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Racing to ore -
victory of the Robert E. Lee.
The fact that Lady Luck continued to frown upon us did not discourage either my
partner or myself, and after a few days of “good time” in Leadville we were
again out in the surrounding hills. This time we followed the trail up White
Horse Gulch for several miles and stopped for lunch on the dump of the Glass Pendery shaft on Carbonate Hill. The claim had been abandoned, but at once we
decided that this was as promising a location as any, and in a few hours we had
the old shack cleaned up. My partner then went to town, where he hired some
burros, and was back before sunset with our camp outfit and tools.
The shaft was full of water, and judging form the size of the dump it was about
seventy-five feet deep. An old horse whim had been left intact, and a torpedo
bucket with a moveable bottom was borrowed from an adjoining claim. A mule,
looking terribly old and decrepit, was rented to us for a dollar a day, and the
water was lowered so quickly to within twenty feet of the bottom that we thought
we could easily keep it under control. Our disappointment was great, therefore,
when next morning we found the shaft full again. This meant a night shift if we
were to get to the bottom, and our efforts were rewarded by the addition of two
more men, whom we had inveigled into the enterprise by persuasion and promises
of big reward when we got down to mineral. Working day and night it took us
eleven days to get the water out, and even then the big torpedo had to be going
constantly. I was encased in hip boots and rubber coat, but there was never a
minute that I was not soaked to the skin. The bottom of the shaft was still in
the “wash,” and it was a feat to get more than six shovels fulls of gravel
into the water bucket before it was hoisted away.
It looked as though
we were sinking in an underground river, and it was not to be wondered at that
we were fast losing our courage as day after day passed without any progress. At
last it began to dawn upon us why the claim, in such a desirable location, on a
hill overlooking the city and with a known contact running through it, should
have been abandoned. We finally had to look the facts in the face, and one
morning we fired our extra men, returned the mule to his pasture, and mournfully
moved away.
With our ambition
to achieve riches still unassuaged, my indefatigable partner was for giving our
luck another test, and then if the jinx was still with us, to dissolve
partnership and go it alone. This time we intended to look for a piece of high
ground where we would be unlikely to strike water at leas than one hundred feet.
We were both fairly acquainted with the mines of the district, and our object
was too trace out the lines of the different claims and discover any fractional
odds and ends that were frequently left in locating the hodge-podge of mining
claims in all western mining camps.
After several
days’ tramp over Fryer and Carbonate Hills, we stumbled upon an unlocated
fraction of a claim that we thought contained about seven acres, surrounded by
producing mines. It took some nerve for a couple of irresponsible prospectors to
plank down their outfit among the towering gallows frames of the opulent
shippers of that section, but we paid no attention to the neighbors and went
about our work in a non-chalent way that disarmed any suspicion of our
intentions for the time being. After getting our tools on the ground, we
selected a site on a mound that gave us a dump without having to build up our
shaft collar too high.
In the days of the
Leadville excitement, the mining laws were obeyed to the letter, and there was
no such gobbling of claims as is practiced in modern times. In order to effect a
legal location it was necessary to make an actual discovery of mineral in place
before a prospector could even put up a stake, but that once accomplished by the
find-of ore, the discoverer was entitled to record his claim under the rule,
“First to mineral, first survey.” Under such conditions it was not unusual
to see three or four prospect shafts going down on the same claim, and each
party had a saddle horse tied to a nearby stump ready to race to the Granite
recording office, twenty miles away.
It was therefore
with great trepidation that we saw two other outfits begin to sink shafts close
by, within a hundred feet of each other. One called itself the Star of the East,
the other dubbed itself the Robert E. Lee, while our location had the honorable
name of the Blue Jay. Visions of the power of wealth rose before us as a bogy to
keep us awake at nights, when we learned that Jerome B. Chaffee, a millionaire
United States Senator, owned the Robert E. Lee. The Star of the East boys also
seemed to have plenty of money. However, my partner and I cajoled and coaxed the
boys we had had with us on the water shaft to give us another chance, promising
them a substantial interest in the mine if we won, so they joined us once more
and the race was on! Four six-hour shifts were put on the Robert E. Lee, three
shifts on the Star of the East, while we could afford only two shifts, but we
worked the full twelve hours each and sank the shaft as fast as either of our
rivals.
Each day vituperous
discussions would occur between the miners of the different shafts on top,
several fist fights occurred, and every night there would be thrown on the air a
shout that ore had been found. Replying epithets in derision drew crowds from
the neighboring mines to see the entertainment.
The ore veins in
the Leadville district lie horizontally in the earth like coal, rising and
falling in an undulating manner, so that in the case of three shafts going down
at about the same rate of speed, it was a pure gamble as to which should be the
lucky one and catch the top of the wave. By some fortuitous circumstance,
however, the ore rose somewhat higher under the Robert E. Lee shaft, and
daybreak on that fateful morning sounded both the discomforture of the Star of
the East and the Blue Jay, when a miner from the Robert E. Lee leaped on his
horse carrying the certificate of location to Granite. All three shafts were
down the same depth, but only one showed ore.
That forenoon an
engineer surveyed in all the ground, and put out the stakes, while Joe and I
loaded our tools and windlass in an express wagon and called it a day. We stayed
around, watching the buckets of beautiful horn silver as they came from the
Robert E. Lee shaft. The ore was put into new canvas sacks for shipment to the
smelter, and the foreman later announced that the first day’s output was
$112,000!
But we had yet another bitter pill to swallow when we reached town, where we
learned that another party had continued the work in the Glass Pendery shaft
after we quit, and the papers told the rest of the story in glaring headlines:
“Strike $12,000 Ore on Carbonate Hill!” |
