|
 Bathing Under Difficulties -
Water was a luxury in the early days of Pioche, when it
cost 25 cents a bucketful, which by the way, is usually the price paid,
and the first tax levied in the history of all
Nevada mining camps. Hence,
it is not mentioned here as a novelty, or a matter of extraordinary
character, but merely as one of the conditions under which the vagaries of
human nature are developed into a craving for the unattainable, especially
in the case of sick people, who are in like cases, usually petulant and
exacting.
At
the time mentioned, the Meadow Valley Company had an outside foreman named
Tom, an Irishman, who was noted for his robust strength and general
disregard for that quality that is akin to godliness. In direct opposition
to Tom's nature, the company had provided him with a clerk, who was a
little sickly fellow that was in the last stages of consumption, and
deeply convinced that only daily bathing in cold water would prolong his
life. Tom and he occupied a comfortable cabin together, fairly furnished
and carpeted. For convenience and economy the clerk, whose salary would
not stand a daily tax of a dollar for a bath, as was then charged, sent
for and obtained a patent rubber bath tub, and commenced taking a bath
daily in the cabin, during Tom's absence. Tom observed the wet spots on
the carpet and showed his impatience over such a waste of water, but
concealed his anger for a while, until he discovered the clerk's habits
were unchangeably fixed, and then Tom let his Irish temper loose, and
asked him why he did it. The clerk explained, but Tom hooted at the need
of a daily bath, and in support of his position he said: "Here ye are,
takin a bath ivery day, spillin the wather all over the kyarpet, and makin
a muss; and yur so wake you can hardly walk. And luk at me, I'm strong and
harty, and kin thrash a houseful of yez, and I niver take a bath."
Article in the Reno Evening Gazette, February 12 , 1891.
 Blunt
Joe Potter -
Joe
Potter was one of the old time sports that is yet remembered in nearly all
the mining towns of
Nevada He died in Bodie,
California some ten years ago, and
without intending any offense to his memory, the following anecdote is
related to illustrate his bluff manners. Joe used to live in Eureka in
1871-72 during the small-pox epidemic. Just previous to the outbreak of
the dreaded scourge, Joe had found himself delinquent to his landlady for
room rent which she reminded him of on several occasions. She, in fact,
waylaid him so often that Joe was, if ever in his life, really distressed
in his desire to pay, but he could not raise a dollar to spare for that
purpose and he was at his wits end when the smallpox broke out in camp.
Joe's room was in a little house off by itself, and he immediately hung
out a yellow flag, and for the months that followed during the epidemic he
never saw the landlady. After a long siege of chipping on borrowed checks,
he one night made a winning of a hundred dollars and left the faro table
to spin around the block and catch his wind. The strikers were laying for
him, having heard by a telegraphic system peculiar to themselves that "Joe
won a hundred." Before he got out of the faro room, three or four struck
him for $5, $2.50, and a dollar, and knowing how it was himself, he handed
it out but, when he reached the door he was surrounded by a half dozen
opium fiends with further requests for a half dollar to hit the pipe. At
this, Joe straightened back with a blunt refusal and some profanity as he
pushed them aside and said, "Go to h--1. Do you think I'm a post office?"
Article in the Reno Evening Gazette, March 13, 1891
 Cactus and Coyotes -
It
was eighteen years ago that this writer first viewed the Mojave Desert
from the eastern outlet of Walker's Pass through the Sierra Mountains.
Being familiar with the characteristics of this intermountain region, it
was not a matter of much surprise to look upon the sterility presented,
but coming through an interesting section of the Sierras, past
well-cultivated farms and through lands of fertility and productiveness,
the first sight of the desert exhibited such a striking contrast that the
change was duly noted in the diary that was a constant companion in
travel, and referring to it now revives memories of that lonely ride. The
view was noted in the following words:
Nearing the mouth of the canyon on the eastern slope, a change was noted
in the air and climate, the roads and the surroundings. It was no longer
California. Instead of the giant oaks of the western slope, with the
rushes and grasses of the glades, the eye rested upon bare hills, stunted
sage brush and occasional specimens of the grim and forbidding bayonet
cactus.
No
rills nor rivulets of crystal waters, but dry, sandy washes instead, with
the slate pebbles glistening like bleached bones in the desert. The road
changed from a springy alluvium bed to the grating, rasping sands, that
nature had seemingly left unfinished centuries ago. One felt at once the
presence of the sterile desolation of the Mojave Desert, which grim and
silent stretched away into hazy distance toward the Colorado River, the
land of cactus and
Apache, which lures lost wanderers to unknown fate.
Right there should be written Dante's inscription, "Who enters here leaves
hope behind."
The
moon was rising through a misty haze directly ahead, and the specter-like
shadows of distant mountains, stretched in wavering lines across the gray
surface of the desert, in startling imitation of gentle, rippling water.
If ever the expression "still life" was appropriate it seemed, at that
instant, a vivid reality. And in the midst of what was a most entrancing
sight, there suddenly appeared an army of grim sentinels that looked like
headless men, with outstretched arms rising in rigid silence out of the
earth, all around and beyond us. It was as weird and ghostly a spectacle
as ever the eye witnessed, and it required a neater approach and closer
inspection to solve the mysterious scene. We had emerged from the canyon,
just at the rising of the moon, into the midst of a forest of bayonet
cactus. They grow the same size from the root to the tips of the few
branches, that stand out from the main trunk like the arms of gibbets, and
which give them, in the moonlight, the looks of hideous, headless
monsters. The picture of Plutonion deviltry was increased by the shadowy
movements of vagabond coyotes that were gliding in silent stealth through
the ghostly forest. And when informed that this section was then the
favorite rendezvous of the Mexican bandit, Chavez and his gang, who roamed
from here to
Elizabeth Lake,
and toward
Los Angeles , it quickened the pulse and banished sleep for the
remainder of that night's ride. Since then the cactus forest has been
located, with the purpose of making it into paper by the usual process,
and what seemed to us a spot of weird romance, is to be converted into
prosy fact.
Article in the Reno Evening Gazette, March 14
, 1891.
Continued Next Page
|
Please report
broken
