The last five years have witnessed a wonderful material progress in the Far West.  The mineral wealth discovered in Colorado and New Mexico has caused a great westward-flowing tide to set in.  The nation seems to be possessed of a desire to reclaim the waste places and to explore the unknown.  Cities that were founded by “fifty-niners,” and after a decade seemed to reach the limits of their growth, have started on a new career.  And for none of these does the outlook seem brighter than in the case of the city of Pueblo, the old outpost whose early history we have attempted to sketch.  Its growth has all along been a gradual one, and its improvements have kept pace with this healthy advance.  Its public schools, like those of all Far Western towns which the writer has visited are model institutions and an honor to the commonwealth.  A handsome brick court-house, situated on high ground, is an ornament to the city, and differs widely from that in which Judge Bradford held court eighteen years ago—­the first held in the Territory, and that, too, under military protection.  Pueblo’s wealth is largely derived from the stock-raising business, the surrounding country being well adapted to cattle and sheep.  The rancheros ride the Plains the year round, and the cattle flourish upon the food which Nature provides—­in the summer the fresh grass, and in the winter the same converted into hay which has been cured upon the ground.  An important railway-centre is Pueblo, and iron highways radiate from it to the four cardinal points.  These advantages of location should procure it a large share of the flood of prosperity that is sweeping over the State.  But enterprises are now in progress which cannot fail to add materially to its importance as a factor in the development of the country.  On the highest lift of the mesa south of the town, and in a most commanding position, it has been decided to locate a blast-furnace which shall have no neighbor within a radius of five hundred miles.  With iron ore of finest quality easily accessible in the neighboring mountains, and coal-fields of unlimited extent likewise within easy reach, the production of iron in the Rocky Mountains has only waited for the growth of a demand.  This the advancement and prosperity of the State have now well assured.  Many kindred industries will spring up around the furnace, the Bessemer steel-works and the rail-mills that are now projected; and a few years will suffice to transform the level mesa, upon which for untold centuries the cactus and the yucca-lily have bloomed undisturbed, into a thriving manufacturing city whose pulse shall be the throb of steam through iron arms.  The onlooking mountains, that have seen strange sights about this old outpost, are to see a still stranger—­the ushering-in of a new civilization which now begins its march into the land of the Aztecs.