The Lack Of Foreground
Is A Great Artistic Fault, And The Absence Of Greenery Is
Melancholy, And Makes Me Recall Sadly The Entrancing Detail Of
The Hawaiian Islands.
Once only, the second time we forded the
river, the cotton-woods formed a foreground, and then the
loveliness was heavenly.
We stopped at a log house and got a
rough dinner of beef and potatoes, and I was amused at the five
men who shared it with us for apologizing to me for being without
their coats, as if coats would not be an enormity on the Plains.
It is the election day for the Territory, and men were galloping
over the prairie to register their votes. The three in the wagon
talked politics the whole time. They spoke openly and
shamelessly of the prices given for votes; and apparently there
was not a politician on either side who was not accused of
degrading corruption. We saw a convoy of 5,000 head of Texas
cattle traveling from southern Texas to Iowa. They had been
nine months on the way! They were under the charge of twenty
mounted vacheros, heavily armed, and a light wagon accompanied
them, full of extra rifles and ammunition, not unnecessary, for
the Indians are raiding in all directions, maddened by the
reckless and useless slaughter of the buffalo, which is their
chief subsistence. On the Plains are herds of wild horses,
buffalo, deer, and antelope; and in the Mountains, bears, wolves,
deer, elk, mountain lions, bison, and mountain sheep. You see a
rifle in every wagon, as people always hope to fall in with game.
By the time we reached Fort Collins I was sick and dizzy with the
heat of the sun, and not disposed to be pleased with a most
unpleasing place. It was a military post, but at present
consists of a few frame houses put down recently on the bare and
burning plain. The settlers have "great expectations," but of
what? The Mountains look hardly nearer than from Greeley; one
only realizes their vicinity by the loss of their higher peaks.
This house is freer from bugs than the one at Greeley, but full
of flies. These new settlements are altogether revolting,
entirely utilitarian, given up to talk of dollars as well as to
making them, with coarse speech, coarse food, coarse everything,
nothing wherewith to satisfy the higher cravings if they exist,
nothing on which the eye can rest with pleasure. The lower floor
of this inn swarms with locusts in addition to thousands of black
flies. The latter cover the ground and rise buzzing from it as
you walk.
I. L. B.
Letter IV
A plague of flies - A melancholy charioteer - The Foot Hills - A
mountain boarding-house - A dull life - "Being agreeable" - Climate
of Colorado - Soroche and snakes.
CANYON, September 12.
I was actually so dull and tired that I deliberately slept away
the afternoon in order to forget the heat and flies. Thirty men
in working clothes, silent and sad looking, came in to supper.
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