The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

The two most striking things about the city to me were the public schools and the private houses. Great corporations, insurance companies, and capitalists erect twelve-story buildings everywhere. They do it for an advertisement for themselves or their business, and for the rent of the offices. But these buildings do not in any way represent a city’s growth. You will find one or two of such buildings in almost every Western city, but you will find the people who rent the offices in them living in the hotels or in wooden houses on the outskirts. In Denver there are not only the big buildings, but mile after mile of separate houses, and of the prettiest, strictest, and most proper architecture. It is a distinct pleasure to look at these houses, and quite impossible to decide upon the one in which you would rather live. They are not merged together in solid rows, but stand apart, with a little green breathing-space between, each in its turn asserting its own individuality. The greater part of these are built of the peculiarly handsome red stone which is found so plentifully in the Silver State. It is not the red stone which makes them so pleasantly conspicuous, but the taste of the owner or the architect which has turned it to account. As for the public schools, they are more like art museums outside than school-houses; and if as much money and thought in proportion are given to the instruction as have been put upon the buildings, the children of Denver threaten to grow up into a most disagreeably superior class of young persons. Denver possesses those other things which make a city livable, but the public schools and the private houses were to me the most distinctive features. The Denver Club is quite as handsome and well ordered a club as one would find in New York City, and the University Club, which is for the younger men, brings the wanderers from different colleges very near and pleasantly together. Its members can sing more different college songs in a given space of time than any other body of men I have met. The theatres and the hotels are new and very good, and it is a delight to find servants so sufficiently civilized that the more they are ordered about and the more one gives them to do, the more readily they do it, knowing that this means that they are to be tipped. In the other Western cities, where this pernicious and most valuable institution is apparently unknown, a traveller has to do everything for himself.

GATEWAY OF THE GARDEN OF THE GODS, AND PIKE’S PEAK

You will find that the people of a city always pride themselves on something which the visitor within their gates would fail to notice. They have become familiar with those features which first appeal to him, have outgrown them, and have passed on to admire something else. The citizen of Denver takes a modest pride in the public schools, the private houses, and the great mountains, which seem but an hour’s walk distant and are twenty miles away; but he is proudest before all of two things—of his celery and his cable-cars. His celery is certainly the most delicious and succulent that grows, and his cable-cars are very beautiful white and gold affairs, and move with the delightfully terrifying speed of a toboggan. Riding on these cable-cars is one of the institutions of the city, just as in the summer a certain class of young people in New York find their pleasure in driving up and down the Avenue on the top of the omnibuses. But that is a dreary and sentimental journey compared with a ride on the grip-seat of a cable-car, and every one in Denver patronizes this means of locomotion whether on business or on pleasure bent, and whether he has carriages of his own or not. There is not, owing to the altitude, much air to spare in Denver at any time, but when one mounts a cable-car, and is swept with a wild rush around a curve, or dropped down a grade as abruptly as one is dropped down the elevator shaft in the Potter Building, what little air there is disappears, and leaves one gasping. Still, it is a most popular diversion, and even in the winter some of the younger people go cable-riding as we go sleighing, and take lap-robes with them to keep them warm. There is even a “scenic route,” which these cars follow, and it is most delightful.

Denver and Colorado Springs pretend to be jealous of one another; why, it is impossible to understand. One is a city, and the other a summer or health resort; and we might as properly compare Boston and Newport, or New York and Tuxedo. In both cities the Eastern man and woman and the English cousin are much more in evidence than the born Western man. These people are very fond of their homes at Denver and at the Springs, but they certainly manage to keep Fifth Avenue and the Sound and the Back Bay prominently in mind. Half of those women whose husbands are wealthy—and every one out here seems to be in that condition—do the greater part of their purchasing along Broadway below Twenty-third Street, their letter-paper is stamped on Union Square, and their husbands are either part or whole owners of a yacht. It sounds very strange to hear them, in a city shut in by ranges of mountain peaks, speak familiarly of Larchmont and Hell Gate and New London and “last year’s cruise.” Colorado Springs is the great pleasure resort for the whole State, and the salvation and sometimes the resting-place of a great many invalids from all over the world. It lies at the base of Pike’s Peak and Cheyenne Mountain, and is only an hour’s drive from the great masses of jagged red rock known as the Garden of the Gods. Pike’s Peak, the Garden of the Gods, and the Mount of the Holy Cross are the proudest landmarks in the State. This last mountain was regarded for many years almost as a myth, for while many had seen the formation which gives it its name, no one could place the mountain itself, the semblance of the cross disappearing as one drew near to it. But in 1876 Mr. Hayden, of the Government Survey, and Mr. W. H. Jackson, of Denver, found it, climbed it, and photographed it, and since then artists and others have made it familiar. But it will never become so familiar as to lose aught of its wonderfully impressive grandeur.

There are also near Colorado Springs those mineral waters which give it its name, and of which the people are so proud that they have turned Colorado Springs into a prohibition town, and have made drinking the waters, as it were, compulsory. This is an interesting example of people who support home industries. There is a casino at the Springs, where the Hungarian band plays in summer, a polo field, a manufactured lake for boating, and hundreds of beautiful homes, fashioned after the old English country-house, even to the gate-keeper’s lodge and the sun dial on the lawn. And there are cañons that inspire one not to attempt to write about them. There are also many English people who have settled there, and who vie with the Eastern visitors in the smartness of their traps and the appearance of their horses. Indeed, both of these cities have so taken on the complexion of the East that one wonders whether it is true that the mining towns of Creede and Leadville lie only twelve hours away, and that one is thousands of miles distant from the City of New York.

It is possible that some one may have followed this series of articles, of which this is the last, from the first, and that he may have decided, on reading them, that the West is filled with those particular people and institutions of which these articles have treated, and that one steps from ranches to army posts, and from Indian reservations to mining camps with easy and uninterrupted interest. This would be, perhaps it is needless to say, an entirely erroneous idea. I only touched on those things which could not be found in the East, and said nothing of the isolation of these particular and characteristic points of interest, of the commonplace and weary distances which lay between them, and of the difficulty of getting from one point to another. For days together, while travelling to reach something of possible interest, I might just as profitably, as far as any material presented itself, have been riding through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Ohio. Indians do not necessarily join hands with the cowboys, nor army posts nestle at the feet of mountains filled with silver. The West is picturesque in spots, and, as the dramatic critics say, the interest is not sustained throughout. I confess I had an idea that after I had travelled four days in a straight line due west, every minute of my time would be of value, and that if each man I met was not a character he would tell stories of others who were, and that it would merely be necessary for me to keep my eyes open to have picturesque and dramatic people and scenes pass obligingly before them. I was soon undeceived in this, and learned that in order to reach the West we read about, it would be necessary for me to leave the railroad, and that I must pay for an hour of interest with days of the most unprofitable travel. Matthew Arnold said, when he returned to England, that he had found this country “uninteresting,” and every American was properly indignant, and said he could have forgiven him any adjective but that. If Matthew Arnold travelled from Pittsburg to St. Louis, from St. Louis to Corpus Christi, and from Corpus Christi back through Texas to the Indian Territory, he not only has my sympathy, but I admire him as a descriptive writer. For those who find the level farm lands of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and the ranches of upper Texas, and the cactus of Southern Texas, and the rolling prairie of the Indian Territory interesting, should travel from Liverpool to London on either line they please to select, and they will understand the Englishman’s discontent. Hundreds of miles of level mud and snow followed by a hot and sandy soil and uncultivated farm lands are not as interesting as hedges of hawthorn or glimpses of the Thames or ivy-covered country-houses in parks of oak. The soldiers who guard this land, the Indians who are being crowded out of it, and the cowboys who gallop over it and around their army of cattle, are interesting, but they do not stand at the railroad stations to be photographed and to exhibit their peculiar characteristics.

WITHIN THE GATES, GARDEN OF THE GODS

But after one leaves these different States and rides between the mountain ranges of Colorado, he commits a sin if he does not sit day and night by the car-window. It is best to say this as it shows the other side of the shield.