Its Chief Center Is The
Rough Mining Town Of Fairplay, But There Are Rumors Of Great
Mineral Wealth In Various Quarters.
The region has been
"rushed," and mining camps have risen at Alma and elsewhere, so
lawless and brutal that vigilance committees are forming as a
matter of necessity.
South Park is closed, or nearly so, by snow
during an ordinary winter; and just now the great freight wagons
are carrying up the last supplies of the season, and taking down
women and other temporary inhabitants. A great many people come
up here in the summer. The rarefied air produces great
oppression on the lungs, accompanied with bleeding. It is said
that you can tell a new arrival by seeing him go about holding a
blood-stained handkerchief to his mouth. But I came down upon it
from regions of ice and snow; and as the snow which had fallen on
it had all disappeared by evaporation and drifting, it looked to
me quite lowland and livable, though lonely and indescribably
mournful, "a silent sea," suggestive of "the muffled oar." I
cantered across the narrow end of it, delighted to have got
through the snow; and when I struck the "Denver stage road" I
supposed that all the difficulties of mountain travel were at an
end, but this has not turned out to be exactly the case.
A horseman shortly joined me and rode with me, got me a fresh
horse, and accompanied me for ten miles. He was a picturesque
figure and rode a very good horse. He wore a big slouch hat,
from under which a number of fair curls hung nearly to his waist.
His beard was fair, his eyes blue, and his complexion ruddy.
There was nothing sinister in his expression, and his manner was
respectful and frank. He was dressed in a hunter's buckskin suit
ornamented with beads, and wore a pair of exceptionally big brass
spurs. His saddle was very highly ornamented. What was unusual
was the number of weapons he carried. Besides a rifle laid
across his saddle and a pair of pistols in the holsters, he
carried two revolvers and a knife in his belt, and a carbine
slung behind him. I found him what is termed "good company." He
told me a great deal about the country and its wild animals, with
some hunting adventures, and a great deal about Indians and their
cruelty and treachery. All this time, having crossed South Park,
we were ascending the Continental Divide by what I think is
termed the Breckenridge Pass, on a fairly good wagon road. We
stopped at a cabin, where the woman seemed to know my companion,
and, in addition to bread and milk, produced some venison steaks.
We rode on again, and reached the crest of the Divide (see
engraving), and saw snow-born streams starting within a quarter
of a mile from each other, one for the Colorado and the Pacific,
the other for the Platte and the Atlantic. Here I wished the
hunter good-bye, and reluctantly turned north-east. It was not
wise to go up the Divide at all, and it was necessary to do it in
haste. On my way down I spoke to the woman at whose cabin I had
dined, and she said, "I am sure you found Comanche Bill a real
gentleman"; and I then knew that, if she gave me correct
information, my intelligent, courteous companion was one of the
most notorious desperadoes of the Rocky Mountains, and the
greatest Indian exterminator on the frontier - a man whose father
and family fell in a massacre at Spirit Lake by the hands of
Indians, who carried away his sister, then a child of eleven.
His life has since been mainly devoted to a search for this
child, and to killing Indians wherever he can find them.
After riding twenty miles, which made the distance for that day
fifty, I remounted Birdie to ride six miles farther, to a house
which had been mentioned to me as a stopping place. The road
ascended to a height of 11,000 feet, and from thence I looked my
last at the lonely, uplifted prairie sea. "Denver stage road!"
The worst, rudest, dismallest, darkest road I have yet traveled
on, nothing but a winding ravine, the Platte canyon, pine crowded
and pine darkened, walled in on both sides for six miles by
pine-skirted mountains 12,000 feet high! Along this abyss for
fifty miles there are said to be only five houses, and were it
not for miners going down, and freight wagons going up, the
solitude would be awful. As it was, I did not see a creature.
It was four when I left South Park, and between those mountain
walls and under the pines it soon became quite dark, a darkness
which could be felt. The snow which had melted in the sun had
re-frozen, and was one sheet of smooth ice. Birdie slipped so
alarmingly that I got off and walked, but then neither of us
could keep our feet, and in the darkness she seemed so likely to
fall upon me, that I took out of my pack the man's socks which
had been given me at Perry's Park, and drew them on over her
fore-feet - an expedient which for a time succeeded admirably, and
which I commend to all travelers similarly circumstanced. It was
unutterably dark, and all these operations had to be performed by
the sense of touch only. I remounted, allowed her to take her
own way, as I could not see even her ears, and though her hind
legs slipped badly, we contrived to get along through the
narrowest part of the canyon, with a tumbling river close to the
road. The pines were very dense, and sighed and creaked
mournfully in the severe frost, and there were other EERIE noises
not easy to explain. At last, when the socks were nearly worn
out, I saw the blaze of a camp-fire, with two hunters sitting by
it, on the hill side, and at the mouth of a gulch something which
looked like buildings.
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