narrow valley between perpendicular uplifts of red and white argillaceous sandstone, which towered, bare as a house-wall, to the height of three or four hundred feet. The effect of the sunlight on these brightly colored precipices was splendid in the extreme. They guarded the sides of our narrow avenue for a distance of three or four miles, and only left us at the edge of the little settlement of Colorado City.

We drove to the one place of entertainment which the town possessed,—a small wooden structure, whose title of the El Paso House was an indication of our approach toward Mexican boundaries and Mexican manners. The latter fact was abundantly attested by the slovenliness with which the house was managed, the discomfort of its rooms, and the melancholy recklessness of its table.

But we were in no mood to grumble, having such food for the eyes and head as dispensed with the necessity of other aliment. The dozen buildings of which Colorado City is composed, lie in a sand plain at the base of the foot-hills which wait upon Pike's Peak. The grand old mountain itself projects its head of glittering snow, through a gap in the nearer ranges which surround it, to a height and loneliness which almost tire imagination. Its altitude is very differently estimated, but cannot vary much from sixteen thousand feet. The best view of it is not from the base of its foot-hills at Colorado City, for its full proportions are veiled at that point by intermediate ranges, but far out on the Plains, east of the town, where for more than a hundred miles the emigrant sees it standing, a solitary beacon, with every detail melted into one heaven-piercing cone. How prominent an object it is, may be inferred from the fact

man

that it gave its name to this entire region, who came to the Colorado mines being a "Pike'sPeaker," though his nearest lodes were situated a hundred miles from that mountain by the shortest

access.

A mountain which I admire more than Pike's Peak (or at least the Colorado City view of it), is the grand Cheyenne, which rises a little further south, and is plainly visible at the rear of the El Paso House, from base to dome. Its height is several thousand feet less than Pike's; but its contour is so noble and so massive that this disadvantage is overlooked. There is a unity of conception in it unsurpassed in any mountain I have seen. It is full of living power. In the declining daylight, its vast simple surface became the broadest mass of blue and purple shadow that ever lay on the easel of Nature.

Having refreshed ourselves with a good night's rest, in which fatigue met fleas and came off conqueror, we took an early start from the El Paso, to examine the natural features of this most interesting region.

Our first visit was paid to a shale-bed on the Fontaine qui Bouille, in which I had heard through Mr. Pierce of the discovery of interesting tertiary remains.

Mr. Garvin, a man of varied experience as sailor, hunter, miner, and merchant, who had finally settled down among the Rocky Mountains, and was conducting a Colorado City branch of George Tappan's house, accompanied us in our examination, and much assisted us by his knowledge of localities. We were joined by another gentleman of the same name, but no relationship with the former, (a singular coincidence in so small a directory!) a Dr. Garvin, whose

some indefinite This is a case in

How many calls

practice is probably more extensive than any physician's in the world,-bounded like a State, by the Arkansas on the south, the Platte on the north, the Rocky Mountains on the west, and line on the Plains to the eastward. which a doctor must keep his horse. can be accomplished in a day by a medical man who has one case of high fever on the top of the snowrange, and a low typhoid patient on the Plains of the Arkansas, may be imagined by merely consulting the atlas. Still another gentleman joined our explorations about the Fontaine qui Bouille-Mr. Sheldon, a resident engineer in Mr. Pierce's department, who shared his chief's enthusiasm for science, and had collected a small cabinet embracing some very valuable geological specimens.

The Fontaine qui Bouille (here pronounced "Fonten kee Boo'yeh ") is a clear and rapid stream, about ten yards wide, and two feet deep, issuing from a cañon near the true base of Pike's Peak, and skirting the edge of the Colorado City settlement, with a southeasterly course towards the Arkansas. Half a mile below the El Paso House, it has been pressed into the service of a grist-mill by a rude dam of stakes and slabs. The little pond resulting from this arrangement gave us a nice opportunity to bathe. We were not slow to avail ourselves of it, and found the nearly snow-cold water the most delightful tonic we had enjoyed since our parching journey across the Plains. Having finished our bath with a cold shower below the dam, we dressed ourselves, and proceeded to work.

The mill, possibly owing to the fact that Colorado as yet buys most of her flour in sacks from the East,

was not in operation, and did not seem to have been for a considerable time previous. This fact facilitated our investigations, some of the most interesting excavations being in the bank near the water-wheel, and at the bottom of the stream beyond the sluice.

The bank was a perpendicular mass of shale interspersed with alluvial soil (the former predominating as we went deeper), about fifteen feet high, immediately below the mill, and running a number of rods without much change of elevation. Through this mass the long fibrous roots of young willow and cottonwood trees growing on the edge of the bluff, had penetrated and reticulated in all directions. The shale itself was almost purely argillaceous, and broke into cubes or scaled into lamina with equal ease. A more friable matrix, one apparently less favorable for the preservation of remains, could scarcely be imagined. Every geologist at the East knows in what low estimation the softer shales are regarded as a store-house for fossils, and how little reasonable hope there is of finding perfect specimens there, especially of the more delicate sorts. This shale was a more unlikely looking one than the brittlest of our Eastern strata. Yet, by the aid of a common jackknife, a hammer, and a shovel, we extracted from it a better preserved and more interesting collection of remains than I ever got from an equal area with thrice the labor. The great bulk of them belonged to a single species of tertiary oyster, resembling our modern mollusk in shape, but larger and heavier, with a beauty of color on its inner surface not surpassed by the mother-ofpearl shells which adorn East Indian cabinets. I was astonished to find the delicate arragonite lining as perfectly preserved and freshly iridescent as if the animal

had died an hour before. Not until the shells had been exposed to the air for several hours did the nacreous layer begin to scale off, and leave the coarser structure bare. Noticing this occur in some of the specimens, I gave the others a thin coating of glue which quite successfully arrested their further deterioration.

Patient digging in the shales was also rewarded by some fragments of an equally well kept ammonite. Though we succeeded in getting out no single perfect specimen, the remains were sufficiently complete to be characterized as Ammonites Jason. In Mr. Sheldon's collection we found several specimens of this mollusk much larger and handsomer, one nearly entire, obtained near the place where we were working. But the most interesting remains of this shale are the baculites. Several found here have measured eighteen inches in length, and exhibit a clearness in their curious markings, points, and iridescence so startling that one can hardly credit them to an obsolete period, and might almost be led into hunting the bed of the creek for contemporary specimens. On our return from the creek, we availed ourselves of the kindly proffered house where Mr. Garvin was keeping his bachelor menage entirely alone, and passed a couple of hours in sorting, varnishing, labeling, and packing the results of our investigation among both the conglomerates and agates of our past two days, and the shales of the Fontaine qui Bouille.

On the following day, the same party went two miles and a half up the Fontaine qui Bouille to visit the springs which gave it its name. The road along the bank of the stream from Colorado City is a pure impromptu affair to every fresh comer; but by skillful