Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 December 1881 — Alpine Climbing a Trade. [ARTICLE]

Alpine Climbing a Trade.

Alpine climbing has within the last twenty years become a science and a trade.” Alpine clubs accumulate experience which is at the disposal of all the world. They have their newspapers and their annual dinners, and their monthly meetings. There are shops where every mountaineering requisite is sold, and so numerous are the guides that it is hard nowadays for even the best of them to make a living. These natives of the Alps make mountaineering easy. They point out to us the safest roads, and warn us against the most dangerous rocks. They cut for the daring adventurer a step in the ice Blope, and after he has put his foot in it they even assist his. upward joUrney by a friendly push behind. Any danger of falling into a crevasse is avoided by the party being tied together, and a precipice is brought within reach of the average tourist by a rope ladder. Hence, unless the ascent is entirely a new one, there is really little danger to encounter. The ordinary mountaineer climbs for pastime and applause, and he must be a spiritless caitiff indeed who knows not the zest which such danger as the usual, but now and then inevitable, avalanche imparts to what is one of the tamest of sports. The Alpine climber, it is true, sometimes sets up claims to be reckoned among the pioneers of science. He now and then prints a dull drawing-room book, with pretty pictures, and fondly imagines that he ranks with Saussures, Tschudes, Schlan-Gentweits, Forbeses, Payers and Tyndalls, who were first attracted to the Alps by a love of what Bacon called “natural knowledge,” but their work was carried on at elevations which the Alpine athlete would not condescend to visit, and where there is really less peril to an explorer than to a policeman in tne Seven Dials on a Saturday night. The people who insist on writing letters to the papers about the necessity of looking after these reckless folks waste their sympathy. The average Alpine tourist is perfectly able to take care of himself. When he foolishly courts danger, the verdict must be that after all he fuss a right to choose his own way of making his exit from a world in which he cannot otherwise achieve distinction.

Thu assessed value of the property of the Chinese in California is estimated at $1,600,000,