Colonial days

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University of California • Berkeley
In Memory of

ROBERT H. BECKER

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Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2007 with funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

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COLONIAL DAYS

By J. MAX CLARK

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DENVER

THE SMITH-BROOKS COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1902
By JAMES MAXWELL CLARK

TO
The Hon. JOSEPH C. SHATTUCK

Whom I met as a stranger Colonist, on the steamer, in
the **Big Muddy" river, in the spring of 1870, coming
to the promised land j whom I have ever since known
as a friend, and who, although he knows me from A
to Z, and probably better than does any man now living,
still contrives to esteem me, this little volume is affec-
tionately dedicated.

CONTENTS

PAGE.

PREFACE 7

CHAPTER 1 9

JOINING THE COLONY.

CHAPTER II 18

THE JOURNEY TO THE PROMISED LAND.

CHAPTER III 28

THE ARRIVAL, AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

CHAPTER IV 32

AN EPISODE WE CELEBRATE.

CHAPTER V 39

PLAIN LIVING AND HIGH THINKING IN HOTEL
DE COMFORT.

CHAPTER VI 48

OUR ONLY SALOON WE HAVE A TILT W^ITH VS^HISKEY.

CHAPTER VII 58

THE WOMEN IN THE NEW HOME.

CHAPTER VIII 67

AN EXPERIMENTAL PERIOD AND HARD TIMES.

CHAPTER IX 75

SUCCESS AND FAILURE.

CHAPTER X 84

THE HARD WINTER A BULL IN A CHINA SHOP.

Vi CONTENTS.

PAGE.

CHAPTER XI 90

SOME DEAD-HORSE REFLECTIONS.

CHAPTER Xn 95

THE FUEL QUESTION — HAULING COAL UNDER
DIFFICULTIES.

CHAPTER XIII 101

A LITTLE GROUP OF MINOR MEMORIES.

CHAPTER XIV 107

THE OLD-TIMER AND THE TENDERFOOT.

CHAPTER XV 118

OUR CLIMATE.

CHAPTER XVI 123

THE LATE N. C. MEEKER.

CHAPTER XVII 136

PROPHECY AND FULFILLMENT 1870 AND 1900.

CHAPTER XVIII 141

BACK TO THE OLD PLACE.

PREFACE

It is now nearly a third of a century since
the Union Colony was organized and the set-
tlement of Greeley and its immediate vicinity
began. Those who actively participated in the
stirring scenes of that unique and interesting
movement are rapidly passing away. To
young or middle-aged people, those who were
born here within the first few years, or came
here as children, there are still indistinct
memories of those early days. But to a large
majority now living here, and to all who came
at a comparatively recent date, the struggle
for an existence under the adverse conditions
of the time, and all the joys and sorrows, the
hardships, the successes and failures con-
nected with that experiment in the desert, are
traditions merely, and all knowledge of them
but that preserved in the printed page will
soon be lost.

Scattered through the files of the Greeley
Tribune and embodied in articles from my
pen, contributed to its columns at various
times as the years flew by, there was much
material, which, if gathered together and pub-
lished in book form, would perhaps illustrate

Viii PEEFACE.

the life of that experimental period in our his-
tory, not better than some other might have
illustrated it, but better than any other is
hereafter likely to do it.

These papers I saved at the time, and, hav-
ing now revised, rewritten and rearranged
them and added some new material as well, I
have had the presumption to believe they may,
in the form here submitted, gratify sentiment
among surviving Colonists and curiosity
among the newer population of Greeley; not
because I wrote of the scenes here faithfully
described, but because others lived them in
the long, long ago.

Very respectfully,

^4h.^,{p^'

r^

Greeley, Colorado, February 25, 1902.

CHAPTER I.

JOINING THE COLONY.

Mr. Meeker's famous call for the formation
of Union Colony found me living in a little
hollow among the hills and mountains of East
Tennessee, whither I had migrated shortly
after the close of the Civil War. I have often
since then wondered why I ever went down
there. I have never questioned the motives
and the good judgment which induced me to
come away. For one inducement to go there,
however, I remember that a number of my
relatives having died with consumption up in
the rigorous climate of Wisconsin, where I
was born, I had thought to find a warmer cli-
mate. I found it more than warm. It was
red hot; and all social affairs, politics, polite
intercourse among neighbors, and religion, as
well, seemed to take their cue from the fiery
climate also, making the temperature too high,
in fact, for the naturally cool blood of North-
ern men.

Three winters' and two summers' residence
in this warm atmosphere had not tended to
increase my love for the adopted land. The
roads, to any Northern man, were simply

10 COLONIAL DAYS.

abominable. It rained all winter and all the
spring, and the small respite from a well-nigh
ever-present flood occurred at a singularly in-
appropriate time, in the growing summer
months, w^hen the vegetation was in need of
moisture; and then by a seemingly singular
error in supernatural economy the country
w^as perennially visited by a burning drouth.

There were no bridges over the small but
terrible streams of the country, and the Obid
river, in particular, over which the Northern
mail had to pass, bringing in news from the
outside world, w^as swollen with floods the
greater share of the time, and not infrequently
the carrier and his "nag" were detained on the
wrong side of its swift-running waters for a
month at a stretch. The river in question was
not as wide as the Poudre, nor as deep as the
ocean, but, although the country had been set-
tled more than one hundred years the South-
ern mind had been unequal to its compass
with any bridge that would stay.

Not a newspaper was at that time pub-
lished in all that section of the country. I
was then an ardent Republican and a sub-
scriber, of course, to the New York Tribune,
just as my father had been before I grew to
man's estate; ever since, in fact, I could re-
member anything whatever of newspapers or
books. There were two other subscribers for

JOINING THE COLONY. 11

the paper in that county — "Bloody Fentress"
county it was called — and one of these was
a gentleman from a foreign country at that.
But the other was native born and lived away
over in the "piney woods/' at the farther end
of the mountain plateau. I often thought I
would sometime make a special trip over
there in order to make his acquaintance and
ascertain just what sort of a crank Southerner
he must be, who, being born and raised in that
illiterate country, could still take kindly to
the old New York Tribune of that day and gen-
eration. Force of circumstances, however,
prevented the visit and I have even forgotten
his name.

There were no public or private schools at
the time I was there. The period of "recon-
struction'^ had, it is true, left the state of Ten-
nessee with a fair school law, based upon that
in force in a majority of the Northern states;
but the amnesty act gave the old conserva-
tive party of the South control of the legisla-
tures once more, and in just indignation for
the many sins and extravagances of "Carpet-
bag rule," the legislature of Tennessee re-
pealed the one redeeming measure the exploit-
ing adventurers had instituted during their
temporary sojourn. I said there were no
schools, but there had been, for only a short
distance from my door there still stood the

12 COLONIAL DAYS.

massive frame of hewed logs, once in the
hoary past occupied as a seat of learning. Its
title, "The Mount Cumberland Academy/' had
evidently been conferred upon it by some one
totally oblivious of humor, or a sense of the
ridiculous. But both the building and the in-
stitution it sheltered had long since gone to
decay. The floor had vanished; not even the
remnants of sash remained in the openings
where the windows had once been; even a
door was lacking to keep out the little flocks
of stray sheep, which in the summer retired
within its walls to chew the cud and escape
the heat of the noonday sun. There had been
a door once, so Black Lize, my wife's colored
servant, informed me, when I was making in-
quiries concerning its history, "But one day
indurin' of the wah," so she said, "the white
folks had a meeting of some kind, one evenin',
and befo' long dey got to quahellin', and atter-
while one getlemen jobbed another with a
knife and killed him. Den dey didn't have airy
a sled or keart to curry him home on and dey
jist 'bleged to take de doah down and curry
him home on dat, and dey ain't no one ever
done fotch it back."

I trust the reader will now see that I was
ready for a change of residence. Two of my
three children, now grown and with families
of their own to care for and educate, were al-

JOINING THE COLONY. 13

ready born to us at the time, and the prospect
of rearing them without the advantages of
good society and good schools was beginning
to give me uneasiness as to the future. In
particular, I remember, that the boy's lin-
guistic attainments were already a matter of
astonishment and dismay to his parents. Two
tow-headed little white playmates, living a
mile away, and one wooly-headed little negro,
only at rare intervals visiting our side of the
creek, were more than a match for our in-
fluence and tongues, and we found ourselves
likely to occupy the unenviable position of
the proverbial old hen watching her progeny
of ducks sporting in an element altogether
foreign to her powers of locomotion.

Things were thus, when one dark, rainy
night in the spring of 1870, as I sat reading
my solace of isolated existence, the Tribune^
I came across the well-remembered notice to
those wishing to unite with N. C. Meeker in
forming the Colony. Taking in its import at
a hurried glance and seizing on the outlook at
once as the one avenue of feasible escape from
the environments of a disagreeable situation,
I arose from my chair with a sudden jump
and surprised my wife nearly out of her wits
with the emphatic declaration that I had
"struck it." She wished to know if I had gone
crazy; and when I proceeded to read her the

■

14 COLONIAIi DAYS.

proposition, pronounced it perfectly wild and
visionary. Women are constitutionally op-
posed to change, and especially the change
involved in moving from one place of resi-
dence to another. My wife had seriously op-
posed the idea of moving South, and I must
acknowledge now in looking backward that
this was one of the very serious blunders
which at one time or another occur in most
men's lives. But although my wife had much
more reason to dislike the surroundings in
our new home than had I, yet she now bitterly
opposed the ^contemplated move to Colorado.
However, having once made up my mind as
to what I conceived to be best for both of
us, I was not deterred by so small a matter
as a divided opinion in the family, on the ad-
visability of a change of base, and immedi-
ately sending the secretary of the proposed
colony the necessary sum of money for mem-
bership in its ranks, I shortly afterwards sold
my "little upright farm" of sassafras and
broom sedge, upon which I had bestowed
nearly three years of the hardest labor I ever
performed in my life, in reclearing, refencing
and reclaiming it from the ravages of war,
and then packing up my household goods and
bundling my wife and babies into my big cov-
ered wagon, prepared to depart.

JOINING THE COLONY. 15

Then an idea struck me; it might perhaps
be denominated a humorous idea, similar, in
fact, to the one which Mr. Barry informs us
dawned upon the mind of "Tammas Haggart"
when looking at the epitaph on his own tomb-
stone. Humor, we know, of a grim sort, is
often born of stress of circumstances, of grief
or sorrow, even of disappointment, or rage, or
chagrin. I had, at some time previous in my
short sojourn there, been involved in a little
misunderstanding with some of the good peo-
ple of the neighborhood in which I lived, and
during its progress had been kindly informed
by others of the less responsible voters of my
precinct that if I did not leave the country
"soon" they would fill my hide so full of bullet
holes that it wouldn't hold "shucks;" and I had
expressed my determination, in reply, of re-
maining with them until I became gray with
age, if I chanced to survive that long. The "un-
fortunate difficulty" had, however, been satis-
factorily settled, after a time, and I did not
come away in the night, and neither brought
away with me, nor, in so far as I know, left
behind me any ill-will. But the "Carpet-bag-
gers" from the North had incurred the just dis-
pleasure and hate of the Southern people,
among whom these aliens, many of them ver-
itable "birds of prey," had, while the pickings
lasted, gone to reside. I had not belonged to

16 COLONIAL DAYS.

that class. I went down there with honest in-
tent to make a home and permanent residence
for myself and family, and I had neither asked
for federal appointment before going there
nor elective office while remaining there.
Nevertheless I knew that in passing up
through Kentucky I should be taken for one
who had made himself unusually obnoxious,
and had consequently been persuaded to leave
the country. In a way I felt that I deserved
to share, on account of kinship, the reproach
justly due our people. The paint pot and
brush with which I had marked my boxes, sat
upon the threshold very soon to be trod by
other feet. I seized them and inscribed in
good, plain characters across the snow white
side of my wagon cover these words:

Baker and Clark, Late

* * Carpet-baggers ' '

**Good-Bye, Sunny Southern Clime'

Then over the clay hills and through the
narrow valleys of Northern Tennessee and the
knob lands of Kentucky, through Columbia
and Standf ord and Lebanon, we trudged afoot,
my brother-in-law and I, beside our team, with
its load of precious freight, entirely oblivious

JOINING THE COLONY.

17

of the half-amused, half-sympathetic smiles
of the people we passed, wholly intent on other
scenes, under other skies, in a different world
beyond.

18 COLONIAL DAYS.

CHAPTER II.

THE JOURNEY TO THE PROMISED LAND.

Various incentives prompted people to join
the new movement. Some did it for the pur-
pose of embarking in business. Others be-
longed to the professional classes at home and
intended, if opportunity permitted, to engage
in professional callings here. Many more were
actuated by the desire to own homes and farms
in the new land. Some had no definite end in
view. I had. Having always been a farmer I
expected to remain one. And so it happened I
was one of the very few colonists who arrived
on the scene of action with a good farm team.
However, several reasons induced me to bring
a team with me instead of buying one after I
got here. I had it and could not dispose of it
at a fair price there, and knew that I would
have to pay a high price for as good a team
here. Then, too, I lived a hundred miles from
the nearest railroad, and I had, in some way,
to get there. Further, I had once driven across
the plains and back, before the completion of
the railroad, and was proposing after reaching
Omaha to do it again. Hence the covered

THE JOURNEY TO THE PROMISED LAND. 19

wagon and household goods and family, as re-
corded in the previous chapter.

At Louisville, Ky., I sent my wife back to
Wisconsin to stay among relatives and friends
until Baker and myself had prepared a home
in the promised land. Then we embarked, out-
fit and all, on a steamer, and came down the
Ohio and up the Mississippi and the Missouri
river to Omaha city, from which point, as
above stated, we intended to come overland
across the plains. At some place on the river,
in Missouri, I do not remember where, as Baker
and myself were sleeping in our wagon, on
deck, I was awakened from my slumbers in
the middle of the night, by hearing some one
read aloud the inscription on the side of our
wagon. There were two or three in the party
and there followed a laugh, and I heard the
remark, "I'll bet that is a queer old fellow,
whoever he may be." It was the Hon. Joseph
Shattuck,^ just then embarking on our boat,
bound for the same place, and for the same pur-
pose as ourselves, and reading our destination
beneath the other inscription, for I had painted
that also, he came around very early next
morning to begin an acquaintance, which we
are now mutually agreed, after a lapse of
thirty-one years, has been profitable and satis-
factory, and hope with confidence that it will
continue so to the end of our lives.

20 COLONIAL DAYS.

The Indians having just about the time of
our arrival in Omaha shown a disposition to
make trouble on the plains, the military au-
thorities would not allow a less number than
thirty persons traveling together to start
across with teams, and not wishing to be de-
tained while so large a party could be secured
for the trip, our intention of coming overland
had to be abandoned. That being decided upon
Mr. Shattuck and his party left us at Omaha
and came on in advance to spy out the prom-
ised land, while Baker and myself, having char-
tered a car in which we placed our team and
wagon in one end, and my own and Mr. Shat-
tuck'S household goods in the other, came on
with a mixed train a day or two later. We
were two whole days in making the trip from
Omaha to Cheyenne. Having arrived at the
latter place the agent of the then uncom-
pleted Denver Pacific road proposed to charge
us fifty dollars for conveying our car to Gree-
ley, or more than half the amount for the fifty
odd miles distance between that point and
this, that the Union Pacific road had charged
us from Omaha to Cheyenne, a distance of
more than 650 miles. But the weather was
pleasant, the roads fine, the country, in its
general features familiar to me on account of
my former trip out w^est, and finding on inquiry
that the Indians were entirely peaceable, we

THE JOURNEY TO THE PROMISED LAND. 21

promptly rose to the occasion, unloaded our
traps from the car, set up our wagon, and
hitching on our horses set out. We started
about three o'clock in the afternoon and had
hardly got well out of the city limits and into
the great plain that spread itself before us,
than Baker had an opportunity of witnessing
his first mirage. Away ahead of us, at seem-
ingly an enormous distance on the plains, there
lay before our eyes a diminutive lake; and in
the center of the lake we saw what we took to
be a round, high post, sticking bolt upright
in the water. Baker speculated a good deal as
to the purpose a post could serve stuck up in
a pond in such an out of the way place, with
neither building nor fences in sight; thought
it might possibly be a section corner, or other
landmark on some big stockman's range. As
for myself, having formerly at one time wit-
nessed many of these deceptions of the plains,
and as a consequence become accustomed to
see "tall oaks into little acorns grow," I had
my suspicions that the high post, so palpably
real, and so perfectly distinct to our vision,
away ahead of us there in the shallow pond of
water in the plain, might, on nearer approach,
turn out to be a hawk, or an owl, or a prairie
dog. It did; and we soon witnessed that pe-
culiar half-somersault, afterwards to become
so familiar to us all, when one of the latter

22 COLONIAL DAYS.

animals displayed his twinkling heels as he
changed ends, and dropped like lightning into
his hole.

It being quite late in the day when we
started from Cheyenne, night overtook us long
before we had accomplished half the distance
between that place and Greeley, and not know-
ing the country through which we were pass-
ing, we traveled until long after dark, vainly
hoping to find water and a place to camp. For-
tunately for us, in passing Crow creek, a few
miles this side of Cheyenne, we had, for the
purpose of keeping a small bucket from drying
out and falling down, filled it with water and
set it in the feed box at the back end of the
wagon, and there was now about a gallon re-
maining that had not slopped out on the way.
It must have been at least ten o'clock at night
when, despairing of reaching any better place
to stop, and with only this scant supply of
water, barely enough to moisten the oats for
our horses and leave a drink for ourselves, we
finally unhitched and went into camp. The
road being the only place comparatively free
from cactus, we stopped the wagon right in
the track, and, after feeding our team, made
our bed under it, between the wheels.

The night was mild and clear, and almost
in a moment we were fast asleep. The enjoy-
ment of food and rest depends with us all so

THE JOURNEY TO THE PROMISED LAND. 23

little on outward circumstances of life, and so
much on inward condition of mind and mood,
that not the most favorable conditions of exist-
ence can of themselves lend us either appetite
for the daintiest fare by day, nor refreshing-
sleep by night. Of the food of a lifetime, I
can recall but three meals which gave me the
satisfaction that clings to memory. In 1860,
while crossing the plains from Omaha to Den-
ver, I one day dined principally on dried buf-
falo meat, purchased from some Indians wq
met on the w^ay. It was cut in thin strips, had
but the least imaginable salt in it, for that was
a scarce luxury with the Indians those days,
and instead of being smoked, was simply cured
by hanging on a line in the sun and wind. I
thought as I ate it that I had never tasted
sweeter meat, and nearly half a century after-
wards I think so yet. On a raid in the army
in Arkansas, in 1862, this same brother-in-law
and myself, called at a log cabin in a swamp,
just at daylight in the morning after an all-
night ride, only to find the cabin empty and
"the cupboard all bare.'' Not so much as a
crust of corn bread did the house afford; but
on looking about us we at last discovered a
string of jerked venison suspended from a
stick across the wide mouth of the great fire
place in one end of the single room in the
abandoned home. We took it down and seat-

24 COLONIAL DAYS.

ing ourselves at the rude pine table that sat
in the middle of the floor, we breakfasted
sumptuously on dry venison and water. We
had been riding all night, were nearly famished
for food, and I thought as I chewed that dry
meat and sipped water from my canteen that
I had never eaten a better meal in my life, and
I think so still.

During the long, cold and dreary winter of
1863-4, while General Sherman's army lay in
and about the city of Chattanooga, Tenn., sub-
sisting on half rations for a regular issue, and
occasionally on less, until the bridges and
railroads could be repaired and communication
thereby established with the army's base of
supplies, myself and a comrade one day pene-
trated the outside guard and getting out among
the farms began a search for something to eat.
The country, however, had been overrun by
each army in turn until not a chicken, not a
ham, not even a sweet potato remained.

At last, finding a small bin of wheat, we
filled our haversacks with that and returned to
camp. Arrived there tired and hungry from
our long tramp, we ground a little of that
wheat in a common coffee mill, and, mixing the
coarse, unsifted meal with water and salt,
cooked pancakes for supper. Some little
knowledge of the art of cookery, gained
through years of experience in army life, and

THE JOUBNEY TO THE PROMISED LAND. 25

roughing it on the plains and in the mines,
enables me with reasonable probability of
truthful estimate to assume that this meal
of cakes must have been an abominable mess.
But I remember it, nevertheless, as one of the
three incomparably delicious and delightful re-
pasts of a lifetime.

So, too, the pleasantest dreams and the
most refreshing sleep in the lives of us all
have not been found in luxurious beds of ease.
I remember with peculiar pleasure the sweet
rest, and the deep sleep I enjoyed on beds of
broom sedge, in Georgia, Alabama, North and
South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, dur-
ing the war, and on beds of pine boughs in
the mountains, and beneath the clear skies
and twinkling stars on the grassy plains; and
particularly this night of which I am speak-
ing, on the road from Cheyenne down to Gree-
ley, in 1870, will count with me as one of the
pleasantest night's repose in all life's flight
of years.

Sleeping with my face to the east, as the
first flush of morning light became visible in
the horizon, its softly-moving, life-stirring
waves fell upon my eyelids and at once awak-
ened me from the deep and uninterrupted
slumber into which I had fallen on lying down
the night before. Giving Baker a sudden
shake to awaken him also, I hastily arose, and.

26 COLONIAL DAYS.

feeding the horses a little grain, began to har-
ness them for the start on our journey. In a
few moments more, as we had neither fuel to
cook our breakfast, nor water to make our
coffee, even had we possessed the fuel, we were
on the road toward our destination. Not long
after sunrise we emerged from the draw in
the neighborhood where B. S. La Grange and
M. J. Hogarty afterwards opened up farms and
established their homes, and soon after that
brought up at an old adobe house near the
river bottom on the farm afterwards known
for years as the Fletcher and Abbott ranch.
There we unhitched, and there being, for some
reason or another, no one at home, we imme-
diately took possesssion, built a fire in the
kitchen stove, helped ourselves from a pan
of milk that happened to sit conveniently near
us on a shelf, had a good breakfast, and about
the middle of the forenoon arrived on the oppo-
site side of the river in the immediate vicinity
of Greeley.

There were at the time no bridges on the
Poudre between the foothills and the railroad
bridge which still stands just opposite the
town. The river was very high, for this was
the 26th day of June, and it being impossible
to ford it with the wagon, we sw^am the horses
over the stream, and dragged the wagon across
the bridge, between the rails, by hand. Then,

THE JOURNEY TO THE PROMISED LAND. 27

attaching the horses, we arrived in the new
city at a little past twelve o'clock, as emi-
grants, in a wagon, after the primitive manner
of our forefathers, and in so far as I know,
were the only original Colonists who reached
the goal of hope in that way.

28 COLONIAL DAYS.

OHAPTEK III.

THE ARRIVAL^ AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

Only remaining in town long enough to
ascertain where we might temx^orarily pasture
our horses and go into camp, and being directed
to Island Grove Park, we proceeded there with-
out delay. We stopped under the branches of
the first large cottonwood, still standing, I
believe, on the right side of the road, after
crossing the bridge over the old mill-power
canal, as you go in. There we pitched our
tent, for we had a good large one with us, and
picketed our horses, and, after getting our din-
ner, came back to town again to make a more
critical examination of the oppportunities the
enterprise afforded than we had been able to
get when passing through the town in the
morning. As we mingled among the commu-
nity of new faces which everywhere met us
while we. looked about, it now occurred to me
for the first time as being a little strange that,
of the dozens of schoolmates and scores of old
acquaintances, and hundreds of army com-
rades I knew, scattered here and there over
the Northern states, many of whom I had

THE ARRIVAL, AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS. 29

naturally expected, from the great publicity
given to the formation of the Colony, would,
like myself, be interested in the movement,
and more than likely arrive here before I did;
but, on the contrary, not one of these had
joined the organization or put a dollar into
the enterprise. When I reflected further that
not one member then on the ground, save Mr.
Meeker alone, had I ever known by name or
reputation, then my heart sank within me, and
I said to myself: "Who are all these people,
gathered together under the leadership of one
visionary old man, in the vain hope of build-
ing up a paradise in the sands of the desert?
Evidently all of them cranks and fools, and
myself pre-eminently the foolest fool in the
lot.''

As we walked about here and there, we saw
men running hither and thither, up and down
the ridiculous little furrows that at the time
marked off the magnificent imaginary streets,
all seemingly laboring under great excitement,
and all of them engaged in looking up desir-
able lots for location. Baker and myself
smiled loftily at these poor infatuated mor-
tals running crazy over imaginary homes to
be built up in the sand; and, returning to camp

ithat night, tired out with our tramp, disgusted
with the enterprise into which we had been
foolishly duped, and displeased and mortified
I

30 COLONIAL DAYS.

at the part we had played in it, we sat there
in the deepening shadows of approaching
night, too ashamed of ourselves to strike a
light and see how mean we looked. Baker sat
on a small box, whittling the edge, and I sat
on the bed, both of us silent as the grave, and
for a long time absorbed in gloomy reflections.
At last Baker broke the seance and struck the
key note of the situation with the remark that
he'd seen enough to satisfy him and should
^^light out;" if not next day, at least very soon.
I expressed the same conclusion, but interposed
a slight objection to immediate action by ask-
ing where? Then we discussed where we would
go, and what we would do, for two or three
hours, and, not being able to agree on any
definite course of action that night, finally went
to sleep.

The next morning, after taking care of our
horses and getting breakfast, not having any-
thing else to do, we paid another visit to the
new town. And now, as we entered the long
straight furrows again, it seemed to me that
for some reason or another they did not look
quite so ridiculous as they did the day before.
As we passed along and saw the people still
engaged in looking up lots, with a view to resi-
dences and business houses, they did not seem
to me quite so unwarrantably insane as they
did the day before. There had been a little

THE ARRIVAL, AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS. 31

shower during the night, the air was fresher,
and it occurred to me that the soil did not look
quite so sandy as it did the day before. Finally,
meeting and receiving a pleasant greeting from
two or three men whom we had met the day
before, our spirits began to rise with the occa-
sion, and we were not conscious of being quite
the extraordinary fools we thought ourselves
the day before; and then the first thing we
knew, we were running frantically about look-
ing for lots for ourselves, and quite disgusted,
too, to think we had wasted so much time. We
got some and that settled the business ; we set-
tled.

32 COLONIAL DAYS.

CHAPTER IV.

AN EPISODE — WE CELEBRATE.

Very naturally one of the first social duties
of the newly-arrived members was to call upon
the president of the Colony. We did so, both
as a matter of etiquette and business as well,
very soon after reaching Greeley, and were
immediately introduced to Mr. Meeker. Then
I remember that I at once got into a dispute
with him concerning the fertility of the up-
lands. It was not so much that I wanted to
argue the pros and cons with him, as that I
wanted to know the truth in the matter. Com-
ing but recently from a country where there
w^ere thousands of acres of sandy, gravely
soil, that was absolutely worthless for agri-
cultural purposes, I naturally had my doubts
as to the fertility of this, and I expressed them.
This seemed to displease Mr. Meeker very
much, and he replied to my observations quite
sharply. However, although curt and short
in speech, I came away from that interview
impressed with the fact that he was an hon-
est man, who had the success of the enterprise
in which he was engaged nearer to his heart
than any other object in the world.

^^■^ tprview

AN EPISODE — ^WE CELEBRATE. 33

Coming out of the Colony office after this in-
terview with the president, I saw a man stand-
ing on a box addressing a crowd of the colonists
who were gathered in a knot to hear him. There
seemed to be dissatisfaction, or misunderstand-
ing and the man was trying to explain matters
so as to molify his audience. He was pleasant,
plausible, good natured and persuasive, and
he soon succeeded in getting his hearers into
as good natured a frame of mind as his own.
It was General Cameron, the vice-president
and superintendent of the Colony at the time,
one for whose ways of managing men and
things, then and later, many of the Colonists,
including myself, conceived a very decided
mistrust, which I am more than willing to ad-
mit now was entirely the result of miscon-
ception, and had no foundation, in fact, from
any wrong he then did or any ulterior motive
that he ever had.

Mr. Shattuck had arrived in Greeley two
or three days in advance of Baker and myself,
and, sharing in the general disappointment at
first felt by nearly every one on their arrival
here, had, although he still retained his cer-
tificate of membership in the Colony, gone up
the river a little below Fort Collins and
bought, or located, a piece of land in company
with a young Englishman of his acquaintance,

34 COLONIAL DAYS.

a Mr. Forward, and they had not, therefore,
met us since our arrival. Preparations had
been made for a grand celebration on the
Fourth of July, in which it was proposed to
give the new town a sort of christening, and
the evening before that event Shattuck and
his friend came down in order to participate
in the festivities of the occasion, and staid
over night with us in our tent in the park. I
remember that we met like old friends that
had been long parted, whereas we w^ere ac-
quaintances of less than a week, all told; but
we had a jolly time, nevertheless, in recount-
ing the adventures we had met with since our
arrival in the new land.

Baker and myself had constructed a rude
sort of bunk, on which to make our beds, but
as we had not expected to entertain company,
Shattuck and his friend, when at last it be-
came necessary to go to bed, spread their
blankets on the floor of the tent and slept upon
the ground. Some time in the night we were
awakened from the sweetest of slumbers by
Mr. Shattuck, w^ho sprang from his bed on
the ground up on our bunk and, grabbing me
by the arm in mortal terror, as it seemed to
me, awakened as I was so suddenly and rudely
from my dreams, began whispering hoarsely
some sort of alarming message in my ear. Not
getting any clear idea of what he said and

Jhavmff

AN EPISODE — ^WE CELEBRATE. 35

aving in my mind but two sources of appre-
hended danger at the time, Indians and
thieves, I at once grabbed the Winchester
which lay by my side and, drawing back the
lever so as to throw a cartridge into the cham-
ber, instantly prepared to repel the invader
of our possessions, whoever he might be.
About this time, however, Mr. Forward arrived
also on top of our bunk with a bound and
Baker and myself being now thoroughly
awake, we discovered that the terror-inspir-
ing cause of our midnight disturbance was
merely a hungry skunk, which, roaming about
in the night in search of something to eat,
had crawled in between the folds of our tent
in front, and was- now at his leisure investi-
gating the contents of our larder. It took no
lengthy council of war to determine our course
of action as to that skunk; we did not hurry
him in the least; we knew he would leave
when he got good and ready, and we patiently
awaited his pleasure in the matter. We
couldn't even strike a light, for we were un-
able to reach the matches, and we accordingly
sat there for an hour or more, Mr. Shattuck
and his friend not being able to secure their
pantaloons during all the time that skunk saw
fit to keep possession of our premises. At last,
after crawling all around the tent and even un-
der our bunk, licking the meat gravy from the

36 COLONIAL DAYS.

frying pan and sniffing his nose at everything
else, to see if he needed it in his business, he
took his departure in the composed, unruffled,
deliberate manner peculiar to this unwelcome
creature, when not unwisely pushed to the
wall, and then closing the tent after him
tightly, so as to prevent a repetition of the
invasion, we once more composed ourselves to
sleep and dreams of home and friends.

I remember very little of the exercises of
the next day, further than that they were va-
ried from the usual course of national cele-
brations, as we had been accustomed to par-
ticipate in them, by some cowboys, who had
been engaged, or had perhaps volunteered, to
amuse the newcomers by riding horses after
the Indian fashion and throwing the lariat.

The governor of the then young territory
had been induced to come down to the new
city and welcome its people with a speech, the
oration of the day; and I remember as little
of what he said as I do of the many other
Fourth of July orations I have heard in my
time. But there was one remark he feelingly
made which attracted my attention, because it
related to bonded indebtedness, and I have al-
ways had a horror of bonds, county, municipal
or state. The Denver Pacific railway had but
just been completed to Denver, and I think it

AN EPISODE — WE CELEBRATE. 37

probable that in the effort to get railroad
bonds voted in Arapahoe county the governor
must have opposed the movement; at all
events, in speaking of the newly-constructed
roads he said we were urged as a reason for
granting aid in their construction that they
helped settle up and improve the country
through which they passed. "That is very
true/' said the doughty governor and ex-gen-
eral, "but I tell them I should like to see a
country settled up in such a manner that a
man might afford to live in it after settle-
ment."

One other incident I remember in connec-
tion with that early day celebration. The
Hon. J. L. Brush, at that time living over on
the Big Thompson, came over in a wagon with
his family to see the new city and take part
in the ceremonies of the day. He staid all
night to attend a dance, which was given out
of doors, if I remember rightly, and on a tem-
porary floor, laid especially for the occasion;
and the next day, as they ascended the crest
of the divide, between the Poudre and the Big
Thompson and loked down into the valley to
catch a glimpse of the home they had left the
day before, beheld only a heap of ashes, and a
thin, curling cloud of smoke arising like the
incense from the altars of the ancient gods;

38 COLONIAL DAYS.

for, the lightning striking it in their absence,
it had burned to the ground, and with it con-
sumed all their household goods but the
clothes they had on their persons.

PLAIN LIVING AND HIGH THINKING. 39

CHAPTER V.

PLAIN LIVING AND HIGH THINKING IN HOTEL
DE COMFORT.

Shortly after the events described in the
last chapter, Mr. Shattuck, having abandoned
the idea of settling on the river near Fort Col-
lins, selected a lot near the one I had mean-
time chosen, and Mr. Forward and himself
joining us in household expenses, we moved
into town and set up our tent on a vacant lot
now occupied by Senator Clayton's lumber
yard. Then we purchased material and im-
mediately began the erection of our houses,
preparatory to sending for our families. One
day, not long after that, as we were eating our
dinner, a sudden gust of wind, such as all of
us have since become accustomed to see and
feel, struck our tent, and, tearing it in two in
the middle, upset all our dishes except those
we held in our hands, and left us to finish our
meal as best we could, exposed to the fury of
the storm. That ended life in a tent for us, and
the next day we moved into the old "Hotel de
Comfort," one of the most noted of the earlier
structures in Greeley, where we remained un-

40 COLONIAL DAYS.

til our homes were suflQciently inclosed to af-
ford us a shelter while completing them.

This building, as all the earlier colonists
well remember, had been moved down from
Cheyenne, and had been fitted up for the use
of arriving colonists until they were able to
erect houses for themselves. It was divided
into two compartments — one for families, and
one for young unmarried men, and those whose
families had been temporarily left behind.
Into this building our party had moved, bag
and baggage, and for a short time thereafter
lived in the most unique society in which it
was ever my lot to be thrown.

During the day, if the weather was pleas-
ant, the larger share of us were at work on our
own houses and in our gardens, for pride in the
garden was one of the first evidences of at-
tachment to the new country and the new
home; but at night we were all gathered to-
gether in the old building, and for hours and
hours, away into the night, we sang songs, told
stories, recited poetry, made speeches, dis-
cussed philosophy, political economy, religion
and the Civil War. We criticised the general
government, and all government, and especi-
ally the management of Colonial affairs. Some
wanted to talk all night and lay abed all the
forenoon; and others w^anted to go to bed at
dark, and get up at daylight in the morning.

PLAIN LIVING AND HIGH THINKING. 41

To this latter class belonged myself, for, if we
concede the proposition that man's optics are
adapted to sunlight and not to darkness; that
he requires an average of eight hours' sleep
in every twenty-four, I never could see w^hy any
sane man, anless the nature of his vocation
absolutely prevented it, should not sleep in the
night and labor in the day. Why should any
human being, for instance, sit up until eleven
or twelve o'clock at night, using artificial
light to guide his eye or hand, and then close
the blinds to keep out the Almighty's free sun-
light in the morning, in order to steal back the
sleep due in the night time to all animated
nature, save only bats, owls and beasts of
prey.

We were all in one room together, and there
was not the opportunity, as in private life, for
each individual to indulge in his whims, at the
expense only of his own household. The night
birds chattered nearly all night, greatly to the
disturbance of the day birds, who wished to
rest; then at daybreak the day birds began to
chatter, and woke up the night birds, who had
but just gone to sleep. One night, in particu-
lar, I remember to have been kept awake until
quite a late hour by a general discussion of
various subjects, and just as the last drowsy
voice had died away in exhausted repose, right
opposite my head as I lay there in the top row

42 COLONIAI- DAYS.

of bunks, the head of a family in the other
compartment began to snore. Snoring was the
one supreme annoyance of my existence dur-
ing the Civil War. Half rations, and these
composed exclusively of the, to me, two most
detested articles of military diet — bacon and
beans — never caused me half the anguish of
spirit that T have suffered in the still watches
of the night, when, on the tented field, I have
been compelled to lie awake and listen to the
snores of armed hosts, reverberating from the
bottoms of undrawn boots.

As the deep, low-toned base snore, ema-
nating from the head of the family in the op-
posite compartment, on this particular occa-
sion, gradually ascended the register into more
distinct articulation, all the more painful to
my unwilling ear because of the lull in the con-
versation which had now taken place, I felt
at last that desperate measures were justifi-
able; and, as repeated rappings on the wall
back of my head had not been attended with
the proper response from the sleeper, I now
carefully drew the rod from my gun near by,
and, poking it through a knot-hole in the par-
tition, gave my neighbor a poke on the top of
his bald head. Then, when I had sufficiently
aroused him to a sense of alarm at the sudden
attack on his head piece, I informed him that
I had feared he was strangling, and asked.

PLAIN LIVING AND HIGH THINKING. 43

with feigned solicitude, if he felt in his usual
health. It happened, however, that the good
man's better half had by that time become
even more clearly aroused than was her liege
lord, and, perfectly comprehending the situa-
tion, and being quite angry, as well, at my in-
terference in matters, she now arose on her el-
bow, and replied for her husband in a loud,
shrill voice, that could be heard distinctly all
over the buildingj "Mr. Clark, my husband
can just snore, and snore as long as he wants
to, and, if you don't like it, you can just lump
it. So there, now!" A responsive titter, run-
ning with a rippling sound along the tiers of
bunks in our compartment, gave me the sense
of the meeting without putting the question,
and I subsided at once into silence, if not into
sleep.

One morning, before I had arisen from my
bed — and I was generally about the first to be
up — I heard below me there, in one of the
bunks, the voice of a man or youth, in silvery
tones, softly soothing to the ear, indulging in
quiet, satirical, critical discourse with some op-
ponent near by; then I began a mental specu-
lation, as I finished dressing myself for the la-
bors of the day, as to what sort of earthly tab-
ernacle must necessarily be associated with a
voice so finely modulated, and a tone so
smoothly effeminate as that; and I pictured to

44 COLONIAL DAYS.

myself, as the ideally essential accompaniment
of such a voice, the dapper little form of a
highly-educated dude, who must have been
lost in the shuffle back East and been wafted
West. Then I cast my eye down among the
lower tier of bunks to corroborate my theory,
and I beheld the burly form of my friend, John
Leavy, whose polite, but stingingly sarcastic
speech, has often since that day excited the ad-
miring wonder of other minds beside my own.

Not long after this a party of the younger
and less responsible members of the Colony
procured some whiskey, and, getting unduly
exhilarated from its effects, sallied out in the
darkness of the night for a lark of loud and
striking proportions, and, entering the door
of the Hotel de Comfort, which in the heat
of summer had been left ajar, they proceeded
to throw great chunks of coal and to hurl
rocks up and down the floor.

The occupants of the building, knowing
nothing of the real animus of the attack, at
once ascribed it to the people of Evans, with
whom, even at that early day, the quarrel over
the ultimate possession of the county seat had
already been engendered. So, after the sec-
ond assault had been made upon us, we there-
fore arose to a man, and, emerging into the
street, gave chase to our assailants. I had but
recently emigrated from a state where night

PLAIN LIVING AND HIGH THINKING. 45

interruptions were not uncommon, but were
never engaged in from a spirit of levity or
hilarious mirth, and where to fool around the
premises of another, after dark, invariably
meant very serious business for one party to
the interview, and not infrequently to both.
It was the social law, I may say, in ^^Bloody
Fentress County," where I hailed from, for
one who wished to make a friendly call upon
another, "of a cloudy evening," to ride up
within hailing distance of the door, and there
dismounting, to shout: "Hello, the house!"
And the occupant would reply, meantime
peeking through the cracks in the door,
without unbarring it: "Who is it, and what's
wanting?" If the visitor could then give a sat-
isfactory account of himself, being a stranger,
or cause recognition, if an acquaintance,
"Bloody Fentress" was one of the most hos-
pitable places in the world. But, if the visitor
could do neither, there was generally a funeral
or two next day. When, therefore, the attack
on our domicile took place in the manner I
have described, when all were in bed, and the
greater number of us asleep, I very naturally
thought of my gun, and, seizing it as I got
down from my bunk, made a rush for the door.
Now, it happened that John Leavy, for some
reason of his own, viewed the situation just
as I did — with gun in hand. And we two

■

46 COLONIAL DAYS.

reached the front door of the building to-
gether, at the head of a hurried procession,
which suddenly emerged into the street. As
we started in pursuit of the marauders, who
took to their heels in the darkness to make
their escape, some one of our crowd in the rear
called out to John and myself: "Boys, don't
shoot." I never turned my head to see who
made the remark, but I heard John assure the
speaker, in that mild, persuasive tone of his:
"Tush, man; it isn't loaded!'' Just at that mo-
ment we heard a woman scream in a tent near
by, most probably from mere hysterical fright,
but, taking it for granted that the marauders
had now added injury to offense, I at once
threw my gun to my shoulder, and, calling on
the rearmost man, whom I could indistinctly
see running ahead of me in the darkness, to
halt, when he did not do so, I fired, and the
man immediately fell to the ground. At the
same moment that I discharged my gun I no-
ticed the singular fact that Leavy^s, also,
which but a moment previous had no load in
it, went off simultaneously with my own. I
was now seized with great alarm for fear we
had killed the man, but, on going up to him,
we found he was only very badly scared; and,
on learning this, Leavy promptly arose to the
occasion, and, catching hold of the man's leg,
gave it a terrible yank, and wanted to know

PLAIN LIVING AND HIGH THINKING. 47

what he meant by falling down that way and
scaring people nearly to death. To this rather
unreasonable inquiry the man merely replied:
"Good God, gentlemen; if the bullets had
whistled about your head as they did about
mine, you would have taken a tumble, too."
Having caught our man, and also another of
the party engaged in the riot, and having by
this time discovered that the occurrence was
purely the result of a drunken spree, we re-
leased our prisoners, and nothing more was
ever said about it. One of the persons engaged
in this escapade, now a sedate, sober-minded,
responsible citizen, was well known long after-
wards for his convivial freaks, but the other,
the man we shot at, I did not know, and who
he was I have never ascertained to this day.

48 COLONIAL DAYS.

CHAPTER VI.

OUR ONLY SALOON — WE HAVE A TILT WITH
WHISKEY.

Just as soon as I could get the frame of
my house erected and sufficiently enclosed to
protect us from wind and rain, Baker and my-
self moved over into the new home. We put
our bed up stairs on some loose boards, for
the floor was not yet laid, set up our stove
in the back yard and went to keeping house
by ourselves. Mr. Shattuck, who was also en-
gaged in constructing his house, did the same.
One Sunday about this time, as I sat writing
letters to distant friends in the old home, I
became conscious of a strange, peculiar din
outside, growing louder and louder each min-
ute, and while speculating in an absent-minded
way, as to what it all meant, Mr. Shattuck
came suddenly to the door and said there
seemed to be a riot or trouble of some kind
going on below us at the abode house on the
bottom, where it was reported that a saloon-
keeper from Evans had moved in with a stock
in trade and opended up business by selling
whiskey and beer. Smoke as well as noise

OUR ONLY SALOON. 49

seemed to emanate from the building, around
which, by that time, a great crowd had con-
gregated, and seeing this we at once started
for the place. Arrived there we found the
building completely enveloped in flames, while
the small stock of whiskey and beer had been
moved to a safe distance outside. Inquiring as
to the cause of the disturbance, and the at-
tendant fire, one young man considerately in-
formed me that a delegation had come down
from town to remonstrate with the saloon-
keeper as to his course, and that while they
were holding their powwow with him, "the
house just took fire of itself." Of course we
took no stock in the theory of that sort as to
the origin of the fire, but noticing the stock
of liquors safely stowed away just out of
reach of the flames, it occurred to me as being
a strange and senseless proceeding to tear
down and burn the building in which the of-
fending beverage was sold, and preserve the
villainous poison itself. I said so; and Ralph
Meeker, it seems, entertaining views similar
to mine, about that time seized a cask of whis-
key and was going to throw it into the flames
when General Cameron grabbed his arm and
thus prevented the destruction of the precious
fluid. Some words ensued between the two,
and, if I remember correctly, Ralph struck at
the general during the altercation. I can now

50 COLONIAL DAYS.

see that it would hardly have answered the re-
quirements of the occasion if the recognized
leaders of the community had appeared to
wink at a riotous i)roceeding like that; some-
thing, of course, was due from the officials as
discouraging lawlessness in the people; but at
the time, and for a long while afterwards, it
seemed to us that the general was very much
overzealous in the matter. He was accused, in
fact, of trying to find favor in the eyes of the
old settlers in the county, and it was thought
that he endeavored to appease the wrath of
outsiders, on this and other occasions, in the
early days of the Colony, from motives which
reached out a great deal farther than mere
solicitude for our own w^elfare. I presume that
in this, as in many other cases of the kind, we
misjudged the general, and that what he did
was for the best; although there can be no
doubt that these suspicions as to the motives
of his conduct, at that and other times, de-
tracted greatly from the influence which his
fine abilities, his genial disposition, and his
real services to the people deserved. I feel
bound to admit, however, even at this late day,
that on this particular occasion, I regretted
exceedingly that Ralph had not the strength
and inclination to give the general a good
threshing.

OUR ONLY SALOON. - 51

The remark I made in reference to destroy-
ing the building and saving the whiskey, con-
stituted my sole part in the proceedings of the
day; but I take no pride or credit to myself on
that account; had I known of the gathering
at the time it first took place, I have little
doubt I should have been at the front with the
rest in all that followed.

The next morning after the destruction of
the property, Mr. Niemeyer swore out warrants
for the arrest of several parties whom he recog-
nized as being participants in the riot of the
day before, and I was among the number. At
the trial which followed, the evidence seemed
to point especially towards Ralph Meeker
and Mr. Norcross; not that they were either
leaders or principal offenders in the matter,
but that Niemeyer had his attention particu-
larly directed to them, and he swore to their
having taken part in the destruction of his
property. In particular he swore positively
that he saw Mr. Norcross place burning paper
and rags upon the window sill of the burning
building, presumably, to facilitate the spread
of the flames; and it was solely on his evidence
that both Meeker and Norcross were bound
over for trial in the district court. But it
happened that the man who really placed the
paper and the rags on the window sill, was
not on trial for the offense at all, but escaped

52 COLONIAL DAYS.

arrest, and enjoj^ed Niemeyer's honest mistake
in identifying the wrong man, as a huge joke,
for many a day after the incident had closed.

Now it happened that on the day of the
preliminary hearing I was expecting my wife
to arrive in Greeley; and after a separation of
several months, almost any one, I infer, pos-
sessing a fair sense of the ridiculous, will be
able to appreciate my predicament. Wife com-
ing to meet her husband in the new home after
months of separation; pleasing anticipations
of reunion with the object of her affection, and
meanwhile, the dear man, instead of being at
the depot to meet her, as young husbands in-
variably do, even after the most temporary of
separations, is obliged to send a friend to break
gently to the better half that owing to an "un-
fortunate little occurrence," husband couldn't
be there. Nothing serious, you know, but a
little awkward, and it is possible, too, that on
account of the unfortunate little occurrence,
husband may not be able to get home to-night;
because — because, — to tell the truth, "my dear
Madam, your husband is on trial for riot and
arson, all because he chose to indulge in a lit-
tle expensive amusement in the way of burning
down a gentleman's store; and it is possible
he may go to prison for years."

It doesn't take a very lively imagination,
I presume, to perceive the distressing predica-

OUR ONLY SALOON. 53

ment I was in. The trial progressed slowly, as
all trials seemingly do, and it must have been
three o'clock in the afternoon — the train was
to arrive at four — before the evidence was all
in, and great beads of cold sweat were begin-
ning to stand out all over my face and body
in anticipation of the final result. Nothing
had appeared against me save the single re-
mark I had made about the folly of burning
the house and saving the whiskey; but the
trial was not yet over, the pleas had not been
made, and at the least, there seemed no pros-
pect that I should be discharged before the
final conclusion of the trial, and that I should,
consequently, still be under arrest when my
wife arrived. As I sat there, every moment
getting more and more crest-fallen, and dis-
mayed with the prospect, I suddenly noticed
Justice Pinkerton looking at me from his seat
on the judicial bench; then presently, he had
turned to consult with Justice Mallory, and as
they both looked my way while conferring to-
gether I judged they had my case under ad-
visement. Now this Mr. Mallory, by the way,
was a justice of the peace summoned from
the extreme south end of the county, on
account of the great gravity of the case,
to sit with his brother Pinkerton, as as-
sociate on the bench. Justice Mallory was
particularly severe in his condemnation of

54 COLONIAL DAYS.

the act for which we were on trial, and
in his remarks he dwelt on the necessity
of maintaining law and order; and the virtuous
indignation he expressed was no doubt quite
edifying to those who did not know him. I
did, however; it happened that I had the ad-
vantage of a previous acquaintance with Mr.
Mallory, and that, too, at quite an early day in
the settlement of the territory. Indeed, at one
time it had been my fortune to be his next-
door neighbor for quite a season; and singu-
larly enough, about the last thing I had known
concerning the now dignified justice, who was
so emphatically, but hypocritically expressing
his horror of the act for which we were on trial,
was in connection with a little incident of a
precisely similar character, without half the
excuse for its perpetration. It happened in
this way : To protect the interests of the early
settlers along the Platte river, below Denver,
at the time, we had perfected an organization
styled and known as a "Claim League." An
outsider had jumped a claim b'elonging to one
of our members, and, with the redoubtable Mr.
Mallory in command of our forces as "mar-
shal," we proceeded in total disregard of the
laws in such cases made and provided, to eject
the intruder from the disputed premises. We
did more; we piled the gentleman's wardrobe
and bed clothes just outside his door, and, set-

OUR ONLY SALOON. 55

ting fire to his domicile, gave him timely warn-
ing that if he again visited the place, or so
much as set his foot over the line of the land,
we would hang him to the nearest cottonwood
on the river. The man's spirit proved fully
equal to the occasion, and he informed us with
a sardonic grin that he would, in this particu-
lar instance, take the will for the deed ; said he
considered the very broad hint he had received
just as effective as a kick, and, bidding us a
courteous "good night," left us in possession of
the premises.

With such reminiscences of Mr. Mallory's
early history running in my mind as I listened
to his utterances from the bench, concerning
the conduct of the enraged Greeleyites of the
day before, it will scarcely seem strange that
they made no very profound impression on my
mind, nor for that matter, increased my re-
spect for either office or man.

After consulting together for a moment,
which, under the circumstances, seemed to me
a long time indeed. Justice Pinkerton turned
towards me and said: "Mr. Clark, as nothing
of a very serious nature has appeared in evi-
dence against you, you are discharged." Then
I flew down the steps of the old Exchange ho-
tel, where the trial was held, with the fleet-
ness of the wind; and it was not until some
time afterwards that the partner of my joys

56 COLONIAL DAYS.

and sorrows discovered how near she came
to catching her husband in limbo on her arrival
at her new home.

That first experiment in starting a saloon
in Greeley, coupled with the very unsatisfac-
tory results attending it, proved a sufficient
protection against its repetition for several
years. We were greatly censured at the time
by many of the outside citizens of the county,
and such, in fact, was the sympathy with some,
for the innocent proprietor who had thus un-
dertaken to impose on the community a nui-
sance its people were determined not to toler-
ate, and whose sacred right to do so had, in
that rude and forcible manner been violated,
that a few of the least respectable and least
responsible of the old settlers along the rivers
openly threatened to band together, reinstate
the injured saloonkeeper in the possession of
his premises, and guard him with their rifles,
if necessary, while he enjoyed his God-given
rights to life, and liberty, and the pursuit of
his happiness and profit, in making other peo-
ple miserable. It must be conceded, too, that
at the time many of our own people greatly re-
gretted the "unfortunate occurrence," but the
movement to interfere with us from outside
had little encouragement from the influential,
responsible element among the old settlers, and
as to actual results, it can not be denied that

OUB ONLY SALOON. 57

we gained in respect and influence by the
means; and that that summary proceeding,
backed by a somewhat similar process on one
or two other occasions in aftertimes, although
absolutely indefensible in a legal point of view,
did more to keep the open saloon out of Greeley
and away from its immediate vicinity, through
all the intervening years, than the influence
of all our laws and ordinances and Colonial
restrictions has been able to accomplish.
Greeley is still a temperance town, after the
lapse of nearly a third of a century of time.
It has remained so, not because the saloon
interests were afraid of our laws, but because
they were afraid of the people ; and if ever the
character of o.ur population shall change, so
that a majority of the inhabitants would tol-
erate the open saloon, we may be sure the law
will soon be safely ignored, and the saloon
make its appearance as a fixture among us.

58 COLONIAL DAYS.

CHAPTER VII.

THE WOMEN IN THE NEW HOME.

To a majority of men, among Americans, at
least, a change of location, of residence, of
trade or profession, or even of moneyed con-
dition, is a matter of usual and expected oc-
currence, and we hail a majority of possible
changes as so many harbingers of probable
good; while we contemplate possible loss with
philosophical unconcern, or submit to it when
we meet it, with stoical endurance. So we have
a place to lay our heads when night comes,
and temporary protection from the storm; if
not a house, at least the prospect of one in the
near future, then hope supplies the rest. Mean-
time, whether in the city or in the country, or
on the mountain in a cabin, or in a dug-out on
the plains, or in the sand hills by a water
hole, and in a tent, we struggle on, and call
it home. But with the women it is different.
To a majority of women a little sea of fair
weather is better than the opportunities of
the great ocean with its possible storms. In
every change she naturally fears the worst
rather than hopes for the best; and so they be

THE WOMEN IN THE NEW HOME. 59

not absolutely insupportable, she prefers, by
all odds, the ^"ills" she has than to ^^fly to oth-
ers'' she "knows not of." Her world is home.
She may want the home enlarged and im-
proved; she may want an addition on the
house, and if she does she will want it higher,
and broader, and longer than the old one. And
she may possibly come to want the old one
dug under, blown up, torn down, or moved
away; but if she does, you may rest assured
that she will want the new one built exactly
on the old spot. And so when you take a
woman out among the sand hills with you,
and set her down by the newly constructed
pine shanty, near the water hole under the sage
brush, among the prairie dogs, the gnats, the
flies, the snakes, the skunks, the wolves, the
owls and the horned toads, and tell her, your
heart meantime palpitating with joy at the
great and glorious prospect around you, "Here,
darling, is our new home," she will not be ;able
to see it anywhere, not a vestige of it, and she
will generally say so at once, and sit down for
the time being and cry.

For these reasons the disappointments at-
tending the early settlement of Greeley fell
largely among the women. Many men were
disgusted with the situation at first, and not
a few, in fact, sold their stock in the enter-
prise at a discount and started back, but among

60 COLONIAL DAYS.

those who stayed, all the bitter anguish of the
outlook was suffered by the women. In going
to a new country to look for a home, if a man
takes his wife with him, it is bad for the wife.
If he leaves her behind in the old home, while
he looks for the new, it is generally bad for the
husband. If a man is domestic in his habits
and tastes, and is attached to his wife and
family, then when he is absent from them he
is very likely to be dissatisfied with himself,
and disgusted with everything about him; so
much so in fact that nothing will look normal,
and in its real light, and he will often be in-
capable of forming any just estimate of the
advantages of the situation in the new coun-
try, no matter how great they may be. On the
other hand, the wife, being present, the man
is at his home and at his ease, wherever he may
be, and although he may never consult her
about anything in the world, nor pay the least
attention to her advice when she offers it, and
although she may chafe at the inconveniences
of the new home, and declare she will never
come to like it, nor be contented in it, yet
the man, satisfied, on the whole, that the loca-
tion selected is the best for himself, and his
family too, will generally be able to disregard
all her little complaints, do what he can to
make her comfortable under the altered circum-
stances of their lives, and stay right with the

THE WOMEN IN THE NEW HOME. 61

situation until prosperity and contentment
dawn upon the family group.

Having made one blunder in moving South
after the close of the Civil War, I had, for
myself, determined, before starting, not to
bring my family West until entirely satisfied
with the place as a permanent home. It had
been my purpose, also, not to send for my wife
and family until I had completed my house
from cellar to garret, and had everything
cleaned up, and absolutely ready for occupa-
tion. This was a very wise theory of action,
if I had only been able to carry it out, but I
could not. I had scarcely got the frame up
and partially inclosed when an opportunity
presented itself by which my wife could come
fin company with some one who could help her
take care of the children on the journey. Mr.
, Meeker was, at the time, about to begin the
[publication of the Tribune and had offered
|L. C. Baker, now residing at Fort Morgan, a
[position on it if accepted at once. He w^as a
f younger brother, and the advantage of his aid
^and assistance on the long ride by rail was not
^to be overlooked. She came, and, of course,
[the time for other reasons selected as best for
rher to come, was absolutely the worst for
[her to arrive. If I had brought her out to
ithe proposed site for the building and set her
[down on one of the trunks while I dug the

62 COLONIAL DAYS.

cellar, it could not have been so bad; she
might in that event at least have advised as
to the location of the cellar and perhaps be-
come interested in the work. As it was, her
arrival found me with the windows tacked in
position, and the outside door hung on its
hinges, but that was about all; the .partitions
were not yet in, and mud and mortar bestrewed
the floor. Lime plaster, during that first sum-
mer, having developed a decided tendency to
tumble from ceilings overhead, a belief had
begun to prevail that lime and sand would not
work the usual combination in Colorado; many
were, therefore, using adobe plaster instead.
Adobe bricks were common, and a few con-
structed their dwellings of that material. A
commoner practice was to fill in the studding
on the inside with these bricks and plaster di-
rectly on that with plain mud. After long con-
sultation with various parties who had already
experimented in the matter, I finally decided
on the latter method, and had been engaged
in putting on this coat of adobe plaster over
the bricks. It was my first and last attempt in
fresco work or plain plastering. I had been
in hopes of, at least, getting that job accom-
plished, and the wood work cleaned before the
arrival of my wife; in fact, I lacked but a sin-
gle day's labor of attaining that end when I
was interrupted by the arrest and trial as pre-

I

THE WOMEN IN THE NEW HOME. 63

viously described. When she finally arrived,
therefore, although the greater share of the
plastering had been completed, and the lower
part of the wall presented a tolerably smooth,
but very dark apppearance, there was still a
rough, unfinished portion, and the floors and
the casings of the windows and doors, as w^ell,
presented a horrible black and dirty look to
any woman of neat housekeeping proclivities.
I remember to this day the feeling of intense
apprehension with which I was absorbed on
the way from the depot, as to the possible
effect these unfinished, unpropitious interior
accommodations might have on her mind when
w^e arrived at the house; and 1 remember, in
particular, the striking resemblance I myself
suddenly discovered betw^een the inside of my
abode and that of a cave in a mountain side,
as I opened the door to admit her into the sin-
gle, large, unfinished room of a building, as
yet without partitions or stairs; and I noticed
with dismay the silent, but clearly perceptible
chill which the unattractive surroundings gave
her. I might appear ever so cheerful, the en-
vironment was certainly not calculated to in-
spire cheerfulness in her. However, soon re-
moving her wraps, she i)repared to set things
to rights as best she could. Such a dirty stove
and dishes and dishpans and dishrags and

64 COLONIAL DAYS.

pots and kettles, she thought she had never
seen, and doubtless never had. The fire I had
started for the purpose of preparing the even-
ing meal did not burn with the alacrity she had
been accustomed to see as a result of her labors
with wood, and she undertook to accelerate
matters with the poker. Of course, the more
she poked it, the less it burned; in fact, it went
out. To cap an inevitable climax, she had
handled the coal with her fingers, just as she
had been accustomed to handle kindlings and
wood, back in the timbered country from which
we came, and now, having extinguished the
fire and blackened her fingers as well, while
I had been busy about something else, the re-
sult was too much for her already overbur-
dened feelings, and turning on me a look of re-
proach for her trouble and misery, she said:
"Oh, why did you bring me to this wretched
country?" and burst into tears.

We ate our first meal together in our new
home that night, with very little of the feeling
which prompted the old saying that "A dinner
with herbs, and contentment, is better than a
stalled ox and hatred therewith." We didn't
have the stalled ox, but I have always sus-
pected my wife swallowed much hatred of the
country with every morsel of the food she ate
that night.

THE WOMEN IN THE NEW HOME. 65

In a day or two after that I took her out
to view our new farm over the river, and to
try if I could not interest her in the future
growth of the new country; for you see, as yet,
I had not plowed a furrow, or set out a tree.
But already, in my mind's eye, I could con-
template the beautiful fields of waving grain,
the blossoming clover, and the stately row of
trees around its border, just as they could
actually be seen in after years. It was indeed
a beautiful tract of land, but there was then
nothing more that could be said for it, and of
course my wife could not see that, any more
than she could see the fields of grain, the clover
blossoms, and the rows of trees. In point of
fact, you could have seen a wild goose or a
jack rabbit anywhere on it, or within a mile
of it, for there wasn't so much as a decent-
sized sage bush on the whole flat, where either
animal or bird might hide. And so she refused
to yield up any more admiration for the pros-
pective magnificent farm than she had pro-
fessed for the new home in town. It was not
until years after that, when actual fields of
yellow, waving grain, and blossoming clover,
and green lawns, and leafy trees were as pal-
pable to her eyes, as the mere vision of them
had been to mine, that she could be induced to
express the least satisfaction with existence

66 COLONIAL DAYS.

here; and even at this late day, I sometimes
half suspect she still believes the clover blos-
soms sweeter, the flowers brighter, the grass
greener and everything better and finer on
that little old stumpy farm we left behind, than
anything to be seen in the adopted land.

AN EXPERIMENTAL PERIOD AND HARD TIMES. 67

CHAPTER VIII.

AN EXPERIMENTAL PERIOD AND HARD TIMES.

Everything went forward with booming
strides that first summer, and in an almost
incredible space of time four hundred houses
had been erected. We talked, then, of a city
of ten thousand inhabitants, and although
some of us thought this estimate a little wild,
I believe a majority of us expected to see a city
of five thousand inside of two years. Lots
went up with a jump, and business corners,
that had cost fifty dollars, ran up to five hun-
dred, and even a thousand, in choice locations.

But alas for human hopes, the expecta-
tions of that first year were too premature for
fully ripened fruit; when the greater number
of original Colonists had arrived, and in a
measure provided themselves with houses and
homes, building stopped, and prices took the
inevitable tumble predicted by Mr. Greeley,
when he made us his one visit, and it was not
until years later, when the country had made
the necessary advance to support the abnormal
growth of the town, that property in lots and
buildings again reached, on a substantial basis,

68 COLONIAL DAYS.

the purely speculative values of that first sea-
son.

And we had no sooner began the improve-
ment of our outside lands, than several of us
became profoundly impressed with the truth
of that old maxim, that "God made the coun-
try, and man made the town." We had worked
the wonders of magic in building the town,
but when we began to meddle with the sup-
posed defects in nature's handiwork in the
country, we were very soon impressed with a
profound respect for the designs of the Al-
mighty. Our canals, intended to supply a de-
ficiency in the rainfall of the state, were found
on trial to be altogether inadequate even for
the small acreage in cultivation under canal
No. 2 the second year. Not many of us
were overburdened with money when we be-
gan the struggle with the desert, and those of
us who had any when we began, soon lost it, or
expended it in improvements, which, for many
years, brought back no profitable return. The
first attempt at general farm cultivation re-
sulted in blank failure to a large majority of
those immediately interested in production,
and as a consequence, the prices of land, in
the country, dropped to a ridiculously low fig-
ure, when compared with the values of after-
years. Good eighty-acre tracts were a drug
in the market for a long time after that first

AN EXPERIMENTAL PERIOD AND HARD TIMES. 69

trial, and it was not until years afterwards
that even the best eighties, and in the choicest
locations, could be sold for a thousand dollars
each. The history of a single tract will well
illustrate waning confidence and its revival
in more propitious times.

In the Colony drawing of lands and lots,
Mr. William F. Thompson, for a long time a
resident of Greeley, secured the eighty-acre
tract next to mine, under canal No. 2. In the
fall after that first failure he offered me this
choice piece of land with the water right for
|650. But I had made a complete failure that
year, owing to a lack of water and a lack of
experience combined, and although I had
plenty of pluck and lots of faith in the ulti-
mate success of the undertaking, I had neither
money nor credit that would enable me to pur-
chase what I even then knew to be worth many
times that sum. But profiting by our experi-
ence out in the bluffs tinkering with a small
ditch and a scant water supply, we petitioned
the Colony board that fall to levy a tax and
enlarge the canal; with the result that nearly
every one who persisted in making a second
trial succeeded in growing excellent crops.
Then prices began to stiffen a little, and my
friend Thompson raised the price of his land
to a thousand dollars. I made a good crop
the second year of my farming operations, but

70 COLONIAL DAYS.

was by that time badly in debt on account of
the previous failure, and I dared not take the
risk of borrowing the money to make the pur-
chase; thus I let the second opportunity slip
away. In 1875 Mr. Thompson offered me the
place a third time for $1,200; but now the
grasshoppers were upon us, and I did not feel
justified in taking the risk and therefore did
not buy. In 1878 I went to him to pay him
his price for it, which had now grown to $1,800,
but while I had been waiting to get returns
from my crops before making the venture, Mr.
Driver, one of the original Colonists, stepped
in and took it. In the spring of 1879, Driver
becoming a little discouraged at the unusually
dry weather, offered to take a hundred dollars
for his bargain; but I had meanwhile invested
what money I had to spare, and again I lost the
opportunity. Soon after that Messrs. Mason
and Bradfield put their savings together and
bought the place of Mr. Driver for $2,000, I
believe, and after farming it in partnership for
two or three years, one of them sold his half
interest to the other for $2,400. I need hardly
say to any one now familiar with the ruling
prices for land in that vicinity that it could not
probably be purchased from Mr. Mason, who
still owns it, and made a fortune farming it,
for $10,000.

AN EXPERIMENTAL PERIOD AND HARD TIMES. 71

During the long, dull, stagnant period in
the growth of Greeley which followed the set-
tlement of the first summer, perhaps a quarter
of the cheap one-story houses originally built in
town, were carted out into the country for use
upon the farms, and from that time clear down
to as late a date as 1875, or even later, rents
were ridiculously low, and many of the houses,
especially in the summer season, remained un-
occupied. People who have become residents
of the place since that chrysalis period of our
growth, could hardly be made to realize the
contrast between the Greeley of to-day, with
its dozens of really fine houses, its hundreds of
neat homes with their closely shaven lawns,
trim gardejis filled with shrubbery and flowers,
and the straggling, poverty-stricken hamlet
of from 1872 to 1875.

For several years after settlement there
existed less than half a dozen grass plots in
the place, and it was not until as late as 1874,
that I remember to have seen a lawn mower
in Greeley.

I myself sent for the first blue grass seed
sown in town. I ordered it from Lexington,
Ky., and distributed it among the members,
during the sessions of the old Greeley Far-
mers' Club, at one time one of the important,
so-thought, institutions of the place.

72 COLONIAL DAYS.

During those dubious years of uncertainty
the very few among our residents who pos-
sessed the means to erect good houses hesi-
tated to do so, from being yet undetermined
whether to make permanent residence here or
to emigrate to more congenial and propitious
climes; and those of our number who pos-
sessed the requisite faith in the country and
really did all the hard, faithful labor, and made
all the practical experiments leading to the
ultimate success of the enterprise, were with-
out the means to build as they might have
wished.

For a long time thereafter the residences
of Mr. Meeker, of Mr. Holmes, now owned by
Mr. Ewing; of Mr. Nettleton, now owned by
Mrs. Mead, and of Mr. Wherrin, now owned
by Mr. Tuckerman, and perhaps two or three
others, which I may not at this moment be
able to recall, constituted all the dwellings in
Greeley which made any pretentions to ex-
cellence of construction or tasteful architec-
tural design.

During the winter months of several of
those earlier years the farmers and a large
share of the townspeople, as well, subsisted
almost entirely on wild game for the meat
they consumed, instead of patronizing the
butcher's stalls. Ex-Governor Eaton, who, in
company with John Abbott, now living at Fort

AN EXPERIMENTAL PERIOD AND HARD TIMES. 7S

Collins, kept the only market in Greeley at
the time, could recount, if they saw fit, to all
who might wish to hear, how a single beef
frequently sufliced for the demands of the mar-
ket for a week at a stretch, while buffalo hams
and shoulders were brought into the place by
the four-horse loads and retailed at from 2 to
4 cents per pound. Antelope, ducks and geese
and jack rabbits served for variety, and if
everybody was poor, there was at least enough
of good, wholesome, cheap meat. Almost
every man had a gun and knew how to use it,
loo, and there are very few of the original
Colonists now living in the town or its vicinity
who at one time or another during those pio-
neer years, did not contrive to bag a buffalo
or two, as among his trophies of the chase.
I have myself a very lively recollection of a
two weeks' jaunt by a party of six, which,
going down the Platte and up Cedar creek in
December, 1871, met with no end of fun and
adventure, as well as considerable hardship,
and returned with the hams and hides of
forty-six.

Another party, as late as 1874, had some
very fine sport in the vicinity of Pawnee
Buttes, and as one of the incidents of the
expedition cornered a herd of buffalo on top
of one of the plateaus in that vicinity, and, ex-
pecting to bag the whole bunch, chased them

74 COLONtA.L DAYS.

off a perpendicular cliff of rock, afterwards
found to be twenty-seven feet high, and were
surprised and chagrined to find but a single
crippled animal at the bottom, when the rest
had scrambled to their feet and ran away.

It must have been some time during the
winter of deep snow, 1872 and 1873, I believe,
that the antelope congregated inside the Col-
ony fence, at that time surrounding our pos-
sessions, and coming up nearly to the borders
of the town on the east, almost the entire male
population turned out with guns, on horse-
back, and even in wagons, and, driving the
herd through the deep crusted snow, killed and
captured more than one hundred in one after-
noon. We hung the carcasses on the north sides
of our houses to freeze and ate them during the
long winter months that followed, and I may
add that a number of us old settlers acquired
that season such a distaste for antelope that
we have never really hankered after any since.

SUCCESS AND FAILtJBE. 75

CHAPTER IX.

SUCCESS AND FAILURE.

There are a number of the original Colo-
nists left who will never forget the trials and
tribulations of that first summer of agricul-
tural experiment under canal No. 2. I can
myself recall, and with lively sensations, too,
the experiences of my first effort at farming
by means of irrigation. I remember that we
could not procure any good seed wheat on the
Poudre and that, in consequence, myself and
my brother Arthur sent a team over on the
Thompson for the sake of getting wheat that
was clear of cockle and sunflower seeds. We
paid three cents a pound for it and got stuck in
the mud on the way home at the foot of the
bluff this side of Hillsboro and had to go back
for half of it, which we were compelled to leave
by the way; and that at last when we had got
the whole precious lot together, and were pro-
ceeding out toward our future estates, over
the river there, one of the sacks in the rear of
the load, by some inscrutable and diabolical
means, came untied on the way and scattered
a little line of golden grains almost the whole

76 COLONIAL DAYS.

distance from the river out to our farms. We
paid a very high price for that wheat, went a
long way after it, had no end of trouble in get-
ting it on account of rain and mud, and hadn't
an ounce more than we needed, at best, and it
will probably not be difficult to understand
our feelings when, arriving at our destination,
we discovered the loss of that sack of three-cent
wheat. Every one has heard the story of that
New Englander whose apples rolled one by
one out of the rear end of his cart as he was
going up a hill, until when near the top he
looked back and found not a single apple left
in the box. It has been a tradition ever since,
handed down through generations of New
Englanders, that our language, rich as it is
in wrathful expletives, is, in some emergen-
cies, an utter failure. Ours was in this. And
I know that I am well under the truth when
1 say that if that sack had been filled full of
the almighty silver dollars which Colorado
people are peculiarly prone to worship, and
they had slipped one by one through our fin-
gers, and fallen into an ocean, we couldn't
have felt more disgusted with the result.

There are times when one annoying, ex-
asperating circumstance after another pursues
a man, until it would seem that the evil Genii
of old-time belief holds possession of his fate
and works all things together for the bad.

SUCCESS AND FAILURE. 77

The loss of that sack of wheat was but the
forerunner of worse disaster and merely typ-
ical of ill-success to come. We had been de-
layed in getting the wheat and had been com-
pelled to make two trips for one, when we
were pressed sorely for time in getting in our
crop; we got stuck in the river on the way out
from town, for there was at the time no bridge
across the Poudre, and we were compelled to
carry the sacks, one by one, out to the farther
shore on our backs ; and when we had sowed it
and killed our best horse in digging the lateral
down to its margin through the desert, with
anxious expectation we watched its feeble
growth day by day, after it had pushed its way
through the ground, and nursed its sickly
vitality with the attenuated little stream of
water that came creeping down through the
mirage that hovered incessantly about the
canal above us, until at last it withered, like
a false hope, and died; then there came
a hail storm that would have knocked seven-
teen vigorous lives out of that crop of wheat,
if there had been any life there to destroy,
and there wasn't a ghost of a chance for it if
the hail storm had passed by on the other side;
and, finally, barring the rich and useful ex-
perience gained that season, and employed to
advantage in after years, that entire load of
wheat might better have been sown in the

78 COLONIAL DAYS.

road rather than with such profitless labor
scattered upon our farms.

It must have been some time in June of
that year of experiment over the river that an
effort was made to establish a woolen factory
in Greeley. Previous to embarking in the Co-
lonial enterprise quite a large proportion of
our members had been engaged in manufac-
turing pursuits. Many of these, by reason of
previous training and experience, were both
disinclined and incapacitated for the business
of opening up new farms in a new country with
unknown and untried conditions of cultiva-
tion. And many of them had joined the or-
ganization with the hope and expectation that
in the new home all the arts and all the manu-
facturing industries would flourish at once,
and in just the same balanced proportions
they had been accustomed to see in the other
land from which they came. They were not
averse to owning a lot or two, for the purpose
of speculation, or a small tract of land which
would increase in value as the country grew
older, but they had not expected to follow ag-
riculture as a means of gaining a livelihood,
and it was, therefore, very natural that they
should become dissatisfied when they saw the
canals and the agricultural interests of the
place receiving so much fostering care, and
so much moneyed assistance at the hands of

SUCCESS AND FAILITEE. 79

the Colony board. Both ditches were in a
crude, unfinished state, it is true, and had
proved entirely inadequate to the demands
made upon them with the little cultivation
under them, even at that early day. But these
unwise brethren, aided by a few of the busi-
ness men of the place, who thought the im-
provement of the town entitled to more con-
sideration than had been bestowed, and who
had not then come to fully understand how
entirely their own prosperity depended on the
success of the agricultural experiment, now
insisted that the canals had already absorbed
more than their fair share of the Colony funds
and asked that several thousand dollars be
given in aid of the new enterprise.

A meeting had been called to consider the
proposition, and, if possible, secure the con-
sent of the stockholders for the desired ap-
propriation. Father Meeker, if I remember
correctly, stood mildly neutral in the premises,
willing that whatever was considered best,
after full discussion, should be done. General
Cameron warmly espoused the new undertak-
ing, and one or two of the members of the
board were opposed. Matters stood thus when
one evening, as I came down town after a
hard day's work, wrestling with the adverse
conditions of the desert, I met an angry dele-
gation of farmers on the street, all of whom,

80 COLONIAL DAYS.

like myself, were sufferers from the incapacity
of the canals. They were discussing the pro-
posed appropriation for a w^oolen factory, and,
as a matter of course, were opposed to the
scheme. One of the number had a bunch of
wheat in his hand which had all headed out.
It was in the same starved-to-death condition
for want of water with which all of us have
since that day become so familiar, and stalk
and head together, being pulled up by the
roots, did not exceed a foot in length. I had,
at that moment, forty acres of just such look-
ing wheat on my own farm, and, of course, I
appreciated the bearing of that bunch of
wheat on the prospects of the future. The
meeting inside the building near by, called for
the purpose of securing the appropriation for
the factory, was just coming to order, and,
seizing the bunch of stunted wheat and hiding
it under my coat, I, in company with the rest,
went in to oppose the measure. I do not now
remember who was the chairman of the meet-
ing, but I do remember that for a time every-
thing seemed to augur success for the new
enterprise. The general made one of his elo-
quent, persuasive speeches, such as he was
always capable of making when he desired to
carry a point, told his hearers the old story of
overproduction in gross products, how all
purely agricultural countries became poorer

SUCCESS AND FAILUBE. 81

year by year, unless their industry was supple-
mented by home markets, which could only he
secured by a manufacturing population, etc.,
and so on; all of it excellent as mere theory,
but quite lacking in the essential particulars,
facts and time. For even at this late day, more
than thirty years after the events here re-
corded, and after a number of unsuccessful
ventures, there is still not a woolen mill in
operation in the state.

When the general closed his argument
some of the opponents of the measure gained
the floor, and among the rest, myself. I told
the assembly that there was a number of us
farmers out in the bluffs just then who felt
very little concern as to what we would do
with the gross product; that, on the oth(?r
hand, we entertained serious fears that for
some time to come the gross product might
not make the bread to keep us alive. Then I
pulled that bunch of wheat from under my
coat tail and, holding it up in full view of the
audience, I asked if that looked like glutting
the markets of the world. I couldn't talk
much, but I had no need to talk; that bunch
of drouth-withered wheat did the business; it
was more eloquent than a host of tongues, and
before the meeting closed it was a conceded
point that the factory would have to wait.

82 COLONIAL DAYS.

It did wait, and, as I have just shown, is wait-
ing yet.

The little circumstance, so minutely related
at this time, had an important, if not, in fact,
a determining influence on the after-destinies
of the Colonial movement. We had arrived at
a crisis, and collapse and ultimate failure might
possibly have followed but for the favorable
turn in events as resulting from that meeting.
A majority of the board was convinced that
the thing of first importance for the success
of all concerned, was the enlargement and bet-
ter management of the canals. There was suf-
ficient money yet in the Colony treasury to
make the necessary improvement, whereas,
through failure the pockets of the farmers
were depleted. The board, therefore, made a
f50 assessment on each water right in No.
2 and temporarily advanced the cash, mean-
time making the assessment a lien against
each owner who could not at the time make
payment. Those who had teams, many of
them worked out the assessment, going into
camp from one of the long canals to the other
while the work was in progress. Other mem-
bers of the Colony, who were out of work at
the time, though not directly interested in the
canal, obtained employment at remunerative
wages until the enlargement was completed.
The sum advanced by the Colony board was

SUCCESS AND FAILTTRE. 83

all, I believe, ultimately returned to the treas-
ury. The crisis in our affairs was thus success-
fully tided over, and the confidence of the
farmers restored and their waning courage re-
newed. As a direct result of the canal en-
largement excellent crops were grown the
next year, and from that time on, through all
the varying vicissitudes through which we
passed, faith never wavered and ultimate suc-
cess became assured..

84 COLONIAL DAYS.

CHAPTER X.

THE HARD WINTER — ^A BULL IN A CHINA SHOP.

The success attending our second season's
operations under canal No. 2 was fully as flat-
tering as the first had been discouraging. The
canal having been more than doubled in ca-
pacity and the distribution of water having
been accomplished with some order and regu-
larity, almost everyone who had any previous
knowledge of farming raised good crops. My-
self and brother, still farming together, pro-
duced that year 1,500 sacks of potatoes, 1,300
bushels of wheat and about 1,000 bushels of
oats. That was before the era of harvesters
and binders; the self-rake reaper and the
"dropper'' still reigned supreme. Mr. Harris,
one of our neighbors, bought one of these lat-
ter machines and Mr. Olin, Mr. Dresser, my-
self and brother made an arrangement with
him that he should cut all our grain and that
we should jointly bind and shock his. Thus
we were able to harvest the four crops with-
out the outlay of a dollar for extra help. That
will appear very primitive to the farmers of
this day and generation, but in such small be-

THE HARD WINTER — A BULL IN A CHINA SHOP. 85

ginnings some of the greatest ultimate
achievements of men have originated.

Those were the days of sword grass and
slough hay, from the river bottom, for which
all the farmers under our newly-constructed
ditches were obliged to travel up and down
the river from five to twenty-five miles and
pay from |8 to |25 per ton. In the spring, fol-
lowing the very hard winter I am about to
describe, it brought $25 and f30. It was very
poor feed for heavy work, when grain was still
scarce and dear with us, and one of the first
subjects of interest to us, after a sufficient
water supply had been secured, was the matter
of forage. I wasted |30 in timothy and red clo-
ver seed, which I sowed in the spring of 1872
and which came up finely, but the clover all
"heaved out'' in the following hard winter,
and during the next summer the grasshoppers,
which for several years thereafter were to
work such havoc to the crops of the Colony,
cleaned up the timothy. I must not forget to
mention that having always lived in a tim-
bered country, one of the first things we did
was to set out trees. In the intervals of time
between putting in crops and beginning the
process of irrigating them I went down on the
river bottom in the spring of 1872 and pulled
up young Cottonwood seedlings froni a quar-
ter to a half inch in diameter and planted

86 COLONIAL DAYS.

them on the lines of my farm by the roadside.
They made a magnificent growth that sum-
mer of from four to six feet, but in the hard
winter following the cattle ate them all oft'
to the surface of the snow, w^hich, however,
did not seriously injure them, and they came
on again with renewed vigor the next year.

And that reminds me of an incident or two
that I may as well recount here as elsewhere.
When the Colonists first settled in Greeley
this was the center of a great cattle range,
and the cattle men of the time very naturally,
and very foolishly, as well, looked with dis-
favor upon our operations here. Not all were
influenced by motives such as these, but many
were, and much ill feeling was for a time en-
gendered, which, as a lingering result, is occa-
sionally seen cropping out even to this day.
The Colonists were too poor to put up indi-
vidual fences, and accordingly the idea of one
large fence to enclose all our possessions, was
soon put into practice. The fence was at first
without the warrant of the law permitting such
fence districts, which we afterwards secured
to protect us in maintaining it, and many of
the cattlemen, therefore, paid little attention
to our rights. I remember one day when I was
irrigating my wheat the second time, and had
about ten acres of it all under water, a little
party of cattlemen, en route to some round-up.

THE HARD WINTER — A BULL IN A CHINA SHOP. 87

or traveling about the range for some other
purpose connected with their business, delib-
erately rode diagonally across my grain, then
all headed out, and made a trail of crushed
wheat about a rod wide from one corner to
the other. I was naturally indignant, and,
going around to the upper end of the field to
meet them as they emerged on the other side,
I remarked that it seemed to me this was a
very large country, and that with hundreds of
thousands of square miles of bare prairie all
around me in every direction, they ought to
have been able to find room for themselves
without traveling directly through my grain.
But they looked at me with undisguised scorn,
and only took the trouble to inform me in inso-
lent tones that they were here first and that
this was no farming country anyway.

In the winter of 1872 and 1873 occurred
the great snow fall that has never been equaled
or approached since that day. For a period
of more than three months it lay upon the
ground to a depth of more than two feet. A
crust soon formed over the top, as it settled
under repeated layers of three or four inches,
which fell as often as the weather moderated
sufficiently to thaw a little, until a man could
travel for miles in any direction on the range
without breaking through. I remember that
I took the rammer from an old-fashioned shot-

88 COLONIAL DAYS.

gun one day when I was out there hunting jack-
rabbits, and, probing it down to the ground
in dozens of places all over the surface of my
farm, found that it averaged twenty-eight
inches deep. Then it was that our fence
counted for nothing, and thousands of head of
starving cattle roamed at will over our farms,
invaded our stacks of unthreshed grain, and
ate the little hay we had on hand for our own
stock. Corrals were broken into and even
granaries proved no sort of barrier to the starv-
ing brutes who bellowed by day and by night
for food. There was an old bull roaming about
the country at the time which became famous
for a long time afterwards for his depredations
and escapes. Nothing could stand in his way,
intact, from a granary to a dug-out, and no
one was seemingly able to kill him. His hide
became very soon charged with buckshot, and
it was not an uncommon sight to see him mean-
dering about the country with one or more lost
pitchforks dangling from his sides, and which
did not seem to annoy him in the least. I need
hardly say that this bull contrived to keep fat
and sleek in that season of unparalleled disas-
ter to his kind. My brother had a little tilt
with this bull, and, as usual, his bullship came
off with flying colors. Coming down to the
young city one night with his family to attend
a meeting of the famous literary society, which

THE HARD WINTER — ^A BULL IN A CHINA SHOP. 89

at the time afforded so much instruction and
entertainment for the Colonists, when they re-
turned to their humble dwelling at a late hour
in the night, they found this bull in their
kitchen. Uncontrollable wrath prompted my
brother to fire a charge of shot into his retreat-
ing flanks, but, although at very short range,
it had neither the effect to accelerate nor to
retard his flight in the slightest degree, and
for months after that he was still the terror
of every neighborhood under the canal.

Such were some of the excitements and
drawbacks of a pioneer people in their efforts
to subdue the desert in that early day.

90 COLONIAL DAYS.

CHAPTER XI.

SOME DEAD-HORSE REFLECTIONS.

Oh! what farmer of Colonial or other days
but has at some time or another sighed,
groaned even, in anguish of spirit, over a dead
horse, "and mourned because it was not." I
have previously noted that I brought a fine
span with me from the South when I came
to Greeley. But I very quickly lost one. Hav-
ing selected the lot on which I still live, and
decided to erect a house and make Greeley my
home, the first necessary operation towards
construction, was to dig a cellar. So I bor-
rowed a plow and a scraper, and Baker and
myself proceeded to make the excavation our-
selves. By the end of the second day we had
nearly completed the job; on the morning of
the third Baker went down on the bottom,
where we had our team picketed, to get it, and
attend to feeding and harnessing it, while I
busied myself in getting our breakfast. Pres-
ently Baker poked his head inside the folds of
the tent in front and informed me in dubious
tones that one of the horses was dead. "Ah!"
said I, always, from constitutional habit, look-

SOME DEAD-HOBSE REFLECTIOI^S. 91

ing for the worst, while striving for the best,
"the best horse, of course." "Certainly," said
he. Then we ate breakfast in silence and fin-
ished digging the cellar with pick and shovel.

I turned the remaining animal out to grass
and did not procure a mate for it until the fol-
lowing spring, when, previous to embarking
on the unfortunate experiment in farming un-
der canal No. 2, already described, myself and
brother went over on the Big Thompson, where
the old settlers had plenty of horses, and were
always willing to take us tenderfeet in, and
bought a fine half-blood broncho with black
rings around its legs and a stripe down its
back, for |175. It was, of course, well broken;
that is to say, I suppose it must have had a
rope around its neck at some time or another,
and by means of a "snub hitch" about its lower
jaw, been yanked a few times around the
farmer's big corral. At all events, the next
morning, when we proceeded to harness the
scrub, it threw itself, in true broncho style, four
times in less than five minutes, and we had to
break it in, regularly, thereafter every morn-
ing before proceeding to work, all that season.
Nevertheless we contrived to get in our spring
crop without serious mishap, until we had to
plow out the laterals in our grain; then the
ground being dry and hard, we overstrained
the remaining animal of the original team, and

92 COLONIAL DAYS.

when we went out the next morning to harness
and feed, that, too, was dead.

I now looked about and bought a very good
horse of old Dr. Scott. It was not a large
horse, but was well formed, and well broken,
and I felt confident it would answer our pur-
pose. But alas for human horse hopes, it had
the epizootic, although supposed to be
recovering nicely from the disease when I
made the purchase. Neither the doctor nor
myself had the remotest suspicion that the
case was a serious one; all the horses in the
country were suffering from the disease at the
time, and nearly all recovered; this one never
did. The ailment degenerated into chronic
catarrh, and, after using him a couple of years,
I was obliged to shoot him. When I got that
horse finally paid for he had been dead more
than a year, and must have cost me, in prin-
cipal and interest, fully |250.

When I first settled in Greeley there was an
Englishman, Pearson, by name, who selected
the lot and built the house on the other corner
of the block, where Mrs. Senier now lives.
Pearson was not a practical man, and, like
many another original Colonist, had the
crudest notions of business, in general, and es-
pecially of agriculture. Pearson had with him
that first year, two Cockney friends, dependent
in true baronial style on himself, who, I should

SOME DEAD-HORSE REFLECTIONS. 93

judge, must at the time have been possessed
of three or four thousand dollars, accumulated,
as we understood, in some sort of manufactur-
ing enterprise in England. He soon got away
with it, in a country he did not know, and a
business he did not understand; but, while it
lasted, he made things quite lively in his new
environment. He took up a homestead, not far
from mine over the river there, and, prepara-
tory to making the necessary improvements on
that, bought a yoke of oxen of some old set-
tler, paying, of course, a hitherto unheard of
price for them, and then sent his two depend-
ents up into the foothills for lumber with which
to construct his claim shanty. They were gone
nearly two weeks, and when they did return —
but I will let Mr. Pearson tell his own story, as
he did to me at the time — "One evening,'' said
he, "as I sat smoking on the back porch, what
should I see but these two bloomin' chumps
coming down the road afoot, and one of 'em
'avin' a bridle a 'angin' hover his harm. ' 'Ello,
boys,' says Hi, ' 'Ow's this; w'ere's the oxens?'
Traded 'em for a 'orse,' says 'e. ^W'at's come
of the 'orse?' said Hi. ^Oh,' says 'e, ' 'e doid hup
at Luveland's, hon the way 'ome.' " Pearson
didn't laugh, but I did, although even then I
was suffering from a dead-horse experience.

It makes a great deal of difference how
many horses, and how much money one has

94 COLONIAL DAYS.

as to the way he will look down on a dead,
horse, or up at a live one. In 1895, now, for
instance, I sold my farm out beyond the river
there, that I had cultivated for nearly a
quarter of a century, to Charles Mason.
Horses were by that time distressingly cheap,
and I had too many. There were still left on
my hands at the time I sold the place, seven
or eight, including three or four one and two-
year-olds. I proposed to turn them in to
Charles with the place, and he did not want
them. But I told him he had to have them;
he might kill or give away what he had no use
for, if he could, in time, find any one who would
take them, but take them he must or there
would be no trade.

In the early days I have been describing,
however, things were vastly different, and my
experiences in dead horses were so painful and
left such lasting effects on my exchequer, that
for many a long year thereafter when success-
fully managing my farming affairs, I ap-
proached the stable each morning with appre-
hension and dread, always expecting, as I cau-
tiously opened the door and peeked in, that only
one horse would greet me with a whinney, and
the other would exhibit to my accustomed
vision a set of dead horse heels turned up in
the morning air.

THE FUEL QUESTION. 95

CHAPTER XII.

THE FUEL QUESTION — HAULING COAL UNDER
DIFFICULTIES.

During those first trying years in the set-
tlement of Greeley the question of fuel was by
no means the least important. We then, and
for years afterwards, had but one line of rail-
road to the mines, and the cost of coal was
enormously high. From six to seven dollars
per ton was the usual price, and for several
winters the former figure was the minimum.
Clothes we brought with us, and they lasted
until we were able to buy new ones. Wild
game, as already noted, was abundant, and an-
telope and buffalo meat a regular article of diet,
and very cheap, even when not killed by the
head of the family. Other food we soon con-
trived to grow in abundance. But coal was
cash, and cash was very scarce for several
years. Trips to Crow creek for cottonwood,
by the farmers over the river, was a regular
business, and it was even brought into the
town and sold on the streets. Wood from the
mountains, for summer use, was not uncom-
mon. And a company was formed for the pur-

96 COLONIAL DAYS.

pose of getting out ties and wood and floating
them down the river from the foothills. But
the regular source of supply, to many of us
who had teams and nothing else to do in the
winter, w^as the old McKissick coal mine over
beyond the St. Vrain. Many of us retain memo-
ries of cross-lot trips over the hills to that place
for coal that will still be distinct and vivid
when all other earthly scenes are receding from
view. I have myself some lively recollections
of frozen toes and ears and frozen bread and
butter, suffered and consumed on these ever-
recurring journeys, and they have a habit of
turning up periodically in my dreams.

One jaunt in particular stands out in bold
relief. The sick horse mentioned in another
place had gone into a regular decline, and it
was evident that his days were numbered. The
winter of 1873-74 was at hand; the coal
bin was depleted, and I made up my mind there
was just about enough vitality left in that
horse to make one more trip to the mines ; then
I would turn him out into the stubble fields,
where he would soon turn up his toes after the
custom of the dead horse kind. It was a shorter
trip to Platteville, although the coal was of an
inferior grade. But my team could probably
stand the shorter trip and might fail me on the
longer one; so to Platteville I went. A new
shaft had recently been opened over in the val-

THE FUEL QUESTION. 97

ley to the left. I had heard of it as being su-
perior to the other mine in the immediate vi-
cinity of Platteville, and I made for it. The
day was a stormy one, and disagreeable in the
extreme. A raw east wind blew in my left
ear all the way over, and unpleasant reflections
goaded my mind. The grasshoppers had eaten
up my corn. I was badly in debt. My dead-
horse account already footed up two fine ani-
mals, since coming to Colorado, and the list
was to be increased by a third in the near fu-
ture. I observed, in fact, as he swung along
the road with his ambling gait, that his vitality
was even lower than I had supposed before
setting out. I had been in the habit of working
him one day, perhaps, and then letting him rest
the next, to recuperate. Now he looked as
though he might not recuperate. I had a doc-
tor's bill that was not yet paid. In fact, I owed
one doctor for this very horse. "Paying for a
dead horse'' has, ever since the first experiences
of civilized man, been regarded as one of the
most irksome of all liquidations. Other annoy-
ances obtruded themselves on my attention in
an inopportune manner, and by the time I ar-
rived at my destination I never felt worse, or
of less consequence, or was more depressed in
spirits in my life.

And now the dump and the windlass and
the miner's shanty loomed in view. Cheerful

98 COLONIAL DAYS.

sight, with the dismal sand hills in the distance
for a background. Drawing nigh, and natur-
ally looking for mine boss, or weigh man, or
cook, not a living soul could I find about the
premises. I had made a mistake, probably, and
most likely would have to go over to Platte-
ville, after all, or return empty; and in the
former alternative, should be on the road un-
til long after dark; pleasing reflection to an
already overburdened mind. Then I went up
and, peeking down the dismal shaft, thought,
after a time, that I detected a faint clicking
sound, as of some one, possibly at work. Some
one was, and, throwing down a chunk of slag
into the hole, I was, after a time, able to give
notice of the arrival of a customer. There were
two proprietors, and not wealthy. They did
their own cooking, mining, hoisting, and sell-
ing; and it being near noon, they came up out
of the shaft and prepared for the midday meal.
On their invitation, I repaired with them to
their shanty. It was not a gorgeous affair;
upright boards nailed on studding after the ap-
proved shanty style of architecture; lined, of
course, with tarred paper. Stove in one cor-
ner, set up on bricks and tin cans. The ashes
had overflown hearth environment and de-
scended in a huge pile upon the dirt floor. A
pile of straw in another corner, with a couple
of blankets dumped upon it, indicated the local-

THE FUEL QUESTION. 99

ity of night's repose. A rough, pine-board,
cross-legged table, strewed with bones and bits
of yeast-powder bread, suggested sumptuous
repast. A molasses can, labeled "Golden Drip,"
very dirty on the outside, and a pan of dried
apples, very black, made a feeble second to the
motion. There was a coffee pot upon the stove
two-thirds full of accumulated grounds, which
the proprietors had evidently been reboiling
for weeks. They invited me to dine with them,
and I suggested that they dump the coffee
grounds and make tea, which I offered to pro-
vide. My offer was accepted readily, and the
meal was soon prepared. As I enjoyed the hos-
pitality of these gentlemen, my own condition
changed for the better. They ate of my bread
and meat, and I ate of their dried apples. We
supped sumptuously of our joint production,
tea. They said they intended to buy a bedstead
or put up a bunk just as soon as they got ahead
a little on coal sales, but they were in debt on
their lease, didn't like to incur needless ex-
pense, and were, therefore, roughing it, tem-
porarily, until they got a start. I looked around
me a little as I ate and began to grow cheerful.
We only know our own condition, relatively,
and by comparison, and I now began to com-
pare. A man is rich or poor according to the
company he keeps. I was now in poor com-
pany, and, accordingly, began to esteem my-

100 COLONIAL DAYS.

self very wealthy. I thought I had known pov-
erty and misery, but I never had.

Dinner over I prepared to return to Gree-
ley. It was now snowing, but my mental hori-
zon was clearing rapidly. I mounted my load
of coal and whistled in glee as I proceeded on
my way. The skies got darker step by step,
but my sky grew brighter. My horse began to
fag, but I got down and walked. Later he
gave out entirely, but the other was a strong
animal and, chaining the doubletree back to
the axle on that side, I managed to keep mov-
ing on. At the hill this side of Evans I
thought we should never get up, but we did.
I arrived at home late in the night, wet, cold
and hungry, but absolutely cheerful in spirits.
I slept well and, rising early next day, led that
horse out into the bluffs and shot him, still
esteeming myself a wealthy man.

A LITTLE GROUP OF MINOR MEMORIES. 101

CHAPTER XIII.

A LITTLE GROUP OF MINOR MEMORIES.

Who of the number of original Colonists
still living does not vividly remember the sea
of troubles connected with irrigation in those
earlier years. The days v^hen the old settler,
that oracle of an early day, told us that no irri-
gation was needed until July, and we found, on
the contrary, that every green thing was dried
to a tan brown before the middle of June; the
days when we were patronizingly informed
that only little furrows were needed every
thirty or forty rods, through our fields of
grain, and that the water would, obligingly,
soak from bank to bank between them, thus
doing away with any necessity of fiooding,
whereas we found that on the upland a young
fresh water lake was required, and that every
square inch of the surface must be covered.
The days, in short, of small experience, great
expectations, diminutive ditches, big dykes
and general disaster. Oh, yes, all of us who
are yet alive can remember the troubles of that
perilous time. I can distinctly remember my
first introduction, by inference merely, to the

102 COLONIAL DAYS.

host of troubles that were destined to follow
for myself and all other experimentalists in
after days. I had gone up the Poudre, some
time during that first summer, just from cu-
riosity, in order to see for myself where the
water in No. 3 came from, and the manner of
diversion from the river. And I remember
that while there I read a most suggestive card
pinned to the head gate of the flume. It was
explicit, laconic, direct and rude to a western
degree, but conclusive and convincing. It
merely said: "Take notice; whoever is found
meddling with this headgate will catch hell
and a great deal of it." I often reflected, in
after days, that this notice was portentious
of the many troubles which followed in the
manipulation of water by novices in the art,
just as certainly and as legitimately, as the
punishment so positively promised the trans-
gressor who should meddle with that gate. In-
deed, we all of us "caught'' it, "and a great deal
of it."

When Mr. Meeker was writing for the New
York Tribune and told his eastern readers
how the waters of irrigation wobbled down the
furrows after a man like a little dog at his
heels, how that pleasing description must have
interested the citizen of that densely popu-
lated city, who, of course, knew absolutely
nothing about the matter except what he read

A LITTLE GROUP OF MINOR MEMORIES. 103

in that letter. But meanwhile Father Meeker
and all the rest of us were nearly sweating
blood in our efforts to make that little water
dog trot faster down the furrow; for the main
furrows were very long and very narrow, and
who that was then with us and not gone from
us can not remember the world of trouble and
tribulation we had before we got them wid-
ened sufficiently.

What wonder, then, that many of our ex-
periences with ditches and water and the
water supply, have taken a deep hold on us,
have sunken deeply in our hearts and have
at last resulted in a set of convictions which,
like our instincts, rise above reason and are
neither subject to review nor revision. There
is still abiding with us a suspicion of the man
above us, on lateral or ditch or river; that sus-
picion has become second nature. I presume
it is probably the same in all the irrigated
countries of the world. I suppose that under
every irrigation system, no matter where, the
man above another on the source of supply
is, for the purposes of irrigation and water
distribution, regarded as a thief and a robber;
and if his character for honesty and fair deal-
ing is absolutely above reproach, then, at
least, that he constantly uses more water than
is needed, is gradually making a swamp of
his premises and is certain to ruin his crops.

104 COLONIAL DAYS.

And the mutual repose of confidence between
farmers under the same ditch or canal is even
yet touching to behold. As the season for
general irrigation approaches, two farmers,
conferring together regarding the matter, in-
variably agree that there is plenty of time,
and each unhesitatingly avers to the other
that he has no thought of beginning before
the "middle of next week.'' Then each shoul-
ders his shovel in the shadows of the evening
and starts for the flume; each as certain as the
spectre, or Brutus, before Philippi, to meet the
other there.

Did I speak just now of the old settler?
Ah, I must not yet leave him. For we all re-
member him well; how, having been here long
before us he had taken possession of the rich
river bottom lands, just as we would have done
had we been here before him ; how he was sure
he owned the earth, or had at least all that was
worth standing upon, right under his feet; was
sure the bluff lands were worthless and so
stood back smiling the smile of superior wis-
dom, while we fooled away our time in digging
long canals that ran from somewhere clear
down into nowhere and wound in and out and
above and around gullies and ravines and
draws, onto adobe flats and ridges of sand that
wouldn't grow gourds or sprout black-eyed
peas. We would hardly suspect it now, but

A LITTLE GROUP OF MINOR MEMORIES. 105

even so shrewd a man as Governor Eaton, a,t
that time one of the best friends the Colonists
had among the old settlers, confessed to me
once, and freely, that he laid awake nights for
at least two years after we began operations
out under canal No. 2, thinking of the awful
consequences likely to ensue, if for any unfore-
seen reason the river farmers failed to grow
enough food to keep us poor Colonists from
starving, and that for a year or two after we
succeeded he still laid awake nights expecting
us to ruin the country by overproduction.

And our first blizzard; we can remember
that, too; the one that happened in the fall of
1871 and sent all of us into our houses bare-
headed, if we were out of doors and lucky
enough to get in again that night, and nearly
froze to death those who could not; and our
first hailstorm, that visited us in July, 1871;
how it hashed up our strawberry beds and our
melons and green peas and mashed out our
windows and then sailed out into the bluffs,
hilariously chanking its teeth and licking its
jaws and looking for further worlds to con-
quer among the scattering fields of grain under
our canals.

And our first grasshoppers, that took all
our first fruits, and stripped off all the leaves
from our trees and left them to die, and ate
up our young lawns and our onions and turnips,

106 COLONIAL DAYS.

and left the weeds to stand, and gathered in
the growing crops of wheat and corn, and flew
into our eyes, and down our backs, and up our
trousers, and into our beds, and into the very
dishes of food as they cooked upon our fires,
and then laid a million eggs apiece, and con-
tentedly died, relying on billions yet unborn
to carry on the good work of destruction next
season.

Oh, yes, all these are memories that will
cling to us to our dying days. But we lived;
and did a good work ; and it will last. The city
we founded and the country we reclaimed will
be our monuments when we have passed away.
The trees we planted will live when we are
gone. Their perennial shade will discredit the
legend of the desert we found here when we
came. And the magnificent canals we con-
structed at such cost of sore trial, and hard toil,
and deprivation, will still convey life-giving
streams to thirsty fields when the very records
of their origin are lost to mankind.

THE OLD-TIMER AND THE TENDERFOOT. 107

CHAPTER XIV.

THE OLD-TIMER AND THE TENDERFOOT.

For many years after the first settlement
of Greeley the original Colonist was by the
old-timer dubbed a "tenderfoot." The term
had been in vogue a long time before our
arrival among those of a still earlier date. I
need not explain it; it fitted us, and we bore
it patiently until, in turn, we could apply it
justly, and effectively, to those who came after
us in a still later day. By the year 1885 the
dawn of prosperity had attracted quite an
addition to the population of the town and was
beginning to fill up the vacant places under
our canals. In 1886 some of the newer set of
business men in Greeley got up what they were
pleased to style a "tenderfoot'^ supper. After
supper there were speeches, toasts and re-
sponses, and to one of these, "The Old-Timers,"
I was asked to respond, and did so, as follows :

"Sisters of the Sensitive Sole and Brothers
of the Susceptible Hoof — You have met to-
night, I presume, to felicitate one another on
your happy arrival and prosperous settlement
in the new country, and your fortunate escape

108 COLONIAL DAYS.

from the old. You came a little late, to be
sure, but considering the cornbread of your
native hills, and the bacon and molasses of the
miasmatic yalleys jou left behind, you are
justified, I think, in believing yourselves ^bet-
ter late than never.' If I understand my sur-
roundings and the object of the meeting, this
is a tenderfoot gathering — so-called — in con-
tradistinction from animals and men who took
residence earlier; as, for instance, the wolf
and the bison, and the ^old settler,' who, by
natural inference, from much valuable experi-
ence and some travel, have come to possess
wiry consciences, and unyielding soles. It is
well, we can not be too careful in such mat-
ters; w^e ought to draw the line somewhere,
and if we put it between '75 and '76,
I think it will sufficiently separate all
the beautiful white sheep from the entirely
unlovely goats. I am not without a sense of
poetic justice in the matter, ladies and gentle^
men, for I remember a painful distinction of
a similar nature, by which, at one time, an
arbitrarily line being drawn between '59
and '60, an impassable gulf was opened up
between the early settlers of the territory of
Colorado; and very much to my chagrin, too,
for coming in the latter year, I can never for-
get the unutterable scorn and profound con-
tempt with which the heroes of '58 and '59 re-

THE OLD-TIMER AND THE TENDERFOOT. 109

garded all population of a later date. It was
not until after the lapse of twenty years or
more that the Society of Colorado Pioneers
finally resolved to admit to membership the
settlers of '60 and '61; and such is the lasting
and debasing effect of long-continued servi-
tude and ostracism on character that I have
never had the courage to join. As for my part
and place in the deliberations of the evening,
fellow citizens, I have little doubt that deli-
cate considerations alone have prompted the
invitation. Old settlers are proverbially hun-
gry, and tender memories and tough yarns are
known to course through their brains and rip-
ple off their tongues as naturally as the Platte
gathers the spring flood from the melting
snows on the mountain side and rushes down
to the thirsty land below. Expanded vision,
expanded ideas and distended veracity seem
to be well-nigh inseparable advantages and
drawbacks resulting from early settlement in
any new country. We mean well, ladies and
gentlemen, and the flesh is willing, but the
spirit, contrary to Scripture, is very weak. You
all of you doubtless remember how Caleb and
Josh, on the return from the promised land,
were careful to take along with them the ripe
fruits of the new country suspended between
them from a pole. To me, ladies and gentle-
men, that has always remained a significant

110 COLONIAL DAYS.

fact. Caleb and Josh had that matter down
pat; they knew that a man, disliking a coun-
try, would always misrepresent it and be be-
lieved, and that a man, loving his adopted
land, w*ould always lie for it and have his evi-
dence discounted. Wise travelers as they
were, they knew better than to trust to their
memories, or the incredulous kindness they
left behind them, and so they carried the
proofs back with them.

I can't even guess how well I may be able
to satisfy you with what 1 shall have to say,
but if you merely desired the presence of a
genuine old settler and an early pioneer among
you, then I ought to be able to fill the bill to
perfection; for I am a natural-born pioneer,
and the son, as well, of a long line of pioneers
before me. I never saw a railway, nor even a
steamboat, until I was nineteen years old, and
with the very first toot of the iron horse in the
old neighborhood, I hopped promptly down
from the home perch, and made a fresh break
for the West. We have been here, my fellow
pioneers, for the longest period we have re-
sided in any one place for nearly ten genera-
tions in the past, and perhaps by the time the
epidermis of your nether extremities has suf-
ficiently hardened to repel reproach, and your
consciences become suflScientlycalous for tough
yarns yourselves, we shall have hied to newer

THE OLD-TIMEB AND THE TENDERFOOT. Ill

lands. Meanwhile I have a little germ of truth,
which has been expanding in my mind like the
proverbial mustard seed, and growing like a
green bay tree for nearly a quarter of a century
of time. I could entertain you, or at least my-
self, for hours together, but for the fatal fact
that you want to talk some yourselves, and
two parties to a conversation constitute the
one insurmountable obstacle to an old settler's
tongue.

"Under the circumstances, therefore, I shall
not recount to you all the old, old stories of
mountain and plain and the Indians, and ever-
lasting snow, but shall confine my efforts to
times of recent date, in which you naturally
feel more interest, as being more nearly con-
nected with yourselves. Of the time when the
little settlement of Colonists, under Father
Meeker and General Cameron and mysterious
Providence, struggled for an existence without
shade from the sun or protection from the
winds, on a barren soil, in an arid atmosphere
and under a blazing sky. Well, my friends, if
in getting here a little late in the day you for-
feited a little of the hearty zest that comes
only with actual adventure, you at least
avoided much that you need neither miss nor
mourn. When you got here, for instance, and
found all the choice corner lots in the hands
of those who came before you, and an unrea-

112 COLONIAL DAYS.

sonable inclination on the part of owners to
hold on to them at that, I have no doubt that,
considering the size of our mountains, corner
lots seemed unreasonably high; but bless you,
my friends, you had no idea what they cost
us. You didn't know, to begin at the first, that
we bought a good share of the town site three
times and paid for it every time in advance;
and you have no very distinct recollection of
the joys of that first winter after settlement,
when a large portion of the most intelligent
community west of the Mississippi subsisted
principally on baked squash and salt; but al-
low me to assure you, on the honor of an orig-
inal Colonist, that we did, and that many of
us can taste it yet; or that in the terrible win-
ter of 72 and '73, when the snow laid on the
ground 120 days, three feet deep on the level,
the entire community, regardless of caste or
social standing, or previous condition of af-
fluence, was confined to a diet of dried ante-
lope— dried on the hoof and before death —
and stale buffalo meat, and considered it good.
But such, indeed, are the facts; facts, too,
which need excite no wonder, when you come
to consider that states of the mind and condi-
tions of the stomach enter largely into the
process of digestion, and that in the absence
of bread even boiled crow is often thought bet-
ter than no meat.

THE OLD-TIMER AND THE TENDERFOOT. 113

"Those were the days, my friends, of com-
paratively pure democracy, in occupation, in
social intercourse, in habits of thought and
feeling in Greeley. When Johnson had no
mill, no city residence, no colossal hotel and
had only recently abandoned the road and the
bull train, with its weekly trip to the moun-
tain towns, laden with flour, grain and hay.
You would hardly suspect our dignified fellow
citizen, Mr. Johnson, of ever having peddled
hay in the streets of Central City, at 3 cents
a pound, but all the very old settlers say he
did. Then there was ^Our Judd,' at that time
an honest granger from up the creek, who
chewed plug tobacco and wore no collar and
wasn't sure which way the wind was going
to blow, but was w^atching the main chance,
and generally struck it at that; and Sam
Wright, who lived in a shanty and dug cellars
and wells for his neighbors and did chores and
ran errands; and Doctor Law, as well, who
manufactured ^doby bricks' for the trade and
patiently waited for paying patients; and Pro-
fessor Boyd, who wore long hair and wrote
poetry and discussed woman's rights and at-
tended the Farmer's club along with all the
other notable men of the place. Then there
was Honest Ben Eaton, too, who wore overalls
and a woolen shirt open at the neck and ran a
meat market and made ditches for the Greeley-

114 COLONIAL DAYS.

ites and farmed and sided with the Colonists
in all their quarrels with the outside precincts,
and was, no doubt, even then laying his pipes
for the office of governor; and, lastly, myself, ^
who rode in a lumber wagon, on a flat board,
without springs, and had a perpetually peeled
nose, attended conventions and quarrelled
with them all, wrote articles on agriculture
and irrigation and worked fourteen hours a
day on the farm.

"Those were the days, my friends, when,
household help being scarce and money to em-
ploy it scarcer still, a majority of the male
* members of this community helped the women
wash and iron regularly every Monday morn-
ing and Tuesday afternoon. Allow me to
state to you as a solemn fact, ladies and gen-
tlemen, that even as late as '74 and '75, when
Governor Eaton lived opposite to me on the
back side of my block here in Greeley, punc-
tually at a quarter past eight every pleasant
Monday morning in the summer season, I
used to exchange salutations with him across
lots from my back porch, as we both bobbed
up and down on the boards, with our hands in
the suds. Even Colonel White and George
West regularly engaged in the felicities of the
tub and the wringer and the clothes line in
those early days. The colonel's wife often had
to scold him, to be sure, because he would insist

THE OLD-TIMER AND THE TENDERFOOT. 115

on stopping tp swap stories with the boys as
they passed dpwn the sidewalk, where he was
at work in the shade of the lilacs, but he con-
formed to the custom cheerfully for all that,
and even Judge Hawks, who had no family
of his own at the time, invariably helped his
landlady get through with her heavy washing
and hung out the clothes on the line.

"Such, my friends, were the simple habits
and tastes of the early pioneers in the city of
Greeley, now famous all over the world for
its pleasant homes. You can scarcely con-
ceive of the changes wrought since that early
day, when, at the call of its founders, a rude
collection of huts and dugouts suddenly occu-
pied the gravelly, sandy plain, which never be-
fore had mound or bush or tree upon its sur-
face. The blasting winds, with nothing but our
frail tenements in their path to break their
force, shook us, in seeming wrath, at our pre-
sumption. They howled by day, and the wolves
coming down from the hills in the darkness
and settling themselves on their haunches in
the streets in front of our very doors, howled
all night. The perpetual sunshine of a rain-
less sky beat down upon us from above and
reflected from a treeless, leafless plain be-
neath us, blistered our tender feet and scorched
our lips and hands. The robbins and the
meadow larks had not yet come to live among

116 COLONIAL DAYS.

us; only the silent watchers of the desert, the
owl and the hawk, sat in the sandy plain,
blinking their horrid eyes and waiting for
prey, while the wild dove, with her mournful
note, chanted a dispiriting lullaby in a sad and
lonely land. Every scanty flower of the plain
had a double row of briars up and down its
short stem; every shrub had thorns on its rigid
branches to preserve it sacred from touch;
every bush had a snake coiled up under it, and
every snake was ^pizen' and ready to bite.

"These, dear friends of a later day, are a
few of the disadvantages of environment which
you missed in coming in '75 and '76 instead of
in '70 and '71. Now note the happy change.
The dreaded grasshopper is gone, let us hope,
forever; lofty trees, with waving branches, now
break the force of the terrible winds which
used to sweep unhindered over the town. The
snakes and the wolves have retired to the
waste places among the hills. The glittering
plain, with its deceptive mirage, has given
place to real lakes and pools and fields of wav-
ing grain. Song birds twitter in every bough,
lovely flowers nod softly in the tempered
breeze and velvety lawns of unsurpassed ver-
dure glisten with dew in the morning sun. The
old landmarks of Colonial days are disappear-
ing from view, and, fresh from the ashes of
their decay, are springing tasteful cottages,

THE OLD-TIMER AND THE TENDERFOOT. 117

stately mansions and lofty spires, in token of
faith in the new home. Fellow pioneers, as I
speak to you myriads of memories of that
early day come teeming up from the treasures
of the brain and demand expression from my
tongue. Time and the necessities of the occa-
sion have permitted me but the merest hasty
glance at the past; but some time in the fu-
ture I'll write a book or hire a hall, and, get-
ting the old settler and the tenderfeet together
inside, I'll lock the door and talk you all to
death."

118 COLONIAL DAYS.

CHAPTER XV.

OUR CLIMATE.

Colorado is a wonderful country; we like
it, dote on it, and would not exchange it for
any other. It is certainly the best all-around
climate in the world and undoubtedly we could
give points and win in a comparison of ad-
vantages with any land on earth. Just think
of some of the small evils, which, counted sin-
gly, do not amount to much, but which,
grouped together as against any state or lo-
cality, are well-nigh too annoying for human
enduraAce. No fleas here, no mosquitoes to
speak of, no chiggers, no ticks, now and then a
bug — so ladies tell us — no severe weather in
the winter five seasons out of six, the most de-
lightful autumn weather always, that exists
on the globe, no cyclones, no earthquakes, no
chills and fever, no snow in the winter, no mud
in the summer, no sunstroke, no mad-dogs,
plenty of coal, no timber to clear, no brush to
burn, no wood to chop, no land to grub. And,
finally, to offset all these well-nigh unparalleled

OUR CLIMATE. 119

advantages, but a single real inconvenience,
periodic, persistent and permanent in its at-
tacks, it is true, but not absolutely unbear-
able— just an insinuating, all-pervasive west
wind, which, after a hot day in summer or a
fair day in spring or an unusually pleasant day
in winter, blows sand in one's eyes and through
one's hair and down his back and up his trous-
ers and into his shoes and inside his watch;
only this slight annoyance and nothing more.

Oh, yes, on second thought, there is one
thing more that is not pleasant, because, to tell
the truth, aside from the winds, we generally
have a diabolical spring, which, considering
that spring is variable and unreliable almost
anywhere, doesn't make ours the more endur-
able; a sort of elastic, convertible, interchange-
able, late winter, early summer, misguided
spring, that often runs the thermometer up to
80 the last of February and down to zero in
March and above fever heat in April and
through the freezing point, with now and then
a snow storm in May and occasionally fur-
nishes all these variations, from grave to gay,
inside of twenty-four hours. Nothing, of
course, so severe as the genuine Texan norther,
in the way of wind, and nothing so variable in
the way of climate as Texas, where the unfor-

120 COLONIAL DAYS.

tunate Missourian, sojourning in August under
a blazing sky, Lad one of his oxen drop dead
with the heat, and, stopping to skin it, was
overtaken with a norther which froze the other
to death; nothing, of course, so bad as that, but
bad and disagreeable enough.

We came to this country when young and
are grizzly-headed now, and we ought to be able
to give points, if anybody can, on Colorado wind
and weather, and we have an idea we can.
Sometimes we think too much has been said
about our state and climate as a resort for in-
valids; there has been exaggeration, and per-
haps an exaggeration of our climatic disadvan-
tages for hollow-chested invalids without heart,
lungs or blood might in the long run save life,
just as Josh Billings informs us that thousands
of lives have been saved by not swallowing
pins. We may remark, then, that the first thing
a confirmed invalid needs, an invalid, say,
who has one leg already in the grave and
scarcely any blood circulation in the other, is
plenty of winter, spring and summer clothing.
Three complete suits of varying weight for
winter, three for spring and three for sum-
mer— only nine in all. Change your clothing
according to actual need, three times every
day. In normal weather in Colorado it is cold

OUR CLIMATE. 121

in the morning at all seasons of the year. When
you get up in the morning and feel a soft, se-
ductive, balmy atmosphere all about you, that
is neither cold nor hot, but simply delicious to
bodily sensation, do not get far from the gar-
den gate that day, for nature is hatching a
convulsion and this is an abnormal symptom.
Do not sit down in the shade without a coat;
take a heavy overcoat with you when you ride,
whether in winter or summer. Do not go in
swimming and play tag without your clothes,
no matter how pleasant the weather may be.
Go in when it rains and stay there until it
clears off; there is plenty of time in Colorado
when the sun is shining, without paddling
around in the wet on our very few rainy days.
Do not worry too much about fresh air. Colo-
rado air is apt to be pretty fresh anyway, and
will contrive to reach you some way. You do
not need to sleep with your window open dur-
ing a blizzard in order to get air.

By following these few simple directions
the confirmed invalid, who is going to die pretty
soon in any case, as sure as shooting, may live
comfortably here, perhaps, longer than in any
other climate; but the man with one lung
should not go on a round-up, nor ride broncho
horses, nor run foot races, nor climb high moun-

122 COLONIAL DAYS.

tains, nor play base ball. He ought to take
moderate exercise in pleasant weather, and
take it easy, and stay in the house when the
wind blows or when it occasionally snows or
rains. He should take the advice named on
the California saloonkeeper's sign; it read as
follows :

"Make yourself comfortable and enjoy yourself
while you are alive; for you'll be a long time dead."

THE LATE N. C. MEEKER. 123

OHAPTEE XVI.

THE LATE N. 0. MEEKER.

The realization of our fondest dreams per-
mits us but the merest sip of the cup of antici-
pated bliss. Our mightiest efforts are wasted
to ourselves.

The discoverer of a new world, now peo-
pled by millions of the human race from every
civilized land of the old and destined to de-
velop all that is possible in the growth of man,
died in disgrace, discredited by court and coun-
tryman at home, and the new land which his
genius had divined and his restless energy and
undying zeal had revealed to his fellows, bears
for all time the name of another.

The composer of the one universally be-
loved of the domestic songs of men died at last
in a foreign land. And he has recorded of his
wanderings on other shores that, walking alone
and discouraged in the streets of the gayest
capitals of Europe by night, he had listened to
the strains of "Home, Sweet Home,'' floated to
him from the open windows of grand mansions
and gilded saloons and uttered from joyous
throats, in every continental tongue, while

124' COLONIAL DAYS.

himself had neither fortune nor home of his
own.

Moses, the leader of his people through
the wilderness, perished on the borders of the
promised land and never entered in.

Virtue is its own reward and the records
tell no other.

These are the inevitable conclusions of ob-
serving, thinking minds, and to all who are
accustomed to read, to reason and reflect it
need not, therefore, appear as a singular se-
quel of the Colonial movement which centered
in Greeley, that not one of the leading spirits
of the organization reaped pecuniary profits
from the enterprise. Such, indeed, were the
results, and even of those who became promi-
nent through after-management of affairs, few
added materially to their worldly possessions
through connection with the Colony.

Mr. Pabor, our first Colonial secretary, was
said to have come here comparatively well-to-
do in the world, but he severed his connection
with us a poor man, and whatever he may pos-
sess at this time is due entirely to after-effort
elsewhere. General Cameron only possessed,
it was understood, a moderate amount of this
world's goods when he arrived, and it is well
known that he took away with him, when he
finally left us, less than he brought.

THE LATE N. C. MEEKER. 125

Mr. West had a snug little fortune when he
came here and for a time he seemed to in-
crease it, but a too sanguine faith in the new
country led him to invest liberally and the de-
pression of values soon following swept his
accumulations away.

Mr. Meeker had from years of patient toil
in his profession saved, as near as I have been
able to ascertain, about $15,000. But the re-
sult is, to our own people at least, well known.
His means were very soon swallowed in the
inevitable expenses incidental to moving and
settling in a new country and in establishing
the Greeley Tribune, which for several years
after did not pay expenses. As a result, he
soon became seriously involved, and the fatal
appointment to the agency of the Ute Indians
at White river, brought about through the so-
licitations of influential friends, was only
sought and accepted b}^ Mr. Meeker, as he him-
self told me shortly before the massacre, be-
cause the general depression in the business
of his profession, about that time, had tem-
porarily thrown him out of regular employ-
ment, and it had seemed to him that there was
really nothing else he could do to save his
home and the little property he had left.

Mr. Meeker made a number of serious mis-
takes in pecuniary matters, which he told me
afterward, he could then clearly see, but which

126 COLONIAL DAYS.

he said were perfectly consistent with certain
principles he had imbibed in his earlier years
and entirely in accordance with what he
thought was right and proper in his position
as president of the Colony. He remarked that
he built a house, which at the time was a sort
of an experiment and which cost him enor-
mously in proportion to its real worth, because
labor was then so high and building material
so dear. But he said that at the time he did
so it seemed absolutely essential that some
one of the leaders of the enterprise should
build something in the way of a home dwell-
ing which would show f^ith in the country
and an intention to make the place the home
they were recommending to others.

Then, too, he said he committed another
serious error in neglecting to get hold of a
good-sized tract of farming land. This, he
said, was attributable, in a great measure, to a
theory he had long held, that no man should
own land which he did not intend to use.

"I was," said he, "consistently opposed to
ownership of large bodies of land for specu-
lative purposes, and as I had no intention of
engaging in general agriculture, as a means
of supporting myself and family, I contented
myself with the small tract of land where I
now reside." Then he went on to say that
this was a mistake and an error in judgment,

THE LATE N. C. MEEKER. 127

and that there was really no good reason why
he should not have profited with the rest of us
in the rise of prices in land, to which we had
all in common contributed by our labors.

' Mr. Meeker had for so many years previous
to his participation in the Colonial movement
been engaged in the newspaper business that
it was perfectly natural he should look to the
founding of a paper here, as his legitimate
part in the labors of the community. But he
underestimated the difficulties of establishing
a local journal in a small place, where the com-
petition is almost always out of all proportion
to the patronage, and it is not at all strange
that the paper was a bill of constant expense
for many years.

It is well known to all who are familiar
with early Colonial affairs that Mr. Meeker
was ambitious of political honors. In particu-
lar he aspired to represent the community he
had been so largely instrumental in bringing
together, in our general assembly. To aid him
in this pardonable and laudable ambition he
possessed at all times the persistent and de-
voted support of those who knew him best. But
Mr. Meeker was perhaps of all men the far-
thest from the possession of the arts of the
mere politician, and he always failed. Long
familiarity with books and a confirmed habit
of mental preoccupation acquired for him an

128 COLONIAL DAYS.

air of reserve and an impatience of all idle and
trifling conversation, so conducive to famil-
iarity with the crowd, on which the profes-
sional politician depends for his support, that
shut him off from contact with a majority of his
fellows. Too proud to plead his own claims to
public honor and distinction, too busy to daw-
dle, too serious to jest, too conscientious to flat-
ter, too honest to deceive, he had, too, a blunt,
direct way of approaching a subject or a man,
which tended, sadly enough, to repel strangers,
to embitter foes and too often to provoke the
best of friends. But underneath the apparently
cold exterior, only occasionally lighted by a
sly twinkle in his gray eye, or slightly modified
by the habitual, half pitiful, half cynical smile
on his grave countenance, there beat a warm
heart, always in accord with the best interests
of the people and capable without effort of
sacrificing personal ends for the public good.
Had we possessed the sound, discriminating
common sense to have humored his reasonable
hopes, he might possibly sometimes have erred
in judgment, but w^e would have known him to
have been absolutely devoid of selfish motive,
and we may feel sure that in honoring him we
should, even in a greater degree, have done
honor to ourselves.

By many of Mr. Meeker^s acquaintances
and friends he was considered in a measure im-

THE LATE N. C. MEEKER. 129

practicable and visionary in his views of men
and things in every-day life, but this was
largely owing to the fact that his vision was
adapted to a long range in its scope and made
him sometimes oblivious of smaller objects at
his feet. In all the larger and more important
transactions of life he possessed unusual sa-
gacity and foresight. He repeatedly prophe-
sied a railroad up the Platte and Poudre rivers
within ten years of the settlement of Greeley,
and I remember that the prediction at the time
seemed to me, and many others, extremely im-
probable of fulfillment; if ever, certainly not
in our time. But it has been years and years
since the predicted roads were constructed and
in steady operation.

At a time when the prospects in and around
Greeley were none of the brightest, a friend
in New York, entrusted him with a few hun-
dred dollars to invest for him, and Mr. Meeker
promptly bought the side hill above No. 3,
just south of town. To a large share of those
having knowledge of the transaction at the
time it seemed an act of stupendous folly.
Making some little pretentions to practical
knowledge of land values myself, I went to
Mr. Meeker, with whom I was from the first
on unusual terms of intimacy, if, as a matter
of fact, anyone can be said to have ever been
intimate with him, and I asked what in the

130 COLONIAL DAYS.

name of common sense induced him to throw
away good money for himself or for anyone
else on such a worthless piece of property;
but instead of being angry with me he merely
replied, with cheerful confidence, that the land
would be all under ditches in a few years at
most, and then its close proximity to Greeley
would render it very valuable. I remember
quite distinctly that I thought a fool back in
New York had very appropriately parted with
his money, and I had the opportunity a few
years later to tell the party of my first impres-
sions, when he came out to look at his land,
just then brought under the Greeley and Love-
land canal, and now become worth probably
twenty times its original cost.

When Mr. Greeley issued his famous call
for the organization of the Colony, it must have
been read by at least half a million people,
who were able, if willing, to embark in the en-
terprise. But to 499,000 of these it undoubtedly
appeared a visionary, foolhardy undertaking, in
which all who invested would suffer great pri-
vations and lose their money. Some six hun-
dred restless, enthusiastic cranks judged the
scheme feasible and practicable, put their
money in it and succeeded, and now people
who in 1870 would have refused the town site
at |1,000 have confidence enough in the struc-
ture our faith has reared to put up |20,000

THE LATE N. C. MEEKER. 131

blocks on fifty-foot lots. Such is the innate,
far-reaching shrewdness of men in their esti-
mate of the future and is probabilities.

Mr. Meeker's right to the credit of being the
founder and originator of the Colony has some-
times been called in question, and particularly
since he is dead and unable to speak for him-
self. It has been said that Mr. Greeley thought
himself entitled to the credit, and also that John
Russell Young thought it properly belonged
to him. There is, however, very little reason
to believe that either of these persons ever
made direct claim to the credit, and it is of the
least consequence in the world if they did.
The plain and obvious facts in the case are
neither more nor less than these: Mr. Gree-
ley, it is true, was widely known to the indus-
trial classes in all the states and had taught
the theory of co-operation in labor in his writ-
ings for more than a quarter of a century in
the columns of his journal; in particular, he
urged young men to come West and leave the
competition of the crowded cities. But there
was not for months and years previous to Mr.
Meeker's call any hint that he had a definite,
a special or any immediate project in view
looking to Colonial settlement.

Mr. Meeker was widely known as a corre-
spondent of rural affairs, and it is not prob-
able that there was at that time a man in all

132 COLONIAL DAYS.

the ranks of journalism whose opinion as to
the merits or demerits of any section of the
country, in any state in the union, would have
possessed the weight of that of N. C. Meeker.

John Russell Young was at that time about
as well known to the after-members of the
Colony as was the czar of Eussia. Those of
us who knew him at all knew him as a mere
literary man, whose opinion of the practica-
bility of the Colonial scheme, had we known
that he had anything to do with originating
the idea, would have possessed about as much
weight, with most of us, as would the views
of a chairman of a precinct or ward committee
in any densely-populated city. As a matter
of fact, it was not known to one in a hundred
of us that he had anything to do with the or-
ganization of the Colony whatever. The ma-
jority of us knew — and if there was more than
this to know, events proved the knowledge
unnecessary to the success of the enterprise,
and it is certainly irrelevant now — that Mr.
Meeker issued the call, signed his name to it,
said, "/ wish to unite with others,'^ etc., in-
stead of saying ''we,^^ and that there were no
other names associated with him in the call,
or subscribed beneath it.

It is an old and long-recognized theory of
operations in peace and war that the credit
belongs where responsibility rests. Mr.

THE LATE N. C. MEEKER. 133

Meeker issued that call, signed it and was
solely responsible for it, and it is useless and
futile to go behind these facts. We might just
as well question Sherman's credit for the fam-
ous march to the seas, or Grant's for the battle
of Appomattox, as to call in question Mr.
Meeker's title to the credit for the Colonial
scheme. Of course, it was a great aid in se-
curing confidence, that Mr. Greeley indorsed
the organization; of course there were others
who helped. But what Mr. Greeley or Mr.
Young might have thought, said or advised in
the matter, in talks with Mr. Meeker, either
before or after the fact, cuts the smallest pos-
sible figure now, when we are discussing the
chief credit; so let us have no more nonsense
about that. Honor to all to whom honor is
due and to N. C. MEEKER, THE FOUNDER
OF UNION COLONY.

A few weeks previous to the fatal event
which terminated the lives of Mr. Meeker and
his associates at the agency, he paid a hurried
visit to Greeley on business connected with
his office and the Indians, and while here, al-
though he had little time to spare, he expressed
a wish to go out into the country under canal
No. 2 and take a look at the farms and the
improvements which had been going on in his
absence. We procured a team and went out
together. The renewed and steady growth of

134 COLONIAL DAYS.

the community which has been marked and
rapid ever since that time, had already set in,
and changes for the better were visible every-
where. The hardships of the first years of
settlement had been endured and survived, the
dreaded grasshopper, whose devastating visits
from '72 to '76 had discouraged the stoutest
hearts among us, no longer ravaged our fields.
The trees had seemingly — to Mr. Meeker — more
than doubled in size, in the short period he had
been gone. Little streams of water glistening
in the sunshine fell with pleasant murmuring
sound from dams and flumes, and rippled under
bridges as we passed them on the way. Broad
fields of waving graia lined the roadside and
plots of alfalfa, even then becoming common,
dotted the landscape with spots of charming
emerald green. Country and town were al-
ready beginning to assume the air of perma-
nent and increasing prosperity. Mr. Meeker
was delighted. During the morning he had
been recounting to me the financial difficulties
under which he had been laboring; the diffi-
culties to which allusion has already been
made, and which had enveloped him previous
to his appointment to the agency at White
river, and the increasing troubles he was meet-
ing in the management of the Indians, and the
dark shadow of impending disaster to him-
self and family had been hanging gloomily

THE LATE N. C. MEEKER. 135

over his brooding spirits. Now, however, his
eye brightened with the unfolding of the mag-
nificent view before us, and he expressed sur-
prise and pleasure at everything he saw. As
we neared the bluff overlooking the town, and
the housetops and spires again burst upon our
view above the dense foliage of the trees, he
said : "After all. Max, although the enterprise
yielded me nothing in return, in a worldly
sense, yet I am proud to have been the leader
in such a movement; it will be counted an
honor to every man who took part in the set-
tlement of Greeley. I am more than compen-
sated in the grand success of the undertaking
itself and I have nothing to regret.''

136 COLONIAL DAYS.

CHAPTER XVII.

PROPHECY AND FULFILLMENT — 1870 AND 1900

"Individuals may rise and fall — may live or
die — property may be lost or gained; but the colony
as a whole will prosper, and the spot on which we
labor shall, so long as the world stands, be the center
of intelligence and activity. Great social reforms
leading to the elevation of mankind move as if di-
rected by destiny. It is the vast future more than
the brief present, that is to be benefited; hence sym-
pathies and feelings are of little moment, and the
cause moves on as if animated by a cold life of its
own.'' — First issue Greeley Tribune, November 16,
1870.

Prophetic vision. It was Mr. Meeker who
made it. The Colony had been the dream of
years and he had staked everything on the
dream. "May live or die;" he died. "Property
may be lost or gained ;" he lost. "But the Col-
ony, as a whole, will prosper;" it did. The
movement was indeed of larger import than
any man's life; of greater consequence than any
man's fortune; and thus, "the cause moved on."

When the locating committee selected the
present cite of Greeley for the center of the
Colonial enterprise in the spring of 1870, Weld

PROPHECY AND FULFILLMENT — 1870 AND 1900. 137

county had an area of 10,000 square miles and
a population of 1,316, according to the census
report. It has since that day been divided and
subdivided, until out of its original territory
there have been carved five additional coun-
ties, each of which contained in 1890 a greater
population than Weld county had in 1870.
Meantime v^e had increased our own popula-
tion to 12,000 in 1890 and, according to the cen-
sus of 1900, have now a population of 16,808.

Space will not permit a review in detail
of each step in the wonderful progress made
since that early day; of the long struggle we
had over the water supply, after we had learned
how to use the water; of the little then known
concerning the rights of prior appropriation,
until our experience and our demands formu-
lated the theory into Colorado law, which now,
through multitudinous court decisions, gov-
erns the water distribution; how little was
known of scientific irrigation, until we had at-
tained it and became a model for other sec-
tions; how little was known of capacity, meas-
urement or the duty of water, until we made
the tests and others accepted our conclusions.
All these things long since came to pass and
have made us famous everywhere. Hundreds
of miles of laterals now link together the bar-
ren ridges and valleys of 1870, in one continu-
ous cultivated garden. In their season fields

138 COLONIAL DAYS.

of emerald green of almost unlimited extent
gladden the eye from every elevation. Great
squares of wheat and oats and alfalfa delight
the passerby on every thoroughfare, and fields
of potatoes of astonishing size, with rows
which fade from the vision in the distance, are
seen on every hand. The horned toad, the
prairie dog and the owl have retired to the sand
hill and the plain beyond. The wolf only yelps
at us from a distance as we pass him by, and
the robin and the dove build nests in our
groves. Yes, Mr. Meeker's dream has been
realized, although he did not live to see it;
"And the cause" still "moves on." We found
this place a desert and we have made it a de-
lightful land. Whoever permanently resides
here, if temperate and industrious, may bask
in fortune's smile. Whoever leaves the place,
for w^hatever reason, of choice or necessity,
sighs to return. Whoever participated in that
movement, resulting in this achievement, may
forever feel proud of his part.

Thirty years — just think of it! How short
the interval seems since we gathered here, from
almost everywhere, to try the experiment and
help Father Meeker to realize his dream. We
can span the gap between 1870 and now with
a single quickened thought, and it "seems to
us but yesterday" since we arrived on the bar-
ren plain where Greeley now stands. And yet,

PROPHECY AND FULFILLMENT — 1870 AND 1900. 139

if we indulge in prolonged retrospect it seems
an age; and, in fact, by the simplest of calcula-
tions we find that we have been here nearly an
average lifetime. We came here, a majority of
us, young men and women, just entering upon
the great sea of life, and children were born to
us and have been reared to maturity and are
married and have children of their own. The
boy born in 1870 and later, has gone from under
the parental roof and is at the head of a new
and "native'' colony. The sire of Colonial days
has become the grandsire and the infant daugh-
ter, whose mother rocked the cradle and sang
her to sleep and dreams, now in turn rocks the
cradle and sings for the grandchild.

Oh, how we toiled in those early days. How
we delved and dug and struggled and wrestled
with the adverse circumstances which for years
environed the little settlement here. How we
skurried along the ditches and hurried back and
forth at our labors, trying to wring subsistence
from a long-dormant and reluctant soil. And
we thought by day and dreamed by night only of
the future. The past was precious, but we had
left it behind. The present was as nothing, for
we discounted it for a better day beyond. Ah,
how temporary we all regarded the arrange-
ments we were making in those early days; for
very few of us imagined we should make this
a permanent home. By and by, when we had

140 COLONIAL DAYS.

accumulated a fortune and had the leisure to
sit down and enjoy life, we would go back to the
dear old land and take our places there, just as
though we had never left it. But, bless our
innocent souls, we builded better than we
knew, and here we are to-day, after a little in-
terval of pretty nearly a third of a century, at
last regarding the country we improved and
the city we builded as our permanent abiding
place. Yes, here we are and here let us,
those who are left, remain in the peaceable
possession and enjoyment of the fruits of our
labors; pleasant homes, rich farms, good so-
ciety and good schools, until the vicissitudes of
earthly existence or the infirmities of age shall
call each of us in turn to join Meeker and Cam-
eron and Flower in another land beyond.

"Justusa little sunshine; just a little rain;
Just a little happiness; just a little pain;
Just a little poverty; just a little gold;
And the great eventful tale of life is told."

BACK TO THE OLD PLACE. 141

CHAPTER XVIII.

BACK TO THE OLD PLACE.

Once in every faithful Mussulman's life-
time, it is said, he must make a pilgrimage to
Mecca; across the river, the ba}^, the seas, the
ocean, the mountain, the valley, the plain, to
worship at the tomb of the departed saint.
Once, too, before he departs this earth, will
every pilgrim who has wandered across the
deserts to these western lands, turn his face
eastward, and, if possible, visit the home of his
youth and the familiar scenes of his childhood;
the Mecca ncA^er to be forgotten in the rest-
less nights and the toilsome days since he left
it; some sentimental shrine, in niche or nook, on
hillside or by brookside, or in wooded dell, kept
green in the memory through long and event-
ful years.

Such a Mecca had I in the old homestead
at Baraboo, Wisconsin, down near the "lit-
tle red school house,'' in the old Kimball-
Clark-Jeffry-Crawford neighborhood of long
ago; and such a shrine I knew, up among
the bluffs of the little brook, along whose
banks and amid its tangled tag alders, wil-
lows and poplars, which lined its sides, the

142 COLONIAL DAYS.

boys of that early time wandered bare-footed
and hunted squirrels, pheasants and rabbits.
There were at first Marion Crawford and my-
self and Newton Clark below for comrades, but
only Marion and myself, being near neighbors,
for bosom companions. There was Zoath Bai-
ley of the "bluff,'' also, and other boys up there
among the neighbors of that region, at, seem-
ingly, an immense distance through the tim-
ber; the Protheros, the Brewsters, shadowy be-
ings to our youthful imaginations, who at in-
tervals of time decended into the valley with
oxen and wagons, going to the "county seat."
Afterward came the Bakers, the Glovers, the
Paines and the Kimballs, but I am dwelling
with the earlier settlers now, from '52 to '55,
the period of the old log school house, before
the "little red school house" came into being.
And so I had gone back after an absence of
thirty years, to visit my Mecca and to pay my
devotion at my shrine in the hills. I thought
to go back during the Centennial at Philadel-
phia, but a hail storm took forty acres of wheat
for me and hope was deferred. I made sure,
long in advance, that I would go back during
the Columbian exposition at Chicago, but, lo,
the panic of '93 set in, the banks closed their
doors and rain stared me in the face, along with
hundreds of thousands of others; and with an
empty purse and a sick heart I gave up the

BACK TO THE OLD PLACE. 143

visit once more. But at last the suspense was
over, sacrifices made, results summed up, sit-
uation discussed between myself and wife and
the pilgrimage begun.

We had visited the old homesteads together,
but I had reserved the shrine for a lonely walk
by myself on another occasion. Then I bor-
rowed a horse and buggy from my cousin
Emma and drove slowly up the creek beyond
the old Asa Wood place; the little farm that
I had purchased of my uncle after the close
of the war, and where my wife and I went to
housekeeping in the spring of 1866. Hills all
there, looking very natural, although the heavy
timber that once covered their sides is now
largely gone. Brook shrunken to insignifi-
cance, that in all the time we lived there we
had no suspicion could ever for a day go dry.
Then I reached the lime kiln, told Mr. Glover
that I used to live in that neighborhood a small
matter of thirty years before, and that I had a
little pilgrimage to make, before I died, up
among the hills there, and how far could I go
up with a horse and buggy? Not far, he said,
on account of the fences crossing the narrow
valley, but he kindly offered to show me the
way. No, I thanked him, there was a spot up
there that I wanted to see, a break-way in the
hills and bluffs bordering the creek bed, but I
thought I could find it without difficulty alone.

144 COLONIAL DAYS.

He understood me; lie said that he, too, had
made a pilgrimage, a few years since, ^^back to
the old place," and I passed on. Presently I
tied my horse and, proceeding on foot, soon
reached the spot. An overhanging bank had
at one time caved down into the brook bed be-
low and the surplus dirt being washed away,
left what us boys called a ^^dug way," on the
steep sides of which, with its loose shale and
sliding sand and soil nothing had ever after-
ward grown. Hunting up in the hills there,
along in 1855, Marion and myself had carved,
or pecked, our initials in two smooth-faced
rocks, and setting them against an oak tree
just at the top of this break in the bluff or
bank by the brookside, we left them there.
Returning to the spot in 18G0, after my first
trip to the Rocky mountains, they were still
in position. Marion was with me; we were
yet boys, with the glamour of youth and senti-
ment hovering over every thought and action
of our lives. It was to be our shrine hence-
forth; sacred to each in memory of the other,
while life might last. For we, who had been
inseparable in childhood, were going forth to
war.

I revisited the scene again when I returned
in 1865. The stones had fallen, but I replaced
them. Time had already dimmed the initials;
but I recut them. Marion was dead, and I was

BACK TO THE OLD PLACE. 145

alone! The shrine was now in my keeping and
doubly precious in memories of the past.

I moved away from Baraboo in the fall of
'67, but before leaving for nearly a lifetime the
hills and hollows of my childhood days, I vis-
ited once more in silence my shrine in the
woods and placed in position for the last time
the two little tablets.

And now, after an absence of thirty years,
I was standing again upon the brink of the
cleft. The tablets were gone. They might have
slidden to the cliff base and become buried in
the loose soil and gravel there. I dug amongst
it, but found them not. They might have dis-
solved in the flight of years, in the drying
winds and the beating rains. They might have
long since been burned in the lime kilns and
mingled in the plaster of a dozen different
homes :

"Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole, to keep the wind away."

Ho, ye restless mortals, who in after-years
may invade this sequestered nook; tread lightly
here upon a sacred soil. Here youth and friend-
ship plighted troth and this is hallowed
ground !

Duty to memory and sentiment had been
discharged ; the hope of years had been accom-
plished; I had worshipped in silence at the

146 COLONIAL DAYS.

shrine of an early devotion and now I would
depart in peace. I descended to the bed of the
little stream below, whose busy murmur had
once perpetually fallen upon delighted ears;
but only limpid pools dripped noiselessly from
one to the other, through the stones in the
bottom of its channel. The birds that once
sang in every bush and bramble, as I wandered
through its glades, were absent, or silent. The
pheasant, whose muffled wing note then
boomed from among the fallen timber, was
neither heard nor seen. But the sound of the
wind, sighing in tag alders and the poplars,
fell upon a familiar ear and unseen spirits
whispered of other days. I thought of my par-
ents, who used to live down the valley there,
near by, my father then dead, my mother still
living, but since passed away; of Uncle Robert
and Aunt Annis, the father and mother of
Marion, gone to join the son who preceded
them. Of old Uncle Dickey Clark, so long since
passed from among the living that few indeed
of the people now there will remember him.
Of Tom Clark, Newton's father, and Aunt
Delilah, his mother. Of the brisk and ener-
getic Ben Jeffries of that olden time, now also
gone, and his good wife. Aunt Martha, still
alive. Of good, old Mother Bailey of the bluffs,
who knew every child, as if her own, within

I

BACK TO THE OLD PLACE. 147

miles and miles of her door on the top of the
hill. Of the elder Kimballs, both gone to their
final rest; and of Deacon and Mother Baker
and their son Abner, my comrade in war and
my companion Colonist in 1870, all lying now,
side by side, in the cemetery at Fort Morgan,
their western home of later years. Then bands
of spectral boys and troops of phantom girls,
who once made those sylvan abodes ring with
song and roar with laughter, passed in weird
procession before my retrospective vision:
Abner and Edwin, Lyman and Frank, Guss and
Channcy, Wilburn and Ralph, Lewis and Al-
bert and Zoath, Arthur and Edgar and Horace
and Charlie, Demarius and Belle, Kitty and
Libbie, Millie and Hatty, Alice and Celestia —
spectral youths and phantoms, all, because
long since to men and women grown or gone
beyond the silent river.

"All are scattered now, and fled;

Some are married, some are dead.
And when I ask with throbs of pain,

When shall they all meet again?
The horologue of eternity

Sayeth this, incessantly,

Forever! Never! Never! Forever!"

Then, getting over the fence and crawling
up into my buggy, I turned once more to the
hills, the hollows and ravines of my youth, with

148 COLONIAL DAYS.

their countless associations of other days, and,
wafted to the breeze, gently floating down to
me from the valley above, a silent adieu :

Farewell, thou peaceful scene!

Farewell, enchanting vale.
Farewell! Farewell!! Along

And last farewell!!!

THE END.

no2

.y.-,!?- BERKELEY LIBRARIES