Lewis B. France

“ At the other end we discern the comfortable cabin of Cozzens, and as we emerge from the shelter of the trees the head of the Park is spread out into a broad valley before us, guarded by low-lying hills, while here and there against the clear blue sky looms up an occasional snow-capped peak. Bright colors everywhere—the green of the meadow and the darker shade of the pine, the silver-lined leaf of the white-trunked aspen, and flowers countless as the stars, reposing tranquilly under the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. ”

“ In August, 1868, I made acquaintance first with the pools and riffles in the vicinity of the old Brown and Stuart’s ranche. I clambered up and down the cañon for five or six miles east and west. The rush and the roar of the crystal waters made glorious music, and an hour’s fishing would send me laden back to camp. But for all the grand surroundings, the fresh air, the wild flowers and the trout, there was weariness of heart for her and me who made our camp on the margin of the then beautiful stream. ”

“ But a new growth is springing up, as if it were the pleasure of the present to keep green the grand monument of the dead glacier.
On the narrow beach, with its background of new growth, smolder the dying embers of a camp-fire. My eyes follow the thin column of blue smoke that rises and wreathes itself among the tree-tops, and floats away to where desecration has stepped in. The suggestion of primitive life is dispelled by the ridge pole of a mean house obtruding itself above a depression in the moraine, and I know that this is but the best of a number of slab shanties. ”

“ An immediate change from a three pound plum bush pole to an esthetic split bamboo rod of a few ounces would drive a man crazy. It would be like putting a delicately turned Kirby into the hands of a pot hunter of the stone age. As the Kirby would compare with a bone sharpened at the ends, and a hole in the middle for the raw hide line, so the little bamboo with the plum bush. No doubt the prehistoric angler and his descendant of the nineteenth century would look, if they could, each upon the implements of the other with curiosity and utter lack of faith. ”

“ As we go on, the sharp ridge of Red Mountain comes into view, guarded on the east by a monster hill, which none of our ingenious explorers, so generous in giving names, have condescended to dignify with a title. Its broad base washed by the rushing torrent, its sides clothed in a mantle of living green away up to the sharp line which marks the limit of the timber growth, and yet on and up the eye glances over the granite, with its azure background, until the vast pile is diademed with a fleecy cloud. ”

“ Up the gorge on the right, toward the summit, an ominous cloud begins to creep upon the blue, and we begin to think the prophet will, after all, command respect, but are doomed to disappointment. As the black mass rises over the summit we notice a rift in its center, soon it widens, goes to the right and left, the blue expands, and we are not deprived of a minute’s sunshine. ”

“ I’m stopping with a friend, a genuine angler, whom I have seen walk in the wake of one of those threshing machines, with a rod light as a buggy whip, and with a twist of the wrist drop a fly upon the water thirty or fifty feet away, and as it settled gently down, as falls the snowflake upon the bosom of the stream, there would come a rush and struggle that denoted the fishing was really good to him who had achieved the art of casting a fly. ”

“ At five o’clock that same day there was a tent pitched in a little valley upon Bear creek, thirty-five miles from home, with two pairs of blankets, a coffee pot, two tin cups and a frying pan; not a soul or a habitation within twenty miles of us; a beautiful mountain stream, clear as crystal, cold as ice, and teeming with trout. What would you have, 12 money? Why, bless your soul, money was at a discount; there were acres of it a little way off, only for the digging.
In those days fishing tackle was scarce, and a plum-bush pole and linen line were the best in the land. ”

“ Along the margin, when the lake is perfectly calm, the bottom seems to shelve to irregular distances, when the light color of the crystal water suddenly changes to a hue almost black, at once suggestive of precipitous and tremendous depths, and which, no doubt, prompted the giving of its name. To the left, its base lapped by this gem of the mountains, rises a cone-shaped spur of the range with summit far above timber-line, and its rugged clefts filled with snow. ”

“ Why, it is worth a day’s journey to sit where I do now, under the shadow of a pine whose every sigh in the cool breeze is freighted with fragrance, and feast on the massively beautiful scenery. A foreground of a mile or two of meadow rich in green and gold; the beetling lava cliffs on the left, and the brown hills, studded with 76 great piles of granite, sloping gently down to the margins of the Grand. ”

“ I had been tickling my vanity with the belief that I knew something about trout fishing, but I have found out that my acquirements were, by way of comparison, merely with the escaped lunatics. He sends me out to “take the cream off” a pool, or out of it, and when I’d be ready to swear there was not another left, he’ll make me bear witness to my own lack of faith by striking as many, if not more, than I had brought to creel. He thinks I’ll learn to handle a fly rod after awhile, and I have hope; besides I am learning to cultivate all the virtues. ”

“ At least I am away from them, toll-roads and wayside houses; in the land of the mosquito and the trout; and the meadow larks perch upon my tent top and “give salutation to the morn,” by conjugating the to them familiar Greek verb—at least it strikes me so.
Mosquitoes are among the blessings of this life; they prepare us for the robes of immortality, by teaching us patience under affliction. If there is anything I love better than a mule, it is a mosquito. There is poetry in his flight and music in his song. Never having concealed my love, I think it got abroad and preceded me this trip. ”

“ Without fair success with rod and line, a camping trip, to some at least, would be a failure. The weather giving fair promise, I started over the divide below the Springs to revisit several familiar pools and riffles down the Grand, in anticipation of a good morning’s sport. The forenoon was expended with half a dozen trout and as many miles’ tramp as the result. Life is not worth living without a disappointment now and then. I met with a decided failure where I had rarely had anything but success, and it sharpened my appetite—for dinner. ”

“ Think of me with the mercury at seventy or more at high noon, rubber boots with tops to my hips, thick breeches, woolen shirts and a duck coat, my intellectual head swathed in a net and my horny hands 63 encased in buckskin gauntlets, a ten-ounce fly rod, and ten pounds of trout brought to basket at my back, perspiration exuding in streams; outside that net nine thousand mosquitoes to the square inch, yet I’m happy—going to school, and have the best of the vermin. ”

“ What has Herbert Spencer got to do with Middle Park and trout fishing? you inquire. Not anything, except that he says no fellow has a right to own a mine; that if he—the fellow, I mean—finds a good mine, it belongs to everybody, and he must ask everybody’s permission to work it and convert the proceeds to his own use. I wish I were everybody, or “Society,” as Herbert calls it, I’d go right over to Leadville or Rabbit Ear Range and assert my rights. Being everybody, nobody else would be around to say anything, except the fellow who had the mine. ”

“ But I can vouch for the fact that it was just eight hours from Denver to happiness. If dissatisfied humanity demands a country better adapted to its wants than Colorado, it will have to die to find it.
Upon a former occasion several years ago, I took upon myself to say publicly through the columns of a Denver daily, that I thought Coates Kinney’s “Rain on the Roof” a satire. But the night before I had lain in a pool of water on the banks of the Blue with nothing between me and the angry heavens except my prayers for daylight; they, of course, were thin but earnest. ”

“ I did not go supperless to bed, and I had some of the fish for breakfast. The diet was no novelty, but the flavor upon that occasion far surpassed that of any former experience, and no fish since has tasted so sweet as that first perch. The burnished silver tint had given way to an exquisite brown, delicate as the hue of an amber cloud painted by the evening rays of an autumn sun. Crisp, and with a fragrance to subdue the censorious palate of an epicure, he invited me to remove his dorsal, and lay bare in equal halves the firm, white meat ”

“ The bright green of the growth contrasts with the time-stained hues of the great piles of rock, and these grow more wild as the eye follows up the defile. Then a white patch, the length of a man’s arm and the breadth of a hand, glistens in the rays of the morning sun, here inaudible, but there a roaring waterfall a hundred feet high.
The gorge widens and drifts away to the right and left, but reaching high, with irregular outlines traced against the blue sky; the tints of brown and gray and green intermingle in bountiful confusion, but never wearisome ”

“ I like to ride after mules in that condition; there is something exhilarating in dashing down a mountain road with one’s hair straightening out behind as though it would disappear by the roots; careening around short curves and making lightning-like estimates of the thousands of feet to the bottom of the gulch; picking out the softest rocks upon which to fall; flying over boulders and becoming entangled in tree tops fifty feet in the air, there to remain a torn and wretched monument of indiscretion. ”

“ As I relieved his mouth of the hook, the Doctor, who had come down to me unawares, startled me with the remark, “You seem to take a heap of delight in catching a sucker.” There was a maliciousness in his tone that led me at once to inquire what success he had met with; his open creel disclosed three only, that would not weigh half as much as my capture; they were the result of his morning’s work. My own dignity will sometimes get the better of my reverence, and I read him a homily on envy. ”

“ The next day the Doctor proposed a visit to Grand Lake. I suggested that it threatened rain, and he replied that he who went fishing must expect to get wet. The retort, I told him, was dry with age; but the mules were 81 hitched,—they have not been lost,—and we started up the Grand Valley in the sunshine, but had not been long on the road before it began to rain. Rain is a good thing in the mountains; it freshens up the earth, brightens the wild flowers, fills the air with a new fragrance, makes the grass grow, and I like it. ”

“ Last night the boy went to bed early, while the pony sorrowfully partook of his evening meal in my friend’s meadow. I flattered myself that a good night’s rest was in store for me, and turned in as the moon came up over the range. The night was very still, and I was dozing off under the soothing melody of the swift flowing river on its road to the sea, when I thought I heard the distant lowing of a cow ”

“ The Ute cannot be induced to approach it, and mentions its name with a shudder, while ye gentle angler commits his frail bark to its bosom with commendable prudence. There is no telling when a storm may come; the clouds are not always the harbingers of a gale; it may come when the sky is clearest, and the awkward skiffs that prevail hereabout are not the safest, even under skilful hands.
But, as the sun puts behind him the early morning hours, the dark tints of the smooth waters change, and a mile or more away a ray of silver flashes across the lake ”

“ With that commendable resignation born of experience, I worked that pool for half an hour, gave up in disgust and started down stream—the Doctor followed in humiliation. We whipped every foot of the way down through the cañon to our horses, but not a fin rewarded our efforts. The forenoon was gone; I felt sorry for the Doctor; my sympathies went out to him as they always do for the under dog in the fight. I had no heart to express anything but unbounded satisfaction for the morning’s enjoyment. ”

“ Good for the trout because they are never caught, and good for the sportsman who knows their ways, though they be like the “way of the serpent upon the rock”—past finding out. The instinct of the trout is akin to the sense of the human sucker, and I have sometimes wondered if they did not entertain a pretty fair idea of our lunatic asylums, and gain the impression that at certain seasons there was an exodus ”

“ My friend has a dozen or more burros, and the burro is another of the blessings of this world for which I possess unlimited love. Their patient and melancholy looking eyes will excite the sympathy of any human save the miner; their ears are a mystery; their song!—Oh for a bard to string his lyre and sing in poetic numbers his praises of the burro’s song! I have sometimes thought the burro the Pegasus of some of our Colorado poets, but that they shunned their source of inspiration ”