Read "The Denver Express" by Augustus Allen Hayes online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
When the celebrated Rocky Mountain gold excitement broke out, more than twenty years ago, and people painted "Pike's Peak or Bust" on the canvas covers of their wagons and started for the diggings, they established a "trail" or "trace" leading in a southwesterly direction from the old one to California.
At a certain point on this trail a frontiersman named Barker built a forlorn ranch-house and "corral", and offered what is conventionally called "entertainment for man and beast."