Moored in the rifted rock,
Proof to the tempest’s shock,
Firmer he roots him the ruder it blow.
—Scott.
If the men who sprang from the stones Deucalion cast behind him set themselves to make homes, the result must have been a close counterpart of Leadville, Colorado.” Such was the phrase with which the present writer began an article upon the “Camp of the Carbonates,” printed in Scribner’s Monthly for October, 1879. Though the Leadville of to-day has graduated from the over-grown mining camp it then was, into a pretentious city of twenty thousand people, and boasts all the “improvements,” yet the interest connected with the town, for the world at large, is chiefly historical.
Historical! Why, Leadville is only seven years’ old now; but the years have been eventful, and history is made fast in this state.
The site of Leadville has a pre-historic interest also,—almost mythological in fact, for have not five and twenty years crept by since then. This is the well verified tradition:
“After the rush to Pike’s Peak, in 1859, which was disappointing enough to the majority of prospectors, a number of men pushed westward. One party made their way through Ute pass into the grand meadows of South Park, and crossing, pressed on to the Arkansas valley, up which they proceeded, searching unsuccessfully for gold, until they reached a wide plateau on the right bank, where a beautiful little stream came down. Following this nearly to its source, along what they called California gulch, they were delighted to find placers of gold. This was in the midsummer of 1860; and before the close of the hot weather, ten thousand people had emigrated to the Arkansas, and $2,500,000 had been washed out, one of the original explorers taking twenty-nine pounds of gold away with him in the fall, besides selling for $500 a ‘worked out’ claim from which $15,000 was taken within the next three months. Now this same ‘exhausted’ gravel is being washed a third or fourth time with profit.
“The settlement consisted of one long street only, and houses, even of logs, were so few that the camp was known as ‘Boughtown,’ everybody abandoning the wickyups in winter, when the placers could not be worked, and retreating to Denver. During the summer, however, Boughtown witnessed some lively scenes. One day a stranger came riding up the street on a gallop, splashing mud everywhere, only to be unceremoniously halted by a rough looking customer who covered him with a revolver and said: