Beyond Santa Fé is the Rio Grande River, which the railway follows down through a grazing country past Albuquerque, its mart for wool and hides. Turning westward an arid region is traversed, with an occasional pueblo, and near Laguna is the famous Mesa Encantada, or the "Enchanted Table Land." This eminence rises precipitously four hundred and thirty feet above the surface, and is only accessible by ladders and ropes. The summit gives evidence of former aboriginal occupancy, and the tradition of the neighboring Acomas Indians is that their ancestors lived upon it, but were forced to abandon the village when a storm had destroyed the only trail and caused those remaining on the summit to perish. To the westward the "Continental Divide" is crossed at seventy-three hundred feet elevation, but with nothing indicating the change, as it is on a plateau. The Navajo Indian Reservation is crossed, Arizona entered and traversed, and at the Flagstaff Station is the Lowell Observatory, and here the nearest route is taken to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. There rises to the northward the huge San Francisco Mountain, a fine extinct volcano, while off to the southwest are the great United Verde Copper Mines, among the largest in the world, and the town of Prescott, in a rich mineral region. The Colorado River is crossed into California, and then the railway traverses the wide Mojave Desert towards the Pacific coast.
DENVER AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
The Union Pacific Railway route across the Continent was the first constructed, the Government giving large subsidies in money and land grants. It was opened in 1869, and greatly encouraged travel to the Pacific coast. The Union Pacific main line starts at Council Bluffs and Omaha on the Missouri River and crosses Nebraska into Wyoming. Here is Cheyenne, a leading cattle-dealers' town on the edge of the Rockies, five hundred miles west of the Missouri, where there are fifteen thousand people. Fort Russell, an Indian outpost at the verge of the Black Hills, is to the northward. At Cheyenne, the main Union Pacific line is joined by the Denver Pacific branch, which starts on the Missouri River at Kansas City, traverses Kansas, passing Fort Riley and the Ogden Monument there, marking the geographical centre of the United States, and enters Colorado, and at Denver turns northward to Cheyenne.
Denver is the great city of the Rockies, whose snow-capped summits are seen to the westward in a magnificent and unbroken line, extending in view for one hundred and seventy miles from Pike's Peak north to Long's Peak, with many intervening summits, most of them rising over fourteen thousand feet. Denver stands on a high plateau, through which the South Platte River flows, and it is at nearly fifty-three hundred feet elevation. This "Queen City of the Plains" was settled by adventurous pioneers as a mining camp in 1858, and through the wonderful development of mining the precious metals has had rapid growth, so that now there is one hundred and seventy thousand population. It has many manufactures and some of the most extensive ore-smelting works in the world, the annual output of gold and silver being enormous. The high elevation and healthy climate make it a favorite resort for pulmonary patients. There are many fine buildings, and a noble State Capitol with a lofty dome, erected at a cost of $2,500,000, and standing on a high hill, so that it gives a superb outlook. The city was named in honor of General James W. Denver, who was an early Governor of Kansas and served in the Civil War. He first suggested the name of Colorado for the Territory (now a State), and thus his name was given its capital. Denver has built for its water-works, forty-eight miles south of the city, the highest dam in the world, two hundred and ten feet, enclosing a gorge on the South Platte to make an enormous reservoir holding an ample supply.
Being so admirably located, Denver is a centre for excursions into one of the most attractive mountain regions in America. The great Colorado Front Range, or eastern ridge of the Rockies, stretches grandly across the country and has behind it one range after another, extending far westward to the Utah Basin. Towering behind the Front Range is the Saguache Range, the chief ridge of the Rockies, which makes the Continental Divide. Among these complicated Rocky Mountain ranges are various extensive Parks or broad valleys, nestling amid the peaks and ridges, which were originally the beds of inland lakes. Out of this mountain region flow scores of rivers in all directions, the affluents of the Mississippi to the east, the Rio Grande to the south, and the Colorado and the Columbia westward. All of them have carved down deep and magnificent gorges, two to five thousand feet deep, and in places the wonderful results of ages of erosion are displayed in the peculiar constructions of vast regions, and in special sections, where the carvings by water, frost and wind-forces have made weird and fantastic formations in the rocks on a colossal scale, as in the "Garden of the Gods." These mountains and gorges are also filled with untold wealth, and the mines, producing many millions of gold and silver, have attracted the population chiefly since the Civil War, so that the whole district around and beyond Denver is a region of mining towns, which are reached by a network of railways disclosing the grandest scenery, and in many parts the most startling and daring methods of railroad construction. Whenever land can be reclaimed for agriculture or grazing on the flanks of the mountains and in the protected valleys and parks, it is done, so that the district has extensive irrigation canals, in some parts diverting practically all the available flow of water in the streams. This is particularly the case with the Upper Arkansas River, such diversion of the headwaters in Colorado having robbed the river of its water to such a degree that the people of Kansas, whither it flows on its route to the Mississippi, are greatly annoyed and have protracted litigation about it.
COLORADO ATTRACTIONS.
Northwest from Denver is the picturesque Boulder Canyon, and here at the mining town of Boulder is the University of Colorado, with six hundred students. Beyond are Estes Park, one of the smaller enclosed parks among the mountains, having Long's Peak on its verge, rising fourteen thousand two hundred and seventy feet. Westward from Denver is the Clear Creek Canyon, and the route in that direction leads through great scenic attractions, past Golden, Idaho Springs and Georgetown, where silver-mining and health-resorts divide attention, the mountains also displaying several beautiful lakes. Beyond, the railway threads the Devil's Gate, climbing up by remarkable loops, and reaches Graymont at ten thousand feet elevation, having Gray's Peak above it rising fourteen thousand four hundred and forty feet. In this district is the mining town of Central City, while to the northwest is the extensive Middle Park, of three thousand square miles area, a popular resort for sportsmen. Southward from Denver the railway route passes the splendid Casa Blanca, a huge white rock, a thousand feet long and two hundred feet high, and crosses the watershed between the Platte and the Arkansas, at an elevation of over seventy-two hundred feet. Here, amid the mountains, seventy-five miles from Denver, upon a plateau at six thousand feet elevation, is the famous city of Colorado Springs, having twenty-five thousand people and being a noted health-resort. It is pleasantly laid out, with wide, tree-shaded streets, like a typical New England village spread broadly at the eastern base of Pike's Peak. Here live large numbers of people who are unable to stand the rigors of the climate on the Atlantic coast, and it has been carefully preserved as a residential and educational city, saloons being prohibited, with other restrictions calculated to preserve its high character. The settlement began in 1871, but there are no springs nearer than Manitou, several miles away in the spurs of Pike's Peak. The climate of Colorado Springs is charming, and it has, on the one hand, a magnificent mountain view, and on the other a limitless landscape eastward and southward, across the prairie land. Here are the Colorado College and other public institutions, and the National Printers' Home, supported by the printers throughout the country. In the pretty Evergreen Cemetery is buried the authoress, Helen Hunt Jackson, who died in 1885.
Probably the best known summit of the Rockies is Pike's Peak, rearing its snowy top over Manitou, and about six miles westward from Colorado Springs, to an elevation of nearly fourteen thousand two hundred feet. As it rises almost sheer, in the Colorado Front Range, this noble mountain can be seen from afar across the eastern plains. A cog-wheel railway nine miles long ascends to the summit from Manitou, rising seventy-five hundred feet. There is a small hotel at the top, and a superb view over the mountains and glens and mining camps all around. In 1806 General Zebulon Pike, then a captain in the army, led an exploring expedition to this remote region and discovered this noble mountain, which was given his name. Forests cover the lower slopes, but the top is composed of bare rocks, usually snow-covered. Below it a huge tunnel is being bored through the range to connect Colorado Springs with the Cripple Creek mining district to the westward. Manitou has a group of springs of weak compound carbonated soda, resembling those of Ems, and beneficial to consumptive, dyspeptic and other patients. They are at the entrance of the romantic Ute Pass, a gorge with many attractions, which was formerly the trail of the Ute Indians in crossing the mountains. Nearby, upon the Mesa, or "table-land," is the "Garden of the Gods," a tract of about one square mile, thickly studded with huge grotesque cliffs and rocks of white and red sandstones, their unique carving being the result of the erosive processes that have been going on for ages. They are all given appropriate names, and its Gateway is a passage just wide enough for the road, between two enormous bright red rocks over three hundred feet high. Farther south on the Arkansas River is Pueblo, an industrial city of thirty thousand people in a rich mining district, where there is a Mineral Palace, having a wonderful ceiling formed of twenty-eight domes, into which are worked specimens of all the Colorado minerals. The route then crosses the Veta Pass at ninety-four hundred feet elevation, whereon is the abrupt bend known as the "Mule Shoe Curve," and beyond this it descends into the most extensive of the Colorado Parks, the San Luis, covering six thousand square miles. Sentineling its western side is the triple-peaked Sierra Blanca, the loftiest Colorado Mountain, rising almost fourteen thousand five hundred feet. The Rio Grande flows to the southward, and there is Alamosa, and up in the mountains Creede, an extraordinary development of recent silver mining, which began its career when the ore was discovered in 1891, has seven thousand people, and has produced $4,000,000 silver in a year.
