may be removed on the morrow, than a town, and you cannot but feel that
the people about you are a part of the show. A great shaft of rock that
rises hundreds of feet above the lower town gives the little village
at its base an absurdly pushing, impudent air, and the silence of the
mountains around from ten to fourteen thousand feet high, makes the
confusion of hammers and the cries of the drivers swearing at their
mules in the mud and even the random blasts from the mines futile and
ridiculous. It is more strange and fantastic at night, when it appears
to one looking down from half-way up the mountain like a camp of
gypsies at the foot of a cañon. On the raw pine fronts shine electric
lights in red and blue globes, mixing with the hot, smoky glare rising
from the saloons and gambling-houses, and striking upward far enough
to show the signs of The Holy Moses Saloon, The Theatre Comique, The
Keno, and The Little Delmonico against the face of the great rock at
their back doors, but only suggesting the greater mass of it which
towers majestically above, hidden somewhere in the night. It is as
incongruous as an excursion boat covered with colored lights, and
banging out popular airs at the base of the Palisades.
[Illustration: HOW LAND IS CLAIMED FOR BUILDING--PLANKS NAILED TOGETHER
AND RESTING ON FOUR STUMPS]
The town of Creede is in what is known as the King Solomon district;
it is three hundred and twenty miles from Denver, and lies directly
in the pathway of the Great Divide. Why it was not discovered sooner,
why, indeed, there is one square foot of land in Colorado containing
silver not yet discovered, is something which the Eastern mind cannot
grasp. Colorado is a State, not a country, and in that State the mines
of Leadville, Aspen, Ouray, Clear Creek County, Telluride, Boulder,
Silverton, and Cripple Creek, have yielded up in the last year forty
million dollars. If the State has done that much, it can do more; and I
could not understand why any one in Colorado should remain contentedly
at home selling ribbons when there must be other mines to be had for
the finding. A prospector is, after all, very much like a tramp, but
with a knowledge of minerals, a pick, rations, a purpose, and--hope.
We know how many tramps we have in the East; imagine, then, all of
these, instead of wandering lazily and purposelessly from farm-house to
farm-house, stopping instead to hammer at a bit of rock, or stooping
to pick up every loose piece they find. One would think that with a
regular army like this searching everywhere in Colorado no one acre of
it would by this time have remained unclaimed. But this new town of
Creede, once known only as Willow Gap, was discovered but twenty months
ago, and it was not until December last that the railway reached it,
and, as I have said, there is not a station there yet.
N. C. Creede was a prospector who had made some money in the Monarch
district before he came to Willow Gap; he began prospecting there on
Campbell, now Moses Mount, with G. L. Smith, of Salida. One of the two
picked up a piece of rock so full of quartz that they sunk a shaft
immediately below the spot where they had found the stone. According
to all known laws, they should have sunk the shaft at the spot from
which the piece of rock had become detached, or from whence it had
presumably rolled. It was as absurd to dig for silver where they did
dig as it would be to sink a shaft in Larimer Street, in Denver,
because one had found a silver quarter lying in the roadway. But they
dug the shaft; and when they looked upon the result of the first day’s
work, Smith cried, “Great God!” and Creede said, “Holy Moses!” and the
Holy Moses Mine was named. While I was in Creede that gentleman was
offered one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for his
share of this mine, and declined it. After that my interest in him fell
away. Any man who will live in a log house at the foot of a mountain,
and drink melted snow any longer than he has to do so, or refuse that
much money for _anything_, when he could live in the Knickerbocker
Flats, and drive forth in a private hansom with rubber tires, is no
longer an object of public interest.
But his past history is the history of the town. Creede and his partner
knew they had a mine, but had no money to work it. So they applied
to David S. Moffatt, the president of the Rio Grande Railroad, which
has a track to Wagon Wheel Gap only ten miles away, and Moffatt and
others formed the Holy Moses Mining Company, and secured a bond on the
property at seventy thousand dollars. As soon as this was known, the
invasion of Willow Gap began. It was the story of Columbus and the egg.
Prospectors, and provisions with which to feed them, came in on foot
and on stages, and Creede began to grow. But no more mines were found
at once, and the railroad into the town was slow in coming, and many
departed, leaving their posts and piles of rock to mark their claims.
But last June Creede received a second boom, and in a manner which
heaps ridicule and scorn upon the scientific knowledge of engineers
and mining experts, and which shows that luck, chance, and the absurd
vagaries of fate are factors of success upon which a prospector should
depend.
[Illustration: THE “HOLY MOSES” MINE]
Ralph Granger and Eri Buddenbock ran a butcher shop at Wagon Wheel Gap.
“The” Renninger, of Patiro, a prospector with no tools or provisions,
asked them to grub-stake him, as it is called when a man of capital
furnishes a man of adventure with bacon, flour, a pick, and three or
four donkeys, and starts him off prospecting, with the understanding
that he is to have one-tenth of what he finds. Renninger asked Jule
Haas to join him, and they departed together. One day the three burros
disappeared, and wandered off many miles, with Renninger in hot and
profane pursuit until they reached Bachelor Mountain, where he overtook
them. But they liked Bachelor Mountain, and Renninger, failing to
dislodge them with either rocks or kicks, seated himself to await their
pleasure, and began to chip casually at the nearest rock. He struck a
vein showing mineral in such rich quantities that he asked Creede to
come up and look at it. Creede looked at it, and begged Renninger to
define his claim at once. Renninger, offering up thanks to the three
donkeys, did so, and named it the “Last Chance.” Then Creede located
next to this property, shoulder to shoulder, and named his claim the
“Amethyst.” These names are merely names to you; they mean nothing; in
Colorado you speak them in a whisper, and they sound like the Standard
Oil Company or the Koh-i-noor diamond. Haas was bought off for ten
thousand dollars. He went to Germany to patronize the people in the
little German village from which he came with his great wealth; four
months later Renninger, and Buddenbock, who had staked him, sold their
thirds for seventy thousand dollars each; a few days later Granger was
offered one hundred thousand dollars for his third, and said he thought
he would hold on to it. When I was there, the Chance was putting out
one hundred and eighty thousand dollars per month. This shows that
Granger was wiser in his generation than Haas.
At the time I visited Creede it was quite impossible to secure a bed
in any of the hotels or lodging-houses. The Pullman cars were the only
available sleeping-places, and rented out their berths for the night
they laid over at the mining camp. But even in these, sleeping was
precarious, as one gentleman found the night after my arrival. He was
mistaken for another man who had picked up a bag of gold-dust from a
faro table at Little Delmonico’s, and who had fled into the night.
After shooting away the pine-board façade in the Mint gambling-house in
which he was supposed to have sought shelter, several citizens followed
him on to the sleeping-car, and, of course, pulled the wrong man out of
his berth, and stood him up in the aisle in front of four revolvers,
while the porter and the other wrong men shivered under their blankets,
and begged them from behind the closed curtains to take him outside
before they began shooting. The camp was divided in its opinion on the
following morning as to whether the joke was on the passenger or on the
hasty citizens.
[Illustration: DEBATABLE GROUND--A WARNING TO TRESPASSERS]
A colony of younger sons from the East took pity upon me, and gave
me a bunk in their Grub Stake cabin, where I had the satisfaction of
watching the son of a president of the Somerset Club light the fire
with kerosene while the rest of us remained under the blankets and
asked him to be careful. They were a most hospitable, cheerful lot.
When it was so cold that the ice was frozen in the tin basin, they
would elect to remain in bed all day, and would mark up the prices they
intended to ask for their lots and claims one hundred dollars each;
and then, considering this a fair day’s wages for a hard day’s work,
would go warmly to sleep again. It is interesting, chiefly to mothers
and sisters--for the fathers and brothers have an unsympathetic way of
saying, “It is the best thing for him”--to discover how quickly such
carefully bred youths as one constantly meets in the mining camps and
ranches of the West can give up the comforts and habits of years and
fit into their surroundings. It is instructive and hopeful to watch
a young man who can and has ordered numerous dinners at Bignon’s,
composing a dessert of bread and molasses, or to see how neatly a Yale
graduate of one year’s standing can sweep the mud from the cabin floor
without spreading it. If people at home could watch these young exiles
gorge themselves with their letters, a page at a time, and then go
over them again word by word, they would write early and often; and if
the numerous young women of New York and Boston could know that their
photographs were the only bright spots in a log-cabin filled with
cartridge-belts, picks, saddles, foot-ball sweaters, patent-medicine
bottles, and three-months-old magazines, they would be moved with great
content.
One cannot always discern the true character of one’s neighbors in
the West. “Dress,” as Bob Acres says, “does make a difference.” There
were four very rough-looking men of different ages sitting at a table
near me in one of the restaurants or “eating-houses” of Creede. They
had marked out a map on the soiled table-cloth with the point of an
iron fork, and one of them was laying down the law concerning it.
There seemed to be a dispute concerning the lines of the claim or the
direction in which the vein ran. It was no business of mine, and there
was so much of that talk that I should not have been attracted to them,
except that I expected from their manner they might at any moment come
to blows or begin shooting. I finished before they did, and as I passed
the table over which they leaned scowling excitedly, the older man
cried, with his finger on the map:
“Then Thompson passed the ball back to me--no, not your Thompson;
Thompson of ’79 I mean--and I carried it down the field all the way to
the twenty-five-yard line. Canfield, who was playing full, tackled
me; but I shook him off, and--”
[Illustration: A MINING CAMP COURT-HOUSE]
I should have liked to wait and hear whether or not he made his
touch-down.
The shaft of the Last Chance Mine is at the top of the Bachelor
Mountain, and one has to climb and slip for an hour and a half to
reach it. A very nice Yale boy guided me there, and seemed as willing
as myself to sit down in the snow every ten minutes and look at the
scenery. But we saw much more of the scenery than of the mine, because
there was more of it to see, and there was no general manager to
prevent us from looking as long as we liked. The trail led over fallen
logs and up slippery rocks caked with ice and through drifts of snow
higher than one’s head, and the pines accompanied us all the way with
branches bent to the mountain-side with the weight of the snow, and a
cold, cheery mountain stream appeared and disappeared from under long
bridges of ice and mocked at us for our slow progress. But we gave it
a very close race coming down. Sometimes we walked in the cold, dark
shadows of the pines, where hardly a ray of sunlight came, and again
the trail would cross a landslide, and the wind brought strong odors
of the pine and keen, icy blasts from the snow-capped ranges which
stretched before us for fifty miles, and we could see Creede lying at
our feet like a box of spilled jackstraws. Every now and then we met
long lines of burros carrying five bags of ore each, with but twenty
dollars’ worth of silver scattered through each load, and we could hear
the voice of the driver from far up above and the tinkle of the bell
as they descended upon us. Sometimes they made way for us or halted
timidly with curious, patient eyes, and sometimes they shouldered us
promptly backward into three feet of snow. It was a lonely, impressive
journey, and the wonderful beauty and silence of the mountain made
words impertinent. And, again, we would come upon a solitary prospector
tapping at the great rock in front of him, and only stopping to dip
his hot face and blistered hands into the snow about him, before he
began to drive the steel bar again with the help which hope gave him.
His work but for this ingredient would seem futile, foolish, and
impossible. Why, he would ask himself, should I work against this
stone safe day after day only to bore a hole in its side as minute as
a nail’s point in the front of a house, and a thousand rods, probably,
from where the hole should be? And then hope tells him that perhaps the
very next stroke will make him a millionaire like Creede, and so he
makes the next stroke, and the next, and the next.
[Illustration: SHAFT OF A MINE]
If ever I own a silver mine, I am going to have it situated at the
base of a mountain, and not at the top. I would not care to take that
journey we made to the Chance every day. I would rather sit in the
office below and read reports. After one gets there, the best has been
seen; for the general manager of the Last Chance Mine, to whom I had
a letter of introduction, and indeed all the employés, guarded their
treasure with the most praiseworthy and faithful vigilance. It was
evident that they were quietly determined among themselves to resist
any attempt on the part of the Yale man and myself to carry away the
shaft with us. We could have done so only over their dead bodies.
The general manager confounded me with the editor of the _Saturday
Night_, which he said he reads, and which certainly ought to account
for several things. I expected to be led into a tunnel, and to be
shown delicate veins of white silver running around the sides,
which one could cut out with a penknife and make into scarf-pins
and watch guards. If not, from whence, then, do the nuggets come
that the young and disappointed lover sends as a wedding present to
the woman who should have married him, when she marries some other
man who has sensibly remained in the East--a present, indeed, which
has always struck me as extremely economical, and much cheaper than
standing-lamps. But I saw no silver nuggets. One of the workmen showed
us a hole in the side of the mountain which he assured us was the Last
Chance Mine, and that out of this hole one hundred and eighty thousand
dollars came every month. He then handed us a piece of red stone and a
piece of black stone, and said that when these two stones were found
together silver was not far off. To one thirsting for a sight of the
precious metal this was about as satisfying as being told that after
the invitations had been sent out and the awning stretched over the
sidewalk there was a chance of a dance in the neighborhood. I was also
told that the veins lie between walls of porphyry and trachyte, but
that there is not a distinctly marked difference, as the walls resemble
each other closely. This may or may not be true; it is certainly not
interesting, and I regret that I cannot satisfy the mining expert as
to the formation of the mine, or tell him whether or not the vein is a
heavy galena running so much per cent. of lead, or a dry silicious ore,
or whether the ore bodies were north and south, and are or are not true
fissures, and at what angle the contact or body veins cut these same
fissures. All of this I should have ascertained had the general manager
been more genial; but we cannot expect one man to combine the riches of
Montezuma and the graces of Chesterfield. One is sure to destroy the
other.
The social life of Creede is much more interesting than outputs and ore
values. There were several social functions while I was there which
tend to show the happy spirit of the place. There was a prize-fight
at Billy Woods’, a pie-eating match at Kernan’s, a Mexican circus in
the bottom near Wagon Wheel Gap, a religious service at Watrous and
Bannigan’s gambling-house, and the first wedding in the history of the
town. I was sorry to miss this last, especially as three prominent
citizens, misunderstanding the purpose of my visit to Creede, took
the trouble to scour the mountain-side for me in order that I might
photograph the wedding party in a group, which I should have been
delighted to do. The bride was the sister of Billy Woods’s barkeeper,
and “Stony” Sargeant, a faro-dealer at “Soapy” Smith’s, was the groom.
The Justice of the Peace, whose name I forget, performed the ceremony,
and Edward De Vinne, the Tramp Poet, offered a few appropriate and
well-chosen remarks, after which Woods and Smith, who run rival
gambling-houses, outdid each other in the extravagant practice of
“opening wine.” All of these are prominent citizens, and the event was
memorable.
[Illustration: VALUABLE REAL ESTATE]
I met several of these prominent citizens while in Creede, and found
them affable. Billy Woods fights, or used to fight, at two hundred
and ten pounds, and rejoices in the fact that a New York paper once
devoted five columns to his personality. His reputation saves him the
expense of paying men to keep order. Bob Ford, who shot Jesse James,
was another prominent citizen of my acquaintance. He does not look like
a desperado, but has a loutish apologetic air, which is explained
by the fact that he shot Jesse James in the back, when the latter was
engaged in the innocent work of hanging a picture on the wall. Ford
never quite recovered from the fright he received when he found out who
it was that he had killed. “Bat” Masterden was of an entirely different
class. He dealt for Watrous, and has killed twenty-eight men, once
three together. One night when he was off duty I saw a drunken man slap
his face, and the silence was so great that we could hear the electric
light sputter in the next room; but Masterden only laughed, and told
the man to come back and do it again when he was sober. “Troublesome
Tom” Cady acted as a capper for “Soapy” Smith, and played the shell
game during the day. He was very grateful to me for teaching him a
much superior method in which the game is played in the effete East.
His master, “Soapy” Smith, was a very bad man indeed, and hired at
least twelve men to lead the prospector with a little money, or the
tenderfoot who had just arrived, up to the numerous tables in his
gambling-saloon, where they were robbed in various ways so openly that
they deserved to lose all that was taken from them.
There were also some very good shots at Creede, and some very bad
ones. Of these latter was Mr. James Powers, who emptied his revolver
and Rab Brothers’ store at the same time without doing any damage. He
explained that he was crowded and wanted more room. The most delicate
shooting was done by the Louisiana Kid--I don’t know what his other
name was--who was robbed in Soapy Smith’s saloon, and was put out when
he expostulated. He waited patiently until one of Smith’s men named
Farnham, appeared, and then, being more intent in showing his skill
than on killing Farnham, shot the thumb off his right hand as it rested
on the trigger. Farnham shifted his pistol to his left hand, with which
he shot equally well, but before he could fire the Kid shot the thumb
off that hand too.
This is, of course, Creede at night. It is not at all a dangerous
place, and the lawlessness is scattered and mild. There was only one
street, and as no one cared to sit on the edge of a bunk in a cold
room at night, the gambling-houses were crowded in consequence every
evening. It was simply because there was nowhere else to go. The
majority of the citizens used them as clubs, and walked from one to the
other talking claims and corner lots, and dived down into their pockets
for specimens of ore which they passed around for examination. Others
went there to keep warm, and still others to sleep in the corner until
they were put out. The play was never high. There was so much of it,
though, that it looked very bad and wicked and rough, but it was quite
harmless. There were no sudden oaths, nor parting of the crowd, and
pistol-shots or gleaming knives--or, at least, but seldom. The women
who frequented these places at night, in spite of their sombreros and
flannel shirts and belts, were a most unpicturesque and unattractive
element. They were neither dashing and bold, nor remorseful and
repentant.
[Illustration: UPPER CREEDE]
They gambled foolishly, and laughed when they won, and told the dealer
he cheated when they lost. The men occasionally gave glimpses of
the life which Bret Harte made dramatic and picturesque--the women,
never. The most uncharacteristic thing of the place, and one which was
Bret Hartish in every detail, was the service held in Watrous and
Bannigan’s gambling-saloon. The hall is a very long one with a saloon
facing the street, and keno tables, and a dozen other games in the
gambling-room beyond. When the doors between the two rooms are held
back they make a very large hall. A clergyman asked Watrous if he could
have the use of the gambling-hall on Sunday night. The house was making
about three hundred dollars an hour, and Watrous calculated that half
an hour would be as much as he could afford towards the collection. He
mounted a chair and said, “Boys, this gentleman wants to make a few
remarks to you of a religious nature. All the games at that end of the
hall will stop, and you want to keep still.”
The clergyman stood on the platform of the keno outfit, and the greater
part of the men took the seats around it, toying with the marking cards
scattered over the table in front of them, while the men in the saloon
crowded the doorway from the swinging doors to the bar, and looked on
with curious and amused faces. At the back of the room the roulette
wheel clicked and the ball rolled. The men in this part of the room who
were playing lowered their voices, but above the voice of the preacher
one could hear the clinking of the silver and the chips, and the voice
of the boy at the wheel calling, “seventeen and black, and twenty-eight
and black again and--keep the ball rolling, gentlemen--and four and
red.” There are two electric lights in the middle of the hall and a
stove; the men were crowded closely around this stove, and the lamps
shone through the smoke on their tanned upturned faces and on the white
excited face of the preacher above them. There was the most excellent
order, and the collection was very large. I asked Watrous how much he
lost by the interruption.
“Nothing,” he said, quickly, anxious to avoid the appearance of good;
“I got it all back at the bar.”
Of the inner life of Creede I saw nothing; I mean the real business of
the place--the speculation in real estate and in mines. Capitalists
came every day, and were carried off up the mountains to look at a hole
in the ground, and down again to see the assay tests of the ore taken
from it. Prospectors scoured the sides of the mountains from sundawn
to sunset, and at night their fires lit up the range, and their little
heaps of stone and their single stick, with their name scrawled on it
in pencil, made the mountains look like great burying-grounds. All
of the land within two miles of Creede was claimed by these simple
proofs of ownership--simple, yet as effectual as a parchment sealed and
signed. When the snow has left the mountains, and these claims can be
worked, it will be time enough to write the real history of the rise or
fall of Creede.
IV
A THREE-YEAR-OLD CITY
IV
A THREE-YEAR-OLD CITY