Camp on Alder Gulch, June 18, 1880.
The general feeling of expectation and suspense which is the natural result of recent mineral discoveries near to any mining town, is still prevalent. If possible it is on the increase, and all the prevailing indications of profound mystery are visible everywhere. There is a general air of knowing something that other people do not. Almost every man is hugging to his bosom a ponderous secret which is slowly crushing him, while all his fellow men are trying to hold down the same secret.
Occasionally a man comes to me, takes my ear and wrapping it around his arm two or three times so that I can't get away, he tells me that he knows where there is the richest thing in America. Only he and his wife and another man and his wife know where this wonderful wealth is to be found.
He asks me to come into it so that capital will then be interested. I agree to it and on the way to the camp I overtake the able-bodied men of Wyoming, all of whom are trying in their poor, weak way to keep the same secret.
Such is life.
Sometimes I think that perhaps I had better give up mining. I do not seem to get the hang of the thing, somehow. All the claims I get hold of are rich in nothing but assessments, while less deserving men catch on to the bonanzas.
Once I located a vein which showed what I called good indications of a permanent vein, staked it out under the United States law and went to work on it. I paid out $11 for sharpening picks alone, in going down ten feet to hold it. It was mighty hard quartz, but the lead grew wider and better defined all the time till I got down ten feet and had an assay.
The assayer said that I had struck a marble quarry, but it was very inferior marble after all. Besides I found afterward that it was owned by Jay Gould and some other tender feet from New York.
Then I relocated the claim and called it The Marble-Top Cemetery Lode, and went away. Probably if I had gone down on it, the ore would have shown free milling tombstones and Power's Greek slaves and all that kind of business, but I felt kind of depressed all the time while I was at work on it. There was a kind of "Hark from the tombs a doleful sound," air about the whole mine.
Cummins City still booms. Building lots have gone up to $100 each. This for a place where a few weeks ago the song of the coyote was heard in the land, and where the valley of the river, and bald sides of the rugged mountains were unscarred, is a good showing.
The magical power of a mineral excitement to transform the bleak prairie and the rocky canyon into a thriving village at once, is something to command our admiration and wonder.
Two months ago, I might say, the little village of Cummins City was nothing but a little caucus of prairie dogs, and a ward meeting of woodticks.
Now look at it. Opera houses, orphan asylums, hurdy-gurdies, churches, barber shops, ice-cream saloons, dog-fights, musical soirees, spruce gum, bowling-allies, salvation, and three card monte. Everything in fact that the heart of man could yearn after.
As you drive up Euclid Avenue, you smell the tropical fragrance of frying bacon, and hear the recorder of the district murmuring with a profane murmur because his bread won't raise. Here and there along the river bank, like a lot of pic-nickers, the guileless miners are panning pounded quartz, or submitting their socks to the old process for freeing them from decomposed quartzite, and nonargentiferous clayite. Flying from the dome of the opera house is a red flannel shirt, while a pair of corpulent drawers of the same ruddy complexion, is gathering all the clear, bracing atmosphere of that locality.
As a picturesque tower on the roof of the Grand Central, the architect has erected a minaret or donjon keep, which is made to represent a salt barrel. So true to life is this new and unique design, that sometimes the cattle which roam up and down Euclid Avenue, climb up on the mansard roof of the Grand Central, and lick the salt off the donjon keep, and fall over the battlements into the moated culverin, or stick their feet through the roof and rattle the pay gravel into the custard pie and cottage pudding.
Bill Root, the stage driver, went out there during the early days of the camp, and with more or less red liquor stowed away among his vitals.
William is quite sociable and entertaining, even under ordinary circumstances, but when he has thawed out his digestion with fire-water, he talks a good deal. He is sociable to that extent that the bystander is steeped in profound silence while William proceeds to unfold his spring stock of information. On the following morning William awoke with a seal brown taste in his mouth, and wrapped in speechless misery. There was no cardinal liquor in the camp, (a condition of affairs which does not now exist,) so that William was silent. On the amputating table of the leading veterinary surgeon of Cummins City was found a tongue that had just been removed. It was really cut from the mouth of a horse that had nearly severed it himself, by drawing a lariat through it: but the story soon gained currency that an indignant camp had risen in its might, and visited its vengeance on William Root for turning loose his conversational powers on the previous day.
Great excitement was manifested throughout the camp, as William had not uttered a word as yet. Toward noon, however, a party of hardened miners, carrying a willow-covered lunch basket with a cork in the top, arrived in camp, and shortly after that it was ascertained that the conversational powers of Mr. Root still remained unimpaired.
The chaplain of the camp set a day for fasting and prayer, and the red flannel shirt on the dome of the opera house was hung at half-mast in token of the universal sorrow and distress.
This is a true story, which accounts for the awkward manner in which I have told it.