RIDING DOWN A MOUNTAIN.
GUNNISON CITY is one of the peculiarities of a mining boom. It spreads out and slops over the plain like a huge camp meeting, but without shape or beauty.
The plains there are red and sandy; the trees are not nearer than the foot-hills; and the city, which claims 5,000 inhabitants, though 3,000 would, no doubt, be more accurate, is composed of a wide area of ground, with scattering houses that look lonely in the midst of the desolation. Mining in Colorado, this season, has not advanced with the wonderful impetus which characterized it in previous years. Wherever you go, you hear first one reason, and then another, why good mines are not being worked. There is trouble among the stock-holders; a game of freeze out; lack of capital to put in proper machinery, or excessive railroad freights, to pay which virtually paralyzes the reduction of ore owned by men too poor to erect the expensive works necessary to the realization of profit from the mines.
Returning from Gunnison City, now, you rise at a rate of over 200 feet to the mile, zig-zagging up the almost perpendicular mountain, near the summit of which is the Alpine tunnel. As you near the tunnel, there is a perpendicular and sometimes even a jutting wall above you, hundreds of feet at your right, while far below you, on your left, is a yellow streak, which at first you take to be an old mountain trail, but which you soon discover is the circuitous track over which you have just come.
Near here, while the road was being built, a fine span of horses balked on the grade, and like all balky horses, proceeded to back off the road. The owner got out of the wagon, and told them they could keep that thing up if they wanted to, but he could not endorse their policy. They kept backing off until the wagon went over the brink, and then there was a little scratching of loose stones, the kaleidoscope of legs and hoofs, a little rush and rumble, and the world was wealthier by one less balky team. The owner never went down to see where they went to, or how they lit. He was afraid they would not survive their injuries, so he did not go down there. Later, the carrion crows and turkey buzzards indicated where the refractory team had landed; and deep in the mountain gorge the white bones lie amid the wreck of a lumber wagon, as monuments of equine folly.
On Saturday evening we had the pleasure of riding down the dizzy grade from Hancock, a distance of eighteen miles, at which time we descended a mile perpendicularly in a push car, with Superintendent Wilbur as conductor and engineer. A push car is a plain flat-car, about as big as a dining-table, with four wheels, and nothing to propel it but gravity, and nothing to stop it but a sharpened piece of two-by-four scantling. Hancock is near the Alpine tunnel, at the summit of the mountains, about 11,000 feet high. Secretary Morgan, Mrs. Morgan, with their little daughter Gertrude; E. A. Slack, of the Sun, Frank Clark, of the Leader, Superintendent Wilbur and ourself, constituted the party.
At first everybody was a little nervous with the accumulating velocity of the car, and the yawning abyss below us; but later we got more accustomed to it, and the solemn grandeur of the green pine-covered canons, the lofty snow-covered peaks, apparently so near us; and the rushing, foaming torrent far below us, were all we saw. Like lightning we rounded the sharp curves where the road seemed to hang over instant destruction, and we held our breath as we thought that, like Dutch Charlie and other great men, only a piece of two-by-four scantling stood between us and death.
Again and again the abrupt curve loomed up ahead, and below us, while we flew along the narrow gauge at such a pace that we were almost sure the car would, leave the track before it would round such a point, and each time the two-by-four went down on the drive wheel with a pressure that sent up volumes of blue smoke.
It was a wild, grand ride—so wild and grand in fact that even yet we wake up at night with a start from a dream in which the same party is riding down that canon at lightning speed, and Mr. Wilbur, in a thoughtless moment, has dropped his pine brake overboard!
Shades of Sam Patch, but wouldn't it scatter the average excurter over southern Colorado if such a thing should happen some day! Why, the woods would be full of them, and for years to come, the prospector along Chalk Creek Canon would find pyrites of editorial poverty, and indications of collar buttons, and fragments of Archimedean levers, and other mementoes of the great editorial hegira of 1882.