We ate dinner with this hospitable family, and then we went back to the corral and the selling of our horses, which commenced soon after we got there, as the farmers came early in the day.
That night we paid the herder for his care of the horses, and then we pulled out for Dallas.
CHAPTER XI.
I do not remember how many days it took us to reach Dallas, but it was in the middle of October when we rode into that city.
This was in the fall of fifty-eight, and the news had just reached Dallas that gold had been discovered on Cherry creek in the territory of Colorado, and the excitement was intense. All over the city people talked of nothing else but gold, and of all the exaggeration stories about gold mines that I had ever heard, the ones told there were the most incredible. The parties who brought the news to Dallas had not been to the mines themselves, but had been told these wonderful stories at Bent's Fort.
Capt. McKee caught the gold fever right away, and he said to me, "I am going to get up a company in the spring and go to those new gold mines. Don't you want to go with me?"
I answered, "No, Capt. I do not, for I know that Cherry creek country, and I do not believe that there is a pound of gold in all that country. It is nothing but a desert."
He said, "Have you been to Cherry creek?"
I answered, "Yes sir, a number of times."
"Where is Cherry creek?" he asked. I told him that Cherry creek headed in the divide between the Arkansas river and the South Platte river, and emptied into the South Platte river about twenty miles below where the Platte leaves the Rocky mountains and near the center of the territory of Colorado. Capt. McKee said, "Well, I am going anyhow. I did not go to California when I ought to have gone, and maybe this will prove as rich a country for getting gold as that did."