t Rocky Mountain system has its advance-guard directly in front.
Cones, peaks, and great shapeless masses of rock, terminating to the
south in Cheyenne Mountain, and in the north in a long chain of
lower mountains. Twenty-five miles north from base of Pike's Peak, a
ridge of hills, 8000 feet high, called the Divide (the water-shed
between the Arkansas and Platte river), shoots out into the east for
seventy-five miles, its blue-black outline cut sharply on the
northern sky. Nearly 100 miles away the sharp eye will detect the
outline of the Spanish Peaks almost upon the New Mexico line.

"Out from this semi-circle of hills and mountains stretch the great
plains beyond the distant eastern horizon; not suddenly and in one
smooth slope, but foothills and small broken mesas end in scattered
and irregular bluffs, these gradually blending and losing themselves
in the billowy rolling country, which makes up the eastern plains of
Colorado.

"On one of these small mesas, close to the foothills and within the
first line of bluffs, is situated Colorado Springs, on a level with
the summit of Mt. Washington, in New Hampshire, 6000 feet above the
sea.

"Neither nature nor art could design and lay out a more finished and
beautiful spot for a town. Nature has made the grading perfect for
streets and sidewalks, for drainage and for irrigating ditches. The
whole town appears perfectly level, but the mesa has just enough
descent towards the south and east to take water from the main
irrigating ditch as it enters the town from the north-west, and carry
it freely throughout the whole city on each side of every street;
four of the main streets and avenues have twelve miles of open boxed
ditches about two feet wide running in absolutely straight lines. The
lawns and gardens are graded and laid out to correspond with the
grade of the ditches, from which they are flooded once a week by a
box ditch running under the sidewalk.

"The town was founded in 1871 by a colony composed mostly of
gentlemen from Philadelphia who were then projecting and building the
Denver and Rio Grande Railroad from Denver. The town plat is three
miles long and two wide, laid out in blocks four hundred feet square,
separated by streets one hundred feet wide, and every third street an
avenue one hundred and forty feet wide. These streets and avenues
are bordered by rows of flourishing cottonwoods, twenty-five feet
apart, that greedily drink the water running over their