“Must be right close to fifty. He was one of the early prospectors out here—came in an ox-wagon across the plains in ’59. Mrs. Tabor was the first woman in the Jackson Diggings. That’s where Idaho Springs is now. He had a claim jumped at Payne’s Bar and never done anything about it. An awful easy-going sort of fellow.”
Our conversation ran along like this for some time and was continued again in the afternoon. That evening my new friend suggested he take me next door to the Opera House where Jack Langrishe’s stock company, brought from New York a month ago, was playing “Two Orphans.” He seemed such a pleasant companion and so well-informed on this particular camp and mining in general that I accepted his suggestion with alacrity.
“Thank you very much. I should be delighted and won’t you let me introduce myself? I’m Mrs. Doe.”
“Not the famous beauty of Central! Most of us miners have already heard about you.”
He then introduced himself. But since he is still alive I won’t give him away after all these years. We always remained good friends, although on a rather formal basis and never called each other by our first names. In the course of the evening, I asked his opinion about the quartz lodes of Nevadaville, still having in mind that something could be done with Harvey’s mine.
“Most of my Colorado mining’s been done down in La Plata and San Juan counties. I wouldn’t be much help. But my advice to you is to hang on to it and maybe work it on shares with some man in the spring when the snow breaks.”
“A new vista for me!” was my reaction. I had always thought of myself as a married woman but now I began to think in terms of a career—I didn’t know what. Jake Sands (as he now called himself in order to shorten his name) wanted me to go into business with him when he opened his new clothing store. But in this glamorous, adventurous world it seemed as if that would be too tame a life for a girl whose exotic name had already spread from one mining camp to another.
(I don’t mind saying that I was flattered at my new friend’s having heard of me—and I am sure that if I hadn’t already fallen in love with Leadville, this tribute alone would have persuaded me to change camps.)
When I returned to Central, my mind was made up. I had gone away with a bruised soul, confused and hurt and undecided. My church did not sanction divorce and it was a dreadful wrench to face what such a step would mean.
But the romance of Colorado mining had caught me forever in its mesh—I would never be happy again away from these mountains and away from the gay, tantalizing feeling that tomorrow anything might happen. And did!