Peak and Prairie / From a Colorado Sketch-book

THE PEAK WAS SUPERB THAT MORNING, BIG AND STRONG AND GLITTERING WITH SNOW.
TO ONE TO WHOM I OWE COLORADO AND MUCH BESIDES THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED

The sketches of Colorado life which make up this volume are little more than hints and suggestions caught from time to time by a single observer in a comparatively narrow field of observation. Narrow as the field is, however, it offers a somewhat unusual diversity of scene; for that most charming of health resorts known in these pages as Springtown, is the chance centre of many varying interests. In its immediate vicinity exists the life of the prairie ranch on the one hand and that of the mining-camp on the other; while dominating all as it were—town, prairie, and mountain fastness—rises the great Peak which has now for so many years been the goal of pilgrimage to men and women from the Eastern States in pursuit of health, of fortune, or of the free, open-air life of the prairie. If, from acquaintance with these fictitious characters set in a very real environment, the reader be led to form some slight impression of the stirring little drama which is going forward to-day in that pleasant Land of Promise, he will have incidentally endorsed the claim of these disconnected sketches to be regarded as a single picture.
May, 1894.

Note.—Of the thirteen sketches included in this volume six have previously appeared in periodicals, as follows:
A Pilgrim in the Far West in Harper's Weekly ; Brian Boru in Worthington's Magazine ; Jake Stanwood's Gal and At the Keith Ranch in The Century Magazine ; The Rumpety Case in Lippincott's Magazine ; and An Amateur Gamble in Scribner's Magazine . They were, however, all prepared with reference to their final use as a consecutive series.
A. F.