The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature
and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880., by Various

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880.

Author: Various

Release Date: June 24, 2005 [EBook #16124]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE ***

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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by J.B.
LIPPINCOTT & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington.

LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.

DECEMBER, 1880.

AN HISTORICAL ROCKY-MOUNTAIN OUTPOST.

[Illustration: GOING TO THE JUDGE'S.]

The day might have graced the month of June, so balmy was the air, so
warmly shone the sun from a cloudless sky. But the snow-covered
mountain-range whose base we were skirting, the leafless cottonwoods
fringing the Fontaine qui Bouille and the sombre plains that stretched
away to the eastern horizon told a different story. It was on one of
those days elsewhere so rare, but so common in Colorado, when a summer
sky smiles upon a wintry landscape, that we entered a town in whose
history are to be found greater contrasts than even those afforded by
earth and sky. Today Pueblo is a thriving and aggressive city, peopled
with its quota of that great pioneer army which is carrying civilization
over the length and breadth of our land. Three hundred and forty years
ago, as legend hath it, Coronado here stopped his northward march, and
on the spot where Pueblo now stands established the farthermost outpost
of New Spain.

The average traveller who journeys westward from the Missouri River
imagines that he is coming to a new country. "The New West" is a
favorite term with the agents of land--companies and the writers of
alluring railway-guides. These enterprising advocates sometimes indulge
in flights of rhetoric that scorn the trammels of grammar and
dictionary. Witness the following impassioned utterances concerning the
lands