Chapter XXX: Montrose and Delta

My father left a park to me,
But it is wild and barren,
A garden too with scarce a tree,
And waster than a warren;
Yet say the neighbors when they call,
It is not bad but good land,
And in it is the germ of all
That grows within the woodland.
--TENNYSON.

The compassion I had been feeling for probable _ennui_ endured by the two who had been left behind at Montrose was quite unnecessary. They had amused themselves very well during my prolonged absence.

"Montrose is better than it looks," they told me.

"But what did you do?" I asked.

"Well, we studied the situation," said Chum, who is becoming thirsty for knowledge in these latter days. "And we got acquainted with some very pleasant people, who told us good stories, and took us out riding and lent us books."

"Yes," said the Madame, "in one of our rides we went up to the camp."

"Eh!"

"And heard how you spent a whole day there doing nothing but playing billiards with the officers. Do you call that being industrious?"

"Well," I began.

"No, it is not well at all; at any rate you might have told me, and not made believe you only saw the camp by passing through. And we heard all about that hop in Ouray. You forgot that, too, didn't you? The people were greatly surprised to learn you were not a gay young bachelor. It was three o'clock in the morning before you went home."

"Oh, Oh-h!" groans Chum.

"'Pon honor, it wasn't," I protest. "It was only two."

"Only two! Well, the next time you go to Ouray I'm going with you."

Chum sings:

"Now is the time for disappearing," and takes a header out of the side door. It is my cue to follow suit, but instead the Madame picks up her parasol and sails out with dignity. She wouldn't make a bad figure in the Lancers, I think, as she closes the door. I had intended to do some writing before the time came to pursue our journey, but I don't feel like it now and pick up _Felix Holt_ and a cigar. Presently the two return in high good humor over some joke, and luncheon is ordered and eaten amid a fusilade of chattered nonsense.

Betweentimes I extract bits of information in regard to Montrose and its neighborhood. The town is the center of a very large agricultural district. It supplies all of the valley of the Uncompahgre as far south as Dallas creek, and westward nearly to Delta; while northward its bailiwick extends over to widely scattered but numerous settlers on the North Fork of the Gunnison and its tributaries. A glance at the map will show the reader that a great number of small streams come down from the mountains lying north of the Gunnison, and of its North Fork, to feed those trunk-streams. The mountains themselves, and the spurs that stretch down between the creeks are rocky, sterile, and too cold for farming; but in the valleys where the descent is always rapid, water is easily led aside in irrigating ditches, and the soil is invariably found to be rich and responsive. Throughout these remote creek-sides, then, a large farming and stock-raising population has already settled itself; and though out of sight, it forms a large element in the class of buyers for whom the merchant at the railway station must provide. Those living on the lower part of the North Fork trade at Delta.

Lately coal has been found within half a dozen miles of town, and veins of great thickness and soundness are being opened in several places by Montrose men, who can sell it much cheaper than it has hitherto been brought from Crested Butte. At Cimmaron, about twelve miles from Montrose, coal of very good quality occurs in great abundance, and is being mined. On the mesas, surrounding Montrose, grows timber of unusual size and importance, and nearly all the large sticks--some forty-four feet in length,--used by the railway in the construction of bridges on this half of the line, were derived from those forests of yellow pine. Several sawmills, each a nucleus of small settlements, buy and sell at Montrose. Local cattle-owners make the town their headquarters, the herds ranging on the upland pastures within a few miles. The cattle business in this region has just begun, but everything proves so favorable that great expectations are entertained of it as a source of wealth. The object is to raise fat beef for local markets, and Durham blood is being introduced to raise the grade of the native stock. The Cimmaron range, the heights beyond the North Fork and the Uncompahgre mesa, supply the chief ranges at present. A good many people are employed at Montrose, also, in the forwarding business,--that is, the re-loading of merchandise and other goods into the huge trailed wagons which they used to call "prairie schooners" on the plains, to be dragged away to the mountain mining camps. Finally, the town is the county seat.

While these resources are all of importance Montrose depends mainly upon the farming which she says is to make her valley and the dun-colored mesas, "blossom as the rose."

"They tell me," says Chum, "and they prove it, too, that there is nothing you cannot raise here short of tropical fruits, and they're not quite sure about that, for they propose peaches, nectarines, and apricots. And as for grain, great Injuns! why I saw stalks of oats as big as a walking-stick, and stems of barley that looked like gun-barrels."

The Madame raises her eyebrows and coughs slightly, but I take no notice.

"And as for wheat, sir,--wheat? why it's immense! Thirty-five and forty bushels to the acre is the regular yield, and of oats they will produce fifty or sixty bushels, and of barley eighty or ninety. As for corn, I forget the figures, but when we go down the road this afternoon you'll see great green fields of it that'll make you think you're back on the banks of the Wabash. There isn't anything they can't raise in these bottoms, where they have more water than they know what to do with, and it'll be only a few years before this whole great patch of greasewood and chalk will be verdant with--with potatoes and corn."

It was a bit of a break, but when this young man gets a fair grip upon poetry he don't let go so easy. He frowned down the suspicion of a smile round the corner of our eyes, and rising to his feet, continued:

"I tell you, sir, in five years from now the people of this favored spot can say in the words of the immortal singer--speaking historically, of course, you understand--can say,

"Behind, they saw the snow-cloud tossed
By many an icy horn"

* * * * *

"Before, warm valleys, wood-embossed
And green with vines--

(watermelons, squashes, pumpkins, hops, morning glories, grapes, strawberries, parsley, honeysuckles--I've seen 'em all!)

"--and corn."

We exploded with laughter, and even the enthusiastic orator smiled grimly as he sat down.

"May be Mr. Whittier wouldn't have seen so much poetry in the way I used his words, but I tell you Montrose knows there's a heap of truth in it."

"Yes, no doubt. But how about the 'icy horn'--these high and dry benches up here?"

"Well, they say the very strongest and most productive soil of all is on those same gravelly mesas. It's lighter and different from the saline clays of the bottoms. Now, over there"--pointing to the great upland, which lay elevated a hundred feet or so above the river on the southern side of the Uncompahgre--"lies a mesa that contains about twenty-two thousand acres. Then down below, at the mouth of the river, is another stretch just twice as large. All that is needful to make that productive farming land is water. A company here is building a canal which will be twenty-seven miles long and will cost a hundred thousand dollars. It takes the water out of the Uncompahgre away up by the Cantonment, leads it along the foot of the wooded bluffs behind the mesa, and can furnish enough to water the whole expanse. If you have a farm there, all you have to do is to select half a mile square or so--there's heaps of it left untouched as yet,--pay $1.25 an acre, dig side ditches and draw as much water as you need at so much an inch rental from the company. That's going to make one vast wheat-field."

"I see, but what next?"

"Well, by the time your wheat is grown there will be mills here to grind it. There is one now at Montrose which will make from seventy-five to one hundred barrels of flour per day, and when the crops get ahead of it other mills will be built. This is not poetry and fancy and talk; it is a settled fact, for the soil has been tried in more places than one, and--but, hello! there's our train!"

Precipitately retreating to our "parlor," we don our dusters and go steaming down toward Grand Junction.

The mountains whence I have just come lift their snow-embroidered heights grandly to the sky, and I can point out nearly all the separate peaks though they are fifty miles away.

"You should have seen that long hill-range
With gaps of brightness riven--
How through each pass and hollow streamed
The purpling lights of heaven--

"Rivers of golden-mist flowing down
From far celestial fountains,--
The great sun flaming through the rifts
Beyond the wall of mountains."

On the right, extended a long line of bluffs, close at hand, sprinkled with cedars between which the brick-red soil showed queerly. The strata in the base of these bluffs were yellowish white and had been cut by water into a series of little knolls and spurs like sand-dunes and equally bare of vegetation. They were hot, desolate, and glaring.

The train ran along the edge of the bottom-lands of which these bluffs were the boundary, and on the left stretched a continuous line of farms watered from the river which was hidden in a distant grove of cottonwoods. That the land was rich was shown not only by the flourishing fields of grain, and of Indian corn, but by the luxuriance of sagebrush and greasewood in the uncultivated spaces. This was the Uncompahgre we were following, and at Delta, where the bottom-lands spread out into a spacious plain, we reached its junction with the Gunnison, and passed to its right bank over a long bridge.

Dominating everything here to the northward is that vast plateau, protected from decay by its roofing of lava over the softer substances that make its bulk, which forms the watershed between the Gunnison and the Grand rivers, and is called the Grand Mesa. We know that its surface is hilly and rough, but from here and everywhere else, its edge, as far as can be seen, cuts the sky with a perfectly straight and even line as though it were as level on top as a table. In color it appears dark crimson above the brown and green of mingled forest and exposed rocks that cover its lower front. Looking past it, up the river, we can see the snowy Elks, and a line of rails is surveyed from Crested Butte right down to this point through a series of cañons. There is little opportunity for farming below the mouth of the Uncompahgre, where abrupt walls of red sandstone shut in the river, and sometimes hem it so closely that a road bed had to be blasted out of the cliff. The river has grown, since we saw it last in the Black cañon, to be a hundred yards wide. It still flows deeply and swiftly, but has lost the cataracts. Its color, too, after so much contact with loose earth, has changed from green to turbid yellow. The run along its banks is straight and swift. Generally the track is laid just at the brink, upon the solid rock, and the river is occasionally crossed upon admirable bridges. One of these bridges, I remember, is at a place where enormous cliffs of carmine-tinted sandstone most curiously worn full of little pits and round holes as though moth-eaten, rise sheer from the water to a great height. The strata of these cliffs--which also have bands of yellow--wear away unequally but always in a rounded shape, so that you can see them edgewise, as at a bend, the protuberances take the form of "volutes;" and this will continue for long distances unchanged, as if the cliff had been adorned with gigantic beads of molding. It is one of the most interesting stages of the whole journey.

Just east of the Grand are the finest cliffs of all,--great piles of ponderous masonry, fit for the bulwarks of a world, each massive block, a hundred feet or so square, set firmly upon its underlying tier, and the whole rising two or three thousand feet in majestic proportions and colors that please by their softness and harmony. Past these we roll slowly out upon the longest bridge in the state--950 feet--spanning the swift yellow flood of the Grand river just above where the Gunnison enters, and find ourselves at Grand Junction.