The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

VALUABLE REAL ESTATE

I met several of these prominent citizens while in Creede, and found them affable. Billy Woods fights, or used to fight, at two hundred and ten pounds, and rejoices in the fact that a New York paper once devoted five columns to his personality. His reputation saves him the expense of paying men to keep order. Bob Ford, who shot Jesse James, was another prominent citizen of my acquaintance. He does not look like a desperado, but has a loutish apologetic air, which is explained by the fact that he shot Jesse James in the back, when the latter was engaged in the innocent work of hanging a picture on the wall. Ford never quite recovered from the fright he received when he found out who it was that he had killed. “Bat” Masterden was of an entirely different class. He dealt for Watrous, and has killed twenty-eight men, once three together. One night when he was off duty I saw a drunken man slap his face, and the silence was so great that we could hear the electric light sputter in the next room; but Masterden only laughed, and told the man to come back and do it again when he was sober. “Troublesome Tom” Cady acted as a capper for “Soapy” Smith, and played the shell game during the day. He was very grateful to me for teaching him a much superior method in which the game is played in the effete East. His master, “Soapy” Smith, was a very bad man indeed, and hired at least twelve men to lead the prospector with a little money, or the tenderfoot who had just arrived, up to the numerous tables in his gambling-saloon, where they were robbed in various ways so openly that they deserved to lose all that was taken from them.

There were also some very good shots at Creede, and some very bad ones. Of these latter was Mr. James Powers, who emptied his revolver and Rab Brothers’ store at the same time without doing any damage. He explained that he was crowded and wanted more room. The most delicate shooting was done by the Louisiana Kid—I don’t know what his other name was—who was robbed in Soapy Smith’s saloon, and was put out when he expostulated. He waited patiently until one of Smith’s men named Farnham, appeared, and then, being more intent in showing his skill than on killing Farnham, shot the thumb off his right hand as it rested on the trigger. Farnham shifted his pistol to his left hand, with which he shot equally well, but before he could fire the Kid shot the thumb off that hand too.

This is, of course, Creede at night. It is not at all a dangerous place, and the lawlessness is scattered and mild. There was only one street, and as no one cared to sit on the edge of a bunk in a cold room at night, the gambling-houses were crowded in consequence every evening. It was simply because there was nowhere else to go. The majority of the citizens used them as clubs, and walked from one to the other talking claims and corner lots, and dived down into their pockets for specimens of ore which they passed around for examination. Others went there to keep warm, and still others to sleep in the corner until they were put out. The play was never high. There was so much of it, though, that it looked very bad and wicked and rough, but it was quite harmless. There were no sudden oaths, nor parting of the crowd, and pistol-shots or gleaming knives—or, at least, but seldom. The women who frequented these places at night, in spite of their sombreros and flannel shirts and belts, were a most unpicturesque and unattractive element. They were neither dashing and bold, nor remorseful and repentant.

UPPER CREEDE

They gambled foolishly, and laughed when they won, and told the dealer he cheated when they lost. The men occasionally gave glimpses of the life which Bret Harte made dramatic and picturesque—the women, never. The most uncharacteristic thing of the place, and one which was Bret Hartish in every detail, was the service held in Watrous and Bannigan’s gambling-saloon. The hall is a very long one with a saloon facing the street, and keno tables, and a dozen other games in the gambling-room beyond. When the doors between the two rooms are held back they make a very large hall. A clergyman asked Watrous if he could have the use of the gambling-hall on Sunday night. The house was making about three hundred dollars an hour, and Watrous calculated that half an hour would be as much as he could afford towards the collection. He mounted a chair and said, “Boys, this gentleman wants to make a few remarks to you of a religious nature. All the games at that end of the hall will stop, and you want to keep still.”

The clergyman stood on the platform of the keno outfit, and the greater part of the men took the seats around it, toying with the marking cards scattered over the table in front of them, while the men in the saloon crowded the doorway from the swinging doors to the bar, and looked on with curious and amused faces. At the back of the room the roulette wheel clicked and the ball rolled. The men in this part of the room who were playing lowered their voices, but above the voice of the preacher one could hear the clinking of the silver and the chips, and the voice of the boy at the wheel calling, “seventeen and black, and twenty-eight and black again and—keep the ball rolling, gentlemen—and four and red.” There are two electric lights in the middle of the hall and a stove; the men were crowded closely around this stove, and the lamps shone through the smoke on their tanned upturned faces and on the white excited face of the preacher above them. There was the most excellent order, and the collection was very large. I asked Watrous how much he lost by the interruption.

“Nothing,” he said, quickly, anxious to avoid the appearance of good; “I got it all back at the bar.”

Of the inner life of Creede I saw nothing; I mean the real business of the place—the speculation in real estate and in mines. Capitalists came every day, and were carried off up the mountains to look at a hole in the ground, and down again to see the assay tests of the ore taken from it. Prospectors scoured the sides of the mountains from sundawn to sunset, and at night their fires lit up the range, and their little heaps of stone and their single stick, with their name scrawled on it in pencil, made the mountains look like great burying-grounds. All of the land within two miles of Creede was claimed by these simple proofs of ownership—simple, yet as effectual as a parchment sealed and signed. When the snow has left the mountains, and these claims can be worked, it will be time enough to write the real history of the rise or fall of Creede.