Book Description

Excerpt from In the San Juan, Colorado: Sketches In August, 1888, I received my appointment to the parish of Ouray, which included pretty nearly the whole of the San Juan country, the scene of these sketches. San Juan is the familiar designation of southwestern Colorado. Bounded on the north by rugged ranges, on the south by New Mexico, on the east by the Gunnison district and on the west by Utah's Blue mountains; it is a mountainous country, diversified by rolling uplands, smiling valleys, darkling glens and rushing streams. When, as a traveler from the east and on my way to Colorado to enter upon my duties as a priest of the diocese of Denver, the Rocky mountains burst on my vision, Pike's Peak appeared like a sentinel at the gateway of a new world. For the flat plains which mark a thousand miles' travel from the Missouri, I beheld scenes of inspiring grandeur. My fancy pictured the condition of a society where cities and towns lie in the clouds, and people live in the presence of perpetual snow and cutting frosts that penetrate the earth to a depth of six or seven feet. I had read of mines, sunk thousands of feet into the bowels of the earth, and of railroads overhanging dizzy abysses. I had not been long in this wonderland, however, when I got some inkling of the kind of life men live at this great altitude, for I experienced the pleasures of a renewed vitality and the clearness of a quickened brain. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.