A Lady's Life on a Farm in ManitobaHall, M. G. C. (Mary Georgina Caroline)
History
A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba
Hall, M. G. C. (Mary Georgina Caroline)
Frontier and pioneer life -- Manitoba; Manitoba -- Description and travel
August 22.
Before leaving Denver we went to a gunsmith and invested in a
fishing-rod and numberless flies, with which we intend to do great
execution. We also went to the exhibition, opened a month ago and
still unfinished; one of the leading men, to whom we had a letter
of introduction, showed us everything. It is chiefly interesting
to miners, as the display of minerals from Western America is
unrivalled. There seemed, in the specimens, enough gold and silver
to make us rich for ever; unfortunately our ignorance on the
subject of ore is too great to thoroughly appreciate it.
* * * * *
OURAY, August 24.
It is not easy to sit down and write after forty-eight hours
travelling, as we have been doing since leaving Denver on Monday night
at 7 o'clock; but in such scenery and air so exhilarating we do not
feel as tired as we expected. You should have seen the omnibus,
stage-coach, charridon, or any other name you please to give the
lumbering vehicle in which we performed our last twelve hours' drive;
it looked truly frightening when it drove up to Cimarron depot, one
tent, last night, to pick us up, intended for twenty passengers and
any amount of luggage, and swung on great straps. It was wonderfully
well horsed, and we changed our teams every ten miles; but only then
came at the rate of five miles an hour. We both of us started for our
sixty-four miles' drive on the box-seat with the driver, who happened
to be an extremely nice man and an experienced whip; in former days he
had driven the stage-coaches across from Omaha to San Francisco, a
journey of three weeks. But he took up much room on the seat, and
every time he had to pull up his horses his left elbow ran into me,
until "he guessed my ribs would be pretty-well bruised."
About midnight, when our only other fellow-passenger turned out
from the inside of the coach, I entered it, though I expected
nearly every moment would be my last, the bumping was so fearful.
I managed to get a few winks of sleep towards morning. E---- sat
outside all night, finding it very difficult not to drop off the
coach from drowsiness. The early hours of the morning, after the
moon went down until dawn, were truly wretched, what between the
outer darkness, the flickering of our lamps, the unevenness of the
road, and the clouds of dust, and one almost began to wonder if
the journey was worth so much trouble.
But with daylight we quite altered our opinions; as really I do
not think, if you searched the whole world over, you would find
anything more beautiful than the Uncompahgre valley and park
looked in the morning light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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