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The Greater America 
 
o 
 
 Co 
 
 O 
 
The 
 Greater 
 America 
 
 by 
 Ralph D. Paine 
 
 Author of "The Story of Martin Coe,' 
 '*7ke Fraying Skipper,'* etc. 
 
 Johnson, Blagden & McTurnan 
 
 NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO 
 
Copyright, 1907, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 OUTING PUBLISHING CO. 
 
 Copyright, iQH. 
 JOHNSON, BLAGDEN & McTURNAN, Inc. 
 
 Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, Eng. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 £ci.A3ia7Hr 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I The Call of the Inland Sea . 
 
 II Past and Present at the " Soo " 
 
 III The Story of a Copper Mine 
 
 IV The Confusion of a Prophet . 
 V The Peopling of the Prairie 
 
 VI The Magnet of the Wheat 
 
 VII " Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed 
 
 Farmer 
 
 VIII The Last of the Open Range . 
 
 IX Jack Teal and Some Others 
 
 X The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 
 
 XI The Cow Puncher versus Irrigation 
 
 XII The Heart of the Big Timber Country 
 
 XIII The Man Who Found Himself 
 
 XIV A Breath from Alaska 
 
 XV Along Pacific Water-Fronts 
 
 V 
 
 I 
 
 H 
 32 
 54 
 63 
 80 
 
 94 
 104 
 117 
 
 135 
 152 
 158 
 178 
 192 
 204 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XVI On the Pilot Schooner's Deck . . 215 
 
 XVII Twentieth Century Argonauts . . 229 
 
 XVIII Where Ranch and City Meet . . 244 
 
 XIX Gold Camps of the Desert . . . 263, 
 
 XX On the Road to Bullfrog . . . 256 
 
 XXI The Men of the Untamed Desert . 298 
 
 XXII In Conclusion 321 
 
 VI 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 On Puget Sound, where commerce seeks the Orient 
 
 Frontispiece i, 
 
 Facing 
 Page 
 
 The vanishing lake carrier of other days . . . 4^ 
 The modern freighter; a steel trough with a lid on it . 4 ^, 
 
 The old way of handling cargo 12 1^ 
 
 Where steam nas succeeded brawn .... 121 
 
 The Soo — the mightiest link between the East and West 13 1- 
 
 Where copper is king 32 ^ 
 
 The toilers of the copper country 33'. 
 
 The railroad's difficulties in winter . . . .50 
 This piece of country has surely been torn to a frazzle 51. 
 Scooping up the rich ore from the earth's surface . 62 
 The low sod house of the homesteader .... 64'. 
 Sprouting buildings from the prairie grow with incon- 
 ceivable rapidity 64. 
 
 The railroad was marching * * * two miles a day 65 
 
 A prairie water wagon 741 
 
 The water-witcher at work 74 
 
 The bank is one of the earliest buildings in the town 75' 
 
 The magnet of the wheat 90 
 
 Blue ribbon live stock — prairie bred . . . . 91 - 
 
 vii 
 
Illustrations 
 
 A Montana round-up of twenty-five years ago . 
 
 Picked survivors of the lost legion 
 
 A Montana sheep ranch ..... 
 
 The round-up camp ...... 
 
 A freighter's outfit 
 
 The first time in harness ..... 
 
 The new king of the cattle range 
 
 Pioneer irrigation ...... 
 
 " The ' donkey ' * * * was yanking it home hand 
 
 over fist "....... 
 
 " Huge logs loomed amid this woodland wreckage " 
 
 The pilot boat at sea ..... 
 
 One of the last of a noble race 
 
 The shack of the Forty-niner .... 
 
 A monster that makes hash of the landscape . 
 
 A corner of Santa Anita ranch .... 
 
 "Lucky" Baldwin's thoroughbreds at pasture . 
 
 In the Mexican quarter of Santa Anita 
 
 A Mexican sheep herder and his flock 
 
 In the heart of a gold camp .... 
 
 A residence section of Tonopah 
 
 The main street of Goldfield .... 
 
 Hauling ore from a mine of fabulous richness . 
 
 A chauffeur of the desert and his car 
 
 viii 
 
 Facing 
 Page 
 
Illustrations 
 
 A desert pass on the Goldfield road . 
 Moving-day in the desert . . . . . 
 The stage station " thirty miles from nowhere " 
 The desert freighter ten days out from port 
 Freighters watering at an oasis . . . . 
 Prospectors in the heart of the hostile desert . 
 
 Facing 
 Page 
 
 294 '^ 
 
 295 > 
 
 306' 
 
 307'' 
 
 318" 
 
 319 
 
 IX 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 This book is a record of Impressions of a western 
 journey undertaken for the purpose of getting out 
 among some of the millions of good Americans who 
 are doing their day's work as they find it, with a 
 cheerful faith in themselves and an abounding confi- 
 dence in the future of their country. This product 
 of my note-books contains nothing that is startlingly 
 new, nor does it pretend to be more than a series of 
 glimpses of the splendid activities of the American 
 West of to-day. I hope, however, that I have been 
 able to catch, here and there, the spirit of that crea- 
 tive energy which has wrought such a marvelous 
 transformation within the span of a single lifetime, 
 and of the dauntless vigor and enterprise which have 
 not yet lost the bold and picturesque flavor that is 
 essentially and typically American. 
 
 I know an old town on the Kennebec, in the 
 " State o' Maine," which holds, embalmed In fra- 
 grant traditions, the life and memories of bygone 
 generations that played a noble part In the early 
 building of the nation. Beside the river winds the 
 main street, beneath whose majestic elms are rows 
 of white houses with green blinds, not one of which 
 was built less than a century ago. Along the valley 
 beyond the town are weather-worn farmhouses with 
 
 xi 
 
Introduction 
 
 shambling barns, some of them deserted. They 
 nestle in rock-ribbed valleys or climb the slopes of 
 wind-swept hills, and their boundaries are marked 
 by low stone walls built with vast toil. Few young 
 men are left on the little farms along the valley. 
 The fathers are always working from dawn to dark, 
 and when the year ends it shows a scanty livelihood 
 in net results, with not much more cash in hand than 
 will pay taxes. The mothers achieve miracles of 
 household economy, yet the struggle to make both 
 ends meet wears them down before their time. 
 
 Living conditions in such communities as this have 
 suffered surprisingly few changes during the last 
 hundred years. A sprinkling of retired gentlefolk, 
 a few merchants whose stores supply the town and 
 valley, and the scattered farming community around 
 about, comprise a population whose daily round of 
 interest largely mirrors those of the days of spinning 
 wheels and stage-coaches. For they are still depend- 
 ent upon the soil, which has become stale and weary 
 with much tilling, and whose small yield no longer 
 gives adequate returns for the sweat that It costs. 
 
 It was such towns as this that sent their best blood 
 onward and westward to carry on the work they had 
 begun. In the village graveyard sleep those men and 
 women who tamed the New England wilderness, 
 and on the slabs you may read hundreds of names, 
 all of Americans of the pioneer stock; names which 
 to-day are scattered as far as the Pacific Coast, and 
 
 xii 
 
Introduction 
 
 which still stand for the qualities of manhood and 
 Americanism that have peopled the prairie, the moun- 
 tain, the desert and the forest. 
 
 The old home towns of these pioneers and the 
 churchyard in which they sleep recall the building 
 of a nation in its heroic beginning. Their work is 
 done, their towns are little more than memorials of 
 what they did, and the spirit that animated them 
 has vanished from them, but only to inspire newer 
 generations of kindred breed to far greater work of 
 the same kind. 
 
 It is true, also, in lesser degree, that in all the 
 other country along the Atlantic seaboard the pioneer- 
 ing and peopling were long ago accomplished. Even 
 the cities of the East find scope for progress chiefly 
 in rebuilding upon the foundations laid by others. 
 Their people have become the consumers of the re- 
 sources of the country to the westward, where the 
 great creative and pioneering forces are still active in 
 the fresh joy of wresting from the mine, the farm, 
 the ranch, the range and the sea their hitherto ungar- 
 nered riches. 
 
 xni 
 
THE GREATERAMERICA 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE CALL OF THE INLAND SEAS 
 
 On the Great Lakes there are no fleets of tall-sided 
 square-riggers waiting for cargoes, no rusty tramps 
 in port a month before loafing off across the Seven 
 Seas. The traditions of the sea have been flung 
 aside. The lines of the vessels of the Atlantic are 
 the result of centuries of battling with all weathers, 
 and even the sorriest and most unlovely tramp has 
 something in her aspect to suggest the noble race of 
 deep-water ships from which she sprang. The salty 
 harbors are still rich with the romance of the ages, 
 and alive with the spirit of adventure and of mystery. 
 The voice of the sea sings, " Far Away, Far 
 Away," but the cry of the Great Lakes is, " Hurry, 
 Oh, Hurry Faster." If the " liner is a lady," the 
 cargo boats of the lakes are husky, sweating men 
 with their sleeves rolled up, ever in furious toil with 
 merciless taskmasters driving them. To be filled to 
 the hatches with ore or grain or lumber, to reach 
 their destination, unload and hasten back for another 
 cargo, this is their business, and for this they are 
 built. 
 
 I 
 
The Greater America 
 
 Along the waterfront of Buffalo I found no forests 
 of graceful yards and spars, nor the towering bulk of 
 the liners and freighters which overtop the ware- 
 houses of the New York docks. Clustered along the 
 elevators and ore docks I saw the long, low lake 
 carriers, in tonnage surpassing most of the ocean 
 cargo steamers. What they looked like was from 
 four to six hundred feet of steel trough with a lid on; 
 at one end a wheel-house, at the other a smokestack 
 and a row of cabins, and between them a clear stretch 
 of deck as long as a city block. This is the steamer of 
 the Great Lakes, a triumph of American utility and 
 adaptability, which can handle more cargo in less 
 time than any other transportation device ever made. 
 
 There was a salt-water captain, who, for reasons 
 of his own, accepted a berth as first mate in a big 
 passenger steamer on the Great Lakes. He was a 
 capable seafaring man, but he did not know what 
 " hustle" meant until he went aboard at Buffalo. The 
 lake skipper to whom he reported for duty remarked 
 in the most casual manner: 
 
 " Just give her a coat of paint this morning, and 
 if the sun stays hot and she dries in good shape, give 
 her a second coat this afternoon." 
 
 The salt-water mate staggered in his tracks and 
 made amazed protest. This was a five-thousand-ton 
 vessel, and giving her two coats of paint was several 
 days' work, by his reckoning. The lake skipper was 
 a person of discernment, wherefore he had pity on 
 
 2 
 
The Call of the Inland Seas 
 
 his new mate and forebore to deal harshly with him, 
 explaining, with a tolerant grin : 
 
 " All right. I suppose you'll have to learn to 
 move more lively after snoozing around salt water 
 all your life. You just pass that order along to the 
 bos'n and tell him it's got to be done and then you 
 sit up and take notice." 
 
 The bos'n took the order calmly, as If it were in 
 the day's work, and by nightfall the big steamer was 
 spick and span with two coats of paint from her 
 water line to her guard rail. The sailor from deep 
 water had learned his first lesson in the ways of the 
 Great Lakes during the navigation season, when the 
 hard-driven shipping must be forced to do twelve 
 months' work in half a year. 
 
 Through the open season the most imposing pro- 
 cessions of merchant craft in the world stream up 
 and down a thousand miles of inland waterway, carry- 
 ing a commerce upon which, in a large measure, hangs 
 the Industrial prosperity of this nation. It is a 
 magnificent marine which has been created within 
 the memory of living men. It is supremely American 
 in every way, and most of all in its fashion of solving 
 new problems, with no time for, or patience with, the 
 old order of things which prevails along the leisurely 
 waterfronts of ocean ports. 
 
 It Is Impossible to travel far on the Lakes without 
 having an amazing series of contrasts and compari- 
 sons fairly flung in one's face by force of what he 
 
 3 
 
The Greater America 
 
 sees and hears. For example, one of the first cargoes 
 of iron ore ever mined in the Lake Superior region 
 was trundled aboard a little schooner about fifty years 
 ago. Four days were required to put three hundred 
 tons aboard her. A week was required to get the 
 ore out of her. Two seasons ago the great steel 
 steamer Augustus B. IVolvin loaded more than ten 
 thousand tons of ore in eighty-nine minutes, or less 
 than an hour and a half. And this huge cargo was 
 jerked out of her in a little more than four hours. 
 Steam and electricity have wrought no more spectac- 
 ular miracles than in the handling of cargoes on the 
 Great Lakes. 
 
 I soon discovered that the minutes are counted as 
 precious in a round trip of two thousand miles. The 
 hatches of the freighters we met or passed were 
 lifted by steam before the vessels reached their docks, 
 and as soon as the hawsers were fast the machinery 
 was in motion for transferring cargo. There was 
 once a mate who worked out a plan whereby fifteen 
 minutes in a journey could be saved, by having the 
 hatches off when the boat touched the dock. He 
 was promoted for his ingenuity and given a ship of 
 his own. In other words, the great railway systems 
 have evolved no more economy of system in hand- 
 ling freight than this shipping, which laughs at the 
 notion that " time and tide wait for no man." 
 
 When I sailed from Buffalo in the summer time our 
 steamer was never out of sight of these long, deep- 
 
 4 
 
■1 ■■riir-i ■■'■', jijggiffmti itbBm 
 
 The vanishiiif[ lake carrier of other days 
 
 The modem f)ii!^htir ; a steel trom^h uith a lid on it 
 
The Call of the Inland Seas 
 
 laden freighters, which in one season can move thirty- 
 five milHon tons of iron ore, besides the flood of grain 
 from the western prairies. Last year the lake fleets 
 carried nearly fifty million tons of American prod- 
 ucts. The sight of this wonderful parade of deep 
 vessels, hurrying by night and day from Duluth and 
 Chicago and a score of other ports, was enough to 
 thrill any American who has been wont to suppose 
 that his country owns no merchant marine. The 
 Pittsburg Steamship Company controls nearly a 
 million tons of shipping, all modern steel steamers 
 and barges, compared with which the tonnage of the 
 biggest of the ocean companies seems small. 
 
 Your big ocean liner or freighter needs half a 
 dozen tugs to swing her and to handle her in the 
 cramped confines of harbor and docking slip. 
 Because the lake steamers are uncouth and barge- 
 like of outline, it must not be presumed that they are 
 awkwardly handled. Their skippers send them 
 through twisting channels and pinching passages, 
 with a skill and ease which would open the eyes 
 of a master on the Atlantic. Longer and wider 
 and deeper these vessels have been building, until 
 now the six-hundred-foot craft has arrived, and the 
 limit has not been reached. Such dimensions as these 
 put these steel monsters in a class with the largest of 
 the Atlantic liners. Yet a crew of twenty-five men 
 will handle one of these freighters, and her master 
 will carry her through a thousand miles of crowded 
 
 5 
 
The Greater America 
 
 waters and out of passages not much wider than a 
 city street without need of towboat to help him. 
 
 For size and luxury of equipment our passenger 
 steamer, the Northwest, would have been called a 
 liner on the Atlantic. In the summer twilight we 
 came to the St. Clair Flats and the ship canal, which 
 unrolled across the lowlands like a silver ribbon. 
 Here were hundreds of cottages, whose porches over- 
 hung the water, scattered along many little water- 
 ways which swarmed with skiffs and launches. It 
 was like a huge colony of stranded houseboats, for 
 there were no other roads than these water-trails. A 
 man from Boston had been gradually shedding his 
 reserve as one peels off a coat of sunburn, and this 
 summer sight struck him as so immensely picturesque 
 and nov^el that he deigned to make comment that was 
 genuinely enthusiastic : 
 
 " Do you know, the farther west I go the better 
 I like it. Why, I thought the people out here were 
 so grossly absorbed in making money that they had 
 neither the time nor the talent for enjoying life. 
 There must be thousands of them in this American 
 Venice. It's most extraordinary for a big steamer to 
 be loafing along here among all these cottages. You 
 could toss the traditional biscuit from the deck and 
 hit a happy householder in the eye almost anywhere." 
 
 The sailing vessel is a thing of the past on the 
 Lakes. No more of them are building, and the few 
 that survive are aged and rotten, and belong with 
 
 6 
 
The Call of the Inland Seas 
 
 another age of shipping. Now and then you will 
 see a lumber-laden schooner staggering on her course, 
 and in the late autumn, when the haste to reap the 
 freight harvest becomes a furious rush against the 
 coming of the ice, crews risk their lives in manning 
 every wornout hulk that will hold together and carry 
 canvas for a final race against time. The shipyards 
 almost ceased to build the wooden schooner as far 
 back as 1873. Most of those which are still in com- 
 mission, therefore, date back thirty years and more 
 ago. The passing of the sailing vessel, which is still 
 in process on the ocean highways, has been accom- 
 plished on the Great Lakes. American methods had 
 no thought for the romance of sail. And the sea- 
 men who have risked their lives in these old wooden 
 death-traps thank their stars that the schooner is so 
 nearly numbered with the traditions of the Lakes. 
 
 The sight of one of these picturesque relics of the 
 inland seas had a certain impressive value as a 
 reminder and a contrast in conditions, whose story 
 of expansion and change has been wrought with 
 magicial swiftness. 
 
 There are gray-haired skippers sailing the Great 
 Lakes to-day who can spin yarns of the fur-trading 
 era, when the cargoes of merchandise were portaged 
 across into Lake Superior and loaded Into little 
 schooners which sailed by day and anchored at night 
 because there were neither lighthouses nor channel 
 marks. They saw the first steamer built to carry ore, 
 
 7 
 
The Greater America 
 
 and this was no longer ago than 1868. In this ves- 
 sel, the /. R. Hackett, the engines were tucked far 
 astern, and the deck was lined with hatches for taking 
 on cargo with a speed previously undreamed of. 
 This was the beginning of that unique style of marine 
 architecture, " the steel trough with a lid on it," 
 which swarms on the Great Lakes to-day. Then 
 came the first iron vessel, and later the beginning of 
 steel construction. These early builders and crews 
 took chances for the benefit of American commerce. 
 Boats of more than three hundred feet in length were 
 more or less experimental for several years. One of 
 the first of the big steel steamers broke in two in a 
 gale off Whitefish Point, and only one of her crew 
 got ashore. An old lake captain told me : 
 
 " I remember when the Centurian was loading 
 for her first trip at Chicago in 1884. She was so 
 big that the newspapers said there wasn't enough 
 corn in the harbor to fill her up. She was the largest 
 vessel on the Lakes, and she was the sensation of the 
 day. At last she was filled and steamed to the west- 
 ward, carrying 165,000 bushels of corn. Now they 
 carry 450,000 bushels for a cargo, and take it as a 
 matter of course. The size of the steamers in future 
 will be limited only by the depth of water and the 
 length and beam of the locks. When these are 
 increased, the shipbuilders will be talking of a seven- 
 hundred-foot vessel. When the Canadian lock was 
 built, with a width of sixty feet, nobody • dreamed 
 
 8 
 
The Call of the Inland Seas 
 
 that a boat would ever be built that would be cramped 
 in getting through. This year a steamer will be 
 launched with a beam of sixty feet, which shuts her 
 out of the Canadian lock entirely." 
 
 As the boats increase in size and become more and 
 more unwieldy, greater demands are made upon the 
 skill and nerve of the navigator. To take a six- 
 hundred-foot steamer across the St. Clair Flats and 
 through the Detroit River and into St. Mary's 
 Canal, even in the best of weather, is a task that 
 requires the highest qualities of seamanship and the 
 most vigilant care. But to feel his way through the 
 Lakes on black nights, steering by range lights and 
 sounding and guesswork, always on a lee shore and 
 in waters which swarm with shipping as does Broad- 
 way with cabs after the theater, is a man's work of a 
 big and stirring kind. And in all weathers the call 
 of the inland seas, " Hurry, Oh, Hurry Faster," 
 drives these skippers ahead until nothing short of a 
 smash in the engine room will hold them in port. 
 
 In the autumn the Great Lakes take their cruel toll 
 of the ships which risk lives and cargo that the mills 
 may have ore and the seaboard may have grain. 
 Then the newspapers of Detroit and Buffalo and 
 Chicago begin to print such items as this: 
 
 " Fourteen lives are known to have been lost and 
 three sturdy vessels sent to the bottom by the storm 
 which swept over Lake Superior Friday night and 
 Saturday. Seven other men are missing, and It is 
 
 9 
 
The Gj' eater Ajnerica 
 
 more than probable that when the vessels which 
 sought shelter wherever they could find it are able to 
 reach port, the tale of losses of ships will be larger 
 and the death roll will total more than a score. The 
 storm was one of the worst that ever swept over 
 the lake. Sailing vessels were at its mercy, barges 
 were torn loose from the steamers which towed them, 
 and the largest and most modern steel vessels limped 
 into port with hatches battered open, cargoes shifted 
 and masts gone, to report men swept overboard in 
 the struggle with the waves." 
 
 When December comes and the lake fleet Is fight- 
 ing to make a last run for it before the ice floes grip 
 them, the matter-of-fact reports run like this : 
 
 " Detroit, Dec. 4. — Sheathed in ice, the steel 
 steamer Angeline, about whose safety there has been 
 much apprehension, arrived at this port for fuel last 
 night. After leaving the head of the Lakes with a 
 cargo of iron ore for a Lake Erie port, the Angeline 
 was struck by a tempest off the Keneewaw Peninsula, 
 and for two days had a terrific battle against the 
 storm. Once the vessel was near Eagle Harbor, but 
 her master, Captain S. A. Lyons, was afraid she 
 would be driven on the rocks, so he turned about and 
 headed for the open. According to the crew, they 
 never saw such high seas on Lake Superior, and their 
 dread was that two big waves would lift the vessel 
 by the bow and stern and break her in two. They 
 gave themselves up for lost through a night and a 
 
 10 
 
The Call of the Inland Seas 
 
 day. To First Mate McLean fell the duty of watch- 
 ing the hatches, to see that none were crushed in. 
 With a rope fastened to his waist, and two of the 
 crew standing in the shelter of the forward cabin, 
 holding the rope, McLean time and again made his 
 perilous rounds. Once a wave engulfed him and he 
 was washed overboard, but the men at the end of 
 the line hauled him back again. Captain Lyons 
 remained on the bridge for forty-eight hours, and 
 said that the seas ran higher than the vessel's smoke- 
 stack." 
 
 From two hundred to four hundred vessels of all 
 kinds are wrecked on the Lakes every season, a tragic 
 roll of disaster to amaze the landlubber sailing along 
 these land-locked stretches in pleasant summer 
 weather. Even more impressive is the muster of 
 missing ships recorded for these treacherous waters. 
 There was the staunch schooner Hume, for instance, 
 which cleared from Chicago fifteen years ago. She 
 was well-found and ably manned, but neither spar 
 nor dead body was ever washed ashore to hint at 
 the manner of her fate. In the same year the 
 schooner Atlanta vanished in Lake Superior, and her 
 end was also utterly mysterious. 
 
 " Then there was the passenger steamer Chkora," 
 said my friend the skipper. " She was one of the 
 finest and ablest steamers on the Lakes in her time. 
 She sailed from St. Joseph, Michigan, in the winter, 
 bound for Chicago, crowded with people. That was 
 
 II 
 
The Greater America 
 
 the last ever seen or heard from her. Not a splinter 
 of wreckage was ever found, and she simply blotted 
 herself off the shipping list without even a farewell 
 whisper. Even worse than this was the loss of the 
 big steel steamer fV. H. Gilcher, in 1892. She car- 
 ried a crew of sixteen men and foundered somewhere 
 in Lake Michigan, without leaving a sign to tell how 
 It happened. She was missing, and that's all we 
 know. Life on the Lakes isn't all a yachting excur- 
 sion, my son." 
 
 A hardy breed of men, doing their duty as they 
 find It, the sailors of the Great Lakes are more and 
 more In demand to man the new fleets that are build- 
 ing every year. While the shipyards of the seacoast 
 were walling over the dearth of business, the ship- 
 yards of the Lakes booked orders for thirty-one steel 
 vessels for the season of 1906, In size from six to 
 twelve thousand tons capacity, with a total value of 
 fourteen million dollars. While those who prefer to 
 search out the dark side of things are finding reasons 
 for mourning the fate of their country, here on the 
 Great Lakes Is a vast field of organized endeavor 
 which is quietly serving the needs of the people from 
 the Pacific coast to the Atlantic seaboard; armies of 
 hard-working men and mighty squadrons of ships 
 hurrying to keep pace with the steadily increasing de- 
 mands of commerce, holding railroad rates in check; 
 ministering to the needs of many millions, In clean 
 and businesslike fashion; moving the raw materials, 
 
 12 
 
Till' old tC(i\ of luiniiruii^ cariro 
 
 '3^^ 
 
 
 IV here steam has succeeded hraivn 
 
 mm 
 
t^ 
 
 fc^ 
 
 ^ 
 
The Call of the Inland Seas 
 
 and making for such a national prosperity as the 
 world has never known. 
 
 Without these fleets the grain crop of the West 
 would not be worth harvesting, for the railroads 
 would be choked in trying to transport half of it. 
 Iron and grain — these are the giant factors, looming 
 above all others in the commercial and industrial 
 power of the country, and they are so largely depend- 
 ent upon the traffic of the Great Lakes that this 
 shipping is one of the proudest assets of the Ameri- 
 can flag. And the men Vv^ho have built it up from 
 its crude beginnings, half a century ago, are pretty 
 good Americans. 
 
 13 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 PAST AND PRESENT AT THE "SOO" 
 
 The modern spirit of the Great Lakes is to be found 
 at high tide at the locks of the " Soo," where the pass- 
 ing shipping is almost double the volume of that 
 which finds its way through the Suez, Kiel and Man- 
 chester ship canals combined. Tonnage statistics are 
 more or less meaningless to the layman, and he ac- 
 cepts the oft-repeated story of the traffic through the 
 " Soo " as a fine display of fine big figures which go 
 to prove what a great country this is. It is another 
 thing, however, to see this shipping go through the 
 locks. It is one of the wonders of America as truly 
 as Niagara Falls or the Yosemite. And Man, with 
 pride in himself and his doings on the face of this 
 planet, can find satisfaction in the boastful truth that 
 this is a wonder wrought by his own hands. 
 
 For six months of the year an average of a big 
 steamer every fifteen minutes of the night and day 
 passes through the lock and ship canal which join 
 Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Try to imagine, if 
 you please, what an imposing spectacle would be 
 made by a parade of ocean liners and freighters filing 
 up the North or East River of New York, at fifteen- 
 minute intervals, twenty-four hours a day, six months 
 on end. 
 
 14 
 
Past arid Present at the " Soo " 
 
 It appealed to me as a sight for mortal man to be 
 proud of, and for an American to cheer with his hat 
 off. It was clean, honest, splendid achievement, 
 wrought out by virtue of brains and pluck and far- 
 sightedness. Into the St. Mary's River and canal 
 these vessels fairly trod on each other's heels, waiting 
 their turn at the lock. In the rapids of the river 
 around which the ship canal has been dug were the 
 canoes of a handful of Chippewa Indians, and on the 
 bank were the tents and wigwams of their camping 
 parties. They were living and thinking about as did 
 their grandfathers when the white fur traders first 
 came among them. And near the modern locks I 
 saw the tiny stone lock built by the Northwest Fur 
 Company in 1790 to permit its canoes and batteaux 
 to make passage between the Lakes without an ardu- 
 ous portage. 
 
 Men alive to-day can remember when ten thousand 
 Indians from the North came to Mackinac Island 
 every year to camp and traffic with the fur traders, 
 and when Sault Ste. Marie was a small fur-trading 
 post in the heart of the wilderness. Inhabited by 
 Canadians, half-breeds and Indians. It was not easy 
 for me to realize that the railroad crept into this 
 part of the Michigan Peninsula less than twenty 
 years ago, and that many people of the town can 
 recall living through dreary winters before the whistle 
 of the locomotive had broken their long and snow- 
 bound Isolation. 
 
 15 
 
The Greater America 
 
 In those times the " Soo " was closely linked in 
 summer by means of the steamers passing daily, but 
 winter made their situation as remote as if they dwelt 
 in the Hudson's Bay country. From the time the first 
 snow fell until the big thaw came in the spring, the 
 people seldom saw a strange face, and the carrier 
 who brought the mail by a dog sled from the 
 nearest railroad point was an important figure in the 
 community. 
 
 Traditions of this sort still linger so strongly that 
 dog teams are plentiful in the region of the " Soo " 
 to-day and are still found so useful that the summer 
 tourist is often surprised to see an outfit of this kind 
 in the streets at the season when wheels are used 
 instead of runners. In winter the mail carrier and 
 his dogs are still found in this region, and one of these 
 teams plies with the mail pouch between White Fish 
 Point and the " Soo," which are sixty-three miles 
 apart. 
 
 Twice each week over the frozen surface of Lake 
 Superior trails the dog-sled to cover this route, often 
 with the thermometer tw^enty degrees below zero. 
 Unlike the old Indian mail carriers, he has a sleigh 
 large enough to give him a seat, and he runs beside 
 his dogs only when it is advisable to keep from freez- 
 ing to death. The carrier drives a four-in-hand, 
 which he raised from puppies. They are large and 
 powerful brutes, half St. Bernard and half Scotch 
 collie, the best possible cross for a sled dog. They 
 
 i6 
 
Past and Present at the " Soo " 
 
 are handy also for getting about the country in the 
 summer, and one can often see this odd team tearing 
 along the streets of the " Soo " at a breakneck gait, 
 the dogs hitched to a four-wheeled buggy and driven 
 by lines fastened to their collars. 
 
 A veterinary surgeon of the " Soo " has six of the 
 finest dogs in the Upper Peninsula, and drives them 
 almost daily during the winter months. His trips 
 extend as far as St. Ignace Detour, and other points 
 within one hundred miles of the " Soo." Last winter 
 he made a trip to St. Ignace, stopping over night on 
 the way, and covered a distance of sixty-five miles 
 in six and one-half hours by actual time on the road. 
 
 Wrapped in a huge fur overcoat, and with a buffalo 
 robe tucked around him, this hardy son of Michigan 
 starts out with his six dogs in the fiercest storm in the 
 coldest weather, and will pass any team of horses on 
 the road. In making a long journey, with favorable 
 conditions, his dogs will keep up a pace of ten miles 
 an hour and wear down any horse. 
 
 The dog is still the most reliable means of trans- 
 port through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 
 the long winters, and civilization has not been able 
 to retire him along with vanished relics of the older 
 and ruder times. Until the railroad came the malls 
 were supposed to arrive at least once in ten days, but 
 sometimes a month elapsed between the visits of the 
 sturdy Indian runners, who made their trips of more 
 than three hundred miles to Bay City through a 
 
 17 
 
The Greater America 
 
 wilderness inhabited by wild animals and a few scat- 
 tered tribes of Indians. It is only forty years ago since 
 there were three white settlements between the " Soo " 
 and Bay City. These were old Mackinaw, at the 
 very northernmost point of the Lower Peninsula of 
 Michigan, and Cheboygan and Alpena, still further 
 south along the west shore of Lake Huron. 
 
 One of the most famous of the Indian runners, 
 John Boucher, lived until very recently. Sharing the 
 honors of his hardy calling was Antoine Paquette, 
 who was not a full-blooded Indian, although he had 
 the Indian's knowledge of the woods and the trail. 
 For twenty-five years these two men made their regu- 
 lar trips to and from Bay City through the densest 
 growth of pine forest on the continent, and over 
 snow which was often six feet deep on the level. 
 
 Their sleds were large enough to carry only the 
 mails and a few small packages, and the men usually 
 ran the entire distance, keeping pace with their fleet- 
 footed dogs. Boucher and Paquette were men of 
 tremendous physical vigor, accustomed to the hard- 
 ships of frontier life, and both lived into ripe old age. 
 They usually drove eight or ten dogs in tandem, and 
 the descendants of their sturdy animals are highly 
 prized to-day for dog teams in the " Soo " region. 
 
 With them in this mail service were William 
 Micron and Edward Vernier, two Frenchmen, who 
 completed the list of four carriers needed to keep up 
 the mail service in the winter. To some of the old 
 
 i8 
 
Past and Present at the " Soo " 
 
 inhabitants of the " Soo " it seems but a little while 
 ago that the arrival of the carrier with letters and 
 newspapers from the outside world was an event of 
 stirring importance in the life of the village. A 
 crowd always gathered at the post-office whenever 
 the eager, yelping dogs came tearing down the main 
 street at the end of their long journey. Newspapers 
 and magazines were passed around from hand to 
 hand, and often little groups of men and women 
 would gather at the home of some neighbor and listen 
 while one of their number read aloud. 
 
 The summer visitor can scarcely realize that this 
 modern-looking town is so closely associated with the 
 traditions of frontier life. The shores of the river 
 and the islands in the upper end of Lake Huron and 
 the lower end of Lake Superior are largely peopled 
 with Indians and half-breeds, who cling to their tribal 
 customs. They bring their canoes loaded with willow- 
 ware and other souvenirs for sale, and during the sum- 
 mer are a picturesque feature of street life at the 
 " Soo." After running across a group of these 
 natives, and then sighting two or three dog teams 
 hitched to little buggies and wagons, waiting outside 
 the stores while their owners were shopping, I was 
 vividly Impressed with the curious mixture of the 
 past and present which Is to be found in this Michigan 
 town. 
 
 The pioneers and frontiersmen of the storied West 
 have seen a marvelous epoch of transformation 
 
 19 
 
The Greater America 
 
 beyond the Mississippi, and yet nowhere did I find 
 the drama of American expansion more strikingly 
 focused than here at the locks of the " Soo." This 
 is the mightiest link between the East and the West, 
 between the old and the new, second only in impor- 
 tance in the history of American material growth to 
 the building of the early transcontinental railroads. 
 Only half a century has passed since the opening of 
 the first ship canal and locks at the " Soo." At that 
 time the project was considered by many wise Ameri- 
 cans as extravagant and visionary beyond words. It 
 appealed to Henry Clay as on a par with asking 
 Congress to make an appropriation for building a 
 canal on the moon. Compared with the boldness of 
 the men who were behind this project, the construc- 
 tion of the Panama Canal is a tame and conservative 
 undertaking. 
 
 The first steamer to navigate the waters of Lake 
 Superior was the Independence, of less than three 
 hundred tons burden. She was laboriously hauled 
 across the portage at the " Soo," an undertaking 
 which required seven weeks. Previous to this epoch- 
 making event a few small schooners were hauled 
 across from Lake Huron, by main strength, into 
 what was. then an uncharted and unpeopled in- 
 land sea. 
 
 As early as 1836, however, or as soon as Michigan 
 was admitted to the Union, the governor advocated 
 the building of a ship canal by the State in his first 
 
 20 
 
Past and Present at the " Soo " 
 
 message to the new Legislature. A little later Con- 
 gress was asked to give a hundred thousand acres of 
 land to aid in the work. The effort failed, after many 
 members of Congress had echoed the sentiment of 
 Henry Clay, that the bill " contemplated a work 
 beyond the remotest settlement in the United States." 
 
 The discovery of copper deposits on the shores of 
 Lake Superior a few years later gave the project a 
 new lease of life. In 1852 Congress granted three- 
 quarters of a million acres of land to aid the State of 
 Michigan in building the canal. The discussion of 
 the project, both in the House and the Senate, was not 
 unlike that which has been recently waged over the 
 Panama Canal. The type of canal and the size of 
 the locks were earnestly fought pro and con. Learned 
 engineers finally agreed that a lock two hundred and 
 fifty feet long would amply provide for the largest 
 vessels possible to conceive as ever navigating those 
 waters. 
 
 Opposed to the engineers and the opinion of Con- 
 gress w^as a young man, Charles T. Harvey, who was 
 visiting the Baptist Mission at Sault Ste. Marie. He 
 was a western agent for the Fairbanks Scales Com- 
 pany, and neither a trained engineer nor an expert 
 on canal building. He was only twenty-one years old 
 at the time, but he was an American from his boot 
 heels up. When he heard of the passage of the land 
 grant by Congress he began to look over the pro- 
 jected site of the canal. His brain was big enough 
 
 21 
 
The Greater America 
 
 to conceive the immense future of this undertaking, 
 and he sought and obtained from his employers a fur- 
 lough and an expense allowance while he should pro- 
 mote the enterprise before the Michigan Legislature. 
 
 Having secured an engineer in New York, young 
 Harvey made a private survey of the canal site, and 
 became convinced that the lock should be at least a 
 hundred feet longer than in the plan adopted by Con- 
 gress. His proposed dimensions exceeded those of 
 any other lock in the world at that time, but he was 
 not in the least abashed. Even the lake navigators 
 laughed at the size of his lock. Captain E. D. Ward, 
 at that time the most important shipowner on the 
 Lakes, opposed the larger lock with tooth and nail, 
 on the ground that a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot lock 
 would be sufficient for all time, and that more ambi- 
 tious plans would result in failure, for lack of finan- 
 cial support. 
 
 Young Harvey succeeded in having his plan 
 adopted, and then formed a company, backed by the 
 Messrs. Fairbanks, which secured the contract for 
 constructing the lock. It was a huge undertaking for 
 those times. The " Soo " was a wilderness. The 
 nearest railroad was several hundred miles away, and 
 it took six weeks to receive a reply to a letter sent to 
 New York. In order to obtain labor, agents had to 
 be sent to New York to board Incoming ships and 
 hire parties of immigrants. 
 
 In the winter there were only eight hours of 
 
 22 
 
Past and Present at the " Soo " 
 
 sunlight, and the temperature often stood at thirty- 
 five below zero. An epidemic of cholera broke out 
 and killed ten per cent, of the workmen, but the work 
 was not suspended for a single day. Once two thou- 
 sand laborers struck. Young Harvey quietly hid all 
 the provisions in the woods, and refused to serve out 
 rations until the men had returned to work. They 
 surrendered within twenty-four hours. 
 
 The canal and lock were finished within two years, 
 at a cost of less than a million dollars. There were 
 no cities on the shores of Lake Superior, and no wheat 
 belt in the country to the westward. Then came the 
 Civil War, which checked the growth of this vast 
 region. In 1870, however, the Federal Government 
 awoke to the needs of the lake navigation, and found 
 that already the three-hundred-and-sixty-foot lock, a 
 hundred feet longer than Congress had approved 
 twenty years before, was too small for the vessels 
 which were steaming east and west. Therefore the 
 old lock was ripped out and two greater locks built 
 by the Federal Government at a cost of more than 
 two million dollars. 
 
 They sufficed no more than fifteen years, although 
 the larger of the two was five hundred and fifteen 
 feet in length. In 1896 the Poe lock, built by the 
 brilliant army engineer of that name, was completed, 
 at a cost of four million dollars. It is eight hundred 
 feet long, and it was expected that four vessels could 
 be locked through at once. It was hardly finished 
 
 23 
 
The Greater America 
 
 before it was found that not more than one modern 
 freighter could be locked through at once. Mean- 
 time the Canadian Government had built a lock at 
 a cost of two million dollars, but already there is 
 much talk of the need of a new and larger lock In 
 order adequately to handle the mighty torrent of 
 traffic and the Increasing size of the steamers. 
 
 It is bracing to read what General Poe had to say 
 about those old locks at the " Soo," in whose con- 
 struction there was none of the savor of graft and 
 scamp work that hangs about too many public under- 
 takings of this day. 
 
 " On the whole the canal was a remarkable work 
 for its time and purpose," he wrote. " The construc- 
 tion of the locks especially bore evidence of a mas- 
 ter's hand In their design and execution, and it was 
 no reflection on the engineer in charge that experience 
 developed certain objectionable features. The locks 
 are now being torn out to make way for new ones, 
 and every step in their destruction reveals the excel- 
 lence of their workmanship, the honest character of 
 the materials employed and the faithful compliance 
 with the conditions of the contract under which they 
 were built, not merely in the letter, but also in the 
 spirit. All honor, then, to every man connected with 
 their design and construction. They were long in 
 advance of their day, and if commerce had not out- 
 grown their dimensions they would have done good 
 service for a century. I must confess to a feeling of 
 
 24 
 
Past and Present at the " Soo " 
 
 great regret that it has become necessary to destroy 
 these first locks. Inanimate though they were, they 
 seemed to appeal to every sentiment of respect. They 
 had never failed to respond to any demand within 
 their capacity, they had contributed in a higher 
 degree than any other one feature to the development 
 of the country to the westward of them, and, having 
 done such good work, are now to be obliterated in the 
 interest of that very commerce they did so much to 
 establish. The man who, knowing their history, can 
 see them go without compunction is made of other 
 stuff than I am, and, if he be an engineer, he has no 
 genuine love for his profession nor pride in the 
 achievement of those who successfully apply Its teach- 
 ings to the best examples of his art." 
 
 Charles Harvey, a vigorous man of eighty, lived 
 to attend the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary 
 of the building of the first canal and lock, which was 
 held at the " Soo " in 1905. Such men as he, who 
 have lived to see the wildest dreams come true, who 
 have beheld the mighty works of a nation wrought 
 from small beginnings, cannot be convinced that the 
 country is going to the dogs. 
 
 The Federal Government has let Its ocean mer- 
 chant service languish and die, but It has dealt wisely 
 and with a generous hand in the development 
 of the lake-carrying trade. Fifty million dollars 
 have been spent in deepening channels and cutting 
 canals. The commerce between Lake Superior and 
 
 25 
 
The Greater America 
 
 Lake Erie passes through more than forty miles of 
 artificial waterway excavated by the government, or 
 a greater length of restricted waterway than is 
 planned for the Panama Canal. Even fifty millions 
 for dredging and excavating ship channels is a small 
 toll to pay, when one realizes that the value of the 
 iron ore alone which has been carried along this 
 water route is more than a billion dollars. 
 
 Bigger things have been done here than piling up 
 dollars for individual and national wealth. Stand 
 beside the American locks at the " Soo " and watch 
 one of the great new freighters steam from the canal 
 into the cradled basin of masonry. In length, nine 
 of her would measure a mile. She is crammed with 
 ten thousand tons of ore from the richest iron mines 
 in the world, the Mesabi range, which was discovered 
 and made use of only fifteen years ago. The steel 
 mills of Pittsburg are waiting for this cargo, which 
 was poured into the vessel's hold at the West Superior 
 docks like a dusky avalanche. Mined by steam, this 
 vast freight of ore is waiting in the lock to be lowered, 
 with the ship that contains it, a sheer distance of 
 eighteen feet. The brains which planned and the 
 cunning hands which made the labor-saving mechan- 
 isms by which the steamer ore was mined and the 
 steamer loaded are matched by the skill that sets this 
 lock at work. 
 
 A half dozen men in blue uniform, scattered along 
 the side of the lock, push levers and set engines 
 
 26 
 
Past and Present at the " Soo " 
 
 working. The massive gate closes behind the steamer, 
 pushed by hydrauHc power. Powerful pumps begin 
 their toil, the steamer begins to drop, and foot by foot 
 she is lowered toward the bottom of the lock, until in 
 a few minutes she rides almost twenty feet below her 
 former level. 
 
 The toil of engines in the big power house, the 
 work of a few men in control of them, and all day 
 long and through the night the great bulks of these 
 cargo-carriers are raised and lowered with no more 
 fuss and flurry than the operation of an elevator in 
 an office building. Once through the lock, the 
 steamer moves on her course to her distant dock, 
 there to be unloaded by another handful of quiet, 
 self-reliant men manipulating a few wheels and levers 
 which set to work the strength of thousands of men 
 focused in steam and electric power. 
 
 On a majestic scale, in every link of this industrial 
 chain, American invention and talent for organization 
 have worked to reduce the cost of the products of 
 the mine and the farm and the forest, benefiting both 
 the producer and the consumer. Brains have almost 
 eliminated brawn. When ten thousand tons of ore 
 have been carried from the mines of Lake Superior 
 to the mills of the Pittsburg district, no more than 
 fifty men have handled them through all stages of 
 transportation. Forty years ago the freight rate from 
 Marquette to Ohio ports was from three to six dollars 
 a ton. To-day it averages seventy-five cents a ton. 
 
 27 
 
The Greater America 
 
 With such a marvelous development of wealth 
 and commerce in a lifetime as the Great Lakes have 
 displayed, it is small wonder that Francis H. Clergue 
 thought that nothing was Impossible when he planned 
 his empire of Industry at the " Soo," He failed 
 because his ideas were bigger than his ability to exe- 
 cute them at the time, but he was not a visionary, and 
 his dreams will all come true within the next 
 generation. 
 
 There Is something inspiring even In such a collapse 
 as overtook him. He had the spirit of the men who 
 have done the biggest things for American material 
 success, but, In the plain Anglo-Saxon, he " bit off 
 more than he could chew." Like the young Harvey 
 who built the first canal and lock, he was stirred by 
 the vast possibilities of the " Soo." He also was a 
 young man, less than thirty-five, when he was sent 
 West to seek a new water-power that might be turned 
 to profit. The " Soo " bewitched him, with Its fall 
 of eighteen feet In the St. Mary's River between the 
 two lakes. 
 
 Clergue obtained a Canadian charter for a water- 
 power canal and constructed It. Then he found him- 
 self with twenty thousand horse power on his hands 
 and no purchaser In sight, for the " hard times " of 
 the early nineties frightened capital away from such 
 pioneering enterprises as this; therefore he decided 
 to use It himself. He knew a good deal about paper 
 mills because he had worked In them In Maine. 
 
 28 
 
Past and Present at the " Soo " 
 
 There was no end of low-priced timber for pulp in 
 the forests around the " Soo." 
 
 He built a pulp mill, one of the largest in the 
 country, running night and day by water-power. He 
 was no more than fairly started in the work of trans- 
 forming the sleepy old town at the " Soo." A little 
 later a second power canal was built, on the Michigan 
 side, to develop forty thousand horse power. Then 
 Clergue planned a railroad, the Algoma Central, to 
 connect with the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles 
 to the northward, and thence to Hudson's Bay, five 
 hundred miles away. He received the promise of 
 Canadian land grants of nearly four million acres, 
 including the mineral and timber rights. Having 
 acquired rich iron mines, he built a blast furnace, and 
 then a steel plant and a rail mill. He rolled the first 
 rail in Canada, made from Canada pig Iron, smelted 
 from Ontario ore. These works were nowhere sur- 
 passed for completeness of equipment. Meanwhile 
 Clergue was building sawmills and developing more 
 mining properties, constructing an electric-light plant 
 for the town of Sault Ste. Marie, building street-car 
 systems, and planning new Industries on every hand. 
 
 He found the " Soo " a primitive settlement, no 
 more than a supply station for passing ships. Within 
 eight years he had built not only his paper and Iron 
 and steel and lumber mills, but also car shops, ferry 
 and traction lines, freight and passenger steamers, 
 and a railroad, In operation for a hundred miles. He 
 
 29 
 
The Greater America 
 
 agreed to settle annually a thousand immigrants on 
 his land grants in the Canadian wilderness, and two 
 thousand men were chopping wood for him in his 
 forests. The cash investment in the Clergue enter- 
 prises was twenty-five million dollars. 
 
 One industry was to feed another, and the whole 
 was to be correlated as a great interdependent indus- 
 trial community. The splendid scheme was extrava- 
 gantly executed, and disaster came before all the 
 plants could be operated as a unit. The dazzling 
 fabric collapsed because no more cash could be ob- 
 tained to round out the undertaking. In the water- 
 power and in the massively constructed buildings 
 which await another master spirit to set them hum- 
 ming with industry, the owners have an asset that 
 must some day realize all the dreams of Its promoter, 
 the young man from Maine who began with an idea 
 and raised twenty-five million dollars In the struggle 
 to make It come true. 
 
 During his leadership Clergue resided in the old 
 blockhouse built by the Hudson's Bay Company. 
 There could be no more dramatic contrast, even in 
 fiction, than between this rugged old blockhouse, with 
 the men who built It and lived In It, and the modern 
 captain of Industry who wove within these walls the 
 projects that should set a thousand men at work to 
 build and to produce, where one Indian fur trapper 
 roamed no more than half a century ago. With the 
 vein of sentiment which led him to use the old 
 
 30 
 
Past and Present at the " Soo" 
 
 blockhouse for his living quarters, Clergue restored 
 the primitive lock made by the fur traders, and it is 
 preserved on the Company's grounds as a memorial 
 of obliterated conditions on the northern American 
 frontier. 
 
 31 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE STORY OF A COPPER MINE 
 
 As I neared the Michigan copper country, after the 
 voyage through the Lakes, there was httle to suggest 
 that devastation of God's green landscape which else- 
 where goes hand in hand with mining operations. 
 Back of the city of Houghton rose a range of billow- 
 ing hills, wooded with a second growth of timber. 
 Against the skyline loomed a red shaft-house or two, 
 looking not wholly unlike grain elevators. And 
 along the crest of the hill trailed a long train of ore- 
 laden cars like a monstrous snake. The scattered 
 towns through which the trolley took me on the way 
 to Calumet had little of that ugliness and squalor 
 of most mining communities, nor was the air heavy 
 with smoke and foul with vapors. The clean breeze 
 swept over fields and patches of woodland, and I per- 
 ceived that this was a far more attractive landscape 
 than that which is left in the wake of the coal or iron 
 miner. In fact, the tall red shaft-houses which dotted 
 the fields were almost the only signs of the prodigious 
 activity that toiled underground by night and day. 
 
 Scattered over this rolling country were a dozen 
 different towns, all part of one vast mining camp, 
 Hecla, and Calumet, Red Jacket, Blue Jacket, Yellow 
 
 32 
 
■ft, 
 •ft. 
 

 e^ 
 
Tlie Story of a Copper Mine 
 
 Jacket, Wolverine, Tamarack, Osceola and Laurlum. 
 More than forty thousand people were living in these 
 towns and depending on copper for their bread. Five 
 thousand men toiled for the Calumet and Hecla 
 Company, and more than half of this army was 
 employed in the underground workings. There were 
 more miles of streets beneath the surface than in the 
 towns on top. Two hundred miles of shafts, drifts 
 and cross-cuts honeycombed the earth as far down as 
 a mile from the surface. To support this amazing 
 system of underground highways, this company was 
 using thirty million feet of timber every year. It 
 was clearing the country of timber for five hundred 
 miles and was eating up the northwestern forests 
 faster than all the lumbering interests. The company 
 has its own logging crews and mills and its great 
 forests. Its lumbering activity is a huge industry in 
 itself. 
 
 Little more than a half century has passed since 
 copper was the lure that led men to explore a wilder- 
 ness as near home as the upper peninsula of Michigan, 
 and to reveal a magnificent storehouse of treasure on 
 the shores of Lake Superior. Late into the last cen- 
 tury that region was considered so hopeless a wilder- 
 ness, fit only for the Indian, the fur trader and the 
 trapper, that Michigan made vehement protest 
 against its inclusion within her borders, and almost 
 put the matter to a clash of arms with the State forces 
 of Ohio. The pioneer settlers of what was then the 
 
 33 
 
The Greater America 
 
 remote West were not looking for iron or copper. 
 They had neither the means for transportation nor 
 manufacture, and they pressed on past the Lake 
 Superior country with an indifference that seems 
 amazing in the light of after events. 
 
 It had been known for centuries that this region 
 was rich in minerals. The hardy Jesuits, who were 
 as keen prospectors after natural resources as after 
 aboriginal souls, found copper by the shore of the 
 inland sea that was later called Lake Superior. And 
 as early as 1640 a history of America written in 
 French declared that " there are in this region mines 
 of copper, tin, antimony and lead." The Indians of 
 that time were mining copper in crude fashion, but 
 even they were not the pioneer discoverers. Stone 
 hammers were found beside ancient workings whose 
 mounds of earth were topped by trees of primeval 
 growth. More remarkable than this, hewn wooden 
 props, not wholly decayed, were found supporting 
 masses of copper mined in a prehistoric age. The 
 Mound Builders, or a race akin to them, had discov- 
 ered and exploited, without the aid of a promotion 
 syndicate or an issue of watered stock, the earliest 
 American copper mines. 
 
 A hundred and forty years ago an adventurous 
 Englishman, Captain Jonathan Carver, voyaged 
 Lake Superior and went home to form a company for 
 developing the mineral wealth of that trackless terri- 
 tory. English Investors were more timid then than 
 
 34 
 
The Story of a Copper Mine 
 
 now about American securities, and Captain Carver, 
 who deserved a better fortune for his daring enter- 
 prise, saw his schemes go ghmmering. 
 
 It was left for a young American geologist, Doug- 
 las Houghton, to explore this peninsula and awaken 
 his countrymen to the riches that lay at their hand. 
 He perished in a storm on Lake Superior at the age 
 of thirty-six, but his brief career wrought a mighty 
 work for his nation. In a birch-bark canoe he skirted 
 the south shore of Lake Superior for voyage after 
 voyage, making observations and gathering data 
 with the eye of a practical scientist and the imagina- 
 tion of a tamer of wilderness places. In 1841 he 
 submitted a report to the State government of Michi- 
 gan, in whose employ he was, and there began a rush 
 of treasure-seekers into a country far more inaccessi- 
 ble than the Klondike of to-day. 
 
 Copper was the prize sought by thousands of pros- 
 pectors, most of whom struggled with the severest 
 hardships, only to abandon their claims in disgust 
 and return to civilization empty-handed. But a begin- 
 ning had been made, and American enterprise, no 
 longer content to let England enjoy what was almost 
 a monopoly of the copper production of the world, 
 buckled down to the task of opening its own mines. 
 
 This was long before the discovery of the great 
 deposits of Montana, which have yielded fabulous 
 wealth for the copper kings of Butte and Anaconda 
 and Helena. Nor has the Lake Superior region been 
 
 35 
 
The Greater America 
 
 besmirched by such a colossal war of greed as has 
 befouled Montana politics and made its copper mines 
 a by-word for stock jobbery and a gorgeous variety 
 of corruption. By contrast, it is as wholesome and 
 clean a story of American commercial success as one 
 can find, this development of the copper resources 
 of the Lake Superior region, as typified in the famous 
 Calumet and Hecla mine. 
 
 Copper is a sturdy king among metals to-day. As 
 the Age of Steel has followed the Age of Iron, so 
 the succeeding industrial epoch is to be the Age of 
 Electricity, whose foundation Is copper. Already 
 this metal adds five hundred million dollars each year 
 to the wealth of the world, and its reign is no more 
 than in its sturdy youth. Here, for example, is this 
 Calumet and Hecla property, which has never gained 
 that kind of spectacular notoriety that is given a 
 famous gold mine. Yet the product of this one 
 group of shafts has paid more dividends than have 
 been reaped by any other mining corporation in the 
 world. 
 
 Almost one hundred million dollars have been paid 
 to the lucky stockholders in the last thirty-five years, 
 on a total capitalization of only two and a half mil- 
 lions. In one recent period of five years the mine paid 
 twenty-seven million dollars in dividends, or more 
 than double its capital stock each year. Small won- 
 der that the group of conservative Boston men who 
 direct this magnificent bonanza have fought shy of 
 
 36 
 
The Story of a Copper 3Iine 
 
 such top-heavy and inflated combinations as " Amal- 
 gamated Copper." 
 
 The Calumet and Hecla mines were discovered 
 forty years ago. Tradition has it that an astute and 
 industrious pig, while rooting amid the forests a few 
 miles back from Lake Superior, turned up the chunk 
 of copper which unearthed this hidden mine. The 
 pig story is plausil>le enough and has no lack of his- 
 torical confirmation from various other sources. In 
 fact, it is a sort of historical mode or fashion for 
 famous mines to have been discovered by an inquisi- 
 tive pig or a wandering burro with an agile hoof. 
 Somewhere in Mexico there is a silver pig with jew- 
 eled eyes, holding a place of honor in a cathedral, in 
 memory of the location of a fine silver mine by one 
 of these porcupine prospectors. In crediting a pig 
 with the discovery of Calumet and Hecla the tradi- 
 tions have been faithfully observed. 
 
 The Calumet and Hecla of to-day is worth a visit 
 as an impressive object lesson of how well a great cor- 
 poration can look after its properties and employees 
 without impairing its dividends. It can be said of 
 certain other American corporations that their prop- 
 erties were discovered by men and have been managed 
 by pigs ever since. The Calumet and Hecla has 
 reversed this procedure. 
 
 This upper corner of the staunch American State 
 of Michigan is a show ground of the people of thirty 
 nations at work, side by side, in peace and comfort. 
 
 37 
 
The Greater America 
 
 The native-born is outnumbered on a basis of one 
 American to a hundred foreigners. The Cornwall 
 and Finnish miners lead in numbers, followed by the 
 Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Germans, Polish, French, Dan- 
 ish, Norwegians, Swedish, Russians, Hollanders, 
 Greek, Swiss, Austrians, Belgians, negroes, Slavs, 
 Bohemians, with a sprinkling above ground of Chi- 
 nese, Arabians, Persians, and one family of Lap- 
 landers. 
 
 This is an amazing medley of races, in which the 
 American seems fairly lonesome. Among the local 
 newspapers are the Weekly Glasnik, the Daily Paiva- 
 lehti, The American Soiimetar, and La SentinelU. 
 Even the leading American newspaper publishes for 
 the benefit of its subscribers a column in the dialect of 
 Cornwall, which includes such poetic gems as this : 
 
 " Wheal Damsel es a fitty mine, 
 Next door to Wheal Kiser; 
 Ef the sun forgot to shine 
 We should never miss her; 
 Give us candle, clay and cap, 
 We can see where we must stap, 
 Ef to work we do incline, 
 Down to Old Wheal Damsel. 
 
 Chorus : 
 
 " Pay-day comes on Saturday, 
 Restin' time on Sunday, 
 38 
 
The Story of a Copper Mine 
 
 Shall we work or shall we play 
 'Pon Maze Monday ?* 
 
 " Ef not chucked with powder smawk 
 And the smeel of dyneemite, 
 'Tes so aisy straight to walk 
 As for dogs to bark and bite; 
 But touch pipe in kiddlywink 
 Weth some fourp'nny for to drink, 
 Reason 'pon its throne will rock, 
 Forgettin' Old Wheal Damsel. 
 Oh, there's trouble in the glass, 
 Wuss than boyer-baiten, 
 When the thursty time do pass, 
 Peggy's tongue es waiten." 
 
 The men from Cornwall chuckle over such bits of 
 the home tongue as this, but need no " Maze Mon- 
 day " to recover from the effects of visiting the 
 saloons of Calumet or Red Jacket. In fact, this 
 polyglot community Is so singularly law abiding that 
 the horde of sociologists that Is rampant In the land 
 should organize a personally conducted tour to this 
 favored community. There Is no municipal police 
 force In the district. The towns are under the su- 
 pervision of a few constables and watchmen, after 
 the manner of one of the old-fashioned New Eng- 
 land village communities. The Calumet and Hecla 
 
 *In the old days Cornish miners used to require the Monday after 
 pay-day to get over the effects of visiting the kiddlywink, or village 
 public-house — hence the name of "Maze Monday." 
 
 39 
 
The Greater America 
 
 Company maintains a metropolitan fire department of 
 its own and carries its own insurance. This relieves 
 the town from the burden of fire protection. 
 
 In the town of Calumet two-thirds of the public 
 revenue is received from saloon license fees, and yet 
 drunkenness seldom becomes disorderly. This town 
 has an income of sixty thousand dollars a year from 
 fees and taxes, and the ofllicials have on their hands 
 the problem of spending a handsome surplus for the 
 benefit of their community. They are using It In 
 paving streets and for other permanent improvements 
 Instead of in supporting a police force and paying 
 salaries to a lot of political barnacles. 
 
 This Calumet, a large and thriving town composed 
 of men of more than a score of different nations, is so 
 much more advanced than most American cities that 
 it has a municipal theater, built by the public funds 
 at a cost of a hundred thousand dollars. This hand- 
 some stone playhouse Is leased to a manager who pays 
 the town four per cent, interest on Its Investment, and 
 who Is held responsible for the conduct of the enter- 
 prise on a popular and efficient basis. 
 
 Here Is a large community peopled by foreigners 
 who are alleged to be pouring into this counti-y faster 
 than we can absorb them. They are called a menace 
 to our institutions, and agitators declare that Ameri- 
 canism will be submerged by this swelling tide. The 
 Calumet and Hecla Company has worked out Its own 
 solution of the immigration problem. Its miners and 
 
 40 
 
The Story of a Coi)per Mine 
 
 their families are treated as human beings, and they 
 are good enough Americans to put to shame the spirits 
 and achievements of many a community which brags 
 of its native stock. This company has no complaint 
 to make on the score of lack of efficiency among its 
 employees, because they are given a fair show to live 
 decently and make their communities clean and pros- 
 perous. It has gone about the business of assimi- 
 lating a foreign population by methods which do not 
 seem to have occurred to the Chicago packers. 
 
 The company owns about twelve hundred dwelling 
 houses in the towns around its mines. They are 
 rented to Its employees at an average charge of six 
 per cent, on the actual cost of the building, plus the 
 cost of maintenance. The miners pay from six to 
 eight dollars In rent for the small frame houses, not 
 tenements, with a patch of ground big enough for a 
 kitchen garden. Wages are never reduced to fatten 
 dividends. If It becomes necessary to curtail the 
 output, a certain number of men are laid off for a 
 time, but wages are not cut. And wages have been 
 good enough to permit one thousand of these miners 
 to purchase outright from the company their own 
 homes, which is a pretty solid argument In Itself. 
 
 On the company's lands there are about thirty 
 churches, occupied by more than a dozen denomina- 
 tions. The company gave the sites for all these 
 churches, and in many cases has furnished cash aid 
 toward the erection and maintenance funds, without 
 
 41 
 
The Greater America 
 
 regard to creed. There are eight school-houses on 
 the Calumet and Hecla property, most of which were 
 built by the corporation. In these school-houses the 
 children of Finns and Welsh and Slavs and Germans, 
 along with the children of twenty other nationalities, 
 are fused as In a melting pot to become good Ameri- 
 cans of the second generation, speaking English as 
 their common tongue, and saluting the Stars and 
 Stripes above their buildings. 
 
 A handsome stone library was built by the com- 
 pany without the aid of Andrew Carnegie, for it has 
 been the policy here to return some of the profits in 
 building institutions to better the condition of the 
 toilers who helped to make the wealth, instead of 
 scattering these profits elsewhere. This free library 
 contains more than sixteen thousand volumes in a 
 score of languages, and it is used and enjoyed by the 
 men and women of all the races that live in this 
 region. There is a fine stone clubhouse, built for the 
 miners by their employers, containing bathrooms, 
 bowling-alleys, etc. There Is also at Lake Linden, 
 where the stamp mills and smelters are situated, a 
 combination library and clubhouse. 
 
 The company maintains for Its people a hospital 
 that Is widely noted for the completeness of Its surgi- 
 cal and laboratory apparatus. A dozen physicians of 
 the hospital staff are ready to respond to the call of 
 any miner or his family needing their services. In 
 1877 a miners' benefit fund was founded by the 
 
 42 
 
The Story of a Copper Mine 
 
 company, and its management was turned over to a 
 board of directors chosen by the workmen. This 
 fund pays death and disability benefits, and has dis- 
 bursed an immense sum since its beginning, every 
 dollar of which has gone to the sick or injured, or to 
 families who have lost their bread-winners by acci- 
 dent or disease. 
 
 Whenever a surplus has accumulated in this fund, 
 it has been invested in the shares of the company, 
 bought in the open market, and this kind of invest- 
 ment has been notably profitable. In one recent year 
 the outlay in benefits from this fund was sixty-five 
 thousand dollars, and the value of the fund, or reserve 
 and surplus in hand, was a hundred and thirty-six 
 thousand dollars. To maintain this fund every 
 employee of the company pays from his wages fifty 
 cents a month. And for every fifty cents paid in by 
 the miner the company adds to the fund a half dollar 
 from its own pocket. It is, therefore, a combined 
 charity, philanthropy and assessment organization, 
 which has acted as a splendid factor in promoting 
 contentment and keeping at arm's length the suffering 
 of helpless poverty. 
 
 Copper mining is clean work, as mining goes, and 
 the men behind this gigantic enterprise have tried to 
 make their miners feel that thrift and comfort can be 
 theirs for a little effort. The prudent Finnish and 
 English miners save their wages, with an eye to the 
 future. As soon as they have funds ahead they begin 
 
 43 
 
The Greater America 
 
 to look up cheap farming and timber tracts for settle- 
 ment. Then they move their families out of the cop- 
 per country, and swing the ax instead of the pick, 
 and get their little farms under way. Thus they help 
 to build up the new country of northern Michigan, 
 and to found American families close to the soil 
 whence the strength of the nation has come. 
 
 But as long as they dwell within the shadows of 
 the tall, red shaft-houses of Calumet and Hecla, they 
 think and talk little else besides copper. They keep in 
 touch with the copper mines and markets of the world, 
 from Montana to Australia, and from the Rio Tinto, 
 in Spain, to the deep pits of Cornwall. One of these 
 thrifty towns strikes the stranger as too big for its 
 population. There are few men in the streets through 
 the daylight hours, and the long blocks of stores 
 seem deserted. Here is a world in which half 
 of the men are underground and a good share of the 
 remainder asleep at home, wherefore you can see the 
 whole town above ground and in the streets only on 
 Sunday. 
 
 These miners go deep after copper. If you go to 
 the famous Red Jacket shaft, for instance, you find 
 the most powerful hoisting machinery in the world, 
 huge engines of as much as eight thousand horse- 
 power, which reel and unreel drums of wire cable 
 that wind down a straight mile below the surface. 
 These engines hoist ten-ton cars of ore one mile at 
 the rate of forty miles an hour, or from the bottom 
 
 44 
 
The Story of a Copper Mine 
 
 to the top of this stupendous hole in the ground in 
 ninety seconds. 
 
 This is the deepest mining shaft in the world. 
 Apart from this fact, perhaps the most interesting 
 feature of the Red Jacket shaft is in the theory that 
 it is possible to detect the effect of the earth's revolu- 
 tion in a hole as deep as this. No less an authority 
 than President McNair of the Michigan College of 
 Mines has explained the belief that nothing dropped 
 in this deepest of mining shafts can ever reach bottom 
 without colliding with the east side of the shaft, 
 
 '' This is due to the motion of the earth," said he. 
 " The article dropped, no matter what its shape or 
 size may be, will invariably be found clinging to the 
 east side of the shaft. One day a monkey-wrench 
 was dropped by a miner, but it failed to reach the 
 bottom, and was found lodged against the east side 
 of the shaft several hundred feet down. We decide 
 that to make a proper test of the theory it would be 
 worth while to experiment with a small, heavy, spheri- 
 cal body. So we suspended a marble tied with a 
 thread about twelve feet below the mouth of the 
 shaft We then burned the thread with a lighted 
 match in order not to disturb the exact fall of the 
 marble. About five hundred feet down it brought 
 up against the east side of the shaft. When miners 
 have fallen down the shaft the result has been similar. 
 Their bodies, badly torn, have been found lodged 
 against the east side of the shaft. A carload of 
 
 45 
 
The Greater America 
 
 rock was dumped down the deepest mining shaft in 
 South Africa, but not a particle of it reached the 
 bottom." 
 
 Professor McNair has said also that the limit of 
 depth to which mines can be driven and worked has 
 not yet been reached. The temperature at the bottom 
 of Red Jacket was almost ninety degrees when it 
 was first opened, but this has been reduced by ventila- 
 tion to between seventy and eighty degrees, at which 
 miners work in comparative comfort. In the opinion 
 of Professor McNair, the Red Jacket shaft will sup- 
 ply the most valuable data ever gathered relating to 
 the thickness and densities of the earth's crust. " The 
 deep shafts in other parts of the world begin at an 
 altitude and end at, or above, sea level," said he, 
 " whereas this shaft pierces the earth's crust deeper 
 and farther below the ocean level than any other hole 
 in existence. Scientific investigations have been in 
 progress for some time, and we hope to make public 
 some interesting results." 
 
 It is a fascinating hole in the ground, simply 
 because of its amazing depth, but it is not an easy 
 hole to enter if you are not personally vouched for 
 by President Agassiz of the Calumet and Hecla Com- 
 pany. Strangers are not admitted, and the reason is 
 startling. Underground fires have imperiled this 
 vast property more than once, and it is believed that 
 they were of incendiary origin. Whether or not rival 
 copper companies are suspected of such a piratical 
 
 46 
 
The Story of a Copper Mine 
 
 method of curtailing the supply of metal is something 
 you must guess for yourself. 
 
 This is the greatest fire risk in the world, and It 
 is protected by a water main and telephone system 
 underground, pumping stations and electric alarm 
 systems. The company has lost several million dol- 
 lars in fire, however, and is cautious to the point of 
 acute suspicion. The elaborate system of fire protec- 
 tion was severely tested in 1890, when an alarm was 
 turned in on Sunday night. There were only a few 
 employees in the workings, and the fire had gained 
 frightful headway before it was discovered. Then 
 the burning area of the mine was shut off by closing 
 a system of fireproof doors. The surface opening 
 was sealed by covering the mouths of the shafts with 
 heavy timbers, and tamping all the crevices with 
 earth. Wherever gas escaped more earth was tamped 
 and made solid with water. In three weeks the fire 
 was smothered in this fashion, and other shafts were 
 kept working without interruption. Fires in deep 
 mines have burned for years, and the masterful sys- 
 tem by which the Calumet and Hecla has been able 
 to protect its property is In keeping with Its resource- 
 ful enterprises In other directions. The layman Is 
 apt to wonder how a mine can be swept by a destruc- 
 tive fire. But In these vast labyrinths which Calumet 
 and Hecla has driven beneath the earth there Is more 
 timber than goes Into the buildings of many a preten- 
 tious and prosperous city. And If this mine were 
 
 47 
 
The Greater America 
 
 burned out there would be a direct loss of scores of 
 millions of dollars and an indirect loss of hundreds 
 of millions. 
 
 There is an impressive industrial community above 
 ground In such an undertaking as this. There are 
 sawmills and carpenter shops, smithies greater than 
 can be found anywhere else except in the works of 
 the most extensive manufacturers of machinery, with 
 a hundred busy blacksmiths. Fifty tons of steel drill 
 have to be sharpened every day, and an army of boys 
 is needed to lug them between the shops and the 
 mines. Warehouses and supply stations, a private 
 railroad operating twenty miles of main track, a fleet 
 of steamships, these and many other parts of this 
 huge Industrial organization are kept In motion by 
 the copper ore that Is hoisted from thousands of feet 
 below the surface. 
 
 The active ruler of this lusty kingdom is James Mc- 
 Naughton, superintendent of the Calumet and Hecla 
 mine. Five thousand men take orders from him, and 
 he pays them six million dollars a year In wages. His 
 story is one of those miracles that happen in this 
 " land of opportunity." He was born In Ontario 
 forty years ago, and left home to " hustle " for him- 
 self. At twelve years of age he was a water-boy on 
 the Calumet and Hecla docks on the lake front. 
 Between working hours he managed to peg away at 
 school until he was fourteen. Then he became a 
 switch-tender, and a year later was a stationary 
 
 48 
 
The Story of a Copper 3Iine 
 
 engineer, earning two dollars a day, and saving half 
 of it toward an education. 
 
 At nineteen he entered Oberlin College, and began 
 to think of becoming a mining engineer. By work- 
 ing during vacation he was able to take a two years' 
 course at the University of Michigan. After gradu- 
 ation he obtained a position in the Boston offices of 
 the Calumet and Hecla Company. From there he 
 took a berth as a mining engineer at Iron Mountain, 
 Michigan. At last, returning to the Calumet and 
 Hecla, he fought his way to the top and was made 
 superintendent five years ago. 
 
 Now mark you what the personal equation of 
 one strong and able man can accomplish as soon as it 
 find its field for action. Without reducing wages, 
 or overworking his men, or curtailing any of the com- 
 pany's many philanthropic enterprises, McNaughton 
 began to tighten up the screws for a higher efficiency. 
 He has saved millions of dollars for his shareholders, 
 and what his ability has amounted to may be per- 
 ceived in the statement that he has cut the cost of 
 milling the ore almost in half. 
 
 There is a somewhat prevalent impression that 
 captains of industry are overpaid, that the army of 
 toilers pay unfair tribute to those who control their 
 labor. I do not know what salary the Calumet and 
 Hecla Company pays James McNaughton, yet if 
 he were given a hundred thousand dollars a year, not 
 a miner in Calumet could object with fairness. For 
 
 49 
 
The Greater America 
 
 every one of them Is getting as good wages as ever, 
 and is as generously treated by his employers, nor 
 have any miners been deprived of their jobs. But be- 
 cause he has the brains and the backbone, McNaugh- 
 ton is able to create millions of dollars in industrial 
 wealth with exactly the same tools which could not 
 create this additional wealth in less competent hands. 
 
 The Michigan copper miner earns from sixty to 
 seventy-five dollars a month, with steady employment 
 the year around. With this he is able to have a home 
 and pay his bills, to educate his children and protect 
 his family if he is overtaken by sickness or death. Nor 
 is he of a different class from the average immigrant 
 who seeks this land from all quarters of Europe. The 
 difference is in the environment and in the way he is 
 handled and taught after he lands. His employers 
 believe that he has something more due him than 
 the right to exist and toil. They give him a chance 
 to live like a man and he looks around him and sees 
 a thousand homes owned outright by miners who 
 began just as he is beginning, as strangers in a strange 
 land, who have only their labor to sell. There are 
 no labor unions among the miners of the Calumet 
 region. The miners say they do not need them. 
 They are satisfied with their wages and their living 
 conditions, and they prefer to work the whole year 
 through to being on strike for higher wages. 
 
 While there is not much of the picturesque in this 
 mining region, it is a cheering American example of 
 
 50 
 
^ 
 
 
The Story of a Copper Miiie 
 
 what can be done with the problem of foreign immi- 
 gration. Nor could this problem be more varied 
 and vexatious than amid so great an assortment 
 of tongues, customs and racial prejudices. The Calu- 
 met and Hecla Company appears to have gone a long 
 way toward a solution by sticking to certain old- 
 fashioned doctrines of fair play and honest apprecia- 
 tion of the bonds between capital and labor. 
 
 If you would see copper transformed from a dull 
 and unlovely ore into something really beautiful, 
 then follow it from the mine to the smelter. My 
 pilgrimage to the Michigan copper country ended 
 with a visit to a smelter near the town of Houghton, 
 where the long ore-trains come trailing over the hills 
 from the stamp mills which grind the fragments of 
 ore to a powder that looks like coarse brown sugar. 
 From the cars it is dumped into elevated bins, which 
 shoot it into other cars that run across a trestle to the 
 great furnaces, whose heat is twenty-three hundred 
 degrees. 
 
 Here the ore must be purified as it melts, and the 
 refiner dumps cord-wood into the glowing cauldron, 
 and blows air through the mass to clean away the 
 dross. At one end of the furnace is a trough, and, at 
 the proper time, a gate is opened and the liquid cop- 
 per floods out In a dazzling stream of gold. With 
 a wonderful play of colored flames, of blue and 
 crimson and violet, the liquid travels onward Into 
 Ingot molds, which are set around the edge of a huge 
 
 51 
 
The Greater America 
 
 wheel. On the hub of this wheel sits a man who 
 rides this chariot of fire with amazing skill and indif- 
 ference to his incandescent surroundings. 
 
 As the slowly revolving wheel brings one set of 
 molds opposite the copper ladle, he fills them and 
 they move on while others take their places. By the 
 opposite rim of the wheel is another workman, who 
 pries the cooling ingots from their molds as they pass 
 him. This is pure, commercial copper, made while 
 you wait, each ingot weighing forty-six pounds and 
 worth six dollars in the metal market. Their color 
 is bright red, shading off into tints of steel blue. 
 
 They are dumped into running water to cool off, 
 and a most ingenious machine with steel fingers picks 
 them up and lugs them up a dripping incline, over 
 which they clatter and slide down on a platform, ready 
 for the warehouse. Two strong men whose hands 
 are protected by cloth pads pick them up and swing 
 them on to cars until 30,000 pounds make the load. 
 A squat electric locomotive, not as tall as the man 
 who operates it, waits until a train of these cars is 
 ready. Then it rattles away to the shed without fuss 
 or effort. 
 
 Upon each of these little cars is piled $4,500 worth 
 of copper which has been transformed from the ore 
 into the shining ingots while you have paused for a 
 few minutes to watch the process. So swiftly wrought 
 is this miracle, so deftly easy looks the process by 
 which the turn of a wheel seems to create wealth 
 
 52 
 
The Story of a Copper Mine 
 
 before your eyes, that you are inclined to number 
 copper among the precious metals. 
 
 No more than six or seven men have been busied 
 in this whole operation, yet in one good working day 
 they will turn out two hundred thousand pounds of 
 copper ingots, which are worth thirty thousand dol- 
 lars. This crew once made a world's record of a 
 week's production of more than a million pounds of 
 copper, worth one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. 
 The daily charge of two hundred thousand pounds 
 is smelted in five or six hours. It is a most fascinat- 
 ing mining exhibit, without fuss, dirt or discomfort, 
 with no uproar and no foul air. 
 
 After seeing the mining region beyond the hills, 
 and watching the smelting, you begin to think that 
 a copper mine may be as worth while owning as a 
 gold mine in Alaska. But while the profits of the 
 Calumet and Hecla mine are so dazzling and envi- 
 able, nobody will begrudge them as long as these 
 communities of mining folk up among the woods and 
 fields of Michigan are being made good Americans 
 in the smelter of an honest corporation's sense of 
 responsibility for the thousands of men, women and 
 children whom wealth and power have committed 
 to its keeping. 
 
 53 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CONFUSION OF A PROPHET 
 
 A FEW years ago the Board of Trade of Duluth, with 
 the spirit of the true Western " booster," printed in 
 pamphlet form that speech by Proctor Knott which 
 immortalized the " Zenith City of the Unsalted 
 Seas." Through the original text were scattered up- 
 to-date comments which show how poor a prophet a 
 senatorial orator could be only thirty-five years ago. 
 As throwing light across the path of progress of 
 this city at the head of the Great Lakes, the follow- 
 ing oratorical extracts and the present-day reflections 
 of the Board of Trade, inserted in italics, are as 
 effective as pages of description of this typical western 
 city of the twentieth century. 
 
 " Years ago," sonorously proclaimed Proctor 
 Knott, " when I first heard that there was some- 
 where in the vast terra incognita, somewhere in the 
 bleak regions of the Northwest, a stream of water 
 known to the nomadic inhabitants as the river St. 
 Croix, I became satisfied that the construction of a 
 railroad from the raging torrent [water-power of 
 St. Louis River adjoining Duluth, 65,000 horse 
 power] to some point in the civilized world was essen- 
 tial to the happiness and prosperity of the Ameri- 
 can people, if not absolutely indispensable to the 
 
 54 
 
The Confusion of a Prophet 
 
 perpetuity of Republican institutions on this continent. 
 (Great laughter.) I felt instinctively that the 
 boundless resources of that prolific region of sand 
 and pine shrubbery would never be fully developed 
 without a railroad constructed and equipped at the 
 expense of the government, and perhaps not then. 
 (Laughter.) \_N umber of lines of railroads entering 
 Diiluth, eleven-l 
 
 ". . . Now, sir, who, after listening to this 
 emphatic and unequivocal testimony of intelligent, 
 competent and able-bodied witnesses, will doubt 
 (laughter), who, that is not as incredulous as St. 
 Thomas himself, will doubt for a moment that the 
 Goshen of America will be found in the valleys and 
 upon the pine-clad hills of the St. Croix? Who will 
 have the hardihood to rise in his seat on this floor 
 and assert that, excepting the pine bushes, the entire 
 region would not produce enough vegetation in ten 
 years to fatten a grasshopper? (Great laughter.) 
 [Estimated amount of standing pine timber tributary 
 to Duluth, 30,000,000 feet. Bankers in Duhith esti- 
 mate that it will take a hundred and thirty million 
 dollars to move the wheat crop tributary to Duluth 
 in 1903.'] 
 
 " But above all, sir, let me implore you to reflect 
 for a moment on the deplorable condition of our 
 country in case of a foreign war, with all our ports 
 blockaded, all our cities in a state of siege, the gaunt 
 specter of famine brooding like a hungry vulture 
 
 SS 
 
The Greater America 
 
 over our starving land, our commissary stores all 
 exhausted, our famished armies withering away in 
 the field, our nav^y rotting in the docks, a helpless 
 prey to the insatiate demon of hunger, and we without 
 any railroad communication whatever with the pro- 
 lific pine thicket of the St. Croix ! [One hundred mil- 
 lion bushels of wheat raised along the Great Northern 
 Railway tributary to Duluth in 1903.] 
 
 " As I have said, sir, I was utterly at a loss to 
 determine where the terminus of this great and indis- 
 pensable railroad should be until I accidentally over- 
 heard a gentleman mention the name of Duluth. 
 Duluth ! The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar 
 and indescribable charm. Duluth ! 'Twas the name 
 for which my soul had panted for years, as a hart 
 panteth for the water brooks. But where was 
 Duluth? Never in my limited reading had my vision 
 been gladdened by seeing the celestial word in print. 
 I rushed to my library and examined all the maps I 
 could find. I discovered in one of them a delicate, 
 hairlike line diverging from the Mississippi, which 
 I supposed was intended to represent the river St. 
 Croix, but nowhere could I find Duluth. Neverthe- 
 less I was confident that it existed somewhere and 
 that its discovery would constitute the crowning 
 glory of the present century. (Renewed laughter.) 
 [Population of Duluth in 1906, 80,000.] 
 
 " In fact, sir, I was overwhelmed with the con- 
 viction that Duluth not only existed somewhere, but 
 
 56 
 
The Confusion of a Prophet 
 
 that wherever it was, it was a great and glorious 
 place, {^Railroad lines tributary to Diduth, twenty- 
 five thousand miles. 1^ 
 
 " I have been told by gentlemen who have been 
 so reckless of their personal safety as to venture 
 away in those awful regions where Duluth is sup- 
 posed to be that it is so exactly in the center of the 
 visible universe that the sky comes down at pre- 
 cisely the same distance all around it. It is alleged to 
 be situated somewhere near the western end of Lake 
 Superior. \^Arrivals and clearances of vessels in igo3, 
 10,52^, registered tonnage, 20,goj, 2^1.1 
 
 " I really cannot tell whether it is one of those 
 ethereal creations of intellectual frost-work, one of 
 those airy exhalations of the speculator's brain, which 
 I am told are ever flitting in the form of towns and 
 cities along the lines of railroads built with govern- 
 ment subsidies, or whether it was a real bona fide, 
 substantial city, all staked off, with the lots marked 
 with their owners' names, like that proud com- 
 mercial metropolis recently discovered on the 
 desirable shores of San Domingo. (Laughter.) 
 [Taxable valuation of Duluth property in 1903, 
 twenty-eight million dollar s.~\ 
 
 " As to the commercial resources of Duluth, sir, 
 they are simply illimitable and inexhaustible as 
 shown by this map. [Bank capital, three million 
 dollar s.'\ 
 
 "... I see stated here that there is a vast 
 
 57 
 
The Greater America 
 
 scope of territory embracing an area of over three 
 million square miles, rich in every element of material 
 wealth and commercial prosperity, all tributary to 
 Duluth. Here are inexhaustible mines of gold, 
 immeasurable veins of silver, impenetrable depths of 
 boundless forest, wide extended plains of richest pas- 
 turage all embraced in this vast territory, which must, 
 in the very nature of things, empty the untold treas- 
 ures of its commerce into the lap of Duluth. 
 (Laughter.) [/row ore shipped from Duluth district 
 in igo^, 1^,000,000 tons. Total cut of lumber, one 
 billion feet. Receipts of coal at head of Lake Su- 
 perior, four million tons. Receipts of wheat, flaxseed, 
 barley and oats, 6^,000,000 bushels.^ 
 
 " I was about remarking, sir, upon these vast 
 * wheat fields ' represented on this map [Duluth' s 
 elevator capacity, ^^,000,000 bushels'] in the imme- 
 diate neighborhood of the buffaloes and the Piegans 
 and was about to say that the idea of there being these 
 immense wheat fields in the very heart of a wilderness, 
 hundreds and hundreds of miles beyond the ut- 
 most verge of civilization, may appear to some 
 gentlemen rather incongruous — as rather too great 
 a strain on the rivets of veracity. [^Capacity of flour 
 mills in i8g^, 2 1 ,100 barrels per day; flour shipments, 
 6, 1 yd,! 1 3 barrels.] But, to my mind, there is no diffi- 
 culty in the matter whatever. The phenomenon is 
 very easily accounted for. It is evident, sir, that the 
 Piegans sowed that wheat there and plowed it with 
 
 58 
 
The Confusion of a Prophet 
 
 buffalo bulls. (Great laughter.) Now, sir, this for- 
 tunate combination of buffaloes and Piegans, consid- 
 ering their relative positions to each other and to 
 Duluth, as they are arranged on this map, satisfies 
 me that Duluth is destined to be the beef market of 
 the world. Here you will observe [pointing to the 
 map] are the buffaloes, directly between the Piegans 
 and Duluth; and here, right on the road to Duluth 
 are the Creeks. Now, sir, when the buffaloes are 
 sufficiently fat from grazing on these immense wheat 
 fields, you will see it will be the easiest thing in the 
 world for the Piegans to drive them on down, stay 
 all night with their friends the Creeks, and go Into 
 Duluth in the morning. I think I see them now, sir, 
 a vast herd of buffaloes, with their heads down, their 
 eyes glaring, their nostrils dilated, their tongues out 
 and their tails curled over their backs, tearing along 
 toward Duluth, with about a thousand Piegans on 
 their grass-bellied ponies, yelling at their heels." 
 
 A generation later than this prophetic utterance 
 the long ore and grain steamers were swarming in 
 squadrons to their docks at Duluth and Superior, or 
 departing loaded to the hatches; and by night their 
 whistles sounded a clamorous chorus that was singu- 
 larly eloquent of the wonderful commerce of which 
 they were the links between the mines and the prairie 
 to the westward and the mills to the eastward of 
 them. The smoke-bannered chimneys of Pittsburg 
 were waiting for them, and their freightage must 
 
 59 
 
The Greater America 
 
 be fashioned into the steel that is the sinews of 
 prosperity. 
 
 The mines of the Mesabi Range are a httle way 
 distant from Duluth, up among the pine-lands of 
 Minnesota, and I sought them to see the most won- 
 derful deposit ever uncovered on the globe. The 
 railroad out of Duluth into the iron country plunged 
 into a pioneer landscape of tiny towns girt about by 
 forest. Most of the houses and barns were built 
 of logs. The lumberman was at work in these vast 
 unkempt tracts of charred stump-land, wilderness 
 clearing and tracts of standing pine. It was still a 
 bold, rude corner of the Northwest, into which the 
 settler was slowly following the lumberman and the 
 miner. 
 
 The iron country could not be mistaken for any- 
 thing else in the first glimpse of it. I came at length 
 to the town of Hibbing, which was set down in the 
 midst of so amazingly devastated a landscape that 
 It appeared to have been plowed, tossed up and 
 excavated by earthquakes and tornadoes, working 
 hand in hand. 
 
 Nothing more unlike the clean and rural aspect 
 of the Superior copper country could be Imagined. 
 This looked more like an industrial inferno, for all 
 the mines were on top of the ground. As a traveler 
 on the train observed: 
 
 " This piece of country has surely been torn to a 
 frazzle." 
 
 60 
 
The Confusion of a Prophet 
 
 The explanation of the chaos was that the ore beds 
 were so amazingly rich that steam shovels instead of 
 miners' picks simply scooped off the surface of the 
 earth and loaded It Into cars which bore it swiftly 
 to Duluth and dumped It Into the open holds of the 
 steamers at the gravity docks. Ore which had lain 
 undisturbed for countless ages was scooped up In this 
 fashion, carried to the vessels, borne down the lake 
 and shoveled Into the Pittsburg furnaces, to be fash- 
 ioned Into rails and billets In less than a week's time. 
 
 I walked along the main street of HIbbIng and 
 faced on the outskirts of the town a series of great 
 gray mountains of earth which had been stripped 
 from the surface by the steam shovels so that they 
 could bite Into the ore just beneath. Everywhere 
 were these puffing steam shovels at work, digging 
 their way deeper Into the open craters they had made, 
 moving along the strips of railroad track that were 
 laid for their convenience. 
 
 These railroad lines were laid down to-day and 
 ripped up to-morrow, and yet long trams of ore- 
 laden cars drawn by huge freight engines were puffing 
 along them, ascending from open pits that were 
 like pictures of volcanic destruction. The nearest 
 mine looked to be half a mile deep and a mile wide, 
 so impressive was it to come upon this Immense hole 
 In the ground which upset all previous notions of 
 mining methods and backgrounds. Far below the 
 steam shovels were toiling like so many ants, their 
 
 6i 
 
The Greater America 
 
 white puffs of vapor rising like breath on a frosty 
 inorning. They were attacking the brown dust with 
 marvelous and furious activity, taking five tons of 
 ore at one bite and spitting it into the car beside 
 them. 
 
 One of these infernally energetic monsters, with a 
 crew of only five men, was mining ore, sixty-five per 
 cent, pure iron, at the rate of three thousand tons a 
 day. In one day's work a handful of men in one of 
 these mines was getting out enough ore to fill the 
 hold of a twelve-thousand ton lake steamer. 
 
 Thirty million tons of ore were scooped from this 
 tract in the working season of two years ago, and 
 hundreds of acres of as rich beds as these were being 
 drilled and prospected before their blankets of pine 
 woodlands and underbrush should be ripped off to 
 expose their marvelous treasure. More than a hun- 
 dred million dollars' worth of iron ore was being dug 
 out from this tract in a single year, a tide of reddish- 
 brown dust which was transmuted by one of the most 
 astounding of modern miracles into sky-scrapers and 
 railroads, machinery and locomotives as fast as it 
 could be hurried down the Lakes. 
 
 62 
 
•SI. 
 
 fl 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PEOPLING OF THE PRAIRIE 
 
 There are two centuries in time and two thousand 
 miles in distance between the New England village 
 and the stretch of North Dakota prairie on which 
 I found the newest manifestation of the vital spirit 
 of a pioneering nation. In an expanse of country 
 larger than many Eastern States, it was possible to 
 see unfolding, like a panorama, such a movement of 
 population as settled first the Atlantic States and 
 later the Middle West. As I saw this North 
 Dakota prairie in the autumn, it was a cross section 
 of American history in the making. 
 
 Into this great new wheat belt that stretched north 
 to the Canadian boundary had come thousands of 
 home seekers, not from the overcrowded East, but 
 from Iowa and Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan and 
 Missouri. They had come to till millions of acres 
 that had never felt a plow, to make new towns, to 
 redeem the empty places, as their fathers had done 
 when they trailed across the Mississippi from the 
 eastward, before the railroad came. 
 
 The railroad! — this was the magic key that 
 unlocked this newest country. It was early morning 
 when I joined the construction train of the latest rail- 
 road to reach up into this thinly peopled vastness of 
 
The Greater America 
 
 American soil. Air that sparkled, a cloudless sky, 
 and miles upon miles of brown, grass-carpeted prairie 
 that lay flat as a lake to the horizon, made the swarm- 
 ing streets of Eastern cities seem a world away. 
 
 Here was the firing line of American civilization. 
 North and east and west the prairie was almost as 
 empty as the sea. But instead of lonely vessels 
 against the sky line there were here and there, miles 
 apart, the low sod houses and shacks of the " home- 
 steaders " who had come into this country ahead of 
 the railroad. These pioneers had been waiting to be 
 linked with the world beyond, meanwhile hauling 
 their wheat fifty or eighty miles to the nearest town, 
 suffering hardships, in privation and loneliness, to 
 compare with those of the men and women who 
 settled New England. They had been led here In- 
 spired by that dearest of incentives to American cour- 
 age and endurance — the ownership of home and land. 
 
 Now, at length, the railroad was marching toward 
 them at the splendid gait of two miles a day. The 
 hundreds of laborers who were flinging the track 
 across the prairie had no time to think of ultimate 
 results. Upon the raw, new grade that ran straight 
 as an arrow into the lonely north, the track-laying 
 machine was feeding out rails as fast as they could 
 be " bridled," bolted, spiked, and thrown Into line. 
 "Wrenchers" and "heelers," "splkers," "peddlers" 
 and " Iron men " were busy as so many ants, and 
 every little while a brakeman perched aloft on a 
 
 64 
 
•«■•■ 
 
 Mr' 
 
 
 
 '-MsiHf^' 
 
 The loii' sod lioi/se of the hoiiivstedder 
 
 Sprouting buildings from the prairie srroiv U'ith inconceivable rapidity 
 
The Confusion of a Prophet 
 
 platform above the " pioneer car " flourished an arm. 
 The engineer nodded from his cab window, " gave 
 her a little steam," and the train was shoved ahead 
 over the track it had just laid. 
 
 Charley Ffolliet, the contractor in command, 
 sauntered to and fro with a specious air of leisure, 
 but it was to be noticed that his foremen and their 
 " straw bosses," or assistants, did not appear to be 
 loafing. System, order, energy were driving full- 
 speed ahead, without waste, flurry or lost motion. 
 This stocky, smiling North of Ireland man, Ffolliet, 
 had built thousands of miles of railroad through the 
 Northwest. He had hewn ledges for his track to 
 cling to in the heart of the Cascades and the Rockies, 
 where the sheer drop was a half mile, and had twisted 
 the ribbons of steel around corners and through passes 
 where only the mountain sheep and the surveying out- 
 fit had found footing. 
 
 There seemed to be no place for sentiment in this 
 headlong drive of men and machinery, but the con- 
 struction boss was reminded of a story during his 
 brief dinner hour and it threw an odd bit of very 
 human feeling into this rude business of railroad 
 building. 
 
 " I once had a foreman named ' Dirty Face ' Char- 
 ley," said Ffolliet, " and he was a hard-working, 
 close-mouthed kind of a slob without a streak of 
 sentiment in him as far as you could see with the 
 naked eye. His only close friend was his partner 
 
 65 
 
The Greater America 
 
 or bunkie, and these two used to get drunk together 
 and fight for each other and run a close corporation 
 generally. One day the partner up and died while 
 we were laying a stretch of track across the prairie 
 like that yonder. There was no town within twenty 
 miles, and the country was too new to have a cemetery 
 within a hundred miles. ' Dirty Face ' Charley came 
 to me and asked for the loan of a couple of men to 
 help dig his partner's grave. I ordered two Italian 
 hands from the grading gang to go with him, but 
 this wouldn't do at all. The tears were rolling down 
 Charley's face as he turned back to me and blubbered: 
 
 " ' You mean well, and I'm obliged to you, Mr. 
 Ffolllet, but no blankey-blankety-blank Dagoes can 
 dig Jim's grave. If you'll give me a half day off, I'll 
 dig it lone-handed.' 
 
 " We bosses turned to with shovels, for there was 
 no withstanding such loyalty as this, and Jim was 
 buried by what Charley called ' white men.' " 
 
 This prairie construction was like a holiday task, 
 a diversion In railroad making for Ffolllet, and yet he 
 was driving his men and trains as fast as material 
 could be handled. It was not easy to see why there 
 should be so much haste to cross this almost empty 
 prairie. Where were the people, where was the 
 freight to make It worth while? There was no 
 terminal city nor any trunk line beyond. A few 
 miles more and the work of the construction gangs 
 would be done. They would double back over their 
 
 66 
 
The Peopling of the Prairie 
 
 track, leaving the road to end on just such a brown 
 and monotonous stretch of prairie as this. 
 
 The answer to this riddle lay in the wake of the 
 construction train. Only a few hundred yards behind 
 the track-layers there was a town, Sarles by name. 
 It was not yet a month old. A bank was open for 
 business. Grocery and hardware stores, the post- 
 office, and a hotel, unpainted and crude, were hum- 
 ming with activity, hope and industry. Grain ele- 
 vators were climbing skyward as fast as men could 
 be found to use hammer and saw, A lumber yard 
 was crowded with teams hauling material for more 
 banks and stores and warehouses. You could not 
 have found a busier town than Sarles in the United 
 States. 
 
 And yet there seemed no more excuse for the town 
 than for the railroad. Within sight of Sarles the 
 prairie held perhaps a half dozen farm-houses as far 
 as one could see. But across the country were crawl- 
 ing four-horse wagons from all quarters of the com- 
 pass. These were the " grain tanks " of the farmers, 
 hauling their wheat to the railroad, coming into 
 Sarles to sell their harvest to the elevator men, to 
 cash their checks in the bank of Sarles, to spend their 
 money in its stores. The few acres upon which this 
 town had sprung up in a matter of days had already 
 become a distributing business and shipping center for 
 a wheat-growing country perhaps thirty miles square. 
 The railroad had no need to bid for traffic. It was 
 
 67 
 
The Greater America 
 
 paying for Itself as fast as the rails were laid. It 
 was like the flood from a bursting dam, this building 
 and settling behind the construction train. Sarles was 
 one of three towns in twenty miles, looking alike as 
 so many peas in a pod, differing in size according to 
 their several ages of from one to three months. 
 
 This stretch of railroad was one of five Great 
 Northern extensions flung up into a belt of new coun- 
 try two hundred miles long, within the last three 
 years. They reach out like the teeth of a comb 
 toward the Canadian boundary, thirty to fifty miles 
 between them, as instruments by which this territory 
 is being dotted with towns, many of them future 
 cities. If you care to see how the thing is done, let 
 us go up forty miles to the end of another of these 
 extensions. Here is the town of Antler. The rail- 
 road came to it about three weeks ago, therefore 
 Antler can be conservatively called one month old. 
 Its founders began to build even ahead of the rail- 
 road, and they lived in tents until lumber could be 
 hauled to them over the new track. 
 
 Four weeks in the life of an Eastern town is but 
 a day. The man who leaves it for a month returns 
 to find the main street looking as he left it, and he 
 would be immensely surprised to find any changes 
 worth his notice. But the man of North Dakota 
 who drove to Antler a month ago would have found 
 a railroad grade waiting for the rails, and a patch 
 of brown prairie, with nothing to indicate that this 
 
 68 
 
The Peopling of the Prairie 
 
 area would not be plowed for wheat this year. Visit- 
 ing the site of Antler a month later, he finds three 
 lumber yards, two banks (two banks, mind you), a 
 drug store, two restaurants, a livery stable, two gen- 
 eral stores, five grain elevators finished and one 
 building, and men hammering and digging and haul- 
 ing by night as well as day. 
 
 The town has grown faster than the railroad can 
 keep pace with it, and the station is not yet built. 
 On a siding stands a box car with a flight of wooden 
 steps leading up to its side door, and a stove-pipe 
 poked through the roof. An alert and capable young 
 woman reigns within as station and express agent 
 and telegraph operator. She has even fenced off one 
 corner of the car near the stove as a " waiting-room." 
 It is such an insignificant looking makeshift of a 
 station and the town is so incredibly new that the 
 information she bestows in reply to your questions is 
 staggering : 
 
 " In the first two weeks the station was opened, 
 the freight receipts at Antler were ten thousand dol- 
 lars. This is big, if you happen to know that three 
 hundred dollars' worth of business a month justified 
 the company in building a station and putting in a 
 salaried agent. The country looks kind of empty to 
 a stranger, doesn't it ? There doesn't look to be much 
 of anything besides Antler on this part of the map. 
 And Antler isn't what you would call a metropolis 
 back east in Michigan where I was raised. But 
 
 69 
 
The Greater America 
 
 this little, brand-new town will ship out a million 
 bushels of wheat this fall. That means nearly seven 
 hundred thousand dollars in cash coming in to these 
 farmers around here, and most of it spent right here 
 in Antler. And that pays for a good many miles of 
 track over this flat country. Oh, we are doing pretty 
 well, thank you." 
 
 A salesman for a St. Paul hardware house comes 
 in to find out when he may expect to get some ship- 
 ments into the town. 
 
 " I've driven three hundred miles across lots In 
 the last six days," he confides. " I crossed four of 
 these new railroad extensions, and struck fourteen of 
 these towns made while you wait. Found them all 
 the way from a week to a year old. I slept in a hotel 
 only one night, because everybody was so busy build- 
 ing stores and elevators that they couldn't stop to put 
 up hotels. I sold ten thousand dollars' worth of 
 stoves in the six days. Five thousand dollars' worth 
 was ordered by men In the new towns who haven't 
 built their stores yet. They expect to have the stores 
 up by the time the stoves get there." 
 
 What Is known as the Thorne extension Is typical 
 of this amazingly new and lusty civilization. Thirty 
 miles of road had been finished In July. I went over 
 It early In September, six weeks after the railroad 
 opened this wheat-raising prairie, six weeks after the 
 first town was begun. Three towns were already In 
 a white heat of activity. McCumber had risen from 
 
 70 
 
The Peopling of the Prairie 
 
 the prairie twenty-five days before I saw It. A two- 
 story bank block loomed grandly in the foreground, 
 flanked by stores and elevators. Only a third of a 
 mile away was a rival city In embryo, Rolette, also 
 sprouting buildings from the prairie grass with in- 
 credible rapidity. While the Great Northern was 
 hurrying its branch roads north and south, the " Soo " 
 Line was cutting this territory east and west, In a 
 stirring race against time for a share of the year's 
 wheat harvest. A crossing of the two roads hap- 
 pened to fall between McCumber and Rolette. The 
 former was the " Great Northern town," the latter 
 the " Soo town." 
 
 Municipal expansion will Inevitably cause the 
 suburbs of one to collide with the outskirts of the 
 other. The unbiased observer would conclude that 
 there was no room for both Infants. But It would 
 not be safe to suggest this to a man of McCumber 
 unless you picked Rolette as the probable victim. 
 The two towns sat side by side on the prairie, crow- 
 ing at each other like two very young bantam roost- 
 ers. For spirit they were St. Paul and Minneapolis 
 In miniature. They have seen other towns, started 
 under similar conditions, wax rich In people and 
 wealth. They can go back Into history, for example, 
 and talk about the comparatively ancient town of 
 Cando, on a neighboring extension. In a recent 
 spring season forty automobiles were shipped Into 
 Cando, bought by the farmers In the near-by country, 
 
 71 
 
The Greater America 
 
 half of them thirty horse-power machines. Cando 
 has thirteen hundred people, and is as prosperous as 
 the automobile market indicates. 
 
 These towns come into being because the West 
 is full of men who are always on the qui vive for new 
 opportunities to create, to produce, to make a town 
 where none grew before. As the railroad invades the 
 virgin territory, the towns spring up according to a 
 general plan that smacks of a problem in geometry. 
 There are no rivers, no forests, no mines, nothing to 
 make for advantages of location. There is no obvi- 
 ous reason why a town should be here instead of there, 
 a few miles beyond or a few miles back. 
 
 The farmer ought to be able to haul his wheat not 
 more than ten miles to the elevator. Therefore the 
 town site is mapped out to draw upon a certain wheat- 
 raising radius. And beyond that radius another town 
 is projected, like placing checkers on certain squares 
 on the board. 
 
 The town Is even announced before it happens. 
 The railroad issues such statements as these : 
 
 " This extension will run forty-two miles from 
 York, northwest through the Island Lake country, 
 and will have five good North Dakota towns. The 
 stations on the line will be well equipped with ele- 
 vators, and will be constructed and ready for opera- 
 tion at the commencement of the grain season. Pro- 
 spective merchants have been active in securing desira- 
 ble locations at the different towns on the line. There 
 
 72 
 
The Peopling of the Prairie 
 
 are still opportunities for hotels, general merchan- 
 dise, hardware, furniture and drug stores, etc." 
 
 Such is the spirit of American enterprise, which 
 builds its towns on paper before the railroad track 
 has been laid past their sites. 
 
 I traveled a thousand miles up and down these 
 Great Northern extensions visiting thirty-one towns 
 in their swaddling clothes, and found every one of 
 them ablaze with confidence that it was certain to 
 surpass in population and prosperity all of its sister 
 infants. In their main essentials, they were bewilder- 
 ingly alike. There was the main business street laid 
 out like a boulevard for width, vastly expensive to 
 pave whenever that step in development should be 
 reached. There had not been time to build " resi- 
 dence sections " in most of them. The workers lived 
 in the hotel or over their stores, and the few dwellings 
 clung close to the clustered beginnings of the town, as 
 if reluctant to scatter over the bare and wind-swept 
 prairie. 
 
 One of the hardships of living in these new settle- 
 ments is the lack of good water. To the towns which 
 spring up over night the tank wagons trail from 
 miles away to supply enough water for drinking. 
 A locomotive is the thirstiest brute in all creation, 
 and millions of gallons a day must be supplied along 
 these pioneer railroad extensions. It is superfluous to 
 remark that for absence of superstitious and sentimen- 
 tal nonsense of all kinds a great railway corporation 
 
 73 
 
The Greater America 
 
 Is almost in a class by itself. If a silly or un- 
 founded romance is afloat, it is not likely to find a 
 welcome refuge in the practical headpiece of a general 
 manager. 
 
 It was, therefore, rather startling to fall in with an 
 elderly and dignified gentleman, a conductor of many 
 years' service on this system, who had been detailed 
 on special duty from the General Manager's office to 
 search for water supplies with the aid of a divining rod 
 or " water-witching " outfit. It may be that his errand 
 was in the nature of a cheerful gamble after other 
 resources had failed, but the fact remained that Mr. 
 Eastman was on the ground equipped for business, 
 and that our train waited upon his investigations. 
 
 His outfit was simple. A friend, acting as assist- 
 ant " witcher," carried a bundle of freshly cut witch- 
 hazel boughs, trimmed in V-shaped branches, the 
 leaves and buds still on them. The two men disem- 
 barked. From up the raw, new street of the town 
 that was not more than a month old, gathered a score 
 of merchants, farmers and idlers. They greeted the 
 visitors with interest and respect. This looking for 
 water touched upon a vital matter in their daily lives. 
 They were still hauling their drinking water in tank 
 wagons from a spring a mile out of town, and the 
 water was sold at so much a gallon. 
 
 Mr. Eastman, stout, conventional as to dress, and 
 looking as essentially practical as a veteran railroad 
 man ought to appear, took one of the V-shaped 
 
 74 
 
A prairie water wagon 
 
 The ivatcr-witcher at ivork 
 
v4 
 
 J 
 
The Peopling of the Prairie 
 
 witch-hazel boughs, and tightly grasped the pliant 
 ends in his two fists, holding the crotch or point 
 upright. Thus equipped he moved sedately across 
 the prairie. The witch-hazel remained upright for 
 perhaps fifty feet. The crowd trailed in behind, 
 vastly curious. Presently the bough began to turn, 
 or waver. The inverted V twisted slowly down until 
 It was parallel with the earth, or pointing straight 
 out from the bearer. 
 
 He slackened his gait and moved ahead, while the 
 telltale bough moved slowly down until it was point- 
 ing toward the soil. Now the " water-witcher " had 
 it so grasped that it was twisting in his fists, and the 
 tender bark along the pliant ends was beginning to 
 break, showing that some force other than muscular 
 effort was pulling the bough toward the earth. When 
 It pointed straight down he stopped and heeled a 
 mark In the grass. 
 
 Then he moved on, and very slowly the branch 
 began to rise, until at length It had returned to the 
 perpendicular, In Its original position. The vein of 
 water had been passed, and the witch-hazel was no 
 longer attracted. 
 
 " There Is your water back there," said Mr. East- 
 man, with the air of a man who is backing a " sure 
 thing." When asked to explain he said: 
 
 " Whatever kind of attraction there may be, I 
 know It Is there. I have located fifty wells along the 
 railway without failure. I picked it up when I was 
 
 75 
 
The Greater America 
 
 a boy of thirteen, by watching an old, bhnd negro 
 ' witch ' for water on my father's farm. Not every 
 one can succeed at it. There must be something in 
 the theory of a magnetic current flowing between the 
 operator and the hidden water through the medium 
 of the green willow or the witch-hazel. I can't 
 explain it, any more than I can tell you why one man 
 succeeds at ' water-witching ' and another fails. 
 
 " I have located a flowing well alongside five dry 
 wells that had been located in the ordinary fashion, I 
 must have found nearly five hundred good wells in 
 the Dakotas, Montana and Idaho in the last twenty- 
 five years. There isn't anything in it for me, and I 
 have no reason for trying any bunco games. 
 
 " Do I voluntarily twist the twigs? Not on your 
 life. Grip one end, next my hand, and see if you can 
 keep it from twisting, or take one end by yourself 
 as we go back. 
 
 " There, what did I tell you? Of course it twists 
 of itself. Why, I have had my hands blister from 
 the force with which the twigs pull down when there 
 is water close to the surface. After you have located 
 water, you must walk away from it until the twigs 
 are upright again. The distance between the loca- 
 tion and this other point will give you a rough esti- 
 mate of the number of feet in depth you must dig 
 before you are likely to strike water." 
 
 Now there is this to be said of Mr. Eastman: 
 Not only does Mr. James J. Hill's railroad think It 
 
 76 
 
The Peopling of the Prairie 
 
 worth while to go " water-witching," but their 
 " water-witcher " is not the kind of a man who can 
 be accused of any mushy sentimentahty. He is gray- 
 bearded and elderly, and there is something almost 
 patriarchal in his aspect. But appearances were never 
 more deceitful. For as a Great Northern conductor 
 he has been for years noted as the most sudden and 
 valiant person to look out for the interests of the 
 road when trouble is brewing on large consignments 
 aboard a passenger train. 
 
 It is still his delight to welcome to his train a car- 
 load of Minnesota " lumber-jacks," just come out of 
 the woods, full of bad whisky and violent purposes. 
 Mr. Eastman has made a habit of wading through 
 such storm centers with a fighting " lumber-jack " 
 hanging to every corner of his frame. It Is in the 
 Interests of peace and order on the train; the " scrap- 
 pers " invariably " hit the gravel " when Mr. East- 
 man Is done with them. It would be absurd to accuse 
 such a hard-headed and hard-fisted railroad veteran 
 as this of harboring a " stray superstition " for no 
 obvious purpose. 
 
 There were no saloons in this prairie belt, for 
 North Dakota is under the sway of a prohibition law. 
 Whereas the saloon Is the pioneer enterprise in the 
 mining camp, the bank took the lead in this whole- 
 some kind of creation. There were towns with a 
 dozen stores, four hundred people and three banks. 
 In fact, the nucleus of such a town is a group of 
 
 77 
 
The Greater America 
 
 elevators, the " general store," and the bank. There 
 was one town, Munich, whose history ran back some 
 twelve months, in which three of the four corners 
 of one block on the main street were occupied by 
 banks. It is an upside down condition of pioneer 
 settlement when banks are so amazingly numerous 
 and saloons so conspicuously missing. 
 
 Of course, the newspaper came arm in arm with 
 the country banker. At Mohall, I met the editor of 
 The Tribune, a flourishing weekly with nothing 
 " countrified " in its make-up. He would not have 
 exchanged positions with the owner of the New York 
 Herald. He was growing up with the country and 
 he had come in " on the ground floor." 
 
 " You think it's a little early to be running a news- 
 paper up here? " he said. " Why, I had two papers 
 going before the railroad got here, one in this town, 
 and another at Sherwood. We don't wait for the 
 railroad. It has to hustle to keep up with us folks. 
 When the extension got to Sherwood, it found the 
 town built, doing business and waiting for it." 
 
 These towns in their infancy, rising by scores on 
 the prairie, were essentially American in their spirit, 
 their purposes and their destinies. They were being 
 peopled not by foreign immigrants, but by the men 
 and women of the Middle West who were not afraid 
 to ** take chances." The schoolhouse and the church 
 would follow the grain elevator, the bank and the 
 crude, new " main street " which ran into a trail 
 
 78 
 
The Peopling of the Prairie 
 
 across the blank prairie. Some of these towns may 
 collapse and vanish, but most of them will grow into 
 solidity and lose their raw edges. For the brick and 
 stone business block and high school, the pavement, 
 the water-works and lighting plant are only a year or 
 two behind the pioneer in such a movement as this. 
 
 79 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE MAGNET OF THE WHEAT 
 
 Wheat is the magnet that drew these people and 
 that created these towns as if by magic. I had only 
 to step into the middle of the main street of one of 
 these towns to see on the prairie beyond the smoke 
 of the threshing outfits, far and near. As they moved 
 slowly across the landscape or spouted the golden 
 straw, they suggested so many twentieth century drag- 
 ons of a benevolent temperament. By day the 
 smoke and turmoil of the threshers, by night the 
 blaze of burning straw stacks — the infant towns were 
 ringed around with the signs of the riches that create 
 the need for them. 
 
 The railroad was fairly blocked with cars crammed 
 with wheat. Seventy-five acres of wheat, twenty 
 bushels to the acre, were swept into one of these cars, 
 and one huge engine hauled to market seventy-five 
 of these carloads. Therefore one of these trains, 
 which fairly trod on one another's heels through the 
 autumn, contained the harvest from 5,625 acres. 
 Herein was the secret of this wonderful building 
 development. 
 
 Ahead of the town came the pioneer wheat-raiser 
 who made the town possible. Now a population 
 
 80 
 
The Magnet of the Wheat 
 
 cannot be picked up bodily and transplanted like so 
 many heads of cabbage. It must be led to move into 
 new regions, to sever the ties that bind it to old homes, 
 kinsfolk, old friends, to the very soil and landscape 
 it has always known. In the one decade beginning 
 with 1894, one hundred thousand people were per- 
 suaded to forsake the lands that bore them, and to 
 make new homes that brought under cultivation eight 
 million acres of prairie land that had belonged to the 
 Indian and the buffalo, and after them to the cattle- 
 man. This movement is a fine, big American story 
 in itself. 
 
 James J. Hill Is the greatest of living empire- 
 builders. Stretching a railroad across the continent 
 was only one end of the task he blocked out for 
 himself. His railroad was worthless without a popu- 
 lation. Therefore he became the leader of a migra- 
 tion which has been carried on so quietly that it Is 
 Impressive only when the statistics are bulked In this 
 fashion. These hundred thousand men, women and 
 children led up toward the northern frontier were 
 not sought in the steerages of Atlantic steamers. This 
 was not a foreign movement such as In a previous 
 generation had settled large areas of Minnesota and 
 Wisconsin. The missionaries who preached the gos- 
 pel of " Jim " Hill went into the Virginias, Iowa, 
 Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Nebraska. 
 
 From the eastern view-point these States and sec- 
 tions are far from being over-crowded. Yet they 
 
 81 
 
The Greater America 
 
 have largely peopled this part of the new northwest, 
 while at the same time they have steadily increased 
 their own wealth and population. In other words, 
 while there has been no economic loss to the older 
 States, there has been a splendid gain to the nation, 
 which Is bigger and better and stronger because 
 energy and industry have found new fields to conquer. 
 
 Twenty-four years ago the Great Northern car- 
 ried only two hundred and fifty-eight thousand bush- 
 els of wheat from harvest in this north country. In 
 1905 it hauled one hundred million bushels of wheat, 
 oats, barley and flax out of its own territory. Much 
 of this tremendously increased contribution to the 
 wealth of the country was made by the great army of 
 stout-hearted pilgrims from the older States. 
 
 These people were seemingly rooted in their native 
 soil, on the farm, in the shop and the store, struggling 
 perhaps, but always hoping for better fortune, expect- 
 ing to end their days where they were. Among them 
 came the agents of a railroad that was crying for 
 strong men and farms and towns. These strangers 
 had no land for sale. Therefore they did not color 
 the facts. They did not want weak-kneed failures 
 chronically incapable of bettering themselves. In 
 school and court houses, in country halls and cross- 
 road post-oflices, from dry-goods boxes, in town 
 squares and at political rallies, from valley to hilltop, 
 these crusaders talked and lectured of " the land of 
 opportunity " in the northern half of North Dakota, 
 
 82 
 
The Magnet of the Wheat 
 
 in Minnesota and Montana. It was a campaign of 
 several years, waged with a common-sense intelli- 
 gence. Its arguments were of a straight-from-the- 
 shoulder, American l<^ind. Their tenor was like this : 
 
 " You see your children come out of school with 
 no chance to get farms of their own, because the cost 
 of land in your older part of the country is so high 
 that you can't afford to buy land to start your sons 
 out in life around you. They have to go to the cities 
 to make a living, or become laborers in the mills or 
 hire out as farm-hands. There is no future for them 
 here. If you are doing well where you are and can 
 safeguard the future of your children, and see them 
 prosper around you, don't leave here. But if you 
 want independence, if you are renting your land, if 
 the money-lender is carrying you along and you are 
 running behind year after year, you can do no worse 
 by moving. Just say to yourself : 
 
 " ' Here goes nothing. Things cannot be any 
 worse up there. Maybe there is something better In 
 store for me.' 
 
 " Every man who moves upon North Dakota can 
 have a half mile square of rich land, one hundred 
 and sixty acres, which is his own little kingdom. It 
 will increase in value as the country settles around 
 him. In a few years his homestead is worth several 
 thousand dollars. He is his own master, he is making 
 a living, and he can look every man unflinchingly In 
 the eye. 
 
 83 
 
The Greater A7nerica 
 
 " You farmers talk of free trade and protection 
 and what this or that political party will do for you. 
 Why don't you vote a homestead for yourself? That 
 Is the only thing Uncle Sam will ever give you. Jim 
 Hill hasn't an acre of land to sell you. We are not In 
 the real-estate business. We don't want you to go 
 up there and make a failure of It, because the rates at 
 which we haul you and your goods make the first 
 transaction a loss. It Is a case of fair play and co- 
 operation. We must have landless men for a manless 
 land." 
 
 You may be sure there was much earnest discussion 
 through the countryside, much reading of railroad 
 literature in long winter evenings, much wagging of 
 gray beards while these arguments were threshed 
 out. At length a few heads of families, men esteemed 
 for truth and good judgment In their communities, 
 would be sent up to spy out the land. They found 
 that It was good, and sent for their women folk. In 
 the winter these pioneers, whose pockets were bulg- 
 ing with the cash received for their first wheat crop, 
 visited their old homes and talked over the new 
 country by the firesides and In the corner stores. 
 
 The snowball was set rolling. It swelled Into a 
 "concentration movement." This meant nothing less 
 than sending home-seekers northward by the train- 
 load. If home Is the word most freighted with emo- 
 tions to stir the heart, then " home-seeker " becomes 
 a phrase with more power than all others to kindle 
 
 84 
 
The Magnet of the Wheat 
 
 the imagination of an American. It holds within 
 itself the history of the nation's creation and growth. 
 
 Successor in direct line to the ox teams and the 
 prairie schooner of the Overland Trail, these railroad 
 trains were carrying into another century the story 
 of the pioneers. In 1894 the first wave of this 
 so-called " concentration " tide flowed out from In- 
 diana. Fourteen passenger coaches were filled with 
 men, women and children, and forty-five freight cars 
 carried their household goods and live stock. In the 
 spring of 1898 more than five thousand people were 
 moved In March and April as part of this movement. 
 The tide of migration rose steadily higher, until five 
 years later one party assembled at Chicago numbered 
 two thousand eight hundred souls, mostly farmers 
 and their families from the Middle West. They 
 moved to North Dakota in five long passenger trains, 
 and six freight trains were filled with their goods. 
 In 1900 a large party was taken out of the Shenan- 
 doah Valley, which for generations has been famed 
 as a rich and fruitful farming section. 
 
 Now these people of American birth had left their 
 farms and their homes to begin life over again; wives 
 and mothers, old men and young, sweethearts and 
 babies, a thousand miles from their own country. 
 From old and settled communities they were going 
 into a land that a generation ago was called unfit for 
 habitation, scourged by drought and blizzards. Gen- 
 eral Sibley in 1863 wrote of North Dakota: 
 
 85 
 
The Greater America 
 
 " If the devil were to select a residence on earth, 
 he would probably choose this particular district for 
 his abode, with the redskins' murdering and plunder- 
 ing bands as his ready ministers." 
 
 Each family was permitted to take free of railroad 
 charge ten head of live stock, together with its house- 
 hold goods and farming implements. When their 
 trains trailed up into the new land the pilgrims were 
 emptied into little towns just springing up, or dropped 
 upon the bare and open prairie, one hundred here, 
 two hundred there. Once a party of two thousand 
 overflowed one village of four hundred people. The 
 few settlers who had arriv^ed before them drove in 
 from many miles around and helped the newcomers 
 as best they could. The freight cars were backed on 
 sidings and used to sleep in until the immigrants could 
 build their own homes. Every dwelling, store, 
 church and schoolhouse within twenty miles was filled 
 to overflowing with these families. 
 
 Within a week, however, the overflow had van- 
 ished from the little towns, and the freight cars on 
 the prairie siding lost their lodgers. The immigrants 
 brought their horses and farm wagons with them. 
 As soon as their homestead claims were located and 
 filed, they hauled out lumber to build shacks, or with 
 the help of neighbors made their sod houses. Then 
 the " homesteader " loaded his family, his household 
 goods and his farming tools into his wagon, and 
 trailed out across the prairie to his new home. The 
 
 86 
 
The Magnet of the Wheat 
 
 day after he had put the house to rights he began to 
 break the land for the spring sowing of wheat. 
 
 The prairie fairly seemed to swallow these thou- 
 sands of settlers and to cry for more. No railroad 
 extensions gridironed the country during this first 
 stage of development. As homestead lands became 
 scarcer, those who could not afford to buy land within 
 twenty miles of the main line went on and on, and 
 built their shacks as far as a hundred miles from the 
 nearest town. Therefore when these migrating hosts 
 moved out to find their " locations," It was like the 
 departure of a great fleet of fishing boats that scatter 
 over a smooth sea, then, one by one, drop hull down 
 and vanish. 
 
 The loneliness and homesickness of the pioneers 
 of these prairies is not a new story. What they suf- 
 fered In Kansas and Nebraska, they fought through 
 in this latest migration into North Dakota. They 
 endured and conquered In the spirit that glows In 
 every line of the following verses. They are better 
 than any attempts at description, for the author, 
 James J. Somers, of Renville, Is a North Dakota man 
 who lived the life whose trials he so vividly sings: 
 
 " I am one of the Pioneers 
 
 Of North Dakota State. 
 At Hill's request I came out West 
 
 In search of real estate. 
 I filed along the Cut Bank Creek, 
 
 Just forty miles from rail ; 
 
 87 
 
The Greater America 
 
 And I started farming with a hoe 
 Along the Minot trail. 
 
 The hardships that we did endure, 
 
 From hunger and from cold, 
 I haven't time to tell you. 
 
 Or it never will be told. 
 To start from Minot with a load 
 
 And face a northwest gale, 
 It would break your heart, right on the start, 
 
 Along the Minot trail. 
 
 ** The rivers they were far apart, 
 
 And a well was something new. 
 It often tickled us to find 
 
 Some water in a slough. 
 I used to have a demijohn — 
 
 I called it " ginger-ale " — 
 Once in a while we'd take a smile 
 
 Along the Minot trail. 
 
 " The only fuel that we knew 
 Was prairie hay and straw. 
 From November until April 
 
 We never had a thaw. 
 I often thought I'd rather be 
 
 In some good warm jail, 
 While twisting hay both night and day 
 Along the Minot trail. 
 88 
 
The Magnet of the Wheat 
 
 " And when the snow would disappear 
 
 The gophers would begin. 
 They'd eat up everything we sowed, 
 
 And then we'd sow again. 
 If I could scheme some new device 
 
 To kill the flicker-tail, 
 I might stand a show with my old hoe 
 
 Along the Minot trail." 
 
 In a more jubilant strain this poet has sung a sequel 
 to his tale of stress and woe : 
 
 " There's no corporation 
 Can dictate our ration. 
 For strikes or for boycotts 
 We don't care a whoop." 
 
 His muse sings a top-note of triumph in these lines, 
 where it Is fitting that we leave him : 
 
 " The gophers we've banished, 
 The shacks have all vanished, 
 Except for an odd one 
 
 That's used as a coop. 
 On each claim there's a mansion 
 Where stockmen were ranchin' 
 Just four years ago 
 
 In the Mouse River Loop." 
 
 Many men took their families Into this region with- 
 out even the cash needed to " make a start." They 
 
 89 
 
The Greater America 
 
 hired themselves out to more prosperous farmers as 
 teamsters and laborers, filed their homestead claims, 
 and toiled for wages, saving a little all the time, until 
 they could build their own shacks and buy horses and 
 farm machinery. There is not much of the romantic 
 or picturesque in such stories as these, but the men 
 behind them are the kind of men and their deeds are 
 the kind of deeds that make the backbone of their 
 country. 
 
 A sun-browned six-footer — all bone and muscle — 
 was driving to town on top of a load of " No. i 
 hard " wheat, and halted long enough to tell me his 
 little story of success: 
 
 " I settled on my claim seven years ago without a 
 cent. All I had coming to me was the use of a yoke 
 of oxen to work for two weeks. The season was so 
 dry that all I could break in two weeks was twelve 
 acres, but I was proud of that much, and in the fall 
 I worked at sowing and putting up a little shanty with 
 wood sides and a sod roof. Now I have a nice, 
 comfortable little house and granary, a hundred and 
 thirty acres under cultivation, stock and machinery 
 to work the farm, and this year threshed out four 
 thousand bushels of grain. This is the country for a 
 poor man if he wants to carve out his home with his 
 own two hands." 
 
 The self-made man of the eastern city who views 
 the farmer at large as a down-trodden clodhopper 
 with singular taste in the fashion of whiskers may 
 
 90 
 
j: 
 ■^ 
 
 y i 
 
 K5 
 
The Magnet of the Wheat 
 
 be enlightened by this tale of a wheat-raiser who 
 worked with his brains and his hands: 
 
 " I came to North Dakota twenty-one years ago 
 from Iowa. I had six broken-down plugs of horses, 
 two steers and two plows. Had no money and was a 
 thousand dollars in debt. I rented a farm for five 
 years before I bought any land. Then I made up my 
 mind to buy land on my own account, and bought 
 two sections on time. Then I kept on raising wheat 
 and buying land until I owned five thousand acres of 
 land, all paid for. In the twenty-one years I cleared 
 out of the ground in clean money, raising wheat, two 
 hundred and forty thousand dollars. Last year I 
 sold four thousand acres and have quit raising wheat. 
 I am now on my way to Cuba, where my wife and I 
 will spend the winter. Whenever I go back East I 
 try to get my old friends and neighbors to come out 
 here and share my prosperity." 
 
 The wheat-raiser of the rich prairie takes his gold 
 from the soil with almost none of the drudgery that 
 goes with real farming. He plows and sows, riding 
 behind his horses across his fenceless quarter or half 
 " section." He labors no more until his crop Is har- 
 vested by machinery. The grain Is threshed for him 
 and he hauls It to the nearest elevator, where he Is 
 paid cash on delivery. His outdoor work Is finished 
 three months after it began. In his first year he may 
 reap profits sufficient to pay for his land, his house 
 and his tools. It Is not uncommon to clear thirteen 
 
 91 
 
The Greater America 
 
 hundred to fifteen hundred dollars from one harvest 
 on a hundred and sixty acres. The average farm in 
 North Dakota contains three hundred and forty-two 
 acres, and nine in every ten men own the farms they 
 live on. 
 
 There is a black cloud on this bright picture if a 
 wheat crop fails. The wheat-raiser has put all his 
 eggs into one basket. He has not learned the value 
 of diversified farming, for nature's prodigal gener- 
 osity is his argument against toiling by the sweat of 
 his brow. As he followed the cattle-men, so the 
 farmer will follow him in a third stage of develop- 
 ment, as population crowds into his country. Mean- 
 time he drives ten or twenty miles to cast his vote, 
 he sends his children to school and college, and he 
 takes a good deal of pride in his town, his county, 
 his State, his nation and its flag. 
 
 The railroad has swept him out of his blizzard- 
 bound isolation. He has become an inveterate trav- 
 eler during the idle winter months, visiting the cities 
 of his own and other States, far and near, like an 
 invading army, hale, hearty and prosperous. Last 
 year the average income of the North Dakota family 
 was larger than in any other State of the Union. 
 
 It was in this region that a Norwegian farmer 
 observed to the station agent at Grand Forks: 
 
 "When does this train go?" 
 
 The agent asked: 
 
 " Where do you want to go? " 
 92 
 
The Magnet of the Wheat 
 
 " I don't give a ," was the cheerful reply. 
 
 " Give me a ticket. I just want to take a ride." 
 
 Compared with the story of the previous genera- 
 tion, the process of peopling this prairie belt seems 
 to be marvelously swift and productive. Compared 
 with the future of such areas as this, the present is 
 only a crude beginning. For a hundred million 
 Americans can be sustained without increasing the 
 area of a single farm now under cultivation in this 
 country, merely by more intelligent farming. When 
 fully developed, the agricultural resources in sight 
 will sustain a thousand million souls, more than ten 
 times the present population. 
 
 To-day more than forty million Americans live on 
 almost six million farms. One bread-winner in every 
 three is a farmer. But from the Missouri to the 
 Pacific the population averages only three persons 
 to the square mile. Disregarding the increasing 
 yields that will be reaped from arable lands by raising 
 the standards of agriculture, the irrigation projects 
 now planned will support an additional population 
 of twenty-five millions on land now called outcast. 
 The pralrle-settler and town-builder, therefore, pic- 
 ture a passing phase, a chapter In a titanic evolution 
 whose goal is not yet in sight. 
 
 93 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 *'JIM" HILL AND THE RECONSTRUCTED FARMER 
 
 This part of the Northwest is " Jim " Hill's coun- 
 try; he helped to make it what it is, and he is proud 
 of it. The settling of the Dakota prairie is typical 
 of the work he has been doing from Minnesota to 
 Puget Sound. The power of such a man as E. H. 
 Harriman consists in his genius for reaching out and 
 absorbing the work that other men have wrought. 
 He is a product of ultra-modern business conditions, 
 a bold strategist in the world of combinations of 
 material wealth, typifying the spirit which most 
 threatens the social future of the Republic. James 
 J. Hill stands largely for the creative and independent 
 forces that have hammered a great nation from a 
 wilderness. Combined with the ability of a great 
 upbuilder he possesses also the genius of the financier 
 and the " captain of industry," so that other men 
 have not been able to snatch his own from him. 
 
 This sturdy, shaggy, patriarchal-looking man, who 
 began life as a Mississippi River " mud " clerk, and 
 was later in charge of a train of creaking ox-carts 
 that trailed north along the Red River Valley into 
 Winnipeg, still lectures the people of his territory 
 as if he were in truth the Moses that had led them 
 into the promised land. They may scold at his 
 
 94 
 
" Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed Farmer 
 
 freight schedules, but they turn out by the thousands 
 to hear him preach the doctrine of the farm as the 
 bulwark of the nation. No county fair in Montana 
 or Washington is too unimportant for him to omit 
 in his tours of the Northwest. A farmer himself, 
 he passes judgment on the prize pigs, fruit and poul- 
 try, with a discerning eye, and now and then Is 
 moved to relate such trying missionary experiences 
 as this : 
 
 " In the summer of twenty years ago, In this State, 
 no rain fell from seed-time until the first of July. The 
 grain was barely alive and promised no more than 
 half a crop. I didn't know as much as I do now, and 
 I thought I would help the farmers of the State so 
 that they would not have to depend on one crop. In 
 my Innocence I thought that they would take advan- 
 tage of a chance to improve their stock. So I brought 
 out from England and Scotland eight hundred thor- 
 oughbred bulls, and distributed them through Minne- 
 sota and South and North Dakota. What did the 
 farmers do with these costly animals? Breed from 
 them and improve their herds? No; they sold them 
 for what they could get. I gave them pigs, and they 
 killed them In the fall and made winter pork of them. 
 This Is what they did with the prize pigs that I 
 imported from the old country and for which I had 
 paid as much as three hundred dollars a head. 
 
 " These farmers were misled by a lot of dema- 
 gogues, fellows who care no more about the farmer 
 
 95 
 
The Greater America 
 
 than about the wind that whistles. They told the 
 farmers that I was trying to cast aspersions on the 
 great wheat-raising State of Minnesota by buying the 
 best stock I could find and distributing it without 
 price." 
 
 Mr. Hill is a prophet who has reaped honor in 
 his own country. He believes that agriculture must 
 be the foundation of this country's material future, 
 and that the iron and coal and timber, and the indus- 
 tries depending on them, will begin to fail in another 
 generation. And because he is a good American, 
 with his country's interests at heart, he loses no chance 
 to tell the people of the great western farming 
 regions such sledge-hammer truths as these : 
 
 " Remember that your gold mine will never be 
 exhausted. As long as this frontier soil remains, it 
 will turn out more money than the richest mines of 
 Alaska or anywhere else. Cultivate it well, preserve 
 your inheritance. Keep your children on the farm 
 and make Intelligent men and women of them, and 
 the agricultural population of this nation always will 
 compare favorably with any other in every quality 
 that goes to make good citizenship. They have their 
 full share of intelligence, and they have more than 
 their share of patriotism. The farmer, if he knows 
 it, is the most independent man in the world. The 
 only consolation I get anywhere is when I go out on 
 the farm and feel — ' Well, here I can raise hogs, 
 horses and cattle.' Let me urge you not to get rid 
 
 96 
 
" Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed Farmer 
 
 of your farm. Keep the roof over the heads of your 
 children ; hand it down to them as home. They will 
 be better off; they will be better citizens." 
 
 " Since the close of the war, in 1865, the enormous 
 territory west of the Mississippi has grown from 
 frontier settlements into great, populous, wealthy 
 States. One-half the population of the United States 
 Is occupied directly or indirectly in the cultivation of 
 the land, and fully one-half of the entire capital of 
 the country is invested in farms and their buildings, 
 and when we come to the questions of intelligence, 
 patriotism and good citizenship, the agricultural 
 population stands out to-day as the great sheet anchor 
 of the nation. The wealth of the world comes from 
 the farm, the forest, the mine and the sea. The 
 farm has from the beginning been the foundation of 
 our growing wealth and greatness. For the first time 
 in the history of this country thousands of farmers 
 from Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin 
 and Minnesota are seeking homes in the Canadian 
 Northwest, because of the cheap lands offered in that 
 country. I feel sure that no one here to-night ever 
 expected to see the time when farmers and farmers' 
 sons from the best States of the West would be forced 
 to leave their country and their flag, to seek homes 
 In a foreign country. Land without population is a 
 wilderness; a population without land is a mob." 
 
 One of the striking features of the last Minne- 
 sota State Fair was a " Pioneer Building " made of 
 
 97 
 
The Greater America 
 
 logs and filled with relics of the primitive times of 
 the earlier settlers in the regions round about. Above 
 this log cabin waved the flag of the nation and 
 through the doors passed hundreds of gray-haired 
 men and women who could recall to one another 
 the days when they were helping to tame wilderness 
 territory for this flag of theirs, with the peaceful 
 weapons of the farmer and the lumberman. Inside 
 the cabin these reunited pioneers found such rude fur- 
 niture and household gear as had scantily equipped 
 their own log homes in the clearings, and they mar- 
 veled anew at the transformation wrought during 
 their generation. 
 
 When I happened to pass this building there stood 
 in front of it an automobile from which disembarked 
 a Dakota farmer and his family. The contrast was 
 immensely significant. In the march of progress 
 from the log cabin in the clearing, and the sod house 
 and shack of the prairie, to the automobile, the party 
 telephone line and the steam-threshing outfit, the 
 American farmer has brought himself abreast of the 
 times in characteristically American fashion. In the 
 past he was the poorest, the most hard-workmg and 
 most indispensable member of the community, but he 
 is rapidly learning that science and system must 
 everywhere supplant those clumsy and wasteful 
 methods which made him rather the serf than the lord 
 of the soil. 
 
 One must go into this western country to find the 
 98 
 
" Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed Farmer 
 
 farmer in his rightful place as the right arm of his 
 country's prosperity and its most useful citizen. I 
 have visited county and State fairs along the Atlantic 
 seaboard where the exhibits of prize stock and 
 produce and the implements of husbandry seemed 
 to be no more than annexes of the trotting track, the 
 balloon ascensions, the " Midway " and other spectac- 
 ular frivolities. This impeachment could not be laid 
 against this typical western fair, which might have 
 comfortably tucked away a half dozen similar exhi- 
 bitions in the eastern States. 
 
 It was first of all a gathering place for thousands 
 upon thousands of farmers and their families from 
 Minnesota and Wisconsin and the Dakotas. They 
 came to enjoy themselves in a fat harvest year, with 
 money to be cheerfully spent; but they came also to 
 see the latest wrinkles of invention and discovery 
 relating to their business. 
 
 There were acres and acres of agricultural ma- 
 chines in tumultuous operation, puffing and clanking 
 and ratthng as if they were suddenly possessed of a 
 myriad devils, every one of them eager to show 
 the critical onlooker that it was needed on every well- 
 regulated farm or ranch. By hundreds the visitors 
 crowded around these exhibits, quick to grasp the 
 value of every new device that meant time and labor 
 saved, ready to throw an old-fashioned machine on 
 the scrap-heap if it was not keeping up with the 
 rapid pace of improvement. 
 
 99 
 
The Greater America 
 
 Here was a new corn-binder which cuts and binds 
 the cornstalks into bundles, with a shocker to work 
 in partnership, so that one man and a team can har- 
 vest seven or nine acres of corn in a day. And after 
 fifty years of experiment and failure here was at last 
 displayed a machine for picking the ears of corn, 
 husking them and throwing them into a wagon, so 
 that one man can gather as much corn in half an hour 
 as he could pick by hand in half a day. Hay is not 
 only cut and raked with machines, but carried into 
 the barn by a hay-loader, and pitched into the mow 
 by an automatic fork. In one of these western 
 farms a hundred and twenty tons of hay have been 
 put into the mow by these machines in four hours of 
 a summer afternoon. The gasoline engine was on 
 deck in dozens of shapes, devised to pump the farm- 
 er's water, shell his corn, grind his feed, saw his wood, 
 run his feed-cutter, churn his butter or haul his grain. 
 
 In regions where the scarcity of labor is the farm- 
 er's most harassing problem, he is keenly on the 
 lookout for machinery which, at small cost, will do 
 the work of a dozen or twenty men. Therefore he 
 goes to his State fair with something more in mind 
 than " having a good time." 
 
 As the business of farming becomes more and 
 more diversified, the transition affects the people of 
 the vast regions of the West In a greater degree 
 than the Easterner can realize. In the Dakotas the 
 bonanza wheat farm already belongs with a past 
 
 lOO 
 
" Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed Farmer 
 
 era. It is spectacular to see twenty plows march- 
 ing abreast over miles of open country, or whole 
 squadrons of reapers and threshers at work on one 
 farm. But, hke the cowboy, the owner of the huge 
 wheat farm was a foe to the upbuilding and peopling 
 of his region. His vast tracts are being cut into 
 small farms, and towns and communities spring up, 
 linked by good roads and telephones, where the bare 
 prairie swept for miles and miles untenanted except 
 during the brief season of sowing and harvesting. 
 
 The " wheat king " is a vanishing American, along 
 with the " cattle king." And It is the women of the 
 western prairies, who rejoice that the farmer is driv- 
 ing out the wheat-raiser. The wife of a Dakota 
 farmer was talking of this coming of new and better 
 conditions which are removing the grave social men- 
 ace of the huge horde of harvest hands that must 
 be collected to harvest the wheat crop. 
 
 " The greatest peril to family life in this section," 
 said she, " is exclusive wheat-raising, with its long 
 periods of comparative idleness alternating with 
 weeks of spasmodic labor, when all the family work 
 to exhaustion, taking into their household " hobo " 
 harvest hands, four-fifths of whom are moral lepers. 
 On a farm near here where formerly nothing but 
 wheat was grown, ten men were picked up in the 
 streets of Fargo to help handle the harvest. Eight 
 of them turned out to be criminals or drunkards, 
 whose language reeked of the vilest slums. The 
 
 lOI 
 
The Greater America 
 
 foreman said he would be glad to discharge the 
 drunken brutes, but It was either hire such men as 
 these or have no help to cut and thresh a thousand 
 acres of wheat. A few years later I visited that farm, 
 and commented on the fine, Intelligent-looking lot of 
 men employed. None of them drank, nor was there 
 any profanity or quarreling. ' They are as good as 
 they look,' said my host. ' Any one of them could 
 manage a farm of his own, and every man of them Is 
 saving money with that end In view.' 
 
 " ' How In the world can you get such men as 
 these?' I asked. 'What has revolutionized your 
 farm ? ' 
 
 " ' The three " P's," pigs, poultry and potatoes,' 
 was the answer. ' We are no longer exclusively 
 wheat-growers, and, having continuous employment 
 for them, we can afford to hire our men by the year. 
 Some of these men have been with me for three 
 years, and my boys and girls are no longer in danger 
 of being ruined by the hoboes that the wheat-raiser 
 must hire or do without labor. What makes possible 
 the many slum saloons that dot Minnesota border 
 towns? Who make up four-fifths of the population 
 of our jails and almshouses? The hobo. What 
 brings him here? The wheat farm. And there you 
 are. The moral tone of the whole grain-raising 
 West is improving because of the diversified farming, 
 a feature of American progress which is often over- 
 looked.' " 
 
 I02 
 
" Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed Farmer 
 
 It was on another of these wheat farms, with the 
 nearest neighbor four miles away, that the five-year- 
 old youngster, tired of gazing at the dreary expanse 
 of wintry stubble, observed to his mother: 
 
 " Don't you think some of us will be sick pretty 
 soon, I mean real sick? I'd be willing to swallow the 
 very bitterest medicine, if the doctor would only 
 come. I get so tired of seeing just us all the time." 
 
 103 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE LAST OF THE OPEN RANGE 
 
 The Nogales Oasis of a recent date contained 
 this paragraph, which may be called an Arizona 
 obituary: 
 
 " The round-up In the Oro Blanco country last 
 week was like a funeral procession. Even the 
 horses knew there was something wrong, and went 
 about their work with a shameless lack of spirit. 
 Occasionally an outlaw cayuse would throw up his 
 head and emit a loud horse laugh. Men who for 
 years had ridden the range with the dash of cen- 
 taurs and a bearing of defiance to all the world 
 sat as still and stiff in their saddles as mutton- 
 chopped Britishers, and with faces as solemn. For 
 there was not a gun or a holster In the outfit. The 
 edict had gone forth that the round-ups would here- 
 after be regarded as public gatherings, and the law 
 of Arizona forbids the carrying of weapons at ' pub- 
 lic gatherings.' " 
 
 Such signs of the times confirm the common Impres- 
 sion that the cow-man of the " open range " Is a part 
 of a picturesque American past, a lost hero with a 
 vanished occupation. It Is true that In the South- 
 west the barbed-wire fence has almost wiped out the 
 characteristic life of the old " cow outfit." The 
 
 104 
 

The Last of the Open Range 
 
 empire of Texas Is already checkered with grazing 
 ranches, some of them hundreds of thousands of 
 acres In area, but nevertheless they are pastures, 
 privately bounded and owned. And the cattle towns 
 of Texas, Arizona, Kansas and the " Indian Na- 
 tions " have been Invaded and filled with a new 
 prosperity by the prosaic farmer, the manufacturer, 
 and the small rancher. 
 
 The era, when half a million long-horned cattle 
 drifted north every year to the Dakotas and Mon- 
 tana, convoyed by an army of the finest horsemen the 
 world ever saw, was long ago wiped out by the rail- 
 road. The time when the Texas steer roamed as 
 free as the buffalo, and the men who rode with him 
 knew no law or boundaries save those of their own 
 making, will never come again. They belonged with 
 the earliest stages of civilization. It was Inevitable 
 that on the heels of the nomad, pastoral age of this 
 country's growth should follow the agricultural. 
 
 But It Is not true that the open range has wholly 
 vanished. Its life still runs wide and free. The 
 heroic bigness of It, however. Is to be sought no 
 longer In the Southwest, where the cowboy has been 
 most often framed In story. He Is making his last 
 stand In northern Montana, where I found him In the 
 fall " round-up " soon after I left the wheat-covered 
 prairie and the amazingly new towns of North 
 Dakota. If you lay a ruler across the map of Mon- 
 tana, east and west, from Fort Buford to Fort 
 
 105 
 
The Greater America 
 
 Benton, it will not cross a town in a line of three hun- 
 dred miles long. If you run the line north and south, 
 say midway between Malta and Glasgow, from up on 
 the Canadian boundary down almost to the Yellow- 
 stone, a stretch of one hundred and fifty miles will be 
 covered without finding a settlement big enough to 
 deserve a dot and a name on the map. 
 
 This is, roughly speaking, the country of the last 
 great open range in the United States. Its area is 
 greater than the combined extent of Connecticut, 
 Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New 
 Jersey and Delaware. It is not so thickly populated 
 that men are in danger of jostling one another. 
 
 It includes, for example, Dawson County, which is 
 bigger than the State of Maryland. There are two 
 million people in Maryland; there are twenty-five 
 hundred in Dawson County, Montana. While one 
 hundred and sixty persons inhabit the average square 
 mile of Maryland, every man, woman and child in 
 Dawson county has five square miles. 
 
 Valley County covers more real estate than Con- 
 necticut and Massachusetts. The two New England 
 States have about four million population. Valley 
 County holds the magnificent total of forty-five hun- 
 dred people, including an Indian Reservation in which 
 you could lose the State of Delaware. 
 
 Three things have kept this range open into the 
 twenty century: the climate, the grass and the lack 
 of population. But the climate and the soil, which 
 
 io6 
 
The Last of the Open Range 
 
 supplies the finest grazing in the world, are the fac- 
 tors that are bringing so swift a tide of population 
 into this country that the finish of the old-time cattle 
 man and his methods is plainly in sight. Even now 
 he is making ready to quit. Within the next three 
 or four years the surviving " outfits " will have 
 shipped their last cattle to market from the open 
 range of northern Montana. The march of civiliza- 
 tion which overtook them in the Southwest was 
 delayed a few more years up in the North, but its 
 vanguard is closing in from all sides. The final 
 " clean-up " is now in progress. 
 
 I counted myself as rarely fortunate in being able 
 to witness both the old and the new conditions as 
 spread out side by side. On the one hand were the 
 wagons of the round-up camp and the white dust 
 clouds that marked the " cutting" of the herds; on 
 the other a meeting of farmers to discuss with the 
 engineers of the Government Reclamation Service 
 Irrigation plans whereby scores of thousands of acres 
 of grazing land were to be watered and planted in 
 hay, wheat and alfalfa. 
 
 The dusty, sweating cowboys, picked survivors of 
 the lost legion, some of them looking back to a quar- 
 ter century of life on the open ranges, were being 
 driven from their last battle ground by the plodding 
 farmer in overalls and straw hat, who preferred rais- 
 ing grain to raising hell. 
 
 The "cow-punchers" were reading the handwriting 
 107 
 
The Greater America 
 
 on the wall. Those of a prudent habit of mind had 
 begun to pick up their own bunches of cattle, and 
 to stock small ranches scattered here and there on 
 both sides of the Missouri. Some of them were even 
 making desultory studies of the hitherto despised 
 agricultural outlook for an honest man unafraid of 
 toil. Others were planning to return to their native 
 Texas, and with their old employers look after the 
 modern steer that is " raised by hand " in a pasture 
 and wintered on hay and alfalfa. 
 
 It was indeed a meeting of old trails and new, a 
 cross-section of America in the making even more 
 sharply contrasting than the panorama of the North 
 Dakota prairie. 
 
 The history of the northern range throws back 
 to the end of the Civil War, when the plains of Texas 
 were covered with millions of cattle for which there 
 was no outlet to market. The rapid settlement of 
 the Middle West created a demand for these Texas 
 herds, and a trail was opened into Kansas. Besides 
 finding a new market, it was discovered that southern 
 cattle wintered In the country to the northward gained 
 in weight and fatness at an amazing rate. Nature 
 favored breeding in Texas, where in good seasons 
 almost every cow had her calf, but beef cattle grew 
 lean and rangy. Therefore they were sent north to 
 fatten, and the trail of the Texas cowboy gradually 
 extended up into Montana and the Dakotas. 
 
 He found a country favored above all others for 
 io8 
 
The Last of the Open Range 
 
 making big, fine cattle of his angular Texas steers. 
 The buffalo had learned this centuries before, when 
 it chose this area for its winter and summer pasture. 
 As the buffalo dwindled the cattle increased, until in 
 the greatest year of the " drive " nearly a million 
 cattle were moved across country from Texas, and 
 with them went four thousand men and thirty thou- 
 sand horses. 
 
 This was in 1884, by which time the buffalo had 
 vanished from the range. Its bones were being gath- 
 ered and shipped for fertilizer by the carload. It 
 has been estimated that before 1890 the bones of 
 seven million buffalo had been shipped from points 
 in North Dakota alone. The range was swept clean 
 for the cattle man. The Indians were rounded up on 
 reservations. The settler had steered clear of these 
 vast northern plains, which were believed to be too 
 arid for farming. But the buffalo grass and the blue- 
 joint supplied not only rich grazing in summer, but 
 standing hay, cured by nature, that sustained cattle 
 on the range through the blizzard-swept winters. 
 
 As the railroad crept north and south, the Texas 
 outfits trailed part of the northward journey and 
 shipped their steers over the remainder of the dis- 
 tance. Year by year, as the trail shortened and the 
 railroads extended, the " drive " dwindled, until the 
 steel highway stretched from Texas to Billings, Mon- 
 tana. But the cattle continued to stream north by the 
 all-rail route, and this movement has been in full tide 
 
 109 
 
The Greater America 
 
 for more than fifteen years. From thirty to fifty 
 thousand cattle of one brand were thus transplanted 
 to be " finished oft" " for market on the Montana 
 range. 
 
 North Dakota has become covered with wheat, 
 which has steadily moved westward, eating more and 
 more into the open range. Already the wheat has 
 spread a hundred miles west beyond the climatic limit 
 assigned it ten years ago, and now irrigation has 
 joined forces with " dry land farming." Another 
 reason for the downfall of the " cow-man " in Mon- 
 tana was his own short-sightedness in failing to safe- 
 guard his future. His herds must have water, and 
 the range is useless without it. The outposts of the 
 farming and ranching invasion got possession of the 
 springs and water holes by purchase and homestead 
 right. 
 
 But away with these epitaphs and this death-chant 
 of the cow-puncher! He was still on the Montana 
 range in all his glory in the autumn of 1905, and 
 there is work for him to do before he has rounded up 
 his last beef herd in this fenceless land of billowing 
 plain, butte and mountain. In the crystalline air of this 
 illimitable out-of-doors. Three big outfits, a dozen 
 to twenty men to a camp, were slowly working In 
 from the Little Rockies, when a Great Northern 
 express dropped me off at Malta, a famous old 
 cow-town, which Is still busy and occasionally even 
 tempestuous. So simple an act as swinging off the 
 
 no 
 
The Last of the Open Range 
 
 platform of a sleeping car was to step into a different 
 world of men and conditions from that left behind. 
 
 On all sides of the little town lay the glorious 
 sweep of untamed country. To find another railroad 
 to the northward was to ride a hundred and fifty miles 
 to the Canadian Pacific; to find a railroad to the 
 southward meant as long a ride to the Northern 
 Pacific. On the edge of the town a freighters' outfit 
 was making ready to pull out four days to a camp 
 near the Little Rockies. Ten horses led the string 
 of laden wagons, behind which trailed the covered 
 chuck-wagon, equipped for sleeping and cooking, for 
 there were no hotels on this route. 
 
 The boss and his two helpers were wrestling with 
 a broncho which, until this ill-fated day, had never 
 felt a harness across his back. He was needed as 
 an off-wheeler, and he had to go. He fought like a 
 hero possessed of seven devils, and three men toiled 
 for an hour to get him into the traces and to keep 
 clear from his infernally active heels. 
 
 At length his nine comrades jumped into their col- 
 lars, and the rebel simply had to go with them. He 
 lay down and was dragged on his ear until his addled 
 wits perceived there was nothing in this sort of 
 mutiny. He rose and slid stiff-legged until, out- 
 numbered, outvoted and outgeneraled, he surged into 
 the collar like a thunderbolt and thereafter tried to 
 pull the whole load, in the vain hope of tearing some- 
 thing out by the roots. 
 
 Ill 
 
The Greater America 
 
 The long string of horses and wagons wound out 
 into the open country, and in a little while dipped 
 across a grassy undulation and was gone. A swirl of 
 dust marked its progress for several miles, — this 
 plodding caravan, with its tanned and bearded men, 
 unlettered and slow of speech, used to living out 
 under the sky, seeing few of their kind. It was thus 
 the pioneers crossed the plains a half century ago. 
 
 Akin to this episode in its portrayal of conditions 
 which are all but crowded out of this twentieth cen- 
 tury, was the aspect of the plain that rolled sheer to 
 the horizon from another side of Malta. Fogged 
 in white alkali dust, five thousand cattle were eddy- 
 ing and drifting into scattered herds. They were 
 not grazing at random. Along the fringes of the 
 piebald masses mounted mea were outlined at rest 
 on the crest of the rising ground, or racing headlong 
 into the dust clouds. 
 
 What looked like confusion was system, skill and 
 daring. Nearer vision showed the cow-punchers at 
 work " cutting " the cattle for shipment. They were 
 in the midst of the fall round-up. As with a drag- 
 net, plain and coulee and butte and river bottom had 
 been swept within a hundred miles radius to sift out 
 and bring in the steers that were ready for market. 
 
 Fat and sleek and " rollicky " from the summer's 
 grazing, the cattle were hard to handle. It was a 
 field for the display of the craft of man and horse. 
 These were no farmers transformed into cow-hands 
 
 112 
 
The Last of the Open Range 
 
 by the gift of a rope and a pair of " chaps." Almost 
 every man had been bred in the business from boy- 
 hood. A big steer boked from the ruck, and shot 
 across the prairie, tail in air. There streaked after 
 him, hell-for-leather, a wizened man half lost in a 
 pair of " chaps " with the fur on. He wore a pair of 
 goggles and a little beard which was white, not all 
 with dust. Old, but spare and sinewy, riding his 
 cow-pony like a wild Indian, he might have stood for 
 a picture of " The Last of the Cowboys." 
 
 The runaway steer could not move quick enough 
 to dodge the wise pony and the dare-devil rider. 
 When the fugitive had been turned after a breathless 
 chase, the old man galloped back to search out 
 another steer with his brand on its flank somewhere 
 in the smother of cattle and dust. He pulled up to 
 wipe his goggles, and the wrinkled parchment of his 
 swarthy cheek confirmed the surmise that he was a 
 veteran of the veterans. 
 
 *' I guess you won't find 'em riding much older 
 than me," he said. " Most all the old-timers on the 
 range knows Doc Thompson. I began punching cat- 
 tle in '72 and I'm still hard at it. I'm too old to learn 
 a new trade. When this range is cleaned up, I reckon 
 I'll have to try what I can do riding herd on a cabbage 
 patch or a likely bunch of potatoes." 
 
 His very fashion of " cutting " cattle showed that 
 he was an old-timer. Everything was done with a 
 rush and a hurrah. His pony was either at rest or 
 
 113 
 
The Greater America 
 
 on the dead run. There were no half-way measures. 
 When he picked out a steer he went after it on the 
 jump, nor thought it worth while to reckon whether 
 he ran a pound or two of beef off an animal so long 
 as he got there in a gorgeous hurry. The golden age 
 when he helped " shoot up " towns for diversion had 
 passed. But in his impetuous manner and his reckless 
 riding there was the flavor of the ruder time that 
 bred him and his kind. 
 
 Of a sterling type, but less flamboyant, was the 
 dark-visaged, black-mustached foreman of the Mil- 
 ner outfit, " Bill " Jaycox, than whom you must travel 
 far to find a better cow-man. Before some of the 
 precocious wizards of finance who dwell in eastern 
 sky-scrapers were weaned, he was outfitting pack 
 trains for troopers of Uncle Sam who were fighting 
 Indians in the Bad Lands and along the Missouri. 
 He used to break In and outfit the creaking trains of 
 bull-carts that trailed out of Fort Benton when it 
 was the city of the Northwest, and the head of 
 navigation on the Missouri. He rode the trail with 
 herds of Texas cattle moving to the northern range 
 ahead of the railroad. He has a wife and babies and 
 a ranch tucked away In a smiling Montana valley, 
 and he will be ready to quit the range " when the 
 range quits him." 
 
 " Bill " Jaycox and his comrades are of the kind 
 bred wholly by American conditions, whose like will 
 not happen often on the farms and in the cities that 
 
 114 
 
The Last of the Open Range 
 
 will cover the ranges they rode. Such old-time cow- 
 men as these are vanishing exemplars of the gospel 
 of elemental manhood, standing on its two feet, 
 wholly apart from the complex scheme of existence 
 which hems in its neighbors. The destiny of the 
 farmer is coupled with the factories that turn out his 
 tilling and harvesting machinery. The sailor is help- 
 less without steam in the boilers, and firemen and 
 engineers in the hold. But give the cowboy his horse, 
 his saddle, his slicker, his rope and his six-shooter, 
 and he will do his work, man to man, asking no odds. 
 He is crude and he must go, but he is honest and 
 brave and loyal, which qualities are not guaranteed 
 by such trumpeted factors of " progress " as elec- 
 tricity, telephones, and great life insurance companies. 
 
 From sunrise to dusk the three outfits outside of 
 Malta sifted the uneasy herds, stopping only at noon 
 to ride back to their camps in the hills, eat dinner, 
 change horses and return to their task. Shipping 
 could not begin till next morning at daybreak. 
 Therefore, when the sun dropped low in the cloudless 
 sky, the herds moved slowly toward the nearest water 
 hole, and the weary outfits scattered toward their 
 camps. 
 
 One bunch of cattle was waiting its turn for water, 
 and two men were left as the first watch of the night 
 herd until they could be relieved for supper. The 
 spare, bent figure of old " Doc " Thompson, on his 
 motionless pony, was outlined against the reddening 
 
 115 
 
The Greater America 
 
 sky. In front of him were the quiet cattle, beginning 
 to " bed down " on the grass. The pose of the old 
 man as he dropped forward a little in his saddle, his 
 hands clasped on the horn had a certain indefinable 
 pathos. He seemed to signify more than merely a 
 cow-hand tired after a day of hard riding. The 
 passing of the virile and rugged youth of the nation 
 was suggested in the silhouette he made against the 
 sunset sky. Then the roar of a train came over the 
 plains. Its lights went by like shooting stars and 
 vanished in the paling west. The spirit of the new 
 civilization was sweeping across the last of the open 
 range. 
 
 ii6 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 JACK TEAL AND SOME OTHERS 
 
 That night the cow-punchers took possession of 
 Malta. They had been three weeks on the round-up, 
 and they rode into town hke homing pigeons. It 
 may cause disappointment to record that, while a 
 considerable amount of whisky was absorbed, nobody 
 was killed, and most of the bar-room lights were 
 intact at midnight. 
 
 A group of cattle-owners planted their chairs on 
 the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Every man of 
 the half dozen counted his cattle by thousands In 
 Texas and Montana. The least prosperous of the 
 company could have rounded up a million dollars' 
 worth of beef on the hoof if he were put to it. But 
 you could not have found among them all a grain 
 of the " bluff " and money worship and straining 
 pretense that surges nightly through the corridors 
 of the Waldorf-Astoria. 
 
 After a while there joined them a stocky man 
 whose garb was not only careless, but seemed to 
 speak of poverty. A dusty handkerchief was around 
 his collarless neck. His shapeless trousers were 
 tucked into dustier boots, and his slouch hat looked 
 as if it had been stamped on by a cayuse. His 
 
 117 
 
TJie Greater America 
 
 manner was almost shy, as if he were nobody and 
 painfully aware of that depressing fact. After he 
 had passed on, one of the group carelessly observed : 
 
 "Of course, I naturally despise sheep. But the 
 sheep-man is ace high in this country. We're all 
 back numbers. The cow-man is in the discard for 
 fair. Look at Ben Phillips, there, who just loafed 
 up. He has some cattle, and he shipped fifteen hun- 
 dred head this year. There's between sixty and 
 seventy thousand dollars as his cattle rake-off for the 
 season. But that isn't a marker to what he's doing 
 with sheep. Why, his wool alone will fetch him a 
 hundred and fifty thousand dollars this year. And 
 he has ten thousand lambs. There's twenty-five thou- 
 sand more. I figure that his cash income this year 
 is well past the two hundred thousand dollar mark. 
 Isn't that enough to make you sore on sheep-men? 
 He carries about twenty-five thousand sheep, he tells 
 me. He has forty thousand acres fenced for them 
 on one range. And I remember when Ben Phillips 
 moved from the Judith Basin to the north side of 
 the Missouri eleven years ago with less than ten 
 thousand sheep." 
 
 A cowboy came out of the nearest bar-room, flung 
 a leg over his pony, drove home both spurs and 
 clattered up street, singing at the top of his lungs. 
 One of the owners was moved to remark with 
 reminiscent chuckle : 
 
 " It seems tame in Malta, but it's not so very long 
 ii8 
 

 /M 
 
 \^ ^'J 
 
 
Jack Teal and Some Others 
 
 ago that Jack Teal held up the whole town for half 
 a day because his feelings had been hurt. Before 
 the hotel was built we stockmen used to sleep in a 
 log house, In a line between the row of saloons and 
 the dance halls. This put us under a cross fire, for 
 the cow-punchers In the saloons had a cheerful habit 
 of emptying their guns at the dance-hall windows 
 and vice versa. I was writing letters one night when 
 my foreman came in and said: 
 
 " ' I hate to bother you, but Jack Teal is getting 
 mad, and he says he's liable to be real mad if things 
 go on. And as he's in the saloon just in front here, I 
 reckon you want to know when to dodge when the 
 shooting gets wild. Jack does seem irritated. A 
 sheep-herder accused him of stealing a bundle of 
 coyote pelts. And Jack didn't like it, of course, and 
 to show his contempt for sheep-men, he up and bit 
 off the sheep-herder's ear. Another sheep-man chips 
 in to help his partner, and Jack sails in and bites off 
 his ear, to show that he Is more contemptuous than 
 ever. It does look to me as if he might get real mad 
 after a while.' 
 
 " The foreman had made a conservative report. 
 Jack was ' getting mad.' Three soundly whipped 
 sheep-men were wiping the blood from their features, 
 and starting out to swear out a warrant for Jack's 
 arrest. They were gone for some time, but were 
 unable to find a marshal or deputy daring enough 
 to arrest Jack when he was ' Irritated.' 
 
 119 
 
The Greater America 
 
 " Whereupon, the justice of the peace, a strap- 
 ping big Scotchman, said he'd serve the papers him- 
 self. He coUided with Jack, and when the smoke 
 cleared, Jack had Justice on the floor and badly bat- 
 tered. 
 
 " It must have been about this time that Jack 
 decided that he was ' real mad ' over the way he was 
 treated in Malta. He rode out to camp, no one ven- 
 turing to annoy his sensitive temperament as he gal- 
 loped through the street. An hour later I rode out 
 to camp with my foreman. The moonlight was 
 bright, and about half-way we met Jack coming back 
 to town. He was about as alarming a sight as I ever 
 bumped into. He had it in for the wide, wide world, 
 for he reined up twenty feet from me, threw down 
 his Winchester, wobbling it square and fair at my 
 manly chest. His finger was fooling most carelessly 
 with the trigger as he remarked with deadly deliber- 
 ation: 
 
 " ' I ain't quite sure whether I ought to kill you 
 or not.' 
 
 " He thought I was coming out to arrest him, and 
 we argued the point for several minutes, while that 
 fool gun was held on my heart. At length Jack 
 let the gun drop with seeming reluctance, and rode 
 on to town. There he proceeded to shoot at every 
 head that showed. The stores and saloons put up 
 their shutters and all business was suspended. Jack 
 took a commanding position in the main street and 
 
 I20 
 
Jack Teal and Some Others 
 
 put in several enjoyable hours taking pop-shots at 
 every man who dared emerge from cover. Malta 
 was put out of commission. Tiring of this amuse- 
 ment, or running out of ammunition, he rode back 
 to camp. 
 
 " I met him next morning, and he looked mighty 
 ashamed of himself. I gave him the devil of a lec- 
 ture, not so much about his general line of conduct, 
 as his shocking practice of biting off the ears of 
 people who disagreed with him. He took it to heart 
 and promised he would never do it again, and he 
 kept his word. I asked with some indignation : 
 
 " * What did you mean by holding me up, the 
 best friend you've got ? ' 
 
 " His only comment was eminently characteristic: 
 " ' Well, you stood it d — n well, Mr. Milner.' " 
 While we smoked and talked there dismounted in 
 front of the hotel this same Jack Teal, dusty from 
 long and lonely riding, blue-eyed and sandy-haired, 
 almost diffident of manner. When we had adjourned 
 to the bar, and Jack had ordered a " dust-cutter " 
 to sluice the alkali from his throat, one of the com- 
 pany asked him : 
 
 " Anything doing? " 
 
 Teal rubbed his stubbled chin and replied: 
 
 " Nothing much. I've been out with George Hall, 
 
 the stock detective. I'm working for Ben Phillips, 
 
 the sheep-man, just now. Somebody's been cutting 
 
 his fences. I'm watching the fences and trying to 
 
 121 
 
The Greater America 
 
 ketch up with the parties. There may be something 
 doing then. 
 
 "What was I doing with George Hall? Last 
 week he cuts the trail of a human coyote that's run- 
 ning off a bunch of stolen horses. This rustler is 
 heading for the boundary, and when George gets the 
 word he rides into Glasgow to dig up the sheriff, 
 and get a warrant and make the play all proper. He 
 couldn't find the sheriff, and not wanting to cut loose 
 alone, in case of accident, he rounds me up and asks 
 me to go along. I'm out of the deputy business, 
 being paid to ride fence for Ben Phillips, but being 
 anxious to oblige an old friend, I says: 
 
 " ' All right, George. Count me in. Where is 
 this rustler of yours? ' 
 
 " My Winchester is in the saddle boot as usual, 
 and the pair of us trails out north, until we swing a 
 circle that fetches a few miles to the south of Malta. 
 The rustler is laying up to rest his stock, and we 
 get the word that he's camped near a coulee when we 
 picket our ponies for the night. George tells me : 
 
 " ' Now, Jack, there ain't going to be no killing 
 in this. We'll jump him at daylight while he's in 
 his blankets and tie him up and pack him back to 
 Glasgow smooth and easy.' 
 
 " ' I don't want no killing,' says I, ' but this party 
 may want to do some shooting of his own, George, 
 and we don't take no chances.' 
 
 " At the first crack of daylight we walk ahead, 
 
 122 
 
Jack Teal and Some Others 
 
 and sights the horse-thief rolled up in his blankets 
 with a tarpaulin over his head. I pulls down on him 
 with my Winchester and George with his six-shooter, 
 and we calls, ' Throw up your hands.' 
 
 " He sits up and blinks and puts 'em over his head, 
 and while I covers him, George invites him to step 
 out and be searched. While George is going over 
 him, I goes through his bed and digs out a rifle and 
 two six-shooters. The rustler takes it quiet and nice, 
 and asks to walk over and get his best horse, which 
 is grazing about twenty yards away toward the mouth 
 of the coulee, saddled up over night. 
 
 " It looks like a safe play, for we have him covered 
 plenty. I notice that as Mr. Rustler edges over to 
 his horse, he ain't aiming to catch him. He don't 
 go at it right. Instead of steering to get his horse 
 by the picket rope and head him round to camp, he 
 sort of ambles behind the pony's tail, slow and easy, 
 and the horse naturally walks on ahead of him. They 
 are drifting toward the coulee a step at a time, and 
 I says to George: 
 
 " ' He ain't acting like he wants to ketch that 
 cayuse and lead him back into camp. He's coaxing 
 him away for a break up the coulee.' 
 
 " George laughs, and don't allow the rustler Is 
 planning any such foolish play as that. 
 
 " Just then, Mr. Rustler makes a dash for it, 
 climbs his horse, and is off, up the coulee, at top 
 speed. We make a jump for our horses, and the 
 
 123 
 
The Greater America 
 
 thief has a good flying start of a couple of hundred 
 yards, and he's on a fresh horse. 
 
 " ' Throw up them hands, or there'll be a killing,' 
 yells George. 
 
 " Mr. Rustler never looks back, but he lays out 
 along that horse's back and is certainly burning the 
 wind. George gets away ahead of me, and we're 
 making tracks, the three of us, over some mighty 
 rough country. George has his automatic six- 
 shooter, and I has my carbine. I aims to take a 
 shot as soon as I can, but I'm up against a funny 
 proposition. 
 
 " George is riding between me and the rustler, we 
 three being strung out in pretty near a straight line. 
 I don't want to plug my friend, but I'm anxious to 
 get a shot at the gent ahead of him. After a little 
 while the thief swings a slight curve to keep up along 
 the bottom of the coulee, and I see his pony's nose 
 poke out no more than a foot ahead of George. 
 There was just room to throw the sight on the rus- 
 tler's horse, and a chance of getting him through the 
 head. We were on the dead jump, and I couldn't 
 see more than eight inches of the farther horse in 
 front of George when I turned loose. 
 
 " Being scared that way of hitting George I 
 throwed a mite too far ahead, and I saw the bullet 
 hit in the bank. It was kind of nervous shooting, 
 and I waited again till the rustler weaved ahead a 
 mite. This time I had to shoot plumb over George's 
 
 124 
 
Jack Teal and Some Others 
 
 shoulder, and I wasn't quite easy in my mind. Mis- 
 takes are easy that way when you're buck-jumping 
 over rocks, and your friend is dead in line with the 
 coyote you're aiming to kill. 
 
 " This time, I found it out later, I put the bullet 
 plumb into the back of the rustler's saddle. It hit 
 a row of iron tacks, turned up, and no more'n bulged 
 through the leather seat, just enough to make the 
 rustler think he was hit without hurting him none. 
 He was some distracted and looked around and felt 
 of himself. Meantime George had worked up 
 within shooting distance, and throwed loose with his 
 six-shooter. The first bullet hit the rustler plumb 
 between the shoulders, the second drilled him through 
 the brain, and he slid off his pony like a bundle of 
 blankets. 
 
 " We slung him across a pony and brung him into 
 Glasgow, and that was the end of it. We didn't 
 go out to do any killing. It ought not to have been 
 necessary, but that rustler was a blank, blank fool. 
 For George can shoot some, when he has to." 
 
 Mr. Teal told the story with a modesty which 
 overlooked his own nerve and confidence in himself 
 when he was shooting within a hair's breadth of 
 George Hall. The " Wild West " stars, who shoot 
 at glass balls and " faked up " targets with ranges 
 all measured, make a spectacular show. But their 
 work seems rather commonplace alongside such a 
 plain tale as this. 
 
 125 
 
The Greater America 
 
 " Was George Hall at all nervous when you were 
 singeing his whiskers in this fashion? " I asked. 
 
 " No, I guess not," said Jack. " He didn't men- 
 tion it none. We've run together a good deal. He 
 knows I wasn't going to take no chances of putting 
 a bullet into him by any fool mistake." 
 
 It is also worth more than passing mention that 
 Mr. George Hall was doing some clean-cut work of 
 his own. From a flying horse in a rocky caiion he 
 put two bullets into his surging target, at a distance 
 of more than a hundred yards, and with a revolver at 
 that. 
 
 There was no boastful strain in Jack Teal. He told 
 of this episode in the day's work with a tolerant 
 air of duty toward entertaining a tenderfoot who for 
 some unknown reason seemed absurdly curious about 
 the most commonplace affairs. As we sat there, and 
 looked through the open door, a Great Northern 
 express, bound for the Pacific Coast, boomed past 
 the station. Tourists in dining-car and sleeper looked 
 out at the sleepy cow-town, and were doubtless say- 
 ing to one another: 
 
 " Years ago this was the kind of frontier you 
 read about, when the cowboys and bad men and 
 six-shooters were busy. It's all gone now, and rid- 
 ing across these prairies Is an infernally monotonous 
 proceeding." 
 
 Mr. Jack Teal clanked out of the bar, cinched up 
 his pony, and made ready to ride fifty miles away 
 
 126 
 
Jack Teal and Some Others 
 
 on the open range, forty miles from a town, to camp 
 in his blanket for two or three weeks. He did not 
 say it, but it was known that If he " ketched up " 
 with the persons who were cutting Ben Phillips' 
 fence, there would be a " killing," nine chances out 
 of ten. The West is alleged to be colorless and 
 quiet, but it is not unlikely that Mr. Jack Teal will 
 die with his boots on in the performance of his 
 duty, for he Is a pitcher that has been often to the 
 well. 
 
 Another owner from Texas was moved to con- 
 tribute another tale of somewhat less recent life on 
 the northern range : 
 
 " When I go to Chicago or New York it's hard 
 for me to realize that things have not quite simmered 
 down to the trolley and asphalt pavement stage of 
 life out here on the old trail. For instance, there was 
 the round-up of the ' Dutch ' Henry gang of rustlers 
 and outlaws only a few years ago, when ' Leather ' 
 Griffith and his posse lay fourteen days in the hills 
 just north of here, trying to catch the outlaws that 
 were hidden somewhere in there. It was In the dead 
 of winter, and some of the sheriff's outfit started In 
 such a hurry that they had nothing but their blankets. 
 They slept in the snow with their saddles under their 
 heads, until it was figured out that the ranchmen In 
 the hills were passing Information along to the rus- 
 tlers, being scared to death at the name of ' Dutch ' 
 Henry. 
 
 127 
 
The Greater America 
 
 " If the word was being passed along ahead of 
 them, there was no sense In the posse's staying out any 
 longer, so ' Leather ' Griffith called them in. But 
 he left two good men behind, George Bird and Jack 
 Moran, who stowed themselves away in a coulee and 
 came near freezing stiff. But the trick worked. The 
 word went through the country that all the sheriff's 
 outfit had gone into Glasgow and Malta. 
 
 " After two or three days, Bird and Moran rode 
 down to the nearest ranch, and kept their eyes peeled 
 to see that nobody broke out to carry information 
 to the rustlers. An old man and a boy were the only 
 people living at the ranch, and the two visitors told 
 them they were out looking up some stray horses. 
 The rancher welcomed them, for he was in fear of 
 his life, and wanted protection against the rustlers. 
 It wasn't more than a day before the boy came run- 
 ning into the house, and told the two deputies that 
 one of the ' Dutch ' Henry gang was coming in, 
 Carlisle, he thought his name was. From description, 
 Bird and Moran sized up the stranger as Jones, one 
 of the most desperate men of the gang, although 
 they could not swear to it. However, the visitor 
 walked in, taking it for granted the coast was clear, 
 and bumped Into the two deputies, whom he could 
 not quite make out. He was suspicious, and they 
 were alert for the first move In one of the most 
 remarkable plays ever pulled off in the West. 
 
 *' These three men ate supper at the same table, 
 128 
 
Jack Teal and Some Others 
 
 chatting pleasantly, but all hands were keyed up for 
 action and ready for the curtain to go up with a 
 rush. The evening passed without incident. The 
 deputies knew that if their man was Jones, the 
 slightest bungle meant a killing. 
 
 " There was only one spare bed, and without 
 remark the three men took off their coats and boots 
 and piled in together, three in a bed. They lay 
 awake all night, side by side, touching elbows, each 
 listening for the slightest movement made by one of 
 his fellows. Each man had his six-shooter under his 
 pillow, his hand on it all the time, it's safe to gamble. 
 
 " This was a situation hard to beat in any novel 
 you ever read. The pull on those three sets of 
 nerves must have been trying, but nobody batted an 
 eyelash, and the trio got up, washed and sat down 
 to breakfast. Now this Carlisle, or Jones, sat at the 
 head of the table. At his right was the old rancher, 
 at his left was the deputy, Moran, and at the foot 
 of the table was the boy. Bird offered to wait on 
 the table and nobody kicked, so he passed dishes and 
 did not sit down. 
 
 " Something was about due to drop. Men can't 
 stand that kind of a strain forever. At last George 
 Bird staked his life on one throw, and you can bet he 
 had figured it pretty carefully during his wakeful 
 night. He had it mapped out that, while the outlaw 
 was mighty suspicious, he wasn't quite sure, and that 
 the quiet and easy twelve hours he had put in with 
 
 129 
 
The Greater America 
 
 these genial strangers had him some puzzled in his 
 mind. This was what Bird banked on, he having a 
 keen set of mental works for a deputy. 
 
 " He sauntered over to the wall, took a bag of 
 tobacco and papers out of a pocket and began to roll 
 a cigarette. This move turned his back square toward 
 Jones at the table. The other deputy sized up the 
 situation out of one eye, but kept on absorbing bacon 
 and beans as If there was nothing doing. 
 
 " Now follows the part of the play that interests 
 me most. When Bird deliberately turned his back 
 on the outlaw, and Moran didn't even look up, Jones 
 figured it that no man really gunning after him would 
 give him a chance like that. Bird walked back to 
 the table, then turned again, went over to his coat, 
 fished out a match, again with his back to the outlaw. 
 Moran kept on chatting easy and calm, while his 
 partner stood looking out of the window and light- 
 ing his cigarette. 
 
 " But as Bird turned toward them, he made a 
 lightning swoop with one hand and caught up his 
 Winchester carbine that was leaning against a cup- 
 board in that corner. This was what he had been 
 aiming to do all through his tobacco and cigarette 
 play. 
 
 " He threw the carbine down on Jones almost with 
 the same motion, and told him to throw up his hands. 
 The outlaw made a motion to pull his gun from 
 inside the waistband of his trousers, where he had 
 
 130 
 
Jack Teal and Some Others 
 
 tucked it for breakfast. But Bird was too quick for 
 him. He shot twice before Jones could get his six- 
 shooter into play, and the outlaw fell off his chair 
 against the stove with one bullet through his head 
 and another through his lungs. Before he died, he 
 muttered : 
 
 " ' I slept In the same bed with the , 
 
 and they shot me down like a dog.' 
 
 " His gun had dropped from his hand, but with 
 his last gasp, so Moran told me, his right fore- 
 finger was twitching as he tried to pull a trigger that 
 wasn't there." 
 
 Next morning we rode out to a cow-camp among 
 the hills, after the shipping was over, and the 
 " rollicky " Texas cattle and the more unruly natives 
 had been driven into the stock-pens and up the shutes 
 to the waiting cars. It was good to lie on the grass 
 near the cook's tent and the chuck-wagon, and watch 
 the cow-punchers come in from their hard and dusty 
 task. Now they would ride the range again for two 
 weeks, " making the circle " to round up more cattle 
 to be driven in for shipment. Two hundred picked 
 horses grazed within sight of the camp, to keep fif- 
 teen men In fresh mounts during their long circuit 
 of several hundred miles after the scattered herds 
 that were roaming at their own sweet will. 
 
 The cook was a man of infinite resource, whose 
 thatch had grown gray with cow outfits from the Rio 
 Grande to the Canadian boundary. When he 
 
 131 
 
The Greater America 
 
 snatched a quiet hour in the early evening to join a 
 group of cow-punchers spinning yarns of other days, 
 he was reminded to recount as follows: 
 
 " Some of you remember that fiddle-player over 
 on the N-Bar-N Ranch? He's horse-wrangler for 
 the Lazy S outfit now. Yes, that's the man. He 
 rode past here yesterday, but he still looked sore and 
 wouldn't stop. The boys were sure annoyed by his 
 fiddle-playin' that time. He would sit around the 
 bunk-house, ' wee-waw-In ' and ' wee-waw-in ' at all 
 times of the day and night. He was just leamin' 
 and it was torturin'. The rest of us got so it was 
 more tryin' on the nerves to be dreadin' that fiddle, 
 not knowin' when it was due to break loose, than to 
 listen to it when it did happen. To get rid of this 
 painful suspense, we worked out a scheme which was 
 laid before the fiddler somethin' like this: 
 
 " ' Here's what you can do. Figure out just how 
 long each day you've got to practice to become a 
 virtue-oso. If it's an hour, all right; If it's two hours, 
 all right. But pick your spell, and name the hour 
 of the day and stick to it hereafter. That gives us 
 warnin' when to look out for it, and we won't be 
 settin' around In a state of nervous panic and gettin' 
 cases of horrors. If you don't like this, then your 
 fiddle Is smashed over your head, pronto.' 
 
 " The fiddler didn't like It, but he studied a while 
 and said he needed two hours a day to keep his 
 hand in. 
 
 132 
 
Jack Teal and Some Others 
 
 " ' All right,' says the gang. ' It's a tough propo- 
 sition, but if it's two hours, she goes.' 
 
 " Right on the first day ail hands got sore on the 
 bargain, but the word had been passed and we stood 
 pat. This locoed fiddler ' wee-waw-ed ' for a while 
 and then asked how long he had been playin'. ' Half 
 an hour,' said the man that held the watch. 
 
 " He started up again and fiddled a while till his 
 arm got tired, and then he laid down and wanted 
 to quit. 
 
 " ' One hour,' said the time-keeper. * Keep her 
 goin'. We're makin' good on our end of the bargain. 
 You can't lay down on your end of it, not on your 
 life.' The fiddler grunted and cussed some, and 
 sailed in and ' wee-waw-ed ' most mournful for half 
 an hour more. Then the boys broke loose and 
 renigged. They simply couldn't stand it any longer, 
 for they saw that there would be no livin' through 
 the winter with a bargain like that. So they grabbed 
 Mr. Fiddler and strung him with a rope around his 
 feet to two bull-rings about eight feet up on the wall, 
 and left him, head down, to think it over, hopin' 
 that if all his brains rushed to his head at once, he 
 might get a gleam of horse sense and quit his vicious 
 habits. 
 
 " He wriggled quite violent, and finally managed 
 to climb up his leg and get a knife out of his belt. 
 Without carin' for consequences, he cuts the rope and 
 drops on the back of his neck with a thump that 
 
 133 
 
TJie Greater America 
 
 shook the buildin'. He was fightin' mad when he 
 come to, and he makes such a rash play with his knife 
 that the musical festivities over at the N-Bar-N 
 wound up for good with one man settin' on the 
 fiddler's head, another on his stomach, and a third 
 whalin' the fiddle into toothpicks against a post." 
 
 134 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE LOST CHARLEY KEYES MINE 
 
 The talk of the cow-men drifted back to recollec- 
 tions of the days when the Missouri River was the 
 great highway into the new Northwest, and a man 
 from Fort Benton who had dropped in to visit old 
 friends in the outfit was moved to relate the following 
 tale: 
 
 " Hunting after lost mines is an acute symptom 
 of a sprained intellect. Oh, yes, I've been one of 
 those fools who thought he could find the Pegleg 
 and the Breyfogle and the Lost Cabin. Why, down 
 In the California desert so many prospectors have 
 gone dippy this way that when a man needs a tin hat 
 to keep his brains from milling they don't call it 
 locoed any more. They say he's ' Breyfogled,' and 
 let it go at that. 
 
 " But for action and what I might call feverish 
 interest, the trip I made after the lost Charley Keyes 
 mine was the finest ever. No, I didn't find the mine, 
 but there was a mine, all right. It's there yet, and 
 now and then you'll hear of a husky and hopeful gent 
 with nothing better to do who is trailing off down the 
 Missouri to find the spot where Charley Keyes dug 
 out his load of nuggets thirty years ago. 
 
 *' My partner and I were young and foolish, and 
 
 135 
 
The Greater America 
 
 we went at it in dead earnest. At Fort Benton we 
 picked up all there was to know of the old story 
 that had been thrashed out a million times. Here 
 are all the facts we had to work on : Along in the 
 early seventies this Charley Keyes, a prospector, was 
 coming into this countiy with his partner, John 
 Lepley. There were no railroads, so of course they 
 came up the Missouri in a steamboat. Passing a 
 point near the mouth of the Musselshell, about a 
 hundred and fifty miles below Fort Benton, Keyes, 
 who was an old California miner, was looking the 
 country over from the hurricane deck, and observed 
 to Lepley: 
 
 " ' If I can read signs right there is gold in the 
 hills over yonder, and I'm coming back here some day 
 and do a little prospecting. It certainly looks good 
 to me.' 
 
 " Lepley recalled this remark later. But they did 
 not hop off, and they wandered out of Fort Benton, 
 prospecting over in the Prickly Pear district, and 
 walked plumb over the Last Chance Gulch near 
 Helena, where gold was found by the wagon load 
 a few years later. They worked along on Silver 
 Creek, without much luck until winter was coming 
 in. Then Keyes decided to go back to Fort Benton, 
 try to raise a little coin, get a new grub stake and 
 work around farther east. He did not like the 
 notion of staying out for the winter with no gold 
 in sight and mighty little cash in their clothes. 
 
 136 
 
mmi' 
 
 M 
 
^ 
 
The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 
 
 Lepley balked and decided to stick it out and hold 
 down their claims and take care of the camp. So 
 they agreed to part company for the time, and Keyes 
 laid down the law most emphatic in his farewell 
 address to his partner: 
 
 " ' If I send for you, Johnny, you drop everything 
 and come. I don't care a hang what it is, but drop 
 it and come quick.' 
 
 " Keyes didn't go into details, and afterwards Lep- 
 ley reckoned that those gold signs along the Missouri 
 must have been stewing in his memory. Anyway, 
 there is where Keyes headed for as soon as he could. 
 He stayed in Fort Benton a little while, and then 
 drifted down the Missouri and camped out with the 
 soldiers at Fort Union, which stood east of the mouth 
 of the Musselshell. He hunted buffalo for the garri- 
 son for several months for his grub and wages, and 
 was looking the country over and prospecting under 
 cover, on the side. 
 
 " When he had the country pretty well mapped 
 out he cut loose from the fort and went off on his 
 own hook and vanished. The next thing heard of 
 him is when he turns up at Fort Benton with five 
 thousand dollars' worth of nuggets in a sack. He 
 left his gold with the bank, turned some into cash, 
 and got a receipt for It. We found the record on 
 the moldy old books of the bank when we tried to 
 get on the trail twenty-five years later. This showed 
 that Charley Keyes had found the mine all right. He 
 
 137 
 
The Greater America 
 
 stayed in Fort Benton long enough to get together a 
 big outfit, which included a bunch of Blackfeet 
 Indians to pack his goods. Keyes, his party and his 
 kit and his mining tools and a lot of timber for 
 building sluices started down the Missouri in flat 
 boats to return to his mine. And that was the last 
 ever seen of them alive, excepting one little Black- 
 feet girl. From her it was learned that the party 
 had been wiped out by a band of Sioux, who had 
 an unpleasant habit of looking for river travel In 
 those days. The first steamer up the river in the 
 spring found ten bodies and buried them. The Sioux 
 took the little girl along with them, but she escaped 
 a few years later and made her way back to her tribe 
 of Blackfeet. This catastrophe put a stop to hunting 
 for the Charley Keyes mine for ten years or so, 
 or until the hostile Indians were cleaned out of 
 Montana. 
 
 " We found the survivor on the Fort Belknap 
 Reservation, a wrinkled hag of a Blackfeet squaw, 
 who told us all she could remember, which wasn't 
 much. She could recall that just before the massacre 
 she had heard Keyes say they were ' two sleeps ' away 
 from his mine, and that the place where he said this 
 was close to old Fort Copeland. Now this fort long 
 ago disappeared, but after a search we found an old 
 map on which we located Fort Copeland, and felt 
 that we had something definite to work on. 
 
 " Lepley was dead, and we were lucky enough to 
 138 
 
The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 
 
 find Mose Solomon, who had been on the steamboat 
 when Keyes first came up the Missouri. The old man 
 recalled that Keyes shaded his eyes and looked south 
 across the hills and said: 
 
 " * There's my country.' 
 
 " This pinned the location of the mine down to a 
 small area. It was near the junction of the Mussel- 
 shell and the Missouri and two days' journey south 
 from old Fort Copeland, if the squaw's memory 
 could be trusted. So my pal and I set sail down 
 the Missouri in a flat-bottomed skiff, prepared to 
 rake the country with a fine-tooth comb. Do you 
 know, we scraped our way down stretches of that 
 old river that set a man back thirty years in the 
 history of the West. 
 
 " There were surely some relics of other days. 
 We spent the night with one old cuss who had been 
 an Indian trader in the merry days of the buffalo. 
 The ruins of the old stockade were around his house 
 where he used to trade whisky for robes. 
 
 " ' I didn't calculate to keep any whisky on hand 
 that was more'n twenty-four hours old,' said the old 
 codger, without a blush of shame. ' I used to stand 
 with one foot on the top of the stockade and the 
 other on the roof of my shack and hand down a 
 cup full of whisky to an Indian who handed me 
 up a buffalo robe in exchange. Two or three of 
 my men sat on the roof with loaded rifles, for the 
 liquor was sudden and searchin', and we wa'n't 
 
 139 
 
The Greater America 
 
 takin' no chances. Business usually wound up in a 
 grand orgy, and we sat inside with the gates barred 
 till the skies cleared. We ginerally made the whisky 
 out of alcohol and coloi'In' matter. Once I found I 
 was clean out of stuff to paint it with, and I chucked 
 in a quart of red ink that had been shipped to me 
 by mistake. It made such a hit with the critturs 
 that I had to send to Fort Benton for a case of it. 
 The red ink brand of liquor was my long suit after 
 that.' 
 
 " There were things to remind you of the days 
 when all the trade of the Northwest came up the 
 Missouri in steamboats. We passed tons and tons 
 of rusted mining machinery on the banks, where boats 
 had blown up or run aground and abandoned the 
 stuff. And once we drifted by a big stern-wheeler 
 squatted In a field where the river had left It thirty- 
 odd years ago. A lot of half-breeds had knocked 
 doors and windows In the sides and were living in 
 clover, 
 
 " I shudder some when I think of what happened 
 to me at Plermont, where we camped over night. 
 The town consisted of a store and a saloon run by 
 a man named Blocker. Once In a while a bunch of 
 cow-punchers rode in and grabbed Plermont by the 
 back of the neck and shook it up. This was the only 
 excuse for Plermont. Blocker had a wonderful sys- 
 tem of handling the drunken cow-puncher. When 
 he had gambled away all his money, Blocker would 
 
 140 
 
The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 
 
 amble out and look over his saddle pony and offer so 
 many chips for the same. When the pony had been 
 blown in, he would liquidate a few on the saddle and 
 blankets. When the pilgrim was stripped to his hide 
 and due to make some trouble about it, Blocker would 
 fill him up to the nozzle with booze, put him gently 
 in a little boat and ferry him across the Missouri. 
 Depositing the unfortunate cow-puncher in the sage- 
 bush, the good-hearted Blocker left a quart of whis- 
 ky beside him, kissed him on the feverish brow and 
 left him there to sleep it off. 
 
 " I was a little uneasy about the tumultuous repu- 
 tation of Piermont when I wandered into this metrop- 
 olis all by myself, for my partner stayed with the 
 boat. I floated into the saloon and was getting on 
 sociably with the barkeeper when the most terrible- 
 looking man I ever saw in my life clattered in from 
 the street. He looked like quick death and he 
 sounded like a shelf falling in a hardware store. He 
 was big and tall and wide and his hair was long and 
 black and the ends of his black mustache drooped 
 down past his chin, and he glared in a way that would 
 positively sicken you. He was decorated with a 
 Winchester and two six-shooters, and a knife outside. 
 I don't know what he had tucked away in his clothes. 
 I threw my liquor down quick, saying to myself: 
 
 " ' This is probably the last drink of whisky you'll 
 live to enjoy, my son. This is the original Bad Man 
 you've read about. I thought he was extinct, but 
 
 141 
 
The Greater America 
 
 here he is, all right, and he's just holding off to 
 decide whether he'll carve you or perforate you or 
 eat you raw.' 
 
 " Of course, if you or I had seen this person in 
 a Wild West show, we'd have set him down as a 
 counterfeit, or a fossilized curio. But he was on a 
 stamping ground of a good many bad characters 
 who used to round-up In these little camps along the 
 Missouri, and you can find some of them there yet 
 who change their names so often that they can't 
 remember whose mail to ask for if they ever ride In 
 to a post-office. Maybe my story is wandering a 
 little, but that's because I hate to come right down 
 to it and confess how scared I was. When this most 
 ferocious man looked at me I shivered. When he 
 spoke to me I came so near jumping out of my boots 
 that I found the uppers were ripped loose from the 
 soles next morning. 
 
 " ' What In the blue blazes are you doln' here? ' 
 he roared at me. 
 
 " Of course I said the most suicidal thing that 
 could be imagined, being rattled. I didn't want to 
 tell him that I was looking for a lost mine for fear 
 he'd think I had money. And I didn't look much 
 like a cow-man. So can you guess the rash and Idiotic 
 conversation I produced from my addled think-tank? 
 I stammered: 
 
 " ' I'm looking up a sheep ranch for a friend of 
 
 142 
 
The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 
 
 " You'd have thought I'd tried to drag him over 
 the bar by his ropy mustaches, he was that insulted. 
 He got red in the face and stamped his feet and he 
 grabbed both his guns and rared and pitched some- 
 thing frightful. When he could get his breath he 
 hollered : 
 
 '''Sheep, Sheep! If there's anything I despise 
 worse than rattlesnakes and horned toads it's Sheep 
 and Sheep-men. Me drink in the same room with a 
 Sheep-man! Wow, Wow, blankety-blank your dou- 
 ble-blankety-blank heart.' 
 
 " Bang, bang! 
 
 " With that he cuts loose and shoots some lead 
 into the floor and shoots some more through the win- 
 dow and tries to bust the lamp and misses it and 
 froths at the mouth and Is dancing nearer to me with 
 every whoop and every bang. 
 
 " The red-headed barkeep didn't pull a gun, as I 
 was hoping he'd do, for I hadn't the sign of a 
 weapon, and I was too paralyzed to run. He ducked 
 behind the bar and says to me in a hoarse whisper: 
 
 " ' Kick him in the belly. Sport. He's got high- 
 heeled boots on and he'll fall over backward. Then 
 jump on his face. Kick him one in the belt. He's 
 bound to topple over.' 
 
 " The advice might have been sound, but by this 
 time I found I had a pair of legs that belonged to 
 me, and I put them in motion and sailed out of the 
 door. As I flew I could hear the Bad Man roaring 
 
 143 
 
The Greater America 
 
 death to all sheep-men and shooting up the bottles 
 on the bar. By luck I ran into a cow-puncher as 
 I was making a sneak for the river, and I told him 
 about the human tornado that was laying waste the 
 hamlet of Piermont. 
 
 " ' Oh, shucks ! ' said he, in a tone of deep disgust. 
 ' Is he loose again. Come back with me.' 
 
 " I trailed along about six paces in the rear, but 
 the cow-man never hesitated. I got inside the saloon 
 in time to see him grab the Bad Man around the 
 neck, point him toward the street and kick him every 
 step of the way to a gully about thirty yards from the 
 building. Then he took the arsenal off the fallen 
 hero, slapped his face and left him there. 
 
 " We walked back to have a drink, and the cow- 
 puncher remarked: 
 
 " ' He don't mean no real harm. He's the cook 
 at the N-Bar-N ranch, and that's his way of amusing 
 himself. He think's he's a bad man, but he's only 
 a rotten bad cook. He's annoying to strangers, 
 but I spanked him good, and I don't think he'll run 
 no more whlzzers for a while.' 
 
 " We got kind of chummy over a few drinks and 
 he told me about another cook of a near-by ranch, 
 who also failed to get away with a play In the same 
 saloon of Piermont. 
 
 " * It reminds me of the time when Nigger Bob 
 got run out of town by Old Man Miller,' he began. 
 ' Nigger Bob was big and strong, a whale of a man, 
 
 144 
 
TJie Lost Charley Keyes Mine 
 
 and pretty bad when the booze was in him. Miller 
 was a little wizened cuss past sixty, but game as a 
 pebble. He was married to a squaw, and had a little 
 hay ranch down the river a ways. One night he blew 
 into this saloon, meek and mild, and sayin' nothin' 
 to nobody. Nigger Bob was givin' it out loud and 
 ugly that he had no use for a squaw-man, and he'd 
 like nothing better than to round one up and tell 
 him what he thought of him, and a whole lot of 
 other promiscuous cussin' of squaw-men in general. 
 
 " ' He wanted to have some fun with Miller, never 
 thinkin' the poor old man would have the nerve to 
 take it up. The old man huddled against the bar, 
 growin' paler and whiter and chewin' his gray mus- 
 tache. Finally he piped up : 
 
 " ' " I'm married to a squaw." 
 
 " ' *' Any man that 'ud marry a squaw is three 
 degrees worse than a hoss-thief," yelled Nigger Bob. 
 
 " ' The old man sidled to the middle of the room 
 and looked up at Nigger Bob, who was grinnin' 
 like a wolf. 
 
 " ' " You'll have to take that back or fight," 
 squeaks Miller, and calls him names that were fairly 
 blisterin'. 
 
 " ' Nigger Bob tells him: 
 
 " ' " It's you that's got to apologize or fight now, 
 you little squaw-lover, you." 
 
 " * " I'm too old to fight, and I won't take nothin' 
 back," says Miller. 
 
 145 
 
The Greater America 
 
 " ' It's a kind of a deadlock for a minute, and the 
 boys try to coax Miller out of the room. But the 
 old man won't have It. At last he slowly peels off 
 his coat and says : 
 
 " ' " I'll fight." 
 
 " ' Nobody wanted to see the row go any farther, 
 but the next thing that happened was that Nigger 
 Bob grabbed the old man by the neck, flung him 
 across his knee and spanked him. The old man was 
 white as a sheet and his eyes were full of tears as 
 he picked himself up and crawled out without another 
 word. 
 
 " ' After he was gone, one of the boys remarked to 
 Nigger Bob, who was laughing fit to split himself: 
 
 " ' " This is a sight more than a joke. Do 
 
 you know where Miller's gone? " 
 
 " ' " Gone to bed, I reckon." 
 
 " ' " He's gone for his Winchester, and he's going 
 to kill you just as sure as sunrise is due to-morrow." 
 
 " ' Everybody looked so serious that Nigger Bob 
 stopped laughin', and then his nerve began to ooze 
 away. He waited about five minutes and then floated 
 out. He wasn't gone more than ten minutes before 
 the barrel of a Winchester showed in the door closely 
 pursued by Old Man Miller, with his cheek against 
 the stock and his finger on the trigger. He poked 
 the barrel along the wall till he'd covered every man 
 without finding Nigger Bob. Then he drifted away, 
 and for one solid month he does nothing but wear out 
 
 146 
 
The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 
 
 horses looking for Nigger Bob. He never does get 
 him, for that coon jumped the country that very 
 night, and he never did stop running. Nobody's 
 ever seen hide or hair of him since.' 
 
 " All of which has mighty little to do with the 
 Charley Keyes mine, but I guess it was as near as we 
 came to finding it. However, I'm drifting along 
 toward it, so don't get impatient. We worked out all 
 our signs, and found the Musselshell and where old 
 Fort Copeland used to be and we shaded our eyes 
 and looked south and said, ' There's my country,' 
 and marched two sleeps and didn't sleep two winks. 
 Our directions, which sounded mighty hopeful and 
 definite at long range, kind of lost themselves when 
 it came to prospecting every inch of ground within 
 ' two sleeps ' of the south bank of the Missouri. We 
 stuck at It for two months, wore ourselves to a fraz- 
 zle, and couldn't find a color. Charley Keyes may 
 have lost a mine, but we didn't find it, and it was an 
 awful big batch of landscape to mislay a mine in, 
 you can bet on that. 
 
 " Well, after we were discouraged and getting 
 very peevish and short with each other, we made 
 back tracks for Fort Benton, leaving behind us two 
 worn-out gold-pans and a busted shovel. If you're 
 not too weary please listen to the joyous sequel. By 
 and by a blacksmith on a ranch over toward the 
 Big Snowy Mountains thinks he'll take a whirl at 
 looking for the treasure of the dead and gone Keyes 
 
 147 
 
The Greater America 
 
 person. He was an old prospector, and he had been 
 brooding over this lost mine proposition for some five 
 years or so. In fact he was a little disordered that 
 way. He roamed around the Musselshell country 
 until he ran across the rusty gold-pans and the shovel 
 we had left behind. With that he goes clean up in the 
 air, is cock-sure that these relics belonged to the late 
 lamented Charley Keyes and that he had found IT. 
 He turns up in Glasgow, a cow-town to the north- 
 ward, and can't keep his precious secret. He'll blow 
 into a thousand fragments if he don't spread the glad 
 tidings, and in due time I get a telegram from my 
 partner, who Is up in that section : 
 
 " ' Come at once and avoid the rush. The mine 
 Is found.' 
 
 " In my blissful Ignorance I think we'll have a 
 chance to beat out the stampede because we've been 
 over the ground, and I hustle off to meet my partner, 
 wondering who found the mine and how he found 
 It, and never connecting It for a minute with those 
 foolish pieces of hardware we had left In the wilder- 
 ness. We pack down to the Musselshell, fairly sweat- 
 ing under the collar, and find out, of course, what 
 started the excitement. 
 
 " It wouldn't be decent to try to tell you how 
 disgusted we were. We knew there was no gold In 
 the district, but as sure as I sit here there was a 
 town of a thousand people sprouted up around our 
 old gold-pans and shovels and they were coming In 
 
 148 
 
The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 
 
 by hundreds every day and making the dirt fly like 
 a locoed colony of prairie dogs. 
 
 " ' Alexander City ' was the name of the town, in 
 honor of the crazy blacksmith who was responsible 
 for it. We were going to quit and go about our 
 lawful business again, but the leading citizens 
 wouldn't let us. They argued that we were the wise 
 men of the camp, that we knew these diggings like 
 a book, and that the town needed us. We didn't 
 dare to tell them there was no gold anywhere near 
 this fine big collection of lunatics, for fear they would 
 lynch us. So I suggested to my party that we sink a 
 shaft anyway. It would keep us busy and the crowd 
 interested and make a diversion so that we could 
 sneak away. 
 
 " We went down sixty feet, cussing freely at the 
 foolishness of the whole performance. Then we 
 washed for color and we didn't get a show of it. 
 Alexander City was a busted boom. But Alexander 
 City wasn't allowed to know it quite yet. We were 
 almost busted ourselves and self-preservation was 
 entitled to draw cards In that game. We jollied the 
 population along by running a cross-cut in our shaft, 
 and at the same time we worked some other claims 
 after a pattern devised by my partner. 
 
 " He had brought along a nugget in his clothes, to 
 tuck away as a cash reserve in case of urgent need. 
 We would first open up a prospect on one of our 
 claims and wait for a tenderfoot. When Providence 
 
 149 
 
The Greater America 
 
 sent him our way seeking a location we would offer 
 to let him dig in one of our prospect holes upon the 
 solemn promise that he'd give us everything he found. 
 This was the way to let him see that the country 
 was good, and if he found gold, then he'd have a 
 tip to steer him about locating somewhere near our 
 claim. 
 
 " The pilgrim naturally wanted to make sure that 
 there was gold in the camp, and he most cheerfully 
 accepted the proposition, agreeing, mind you, to give 
 us any gold he found on our property. 
 
 " Meanwhile my partner's nugget had been care- 
 fully salted in the bottom of the hole. 
 
 " Then one of us would hide behind a screen of 
 sage-brush and watch the victim dig. It was easy 
 telling when he found the nugget, for he couldn't 
 conceal his agitation, and generally we could see him 
 stow it away in his clothes. Then we would jump 
 him and ask him whether he had found anything. 
 Of course he would deny it, and then we'd search him 
 and find the nugget inside his shirt. 
 
 " It would not do to let the camp know that a thief 
 had been found in its midst. It was explained to 
 the victim that lynching was a certainty if he was 
 exposed, and the case was settled out of court. My 
 partner had been made a justice of the peace for 
 Alexander City and he collected a ten-dollar fine 
 from the guilty tenderfoot, and the costs were taken 
 out in drinks. 
 
 150 
 
The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 
 
 " Does it sound like a hold-up? Not a bit of it. 
 We put our trust in these strangers, we had their 
 word that they would be square with us and they tried 
 to hog our nugget. 
 
 " We did our little toward making virtuous men 
 of them. If we had not punished them they might 
 have gone on and become presidents of big life insur- 
 ance companies. 
 
 " Alexander City faded swiftly away, you couldn't 
 find its remains to-day, but the Charley Keyes mine 
 is still there. And men will be looking for it after 
 you and I are dead and gone." 
 
 151 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE COW-PUNCHER VERSUS IRRIGATION 
 
 Other days in the open range were made bright in 
 memory by long rides over the crisp, brown buffalo 
 grass; and other nights were enlivened by stories of 
 a life that is almost gone, as told in the blankets 
 around the camp fires. Then the scene shifted to 
 another kind of life which seemed tame and colorless 
 by contrast, but in which can be glimpsed not the 
 past, but the future of this North country. 
 
 In Williston, North Dakota, just beyond the Mon- 
 tana boundary line, I found the men who stand for 
 the new order of things. Some of them were dressed 
 in khaki, leather puttees and campaign hats, with a 
 military smartness of bearing. They were not army 
 men, but the scouts of the peaceful invasion that Is 
 crowding back our dashing heroes of the lariat and 
 the branding iron. This engineer's party of the 
 Government Reclamation Service had come to dis- 
 cuss with the people of that region an irrigation proj- 
 ect involving forty thousand acres of lands now used 
 for wheat-growing and grazing. The gathering was 
 like an old-fashioned " town-meeting " in New Eng- 
 land. A hall was filled to overflowing with farmers 
 and townsmen who pressed around a table on which 
 was spread a map of the near-by country. Leaning 
 
 152 
 
The neiv king of the cattle range 
 
The Cow-Puncher Versus Irrigation 
 
 over it was the Supervising Engineer from Wash- 
 ington. The proceedings were in the nature of a 
 heart-to-heart talk between Uncle Sam and his 
 children. 
 
 The paternal government was willing to advance 
 the funds needed to increase the value of their lands 
 twenty- and thirty-fold if a fair bargain could be 
 struck with the owners. This was a minor project 
 compared with the greater irrigation schemes in 
 progress elsewhere in the arid West, but it was no 
 less significant and interesting. Impressive facts, 
 arrayed in terms of millions of dollars and acres, 
 make rather bloodless reading, unless you can get 
 behind them at the men and women concerned, whose 
 essential joys and hopes and sorrows are little differ- 
 ent from your own. Therefore this little assemblage 
 In a small town of the Northwest appealed more to 
 the imagination than the sight of some stupendous 
 masonry dam impounding heaven knows how many 
 millions of gallons of water in a corner of the 
 Arizona desert. 
 
 Here was a handful of hardy-looking men, just 
 plain American farmers, who had won their holdings 
 from a wilderness and carried their burdens without 
 help. They were hoping for a verdict which would 
 Increase the value of their land from five dollars to 
 one hundred dollars an acre. The government pro- 
 posed to lend them nearly a million dollars without 
 interest to put the water on their land. They must 
 
 153 
 
The Greater America 
 
 agree to repay the loan, twenty dollars for each acre, 
 in ten yearly installments. It would be easy to pay 
 this from the greatly increased production. You 
 would think that these farmers of Williston would 
 jump to grasp such a magnificent benefaction. The 
 Supervising Engineer looked up from his map and 
 said: 
 
 " It is the wish of the government that these 
 irrigated lands shall be cultivated to the best advan- 
 tage. It has been found in other reclaimed areas 
 that eighty acres is as much land as one man can 
 make highly productive. It is probable that the 
 future will show forty acres to be the most effective 
 farming unit." 
 
 The postmaster replied in behalf of his fellow- 
 citizens: 
 
 " We are the fellows that suffered the hardships 
 to get and keep our land. We came into this coun- 
 try as pioneers, and settled it, and we have hung on 
 by the skin of our teeth through thick and thin We 
 deserve all we can get. Most of us have quarter 
 sections, and we think we can handle our hundred and 
 sixty acres and make money on the deal. It would 
 not be fair to cut us down to eighty acres. The 
 smaller the farm the more settlers will come in, 
 that is true. But let us have the benefits of the irri- 
 gation project. We are used to big farms. We need 
 lots of land. But the main question is, do we get the 
 water? " 
 
 154 
 
The Cow-Puncher Versus Irrigation 
 
 Thus spoke the independent American to his gov- 
 ernment, sticking up for what he believed belonged 
 to him. The bigger question at stake was whether 
 the government would approve the general project. 
 This was what these people were breathless to know. 
 Think what it meant to them. Sure crops, certain 
 incomes, so swift an expansion of settlement that It 
 would read like a fairy tale in any other country, 
 every man's possessions swelled thirty-fold by the 
 stroke of a pen in the hand of the Secretary of the 
 Interior. After all, this meeting was as dramatic, in 
 Its own fashion, as the fall round-up a hundred miles 
 away. The Supervising Engineer announced with 
 dignified deliberation: 
 
 " In behalf of the Reclamation Service, I have 
 decided to recommend the Williston project to the 
 approval of the Secretary. His word is final, but we 
 have gone over the ground ver^^ thoroughly, and I 
 see no reason why you may not expect a favorable 
 action at Washington. Your co-operation, as shown 
 by the contracts signed, makes this a most promising 
 undertaking." 
 
 There was much shaking of hands and a few 
 cheers. A lone cow-puncher on the sidewalk, who 
 had seemed lost in such company, let out an exultant 
 whoop. 
 
 " Right here Is where I draw cards," he shouted 
 to a friend. " I found a vein of coal while I was 
 riding range. I made my location and I'm surely 
 
 ^55 
 
The Greater America 
 
 in on the ground floor. The pumping plant to lift 
 the water from the Missouri and put it on the 
 bench lands will have to be staked out near my land. 
 And I'm the boy to supply the coal. Here's one 
 cow-man you punkin-rollers can't put out of busi- 
 ness." 
 
 In the heart of the Montana range is the Milk 
 River Valley, a land of fertile farming soil three 
 hundred miles long and sixty miles wide. Most of 
 It was an Indian reservation until fifteen years ago. 
 Since then it has been opened for settlement, and 
 among the earliest pilgrims of the plow was a colony 
 of Eastern farmers who founded the town of Chi- 
 nook on the Great Northern, and spread around it 
 along the valley. Upon this empty piece of cattle 
 range has grown a town of two thousand people, 
 with brick blocks, two school buildings, three churches 
 and three hotels. Its business contributes a quarter 
 of a million dollars a year in freight receipts. 
 
 Chinook is an important shipping point for cattle 
 and sheep, and the cow-puncher and the shambling 
 herder with his faithful dogs mingle in the streets 
 with the farmer who has brought to town a load of 
 beets or alfalfa seed. The Chinook farmers who 
 flung this outpost into the middle of the open range 
 did not wait for government Irrigation projects. 
 They sturdily banded together, men and teams, dug 
 their own ditches, and made land that had been 
 worth a few cents an acre to the stock-men yield 
 
 IS6 
 
The Cow-Puncher Versus Irrigation 
 
 from eighteen to twenty-five dollars a year in hay, 
 wheat, fruit and alfalfa. 
 
 They showed what could be done with the sleep- 
 ing resources of the Milk River Valley. Now th: 
 government is planning mightily to reinforce the 
 work they so manfully began, and irrigation projects 
 have been surveyed which will sweep twelve thousand 
 square miles into the golden zone of cultivation. 
 The future will see more than a hundred thousand 
 families, each with a hundred and sixty acre farm, 
 filling this Milk River Valley from end to end. In 
 this one corner of the State of Montana irrigation 
 will Increase the value of these open grazing lands 
 more than fifty million dollars. 
 
 The alarmist swears the country is going to the 
 dogs when a few rascals In high places are exposed. 
 But he does not know, or he pays no heed, when 
 ten thousand honest men quietly go forth to build 
 their homes in new places, and thereby clinch just 
 so many more rivets In the keel of the American 
 Ship of State. 
 
 As the frontier passes, the nation waxes stronger 
 and more unified, and the right arm of the Future is 
 strengthened to deal with the problems that vex the 
 Present. 
 
 157 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE HEART OF THE BIG TIMBER COUNTRY 
 
 Lumbering is the chief industry of that vast region 
 bounded on the north by Alaska, on the south by 
 Cahfornia, on the west by the Pacific Ocean, and on 
 the east by the Rocky Mountains. In this territory, 
 known as the Pacific Northwest, nearly two hundred 
 thousand men are employed in cutting down the 
 last primeval forests of this country, and slicing these 
 stately armies of spruce and fir and cedar into five 
 billion feet of lumber and six billion shingles every 
 year. 
 
 This prodigious activity has built up cities and 
 States and launched a mighty commerce. Its allied 
 industries directly support half a million people. 
 This timbered area is the richest natural treasure 
 of the American continent, compared with which the 
 gold mines of Alaska and Nevada are of picayune 
 value for this and for coming generations. It is 
 so wonderfully rich a treasure that Its owners are 
 squandering it like drunken spendthrifts. In these 
 mighty western forests a billion feet of lumber is 
 wasted every year, enough to build one hundred 
 thousand comfortable American homes. 
 
 " Do these people ever think of the centuries 
 through which their harvest has been growing?" 
 
 158 
 
The Heart of the Big Timber Country 
 
 implores a western man with the interests of his State 
 at heart. " Does it never occur to them that they 
 are the trustees of a heritage for future generations, 
 to be guarded, cared for and watched, to be used 
 only as necessity requires or price justifies, and not 
 to be wantonly wasted or destroyed, or disposed of 
 without adequate return? And how are they ful- 
 filling their trust. They are leaving half their crop 
 in the woods to be burned, and for the half they are 
 marketing they are obtaining a beggarly return. 
 They are leaving the ground a fire-swept, desolate 
 waste. They are taking to themselves the whole 
 of the heritage intrusted to them. The sacred 
 right of property is theirs, and they do as they will 
 with their own." 
 
 The ancient woods of New England and Michi- 
 gan and Minnesota have been stripped of their heavy 
 growth by the logger; the white pine already belongs 
 with the past, and a country which has been wont to 
 consider its natural resources inexhaustible can fore- 
 see the end of its timber supply within the next 
 century unless the forests are replanted and cared 
 for. It Is very hard for the American of this genera- 
 tion to realize that there can be any end to the wealth 
 of the land and the forests and the mines which have 
 done so much to make this country what It Is. 
 
 It is possible, however, to see American enterprise 
 and headlong haste after quick returns attacking the 
 " last stand of the big timber " with an energy that 
 
 159 
 
The Greater America 
 
 is fairly Infernal. A thousand mills, and fleets of 
 steam and sail are waiting for this harvest, and yet 
 it is tragic and almost pitiful to think that the future 
 is being robbed of great treasures for the sake of a 
 little profit in hand, and that a nation's birthright is 
 being sold for a mess of pottage. 
 
 It is characteristic of western men and methods 
 that the ways of logging in the East should have been 
 flung aside as crude and slow. The giant timber 
 of the Washington forests on the slopes of the Cas- 
 cades is not hauled by teams or rafted down rivers. 
 Steam has made of logging a business which devas- 
 tates the woods with incredible speed, system, and 
 ardor. The logging camps of the Cascades differ as 
 strikingly from the lumbering centers of northern 
 New England as the electric gold-dredgers of the 
 Sacramento Valley contrast with the placer diggings 
 of the Forty-niners. In other words, the greater the 
 need of preserving the forests, the greater is the 
 American ingenuity for turning them into cash as fast 
 as possible. 
 
 The camp where I found these up-to-date lumber- 
 men tearing the heart out of one of the noblest forests 
 in America was near the Skykomish River in Wash- 
 ington, where this mountain stream winds through 
 the foothills of the western slopes of the Cascade 
 Range. We set out from Everett in the early morn- 
 ing and left the train at a raw little town called Sul- 
 tan. Beyond the town was the wreckage of the 
 
 1 60 
 
The Heart of the Big Timber Country 
 
 forest, blackened patches where the fire had swept in 
 the wake of the loggers, miles of gaunt and melan- 
 choly trunks spared by the ax to die in flame and 
 smoke. Beyond this devastated area rose the moun- 
 tains, still clothed with trees, far up to the rocky 
 heights, whose bare outline was fleeced with snow and 
 wreathed in mists and clouds. 
 
 In a near-by clearing was the camp of the lumber- 
 men, a row of bunk-houses, a kitchen and a big 
 dining-room. The buildings were of sawed lumber, 
 because this material was easier to handle than logs, 
 so that there was nothing picturesque in this first 
 glimpse of the Pacific lumberman at work. His 
 settlement looked like the beginnings of a frontier 
 town. 
 
 Past the camp ran a single-track railroad which 
 wound up through a gash in the bold hills, twist- 
 ing like a snake, climbing hills that would tire a pack 
 train. It spanned ravines on crazy wooden trestles, 
 and cut corners at impossible angles. No civilized 
 locomotive could be expected to operate on this track, 
 but presently a squat, broad-shouldered dwarf of an 
 engine scuttled down from the hills with a train- 
 load of logs behind it, and proceeded to show how 
 singularly adapted it was for the work in hand. It 
 was a deformed, one-sided looking monster, built 
 for power, not for speed. The boiler was not hung 
 over the center of its trucks, but sat well on the 
 starboard side. Instead of driving-rods, a shaft was 
 
 i6i 
 
The Greater America 
 
 geared along one side, cogged and geared to every 
 wheel, drivers and trucks, so that when the shaft 
 turned and the gearing took hold, every wheel of 
 this little giant bit hold of the rail, and pushed, or 
 held back with concentrated energy. 
 
 Soon this lop-sided toiler towed us up among the 
 hills, away from the wreckage of the forest, and 
 plunged into the green and towering vistas of Doug- 
 las fir and red cedar and fragrant spruce. Part of 
 this tract had been cut over, and the refuse might 
 have marked the trail of a cyclone. But the " culls " 
 left standing were majestic in size. They had been 
 passed by as not worth felling. Two months before 
 I had been loafing along the Kennebec River, watch- 
 ing the tail end of the spring drive float down from 
 the woods of northern Maine. Alas, most of that 
 harvest had been sapling logs, toothpicks in size, for 
 the pulp mills. The biggest of the timber logs of 
 that Maine drive, looked like kindlings compared 
 with these neglected " culls " of the Washington 
 forest. 
 
 When the logging train trailed into the virgin 
 woods, the straight, clean trunks of standing timber 
 were like the columns of a wonderful cathedral. 
 Their spreading tops were more than two hundred 
 feet in air, the branches clothed with moss like green 
 velvet. Through their canopy of verdure the sun- 
 light sifted, far down to the dense undergrowth of 
 salmon-berry, tall ferns and other shrubs spreading 
 
 162 
 
The Heart of the Big Timber Comitry 
 
 m an almost Impenetrable mass. Many of the trees 
 which made this splendid picture had been growing 
 in their solitude for three or four hundred years. 
 Now they were doomed to be destroyed by puny, 
 bustling, swearing men with saws and axes, assailants 
 who were tapping at their grand butts like so many 
 woodpeckers. Mingled with the staccato tapping of 
 the distant axes was the " rasp-rasp " of the sawyers, 
 gnawing their way through in less than an hour 
 that which it had taken God Almighty to perfect 
 since the time when Columbus found this continent 
 of ours. 
 
 Presently a spur or branch line zig-zagged off from 
 the railroad. The squat and laboring locomotive 
 crawled along this side track, which was laid on top 
 of the ground with so little grading that the rails 
 billowed up and down the hills. The toot of the 
 locomotive was answered by the scream of another 
 whistle somewhere ahead, as if there were a bustling 
 activity beyond the curtaining trees. The foreman 
 of the " outfit " was waiting to go to the end of 
 the " spur," and he swung himself aboard from a 
 handy log alongside the track. He was a quiet young 
 man with a frank gray eye, a square jaw and a fine 
 pair of shoulders. He explained in reply to many 
 questions : 
 
 " I've got a gang of a hundred Irish, Swedes and 
 Americans, and most of them get drunk whenever 
 they get a chance. No, they aren't always easy to 
 
 163 
 
The Greater America 
 
 handle, but if you let little things worry you, you'll 
 go crazy, so what's the use? I was raised in Michi- 
 gan logging camps, and this getting timber out by 
 steam power is different. I had to learn the business 
 all over again when I came out to the coast. We 
 run these spurs off the main line about every four- 
 teen hundred feet, two of them off each side, parallel, 
 you understand. Then we log between the two spurs, 
 giving us a seven hundred foot haul either way to the 
 flat cars. When we're through, we pull up our 
 tracks and push ahead and then run the spurs off to 
 the left and right in the same fashion. If you've 
 been used to seeing logging with ox teams and sleds, 
 you'll have a chance to see some real live action when 
 you've watched the donkey-engine at work." 
 
 His forecast was most conservative. Logging by 
 steam, as it is done in the Cascades, is worth going 
 many miles to see as a hair-raising spectacle. When 
 the train toiled into a clearing, the donkey-engine 
 stood near the track and the skidway which led to the 
 loading platform. It was a commonplace looking 
 " donkey," although bigger than most of its breed 
 which puff and strain on docks and at the foot of 
 derricks. The boiler and engine were mounted on 
 a massive timber sled, whose runners or underpin- 
 nings were two weighty logs. This timber raft had 
 a blunt bow and a snub nose where the runners had 
 been hewn away, like the front end of a New Eng- 
 land " stone-boat." Stout guy-ropes ran to near-by 
 
 164 
 
The Heart of the Big Timber Country 
 
 trees, mooring the " donkey " as If it were an unruly 
 kind of a beast. In front of the engine was a series 
 of drums, wound round with wire cable which trailed 
 off into the forest and vanished. 
 
 The area across which these cables trailed was 
 littered with windfalls, tall butts, sawed-off tops and 
 branches, upturned roots fifteen feet in air. Huge 
 logs, cut in lengths of from twenty-five to forty feet, 
 loomed amid this woodland wreckage like the backs 
 of a school of whales in a tumbling sea. No roads 
 had been cut. It seemed impossible to move these 
 great sections of trees to the railroad and thence 
 to market. Teaming was out of the question in 
 such a ruck as this. 
 
 The only appliances in sight were the humble 
 " donkey," and the aimless wire-cable which led off 
 into the general tangle of things. Closer inspection 
 showed a signal rope which led from the whistle of 
 the " donkey " off into the woods without visible 
 destination. Some one out of vision yanked this six 
 hundred feet of rope. The " donkey " screamed a 
 series of intelligent blasts. The engine clattered, the 
 drums began to revolve and the wire cable which 
 seemed to wind off to nowhere in particular grew taut. 
 The " donkey " surged against its moorings, its mas- 
 sive sled began to rear and pitch as if it were striving 
 to bury its nose in the earth. 
 
 There was a startling uproar in the forest, wholly 
 beyond seeing distance, mind you. It sounded as if 
 
 165 
 
The Greater America 
 
 trees were being pulled up by the roots. The " don- 
 key " was puffing and tugging at its anchorage as if 
 it had suddenly undertaken to jerk out the side of 
 the mountain. In a moment a log came hurtling out 
 of the undergrowth nearly a thousand feet away. It 
 was a section of tree six feet through, a diameter 
 greater than the height of most men. It was forty 
 feet long, and it must have weighed a large number 
 of tons. 
 
 It burst Into sight as If it had wings, smashing and 
 tearing its own pathway. The " donkey " was not 
 merely dragging it at the end of a wire cable a quar- 
 ter of a mile long, it was yanking it home hand 
 over fist. The great log was coming so fast that 
 when it fetched athwart a stump it pitched over It as 
 If it were taking a hurdle. Then it became entangled 
 with another whopper of a log, as big as itself. The 
 two locked arms, they did not even hesitate, and both 
 came lunging toward the " donkey " and the railroad. 
 
 The " donkey " did not complain of this extra 
 burden. It veered sidewlse as if to get a fresh grip, 
 reared a trifle more viciously, coughed and grunted, 
 and jerked the burden along with undiminished vigor. 
 It is an awesome sight to see a log six feet through 
 and forty feet long bounding toward you as if the 
 devil were in it, breaking off small trees as If they 
 were twigs, leaping over obstacles, gouging a way 
 for Itself with terrific uproar. 
 
 I waited until the log was within twenty feet of 
 i66 
 
The Heart of the Big Timber Country 
 
 the loading platform, and then, fearful that the 
 " donkey " might forget to let go in the excitement 
 of the moment, I moved rapidly away from the scene 
 of action. The huge missile halted in its flight, and 
 the masterful " donkey " had a breathing spell. 
 
 It was time to wonder how they were going to 
 load this unwieldly brute of a log on a flat car. One 
 realized the girth and weight of it when the " chaser " 
 followed it in, and branded it by stamping one end 
 with a sledge hammer. As he stood by the butt of 
 it, the top of the log was well above his head. Now 
 the " head loader," and " loader " assumed com- 
 mand. They deftly rigged slings of wire cable 
 around the log, and the donkey engine was asked to 
 give them a lift. The tireless " donkey " squatted 
 back, made a wild lunge or two before settling in the 
 traces, and the log began to roll over and over up 
 the inclined skidway in the bight of these slings. 
 
 A pull here and a tug there, and the log rolled 
 across the platform, and settled In Its place on the 
 car, handled by steam and by steam alone from the 
 time when the " fallers " and sawyers had brought it 
 crashing to earth, and cut It Into sections. 
 
 This was not the limit, however, of the resource- 
 fulness of the " donkey." No sooner had this log 
 been gripped by the back of the neck and flung aboard 
 a car, than the gang back there In the woods had 
 made another log fast to the trailing cable. Not 
 a second was wasted. When the first log settled on 
 
 167 
 
The Greater America 
 
 the car a second was crashing and leaping through 
 the forest. It was even more impressive to learn that 
 when the " yard " is cleared, and it is time to move 
 to another forest tract, the " donkey " loads itself 
 aboard a flat car by a process analogous to that of 
 lifting one's self by the bootstraps. The cables are 
 belayed to convenient trees, the " donkey " takes 
 hold, the drums revolve, and the astute engine hauls 
 itself along until it is close to the loading plat- 
 form. Now purchases are secured, and the ponder- 
 ous machinery jerks itself up the skidway prepared 
 for its passage. One more clever effort and it hauls 
 itself across the platform to the car, thus demon- 
 strating itself a " donkey " whose capabilities give 
 the lie to its name. 
 
 We followed the cable back into the forest while 
 the coast was clear. There was first the " haulback," 
 a wire rope more than half a mile long, which led 
 in a wide circle through that part of the forest which 
 was being logged by this particular " donkey." This 
 cable is an errand boy for the larger and stronger 
 cable which does the heavy work. The " haulback " 
 leads from the drums of the donkey-engine, turning 
 corners through sheaves made fast to trees, and is 
 thus an endless line which can be reeled out or in to 
 carry the stronger cable whenever it may be needed. 
 It would be a slow and back-breaking task for men 
 to pull the big cable through such a tangle of forest 
 as this. Therefore they hitch a length of it on to 
 
 i68 
 
The Heart of the Big Timber Country 
 
 the " haulback," the " donkey " kindly assists, and 
 deposits the gear just in the right spot. Then the 
 " hook tenders " and " rigging slingers " fall to, and 
 pass the heavy cable, or " lead," around the end of 
 the log, making it fast with big steel hooks which 
 bite deep into the shaggy bark. 
 
 Thus harnessed, there is no more use for the 
 "haulback" cable, and the "donkey" reels in the 
 bigger cable with the log at the end much as one 
 handles a fish that is securely hooked. Ahead of this 
 gang are the " windfall buckers," who saw into handy 
 lengths such fallen trees as are square in the way. 
 These are jerked aside by a " lead " from the big 
 cable, but it is not considered necessary to clear the 
 path any more carefully than by the removal of these 
 most conspicuous obstacles. 
 
 The men work in a dense and damp undergrowth, 
 in mud and slime up to their knees when the autumn 
 rains fall for months on end. It is slippery, trying 
 work, and when the steel hooks lose their grip, and 
 the lengths of cable whip blindly through the air, 
 and the log runs amuck before the ardent " donkey " 
 can be checked, there is such vivid and varied pro- 
 fanity as cannot be found outside a polygot lumber 
 camp in the untamed West. 
 
 This part of the logging industry in the Cascades 
 is essentially business-like and specialized. It lacks 
 romance, although the method of it is filled with 
 dashing and picturesque energy. If you would see 
 
 169 
 
The Greater America 
 
 the tragedy of the big woods, you must wander a 
 little back from the " donkey's " area of infernal 
 activity. Down the columned aisles of these noble 
 trees there rings a long, deep call: 
 
 *' Look out of the r-o-a-d." 
 
 It is the warning signal of the sawyer, the dirge 
 of a big tree which is about to fall. From a few 
 hundred feet away there is a fierce crackling like the 
 volley firing of rifles. The fibers of the giant are 
 being torn asunder. A mighty green crest more than 
 two hundred feet in air begins to sway ever so slightly 
 as if moved by a big wind. Then comes a long- 
 drawn, rending crash, gathering volume as the heart 
 of the tree is ripped In twain. Now the top of the 
 tree, far up in the bright sunlight, begins to move 
 toward the earth, very slowly. It seems a long time 
 before it gathers headway and begins to crash In a 
 sweeping arc down among the trees around and 
 beneath It. The air is full of torn branches and 
 fragments of the smaller trees that are in the shat- 
 tering path of this fall. 
 
 So fast is the flight of the tree as Its mass picks 
 up momentum that the wind wails through its top, 
 and the sound of it can be heard afar. There Is a 
 vast, solemn groaning sound, and then with the noise 
 of thunder the tree smites the ground, and the earth 
 trembles. It Is an Impressive spectacle for the lay- 
 man who Is not figuring how many feet of lumber 
 this prostrate monarch will yield. Nor does It cheer 
 
 170 
 
'The Heart of the Big Timber Country 
 
 him to learn that one of these great trees is worth 
 only fifty dollars to the logger, and that when it 
 reaches the mill it will be cut up into ten thousand 
 feet of lumber. 
 
 When it is down, the " buckers " attack it. With 
 one man on each end of a long and limber saw, the 
 tree is soon cut into handy lengths, ready for the wire 
 cable and the obstreperous donkey-engine.. Perched 
 high on their spring-boards set in notches made in 
 the butt six or eight feet above ground, the " fallers " 
 are at work, nibbling at other great trees before the 
 saws come into play, for these trees are sawed, not 
 chopped down, and the ax does only the preliminary 
 work. Twenty trees are felled every working day 
 by the crew of two " fallers " and one " undercutter," 
 twenty trees, together worth a thousand dollars as 
 they fall. 
 
 Fifty men work In each gang, and two " yards " 
 are being cleared at the same time, so that a hundred 
 men toil to keep the two donkey-engines and the rail- 
 road spurs busy. Between forty and fifty big trees 
 come down in the day's work of the " outfit." They 
 are a strong and hustling lot of men. Logging by 
 steam admits of no leisurely methods. The gangs 
 are kept on the jump to measure pace with the 
 " donkey " and the busy little railroad, and profits 
 are so small at best that no time can be wasted. The 
 boss drives his crews, but he feeds and pays them 
 well, and they have no snow-bound winters to fight. 
 
 171 
 
The Greater America 
 
 When the day's work was over in the " yards " 
 we visited, the men came flocking from the woods 
 to board the train that was waiting to carry them 
 down to the camp at the foot of the hills. They were 
 rough and husky men, ready for a fight or a frolic, 
 but the quiet young foreman with the gray eye and 
 square jaw held their respectful attention whenever 
 he joined a group on the swaying flat cars. Most of 
 the cars were piled high with logs, and the broad- 
 shouldered, lop-sided little engine had to hold back 
 with all its might to prevent the train from running 
 away with it. 
 
 We slowed up at another " yard " where a spur 
 of track led to a loading platform. Here an 
 unwearied " donkey " was engaged in its last task 
 of the long day. It was perched on the crest of a 
 hill beyond which the cleared land pitched down to 
 a shallow pond. Across the pond a trail opened 
 into the dense forest, a trail furrowed like an irrigat- 
 ing ditch. Down the hill, through the pond, and 
 along the furrowed ditch ran the wire cable, taut and 
 humming as the " donkey " pulled it home. 
 
 It was a matter of minutes while we waited and 
 looked at the opening in the woods. Then the log 
 heaved in sight, riding grandly through the shadows 
 like a sentient monster. It charged out of the woods, 
 hurling earth and stones before it. On top of it 
 stood a logger, swaying easily, shifting his footing 
 to meet the plunges of his great beast, a dare-devil 
 
 172 
 
The Heart of the Big Timber Country 
 
 figure of a man outlined against the sunset sky as the 
 log flew down hill. Before it dived Into the pond he 
 made a flying leap, and tumbled Into the undergrowth 
 with a yell of pure enjoyment. Then the log tore 
 through the pond amid a whirlwind of spray, and 
 moved up the opposite slope to the end of Its long 
 journey. 
 
 Fully as heroic as the figure of the logger on the 
 riding home was the man perched above the groan- 
 ing drums of the donkey-engine. He handled his 
 straining cables and machinery in a fashion to suggest 
 the management of an elephant by means of a walk- 
 ing-stick. When the tooting signals came to him 
 that all was ready somewhere out in the woods, he 
 let the " haulback " unwind, and then tightened the 
 pull on the big cable and made ready for action. 
 When the signal came that meant " go ahead," he 
 threw his lever over, and a hundred horse power 
 surged Into being not by easy gradation, but with 
 a fierce and sudden jump. It was like starting a 
 heavy train by throwing the throttle wide open. It 
 was taken for granted that everything would hold 
 together, and, mirahile dlctii, it did. And when the 
 log moved, it was with the power of a hundred horses 
 jumping Into their collars as one and starting on the 
 gallop. The most vivid impression of the day among 
 the big timber was made by the " donkey-engine " 
 as used In modern logging. It (I was going to 
 say "he") is an uproarious embodiment of the 
 
 173 
 
The Greater America 
 
 American spirit in action, with no time for sentiment. 
 The " donkey " recks not of the tragedy of the big 
 trees. It rolls up it sleeves and proceeds to get results 
 or break its back in the attempt. 
 
 In a hundred valleys of the Far West and along 
 a hundred hillsides the logger is tearing the forest 
 to pieces by these twentieth century methods. He 
 picks out the choicest timber for slaughter, leaves 
 the remainder to be burned by the fires which follow 
 his crews, and is making desolation in the noblest 
 wilderness left to the American nation. He has 
 invested money in the ownership of timber lands. 
 He is unwilling to let this investment lie idle. The 
 only way in which he can get returns is by cutting 
 timber, and he is not to be harshly blamed for wish- 
 ing to realize on his investment. He has been crim- 
 inally wasteful and careless, and he is beginning to 
 see the folly of his ways. 
 
 His spirit of extravagance and contempt for the 
 future has been of a piece with the handling of the 
 public domain as if Uncle Sam and his people could 
 never come to the end of their rope. The demand 
 for timber is enormous, and the men who possess it 
 are average, hard-working Americans who want to 
 make a success of the business in which their dollars 
 and their Industry are staked. 
 
 There Is a class of sentimentalists who make out- 
 cry against all destruction of forests, as If lumber 
 could be made In a mill and not from trees. Vast 
 
 174 
 
The Heart of the Big Timber Country 
 
 as is the production of the forests of the Pacific 
 Northwest, the annual cut amounts in board measure 
 to only twice as much as the annual consumption of 
 timber for railroad ties alone in the United States. 
 About two hundred railroad ties is the average yield 
 of forest per acre, and to replace the worn-out ties 
 and lay new track for one year means the stripping 
 of one half million acres of American forest. Bridge 
 timbers, telegraph poles, etc., swell this demand to 
 a million acres. of forest, cut down each year to malnr 
 tain American railroads. And railroad ties are a 
 small item in the total consumption of lumber. 
 
 ..One of the most hopeful sdgns of the times is the 
 changing attitude of the lumbermen toward the 
 science of forestry as fostered by the Federal Govern- 
 ment; They are beginning to see that their industry 
 is doomed to an. early extinction imless the wastage 
 is checked and the forest is renewed for future genr 
 erations. And more than this, unless the forests are 
 preserved, vast tracts of fertile and prosperous 
 America will become desert in the next centuity. This 
 is a lesson taught by such countries as Tunls^ now a 
 part of the North African desert, which in old times 
 was a smiling and populous garden. An Arab chronir 
 cler relates that " in those days on^ could walk from^ 
 Tunis to Tripoli In the shade." The Arab conquest 
 destroyed the forest, arid the desert swept over the 
 face of the land. 
 
 It is difficult to realize that all attempts to educate 
 175 
 
The Greater America 
 
 the present-day American in the value of forest pres- 
 ervation fly in the face of the teachings of his imme- 
 diate forefathers. In an address dehvered at the 
 American Forest Congress last year, this change of 
 national view-point was put in a striking manner : 
 
 " No reasonable man would be disposed to 
 denounce the early settlers of the timbered portions 
 of North America for cutting away the forests. 
 Cleared land was necessary for the growing of food 
 products which were needed to sustain life. A man 
 with a family by a courageous enterprise, or by the 
 force of circumstances, projected into the wilderness, 
 would not hesitate to cut down and clear off the tree 
 growth as rapidly as his strength permitted. Self- 
 preservation is the first law of nature, and the pio- 
 neers in our forest areas had to clear the land or 
 starve. Moreover, in the early period of settlement 
 he was considered the greatest benefactor of the 
 State, and to the community in which he lived, who 
 slashed down the most forest and cleared the most 
 land. There was no thought of the future value of 
 timber. It was a cumberer of the ground, like ledges 
 of rock and the loose stones of the glacial drift. The 
 lumberman was not a devastator, but performed a 
 useful function by removing that which, as it stood, 
 had little or no value." 
 
 The lumbermen of to-day, realizing that our 
 grandfathers attacked the timber as an enemy rather 
 than a friend, are asking : " How can I cut my 
 
 176 
 

 I 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 ^^^^^__ 
 
 & _..-^jiy 
 
 ^^ 
 
 
 ^Hi^B^^^HE^ ' 
 
 
 1 
 
 I { litre loi[s 
 
 loomed amid this li'oodland wreckage " 
 
Tlie Heart of the Big Timber Country 
 
 timber now, and at the same time grow a new crop 
 for future supply? " The Forestry Bureau at Wash- 
 ington is ready to tell the lumberman how to face 
 this problem, and, better yet, offers to send its ex- 
 perts to show him, on the ground, how to cut his 
 timber to the best advantage for present and future 
 use. 
 
 177 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE MAN WHO FOUND HIMSELF 
 
 " Hello, old man." . ,_.,.. , 
 
 I faced about at the sound of this greeting voice 
 in the street of a town on the shore of Puget Sound, 
 and saw a tall and sunburned man of a rugged aspect 
 who held out a hand in welcome. There was some- 
 thing very familiar in the boyish smile and the danc- 
 ing light of his blue eye, but for the moment the 
 " Stetson " hat, the flannel shirt and the corduroy 
 breeches were an effective disguise. While I sparred 
 for time in which to link him with past acquaintance, 
 he observed, with a chuckle: 
 
 " The last time we met you blew into my special 
 car to join the gang on the way to the Yale-Harvard 
 game." 
 
 Then, of course, I knew him, but he could scarcely 
 blame me for failing to recall him at the first glance, 
 so great was the transformation not only in garb, 
 but in the whole demeanor of the man. Five years 
 before, he had suddenly vanished from the haunts 
 that had known him, nor had any word come back, 
 in all this time, to tell his host of friends in New 
 York that he was still alive. A genial idler, drifting 
 in swift and pleasant currents, he has flung away a 
 fortune in many gilded follies to reap the verdict 
 that *' his only enemy was himself." A stalwart 
 
 178 
 
The Man Who Found Himself 
 
 body and a fine mind had been so rapidly losing their 
 keen edge that his friends were beginning to predict 
 an inevitable smash, when he capped their worries by 
 a startling disappearance. 
 
 I remembered these things as we shook hands 
 again with much fervor, and called each other hard 
 names, in the foolish fashion of men when they are 
 very glad to see each other. We dined together, and 
 he was persuaded to talk of his five years of wander- 
 ing. At times it was hard to believe that this was 
 the man I had once known. This was an American 
 of the pioneer breed, from his heels up. The set of 
 his jaw was new, the poise of his head was that of 
 quiet confidence, and in his eyes there was an un- 
 quenchable belief in himself and his destiny. • , 
 
 He did not have to tell it for me to perceive that 
 here was one who had " found himself " in. the bat- 
 tering stress of circumstances. He had not. pros-, 
 pered as the world measures prosperity, but he had 
 won that which was worth many times the fortune 
 he had squandered as a wastrel in. his earlier years. 
 When he began to talk of the., life that had made a 
 man of him, it was in the. measured, almost subdued, 
 tone which you hear among men who have lived long 
 on the .-trail of the western frontier, on range and 
 ranch and prairie: 
 
 " You needn't say anything in New York about 
 running across me out here. I'm not ready to break 
 cover yet. Some day I am going back, but not until 
 
 179 
 
The Greater America 
 
 I have found the place that is waiting for me some- 
 where, and have made my stake. It's there, I know, 
 and I am moving along until I catch up with it. I'll 
 let you blow me off to this dinner for old times' sake, 
 for it may be the last decent meal I'll have for a 
 while. I have a few dollars in my clothes, but I may 
 need them for railroad fare and grub money until 
 I connect with another job. I've just quit my berth 
 here, aboard a fishing schooner, after punching the 
 head of the mate. Now I am steering for the lumber 
 country up in the mountains. 
 
 " We used to talk about the world's being so small 
 that one could not travel far without meeting a 
 familiar face. I have been on the move for five 
 years, from the Rio Grande to the Canada border, 
 and you are the first man I've seen that I used to 
 know. What became of me when I fell off the edge 
 of New York and left you all guessing? I didn't tell 
 the crowd that I had come to the end of my rope, and 
 that I was broke, and that the giddy round was all 
 over for me. I looked around New York in a lucid 
 interval after I made this painful discovery, and 
 found that there was nothing for me in the town 
 except to beg one of my friends for a job as a clerk 
 in his office. There was nothing that I was good for 
 as a bread-winner. It was too much like asking 
 charity to try to persuade anybody to pay me a sal- 
 ary. I couldn't stand for the notion of it. 
 
 " So I simply headed away from it all without a 
 i8o 
 
The Man Who Found Himself 
 
 plan in my head, and about two hundred dollars in 
 my pocket after paying oft my valet and squaring up 
 my club bills. I simply steered west, where there 
 was more room for action, and where I could keep 
 clear of my friends. In the first week I lost what 
 cash I had playing the races, as a get-rich-quick propo- 
 sition. Then I was down and out. It's an interesting 
 situation, but rather disquieting until you get har- 
 dened to it, this being without work or coin. It was 
 a case of rustle for grub and a bed, and I began 
 right there to find out what the real world was 
 made of. 
 
 " It was in the summer, and I decided to try to 
 beat my way on the railroad and get as far as the 
 grain country, where the farmers were offering all 
 kinds of fancy wages for harvest hands. The pro- 
 fession of the hobo requires training to be success- 
 fully practiced, and I bungled it at the start. Three 
 strong brakemen tossed me off a freight train at the 
 edge of an Ohio town, and I wandered into the public 
 square and sat on a bench to rest. I was dead for 
 sleep, and sore and hungry, for I had been without 
 food for twenty-four hours. On a bill board across 
 the way were some circus posters, and presently a 
 man strolled by whom I recognized as one of the 
 partners of the show. We had crossed the Atlantic 
 on the same steamer two years before, and sat across 
 the table in the smoking-room during a two days' 
 poker session. 
 
 i8i 
 
TJie Greater America 
 
 " ' Hello, Jerry Walsh,' said I. ' I'm looking for 
 a job.' He sized me up and was tactful enough to 
 ask no questions. 
 
 " ' Up against it? ' said he. ' What can you do in 
 a circus ? ' 
 
 " ' I drove my own four-in-hand well enough to 
 win a few blue ribbons,' I replied, ' and I guess I 
 could handle a chariot as well as the next man.' 
 
 " ' Come over to the tent,' said Jerry Walsh, with 
 a grin. 'We're shy a chariot driver just now. It's 
 a funny old world, ain't it? ' ; •.-, 
 
 " Calling out the boss of the stables, he told him, 
 without wasting words : ■; 
 
 • " ' Here is a New York swell that wants a job.l 
 He can drive horses to beat Jehu, though he ain't 
 good for much else. Hitch up the sorrels and give 
 him a try-out. We'll want them in the street parade 
 this morning.' » 
 
 " The helpers hooked up twelve sorrels in front 
 of a gilded Roman chariot, and I got aboard. They 
 were not hard to handle, and I drove figures-of-eight 
 and cut corners until the boss was satisfied. Then he, 
 rjgged me out in a flowing toga, and a gilt crown, and 
 I was a Roman charioteer on the payroll. I drove 
 the sorrels for two weeks, in the ring and in the street 
 parades, and it was pretty fair sport But I couldn't 
 see any future for me in the circus life, and we parted' 
 cbmpany as soon asT had a few dollars ahead! 
 
 " It Was sweeter and cleaner to join the army of 
 182 
 
The Man Who Found Himself 
 
 harvest hands, and so I followed the wheat harvest 
 from Kansas up to Manitoba and back again. It 
 nearly broke my back, for I was soft and flabby, but 
 little by little I got as hard as nails and able to take 
 care of myself. In this first year I saw that my old 
 life had been fast making a wreck of me. I was 
 learning to stand on my own two feet, and to sleep 
 without the fear of going broke or losing my job. 
 The world could not starve me and I was as able to 
 rustle a living out of it as the next man. So I kept 
 moving on, now as a trolley conductor, now as a 
 freight brakeman, again as farm hand, and trying a 
 dozen other things. 
 
 " At last I drifted Into the cattle country, and was 
 a cow-puncher for two years In Wyoming and Mani- 
 toba. They called me ' New York Red ' on the 
 ranges, and I managed to make good after I'd learned 
 to keep my mouth shut and to try to hold up my end 
 of any job I had to tackle. You run Into queer odds 
 and ends of life when you get close down to it on 
 the range. Sometimes It's like seeing the curtatin fall 
 on a play before It Is finished, and you are' left to 
 wonder what happened afterwards. I ran' across 
 one man In the cow country who had come out of my 
 own world back East. He was a Harvard man, and 
 the punchers called him 'Four-eyed Texas 'because 
 he wore glasses whenever he got a chance to read. I 
 never knew his real name, and none of us ever asked 
 him what It was. Somewhere In his past there was 
 
 183 
 
The Greater America 
 
 a streak of bad medicine. He was a man afraid of 
 himself, and worse scared of somebody else that 
 must have been looking for him. We were sure that 
 somebody was camping on his trail, and we asked no 
 questions. We could not help seeing that he never 
 sat by the fire at night, where he might make a target, 
 but always spread his blankets away off in the 
 shadows. He had two guns ready all the time, and 
 he jumped when he was suddenly spoken to. 
 
 " While riding on the round-up one day, I met a 
 stranger about ninety miles from our home ranch 
 where ' Four-eyed Texas ' was working. The 
 stranger, who looked very glum and hostile, began 
 to ask me about the different punchers in our outfit. 
 He had more curiosity than was normal, and at last 
 he pulled a photograph from his pocket and asked 
 me if I had ever happened to see a man that looked 
 like the picture. It was our Harvard man beyond a 
 chance of mistake. I swallowed hard and lied to 
 the best of my ability. What I told him was that I 
 had seen a young man exactly like that photograph 
 and description, about three months before, heading 
 into the Judith Basin. This was as far away from 
 our ranch as I could figure out in a hurry. The 
 stranger thanked me and started toward the Judith 
 Basin, riding hard, as if he had something important 
 on his mind. 
 
 " As soon as I could get back to the ranch I told 
 ' Four-eyed Texas ' of the interview. He thanked 
 
 184 
 
The Man Who Found Himself 
 
 me and made no comments, but that night he van- 
 ished with the best pony in his string, and we never 
 saw or heard of him again. Now what had this 
 Harvard fugitive ever done to set this other man 
 on his trail hke a human bloodhound? There was 
 sure to be some killing when they met. You could 
 see it in his manner as long as he stayed with us. But 
 he rode away in the dark and carried his story with 
 him, and it was just a fragment of life in the big 
 West. 
 
 " For almost a year I was with an army pack train 
 at Fort Assiniboine, and in the Yellowstone. There 
 was a life in which you could depend upon the govern- 
 ment mule to drive monotony far, far away. I recall 
 one Sunday afternoon when we were in camp after 
 a hard march. The pack mules were grazing, and 
 I was reading a tattered novel, and a holy quiet 
 brooded over the landscape. A freight outfit trailed 
 past and a tarpaulin blew off one of the wagons and 
 danced across the country. This stampeded the bell 
 mule, which was roped to a tree. The skittish crea- 
 ture tore the tree up by the roots and started across 
 country, and the pack train proceeded to scatter itself 
 over twenty-five square miles of landscape. After 
 we had collected them, another stampede happened 
 at night, and the mules swept clear over the camp, 
 knocking tents Hat and demoralizing the outfit as If 
 a cyclone had struck it. 
 
 " While I was quartered at Fort Assiniboine there 
 185 
 
The Greater America 
 
 came a call from the reservation for troops. The 
 colonel sent for the chief packer, with orders to have 
 the mule train made ready for service. The chief 
 packer had gone to town. The colonel sent for the 
 second packer. He had also gone to town. The 
 colonel swore, and asked if there was anybody left 
 of the party attached to the condemned pack train. 
 The orderly reported: 
 
 " ' They have all gone to town, sir.' 
 
 " ' Who the devil is left of the outfit? ' 
 
 " ' Only the cook, sir.' 
 
 " ' Fetch him here.' 
 
 " The cook was a cockney Britisher, who reported, 
 with fear and trembling: 
 
 " ' Please, sir, they 'ave all gone to town to get 
 drunk, sir.' 
 
 " ' Why in blazes didn't you go with them? ' thun- 
 dered the colonel, with a fine touch of sarcasm. 
 
 " ' Please, sir, I didn't 'ave the price to get drunk, 
 sir, and they wouldn't lend it to me, sir.' 
 
 " No, I didn't go to town to get drunk, old man," 
 continued the wanderer. " It's queer, perhaps, but 
 I have cut out the booze, and I have kept myself 
 clean and fit through it all, because I want to be 
 ready when my big chance comes, whatever it Is. And 
 there's something in a husky, out-door life like mine 
 that makes some men want to keep fit and decent all 
 the time. And there's been lots of pleasure with the 
 hard knocks. Why, for a while I drove a stage out 
 
 i86 
 
The Man Who Found Hiinself 
 
 of Great Falls, Montana. We horsed It with un- 
 broken bronchos and put them Into harness by main 
 strength. I drove the coach over part of the run 
 between London and Brighton one summer, just for 
 fun, and I thought It was pretty fair sport. But It 
 was slow and tame beside the whirlwind rush of that 
 start out of Great Falls. In the traces was a bunch of 
 cyclones with hair on them. Once started there was 
 no holding them until they had run themselves tired. 
 For the first ten miles out of town my stage ran as a 
 through express, making no stops, because we couldn't 
 stop. It was a matter of keeping the bronchos headed 
 straight and pouring the leather Into them. Over 
 this route we covered a hundred and twenty-eight 
 miles In eighteen hours, which was going some for 
 that kind of country with no roads worth the name. 
 
 " From stage driving I shifted to freighting wool 
 Into Great Falls, with an outfit of twelve horses and 
 a string of trail wagons carrying three thousand dol- 
 lars' worth of wool every trip. Then I was led astray 
 by the possibilities of piling up swift wealth In raising 
 sheep. I thought my chance had come after I broke 
 a faro bank In Gilt Edge and walked out with three 
 thousand dollars In cash. I put It all In sheep, and 
 lost It all In three days, when a May blizzard burled 
 my sheep so deep that I never found them to dig 
 them out. 
 
 " While I was in Montana, as cow-puncher and 
 sheep-man, I used to get little glimpses of civilization 
 
 187 
 
The Greater America 
 
 now and then. On my days off I would get into a 
 clean pair of overalls and ride into Great Falls and 
 browse all day in the public library, reading the new 
 books and magazines, and having a royal literary 
 spree. At length I moved on to the Pacific Coast, 
 and worked in the sawmills along Puget Sound until 
 I knew the business from top to bottom. As fore- 
 man of a gang I broke all records in loading lumber 
 aboard vessels, and I was pretty proud of it. It was 
 my pet theory that because I had some brains and 
 education I ought to be able to load lumber or boss 
 a bunch of men in better shape than the average 
 laborer. Therefore, wherever I was working, if I 
 was not made a ' straw boss ' or given a bunch of men 
 to handle inside a month, I threw up the job and 
 moved on. 
 
 " Stevedore or cow-puncher, harvest hand or brake- 
 man, sailor or lumber-jack, I have never regretted 
 breaking away from the soft, fat, useless life I used 
 to lead in New York. It's all right for you to think 
 that in five years I ought to have ' made good ' and 
 settled down in some kind of a berth with a solid 
 future attached. But I have earned every dollar 
 I've spent, and I have been learning a few things, 
 and I have won what your city man on a salary never 
 does get, freedom from the shackles of fear, fear of 
 losing his job, fear that he cannot meet his bills, fear 
 that he will starve if he is forced out of the narrow 
 rut in which he has made his livelihood. I have 
 
 i88 
 
The Man Who Found Himself 
 
 made two or three good-sized stakes, one in Alaska, 
 and lost them in playing for bigger stakes. But I 
 am not much past thirty, and the world is big and 
 busy, and it needs me somewhere. So I shall move 
 on, until I find my niche, and then I shall win out 
 and win out big. When that day comes you may see 
 me back on Broadway, but not until then. I may 
 look like a failure to you, but I am a heap sight 
 more of a man than when I was chartering special 
 cars and driving my own coach." 
 
 The wanderer smote the table with a hard and 
 calloused palm, and his brown face glowed with a 
 manly earnestness which was good to see. 
 
 " You don't know what it is to pull your belt 
 tighter for lack of grub, and to keep your nerve 
 though you haven't a cent, and always to feel sure 
 that there's a job waiting ahead if you keep on mov- 
 ing. It's a good gamble, if you look at it right, and 
 it's a blessed thing never to be bored and tied down." 
 
 With all his brave attitude, there was a wistful 
 look in his eyes when he asked me about men and 
 women and places that had been dear to him in the 
 East. But he had learned to " take his medicine," 
 and to pay the price without flinching. And, more 
 than this, he had found something worth while. It 
 was true, as he said, that fear had been banished from 
 his world of action. He had cast from him the 
 cramping artificialities of the life in which he had 
 been reared and spoiled, and he had become changed 
 
 189 
 
The Greater America 
 
 into a man who was fit to do and to dare all things, 
 and to face any odds by virtue of his strength and 
 courage and endurance. He had nothing to lose and 
 everything to win as he pressed on along the unknown 
 trail, under the big sky, with the fresh winds in his 
 face. He had suffered much, in mind and body, but 
 with it all he had kept unspoiled his faith in human 
 nature, his faith in himself, and, what was as impor- 
 tant, his sense of humor. 
 
 Even though success had eluded him, it seemed 
 to me that " he had made good." He was braced to 
 fight and to strive, and wealth would not have spoiled 
 this stirring game which he was playing with so high 
 a heart. Nor could I help sharing his buoyant confi- 
 dence that some day he would return to Broadway 
 and Fifth Avenue, a wanderer and exile come back 
 to his own, after winning the fortune that was wait- 
 ing somewhere along his trail. 
 
 We parted in the late evening, and he turned his 
 face toward the big timber country, reliant, hopeful, 
 and unafraid. It occurred to me that these fragments 
 of his story might be worth while recording, because, 
 in the course of a year, many a young man is heard to 
 say that he wants to try " roughing it in the West " 
 for a time, in order to gain health, or experience, or 
 what not. Here was a young man unfitted by his 
 earlier training to do any kind of work, and yet he 
 has lived and toiled as a man among men for some 
 five years without being overtaken by starvation, and 
 
 190 
 
The Man Who Found Himself 
 
 perhaps his story carries a moral, even though he has 
 chosen to follow, instead of the prudent maxims of 
 Poor Richard's Almanac, the reprehensible desire of 
 him who sung: 
 
 " Therefore from job to job I've moved along, 
 Pay couldn't hold me when my time was done, 
 For something in my 'ead upset me all, 
 Till I 'ad dropped whatever 'twas for good. 
 An' out at sea, beheld the «^ock-light die, 
 And met my mate, — the wind ihat tramps the world." 
 
 191 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 A BREATH FROM ALASKA 
 
 Only ten years have passed since the steamer Port- 
 land came Into Seattle with the first big shipment of 
 gold from the Yukon and Nome in her treasure room. 
 Since then more than a hundred million dollars in 
 raw gold have poured 'nto the assay office at Seattle. 
 It has created a traffic of twenty million dollars a 
 year with Alaskan ports, the greater part of which 
 streams northward from Seattle. 
 
 If you think that steam has wholly banished hot- 
 blooded romance from the sea, it is worth loafing 
 along the Seattle wharves in the early autumn when 
 the last steamers of the year are loading for Nome. 
 It is a race with the ice that is already grinding off 
 the distant and lonely coast they are hurrying to 
 reach. Cargo fills their holds in roaring torrents of 
 activity. When the last pound of freight that can be 
 carried is shoved aboard the steamers, perhaps three 
 or four of them turn northward with all the steam 
 their straining boilers can stand up under. It is a 
 gamble, with the chances of being nipped In the ice 
 or being forced to turn back baffled. In the autumn 
 of 1905 the gamblers lost, and one steamer which I 
 saw go surging out of Seattle came limping back a 
 month later, her cargo still under her hatches. 
 
 192 
 
A Breath from Alaska 
 
 An average of nine vessels a week, or almost five 
 hundred a year, clear from American ports for 
 Alaska, figures worth putting alongside the objec- 
 tions of certain sapient Congressmen that it was a 
 ridiculous waste of money to pay Russia $7,200,000 
 for " an empty ice-box." The docks of Seattle tell 
 another story. 
 
 In this Puget Sound port one stands almost In the 
 middle of the United States of this generation, for 
 the Aleutian Islands stretch two thousand nine hun- 
 dred miles west of Seattle, while Eastport, Maine, 
 is about the same distance to the eastward. And some 
 of us have to go west to learn that the sun is always 
 shining somewhere in this new America, for when 
 the June twilight falls on the gray waters of Behring 
 Sea, the New England farmer is milking his cows 
 in the early dawn. 
 
 To Seattle come down from the mysterious North 
 the weather-beaten prospectors and motley adven- 
 turers who have won or lost in the struggle for 
 gold. They lend to this bustling city of trolleys and 
 skyscrapers a touch of the old frontier, and they 
 seem to link the new world with the most primitive 
 and picturesque order of things. You may be sitting 
 at a table in a cafe as ostentatiously well-appointed 
 as one of your Broadway haunts, and at your elbow is 
 a sturdy pilgrim just landed from the frozen North, 
 who is telling such a story as this, which floated across 
 the table to me : 
 
 193 
 
The Greater America 
 
 " Wilkins was as brave and hardy a man as ever 
 shouldered a pack and hunted for gold along the 
 Copper River," began the narrator, J. S. Gordon. 
 " He was the kind that would travel all day 
 and never get peevish or done up, and he had 
 a cheerful laugh and a good word for all hands, no 
 matter how fast the trouble was coming. He was 
 just one of that breed, big of mind and body, that 
 seems built to rough it and take chances out-of-doors, 
 and who would curl up and pine away cooped up in a 
 city. No game was too stiff for him to go up against, 
 until — but I am getting ahead of the day which fairly 
 shriveled the soul of Charlie Wilkins and left him 
 crushed and quiet and nervous until you pitied him 
 and swore because you couldn't help him get back the 
 courage and the bright temper that had been wrenched 
 out of him for good and all. 
 
 " It was in the month of February, and if you've 
 been in Alaska you know what it means to be hauling 
 your outfits up the Copper River on the ice. It 
 wasn't exciting, just a terrible drudgery of fighting 
 the cold and toiling along in the snow and faking up 
 new dreams of gold somewhere ahead to keep you 
 pegging along to God knows where. It was monoto- 
 nous, hard, and without any end to it, and Charlie 
 Wilkins was the only man who didn't wear the edge 
 off his temper while he was hauling more pounds on 
 his sled than any of the rest of us. 
 
 " What happened to him came without any 
 194 
 
A Breath from Alaska 
 
 warning. We were shuffling along the river bed, 
 when Charhe looked ahead and saw an open hole in 
 the ice. He was thirsty, and he hustled on a little 
 ahead and was glad to note that the ice was thin and 
 the black water running close to the surface. This 
 made it look easy for him to kneel down, unsling his 
 tin cup from his belt and scoop up a drink. We were 
 moving up to join him when, plop! the ice gave way 
 and Wilkins vanished like a shot. There was no 
 time for him to yell or wave an arm. He just 
 dropped into the black water that swirled under the 
 Ice and was carried out of sight before we could more 
 than gasp and blink. 
 
 " There wasn't one chance in a million that we 
 could ever find poor Wilkins again, alive or dead. 
 While we stood like dumb fools and glared at the 
 hole he had dropped into, the swift current was 
 rolling him under the ice like a log. But with a kind 
 of frenzy we four scattered and ran down stream, 
 stumbling in the snow, falling, scrambling, crying 
 and swearing and calling to each other, 
 
 " Every little way one of us, and then another, 
 would fall to scraping a hole in the snow until he got 
 down to the ice, to try to see through It and holler for 
 Wilkins like a crazy man. Then we'd put an ear 
 close to the Ice and listen, hoping to hear a yell from 
 Wilkins. It wasn't reasonable, but we couldn't 
 give him up without making a try, and if anybody 
 in the world could best out a hideous game like 
 
 195 
 
The Greater America 
 
 this, it was this same Charlie Wilkins; we all knew 
 that. 
 
 " Ray Millard was plowing along about five hun- 
 dred yards below the airhole where Wilkins had dis- 
 appeared, when he thought he heard a faint cry from 
 somewhere under his feet. He pricked up his ears 
 and his hair stood on end, while he yelled for us to 
 come and listen. We crowded around him with our 
 mouths open, and there was a silence you could have 
 cut with an ax while we waited for what seemed 
 years and years. Then we all heard it repeated, a 
 muffled cry for help, just a little, weak ghost of a 
 cry, that seemed ever so far away. There was no 
 doubt about it. We heard it again, and we knew that 
 Wilkins was alive somewhere there underneath the 
 ice. 
 
 " We scattered a little, trying to locate it more 
 definitely, and then we found ourselves circling back 
 like a pack of hounds to where Millard was already 
 flat on his belly, digging away at the ice with his 
 sheath-knife. We had lost our ax coming up the 
 river, and we were expecting to get another that 
 night at camp we were heading for. So all we had 
 to dig with was our heavy knives, and they were like 
 toothpicks for the task in front of us. We flopped 
 down in a bunch and began to chip away at that 
 infernal ice, not knowing how many feet down we 
 had to carve our way. Nobody said a word, just 
 grunted and panted and dug and made the ice fly, 
 
 196 
 
A Breath from Alaska 
 
 and wondered whether we would ever see Charhe 
 Wilklns again. It was almost worse in some ways 
 than to have seen him drowned good and dead before 
 your eyes. If he was still alive and could hear us 
 trying to get at him, and he didn't hold out until we 
 got a hole through — good God, man, think of what 
 torture it meant for him and for us ! 
 
 " Before long our hands began to bleed from the 
 edges of the ice we were tearing at, and as the hole 
 grew bigger a big crimson splotch appeared in the 
 ice. But nobody stopped to tie up his hands or try to 
 keep gloves on them. Now, you could not have made 
 me believe that a bunch of men could cut down 
 through two feet of ice with nothing but their knives, 
 and do it in time to pull out a man beneath. But we 
 were doing impossible things that day. 
 
 " When we were a foot and a half down we were 
 somewhere near the end of this incredible under- 
 taking. We knew this because we could see the 
 water running, and soon could hear the voice of 
 Wilkins. 
 
 " We stopped work for a minute, with our heads 
 in the hole, and we could make out some of his words. 
 He was asking us to listen, and then we heard him 
 telling us that he couldn't hold out any longer, and 
 he was bidding us each good-by by name. 
 
 " The tears froze on our cheeks as we shouted 
 back to him to hold on and we would soon have him 
 out of there. But there was no response, and we 
 
 197 
 
The Greater America 
 
 were sure that he had drifted away to his death just 
 as we were almost within reach. We fell to again, 
 however, and it seemed as if we could never get 
 through that last few inches. Then some man who 
 had kept his wits from getting clean jumbled shouted 
 back that we must scoop out the ice and make a big- 
 ger hole before we broke through, because the water 
 would rush in as soon as the ice was broken, and we 
 couldn't fish Wilkins out if he was still in sight. So 
 we hacked away until we had a hole big enough to 
 let a man's body through and then our knives drove 
 at the bottom all together and we broke through 
 and almost slipped in ourselves, because we were 
 hanging over the edge on our bellies. 
 
 " The sled rope had been fetched and we made a 
 loop and passed it down and around the body of what 
 looked like a dead man doubled under there, with 
 only his nose and mouth out of water. He was all 
 In, and there seemed to be mighty little hope of doing 
 anything more with him than digging another hole 
 to bury him ashore. We put him on a sled, stripped 
 and rubbed him, wrapped him up in furs, and filled 
 him full of alcohol and Jamaica ginger and hot water 
 as soon as we could make a fire. 
 
 " The drink we threw into him would have made 
 a corpse sit up and kick, and after a repetition of the 
 dose, Wilkins actually opened his eyes. They were 
 sunk 'way back in his head and he looked as If he had 
 lost fifty pounds and aged as many years, his face 
 
 198 
 
A Breath from Alaska 
 
 was so wrinkled and white and drawn. Then we 
 pushed along toward the camp we were hoping to 
 make by nightfall and on the way Wilkins groaned 
 and finally managed to sputter: 
 
 " ' Boys, that was a close call.' 
 
 " Next day he was up and weakly puttering around 
 the camp, and trying to lend a hand at the cooking. 
 But he had no strength in him, and he would just sit 
 around most of the time and shiver for sheer nerv- 
 ousness. As soon as he pulled himself together 
 enough to tell us his end of the struggle under the 
 ice, this is what we heard: 
 
 " ' When the ice broke under me and I was spilled 
 into the river, I touched bottom with my feet and 
 dragged them along over the rocks trying to brace 
 myself while the current pulled me along. There 
 was room for me to keep my head above water, but 
 in no time I had been dragged down past the hole I 
 had made and was under the ice. But I could see 
 the light that filtered through the hole behind me and 
 I tried to get back to it. 
 
 " ' I think I could have made it even against the 
 current, but for the weight of the big cake of Ice 
 that had broken off with me and which was butting 
 against my chest and forcing me down stream. It 
 pushed me back step by step, the light getting fainter 
 all the time. I felt my last chance for life was In 
 fighting my way back to the hole, and as the light 
 died out and I went stumbling and kicking down 
 
 199 
 
The Greater America 
 
 stream an inch at a time, I thought it was all over 
 with Charlie Wilkins. 
 
 " ' This seemed like dying slow and hard but the 
 worst was yet to come. The cake of ice that was 
 shoving me down stream was as cruel and in- 
 fernally active as if it had been alive. Whenever 
 Td get a foothold on the bottom and begin to think 
 I could make a step toward the light, the cake of ice 
 would hand me one in the chest or beat my head 
 down under water and I'd have to give up and fight 
 for breath and a chance to get my head above water 
 again. Finally I had to let go, I was getting so 
 weak that I couldn't brace myself for another effort, 
 and the cake of ice swung me clean around, I lost 
 my footing, and was whirled down stream like a chip, 
 rolling over and over. 
 
 " ' Somehow I managed to keep the water from 
 getting into my lungs, for I held my breath until I was 
 on the point of blowing up, and then my head would 
 bob out of water and bump against the roof of the 
 river and be forced under again. Now and then my 
 feet would get a hold for a minute and I would try 
 to brace back and turn, but it was no use. Once I 
 fetched up against a boulder but it was too slippery 
 to cling to and I was too weak to get much of a wrap 
 around it. What was I thinking about? Nothing 
 except that I had a mighty few seconds left to live 
 and that it was up to me to make a last kick or two 
 and die with some self-respect because I'd done my 
 
 200 
 
A Breath from Alaska 
 
 best right up to the finish. Also it struck me as a 
 poor kind of a joke to play on a man — this fooling 
 with him like a cat with a mouse. 
 
 " ' Just about that time my feet struck bottom 
 again and I clawed at the ice overhead and one hand 
 caught in a little fissure or crack. I held fast for a 
 moment, got the other hand up and squeezed an arm 
 Into the crack pretty near up to my elbow. I dug 
 my heels into the gravel, and hung there, while the 
 water sucked at me and was pulling me down. But 
 by holding my mouth close to the ice I could breathe 
 and I got a little bit of strength back, and my arm 
 half fast in the crack and I was anchored, but God 
 only knew for how long, and it seemed to be no better 
 than dragging the agony out anyhow. But I hung 
 on, you bet, though it did seem most foolish. 
 
 " ' I yelled as loud as I could as soon as my wind 
 came back, though it seemed as silly a stunt as shout- 
 ing from the Copper River to draw the attention of 
 a friend on Broadway. Then my arm would slip and 
 my heart would freeze up with thinking the end had 
 come, and I'd claw for a fresh hold, and my chin 
 would dip under water and strangle, and the fight for 
 breath would begin again. I was yelling for help 
 whenever I could, but I didn't expect any help, that's 
 the curious part of it. I knew that the ice must be 
 two or three feet thick, and I remembered that the 
 gang had no axe handy, and I had no notion that my 
 voice would carry through the ice. 
 
 201 
 
TJie Greater America 
 
 " ' I don't know how long I hung there and went 
 through all this useless circus, but after a long, long 
 while I heard a faint tap, tap. I thought it must be 
 inside my head, but I yelled some more. And after 
 another century or so, it seemed as if a pale patch of 
 light was coming through the ice into the black dark- 
 ness above me. The tappings sounded nearer, and 
 I guessed that the boys had located me and were try- 
 ing to get at me by digging at the ice with their 
 knives. 
 
 " ' I was numb and dead all over by this time, and 
 had lost all feeling of cold or pain, although my neck 
 was straining nearly double, like a busted hinge, to 
 keep my mouth clear of the water. I was near the 
 end of my rope. I knew I could hold out only sec- 
 onds longer, and I tried to yell again. This time I 
 got an answer. I could hear voices over my head 
 and I understood they were telling me to keep up 
 courage and hold on and they would get me out. 
 
 The news came too late to brace me up. I felt 
 calm and clear-headed and faced death without any 
 more thought of fighting it. I was sure the boys 
 could not reach me in time, for my arm was slipping 
 again and my legs were too far gone to hold me up 
 against the current. I tried to figure out how much 
 longer It would take to get through the remainder of 
 the ice, but It seemed hopeless. 
 
 " ' So I said good-by to each of the boys, though T 
 couldn't see them — but they could hear me. I told 
 
 202 
 
A Breath from Alaska 
 
 them that in my clothes bag I had a httle sack of 
 gold-dust which they were to send back to my wife in 
 the States, and I sent a message to her. Then I went 
 off to sleep, and had a few mixed-up thoughts of 
 home and one thing or another, such as you float away 
 into dreamland with, and I thought I heard the tap- 
 ping and digging again, but it was all very faint and 
 far away.' 
 
 " That was the end of Charlie Wilkins," concluded 
 Gordon, " until he came to with a jolt of raw alcohol 
 surging through his system like a prairie fire." 
 
 203 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 ALONG PACIFIC WATER-FRONTS 
 
 The steam-schooner, a vessel whose build and habits 
 are peculiar to the Pacific, often goes to sea " with 
 her load-line over her hatch." Which means, that 
 after her hold has been crammed with cargo, a deck- 
 load of lumber is piled half way up the masts, so that 
 her skipper puts out with the water washing green 
 over his main deck, and an occasional comber frisking 
 across his battened hatches. 
 
 Along the harbor front of Seattle runs the story 
 of a passenger who loped down to the wharf in a 
 hurry to get aboard a departing steam-schooner. He 
 balanced himself on the stringpiece for an instant, 
 looked down at what little he could see of the laden 
 craft, and hove his grip-sack down the only opening 
 in sight. He was about to dive after it when a 
 lounger on the wharf shouted : 
 
 " Hi, there ! Where do you think you're jumpin' 
 to ? That's the smoke-stack you tossed your baggage 
 down." 
 
 " What ! " gasped the passenger, " I thought it 
 was the hatch." 
 
 The yarn has a slight flavor of exaggeration, 
 but it may serve to hint that the commerce of the 
 Pacific has ways of its own. Until recently another 
 
 204 
 
Along Pacific Water-Fronts 
 
 distinctive feature of this shipping was that there 
 seemed so very little of it for so vastly much water. 
 Six years ago I crossed the Pacific, bound out of San 
 Francisco for China. The Stars and Stripes had 
 been in the Philippines for two years, and much big 
 talk was stirring about "American expansion" toward 
 the Orient. But even then such dreams had no more 
 than begun to materialize. 
 
 That expanse of ocean seemed as empty of shipping 
 as when Sir Francis Drake crossed it in chase of the 
 galleons of Spain, three centuries ago. We steamed 
 three weeks without sighting sail or smoke. Our 
 vessel was the Rio Janeiro, an ancient iron kettle 
 which would have been rated as hardly fast enough 
 or stanch enough for the coastwise passenger trade 
 between New York and Florida. A few months 
 later she struck a rock In San Francisco harbor, 
 crumpled up like an old hat, and carried nearly two 
 hundred souls to the bottom in twenty minutes. 
 
 At that time, however, she was considered good 
 enough to be called a " Pacific liner," along with such 
 other nautical relics as the old City of Peking and the 
 Peru. The Pacific Mall had one first-class ship in 
 commission, the China. An allied company operated 
 three White Star boats, which in course of time had 
 been found too small and slow for the Atlantic pas- 
 senger service. It had been left to the Japanese to 
 fly their flag over three fine new steamers of me- 
 dium size and yacht-like smartness that plied out of 
 
 205 
 
The Greater America 
 
 San Francisco, and from Seattle the same hustling 
 Orientals had put on a regular service in connection 
 with the Great Northern Railway. 
 
 Recently revisiting the western coast, I found the 
 signs of a swift and inspiring growth, which may be 
 glimpsed in these bristling figures : 
 
 In 1897 the total tonnage of American steam ves- 
 sels engaged in the Pacific Ocean was 23,426 ; in 1905 
 it had increased to 149,685, by which time more 
 vessels in foreign trade were owned in Washington 
 than in any other State of the Union. 
 
 From Seattle now sail the magnificent steamers 
 Minnesota and Dakota, built for James J. Hill, which 
 would loom as giants on the swarming Atlantic and 
 from San Francisco steams the new fleet of majestic 
 liners of the Korea and Manchuria class, created by 
 the Pacific Mail. Out of Tacoma voyage westward 
 the new ships of the Boston Steamship Company; the 
 China Mutual Navigation Company has invaded the 
 field with a monthly line from Puget Sound to Liver- 
 pool and Glasgow, via Oriental ports, and the Ger- 
 mans are building up a new service out of Portland. 
 Besides these regular lines, unattached freighters 
 under steam and sail are hurrying to and from these 
 ports in greater fleets each year. Far to the south- 
 ward the breakwater at San Pedro stretches out a 
 mighty arm to shelter the coming squadrons of com- 
 merce. New ships are building to meet new de- 
 mands, and yet with almost every voyage the liners 
 
 206 
 
Along Pacific Water-Fronts 
 
 leave behind them waiting cargoes for which they 
 have no space, whose bulk is measured by hundreds 
 of carloads. In the first half of a recent year ten 
 ships were filled with freight left behind by steamers 
 out of Seattle and Tacoma. 
 
 Compared with what it is to be, however, this 
 traffic, like the new empire of the coast it serves, is a 
 lusty infant able to sit up and kick. The Pacific is 
 even now an ocean the richness of whose argosies will 
 be revealed to future generations and other centuries. 
 This was one of the impressions gleaned from the 
 tossing deck of a San Francisco pilot schooner cruis- 
 ing to seaward of the oldest and most populous port 
 of the long Pacific coast. I recalled the stately col- 
 umns of ocean craft that daily move past Sandy 
 Hook, homeward bound and outward bound, their 
 signal bunting fluttering the names of ports in all the 
 Seven Seas, and how on "steamer" days the liners file 
 out through the Narrows, crowding at each other's 
 agile heels, or flock in from the Atlantic, by day and 
 night, like express trains on a crowded schedule. 
 
 The pilot schooner Grade S., off the Golden Gate, 
 was not compelled to dodge any such traffic as this. 
 She might reach out to the Farallones and back to the 
 lightship, or reel hove to on the deep-bosomed Pacific 
 swell for two or three days on end without once trim- 
 ming sail to meet an incoming vessel from "blue 
 water." 
 
 This pilot service differs from that of Atlantic 
 207 
 
The Greater America 
 
 ports in that no apprentices are trained to take the 
 places of their elders. The men that cruise off the 
 Golden Gate are chosen from among the veteran 
 shipmasters who have commanded big vessels, under 
 steam and sail, in many waters of the world. There- 
 fore they know not only the harbors of their own 
 coast, but also the ways of ships and the sea at large. 
 To cruise with a crew of these pilots was to gain a 
 more vivid acquaintance with the shipping of the 
 Pacific than could be picked up in browsing along 
 water-fronts and juggling with tonnage statistics. 
 
 For it is one thing to read in the Shipping Gazette 
 that " the American ship Wanderer, a hundred and 
 thirty days from New York, was reported yesterday," 
 and quite another to have seen her backing her main 
 yard for a pilot outside the Golden Gate. First, her 
 royals lifted from the empty sea like a gleaming fleck 
 of cloud. Then one by one her foreyards climbed 
 into view until, when the snowy fabric towered clear 
 of the horizon, she was a picture of surpassing beauty 
 that stirred the imagination to recall a vanishing 
 story of one kind of commerce on the Pacific whose 
 climax was reached nearly half a century ago. 
 
 The sails of the Wanderer were patched in many 
 places, but the lines of her wooden hull were of more 
 graceful mold than can be found in the cargo carriers 
 of to-day. One of the last of the American sailing 
 ships, the Wanderer belonged with the past, just as 
 the great Pacific liner and the wallowing, wall-sided 
 
 208 
 
Along Pacific Water-Fronts 
 
 tramp foreshadow the commercial expansion of the 
 future. The time was when Cape Horn cHppers and 
 packets swept through the Golden Gate in such noble 
 fleets as have never since sailed under the American 
 flag. At the height of the gold excitement of the 
 fifties the harbor of San Francisco held more shipping 
 than have ever the ports of Liverpool or New York. 
 The present generation is apt to fancy that creating 
 a commerce on the Pacific is a new thing, for it is 
 easy to forget that it was the Pacific trade which for 
 many years pushed the Stars and Stripes to the front 
 of the merchant marine of the world, a prestige lost 
 so long ago that even its memories are fading. 
 
 Where one lonely Wanderer signals for a pilot, a 
 score of hard-driven Yankee clippers once surged in 
 from over seas. Now, when British and German 
 ships are carrying the wheat and the lumber and the 
 manufactured products of America across every ocean, 
 it sounds like a fairy tale to read of American fleets 
 which have never been excelled for speed, power and 
 beauty; of the clipper Flying Cloud, which in a fair, 
 strong breeze could run away from the steam liners 
 of her time, of the Sovereign of the Seas, the Flying 
 Fish, the Phantom, the Shooting Star, the Westward 
 Ho and the Bald Eagle, all peerless in their day. 
 
 They belonged with the time when California, 
 Australia and Oregon were first opening to trade. 
 " The merchant who could get the fastest ship had 
 the market for the fruits of the Mediterranean, for 
 
 209 
 
The Greater America 
 
 the rugs of Smyrna, for the silks of India and the 
 teas of China, and suppHed the new States of which 
 the Anglo-Saxon race was then laying the founda- 
 tions. When John Bull came floating into San Fran- 
 cisco or Sydney or Melbourne he used to find Uncle 
 Sam sitting carelessly, with his legs dangling from the 
 dock, smoking his pipe, with his cargo sold and his 
 pockets full of money. The flag of the United States 
 was a flower that adorned every port." 
 
 There is no oratorical exaggeration in this briny 
 eulogy. For example, the log of the medium clipper 
 Florence, one thousand tons, records that in a voyage 
 from Shanghai to England, in 1859, when seventeen 
 days out, she exchanged signals with the English ship 
 John Masterman, which had sailed thirteen days 
 before her. 
 
 The shining prestige of those times was due to the 
 Yankee skipper as well as the Yankee hull. They 
 carried sail and held on to their spars when foreign 
 ships were reefed down snug. It was this same 
 Florence clipper that " passed two barks under reefed 
 courses and close-reefed topsails standing the same 
 way — we with royals and topgallant studding sails." 
 
 List, ye landsmen, also, to an incident in the career 
 of the immortal Sovereign of the Seas. Built by the 
 famous Donald McKay, and sailed by his gallant 
 brother Lauchlan, she left New York for San Fran- 
 cisco in August, 1 85 1. Off Valparaiso she was al- 
 most wholly dismasted in a storm carrying away 
 
 210 
 
Along Pacific Water-Fronts 
 
 everything on the fore- and mainmasts above the 
 lower mastheads. In two weeks Captain Lauchlan 
 McKay had fitted out his crippled vessel with so mar- 
 velous a jury rig that he reached San Francisco in one 
 hundred and two days from New York, which was 
 recorded as " the best passage ever made for the 
 season." 
 
 Mostly under foreign flags, the square rigger still 
 plies the Pacific, no longer clipper built, but a bluff- 
 bowed, clumsy, fuU-waisted tank jammed full of 
 cargo, with small thought of speed. As for the 
 famous Yankee sea-skimmers, a few of them may be 
 found cut down to melancholy hulks and doing duty 
 as barges towing up and down the Pacific coast, or, 
 with spread of spars sadly reduced, tumbling slug- 
 gishly with the salmon and grain fleets, like worn-out 
 thoroughbreds impressed as cart horses. 
 
 But even the cheaply built and cheaply manned 
 steel sailing ships of the foreigner must struggle to 
 compete with the big-bellied tramp steamer. The 
 solitary Wanderer was not alone in her departing 
 glory. She was luckier than many of her sisters. As 
 our pilot schooner tacked past Sausalito, outward 
 bound, there lifted into view a fleet of a dozen rusting 
 sailing ships tucked away In a pocket of the harbor. 
 They had been laid up In costly idleness, some of 
 them for two and three years, waiting for charters. 
 Said Pilot "Jimmy" Hayes: 
 
 " I've seen twenty of these deep-water ships lying 
 
 211 
 
The Greater America 
 
 over there at one time, eating their heads off year 
 after year until you'd think their plates would rust 
 through. A while ago I took one of them to sea, a 
 German bark that had been waiting two years to 
 get a charter. The skipper had tarried so long that 
 he had sent out to Germany and fetched his old 
 mother to 'Frisco to keep him company. He told 
 me his hard-luck story: how at last he had got a 
 grain charter out of Portland and had drawn eleven 
 thousand dollars from home, all he had in the world, 
 to refit his vessel for sea. He worked on my sympa- 
 thies, telling me how near broke he was and how 
 much he had at stake, and persuaded me to let him 
 down easy on his pilotage charges. He was between 
 the devil and the deep sea, that Dutchman, and there 
 are lots more like him, only they don't bring their 
 old mothers along to make us feel sorry for them." 
 
 Awakening a different kind of sentiment was the 
 sight of an army transport signaling farewell to the 
 station at the Golden Gate as she straightened out 
 on her course for Manila. While the East has almost 
 forgotten that troops still say farewell to mothers 
 and sweethearts and wives at the transport docks, to 
 sail away to years of exile In the islands of the Orient, 
 the Pacific coast still thrills to these stirring episodes. 
 
 " I was commander of the steamer St. Paul while 
 she was a transport on the Philippine run," said Cap- 
 tain Hayes, " and I'll swear I feel the prickles up and 
 down my back to this day when I see one of those 
 
 212 
 
Along Pacific Water-Fronts 
 
 vessels leaving harbor with a regiment of soldiers 
 crowding along her rail, and the band playing, and 
 the old flag snapping in the wind. I got my first 
 thrill at Manila. I had a Tennessee regiment of 
 volunteers on board, homeward bound, at the time 
 when there was a lot of fighting in the islands. We 
 steamed out past the Olympia, as close as I dared 
 shove my ship. The band on the flagship was playing 
 the ' Star-Spangled Banner,' and every blue-jacket 
 stood at attention with his cap in his hand. The 
 thousand infantrymen on my vessel let out a yell you 
 could have heard in Manila. 
 
 " Admiral Dewey was standing on the quarter- 
 deck, and he bowed, of course. But just then the 
 flagship band swung into ' Dixie,' and our band took 
 it up, and they played it together, and, good Lord, 
 if you ever heard men really yell, it was those thou- 
 sand lads from Tennessee! The Admiral threw his 
 cap as high as he could toss it, and didn't give a hang 
 whether it came down on deck or over side. And 
 that's the way we left the Philippines. 
 
 " Why, I got a lump in my throat the other day 
 when I happened to be down on the dock to see a 
 transport start from 'Frisco. A regular regiment 
 was outward bound, and the dock was jammed with 
 folks come down to say good-by. Half the town was 
 there, as if it was something new to see a transport 
 pull out. There were cheers and tears, and just as 
 the vessel swung clear of the dock the band led off, 
 
 213 
 
The Greater America 
 
 and a thousand men in khaki sung all together, 
 ' Good-by, Little Girl, Good-by.' 
 
 " They say sailors are kind of sloppy weather when 
 it comes to sentiment, but it did beat going to hear 
 an opera just to hear those boys sing ' Good-by, Little 
 Girl, Good-by.' " 
 
 214 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 ON THE PILOT SCHOONER'S DECK 
 
 While the Grade S. was cruising off the Golden 
 Gate there was much time for yarning of ships and 
 sailors. When the wind rose and the green rollers 
 put on their bonnets of foam, a reef was tucked in 
 the mainsail of the stanch schooner, her jib hauled 
 to windward, and she lay to with no more attention 
 from her crew. Then in her little cockpit, whose 
 rail was a shelter against the spray that stormed from 
 forward, or down in the roomy cabin, the pilots three 
 smoked and talked and waited (with the large pa- 
 tience that belongs to sailors and fishermen and pros- 
 pectors) for the summons of the watch on deck to 
 " board off " when a vessel should be sighted. 
 
 There were always shifting backgrounds in har- 
 mony with the random chat that seldom veered from 
 salty topics. Sleek and dog-like seals poked their 
 heads from the lazy swells alongside, and stared 
 curiously before they ducked under again. The 
 brown and white gulls that nest on the rocky Faral- 
 lones hovered astern almost within arm's reach, or 
 swam close to the schooner's counter while they 
 waited for the cook to come on deck with a pan of 
 scraps. Pilots and seamen might bob up through the 
 
 215 
 
The Greater America 
 
 companion hatch and go below without a sign of 
 agitation among the astute gulls. But let the white 
 apron of the cook appear on deck, and there was 
 clamorous commotion among these eager and auda- 
 cious guests. A flourish of his arm made them fairly 
 hysterical with excitement, and when he tossed his 
 garbage overboard a score of gulls were flying and 
 crying around him, ready to catch the morsels the 
 instant they fell into the sea. It Is not too venture- 
 some an assertion that these Pacific gulls knew the 
 meal hours aboard the Grade S., and if breakfast was 
 late they began to protest with creaking cries and 
 impatient, fluttering flights. 
 
 Four-masted coasting schooners now and then 
 slipped into the Golden Gate, bound from Puget 
 Sound ports. They were lumber laden, and their 
 deck loads were of a top-heavy height to afflict an 
 Atlantic coasting skipper with nervous prostration. 
 They were in accord with the spirit of Pacific naviga- 
 tion, which is " to load 'em deep and take chances." 
 A big tramp, coal laden, came waddling in from 
 British Columbia. There was no more than a fine 
 sailing breeze, but when this sluggish Germanicus 
 swung in to pick her way through the North Channel, 
 the sea was slopping over her well deck fore and 
 aft. She appeared to be on the point of foundering, 
 but she was no more than making good weather of it 
 with a full cargo. 
 
 A slim black schooner, heavily sparred, and tearing 
 216 
 
On the Pilot Schooner s Deck 
 
 along like a racing yacht, slid out of the Golden 
 Gate and laid a course a little south of west. There 
 were brown-skinned sailors on her deck, and she 
 smacked of the trade winds and the South Seas. 
 
 " She's one of the few island traders left," said a 
 pilot. " There's a bit of life that's almost gone from 
 the San Francisco water-front. A dozen years ago 
 you could find the island schooners in here by the 
 dozen, the kind you read about in Stevenson's bully 
 yarn of ' The Wrecker.' But the beach-comber and 
 the Kanaka sailor and the fast schooner chock full of 
 trade for the benighted islander have slipped away 
 from the American, who didn't hustle enough to keep 
 up with the Germans. It's the Dutchmen that have 
 captured the South Sea business, just as they have 
 scuppered us in the deep-water cargo trade and 
 have made the English look sick in the race for the 
 commerce of the Orient." 
 
 The schooner bound for the Marshall Islands was 
 no sooner hull down than a French ship four months 
 out from Hamburg hove in sight, heading for the 
 light-ship. Her string of signal flags showed that she 
 wanted to talk to a pilot. The Grade S. was expect- 
 ing this stately square-rigger, because the ship's agent 
 In San Francisco had sent orders which he wished 
 delivered to the skipper before he could haul in for 
 the Golden Gate. The pilot schooner shook out a 
 reef, and sped off to meet the Frenchman. Her red- 
 capped crew was cheerily tidying ship, for port was In 
 
 217 
 
The Greater America 
 
 sight. At sight of the pilot boat they dropped their 
 tasks, and tailed on to the weather clew of the main- 
 sail. From the deck rose the hurricane voice of the 
 mate: 
 
 " Weather main brace," and then, " Let go the lee 
 main brace." 
 
 The main yard swung slowly aback, the big ship 
 lost headway, and lay waiting for the pilot, who, the 
 skipper expected, was hurrying to take him into port. 
 But alas ! the envelope delivered from the agent in 
 the San Francisco office held orders to proceed to 
 Portland to discharge her cargo. 
 
 " By Gar, it means anozzer month at sea," bawled 
 the sallow skipper, as he stamped his quarter-deck in 
 rage and disappointment. " Anozzer month of beat- 
 ing up coast, an' God knows how long waiting off 
 ze bar." 
 
 The pilot sympathized and made haste to escape. 
 Even the ship seemed to sulk. For an hour she lay 
 off the lightship, her main yard aback, before her 
 crew fell to work, and she swung slowly on her way. 
 It was easy to imagine the gloom streaked with the 
 most vivid profanity which filled the weary ship from 
 cabin to forecastle. Within sight of the Golden Gate, 
 to be ordered to sea again after months of solitary 
 wandering half around the world was like being 
 turned back at your own gate, and within sight of the 
 lights in your own home window, after a long, long 
 absence. 
 
 218 
 
The pilot boat at sea 
 
 I. Yarni'^.g in the cockpit. 2. Taking in sail. 3. On her station. 
 4. " Heave ho !" on the anchor. 
 
o 
 
On the Pilot Schooner's Deck 
 
 The disheartened wayfarer, with her splendid 
 spread of gleaming canvas, was swooping hull down 
 to the northward like a great gull, when a smudge of 
 smoke showed against the tumbling green sea to the 
 westward. 
 
 " The Siberia," cried a pilot. " I said she would 
 show up at nine o'clock this morning. It's a little 
 after eight, and she'll be abreast of the light-ship in 
 less than an hour." 
 
 His guess was right to a dot. The great liner, fit 
 type of a new era in the life of the wide Pacific, was 
 racing for home from the far-away Orient so close 
 to her schedule that her arrival could be timed as 
 accurately as if she were a transcontinental express. 
 Against another quarter of the horizon the square- 
 rigger was dropping hull down, bearing with her an 
 outlived age of romance on the sea. The liner, with 
 her trailing column of smoke, the cargo of a dozen 
 clippers stowed in her cavernous holds, and the 
 strength of ten thousand horses driving her against 
 wind and weather, brought the message of the new 
 age of the Mind in the Machine. Her giant bulk 
 lost headway, she picked up her pilot, who crawled 
 up her tall side like a fly on the wall, and five minutes 
 later the huge steel fabric was crashing through the 
 swell to finish her run into the Golden Gate, a link 
 between the oldest and newest civilizations, that lie 
 five thousand miles apart in distance but only a few 
 days in time. 
 
 219 
 
The Greater America 
 
 Captain John Wallace, now a pilot on the Grade 
 S., had seen as much of the two eras of steam and 
 sail as a man In his prime could be expected to know. 
 He first went to sea at the precocious age of six 
 months, for his mother was the wife of a down-east 
 shipmaster from Thomaston, Maine. When barely 
 out of his teens this thoroughbred Yankee seaman was 
 master of a deep-water vessel, and for eight years com- 
 manded one of the few fine big sailing ships that hail 
 from Maine. His shipmate, Captain Jimmy Hayes, 
 had been master of vessels in the Alaska trade when 
 the gold stampedes to that wonderful country were in 
 full flight. He carried the frenzied argonauts north 
 to the crowded beach of Nome, and to Skagway, 
 when many skippers were facing hazards as startling 
 as any of the perils undergone by the gold seekers. 
 For the sorriest fleet of patched and painted cofl'ins 
 that ever masqueraded as sea-going vessels was assem- 
 bled to reap the fat harvest of the Alaska coast. Any- 
 thing that would float and turn over an engine was 
 pressed into service, and the story of the North Pacific 
 includes a picturesque and tragic tally of ships that 
 had no plausible excuse for staying afloat. Even now 
 when an ancient liner drops from the list of the 
 Atlantic trade because of sheer decrepitude it is not 
 to be concluded that she has been sent to the marine 
 bone yard. Two to one she will turn up with a new 
 name and a fresh coat of paint in the Alaska trade. 
 
 One evening aboard the Grade S. the merits of 
 220 
 
On the Pilot Schooner's Deck 
 
 the Chinese and the Japanese as sailors drifted into 
 the discussion. 
 
 With a tone of profound regret in his voice, Cap- 
 tain Wallace observed : 
 
 " This boat has never been the same since Bennie 
 left. Who was Bennie? Just a wizened, cock-eyed 
 Chinaman, cook of the Grade S. for seven years. He 
 left us last cruise, just packed up his duffle and went 
 ashore. All Chinamen look alike to you, eh? Well, 
 that's because you didn't know Bennie. He was a 
 down-east, New England Chinaman. Old Captain 
 Scribner, a Maine skipper, picked Bennie up when he 
 was six years old and raised him by hand. He grew 
 up as good an American as you ever clapped eyes on. 
 He could pull a rope, stand a trick at the wheel, work 
 fifteen hours a day and cook like a wizard. We 
 couldn't get along without him, and then he up and 
 quit us because the Scandinavian foremast hands made 
 some remarks about his grub. His cooking was too 
 good for them, that was the matter. Bennie stood it 
 a little while, and then came to me and told me that 
 he liked Yankees, because he was one of us, and 
 would stand anything we had a mind to say about his 
 menu, but he'd be jiggered if he'd stand any observa- 
 tions from those foreigners forward, meaning the 
 * square-heads.' " 
 
 " That's right, Johnny," broke in Captain Hayes; 
 " Chinamen are good men afloat, but I haven't much 
 use for Japs. Why, I took in a Maru boat the other 
 
 221 
 
The Greater America 
 
 day, and the chief engineer, who was an Englishman, 
 was giving me his opinion of Japs as sailors. He 
 had the evidence to back it up, too. We know they're 
 slow and lazy, but did you know that they're man- 
 eaters? This engineer was all bandaged up. He 
 said the back of his hands and the front of his legs 
 were chewed up as if a menagerie had broken adrift 
 in the cargo. There had been a lively scrap in the fire 
 room, and when he sailed in to clear the place, his 
 Jap stokers and trimmers turned on him and chewed 
 him up, according to their own style of fighting. 
 Now wouldn't that make you sick Men calling 
 themselves sailors with habits like that ! " 
 
 I asked for tales of personal adventure and was Ill- 
 rewarded, for men who live amid strong and hazard- 
 ous deeds are not easily led to talk about themselves. 
 
 " We have some rough times off here in the win- 
 ter," said Captain Hayes, " when the southeasterly 
 gales blow up. It isn't freezing weather, like Atlantic 
 cruising, but It blows hard enough to break the light- 
 ship adrift every winter or so, and she manages to 
 clear Race Point somehow when she blows to the 
 northward. She'll go ashore some time and there'll 
 be a lively story for you. Which reminds me of the 
 time when the reporter asked Gus, the Norwegian 
 foremast hand, for an adventure story. 
 
 " ' I vas upset sometimes In de yawl, boarding off 
 steamers in bad wedder,' said Gus, willing to oblige. 
 ' Last vinter de yawl turned over und de udder feller 
 
 222 
 
On the Pilot Schooner's Deck 
 
 vas drownded. I vas in de vater an hour, und I got 
 pooty vet. Dot's all, I tink.' 
 
 " Seafaring life on this coast isn't so much what 
 you get into as what you manage to steer clear of," 
 Captain Hayes continued. " The pilots and ship- 
 masters are blamed for a lot of disasters, but there's 
 two sides to the question. San Francisco harbor, for 
 example, is a mean place to handle a vessel. The 
 currents shift over night and the fog shuts down like 
 a blanket. Then we have to smell our way and often 
 steer by the echo of the fog whistles against the rocks, 
 and steering by echoes isn't all plain sailing, if you've 
 ever tried it. Why don't we anchor and wait? fVe 
 do, but it's often against the wishes of the shipmaster, 
 and back of him is the owner, crazy to take chances 
 and make time. Most ships lost along the Pacific 
 coast go ashore because the master is hugging the 
 points and doubling the headlands instead of giving 
 himself plenty of sea room, all to gain a little time 
 and save a few tons of coal. 
 
 " And I've taken many a steamer to sea when her 
 compasses were no more use for steering by than a 
 cat's tail in the dark. Her owner had given the skip- 
 per no time to swing his ship in port and adjust his 
 compasses, and he went blundering out to sea, shaving 
 the coast, his compass behaving like a drunken sailor. 
 Then when he loses his ship, he's most likely 
 ruined for life, if he's lucky enough to escape 
 being drowned." 
 
 223 
 
The Greater America 
 
 *' Right you are, Jimmy," said Captain Wallace. 
 " And folks ashore think the compass always points 
 north and south. If they want to signify the straight, 
 honest goods, they'll say ' true as the needle to the 
 pole.' As a matter of fact, the compass points almost 
 any other old way by preference. Think of all the 
 kinks you have to look out for. For instance, do you 
 know there is less compass deviation aboard a steel 
 ship if she's laid down north and south in the building 
 yard? It's true. Her hull becomes magnetized by 
 the pounding of the riveters on her plates. This 
 wears out of a ship in time. I once boarded a new 
 steel steamer, and her captain said, while he was 
 showing me his compasses: 
 
 " ' She's getting better all the time. It will wear 
 out of her in two or three more voyages. If she'd 
 laid down east and west, the deflection would be much 
 worse.' You might have thought he was telling me 
 about a horse he was breaking to harness. Funny, 
 isn't it?" 
 
 " Yes," said Captain Jimmy, " it's one more nut 
 for the poor shipmaster to crack. It's bad enough 
 to have to allow for deviation caused by cargo. Even 
 coal has played the devil with lots of compasses and 
 wrecked more than one fine vessel on this coast. 
 There's enough iron in several thousand tons of coal 
 to get on the nerves of the compass, and I once saw 
 a ship get clean off her course because the man at the 
 wheel had a jackknife in his pocket." 
 
 224 
 
On the Pilot Schooner s Deck 
 
 Within the last half century hundreds of stout 
 vessels have piled up on the rocky heads between 
 Puget Sound and San Diego, many of them over- 
 loaded and undermanned. Contrasted with this black 
 record is the story of the pilot schooner of the 
 Golden Gate, which is almost the last of her kind. 
 She has already vanished from the offing of New 
 York harbor and the Delaware Capes, where steam 
 has retired these stout-hearted little vessels. Through 
 the storms of two generations, while big ships and 
 steamers were adding their names to the list of Pacific 
 disasters, these schooners have fought through heavy 
 weather and clawed off lee shores. 
 
 Only two of them have been lost since the fleets 
 of the Cape Horn clippers brought them into being. 
 Five years ago the Bonita was rammed by a whale 
 while at sea, and the sternpost ripped out of her. 
 Her crew had barely time to pitch their yawls over 
 and escape with what they stood in before she went 
 to the bottom. Thirty years ago, the Caleb Cushing 
 capsized while crossing the bar in a southeast gale. 
 She turned over end for end and all hands were lost 
 in this fatal somersault. Neither disaster could be 
 blamed to poor seamanship or lack of stanchness in 
 the lost vessels. They are examples of honest ship- 
 building to-day. It was the Grade S. that missed 
 stays in a strong tide, and crashed fourteen feet into 
 a San Francisco wharf without starting a plank of 
 her hull. As for the seas that break over the bar 
 
 225 
 
The Greater America 
 
 when big winds blow and the pilot schooners are 
 scudding for home, Captain Jimmy Hayes can tell 
 you stories like this : 
 
 " I was taking out a big English tramp when there 
 was some weather on the bar. Three seas broke clean 
 over her bridge. The captain and the mate took to 
 the rigging and left me by my lonesome. I couldn't 
 persuade 'em to come down from their perches until 
 we were in the channel again. They swore the ves- 
 sel was foundering. They looked kind of ridiculous 
 spraddled out in the shrouds. Yes, it's a bad bar at 
 times." 
 
 When all three pilots had forsaken the Grade S. 
 to board the vessels they were seeking, the little 
 schooner was left in charge of her grizzled boat- 
 keeper, who had sailed in these craft for more than 
 thirty years. We headed homeward with a fair wind 
 and slipped past the rugged portals of the Golden 
 Gate into one of the fairest harbors in all the world. 
 The greatest city of the Far West was purpled in 
 twilight that shadowed its protecting hills. Along 
 the water-front were clustered the spars and stacks 
 of vessels loading for the ports of the Orient, Alaska, 
 the South Seas and Hawaii. 
 
 And beyond the wharves and the city stretched the 
 unseen railroads, fighting the most dramatic indus- 
 trial conflict of to-day for the victors' share of the 
 Pacific commerce that bulks so big in reckoning with 
 the future of American enterprise. Half a century 
 
 226 
 
On the Pilot Schooner's Deck 
 
 ago William H. Seward read the signs aright when 
 he said: 
 
 " The Pacific Ocean, with its shores, its islands and 
 the vast region beyond will become the chief theater 
 of events in the world's great hereafter." 
 
 Building fleets is only one factor in the present 
 struggle for expansion. Far back of the firing line 
 are the leaders of the opposing forces, James J. Hill 
 and E. H. Harriman. They have spent half a billion 
 dollars in a decade. They have rebuilt the trans- 
 continental railway system, and their competition has 
 reduced freight rates thirty per cent. They have 
 made cities, bridged seas, tunneled mountains, and 
 achieved feats of engineering and executive daring 
 unequaled in industrial development. Mr. Hill has 
 said of his controlling ambition: 
 
 " I have been charged with everything, from being 
 an ' Oriental dreamer ' to a crank, but I am ready at 
 all times to plead guilty to any intelligent effort within 
 my power that will result in getting new markets for 
 what we produce in the northwestern country." 
 
 He has made his dreams come true. Seattle was 
 a straggling seaside town when he put his railroad 
 into it. Since that time the Puget Sound ports have 
 become mighty rivals of San Francisco for ocean 
 traffic, and the older city at the Golden Gate has seen 
 them increase their tonnage by leaps and bounds, 
 and at her expense. 
 
 If you would be Impressed by a final proof that 
 227 
 
The Greater America 
 
 the dreamers of yesterday are the builders of to-day, 
 you should see one of J. J. Hill's new steamers 
 loading for Japan and China and Manila, and then 
 recall the kind of liners that were on the Pacific a few 
 years ago. The Minnesota or Dakota swallows 
 thirty thousand tons of cargo, which is the burden 
 of five hundred freight cars. They carry three thou- 
 sand passengers when the lists are full. Their ton- 
 nage is twenty-two thousand, or six thousand tons 
 greater than any other vessel in the Pacific trade. 
 And looking a little further backward, one finds that 
 the Minnesota is almost twenty times larger than the 
 far-famed clipper of the age of sail, whose titanic 
 heir she is to the commerce of the Pacific. 
 
 A century ago a Salem bark of only two hundred 
 tons (a hundred of her 'like could be stowed in the 
 holds of the Minnesota or Dakota) made one of the 
 first voyages around the Horn to the new Northwest 
 coast. She mounted eight guns, and her cargo con- 
 sisted of " broadcloth, flannel, blankets, powder, mus- 
 kets, watches, tools, beads and looking-glasses," for 
 trading with the painted natives. On a recent voy- 
 age the Minnesota carried to the Orient seventy loco- 
 motives, more than a hundred railway cars, ten 
 thousand kegs of wire nails, and half a million dol- 
 lars' worth of hardware, machinery, flour and other 
 products of the mills, the mines, the farms and the 
 factories, that, even from the far-away Atlantic coast, 
 seek new outlets toward the setting sun. 
 
 228 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 TWENTIETH CENTURY ARGONAUTS 
 
 Forty gold dredgers working in the heart of the 
 storied land of the Forty-niner! 
 
 There could be no more melodramatic contrast 
 between Past and Present, between the age of Man 
 and the age of the Machine. 
 
 Then, the hardy argonauts with hearts of oak, who 
 toiled and sweated and roistered and starved in the 
 Sacramento Valley and the Sierras, packing their gold 
 pans and rockers on their backs; now, the huge ma- 
 chine, devastating, incredibly industrious, that makes 
 play of doing the work of hundreds of men in a day. 
 
 The argonauts skimmed the cream of the placer 
 diggings and spent their gold and died. After them 
 came hordes of Chinese, who reaped a second harvest 
 from the same country. Hydraulic mining followed, 
 and had its era, and then placer mining seemed a dying 
 industry in the region Bret Harte peopled for the joy 
 of nations with such heroic figures as Jack Oakhurst 
 and Colonel Starbottle. The gold seekers turned to 
 other fields afar, to the Klondike and South Africa; 
 and the famous old-time placer camps of Stanislaus, 
 Yuba, Calaveras and Oroville slumped into a pictur- 
 esque and melancholy dilapidation. They belonged 
 with a brave and splendid history. 
 
 229 
 
The Greater America 
 
 Around them for miles and miles was strewn the 
 wreckage left by those early placer miners, a country 
 dotted with heaps of stone and gravel, pitted with 
 raw scars, a landscape ravaged and unsightly, yet 
 dignified, in a certain measure, by the memories of 
 the elemental manhood that had dared and labored 
 with strong arms, and left its sons to build up this 
 western empire. 
 
 In those days flat-bottomed steamers scraped their 
 way up the Sacramento, far above the city of that 
 name, slid into the Feather River, and managed to 
 go as far as Orovllle. This town, in the shadow 
 of the Sierra Nevadas, when left stranded by the 
 decay of placer mining, suffered yet another Invasion, 
 before there came a generation of slumber, and then, 
 in these days, a clamorous invasion by the fleet of 
 gold dredgers. In the early sixties, the Chinese 
 swarmed down to pan and rock for gold, until ten 
 thousand of these alien Invaders were slaving in the 
 fields and canons and creek bottoms around the town. 
 The straight American breed was not only outnum- 
 bered, it was almost submerged. But at length the 
 plague of pig-tailed miners with the blue blouses 
 passed on when they could no longer wash out enough 
 " color " to satisfy their singularly modest demands, 
 and the average on-looker would naturally have sup- 
 posed that whatever gold the Chinese left behind 
 was not worth the attention of any white man outside 
 a padded cell. 
 
 230 
 
Twentieth Century Argonauts 
 
 Oroville discovered that the only natural asset not 
 torn to pieces by the hunt for gold was the climate, 
 and began to plant orange and olive groves, and turn 
 itself into as conservative and respectable a commu- 
 nity as you could find on the map. The green groves 
 spread among the pits and stone piles, and slowly the 
 country took on a verdant and pleasing aspect, and 
 the quiet industry of the fruit farmer was hiding the 
 wounds left by the gold seeker. 
 
 Less than ten years ago, however, an amazing 
 thing happened to Oroville, beside which those earlier 
 Invasions were of the kindergarten order. Employ- 
 ing huge power dredging machines to extract gold 
 from ground already worked over had been tried 
 many years before In Montana. It failed there for 
 lack of sufficient mechanical Ingenuity. Earlier even 
 than that, half a century ago. Inventors were dream- 
 ing and working at the problem, and the rusting skele- 
 tons of their failures are scattered over California 
 and New Zealand. There Is even report of a dredge 
 that failed on the Feather River near Oroville while 
 the argonauts were In their heyday. And It was at 
 Oroville, In 1896, that the first successful operation 
 on a large scale had Its beginning. 
 
 Now, thirty of these monsters are making hash 
 of the landscape within eight miles of the town, and 
 more are building. 
 
 Unless you have seen them at work, the gold 
 dredger does not convey much that Is of striking and 
 
 231 
 
The Greater America 
 
 impressive interest. You couple it in your mind with 
 the squalid and grimy harbor and river steam dredg- 
 ers, which fail to inspire a thrill in the most morbidly 
 imaginative observer. Compared with these, how- 
 ever, the gold ship is as a thoroughbred to a cart 
 horse, or a liner to a coal schooner. 
 
 It does things which no machine built by man has 
 any business doing. It is a huge vessel afloat, of the 
 imposing height and bulk of a Mississippi River 
 packet; a regiment of troops could be massed on its 
 decks. Yet it is not built on the river, it is never 
 launched, and you may find one working five miles 
 from the nearest navigable stream, yes, even in the 
 middle of an orange grove whose only pretense to 
 water transportation is an irrigating ditch. 
 
 This vessel, so big and towering that its upper 
 works can be seen across miles of open country, is 
 distinctly a nautical paradox to the verge of absurdity. 
 When the capitalist behind one of these enterprises 
 wishes to invest from $50,000 to $80,000 to add a 
 new dredge to his fleet (for this is not a poor man's 
 game), the construction force begins the operation 
 by digging an immense hole in the ground, called the 
 " pit," located in the middle of the area which is to 
 be dredged for gold. In this excavation the hull of 
 the vessel is built, resting on the bottom. Then her 
 upper works are added, and her powerful electric 
 machinery and dredging apparatus installed. 
 
 So far the process is like that of building a factory, 
 232 
 
Twentieth Century Argonauts 
 
 minus the cellar. When the vessel is ready to be 
 *' launched," if you may call it such, a ditch is opened 
 from the nearest water supply — a little ditch at that, 
 not much bigger than the kind one jumps across in 
 a country field. The water fills the pond, until the 
 ungainly craft is floating, and she needs only three 
 feet of water for her extraordinary purposes. 
 
 A heavy copper cable, buoyed on floats, writhes 
 from the bank to her interior. There is no boiler, 
 no smokestack, no fireman, no engines to speak of. 
 She is a craft of surprises at every turn. She haS bor- 
 rowed the water to float herself. She takes the power 
 to operate her machinery from mountain streams 
 forty miles away in the Sierras. The electric current 
 thus generated is not alone for the dredgers. It 
 is carried two hundred miles farther, and turns the 
 factory wheels of San Francisco, and even down to 
 San Jose. And because man has solved the problem 
 of transmitting the strength of thousands of horses 
 from waterfalls, over hundreds of miles, man is 
 almost eliminated from these gold dredgers. 
 
 Over a great arm of timbers and steel, lowered to 
 the bottom of the little pond, revolves an endless row 
 of steel buckets. The edges of these buckets bite 
 into the clay, the gravel and the sand, and this real 
 estate is fed into a hopper which sends it along for 
 treatment. 
 
 As the dredger eats its way into the bank ahead. 
 It hitches its bulk along and thus makes more room 
 
 233 
 
The Greater America 
 
 for itself. In time the muddy pit may stretch away 
 into a canal, perhaps a half mile long, in which the 
 dredger advances, chews up the landscape, turns 
 and digs another canal parallel with its first track, 
 as it seeks the earth worth its while to pick up and 
 digest. 
 
 The havoc wrought is fairly staggering. The 
 earth is washed from the stones as the debris passes 
 through the vessel, and these stones, in size from a 
 pebble to a bowlder, are spewed out from the other 
 end of the machine until they are piled into great 
 windrows and hills thirty and forty feet high — gaunt, 
 bald ranges of stone on which nothing can ever grow. 
 No contrivance of man blasts a landscape more 
 utterly. 
 
 Thus devouring earth and spitting out rock, the 
 dredger moves across the face of the land. She 
 picks up two thousand cubic yards of earth every day, 
 and the weight of it is five thousand tons, a cargo for 
 a large ocean steamer. This five thousand tons is 
 taken aboard, the gold extracted, and every bit of 
 the earth and stone put overboard again, by a crew 
 of — fifty men? No, only three men are required to 
 operate this monster, three men and a " boss," three 
 shifts a day, with helpers, a dozen men all told, to 
 keep the gold ship working twenty-four hours a day, 
 three hundred and sixty-four days a year, for Christ- 
 mas is the only day on which the vessel is idle, except 
 for repairs. 
 
 234 
 
Twentieth Century Argonauts 
 
 Of these three men, one stands In what may be 
 called the pilot house on the hurricane deck, and 
 handles a set of levers and two electric controllers 
 like those of the motorman of a trolley car. In this 
 easy fashion he sends the great dredging arm bur- 
 rowing deeper, or farther ashore, and moves the 
 vessel to keep pace with the work. Timber anchor- 
 ages, called " spuds," hold her in position fore and 
 aft, and wire cables lead from shore to geared drums 
 aboard, so that the craft pulls herself into a new 
 position whenever needed. 
 
 The second man looks after matters in the machin- 
 ery between decks, and a third man hovers around as 
 an extra hand, although he Is not needed In the actual 
 operation of the ship. 
 
 Here you see a rare triumph of labor-saving inge- 
 nuity, yet the gold saving Is far more remarkable 
 a feat. A cubic yard of earth, gravel and stones 
 weighs nearly one and a half tons. The average 
 value of the gold taken from this mass of earth in 
 the Orovllle district Is seventeen cents. That Is to 
 say, to extract one dollar's worth of gold, between 
 eight and nine tons of real estate must be screened 
 and washed. 
 
 Now, one cubic yard, or ton and a half, of earth. 
 Is a large mass, how large you may gain some notion 
 by recalling what a ton of coal looks like. The 
 seventeen cents' worth of gold in It is not all in one 
 piece. Even if it were, It would bulk about one-sixth 
 
The Greater America 
 
 of the size of one of those wee gold dollars that were 
 withdrawn from circulation because when a man 
 received one he was never quite sure whether he had 
 it with him or not. 
 
 This tiny amount of gold is scattered through the 
 earth and stones in particles so fine that a breath will 
 often blow them from the palm of your hand. Their 
 average size is — well, they just miss being smaller 
 than anything — not mustard seed, because they are 
 flat and thin like tiny scales. 
 
 Now, when you divide an amount of gold one- 
 sixth the size of a gold dollar into a large number of 
 fractions, and hide these almost infinitesimal bits in 
 a cartload of earth, finding the proverbial needle in a 
 haystack becomes child's play. On a somewhat larger 
 scale, imagine sifting eight tons of coal over a screen 
 until one gold dollar drops through in installments. 
 
 When the avalanche of dripping earth and stones 
 thunders through the hopper, it falls upon a series 
 of steel screens frequently perforated with holes about 
 the size of a lead pencil. Many jets of water, under 
 pressure from a pump below, drive into the mass of 
 debris, which is in violent agitation because the screens 
 are shaking to and fro with much rapidity. The 
 stones, smooth and rounded by glacial wear and tear, 
 do a devil's dance, tons of them at once, while the 
 earth and the smallest gravel are washed through 
 the screens. 
 
 Inasmuch as only a small part of the material is 
 236 
 
Twentieth Century Argonauts 
 
 shaken through, the stone becomes refuse. It roars 
 down across the screens, and tumbles on to an endless 
 belt moving in a trough, and marches up, up a long 
 arm at the stern of the vessel until it tumbles on the 
 heap of waste material which grows into one of the 
 young mountains of stone that are murdering the 
 Oroville landscape. 
 
 Once through the screens, the material saved is 
 caught up in a flood of water that surges down over 
 a row of sluices. These sluices or inclines are crossed 
 by many bars of wood and metal, called " riffles," 
 which are loaded with mercury as a bait to catch the 
 coy flakes of gold. 
 
 Gravity is the engineer In charge here, As by a 
 miracle, these tiny particles settle In this seething 
 torrent of water, and nestle against the " riffles," there 
 to stay until the monthly " clean-up." This part of 
 it Is the old placer-mining process expanded to meet 
 these new conditions. 
 
 Freed of Its gold, the water races down to flow into 
 the pond through a " tail sluice," and is used over 
 and over again by this highly economical craft. 
 
 It Is an easy matter to reckon that by handling 
 2,000 yards of earth a day one of these dredgers will 
 hold on to $640 worth of gold every twenty-four 
 hours. It is a lesson In the value of little things that 
 would have delighted the author of " Poor Richard's 
 Almanac." The owners of these plants work them 
 to the limit of their capacity In order to extract the 
 
 237 
 
The Greater America 
 
 profits demanded. If a dredger stops working five 
 minutes for repairs, the stop is logged by the fore- 
 man, and if there are many of these pauses in the 
 month, the superintendent is apt to ask for explana- 
 tions. It is a breathless race for gold, seemingly as 
 frenzied in its way as the headlong rush for a Klon- 
 dike field. Machinery is not built that can stand such 
 high-pressure strain without rest, and many and costly 
 have been the breakdowns in these greedy craft. 
 
 My first glimpse of this quest of gold by twentieth 
 century methods was by night, with the general man- 
 ager of one of the largest companies operating. I 
 drove through a starlit evening to the Garden Ranch 
 dredger, five miles out of Oroville, and five miles 
 from the river. By the roadside were dusky rows of 
 orange trees, the homes of farmer and fruit grower 
 were half hidden in shade trees, and the smell of 
 roses blooming out-of-doors In late October was in 
 the air. 
 
 The scenes were sweetly rural, with the semi- 
 tropical charm of this sun-bathed California valley. 
 
 After a while there gleamed through orderly rows 
 of orange trees a blaze of electric illumination, as if a 
 bit of Coney Island had been broken oft and tossed 
 into this far corner. Drawing nearer, the incon- 
 gruous dazzle outlined the broad-beamed bulk and 
 extended arms of the dredger, a strange sight in the 
 night for such a background. One hundred and fifty 
 candle-power lights bedecked it, and the crew stood 
 
 238 
 
Twentieth Century Argonauts 
 
 out black against this fierce illumination. Daylight 
 could have been no brighter. 
 
 The vessel floated in a pond just big enough to 
 hold her. Ahead was the orange grove she was 
 devouring. Astern of her the debris of stone was 
 heaped higher than her decks. It was impossible to 
 help asking, "How on earth did she get there?" 
 " Oh, she was built and floated several hundred yards 
 back of where she is now," was the explanation. " As 
 she's worked forward, the waste has been thrown off 
 behind her, so she's covered up her tracks. All the 
 water we need is just what you see around her, this 
 little mud-hole of a pond. An Irrigation ditch gives 
 us all the water we need." 
 
 Clamorous, untiring, eating land by night as well 
 as day, the dredger tugged at her moorings, her deck 
 heaving to the power of her exertions, until, out here 
 in the mysterious night, it were not overfanclful to 
 think of her as incarnate with the spirit of the age that 
 can create such things as these. 
 
 As we drove townward, the road lifted to a hill- 
 top, beyond which the quiet country unfolded for a 
 long distance. There were no lights in the houses by 
 the road, and the town was not yet visible, but against 
 the starry horizon gleamed a line of brilliant lights in 
 clusters. They stretched away in a dimming belt for 
 five miles. One was reminded of a procession of big 
 excursion steamers passing up river after dark. These 
 were the lights of the gold ships, a squadron taking 
 
 239 
 
The Greater America 
 
 new wealth from the soil, an up-to-date argosy under 
 the American flag. 
 
 Next day I visited several of these craft, scattered 
 over thousands of acres of land, most of which was 
 valuable for fruit growing until the gold fleet came. 
 Now the dredge companies own about 5,500 acres 
 in the Oroville district, and will buy about two thou- 
 sand acres more that have been prospected. 
 
 Calculating that this area will be worked to a 
 depth of ten yards, it is estimated that these 7,500 
 acres will yield a little more than sixty million dollars 
 in gold. In the Folsom district of Sacramento 
 County, where eight dredgers are now at work, the 
 probable yield for the 5,000 acres controlled will be 
 forty million dollars. 
 
 There is another side to this glittering picture. 
 These 7,500 acres around Oroville, in the orange 
 belt, will be ruined for all purposes and for all time. 
 They will be destroyed as effectively as if an earth- 
 quake dropped them into the bowels of the earth. 
 The Gould transcontinental line from Salt Lake is 
 pushing its construction through the Oroville district. 
 Competition for freight traffic with the Southern 
 Pacific will lower rates for the fruit growers, and 
 increase the productive value of their land. I have 
 seen regions in this western country, far less favored 
 by nature, in which irrigated land had reached a 
 value of a thousand dollars an acre for fruit 
 growing. It is therefore not impossible that the 
 
 240 
 
Twentieth Century Argonauts 
 
 next generation of dwellers in the Oroville dis- 
 trici may bitterly regret that their fathers sold their 
 acres to the gold dredgers. 
 
 But the gold seekers, as has been their habit always, 
 think not of the morrow. They will devour until no 
 more remains, and then move on to fresher fields, 
 leaving wreckage in their wake. Hydraulic mining 
 in California was at length killed by process of law, 
 for the very reasons mentioned. But your gold miner, 
 whether he toils at rocker or ground sluice or from 
 his offices in New York and San Francisco urges his 
 eighty-thousand-dollar dredger to strain for greater 
 output, reckons not with the future. His view-point 
 is somewhat akin to that of the lumberman of Wash- 
 ington and Oregon who sweeps through the primeval 
 forest like a whirlwind, and leaves a vast wreckage 
 behind him. Wealth is in the present tense, and " the 
 sooner the quicker," is the motto of such enterprising 
 Americans as these. 
 
 The gold dredgers may be right. Perhaps the 
 gold is worth more than the land will ever be. This 
 is for the future to solve. The observation of another 
 stranger in Oroville when first he surveyed the trail 
 of the gold ships Is not out of place or open to 
 argument : 
 
 " Now ain't they kicking up the unadulterated 
 dickens of a muss ! " 
 
 When you think that this bold quality of American 
 Inventive talent has been able to devise machinery 
 
 241 
 
The Greater America 
 
 that makes it profitable to extract ten cents' worth 
 of gold from a ton of earth, the enterprise becomes 
 one of the romances of American industry; even 
 if lives were not risked in the quest, capital gambled 
 against huge hazards, and dashingly played for big 
 stakes. Hundreds of thousands were thrown away 
 in dredgers that failed. Even now, many problems 
 are not out of the experimental woods. In New 
 Zealand, for example, twenty dredgers were built 
 fifteen years ago, at a cost of nearly $20,000 each, 
 and proved failures. New talent made the attempt 
 and succeeded, until now more than three hundred 
 dredgers are digging for gold in New Zealand. 
 
 Near Oroville, on a noble height, overlooking the 
 Feather River, there is a home for ancient and dis- 
 abled Odd Fellows. The Butte dredger Is not far 
 away, and on the road to it you cross a mountain 
 brook that winds amid many placer piles left by the 
 " old-timers." One of these fine old Odd Fellows 
 is a miner of the days of the argonauts, and he is not 
 content to pass his latter days in idleness. So at the 
 edge of the brook he has built him a rude shack of 
 the type he learned to make in these valleys a half 
 century ago. Under this shelter he has planted a 
 gold rocker, and the simple kit of the California 
 pioneer gold seeker. Here you can find him digging 
 gravel from a near-by bank, lugging it up to his 
 rocker by the brook and washing out a little gold for 
 a prodigious amount of labor. With good luck, he 
 
 242 
 
Tlie shack of the Forty-niner 
 
 A monster that makes hash of the landscape 
 
Twentieth Century Argonauts 
 
 may clean up fifty cents a day. He no longer has 
 to earn his bread that way. He does it because he 
 Hkes to. His shack is a picture such as you must 
 travel far to find in the California of to-day. From 
 his rocker, the old miner can hear the gold dredge 
 grumbling and clanking as it chews up and spits out 
 live thousand tons of " pay dirt " every twenty-four 
 hours. Past and Present are neighbors here. 
 
 243 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 WHERE RANCH AND CITY MEET 
 
 Nowhere can old and new American conditions be 
 found, side by side, in more picturesquely impressive 
 contrast than in that sunny corner of the Pacific Coast 
 which is dominated by the spirit of Los Angeles. The 
 city itself is a display of almost cyclonic enterprise, 
 prosperity, and expansion, which have safely weath- 
 ered the perilous enthusiasms of the " boomer " and 
 the " booster." 
 
 A foreign observer seeking the typical American 
 spirit working at high pressure could do no better 
 than to sit and " watch Los Angeles grow." This 
 sounds a trifle like a real estate advertisement, but It 
 Is meant only as a passing tribute to a city which has 
 outstripped every other American city through the 
 last decade, in the rate of Its Increase in building 
 operations, property values, and population. 
 
 Our observer would not have to dig out the facts 
 and figures. They would be hurled at him by every 
 other son of this magical city, and with an air of pride 
 which makes your thorough-going western man dis- 
 tinctive. He boils over with loyalty and belief In the 
 ultimate destiny of his particular town from his boot- 
 heels up, and whether It be Spokane or Portland or 
 
 244 
 
Where Ranch and City Meet 
 
 Los Angeles, he feels that his individual fortune is 
 vitally bound up in the future of his community. 
 
 Can you imagine a committee of citizens of an 
 eastern town setting in operation a plan whereby all 
 the boys and girls in the public schools pledge them- 
 selves that whenever they write a letter to friends or 
 relatives " back East," they will include mention of 
 the charms of climate and the allurements of material 
 prosperity to be found in their community and State? 
 This was one item in a recent " Boosters' Club " 
 campaign In Spokane, and it is mentioned here to 
 illustrate the spirit which is common to these coast 
 cities. 
 
 Los Angeles is unique because it has become a city 
 of two hundred thousand souls with a cheerful dis- 
 regard of the laws of growth which are presumed to 
 have a hand in upbuilding important commercial and 
 distributing centers. Its back country is still unde- 
 veloped. Its shipping is in its infancy, and its manu- 
 factures are as yet a minor factor. These things have 
 made it the prodigy among American cities — climate, 
 trolley lines, advertising. At first glimpse, this does 
 not look like a stable foundation, yet Los Angeles 
 continues to grow and to turn the laugh on the 
 prophets who have wailed that such expansion was 
 top-heavy by the very nature of things. 
 
 Now this city of massive hotels and business blocks 
 and beautiful homes, with an interurban electric rail- 
 way system which makes eastern enterprise seem crude 
 
 245 
 
The Greater America 
 
 and primitive, has risen from a half -Mexican pueblo 
 of ten thousand people in less than a generation. Fig- 
 ures are bald and unromantic, but let us deal with a 
 few and have done with them. Los Angeles has more 
 automobiles and telephones per head than any other 
 American city; it led them all in increase of postal 
 receipts last year; its assessed values are nearing the 
 two-hundred-million-dollar mark, and it has begun 
 work on a water-supply system which will cost twenty- 
 one million dollars, and which will convey the moun- 
 tain streams of the Sierras a distance of more than 
 two hundred miles. 
 
 So much by way of showing that the era of frenzied 
 speculation is past, and with it the days of the real 
 estate auction circuses with brass bands and side 
 shows, which ran amuck some twenty years ago. It 
 is true that to-day the real estate market strikes a 
 conservative Easterner as fairly acrobatic. You can- 
 not heave a brick anywhere within twenty miles of 
 the city that will not alight on an attractive specula- 
 tion in town lots. The electric roads, four hundred 
 miles of them radiating from Los Angeles and five 
 hundred miles more building along this corner of the 
 coast, are bringing the whole countryside within 
 touch of the city, and as a direct result there are such 
 rapid increases in values as make one's head swim 
 until he becomes acclimated. On these roads, which 
 are built and ballasted like steam lines, trains of elec- 
 tric cars whizz and whirr at speeds of thirty and forty 
 
 246 
 
Where Ranch and City Meet 
 
 miles an hour, thereby sweeping all the land within 
 fifteen miles of Los Angeles, for example, into the 
 market for suburban property. 
 
 This tide of excessively up-to-date American expan- 
 sion has swept before it the old life and atmosphere 
 of the surviving Spanish and Mexican settlements. 
 The prosaic Saxon first curtailed the beautiful name 
 of his town, Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles (Town 
 of the Queen of the Angels) , and later obliterated the 
 native himself. There is a straggling Mexican quar- 
 ter of the modern Los Angeles, and in the outskirts 
 you may find the 'dobe house and the mud hovel 
 thatched with straw where dwell the descendants of 
 the race which won this wondrous territory for the 
 red and yellow banner of Castile. These are no more 
 than melancholy and unimportant relics of a vastly 
 romantic and picturesque era which has passed away 
 within the memory of living men. 
 
 There still survives an opportunity, however, to 
 find, in its last days, a magnificent survival of the life 
 and background and conditions which immediately 
 preceded the amazing modernity of Los Angeles and 
 of the lamented San Francisco. One of the last of 
 the ancient and lordly estates of Southern California 
 lies at the very edge of Los Angeles, the Santa Anita 
 ranch of " Lucky " Baldwin. Its doom is so immi- 
 nent that the process of destruction has even begun. 
 The electric road has gashed a path through its 
 groves and orchards, and the real estate speculator is 
 
 247 
 
The Greater America 
 
 nibbling at its outskirts. Within five years it is likely 
 that this ranch will be dotted with the red-roofed cot- 
 tages of the eastern pilgrim, and checkered with 
 " boulevards " and " avenues." 
 
 It is still a feudal community unto itself, this 
 princely realm of sixty thousand acres. But it must 
 go, because these sixty thousand acres are worth ten 
 million dollars as city and suburban " real estate," a 
 very pretty rise in values since " Lucky " Baldwin 
 picked up these Spanish grants for a song as farming 
 land some forty years ago. For more than a century 
 these lands have been cultivated in a glorious sweep 
 of vineyards, and orange and olive orchards, rich 
 sheep and cattle pastures, and horse ranches, their 
 life and customs handed down from the Spanish 
 owners of the various ranchos which were swept into 
 one estate by the pioneer " Lucky " Baldwin. 
 
 The very names of the tracts which were grouped 
 under the name of Santa Anita ranch sound mellow 
 and reminiscent to the ear: La Puenta, Portrero de 
 Felipe Logo, Portrero Grande, La Merced, San Fran- 
 cisquito. Da Cienega, and Portrero Chico, all in the 
 heart of the beautiful San Gabriel Valley. 
 
 With these ranches came one of the oldest vine- 
 yards and wineries of Southern California, founded 
 by the Spanish padres from the San Gabriel Mission. 
 And the low, white-walled adobe home In which the 
 aged " Lucky " Baldwin lives to-day was built as a 
 fort and outpost by these same Spanish friars when 
 
 248 
 
Where Ranch and City Meet 
 
 these lands were being wrested from the wilderness. 
 The links which lead from the modern Los Angeles 
 back to the Spanish era are therefore unbroken. 
 
 The Santa Anita ranch, through which darts the 
 electric car filled with tourists from the East, was 
 tenanted when the tall galleons were bringing from 
 Spain the priests and soldiers to govern this new land 
 of theirs; when the little pueblo of Los Angeles was 
 gay with caballeros who bade farewell to black-eyed 
 girls before they set out for the unknown North; 
 when, at length, the Santa Fe trail crept overland to 
 reach the Pacific shore and brought the vanguard of 
 the hardy American invasion which was to sweep over 
 the Spanish-speaking race like a landslide. 
 
 The tourist and home seeker, the real estate agent 
 and the manufacturer, the trolley and the electric 
 light denote the march of civilization, but something 
 most attractive and in a way very precious will vanish 
 when Los Angeles absorbs into its feverish activity 
 this fine old Santa Anita ranch. 
 
 Even in these, its last days, it seems to stand remote 
 and aloof with a certain strength of dignity and inde- 
 pendence. It does not belong with that complex and 
 interwoven civilization in which a man must depend 
 upon other men to produce all that he eats and wears 
 and uses. It is opposed to all that makes the life and 
 commerce of a city. 
 
 Such an estate, if put to it, could to-day maintain 
 its population of perhaps a thousand men, women 
 
 249 
 
The Greater America 
 
 and children without commerce with the world be- 
 yond. Cut the railroads, and Los Angeles must face 
 starvation within three or four days. It consumes 
 and devours with titanic appetite, but it does not 
 produce. 
 
 Out at Santa Anita, however. Its busy community 
 could be clothed and fed in comfort and even luxury, 
 without help from a railroad. Even during " Lucky " 
 Baldwin's proprietorship, the twelve-mule freight 
 teams, with jingling bells on the collars, trailed to 
 and from Los Angeles, as the only link of communi- 
 cation with the outside world, and the people of the 
 estate were as comfortable and possibly as happy as 
 they are to-day. 
 
 The lord of this ranch can drive eighteen miles In 
 a straight line across his own acres. In such a tour 
 he will pass his own general merchandise store, main- 
 tained for the convenience of his own people, the 
 school supported for their children, the blacksmith 
 shop, the church and the post office, all belonging to 
 the equipment of the estate. He will pass through 
 his vast orange and fig and olive orchards, his walnut 
 groves and his vineyards where the Mission grape Is 
 gathered from the gnarled vines planted by the 
 padres. There are also one hundred acres of lemons, 
 one hundred acres of grape fruit, two thousand acres 
 of vegetables, and twenty thousand acres of corn, hay 
 and small grains. His thirty thousand sheep graze 
 on the brown hillsides, and he could clothe his people 
 
 250 
 
Where Ranch and City Meet 
 
 with their wool, if he wished. His wheat ranch 
 could feed them, his three thousand head of cattle 
 could provide beef and leather. In other fields are 
 five hundred work mules and five hundred draught 
 and carriage horses. 
 
 These sixty thousand acres are divided into several 
 ranches, each in charge of a superintendent, who in 
 turn reports to a general manager, who is responsible 
 to the owner. It is a paternal, feudal system, highly 
 specialized by means of the American talent for sys- 
 tematic administration and organization. 
 
 Toiling in the flooding sunshine of these smiling 
 fields and slopes are Japanese and Mexicans and 
 negroes and Chinese and Americans, almost a thou- 
 sand of them, scattered over many miles of country. 
 Tucked away in the corners of little valleys, under 
 the spreading oaks, you will find the villages of this 
 motley population. In the Mexican colony of 
 thatched and flimsy huts, little brown children run 
 about with no more clothing than would dust a gun- 
 barrel. In sheep-shearing time the population Is 
 enlivened by the coming of the band of half-breeds 
 and Indians and " Greasers," who make festival with 
 the residents when the work is done. When one 
 wanders about the odd corners of the ranch, watching 
 the quiet and ancient habit of tilling and garnering 
 the abundant fruits of the earth and the pasture, the 
 twentieth century bustle of Los Angeles becomes a 
 thing remote and incongruous. 
 
 251 
 
The Greater America 
 
 While this estate mirrors so largely the life of the 
 Spanish grants of the early settlement of the Pacific 
 Coast, its latest owner in himself supplies a chap- 
 ter which covers the last half century almost, from 
 the time when Fremont, the Pathfinder, unfurled the 
 Stars and Stripes in Los Angeles in 1846. While the 
 stout adobe walls of the home on Santa Anita ranch 
 preserve the legends of a century and more ago, the 
 aged man who dwells therein is a relic and a reminder 
 of an era even more vivid and picturesque. " Lucky " 
 Baldwin belongs with the flamboyant days of the 
 Forty-niners, with the age when life on the Pacific 
 Coast was a melodrama of great fortunes won and 
 flung away with lavish hand and high heart, the era 
 of the argonauts, the builders, and the gamblers with 
 life and gold. 
 
 In 1853, or more than a half century ago, a little 
 party of gold seekers, with a meager outfit of horses 
 and wagons, started for California from the village 
 of Racine, Wisconsin. In command of this adven- 
 turous expedition was a young man who took with 
 him his wife and infant daughter. His name was 
 E. J. Baldwin, and he made a wise choice in shaking 
 from his restless feet the dust of a tamer civilization. 
 He needed a larger theater of action for his pent-up 
 and surging activities. While trailing through the 
 mountains of Utah the pioneers were attacked by 
 Indians, who were beaten off during a six-hour fight 
 in which young Baldwin killed their chief. After 
 
 252 
 
Where Ranch and City Meet 
 
 six months of hardship the party reached Hangtown 
 (later called Placerville) , in California. 
 
 Here Baldwin tarried and began placer mining. 
 He appears to have been no more than an ordinary 
 red-shirted argonaut, meeting the ups and downs of 
 mining luck, until the discovery of the Comstock Lode 
 at Virginia City. Thither he drifted, and discovered 
 that his natural bent was gambhng with the mines 
 that other men had opened. Amid a whirlwind of 
 speculation he fought his way with such success that 
 he loomed from the smoke In a few months as 
 " Lucky " Baldwin, the man who had cleaned up 
 seven and a half million dollars in the gigantic deals 
 In the stock of the Ophir mines. 
 
 San Francisco was the Mecca of those lucky sons 
 of fortune who were rearing a great city by the 
 Golden Gate. As a stock and mining speculator, 
 " Lucky " Baldwin shone resplendent, but he was 
 also a loyal son of San Francisco. He built hotels 
 and theaters and business blocks, even while he was 
 amazing that far from conservative community by 
 madly freakish extravagances. 
 
 In a very lucid interval he bought all the Spanish 
 grants he could find near Los Angeles, and there spent 
 a million In making this ranch of his not only a splen- 
 didly productive property, but also one of the most 
 beautiful estates ever laid out In this or any other 
 country. It was his hobby, his pet, and he planted 
 miles of avenues with noble shade trees, and made 
 
 253 
 
The Greater America 
 
 wonderful tropical gardens, so that to-day his home 
 is surrounded by a paradise of vernal beauty. 
 
 " Lucky " Baldwin became interested in the turf 
 while he was in the heyday of his wealth, health and 
 headlong vigor. He made Santa Anita ranch famous 
 as a home of winning thoroughbreds, and his racing 
 colors flashed on every noted track. The racing sta- 
 ble is still a part of the ranch, and in the lush pastures 
 wander costly bands of colts and brood mares, while 
 in the stables are such sires and famous winners of 
 historic events as Emperor of Norfolk, and Rey del 
 Santa Anita, and Cruzadas. The mighty sire Grim- 
 sted, who produced more stake winners than any other 
 horse in America, is buried in a park-like enclosure, 
 over the gateway of which is an arch inscribed with 
 the words, " The Home of Grimsted." The grave 
 and park are tended with scrupulous care, and betoken 
 a strain of sentiment in this rough-and-tumble hero of 
 a hundred bizarre adventures and hazards, " Lucky " 
 Baldwin. 
 
 More than once it has been reported that this West- 
 erner's fortune has been swept away in speculation, 
 or plunging on the turf, or in extravagant whimsicali- 
 ties, yet through it all he has clung to his beloved 
 Santa Anita. The ranch was heavily mortgaged to 
 help him weather one heavy storm, yet the value of 
 this land has risen with such amazing swiftness, be- 
 cause of its nearness to Los Angeles, that in the end 
 he has a splendid fortune in the estate, which can 
 
 254 
 
Where Ranch and City Meet 
 
 be sold for more than fifteen hundred dollars an acre, 
 as fast as he is willing to let it be chopped up by the 
 city broker. 
 
 In his old age " Lucky " Baldwin retired to his 
 ranch, there to spend the little time of his life that 
 might be left for him. When I met him there last 
 year, he was still alert in mind and vigorous of frame, 
 a wiry, sharp-visaged little man past his eightieth 
 year, who had endured enough of reckless living and 
 bruising shocks of fortune to kill ordinary men in 
 their prime. Three mornings each week he arose at 
 daylight and drove to his racing stables to see his 
 string of thoroughbreds in their morning gallops 
 around a half-mile track. They were being prepared 
 for their campaign on far-away tracks, but he would 
 nevermore see them break and wheel in the start, and 
 thunder past the finish post. His sight was fast fail- 
 ing, but he knew and loved his horses, as they filed 
 by him, one by one. 
 
 Thus, after as stormy and colorful a career as befell 
 any of those bold jugglers with titanic fortunes in the 
 days of gold, he found a placid refuge on this noble 
 ranch, the creation of which had been the work of his 
 youth. With all his faults, and they have been many 
 and notorious, he was one of the builders of that 
 empire of the Pacific; and when San Francisco was 
 overwhelmed by earthquake and fire, the destruction 
 included no small share of " Lucky " Baldwin's crea- 
 tive effort in the upbuilding of that noble city. 
 
 255 
 
The Greater America 
 
 This ranch of his is a monument also to his con- 
 structive genius. Its successful operation has been a 
 task demanding unusual talent and ability, and these 
 qualities of his have preserved it intact with its 
 imposing array of belated industries and activities 
 in an age in whose social economy it can find no place. 
 Just as he is a relic of another age in the expansion of 
 this nation, so his ranch harks farther back into a 
 more remote era and affords a vanishing glimpse of 
 the life which was before the Stars and Stripes were 
 flown over this vast territory to the west of the Rock- 
 ies, and south of the area first explored and claimed 
 by the Hudson's Bay Company's pioneers who in- 
 vaded the Pacific Slope from the north. 
 
 Not far from Santa Anita ranch is the old Mission 
 of San Gabriel, whose life was co-existent with that 
 of these Spanish grants and ranches. The gray bell 
 tower, the massive adobe walls, and the quiet gardens 
 where once walked the black-robed padres, and where 
 their Indian converts toiled, have been preserved to 
 lend a little touch of old-world atmosphere to the 
 landscape of to-day. They will be kept as memorials, 
 but the broad fields and orchards, the pastures and 
 the groves of Santa Anita are being submerged in the 
 roaring tide of American progress in material wealth 
 and faith in the future. 
 
 " Lucky " Baldwin sat on the wide porch of his 
 adobe mansion, whose walls were a Spanish fort a 
 hundred and fifty years ago. On every side stretched 
 
 256 
 
Where Ranch and City Meet 
 
 the smiling fertility of his principality, watered by 
 gushing streams from artesian wells, a water system 
 as extensive as that of many cities. In the background 
 marched the brown ramparts of the Sierra Madre 
 Mountains, and even on those heights one could dis- 
 cern a ribbon-like trail cut for the sight-seeing tourist. 
 The old man Indulged in no poetic reverie over the 
 passing of the old order of things. His mind dwelt 
 on what he had done toward making the building of 
 California and San Francisco. Thus In his last days 
 this battered survivor of the blazing days of gilded 
 toll and folly by the Golden Gate wished to be 
 remembered for what he had done for the land he 
 loved, and In this he showed the spirit of your true 
 Callfornian. 
 
 " If you will look In Bancroft's ' Chronicles of the 
 Builders,' " he said, " you will find all you want to 
 know about me. Don't take any stock in all the 
 stories you hear about my foolishness in slinging for- 
 tunes around. There's a set of harness out there in 
 the stable that cost me eight thousand dollars, and 
 I've had a run for my money, but I helped make San 
 Francisco a stronger, bigger city, and that counts for 
 something. And I've made a beautiful spot of this 
 ranch, and I've held It together, and I don't expect 
 to live to see it cut up entirely. It's my home, and 
 it means a big sight more to me because I made 
 It, sixty thousand acres, and every acre working for 
 me." 
 
 257 
 
The Greater America 
 
 His mood veered and his faded eye twinkled as he 
 observed : 
 
 " Jim Jeffries was down to see me the other day, 
 and he told me he made twenty thousand dollars in a 
 ^ght. I told him that I won five million dollars in 
 one fight when I was in my prime, and that I guessed 
 it paid better than pugilism while it lasted." 
 
 " Lucky " Baldwin, a type of the days of the young 
 and riotous California, is too old to meet and conquer 
 the new conditions which have shoved his ranch and 
 himself far into the background of progress. As Los 
 Angeles pictures the expanding Americanism of this 
 century, so H. E. Huntington, the man who has led 
 in its promotion, is a type of the American builder of 
 to-day; and as he has driven his electric roads through 
 the heart of Santa Anita ranch, so he is everywhere in 
 his part of the country infusing old conditions with 
 the new spirit of progress. 
 
 There has been nothing of the bizarre or spectacu- 
 lar about his programme of expansion. A trained 
 railway man, schooled by his uncle, C. P. Huntington, 
 he has swung his energy away from the steam road to 
 become the foremost promoter of the electric trolley 
 as a means of developing and exploiting natural re- 
 sources. He has made all the towns of Southern 
 California near neighbors of Los Angeles, and this 
 task has been accomplished in less than ten years. 
 First came the purchase of existing lines, then consoli- 
 dation and reorganization, and after that rebuilding 
 
 258 
 
Where Ranch and City Meet 
 
 and new construction, until within the city hmits of 
 Los Angeles alone there are two hundred miles of 
 trolley tracks. Now you can whirl out into the coun- 
 try over standard-gauge, double-track lines operated 
 by automatic signal systems, at express speed. 
 
 The real estate " boom " of Los Angeles cannot be 
 fairly weighed without a knowledge of this wonder- 
 ful transportation development. H. E. Huntington 
 has made fortunes for others, while at the same time 
 he has reaped great wealth for himself. He had 
 bought up great tracts of unimproved land within 
 a few miles of Los Angeles, and then put an electric 
 road through the tree property thus acquired. Of 
 course the coming of the railroad has increased the 
 realty values by hundreds per cent, and Mr. Hunting- 
 ton, having bought on a certainty, has not suffered by 
 this method of operation. 
 
 At the same time it should be remembered, even 
 though it be the fashion to sling bricks at the railway 
 magnate on general principles as an oppressor and a 
 robber, that for every million H. E. Huntington has 
 reaped from his transactions, the community has ben- 
 efited tenfold in increased property valuations and 
 ease of communication. 
 
 It is a magical sort of an operation, this develop- 
 ment of the Los Angeles country. A small rancher 
 is struggling to make both ends meet, away off in 
 what appears to be an isolated corner of the landscape. 
 He lives perhaps several miles from his nearest 
 
 259 
 
The Greater America 
 
 neighbor, and it is an all-day haul to get to the nearest 
 market. Along come the surveyors, and then the 
 construction gangs, and presto ! the electric road has 
 linked this ranch with Los Angeles by no more than 
 half or three-quarters of an hour in time. The little 
 poverty-stricken ranch has become suburban property 
 overnight, and our son of the soil is in affluence and 
 thinks " The Arabian Nights " tame reading. The 
 chances are even that he blossoms out as a real estate 
 agent and invades Los Angeles with a bundle of blue- 
 print maps under his arm. 
 
 As a result of this prodigious railway develop- 
 ment, the fifty thousand visitors who frequent Los 
 Angeles most of the time no sooner land in the city 
 than they plan to get out of it. The hotels are built 
 like business blocks, essentially metropolitan of aspect. 
 This disappoints the stranger who expects to find palm 
 trees and gardens under his hotel window. He soon 
 discovers, however, that the hotel is for eating and 
 sleeping, nothing more. He streams with the multi- 
 tude into the big street cars, and flies into the country 
 in almost any direction, to seashore, mountain, trop- 
 ical city and resort, covering a hundred miles of 
 landscape in a day, while the Pacific breezes blow 
 through him, and he speeds over a dustless roadbed. 
 He can visit one or more of fifty attractive places 
 every day and return to the city for dinner. 
 
 When time hangs heavy on his hands he can find 
 abundant entertainment in trying to figure out the 
 
 260 
 
Where Ranch and City Meet 
 
 why and wherefore of Los Angeles, and he must come 
 back In the final issue to the three factors of climate, 
 trolleys and advertising. As cosmopolitan a city as 
 there is in America, made up of pilgrims from every 
 State of East and West, these two hundred thousand 
 men, women and children are fused in the smelting 
 pot of local pride and enthusiasm until they are sure 
 in their hearts that there is no place on God's green 
 footstool worthy to be compared with Los Angeles, 
 and that even though its present prosperity is fairly 
 staggering, its future holds possibilities even more 
 awe-inspiring. It is, in a way, like an air plant, tak- 
 ing its sustenance from the climate and not from the 
 soil, and there is no danger of bankrupting this chief 
 asset. 
 
 The commercial bodies of this lusty young metropo- 
 lis have spent three hundred and fifty thousand dollars 
 within ten years in directly advertising its attractions. 
 They have reaped big dividends and to-day their city 
 is the best-known pleasure and health resort in the 
 world, San Francisco had a large share of this com- 
 mon western spirit, and neither fire nor earthquake 
 can cripple it. The city which will rise on the ruins 
 of the old San Francisco will be more like Los 
 Angeles, essentially modern in every way, and proud 
 of its modernity. The storied days of the Forty- 
 niners have been obliterated in San Francisco, the 
 memories of the argonauts have been destroyed, but 
 their spirit lives and shines. 
 
 261 
 
The Greater America 
 
 Los Angeles is sweeping away the last traces of the 
 old era, and faces the future, not the past. We may 
 sigh for the passing of Santa Anita ranch, but where 
 thirty thousand sheep and cattle graze, as many 
 Americans will be dwelling in their own homes within 
 the life of this generation. 
 
 262 
 
A Mexican sheep herder and his flock 
 
■^ 
 « 
 
 'J>yj^ 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE GOLD CAMPS OF THE DESERT 
 
 " // it looks good to you, get to it." 
 
 This Is a western slogan in which faith and works 
 are so closely packed that another word would spoil 
 it. There is lacking the literary adornment of those 
 " creeds " and " symphonies " which, done in a very 
 pretty type or stamped on a ragged bit of leather, 
 exhort us to plain living and high thinking with due 
 regard for the birds and flowers. No, there is none 
 of the tinkling " preachment " doctrine of conduct 
 in this big, rugged call to action, " If it looks good 
 to you, get to it." It is not preached, but lived by 
 men who are too busy to prate much about the " sim- 
 ple life," and it says nothing about obstacles in the 
 way. It would be hard to focus with more brevity 
 and force the virile spirit of the Americans who have 
 made and bulwarked their nation. I soon discovered 
 that this was the war cry whose inspiration has peo- 
 pled the desert of Nevada within the last five years. 
 
 " It looked good " to many thousand men who 
 wanted to seek gold, and they " went to it," and 
 made cities in the most desolate and forbidding corner 
 of the United States. 
 
 It is probable that this country will not see another 
 263 
 
The Greater America 
 
 great " gold stampede," wherefore this corner of the 
 West was the next goal of my pilgrimage after swing- 
 ing up from among the lush vineyards and smiling 
 orchards of Southern California. Before these latest 
 discoveries were made in Nevada, it was generally 
 believed that the frenzied rush of armies of treasure 
 seekers must be classed as a vanished part of the 
 frontier life and conditions. Old prospectors, how- 
 ever, with the clamor of Cripple Creek still echoing 
 in their memories, would wag their gray beards with 
 a knowing air and trudge into the desert and among 
 the mountains, confident that other bonanzas were 
 waiting to be revealed. 
 
 Instead of seeking new sources of supply the men 
 with more capital than imagination were devising new 
 methods to work over old diggings. Their mighty 
 electric dredges were turning over the placer gravel 
 washed out by the Forty-niners, and by a miracle of 
 economy making it profitable to extract eleven cents' 
 worth of gold from a ton of earth. Or their stamp 
 mills and scientific processes were pounding up and 
 milling the low-grade ore of Alaska and the moun- 
 tains of the West. The gold hunter and producer 
 were being rapidly stripped of their ancient red- 
 blooded romance of adventure by the prosaic methods 
 of twentieth century enterprise, which have conspired 
 to banish the cowboy and the sailor. 
 
 Nevada was a butt for jests among her sister States, 
 which delighted to record such items as : 
 
 264 
 
The Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 " Three hoboes were thrown off a train while 
 crossing the Nevada desert the other day. Their 
 arrival doubled the population of the county in which 
 they hit the alkali, and a real estate boom was started 
 on the strength of it." 
 
 The State of bare, brown mountains and sand and 
 sagebrush was beginning to feel the stir of the irri- 
 gation movement, but the heyday of her mining glory 
 seemed to slumber with a dead past. Silver camps 
 that were hilarious cities of thousands of men and 
 millions in wealth thirty years ago had dwindled to 
 ruined hamlets whose brick blocks stood tenantless 
 and forlorn. The queen of them all, Virginia City, 
 was no more than a ghost of what she had been in 
 the days of the Comstock lode. 
 
 Those were the times when the poor miner John 
 Mackay went to Nevada with only his pick and his 
 stout arms; when Fair, the blue-eyed Scotchman, 
 walked into Virginia without a dollar, and " hung 
 up " his board with the widow Rooney up the gulch, 
 until he should make his strike; when two young 
 Irishmen, Flood and O'Brien, were digging in the 
 hills with their comrade, George Hearst, all of them 
 red-shirted prospectors together, with no other capi- 
 tal than stout hearts and stouter backs. 
 
 Their fortunes have built railroads, laid cables 
 under seas and flung their children into the spangled 
 world of fashion. The Comstock yielded more than 
 two hundred millions of silver in sixteen years. Its 
 
 265 
 
The Greater America 
 
 mines were the lifeblood of the Pacific Coast. But 
 when their glory departed, Nevada went to sleep 
 again. Like the State In which he made the first dis- 
 covery of the lode that bears his name, H. T. P. Com- 
 stock could not cling to the riches he had laid bare for 
 others. After wandering In poverty for years, he blew 
 out his brains near Bozeman City, Montana, in 1870. 
 
 The times have changed since then, and men have 
 changed with them. The new mining camps of 
 Nevada are alive with the old spirit that laughs at 
 hardship and danger, and their builders have earned 
 a place in the latter pages of the story of the American 
 frontier. The professional " bad man " is a missing 
 figure, and the contrast between these present-day 
 camps of Tonopah, Goldfield and Bullfrog, and their 
 predecessors of the Comstock, is wide and Impressive. 
 Such colorful gentlemen as stalked through Virginia 
 City thirty years ago may be glimpsed In these bits 
 of life and manners as told by one of them: 
 
 " A gambler of Herculean frame, with a huge 
 black beard that gave him a most ferocious appear- 
 ance, cheated a miner out of four or five hundred 
 dollars in a poker game. The miner saw that he 
 had been swindled after his money was gone, and 
 demanded his cash. The big gambler laughed in his 
 face. The miner, who was a small and inoffensive- 
 looking person, left the place without more words. 
 Some of the crowd in the saloon told the big sport 
 that his man had gone off to heel himself, and that 
 
 266 
 
TJie Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 there would be trouble later on. The big man was 
 not alarmed — he was not going to be frightened 
 away. He sat on a chair in the back room, near an 
 open window, his head thrown back and his legs 
 cocked up. He didn't care how many weapons the 
 miner might bring. 
 
 " ' Why, gentlemen,' he roared, ' you don't know 
 me — you don't know who I am. I'm the Wild Boar 
 of Temaha. The click of a six-shooter is music to 
 my ear, and a bowie knife is my looking-glass.' 
 (Here he happened to look toward the door, and saw 
 the miner coming in with a sawed-off shotgun.) 
 ' But a shotgun lets me out,' and he went through 
 the window head first." 
 
 While I was going into Tonopah from Reno a 
 mining engineer recalled his earlier experiences in the 
 sizzling towns of the frontier. 
 
 "I was a boy in Tombstone in 1881," said he, 
 " and saw ' Doc ' Holliday and Wyatt and Virgil 
 Earp wipe out the McClowrie and Clanton outfit. 
 One of the Earps was a deputy United States marshal, 
 another was the town marshal, and a third, Morgan 
 Earp, was a Wells Fargo ' shotgun man ' or express 
 messenger. There was a bad feeling between the 
 Earps and the gang of cowboys led by Curly Bill, 
 who were accused of holding up the stage and killing 
 the driver. The two McClowries and the two Clan- 
 tons accused the Earps of having a hand in the hold- 
 up. The climax came when the Earps sent out word 
 
 267 
 
The Greater America 
 
 that the cow-men must not ride into Tombstone and 
 shoot up the town any more. I was hiding behind 
 an adobe house down at the corral when the Mc- 
 Clowries and Clantons rode in to accept the chal- 
 lenge. It was a fight to the finish. Two of the 
 Earp crowd were wounded, but all of the other side 
 were killed or mortally hurt right there at the corral. 
 
 " A little later Morgan Earp was killed in a saloon 
 by a load of buckshot fired through the window near 
 which he was playing billiards." 
 
 Now, the two surviving Earps, perhaps hoping 
 that the frontier had come back to them, drifted into 
 the new Goldfield district within the last year or so. 
 Virgil Earp died in the Miners' Hospital at Goldfield, 
 with his boots off, last autumn, after a most prosaic 
 illness. Wyatt ran a little saloon in Tonopah for a 
 while, and moved on. Once he flourished his guns 
 while drunk, and they were rudely taken away from 
 him by an undersized sheriff. 
 
 This was in a mining camp of five thousand souls 
 in which it had not yet been found necessary to 
 organize a town government. Such is the law and 
 order that reigns on the frontier of to-day. The 
 story of the discovery of the first of this chain of 
 desert gold camps appealed to me as worth more than 
 passing mention, because of the rugged honesty of the 
 leading actor in this gigantic melodrama. 
 
 Six years ago a desert rancher named " Jim " 
 Butler was prospecting in southern Nevada, packing 
 
 268 
 
The Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 his outfit along on the backs of six burros, trudging 
 among the mountains a hundred and fifty miles from 
 a railroad, in a country which an experienced miner 
 would have laughed at. It had none of the signs of 
 gold-bearing rock, and in his " plumb ignorance " 
 Butler plodded along " forty miles from water and 
 
 one mile from ," trusting to gold seeker's luck, 
 
 and not at all confident of making a strike big enough 
 to keep him in tobacco money. 
 
 One night he camped at Tonopah Spring and found 
 some rock that " looked good to him." He broke 
 off a few chunks, loaded them on a burro and ram- 
 bled home with them in the course of time. In the 
 town of Belmont, near his ranch, his rock was greeted 
 with light-hearted incredulity, and he was about to 
 throw it away when a young lawyer named Oddie 
 pricked up his ears, and with the rashness of youth 
 offered to have the samples assayed. Butler went 
 back to his ranch in Monitor Valley, and betook 
 himself to the more important business of harvesting 
 his hay crop. He had forgotten about his rock when 
 Oddie sent him word that the stuff assayed several 
 hundred dollars a ton in gold and silver. 
 
 Even then the doubting rancher did not think it 
 worth while to make a trip after more rock, but his 
 very capable wife kept at him until he hitched up a 
 team and drove into Belmont. Oddie had business 
 of his .own by this time and could not go with them, 
 so Butler and his wife made the lonely journey back 
 
 269 
 
The Greater America 
 
 to the Tonopah Spring region to look after his " false 
 alarm." 
 
 This was more than three months after his discov- 
 ery, which indicates that Jim Butler was none of 
 your get-rich-quick financiers. 
 
 He staked out a claim for his wife, one for Oddie, 
 and a third for himself. Three months more passed 
 before Butler and Oddie loaded two wagons with 
 grub and tools for doing development work on their 
 claims. Oddie hauled water from the spring four 
 miles away, cooked and looked after the horses, sharp- 
 ened tools and helped Butler sink a shaft. In this 
 back-breaking fashion they got out a ton of ore and 
 hauled it fifty miles to Belmont, from which It was 
 freighted across the desert a hundred miles farther 
 to the nearest railroad at Austin, to be shipped to a 
 smelter. This ton netted six hundred dollars in gold, 
 and the two men, whose cash capital was twenty-five 
 dollars, were able to hire a few men to help them. 
 
 By winter the news sifted to the outside world that 
 a rich strike had been made in that far-away corner 
 of the Nevada desert, and men began to " get to it " 
 from Carson and Reno, and the small camps In the 
 mountains. Jim Butler decided to lease claims to 
 the newcomers, and staked out locations for them 
 as fast as they arrived. Another year and the human 
 trickle had swelled to a flood, and capitalists were 
 scenting the treasure and sending In their scouts. A 
 year from the time he had swung the first pick on his 
 
 270 
 
The Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 locations, Butler sold the original claims for $336,- 
 000, and shrewdly took part of his interest in stock 
 of the company that was formed. 
 
 The rise of these shares has since brought the pur- 
 chase price of the claims to a value of more than a 
 million dollars. 
 
 Meanwhile this Jim Butler had been making addi- 
 tional locations which included part of the future 
 town site as well as other rich ledges in the moun- 
 tains. He showed himself to be very much of a man, 
 which is a good deal better than being very much of 
 a millionaire. He leased out hundreds of claims in 
 the height of the rush when the gold fever was 
 addling the brains of men, as it has always done. 
 But it never threw Jim Butler off his balance. He 
 refused to have written deeds and contracts with 
 his customers. Transactions whose total ran into the 
 millions were bound only by the spoken word of 
 Jim Butler. Nor could a fabulous strike on one 
 of his leases ever tempt him to go back on his word. 
 The town lots he sold when values were going sky- 
 ward every few minutes were transferred with no 
 paper to show for it. Broken grub-stake contracts, 
 claim-jumping suits, and real estate disputes raged 
 all around him, but nobody who did business with 
 Jim Butler got into a lawsuit. That capable wife of 
 his helped him keep track of his transactions, and an 
 old account book held them all. 
 
 Within two years Tonopah was a town of four 
 271 
 
The Greater America 
 
 thousand people, mostly men. It had been lighted 
 with electricity, and a water system put in. There 
 were two churches, a graded school with a hundred 
 pupils, a club, two newspapers; and a railroad had 
 crawled over the desert, built by the Tonopah Mining 
 Company with $600,000 of its profits from its gold 
 diggings. Tonopah took on a settled and civilized 
 air, with its stone business and bank blocks rising in 
 the midst of the shacks and tents that swarmed on 
 its disheveled outskirts. Mining corporations, with 
 millions of eastern capital behind them, were in pos- 
 session of the richest claims, the country round had 
 been prospected by thousands of invaders, and so the 
 vanguard moved on south into the wilderness. At 
 that time, if your water supply held out and you did 
 not get lost or die of thirst along the edge of Death 
 Valley, you could travel two hundred miles and find 
 no town, no human settlement, except a shack or two 
 beside the springs that were from thirty to fifty miles 
 apart. Nothing alive flourished in the country except 
 rattlesnakes and tarantulas; nothing grew there 
 except sagebrush, cactus and mesquite. It was in 
 the very heart of what is left of the " Great Ameri- 
 can Desert." Water, food, fuel — everything had to 
 be hauled through the mountain passes and sand from 
 the nearest railroad. The heat in summer was fright- 
 ful, rising to a hundred and twenty degrees in the 
 shade, where there was any shade, and lingering over 
 a hundred degrees at midnight in midsummer. 
 
 272 
 
E^ 
 
 ^ 
 

The Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 While In Alaska the gold hunters' stories are of 
 snow and Ice and bitter cold, of dog sleds and snow- 
 shoes and furs, this rush Into the desert was framed 
 In clouds of white and choking dust, amid the peril 
 of heat and thirst. 
 
 Thousands turned backward, and hundreds pushed 
 on. Their ardor flamed afresh when thirty miles 
 south of Tonopah a second " big strike " was made, 
 and the town of Goldfield rose over night. The lucky 
 locators and lessees began to find out ore whose total 
 values ran into the millions in a very few months, and 
 In the first year the wealth dug out of the desert 
 amounted to more than the production of Cripple 
 Creek In Its first two years of activity. Within eigh- 
 teen months, nearly ten thousand people were at 
 Goldfield, and the railroad had pushed on from 
 Tonopah. 
 
 Still the prospectors headed southward, away from 
 the town and the railroad, and sixty miles beyond 
 Goldfield they were the pioneers In another stirring 
 stampede Into the desert. The Bullfrog district 
 became the firing line of the gold-seeking Invasion. 
 When the gold was found only three families were 
 living within eighty-five miles of the location, a 
 rancher named Beatty, one Howell, who had a little 
 ranch by a spring, and Panamint Joe, a Shoshone 
 Indian who was camped with a few of his tribe near 
 another spring where there was a patch of watered 
 grazing land. In less than a year four thousand 
 
 273 
 
The Greater America 
 
 people were living in the new-fledged towns of Bull- 
 frog, Beatty, and Rhyolite. They were linked with 
 the railroad sixty miles away by a line of automobiles, 
 daily stages and toiling trains of freighters' wagons. 
 Telephone lines were strung across the desert to 
 Goldfield, and these isolated, desert-bound settlements 
 were in touch with the outside world as soon as they 
 were big enough to be named. 
 
 Tonopah, meanwhile, as the oldest of these camps 
 along the path of the dusty argonauts, had lost its 
 floating population and was in a second stage of solid 
 development, with mines in operation and ore going 
 by solid train loads to the smelters at Salt Lake. 
 Speculation in mining stock succeeded the gambling 
 fever of the prospector, and if other excitement was 
 wanted, it must be sought in the resorts where the 
 faro layout and the roulette wheel held sway. 
 
 Although the " modern improvements " were hur- 
 ried into Tonopah and Goldfield with an amazing 
 speed that makes this peopling of the desert a modern 
 miracle, it was nevertheless a new civilization, whose 
 raw edges could not be trimmed off in one year, or 
 even five. These are still frontier outposts, although 
 they belong to a tamed frontier. They seethe with 
 strong, bold currents of life, and men are counted for 
 what they are, and not for what they have, as it was 
 in the days of old. 
 
 Conspicuous among the veterans of the Klondike 
 rush who mingled with Australian, Californian, and 
 South African prospectors in the busy Goldfield streets 
 
 274 
 
The Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 was " Diamondfield Jack " Davis, as rampantly a 
 picturesque character as ever enlivened frontier his- 
 tory. While mining in Idaho he had achieved the 
 unique distinction of being three times sentenced to be 
 hanged for the alleged murder of two men in a labor 
 war. Twice reprieved, things looked dark for " Dia- 
 mondfield Jack " when the fatal day again rolled 
 around. His enemies cut the telegraph wires so that 
 the governor's message of pardon could not be sent 
 through in time to head off the deadly activity of the 
 sheriff. The document was hustled along by relays 
 of pony riders, and the last rider spurred his foaming 
 steed up to the gallows in time to see the noose dan- 
 gling about the neck of " Diamondfield Jack." 
 
 It is to be presumed that the courier waved the 
 pardon over his head and shouted : " Villain, stay 
 your hand. You are about to take the life of an 
 innocent man." This touch is needed to round up 
 the dramatic units of this lurid episode which real 
 life borrowed from the stage. 
 
 " Diamondfield Jack " was treated with respect 
 and even deference when I was in Goldfield, and 
 although his vivid past shone about him, there was 
 nothing of the " bad man " or terror in his common- 
 place and industrious demeanor. Later events 
 showed, however, that this Davis held in reserve cer- 
 tain qualities of character which filled a needed gap 
 in the business activities of these desert gold fields. 
 
 Last year the mining camp union, which vain- 
 gloriously calls itself the " Industrial Workmen of 
 
 275 
 
The Greater America 
 
 the World," decided to throw Into total eclipse by 
 means of a boycott those enterprising journals, the 
 Tonopah Sun and the Goldfield Sun. The editors 
 of these twin luminaries were of the pioneer breed, 
 and not easily daunted, but the boycotters, because of 
 the strength of their labor organization, so coerced 
 the merchants of the two camps that they ceased 
 advertising. 
 
 The union was not satisfied with this victory, but 
 declared that the newspapers could not be sold on the 
 streets. The valiant editors stuck to their guns with 
 such fusillades as this : 
 
 COME ON, YOU COWARDLY CURS! 
 
 A Committee of the Goldfield I. W. W. Called 
 at the Goldfield Sun Office To-Day and 
 Notified Four Employees that They Must 
 Join the I. W. W. by To-Morrow or Be Eim 
 Out of Town. 
 
 The I. W. W. men who made the call 
 are Joe Smith, walking delegate for the 
 anarchists; a man named Tims, who is a 
 member of the fire department, and an- 
 other party whose name is not yet known 
 here. They demanded that every em- 
 ployee join their band of conspirators, 
 which flourishes under the name of a 
 union. The demand includes printers 
 and pressmen, who are members of the 
 American Federation to a man. 
 
 Now it is up to the dirty scoundrels to 
 start something. The Sun is ready for 
 the scoundrels. 
 
 Come on, you cowards, if you are look- 
 ing for something. 
 
 276 
 
The Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 Newsboys were bullied and beaten until none of 
 them dared try to sell the papers. After a time four 
 brave young men volunteered to peddle the Goldfield 
 Sun. They had no more than started on their venture- 
 some routes when a mob of union men charged them, 
 with oaths and threats and brandished weapons. 
 The flight of the newspaper merchants led them 
 toward the brokerage office of Mr. " Diamondfield 
 Jack " Davis, who was just then engaged in an elo- 
 quent eulogy of the shares of certain claims for the 
 benefit of an eastern visitor. The mob poured 
 through the office door, and Mr. Davis was reason- 
 ably annoyed. Rising without haste he unbelted 
 two revolvers of prodigious caliber and shoving 
 them in the faces of the nearest pursuers he spoke 
 in a terse summary of the prevailing fashion in 
 slang : 
 
 " I'll give you until I count twenty-three to beat it." 
 The mob had unanimously scattered before " Dia- 
 mondfield Jack " counted " three," in terror of name 
 and weapons combined. He had just returned from 
 a visit to San Francisco, and this expressive exhibit 
 of the social disorder in Goldfield interested him to 
 such an extent that he at once determined to volunteer 
 as a newsboy. Thereafter until the boycott was 
 broken, the public-spirited Mr. Davis daily paraded 
 the streets of Goldfield, a bulky bundle of Suns tucked 
 under one arm, and two long-barreled " forty-fours," 
 hanging by swivels from his belt. No objections on 
 
 277 
 
The Greater America 
 
 the part of the miners' union were made a matter of 
 public record. 
 
 Allied with Mr. Davis in this defense of private 
 rights was Mr. " Black " Allen, editor of the Gold- 
 field Sun. He also was a quiet and well-mannered 
 man who was ready to back his faith with his works. 
 After his life had been threatened by the miners' 
 union until the matter wore on his nerves, he saun- 
 tered into the headquarters of his assailants. He was 
 alone, and local history adds with a touch of pride in 
 the fitness of things, that he was carefully dressed 
 in a spick-and-span suit of white flannels, a silk shirt, 
 and a blue " butterfly " tie. His natty wardrobe 
 included also two derringers in the side pockets of 
 his flannel coat. Some thirty odd members of the 
 *' Industrial Order of the World " were loafing in 
 their rooms when this frontier editor of the year of 
 our Lord 1906 appeared among them and remarked 
 in an even voice: 
 
 " If any of you dirty, cowardly loafers are look- 
 ing for trouble, now is the time to begin. I don't 
 believe there is one real live man in your whole 
 blankety outfit. If there does happen to be one let 
 him step to the front and declare himself. You've 
 been going to kill me till I'm tired and sick of it." 
 
 There befell a silence that could have been heard 
 from Goldfield to the head of Death Valley, and 
 while the miners were staring at him, bluffed and 
 beaten, the sturdy young man twisted one end of his 
 
 278 
 
The Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 black mustache with a jaunty air, turned on his heel 
 and went back to his desk to prepare a triple-leaded 
 editorial headed: 
 
 " Cowardly Bluffers Fail to Make Good Their 
 Threats." 
 
 The petulant pop of the pistol is almost unknown 
 in the desert, however, and the six-shooter is not a 
 commonplace adornment of the well-dressed male. 
 The gambling house, saloon and dance hall, however, 
 are populous and profitable business enterprises and 
 they dot the streets *' gay and frequent." Because 
 public gambling Is licensed by law In Nevada, these 
 mining camps have a more vivid streak of frontier 
 conditions than can be found anywhere else. The 
 tanned and dusty men In boots, leggings and cordu- 
 roys who throng the streets of Tonopah when the 
 day's work is done, flock into the gambling houses 
 either to play or to look on by the way of diversion. 
 
 When I drifted Into the " Tonopah Club " the 
 bar was crowded and the big room jammed with 
 men who were drifting from one gambling table to 
 another. There was much heavy play and some 
 hard drinking, but no loud talk, no boisterous pro- 
 fanity, no ruffianly drunkenness. The place was 
 quieter than the average camp meeting. If one was 
 looking for surviving phases of the frontier, he would 
 be disappointed at first glimpse of so singularly docile 
 a gathering. 
 
 But In front of a faro table a brace of grizzled 
 279 
 
The Greater America 
 
 prospectors were "piping" along with fifty-cent chips. 
 They were almost cleaned out, and to the average 
 town-bred man, whose chief worry is lest he lose his 
 job, their situation would seem perilous and even hair 
 raising. For they had come in from the desert for a 
 " whirl," and when their modest stakes were gone, 
 they would be without a dollar in the world. They 
 were aware of this fact, but it did not disturb them. 
 They had been " broke " many times, and they 
 expected to "go broke" many times more. They had 
 been prudent enough to buy a little store of bacon, 
 beans and flour before they embarked on this ruinous 
 evening, and in the morning they would pack their 
 burros and trail off into the mountains to live another 
 month or two without seeing any other human being 
 until they could come back to town for another grub- 
 stake. And if they couldn't raise the cash for the 
 next grub-stake — well, that time was far distant, and 
 it's a poor kind of a man that will worry when he 
 has enough to eat for a month ahead. 
 
 So they dutifully and cheerfully went " broke," and 
 strolled over to watch a crowd that pressed around a 
 roulette table. Three young men in well-worn khaki 
 were playing with stacks of twenty-dollar gold pieces 
 in lieu of chips. Their speech was that of the campus 
 and the club of the eastern seaboard, and it was likely 
 that they learned the rudiments of this pastime in a 
 metropolitan palace of art presided over by one Rich- 
 ard Canfield. They staked twenty dollars on a 
 
 280 
 
The Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 number and one of them won a thousand dollars with 
 two turns of the wheel. Now there was a sudden 
 buzz of talk and the word was passed: 
 
 " Here comes Jack C for a whirl. Now 
 
 you'll see some action." 
 
 The little fish retired and made room at the rou- 
 lette table for the noted plunger, who had dropped 
 in to put into circulation a few thousands' worth of 
 the gold he had dug from a near-by hillside. The 
 dealer raised the limit to the ceiling, and the stout 
 man of the rough-and-ready garb lost ten thousand 
 dollars in an hour, and told the bartender to " set up 
 champagne for all hands." This generous act cost 
 him another thousand, and he swung carelessly out 
 to meander among the dance halls, where the jangle 
 of battered pianos mingled with that of women's 
 voices that had long lost their freshness. 
 
 One of these suddenly rich and prodigal miners, 
 in order fittingly to express his esteem for one of these 
 nightingales of the desert, vowed in a care-free and 
 exhilarated hour that he was going to give her a 
 grand piano. The lady protested and said she pre- 
 ferred the cash, but he insisted upon the grand piano 
 or nothing. After the ponderous instrument had 
 been freighted across the desert behind twenty mules, 
 at vast expense, it was found that the residence of 
 the faded songstress was not big enough to hold it. 
 
 At the time she was living in a one-room shack built 
 of lumber ripped from packing cases, as are many 
 
 281 
 
The Greater America 
 
 residents of to-day, and her house was scarcely larger 
 than the piano box. The miner handsomely solved 
 the problem when he embarked on his next " whirl," 
 for he gave orders that a house be built to hold the 
 piano, which was no mean tribute to her charms when 
 rough lumber was costing a hundred and thirty dol- 
 lars a thousand feet. 
 
 All things are in a state of change in such a town 
 as this. The " old-timer " who goes away for three 
 months returns to find that most of his friends have 
 moved away, or are holding down new jobs. I wasted 
 half a day in the company of a mining engineer who 
 sought a friend. We found him at length, in com- 
 mand of a hardware store. 
 
 " What do you think of him? " said the engineer 
 impatiently. " Last year at this time he was janitor 
 of the bank. Then he was made assistant cashier, 
 next he was made the full-fledged cashier, and then 
 he up and opens a hardware store, and It's all hap- 
 pened Inside of twelve months." 
 
 My acquaintance inquired for a gambler who had 
 been one of the big men of the town three months 
 before. 
 
 " He's keeping cases for a faro layout down street 
 for four dollars a day wages," was the reply. " He 
 had fifty thousand dollars last spring." 
 
 " Where is the professor who blew in to give 
 Shakespearean readings just before I went away?" 
 was the next query. 
 
 282 
 
The Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 " Oh, he chucked Shakespeare into the discard, and 
 he's deahng faro over in the Tonopah Club." 
 
 Mingled with these ups and downs are the bizarre 
 and almost incredible tales of men who have found 
 fortunes, almost with the stroke of a pick, in this 
 God-forsaken desert, from Tonopah to Bullfrog. All 
 kinds and conditions have won or lost in this tre- 
 mendous lottery, the college-bred man from the East 
 alongside the ragged prospector who had tramped 
 the Klondike in vain before he drifted at the call of 
 the latest cry of gold. I recall a Yale man in his 
 early thirties who told me of his luck: 
 
 " After I got out of college I began work in a 
 broker's office in Wall Street, expecting to touch only 
 the high places on the road to wealth. After two 
 years of it I was starting a crop of wrinkles trying 
 to live in New York on my salary, and. I needed 
 fresh air bad. I broke out and came West and did 
 a number of things. They did not pan out, as you 
 may gather when I tell you that I followed the rush 
 to Goldfield hoping something would turn up. I had 
 forty-five dollars in my clothes, and this wasn't going 
 to last long with grub at high-water prices. I applied 
 for work in a mine and cinched a job at four dollars 
 a day. The boss listened to my plea that I wasn't 
 feeling quite fit and wanted to wait a few days before 
 sharpening my pick. He promised to hold the job 
 for ten days, and I went out prospecting. Inside the 
 ten days I had staked a claim and had the ore in sight. 
 
 283 
 
The Greater America 
 
 It was so good that I cleaned up forty-five thousand 
 dollars, and the boss was shy one miner. Oh, yes, I 
 have held on to it, and it's working for me in develop- 
 ing some other rich properties." 
 
 College men fairly swarm in the gold camps, and 
 many of them flocked in as soldiers of fortune. 
 
 " Some fool threw a football into the middle of the 
 main street of Goldfield one day," said a prospector. 
 " Then he gave a college yell, and twenty men piled 
 out of stores and hotels and saloons so fast you 
 couldn't count 'em. They lined up without anybody's 
 giving the word, and played a game right on the 
 jump. They clean wore that football out in no 
 time." 
 
 While the college-bred man may find only disap- 
 pointment and hardship in such a stormy tide of life 
 as this, he quits it, at any rate, with a new respect 
 for mankind, a bed-rock democracy of view-point, 
 and a stock of elemental courage and self-reliance. 
 For there is this to be said of the men of the desert 
 and mountains, that they know how to take defeat 
 with a smile for the future and a firmer set of the 
 jaw for the present. While there are prodigal and 
 foolish deeds among the few who find bewildering 
 wealth in the earth, a finer wealth of manhood is 
 developed In the hearts of the many who fail to find 
 that which they seek. 
 
 On a hillside near Goldfield, I found an old 
 miner who was sinking a shaft to develop his 
 
 284 
 
'^ 
 
The Gold Camps of the Desert 
 
 prospect. There was a white heap of rock, a hole, 
 and a hand windlass and bucket to mark the scene of 
 his back-breaking endeavor. He was sharpening his 
 picks at his little forge, and as he smote the red steel 
 with his hammer and thrust it hissing into a water 
 bucket, he talked with the clang of his tool for punc- 
 tuation. He was gray and he wore spectacles and his 
 back was bent. But the seamed and sun-scorched face 
 held a certain quality of kindly tolerance of things, 
 a kind of tempered patience and sweetness, as if he 
 held a grip on a few simple doctrines of life gained 
 through hard stress. 
 
 " I've been mining and prospecting for twenty- 
 eight years," he said — " in Colorado and Wyoming 
 and California (bang, bang) — and in Alaska and 
 South Africa (thump, thump) — and I tried it awhile 
 in Australia (clang, bang) — I've made two big 
 strikes In my time — you might call 'em fortunes 
 (s-s-s-s-s-s) — lost 'em both In mining propositions — 
 I'm going down a hundred feet here and If I don't 
 strike it then I'll quit (bang, thump) — The surface 
 rock looks good to me — Hope I'll find some more 
 color before my grub-stake runs out — It's hard work, 
 but I don't know as I want to do anything else — It 
 sort of gets hold of a man after a while so he ain't 
 happy unless he's being disappointed and trying 
 again." 
 
 285 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 ON THE ROAD TO BULLFROG 
 
 There is another desert breed which is essentially 
 modern, and which must be classed as a type of the 
 twentieth century mining camp. This is the desert 
 chauffeur, who opened the trail of traffic between 
 Tonopah and Goldfield, and later drov^e his machines 
 on south to the camps of the Bullfrog district. He 
 was distinctly picturesque and as thorough-going a 
 pioneer in his way as the freighter in his. 
 
 " I can spot one of those desert automobile drivers 
 coming up the street as far as I can see him," said a 
 man in Goldfield. " After he has been at it a year, 
 he looks like a sheep herder. He gets that locoed 
 look in his face and the same kind of a wild stare, 
 and he looks as if you couldn't get the dust out of his 
 system if you ran him through a stamp mill." 
 
 It is one of the many incongruities of these towns 
 dumped down in the heart of the desert to see 
 the prospector and his burros turn out to dodge the 
 high-powered automobiles which snort through the 
 unpaved streets in squadrons. Nor have so many 
 costly machines been wrecked anywhere as on the 
 road (if you may call it such) between Goldfield 
 and Bullfrog. It was a stretch of sixty miles of lonely 
 
 286 
 
On the Road to Bullfrog 
 
 desert, without a town or a house as a refuge in case 
 of a breakdown. 
 
 When I made the trip, which was before the rail- 
 road had pushed beyond Goldfield, it was as cheerful 
 a gamble with respect to reaching your destination 
 as putting out to sea in a flat-bottomed skiff. 
 
 The law of the survival of the fittest had wrought 
 its pitiless work among the battered machines, and 
 from the wreckage loomed the commanding figure of 
 one Bill Brown, the only driver who guaranteed to 
 get you across whether his auto held together or not. 
 
 He had rebuilt his car several times. So little of 
 the original material was left that she suggested the 
 present condition of the frigate Constitution. The 
 car had been shipped into the desert, ornate, elab- 
 orate, equipped with many glittering devices which 
 Bill Brown began to eliminate with ruthless hand. 
 It should furnish makers and owners of automobiles 
 with food for reflection to learn that this Iconoclastic 
 chauffeur took a thousand pounds of weight from this 
 machine before he had her running to please him. 
 
 To look at this bucking broncho of a car, the novice 
 would conclude that Bill Brown had laid violent 
 hands upon her and removed most of her vitals at 
 random. When he had discarded a vast amount of 
 machinery and trimming, he tossed aside the body and 
 built a new one from the sides of packing cases to save 
 more weight and make room for more passengers. 
 
 Thus humbled and transformed, suggesting a New 
 287 
 
The Greater America 
 
 York club man stripped down to a prospector's outfit 
 and set adrift in the desert to shift for himself, the 
 car was made to look even less like an automobile. 
 Water-kegs and cases of oil and gasoline were 
 strapped on her sides, together with enough spare 
 tires and parts to reconstruct her at short notice. 
 With her engines uncovered, reeking of oil and dust, 
 rusty and patched and gaunt, the machine seemed 
 to belong to the desert after " Bill " Brown had 
 fashioned her to his liking. And like his machine, the 
 driver had come to harmonize with the environment. 
 He had been in the employ of a New York physician 
 before he came West to tame one of these desert 
 steeds. It was a far cry from the uniformed and 
 dapper chauffeur of the boulevard and the garage 
 to the rugged, dusty, self-reliant fighter against odds 
 that the desert had made of him in one year. 
 
 " I like it better than I did in New York," said 
 Bill, with a smile that struggled through his mask of 
 alkali. " I can't tell you why. I guess because this 
 comes pretty near being a man's work." 
 
 Sometimes he made the run to Bullfrog in five 
 hours. This was when the machine held together. 
 He was seldom on the road longer than twelve hours, 
 which was a better record than that of other drivers, 
 who had been stranded for a day and a night in the 
 blazing desolation between the two ports. 
 
 His road twisted through cafions, or lava-strewn 
 plains, across the bottom of dead lakes, and through 
 
 288 
 
On the Road to Bullfrog 
 
 sand that buried his tires. The steering wheel was 
 never still as he snaked his old machine through the 
 rough going, while the passengers bounded merrily 
 from their seats, and wondered while in air whether 
 they would come down in or out of the car. 
 
 Twenty miles from anywhere we passed a tent 
 which bore the legend, " Saloon and Restaurant." 
 Another sign informed us that this tent was the town 
 of " Cuprite " and that its reason for being was, 
 " First shipment, $238 per ton." The worth of very 
 many tons would have been required to hold the aver- 
 age man more than five minutes in " Cuprite," but the 
 population of four was cheerful and apparently con- 
 tented. Far ahead a dust cloud marked the crawling 
 progress of a freight outfit, hauling hay and lumber 
 to Bullfrog, taking five days to make the sixty-mile 
 journey. 
 
 Against the background of sand and mountains 
 gleamed a little lake. It was framed in wet marsh 
 and green undergrowth, and tall trees marched behind 
 it. Presently the machine stormed over this patch 
 of desert, and there was nothing but a streak of daz- 
 zling white soda and clumps of sagebrush. This dry 
 lake whence the mirage had fled was as smooth and 
 hard as asphalt, and for a mile Bill Brown " let 
 her out," and it was like flying, after the pitching and 
 bucking over the desert road. 
 
 " I made the trip by night during the summer," 
 said he. " It was too hot in the daytime. Then 
 
 289 
 
The Greater America 
 
 you did get a run for your money, because I'd miss 
 the road now and then and cavort over the rocks till 
 I struck it again. But I've been lucky. I never had 
 to walk forty miles for help and leave my passengers 
 spraddled out in the sand like one of the drivers did, 
 with the thermometer playing around a hundred and 
 twenty." 
 
 The machine stopped with an ominous rattle. It 
 seemed as if Bill Brown had boasted before he 
 was out of the woods. He climbed down and looked 
 his battle-scarred veteran over. A freighter was 
 passing a few hundred yards away. To this outfit 
 hastened the resourceful Bill and returned with a 
 few feet of wire which he had purloined from a 
 bale of hay. With unruffled temper Bill burrowed 
 into the stifling dust, somehow utilized the wire to 
 hitch his machine together again, and she bounded 
 away with renewed and headlong enthusiasm. 
 
 Ten miles from the camp of Beatty, we essayed to 
 jump across a gully at a gait of about thirty miles an 
 hour. There was a crash and a spill, in which the 
 passengers were dumped overside on their several 
 heads. Bill Brown rolled out like a shot rabbit, 
 and when he scrambled to his feet, surveyed a wrecked 
 car. The rear axle had snapped in twain and one 
 wheel had rolled on down the gully. A civilized 
 driver with a broken axle would have thrown up his 
 hands and waited to be towed into harbor. The 
 passengers gazed mournfully across the desert and 
 
 290 
 
Oti the Road to Bullfrog 
 
 thought of the ten-mile walk. The time was the late 
 afternoon, and the prospect was not pleasing. But 
 Bill remarked with an air of a man who has no 
 troubles : 
 
 " This don't amount to shucks. You just loaf 
 around and pick wild flowers for half an hour and 
 then we'll go on our way rejoicing." 
 
 He extracted a spare axle, a jack and a wrench 
 from his machine shop under the seats, collected a 
 few rocks of handy size and hummed a little song 
 while he toiled. The rear of the car was jacked up 
 on a stone underpinning, and the broken axle 
 removed, and a new one fitted in thirty-five minutes 
 by the watch. 
 
 " I was a little slower than usual," apologized 
 Bill. "This gully Is a mean place to break down 
 in. You can't get under the machine without build- 
 ing up a rock pile first." 
 
 Again the old car buckled down to her task, and 
 rattled into Beatty, six hours out from Goldfield. 
 There was one long street of tents, and straggling 
 away from them were tiny dwellings ingeniously 
 walled with tin cracker boxes hammered out flat or 
 with gunny sacks, or beer bottles set in adobe, and 
 dugouts were burrowing into the hillsides. Beatty 
 was five days by freight from a railroad and lumber 
 was a staggering luxury. 
 
 Ringed about by painted mountains, whose tower- 
 ing slopes were wondrously streaked with crimson and 
 
 291 
 
The Greater America 
 
 green, the new camp seemed vastly more remote from 
 the world of men than could be measured In miles 
 of desert. The concentrated essence of American 
 enterprise was displayed in a hotel which had been 
 opened a few days before our arrival. It was a big 
 square, wooden building of two stories, which stood 
 forth In this town of tents and shacks like a battle ship 
 amid a fishing fleet. And one had to fare to this far 
 corner of the country to find that " welcome at an 
 Inn " which cities have forgotten. Waiting on the 
 porch was Mrs. Casey, the landlord's wife, blowing a 
 horn and cheerily calling: 
 
 " Dinner's hot and waiting. Come In to the best 
 hotel in a hundred miles." 
 
 A piano was busy in the parlor, there were mission 
 furniture and big lounging chairs in the oflice, and 
 at the dining room door tarried, with smiling counte- 
 nance, a plump and ruddy waiter with a white mus- 
 tache, who was an animated evidence of good living. 
 
 It seems worth while to recall some of the items 
 of that memorable menu down at Casey's, In the 
 camp of Beatty, not far from the edge of Death 
 Valley, amid as ghastly an isolation of natural back- 
 ground as can be found on the globe : 
 
 " Utah celery, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, 
 roast spring chicken, lettuce salad, corn on the cob, 
 green apple pie, English plum pudding, apples and 
 grapes, and fresh milk." 
 
 There were telephones In the bedrooms, bathtubs 
 292 
 
On the Road to Bullfrog 
 
 and running water, a plate-glass bar and two spick- 
 and-span roulette wheels; in short, all the comforts 
 of home and most of the luxuries. 
 
 In the starlit evening the untiring Bill Brown 
 limbered up his scarred chariot and drove us over to 
 Bullfrog, five miles away. The lamps went out dur- 
 ing the journey, but Bill was not disturbed. He 
 drove at top speed and occasionally lost the rocky 
 trail. At such times the car careened on two wheels, 
 came down with a grunt, and hurdled a few bowlders. 
 But with unshaken energy the machine boomed Into 
 Bullfrog, and by a miracle of luck the passengers 
 were still inside. 
 
 At the hotel, which at that time was almost the 
 only wooden building In Bullfrog, we chanced to meet 
 a sharp-featured, boyish-looking young man, George 
 Wingfield by name. Three years before this he 
 had been a cow puncher, and tradition has It that 
 he landed In Tonopah with assets of twenty-five dol- 
 lars. Gambling *' looked good to him " as offering 
 an opening for a strong and willing young man who 
 was Intent on piling up a fortune with the least possi- 
 ble delay. Millions were being talked all around him 
 and he wanted a few of them. His good luck was 
 so extraordinary that In a few months he was able 
 to buy out a controlling Interest In the " Tonopah 
 Club." 
 
 Then he was able to stake prospectors in the more 
 fascinating gamble for gold claims. He sent these 
 
 293 
 
The Greater America 
 
 hardy pilgrims out to right and left, reckoning that 
 a few " grub-stakes " and burros were worth risking 
 even if only one man in twenty should find gold. 
 Within the year young WIngfield had Interests In 
 several of the richest desert claims, and was speeding 
 over the hot sands in the biggest, reddest automobile 
 in all Nevada. Within three years from the time 
 he had been punching cattle he was worth a million. 
 Meanwhile United States Senator Nixon had become 
 interested In this quiet, shrewd gambler, and took 
 him into business partnership. Later, however, the 
 Senator has urged young WIngfield to forego his 
 proprietorship of the " Tonopah Club," as a feature 
 of his business activities which might cause caustic 
 comment in Washington touching the alliance. 
 
 It occurred to me while I was eating ham and eggs 
 alongside this George WIngfield in the Bullfrog hotel 
 that there was romance left even in money getting. 
 Here was a modern buccaneer, if you please, who had 
 diced with fortune, and won by means of daring and 
 enterprise as bold as ever sent men to fight for gold 
 that lay in the holds of tall galleons. He had " made 
 his stake " as a gambler, but In this corner of the 
 West your honest gambler is as respectable a figure 
 as a Standard Oil king of the Atlantic seaboard. I 
 found that young WIngfield was one of the most 
 respected and popular men of the desert not because 
 he is rich, but because he is square and fearless and 
 generous. I heard not long ago that he has piled up 
 
 294 
 
"^ 
 
 
On the Road to Bullfrog 
 
 such huge Interests in mining operations that his in- 
 come is about two hundred thousand dollars a year. 
 He belongs with a modern generation of " Bonanza 
 Kings " .whose beginnings are no more bizarre and 
 rude and lawless than those of earlier argonauts 
 whose descendants squander the wealth of the Com- 
 stock lode. 
 
 Inasmuch as a man would have to pack water on 
 his back to camp on this site, the town of Bullfrog 
 was named by a man of high-powered fancy. The 
 camp had another distinction in that it was the last 
 outpost of the gold seeker. To push on toward the 
 south meant a journey of a hundred and twenty-five 
 miles to reach the nearest railroad, within sight of 
 the Funeral Range, whose ramparts march along 
 Death Valley. 
 
 Bullfrog was somewhat in the condition of a man 
 with a thousand-dollar bank note in his pocket who 
 is likely to go hungry before he can break it. 
 The rush was over, and the hills were speckled with 
 claims and the ore was there. The hundreds who 
 tarried to hold down their locations and wait for 
 something to turn up lacked capital to take out the 
 ore; and when they had It on the dump, they were 
 so far from a railroad that hauling It over the desert 
 cut too heavily Into the profits. Therefore they sat 
 tight and held on, waiting for the railroad which must 
 come to them in a few months. Meantime there was 
 much gold In the hills and little cash In the camp. 
 
 295 
 
TJie Greater America 
 
 But hopes were high, and it was good to see the rows 
 of tents that stood for pluck and courage, on the fir- 
 ing line of civilization. 
 
 Next day I was invited to lunch at one of the show 
 mines of this district. Bob Montgomery was one 
 of the tribe of desert prospectors when he stum- 
 bled upon this bonanza. When I saw it the miners 
 had been crosscutting and tunneling into the white 
 and chalk-like rock only a few months. They had 
 piled up several thousands of tons of ore that was 
 worth from $200 to $700 a ton. It was crumbly 
 stuff that looked like lime, and it held no free gold 
 that the eye could see. It was costing fifty dollars a 
 ton to freight it to a smelter, but it paid to ship such 
 ore as this out of the remote desert. Inside the mine, 
 a huge mass of ore had been blocked out which 
 assayed from $230 to $1,500 a ton. The experts 
 estimated that three million dollars' worth of ore was 
 already in sight. Taking it out was the cleanest and 
 easiest mining imaginable. The soft, clean talc cut 
 almost like cheese, and it was like removing sacks of 
 gold from a vault. After a glimpse of such treasure 
 finding as this, it was possible to understand the exu- 
 berant declaration of a wild-eyed young citizen of 
 Bullfrog: 
 
 " Give us time enough and we'll demonetize gold." 
 The story of one such strike as this lures thousands 
 into the desert, and they paint another and a con- 
 trasting picture. For many are called and few are 
 
 296 
 
On the Road to Bullfrog 
 
 chosen by the fickle fortune that directs the trail of 
 the gold hunter. Where these thousands of adven- 
 turous men of broken fortunes come from, and where 
 they drift to when the stampede has passed, Is one 
 of the mysteries of the " gold strike." They leave 
 behind them, however, cities where there was a desert, 
 they help to redeem the waste places and in their 
 wake is new wealth that flows Into every artery of the 
 nation's material welfare. 
 
 Twenty thousand people have been already added 
 to the population of Nevada, and many millions In 
 money to her resources. And the hero and the 
 creator of it all Is the dusty prospector with his hardy 
 burros, his canteen, his blankets and his gold pan and 
 hammer. Behind him comes the army of careless 
 and high-hearted Invaders, whose truly American 
 war cry is : 
 
 *' If It looks good to yoUj get to It." 
 
 297 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE MEN OF THE UNTAMED DESERT 
 
 It was in the camp of Bullfrog that Mitchell, the big, 
 brick-red mining man of Nevada, told me his view of 
 law on the desert : 
 
 " If you are prospecting with an unreasonable hog 
 of a partner, who wants to eat three slices of bacon 
 and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, and lets the 
 canteen gurgle down his throat, while you get along 
 with a strip of bacon and just moisten your lips when 
 you take a drink, then you're all right if you kill him, 
 I'd kill him if there wasn't anything else to do. It's 
 a tough game, and it's your life or his when you're 
 lost or your grub-stake and water are giving out." 
 
 These observations were suggested by the arrival 
 in camp two days before of the bones of a prospector 
 who had died of thirst some forty miles from Bull- 
 frog during the previous summer. He had been a 
 carpenter, earning wages of eight dollars a day in the 
 new camps during the " boom," but the gold fever 
 led him away from this safe and profitable toil. He 
 picked up a partner, they loaded their burros and 
 trailed off south toward the Death Valley country to 
 prospect in the Funeral Range. 
 
 Three weeks after the desert swallowed them 
 up the partner wandered into a freighters' camp, 
 
 298 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 half-crazed with thirst and exhaustion. He was able 
 to tell the freighters that the carpenter was some- 
 where out beyond, lost and without water, too helpless 
 to move. The partner was too weak and fevered to go 
 back with the rescue party of freighters, so they left 
 him in camp. He directed them as well as he could, 
 but the search was bootless, and Griffin, the carpenter 
 of Bullfrog, was added to the long list of desert vic- 
 tims. Several months later a party of prospectors 
 stumbled, by chance, across what was left of him. 
 There were no traces of his outfit; he had thrown 
 away his gun, his canteen and his hat. One shoe was 
 found thirty feet from his body, and he had torn off 
 and flung away most of his clothing. These were the 
 ghastly evidences of the last great fight he had made 
 to struggle on. 
 
 " When they're dying for water," said Mitchell, 
 who knew the " desert game," " they throw away 
 everything until all their clothes are gone, and you 
 generally find them without a stitch on." 
 
 To those who have not been in the Nevada desert 
 it seems almost incredible that men should wander 
 there and die, a dozen or more every summer, and 
 that others will follow them and die of thirst in there 
 so long as there are inaccessible mountains to be 
 searched for gold. Nor is it always the heedless 
 prospector that loses his life by daring the desert. I 
 heard many of these stories while crossing this stretch 
 of country, and passed more than one little heap of 
 
 299 
 
The Greater America 
 
 lava fragments that marked the grave of a victim of 
 thirst, but that which made the most haunting impres- 
 sion ran as follows : 
 
 A prosperous mining man of Delamar, Nevada, 
 started to drive from his home to Pioche, an old 
 silver-mining camp which was a large and tumultuous 
 city thirty years ago. Pioche lay across an expanse 
 of desert, but the driv^er had made the trip many 
 times and had no more thought of danger than if he 
 were taking a train for San Francisco. He had a 
 good pair of horses and a buckboard in which he 
 stowed a full canteen, food and a keg of water for 
 his horses. With good luck he expected to cover the 
 distance between daylight and dark, and to return 
 home next day. It was hardly worth saying good-by 
 to his family. 
 
 Somewhere out in the sand and sagebrush he got 
 out of his buckboard, for what purpose no one knows. 
 It may have been to adjust the harness, or to kill a 
 rattlesnake with his whip. By an almost incredible 
 twist of fate it happened that he would have been a 
 luckier man to jump from the deck of a liner into mid- 
 ocean. His horses took fright and ran away and left 
 him. They wandered into Delamar on the day after, 
 and the empty buckboard told the town that disaster 
 had overtaken the driver. 
 
 A party was hastily equipped and the wheel tracks 
 were followed until dark. Then a dry camp was 
 made and the search was picked up on the following 
 
 300 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 day. When they found the man only three days had 
 elapsed since he left home. He was naked and stark 
 mad. He became conscious for a little while, long 
 enough to tell how the tragedy had happened, and he 
 died soon after they carried him home, of thirst, 
 fever and a shattered mind. 
 
 " Why didn't he follow his wagon tracks back 
 home?" said the man from Delamar who was re- 
 minded to tell the story. " It's most likely that he 
 did try for a little way, and then he went off his head, 
 just scared crazy at the bare thought of being lost on 
 foot out there with no water In thirty or forty miles, 
 and he figured that he could never make the distance, 
 and that made him locoed. Or maybe he thought 
 he saw a spring and lost the trail and couldn't find it 
 again. The desert plays queer tricks with a man's 
 thinkin' outfit." 
 
 When I was in Bullfrog in the autumn of 1905 a 
 stage line had been recently put across a stretch of a 
 hundred and twenty-five miles of this desert to connect 
 the new gold camps with the railroad which runs from 
 Los Angeles to Salt Lake. It was a hardy and ven- 
 turesome enterprise, backed by the Kimball Brothers, 
 two young men of the stuff that men are made of in 
 the new West. They came naturally by their liking 
 for the stage business, for their father had been one 
 of the partners in the Overland Mail when Ben Holli- 
 day was making a new highway across the continent. 
 
 To set this desert enterprise going they had to 
 301 
 
The Greater America 
 
 establish supply and water stations, for in the route 
 of a hundred and twenty-five miles there were only 
 two springs, and not a human being except for the 
 lonely ranchers that dwelt in these two little oases. 
 Three wells were driven, so that water stations were 
 about thirty miles apart, and by these wells were 
 pitched the tents of the station-keepers who fed and 
 watered the change horses. 
 
 There was no way traffic, and the revenues must 
 come from the daily mail contract and the few pas- 
 sengers who went through to the gold camps or came 
 out to the railroad at twenty-five dollars a head. 
 Whether or not the young men gained profit by the 
 enterprise, they were sure of the distinction of oper- 
 ating the loneliest and most forbidding stage route 
 in the United States. 
 
 When I decided to come out of Bullfrog by this 
 route my acquaintances agreed that the Idea was 
 wholly asinine. 
 
 " Go back to Goldfield in an automobile and take 
 a train for Reno," they chorused. " That stage trip 
 to Las Vegas Is the worst ever. Those who have 
 lived through it swear they'll die here of old age 
 before they'll try to escape the way they came in. 
 It's the limit." 
 
 The project sounded so uncommonly forbidding 
 that It seemed well worth undertaking. Surely the 
 kind of men who drove and supplied the stage line, 
 as well as the wayfarers to be met along the route, 
 
 302 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 were helping to build up the unpeopled places after 
 their own solitary fashion, and they would be far 
 more worth knowing than the commonplace traveling 
 acquaintances one is wont to make in the beaten ruts 
 of railway journeying. 
 
 The stage halted to pick me up at the Beatty hotel 
 in the Bullfrog district at five o'clock in the morning. 
 The starlit night was yet chill with the windless and 
 crystalline air that refreshes the desert when the sun 
 has left it. A covered Concord wagon pulled by two 
 horses came slowly up the tented street that was ankle 
 deep in white alkali dust. 
 
 Here and there a canvas wall glimmered from an 
 early candlelight within. The little camp, cuddled 
 in the rugged arms of the mountains that locked It 
 round about, seemed very lonely and almost forlorn, 
 so far it was from the more permanent habitations 
 of men and women, so brave an outpost of a civiliza- 
 tion that has almost outgrown this kind of pioneering. 
 It needed the talk and stir of its rough-clad, sun- 
 burned men in the raw, new streets, and the noise of 
 pick and blast in the prospect holes that burrowed the 
 slopes, to detach it from the lifeless silence that 
 brooded over the desert. 
 
 There were no other passengers for the stage, and 
 the driver welcomed me like a long-lost brother, for 
 he did not like to drive his thirty-mile stretch alone. 
 We passed out through a gap in the mountains and 
 they were just beginning to flush with the singular 
 
 303 
 
The Greater America 
 
 glory of the desert dawn. In the wake of a shroud- 
 ing haze of blue, which lingered briefly, came a 
 crimson flush that touched first the crests of the 
 mountains, then stole swiftly down their sides, and 
 the day leaped into being. 
 
 While it was yet early morning we passed through 
 a tiny camp called Gold Center. Gold had not been 
 found there, and it was the center of nothing except 
 sand and mountains. It was, in a way, left stranded 
 in the ebb of the roaring tide of the first rush a few 
 months before, when the vanguard of the invaders 
 took it hilariously for granted that gold must be 
 everywhere in these mountains. 
 
 The more rational settlements of Beatty and Bull- 
 frog lay only a few miles away, yet Gold Center 
 persisted in being, and, mirahile dictu, misguided 
 initiative was erecting a brewery in the camp, which 
 was as far removed from malt and hops as It was 
 possible to find this side of Hades. We stopped to 
 pick up a passenger who was waiting at the canvas 
 saloon, fittingly named " The Last Chance." The 
 driver, in an ill-timed spirit of jest, observed to the 
 shaggy landlord : 
 
 *' How are things in Dead Center? " 
 
 " Dead Center! humph! " indignantly snorted the 
 leading citizen. *' For two cents I'd pull you off that 
 broken-down hearse and spill you all over Gold Cen- 
 ter, which is booked to be the best camp in the State 
 of Nevada. Busted prospectors that have to drive 
 
 304 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 stage to get a grub-stake mustn't come round here 
 passing any gay remarks about ' Dead Center.' " 
 
 The passenger was tactful enough to add no fuel 
 to this blaze as he clambered into the wagon and 
 shook the dust of Gold Center from his battered 
 boots. He slumped into the collar of his faded over- 
 coat beside the driver, and pulled down over his eyes 
 a dilapidated soft hat, which in itself was eloquent 
 of many things suffered in desert wandering. 
 
 He was a chunky, elderly man, with a blue eye, a 
 flaming ruddiness of countenance and a thatch of tow 
 hair which defied the onslaught of years to turn it 
 gray. Ever and anon this Bill Crump extracted 
 a bottle from his pocket, offered it to the driver, who 
 always refused with a melancholy gesture, and drank 
 therefrom a " slug to keep the chill off," with a deft- 
 ness which gave weight to his claim that he was a son 
 of old Kentucky. They were an oddly contrasting 
 pair, the stout and garrulous Crump and the driver, 
 who was a lanky man with a subdued and even 
 chastened air, as if life were bound to be a losing 
 fight. 
 
 Yet they were kindred spirits, in that both had 
 been rolling stones along the outer edge of civiliza- 
 tion, and old age was overtaking them with naught 
 to show for the long years except an amazing variety 
 of experiences. 
 
 Crump faced the future stoutly with a flamboyant 
 courage, and you could picture in your mind's eye 
 
 305 
 
The Greater America 
 
 this battered, sturdy figure shaking his fist at fortune 
 in city and camp and desert, always making the best 
 of it and letting the morrow go hang. 
 
 As for the stage driver, he was and would be a 
 dreamer to the end, industrious, sober, but never 
 making a winning fight against the realities, moving 
 on with an air of resignation to find the vision still 
 beyond his grasp. Crump had just quit a government 
 surveying party, with which he had been horse- 
 wrangler for four months. The expedition was mov- 
 ing into Death Valley, to make the first map of that 
 unpleasant region, and Crump decided that he needed 
 change of occupation. 
 
 " I'm going to spend the winter in Los Angeles," 
 he explained, with his enduring bravado. " I need 
 rest and change. I'm a furniture-maker by trade. 
 My chest of tools is In hock, but I'll get it out and 
 make money and mix up with good people." 
 
 His versatility had Included many years of driving 
 stage. Indeed, he could rake up memories of stage 
 routes In Texas forty years ago, but heaven only 
 knows how many things Crump had turned his hand 
 to In the meantime. The driver had been fairly con- 
 sistent as a miner " on and off " for twenty-five years. 
 Last year he prospected In the desert for nine months 
 and found nothing. Now he was full of a scheme to 
 return to Alaska and outfit a party to trap for furs 
 and Incidentally look for gold. There was no chance 
 of failure, he argued, and whoever should be bold 
 
 306 
 
s 
 
 L' L 
 
 »ii 
 
 
 
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 *s 
 
 ^J&i 
 
 
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 CPl 
 
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 .,>^' 
 
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 1^ 
 
 
 /^4'.i^ 1 
 
 SbJHl ^ ' 
 
 *■•"■' p^ 
 
 ^B^HI %'\ 
 
 '1 ^o; 1 
 
 
 &■.•-*-■' ii 
 
 ^^■^^K^ • 
 
 -•:^ 
 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 enough to grub-stake him would inevitably reap a 
 dazzling reward. 
 
 He was driving stage only until he could turn 
 miner again. He had seen the partners of his youth 
 make great strikes and become the millionaires of 
 Utah and Colorado. His own failures had not 
 soured him. He was inclined to believe that every 
 man got a square deal sooner or later, and his turn 
 was coming, of course it was. Crump was not look- 
 ing an inch beyond his florid nose, even when he 
 talked so large about his plans for the winter, while 
 the driver was continually dwelling with the visions 
 that were as impalpable as the desert mirages. 
 
 When the sun swiftly climbed clear of the curtain- 
 ing mountains the desert began to swim in a glare of 
 heat. To the right ran the naked heights of the 
 Charleston mountains, while a few miles to the left 
 was the grim Funeral Range, beyond which lay Death 
 Valley. Between these towering ranges stretched the 
 desert, over which the stage crawled like a fly on a 
 whitewashed floor. Through a notch in the Funeral 
 Range we could see across Death Valley to the moun- 
 tains which lifted high on the other side of it. There 
 was something inexpressibly forbidding and mys- 
 terious about this view-point in the desert. 
 
 For Death Valley has been for long a fabled place, 
 In which have been focused many strange and dread- 
 ful stories, some of them true. It is one of the hottest 
 corners on the globe, because, while Bullfrog, only 
 
 307 
 
Tlie Greater America 
 
 thirty miles from the head of it, is four thousand feet 
 above the sea, this narrow valley between two moun- 
 tain ranges drops to a depth below sea level. There- 
 fore it becomes a furnace in which no air is stirring. 
 It is perilous to life because good water can be found 
 in only two or three places in a length of more than 
 a hundred miles, while there are many poison springs, 
 fatal to man and beast. 
 
 It is bad enough, in truth, without need of exag- 
 gerated pen pictures such as the western correspon- 
 dent loves to paint. If any disaster to outfit occurs, 
 if the canteen runs dry, if a man should fall and 
 break a leg while prospecting in the valley, he were 
 wise to blow out his brains to avoid lingering in slow 
 torture. A veteran prospector who had crossed 
 Death Valley three times, and was known among 
 his fellows as a man of unsurpassed physique, hardi- 
 hood and experience, told me what he thought of 
 the journey while we were in camp together in the 
 desert : 
 
 " It's plumb foolishness to go into Death Valley 
 with less than three or four men in your party, and 
 twelve to fifteen burros. Load four or five burros 
 with hay and barley for their own feed, three or 
 four with canned stuff, flour and bacon, and at least 
 four with water, and If you don't get lost you will 
 pull through all right. There's gold in there, though 
 I don't take any stock In Scotty and his mysteri- 
 ous mine. He's a four-flusher. There's prospectors 
 
 308 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 ransacking the Death Valley country all the time, and 
 you can't hide a rich mine in this country any more 
 than you can hide a brick building in a town." 
 
 You cannot cross the Nevada desert without hear- 
 ing much gossip about " Scotty," he of the meteoric 
 special trains and the colossal bluffs. A " busted 
 cow puncher " with an exotic imagination, he has 
 juggled fact and fancy until the shrewdest men in 
 the Southwest lock horns in argument as to whether 
 " Scotty " has a mine In Death Valley or dreamed it. 
 When I met him he was coming out of the desert 
 with a bag of ore on a burro and the announcement: 
 
 " I'm due to take a little whirl down the road. I'm 
 going to bluff old Harriman out of his boots. I'll bet 
 him fifty thousand dollars I can beat him In a race 
 from, the Coast to Chicago, me taking a special on the 
 Santa Fe and that old figger-head pulling out on the 
 Union Pacific. I'm afraid he'll take water. He's a 
 counterfeit, on the level, he is. 
 
 " They say I've killed fifteen men just to see 'em 
 kick," continued " Scotty," as he cocked his hat over 
 one eye. " It ain't so. I wouldn't do no such thing. 
 They don't know me. I fool 'em all. I've got a pair 
 of glasses that can see fifty miles, and a gun that 
 shoots five miles, and when they try to trail me Into 
 the Valley I run blazers on 'em. I'm due for a little 
 race down the pike behind an engine. Maybe I've 
 got a mine and maybe not. Maybe it's on Furnace 
 Creek, In the Funeral Range, Death Valley, and 
 
 309 
 
The Greater America 
 
 maybe It's somewhere else, and maybe I ain't got a 
 cent." 
 
 A bizarre figure of a man who harmonizes im- 
 mensely well with the romantic mystery of Death 
 Valley, " Scotty " has managed to find and somehow 
 maintain the notoriety that is dear to his soul. To 
 my knowledge he *' blew in " on his " whirl " some 
 six or eight thousand dollars advanced under a grub- 
 stake contract by a hypnotized New York banker, 
 which funds were to be used in developing the alleged 
 mining properties. " Scotty " refused to tell his 
 backer where the mine was, and squandered all the 
 money advanced, which accounts for a good part 
 of his flaming prosperity. As a type of the vanish- 
 ing West, he makes a crudely picturesque figure 
 against the dull background of a tamed civilization. 
 
 While the stage toiled through the sand and the 
 choking dust clouds at the depressing speed of three 
 miles an hour, there moved in the far distance 
 another pillar of alkali powder, heralding the ap- 
 proach of a freight outfit. By and by there emerged 
 from this gray veil the long string of eighteen mules, 
 stepping out with brave and patient endurance, pull- 
 ing the linked trail wagons no more than ten or twelve 
 miles in a day. The " mule skinner " in the saddle of 
 a wheeler and the " swamper " trudging alongside 
 exchanged quiet greeting with the stage driver from 
 the enveloping fog: 
 
 " How are you? " 
 
 310 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 " All right; how are you? " 
 
 " Pretty good." 
 
 The passing was like that of two ships at sea. The 
 freighters were ten days out from Las Vegas. One 
 trail wagon was loaded with hay and water kegs, 
 for they must make dry camps between wells, and 
 they moved over the face of the desert with a lonely 
 deliberation that made an impression of large and 
 patient self-reliance. Scarcely anywhere in America 
 could they be found outside of the desert. Nor 
 would they linger much longer even here, for the rail- 
 road was creeping along their trail and soon they 
 would be of a piece with the other relics of the genu- 
 inely " simple life " which has made a nation of a 
 wilderness. 
 
 At noon we stopped at a tent where there was a 
 driven well. The keeper of the station lived here 
 with his wife, and there were no other dwellers within 
 thirty miles of them. Nothing grew around them but 
 the sagebrush, nothing else could be made to grow 
 without water. There was not a tree within a day's 
 journey. But this cheerful, kindly, gray-haired man 
 and his motherly wife said that they liked the desert. 
 Perhaps it was because their faces hinted that home 
 and contentment are where the heart is. A stage 
 each way within the twenty-four hours, the occasional 
 freight outfit or prospector that tarried for water — 
 these were their only visitors. There were no 
 neighbors. 
 
 311 
 
The Greater America 
 
 The heat beat down on their shadeless tents as 
 from a furnace, and the uneasy dust was always sift- 
 ing into food and clothing and blankets. But their 
 contentment in each other and the inscrutable fascina- 
 tion of the desert had turned the edge of their 
 hardships. 
 
 A change of drivers was made, and a white-bearded 
 patriarch turned back with us to drive over the same 
 forty miles he had just covered northward bound. 
 
 " When you get home," he chuckled as he picked 
 up the reins, " tell 'em you rode one stage with old 
 Pop Gilbert, that crossed the plains with his dad 
 'way back in Fifty. We set out with ox teams to go 
 from Illinois to California and we were six months 
 on the way. Dad didn't like it out there, and being 
 a sudden man he turned round and trailed back to 
 Illinois. I'm still pretty chipper." 
 
 He was a " chipper " veteran of the frontier, for 
 after a conversation with the invincible Crump and a 
 pull at the black bottle, he became interested in the 
 government survey lately forsaken by this passenger 
 and asked: 
 
 " S'pose there's a chance for me to get that job 
 you throwed up? I like bosses, and Death Valley's 
 one place where I hain't been. I don't mind hot 
 weather. I'm a desert lizard, and my hide's turned 
 to leather." 
 
 Crump was discouraging, but " Pop " prattled for 
 some time about missing this chance to be baked alive 
 
 312 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 in Death Valley. It seemed absurd that danger 
 should menace along a trail rutted by the wheel tracks 
 of the stage, but in mid-afternoon we came up with 
 an unexpected suggestion of the implacable hostility 
 of these waste places. The stage had covered per- 
 haps twenty miles from the noon-time camp, and the 
 next station lay about the same distance beyond. A 
 solitary man was staggering on ahead, reeling from 
 one side of the trail to the other, frequently halting 
 to throw himself flat on the sand and then more 
 weakly scrambling on. Far in advance, mere dots 
 on the horizon, were three other figures on foot. 
 
 Presently the voice of the derelict floated back in 
 incoherent cries. He was so absorbed in trying to 
 overtake those far ahead of him that he paid no heed 
 to the stage until it was beside him. Then he fell 
 on his knees with wild gestures and husky pleadings 
 in Spanish. It seemed that the vanishing dots beyond 
 were companions with whom he had set out to walk 
 from the Bullfrog camps to the railroad. They had 
 only two canteens among them, and since leaving the 
 last well their water had given out, and his strength 
 had been the first to break. 
 
 They had pushed on in desperation, leaving him to 
 fall by the wayside, and as Crump expressed it, " the 
 Greaser was all in." The pitiable wretch was given 
 a lift in the stage, and a pull at the driver's big can- 
 teen. When his callous comrades were overtaken 
 they were fluently cursed by old man Crump in vivid 
 
 313 
 
The Greater America 
 
 Spanish, and their canteens were filled for them, after 
 which the abandoned one was dumped among them 
 to shift for himself. 
 
 Of a different metal was the old prospector met a 
 little while later. He was really an amazing figure 
 of a man. Bent and partly crippled with rheumatism, 
 he was trudging along alone, with no burros, and not 
 even a blanket on his back. He had not a cent in 
 his pocket, and his outfit consisted of a canteen and 
 a paper parcel of bacon and biscuit given him by a 
 generous freighter. While we stopped to breathe the 
 horses in the sand, which made walking like pulling 
 through a heavy snow, the old man made cheerful 
 chat with us. He had been working a claim in the 
 Funeral Range through the summer, and his grub- 
 stake having run out, he was footing it into the min- 
 ing camps to look for work to tide him over the 
 winter. He pulled a few chunks of rock from his 
 pockets, gazed at them with an expression of the 
 most radiant confidence, and said that on the strength 
 of these samples he proposed to save enough money 
 from his wages to outfit in the spring and return to 
 his mountain solitude. Here was a man for you, who 
 preached a concrete gospel of faith, hope and works. 
 
 In the early evening we toiled through a canon 
 or " wash," and found a tent inhabited by a youth in 
 charge of a " dry camp." He was somewhat peevish 
 as he protested: 
 
 " I've watered your fresh team of horses, but 
 314 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 they drunk every drop I had, and there ain't enough 
 left to make a pot of coffee. What am I going to 
 do? If you don't send me back a barrel from Indian 
 Spring in the morning, I'm up against it hard. I ain't 
 a kicker, but likewise I ain't a lizard to live without 
 water." 
 
 Now the stage crept along over a rolling country 
 In which the darkness conjured many delusions and 
 fantasies. We always seemed to be climbing the 
 white trail that streaked the night, even when the 
 desert was tilting downward. One could see, or 
 thought he saw, houses, railroad grades, even trains 
 of cars. These were only the shadowed shapes of 
 bleak buttes and uncouth fragments of landscape that 
 had been gashed by cloud-bursts tearing down from 
 the distant mountain sides. The " Joshua trees," dis- 
 torted caricatures of verdure, became clothed with an 
 uncanny vagueness of aspect. Their twisted, spiked 
 limbs took on the shapes of men who were crawling 
 over the sand, or crouching in wait, or gesturing either 
 In threat or appeal. All sense of proportion had van- 
 ished with the daylight. One's eyes were no longer 
 to be relied upon. A low-hung star, barely veiled 
 behind the ragged crest of a mountain " wash," cast 
 an upward reflection which so well mimicked the glow 
 of a distant camp fire that a lost tenderfoot would 
 have struggled toward It, believing help was near. 
 
 Long after midnight we came to whispering trees 
 around a spring, the first oasis In twenty hours of 
 
 315 
 
The Greater America 
 
 travel from Bullfrog, and as grateful a resting place 
 as ever the school-day geographies pictured of a palm- 
 fringed well in the Sahara. Water had done a mira- 
 cle here, and when we pushed on at daylight after a 
 few hours' sleep in a tent, green fields and pastured 
 cattle were glimpsed, and the growing crops that 
 sweetly contrasted with the desolation round about. 
 The rancher who made breakfast for the stage crew 
 had lived in this place for many years, and by choice, 
 for he said in parting : 
 
 " I went back to my old home in Vermont last 
 year, and I didn't hanker to stay there. This place 
 looked good to me when I drove in again." 
 
 Almost all that day the road led across the desert, 
 until in the waning afternoon we were within sight 
 of the town of Las Vegas, which had come suddenly 
 into being when the new railroad to Salt Lake 
 marched through this region. At one end of the 
 new town, in a grove of splendid trees, are the adobe 
 walls of a ranch and fort built by the Mormon pio- 
 neers when they pushed through Utah to Lower 
 California in 1851. We had crossed their old trail 
 on the previous day, and the road they made is still 
 used to pass through the Meadow Valley Wash, 
 where a party of scores of men, women and children 
 perished together in that first heroic pilgrimage. A 
 stone marks the place where their bones were found. 
 
 Over this route they pushed southward until they 
 came to Las Vegas, and, wonder of wonders, found a 
 
 316 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 spring that gushed from the thirsty plain like a young 
 river. Here they camped and rested and refitted 
 before the caravan moved along its four months' 
 journey to the San Bernardino Valley. The new 
 railroad, built by Senator Clark, follows through 
 Nevada and Utah that old Mormon trail for much 
 of its length. Nor are the crumbling adobe walls 
 of the old ranch at Las Vegas the only relics of that 
 other age in the building of the West. When the 
 grading camps of the railroad were moving up 
 through the desert, they found the bleached bones of 
 many of those pioneers, and buried them beside the 
 track. I met an old man who crossed the desert 
 even before the gold rush of Forty-nine, and who saw 
 the Mormon vanguard on its march to Utah. 
 
 " There were six hundred wagons," said he, " mov- 
 ing in a trail of six abreast, and we saw the dust which 
 they made for two days before we overtook them." 
 
 The Mormons proved that water could make a 
 garden of this desert area, and now, half a century 
 later, Nevada, in the wake of Utah, is beginning to 
 feel the stimulus of an irrigation movement which is 
 certain to make for her greater wealth and population 
 than all the gold and silver that have been found in 
 her mountains. 
 
 Said President Roosevelt at Reno three years ago: 
 
 " And now here in Nevada a new future opens to 
 you because of the energy, the foresight and the far- 
 sighted intelligence of those who have recognized the 
 
 317 
 
The Greater America 
 
 absolute need of using for the tillage of your fields 
 the waters that run to waste in your rivers. It would 
 be difficult to find in the United States a locality bet- 
 ter fitted to serve as an object lesson in the need of 
 irrigation and the use of it." 
 
 The men who have been the scouts in the invasion 
 of the desert, the hardy, patient pioneers of the gold 
 camps, the prospecting outfits, the freight wagons and 
 the stage lines, bulk big among the builders of this 
 part of the West. Behind them, however, there will 
 flock a population which will make its permanent 
 settlement even in such a hopeless-looking desert as 
 I have tried briefly to picture. 
 
 The irrigation work of the national government 
 has made its first great conquest in this same Nevada. 
 Into this parched sand and sagebrush the water was 
 turned last year from the works of the " Carson and 
 Truckee Project." It was the most important event 
 in the history of the State, of more lasting value even 
 than the discovery of the Comstock lode. From the 
 massive masonry dam, constructed to hold the waters 
 of the Truckee River, the blessed flow was turned 
 over fifty thousand acres. 
 
 This was the first completed section of a plan which 
 is to irrigate almost a million acres of desert. This 
 means, within a few years, fifty-acre farms for twenty 
 thousand families, on which they are certain of large 
 and profitable crops. It means also new towns and 
 cities to supply this great farming community with 
 
 318 
 
tt. 
 
The Men of the Untamed Desert 
 
 the products of the mills and mines and factories of 
 the country, east and west. 
 
 More than that, it means a new population of per- 
 haps two hundred thousand souls and a prosperous 
 principality added to the greatness of the Union. It 
 is all purely creative, for wealth is made where there 
 was none before, and magnificent opportunity offered 
 for independent and self-reliant livelihood to those 
 who seek it. 
 
 When one has seen the desert at close range, and 
 then views the great beginnings of its redemption by 
 means of water, he becomes impressed with the fact 
 that there are two sides to the " Mormon question." 
 Their wagon trains marked the path for the first sur- 
 vey of the first transcontinental railroad. And they 
 pushed on into and claimed for their own a territory 
 so forbidding that other pioneers shunned it as they 
 would the shadow of death. Before the sun had set 
 on the second day of the Mormon camp in the Salt 
 Lake valley work had begun on the first irrigation 
 ditch ever constructed by Anglo-Saxon hands. 
 
 The teeming mining camp may pass. Nevada is 
 a graveyard of dead camps. In the seventies Vir- 
 ginia, Pioche, Belmont, Jefferson, Ely, flaunted what 
 they believed was inexhaustible mineral wealth. 
 Their streets roared with life and activity, their hills 
 echoed to the thunder of stamp mills and hoisting 
 engines. Their shacks hold a hundred people where 
 once thousands toiled and planned and hoped. Their 
 
 319 
 
TJie Greater America 
 
 smelters, furnaces and tall chimneys are rusted and 
 forlorn. But the water that is being turned into the 
 desert brings with it an enduring prosperity that will 
 eclipse all the present-day gold bearing of Tonopah 
 and Bullfrog. 
 
 320 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 IN CONCLUSION 
 
 "The Booster " is the most characteristic and 
 stimulating figure in that vast territory that runs west- 
 ward from the Great Lakes. He is banging his 
 cymbals in Duluth and St. Paul and Minneapolis, 
 from Spokane to Seattle, in Tacoma and Portland. 
 His clarion note rings shrill down the Pacific Coast 
 to Los Angeles and beyond. He is shouting the 
 praises of his country and community in Salt Lake 
 and Denver, and Texas has awakened to hearken to 
 the din that he makes in Dallas and Galveston. Nor 
 are his efforts confined to the cities that are clamoring 
 for population and capital. Whether it be a tiny 
 colony of pioneers tucked away in a remote valley 
 of the Columbia, or a settlement of fruit growers in 
 a far corner of California, Promotion Committees, 
 Commercial Clubs, Boards of Trade and '' Boost- 
 ers " unattached are lying awake nights to map out 
 campaign literature and devise new stratagems for 
 making their " garden spot " known to the world 
 at large. 
 
 This is the spirit of the newer West, a spirit of 
 close-knit community interest in which the individual 
 works for the good of all; as far as the poles apart 
 from that curious selfishness and isolation in which 
 many a dweller in Manhattan so envelops himself 
 
 321 
 
The Greater America 
 
 that he does not pretend to a bowing acquaintance 
 with his next-door neighbor. It is a fresh and 
 buoyant spirit, like that of vigorous youth, and can 
 be no more vividly expressed than in the hymn of a 
 prairie songster which runs like this : 
 
 " Fall in with the big procession, 
 
 Ketch the step and move along 
 With the army of progression — 
 
 That's the place where you belong. 
 Rise your voice and jine the chorus; 
 
 Swing your hat and shout hooray. 
 If your back's weak put a porous 
 
 Plaster on your vertebrae. 
 Crawl from under public scorn 
 
 Drop the hammer! Grab a horn! " 
 
 Or again this typical spirit strikes the top note in 
 the lusty exhortations scattered broadcast by a West- 
 ern Board of Trade : 
 
 BOOST 
 
 Every citizen of Salt Lake City should 
 be an Advance Agent of his town. Tell 
 the people you meet what we have, what 
 we need, and what we are capable of 
 doing. 
 
 Don't Knock. Just Boost. 
 
 If you own only a cottage in Salt Lake 
 City — you are deeply interested — just as 
 deeply as the man or corporations owning 
 millions in factories or realty. 
 
 Boost all the time. Every good word 
 
 helps. 
 
 Boost to-day. Boost to-morrow. 
 
 322 
 
In Conclusion 
 
 Some of these cities have evolved their own peculiar 
 slogans of progress to rally their citizens, as soldiers 
 of the olden times followed the war cry of their clan 
 or leader. In the Northwest you hear, " What can I 
 do for Spokane?" or " Portland Leads the Way," 
 or " Watch Tacoma Grow," and these legends bom- 
 bard you on every hand until you realize that a 
 different kind of a spirit is in these people from their 
 more conservative cousins of the Atlantic seaboard. 
 
 The journalistic " muck raker " is an eastern prod- 
 uct, and his activities have been chiefly confined to 
 eastern soil. He takes himself with that immense 
 seriousness characteristic of the mental attitude of 
 the New Yorker who is inclined to believe that the 
 welfare of the nation hangs upon the condition of his 
 liver and such other peculiarly local influences as 
 tend to color his national view-point. So far as the 
 stirring and lusty West is concerned, Manhattan 
 Island, over which several million fussy human 
 beings scamper to and fro like ants in an over- 
 crowded hill, might be scuttled and sunk in the 
 Atlantic without impairing the stability of the United 
 States. 
 
 The West, which is to be more and more the 
 backbone and vitals of America in this twenti- 
 eth century, has no time for holding post-mortems 
 over Itself. It has an abiding sense of humor 
 along with Its tremendous faith In itself and its 
 destiny. When a beardless young man not long 
 out of college sighs hopelessly and after a swift 
 
 323 
 
The Greater America 
 
 bird's-eye view of the past, present and future 
 sits down to write a lugubrious series of articles 
 called " American Rotten to the Core and I Am the 
 First to Discover It," the West does not put up its 
 shutters and go out of business. It perceives that 
 the young man will know better when he is somewhat 
 older and that plenty of hardy, outdoor exercise is 
 what he most needs at present. 
 
 If your typical Western publicist of brains and 
 backbone concludes that a bit of " muck raking " is 
 needed in his home garden he goes about it after the 
 fashion of William Allen White, who began the 
 editorial that was heard around the world with this 
 arraignment : 
 
 "what's the matter with KANSAS? 
 
 " We all know, yet here we are at it again. We 
 have an old moss-back Jacksonian who snorts and 
 howls because there is a bath tub in the State House. 
 We are running that old jay for Governor. We have 
 another shabby, wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatic who 
 has said openly in a dozen speeches that the rights 
 of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner. 
 We are running him for Chief Justice so that capital 
 will come tumbling over itself to get into the State. 
 We have raked the old ash-heap of failure in the 
 State and found an old human hoop skirt who has 
 failed as a business man, who has failed as an editor, 
 who has failed as a preacher, and we are going to run 
 
 324 
 
In Conclusion 
 
 him for Congressman-at-large. He will help the 
 looks of the Kansas delegation at Washington. Then 
 we have discovered a kid without a law practice and 
 have decided to run him for Attorney-General. Then 
 for fear some hint that the State had become respect- 
 able might percolate through the civilized portion of 
 our nation, we have decided to send three or four 
 harpies out lecturing, telling the people that Kansas 
 is raising hops and letting the corn go to weeds." 
 
 Kansas discovered what was '* the matter with 
 her," and to-day her people raise four hundred mil- 
 lion dollars' worth of farm products and live stock 
 in a year, nearly three hundred dollars' worth for 
 every man, woman and child within her borders. 
 She has ceased to preach the gospel of discontent 
 because she is too busy living and teaching the rest 
 of the country that its chief asset is In the soil, as it 
 was in the days of our fathers. 
 
 Between 1896 and 1904 the Increase In bank de- 
 posits In Kansas was two hundred and nineteen per 
 cent., as compared with an Increase for the whole 
 United States of but ninety-one per cent. Iowa 
 made even a more remarkable showing, for its sav- 
 ings banks In the same period swelled their roll of 
 depositors two hundred and nine per cent., while the 
 United States as a whole recorded an Increase of only 
 thirty-six per cent. W. S. Harwood has written in 
 his book called " The New Earth," one paragraph 
 which focuses the view-point of this vast and pre- 
 eminently farming empire of the West : 
 
 325 
 
The Greater America 
 
 " Time was, and not so very long since, either, 
 when the most feared, because the most powerful 
 friend or foe the farmer had, was Wall Street. To- 
 day the great body of the West, essentially a farming 
 body, has become absolutely independent of this pow- 
 erful factor. Now and then a farmer, grown rich 
 in his new estate, contracts the fever of speculation, 
 and is cured or killed by the medicine which Wall 
 Street so adroitly administers, but the mass of the 
 western producers, recognizing legitimate uses of 
 capital as never before, freed from the want and cant 
 of demagogues whose only capital is hatred of cap- 
 ital, have come to see that their occupation is a busi- 
 ness in itself as much as any other; indeed far more 
 than this, that they maintain a great manufacturing 
 plant, the most colossal in existence, turning out the 
 raw materials for the preservation of life itself. They 
 have come to realize that they are the independent 
 factors; the millions that must be fed, the de- 
 pendents." 
 
 But the eastern view is still colored somewhat by 
 the Wall Street doctrine, which holds that the founda- 
 tions of this mighty nation are shaken when the 
 schemes of a few money jugglers miss fire, or a few 
 politicians are discovered to be unfit for the offices 
 to which they were elected. 
 
 The foregoing impressions in conclusion were 
 gleaned from the notebooks of the tenderfoot who 
 has written these chapters after a journey which dis- 
 covered for him certain regions of the newer America 
 
 326 
 
In Conclusion 
 
 in which there are big and fine and hopeful lessons 
 to be read for the seelcing. He has had to leave un- 
 touched, for lack of space, the marvelous develop- 
 ment of the Southwest and the new South. Statistics 
 could be mobilized by regiments and brigades to 
 show that such material expansion and prosperity 
 as the world has never known are making empire in 
 all those other States where there is still opportunity 
 for men to carve their own futures by the power of 
 their brawn and brains, notwithstanding the dismal 
 yawp of the " muck raker " and the calamity howler. 
 
 Nor is the future of the United States befogged 
 with doubts and fears so long as the spirit of its 
 people can still be voiced in two brief texts. They 
 were worth the cost of this journey, and they are 
 vitally and essentially American, now as in the older 
 days. 
 
 The one is : 
 
 " // // Looks Good to You, Get to It.'' 
 And the other is : 
 
 " Drop the Hammer; Grab a Horn." 
 
 THE END 
 
 327 
 
15 89 ** 
 

 
 
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