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Show CHAPTER XXXV. MINING FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES. IN the closing months of 1878 the white nomads of the West were greatly excited by reports of a new Eldorado and a great mining city modestly called Lead- viUe. Soon all the journals were spotted with stirring accounts of the Magic City. All old similes were exhausted and a hundred new ones invented : it was the future metropolis astride the Mother Lode of the world ; it had sprung up as if from the touch of Aladdin's lamp; it seemed as if built by genii in a night; it was Ophir and Lydia and Potosi, Tyre and San Francisco, all in one. All around it the rock- ribbed hills were said to be thick- set with bot-tomless lodes of argentiferous ore. All this and much more. Of course the old campaigner knew that at least half of this was the nat-ural gush of the editor whose bright home is in the setting sun, etc. ; nevertheless a great longing grew upon me to mingle once more in such stirring scenes. But, alas! business and. domestic cares forbade; so I confided my interest in the sight- seeing to my friend and rela-tive, C. K. Bright, Esq., and the purely narrative portion of this chap-ter is from his diary. February 10th, 1879, says the diary, I bought of the Indianapolis, Bloomington and Western Railroad a ticket from Covington, Indiana, to Denver via Pueblo, for the low price of $ 44.10. Including all expenses for food and rest, the total cost is less than $ 60.00: this for a journey which once occupied at least two months, and required an outfit of two or three hundred dollars. Steel and steam have brought the Far West almost to our doors. At 10 o'clock that evening we crossed the Mississippi at Quincy, and at 9: 15, next morning landed in Kansas City. Thence we departed at 11 A. M., on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line, stopping for dinner at Topeka, sixty- six miles out. All the way, and for seventy- five miles beyond Topeka, the country teems with every variety of agricultural products; pleas-ant homes and thriving villages cheer the traveler's eye, and, except the general air of freshness and smartness, one sees no signs of a new West. It is, rather, a transplanted New England. ( 568 |
