“CAMPING WITH LADIES” AND—THE BABY.
Before the little narrow gauge engines of the Denver, South Park and Pacific with their trains of baby cars went thundering up through the cañons, reaching out for Leadville, the trouting in the Platte was prime. Following the sinuous track, first on one side of the river, then on the other, you can look out to the right and see your engine going west while your car is going east, then your engine starts east or north and you go south or west. Now you crane your neck to catch the top of some overhanging cliffs a thousand feet high, and are suddenly jerked around a curve into a little glade of a dozen acres with a little brook running through it; then you are as quickly yanked into another cañon. If one were drunk no doubt, the road would be straight. But thirty-five or forty miles from Denver the cañon grows familiar. Buffalo Creek comes tumbling out from the south, and presently the brakeman puts his head in at the door and shouts: “Pine Grove!” This is the Pine Grove known to travelers who go by rail, but the Pine Grove of twenty odd years ago was six miles away from the river, and the railroad Pine Grove was Brown and Stuart’s ranche, the owners of which drove a thrifty traffic in hay.
In August, 1868, I made acquaintance first with the pools and riffles in the vicinity of the old Brown and Stuart’s ranche. I clambered up and down the cañon for five or six miles east and west. The rush and the roar of the crystal waters made glorious music, and an hour’s fishing would send me laden back to camp. But for all the grand surroundings, the fresh air, the wild flowers and the trout, there was weariness of heart for her and me who made our camp on the margin of the then beautiful stream. There had a little while before crept over our threshold a shadow we all dread, and which had gone out again leaving a wound that would not heal.
But later on, when the cloud with the silver lining had turned a little of its brighter side our way, there came out to us one of your down-east girls, to whom the “Great American Desert” was a revelation, and these grand old mountains an epic. It was the season for camping, and she was stricken with the mania at once. She approached the subject tenderfootedly, but being assured that nothing was easier, nothing better for city folks, ecstacy was the consequence. Then there suddenly arose an insurmountable barrier.
“What will you do with the Governor?”
“Take him along, of course.”
“What! baby sleep in a tent? Be eaten by mosquitoes, rained on and bitten by snakes?”
The prospect was appalling; but then I assured her that fresh air never hurt babies; that mosquitoes were unknown, in August, at least; that rain was such a rarity that I was compelled to go to the creek for moisture, and as for snakes, the rattlers, at least, they never got beyond the foot hills; the little gart—a-hem—striped snakes were pleasant to have around, and were cleaner than flies. Besides it was confidently anticipated that baby was about to distinguish himself, and there was no panacea so efficacious for teething babies as the mountain air. That settled it.
The first thing to be looked after was the mess kit—known among the cow-boys as the “chuck box.” Mine would fit neatly into the tail end of a wagon; was about two feet and a half from top to bottom, and about twelve inches deep; had racks for cups, saucers, plates, knives and forks, and plenty of room for two weeks’ supplies of flour and other necessaries. When we wanted to lunch it was an easy matter to drop the tail gate of the wagon, let down the side of the mess kit, and we had a good table; the whole thing was as handy as a pocket in a shirt, and its capacity marvelous. An ordinary lumber wagon with spring seats, an A tent, 7 × 7, for the women folks, plenty of rubber ponchos, a change of clothing, wool, of course, all round. All together making an abundance for comfort, and a light load with which the horses could trot along and not half try.
About the hour that Hamlet’s father was wont to render himself up to “sulphurous and tormenting flames,” we were astir, and before the sun was up we were away. Fifteen miles to the foot hills and Turkey Creek cañon. Towards noon the sun beats down hotly on the plains, and I always make it a point to get to the cañon by ten o’clock at the outside. And this morning we passed Harriman’s before ten, and from our shelf on the mountain side we could look out east till plains and sky came together.
Down below us, on the left, six or eight hundred feet, the little creek looked about as wide as one’s finger. The road is fairly wide enough for the wagon, with here and there a “turn out,” to accommodate passing teams. To the right a perpendicular wall running up a hundred feet; to the left—well, our visitor said she was tired of riding and would like to walk a little; the road was smooth as a floor, and the grade easy. I suggested that horses rarely cut up capers in such places, but the effect of a wrecked wagon and the remains of a mule lodged against a granite boulder half way down the mountain was not to be overcome by any assurance of mine; and walk she did; so did the baby’s mother and maid, taking turns in carrying his majesty for a couple of miles. Not having any hills to climb the inconvenience is not so great; but, take a twenty-five pound youngster in your arms, at an elevation of, say nine thousand feet, and undertake to walk up hill; a half mile seems twenty, and at the end of three-quarters you want to lie down, wondering if your lungs are larger than the universe. But like everything else in this life, it becomes easy when you get used to it.
Our first objective point on this trip was Reed’s Mill, about thirty miles from home. No trout, but wild raspberries, now in their prime. Did you ever eat any? If not, the first one you put on your tongue will make you “wish your throat a mile long and every inch a palate,” with accessible untold acres of berries. There is about them a tenderness and luscious delicacy, a fragrance and even beauty, that makes a cultivated brother look and taste in comparison like a combination of mucilage and sawdust. The “Shepherd” thought when Tom Moore was penning his Loves of the Angels, that he “fed upon calf foot jeelies, stewed prunes, the dish they ca’ curry, and oysters.” But I don’t believe it. Tom was in America once, and I believe he strayed this way, and was inspired by mountain raspberries, with cream so thick “a spider might crawl on’t.” I do not believe Tom was so much of an animal as Hogg, by his wit, would make him.
But the fruit season is brief, and three or four days in the berry patch set me yearning for running waters, and the delicate salmon-colored fins. So we broke camp and turned into the road for Pine Grove and the Platte. By five o’clock we were fixed to stay, with plenty of pine knots for the camp fire and quaking asp to cook with, our only neighbors a couple of “English cousins,” owners of the ranche, from whom we could get cream, and butter and milk, and who helped make our evenings “jolly.”
Everything being in trim for the proper conducting of household matters, I received orders to “catch a mess for supper.” Right in front of our tent, two rods away, a gravelly bar reached from the bank to the water, and the opposite side, fifty feet about, the river ran deep and rapidly. I had never failed securing a trophy from that swirl, and I sent a gray hackle on its mission as near the opposite willows, and as deftly as my skill would permit. I “struck it rich” the first cast; the fraud had barely touched the water before I saw the jaws of a beautiful trout close upon it, and felt his strength at the same instant. Since last summer’s experience I have wished more than once that I had been on that occasion the owner of a split bamboo. As it was, the sport resolved itself into a mere trial of strength between tackle and fish. In three seconds he was ignominiously snaked out on the beach, a three-pound trout, the largest I have ever caught, and enough for supper.
The whole family had “swarmed up” the bank, as Dickens would say, to enjoy my discomfiture, but the contemplated taunts were never given breath. I stood in my tracks and landed three more, and, will heart of man believe it? they complained because the three last were not as large as the first. But my merit was established; when I came home empty handed, which was hard to do, any explanation of mine was “confirmation, strong as proof of holy writ,” that the trout would not rise for anything. So much for reputation! I wonder how many fellows there are in the world who enjoy it who are no more deserving than I?
One morning I started down the stream; it was my birthday, and though nothing had been said about that momentous epoch in my history, I felt it incumbent upon me to achieve something out of the ordinary. I did. I fell off a log, head first, into a hole four feet deep. Cold? well, yes! I thought I had struck a moderate sized Arctic winter. But there was no one “there to see,” and I uttered my benison on the man who invented the sun, as I crawled out to the warmth of our daily servant and friend. My creel was not empty and I saved everything, even my temper. When I got back to camp, she who had taken “the long path with me” suggested that I was wet, that an immediate change of garments was imperative. But, having an exasperating disposition to stubbornness, I insisted that every thread must dry where it was, and it did, without even a sneeze, to punish me for not taking a woman’s advice. I had been there before.
It was determined that baby and I should tend camp for half an hour or so that afternoon, while the three natural guardians wandered off to the adjacent hillside for wild flowers wherewith to deck the tea-table. This was no new business to us. The young man with a pillow at his back, seated in the middle of a blanket rubbing his face with a teaspoon; I lying prone three feet away with my toes beating an occasional tattoo on the soft sward, my chin in my hands and brier-root between my teeth, watching him. There was a bright light in his eyes, and his cheeks were rosy, soft as velvet, yet firm and cool. What is there like the touch of a baby’s cheek pressed against your own! You must turn and kiss it, just as you did its mother’s the first time you had a right to. But is there anything more ridiculous in life than to see a baby attempt to put a spoon into his mouth before he has got the knack of it? See him hit himself in the eye with it, pretty much as a drunken man would knock a fly off his nose; smear it down his face, with his mouth wide open and turned up like a young robin’s, but it misses the place on the way down; he takes it with both chubby fists, looks at it with dignified surprise, as though for the first time aware of its presence, lets go one hand, whacks the spoon against his ear and drags it across his cheek with the same result. But persistence is characteristic of this baby, a quiet determination that has something appalling about it. If there were any raspberry jam on that spoon his face would look worse than a railroad map of the State of New York. Finally, and as it would seem, after all, more by accident than design, the spoon reaches the right place; he twists it round to the distortion of his rosebud mouth; then he looks at me, sees me laughing; the fun seems to dawn upon him; he takes the spoon out of his mouth, pounds the blanket with it, and smiles back at me, and the smile resolves itself into a well-defined laugh.
The sun has just disappeared behind the range, but there is a mellow ray of golden light that lingers about the baby’s head that makes me think—think of the one so like him, and from the base of the hill, with her hands full of wild flowers, the tallest of the three starts toward me, and I remember only the sunshine of the long path.
But I forgot to tell you about my camp stove: it is a piece of sheet iron, eighteen inches square, with a hole in the centre, eight inches in diameter; set upon four stones, it makes a first-class stove.
