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Show 52 WESTERN WILDS. aristocracy and common people, old settlers and first families. Three months after it consisted, in the sarcastic language of the Julesburgers, of a hotel, two saloons, a bakery, section- house and another saloon. Then came Julesburg, the wickedest city on the list. For sixty- three days there was a homicide every day ; ten dance houses ran all night, and thirty saloons paid license to the evanescent corporation. The rise culminated at Cheyenne; thenceforward Laramie, Benton, Green River City and Bryan grew successively smaller, and Bear River City closed the chapter with a carnival of crime ending in a pitched battle between citizens and roughs, in which twelve men were killed and twenty wounded. But the history would be incomplete without the annals of Wahsatch, built upon the summit of Wasatch Mountains, 7,000 feet above the sea, in ten days of January, 1869, while the mercury ranged from zero to ten degrees below. Despite the intense cold, the sound of hammer and saw was heard day and night, and restaurants were fitted up in such haste that meals were served while the carpenters were putting on the second thickness of weatherboarding. I ate my first breakfast there in one where the mer-cury stood at five degrees below zero ! A drop of the hottest coffee spilled upon the cloth froze in a minute, while gravy and butter solid-ified in spite of the swiftest eater. It was a " wicked city." During its lively existence of three months it established a graveyard with forty- three occupants, of whom not one died of disease. Some were killed by accident; a few got drunk and were frozen ; three were hanged, and several killed in a fight or murdered; one " girl" stifled herself with charcoal fumes, and another inhaled sweet death from subtle chloroform. Transactions in real estate in all these towns were, of course, most tiUcertain ; and every thing that looked solid was a sham. Red brick fronts, brown stone fronts, and stuccoed walls, were found to have been made to order in Chicago, and shipped in ( pine) sections. Ready-> made houses were finally sent out in lots, boxed, marked and num-bered ; half a dozen men could erect a block in a day, and two boys with screw- drivers put up a " habitable dwelling " in three hours. A very good gray- stone stucco front, with plain sides, twenty by forty tent, could be had for three hundred dollars ; and if one's business hap-pened to desert him, or the town moved on, he only had to take his store to pieces, ship it on a platform car to the next city, and set up again. There was a pleasing versatility of talent in the population of such towns. To return to Benton. The Mormon converts were going forward |
