 Letters 6, Part 1 of A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Byrd. Part 1 of Letter 6. Lower Canyon, September 25th. This is another world. My entrance upon it was signalized in this fashion. Chalmers offered me a Bronco mare for a reasonable sum, and though she was a shifty, half-broken young thing, I came over here on her to try her. When, just as I was going away, she took it into her head to scare and bug, and when I touched her with my foot, she leaped over a heap of timber, and the girth gave way. And the onlookers tell me that while she jumped, I fell over her tail from a good height upon the hard gravel, receiving a parting kick on my knee. They could hardly believe that no bones were broken. The flesh of my left arm looks crushed into a jelly, but cold water dressings will soon bring it right, and a cut on my back bled profusely. And the bleeding, with many bruises and the general shake, have made me feel weak, but circumstances do not admit of making a fuss, and I really think that the rinse in my riding-dress will prove the most important part of the accident. The surroundings here are pleasing. The log cabin, on the top of which a room with a steep ornamental Swiss roof has been built, is in a valley close to a clear, rushing river, which emerges a little higher up from an inaccessible chasm of great sublimity. One side of the valley is formed by cliffs and terraces of porphyry, as red as the reddest new brick, and at sunset blazing into Vermillion. Through rifts in the near-ranges there are glimpses of pine-clothed peaks, which, towards twilight, pass through every shade of purple and violet. The sky and the earth combine to form a wonderland every evening, such rich, velvety coloring in crimson and violet, such an orange, green, and Vermillion sky, such scarlet and emerald clouds, such an extraordinary dryness and purity of atmosphere, and then the glorious afterglow which seems to blend earth and heaven. For color the riky mountains beat all I have seen. The air has been cold, but the sun bright and hot during the last few days. The story of my host is a story of misfortune. It indicates who should not come to Colorado. He and his wife are under thirty-five, the son of a London physician in a large practice with a liberal education in the largest sense of the word, unusual culture and accomplishments, and the partner of a physician in good practice in the second city in England. He showed symptoms which threaten pulmonary disease. In an evil hour he heard of Colorado with its unrivaled climate, boundless resources, and so on, and fascinated not only by these material advantages, but by the notion of being able to found or reform society on advanced social theories of his own. He became an immigrant. Mrs. Hughes is one of the most charming and lovable women I have ever seen, and their marriage is an ideal one. Both are fitted to shine in any society, but neither had the slightest knowledge of domestic and farming details. Dr. H. did not know how to saddle or harness a horse. Mrs. H. did not know whether you should put an egg into cold or hot water when you meant to boil it. They arrived at Longmount, bought up this claim, rather for the beauty of the scenery than for any substantial advantages. Were cheated in land, goods, oxen, everything, and to the discredit of the settlers, seemed to be regarded as fair game. Everything has failed with them, and though they rise early and late take rest and eat the bread of carefulness, they hardly keep their heads above water. A young Swiss girl devoted to them both works as hard as they do. They have one horse, no wagon, some poultry, and a few cows, but no hired man. It is the hardest and least ideal struggle that I have ever seen made by educated people. They had all their experience to learn, and they have bought it by losses and hardships. That they have learnt so much surprises me. Dr. H. and these two ladies built the upper room and the addition to the house without help. He has cropped the land himself, and has learned the difficult art of milking cows. Mrs. H. makes all the clothes required for a family of six, and her evenings, when the hard day's work is done and she is ready to drop from fatigue, are spent in mending and patching. The day is one long grind, without rest or enjoyment, or the pleasure of chance intercourse with cultivated people. The few visitors who have happened in are the thrifty wives of prosperous settlers, full of housewifely pride, whose one object seems to be to make Mrs. H. fill her inferiority to themselves. I wish she did take a more genuine interest in the coming on of the last calf, the prospects of the squash crop, and the yield and price of butter, but though she has learned to make excellent butter and bread, it is all against the grain. The children are delightful. The little boys are refined, courteous, childish gentlemen, with love and tenderness to their parents and all their words and actions. Never a rough or harsh word is heard within the house, but the atmosphere of struggles and difficulties has already told on these infants. They consider their mother in all things, going without butter when they think the stock is low, bringing in wood and water too heavy for them to carry, anxiously speculating on the winter prospects and the crops, yet with all the most childlike and innocent of children. Beginning of Footnote The story is ended now. A few months after my visit Mrs. H. died a few days after her confinement, and was buried on the bleak hillside, leaving her husband with five children under six years old, and Dr. H. is a prosperous man on one of the sunniest islands of the Pacific, with a devoted Swiss friend as his second wife. End of Footnote One of the most painful things in the western states and territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children, only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old. The atmosphere in which they are brought up is one of greed, godlessness, and frequently of profanity. Consequently these sweet things seem like flowers in a desert. Except for love, which here as everywhere raises life into the ideal, this is a wretched existence. The poor crops have been destroyed by grasshoppers over and over again, and that talent deified here under the name of smartness has taken advantage of Dr. H. in all bargains, leaving him with little except food for his children. Experience has been dearly bought in all ways, and this instance of failure might be a useful warning to professional men, without agricultural experience, not to come and try to make a living by farming in California. My time here has passed very delightfully in spite of my regret and anxiety for this interesting family. I should like to stay longer, were it not that they have given up to me their straw bed and Mrs. H. and her baby, a wisened, fretful child sleep on the floor in my room, and Dr. H. on the floor downstairs, and the nights are frosty and chill. Work is the order of their day and of mine, and at night when the children are in bed, we three ladies patch the clothes and make shirts, and Dr. H. reads Tennyson's poems. Or we speak tenderly of that world of culture and noble deeds which seem here, the land, very far off. Or Mrs. H. lays aside her work for a few minutes and reads some favorite passage of prose or poetry, as I have seldom heard either read before, with a voice of large compass, an exquisite tone, quick to interpret every shade of the author's meaning, and soft, speaking eyes, moist with feeling and sympathy. These are our housing and hours, when we forget the needs of the morrow, and that men still buy, sell, cheat, and strive for gold, and that we are in the rocky mountains, and that it is near midnight. But morning comes hot and tiresome, and the never-ending work is oppressive, and Dr. H. comes in from the field two or three times in the day, dizzy and faint. And they condole with each other, and I feel that the Colorado settler needs to be made of sterner stuff and to possess more adaptability. Today has been a very pleasant day for me, though I have only once sat down since 9 a.m., and it is now 5 p.m. I plotted that the devoted Swiss girl should go to the nearest settlement with two of the children for the day in a neighbor's wagon, and that Dr. and Mrs. H. should get an afternoon of rest and sleep upstairs, while I undertook to do the work and make something of a cleaning. I had a large wash of my own, having been hindered last week by my bad arm, but a clothes-ringer, which screws on to the side of the tub, is a great assistance, and by folding the clothes before passing them through it I make it serve instead of mangle and iron. After baking the bread and thoroughly cleaning the churn and pales, I began upon the tins and pans, the cleaning of which had fallen into arrears and was hard at work, very greasy and grimy. When a man came in to know where to ford the river with his ox-team, and as I was showing him, he looked pityingly at me, saying, Be you the new hired girl, bless me, you're awful small. Yesterday we saved three quarts of tomatoes for winter use, and about two tons of squash and pumpkin for the cattle, two of the former weighing a hundred forty pounds. I pulled nearly a quarter of an anchor of maize, and it was a scanty crop, and the husk were poorly filled. I much prefer field work to the scouring of greasy pans and to the wash tub, and both to either sowing or riding. This is not Arcadia. Smartness, which consists in overreaching your neighbor in every fashion which is not illegal, is the quality which is held in the greatest repute, and mammon is the divinity. From a generation brought up to worship the one and admire the other, little can be hoped. In districts distant as this is from church ordinances there are three ways in which Sunday is spent. One to make it a day for visiting, hunting and fishing, another to spend it in sleeping and abstinence from work, and the third to continue all the usual occupations. Consequently, harvesting and felling and hauling timber are to be seen in progress. Last Sunday a man came here and put up a door and said he didn't believe in the Bible or in God, and he wasn't going to sacrifice his children's bread to old-fashioned prejudices. There is a manifest indifference to the higher obligations of the law, judgment, mercy and faith. But in the main the settlers are steady. There are few flagrant breaches of morals. Industry is the rule. Life and property are far safer than in England or Scotland, and the law of universal respect to women is still in full force. The days are now brilliant, and the nights sharply frosty. People are preparing for the winter. The tourists from the east are tripping 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. Yesterday was perfect. The sun was brilliant, and the air cool and bracing. I felt better, and after a hard-stay 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 sorroco like a Victorian hot wind. Neralgia, inflamed eyes, and a sense of extreme prostration followed, and my acclimatized host 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. is 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 the 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. Halfway here we camped at a river, now only a series of mud-holes, and I fell asleep under the imperfect shade of a cottonwood tree, dreading the thought of waking and jolting painfully along over the dusty prairie and the dust-laden, fierce sorroco under the ferocious sun. We never saw a man or beast the whole day. This is the Chicago Colony, and it is said to be prospering, after some preliminary land-swendles. 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-filled adjacent. The crop, not the product of the rains of heaven, but of the muddy overflow of irrigating ditch number two. 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-story house, one of the widest and most glaring, and without a veranda like all the others, is the St. Frain Hotel, called after the St. Frain River, out of which the ditch is taken which enables long-mount to exist. Everything was broiling in the heat of the slanting sun, which all day long had been beating on the unshaded wooden rooms. The heat within was more sickening than outside, and black flies covered everything, one's face included. We all sat fighting the flies in my bedroom, which was cooler than elsewhere, till a glorious sunset over the rocky range, some ten miles off, compelled us to go out and enjoy it. Then followed supper, western fashion, without table-cloths, and all the unattached men of Longmount came in and fed silently and rapidly. It was a great treat to have tea to drink, as I had not tasted any for a fortnight. The landlord is a jovial, kindly man. I told him how my plans had faded, and how I was reluctantly going on to Denver, in New York, being unable to get to Estes Park. And he said there might yet be a chance of someone coming in tonight, who would be going up. He soon came to my room and asked definitely what I could do, if I feared cold, if I could rough it, if I could ride horseback in Lope. Estes Park and its surroundings are, he says, the most beautiful scenery in Colorado, and it's a real shame, he added, for you not to see it. We had hardly sat down to tea, when he came saying, You're in luck this time, two young men have just come in, and are going up tomorrow morning. I am rather pleased, and have hired a horse for three days, but I am not very hopeful, for I am almost ill of the smothering heat, and still suffer from my fall. And not having been on horseback since, thirty miles will be a long ride. Then I fear that the accommodation is as rough as chalmers, and that solitude will be impossible. We have been strolling in the street ever since it grew dark, to get the little air which is moving. End of Letter 6 Part 1 Letter 6 Part 2 of A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Byrd Part 2 of Letter 6 Estes Park, September 28 I wish I could let those three notes of admiration go to you, instead of a letter. They mean everything that is rapturous and delightful. Granger, cheerfulness, health, enjoyment, novelty, freedom, and so on and so on. I have just dropped into the very place I have been seeking, but in everything it exceeds all my dreams. There is health in every breath of air. I am much better already, and get up to a seven o'clock breakfast without difficulty. It is quite comfortable, in the fashion that I like. I have a log cabin, raised on six posts, all to myself, with a skunk's lair underneath it, and a small lake close to it. There is a frost every night, and all day it is cool enough for a roaring fire. The ranchman, who is half-hunter, half-stockman, and his wife are jovial, hearty Welsh people from the land-berries, who laugh with loud, cheery British laughs, singing parts down to the youngest child, are free-hearted and hospitable, and pile the pitch-pine logs half-way up to the great rude chimney. There has been fresh meat each day since I came, delicious bread baked daily, excellent potatoes, tea and coffee, and an abundant supply of milk-like cream. I have a clean hay-bed with six blankets, and there are neither bugs nor fleas. The scenery is the most glorious I have ever seen, and is above us, around us, at the very door. Most people have advised me to go to Colorado Springs, and only one mentioned this place. Until I reached Longmount I never saw anyone who had been here. But I saw from the lie of the country that it must be the most superbly situated. People said, however, that it was most difficult of access, and that the season for it was over. In traveling there is nothing like dissecting people's statements, which are usually colored by their estimate of the powers or likings of the person spoken to, making all reasonable inquiries and then pertinaciously but quietly carrying out one's own plans. This is perfection, and all the requisites for health are present, including plenty of horses and grass to ride on. It is not easy to sit down to ride after ten hours of hard riding, especially in a cabin full of people, and wholesome fatigue may make my letter flat when it ought to be enthusiastic. I was awake all night at Longmount, owing to the stifling heat, and got up nervous and miserable, ready to give up the thought of coming here. But the sunrise over the plains and the wonderful red of the rocky mountains, as they reflected the eastern sky, put spirit into me. The landlord had got a horse that could not give any satisfactory assurances of his being quiet, and, being much shaken by my fall at Canyon, I earnestly wished that the grilly tribune had not given me a reputation for horsemanship, which had preceded me here. The young men who were to escort me seemed very innocent, he said, but I have not arrived at his meaning yet. When the horse appeared in the street at eight-thirty, I saw to my dismay a high-bred, beautiful creature, stable-kept with arched neck, quivering nostrils, and restless ears and eyes. My pack, as on Hawaii, was strapped behind the Mexican saddle, and my canvas-bag hung on the horn. But the horse did not look fit to carry gear, and seemed to require two men to hold and coax him. There were many loafers about, and I shrank from going out and mounting in my old Hawaiian writing-dress, though Doctor and Mrs. H assured me that I looked quite insignificant and unnoticeable. We got away at nine with repeated injunctions from the landlord in the words, Oh, you should be heroic! The sky was cloudless, and a deep brilliant blue, and though the sun was hot, the air was fresh and bracing. The ride for glory and delight I shall label along with one to Hanalei, and another to Mauna Kea, Hawaii. I felt better quite soon. The horse and gate and temper turned out perfection, all spring and spirit, elastic in his motion, walking fast and easily, encountering with a light, graceful swing, as soon as one pressed the reins on his neck, a blithe, joyous animal, to whom a day among the mountains seemed a pleasant frolic. So gentle he was that when I got off and walked he followed me without being led, and without needing any one to hold him he allowed me to mount on either side. In addition to the charm of his movements he has the cat-like, sure-footedness of a Hawaiian horse, and Ford's rapid and rough-bottomed rivers and gallops among stones and stumps, and down steep hills with equal security. I could have ridden him a hundred miles as easily as thirty. We have only been together two days, yet we are firm friends and thoroughly understand each other. I should not require another companion on a long mountain tour. All his ways are those of an animal brought up without curb, whip, or spur, trained by the voice, and used only to kindness, as is happily the case with the majority of horses in the western states. Consequently, unless they are Broncos, they exercise their intelligence for your advantage and do their work rather as friends than as machines. I soon began not only to feel better but to be exhilarated with the delightful motion. The sun was behind us and puffs of a cool elastic air came down from the glorious mountains in front. We cantered across six miles of prairie and then reached the beautiful canyon of the St. Vrain, which towards its mouth is a narrow, fertile, wooded valley through which a bright, rapid river, which was forded many times, hurries along, with twists and windings innumerable. Ah! how brightly its ripples danced in the glittering sunshine, and how musically its waters murmured like the streams of windward Hawaii! We lost our way over and over again, though the innocent young men had been there before. Indeed, it would require some talent to master the intricacies of this devious trail. But settlers making hay always appeared in the nick of time to put us on the right track. Very fair it was, after the brown and burning plains, and the variety was endless. Cottonwood trees were green and bright, aspens shivered in gold tremulousness. Wild grapevines trailed their lemon-colored foliage along the ground, and the Virginia creeper hung its crimson sprays here and there, lightening up green and gold into glory. Sometimes from under the cool and bowery shade of the colored tangle, we passed into the cool St. Vrain, and then were wedged between its margin and lofty cliffs and terraces of incredibly staring, fantastic rocks, lined, patched and splashed with green of all tents, blue, yellow, orange, violet, deep crimson, coloring that no artist would dare to represent, and of which in sober prose I scarcely dare to tell. Longs wonderful peaks, which hither too had gleamed above the green, now disappeared, to be seen no more for twenty miles. We entered on an ascending valley, where the gorgeous hues of the rocks were intensified by the blue gloom of the pitch pines, and then taking a track to the northwest, we left the softer world behind, and all traces of man and his works, and plunged into the rocky mountains. There were wonderful ascents then, up which I led my horse, wild fantastic views opening up continually, a recurrence of surprises, the air keener and pure with every mile, the sensation of loneliness more singular. A tremendous ascent among rocks and pines, to a height of nine thousand feet, brought us to a passage seven feet wide through a wall of rock, with an abrupt descent of two thousand feet, and a yet higher ascent beyond. I never saw anything so strange as looking back. It was a single gigantic ridge which we had passed through, standing up knife-like, built up entirely of great brick-shaped masses of bright red rock, some of them as large as the royal institution, Edinburgh, piled one on another by titans. Pitch pines grew out of their crevices, but there was not a vestige of soil. Beyond, wall beyond wall, of similar construction, and range above range, rose into the blue sky. Fifteen miles more, over great ridges, along passes dark with shadow, and so narrow that we had to ride in the beds of the streams which had excavated them, round the bases of colossal pyramids of rock crested with pines. Up into fair upland parks, scarlet in patches with a poisoned oak, parks so beautifully arranged by nature that I momentarily expected to come upon some stately mansion, but that afternoon crested blue jays and chipmunks had them all to themselves. Here in the early morning, deer, big horn, and the stately elk come down to feed, and there in the night prowl and growl the rocky mountain lion, the grizzly bear, and the cowardly wolf. There were chasms of immense depth, dark with the indigo gloom of pines, and mountains with snow, gleaming on their splintered crests, liveliness to be willed and grandeur to all, and still streams and shady pools and cool depths of shadow, mountains again dense with pines among which patches of aspen gleamed like gold, valleys where the yellow cotton would mingled with the crimson oak, and so on and on through the lengthening shadows till the trail which in places had been hardly legible, became well-defined and we entered a long gulch with broad swellings of grass belted with pines. A very pretty mare, hobbled, was feeding, a collie-dog barked at us, and among the scrub not far from the track there was a rude black-log cabin, as rough as it could be, to be a shelter at all, with smoke coming out of the roof and window. We diverged towards it. It mattered not that it was the home, or rather den, of a notorious ruffian and desperado. One of my companions had disappeared hours before. The remaining one was a town-bred youth. I longed to speak to someone who loved the mountains. I called the hut a den. It looked like the den of a wild beast. The big dog lay outside it in a threatening attitude and growled. The mud-roof was covered with lynx, beaver, and other furs laid out to dry. Beaver-pawls were pinned out on the logs. A part of the carcass of a deer hung at one end of the cabin. A skinned beaver lay in front of a heap of peltry just within the door, and antlers of deer, old horseshoes, and awful of many animals lay about the den. Roused by the growling of the dog his owner came out, a broad, thick-set man, about the middle height, with an old cap on his head and wearing a gray hunting suit, much the worse for wear, almost falling to pieces, in fact. A digger's scarf knotted round his waist, a knife in his belt, and a bosom friend, a revolver sticking out of the breast-pocket of his coat. His feet, which were very small, were bare except for some dilapidated moccasins made of horse-hide. The marvel was how his clothes hung together and on him. The scarf round his waist must have had something to do with it. His face was remarkable. He is a man about forty-five, and must have been strikingly handsome. He has large gray-blue eyes, deeply set, with well-marked eyebrows, a handsome aquiline nose, and a very handsome mouth. His face was smooth-shaven except for a dense mustache and imperial. Tawny hair, and thin, uncared-for curls, fell from under his hunter's cap and over his collar. One eye was entirely gone, and the loss made one side of the face repulsive, while the other might have been modelled in marble. Desperado was written in large letters all over him. I almost repented of having sought his acquaintance. His first impulse was to swear at the dog, but on seeing a lady he contended himself with kicking him, and coming to me he raised his cap, showing as he did so a magnificently formed brow and head, and in a culture tone of voice asked if there were anything he could do for me. I asked for some water, and he brought some in a battered tin, gracefully apologizing for not having anything more presentable. We entered into conversation, and as he spoke I forgot both his reputation and appearance, for his manner was that of a chivalrous gentleman, his accent refined, and his language easy and elegant. I inquired about some beaver's paws which were drying, and in a moment they hung on the horn of my saddle. A propice of the wild animals of the region he told me that the loss of his eye was owing to a recent encounter with a grizzly bear, which after giving him a death-hug, tearing him all over, breaking his arm and scratching out his eye, had left him for dead. As we rode away, for the sun was sinking, he said courteously, You are not an American. I know from your voice that you are a countrywoman of mine. I hope you will allow me the pleasure of calling on you. Of this unhappy man, who was shot nine months later within two miles of his cabin, I write in the subsequent letters only as he appeared to me. His life, without a doubt, was deeply stained with crimes and vices, and his reputation for ruffianism was a deserved one. But in my intercourse with him I saw more of his nobler instincts than of the darker parts of his character, which, unfortunately for himself and others, showed itself in its worst colors at the time of his tragic end. It was not until after I left Colorado, not indeed until after his death, that I heard of the worst points of his character. End of Footnote This man, known through the territories and beyond them as Rocky Mountain Gym, or more briefly as Mountain Gym, is one of the famous scouts of the plains, and is the original of some daring portraits in fiction concerning Indian frontier warfare. So far as I have at present heard, he is a man for whom there is now no room, for the time for blows and blood in this part of Colorado is past, and the fame of many daring exploits is sullied by crimes which are not easily forgiven here. He now has a squatter's claim, but makes his living as a trapper, and is a complete child of the mountains. Of his genius and chivalry to women there does not appear to be any doubt, but he is a desperate character, and is subject to ugly fits, when people think it best to avoid him. It is here regarded as an evil that he has located himself at the mouth of the only entrance to the park, for he is dangerous with his pistols, and it would be safer if he were not here. His besetting sin is indicated in the verdict pronounced on him by my host. When he is sober, Jim is a perfect gentleman, but when he has had liquor he is the most awful ruffian in Colorado. From the ridge on which this gulch terminates, at a height of nine thousand feet, we saw at last Estes Park, lying fifteen hundred feet below in the glory of the setting sun. An irregular basin, lighted up by the bright waters of the rushing Thompson, guarded by sentinel mountains of fantastic shape and monstrous size, with Long's Peak rising above them all in unapproachable grandeur, while the snowy range, with its outlying spurs heavily timbered, come down upon the park, slashed by stupendous canyons lying deep in purple gloom. The rushing river was blood-red. Long's Peak was aflame. The glory of the glowing heaven was given back from earth. Never, nowhere, have I seen anything to equal the view into Estes Park. The mountains, of the land which is very far off, are very near now, but the near is more glorious than the far, and reality than dreamland. The mountain fever seized me, and giving my tireless horse one encouraging word, he dashed at full gallop over a mile of smooth sword at delirious speed. But I was hungry, and the air was frosty, and I was wondering what the prospects of food and shelter were in this enchanted region, when we came suddenly upon a small lake, close to which was a very trim-looking log cabin, with a flat mud roof, with four smaller ones. Picturesquely dotted about near it, two corrals, a long shed in front of which a steer was being killed, a log-dairy with a water-wheel, some hay-piles, and various evidences of comfort, and two men on serviceable horses were just bringing in some tolerable cows to be milked. A short, pleasant-looking man ran up to me and shook hands gleefully, which surprised me. But he has since told me that in the evening light he thought I was mountain-gymn dressed up as a woman. I recognized in him a countryman, and he introduced himself as Griffith Evans, a Welshman from the slate quarries near Landbury's. When the cabin door was opened I saw a good-sized log-room, un-chinked, however with windows of infamous class, licking two ways, a rough stone fireplace in which pine logs half as large as I am were burning, a boarded floor, a round table, two rocking-chairs, a carpet covered backwood's couch, and skins, indy and bows and arrows, wampum belts, and antlers, fitly decorated the rough walls, and equally fitly, rifles were stuck up in the corners. Seven men, smoking, were lying about on the floor, a sick man lay on the couch, and a middle-aged lady sat at the table, writing, I went out again and asked Evans if he could take me in, expecting nothing better than a shakedown. But to my joy he told me he could give me a cabin to myself, two minutes' walk from his own. So in this glorious upper world, with the mountain pines behind and the clear lake in front, in the blue hollow at the foot of Longspeak, at a height of seventy-five hundred feet, where the whore-frost crisps the grass every night of the year, I have found far more than I ever dared to hope for. I.L.B. End of Letter 6 Letter 7, Part 1 of A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Byrd. Part 1 of Letter 7 As this account of the Ascent of Longspeak could not be written at the time, I am much disinclined to write it, especially as no sort of description within my powers could enable another to realize the glorious sublimity, the majestic solitude, and the unspeakable awfulness and fascination of the scenes in which I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Longspeak, fourteen thousand seven hundred feet high, blocks up one end of Estee's Park and dwarfs all the surrounding mountains. From it on this side rise snow-born the bright St. Rain and the big and little Thompson. By sunlight or moonlight its splintered gray crest is the one object which, in spite of Wipedian bighorn, skunk and chrisly, unfailingly arrest the eyes. From it come all storms of snow and wind, and the fort's lightnings play round its head like a glory. It is one of the noblest of mountains, but in one's imagination it grows to be much more than a mountain. It becomes invested with a personality. In its caverns and abysses one comes to fancy that it generates and chains the strong winds to let them loose in its fury. The thunder becomes its voice and the lightnings do it homage. Other summits blush under the morning kiss of the sun and turn pale the next moment, but it detains the first sunlight and holds it round its head for an hour at least till it pleases to change from rosy red to deep blue. And the sunset, as if spellbound, lingers latest on its crest. The soft winds which hardly rustle the pine needles down here are raging rudely up there round its motionless summit. The mark of fire is upon it, and though it has passed into a grim repose it tells of fire and upheaval as truly, though not as eloquently as the living volcanoes of Hawaii. Here under its shadow one learns how naturally nature worship and the propitiation of the forces of nature arose in minds which had no better light. Long's Peak, the American Matterhorn, as some call it, was ascended five years ago for the first time. I thought I should like to attempt it, but up to Monday when Evans left for Denver cold water was thrown upon the project. It was too late in the season, the winds were likely to be strong and so forth, but just before leaving Evans said that the weather was looking more settled, and if I did not get farther than the timber line it would be worth going. Soon after he left Mountain Jinn came in and said he would go up his guide, and the two youths who rode here with me from Longmount and I called at the proposal. Mrs. Edwards at once baked bread for three days, steaks were cut from the steer which hangs up conveniently, and tea, sugar, and butter were benevolently added. Our picnic was not to be a luxurious or well-founded one, for in order to avoid the expense of a pack mule we limited our luggage to what our saddle horses could carry. Behind my saddle I carried three pair of camping blankets and a quilt which reached to my shoulders. My own boots were so much worn that it was painful to walk, even about the park in them, so Evans had lent me a pair of his hunting boots, which hung to the horn of my saddle. The horses of the two young men were equally loaded, for we had to prepare for many degrees of frost. Jim was a shocking figure. He had on an old pair of high boots with a baggy pair of old trousers made of deer-hide, held on by an old scarf tucked into them. A leather shirt with three or four ragged unbuttoned waistcoats over it. An old smashed wide-awake from under which his tawny, neglected ringlets hung. And with his one eye, his one long spur, his knife in his belt, his revolver in his waistcoat pocket, his saddle covered with an old beaver skin from which the paws hung down. His camping blankets behind him, his rifle laid across the saddle in front of him, and his axe, canteen, and other gear hanging to the horn, he was as awful-looking a ruffian as one could see. By way of contrast he wrote a small Arab mare of exquisite beauty, skittish, high-spirited, gentle, but altogether too light for him, and he fretted her incessantly to make her display herself. Heavily loaded as all our horses were, Jim started over the half-mile of level grass at a hard gallop, and then throwing his mare on her haunches pulled up alongside of me, and with a grace of manner which soon made me forget his appearance, entered into a conversation which lasted for more than three hours, in spite of the manifold checks of hoarding streams, single file, abrupt descents and descents, and other incidents of mountain travel. The ride was one series of glories and surprises, of park and glade, of lake and stream, of mountains on mountains, culminating in the rent pinnacles of Long's Peak, which looked yet grander and gaslier as we crossed an attendant mountain eleven thousand feet high. The slanting sun added fresh beauty every hour. There were dark pines against a lemon sky, grey peaks reddening and etherealizing, gorges of deep and infinite blue, floods of golden glory pouring through canyons of enormous depth, an atmosphere of absolute purity, an occasional foreground of cottonwood and aspen flaunting in red and gold to intensify the blue gloom of the pines, the trickle and murmur of streams fringe with icicles, the strange sound of gusts moving among the pine-tops, sights and sounds not of the lower earth, but of the solitary, beast-haunted, frozen upper altitudes. From the dry, buff grass of Estes Park we turned off up a trail on the side of a pine-hung gorge, up a steep pine-clothed hill, down to a small valley, rich in fine sun-cured hay about eighteen inches high, and enclosed by high mountains, whose deepest hollow contains a lily-covered lake, tightly named the Lake of the Lilies. Ah, how magical its beauty was, as it slept in silence, while there the dark pines were mirrored motionless in its pale gold, and here the great white lily-cups and dark green leaves rested on amethyst-colored water. From this we ascended into the purple gloom of great pine forest which clothed the skirts of the mountains up to a height of about eleven thousand feet, and from their chill and solitary depths we had glimpses of golden atmosphere and rose-lit summits, not of the land very far off, but of the land nearer now and all its grandeur, gaining in sublimity by nearness. Glimpses, too, threw a broken vista of purple gorges, of the illimitable plains lying idealized in the late sunlight. Their baked, brown expanse transfigured into the likeness of a sunset sea, rolling infinitely in waves of misty gold. We rode upwards through the gloom on a steep trail, blazed through the forest. All my intellect concentrated on avoiding being dragged off my horse by impending branches, or having the blankets badly torn, as those of my companions were, by sharp dead limbs between which there were hardly room to pass. The horse is breathless and requiring to stop every few guards, though their riders, except myself, were afoot. The gloom of the dense, ancient, silent forest is to me awe-inspiring. On such an evening it is soundless except for the branches creaking in the soft wind, the frequent snap of decayed timber, and a murmur in the pine-tops as of a not distant waterfall, all tending to produce eeriness and a sadness hardly akin to pain. There no lumber as axe has ever rung. The trees die when they have attained their prime, and stand there, dead and bare, till fierce mountain winds lay them prostrate. The pines grew smaller and more sparse as we ascended, and the last stragglers were a tortured, warring look. The timber line was passed, but yet a little higher a slope of mountain meadow dipped to the south-west towards a bright stream trickling under ice and icicles, and there a grove of the beautiful silver spruce marked our camping-ground. The trees were in miniature, but so exquisitely arranged that one might well ask what artist hand had planted them, scattering them here, clumping them there, and training their slim spires towards heaven. Hereafter, when I call upon memories of the glorious, the view from this camping-ground will come up. Looking east, gorges open to the distant plains, then fading into purple-gray. Mountains with pine-clothed skirts rose in ranges, or solitary, uplifted their gray summits while close behind, but nearly three thousand feet above us, towered the bald white crest of Long's Peak. Its huge precipice is red with the light of a sun long lost to our eyes. Close to us, in the cavern-side of the peak, was snow that, owing to its position, is eternal. Soon the after-glow came on, and before it faded a big half-moon hung out of the heavens, shining through the silver-blue foliage of the pines on the frigid background of snow, and turning the whole into fairy-land. The photo, which accompanies this letter, is by a courageous Denver artist who attempted the ascent just before I arrived. But, after camping out at the timber-line for a week, was foiled by the perpetual storms, and was driven down again, leaving some very valuable apparatus about three thousand feet from the summit. Unsaddling and picketing the horses securely, making the beds of pine shoots, and dragging up logs for fuel warmed us all, Jim built up a great fire, and before long we were all sitting around it at supper. It didn't matter much that we had to drink our tea out of the battered meat tins in which it was boiled, and eat strips of beef reeking with pine smoke, without plates or forks. Treat Jim as a gentleman, and you'll find him one, I had been told. And though his manner was certainly bolder and freer than that of gentlemen generally, no imaginary fault could be found. He was very agreeable as a man of culture, as well as a child of nature. The Desperado was altogether out of sight. He was very courteous, and even kind to me, which was fortunate, as the young men had little idea of showing even ordinary civilities. That night I made the acquaintance of his dog Ring, said to be the best hunting dog in Colorado, with the body and legs of a collie, but a head approaching that of a mastiff, a noble face with a wistful human expression, and the most truthful eyes I ever saw in an animal. His master loves him if he loves anything, but in his savage moods ill treats him. Ring's devotion never swerves, and his truthful eyes are rarely taken off of his master's face. He is almost human in his intelligence, and unless he is told to do so, he never takes notice of any one but Jim. In a tone, as if speaking to a human being, his master, pointing to me, said, Ring, go to that lady, and don't leave her again tonight. Ring, at once, came to me, licking into my face, laid his head on my shoulder, and then laid down beside me with his head on my lap, but never taking his eyes from Jim's face. The long shadows of the pines lay upon the frosted grass, and Aurora leaped fitfully, and the moonlight, though intensely bright, was pale beside the red leaping flames of our pine logs, and their red glow on our gear, ourselves, and Ring's truthful face. One of the young men sang a Latin student song and two Negro melodies. The other, sweet spirit, hear my prayer. Jim sang one of Moore's melodies in a singular falsetto, and altogether sang the Star-Spangled Banner and the Red, White, and Blue. Then Jim recited a very clever poem of his own composition, and told some fearful Indian stories. A group of small silver spruces away from the fire was my sleeping place. The artist who had been up there had so woven and interlaced their lower branches as to form a bower, affording at once shelter from the wind and a most agreeable privacy. It was thickly strewn with young pine shoots, and these, when covered with a blanket with an inverted saddle for a pillow, made a luxurious bed. The mercury at nine p.m. was twelve degrees below the freezing point. Jim, after a last look at the horses, made a huge fire and stretched himself out beside it. But Ring lay at my back to keep me warm. I could not sleep, but the night passed rapidly. I was anxious about the ascent, for gusts of ominous sounds swept through the pines at intervals. Then wild animals howled, and Ring was perturbed in spirit about them. Then it was strange to see the notorious Desperado, a red-handed man, sleeping as quietly as innocent sleeps. But above all, it was exciting to lie there with no better shelter than a bower of pines on a mountain eleven thousand feet high. In the very heart of the rocky range, under twelve degrees of frost, hearing sounds of wolves, with shivering stars looking through the fragrant canopy, with arrowy pines for bed-posts, and for a nightlamp the red flames of a campfire. Day dawned long before the sun rose, pure and lemon-colored. The rest were looking for the horses, when one of the students came running to tell me that I must come farther down the slope, for Jim said he had never seen such a sunrise. From the chilled gray peak above, from the everlasting snows, from the silvered pines, down through mountain ranges with their depths of teary and purple, we looked to where the plains lay cold, in blue gray, like a morning sea against a far horizon. Suddenly, as a dazzling streak at first, but enlarging rapidly into a dazzling sphere, the sun wheeled above the gray line, a light and glory as when it was first created. Jim involuntarily and reverently uncovered his head and exclaimed, I believe there is a god. I felt as if, parsey-like, I must worship. The gray of the plains changed to purple. The sky was all one rose-red flush, on which four million cloud-streaks rested. The ghastly peaks gleamed like rubies. The earth and heavens were new created. Surely the most high dwelleth not in temples made with hands. For a full hour those plains simulated the ocean, down to whose limitless expanse of purple, cliff, rocks and promontories swept down. By seven we had finished breakfast and passed into the ghastlier solitudes above, I writing as far as what rightly or wrongly are called the lava-beds, an expanse of large and small boulders with snow in their crevices. It was very cold, some water which we crossed was frozen hard enough to bear the horse. Jim had advised me against taking any wraps and my thin Hawaiian writing-dress, only fit for the tropics, was penetrated by the keen air. The rarefied atmosphere soon began to oppress our breathing, and I found that Evan's boots were so large that I had no foothold. Fortunately, before the real difficulty of the ascent began, we found, under a rock, a pair of small overshoes, probably left by the Hayden Exploring Expedition, which just lasted for the day. As we were leaping from rock to rock, Jim said, I was thinking in the night about your traveling alone, and wondering where you carried your derringer, for I could see no signs of it. On my telling him that I traveled unarmed, he could hardly believe it, and assured me to get a revolver at once. On arriving at the notch, a literal gate of rock, we found ourselves absolutely on the knife-like ridge or backbone of Longs Peak, only a few feet wide, covered with colossal boulders and fragments, and on the other side shelving in one precipitous snow-patched sweep of three thousand feet to a picturesque hollow containing a lake of pure green water. Other lakes, hidden among dense pine woods, were farther off. While close above us rose the peak, which, for about five hundred feet, is a smooth, gaunt, inaccessible-looking pile of granite. Passing through the notch, we looked along the nearly inaccessible side of the peak, composed of boulders and debris of all shapes and sizes, through which appeared broad, smooth ribs of reddish-colored granite, licking as if they upheld the towering rock mass above. I usually dislike bird's-eye and panoramic views, but, though from a mountain, this was not one. Serrated ridges, not much lower than that on which we stood, rose one beyond another, far as that pure atmosphere could carry the vision, broken into awful chasms deep with ice and snow, rising into pinnacles piercing the heavenly blue with their cold, barren gray, on, on forever, till the most distant range up bore unsullied snow alone. There were fair lakes mirroring the dark pine woods, canyons dark and blue-black with unbroken expanses of pines, snow-slashed pinnacles, wintry heights frowning upon lovely parks, watered and wooded, lying in the lap of summer, north park floating off into the blue distance, middle park closed till another season, the sunny slopes of Estes Park and winding down among the mountains the snowy ridge of the divide, whose bright waters seek both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. There, far below, links of diamonds showed where the Grand River takes its rise to seek the mysterious Colorado, with its still unsolved enigma, and lose itself in the waters of the Pacific, and nearer the snow-born tops and burst forth from the ice to begin its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. Nature, rioting in her grandest mood, exclaimed with voices of grandeur, solitude, sublimity, beauty, and infinity. Lord, what is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him? Never to be forgotten glories they were, burnt in upon my memory by six succeeding hours of terror. End of Letter 7, Part 1 Letter 7, Part 2 of A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains This is a LibriVox recording. Our LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Byrd. Part 2 of Letter 7 You know I have no head and no ankles, and never ought to dream of mountaineering. And had I known that the ascent was a real mountaineering feat, I should not have felt the slightest ambition to perform it. As it is, I am only humiliated by my success, for Jim dragged me up like a bale of goods by sheer force of muscle. At the notch the real business of the ascent began. Two thousand feet of solid rock towered above us. Four thousand feet of broken rock shelved precipitously below. Smooth granite ribs, with barely foothold, stood out here and there. Melted snow refrozen several times, presented a more serious obstacle. Many of the rocks were loose and tumbled down when touched. To me it was a time of extreme terror. I was roped to Jim, but it was of no use. My feet were paralyzed and slipped on the bare rock, and he said it was useless to try to go that way, and we retraced our steps. I wanted to return to the notch, knowing that my incompetence would detain the party, and one of the young men said almost plainly that a woman was a dangerous encumbrance. But the trapper replied shortly that if it were not to take a lady up he would not go up at all. He went on to explore and reported that further progress on the correct line of ascent was blocked by ice, and then for two hours we descended, lowering ourselves by our hands from rock to rock along a bolder, strewn sweep of four thousand feet, patched with ice and snow, and perilous from rolling stones. My fatigue and giddiness and pain from bruised ankles and arms half pulled out of their sockets were so great that I should never have gone half way. Had not Jim, Nolan's volans, dragged me along with the patience and skill, and with all the determination that I should ascend the peak, which never failed. After descending about two thousand feet to avoid the ice, we got into a deep ravine with inaccessible sites, partly filled with ice and snow, and partly with large and small fragments of rock, which were constantly giving away, rendering the footing very insecure. That part to me was two hours of painful and unwilling submission to the inevitable, of trembling, slipping, straining, of smooth ice appearing when it was least expected, and of weakened treaties to be left behind while the others went on. Jim always said that there was no danger, that there was only a short bit ahead, and that I should go up even if he carried me. Slipping and faltering, gasping from the exhausting toil in the rarefied air, with throbbing hearts and panting lungs, we reached the top of the gorge, and squeezed ourselves between two gigantic fragments of rock, by a passage called the Dog's Lift, when I climbed on the shoulders of one man, and then was hauled up. This introduced us by an abrupt turn round the southwest angle of the peak, to a narrow shelf of considerable length, rugged, uneven, and so overhung by the cliff in some places that it is necessary to crouch to pass it all. Above the peak looks nearly vertical for four hundred feet, and below the most tremendous precipice I have ever seen descends in one unbroken fall. This is usually considered the most dangerous part of the ascent, but it does not seem so to me, for such foothold as there is, is secure, and one fancies that it is possible to hold on with the hands. But there, and on the final, and to my thinking the worst part of the climb, one slip, and a breathing, thinking human being would lie three thousand feet below, a shapeless, bloody heap. Ring refused to traverse the ledge, and remained at the lift howling piteously. From thence the view is more magnificent even than that from the notch. At the foot of the precipice below us lay a lovely lake, wood embossed, from or near which the bright St. Vrain and other streams take their rise. I thought how their clear cold waters, growing turbid in the effluent flats, would heat under the tropic sun, and eventually form part of that great ocean river which renders our far-off islands habitable by impinging on their shores. Snowy ranges, one behind the other, extended to the distant horizon, folding in their wintry embrace the beauties of Middle Park. Pike's Peak, more than one hundred miles off, lifted that vast but shapeless summit which is the landmark of southern Colorado. There were snow patches, snow slashes, snow abysses, snow forlorn and soiled licking, snow pure and dazzling, snow glistening above the purple robe of pine worn by all the mountains. While away to the east in limitless breadth stretch the green gray of the endless plains. Giants everywhere reared their splintered crests. From thence, with a single sweep, the eye takes in a distance of three hundred miles, that distance to the west, north and south, being made up of mountains ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen thousand feet in height, dominated by Long's Peak, Gray's Peak and Pike's Peak, all nearly the height of Mont Blanc. On the plains we trace the rivers by their fringe of cottonwoods to the distant Platte, and between us and them lay glories of mountain, canyon and lake, sleeping in depths of blue and purple most ravishing to the eye. As we crept from the ledge round a horn of rock I beheld what made me perfectly sick and dizzy to look at, the terminal peak itself, a smooth cracked face or wall of pink granite, as nearly perpendicular as anything could well be up which it was possible to climb, well deserving the name of the American Matterhorn. Beginning of Footnote Let no practical mountaineer be allured by my description into the ascent of Long's Peak. Truly terrible as it was to me, to a member of the Alpine Club, it would not be a feat worth performing. End of Footnote Scaling, not climbing, is the correct term for this last ascent. It took one hour to accomplish five hundred feet, pausing for breath every minute or two. The only foothold was in narrow cracks or on minute projections on the granite. To get a toe in these cracks, or here and there on a scarcely obvious projection, while crawling on hands and knees all the while tortured with thirst and gasping and struggling for breath. This was the climb. But at last the peak was one. A grand, well-defined mountaintop it is, a nearly level acre of boulders, with precipitous sides all round. The one we came up being the only accessible one. It was not possible to remain long. One of the young men was seriously alarmed by bleeding from the lungs, and the intense dryness of the day and the rarefication of the air at a height of nearly fifteen thousand feet made respiration very painful. There is always water on the peak, but it was frozen as hard as a rock, and the sucking of ice and snow increases thirst. We all suffered severely from the want of water, and the gasping for breath made our mouths and tongues so dry that articulation was difficult, and the speech of all unnatural. From the summit were seen in unrivaled combination all the views which had rejoiced our eyes during the ascent. It was something at last to stand upon the storm-rent crown of this lonely sentinel of the rocky range, own one of the mightiest of the vertebrae of the backbone of the North American continent, and to see the water start for both oceans, uplifted above love and hate and storms of passion, calm amidst the eternal silences, fanned by zeffers and bathed in living blue, peace rested for the one bright day on the peak, as if it were some region. Where falls not rain or hail or any snow or ever wind blows loudly. We placed our names with the date of ascent and a tin within a crevice, and descended to the ledge, sitting on the smooth granite, getting our feet into cracks and against projections, and letting ourselves down by our hands. Jim, going before me, so that I might steady my feet against his powerful shoulders. I was no longer giddy and faced the precipice of thirty-five hundred feet without a shiver. Repassing the ledge and lift we accomplished the descent through fifteen hundred feet of ice and snow, with many falls and bruises, but no worse mishap. And there separated the young men taking the steepest but most direct way to the notch, with the intention of getting ready for the march home. And Jim and I, what he thought the safer route for me, a descent over boulders for two thousand feet, and then a tremendous ascent to the notch. I had various falls, and once hung by my frock, which caught on a rock, and Jim severed it with his hunting-knife, upon which I fell into a crevice full of soft snow. We were driven lower down the mountains than he had intended by impassable tracks of ice, and the ascent was tremendous. For the last two hundred feet the boulders were of enormous size, and the steepness fearful. Sometimes I drew myself up on hands and knees, sometimes crawled, sometimes Jim pulled me up by my arms or a lariat, and sometimes I stood on his shoulders, or he made steps for me with his feet and hands. But at six we stood on the notch in the splendor of the sinking sun, all color deepening, all peaks glorifying, all shadows purpling, all peril past. Jim had parted with his brusquery when we parted from the students, and was gentle and considerate beyond anything, though I knew that he must be grievously disappointed, both in my courage and strength. Water was an object of earnest desire. My tongue rattled in my mouth, and I could hardly articulate. It is good for one sympathies to have for once a severe experience of thirst. Truly there was, water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Three times its apparent gleam deceived even the Mountaineers' practice dye, but we found only a foot of glare ice. At last in a deep hole he succeeded in breaking the ice, and by putting one's arm far down one could scoop up a little water in one's hand, but it was tormentingly insufficient. With great difficulty and much assistance I recrossed the lava beds, was carried to the horse and lifted upon him, and when we reached the camping-ground I was lifted off him and laid on the ground wrapped up in blankets, a humiliating termination of a great exploit. The horses were saddled, and the two young men were all ready to start, but Jim quietly said, Now gentlemen, I want a good night's rest, and we shan't stir from here to-night. I believe they were really glad to have it so, as one of them was quite finished. I retired to my arbor, wrapped myself in a roll of blankets, and was soon asleep. When I woke the moon was high shining through the silvery branches, whitening the bald peak above, and glittering on the great abyss of snow behind, and pine logs were blazing like a bonfire in the cold still air. My feet were so icy cold that I could not sleep again, and getting some blankets to sit on and making a roll of them for my back, I sat for two hours by the campfire. It was weird and gloriously beautiful. The students were asleep not far off in their blankets, with their feet towards the fire. Ring lay on one side of me with his fine head on my arm, and his master sat smoking, with the fire lighting up the handsome side of his face, and except for the tones of our voices, and an occasional crackle and splutter as a pine-knot blazed up, there was no sound on the mountain side. The beloved stars of my far-off home were overhead, the plow and pole-star, with their steady light, the glittering Pleiades, looking larger than I ever saw them, and Orion studded about shining gloriously. Once only some wild animals prowled near the camp when ring with one bound disappeared from my side, and the horses which were picketed by the stream broke their lariots, stampeded, and came rushing wildly towards the fire, and it was fully half an hour before they were caught, and quiet was restored. Jim, or Mr. Nugent, as I always scrupulously called him, told stories of his early youth, and of a great sorrow which led him to embark on a lawless and desperate life. His voice trembled, and tears rolled down his cheek. Was it semi-conscious acting I wondered, or was his dark soul really stirred to its steps by the silence, the beauty, and the memories of youth? We reached Estee's Park at noon of the following day. A more successful ascend of the peak was never made, and I would not now exchange my memories of its perfect beauty and extraordinary sublimity for any other experience of mountaineering in any part of the world. Yesterday snow fell on the summit, and it will be inaccessible for eight months to come. I L B End of Letter 7 Letter 8, Part 1 of A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Byrd. Part 1 of Letter 8 Estee's Park, Colorado Territory October 2 How time has slipped by I do not know. This is a glorious region, and the air and life are intoxicating. I live mainly out of doors and on horseback, where my half-threadbare Hawaiian dress sometimes under the stars on a bed of pine-bows, ride on a Mexican saddle, and hear once more the low music of my Mexican spurs. There's a stranger. Heave our fabric at him. He's said by many travelers to express the feeling of the new settlers in these territories. This is not my experience in my cheery mountain home. How the rafters ring as I write with songs and mirth, while the pitch-pine logs blaze and crackle in the chimney, and the fine snow-dust drives in through the chinks and forms mimic snow-reaths on the floor, and how the wind raves and howls and plays along the creaking pine branches and snaps them short off, and the lightning plays round the blasted top of Longs Peak, and the hardy hunters divert themselves with the thought that when I go to bed I must turn out and face the storm. You will ask, what is Estee's Park? This name, with the quiet Midland County sound, suggests park palings, well-likened, a lodge with a curtsy woman, fallow deer, and a queen and mansion. Such as it is, Estee's Park is mine. It is unsurveyed, no man's land, and mine by right of love, appropriation, and appreciation. By the seizure of its pureless sunrise and sunsets, its glorious afterglow, its blazing noons, its hurricanes sharp and furious, its wild auroras, its glories of mountain and forest, of canyon, lake and river, and the stereo typing them all in my memory. Mine too, in a better than the sportsman's sense, are the majestic wopity which play and fight under the pines in the early morning, as securely as fallow deer under our English oaks. Its graceful black tails, swift afoot, its superb big horns, whose noble leader is to be seen now and then with his classic head against the blue sky, on the top of a colossal rock. Its sneaking mountain lion, with his hideous nocturnal catarollings. The great grizzly, the beautiful skunk, the wary beaver, who is always making legs, damming and turning streams, cutting down young cottonwoods setting an example of thrift in industry. The wolf, greedy and cowardly, the coyote and the lynx and all the lesser fry of mink, marten, cat, hare, fox, squirrel and chipmunk, as well as things that fly, from the eagle down to the crested blue-chay. May their number never be less, in spite of the hunter who kills for food and gain and the sportsman who kills in marauds for past time. But still I have not answered the natural question. What is Estes Park? Among the striking peculiarities of these mountains are hundreds of high-lying valleys, large and small, at heights varying from 6,000 to 11,000 feet. The most important are North Park, held by hostile Indians. Middle Park, famous for hot springs and trout. South Park, rich in minerals. And San Louis Park. South Park is 10,000 feet high, a great rolling prairie 70 miles long, well grassed and watered, but nearly closed by snow in winter. But parks enumerable are scattered throughout the mountains, most of them unnamed, and others nicknamed by the hunters or trappers who have made them their temporary resorts. They always lie far within the flaming foothills. Their exquisite stretches of flowery pastures dotted artistically with clumps of trees, sloping long light to bright swift streams full of red-waisted trout, or running up in soft glades into the dark forest, above which the snow peaks rise in their infinite majesty. Some are bits of meadow a mile long and very narrow, with a small stream, a beaver dam, and a pond made by beaver industry. Hundreds of these can only be reached by riding in the bed of a stream or by scrambling up some narrow canyon till it debouches on the fairy-like stretch above. These parks are the feeding grounds of enumerable wild animals, and some, like one three miles off, seem chosen for the process of antler casting, the grass being covered for at least a square mile with the magnificent branching horns of the elk. Estee's Park combines the beauties of all. Dismiss all thoughts of the middling counties for park palings there are mountains, forest-skirted 9,000, 11,000, 14,000 feet high, for a lodge, two sentinel peaks of granite guarding the only feasible entrance, and for a queen and mansion, an unchinked log cabin with a vault of sunny blue overhead. The park is most irregularly shaped and contains hardly any level grass. It's an aggregate of lawns, slopes, and glades, about 18 miles in length, but never more than two miles in width. The Big Thompson, a bright, rapid-trout stream, snow-born on Long's Peak a few miles higher, takes all sorts of magical twist, vanishing and reappearing unexpectedly, glancing among lawns, rushing through romantic ravines, everywhere making music through the still, long nights. Here and there the lawns are so smooth, the trees so artistically grouped, a lake makes such an artistic foreground, or a waterfall comes tumbling down with such an apparent feeling for the picturesque, that I am almost angry with nature for her close imitation of art. But in another hundred yards, nature, glorious, unapproachable, inimitable, is herself again, raising one's thoughts currently upwards to her creator and ours. Granger and sublimity, not softness, are the features of Estes Park. The glades which begin so softly are soon lost in the dark primeval forest, with their peaks of rosy granite, and their stretches of granite blocks piled and poised by nature in some mood of fury. The streams are lost in canyons, nearly or quite inaccessible, awful in their blackness and darkness. Every valley ends in mystery. Seven mountain ranges raise their frowning barriers between us and the plains, and at the south end of the park Longs Peak rises to a height of fourteen thousand seven hundred feet, with his bare, scathed head slashed with eternal snow. The lowest part of the park is seventy five hundred feet high, and though the sun is hot during the day, the mercury hovers near the freezing point every night of the summer. An immense quantity of snow falls, but partly owing to their tremendous winds which drifted into the deep valleys, and partly to the bright warm sun of the winter months, the park is never snowed up, and a number of cattle and horses are wintered out of doors on its sun-cured, saccharine grasses, of which the grandma grass is the most valuable. The soil here, as elsewhere in the neighborhood, is nearly everywhere coarse, grey, granitic dust, produced probably by the disintegration of the surrounding mountains. It does not hold water and is never wet in any weather. There are no thaws here. The snow mysteriously disappears by rapid evaporation. Oats grow, but do not ripen, and when well advanced are cut and stacked for winter fodder. Potatoes yield abundantly, and though not very large, are of the best quality, merely throughout. Evans has not attempted anything else, and probably the more succulent vegetables would require irrigation. The wildflowers are gorgeous and innumerable, though their beauty, which culminates in July and August, was over before I arrived, and the recent snow flurries have finished them. The time between winter and winter is very short, and the flowery growth and blossom of a whole year are compressed into two months. Here are dandelions, butter-cups, lark-spurs, hair-bells, violets, roses, blue-tension, columbine, painter's brush, and fifty others, blue and yellow predominating. And though their blossoms are stiffened by the cold every morning, they are starring the grass and drooping over the brook long before noon, making the most of their brief lives in the sunshine. On ferns, after many a long hunt, I have only found Sestopterus, Fragilus, and the Blechnum Spiccant, but I hear that the Terrace Aquilina is also found. Snakes and mosquitoes do not appear to be known here. Coming almost direct from the tropics, one is dissatisfied with the uniformity of the foliage. Indeed, foliage can hardly be written off, as the trees properly so-called at this height are exclusively coniferi, and bare needles instead of leaves. In places there are patches of spindly aspens, which have turned a lemon yellow, and along the streams bear cherries, vines, and roses lighten the gulches with their variegated crimson leaves. The pines are not imposing, either from their girth or height. Their coloring is blackish-green, and though they are effective singly or in groups, they are somber, and their color is blackish-green, in groups they are somber, and almost funeral, when densely masked, as here along the mountain sides. The timber line is at a height of about eleven thousand feet, and is singularly well-defined. The most attractive tree I have seen is the Silver Spruce, Abbey's Inglamoni, near of kin to what is often called the Balsam Fir. Its shape and color are both beautiful. My heart warms toward it, and I frequent all the places where I can find it. It looks as if a soft blue silver powder had fallen on its deep green needles, or as if a blueish whore-frost, which must melt at noon, were resting upon it. Anyhow one can hardly believe that the beauty is permanent, and survives the summer heat and the winter cold. The universal tree here is the Pinus Ponderosa, of any very considerable size, and there is nothing to compare with the redwoods of the Sierra Nevada, far less with the Sequoias of California. As I have written before, Estes Park is twenty-five and a half miles from Longmount. The nearest settlement, and it can be reached on horseback only by the steep and devious track by which I came, passing through a narrow rift in the top of a precipitous ridge nine thousand feet high, in the middle of a steepest mountainous gate. Evans takes a lumber-wagon with four horses over the mountains, and a Colorado engineer would have no difficulty in making a wagon-road. In several of the gulches over which the track hangs, there are the remains of wagons which have come to grief in the attempt to emulate Evans' feet, which, without evidence, I should have supposed to be impossible. It is an awful road. It is a great man a mile higher up. Mountain Jim's Cabin is in the entrance gulch, four miles off, and there is not another cabin for eighteen miles toward the plains. The park is unsurveyed, and the huge tract of mountainous country beyond is almost altogether unexplored. Elk Country's occasionally come up and camp out here, but the two settlers, who, however, are only squatters for various reasons, are not disposed to encourage such visitors. When Evans, who is a very successful hunter, came here, he came on foot, and for some time after settling here, he carried the flour and necessaries required by his family on his back over the mountains. As I intend to make Estes park my headquarters until the winter sets in, I must make you acquainted with my surroundings and mode of living. The Queen Anne mansion is represented by a log cabin made of big hewn logs. The chinks should be filled with mud and lime, but these are wanting. The roof is formed of barked young spruce, then a layer of hay at an outer coating of mud, all nearly flat. The floors are roughly boarded. The living room is about sixteen feet square and has a rough stone chimney in which pine logs are always burning. At one end there is a door into a small bedroom, and at the other a door into a small eating room at the table of which we feed in relays. This opens into a very small kitchen with a great American cooking stove and there are two bed closets besides. Although rude it is comfortable except for the drafts. The fine snow drives in through the chinks and covers the floors, but sweeping it out at intervals is both fun and exercise. There are no heaps of rubbish places on the side. Near it on the slope under the pines is a pretty two-roomed cabin and beyond that near the lake is my cabin, a very rough one. My door opens into a little room with a stone chimney and that again into a small room with a hay bed, a chair with a tin basin on it, a shelf and some pegs. A small window looks on the lake and the glories of the sunrises which I see from it are indescribable. Neither of my doors has a lock and to say the truth neither will shut as the wood has swelled. Below the house on the stream which issues from the lake there is a beautiful log dairy with a water-wheel outside used for churning. Besides this there are a corral, a shed for the wagon a room for the hired men and shelters for horses and weekly calves. All these things are necessaries at this height. The ranchmen are two Welshmen Evans and Edwards each with a wife and family. The men are as diverse as they can be. Griff, as Evans is called, is short and small and is hospitable, careless, reckless, jolly, social, convivial, peppery, good-natured. Nobody's enemy but his own. Nobody's enemy but his own. He had the wit and taste to find out Estes Park and still have found him out and have induced him to give them food and lodging and add cabin to cabin to take them in. He is a splendid shot, an expert and successful hunter, a bold mountaineer, a good writer, a capital cook and a generally jolly fellow. His cheery laugh rings through the cabin from the early morning and is contagious and when the rafters ring at night with such songs as Do Ya Ken John Peel, and John Brown, what would the chorus be without poor Griff's voice? What would Estes Park be without him indeed? When he went to Denver lately we missed him as we should have missed the sunshine and perhaps more. In the early morning when Long's Peak is red and the grass crackles with the whorefrost he arouses me with a cheery thump on my door. We're getting cattle-hunting. Will you come? To drive in the cattle? You can take your pick of the horses. I want another hand. Free-hearted, lavish, popular, poor Griff loves liquor too well for his prosperity and is always tormented by debt. He makes lots of money but puts it into a bag with holes. He has fifty horses and one thousand head of cattle many of which are his own wintering up here and makes no end of money for people at eight dollars a week yet it all goes somehow. He has the most industrious wife a girl of seventeen and four younger children all musical but the wife has to work like a slave and though he is a kind husband her lot, as compared with her lords is like that of a squall. Edwards, his partner is his exact opposite tall, thin and condemnatory looking industrious, saving grave, a teetotaler grieved for all reasons at Evans follies and rather grudging as naturally unpopular as Evans is popular a decent man who with his industrious wife will certainly make money as fast as Evans loses it. I pay eight dollars a week which includes the unlimited use of a horse when one can be found and caught we breakfast at seven on beef, potatoes tea, coffee, new bread and butter. Two pictures of cream and two of milk are replenished as fast as they are exhausted. Dinner at twelve is a repetition of the breakfast but with the coffee omitted and a gigantic pudding added. Tea at six is a repetition of breakfast. Eat whenever you are hungry you can always get milk and bread in the kitchen Evans says as you can it'll do you good and we all eat like hunters there is no change of food. The steer which was being killed on my arrival is now being eaten through from head to tail the meat being hacked off quite promiscuously without any regard to joints in this dry, rarefied air the outside of the flesh blackens and hardens and though the weather may be hot the carcass keeps sweet for two or three months the bread is super excellent but the poor wives seem to be making and baking it all day the regular household living and eating together at this time consist of a very intelligent and high-minded American couple Mr. and Mrs. Dewey people whose character culture and society I should value anywhere a young Englishman brother of a celebrated African traveler who because he rides on an English saddle and clings to some other insular peculiarities is called the Earl a minor prospecting for silver a young man the type of intelligent practical young America whose health showed consumptive tendencies when he was in business and who is living a hunter's life here a grown-up niece of Evans and a melancholy looking hired man a mile off there is an industrious married settler and four miles off in the gulch leading to the park mountain gym otherwise Mr. Nugent is posted his business as a trapper takes him daily up to the beaver dams in Black Canyon to look after his traps and he generally spends some time in or about our cabin not I can see to Evans satisfaction for in truth this blue hollow lying solitary at the foot of Long's Peak is a miniature world of great interest in which love, jealousy, hatred envy, pride, unselfishness greed, selfishness and self-sacrifice can be studied hourly and there is always the unpleasantly exciting risk of an open quarrel with the neighboring Desperado whose I'll shoot you has more than once been heard in the cabin the party however has often been increased by campers either elk hunters prospectors for silver or locations who feed with us and join us in the evening they get little help from Evans either as to elk or locations and go away disgusted and unsuccessful two Englishmen of refinement and culture camped out here prospecting a few weeks ago and then contrary to advice cross the mountains into North Park where gold is said to abound and it is believed that they have fallen victims of the bloodthirsty Indians of that region of course we never get letters or newspapers unless someone rides to long mount for them two or three novels and a copy of our New West are our literature our latest newspaper is 17 days old somehow the park seems to become the natural limit of our interest so far as they appear in conversation at table the last grand aurora the snowstorm track and sign of elk and grizzly rumors of a big horn heard near the lake the canyons in which the Texan cattle were last seen the merits of different rifles the progress of two obvious love affairs the probability of someone coming up from the plains with letters Mountain Jim's latest mood or escapade and the merits of his dog Ring as compared with those of Evans dog Plunk are among the topics ever abandoned as exhausted on Sunday work is nominally laid aside but most of the men go out hunting or fishing till the evening when we have the harmonium and much sacred music and singing in parts to be alone in the park from the afternoon till the last glory of the afterglow has faded with no books but a bible and prayer book is truly delightful no worthy or temple for a tedium or gloria in excelsis could be found than this temple not made with hands in which one may worship without being distracted by the sight of bonnets of endless form and curiously intricate back hair and countless oddities of changing fashion End of letter 8 part 1 letter 8 part 2 from a lady's life in the Rocky Mountains this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org a lady's life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Byrd part 2 of letter 8 I shall not soon forget my first night here somewhat dazed by the rarefied air entranced by the glorious beauty slightly puzzled by the motley company whose face is loomed not always quite distinctly through the cloud of smoke produced by eleven pipes I went to my solitary cabin at nine attended by Evans it was very dark and it seemed a long way off something howled Evans said it was a wolf and owls apparently innumerable hooded incessantly the pole-star exactly opposite my cabin door burned like a lamp my chest was sharp Evans opened the door lighted a candle and left me and I was soon in my hay-bed I was frightened that is afraid of being frightened it was so eerie but sleep soon got the better of my fears I was awoke by a heavy breathing a noise something like sawing under the floor and a pushing and upheaving all very loud my candle was all burned I dared not stir the noise went on for an hour fully when just as I thought the floor had been made sufficiently thin for all purposes of ingress the sounds abruptly ceased and I fell asleep again my hair was not as it ought to have been wide in the morning I was dressed by seven our breakfast hour and when I reached the great cabin and told my story and Edwards contorted his face dismally they told me that there was a skunk's lair under my cabin and that they dare not make any attempt to dislodge him for fear of rendering the cabin untenable they have tried to trap him since but without success and each night the noisy performance is repeated I think he is sharpening his claws on the underside of my floor as the grizzlies sharpen theirs upon the trees the odor with which this creature truly named Mophitis can overpower its assailants is truly awful we were driven out of the cabin for some hours merely by the passage of one across the corral the bravest man is a coward in its neighborhood dogs rub their noses on the ground till they bleed when they have touched the fluid and even die of the vomiting produced by the effluvia the odor can be smelt a mile off if clothes are touched by the fluid they must be destroyed at present its fur is very valuable several have been killed since I came a shot well aimed at the spine secures one safely and an experienced dog can kill one by leaping upon it suddenly without being exposed to danger it is a beautiful beast about the size and length of a fox with long, thick black or dark brown fur and two white streaks from the head to the long bushy tail the claws of its forefeet are long and polished yesterday one was seen rushing from the dairy and was shot Plunk, the big dog, touched it and has to be driven into exile the body was valiantly removed by a man with a long fork and carried to a running string but we are nearly choked with the odor from the spot where it fell I hope that my skunk will enjoy a quiet spirit so long as we are near neighbors October 3rd this is surely one of the most entrancing spots on earth oh, that I could paint with pen or brush from my bed I look on mirror lake and with the very earliest dawn when objects are not discernible it lies there absolutely still a red-flesh-lead color then suddenly into its mirror flash inverted peaks at first a bright orange then changing into red making the dawn darker all round this is a new sight each morning new then the peaks fade and when morning is no longer spread upon the mountains the pines are mirrored in my lake almost as solid objects and the glory stills downwards the red-flesh warms the clear atmosphere of the park and the whorefrost sparkles and the crested blue jays step forth daintily on the jeweled grass the majesty and beauty grow on me daily as I crossed for my cabin just now and the long mountain shadows lay on the grass and form and color gained new meanings I was almost false to Hawaii I couldn't go on writing for it but went out and sat on a rock to see the deepening blue in the dark canyons and the peaks becoming rose-color one by one then fading into sudden gasliness the awe-inspiring heights of Long's peak fading last then came the glories of the afterglow when the orange and lemon of the east faded into gray and then gradually the gray for some distance above the horizon brightened into a cold blue and above the blue into a broad band of rich warm red with an upper band of rose-color above it hung a big cold moon this is the daily miracle of evening as the blazing peaks in the darkness of mirror lake are the miracle of morning perhaps this scenery is not lovable but as it were a strong stormy character it has an intense fascination the routine of my day is breakfast at seven then I go and do my cabin and draw water from the lake read a little loaf a little return to the big cabin and sweep it alternately with Mrs. Dewey after which she reads aloud till dinner at twelve then I ride with Mr. Dewey or by myself or with Mrs. Dewey who is learning to ride cavalier fashion in order to accompany her invalid husband after cattle till supper at six after that we all sit in the living room and I settle down to write to you or mint my clothes which are dropping to pieces some sit around the table playing at Euker the strange hunters and prospectors lie on the floor smoking and rifles are cleaned bullets cast fishing flies made fishing tackle repaired boots are waterproofed last eight I cross the crisp grass to my cabin always expecting to find something in it we all wash our own clothes and as my stock is so small some part of every day has to be spent at the wash tub politeness and propriety always prevail in our mixed company and though various grades of society are represented true democratic equality prevails not its counterfeit there is neither forwardness on one side nor condescension on the other Evans left for Denver ten days ago taking his wife and family to the plains for the winter and the mirth of our party departed with him Edwards is somber except when he lies on the floor in the evening and tells stories of his march through Georgia with Sherman I gave Evans a hundred dollar note to change and asked him to buy me a horse for my tour and for three days we have expected him the mail depends on him I have had no letters from you for five weeks and can hardly curb my impatience I ride or walk three or four miles out on the Longmount Trail two or three times a day to look for him others for different reasons are nearly equally anxious after dark we start at every sound at every time the dogs bark all the able-bodied of us turn out en masse wait for the wagon has become a nearly maddening choke October 9th the letter and newspaper fever has seized on everyone we have sent it last to Longmount this evening I rode out on the Longmount Trail towards dusk escorted by Mountain Gym and in the distance we saw a wagon with four horses and a saddle horse behind and the driver waved a handkerchief the concerted signal if I were the possessor of a horse we turned back galloping down the Long Hill as fast as two good horses could carry us and gave the joyful news it was an hour before the wagon arrived bringing not Evans but two campers of suspicious aspect who have pitched their camp close to my cabin you cannot imagine what it is to be locked in by these mountain walls and not know where your letters are lying later on Mr. Buckin one of our usual inmates returned from Denver with papers letters for everyone but me and much exciting news the financial panic has spread out west gathering strength on its way the Denver banks have all suspended business they refuse to cash their own checks or to allow their customers to draw a dollar and would not even give greenbacks for my English gold neither Mr. Buckin nor Evans could get a cent business is suspended and everybody, however rich is for the time being poor the Indians have taken to the warpath and are burning ranches and killing cattle there is a regular scare among the settlers and wagon loads of fugitives are arriving in Colorado Springs the Indians say the white men has killed the buffalo and left them to rot on the plains we will be revenged Evans had reached Longmount and will be here tonight October 10th wait for the wagon still we had a hurricane of wind and hail last night it was eleven before I could go to my cabin and I only reached it with the help of two men the moon was not up and the sky overhead was black with clouds when suddenly Longs Peak which had been invisible gleamed above the dark mountains all glistening with new fallen snow on which the moon as yet unrizen here was shining the evening before after sunset I saw another novel effect my lake turned a brilliant orange in the twilight and in its still mirror the mountains were reflected a deep rich blue as a world of wonders today we had a great storm with flurries of fine snow and when the clouds rolled up at noon the snowy range and all the higher mountains were pure white I have been hard at work all day to drown my anxieties which are heightened by a rumor that Evans has gone buffalo hunting on the plat this evening quite unexpectedly Evans arrived with a heavy mail in a box I sorted it but there was nothing for me and Evans said he was afraid that he had left my letters which were separate from the others behind at Denver but he had written from Longmount for them a few hours later they were found in a box of groceries all the hilarity of the house was returned with Evans and he has brought a kindred spirit with him a young man who plays and sings splendidly has an inexhaustible repertoire that produces sonatas funeral marches, anthems reels, strath space and all else out of his wonderful memory never, surely, was a chamber organ compelled to such service a little cask of suspicious appearance was smuggled into the cabin from the wagon and heightens the hilarity a little I fear no churlishness could resist Evans' utterable jollity or the contagion of his hearty laugh he claps people on the back shouts at them will do anything for them and makes a perpetual breeze my kingdom for a horse he has not got one for me and a shadow crossed his face when I spoke of the subject eventually he asked for a private conference when he told me with some confusion that he had found himself very hard up in Denver and had been obliged to appropriate my hundred dollar note he said he would give me as interest for it up to November 25th a good horse saddle and bridle for my proposed journey of six hundred miles I was somewhat dismayed but there was no other course as the money was gone beginning a footnote injustice to Evans I must mention here that every cent of the money was ultimately paid that the horse was perfection and that the arrangement turned out to be the most advantageous one for me end of footnote I tried a horse mended my clothes reduced my pack to a weight of twelve pounds and was all ready for an early start when before daylight I was awakened by Evans' cheery voice at my door I say Miss B we've got to drive wild cattle today I wish you'd lend a hand there's not enough of us I'll give you a good horse do you think much difference? so we've been driving cattle all day riding about twenty miles and fording the big Thompson about as many times Evans flatters me by saying that I am as much use as another man more than one of our party I hope who always avoided the ugly cows October 12th I am still here helping in the kitchen driving cattle and riding four or five times a day Evans detains me each morning by saying here's lots of horses for you to try and after trying five or six a day I do not find one to my liking today as I was cantering a tall, well-bred one round the lake he threw the bridle off by a toss of his head leaving me with the reins in my hands one bucked and two have tender feet and tumbled down such are some of our little varieties still I hope to get off on my tour in a day or two so at least as to be able to compare Estes Park with some of the better known parts of Colorado you would be amused if you could see our cabin just now there are nine men in the room and three women for want of seats most of the men are lying on the floor all are smoking and the blithe young French Canadian who plays so beautifully such is about fifty speckled trout for each meal is playing the harmonium with a pipe in his mouth three men who have camped in black canyon for a week are lying like dogs on the floor they are all over six feet high immovably solemn neither smiling at the general hilarity nor at the absurd changes which are being rung on the harmonium they may be described as clothed only in boots for their clothes are torn to racks they stare vacantly they have neither seen a woman nor slept under a roof for six months Negro songs are being sung and before that Yankee Doodle was played immediately after rule Britannia and it made everyone but the strangers laugh it sounded so foolish and mean the colder weather is bringing the beast down from the heights I heard both wolves and the mountain lion as I crossed seven last night ILB End of letter 8