Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science

Lippincott's Magazine of Popular
Literature and Science

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular
Literature
and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880., by Various This eBook is
for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol.
XXVI., December, 1880.
Author: Various
Release Date: June 24, 2005 [EBook #16124]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE ***

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by J.B.
LIPPINCOTT & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington.
LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF
POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.
DECEMBER, 1880.

AN HISTORICAL ROCKY-MOUNTAIN OUTPOST.
[Illustration: GOING TO THE JUDGE'S.]
The day might have graced the month of June, so balmy was the air, so
warmly shone the sun from a cloudless sky. But the snow-covered
mountain-range whose base we were skirting, the leafless cottonwoods
fringing the Fontaine qui Bouille and the sombre plains that stretched
away to the eastern horizon told a different story. It was on one of those
days elsewhere so rare, but so common in Colorado, when a summer
sky smiles upon a wintry landscape, that we entered a town in whose
history are to be found greater contrasts than even those afforded by
earth and sky. Today Pueblo is a thriving and aggressive city, peopled
with its quota of that great pioneer army which is carrying civilization
over the length and breadth of our land. Three hundred and forty years
ago, as legend hath it, Coronado here stopped his northward march, and
on the spot where Pueblo now stands established the farthermost
outpost of New Spain.
The average traveller who journeys westward from the Missouri River
imagines that he is coming to a new country. "The New West" is a
favorite term with the agents of land--companies and the writers of
alluring railway-guides. These enterprising advocates sometimes
indulge in flights of rhetoric that scorn the trammels of grammar and
dictionary. Witness the following impassioned utterances concerning
the lands of a certain Western railroad: "They comprise a section of
country whose possibilities are simply infinitesimal, and whose
developments will be revealed in glorious realization through the
horoscope of the near future." This verbal architect builded wiser than
he knew, for what more fitting word could the imagination suggest
wherewith to crown the possibilities of alkali wastes and barren,
sun-scorched plains?
A considerable part of the New West of to-day was explored by the
Spaniards more than three centuries ago. Before the English had landed

at Plymouth Rock or made a settlement at Jamestown they had
penetrated to the Rocky Mountains and given to peak and river their
characteristic names. Southern Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona
have been the theatres wherein were enacted deeds of daring and
bravery perhaps unsurpassed by any people and any age; and that, too,
centuries before they became a part of our American Union. The whole
country is strewn over with the ruins of a civilization in comparison
with which our own of to-day seems feeble. And he who journeys
across the Plains till he reaches the Sangre del Cristo Mountains or the
blue Sierra Mojadas enters a land made famous by the exploits of
Coronado, De Vaca and perhaps of the great Montezuma himself.
In the year 1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado was sent by the
Spanish viceroy of Mexico to explore the regions to the north. Those
mountain-peaks, dim and shadowy in the distance and seeming to
recede as they were approached, had ever been an alluring sight to the
gold-seeking Spaniards. But the coveted treasure did not reveal itself to
their cursory search; and though they doubtless pushed as far north as
the Arkansas River, they returned to the capital from what they
considered an unsuccessful expedition. The way was opened, however,
and in 1595 the Spaniards came to what is now the Territory of New
Mexico and founded the city of Santa Fé. They had found, for the most
part, a settled country, the inhabitants living in densely-populated
villages, or pueblos, and evincing a rather high degree of civilization.
Their dwellings of mud bricks, or adobes, were all built upon a single
plan, and consisted of a square or rectangular fort-like structure
enclosing an open space. Herds of sheep and goats grazed upon the
hillsides, while the bottom-lands were planted with corn and barley.
Thus lived and flourished the Pueblo Indians, a race the origin of which
lies in obscurity, but connected with