Happy days; carolings of Colorado, etc.

As in subsequent pages of this little work its author has had so much to say regarding himself and the land of his nativity, we deem it but proper that he and the reader should be made more fully acquainted here at the outset. Permit, therefore, this brief biographical sketch. Born in the sunny valley of the South Platte, near the present site of the Queen City of the Plains (Denver), the author is of course a native of the Centennial State (Colorado).

In the days of his boyhood the wooly bison and the prong-horned antelope still ranged in countless droves upon the Great Plains, and the antlered elk and the mule deer, among the airy table-lands and in the more-sequestered, grassy forest-glades of the Rocky Mountains, were most plentiful indeed. The little red Indian papooses were his earliest childhood playmates, and the “big braves,” Cheyenne Charley, the Arapahoe chief, Black Kettle, and the fat old Ute, Colorow, are still well remembered by him. The long lines of freight and emigrant wagons; the “Overland stage coaches,” the ox and mule teams, the various motley crowds of old-time denizens of those then “first days” of stir and change, of sanguine strife and hardy enterprise, were all familiar objects of his youthful vision.

Being reared thus, amidst wild and savage life, and born a native of a then savage wild-land, his poetic efforts of these later happier days will no doubt prove of especial interest to the people of the middle Great West and the Rocky Mountain region generally.

THE PUBLISHERS.