[Percy F. Montgomery, The Dead Camp, Sunset, November 1905]

 

The Dead Camp

            THERE was, there is, and there always will be, a deeply rooted interest in the west as it existed in the days of Bret Harte. The lure of gold, the tragedy of the life of the man who sought it, the country which dared him to enter its wilderness and the magnificent romance of the whole is, perhaps, next to our colonial tales and traditions, the choicest bit of history we hold as a people. There exists no longer, save in a few men's memories, anything personal or tangible that reaches back half a century to these golden days. Palatial trains swiftly pass, by day and night, the deserted stage stations and the travel-weary tourist looks idly at the distant mountains and turns to the guide book to read mechanical descriptions of this and that place, and forgets it all even as he reads.

            In all this land of the western country Nevada alone holds the links between the present and the past. Nevada is the custodian of countless dead camps—the weird ghosts of a former life.

            Pioche, Nevada, is one of these camps; Belmont another. Hamilton, Jefferson, Ely —all of them once thriving towns, teeming with life and action, resounding with the heavy sound of machinery, brilliant in the night with the lights within, proud of the power of their inexhaustible mineral wealth—are silent tombs of departed folk who peopled them and went over the long trail into the land beyond the Divide.

            Pioche is situated over five hundred miles southwest from Salt Lake. In the late seventies it still clung to its position in the world, but the inevitable happened. The Nemesis of the gold hunter blighted its activity, and it died. The same houses line its weed-grown streets; their blinds flap idly in the wind. Upon the counters of the musty saloons stand blackened bottles, covered with cobwebs. The cry of richer gold fields has called its life-blood elsewhere, and it is left nerveless and alone, to wither amid the sage brush and disintegrate with its memories forever locked within its silent halls.

            Upon the hills about this mountain camp of the long ago, rise smelters, chimneys, hoists, furnaces, iron machines all rusted and torn, huge piles of red and green and russet rock.

            At Hamilton, a camp that once held over fifteen thousand souls, but where one hundred now dwell, the recent advent of an automobile, driven by a daring mountain tourist, caused a great sensation. Yet its day of success knew every luxury invented by man. Today it is a dream place far above the colored clouds. Sheep and cattle wander amid its streets, and a few grizzled men sit about the old iron stove in the postoffice and speculate on the value of the Klondike. Below this little camp lies a valley of green and gold. Over it float clouds so exceedingly rare in coloring that their like is not to be found in a dozen places in the world. But it is not the clouds that lure the gold hunter, and so the sky paints pictures for no man's eyes in this "No-Man's" land.

            There is a new camp over there now.  They call it Tonopah. Houses are springing up in

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the night time. Every paper tells of its newer and richer finds. Anxiety to be first is developing into a frenzy. A newspaper man on a big city paper has given up a paying position to start a newspaper there. A railroad gang has just completed an iron link between this new camp and the outside world. Pioche is reincarnated at Tonopah. It is the cry of the gold hunter that is calling them thither. They are daring the desert, sleeping like coyotes beneath the stars, shooting when their rights are questioned—Hamilton is again being brought to life in this strange, romantic land. Each incoming man is flushed with the wine-like dream of wealth. Only the rocks and the copper desert-sky and the summer stars can read the history of this camp aright.

            Below Pioche lies a little fenced inclosure containing wooden slabs, from the surface of which the effect of weather has long since effaced the names. An old man living in a nearby cabin now and again patches up the fence and trims out the encroaching weeds. When a head-board falls he sets it back again. These are the graves of the man who was shot in the stone saloon where the cobwebbed bottle rests and the man who "jumped a claim." The others got away. At night the long shadow fingers point out the street corners in the gloom where once anxious vigilance committees discussed desperate measures for protecting their interests. There is no need of a vigilance committee now, for the timid desert jackrabbit wanders at will through the roadways and jumps unafraid down the flagstones of the main street in the moonlight.

            The gold hunter is still with us. He is today braving the snows of the northland, and in California he is working gold in a great machine that does the work of five hundred men with the turn of a single lever. In western Nevada the federal government is building a wonderful irrigating dam. Further east men are getting rich in grazing sheep.

            Engineers say that Nevada is as rich today as ever, that men have but uncovered the top layers of its hidden gold. The palatial tourist car speeds by the stage station and the tourist looks upon the mountains and wonders what it was all like in the long ago. He sees a chain of snow-capped mountains and a desert at their feet. Over beyond them lie the dead camps. They are America's gems of romance, her priceless jewels of yesterday's glory in the free, daring life of the upbuilding days of the golden west. He is living in a new age. The dead camp is but the plaything of the writer and the dreamer. Out beneath the sunlit sky, far away from the arteries of trade, it dreams—ever dreams of that other day of the long ago when it was Bret Harte's "Roaring Camp"—of that wonderful day that is forever gone.

PERCY F. MONTGOMERY.