Scores of places are not in the guidebooks at all that strike the casual stranger as vividly as anything that is. Every man’s Colorado is his own. Descriptions weary him. In them the words, however well chosen, illustrate only the orotund and the declamatory, not the thing described. All the guidebooks need much to be done again, and there does not live the man who can effectively rewrite them. Presence is required; presence undeterred by all that is merely written, here or elsewhere.
It might be not unprofitably remembered that much of the pleasure lies in the unmentioned things that lie between. One need not pass all the fourteen miles of the Black Cañon looking for the single towering red shaft that is called the Currecanti Needle. He need not wait and watch for Chipeta Falls—a little snow-born rivulet that commits ten thousand suicides in its tumble down the cliffs to die at last in the little tumbling river that never notices, and goes on forever. He need not shut his eyes because the guidebook gives him the impression that just ahead somewhere stands that special wonder that he is almost sure he came so far particularly to see. The entire endless, solemn, silent, chaotic mass that fills the view for days has all its entirely undescribable charm.
And amid it all live the plodding sons of men. Each little mountain nook where there is water has its occupant. Often there are ranch houses, and cattle and haystacks. Little mountain towns cling to the bench here and there. These things seem strange to us, but how must the wide Nebraska cornfield seem to the man who was born and reared amid scenes like these?
A man said he did not want any of that land; he thought it might pay, but he was not willing to undertake a Colorado farm with any hope of success. Would not a man, he inquired, go out in the morning with the best intentions, but with almost the certainty that he would sit down on the plow-beam and look at these mountains almost all day? And he was morally sure, besides, that he could never wait until Saturday, as they did in Michigan, to go a-fishing. Look at the river, he said, can a man stay away from that to farm?
A Nook in Estes Park.
James’ Ranch.
These are but glimpses. They fail, too, just as the guidebooks do, and there is a vivid glimpse of but one fact—that a man can see and know, and yet utterly fail to convey to any other human his conception of anything beyond the merest commonplaces of a country that sends no messages, writes no embellished chapters, and talks to her visitors only as the sibyl did—personally and mysteriously or not at all.
CHAPTER II.
The Colorado of Reality.
There are two view-points for Colorado, as there are for a woman who has two great endowments; wealth and personal beauty. Colorado is like such a woman. Captivating all comers, she yet claims importance as an industrial entity; a country with vast resources. In 1897, for example, she produced something more than thirty millions in yellow gold. She feeds herself besides, and has fruit, beef, wheat, galore.
But, attracted first by beauty, it is not such statistical, and withal very pleasant, things as these the casual visitor cares most about. He wants rather to understand the qualities and characteristics of so unique a piece of God’s creation.