Arizona republican., 1891-07-31

IEfsh reallIeU that l was gO-
 dJts3fA ing l found to my sur
 tf3Tai prise that had made a
 ''tF8 home in California, that
 %s it was an old home and
 about it clung all the memories and associations of an old home.
 wanted to visit the mines and take a farewell look at the camps where had lived and worked in a period now fast becoming ''old times, and l straightway went.
 The term antiquity is relative in it's character. Twenty years may involve an antiquity as much as two hundred or two thousand Indeed, as regards sen satlon and emotion, the more recent an nquity k the more strongly is it realized and more keenlv 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, SD 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 wears ago or six thousand. We are imposed upon by these rows of ci- phers. 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, cov-
 
 ere We were born, and that of it all we have but fragments of their history. or rather fragments of the history of a few prominent individuals.
 But when you stand alone at Dry Bar, where you mined when it was a lively camp in 1851, with its score of muddy sluice streams cOursing hither and thither, its stores, its saloons, it's hotel and its express office, and see now but one rOtting pine log cabin, whose roof has tumbled in and whose sides have tumbled out; where all about is a silent waste of long worked off banks or bare ledge and piles of powders in which the herbage has taken root; where every mark of the former houses and cabins has disappeared, save mound here, or a apile of stone indicating former chim. ncy 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 a memory for every acre of territory hereabout. Down there, tl,.., Al. two high points of rock, once stood ricRety bridge It became more and more shaky and dangerous, until one day Tom Wharton, the justice of the peace, fired by a desire pro bono publico and rather more than his ordinary Quan- tity of whisky, cut the bridge away with his aX, and it doated down stream Over ypnder, on that sandy point, was the richest claim on the Bar.
 Will 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 few years. There is no trace of the trail. The Chaparral has grown over and quite closed it up. Here and there is a faint trace, and then it brings up short against young pine or q 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 in upon 1t, start plantations of chaparral in the streets, festOon the houses with vines, while winged seeds would fill the gutters and cOrnices with verdure It is ahard struggle through the undergrowth to Pot Hole Bar No man lives there now. No man goes there. Even the powder 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. It was a taVorite atter supper trip rom Dry Bar to Pot Hole to see how the "boys" were getting on, and vice versa from Pot Hole to Dry Bar,
 A cottontail rabbit sends a flash 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- A Al T
 broken shovel at your feet, and near by | in the long grass you see the fragment of sluice's false bottom, bored through with auger holes to catch the gold, and worn quite thin by the attrition of peb- ble and powder along its upper surface. This is about the only vestige of the miners former work. Stopl On the, hillside wonder is motfndlike elevation, and beyond that long green raised |