PIKE’S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS
(UNITED STATES)
IZA DUFFUS HARDY
Colorado Springs—so called because the springs are at Manitou, five miles off, is a prairie town on a plateau six thousand feet high, above which Pike’s Peak stands sentinel, lifting his snow-capped head fourteen thousand feet into the clear depths of azure light, in which no fleck of cloud floats from morn to night and night to morn again. It is April, and not a drop of rain has fallen since the previous August. Mid-April, and not a leaf upon a tree. Not a flower or a bird seems to flourish here. No spring-blossom scents the keen fresh life-giving air; no warbler soars high up into the stainless sapphire sky. The leafless cottonwood trees stand out white in the flood of sunlight like trees of silver, their delicate bare branches forming a shining tangle of silvery network against that intense blue background.
The place all looks bleak and barren to us; the wild grandeur of the mountains is unrelieved by the rich shadows of the pine forests or the sunny green glints of meadows that soften Alpine scenery. No flower gardens, no smiling valleys, no velvet turf, no fragrant orchards, no luxuriant hedge rows; only the lonely mountain range, the crowning height of Pike’s Peak stern and solitary in his icy exaltation, and the dead level of the prairie, stretching away eastward for hundreds and hundreds of miles, declining always at a gradual and imperceptible angle till it slopes down to the very banks of the great Mississippi, over a thousand miles away.
But, although the spot does not seem altogether a Paradise to us, it is a veritable Eden for consumptive invalids. Here they come to find again the lost angel of Health, and seldom seek again, unless they come too late. People live here who can live nowhere else. They long to return to their far-off homes; but home to them means death. They must live in this Colorado air, or die. There is a snake in the grass of this Eden, where they have drunk the elixir of a new life, and its name is Nostalgia. They long—some of them—for the snowy winters and flowery summers of their eastern homes. Others settle happily and contentedly in the endless sunshine of winterless, summerless Colorado.
THE GARDEN OF THE GODS.
We rattled along cheerily in our light spring-waggon over the smooth, fine roads, viewing the landscape from beneath the parasols which only partially shielded us from the blazing sun. Although the gentleman from Tennessee preserved a truly western taciturnity, our driver beguiled the way with instructive and amusing converse. He pointed out to us, flourishing by the wayside, the soap-weed, whose root is a perfect substitute for soap, and taught us to distinguish between the blue joint-grass—yellow as hay in winter, but now taking on its hue of summer green—and the greyish neutral-tinted buffalo-grass, which is most succulent and nutritious, although its looks belie it, for a less tempting-looking herb I never had the pleasure of seeing. He also pointed out the dead body of a cow lying on a desolate plain, and informed us it would dry up to a mummy in no time; it was the effect of the air; dead cattle speedily mummified, and were no nuisance. Another dried-up bovine skeleton bore witness to the truth of his assertion.
We observed that the soil looked barren as desert sand; but he replied that it only required irrigation to be extremely fertile, showed us the irrigating ditches cut across the meadows, and described to us some of the marvellous productions of Colorado—a single cabbage-head weighing forty pounds, etc. He told us of the wondrous glories of the Arkansas cañon and the Mount of the Holy Cross—which, alas! we were not to see, the roads thither being as yet rough travelling for ladies. He sang the praises of the matchless climate, and the joys of the free, healthful life, far from the enervating and deteriorating influences of great cities. Indeed, it appeared from his conversation that nowhere on the face of the habitable globe could there be found any spot even remotely emulating the charms of Colorado—an opinion shared by every Coloradian with whom we held any intercourse.
Our way then led up the Ute Pass, once, in days not so far back frequented by the Ute Indians. Now, not an Indian is to be seen for miles; they have all been swept back on to a reservation, and the story of the Ute outbreak there of the past autumn is yet fresh in the minds of all. The Ute Pass is a winding, uphill road along the side of a deep cañon, the rocks here and there overhanging it threateningly, and affording a welcome shade from the piercing sun-rays, which follow us even here. The steep walls of the cañon are partly clothed and crowned with pine-trees, and along its depths a rapid, sparkling stream bubbles and leaps over the rocks and boulders.
Up the pass a waggon-train is toiling on its way to the great new mining centre—the giant baby city—Leadville, the youngest and most wonderful child of the prolific west! In this train we get entangled, and move slowly along with it—waggons and cattle before us, waggons and cattle behind us—tourists, teamsters, miners, drivers, drovers, dogs, all huddled together in seemingly inextricable confusion.
At the top of the pass, we tourists turn: and, while the waggon-train plods on its slow way, we make the best of our way back down the hill, and take the road to the Garden of the Gods.
Why the Garden of the Gods? I do not myself perceive the appropriateness of the appellation. There is not a flower in sight; only a few stunted shrubs, and forlorn-looking, thin trees. It is a natural enclosure, of fifty or more acres, such as in Colorado is called a “park,” scattered with rocks of a rich red hue, and the wildest and most grotesque shapes imaginable.
The giants might have made it their playground, and left their playthings around them. Here, tossed and flung about as if by a careless hand, lie the huge round boulders with which they played at ball. Here they amused themselves by balancing an immense mass of stone on a point so cunningly that it has stood there for centuries looking as if a touch would overturn it. There they have hewn a high rock into the rough semblance of a veiled woman—here they have sculptured a man in a hat—there piled up a rude fortress, and there built a church.
But the giants have deserted their playground ages ago, and trees have grown up between the fantastic formations they left. It is a strange weird scene, and suggested to us forcibly that if we would “view it aright” we should
“Go view it by the pale moonlight!”
How spectral those strange shapes would look in the gloom! What ghostly life would seem to breathe in them when the white moonbeams bathed their eerie outlines in her light! There is a something lost in the Garden of the Gods to us who only saw it with a flood of sunshine glowing on its ruddy rocks. Most of these have been christened according to their form—the Nun, the Scotchman, the Camel, and so on.
Two huge walls of red and white stone, rising perpendicularly a sheer three hundred feet, form the gate of the Garden. Through this colossal and for-ever-open gate we looked back with a sigh of farewell—our glimpse of the scene seemed so brief!—and we half-fancied that the veiled Nun bowed her dark head in the sunshine in parting salute as we were whirled out of sight.
Between Two Oceans, or Sketches of American Travel (London, 1884).