now slipping out upon a sky-high terrace commanding a
view of hundreds of square miles of plains, now wind-
ing its way gingerly about dizzy cliffs which seemed to
lean out over chasms, into which one looked with admir-
ing terror; now coming out upon the other side, the main
chain of the Rockies was revealed a hundred miles to the
westward, glittering superbly with eternal ice and snow.
It is an unbelievable railroad--the Cripple Creek Short
Line. It travels fifty miles to make what, in a straight
line, would be eighteen, and if there is, on the entire sys-
tem, a hundred yards of track without a turn, I did not
see the place. We were always turning; always turn-
ing upward. We would go into a tunnel and presently
emerge at a point which seemed to be directly above the
place where we had antered; and at times our windings,
our doublings back, our writhings, were conducted in
so limited an area that I began to fear our train would
get tied in a knot and be unable to proceed.

However, we did get to Cripple Creek, and for all its
mountain setting, and all the three hundred millions of
gold that it has yielded in the last, twenty years or so,
it is one of the most depressing places in the world.
Its buildings run from shabbiness to downright ruin;
its streets are ill paved, and its outlying districts are a
horror of smokestacks, ore-dumps, shaft-houses, reduc-
tion-plants, gallows-frames and squalid shanties, situ-
ated in the mud. It seemed, to me that Cripple Creek
must be the most awful looking little city in the world,
but I was informed that, as mining camps go, it is in-

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