The prospect did not look good to me—nor was I fooled by the enthusiasm of my inexperienced associates, but I wanted to go along with them. The other Wetmore men thought enough of the prospect to locate adjoining claims, naming them for their children—The Marsena, The Gracie, and The Marguerite. I had no child, not even a wife—so no claim. But I then and there made a resolve to learn something more about that enticing mining game, perhaps elsewhere. And in the final analysis I suppose I have.
Doctor Lapham was the principal exuder of enthusiasm, an inborn trait which came to the fore again in a big way on the train enroute to Salt Lake City. The Doctor had spent some time in the smoker, and came back to the coach all “hepped” up. Rubbing his hands together in his characteristic manner, he said he had gotten—on the qt—a tip from the newsboy that an observation car was to be hooked on at Gunnison, for the trip through Colorado’s most colorful canyon. The observation car would be on a siding to the left of our train—and that the favored few were to make a dash for it the moment the train stopped.
The Doctor was always putting forth his best efforts to make us all comfortable—and happy. He said he had bought a book of views, paying $2 for it, something he really didn’t care a whoop for—but he wanted to reward the boy for his kind tip. With an eye for business, the newsboy had also tipped off other passengers.
The “observation” car was only a coalcar having temporary backless board seats placed crosswise of the car. One had to climb over the seats, or step across from one plank to another to get to the rear end of the car—all right for the fellow who had so recently clambered up the tunnel dump, but very awkward for the women and the man with the wooden leg.
Many of the passengers looked at the thing and went back to the coaches, and some abandoned their seats and went inside after the train started—but our men folk, being well to the rear and encumbered with helpless women whom they did not wish to lose just then, couldn’t even do that once the train headed into the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a narrow gorge with 2800-foot almost perpendicular walls, following the serpentine course of the Gunnison river, on a steeply down grade, switching the “observation” car like a whipcracker from one black wall to the other. Hot cinders rained down on us so that we could look neither to the right, or the left—nor up. Now, Lap’s newsboy came aboard crying, “Goggles, goggles, goggles!”
And the appreciative Doctor gave the boy some more money.
We had done Denver, Colorado Springs, Manitou and Pike’s Peak—and Cripple Creek. And we had all climbed “Tenderfoot” Mountain while waiting over-night at Salida for train connection—and I individually had literally sat on the proverbial powderkeg for three hours during a twenty-mile overland drive. Mr. Mann had provided a spring wagon for the other members of the party, and I, being unexpected, was conducted to a freight wagon going our way. When told, near the end of the journey, that I was sitting on a box of dynamite I blew up—in spirit. But nowhere had we experienced anything so disappointing as this “observation” car ride. It is anchored in my memory as the one really big scene that beggared description.
NOTE — The railroad through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison has been abandoned, and sightseers may now view this colorful canyon from their automobiles over a highway—a “highway,” mind you, more than a half mile down in a narrow slit in the earth.
Then, again, my newspaper friend, William Allen White, of the Emporia Gazette, toured the western mining districts and wrote enthusiastically about some newly discovered mining opportunity in the west, known as Thunder Mountain. It stimulated my desire. I wrote William Allen, asking him if he would, as one newspaperman to another, advise me to try my luck at Thunder Mountain? His personal letter to me was even more optimistic than was his editorial. Like Horace Greely, his advice was substantially, “By all means go west, young man, and give it a try.”
But I did not fetch up at Thunder Mountain. On the advice of another friend, I dumped the proceeds from the sale of my newspaper, sight unseen, in a hole in Nevada — while the wise Mr. White kept on publishing his Gazette; wrote a best seller book, “A Certain Rich Man,” and got rich himself. His name and fame are to be perpetuated in the erection of a public library building in Emporia; while I, his misguided friend, still have my laurels to make. And, incidentally, as a mining man, after that first big blow, I never again heard of Thunder Mountain.