PREFACE.
It is Emerson's beautiful thought that all true history is biography, and that men are but the pages of history. In felicitous language the author has pictured a period that is indeed the bright romance of American history. It is the story of the discovery of a new Continent in the Western Seas; the story of a graceful and cultured people of a mighty world-power in the Fifteenth Century; the story of the dream of a great Western Empire to be founded in the New World, where would be revived all the pomps and chivalries of Castile's ancient court; the story of the fading of that dream in the splendor of the great world-idea of the self-government of man carried by the Pilgrim Fathers to Plymouth Rock in 1620; the story that in the great drama of life man is ever changing from the old into the new, and from the bad into the better in unceasing, unchanging, inevitable evolution; the story of early Colorado, whose ancient Capital, Santa Fe,—in the sense that Colorado is a part of the old Spanish country—was the first white settlement west of the Floridas upon all this Western Continent within the present domain of the United States.
But more than all, it is a story of the human touch of those still living and of great empire builders not long since passed away, whose "hands bent the arch of the new heavens" over our beloved State of Colorado; whose eyes were filled with far-away visions and their hearts with sublime faith; pioneers and history makers of whom we would say as Cinneas said when asked by his master Pyrrhus after his return from his Embassy at Rome, "What did the Roman Senate look like?"
"An assembly of Kings!" replied Cinneas.
Wendell Phillips, in the greatest of all his lectures, pictures the "Muse of history dipping her pen in the sunlight and writing in the clear blue" above all other names the name of his hero "Toussaint l'Ouverture." The author in these pages which so graphically portray the early history of our State would not write the name of Colorado above any sister state; but we can catch between his lines the deep undertones of the music of the Union, which overmaster all sectional notes in the thought, that Colorado is a glorious part of it all.
And so it is enough that we read in the title of this book these magic words, as if traced in the clear sunlight of our mountain skies, "Colorado—The Bright Romance of American History."
J. F. Tuttle, Jr.
COLORADO—
THE BRIGHT ROMANCE
OF AMERICAN HISTORY