Part 9

Night fell upon us, while yet six or seven miles from the diggings, and we camped in the edge of the pines, on the brow of a gentle acclivity, with a prospect of grass as well as water for our weary, hungry beasts down the slope south of us. Mine had fallen to her knees in the last water-course we had passed, very nearly throwing me over her head; had she done it, I am sure I had not the strength left to rise and remount, and hardly to walk the remaining half-mile. As it was, I had to be lifted tenderly from my saddle and laid on a blanket, with two more above me, where I lay while the fire was built, supper prepared, and a lodge of dry poles and green pine boughs hastily erected. I was too tired to eat, but the bright, leaping flame from the dry pines heaped on our fire gradually overcame the shivering, which was about the only sign of vitality I showed when first laid down, and I at length resumed the perpendicular by an effort, and took my place in our booth, where sleep but fitfully visited me during that bright, cool, short summer night. But this left me more time to rub my chafed and stiffened limbs, so that, when breakfast was called in the morning, I was ready, appetite included, and prepared to dispel the apprehensions of those who had predicted, on seeing me taken off my mule, that I must be left there for at least a day. By six o’clock, we were again in the saddle, and pushing on, over a stony but rather level table-land, which extended for two or three miles, thickly covered with young pines and aspens, to the next ravine, whence the road leads up a short, steep hill, then down a very long, equally steep one, to Ralston’s fork of Clear Creek—being as rapid and rock-bottomed as where we had crossed the main creek the day before thirty miles below, but with only one-third the volume of water, so that we forded it easily without a wet foot. A little runnel coming in from the west directly at the ford, with its natural translucency changed to milky whiteness by the running of its waters through sluices in which the process of gold-washing was going forward, gave us assurance that we were in immediate proximity to the new but already famous workings called, after their discoverer, “Gregory’s Diggings.”[2]

Footnote 2:

Now (October) known as “Mountain City.”

I shall not here speak of their pecuniary success or promise, though I have visited, during the day, a majority of those which have sluices already in operation, and received reports from my fellow-visitors from nearly all the others. Having united with them in a statement—to be herewith forwarded—of what we saw and learned, I refer those who feel any interest in the matter to that statement. What I propose here to do is to give the reader some idea of the place and its general aspects.

The little brook which here joins Clear Creek from the west starts at the foot of mountains three or four miles distant, and runs in a usually narrow ravine between generally steep hills from five hundred to fifteen hundred feet high. Gregory’s lead is very near its mouth; half a mile above seems the heart of the present mining region, though there are already sluices in operation at intervals for at least two miles up the runnel, and others are soon to be started at intervals above them. Three or four miles south-west from its mouth, are Russell’s Diggings, where coarse gold is procured, but I was unable to visit them. Prospecting is

## actively going forward in every direction, and vague reports of lucky

hits or brilliant prospects are started on this side or on that, but I have not been able to verify them. It is no disparagement to the others to say that, though mining is carried on at various points within a radius of thirty miles from this spot, “Gregory’s Diggings” are to-day the chief hope of gold-mining in the Rocky Mountains.

Six weeks ago, this ravine was a solitude, the favorite haunt of the elk, the deer, and other shy denizens of the profoundest wildernesses, seldom invaded by the footsteps of man. I believe this strip of country has long been debatable land between the Utes and the Arapahoes, which circumstance combined with its rarely accessible situation to secure its wild tenants against human intrusion and persecution. I hear that the Arapahoes say that a good “lodge-pole trail”—that is, one which a pony may traverse with one end of the lodge-poles on his back, the other trailing behind him—exists from this point to the open prairie where Clear Creek debouches from the mountains—a trail which doubtless winds along the steep sides of the ravines and avoids the rugged heights necessarily traversed by the miner’s wagon-road. Should these diggings justify their present promise, I doubt not a road will in time be made, reducing by one-half—say five thousand feet—the present aggregate of ascent and descent between this and Denver. But an unworked wagon-road must avoid the sides of these steep-banked ravines, running square up the faces and along the crests of the mountains, so that this spot is destined to remain barely accessible for at least another year.

This narrow valley is densely wooded, mainly with the inevitable yellow-pine, which, sheltered from the fierce winds which sweep the mountain-tops, here grows to a height of sixty or eighty feet, though usually but a foot to eighteen inches in diameter. Of these pines, log cabins are constructed with extreme facility, and probably one hundred are now being built, while three or four hundred more are in immediate contemplation. They are covered with the green boughs of the pines, then with earth, and bid fair to be commodious and comfortable. As yet, the entire population of the valley—which cannot number less than four thousand, including five white women and seven squaws living with white men—sleep in tents, or under booths of pine boughs, cooking and eating in the open air. I doubt that there is as yet a table or chair in these diggings, eating being done around a cloth spread on the ground, while each one sits or reclines on mother earth. The food, like that of the plains, is restricted to a few staples—pork, hot bread, beans and coffee forming the almost exclusive diet of the mountains; but a meat-shop has just been established, on whose altar are offered up the ill-fed and well-whipped oxen who are just in from a fifty days’ journey across the plains, and one or two cows have been driven in, as more would be if they could here been subsisted. But these mountains are mainly wooded, while the open hill-sides are so dry during summer that their grass is very scanty. It is melancholy to see so many over-worked and half-starved cattle as one meets or passes in this ravine and on the way hither. Corn is four dollars per bushel in Denver, and scarce at that; oats are not to be had; there is not a ton of hay within two hundred miles, and none can ever be brought hither over the present road at a cost below forty dollars per ton. The present shift of humane owners is to herd their oxen or mules on the rich grass of the nearest prairies for a week or so, then bring them in here and keep them at work for a week or more, letting them subsist on browse and a very little grass, and then send them down the mountain again. This, bad as it is, seems the best that can be done. Living of all kinds will always be dear at these mines, where American flour is now selling at the rate of forty-four dollars per barrel, and bacon is worth fifty cents per pound; sugar ditto.

I presume less than half the four or five thousand people now in this ravine have been here a week; he who has been here three weeks is regarded as quite an old settler. The influx cannot fall short of five hundred per day, balanced by an efflux of about one hundred. Many of the latter go away convinced that Rocky Mountain gold-mining is one grand humbug. Some of them have prospected two or three weeks, eating up their provisions, wearing out their boots—and finding nothing. Others have worked for the more fortunate for one dollar per day and their board and lodging—certainly not high wages when the quality of the living is considered. And I feel certain that, while some—perhaps many—will realize their dreams of wealth here, a far greater number will expend their scanty means, tax their powers of endurance, and then leave, soured, heart-sick, spirit-broken. Twenty thousand people will have rushed into this ravine before the 1st of September, while I do not see how half of them are to find profitable employment here. Unless, therefore, the area of the diggings shall meantime be greatly enlarged—of which there is no assurance—I cannot imagine how half the number are to subsist here, even up to that early setting in of winter which must cause a general paralysis of mining, and consequently of all other Rocky Mountain industry. With the gold just wrested from the earth still glittering in my eyes—and one company has taken out to-day, at a cost of not more than twenty-five dollars a lump (condensed by the use of quick-silver) which looks like a steel-yard-poise and is estimated as worth five hundred and ten dollars—I adhere to my long-settled conviction that, next to outright and indisputable gambling, the hardest (though sometimes the quickest) way to obtain gold is to mine for it—that a good farmer or mechanic will usually make money faster—and of course immeasurably easier—by sticking to his own business than by deserting it for gold-digging—and that the man who, having failed in some other pursuit, calculates on retrieving his fortunes by gold-mining, makes a mistake which he will be likely to rue to the end of his days.

We had a famous gathering a few rods from this tent this evening. The estimate of safe men puts the number present at fifteen hundred to two thousand. Though my name was made the excuse for it, brief and forcible addresses were made by several others, wherein mining, postal, and express facilities, the Pacific railroad, the proposed new Rocky Mountain state, temperance, gambling, etc., etc., were discussed with force and freedom. Such a gathering of men suddenly drawn hither from every section, and nearly every state, in a glen where the first axe was raised, the first tent pitched by white men, less than six weeks ago, should have inspired the dullest speaker with earnestness, if not with eloquence.

Mining quickens almost every department of useful industry. Two coal-pits are burning close at hand. A blacksmith has set up his forge here, and is making a good thing of sharpening picks at fifty cents each. A volunteer post-office is just established, to which an express-office will soon attach itself. A provision store will soon follow; then groceries; then dry goods; then a hotel, etc., until within ten years the tourist of the continent will be whirled up to these diggings over a longer but far easier road winding around the mountain-tops rather than passing over them, and will sip his chocolate and read his New York paper—not yet five days old—at the “Gregory House,” in utter unconsciousness that this region was wrested from the elk and the mountain-sheep so recently as 1859.

* * * * *

DENVER, _June 10, 1859_.

We left the diggings yesterday morning, and came down to the foot of the mountains, in spite of a drizzling rain from noon to three or four o’clock, which at one time threatened a heavy shower. We made a poor shelter of a buffalo-skin and a rubber blanket, stretched across a fallen tree, and there waited half an hour; but, finding the rain neither stopped nor grew violent, we saddled up and came on. Two accidents, which might have proved serious happened to members of our party—the first to Mr. Villard, of Cincinnati, who, riding at some distance from all others, was thrown by his mule’s saddle slipping forward and turning under him, so that he fell heavily on his left arm, which was badly bruised, and thence was dragged a rod with his heel fast in the stirrup. His mule then stopped; but when I rode up behind him, I dared not approach him lest I should start her, and waited a moment for the friend who, having heard his call for help, was coming up in front. Mr. V. was released without further injury, but his arm is temporarily useless. The other casualty happened to Mr. Kershaw, of New York, who, riding to my assistance at Clear Creek crossing at nightfall, was thrown by his mule’s starting at the rush of a savage dog, and considerably injured, though he is nearly well to-day. It would have been to me a source of lasting sorrow had his fall resulted in more serious damage.

When we reached Clear Creek on our way up three mornings since, though the current rushing from the mountains looked somewhat formidable, I charged it like a Zouave, and was greeted with three ringing shouts from the assembled Pike’s Peakers, as I came up, gay and dripping, on the north shore. But now, though the water was but a few inches higher, the starch was so completely taken out of me by those three days’ rough experience in the mountains, that I had neither strength nor heart for the passage. I felt that the least stumble of my mule over the round, slippery stones that fill the channel would fling me, and that I was unable to stand a moment in that rushing torrent. So, driving in my mule after the rest of the party, and seeing her reach the south bank safely, though with great difficulty—breaking a girth and spilling saddle, blanket, etc., into the water—I betook myself to a spot, half a mile up stream, where the creek is split by islets into three channels, and where a rude foot-bridge of logs affords a dry-shod passage. Here I was met by my friend with his mule, and in a few minutes rode to our wagon, beside which we found supper in an emigrant tent and lodging in several, and at four o’clock this morning harnessed up and drove into Denver—just three whole men out of a party of six, and all as weary and care-worn as need be, but all heartily gratified with our experience of three days in the Rocky Mountains.

XII. THE PLAINS—THE MOUNTAINS.

DENVER, _June 15, 1869_.

I know far greater contrasts than that between the region which stretches hundreds of miles eastward from this spot toward the Missouri, and is known as _The Plains_, and that which overlooks us on the west, and, alike by its abrupt and sharp-ridged foot-hills seeming just at hand, and its glittering peaks of snow in the blue distance, vindicates its current designation, _The Mountains_. Let me elucidate:

The plains are nearly destitute of human inhabitants. Aside from the buffalo-range—which has been steadily narrowing ever since Daniel Boone made his home in Kentucky, and is now hardly two hundred miles wide—it affords little sustenance and less shelter to man. The antelope are seldom seen in herds—three is the highest number I observed together, while one, or at most two, is a more common spectacle. One to each mile square would be a large estimate for all that exist on the plains. Elk are scarcely seen at all, even where they have hardly ever been hunted or scared. Of deer, there are none, or next to none. For the plains are the favorite haunt of beasts and birds of prey—of the ravenous and fearless gray-wolf, of the cayote, the raven, and the hawk—the first hanging on the flanks of every great herd of buffalo, ready to waylay any foolish calf or heedless heifer that may chance to stray for water or fresher grass beyond the protection of the hard-headed and chivalrous patriarchs, behind whose vigilant ranks there is comparative safety, and counting as their property any bull, even, whom wounds or disease or decrepitude shall compel to fall behind in the perpetual march. For, while a stray buffalo, or two, or three, may linger in some lonely valley for months—for all winter, perhaps—the great herds which blacken the earth for miles in extent cannot afford to do so—they are so immensely numerous and find their safety in traveling so compactly that they must keep moving or starve. Avoiding, so far as possible, the wooded ravines of the slender water-courses, where experience has taught them to dread the lance-like arrow of the lurking Indian, they keep to the high “divides,” or only feed in the valleys while they have these well covered by sentinel bulls to give warning of any foe’s approach. Take away the buffalo, and the plains will be desolate far beyond their present desolation; and I cannot but regard with sadness the inevitable and not distant fate of these noble and harmless brutes, already crowded into a breadth of country too narrow for them, and continually hunted, slaughtered, decimated, by the wolf, the Indian, the white man. They could have stood their ground against all in the absence of fire-arms, but “villainous salpeter” is too much for them. They are bound to perish; I trust it may be oftener by sudden shot than by slow starvation.

Wood and water—the prime necessities of the traveler as of the settler—are in adequate though not abundant supply for a hundred miles and more on this as they are throughout on the other side of the buffalo-range; at length they gradually fail, and we are in a desert indeed. No spring, no brook, for a distance of thirty to sixty miles (which would be stretched to more than a hundred[3] if the few tracks called roads were not all run so as to secure water so far as possible)—rivers which have each had fifty to a hundred miles of its course gradually parched up by force of sun and wind, and its waters lost in their own sands, so that the weary, dusty traveler vainly digs for hours in their dry beds in quest of drink for his thirsty cattle—rivers which dare not rise again till some friendly brook, having its source in some specially favored region, pours in its small but steady tribute, moistens the sands of the river-bed, and encourages its waters to rise to the surface again. In one case, an emigrant assures me that he dug down to the bed-rock of one of these rivers, yet found all dry sand.

Footnote 3:

Since writing the above, I learn by a newly arrived Pike’s Peaker that the waterless stretch of desert is already a hundred miles long, and that every day’s sun is extending it.

I know not that I can satisfactorily account, even to myself, for the destitution of wood which the Plains everywhere present, especially the western half of them. The poverty of the soil will not suffice, for these lands, when sufficiently moistened by rain or thawing snowdrifts, produce grass, and are not so sterile as the rocky hills, the pebbly knolls, of New England, which, nevertheless, produce wood rapidly and abundantly. On the Prairies of Illinois, Missouri, and eastern Kansas, the absence of wood is readily accounted for by the annual fires which, in autumn or spring, sweep over nearly every acre of dead grass, killing every tree-sprout that may have started up from scattered seeds or roots running from the timber in the adjacent ravine beneath the matted grass. But here are thousands of acres too poorly grassed to be swept by the annual fires—on which the thinly scattered reed-stalks and bunch-grass of last year shake dryly in the fierce night-winds—yet not a tree nor shrub relieves the tameness, the bareness, the desolation, of thousands after thousands of acres—not a twig, a scion, gives promise of trees that are to be. For a time, the narrow ravine or lowest intervale of the frequent streams were fairly timbered with cotton-wood, and low, sprawling elm, with a very little oak, or white-ash at long intervals intermixed; but these grew gradually thinner and feebler until nothing but a few small cotton-woods remained, and these skulking behind bluffs, or in sheltered hollows at intervals of twenty to forty miles. Once in ten or twenty miles, a bunch of dwarf willows, perhaps two feet high, would be found cowering in some petty basin washed out by a current of water many years ago; but these, like the cotton-woods, are happy if able to hold their own; indeed, I have seen much evidence that wood was more abundant on the Plains a hundred years ago than it now is. Dead cotton-woods, of generous proportions, lie in the channels of dry brooks on which no tree nor shrub now grows; and, at one or more stations of the express-company, near the sink of the Republican, they find dead pine eight miles up a creek, where no living pine has been seen for generations. I judge that the desert is steadily enlarging its borders and at the same time intensifying its barrenness.

The fierce drouth that usually prevails throughout the summer, doubtless contributes to this, but I think the violent and all but constant winds exert a still more disastrous potency. High winds are of frequent, all but daily, occurrence here, within a dozen miles of the great protecting bulwark of the Rocky Mountains; while, from a point fifty miles eastward of this, they sweep over the Plains almost constantly, and at times with resistless fury. A driver stated on our way up, with every appearance of sincerity, that he had known instances of tires being blown off from wagon-wheels by the tornados of the Plains; and, hard to swallow as that may seem, I have other and reliable assurance that, when the Missourians’ camp, on the express-road, was swept by a hurricane, five or six weeks ago, so that, after the wreck, but three decent wagons could be patched up out of their six, as I have already narrated, one of the wheel-tires was found not only blown off but nearly straightened out! There is almost always a good breeze at mid-day and after, on the Plains; but, should none be felt during the day, one is almost certain to spring up at sunset, and blow fiercely through the night. Thus, though hot days, or parts of days, are frequent on the Plains, I have experienced not even a moderately warm night. And thus trees are not; mainly because the winds uproot or dismember them, or so rock and wrench them while young, that their roots cannot suck up even the little nourishment that this soil of baking clay resting on porous sand would fain afford them. Thus the few shoots that cleave the surface of the earth soon wither and die, and the broad landscape remains treeless, cheerless, forbidding.