I Rode Home
On Dr. Hughes's Horse After Dark, To Find Neither Fire Nor Light
In The Cabin.
Mrs. C. had gone back saying, "Those English
talked just like savages, I couldn't understand a word they
said.
"
I made a fire, and extemporized a light with some fat and a wick
of rag, and Chalmers came in to discuss my visit and to ask me a
question concerning a matter which had roused the latent
curiosity of the whole family. I had told him, he said, that I
knew no one hereabouts, but "his woman" told him that Dr. H. and
I spoke constantly of a Mrs. Grundy, whom we both knew and
disliked, and who was settled, as we said, not far off! He had
never heard of her, he said, and he was the pioneer settler of
the canyon, and there was a man up here from Longmount who said
he was sure there was not a Mrs. Grundy in the district, unless
it was a woman who went by two names! The wife and family had
then come in, and I felt completely nonplussed. I longed to tell
Chalmers that it was he and such as he, there or anywhere, with
narrow hearts, bitter tongues, and harsh judgments, who were the
true "Mrs. Grundys," dwarfing individuality, checking lawful
freedom of speech, and making men "offenders for a word," but I
forebore. How I extricated myself from the difficulty, deponent
sayeth not. The rest of the evening has been spent in preparing
to cross the mountains. Chalmers says he knows the way well, and
that we shall sleep to-morrow at the foot of Long's Peak. Mrs.
Chalmers repents of having consented, and conjures up doleful
visions of what the family will come to when left headless, and
of disasters among the cows and hens. I could tell her that the
eldest son and the "hired man" have plotted to close the saw-mill
and go on a hunting and fishing expedition, that the cows will
stray, and that the individual spoken respectfully of as "Mr.
Skunk" will make havoc in the hen-house.
NAMELESS REGION, ROCKY MOUNTAINS, September.
This is indeed far removed. It seems farther away from you than
any place I have been to yet, except the frozen top of the
volcano of Mauna Loa. It is so little profaned by man that if
one were compelled to live here in solitude one might truly say
of the bears, deer, and elk which abound, "Their tameness is
shocking to me." It is the world of "big game." Just now a
heavy-headed elk, with much-branched horns fully three feet long,
stood and looked at me, and then quietly trotted away. He was so
near that I heard the grass, crisp with hoar frost, crackle under
his feet. Bears stripped the cherry bushes within a few yards of
us last night. Now two lovely blue birds, with crests on their
heads, are picking about within a stone's-throw. This is "The
Great Lone Land," until lately the hunting ground of the Indians,
and not yet settled or traversed, or likely to be so, owing to
the want of water. A solitary hunter has built a log cabin up
here, which he occupies for a few weeks for the purpose of
elk-hunting, but all the region is unsurveyed, and mostly
unexplored. It is 7 A.M. The sun has not yet risen high enough
to melt the hoar frost, and the air is clear, bright, and cold.
The stillness is profound. I hear nothing but the far-off
mysterious roaring of a river in a deep canyon, which we spent
two hours last night in trying to find. The horses are lost, and
if I were disposed to retort upon my companions the term they
invariably apply to me, I should now write, with bitter emphasis,
"THAT man" and "THAT woman" have gone in search of them.
The scenery up here is glorious, combining sublimity with beauty,
and in the elastic air fatigue has dropped off from me. This is
no region for tourists and women, only for a few elk and bear
hunters at times, and its unprofaned freshness gives me new life.
I cannot by any words give you an idea of scenery so different
from any that you or I have ever seen. This is an upland valley
of grass and flowers, of glades and sloping lawns, and
cherry-fringed beds of dry streams, and clumps of pines
artistically placed, and mountain sides densely pine clad, the
pines breaking into fringes as they come down upon the "park,"
and the mountains breaking into pinnacles of bold grey rock as
they pierce the blue of the sky. A single dell of bright green
grass, on which dwarf clumps of the scarlet poison oak look like
beds of geraniums, slopes towards the west, as if it must lead to
the river which we seek. Deep, vast canyons, all trending
westwards, lie in purple gloom. Pine-clad ranges, rising into
the blasted top of Storm Peak, all run westwards too, and all the
beauty and glory are but the frame out of which
rises - heaven-piercing, pure in its pearly luster, as glorious a
mountain as the sun tinges red in either hemisphere - the
splintered, pinnacled, lonely, ghastly, imposing, double-peaked
summit of Long's Peak, the Mont Blanc of Northern Colorado.[10]
[10] Gray's Peak and Pike's Peak have their partisans, but
after seeing them all under favorable aspects, Long's Peak stands
in my memory as it does in that vast congeries of mountains,
alone in imperial grandeur.
This is a view to which nothing needs to be added. This is truly
the "lodge in some vast wilderness" for which one often sighs
when in the midst of "a bustle at once sordid and trivial." In
spite of Dr. Johnson, these "monstrous protuberances" do "inflame
the imagination and elevate the understanding." This scenery
satisfies my soul.
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