“No, no! you didn’t dream that! You did actually wade across the river.”
“Well, then what part of it did I dream? Can anybody tell me that?” and poor Pike looked more puzzled than ever.
“You must have waded the river, you know, or you would not be here.”
“Well, yes; I s’pose I did, but that don’t seem a bit plainer, nor hardly half as plain as the shootin’ and yellin’ part. That was the dogonest plainest dream I ever did hev!”
“Yet, as we are all here, alive and well; it must have been a dream?”
“Oh, yes, it was a dream, sartain and sure, but what gits me was its bein’ so astonishin’ plain—jist the same as bein’ wide awake!”
Pike continued to tell his dream for some years, constantly adding new matter, till at last it was a wonderful yarn. He enlarged greatly on the part he took in the fight, and after wearing out the pick on the skulls of the Indians, wound up by thrusting the handle down the throat of a brave, as his last act before beating a retreat. Tom more than once told him the truth about the whole affair, bringing in half a dozen of the “boys” to corroborate what he said, but not a word of it would Pike believe.
“Do you think,” he would say, “that I was fool enough to believe that sich things actually happened? No, it was all a dream from fust to last, and the biggest and plainest dream I ever had!”
The account I have given of our prospecting trip is a fair sample of all such expeditions—though this trip “panned out” rather more than the usual amount of deviltry. Parties of men frequently travel two or three hundred miles to prospect a certain region, and when they reach it, merely scratch about on the surface for a day or two and if nothing is then found they curse the place and strike out for some other section, when the same surface scratching is repeated. With prospectors the “big thing” is always just ahead, never in the place where they are. Of course good miners are frequently found, but in nine cases out of ten a prospecting trip results about as did the little scout given above.
When we were prospecting there were things worth looking after, but we did not pay any attention to them. We saw in the cañon abundant indications of coal, but we were looking for gold alone. The coal, the croppings of which we saw, is now being extracted by a company and their mine is one of great value. Near where we camped while prospecting in the cañon now stand the steam-hoisting works of the coal company. It may look as though we did very little work for a prospecting party, but I have known a party of men to travel three hundred miles without having washed a pan of dirt; half the time they did not even dismount from their horses when looking at mining ground. Large parties do less work than small ones, as they can never agree in regard to where they are to set in or what is to be done. If one or two men wish to stop and prospect, the others are pretty sure to say: “Confound the place! there is nothing there. I know by the looks of the ground that it is of no account,” and so the whole party moves on, and a good place in which to set to work is never found.