Picked up at Sea / The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek

by John C. Hutcheson

Spreading buffalo skins over their unroofed cabin to keep out the wet, they piled on them rocks and timber that they had kept in reserve for service in the mine, weighing their ends down with some of the ponderous rocks with which the flood had assailed them—so making a temporary provision against the weather until they should be able to build their log shanty afresh.

By these means the winds were conquered, stopping their onslaught presently and making a truce, which in time was lengthened into a treaty. But it was a mighty battle while it lasted; a fight of the Titans with the gods; man opposed to nature; the material to the immaterial—self-reliant, well-husbanded, carefully-applied strength matched against purposeless force.

Man does not generally win in such contests, but did in this instance. The powers of the water and air were powerless against a systematic resistance, and were compelled to succumb. The miners suffered, certainly—who comes out of a fray scathless? But they were victorious; and being such, could at last laugh at their losses. Beyond, also, the consciousness of having fought a successful fight, they were encouraged by the certainty that they had met and encountered with success the extremity of peril to which they would be subjected; and that thenceforth Nature could only be a passive enemy to them, with no terrors now to daunt them with, albeit she struggled against them still in the bowels of the earth, that refused as yet to give up those hidden riches which they were confident were there. Refuse? Ay, but only for a time; they would, in the end, conquer that refusal, as they had met and overcome nature’s more active opposition!

Their house was in ruins; their provisions mostly spoilt by the elements they had battled—fire had only been wanting to complete the sum of their calamities; whilst the staging around their mine-shaft was broken down and tons of water upon tons poured down the embouchure.

They reviewed their position, and grasped its salient points, not a single faint heart among them:—hope, trust, energy, made them think and act as one man.

There was the iron hut and shanty to rebuild, the mine-shaft and its supports to repair, the dam to mend and remake in its weaker places, the mine to pump out.

Thus they thought; and, what is more, they acted upon the thought. Some men think, and others work. They did both; and, through their strenuous efforts, ere the early buds of spring had given a palpable green tinge to the shrubs and trees that clothed the slopes of the hills and dotted the valley of Minturne Creek here and there, or the snow had quite vanished from the topmost mountain peaks, and the river that ran through the gulch subsided down into its proper proportions, all traces of the storm ravages had been cleared away, and the snug little camp of the Boston exploring party looked itself again, “as neat and trim as a new pin, I reckon!” as Seth Allport said.

The miners themselves allowed, however, that the victory might not have been theirs had they not had the assistance of a visitor—and that a most unexpected one, as the spring was not sufficiently advanced to have cleared away all the snow from the back track to the settlements and made the roads passable, so as to allow the diggers to return to their claims on the hills.

Strangers are rare birds amongst the squatters out West, and are generally regarded with much suspicion by travellers on the prairies and in the mountain fastnesses.

The rougher part of the restoration of the camp belongings having been accomplished and not so many hands being now required for the further repairs needed, while the day was especially fine and suggestive of “sport,” the hunters were out on the hills, under the leadership of Mr Rawlings, who had proved himself by this time one of the best shots in camp.