MAY-DAY BESIDE THE PLATTE
To-day—to-day! It is sweet May-day again beside the Platte. The cottonwoods are putting forth their green. The wild, red-roses and the white plum-blossoms scent the air. The lark is in the fields; the robin’s cheery voice is heard. The golden flecker and the oriole make music in the woods. The dove’s low cooing woos the murmur of the streams, and the merry blackbirds chant amid the wild, sweet meadow-grass, and starry-eyed asclepia blooms.
The vast, green prairie spreads around. Its boundless lawns are sweet with flowers. The “bonny-bells” and “yellow eyes” have decked the sunny slopes with gold. The round, green hills are gay with dandelions and daisies. The sweet blue-flags, the “yuccas” and the “artemisias” brighten everywhere.
Northward, amid his banks of bloom and graceful curves, the “silver river” glides. Westward, a dozen miles beyond, the stream, and, looming over all in grand relief, appears the old, shining Rocky Mountains, the snowy range towering amid the storm-clouds, and the purple foot-hills, like the Titan forms of old among the shattered fortresses of vanquished gods!
Dreamer, you are in Colorado—you stand upon the banks of the Platte. The great, wild prairie stretches all around us. Its smooth, green lawns are bright with silver brooks and crystal lakes. Hundreds of wild fowl disport upon the water’s blue, unrippled bosom. Long strings of cattle come forth to drink—others graze in droves among the low, round hills near by. How beautiful! how bright! how grassy wild! how fair and sweet!
Dreamer, does not your heart grow glad? This is a land for rest and holiday! You hear the hum of golden bees. You feel the soft flow of the air. The sky is clear and blue and bright. The fields are green and dry and warm. The woods are beryl-hued and full of singing birds. High above you, snowy mountains tower—“Long” and “Lincoln” prop the sky. You behold Pike’s Peak further south—its blue sides terminating in a crown of snow.
My name is Brown—Sam Brown. I was born under the shadow, as it were, of these grand old Rocky Mountains. Thirty years ago, when all this vast region of plains and mountains, extending from the Mississippi River on the east to the shores of the Pacific Ocean on the west, to the Mexican Gulf on the south, and to the British possessions on the north, was an almost unexplored wilderness, filled with wild beasts and hostile Indians, my father and mother crossed the plains in a “prairie schooner,” drawn by a yoke of oxen. They came west early in ’59, with the first rush of those hardy gold seekers whose motto was “Pike’s Peak or Bust!”
Finding mining unprofitable they settled down to farming and stock-raising near the base of the mountains. Here to them four sons were born—of whom I am the eldest, having been born on March 21, 1860. I am a Colorado pioneer—yes, born of a pioneer ancestry—and it is with a sense of pride that I point out to you the fact. I also take a kind of grim pleasure in informing you that my earlier life was spent in the free and easy pursuits of a cowboy, and that my first childhood playmates were the red Indians of whose boundless liberty I used to feel very envious during my school days.
Many incidents which occurred away back in the “sixties,” when we white settlers used to have to fortify ourselves at Denver, to avoid being scalped by the Arapahoes and Cheyennes, are still fresh in my memory.
Denver, which is now a city of nearly 200,000 inhabitants, was in those days but a mere hamlet of several dozen shanties, standing almost entirely on the west bank of Cherry Creek. What a change has taken place about my home within the space of but a few brief years! On the little plateau where Fort Logan stands to-day, I shot my first “prong-horn,” and oftentimes I have played ball with Willie Bates and Jimmy Steck on the grounds now occupied by our State’s capitol and County’s court-house.
All of those dry uplands, where I used to pasture my cows, are now covered in season with wavy fields of wheat, maize and alfalfa—meadows, orchards and blooming garden plats. Where the Indian wigwam smoked but a few brief summers gone by, lordly mansions and pleasant homes are standing to-day. But the humble structure in which I was born has not been torn down yet. It stands on the west bank of the Platte River, near Littleton, and in Denver’s beautiful suburb, Wynetka. My parents, who still live at the old homestead, but now in a large and comfortable farm-house, have preserved the little old log cabin as a relic of bygone days.—Written Jan. 20, 1890.