When I first read of Creede, when I was so ignorant concerning it that I pronounced the final _e_, it was on the date line of a newspaper, and made no more impression upon me then than though it were printed simply _Creede_. But after I had reached Denver, and even before, when I had begun to find my way about the Western newspapers, it seemed to be spelled CREEDE. In Denver it faced you everywhere from bill-boards, flaunted at you from canvas awnings stretched across the streets, and stared at you from daily papers in type an inch long; the shop-windows, according to their several uses, advertised “Photographs of Creede,” “The only correct map of Creede,” “Specimen ore from the Holy Moses Mine, Creede,” “Only direct route to Creede,” “Scalp tickets to Creede,” “Wanted, $500 to start drug-store in Creede,” “You will need boots at Creede, and you can get them at ----’s.” The gentlemen in the Denver Club talk Creede; the people in the hotels dropped the word so frequently that you wondered if they were not all just going there, or were not about to write Creede on the register. It was a common language, starting-point, and interest. It was as momentous as the word Johnstown during the week after the flood. The train which carried me there held stern, important-looking old gentlemen, who, the porter told me in an awed whisper, were one-third or one-fifteenth owners of the Potluck Mine; young men in Astrakhan fur coats and new top-boots laced at the ankles, trying to look desperate and rough; grub-stake prospectors, with bedding, pick, and rations in a roll on the seat beside them; more young men, who naïvely assured me when they found that I, too, was going to Creede, and not in top-boots and revolvers and a flannel shirt, that they had never worn such things before, and really had decent clothes at home; also women who smoked with the men and passed their flasks down the length of the car, and two friendless little girls, of whom every one except the women, who seemed to recognize a certain fitness of things, took unremitting care. Every one on the crowded train showed the effect of the magnet that was drawing him--he was restless, impatient, and excited. Half of them did not know what they were going to find; and the other half, who had already taken such another journey to Leadville, Aspen, or Cripple Creek, knew only too well, and yet hoped that _this_ time-- Creede lies in a gully between two great mountains. In the summer the mountain streams wash down into this gully and turn it into a little river; but with the recklessness of true gamblers, the people who came to Creede built their stores, houses, and saloons as near the base of the great sides of the valley as they could, and if the stream comes next summer, as it has done for hundreds of years before, it will carry with it fresh pine houses and log huts instead of twigs and branches. [Illustration: CREEDE]