My days in Colorado are drawing rapidly to an end. The term of the summer holiday which I have allowed myself is nearly over; yet while I have every reason to be satisfied with what has been seen and done in a brief space of time, I find myself regretting, at the close, that I am not able to make my survey of the territory more complete.

The change from camp-life in the mountains to the comparative luxury of a hotel in Denver, was so very agreeable that for two days I did little else than enjoy it, and complete my lost knowledge of the world’s doings, up to the point of comprehending the telegrams of national and foreign news. The weather was almost insupportably hot during the day — 98° in the shade — and the better part of one’s life was expended from eight o’clock in the morning until sunset, in a vain effort to be cool. Every afternoon a lurid mass of clouds gathered along the sunny range, distant thunders echoed among the peaks, lightnings dashed feebly through the shadows, and the storm dissolved again. We were just near enough to gasp in its sultriness, without catching a drop of its refreshment.

Before setting out on my mountain trip, I had made an engagement to visit the Boulder Valley, twenty-five miles to the north of Denver. Yesterday was the appointed day, and when the morning came with a burning, breathless heat, I lamented, — for a moment, only, — the necessity of the journey. It was the usual shudder before the plunge. My faithful pony had been sent back to his pastures in the Middle Park, and I took a saddle-horse at five dollars per day, at a livery-stable. I had the owner’s word that he was a good animal; but the result proved, for the hundredth time, a truth which I long ago discovered —that all men who have much to do with horses become demoralized. Mr. Thomas, of the " Chicago Tribune," had agreed to accompany me, so that I was sure, at least, of cheerful society on the way.

We rode out of Denver by the Salt Lake stage road, which runs northward, parallel with the mountains, for near a hundred miles. In the morning air, the snowy peaks, from Pike’s to far beyond Long’s, were free from clouds, and I was struck with the great diminution of snow upon their sides, since I first saw them. At the same rate of melting they will be almost entirely bare in another month. I doubt whether the line of perpetual snow can here be placed lower than thirteen thousand feet: in the Alps it is not more than eight thousand. Their forms were no less imposing, after seeing the grand landscapes of the Parks, and there was a constant refreshment in turning from the heated shimmer of the Plains to the sight of their gorges in cool shadow, the dark, cloudy patches of their pine forests, and even the bare outlines of their rocky pinnacles, suggesting tempered sunshine and the breezes of the upper sky.

In four miles we reached Clear Creek, at a point above Captain Sopris’s ranche. The stream was so swollen by the melting snows, that half the bottom was overflowed, and we rode for a furlong in water up to the horses’ bellies. Irrigation seemed unnecessary; but the cultivated land is a mile or more in breadth, and we found the outer ditches full. The wheat is in head, and finer crops I never saw, except in California. We passed no field which will produce less than thirty bushels to the acre. It is now considered secure beyond damage from smut or grasshoppers. The sight of such splendid and bounteous agriculture, here, in the very heart of the continent, is inexpressibly cheering.

The roads leading into Denver from the east, and out of it toward the west, north, and south, now begin to be populous with the usual summer emigration. A considerable number of wagons bring settlers to the Territory — though less than there would be, were its climate and resources generally understood; large freight trains are on their way to Salt Lake (which I hear has become an important business centre, with a population of twenty-five thousand): and many emigrants, bound for Montana and Idaho, have been obliged to make a detour of two hundred miles, through Denver, in order to get over the swollen Platte. One meets, every day, the same variety of characters —the lazy, shiftless emigrant, always trying new countries and prospering in none; the sharp, keen, enterprising emigrant, who would do fairly anywhere, and will rise very rapidly here; the shabby-genteel adventurer, on the lookout for chances of speculation or office; and the brutal, ignorant adventurer, who, some morning, will leave the country "up a tree." The "Rocky Mountain News" will then chronicle the fact in a paragraph headed: "And he went."

The white wagon-covers of some of these parties contribute to the popular literature of the Plains. Many of them are inscribed with the emigrant’s name, home, and destination, "accompanied" (as the applicants for autographs say) "with a sentiment." I noticed one which was simply entitled "The Sensible Child." Another had this mysterious sentence, which I will not undertake to explain: Cold Cuts and Pickled Eel’s Feet." "The Red Bull," and "Mind Your Business," were equally suggestive; but the most thrilling wagon-cover was that which met our eyes on crossing the Platte Bridge, and whereon we read: " Hell-Roaring Bill, from Bitter Creek!" In the shade of the cover, between the wheels, Hell-Roaring Bill himself was resting. He looked upon us with a mild, sleepy eye; his face and breast were dyed by the sun to almost the exact color of his hair; his general appearance was peculiar, but not alarming. When we returned this morning he had departed, and, if all they say of Bitter Creek be true, I think he has done well in changing his residence.

After leaving the wheat fields of Clear Creek, we rose again to the "second bottoms," or rolling table-land (this sounds like a bull, but it describes the thing), where the crimson and golden blossoms of the cactus burned in the intense sunshine, all over the scorched, cracked soil. Thus we rode over the tawny, treeless swells, for seven or eight miles, in a suffocating heat. We then left the stage road, and took a trail leading to the iron and coal mines of Belmont, at the base of the mountains. The thunder-storm was already collecting in the southward, and drew toward us, following the range and blotting out peak after peak in its course. Presently the clear, cool shadows crept down from the upper heights, quenching the fiery red glare of the masses of rock, two thousand feet in height, before us; then it touched the Plains, crept nearer to us, and the sting of the sun was withdrawn.

The local limits of these storms was very strikingly marked. At the distance of a few miles from the mountains the clouds ceased to spread. Though behind us they gloomed like night, and under their grand, majestic arch we looked into distant floods of rain and lightning, the eastern half of the sky remained cloudless, and the Plains, for leagues away, smouldered in fiercest heat. The rain, also, seemed to be confined to a second limit, inside the line of cloud. The great irregular pyramid of Long’s Peak, full in front of us, became a shadow on the air; the vast nearer piles of red rock were silvered with slanting sheets, and we expected, every moment, to feel the drops. But the sheets moved on, northward, as if with half-spread wings: we only touched their outer edge, on reaching Belmont, and that, because we rode toward them.

This is a charming little valley, at the base of the mountains. The outcropping of limestone, and the black piles at the mouths of coal drifts indicated our approach to it. On dropping into a little winding hollow, we soon saw the massive smelting furnace surrounded by clustered cabins. Mr. Marshall, the proprietor, received us at the door of his residence, and, after dinner, piloted us to the furnace and mines. There are eleven veins of coal, varying from four to twelve feet in thickness, in the space of half a mile; iron ore of a richness of fifty per cent. just beyond it, and the best limestone, in almost inexhaustible quantities. Mr. Marshall, however, has only experimented with the native ores sufficiently to establish their value. He finds it more profitable to buy up abandoned machinery at a trifling cost, and recast it. The furnace is not only substantially but handsomely built, and has thus far done a thriving and successful business for its owner.

Our inspection of the place was necessarily hurried, as I had an engagement for the evening at the new town of Valmont, some eight or ten miles down the Boulder Valley. I looked longingly toward the magnificent gorge by which the South Boulder issues from the mountains, and the sheltered semi-basin beyond, where we saw the town of Boulder above the cotton-woods; but there was not time (without better horses) to extend our journey so far. The extent and beauty of the cultivated land watered by the two streams, was a new surprise. For miles farm followed farm in uninterrupted succession, the breadths of wheat, black-green in its richness, or overrun with a yellowing gleam, dotted with houses and clumps of trees, like some fenceless harvest-plain of Europe! A spur of softly-tinted hills in the north, the solitary, rock-crowned hill of Valmont in the east, the snows of Long’s Peak to the northwest — these were the features enframing the lovely valley. Here I saw again how much Civilization improves Nature.

We were full two hours in reaching Valmont, on account of the very independent habits of the Colorado farmers. The second bottoms being devoted to grazing purposes, they have found it necessary to fence the outer edge of the farm land; and, in so doing, they cut off the road with the most utter disregard of the public. If there are laws in relation to roads, they seem to be a dead letter. That which should be the first business of a territorial government, is left to a time when it can only be regulated by a great deal of trouble and expense. Our National Government acts in the most niggardly manner toward its incipient States. There should be at least a million of dollars annually spent in each Territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific, on roads and bridges.

In spite of the tedious zigzags we were forced to make, the views of the broad, prosperous, and thickly-settled Boulder region, made our ride very enjoyable. On approaching the isolated hill which had been pointed out to us as indicating the position of Valmont, we were surprised to find no sign of a village. The dark wheat-plains swept up to its base, masses of rock looked down from its summit, and the rosy ridges toward St. Vrains lay beyond. We turned a corner where the fields had almost forced the road off the level, and there stood perhaps a dozen new cabins, and a few scattering cotton-woods. But of these cabins one was a store, one a printing-office, and one a Presbyterian church. So it was Valmont.

We found comfortable quarters at the house of Mr. Jones, a farmer, who has been on the spot six or seven years, and has made himself a pleasant home. After supper, the other farmers began to arrive from up and down the stream, and even from St. Vrains — shrewd, intelligent men, every one of them, and with an air of health and vigor which speaks well for the climate. I would have much preferred talking with them all the evening to lecturing in the church. I wondered, on arriving, where an audience was to come from, and was not a little astonished to find more than a hundred persons gathered together. What I had looked upon as a task became a pleasure, and the evening I spent at Valmont was one of my pleasantest in Colorado.

The people informed me that the farming on the St. Vrains is fully equal to what I saw on the Boulder — that the valleys of the Big and Little Thompson, and even of the Cache-la-Poudre, are settled and cultivated, and will this year produce splendid crops. The line of settlement is thus not only creeping northward and southward from Denver, but, also, following the tributaries of the Platte, it advances eastward to meet the great tide approaching it. I verily believe that it will not be more than two or three years before there is a continuous belt of settlement —probably two of them — from the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains.

I was introduced to one of the original eight squatters in Boulder Valley. He tells a singular story of their experience with the Indians, when they first settled here, in 1859. Where the town of Boulder now is, was one of the favorite camping-grounds of the former. They not only warned the intruders away, but threatened to exterminate them if they remained. The eight men, however, constructed a rude fort, and made preparations to stand a siege. Hostilities commenced and were carried on for some time, when, one day, the besieged noticed signs of commotion in the Indian camp. Toward evening a warrior arrived, demanding a parley. They hesitated for a while, but finally admitted him, whereupon he stated that the medicine-man of the tribe had dreamed, the night before, of stars falling from heaven and a flood from the mountains sweeping away their camp. This he interpreted as a warning that they should leave, and the tribe, therefore, were preparing to depart. The next morning they packed their tents, and after uttering in concert a mighty howl of lamentation, went out on the Plains, and never afterward returned.

We started early this morning, to avoid the terrific midday heats. For our entertainment and that of our horses, at Valmont, we were only asked to pay two dollars and a half each. The farms were lovelier than ever in the fresh morning light, and as we paused on a ridge to take a last look at the place, we pronounced it the prettiest village-site in Colorado. Then came the open, unsheltered, rolling Plains, gathering heat and dryness from hour to hour. Toward noon the inevitable storm crept along the mountains, but we were outside of its shadow, under the burning half of the sky — and long indeed were the last few miles which brought us into Denver. My face still burns with the blistering heat absorbed during the ride; but I rejoice that I have seen Boulder Valley before leaving the Rocky Mountains.  NEXT