THE COLORADO PIONEERS

Not even the starry splendor of Colorado skies or the untold magic of the atmosphere vibrating with unwritten music, pictorial with such scenes as no artist ever put on canvas; not even the scientific achievements in feats of civil and electrical engineering; not even any advancement of the arts and the development of industries, commerce, or economics that bring the general life into increasing harmony with the physical environment,—none of these things, important and significant as they are, touch the profoundest interest of Colorado. For this supreme interest is that of the noble men and women whose lives have left to the state the legacy of their hopes, their efforts, their earnestness, and their faith. "Much is made of the Pilgrim Fathers who landed on Plymouth Rock," editorially remarked the "Denver Republican" in an article on "Pioneers' Day," in June of 1906; "and if there had been phonographs in those days to preserve the record of the speech of one of those old fugitives from European persecution, with what delight the men and women of this generation would listen to the tones which come from the instrument! But, after all, were the Pilgrim Fathers, canonized by nearly three hundred years of tradition, any braver, any more venturesome, any more worthy of honor, than the pioneers who fought Indians and struggled against adverse fortune of every kind while they laid in fear and hope the foundations of this great state?"

Among the poems of Walt Whitman is one entitled "The Beginners," which interprets a high quality of life. The lines are as follows:

The price was paid by the pioneers of Colorado. They poured out lavishly all their hope, their indomitable energy, their patience, which was faith, as well. They planted, knowing that not to themselves would come the harvest. They builded that those yet to come might have shelter. They gave to Colorado such an endowment of potent but invisible force that its momentum pervades the air to-day. The accelerated ratio of power with which spiritual forces proceed defies even the ablest of the statisticians.

In all the chapters of American history there are none more thrilling than the story of the early life in Colorado; there are no chapters that more vividly demonstrate the absolutely present and practical aid of the divine guidance of God acting through His messengers,—those who have lived on earth and have gone on into the life more abundant.

The lives of the remarkable men and women who have been canonized by the church have left the world the better for their being and humanity the richer for the inheritance of their experience. Their history is not to be held merely as tradition or as superstition. Let one visit in Italy Assisi, the home of St. Francis; Siena, the home of St. Catherine, and follow the footsteps of others whose names enrich the church calendar, to their homes and haunts, and their record becomes vivid and vitalized as, to a stranger visiting Boston, might become the footsteps of her noble and consecrated lives which are yet almost within universal personal remembrance: the lives of Lydia Maria Child, William Lloyd Garrison, Emerson, Whittier, Lucy Stone, Lowell, Mary A. Livermore, James Freeman Clarke, and Phillips Brooks,—men and women whom Boston may well hold as her prophets and her saints. They, too, were of the order of "The Beginners." They sowed the seeds of the higher life. They were receptive to all high counsels from the ethereal world, from the divine realms; they listened to great truths which the multitude did not hear, and they gave it anew by voice and by pen, till all the world might hear and read and receive it. They were, indeed,—

"God's prophets of the Beautiful."

Such persons were living a twofold life during their entire earthly pilgrimage, and we may well recall their lives and link them with those of the great and the holy men and women of all ages and all climes.

The pathfinders of human progress do not live for personal ease,—

"The hero is not fed on sweets."

These are royal natures, who come into the world not to enjoy ease and prosperity, but who bring with them the high destiny of sacrifice. Their lives are companioned with struggle and conflict. Of such experiences as theirs well might be asked the question so impressively conveyed in these noble lines by America's great woman poet,—our poet who sang the song of the nation's "Battle-Hymn,"—Julia Ward Howe:

These Shining Ones are on earth to serve as co-workers with the divine power; to serve through good fortune or ill fortune; through evil report or good report,—still to serve; still to follow The Gleam. These are the men who

The names of many of these heroic pioneers of Colorado may be unwritten save in the pages of the Recording Angel; but they live and are immortal in the influence they have left as a heritage to succeeding generations, in the trains of thought and purposes they initiated, and in all that potent power of generous aims and noble ideals,—for all advancing civilization rests on lofty ideals. "While the basis of civilization must be material," says the Rev. Dr. Charles Gordon Ames of Boston, "its life must be spiritual. Its end and object must be the soul, and not the body; and it will provide all best things for the body, that the soul may be worthily housed and served. The higher and chief interests of society will always be intellectual, affectional, aspirational—human and humane. The true, the beautiful, and the good—almost unknown to the barbarian, and often mocked at by the Philistines of modern society—will be sought for as men seek for gold and pearls of great price. Wealth will bring its offering to the altars of education and art and worship. Science, as it searches the worlds of matter and of mind, will find new and sacred parables and gospels of grace. Learning will be a priestess of truth. The imagination of man will wander and wander in the wide creation, free, fearless, and glad, knowing that the Father's house is everywhere, and that his child may be everywhere at home."

In many of the pioneer households of Colorado, whether those of plenty or of privation, the children had the inestimable advantage of the refined and beautiful atmosphere of a home in which high ideals and lofty devotion to intellectual progress and spiritual culture prevailed. If schools were insufficient, there were the trained educational methods of both the father and the mother under which they were reared and taught; and poverty of purse cannot greatly matter where there is no poverty of the spirit.

Well may these pioneers of Colorado be held as belonging to that order of humanity which the poet calls "The Beginners." Some of them were unlettered and untaught save in the great school of life itself; some of them were rich in learning and culture; but they all shared in common a devotion to progress differing only in degree or conception: they shared common sacrifices; they gave their best energies to the development of a great and beautiful state whose increasing rate of progress is to them an immortal monument. These leaders of humanity whom the poet so finely characterizes as "The Beginners" are an order of people always appearing on earth. They are of those who hear the Song in the air and behold the Star in the sky. They are the persons who discern—and follow—The Gleam. Their lives are rich in service and sacrifice. Their kingdom is not of this world. Their lives are not unfrequently cheerless and cold, but on their altar fires glows the living coal sent down from heaven. They fast that others may feast. They accept privations that others may revel in possessions. They pay the inexorable price for the same great purchase. They are those who are sent on earth peculiarly set apart to co-operate with God in the larger fulfilment of the divine laws. They pay the inexorable price of toil and labor and sorrow and sacrifice. They rise into the everlasting triumph and the beauty and the joy of spirituality of life. They give all for this; they find all in it. But let no one resign his hopes or his dreams. Let no one doubt, for an instant, that all of goodness and beauty and sweetness and joy that he longs for is on its way toward him. It is only a question of time. Let him be patient, which is not a mere passive and negative condition, but one full of intense activities and serene poise; let him be patient and believing, and make room in his life for that immortal joy which no man taketh from him.

The town of Greeley, with its felicitous location midway between the two state capitals, Denver and Cheyenne, fifty miles from each, and which is already the principal town of Northern Colorado as Pueblo is of the southern part of the state, has a romantic and thrilling story connected with its founding. In the history of Colorado, among the many men whose lives stand out in noble pre-eminence, was that of the founder of Greeley, Hon. Nathan Cook Meeker, whose personal life is inseparably associated with the interesting town which owes to him its origin.

The Meekers trace their ancestry to men who went to England from Antwerp about 1500. In 1639 Robert and William Meeker came to this country and settled in New Haven. Thirty years later William Meeker removed to New Jersey, and the town of Elizabeth was founded by him and named for his wife. He was a leader in the affairs of the day, held prominent office, and in 1690 he died, leaving the old Meeker homestead in Newark, New Jersey, which is still in the possession of his descendants. One of his sons was Joseph Meeker, also prominent in promoting the conditions of progress, and he was the grandfather of Nathan Cook Meeker, the founder of Greeley, who inherited the qualities that have made the family a marked one in America. When he was but seventeen he carried on an extensive correspondence with Henry Clay, John Tyler, George D. Prentice, and other noted men of the day, discussing with them subjects of importance, and he was a contributor even in these early years to the "Louisville Journal," then edited by George D. Prentice, and now the "Courier-Journal," edited by the brilliant Colonel Henry Watterson; to the New Orleans "Picayune," and other leading papers. Even in his early youth Mr. Meeker seems to have been a man of perpetual aspiration and honorable ambition carried out to achievement, and by means of his own energy and persistence he graduated in 1840 from Oberlin College, became a teacher, and later (for literary work was his dominant gift) became a regular contributor to the "New York Mirror," edited by N. P. Willis, the poet, and the most brilliant man of letters of his day. Mr. Meeker wrote both prose and poetry,—essays, romance, and verse alike flowing from his facile pen. He is the author of three books, one of which he dedicated to President Pierce, and which is in the Boston Public Library among the choice and rare works not allowed for general circulation but kept intact for the special use of scholars and researchers. He became one of the leading writers of the day on sociology, advancing many ideas which are to-day maintained by thoughtful students of the questions involved in this subject.

Founding towns seemed to "run in the family," and even as his great-grandfather founded the town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, so Nathan Cook Meeker felt the impulse to stamp his own strong and progressive individuality on new communities. He became the secretary and librarian (in 1844) of the Ohio Trumbull Phalanx, a colony founded to realize in practical form the theories of Fourier, and somewhat similar to the famous Brook Farm experiment. Mr. Meeker also co-operated in founding the Western Reserve Institute, of which, many years afterward, Hon. James A. Garfield became president.

About this time he married Arvilla Delight, a daughter of Levi Smith of Connecticut and a descendant of Elder Brewster; a woman whose singular force, exaltation, and beauty of character may be traced through a notable New England ancestry. The family soon removed to the Western Reserve in Ohio. Mrs. Meeker had been known in her sweet girlhood as the beauty of the town. She was a woman of exceptional refinement and culture; for many years a teacher, and, more than all, of a spirituality of character that added to her life its dignity and grace.

The spell of destiny, the burden always laid upon "The Beginners," seemed to be on Nathan Cook and Arvilla Delight Meeker; for no history of the work of the husband could be written that did not include that of the wife. Like Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, their lives were conjoined in that perfect mutual response of spiritual sympathy which alone makes the mystic marriage a divine sacrament.

Horace Greeley became interested in Mr. Meeker's work and invited him to a place on the editorial staff of "The Tribune," a position which he filled with conspicuous ability for several years; but in common with all idealists, Mr. Meeker was haunted and beset by his visions of a more Utopian future for humanity. A Colorado journal, recently giving some reminiscences of the life of its great citizen, said:

"In the fall of 1869 Mr. Meeker made a trip to the West for the 'Tribune,' writing interesting letters by the way. On his return to New York he was full of the idea of establishing a colony in Colorado. He mentioned his ambition to John Russell Young, who talked it over with Mr. Greeley, and that great man, at the first opportunity, said to the returned correspondent: 'I understand you wish to lead a colony to Colorado.' When Mr. Meeker answered 'Yes,' Greeley added, 'I think it would be a great success. Go ahead; "The Tribune" will stand by you.'

"With such encouragement Mr. Meeker spent the following day in writing the article announcing his purpose and outlining the plan which was afterwards adopted as the constitution of the colony. Mr. Greeley suggested a few minor changes, after which the article was printed and kept in type for a week, in order, as its author said, 'that there might be due reflection and no haste.' It was published in the 'Tribune' of December 14, 1869, with an editorial indorsement of the plan and its originator. Nine days later the colony was organized, and yet in that short time more than a thousand letters had been received in answer to the article. On the 15th of the next April the certificate of organization of 'The Union Colony of Greeley' was filed for record."

In less extended detail some outline of the life of the founder of Greeley, the "Garden City" of Colorado, has already been narrated by the writer in a previous book;[1] but no adequate reference can be made to the state in which Mr. Meeker's life and work remains as so remarkable a contribution and so fundamental a factor, which does not present in full the story of his relation to its development; and the matter is thus presented even at the risk of some minor repetitions.

In the spring of 1870 Mr. Meeker led his colony to Colorado. The colonists wished to give the town the name of its founder, but he himself insisted that it should bear the name of Greeley, after the great editor of the "Tribune," of whose staff he was still a member. Into all the sacrifice and the hardships of this pioneer life Mrs. Meeker, a woman gently born and bred, entered with the utmost heroism. From the very inception the undertaking was a signal success. But Mr. Meeker conceived of still another extension of his activities in the problem then so prominently before the country,—the civilization of the Indians. He was appointed agent of the northern Utes, in possession of the great park region of the Rocky Mountains, on White River. To it he went in the same spirit in which General Armstrong entered on his work at Hampton. He had matured certain theories regarding the proper treatment of the Indians, in bringing them within the pale of the civilized arts,—theories so wise, so just, so humane, that they might be studied with advantage. These theories he put to the test. His youngest daughter, a beautiful and gifted girl, opened a free school for teaching the Indians. His wife united with him in every kindly and gracious act by which he strove to win the confidence of the race. This kindness and gentleness was unmeasured. The family lived a life of constant sacrifice and effort for the education and training of the Utes. But the Indian nature is one that wreaks its revenge,—not necessarily on the aggressor, but on the first comer. Other agents had been lax, and a number of causes of discontent to which allusion cannot here be made fanned the smouldering fire. Their chief complaints were that they were required to work, and to abandon a bit of pasturage, only a few acres, for the new agency grounds and gardens. Events drew on like the fates in a Greek tragedy, and on the morning of September 29, 1879, Mr. Meeker was cruelly massacred.

The little town of Meeker marks the site of the Meeker massacre. Here is a little village of a thousand inhabitants, located on White River, among the most beautiful of the mountain ranges,—the location being very much like that of Florence, in Italy,—which is the centre of a very rich agricultural and grazing region. Meeker is now forty-five miles from a railroad, the nearest station being Rifle, on the Denver and Rio Grande, a few miles from Glenwood Springs; but the Moffet road brings to it railroad connection with Denver. There is an extensive stage line of over one hundred miles, starting from Rifle and going on through Meeker up into the mountains, where the hunting attracts a great number of travellers, and especially many Englishmen. It is in this region that President Roosevelt's happy hunting-grounds lie, and he is a familiar and favorite figure in Meeker.

There is a little gray-stone Episcopal church among other churches that adorn this town, which has laid out a handsome park and which has the perpetual adornment of the beautiful river that flows through it. The mountains about supply streams that make irrigation easy, and the great fields of wheat, potatoes, and alfalfa are fertile and prosperous. Irrigation makes it everywhere possible to control the climatic conditions.

Meeker is the county seat of Rio Blanco County, in which uranium has been discovered in two different places; and two oil wells, each at a cost of four thousand dollars, a creamery, costing nearly six thousand dollars, and water-works at a cost of sixty thousand dollars, have been established within the past two years. Fifteen reservoirs and eighty miles of irrigation ditches were constructed in 1905, and in that year was harvested, in this county, a quarter of a million bushels of wheat, oats, and rye.

The basis on which Greeley was founded is thus outlined in the official documents drawn up by Nathan Cook Meeker:

"I propose to unite with proper persons in the establishment of a Union colony in Colorado territory. A location which I have seen is well watered with streams and springs; there are beautiful pine groves, the soil is rich, the climate healthful, grass will keep stock the year round, coal and stone are plentiful, and a well-travelled road runs through the property."

Mr. Meeker proceeded to note the cost of the land,—eighteen dollars for every one hundred and sixty acres,—and he especially called attention—for he had the poet's eye—to the grandeur of the Rocky Mountain scenery, and he added:

"The persons with whom I would be willing to associate must be temperance men and ambitious to establish good society, and among as many as fifty, ten should have as much as ten thousand dollars each, or twenty should have five thousand dollars each, while others may have from two hundred dollars to one thousand dollars and upward. For many to go so far without means could only result in disaster."

The practical wisdom of this clause will be appreciated. The true idealist is the most practical and wisest of counsellors. It is only false idealism that leads to destruction. Mr. Meeker's idea was to make the settlement a village, with ample building lots, and then to apportion to each family from forty to one hundred and sixty acres outside for agriculture.

On such a basis as this the Union Colony of Greeley was founded. A constitution was adopted that is a model of the condensation of the duties of good citizenship. Industry, temperance, education, and religion were the pillars on which the superstructure was raised. It is little wonder that the social quality of Greeley to-day—thirty-six years after its inauguration as a community—is of the highest type and exceptional among all the cities of the United States.

Irrigation was the first necessity. A canal thirty miles long was dug, costing sixty thousand dollars. The Cache la Poudre was first examined and then tapped to furnish water. The elevation of the surrounding high bluffs secured the needed descent for the flow of water. The life began.

Greeley is now a town of some seven thousand inhabitants; the seat of the State Normal College, which its president, Dr. Z. X. Snyder, has made one of the great educational institutions, not only of Colorado, but of the United States; a college that draws students from almost every section, even from New England, so able is President Snyder's course of instruction and so admirable are the opportunities it affords for subsequent connection with the fine public school system in Colorado. A position in any of these offers a higher salary than can be obtained in the East, to say nothing of many other advantages associated with the work. Dr. Snyder was one of the eminent educators of the East; and when some sixteen years since he accepted his present responsible office, he brought to it the best traditions of Eastern culture and united them with the zeal and freedom and infinite energy of the West. The Normal campus of forty acres on high ground, overlooking the town, with President Snyder's residence in the grounds and other college buildings near, comprise a beautiful feature of Greeley. The western view, both from the college and from the home of President and Mrs. Snyder, over the mountain range including Long's Peak, is one of almost incomparable beauty. The faculty of the State Normal comprises thirty specialists; there is a library of thirty thousand volumes; the laboratory has the latest scientific equipment of the day; the art department and the music course are admirably conducted; French, German, and Italian are taught according to the latest language methods; and athletics, domestic science, nature studies, all receive due recognition. The "Training School" of the State Normal College has an attendance of nearly five hundred, and the graduates of this institution begin work on salaries ranging from five hundred to twenty-five hundred dollars annually. The tuition is free to all citizens of Colorado.

The many churches, the excellent public schools, the clubs and societies for social enjoyment and improvement, indicate the high quality of life in Greeley. There are three newspapers; and of these the "Greeley Tribune," founded by Mr. Meeker and now under the able editorship of Mr. C. H. Wolfe, has created for itself more than a local reputation. Financially, Greeley stands well, with its several banks and its solidity of resources.

There is hardly a shabby house to be found in all the town, whether of residence or business. Every building has a neat and thrifty aspect, and the art of architecture has been especially studied, for almost without exception every house, whether large or small, is tasteful and attractive. A bay window is thrown out here, a little balcony there, a piazza, a loggia, an oriel window, and the eye is gratified. But, besides this dainty and tasteful architecture, the one great feature of Greeley is her beautiful streets. These are due directly to the taste and the direction of the founder, Mr. Meeker. The streets are one hundred feet wide, lined invariably—every street in the town—with a double row of shade trees, giving coolness, beauty, and contributing much to the modification of the temperature. Every deed granted in Greeley forbids the sale of any intoxicating liquor. There is not a saloon in the place. There is not a loafer or a criminal, nor are there any poor in the unfortunate sense of the large cities. No police are needed. The jail is locally known as a mere ornamental appendage to the fine forty thousand dollar courthouse.

For many years it has been felt that some expression should be made in honor of the memory of the founder of Greeley, and this has now taken form in the project for the "Meeker Memorial Library," which is in preparation. The beautiful young city is itself, however, the best memorial of its noble founder. It is a living monument of perpetually increasing greatness and beauty; and who to-day can wander under the shade of the beautiful trees which in a double row line every street and boulevard—trees planted in 1870 under Mr. Meeker's personal superintendence—without hearing amid the rustle of their whispering leaves the poet's words, that fall like a benediction:

The glamour of romance can never fade from Colorado, whose entire history is one of heroic deeds and splendid energy; but the primitive stage of the state is already left far behind with the nineteenth century. In its intellectual and scientific development the years of the twentieth century have almost exceeded its twenty-four years of life as a state in the nineteenth. The tide of immigration still continues, but from being the objective point of mining activities where fortune hunters rushed to find a royal road to riches, it is now a state of agriculture and of commerce. Social conditions are thus altered; and though some of these conditions are those of mining regions, as in the Cripple Creek district, they have altered from the typical Bret Harte mining-camp life to those of orderly progress,—to the life dominated by twentieth-century ideals of humanity; the life whose framework is seen in public-school systems, in religious observance, in the liberal reading of periodical and other literature, and in the maintenance of public libraries as a necessity in every community.

The dawn of literary and artistic development in Colorado is very evident,—a dawn that is already of such radiant promise as to forecast the day when this state shall contribute to our greatest national literature. A large number of individual writers could already be named whose work in books, magazine articles, and excellent journalism might well be held as typical of the best culture of the entire country. The first wild turmoil of a new and richly varied state has given way to a prosperous, progressive commonwealth. Material progress must still always precede the higher growth, yet the air is vital with ideas, and the vision of Colorado is always toward the stars. The beauty and majesty of the environment cannot but react upon the people. The growth of women's clubs has been one steady factor of progress, with most favorable effect on all the general life of intellectual and moral advancement. The public libraries in every centre establish and develop the reading habit. While a love for beauty is an element in human life, the influence of the transcendent majesty and incomparable sublimity of the Colorado scenery will continue to prove a source of inspiration to the mental and moral life of the people. The changing colors of the mountains are a constant delight. Colorado offers a perpetual feast of beauty. Her resources are infinite. Colorado combines all the exaltation of the untried with an abundance of the conveniences and luxuries of the older civilization; and of this Centennial State it is difficult to record facts and statistics that do not seem to suggest the tales of a thousand nights. With resources and with scenic loveliness which no language could exaggerate, it is still only to those who themselves know and appreciate the grandeur of this state that any interpretation of it will appear as rather within than as at all beyond the limits of the most statistical and demonstrable facts. The East has already outgrown the tradition that the entire trans-Mississippi region is a howling wilderness. Colorado is no longer as vague as is Calcutta to the average mind. Dr. Edward Everett Hale exclaimed that he desired his sons to know that there was something in the world besides Beacon Street, and this ambition has of late years become too prevalent to leave even the extreme East in any absolute and total ignorance of the wonderful West. Still it may be true that the flying visions from Pullman-car windows are marvellously extended and intensified by increasing familiarity with the almost incredibly swift progress of this region.

A typical illustration of the fallibility of human judgment is seen in the attitude taken in 1838 by the great Daniel Webster on the floor of the United States Senate against an appropriation for a post route west of the Missouri River.

"What do we want," said he, "of this vast worthless area,—this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, shifting sands, and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts, or these endless mountain ranges, impregnable and covered to their base with eternal snow? What use have we for such a country? Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Coast one inch nearer Boston than it is to-day."

It is a far cry from this "vast worthless area," as Mr. Webster termed it in 1838, to the grand and richly promising state of to-day, with its splendid young cities where art and science unite with literature and ethics in the rapid development of social progress; with its mountain ranges climbed in palace cars; its electric transit and electric lighting; its vivid and forceful achievements, that even in each decade concentrate the progress of a century, as seen in the past.

It is not a mere vagary, but rather a practical and momentous fact, that Colorado is peculiarly the realm receptive to invisible potencies and mental impressions. Science is now confronted with the question as to whether thought and electricity may be identified as the same force under different degrees of manifestation. "There is an elemental essence—a strange living force—which surrounds us on every side, and which is singularly susceptible to the influence of human thought," says an English scientist, and he continues: "This essence responds with the most wonderful delicacy to the faintest action of our minds or desires; and this being so, it is interesting to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite thought or desire." All the significance of a thousand years may be concentrated in an instant's thought, as all the heat stored up in all the forests of the world is concentrated in a small quantity of radium. Emerson embodies this truth in the stanza: