The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

But I liked most of all to hear Hamilton as he would sit left ankle crossing his right knee, his right foot tip-toe on the floor balancing his tilted chair, and his guitar resting on his lap. Over the strings his great strong fingers would pass, striking soft harmonies, and his handsome, manly face would respond to the free play of emotion as in his rich voice and with unconscious vividness of camp speech he would talk of life and of its revelations to him throughout his varied history.

“I have had every experience but that of death,” he said very quietly to me one day, when we had come to know each other well. As I watched him and saw his innate, thoughtful courtesy to women, and his strong, tender-hearted love of little children, and the frankness of his life, and his useful efficiency as a man, and his devotion to the truth, and his utter hatred of all cowardice and hypocrisy, I began to understand what royal possibilities there are in the men who prove best fitted to survive in the struggle of the frontier.

It was Hamilton who introduced me to Price. Price shall stand for the name of a prospector of a sort that is becoming rare at the West. The son of an officer in an Irish regiment, he was brought to America in his early boyhood and was reared on the Pacific coast. But the strictures of high civilization were too much for him, and long before he was out of his teens he was living the rough, fortuitous life of the mining camps and cattle tracts of the Southwest. Price is about forty now, and his range of occupation includes almost everything from a “burro puncher” to a member of the Legislature of Arizona. He seems to know, moreover, every trail in the two Territories and every soul along them, to the very Indians and “greasers” of the youngest generation, and he is just the sort who is looked upon out here as likely at any time “to strike it rich.” So far, however, he has not struck it rich; very much the reverse. In the spring he punched his burros up from Phœnix to the Wagon Wheel Gap region and prospected there all summer, but with no luck. When Hamilton introduced me to him, his burros were in hock and so were his blankets and his very cooking utensils and even his “gun,” and he was longing for the means to redeem them that he might get out of the bitter cold of the mountains and down into the balmy Indian summer of the Salt River Valley which was “God’s country” to him.

No more ideal opportunity could have presented itself to me. It was late in November and the problem of going alone westward through the thinly settled country was a difficult one, and here, as by miracle, was its perfect solution. Moreover, as it proved, Price was a good fellow with a truly Irish sense of humor and a perfect adaptability born of long habit. And withal he was patient with my inexperience. He taught me the “diamond hitch,” and how to make a fire from next to nothing, and tea out of water that was thick and green on the surface, how to cook “spuds” and fry bacon and make gravy and bake bread in a saucepan. He tried to make a burro puncher of me, but his patience gave out there, and he declared that I’d “never be worth my salt at that until I learned to swear.” Then suiting the action to the word he would take a hand himself at this point, and fairly dancing in a frenzy of rage, would rip the air with uncouth, fluent curses, and the stubborn beasts would meekly take the ford or cease their aimless wandering and quicken their pace along the trail.

I had been working for two dollars and a half a day, the highest wages I had ever received; I soon got Price’s animals and gun and camping outfit from the pawn-shop, and, on the morning of November 20th, we set out together to cross some five or six hundred miles of the frontier from Créede to central Arizona.

Ours was rather a typical prospecting outfit, I thought, for Price had an old, gaunt Indian pony which he rode, and our blankets and cooking utensils and provisions were made fast to packing saddles on the backs of two burros, one of which was called California and the other, Beecher. I was free to ride, when I chose, another burro, an uncommonly big one, which Price called Sacramento; but I generally preferred to walk, for the pace was slow, and, besides the three which I have named, there were two little burros, California’s foals, and punching five, I soon found, was best accomplished on foot.

We camped that night far up among the head waters of the Rio Grande, and next day with much difficulty we began the toilsome journey of the Winnemonche Pass. It was hard work crossing the “divide.” For many miles the trail lay through nearly three feet of snow. There was no driving the animals ahead; we were obliged to take turns in breaking a way ourselves, and then leading the animals through. Very soon we were drenched with sweat and with the snow that melted in the heat of our bodies, and all the while we were assailed by mountain winds which seemed to cut to the marrow in one’s bones. But we always found a sheltered place in which to camp, where wood and water were plenty, and where after a good supper, we slept gloriously, huddled close together on our bed of canvas and gunny sacks, our blankets drawn up snugly over our heads.

With what a sense of keen relief did we begin the descent and pass swiftly into warmer regions, where the snow became thinner and gradually disappeared, and the sun warmed us with mild rays, and we came upon a settler’s cabin here and there and had speech once more with our fellow-men!

Price had promised me Indian summer when once we should get so far on our way as Durango, and most amply was his promise fulfilled, for we passed through the town on a day when the sun shone from clear, cloudless blue, and the horizon was a sierra in sharp lines, and the twigs of distant trees stood clean-cut against the sky, and the withering, dusty earth reflected the glory of the sun, and the cool, buoyant air seemed almost vocal of a solemn ecstasy.

We camped that night in a wilderness region to the south of Durango, where we could see the smoke rising from encampments of Ute Indians, many of whom we met on the next day’s march with droves of fine Indian ponies, which they were raising for the market. Our course was southward now across the San Juan River and through a section of the Navajo reservation in northern New Mexico.