THE DOME OF THE CONTINENT

Excerpt from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, published in New York City,  December 1872

n these days, when every one may travel, and the great plains, the Sierra Nevadas, and even the beauteous Yosemite Valley are becoming trite and common, it will please the tourist to learn of new routes of travel, fresh sights and places to be seen.  Some who have rushed across the continent to see the wonders on its western shore will yet gaze with amazement upon equal or greater wonders which they have hurried past without even imagining their existence; or men may journey and see nothing, may travel and have little for their pains.  Thousands boast their overland passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and return, who never saw the Rocky Mountains! Not that they traversed them in the night, nor that some of the mountain ridges were not seen; but that the sea of towering snow-clad summits which mark the eminent majesty of this great range were to them distant or invisible, hidden by the foot-hills through which they passed.

Of the whole Rocky Mountain chain Colorado  Territory possesses the chief mountains....

    Of the whole Rocky Mountain chain Colorado Territory possesses the chief mountains---certainly the most famous; for here, amidst a multitude of others, each one a monarch in itself, rise Pike's and Long's Peaks---names linked with the earliest history of the West---the landmarks of Prairie voyageurs in days gone by.  Further west, Gray's Peaks, Mount Lincoln, and a host besides tower, with summits crested with eternal snow, and, circling, 

surround those beautiful and wondrous valleys, which Rasselas might envy---the North, Middle, and South Parks.  Here is the snowy range, the icy mountain wall which parts Orient from Occident---the "divide," as it is popularly called, where melting snows discharge their waters east and west to the world's greatest and most widely separated oceans.

   The days of danger are past in Colorado.  Upon most of the stage routes the traveler is as comfortably kept and cared for as at many Eastern summer resorts, and already Saratoga trunks are seen where but a dozen years since the bear and deer only were met.  Many tourists come to see the gold mines, perhaps longing to pan out some "dust" for themselves; mineralogists and geologists come here to find the earth's wealth thickly spread before them; the botanist meets a new and splendid flora; and cactus growing thriftily beside the snow; the eyes of the ornithologist are dazzled with the dark blue-green iridescent plumage of the bold and fearless Rocky Mountain blue jay, and he starts at the sudden cry of the large, garrulous, black and white jackdaw.  The sportsman looks to his rifle as he sees the monstrous tracks of the cinnamon grizzly, and by the camp-fire listens with surprise to stories of adventurous "mountain lions," of hand-to-hand encounters with huge elk, or of thrilling climbs amidst the cliffs in pursuit of the big-horn or mountain sheep; regrets the absence of his fly-rod as he hears cold crystal brooks swarming with speckled trout of the same old habits and as vigorous in their play as those that haunt the Adirondack lakelets or the streams of Maine.  The Alpine tourist feels anew the longing for adventure as he hears ofuntrodden summits vying in altitude with the loftiest of the Swiss Jura; and the artist longs to stand in the presence of those scenes which have inspired the pencil of Bierstadt.

It is a great pleasure-ground, and soon to be the resort of those that leave the stale and hackneyed routes of European travel to see and appreciate the fresh glories of their native land; the summer home of those who, loving mountains, prefer to find their Alps this side of the stomach-troubling ocean.