Chapter VI: Castle Safety

“Here we are pard!” chirped the general, as he turned the forward end of our raft shoreward, where a clump of scraggy pines grew by the water’s edge and underneath the open door of our lately acquired brownstone front, which appeared to have been excavated in solid sandstone rock, some thirty to forty feet from the water’s edge and chiseled in a face wall so nearly perpendicular that I was puzzled to know how the commander in chief intended to conduct his army into the new barracks, and said as much to him.

“Oh ho! have you never heard of the advantages of a good, healthy, elevated moral tone in home life? Well, I’ll show you in half a wink how to elevate the working man of Colorado beyond the reach of evil--Piutes.”

And he began to run up a thick-branched pine like a kitten. I followed suit and soon found myself on a level with a ledge that jutted out so close to our rustic ladder that it was but a step from the one to the other. From this point our cave was reached by a winding zigzag path which had at some time been cut into the rocky mountain side, and was flanked here and there by a scrawny cedar or spruce with a meager foothold in the rocky wall.

If I had cherished any romantic dreams of finding a primitive, but once elegant rock dwelling that had been inhabited by a luxurious, intelligent people, who should prove their right to be called such by leaving their cavern bestrewn and behung with profuse and unmistakable evidence of their wealth and culture, I was soon disenchanted by actual contact in broad daylight with a rudely constructed, dark, chilly, rock chamber hewn in the sandstone rock, intended apparently to solve a problem of direst need of shelter from inclement wintry storms, and protection against some relentless, terror-inspiring foe. The only tokens of former occupation were a few remains of charred wood, and a few ashes where some miner, probably Abner himself, had prepared his anchorite repast, intent upon his own reflections, not of the mouldy past and the hands that had driven this incipient tunnel into the mountain or what had been the need that prompted the work, only so far as to wonder if he were some poor prospector, braving the fury of the savages in the hope of unearthing riches as fabulous as these within our very grasp at Mountain Spring, and if he, too, was driven away at the supreme moment of success, or tomahawked and scalped while he was yet gloating over his newly-found treasure. Vain speculation and echoless inquiries of past decades, perhaps of past centuries. The rudely cut walls gave no clew to the kind of implement employed or the complexion of the hand that had wielded it. The very absence of any distinctive marks or characteristic relics, tantalized the antiquarian instinct, and piqued my curiosity, convincing me that, under favorable circumstances, I might soon become a fully equipped and matured relic fiend, with more pleasure than I ever felt for the pursuit of gold-hunting, or any mere wealth-getting pursuit. No reasonable hypothesis of settlement based on the agricultural advantages of this region could ever be formed, for of all inducements to the former it was barren and even a sheepman would hardly deem it possible for his flocks to crop a living on this rocky height, for the Elk Mountains presented a spectacle suggesting nature’s wildest frolics to produce chaotic and grotesque effects.

Here the geologist’s theory of successive stratification is demolished and flung to the winds. Granite and sandstone capped the carboniferous limestone at one point. All three intermingled in confused conglomerate, and again the various strata carefully placed side by side, on edge, or overlapped each other in successive folds, altogether forming an object lesson fit for pandemonium, but one to drive a student of geology to distraction.

No less fruitful field opened to the student of anthropology. Was this an outpost of the lines of fortresses of the Cliff Dwellers, who had lived and loved and worshiped here? Aztec, Toltec, worshiper of the sun, the fire, or more modern devotee at the shrine of the Golden Calf?

But to return from our airy flight of fancy into far realms of space, to our unromantic, but very real dwelling in the rock with the coney, we were grateful for a safe resting place, and with slow pains carried aloft all our little store of food and weapons together with our axes, and, having done so, we proceeded to relax our strained nerves and indulge to the full our physical desire for rest. We did little else for two or three days, beyond watching for signs of pursuit. Abner, however, gave it as his opinion that the reds stood too much in dread of the wild Colorado and its sources to venture very far upon the current of the Gunnison, which we had found swift and turbulent and exceedingly capricious in its channel, but not a circumstance, said the general, to what it is below us. “It’s built on the same higgledy-piggledy plan as this ere mountain, where the rocks are tumbled around so promiscuous-like that a prospector has to stand on his head to get his bearings.”

When we were rested and recruited a little, we began to prospect on the mountainous banks of the river, rather listlessly on my part, I confess, for I had been too near the clouds for a few feverish days to relish the idea of being an earthworm again; but my brave old comrade went to work with as much apparent good humor and hopeful earnestness as ever, encouraging me by relating numerous incidents that had come within his knowledge of parties who had endured all sorts of disaster and ill luck in their attempts to locate a paying mine, and had at last been rewarded beyond expectation, and found ample indemnity for all that they had suffered.

His philosophy comforted me greatly, not because I was at all sanguine now that we should ever be among that fortunate class, for I recognized the fact that for every instance of adequate success, whose recipients were the talk and envy of their fellows, a hundred miners might have perished unknown and unrewarded in the wild mountains of the Rockies. But his philosophy was sublime to me, because of the sublime faith which prompted it.

A wild spirit of adventure, nurtured by its legitimate surroundings, began to stir in my breast. A desire to know more of this mysterious river system, that had been as a myth to me in my schooldays, and in fact the sum total of the knowledge gained or professed to be gained of it was little short of mythical.

Until now I had been acting as high private in this exploring party, and had merely acquiesced in and seconded all the plans proposed by my leader; now I had the hardihood to propose a plan of my own.

Since we were prospecting in a region that was as much a sealed book to Abner as to myself, on account of the wildly irregular geological arrangement of all the various stratifications, I argued that we might as well waste a little of our time of enforced exile in exploring the lower Gunnison, and perhaps a part of the Grand, as to waste it in monotonous, unprofitable labor here.

To my delight the old man fell in with my view of it, after some hesitation, thinking perhaps that a little show of disapproval was due his superior years; but once enlisted he was as enthusiastic as a boy. Beyond our present location he had never explored, and consequently it was to him an unknown land of possible wonders as well as to me, and his unspoiled, ardent, cheerful temper caused him to enter as heartily into the project as I could desire. But his riper judgment was apparent in many ways while we planned our expedition, and I fear that if it had not been so, the tale of our wonderful voyage would never have been written, or if it had, would have been as limited as the narrative of the Three Wise Men of Gotham, spoken of in the classical writings of Mrs. Goose. My plans would have been simply like that of the wise Mr. Sherman, statesman and financier, who, when asked, after the Rebellion had closed, how resumption of specie payment could be brought about, replied, with a pardonable show of philosophic pride on delivering himself of so profound and patriotic a statement, that “the way to resume is to resume.”

My plan of embarkation on our voyage would have been to embark forthwith, and leave the rest to luck and Abner, for I had learned to lean on Abner as being an own cousin to luck, but he was inclined to trust more to plain everyday common sense preparation, and less to luck and Abner.

He pointed out two important particulars in which I should have acted indiscreetly had I embarked at once, first that we should need a much better constructed raft than our present one to weather all the gales of misfortune we were likely to encounter, and second, that it behooved us to make substantial additions to our larder before passing from the known to the unknown. I did not attempt to question the wisdom of his plans, but set about to assist him in carrying them out. A mariner’s first care is to secure a seaworthy vessel, afterwards to provision and man her; so we occupied a few days in building a boat, and afterward several days in killing and jerking a liberal supply of venison, which was very plentiful here, so that even with my lack of skill in hunting I had no trouble to kill several deer each day, the meat of which we cut in thin slices and dipped for a moment in boiling brine and then hung on poles in the sun to dry. The pure mountain air and the sun’s rays did the rest, and we soon had a fine store of concentrated food, not so attenuated in bulk, perhaps, as the wonderful food-tablets that scientists begin to tell us about at present, when a quarter of beef may be slipped into the vest pocket and an equivalent of a barrel of flour stored in a common pill box; but still in compact form, and in a state of preservation to tempt any honest appetite.

Our boat or raft, for it was little more, was constructed “specially for our trade,” was long and narrow, to give it better facilities for shooting between rocks, or leaping down the rapids we expected to encounter, was provided with cross trusses, or platforms one above another to prevent our provision deck from shipping water. Our cargo was transferred laboriously from the stronghold in the wall to our craft and securely lashed in place. Our steering oar was shipped, our paddles stowed away as a part of the cargo, for a possible time of need, and our fantastic craft headed down stream, her captain and crew as gayly hopeful of the future and as undisturbed by thoughts of peril as though we had launched a tiny “egg shell” upon a shallow artificial park lake, instead of a roaring torrent whose dangers had hitherto deterred the most courageous from braving the rapids and whirlpools and shooting the cataracts of this wild branch of a wilder stream.

Our plan embraced only a mild part of such a program; we only meant to play with the monster a little, not to come within reach of his jaws, to float down some of the lesser rapids by day and camp by some of her less stupendous canyon walls at night, to feel our way along cautiously and end our voyage where the Grand Canyon of the Gunnison began, or at least to use our best judgment as to where our exploring voyage should end. We were soon swinging along at a good rate and all our cares were needed to avoid rocks and sudden curves and freaks in the current, even now, but we got used to the wild ways of the frisky Gunnison after a few hours, and were less alarmed at her exhibitives of untamable temper, and enjoyed the wild scenery about us to the limit of our capacity for appreciating the sublime in nature, but without exhausting the subject.

The stream was as capricious as the traditional feminine shrew. For some distance the channel would widen out and the current move as placidly as a Sister of Charity; and again it would suddenly contract its bounds to one-fourth its former width, and rush its waters through the gorge as furiously as the Sister of Charity is followed about the street on her hallowed mission by the society butterfly chasing social bubbles. We knew before the close of the first day’s voyage that for us was no return by water. No human being could stem the current of those wild, rocky stretches of channel where the waters raged and foamed and rushed forward and downward with the speed of a racehorse. It was like the closing of the gate of mercy behind a poor mortal, while he was whirled forward resistlessly by the cumulative forces of evil habits until he realized that

“There is a line by us unseen,
That crosses every path,
The hidden boundary between
God’s patience and his wrath.”

We judged that we were within two days’ run of the Grand Canyon from our cavern home, and the fast increasing wildness both of the river and its surroundings convinced us that we had not overestimated the distance. The shore walls grew so precipitous that we had some difficulty in finding a suitable landing place to camp for the night; but presently the cliffs receded a little, leaving a few feet of level shore where we made our bivouac, and except for the oppressive sense of solitude that bore down upon our spirits, we passed a comfortable night.

Then, after a hearty breakfast, we again launched upon our exciting voyage. During the morning we encountered a state of things similar to that of the day before, but before noon we were whirling along at so rapid a rate and the rock walls closed in so relentlessly upon us that at times the light of day was shut out overhead, and the roar of the mad current in the hollow cavernous depths was so deafening that it was impossible to converse and we could only look in each other’s faces and read the confirmation of our own convictions there, that we were in the power of an unchained element, and flying at break-neck speed through the Grand Canyon of the Gunnison. Now we shot down a cataract with the speed of the wind gasping for breath and immersed in spray, clinging to the ropes that held our traps in place, Abner still grasping the steering oar, guiding our bark when possible to see our course, and holding her steadily before the current when the dashing spray from the menacing rocks blinded us. Then our craft would be caught in the maelstrom at the foot of these rapids and be whirled around and around, until at last it would be projected by the current beyond the caldron and dash on again into calmer waters, where we would have a brief breathing space before being again immersed in the boiling, eddying water, deafened by the roar and almost stupefied by the swiftness with which we were borne along as if nature were mercifully deadening our senses against the time of the final catastrophe, as a lion is said to toss a man in the air till his senses are so dulled to pain that it is only a sort of dreamy pleasure to be eaten.

When we had just passed one of these wild rapids which was a little more terror inspiring than anything we had yet encountered, and came out upon a stretch of comparatively quiet water, Abner delivered himself of his opinion of the situation in his characteristic style: “I’ll tell you, my little bantling, if you’ve got any words to say now’s your time to say ’em, for when we get into another of them sheep dips the Almighty himself couldn’t hear your little petition, and if the next one grows worse along of the rest of ’em we’ve passed this morning, I wouldn’t give poor Riley’s chances to get out from under the little forty-ton coverlid we lapped around him, for ours to come out alive.”

It is needless to say that I had been doing some intensely sober thinking about my past life, the mere privilege of living seeming more precious as the probabilities of its being suddenly and forever snatched away from me increased. The recollection of my dear old uncle and foster parent added a decided pang to the thought of dying without being able as I had hoped, one day, to give him substantial proof of my gratitude for his care. But all these considerations were but as added sparks to the flames of torment that racked me at the thought of being apparently so near to success and Lena, and now--delivered from the bloodthirsty Piutes, only to be reserved for a fate quite as horrible and affording even smaller chances that the story of our fate would ever be told. We might better have been swallowed in the rush of the avalanche or met our death at the first volley when Riley was killed; then we would have escaped the second horror, for we suffered all of death itself in our momentary anticipation of it in the mountain shanty. So I ran on in my train of bitter reflections, my heart rebelling with all the force of love-lorn youth against the decree that death seemed to have pronounced against it. I had never spoken of my love affair to any one and it was too sacred a subject to broach to Abner even now; but I hastily penciled a few words to Lena, on a scrap of paper, folded and directed it and gave it to Abner, telling him that if he should be saved and I was lost, to mail it as directed. Even this slender thread of chance that I might apprise her of my fate and of my unaltered affection for her in my last moments was a grain of comfort and I thought that, perhaps, even though we might both be lost there was a chance that our bodies might be recovered and the writing be legible and find its way to Lena, at once relieving her from the horrors of suspense concerning my fate and emancipating her from a compact that I fully believe would never be broken by any voluntary act of hers.

The cheery voice of Abner recalled me from my morbid speculations, and bitter self-denunciations for ever having embarked in any such business, much less on such a voyage.

“Chirk up, my tender kidling, don’t you see the old Gunnison is giving herself a little spread room and us a chance to hear ourselves think? We’re past the canyon, I think, and from now on we’ll have smooth sailin’ accordin’ to the best information I could get about the Gunnison, and you’ll see yor sweetheart sure, and all your native fields.”

I looked above me and sure enough the rocky shores had receded, the racing current had subsided to a sober gait, and we were suddenly transformed from terrified wretches expecting instant death to a pair of quiet voyagers on a quiet stream that bore us upon a smooth current, free from obstruction, and treated us to a tamer variety of scenery.

Will you oblige me, reader, by pausing here and trying to reason out from your general knowledge of human nature what was my first thought on realizing that our worst dangers were past? I remark your vacant gaze into space as you try to solve the problem and make haste, a little slowly, perhaps, some over-curious feminine reader may be so unkind as to suggest--but still with all the haste of which my slow brain is capable, to inform you that the wild desire that a few moments ago had prompted me to write and entrust to Abner an epistle to my friends in Chicago--well then to a particular friend there, if you insist on putting it that way--had changed to as wild a desire to re-possess myself of that little piece of paper.

No, it was not that I remembered having omitted to punctuate it properly with a comma here, and a semicolon there, or had neglected to add a postscript or to sign myself, “Yours in haste,” but if there were more intrinsic reasons why I wished to regain my jewels before they should be cast before swine, or if the words that seemed feeble and utterly powerless to express my dying sentiments to one of my particular friends did seem now a little--just a little--gushing, or might be so regarded by a matter-of-fact old duffer like my beloved old Abner, what is that to thee, guileless reader?

But Abner was inclined to be frisky, and intimated that the sacred trust bequeathed to him with my dying blessing could not be so lightly given up; that my passionate appeal to him to be faithful in my efforts to deliver the message could not be so easily ignored, and he added with a twinkle of merriment in his weather-worn eye, “besides, if I should deliver it in person and figure as your faithful friend to the last, and your sincere mourner, I might ‘stand in’ on her sympathies, see?”

So far as I had been able to ascertain, the merry old stager had never had a touch of a love affair in his life, and it was refreshing to hear his badgerings, especially as I knew that Chesterfield himself would break the first commandment in etiquette as soon as chivalrous Abner Callaway would take any liberties with my missive, or withhold it from me longer than it should serve his turn for a little amusement at my expense. So I fell in with his view of it, and offered to give him a letter of introduction, and advised him to procure a red necktie to match his shirt before he rung the bell at her fine, up-town residence, and hinted that his chances of success would be improved if he should scrape some of the pay-dirt from his cowhide boots before appearing before my inamorata, and take a few lessons in doffing his broad-brimmed white hat. I saw the terror that walketh in the boulevard and the spirit of the metropolitan belle that wasteth in the midnight ball, with her glances, alight upon him at the very mention of such laborious gallantries, and I knew that what the Indians could not accomplish by ruse or valor or ambuscade, I had accomplished by mere allusion--I had found his vulnerable spot.

“I surrender laddie, here’s your billy-doo; but you can stake her heavy on one card and that is, Abner don’t. And remember one thing, my boy, if ever we strike it rich and go back to Chicago to paint the town red, and you should invite me to dine with you and your filigreed friends, or to attend a fandango where your female beauties unbosom themselves to their admiring, simpering, high-dressed, and low-moraled bilks whose dads has a million dollars, you’ll ask a harder job of me than the one we’ve just finished up.” And I had no reason to doubt the entire sincerity of his statement.

“I promise you, my father in Israel,” said I, “that when we do the town together it shall be in our mining garb, or you shall suggest the change; and, as to dining, if ever I should be so fortunate as to be a diner-at-home, I’ll have a corner reserved especially for you, and a wife to do the honors who shall be as straight-laced and puritanical in all her ways as your own grandmother. But where do you propose to commence operations to secure the glittering fortune we’ve been chasing up the mountains and down this bowel of the earth?

“Oh, we may as well run down to the mouth of the Gunnison, seein’ how we can ride back this far anyway. I had an old pard once, the poor old fellow gave his scalp to the Bannocks in ’76; he was down in this country once, and we had planned to take the very identical wild goose chase we’re takin’ now. He used to keep me awake nights to tell me about the nuggets that could be picked up at the mouth of the Gunnison, if you only knew where to look; and then he’d pucker up his mouth and whistle knowingly to himself, but if he knew where to look, he died with the seed of his secret remainin’ in him unsprouted. But since we’ve been on this lonesome voyage of discovery, I’ve had plenty of spare time to think of my old pard and since we were obliged to start on this here little pleasure trip against our will, I propose that we become an explorin’ expedition on our own hook, and so make a virtue of necessity like the little snarlin’ puppy the widdy I used to work for at Chicago owned; when his mongrelship was ordered out of the house, he’d bounce across the porch, out of the yard, and down the lane with his bristles raised and a-barkin’ furiously, what the old lady used to call his ‘person bark,’ all to pretend that he went out of his own accord, and was just about to tree a tramp, or smell out a burglar in ambush.”

So we beguiled the tedious hours of the long days and grew into close companionship, my respect for the general growing daily, and his fatherly affection for me, I can account for it by no other name, seeming to thrive quite as well. Our voyage to the mouth of the Gunnison henceforth was uninterrupted, and our arrival there created no stir in mining circles except that which we created with our spades. That was to very little purpose, though I have never yet panned out a bushel of sand and gravel on the bars of these Rocky Mountain rivers without finding more or less gold, or in mining phrases “raising the color.”

But its fineness and a persistent tendency to sift down to bed rock often made it impossible to secure more than enough to tantalize the imagination for bed rock along these sand bars meant under water and the fine gold, known as “flour gold” had so far resisted all efforts to secure it by any process known to science, to a paying extent.

We continued to drift down stream a few miles almost daily and did a little half-hearted prospecting, adding at every opportunity to our store of dried venison against a possible time of need, till we found ourselves in the turbulent Colorado itself and in the dominions of Brigham Young, Joe Smith, and Ann Eliza. But if the Latter Day Saints had any title, right, or estate in the untamed mountain torrent that furrowed the southern part of Utah, they had made no effort to come into actual possession. The wild freaks of nature indulged in various directions here amid the perfect solitude gave it an air of almost awful wildness that oppressed the spirits, and our minds reflected some of the gloom of the dark, deep rifts in the rocks that the river had claimed as its channel. But the sunshine, when we found it again, was all the brighter for having been obscured, and our Bedouin manner of life was giving us an appetite for adventures from which we would have shrunk in fear at first. Fate, apparently, was fitting us for the strange predicament in which we were to find ourselves presently.

Perhaps we realized more fully the perils of our undertaking now that we had experienced them, and our realization of the facts and figures that are familiar to everybody was quickened by contact with the stupendous facts themselves. Do you realize that the Colorado falls in many places two hundred feet in one mile; that the channel is merely a seam in the solid rock; that while it expands in some places to hundreds in width it suddenly contracts to twenty yards in others, and forces its waters through this choked outlet with terrific force; that what would be banks or bluffs on ordinary rivers are here perpendicular walls of granite, sandstone, and limestone rock, towering upward from two thousand to seven, and even ten, thousand feet above your head, so that at midday the light in the depths of these gorges is that of late twilight; that the sights and sounds that greet your rocket-like passage remind one of all sorts of grewsome subjects, and suggests all sorts of stygian comparisons, and Hadean similes?

There were two mortals to whom all this Plutonian scenery was a fearful reality, for we toyed with the cub of old Neptune till she learned her power over us, and hurled us into her secret caverns, and roared and lashed herself into an ecstasy of delight at our helplessness.