“Then Thompson passed the ball back to me—no, not your Thompson; Thompson of ’79 I mean—and I carried it down the field all the way to the twenty-five-yard line. Canfield, who was playing full, tackled me; but I shook him off, and—”
A MINING CAMP COURT-HOUSE
I should have liked to wait and hear whether or not he made his touch-down.
The shaft of the Last Chance Mine is at the top of the Bachelor Mountain, and one has to climb and slip for an hour and a half to reach it. A very nice Yale boy guided me there, and seemed as willing as myself to sit down in the snow every ten minutes and look at the scenery. But we saw much more of the scenery than of the mine, because there was more of it to see, and there was no general manager to prevent us from looking as long as we liked. The trail led over fallen logs and up slippery rocks caked with ice and through drifts of snow higher than one’s head, and the pines accompanied us all the way with branches bent to the mountain-side with the weight of the snow, and a cold, cheery mountain stream appeared and disappeared from under long bridges of ice and mocked at us for our slow progress. But we gave it a very close race coming down. Sometimes we walked in the cold, dark shadows of the pines, where hardly a ray of sunlight came, and again the trail would cross a landslide, and the wind brought strong odors of the pine and keen, icy blasts from the snow-capped ranges which stretched before us for fifty miles, and we could see Creede lying at our feet like a box of spilled jackstraws. Every now and then we met long lines of burros carrying five bags of ore each, with but twenty dollars’ worth of silver scattered through each load, and we could hear the voice of the driver from far up above and the tinkle of the bell as they descended upon us. Sometimes they made way for us or halted timidly with curious, patient eyes, and sometimes they shouldered us promptly backward into three feet of snow. It was a lonely, impressive journey, and the wonderful beauty and silence of the mountain made words impertinent. And, again, we would come upon a solitary prospector tapping at the great rock in front of him, and only stopping to dip his hot face and blistered hands into the snow about him, before he began to drive the steel bar again with the help which hope gave him. His work but for this ingredient would seem futile, foolish, and impossible. Why, he would ask himself, should I work against this stone safe day after day only to bore a hole in its side as minute as a nail’s point in the front of a house, and a thousand rods, probably, from where the hole should be? And then hope tells him that perhaps the very next stroke will make him a millionaire like Creede, and so he makes the next stroke, and the next, and the next.
SHAFT OF A MINE
If ever I own a silver mine, I am going to have it situated at the base of a mountain, and not at the top. I would not care to take that journey we made to the Chance every day. I would rather sit in the office below and read reports. After one gets there, the best has been seen; for the general manager of the Last Chance Mine, to whom I had a letter of introduction, and indeed all the employés, guarded their treasure with the most praiseworthy and faithful vigilance. It was evident that they were quietly determined among themselves to resist any attempt on the part of the Yale man and myself to carry away the shaft with us. We could have done so only over their dead bodies. The general manager confounded me with the editor of the Saturday Night, which he said he reads, and which certainly ought to account for several things. I expected to be led into a tunnel, and to be shown delicate veins of white silver running around the sides, which one could cut out with a penknife and make into scarf-pins and watch guards. If not, from whence, then, do the nuggets come that the young and disappointed lover sends as a wedding present to the woman who should have married him, when she marries some other man who has sensibly remained in the East—a present, indeed, which has always struck me as extremely economical, and much cheaper than standing-lamps. But I saw no silver nuggets. One of the workmen showed us a hole in the side of the mountain which he assured us was the Last Chance Mine, and that out of this hole one hundred and eighty thousand dollars came every month. He then handed us a piece of red stone and a piece of black stone, and said that when these two stones were found together silver was not far off. To one thirsting for a sight of the precious metal this was about as satisfying as being told that after the invitations had been sent out and the awning stretched over the sidewalk there was a chance of a dance in the neighborhood. I was also told that the veins lie between walls of porphyry and trachyte, but that there is not a distinctly marked difference, as the walls resemble each other closely. This may or may not be true; it is certainly not interesting, and I regret that I cannot satisfy the mining expert as to the formation of the mine, or tell him whether or not the vein is a heavy galena running so much per cent. of lead, or a dry silicious ore, or whether the ore bodies were north and south, and are or are not true fissures, and at what angle the contact or body veins cut these same fissures. All of this I should have ascertained had the general manager been more genial; but we cannot expect one man to combine the riches of Montezuma and the graces of Chesterfield. One is sure to destroy the other.
The social life of Creede is much more interesting than outputs and ore values. There were several social functions while I was there which tend to show the happy spirit of the place. There was a prize-fight at Billy Woods’, a pie-eating match at Kernan’s, a Mexican circus in the bottom near Wagon Wheel Gap, a religious service at Watrous and Bannigan’s gambling-house, and the first wedding in the history of the town. I was sorry to miss this last, especially as three prominent citizens, misunderstanding the purpose of my visit to Creede, took the trouble to scour the mountain-side for me in order that I might photograph the wedding party in a group, which I should have been delighted to do. The bride was the sister of Billy Woods’s barkeeper, and “Stony” Sargeant, a faro-dealer at “Soapy” Smith’s, was the groom. The Justice of the Peace, whose name I forget, performed the ceremony, and Edward De Vinne, the Tramp Poet, offered a few appropriate and well-chosen remarks, after which Woods and Smith, who run rival gambling-houses, outdid each other in the extravagant practice of “opening wine.” All of these are prominent citizens, and the event was memorable.
