A Hospitable Welcome Awaited Me At This Inn, And An
English Friend Came In And Spent The Evening With Me.
GREAT PLATTE CANYON, October 23.
My letters on this tour will, I fear, be very dull, for after
riding all day, looking after my pony, getting supper, hearing
about various routes, and the pastoral, agricultural, mining, and
hunting gossip of the neighborhood, I am so sleepy and
wholesomely tired that I can hardly write. I left Longmount
pretty early on Tuesday morning, the day being sad, with the
blink of an impending snow-storm in the air. The evening before
I was introduced to a man who had been a colonel in the rebel
army, who made a most unfavorable impression upon me, and it was
a great annoyance to me when he presented himself on horse-back
to guide me "over the most intricate part of the journey."
Solitude is infinitely preferable to uncongeniality, and is bliss
when compared with repulsiveness, so I was thoroughly glad when I
got rid of my escort and set out upon the prairie alone. It is a
dreary ride of thirty miles over the low brown plains to Denver,
very little settled, and with trails going in all directions.
My sailing orders were "steer south, and keep to the best beaten
track," and it seemed like embarking on the ocean without a
compass. The rolling brown waves on which you see a horse a mile
and a half off impress one strangely, and at noon the sky
darkened up for another storm, the mountains swept down in
blackness to the Plains, and the higher peaks took on a ghastly
grimness horrid to behold.
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