But the Parisians of Colorado are not blind to the summer joys of the wonderful country that lies aroundabout them. They quickly become mountaineers, in the full sense of the word. They can ride—and read riding not as merely cantering in the park but as sitting all day in the saddle of some cranky broncho—they can build fires, cook and live in the open. A Denver society woman is as particular about her khakias as about her evening frocks. When these folk, experienced and well-schooled, go off up into the great hills, they are the envy of all the tourists.
Do not forget that we started by showing Denver as a mecca for these folk. When you come to see how very well the Paris of America takes care of them you do not wonder that they return to her—many times; that they are with her more or less the entire year round. Her hotels are big and they are exceedingly well run. There are more side trips than a tourist can take, using the city as a base of operations, than a man might physically use in a month. The most of these run off into the mountains that have been standing sentinel over Denver since first she was born. In a day you can leave the bustling capital town, pass the foothills of the Rockies and climb fourteen thousand feet aloft to the very backbone of the continent. Indeed, it seems to be the very roof of the world when you stand on a sentinel peak and look upon timber line two thousand feet below, where the trees in another of Nature's great tragedies finally cease their vain attempts to climb the mountain tops.
A man recommended one of the mountain trips over a wonderfully constructed railroad, poetically called the "Switzerland Trail."
"You'll like that trip," he said, with the enthusiasm of the real Denverite. "It's wonderful, and such a railroad! Why, there are thirty-two tunnels between here and the divide."
The tourist to whom this suggestion was made looked up—great scorn upon his countenance.
"That doesn't hit me," he growled, "not even a little bit. I live in New York—live in Harlem, to be more like it, and work down in Wall street—use the subway twelve times a week. I don't have to come to Colorado to ride in tunnels."
A broad arch spans Seventeenth Street and bids you welcome to Denver
Tourists form no small portion of Denver industry. She has restaurants and souvenir shops, three to a block; seemingly enough high-class hotels for a town three times her size. Yet the restaurants and the hotels are always filled, the little shops smile in the sunshine of brisk prosperity. And as for "rubberneck wagons," Denver has as many as New York or Washington. They are omnipresent. The drivers take you to the top of the park system, to the Cheesman Memorial, to see the view. All the time you are letting your eyes revel in the glories of those great treeless mountains, the megaphone man is dinning into your ears the excellence of his company's trips in Colorado Springs, in Manitou, in Salt Lake City. He assumes that you are a tourist and that you will have never had enough.
Tourists become a prosperous industry in a town that has no particular manufacturing importance. Great idle plants, the busy smelters of other days, bespeak the truth of that statement. Denver, as far as she has any commercial importance, is a distributing center. Her retail shops are excellent and her wholesale trade extends over a dozen great western states. Her banks are powers, her influence long reaching. But she is not an industrial city.