12/22/03

Prospecting. Our first find. Mining opportunities. My first experience with snow slides. The English plum pudding for Christmas.

Soon after my return to Ouray I abandoned the printing business and acquired a prospecting partner, Charley Morris. Together we built a log cabin near the river for my future home, as Charley lived with his wife in the upper part of Ouray’s main street.

Our first venture into mining as partners was a lease on the dump of the old Fisherman mine, at the mouth of Canyon Creek, almost adjoining the town of Ouray. Establishing ourselves on the dump at the entrance of the mine, we sorted out twelve hundred pounds of grey copper ore, which we took to the mud smelter below Ouray and Old Man Paquin paid us $1200 for it. We did not try to operate the mine itself, and so far as I know it has never been operated since, probably on account of the hot water in the mine, which made it difficult to operate. The whole San Juan Basin is sprinkled with springs of hot mineral water, and the proximity of many other hot springs at Ouray may have caused the suspicion that the Fisherman vein is the source of all the hot water at that point. It is a pity, however, that a mine, which should produce such rich ore, should be abandoned and the workings allowed to go back to nature.

After we paid our debts we still had $200, and with this as a backlog we started out to locate a mine for ourselves. Together we climbed the hills for a week, until we found a vein of lead ore running along a cliff that hardly afforded standing room. Charley was for passing it by, but I suggested that we take out a ton of the galena and then I would go down to Paquin and ask him to buy it. Our only tools were a gad, hammer, and pick, with which we dug out of the cliff a quantity of the ore. I took some of it down to the smelter, and after the old man had examined the ore he said: “I’ll give you twenty dollars a ton for it on the dump.” I replied, “All right; we will have a load for you tomorrow.” The next afternoon Paquin was there with his burros. We had twenty sacks filled, and he handed me twenty silver dollars.

After a few days of gadding the ore, the gutter from which we were getting the lead was becoming too tight to make further progress without using powder, so we decided to abandon the ground. We learned afterwards that the ore assayed 80% lead and 20 ounces of Silver to the ton. In after years this property became the Grizzly Bear Mine, which for a long time paid large profits to the owners.

One evening, while I was standing in the doorway of my cabin, an elderly man, with a bundle tied in a red bandana handkerchief, came along and asked if I could accommodate him for the night, as there were no hotels in the town. I told him I would be glad to, and invited him into my cabin. As he entered, he lowered the bundle from his shoulder and tossed it under my bunk. When it rolled over on the floor something peculiarity about it attracted my attention, and I asked him what was in it. He replied: “There is fourteen thousand dollars and some change in there.” I gasped at this, for I had never been in such close proximity to such a fortune before. He then explained that he was an Illinois doctor, had sold his practice, and had come to the San Juan to buy a mine.

The next morning the doctor, having absorbed all the information I could impart about the mining district of Mt. Sneffels, especially regarding a prospect called the Virginius, which I advised him to buy if he could get it at a reasonable price, took his stick and bundle and disappeared up the Canyon Creek trail.

Fours days later the doctor, minus his bundle, stepped into my cabin and laid a slab of grey copper ore on the table. “Well,” said he, “I bought that mine! Jim rubbed his name off the stake and put mine on. That was all there was to the transaction.”

“How much did you pay for it?” I asked.

“I gave him an even fourteen thousand dollars.”

That transaction marked the beginning of the Virginius Mine. The ore he had brought down assayed 1740 ounces in silver to the ton, and silver was then worth $1.12 an ounce. The doctor took out $3,500,000 before his death, and the mine went to Diamond Joe Reynolds.

My partner Charley Morris was the owner of the Silver Point Mine, high up on Uncompahgre Mountain, and had leased the mine to a party of Swedes. At intervals he would make the leasers a visit, and on his next trip I determined to go with him. I was just recovering from an attack of mountain fever, and my friends told me the climb would do me good.

The snowfall in the winter of ’77 was particularly heavy. We traveled on snowshoes, and bucked snow all the way to timberline, where we had to cross the path of the Riverside slide. The sluice or draw down which the big slide rushes when it makes its run – an occurrence that takes place several times every winter – was less than one hundred feet wide where we had to cross. The run starts far above timberline, and when it moves it strikes terror to every thing for miles around. Just below the sluice, which it has cut out for itself, at the point where we had to cross, the avalanche leaps over a precipice twelve hundred feet deep and then cascades to the river two thousand feet below. At the bottom the mass spreads out to fifteen hundred feet and packs into solid form along the highway sixty feet deep. In the spring the mass was tunneled, so that the coaches could pass under instead of over the blockade.

A heavy snow had fallen earlier in the month, and weeks of fine weather had formed a hard crust. The next snowfall, therefore, was resting on the glassy surface and was ready to slip at any moment. My partner, who was an experienced mountaineer, saw the danger and directed me to wait on the bank until he reached a large tree stump that stood in the center of the draw, which I did. There he waited for me and I joined him. The rest of the crossing was made in the same manner.

We reached the Silver Point for dinner, and I waited while my partner inspected the workings. Then we started back, crossing to the halfway stump as before. I watched for him to reach the farther bank, and he shouted to step lightly. I minced across, and was reaching for Charley’s hand when – C-r-a-c-k!! went the snow above us, and the whole mass slipped with a monstrous rush, bringing with it great boulders and huge trees in splinters. Over the precipice it went in a great volume of smoke, while we watched the awesome sight and congratulated ourselves that we were not in it. When I entered my cabin that night my mountain fever was gone.

It was a hard winter in Ouray and supplies came slowly. I had been down to the Indian Agency, where they had butchered an antiquated work ox, and I was able to secure a fore quarter, which still had the shoe on. This I hung up outside the cabin and it kept me in meat until spring, it was that tough! I also found that a little of it went a long way when scientifically connected to a pot of beans.

Thanksgiving passed and Christmas was coming on without a ripple of change from the daily routine. My partner said that if I intended to become a mine owner I would have to take out my citizenship papers. I had just turned twenty-two, so I got Jim Vance, the Clerk of the Court, to make them out for me, and he said I could now locate claims and hold property. My first location was made on the hill south of Ouray, over which the wagon road to Poughkeepsie Gulch was being built. I called it the Black Eagle, and some surface specimens from it assayed $18,000 in silver and gold to the ton, but when my shaft was fifteen feet deep the average value was only $24.00. The following spring the road builders filled up my poor little mine, and I forgot it.

As Christmas approached I determined to celebrate the day with a big English plum pudding, such as Mother used to make. There were no turkeys or other poultry in town, and very little meat of any kind. Eggs were fifty cents apiece and butter $1.50 a pound, but I sailed in and if – but I am anticipating!

Mother’s pudding must have been a large one, because she used to bring out a big piece of it as late as the middle of July, carefully wrapped in a white cloth; and that was the kind I wanted. I procured four pounds of beef suet, and froze it until the blows of a hammer it fell apart like crackers under a rolling pin. This I mixed with some flour in a washtub. I had four pounds of raisins, four of current, two of citron, four of sugar (and four pounds of salt in the same kind of bag). After mixing everything else I put in the sugar, adding a pint of brandy to give it a zest, then giving it another stirring I tied it up in a cloth and boiled it until Christmas morning, when it looked as fine and plump a pudding as ever graced a boiler!

I had invited a few hungry friends, who had otherwise expected to eat their Christmas dinner out of the conventional bean pot, to partake of my feast, and when a big hunk of my fore quarter beef, which I had succeeded in separating from the shank with an ax, was placed on the table and the plum pudding was on the bunk ready to fall apart with its puffiness, their enthusiasm knew no bounds. With the assistance of a saw and cleaver I had already carved the joint, so the guests lost no time in attacking the roast. They did not seem to have much success with the meat, which I attributed to the desire on their part to save their appetites for the English plum pudding. Their jaws must have ached from the exercise they got from the beef, for they gave grunts of relief when the table was cleared and the big pudding was set down in their midst.