The river press. [volume] (Fort Benton, Mont.) 1880-current, 1883-03-14
HANK MONK.
Horace Greeley's Famous Driver Reaches
the Home Station.

The famous stage driver is dead He
has been on the down grade a long time.
On Wednesday his foot lost its final
hold on the brake and his coach could
not be stopped until, battered and
broken OH a sharp turn, it went over
into that canon, black and deep, which
we all call death. In his way Hank
Monk was a character. In the old days,
before the feathers under his coach were
so soaked with alcohol, there was no
better balanced head than his. There
was an air about BIN which his closest
friends could not understand. There
was something which seemed to say
that stage driving was not his intended
work; that if he pleased, there were
other things, even more difficult than
handling six wild horses, which he
could do as well. Generally, he was
reserved of speech, sententious in his
ways, but often, when battling with a
high strung team, would pronounce an
epigram worthy of Ingersoll or Emerson.
After his little episode with Greeley, dis
tinguished men passing over the Sierras
where Monk drove, would plan to ride
outside with him. Many a one has rid
den twenty miles, trying in vain to call
him out, and at last has settled back
with the belief that he was but a stolid
idiot, when half a dozen words from
Monk, spoken with his peculiar drawl,
showed that when he drove Greeley's
coach over the mountains there was,
perhaps, as big a man outside as there
was inside the vehicle. AS he was not
like any other man, SO he was not like
any other stage driver. In his prime he
would turn a six-horse coach in the
street with the team at a full run, and
with every rein apparently loose. But
the coach would always bring up in x
actly the spot that the most careful
driver would have tried to bring it. His
eye never deceived him, and his estima-
ton of distances was absolute; the result
which must be when leaders, swings
and wheelers all were playing their
roles, was with him al exact science.
His driving was such a perfection OF art
that it did not seem art al all, and many
I1 IL 1Ouo 111p3 AAAt Ao
turned away saying, "he is the luckiest
man that ever climbed on top of a box"
Tt was not luck at all, it was simply an
intuitive, exact calculation from cause
to effect, and his whole duty ended
when he fixed the cause. The effect had
to be. He has often driven from the
summit of the Sierras down into h val
ley, ten miles, in ~forty-five minutes.
Other drivers have done as we'll, the
only difference being with others it was
a strain upon eye, and hand, and arm,
and foot; with Monk it was a matter or
course. He was to stage driving what
the German papers say Edwin Booth
was in Hamlet: 1T was not played,
but lived.o OF course we speak OF him
as he was of old, when the railroad was
yet beyond the Sierras, and when stag
ing over the Sierras was something finer
than staging ever was before, or ever
will be again. OF late years Monk has
been but a ghost of himself. His physi-
cal strength has been so wasted hat no
wild horses have been given him; the
grades up the mountains have not been
sprinkled; the locomotive took away the
glory of staging, and bad whisky sapped
the finer springs of the old drivers life.
"A year ago, for the first time, a coach
capsized under him, and while the acct
dent seemed trivial in itself, it was a
notice to him that his hand had lost its
cunning, that his lamps were going out,
that a dark canon was before him, and
there was no moon to rise. When this
winter closed down he went into his
little den Of a house and knew that he
was going to mire down in a few weeks.
When friends tried to have him consent
to be removed to the hospital, where he
could have more comforts, he refused
and waited where he was, until We'd,
nesday last, when he drove into the
home station. He died simply a dissi-
pated old stage driver; but if in the long
ago, when life was bright and hope was
exultant, his heart did not receive a
wound which changed his whole life,
and all its purposes, then a mans face.
and acts, and moods, and modes OF
thought are no indication of what he
has done and suffered.-SdH Lake 1ri-
buae. 81
S1lkworms in a Kansas Parlor.