On the narrow beach, with its background of new growth, smolder the dying embers of a camp-fire. My eyes follow the thin column of blue smoke that rises and wreathes itself among the tree-tops, and floats away to where desecration has stepped in. The suggestion of primitive life is dispelled by the ridge pole of a mean house obtruding itself above a depression in the moraine, and I know that this is but the best of a number of slab shanties. They are hidden from my sight, but I recognize them as one does a boil.
The first step into the wilderness of life is filled with bright anticipations, and lack of restraint makes one’s happiness as limitless as the great unknown into which one is traveling; the second step is monotonous, and one sighs for the promises of the end. The camp-fire, emblematical of the first step, is passing away; the slab shanty, the sordid, hard existence that makes life a burden, is the second step, and one longs for the third, that may, if nature must feel the weight of our sacrilegious hands, give us the ashler, graceful roofs, broad porches, and the comforts of a new life. Pioneers are lauded for “subduing the wilderness,” but deliver me from witnessing the progress of subjugation. I want to be the first, or, that being impossible, the next best thing to do is to wait till the ruin is complete. One can then imagine what the surroundings were; but in the middle period no room is left for imagination,—one can neither wonder what it was or will be, and the only thing left is to “unpack my heart with words, and fall a cursing like a very drab.”
While my mental anathemas and I are holding high carnival, I am conscious of the presence of something besides the figures of my imagination. Looking around, I discover a dark-complexioned woman, with hair black as night, when cats most do congregate; eyes like jet, square face, all one color—parchment; a mouth that shuts like a steel-trap. Her hair brushed smoothly back, and gathered behind in a great coil, is beautiful; that is all the beauty I see, except, perhaps, a dainty buttoned boot with a high instep. In one hand she holds the end of a small chain, at the other end of which is—yes, a monkey! This predecessor of the missing link looked at me in a sort of dreamily sympathetic way, and I at him. Our commiseration was mutual, and I felt inclined to shake hands with him. His owner was a French woman, of course; I do not think a woman of any other nation, except as a matter of business, would go wandering round among the Rocky Mountains with a monkey. If she had had a hand-organ strapped to her back, I could have forgiven her, even if grinding out “Days of Absence.” About the time I had “doffed my old felt,” we were joined by the other member of the family; he looked like an Egyptian three thousand or more years old. Not understanding French, I stepped into my boat and joined my friend.
I have been making an effort to secure for you a picture of the lake, and though the photographer has been about here frequently, my success has been indifferent. Every view worth having is sure to have a foreground of one or more of the lords of creation, “bearded like the pard,” with an arsenal strapped around their bodies, and an expression beaming out from under their broad-brimmed hats that would drive an ordinary man clear into the ground in sheer humiliation. Think of these addle-pated asses posing for exhibition amid scenes that should awaken naught but wonder and admiration, blended with that reverence one must feel in the presence of the Father’s works, and have charity if you can. The very boulders against which they lean are satires that will endure the tread of the centuries long after this world shall have forgotten that such fellows or their seed had ever incumbered the earth.
“CAMPING WITH LADIES” AND—THE BABY.
Before the little narrow gauge engines of the Denver, South Park and Pacific with their trains of baby cars went thundering up through the cañons, reaching out for Leadville, the trouting in the Platte was prime. Following the sinuous track, first on one side of the river, then on the other, you can look out to the right and see your engine going west while your car is going east, then your engine starts east or north and you go south or west. Now you crane your neck to catch the top of some overhanging cliffs a thousand feet high, and are suddenly jerked around a curve into a little glade of a dozen acres with a little brook running through it; then you are as quickly yanked into another cañon. If one were drunk no doubt, the road would be straight. But thirty-five or forty miles from Denver the cañon grows familiar. Buffalo Creek comes tumbling out from the south, and presently the brakeman puts his head in at the door and shouts: “Pine Grove!” This is the Pine Grove known to travelers who go by rail, but the Pine Grove of twenty odd years ago was six miles away from the river, and the railroad Pine Grove was Brown and Stuart’s ranche, the owners of which drove a thrifty traffic in hay.
In August, 1868, I made acquaintance first with the pools and riffles in the vicinity of the old Brown and Stuart’s ranche. I clambered up and down the cañon for five or six miles east and west. The rush and the roar of the crystal waters made glorious music, and an hour’s fishing would send me laden back to camp. But for all the grand surroundings, the fresh air, the wild flowers and the trout, there was weariness of heart for her and me who made our camp on the margin of the then beautiful stream. There had a little while before crept over our threshold a shadow we all dread, and which had gone out again leaving a wound that would not heal.