Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by J.B. LIPPINCOTT & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF _POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_. DECEMBER, 1880. AN HISTORICAL ROCKY-MOUNTAIN OUTPOST. [Illustration: GOING TO THE JUDGE'S.] The day might have graced the month of June, so balmy was the air, so warmly shone the sun from a cloudless sky. But the snow-covered mountain-range whose base we were skirting, the leafless cottonwoods fringing the Fontaine qui Bouille and the sombre plains that stretched away to the eastern horizon told a different story. It was on one of those days elsewhere so rare, but so common in Colorado, when a summer sky smiles upon a wintry landscape, that we entered a town in whose history are to be found greater contrasts than even those afforded by earth and sky. Today Pueblo is a thriving and aggressive city, peopled with its quota of that great pioneer army which is carrying civilization over the length and breadth of our land. Three hundred and forty years ago, as legend hath it, Coronado here stopped his northward march, and on the spot where Pueblo now stands established the farthermost outpost of New Spain. The average traveller who journeys westward from the Missouri River imagines that he is coming to a new country. "The New West" is a favorite term with the agents of land--companies and the writers of alluring railway-guides. These enterprising advocates sometimes indulge in flights of rhetoric that scorn the trammels of grammar and dictionary. Witness the following impassioned utterances concerning the lands of a certain Western railroad: "They comprise a section of country whose possibilities are simply _infinitesimal_, and whose developments will be revealed in glorious realization through the horoscope of the near future." This verbal architect builded wiser than he knew, for what more fitting word could the imagination suggest wherewith to crown the possibilities of alkali wastes and barren, sun-scorched plains?