ALLEN GREEN CAMPBELL.

 

            A VERY sterling man was Allen Green Campbell ; there are thousands of people in Utah who knew him, who were familiar with him every day for years ; but we venture the belief that not one in two hundred of them all realized how true was his manhood, how high his soul.

            Could he, when he was poor, have been offered a fortune at the expense of doing an unmanly act, such as thousands would cheerfully do and esteem it as a shrewd business trans- action, he would have spurned it.

            An instance of this was shown when the Horn Silver mine was sold. The company had given a certain man a bond on the mine. He went to New York and after awhile wired or wrote Campbell to come with authority to give a title to the mine, as it was sold. Mr. Campbell prepared the necessary papers and went to New York. The day after his arrival he was ushered into a room where he found the principal subscribers to the purchase waiting for him.

            Then one of those present said : "Mr. Campbell, we have agreed to purchase the Horn Silver mine on the report that has been presented to us, provided you endorse the report."

            The report was read to him, then pushed over the table for his endorsement.

            He pushed it aside and said: "I cannot endorse that report."

            "And why not?" was asked him.

            "Because," he replied, "it is not true."

            All looked disappointed, and the man who had obtained the option was paralyzed. There was an oppressive silence for a moment, when one of those present said :

            "What kind of a report would you endorse, Mr. Campbell?"

            Campbell replied : "Yours, if you would but stick to the truth."

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            "But I know nothing about mines or miners," said the man.

            "Well," said Campbell, "push your chair up to the table and let me make an expert out of you !"

            The gentleman laughingly assented, drew some papers and pens before him, and said, "I am ready."

            Then Mr. Campbell told him to write what the surface formation showed, giving him the data sentence by sentence. Then he took him to the first level in the mine, had him write the length, breadth, and the assay value of the ore shoot developed there. In the same way he went through all the levels of the mine, then he bade him put down the cost of mining, hauling and smelting, to make clear what the net value of the mine so far as developed was.

            Then he told him to reckon thirteen cubic feet of ore to the ton, to calculate the tonnage, then deduct the cost of mining and reduction and give the gentlemen present the result.

            The man was an expert accountant, and in five minutes gave the amount, which was some $300,000 more than the man with the option had figured out from his imagination. Then Mr. Campbell said : "I will sign that report. You are about the only honest expert that I have met for six months. I will sign the report and guarantee that you will find the mine as stated, except that on the lowest level the boys were uncovering the ore chute several feet every day. and there will probably be 100 feet more ore there for you than this report includes."

            Then all present took on a new idea of a western miner.

            Mr. Campbell was a great miner and an intense American. He was not a scholar in the usual sense; but he would have been a close friend of Plato or Socrates had he lived in the generation of either of them, for he had reasoned out how things should be from an intuition all his own.

            One day when a group of men were discussing the Chinese question, one of them turned to him and said: 'Mr. Campbell, do you not think the Chinese should be kept out of our country, such a menace are they to poor white laborers?'

            Campbell waited a moment and then said : "The Chinese

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that come to our country are poor wretches, but they are men. They represent the results of thousands of years of want and suffering. They are grateful to work for a pittance and to do menial work. Could I have my way I would let them come and do that work and at the same time exalt American workingmen to places where the Chinese could not compete with them."

            He always meant to be absolutely fair, and justice was his insistence from childhood to the last day of his life.

            At the same time he had some weights upon him. He never could outgrow some provincialisms and prejudices that were due to the environments of his youth, and could not always distinguish an honest man from a would-be grafter.

            He became accustomed to the control of a great fortune, but when he traded his Nevada farm for a small orange grove at Riverside, Cal., he fixed his home there and told with more pride that he cleared $2,000 from it the previous year, than he ever exhibited when a mining transaction had brought him three hundred times that amount.

            He was one of the truest of friends. He and Mr. Matt Cullen of Salt Lake City were partners in the Horn Silver mine. To his dying day he always looked upon Mr. Cullen as a brother.

            When he accepted the nomination as a delegate to Congress from Utah, he did not expect or desire to hold the office. He ran merely to vindicate a principle and as a protest against what he looked upon as a defiance of law on the part of the majority here.

            There was much of the martyr in him. He feared nothing on earth except to do wrong, and he would have cheerfully faced death for what he believed to be right.

            He left his early home with nothing except his faith in the invincibility of labor, backed by honest intentions. He became an accomplished miner and made a fortune, but there was not one stain upon one of the dollars he accumulated, or upon his life while he was accumulating it.

            He was a great-hearted man and a patriot as true as was Regulus. He was always a reminder of Abraham Lincoln in

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the unfeigned integrity of purpose which controlled his life. But his hands and feet showed that he was of gentler stock than was Mr. Lincoln.

            Utah never realized how great and true a man he was, for he was utterly unpretentious and was never in a position where his real character shone out before the eyes of the people. He had within him all the elements of a great soul ; we do not believe that he ever himself knew how much of a factor for good he might have been.

            I one day heard a man ask him what his idea of serving God was. He replied : "To do what little good we can here for God's poor." That was one key to his real nature.

            He died too soon, but he met death as he had all the storms of life, with calmness and without fear.