Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

I expressed some of the surprise I felt at finding a place like Omaha, 500 miles beyond Chicago. But here, at Denver, is a busy, thriving town, 600 miles beyond Omaha. It has almost completed its transition from wood to brick. The stores and offices are now nearly all of the latter material. So is the new church of the Methodists, which besides has stained glass windows. In the church of the Episcopalians, the primitive wood still maintains its ground in the greater part of the building. The finest structure in the place is a seminary for young ladies, which has just been erected by Bishop Randall. The Methodists have a large seminary of the same kind, but externally it is very inferior to the Bishop’s. The United States Government has also a Mint here, for the gold and silver extracted from the mountains. I inspected in the town three common schools; two for whites, one for boys, one for girls, and one for coloured people of any age; for I saw several adults in the room, seated on the same benches as the children. Denver, as far as I could judge, is well provided with everything. On enquiry, I found that a haunch of antelope venison sold for seventy-five cents—about half-a-crown of our money. The mountains are close upon the town, and present a view that is very grand. Golden City, which is in a gap of the first range, is distant from Denver only ten miles.

In so new and remote a place one would not expect to find everything, in the way of manners and customs, moving on precisely in the grooves of the Old World. For instance, I was just too late for a ball which the ladies of Denver, availing themselves of the fact that it was leap-year, had given to the gentlemen. It had been, I understood, a lively affair and a great success. The ladies selected their own partners (one, however, has heard of other instances of this), and took the gentlemen in to supper. As in all new settlements the fair sex must always be in a minority, some of the gentlemen must on this occasion have learnt, ‘with pangs unfelt before, unpitied and alone,’ what it is to be a ball-room wall-flower.

I arrived at Denver at 4 A.M. A few hours afterwards, as I was passing the door of the drawing-room of the hotel, a gentleman I had never seen before came out to meet me, and, conducting a lady up to me, requested me to take her down to breakfast. I afterwards became acquainted with this gentleman, and found that he was an ex-judge, who on the expiration of his term of office had resumed his practice at the bar.

‘Quite our Finest Gentleman.’

When breakfast was over, the manager of the hotel invited me to accompany him up stairs to the ladies’ drawing-room, that he might introduce me to the mistress of the house and some other ladies whom I should find sitting with her.

These ceremonies having been got through, I took a letter of introduction to the editor of the local news department of one of the Denver dailies. With the overflowing good-nature of his countrymen, he immediately placed himself at my service, showing me over the town, and introducing me to its notabilities. Hospitality here is plainly the order of the day; for wherever we went, invitations of one kind or another were immediately given. In a place like Denver, where even the tradition of social inequalities has been lost, and the idea and practice of equality that rule society have, in their passage across the continent, been distilled and redistilled a hundred times, you find the article in its purest possible form; men are valued only according to their personal qualities, such as their cleverness, their bonhomie, and their ability to make money. I give this as a preface to my Denver cicerone’s description of one of the persons to whom he was about to introduce me. ‘You must now,’ he said, ‘let me take you to Mr. A. He is quite our finest gentleman.’ I had not had many minutes’ conversation with ‘quite the finest gentleman in Denver,’ before I had reason for coinciding with the estimate of his fellow-townsmen; for among other offers of assistance and hospitality, he had given me an invitation to be his companion and guest in a long tour he was about to make in the mountains, but which, he explained, would on his part combine business with exploration and pleasure. Of course it is inconceivable that there could be any gentleman in Denver who was not in some kind of business, and ‘quite the finest gentleman’ of the place happened to be a grocer. But what of that? So is the senator for the State of New York; and Denver grocers can and do possess many of the personal qualities of gentlemen, though it may be supposed they are quite unconscious of the sense in which Charles II. used the word, when he replied to his foster-mother’s request that he would make his foster-brother a gentleman, ‘that he could make him a lord, but that God Almighty could not make him a gentleman.’ Meaning that the being, or the not being a gentleman, was a matter of birth, and of birth only.

One who has seen anything of these enormous plains, cannot but speculate on their future. I came to the conclusion that in a few years they will be the Australia of North America. And as their soil and climate are very much better, they will support, at a far cheaper rate, a much greater number of millions of sheep and cattle. In the Valley of the Platte, for 500 miles, and down as far as Denver, though the climate is too dry for agricultural purposes, still the herbage is so abundant and nutritious that even in winter, when it is all dried up into the form of natural hay, herds of cattle are turned out to fatten upon it, which they do readily, without any shelter or any help from artificial food.

The Australia of America.

As you go further south, you get some regions still better adapted to grazing and sheep-farming, and some not so good, till you come to Texas, in which enormous numbers of horned cattle are raised already. That Nature does of herself supply everything that is needed, is proved by this having been the home of the buffalo, which has ever been covering these plains with numbers beyond belief. It becomes, then, a kind of rule of three sum: if Nature, unaided, supported without fail so many millions of large herbivorous animals, how many more will she support when aided by the care and forethought of man? Convert in your mind these countless herds of buffalo into sheep and oxen, and then multiply the result twenty fold, for that amount may easily be reached, when American flock-masters and herd-masters shall have taken possession of the plains, and parcelled them out into manageable ranches, turning the whole of the surface to account.

There are a great many streams, small and great, which carry the drainage of the mountains across these plains to the Mississippi; and in places where there are no streams, water may be obtained by sinking wells. Wherever I went I made enquiries on this subject, and looked myself into the wells; and I found that water was reached in the Valley of the Platte, and on the plains from Shyenne to Denver, at a depth of about thirty feet. Water for the stock might be pumped from such wells by horse-engines or wind-mills.