ouse is freer from bugs than the one at
Greeley, but full of flies. These new settlements are altogether
revolting, entirely utilitarian, given up to talk of dollars as well as
to making them, with coarse speech, coarse food, coarse everything,
nothing wherewith to satisfy the higher cravings if they exist, nothing
on which the eye can rest with pleasure. The lower floor of this inn
swarms with locusts in addition to thousands of black flies. The
latter cover the ground and rise buzzing from it as you walk.

I. L. B.

Letter IV

A plague of flies--A melancholy charioteer--The Foot Hills--A mountain
boarding-house--A dull life--"Being agreeable"--Climate of
Colorado--Soroche and snakes.

CANYON, September 12.

I was actually so dull and tired that I deliberately slept away the
afternoon in order to forget the heat and flies. Thirty men in working
clothes, silent and sad looking, came in to supper. The beef was tough
and greasy, the butter had turned to oil, and beef and butter were
black with living, drowned, and half-drowned flies. The greasy
table-cloth was black also with flies, and I did not wonder that the
guests looked melancholy and quickly escaped. I failed to get a horse,
but was strongly recommended to come here and board with a settler,
who, they said, had a saw-mill and took boarders. The person who
recommended it so strongly gave me a note of introduction, and told me
that it was in a grand part of the mountains, where many people had
been camping out all the summer for the benefit of their health. The
idea of a boarding-house, as I know them in America, was rather
formidable in the present state of my wardrobe, and I decided on
bringing my carpet-bag, as well as my pack, lest I should be rejected
for my bad clothes.

Early the next morning I left in a buggy drawn by light broncos and
driven by a profoundly melancholy young man. He had never been to the
canyon; there was no road. We met nobody, saw nothing except antelope
in the distance, and he became more melancholy and lost his way,
driving hither and thither for about twenty miles till we came upon an
old trail which eventually brought us to a fertile "bottom," where hay
and barley were being harvested, and five or six frame houses looked
cheerful. I had been recommended to two of these, which professed to
take in strangers, but one was full of reapers, and in the other a
child was dead. So I