In to the Yukon

by William Seymour Edwards

EIGHTEENTH LETTER.
COLORADO AND DENVER.

Denver, October 19th.

After leaving Glenwood Springs we wound up the gorge of the Grand River, the castellated, crenelated, serrated, scarped and wind-worn cliffs towering many thousand feet into the blue sky. The valley narrowed sensibly and the sheer heights imposed themselves more and more upon us as we approached the tunnel at the height of land 10,200 feet above the sea, and where part the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from those of the Pacific. On the Canadian Pacific Railway, the interoceanic divide between the waters of Hudson Bay and the Pacific is only some 5,300 feet above tide level, so now we were nearly a mile higher in the air. Yet the long journey of 2,000 miles from San Francisco, the crossing of the Sierra Nevada and Wasatch ranges, had brought us to this final ascent almost unperceived.

Traversing the divide and coming out from the long tunnel which bows above the continental height of land, we diverged from the main line and crept yet higher right up into Leadville, where the air was thin and keen and as chill as in December. Thence we descended through the wonderful cañon of the Platte River that has made this journey on the Denver and Rio Grande Railway famous the world round.

We came to Denver early in the morning; the metropolis of the middle West, the chief railroad center west of the Missouri, the mining center of all the Rocky Mountain mineral belt, and now claiming to be equally the center of the great and rapidly growing irrigated agricultural region of the inter and juxta mountain region of the continent. Essentially a business place is Denver. Its buildings are as elegant as those of New York City, many of them almost as pretentious as those of Chicago, as solid as those of Pittsburg, and as new as the fine blocks of Los Angeles. She is altogether a more modern city than San Francisco, is Denver. Her residences are also up to date, handsome, substantial. The homes of men who are making money. Her one hundred and eighty miles of electric tramways are good, though not quite as good as the two hundred miles of Los Angeles. Her schools are probably unexcelled in the Union. Denver is new, and in the clear, translucent atmosphere looks yet newer; she is neat, she is ambitious, and she is gathering to herself the commerce, the trade, the manufacturing pre-eminence, the mining supervision of all that vast section of our continent from Canada to Mexico, from the great plains to the snowy summits of the Cascades and Sierra Nevadas. All this is Denver, while at the same time she is the capital of Colorado, a State four times as big as West Virginia, though with only half the population. And Denver is so fast seated in the saddle of state prosperity that no section of Colorado can prosper, no interest can grow nor develop, neither the gold and silver mining with its yield of forty millions a year, nor the iron and coal fields—30,000 square miles of coal fields—nor the agriculture and grazing interests, worth eighty millions a year (now exceeding the value of the gold and silver produced twice over), none of these can grow and gain, but they immediately and permanently pay tribute to Denver.

Yet this very up-to-dateness of Denver robs it of a certain charm. You might just as well be at home as be in Denver. The people look the same, they dress the same, they walk the same, they talk the same. Just a few more of them, that’s all.

There are none of the lovely lawns and gardens of Los Angeles and Tacoma in Denver, nor can there ever be. Roses do not bloom all the winter through, nor in Denver does the turf grow thick and velvety green as in Seattle, nor can they ever do so—only a few weakly roses in the summer-time and grass—only grass when you water each blade with a hose three times a day. And then, too, men do not go to Denver to make homes; they go there the rather to make fortunes, and, if successful, then to hurry away and live in a more congenial clime.

Denver is not laid out with the imposing regalness of Salt Lake City, nor can it ever possess the dignity of that place. It is just a big, hustling, commercial, manufacturing, mine-developing center, where the well man comes to work and toil with feverish energy in the thin air; and the sick man—the consumptive—comes to live a little while and die—“One Lungers” do not here hold fast to life as in the more tender climate of southern California—nor can they survive long in Denver’s harsh, keen air.

The loveliest, grandest part of Denver is that which it does not possess. It is the splendid panorama of the Rocky Mountain chain that stretches, a monstrous mass of snow-clad summits, along the western horizon, eighteen to thirty miles away. Across a flat and treeless plain you behold the long line of lesser summits, and then lifting behind them, towering skyward, the splendid procession of snow-clad giants, glittering and flashing in the translucent light of the full shining sun. The panorama is sublime, as fine as anything in Switzerland, and of a beauty worthy of a journey—a long journey—to behold. In Canada, the Rockies come so slowly upon you that they seem almost insignificant compared with their repute. But here, one realizes in fullest sense the dignity of this stupendous backbone of the continent. And the pellucid atmosphere of the mile-high altitude, gives renewed and re-enforced vision to the eye. The gigantic mountains stand forth with such distinctness that the old tale of the Englishman who set out to walk to them before breakfast—thinking them three instead of thirty miles away—is likely enough to have more than once occurred.