Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska | Page 6

take a carriage for the hotel, and come at once to
the centre of the city. Were you to continue your drive but a few blocks
farther, you would come with equal abruptness to the edge of it. The
surprise is delightful in either case, but the suddenness of the transition
makes the stranger guest a little dizzy at first. There are handsome
buildings in Denver--blocks that would do credit to any city under the
sun; but there was for years an upstart air, a palpable provincialism, a
kind of ill-disguised "previousness," noticeable that made her seem like
the brisk suburb of some other place, and that other place, alas!
invisible to mortal eye. Rectangular blocks make a checker-board of the
town map. The streets are appropriately named Antelope, Bear, Bison,
Boulder, Buffalo, Coyote, Cedar, Cottonwood, Deer, Golden, Granite,

Moose, etc. The names of most trees, most precious stones, the great
States and Territories of the West, with a sprinkling of Spanish,
likewise beguile you off into space, and leave the once nebulous burg
beaming in the rear.
Denver's theatre is remarkably handsome. In hot weather the
atmosphere is tempered by torrents of ice-water that crash through
hidden aqueducts with a sound as of twenty sawmills. The management
dams the flood when the curtain rises and the players begin to speak;
the music lovers damn it from the moment the curtain falls. They are
absorbed in volumes of silent profanity between the acts; for the
orchestra is literally drowned in the roar of the rushing element. There
was nothing that interested me more than a copy of Alice Polk Hill's
"Tales of the Colorado Pioneers"; and to her I return thanks for all that
I borrowed without leave from that diverting volume.
Somehow Denver, after my early visit, leaves with me an impression as
of a perfectly new city that has just been unpacked; as if the various
parts of it had been set up in a great hurry, and the citizens were now
impatiently awaiting the arrival of the rest of the properties. Some of
the streets that appeared so well at first glance, seemed, upon inspection,
more like theatrical flats than realities; and there was always a
consciousness of everything being wide open and uncovered. Indeed,
so strongly did I feel this that it was with difficulty I could refrain from
wearing my hat in the house. Nor could I persuade myself that it was
quite safe to go out alone after dark, lest unwittingly I should get lost,
and lift up in vain the voice of one crying in the wilderness; for the
blank and weird spaces about there are as wide as the horizon where the
distant mountains seem to have slid partly down the terrestrial
incline,--spaces that offer the unwary neither hope nor hospice,--where
there is positively shelter for neither man nor beast, from the red-brick
heart of the ambitious young city to her snow-capped ultimate suburb.
CHAPTER III.
The Garden of the Gods.

The trains run out of Denver like quick-silver,--this is the prettiest thing
I can say of Denver. They trickle down into high, green valleys, under
the shadow of snow-capped cliffs. There the grass is of the liveliest
tint--a kind of salad-green. The air is sweet and fine; everything looks
clean, well kept, well swept--perhaps the wind is the keeper and the
sweeper. All along the way there is a very striking contrast of color in
rock, meadows, and sky; the whole is as appetizing to the sight as a
newly varnished picture.
We didn't down brakes until we reached Colorado Springs; there we
changed cars for Manitou. Already the castellated rocks were filling us
with childish delight. Fungi decked the cliffs above us: colossal,
petrified fungi, painted Indian fashion. At any rate, there is a kind of
wild, out-of-door, subdued harmony in the rock-tints upon the exterior
slopes of the famed Garden of the Gods, quite in keeping with the spirit
of the decorative red-man. Within that garden color and form run riot,
and Manitou is the restful outpost of this erratic wilderness.
It is fitting that Manitou should be approached in a rather primitive
manner. I was glad when we were very politely invited to get out of the
train and walk a plank over a puddle that for a moment submerged the
track; glad when we were advised to foot it over a trestle-bridge that
sagged in the swift current of a swollen stream; and gladder still when
our locomotive began to puff and blow and slaken its pace as we
climbed up into the mouth of a ravine fragrant with the warm scents of
summer--albeit we could boast but a solitary brace of cars, and these
small ones, and not overcrowded at that.
Only think of it! We were scarcely