Now, here is something that, from my power of reasoning, is inexplicable. There are, however, people who would have a ready explanation for it. Elwood Thomas, Frank’s uncle, had driven his team of ponies from Goodsprings over to Searchlight, ten miles beyond Crescent, and was returning late in the afternoon, aiming to go by way of Crescent, as it was shorter and a better road.
Elwood told me that when he had come to the by-road leading through the canyon past his nephew’s location, he naturally thought of Frank, and as he drove on toward Crescent he began to think he should have gone the other road. He said, “Something told me to turn around—I wouldn’t pretend to say what it was—but it was so strong, so insistent, that I did turn around after I had gone a mile.” He found Frank still hollering for help—but his calls were now very feeble. With the help of the two miners Frank had been trying to attract, Elwood got him out from under the boulder, loaded him into the wagon, and drove on down through the canyon and across the big flat to Nipton, the railroad station. Frank was put on the train and taken to a hospital in Los Angeles. He was paralyzed from the waist down. Six weeks in the hospital fixed him up as good as ever. Frank was on his own then—that is, had no insurance. The expense was terrific. I think Frank never did get his curiosity satisfied about the boulder.
As his inactive partner, I cautioned Frank against working alone in those remote places—but it did no good. He said he was safer working alone in the mines than I was when riding the trains between Kansas and Nevada. When I first went into the mining country, I observed that practically all prospectors had partners. I asked an Irishman (a miner) why was it so? He said, “And how the divvel would a man pull his-self up out of a hole widout a partner?” But there was a more important reason. It was for protection against accidents such as Frank had just experienced.
Frank’s second accident, more serious than the other one, was at our Goodsprings mine, while loading out vanadium ore on Government contract, in more recent years. He was unable to tell how it happened. The trucker had left with a 5-ton load, and Frank was “waiting around” for him to come back for a second load. When the truck driver got back from his ten-mile trip over the mountain, he found Frank wandering around down on the road below the ore bin, in a dazed condition—really worse than that. Frank wrote me later that he remembered standing on the ore bin after the trucker had gone with his load, and thought he must have fallen off—but remembered nothing more. The ore bin is built against the slope of the mountain, having a flat top about 16x20 feet, on a level of the tunnel, with car-track extending to the outer edge, where a drop would be about 18 feet—and less, (to nothing), at the upper end of the ore bin. Frank did not say where he was standing in the last moments of consciousness—but a fall from anywhere near the upper edge would mean a rough tumble all the way down to the road.
When Frank was taken to the Las Vegas hospital, it was found he had a broken collarbone, a bad head injury — and a touch of pneumonia. He remained two months in the hospital, at state expense, plus $90 per month compensation — with final payment of $1,500, on a basis of one-fourth incapacitation.
In Nevada now you don’t have to apply for state insurance. If you are a miner, you’ve got it, with monthly billing—unless you have filed notice that you do not want it.
The Williams girls are both married and live in Las Vegas. Helen is the wife of Vaughn Holt, a barber. When I called at her home in 1941 she had a very sweet little girl not quite a year old. Ruth’s husband, Charles Thomas, is a linotype operator on Frank Garside’s Daily newspaper. He is not the Charley Thomas who grew up in Wetmore and spent many years in Nevada. That Charley was the son of Elwood Thomas and was Frank William’s cousin. And it so happens that Ruth now takes her grandmother Williams’ maiden name—Ruth Thomas.
Frank Garside, postmaster at Las Vegas, and publisher of the Daily Review there, formerly lived in Atchison. His aunt, Frances Garside—well known to me at that time — made a record writing “Globe Sights” for Ed Howe’s Daily Globe, back in the “Gay Nineties.”
And now the panther. Maybe it was only a wildcat, but its scream was enough to put fear in the “sleepers” out on the tunnel dump. The varmint came yowling down the canyon, fifteen feet away from our bunk, going on down the trail Frank had taken with his bedroll. Frank said the thing had been heard several times before, and he was not sure if it was a panther, or a wildcat. Panthers—called cougars in the west—he said, were very much in evidence down on the Rim; that is, the high bank of the Colorado river. And something very like the cougar in habit had killed a calf in the valley, close by. Myrtle regarded the thing as a threatening menace, and had it not been for that exposed shaft at the entrance of the underground house, she doubtless would have made a break for shelter. And I think that, notwithstanding my black and blue ankle, I should have followed pronto.
However, Myrtle was compensated for all this by the fact—vouched for by Frank Williams—that she was the first white woman to set foot on that mountain. By the same line of reasoning, Edith Willams was, I suppose, if we can be sure Frank knows his history, the second, and probably the last, white woman to climb Hunter mountain.