Now the whole of these mines and trials for a mine are so much grist to Del Norte’s mill. So long as they keep men digging, so long she will thrive exceptionally and remain an important feeder to our railway.
The scenery along the Rio Grande, above Del Norte, is very fine, and has always the zest of human interest in the quaint ranches of the Mexican farmers, whose women and children flock out to see every train go by. Terraced steeps bound the river-valley where the farms are, at a little distance, on the right, while rounded pine-clad hills slope upward on the left. We see this part of the river on our way to Wagon Wheel Gap, a place for which, if I were writing a separate chapter, I should adopt as a motto the words of Exodus: “And they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water and three score and ten palm trees, and they encamped there by the waters.”
“But what is Wagon Wheel Gap, and how did it get such a name?” asks the Madame.
“The gap,” it is thereupon explained, “is a noble gateway, thirty miles west of Del Norte, through which the Rio Grande breaks out of the confinement of its youth in the San Juan mountains; and I heard only yesterday how it come by its name, from the great and good Judge Jones, whose narratives most happily combine both facts and fancies.
“You will remember what we heard of the band of men who went into the San Juan mines four and-twenty years ago, under Colonel Baker. Well, there was a part of that story you have not heard yet. It seems that the party was composed of Northern and of Southern men in nearly equal numbers. When they heard that war had broken out between the Northern States and the hoped for ‘Confederacy,’ there was added to the woe of disappointment, diminished food, and the fear of Indians, the bitterness of a little civil war among those who previously had been compatriots and friends. It was a miserable little copy of the great struggle, but it resulted in disproportionate sorrows, for a panic ensued, in which the men of the party broke up and scattered out of the mountains by every available passage, a prey to double the dangers which would have menaced them had they stayed together. Some tried to take their wagons out piecemeal over Cunningham Pass. Putting them together on the eastern side, they worked their way down to Del Norte, Fort Garland, and so to Santa Fe, or around to Denver. But they often broke down, and a relic of this panic-stricken flight, in the shape of a large wagon wheel, found by Judge Jones, served to give the place its peculiar name. To distinguish it from other gaps in the range it was spoken of as ‘the gap where the wagon wheel was found,’ which soon, by natural process of curtailment, condensation and transposition, became ‘Wagon Wheel Gap,’ and Wagon Wheel Gap it is, even unto this day.”
The gap itself is a cleft through a great hill; or it is two half hills (for they stand not squarely opposite one another, but with somewhat overlapping ends only) each vertically faced and uprightly seamed on the river side, but sloping away into a grassy ridge behind. The southern end of the bluffs, which also is the farthest up stream, is narrow and tower-like, but the other, rounding out and swelling high, in the center has a breadth of half a mile or more, the river washing its bowed base. Of about the same height as the Palisades of the Hudson, and like them marked with vertical lines of cleavage, this bluff of reddish volcanic rock would bear a striking resemblance to that great monument of the Plutonic reign on the Atlantic slope, did its façade present a straight front; but in this swelling front is where it exceeds its eastern rival, for one gets added pleasure from the perspective of the massive battlement retreating right and left in grand curvature.
The gap is wide enough not to pen the water into a very narrow flood, so that only a slight exaggeration of the always lively current occurs. This is enough, however, to make these ripples a favorite spot for the splendid trout in which the whole upper part of the river abounds, and I suppose four or five thousand pounds of these gamy fish are taken every year.
Right at the foot of the talus stands a group of connected log-cabins forming a comfortable hotel. As we are bound for the hot springs, we do not remain here, but climbing into the spring wagon in waiting ride southward for a mile back into the hills to a second little cuchara of a valley where are the springs themselves and the hotel, bath houses and accessories belonging to the sanitarium they have created. This hotel is delightfully home-like in its excellence of bed and board.
Persons go to Wagon Wheel Gap seeking recreation and for recovery from ill health. If the first is their object (as it has been in the case of the late Secretary of the Treasury,—one of the hardest working men for ten months in the year, in the United States) they have a pleasant home and good company and no end of out-door fun from which to choose. There are little hills near by which they may begin on, and taller bluffs beyond, where they may make perfect their practice; while far away stand the “ultimate heights” of the Sierra Madre,—unbroken masses of snow when we last beheld their spear-pointed peaks. There are ponies they may ride, and donkeys for the children. There are single buggies and phætons for the ladies and carryalls for the whole family. There are geologizing, botanizing and general natural history to invite study in endless variety.
Then there is good sport. That noblest of the deer race,—the elk—still haunts the upland pastures and mountain glades. The black-tailed deer is to be found lurking in the aspens, and, if you are a good climber, you may enjoy the very next thing to Alpine chamois shooting in the arduous chase of the mountain sheep. As for fishing, there is no stint to it in the proper season. I know no place in Colorado where the fly-fisher will have better sport and the angler, though uninstructed in the wiles of Walton, get better results.