CHAPTER XVII. OLD MINERS.

Oblivion scattereth her poppies even in guarded chambers where the Muse of History holds sleepless watch, and the broken, disconnected annals of New Mexico in the seventeenth century are like dreamy legends or misty fables of the heroic ages.

The avaricious and despotic governors of the province made no secret of their odious laws, and appalling atrocities are put on record in business manner, without concealment or attempt at palliation. Many details are trivial and there are long catalogues readable by no man but Dr. Dryasdust. Running through dispatches is an appeal for money, petitions for appropriation the keynote of official song, from the Empress of India down to the lowest official of the youngest republic. How could the commandants open mines, develop the resources of Nueva Mejico, even with slave labor, without money or its equivalent? Beside this familiar wail are found meager and detached accounts of long marches among the peace-loving Pueblos, who hailed the fair strangers as gods, and their horses as beautiful, immortal animals, tamed for the service of their celestial visitants. These

----“most Gothic gentlemen of Spain”

were no believers in the rolling-stone theory. We think of them as filled with restless energy; but in a half sheet of ancient MS. I find this item, made probably by a peevish Churchman, soured because he missed promotion: “Our captains were great enemies to all kinds of labor. They taught that gold was good for sore eyes and disease of the heart. Their desire for it was such they would enter into the infernal regions and cross the three rivers of hell to obtain it.” One Captain Salazar, in the Valley of the Del Norte, caught a _cacique_ [chief] and chained him, to make him tell where certain treasure was hidden. After holding the savage in confinement several months, the Christian put him to torture; but without avail. “We then let him go,” said the historian, dryly; “for the miserable heathen could not tell what he did not know.”

The blood of the Christian of that age ran riot with the lust of gold and power; the two passions swaying men of mature years, tempered in youth by the soft influence of love. It is easy to understand that the Pueblo Indians, who were making some approaches to civilization in the midst of savagery, then wore a yoke to which the iron collar of thrall worn by Gurth, the swineherd, was light as a lady’s necklace.

History holds no deeper tragedy than the record of foreign invasion in North America. The man on horseback assumed that slavery was necessary, therefore right, therefore just; and by the grace of God (which meant the iron hand in the glove of steel) he rewarded captains and corporals with lands wide as whole counties, as yet unmapped and unsubdued. His first object was to pile high and yet higher the riches which maintained the splendor of his house. The old Castilian had the psychic identities of the modern one--pride, vanity, intolerance, egotism, hatred of labor, and fondness for bloody sports. In the irresponsible positions held by the local tyrants in Nueva Espagna there was boundless sweep for gratification of these traits. Whatever was not Romish or Spanish they regarded with haughty scorn. Adventurers those colonists were, but adventurers of no common order. The spirit of Crusades was yet alive, and each man felt himself a champion of the Cross, and with his sword of matchless temper vowed to strike a blow for Holy Church. Conversion was ever a prime object with the _Conquistador_. The saintly Isabella had it always at heart, and one of the latest acts of her reign was to commend to the fathers the souls of her unbelieving subjects across the sea. The fanatic zeal of the _padres_ reached through every grade, and the _hidalgos_ gloried in the title “Swords of the Church.” The temples of sin, as the little mud _estufas_, or chapels, of the Indians were called, must be leveled, false gods and altar-fires overthrown, and the heathen brought to the true faith, under their converting steel. The earliest revolt of the Pueblos, after the first conquest, grew out of the whipping of forty natives, because they refused to accept the new religion and bow to the hated cross of the unseen God of the stranger.

The early colonists were all miners; but, owing to the care taken in concealments of them by the natives, little is left to indicate operations, except miles of earth cut into running galleries and driven tunnels. Slavery everywhere, when applied to field labor, is destructive to human life. What must it have been when directed to mining, under taskmasters who did not value one life at a pin’s fee?

Even with the aid of science, machinery, and the many humanities of the nineteenth century, it is still the most melancholy of trades. The task of him who “hangs in midway air” to gather samphire is not half so dreadful as work done in danger from every element.

The ruins of a large prison among the placers of the Mimbres Mountains, abandoned mines reopened, and traditions of Indians clearly show that the conquered races were treated as though they did not belong to the human family. There is infinite pathos in the banishment of the untamed Indian from the free Sierras and the glad sunshine to gloomy caverns, where thousands were actually buried alive. They were driven to toil under the lash and at the bayonets’ point; in peril from falling walls, deadly gas, sudden floods, and the work was done by manual labor alone. They broke the rocks with miserable tools and insufficient light, and mixed the ores slowly and painfully with naked feet. Quartz was ground in rude _arrastres_, or mills to which men and women were yoked like cattle. Every ounce of precious metal was literally the price of blood.

So changeless are the Spaniard and the Indian that the description of a miner near Chihuahua, written last year, will do tolerably well for the Pueblo of the seventeenth century. Then, as now, the Spaniard was the overseer. The peon is the slave of to-day. As a rule, Mexicans, however intelligent and educated, have no genius for machinery. They blow, crush, and drill as their fathers did before them, and for transportation of ore they prefer a train of mules to a train of cars. The miner in the sepulchral shades of San Domingo has never heard of crushing-mills or cars. A yard-square piece of untanned hide, stretched on two sticks, is his wheelbarrow. The drill, the pick, the crowbar are his only tools. Out of the black door of the mine he steps quickly, lightly, though weighted by a sack containing a hundred and fifty pounds of ore. A broad band of rawhide attaches the burden to his forehead. He is naked as when he came into the world. His neck and limbs are like a prize-fighter’s. The perspiration streams from his sooty face and body, and his breast heaves spasmodically. There are no air-shafts, and for two hours he has been down in the hydrogen of the mine. The path he has travelled, in ascending, winds hither and thither; now up, then down; now in a chamber of whose extent he has no conception; now through a gallery narrow as the cavity of a sugar hogshead--so narrow that, to bear his cargo through, he must double and crawl like a panther; now along a slippery ledge, where the slightest error in the placement of a hand or foot is instant death, because on one side is an abyss which for the matter of vision might as well be fathomless. Now it turns a sharp corner; now it traverses rough masses of rocks, which are not all _débris_ from blasting, for some of them have tumbled from the roof, and may be followed by “companion pieces” at any moment. Woe to him whom they catch! Thus for more than half an hour the poor wretch has come. To such a feat, performed regularly six times a day, what is crossing the rapids of Niagara on a wire? What wonder that the breast heaves and the sweat pours? Have you not heard a man escaped from drowning tell of the agony thrilling him the instant the life-saving air rushed into the cells of his collapsed lungs? Something like that this poor miner and his comrades say they suffer every time they pass the door of the mine, suddenly into the rarefied atmosphere of the upper world. Horrible life! And how wretchedly rewarded! Between mining and morals there is no connection, still the question comes: Was it for this God gave him a soul?

The man’s first act, on stepping into daylight, is to snatch the little tallow-dip from its perch on his head and blow it out. It cost him a _claco_ only; but it was such a friend down in Tartarus! Without it, could he have ever risen to the light? As its glimmer came dancing up the rugged way, how the darkness parted before him and the awaiting gulfs revealed themselves! He proceeds next to the door of the roofless house. A man meets him, helps him unload, takes the sack to a rough contrivance and weighs it, giving a ticket of credit. Not a word is spoken. They are like gliding ghosts. Resuming the emptied sack, the naked wretch turns, walks quickly to the entrance of the mine, lights the friendly taper, looks once

----“to sun, and stream, and plain, As what he ne’er might see again,”

re-enters the rocky jaws, and wades back through the inner darkness. Yet he is not alone. He is a type. He has comrades whom he will meet on the way; comrades in the extremest pit, wherein the sounds of rueful labor are blended with mournful talk.

The friction of the coming and going of miners has polished the slippery floor to glassy smoothness. With the help of guides, we descended the black pit, and deep in the heart of the mountain sought the men at work. The wretched candle each one carried served not so much to illuminate our way as it appeared to burn a little hole in the darkness. Perspiration fairly rained from us; but we came to see, and pushed on in the black solitude, till strength and courage almost failed. At last we observed, far off to our right, a light dimly reddening the rocky wall. Miners at work! Good! Just what we came for. Slowly, carefully, painfully we drew near the beacon. There was no sound of voices, no ring of hammers, nor echo of blows. A solitary workman was playing the mystic art. He had not heard our approach, and we stopped to observe him before speaking. A little basket at his left contained a few tallow dips and some _tortillas_. Close by, in position to illuminate brightly about two feet of the wall directly in front of him, was his lighted candle. A pile of fine crushed ore, the result of his labor, covered the floor to his right, and on it lay an iron bar and a pick. Above him extended a vault in the darkness without limit. He had come there about the break of day in the upper world. He came alone, and alone he had remained. Not a word had he heard, not one spoken. The candles not merely lightened his labor: but, since each one would burn about so long--a certain number exhausting by noon, another bringing the night--they also kept his time. The solitude was awful! In the uncertain light the naked, crouching body seemed that of an animal. We spoke to him. The voice was kindly, yet it sounded in his ears, so long attuned to silence, like a pistol-shot. He started up in attitude of defense. He may be squatted at the base of the same wall to-day. Pity for him, wherever he is! Pity for all of his craft!