Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska | Page 3

Charles Warren Stoddard
two, above and below,
through the length of our flying university, and made a night of it,
without fear of notes or detentions, and with no prefect stalking
ghostlike in their midst.
It would be hard to say which we found most diverting, the long, long
landscape that divided as we passed, through it and closed up in the
rear, leaving only the shining iron seam down the middle; the beautiful,
undulating prairie land; the hot and dusty desolation of the plains; the
delicious temperature of the highlands, as we approached the Rockies
and had our first glimpse of Pike's Peak in its mantle of snow: the
muddy rivers, along whose shores we glided swiftly hour after hour:
the Mississippi by moonlight--we all sat up to see that--or the Missouri
at Kansas City, where we began to scatter our brood among their far
Western homes. At La Junta we said good-bye to the boys bound for
Mexico and the Southwest. It was like a second closing of the
scholastic year; the good-byes were now ringing fast and furious. Jolly
fellows began to grow grave and the serious ones more solemn; for
there had been no cloud or shadow for three rollicking days.
To be sure there was a kind of infantile cyclone out on the plains,
memorable for its superb atmospheric effects, and the rapidity with
which we shut down the windows to keep from being inflated

balloon-fashion. And there was a brisk hail-storm at the gate of the
Rockies that peppered us smartly for a few moments. Then there were
some boys who could not eat enough, and who turned from the dessert
in tearful dismay; and one little kid who dived out of the top bunk in a
moment of rapture, and should have broken his neck--but he didn't!
We were quite sybaritical as to hours, with breakfast and dinner courses,
and mouth-organs and cigarettes and jam between meals. Frosted cake
and oranges were left untouched upon the field after the gastronomical
battles were fought so bravely three or four times a day. Perhaps the
pineapples and bananas, and the open barrel of strawberries, within
reach of all at any hour, may account for the phenomenon.
Pueblo! Ah me, the heat of that infernal junction! Pueblo, with the
stump of its one memorable tree, or a slice of that stump turned up on
end--to make room for a new railway-station, that could just as well
have been built a few feet farther on,--and staring at you, with a full
broadside of patent-medicine placards trying to cover its nakedness. On
closer inspection we read this legend: "The tree that grew here was 380
years old; circumference, 28 feet; height, 79 feet; was cut down June 25,
1883, at a cost of $250." So perished, at the hands of an amazingly
stupid city council, the oldest landmark in Colorado. Under the shade
of this cottonwood Kit Carson, Wild Bill, and many another famous
Indian scout built early camp fires. Near it, in 1850, thirty-six whites
were massacred by Indians; upon one of its huge limbs fourteen men
were hanged at convenient intervals; and it is a pity that the city council
did not follow this admirable lead and leave the one glory of Pueblo to
save it from damnation. It afforded the only grateful shelter in this
furnace heat; it was the one beautiful object in a most unbeautiful place,
and it has been razed to the ground in memory of the block-heads
whose bodies were not worthy to enrich the roots of it. Tradition adds,
pathetically enough, that the grave of the first white woman who died
in that desert was made beneath the boughs of the "Old Monarch." May
she rest in peace under the merciless hands of the baggage-master and
his merry crew! Lightly lie the trunks that are heaped over her nameless
dust! Well, there came a time when we forgot Pueblo, but we never will
forgive the town council.

Then we listened in vain at evening for the strumming of fandango
music on multitudinous guitars, as was our custom so long as the
muchachos were with us. Then we played no more progressive euchre
games many miles in length, and smoked no more together in the
ecstasy of unrestraint; but watched and waited in vain--for those who
were with us were no longer of us for some weeks to come, and the
mouths of the singers were hushed. The next thing we knew a city
seemed to spring suddenly out of the plains--a mirage of brick and
mortar--an oasis in the wilderness,--and we realized, with a gasp, that
we had struck the bull's-eye of the Far West--in other words, Denver!
CHAPTER II.
In Denver Town.
Colorado! What an open-air sound that word has! The music of the
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