Chapter C: F. L (4)

The Midases are not dead yet—for the one of ancient fable there are thousands to-day, at whose very touch all turns to gold. Their food does not become metal between their lips—but often it might as well, for all the joy they have of it. And the little Phrygian princess was not the only child to be changed and hardened forever by the “Golden Touch.”

Gold figures largely through all the quaint history-fables of the ancients; and history itself is full of tales hardly less remarkable. The early history of America was _made_ by gold—or rather, by golden hopes which achieved wonders for civilization, but very little for the pockets of the most wonderful explorers the world has ever seen. Had it not been for the presence of gold here—and the supposed presence of even more than has yet been dug—the western hemisphere would be very much of a wilderness still. It was the chase of the golden myths which led to the astounding achievements that opened the New World; and since then, almost to this day, civilization has followed with deliberate march only in the hasty footprints of the gold seekers. No tale was too wild to find credence with the early adventurers.

The fabled ransom of Montezuma is _all_ a fable; but it is a fact that Atahualpa, the head Inca of Peru, did pay to that marvelous soldier Pizarro a ransom of golden vessels sufficient to fill a room twenty-two by seventeen feet to a height of nearly six feet above the floor! While gold was not much in use in Mexico, there was a great deal of it employed in Peru for sacred utensils and idols and for personal ornaments; and to this day the “mummy miners” are taking it out there. The early Spanish discoveries of gold in North America were unimportant, despite the gilded myths which have surrounded them. In Columbus’s time the gold fields of the known world were so “worked out” that their product was barely enough to meet the “wear and tear” of the precious metal in use; so there was crying need of new finds. But they came slowly.

By 1580 there were vague rumors of gold in what is now California. Loyola Casallo, a visiting priest, saw placer gold there, and tells of it in his book written in 1690. In the last century Antonio Alcedo speaks of lumps of California gold, weighing from five to eight pounds. But though its presence was known, and though the rocky ribs of the Golden State hid far more millions than were dreamed of—and perhaps than are dreamed of yet—there was little mining, and that little with scant success.

The first gold discovery in the American colonies was in Cabarrus county, North Carolina, in 1799; and up to 1827 that state was the only gold-producer in the Union. In 1824 Cabarrus county sent the first American gold to the mint in Philadelphia. The Appalachian gold field, which embraces part of Virginia, and stretches across North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, touching also parts of Tennessee and Alabama, was once looked to for great things; but it long ago dropped from all importance.

In 1828 the New Placers were discovered in New Mexico, some fifty miles south of Santa Fé, and for a great many years produced richly. Even to this day they are far from unproductive. Gold had been found in New Mexico many generations before, but never in quantities to come anywhere near paying. A decade later, placer gold was discovered in Santa Barbara county, California, in the vast rancho of that gallant old hidalgo whose home was described by Mrs. Jackson as the home of “Ramona.” These placers have been worked steadily though clumsily by Mexicans ever since; and I have a waxy nugget which was washed out in Piru creek in 1838.

Within half a century the world’s supply of gold had long been inadequate to the growing demand. Russia was the chief producer; and her mines—discovered about 1745—kept the nations from a “famine” which would be most disastrous. There were old mines in China, but little worked; and though Japan’s gold output was large, it was but a drop in the cosmopolitan bucket. Russia at present, by the way, produces an average of twenty millions of gold a year.

The wonderful gold fields of Australia were discovered in 1839 by Count Strzelcki; but the priceless find was concealed, for a curious reason. Australia was already England’s out-door prison; and it was feared that if the golden news were known the 45,000 desperate convicts there would rise in rebellion and annihilate their keepers—as they could well have done. So for a dozen years the mighty secret was jealously guarded; and thousands walked unsuspecting over the dumb gravel that held a million fortunes. In 1848 Rev. W. B. Clark again stumbled upon the dangerous secret, but again the discovery was suppressed; and it was not until California had set the whole world on fire with excitement which nothing could bottle up, that Australia threw off her politic mask. In 1851 E. H. Hargreaves, who had just come from the new mines of California, saw that Australia was geologically a gold country; and his prospecting proved his surmises correct. The news spread in spite of cautious officials; and the wild epidemic of fortune seekers pitted the face of the island-continent, and watered its thirsty sands with blood. Even yet, Australia is producing over $45,000,000 gold a year.

The rich gold fields of New Zealand were first found in 1842, but were not extensively worked until 1856, when the swarming gold hunters had overrun the Australian fields, and the restless sought still easier wealth.

As I have told you, gold was mined spasmodically in California much more than two centuries ago, and steadily mined for more than a decade before the “great discovery” which was to change the face of an empire and bring about what was in many ways the most remarkable migration in the whole history of the human race. But these early diggings of the precious metal made little stir. The swarthy miners delved away quietly, exchanged their glittering “dust” for rough food and other rude necessaries, and made no noise. They were very much out of the world. The telegraph, the railroad and the printing press were far from touch with them. There were a few “Americans” in California, and even one or two newspapers, but neither paid attention to the occasional rumors of gold, save to ridicule them.

But on the ninth day of February, 1848, a little girl held in her unknowing hand the key of the West—the wee yellow seed which was to spring into one of the most wondrous plants in history. On the American fork of the Sacramento river, in what is now El Dorado county, Cal., stood a shabby little mill, owned by an American named Sutter. (Californians, by the way, pronounce the name “Soo´-ter.”) The mill race became broken, and three men were hired to repair it. Two were Mormons, and the third, the overseer, was named Marshall. As the men worked, Marshall’s little daughter played about them—dreaming as little as did her elders that she was to upset a continent.

A yellow pebble in an angle of the sluice caught her eye, and picking the pretty trifle from the wet sand, she ran to her father with, “Papa! see the pitty stone.” It was indeed a pretty stone, and Marshall at once suspected its value. Tests proved that he was right, and gold was _really_ found. The discovery made some little noise among the few Americans in that lonely, far land, but nothing was known of it to the world until Rev. C. S. Lyman, who saw some of the nuggets which further search yielded, wrote a letter to the _American Journal of Science_, in March, 1848. As soon as the news was in type, it spread swiftly to the four ends of the earth, and already by August of the same year four thousand excited men were tearing up the sands of the American Fork, and coaxing them to yield their golden secrets. And well they succeeded, for every day saw from $30,000 to $50,000 worth of gold washed out and transferred to rude safes of bottles or buckskin sacks. How long and high that gold fever raged; how it patted the fearful intervening desert with the weary footprints of tens of thousands of modern Jasons; how it brought around the Horn a thousand heavy ships for every one that sailed before; how it overturned and created anew the money markets of the world; how it turned a vast wilderness into the garden of the world, and pulled the Union a thousand miles over to the West, and caused the building of such enormous railway lines as mankind had never faintly dreamed of, and did a thousand other wonders, you already know—for it has made literature as well as history. Our national history is crowded with great achievements, but its chief romance was—

“The days of old,
The days of gold,
The days of ’49.”

California produced $5,000,000 gold in 1848, and crazed the civilized world. The output grew to $60,000,000 by 1852. To-day the state yields between eleven and twelve million dollars’ worth of gold a year, and it creates no excitement whatever; for its people are more occupied with mining the safer gold of agriculture.

Of late years South Africa has entered the field as one of the great gold countries. Its annual “crop” is over forty millions. There is a possibility that hereafter Alaska will have to be added to the list. This summer of 1897 between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000 in “dust” and small nuggets came out of the region generally and loosely called “The Klondike.” I saw in the San Francisco mint 152,000 ounces the returning miners poured out from their buckskin bags. Over 3,000 people left California under the excitement caused by the exhibition of these treasures, in a “gold-rush” which recalled the old days, by its fever and its follies; but the Klondike rush will probably be remembered, whatever its results in gold, as the most disastrous in history. Instead of the mild climates of California, Australia and South Africa (and thousands lost health and life even there) the gold seekers upon the Klondike will have to do with the cruel winters and inhospitable wildernesses of a land almost under the Arctic Circle.

* * * * *

Of the various methods of liberating our Yellow Slave from the hard clutches of the earth it would be too long to speak in detail here; but they are broadly divided into two classes, according to the surroundings of the gold itself. Free or “placer” gold—which was for centuries the first known to mankind, and which was the sort that started the great “fever” in California and Australia—is found in beds of sand and gravel, generally the present or former bed of a stream. It is extracted—this precious needle from an enormous and worthless haystack—by means of its own weight; water being applied in various manners to give that weight a chance to assert itself. The mixed gravel is given up to the mercies of running water, which wets it through, and causes its heaviest parts to sink to the bottom, where they are held by artificial obstacles, while the lighter particles of sand are swept away by the natural or artificial current. In this manner the vast mass of soil is water-sifted until but little is left; and from that little it is easy to hunt out the coy yellow grains.

The placer gold was not formed in the gravel banks where it is found, but came there by the death of its mother rock. All gold began in “veins” in the earth’s rocky ribs; but Time, with his patient hammers of wind and rain and frost, has pounded vast areas of these rocks to sand; and the gold, broken from great bands to lumps, has drifted with the bones of the mountains into the later heaps of gravel.

The processes of mining gold which still remains in its original home in the rocks are far more complicated. There is a vast amount of boring to be done into the flinty hearts of the mountains, with diamond-pointed drills and with blasting; and then the rock, which is dotted with the precious yellow flakes, has to be crushed between the steel jaws of great mills. Much of the gold that is mined, too, is so chemically changed that it does not look like gold at all, and requires special chemical processes to coax it out. In gold (and silver) mining mercury is one of the most important factors. It is the mineral sheriff, and swift to arrest any fugitive fleck of gold that may come in its way. The sluice boxes in extensive placer mines, and the “sheets” in stamp mills are all charged with quicksilver, which saves a vast amount of the finer gold dust that would be otherwise swept away by the current of water—for water is equally essential in both kinds of mining.

There is no such thing as pure gold, often as we hear the phrase. Nature’s own “virgin gold” is always alloyed with silver; and the very purest is but 98 or 97 per cent gold. California gold averages about the fineness of our American coin—90 per cent pure. As a general rule, the lighter the color the purer the gold. The beautiful red gold gets its color from a large alloy of copper.

It is an odd fact that the sea is full of gold. No doubt at the bottom of that stupendous basin which has received for all time the washings of all the world, there is an incalculable wealth of golden dust; but the strange ocean mine is not all so deep down as that. The sea water itself carries gold in solution—a grain of gold to every ton of water, as a famous chemist has shown.

Among the historical big nuggets found in various parts of the world, there have been some wonderful yellow lumps. In Cabarrus county, N. C., one was found in 1810 which weighed thirty-seven pounds Troy. In 1842 the gold fields of Zlatoust, in the Ural, gave a nugget of ninety-six pounds Troy. The Victoria (Australia) nugget weighed one hundred and forty-six pounds and three pennyweights, of which only six ounces was foreign rock; and the Ballarat (Australia) nugget was thirty-nine pounds heavier yet. The largest nugget ever found was also dug in Australia—the “Sarah Sands,” named for a far-off loved one. It reached the astonishing weight of two hundred and thirty-three pounds and four ounces Troy! I wonder what Miner Sands felt when he stuck his pick into that fortune in one lump!

The quality which makes gold commercially the most valuable of the metals is its docility. The cunning hammer of the smith can “teach” it almost anything. The more stubborn metals crumble after a certain point; but gold can be hammered into a sheet so infinitely fine that 282,000 of them, piled one upon the other, would be but an inch thick! And a flake of gold tiny as a pin-head can be drawn out, a finer thread than ever man spun, to a length of five hundred feet!

There is no end to the uses of gold. They broaden every day. In some one of its many forms our Yellow Slave helps us in almost every art and walk of life. It has become as indispensable as its red fellow-slave, fire—and like fire can be as bad a master as it should be a good servant.

The Peak of Gold.

The Peak of Gold.

The most remarkable myths that appear in American history are those which were so eagerly listened to by the early Spanish conquerors, who overran two-thirds of the two Americas long before the Saxons so much as attempted a foot-hold in the New World. There was the famous myth of El Dorado in South America—a living man covered from head to foot with pure gold dust and nuggets. In Mexico was the fable of Montezuma’s untold tons of gold and bushels of precious stones, and many other impossible things. Ponce de Leon, the gallant conqueror of Puerto Rico, paid with his life for the credulity which led him to the first of our states ever entered by a European, in quest of an alleged fountain of perpetual youth—a butterfly which some of the world’s learned doctors are still chasing under another form. And all across the arid Southwest the hot winds have scattered the dust of brave but too-believing men who fell in the desert through which they pursued some glittering shape of the American golden fleece. When Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the first American traveler, walked across this continent from ocean to ocean, over three hundred and fifty years ago, he heard from the Indians many gilded myths, and chief of them were those concerning the famous Seven Cities of Cíbola. So enormously abundant was gold said to be in these Indian cities, that it was put to the meanest uses. When Vaca got to the Spanish settlements in Mexico and told this wonderful report it made a great commotion, and soon afterward that great explorer, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, came to the Seven Cities of Cíbola—which surrounded the site of the present Pueblo Indian town of Zuñi in the extreme west of New Mexico. But instead of the dazzling cities he expected, Coronado found only seven adobe towns, without an ounce of gold (or any other metal, for that matter)—towns which were wonderfully curious, but which sorely disheartened the brave Spanish pioneers. A little later Coronado heard equally astounding tales of a still more golden aboriginal city—the fabulous Gran Quivira—and set out to find it. After a marvelous march which took him almost to where Kansas City now is, he found the Quivira—but no gold, of course. And it has been the same ever since. Coronado’s footsore men ran down their fables in 1541. Certainly not a decade, and very likely not a year, has passed since then in which some equally preposterous story of incalculable treasures has not been born and found followers in the Southwest.

I know of but one thing in the world more remarkable than that the Spaniards should have believed such self-evident myths; and that one thing is that so many, many Americans believe them to-day. Not long ago I visited the most remote and inaccessible ruins in the Southwest, and found there the work of these sanguine dupes, who had actually dug through solid rock in search of buried treasure. And even while I write a party is digging, a hundred miles to the west, for a treasure as mythical, and as palpably so, as that at the end of the rainbow. The stories of golden mountains, of buried millions and of mysterious “lost mines”—far richer, of course, than those which any one can find—in New Mexico alone would fill a volume.

I had once the good fortune to run across some old and fragmentary Spanish manuscripts of the last century and the beginning of this, which are extremely interesting. It is not often that we get so much documentary evidence concerning the golden will-o’-the-wisps which have lured so many to disappointment and death. The writings all bear the stamp of implicit belief, and the old soldier, in particular, who is the hero of the fragmentary story, is often unconsciously eloquent and sometimes pathetic in his recital. I translate all the documents literally.

The first manuscript is a certified copy (certified in the City of Mexico, March 5, 1803), of the “relation” and petition of Bernardo de Castro, a copy for which the Spanish governor of New Mexico had sent. Bernardo’s story and appeal are as follows, rendering as closely as possible the quaint language of the day:

“_Most Excellent Sir_: Bernardo de Castro, retired sergeant of the company of San Carlos [St. Charles] of the government of the City of Chihuahua, in the Provinces of the Interior, admitted to citizenship in the City of Santa Fé, capital of the kingdom of New Mexico, and resident of this capital, goes on and before Your Excellency says: That having served our Royal Monarch for the space of nine years and eight months as sergeant of the said company in the countless combats at which I assisted against the nations of the ynfidels [Indians], I came out with a lance-thrust in one leg, of the which it resulted that I was placed in the Ynvalid corps by the Sir Commander Don Juan de Ugalde. But considering that with time and medicines I recovered and gained strength to seek my subsistence free from the hardships to which the frontier troop is exposed from the Mecos [probably the Apaches], I gave up for the benefit of the royal exchequer my pay as invalid sergeant, and have followed working in the same kingdom of New Mexico. There I have suffered various fights—as it befell in the past year of 1798, that while I was conducting a multitude of large cattle and other effects, the whole valued at more than $14,000, from New Mexico to El Paso del Norte, the barbarous Mecos assailed me, and after a long battle, in which flowed much human blood, they carried off all I had in the world. And we gave to God thanks for having saved us even the life.

“This continual contact with the savages has contracted me a friendship with the Cumanche nation, which is at peace with the Spaniards, and understanding their idiom facilitates me in trading with them to gain my livelihood.

“In the past year, 1798, I arrived in Santa Fé and presented myself to the Sir Governor Don Fernando Chacon. His Lordship informed me that there had come a Frenchman and had shown him a piece of metal of fine gold, assuring him he knew the spot where it was produced, and that it was a peak which the ynfidel nations called Peak of the Gold, where there was such an abundant breeding-place of this precious metal that all the peak and even its surroundings could with propriety be said to be pure gold. That he offered to show the spot if his Lordship would guard him with three hundred men of troops, and this he was bound to grant for the benefit of our monarch. That the distance, he considered, would be a matter of eight or nine days’ journey. The faithful love to our Sovereign animated the Sir Governor, and he supplied the escort which had marched two days before, and his said Lordship informed me that if he had found me in the city he would have made me one of the commanders. This offer inspired me, and I offered to follow after the expedition, and the love with which I have always served my lord, the King, enabled me by the utmost exertion to overtake the expedition, with which I incorporated myself on the third day.

“And journeying on our course, on the ninth day the French guide slipped away from us, leaving us in the plains without knowledge of the road to our desired peak. At the which it was resolved by the leaders of the expedition to return to Santa Fé. But I, not suffering from the short march, separated from the expedition and went on alone to verify the report. And in the rancherias [villages] of the Cumanches, where I was entertained, when I told them the trick and the mockery that the Frenchman had put upon us, they assured me with one accord that the said Frenchman did not know the location of the peak at all, and that he had never been there, for the gold which he took to New Mexico they themselves had given him in exchange for various trinkets of coral, belts and other trifles. But that they knew the peak of gold, that was indeed with an abundance never seen before, and if I would go with them they would show me it, and I could pick up all I wished, and if we met any other nation [of Indians] I should not be harmed if with them, for they were all friends.

“Indeed, most illustrious Sir, only by my fidelity and obedience to my superior could I contain myself not to march to the peak without delay; and I told my friends the Mecos Cumanches, that I was going to seek permission of that Sir Governor of the New Mexico, and with it would return. I arrived in Santa Fé and sought that permission, but it was denied me. But continuing my visits to the Mequeria [I find that] so strong a desire have they formed for the granting of that permission and the development of this treasure, and the facility there is that the Spaniards enjoy it and that their Sovereign make heavy his royal coffers, that I resolved to make a walk of more than seven hundred leagues to seek the aid and encouragement of Your Excellency. [The brave sergeant so fully believed in his Peak of Gold that he actually walked nearly 2,200 miles alone through a most dangerous country to lay the matter before the Viceroy in Mexico.]

“My plan being approved, it is undeniable that the Royal treasury will be swelled by the tithes and dues to the Royal crown; new interest will animate men to follow up the discovery, and there will be civilized (with time and the friendship which is contracted with the nations of the Cumanches, Yutas and Navajosos) more than three hundred leagues of virgin and powerful lands—that being reckoned the distance from the city of Santa Fé to the Peak of Gold. The inhabitants of the internal provinces, who now live under the yoke of the assaults of the hostile Indians, will revive; it will be easier for the Sovereign to guard the frontiers of these his vast dominions. Settlements will be made, and insensibly will follow the conquest and pacification of the ynfidels, who will easily embrace the holy Gospel and come under the faith of Jesus Christ. What results to religion, to the monarch and to his vassals are presented, even by this clumsy narration!

“I do not intend to burden the Royal treasury with the slightest expense, nor do I think to involve the Royal arms in actions which might imperil the troops. My person is declared past its usefulness for the Royal service, and I count myself as a dead man for entering matters of importance. But my military spirit does not falter, and I only desire to manifest, even at the foot of the tomb, my love to my Sovereign. With only one faithful companion I intend to go among my friends, the Cumanches, and, with the protection and guidance of them, to enter and explore the land, silently, without noise or preparation, to force a passage. Quietness, the gray shadows of the night and our own courage are the only preparations I make for the difficult undertaking, and, above all, the divine aid. Having found the desired Peak of Gold, charted the roads to it, made the due surveys, and gathered so much of the precious metal as we can transport without making danger (and under the divine favor), I will present myself again to Your Excellency, and by your Superiority will be taken such steps as the state of the case demands.

“Under which considerations, and the solid arguments which I have expressed, of which Your Excellency can receive full confirmation from the most excellent Señor Don Pedro de Nava, commander-in-chief of the interior provinces, and Don Joseph Casiano Feaomil y Garay, lieutenant-captain of dragoons of San Luís Potosí, I humbly beg of Your Excellency that in use of your Viceroyal powers, you deign to grant me your superior permission to go in search of the Peak of Gold; being kind enough to send to the Señor Don Fernando Chacon, actual Governor of the New Mexico, that he put no difficulty in my path, and giving orders to the captains and chiefs of the friendly nations—Cumanches, Yutas and Navajosos—that they accompany and guide me in this expedition.

“And I respectfully say that my delay in getting to this Capital [the City of Mexico] was because I had to come nearly all the way on foot, my horse having given out in that great distance, and that now I am supported here by alms, such is my great anxiety for the benefit of the monarch, and beg that I be excused for this paper. [He was too poor to buy the stamped and taxed paper on which petitions to the Viceroy must be addressed.]

“For so much I pray Your Excellency’s favor.

BERNARDO CASTRO.”

He had the real spirit of the Argonauts, this crippled old soldier, to whom poverty and danger and 2,000-mile walks were trifles when they stood between him and his Peak of Gold.

The Viceroy evidently gave the desired permission—without which, under the strict Spanish laws, no such venture was to be thought of—and there were one or more expeditions, but unfortunately we have left no account of them. It is clear that the Viceroy ordered Governor Chacon, of New Mexico, to assist Castro in his undertaking, and that the matter aroused a good deal of interest throughout the provinces of New Spain. Don Nemecio Salcedo, military commandant at Chihuahua, seems to have interested himself in the matter, for the next document in this fragmentary series is a draft of a reply to him from Governor Chacon, as follows:

“According to that which Your Lordship advises me in communication of the 16th of September of the current year, I repeat that as to the expedition of Bernardo Castro to the discovery of the Peak of Gold, I will help him and the others who accompany him, that they may have no difficulty with the General of the Cumanches, whom, however, I have not yet seen, since he has not yet returned with the ransom he offered me when he was last in this capital.

“God, etc. Santa Fee, 25th of Fber, 1803.

“To Señor Don Nemo. Salcedo.”

There was other correspondence between these two on the same matter, for now we come to an original letter from Commandant Salcedo to Governor Chacon, replying to a late one of his. It says:

“The communication of Your Lordship, No. 36, of the 18th of last November, leaves me informed of all the assistances you gave Bernardo Castro, that he might undertake the second journey [so he had already made one] from that city, with the object to discover the Peak of Gold, which he has described in the territory of that province. And of the results I hope Your Lordship will give me account.

“God guard Your Lordship many years.

“CHIHUAHUA, January 5, 1804.

“NEMECIO SALCEDO.

“To the Sir Governor of New Mexico.”

Poor brave, misguided Bernardo de Castro! I wish we might have more of the documents about his venturesome wanderings in quest of the Peak of Gold. He must have gone far out into the wastes of Texas; and at last he, too, yielded up his life, as did countless of his countrymen before him, to that deadliest of yellow fevers. We lose all track of him until Governor Chaves writes from Santa Fé, in 1829, to his superior in the City of Mexico, who had written to ask him about these and other matters. His letter says:

“_Most Excellent Sir_: In compliance with that which Your Excellency requests in your official letter of the 19th of August last, that I make the necessary verifications upon the mineral reported by the Rev. Father Custodian of these missions, Fray Sevastian Alvares, to be found among the gentile Comanches, I have investigated the matter, and place in the knowledge of Your Excellency that which various of the citizens of this capital—and all of them most veracious—say. They all agree in that it is a fact that Don Bernardo de Castro [the old soldier had evidently won honorable recognition, else a Governor of New Mexico would not speak of him by the respectful title of “Don”] entered this territory with the object of seeking the said mineral; that he made various expeditions with this object, until in one of them he was slain by the heathen Apaches.

“Passing to information received from the travelers to that nation, all agree in the statement that the Comanches offer to sell them pouches filled with a metal which appears fine and of great weight, which they say they get from the neighborhood of the Ash peaks (which are very well known to our people, but not explored or charted, because they are distant from the trails).

“The citizen Pablo Martin has been he who expressed himself most fully. He, knowing that the said Don Bernardo de Castro sought a mineral in the Comanche nation, has procured them to look for the said mineral. The only result was that one Comanche named Paño de Lienso [‘Cloth of Linen’], who made himself his companion, gave him information that beyond the Ash peaks, in some round hills, were stones with much silver, whereof the said Comanche had carried some to the province of San Antonio de Bejar [Texas], where they made buttons for him. He who made the buttons charged the Comanche to bring him a load [of that metal], but he did not do so, because in that time came the war of his people with that province. Other Comanches also have told him [Pablo Martin] that in said spot were stones with silver.

“This is all I have been able to find out as the results of my investigations, the which I place in the knowledge of Your Excellency, that you may put it to the use which you deem best.

“SANTA FEE, 30 of 8ber of 1829.

“CHAVES.”

And there, so far as we know it now, is the story of the Peak of Gold.

Pablo’s Deer Hunt.

Pablo’s Deer Hunt.

A PUEBLO FAIRY TALE TOLD OVER.

The yellow cottonwoods above the Rio Grande shivered in the fresh October morning as the sun peeped over the Eagle Feather mountain into the valley of his people. Above the flat, gray pueblo of Shee-eh-huíb-bak the bluish breath of five hundred slender chimneys melted skyward in tall spirals. Upon here and there a level housetop a blanket-swathed figure stared solemnly at the great, round, blinding house of T’hoor-íd-deh, the Sun Father.

Then a burro, heavy eared and slow of pace, rattled the gravel on the high bluff, gazed mournfully on the muddy eddies, and broke out in stentorian brays. Apparently Flojo[32] felt downcast. Across these treacherous quicksands the grass was still tall in the _vega_—why did not Pablo take him over too? And mustering up his ears, he trotted almost briskly down the slope to the water’s edge, where a swart young Apollo was just stepping into the swift current. Tall, sinewy, lithe as Keem-eé-deh, the mountain lion that lent its tawny hide for the bow-case in his hand; his six feet of glowing bronze broken only by a modest clout of white at the supple waist, his dense black hair falling straight upon broad, bare shoulders, and his dark eyes watchful of the swirling waters, the young Pueblo strode sturdily in, paying no heed to the forlorn watcher upon the shore. In a moment he was in the channel swimming easily, one hand holding the bow-case above the red bundle upon his jet crown. _Sush-sh! sush-sh! splosh! splash! splash!_ and Flojo heaved a great sigh as his master went spattering across the farther shoals, and at last climbed the sandy eastern bank.

Pablo unrolled the bundle from his head, wriggled, wet-skinned, into the red print shirt and snowy _calzoncillos_, wrapped their flapping folds about his calf with the buckskin leggings of rich maroon; belted these at either knee with a wee, gay sash from the looms of Moqui, fastened the moccasins with their silver buttons, and, with the tawny sheath of bow and arrows slung across his back, started at a swift walk. Once only he stopped, after a scramble up the gravel hills that scalloped the plateau, to look back a moment. The long ribbon of the valley, now faded from its summer green, banded the bare brown world from north to south, threaded with the errant silver of the river, whose farthest shimmer flashed back from under the purple mass of the Mountain of the Thieves. Midway lay the pueblo, dozing amid its orchards below the black cone of the Kú-mai, and Pablo shook his head sadly, as he turned again and strode across the broad, high _llano_.

“It is not well in the village,” he muttered, “for it is full of them that have the evil road. The Cum-pah-huít-lah-wen have told me that the half of those of Shee-eh-huíb-bak are witches; but not all can be punished. But it is in ill times for us. _Tio_ Lorenzo is twisted by the Bads so that he cannot walk; and many die; and did not Ámparo and José Diego marry the prettiest maidens of the Tee-wahn, only to find them witches? How shall one take a wife when so many are accursed? It is better to hunt and forget the women, as do the warriors; for we know not who are True Believers, and who have to do with the ghosts.”

Across the wide, sandy plateau the young Indian walked with undiminished pace; and as the house of the Sun Father stood in the middle of the sky, he entered a rocky cañon of the Eagle Feather mountain and began to climb a spur of the great peak. The huddled dry leaves under a live oak caught his eye, and he turned them with deft foot. “Here Pee-íd-deh, the deer, slept last night,” he exclaimed, “for the fresh earth clings to their under side. And here is a hair, and here the footmark. If only Keem-eé-deh will help me.”

Kneeling by the tree, he broke off a twig and stuck it in the earth in front of the footprint, the fork pointing backward, that Pee-íd-deh might trip and fall as it ran. Then, drawing the Left-Hand Pouch from his side, he opened it and reverently took out a tiny parcel in buckskin, whose folds soon disclosed a little image of the Mountain Lion, chief of hunters, carved from adamantine quartz. Its eyes were of the sacred turquoise; and in the center of the belly was inlaid a turquoise heart over the hollow which held a pinch of the holy corn meal. On the right side was lashed a tiny arrow-head of moss agate—one of the precious “thunder knives” which the Horned Toad had made and had left for Pablo on the plains of the Hollow Peak of Winds. Putting the fetich to his mouth and inhaling from the stone lips, the hunter prayed aloud to Keem-eé-deh to give him true eyes and ears, and swift feet to overtake; and rising, gave a low, far roar to terrify the heart and loosen the knees of his prey. Then, restoring the image to its pouch, with bow in hand and three arrows held ready, he pushed rapidly up hill, with keen eyes to the dim trail. Here a trampled grass blade, there a cut leaf or overturned pebble, and again a faint scratch on the rocks, led him on. At last, just where the flat top of the mountain had been wrought to a vast arrow-point by the Giant of the Caves, he saw a sleek doe standing under a shabby aspen. Down on his belly went Pablo, and with a new breath-taking from the stone lips of the prey-god, crawled snake-like forward. The deer moved not, and within fifty yards Pablo tugged an arrow to its agate head and drove it whirring through Pee-íd-deh’s heart. The doe turned her great, soft eyes toward him, sniffed the air and went bounding up the rocky ledges as if unhurt. Yet on the left side the grey feathers of the shaft touched the skin; and once on the right Pablo caught the sparkle of the gem tip.

There was a curious ashen tint in the bronze of his cheeks, as the hunter sprang to his feet and began running in pursuit. “Truly, that was to the life,” he whispered to himself. “And why does she not fall? Will it be that they of the evil road have given me the eye?” And stopping short, he fished out a bit of corn husk and a pinch of the sweet _pee-én-hleh_ and rolled a cigarette, lighting it from his flint and steel. The first puff he blew slowly to the east, and then one to the north, and one to the west, and one south, one overhead, and one downward, all about, that the evil spirits of the Six Ways might be blinded and not see his tracks. When the sacred _weer_ was smoked, he rose and took up the trail again. It was easy to be followed, now, in the soft wood soil of the mountain top; and in the very edge of the farther grove of aspens he saw the doe again, grazing in unconcern. Worming from tree to tree, Pablo came close, and again sent a stone-tipped shaft. It struck by the very side of the first, and drank as deep; but the doe, pricking up her ears as if she had but heard the whizz of the arrow, trotted easily away and disappeared over the eastern brow of the mountain, amid the somber pines.

Pablo was very pale now, but not yet daunted. He smoked again to the Six Ways and prayed to all the Trues to help him, and with another arrow on the string, pushed forward.

Where the tall pines dwindled to scrubby cedars he came again to his quarry. But now the doe was more alert and would not let him within bowshot. Only she looked back at him with big, sad eyes and trotted just away from range. And soon Night rolled down the mountain from behind him and filled the whispering forest and drowned the great, still plains beyond, and he lost her altogether.

“This is no deer,” said Pablo, gloomily, as he stretched himself under a twisted _savino_ for the night, “but one who has _wahr_, the Power. And her eyes, how they are as those of women sorrowing, large and wet! But I will see the end, even though I die.” And weary with the rugged forty miles of the day, he was soon asleep.

As the blue flower of dawn bloomed from the eastern gray, Pablo rose, and smoked again the sacred smoke and inhaled the strengthful breath of Keem-eé-deh, and started anew on his awesome hunt. Soon he found the trail marked with dark blotches, and all day long he followed it. Just as the sun-house stood on the dark western ridges he came to the foot of a high swell, on whose summit gleamed the gray of strange, giant walls.

“It will be the bones of Ta-bi-rá,” thought Pablo aloud, “for my father often told me of the great city of the Pi-ro that was beyond Cuaray in the First Times, before the lakes of the plain were accursed to be salt, before Those-of-the-Old came to dwell on the river that runs from the Dark Lake of Tears. But how shall a deer come thus into the plains, which are only of the prong-horns?[33] Yet I have walked in her road all day, and here are her marks, going”—and he stopped, for his sharp ear caught a faint, far-off chant. It seemed to come from the ruins that crowned the hill; and, dropping to the earth, Pablo began to crawl from cedar to cedar, from rock to rock toward it. At the very crest of the rounded ridge was a long line of jumbled stone—the mound of fallen fortress houses—and beyond, from the gathering dusk, loomed the ragged, lofty walls of a vast temple. Under the shadows of the mound he crawled far around to the rear end of the gray wall, and then along the wall itself toward the huge buttresses that proclaimed its front. The chant was close at hand now—the singer was evidently within the ruined temple. But the tongue Pablo did not know. It was not so musical as his soft Tee-wahn, nor was it like the guttural of the Quéres—for that he knew also—and yet it was some voice of the Children of the Sun, and not the outlandish babble of the Americanoodeh, nor of the Spanish Wet-Head. It was not, then, some new _tonto_ come to dig for the fabled gold of Ta-bi-rá—whose shafts yawned black in the gray bedrock and here and there through the very base of the great wall—but some Indian, and probably a medicine man, for the song was not as those of the careless. Pablo crouched in the darkness against the eastern end of the wall, listening, forgetful of the bewitched deer and of all else. Once in a wild swell of the song he thought he discerned a familiar word.

“Hoo-máh-no?” he kept repeating to himself. “Surely, the grandfather Desidério said me that word when he told of Them-of-the-Old, when They-with-Striped-Faces dwelt on yonder mesa. But they are all dead these many years.”

A swift, short flash split the darkness, and a growl of far thunder rolled across the ruins. Pablo glanced at the heaven. It was sown thick with the bright sky-seeds that flew up when the Coyote disobeyed the Trues and opened the sacred bag. From horizon to horizon there was not a cloud; but again the flash came, and again the mighty drum-beat of Those Above. Pablo crept to a breach in the wall, and peeped into the gloomy interior of the temple. Even as he looked, the zig-zag arrow of the Trues leaped again from ghostly wall to wall; and its blinding flight showed him that at which he caught his breath. For squat by a corner in the wall was a white-headed Indian waving his bare arms; and facing him and Pablo a dusky maiden, with drooping head. But her face was burned into his heart.

“Surely, such are precious to the Trues! For she is as the Evening Star, good to see!” and Pablo craned forward eagerly. “The _viejo_ will be a Shaman,” he added, mentally, “for so our own Fathers make the lightning come at the medicine dance.[34] But she! If there were such in Shee-eh-huíb-bak, then one might take a wife—for her face is no face of a witch!”

Just then there came another flash; and then a soft, girlish cry. The magic lightning of the conjurer had betrayed Pablo; and before he could spring away a heavy hand was upon his shoulder.

“_Hi-ma-tu-kú-eh?_” demanded a deep voice in an unknown tongue.

“_Nah Tee-wah_,” said the abashed hunter, trying in vain to shake off that strong grasp.

“Tee-wah?” said the stranger, speaking in Pablo’s own language. “I, too, have the tongue of Shee-eh-huíb-bak, for my wife was of there. But now she has gone to Shee-p’ah-poón, and there lives for me only my child, and she is hurt. But what hast thou here, peeping at our medicine?”

“It is by chance, Kah-báy-deh,” answered Pablo. “For yesterday when the sun was _so_, I wounded a deer, and unto here I have followed it in vain. For, perhaps, it has the Power, and I could not kill it. And when I heard thy song I came, not knowing what it was.”

“Since yesterday when the sun was _so_, thou hast followed the road of a wounded deer? And how wounded?”

“In truth, I gave it two arrows through the life, but it minded them not.”

“Come, then, and thou shalt see thy hunting,” and he drew Pablo into the temple. In a moment a dry arm of the _entraña_ (which the Trues gave for the first candles) was burning; and by its smoky, flaring light Pablo could see his strange surroundings. Beside him, that breakless hand still on his shoulder, stood an aged Indian. His hair was white as the snows of Shoo-p’ah-toó-eh, and his undimmed eyes shone from deep under snowy brows. He was naked but for the breech-clout, and upon his left arm was a great gauntlet from the forepaw of Ku-aí-deh, the bear, with all its claws. But at his wrinkled face Pablo stared in affright, for all across it ran long, savage knife-stripes, so old that they, too, were cut with wrinkles. “_Rayado!_” flashed through the young hunter’s mind, “even as were They-of-the-Old who dwelt in the mesa of the Hoo-máh-no! But they are all dead since long ago.”

But even his superstitious terror could not keep his eyes from that modest figure crouched in the angle of the strange wall. Truly, she was good to look at. In the soft olive of the cheeks a sweet, deep red was spreading. Under the downcast eyes the lashes drew dark lines across the translucent skin. A flood of hair poured into her lap, and from under its heavy waves peeped a slender hand. It was plain from her dress that she was none of the _bárbaros_, but a Pueblo. There was the same modest black _manta_ of his people, the same fat, boot-like leg-wraps of snowy buckskin, the same dainty brown moccasins. Even the heavy silver rosary was about her neck, and from her ears hung strands of precious turquoise beads from the white, blue-veined heart of Mount Chalchihuitl. But even the white silver, and the stone that stole its color from the sky were not precious beside that sweet young face from which Pablo could not turn away.

And as he gazed with a strange warm tickling at his heart strings, the long lashes lifted timidly toward the handsome stranger, and on a sudden the bright face turned ashen, and the girl sank back upon a heap of fallen stones. Pablo stared with wide eyes, and a dizziness ran from head to knee, for there were dark drops upon the rocks, and amid the flowing hair he saw the notched ends of two arrows—his very own, feathered from the gray quills of Koor-níd-deh, the crane. He reeled, to fall, but the strong hand held him up and the strong voice said:

“Take the heart of a man, for it is not yet too late. Thou hast done this, unknowing; for the witches filled thine eyes with smoke, to fool thee. But we will yet make medicine to heal my daughter—for I am the wizard T’bó-deh, the last of the Hoo-máh-no, and precious to Those Above, who will help us. But thou hast still arrows in the quiver—go, then, till thou come to the first cliff on the west, and shoot three arrows strongly into the sky. And bring to me that which falls—for it needs that thou who hast shed her blood shouldst bring it again. Nay, tremble not, for the Trues will help thee; and with this amulet of the striped stone the witches cannot come nigh. Take the heart of a man, and go!”

Pablo looked at the pitiful little heap in the corner, and turning, manfully strode out through the broad portal and went stumbling westward in the darkness, over mounds and hollows and fallen walls. Down the long, steep ridge, across the undulant plain, knee-deep in dry and whispering grass, and up the western slope of the valley he trudged; and at last in the darkness ran up against a smooth, straight face of rock. “It is the cliff,” he shivered—for he feared greatly. But plucking up his soul, he backed away a few paces from the rock and notched a shaft and drew it to the head and sent it hurtling to the sky, and another and another. For a long time he waited, and then there was a soft _whish!_ and an arrow stood in the earth at his feet. He groped and found it and drew back his hand quickly, for shaft and feathers were wet—with that soft, warm, ticklish wetness that never came from water yet. Another arrow fell and it was so, and so also was the third.

Shaken as are the leaves of the shivering tree,[35] Pablo put to his lips the amulet of the wizard and drew a long breath from it. Then, gingerly plucking the standing arrows one by one, he started running from the haunted spot, not resting in his stumbling flight until he found himself at the foot of the hill of Ta-bi-rá. In a few moments he was groping along the great wall, and at last stood again within the roofless temple.

Now there was a tiny fire there, and the old man was squatted by it chanting and snapping two long feathers together in rhythm with his wild refrain. And in the corner was the same dark, limp heap, which seemed to drift near or farther away on the waves of the firelight.

“It is well!” said the old man, rising; “for already I have blown away the evil ones, that we be alone. And I see that thou hast brought blood from above to pay for that which is lost.”

Taking from Pablo’s hand the arrows, still red-wet, he broke one over the fire and one he thrust upright in the hard earth at the maiden’s feet. Then he rubbed his hands with ashes and laid them upon her breast, chanting: