Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

In the northern part of the plains, in most winters there is a short spell of very severe cold, and it is possible that the ground may for several days continuously be covered with snow. Both of these difficulties may be met. The first by enclosures that will keep the cold wind from the stock, the walls being of wood, or of wood and adobe, or of any material that is the cheapest on the spot; and the second, by laying up a store of prairie hay. This is already done by Wells, Fargo, and Company, on these very plains, for the purpose of supplying provender for the horses of their numerous coaches. They have it cut by the hay-cutting machine that is getting into use in this country. The prairie hay looks hard and coarse, but in reality is of very good quality, and has the great advantage that it will keep for many years; so that what is cut this summer, if on account of the openness of the season it be not needed in the ensuing winter, will stand over for another year; in fact, it will remain good till it is wanted.

Heretofore there have been two hindrances to stock-keeping on the plains—the Indians, and the want of a market. Both of these are now in course of removal. In a year or two the Indians to the north of Shyenne and Denver will have ceased to give any more trouble. To the south of Denver they have already been cleared off to a considerable distance. With them, indeed, everywhere throughout the plains, as it has been with them all the way up from the Atlantic coast, their disappearance will only be a question of time. And the time is now at hand, for the white man has begun to settle on the plains, and the two races cannot exist together in the same region. And as to the want of a market, that deficiency is being removed by the peopling of the Valley of the Mississippi, and by the advance into the plains of the two branches of the Pacific railway. These lines will carry mutton and beef to the Eastern States, at a lower figure than that at which they can grow the meat themselves. They will also carry away the tallow, hides, bones, and wool. In the Eastern and Northern States stock has to be kept all the winter on corn and artificial food, while here on the plains its keep costs nothing, for it can be fattened very well for market on the natural grasses. What, therefore, the wheat-growing States of the North-west have done for those who were formerly the wheat-growers of the East, these States on the plains will do for those who are now the meat-growers of the East.

There will be this great difference between farming and stock-keeping—that is, between the proprietors of arable land in the old States, and the flock and herd masters of the plains—that it is impossible to farm on a large scale; it has, with exceptions hardly worth noticing, been so throughout the Union, a farmer seldom getting beyond what he can manage with his own hands and the assistance of his family; but here just the reverse will be the only thing possible. It will be here as it has been in Australia: a man cannot keep a few head of cattle, or a few hundred sheep. To make it pay, indeed, to keep his animals alive, he must have a large tract of land, and do the thing on a large scale. We hear of paddocks in Australia thirty miles square. I suppose on the plains a third of this size will be a sufficiently large run, and a much more profitable one.

As the tide of population has now reached the plains on their eastern side, and in some degree on the western and northern sides also, and as many have already got a footing upon them, I suppose, judging from the rapidity with which everything that pays is carried out in America, that in a few years this enormous district, twice as large as France, will be occupied, and by a class of men such as the Union does not now possess. They will be very numerous and very wealthy—quite the wealthiest class in the Union; and even if there is to be no resurrection for the South, which it is impossible to believe, they will compensate, speaking from the wealth-of-nations point of view, for its loss. I have seen some of the pioneers of the class, and, prophesying of those who are to follow, from the way in which the influences of the Plain have shaped those who have already come, I would say that they will be characterised by hardihood, generosity, and manliness. They will occupy with their flocks and herds a great part of Texas on the south, and of Nebraska on the north, with the whole of Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. This region will, like Australia and the districts of the La Plata, export enormous quantities of wool, tallow, and hides. But they will have a mighty advantage over those two great stock-keeping regions, that they will not be themselves the only consumers of their beef and mutton, but will have customers for as much as they can produce, in the inhabitants of a rich and populous continent, of which they will be the centre. In this way is some new source of wealth, and always on the grandest scale, ever being developed in the United States.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS—GOLDEN CITY—GOLDEN GATES—MINING TOWNS—NEIGHBOURING MOUNTAINS STRIPPED OF EVERY TREE—WHAT GROWS ON THE MOUNTAINS—AMERICAN HORSES—ROADS AND BRIDGES THEY HAVE TO PASS—HOW, SIX-IN-HAND, WE WENT DOWN A HILL SIDE IN THE MOUNTAINS—A NICE DISTINCTION AS TO ACCIDENTS ON THIS HILL—CLIMATE-WIND-STORMS—BIRDS—DOGS.

The Rocky Mountains.

I entered the Rocky Mountains at a place called Golden City. It lies in a gap of the first range. Till lately it was the capital of Colorado, which honour has now been transferred to Denver. It is chiefly of brick—the proof, in this part of the world, of mature age in a town. I counted three churches in the place; the best of the three belongs, as I was told, to the Episcopalians. The population appeared to be about three thousand. A thick seam of good coal is exposed just at the foot of the hill close to the town. I had heard that I should find a place of this name, but I was not at all prepared for the brick, and the churches, and the population. There is a good hotel here, kept by an Englishman; but, judging from those I fell in with, the well-to-do people of the place were mostly New Englanders.

Just beyond Golden City the road passes through a grand defile, between precipitous mountains of dark rock; this, as it leads to the auriferous regions up in the mountains, is called the Golden Gates.

Up in the mountains I visited the three mining towns of Black Hawk, Central City, and Nevada. The district to which these towns belong had a population of fifteen thousand persons engaged in mining, but I found several of the mills not at work, and was told that the population had lately fallen off considerably. In the neighbourhood of these towns all the timber has been cut down for building and mining; and as everything that would burn has also been cleared off for fuel, every accessible mountain has been made as bare as a ploughed field. Their sides are covered with what appear to be gigantic mole-hills, but which in reality are the heaps of earth the miners have thrown up in prospecting—that is, examining the ground for auriferous veins, which is done by digging holes ten or twelve feet deep. It will be a long time before the forest appears again, for at this altitude it was composed entirely of pine, and I could nowhere, on exposed places, find any young trees: I could find plenty of little seedlings, but they all were dead or dying, I supposed from their inability to bear without protection the wind, or the cold, or the drought. I saw some magnificent trees of, I believe, a kind of spruce, and a kind of silver fir, on the hills, from which it would have been difficult to have removed them if cut down. They were of great height, and very straight, though of course nothing like what we hear of as growing on the western slopes, and down to the Pacific coast. On the lower hills I saw abundance of a white-barked poplar, of a kind of alder, of birch, and of willow. Gooseberry bushes in places covered the ground. I heard that currants, raspberries, blueberries, and some other small edible fruit were to be found in equal plenty. I saw large spaces on the hill sides, where the undergrowth was chiefly Berberis aquifolium. In the valleys of the outer ranges there was a great deal of the small cactus I had seen in the plains, clothing the surface for miles together. This species must be capable of bearing very severe cold, for 20° below zero is a point that is occasionally reached here.