The Indian question is not likely to be one much longer: before I reached England again, I learnt that the Coloradan capital had offered “twenty dollars a piece for Indian scalps with the ears on.”
CHAPTER XII.
COLORADO.
WHEN you have once set eyes upon the never-ending sweep of the Great Plains, you no longer wonder that America rejects Malthusianism. As Strachey says of Virginia, “Here is ground enough to satisfy the most covetous and wide affection.” The freedom of these grand countries was worth the tremendous conflict in which it was, in reality, the foremost question; their future is of enormous moment to America.
Travelers soon learn, when making estimates of a country‘s value, to despise no feature of the landscape; that of the plains is full of life, full of charm—lonely, indeed, but never wearisome. Now great rolling uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains; there is all the grandeur of monotony, and yet continual change. Sometimes the grand distances are broken by blue buttes or rugged bluffs. Over all there is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze; the air is bracing even when most hot; the sky is cloudless, and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, and the boundless prairie swell, convey an idea of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the plains.
Maps do not remove the impression produced by views. The Arkansas River, which is born and dies within the limit of the plains, is two thousand miles in length, and is navigable for eight hundred miles. The Platte and Yellowstone are each of them as long. Into the plains and plateau you could put all India twice. The impression is not merely one of size. There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe; no patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveler wishing here to end his days.
To those who love the sea, there is a double charm. Not only is the roll of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the crispness of the wind, the absence of trees, the multitude of tiny blooms upon the sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the ocean, the effect of which is we are always expecting to hail it from off the top of the next hillock.
The resemblance to the Tartar plains has been remarked by Coloradan writers; it may be traced much farther than they have carried it. Not only are the earth, air, and water much alike, but in Colorado, as in Bokhara, there are oil wells and mud volcanoes. The color of the landscape is, in summer, green and flowers; in fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers ever.
The eastern and western portions of the plains are not alike. In Kansas the grass is tall and rank; the ravines are filled with cottonwood, hickory, and black walnut; here and there are square miles of sunflowers, from seven to nine feet high. As we came west, we found that the sunflowers dwindled, and at Denver they are only from three to nine inches in height, the oddest little plants in nature, but thorough sunflowers for all their smallness. We found the buffalo in the eastern plains in the long bunch-grass, but in the winter they work to the west in search of the sweet and juicy “blue grass,” which they rub out from under the snow in the Coloradan plains. This grass is crisp as hair, and so short that, as the story goes, you must lather before you can mow it. The “blue grass” has high vitality: if a wagon train is camped for a single night among the sunflowers or tall weeds, this crisp turf at once springs up, and holds the ground forever.
The most astounding feature of these plains is their capacity to receive millions, and, swallowing them up, to wait open-mouthed for more. Vast and silent, fertile yet waste, fieldlike yet untilled, they have room for the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, for all the teeming multitudes that have poured and can pour from the plains of Asia and of Central Europe. Twice as large as Hindostan, more temperate, more habitable, nature has been placed here hedgeless, gateless, free to all—a green field for the support of half the human race, unclaimed, untouched, awaiting smiling, hands and plow.
There are two curses upon this land. Here, as in India, the rivers depend on the melting of distant snows for their supplies, and in the hot weather are represented by beds of parched white sand. So hot and dry is a great portion of the land, that crops require irrigation. Water for drinking purposes is scarce; artesian bores succeed, but they are somewhat costly for the Coloradan purse, and the supply from common wells is brackish. This, perhaps, may in part account for the Western mode of “prospecting” after water, under which it is agreed that if none be found at ten feet, a trial shall be made at a fresh spot. The thriftless ranchman had sooner find bad water at nine feet than good at eleven.