While on my way, a gentleman met me on the train, and pressed me to stop over at Leadville, promising that he would take me down the deepest gold mine in the place. I could not stay, even for that approach to the presence of all-powerful gold.
I am sure that the underground view of Leadville would be better than that which the sun looks upon. It is not an inviting-looking place. It lies on the great top surges of the mountains, having all the bleakness of a plain, and the rarefied atmosphere of the mountain summit, which it really is.
It is always a weird thing to look at the scenes of early mining days in Leadville, when the fame of the fabulous wealth therein, entered into men's brains, with an intoxication, like that of some Oriental drug. California Gulch looks like the dried bed of a mountain torrent. What must it have been when every inch of it was staked out in claims, and men, by men, close together, but widely separate in their interests, shovelled up the dirt, and peered with eager gaze therein for the yellow gold.
It is well to realize that even in Colorado, which is considered more a mining than an agricultural State, the farm products, at the present time, far outweigh in value the entire annual output of the mines. The prosaic toil, as some may deem it, of the spade, and the plough; and the pastoral occupation of stock-raising and dairy farming, are better wealth-makers than the pick of the miner, or the labors of the mining engineer.
The great day of our run through the giant attractions of the mountains comes to a close at Pueblo, a busy railroad centre, where our track bends to the north, and brings us at nightfall to Colorado Springs.
When we remembered all the glories of the day, the great mountain clefts through which we passed, the roaring torrents which accompanied us, the fantastic coloring of the rocks, and the evidences of labor and energy which we had seen on every hand; and remembered also the untold wealth which lay concealed, whether gold and silver, or rock oil, or the produce of ranch and cattle range, our thoughts gathered up a splendid impression of opulence, actual, and future.
Yet, wild and vast as it all was, we could not help thinking also, that the nearest approach we had anywhere seen, to the glories through which we had passed, had been already presented to us by the streets of New York. Yes, it is like seeing a Grand Cañon, to look from Murray Hill on some October afternoon, down Fifth Avenue. There it all is,—the towering edifices at each side are the mountains, the crowd rushes on like the river,—all is color, life, and motion; and the blue haze of the autumn day gives vagueness and mystery to the descending perspective, as it comes to a point in Washington Square.
One sees the same effect also on lower Broadway, where the huge buildings, and the wealth and energy which they express, suggest ever to my mind the splendors of the great cañons of the West.
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