"My spirit beats her mortal bars
As down dark tides the glory slides
And star-like mingles with the stars."
With the excursions offered,—grand panoramas of mountain views where the tourist from his lofty perch in the observation-car looks down on clouds and on peaks and pinnacles far below the heights to which his train climbs,—with the cogwheel road ascending Pike's Peak, the fascinating drives through Cheyenne Cañon, the Garden of the Gods, Ute Pass, and around Glen Eyrie, and with the luxurious ease of life at "The Antlers," the traveller finds fairly a new world, rich in suggestion and wide outlook. This attractive region is, however, only one of the central points of interest in Colorado. Denver, the brilliant and fascinating capital; Pueblo, the metropolis of Southern Colorado; Glenwood Springs, the romantic and fashionable watering place and summer resort high up in the mountains on the beautiful "scenic route" of the Denver and Rio Grande; Boulder, the picturesque mountain town, with its State University so ably conducted; Greeley, the town of the "Union Colony," whose romantic and tragic story is a part of the great history of the Centennial State, and where an admirable normal school draws students from all over the country, even including New England,—these and a wealth of other features offer interest that is coming to engage the attention of the civilized world.
New Mexico has been more or less considered as one of the impossible and uncivilized localities, or has failed to establish any claim to being considered at all; yet here is a territory whose climate is simply delightful by virtue of its altitude,—cool in summer and mild and sunny in winter,—whose mines of amethysts and other precious stones suggest developments yet undreamed-of; whose ethnological interest, in the marvellous remains of Cliff-dwellers and of a people far antedating any authentic records, enchains the scientist; a territory whose future promises almost infinitely varied riches in many directions of its development.
Arizona is simply a treasure land. If it offered only that enthralling feature, the Grand Cañon, it would be a central point of pilgrimage for the entire civilized world; but even aside from this,—the sublimest vision ever offered to human eye,—even aside from the Grand Cañon, which dominates the world as the most sublime spectacle,—Arizona offers the fascinations of the Painted Desert, the Tonto Basin, the uncanny buttes that loom up in grotesque shapes on the horizon, the dreamy lines of mountain ranges, the strange pueblos, the productive localities where grains and where fruits and flowers grow with tropical luxuriance, the Petrified Forests, and the exquisite coloring of sky and atmosphere.
Southern California, with its brilliantly fascinating metropolis, Los Angeles; the neighboring city of Pasadena, the "Crown of the Valley"; with an extensive electric trolley-car connection with towns within a radius of fifty miles, and other distinctive and delightful features, almost each one of which might well furnish a separate chapter of description; with mountain trips made easy and enjoyable by the swift electric lines,—all this region fascinates the imagination and indicates new and wonderful vistas of life in the immediate future. The vast and varied resources of the great Southwest will also, as they are developed, increasingly affect the economic aspects of the country.
To the traveller one fact stands out in especial prominence, and that is that the traditional primitive conditions in this region hardly continue to exist. The picturesque aspects of nature form the stage setting to very-much-up-to-date life. The opportunities and advantages already offered and constantly increasing are greater than would at first be considered possible. In isolated homes on the desert the children of the family will be found studying the higher mathematics, taking music lessons, or receiving lessons in languages (classic, or the romance languages) from some one in the neighborhood who is able to give such instruction. If any traveller expects to encounter the traditional "cow-boy" aspects of life, he will be very much disappointed. There is no refinement of life in the East that is not mirrored and duplicated in the West. There are no aspirations, no ideals, no fine culture in the East that have not their corresponding aspects in the great West. In fact, in many ways the West begins where the East leaves off. For instance, the new towns of the West that have sprung up within the past twenty years have never known what it was to have gas or horse-cars. They begin with electric lights and electric transit. Their schoolhouses are built with up-to-date methods, and the houses, however modest, are constructed with a taste and a beauty unknown in the rural regions of the East. The square white house with green blinds and a straight stone-paved pathway to the front gate, so common in New England, is not seen in the West. Instead, the most modest little structure has its piazza, its projecting bay window thrown out, its balcony—something, at all events, tasteful and beautiful to the eye.
The journey from La Junta (in Colorado) to Los Angeles offers a series of enthralling pictorial effects that are invested with all the refinements of civilized life delightfully devoid of its commonplaceness. These long transcontinental trains with two engines, one at the front and one at the rear, with their different grades of the Pullman, the tourist, and the emigrant car service, are as distinctive a feature of the twentieth century as the "prairie schooners" were of the early half of the nineteenth century. The real journey begins, of course, at Chicago, and as these trains leave in the evening the traveller fares forth in the seclusion of his berth in the Pullman. The nights on a sleeping-car may be a very trance of ecstasy to one who loves to watch the panorama of the skies. Raise the curtain, pile up the pillows to the angle that one can gaze without lifting the head, and what ethereal visions one is wafted through! One has a sense of flying in the air among the starry spaces, especially if he chances to have the happy fortune of a couch on the side where the moon is shining down,—a midsummer moon, with stars, and filmy, flitting clouds,—when the panorama of the air becomes the enchantment of a dream.
It is, literally, "such stuff as dreams are made of," and when one drops off into slumber, he utilizes it for his fancies of the night. Miss Harriet Hosmer, the famous sculptor, once related a story of a night journey she took with a party of congenial spirits on horseback between Rome and Florence. By way of "a lark" they rested by day and rode by night, and the beauty of the effects of light and shade sank into her mind so that she drew on them thirty years or more later for the wonderful designs in her great "Gates," which even rival those of Ghiberti. "The night hath counsel" and suggestion of artistic beauty as well, and the effects that one may get from a flying train are impossible to obtain under any other condition. After all, is it not a part of the fine art of living to take the enjoyment of the moment as it comes, in whatever guise, without lamenting that it is not something else?