The man—he said his name was Sam Bolger—again fell into a moody silence. Then he resumed his talk.
"I was a fool for ever leaving Topeka. It was in 1880, not long after the prohibition amendment went into effect. I had lost my job. I had no money. So I just naturally drifted West, and for the next ten years I roamed around California, New Mexico, Arizona, and old Mexico. But it was in eighteen-ninety that I came to Cripple Creek. The first real strike had been made. With thousands of others I fell a victim to my ambition to be rich. Out of all those who went to Cripple Creek in those years, only a few remain to-day who have wealth.
"I just naturally had no luck. I sweated my life away in the mines. I gambled and drank away my wages in Cripple Creek. There never was a city yet that could equal it. Money flowed like water. I believe it was the wickedest spot on the map.
"I was in the great Cripple Creek fire of eighteen-ninety-[Pg 60]six. By that time I was part owner of a small saloon. The fire destroyed my place, and I was broke again.
"Then I heard rumors of Gillette. The town became a city in a night. The rush of men here at that time was heavy. Being one of the first on the ground, I started a saloon in a shack and a boarding house in a tent. Then I leased the upstairs of a building and owned the first dance hall here. For several months Gillette was fast becoming the center of the Cripple Creek region. Then the gold gave out. It was shallow. People left here in a single night. Many did not take even the precaution of shutting their doors. Gillette started like a whirlwind, and in a like manner it became deserted.
"Only a few of us remained, firm in the belief that the country was plentiful in gold. My saloon business was ruined, yet I kept it up, and still have it to-day. Gradually my friends left Gillette, but I remained, and have lived in solitary grandeur since nineteen hundred and eight, when the last of my family moved away.
"Why don’t I leave, you ask? Why should I? I have nothing especially to live for. I have formed an attachment to Gillette. I will die here. I am emperor of the place. My word is law, having no one to dispute it."
The visitors soon after this resumed their journey to Cripple Creek, seven miles away. An air of depression filled each and every one of them. They began to realize what Carthage looked like after the carnage of the Romans. As they turned off the main "drag" into a side street and thence to the main road, the newspaper man looked back. Sam Bolger, a pathetic figure to say the least, was still sitting where he had been left.
The Strange Rites of the "Voodoo Queen."
While voodooism—into the realm of which hideous and grotesque cult one cannot go far without encountering the snake dancer, medicine faker, charm vender, witchcraft queen, and the like—is becoming a matter of "ancient history" in the South, still, one is bound to stumble onto signs of it occasionally, and if one only follows the right trail, he may come upon a scene that will readily convince him that the old-time practices of some superstitious blacks are not dead or soundly slumbering.