The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

When I first read of Creede, when I was so ignorant concerning it that I pronounced the final e, it was on the date line of a newspaper, and made no more impression upon me then than though it were printed simply Creede. But after I had reached Denver, and even before, when I had begun to find my way about the Western newspapers, it seemed to be spelled Creede. In Denver it faced you everywhere from bill-boards, flaunted at you from canvas awnings stretched across the streets, and stared at you from daily papers in type an inch long; the shop-windows, according to their several uses, advertised “Photographs of Creede,” “The only correct map of Creede,” “Specimen ore from the Holy Moses Mine, Creede,” “Only direct route to Creede,” “Scalp tickets to Creede,” “Wanted, $500 to start drug-store in Creede,” “You will need boots at Creede, and you can get them at ——’s.” The gentlemen in the Denver Club talk Creede; the people in the hotels dropped the word so frequently that you wondered if they were not all just going there, or were not about to write Creede on the register. It was a common language, starting-point, and interest. It was as momentous as the word Johnstown during the week after the flood.

The train which carried me there held stern, important-looking old gentlemen, who, the porter told me in an awed whisper, were one-third or one-fifteenth owners of the Potluck Mine; young men in Astrakhan fur coats and new top-boots laced at the ankles, trying to look desperate and rough; grub-stake prospectors, with bedding, pick, and rations in a roll on the seat beside them; more young men, who naïvely assured me when they found that I, too, was going to Creede, and not in top-boots and revolvers and a flannel shirt, that they had never worn such things before, and really had decent clothes at home; also women who smoked with the men and passed their flasks down the length of the car, and two friendless little girls, of whom every one except the women, who seemed to recognize a certain fitness of things, took unremitting care. Every one on the crowded train showed the effect of the magnet that was drawing him—he was restless, impatient, and excited. Half of them did not know what they were going to find; and the other half, who had already taken such another journey to Leadville, Aspen, or Cripple Creek, knew only too well, and yet hoped that this time—

Creede lies in a gully between two great mountains. In the summer the mountain streams wash down into this gully and turn it into a little river; but with the recklessness of true gamblers, the people who came to Creede built their stores, houses, and saloons as near the base of the great sides of the valley as they could, and if the stream comes next summer, as it has done for hundreds of years before, it will carry with it fresh pine houses and log huts instead of twigs and branches.

CREEDE

The train stopped at the opening of this gully, and its passengers jumped out into two feet of mud and snow. The ticket and telegraph office on one side of the track were situated in a freight car with windows and doors cut out of it, and with the familiar blue and white sign of the Western Union nailed to one end; that station was typical of the whole town in its rawness, and in the temporary and impromptu air of its inhabitants. If you looked back at the road over which you had just come, you saw the beautiful circle of the Wagon Wheel Gap, a chain of magnificent mountains white with snow, picked with hundreds of thousands of pine-trees so high above one that they looked like little black pins. The clouds, less white than the snow, lay packed in between the peaks of the range, or drifted from one to another to find a resting-place, and the sun, beating down on both a blinding glare, showed other mountains and other snow-capped ranges for fifty miles beyond. This is at the opening of Willow Gulch into which Creede has hurried and the sides of which it has tramped into mud and covered with hundreds of little pine boxes of houses and log-cabins, and the simple quadrangles of four planks which mark a building site. In front of you is a village of fresh pine. There is not a brick, a painted front, nor an awning in the whole town. It is like a city of fresh card-board, and the pine shanties seem to trust for support to the rocky sides of the gulch into which they have squeezed themselves. In the street are ox-teams, mules, men, and donkeys loaded with ore, crowding each other familiarly, and sinking knee-deep in the mud. Furniture and kegs of beer, bedding and canned provisions, clothing and half-open packing-cases, and piles of raw lumber are heaped up in front of the new stores—or those still to be built—stores of canvas only, stores with canvas tops and foundations of logs, and houses with the Leadville front, where the upper boards have been left square instead of following the sloping angle of the roof.

It is more like a circus-tent, which has sprung up overnight and which may be removed on the morrow, than a town, and you cannot but feel that the people about you are a part of the show. A great shaft of rock that rises hundreds of feet above the lower town gives the little village at its base an absurdly pushing, impudent air, and the silence of the mountains around from ten to fourteen thousand feet high, makes the confusion of hammers and the cries of the drivers swearing at their mules in the mud and even the random blasts from the mines futile and ridiculous. It is more strange and fantastic at night, when it appears to one looking down from half-way up the mountain like a camp of gypsies at the foot of a cañon. On the raw pine fronts shine electric lights in red and blue globes, mixing with the hot, smoky glare rising from the saloons and gambling-houses, and striking upward far enough to show the signs of The Holy Moses Saloon, The Theatre Comique, The Keno, and The Little Delmonico against the face of the great rock at their back doors, but only suggesting the greater mass of it which towers majestically above, hidden somewhere in the night. It is as incongruous as an excursion boat covered with colored lights, and banging out popular airs at the base of the Palisades.

HOW LAND IS CLAIMED FOR BUILDING—PLANKS NAILED TOGETHER AND
RESTING ON FOUR STUMPS

The town of Creede is in what is known as the King Solomon district; it is three hundred and twenty miles from Denver, and lies directly in the pathway of the Great Divide. Why it was not discovered sooner, why, indeed, there is one square foot of land in Colorado containing silver not yet discovered, is something which the Eastern mind cannot grasp. Colorado is a State, not a country, and in that State the mines of Leadville, Aspen, Ouray, Clear Creek County, Telluride, Boulder, Silverton, and Cripple Creek, have yielded up in the last year forty million dollars. If the State has done that much, it can do more; and I could not understand why any one in Colorado should remain contentedly at home selling ribbons when there must be other mines to be had for the finding. A prospector is, after all, very much like a tramp, but with a knowledge of minerals, a pick, rations, a purpose, and—hope. We know how many tramps we have in the East; imagine, then, all of these, instead of wandering lazily and purposelessly from farm-house to farm-house, stopping instead to hammer at a bit of rock, or stooping to pick up every loose piece they find. One would think that with a regular army like this searching everywhere in Colorado no one acre of it would by this time have remained unclaimed. But this new town of Creede, once known only as Willow Gap, was discovered but twenty months ago, and it was not until December last that the railway reached it, and, as I have said, there is not a station there yet.