CHAPTER VIII
FROM DENVER TO THE PACIFIC
Phœnix, Arizona,
January 3, 1893.
Journeying by no pre-arranged plan, but directing my course according to the promptings of chance circumstances, I have wandered far from a direct westward line from Denver to the sea, but I have come by a way that has furnished in experience all that I could have hoped.
The very first step from Denver carried me out of a due westward course. In the vague, ill-defined manner of a tenderfoot, I knew that Cripple Creek was a relatively new mining camp, and that it lay somewhere beyond Pike’s Peak, and I light-heartedly dreamed that, being a new camp, it was just the place for a new-comer; so, late in September, I set out from Denver with Cripple Creek in view.
For seventy miles or more I went south, the earlier part of the walk leading me through the sandy tract which begins abruptly at the very edge of the fresh green lawns that mark the end of irrigation in the city. The road which first I followed gradually faded out on the open plain. Then I cut diagonally across country in the direction of the foot-hills.
Near to the city as it was this bit of country, after weeks of drought, was like a veritable desert. Underfoot was the hot alkali dust, where grew the short plain-grass that lay whitened in tufts of crisping curls, as though dead beyond all reviving. Thick on every side was a growth of stunted cactus, well in keeping with the character of the plain, while the deeper green of the long, sharp Spanish needles was a sad mockery of fertility. Along occasional ravines, washed deep by sudden, rain-fed streams whose beds now lay stony and parched and baked under the hot sun, were here and there clusters of scrub-oaks, small in growth but with their wiry branches spreading a luxuriance of small oval leaves which supplied the welcome of a shadow in a desert land. At intervals among the dry, tufted grass small sand-heaps appeared, and above them the heads of prairie dogs, piping shrill warning of suspicious approach, or darting in swift flight from one burrow to another.
For some miles I walked through such a region, growing momentarily thirstier as the sun beat down upon me and I inhaled the alkali with the sensation of having eaten soap. The only sign of habitation that I saw was a shanty, a mere shell of boards tacked upon a frame and standing ten feet square, perhaps, and seven feet high. The hill on which it stood sloped to a deep ravine, and past the shanty door wound a smaller water-course, where a line of scrub-oaks grew, suggesting the presence of a spring. But the bed was dry and yawned in thirsty cracks, and no source of water could I find, although the shanty was plainly inhabited; for the door was heavily padlocked, and a half-starved dog, with a broken leg, limped from his kennel among some old soap-boxes and barked a feeble protest against my approach, and a few fowls were squatting in the dust in the shade of the scrub-oaks, or scratching for food in the dry grass near the shanty.
Two or three miles farther on I came out upon a highway, which follows the general direction of the Santa Fé and the Rio Grande railways, as they parallel each other to the south. Here was a very different tale to tell. There were many ranches along the route with abundant supplies of water from artesian wells, apparently, whose streams were playing ceaselessly over gardens and at the roots of thrifty fruit-trees. I passed through a number of typical Western villages on the march, and once through an encampment of a regiment of regulars, whose officers were at mess and many of the men lying at full length on the ground with their legs protruding from under the slight shelter tents, while foraging expeditions could be seen bargaining among their out-houses with the neighboring ranchmen, with all the womenkind and children in interested attendance.
The road was gradually drawing nearer to the foot-hills. Instead of a hundred miles of unbroken mountain-range, from Long’s to Pike’s Peak, that seemed to rise abruptly from the plain only an hour’s walk away, I began to be aware of the magnificent distances so strangely disguised in that clear, rarefied air, and to appreciate altitudes by comparison with lesser heights. The view lost in extent, only to gain in the grander outlines of splendid detail. And with the nearer view there grew clear the marvellous coloring in the exposed strata and the fantastic shapes which mark the play of erosion among the rocks. There were deep saffrons and reds of every hue, from a delicate flush to crimson; there were browns and grays without number, and a soft cream color deepening to yellow, and now and then a jut of rock that in certain lights appeared milk-white. To boundless variety in color was added a weird charm of form with which the imagination could play endlessly. Sitting a rugged bowlder with the dainty poise of an egg upon a conjurer’s finger would appear a round-bellied Hindu god in solid stone, and near him, in exquisitely delicate tracery, a flying buttress or the tapering spire of a cathedral, while crowning some sheer height in all the glory of gorgeous color would rise the grim towers and battlements of a mediæval fortress.