On the 15th of August, 1871, two brothers and a sister—Sepia, an artist, Levell, an engineer, and Scribe, who is the narrator—left Chicago by the North-western Railroad, bound for Denver in Colorado, about eleven hundred miles west. The first day we were climbing the gradual ascent from the Lakes to the Mississippi, which we crossed at 4.30 P.M., at Clinton. The thirty years which had elapsed since I first traversed this region had changed it from wild, unbroken prairie to a well-cultivated country, full of corn-fields, cattle and flourishing towns. Then I traveled in a wagon four miles an hour, and had to find my own meat in the shape of a deer from the grove, a grouse from the prairie or a duck from the river. Now we rushed across the State in six hours, stopping fifteen minutes for dinner in a fine brick hotel, metropolitan in charges, if not in fare. In 1840, when we arrived at the great river, we waited two or three hours for the ferry-boat, and finally had to cross in a "dug-out," which seemed but a frail vessel to stem the rapid currents and whirling eddies of the Mississippi. Now we crossed upon a railroad bridge of iron, which cost more money than all Iowa contained in 1840. Still, I fancy that the first method of traveling was the more interesting.
Through the still summer afternoon we rushed on over the rolling prairies of Iowa, dotted with towns and villages and covered with great corn- and wheat-farms. Here in 1840 was absolute wilderness: we made our hunting-camp seventy-five miles west of the river, and we were twenty miles away from any white settler. Wolves howled and panthers screamed around our camp, we lived upon elk and deer meat, and our only visitors in two weeks were some Sac and Fox Indians, who disapproved of our intrusion upon their hunting-grounds.
At 9 A.M. on the 16th we arrived at Council Bluffs, and crossed the turbid and furious Missouri in a steam ferry-boat to Omaha in Nebraska. For many years Council Bluffs was one of the remotest military posts: to go there was to be banished from the world. Now it is a town of ten thousand inhabitants, struggling to overtake its rival on the other bank, Omaha, which has sixteen thousand.
Here our baggage was rechecked for Denver, for at Omaha begins the Union Pacific Railroad. A great road it is, and great are its charges. On the North-western, as on most others, the charge is about four cents per mile, but the Union Pacific, to which corporation Congress gave the usual land-grant, and more than enough money to build the road, cannot afford to carry you for less than ten. This may arise from the custom which has prevailed of giving free passes to all Congressmen, governors, editors and other privileged classes, so that, half the passengers paying nothing, the others have to pay double. Not only are the fares high, but you are charged for extra baggage. Like the elephant, who can drag a cannon or pick up a pin, this great corporation is able to give free passes to a whole legislature or to charge me twenty-five cents for five pounds of extra baggage.
From Nebraska into Wyoming, and we are nearly out of the United States, though the old flag still flies over us. The people here talk about going to the "States." All the region hereabouts, from the middle of Nebraska, lies in what used to be called by the French Les Mauvaises Terres, or "Bad Lands," and was eloquently described by Irving in Astoria as the Great American Desert. "This region," he writes, "resembles one of the immeasurable steppes of Asia, and spreads forth into undulating and treeless plains and desolate sandy wastes, which are supposed by geologists to have formed the ancient floor of the ocean countless ages ago, when its primeval waves beat against the granite bases of the Rocky Mountains. It is a land where no man permanently abides, for in certain seasons of the year there is no food either for the hunter or his steed. The herbage is parched and withered, the streams are dried up, the buffalo, the elk and the deer have wandered to distant parts, leaving behind them a vast, uninhabited solitude."
But this "land where no man permanently abides" is rapidly being settled, and is found to be rendered very fertile by the simple process of irrigation, which costs less than the manuring of Eastern farms. So the Great American Desert recedes before the immigrant, and, like the noble savage, is found to be a myth.
On the railroad midway between Cheyenne and Denver lies the new town of Greeley. Although not on the maps in 1870, it now contains fifteen hundred inhabitants, forty or fifty stores, six hotels, churches, schools, and all the apparatus of civilization. This aspiring town, 4779 feet above the sea-level, is an example of those colony towns so successful in the West, and on which we must depend for rebuilding society in the South. Greeley is surrounded by fertile farms, and every city lot looks fresh and green: all this is effected by irrigation. Two canals have been dug from the head-waters of the Platte—one twenty-six miles long, which will water fifty thousand acres; the other ten miles long, to furnish water for the town and five thousand acres. The prairie where it is not irrigated now, in midsummer, looks burned up and covered with a parched herbage, which, however unpromising to the eye, is really good sweet hay, dried and preserved by the hand of Nature for the buffalo and antelope, and now cropped by the flocks and herds of the white man.
Denver, the capital of the Territory, contains about eight thousand inhabitants. It is a true specimen of a Western town which fully believes in itself, and blows a loud trumpet from its elevation of five thousand feet. It was said of old "that the meek shall inherit the earth," but it was not by that quality that the Denverites obtained their location. Here are plenty of hotels, three banks and a mint: five railroads centre here, bringing in ten thousand tons of freight per month. Denver has schools and churches in satisfactory numbers, and her merchants sell ten millions of dollars' worth of goods per annum. Considering that the place was only settled in 1858, and has in these fifteen years been destroyed both by fire and water, and almost starved by an Indian blockade, it must be admitted to be a pretty smart specimen of a Western city.
We ride in a 'bus, city fashion, to the Broadwell House, a fatigued-looking structure of the earlier period, but probably no worse than the others. Directly we begin to plan an excursion to the South Park, seventy-five miles distant, and going out to look for wagon and horses, we catch our first sight of the Rocky Mountains, a line of dim, misty heights, with the more pronounced outline of the foot-hills beneath. We engage a strong covered wagon, with a good pair of horses and a driver, the latter only seventeen years old, but owner of the team, and carrying himself man-fashion, with the precocity of the Western youth. The wagon is brought to the hotel and loaded, so as to be ready for an early start in the morning: we have a tent and camp-equipage, with gun and fishing-rods for Levell and Scribe, and the sketching-gear belonging to Sepia.
So on the 18th, at 8 A.M., we drive over the bridge which crosses Cherry Creek, and then cross six miles of uninhabited prairie, seamed with gulches, and brown with withered herbage and cactus—no verdure except along the canals, where several species of Artemisia and a prickly poppy with a large white flower grow profusely. We then begin to mount the bare foot-hills, among which are curious masses of red rock as large as city churches, and washed by the storms of ages into various fantastic forms. We then enter a ravine or cañon through which flows Bear Creek, a tributary of the Platte.