The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

N. C. Creede was a prospector who had made some money in the Monarch district before he came to Willow Gap; he began prospecting there on Campbell, now Moses Mount, with G. L. Smith, of Salida. One of the two picked up a piece of rock so full of quartz that they sunk a shaft immediately below the spot where they had found the stone. According to all known laws, they should have sunk the shaft at the spot from which the piece of rock had become detached, or from whence it had presumably rolled. It was as absurd to dig for silver where they did dig as it would be to sink a shaft in Larimer Street, in Denver, because one had found a silver quarter lying in the roadway. But they dug the shaft; and when they looked upon the result of the first day’s work, Smith cried, “Great God!” and Creede said, “Holy Moses!” and the Holy Moses Mine was named. While I was in Creede that gentleman was offered one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for his share of this mine, and declined it. After that my interest in him fell away. Any man who will live in a log house at the foot of a mountain, and drink melted snow any longer than he has to do so, or refuse that much money for anything, when he could live in the Knickerbocker Flats, and drive forth in a private hansom with rubber tires, is no longer an object of public interest.

But his past history is the history of the town. Creede and his partner knew they had a mine, but had no money to work it. So they applied to David S. Moffatt, the president of the Rio Grande Railroad, which has a track to Wagon Wheel Gap only ten miles away, and Moffatt and others formed the Holy Moses Mining Company, and secured a bond on the property at seventy thousand dollars. As soon as this was known, the invasion of Willow Gap began. It was the story of Columbus and the egg. Prospectors, and provisions with which to feed them, came in on foot and on stages, and Creede began to grow. But no more mines were found at once, and the railroad into the town was slow in coming, and many departed, leaving their posts and piles of rock to mark their claims. But last June Creede received a second boom, and in a manner which heaps ridicule and scorn upon the scientific knowledge of engineers and mining experts, and which shows that luck, chance, and the absurd vagaries of fate are factors of success upon which a prospector should depend.

THE “HOLY MOSES” MINE

Ralph Granger and Eri Buddenbock ran a butcher shop at Wagon Wheel Gap. “The” Renninger, of Patiro, a prospector with no tools or provisions, asked them to grub-stake him, as it is called when a man of capital furnishes a man of adventure with bacon, flour, a pick, and three or four donkeys, and starts him off prospecting, with the understanding that he is to have one-tenth of what he finds. Renninger asked Jule Haas to join him, and they departed together. One day the three burros disappeared, and wandered off many miles, with Renninger in hot and profane pursuit until they reached Bachelor Mountain, where he overtook them. But they liked Bachelor Mountain, and Renninger, failing to dislodge them with either rocks or kicks, seated himself to await their pleasure, and began to chip casually at the nearest rock. He struck a vein showing mineral in such rich quantities that he asked Creede to come up and look at it. Creede looked at it, and begged Renninger to define his claim at once. Renninger, offering up thanks to the three donkeys, did so, and named it the “Last Chance.” Then Creede located next to this property, shoulder to shoulder, and named his claim the “Amethyst.” These names are merely names to you; they mean nothing; in Colorado you speak them in a whisper, and they sound like the Standard Oil Company or the Koh-i-noor diamond. Haas was bought off for ten thousand dollars. He went to Germany to patronize the people in the little German village from which he came with his great wealth; four months later Renninger, and Buddenbock, who had staked him, sold their thirds for seventy thousand dollars each; a few days later Granger was offered one hundred thousand dollars for his third, and said he thought he would hold on to it. When I was there, the Chance was putting out one hundred and eighty thousand dollars per month. This shows that Granger was wiser in his generation than Haas.

At the time I visited Creede it was quite impossible to secure a bed in any of the hotels or lodging-houses. The Pullman cars were the only available sleeping-places, and rented out their berths for the night they laid over at the mining camp. But even in these, sleeping was precarious, as one gentleman found the night after my arrival. He was mistaken for another man who had picked up a bag of gold-dust from a faro table at Little Delmonico’s, and who had fled into the night. After shooting away the pine-board façade in the Mint gambling-house in which he was supposed to have sought shelter, several citizens followed him on to the sleeping-car, and, of course, pulled the wrong man out of his berth, and stood him up in the aisle in front of four revolvers, while the porter and the other wrong men shivered under their blankets, and begged them from behind the closed curtains to take him outside before they began shooting. The camp was divided in its opinion on the following morning as to whether the joke was on the passenger or on the hasty citizens.

DEBATABLE GROUND—A WARNING TO TRESPASSERS

A colony of younger sons from the East took pity upon me, and gave me a bunk in their Grub Stake cabin, where I had the satisfaction of watching the son of a president of the Somerset Club light the fire with kerosene while the rest of us remained under the blankets and asked him to be careful. They were a most hospitable, cheerful lot. When it was so cold that the ice was frozen in the tin basin, they would elect to remain in bed all day, and would mark up the prices they intended to ask for their lots and claims one hundred dollars each; and then, considering this a fair day’s wages for a hard day’s work, would go warmly to sleep again. It is interesting, chiefly to mothers and sisters—for the fathers and brothers have an unsympathetic way of saying, “It is the best thing for him”—to discover how quickly such carefully bred youths as one constantly meets in the mining camps and ranches of the West can give up the comforts and habits of years and fit into their surroundings. It is instructive and hopeful to watch a young man who can and has ordered numerous dinners at Bignon’s, composing a dessert of bread and molasses, or to see how neatly a Yale graduate of one year’s standing can sweep the mud from the cabin floor without spreading it. If people at home could watch these young exiles gorge themselves with their letters, a page at a time, and then go over them again word by word, they would write early and often; and if the numerous young women of New York and Boston could know that their photographs were the only bright spots in a log-cabin filled with cartridge-belts, picks, saddles, foot-ball sweaters, patent-medicine bottles, and three-months-old magazines, they would be moved with great content.

One cannot always discern the true character of one’s neighbors in the West. “Dress,” as Bob Acres says, “does make a difference.” There were four very rough-looking men of different ages sitting at a table near me in one of the restaurants or “eating-houses” of Creede. They had marked out a map on the soiled table-cloth with the point of an iron fork, and one of them was laying down the law concerning it. There seemed to be a dispute concerning the lines of the claim or the direction in which the vein ran. It was no business of mine, and there was so much of that talk that I should not have been attracted to them, except that I expected from their manner they might at any moment come to blows or begin shooting. I finished before they did, and as I passed the table over which they leaned scowling excitedly, the older man cried, with his finger on the map: