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Show COLORADO. 451 Leavenworth Mountain, which rises twelve hundred feet above the Barton House set on a rocky offset at its foot. But the visible peak is only the end and lowest point of Leavenworth, a spur from the Rocky Mountains, which are here known as " the Range." The fairer section of our party are startled at the crowds of men in the streets, not a woman being visible ; for this is Saturday evening, when fifteen hundred men from the hills get their mail here, besides the res-ident population ; while the whole district probably does not contain three hundred females. After a week's rest at the Barton House, we take for the season a roomy cabin in a little pine grove, at the foot of Griffith Mountain, where we dwell in all comfort and coolness for three months. The first sensation of visitors from the low country is a slight languor, and a wonderful tendency to sleep. The nights are so eool and the air so light. For a fortnight we sleep ten hours every night, and can scarcely get through the day without a nap. But if we rashly attempt to run up^- stairs, or even hurry on level ground, the la-boring lungs swell the chest, and the heart pounds away on the ribs as if it would give loud warning to " go slow." But the thin air is also in-vigorating ; the cold nights and sharp morning air are wonderful ap-petizers; while the days are rarely too warm for comfort, and in no long time one feels his vigor redoubled, and fairly rejoices in high climbs. When it is said that the Rocky Mountains have an average eleva-tion of 12,000 feet above the sea, the Eastern imagination is apt to picture them as rising abruptly two miles or more above the plains ; but in fact nearly half this elevation is gained by the traveler before he reaches the mountains. All the way from Kansas City, 800 feet above the sea, to Denver, 5,600 feet high, and still twenty miles from the mountains, one constantly travels up- hill ; and at the station on the Kansas Pacific, where one gets his first dim and distant view of Pike's Peak, he is higher than the summit of any mountain in Pennsylvania. Colorado contains no land less than 3,000 feet high. Denver is one mile above New York, and the prosperous cities of Georgetown and Central City 3,000 feet higher still. Manifestly all the conditions of animal and vegetable life are changed, and time only is needed to pro-duce in this Alpine State a new and peculiar variety of the genus American. The miner lives at an average elevation of 3,000 feet above the agriculturist, but in most of the large cations wheeled carriages can be driven 2,000 feet higher: over grassy meads and through dense pine forests, beside brawling brooks, and again out upon bare rocky flats, to the foot of the summit ridge, which rises, |
