The daily morning journal and courier. [volume] (New Haven, Conn.) 1894-1907, 1901-10-07
THE GREAT PLATEAU.

The story Of the great plateau west
of the Rocky Mountains is long and
varied. II tells of ages in which the
world was slowly moulded by fire and
/ flood, and carved by wind and sand
and rain. Dry land was conjured from
| the sea and lifted into vast plateaus;
then torn and tilted and quilted. Life
came and traced it's record here and
there on the pages Of the great stone
book.
The vast tableland is dumb anent the
coming of man, but you will find the
ruins of his abandoned homes all over
its southern reaches and struggling
out upon it's eastern and it's western
fringes, Cliff dwellers and cave dwell
/ ers, jewellers upon lofty mesas and in
snug valleys at their feet, all are gone,
and their crumbling homes are desolate.
1t was not until the Spaniards came
prying up over the plateau that the
Pueblos and other still living types of
Indians were dragged, very much
against their will, out of the languid
prehistoric silences. Then came the
conquests by the Spaniards and their
dred years, followed by a quarter of a
century Of Mexican rule.
At last the great plateau, austere as
ever, was gathered to the fold of the
United States. It's wayside stories,
wild, quaint pathetic it tells to the
wanderer in tune with its spirit along
the ancient pathways 1t has received
the hunter, the trapper. the explorer,
into it's capacious bosom--to return or
not, as fortune and the Indian willed.
The cowboy has sped out it's fastness-
es; the railway engineer has marked in
toll and hardship the routes along
which in later time the tides Of life and
industry and trade surge to and fro;
the surveyor has projected his lines
over it's arid one hundred and thirty
square miles. But the great plateau
yields grudgingly to the touch of civil
ization. 1t grants some meagre green
GASES beside the waterways. 1t opens
here and there a narrow path for the
hurrying trains, closing it's great ST.
lences behind them as they vanish
then rolls away their polluting trails of
smoke into it's vast aerial spaces, and
falls asleep again.
The part of the plateau which, on
the whole, Is most attractive to the
traveller in the land of wide horizons is
that which lies between the Denver and
Rio Grande railroad on the north and
the Santa re railroad and its adjacent
country on the south The Santa Fe
crosses the heart of the plateau, over
region austere and forbidding enough,
it is true, from the car window for all
its miles of gorgeous cliffs and noble
forests, SO lavish in stories of the
worlds fashioning, so rich in fading
glimpses of strange old barbarians
who are gone, so quantity peopled with
kindly children Of the earth and the
sun. who bid you welcome to- homes
and fresdes where for centuries they
have fore gathered, a land withal so
attractive for it's absolute freedom
from fret and fume, where you are the
unchallenged owner of the day, that
when once you have broken the link
which bound you to the rails and head
away into the dreamy shimmering
mazes which lure you on and on, it will
be strange indeed if you do not for
some lucid hours care least of all things
whether the fortunes Of the way are
ever to lead you back.-T. Mitchell
Prudden in Harper's Magazine.