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UTAH PRESS ASSOCIATION This was a time when a Utahn with a yen to travel could ride to Chicago and back by rail for only $44.50. However $44.50 was difficult to come by and there is no indication people were standing in line to buy tickets. One week the news columns of the Record related that five tramps had "stolen gold watch chains at Shriver's Clothing Store, necessitating Marshall Stilman coming over from Eureka. " The marshall caught the culprits and dispensed quick justice - four were given 30 minutes to get out of town and the fifth was held for trial in district court. Not long thereafter, the newspaper enthusiastically reported that the County Commission had decided to build a jail in Mammoth. Not only was it the community's first place in which lawbreakers could be incarcerated, but it was also the first brick building in Mammoth. The 867 square foot structure, which would accommodate two steel cells and the marshall's office, was to cost $3,000. Wrote the Record's editor: "This is a wise investment by the County Commission as it will reduce by at least one half the expense occasioned by making an arrest and conveying the prisoner to Eureka and then back to Mammoth for trial." Aside from the trivial, though, the Record reported with regularity on Tintic's principal industry, mining, and related the down-to-earth news which resulted from confrontations of the various ethnic backgrounds which followed that work. Hard-rock miners worked hard and lived hard - and when they played the same way, there was frequently much to occupy the time of law enforcement officers and to fill the newspaper's columns. When the Record reported, in "holier-than-thou" manner, that 25 fist-fights had taken place in Eureka in a single day, the editor of the Eureka Reporter retorted: "The Mammoth Record is authority for a statement that there were 25 fights in Eureka on Christmas Day. This paper has made a careful canvass of the situation, and we are under the necessity of calling the Record editor down for exaggerating the immorality of the camp. There were but 24 fights here on that day!" Ike Diehl wrote with dry wit, as evidenced by his wry ob- 478 |
