Part 26

Green Campbell would, of course, want to do something to perpetuate the school that bore his name. But in his will he made the fatal mistake—fatal for the school—of first taking care of his family with the more tangible assets. He bequeathed $100,000 to Campbell University, conditionally, however. It was to be paid out of the proceeds of two mining properties, namely, his Vanderbilt and Goodsprings holdings. A minimum price of $500,000 was placed on his Vanderbilt mine, and $200,000 on his Goodsprings claims, and they were not to be offered for less than the stipulated price for two years. The properties have not yet been sold. While really promising properties, with the future pledged, largely, by the terms of the will, there was no one to continue developments to make them bring the price. Green Campbell had expended something like a half million dollars in developing his gold mine at Vanderbilt.

Secure in the fortune left them, the Campbell heirs — Green’s second family—have risked no money in mining. Besides his various mining interests Green Campbell owned, at death, a magnificent home on Brockton Square, in Riverside, California; numerous tracts of California ranch lands, and real-estate holdings in downtown Los Angeles. Also, a substantial cash operating fund, and some income property in Salt Lake City—notably, the Dooley block. Mr. Campbell often expressed his faith in the future of Los Angeles. The fortune has largely been kept intact.

When last contacted a few years back, Mrs. Campbell was living at 705 Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, California. The two unmarried sons lived at the same address. Caroline, the daughter, was married to a Los Angeles banker, Leland T. Reeder, a son of the fiery and famous Congressman W. A. Reeder, from the sixth Kansas district, back in the nineties.

Idle mining properties, or mines worked only spasmodically by lessees, do not readily attract buyers, especially when filled with water, as in the case of the Campbell mine at Vanderbilt. Incredible as it may seem, there really is water deep down—in places—in that desert country, and it even rises sometimes. The shaft at our own mine, in the very heart of the desert, situated in a small depression on the mountain side, was once filled to overflowing during a heavy rain.

Other bequests, principally to relatives, also were contingent upon the sale of those two properties. And hope, tenacious hope, once bloomed so very brightly but now devoid of sparkle, still lingers with heirs around here.

Henry Campbell, a nephew, who was sheriff of Nemaha County for two terms about the turn of the century, with his two sisters, Mary and Frances, the son and daughters of John Campbell, all deceased now, were named jointly for $100,000. The surviving heirs are: Emma Swarm Campbell, wife of Henry, Bancroft, and two sons by a former marriage, living in the West; George Cordon, husband of Mary, Ontario; Ray Drake, son of Frances, Norton.

The heirs of Caroline Campbell, who married a Mr. Steele and went West, and the heirs of Sally Ann Campbell, who married Henry Stanley and lived near Circleville, were named jointly in the will for $100,000. William and Edward Stanley and Laura Hart, all dead now, were children of Sally Ann. William worked with his uncle in the mines and was named for an extra $100,000.

Two daughters of Green Stanley, another son of Sally Ann, are married to “Jack” and “Kid” Rudy, and live at Soldier. A daughter of Sally Ann—Julia Alice Stanley — married Albert D. Chamberlin, now living in Holton. Mrs. Chamberlin is dead. Her heirs are: Mrs. Lee Able, Holton; Mrs. S. B. Moody, Centralia; Mrs. Ernest Hogg, Payette, Idaho; Mrs. Mary Gaston and Nathaniel Chamberlin, Whitehall, Montana; and Charles Chamberlin, Salt Lake City.

One small payment was received by the heirs here about two years back, which revived interest in about the same degree of satisfaction as that of a sprinkle of rain to a thirsty earth. Time was, though, George Cordon tells me, when they could have accepted settlement at fifty cents on the dollar.

It is probable that the inheritance of Charley Campbell was tied up in this or by some other uncertain condition. Whatever the case, he settled with the estate for $50,000. Crediting rumor afloat at the time, it is my recollection that, in recognition of close—and perhaps menacing—kinship, this was paid with money left by Green Campbell to his second family.

Leaving an ex-wife and two sons, Allen and Robert, in the West, Charley Campbell later returned to Circleville. There, in 1920, he married Laura Deck. He is now living in or near Philadelphia.

His mother, Florence Campbell, did not marry again. She went to work. And by the irony of Fate she became a teacher of art in the college founded by her divorced husband, along about 1895. Later, years later, when I saw her last she seemed merely to be waiting, in emptiness and dead memories, for the end. She died in Pomona, California, about 1920.

Elwood Thomas was administrator for the Campbell estate—in Nevada. After spending thirty-eight years on the desert and in the mines, without receiving so much as a damaging scratch, Elwood was fatally injured in a horse and buggy accident while back Here on a visit to his daughter, Mrs. Maude Ralston, at Holton, in 1915. He died three days after the accident. He was buried in the Wetmore cemetery. Elwood Thomas lived apart from his family from the time he he went West in 1873. Family ties, it seems, were not strong enough to bridge the distance between them. Maybe it was the desert again.

Turning momentarily aside from the path that leads toward the rainbow’s elusive end, let me here interpose a brief paragraph about John Campbell, the brother whom Green had said could remain on the farm and keep up the fight against odds if he wanted to. John did remain on the farm; and kept up the fight—and won. He even elected to remain on the farm after pressing invitations to join his brother in the land of gold. He lived on the original homestead in Wetmore township until he died, in 1894. As the years became more seasonable for the production of grain, John Campbell made a good living—and more—from his acres and his herds. And, best of all, he found contentment and happiness with his wife and three children on the farm. I think that in all my life I have never known a more kindly, considerate, and contented person than was this tall, slim, fine man.

Luck was a bit fickle with Green Campbell. It both smiled and frowned on him in a few fleeting years. Alert, with a keen mind, he made good at first on everything he touched — save, of course, that first water-hole. Then, abruptly, as if a great cloud had obscured his vision, he lost his charm. Two outstanding reverses followed in quick succession.

Irreparable damage is often done in the name of friendship. With millions of dollars to the good, Green Campbell was picked by his friends to turn the tide of politics in Utah, to break Mormon rule. He was on the minority side, to be sure, but what did that matter? Clean and ambitious, with bulging pockets, he would be a formidable figure in bringing about the change so much desired—by the outs of course.

Thus, Green Campbell was launched upon the perilous sea of politics—literally shoved off into its unfriendly waters, slightly, but assuredly, beyond his depths. The warm and manifest enthusiasm of his friends, so goes the story, inspired in him a feeling of confidence—and, unschooled in the hard-played game of politics, he set sail upon the turbid political waters with never a thought as to the many, many wrecked political ships that mark the shores of Time.

Infectious enthusiasm had spread over the field. Voters and non-voters alike cheered for him. The Italian colony piped, “Viva Campbell—bigga man!” John Chinaman, it was related, yelled in badly Americanized Cantonese, “Hoola Campbell! All-o-same-e, no like-e dlam Mormon lenny-way!”

Deliverance, it seemed, was at hand. Still in the first flush of his great financial triumph, Green Campbell spent money freely for the cause, and incidentally tried for a seat in Congress. This experience cost him a lot of money—just how much no one knows. Some said it was nearly a million dollars.

Green Capbell was defeated for delegate to Congress by the Mormon bishop, Cannon. But he contested the election upon the grounds that Cannon, a Canadian, was not naturalized. In this he won, but not until the two-year term was almost over. He went to Washington as the Hon. Allen G. Campbell.

I shall not attempt to tell you his politics, because I don’t know—for sure. But when I tell you his fine saddle horse was named Cleveland, you can make your own deductions. It was a common sight to see Green Campbell mounted on that spirited horse riding about the streets of Vanderbilt, often with one of his little boys up in front of him or riding behind, while his luxuriant white beard, always well groomed, billowed gracefully in the desert breezes. Green Campbell was a large man, about six feet tall and rather portly, though not really fat. He always presented a prosperous, dignified appearance.

And now, while a million dollars, or whatever sum it really was, out of one pocket was a lot of money wasted in priming the political pump, it wouldn’t have been so bad for Green Campbell, seeing that he had obliged his friends, had there not been other heavy and unexpected drains upon his purse. It was a partnership with Jay Cooke and Company, a Washington stock brokerage firm, at a most unfortunate time, that really hurt.

Jay Cooke was perhaps the foremost broker of that day. Hard luck bankrupted him. His brokerage houses in three eastern cities collapsed in 1873, causing one of the greatest financial panics of all time. He was financing the building of the Northern Pacific railroad and had made too many advances. But Jay Cooke was still the promoter par-excellence. He was the promoter previously mentioned as having received an interest in the Horn Silver mine for securing a railroad to the camp.

Jay Cooke was heavily involved when Green Campbell became a member of the firm, and through an oversight a protecting clause was omitted. With new money in the firm, Cooke’s old creditors forced their demands. Green Campbell’s first check was drawn for nine hundred thousand dollars! And that was by no means the end of enforced payments. However, much of this loss was salvaged through securities turned over to Campbell by Cooke.

It was not at all strange that at some time in his financial career, after climbing up to the heights, that Green Campbell should take his turn on the toboggan. Nobody ever wins every step in life. But these two reverses, falling so swiftly and so heavily as to make them the high points of the drama, cut a jagged gash in the fabric of his dreams. And while the hand of Fate continued, for a time at least, to carry the Campbell fortune steadily downward, he did not lose all. Far from it! There was no time after selling the Horn Silver mine that he was not a rich man!

But the winds of adversity, mighty dream-wrecking gales though they were, had not swept away the flame of hope. Back to his mines, unflagging in his efforts to do it all over again, Green Campbell was full of plans for the future when he died rather suddenly of pneumonia, in 1902. Thus, the call of the desert, the lure of the mining game, held him until the last.

And this is the true story of Green Campbell—gentleman, miner, and great wealth-builder, in whose heart there seems to have burned an inextinguishable desire for something that never came.

DESERT CHIVALRY Published in Wetmore Spectator,

March 13, 1931.

By John T. Bristow

There were not conveyances enough to handle the influx of gold-seekers when I got off the train at Nipton, California, and a long walk across a dry sun baked waste lay ahead of me. I was on my way to the new mining camp of Crescent, just over the line in Nevada, and on my way to a fortune—maybe. Rainbow visions began to rise before me, and hot though it was I did not mind that six-mile walk one bit. I was not alone. She was young, slender — and pretty. And Elsie was a “gold-digger” too. There were others.

With Frank Williams, a former Wetmore boy, as partner, I was in from the start at the “hell-roaring” mining camp back in 1907. Born overnight, it was a stampede mining camp, growing from nothing to a tented city of one thousand people in a few weeks time—followed quickly with saloons, dance-halls, and whatnots.

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Crescent was wild, mad, wide open.

When the big news broke, I beat it for Nevada. Frank and I and associates owned three claims in the very heart of the Crescent district. Also, I personally owned an adjoining claim on which Frank had caused one of his men, Paul Stahmer, to do the required ten feet of work to hold it for one year, at a cost to me of $100. The work was done on a $544 gold showing.

Having operated with Frank rather disappointedly in the lead-zinc-vanadium camp of Goodsprings, thirty miles away, through the years since 1904, I believed that here at last—at Crescent—I was about to pounce, in one fell swoop upon the legendary pot of gold. It was a fantastic notion, of course—but oh, the magic thrill of it!

Charles M. Schwab, Pennsylvania multi-millionaire steel magnate, who held mining interests in Nevada, lent encouragement with an on-the-spot pronouncement: “In the past the great fortunes have been made in manufacturing, but henceforth the really big money will be made in mining.” Also, operators from Goldfield, the Nevada camp that gave George Wingfield, a lowly cowhand, twenty million dollars almost in a jiffy—men in the big money up there said in my presence, “If we had such surface showings at Goldfield as you have at Crescent, any old claim would sell for a fortune.” I don’t mind telling you that I had fed rather too optimistically upon the glorious prospect of grabbing a quick fortune at Crescent. But the unveiling of facts there proved a solvent for the nightmare in which a lot of us had been living for months.

With fabulously rich surface showings — high assays, $500 to $20,000 to the ton reported almost everywhere — Crescent proved, in the end, the greatest bubble of them all. Countless thousands of dollars were expended, over a period of two years, in a frantic effort to bring out a profitable producer. But if there ever was as much as a shirt-tail full of ore shipped from that camp, I don’t know it. And though I never had the time nor the inclination to compare notes, I’ll bet Elsie had better pickings than any of the hopeful miners who wore pants.

It was with reluctance that we pulled out of Crescent. It’s most fascinating, this thing of prospecting for gold — like participating in a big-game hunt. Were I full-handed, even now, I would go back to Crescent and give our Shreve-port group another try. Someday, somebody is going to find the “mother lode” there.

There was honest effort—a lot of honest effort—as well as the usual faking, at Crescent. A $20,000 gold strike was reported near the summit, between our claims and Crescent. The first day out there, I was all for seeing this strike right away. My partner said, “Oh, wait until tomorrow—we’ll be going past it when we go over to Crescent.”

The next day, starting from our claims by way of a perfectly good wagon road down the canyon a ways, Frank took me by a tortuous climb, off the road, to near the top of the mountain. He pointed out the spot where the assay had been obtained. When I began to examine the shallow trench, he said, quickly, “It took all the ore in sight to make the assay.” Twenty steps farther on we reached the summit where we could look down on Crescent a mile below. And then we stepped out onto a very good wagon road. On inquiry, he said, “It’s the same road we left back there in the canyon.” I asked him how come we made that rough climb? Frank said, “You know, it’s about as much as a man’s life is worth to be caught showing up that strike to a tenderfoot.”

This was an eye-opener—the first clear signpost on a long and uncertain road.

At another time, later, Frank and I paid a saloon keeper in Nipton, the railroad station, twenty dollars to drive us over the Crescent district, for the full day. We visited our claims first, got dinner in Crescent—then to a saloon where drinks were 50 cents each, whether whiskey, beer, or water. The bartender simply counted noses or glasses, as it were, and summed up the charge. There were about twenty saloons in the camp, and our “host” deemed it his duty to visit them all. I am sure he dumped the $10 I paid him on twenty glasses of water for me. It was a spot where you couldn’t afford to shake your head and say, “No thanks.” When asked to drink, it was wise to call your drink.

The main object of the drive—on my part, anyway — the thing we had paid twenty dollars for, was to visit a highly newspaper publicized mine two miles south of Crescent, where it was shamefully claimed immense bodies of rich gold ore running into the millions, were blocked out. But the desert twilight caught us still drinking Adam’s ale and the Indian’s “fire water.” Our driver knew his business all right—and I suspect Frank knew from the start that we would never fetch up at that mine. Nothing, absolutely nothing—but the truth—was barred in that camp.

I shall now leave the desert momentarily, and write candidly about my earlier “mining” experience. This, and other notations here—until we get back to Crescent—are throw-ins, kindred situations not contained in the printed’ article.

With our townsman Green Campbell’s enviable mining success as an incentive, it has ever been my hope that I might someday also strike it rich—and mining seemed to offer the best lure. I therefore joined a group of Wetmore and Horton men in an effort to rejuvenate a gold mine at Whitepine, Colorado, twenty miles north of Sargent on the narrow gauge branch of the Denver & Rio Grande railroad. With the Wetmore group—Dr. Augustus Philip Lapham and wife Elzina Brown-Lapham; Jay Wellington Powers and wife Helen Hoyt-Powers; Charles Samuel Locknane and wife Coral Hutchison-Locknane; and Mr. C. A. Mann, the owner, backed by Scott Hopkins, Horton banker, and other moneyed men of that city, I spent a week at White pine looking things over.

The mine was really six miles up the canyon from White pine—just beyond the abandoned town of Tomichi, not far from the “Top of the World.” Tomichi had been hit by a snow slide which wrecked a number of houses, killing several people. The residents, numbering about 1,000, had abandoned their homes and places of business, leaving the buildings intact—a true “Ghost Town.” Thinking in terms of the present, one might wonder why had the buildings been left to rot down? A mill had sawed the lumber on the site — and in that out-of-the-way place, the material was not worth salvaging.

The tunnel of the Mann mine was about 150 feet up-slope from the wagon road on the floor of the canyon, which road was also Main Street in Tomichi. To get up to the tunnel, the trail started several hundred feet up the gulch and then swung back around a projecting ledge where the footing was rather insecure. To negotiate it the men would use the lines off the harness. The women could remain at the wagon and watch the men fall, if such might be the case.

And here I pulled a boner—not my first, nor last, I frankly admit. I looked across to the “scary” ledge, and straight up to the tunnel—and then I started up on the run, the loose rock in places sliding me back almost as fast as I was gaining. However, I made the tunnel, completely exhausted. I did not sit down to rest. I fell down. And I crawled into the tunnel where there was ice—in July—and revived quickly. One of the men was hampered in that climb with a wooden leg, which afforded me ample time to recover before their arrival—but my own legs were still shaky as I eased myself around that projecting ledge, grabbing the strap now and then, while coming down. I don’t know how the first strap-holder got around without help—nor the last one, either.

Mr. Mann said I had taken a great risk; that he had called to me to come back; that the exertion required to negotiate that heap of sliderock was really too much for one unaccustomed to the high altitude; that he himself—a seasoned mountain man—would not have undertaken it for the whole mine. And, you know, after I had taken one peep at the spot of interest in the tunnel, I thought, “Neither would I.”

The prospect did not look good to me—nor was I fooled by the enthusiasm of my inexperienced associates, but I wanted to go along with them. The other Wetmore men thought enough of the prospect to locate adjoining claims, naming them for their children—The Marsena, The Gracie, and The Marguerite. I had no child, not even a wife—so no claim. But I then and there made a resolve to learn something more about that enticing mining game, perhaps elsewhere. And in the final analysis I suppose I have.

Doctor Lapham was the principal exuder of enthusiasm, an inborn trait which came to the fore again in a big way on the train enroute to Salt Lake City. The Doctor had spent some time in the smoker, and came back to the coach all “hepped” up. Rubbing his hands together in his characteristic manner, he said he had gotten—on the qt—a tip from the newsboy that an observation car was to be hooked on at Gunnison, for the trip through Colorado’s most colorful canyon. The observation car would be on a siding to the left of our train—and that the favored few were to make a dash for it the moment the train stopped.

The Doctor was always putting forth his best efforts to make us all comfortable—and happy. He said he had bought a book of views, paying $2 for it, something he really didn’t care a whoop for—but he wanted to reward the boy for his kind tip. With an eye for business, the newsboy had also tipped off other passengers.

The “observation” car was only a coalcar having temporary backless board seats placed crosswise of the car. One had to climb over the seats, or step across from one plank to another to get to the rear end of the car—all right for the fellow who had so recently clambered up the tunnel dump, but very awkward for the women and the man with the wooden leg.

Many of the passengers looked at the thing and went back to the coaches, and some abandoned their seats and went inside after the train started—but our men folk, being well to the rear and encumbered with helpless women whom they did not wish to lose just then, couldn’t even do that once the train headed into the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a narrow gorge with 2800-foot almost perpendicular walls, following the serpentine course of the Gunnison river, on a steeply down grade, switching the “observation” car like a whipcracker from one black wall to the other. Hot cinders rained down on us so that we could look neither to the right, or the left—nor up. Now, Lap’s newsboy came aboard crying, “Goggles, goggles, goggles!”

And the appreciative Doctor gave the boy some more money.

We had done Denver, Colorado Springs, Manitou and Pike’s Peak—and Cripple Creek. And we had all climbed “Tenderfoot” Mountain while waiting over-night at Salida for train connection—and I individually had literally sat on the proverbial powderkeg for three hours during a twenty-mile overland drive. Mr. Mann had provided a spring wagon for the other members of the party, and I, being unexpected, was conducted to a freight wagon going our way. When told, near the end of the journey, that I was sitting on a box of dynamite I blew up—in spirit. But nowhere had we experienced anything so disappointing as this “observation” car ride. It is anchored in my memory as the one really big scene that beggared description.