McReynolds Robert
Thirty Years on the Frontier

XXIV
IN THE DOME OF THE SKY

There are three ways of reaching the summit of Pike’s Peak – walking, riding a burro, or seated comfortably in one of the coaches of the Cog Road.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon when the car was pulled out of the yards at the foot of the Peak. The strongly-built little engine puffed like a living thing, obedient to the task of drawing its heavy load. The wheels moved rapidly, and we ascended the steepest mountain railroad in the world. It wound about the mountain sides in little curves, climbing, always climbing higher and higher, until we shuddered at the dizzy heights as we looked down into the great yawning chasms thousands of feet below.

The air grew cooler in the deep mountain defiles densely wooded with fir, pine, cedar and quaking asp. A great fire once swept up these gorges and burned away the fir and pine in patches; in their place came the quaking asp, growing here and there in thickets.

Along the slopes and in the dells, wild flowers grew with the luxuriant profusion of a semi-tropical clime. There were columbines and tiger lilies growing at an altitude of ten thousand feet.

Nature has done some queer things in the mighty rocks which stand sentinel guard along the route.

One great boulder is named the Hooded Monk, because of its resemblance to the human head in a monk’s cowl. There is a Gog and Magog. The Sphynx, the Lone Fisherman, and many other images of man, bird and beast, wrought by nature’s hand in stone.

We glided by one of the loveliest glens in all the mountains; it was called Shady Springs. Here the oriole, the raven and the big blue jay of the mountains have builded their nests and take their morning baths in waters clear as crystal from a spring that gushed from fern and moss covered banks.

Farther on to the right a stream plunges in wild, mad swirl of clear waters and dashing from rock to rock in foamy white, forms Echo Falls. An elephant’s head in bass relief was here to be seen wrought in stone.

We rounded Cameron’s Cone and Sheep Mountain and soon began the ascent of the “Big Hill,” which has a rise of 1,300 feet to the mile.

Nearing timber line, the road ahead appears to be almost at an angle of 45 degrees.

Higher and higher; the great chasm below grew almost a mile deeper. On one side there were masses of square rock which looked like they were broken by human hands. Here, far above timber line, a variety of wild flowers blossomed, while among the rocks lived some of the strangest little animals, the whistling marmot, a fur animal about the size of an overgrown cat, and the peka, which has the legs of a rabbit and the head of a mountain rat; there were also minks, weasels, porcupines and mountain rats.

At the summit was where the magnificence of the great panorama burst upon our view. Northward, away down on the bluish haze of the horizon, rose the Arapahoe peaks – Long and Grey’s Peak, with their white summits glistening in the setting sun. Northwest, Mt. Massive and Mt. Sheridan were outlined against the clear blue sky, while the green sward of the famous South Park, a hundred miles distant, lay between. College Range, Mt. Yale, Mt. Princeton, Mt. Ouray and Cavenaugh reared their rugged heads far to the west, while green mountain ranges of lesser note lay half way between them.

Far to the southwest, far as the eye could reach, faintly outlined against the sky, rose the snowy peaks of the Sangre de Christo and Sierra Blanco Mountains on the other side of the grand San Luis Valley.

Looking to the south, were the Spanish Peaks and range of Greenhorn Mountains, and a little to the southeast rose the snow-capped Gloriettas on the borders of New Mexico.

To the east, lay the mighty plains, stretching away to where the blue of the sky blended in coppery tones with the billowy green.

There were dark spots here and there that were dense forests of pine. The cloud banners hung above, in all the gorgeous colors of sunset in crimson, purple and gold.

A dark shadow crept out upon the plain toward the east, like the finger of a mighty giant. It moved rapidly along, covering the yellow sand lines that mark the course of old river beds, and finally, this shadow of Pike’s Peak was covered by the shadows of other mountains lower down, until the plain was shrouded in the sable garb of eventide.

But westward, the gold and crimson of the sky lingered long above the distant peak of Mt. Ouray. The purple haze grew denser, and the silence of the hour was made more solemn by the mountains standing out in dark silhouette as the shadows of the night grew deeper and denser.

At such a time as this, one feels as though he stood upon the boundary of another world, while all about the wide white waste and hush of space, eternity and the infinite were calling to other glories, too great for the understanding of the human mind.

Here, in the very dome of the skies, in this clear air, the bright worlds seem to hover over, while the vault is strewn with stars, like isles of light in the misty sea above our heads. The purity of the heavenly prospect awakens that eternal predisposition to melancholy, which dwells in the depth of the soul, and soon the spectacle absorbs us in a vague and indefinable reverie. It is then that thousands of questions spring up in our mind, and a thousand points of interrogation rise to our sight – the great enigma of creation.

The harvest moon shed her yellow light over the distant plain, and gilded with a phosphorescent light the rocks and crags of the almost bottomless chasm below. The rocks took on fantastic shapes, while distant mountains rose in spectral form.

I sat throughout the night, watching the ever changing panorama, the most wondrous ever spread out to the gaze of man.

The moon and stars were bright above, while far down below storm clouds had formed where within their inky blackness the forked lightning played like so many fiery serpents.

There were thunderous crashes in the wild rocky pit below, where huge rocks were shivered by lightning bolts, while echo, echoing back the thunders of heaven’s artillery, would seem as though a legion of imprisoned Joshuas were reaching upward again for that sun which would stand still no more over the plains of Agalon.

The shades of night grew deeper and then the blackness was driven back from the east by a flush of grey, gradually changing to a deep scarlet tinged with yellow and the sun burst above a dashing sea of clouds. There were purple and crimson waves below rising and falling in mighty billows. A shipless and shoreless ocean whose raging bosom claims no living thing.

An hour more and this purple sea of clouds has drifted on forever from the sight of human eyes.

The summer sun beamed once more upon the vast panorama. Far down upon the green mesa lay Lake Moraine, glistening in the morning light like a molten mass of silver.

Smoke was seen to rise from Denver and Pueblo, both fully sixty miles away. Some smelters in Cripple Creek and Victor could be seen with the naked eye, while the streets of Colorado Springs were but sandy marks like a checkerboard upon the plain.

I descended the peak on foot amid the beauteous scenes of green mountain defiles, where dashing waters sing eternal symphonies amid ferns and flowers, and the song of birds gladden the heart in their sweet echoes from rock to rock.

XXV
WHERE NATURE IS AT HER BEST

If one would view the wondrous surroundings of Manitou, in all their grandeur, let him some bright morning stroll up the long yellow road that winds its serpentine course through Williams Canon. A little brook with waters cold and clear as crystal, dashes along its pebbly bed beside the road, murmuring as it were, a song of regret at leaving its enchanted home on its journey to the sea. The road is known as Temple Drive, named so because many towering rocks look, at first glance, like ruined temples of India or of Egypt along the Nile.

At times the road narrows to barely carriage room between great high cliffs, and again abruptly brings the majestic panorama of the canon into view. High above, among the mountain crags is the Cathedral of St. Peter, like a massive ruin whose cornice, column and frescoed walls had fallen with decay ages past. A little farther and the Amphitheatre rises against the cliffs in hues of brown and yellow, with brighter streaks of golden ochre here and there, which fairly gleam and glisten in the morning sun. High above and in the background on either side are hills of emerald green, studded with cedar and pine, and dotted with flowers of gorgeous color and of form, found elsewhere only in Alpine lands. There are towering rocks that rise a thousand feet above the road, which resemble the ruins of a Moorish citadel. There are towers, mosques and temples, with turrets and battlements, needing only the white-robed figure of the Arab in turban to make one fancy himself suddenly transported to that enchanting and mysterious land of Sultan and slave. No sky of Tangiers was ever deeper, clearer or bluer, and no air of Geneva was ever purer or sweeter.

The road makes a sharp turn and traverses backward nearly half a mile, then turns again and runs in its original direction, climbing the mountain side like a great yellow serpent resting its head a thousand feet among the crags, where eagles build their nests; the white and red painted building that marks the entrance to the Cave of the Winds, does duty as the serpent’s head. From this dizzy point of sight, the great mountain gorge with its grey and brown rocks, and the sloping foothills of green that stretch away to where fair Manitou lies cradled in the valley, form a wondrous panorama.

Eastward, down on the horizon, far as the eye can reach, stretch the mighty plains, westward the higher range of the eternal Rockies, and above all rises the snow-capped summit of Pike’s Peak, about whose whitened crest float the fleecy clouds of the soft, still summer morning.

At the entrance of the Cave of the Winds one follows the guide into the dark pathway that leads into the subterranean chambers, where at some remote period a wild mountain cataract has whirled and plunged its maddening waters, in swirl and maelstrom into the black abyss of the earth. One is so suddenly transported from the gladsome and awe-inspiring scenes without, that the lamp and figure of the guide become spectral, his voice sounds in hollow tones and is echoed back from cavernous depths as though titanic monsters were repeating his words.

Knowing the cause, one bursts into a laugh, then the monsters laugh, too, long and loud, and still others take up the laugh, way down the black corridors, and high above in domes, as though all the imps of darkness were there to laugh at one in revenge for intrusion.

The guide flashes a magnesium light and the pilgrim beholds the wonders of Curtain Hall, which nature has ornamented with strangely colored stalactites glistening here and there on the cavern walls, and again where they form a curtain of an intricate work and beauty as though wrought by maiden hands, amid scenes of love and apple blossoms. Mutely you follow the flaring lamp of the guide into the blackness of winding passages and across bridges that span bottomless pits opening into the very breast of the mountain, and when the magnesium light is again flashed, one sees the arching dome of the great canopy hall, its stalactite nymphs, Bed of Cauliflowers, Frescoed Ceiling, Lake Basin, Grandmother’s Skillet, Bat’s Wing, Prairie Dog Village and Fairy Scene; all presenting a picture weird and ghost-like in the moment of stillness, and heightened by the demoniacal, fiendish voices that repeat your every word.

On through other crooked subterranean passages where other demons mock the sound of your footsteps, through what the guide calls Boston Avenue, one enters Diamond Hall. The lofty ceiling is decorated its entire length by graceful festoons and wreaths of coral and flowering alabaster. The walls sparkle and scintillate with the rainbow shades, thrown back from the myriad brilliants that stud these walls like diamonds set by hand in some antique mosaic work.

In these regions of darkness you are led by the guide until the Hall of Beauty is lit up to your astonished gaze. Crystal flowers of the most delicate design and exquisite workmanship hang in festoons from every nook and corner. Sparkling incrustations that rival the beauty of Arctic frosts and glitter in the bright light are sparkling on every side. Most wondrous of all there are a million stalactite figures in miniature that appear to be in a pandemonium of outlandish contortions. Maybe, who knows, but what the goblin spirits once lived here and worked out curious things in translucent stone, further down the black passages of earth and caught a glimpse of our ancestors in some of the great halls of torture way down below, and so reproduced the scene as Jack Frost has been wont to paint the leaves of summer on our frosted window panes.

The Magi of this dark abode, the guide in wide sombrero, black eyed and wearing a mustache fierce as a bandit of the Corsican isle, though harmless as a Kansas Populist, beckons on and leads the way. Here the Bridal Chamber, and there writhing reptiles, dancing devils, monkeys, beasts, birds in every form and riotous posture. Then as the weird wilderness is shut out in semi-darkness, one is inclined to ask of him with lamp and sombrero, “Mister, have I got ’em, or have you?”

The light flashes on Crystal Palace, where gems and jewels bedeck the walls, where huge chrysanthemums or chestnut burrs stand out in bold relief in fadeless crystal flowers moulded from tinted rock, and all seem to mutely plead for recognition as we pass. These silent beauties hidden away under the mountain slopes, where the rays of sun can never reach, speak with the beauty of their creation, to the soul with as great a love and power as the violet in the sequestered glens.

It is mysterious. It is strange. It is one of those unaccountable things in nature which no man can explain that here in the very bowels of the earth, human scenes have been reproduced and human passions portrayed.

Here perhaps centuries before man’s eyes gazed upon the scene, we find in moulded stone, the head of a buffalo, the skeleton of a mastodon, the drapery of a palace, the bride at the altar, the face of sorrow, the Nymphs of Love, War and Poetry are depicted upon these stones.

Once more the light of day, the great chasm beneath, the turquoise skies above, and mighty plains beyond, brings one to the realm of the outer world.

The spectral figure of an hour ago is a pleasant faced young man, who bids you follow the winding path that leads around the mountain side some three hundred yards and which ends at the entrance to the Grand Caverns.

Desiring to see all, you meekly follow another guide through a dark labyrinth and find yourself in the mighty Rotunda of the Caverns. Here loyal hands have raised monuments to Lee, Grant and McKinley. They are built of fragments of stone cast by visitors to the memory of these heroes. The Imp, the guide, motions on; you are next within a mighty auditorium and as there comes upon you the awful silence and stillness of the hour, you hear musical notes, swelling and cadencing louder and louder until they break in thunderous tones within the cavernous depths, “Nearer, Nearer, My God to Thee.” High above, mid the domes of the cavern, the light shows the organist to be playing upon the stalactites which Nature has attuned to the same chords as instruments made by human hands. These stalactites are of crystal, and have the same resonant sound as though they were of finely tempered glass. Up and down the corridors of the cave, through winding passages and circling galleries above, come echoes of “Nearer, My God to Thee,” in waves and billows of sound, such as is only heard by artificial means in the Notre Dame of Paris.

Round about somewhere, in one of the chambers, near the entrance, the visitor is shown a human skeleton, as it was found at the time of the discovery of the cave. It belonged perhaps to that race of men known as the Cliff Dwellers, who once upon a time, when the world was new, lived, loved and reared a race of men in this fair region of the west whom Saxby, a western poet, touches with his magic pen, and beautifies the tradition of them when he says,

 
“Dismantled towers and turrets broken,
Like grim war-worn braves who keep
A silent guard with grief unspoken
Watch o’er the graves, by the canon weep,
The nameless graves of a race forgotten
Whose deeds, whose words, whose fate are one
With the mist, long ages past, begotten of the sun.”
 

The sun is now casting his shadows toward the east. From this point of sight we see the Midland trains creeping from tunnels like monster creatures of the Azotic period crawling from their lair. There are green valleys below, and there is also a long serpentine road leading to this side of the mountain by which visitors again reach the pleasant shades of Manitou. Silence, and even sadness, abound in the green-clad mountains beyond. They speak in whispers to themselves and you can understand them if you will. They tell you in sweet, soft voices of the song of birds, the lullaby of mountain brooks, and by gentle winds that sing a song of peace through cedar, fir and pine, that the love of nature, is the love of nature’s God.

XXVI.
WHEN THE WEST WAS NEW

Thirty years have passed since I first crossed the plains. The buffalo and antelope have disappeared and in their stead herds of cattle and sheep graze in countless thousands. Farms are tilled where raging fires swept the mighty plains in ungoverned fury; cities and towns rear their spires where once stood Indian tepees. The westward march of civilization has stretched across the continent and redeemed the desert. The soil has been made to yield its harvest and the eternal hills to give up their buried treasure. For the men who made the trails by which these things were done, life’s shadows are falling toward the east. They braved the vicissitudes of the western wilderness as heroic as any soldier faced the battlefield; and the trails over which the pioneers slowly made their way across the desert wastes, were blazed with blood and fire. Women, too, on the frontier, volumes might be written of her sacrifices – Indians, poverty, years of patient toil, far from former home and friends, the luxuries of organized society denied, all for the purpose of earning a home and a competence for declining years.

It was my good fortune to become personally acquainted with many early pioneers of the west and number them among my warmest friends, and as I recall to mind some of their heroic deeds I feel that these chapters would be incomplete without a personal mention of a few of them.

*****

Captain Jack Crawford, the poet scout, is one of those noble characters whose memory will live so long as records exist of the pioneers who braved the vicissitudes of the frontier and made possible our Western civilization of today. A man of broad mind, daring and brave and yet with all the sweet tenderness of a child of nature, he became great by achievements alone. Others have gained a temporary fame by dime novel writers. Captain Jack, in comparison with others, stands out as a diamond of the first water. He has helped to make more trails than any scout unless it was Kit Carson. That was before the war. During that struggle he was wounded three times in the service of his country. When the war closed he was for many years chief of scouts under General Custer. He laid out Leedville in the Black Hills in 1876, and was of great service to the government in the settlement of the Indian troubles which succeeded the Custer massacre.

Captain Jack is one of the very few thrown together with the wild, rough element of the frontier who maintained a strictly moral character. I knew him in the “Hills” in 1876 and have known him ever since, and have always found him to be the same genial, whole-souled, brave Captain Jack.

*****

John McCoach, a pioneer of the sixties, was a among a party near the headwaters of Wind River, Wyoming, in August, 1866, who defeated a thousand warriors with the first Henri rifles used on the plains. The story is best told in Mr. McCoach’s own language.

“Our mule trains consisting of thirty-eight wagons and forty-two men, left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in April, 1866, for Virginia City, Montana. We were all old soldiers and most of us had seen four years of war and, inured as we were to dangers, we cared but little for the hostile Indians of the plains.

“When we reached Fort Laramie, a big council of Indians was in progress, Chiefs Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, American Horse and others of lesser note were there to demand guns and ammunition from the government, saying they needed them with which to hunt game. Officials of high rank from Washington were there to listen to them and among the newspaper correspondents was Henry M. Stanley, who had been sent out by the New York Herald.

“After days of deliberation the Indians were refused the arms and they broke camp in bad humor.

“Before allowing our party to proceed the commander of the fort had us lined up for an inspection of our arms which were a miscellaneous collection all the way from an old muzzle-loading rifle to a modern musket. He told us we were too poorly armed to proceed, when the wagon boss took him to some of the wagons and showed him 200 Henri rifles and abundant ammunition which we were freighting to gun dealers in Virginia City. He then allowed us to go.

“I was herding the mules one afternoon near the headwaters of Wind River, when a party of Sioux Indians, led by Little Thunder, made a dash, intending to stampede the animals. One of them carried a rawhide bag containing some pebbles, which made a hideous noise. Despite their efforts, the mules broke for our camp of circled wagons. I tried to shoot the Indian with the rattle bag but missed. Then I dismounted and the next shot I cut the quiver of arrows from his back when he gave a long yell and throwing himself on the side of his pony, got away.

“When I reached camp the rifles had been distributed. We were called from our slumbers the next morning at four o’clock and told to keep quiet and hold our fire.

“With the first gray streak of dawn about one thousand warriors began to encircle us, riding at full speed and like a great serpent, drawing the coil closer about us with each revolution of the circle. Then the order came and forty-two blazing rifles with eighteen shots to each one dealt out death. Four years of war had taught the men the value of a steady nerve and deliberate aim and before the astonished Indians could retreat the plain was strewn with their dead and wounded.

“These Indians had been at the Fort Laramie council and had seen us drawn up in line with our old assortment of guns for inspection and had counted on us being easy prey. They were the first Henri rifles used on the plains and caused the Indians to speak of us in whispers, as the white men who could load a gun once and then shoot all day. That morning we built our fires with arrows and cooked our breakfast. After that the Indians avoided us as though we were devouring monsters.”

*****

The experience of John McCoach’s party in surprising Little Thunder’s braves with their Henri rifles, calls to mind a story often told in Fort Laramie of how General W. S. Harney fooled these same Sioux Indians under Little Thunder a few years previous to their attack on the McCoach outfit. Jake Smith, a soldier with General Harney in the 60’s thus relates the story:

“General Harney established his headquarters in Leavenworth, Kansas. Little Thunder was at the head of the Sioux and sent word that he was willing either to fight or shake hands with the white soldier. Harney replied that if the Indian was without choice in the matter it might as well be fight; besides, as he remembered his orders, he was to whip some one. So Harney met Little Thunder and about a thousand war men on the North Platte in Nebraska. He whipped them good and some of the Indians’ friends back East tried to make trouble for Harney because he had not had a long preliminary confab with Little Thunder. That Sioux band was a mild-mannered set long after Harney went back to Leavenworth.

“It was after this fight that Harney threw the Society for the Protection of Western Savages into a particular frenzy. The wagon trail for Oregon and California led from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Kearney, Neb., then to Julesburg, in Colorado, from there to Fort Laramie, through old South Pass to Badger and then to Salt Lake. The trip by ox train took about one hundred days with good luck. I know of a party that was on the road 300 days, delayed by Indians and then snowbound. That wasn’t a pleasant winter for a boy of 16.

“Every now and then a band of Sioux would ride up to an ox train, kill if they felt like it and always drive away the stock. Soldiers would be sent out and have the pleasure of following the Indians’ trail until the weather would make winter quarters necessary. Harney started from Leavenworth after one band, taking about 400 cavalrymen, or dragoons. The Indians loafed along ahead of him till they reached the mountains, and then Harney turned back. It was the old story, the Sioux said, and their scouts followed the soldiers until they were well into Kansas. Then the Sioux knew the country was clear for new operations.

“Harney stopped on the Blue River in Northern Kansas near where Marysville now stands. A wagon train reached there from Leavenworth and Harney had all the freight unloaded – simply seized the train – then he put 400 soldiers into those wagons and in two were mountain guns. The great covers were pulled close and leaving a guard over the abandoned freight and horses, Harney started on his journey as a bull-whacker. Not a soldier or officer was permitted to put his head from under a cover in the day time, and only at night a few got leave to stretch their legs. All day they sat in those wagon beds, hot and dusty, playing cards, fighting and chewing tobacco for pastime.

“There were twenty-six of those wagons and they trailed along as if they were carrying dead freight; no faster nor slower than the ordinary freighters, and making camp at the usual places, forming the usual corral of wagons and herding stock at night. The train reached Fort Kearny and slowly went across the South Platte to Julesburg. Occasional Indian signs made Harney have hope.

“The outfit was seventy miles on the way to Laramie when the big day came, and it came quick. Behind them on the trail the men on the outside saw a war party – some say there were five hundred Indians in it. Even if they hadn’t been painted the fact that they were without women or children would have told the story. The train made the usual preparations for an Indian attack, throwing the wagons into a circle, or more of an ellipse, and unhooking the five lead yokes to each wagon. A front wheel of each wagon touched a hind wheel of the one in front and the tongues were turned to the outside. At the front end of the corral an opening about fifteen feet wide was left, but at the rear the opening into the corral was about fifty feet wide. That, also, was according to the freighters’ methods; after a night camp the cattle would be driven into the corral through the big end to be yoked for the day.

“Harney didn’t have time to drive his oxen into the corral, or else he didn’t want to. Only the five yoke of leaders were unhooked and they were then chained to the front wheel of their wagon. The space in the corral was all clear for the Indians, whose method of attacking a wagon train was to rush into the corral and do their shooting. They were a happy lot of braves this day; the war band started for the train when the corral was forming; they spread out like a fan and then came together again and started for the big opening as hard as their war ponies could carry them. A whooping, variegated mob with no more clothes than the paint gave it fell into the corral and then real fun began.

“Those soldiers, who had been sweating under canvas for a few weeks wanted excitement and revenge. The tarpaulins went up and they shot down into that mess of braves as fast as they could load. The two mountain guns completed the surprise and the bucks hardly fired a shot before their ponies were climbing over one another to get out the way they came. It was the only real Indian panic. When the last Sioux brave able to ride disappeared across the prairie there was a big mess to clean up. In those days the Indians needed school all the year around. However, one old buck, a little chief, seemed to be impressed. He was near a mountain gun when the fire opened. ‘Harney is the man who shot wagons at us,’ is the way he told about it years later.

*****

Charles S. Stroble, “Mountain Charley,” known as the cowboy painter, was adopted by the Ute Indians at the age of nineteen. I have often heard him tell the following experience:

“It was the most marvelous instance of daredevil bravery I ever witnessed. It happened in 1866 when I was living with the Utes west of the range in Middle Park, Colorado. They had adopted me a year or so before when I was twenty years of age. My name in Ute was Paghaghet, which means ‘long-haired.’

“It was at this time that the old feud between the Utes and Arapahoes was at its height. Our scouts found the Arapahoes coming in from North Park in the endeavor to surprise some of the Utes’ hunting parties. Our runners having come in and informed us, we soon collected a war party and started north to intercept our enemies.

“I was with the scouting party which went in advance, and I was the only white man in the entire tribe. We found the sign left by their scouts, and then concealed ourselves until our war party could come up. As soon as reinforcements arrived we deployed on either side of a gulch or canon, with our horses hidden away among the rocks and timber in charge of horse-holders.