the bustling frontier city. You wonder to see glistening dome and
spire far out there under the very shadow of the Rockies. At least you
would have wondered a decade ago in the Centennial year. You note the
transparency of the atmosphere. Science has told you that at such an
altitude the air is rarefied. There is no light haze to soften outlines
and to lend enchantment to a distant view. Roof, spire, chimney, all
stand out clear and hard, and the coal-smoke from the railway blots the
landscape where it rises, yet is quickly scattered by the mountain
breeze. Between you and the little town lies the prairie over which the
stage road runs straight and hard as a pike until, nearing us, it begins
to twist and turn among the foot-hills for a climb across the ridge into
the valley of Lodge Pole Creek beyond. Lodge Pole indeed! The creek
valley has not a stick of timber far as one can see it. Follow it to its
source, two days' trot or tramp up towards Cheyenne Pass, and there you
find them, as the Sioux did twenty years ago, before we bade them seek
their lodge-poles farther north. How far is it to the prairie
metropolis,--a mile and a half, you venture? My friend, were you an
artillerist, and were you to sight a two-hundred-pounder to throw a
shell into Cheyenne from where we stand, "setting your sights for three
thousand yards,"--more than your mile and a half,--the shell would rip
up the prairie turf somewhere down there where you see the road crossing
that _acequia_. Cheyenne lies a good four miles away, and is a good deal
bigger than you take it to be. But here to the south lies a strange
diamond-shaped enclosure,--a queer arrangement of ugly brown wooden
barns and sheds far out all by itself on the bare bosom of the prairie.
That is _called_ a frontier fort. It is not a fort. It never has been.
Even tradition cannot be summoned to warrant the name. It was built
after our great civil war, and named for one of the gallant generals who
fell fighting in the Shenandoah Valley. It has neither stockade nor
simplest defensive work. It is all it can do to stand up against a
"Cheyenne zephyr," and a shot fired at one end of it would go clean
through to the other without meeting anything sufficiently solid to
deflect it from its course. It is a fort by courtesy, as some of our
non-combatants are generals by brevet, and would be as valuable in time
of defensive need. All around it, east, west, and north, sweeps the
level prairie. South