The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1903-04-18
MAGEArEs THE GOLD BOOM MADE.

characters became rich in day. Ons
of the most picturesque of them wa.
Pat Casey of Black Hawk. Pat wa.
day laborer without education. Ht
could not read nor write, and could
hardly count. But when he wa:
working on little prospect hole one
fine morning a single blast disclosed
a great vein of wonderfully rich gold
ore and he became at once ''Mr.
Casey"
His mine was one of the new places
which tourists visited, and he himself
was the greatest curiosity around the
mine. He was much ashamed of his
illiteracy, and one of his foibles was
to keep pile of pencils on his table
in the Office of the mine. Whenever
he saw strangers coming he began
sharpening pencil, and never failed
to inform the admiring visitors, in a
brogue that was all wool and a yard
wide, that II use twilve lid pencils a
day in me business" !"
The superintendent of the adioin-
ing mine was Colonel. When Casey
heard this he had all his men called
up out of the mine and made speech
to them from the dump pile.
"Byes,' said he, "when there bese
tendherfeet here, yez will all be sure
to call me Kunnel Casey. And when
they bese gone yez will all take a
dhrink."
He had big lot of men in his en-
ploy, for he was a warm hearted
lrlshman, and never turned away
any any man who wanted job, the
result being that the miners were so
thick in his shafts that they could
hardly move around. Once when he
was feeling happy he called down to
some men in little prospecting shaft:
How many of yez are down
there?"
The answer came, Five, Col.
Casey" and then said the genial Pat:
"Yez will come up, half of yez at
time, and take dhrink with the
Colonel"
He heard that there was such a
thing as diamond drill used in min
ing, but had not the remotest idea
what it was, but he was with difficult
ty dissuaded from buying one, having
got it into his head that it was used
to discover diamonds in gold mines.
There was an industrious couple
named Flanagan in Black Hawk, who
had been working away in poverty,
for years, the husband prospecting
without finding anything and the wife
supporting the family by taking in
washing. One day her customers
found themselves without clean linen
and one of them went out to her cabin,
up on the mountain side, to find out
what the trouble was. He found her
arrayed in all kinds of fnery sitting
on wooden stool on the dirt floor of
the log cabin. ShA-AeA;--~,l i.;..- --.:4i-
Pagne ann-cigars.
"My old man has struck it rich, so
1 have retired from business said
she.
There were n Leadville three
brothers, prospectors, Gallaher by
name, who had discovered mine
called the pine" or something like
that, which suddenly turned out rich.
They sold it, realizing about 500, 900
each. They had always been day la
borers had never had any money,
and did not know the difference be-
tween 500, 900 and 81 900, 900. One
of them, Pat, went down to Denver
and put up at the Grand Central
Hotel, kept by "Uncle Dave" Gage,
ex-city treasurer of Chicago. Pats
princiele ambition had always been to
own a gold watch, so the first thing
he did was to go to the Denver Tiff
fany's and buy six watches of the
largest possible size, with chain
weighing about pound.
Leaving five of the watches in the
hotel safe, he sailed out to promote
the circulation of currency, good fell
lowship and wet goods. When he
came back the hotel clerk pointed out
to him that his watch chain was hang.
ing down and his watch was missing.
He asked for another watch and it
was given to him. But in trying to
fasten it on the chain it slipped
through his fingers and on the marble
floor with bang. Pat made several
fruitless efforts to pick it up. Then
he steadied himself against the coun-
ter and said:
"Never mind. Gimme 'nuther
watch"
Few of these men kept their money,
and in most cases less than six months
found them once more taking up, not
the "shovel and the hoe," but the
shovel and the pickaxe and returning
to the night shift for their daily wage.