTY OF ROVERS.

[1860. tionaries in the gold region, and a dozen works of travel. A bed on the floor with snowy sheets, two chairs, three stools, one bench, one table, two revolvers, one musket, one bowie-knife and three or four trunks and carpet sacks, make up the inventory of household goods.

During our chat the Ethiopian Sam, caterer, steward and factotum, announces breakfast. Two years ago Sam was a barber in Lecompton. When Samuel Medary, eighth Kansas governor within three years, had taken his initial shave, he proposed to pay by the month. Sam's witty answer went on a newspaper tour from Maine to Oregon :

'If you please, mass'r, I prefer to have you pay by de shave; dese new gub'ners goes away so mighty sudden!'

He is still the slave of Judge Elmore of Kansas. For the last three years he has hired his time at thirty dollars per month; and now the judge has permitted him to come to Pike's Peak, upon his agreement to pay twelve hundred dollars for himself as soon as he can accumulate the money. He reads fluently and writes a little; concocts miraculous sherry cobblers, and is a man of brains. In that cabin a hundred yards away are templed his household gods. His wife, now standing in the door, was formerly a slave of the Rev. Tom Johnson,' of the Kansas Shawnee Mission; but from her earnings as a laundress saved and paid six hundred dollars in hard cash for her freedom. In her arms you see a little image of God cut in ebony, with astonishing white eyes, which all the matrons hereabout declare the 'cunningest' of babies.

Our breakfast party is composed of half a dozen rovers who, kept at home, would have famished for travel and excitementyoung men to whom 'magnificent distances appear beautiful and the possibilities of infinite far-off-ness delicious.' One used to keep a hotel in Sacramento; another, a smooth-faced boy, has made two voyages up the Mediterranean; the third has done business in Boston, New York, Australia, California, Missouri and Kansas; the fourth, typo and editor, has worked upon newspapers in Chicago, California, Australia, New Zealand, and Peru; the fifth was recently principal of a New Hampshire academy; and the sixth, for ten years a journalistic shuttlecock, has taken notes among eastern newspaper offices, Kansas wars, Nebraska buffaloes,

1860.] NEWSPAPERS, CHURCHES, HOTELS, STORES. 297

Missouri iron and lead mines, Arkansas fevers, Choctaw cotton plantations, Texas northers, Mexican fandangoes, and Rocky Mountain Indians.

Here is the morning newspaper, damp from the press, in season for our ultimate cups of coffee. It is about one-third as large as the Tribune, delivered by the carrier at fifty cents per week, and edited by an Englishman who cherishes deep-seated malignity against the letter 'h,' and fears neither God, man nor Lindley Murray. With only four thousand people, Denver has three daily

newspapers.

Here comes the milk-man, in whose fluid the aqueous largely preponderates over the lacteal; and he is closely followed by the ice-man, and the vender of vegetables. After all we are not so far out of the world; it is only five hundred miles to the nearest telegraph station.

Now we will stroll down and see the lions. Buckling on our revolvers? Most certainly. It may shock you who have always lived in a state of utter civilization, but no journalist who means to tell the truth is wise to step into these streets without some display of fire-arms, unless partial to having his nose pulled or being made a target.

Here is rising a frame Catholic church. Who can travel beyond the far-reaching arms of the Roman power, even in the decadence? A walk of a third of a mile, past lumber yards and scattered nebulous frames daily developing into neat cottages, brings us to Larimer street. One square to the right is the Broadwell House, a large wooden structure, where you can obtain tolerable accommodations at Astor House prices. To the left a labyrinth of buildings including the new brick church, trading houses and dens of vice-temples to God, Mammon and Satan, side by side.

Here is the City Drug-store of brick, which would look well in St Louis or Chicago; within, you may buy the latest newspapers, ten days old, for twenty cents. Ten thousand eastern journals arrive in Denver weekly.

Looking down F street for five blocks we see the shining Platte, its green banks sprinkled with immigrant tents and Indian lodges. Beyond rise the abrupt many-colored mountains. Handsome blocks are everywhere springing up, interspersed with smaller

298

MINT, EXPRESS-OFFICE, AND COACH. [1860. wooden buildings and log-cabins, relics of the remote antiquity of a twelvemonth ago. Bricks are the cheapest material, costing only six dollars per thousand, while lumber commands five dollars per hundred. A corner lot, twenty-five feet by one hundred, has just sold for twelve hundred dollars.

We stroll down G street past the banking-house, assay office and mint of Clark, Gruber and Company.* Within one sees pouches and bags of shining dust, and glittering nuggets. The firm issue their own gold coins of two and-a-half, five, ten and twenty dollars. They form the chief currency of the town, though much crude dust circulates in the mountains.

Below the corner of Blake street, is the huge frame two-story ex

press office, with

low,

long, one

story wing,

running up nearly one

square upon

G. In it are

WAITING FOR LETTERS.

the two windows of the

express postal department, and from them

stretches a long file of

anxious in

quirers each patiently awaiting his turn to be served with letters. Near by is the office of Hinckley's express which forwards mail matter from Denver to twenty thousand miners in the mountains. On the corner, a hundred people are gazing at the Concord coach of the Central Overland and Pike's Peak Express Company, about

*Since converted into the United States Branch Mint.