To Leadville
ON the 25th day of last May the bottom-lands along the Monument Creek, just west of the town of Colorado Springs, were as purple as a clover field. I had not seen them for a week; between a Saturday and a Saturday thousands of purple vetches had grown high and burst into bloom, and the change from the usual muddy and unsightly color of the place was so great that my first feeling in looking at it was of bewildered wonder, as if the region were new. In no other year since I had known the spot had it ever been beautiful. If the world lasts and these vetches keep on growing, there will come a spring when these acres of bottom-land will stretch a solid belt of waving purple bloom, quarter of a mile wide, for two or three miles up and down the creek.
One short season of exceeding loveliness even this muddy bottom-land will have; what earthly thing or creature can have more ?
A season of peerless music, moreover, it has, for larks like vetches, and hang about their low and shady coverts, every now and then fluttering up to sing. Four of them we saw in less than a mile, this morning, — soft, brown-winged, yellowbreasted, trusting creatures, perched on posts or bushes close to the road, looking us full in the eyes, and throwing back their heads as if to let the song out faster and give us all they could before we were out of sight.
“ You say that the voice is always a test of a person’s culture,” said the professed realist of the party. ” How much do you think the lark knows? ”
How often do these realists surprise us by a thought or a phrase so full of poetic fervor that it instantly recalls Herbert Spencer’s bold assertions that not only does science underlie all poetry, but is itself poetic!
Past the hamlet of the Good Spirit (Manitou), a bower of shining green; up the Ute Pass, down which the Fountain Creek came foaming, all white and amber; past blue mertensias nodding rhythmically into the water, and seeming to drink at each dip, like birds; alders, willows waving full of catkins; vines all starting to climb; pines and firs glittering with fresh plumes at every bough tip; thickets where dusky wings were glimmering; narrow belts of young cotton-wood trees on the mountain sides, so vividly green they looked like narrow belts of sunbeam slanting here and there, — past all these, through the pass, up, and out into the great plateaus of spruce and fir forests we climbed, twenty miles or more, climbed slowly: and yet, could it have been so slowly after all? We outstripped the Spring and left her behind, sitting by the roadside, cautiously unfolding a few catkins and cotton-wood buds, and keeping one eye askance and apprehensive on an inky cloud in the northwest which might mean rain, hail, snow, and ice.
Sure enough, it had meant them all. When we had climbed high enough and gone northward enough to turn the flank of Pike’s Peak, there stood the great mountain, solid walls of white on its north and northwest sides; it looked like eternal winter, and we chuckled to think how shrewd Spring had been to halt ten miles back down the pass. Bare trees, bare roadsides, deep mud, icy sloughs, chilly winds, —these were what we got by racing ahead of Spring, up the Ute Pass, on that late May day.
It was twilight. As we floundered through the fast-stiffening mud in front of the little inn where we were to pass the night, we said to each other, “ Did we really see anemones and mertensias and willow catkins and purple vetches three hours ago? Is this Wonderland, and are we Alice and the rabbit? Shall we be short or long when we step out of the carriage?”
The Kansas woman who was temporarily acting as landlady of the little inn took the same view of the paradoxical situation of things that we did; but having neither a poetical temperament nor an acquaintance with Lewis Carroll’s wonderful fairy story, she expressed herself more tersely, and also more to the point:—
“ Ye would n’t call this spring, now, would ye? ” she said. “ Why, last night the hailstones were lying two inches deep up to this very door-step. It does beat all. We came here two weeks ago from Kansas, and there the grass was real high, and all our vegetables up. This country beats all.”
While she was speaking, a heavilyloaded freight wagon came creaking, twisting, and plunging along in the mud. It was drawn by only two horses; the poor things tugged till the muscles in their legs stood out like ropes. The driver, muddy and wet up to his knees, ran by their side, laying on the whip, swearing now in German, now in English, as he sank into one deep hole after another. Before the inn door he halted, wiped his face, and looked anxiously at the wagon.
“ How much does your load weigh?" I asked.
“ Twenty - t’ree hunder,” he answered. “ I did not t’ought it vas so bad. But she pull like devil, dat mare,” pointing to the near horse; “she wort two, to pull. But I dill not t’ought it so bad.”
“ Oh, they go by every day, worse loaded than that,” said the Kansas woman. “ I thought I’d seen cattle driven hard in Kansas, but I had n’t. It seems as if every teamster on this road was bound to get to Leadville, dead or alive, no matter how many cattle he kills on the road. It’s a downright shame! I don’t suppose the silver’s goin’ to run away before you get there, — do you? ” she continned, addressing the teamster, severely. “ Why don’t you take one more day, or two days, on the road, and show some mercy to your beasts? It would pay ye better ’n hurry in’ through.”
“ Dat ish so,” said the man, striking the good mare a sharp cut on the hindquarters, which made her plunge violently forward, and really start the wagon before her slower mate had bestirred herself at all. “ Dat ish so; but must make time; all bodies ish railing for deir t'ings. Vat wagon go quickest, he get most freight.”
From the window above came the faint wail of a very young babe. Only a few days before, the little creature had come to begin life in this lonely, storm-smitten spot. There was something infinitely touching in the low cry. If it had come from the top of one of the tall, creaking pines, it would not have seemed to belong more thoroughly to the wilderness ; no young of wild bird in all the surrounding forest more helpless and more unconscious of the meaning of the perpetual going up and down of money seekers on the road below.
Next morning, clear sun and white frost everywhere. Seven miles of muddy slough were powdered thick with tiny ice crystals, whose treacherous beauty would only make the muddy slough worse an hour later. Out on the open of the Platte River, northward along its meadows, then westward again, over divide after divide, through seemingly interminable forests of spruce and fir, and so we came at sunset to the edge of the great South Park. Here we found the song sparrow; or at least if he were not the song sparrow, he was a sparrow with a song, “ How would you describe the song of that bird? ” said I to the realist. “ Does it not baffle all description? ”
“ Oh, no,” was the instant reply. “Two sweet little whoops, a twiddle, and a twitter.”
And that is precisely what it was. Will an ornithologist recognize our bird by this token?
All along the way we had found flocks of blackbirds eating greedily in the road and on the roadsides, hundreds in a flock, and so tame that they only hopped, like hens, leisurely to right or left, as we passed, often barely escaping the wheels. Even these tiny creatures were profiting by the new discoveries of silver in Leadvilie; but who told them that freight wagons and campers would be on this particular road this particular summer? They were like the stragglers in the rear of a great army on its march, picking up a comfortable vagabond living on the remains of the army supplies. Sometimes, the first indication we saw that a spot had been a camping-ground the night before was a solid black patch of these birds, heads down, tails all in a quiver, crowding, pushing, snapping, as if they were in terror of being driven away before getting their fill. They were so fat and round-bodied they waddled. Evidently, they had been part of the Leadville procession for weeks. When the reaction comes, as it does come in all these mining excitements; when some bigger mines are found in some other mountain, or the Leadville mines begin to dwindle in yield, and the frantic throng of delvers and sellers turns into another road, how will the little blackbirds begin to wonder and wait. They too will have to come down from a season of unearned plenty to one of want. Yet they are luckier than men: they can take wing any morning, and fly till they come where food is; at worst, they can return to their native wild foods, which though scantier are no doubt more wholesome for them than the oats and corn of civilization. But they are sure of feasting so long as the Leadville fever lasts, for all roads leading to the town are alive: freight wagons coming down loaded with ore, and freight wagons going up loaded with every conceivable thing, from mining machinery and railroad iron down to baby-wagons and pepper-casters; we saw sixty-two of these wagons in this first day’s journey of ten hours. The most interesting thing in the procession, next to the blackbirds, was the human element: families — fathers, mothers, with crowds of little children, bedsteads, iron pots, comforters, chairs, tables, cooking-stoves, cradles — wedged into small wagons, toiling slowly up the long hills and across the long stretches of plain, all going to Leadville to seek that fortune which had so evidently eluded their efforts hitherto; solitary adventurers, whose worldly possessions consisted of a pack-mule, a bundle, and a pick-axe; and adventurers still more solitary, with only the bundle and pick-axe, and no mule; dozens of these we passed.
“ Going to Leadville? ” was our usual greeting.
“ Wall, yes; I was a-thinkin’ I 'd make my way over there,” was a frequent reply, often followed by the anxious inquiry, “ How fur is it ? ”
We always gave them the distance as low as we conscientiously could. It seemed cruel to say to that sort of pedestrian that he had fifty or a hundred miles to walk; and it seemed half inhuman to whirl past him with our fast trotting horses.
The South Park is sixty miles long and forty wide, walled on all sides by high mountains. When it was a lake it held many fair and wooded islands; these islands are now fair and wooded hills, among which winds sluggishly the Platte River, all that is left of the waters of the olden time. A belt of green meadow, invaluable for farming and pasturage, marks the course of the river, and ranchmen are growing rich on its free domain. We slept in one of the most comfortable of the ranches, and were up and off again early on our second morning; snow-covered peaks before us, behind us, east, west, north, south, — a panorama of the guard mounting of Winter over one of Summer’s palaces. And the figure is, after all, not so forced as it sounds; for it is the slow and almost exhaustless filtering down from the mountains’ reservoir of snow which keeps the rivers full and the park green and fertile. The western foot-hills were dark blue and purple; the snow line just above the blue and purple sharply defined and dazzling white. Winding among the fair and wooded hills we had a succession of changing vistas, and new revelations of the mountain walls in the distance. They looked arctic and forbidding; as we journeyed toward the northwest boundary of the park, where Mount Lincoln and its surrounding group make the great water-shed of the continent, we could well fancy ourselves looking toward Labrador. To heighten the effect, columns of storm gathered in the north, inky black, and moved slowly southward, following the mountain line. In spaces they suddenly fringed out into a great glory of white mist, spent themselves for a few moments, then gathered up all their forces and hurried on, in narrower and blacker pillars against the sky.
As we drew near the town of Fair Play, we descended into a miserable bottom-land, full of sloughs and pools of muddy alkali water. Long and sinister-looking lines of gaunt firs bounded and divided this evil region; its tint was ghastly and dead; as our wheels rolled through the sticky water they were instantly covered thick with a white and muddy incrustation, like the hideous things which rural people in some sections of our country make out of variously colored alum solutions. It was a spot for despair, for murders, for suicides. The town of Fair Play, lying in full sight on the foot-hills to the north, and not more than six miles away, looked unreal, unattainable. If we had found ourselves suddenly seized by some dire enchantment and forced to circle round and round, hopeless, slower and slower, to be changed into speechless firs rooted in the desolate moor, it would have seemed nothing surprising. I did not know that Colorado held so unredeemed a spot.
To enter Fair Play from the South Park, you cross the Platte River; that is, you cross the place where the Platte River once was. Men have treated the Platte River roughly here. They have ripped it up, so to speak, and not left a thread of it in place. They are forever sluicing it, draining it, pumping it dry, twisting and torturing it, to get the gold of which its water has been full in its day; but the stream is getting to be poverty-stricken in its old age, and no longer returns such lavish good for evil to its persecutors. It looks now like an old gully worn out by years of freshets; and the water, all of it which is not cooped up in sluices, zigzags along in slow, purposeless, tinkling lines, as if it were not worth while to try to go anywhere in particular. You lower yourself cautiously down a precipice into this gully, pick your way across it, climb up another precipice, and then you are in Fair Play. The name has an attractive sound, as if mirth and mercy had joined hands with justice; but when you hear the legend from which the name sprang, it loses its charm, and makes you shudder.
Two men loved one woman, as lias been the way of men ever since the world began. The man whom the woman loved deserted her. The man whom the woman did not love followed the faithless lover, found him, unarmed, working with his miner’s pick on the banks of the Platte River,—perhaps just where we crossed that day; nobody knows now the spot where the lovers fought. The avenger pointed his rifle, and was about to fire. The guilty betrayer threw up his hands and called out, —
“ Go home, then, and get your rille,” said the true lover of the woman and of honor I'll wait for you here.”
The other must have had honor, also, for he did not fly; he came back, and met, what perhaps he did not wholly deserve, his death. The rival disappeared, and this is all that is known to-day of the two men and the woman whose loves and sorrows made such sharp tragedy and named the little town.
In its infancy Fair Play, like all mining towns, was full of hope, enthusiasm, and brilliant expectation; it knows better now; nobody has made a very big fortune. It is dull work simply earning a living and no more, — getting just gold enough to pay one’s current expenses, when one has had visions of being a millionaire; but if a man would only realize it, it is matter for some thankfulness in this world even to get a living, and mining is not on the whole a harder vocation than many others. When Fair Play recovers from the reaction of disappointment and relative failure, it will perhaps put shoulder to the wheel and be blithely industrious, clear up its disorderly streets, and make itself into a tidy and contented town, which there is every reason for its being. At present it is the picture of slovenly confusion: broken and dirty ditches through which unwholesome water is carried about for the town to drink; uuneat-looking houses with only here and there an attempt at inclosure; great waste spaces littered with old bones, tin cans, junk, dead hens, cats, ground moles, straw, paper, rags; and if there he any other variety of refuse likely to accrue to a town from untidy habits on the part of its citizens, it is to be found in the highways and byways of Fair Play. The demoralizing effect on a community of living year after year in such surroundings is hardly to be reckoned. It will make itself felt “ unto the third and fourth generation.”
The most contented-looking person I saw in Fair Play was a German woman who kept a shop, where she sold newspapers, tobacco, and herbs. The place was barely big enough to turn round in, and looked and smelled as if it belonged to an out-of-the-way street in Prague.
“ Do you like living in Fair Play ? ”
I asked her.
“ Ach, yes; I haf been in mush bad der place,” she replied, with a chuckle.
“Where was that? ” said I.
“ Shentral,” she answered. “ Ach, but dat is hole-y place; if go out house, you ish unter mountain.”
So graphic a picture of Central City and of the condition of its inhabitants could not be drawn in good English.
“In a gulch and among gulches,” which is what we should say of the situation of the town, is very feeble by the side of “ hole-y place;” and how infinitely superior is “ you ish unter mountain ” to any or all of the circumlocuting phrases by which we should say that each street seemed to be tumbling down on the one below it!
Another contented-looking woman I saw; she also kept a shop, — dry goods, millinery, —and there was a dress-making department in addition. Her stock of goods was so surprisingly well selected that I took the liberty of saying so, and of asking some questions as to her method of doing business. A woman suffragist would have been delighted to hear the story of this Fair Play milliner, whose husband gives her the building for her shop, warms it and lights it for her, and then allows her to “ have for her own ” all that she can make off the shop. Six years she had kept it, and had never in all that time asked her husband for one cent of money, except for doctor’s bills. It struck me, not being a woman suffragist, that most shop-keeping men would be glad to get shops on these terms. However, the energetic milliner had not, apparently, looked at the matter from that stand-point. One of her business principles impressed me as being a noticeably good one; “ I never keep an inferior article,” she said; “ or, if I have to, I keep a first-rate one also of the same sort.”
The stage from Fair Play to Leadville starts at seven o’clock every morning. It is an open wagon with three seats; two horses draw it, no matter how many men it carries; luggage is not much taken into account, most of the stage passengers for Leadville being able to carry their luggage in one hand. Men going to Leadville with grave and permanent views are not apt to go by stage. The stage passengers are more likely to be prospectors, silent partners in mines running up for a few days to look into matters, adventurers, curiosity mongers,— in fact, it would be hard to mention the sort of man who is not to be found, in these days, going to Leadville, so strong is the magnet of rumors of new mines. Before the stage set off, I studied the eight faces of the men it carried. They were simply eight different types of expectation and plotting. They were silent, observant, full of reverie. I fancied that each of them wished he knew about the other seven, — whether they had “ struck ore ” or not, whether they were going to buy claims or not; but the money seeker keeps his own secrets.
We followed on, close in the wake of the stage. It was to be our guide.
“ How tiresome! ” I thought. “ We shall have to crawl along at a snail’s pace behind.” If the stage-driver had known of our apprehension, he might have laughed well at our mortification at discovering that our horses had hard work to keep up.
It was a clear morning; a hot sun, but a crisp air blowing off the mountains, which stood white as great icebergs against the blue sky. When the Colorado mountains are solidly covered with snow, their many-sided, wedged, crystallike formation becomes more striking, and makes them look in some lights simply like gigantic upheavals of frozen seas. The range we were to cross looked as white as the rest, but we were assured that, except at the very top of the pass, we should find no snow on the road. Nobody said anything about mud, and who would have thought to ask? A few miles southward down the park, then sharply to the right, threading among the wooded islands, and up into the foothills, and we were in Weston’s Pass, one of the very few clefts through which men can cross the great snowy range. As usual, a creek had made the way for the road. The slopes of the pass which faced the north were white with snow. The forests of spruce and fir showed black against it. The slopes facing the south were bare of snow, beginning to be green, young shoots well out on the firs, and here and there daisies in patches. On our left hand, winter; on our right hand, spring. The creek bottom was a study of delicious color. It was filled in solidly with willows, whose stems were claret, red, yellow, orange, slaty purple. To have painted a picture with this broad, curving belt of vivid tints lying low between a black and white mountain wall on the one side, and a green mountain wall on the other, would have been merely to invite laughter and scorn, as by a picture of the impossible. Nobody may dare be so daring as nature herself; no, not even so daring as to tell the truth about nature. Now and then little opens, where last year’s grass lay silvery or pale brown, added to the beauty of the belt of reds and yellows. In some places this belt must have been three hundred yards wide; in others it narrowed to a yard; but nowhere did any one tint, predominate; they mingled like threads shot in and out of some gossamer fabric, distinct yet blending, transparent yet solid. As we climbed up, the contrasts grew more vivid,—the forests blacker, the snow whiter, the willows redder. At last we were twelve thousand feet high. The forests suddenly ceased; the creek sank farther from sight among sharp and barren hills; forbidding peaks, seemingly all of disintegrated rock, with here and there colossal bowlders to hold them down, rose on all sides, their tops shining with snow; snow-banks began to appear on the roadside; on the edge of one of these, where the sun had melted a tiny opening, looked up one white strawberry blossom ; and on two or three of the barrenest hills we saw the blue anemone, lying low, dainty and courageous. But at the top of the pass was a deep-sunk lake; it was frozen solid; the wind had swept the snow off its surface, and piled it up in a wall on two sides. This was the highest point; from this summit we looked down into the great Arkansas valley, which would be called a park, doubtless, except for its view. The Sawatch mountains, sharp, serrated, made its western wall. They were dazzling white with snow; only for a few moments did we enjoy this surpassing view. The stage, which was a few rods before us, began suddenly to execute the most surprising gyrations. My first thought was that the driver had lost his senses and was driving over bowlders. The realist knew better. An ejaculation of something very like dismay broke from his practical lips. A few seconds more, and we ourselves were gyrating, floundering, as the stage had been; it took all the nerve and muscle of our good little horses to pull us through the morass mud — black, sticky, bottomless mud — on this mountain ridge, twelve thousand feet above the sea. As we descended the slope, a sorry sight met our eyes: all we could see was a ghastly alternation of snow-drifts and black mud. The road, a gloomy belt of inky water, disappeared at intervals between high walls of snow on either hand; it was simply a track hewn through the snow-banks. On the left hand the ground sloped away sharply, almost precipitously, in places, down to the snow-filled bed of a creek. On the right it was less forbidding; there were here and there open spots on which it seemed probable a man, if he were cautious, might stand without slumping through. These gracious high and dry spots were crowded with freight wagons in different states and stages of unloading and general confusion, mules in different states and stages of exhaustion, and men in different states and stages of profanity. Some of the wagons were stuck fast in mud; some drivers were unloading and dividing their load into two parts, to make two trips across the ridge; some were unhitching their horses and mules, to “double up” on the more heavily loaded wagon of a comrade. All was misery. In desperation, for there was nothing else to be done, we floundered along, following closely the lead of the floundering stage. The driver knew better than we where the mud was deepest. Except for the sight of the stage ahead, we would hardly have ventured on and in. Again and again we thought it had surely gone over, or sunk too deep to get out. Our little horses went in literally up to their bellies; their legs seemed to fly and sprawl like the legs of spiders. Even the realist was alarmed.
“ How much road is there like this? ” he asked one of the freighters.
“ Oh, only about three miles where it’s so muddy; none of it so bad ’s this,” he replied, cheerfully, as if it were all nothing more than what might be expected in spring on mountain tops.
“ That man is a philosopher,” said the realist.
“ What 'd ye say, sir?” asked the man, thinking the words were addressed to him.
“ Nothing, nothing,” the deceitful realist replied. “ I did not speak. This is the worst road I ever ” . . He did not finish his sentence. At that moment we suddenly sank into a trough of mingled mud, water, and ice; the trough was barely wide enough for the carriage; walls of muddy snow from eight to ten feet high were on both sides of it. The bottom of the trough was simply more snow; soft in places; worn away in places by bidden currents of water. The horses sank, we sank; the horses scrambled out, and as no part of the harness gave way the carriage had to follow, but it was an ugly piece of work. Nobody spoke a word. The stage-driver, in spite of his own difficulty, looked back anxiously at us. A worse spot for an upset, or one where an upset seemed so inevitable, I never saw. Nothing but positive virtue could carry horses safely out. This did not last long, luckily. When we were out we stopped and looked back. Doré would have liked to add the sketch of that hill-side to his portfolio of studies for the horrible. And in one hour we were on smooth, green, grassy opens in the Arkansas valley: such is Maying in Colorado.
California Gulch, in which or on which the new town of Leadville is growing up, lies at right angles to the Arkansas valley, and about twelve miles from the head waters of the Arkansas River. It was a wild gulch, its sides grown thick with spruce forests, and a little snow-fed creek making its way down among them. But the waters of the creek held gold, and men soon found it out, cut down the spruce forests, and began placer mining all along the sides of the gulch. They are torn up and riddled, to-day, as if an earthquake had shaken them violently. All this while, in the stony mountains at the head of the gulch, lay stores untold of solid silver, of which the miners lower down, working for gold sands by the handful, never so much as dreamed. It is the old story of treasure biding the time of the man who knows its secret. One day, a man who knew one stone from another picked up a bit of mineral and handed it slyly and significantly to his comrade, saying nothing. The comrade, experienced in the ways of mines, took it, saying nothing, and pocketed it. The gulch was full of men: there were those working by their side to whom one word might be a hint. Later, alone, the two comrades conversed with each other on the subject of this bit of stone. They took cautious and secret rambles over the mountain side. They said not one word to anybody for two years, but quietly possessed themselves largely of lands. To-day, in one mine which these two men own, you may see, it is said, six millions of dollars’ worth of silver; not infer it, trust, hope, believe it, from the " dip,” or " bearing,” or “ vein,” as is usually the ease in silver mines, but see it; (he walls of the galleries are. it! The miners simply chop the walls down, foot by foot, and wheel out the ore in barrows.
And the whole range is believed to be full of the precious metal. It is the western slope of the mountains lying back of Fair Play, on whose eastern slopes many profitable mines have been worked for years. It is odd that miners did not at once think that if one side of a mountain were made of silver, the other was likely to be. But they did not ; and so the Leadville silver bided its time.
The town is a marvel. In six months a tract of dense spruce forest has been converted into a bustling village. To be sure, the upturned roots and the freshly hacked stumps of many of the sprucetrees are still in the streets of the town; fallen spruce-trees, too, on which you can sit down to rest, and here and there clumps of superb tall ones standing, which afford a most grateful protection from Colorado’s hot May sun, — the sun which made that mud I spoke of at the top of Weston’s Pass. Great spaces of scorched sage brush are to be seen, its gray stalks looking as twisted as if they had been wrung out wet and thrown down to dry. Great spaces covered with chips, also; nobody had time to pick up his chips, and they are handy to horn; the houses are all log cabins, or else plain, unpainted, board shanties. Some of the cabins seem to burrow in the ground; others are set up on oosts, like roofed bedsteads. Tents; wigwams of boughs; wigwams of bare poles, with a blackened spot in front, where somebody slept, last night, but will never sleep again; cabins wedged in bet ween stumps; cabins built on stumps; cabins with chimneys made of flower-pots or bits of stove pipe, —I am not sure but out of old hats; cabins half roofed; cabins with sail-cloth roofs; cabins with no roof at all, —this represents the architecture of the Leadville homes. The Leadville places of business are another thing; there is one compact, straight street, running east and west, in the centre of this medley of sage brush, spruce stumps, cabins, and shanties. Here are shops, restaurants, billiard rooms, dance halls, banks, lawyers’ offices, hotels, livery stables,—all that a town needs. There are fairly-built, wooden houses, principally of the battlement-front style, and one story high, —a few of them two stories high,— and not without some pretense of finish; the platforms and steps in front of them make one continuous line of lounging grounds, for Leadville men. I counted forty-six at one time in a short distance, men either leaning against door-posts, or sitting with their elbows on their knees. The middle of the street was always filled with groups of men talking.
Wagons were driven tip and down as fast as if the street were clear. It looked all the time as if there had been a fire and the people were just about dispersing, or as if town-meeting were just over. Everybody was talking, nearly everybody gesticulating. All faces looked restless, eager, fierce. It was a Monaco gambling room emptied into a Colorado spruce clearing.
The town lies well up on the slope; the mountain off-look toward the west is good, —the broad, green valley of the Arkansas, some miles wide, and the Sawatch mountains, all from ten to fourteen thousand feet high, all snow-topped, beyond. From higher points on the mountain, where clearings have been made for the miners, the view is made much more beautiful by the near foreground of the solid green of the spruce forest. Just in the edge of the forest are large reduction works, their smoke pouring up a perpetual lurid column of almost rainbow tints. Here one may see long rows of bins filled with the ore from different mines. It looks simply like yellow dirt, but fire turns it into solid silver. I looked into the mouths of the great furnaces; the molten mass bubbled and seethed; from one opening ran the worthless “ slag,” from the other the shining metal. The slag was caught in an iron vessel shaped liked an inverted bee-hive, and swung between two wheels. By a long tongue, two men drew it out, emptied the fiery liquid on the ground and shook out the crust which in that few seconds had solidified into a cast of the bee-hive. The ground was strewn with these casts, and crusted with the hardened slag in shapes like those of lava beds.
Near the other opening were piles of solid bullion bars ready to be shipped, each bar worth about fifty dollars. I saw a dozen of these made in a few minutes.
By a queer and paradoxical mental process, money seems to be at once cheapened and made precious as you watch it being created by the ton. There is no reason why everybody should not be a millionaire; and as for actual poverty, it is perverse and impossible.
In the afternoon we climbed the mountain side to the highest point where mines are being worked. Looking up from the town we could see nothing except a solid front of spruce forests, but winding in among the trees we found mines and miners every few rods; before we could see them, the creak of the windlass would draw our attention to the spot. They were all alike: a square hole in the ground planked over like a disused well; just open space enough left for a man to go up and down; a windlass, rope, and bucket; two men at the windlass; one below, filling the bucket. Over and over and over, all day long, the bucket is lowered and raised, emptied on the yellow pile of earth or ore, at one side, —lowered and raised, lowered and raised, from eight to twelve times an hour. Bending over the dark opening, you can hear the faint clink, clink, of the miner’s shovel at the bottom of the well; it sounds incredibly far off. The men at the windlass lean on their elbows in the intervals of rest, and look off vacantly into space. They are paid by the day, most of them; it is all one to them what the bucket brings up, earth or ore. Now and then, however, when a new shaft is being worked, and it is uncertain whether ore will be " struck " or not, as the decisive time draws near there is great excitement at the windlass. Any moment may show that which will reveal that a fortune lies below. It is like waiting a throw of the dice.
It is two miles from the town up to the highest mine now being worked. Nobody seems to think the road a bad one; but it is simply a mixture of gullies, morasses, and bowlders. A New England farmer would hardly think his oxen could draw wood down such a road, yet every day the Leadville mules and horses draw four-thousand-pound loads up, and eightthousand-pound loads down, and make nothing of it, — so their drivers say. The stretches of spruce forest are grand, and even the thickly-scattered mines, with their windlasses and piles of ore, do not much break the sense of profound solitude. The ground is in places literally matted with Linnea vines, the first I have found in Colorado; why it should elect to grow at this altitude of eleven thousand feet, and decline to grow lower down in the same latitude, is not easily seen. In New England it luxuriates at elevations of twelve to fourteen hundred feet; in the White Mountain region and in Nova Scotia it runs riot in the woods along the banks of tidal rivers; but in Colorado I have never found it before. It startled me, looking up suddenly in my face in the dark depths of these spruce forests. It would have been easy to fancy the dainty thing chuckling at my surprise. The vine is a little more compact, leaves smaller and closer together, than at the East, but the mats are thick and glossy, and can be taken up solidly. When it is in bloom, the air of these wildernesses must be almost overpoweringly sweet with its fragrance, added to the aromatic odor of the spruce. I ran against another old friend, also, on this high mountain, — the yellow buttercup, genuine glossy buttercups; these and a new variety — to me — of white daisy grew in a hit of green and spongy meadow which lay far up on the mountain side.
Around two of the largest mines we found clearings of some size, and comfortable wooden buildings put up,—boarding-houses for the miners, offices, and stables. In one of these boarding-houses was a woman who reminded me of the Fair Play milliner in clear business-like qualities. She had “ taken ” this miner’s boarding-house on her own responsibility, and during the first month had made profit enough to buy the furniture for her bedroom, goblets, glass preserve dishes, and pitchers for the table; at least fifty dollars she must have spent on these things. And she had not made the money by starving her boarders, either, for I chanced to be in her house as she was putting dinner on the table, and very much I wished I could accept her hospitable invitation to eat dinner with them, the meal looked so thoroughly good: roast beef, potatoes, stewed tomatoes, pie (of course), stewed cranberries, and a sort of jelly cake; the bread looked delicious. All was neatly served, and on a white table-cloth.
“ The men think everything of that,” the woman said, with justifiable pride. “ Some folks think miners don’t know the difference, but they do. This is the only boarding-place where they get a white table-cloth, and they jest do enjoy it. It’s some trouble to wash ’em, but I’d rather ’n not.”
The ordinary visitor to Leadville listens to the talk of men, and busies himself with the statistics of the newly-made fortunes. These conversations, as you overhear them, on street corners, doorsteps, in hotel offices, sound bewildering enough, almost like a jargon of new dialects. And no doubt there is much of interest to be learned from them, — some most remarkable cases: for instance, like this of two brothers, Irishmen, common day laborers, so poor that they had difficulty in supporting their families. One day they would have been glad and thankful to engage themselves for three months at two dollars a day, to dig; the next, they had sold their “ claim ” tor two hundred thousand dollars, and had had the actual money counted down into their hands. And of another man who offered his mine for sale, went about vainly begging people to buy it for four thousand dollars, and is now taking out of it eight hundred or a thousand dollars a day. There are numbers of cases similar to these; but to me the whole thing resolved itself, after all, into the same old story: so many men getting rich of a sudden; so many men getting poor; crowds pouring in to snatch at chances. Names and dates are of no account. The drama has been repeating itself over and over ever since the time when the Weitmorers mined gold in the Austrian Alps, centuries ago. Weitmorer then, Gallagher now. It is all one, or will be.
But the lives of the homes, the experiences of women, little children, fathers, mothers, — those are individual; those belong to humanity; those have the greatest interest. Of any new or exceptional life the narrative of one individual home will give a far better history than volumes of statistics and general descriptions. One who wishes to know the real atmosphere of a place lingers in suburbs, chats on door-stops, and does not concern himself about town records. By far the most vivid impressions I brought away from Leadville are of conversations which I had with women whom I met accidentally, and who never dreamed that they were talking history. Two of these women were washer-women: theirs is always the first and most thriving industry in a new mining town.
One of the women was a Canadian, mother of twelve children. Seven were with her in Leadville; four or five of them were rolling about on the floor of her log-cabin. The cabin had no window; a big fire-place supplied some ventilation, but not enough. The fumes of the boiling clothes made the place reek. This woman was hold, slatternly, and antagonistic. She saiil, with a toss of her head, that they had always lived " in style ” till they came to Leadville, but she thought she " might as well make a little money, ’s that was the order of the day. She reckoned, however, she should n’t keep on long. ’T was too hard work, and one dollar and a quarter a dozen did n’t pay, anyhow.”
Meantime, her children were in filthy rags, and she herself was barely decently clothed. If this woman’s husband finds his fortune in the hill-side, evil times will come of it.
The other washer-woman was English: a sweet-faced, fair, blue-eyed woman, painfully thin, and with a nervous vivacity and energy in every word and movement. Her cabin was in the edge of the forest. I had found her hanging out clothes the first time I climbed the hill, and had been much amused by her reply to my inquiry how she got water for her washing.
“ Oh, I ’ire my ’usband and his partner to pack it up ’ere for me. They pack up all my washing water, and I keep them in tobacco. That ’s our bargain.”
The next day, when I went by, the husband was at work putting up a little shed in addition to the cabin. Ah,” I said, " you are going to have another room. ”
“ Yes,” she siiid, “ ’e is going to put it up for me. I ’ve got it to pay for, though. Fourteen dollars it. ’ll cost me; not paying ’im for the work. ’E can take that out in board, I tell ’im,” and she looked affectionately at the strong, square-shouldered fellow, who did not betray by a change of muscle that he heard a word we said.
“ It is a comfort to see anybody look so contented as you do,” said I.
She laughed out. “Sugar, Sugar!” she called to her husband, “ the lady says I look so contented.”
“ Live with her, mum, an’ you ’ll see the difference,” said Sugar gruffly, but with a half twinkle in his eyes.
“ Oh, you can’t deceive me,” I said. “ I know by the little wrinkles all round her eyes that she laughs a great deal.”
“ And the corners of her mouth turn up, too,” continued Sugar, proudly and confidingly, thawing out at last. Then they fell to chaffing each other goodnaturedly about the new shed and how it was to be paid for. “ She always gets the best of me, somehow. She ’s sharp enough for that,” said he.
And she: “ Ah, ’e ’s always a-borrowin’ money of me, an’ there’s never any change, when it’s to pay.” But it was plain that they loved each other, and matters generally went well between them. Twenty-seven dollars she had earned by her washing the last week, and she would earn more this; but “a dollar was not worth any more here than a shilling in the old country,” she said. She had been a servant in a gentleman’s house in Liverpool, and she liked it much better there than in America. People talked about all people’s being alike in this country; she did n’t see it. If you had money, you were somebody; if not, you, were nobody. Poor woman! it was a strange thing that she had such merry wrinkles around her eyes, for she had known great suffering. For three years after coming to this country she had been very ill, and had finally had “ a tumor large as a water jug ” taken out of her side. For a year she could not sit up or move. “ It cost ’im as much as eight hundred dollars, my bein’ sick,” she said; “ an’ that took just about all we had.” Now she felt perfectly well again, if she did not sit and sew. She could wash or iron all day long, “ from morning till night, an’ never get tired; anything but sewing.” The last year they had lived above timber line, and she had washed and ironed “every day but Sundays for one whole year, and hardly sat down.”
There was a lesson for pleasure lovers, and all grumblers, in the laughter record on the temples of this working woman, I am not sure that I know today any other face which has so long a “ tally ” of smiles.
A mile farther up on the mountain I met Cupid and Psyche. One meets them everywhere, the masqueraders, of so many ages and in so many different garbs that one never knows where or how they will turn up next. This time Cupid was a tiny fellow, about ten; he wore ragged gray trousers and a flannel shirt of red and black check. Psyche was a little older, — twelve, per haps; she wore a limp, short, blue cali co gown, an apron of plaid, and a green sunbonnet which hung far down her back. Her pretty brown hair, half in, half out, of curl, reached to her waist. She held her apron gathered up carefully in one hand; it was evidently full of something very heavy.
“ Goodness!” I exclaimed, “where have you been, children?”
“ Oh, up to the Crescent Mine,” they answered, both speaking at once.
“ What have you in your apron?” said I.
“ Specimens,” they answered proudly, still speaking both at once, as if some mysterious bond linked their vocal organs together; and Cupid took hold of Psyche’s hand, and loosening her grasp of the apron folds opened them, so that I might see their treasures.
I examined them eagerly with deceitful interest, to lure the children on to more talk. “What is this?” I said; “ and this ? ” touching some of the stones.
“ Oh, that’s no good,” said Cupid, scornfully; “ that ’s jest waste.”
“ I don’t care,” said Psyche. “ It’s real pretty, and I’m going to have it in my museum.”
Cupid tossed the stones over with a lofty air of superior information. “ That’s third-class ore,” he said, pointing out one piece; “ and that s—well, I guess that’s pretty near first-class. They don’t let us take much that ’s real firstclass, though; but that’s more ’n secondclass, I’m sure.”
“ How do you know them apart? ” I asked, eying the confident little chap more closely, he seemed so ludicrously mature for his size.
“ Oh, I ’ve been told lots o’ times,” he replied; and waxing garrulous under my admiring gaze, “ I’ve been down a hundred feet under the ground, too, in lots o’ mines, on a ladder; ’t was all icy, too.”
“ What did you see down there?” I said.
“ Oh,” contemptuously, as if it were not worth while to particularize to an ignoramus like me, “ lots o’ stuff. It seemed as if you’d never git to the bottom.”
“ One of these days you won’t,” interrupted Psyche, sententiously, looking down at Cupid from her vantage-ground of some two inches more height. He quieted under her glance, and began kicking in the dust uneasily with one of his bare and dusty little feet.
“ Do you like living in Leadville? ” said I to Psyche.
“ No,” she replied, “I don’t like Leadvllle very well. I like a bigger place. We used to live in Denver. That’s splendid. I used to like to look at these mountains, but I don’t now. We had such a terrible time gettin’ over ’em. We was a whole week comin'.”
“ How did you come? ” I asked.
“ Oh, we come in a wagon : marmer [mamma] and us — there’s three of us — an’ Miss Sanborn an’ Mr. Elkins. He drove. Parper he’d been here all winter, an’ he sent for us to come; an’ Mr. Elkins he wanted to come, an’ he said he’d drive for his board ; an’ manner an’ Miss Sanborn they thought that would n’t be much; but my! he jest et and et; it seemed as if he could n’t ever eat enough. Ye see, we had our own pervisions. Miss Sanborn she laid in four dollars’ worth, and marmer she laid in live dollars’ worth, and she thought that would carry us through; but my! we had to buy all over again in Fair Play. So you see we was out all that,” and the worldly-wise little Psyche stopped, and drew a long, sighing breath at the recollection. Then she continued; “ Miss Sanborn she gave fifty cents for bread, at once; and mariner she gave fifty cents too, and it did n’t last any time; an’ then we had to buy oats an’ hay for the horses every day; so we was out all that; an’ mariner she said, anyhow, she would n’t do it over again, not if she got her fare for nothin’.”
Cupid listened to this narrative with a shrewd and serious expression, which gave a queer and incongruous sort of dignity to his small face. They knew a great deal about ways and means, these babies; quite too much for their years. It was pathetic to see. Psyche’s brow knit itself into wrinkles, as she enumerated the “fifty cents for bread,” and the “four dollars” and “five dollars’ worth” of “pervisions;” and added, with a sort of taken-for-granted intelligent freemasonry between herself and me, “ You see we was out all that.”
I did not want to hear her talk any more about such sordid details, so I said, looking towards Cupid, “ Is this your brother? ”
“ Oh, no,” she replied; “ we ’re ” —
She hesitated for a word. “ Just friends? ” I suggested, laughing inwardly to think how many times a year Psyche was caught in that same dilemma of need of defining her relation to Cupid.
“ Yes,” she nodded, “ that ’s it. Just friends. Come on!” And seizing Cupid by the hand, she set off on a quick run down the hill. As they ran, Cupid said something which I only half heard. I heard the word “ friends,” however; and Cupid laughed.
Could it have been that the little barefooted beggar was chuckling defiantly over my volunteered shield of phrase to describe his relation to Psyche? Just like Cupid !
H. H.