The tourists from the East are
trooping into Denver, and the surveying parties are coming down
from the mountains.
Snow has fallen on the higher ranges, and my
hopes of getting to Estes Park are down at zero.
LONGMOUNT, September 25.
Yesterday was perfect. The sun was brilliant and the air cool
and bracing. I felt better, and after a hard day's work and an
evening stroll with my friends in the glorious afterglow, I went
to bed cheerful and hopeful as to the climate and its effect on
my health. This morning I awoke with a sensation of extreme
lassitude, and on going out, instead of the delicious atmosphere
of yesterday, I found intolerable suffocating heat, a BLAZING
(not BRILLIANT) sun, and a sirocco like a Victorian hot wind.
Neuralgia, inflamed eyes, and a sense of extreme prostration
followed, and my acclimatized hosts were somewhat similarly
affected. The sparkle, the crystalline atmosphere, and the glory
of color of yesterday, had all vanished. We had borrowed a
wagon, but Dr. H.'s strong but lazy horse and a feeble hired one
made a poor span; and though the distance here is only twenty-two
miles over level prairie, our tired animal, and losing the way
three times, have kept us eight and a half hours in the broiling
sun. All notions of locality fail me on the prairie, and Dr. H.
was not much better. We took wrong tracks, got entangled among
fences, plunged through the deep mud of irrigation ditches, and
were despondent. It was a miserable drive, sitting on a heap of
fodder under the angry sun. Half-way here we camped at a river,
now only a series of mud holes, and I fell asleep under the
imperfect shade of a cotton-wood tree, dreading the thought of
waking and jolting painfully along over the dusty prairie in the
dust-laden, fierce sirocco, under the ferocious sun. We never
saw man or beast the whole day.
This is the "Chicago Colony," and it is said to be prospering,
after some preliminary land swindles. It is as uninviting as
Fort Collins. We first came upon dust-colored frame houses set
down at intervals on the dusty buff plain, each with its dusty
wheat or barley field adjacent, the crop, not the product of the
rains of heaven, but of the muddy overflow of "Irrigating Ditch
No.2." Then comes a road made up of many converging wagon
tracks, which stiffen into a wide straggling street, in which
glaring frame houses and a few shops stand opposite to each
other. A two-storey house, one of the whitest and most glaring,
and without a veranda like all the others, is the "St. Vrain
Hotel," called after the St. Vrain River, out of which the ditch
is taken which enables Longmount to exist. Everything was
broiling in the heat of the slanting sun, which all day long had
been beating on the unshaded wooden rooms.
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