Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/50

 The population, once 6000, is now about 4000. It is an ill-arranged set of frame houses and shanties; and rubbish heaps, and offal of deer and antelope, produce the foulest smells I have smelt for a long time. Some of the houses are painted a blinding white; others are unpainted; there is not a bush, or garden, or green thing; it just straggles out promisenously on the boundless brown plains, on the extreme verge of which three toothy peaks are seen. It is utterly slovenly-looking and unornamental, abounds in slouching bar-room-looking characters, and looks a place of low, mean lives. Below the hotel windows freight cars are being perpetually shunted, but beyond the railroad tracks are nothing but the brown plains, with their lonely sights—now a solitary horseman at a travelling amble, then a party of Indians in paint and feathers, but civilised up to the point of carrying firearms, mounted on sorry ponies, the bundled-up squaws riding astride on the baggage-ponies; then a drove of ridgy-spined, long-horned cattle, which have been several months eating their way from Texas, with their escort of four or five much-spurred horse-men, in peaked hats, blue-hooded coats, and high boots, heavily armed with revolvers and repeating rifles, and riding small wiry horses. A solitary wag-