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241 Chapter XVII 289.

I entered the Rocky Mountains at a place called Golden City. It lies in a gap of the front? range. Till lately it was the Capitol of Colorado, which [[unclear] has now been transferred to Denver. It is chiefly of brick, the people in this part of the world of mature in a town. I counted three churches in the place: the best of the three belongs as I was told to the Episcopalians. The population appeared to be about three thousand. A thick seam of good coal is exposed just at the foot of the hill close the town. I had heard that I sd find here a place of this, but I was not at all prepared for the brick, & the churches, the population. There is a good hotel here kept by an Englishman, but as far as I cd judge the well-to-do people of the place were mostly New Englanders. Just beyond Golden City the road passes through a grand unclear between unclear mountains of dark rock: this, as it leads to the unclear regions of the mountains, is called the Golden Gates. In the Mountains I visited the three mining towns of Black Hawk, Central City, & Nevada. The district to which these towns belong had a population of fifteen thousand persons engaged in mining: but I found several of the mills out-of-work, & was told that the population had likely fallen off considerably. In the neighbourhood of all these towns all the timber has been cut down for building & mining & as everything that wd burn has also been cleared off for fuel every accessible Mountain has been made as bare as a unclear field. Their sides are covered with what appears to be