The West from a Car-Window by Richard Harding Davis

THE City of Denver probably does more to keep the Eastern man who is mining or ranching from returning once a year to his own people, and from spending his earnings at home, than any other city in the West. It lays its charm upon him, and stops him half-way, and he decides that the journey home is rather long, and puts it off until the next year, and again until the next, until at last he buys a lot and builds a house, and only returns to the East on his wedding journey. Denver appeals to him more than do any of these other cities, for the reason that the many other Eastern men who have settled there are turning it into a thoroughly Eastern city -- a smaller New York in an encircling range of white-capped mountains. If you look up at its towering office buildings, you can easily imagine yourself, were it not for the breadth of the thoroughfare, in down-town New York; and though the glimpse of the mountains at the end of the street in place of the spars and mast-heads of the East and North rivers undeceives you, the mud at your feet serves to help out the delusion. Denver is a really beautiful city, but -- and this, I am sure, few people in New York will believe -- it has the worst streets in the country. Their mud or their dust, as the season wills it, is the one blot on the city's fair extent; it is as if the City Fathers had served a well-appointed dinner on a soiled table-cloth. But they say they will arrange all that in time.

The two most striking things about the city to me were the public schools and the private houses. Great corporations, insurance companies, and capitalists erect twelve-story buildings everywhere. They do it for an advertisement for themselves or their business, and for the rent of the offices. But these buildings do not in any way represent a city's growth. You will find one or two of such buildings in almost every Western city, but you will find the people who rent the offices in them living in the hotels or in wooden houses on the outskirts. In Denver there are not only the big buildings, but mile after mile of separate houses, and of the prettiest, strictest, and most proper architecture. It is a distinct pleasure to look at these houses, and quite impossible to decide upon the one in which you would rather live. They are not merged together in solid rows, but stand apart, with a little green breathing-space between, each in its turn asserting its own individuality. The greater part of these are built of the peculiarly handsome red stone which is found so plentifully in the Silver State.