The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

It was by mere accident that I drifted in the evening to Squaw’s Gulch, and fell in there with an old prospector who was working out the assessment on his claim, and who offered me food and shelter in his cabin and a certain share in the mine if I would help at the work.

When, finally, I left Cripple Creek, Créede was my next objective point. Down the mountain road in the direction of Cañon City I went, but I did not get so far as that on the first day’s march, for I was late in leaving Cripple Creek and darkness overtook me when some fifteen miles of the way yet remained. For some time I had been following an excellent road which wound through a charming valley in its easy descent to the plain. The valley narrowed presently, leaving but a few hundred yards between the steep sides of mountains, which hemmed it in. A stream was flowing swiftly along its rocky bed, and the evening winds were blowing with the sound of a low murmur among the pines as I pressed on in the darkness through the ankle-deep dust of the road.

It was not a light that first attracted me, but the black bulk of a cabin that seemed to rise suddenly from the ground on my right. Soon I saw that it was occupied, and, going near, I found a side door wide open, with lamplight streaming from it into the night. For a moment I stood unnoticed in the doorway, and could see at a glance the heavy wooden table and the chairs and the large, old-fashioned cooking-stove, and the prints tacked to the walls, and the cooking utensils hanging behind the stove, which made up the furniture. The floor was of well-planed boards, which had been scrubbed white, and the whole room partook of the atmosphere of cool, wholesome cleanliness, characteristic of the best New England kitchens. And the figure that stood ironing at the table in the centre of the room was in perfect keeping with her surroundings. A tall woman, evidently past fifty, of strong, muscular frame, and with a face of high intelligence, wearing in repose an expression of sweetness and of lady-like serenity, which gives to the wrinkled faces of some women so high-bred and distinctive a grace.

I knocked on the open door, and she looked up in no wise disturbed at sight of a stranger there. I explained my purpose and asked whether there was anything that I could do in payment of shelter and a breakfast. She drew out a chair from the wall and invited me to be seated, saying that we should consider that matter in the morning. For some time I sat talking with her, and while she ironed she conversed in an easy, natural manner, bred of the free life out here, which has in it all the charm of the directness and simplicity of a true woman of the world.

Presently she invited me to meet her husband, and, leading the way, she took me to an inner room, where, in a rocking-chair before a wood fire on a large, open hearth, sat a man of about her own age. He looked his character perfectly, for he was a hard-handed frontiersman of rugged, sinewy frame, with hair and beard unkempt, apparently, but you saw at once that he was faultlessly clean, as was the beautifully whitewashed room in which he sat, with its muslin ceiling sagging here and there. He did not rise to meet us, only turned a little in his chair and allowed his paper to rest on his knees as, for a moment, he fixed upon me his dark eyes full of the unfathomable mystery and sadness of life. I marked in him at once the same well-bred repose and self-possession which I had noticed in his wife.

We talked at first of indifferent matters until I, keen with interest in the shelves of books which I saw about the walls, and other shelves on which fragments of many kinds of rock were lying in order and all labelled, ventured an inquiry as to whether he was interested in geology.

With shame do I confess that there was in my witless head at the moment a patronizing, supercilious curiosity at the fact that the rough old backwoodsman who sat before me in his shirt-sleeves should have surrounded himself with objects about which he could know so little. I got it full between the eyes.

“Yes,” he said quietly, in answer to my inquiry, “I have been a good deal interested in the science for the last twenty-five years, for my ranch turned out to be remarkably rich in paleontological remains and in geological material, particularly of the cretaceous period.”

And then with natural straightforward ease he began to go into details, describing to me his first chance discoveries on the ranch when, soon after the civil war, he had moved out from New England and pre-empted a homestead here. It was a fascinating narrative most modestly told, of one discovery leading to another, of interest awakened in an unknown field, of a book secured here and there, of a widening intellectual horizon, and of an awakening to undreamed-of worlds of infinite interest and wonder, of communication with men of science, of personal acquaintance with some of them, and finally of a recent visit to a great Eastern university where the best of his specimens are all mounted in the Geological Museum. Now and then he would reach down a fragment of rock bearing the impress of some paleontologic form and would illustrate in concrete detail. In a single sentence he would be far beyond my shallow depth of meagre, book-learned science, but he generously paid me the compliment of taking for granted that I knew, and he could hardly have had a more interested listener.

In the morning he was driving to Cañon City and he invited me to go with him. On the way he talked of science, geology this time, and he amply illustrated what he said by means of the vast exposed strata which rose tier on tier in the sheer sides of the cañon through which we drove to the plain.