 12. Dear Valley, November Tonight I am in a beautiful place, like a Dutch farm, large, warm, bright, clean, with abundance of clean food and a clean, cold little bedroom to myself. But it is very hard to write, for two free-tongued, noisy Irish women who keep a minor's boarding-house in South Park, and are going to winter quarters in a freight wagon, are telling the most fearful stories of violence, vigilance committees, lynch-law, and stringing that I ever heard. It turns one's blood cold only to think that where I travel in perfect security only a short time ago men were being shot like skunks. At the mining-towns up above this nobody has thought anything of, who has not killed a man. That is a certain set. These women had a border, only fifteen, who thought he could not be anything till he had shot somebody, and they gave an absurd account of the lad dodging about with the revolver, and not getting up courage enough to insult anyone, till at last he hid himself in the stable and shot the first Chinaman who entered. Things up there are just in that initial state which Desperados love. A man accidentally shoves another in a saloon, or says a rough word at mills, and the challenge, first finger on the trigger, warrants either in shooting the other at any subsequent time without the formality of a duel. Nearly all the shooting a phrase arise from the most trivial causes in saloons and bar rooms. The deeper quarrels arising from jealousy or revenge are few, and are usually about some woman not worth fighting for. At Alma and Fair Play vigilance committees have been lately formed, and when men act outrageously and make themselves generally obnoxious, they receive a letter with the drawing of a tree, a man hanging from it, and a coffin below, on which is written four warrant. They get in a few hours. When I said I spent last night at Hall's Gulch there was quite a chorus of exclamations. My host there, they all said, would be strung before long. Did I know that a man was strung there yesterday? Had I not seen him hanging? He was on the big tree by the house, they said. Certainly had I known what a ghastly burden that tree bore, I would have encountered the ice and gloom of the Gulch rather than have slept there. They then told me a horrid tale of crime and violence. This man had even shocked the morals of the Alma crowd, and had a notice served on him by the vigilance, which had the desired effect, and he migrated to Hall's Gulch. As the tale runs the Hall's Gulch miners were resolved either not to have a groggery or to limit the number of such places, and when this Ruffian set one up he was forewarned. It seems, however, to have been merely a pretext for getting rid of him, for it was hardly a crime of which even Lynch Law could take cognizance. He was overpowered by numbers, and with circumstances of great horror was tried and strung on that tree within an hour. Beginning of Footnote Public opinion approved this execution regarding it as a fitting retribution for a series of crimes. End of Footnote I left the place this morning at ten and have had a very pleasant day, for the hills shut out the hot sun. I only rode twenty-two miles, for the difficulty of riding on ice was great, and there is no blacksmith within thirty-five miles of Hall's Gulch. I met two freighters just after I left, who gave me the unwelcome news that there were thirty miles of ice between that and Denver. You'll have a tough trip, they said. The road runs up and downhill, walled in along with a rushing river by high mountains. The scenery is very grand, but I hate being shut into these deep gorges, and always expect to see some startling object moving among the trees. I met no one the whole day after passing the teams except two men with a pack-jack. Bertie hates jacks, and rears and shies as soon as she sees one. It was a bad road, one shelving sheet of ice, and awfully lonely, and between the peril of the mare breaking her leg on the ice and that of being crushed by windfalls of timber. I had to look out all day. Toward sunset I came to a cabin where they keep travelers, but the woman looked so vinegar-faced that I preferred to ride four miles farther, up a beautiful road winding along a sunny Gulch filled with silver sprues, bluer and more silvery than any I have yet seen, and then crossed a divide from which the view and all the ecstasy of sunset color was perfectly glorious. It was enjoyment also in itself to get out of the deep chasm in which I had been immured all day. There is a train of twelve freight wagons here, each wagon with six horses, but the teamsters carry their own camping blankets and sleep either in their wagons or on the floor, so the house is not crowded. It is a pleasant two-story log-house, not only chinked but lined with plained timber. Each room has a great open chimney with logs burning in it. There are pretty engravings on the walls and baskets full of creepers hanging from the ceiling. This is the first settler's house I have been in, in which the ornamental has had any place. There is a door to each room. The oak chairs are bright with rubbing, and the floor, though unplained, is so clean that one might eat off it. The table is clean and abundant, and the mother and daughter, though they do all the work, look as trim as if they did none, and actually laugh heartily. The ranchman neither allows drink to be brought into the house nor to be drunk outside, and on this condition only he keeps travelers. The freighters come in to supper quite well washed, and though twelve of them slept in the kitchen, by nine o'clock there was not a sound. This freighting business is most profitable. I think that the charge is three cents per pound from Denver to South Park, and there much of the freight is transferred to pack-jacks and carried up to the mines. A railroad, however, is contemplated. I breakfasted with the family after the freight train left, and instead of sitting down to gobble up the remains of a meal they had a fresh tablecloth and hot food. The buckets are all polished oak, with polished brass bands. The kitchen utensils are bright as rubbing can make them, and more wonderful still the girls black their boots. Blacking, usually, is an unused luxury, and frequently is not kept in houses. My boots have only been blacked once during the last two months. Denver, November 9th. I could not make out whether the superiority of the Deer Valley settlers extended beyond material things, but a tempster I met in the evening said it made him more of a man to spend a night in such a house. In Colorado, whiskey is significant of all evil and violence, and is the cause of most of the shooting of phrase in the mining camps. There are few moderate drinkers. It is seldom taken except to excess. The great local question in the territory, and just now the great electoral issue, is drink or no drink, and some of the papers are openly advocating a prohibitive liquor law. Some of the districts, such as Greeley, in which liquor is prohibited are without crime, and in several of the stock-raising and agricultural regions through which I have traveled, where it is practically excluded, the doors are never locked, and the miners leave their silver bricks in their wagons, unprotected at night. People say that on coming from the eastern states they hardly realize at first the security in which they live. There is no danger and no fear. But the truth of the proverbial saying, there is no God west of the Missouri, is everywhere manifest. The almighty dollar is the true divinity, and its worship is universal. Smartness is the quality thought most of. The boy who gets on by cheating at his lessons is praised for being a smart boy, and his satisfied parents foretell that he will make a smart man. A man who overreaches his neighbor, but who does it so cleverly that the law cannot take hold of him, wins an envied reputation as a smart man. And stories of this species of smartness are told admiringly round every stove. Smartness is but the initial stage of swindling, and the clever swindler who evades or defines the weak and often corruptly administer laws of the states excites unmeasured admiration among the masses. Beginning of Footnote May 1878 I am copying this letter in the city of San Francisco and regretfully add a strong emphasis to what I have written above. The best and most thoughtful among Americans would endorse these remarks with shame and pain. I L B End of Footnote I left Deer Valley at ten the next morning on a glorious day, with rich atmospheric coloring, had to spend three hours sitting on a barrel in a forge after I had ridden twelve miles, waiting while twenty-four oxen were shod, and then rode on twenty-three miles through streams and canyons of great beauty till I reached a grocery store, where I had to share a room with a large family and three teamsters, and being almost suffocated by the curtain partition got up at four before anyone was stirring, saddled birdy, and rode away in the darkness, leaving my money on the table. It was a short eighteen miles ride to Denver down the Turkey Creek Canyon, which contains some magnificent scenery, and then the road ascends and hangs on the ledge of a precipice six hundred feet in depth. Such a narrow road that on meeting a wagon I had to dismount for fear of hurting my feet with the wheels. From thence there was a wonderful view through the rolling foothills and over the gray brown plains to Denver. Not a tree or shrub was to be seen. Everything was rioting in summer heat and drought, while behind lay the last Grand Canyon of the mountains, dark with pines and cool with snow. I left the track and took a shortcut over the prairie to Denver, passing through an encampment of the Ute Indians, about five hundred strong, a disorderly and dirty huddle of lodges, ponies, men, squalls, children, skins, bones, and raw meat. The Americans will never solve the Indian problem till the Indian is extinct. They have treated them after a fashion which has intensified their treachery and devilry as enemies and as friends reduces them to a degraded pauperism devoid of the very first elements of civilization. The only difference between the savage and the civilized Indian is that the latter carries firearms and gets drunk on whiskey. The Indian agency has been a sink of fraud and corruption. It is said that barely thirty percent of the allowance ever reaches those for whom it is voted, and the complaints of shoddy blankets, damaged flower, and worthless firearms are universal. To get rid of the engines is the phrase used everywhere. Even their reservations do not escape seizure practically, for if gold breaks out on them they are rushed, and their possessors are either compelled to accept land farther west or are shot off and driven off. One of the surest agents in their destruction is vitriolized whiskey. An attempt has recently been made to cleanse the Aegean stable of the Indian department, but it has met with signal failure. The usual result in America of every effort to purify the official atmosphere. Americans specially love superlatives. The phrases, biggest in the world, finest in the world, are on all lips. Unless President Hayes is a strong man they will soon come to boast that their government is composed of the biggest scoundrels in the world. As I rode into Denver and away from the mountains the view became glorious, as range above range crowned with snow came into sight. I was sure that three glistening peaks seventy miles north were the peerless shapeliness of Longs Peak, the king of the Rocky Mountains, and the mountain fever returned so severely that I grudged every hour spent on the hot, dry plains. The range looked lovelier and sublimer than when I first saw it from Greeley, all spiritualized in the wonderful atmosphere. I went direct to Evans House where I found a hearty welcome, as they had been anxious about my safety, and Evans almost at once arrived from Estee's Park with three elk, one grizzly, and one bighorn in his wagon. Regarding a place and life one likes, in spite of all lessons, one is sure to think, tomorrow shall be as this day and much more abundant. And all through my tour I had thought of returning to Estee's Park and finding everything just as it was. Evans brought the unwelcome news that the Goodlee Fellowship was broken up. The Deweys and Mr. Waller were in Denver, and the House was dismantled. Mr. and Mrs. Edwards alone remaining, who were, however, expecting me back. Saturday, though like a blazing summer day, was wonderful in its beauty, and after sunset the afterglow was richer and redder than I had ever seen it. But the heavy crimson betokens severe heat, which came on yesterday, and was hardly bearable. I attended service twice at the Episcopal Church, where the service was beautifully red and sung. But in a city in which men preponderate, the congregation was mainly composed of women, who fluttered their fans in a truly distracting way. Except for the church going, there were few perceptible signs of Sunday in Denver, which was full of rowdies from the mountain mining camps. You can hardly imagine the delight of joining in those grand old prayers after so long a deprivation. The Tadeum sounded heavenly in its magnificence, but the heat was so tremendous that it was hard to wassel through the day. They say that they have similar outbreaks of solar fury all through the winter. Golden City, November 13th Pleasant as Denver was, with the Deweys and so many kind friends there, it was too much of the wearying world, either from my health or taste. And I left for my sixteen miles ride to this place at four on Monday afternoon, with the sun still hot. Passing by a bare, desolate-looking cemetery, I asked a sad-looking woman who was leaning on the gate if she could direct me to the Golden City. I repeated the question twice before I got an answer. And then, though easily to be accounted for, it was wide of the mark. In most oldful tones, she said, Oh, go to the minister. I might tell you, maybe, but it's too great a responsibility. Go to the ministers. They can tell you. And she returned to her tears for someone whose spirit she was doubtless thinking of as in the Golden City of our hopes. The sixteen miles seemed like one mile after sunset, in the rapturous freshness of the Colorado air, and birdie after her two days rest and with a lightened load galloped across the prairie as if she enjoyed it. I did not reach this gorge till late, and it was an hour after dark before I groped my way into this dark, unlighted mining-town, where, however, we were most fortunate, both as to stable and accommodation for myself. I fear you will grow tired of the details of these journal letters. To a person sitting quietly at home, Riky Mountain traveling, like Riky Mountain scenery, must seem very monotonous. But not so to me, to whom the pure, dry mountain air is the elixir of life. At Golden City, I parted for a time from my faithful pony, as Clear Creek Canyon, which leads from it to Idaho, is entirely monopolized by a narrow-gauge railroad, and is inaccessible for horses and mules. To be without a horse in these mountains is to be reduced to complete helplessness. My great wish was to see Green Lake, situated near the timber line above Georgetown, said to be the highest town in the United States, at a height of nine thousand feet. A single day took me from the heat of summer into the intense cold of winter. Golden City by daylight showed its meanness and belied its name. It is ungraded, with here and there a piece of wooden sidewalk, supported on post, up to which you ascend by planks. Brick, pine, and log houses are huddled together. Every other house is a saloon, and hardly a woman is to be seen. My landlady apologized for the very exquisite little bedroom which she gave me, by saying it was not quite as she would like it, but she had never had a lady in her house before. The young lady who waited at breakfast said, I've been thinking about you, and I'm certain sure you're an authoress. The day, as usual, was glorious. Think of November half through, and scarcely even a cloud in the sky, except the vermilion cloudlets which accompany the sky at his rising and setting. They say that winter never sets in, there in the foothills, but that there are spells of cold, alternating with bright, hot weather, and that the snow never lies on the ground so as to interfere with the feet of the cattle. Golden City rang with oaths and curses, especially at the depot. Americans are given over to the most atrocious swearing, and the blasphemous use of our Savior's name is peculiarly revolting. Golden City stands at the mouth of Tuftkus, otherwise Clear Creek Canyon, which many people think the grandest scenery in the mountains, as it twists and turns marvelously, and its stupendous sides are nearly perpendicular, while farther progress is to all appearance continually blocked by great masses of rock and piles of snow-covered mountains. Unfortunately, its sides have been almost entirely denuded of timber, mining operations consuming any quantity of it. The narrow gauge, still-grade railroad, which runs up the canyon for the convenience of the rich mining districts of Georgetown, Black Hawk, and Central City, is a curiosity of engineering. The track has partly been blasted out of the sides of the canyon, and has partly been built by making a bed of stones in the creek itself and laying the track across them. I have never seen such churlishness and incivility as in the officials of that railroad and the state lines which connect with it, or met with such preposterous charges. They have handsome little cars on the route, but though the passengers paid full fare, they put us into a baggage car because the season was over, and in order to see anything I was obliged to sit on the floor at the door. The singular grandeur cannot be described. It is a mere gash-cut by the torrent, twisted, walled, chasmed, weather-stained with the most brilliant coloring, generally dark with shadow, but its utter desolation occasionally revealed by a beam of intense sunshine. A few stunted pines and cedars, spared because of their inaccessibility, hung here and there out of the rifts. Sometimes the walls of the abyss seem to meet overhead, and then widening out the rocks assumed fantastic forms, all grandeur, sublimity, and almost terror. After two hours of this the track came to an end and the canyon widened sufficiently for a road, all stones, holes, and sitings. There a great concord coach waited for us, intended for twenty passengers, and a mountain of luggage in addition, and the four passengers without any luggage sat on the seat behind the driver, so that the huge thing bounced and swung upon the straps on which it was hung, so as to recall the worst horrors of New Zealand staging. The driver never spoke without an oath, and though two ladies were passengers, cursed his splendid horses the whole time. Formerly even the most profane men intermitted their profanity in the presence of women, but they have changed all that. Everyone I saw up there seemed in a bad temper. I suspect that all their smart tricks and mining and shares had gone wrong. The road pursued the canyon to Idaho Springs, a fashionable mountain resort in the summer, but deserted now, where we took a superb team of six horses, with which we attained a height of ten thousand feet, and then a descent of one thousand took us into Georgetown, crowded into as remarkable a gorge as was ever selected for the sight of a town. The canyon beyond apparently terminating into precipitous and inaccessible mountains, sprinkled with pines up to the timber line, and thinly covered with snow. The area on which it is possible to build is so circumcised and steep, and the unpainted gable-ended houses are so perched here and there, and the water rushes so impetuously among them, that it reminded me slightly of a Swiss town. All the smaller houses are short up with young pines on one side to prevent them from being blown away by the fierce gust which sweep the canyon. It is the only town I have seen in America to which the epithet, picturesque, could be applied. But truly, seated in that deep hollow in the cold and darkness, it is in a terrible situation, with the alpine heights towering round it. I arrived at three, but its sun had set, and it lay in deep shadow. In fact, twilight seemed coming on, and as I had been unable to get my circular notes cashed at Denver, I had no money to stay over the next day, and much fear that I should lose Green Lake, the goal of my journey. We drove through the narrow, piled-up, irregular street, crowded with miners standing in groups, or drinking and gaming under the verandahs, to a good hotel, declivitously situated, where I at once inquired if I could get to Green Lake. The landlord said he thought not, the snow was very deep, and no one had been up for five weeks, but for my satisfaction he would send to a stable and inquire. The amusing answer came back. If it's the English lady traveling in the mountains, she can have a horse, but not anyone else. Boulder, November The answer regarding a horse at the end of my former letter was given to the landlord outside the hotel, and presently he came in and asked my name, and if I were the lady who had crossed from Lynx to South Park by Terriol Creek. So news travels fast. In five minutes the horse was at the door, with a clumsy two-horned side saddle, and I started at once for the upper regions. It was an exciting ride, much spiced with apprehension. The evening shadows had darkened over Georgetown, and I had two thousand feet to climb, or give up Green Lake. I shall forget many things, but never the awfulness and hugeness of the scenery. I went up a steep track by Clear Creek, then a succession of frozen waterfalls in a widened and then narrowed valley, whose frozen sides looked five thousand feet high. That is the region of enormous mineral wealth in silver. There are the terrible and other mines who shares you can see quoted daily in the share list in the Times, sometimes at cent per cent premium, and then down to twenty-five discount. These mines, with their prolonged subterranean workings, their stamping and crushing mills, and the smelting works which have been established near them fill the district with noise, hubbub, and smoke by day and night. But I had turned altogether aside from them into a still region, where each miner in solitude was grubbing for himself, and inviting to none his fines or disappointments. Agriculture restores and beautifies, mining, destroys, and devastates, turning the earth inside out, making it hideous, and blighting every green thing, as it usually blights man's heart and soul. There was mining everywhere along the Grand Road, with all its destruction and devastation, its digging, burrowing, gulching, and sluicing, and up all along the seemingly inaccessible heights, or holes, with their roofs locked supported, in which solitary and patient men were selling their lives for treasure. Down by the stream, all among the icicles, men were sluicing and washing, and everywhere along the heights were the scars of hardly passable trails, too steep even for pack-jacks, leading to the holes, and down which the miner packs the ore on his back. Many a heart has been broken for the few fines which have been made along those hillsides. All the ledges are covered with charred stumps, a picture of desolation, where nature had made everything grand and fair. But even from all this I turned. The last miner I saw gave me explicit directions, and I left the track and struck upwards into the icy solitudes. Sheets of ice at first, then snow, over a foot deep, pure and powdery, then a very difficult descent through a pine forest where it was nearly dark, the horse tumbling about in deep snow drifts, but the goal was reached, and none too soon. At a height of nearly twelve thousand feet I halted on a steep declivity, and below me completely girdled by dense forest of pines, with mountains red and glorified in the sunset rising above them, was Green Lake, looking like water, but in reality a sheet of ice two feet thick. From the gloom and chill below I had come up into the pure air and sunset light, and the glory of the unperfamed works of God. It brought to my mind the verse. The darkness is past, and true light now shineth. And as if in commentary upon it were the hundreds and thousands of men delving in dark holes in the gloom of the twilight below. Oh earth so full of dreary noises! Oh men with wailing in your voices! Oh delved gold, the whalers heap! God strikes a silence through you all. He giveth his beloved sleep. It was something to reach that height and see the far-off glory of the sunset, and by it to be reminded that neither God nor his Son had yet deserted the world. But the sun was fast going down, and even as I gazed upon the wonderful vision, the glory vanished, and the peaks became sad and gray. It was strange to be the only human being at that glacial altitude, and to descend again through a foot of untrodden snow and over sloping sheets of ice into the darkness, and to see the hillsides like affirmament of stars, each showing the place where a solitary man in his hole was delving for silver. The view, as long as I could see it, was quite awful. It looked as if one could not reach Georgetown without tumbling down a precipice. Precipices there were in plenty along the road, skirted with ice to their verge. It was the only ride which required nerve that I have taken in Colorado, and it was long after dark when I returned from my exploit. I left Georgetown at eight the next morning on the Idaho stage, and glorious cold. In this dry air it is quite warm if there are only a few degrees of frost. The sun does not rise in Georgetown till eleven now. I doubt if it rises there at all in the winter. After four hours fearful bouncing, the baggage car again received us, but this time the conductor, remarking that he supposed I was just traveling to see the country, gave me his chair and put it on the platform so that I had an excellent view of that truly sublime canyon. For economy I dined in a restaurant in Golden City, and at three remounted my trusty birdie, intending to arrive here that night. The adventure I met with is almost too silly to tell. When I left Golden City it was a brilliant summer afternoon and not too hot. They could not give any directions at the stable and told me to go out on the Denver track till I met someone who could direct me, which started me off wrong from the first. After riding about two miles I met a man who told me I was all wrong and directed me across the prairie till I met another who gave me so many directions that I forgot them and was irretrievably lost. The afterglow seemed to perfection on the open plain was wonderful. Just as it grew dark I rode after a tempster who said I was then four miles farther from Boulder than when I left Golden and directed me to a house seven miles off. I suppose he thought I should know, for he told me to cross the prairie till I came to a place where three tracks are seen and there to take the best traveled one, steering all the time by the North Star. His directions did bring me to the tracks, but it was then so dark that I could see nothing and soon became so dark that I could not even see Bertie's ears and was lost and benighted. I rode on hour after hour in the darkness and solitude, the prairie all around and affirmament of frosty stars overhead. The prairie wolf howled now and then and occasionally the lowing of cattle gave me hope of human proximity. But there was nothing but the lone wild plain. You can hardly imagine the longing to see a light, to hear a voice, the intensely eerie feeling of being alone in that vast solitude. It was freezing very sharply and was very cold and I was making up my mind to steer all night for the Pole Star, much fearing that I should be brought up by one of the effluents of the Platte or that Bertie would tire. When I heard the undertoned bellowing of a bull, which from the snorting rooting up of earth seemed to be disputing the right of way, and the pony was afraid to pass. While she was scuffling about, I heard a dog bark and a man swear. Then I saw a light and in another minute found myself at a large house where I knew the people, only eleven miles from Denver. It was nearly midnight, and light, warmth, and a good bed were truly welcome. You can form no idea of what the glory on the plains is just before sunrise. Like the afterglow, for a great height above the horizon, there is a shaded band of the most intense and glowing orange, while the mountains, which reflect the yet unrisen sun, have the purple light of amethysts. I left early, but soon lost the track, and was lost. But knowing that a sublime gash in the mountains was bare canyon, quite near Boulder, I struck across the prairie for it, and then found the Boulder track. The best laid schemes of men and mice gang aft-agly. And my exploits came to an untimely end today. On arriving here, instead of going into the mountains, I was obliged to go to bed in consequence of vertigo, headache, and faintness, produced by the intense heat of the sun. In all that weary land, there was no shadow of a great rock under which to rest. The gravelly, baked soil reflected the fiery sun, and it was nearly maddening to look up at the cool blue of the mountains, with their stretches of pines and their deep indigo shadows. Boulder is a hideous collection of frame houses on the burning plain, but it aspires to be a city, in virtue of being a distributing point, for the settlements of the Boulder canyon, and of the discovery of a coal seam. Long Mount, November. I got up very early this morning, and on a hired horse went nine miles up the Boulder canyon, which is much extolled. But I was greatly disappointed with everything except its superb wagon-road, and much disgusted with the laziness of the horse. A ride of fifteen miles across the prairie brought me here early in the afternoon, but of the budget of letters which I expected there is not one. Bertie looks in such capital condition that my host here can hardly believe that she has traveled over five hundred miles. I am feeling the pinch of poverty rather severely. When I have paid my bill here I shall have exactly twenty-six cents left. Evans was quite unable to pay the hundred dollars which he owed me, and to save themselves the Denver banks, though they remain open, have suspended payment, and would not cash my circular notes. The financial straits are very serious, and the unreasoning panic which has set in makes them worse. The present state of matters is, nobody has any money, so nothing is worth anything. The result to me is that no one's fulens. I must go up to Estes Park, where I can live without ready money, and remain there till things change for the better. It does not seem a very hard fate. Long's peak rises in purple gloom, and I long for the cool air and unfettered life of the solitary blue hollow at its base. Estes Park November 20th With that three notes of admiration were all I need give to my grand, solitary, uplifted, sublime, remote, beast-haunted lair, which seems more indescribable than ever. But you will wish to know how I have sped, and I wish you to know my present singular circumstances. I left Longmount at eight on Saturday morning, rather heavily loaded, for in addition to my own luggage I was asked to carry the mail bag, which was heavy with newspapers. Edwards, with his wife and family, were still believed to be here. A heavy snowstorm was expected, and all the sky, that vast dome which spans the plains, was overcast. But over the mountain it was a deep, still, sad blue, into which snowy peaks rose sun-lighted. It was a lonely, mournful-looking morning, but when I reached the beautiful canyon at the St. Brain, the sad blue became brilliant, and the sun warm and scintillating. Ah, how beautiful and incomparable the ride up here is, infinitely more beautiful than the much-vaunted parts I have seen elsewhere. There is, first, this beautiful hill-girdled valley of fair savannas, through which the bright St. Brain curves in and out amidst a tangle of cottonwood, and withered clematis and Virginia creeper, which two months ago made the valley gay with their scarlet and gold. Then the canyon, with its fantastically stained walls. Then the long ascent through sweeping foothills to the gates of rock, at a height of nine thousand feet. Then the wildest and most wonderful scenery for twenty miles, in which you cross thirteen ranges from nine thousand to eleven thousand feet high, pass through countless canyons and gulches, cross thirteen dark fords, and finally descend through McGinn's Gulch upon this, the gem of the Riky Mountains. It was a weird ride. I got on very slowly. The road is a hard one for any horse, especially for a heavily loaded one, and at the end of several weeks of severe travel. When I had ridden fifteen miles I stopped at the ranch where people usually get food, but it was empty, and the next was also deserted. So I was compelled to go to the last house, where two young men were barking. There I had to decide between getting a meal for myself or a feed for the pony. But the young man, on hearing of my sore poverty, trusted me till next time. His house, for order and neatness, and a sort of sprightliness of cleanliness, the comfort of cleanliness without its severity, is a pattern to all women, while the clear eyes and manly self-respect which the habit of total abstinence gives in this country are a pattern to all men. He cooked me a splendid dinner with good tea. After dinner I opened the mailbag and was delighted to find an accumulation of letters from you. But I sat much too long there, forgetting that I had twenty miles to ride, which could hardly be done in less than six hours. It was then brilliant. I had not realized the magnificence of that ride when I took it before. But the pony was tired, and I could not hurry her, and the distance seemed interminable, as after every range I crossed another range. Then came a region of deep, dark, densely wooded gulches, only a few feet wide, and many fords, and from their cold depths I saw the last sunlight fade from the brows of precipices, four thousand feet high. It was eerie, as darkness came on, to wind in and out in the pine-shattered gloom, sometimes on ice, sometimes in snow, at the bottom of these tremendous chasms. Wolves howled in all directions. This is said to denote the approach of a storm. During this twenty-mile ride I met a hunter with an elk packed on his horse, and he told me not only that the Edwardses were at the cabin yesterday, but that they were going to remain for two weeks longer, no matter how uncongenial. The ride did seem endless after darkness came on. Finally the last huge range was conquered. The last deep chasm passed, and with an eeriness which craved for human companionship I rode up to Mountain Jim's den. But no light shone through the chinks, and all was silent. So I rode tediously down McGinn's Gulch, which was full of crackings, and other strange mountain noises, and was pitch dark, though the stars were bright overhead. Soon I heard the welcome sound of a barking dog. I supposed it to denote strange hunters, but calling ring at adventure. The noble dog's large paws and grand head were in a moment on my saddle, and he greeted me with all those inarticulate but perfectly comprehensible noises, with which dogs welcomed their human friends. Of the two men on horses who accompanied him, one was his master, as I knew by the musical voice and grace of manner, that it was too dark to see any one, though he struck a light to show me the valuable furs with which one of the horses was loaded. The Desperado was heartily glad to see me, and sending the man and fur-laden horse onto his cabin he turned with me to the Evans's, and as the cold was very severe and Verdi was very tired, we dismounted and walked the remaining three miles. All my visions of a comfortable reception and good meal after my long ride vanished with his first words. The Edwards's had left for the winter on the previous morning, but had not passed through Long Mount. The cabin was dismantled, the stores were low, and the two young men, Mr. Caven, a minor, and Mr. Buchan, whom I was slightly acquainted with before, were biking there to look after the stock until Evans, who was daily expected, returned. The other settler and his wife had left the park, so there was not a woman within twenty-five miles. A fierce wind had arisen, and the cold was awful, which seemed to make matters darker. I did not care in the least about myself. I could rough it, and enjoy doing so, but I was very sorry for the young men, who I knew would be much embarrassed by the sudden appearance of a lady, for an indefinite time. But the difficulty had to be faced, and I walked in and took them by surprise as they were sitting smoking by the fire in the living-room, which was dismantled, unswept, and wretched looking. The young men did not show any annoyance, but exerted themselves to prepare a meal, and courteously made Jim share it. After he had gone, I boldly confessed my impecunious circumstances, and told them that I must stay there till things changed, that I hope not to inconvenience them in any way, and that by dividing the work among us they would be free to be out hunting. So we agreed to make the best of it. Our arrangements, which we supposed would last only two or three days, extended over nearly a month. Nothing could exceed the courtesy and good feeling which these young men showed. It was a very pleasant time on the whole, and when we separated they told me that though they were much taken aback at first they felt at last that we could get on in the same way for a year in which I cordially agreed. Sundry practical difficulties had to be faced and overcome. There was one of the common spring mattresses of the country in the little room which opened from the living-room, but nothing upon it. This was remedied by making a large bag and filling it with hay. Then there were neither sheets, towels, nor tablecloths. This was irremediable, and I never missed the first or last. Candles were another loss, and we had only one paraffin lamp. I slept all night in spite of a gale which blew all Sunday and into Monday afternoon, threatening to lift the cabin from the ground, and actually removing part of the roof from the little room between the kitchen and the living-room, in which we used to dine. Sunday was brilliant, but nearly a hurricane, and I dare not stir outside the cabin. The parlor was two inches deep in the mud from the roof. We nominally divided the cooking. Mr. Cabin makes the best bread I ever ate. They bring in wood and water and wash the supper things, and I do my room and the parlor, wash the breakfast things, and number of etc. My room is easily done, but the parlor is a never-ending business. I have swept shovelfuls of mud out of it three times today. There is nothing to dust it with but a buffalo's tail, and every now and then a gust descends the open chimney and drives the wood ashes all over the room. However I have found an old shawl which answers for a tablecloth and have made our parlor look a little more habitable. Jim came in yesterday in a silent mood, and sat looking vacantly into the fire. The young men said that this mood was the usual precursor of an ugly fit. Food is a great difficulty. Of thirty milk-cows only one is left, and she does not give milk enough for us to drink. The only meat is some pickled pork, very salt and hard, which I cannot eat, and the hens lay less than one egg a day. Yesterday morning I made some rolls and made the last bread into a bread-and-butter pudding, which we all enjoyed. Today I found part of a leg of beef hanging in a wagon shed, and we were elated with the prospect of fresh meat. But on cutting into it we found it green and unedible. Had it not been for some tea which was bestowed upon me at the inn at Longmount we should have had none. In this superb air and physically active life I can eat everything but pickled pork. We breakfast about nine, dine at two, and have supper at seven, but our menu never varies. Today I have been all alone in the park, as the men left to hunt elk after breakfast, after bringing in wood and water. The sky is brilliant, and the light intense, or else the solitude would be oppressive. I keep two horses in the corral, so as to be able to explore. But except Bertie, who is turned out, none of the animals are worth much now for molt of shoes and tender feet. End of LETTER XIII. LETTER XIV. OF A LADY'S LIFE IN THE ROCCY 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 ROCCY MOUNTAINS. By Isabella L. Bird. LETTER XIV. S.D.'S. PARK. I must attempt to put down the trifling events of each day just as they occur. The second time that I was left alone, Mr. Nugent came in looking very black, and asked me to ride with him to see the beaver dams on the Black Canyon. No more whistling or singing, or talking to his beautiful mare, or sparkling repartee. His mood was as dark as the sky overhead, which was black with an impending snowstorm. He was quite silent, struck his horse often, started off on a furious gallop, and then throwing his mare on her haunches close to me, said, Here the first man or woman who's treated me like a human being, for many a year. So he said in this dark mood, but Mr. and Mrs. Dewey, who took a very deep interest in his welfare, always treated him as a rational, intelligent gentleman, and in his better moments he spoke of them with the warmest appreciation. If you want to know, he continued, How nearly a man can become a devil, I'll tell you now. There was no choice, and we rode up the canyon, and I listened to one of the darkest tales of ruin I have ever heard or read. Its early features were very simple. His father was a British officer, quartered at Montreal, of a good old Irish family. From his account he was an ungovernable boy, imperfectly educated and tyrannizing over a loving but weak mother. When seventeen years old he saw a young girl at church whose appearance he described as being of angelic beauty, and fell in love with her with all the intensity of an uncontrolled nature. He saw her three times, but scarcely spoke to her. On his mother opposing his wish and treating it as a boyish folly, he took to drink, to spite her, and almost as soon as he was eighteen, maddened by the girl's death, he ran away from home, entered the service of the Hudson's Bay Company, and remained in it for several years, only leaving it because he found even that lawless life too strict for him. Then, being as I supposed about twenty-seven, he entered the service of the United States Government, and became one of the famous Indian scouts of the Plains, distinguishing himself by some of the most daring deeds on record, and some of the bloodiest crimes. Some of these tales I have heard before, but never so terribly told. Years must have passed in that service till he became a character known through all the West, and much dreaded for his readiness to take offense, and his equal readiness with his revolver. Vane, even in his dark mood, he told me that he was idolized by women, and that in his worst hours he was always chivalrous and good to women. He described himself as riding through camps in his scout-stress, with a red scarf round his waist, and sixteen golden curls, eight inches long, hanging over his shoulders. The handsome, even superbly handsome, side of his face was towards me as he spoke. As a scout, and as an armed escort of immigrant parties, he was evidently implicated in all the blood and broil of a lawless region and period, and went from bad to worse. Varying his life by drunken sprees, which brought nothing but violence and loss. The narrative seemed to lack some link, for I next found him on a homestead in Missouri, from whence he came to Colorado a few years ago. There again something was dropped out, but I suspect, and not without reason, that he joined one or more of those gangs of border-Ruffians, which for so long raided through Kansas, perpetrating such massacres and outrages as that of the murder-zine scene. His fame for violence and ruffianism preceded him into Colorado, where his knowledge and love of the mountains have earned him the sober kei he now wears. He has a squatter's claim, and forty head of cattle, and is a successful trapper besides. But envy and vindictiveness are raging within him. He gets money, goes to Denver, and spends large sums in the maddest dissipation, making himself a terror, and going beyond even such desperados as Texas Jack and Wild Bill, and when the money is done returns to his mountain den full of hatred and self-scorn till the next time. Of course, I cannot give details. The story took three hours to tell, and was crowded with terrific illustrations of a desperado's career, told with the rush of wild eloquence that was truly thrilling. When the snow, which for some time had been falling, compelled him to break off and guide me to a sheltered place from which I could make my own way back again, he stopped his horse and said, Now you see who has made a devil of himself. Lost, lost, lost. I believe in God. I've given him no choice but to put me with the devil and his angel. I'm afraid to die. You've stirred the better nature in me too late. I can't change. If ever a man were a slave, I am. Don't speak to me of repentance and reformation. I can't reform. Your voice reminded me of blank. Then in feverish tones, How dare you ride with me? You won't speak to me again, will you? He made me promise to keep one or two things secret whether he were living or dead, and I promised, for I had no choice. But they come between me and the sunshine moments, and I wake at night to think of them. I wish I had been spared the regret and excitement of that afternoon. A less ungovernable nature would never have spoken as he did, nor told me what he did. But his proud, fierce soul all poured itself out then, with hatred and self-loathing, blood on his hands and murder in his heart, though even then he could not be altogether other than a gentleman, or altogether divest himself of fascination, even when so tempestuously revealing the darkest points of his character. My soul dissolved in pity for this dark, lost, self-ruined life, as he left me and turned away in the blinding storm to the snowy range, where he said he was going to camp out for a fortnight. A man of great abilities, real genius, singular gifts, and with all the chances in life which other men have had. How far more terrible than the actymest peristy of Calpher is his exclamation. Lost, lost, lost. The storm was very severe, and the landmarks being blotted out, I lost my way in the snow, and when I reached the cabin after dark I found it still empty, for the two hunters on returning, finding that I had gone out, had gone in search of me. The snow cleared off late, and intense frost set in. My room is nearly the open air, being built of unchinked logs, and as in the open air one requires to sleep with the head buried in blankets, or the eyelids and breath freeze. The sunshine has been brilliant to-day. I took a most beautiful ride to Black Canyon to look for the horses. Every day some new beauty or effect of snow and light is to be seen. Nothing that I have seen in Colorado compares with Estes Park, and now that the weather is magnificent and the mountain tops above the pine woods are pure white, there is nothing of beauty or grandeur for which the heart can wish that is not here. And it is health-giving, with pure air, pure water, and absolute dryness. But there is something very solemn, at times almost overwhelming, in the winter solitude. I have never experienced anything like it even when I lived on the slopes of Hualaly. When the men are out hunting I know not where, or at night, when storms sweep down the longs peak, and the air is full of stinging, tempest-driven snow, and there is barely a probability of any one coming, or of my communication with the world at all. Then the stupendous mountain ranges which lie between us and the plains grow in height till they become impassable barriers, and the bridgeless rivers grow in depth, and I wonder if all my life is to be spent here in washing and sweeping and baking. Today has been one of manual labor. We did not breakfast till 9.30, then the men went out, and I never sat down till two. I cleaned the living-room and the kitchen, swept a path through the rubbish in the passage-room, washed up, made and baked a batch of rolls and four pounds of sweet biscuits, cleaned some tins and pans, washed some clothes, and gave things generally a redding up. There is a little thick butter-milk, fully six weeks old, at the bottom of a churn, which I use for raising the rolls. But Mr. Cavern, who makes lovely bread, put some flour and water to turn sour near the stove, and this succeeds admirably. I also made an unsatisfactory investigation into the state of my apparel. I came to Colorado now, nearly three months ago, with a small carpet-bag containing clothes, none of them new, and these, by legitimate wear, the depredations of caps and the necessity of tearing some of them up for dishcloths are reduced to a single change. I have a solitary pocket handkerchief and one pair of stockings, such a mass of darns that hardly a trace of the original wool remains. Owing to my inability to get money in Denver, I am almost without shoes, having nothing but a pair of slippers and some arctics. For outer garments, well, I have a trained black silk dress, with a black silk polonaise, and nothing else but my old flannel writing suit, which is quite threadbare, and requires such frequent mending that I am sometimes obliged to dress for supper, and patch and darn it during the evening. You will laugh, but it is singular that one can face the bitter winds with a mercury at zero, and below it, in exactly the same clothing which I wore in the tropics. It is only the extreme dryness of the air which renders it possible to live in such clothing. We have arranged the work better. Mr. Buchan was doing too much and it was hard for him, as he is very delicate. You will wonder how three people here in the wilderness can have much to do. There are the horses which we keep in the corral, to feed on sheep-oats and take to water twice a day, the fowls and dogs to feed, the cow to milk, the bread to make, and to keep a general knowledge of the whereabouts of the stock in the event of a severe snowstorm coming on. Then there is all the wood to cut, and there is no woodpile, and we burn a great deal, and besides the cooking, washing, and mending, which each one does, the men must hunt and fish for their living. Then two sick cows have had to be attended to. We were with one when it died yesterday. It suffered terribly, and looked at us with the pathetically pleading eyes of a creature made subject to vanity. The disposal of its carcass was a difficulty. The wagon horses were in Denver, and when we tried to get the others to pull the dead beast away, they only kicked and plunged, so we managed to get it outside the shed, and according to Mr. Cavern's prediction, a pack of wolves came down, and before daylight nothing was left but the bones. They were so close to the cabin that their noise was most disturbing, and on looking out several times I could see them all in a heap wrangling and tumbling over each other. They are much larger than the prairie wolf, but equally cowardly, I believe. This morning was black with clouds, and a snowstorm was threatened, and about seven hundred cattle and a number of horses came in long files from the valleys and canyons where they mirrored, their instinct teaching them to seek the open and the protection of man. I was alone in the cabin this afternoon when Mr. Nuget, whom we believed to be on the snowy range, walked in very pale and haggard licking and coughing severely. He offered to show me the trail up one of the grandest of the canyons, and I could not refuse to go. The Fall River has had its source completely altered by the operations of the beavers. Their engineering skill is wonderful. In one place they have made a lake by damming up the stream, and another their works have created an island, and they have made several falls. Their storehouses, of course, are carefully concealed. By this time they are about full for the winter. We saw quantities of young cottonwood and aspen trees, with stems about as thick as my arm, lying where these industrious creatures have failed them, ready for their use. They always work at night, and in concert. Their long sharp teeth are used for gnawing down the trees, but their mason work is done entirely with their flat, trowel-like tails. In its natural state the fur is very durable, and is as full of long black hairs as that of the sable, but as sold all these hairs have been plucked out of it. The canyon was glorious. Ah, glorious beyond any other, but it was a dismal and depressing ride. The dead past buried its dead. Not an illusion was made to the conversation previously. Jim's manner was courteous, but freezing, and when I left home on my return he said he hardly thought he should be back from the snowy range before I left. Essentially an actor, was he, I wonder, posing on the previous day in the attitude of desperate remorse, to impose on my credulity or frighten me? Or was it a genuine and unpremeditated outburst of passionate regret for the life which he had thrown away? I cannot tell, but I think it was the last. As I cautiously rode back the sunset glories were reddening the mountaintops and the park lay in violet gloom. It was wonderfully magnificent, but oh, so solemn, so lonely. I rode a very large, well bred mare with three shoes loose and one off, and she fell with me twice and was very clumsy in crossing the Thompson, which was partly ice and partly a deep ford. But when we reached comparatively level grassy ground I had a gallop of nearly two miles which I enjoyed thoroughly, her great swinging stride, being so easy and exhilarating after Bertie's short action. Friday. This is a piteous day, quite black, freezing hard, and with a fierce northeast wind. The absence of sunshine here, where it is nearly perpetual, has a very depressing effect, and all the scenery appears in its grimness of black and gray. We have lost three horses, including Bertie, and have nothing to entice them with, and not an animal to go and drive them in with. I put my great mare in the corral myself, and Mr. Cavern put his in afterwards and secured the bars, but the wolves were holding a carnival again last night, and we think that the horses were scared and stampeded, as otherwise they would not have leaped the fence. The men are losing their whole day in looking for them. On their return they said that they had seen Mr. Nugent returning to his cabin by the other side and the lower fort of the Thompson, and that he had an awfully ugly fit on him, so that they were glad that he did not come near us. The evening is setting and sublime in its blackness. Late in the afternoon I called a horse which was snuffing at the sheaf-oats, and had a splendid gallop on the Longmount Trail, with the two great hunting dogs. In returning, in the grimness of the coming storm, I had that view of the park which I saw first in the glories of an autumn sunset. Life was all dead. The dragonflies no longer darted in the sunshine. The cottonwoods had shed their last amber leaves. The crimson trailers of the wild vines were bare. The stream itself had ceased its tinkle and was numb in the fetters of ice. A few withered flower stalks only told of the brief, bright glory of the summer. The park never had looked so utterly walled in. It was fearful in its loneliness. The ghastliest of white peaks lay sharply outlined against the black snow-clouds. The bright river was ice-bound. The pines were all black. The world was absolutely shut out. How can you expect me to write letters from such a place? From a life in which nothing happens. It really is strange that neither Evans nor Edwards come back. The young men are grumbling, for they were asked to stay here for five days, and they have been here five weeks, and they are anxious to be away, camping out for the hunting, on which they depend. There are two calves dying, and we don't know what to do for them, and if a very severe snowstorm comes on, we can't bring in and feed eight hundred head of cattle. Saturday The snow began to fall early this morning, and as it is unaccompanied by wind, we have the novel spectacle of a smooth, white world. Still it does not look like anything serious. We have been gradually growing later at night and later in the morning. Today we did not breakfast till ten. We have been becoming so disgusted with the pickled pork that we were glad to find it just at an end yesterday, even though we were left without meat for which in this climate the system craves. You can fancy my surprise on going into the kitchen to find a dish of smoking steaks of innocent on the table. We ate like famished people and enjoyed our meal thoroughly. Just before I came the young men had shot an elk, which they intended to sell in Denver, and the grand carcass with great branching antlers hung outside the shed. Often while vainly trying to swallow some pickled pork I had looked across to the tantalizing animal that it was not to be thought of. However, this morning, as the young men felt the pinch of hunger even more than I did, and the prospects of packing it to Denver became worse, they decided on cutting into one side, so we shall luxuriate in venison while at last. We think that Edwards will surely be up tonight, but unless he brings supplies our case is looking serious. The flour is running low, there is only coffee for one week, and I have only a scanty three ounces of tea left. The baking powder is nearly at an end. We have agreed to economize by breakfasting very late, and having two meals a day instead of three. The young men went out hunting as usual, and I went out and found birdie, and on her brought in four other horses. But the snow balled so badly that I went out and walked across the river on a very passable ice bridge, and got some new views of the unique grandeur of this place. Our evenings are social and pleasant. We finish supper about eight, and make up a huge fire. The men smoke while I write to you, then we draw near the fire, and I take my endless mending, and we talk, or read aloud. Both are very intelligent, and Mr. Buchan has very extended information, and a good deal of insight into character. Of course, our circumstances, the likelihood of release, the prospects of snow blocking us in, and of our supplies holding out, the sick calves, Jim's mood, the possible intentions of a man whose footprints we have found and traced for three miles, are all topics that often recur, and few of which can be worn threadbare. End of Letter 14 Letter 15 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. Bird Letter 15 Estes Park Sunday A trapper passing last night brought us the news that Mr. Nugent is ill, so after washing up the things after our late breakfast, I rode to his cabin, but I met him in the gulch, coming down to see us. He said he had caught cold on the range, and was suffering from an old arrow wound in the lung. We had a long conversation, without adverting to the former one, and he told me some of the present circumstances of his ruined life. It is piteous that a man like him, in the prime of life, should be destitute of home and love, and live a life of darkness in a den with no companions but guilty memories, and a dog, which many people think is the nobler animal of the two. I urged him to give up the whiskey, which at present is his ruin, and his answer had the ring of a sad truth in it. I cannot. It binds me hand and foot. I cannot give up the only pleasure I have. His ideas of right are the queerest possible. He says that he believes in God, but what he knows or believes of God's law I know not. To resent insult with your revolver, to revenge yourself on those who have injured you, to be true to a comrade and share your last crust with him, to be chivalrous to good women, to be generous and hospitable, and at the last to die game. These are the articles of his creed, and I suppose they are received by men of his stamp. He hates Evans with a bitter hatred, and Evans returns it, having undergone much provocation from Jim in his moods of lawlessness and violence, and being not a little envious of the fascination which his manners and conversation have for the strangers who come up here. On returning down the gulch the view is grander than I have ever seen it, the gulch in dark shadow, the part below lying in intense sunlight, with all the majestic canyons which sweep down upon it in depths of infinite blue gloom, and above the pearly peaks dazzling in purity and glorious in form, cleft the turquoise blue of the sky. How shall I ever leave this land which is very far off? How can I ever leave it? Is the real question. We are going on the principle, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die, and the stores are melting away. The two meals are not an economical plan, for we are so much more hungry that we eat more than when we had three. We had a good deal of sacred music today, to make it as like Sunday as possible. The faint melancholy of this winter loneliness is very fascinating. How glorious the amber fires of the winter dawns are, and how gloriously tonight the crimson clouds descended just to the mountaintops and were reflected on the pure surface of the snow. The door of this room looks due north, and as I write, the pole star blazes, and a cold crescent moon hangs over the gasliness of Longs Peak. Estes Park, Colorado, November. We have lost count of time and can only agree on the fact that the day is somewhere near the end of November. Our life has settled down into serenity, and our singular and enforced partnership is very pleasant. We might be three men living together, but for the unvarying courtesy and consideration which they show to me. Our work goes on like clockwork. The only difficulty which ever arises is that the men do not like me to do anything that they think hard or unsuitable, such as saddling a horse or bringing in water. The days go very fast. It was three-thirty today before I knew that it was one. It is a calm life without worries. The men are so easy to live with. They never fuss or grumble or sigh or make a trouble of anything. It would amuse you to come into our wretched little kitchen before our disgracefully late breakfast and find Mr. Cavern busy at the stove frying venison, myself washing the supper-dishes, and Mr. Buchan drying them, or both the men busy at the stove while I sweep the floor. Our food is a great object of interest to us, and we are ravenously hungry now that we have only two meals a day. About sundown each goes forth to his chores, Mr. K. to chop wood, Mr. B. to haul water, I to wash the milk-pans and water the horses. On Saturday the men shot a deer, and on going for it to-day they fell nothing but the hind legs, and following a track which they expected would lead them to a beast's hole. They came quite carelessly upon a large mountain lion, which, however, took itself out of their reach before they were sufficiently recovered from their surprise to fire at it. These lions, which are really a species of puma, are blood thirsty as well as cowardly. Lately one got into a sheepfold in the canyon of the St. Vrain, and killed thirty sheep, sucking the blood from their throats. November This has been a day of minor events, as well as a busy one. I was so busy that I never sat down from ten-thirty till one-thirty. I had washed my one change of raiment, and though I never ironed my clothes, I liked to bleach them till they are as white as snow, and they were whitening on the line when some furious gust came down from Long's Peak, against which I could not stand, and when I did get out all my clothes were blown into strips from an inch to four inches in width, literally destroyed. One learns how very little is necessary, either for comfort or happiness. I made a four-pound spice ginger-cake, baked some bread, mended my writing-dress, cleaned up generally, wrote some letters with the hope that some day they might be posted, and took a magnificent walk. Reached the cabin again in the melancholy glory, which now immediately precedes the darkness. We were all busy getting our supper ready when the dogs began to bark furiously, and we heard the noise of horses. Evans at last, we exclaimed. But we were wrong. Mr. Cabin went out, and returned, saying that it was a young man who had come up with Evans' wagon and team, and that the wagon had gone over a gulch seven miles from here. Mr. Cabin looked very grave. It's another mouth to feed, he said. They asked no questions and brought the lad in. A slanky, assured fellow of twenty, who, having fallen into delicate health at a theological college, had been sent up here by Evans to work for his board. The men were too courteous to ask him what he was doing up here, but I boldly asked him where he lived, and to our dismay he replied, I've come to live here. We discussed the food-question gravely, as it presented a real difficulty. We put him into a bed-closet opening from the kitchen, and decided to see what he was fit for before giving him work. We were very much amazed in truth at his coming here. It is evidently a shallow, arrogant youth. We have decided that today is November twenty-sixth. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, and we are planning a feast, though Mr. K. said to me again this morning, with a dullful face. You see there's another mouth to feed. This mouth has come up to try the panacea of manual labor. But he is town-bred, and I see that he will do nothing. He is writing poetry, and while I was busy today, began to read it aloud to me, asking for my criticism. He is just at the age when everything literary has a fascination, and every literary person is a hero, especially Dr. Holland. Last night was fearful from the lifting of the cabin and the breaking of the mud from the roof. We sat with fine gravel driving in our faces, and this morning I carried four shovelfuls of mud out of my room. After breakfast Mr. Caven, Mr. Lyman, and I, with the two wagon horses, rode the seven miles to the scene of yesterday's disaster in a perfect gale of wind. I felt like a servant going out for a day's pleasuring, hurrying through my dishes and leaving my room in disorder. The wagon lay halfway down the side of a ravine, kept from the destruction by having caught on some trees. It was too cold to hang out while the men halted up and fixed it, so I went slowly back, encountering Mr. Nugent in a most bitter mood, almost in an ugly fit, hating everybody and contrasting his own generosity and reckless kindness with the selfishness and carefully weighed kindness of others. People do give him credit for having as kind a heart as ever beat. Lately a child in the other cabin was taken ill, and though there were idle men on horses at hand, it was only the Desperado, who rode sixty miles in the shortest time ever made, to bring the doctor. While we were talking, he was sitting on a stone outside his den, mending a saddle, shins, bones, and skulls lying about him. Ring, watching him with jealous and idolatrous affection, the wind shifting his thin curls from as grand a head as was ever molded, a ruin of a man. Yet the sun which shines on the evil and the good was lighting up the gold of his hair. May our Father which is in heaven yet show mercy to his outcast child. Mr. Cavern soon overtook me, and we had an exciting race of two miles, getting home just before the wind fell, and the snow began. Thanksgiving Day The thing dreaded has come at last, a snowstorm, with a northeast wind. It ceased about midnight, but not till it had covered my bed. Then the mercury fell below zero, and everything froze. I melted a tin of water for washing by the fire, that it was hard frozen before I could use it. My hair, which was thoroughly wet, with the thawed snow of yesterday, is hard frozen in flats. The milk and treacle are like rock, the eggs have to be kept on the coolest part of the stove to keep them fluid. Two calves in the shed were frozen to death. Half-hour floor is deep in snow, and it is so cold that we cannot open the door to shovel it out. The snow began again at eight this morning, very fine and hard. It blows in through the chinks and dusts this letter while I write. Mr. Cavern keeps my ink bottle close to the fire, and hands it to me every time that I need to dip my pen. We have a huge fire, but cannot raise the temperature above twenty degrees. Ever since I returned, the lake has been hard enough to bear a wagon, but today it is difficult to keep the water-hole open by the constant use of the axe. The snow may either melt or block us in. Our only anxiety is about the supplies. We have tea and coffee enough to last us over tomorrow. The sugar is just done, and the flour is getting low. It is really serious that we have another mouth to feed, and the newcomer is a ravenous creature, eating more than the three of us. It dismays me to see his hungry eyes gauging the supply at breakfast, and to see the loaf disappear. He told me this morning that he could eat the whole of what was on the table. He is mad after food, and I can see that Mr. Cay is starving himself to make it hold out. Mr. Buchan is very far from well, and dreads the prospect of half-rations. All this sounds laughable, but we shall not laugh if we have to look hunger in the face. Now in the evening the snow-clouds, which have blotted out all things, are lifting, and the winter scene is wonderful. The mercury is five degrees below zero, and the aurora is glorious. In my unchinked room the mercury is one degrees below zero. Mr. Buchan can hardly get his breath. The dryness is intense. We spent the afternoon cooking the Thanksgiving dinner. I made a wonderful pudding for which I had saved eggs and cream for days, and dried and stone cherries supplied the place of currents. I made a bowl of custard for sauce, which the men said was splendid. Also a rolled pudding with molasses. And we had venison steak and potatoes. But for tea we were obliged to use the tea leaves of the morning again. I should think that few people in America have enjoyed their Thanksgiving dinner more. We had urged Mr. Nugent to join us, but he refused, almost savagely, which we regretted. My four-pound cake made yesterday is all gone. This wretched boy confesses that he was so hungry in the night that he got up and ate nearly half of it. He is trying to conjure me into making another. November 29th. Before the boy came I had mistaken some faded cayenne pepper for ginger and had made a cake with it. Last evening I put half of it into the cupboard and left the door open. During the night we heard a commotion in the kitchen and much choking, coughing, and groaning. And at breakfast the boy was unable to swallow food with his usual ravenousness. After breakfast he came to me whimpering and asking for something soothing for his throat, admitting that he had seen the gingerbread, and felt so starved in the night that he got up to eat it. I tried to make him feel that it was real mean to eat so much and be so useless, and he said he would do anything to help me, but the men were so down on him. I never saw men so patient with the lad before. He is a most vexing addition to our party, yet one cannot help laughing at him. He is not honorable, though. I dare not leave this letter lying on the table, as he would read it. He writes for two western periodicals, at least he says so, and he shows us the long pieces of his published poetry. In one there are twenty lines copied, as Mr. Cavern has shown me, without alteration from Paradise Lost. In another there are two stanzas from Resignation, with only the alteration of Stray for Dead. And he has passed the whole of Bonner's meeting-place off as his own. Again he lent me an essay by himself, called The Function of the Novelist, which is nothing but a mosaic of unacknowledged quotations. The men tell me that he has bragged to them, that on his way here he took shelter in Mr. Nugent's cabin, found out where he hides his key, opened his box, and read his letters and manuscripts. He is a perfect plague with his ignorance and self-sufficiency. The first day after he came while I was washing up the breakfast things, he told me that he intended to do all the dirty work, so I left the knives and forks in the tub, and asked him to wipe and lay them aside. Two hours afterwards I found them untouched. Again the men went out hunting, and he said he would chop the wood for several days' use, and after a few strokes, which were only successful in chipping off some shavings, he came in and strummed on the harmonium, leaving me without any wood with which to make the fire for supper. He talked about his skill with the lasso, but could not even catch one of our quietest horses. Worse than all, he does not know one cow from another. Two days ago he lost our Milch-cow in driving her in to be milked, and Mr. Caven lost hours of valuable time in hunting for her without success. Today he told us triumphantly that he had found her, and he was sent out to milk her. After two hours he returned with a rueful face, and a few drops of whitish fluid in the milk-pill, saying that that was all he could get. On Mr. Caven going out, he found, instead of our Calico-cow, a brindled one that had been dry since the spring. Our cow has gone off to the wild cattle, and we are looking very grim at Lyman, who says that he expected he should live on milk. I told him to fill up the four-gallon cattle, and an hour afterwards found it red-hot on the stove. Nothing can be kept from him unless it is hidden in my room. He has eaten two pounds of dried cherries from the shelf, half of my second four-pound spice loaf before it was cold, licked up my custard sauce in the night, and privately devoured the pudding which was to be for our supper. He confesses it all, and says, I suppose you think me a cure. Mr. Caven says that the first thing he said to him this morning was, will Miss B make us a nice pudding today? This is all harmless, but the plagiarism and want of honour are disgusting, and quite out of keeping with his profession of being a theological student. This life is in some respects like being on board ship. There are no males, and one knows nothing beyond one's little world, a very little one in this case. We find each other true, and have learnt to esteem and trust each other. I should, for instance, go out of this room leaving this book open on the table, knowing that the men would not read my letter. They are discreet, reticent, observant, and on many subjects well informed. But they are of a type which has no anti-type at home. All women work in this region, so there is no fuss about my working, or saying, oh, you mustn't do that, or oh, let me do that. November 30th. We sat up till eleven last night, so confident where we that Edwards would leave Denver the day after Thanksgiving and get up here. This morning we came to the resolution that we must break up. Tea, coffee, and sugar are done. The venison is turning sour, and the men have only one month left for the hunting on which their winter living depends. I cannot leave the territory till I get money, but I can go to Longmount for the mail, and hear whether the panic is abating. Yesterday I was alone all day, and after riding to the base of Longspeak made two roly-poly puddings for supper, having nothing else. The men, however, came back perfectly loaded with trout, and we had a feast. Epicures at home would have envied us. Mr. Cavern kept the frying pan with boiling butter on the stove. Butter enough thoroughly to cover the trout, rolled them in coarse cornmeal, plunged them into the butter, turned them once, and took them out, thoroughly done, fizzing and lemon-colored. For once young Lyman was satisfied, for the dish was replenished as often as it was emptied. They caught forty pounds, and have packed them in ice until they can be sent to Denver for sale. The winter fishing is very rich. In the hardest frost, men who fish not for sport but gain take their axes and camping blankets, and go up to the hard frozen waters, which lie in fifty places round the park, and choosing a likely spot, a little sheltered from the wind, hack a hole in the ice, and fastening a footlink to a cottonwood tree, bait the hook with maggots, or bits of easily-gotten fresh meat. Often the trout are caught as fast as the hook can be baited, and looking through the ice hole in the track of a sunbeam, you see a mass of tails, silver fins, bright eyes, and crimson spots, a perfect shoal of fish, and truly beautiful the crimson-spotted creature's look, lying still and dead on the blue ice under the sunshine. Sometimes two men bring home sixty pounds of trout as the result of one day's winter fishing. It is a cold and silent sport, however. How a cook at home would despise our scanty appliances, with which we turn out luxuries. We have only a cooking-stove, which requires incessant feeding with wood, a kettle, a frying pan, a six-gallon brass pan, and a bottle for a rolling-pin. The cold has been very severe, but I do not suffer from it even in my insufficient clothing. I take a piece of granite made very hot to bed, draw the blankets over my head, and sleep eight hours, though the snow often covers me. One day of snow, mist, and darkness was rather depressing, and yesterday a hurricane began about five in the morning, and the whole park was one swirl of drifting snow, like stinking wood smoke. My bed and room were white, and the frost was so intense that water brought in a kettle hot from the fire, froze as I poured it into the basin. Then the snow ceased, and a fierce wind blew most of it out of the park, lifting it from the mountains in such clouds as to make Long's peak look like a smoking volcano. Today the sky has resumed its delicious blue, and the park its unrivaled beauty. I have cleaned all the windows, which ever since I have been here I supposed were of discolored glass, so opaque and dirty they were, and when the men came home from fishing they found a cheerful new world. We had a great deal of sacred music and singing on Sunday. Mr. Buchan asked me if I knew a tune called America, and began the grand roll of our national anthem to the words, my country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty. December 1st. I was to have started for canyon today, but was awoke by snow as stinging as pinpoints beating on my hand. We all got up early, but it did not improve until nearly noon. In the afternoon Lyman and I rode to Mr. Nugent's cabin. I wanted him to read and correct my letter to you, giving the account of our ascent of Longs Peak, but he said he could not, and insisted on our going in for which young Lyman was more anxious than I was, as Mr. Cavern had seen Jim in the morning, and departed from his usual reticence so far as to say, There's something wrong with that man. He'll either shoot himself or somebody else. However the ugly fit had passed off, and he was so very pleasant and courteous that we remained the whole afternoon. Lyman's one thought was that he could make capital out of the interview, and write an account of the celebrated desperado for a western paper. The interior of the den was frightful, yet among his black and hideous surroundings the grace of his manner and the genius of his conversation were only more apparent. I read my letter aloud, or rather the ascent of Longs Peak which I have written for our west, and was sincerely interested with the taste and acumen of his criticisms on the style. He is a true child of nature, his eye brightened, and his whole face became radiant, and at last tears rolled down his cheek when I read the account of the glory of the sunrise. Then he read us a very abled paper on spiritualism which he was writing. The den was dense with smoke, and very dark, littered with hay, old blankets, skins, bones, tins, logs, powder flasks, magazines, old books, old moccasins, horseshoes, and relics of all kinds. He had no better seat to offer me than a log, but offered it with a graceful unconsciousness that it was anything less luxurious than an easy chair. Two valuable rifles and a sharps revolver hung on the wall, and the sash and badge of a scout. I could not help looking at Jim as he stood talking to me. He goes mad with drink at times, swears fearfully, has an ungovernable temper. He has formally led a desperate life, and is at times even now undoubtedly a ruffian. There is hardly a fireside in Colorado where fearful stories of him as an Indian fighter are not told. Mothers frighten their naughty children by telling them that Mountain Jim will get them, and doubtless his faults are glaring, but he is undoubtedly fascinating and enjoys a popularity or notoriety which no other person has. He offered to be my guide to the plains when I go away. Lyman asked me if I should not be afraid of being murdered, but one could not be safer than with him, I have often been told. The cold was truly awful. I had called a chill in the morning from putting on my clothes before they were dry, and the warmth of the smoky dim was most agreeable. But we had a fearful ride back in the dusk, a gale nearly blowing us off our horses, driving snow nearly blinding us, and the mercury below zero. I felt as if I were going to be laid up with a severe cold, but the men suggested a trapper's remedy, a tumbler of hot water with a pinch of cayenne pepper in it, which proved a very rapid cure. They kindly say that if the snow detains me here, they also will remain. They tell me that they were horrified when I arrived, as they thought that they could not make me comfortable, and that I had never been used to doing anything for myself, and then we complimented each other all round. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I set off for a ride of one hundred miles, and my next letter will be my last from the Rocky Mountains, I-L-B. End of letter 15. Letter 16 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. Bird. Letter 16. Dr. Hughes's Lower Canyon, Colorado, December 4. Once again here, in refined and cultured society, with harmonious voices about me, and dear sweet loving children, whose winning ways make this cabin a true English home. England, with all thy faults, I love thee still. I can truly say, where ere I roam, whatever rounds I see, my heart, untraveled, fondly turns to thee. If it swerved a little in the sandwich islands, it is true to the pole now. Surely one advantage of traveling is that, while it removes much prejudice against foreigners and their customs, it intensifies tenfold one's appreciation of the good at home, and above all of the quietness and purity of English domestic life. These reflections are forced upon me by the sweet child voices about me, and by the exquisite consideration and tenderness which are the atmosphere, some would call it the hot-house atmosphere, of this house. But with the bare hard life and the bare, bleak mountains around, who could find fault with even a hot-house atmosphere, if it can nourish such a flower of paradise as sacred human love. The mercury is eleven degrees below zero, and I have to keep my ink on the stove to prevent it from freezing. The cold is intense, a clear, brilliant, stimulating cold, so dry that even in my threadbare flannel writing dress I do not suffer from it. I must now take up my narrative of the nothings which have all the interest of somethings to me. We all got up before day break on Tuesday, and breakfasted at seven. I have not seen the dawn for some time, with its amber fires deepening into red, and the snow peaks fleshing one by one, and it seemed a new miracle. It was a west wind, and we all thought it promised well. I took only two pounds of luggage, some raisins, the mail bag, and an additional blanket under my saddle. I had not been up from the park at sunrise before, and it was quite glorious, the purple depths of McGinn's Gulch, from which at a height of nine thousand feet you looked down on the sunlit park, one thousand five hundred feet below, lying in a red haze, with its pearly needle-shaped peaks, framed by mountainsides dark with pines. My glorious, solitary, unique mountain home. The purple sun rose in front. Had I known what made it purple, I should certainly have gone no farther. Then clouds, the morning mist as I supposed, lifted themselves up, rose lighted, showing the sun's disc as purple as one of the jars in a chemist's window, and having permitted this glimpse of their king, came down again as a dense mist, the wind chopped round, and the mist began to freeze hard. Soon Bertie and myself were a mass of acicular crystals. It was a true easterly fog. I galloped on, hoping to get through it, unable to see a yard before me, but it thickened, and I was obliged to subside into a jog trot. As I rode on, about four miles from the cabin, a human figure, looking gigantic like the specter of the brocken, with long hair, white as snow, appeared close to me, and at the same moment there was the flash of a pistol close to my ear. And I recognized Mountain Jim, frozen from head to foot, looking a century old with his snowy hair. It was ugly altogether, certainly, a desperado's grim jest, and it was best to accept it as such, though I had just cause for displeasure. He stormed and scolded, dragged me off my pony, for my hands and feet were numb with cold, took the bridle, and went off at a rapid stride, so that I had to run to keep them in sight in the darkness, for we were off the road in a thicket of scrub, looking like white branch coral I knew not where. Then we came suddenly on his cabin, and dear old ring, white like all else, and the ruffian insisted on my going in, and he made a good fire, and heeded some coffee, raging all the time. He said everything against me going forward, except that it was dangerous. All he said came true, and here I am, safe. Your letters, however, outweighed everything but danger, and I decided on going on. When he said, I've seen many foolish people, but never one so foolish as you. You haven't a grain of sense, why I, an old mountaineer, wouldn't go down to the plains today. I told him he could not, though he would like it very much, for that he had turned his horses loose, on which he laughed heartily, and more heartily still at the stories I told him of young Lyman, so that I have still a doubt how much of the dark moods I have lately seen was assumed. He took me back to the track, and the interview which began with a pistol shot ended quite pleasantly. It was an eerie ride, one not to be forgotten, though there was no danger. I could not recognize any localities. Every tree was silvered, and the fir tree tufts of needles looked like white chrysanthemums. The snow lay a foot deep in the gulches, with its hard, smooth surface marked by the feet of innumerable birds and beasts. Ice bridges had formed across all the streams, and I crossed them without knowing when. Gulches looked fathomless abysses, with clouds boiling up out of them, and shaggy mountain summits have seen for a moment through the eddies as quickly vanished. Everything looked vast and indefinite. Then a huge creation, like one of the door's phantom illustrations, with much breathing of wings, came sailing towards me in a temporary opening in the mist. As with a strange rustle it passed close over my head. I saw, for the first time, the great mountain eagle carrying a good-sized beast in his talons. It was a noble vision. Then there were ten miles of metamorphist gulches, silent, awful, many ice bridges, then a frozen drizzle, and then the winds changed from the east to northeast. Bertie was covered with exquisite crystals, and her long mane and the long beard which covers her throat were pure white. I saw that I must give up crossing the mountains to this place by an unknown trail, and I struck the old trail to the Saint Frayne, which I had never traveled before, but which I knew to be more legible than the new one. The fog grew darker and thicker, the day colder and windier, the drifts deeper. But Bertie, whose four cunning feet had carried me six hundred miles, and who in all difficulties proves her value, never flinched or made a fault step, or gave me reason to be sorry that I had come on. I got down to Saint Frayne Canyon in good time, and stopped at a house thirteen miles from Longmount to get oats. I was white from head to foot, and my clothes were frozen stiff. The women gave me the usual invitation, put your feet in the oven, and I got my clothes thawed and dried, and a delicious meal consisting of a basin of cream and bread. They said it would be worse on the plains, for it was an easterly storm. But as I was so used to riding, I could get on, so we started at two-thirty. Not far off I met Edwards going up at last to Estes Park, and soon after the snowstorm began in earnest, or rather I entered the storm, which had been going on there for several hours. By that time I had reached the prairie only eight miles from Longmount, and pushed on. It was simply fearful. It was twilight from the thick snow, and I faced a furious east wind loaded with fine, hard-frozen crystals, which literally made my face bleed. I could only see a very short distance anywhere. The drifts were often two feet deep, and only now and then, through the blinding whirl, I caught a glimpse of snow, through which withered sunflowers did not protrude. And then I knew I was on the track. But reaching a wild place I lost it, and still cantored on, trusting to the pony's sagacity. It failed for once, for she took me on a lake, and we fell through the ice into the water, one hundred yards from land, and had a hard fight back again. It grew worse and worse. I had wrapped up my face, but the sharp, hard snow beat on my eyes, the only exposed part, bringing tears into them, which froze and closed up my eyelids at once. You cannot imagine what that was. I had to take off one glove to pick one eye open, for as to the other the storm beat so savagely against it that I left it frozen, and drew over it the double piece of flannel which protected my face. I could hardly keep the other open by picking the ice from it constantly with my numb fingers, in doing which I got the back of my hand slightly frostbitten. It was truly awful at the time. I often thought, suppose I am going south instead of east. Suppose birdie should fall. Suppose it should grow quite dark. I was mountaineering up to shake these fears off and keep up my spirits, but I knew how many had perished on the prairie in similar storms. I calculated that if I did not reach Long Mount in half an hour it would be quite dark, and that I should be so frozen or paralyzed with cold that I should fall off. Not a quarter of an hour after I had wondered how long I could hold on. I saw, to my surprise, close to me, half smothered in snow, the scattered houses and blessed lights of Long Mount, and welcome indeed its white dreary, lifeless, soundless road looked. When I reached the hotel I was so benumbed that I could not get off, and the worthy host lifted me off and carried me in. Not expecting any travelers they had no fire except in the bar room, so they took me to the stove in their own room, gave me a hot drink and plenty of blankets, and in half an hour I was all right and ready for a ferocious meal. If there's a traveler on the prairie tonight, God help him. The host had said to his wife, just before I came in. I found Evans there, storm-stayed, and that, to his great credit at the time, my money matters were all right. After the sound and refreshing sleep which one gets in this splendid climate, I was ready for an early start, but warned by yesterday's experience, waited till twelve to be sure of the weather. The air was intensely clear, and the mercury seventeen degrees below zero. The snow sparkled and snapped under one's feet. It was gloriously beautiful. In this climate, if you only go out for a short time you do not feel cold even without a hat, or any additional wrappings. I bought a cardigan for myself however, and some thick socks, got some stout snow shoes for birdies hind feet, had a pleasant talk with some English friends, did some commissions for the men in the park, and hung about waiting for a freight train to break the track. But eventually, in spirited by the good news from you, left Longmount alone, and for the last time. I little thought that miserable, broiling day on which I arrived at it with Dr. and Mrs. Hughes of the glories of which it was the gate, and of the good times I should have. Now I am at home in it. Everyone in it, and along the St. Frank Canyon, addresses me in a friendly way by name, and the newspapers with their intolerable personality, have made me and my writing exploits so notorious, that travelers speak courteously to me when they meet me on the prairie, doubtless wishing to see what sort of monster I am. I have met nothing but civility, both of manner and speech, except that distraught pistol shot. It looked icily beautiful, the snow so pure, and the sky such a bright sharp blue, the snow was so deep and level, that after a few miles I left the track, and steering for Storm Peak, rode sixteen miles over the pathless prairie without seeing man, bird, or beast. A solitude awful even in the bright sunshine. The cold, always great, became piteous. I increased the frostbite of yesterday by exposing my hand in mending the stirrup, and when the sun sank in indescribable beauty behind the mountains, and color rioted in the sky, I got off and walked the last four miles, and stolen here in the color twilight without anyone seeing me. The life of which I wrote before is scarcely less severe, though lighted only by a hope of change, and this weather brings out some special severities. The snow has to be in the living room, the children cannot go out, and good and delightful as they are, it is hard for them to be shut up all day with four adults. It is more of a trouble than you would think for a lady in precarious health that before each meal, eggs, butter, milk, preserves, and pickles have to be unfrozen. Unless they are kept on the stove, there is no part of the room in which they do not freeze. It is uninteresting down here in the foothills. I long for the rushing winds, the piled-up peaks, the great pines, the wild night noises, the poetry and the prose of the free, jolly life of my unrivaled Eyrie. I can hardly realize that the river which lies ice-bound outside this house is the same which flashes through Estes Park, and which I saw snow-born on Long's Peak. Yesterday morning the mercury had disappeared, so it was twenty degrees below zero at least. I lay awake from cold all night, but such is the wonderful effect of the climate, that when I got up at half-past five to awaken the household for my early start I felt quite refreshed. We breakfasted on Buffalo Beef, and I left at eight to ride forty-five miles before night. Dr. Hughes and a gentleman who was staying there, convoying me the first fifteen miles. I did like that ride, racing with the other riders, careering through the intoxicating air and that indescribable sunshine. The powdery snow spurned from the horse's feet like dust. I was soon warm. We stopped at a trapper's ranch to feed, and the old trapper amused me by seeming to think Estes Park almost inaccessible in winter. The distance was greater than I had been told, and he said that I could not get there before eleven at night, and not at all if there was much drift. I wanted the gentleman to go on with me as far as the devil's gate, but they could not because their horses were tired, and when the trapper heard that, he exclaimed indignantly, What? That woman going into the mountains alone? She'll lose the track or be frozen to death. But when I told him I had ridden the trail in the storm of Tuesday, and had ridden over six hundred miles alone in the mountains, he treated me with great respect as a fellow mountaineer, and gave me some matches, saying, You'll have to camp out anyhow. You'd better make a fire than be frozen to death. The idea of my spending the night in the forest alone, by a fire, struck me as most grotesque. We did not start again till one, and the two gentlemen rode the first two miles with me. On that track, the little Thompson, there a full stream, has to be crossed eighteen times, and they had been hauling wood across it, breaking it, and it had broken and re-frozen several times, making thick and thin places. Indeed, there were crossings which even I thought bad, where the ice led us through, and it was hard for the horses to struggle upon it again. And one of the gentlemen, who, though a most accomplished man, was not a horseman, was once or twice in the ludicrous position of hesitating on the bank with an anxious face, not daring to spur his horse upon the ice. After they left me I had eight more crossings, and then a ride of six miles, before I reached the old trail. But though there were several drifts up to the saddle, and no one had broken a track, Bertie showed such a pluck, that instead of spending the night by a campfire, or not getting until midnight, I reached Mr. Nugent's cabin, four miles from Estes Park, only an hour after dark. Very cold, and with the pony so tired that she could hardly put one foot before another. Indeed, I walked the last three miles. I saw light through the chinks, but hearing an earnest conversation within was just about to withdraw, when Ring barked, and on his master coming to the door, I found that the solitary man was talking to his dog. He was looking out for me and had some coffee ready, and a large fire, which was very pleasant, and I was very glad to get the latest news from the park. He said that Evans told him that it would be most difficult for any one of them to take me down to the plains, but that he would go, which is a great relief. According to the Scotch proverb, better a finger off than a wagon. And as I cannot live here, for you would not like the life or climate, the sooner I leave, the better. The solitary ride to Evans's was very eerie. It was very dark, and the noises were unintelligible. Young Lyman rushed out to take my horse, and the light and warmth within were delightful, but there was a stiffness about the new regime. Evans, though steeped in difficulties, was as hardy and generous as ever. But Edwards, who had assumed the management is prudent, if not parsimonious, thinks we wasted the supplies recklessly, and the limitations as to milk and so on are painfully apparent. A young ex-guardsman has come up with Evans, of whom the sanguine creature forms great expectations, to be disappointed, doubtless. In the afternoon of yesterday a gentleman came who I thought was another stranger, strikingly handsome, well-dressed, and barely forty. With sixteen shining gold curls falling down his collar, he walked in, and it was only after a careful second look that I recognized in our visitor the redoubtable desperado. Evans courteously pressed him to stay and dine with us, and not only did he show the most singular conversational dexterity in talking with a stranger, who was a very well-informed man, and had seen a great deal of the world, but though he lives and eats like a savage, his manners and way of eating were as refined as possible. I noticed that Evans is never quite himself or perfectly comfortable when he is there, and on the part of the other there is a sort of stiffly assumed cordiality, significant, I fear of lurking hatred on both sides. I was in the kitchen after dinner making rolled puddings. Young Lyman was eating up the relics as usual. Jim was singing one of Moore's melodies, the others being in the living room, when Mr. Cavern and Mr. Buchan came from up the creek to wish me could buy. They said it was not half so much like home now, and recalled the good time we had had for three weeks. Lyman having lost the cow, we have no more milk. No one makes bread. They dry the venison into chips, and getting the mills at all seems a work of toil and difficulty, instead of the pleasure it used to be to us. Evans, since tea, has told me all his troubles and worries. He is a kind, generous, whole-hearted, unsuspicious man, a worse enemy to himself, I believe, than to any other. But I feel, sadly, that the future of a man who has no stronger principles than he has must be at the best, very insecure.