Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/104

 perfect shade of a cotton-wood tree, dreading the thought of waking and jolting painfully along over the dusty prairie in the dust-laden, fierce sirocco, under the ferocious sun. We never saw man or beast the whole day.

This is the "Chicago Colony," and it is said to be prospering, after some preliminary land swindles. It is as uninviting as Fort Collins. We first came upon dust-coloured frame-houses set down at intervals on the dusty buff plain, each with its dusty wheat or barley field adjacent, the crop, not the product of the rains of heaven, but of the muddy overflow of "Irrigating Ditch No. 2." Then comes a road made up of many converging waggon tracks, which stiffen into a wide straggling street, in which glaring frame-houses and a few shops stand opposite to each other. A two-storey house, one of the whitest and most glaring, and without a verandah like all the others, is the "St. Vrain Hotel," called after the St. Vrain river, out of which the ditch is taken which enables Longmount to exist. Everything was broiling in the heat of the slanting sun, which all day long had been beating on the unshaded wooden rooms. The heat within was more sickening than outside, and black flies covered everything, one's face included. We all sat fighting the flies in my bedroom, which was cooler than elsewhere, till a glorious sunset over the Rocky Range, some ten miles off, compelled us to go