The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1907-01-16

There's a terrible little Ieliow
seems to have been appointed by tht
S,tr;ts of the Desert to Keep ward AZ
watch over the golden treasure oufie'
in the barren hills of bleak NeVssad
He is the Pneumococcus. The treasure
hunters are slowly besting him, out Inc
little demon is exacting heavy pay
ment for the gold they take away.
Pneumonia is the scourge of Cold
field. Deaths in the mining camp run
from so to 100 a month. Call it an aV-
erage of so and you have a yearly
death rate of per cent. very large
majority of these deaths are due &c
pneumonia, a few to typhoid.
The outside world hears little of IT
save when some well-known man
passes away, such as ex-Gov. Hunt CT
Idaho. who succumbed here to the
scourge of the camp. Most of the VIC
tins are homeless and friendless ad-
venturers No fuss is made over them
They are simply taken out and buried
in the most Godforsaken cemetery IN
all the world.
| In most of the victims life goes our
like a snuffed candle So swiftly death
rides on the wings Of the Pneumococ-
Gus that they call it black pneumonia
down here. But it's only old fashioned
pneumonia working the more swiftly
10 eynil
plant its seeds 1t is intensive farm
ing, Death the farmer.
The hardships of this coalless. over
crowded mining camp weaken const1-
tutions so that when disease comes 1t
meets little resistance. In four sa-
looms late last week The Sun cor
respondent counted sixty-eight men
asleep on the floor. Some were drunk
and some were merely exhausted with
tot. and had no other place where they
could sleep.
Out of the kindness Of their hearts
the bartenders let them sleep where
they lay. Occasionally man with
ers and poke him into semi-wakeful-
ness.
Hey, BILL" he would say, roll over
till mop beneath ye."
The sleeper would obey orders, re-
turning to slumber the next instant.
while the mop continued its work under
the next man and the whirr of the rou-
lette ball, the popping of many corks
and the volleys of profanity in many
tongues blended for the slumberer's
lullaby. 1t is men of this sort that are
dying like sheep in Goldheld. They
are shipping two or three of them out
on every train, others they bury In
nameless graves; the hospital is full
and the undertaken cheerful.
The newcomer wonders why there Is
a graveyard SO near the middle of the
town. This is the story of how it hap
pened, related by one of the oldest in
habitants of the Goldfield settlement:
When I first blew in here nobody
had ever cashed in. A few days later
some fellow croaked. He'd no money.
no friends, no name that anybody
knew of.
so a few of us thought it was up
to us to plant him. I was on the COM
mittee to pick out a cemetery site. We
found a place out on the desert about
mile from town. Then we gave a
man SIS to dig the grave.
Jake Thurman was the fellow we
picked for the job. Jake was drunk
and broke. He hated to let his jag die,
so fivespot looked big to him.
IT took him out and showed him the
place and Jake came back to get a
shovel and a pick. On the way back
he comes on a hole, by s foot, that
some prospector had made and bein'
some tired he figures that this is just
as slightly a place for a grave as the
one we picked out. So he digs it right
| there in that prospector's excavation.
When we come to bury the stranger
We sees Jake has made a break, but
we was too busy to bother about it.
So we plants him right there.
Course, the next one was put right
next to him and so it grew up into
| fine young cemetery. Pretty soon we
gets 200 bodies planted there.
so we calls a halt and starts another
| cemetery further out. But Jake is re-
sponsible for the first one"
But it's little Goldfield cares for the
man who falls They are rushing in
every day to take his place. There's
gold out there in the desert and the
lucky ones will get 1t. If you live. you
live; if you die, You die, says fatalistic
Goldfield.
1t man were to recount all the tales
he hears down here of men who go to
bed paupers and wake worth tens of
| thousands he would be set down as the
possessor of a singularly active imag-
nation. But a great many of these
yarns are true and capable of demon
stration. For example:
Walter Williams and Charles d. Tav-
Tor, the men who located the Red TOP
and the Jumbo mines were So straDpeI