The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

It was after nightfall on Saturday evening when I entered Colorado Springs. With the aid of the electric lights I soon gathered an impression of a considerable town of large hotels and wide, regular thoroughfares, with the squares built up, many of them, in detached villas, after the manner of Eastern summer-resorts by the sea. In the course of a walk about the town I came upon an empty prairie schooner, which stood in a cluster of trees on the outskirts of an open square, and creeping under the sheltering canopy I slept there for the night.

The Sunday which followed I remember chiefly for its glorious sunshine and the view which I had in the morning of Pike’s Peak. Its summit seemed to leap into the sky as it rose stark and bald above the timber-line, and yet there was infinite repose in its splendid height, standing out clear and majestic in the full rays of the morning sun. I remember, too, a service in a well-filled church, and an odd reminder in its worshippers of the Eastern seaboard, and the exciting expectancy of chance sight of some familiar face, and, finally, the figure of a girl, who, entering after the service had begun, slipped noiselessly into a seat at my side in a pew near the door. A wonderful vision she was of what men mean when they speak feelingly out here of “God’s country,” for you no sooner saw her than there flashed into sight the long vista of the avenue as it heaves to the lift of Murray Hill. You could see her there—and can see her superior nowhere under heaven—with the light streaming in red, level rays through the side streets on a late afternoon in the cold, crisp air of autumn, with the tan of a summer on the New England coast upon her, and her exquisite figure instinct with the vitality which comes of yachting and hard riding, her frock and jacket fitting her like a glove, and her clear, frank eyes looking you straight between your own and making you feel in her presence what a clean, wholesome, manly thing is life! She little dreamed, as she cordially shared her prayer-book with me, how deeply indebted to her I was for being so fine a type of the finest and handsomest women in the world, and how much I owed her for so fair a vision before I launched into the mining regions of the frontier.

Monday dawned as bright as Sunday had been, and by eight o’clock I reached Manitou and was ready to begin the ascent of Pike’s Peak. There was a wide choice of route, for there was a road, and a well-beaten trail, and the bed of the cog railway. I took to the railway as the most unmistakable and very likely the directest course.

With infinite engineering skill the first ascent of the cog-road is cut as a ledge along the side of a deep gorge or cañon, down which rushes a mountain stream of considerable volume. Following the great turns of the cañon the road ascends in the shadow of huge rocks, that tower straight above it or slope in a more gradual rise, furnishing place for the cabin of a miner or of some lover of camp life. The mountain-sides are dark with evergreen, which seems to grow deep-rooted in the rock, clinging at times to a bare, protruding ledge with naked roots thrust deep into crevices where soil and moisture are found. The quaking aspen shares this bare subsistence with the pine, and, green with the rich green of late summer at the mountain-base, it marked all the stages of the autumn in the ascent, until at the timber-line I found its leaves turned yellow and fast falling to the ground.

About two miles below Windy Point I had the good luck to overtake a miner, who had been spending Sunday with his family near Colorado Springs and was now on his way back to work in Cripple Creek. He was not at all encouraging as to the prospect of my finding work in the camp, but before we parted at Windy Point he gave me careful directions about the way, and I began to feel, in his calling me “partner” and in his talk of “claims” and “gulches” and “blazed trails,” my first intimation of nearing the mining regions of the Rockies.

We separated where the cog-road sweeps around the southern side of the mountain, only because I was bent on reaching the summit before going on to Cripple Creek. All the difficulty of the ascent I found concentrated in the last hour of climbing. It no longer was a matter of steady uphill work, but a succession of short spurts wherein one breathed more by accident than design. You were not tired in the least, but, at an altitude of some 14,000 feet, your breath failed completely in an upward walk of fifty yards, and you were obliged to stand still, panting until respiration became normal again.

Exactly at twelve o’clock I reached the summit, where I found a piercing cold wind blowing and small drifts of snow lying in crevices among the rocks on the northern slope; in an air as clear as crystal my eye swept boundless mountain-ranges to the north and west and south and a boundless plain below, where, at the foot of the mountain, lay Colorado Springs, a few, dim squares formed by the intersection of faint parallel lines at right angles to one another. Above the rushing of the wind among the grim, naked crags which form the summit, a wind, which at that solemn height suggests the sweep of awful interstellar spaces, the only sound I heard was the voice of an attendant in a stone building near by as he sang, again and again, the chorus of “Ta, ra, ra, ra, boom, de ay!”

I remained at the summit as long as I dared, held by the fascination of the view; then I returned to Windy Point and went down the south face of the mountain and across a beautiful grass-grown level to the brink of another descent, where, according to my miner friend of the morning, I should find a blazed trail. I found instead the sheer side of a cañon. I followed the brink of the precipice for some distance, and coming at last upon a less abrupt point, I plunged down and made my way over shelving rock and fallen trees until I eventually chanced upon the trail. This I followed to the deep bed of the cañon, where I saw some claims staked out and lost my way in a tangle of cattle trails. It was growing dark, and there was no sign of the journey’s end, but I knew the general direction of Cripple Creek, and the moon was at its first quarter.

Even the cattle trails failed at last, and in the dark forest I was soon lunging on over bowlders and rotting trees and the débris of a mountain wood in the direction of the camp, hoping, meanwhile, that I should not be obliged to spend the night in the open, for at that altitude in late September it was turning “wondrous cold.”

Down one ridge and up another I forged ahead through the tangled undergrowth of the forest, and at last, from the top of a rock which cleared the trees about it, I caught the glimmer of a light through the window of a cabin a mile or two away.