You have long ago turned away from the river’s yellow sand flats, and you watch that slowly rising snow-topped rim, until—it may be gradually, or it may be suddenly—your heart is thrilled by the sublimity of the amazing contrast of mountain upon plain.
Perhaps you may merely find dullness in the endlessly flat, unvarying monotonous land; perhaps you are unwilling to be enthralled by Titanic cones of rock or snow. But steep your sight for days in flatness, until you think the whole width of the world has melted into a never-ending sea of land, and then see what the drawing close to those most sublime of mountains does to you!
And afterwards, when you have actually climbed to their knees or shoulders, and look back upon the endless plains, you forget the wearying journey and feel keenly the beauty of their very endlessness. The ever-changing effect of light and shadow over that boundless expanse weaves an enchanted spell upon your imagination that you can never quite recover from. Sometimes the prairies are a great sea of mist; sometimes they are a parched desert; sometimes they are blue like the waves of an enchanted sapphire sea; sometimes they melt into a plain of vaporous purple mystery, and then the clouds shift away from the sun and you see they are a width of the world, of land.
But however or whenever you look out upon them, you feel as though mean little thoughts, petty worries, or skulking gossip whispers, could never come into your wind-swept mind again. That if you could only live with such vastness of outlook before you, perhaps your own puny heart and mind and soul might grow into something bigger, simpler, worthier than is ever likely otherwise.
And now I am getting quite over my head, so better climb down the mountains again and go back to the motor, which may be supposed to have reached Cheyenne.
If you think Cheyenne is a Buffalo Bill Wild West town, as we did, you will be much disappointed, though it may be well not to show the progressive citizens of that up-to-date city that you hoped they were still galloping along wooden sidewalks howling like coyotes!
I thought that Celia and E. M. looked distinctly grieved at the sight of smooth laid asphalt, wide-paved sidewalks, imposing capitol and modern buildings. Even the brand-new Plains Hotel was accepted by both of them in much the same spirit that a child who thought it was going to the circus and found itself at a museum of art, would accept the compensation of a nice hot supper instead of peanuts and red lemonade.
Wyoming in the Ranch Country
Unfortunately we had no friends in Cheyenne and therefore never got so far as even the threshold of society, but the following account taken from the morning paper is irrefutable evidence that Cheyenne, far from being a wild town of border outlawry, is a center of refined elegance and fashion: