The Crest of the Continent: A Summer's Ramble in the Rocky Mountains and Beyond. Ernest IngersollЧитать онлайн книгу.
estimate places the amount of iron ore the company has developed at over two millions of tons. Besides these high-grade ores, there are others of an inferior grade, which, being mixed with mill-cinders, will produce the commoner sorts of pig-iron, suitable for foundry-work. Limestone, valuable as flux, is quarried from a ledge within seven miles of the furnace, with which it is connected by rail, and the supply is practically inexhaustible. Gannister and fire-clay, also, are found in abundance in the vicinity. With coal, coke, iron and all the furnace ingredients radiated about this point, which, at the same time is nearest to the Eastern forges whence must be brought the massive machinery to equip the works, it requires no second thought to perceive that South Pueblo offers altogether the most profitable site for vast factories like these.
Immediately following this decision, in the spring of 1879 a large tract of mesa-land was secured, beside the track of the Denver and Rio Grande railway, about a mile south of the Union Depot, where not only the foundations of the mills, but a village-site was laid out and numerous side-tracks were put down. Very soon the tall chimneys of the blast furnaces began to rise into the ken of the people of Pueblo. Simultaneously a large number of fine cottages were built as homes for workmen, and other structures were set on foot, among them a commodious hospital, for joint use of the mills and the railway company. It is a very pleasant, well-ordered and growing little town, known as Bessemer, and even now the space between it and the city is rapidly filling up. The present daily output of the blast furnaces is one hundred tons of pig-iron, but soon a twin furnace will double the productive capacity of the works. Besides the furnaces, the plant includes Bessemer steel converting works, a rolling and rail mill, 450 by 60 feet, a nail mill, a puddling mill and foundry. All of these establishments are in every way equal to the best of their kind in the East. The blast furnace is fifteen feet base and sixty-five feet high, with fire-brick, hot-blast stoves, and a Morris blowing engine. In the steel-converting works the arrangement of the plant is similar to that of the new Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Company, which has given exceptionally good results. The rail mill plant consists of Siemen’s heating furnaces and heavy blooming and rail trains, and the puddling and nail mills are equipped with the best modern machinery. At Denver the same company owns a rolling mill, where bar and railroad iron and mine rails are manufactured: these in the future will mainly be supplied from South Pueblo. The effect upon Colorado of this forging of native iron for home consumption must be very important. All iron and iron ware is nearly doubled in value by the necessarily high rates of freight across the plains. Manufacturing, now that the crude material can be obtained on the spot, is cheaper than importing, and in the wake of the blast furnace must follow a long train of iron industries. Already negotiations are on foot for the establishment of extensive stove works (a million of dollars was sent East last year from Colorado in payment for stoves alone), and the erection of car-wheel shops is also contemplated. Indeed, in this mining country, which also is a region that is rapidly filling up with large towns, the demand for manufactured iron of all sorts is very large. It is another step in the gradual movement of trade-centers westward.
ENTRANCE TO CAVE OF THE WINDS.
A still clearer idea of the great value of its interests to the State, and of its local works to Pueblo may be obtained from the report of the productions of the Colorado Coal and Iron company for the year 1882 which, briefly summarized, aggregates as follows: Coal, 511,239 tons; coke, 92,770 tons; iron ores, 53,425 tons; merchant iron, mine rails, etc., 3,883 tons; castings, 2,752 tons; pig-iron, 24,303 tons; muck bar, in four months, 1,253 tons; steel ingots, eight months, 20,919 tons; steel blooms, eight months, 18,068 tons; steel rails, eight months, 16,139 tons; nails, four months, 16,158 kegs; and spikes, six months, 5,022 kegs.
The economy of location, and the successful results attending the establishment here of the great enterprises referred to, are attracting many others. During the past season one of Leadville’s largest smelters, having been destroyed by fire, has been rebuilt at Pueblo, and more will naturally follow.
The mercantile part of the community, however, while admitting all the claims of the steel works and the smelter to their great and beneficent influence upon the destiny of the new town, puts forward its own claim to the credit of commencing the progressive movement. When, by the extensions of the railway into the back country of Colorado, merchants began to perceive that at Pueblo they could buy goods of precisely such grades as they desired a trifle more cheaply, and get them home a trifle more expeditiously, than by going to Denver or Kansas City, Pueblo began to feel the impulse of new commercial vigor. When it came to reckoning upon a whole year’s purchases, the slight advantage gained in freight over Denver, to all southern and middle interior points, amounted to a very considerable sum. Here, far more than in the Eastern States, the freight charges must be taken into account by the country merchant; particularly in the provision business, where the staples are the heaviest articles, as a rule, and, at the same time, those on which the least profit accrues. This consideration, impressing itself more and more upon the good judgment of the mountain dealers, is bringing a larger and larger trade to Pueblo, until now she is beginning to boast herself mistress of all southern and middle Colorado and of northern New Mexico. She can not hope to compete with Denver for the northern half of the State, but she does not intend to lose her grip upon the great, rapidly-developing, money-producing San Juan, Gunnison and Rio Grande regions. And as the visitor sees the railway yards crowded with loaded freight trains destined for every point of the compass; notes the throng of laden carts in the furrowed streets; observes how every warehouse is plethoric with constantly changing merchandise, often stacked on the curbstone under the cover of a canvas sheet because room within doors can not be found; witnesses the temporary nature of so many scores of buildings for business and for domiciles, and learns how most of their owners are putting up permanent houses, multitudes of which are rising substantially on every side;—when he has caught the meaning of all this, he finds that Pueblo has an idea that her opportunities are great, and that she does not propose to neglect them in the least particular. There is much wealth there now, and more is being introduced by Eastern investors, or accumulated on the spot, not only in trade, but in the very extensive herds of cattle and sheep that center there. Yet this seems to be but the incipience of her prosperity—a prosperity which rests on solid foundations, existing not alone in the industries I have catalogued and the trade which has centered there, but in the fact that values are not inflated and that the real property of the city is mortgaged to a remarkably small degree.
Pueblo, though I have treated it as a unit, really consists of two cities, having the rushing flood of the Arkansas between them. Each has water-works, and civic institutions separately, but I have no doubt this cumbersome duality will be done away with in time. It is on the South Pueblo side that the railways center at the Union Depot. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe sends hither daily its trains from Kansas City, and hence the Denver and Rio Grande forwards its passengers northward to Denver, westward to Silver Cliff, Leadville, Salt Lake City and Ogden, and southward to El Moro, Alamosa, Del Norte, Durango, Silverton and Santa Fe. It is on this side, also, that the factories are, and that others will stand. Here, too, are being placed the great wholesale depots.
There is too much rush and dust and building and general chaos in the lowlands, where the business part of the town is to make a residence there as pleasant as it will be a few years later; but upon the high mesa, Whose rounded bluffs of gravel form the first break upon the shore of the great plains that extend thence in uninterrupted level to the Missouri River, a young city has grown up, which is admirable as a place for a home. Here are long, straight, well-shaded streets of elegant houses; here are churches and school buildings and all the pleasant appurtenances of a fine town, overlooking the city, the wooded valley of the Arkansas, the busy railway junctions, and the measureless plateaus beyond. One gets a new idea of the possibilities of a delightful home in Pueblo after he has walked upon these surprising highlands.
Nowhere, either, will you get a more inspiring mountain landscape—the far scintillations of the Sangre de Cristo; the twin breasts of Wahatoya; the glittering, notched line and clustering foothills of the Sierra Mojada; the great gates that admit to the upper Arkansas; and Pike’s “shining mountain,” surrounded by its ermined courtiers, only a little less in majesty than their prince.