A native of Indiana; went to Texas during his youth; worked over ten years on cattle ranches and on the trail, rising from common hand on the latter to a foreman. Quit cattle fifteen years ago, following business and mining occupations since. When contrasted with the present generation is just beginning to realize that the old days were romantic, though did not think so when sitting a saddle sixteen to twenty-four hours a day in all kinds of weather. His insight into cattle life was not obtained from the window of a Pullman car, but close to the soil and from the hurricane deck of a Texas horse. Even to-day is a better cowman than writer, for he can yet rope and tie down a steer with any of the boys, though the loop of his rope may settle on the wrong foot of the rhetoric occasionally. He is of Irish and Scotch parentage. Forty-three years of age, six feet in height and weighs 210 pounds.
Though I met Mr. Adams at Colorado Springs, I shall, for obvious reasons, let my description of him rest at that.
When writing of clubs I should have mentioned the Cooking Club, which is one of the most unique little clubs of the country. The fifteen members of this club are the gourmets of Colorado Springs—not merely passive gourmets who like to have good things set before them, but active ones who know how to prepare good things as well as eat them. Every little while, throughout the season, the Cooking Club gives dinners, to which each member may invite a guest or two. Each takes his turn in acting as host, his duties upon this occasion being to draw up the menu, supply materials, appoint members to prepare certain courses, and, wearing the full regalia of a chef, superintend the preparation of the meal, which is cooked entirely by men belonging to the club. Wine is not served at Cooking Club dinners, the official beverage being the club Rum Brew, which has a considerable local reputation, and is everywhere pronounced adequate. Not a few of the members learned to cook in the course of prospecting tours in the mountains, and the Easterner who, with this fact in mind, attends a Cooking Club dinner is led to revise, immediately, certain preconceived ideas of the hard life of the prospector. No man has a hard life who can cook himself such dishes. Indeed, one is forced to the conclusion that Colorado is full of undiscovered mines, which would have been uncovered long ago, were it not that prospectors go up into the mountains for the primary purpose of cooking themselves the most delightful meals, and that mining is—as indeed it should be—a mere side issue. For myself, while I have no taste for the hardy life of the mountaineer, I would gladly become a prospector, even if it were guaranteed in advance that I should discover nothing, providing that Eugene P. Shove would go along with me and make the biscuits.
Aside from its clubs Colorado Springs has all the other things which go to the making of a pleasant city. The Burns Theater is a model of what a theater should be. The Antlers Hotel would do credit to the shores of Lake Lucerne. Where the "antlers" part of it comes in, I am unable to say, but as nothing else was lacking, from the kitchen, down stairs, to Pike's Peak looming up in the back yard, I have no complaint to make.
I suppose that every one who has heard of Colorado Springs at all, associates it with the famous Garden of the Gods.
Before I started on my travels I was aware of the fact that the two great natural wonders of the East are Niagara Falls and the insular New Yorker. I knew that the great, gorgeous, glittering galaxy of American wonders was, however, in the West, but the location and character of them was somewhat vague in my mind. I knew, of course, that Pike's Peak was a large mountain. I knew that the giant redwoods were in California. But for the rest, I had the Grand Cañon, the Royal Gorge, and the Garden of the Gods associated in my mind together as rival attractions. I do not know why this was so, excepting that I had been living on Manhattan Island, where information is notoriously scarce.
Now, though I saw the Royal Gorge, though I rode through it in the cab of a locomotive, with my hair standing on end, and though I found it "as advertised," I have no idea of trying to describe it, more than to say that it is a great cleft in the pink rocks through which run a river and a railroad, and that how the latter managed to keep out of the former was a constant source of wonder to me. As for the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, it affects those who behold it with a kind of literary asthma. They desire to describe it; some try, passionately; but they only wheeze and look as though they might explode. Since it is generally admitted that no one who has seen it can describe it, the task would manifestly devolve upon some one who has not seen it, and that requirement is filled by me. I have not seen it. I am not impressed by it at all. I am able to speak of it with coherence and restraint. But even that I shall not do.
With the Garden of the Gods it is different. The place irritated me. For if ever any spot was outrageously overnamed, it is that one. As a little park in the Catskills it might be all well enough, but as a natural wonder in the Rocky Mountains, with Pike's Peak hanging overhead, it is a pale pink joke. If I had my way I should take its wonder-name away from it, for the name is too fine to waste, and a thousand spots in Colorado are more worthy of it.
The entrance to the place, between two tall, rose-colored sandstone rocks may, perhaps, be called imposing; the rest of it might better be described as imposition. Guides will take you through, and they will do their utmost, as guides always do, to make you imagine that you are really seeing something. They will point out inane formations in the sandstone rock, and will attempt to make you see that these are "pictures." They will show you the Kissing Camels, the Bear and Seal, the Buffalo, the Bride and Groom, the Preacher, the Scotsman, Punch and Judy, the Washerwoman, and other rock forms, sculptured by Nature into shapes more or less suggesting the various objects mentioned. But what if they do? To look at such accidentals is a pastime about as intelligent as looking for pictures in the moon, or in the patterns of the paper on your wall. As nearly as Nature can be altogether silly she has been silly here, and I think that only silly people will succeed in finding fascination in the place—the more so since Colorado Springs is a prohibition town.
The story of prohibition there is curious. In 1870, N. C. Meeker, Agricultural Editor of the New York "Tribune," under Horace Greeley, started a colony in Colorado, bringing a number of settlers from the East, and naming the place Greeley. With a view to eliminating the roughness characteristic of frontier towns in those days, Mr. Meeker made Greeley a prohibition colony.