The Gold of Ophir

By D. Howard Gwinn.

F. Tennyson Neely, Publisher, London. New York.

Copyright, 1898, by F. Tennyson Neely in United States and Great Britain.

All Rights Reserved.

Chapter I.

Salaam.

Have you, average American reader, ever paused in the midst of your journey by the Rapid Transit Line through the jostling crowd of humanity to the somber terminus of Life, paused long enough to consider what startling vicissitudes attend some brief human experiences? Do you realize that men now living remember Chicago as a hamlet of a dozen shops and dwellings located, or more properly sunken, in quagmire? Are you aware that men who are still pursuing the phantom Hope, by active efforts in practical everyday occupations, remember it many years before Long John Wentworth was dreamed of, or Phil Armour had seen the light of an Illinois day?

Yet such is the case, and though I, Thomas Hardman, Jr., can lay claim to no such venerable years in my own right, some strange and not altogether untoward circumstances in my life have brought about these reflections in my mind with startling force.

[Pg 6]

I am a native of Chicago, and my school life from the time that I entered the primary department of the public school until I finished the curriculum prescribed by the University of Chicago, was all encompassed by a matter of a few blocks of the city, including my home, which was with my paternal uncle. Fortune I had none; but educational privileges second to none. My observation has taught me that such advantages, coupled with the knowledge that these advantages and the resulting mental and moral stamina are to constitute the sole equipment for the struggle in the world, are in themselves an independent fortune to any young man deserving of success.

It is true that the atmosphere of school life is apt to develop the ideal faculties unduly, and has a tendency to exalt our ideas of life and exaggerate our own importance in the world, and induce in the young and imaginative student that state of mind denominated “walking on air.” But if, when the valedictorian has made his bow, thrilled the hearts of his fond friends and relatives by his eloquence, been the recipient of flowers and compliments to his heart’s content, and as the finished product of a great and grand institution, succeeds in alighting from his airy perch on terra firma, plain and simple, without breaking his neck, there is yet hope for him that he is made of the tough genuine fiber of the type of manhood [Pg 7]known in polite language as the successful variety.

So having in my own person proven the correctness of these theories, and run the educational gauntlet and found myself still alive, I determined to make the best of it, though I found myself growing cynical in my views of life and almost ready at times to give up in despair.

While in the confessional I may as well make a clean breast of it, and own that to add to my despair and intensify my melancholy reflections on the unequal gifts of life, I was madly in love. Yes, even in the practical city of the young West, there was at least one young man completely given over to the pleasing yet painful, the poetical yet contradictory and deliciously bitter-sweet sense of yearning and pining, and hoping and fearing, that marks the condition of the hopelessly distraught lover. Not that the adored one did not reciprocate the feelings of her inamorata, for she had long since yielded her affections to my soft persuasions, and we had framed our own philosophy of life into which love was to enter so largely as to exclude all disagreeable minor themes; and as we were schoolmates and classmates, I knew beyond a peradventure that in all social and intellectual acquirements as well as gifts, I was her peer. Beyond this no troublesome questions of inequality had intruded, [Pg 8]believing as we did with Charles Dickens that “there

is no disparity in marriage so great as unsuitableness in thought and feeling.” Our interests from childhood had been on the same horizon; the same form of religious belief was ours. The same social status had been thus far given no hint of the chasm that was to open between us. What was the Griffin that stood in our path to happiness? Ah! the only disparity in our lives was the disparity in the number of paltry dollars we possessed.

Lena Upton was the child of wealthy parents, while I was the almost penniless ward of an indulgent but impecunious uncle. Lena’s ancestors had settled upon a section of swamp land adjoining a like tract owned by my ancestors. Her family acres were not one whit less productive of frog-spawn, mosquitoes, and miasma than were those of my progenitors. The city was as densely populous on the tract that should have been my patrimony as on that which made Lena’s father a multi-millionaire. But strange to say, all this divergence of results was brought about by a trifling superiority of liver on the part of Lena’s grandfather over that of mine, or perhaps the whiskey and quinine that he employed as a remedial agent was a bona fide brand, while my worthy grandsire was a victim of the spurious article. Be that as it may, my grandfather died of malarial fever at a critical time [Pg 9]in the history of his possessions and a slight flaw in the title was examined with a lens of high magnifying power, by the sharks of the law, till it appeared as a

blotch on the land large enough to obscure and alienate it.

Great was my wrath and towering my impotent rage when I learned that this trifling circumstance was regarded by Lena’s parents as an impassable barrier between us. And while a schoolboy and schoolgirl friendship between us was smiled upon as quite the correct thing, the knowledge that an engagement existed between Lena and myself was the signal for an explosion of wrath against me, and, from being an innocent, agreeable, and suitable companion for Lena Upton, I became at a bound, in the sight of her parents, a dangerous charmer and cold-blooded fortune hunter, who would contaminate Lena’s morals by my presence, and if allowed to carry out my plotting programme, would make complete shipwreck of her happiness.

This was what I gathered to be the sum and substance of the politely worded interview with which Mr. Upton favored me. In my ignorance of worldly wisdom, I made my plea of an unsullied life, undying lofty Platonic affection for Lena, and ventured to quote from Scripture that a good name was rather to be chosen than great riches.

[Pg 10]

But to my surprise, for Mr. Upton is a very prominent worker in the —⁠— Street Baptist church, he ignored all these arguments, as not applying to this case in the least, though certainly very true in a general sense.

I was sanguine that with my splendid health, and with such an all-impelling motive, I could, in a few years, achieve wealth, and as for position socially, was not mine already on an equal footing with hers?

He shook his head incredulously at my first proposition, and as to the second, he said, “You think so now, my boy, but you will speedily find your mistake.”

I was forced to own that the tropical warmth of my pleadings was powerless against his glacial coldness, and I soon found myself reduced to the dire extremity of asking leave to see Lena for five minutes, to say good-by, which was grudgingly granted, on my promising on my sacred honor not to make any effort to communicate in any way with her clandestinely. Lena’s distress at parting—strange contradiction—was all that I could desire. She agreed that we must keep sacredly the promise I had made, not to see her again, but with a woman’s unerring instinct in such matters, fixed upon the only possible source of comfort in the situation, by assuring me that she could [Pg 11]and would wait. For she said, “I am sure something will yet happen to bring us back to each other.”

So with all the tenderness of an ardent nature toward Lena, and all the bitterness, I fear, of a somewhat resentful one toward her parents, I was forced to a parting that was fully understood and believed by her parents to be a final one, but brightened by her loving assurance that time could not change her feelings toward me.

I resolved then and there that I would rest neither day nor night till I had secured a situation in the city where I might begin to climb, even if it were from the lowest round. I naturally turned first to those with whom I had been on terms of friendship socially, among the business men of my acquaintance. I found to my disgust that there were no vacancies here and I imagined that I was dismissed a trifle superciliously by the men whom I had called friends.

I haunted the streets and business houses like a ghost and I soon came to resemble one as compared to my former self. I was compelled to plead guilty to the charge of inexperience, which seemed to be considered an unpardonable one in the eyes of many, while I was politely dismissed to wander on again with a somewhat dazed and perplexed inner questioning as to how I was to gain experience without opportunity. I began to envy the very bootblacks who [Pg 12]had a settled calling and with every boot they polished were gaining what lacked. I, too, was gaining experience, but it was of that painful kind that turns to wormwood the spirit of benevolence that sweetens human intercourse. I saw young men, whom I knew to have enjoyed not a tithe of the advantages which I had not only enjoyed but improved, holding positions of trust and profit because they had a friend at court; and others who had enjoyed equal advantages with me, but had despised them and had merely drifted through the prescribed course, studying to evade rather than master the task of to-day, heedless and

ambitionless of to-morrow, succeeding without an effort on their part to a partnership in a lucrative business with their fathers or other near relatives.

All these things, with my failure to find work, preyed as a moral gangrene on my happiness, I found myself harboring wild thoughts of ending it all by a plunge in the waters of the harbor.

My uncle, ever kindly solicitous for my welfare, at last seeing my desperate state of mind and knowing my straightened circumstances better than I, at last came to my rescue with a suggestion which was the means of changing the whole drift of my life into new channels. Knowing my partiality for chemistry, mineralogy, and kindred studies, he suggested a trip to Leadville, then beginning to create quite a sensation [Pg 13]by its great mineral wealth, with a view of utilizing my technical knowledge of minerals primarily in investigating the worth of that one of the various groups of mines known as The Little Pittsburg in which my uncle and I each owned some shares, which we had bought for a song of a disgusted eastern gold seeker on his way home from Colorado a year or two before. Afterward, he said, “You may be able to qualify yourself by practical experience as a mining expert and do a thriving business.”

I was in just the reckless frame of mind to act on such a suggestion, and adding his slender resources to mine, my uncle gave me a hearty handshake and “God bless you, my boy,” and saw me on board a train with a ticket for Leadville.

[Pg 14]

Chapter II.

Leadville.

At the time when America was celebrating the centennial of her independence at Philadelphia the present site of Leadville was an elevated sage brush valley skirting the headwaters of the Arkansas at an altitude of many thousand feet above the sea level. The whole population of the valley would not exceed a score or so of souls, but in three years from that time a city of twenty-five thousand souls had sprung up.

This is a summary of my knowledge of the place for which I was bound, bent on making my fortune. In a little over forty-eight hours after leaving my native city I alighted on the platform of the Leadville station. I doubt if anything in the annals of the famous forty-niners in California, could equal this seething chaotic mass of humanity or rival the wildly grotesque appearance of this city of instantaneous growth.

Pandemonium let loose was the only comparison that seemed adequate to the situation. Houses there [Pg 15]were none. Of sheds, shanties, tents, covered wagons and dens in the earth there were legions. The movements of the inhabitants of this outlandish city bore no resemblance to the earnest hurry and life of my native city, but resembled rather a universal desire on their part to catch a vanishing train or the wild effort to escape an avalanche or such a conflagration as had visited Chicago a few years before, some of the scenes of which were stamped ineffaceably on my mind.

I could scarcely keep my feet, much less any stable position where I might pause to view the ludicrous scene, but was borne irresistibly on toward the principal street of the city. I was, I protest, in no such hurry as the dog trot I was compelled to adopt would seem to indicate. Every one of the presumptuous builders of Babel were represented there and the scene struck me as being in a marked degree like the one my imagination had always pictured as immediately following the confusion of tongues. Men of different nationalities were endeavoring to make themselves intelligible to each other, gabbling, gesticulating, able often only to comprehend the choice store of profanity poured out on their stolid neighbor’s head because he could not interpret this jargon. Assay offices whose walls could not wholly exclude the daylight; stores whose shelves could be reached almost equally well from the outer as the inner side; saloons in [Pg 16]endless reach, some of them consisting simply of a barrel and a few glasses in the open air with a board

announcing its character nailed upon a post, beside the barrel—were everywhere in evidence. Passing along this street in the human current, I find residence buildings taking the place of the business block or board, as the case may be, and boarding houses taking the place of saloons. To one of the more respectable looking of these I applied for board and lodging, and found that for the modest sum of forty dollars a week I could be sumptuously boarded and luxuriously lodged. The proprietor, a big, red-faced fellow, in top boots and cowboy hat, assured me that their accommodations were strictly first-class, and conducted me to the sleeping apartment in the rear, which was a big lean-to shed, walled and roofed with a single course of unplaned boards, leaving little lines of daylight where the lumber purported to join. Bunks wide enough for two ran around the walls tier on tier; each pair of occupants were supplied with a pair of blankets, which, he assured me, was a luxury that no other place afforded, and which, later, I found to be correct, most of the lodgings being simply a

spot of earth enclosed, where the lodger had the privilege of spreading his blankets on the ground, where saint and sinner, Yale College graduate and Mexican greaser lay down together to shiver the night away, [Pg 17]having—as incongruous as were their former lives—one opinion in common, namely, that never before in their lives would they have considered it a fit enclosure for swine.

But the all-leveling mania for gold reconciled them to any kind of fare, and any or no shelter, just as circumstances might direct. The class of boarders at mine host’s inn was mainly of those who were engaged in ordinary business pursuits in the rickety, ridiculous segregation and exaggeration of the “wharf-rat” district of Chicago, called the city; merchants bent on doing business on the buy-for-a-dollar-and-sell-for-five-plan, lawyers scenting the battle of contending claimants from afar, assayers, surveyors, wet goodsmen, proprietors of faro banks and roulette wheels—a striking mass of humanity, representing every nation and affecting a style of dress that was a hybrid of the Spanish bull-fighters and Western cowboy cross—all were here. The supper hour, which was not far off when I arrived, brought all this motley group with a rush like the stampede of a Texas herd to feed voraciously on a meal of plain substantial mountain fare. Bread and butter, black coffee, fat bacon, and fried potatoes constituted the menu,

which was regarded, I was told, as a great modern improvement on the rations provided before the railroad was completed, when provisions were freighted a long distance.

[Pg 18]

The landlord, disposed to be friendly and talkative, informed me that in those good old days flour had sold in camp as high as a dollar per pound, potatoes fifty cents per pound, eggs five dollars per dozen, meat five dollars per pound, and hay five hundred dollars per ton. Board was to be had at the low rate of ten to twenty-five dollars per meal, or three hundred and fifty to five hundred dollars per week. But the fabulous yield of silver on the Mosquito Range, he said, “wuz payin’ the fiddler,” when the New Discovery, the Vulture, and Carboniferous were yielding ore that ran two thousand and sometimes upward of three thousand ounces of silver to the ton, and there were a dozen mines in the camp that were putting out ore day after day, and week after week, estimated to be worth five dollars per shovelful. “How do they hold out at present?” I inquired, feeling my way toward a more vital question.

“Oh, purty fair, purty fair,” he said. “The Long Hannah and the Mosquito Belle, and the Vulture air all runnin’ smelters of thear own an’ cleanin’ up two or three thousand a day apiece. But,” he added, with a tremendous sigh, “we’ll never see sich rattlin’ times agin’.”

I then ventured to ask him if he happened to know anything of The Little Pittsburg Mine.

“To be sure, to be sure, up on Prayer Hill, must be [Pg 19]ten thousand feet above the sea. Air up thar thinner ’n a snipe, mine no good, started in purtier ’n a picter, clean petered out, now, hardly raise the color any more. On the assessment list for some time, still workin’ her feeble-like. Any interest in her? Sorry. One of the bluest on the range at present. Belong in Chicago, did you say? Great place.”

So he rattled on in accompaniment to my supper, till a man who sat next me, attracted by the name of Chicago, began to pay his addresses to me.

“Mabbe you think I’m lyin’, young feller, but I see Chicago when there was only three stores, one blacksmith shop and one drug store there. I’m seventy year old last February, but I can remember like it was yesterday how she looked squatten there in the mud, and the shakes in the air so thick you could cut um with a knife. I was workin’ for Widdy Simpson on her claim that run up chuck to the town. I didn’t like the style of atmosphere they furnished there, so I began to get ready to go West. The widdy was anxious fur me to stay an’ work fur her, fur hands was mighty skeerce thar, and she showed me another government claim that was vacant and laid in the same delightful, stagnatin’ condition as hern, and mighty nigh as close to town. She advised me to stop an’ work fur her an’ build a shanty on the claim an’ hold it down, but I couldn’t see no policy in shakin’ my [Pg 20]sides when I wuzn’t tickled, and had no faith in that bloomin’ pollywog pond no way, so I sloped; but it was a great mistake, for the widdy lived to see herself

a millionaire an’ I might a’ bin a close second, but sich is life. Here I’ve bin a prospectin’ all my life and haven’t made enough to take me beck to Chicago. But,” he added, turning toward me, “I’m goin’ to strike her rich one of these days and don’t you furgit it.”