O-Be-Joyful Creek and Poverty Gulch
“ WHAT ’S in a name ?” is no idle question in a mining country. Everything is in the names ; records of hope, disappointment, success, failure, exiles’ homesickness, lovers’ passion, desperadoes’ profanity,— all are left, written often in strange syllables on the rocks, hills, and streams of the half-conquered wilderness.
When the wilderness has proved a mockery, refusing to give up its treasures, and the miners have pushed on, leaving behind them no trace except deserted cabins and mounds of tin cans, the names they gave still linger, becoming part of the country’s history, and outranking in importance ordinary geographical designations. No doubt, in centuries to come, antiquaries will puzzle and delve over the nomenclatures in all those portions of America now known as “ mining regions.” It would not be strange, either, if the tin-can mounds ultimately became centres of archæological research. Nothing can be more certain than that, if the human race continues to advance, an age will come which will abhor and repudiate the tin can, with all its sickening contents. After a century or two of disuse and oblivion, the hideous utensil and its still more hideous foods will be relegated to their proper place as relics of a phase of barbarism ; and then the exhuming of some of the huge mounds of them, now being piled up in mining camps, will be interesting to all persons curious in such matters. The miner’s frying-pan also may come in for a share of analytic attention ; will perhaps take a place in museums, in the long procession headed by the Indian’s stone mortar and pestle. It may even come about that there will be an age catalogued in the archæologist’s lists as the tin age. Contrasted with it, what noble dignity will " the stone age ” assume !
Such forerunning fancies as these, sometimes fantastic, sometimes, again, melancholy to the last degree, haunt one in journeying among mining camps, old and new. It is hard to keep separate the fantastic and the sad, in one’s impressions ; hard to decide which has more pathos, the camp deserted or the camp newly begun, the picture of disappointment over and past or that of enthusiastic hopes, nine out of ten of which are doomed to die. I have sometimes thought that the newest, livest, most sanguine camps were saddest sights of all.
The expression of a fresh mining camp, at the height of its “ boom,” is something which must be seen to be comprehended.
The camp is in the heart of a fir forest, perhaps, or on the stony sides of a gulch. Trees fall here, there, everywhere, day and night. Nobody draws breath till he has got a cabin, or a bough hut, or a tent over his head. As if by magic, there grows up a sort of street, a dozen or two board shanties, with that cheapest and silliest of all shams, the battlement front, flaunting its ugly squares all along the line. Glaring signs painted on strips of cotton sheeting, bleached and unbleached, are nailed over doors. In next to no time, there will be a “mint,” an “exchange,” a “bank,” a “ Vienna bakery,” a “ Chinese laundry,” a “ hotel,” and a “ livery stable.” Between each night and morning will blossom out crops of “ real estate offices,” and places where “ mining properties are bought and sold,” “ claims located, proved, bought and sold,” “ surveys of mining claims made,” etc. ; crops also, alas, of whiskey saloons, with wicked names and lurid red curtains, danger and death signals.
The stumps are not taken out of the pretense of a road, neither are the bowlders; nobody minds driving over them, or over anything, in fact, so he gets quick to his “ claim,” or to the tract in which he is feverishly “ prospecting.” If a brook trickles through the camp, so much the better; it can do double duty as drain and well. Luckiest they who drink highest up, but they who drink lowest down do not mind. The women, if women there are, are fierce and restless, like the men. They make shifty semblances of homes out of their one-roomed cabins. It is not worth while to have things comfortable, or keep them in order, for there is no knowing whether the camp will turn out to be a good one or not; and tomorrow they may pack up their chattels and move on. At the faintest rumor of a bigger “ find,” in another camp, the men to whom they belong will be off, and they must follow. They stand in their doorways, idling, wondering, waiting, gossiping, and quarreling. The only placid creatures are the babies, whose simple needs of sun, dirt, and being let alone are amply supplied. They are happy, and they only, in all the camp. It is a strange life, unnatural, unwholesome, leading to no good, comfortless to a degree which many of those who lead it would not endure a day, except for the hope of great gain, which fires their very veins. The worst of it is that the life is as fascinating as it is unwholesome. “ Once a miner always a miner ” is a proverb which is little less than an exact truth. The life is simply a gamester’s life, with the wide earth for a hazard table, and the instances are rare in which a person who has once come under its spell ever breaks away. It is no uncommon thing, in Colorado, to meet an old gray-haired man who has been prospecting and mining all his life, and has not yet made a dollar, but is buoyantly sure that he will “strike it” soon.
During the autumn of 1880 there were frequently to be seen in the Colorado newspapers, and also in the leading ones of the Eastern States, accounts of new and wonderful discoveries of precious metals and minerals in Gunnison County, Colorado. The excitement was not so intense and sudden as that which followed upon the Leadville finds, but it was sufficient to send thousands of men swarming into the “ Gunnison country,” as it was called, and to bring into existence, in less than a year, scores of brisk, bustling, “ bonanza ” mining towns.
“ On to Gunnison! ” was the cry throughout the mining population of the State. It is instructive as well as interesting to read now, and on the ground, the descriptions then written and the prophecies then made of some of these towns. There was, perhaps, no exaggeration in the descriptions or the prophecies, applying them to the region at large, for it is undoubtedly one of the richest and most varied in treasures in all Colorado. But the casual observer would hardly believe this, journeying to-day through some of the districts of which, at the beginning of the “ boom,” such unbounded successes were predicted. The likelihood of the first being last and the last first was never better proven and shown. There seems, on a closer view of the situations, to have been a half-fantastic analogy between the irregular and unforeseeable human conditions and successions in the country and the puzzling conditions and successions geologically recorded there : veins crossing and outcropping in inexplicable places ; crevices and fissures doubling on themselves, twisting and tying knots, tendril-like; deposits and measures due, according to all known antecedents, in one spot appearing in quite another, — overlying where they should underlie, going to left where they should go to right, and setting at defiance all the horizontal and vertical conventionalities in well-regulated geological society. Evidently there were periods when something, whether misery or joy, made strange bedfellows underground in Gunnison County. Evidently, also, the law had not then been heard of that as one makes his bed so he must lie ; for every mother’s son of them, — primitive granite, coal-measure sediments, silica, calc-spar, porphyry, — all have shifted around as they liked, century in and out, till a state of things has resulted which puzzles the best experts in rocks and formations.
The town of Crested Butte and its vicinity afford good opportunities for observing these interesting phenomena of both the upper and the under world.
Crested Butte lies among the peaks of the Elk Mountain range, twentyeight miles north of Gunnison City, in a beautiful basin, to the making of which go three mountains, two streams, and many gulches. The town gets its odd and rather high-sounding name at second hand, from the highest mountain in its neighborhood. “Why Hayden, in his survey, should have named this sharp, pyramidal peak Crested Butte does not at all appear until one goes some distance north of the mountain. Seen from that side, part of its sky line is a curious jagged cock’s-comb sort of crest, which vindicates the first half of the epithet, but leaves the last hardly less inappropriate than before : a peak twelve thousand feet high, its upper half of bare majestic stone, is surely entitled to a rank higher than “ Butte.”
Crested Butte, more than any other town, is centrally located in relation to the mines of Gunnison County. Every road leading out of the town to east, west, or north brings out before long in a mining camp. It is thus a natural centre of supplies, and has in that one fact alone an excellent reason for being, aside from its own resources, which are already so great that it would be a rash man who undertook to-day to set limit to them. Both south and north of the town are vast coal measures, the extent of which can as yet only be guessed at. Thousands of acres in the immediate outskirts of the village are evidently underlaid by the veins already in work, ing; and similar measures are to be traced on the terraced fronts of the hills and mountains for many miles to the north and west. Mountains full of silver and gold, and creek beds and gulches close at hand full of fuel to smelt and refine them, — what more could the heart of money-lover ask, and what plainer indication could nature give of the chief duty of man in lands thus formed and filled ? This would be the miner’s creed of predestination in the Crested Butte region.
One need not, however, be either money-seeker, miner, or predestinarian to enjoy Crested Butte and its vicinity. Even to eyes that could not tell trachyte from sandstone, or a coal measure from a granite ledge, the country has treasures to offer. There are many sorts of “ claims,” “prospectors,” and “ prospecting.”
There is a field of purple asters two miles west of Crested Butte that some people would rather possess for the rest of the summers of their lives than the coal bank opposite it, — a million times rather ; and it a man would secure them a perpetual “ claim ” to the roadway and a narrow strip of shore of O-BeJoyful Creek, he might have all the gold and silver in the upper levels of its canyon, and welcome. There is no accounting for differences in values; no adjusting them, either, unluckily. The men who are digging, coking, selling the coal opposite the aster field, do not see the asters ; the prospectors hammering away high up above the foaming, plashing, sparkling torrent of the O-BeJoyful water do not know where it is amber and where it is white, or care for it unless they need drink. And I, before whose eyes the aster field, only once seen, will go on and on waving its purples and yellows all winter, with the laugh of the O-Be-Joyful stream still echoing and the mystery of its amber pools still lingering in my heart, — I shall never see either the radiant field or the laughing water again.
There is one comfort : the “ market ” in which stock in aster fields and brooks is bought is always strong. Margins are safe, and dividends sure. Ten years from now, that coal bank may not pay, but I shall have my aster field. Whoever goes in July to Crested Butte may have it also, if he will drive out of town westward, up Coal Creek Gulch, on the road leading to the White Cloud, Ruby, Irwin, and Hopewell camps. It is a toll road, built at the time when from Ruby Camp there were daily being taken out masses of ruby native and wire silver, and fortunes were supposed to be waiting to be picked up on all hands. The road lies high on the southfacing slope of the gulch’s north wall ; far below it, to the left, dashes the black little stream, close to the base of the gulch’s south side, which is a steep and almost unbroken wall of fir and spruce forests. On the right-hand slope run the aster fields, — not asters alone, but every other flower of the region : where the slope is steepest, the uppermost ranks and ranges of blossoms are pricked out against the sky ; where the hills fall back, and the fields spread out at easier angles, their surface is a mosaic. The blue harebells, scarlet gilia, lupine of all shades of blue and purple, mariposa, golden-rod, white yarrow, purple vetch, red roses, are there in abundance wherever the purple aster leaves space ; but the asters have plainly been first in the field for generations. They grow like clover, in clumps and thickets, making in many places a firm tint of shaded mauve and purple, as solid as ever meadow clover can make at its best. Next to the asters in supremacy is wild parsley, which grows here with a magnificent prodigality, spreading feathery umbrels two hand’s-breadths broad. The delicate white “ bedstraw ” also is stippled in, in masses; and crowning, lighting up all, like the last touches of gold in the illuminated page, is spread a blazonry of yellow, — sunflowers of unusual varieties : one, deep orange, with long, pointed, drooping petals, like a greyhound’s ears, — perhaps it is not a sunflower; another, pale straw color, with an old-gold button in the centre, — dusky old gold, like the color of a bumble-bee in the sun ; another, small, thickset, like a glorified dandelion; golden coreopsis, of many kinds, and a satinsurfaced, yellow-disked blossom, like the immortelle: these are a few I knew, or partly knew, and can recollect. But there were scores of others, of which I knew neither face nor name. Never, except in a certain meadow in the Ampezzo Pass, in Titian’s country, have I seen such splendid and unstinted massing of flowers. Snow lies from five to twelve feet deep, in the Crested Butte region, all winter, and the winter is from five to seven months long. This is the secret — this, and the plentiful spring rains — of the short summer’s brilliant blossoming; only another of the myriad instances of the great and tender law of compensation.
There are eight miles of these flower fields and fir forests between Crested Butte and White Cloud, the first of the mining camps on the Ruby road. At the end of this eight miles the gulch suddenly widens into a basin, surrounded by high mountains, on the summits of which clouds are always resting. Hence the beautiful name of White Cloud. Of White Cloud’s past I learned nothing, except by the picture of its present : a half dozen houses, all deserted; windows boarded up, and wild weeds running riot over door-sills ; even the mounds of tin cans and broken bottles, sunk and softened into rounded contours, being fast draped in green and reclaimed into decency by gracious nature.
The most significant sight in White Cloud was a large building, evidently intended for smelting-works : every window and door boarded, and the whole place as it were barricaded by piles of rusty, battered iron machinery which would never again do duty, — piles of old iron wheels, cylinders, pipes, trays of pots, tanks, all the innumerable contrivances and devices for metal working; there they lay, in confused heaps, like the débris of a fire, or a wreck. And so they are, — débris of fire and wreck in which the hope and strength of many a heart have been lost forever.
At White Cloud the Ruby road turns sharply to the north and follows up another gulch, heading toward two high red mountains, named Ruby One and Ruby Two. In some lights, these peaks glow like carnelians, and it is easy to see why their baptismal name, Ruby, was numerically pieced out, and made to do double duty for them both. No other name would have answered so well for either.
Just beyond White Cloud we passed a heavy ore wagon, whose driver, at some inconvenience, drew out to one side of the narrow stony road, to let us pass ; an attention for which I expressed warm gratitude to him, and proceeded to make similar comments on it to my driver. He listened amusedly to all I had to say, and then replied, in a deliberate tone, —
“Well, p’r’aps he ain’t so kind’s you think. A feller that’s teamin’ on these roads’s got to be accommodatin’ ‘n’ git out th’ way, ’s often’s he can. Ef he don’t, there won’t nobody git out th’ way for him, don’t you see ? A feller’d better be accommodatin’, I tell you, or he ’ll get paid up ’mighty quick. Any feller ’s on the road ’ll tell all the rest.” After a short interval of reflection, he continued, “A pusson thet ain’t in any hurry can make a heap o’ trouble for one thet is,” which bit of well-phrased philosophy gave me pleasure, and is worth recalling in many a crisis in life.
Ruby is — was (one hesitates as to tenses, in speaking of these camps) much larger than White Cloud, and had a more vigorous and developed life in its day. It is not yet quite dead. Smoke was curling from a chimney or two; one multifarious shop had its door open ; also, one whisky saloon, where on the door-sill, with their elbows on their knees, sat three men, whose faces of ludicrous wonderment, as we drove by, were speaking tokens of the evenness of the tenor of the usual way in Ruby. Big-lettered signs, grotesquely out of proportion to the diminutive buildings, even in their heyday of brisk business, looked still more grotesque, now, on the fronts of shanties with doors boarded and windows either boarded or ghastly with cobwebs and broken panes. “ Ruby City Bank,” “ Exchange,” “ News Company,” all closed; the place that knew them knew them no more. Above some of the doorways hung fluttering shreds of cotton cloth, the remains of signs which more economical migrants (is there any other word that would so properly designate the class?) had stripped off their deserted houses, and carried on to the next camp.
Where Ruby leaves off and Irwin begins does not appear. In fact, the camps need not have had two names, most of the Irwinites being Ruby men, who pushed on a half mile farther up the gulch, to be nearer to the Forest Queen and other seductive mining properties of high-grade ores. Irwin still lives. At least half of the houses are occupied, and businesses of various sorts seem to be—it would perhaps be exaggeration to say, going on ; seem to be still extant would come nearer to giving a correct picture of the curious atmosphere of half-suspended activity which the place presents. Dumps of ore here and there on the hillsides and sounds of steam-pumping indicated that miners were at work ; the faces of the people also showed it. They were going about their business, in one way or another, but the very fact of this partial activity seemed only to heighten and emphasize the desolate look of the many houses deserted. I wondered what would be the effect on a sensitive and impressionable nature of living for a year in a place where one half the houses were not only empty, but abandoned forever by the men who had builded them. Simply the continued seeing of such houses might well breed a contagion of restlessness and migratory impulse. Whither did all those men go? Was it not to a better place ? Are they not glad they went ? There are not such fierce suns as this, perhaps, or so cold rains, where they are. “ Let us follow ! ” says the idle, dreaming thought, looking day after day on the deserted homes.
In the northward suburbs of Irwin were several deserted log cabins, among trees, in rude inclosures, overgrown and choked with scrambling, blossoming things. It was noticeable that there was about these no expression of dreariness or desolation. The log cabin is, of all man-built homes, the nearest to nature. Left unoccupied, it is quickly relegated to its original affinities, slips back into much of its old tree dignity, and can never by any chance become unsightly. Coming upon such a cabin, open-doored, windowless, the grass perhaps its only floor, the traveler is never repelled, only attracted. “ Not a bad place to sleep, if one need,” he says, and half wishes he need. But the board shanty, and above all the battlement-fronted board shanty, has only to be left disused for a brief period to acquire abjectness, ignominy, a look of having come from base uses and being fit only for such. There is room here for analysis and reflection, if one chose ; especially is there room for analytic reflection on the battlement front, its significance and insignificance. It is in pioneer ways and means and standards at once a feature and a factor ; its appearance and its disappearance are alike gauges of the community’s condition, a record much more exact than would be supposed. There can be few better signs in a new town than the arrival of the day when a man is ashamed to put up a battlement-fronted house, and knows that it would be against his business interests to do so.
Just beyond Irwin’s last uninhabited log cabin, on the shores of a beautiful emerald-green lake, we found a United States survey party camped.
“ You call these camps deserted ? ” said one of the engineers. " Why, these camps are lively. You have n’t been to Silver Cliff, I guess. Down there, there are thousands of acres with the prospect holes not over a foot apart. The ground is nothing more than a colander, and there is n’t a living person in Silver Cliff, and hasn’t been for a year. These Ruby camps are lively. You’d better go to Silver Cliff. It’s a sight worth seeing, just to look at those acres of prospect holes.”
At the head of the gulch, close at the base of Ruby One and Ruby Two, lies the town of Hopewell, the last of the four once “ booming” mining camps in Ruby Gulch. Of the half dozen houses, two were inhabited. One was the “ Pink Boarding - House,” a building quoted as a landmark in giving us our directions for finding the Ruby chief mine. The house was not so flagrant as its name ; æsthetic art would have found some other designation for its mongrel tint, which was nearer to the crushed strawberry than to any other defined color. It stood out in amazing relief. Its two high stories, abundant in windows, its double doors and expansive sides of startling hue, — all these contrasted with the desolate loneliness of the spot, and the low cabins of logs or rough boards on either hand seemed to lift the ugly structure into a sort of magnificence ; and it was not to be wondered at that it had attained an eminence of notoriety in the region.
The keeper of the Pink BoardingHouse was an elderly woman, with bright, resolute hazel eyes, who had a story to tell; one of the instances, so frequently met with in Colorado journeying, of lives which would read like romances if written out in detail. She moved from Seneca Falls in New York to Denver, in 1859 ; " the second white woman who,” as she emphatically said, “ ever set foot in Denver.” She lived there through the horrors of the Arapahoe and Cheyenne wars. She saw, drawn in open wagons through Denver streets, the dead bodies of men and women, killed by Indians. She also saw white men, Chivington’s men, murderers of friendly and unarmed Indians, ride through the same streets, carrying at their saddle-bows unmentionable trophies of the horrible massacre they had perpetrated. After seven years of this life, she migrated back again, eastward, to Wisconsin, where they had good luck, made a comfortable home, and lived until the mining fever of 1880 seized her husband. On the pleasant Wisconsin home, “ with every comfort heart could wish,” they had turned their backs, and plunged into this wilderness for gain of silver and gold. Here she had lived three years. Two winters she had spent in this home, with the snow twelve feet deep all around ; no going about except on snow-shoes; no going out at all, for her, for twelve long weeks. The windows on the south side of the house were blocked by drifted snow to the eaves; on the north side one row of panes in the upper-story windows was left uncovered; long tunnel ways led to the doors, through banks of snow so high that the tunnel ways were dark. This it is to mine for precious metals in Hopewell in winter. Strange as it seems, however, the winter is the better part of the year for work. In summer, the innumerable mountain springs are so full that pumps have to be kept going continually to clear the mines of water. In winter the only danger is from snow-slides. Hearing this woman’s graphic account of a slide in the winter of 1882, which “ went off like a cannon,” she said, “ waking them right up ” at midnight, and in a minute had piled its mountain of snow far down the valley, having carried with it all the buildings of the Ruby chief mine, and buried tw-o miners, asleep in their cabins (one killed instantly; one worse off than his dead comrade, crushed, but left alive, to linger in agony for days) : all this over and past in the twinkling of an eye, at dead of night, — hearing this story, it no longer seemed strange that Hopewell and Ruby and Irwin and White Cloud were so nearly deserted of men ; the wonder was that any should remain. But the nonchalant indifference of miners to chances of death is proverbial. They play at the game so constantly that their sense is dulled. Later on this very day, I spoke with a Hopewell miner, who said, “ I was in that slide she was a-tellin’ ye about.”
“ In it! ” I cried. “ Were you hurt ? ”
“ No. I was in the tunnel, when it went off. I’d changed round with another feller: I’d gone on the night shift in place of him. He wa’n’t feelin’ well, so I took his place on the night shift. My cabin was buried up : reckon I might ha’ been killed if I ’d happened to ha’ been in it.”No more trace of feeling in his tone as he said this than if he had spoken of the most every-day matters.
Sixteen miles north of Crested Butte is a new and live mining town called Schofield. It is in a basin ; the centre of a knot, almost a tangle, of peaks, all supposed to be full of mineral. The drive to it from Crested Butte is a succession of beautiful and weird pictures : first, low hills, flower meadows, and slopes similar to those on the westward road ; then, steep mountain spurs, dark green lakes, and dense fir forests. High up on one of these spurs, midway between Crested Butte and Schofield, is the town of Gothic, at the base of a grand trachyte pyramid fourteen thousand feet high, bearing the same name. Two years ago Gothic was larger and more flourishing than Crested Butte. To-day Gothic is dead, and Crested Butte thrives and grows. A Gothic philosopher, sitting at midday on his saw-horse smoking his pipe, nodded complacently to us as we passed.
“ Where are all the people of this town ? ” I asked.
“ Gone to the mountains,” was the reply.
“ Ah, the place is not really deserted, then ? ” I said.
“ Well, not exactly,” answered the philosopher, with a twinkle.
“ What do you think about the place?” I continued.
“ Well, it’s this way : there’s plenty of good properties here, but the people are too poor to work them, anything more’n just to do their assessment work and hold ’em.”
“ Do you mean to stay ? ”
“ Yes, I think I ‘ll see it through.”
“ When were all these houses built ? ”
“ Two years ago, when everybody thought that mountain” — pointing to Gothic peak—“ was made of solid silver ; and so ’t is, pretty near, if there was only any getting at it.”
A few steps farther on we met another Gothic man: rosy, hearty, accoutred in fringed buckskin, with a canopy-brimmed yellow sombrero, he galloped along as if he owned the earth and the air. To him, also, we put the same questions. He had been there two years ; had no idea of going away. The region was “ full of splendid properties,” and Gothic would be “a first-rate camp to live in when they got things fixed up a little.” It was not “ just the place for the winter,” but by and by it would be. Gothic was “all right.”
Chance bits of talk like these, along roadsides, always bring interesting facts to surface. They are like the deepsea soundings of naturalists ; not one of the masses of sand and rubbish which dredgers bring up, is without its shell, or bone, or scale, or plant, significant in record.
“ Waiting for a boom ; that’s what’s the matter with this town,” said a discontented woman, in Schofield. “ I’ve got no patience with this boom business. It’s the ruination of this country. It just spoils everything. There isn’t a decent house in the town, and there won’t never be.”
“ The camp ’s been pretty dull, this spring,” said the landlord of the board shanty which does duty as Schofield’s inn, — “the camp’s been pretty dull, and so we have n’t got our horses in yet. You see there was a foot of snow lyin’ in the street here the 22d of June, and that’s put things back. It looked for a spell as if there would n’t be much doin’ here this season ; but they ’re comin’ now, fast.”
This was the 10th of August; in six or eight weeks more, Schofield would be snowed in again. Before the first of November everything needed for seven months’ living must be provided, and must be packed up to the mines over steep trails.
After the first deep snow, all mines high up on the mountain sides are cut off from communication with the region below. It must be a good deal like being dead, seven months of such isolation, and severance of all connection with human life outside the walls of the mine and the cabin. At the bare thought of it the imagination instantly teems with fancies of terrible possibilities : illness, death, in that icy solitude; hardly less awful, the coming down in the spring, ignorant of what the winter may have wrought of harm or loss. One pictures the mute question of the eye, which the lips would refuse to frame, on the first meeting of such an exile with his neighbor below. Though a man should gain the whole world, would he be well paid for such a life as this ?
It is claimed by enthusiastic Crested Butteians that there are within an easy day’s drive of their town seventy miles of good roads, all leading through wild and picturesque scenery. This seems in no wise incredible on the spot, when going only to the west and northwest one has driven out twenty miles a day, for three successive days, never repeating a mile previously seen, and finding each day’s journey more and more beautiful. Our third and last day was most brilliant of all; a twelve-hour day, but if the sun could have been bribed we would have had it longer.
In the morning we climbed up through flowery meadows and cottonwood groves, among ridges and basins and gulches, over a thousand feet in a vertical line, above the Crested Butte level, to a large coal mine recently opened, and promising to be of enormous value.
To look through green vistas of waving boughs, grasses live feet high, myriads of huge-leaved plants of almost tropical luxuriance, up to the glistening black coal measures and grim stone terraces, hundreds of feet above, was a strange sight. Once up at the mine’s mouth the picture is stranger still. The mountain side is so steep that the Crested Butte basin sinks, and seems a low valley. Down this valley the Slate River winds in so serpentine a course that at most of the angles it is lost from sight, and the effect on the eye, looking down from above, is of an infinity of small, oval-shaped, shining tarns in the green meadows. The three majestic trachyte mountains, Crested Butte, Wheat Stone, and Gothic, rising from these meadows, are now seen to be the upper crests, monarchs as it were, of a vast system of divides, gulches, basins, mountains, and ridges, which at once suggest, even to the most superficial thought, the idea of a period of terrific throes in the whole visible frame of the earth. Down the sides of these mighty stone-walled basins spin threads of silver water, like the fosses in Norwegian fjords; the bottoms of the basins are emerald green, as if of solid moss; they seem a reproduction, on a colossal scale, of the exquisite little cup-like, moss-carpeted basins, fed by trickling springs, which are to be found along the rims of mountain brooks in rocky beds. This beauty of coloring gives to the titanic shapes a look of warm vitality, almost personality, weird in effect. There is a radiant exultance about them, a mysterious audacity of delight, which fills the very air itself with a solid warp and woof of uncanny spell.
A Scotchman called Jim Brennan, “a sort of genius,” — “ more what they call a genius at the East, though, than out here,” our guide and legend-teller said, — had prospected in 1879, up and down, over and through, this whole kingdom, and given queer names to many of the localities, branding them by the stamp of his own good or ill luck. He it was who, having searched along the sides of one of the dark fir-crowded gulches, and found nothing, nailed up, on one of the trees at the month, as he came out, a shingle on which he had scrawled the name “ Poverty Gulch ; ” the most opprobrious epithet a miner could invent. Bad names stick to localities as to persons. The gulch is still called Poverty Gulch, spite of the fact that some of the best paying and best promising mines to-day are on its sides. Brennan was not so wise as those who came after him. He searched too low down; was perhaps a trifle lazy about climbing precipices.
“I don’t never want to hear nothin’ about no claims down among the slip rock,” said an old miner we met drawing a load of good silver ore from his mine in this very gulch. “ The higher up a claim is, the better I like it; ’t least, in these mountains. Them fellers that prospected here first did n’t know nothin’ about the way things is tilted up endways here. That’s the reason they was in such a hurry to call it Poverty Gulch. Ain’t much poverty about it now.”
From Poverty Gulch the Scotchman and his party pushed south, and came soon into a splendid basin, where they found rich indications of ore and a delightsome stream of water leaping from summits above, and cutting a fantastic way for itself down between porphyry walls and layers of slate to the valley below. “ O-Be-Joyful ” basin they forthwith named it; and the darling stream, the “ O-Be-Joyful Creek.” The name will commend itself forever, so long as water runs and sun shines. The basin is hard to get at; it is to be reached only by a narrow trail, difficult even to surefooted mules. But the creek is at all men’s pleasure to follow. Along its right-hand bank was the natural way for a road to go, to a nest of mining camps in some small gulches and basins a few miles out to the westward ; so the road goes up, and the brook comes down, and the pair of them are as fine a sight as ever was seen out-of-doors on a summer day. The road has rims and walls of blossoms, chiefly purple asters ; the brook has shelves and beds of purple slate, columns of porphyry and great tables of granite, ferns and moss in every crevice, and still green pools after every tumble. When it reaches the valley level it spreads out in many a rivulet, with winding, shaded beaches ; and you ford and ford and ford it before you leave it fairly behind, and come to the straight river road in the meadow.
When Jim Brennan named these basins and gulches, nothing was farther from his mind, probably, than the idea of speaking in parables. But if he had so meant he could not have done better. Poverty Gulch and O-Be-Joyful Creek, — the two will be found always side by side, as they are in Gunnison County. Only a narrow divide separates them, and the man who spends his life seeking gold and silver is as likely to climb the wrong side as the right.
H. H.