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Ida. Back to
Colorado to stay. The lost mine. Reminiscences.
The greatest disaster of my life came in March 1928,
while my wife and I were in Washington after the closing of the Whitehall. We
lived at the Westmoreland Apartments, where we had maintained our home for many
years. Ida had not been well for several weeks, but on this day felt that a walk
down Connecticut Avenue would benefit her. The morning was cold and a raw wind
blowing up from the Potomac flats made our walk so disagreeable that after a few
blocks we turned back. At the corner of Florida Avenue we met an old
acquaintance and stood talking for some time. Reaching home, my wife complained
of a cold and I advised her to go to bed while I prepared for her some simple
remedy.
Towards evening of the next day she felt worse and I put
in a call for a doctor, but none responded. Late that night a doctor came, but
after he had examined the patient he said he could not prescribe for her because
he was not a general practitioner but a surgeon. Again I called for a physician,
but it was noon on the third day of her illness before one came. Pronouncing
double pneumonia, he ordered a nurse and gave me no encouragement. By evening
her pulse had stopped and I prepared for the worst. I had been in constant
attendance on my beloved wife since she took to her bed and as night wore on I
noticed her hands and lower limbs were growing cold, so I heated them with hot
water bags. Her breathing was difficult and her chest sounded dry. She tried to
talk to me, but I could not distinguish what she said. Then she lay quiet until
2:00 A.M., when she said clearly, “You are worn out, Allie. Lie down and get
some sleep.” I lay down on the bed and she turned over on her side. I must
have slept about fifteen minutes when I woke with a start, and reaching out my
hand I felt her body growing cold. I sprang off the bed and ran to the other
side. There she lay still in death, a seraphic smile on her face. I knelt by her
side to chafe her dear hands, but all was quiet and I knew no more.
When I revived, the doctor was there and all that was
left of the dearest woman in the world was being taken away in a basket by the
undertaker to prepare for burial. We held the funeral services in a chapel and I
took the body to Glens Falls, New York, where in the midst of the friends of her
girlhood, she was lowered to rest in the family tomb with her parents. Thus
passed the love of my life, my helpmate of thirty-five years, an incomparable
wife, and a woman true as steel.
Lonely and discouraged, I tried to throw myself into the
development of the copper deposits in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, with
the results as given in the preceding chapter. My efforts to start a mining
enterprise in the East were doomed to failure. It was getting late in the
spring, and if I was to accomplish anything that year in the West, it was time
for me to be moving. Therefore, I sold my apartment furnishings, and again
turned my face to the San Juan, where I had spent so many happy days with my
beloved Ida.
If one can stand an altitude of over 9000 feet, life in
Silverton can be endured if not enjoyed by “holing up,” listening to the
gossip of the neighbors, watching the bus come in, and if fortunate enough to
have a job, trying to keep it. Silverton, being a thriving camp, is far ahead of
the general run of the mining towns, and having the mines to support its
population, it is the Mecca of outside miners in search of employment and the
goal of the itinerant promoter, all of which tends to a state of versatility
which is needed to absorb the surplus energy of the people. One thing to be
sure, the town is not so “wide open” as in former times. The pack trains and
ox teams no longer crowd Greene Street, and lynching bees no longer put the fear
of vigilance committees in the hearts of thieves and other evildoers. The
businessmen do not outfit the prospector on credit any more, and the mine buyer
has quit appearing on the dump of a new strike with his checkbook in his hand.
The glamour of rich mineral is still there, but somehow the mines change hands
differently from the methods of the ‘80s. I can recall the day when New
Yorkers paid $250,000 for an Ouray claim, and all the sellers had with which to
make the deal was a specimen of ruby silver from Mount Sneffles. Today the
$250,000 would have to be blocked out in the mine before they got a nickel. But
the mining game is still very much alive, and as long as one plays honestly and
with business sense, there will always be profits in mining.
I am now coming to the end of my narrative. I have passed
my eightieth year, and feel that I have earned at least a temporary rest. I have
related my story without embellishment, at the risk of being called a
first-class liar by those who do not know that truth is often stranger than
fiction. As to whether it is believed I am entirely indifferent, for I am rich
in my memories of adventures in all corner of the globe. My hairbreadth escapes
from death have been almost uncanny. The incident of the Hugli River, where the
ship passed over me and there was less than two fathoms of water between the bed
of the muddy stream and the “Glasgow’s” keelson; the fall from the royal
truck; the loss of the “Captain” when she went down with nearly all hands;
the awful feeling of falling from a ship into the Red Sea in the dead of night
in a gale of wind; the almost miraculous escape from drowning while being washed
overboard by one sea and thrown back by another; the tumbling along the river
bottom of the muddy Nebesna in Alaska; the extremely embarrassing situation I
was in at the Ajo mine, when I was standing on the brink of a shaft with a rope
around my neck, at the mercy of a band of hoodlums; the wild scramble up the
shaft at Leadville to escape the explosion; the moments of terror as I watched
tons of rock slip slowly down upon me in the true style of Edgar Allen Poe, not
to mention the dallying with the deadly snow slides of the San Juan – These
things have brought me close to Eternity and snatched me away again. Fate has
ordained that I should miss them one after another, and seems to have me tucked
comfortably under her wing until perhaps some time I will feel too sure of
myself –-
My story is one of adventure, struggle, and enterprise,
in which failure and success is alternated with sometimes surprising rapidity.
The reader, from a disinterested perspective, not influenced by the human
element, which was present in each incident, can see my errors of judgment and
so may take steps to avoid similar mishaps if confronted with like
circumstances. The wise person is one who learns to capitalize upon and not be
crushed by failure and misfortune. In the coming years I hope to take advantage
of them myself. The secret of success seems to be embodied in the ability to
know just when to hang on and when to let go, and it is not always possible to
know at the time which procedure is best.
In chronicling many of my disappointments in mining
ventures, it was not so much to record the events of my life as to give
first-hand information to those who follow as to locations in which lost mines
are waiting to be rediscovered and developed. This old world has many fabulous
treasures tucked away in her wrinkled old surface, waiting for the hardy
prospector who is willing to dig. Let them take advantage of my sixty years of
poking about this earth. In this story I have touched many opportunities, which
may be seized with advantage by others who are in a position to work out the
steps necessary to carry them to a successful conclusion.
There is one lost mine which I reserve for myself, and
before “30” is written over my name and I am gathered to my forefathers, I
will find it. Back in the summer of ’81, one afternoon I was returning from a
trip to the south fork of Cement Creek, on the side of Boulder Mountain. It was
growing late, and I stopped for the night at the cabin of Doc Wattles, in the
timber near Illinois Gulch. Doc was an old-time prospector, and what he did not
know of Boulder Mountain was not worth telling. We sat up late swapping stories,
he telling of hair-raising discoveries and I of my experience at sea. The next
morning I was awakened by a rifle shot under my bunk, and on jumping from my bed
I found that Doc had shot a ground hog that had crept into the cabin during the
night and crawled under my bed. The ground hog was young and we had him for
breakfast. After the meal Doc said he was going my way, and we started out
together toward the Pride of Cement Mine, which was in the next gulch. The trail
lay along the side of the mountain through heavy timber. After walking about
half a mile Doc suddenly stepped off the trail, saying, “Wait a minute,” and
went straight down the hill. About eighty or a hundred feet below the trail he
began to pick in the hillside, and I, curious to know what he had found, also
went down to where he was working. He had laid a slab of the moss back and dug a
hole about twelve inches in diameter, from which he was pulling out the broken
rock with his hands. What I saw made me gasp! The hole was in white quartz,
which was speckled all through with a glittering yellow metal. I reached in and
took one of the flakes in my finger, thinking it was iron pyrite, but it bent to
my touch and I knew it was gold. I slipped a piece of it into my pocket, and
Doc, without a word, filled up the hole and covered it with the slab of moss
that he had thrown back. He then motioned me back to the trail and we proceeded
on our way. Later in the fall, Doc went to Seattle and died there.
After carefully preserving that piece of quartz all these
years, in October 1935, I had it crushed and run into a button of gold by Root
& Norton, the Durango assayers. The button weighs four pennyweights, showing
that a ton of the same quartz is worth $84,000.
For the past several years I have searched that hillside,
but there have been many changes in the district that I have not yet recognized
it. Old trails have disappeared and new ones have been built, but I have at last
located the remains of the old cabin, and feel that I am close to the spot where
the blanket of green moss may again be laid aside to disclose the pot of gold
which is at the end of every prospector’s rainbow. But even if I do not find
it, I can think of no lovelier spot in which to spend my last days. There is no
place in the world where I would rather be, unless perhaps, if I find that mine,
I may again be able to visit the island of Johanna, or some other quaint port in
the South Seas!
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