1865.] GROWTH AND RESOURCES OF COLORADO.

337

intelligent experimenting is constantly going forward, and sooner or later American ingenuity will surmount the obstacles.

Despite this drawback, Colorado though developed during our great civil war, has produced more treasure than any other State except California. Much of our native gold is used in jewelry and other manufactures, and the following official exhibit shows only that deposited in our Government mints from 1804 to July, 1866:

This is exclusive of silver, of which all our gold regions yield considerably; and Nevada, Oregon and Idaho turn out almost twenty millions yearly. Most of the yield of the southern States was prior to 1858, though since the great war the product has revived in North Carolina, Georgia and Virginia.

The Colorado mining regions are seven thousand feet above the sea, in regions subject to frequent frosts. Still the mountainguarded valleys produce excellent vegetables. The auriferous quartz contains from nine to twenty per cent. of copper, which ought to pay all expenses of extracting the gold.

The Rocky Mountain beds of coal, from ten to twelve inches thick, are among the largest in the world; and there are indications of the same material in large quantities all the way from Kansas to the range. Iron is abundant and foundries are already at work. Considerable wool is produced, and large manufactories are going up. Valuable oil wells have been discovered; one is opened seventy-five feet, and yields twenty barrels per day. Now (1867,) Colorado contains thirty thousand inhabitants, and its property is appraised for home taxation at fifteen millions of dollars-all developed since 1859!

338

VIRGINIA DALE-LOVER'S LEAP. [1865.

CHAPTER XXIX.

BEYOND Denver, the road had been practically closed for several weeks by Indian hostilities. We encountered few emigrants or freighters save in large parties traveling together for protection. At nightfall their wagons were drawn close together, with the tongue of each under the bed of the next, making two elliptical lines which no assault can easily break. Within this extemporized fortification, all the animals are driven, the last gap is closed up; and the emigrant sleeps secure from the Noble Savage, who never moves upon the enemy's works.

More than one Coloradoan, indignant at the failure of the authorities to guard settlements and roads, had remarked in our hearing:

'I wish the Indians might catch the Colfax party; for that would stimulate the Government to protect us.'

We were hardly public-spirited enough to echo the prayer. The Indians did not catch us; but a hundred miles west of Denver the troubles grew so serious that we waited for trustworthy informa tion from the front, remaining one day at Virginia Dale station, in a lovely little valley imprisoned by towering mountains. One of their precipitous walls is known as the Lover's Leap. The legend runs that an emigrant, whose mistress had abandoned him and married another, threw himself from it and was dashed to pieces, in full view of the woman for whom he had flung away his life. The Secession founder of the station, not daring to call it Virginia Davis in honor of Mrs. Jefferson Davis, found solace in the name, Virginia Dale.

A hundred miles beyond, the savages had driven off the horses and mules from three stations. Two emigrants were found dead

1865.]

SMELLING THE BATTLE AFAR OFF.

339

upon the road-one scalped, the other with throat cut from ear to

One of these, with the iron The varieties of arrows indi

ear, and thirteen arrows in his body. point still bloody, was shown to us. cated that the attack was made by a mixed party and not by one

tribe.

On a June day, cold as November, at the crossing of the North

horses, reports of guns and loud yells announced an Indian attack. The wagons of the emigrants, with the women and children, were at the water's edge. Beyond them in a little valley, were grazing their weary horses and mules, well guarded by the men. The Indians came over a hill, in a sharp dash upon the animals, hoping to stampede and secure them. The soldiers of our escort rushed to the ferry-boat to participate in the fray; but I reconciled myself to the decrees of Providence, content to smell the battle

340

INDIANS A LITTLE TOO NEAR.

[1865.

afar off-indeed with a secret wish that I were too far off to smell it at all. The river was a safe barrier between the savages and ourselves; for the waters were high, and a coach, horses, mail and all, which had gone to the bottom a week before, was still buried in its depths.

The sturdy emigrants uprose from their concealment among the horses, and fired a volley at their assailants with such coolness and precision that the savages fled yelling over the hills, and were out of sight again in a twinkling.

While our mules were changed that evening, at a station fifteen miles beyond, we chatted for ten minutes with guards and hostlers. Twelve hours afterward, the Indians swept down, killing every occupant except two soldiers, who, wounded, made their escape.

Many of the desert stations are substantial stone buildings, with loop-holes in the walls, with shining rifles and well polished revolvers hanging ready to be grasped at any moment. Some of the women are comely and lady-like, adapting themselves with grace and heroism to the rude labors of cooking meals for passengers, and the horrible, ever-present peril 'of capture.

At one station, by a lurid candle we saw the red-hot brand of the stage company, pressed on the flanks of the shrinking mules. They had just been purchased to replace those taken by the Indians. The next day they too were stolen. This happened again and again during the summer.

Our road traversed portions of Colorado, Dacotah, Montana and Utah, over endless wastes; and among the Black Hills, Wind River, Uintah and Wasatch ranges and offshoots of the Rocky Mountains. We saw clear trout-haunted brooks and little lakes; lofty peaks; terrible wastes white with alkali; dreary ashen hills of bare drab earth, the parched ground deeply gashed and gullied, the faint streams bitter and poisonous, blinding dust filling the air; and no atom of vegetable life except the sage-brush and the cactus. This is indeed the desert-the very abomination of desolation.

One of our escort, with cavalry rifle at four hundred yards, brought down an antelope with great branching horns, which he flourished wickedly about our soldier, who boldly seized them and then cut his throat. Strapping the fallen chieftain to our coach, we contributed him to the larder of the next station-keeper. Surly gray

1865.]

WAGON THREE INCHES TOO WIDE.

341

wolves gazed fixedly at us, until Governor Bross fired at them with his shot-gun; then galloped lazily away. We were a sort of traveling arsenal, with two or three weapons to the man. Attacked, we should have been dangerous indeed-at least to each other. That we all escaped with our lives is due only to that overruling Providence which restrains the recklessness of overland tourists, and sets at naught the aims of amateur sportsmen.

One night a huge grizzly struck an attitude directly before our coach, and refused to stir

an inch. An old trapper had lately shown me the scars on his thigh, where, years before, one seized and shook him as a dog shakes a rabbit, and told me of another bear, near Salt Lake, who killed five hunters before he was dispatched. With these fresh memories, we did not attempt either to wheedle or frighten Bruin, but e'en

turned out of the road, and

AN OUTSIDE PASSENGER.

left him peacefully studying astronomy. As Artemus Ward observes of the man who insulted him: 'He was larger than we, and we forgave him.'

We traversed Bridger's Pass, nine thousand feet above sea-level. There is a story of a California emigrant who, a hundred miles back, sold his wagon to a ranch-keeper, on the assurance that it was just three inches too wide to go through Bridger's Pass!

Here the waters of the Atlantic are divided from those of the Pacific; but there is no gorge or canyon-only a vast desert so nearly level that one can not tell when he crosses the summit.

Two nights later, just as the great moon rose from behind eastern mountains, we reached the Church Butte.

'If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,

Go visit it by the pale moonlight.'