It was the Prospector who, with a courage sublime, attacked the granite forehead of the world, and proclaimed that, locked in the bosom of the Rocky Mountains, were silver and gold, for which men strive and die. He strode into the dark cañon where the sword of the Almighty had cleft the mountain chain, and climbed the rugged steeps where man had never trod before, and there, above and beyond the line that marked the farthest reach of the Bluebell and the Pine, he slept with the whisperings of God. His praises are unsung, but his deeds are recorded on every page that tells of the progress and glory of the West. He has for his home the grand mountains and verdant vales, whose wondrous beauty is beyond compare.
From the day the earth feels the first touch of spring, when the first flower blooms in the valley, all through the sunny summer time, when the hills hide behind a veil of heliotrope and a world of wild flowers; all through the hazy, dreamy autumn, this land of the Prospector is marvelously beautiful.
When the flowers fade, and all the land begins to lose its lustre; when the tall grass goes to seed and the winds blow brisker and colder from the west, there comes a change to the Alpine fields, bringing with it all the bright and beautiful colors of the butterfly, all the rays of the rainbow, all the burning brilliancy and golden glory of a Salt Lake sunset. Now, like a thief at night, the first frost steals from the high hills, touching and tinting the trees, biting and blighting the flowers and foliage. The helpless columbine and the blushing rose bend to the passionless kisses of the cold frost, and in the ashes of other roses their graves are made.
When the God of Day comes back, he sees upon the silent, saddened face of Nature the ruin wrought by the touch of Time. The leaves, by his light kept alive so long, are blushing and burning, and all the fields are aflame, fired by the fever of death. Even the winged camp robber screams and flies from the blasted fields where bloom has changed to blight, and the willows weep by the icy rills. All these wondrous changes are seen by the Prospector as he sits on a lofty mountain, where the autumn winds sigh softly in the golden aspen, shaking the dead leaves down among the withered grasses, gathering the perfume of the pines, the faint odor of the dying columbine and wafting them away to the lowlands and out o’er the waste of a sun-parched plain.
THE PROSPECTOR.
CHAPTER I.
BIRTHPLACE—SCHOOL DAYS—BOY LIFE ON THE FRONTIER—FAVORITE SPORTS.
FIFTY years and one ago, near Fort Wayne, Indiana, Nicholas C. Creede, the story of whose eventful life I shall attempt to tell you, first saw the light of day. When but four years old his parents removed to the Territory of Iowa, a country but thinly settled and still in the grasp of hostile tribes whose crimes, and the crimes of their enemies, have reddened every river from the Hudson to the Yosemite.
In those broad prairies, abounding with buffalo and wild game of every kind, began a career which, followed for a half century, written down in a modest way, will read like a romance.