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Show 574 WESTERN WILDS. and night after night enjoyed seeing the motley crowd on the streets. Nothing surprised me so much as the enormous quantities of mail re-ceived and the crowd at the post- office, especially on Sundays. Then one often has to wait in line an hour or two for his chance. It would seem that miners spend all their spare time in reading or answering letters. But there is a good sized theater crowded nightly, and scores of popular resorts, all of which seem well patronized Day after day the town is excited by new reports of rich discoveries in the mount-ains, " a little further on." And after a month's experience of this sort of thing, and diligent study of the formation, it seems fair to drop the narrative style and give the reader some condensed facts. Come with us now, in the opening of 1882, to Leadville. You need not stage it as we did, for you can lie back in a Horton reclining-chair and view the scenery as you come, on either of two railroads. The Denver and Rio Grande comes directly up the Arkansas from Pueblo, the Denver and South Park in a general south- west direction from Denver; and whichever one you come by, you will think the scenery the finest in the world till you return by the other. You will land in a city of fifteen thousand or twenty thousand people, with large hotels, immense wholesale and retail stores, an elegant opera-house, with good society, an odd compound of that of Chicago and San Francisco, and some of the worst society in the world if you look for it. Leadville lies on the east side of, and about three miles from the Arkansas River, on a gently sloping plain, or plateau, cut through on the south by the famous California Gulch, walled in on the east by the world- renowned Freyer and Carbonate Hills, which are in turn overshadowed by the frowning peaks of the Mosquito Range. On the north the main portion of the city is flanked by an elevation known as Capital Hill, upon wr hich some of the finest residences in the city are located. Looking west, the valley of the Arkansas is seen, beyond which towers the majestic Mount Massive, whose snowy head is often veiled with clouds. Surely no city could be more beautiful for situ-ation. Near the city indeed, throughout the district this side of the divide the geological formation is very irregular. The basis is granite, which crops out frequently. All along the valley of the Arkansas indications of extensive Silurian formations are quite abun-dant. However, the strata have been so broken up by volcanic action and so extensively converted into metamorphic rock, that it is impossible to determine the^ extent of the original formations. So far |