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Victor
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THE CONFESSIONS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF
HARRY ORCHARD
CHAPTER FOUR
I GO TO LIVE IN CRIPPLE CREEK
ABOUT the middle of July, 1902, I left Salt Lake City with Arthur Dulan for Cripple Creek, Col. On arriving in the district I stopped at Victor first. I only stayed there a few days, and then went over to Independence, and Mr. Dulan introduced me to Johnnie Neville, who ran a saloon. He was an old miner, and got hurt by a man falling on him in a stope, and so had to stop work, and went into the saloon business. Mr. Neville was a liberal and good-hearted fellow. He and I got to be quite good friends, and I boarded with him quite a while.
I will give a little account of the Cripple Creek district and its surroundings. This was then the greatest gold-producing camp in the world. It is about one hundred miles from Denver, and about thirty miles from Colorado Springs. It has three different railroads running to it, one from Florence and two from Colorado Springs. The altitude is about ten thousand feet above sea level. The climate is mild, and there is very little snow in winter. The country is not rough like most mining-camps. It is a long way to bed-rock—in some places nearly a hundred feet—so it is a pretty hard place to prospect. I think the district has a population of about thirty thousand.
Cripple Creek is the largest town, and Victor next, and there are several other smaller towns. Goldfield, Independence, Altman, and Midway are on Bull Hill. Then Elkton and Anaconda lie between Victor and Cripple Creek, and Cameron lies on the north side, at the foot of Bull Hill. There is an electric-car system all over the district, and you can ride from Cripple Creek to Victor for ten cents, and the cars run every half-hour. The steam roads also run suburban trains, so you can ride practically all over the district. It is more like living in a city than a mining-camp. They have a fine opera-house at Victor, and also one at Cripple Creek, and nearly all the good plays come there. There are good hotels. There are no company boarding-houses or stores. All work at the mines is eight hours. The wages run from $3 to $4 per day, and without an exception this is the finest mining-camp to work at that there is in the country, if not in the world. I think they employ about six thousand miners. There are hardly any foreigners there, and no Chinamen at all.
Mr. Neville introduced me to some of the mine managers, and I got a job in a few days in the Trachyte mine. I had learned to mine pretty well by this time, and ran a machine drill. I worked at the Trachyte about four months, and then had a little trouble with the engineer and quit. I got a job right away at the Hull City mine. I worked in the Hull City altogether three or four months. Then I went over to the Vindicator No. 1 with Mr. Warren, the contractor I was working for at the Hull City. I worked for them till the strike in August, 1903.
When I was working here at the Vindicator I got to "high grading." Most of the miners were looking for high-grade ore or "glommings"—"something good for the vest pocket," they called it. The other ore they called "company ore." 'Most all the paying mines there had more or less "high grade" in bunches. Some places in the ore chutes you would find sylvanite that was almost pure gold. There was plenty of ore that would run $2 or $3 a pound. There were two of us working alone in the stope when I started. We would put high-grade screenings between our underclothes and pants legs, down where they were tucked into our shoes. I remember once of carrying out a little over fifty pounds stored away in my clothes. My partner said to me, if I fell down, I would not be able to get up again. Still, altogether, I did not get so much as many did. In all I must have made not to exceed $500 "high-grading" while I was in Cripple Creek.
I believe there have been hundreds of thousands of dollars taken out of these mines this way. I know of one man that it was said made about $20,000 in two years, and smaller amounts are accredited to others. There was a superintendent at Independence that some of the miners have told me they stood in with, and had to divide up with. He was a gambling fiend, and used to lose twice as much as his salary was every month gambling. There were plenty of assayers that made a business of buying stolen ore. There were four assay shops in the little town of Independence, and besides the producing mines had their own assayers. These outside assayers were mostly all there to buy high-grade ore from the miners. The miner would steal it from the mine, and when he took it to the assayer to sell it, the assayer would steal about half of it from the miner, and the miner could not say anything, and the assayer knew this. The only thing he could do was to take it to another assayer, but I never found any difference. They were all alike, and had an understanding with each other, and they would all give about the same returns. They would buy anything that would run fifty cents or over a pound, and some would buy a lower grade. There were several of these assay offices blown up in Cripple Creek —once, I think, seven in one night. This was laid to the mine owners, and no doubt they had it done, thinking this would scare the assayers out, and the miners would have no place to sell the ore and would not steal it. The mine owners used to watch pretty close, and in some mines made the miners change their clothes down to their underclothes at the mines, but there was always some way to get "high grade" out.
I worked around the mines on Bull Hill about a year before the strike, spending my money as fast as I earned it. I worked pretty steadily and got good wages—$4 per day of eight hours most of the time, and the "high grade" on the side. Still I was a very unhappy man, and seemingly had no mind of my own and no purpose in life, and often wished I was dead, and often thought to end my miserable existence. I tried to be cheerful, and think perhaps I made a good showing on the outside, but if any human mortal could have read my inner thoughts as God can, they would have had a different story to tell.
I often drank to stop and deaden my thoughts, for sometimes my past life would rise up before me as fresh as though it was but a day ago, and, try as hard as I could, I could not get it out of my mind. I would think of my dear wife and little girl, and wonder if they were still living and how they were getting along. At such times I would go to the saloon and drink to drown the sorrow, as I thought I must forget that they were anything to me. I often thought I would take a trip back there and disguise myself and see what had become of them, but I never got started. I used to go out in company some, but never enjoyed myself.
I met a lady in Cripple Creek and kept company with her a short time that spring, and asked her to marry me, and she consented. She was a widow and was keeping house; her husband was killed in the mines there a few years before. Her name was Ida Toney. I saved up a little money, and we were married. I think this was in June. I did not mean anything wrong to her, and thought the past dead to me, and thought if I had some place I could call home I would be more contented. I was going under an assumed name, and it was about seven years since I had heard from home. I had never met any one I knew, and as I had changed a great deal during that time, I did not think any one would recognize me.
This was a good, true little woman, and while I might not have loved her as a man ought to love the woman he is going to make his wife, still I loved her as much as I could love any one, and thought enough of her to be good to her, and intended to take care of her well. I had worked about two months after we were married when the strike was called in August, 1903. In that short time after we were married, I had saved up a little money and bought some furniture, and had it almost paid for, and fixed up the house some. Mrs. Toney owned the house herself.