Leadville, that has added so many millions to the wealth of the world, is more dignified than half a dozen years ago; there is less of the revolver and saloon and a little more of the church and the Sabbath-school; no longer a mining camp, but a city with only a tithe of its resources developed.
It reposes very quietly this Sabbath morning under the bright sun. Turning from the range at the north with its snow-capped peaks and looking down the almost deserted avenue, I am reminded of another Sunday morning—and it seems only a little while ago—when the same street was wont to be alive with humanity. Coming out of an adjacent saloon a couple of young men faced each other, blear-eyed and dishevelled; they had plainly been making a night of it. Each stood with his hand on his hip, while epithets, the most choice in the camp vocabulary, flew thick and furious. It might be dangerous or not; perhaps not. But the innocent third party running away or seeking shelter at the side might be in peril. I took up a vibrating station, so to speak, immediately in the rear of one of the would-be murderers, and awaited the opening. It did not come, but ended in froth and the appearance of an autocrat with a star on his breast and a club in his hand. He gathered in the bad men and was about to possess himself of the undersigned, when I felt compelled to explain the situation. He complimented me by saying: "Your head's level," and I was suffered to depart.
From the carbonate metropolis to the tunnel through the Saguache Range the distance by rail is perhaps seventeen miles, the difference in elevation about thirteen hundred feet. To make this distance one can hardly realize that one is ascending, the grade is so light, winding on and about the mountain sides. Lake Valley, with its crooked band of water here and there widening into silvery pools, and the gold and green of its meadow-like spots, seems to be silently drifting down and away. At the foot lies the city we have just left, and beyond is the Mosquito Range. In following the tortuous line the grand peaks seem to change from one side of you to the other, all the motion being with them.
Mount Massive gives you the aptness of its name. You feel its magnificence as you approach, and that it may be the glorious court of blue-eyed Athena at whose vestibule you stand wonderingly, and whence she issues to kiss the petals of the wild flowers and endow the earth with health and beauty. All about you are the pines, with here and there a patch of aspens, their whitened trunks set in banks of larkspur empurpling the sloping mountain sides. Over deep gorges spanned by threadlike trestle-work, you feel awed at the audacity that planned and executed the way into this solitude. High above the utmost peak of the bulky mass, a spot no larger than your hand is poised in ether, or moving, passes between you and the sun, and you think perhaps of what Tennyson says:
"He clasps the crag with hooked hands,
Close to the sun in lonely lands;
Ringed with the azure world he stands:
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls:
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls."
Or as Campbell puts it:
"And stood at pleasure, 'neath heavens zenith, like
A lamp suspended from its azure dome,
Then downward, faster than a falling star,
He neared the earth, until his shape distinct
Was blackly shadowed on the sunny ground."
Hagerman Pass.