is prettily placed among the cottonwoods. These give a name to the
stream not only, but to the expansion of the valley, which is known as
Cottonwood park. The supply point not only for the Chalk Creek mines on
Mt. Princeton, but for the remoter settlements on the other side of the
range, Buena Vista seems to have a good chance for long life. One sees
here the big, trailed wagons in all their glory, and the voice of the
burro is heard in the land, complaining of his burdens and bewailing the
lost friskiness of his unfettered youth.
Below Granite we pass through almost a cañon. The inclined and
splintered rocks of reddish granite and gneiss rise very high at certain
points on the eastern bank of the river, and the water itself is in
continual ebullition among large bowlders, falling meanwhile at such a
grade that the track cannot follow it, but must needs rise away above
it. The scene here is one of extreme desolation. There is nothing
_pretty_ in the whole landscape short of the small snow-banks that
remind us of scattered sheep browsing on the crest of the range. Almost
the only relief to the sterility--sterile not only in respect to
pleasing vegetation, but in any comfortable suggestiveness--is when the
sun shines suddenly straight down some rift-like gulch in the
precipitous walls, transmuting what seemed a crystal-clear atmosphere
into a golden dust finer than any flakes that ever came out of the
gravels.
Now we are rapidly approaching Granite, a town twenty-five years old;
and presently we catch sight of the great gold placers that formerly
made the fame of this locality. They are still operated in a quiet,
scientific method, and one large flume crosses the track at a height of
fully fifty feet. The western bank has been ploughed up by water and
turned topsy-turvy over a long area, exposing its innermost pebbles and
bowlders, all well cleaned and white by their second scrubbing.[A]
[A] If the reader cares to know more about the lively times that used
to occur now and then in Granite, years ago, he can find some
incidents in my "Knocking 'Round the Rockies" (New York, Harper &
Brothers, 1882), on page 70 and following.
Three miles west of Granite lie the charming "Twin Lakes," but we are
frustrated in our attempt to reach them on the only day we wished to
spare for that purpose.
During all the summer, carriages from the lake meet passenger trains at
Twin Lakes station, four miles above Granite, in order to carry visitors
to this lake.
[Illustration: THE SHAFT HOUSE.]
"Of all the health and pleasure resorts of the upper Arkansas Valley," I
have read, "the Twin Lakes are perhaps the most noted. Water is nowhere
too plentiful in Colorado, the largest rivers being usually narrow and
rapid streams, that seldom form an important feature in the extended
landscapes, and these lakes are all the more prized for constituting an
exception. They are fourteen miles south of Leadville. The larger of the
two lakes is two and one-half miles in length by one and one-half in
width, and the other about half that size. The greatest depth is
seventy-five feet. These lakes possess peculiar merits as a place of
resort. Lying at an altitude of 9,357 feet,--over one and three-fourths
miles,--at the mouth of a cañon, in a little nook, surrounded by lofty
mountains, from whose never-failing snows their waters are fed, their
seclusion invites the tired denizens of dusty cities to fly from
debilitating heat and the turmoil of traffic, to a quiet haven where
Jack Frost makes himself at home in July and August. On the lakes are
numerous sail and row boats, and fishing tackle can always be obtained.
Both lakes are well stocked with fish, and the neighboring streams also
abound in mountain trout. Surrounding the lakes are large forests of
pine, that add their characteristic odor to the air. The nearest
mountains, whose forms are reflected in the placid waters, are Mount
Elbert, 14,351 feet in height, La Plata, 14,311,--each higher than
Pike's Peak,--Lake Mountain, and the Twin Peaks. Right royal neighbors
are these. And across the narrow Arkansas valley rises Mount Sheridan,
far above timber-line, flanked by the hoary summits of the Park range.
The hotel and boarding-house accommodations are good, and will be
rapidly extended. During the summer months there is an almost constant
round of church and society picnics and private pleasure parties coming
down to the lakes from Leadville, so that nearly every day brings a
fresh influx of visitors, enlivening the resort, and dispelling all
tendency to monotony.
"Twin Lakes is the highest of all the popular Rocky Mountain resorts,
and furnishes an unfailing antidote for hot weather. Even in midsummer
flannels are necessary articles of apparel, and thick woolen blankets
are indispensable at night."
[Illustration: BOTTOM OF THE SHAFT.]
There are mines in the mountains back of Twin Lakes, and gradually a
permanent settlement is growing up there, which is reached all the year
round by stage from Leadville. This stage passes over Hunter's pass, and
carries the mail to some important camps on the other side of the
range,--Independence, Highland, et cetera. The main point of interest, I
hear, is at Independence, which is said to be much such a camp as
Kokomo, and standing at a greater altitude than even Leadville. The
veins are true fissures filled with quartz containing free gold, iron
and copper pyrites. The Farwell Mining company are the chief operators,
and have recently erected what has been pronounced the finest
stamp-mill in Colorado. It consists of thirty stamps, and cost $2.87-1/2
cents a hundred pounds for carriage from the railway to its site. This
feat required the building and repair of roads to an extent that has
been of immense benefit to the public. Besides this mill there is an old
one of twenty stamps, and additions are to be made. A few miles further
on, is the flourishing camp of Aspen, standing in a beautiful valley
7,500 feet above the sea. This is the locality of the Smuggler mine
owned by Mackay and other Eastern capitalists. It is described as "a
large lead of fine-grained galena, carrying native silver in wire form."
Aspen is a good type of the "magic" town, where lots increase a thousand
per cent. in value in six months.
[Illustration: ATHWART AN INCLINE.]
This brings us to Malta, a station in the midst of a wide waste of
denuded gravel, where we turn up California gulch to Leadville, bidding
good-bye, for a little, to the white crests of the Saguache
range,--Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Antlers and others that have been our
constant companions. Turn where we will in this region, we can not long
escape the sight of snow-smothered peaks. It is impossible to get away
from them. This river-valley is a great basin surrounded on all sides by
mountains that hasten to bid winter welcome before summer has thought of
saying farewell to the valleys. As in that wonderful story, wherein we
are constantly reminded that "the villain still pursued her," so here
the mountains unceasingly confront us, and every changing mood can be
studied by our eager eyes.
Malta seems to be a great place for charcoal, many groups of the white
conical ovens being visible on the blackened and denuded side-hills.
Charcoal is an extremely important element in smelting operations, and
enormous quantities are made, to the destruction of all the forests, so
that the burners have to go farther and farther with their ovens, or
else, as most of them are doing, have wood brought from increasing
distances. A favorite method is to build a flume and float the timber,
in short pieces, down from the higher woods; or else, simply to make a
trough, laying it partly on the ground and partly on trestles, so as to
secure proper levelness. It is great fun to watch them shuteing wood or
ties (for the "tie-punchers" adopt the same expedient) down the slope of
the high, steep hills. Little choice is made in the kind of wood burned.
The effect of these charcoal makers is very plain as we climb up the
devious track through the hills of California gulch to Leadville.
[Illustration: THE JIG DRILL.]
The trees were cut which once stood dense over the whole of the gulch,
and then every vestige of brushwood, grass,--everything was burned away,
so that the ash-strewn soil and the charred stumps alone remain of the
former verdancy. Into this oddly desolate tract the town has pushed
itself without altering it much for the better. The outer suburbs of a
town are seldom pleasing, and Leadville is no exception. The burned
stumps, thick as the original forest, give a general black aspect to the
whole scene. Fences are few, and amount to the merest pretense of
enclosures, more than an unbarked pole or two, strung along the
boundary, being rare. The streets are mere spaces, for there is no
difference at all between the outside and the inside of the fence. The
public highway finds itself as best it can among the stumps, and the
householder rarely bothers himself to pull one out of his front yard.
This is not mere rough neglect, and, in the center of town, of course
does not exist. It shows that the citizens, as a rule, do not care to
make fine their surroundings, because they have not come to stay. They
are a generation of pilgrims, even though, under endless protest, they
may linger, or be held here, all their lives, and be buried in the stony
little graveyard, under the yellow fumes of the smelters down the creek,
at the last. Inside, though, the houses glow with pretty things and
abound in luxuries. Here, men combat the outward roughness and resolve
that they will be comfortable in compensation for the inclemency
outside.
And so we come to Leadville, the "Camp of the Carbonates."
XXI
THE CAMP OF THE CARBONATES.
Moored in the rifted rock,
Proof to the tempest's shock,
Firmer he roots him the ruder it blow.
--SCOTT.
"If the men who sprang from the stones Deucalion cast behind him set
themselves to make homes, the result must have been a close counterpart
of Leadville, Colorado." Such was the phrase with which the present
writer began an article upon the "Camp of the Carbonates," printed in
_Scribner's Monthly_ for October, 1879. Though the Leadville of to-day
has graduated from the over-grown mining camp it then was, into a
pretentious city of twenty thousand people, and boasts all the
"improvements," yet the interest connected with the town, for the world
at large, is chiefly historical.
Historical! Why, Leadville is only seven years' old now; but the years
have been eventful, and history is made fast in this state.
The site of Leadville has a pre-historic interest also,--almost
mythological in fact, for have not five and twenty years crept by since
then. This is the well verified tradition:
"After the rush to Pike's Peak, in 1859, which was disappointing enough
to the majority of prospectors, a number of men pushed westward. One
party made their way through Ute pass into the grand meadows of South
Park, and crossing, pressed on to the Arkansas valley, up which they
proceeded, searching unsuccessfully for gold, until they reached a wide
plateau on the right bank, where a beautiful little stream came down.
Following this nearly to its source, along what they called California
gulch, they were delighted to find placers of gold. This was in the
midsummer of 1860; and before the close of the hot weather, ten thousand
people had emigrated to the Arkansas, and $2,500,000 had been washed
out, one of the original explorers taking twenty-nine pounds of gold
away with him in the fall, besides selling for $500 a 'worked out' claim
from which $15,000 was taken within the next three months. Now this same
'exhausted' gravel is being washed a third or fourth time with profit.
"The settlement consisted of one long street only, and houses, even of
logs, were so few that the camp was known as 'Boughtown,' everybody
abandoning the wickyups in winter, when the placers could not be
worked, and retreating to Denver. During the summer, however, Boughtown
witnessed some lively scenes. One day a stranger came riding up the
street on a gallop, splashing mud everywhere, only to be unceremoniously
halted by a rough looking customer who covered him with a revolver and
said:
"'Hold on there, stranger! When ye go through this yere town, go slow so
folks can take a look at ye!'
"No money circulated there; gold-dust served all the purposes of trade,
and every merchant, saloon-keeper and gambler had his scales. The phrase
was not 'Cash up,' but 'Down with your Dust,' and when a man's buck-skin
wallet was empty, he knew where to fill it again. It was not long,
however, before the placers were all staked off, and the claims began to
be exhausted. Then the town so dwindled that, in half a dozen years,
only a score were left of the turbulent multitude, who, in '60 and '61,
made the gulch noisy with magical gains and unheeded loss. Among the
last of their acts was to pull down the old log gambling hall, and to
pan two thousand dollars out of the dirt where the gamblers had dropped
the coveted gains. This done everybody moved elsewhere, and the
frightened game returned to thread the aspen groves and drink at the
once more translucent streams of California gulch, where eight millions
of dollars had been sifted from the pebbles.
"One striking feature of this old placer-bar had impressed itself
unpleasantly upon all the gold-seekers. In the bottoms of their pans and
rockers, at each washing there accumulated a black sand so heavy that it
interfered with the proper settling of the gold, and so abundant that it
clogged the riffles. Who first determined this obnoxious black sand to
be carbonate of lead is uncertain. It is said that it was assayed in
1866, but not found valuable enough to pay transportation to Denver,
then the nearest point at which it could be smelted. One of the most
productive mines now operated is said to have been discovered in '67,
and in this way: Mr. Long, at that time the most poverty-stricken of
prospectors, went out to shoot his breakfast, and brought down a deer;
in its dying struggles the animal kicked up earth which appeared so
promising that Long and his partner Derry located a claim on the spot.
The Camp Bird, Rock Lode, La Plata and others were opened simultaneously
outside the placers, but all these were worked for gold, and though even
then it seemed to have been understood in a vague way that the lead ores
were impregnated with silver, nobody profited by the information. Thus
years passed, and I and many another campaigner in that grand solitude,
riding over those verdant slopes, passing beneath those somber pine
woods, camped, hunted, even mined at what now is Leadville, and never
suspected the wealth we trampled upon.
[Illustration: FREMONT PASS]
"Among the few men who happened to be in the region in 1877, was A. B.
Wood, a shrewd, practical man, who, finding a large quantity of the
heavy black sand, tested it anew and extracted a large proportion of
silver. He confided in Mr. William H. Stevens, and they together began
searching for the source of this sand-drift, and decided it must be
between the limestone outcropping down the gulch and the porphyry which
composed the summit of the mountain. Sinking trial shafts they sought
the silver mean. It took time and money, and the few placer-washers
there laughed at them for a pair of fools; but the men said nothing, and
in the course of a few weeks they 'struck it.' Then came a period of
excitement and particularly lively times for the originators of the
enterprise. Mr. Stevens was a citizen of Detroit, and finding a chance
for abundant results from labor, but no laborers wherewith to 'make the
riffle,' he went back to Detroit and persuaded several scores of
adventurous men to come out here and amuse themselves with carbonates.
"They came, hilariously, no doubt, with high anticipations of sudden
wealth and the fulfilling of wide ambitions; came to find the snow deep
upon the ground, and winter bravely entrenched among the gray cliffs of
Mosquito and the Saguache. No one could work; everyone was tantalized
and miserable; discontent reigned. It was the old story of Baker and the
San Juan silver fields. They took Wood and Stevens, imprisoned them in a
cabin, and even went so far toward the suggestion of hanging as to noose
the rope around their necks. At this critical moment, reprieve came in
the shape of a capitalist who appeased the hungry crowd with cash and
stayed their purpose until the weather moderated and digging could be
begun.
"As spring advanced and the mountains became passable, there began a
rush into the camp, for the report of this wonderful rejuvenation of the
old district had spread far and wide. The Denver newspapers took up the
laudation of the region. The railways approaching nearest, advertised
the camp all over the East for the sake of patronage; and many an
energetic prospector, and greedy saloon-keeper, and many a business man
who wanted to profit by the excitement, started for Leadville. It was
early spring; the snow lay deep on the lofty main range of the Rocky
mountains which had to be crossed, and filled the treacherous passes,
but the impatient emigrants could not wait. To be first into Leadville
was the aim and ambition of hundreds of excited men, and to accomplish
this, human life was endangered and mule flesh recklessly sacrificed.
Companies were organized, who put on six-horse stages from Denver, Cañon
City and Colorado Springs, and ran three or four coaches together, yet
private conveyances took even more than the stages, and hundreds walked,
braving the midwinter horrors of Mosquito pass.
"Meanwhile an almost continuous procession of mule and ox trains were
striving to haul across that frightful hundred miles of mountains the
food, machinery and furniture which the new settlement so sorely needed,
and which it seemed so impossible to supply. Ten cents and more a pound
was charged for freight, and prices ranged correspondingly high, with
an exorbitant profit added. Hay, for example, reached $200 per ton.
"Nor were all who came rough or even hardy characters. There were among
them men of wealth and brains, young graduates of colleges eager for a
business opening, engineers and surveyors, lawyers, doctors, and a
thousand soft-handed triflers who hoped to make a living in some
undefined way out of the general excitement. Many of these gentlemen
went to stay and took their wives, or, more usually, waited until they
had prepared some sort of a home, and then sent for them. What stories
some of these ladies tell of their stage-journey through those wintry
mountains! How many wagons, heavily loaded with freight, did they see
overturned by the roadside! How many dead mules and horses did they
count! How many snow-banks did they fall through! how many precipices
escape! how many upsettings avoid by the merest margin of consummate
good driving! I knew of three ladies who for twenty-four hours were
packed in a stage with a lot of drunken men, who could only be kept
within the bounds of decorum and safety by being sung to sleep. The
driver was utterly powerless to control them, and had as much as he
could do to steer his six horses over that icy road. The crazy men said,
'Sing to us, we like it, and if you don't we'll dump you into the snow!'
and sing they did, all night long. Whether this incident be considered
laughable or pathetic, it is literally true. In the summer the stage
passenger was not frozen, but was choked to slow death by impenetrable
clouds of dust, and in the seasons between he was engulfed in mud.
Verily that hundred miles of staging at fifteen cents a mile, with only
thirty pounds of baggage allowed free, was the Purgatory of Leadville,
and helped wonderfully to make one contented with his reception.
"With the beginning of 1879, the steady current that had flagged
somewhat during the tempestuous last months of 1878, burst into a
perfect freshet of travel. Log huts, board shanties, canvas tents,
kennels dug into the side hill and roofed with earth and pine boughs,
were filled to repletion with men and women, and still proved
insufficient to shield the eager immigrants from the arctic air and
pitiless storms of this plateau in the high Sierras. Men were glad to
pay for the privilege of spreading their overcoats or blankets on the
floor of a saloon and sleeping in stale smoke and the fumes of bad
whisky--an atmosphere where the sooty oil lamps burned with a weak and
yellow flame. Perhaps the dice rattled on till morning above the
sleepers' heads, the monotonous call-song of the dealers lulling them to
an unquiet doze in the murky air, only to be awakened by the loud
profanity of some brawler or sent cowering under the blankets to escape
the too free pistol-balls that fly across the billiard table. Even the
sawdust floors of these reeking bar-rooms were not spacious enough to
hold the two hundred persons a day who rushed into Leadville, and every
dry-goods box upon the curbstone, every pile of hay-bales in the alley,
became a bedroom for some belated traveler.
[Illustration: CASCADES OF THE BLUE]
"But the era of saloon-floors and empty barrels did not last long.
Enterprising men built huge hotels, and opened restaurants and great
lodging-tents and barracks; strangers joined in twos and threes, cut
logs and planted cabins as thick as corn.... Every day chronicled some
new accession of wealth, some additional tapping of the silver deposits
which were firmly believed to underlie every square foot of the region.
It seemed all a matter of luck, too, and skilled prospecting found
itself at fault. The spots old miners had passed by as worthless,
'tenderfeet' from Ohio dug down upon, and showed to be rich in
'mineral.' One of the first mines opened--the Camp Bird--was discovered
by the Gallagher brothers, two utterly poor Irishmen. Another early
piece of good fortune was that of Fryer, from whom Fryer Hill, one of
the most productive districts, derives its name. He lived in a squatty
little cabin on the side-hill, where the dirt floor had become as hilly
as a model of the main range, and the rough stone fire-place in the
corner was hardly fit to fry a rasher of bacon; but one day he dug a
hole up near the top of the hill, hiding himself among the secret pines,
saying nothing to anybody, and a few yards below the surface struck a
mine which has already yielded millions of dollars without being urged.
Innumerable incidents might be related of the patience and expense and
hardship which resulted in failure; of the equal pluck and endurance
that brought success; of happy chance or perfect accident divulging a
fortune at the most unexpected point. The miners have a proverb, 'Nobody
can see into the ground,' and the gamblers an adage, 'The only thing
sure about luck is that it's bound to change!'
"One of the grimmest of these tales is that attached to the Dead Man
claim, which is briefly as follows: It was winter. Scotty had died, and
the boys, wanting to give him a right smart of a burial, hired a man for
twenty dollars to dig a grave through ten feet of snow and six feet of
hard ground. Meanwhile, Scotty was stuffed into a snow bank. Nothing was
heard of the grave-digger for three days, and the boys, going out to see
what had happened to him, found him in a hole which, begun as a grave,
proved to be a sixty-ounce mine. The _quasi_ sexton refused to yield,
and was not hard pushed, for Scotty was forgotten and staid in the
snow-bank till the April sun searched him out, the boys meanwhile
sinking prospect-holes in his intended cemetery.
"One mine had its shaft down one hundred and thirty-five feet and the
indications of success were good. Some capitalists proposed to purchase
an interest in it, and a half of the mine was offered them for $10,000,
if taken before five o'clock. At half-past four, rich silver ore was
struck, and when at half-past five the tardy men of money came leisurely
up and signified their consent to the bargain, the manager pointed at
the clock, and quietly remarked:
"'The price of a half interest in this mine now, gentlemen, is sixty
thousand dollars.'