Just east of the Grand are the finest cliffs of all,—great piles of ponderous masonry, fit for the bulwarks of a world, each massive block, a hundred feet or so square, set firmly upon its underlying tier, and the whole rising two or three thousand feet in majestic proportions and colors that please by their softness and harmony. Past these we roll slowly out upon the longest bridge in the state—950 feet—spanning the swift yellow flood of the Grand river just above where the Gunnison enters, and find ourselves at Grand Junction.
XXXI
THE GRAND RIVER VALLEY.
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in Paradise was more favorably situated, on the whole, than a backwoodsman in this country.
—Thoreau.
A very honest little circular—quite a phenomenon among prospectuses—had come into our hands, which gave in terse language the claims that Grand Junction made to the notice of the world and upon the attention of the man who was looking for a place of residence in western Colorado. This honest little circular, toward its end, contains the following paragraph:
We desire, however, to inform all eastern people who may be thinking of coming west, that, while this is one of the most productive valleys in Colorado, it is anything but this in appearance now. Excepting along the banks of the streams or near them, there is probably not a tree to be seen in the valley, unless it was planted since the valley was settled, or within the past eighteen months. The soil has a dull grayish appearance, with hardly a blade of grass growing in it for several miles back from the river, and it produces naturally only sagebrush and greasewood. It is uninviting and desolate looking in the extreme, and yet it is far from being so in reality. We are thus explicit in speaking of the desolate appearance of the country, so that no homesick wanderer in this far-off western land will say when his heart fails him in looking over our valley, that he has been deceived, and that all that has been said of Grand Junction and its surrounding country is a delusion and a snare. If the reader of this lives in the east, he will almost surely be disappointed at first, if he comes out here. It will be the disappointment of ignorance though, for it is only a man who is ignorant of the productiveness of this country who will refuse to believe what is said of it in this respect.
That paragraph put us upon our metal. We were eastern people undoubtedly, but then we had seen “a heap” of Colorado, and the word “ignorance,” we would not confess applied in our case. It was therefore with no little curiosity, and something of a resolution to be pleased anyhow (since we had been told we might not be,) that we detached our peripatetic home and slipped into a resting-place upon the customary siding. The glow of the sunset filled the valley with a blaze of yellow light, and the mesas wore chevrons of indigo shadow and pink light to the northward, while the scarred bluffs across the Grand reflected the last rays from burning crests of red sandstone. Weary with travel we threw open our doors, brushed and dusted and bathed, while the kitchen was busy, and then sat down to dinner in the cool soft air of the twilight. When it was over a multitude of twinkling lights alone showed where the town lay, and so we left until morning learning more about it.