The South Park line—Oscar Wilde on sunflowers as food—In a wash-hand basin—Anti-Vigilance Committees—Leadville the city of the carbonates—"Busted" millionaires—The philosophy of thick boots—Colorado miners—National competition in lions—Abuse of the terms "gentleman" and "lady"—Up at the mines—Under the pine-trees.
STARTING from Denver for Leadville in the evening, it seemed as if we were fated to see nothing of the very interesting country through which the South Park line runs. At first there is nothing to look at but open prairie land sprinkled with the homesteads of agricultural pioneers, but as the moon got up there was gradually revealed a stately succession of mountain ridges, and in about two hours we found ourselves threading the spurs of the Sangre di Christi range and following the Platte River up toward its sources. Crossing and recrossing the cañon, with one side silvered, and the other thrown into the blackest shadow by the moon, and the noisy stream tumbling along beside us in its hurry to get down to the lazy levels of the great Nebraska Valley, I saw glimpses of scenery that can never be forgotten. It was fantastic in the extreme; for apart from the jugglery of moonlight, in itself so wonderful always, the ideas of relative distance and size, even of shape, were upset and ridiculed by the snowy peaks that here and there thrust themselves up into the sky and by the patches and streaks of snow that concealed and altered the contour of the nearer rocks in the most puzzling manner imaginable. And all this time the little train—for the line is narrow-gauge—kept twisting and wriggling in and out as if it were in collusion with the hills, and playing into their hands to disconcert the traveller.
I have seen at different times great curiosities of engineering, as in travelling over the Ghats in Western India, where everything is stupendous and at times even terrific, where danger seems perpetual and disaster often inevitable. In passing by train from Colombo to Kandy in Ceylon, and crossing Sensation Rock, the railway cars actually hang over the precipice, so that when you look out of the window the track on which you are running is invisible, and you can drop an orange plumb down the face of this appalling cliff on to the tops of the palm-trees, which look like little round bushes in the valley down below. From Durban to Pietermaritzburg again, on the line along which, when it was first opened, the engine-driver brought out from England refused to take his train, declaring it to be too dangerous, but along which, nevertheless, the British troops going up to Zululand were all safely carried. The South Park line, however, can compare with these, and must be accepted as one of the acknowledged triumphs of railway enterprise. For much of its length the rocks had to be fought inch by inch, and they died hard. The result to-day is a very picturesque and interesting ride, with a surprise in every mile and beauty all the way.
On the way to the "City of the Carbonates," I heard much of Leadville ways and life. That very morning the energetic police of the town had arrested two young ladies for parading the sunflower and the lily too conspicuously. One had donned a sunflower for a hat, the other walked along holding a tall lily in her hand. The Leadville youth had gathered in disorderly procession behind the aesthetic pair. So the police arrested the fair causes of the disturbance.
I told Oscar Wilde of this a few days later. "Poor sweet things!" said he; "martyrs in the cause of the Beautiful." He was on his way to Salt Lake City at the time, and I told him how the Mormon capital was par excellence "the city of sunflowers," and assured him that the poet's feeding on "gilliflowers rare" was not, after all, too violent a stretch of imagination, as whole tribes of Indians (and Longfellow himself has said that every Indian is a poem, which is very nearly the same thing as a poet) feed on the sunflower. The Apostle of Art Decoration was delighted.
"Poor sweet things!" said he; "feed on sunflowers! How charming! If I could only have stayed and dined with them! But how delightful to be able to go back to England and say that I have actually been in a country where whole tribes of men live on sunflowers! The preciousness of it!"
It is a fact, probably new to some of my readers: that the wild sunflower is the characteristic weed of Utah, and that the seeds of the plant supply the undiscriminating Red Man with an oil-cake which may agreeably vary a diet of grasshoppers and rattlesnakes, but has not intrinsically any flavour to recommend it. So South Kensington must not rush away with the idea that the noble savage who has the Crow for his "totem," feeds upon the blossoms of the vegetable they worship. It is the prosaic oil-cake that the Pi-ute eats.
But all I heard got mixed up eventually into a general idea that every man in the place who had not committed a murder was a millionaire, and all those who had not lost their lives had lost a fortune. The mines, too, got gradually sorted up into two kinds—those that had "five million now in sight, sir," or those whose "bottoms had fallen out." But one fact that pleased me particularly was the "Anti-Vigilance" Committee of Leadville. Every one knows that a "Vigilance Committee" consists of a certain number of volunteer guardians of the peace, who call (with a rope) upon strangers visiting their neighbourhood and offer them the choice of being hanged at once for the offences they purpose committing or of going elsewhere to commit them. The strangers, as it transpires in the morning, sometimes choose one course and sometimes the other. This is all very right and proper, and conduces to a general good understanding. But in Leadville, the citizens started an anti-vigilance committee and so the Vigilance Committee sent in their resignations to themselves—and accepted them. I do not think I ever heard of a fact so appalling in its significance. But the humour of it is that the Anti-Vigilance Committee managed somehow to keep the peace in Leadville as it had never been kept before.
It reminded me of an incident of the Afghan war. A certain tribe of hill-men persisted in killing the couriers who carried the post from one British camp to the other, and the generals were nearly at their wits' end for means of communication, when the murderers sent in word offering to carry the post themselves—and did so, faithfully!
It was in Leadville also that lived the barber who, going forth one night, was met by two men who told him peremptorily to take his hands out of his pockets, as they intended to take out all the rest. But he had nothing in his pockets except two Derringers, so he pulled his hands out and shot the two men dead where they stood. Next morning the citizens of Leadville placed the barber in a triumphal chair, and carried him round the town as a bright example to the public, presented him with a gold watch and chain as a testimonial of their esteem for his courage—and then escorted him the first stage out of the town, advising him never to return.