The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

They urged me to stay longer on Friday morning, but the day was perfectly clear and patches of dry ground had begun to appear through the snow, and so I set out early, hoping to cover before night most of the distance to the entrance of Musa Pass, which leads from Green Mountain Valley over the Sangre De Cristo Range to the San Luis country.

I accomplished it comfortably, and early on the next morning made my way into the pass. The snow lay deep about the entrance, and it deepened as I climbed the range, but a party of prospectors had just come over the trail as I started in, and it was a simple matter to walk in the path which their burros had made through the snow. The prospectors did me another unconscious service, for when I met them two of the five men were suffering keenly from snow blindness, and, taking warning, I tore a strip from a coarse cotton handkerchief and bound it around my eyes, in a way that interfered very little with vision and yet acted as an adequate protection from the blinding glare of the sunlight on the snow.

That night I reached a Mormon’s ranch well in the San Luis Valley. It was a matter of easy marching after that, for the snow was all gone in a day or two and I had only to walk by way of Alamosa and Monte Vista and Del Norte to the Wagon Wheel Gap region and so up to Créede.

I was much disappointed there in not finding work in the mines. Numbers of them were in operation, and there were large gangs of men employed, but there were plenty of experienced hands about, and nothing whatever in the mines for a raw tenderfoot to do. Still I had no difficulty, for at the very first asking I got work with a gang which was cutting a new road down Bachelor Mountain from the New York Chance Mine to Créede. And so, while not a member of a mining crew, I was a member of one which contained many miners, and I lived in the camp on Bachelor Mountain with scores of the men from the New York Chance and the Amethyst Mines. I fell in eventually with a group of truest Bohemians, a mine superintendent of the best type, and a magnificent chap who was an engineer and surveyor and whom I liked best of all, and a young Harvard-bred barrister who was on the high road to being the District Attorney, and a newspaper editor. I cannot now recall how I came to be one of their number, it was done so quickly and naturally; but I was suddenly aware that I had been accepted as such, and all that belonged to my new-found friends was mine, and the engineer and barrister and I were sleeping three in a bed.

My pen rebels against the necessity which spurs it to so swift a pace over details where it longs to linger. For those were hard but glorious days on the mountain; there were always new and strange men to be known among the crews, men whose emancipation from conventionality was complete, and whose personalities possessed a marvellous richness. The railway and statutory laws and honest women and the ten commandments were there, so that the camp “enjoyed the blessings of civilization,” and was widely different from the camps of earlier days—much to the regret of the older men who knew the earlier days and many of the younger ones who would have liked to know them.

Already there were apparent the phases of human nature which seem by a curious contradiction to reveal themselves under the very protection of the vast improvement wrought by the reign of “law and order.” But the freer, braver elements of human nature were present, too, and were not always beneath the surface of convention. How it stirred one’s better blood to see those free, strong, natural men face one another in the common intercourse of life and meet the exigencies of their work! And under what spells have I sat looking in the eye some tawny-bearded giant of a prospector as he told of thirty years or more among the mountains and in the mining camps, of hardships endured and difficulties overcome and death and danger faced, and of the rare times when he “struck it rich,” and then the lordly, vicious days when he “blew it in!” How much may have been concocted for the ready ear of a tenderfoot I did not know; I only knew that it reeked with the red, raw blood of life, and whether true or false it thrust roots deep into grim and stanch realities.

Hamilton will answer as the name of the engineer. It was in his office that the little coterie which I have mentioned would gather in the evenings. There were rough chairs of most comfortable shape, and there was always a roaring fire in the stove, for the nights were bitter cold, and a number of Hamilton’s drawings in crayons and blue prints were tacked upon the walls, for besides being a skilful engineer he was a splendid draughtsman. His surveying instruments stood together in a corner, and the ample tables were covered with unfinished drawings and with the tools of his art.

Never was more diverting talk than that which ranged around the room where we sat in easy attitudes, with feet cocked up and chairs tilted, in the soft light of Hamilton’s well-shaded lamps and in a deepening density of tobacco-smoke. And the talk was catholic in its range, for the editor was an authority on local and state and national politics, and, as a recent convert to “free silver,” he could argue its cause with all the fervor of a novice. The barrister was a man of liberal education who had taught the classics and loved them, and who could, with real enthusiasm, lead the talk back from all things modern to

“—those old days which poets say were golden.”

And the mine superintendent, for all his shrewd and efficient practicality—for he was counted the best superintendent in the camp who, in the face of the declining price of silver and of other difficulties as great, had accomplished marvels with his mine—was profoundly interested in Biblical criticism; he could speak with the knowledge of a theologian on the authorship of the Pentateuch and the question of the inerrancy of Scripture and the authenticity and genuineness of the synoptic Gospels.