[Illustration: In the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel my companion and I saw several old fellows, sitting about, looking neither prosperous nor busy, but always talking mines. A kind word, or even a pleasant glance, is enough to set them off.]
Another feeling of my first ten minutes in Denver was one of wonder at the city's flatness. That part of it through which we passed on the way to the Brown Palace Hotel was as flat as Chicago, whereas I had always thought of Denver as being in the mountains. However, if flat, the streets looked attractive, and I arrived at the proudly named caravansary with the feeling that Denver was a fine young city.
Meeting cities, one after another, as I met them on this journey, is like being introduced, at a reception, to a line of strangers. A glance, a handshake, a word or two, and you have formed an impression of an individuality. But there is this difference: the individual at the reception is "fixed up" for the occasion, whereas the city has but one exterior to show to every one.
That the exterior shown by Denver is pleasing has been, until recently, a matter more or less of accident. The city was laid out by pioneers and mining men, who showed their love of liberality in making the streets wide. There is nothing close about Denver. She has the open-handed, easy affluence of a mining city. She spends money freely on good pavements and good buildings. Thus, without any brilliant comprehensive plan she has yet grown from a rough mining camp into a delightful city, all in the space of fifty years.
A little more than a hundred years ago Captain Zebulon Pike crossed the plains and visited the territory which is now Colorado, though it was then a part of the vast country of Louisiana. Long, Frémont, Kit Carson, and the other early pioneers followed, but it was not until 1858 that gold was found on the banks of Cherry Creek, above its juncture with the South Platte River, causing a camp to be located on the present site of Denver. The first camp was on the west side of Cherry Creek and was named Auraria, after a town in Georgia. On the east side there developed another camp, St. Charles by name, and these two camps remained, for some time, independent of each other. The discovery of gold in California brought a new influx of men to Colorado--though the part of Colorado in which Denver stands was then in the territory of Kansas, which extended to the Rockies. Many of the pioneers were men from eastern Kansas, and hence it happened that when the mining camps of Auraria and St. Charles were combined into one town, the town was named for General James W. Denver, then Governor of Kansas.