The Westerners

by Stewart Edward White

THE BROAD WHITE ROAD

Copper Creek had begun as a half-way house, and had ended as a camp. Thus the hotel was its oldest structure.

Situated about half way between Rockerville and Custer, on the old Spring Creek trail, it often happened that the stage running from Rapid to the last-named town would stop for the evening meal, or even for the night, at the little log structure which Bill Martin had been sagacious enough to erect there. The soil was good for potatoes, which was lucky, for Bill Martin could never have prospered as a hotel keeper pure and simple; because purity, simplicity, and temperance principles have nothing to do with a Western inn. Bill cooked, made beds, and raised potatoes. Then a fortuitous "grub staker" discovered the Great Snake lode. A town sprang up in the night, so Bill Martin hired Black Jack and built additions. And finally, since his food was good and cheap, it came to be the proper thing to eat late dinners at two dollars a week in the long dining-room of Bill Martin's new building. After the Little Nugget, a later but more enterprising venture, Bill Martin's Prairie Dog, with its small office, its big eating room, its little square bedrooms above the office, and its ancient and musty copies of distant journals, was acknowledged to be the most important institution of the place.

From the narrow, roofless stoop its proprietor looked out tranquilly on the growth of the camp. He was a tall, cadaverous, facetious individual, slightly stooped, with thin impassive face, deep eyes, and a beard that seemed always just two days old. He spoke with a drawl that was at first natural, but later, as the quaint old fellow grew to appreciate its humorous qualities, it took on a faint color of affectation. He adopted always the paternal attitude, as was clearly his right.

Bill Martin was probably the only man who could have told you the history of Copper Creek, for he had been, through all of its changes of population, the one stable character. First came the original "grub staker" and a score more like him—impecunious, giving, many of them, their labor and experience, in exchange for tools and provisions furnished them by a speculator in the towns. The speculator took half of what was found. These men were hardy, bold, enduring, skilful. They grubbed about in the hills with the keen restless instinct of ants over a mould of earth, moving rapidly, pausing often, lighting finally, with an accuracy that to the outsider would have seemed something preternatural, on the one quartz vein of the many, or the one significant lead in the multitude of systems that seamed the country in all directions. Thereupon they staked out claims with white pine posts, and blasted little troughs to show milk-white quartz or red ore filling. And finally they disappeared, like bats before daylight, leaving not an echo of themselves to recall their presence to the hills in which they had toiled.

Their places were taken by the speculator, the miner with a little money, the small capitalist willing to invest and not unwilling to work with his own hands. These men paid a certain modest amount to the first discoverers for the chance to take chances on the embryo mines. The prospector never had the patience to wait, or scheme, or develop, to the justification of a better price. The excitement of the chase was his. He was a master who sketched, in bold comprehensive strokes, the design of a work which men patient in the little details must fill in with color and value. Having thus outlined the lifetimes of men, the prosperity of the whole great industry that was to be, he was content to move on to where a new and virgin country offered a fresh canvas to his creative genius. He was always poor, but he never pitied himself.

The new owner, then, represented the investor. He expected no immediate returns. He was willing to wait. Meanwhile he spent as much time in going over the fifty thousand square yards of his one claim as his predecessor had in examining the whole twenty-five hundred square miles of the district. He carefully analyzed the lead, its tendencies, its virtues, its defects. When he had fully satisfied his mind, he sank neat, square-timbered shafts, from fifty to two hundred feet in depth, from which ramified tunnels, both across and along the drift. The débris he piled outside, without attempting to save its value. In this manner, gradually, he came to possess points of view from which the next purchaser of the claim could plainly see its worth and possibilities.

For this second proprietor never expected to make his profit from the ore. That accrued later, and to another man. When the country became a little known, the other man would happen along; he, in his turn, would be willing to invest; and the present holder of the property, the middleman in this queerly constructed industry, could measure the success of his undertaking by the difference between the price he had paid to the original "grub staker" and the price he now received from the future developer. Meanwhile, he worked hard with his hands.

Thus the camp presented the phenomenon of a community prospering on nothing more tangible than hope. When the cabins began to crowd thicker and thicker between the walls of the little gulch, Bill Martin had been forced to give up agriculture because of lack of room; so that Copper Creek produced absolutely nothing, not even potatoes. Every cent of its present and actual value came from outside, either with the men themselves, or with some investor who brought in the price of wages for a contemplated improvement. Only as long as there existed in men's minds the comparative certainty of a future stamp mill, by which the quartz could be made to give up its treasure, would the machinery of life run well. Hope depended on confidence.

The miners built themselves cabins in which to live, and so there came into being a town. It was a dusty, new little town; but venerable in its age—old air from the first. The cabins themselves were low and dark, flanking the street closely, a sort of monotone of brown, by which the stable, the saloon, and the hotel were thrown into stronger relief; the one by virtue of its wide-open door, the other two because of their porch and painted front respectively. These structures held the eye. One noticed the cane chairs on the stoop; the bench outside the saloon; the dumped down saddles, the hay dust, the lazy loafers about the stable. And always one drew aside instinctively to the edge of the broad, white, dusty street, as if to let pass a horse race, or a train of cars, or something equally swift and irresistible.