his plans to
the large audience. He presented them, also, in full detail in the
columns of the "Tribune," and the result was that in 1870 he led a
colony of some seven hundred to this most favorable site--now mid-way
between two state capitols--fifty miles north of Denver and fifty miles
south of Cheyenne; he laid out the town with broad boulevards and double
rows of shade-trees while yet they lived in tents, and the shade-trees
seen in his imagination are now an established fact. Greeley is to-day a
town embowered in trees. The first work was to dig a canal at a cost of
sixty thousand dollars, this being the initial experiment of upland
irrigation. Such is, in outline, the history of Greeley, which the
colony desired to name Meeker--for its founder--but which Horace
Greeley's friend and associate editor insisted should bear its present
name. Greeley is known as the "garden city" of Colorado, and that it was
founded in faith and in ideals has been a determining fact in its
quality of life and its phenomenal progress.

Nathan Cook Meeker was born in the "Western Reserve," in Ohio, in 1814,
coming of the order of people whom Emerson characterized as those "who
go without the new carpet and send the boy to college." Behind him were
a long list of distinguished ancestry, men who through successive
generations had stood for achievements. Mr. Meeker in his youth taught
school, went into journalism, was connected with the New York "Mirror,"
and later was associated with George D. Prentice on the Louisville
"Journal," now the "Courier-Journal," edited by the brilliant Henry
Watterson. A versatile writer in both prose and verse, he wrote two or
three books, one of which he dedicated to President Pierce. He married a
woman of great force and exaltation of character, a native of
Connecticut, and a descendant of Elder Brewster. She shared his aims and
ideals.

In the decade of 1860-70 Horace Greeley, who was always waving his
divining rod to see if it indicated the proximity of genius, discovered
Mr. Meeker, and invited him to become the agricultural editor of the
"Tribune," succeeding Solon Robinson. Mr. Meeker's work made a strong
impression on the reading public of the day, and even Emerson inquired
as to the authorship of some of Mr. Meeker's editorial work, which won
the appreciation of the Concord seer.

In 1868 Mr. Meeker made a trip to the West for the "Tribune," writing a
series of valuable letters embodying his observa