DENVER AND BEYOND 23 



but I cannot recall when I have heard of one on 

 this road, and I never felt safer. I knew I was 

 safe. I was surrounded by every safeguard that 

 human ingenuity has invented up to date, and 

 watched over by a human machine that tireless 

 patience, and the weeding out of every proved 

 incompetent, has brought as near perfection as a 

 human machine can be made. 



The land of wheat succeeds the land of corn; 

 tillage fails, and vast herds and flocks take the 

 place of cultivated fields. 



Still the steel rails slip behind you, prosperous 

 towns and pretentious cities alternating with the 

 wild and the remote. Elk Mountain follows you 

 with its great visage for fifty miles. The glories 

 of Weber Caflon, the gateway of the Mormons, 

 vanish. The pathway of the pioneers you are 

 following rises and dips and falls, and the years 

 when this trail was strewn with bleaching bones 

 of toil-spent oxen, and marked with the graves of 

 woman and child over-done with the stress of the 

 trail, seem far away and vastly remote. And yet, 

 it is barely half a century since the first great cara- 



