al of trouble to get me a
horse. Horses abound, but they are either large American horses, which
are only used for draught, or small, active horses, called broncos,
said to be from a Spanish word, signifying that they can never be
broke. They nearly all "buck," and are described as being more "ugly"
and treacherous than mules. There is only one horse in Greeley "safe
for a woman to ride." I tried an Indian pony by moonlight--such a
moonlight--but found he had tender feet. The kitchen was the only
sitting room, so I shortly went to bed, to be awoke very soon by
crawling creatures apparently in myriads. I struck a light, and found
such swarms of bugs that I gathered myself up on the wooden chairs, and
dozed uneasily till sunrise. Bugs are a great pest in Colorado. They
come out of the earth, infest the wooden walls, and cannot be got rid
of by any amount of cleanliness. Many careful housewives take their
beds to pieces every week and put carbolic acid on them.

It was a glorious, cool morning, and the great range of the Rocky
Mountains looked magnificent. I tried the pony again, but found he
would not do for a long journey; and as my Vermont acquaintance offered
me a seat in his wagon to Fort Collins, twenty-five miles nearer the
Mountains, I threw a few things together and came here with him. We
left Greeley at 10, and arrived here at 4:30, staying an hour for food
on the way. I liked the first half of the drive; but the fierce,
ungoverned, blazing heat of the sun on the whitish earth for the last
half, was terrible even with my white umbrella, which I have not used
since I left New Zealand; it was sickening. Then the eyes have never
anything green to rest upon, except in the river bottoms, where there
is green hay grass. We followed mostly the course of the River
Cache-a-la-Poudre, which rises in the Mountains, and after supplying
Greeley with irrigation, falls into the Platte, which is an affluent of
the Missouri. When once beyond the scattered houses and great ring
fence of the vigorous Greeley colonists, we were on the boundless
prairie. Now and then horsemen passed us, and we met three wagons with
white tilts. Except where the prairie dogs have honeycombed the
ground, you can drive almost anywhere, and the passage of a few wagons
over the same track makes a road. We forded the river, whose course is
marked the whole way by a fringe of small cotton-woods and aspens, and
traveled hour after hour with