The hills grow dark,
On purple peaks a deeper shade descending;
In twilight copse the glow-worm lights her spark,
The deer, half-seen, are to the covert wending.
—Walter Scott.
The station at the western end of the cañon of the Gunnison is called Cimmaron after the river upon whose banks it stands. In the prehistoric days before the railway, this was Cline’s ranch, where all the stages from the Gunnison to the San Miguel region stopped. He was one of the few pioneers who got on well with the Indians, and his monument stands in the name of a peak down by Ouray.
From Cimmaron upward stretches one of the steepest grades between Denver and Salt Lake, in order to surmount Squaw Hill in the Cedar range,—the water-shed between the Cimmaron and the lower drainage of the Gunnison. Two locomotives drag us at a snail’s pace, struggling, puffing rapidly and spasmodically just as though their lungs were tortured by the rarity of the air. Their efforts suggest Pope’s line, and seem to beat time to it,—
“When Ajax strives, some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line, too, labors, and the words move slow.”