[to be continued.]
[THE BABYHOOD OF DENVER.]
BY JULIAN RALPH.
The first cabin in any part of what is now Denver, the capital of Colorado, was that of a hunter and trader, and is thought to have been an Indian's old tepee. It stood in what is now West Denver in 1857. To that neighborhood, in the early summer of 1858, came a party of Georgia men headed by a leader named Green Russell, and hunting for gold on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains. It had been said that some white men had found gold there nine years before, and that three years later some Indians also found a little. Later still a party of traders actually carried some "pay dirt" from there to their homes in Missouri. "Pay dirt," the reader should know, is any form of rock or earth or sand that contains sufficient gold to pay for working it.
Green Russell and his men arrived in June, 1858. If we stop a moment to consider these true founders of Denver, we shall see that they add a new picture to the varied, highly colored gallery of paintings that make the true pictorial history of the growth of our country. We have seen the stolid, dignified Dutchmen sail into New York Harbor with their swords, banners, queer old flint-lock guns, and quaint long pipes. We have seen the grave Puritans assemble in Massachusetts with their sober garments, their stern faces, and their muskets and Bibles carried side by side. We have seen the gorgeously dressed servants of the kings of France and Spain at their work of founding New Orleans, having their wives sent to them in ships, to make their acquaintance and be their wives after they got there. And at St. Louis we came upon the same sort of men who built up Canada—rough, brave boatmen in furs, singing and dancing, and throwing away their money that they earned in pathless forests and in savage Indian camps. When we came to study the birth of Helena, Montana, we saw upon the canvas of history the veteran gold-miner, old at the business, leaving one camp when it ceased to pay, and roaming all over the mountains, with, sharp, ferretlike eyes that saw no beauties in nature—nothing but the dull rocks and the sand in the beds of the streams where gold might be found. Rough, long-haired, bearded, dressed in whatever they could get, these "prospectors" clambered over the mountains, leaving many cities behind them that did not exist until they started them.
And now, at the birth of Denver, we see the life of the immigrants on the plains. We see the caravans of "prairie-schooners," crossing the continent like flights of brown moths, and settling a city as winged things light on a field or on a bed of flowers that offers food. They were miners, or were led by miners, but they were not yet veterans of the far Western type. They were closely followed by absolute strangers to the business—Eastern folk who wanted to pick up gold between their feet. Therefore the newest part of the picture is the life in the caravans of "prairie-schooners."
These were strong four-wheeled wagons, drawn by horses, and covered with canvas tops drawn over a series of half-hoops. In these wagons were beds, clothing, stoves, cooking and eating and drinking utensils, and women, children, and whatever invalid men there were in the train. I could not tell you fairly, in such a short article as this, a tenth part of the general experiences of the people who built up the West by travelling in these trains before the railroads came. Peril surrounded them—peril in many shapes. They were attacked by Indians. They dodged the savages, they fought them, they whipped them or were massacred. They crossed rivers and swollen streams without bridges. They crossed the plains through fearful heat or still more fearful cold. They found no water, or water unfit to drink. They fell sick, they died; cholera overtook some of them, chasing after them all the way from Asia. Their horses were stolen or died or broke down. Their food ran out. There was enough adventure in the journey to fill a lifetime—even to fill an extraordinary lifetime.
DENVER IN ITS EARLY YOUTH.
Those who reached Denver were a ragged, dust-grimed, tired-out lot, with worn horses, battered wagons, and no immediate desire except to fling themselves on the ground beside the Platte River, in the shade of the cottonwoods, and rest. Stop a moment to think of the courage and condition of those others who went all the way to Oregon! Their courage passes belief. Well, Green Russell and his Georgia men built a hut of logs, and roofed it with mud. When the rain fell it dropped on the roof as water, but it came through the roof as mud. The hut stood by that of the trader, where West Denver stands now. A third hut was built by one Ross Hutchins, and the row or street or village was called Indian Row. Gold was found in the nearby creek, and Russell took some back to Georgia to coax more of his people out to the new camp.
Then there came a party of twenty persons from Lawrence, Kansas. All of Colorado was then Kansas. These new-comers went three miles farther up the river, and washed the sand for gold at a village of their own, which they called Montana. That was in midsummer. In September of the same year, 1858, some of the Georgia men—or perhaps some outsiders—organized a town where East Denver is now, and called it St. Charles. They drew up formal organization papers, and then, not knowing what to do with them, filed them with themselves. A month later the Georgians established at Indian Row, now West Denver, formally turned that queer little pin-point on the map into a town, which they called Auraria. A store was added to the village very quickly, and one of the merchants who opened it is alive in Denver to-day. Remember that all this was only a little more than thirty years ago, when some of my readers would have called Mr. Gladstone an old man. Prince Bismarck was fifty years old when this happened.
St. Charles village was a failure, and the founders of Montana soon moved away and joined Auraria. Then came some men, such as are called "hustlers" in the West, and they went to work in mighty earnest to make a city of St. Charles. They agreed that each should build a house, and in less than fifty days (by January, 1859) there were twenty houses standing. They named the place Denver, using the name of an ex-Governor of Kansas Territory, and they gave the town a full set of officials. Then began a great rivalry between Denver and Auraria. Auraria seemed to get the business places. The merchants went there, and there Mr. William N. Byers established the first newspaper—the Rocky Mountain News. He and the paper are both active to-day. But little Denver captured the express company when it came, and that ended the rivalry, for all communication with civilization was had through the express company. In 1860 the two towns became one, and were called Denver.
It was in 1859 that the prairie-schooners going to Denver most nearly resembled great swarms of moths. There had been a money panic in the United States, and hard times followed. This led to a rush for the new gold-fields. The truth was that there was not gold enough to pay the crowds for coming, but two remarkable events happened. In the first place, a miner named Gregory, who had been drifting about in the West, happened just then to come upon rich "diggings" not far away. The people came from the East as in a stampede. Some heard that the finding of gold was a hoax, and turned back to go home, meeting other thousands on their way to the diggings. In the East no one knew what to believe; but just then three newspaper men—Horace Greeley, the great editor, Henry Villard, and A. D. Richardson—arrived in this region, investigated the new diggings, and wrote an account of them for all the world to read. They told how a great many miners were making a great deal of money, and how a much greater number were not finding any gold at all. Then they warned the public not to come in such great numbers. I will repeat in substance what they wrote, as it makes a picture of the surroundings of Denver when it was a tiny baby city.
They said they found 5000 persons in the ravine called Gregory's Diggings. Hundreds poured in daily, and they passed tens of thousands hurrying to the place. For all of these provisions must be carted from the Missouri River, 700 miles, over mere trails, across unbridged streams that were steep banked, miry, or swollen by rains. Part of the way to the Diggings (and to Denver) was across a desert, with wood and grass very scanty and miles apart. To try to cross this desert on foot was madness, suicide, murder. To cross it with teams was only possible to those who knew the way to find grass and water. In early autumn the Diggings would be snowed under and frozen up. Then for six months there would not be work, food, or shelter within 500 miles for the army of men who were fooled into thinking that gold could be picked up like pebbles at the sea-shore. This sensible report did vast good in moderating the rush. There was great misery and hardship, nevertheless, but gold continued to be found, and many towns sprang up around Denver, which became the main city or metropolis of the region. For a time the people called the region Jefferson Territory, though the Kansas people claimed the district around Denver. The people established a territorial government in this way as early as 1859, and in February, 1861, Congress legally established the Territory, and called it Colorado. After that, with many reverses and hardships, the place grew steadily as a city, and as a capital not only of Colorado, but of the whole country between the mountains and the Eastern frontier. It is a beautiful city. It is actually on the plains, and yet at that point the plains are nearly a mile in the air—above the sea-level. This makes the city a great health resort, and brings to it so many Eastern people of wealth and refinement that they have been able to give Denver a great deal of the character of an Eastern city. It is modern, enterprising, and very beautiful. It is full of lovely homes and magnificent hotels, public buildings, theatres, stores, and office structures. It has almost 150,000 population.
DENVER TO-DAY.
I could have gone far back of the birth of Denver to show how the Spaniards explored Colorado before the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock. It was in 1541 that Vasquez Coronado entered Colorado with his little army, coming from Mexico. In the year of our Revolutionary war a Spanish priest journeyed toward California, sprinkling southern Colorado with the pretty Spanish names now borne by the rivers and mountains and valleys. The immediate neighborhood of Denver came to us in 1804 by the Louisiana Purchase, and two years later Lieutenant Zebulon Pike explored the region. In 1819 Major Stephen S. Long started upon a second exploring expedition that led him literally to the site of Denver, where he camped in July, 1820. Twenty-three years later John C. Fremont, "the Pathfinder," came that way, and found several Indian traders established along the Platte. In 1847 the hardy, enthusiastic Mormons passed over this ground on their way to establish themselves in Utah. It is said, too, that Francis Parkman, the historian, built a camp close to or on the site of Denver when he made his famous journey in 1846. And yet it seems to me that none of these events connects itself so closely with the birth of Denver as the expedition of the gold-hunters from Georgia.
[IN THE BARN.]
Whenever there's a rainy day
They send us to the barn to play
From after lunch till supper-time.
And there they let us run and climb
And tumble in the hay and straw—
Such funny tricks you never saw!
We overhaul the piles of junk,
We open every battered trunk,
And every corner we explore
As if we'd never searched before;
We play at burglars or at thieves,
And crawl along beneath the eaves,
Or else we are a garrison
Besieged, outnumbered ten to one,
And from the windows we repel
The foe that hides beyond the well.
And sometimes, if there's no one by
(If John has gone down to the sty
Or to the pasture for the cow,
Or—if John's absent, anyhow),
We take old Dobbin from the stall—
Which we ought never do at all—
And play at circus, while the horse
Plods around a ring, of course,
With one of us upon his back;
Another makes the long whip crack;
A third—the lucky one—is clown;
And all the girls have to sit down
On seats that have been put about,
And they must clap their hands and shout.
Oh, circus is the greatest fun!
When John goes out, it's always done.
Albert Lee.