In to the Yukon

The crowd stuck to the sidewalk and seemed expectant. We did not know just what was going to happen, but stuck to the sidewalk, too, and well for us it was that we did so. There were rumors of a parade. A number of ranch maidens, riding restive bronchos, some sitting gracefully astride, drew their horses to one side. The crowd was silent. We were silent, too. Just then a cloud of dust and a clatter of hoofs came swirling and echoing down the street. A troop of horses! They were running like mad. They were bridleless, riderless; they were wild horses escaped. They ran like things possessed. No, not all were riderless, for behind them, urged by silent riders, each man with swinging lasso, came as many cowboys hot on the chase. Had the wild horses broken loose? Could they ever be headed off? We wondered. Was the fun for the day all vanished by the accident? Not so, we found. This was part of the game. Every broncho buster, if he would take part in the tests of ridership, must first catch a wild horse, that later an opponent should master. And the way those lassos swung and reached and dropped over the fleeing bronchos was in itself a sight worth stopping to see. Then, as each rider came out of the dust and distance leading the wild-eyed, terrified beast by his unerring lasso, great was the acclaim given him by the hitherto silent multitude. Every loose horse was caught before he had run half a mile, and thus haltered – the lariat around the neck – was led to the corral near the big meadow, where the man who should ride most perfectly would win the longed-for prize – a champion’s belt and a purse of gold.

Many famous men were met there to win the trophy – the most coveted honor a Coloradan or any ranchman may possess.

There was Marshall Nuckolds, of Rifle City, swarthy and black as an Indian, who had won more than one trophy in hard-fought contests – his square jaw meaning mastery of any four-footed thing that bucks. There was Red Grimsby, long, and lank and lithe as a Comanche, with a blue eye that tames a horse and man alike. There was big, loose-limbed Arizona Moore, a new man in Glenwood, but preceded by his fame. He it was who won that cowboy race in Cheyenne, not long since, when his horse fell, and he underneath – dead, the shuddering audience thought him – and who shook himself loose, re-mounted his horse and won the race amidst the mad cheers of every mortal being on the course. He rode a fiery black mustang, and was dressed in gorgeous white Angora goat’s hair leggins, a blue shirt, a handkerchief about his neck. Handy Harry Bunn, of Divide Creek, was there too, a dapper little pile of bone and sinew, whom broncho, buck as he might, never yet had thrown. And Freddy Conners, solid and silent, and renowned among the boys on the ranches all ’round about. And the two Thompson brothers, of Aspen, home boys, the youngest, Dick, the pride of Grand River, for hadn’t he won the $100 saddle in the big match at Aspen last year, and then carried off the purse of gold at Rifle City on the Fourth of last July! Slim and clean-muscled, and quick as a flash he was, with a piercing black eye. The crowd on the streets were all betting on Dick, and Dick was watching Arizona Moore like a hawk. The honors probably lay between the two.

The big meadow in the midst of the mile track was the place. H – sat in the grandstand, my field-glasses in hand. I was invited to the judges’ stand, and even allowed with my kodak out in the field among the judges who sat on their horses and followed the riders, taking points.

Swarthy Nuckolds was the first man. He came out into the meadow carrying his own saddle and rope and bridle. To him had fallen a wiry bay, four-year old, never yet touched by man. First the horse was led out with a lasso halter around its neck, then, when it came to a standstill, Nuckolds, with the softness of a cat, slipped up and passed a rope halter over its head, which he made cleverly into a bitless bridle, then he stealthily, and before the horse knew it, hoodwinked it with a leather band, and then when the horse could not see his motions, he gently, oh, so gently, laid the big Mexican saddle on its back, and had it double girt fast before the horse knew what had happened. Then he waved his hand, the hoodwink was pulled off by two assistants, and instantly he was in the saddle astride the astonished beast. For a moment the horse stood wild-eyed, sweating with terror – and then, and then – up it went like a bent hook, its head between its legs, its tail down, its legs all in a bunch, and down it came, stiff-kneed, taut as iron, and then up again, and so by leaps and bounds across the wide field and back again right through the scrambling crowd. All the while Nuckolds rising and falling in perfect unison with the mad motions of the terrified horse – his hat gone, his black hair flying, his great whip and heavy spurs goading the animal into subjection. At last he rode it on a trot, mastered, subjugated, cowed, up to the judges’ stand. The horse stood quietly, trembling, sweating, wet as though having swum Grand River. Wild were the yells that greeted Nuckolds. He had but added to a reputation already made.

“Grimsby next,” was the command. His horse was a short-backed, spindle-tailed sorrel, with a sort of a vicious gait that boded a bad temper and stubborn mind. Again the halter was deftly put on and made into a bitless bridle, the hoodwink slipped on, the saddle gently placed, and man and horse were furiously rushing, bucking, leaping, rearing across the meadow, and right straight at the high board and wire fence. The horse, if it couldn’t throw him, would jam and scrape him off if it ever reached that merciless mass of pine and barbed wire. Could Grimsby turn him, and without a bit? Great riding that was, and greater steering, for just before the seeming inevitable crash, the horse swerved, turned and was bucking across and then around the field again. Grimsby never failed to meet every wild movement, and sat in the saddle as though in a rocking-chair. The horse, at last conquered, stood quiet as a lamb, and the cheers for the sturdy rider quite equaled the plaudits given his raven-maned predecessor.

Now the crowd had its blood up. Two native champions had proved their grit, what could the Arizonian do against such as these? “He’s too big and awkward,” said one onlooker. “He’s not the cut for a King buster,” grunted another. “The h – l he ain’t. Ain’t he the man who won that Cheyenne race after his horse fell on him?” exclaimed one who knew, and the scoffers became silent.

Arizona Moore strode clumsily under the weight of his big saddle, but his black eye shone clear and masterful, and I felt he was sure enough a man. His horse was a dark blood bay, well knit, clean limbed, short-barreled, full mane and tail, a fighter with the grit of a horse that dies before it yields. I stood quite near with my camera. It was difficult to get the rope bridle on, it was more difficult to put on the hoodwink, it was nigh impossible to set and cinch the saddle. But Moore did it all, easily, deftly, quietly. The hoodwink dropped, and instantly the slouchy, awkward stranger was riding that furious, leaping, cavorting, bucking, lunging creature as though horse and man were one. I have never beheld such riding. He sat to his saddle and every muscle and sinew kept perfect time to the fiery, furious movements of the horse. And he plied his whip and used his spurs and laughed with glee, as though he were on the velvet cushions of a Pullman car. The horse was stronger, more active, more violent than the two before. It whirled ’round and ’round until you were dizzy looking. It went up all in a bunch, it came down spread out, it came down with stiff legs, it reared, it plunged, it ran for the fence. Nothing could mar the joy of the rider nor stir that even, easy, tenacious seat. “You’ve beat ’em all.” “Nor can the others beat you,” roared the crowd, as he rode the conquered animal on a gentle trot up to the judges’ stand and leisurely dismounted. It was the greatest horsemanship I have ever seen, nor shall I again see the like for many a day.

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.