At this juncture the suffering animal was mercifully shot, and the wolves allowed to batten on his thin and tough carcass.
JUDGE LYNCH'S COURT AT WHOOPING HOLLOW.
Whooping Hollow is the uneuphonious name of a mining camp in the very heart of the Taos Range—or rather, was, for it has been expunged from the map these twenty-five years, and but few of the present generation in New Mexico are aware that such a place ever existed. It was almost inaccessible, so awfully abrupt and broken were the bare granite ridges surrounding it, out of which the circumscribed valley in which the town lay seemed to have been literally scooped when the rocks were plastic—Titanic hands holding the scraper, and the lightning the propelling power. How the place received its strange appellation was a mystery even to the majority of the miners who worked there for nearly five years with picks, shovels, long-toms, sluices, and other appliances for extracting the ore from the refractory rock. The quantity of the precious metals shipped during that period made the camp famous, and resulted in building up a town of rude shanties and dugouts which at the height of its prosperity numbered over twelve hundred souls. But you cannot find Whooping Hollow on any modern map, for it played out in less than six years from the date of the discovery of gold there; though several fortunes were mined in that time, and made by traffic the specialty of which was bad whisky.
There was a legend current in the early days of the valley's occupancy, that was honestly believed in, which affirmed that the first party of prospectors, consisting of four or five men, all Tennesseeans, who entered the great cañon in their search, were rewarded well for their pains, finding plenty of water, game, fuel, together with other necessaries in the prosecution of their vocation—a beautiful place for their camp, lots of silver, and gold in paying quantities—were scared out of the gulch (to which they never returned) by an unearthly screeching, seemingly emanating from a human throat. Its ghostly owner, they declared, visited their camp every night about 11 o'clock, and on the top of a timbered knoll, where they could plainly see it as the moonlight sifted through the scattered piñons and dwarfed cedars, took its stand, setting up its blood-curdling cries, which it continued with short intervals of cessation, until daybreak. Those men, it was alleged, were a very ignorant and superstitious set, who, after three nights of their weird experience, could bear it no longer, and were absolutely driven away through fright.
Of course they told others of their rich strike, not forgetting to mention the "hant" of the place, as they called it; but these others, old mountaineers, not fearing any disturbance from the moonlight specter, went there, established their camp—to which hundreds soon flocked—calling it Whooping Hollow, in derision of the tale told by the alarmed Tennesseeans; which name it retained during its whole existence, and was known and recognized by that as a postoffice on the mail records in Washington.
In all probability what the men really heard was the mottled or American screech-owl, which makes a plaintive noise, and a peculiar sound during part of its mournful notes, like the chattering of teeth, keeping up its alternating whooping and moaning all night. It loves to perch on some blasted tree in the moonlight, and the disembodied form seen by the superstitious miners must have been a shattered and denuded piñon, on which the nocturnal bird sat, that, escaping their vision in the daytime, was exaggerated by their frightened eyes at night into the "hant" of the place!—But this is not a ghost story, and the reader will pardon the digression.