but not any one else."

Letter XIII

The blight of mining--Green Lake--Golden
City--Benighted--Vertigo--Boulder Canyon--Financial straits--A hard
ride--The last cent--A bachelor's home--"Mountain Jim"--A surprise--A
night arrival--Making the best of it--Scanty fare.

BOULDER, November.

The answer regarding a horse (at the end of my former letter) was given
to the landlord outside the hotel, and presently he came in and asked
my name and if I were the lady who had crossed from Link's to South
Park by Tarryall Creek; so news travels fast. In five minutes the
horse was at the door, with a clumsy two-horned side-saddle, and I
started at once for the upper regions. It was an exciting ride, much
spiced with apprehension. The evening shadows had darkened over
Georgetown, and I had 2,000 feet to climb, or give up Green Lake. I
shall forget many things, but never the awfulness and hugeness of the
scenery. I went up a steep track by Clear Creek, then a succession of
frozen waterfalls in a widened and then narrowed valley, whose frozen
sides looked 5,000 feet high. That is the region of enormous mineral
wealth in silver. There are the "Terrible" and other mines whose
shares you can see quoted daily in the share lists in the Times,
sometimes at cent per cent premium, and then down to 25 discount.

These mines, with their prolonged subterranean workings, their stamping
and crushing mills, and the smelting works which have been established
near them, fill the district with noise, hubbub, and smoke by night and
day; but I had turned altogether aside from them into a still region,
where each miner in solitude was grubbing for himself, and confiding to
none his finds or disappointments. Agriculture restores and
beautifies, mining destroys and devastates, turning the earth inside
out, making it hideous, and blighting every green thing, as it usually
blights man's heart and soul. There was mining everywhere along that
grand road, with all its destruction and devastation, its digging,
burrowing, gulching, and sluicing; and up all along the seemingly
inaccessible heights were holes with their roofs log supported, in
which solitary and patient men were selling their lives for treasure.
Down by the stream, all among the icicles, men were sluicing and
washing, and everywhere along the heights were the scars of
hardly-passable trails, too steep even for pack-jacks, leading to the
holes, and down which the miner packs the o