Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 8 - Part I - 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.