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Bunn rode next. His horse was in full and fine condition. It leaped, it bucked, it raced for the fence, it reared, it even sat down and started to roll backwards, a terrible thing to happen, and often bringing death to an incautious rider. But Bunn never lost his seat, nor did the horse stay long upon its haunches, for, stung by rawhide and spur, it sprang to its feet and tore across the meadow, actually leaping clean and sheer the impounding fence. And Bunn, vanquishing at last, walked his quiet horse peacefully up and dismounted.
The Thompson boys each covered themselves with glory. Dick’s first horse was tamed so quickly – a big, bright bay – that they brought him a second one to ride again – a long, lean, dun-colored, Roman-nosed cayuse, with scant mane and tail. A mean beast, the sort of a horse that other horses in the bunch scorn to keep company with and hate with natural good horse sense. He stood very quiet through bridling, hoodwinking and saddling. He had seen the others in the game. His mind was quite made up. And when Dick vaulted into the saddle, he at first stood stock still, and then, as I set my kodak, I could see nothing but one great cloud of dun-colored dust and Thompson’s head floating in the upper levels of the haze. The horse was whirling and bucking all at the same instant, a hump-buck, a flat buck, an iron-legged buck, a touch-ground-with-belly buck, and a swirling-whirl and tail-and-neck twist at one and the same moment. Enough to throw a tender seat a hundred feet and crack his bones like pipe stems. And then, like the flight of an arrow from a bow, that dun-colored devil bolted straight for the wickedest edge of the fence. I thought Dick would be killed certain, but there he sat and drew that horse down on its hams three feet from sure death. It was a long battle, vicious, mean, fierce, merciless – the beast was bleeding, welts stood out on flanks and shoulders, its dry, spare muscles trembled like leaves shaken by wind.
The boy hero of Aspen was hero still, and the dun horse walked quietly up to the judges’ horses and allowed himself to be unsaddled without as much as a flinch, and he, too, was drenching wet, as well as bloody.
I did not see the last rider, for my train was soon to leave, and I barely had time to get aboard. But I got some fine kodak photographs, and have promised to send a set to the old, gray-headed rancher who stood near me and who almost cried for joy to see how these men rode. “I’ve seven boys,” he said, “and every one of ’em’s a broncho buster; even the gals can bust a broncho, that they can.”
I have not learned who got the coveted prize belt, but I should divide it between Arizona Moore and Dandy Dick.
EIGHTEENTH LETTER
COLORADO AND DENVER
Denver, October 19th.
After leaving Glenwood Springs we wound up the gorge of the Grand River, the castellated, crenelated, serrated, scarped and wind-worn cliffs towering many thousand feet into the blue sky. The valley narrowed sensibly and the sheer heights imposed themselves more and more upon us as we approached the tunnel at the height of land 10,200 feet above the sea, and where part the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from those of the Pacific. On the Canadian Pacific Railway, the interoceanic divide between the waters of Hudson Bay and the Pacific is only some 5,300 feet above tide level, so now we were nearly a mile higher in the air. Yet the long journey of 2,000 miles from San Francisco, the crossing of the Sierra Nevada and Wasatch ranges, had brought us to this final ascent almost unperceived.
Traversing the divide and coming out from the long tunnel which bows above the continental height of land, we diverged from the main line and crept yet higher right up into Leadville, where the air was thin and keen and as chill as in December. Thence we descended through the wonderful cañon of the Platte River that has made this journey on the Denver and Rio Grande Railway famous the world round.
We came to Denver early in the morning; the metropolis of the middle West, the chief railroad center west of the Missouri, the mining center of all the Rocky Mountain mineral belt, and now claiming to be equally the center of the great and rapidly growing irrigated agricultural region of the inter and juxta mountain region of the continent. Essentially a business place is Denver. Its buildings are as elegant as those of New York City, many of them almost as pretentious as those of Chicago, as solid as those of Pittsburg, and as new as the fine blocks of Los Angeles. She is altogether a more modern city than San Francisco, is Denver. Her residences are also up to date, handsome, substantial. The homes of men who are making money. Her one hundred and eighty miles of electric tramways are good, though not quite as good as the two hundred miles of Los Angeles. Her schools are probably unexcelled in the Union. Denver is new, and in the clear, translucent atmosphere looks yet newer; she is neat, she is ambitious, and she is gathering to herself the commerce, the trade, the manufacturing pre-eminence, the mining supervision of all that vast section of our continent from Canada to Mexico, from the great plains to the snowy summits of the Cascades and Sierra Nevadas. All this is Denver, while at the same time she is the capital of Colorado, a State four times as big as West Virginia, though with only half the population. And Denver is so fast seated in the saddle of state prosperity that no section of Colorado can prosper, no interest can grow nor develop, neither the gold and silver mining with its yield of forty millions a year, nor the iron and coal fields – 30,000 square miles of coal fields – nor the agriculture and grazing interests, worth eighty millions a year (now exceeding the value of the gold and silver produced twice over), none of these can grow and gain, but they immediately and permanently pay tribute to Denver.
Yet this very up-to-dateness of Denver robs it of a certain charm. You might just as well be at home as be in Denver. The people look the same, they dress the same, they walk the same, they talk the same. Just a few more of them, that’s all.
There are none of the lovely lawns and gardens of Los Angeles and Tacoma in Denver, nor can there ever be. Roses do not bloom all the winter through, nor in Denver does the turf grow thick and velvety green as in Seattle, nor can they ever do so – only a few weakly roses in the summer-time and grass – only grass when you water each blade with a hose three times a day. And then, too, men do not go to Denver to make homes; they go there the rather to make fortunes, and, if successful, then to hurry away and live in a more congenial clime.
Denver is not laid out with the imposing regalness of Salt Lake City, nor can it ever possess the dignity of that place. It is just a big, hustling, commercial, manufacturing, mine-developing center, where the well man comes to work and toil with feverish energy in the thin air; and the sick man – the consumptive – comes to live a little while and die – “One Lungers” do not here hold fast to life as in the more tender climate of southern California – nor can they survive long in Denver’s harsh, keen air.
The loveliest, grandest part of Denver is that which it does not possess. It is the splendid panorama of the Rocky Mountain chain that stretches, a monstrous mass of snow-clad summits, along the western horizon, eighteen to thirty miles away. Across a flat and treeless plain you behold the long line of lesser summits, and then lifting behind them, towering skyward, the splendid procession of snow-clad giants, glittering and flashing in the translucent light of the full shining sun. The panorama is sublime, as fine as anything in Switzerland, and of a beauty worthy of a journey – a long journey – to behold. In Canada, the Rockies come so slowly upon you that they seem almost insignificant compared with their repute. But here, one realizes in fullest sense the dignity of this stupendous backbone of the continent. And the pellucid atmosphere of the mile-high altitude, gives renewed and re-enforced vision to the eye. The gigantic mountains stand forth with such distinctness that the old tale of the Englishman who set out to walk to them before breakfast – thinking them three instead of thirty miles away – is likely enough to have more than once occurred.
The great “Mountain Empire State” of Colorado is vastly rich in deposits of gold and silver and lead and antimony and copper and coal and iron, yet very few there are, or ever can be, who do or may amass fortunes therefrom. Her coal beds exceed in area the entire State of West Virginia nearly twice over, yet thousands of acres lie unworked and are now practically unworkable. Her oil fields are promising, a paraffine oil of high grade, yet no oil producer has made or can make any great stake out of them. Her agriculture and grazing interests already exceed the enormous values of her gold and silver, yet few farmers or cattle men make more than a living. Colorado is rich, fabulously rich, yet the wealth that is wrung from her rocks and her pastures and her tilled fields passes most of it into hands other than those who produce it.
The great railroad corporations get the first whack. It has cost enormously to build them; they are expensive to maintain; they are safe from competition by reason of the initial cost of their construction. They are entitled to consideration, and they demand it and enforce it to the limit. The freight rates are appalling, and so adjusted as to squeeze out of every natural product the cream of profit it may yield – sometimes only very thin skim milk is left. The passenger fares are high, usually four cents to ten cents per mile. The cost of living is onerous in Colorado; all freights brought there pay excessive tribute to the railways. So much for the general conditions. With mining it is yet more serious. The Rockefeller-Gugenheim Smelter combine now controls mercilessly all the smelting business of the State, and, as for that, of the mining country. And unless you have an ore that “will yield more than $20 per ton, you might as well not go into the mining business,” experienced mining men repeatedly observed to me.
Colorado boasts enormous agricultural and grazing wealth. She claims that the present values of her herds of cattle and horses, and flocks of sheep, of her orchards and irrigated crops already exceed that of her gold and silver and mineral production. This may be so, and yet after the cattle and sheep and horses are transported to distant markets and converted into cash, after her farmers have paid the enormous irrigation charges to the private corporations that control the water springs, the man on the soil makes little more than a bare living, the fat profits, if any there be, having passed into the capacious pockets of the water companies, of the transportation companies, of the great meat-packing and horse-buying companies. The farmers and grazers with whom I have talked tell me that if they come out even at the end of the year, with a small and moderate profit, they count themselves fortunate. Here and there, of course, a fortune may be amassed by an unusual piece of good luck by the man who raises cattle or fruit, or crops, but as a rule the undoubted profits of these industries are absorbed by the great corporate interests at whose mercy they lie.
Just what will be the outcome of these crushing industrial conditions it is difficult to forecast, but we already see the first expressions of popular dissatisfaction in the extensive labor strikes now prevailing in the Cripple Creek region, and threatening to spread to and include all of the mining camps and operations of the State and adjoining States. Corporate greed and unscrupulous selfishness arouse opposition, and then ensues corresponding combination, and too often counter aggression quite as unreasonable and quite as inconsiderate in scope and action. Men are but mortal, and “an eye for an eye” is too ancient an adage to have lost its force in this twentieth century.
Just how these transportation, mining, agricultural and industrial problems will be finally solved I dare not predict, but we will trust that the ultimate good sense of American manhood will work out a reasonable solution.
NINETEENTH LETTER
ACROSS NEBRASKA
On Burlington Route Express,October 20, 1903.
We left Denver upon the night express over the Burlington Railway system, and all day to-day are flying eastward across flat, flat Nebraska.
At dawn the country looked parched and treeless; expanses of buffalo grass and herds of cattle. Here and there the course of a dried-up stream marked by straggling cottonwood trees and alders, their leaves now turned a dull yellow brown. A drear land, but yet less heart-sickening than the stretches of bleak and barren landscape we have so often gazed upon through Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Despite the dry and parched appearance of this immediate region, it is yet counted a fine grazing country, and the cattle range and thrive all the year round upon the tufted bunches of the sweet, nutritious buffalo-grass that everywhere here naturally abounds.
By middle morning we are entering the more eastern farming section of the State, though still in western Nebraska. The land is all fenced, laid out in large farms, the fences and public roads running north and south and east and west. The farmhouses are neat, mostly, and set in tidy yards with groves of trees planted about. Large red barns, many hay and wheat stacks, illimitable fields of thick-growing wheat stubble, and miles of corn, the stalks bearing the large ears yet standing in the hill, while, as a general thing, the roughness has all been gathered in – the Southern way of handling the corn crops. No shocks standing like wigwams in the fields.
Fall plowing is also under way. We have just passed a man sitting on a sulky plow, driving four big horses abreast, his little six-year old daughter on his knee. A pretty sight. There are many windmills, one near each house and barn, some out in the wide fields, all pumping water, turned by the prairie winds that forever blow.
We are passing many small towns. All just alike. The square-fronted stores, the steepled churches, the neat residences, rows of trees planted along either side of the streets. “That dreadful American monotony,” as foreign visitors exclaim!
The country looks just like the flat prairie section of Manitoba, Assiniboia and Alberta, in Canada, that we traversed in August, except that this is all occupied and intelligently tilled, while the most part of that is yet open to the roaming coyote, and may be yet purchased from the Canadian Government or from the Railway Company, as is rapidly being done. And this country here looks longer settled than does northern Minnesota and North Dakota through which we passed.
The planting of trees in Nebraska seems to have been very general, and along the roadways, the farm division lines, and about the farmsteads and in the towns are now multitudes of large and umbrageous trees. And sometimes large areas have been planted, and are now become veritable woodland.
At the town of Lincoln, Mr. W. J. Bryan’s home city, we have stopped quite awhile, and in the distance can see the tall, white, dome-hooded cupola of the State Capitol through the yellow and brown foliage of autumnal tinted cottonwood.
Sitting in the forward smoker and falling into conversation with a group of Nebraska farmers, I found a number of substantial Democrats among them, admirers but no longer adherents of Mr. Bryan – “Our crops have never been so good and gold never so cheap and so plenty as during the last few years,” they said. And they were not surprised when they saw by the quotation of silver in the Denver morning paper that silver had never risen to so high a price in the open market as it holds to-day, sixty-eight cents per ounce. And they spoke of Grover Cleveland with profound respect. In Nebraska, they tell me, all possibility of a recrudescence of the Bryan vagaries is now certainly dead, and that this fine agricultural State is as surely Republican as is Ohio. The farmers are all doing well, making money and saving money. They are fast paying off such land mortgages as remain. Also, there are now few, very few, unoccupied lands in Nebraska. The State is practically filled up, and filled up with a permanent and contented population. As families grow, and sons and daughters come to manhood and womanhood, the old farms must be cut up and divided among them, or the surplus young folk must seek homes elsewhere. And of this surplus some are among the great American trek into the Canadian far north.
We reached Omaha, the chief city of Nebraska, late in the afternoon, coming into the fine granite station of the Burlington Railway system.
While in the city we were delightfully taken care of by our old school and college friends, to whom the vanished years were yet but a passing breath. We were sumptuously entertained at a banquet at the Omaha Club. We were dined and lunched and driven about with a warm-hearted hospitality which may only have its origin in a heart-to-heart friendship, which, beginning among young men at life’s threshold, comes down the procession of the years unchanged and as affectionately demonstrative as though we were all yet boys again. It carried me back to the days when we sat together and sang that famous German student song: “Denkt Oft Ihr Brueder an Unserer Juenglingsfreudigheit, es Kommt Nicht Wieder, Die Goldene Zeit.”
Omaha, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, forms, together with Kansas City on the south and St. Paul, and Minneapolis on the north, the middle of the three chief population centers between St. Louis, Chicago and Denver. It is the chief commercial center of Nebraska and of South Dakota, southern Montana and Idaho, and controls an immense trade.
In old times it was the chief town on the Missouri above St. Louis and still maintains the lead it then acquired. I was surprised to find it situated on a number of hills, some quite steep, others once steeper, now graded down to modern requirements. Its streets are wide and fairly well paved, and its blocks of buildings substantial. The residence streets we drove through contain many handsome houses, light yellow-buff brick being generally used, while Denver is a red brick town. The parks, enclosing hill and dale, are of considerable natural beauty, here again having advantage over Denver, where the flattened prairie roll presents few opportunities for landscape gardening.
The extensive stockyards and abattoirs of Armour, Swift and several other companies have made Omaha even a greater center of the meat trade than Kansas City. In company with W – I spent the morning in inspecting these extensive establishments. The volume of business here transacted reaches out into all the chief grazing lands of the far West. The stockyards are supposed to be run by companies independent of the packing-houses, and to be merely hotels where the cattle brought in may be lodged and boarded until sold, and the cattle brokers are presumed to be the agents of the cattle owners who have shipped the stock, and to procure for these owners the highest price possible. But, as a matter of fact, the packing-houses control the stockyards, dominate the brokers, who are constantly near to them and far from the cattle owners, and the man on the range who once ships his cattle over the railroads, forthwith places himself at the mercy of the packer – the stock having been shipped must be fed and cared for either on the cars or in the yards, and this takes money – so the quicker the sale of them is made the better for the owner. Hence, inasmuch as the packer may refuse to buy until the waiting stock shall eat their heads off – the owner, through the broker, is compelled to sell as soon as he can, and is compelled to accept whatsoever price the packer may choose to offer him. So the packing companies grow steadily richer and their business spreads and Omaha increases also.
The other chief industry of Omaha is the great smelter belonging to the trust. Incorporated originally by a group of enterprising Omaha men as a local enterprise, it was later sold out to the Gugenheim Trust, whose influence with the several railroads centering in Omaha has been sufficient to preserve the business there, though the smelter is really far away from ores and fluxes.
These two enterprises, the cattle killing and packing and ore-reducing, together with large railway shops, constitute the chief industrial interests of Omaha, and, for the rest, the city depends upon the extensive farming and grazing country lying for five hundred miles between her and the Rocky Mountains. As they prosper, so does Omaha; as they are depressed, so is she. And only one thing, one catastrophe does Omaha fear, far beyond words to tell – the fierce, hot winds that every few years come blowing across Nebraska from the furnace of the Rocky Mountains’ alkali deserts. They do not come often, but when they do, the land dies in a night. The green and fertile country shrivels and blackens before their breath, the cattle die, the fowls die, the things that creep and walk and fly die. The people – the people flee from the land or die upon it in pitiful collapse. Then it is that Omaha shrivels and withers too. Twice, twice within the memory of living man have come these devastating winds, and twice has Omaha suffered from their curse, and even now Omaha is but recovering her activity of the days before the plague, forgetful of a future that – well! men here say that such a universal catastrophe may never again occur.
And the handsome city is prosperous and full of buoyant life.
We now go on to St. Louis and thence to Cincinnati and so home.
