a man to spend a night in such a
house." In Colorado whisky is significant of all evil and violence and
is the cause of most of the shooting affrays in the mining camps.
There are few moderate drinkers; it is seldom taken except to excess.
The great local question in the Territory, and just now the great
electoral issue, is drink or no drink, and some of the papers are
openly advocating a prohibitive liquor law. Some of the districts,
such as Greeley, in which liquor is prohibited, are without crime, and
in several of the stock-raising and agricultural regions through which
I have traveled where it is practically excluded the doors are never
locked, and the miners leave their silver bricks in their wagons
unprotected at night. People say that on coming from the Eastern
States they hardly realize at first the security in which they live.
There is no danger and no fear. But the truth of the proverbial
saying, "There is no God west of the Missouri" is everywhere manifest.
The "almighty dollar" is the true divinity, and its worship is
universal. "Smartness" is the quality thought most of. The boy who
"gets on" by cheating at his lessons is praised for being a "smart
boy," and his satisfied parents foretell that he will make a "smart
man." A man who overreaches his neighbor, but who does it so cleverly
that the law cannot take hold of him, wins an envied reputation as a
"smart man," and stories of this species of smartness are told
admiringly round every stove. Smartness is but the initial stage of
swindling, and the clever swindler who evades or defines the weak and
often corruptly administered laws of the States excites unmeasured
admiration among the masses.[20]

[20] May, 1878.--I am copying this letter in the city of San Francisco,
and regretfully add a strong emphasis to what I have written above.
The best and most thoughtful among Americans would endorse these
remarks with shame and pain.--I. L. B.

I left Deer Valley at ten the next morning on a glorious day, with rich
atmospheric coloring, had to spend three hours sitting on a barrel in a
forge after I had ridden twelve miles, waiting while twenty-four oxen
were shod, and then rode on twenty-three miles through streams and
canyons of great beauty till I reached a grocery store, where I had to
share a room with a large family and three teamsters; and being almost
suffocated by the curtain partition, got up at four, before any one was
stirring, saddled Bir