MISS BIRD AND OTHERS.
"The climate of Colorado is the finest in North America; and consumptives, asthmatics, dyspeptics, and sufferers from nervous diseases are here in hundreds and thousands, either trying the 'camp cure' for three or four months, or settling here permanently. People can safely sleep out of doors for six months of the year. The plains are from 4,000 to 6,000 feet high, and some of the settled 'parks,' or mountain valleys, are from 8,000 to 10,000. The air, besides being much rarefied, is very dry; the rainfall is far below the average, dews are rare, and fogs nearly unknown. The sunshine is bright and almost constant, and three-fourths of the days are cloudless."
This is not Eden, but Colorado; yet, seeing it reproduces as nearly as possible what we may suppose to have been the primary characteristics of that first Garden, to us dwellers in a land where mists and fogs are frequent and sunbeams are rare, Miss Bird's description of it reads like an effort of the imagination. Miss Bird traversed a portion of Colorado in 1878, on her way to explore the recesses of the Rocky Mountains. Starting from San Francisco, she travelled by railway to Truckee. Here she hired a horse, and for greater convenience assumed what she styled her "Hawaiian riding dress"—that is, a half-fitting jacket, a skirt reaching to the ankles, and full Turkish trousers gathered into frills, which fell over the boots—"a thoroughly serviceable and feminine costume for mountaineering and other rough travelling in any part of the world." Throwing over these habiliments a dust-cloak, she rode through Truckee, and then followed up the windings of the Truckee river—a loud-tongued, rollicking mountain-stream, flowing between ranges of great castellated and embattled sierras. Through the blue gloom of a pine-forest she gallantly made her way, charmed by the magic of the scenery that opened out before her. "Crested blue-jays darted through the dark pines, squirrels in hundreds scampered through the forest, red dragon-flies flashed like 'living light,' exquisite chipmonks ran across the track, but only a dusty blue legion here and there reminded one of earth's fairer children. Then the river became broad and still, and mirrored in its transparent depths regal pines, straight as an arrow, with rich yellow and green lichen clinging to their stems, and firs and balsam pines filling up the spaces between them. The gorge opened, and this mountain-girdled lake lay before me, with its margin broken up into bays and promontories, most picturesquely clothed by huge sugar-pines."
From Lake Tabor Miss Bird returned to Truckee, and started on another excursion which brought her within view of the Great Salt Lake and the Mormon town of Ogden, and thence to Cheyenne, in the State of Wyoming. Having thus crossed the mountain-range of the Sierras and descended into the plains, she entered upon the region of the "boundless prairies—great stretches of verdure, generally level, but elsewhere rolling in long undulations, like the waves of a sea which had fallen asleep." Their monotony is broken by large villages of the so-called prairie dogs, the Wishton-Wish, a kind of marmot, which owes its misleading name to its short, sharp bark. The villages are composed of raised circular orifices, about eighteen inches in diameter, from which a number of inclined passages slope downwards for five or six feet. "Hundreds of these burrows are placed together. On nearly every rim a small furry, reddish-buff beast sat on his hind legs, looking, so far as head went, much like a young seal. These creatures were acting as sentinels, and sunning themselves. As we passed each gave a warning yelp, shook its tail, and, with a ludicrous flourish of his hind legs, dived into its hole. The appearance of hundreds of these creatures, each eighteen inches long, sitting like dogs begging, with their paws down and all turned sunwards, is most grotesque."
At Greeley Miss Bird entered Colorado, which she describes, as we have seen, in such a manner as to suggest that it rivals Dr. Richardson's imaginary "Hygeia" in all essential particulars. From Greeley she hastened to Fort Collins, with the grand masses of the Rocky Mountains facing her as she advanced. Still across the boundless sea-like prairie struck the indefatigable traveller, until she came to a sort of tripartite valley, with a majestic crooked cañon, 2,000 feet deep, and watered by a roaring stream, where in a rude log-cabin she abode for several days. Having obtained a horse she rode across the highlands, and striking up the St. Vrain Canyon ascended to Esteo Park, 7,500 feet above the sea-level. To understand the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, the reader must think of them as a mass of summits, frequently 200 and 250 miles wide, stretching, with scarcely any interruption of continuity, almost from the Arctic Circle to the Straits of Magellan. At the point ascended by Miss Bird their scenery was of the grandest description—wonderful ascents, wild fantastic views, cool and bowery shades, romantic glens echoing melodiously with the fall of waters. But it is only fair that Miss Bird should be heard on her own account:—
"A tremendous ascent among rocks and pines to a height of 9,000 feet brought us to a passage seven feet wide through a wall of rock, with an abrupt descent of 2,000 feet, and a yet higher ascent beyond. I never saw anything so strange as looking back. It was a single gigantic ridge which we had passed through, standing up knife-like, built up entirely of great brick-shaped masses of bright-red rock, piled one on another by Titans. Pitch-pines grew out of these crevices, but there was not a vestige of soil. Beyond, wall beyond wall of similar construction, and range above range, rose into the blue sky. Fifteen miles more over great ridges, along passes dark with shadow, and so narrow that we had to ride in the beds of the streams which had excavated them, round the bases of colossal pyramids of rock crested with pines, up into fair upland 'parks' scarlet in patches with the poison oak, parks so beautifully arranged by nature that I momentarily expected to come upon some stately mansion; but that afternoon, crested blue jays and chipmonks had them all to themselves. Here, in the early morning, deer, bighorn, and the stately elk come down to feed; and there, in the night, prowl and growl the Rocky Mountain lion, the grizzly bear, and the cowardly wolf. There were chasms of immense depth, dark with the indigo gloom of pines, and mountains with snow gleaming on their splintered crests, loveliness to bewilder and grandeur to awe, and still streams and shady pools, and cool depths of shadow; mountains again, dense with pines, among which patches of aspen gleamed like gold; valleys where the yellow cottonwood mingled with the crimson oak, and so, on and on through the lengthening shadows till the track, which in places had been hardly legible, became well defined, and we entered a long gulch with broad swellings of grass belted with pines."[41]
Long's Peak, the "American Matterhorn," 14,700 feet high, has seldom been ascended, and Miss Bird is the first woman who has had the courage and resolution to reach its summit. Her party consisted of herself, two youths, the sons of a certain Dr. H., and "Mountain Jim," one of the famous scouts of the plain, an expert in Indian border warfare, who acted as guide. The ride at first was one long series of glories and surprises, of peak and glade, of lake and stream, and of mountain upon mountain, culminating in the shivered pinnacles of Long's Peak. And as the sun slowly sank, the pines stood out darkling against the golden sky, the grey peaks took upon their crests a glory of crimson and purple, a luminous mist of changing colours filled every glen, gorge, and canyon, while the echoes softly repeated that peculiar sough or murmur which accompanies the departing day. Our adventurer, with heart touched by the magical beauty and magnificence of the scene, crossed a steep wooded incline into a deep hollow, where, embosomed in the mountain-solitude, slept a lily-covered lake, cradling white, pure blossoms and broad green leaves, and aptly named "The Lake of the Lilies." Calm on its amethyst-coloured waters lay the tremulous shadow of the great dark pine woods.
Thence she and her companions passed again into the leafy wilderness which clothes the mountain side up to a height of about 11,000 feet, cheered, as they climbed slowly upwards on their laborious path, by delightful vistas of "golden atmospheres and rose-lit summits," such as broke upon the dreams of him who created in his fancy the Garden of Armida; upward and onward through the dusky shade, which in itself may well impress a quick imagination. It is the silence of the forest that makes its mystery. The only sounds are those of the branches swaying in the breeze, or of a bough crashing to the ground through decay, or the occasional voices of the wandering birds; and these seem but to increase the silence by their inadequateness of contrast. Alone in this profundity of gloom it is difficult for the traveller to resist the sense and feeling of a supernatural Presence, and he comes to understand in what way such eerie legends and grim traditions have grown up about the forest, and why to the early races its still depths seemed haunted by the creatures of another world.
Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades
Like vaporous shapes half seen;—
and the forest is peopled with the phantoms that are born of Silence and Twilight.