Part 27

NOTE — The railroad through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison has been abandoned, and sightseers may now view this colorful canyon from their automobiles over a highway—a “highway,” mind you, more than a half mile down in a narrow slit in the earth.

Then, again, my newspaper friend, William Allen White, of the Emporia Gazette, toured the western mining districts and wrote enthusiastically about some newly discovered mining opportunity in the west, known as Thunder Mountain. It stimulated my desire. I wrote William Allen, asking him if he would, as one newspaperman to another, advise me to try my luck at Thunder Mountain? His personal letter to me was even more optimistic than was his editorial. Like Horace Greely, his advice was substantially, “By all means go west, young man, and give it a try.”

But I did not fetch up at Thunder Mountain. On the advice of another friend, I dumped the proceeds from the sale of my newspaper, sight unseen, in a hole in Nevada — while the wise Mr. White kept on publishing his Gazette; wrote a best seller book, “A Certain Rich Man,” and got rich himself. His name and fame are to be perpetuated in the erection of a public library building in Emporia; while I, his misguided friend, still have my laurels to make. And, incidentally, as a mining man, after that first big blow, I never again heard of Thunder Mountain.

Now back to the desert—and the printed Crescent story.

Our contribution here at Crescent, with a minimum of outside help, was a 500-foot tunnel driven into the side of a mountain—the rock shot with high assay in gold and silver and copper. But the cost of this work, though a dead loss and highly disheartening, was as nothing compared to the outlay for the 2197 feet of tunnels and shafts we have driven—also with a minimum of help—through solid rock on our Goodsprings claims, where production, though quite good at times, has never caught up with expenses.

And the end is not yet.

You can take it from me that a man has to be insensible to pain to laugh this off.

On the train away back in the valley on this my first trip to Crescent, the conductor had pointed to a distant cluster of white flecks barely discernible through the shimmering, sun-drenched haze that lies always, like a pall, over the desert, and said to me, “There she is—the biggest thing in all Nevada!”

I had become chummy with the conductor, and that chumminess increased mightily when we learned that we were both on the way to become millionaires—as we visualized it then—through the mining route. He told me that he knew my mining partner, that he had engaged Frank Williams to look after the assessment work on some claims he himself owned over in the Goodsprings district. And when I asked the conductor his name and made a move as if to write it down, he shook his head negatively and threw out his hands in a gesture of utter uselessness, and said, “Oh-hell, man, you couldn’t forget it as long as you are in this country. It’s Dry—just plain William Dry.”

My friend’s parting words to me were a mixture of jocularity and serious hope. “Well, so long, old top,” he said. “See you again when we fetch up at the end of the rainbow.”

And do you know, the next time I saw that conductor, two years later—and I might say before either of us had made any appreciable advances on the rainbow’s elusive end — he recognized me at once, and in offering his hand, said: “It’s Dry.” And I said, “Oh-hell, man, don’t I know it!”

And so it was.

That meeting was in Superintendent J. Ross Clark’s private car, hitched to the flyer. We had exchanged some correspondence before, and Ross wanted to tell me in as hopeful words as possible that the officials of his railroad were still watching the situation closely and would build a branch line into our district—to our claims and to his claims — just as soon as the required tonnage was assured. You see, J. Ross Clark, too, was possessed of the desire to harvest a quick fortune and owned mining claims across the flat from our claims in the Goodsprings district.

That meeting with J. Ross Clark bore fruit for me, though—and it was the means of holding up the Los Angeles Limited for an hour, as well. Several years later I had an important engagement at Goodsprings and was delayed seven hours in Pueblo on the way out there, owing to a change in time of the Denver & Rio Grande trains. The best I could do then was to arrive in Salt Lake five minutes after the Limited’s leaving time, at one o’clock at night, with depots a mile apart. Failure to keep my appointment at Goodsprings would mean disappointment to others and a money loss to me, as well as a wasted trip. In desperation, I went to the up-town office of the Denver & Rio Grande, and asked the agent there to try to have the Los Angeles train held for me at Salt Lake. Nothing doing. That important personage swelled up to full capacity and said, “Evidently, if the San Pedro people wanted to neighbor with my Company they would change their leaving time.”

Next, I asked the conductor on the Rio Grande train to wire ahead for me—and I am happy to state he was a gentleman. Also he was a one-time miner. “Tried it once over at Aspen,” he told me. And right away there was a bond of sympathy, or something, between us. That conductor really wanted to help me. But, as he told me he had wired the San Pedro people several times without results, I had to think of some other way, for I wanted to make that Limited as a lost soul wants to make Paradise.

It was then I thought of J. Ross Clark. What was the good of making friends, if you could not use them? The Rio Grande conductor obligingly held his train for me at Green River, Utah, while I filed a message to the Superintendent of the San Pedro lines. We arrived in Salt Lake ten minutes ahead of time, and the conductor, pointing to a hack-stand, said to me, “Now hurry—the Los Angeles train may be a little late in getting away.”

At the San Pedro station I found the Limited all steamed up, ready to go—and I boarded it quickly, all out of breath. But there was no need for hurrying. Presently the conductor came along and asked me: “Did you come in on Rio Grande Three?” I told him I did. Then he asked, “First or second section?” I admitted that I didn’t know the train had been split up at Grand Junction. The conductor, wanting to be sure of his order, drew a yellow slip from his pocket, and re-read: “Hold for one or more passengers off Rio Grande Three.” He then said, “Yes, that’s it. I’m sure you are the man I’m holding for—but I’ll have to wait for the second section.” And it was an hour late.

I think perhaps Ross had put in his order the words “one or more” solely as a precaution against the possibility of being accused of showing partiality to his mining neighbor, in breaking rules. Anyway, J. Ross Clark had no call for worry. His brother, William A. Clark, a mining man, controlling, among other holdings, the fabulously rich United Verde mine at Jerome, Arizona, owned also forty-nine per cent of the San Pedro lines—and was at this time operating the road under a twenty-year control agreement. It is now in full control of the Union Pacific.

The Limited was not scheduled to stop at Jean, Nevada, my destination. The regular procedure would have been for me to go on down the line forty miles or more and then double back on a local train. But when the Limited began slowing down on approaching Jean, the conductor said to me, “No, don’t jump—wait ‘till she stops.”

The engineer climbed down from his cab. The conductor hopped off the train and yelled, “Hey, Bill, what’s wrong?” I knew what was wrong. And Bill knew; and the conductor knew; and possibly one other knew—but that was all. And whose business was it, anyway?

The lost hour had been made up before the train pulled into Caliente, Nevada, where it halted ten minutes. And, paradoxically, it gained another hour there in that ten minutes. Caliente—Mexican for hot—is where Pacific time begins.

Bill had left that division point “on time” and held to the fast schedule all the way. And I’ll bet Bill and his relief engineer landed the old Limited in Los Angeles on the dot — even though there were miles and miles of desert wasteland, with two high mountain ranges, and, finally, a beautiful irrigated valley with orange groves and banks and banks of roses, yet to be crossed.

As the Limited started to move again the conductor threw me a last cheerful word: “You’ll have only a little way to walk.” And I could only hope that there was no one to report that conductor—nor my friend Ross.

You see, it was Dry again.

All about lay the eternal waste of the desert and mountain slopes, barren and desolate, walled in that arid corner of the world.

THE WIFE—AT GOODSPRINGS Not Hitherto Published — 1947

By John T. Bristow

To round out the foregoing story, I might say here that my wife was a guest for the week during my absence in Crescent, at Mrs. Yount’s hotel in Goodsprings. Sam Yount, the landlady’s husband, was leading merchant, postmaster, private banker—and miner. And he backed the hotel proposition too. The sleeping quarters of the hotel were a detached row of ground-floor rooms close by the main structure. It was before the building in Goodsprings of the Southern Nevada Hotel, said at the time to have been the most commodious hotel in the state. It was before the camp boasted a newspaper, even before the camp got electricity.

My wife was not versed in the ways of the West; and she had some misgivings about making this stop-over on the desert, particularly because of the lateness of our train, while on our way to visit my people in California. I had told her that of the many times I had been out there I had never seen a gun-toting man—and that there was a fixed impression that it would be about as much as a man’s life was worth to molest a woman.

This trip was made at a time following the great flood that had wiped out all the railroad bridges for many miles along the Meadow Valley Wash, in eastern Nevada. Owing to a slow track, our train, due in Jean in the forenoon, did not arrive until near midnight. There were no accommodations at Jean when I was last out there, and I had told Myrtle that, as we would now miss the stage, we might have to sit in the depot until morning, or walk ten miles across the desert to Goodsprings.

Frankly, she was not of a mind to do anything of the kind. She said we could remain on the train, go on to Los Angeles, and maybe stop at Goodsprings on our return trip—or we could, as far as she was concerned, pass it up altogether. I pointed out that we could hardly do this, with her trunk and all her fine clothes—clothes she didn’t need at all—checked through to Jean. And besides, we would be returning by way of San Francisco.

Remember, I had told her that I had never seen a gun toter in the West. Remember also that this was before Crescent. Then, imagine my surprise, and the wife’s renewed misgivings, when, on getting off at Jean, the first and only man to be seen had a murderous looking six-shooter strapped on him. And the wife had so little respect for my veracity as to tell me right out loud that in her best judgement I had purposely misrepresented matters to her.

George Fayle, whom I had known in Goodsprings — associated with Sam Yount—had come over to the railroad to engage in the mercantile business. He owned a general store, a restaurant, and was building a hotel. This made matters fine for us—almost. Fayle was postmaster, and handled pouch mail between the postoffice and the trains. The gun he carried was only routine.

George Fayle took us to a ground-floor room in his unfinished hotel. The room had wallboard partitions, bed upon springs flat on the floor, with a blanket hung across the outside door opening, leaving one-fourth of the space with nothing but thin desert air between us and the unknown. George did not tell us what kind of characters he was harboring beyond the cardboard—but he did wish us a pleasant good night, and, patting his six-shooter, said we would be perfectly safe, as is.

But the wife did not readily catch the spirit of the West. I had told her that the desert was overrun with lizards and sidewinder rattlesnakes, the poisonous kind that travel in spiral form with head up ready for a strike at all times. She put in most of the remainder of the night watching the 18-inch opening between the blanket and the floor—precisely for what, she could not be sure. Luckily there was no wind. The blanket hung limp throughout the night. I can swear to that. Two of a kind, you might say.

At breakfast, George told me there had been a manhunt the day before over in the country west of Goodsprings — that an escaped convict was reportedly holed up in the hills east of Sandy. That would be in the neighborhood of our lead mine. The wife took this in without comment — but it was plain to be seen that she was stowing it away for future consideration.

When Frank and I had returned from our tour of inspection at Crescent, after nightfall, we found the Good-springs camp in an awful state of alarm. My wife, fully dressed, was sitting upright in the middle of the bed in our ground-floor room, afraid to put foot on the floor. She had been so since shortly after dusk. Dusk—that indeterminate translucent veil which, like a mist, screens and magnifies, transposing even the most common objects into phantom figures.

She had heard a scraping noise, likely a block away, but at such times the imagination does tricks to one’s reasoning. In her state of nervous tension, it was but natural for her to imagine that indistinct noise had come from under the bed, the obvious place for an intruder to hide.

Ordinarily Myrtle was not given to such fits of timidity. But she had entered the country under trying conditions, and therefore was not prepared for the many unexpected irregularities. We had not counted on our train being so far behind time as to land us out there in the middle of the night. With my memory of the surroundings as I last knew them, it required a lot of silent argument with myself to get up courage to subject her to the risk we must necessarily take in finding accommodations of any sort, at Jean. I knew there were ten miles of desert on either side of the railroad station. That the country was not inhabited might or might not have been in our favor. Certainly, it presaged loneliness—and it was dark.

A woman at the hotel in Goodsprings thought she had glimpsed the deadly thing, at dusk, near the sleeping quarters—and Myrtle’s door had been left open for a brief spell while she was out. Or rather the door had been found open on her return—she just wasn’t sure how it was. Myrtle informed me that all the other women in camp were just as frightened as she was. And she bade me look under the bed, forthwith.

The thing I was supposed to make sure was—or wasn’t — there, had an overall length of about two feet, a width of four to five inches, an inch or so less in height when inactive—and it was a little pot-bellied. It was rusty in color, with yellowish spots distributed the full length of its body. It had a fat meaty tail, and a broad ugly looking head.

There really was something alive under the bed. It moved. Its eyes moved toward me. Also there were now two people upon the bed. And simultaneously the door swung open, as if the devil was in cahoots with the thing, bent on letting in all the demons of a wicked world. I had hit the bed on the bounce with a jarring thud, causing the door to swing in, as it invariably did when not securely latched. And the cat “hightailed it” out into the night.

But the house cat was not the thing so much dreaded.

Mr. Springer’s Gila Monster, a lizard-like reptile, even more poisonous than the rattlesnake, was on the loose. It had got out of its place of confinement two days back, and diligent search by the whole camp had failed to locate it. On the third day, however, the Monster was found at a water-hole, an old trench dug years before by our former Wetmore citizen, Green Campbell. The camp demanded that the reptile be killed immediately.

Elwood Thomas, also formerly of Wetmore, was a close neighbor to Mr. Springer, and he had carried the word of caution to Myrtle. It was all so very exciting—even worse than a panther scare. And, miraculously, the wife was to experience that one too before leaving the Goodsprings camp.

We were to go with Frank Williams to stay over Sunday at our lead mine, which was twelve miles over the mountain range on the west side. The daily stage (except Sunday) passed within a few hundred yards of the mine. Frank and I started to walk over, at sunup, on Saturday morning. Myrtle was to go over on the stage in the afternoon.

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To make a short cut, Frank and I took a burro trail at the summit, near the Columbia mine. While trailing that rugged miner ten yards in the rear, going down on the west side, I sprained my right ankle, badly, rolling down the slope almost to where Frank was—my camera trailing in the wake, taking the bumps.

We stopped for a brief rest at the Hoosier mine—formerly owned by Frank’s uncle, Elwood Thomas—where the miners were taking out zinc ore, a new find in that district. And “tenderfoot” though I was, I made a discovery there which had escaped my seasoned miner-partner for a whole year. At least I thought I had done this to him. Frank had cut through a 12-foot body of identical appearing stuff in running the tunnel, and had several tons of it ricked up on the dump. It would require an assay to convince him that we had a zinc mine, as well as a lead mine.

In accordance with the miners’ code we were invited to stop at the Hoosier shack in the foothills and get our dinners. By this time my swollen ankle was hurting so badly that I preferred not to stop until we could get out to the stage road a mile farther on—but Frank said it would be an insult to the Hoosier boys for us to pass them by. And besides he was hungry. Also, according to the miners’ code Frank had to wash his dirty dishes. This is a must in the mining country.

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This is where I went down—second time. Took this picture while waiting for the stage. Frank’s mail box is about a mile around the bend of the road. The trail—foot path—going over the mountain starts near the right edge of this view’ and tops the mountain starts near the right edge of this view, and tops the mountain at the head of a canyon, on the other side.

We reached the stage road about two hours before the stage was due. Frank walked on three miles farther to the mine, and I hobbled along until within a mile of “our” mountain—then my ankle toppled me over again, and I lay there with my head shaded by a single sagebrush. As the sun moved along on its westward course—which of course it didn’t do at all—I had to scratch gravel frequently, sliding on my back, to keep my head shielded from the burning desert sun.

The stage-driver let us off at Frank’s mail box, and Myrtle had a hard time helping me over the hump and down the canyon to the mine. We took the short cut over the mountain instead of going a mile or more around on the wagon road; through a saddle-back, and then up the canyon to the mine, which would have been less arduous. We were carrying provisions for six meals for the three of us. There was water at the mine. It had rained a month before, and Frank had scooped up the water out of a ditch. No fiction in this. Water really “keeps” out there—when in an underground house, anyway.

We had overlooked the need for candles and coffee—or rather they were missing from the pack. Acting on Frank’s suggestion, Myrtle went out on the mountain side, gathered leaves from the lowly sage brush—and we had our tea. But the absence of candles was a more serious matter. Frank hunted the underground house, and the tunnels, finally finding a two-inch piece of candle at the far end of a 500-foot tunnel.

The wife and I slept—no, bunked—the first night in the underground house. To get into the place we had to hug a wall as we approached the door to avoid dropping into a 60-foot shaft by the side of the entrance, where Frank had taken out $65 worth of RICH silver ore—at a cost of $500 for digging the hole.

There were mice, and probably lizards too, running over our bed on the floor. Little lizards were very active on the outside, in the daytime. And Frank and I had killed a rattlesnake while strolling about over the grounds the year before. The crack under the door was big enough to let in almost anything short of a panther.

Also, a big body of ore protruding from the ceiling directly over our bed looked as if it might slip from its moorings with the slightest jar, and there was some jarring force at work all through the night. Grains of crushed limestone, like sand, sifted down upon us almost continously. Myrtle spent the night lighting, blowing out, and relighting that little piece of candle. In this way she made it last until morning.

The next night—Sunday night—we slept, or rather bunked, on an ore-sorting table out on the tunnel dump, under the stars. Frank had taken his bedroll a hundred yards down the canyon to find level “ground” on which to make his spread. I had sent an old trunk filled with bedding including a couple of pillows the year before. The wife thought Frank had been a little lax in the matter of laundering same.

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After going over the mountain (at left) we — Myrtle and I — came down the canyon to the mine. The tunnel dump shows between the two arms of the mountain — about a half mile away. Getting down from the top was tough. I had to back down much of the way — and have a lot of help. Frank had said he would meet us at the mailbox — but he was taking lessons in French off a gramophone and did not show up until we were well along the way to the mine. Frank’s and Edith’s first tent house — part canvas — was built was built on this dump.

This, of course, was before Frank had gone East to study political economy. Also it was before he had brought back to the mine a New England school teacher called Edith, bearing his name. There was no laxity after Edith took charge. And, with this touch of “new life” on the job, the mine, besides yielding rich ore, sparingly, produced two fine little girls, Ruth and Helen—girls that grew up at the mine. With their father a graduate of Campbell University, Holton, Kansas, and their mother holding a teacher’s certificate, the girls didn’t fare badly, even in semi-isolation. As a matter of fact, district school was held for a time in their home, with their mother as teacher.

The home at this time was a four-room house on a 5-acre water claim—held in connection with the mining claims — on the edge of Mesquite Valley, one mile from the mine. There was a 75-foot dug well, with windmill, and running water in the house. And there were growing fruit trees, a vineyard in bearing, and a green—very green alfalfa patch. The two Williams girls represented two-sevenths of the possible pupils for the school.

Then a little green school house was erected not more than three hundred yards from their door—with Miss Leah Lytle as first teacher—where all seven of the miners’ children studied their lessons, romped and played among the sage and mesquite. While so doing, Helen Williams was bitten by a rattlesnake. She was taken to Las Vegas, the nearest big town, fifty miles away for treatment—and that move spelled the end of the little green school house in the Mesquite Valley so far as the two girls were concerned. They finished their schooling in Las Vegas, graduating from the high school there. Then, when Rex Ewing, Frank William’s closest mining neighbor, moved to Las Vegas to capture some of the prevailing high wages, the school blew up. Rex had supplied the other five pupils. The sequence of events as set down here may be faulty—but were I able to chronicle them in order, the result would be the same.