The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1891-05-23

about it chung all the
memories and associations of an old
| home.
I wanted to visit the mines and take a
| farewell look at the camps where had
lived and worked in period now fast
becoming cold times" and straightway
| went.
The term antiquity is relative in its
character. Twenty years may involve
an antiquity as much as two hundred or
two thousand. Indeed, as regards SEN
sation and emotion, the more recent an
tiquity is the more strongly is it realized
and more keenly felt. Standing today
on the hillside and looking down on the
site of the camp where you mined
twenty-five years ago, and then going
down that hill and treading over that
site, now silent and deserted, and you
realize, so to speak, live antiquity. So
far as ancient Greece or Rome are con-
cerned, their histories would make no
different impression on US if dated six
hundred years ago or six thousand. We
are imposed upon by these rows of ci-
pliers. They convey really no sense Of
times duration. They are but mathe-
NAUTICAL sounds. We know only that
these nations and these men and women
lived, ate, slept, drank, quarreled, COW
eted, loved, hated and died long time
ere we were born, and that Of it all we
have but fragments Of their history, or
rather fragments of the history of few
prominent individuals.
But when you stand alone at Dry Bar,
where you mined when it was a lively
camp in 1857, with its score of muddy
sluice streams coursing hither and
thither, its stores, its saloons, its hotel
and its express Office, and see now but
one rotting pine log cabin, whose roof
has tumbled in and whose sides have
mbled out; where all about is silent
waste of long worked off banks or bare
ledge and piles of powders in which the
heritage has taken root; where every
mark of the former houses and cabins
has disappeared, save mound here, or
pile of stone indicating former Chin
ney there, you have lively realization
of antiquity, though it be a recent one.
You knew the men who lived here; you
worked with them. You know the sites
of the houses in which they lived; you
have an event and memory for every
acre of territory hereabout. Down there,
where the river narrowS between those
two high points of rocl4 once stood a
rickety bridge. It became more and
more shaky and dangerous, until one
day Tom Wharton, the justice of the
peace, fired by desire pro bono publico
and rather more than his ordinary guam
tity of whisky, cut the bridge away
with his AK, and it fioated down stream.
Over yOnder, on that sandy point, was
the richest claim on the Bar.
VIII you go down to the Pot Hole
Bar, two miles below? The trail ran by
the river. But freshet after freshet has
rushed over the bank and wiped out the
track made by the footprints of a few
years There is no trace of the trail.
The chaparral has grown over and
quite closed it up. Here and there is
faint trace, and then it brings up short
against young pine or buckeye, the
growth of the last ten years Yet in
former days this path ranked in your
mind of the Importance of town street.
You had no idea how quickly nature, if
left alone, will restore things to what
we term primitive conditions"
If a great city was deserted in these
foothills, within twenty years time the
native growths would creep down and
N upon it, start plantations of chaparral
n the streets. festoon the houses with
zines, while winged seeds would fill the
cutters and cornices with verdEre. 1t is
/ hard struggle through the underground
10 Pot Hole Bar. No man lives there
now. No man goes there. Even the
bowlder piles and bare lodges of fifteen
years ago, marking the scarifying work
Of your race on mother earth's face, are
now mounds overgrown with weeds.
What solitude of ancient ruined cities
equals this? Their former thousands are
nothing to you as individuals, but you
knew all the boys at Pot Hole. 1t was a
favorite after supper trip from Dry Bar
10 Pot Hole TO see how the boys" were
getting on. and vice versa from Pot Hole
10 Dry Bar.
A cottontail rabbit sends fash Of
white through the bushes. His family
now inhabits Pot Hole. They came
back after all of your troublesome race
had left, and very glad were the "cot-
tontails' of the radiance. There is a
broken shovel at your feet, and near by
IN the long grass You see the fragment
NJ sluice's false bottom. bored through
with anger holes 10 catch the gold. and
worn quite thin bv the at.rition of peb-
hle and bowlder along its upper surface.
This Is about the only veStige OF the
miners former work Stop. On the
hillside yOnder is a moUadlike elevation.
~ be--0"i tbsr . long Green raised
ma One EarkS Inc reservoir ana tho
other the ditch.
II was the Pot Hole cornpanv's reser-
voir, built after they had concluded to
take water from the ditch and wash Of
a point of gravel jutting toward the
river. They had washed it all of bv
1886. and then the company disbandei
and went their respective ways. Pot
Hole lay very quiet for couple of years,
but little doing there save rocker wash
ing fer grub and whisky by four or FIVE
men who had concluded that grub and
whisky" were about all in life worth liv-
ing .Or. j ''siouc..Y" crowd. proQs %