Remarks, Bill Nye [android pdf ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Bill Nye
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At an elevation of over 10,000 feet above high water mark, Fahrenheit, the South Park, a hundred miles long, surrounded by precipitous mountains or green and sloping foot-hills, burst upon us, In the clear, still air, a hundred miles away, at Pueblo, I could hear a promissory note and cut-throat mortgage drawing three per cent a month. So calm and unruffled was the rarified air that I fancied I could hear the thirteenth assessment on a share of stock at Leadville toiling away at the bottom of a two hundred and fifty foot shaft.
Colorado air is so pure that men in New York have, in several instances, heard the dull rumble of an assessment working as far away as the San Juan country.
At Como, in the park, I met Col. Wellington Wade, the Duke of Dirty Woman's Ranch, and barber extraordinary to old Stand-up-and-Yowl, chief of the Piebiters.
Colonel Wade is a reformed temperance lecturer. I went to his shop to get shaved, but he was absent. I could smell hair oil through the keyhole, but the Colonel was not in his slab-inlaid emporium. He had been preparing another lecture on temperance, and was at that moment studying the habits of his adversary at a neighboring gin palace. I sat down on the steps and devoured the beautiful landscape till he came. Then I sat down in the chair, and he hovered over me while he talked about an essay he had written on the flowing bowl. His arguments were not so strong as his breath seemed to be. I asked him if he wouldn't breathe the other way awhile and let me sober up. I learned afterward that although his nose was red, his essay was not.
He would shave me for a few moments, and then he would hone the razor on his breath and begin over again. I think he must have been pickling his lungs in alcohol. I never met a more pronounced gin cocktail symphony and bologna sausage study in my life.
I think Sir Walter Scott must have referred to Colonel Wade when he said, “Breathes there a man with soul so dead?” Colonel Wade's soul might not have been dead, but it certainly did not enjoy perfect health.
I went over the mountains to Breckenridge the next day, climbed two miles perpendicularly into the sky, rode on a special train one day, a push car the next and a narrow-gauge engine the next. Saw all the beauty of the country, in charge of Superintendent Smith, went over to Buena Vista and had a congestion of the spine and a good time generally. You can leave Denver on a morning train and see enough wild, grand, picturesque loveliness before supper, to store away in your heart and hang upon the walls of memory, to last all through your busy, humdrum life, and it is a good investment, too.
Taxidermy.
This name is from two Greek words which signify “arrangement” and “skin,” so that the ancient Greeks, no doubt, regarded taxidermy as the original skin-game of that period. Taxidermy did not flourish in America prior to the year 1828. At that time an Englishman named Scudder established a museum and general repository for upholstered beasts.
Since then the art has advanced quite rapidly. To properly taxiderm, requires a fine taste and a close study of the subject itself in life, akin to the requirements necessary in order to succeed as a sculptor. I have seen taxidermed animals that would not fool anybody. I recall, at this time especially, a mountain lion, stuffed after death by a party who had not made this matter a subject of close study. The lion was represented in a crouching attitude, with open jaws and red gums. As time passed on and year succeeded year, this lion continued to crouch. His tail became less rampant and drooped like a hired man on a hot day. His gums became less fiery red and his reddish skin hung over his bones in a loose and distraught manner, like an old buffalo robe thrown over the knees of a vinegary old maid. Spiders spun their webs across his dull, white fangs. Mice made their nests in his abdominal cavity. His glass eye became hopelessly strabismussed, and the moths left him bald-headed on the stomach. He was a sad commentary on the extremely transitory nature of all things terrestrial and the hollowness of the stuffed beast.
I had a stuffed bird for a long time, which showed the cunning of the stuffer to a great degree. It afforded me a great deal of unalloyed pleasure, because I liked to get old hunters to look at it and tell me what kind of a bird it was. They did not generally agree. A bitter and acrimonious fight grew out of a discussion in relation to this bird. A man from Vinegar Hill named Lyons and a party called Soiled Murphy (since deceased), were in my office one morning—Mr. Lyons as a witness, and Mr. Murphy in his great specialty as a drunk and disorderly. We had just disposed of the case, and had just stepped down from the bench, intending to take off the judicial ermine and put some more coal in the stove, when the attention of Soiled Murphy was attracted to the bird. He allowed that it was a common “hell-diver with an abnormal head,” while Lyons claimed that it was a kingfisher.
The bird had a duck's body, the head of a common eagle and the feet of a sage hen. These parts had been adjusted with great care and the tail loaded with lead somehow, so that the powerful head would not tip the bird up behind. With this rara avis, to use a foreign term, I loved to amuse and instruct old hunters, who had been hunting all their lives for a free drink, and hear them tell how they had killed hundred of these birds over on the Poudre in an early day, or over near Elk Mountain when the country was new.
So Lyons claimed that he had killed millions of these fowls, and Soiled Murphy, who was known as the tomato can and beer-remnant savant of that country, said that before the Union Pacific Railroad got into that section, these birds swarmed around Hutton's lakes and lived on horned toads.
The feeling got more and more partisan till Mr. Lyons made a pass at Soiled Murphy with a large red cuspidor that had been presented to me by Valentine Baker, a dealer in abandoned furniture and mines. Mr. Murphy then welted Lyons over the head with the judicial scales. He then adroitly caught a lump of bituminous coal with his countenance and fell to the floor with a low cry of pain.
I called in an outside party as a witness, and in the afternoon both men were convicted of assault and battery. Soiled Murphy asked for a change of venue on the ground that I was prejudiced. I told him that I did not allow anything whatever to prejudice me, and went on with the case.
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