Seeking Fortune in America

by F. W. Grey

The Cline foreman was what is known as “poor white trash” in the south, and his failing was drink, in which his wife often joined him. When on these sprees they used to quarrel, and sometimes he threw her out of the house, and sometimes she threw him. But as he did not bother the superintendent with “details,” the colonel overlooked these matters. Of course I found out all this later, but describe it here to give an idea of the class of men I worked under.

The mattresses and beds in the bunk-house were indescribable, and dust was everywhere, as the men were supposed to clean out their own rooms, and tired men of their stamp are not over-particular. I and Cursin spent a good part of the night fighting pests—winged and otherwise—but he was sleeping when I got up to get my breakfast before going to work at 6 A.M. the next morning. The food was good and plentiful, and the cook was good as camp cooks go.

I was ordered to go to one of the rock-crushers, of which there were two, and was handed a crowbar and sledge-hammer as the working tools of my trade. My work consisted of putting, unaided, forty-five tons of rock per day through the crusher. When the rock stuck, I had the bar to push it through with; and if the pieces were too big to go into the mouth of the crusher, I had the hammer to break them. The rock came up out of the pit in one-ton cars on an incline railway over my head, and were there dumped on to my platform, from which I had to pick them by hand and put them into the crusher mouth, which was about waist-high to me standing on the platform. This extra and unnecessary work was simply owing to the bad design, or rather absence of any design, when the plant was laid out.

Across, on the other side of an endless chain-bucket elevator, was my shift-mate, who, owing to his having a 6o-ton capacity crusher, had a Mexican assistant. Both crushers dumped into the same elevator, which carried the crushed rock up into an elevated bin, from which it was distributed to the extractors, which I shall describe later.

I worked all the morning, wondering what young Cursin could be doing with himself that he had not come round to visit me. But when I went to dinner, at noon, I found a note from him, saying he could stand it no longer, and he had gone off to catch the morning train.

I got out a pair of dogskin gloves from my trunk at noon, as my hands were nearly raw from the rough rock, and, as they were good English leather, by the time they wore out my hands were tough enough to stand the strain. By night I ached in every muscle, and I had cramp in my hands and wrists from the jar of the crusher, because, owing to lack of knowledge and unskilfulness, I would, when jamming down a rock, get the bar between the rock and the moving jaw, and get all the jar of the machine stiff-armed. After a few days, however, I and my shift-mate got on friendly terms, and he would come over to show me how to do things right, so that the work became much easier. Each night I went to bed almost convinced that I could not stand more, and that I would have to quit in the morning. But in the morning I felt I could stand it one more day; and so it went on, all the time getting easier, till the idea of quitting went out of my mind entirely.

There were thirty odd white men working at the mine, and about one hundred Mexicans, when I first went there, and it was certainly a tough camp. There was a barbed-wire fence dividing the Mexican camp, which was known as “Mexico,” from the rest of the buildings where the boarding-houses and the rest of the factory were. Over in Mexico they had a dance hall with a saloon attachment, and most of the men went over there when off duty. Fights were frequent and gun-plays occasional, but as a drunken man is seldom dangerous with a gun, no one got seriously hurt.

The man (an American) who ran the dance hall was the son of the man in charge of the company’s freight wagons. He was called “Bud” Towser, and had the makings of a “bad-man” minus the “sand,” or pluck. Sober, he was very quiet and generally polite, but drunk, or even partly so, he was very quarrelsome, and the Mexicans were in deadly fear of him; and most of the white men gave him the road.

One night two of the boys started a “rough-house” in his dance hall, thinking he had gone to town, but he had returned and was back in his room. When he burst out they made a bee-line for home, and as his gun barked after them in the dark they carried away most of the barbed-wire fence in their hurry.

On the 5th of May (one of the Mexican national holidays) I heard that there was to be a big dance about a mile from the mines, at a fence-rider’s house, and I went up with some of the boys to look on. The dance was held on a big levelled piece of ground in front of the house, and round this piece, which was laid out for the dancing-floor (just mud wetted and well packed), there was a ring of posts on which were hung lamps and lanterns to light the dancers. Outside of this again were rows of benches for the dancers to rest on and for the onlookers; the side of the circle towards the house, however, was left open, so that there was a free passage to the refreshments, which were served inside, and consisted of tamales, enchiladas, and unlimited quantities of mescal. Mescal, or tequila, is spirit distilled from the sap of the large cactus known as the century plant in the States, and called maguey by the Mexicans.