While spending a holiday at Glenwood Springs, Colorado, I met a man from Goldfield, Nevada. He was fresh from the mining camp then just blossoming into great public notice and he knew in detail all the stories of its vast mineral products. His name was Brewer, not that it matters, and he had all the swagger and bluster of a mining magnate. In no time at all he had convinced everyone in the hotel, including me, that he was one of the lucky ones who had struck it rich in that land of gold!
He literally threw money broadcast. Bell boys sprinted in a continuous marathon to and from the telegraph office with voluminous messages Brewer sent and received. The guests spent most of their time admiring and envying this Croesus. For my part I found my gambling blood becoming aroused at his wondrous recitals of the possibilities of this strange country. When he invited me to attend the Gans-Nelson prize fight at Goldfield I accepted with alacrity.
At Reno we found a private car awaiting us and we were conveyed the remaining two hundred miles to the scene of the fistic encounter in royal state. What an exciting two hundred miles they were! Brewer, who had proved a most hospitable gentleman, planned our having the car for our exclusive use, but before we had journeyed half the distance from Reno to Goldfield that car was crowded to suffocation! His impromptu guests included gamblers, fighters, thieves, soubrettes, merchants, miners, lawyers! It was a conclave as interesting as it was motley.
Thus, sans sleep, we rolled into Goldfield.
What an exciting place it was! It reminded me of another primitive community in Nevada, Virginia City, which I had visited twenty years earlier. Here were the same lack of civilization, utter abandon, tent houses by the hundreds, a few straggling brick and adobe buildings and the inevitable long street running from end to end of the town. On this occasion the street was filled with a howling mob of men and women—rabid fight fans.
Scores of derricks and piles and piles of ore dumped on the sides of operating mines, not to mention hundreds of prospects and claims, told the veriest stranger that here was a mining town. Every other door led into a gambling house or a saloon.
As you contemplated the arid desert utterly devoid of vegetation, hemmed in by huge mountains themselves great uplifts of barren rock, you marvelled at the courage of the first man who made bold to enter that land of devastation and dust. To see that transplanted Brocken scene trodden by people from every part of the globe made me stop and ponder. What will man not do for gold? To be sure a greater part of this mob was attracted to Goldfield by the fight; but the aftermath was horrible to contemplate, the time when only those remained who gambled on what they hoped to find under the crust called earth. I realized that truly this was the country of the survival of the fittest.
