Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 30, September, 1873Various
Science
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 30, September, 1873
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
[TO BE CONTINUED]
COLORADO AND THE SOUTH PARK.
On the 15th of August, 1871, two brothers and a sister--Sepia, an
artist, Levell, an engineer, and Scribe, who is the narrator--left
Chicago by the North-western Railroad, bound for Denver in Colorado,
about eleven hundred miles west. The first day we were climbing the
gradual ascent from the Lakes to the Mississippi, which we crossed
at 4.30 P.M., at Clinton. The thirty years which had elapsed since I
first traversed this region had changed it from wild, unbroken
prairie to a well-cultivated country, full of corn-fields, cattle and
flourishing towns. Then I traveled in a wagon four miles an hour,
and had to find my own meat in the shape of a deer from the grove, a
grouse from the prairie or a duck from the river. Now we rushed across
the State in six hours, stopping fifteen minutes for dinner in a fine
brick hotel, metropolitan in charges, if not in fare. In 1840, when
we arrived at the great river, we waited two or three hours for the
ferry-boat, and finally had to cross in a "dug-out," which seemed but
a frail vessel to stem the rapid currents and whirling eddies of the
Mississippi. Now we crossed upon a railroad bridge of iron, which cost
more money than all Iowa contained in 1840. Still, I fancy that the
first method of traveling was the more interesting.
Through the still summer afternoon we rushed on over the rolling
prairies of Iowa, dotted with towns and villages and covered with
great corn- and wheat-farms. Here in 1840 was absolute wilderness:
we made our hunting-camp seventy-five miles west of the river, and
we were twenty miles away from any white settler. Wolves howled and
panthers screamed around our camp, we lived upon elk and deer meat,
and our only visitors in two weeks were some Sac and Fox Indians, who
disapproved of our intrusion upon their hunting-grounds.
At 9 A.M. on the 16th we arrived at Council Bluffs, and crossed
the turbid and furious Missouri in a steam ferry-boat to Omaha in
Nebraska. For many years Council Bluffs was one of the remotest
military posts: to go there was to be banished from the world. Now
it is a town of ten thousand inhabitants, struggling to overtake its
rival on the other bank, Omaha, which has sixteen thousand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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