The Boys of Crawford's Basin / The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado

by Sidford F. Hamp

One of the advantages to us of the frosty weather was that the mail coach between San Remo and Sulphide came our way instead of taking the hill-road, so that during the winter months we received our mail daily, whereas, through the greater part of the year, while the “forty rods” were “bottomless,” we had to go ourselves to San Remo to get it. The coach, going up, passed our place about ten in the morning, and by it my father sent the promised letter.

We quite expected that Tom would come flying down at once, but instead we received from him next morning a reply, stating that he could not leave his work, and asking my father to allow us boys to do a little prospecting for him—which, I may say, we boys were ready enough to do if my father did not object.

He did not object; being, indeed, very willing that we should put in a day’s work for the benefit of our friend. For, as he said, to undertake one day’s prospecting for a friend was a very different matter from taking to prospecting as a business.

It is a fascinating pursuit; men who contract the prospecting disease seldom get the fever entirely out of their systems again, and it was for this reason my father was so set against it, considering that no greater misfortune could befall two farmer-boys like ourselves than to be drawn into such a way of life. Now that we were seventeen years old, however, and might be supposed to have some discretion, he had little fear for Joe and me, knowing, as he did, that we shared his sentiments. We had seen enough of the life of the prospector to understand that a more precarious way of making a living could hardly be invented.

How many men get rich at it? I have heard it estimated at one man in five thousand; and whether this estimate—or, rather, this guess—is right or wrong, it shows the trend of opinion.

Suppose a prospector does strike a vein of ore: what is the common result? By the time he has sunk a shaft ten feet deep he must have a windlass and a man to work it, and being in most cases too poor to hire a miner, his only way of getting help is to take in a partner. The two go on sinking, until presently the hole is too deep to use a windlass any more—a horse-whim is needed and then a hoisting engine. But it is seldom that the ore dug out of a shaft will pay the expense of sinking it—for powder and drills, ropes, buckets and timbers, are expensive things—much less enable the owner to lay by anything, and the probability is that to buy a hoisting engine he must sell another portion of his claim. And so it goes, until, by the time his claim has been turned into a mine—for, as the common and very true saying is, “Mines are made, not found”—his share of it will probably have been reduced to one-quarter or less; while it is quite within the limits of probability that, becoming wearied by long waiting for the slow development of his prospect, he will have sold out for what he can get and gone back to his old life.

But though I do not advocate the business of prospecting as a way of making a living—I had rather pitch hay or dig potatoes myself—I am far from wishing to disparage the prospector himself or to belittle the results of his work. He is the pioneer of civilization; and personally he is generally a fine fellow. At the same time, as in every other profession, the ranks of the prospectors include their share of the riff-raff. It was so in our district, and we were destined shortly to come in contact with one of them.

Tom Connor in his letter instructed us as to what he wished us to do: it was very simple. He asked us to walk up the little cañon along which our stream flowed, when it did flow, and to examine the bed of each of its feeders as we came to them, to determine, if possible, which of the branch streams it was that brought down the powdered lead-ore. He also suggested that we get out some more of the black sand from the bottom of the pool for him to see, and at the same time ascertain, if we could, how much of a deposit there was there.

The last request we performed first. Taking down to the pool a long, pointed iron rod, we lowered it into the water, marking the depth by tying a bit of string round the rod at high-water-mark, and then bored a hole down through the frozen sand until we struck bed-rock. By this means we discovered that the deposit was five inches thick at the upper end of the pool. A few feet further from the waterfall, however, the deposit was thicker, but we noticed at the same time that the ground ice which came up carried with it more or less yellow sand. The further we retreated from the waterfall, too, the larger became the proportion of yellow sand, until towards the edge of the pool it had taken the place of the black sand altogether.