The West from a Car-Window by Richard Harding Davis

MY only ideas of a new mining camp before I visited Creede were derived from an early and eager study of Bret Harte. Not that I expected to see one of his mining camps or his own people when I visited Creede, but the few ideas of miners and their ways and manners that I had were those which he had given me. I should have liked, although I did not expect it, to see the outcasts of Poker Flat before John Oakhurst, in his well-fitting frock-coat, had left the outfit, and Yuba Bill pulling up his horses in front of the Lone Star saloon, where Colonel Starbuckle, with one elbow resting on the bar, and with his high white hat tipped to one side, waited to do him honor. I do not know that Bret Harte ever said that Colonel Starbuckle had a white hat, but I always pictured him in it, and with a black stock. I wanted to hear people say, "Waal, stranger," and to see auburn-haired giants in red shirts, with bags of gold-dust and nuggets of silver, and much should I have liked to meet Rose of Touloumme. But all that I found at Creede which reminded me of these miners and gamblers and the chivalric extravagant days of '49 were a steel pan, like a frying-pan without a handle, which I recognized with a thrill as the pan for washing gold, and a pick in the corner of a cabin; and once when a man hailed me as "Pardner" on the mountain-side, and asked "What luck? " The men and the scenes in this new silver camp showed what might have existed in the more glorious sunshine of California, but they were dim and commonplace, and lacked the sharp, clear-cut personality of Bret Harte's men and scenes. They were like the negative of a photograph which has been under-exposed, and which no amount of touching up will make clear. So I will not attempt to touch them up.

When I first read of Creede, when I was so ignorant concerning it that I pronounced the final _e_, it was on the date line of a newspaper, and made no more impression upon me then than though it were printed simply _Creede_. But after I had reached Denver, and even before, when I had begun to find my way about the Western newspapers, it seemed to be spelled CREEDE. In Denver it faced you everywhere from bill-boards, flaunted at you from canvas awnings stretched across the streets, and stared at you from daily papers in type an inch long; the shop-windows, according to their several uses, advertised "Photographs of Creede," "The only correct map of Creede," "Specimen ore from the Holy Moses Mine, Creede," "Only direct route to Creede," "Scalp tickets to Creede," "Wanted, $500 to start drug-store in Creede," "You will need boots at Creede, and you can get them at -- -- 's. " The gentlemen in the Denver Club talk Creede; the people in the hotels dropped the word so frequently that you wondered if they were not all just going there, or were not about to write Creede on the register. It was a common language, starting-point, and interest. It was as momentous as the word Johnstown during the week after the flood.