While these events were transpiring at the old fort a party of Mexicans had journeyed from the south, crossed the Arkansas River and formed a settlement on the east side of the Fontaine.  A characteristically squalid and miserable place it was, with the dwellings—­they scarce deserved the name of houses—­built in the side of the bluffs very much as animals might burrow in the ground.  Part dug-out and part adobe were those wretched habitations, and the shed-like parts which projected from the hill were composed of all conceivable and inconceivable kinds of rubbish.  Sticks, stones, bits of old iron, worn-out mattings and gunny-sacks entered more or less into the construction of these dens, all stuck together with the inevitable adobe mud.  The settlement extended some distance along the side of the bluff, and the sloping plain in front was dignified as the plaza.  Perhaps the dark-hued immigrants expected a large town to spring from these unpromising beginnings, and their plaza to take on eventually all the importance which a place so named ever deserves in the Spanish and Mexican mind.  But the Pike’s Peak excitement, originating in 1852 with the finding of gold by a party of Cherokee Indians, and reaching its culmination in 1859, brought a far different class of people to our Rocky-Mountain outpost, and a civilization was inaugurated which speedily compelled the ancient Mexican methods to go by the board.  Thus, Fontaine was soon absorbed by the rising town of Pueblo, though the ancient dug-outs still picturesquely dot the hillside, inhabited by much the same idle and vagabond class from which the prosperous ranchman soon learns to guard his hen-roost.

The growth of any of our Far Western towns presents a curious study.  In these latter days it frequently requires but a few months, or even weeks, to give some new one a fair start upon its prosperous way.  Sometimes a mineral vein, sometimes the temporary “end of the track” of a lengthening railway, forms the nucleus, and around it are first seen the tents of the advance-guard.  Before many weeks have elapsed some enterprising individual has succeeded, in the face of infinite toil and expense, in bringing a sawmill into camp.  Soon it is buzzing away on the neighboring hillside, and the rough pine boards and slabs are growing into houses of all curious sizes and shapes, irregularly lining the main street.  Delightfully free from conventionality are matters in these new towns.  Former notions of things go for naught.  Values are in a highly-disturbed state, and you will probably be charged more for the privilege of sleeping somewhere on the floor than for all the refined elegancies of the Fifth Avenue.  The board-walks along the street, where they exist at all, plainly typify this absence of a well-defined dead level or zero-point in the popular sentiment; for the various sections are built each upon the same eccentric plan that obtains in the corresponding house.  The result is an irregular