The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1903-09-06
inspection over the Kalso division of the
Sierra Northern Railway
CHAPTER III.
HOW THE FIRST GENERATION ONCE
RIGHTED ITSELF.

CHAPTER III.
HOW THE FIRST GENERATION ONCE
RIGHTED ITSELF.
BY some philosophers unhappiness is be-
Iieved-rather than coming from depriva-
ton or inhiction-to result from the indi-
vidual's failure to select from a number of
possible occupations one that would. afford
him entire satisfaction with life and him
self. To this perverse blindness they at
tribute the dissatisfaction with great wealth
traditional of men who have it. The fault.
they contend. is not with wealth Inherently.
The most they will admit against money is
that the possession of much OF it tends 10
destroy that judicial calm necessary to a
wise choice of recreations; to incline the
possessor, perhaps. toward those that are
unsaIutary.
Concerning the old man that Billy Brue
now sought with his news of death, a phil
osOpher of this school would unhesitatingly
declare that he had sounded the last note
OF human wisdom. Far up in some mountain
solitude old Peter Bines, multimillionaire.
with a lone pack-mule to bear his meagre
outfit. picked up foatrock. tapped and
scanned lodges, and Clipped at powders
with the same ardor that had fired him in
; his penniless youth.
| Back in 1850. a young nan of twenty-four,
he had joined the rush to California, work.
ing his passage as deckhand on a vessel
that doubled the Horn. Landing without
capital at San Francisco. the little seaport
settlement among the shifting yellow sand
dunes. he had worked six weeks along the
docks as rOustabout for money to take him
back into the hills whence came the big
fortunes and the bigger tales of fortunes.
For six years he worked over the gravelly
benches of the California creeks for vagrant
particles of gold. Then, i'm the late hfties, he
joined a mad stampede to the Frazer river
gold fields In British Columbia. Thence. in
the sixties, the mining world being still
wild over its first knowledge of silver sui
phurets, he was drawn back by the wonder
tales of the Comstock lode.
Joining the bedraggled caravan over the
Carson trail, he. continued his course of bit
ter hardship in the Washoe valley. From a
patch of barren sun-baked rock and earth,
three miles long and a third of a mile wide,
high up on the eastern slope of Mount Da-
wilson, he beheld more millions taken out
than the widest enthusiast had ever be-
fore ventured to dream of. But Peter Bines
was a luckless unit of the majority that
had, perforce, to live on the hope produced
by others findings. The time for his strike
had not come.
For ten years more. half clad in flannel
shirt and overalls, he lived in fimsy tents,
tattered canvas houses. and sometimes holes
in the ground. One abode of LUXURY, long
cherished in memory, was a ten-by-twelve
4 Yp6uynn6 Chonfu an Ea.<I1- ~;,z~ -
only boasted a window, but there was a
round hole in the shake roof fastidiously
cut to fit a stovepipe. That he never pos
sessed a stovepipe had made this feature Of
the architecture not less sumptuous and en-
gaging. He lived chiefly on salt pork and
beans, cooked over smoky campfres.
Through it all he was the determined,
eager, confident prospector, never for an in
slant prey to even the suggestion of a doubt
that he would not shortly be rich. Whether
he washed the golden specks from the sand
of a sagebrush plain. or sought the mother
ledge of some wandering golden child, or
dug with his pick to follow a promising
surface lead, he knew ii to be only the mat
ter of time when his day should dawn. He
was of the make that wears unbending
hope as it's birthright.
oohlt udy tnt lHtA1duStlDle placer WOu1Q
be found; or. on a mountainside where the
porphyry was stained, he would carelessly
chip off a fragment of rock. turn it up to
the sun, and behold it rich in ruby silver;
or, some day, the vein instead of pinching
out would widen; there would be pay ore
almost from the grass-roots-rich yellow,
free-milling gold. so that he could put up a
little arastra, beat out enough in a week to
buy a small s%tampmill. and then, in six
months
Ten years more of this ~fruitless but nour-
fishing certainty were his-ten years of the
awful solitudes. shared sometimes by his
hardy and equally confident wife,. and. at
the last, by his boy, who had become old
enough to endure with his father the snow
and ice of the mountain tops and the with
ering heat of the alkali wastes.
Footsore. hungry most of the time, alter
nately burned and frozen. he lived the life
cheerfully and tirelessly, with an enthusi-
asm that never faltered.
When his day came it brought no surprise.
so freshly certain had he kept Of its COM
ing through the twenty years of search.
At his feet. one July morning in 1870. he
noticed a piece of dark-stained rock IN a
mass OF driftstones. So small was it that to
have gone a few feet to either side would
have been to miss it. He picked it up and
examined 1t leisurely. 1t was rich in silver.
Somewhere. then, between him and the
mountain top was the parent stock from
which this precious fragment had been
broken. The sun beat holly upon him as it
had OH other days through all the hard
years when certainty. after all. was nothing