Chapter XVIII: In the Wet Mountain Valley

For some were hung with arras green and blue,
Showing a gaudy summer morn.
* * * * * * * *
And one a full-fed river winding slow
By herds upon an endless plain.
--TENNYSON.

Cañon City was by no means a bad place to stay, and we would have prolonged our visit to the benefit of our table, had not the railway yard been so busy a one that there was no rest for our cars, which were pulled about, here and there, by the necessities of train-forming, in a way we were far from enjoying, so we decided to go on. At the last minute, nevertheless, this happy-go-lucky crowd concluded that they were extremely anxious first to take a run over into the Wet Mountain valley. One gentleman, of uncertain influence, raised his voice against it, but was silenced so quickly it made his head swim. He had endeavored to point out that it would be more instructive to go down to the great coal mines, a few miles below; and far more fun to ascend Signal mountain and "see what we should see." He tried skillfully to arouse some enthusiasm by telling how, though it seemed within rifle-shot, it was really eighteen miles away; how it can be seen from the plains not only, but also from South Park and the peaks that surround; how, in consequence, the Utes chose it as one of their telegraph stations, and the early pioneers bound for Pike's Peak, saw from their camps the wavering smoke by day, or the signal fires at night, upon its summit, through which the Indians informed their companions of the invaders' movements. Thus it came to be known as Signal mountain, but in this gentleman's humble opinion the old Spanish name of "Pisgalo Peak" was better. All this was listened to with a sort of consolatory attention; nevertheless the speaker was compelled, not only to resign his plan, but to give orders otherwise.

Grown strong in the lap of the Wet Mountain valley, Grape creek assaults the red walls of rock that bar its progress to the Arkansas at the mouth of the Grand Cañon. The profusion of wild vines its waters nourish, makes its name a natural one, and they adorn its course as few streams in the West are garnished. These are particularly abundant along the rocky lower part of the stream, growing luxuriantly upon the arbors the great cottonwoods afford, and under the shelter of the warm, red walls, relieving the ruggedness of their abrupt slopes, "as if nature found she had done her work too roughly, and then veiled it with flowers and clinging vines."

"The entrance to Grape Creek cañon," writes an acquaintance, who was there a little in advance of us, "for over a mile, follows the windings of the clear flowing creek, with gently sloping hills on either side covered with low spruce and piñon, and with grass plats and brilliant flowers in season far up their slopes, and the Spanish lance and bush cactus present their bristling points wherever a little soil affords them sustenance.... About seven miles from the mouth of the creek a small branch cañon comes in from the right. It was once a deep cleft, with perpendicular sides, created in some convulsion of nature, but it has been gradually filled up with débris and broken rock until a sloping and not difficult path is made, by the sides of which a luxuriant vegetation has taken root, and the wild rose and clematis blooms with the humble blue-bell among the mossy bowlders. Climbing this path for a few hundred feet a side cleft is seen at the right, which seems to terminate in a solid wall. Following it to the breast, however, you find at the left a passage made by a water channel, with steps which ladies can easily pass with a little help, and we enter a narrow passage between high rocky walls. Turning again to the right, we follow this perhaps two hundred feet, and looking to the left we find before and above us the lofty arched dome of the "Temple." About twenty-five feet above where we are standing is a platform, perhaps fifty feet in width and six or eight feet in depth, over which projects far above the arching roof. Though the auditorium in front is rather narrow for a large audience, the platform is grand, and may be reached without great difficulty. Music sounds finely as it rolls down from the overhanging sounding-board of stone. From the platform deep cavernous recesses are seen at the sides, which time has wrought, but which are invisible from below. Moreover, the action of water slowly percolating through the back walls, carrying lime and spar in solution, has coated them with crystals, which gleam in sparkling beauty when the sunlight touches them early in the day. Farther up the cañon the rocks do not rise to so great heights, and the vista opens out into pleasant winding valleys well covered with grass, but there are several very interesting points where the action of internal convulsions upon the granite and syenite in elder ages, when they came hot from the crucible of nature, have rolled and twisted and kneaded the great rock-masses into most curious and notable shapes."

These beauties passed all too rapidly, the green expanse of the Wet Mountain valley opened before us. It seemed to merit its name, for the Sangre de Cristo, walling in its western side, was the abode of contending hosts of rain and snow, whose pale, dense phalanxes lent new sublimity to the noble battle-ground they had chosen; but the real "Wet Mountains,"--the old "Sierra Mojada" of the Spaniards, the "Green Horn" range of the dwellers on its eastern outlook--are the ragged range eastward.

The Wet Mountain valley has long been settled by ranchmen, and extensive herds pasture on its wide-sweeping hillsides. Grape creek, flowing from Promontory bluff and the hills to the southward, which separate this valley from Huerfano park and the drainage of the Cucharas, waters the center of the valley, and its banks are lined with meadows and farms. Each winter sees hay alone sent from these meadows to the value of not less than $150,000. Oats and barley, especially, do well, and most of the roots are grown successfully; very fine potatoes were transferred from those fields to our boiler, so that we have the best evidence of their excellence. The improved appearance of the numerous ranches, which in one or two places are agglomerated into hamlets, shows their prosperity, and the whole picture of the valley is one of the most pleasing in Colorado,--not only in point of natural beauty, but for its commercial and human interest, for Rosita is one of the oldest towns in Colorado.

"A legend runs," _vide_ H. H., "that there was once another 'Little Rose,' a beautiful woman of Mexico, who had a Frenchman for a lover. When she died her lover lost his wits, and journeyed aimlessly away to the north; he rambled on and on till he came to this beautiful little nook, nestled among mountains, and overlooking a green valley a thousand feet below it. Here he exclaimed, 'Beautiful as Rosita!' and settled himself to live and die on the spot. A simpler and better authenticated explanation of the name is, that, when the miners first came, six years ago, into the gulches where the town of Rosita now lies, they found several fine springs of water, each spring in a thicket of wild roses. As they went to and fro from their huts to the springs, they found in the dainty blossoms a certain air of greeting, as of old inhabitants welcoming newcomers. It seemed no more than courteous that the town should be called after the name of the oldest and most aristocratic settler,--a kind of recognition which does not always result in so pleasing a name as Rosita (Tompkinsville, for instance, or Jenkins' Gulch). Little Rose, then, it became, and Little Rose it will remain."

But the metropolis of the valley, and the terminus of the railway at present is the newer town of Silver Cliff, a town which saw one of the "biggest booms" on record. The story goes that the first known discovery of silver here was in July, 1877, by the Edwards brothers, who had previously been running saw-mills on Texas and Grape creeks. Returning one warm evening from one of the mills to Rosita, Mr. R. J. Edwards stopped in the shade of a low bluff, jet-stained reddish rock, which stood out from the slope of a hill on the western side of the valley seven miles north of his destination. The peculiar appearance of the rock moving his curiosity, he procured an assay of it, when, to his astonishment, he was told that it ran twenty-four ounces in silver to the ton. In a few days the entire population of Rosita had migrated to the rock which they agreed to call the Silver Cliff, and were digging holes and testing for gold, since it was thought there was more of that than of the less valuable mineral to be obtained. But their efforts came to nothing; and as quick to be discouraged as they were to have their hopes aroused, the mercurial crowd vanished, and the black striped rocks enjoyed their previous solitude through all the next autumn and winter.

Then (this was in the spring of 1878) some sensible prospectors tried for silver and located the "Racine Boy" and various other properties right on the brow of the cliff, which have since proved of great value. This was the signal for a second rush, but the new comers, who dug holes everywhere and anywhere, like an immense colony of prairie badgers, each thought himself sure of millions, and held his bit of ground at so high a price that nobody would buy at all. This resulted in a panic, the effect of which was really for the prosperity of the critical camp, since capital now took hold and deep developments proceeded on some properties that had proved their worth.

It did not take long to evince the fact that ninety out of every hundred of the holes scattered so indiscriminately over the velvety knolls of Round mountain and the smooth, hard plain near by, were of no value; and also, on the other hand, to show enough paying mines to make it appear that the ore (at any rate that near the surface) all lay in a particular "belt," apparently culminating in the exposed ledges that had first attracted the miner's eyes.

The Hardscrabble mining district, in which both Silver Cliff and Rosita are situated, takes its name from a small creek that rises in the foothills on the west side of the Wet Mountain range, or Sierra Mojada, and, forcing its way through a wild and difficult cañon, flows into the Arkansas river seven or eight miles east of Cañon City. The mountains themselves are of red granite, which has been thrown up in the wildest confusion, and which the winds and rains in many places have carved into all sorts of fantastic shapes. The range is extremely rugged, almost destitute of large timber, and is impassable for wagons, except where roads have been built at great expense through the cañons and over the divide.

The western foothills of the Sierra Mojada generally present, at a distance, a smooth, rounded appearance, with now and then a ledge of rocks sticking out of the summit or side, and while on some of them timber of considerable size is growing, in most instances the vegetation consists solely of a few stunted evergreen bushes and a very thin growth of gramma grass. The soil on these hills is generally very thin, and, on approaching them, the surface is found to be covered with loose pieces of broken rock, which the frosts have detached and the rains washed out from beneath a slight covering of earth. It is in these foothills that all the best mines of the Hardscrabble district have been found.

The geological formation of this rich mineral belt is peculiar and very interesting. Resting upon and against the granite of the Wet Mountain range and its higher foothills, and extending down into the valley beyond the southern line of the belt, lies an enormous deposit of porphyry, or trachyte, a volcanic rock poured out and consolidated during the tertiary period. Its width is at least five miles, and its length is probably fifteen or twenty. Extending into the trachyte formation from the southwest, and following its general direction, is a tongue-shaped mass of granite about three-fourths of a mile wide and at least seven or eight miles long. When the trachyte was poured out this granite apparently formed a ridge which rose above the level of the fluid mass of the surrounding volcanic rock, and therefore was not covered by it. That it does not now stand higher than the surrounding country does not disprove this theory, because there are everywhere to be found evidences of terrible convulsions since the trachyte was deposited which have completely changed the face of this entire region. The mines here are found both in the granite and also in the trachyte. Winding through the porphyry, in a serpentine course, there is also a stream of obsidian, as it is called here, or volcanic glass, mixed with trachyte and quartz bowlders. This stream, where it has been examined, varies from a few feet to many rods in width, and in crevices of the bowlders which form the mass of it were found, on the Hecla claim, some very rich specimens of horn silver.

At Silver Cliff, and north of there especially, the trachyte rock has been shaken up and fractured in all directions, and in many places the crevices have been filled with iron and manganese, which has become oxidized, and with chloride of silver. This is the free milling ore which is found in all the mines that lie directly north of this town and adjoining it. The trachyte is of itself yellowish white; when it is stained with the black oxide of manganese and the red oxide of iron that variegates the ores, it is sure to carry silver, though this (in the form of a chloride) can rarely be seen. Sometimes, however, the silver can be seen upon the surface of a fracture in the form of a green scale, or appears in little globules of horn silver. While the rich ore is discovered in large masses, surrounded by leaner or less valuable rock, there is nowhere in the chloride belt anything that looks like a vein. The rock just covers the entire face of the country over an area two miles long and half a mile wide, and the whole mass of it contains at least a small quantity of silver.

The theory of the geologists, accepted by the miners, is, that the trachyte, after it became solidified, was shaken and broken up by some great convulsion, and that simultaneously, or afterward, silver, iron, manganese, and the other metals of which traces are found in the rock, were disseminated through crevices, either in water solutions or volatilized--in the form of gases. These solutions or gases are supposed to have come up through cracks in the earth's crust. Such a deposit is called in the old world "stockwork," and Professor J. S. Newberry, in writing recently of "The Origin and Classification of Ore Deposits," mentions this as one of the two most important examples of this kind of deposit that have come under his observation. The other is the gold deposit in Bingham cañon, Utah. None of the oldest miners ever saw before any ore that looked like this at Silver Cliff, and this explains their failure to discover its value until recently. The same is true of the quartzite gold ore in Bingham cañon. The miners worked for years there getting out silver-lead ores, but threw aside the gold ore as waste, not dreaming of its value.

But the mineral belt which I have described contains other classes of mines. At Rosita, in the "Pocahontas-Humboldt" lode, the trachyte, instead of being shattered and impregnated, has been rent asunder and a true fissure formed in it, filled with gray copper, galena, zinc blende, iron and copper pyrites and heavy spar--all carrying sulphide of silver. These form a narrow pay streak from one to eighteen inches wide, and the remainder is filled with a gangue rock, generally of a trachytic formation. This vein extends for a long distance through the hills, and is inclosed by walls that are as clearly defined as those of a room. Other smaller veins of the same character have been found in the country north of Rosita, and on some of them valuable mines have been located and developed.

Still another class of mines in the same mineral belt remains to be mentioned. Those are what Professor Newberry has called the "mechanically filled" veins, and they include the "Bassick" and the "Bull-Domingo." The former is supposed to be a true fissure vein in the trachyte rock, the cavity of which, after the rocks were rent asunder, was filled with well rounded pebbles and bowlders, generally similar in constitution to the country rock. The interstices in this mass have been filled with tellurides of gold and silver, free gold, zinc blende, galena, and the pyrites of iron and copper carrying silver. These materials surround the stones in thin shells, the pebbles and bowlders forming nuclei about which the metallic substances crystallized. In the "Bull-Domingo," situated in the granite tongue, the stones are generally granite or syenite, and the cementing substance is argentiferous galena, which not only surrounds the stones, but in many cases entirely fills up the irregular spaces between them. In both of these cases it is supposed that the metallic matter came up from below in the form of a hot solution.

Silver Cliff has been a trifle disappointed, however. Not only were her streets laid out broad and straight, upon a splendid town site, over a considerably larger area than has yet been occupied, but two other towns, Westcliffe, where the railway station is, and Clifton, between the two towns, invite persons to buy town lots and build houses in rivalry. At present, however, Clifton's population consists chiefly of its town-agent, and there is one of the best opportunities to take your choice of building sites there that I know of in the Centennial state. Westcliffe has a big smelter, a hay-press, the water-works, and various other reasons for being a future village of importance.

Yet Silver Cliff is a fine town, and its streets are busy with miners and merchants and professional men, who know where their money is coming from and going to. The immense interests of the Silver Cliff Mining company, with its open, quarry-like mine, and its great mill, which has the reputation of being the finest in Colorado, employ a large number of men. Another mill, further down the creek, is running on the product of its mines, and a great deal of development-work along the whole belt is in progress, while prospects of rich strikes elsewhere keep things in a bright, hopeful condition.

As for Rosita, it was a thriving mining camp, half a dozen years before Silver Cliff and its chlorides were heard of. True fissure veins were disclosed, and a permanent town resulted, which is yet mining quietly but successfully, and making its people wealthy.