FROM DENVER TO THE PACIFIC
PHŒNIX, ARIZONA,
January 3, 1893.
Journeying by no pre-arranged plan, but directing my course according
to the promptings of chance circumstances, I have wandered far from a
direct westward line from Denver to the sea, but I have come by a way
that has furnished in experience all that I could have hoped.
The very first step from Denver carried me out of a due westward
course. In the vague, ill-defined manner of a tenderfoot, I knew
that Cripple Creek was a relatively new mining camp, and that it lay
somewhere beyond Pike’s Peak, and I light-heartedly dreamed that,
being a new camp, it was just the place for a new-comer; so, late in
September, I set out from Denver with Cripple Creek in view.
For seventy miles or more I went south, the earlier part of the walk
leading me through the sandy tract which begins abruptly at the very
edge of the fresh green lawns that mark the end of irrigation in the
city. The road which first I followed gradually faded out on the open
plain. Then I cut diagonally across country in the direction of the
foot-hills.
Near to the city as it was this bit of country, after weeks of drought,
was like a veritable desert. Underfoot was the hot alkali dust, where
grew the short plain-grass that lay whitened in tufts of crisping
curls, as though dead beyond all reviving. Thick on every side was a
growth of stunted cactus, well in keeping with the character of the
plain, while the deeper green of the long, sharp Spanish needles was
a sad mockery of fertility. Along occasional ravines, washed deep by
sudden, rain-fed streams whose beds now lay stony and parched and baked
under the hot sun, were here and there clusters of scrub-oaks, small
in growth but with their wiry branches spreading a luxuriance of small
oval leaves which supplied the welcome of a shadow in a desert land.
At intervals among the dry, tufted grass small sand-heaps appeared,
and above them the heads of prairie dogs, piping shrill warning of
suspicious approach, or darting in swift flight from one burrow to
another.
For some miles I walked through such a region, growing momentarily
thirstier as the sun beat down upon me and I inhaled the alkali with
the sensation of having eaten soap. The only sign of habitation that
I saw was a shanty, a mere shell of boards tacked upon a frame and
standing ten feet square, perhaps, and seven feet high. The hill on
which it stood sloped to a deep ravine, and past the shanty door wound
a smaller water-course, where a line of scrub-oaks grew, suggesting the
presence of a spring. But the bed was dry and yawned in thirsty cracks,
and no source of water could I find, although the shanty was plainly
inhabited; for the door was heavily padlocked, and a half-starved dog,
with a broken leg, limped from his kennel among some old soap-boxes
and barked a feeble protest against my approach, and a few fowls were
squatting in the dust in the shade of the scrub-oaks, or scratching for
food in the dry grass near the shanty.
Two or three miles farther on I came out upon a highway, which follows
the general direction of the Santa Fé and the Rio Grande railways, as
they parallel each other to the south. Here was a very different tale
to tell. There were many ranches along the route with abundant supplies
of water from artesian wells, apparently, whose streams were playing
ceaselessly over gardens and at the roots of thrifty fruit-trees. I
passed through a number of typical Western villages on the march, and
once through an encampment of a regiment of regulars, whose officers
were at mess and many of the men lying at full length on the ground
with their legs protruding from under the slight shelter tents, while
foraging expeditions could be seen bargaining among their out-houses
with the neighboring ranchmen, with all the womenkind and children in
interested attendance.
The road was gradually drawing nearer to the foot-hills. Instead of
a hundred miles of unbroken mountain-range, from Long’s to Pike’s
Peak, that seemed to rise abruptly from the plain only an hour’s walk
away, I began to be aware of the magnificent distances so strangely
disguised in that clear, rarefied air, and to appreciate altitudes by
comparison with lesser heights. The view lost in extent, only to gain
in the grander outlines of splendid detail. And with the nearer view
there grew clear the marvellous coloring in the exposed strata and
the fantastic shapes which mark the play of erosion among the rocks.
There were deep saffrons and reds of every hue, from a delicate flush
to crimson; there were browns and grays without number, and a soft
cream color deepening to yellow, and now and then a jut of rock that
in certain lights appeared milk-white. To boundless variety in color
was added a weird charm of form with which the imagination could play
endlessly. Sitting a rugged bowlder with the dainty poise of an egg
upon a conjurer’s finger would appear a round-bellied Hindu god in
solid stone, and near him, in exquisitely delicate tracery, a flying
buttress or the tapering spire of a cathedral, while crowning some
sheer height in all the glory of gorgeous color would rise the grim
towers and battlements of a mediæval fortress.
It was after nightfall on Saturday evening when I entered Colorado
Springs. With the aid of the electric lights I soon gathered an
impression of a considerable town of large hotels and wide, regular
thoroughfares, with the squares built up, many of them, in detached
villas, after the manner of Eastern summer-resorts by the sea. In the
course of a walk about the town I came upon an empty prairie schooner,
which stood in a cluster of trees on the outskirts of an open square,
and creeping under the sheltering canopy I slept there for the night.
The Sunday which followed I remember chiefly for its glorious sunshine
and the view which I had in the morning of Pike’s Peak. Its summit
seemed to leap into the sky as it rose stark and bald above the
timber-line, and yet there was infinite repose in its splendid height,
standing out clear and majestic in the full rays of the morning
sun. I remember, too, a service in a well-filled church, and an odd
reminder in its worshippers of the Eastern seaboard, and the exciting
expectancy of chance sight of some familiar face, and, finally, the
figure of a girl, who, entering after the service had begun, slipped
noiselessly into a seat at my side in a pew near the door. A wonderful
vision she was of what men mean when they speak feelingly out here of
“God’s country,” for you no sooner saw her than there flashed into
sight the long vista of the avenue as it heaves to the lift of Murray
Hill. You could see her there--and can see her superior nowhere under
heaven--with the light streaming in red, level rays through the side
streets on a late afternoon in the cold, crisp air of autumn, with the
tan of a summer on the New England coast upon her, and her exquisite
figure instinct with the vitality which comes of yachting and hard
riding, her frock and jacket fitting her like a glove, and her clear,
frank eyes looking you straight between your own and making you feel
in her presence what a clean, wholesome, manly thing is life! She
little dreamed, as she cordially shared her prayer-book with me, how
deeply indebted to her I was for being so fine a type of the finest and
handsomest women in the world, and how much I owed her for so fair a
vision before I launched into the mining regions of the frontier.
Monday dawned as bright as Sunday had been, and by eight o’clock I
reached Manitou and was ready to begin the ascent of Pike’s Peak. There
was a wide choice of route, for there was a road, and a well-beaten
trail, and the bed of the cog railway. I took to the railway as the
most unmistakable and very likely the directest course.
With infinite engineering skill the first ascent of the cog-road is cut
as a ledge along the side of a deep gorge or cañon, down which rushes
a mountain stream of considerable volume. Following the great turns
of the cañon the road ascends in the shadow of huge rocks, that tower
straight above it or slope in a more gradual rise, furnishing place for
the cabin of a miner or of some lover of camp life. The mountain-sides
are dark with evergreen, which seems to grow deep-rooted in the rock,
clinging at times to a bare, protruding ledge with naked roots thrust
deep into crevices where soil and moisture are found. The quaking aspen
shares this bare subsistence with the pine, and, green with the rich
green of late summer at the mountain-base, it marked all the stages of
the autumn in the ascent, until at the timber-line I found its leaves
turned yellow and fast falling to the ground.
About two miles below Windy Point I had the good luck to overtake a
miner, who had been spending Sunday with his family near Colorado
Springs and was now on his way back to work in Cripple Creek. He was
not at all encouraging as to the prospect of my finding work in the
camp, but before we parted at Windy Point he gave me careful directions
about the way, and I began to feel, in his calling me “partner” and
in his talk of “claims” and “gulches” and “blazed trails,” my first
intimation of nearing the mining regions of the Rockies.
We separated where the cog-road sweeps around the southern side of
the mountain, only because I was bent on reaching the summit before
going on to Cripple Creek. All the difficulty of the ascent I found
concentrated in the last hour of climbing. It no longer was a matter
of steady uphill work, but a succession of short spurts wherein one
breathed more by accident than design. You were not tired in the least,
but, at an altitude of some 14,000 feet, your breath failed completely
in an upward walk of fifty yards, and you were obliged to stand still,
panting until respiration became normal again.
Exactly at twelve o’clock I reached the summit, where I found a
piercing cold wind blowing and small drifts of snow lying in crevices
among the rocks on the northern slope; in an air as clear as crystal
my eye swept boundless mountain-ranges to the north and west and south
and a boundless plain below, where, at the foot of the mountain, lay
Colorado Springs, a few, dim squares formed by the intersection of
faint parallel lines at right angles to one another. Above the rushing
of the wind among the grim, naked crags which form the summit, a wind,
which at that solemn height suggests the sweep of awful interstellar
spaces, the only sound I heard was the voice of an attendant in a stone
building near by as he sang, again and again, the chorus of “Ta, ra,
ra, ra, boom, de ay!”
I remained at the summit as long as I dared, held by the fascination of
the view; then I returned to Windy Point and went down the south face
of the mountain and across a beautiful grass-grown level to the brink
of another descent, where, according to my miner friend of the morning,
I should find a blazed trail. I found instead the sheer side of a
cañon. I followed the brink of the precipice for some distance, and
coming at last upon a less abrupt point, I plunged down and made my way
over shelving rock and fallen trees until I eventually chanced upon the
trail. This I followed to the deep bed of the cañon, where I saw some
claims staked out and lost my way in a tangle of cattle trails. It was
growing dark, and there was no sign of the journey’s end, but I knew
the general direction of Cripple Creek, and the moon was at its first
quarter.
Even the cattle trails failed at last, and in the dark forest I was
soon lunging on over bowlders and rotting trees and the _débris_ of a
mountain wood in the direction of the camp, hoping, meanwhile, that
I should not be obliged to spend the night in the open, for at that
altitude in late September it was turning “wondrous cold.”
Down one ridge and up another I forged ahead through the tangled
undergrowth of the forest, and at last, from the top of a rock which
cleared the trees about it, I caught the glimmer of a light through the
window of a cabin a mile or two away.
It was an ore-crushing camp I found; I was made most cordially welcome,
and given a bed on a pile of blankets in a tent where slept the half
dozen men of the crew. They were a hearty, healthy lot of young farmers
to all appearances, and I gathered that they had come up from Kansas at
the time of the “boom” at Cripple Creek.
A walk of only four or five miles carried me into the camp after
breakfast next morning. The first view that I had of it was very
striking, I thought, as I looked down upon it from a sudden turn in
the road. The settlement lay in the southeastern bend of a basin whose
bottom was as flat as the prairie and well turfed. The hills rose
quite bare for some distance about it, and their sides looked oddly,
as though heavy artillery had been playing upon them, for they were
peppered with holes made by prospectors, with loose earth and stones
lying about them.
Straggling lines of wooden buildings followed roughly the rude course
of a long, dusty street, which ran southward to the mouth of a gulch
and then turned abruptly west until it lost itself on the level. Some
of these buildings were log-cabins, of much solidity, and others were
trim, substantial frame houses, neatly painted; but for the most part
they were crude, unpainted shanties, and there were many tents dotting
the hillsides, and a few lines of light structures which marked the
outlines of prospective streets branching from the main thoroughfare.
The camp itself wore an air of desertion, which was only confirmed
when I entered it. There were few persons in the streets, and some of
the houses were abandoned. The picture formed a very welcome contrast
when I saw a school-mistress step to the door of a long log-cabin, with
grass growing thick on its roof, and ring a bell to summon a troop
of little children, who came running and shouting from unexpected
quarters, dispelling at once the loneliness and quiet of the place.
It was but nine in the morning, and I had the full day in which to
look for work. There were very few mines in actual operation in the
neighborhood, I found, but I visited all of them, asking for any form
of unskilled labor.
I was struck at once with the wide difference in bearing out here,
as compared with the East and Middle West, on the part of employers
toward workingmen. It did not take long to discover that there were
scores, possibly hundreds, about the camp who were out of work, and yet
the manner of men to whom I applied for employment was most uniformly
courteous, and courteous in the best possible way. Invariably I found
myself treated as a fellow-man, and that was a wonderful salve to
one’s self-respect. There was no effort at politeness, but simply an
instinctive recognition of fellowship.
“Why, no, I ain’t got nothing that I can give you to do now, partner,”
a boss would say. “You see it’s like this----,” and then would follow
a friendly talk on the general situation, as one man might naturally
explain a case to another.
It was all easily intelligible. The camp had enjoyed its “boom” during
the last autumn and winter, but especially through the spring.
There had been the usual rush of fortune-seekers, with an uncommon
preponderance, however, of farmers from Kansas and Nebraska. Some
silver had been found, but much more gold-bearing quartz and a little
placer deposit. Evidently Cripple Creek is to become a gold-producing
centre, but the ore discovered so far is of rather a low grade. Very
little of it can be worked at a profit so long as it must meet the
great cost of transportation by mule train to the railway at Cañon
City, more than thirty miles away. There are two railways now making
for the camp; so soon as they have entered the region and reduced
greatly the present cost of transportation and other costs attached
to mining there, many claims will rise instantly to the position of
paying properties which cannot now be worked to any profit whatever.
The miners were all sanguine of rich results when once this period of
waiting has been tided over.
But in the meantime it was “hard scrapping” for a living. There were
golden prospects, but very little immediate work, and the best of
prospects makes but an indifferent diet. After a long and tiring
round of mines, I went at last, very hungry, in the direction of an
ore-crushing outfit, which stood in the bottom of the basin near the
camp. Nothing in the way of work was to be had there, but I was
fortunate enough to see an old prospector test some placer diggings,
deftly washing out a panful of soil, and exhibit the few tiny specks of
gold deposit at the last.
Turning back to the camp I began a round of the lodging- and
eating-houses and shops, in the hope that some opening might be found.
But there was as little demand for help there as I had found about the
mines, with the exception of one cheap chop-house, where a notice was
exposed advertising for a dishwasher. I applied for the place with
high hope of getting it, but the buxom, stolid woman who was in charge,
met every advance on my part with an unvarying “No” and with nothing
more, and, worsted at last, I was obliged to withdraw.
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.
From Cañon City I crossed the Arkansas and struck up into the mountains
in the direction of Green Mountain Valley. The weather had favored
me marvellously. Not since I had left my job as a navvy at Buda on
the Union Pacific Railway had I been hampered by a drop of rain. Down
through Colorado and among the mountains so far, I had enjoyed an
unbroken succession of most delightful autumn days. But the clouds
began to gather now as I made my way through Green Mountain Valley.
I well remember the cold, threatening morning of October 18th, when
I walked through the all but deserted mining camp of Silver Cliff.
That night I spent with a ranchman in the heart of the rich valley;
when I set out in the morning snow had begun to fall, and I realized,
with some concern, that I still had a considerable range to cross and
several days’ march to the mining camp of Créede.
I did not get very far on that memorable 19th. For an hour or two I
had no difficulty in keeping the road, but the snow had thickened to
a blinding storm by then, and the wind was fast rising to a gale.
Anything like that snow-fall I have never seen. A whole landscape
was blotted out as in a moment, and the road which just now was
a clearly defined way through the valley became almost instantly
indistinguishable in the general sweep of flaky whiteness, over which
fresh snow was falling so fast that you could not see ten yards ahead.
I found out afterward that I had been very near to losing my way on a
plain where I might have wandered in endless circles, for the falling
snow instantly covered one’s tracks and left no trace of the way one
had come. As it was, seeing that it was impossible to make headway in
such a storm, I struck out for shelter, and before I realized my actual
danger I ran up against a ranchman’s cabin.
It was a very small affair, with a lean-to for a kitchen, but a dark
little German woman with a soft musical voice, who opened the door,
bade me a most cordial welcome; and as she placed a chair for me before
the fire, she assured me, again and again, of the anxiety that she
should feel if one of her boys were caught out in such a storm, and of
her gratitude to anyone who might shelter him. I began to understand
that I was coming in for a good deal of vicarious attention, for she
took my wet coat and boots to dry them in the kitchen and insisted upon
my drinking some hot tea.
It was a very cosy nest into which I had fallen. The ranchman himself
was a mild-mannered German, with a blonde beard and dreamy eyes, and
an air of abstraction, who looked up to his wife in all things, for
she was vastly his superior. Two boys were at home, magnificent young
fellows of about fifteen or sixteen, handsome, clear-eyed, ruddy-faced
lads, with the carriage of men who are most at ease in the saddle.
And visiting her prospective in-law relations, was the fiancée of the
oldest son, who is a merchant, I think, in West Cliff. It was worth far
more than all the risks of the storm to see her. She was a Swedish girl
in the very bloom of youth, and her light hair had in it the living
fire of red gold. It was brushed straight back and done up behind her
head in a great mass of interweaving coils in which the light played
superbly. Some shorter hairs had worked loose, and these fell in almost
invisible curling threads of gold about her white forehead. Her cheeks
were of translucent pink, and her rich red lips were as delicately
formed as in the Psyche of Praxiteles.
The child was perfectly unaware of her beauty. In her wide, blue eyes
there was not a suggestion of self-consciousness. And the family about
her seemed not to consider it either; perhaps they all regarded it,
as the poor instinctively accept much in life, as belonging to the
natural order and not to be counted in an individual sense.
We had a jolly time that day playing games and telling stories far into
the evening. It was perfectly clear next morning, with a warm sun fast
melting the deep snow. I could not venture on, however, for the way was
too obstructed, and in another day spent in the cabin I got on quite
intimate terms with the family, especially with the ranchman’s wife,
who told me much of their life and many of her troubles. They were
very serious, though her life was not without its compensations. It
was pitiful to see the care-lines deepen in her sensitive face and an
infinite perplexity cloud her eyes as she talked to me of her sorrows.
“My man is a good husband,” she would say, “but he’s not a good farmer.
I don’t know what’s to become of us. He gets deeper and deeper into
debt. Sometimes he works hard and manages well and I think that we are
going to get on; and then in the middle of it the prospecting fever
takes him, and he leaves everything and goes off into the mountains and
spends every cent that he can raise, looking for silver.
“You see a fortune-teller told him once that he’d ‘find his fortune
in stone,’ and ever since then he’s been crazy to prospect and he’s
squandered everything off there in the mountains. The boys have to
work too hard and they don’t get the proper schooling, and I don’t know
what’s to become of us.
“But there’s my son John that keeps store in West Cliff”--and it was
beautiful to see her face light up--“no woman ever had a better son
than him. He’s been like a father to the family. I don’t know what we’d
ever have done without him, for he’s been the greatest help to us in
all our troubles.”
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.
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.
The trail led us then through a dreary desert, where at times it was
with great difficulty that we got fodder for our burros and wood
enough to cook our meals and water enough to drink. After days of such
marching and camping, there was immense delight in coming eventually to
some cedar grove, where living water flowed and grass grew thick and we
could build a huge campfire at night of well-seasoned cedar boughs.
The only sign of habitation that we saw for days together was an
occasional trader’s post, about which we usually found a considerable
company of Navajos. Price could speak their language, and the young
braves occasionally passed us on the march. Now and then one joined
us in camp, shared a meal with us, and, after a long talk with Price,
rolled himself in his blanket and slept beside our fire.
[Illustration: PRICE COULD SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE, AND NOW AND THEN ONE
JOINED US IN CAMP.]
At last we came out upon the Santa Fé Railway, not far from Fort
Wingate, and followed the line to Gallup, where, in a grove on the hill
above the village, we went into camp for the night. As a matter of
fact we remained there nearly a week. Quite buried under a soft, wet
snow we awoke on the first morning to find ourselves lying in melting
slush, and the trail so obstructed that we could not get on. Then a
bitter cold set in, and, in a region where I imagined the whole winter
like a balmy spring, the thermometer sank to ten and twelve degrees
below zero every night until we had nearly perished from the cold.
But the wave passed over us at last, and on December 10th we set out
again, really none the worse for the touch of Arctic weather. Following
the line of the Santa Fé Railway we crossed into Arizona, and, from a
point due north of it, we cut down to the Petrified Forest and on down
to a Mormon settlement called Woodruff on the Little Colorado River. It
was two days’ march thence to another Mormon settlement, Heber by name,
among the Mogollon Mountains.
All this time Indian summer had utterly failed us, and had been
succeeded by a season of lowering days wherein light snow-falls were
frequent. Price hated snow as he hated nothing else in nature. It got
upon his nerves and drove him to a species of madness. Frequently in
the course of the journey from Gallup to Heber snow fell at night.
Price was usually the first to stir in the morning. We had knowledge
of a snow-fall in the added weight upon us when we woke, and it was
something memorable to see Price throw back the blankets and the
heavy tarpaulin which were drawn over our heads, and lift himself on
his elbow in the gray dawn, and gaze about with fierce anger in his
black eyes upon a pure, white, flawless world, with soft snow clinging
to every twig in the still morning air, and delicate crystal prisms
beginning to form in the warmth of the coming sun, and hear him growl,
in deep disgust,
“This is hell!”
But Heber marked nearly the last stage of that phase of our journey. We
spent Sunday, the 18th December, there with an old Mormon elder and his
son; worked for them on Monday for our keep and then renewed the march
on Tuesday morning. It was a long, hard day’s pull up the northern
side of the mountain to the “rimrock,” in deep snow through a vast
primeval forest of spruce and pine. Then a wonderful thing happened,
for we made a sharp descent on the south side and, in the space of a
little more than a day, reached a country where there was no snow,
and the sun shone warm, and the cotton-wood was in full bloom along
the water-courses, and the cedar and live-oak stood green against the
winter brown of the grass-grown hills.
We had Indian summer once more, and the softest, balmiest Indian summer
has accompanied us thence all the way to Phœnix. We had hardships to
endure, for the way was long and our provisions sometimes ran out. Once
we lost our way for a time in a maze of “box cañons” and had nothing
to eat for twenty-four hours, until, late on Christmas afternoon, we
came out upon the ranch of a Virginian settler, whom Price knew well,
and whose wife gave us a royal dinner of “hog and hominy,” which I have
heard lightly spoken of as a dish, but which I shall always remember as
a most satisfying delicacy.
On we went then over the mountains to the Tonto Basin and through
the Reno Pass to the Verde River. We were encamped there over Sunday
on January 1st in the former reservation of the now deserted Fort
McDowell, and early on Monday morning we started for Phœnix. By a
forced march of thirty miles we entered the city at ten o’clock the
same evening and had a huge supper in a Chinese restaurant; then,
while our animals were eating their fill of fresh alfalfa in a corral
attached to a livery-stable, we slept deeply near by on a heap of
hay, glad to have reached the end of our six weeks’ march across the
narrowing frontier.
* * * * *
SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.,
February 1, 1893.
Not the most interesting nor profitable and certainly not the most
adventurous of the many miles which I have walked in a slow progress
across the continent has been this last stage of the journey up through
California. And yet the remembrance of it will always have a place
apart. Work was plenty, but I made no long stops, pressed on at the
rate of thirty miles a day, impelled by the delight of walking in so
glorious an air through the marvellous beauty of this Pacific slope.
Fresh from the dusty plains I was soon in the midst of the
orange-groves heavily laden with ripe fruit all about Colton and
Riverside, where the hills were terraced as in the Riviera and the
sky was the deep, unfathomable blue of Italy. It was January, and
the first, fresh green of the new year was upon the fields and had
touched with infinite delicacy the rugged sides of the mountains whose
summits flashed white in places from melting snow. The early mornings
were frosty, but mid-day warmed to a gentle glow, and the cool of the
evening came with the declining sun.
Many a time, on the plains or in the mountains, in the presence of
some Mexican Pueblo of adobe huts in a strangely foreign setting of
cedar-trees, with threads of water apparently flowing up hill along
the irrigation ditches to scant fields reclaimed from the desert, it
had been difficult to realize that one was still in America. Here again
was strongest suggestion of the foreign, in the houses which survive
from the Spanish period, and especially the old Mission churches, where
dwells the dignity of age and one can pass completely into the very
atmosphere of Spain.
It was on the third day’s march, I think, from Los Angeles that I found
myself nearing San Buenaventura. It was late in the afternoon, and the
road ahead was an easy upward slope for several miles. Just at sunset
I reached the summit. The town of San Buenaventura lay below me, with
its long main street curving through rows of houses of widely various
kind, and the Mission church standing on an elevation to the left, with
its stucco walls bathed in sunset light, making a strange contrast with
the modern town. And beyond, with the sun’s red disc a half circle on
the horizon line, lay the peaceful sea, with a tongue of living flame
across it turning to black coals the islands in its wake. In a moment
the sun was gone, the shadow of the evening was upon the ocean, and
over the town had fallen the transfiguration light which rests after
sunset in spring-time upon Naples.
Three thousand miles away, and a year and a half in point of time
for me, was Long Island Sound. I recalled the last glimpse of it as
I looked back from Greenfield Hill in the early morning of my start,
and saw it radiant in the sunshine of a midsummer day. And here again,
after many months and many leagues of land journey, was the sea.
Θἁλαττα! Θἁλαττα! I called aloud, for there was no one near enough to hear.
It was a rare moment, worth living for, that first unexpected glimpse
of the Pacific. But strangely enough the feeling which it bred was no
harbinger of an eager willingness to end my long experiment. Many a
time when work was hard, and far more ardently when there was no work
and the physical conditions of life seemed well-nigh unendurable, had
I looked with longing to a return to normal living. And yet, as I
neared my journey’s end I found possessing me a strange indifference
to the idea of return. I do not attempt to analyze the feeling, I
simply note it as a fact; but in some degree I recognize in it a vague
unwillingness to have done with a phase of experience which for me
has opened avenues of useful knowledge. Among them all there rises
clearest at this moment the way of added knowledge of my country.
I may have travelled it to little purpose, but I am conscious at
least of a new-born sense of things which comes of actual contact
with the soil and with the primal struggle for existence among men.
One stands awestruck before the vastness of our great domain and its
quick redemption from the wilderness. But most of all it is contact
with the people which breeds in one the strongest patriotic feeling.
Local conditions and the presence of large numbers of yet unassimilated
foreign elements and rapid changes in economic relations and native
weaknesses and vagaries are responsible for awful sores upon the body
politic, while the power of aggregated wealth grows apace, and fierce
antagonisms and sectional differences arise. Yet beneath the troubled
surface of events one comes to know of the great body of a nation
whose unity has been purchased and made sure by such a cost of blood
and treasure as was never poured out upon the altar of a nation’s life
before, and one sees a people intelligent, resourceful, and hugely
vital, having much to learn and surely learning much, assimilating
foreign elements with miraculous swiftness and growing stronger
thereby, living laborious days wherein the rewards are to thrift and
energy and enterprising skill, knowing no defeat and unacquainted with
the sense of fear, and awakening year by year to a fuller consciousness
of national life and of the glorious mission of high destiny. And with
increasing knowledge the love of country grows until all thought of
worth in her is merged and lost in reverence, and love of her becomes a
summons to live worthy of the name and calling of an American.
THE END.
_Transcriber’s Notes_
A number of typographical errors have been corrected silently.
Archaic spellings have been retained.
Cover image is in the public domain.
Variations in spelling of hyphenated words have been normalized to a
single form when there either was a preponderance of one version or
the first version to appear was used.
The snip of Greek "Θἁλαττα!" translates to "The Sea!" in English.