Up the pass a waggon-train is toiling on its way to the great new mining centre—the giant baby city—Leadville, the youngest and most wonderful child of the prolific west! In this train we get entangled, and move slowly along with it—waggons and cattle before us, waggons and cattle behind us—tourists, teamsters, miners, drivers, drovers, dogs, all huddled together in seemingly inextricable confusion.
At the top of the pass, we tourists turn: and, while the waggon-train plods on its slow way, we make the best of our way back down the hill, and take the road to the Garden of the Gods.
Why the Garden of the Gods? I do not myself perceive the appropriateness of the appellation. There is not a flower in sight; only a few stunted shrubs, and forlorn-looking, thin trees. It is a natural enclosure, of fifty or more acres, such as in Colorado is called a “park,” scattered with rocks of a rich red hue, and the wildest and most grotesque shapes imaginable.
The giants might have made it their playground, and left their playthings around them. Here, tossed and flung about as if by a careless hand, lie the huge round boulders with which they played at ball. Here they amused themselves by balancing an immense mass of stone on a point so cunningly that it has stood there for centuries looking as if a touch would overturn it. There they have hewn a high rock into the rough semblance of a veiled woman—here they have sculptured a man in a hat—there piled up a rude fortress, and there built a church.
But the giants have deserted their playground ages ago, and trees have grown up between the fantastic formations they left. It is a strange weird scene, and suggested to us forcibly that if we would “view it aright” we should
“Go view it by the pale moonlight!”
How spectral those strange shapes would look in the gloom! What ghostly life would seem to breathe in them when the white moonbeams bathed their eerie outlines in her light! There is a something lost in the Garden of the Gods to us who only saw it with a flood of sunshine glowing on its ruddy rocks. Most of these have been christened according to their form—the Nun, the Scotchman, the Camel, and so on.
Two huge walls of red and white stone, rising perpendicularly a sheer three hundred feet, form the gate of the Garden. Through this colossal and for-ever-open gate we looked back with a sigh of farewell—our glimpse of the scene seemed so brief!—and we half-fancied that the veiled Nun bowed her dark head in the sunshine in parting salute as we were whirled out of sight.
Between Two Oceans, or Sketches of American Travel (London, 1884).