Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/57

for a long journey; and as my Vermont acquaintance offered me a seat in his waggon to Fort Collins, 25 miles nearer the Mountains, I threw a few things together and came here with him. We left Greeley at 10, and arrived here at 4.30, staying an hour for food on the way. I liked the first half of the drive; but the fierce, ungoverned, blazing heat of the sun on the whitish earth for the last half, was terrible even with my white umbrella, which I have not used since I left New Zealand; it was sickening. Then the eyes have never anything green to rest upon, except in the river bottoms, where there is green hay grass. We followed mostly the course of the River Cache-a-la-Poudre, which rises in the mountains, and after supplying Greeley with irrigation, falls into the Platte, which is an affluent of the Missouri. When once beyond the scattered houses and great ring fence of the vigorous Greeley colonists, we were on the boundless prairie. Now and then horsemen passed us, and we met three waggons with white tilts. Except where the prairie dogs have honeycombed the ground, you can drive almost anywhere, and the passage of a few waggons over the same track makes a road. We forded the river, whose course is marked the whole way by a fringe of small cotton woods and aspens, and travelled hour after hour with nothing to see except some dog towns, with their quaint little sentinels; but the view in front was glorious. The