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[Illustration: GARFIELD PEAK.]


THE CREST OF THE CONTINENT:

A Record of a Summer's Ramble in the Rocky Mountains and Beyond.

by

ERNEST INGERSOLL.


    "We climbed the rock-built breasts of earth!
     We saw the snowy mountains rolled
     Like mighty billows; saw the birth
     Of sudden dawn; beheld the gold
     Of awful sunsets; saw the face
     Of God, and named it boundless space."


Twenty Ninth Edition.







Chicago:
R. R. Donnelley & Sons, Publishers.
1887.

Copyright,
By S. K. Hooper,
1885.

R. R. Donnelley & Sons, The Lakeside Press, Chicago.




                                   TO
                        THE PEOPLE OF COLORADO,
            SAGACIOUS IN PERCEIVING, DILIGENT IN DEVELOPING,
                          AND WISE IN ENJOYING
                                  THE
           RESOURCES AND ATTRACTIONS OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS,
                         THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
                                  WITH
                             THE HOMAGE OF
                                                       THE AUTHOR.




PREFACE.


Probably nothing in this artificial world is more deceptive than
absolute candor. Hence, though the ensuing text may lack nothing in
straightforwardness of assertion, and seem impossible to misunderstand,
it may be worth while to say distinctly, here at the start, that it is
all true. We actually _did_ make such an excursion, in such cars, and
with such equipments, as I have described; and we would like to do it
again.

It was wild and rough in many respects. Re-arranging the trip, luxuries
might be added, and certain inconveniences avoided; but I doubt whether,
in so doing, we should greatly increase the pleasure or the profit.

"No man should desire a soft life," wrote King Aelfred the Great.
Roughing it, within reasonable grounds, is the marrow of this sort of
recreation. What a pungent and wholesome savor to the healthy taste
there is in the very phrase! The zest with which one goes about an
expedition of any kind in the Rocky Mountains is phenomenal in itself; I
despair of making it credited or comprehended by inexperienced
lowlanders. We are told that the joys of Paradise will not only actually
be greater than earthly pleasures, but that they will be further
magnified by our increased spiritual sensitiveness to the "good times"
of heaven. Well, in the same way, the senses are so quickened by the
clear, vivifying climate of the western uplands in summer, that an
experience is tenfold more pleasurable there than it could become in the
Mississippi valley. I elsewhere have had something to say about this
exhilaration of body and soul in the high Rockies, which you will
perhaps pardon me for repeating briefly, for it was written honestly,
long ago, and outside of the present connection.

"At sunrise breakfast is over, the mules and everybody else have been
good-natured and you feel the glory of mere existence as you vault into
the saddle and break into a gallop. Not that this or that particular day
is so different from other pleasant mornings, but all that we call _the
weather_ is constituted in the most perfect proportions. The air is
'nimble and sweet,' and you ride gayly across meadows, through sunny
woods of pine and aspen, and between granite knolls that are piled up in
the most noble and romantic proportions....

"Sometimes it seems, when camp is reached