“Meanwhile an almost continuous procession of mule and ox trains were striving to haul across that frightful hundred miles of mountains the food, machinery and furniture which the new settlement so sorely needed, and which it seemed so impossible to supply. Ten cents and more a pound was charged for freight, and prices ranged correspondingly high, with an exorbitant profit added. Hay, for example, reached $200 per ton.
“Nor were all who came rough or even hardy characters. There were among them men of wealth and brains, young graduates of colleges eager for a business opening, engineers and surveyors, lawyers, doctors, and a thousand soft-handed triflers who hoped to make a living in some undefined way out of the general excitement. Many of these gentlemen went to stay and took their wives, or, more usually, waited until they had prepared some sort of a home, and then sent for them. What stories some of these ladies tell of their stage-journey through those wintry mountains! How many wagons, heavily loaded with freight, did they see overturned by the roadside! How many dead mules and horses did they count! How many snow-banks did they fall through! how many precipices escape! how many upsettings avoid by the merest margin of consummate good driving! I knew of three ladies who for twenty-four hours were packed in a stage with a lot of drunken men, who could only be kept within the bounds of decorum and safety by being sung to sleep. The driver was utterly powerless to control them, and had as much as he could do to steer his six horses over that icy road. The crazy men said, ‘Sing to us, we like it, and if you don’t we’ll dump you into the snow!‘ and sing they did, all night long. Whether this incident be considered laughable or pathetic, it is literally true. In the summer the stage passenger was not frozen, but was choked to slow death by impenetrable clouds of dust, and in the seasons between he was engulfed in mud. Verily that hundred miles of staging at fifteen cents a mile, with only thirty pounds of baggage allowed free, was the Purgatory of Leadville, and helped wonderfully to make one contented with his reception.
“With the beginning of 1879, the steady current that had flagged somewhat during the tempestuous last months of 1878, burst into a perfect freshet of travel. Log huts, board shanties, canvas tents, kennels dug into the side hill and roofed with earth and pine boughs, were filled to repletion with men and women, and still proved insufficient to shield the eager immigrants from the arctic air and pitiless storms of this plateau in the high Sierras. Men were glad to pay for the privilege of spreading their overcoats or blankets on the floor of a saloon and sleeping in stale smoke and the fumes of bad whisky—an atmosphere where the sooty oil lamps burned with a weak and yellow flame. Perhaps the dice rattled on till morning above the sleepers’ heads, the monotonous call-song of the dealers lulling them to an unquiet doze in the murky air, only to be awakened by the loud profanity of some brawler or sent cowering under the blankets to escape the too free pistol-balls that fly across the billiard table. Even the sawdust floors of these reeking bar-rooms were not spacious enough to hold the two hundred persons a day who rushed into Leadville, and every dry-goods box upon the curbstone, every pile of hay-bales in the alley, became a bedroom for some belated traveler.
CASCADES OF THE BLUE
“But the era of saloon-floors and empty barrels did not last long. Enterprising men built huge hotels, and opened restaurants and great lodging-tents and barracks; strangers joined in twos and threes, cut logs and planted cabins as thick as corn.... Every day chronicled some new accession of wealth, some additional tapping of the silver deposits which were firmly believed to underlie every square foot of the region. It seemed all a matter of luck, too, and skilled prospecting found itself at fault. The spots old miners had passed by as worthless, ‘tenderfeet’ from Ohio dug down upon, and showed to be rich in ‘mineral.’ One of the first mines opened—the Camp Bird—was discovered by the Gallagher brothers, two utterly poor Irishmen. Another early piece of good fortune was that of Fryer, from whom Fryer Hill, one of the most productive districts, derives its name. He lived in a squatty little cabin on the side-hill, where the dirt floor had become as hilly as a model of the main range, and the rough stone fire-place in the corner was hardly fit to fry a rasher of bacon; but one day he dug a hole up near the top of the hill, hiding himself among the secret pines, saying nothing to anybody, and a few yards below the surface struck a mine which has already yielded millions of dollars without being urged. Innumerable incidents might be related of the patience and expense and hardship which resulted in failure; of the equal pluck and endurance that brought success; of happy chance or perfect accident divulging a fortune at the most unexpected point. The miners have a proverb, ‘Nobody can see into the ground,’ and the gamblers an adage, ‘The only thing sure about luck is that it’s bound to change!’
“One of the grimmest of these tales is that attached to the Dead Man claim, which is briefly as follows: It was winter. Scotty had died, and the boys, wanting to give him a right smart of a burial, hired a man for twenty dollars to dig a grave through ten feet of snow and six feet of hard ground. Meanwhile, Scotty was stuffed into a snow bank. Nothing was heard of the grave-digger for three days, and the boys, going out to see what had happened to him, found him in a hole which, begun as a grave, proved to be a sixty-ounce mine. The quasi sexton refused to yield, and was not hard pushed, for Scotty was forgotten and staid in the snow-bank till the April sun searched him out, the boys meanwhile sinking prospect-holes in his intended cemetery.
“One mine had its shaft down one hundred and thirty-five feet and the indications of success were good. Some capitalists proposed to purchase an interest in it, and a half of the mine was offered them for $10,000, if taken before five o’clock. At half-past four, rich silver ore was struck, and when at half-past five the tardy men of money came leisurely up and signified their consent to the bargain, the manager pointed at the clock, and quietly remarked:
“‘The price of a half interest in this mine now, gentlemen, is sixty thousand dollars.’