CHAPTER XIX. THE HONEST MINER.

The man on the frontier who has no speculation in his eyes is dead as Banquo. The contagion of soul, says the ancient philosopher, is quicker than that of the body, and I have yet to see the one with soul so dead as to refuse a venture in mines, and wholly resist the fever which spares neither age nor sex, yet is not fatal or even unpleasant. While the craze lasts, it affects the brain, quickening the imagination and distorting the vision. Under its powerful alchemy discolored stones by the wayside become bowlders of ore, it seams bare cliffs with veins of gleaming metal, plants mines in impossible places, converts vertical strata into immense deposits. All the way it silvers the dreams of night and lengthens them unbroken into the day. Knowledge comes to the fever-smitten without study. One glance at a lofty mountain-range is sufficient to determine if it be metalliferous, and, balancing a lump of ore on his gritty forefinger, he can tell its exact per cent. of silver.

The victim of the epidemic carries scraps of grimy stuff in his pockets, wrapped in dirty cloths, and a small magnifying glass, into which he puckers his fevered eyes many times in the twenty-four hours, and surveys his uncoined treasure with doating glances. He unselfishly allows confidential friends to look through the lens, and expects enthusiastic admiration in return for the privilege. Unless the confidential friend is an enemy in disguise, he will gloat over the earthy specimens too. He talks little, if at all, apparently in a generous burst of feeling about bonanzas. _En bonanza_ means literally smooth sailing, a fair breeze, etc., and is used by Mexican miners, applied to exceedingly rich ores or “shoots.” Free translation, “booming.” His voice is pitched in a low key--a loud, impressive, I may say distracting whisper. The delirium is pleasurable, for the man’s hopes are indomitable, and a secret trust covers a dark stratum, so to speak, of fear; but he is reticent, grave as though his shafts had pierced to the very center of gravity.

The arithmetic man, who loves figures, has estimated that in the flush times of Colorado the successful were one to every five hundred honest miners. He has not brought in returns from the territories, and there is, in consequence, broader sweep for imagination in the undeveloped regions, where mining is yet partly experiment.

The fortunes of two or three millionaires balance the losses of thousands, like the many deaths which go to make up a victory. Are you the five hundredth or eight hundredth happy child of Destiny, the victorious captain for whom the unnamed heroes fell? YOU? Of the bonanza king we daily hear by telegraph, photograph, autograph. Of the vast army of the defeated--nothing. Singly they tramp back home, steal in darkly at dead of night, ravage the pantry, and, having slept off fatigue, are ready to deny having thought of Leadville and Golden.

One of the cheapest and easiest ways of reaching a mine is by a “grubstake.” This euphonious word means a certain sum (say one hundred and eighty dollars) advanced to a man by another, with more money and less time, and the prospector has an interest in whatever he may find. You meet him on every road, every highway, every by-way, and where there is no way in the territories. The prospective millionaire generally wears an umbrageous hickory shirt, sleeves usually rolled to the elbow, exposing arms not the fairest, buckskin or brown duck pants, or a ready-made suit, ready to be unmade at the seams, and a hat of superlative slouch. His head is shaggy as a buffalo’s, with sun-scorched hair, and his face, lined with fierce sunbeat and wrinkling wind, is a glossy red, as though it had been veneered, sand-papered, and varnished. He carries a striking hammer, weighing from five to eight pounds. Does it look like an enchanter’s rod? In his hand it may prove a fairy wand, potent as the double-headed hammer of Thor. His _burro_, or donkey, is not much larger than a sheep, yet able to bear three hundred pounds’ weight. On the patient, long-suffering brute is strapped a blanket. Above it are piled rations of bacon, sugar, crackers, a pick and shovel, and a tin pot for boiling a coarse brown powder, called in bitter (very bitter) sarcasm coffee. In seeking claims, he is oftenest attended by a partner, familiarly and affectionately called “my pard.” In this land of sudden death, where every man carries pistols and loves to use them, one lone prospector may be picked off almost anywhere, and his bones left in deep cañon or lonesome gulch, and no questions asked. It is best to hunt in couples. Like the intelligent and reliable contraband of other days, the honest miner is forever bringing in good news. “Lee is just where we want him!” “The latest find is prodigious, the best thing yet, and lacks nothing but capital for development to equal anything in the Comstock Lode or Santa Eulalia!” This last is a mine worth having, where the early diggers set no value on common ore, but sought “pockets,” rich with silver; a soft yellow clay, scooped out rapidly and easily with horn spoons. Sometimes they were of immense extent, requiring years to exhaust.

I have not been able to learn why the miner is always named the honest miner; but such is the fact. To this well-worn adjective are sometimes added reticent and successful, when the speaker wishes to be unusually impressive. It has been written that mining speculations, like transactions in horse-flesh, have a tendency to blunt moral perceptions, and soured politicians insinuate it was first phrased by ambitious patriots who were anxious to secure his suffrage. Be that as it may, the honest miner is our man now. Though he does not pretend to be a poet, his is the vision and faculty divine. He is attended by presences to other eyes unseen, like the inspired sculptor, who in a heavenly fervor of inspiration hewed the rough block of marble by the roadside and let the prisoned angel out. By break of day, while the warm valley still holds the night in its bosom, he is up and on the march. The shadow of a great rock or a sighing pine has been his shelter, the overarching blue canopy his tent, the world is his field. For his unfailing appetite there are crackers, bacon, and coffee. Like Macaulay’s fellow-traveler, he breakfasts as if he had fasted the day before, and dines as though he had never breakfasted. His _burro_ is happy as that melancholy beast can be on a little grama grass (_Ætheroma oligistarchon_) or twigs and leaves of scrub oak. He wanders from the borderline northward, among cold, sharp, icy crags, where desolation dwells in matchless state; where, among treeless, bald peaks, she holds and guards her Paradise, perfect even to the grim, painted savage, who, with scalping-knife, instead of flaming sword, does the duty of the sentinel-angel at the gate. Lava-beds do not stop him, nor chaparral, mezquit, or cactus jungle, or the pricking “Spanish bayonet.” In withering wind, in blinding snow and drifting sand, the undaunted fellow pushes his search for rich leads. Such persistent energy directed to any other business would command success; but will it in prospecting? That depends. If he fails in finding a good thing (say a lode worth a million or so) in a given district, it does not shake his steadfast confidence. He makes a new deal, and begins again, for he “is bound to spot the treasure.”

The claim-stake is usually a pine board, marked with certain inscriptions in pencil, which ooze from within glazes over and makes indelible. Pleasant and consoling to him is it to know that no wise man from the East--no scientist, no geologist--has ever found a valuable mine. “Them literary fellows have to take a back seat” when it comes to locating a claim. Luck, chance, accident, and the prospector are the powers to be depended upon then. But when he does strike the big lead, and the crumbly ore, with its glittering white-and-yellow streakings, is reported inexhaustible then these wholesome adages floor the honest miner. A man cannot see very far underground. It takes a mine to work a mine. Luck may find the lead, but science molds the silver brick; and to these precious truths are added the proverb so dear to gentlemen of the profession of the renowned Oakhurst: “There’s nothing certain about luck, except that it’s bound to change.”

The old Spaniards had the national love of gambling--the gambler’s unreasoning hope and his blind belief in luck. If Fortune frowned to-day, she would brightly smile across the green cloth to-morrow. If gold is not in this glittering, cheating mica, it is hidden elsewhere, awaiting him who is bold enough to risk the chances of winning. The same trait is deeply marked in the American of our generation. Mining is a business to which all other occupations are dull and tame. The lumps of soft, blue-looking rock, not much harder than clay, streaked and spangled with shining threads, are dear to the American as they were to the Castilian heart and eye.

A man undertaking a scheme in which the odds are five hundred to one against success might be considered a simpleton elsewhere; but not so on the frontier. Thousands, armed with pretended stoicism, fevered with anxiety, rush West, “to look into mines a little,” dig deep, and find at the bottom of the shaft what the gods of Olympus sent as underlying all the ills--Hope.

It is as certain as the sun rises and sets that the gambling and not the commercial instinct predominates in mining transactions. The fascination is in the hazard. The spell, so binding usually, is not of avarice, but lies in that delicious, feverish, intoxicating _charm of chance_. To borrow the words of one who has tried it: “There is a delight in its agony, a sweetness in its insanity, a drunken, glorious intensity of _sensation_ in its limitless swing between a prince’s treasures and a beggar’s death, which lend life a sense never known before; rarely, indeed, once tasted, ever abandoned.”