With Rod and Line in Colorado Waters

As I lazily wave a response of appreciation my boot-heel comes in contact with a small stone. Something in its shape leads me to pick it up; I find it scarred, and know enough to understand that it is a scratched stone from the till. And so my eyes wander from this product of nature’s great lapidary over to the waterfall and the mountain gorge, which had been his workshop, how many thousand years ago, who can tell? The beautiful waterfall is all that remains of him, but his handiwork is abundant.

Stretching along the east shore lies a great lateral moraine, even now twenty, and, in places, thirty feet high, made of great rocks, thousands of tons in weight, down to mere grains of sand. How many generations of pines have found precarious foothold there and died, may be conjectured only. But a new growth is springing up, as if it were the pleasure of the present to keep green the grand monument of the dead glacier.

On the narrow beach, with its background of new growth, smolder the dying embers of a camp-fire. My eyes follow the thin column of blue smoke that rises and wreathes itself among the tree-tops, and floats away to where desecration has stepped in. The suggestion of primitive life is dispelled by the ridge pole of a mean house obtruding itself above a depression in the moraine, and I know that this is but the best of a number of slab shanties. They are hidden from my sight, but I recognize them as one does a boil.

The first step into the wilderness of life is filled with bright anticipations, and lack of restraint makes one’s happiness as limitless as the great unknown into which one is traveling; the second step is monotonous, and one sighs for the promises of the end. The camp-fire, emblematical of the first step, is passing away; the slab shanty, the sordid, hard existence that makes life a burden, is the second step, and one longs for the third, that may, if nature must feel the weight of our sacrilegious hands, give us the ashler, graceful roofs, broad porches, and the comforts of a new life. Pioneers are lauded for “subduing the wilderness,” but deliver me from witnessing the progress of subjugation. I want to be the first, or, that being impossible, the next best thing to do is to wait till the ruin is complete. One can then imagine what the surroundings were; but in the middle period no room is left for imagination, – one can neither wonder what it was or will be, and the only thing left is to “unpack my heart with words, and fall a cursing like a very drab.”

While my mental anathemas and I are holding high carnival, I am conscious of the presence of something besides the figures of my imagination. Looking around, I discover a dark-complexioned woman, with hair black as night, when cats most do congregate; eyes like jet, square face, all one color – parchment; a mouth that shuts like a steel-trap. Her hair brushed smoothly back, and gathered behind in a great coil, is beautiful; that is all the beauty I see, except, perhaps, a dainty buttoned boot with a high instep. In one hand she holds the end of a small chain, at the other end of which is – yes, a monkey! This predecessor of the missing link looked at me in a sort of dreamily sympathetic way, and I at him. Our commiseration was mutual, and I felt inclined to shake hands with him. His owner was a French woman, of course; I do not think a woman of any other nation, except as a matter of business, would go wandering round among the Rocky Mountains with a monkey. If she had had a hand-organ strapped to her back, I could have forgiven her, even if grinding out “Days of Absence.” About the time I had “doffed my old felt,” we were joined by the other member of the family; he looked like an Egyptian three thousand or more years old. Not understanding French, I stepped into my boat and joined my friend.

I have been making an effort to secure for you a picture of the lake, and though the photographer has been about here frequently, my success has been indifferent. Every view worth having is sure to have a foreground of one or more of the lords of creation, “bearded like the pard,” with an arsenal strapped around their bodies, and an expression beaming out from under their broad-brimmed hats that would drive an ordinary man clear into the ground in sheer humiliation. Think of these addle-pated asses posing for exhibition amid scenes that should awaken naught but wonder and admiration, blended with that reverence one must feel in the presence of the Father’s works, and have charity if you can. The very boulders against which they lean are satires that will endure the tread of the centuries long after this world shall have forgotten that such fellows or their seed had ever incumbered the earth.

“CAMPING WITH LADIES” AND – THE BABY

Before the little narrow gauge engines of the Denver, South Park and Pacific with their trains of baby cars went thundering up through the cañons, reaching out for Leadville, the trouting in the Platte was prime. Following the sinuous track, first on one side of the river, then on the other, you can look out to the right and see your engine going west while your car is going east, then your engine starts east or north and you go south or west. Now you crane your neck to catch the top of some overhanging cliffs a thousand feet high, and are suddenly jerked around a curve into a little glade of a dozen acres with a little brook running through it; then you are as quickly yanked into another cañon. If one were drunk no doubt, the road would be straight. But thirty-five or forty miles from Denver the cañon grows familiar. Buffalo Creek comes tumbling out from the south, and presently the brakeman puts his head in at the door and shouts: “Pine Grove!” This is the Pine Grove known to travelers who go by rail, but the Pine Grove of twenty odd years ago was six miles away from the river, and the railroad Pine Grove was Brown and Stuart’s ranche, the owners of which drove a thrifty traffic in hay.

In August, 1868, I made acquaintance first with the pools and riffles in the vicinity of the old Brown and Stuart’s ranche. I clambered up and down the cañon for five or six miles east and west. The rush and the roar of the crystal waters made glorious music, and an hour’s fishing would send me laden back to camp. But for all the grand surroundings, the fresh air, the wild flowers and the trout, there was weariness of heart for her and me who made our camp on the margin of the then beautiful stream. There had a little while before crept over our threshold a shadow we all dread, and which had gone out again leaving a wound that would not heal.

But later on, when the cloud with the silver lining had turned a little of its brighter side our way, there came out to us one of your down-east girls, to whom the “Great American Desert” was a revelation, and these grand old mountains an epic. It was the season for camping, and she was stricken with the mania at once. She approached the subject tenderfootedly, but being assured that nothing was easier, nothing better for city folks, ecstacy was the consequence. Then there suddenly arose an insurmountable barrier.

“What will you do with the Governor?”

“Take him along, of course.”

“What! baby sleep in a tent? Be eaten by mosquitoes, rained on and bitten by snakes?”

The prospect was appalling; but then I assured her that fresh air never hurt babies; that mosquitoes were unknown, in August, at least; that rain was such a rarity that I was compelled to go to the creek for moisture, and as for snakes, the rattlers, at least, they never got beyond the foot hills; the little gart – a-hem – striped snakes were pleasant to have around, and were cleaner than flies. Besides it was confidently anticipated that baby was about to distinguish himself, and there was no panacea so efficacious for teething babies as the mountain air. That settled it.

The first thing to be looked after was the mess kit – known among the cow-boys as the “chuck box.” Mine would fit neatly into the tail end of a wagon; was about two feet and a half from top to bottom, and about twelve inches deep; had racks for cups, saucers, plates, knives and forks, and plenty of room for two weeks’ supplies of flour and other necessaries. When we wanted to lunch it was an easy matter to drop the tail gate of the wagon, let down the side of the mess kit, and we had a good table; the whole thing was as handy as a pocket in a shirt, and its capacity marvelous. An ordinary lumber wagon with spring seats, an A tent, 7 × 7, for the women folks, plenty of rubber ponchos, a change of clothing, wool, of course, all round. All together making an abundance for comfort, and a light load with which the horses could trot along and not half try.

About the hour that Hamlet’s father was wont to render himself up to “sulphurous and tormenting flames,” we were astir, and before the sun was up we were away. Fifteen miles to the foot hills and Turkey Creek cañon. Towards noon the sun beats down hotly on the plains, and I always make it a point to get to the cañon by ten o’clock at the outside. And this morning we passed Harriman’s before ten, and from our shelf on the mountain side we could look out east till plains and sky came together.

Down below us, on the left, six or eight hundred feet, the little creek looked about as wide as one’s finger. The road is fairly wide enough for the wagon, with here and there a “turn out,” to accommodate passing teams. To the right a perpendicular wall running up a hundred feet; to the left – well, our visitor said she was tired of riding and would like to walk a little; the road was smooth as a floor, and the grade easy. I suggested that horses rarely cut up capers in such places, but the effect of a wrecked wagon and the remains of a mule lodged against a granite boulder half way down the mountain was not to be overcome by any assurance of mine; and walk she did; so did the baby’s mother and maid, taking turns in carrying his majesty for a couple of miles. Not having any hills to climb the inconvenience is not so great; but, take a twenty-five pound youngster in your arms, at an elevation of, say nine thousand feet, and undertake to walk up hill; a half mile seems twenty, and at the end of three-quarters you want to lie down, wondering if your lungs are larger than the universe. But like everything else in this life, it becomes easy when you get used to it.

Our first objective point on this trip was Reed’s Mill, about thirty miles from home. No trout, but wild raspberries, now in their prime. Did you ever eat any? If not, the first one you put on your tongue will make you “wish your throat a mile long and every inch a palate,” with accessible untold acres of berries. There is about them a tenderness and luscious delicacy, a fragrance and even beauty, that makes a cultivated brother look and taste in comparison like a combination of mucilage and sawdust. The “Shepherd” thought when Tom Moore was penning his Loves of the Angels, that he “fed upon calf foot jeelies, stewed prunes, the dish they ca’ curry, and oysters.” But I don’t believe it. Tom was in America once, and I believe he strayed this way, and was inspired by mountain raspberries, with cream so thick “a spider might crawl on’t.” I do not believe Tom was so much of an animal as Hogg, by his wit, would make him.

But the fruit season is brief, and three or four days in the berry patch set me yearning for running waters, and the delicate salmon-colored fins. So we broke camp and turned into the road for Pine Grove and the Platte. By five o’clock we were fixed to stay, with plenty of pine knots for the camp fire and quaking asp to cook with, our only neighbors a couple of “English cousins,” owners of the ranche, from whom we could get cream, and butter and milk, and who helped make our evenings “jolly.”

Everything being in trim for the proper conducting of household matters, I received orders to “catch a mess for supper.” Right in front of our tent, two rods away, a gravelly bar reached from the bank to the water, and the opposite side, fifty feet about, the river ran deep and rapidly. I had never failed securing a trophy from that swirl, and I sent a gray hackle on its mission as near the opposite willows, and as deftly as my skill would permit. I “struck it rich” the first cast; the fraud had barely touched the water before I saw the jaws of a beautiful trout close upon it, and felt his strength at the same instant. Since last summer’s experience I have wished more than once that I had been on that occasion the owner of a split bamboo. As it was, the sport resolved itself into a mere trial of strength between tackle and fish. In three seconds he was ignominiously snaked out on the beach, a three-pound trout, the largest I have ever caught, and enough for supper.

The whole family had “swarmed up” the bank, as Dickens would say, to enjoy my discomfiture, but the contemplated taunts were never given breath. I stood in my tracks and landed three more, and, will heart of man believe it? they complained because the three last were not as large as the first. But my merit was established; when I came home empty handed, which was hard to do, any explanation of mine was “confirmation, strong as proof of holy writ,” that the trout would not rise for anything. So much for reputation! I wonder how many fellows there are in the world who enjoy it who are no more deserving than I?

One morning I started down the stream; it was my birthday, and though nothing had been said about that momentous epoch in my history, I felt it incumbent upon me to achieve something out of the ordinary. I did. I fell off a log, head first, into a hole four feet deep. Cold? well, yes! I thought I had struck a moderate sized Arctic winter. But there was no one “there to see,” and I uttered my benison on the man who invented the sun, as I crawled out to the warmth of our daily servant and friend. My creel was not empty and I saved everything, even my temper. When I got back to camp, she who had taken “the long path with me” suggested that I was wet, that an immediate change of garments was imperative. But, having an exasperating disposition to stubbornness, I insisted that every thread must dry where it was, and it did, without even a sneeze, to punish me for not taking a woman’s advice. I had been there before.

It was determined that baby and I should tend camp for half an hour or so that afternoon, while the three natural guardians wandered off to the adjacent hillside for wild flowers wherewith to deck the tea-table. This was no new business to us. The young man with a pillow at his back, seated in the middle of a blanket rubbing his face with a teaspoon; I lying prone three feet away with my toes beating an occasional tattoo on the soft sward, my chin in my hands and brier-root between my teeth, watching him. There was a bright light in his eyes, and his cheeks were rosy, soft as velvet, yet firm and cool. What is there like the touch of a baby’s cheek pressed against your own! You must turn and kiss it, just as you did its mother’s the first time you had a right to. But is there anything more ridiculous in life than to see a baby attempt to put a spoon into his mouth before he has got the knack of it? See him hit himself in the eye with it, pretty much as a drunken man would knock a fly off his nose; smear it down his face, with his mouth wide open and turned up like a young robin’s, but it misses the place on the way down; he takes it with both chubby fists, looks at it with dignified surprise, as though for the first time aware of its presence, lets go one hand, whacks the spoon against his ear and drags it across his cheek with the same result. But persistence is characteristic of this baby, a quiet determination that has something appalling about it. If there were any raspberry jam on that spoon his face would look worse than a railroad map of the State of New York. Finally, and as it would seem, after all, more by accident than design, the spoon reaches the right place; he twists it round to the distortion of his rosebud mouth; then he looks at me, sees me laughing; the fun seems to dawn upon him; he takes the spoon out of his mouth, pounds the blanket with it, and smiles back at me, and the smile resolves itself into a well-defined laugh.

The sun has just disappeared behind the range, but there is a mellow ray of golden light that lingers about the baby’s head that makes me think – think of the one so like him, and from the base of the hill, with her hands full of wild flowers, the tallest of the three starts toward me, and I remember only the sunshine of the long path.

But I forgot to tell you about my camp stove: it is a piece of sheet iron, eighteen inches square, with a hole in the centre, eight inches in diameter; set upon four stones, it makes a first-class stove.

BOYS AND BURROS

From my outlook under the shade of the old pine I see a familiar and massive pile of granite over fourteen thousand feet high, and a bit of the range, with patches of last winter’s snow glistening in the sunlight. The brown and gray of the lofty peaks are contrasted with the mist-covered blue of the lower mountains. Then comes the furthest glimpse of the beautiful river rolling out from the beautiful cañon of lava cliffs. Then the meadow for a foreground, its rich green tinted here and there with the gold that denotes the coming sickle time. Then the quiet, straggling village of log houses, with its tavern perched upon a hillside, and down by the river bank the smith’s shop, where seems the only sign of life. The ring of the “ten-pound-ten,” as it comes up to me clear and resonant upon the pure air, does not mar the harmony of the river’s melody, nor taint the romance of the scene. But a boy, taking his afternoon nap astride a shingle horse on the shady side of a cabin, does; he is suggestive of some of the realities of life, and is recuperating for my benefit. That shingle horse is to him a bed of roses, and the hard log of the old cabin a pillow of down. He can sleep standing on his head, I believe; I know he can crosswise or tangled up. I am not near enough to see, but I know that his cheeks are red, his face tanned to russet, his hands dirty, his clothes ragged, and – his pulse regular. I know exactly what he will do when he awakes; he’ll whistle, whistle for me, but not for my benefit. If he’d only whistle Put Me in My Little Bed, Yankee Doodle, or other soul-moving melody, his music would not be so much a burden. But he cannot distinguish between Gray Eagle and the Doxology; he could whistle a stave from a barrel sooner than a bar from an opera. He whistles to make a noise; and, not content with ordinary methods, he sticks his fingers in his mouth, and awakens the echoes down the cañons until you would think the Utes had escaped from the Reservation and were round hunting scalps.

How did I come by him? Why, through his mother, of course; did you ever know of a boy being round to make life a joy forever, without his mother being at the bottom of it? I had an interest in the boy; his mother is a near relative of mine, and hearing that I was to have a short vacation in the mountains, she thought it a splendid idea, if you know what that is, to have him spend his vacation with me instead of running round the streets. I told her I was going a great way off, into a rough country where the mosquito and buffalo gnat were rampant, to sleep upon the bare ground, to live upon flitch and potatoes with flap-jacks fried in grease, and she said that was just what he needed, fresh air and plain food. I told her that where I was going the boys were wicked and the men drank and swore like pirates, and there were no Sabbath schools; she said he would never be good for anything were he not thrown in the way of temptation, and as to the Sabbath school, I could take along a Testament and read to him; that would be novel to myself and amuse the boy. I told of high mountains and dangerous trails to be traversed, of deep caverns and antres vast, of swift rivers, and Utes whose heads were filled with vermin, “the chief end and market of whose time” was to capture and torture boys. She said he would have something to tell about when he came back, and as to the vermin, I could have his head mowed with a clipping machine. I swore I wouldn’t take him; but she said she knew I would, and was right, because I always like to, and do, have my own way, except – .

Yes, he is waking up and looking round in search of his Barlow, perhaps. I saw him stabbing the shingle horse with it when he went to sleep. No, he is not looking for his Barlow, but another fellow of later date. There goes his hand to his mouth; I knew it.

“Hello, old fellow! here I am under the old pine.”

“All right,” came back to me, in confidence of my ability to take care of myself, while he had me in sight.

“Can I come up there?” and he granted his own request, as usual.

“What’s that thing over there?”

“What thing, and where do you mean?”

“Why, that thing over yonder; it looks like a man.”

“I don’t see anything that looks like a man.”

“Why, don’t you see that thing up against that mountain that runs down to the river? It looks like a man with his fist doubled up goin’ to hit somebody.”

“I see a brown patch against the mountain side surrounded by green that has something the shape of a man – is that what you mean?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“A patch of brown surrounded by grass or bushes.”

“Well, what does it mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did it come there?”

“Because the grass or bushes grew around it, I suppose.”

“Well, but I mean does it mean anything? It looks like a big man.”

“Life is short, little boy. But if it means anything, it is the photograph of the presiding genius of the Hot Sulphur Springs.”

“What’s a presiding genius?”

“Little boy, did you say that you would like to ride horseback? Yes – well go over and tell the man at the barn that you want the pony.”

I am a great lover of ponies, they give one a rest. In fact, if it were not for this particular pony, the only non-bucking broncho in the vicinity, I should be constrained to leave. I have been anxious to go down the river to the house of a friend and have a week’s fishing, but I dare not go away from that pony. I am afraid the owner of that pony is mercenary; he refuses to hire him for a week; I think he knows that I want to go fishing, and has possessed himself of the idea that I cannot fish without the pony. He told me only yesterday that he commonly fished off that pony’s back; in fact that it was “the best way to fish anyhow.” It may be a good method; I never tried it; the novelty of the thing is something of an inducement. But the man asks too much, I am satisfied; the pony is not worth more than thirty dollars, but the owner demands fifty. He says I can sell him again, and I have no doubt of that. But what can I get for him? Well, he don’t know, but he’s sure I “won’t lose nothin’;” he might take a notion to buy him back, at a discount, of course. I offer to pay him the “discount” for the pony’s use, and also tender references as to my integrity. But he “don’t know nothin’ about references – there’s the pony, sound in wind and limb, and so gentle a child can ride him, and the best pony to fish off’n I knows on; you can take him, or leave him.”

I have concluded to take him; an indifferent saddle and bridle, ten dollars – total, sixty dollars. The boy takes the outfit under his immediate supervision and we go down to the house of my friend.

Here we found another boy a couple of years younger. I did not know of this boy save by report, but now I do. This last boy is sedate; sometimes I think he is about sixty, but his father is not that old, and it bothers me occasionally to determine which is the father and which the son. They call him Judge, and it’s worth half a dollar to hear him call me counselor – the title with which he dubbed me on our introduction.

“Counselor, I’m glad to see you; the fishing is good; the mosquitoes are a little troublesome for this time of year; but we can give you a net, and I’ll show you where to fish.”

His hair is curly, and he has what the mother of the boy in charge of me would call a “sweet face.” I was about to take him in my arms, but I took off my hat instead, and introduced him to my boy; they looked at each other, grinned and shook hands; then I knew he was a boy, and again wanted to take him in my arms, but dared not. That evening I sat on a stool mending a broken leader, and the Judge sat opposite in a high chair.

“Counselor,” said he, “you are not tying that knot square; that knot will slip; bring it here and let me tie it for you.”