[Philip Verrill Mighels, When Mammon Makes a Camp, Harper's Monthly Magazine, May 1905]

 

When Mammon Makes a Camp

BY PHILIP VERRILL MIGHELS

          A PHASE of life, a stripping bare of human nature, a spectacle of prodigiously vital gambling—this is the brief synopsis of a mining-camp, flashed into being in the night by the wonderful glint of millions of dollars' worth of gold abruptly revealed to the eager eyes of man. The tale is one of luck and failure, fever and calculation, comedy and tragedy, hilarity and death, pity and wild exultation.

          A thousand dollars strewn upon the hills in dust of gold outshines a hundred thousand worth of lead or a million's worth of hay or common potatoes. Gold the blinding, gold the crazing, gold the relentless—how shall its victims be counted ?—how shall its new-made favorites voice the might of delirious joy?

          A wonderful, fast-written drama is that of the gold camp suddenly created on the desert. In the vast, unknown region comprising the southern portion of the State of Nevada, such a camp is even now being feverishly fashioned. The region lies at the edge, as it were, of that God-rebuked area which man—the witness of sacrifice—has cursed and named Death Valley. It is all a desert country—waterless, treeless, and forbidding. The gold there was flung, by the prodigal hand of some ancient volcanic eruption, across a desolation five hundred miles in length. It lies there, masked in a hundred clumsy disguises, boldly flaunted in ribs of seemingly impossible rock, or shamelessly bedding with the worthless dross of sand; and men by the score have ridden, walked, and run across its treasuries for years with never a dream it was there dully winking beneath their very feet.

          It was not until a dusty man, cruising in his loneliness through waste of moun-

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tain and valley, came upon and smote off the mask with his prospector's pick that the golden secret was revealed. Then followed the " rush."

          For months a gold-fevered people have been sacrificing anything and everything to get to the vast arena where the gods—from the towering table-lands about the field—look down upon the game. The tale of man abandoning his certainty, comfort, and home to snatch at the glittering promises that gold reflects upon the sky is as ancient as Adam's parentage. And a little gold has a wonderful way of illumining miles of desolation. The stories most commonly told are of those who win, and stirring, worthy tales they be; but the picture is left incomplete without the annals of those who fail and those who perish in the race.

          The first raw days of autumn were at hand when the writer made a pilgrimage to the newest scene of excitement. A railroad, recently completed across unpeopled territory, penetrates the region to a point some thirty miles from the field of gold. From there the way is made, theoretically, by stage or private conveyance. Many hurried persons walk. On the railroad over two hundred car-loads of freight were blocked that day, so inadequate were all the means of transportation and so unrelenting was the torrent of supplies, machinery, hay, tools, and material being hurled toward the centre every hour.

          The railroad town or terminus was thronged with people, all excitedly endeavoring to hasten onward. The streets were filled with bell-jangling mule-teams, merchandise, outfits, and human beings. Three stages a day were whipping across the desert, loaded to the wrecking-point; and four days ahead the seats were sold. Ten hours before our arrival the last private " rig " had been engaged to make the drive. Not even so much as a saddle-horse remained for hire. From twenty sources came the tale of no beds to be had, for love nor money, in the new camp whither we were heading. But the traffic in, and bribing for, means of transportation increased as the morning advanced.

          The price for a stage seat had risen a dollar in the night. It was now four dollars, and cheap enough. Men, how ever, were offering eight, ten, fifteen dollars, for a ride on any conveyance which would start at once. This is the ordinary spirit of extravagance and panic.

          The writer heard of a chance to go forward on a " fast freight " wagon, soon to start. It was down the street, a four-horse van, loaded full of iron beds, stoves, chairs, cots, trunks, tents, and giant powder. Roped on the back was a bicycle. Thrown on the top were half a dozen mattresses. Already two husky men were on the seat, and four were on the pinnacle of household goods. In addition, there sat a woman, a boy, and a pup, perched on the bedding. I stated my wish to be one of the party, only to be informed there was still another man who was booked for a seat, and that such a load was already beyond the strength of the horses. The wagon was driven up the street, where it presently halted. I followed and asked once more for a chance to ride as freight, and was once again refused. Again it heaved up the steepness of the road, and, as before, it stopped, and I followed.

          " You'd better let me get up there on top," I said.

          The driver answered: " Oh, hell! Come on."

          That was early in the morning. We started at once. A few hundred yards from the limits of the town we saw an empty bottle lying near the highway. A rod beyond it lay another. After that the trail was more than abundantly blazed with these signs of penetrating civilization. A blind man with a nose for glass could have smelled his way unerringly, by the bottles, across all those thirty miles of country. An empty bottle thus cast aside is called "a dead soldier." There must have been a terrible and long-protracted conflict waged there but a very brief time before.

          Up every hill our horses barely dragged the load ; down every declivity they trotted madly, the wagon swaying and creaking like an overburdened ship. In two hours' time we overlooked the desert—gray and level and lifeless in its barren monotony, — stretching from one huge range of mountains to another, over twenty miles away. There the road became two roads, and spaced along on either one were clouds of dust, one after

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another, marking the teams ahead of ourselves, all of them straining toward the one far-distant goal.

          The sun was hot when it shone at all, but clouds banked up and scattered continuously. Three violent storms of rain and hail descended upon us before the hour of noon. The boy got restless, the pup was whining and shivering, the men smoked pipes and said nothing, while the woman indulged herself in a little public blasphemy, directed at the driver, who had neglected to protect her goods with a " tarpoleon." She described herself as a trained nurse. Parrots frequently undergo similar " training," usually at the hands of ingenious sailors.

          The outfit, at noon, had come to the centre of the desert, where a man had digged him a well. He had fenced it in with barbed wire. A horse there worked a pump, soon exhausting the flow of water, whereupon the owner went to a better well, a mile away, on the second road, and fetched water hither in barrels. The second well was two hundred and fifty feet in depth. At both these desert stations the price of watering a horse is twenty-five cents. Both men are getting rich so fast they are dazed. And each has a large " back yard" in the rear of his cabin, where stands a multicolored pyramid of bottles—all of them empty. Each station has an eating-house and a bar. The woman on our load had a cup of coffee, for which no charge was made. Said the landlady : " Oh, I couldn't ask any pay for that. I guess we make money enough on the water."

          A few miles out from the station our " fast freight " was driven around a typical desert caravan—a train of twenty raw-boned, sweating, dusty mules, straining at two huge wagons and a smaller conveyance, termed a " trailer " (containing feed and the teamster's bed), coupled one behind another. The cargo was, as ever, the mixture of things incongruous—beds, engines, food, lumber, drinkables, shingles, clothing, and implements of mining, gambling, and cooking. The teamster, seated astride of the " nigh " wheel animal and driving with a " jerk line," was a hero. No man save a hero, cast in some manner of mould, could face that constantly roving desert gale that sweeps up the dust from four times twenty beating hoofs and drives it upon him all day long—not even at five dollars a day. He was gray with the desolation's essence. There were two small clean spots left on the man's exterior—his eyes. Bright and sharp and clean were those two brown eyes, in all that nimbus of floating grime. The inside lining of his mouth, when he bawled at the mules, was likewise free from dust, but he had to keep up " a divvle of a swallowing." One such teamster told me that now that he had this job, " at big figures," the wife and children at home need not worry any more. Home was a thousand miles away.

          There were teams, teams, teams, wherever the sight could follow the way of the road. Many were coming toward us, laden with golden cargoes—sacks of ore as ugly as so many heaps of rags, and as rich as butter with the bullion concealed in the rock. Three fiercer storms than those of the morning took turns at us, clinging as we were to the summit of our load. The " fast freight" barely crawled by now, for the ruts of the road were twenty inches deep and the sand was ceaselessly following the wheel-spokes upward, out of the ruts, only to trickle and flow and fall to its bed again, and lie in wait for the next great horse-propelled contrivance. And the " dead soldiers " strewn along the road, on either side, were yet a little closer together. The land was so barren that, as the teamster said, " the chipmunks have to bring their lunches along " when they come to the place.

          It was twilight when we came in sight of the brand-new mining-camp, built in a natural amphitheatre formed by the square-cut table-mountains. It was a thickly studded constellation of tents, with straggling domiciles and dugouts scattered about over a space of ten square miles. In their whiteness and squareness the tents resembled countless dice at rest where the toss of fate and chance had left them to grasp at a foothold.

          The darkness closed in as we drove into town. Our teamster swung his animals at once into a large corral where hundreds of mules, a dozen cows, scores of men, great dusty wagons, and piles and heaps of baggage, lumber, cases, rolls of bedding, gaunt iron boilers, and domestic necessities were mixed in hopeless con-

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fusion. I paid him my fare, and told him I would willingly pay him more could he manage to provide me with a six-by-one accommodation in his blankets for the night. He knew men were walking the streets for lack of beds in the town, and being a large-hearted teamster, he agreed to take me in, provided there was space sufficient under cover.

          " T sleep 'most anywheres in this corral," he said. " There's a tent over here that we may get in, if there ain't too many beds there now."

          In the semidarkness we stumbled over to the tent, which he entered. A second later he let out a horrible whoop. He had bumped into something alive. It was merely a cow. She had gone inside in search either for news from home or hay in the mattresses. She came out hurriedly, bowling the writer aside in her haste. Then a match was lighted, its wavering light revealing nine rough beds in the tent, all on the ground, in a space so limited that many were, perforce, rolled up in order to squeeze into the space. But I could come here and bunk in with the teamster if nothing more inviting could be found. He seemed to believe there was room.

          A final storm of the day now broke before I could make my way from the strewn corral. In Nevada the rarest disturbance known is a storm of thunder and rain. But to-night, above the brow of the sombre mountains raged a mighty war of elements, terrific and ominous. Out of clouds as black as felt, stabbed three-pronged lightning strokes, vicious and awful. A sudden wind hurled dust and rain and hail together, in a tempest, on the town. The street was ablaze with lights from a score of saloons and gambling - halls. Music arose from these thronged abodes of carelessness. It swept in interrupted gushes on the storm, laughing out its frivolity against the stern, deep roar of thunder from the hill. To me it was threat and portent, fearful and majestic, that the gods were sounding. But two thousand men had fled to the shelter of gay saloons, and a negro here and a woman there were beating, sans peace, on loud-stringed pianos and

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piercing the storm with rag-time song. The furies outside could rage and shake that awful trident of thunderbolts unheeded by the crowd; and the threat of death and pestilence and woe to descend on the fevered camp below was hurled against unhearing walls and past the ears of the children at their play.

          That night the sky was clear again. In hundreds of tents a candle cast a dim effulgence, creating an effect most ghostly. A tent is entirely, though but dimly, outlined by any light within, and hundreds of tents thus grayly cast upon a background of black, none of them definite, no two alike, no three along a street, but each by itself and each grotesque with shadows—hundreds of these strange luminous presences seemed issuing from out the cryptic hollows, like the merest phosphorescent wraiths of human habitations.

          All night there was gambling in every direction. It is always a part of a camp. Every saloon was " wide open " for games of chance. Roulette, "klondyke," faro, poker and stud-poker, craps," twenty-one "—anything that any one could wish was frankly spread before the crowds. The way to make money in a mining-camp is to let the other fellow dig it out of the ground—and then take his money away from him as quickly as possible. And leave him good-natured. Coin — more golden coin, more twenty - dollar gold pieces, were displayed in the " banks " of the games than a man would see in a mint. Chinamen. Mexicans, Yankees, college graduates, Portuguese, Dutchmen, Italians, Russians, Canadians, Japs, Indians—all were there, large and small, tough and tender, young and old, rich and poor, hopeful and hopeless — a heterogeneous, ill-assorted, rough-clad lot, drawn there like so many living atoms by the undiscriminating magnet, the gold all about them in the rocks.

          A few men were drunk; a thousand were drinking. A few women drank, here and there, with the men. A month before, the camp had experienced a famine of food for men and of hay and grain for the beasts. It was soon to know a famine of fuel for the winter. But there had never been and never will be a famine of drink. Whiskey is the one known liquid that will flow up every hill.

          At the newspaper office, where, if anywhere, they would know all things, the writer discovered a good Samaritan who found him a bed in a private tent, where a hard and healthy hunk was shared with a husky young miner. That very night two hundred men were bedless in the town. The streets were thronged till long after midnight, where men were discus-

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sing the newest strikes, and others were arriving from excursions into the hills, and yet new groups were preparing to leave, under cover of night, for regions being secretly explored.

          The raw windy morning that succeeded revealed the camp in the very act of crystallizing. Aside from the one straight street on which the business houses fronted, there had been but little attempt at providing for regularity of highways. The living-places were planted almost anywhere among the scattered rocks. And there were dwellings in every stage of construction and of every conceivable type. A few ambitious builders were cracking up the boulders, of which to make their cabins; by far the greater number were using adobe—sun-dried bricks—to wall themselves in from the weather. New tents were going up in every direction. Thin frame stores and dwellings were scattered here and there in the scene. One man had builded his shack entirely of mud and empty bottles. There were thousands of bottles, tons of bottles, pyramids of bottles—all of them empty—at the rear of every saloon in the place.

          There were dugouts located conveniently in natural banks of earth and stone; there were houses built of packing-cases labelled " soap," " dynamite," " Boston baked beans," " tobacco." Some one had fetched a hundred factory-made doors to camp and sold them, ready to build a house about. Many of these were gorgeous with redwood panels and stained-glass radiance. They had sold like the proverbial hot cakes, and there they were, set into mere little shanties of mud or bottles or patchwork of packing - case lumber. Anything more incongruous is hard to imagine.

          More than half the new structures in camp were roofless. The famine of lumber and shingles had not yet abated. Mud houses, stone houses, wooden houses

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—all were gaping open at the top. In despair of a thatch before the storms should come, many owners were throwing clay and gravel on the roof, to form a covering till improvements could arrive. But here, there, everywhere, the first essential was haste. And with lumber and tools at a premium, nothing was safe. A carpenter put down his saw to go for his hammer. When he turned about the saw was gone. A plank, beam, or board, neglected for a moment, disappears. The appropriator, if caught, is willing to pay, but have that plank he must, and never again will its original owner behold its shape or color.

            The street was swarming with life as before. Mules and horses, merchandise and wagons, blocked the thoroughfare. Men in khaki and corduroy were everywhere. A thousand were lined up before the post-office, hoping for mail. A score were lazily hounding a worried-looking man who had recently made a new strike and fetched in rock of fabulous value. For three days and nights he had been attempting to escape his self-appointed guard, whose one intent was to follow him back to his rich discovery. There was no peace for him; there is no peace for any one in such a camp. Like the men who snatch a plank or a tool, the gold-fevered beings, unable to hire what they need, will steal a horse or a whole conveyance, in a moment, to dash to a new-found field. On returning they are willing to pay.

          Merchants, assayers, brokers, bankers, lawyers, doctors, dentists — these and innumerable others were more than represented in the camp. A jewelry-shop was selling more diamonds than any similar place in the State had handled for a year. In addition to his regular business, nearly every man in town has a mine or an interest in a mine. And, without exception, all these mines are "great big propositions," for each man tells you so himself. It is marvellous with what childlike confidence men will believe that all they have to do is to drive a hole into a mountain, anywhere, and dig out solid gold.

          The water we used that morning was dipped from a shallow well exposed to all the terrors engendered by conditions of no sanitation whatsoever. Two of the camp's most visited wells are fairly in the centre of the one main street. Half a mile up on the hillside a meagre spring supplies a tank, from which a pipe-line is laid to several faucets. This is patronized by the more fastidious. The " water-wagon," consisting of a dray with six or seven barrels in its hold, is filled from the faucets. Inserted in a barrel is a

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piece of ordinary hose. The driver comes to a customer's door, sucks on his hose to start the water siphoning out of his barrel, and then, thrusting the spouting end into his customer's five-gallon oil-can receptacle, fills it and charges ten cents.

          At the outskirts of the town the spirit of the fever knew no rest. The makers of bricks and the builders of houses were working like toil-hungry bees. The " bricks " are fashioned of mud and manure. Of straw there is none to spare for human houses, in a land where hay commands a price of seventy-five dollars a ton. And manure costs nothing. The stablemen are glad to haul it to a brickyard and throw it on the ground. A plant for making these adobes consists of a cleared space, open to the weather, a mixing-mill operated by a mule or a horse, a hole wherein the mud, or clay, plus manure, is salted down at the end of the day, and a frame in which to mould the bricks. Alternate layers of clay and manure, properly wetted, having been thrown into a hole beside the mill on the previous evening, the two men ordinarily employed at a yard go hotly at the work in the morning. One shovels the mixture into the mixing-mill, and yells at the horse to keep him grinding round and round. From a hole, below, on the opposite side, the mixed mud issues forth. There the second man catches it up in his hands and—yelling at the horse -throws it into his frame, or mould, until the thing is filled. He then " dumps " the wet brick flat upon the earth, where it dries, in the course of a week or less, and becomes the building material of an empire.

          The men I saw were in nerve-destroying haste. He who formed the bricks was bare of foot, as he stood in a puddle of ice-cold ooze. He was dressed in a shirt and a thin and tattered pair of overalls, wet from waist to feet and flabbily blowing against his legs, in the bitter wind of the morning. He worked like a very fiend, clutching at the mixture of stuff, as it came from the mill, with hands like talons. He screamed at the horse in strident tones. When his mould was filled he snatched it up and ran from his hole to the drying-ground, heaved the billet out upon the sand, and ran, like a figure of famine and despair, hack to the ooze and the toil. He snatched a breath to say that, selling the bricks at seventy-five dollars a thousand, he and his partner make " a little bit better than wages." The bricks were four inches thick, nine inches wide, and fifteen inches long. A thousand will answer for quite a house, and the structure, when completed, will defy the gnawing teeth of time and the elements for half a century, meantime excluding all manner of weather, either hot or cold. Let him who complains of making bricks without straw bethink him of the stable. And perhaps there is something kindred between the little family domiciled in such a house and Him who was born in a manger.

          Near by the brick-yard two young men, New-Yorkers, college graduates, gentlemen, had bought themselves a lot whereon to make a house. They were assayers, neither of them more than twenty-five years of age. They were poor—in everything save grit. Together they were building their much-needed structure, with the 'dobe bricks, which they carried in their arms from the yard to the site of their dwelling. They had never laid a brick or builded anything before. All day long, in the cold, searching wind, they mixed up mud for mortar and piled up the units of their walls. It was a crooked, ill-constructed, pathetic little house they were making, and at nights their hacks were aching unbearably, but they wrought steadily, doggedly on. And when they have finished, their house will be their castle and their workshop, all in one, and then against a score of competitors they must vie for the work that brings a livelihood.

          From a hilltop near the centre of the district a man may see a thousand holes where the human ants have burrowed after gold. The holes are like the tunnels made by worms that eat into stumps of fallen trees—each with its grayish heap of refuse left at the door. Already a thousand men had delved into adamant, only to use up their last remaining penny and abandon the enterprise without having found a single " color."

          An ordinary mining claim extends for fifteen hundred feet in length and six hundred feet in width, over the section of rock and hill that a miner may select.

THE PRIMITIVE BRICK-YARD

          Many such a claim, after being " staked," or marked out on the earth, is frequently subdivided and leased out on shares to as many as ten or more parties. For one man who finds the precious metal there are always a hundred who fail. Mining, ordinarily, is not a business; it is merely a gamble. Industry, perseverance, economy, sobriety—none of the well-known business virtues will insure success. In new camps, particularly, it is all a matter of luck. The most deserving lose, along with the wise, the skilful, and the prudent, while the shiftless, the ignorant —any one, in a word—may come upon the streaks of gold, and shame poor Aladdin in a night.

          The man with whom the writer bunked —a sober, industrious young fellow—engaged in working a lease with several partners. They sunk a shaft one hundred and fifty feet in depth and "drifted " from the bottom, in their search for golden ore, until not a penny was left in their treasury. They had discovered absolutely nothing. The lease was abandoned and all were obliged to go to work for wages. Day after day they had flung their coats across a monster dorsal fin of dark, volcanic rock, out-jutting from the hill near by, and given it never a thought. That ledge of rock was fabulously rich. The leasers who followed them went at the ledge of hopeless-looking porphyry, on top of the ground, and found it fairly shot full of gold. They channelled it out, as men might channel for a ditch, and removed over fifty sacks of ore, worth four hundred dollars a sack.

          On another lease two partners drove a hole in the ground with an eagerness so hot and blind, in their fever to get below to riches, that they shovelled their way through gold worth a million of dollars, and cast it out with the waste. Two fellow beings, well aware that gold abounded at the "grass roots," sat by and watched—watched like two patient harpies for the men on the lease to expend their final dollar and abandon the last faint hope in their breasts. Three months of toil and hardship and denial were required to break the eager spirits, to beat them—clean them out! Three months the vultures waited and made no sign; and their moment finally came to feed on the dead aspirations of men whose ears had been deaf to the knock of Fortune at the door. No sooner had the lease changed hands than the new possessors began to shovel up the stuff they knew for gold. The gravel there was so

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rich in precious metal that the owners dared not trust it in sacks. It was garnered in empty oil-cans, which were soldered up tightly before they were shipped. There was rock in that hole that any man would fling away as worthless, and in just a ton of it Jade Nature was concealing gold worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

          In one instance a miner snatched five claims for his own. He was presently land poor and found himself obliged to sell a portion of his holdings for capital to work the remainder. He received one hundred dollars each for two of his claims. The man to whom he sold dug out a fortune. The remaining three claims produced nothing.

          One " lucky devil " bought a fifth interest in two claims for the sum of forty dollars. In less than six months he had netted therefrom over $200,000; and he still retained a hold upon the property.

          From the first the place was called a "poor man's camp." The mining experts " turned it down "; the rich exploiters of the game declared it all a " false alarm." The poor man dug out gold by the barrelful.

          I came away from the town on the stage, with twelve other passengers. Two were piano-men, travelling on their new-made rounds. One on the outside was a shotgun messenger, riding with his weapon in his hands, to meet any highway contingencies that might arise. Three of the men were prisoners, in charge of a deputy sheriff, who was taking them all to the nearest jail, a two days' ride away. They had a monster bottle of whiskey as a solace to their feelings. An entente cordiale more pronounced than that which existed between prisoners and custodian would be practically impossible. They called him Bill, gave him drinks from their bottle, and otherwise treated him precisely as one of themselves. The crime for which they were about to serve the county was attempted highway robbery.

          Such is the camp on the desert. When the winter comes, so the doctors there predict, the rains will seep through polluted soil into all the wells in the place. Like rats in a trap the careless will perish. This is the law; this is the history of Mammon's fevered votaries. And many an innocent, " unfit " to survive the hardships and the woes, will be numbered in the sacrifice. The men responsible for all those empty bottles will die in the first sharp stage of pneumonia. A few will have the sheer vitality to totter into the second stage and meet the summons there.

          The day will come when the fever will have run its course. Even then a mining-camp will always be a mining-camp, and like no other community extant. But on that day the men will build a little schoolhouse, and a housewife will plant a tiny tree and sow some seeds of hollyhock. And from this little town, as a centre of refuge, the tireless human cruisers will again venture forth, hearing the germ of empire into the trackless desolation.