Chapter XIV: Beyond the Ranges

All the means of action--
The shapeless masses, the materials--
Lie everywhere about us.
--LONGFELLOW.

Three districts require mention before this corner of the state is bidden farewell,--Ophir, Rico and the La-Plata mountains.

Ophir lies fifteen miles east of Silverton and on the Pacific slope, for it is at one source of the Rio Dolores. It is reached by a wagon-road up Mineral Creek, which is one of the most "scenic routes" I know of in Colorado. At first there is not much to call forth admiration; nearing the top, however, a remarkable picture presents itself. In a closely guarding circle of purplish peaks, stand two isolated mountains of entirely different character and most striking appearance. Instead of the vertical cliffs, serrated and splintered summits and ragged gray of the majority of the mountains, these are as rounded and smooth on top as if they had been shaved by a lawn mower, and rise in unbroken slopes far above the blackish masses of timber which closely envelope their bases. It is their color, however, that makes them so grandly conspicuous. Long strokes of orange and rust color extend up and down from the spruces to the apex, streaked with bright red and set off with upright lines of glowing yellow, all softly blended together and crossed by a crowd of hair-lines, wavy and level with the horizon, like the plumage of a canvas-back duck. Stand where you will on the eastern side of this divide between the Animas and the San Miguel, and these great, smooth, cushiony hills of red, tower up level with your eye, burning under the sunlight.

At last the road rises above timber line, but even to the last verge, the soil under the trees is crowded with flowers and all sorts of pretty herbage, among which the strawberry takes precedence in point of abundance. Then the track lies underneath beetling cliffs which have crumbled into long tall, and the pass itself is only the triangular depression between two opposite slides. On one side here the rock is brown and broken almost as fine as railway ballast; on the other the fragments rule much larger in size, are of bluish trachyte and completely covered everywhere with a stone-lichen hardly thicker than paint, which gives them a decidedly green color, while the brown rocks opposite are entirely devoid of lichens.

Down this jumble of fallen rocks--the scene of one incessant slow avalanche from the weather-crumbled crests still remaining above--the road passes by a steep and tortuous grade, made somewhat smooth by filling the crevices with small stuff; but the result would make the ghost of McAdam turn a shade paler.

These vast "slides" are a prominent feature in every landscape in southern Colorado. The volcanic rock with which all the mountains are capped, has a natural cleavage in two directions, and rapidly disintegrates, even under the air. On the quiet, still days of midsummer, you continually hear the rattle of pieces of rock which have fallen untouched from some scarp or pinnacle, and are racing down the steep talus below. The winter, however, is the time of greatest destruction. Into the thousand cracks and crannies the rains and snows of autumn pour floods of water, which penetrate the inmost recesses of the well-seamed crags. Then comes a frost. The little veins and pockets of water expand with a sudden force, combined and irresistible. Perhaps some huge projection of cliff flies to pieces as though filled full of exploding dynamite; perhaps a stronger body of frost behind it pries off the whole mass at once, and it dashes head-long down the side of the mountain, to scatter widely its cracked shell and leave the core a huge bowlder, which crashes its way far into the struggling woods at the foot of the rough slope. This process goes on, season after season, until finally the thousands of feet of summit, which once towered proudly above the mountain's base, have been crumbled down to a level with the top of the debris-slope. If the rock is very soft, then the process goes on with each fallen block, until it is reduced to soil and forms a smooth, grassy slope, or a clean shaven but barren slide, like the rich red hills we saw on the other side of Lookout; but if the fragments are hard, then gradually the bushes and grass will creep up, and the forest will follow as high as climate and snow-fall will let it grow, and above will be a rounded crest of broken lava, like Veta mountain--the worst thing to climb in the wide world.

From the long, slanting niche which lets the road down across this broken and sliding rock, where men are always at work to throw aside the ceaselessly falling crumbs of the cliff, one gets his first view of Ophir gulch,--a valley half a dozen miles in length, without an acre of level ground in the whole of it. This end is closed by Lookout mountain, the opposite by the lofty crags of Mt. Wilson. On the north, Silver mountain cuts the sky in ragged outline, and, braced against its base, Yellow mountain rises straight from the creek-side to an almost equal altitude. In the crevice between stand the score or so of log cabins, which constitute what many persons consider the liveliest camp in the whole San Juan.

It is only eight years since the value of this locality was made known, but now the mountains on both sides of the gulch are pitted like a pepper-box with prospecting tunnels, and there are perhaps twenty mines shipping ore in profitable quantities, even under the great disadvantages of their isolation. The leads in general run northeast and southwest, but good openings have been found all the way from the brink of the creek to the shattered combing that casts its ragged shadow down the long, white slopes. Systematic development has been carried on in very few mines as yet, but the indications promise great things for the future. Half a dozen gold workings in particular are very rich, and several sales have been made exceeding $50,000 for a single location.

Remounting, the ride homeward through the mellow afternoon, was very delightful. The mountains rose on either side high above where the hardiest trees could manage to exist, gorgeously stained in great chevrons of red, orange and rust yellow. Lookout and its brother peaks seemed vast stacks of triangles, all upright and baseless, backed with long slides of varied umber tints. On some of these slides the grass has grown, long tongues of it penetrating far toward the bright walls overhead, while elsewhere mile-wide slopes of grayish white lie untouched by any blemish or projection. Everything is triangular,--the outlines of the peaks and the reverse in the gorges between; the shape of the fallen fragments; of the long spear-points of verdure that climb them, and of the trees and even the separate leaves that blend into those acute green patches; of the broad strokes of vivid color that have been painted so lavishly on these splendid slopes; even of the splitting and cleavage of every cliff-face and toppling spire that glistens in the slanting light and throws a slender-pointed shadow across the velvet brim of the valley.

Backward, where the forests lie unbroken on the southern wall of the gulch, long ranks and patches of aspens were interspersed with the reigning evergreens, and these the frosts had touched with various hues from its full palette--bright green still where the leaves were protected, yellow on the warm side of the ridges, vivid orange and scarlet along the crests,--so that these patches glowed like red and yellow flame against the dark spruces and firs.

Near timber-line there is a remarkable picture. Down from the northern mountain there trickle reddish streamlets over a space several rods in width. A few yards below the road all this water collects itself into a basin, which, begun by some trivial obstruction, has been able to build up its walls by slow deposition, until a great iron tank, with walls twenty-five or thirty feet high, and several feet thick, contains all but a trickling overflow of the mineral water. This tank is surrounded with pretty trees, and its wavy red outline holds a fountain as richly green as an emerald; or blue if you look at it from some one of the surrounding heights, so that the Spanish way of calling a spring _ojo_--an eye--seems very natural.

Beyond this highly tinted natural reservoir, built out like a balcony on the steep hillside, you look across to undulating verdant knolls, where shapely trees are scattered thinly, up beyond a deep maroon slope, falling from a noble, iron brown bluff, and so on away to the gray and lofty peaks, in whose rifts and vertical gorges the shadow lies blue as the farther edge of the sea, and whose clustering, cumulative spires, culminate in gleaming apices of snow.

Rico is the next point. It is accessible from the north by wagon roads, but the entrance from this side is by stage from Rockwood Station on the railway, midway between Durango and Silverton. The road bears northward, and the views to the eastward are far-reaching and noble. The traveler alive to the resources of the region, will note the rich, thick grass, and the great pine timber, with poplars between to serve for log house and fencing purposes; he will also regret the limited possibilities for agriculture. Toward the head of this valley the woods thicken, and the road gets rougher and starts up the long slope that ultimately carries it over the hill. The ragged outlines of the San Miguel range come into view ahead, while the valley below, a solid "heather" of scrubby oak bushes, briers, ferns, and so on, seems carpeted in a queer design of tints of green and yellow, interspersed with all the mixtures of orange, scarlet and crimson that the deft fingers of the early frost could devise.

Over the long hill and past the spruces, an hour's trotting takes the buckboard through the long hay meadows of Hermosa park, whence it ascends a four-mile hill to the summit of the last range dividing the waters of the Rio Las Animas from those of the Rio Dolores. And how we rattle down that Dolores slope! An Englishman riding on the Pennsylvania's sixty-miles an hour train from New York to Philadelphia, the other day, exclaimed, "It's wonderful! I think if something should drop one of you Yankees astride a thunderbolt, the first thing you would do would be to say, '_chk! chk!_'" I thought of that as we started, almost at a gallop, down that steep and winding mountain road. Corners--we snapped around them. Hollows and ridges--we bounced into and out of them. Down long, rough slopes, cut in the side of a hill so steep that just under the hub it fell away hundreds of feet almost like a precipice; down through the full blaze of the afternoon rays in the frost-turned aspens, where

"Tremulous, floating in air, o'er depths of azure abysses,
Down through the golden leaves the sun was pouring his splendors,"

we rushed at a pace that Phæton, in his first hours of freedom, might have enjoyed in his chariot, but which to us, in an old buckboard, was simply torture. Why we didn't pitch off the imminent verge, why we didn't fall to pieces against some one of the thousand rocks we assaulted, why our bones were not broken and our diaphragms bursted, is incomprehensible.

Rico is situated in the center of a volcanic upburst which has parted the sandstones and limestones once spread thousands of feet thick over the area, and whose edges now stand as bold bluffs all around this break, which is nearly four miles in breadth and about eight in length. The town itself is made up of a scattered, gardenless collection of log cabins and some frame buildings, with a log suburb called Tenderfoot Town, and numbers about six hundred people. It is very dull, compared with most Colorado camps, but this is owing to the fact that everybody is waiting until the railway gets a little nearer.

The Rico mines are characterized by their great dissimilarity with each other. Nearly every sort of ore, of both silver and gold, is found mingled in a most heterogeneous way among the lavas, recalling that marvelously mixed mineralogical madrigal in the Colorado comic opera, _Brittle Silver_.

"I have found out a gift for my fair,
I have found where the cálcites abound,
Where sklópsite and zírcon appear
With sárcolite scattered around.

"Then come love, and never say nay;
With picrosmine thy heart I'll delight,
With diaspore and mangandblend gay,
And phármakósideríte."

Some true fissure-veins exist, but more irregular deposits, and both "lead" and "dry" ores occur, often in contiguous claims. The richest ores thus far are those without lead; where galena occurs it is mixed with so much zinc and antimony as to make it troublesome in treatment. A galena ore here, which will show a mill-run of thirty ounces (my authority is Mr. Amos Lane, superintendent of the smelter), is considered very good.

Rico has not yet worked far enough into her very numerous "locations" to make sure of the riches her mountains are supposed to contain. There is no doubt that the cliffs about her are full of silver and gold, stored up in what, under more favorable circumstances, would be profitable quantities; also that there is in the near neighborhood a magnificent supply of bituminous and "free-burning anthracite" coal, good material for charcoal, limestone for flux, bog and magnetic iron, fire-clay and good building stone. The time will come, then, when Rico will be able cheaply to treat its own product, but this will be after wagon-roads and railways have come nearer, and outside capital has lent its strength to bring to the surface the hidden, or only partially exposed, treasures of the veins.

South of the San Juan range, and somewhat isolated, is the noble La Plata group of mountains. They are volcanic, like the rest, and, of course, of Alpine appearance, while their slopes, lying far south, produce so many varieties of foliage, that they often present real bits of beauty--a word having rare application in Colorado's scenery. These mountains were prospected eight or ten years ago, and a placer bar of supposed extraordinary value was found near the head of the Rio La Plata by a company of California miners. I remember very well the picturesque little camp they had there, and the day they got their first butter for nine months. Having interested in the locality Mr. Parrott, a California capitalist, a town grew there rapidly, called Parrott City, now only sixteen miles from Durango, and arrangements were made for working the placers by hydraulic machinery. Meanwhile searching about the peaks disclosed gold quartz in some quantity, and many veins bearing dry ores of silver, absence of galena being characteristic. I see no reason why these peaks should not be equally productive with any district in the region.

But this is true, as I constantly insist, of all the San Juan. Everybody looks forward. Each proposes to do this and that, and to be happy--"when I sell my mine." Perhaps this delicious uncertainty is a part of the fun. Yet many a miner would reprove me for exaggerating the uncertainty; I only hope he is right and I am wrong. That there is a vast amount of the precious metals hidden in the veins of these mountains is undeniable. It is equally true that we know where very much of it lies. But the question stands: Is it sufficiently concentrated to make the getting it out and refining it into a useful condition, yield a margin of profit on expenses? No doubt it is in many cases, but is it in the majority of so-called "mines," or in enough to support any general population and business? Many discreet persons say "No." Many more, naturally, will answer, "Yes." I, myself, making no claim to utter a skilled, or a weighty, or any kind of an opinion except a carefully unbiased one, think the balance of chances is in favor of ultimate success; and I am not afraid to predict that through slow but permanent advancement this corner of Colorado will come to be one of the most important silver-producing regions on the globe.

Upon this event depends the fate of a great many enterprising investments. Faith in the success of these mines has caused the Denver and Rio Grande to build two hundred and fifty miles of railroad over mountains and wide plains which of themselves would never support the line. Faith in these mineral treasures has caused hundreds of men to follow the railway, and has set on foot little towns all along its track; and a part of the same faith is all that keeps alive the thriving town, Durango, where scores of well packed warehouses vie with one another in plethoras of merchandise, and thousands of men are exciting each other in pushing, plucky struggles after the supremacy of wealth. The miner picks away at his rock, and hopefully pays for his supplies until the last dollar is gone, and then goes at work earning more in the service of his more fortunate companion. The patronage of these men, always just on the brink of a "rich strike," is what keeps this southern Denver--scarcely four years old yet--alive and sturdy. The precious minerals can only be procured in this region by hard and skillful labor; they are not in carbonate-beds or placer-bars, to be picked to pieces and reduced at trifling cost. On the other hand, they are richer, and while the profits are no less than in the former case, the expense of getting out is several times greater. This means the disbursement of far more money in the locality for the same amount of value received from the mines by the owners, than in an easier district to work--Leadville, for example. Thus an ore which would yield only sixty dollars to the ton will pay to work, very likely, in a carbonate camp, since it would cost only ten dollars to get it out and through the smelter; while to get the same profit on a ton of San Juan ore, it must carry one hundred dollars to the ton, say, since it requires fifty dollars to mine it. Thus for every ten dollars spent in an easy locality, five times as much must be expended here; or, in other words, five times the population maintained under the former circumstances, will be supported here, and be permanent, for fissure-veins do not produce spasmodic and uneven results, but continuous, progressive and practically inexhaustible supplies of ore for the proprietor, wages for his workman and business for the merchant, artisan and shipper. All this is the best kind of an outlook, and means that the San Juan will always be a good country for the man of moderate means, although the mining speculator may consider it too solid and tangible to suit his purposes, and therefore be loath to praise it.