The Prospector, and The Silver Queen

STORY OF THE LIFE OF NICHOLAS C. CREEDE.
BY CY WARMAN.
DENVER The Great Divide Publishing Company 1894.
Copyrighted 1894, by Cy Warman, Denver, Colorado.
The purpose of these pages is to tell the simple story of the life of an unpretentious man, and to show what the Prospector has endured and accomplished for the West.
The Author.
The convulsion was over. An ocean had been displaced. Out of its depths had risen a hemisphere; not a land finished for the foot of man, but a seething, waving mass of matter, surging with the mighty forces and energies of deep-down, eternal fires. The winds touched the angry billows and leveled out the plains. One last, mighty throe, and up rose the mountains of stone and silver and gold that stand to tell of that awful hour when a continent was born. The rain and gentle dew kissed the newborn world, and it was arrayed in a mantle of green. Forests grew, and the Father of Waters, with all his tributaries, began his journey in search of the Lost Sea.
That miniature race, the Cliff Dwellers, ruled the land, and in the process of evolution, the Red Man, followed by our hero, the Prospector, who brushed away the mysteries and disclosed the wonders, the grandeur, the riches of the infant world. Before him the greatest of the earth may well bow their heads in recognition of his achievements. His monument has not been reared by the hands of those who build to commemorate heroic deeds, but in thriving villages and splendid cities you may read the history of his privation and hardship and valor. He it was who first laid down his rifle to lift from secretive sands the shining flakes of gold that planted in the hearts of men the desire to clasp and possess the West.
It was the Prospector who, with a courage sublime, attacked the granite forehead of the world, and proclaimed that, locked in the bosom of the Rocky Mountains, were silver and gold, for which men strive and die. He strode into the dark cañon where the sword of the Almighty had cleft the mountain chain, and climbed the rugged steeps where man had never trod before, and there, above and beyond the line that marked the farthest reach of the Bluebell and the Pine, he slept with the whisperings of God. His praises are unsung, but his deeds are recorded on every page that tells of the progress and glory of the West. He has for his home the grand mountains and verdant vales, whose wondrous beauty is beyond compare.