While I was learning my job, he was learning the different steps in milling gold ore in that sixty stamp mill of the Tomboy. His first job was assistant to the amalgamator, Osborn, who had grown old in that one position.
After the ore had been crushed it was washed over copper plates covered with amalgam, a sticky mixture of gold and quicksilver. Excess amalgam was removed from the plates and stored in the office safe until there was enough to charge the retort furnace where the quicksilver was recovered and the gold prepared for melting into bars.
Gold ore has been found running as high as $70,000 to $80,000 a ton. Though the Tomboy never reached that high in gold content, pockets had been found which assayed from $10.00 to $15.00 a pound. In such rich rock the gold shows plainly. Precautions were taken against theft in such veins, but it was difficult to watch the men and easy for them to sneak out small, valuable pieces. Reports disclosed that from one mining town alone the express companies shipped $100,000 more cash each year than was reported by the mines.
One morning, as I went to get the mail, I saw several grim-faced men standing near the Finn’s shack. I wondered if an accident had befallen our taciturn neighbors. In this small community everyone was concerned about the welfare of the miners.
It wasn’t many hours before the story, which the company tried hard to keep quiet, had spread from one to another and I was able to piece together several bits of it. Early that morning, Tom Sullivan, a big, good-looking Irishman with curly red hair and vivid blue eyes, was standing by the shaft house about ready to go off duty. He was the night watchman with many responsibilities. It was his duty to wander over the property with eyes and ears alert to anything out of the ordinary—theft, sabotage, fire hazards, danger of slides—and to be at the shaft house at four in the morning to notice anything suspicious among the night crew coming up from the mine. Tom had found no trouble that night and was ready for his rest. One miner after another greeted the well-liked guard. “Hi, Tom, how’r you?” “Fine, how’s it below?” “Hello, Tom.” “How’s the ol’ mule that was sick last night?” And so went the usual conversation. Then our neighbor, the Finn, stepped off the cage hoist and suddenly slipped on the icy ground. Sprawling there before Tom he frantically tried to cover the contents of his opened lunch bucket. Too late! The tell-tale pieces of ore lay evidence to all his secret activity. Needless to say the man was caught “dead in his tracks.”
The Finn’s shack was thoroughly searched. On the ground under a freshly nailed floorboard a cache of one thousand pounds of high-grade ore was discovered. It was taken to the mill where George amalgamated it and recovered a large amount of gold. The noise in the early morning hours that had puzzled us had been the sound of the high grader crushing the ore with a mortar and pestle to extract the gold. This is what the Finn was up to when he reached home after his shift. My curiosity about the “aloof” neighbors was finally satisfied.
Several months later a trial was held in Telluride and the entire story was told. The Finn had been employed at the Tomboy for several years and recently had been under suspicion, but there had to be proof of his crime before he could be accused. He had been working in the “lower workings” where rich pockets had been uncovered—so rich, in fact, that the management mined low grade ore in greater quantities to average the values. The man could not resist the temptation. He took out several pieces of highgrade ore without being caught. Growing bolder, he repeated the theft time after time, only a few pieces every day but he knew how to select them and his filching continued until that fatal slip on the ice.
The judge set a high bail and his wife promptly deposited thousands of dollars in Finnish securities purchased with the stolen gold. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. However, he said he didn’t mind. He needed a rest and he had bought enough securities in Finland to assure independence for himself and his wife when, after his prison term ended, they would return to their homeland.
CHAPTER 6
When the storms and bitter cold of March were upon us, we learned that a shack on the bench above the tailings was to be vacated. The school teacher would need her house shortly so we thought it wise to get settled permanently.
It was customary for those leaving the hill to sell their meager furniture to the new occupants, usually a so-called bed, a table, chairs, and stoves priced from thirty-five to seventy-five dollars. We bought the outfit from our predecessors for seventy-five dollars and moved into our “furnished” home.
The view was superb. On three sides the great white range of mountains stood close like a surrounding guard of honor and we could look down the deep canyon as it sloped off into the valleys toward the horizon.
Our entrance porch was made of three rotting planks weakly supported by a six-inch-thick log on the down side. Squatted flat on the ground unpainted, like all the other shacks, it measured twenty-two feet by ten feet in size and was built of one-inch boards with battens, but no lining whatever. It was divided into three sections by partitions with doorways lacking doors. Between the front and rear sections, our parlor and kitchen each eight feet deep, a six-foot sleeping compartment was literally squeezed in. A small window on each side of the front room and one in the kitchen supplied daylight. The middle or bedroom had no window, but from the middle of its rough ceiling was a long cord and a small electric light bulb which could be carried into the front or back rooms to light the darkness. This room contained only a double couch. There was no space for a dresser—even if we had one. The only daylight came through the doorways.
In the depth of winter, our shack is faintly seen at extreme right. The range on the left is part of the 13,000-foot cirque surrounding it.
The “parlor” consisted of a pot-bellied stove in one corner, a single mattress on legs, and two chairs, one of which was made of three twelve-inch-wide boards painted black.
The kitchen seemed larger only because there was no ceiling to hide the rafters. A large coal range, a small table, two chairs, three narrow shelves on the wall completed our kitchen equipment, except of course for the tin basin in its stand with the utilitarian five-gallon can beneath.
Yet, more accessible than at the teacher’s house, the important outhouse was only fifty feet from a decrepit lean-to attached to the kitchen, less than half the distance George used to shovel snow.
The flooring of our shack was of ugly, splintering planks. Something had to be done about that! At least in the “parlor.” With blue denim, brought up from Telluride by the faithful mules, we nailed our “carpet” over a padding of newspapers, then we went to work on the walls. They were rough-surfaced boards impossible to paint. George got enough blue building paper to line the entire house, tacking the paper to the boards and over the narrow ledge that ran horizontally around the walls three feet above the floor.
The snow was too deep for the mules to climb to our shack so our sacks of coal were dumped near the main packed trail, two hundred feet away. The labor George was saved digging to the privy was more than doubled carrying coal four times the distance. Every night when it was time for him to come home I watched until I could see him start up the trail with a hundred-pound sack of coal on his shoulder, propped the door open for him, and turned and dashed to the kitchen in order to avoid seeing him at this Herculean task. I couldn’t bear to watch and suffered with him all the way. If one foot slipped from the icy ridge, he would sink deep into the feathery trap, sometimes able to hold fast to the sack of coal, but more often it would slip from his grasp and only with strenuous effort could he lift it from the snowy depths and start again. And that was not all!
Water was as precious as on a burning desert and in winter the mine company’s most serious problem. The only available source was at the summit of the range, beautiful Lake Ptarmigan, named for that bird of high altitudes that changes its dark summer plumage to white in winter. The lake was small, its capacity limited. The amount drawn for running the mill and all other uses must not exceed sixty gallons per minute. Consequently, not a drop could be wasted. Besides the coal, George had to carry water from the shaft house four hundred feet away. A five-gallon oil can