Abroad At Home Part 33

Tumbleweed is a bushy plant which grows to a height of perhaps three feet, and has a ma.s.s of little twigs and branches which make its shape almost perfectly round. Fortunately for the amus.e.m.e.nt of mankind, it has a weak stalk, so that, when the plant dries, the wind breaks it off at the bottom, and then proceeds to roll it, over and over, across the land. I well remember the first tumbleweed we saw.

"What on earth is that thing?" cried my companion, suddenly, pointing out through the car window. I looked. Some distance away a strange, buff-colored shape was making a swift, uncanny progress toward the east.

It wasn't crawling; it wasn't running; but it was traveling fast, with a rolling, tossing, careening motion, like a barrel half full of whisky, rus.h.i.+ng down hill. Now it tilted one way, now another; now it shot swiftly into some slight depression in the plain, but only to come bounding lightly out again, with an air indescribably gay, abandoned and inane.

Soon we saw another and another; they became more and more common as we went along until presently they were rus.h.i.+ng everywhere, careering in their maudlin course across the prairie, and piled high against the fences along the railroad's right of way, like great concealing snowdrifts.

We fell in love with tumbleweed and never while it was in sight lost interest in its idiotic evolutions. Excepting only tobacco, it is the greatest weed that grows, and it has the advantage over tobacco that it does no man any harm, but serves only to excite his risibilities. It is the clown of vegetation, and it has the air, as it rolls along, of being conscious of its comicality, like the smart _caniche_, in the dog show, who goes and overturns the basket behind the trainer's back; or the circus clown who runs about with a rolling gait, tripping, turning double and triple somersaults, rising, running on, tripping, falling, and turning over and over again. Who shall say that tumbleweed is useless, since it contributes a rare note of drollery to the tragic desolation of the western plains?

As I have said, I am not certain that we saw the tumbleweed before we crossed the line from Kansas into Colorado, but there is one episode that I remember, and which I am certain occurred before we reached the boundary, for I recall the name of the town at which it happened.

It was a sad-looking little town, like all the rest--just a main street and a few stores and houses set down in the midst of the illimitable waste. Our train stopped there.

I saw a man across the aisle look out of the window, scowl, rise from his seat, throw up his arms, and exclaim, addressing no one in particular: "G.o.d! How can they stand living out here? I'd rather be dead!"

My companion and I had been speaking of the same thing, wondering how people could endure their lives in such a place.

"Come on," he said, rising. "This is the last stop before we get to Colorado. Let's get out and walk."

I followed him from the car and to the station platform.

Looking away from the station, we gazed upon a foreground the princ.i.p.al scenic grandeur of which was supplied by a hitching post. Beyond lay the inevitable main street and dismal buildings. One of them, as I recall it, was painted sky-blue, and bore the simple, unostentatious word, "Hotel."

My companion gazed upon the scene for a time. He looked melancholy.

Finally, without turning his head, he spoke.

"How would you like to get off and spend a week here, some day?" he asked me.

"You mean get off some day and spend a week," I corrected.

"No, I mean get off and spend a week some day."

I was still cogitating over that when the train started. We scrambled aboard and, resuming our seats in the observation car, looked back at the receding station. There, in strong black letters on a white sign, we saw, for the first time, the name of the town:

Monotony!

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE COAST

CHAPTER x.x.x

UNDER PIKE'S PEAK

What a curious thing it is, that mental process by which a first impression of a city is summed up. A railway station, a taxicab, swift glimpses through a dirty window of streets, buildings, people, blurred together, incoherently, like moving pictures out of focus; then a quick unconscious adding of infinitesimal details and the total: "I like this city," or: "I do not like it."

It was late afternoon when the train upon which we had come from eastern Kansas stopped at the Denver station--a substantial if not distinguished structure, neither new nor very old, but of that architectural period in which it was considered that a roof was hardly more essential to a station than a tower.

Pa.s.sing through the building and emerging upon the taxi stand, we found ourselves confronted by an elaborate triple gateway of bronze, somewhat reminiscent of certain city gates of Paris, at which the _octroi_ waits with the inhospitable purpose of collecting taxes. However, Denver has no _octroi_, nor is the Denver gate a barrier. Indeed, it is not even a gate, having no doors, but is intended merely as a sort of formal portal to the city--a city proud of its climate, of the mountain scenery, and of its reputation for thoroughgoing hospitality. Over the large central arch of this bronze monstrosity the beribboned delegate (arriving to attend one of the many conventions always being held in Denver) may read, in large letters, the word "Welcome"; and when, later, departing, he approaches the arch from the city gate, he finds Denver giving him G.o.dspeed with the word "Mizpah."

Pa.s.sing beneath the central arch, our taxi swept along a wide, straight street, paved with impeccably smooth asphalt, and walled in with buildings tall enough and solid enough to do credit to the business and shopping district of any large American city.

All this surprised me. Perhaps because of the unfavorable first impression I had received in Kansas City, I had expected Denver, being farther west, to have a less finished look. Furthermore, I had been reading Richard Harding Davis's book, "The West Through a Car Window,"

which, though it told me that Denver is "a smaller New York in an encircling range of white-capped mountains," added that Denver has "the worst streets in the country." Denver is still by way of being a miniature New York, with its considerable number of eastern families, and its little replica of Broadway cafe life, as well; but the Denver streets are no longer ill paved. Upon the contrary, they are among the best paved streets possessed by any city I have visited. That caused me to look at the copyright notice in Mr. Davis's book, whereupon I discovered, to my surprise, that twenty-two years (and Heaven only knows how many steam rollers) had pa.s.sed over Denver since the book was written. Yet, barring such improvements, the picture is quite accurate to-day.

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel my companion and I saw several old fellows, sitting about, looking neither prosperous nor busy, but always talking mines. A kind word, or even a pleasant glance, is enough to set them off.]

Another feeling of my first ten minutes in Denver was one of wonder at the city's flatness. That part of it through which we pa.s.sed on the way to the Brown Palace Hotel was as flat as Chicago, whereas I had always thought of Denver as being in the mountains. However, if flat, the streets looked attractive, and I arrived at the proudly named caravansary with the feeling that Denver was a fine young city.

Meeting cities, one after another, as I met them on this journey, is like being introduced, at a reception, to a line of strangers. A glance, a handshake, a word or two, and you have formed an impression of an individuality. But there is this difference: the individual at the reception is "fixed up" for the occasion, whereas the city has but one exterior to show to every one.

That the exterior shown by Denver is pleasing has been, until recently, a matter more or less of accident. The city was laid out by pioneers and mining men, who showed their love of liberality in making the streets wide. There is nothing close about Denver. She has the open-handed, easy affluence of a mining city. She spends money freely on good pavements and good buildings. Thus, without any brilliant comprehensive plan she has yet grown from a rough mining camp into a delightful city, all in the s.p.a.ce of fifty years.

A little more than a hundred years ago Captain Zebulon Pike crossed the plains and visited the territory which is now Colorado, though it was then a part of the vast country of Louisiana. Long, Fremont, Kit Carson, and the other early pioneers followed, but it was not until 1858 that gold was found on the banks of Cherry Creek, above its juncture with the South Platte River, causing a camp to be located on the present site of Denver. The first camp was on the west side of Cherry Creek and was named Auraria, after a town in Georgia. On the east side there developed another camp, St. Charles by name, and these two camps remained, for some time, independent of each other. The discovery of gold in California brought a new influx of men to Colorado--though the part of Colorado in which Denver stands was then in the territory of Kansas, which extended to the Rockies. Many of the pioneers were men from eastern Kansas, and hence it happened that when the mining camps of Auraria and St. Charles were combined into one town, the town was named for General James W. Denver, then Governor of Kansas.

Kansas City and Denver are about of an age and are comparable in many ways. The former still remains a kind of capital to which naturally gravitate men who have made fortunes in southwestern oil and cattle, while the latter is a mining capital. Of her "hundred millionaires,"

most have been enriched by mines, and the story of her sudden fortunes and of her famous "characters" makes a long and racy chapter in American history, running the gamut from tragedy to farce. And, like Kansas City, Denver is particularly American. Practically all her millionaires, past and present, came of native stock, and almost all her wealth has been taken from ground in the State of Colorado.

J. M. Oskison, in his "Unconventional Portrait," published in "Collier's" a year or so ago, told a great deal about Denver in a few words:

Last October a frock-coated clergyman of the Episcopal Church stood up in one of the luxurious parlors of Denver's newest hotel and said: "I am an Arapahoe Indian; when I was a little boy my people used to hunt buffalo all over this country; we made our camps right on this place where Denver is now." There is not very much gray in that man's hair.

In the summer of 1867, when Vice-President Colfax came to Denver from Cheyenne, after a stage ride of twenty-two hours, he found it a hopeful city of 5,000. Denver had just learned that Cherry Creek sometimes carried a great deal of water down to the Platte River, and that it wasn't wise to build in its bed.

Irrigation has made a garden of the city and lands about. There are 240,000 people who make Denver their home to-day. The city under the shadow of the mountains is spread over an area of sixty square miles; a plat of redeemed desert with an a.s.sessed valuation of $135,000,000.

In 1870, three years after the visit of Colfax, Denver got its first railroad: a spur line from Cheyenne; in the 80's it got street cars; to-day it has the look of a city that is made--and well made. But, as I have said before, that has, hitherto, been largely a matter of good fortune. Denver's youth has saved her from the munic.i.p.al disease which threatens such older cities as St. Louis and St. Paul: hardening of the arteries of traffic. Also, nature has given her what may be termed a good "munic.i.p.al complexion," wherein she has been more fortunate than Kansas City, whose warts and wens have necessitated expensive operations by the city "beauty doctor."

Now, a city with the natural charm of Denver is, like a woman similarly endowed, in danger of becoming oversure. Either is likely to lie back and rest upon Nature's bounty. Yet, to Denver's eternal credit be it said, she has not fallen into the ways of indolent self-satisfaction.

Indeed, I know of no American city which has done, and is doing, more for herself. Consider these few random items taken from the credit side of her balance: She is one of the best lighted cities in the land. She has the commission form of government. (Also, as you will remember, she has woman suffrage, Colorado having been the first State to accept it.) Her Children's Court, presided over by Judge Ben B. Lindsey, is famous.

She has no bread line, and, as for crime, when I asked Police Inspector Leonard De Lue about it, he shook his head and said: "No; business is light. The fact is we ain't got no crime out here." Denver owns her own Auditorium, where free concerts are given by the city. Also, in one of her parks, she has a city race track, where sport is the only consideration, betting, even between horse owners, having been successfully eliminated. Furthermore, Denver has been one of the first American cities to begin work on a "civic center." Several blocks before the State Capitol have been cleared of buildings, and a plaza is being laid out there which will presently be a Tuileries Garden, in miniature, surrounded by fine public buildings, forming a suitable central feature for the admirable system of parks and boulevards which already exists.

Curiously enough, however, by far the smallest part of Denver's parks are within the confines of the city. About five years ago Mr. John Brisben Walker proposed that mountain parks be created. Denver seized upon the idea with characteristic energy, with the result that she now has mountain parks covering forty square miles in neighboring counties.

These parks have an area almost as great as that of the whole city, and are connected with the Denver boulevards by fine roads, so that some of the most spectacular motor trips in the country are within easy range of the "Queen City of the Plains."

But though the mountains give Denver her individuality, and though she has made the most of them, they have not proved an unmixed blessing. The riches which she has extracted from them, and the splendid setting that they give her, is the silver lining to her commercial cloud. The mountains directly west of Denver form a barrier which has forced the main lines of trancontinental travel to the north and south, leaving Denver in a backwater.

To overcome this handicap the late David Moffat, one of Denver's early millionaires, started in to build the Denver & Salt Lake Railroad, better known as the Moffat Road. This railway strikes almost due west from Denver and crosses the continental divide at an alt.i.tude of over two miles. While it is one of the most astonis.h.i.+ng pieces of railroad in the world, its windings and severe grades have made operation difficult and expensive, and the road has been built only as far as Craig, Colo., less than halfway to Salt Lake City. The great difficulty has always been the crossing of the divide. The city of Denver has now come forward with the Moffat tunnel project, and has extended her credit to the extent of three million dollars, for the purpose of helping the railroad company to build the tunnel. It will be more than six miles long, and will penetrate the Continental Divide at a point almost half a mile below that now reached by the road, saving twenty-four miles in distance and over two per cent. in grade. The tunnel is now under construction, and will, when completed, be the longest railroad tunnel in the Western Hemisphere. The railroad company stands one-third of the cost, while the city of Denver undertakes two-thirds. When completed, this route will be the shortest between Denver and Salt Lake by many miles.

Nor is Denver giving her entire attention to her railway line. The good-roads movement is strong throughout the State of Colorado. Last year two million dollars was expended under the direction of the State Highway Commission--a very large sum when it is considered that the total population of the State is not a great deal larger than that of the city of St. Louis.

The construction of roads in Colorado is carried on under a most advanced system. Of a thousand convicts a.s.signed to the State Penitentiary at Canon City, four hundred are employed upon road work. In traveling through the State I came upon several parties of these men, and had I not been informed of the fact, I should never have known that they were convicts. I met them in the mountains, where they live in camps many miles distant from the penitentiary. They seemed always to be working with a will, but as we pa.s.sed, they would look up and smile and wave their hands to us. They appeared healthy, happy, and--respectable.

They do not wear stripes, and their guards are unarmed, being selected, rather, as foremen with a knowledge of road building. When one considers the ghastly mine wars which have, at intervals, disgraced the State, it is comforting to reflect upon Colorado's enlightened methods of handling her prisons and her prisoners.

Denver, in her general architecture, is more attractive than certain important cities to the eastward of her. Her houses are, for the most part, built solidly of brick and stone, and more taste has been displayed in them, upon the whole, than has been shown in either St.