Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/243

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LETTER XII.
THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
213

more of a man to spend a night in such a house." In Colorado whisky is significant of all evil and violence, and is the cause of most of the shooting affrays in the mining camps. There are few moderate drinkers; it is seldom taken except to excess. The great local question in the Territory, and just now the great electoral issue, is drink or no drink, and some of the papers are openly advocating a prohibitive liquor law. Some of the districts, such as Greeley, in which liquor is prohibited, are without crime, and in several of the stock-raising and agricultural regions through which I have travelled, where it is practically excluded, the doors are never locked, and the miners leave their silver bricks in their waggons unprotected at night. People say that on coming from the Eastern States they hardly realise at first the security in which they live. There is no danger and no fear. But the truth of the proverbial saying, "There is no God west of the Missouri," is everywhere manifest. The "almighty dollar" is the true divinity, and its worship is universal. "Smartness" is the quality thought most of. The boy who "gets on" by cheating at his lessons is praised for being a "smart boy," and his satisfied parents foretell that he will make a "smart man." A man who overreaches his neighbour, but who does it so cleverly that the law cannot take hold of him, wins an envied reputation as a "smart man," and stories of this species of smartness are told admiringly round