[J. H. Cradlebaugh, Rawhide and Its Gold: The Newest Record-Breaker Among the Wonderful Treasure Towns of Nevada, Sunset, July 1908]

RAWHIDE AS IT LOOKED NOVEMBER, 1907

RAWHIDE AND ITS GOLD

THE NEWEST RECORD BREAKER AMONG THE WONDERFUL TREASURE TOWNS OF NEVADA

By J. H. CRADLEBAUGH

            ANOTHER desert-born mining camp is attracting the attention of the world. The new baby, still in its swaddling clothes, is Rawhide. In October, 1907, a dozen prospectors, a half-dozen tents and a few burros were all the camp could boast. To-day it is a wide-awake, hustling mining camp, the city having a population of about eight thousand and the district probably twelve thousand.

            Its history is that of each and all of Nevada's latter-day mining camps—a story of sturdy, stronghearted men braving the summer's heat and desert's desolation, pitting human intelligence and endurance against anything Fate might offer, staking their all in the game where Fortune deals the cards, and winning.

            It is not a long story, that of the camp's earlier days, and perhaps worth briefly recording while still fresh and uncolored by the glamour of romance and ungilded by fiction. W. W. Stockton was the first prospector to wander over the Rawhide hills, coming here in July, 1906. Charley McMann was next, coming in from Schurz, a point on the railroad thirty miles distant. His auto was the original kind, a burro, and he located the Royal Coachman, the first claim located in the district, in July, 1906. Schaedler and Wasser came in soon afterward from Fairview, chasing a rainbow-tinted story of a lost mine. They found the Regent about two miles northwest of Rawhide. This claim had been located at some remote time and was relocated by them, when coming back in December. Other parties came in from Fairview, among them J. E. Keyes, who located the Royal and Tiger, at this writing (the middle of April) probably the most promising mine in the district and others, twenty-three in all, and at the same time the Silent Friend, another mine of

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great promise, was located. Johnny Rose located the present Steinheimer properties, among them the Jack Pots, forty claims in all.

            J. Carlton Bray, a prominent young mining engineer, was sent in to examine and report upon the Regent in February, 1907, and was highly impressed with the possibilities of the district. On his way out he met at Schurz, Charles McLeod, who at his suggestion visited the camp and who located all of McLeod Hill and also the Mascot and other claims on Grutt Hill.

            It was through McLeod, by the way, the camp obtained its name. He had at one time owned the townsite of Buckskin which he lost through the ground being located as mineral ground. The boys joked him so much that he finally said, "Boys, we will have a camp here and will call it Rawhide," and Rawhide it has remained.

            The first pay ore was found on the Regent, eighty dollar values being struck by Stockton, but the first gold found in Rawhide was struck by Jack Davis on the present Murray lease in May, 1907. C. C. Dunning was a partner of Davis, and is now associated with the Grutt Brothers, four sturdy young hustlers who came here from Spokane and bought the Davis interests. The first really high-grade ore was struck on the Bald Hornet fraction, and the first shipment of ore was made early in October, 1907—sixteen sacks that yielded better than ten thousand dollars a ton. That shipment marked the birth of the camp. Less than seven months ago a half-dozen tents—to-day a booming mining camp with two daily and three weekly newspapers with power presses and linotype machines, two telegraph and telephone lines, four daily six-horse stages and a dozen or more autos carrying passengers to railroad points and neighboring camps.

            The mine owners very wisely adopted the leasing system, claims being divided into tracts three hundred feet square, or for a full claim ten leases. The result has been an unusually rapid development.

            There were on May 1 of this year more than two hundred leases on which work was being rushed, and others are taken almost as soon as offered. The scenes of the greatest activity are on Balloon and Grutt hills, lying just east of the town, in fact partly within the city limits, and in some cases the dumps from the shafts mark the eastern boundary of the main street. Three months ago when the leasers began work the scene was one long to be remembered. The work was on the surface, and the puffs of dust and continuous boom of blasts all over the faces of the hills gave one a vivid idea of a besieged fortress with its bursting shells and answering cannon. By the middle of March most of the leases had gone as deep as could be done by hand and hoists began to appear. By early April seven were in place, and at this time it would be a task to count them, for they are everywhere. Near most of them can be seen great piles of sacked ore, looking from the town like ricks of cordwood, and none of this ore runs below fifty dollars, most of it being worth above one hundred dollars a ton and some of it running into the thousands,

            Early in March the Rawhide Coalition Company put in a shot on one of their claims on Grutt Hill that aptly illustrates the difficulties which the prospector encounters and the uncertainty of the game at which he plays. The shot was put in on a low point on the hill about fifty yards from the main street. There was only a knife blade seam on the surface and this had been tramped over daily for months by miners working on the hill without attracting attention. It was more from curiosity than any hope of uncovering values that the blast was put in, but when it was fired it rained gold in Rawhide. Considerable of the gold was lost but a conservative estimate places the value of the yellow metal blown out by that shot at fourteen thousand dollars. One piece in its hurry to reach its ultimate destination crashed through the window of the Bank of Rawhide, though that institution had not yet opened for business, and succeeded in opening the first account there, as the bank kept the specimen and after deducting a sum sufficient to pay for the damage to the window, paid the mine owners six dollars for the piece!

            How many thousands of such places have been tramped over without the

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presence of values being suspected by the weary searcher no man can guess, but that there are thousands of them that will be found when generations yet unborn have passed away is a certainty, and thousands more will be overlooked by those who pass over them in blissful ignorance of the wealth beneath their feet.

            McLeod Hill, lying south of the town and also partly within its limits, is another scene of great activity, and some of the richest ore in the district is found here. It was on this hill the big strike was made on the Miller lease in February that for a time promised to lead to a pitched battle. It seems Miller and five others had a lease on the ground and that the five, after doing a small amount of work, became discouraged and left. Miller, however, hung on and his perseverance and grit were rewarded by uncovering a fine pay shoot running well into the thousands in "picture ore." Naturally the five were sore, and as they were legally full owners with Miller insisted on having their share of the find. Miller could not see it that way, and with a few friends barricaded the shaft and refused his partners entrance. They with thirty or more friends besieged the Miller crowd and it looked for a day or two as though the good old days of the Comstock were to be revived and the sound of the shotgun and the pop of the six-shooter were again to gladden the hearts of the old-timers. It was a vain hope, for some kind of a truce was patched up and the battle was transferred to the courts. The lawyers will, no doubt, soon own the controlling interests, if indeed they do not take the mine for part payment and with their usual generosity wait for the balance of their fees until the litigants have a chance to go prospecting.

            Rawhide is a dry town, not in the prohibition sense, not by a good many saloons as well as jugs full, but it is four miles to the nearest water supply. Water for all purposes is hauled in tanks and sold at two bits the coal oil can full or two dollars for a fifty-gallon barrel. It is good, much better than the usual southern Nevada kind. A bath in it costs about two and a half dollars.

            To the southeast of the town about six miles is a big alkali flat brevetted a lake, and near this, water is found in abundance at a depth of from twenty-five to forty feet. It is not fit for drinking but already one small mill has been installed here by "Swiftwater Bill"—of Alaskan and matrimonial notoriety—with a capacity of twenty-five tons a day, and others are contemplated. Water companies have been organized and contracts let for putting in pumping plants. A reservoir on top of Balloon Hill will give several hundred feet pressure through the business section of the city, and will furnish much-needed fire protection.

            Wood and coal are classed along with the high-grade ore, the former, principally white pine, is hauled fifty miles and costs thirty dollars a cord, and coal costs forty-five dollars a ton.

            During the latter part of February the business men and mine owners concluded Rawhide needed a railroad. A petition was sent the county commissioners asking for a right of way, and fifty thousand dollars were subscribed in two hours for the survey and other preliminary work. This survey was completed early in April and it is expected the road will be completed in July, or at the latest in September. The road will connect with the Goldfield branch of the Southern Pacific either at Schurz or at Walker Lake, a short distance south of that point, and there the ores of the camp will eventually be worked, as water is abundant and fuel is available over the Southern Pacific lines.

            While Rawhide is the youngest of Nevada's many great mining camps, it gives promise of being second only to the Comstock. The values are here and are widely disseminated. Covering an area of four by eight miles the whole country is located, and strikes are of daily occurrence. The only question is, "Do the values go down?" Few of the mines are below the one hundred and fifty-foot level, but at the deepest points the very best showings are made. In the Kearns No. 2 on Balloon Hill at a depth of sixty-five feet a twelve-foot vein of shipping ore is in sight, and estimates are that eighteen inches of this will work above four thousand dollars a ton. This is not hearsay

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but the writer has seen the ore in place and the tests made. The Kearns No. 1 has also a splendid showing and the Murray lease a short distance south is producing a large quantity of high-grade ore. The Ogilsvie-Reynolds lease is also producing plenty of high-grade; the Big Four is keeping its hoists busy on high values, and in fact there is scarcely a lease on Balloon or Grutt or McLeod hills that is not producing shipping ore. The Last Chance opposite Grutt Hill is also good. Mining men for the past two months have been turning their attention to Tiger Hill, two miles west of town. Here are the famous Royal Tiger, a steady producer of high-grade, the Royal Coachman, another producer, the Salmon with a fine vein cut, the McMann with a wonderful showing of phenomenally rich ore carrying a large percentage of silver and the Silent Friend with five strong ledges which is coming to the front as one of the permanent, great properties.

            The town of Rawhide is the typical mining camp. It has established the record for growth, springing up like a mushroom after a warm rain. While the big slope west of the arroyo is dotted with tents, Nevada, the main street, is being

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GRUTT HILL (TO THE LEFT) WHERE $14,000 WORTH OF GOLD WAS BLOWN OUT WITH ONE BLAST

lined with substantial frame buildings, many of them two-story, and Rawhide avenue, the main cross street, is rivaling it. In the residence district tents are giving place to frame buildings as rapidly as lumber can be obtained, even though it costs from seventy dollars to ninety dollars per thousand. There are lodging houses everywhere, big, single-story, frame shacks and innumerable big tents, some of them partitioned off with calico curtains where one may have the utmost privacy—if the light is blown out—and some run on the corral plan where cots almost touching each other, provide resting places for the weary Rawhider at six bits a rest for the privileges of the corral and one dollar for sybaritic ease behind the print draperies. As the population is steadily increasing at the rate of fifty persons a day, other corrals are being built, though the limit has been about reached.

            As an example of the way business is done in a new mining town, the building of Tex Rickard's saloon is a fair sample. Everybody knows Tex, at least since the Gans-Nelson battle at Goldfield. He came into Rawhide from Goldfield one afternoon

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BALLOON HILL, WHERE SOME OF THE RICHEST MINES OF THE DISTRICT ARE LOCATED

in an automobile, bought a lot for eight thousand dollars that evening. Ten days later a building thirty by one hundred feet was completed and that night a dance was held in the building and three days later the place was opened with five barkeepers, two faro tables, two roulette wheels and half a dozen other games going. The building and stock cost Rickard thirty thousand dollars. This same lot, by the way, was sold last September for twenty dollars.

            In the past two months there has been a great change in the character of Rawhide's population. The floaters, who blow into every new mining camp as certainly as the down blows from the cottonwood trees in the spring, have blown out again, and miners have taken their places. More men are being employed every day, the payroll is growing steadily, and Rawhide is settling down to a steady business gait.

            Every resort has its full quota of gambling games. The clatter of chips and the click of the little ball as it drops into the pockets on the roulette wheel and makes the heart of the player glad—

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NEVADA STREET, THE BUSIEST THOROUGHFARE IN RAWHIDE

sometimes—the faro table with its crowd of devotees whose faces show all the baser passions of humanity; where mine owner and miner, business man and clerk, gambler and teamster jostle elbows, twenty-one and crap games, besides innumerable other devices for separating the unwary from their money—all have their votaries and plenty of them. Between Grutt and Balloon hills is a small flat that might appropriately be called Babylon. Here the lower world holds forth and here at all hours of the night may be heard the rattle of the piano and squeak of the dance-hall fiddles. Here also assemble the patient burros, turned loose to eke out a living on the scant sage and pungent greasewood while their owners lay off to take a rest and incidentally add to the hilarity of the midnight hours, and these—the burros—lift up their voices betimes and sing in unknown tongue the only song known to Nevada's deserts.

            Such is Rawhide—speculator and prospector, gambler and miner, teamster and tradesman, youth, energetic and ambitious, with dreams of a home in "the states" where someone awaits his return; grizzly-haired men who woke from that dream long ago and who now woo nothing less "flirtatious" than Dame Fortune. The good, the bad, virtue and vice, men of all professions and trades and those of none. Here are women sweet and dainty enough to grace any home, and others indigenous to mining camps—a motley crowd, all answering to the call from the desert and following the lure of gold.