To his intense surprise he had been ordered to report to Colonel Hewes, to whom he bore despatches. And where could one suppose? At Stanham Mills! A horse was placed at his disposal; he was to start at once.
[to be continued.]
[THE BABYHOOD OF DENVER.]
BY JULIAN RALPH.
The first cabin in any part of what is now Denver, the capital of Colorado, was that of a hunter and trader, and is thought to have been an Indian's old tepee. It stood in what is now West Denver in 1857. To that neighborhood, in the early summer of 1858, came a party of Georgia men headed by a leader named Green Russell, and hunting for gold on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains. It had been said that some white men had found gold there nine years before, and that three years later some Indians also found a little. Later still a party of traders actually carried some "pay dirt" from there to their homes in Missouri. "Pay dirt," the reader should know, is any form of rock or earth or sand that contains sufficient gold to pay for working it.
Green Russell and his men arrived in June, 1858. If we stop a moment to consider these true founders of Denver, we shall see that they add a new picture to the varied, highly colored gallery of paintings that make the true pictorial history of the growth of our country. We have seen the stolid, dignified Dutchmen sail into New York Harbor with their swords, banners, queer old flint-lock guns, and quaint long pipes. We have seen the grave Puritans assemble in Massachusetts with their sober garments, their stern faces, and their muskets and Bibles carried side by side. We have seen the gorgeously dressed servants of the kings of France and Spain at their work of founding New Orleans, having their wives sent to them in ships, to make their acquaintance and be their wives after they got there. And at St. Louis we came upon the same sort of men who built up Canada—rough, brave boatmen in furs, singing and dancing, and throwing away their money that they earned in pathless forests and in savage Indian camps. When we came to study the birth of Helena, Montana, we saw upon the canvas of history the veteran gold-miner, old at the business, leaving one camp when it ceased to pay, and roaming all over the mountains, with, sharp, ferretlike eyes that saw no beauties in nature—nothing but the dull rocks and the sand in the beds of the streams where gold might be found. Rough, long-haired, bearded, dressed in whatever they could get, these "prospectors" clambered over the mountains, leaving many cities behind them that did not exist until they started them.
And now, at the birth of Denver, we see the life of the immigrants on the plains. We see the caravans of "prairie-schooners," crossing the continent like flights of brown moths, and settling a city as winged things light on a field or on a bed of flowers that offers food. They were miners, or were led by miners, but they were not yet veterans of the far Western type. They were closely followed by absolute strangers to the business—Eastern folk who wanted to pick up gold between their feet. Therefore the newest part of the picture is the life in the caravans of "prairie-schooners."
These were strong four-wheeled wagons, drawn by horses, and covered with canvas tops drawn over a series of half-hoops. In these wagons were beds, clothing, stoves, cooking and eating and drinking utensils, and women, children, and whatever invalid men there were in the train. I could not tell you fairly, in such a short article as this, a tenth part of the general experiences of the people who built up the West by travelling in these trains before the railroads came. Peril surrounded them—peril in many shapes. They were attacked by Indians. They dodged the savages, they fought them, they whipped them or were massacred. They crossed rivers and swollen streams without bridges. They crossed the plains through fearful heat or still more fearful cold. They found no water, or water unfit to drink. They fell sick, they died; cholera overtook some of them, chasing after them all the way from Asia. Their horses were stolen or died or broke down. Their food ran out. There was enough adventure in the journey to fill a lifetime—even to fill an extraordinary lifetime.