Stringer on Pikes Peak

by Lou Cameron

This far from town the slopes had been left to their original appearance, with second or even first-growth timber shading the road and cutting the thin dry winds that could goosebump you by surprise at any time up here, if they caught you in the open. Some of the trees were aspen, lodgepole and other scrub species that you found after mankind or wildfire had passed through.

  But further from the roadway he spied downright impressive fir and spruce. Orchard grass grew emerald green between the tree trunks with wild flowers, mostly yellow and lavender, indicating nobody much could be living hereabouts. For while menfolk could live and let live around wild flowers, there was some mysterious inner urge that possessed women as well as children and pack rats to reach for anything shiny or brightly colored.

  Stringer, having long since decided pretty things looked as pretty where they grew naturally, was content to just enjoy the ride as it turned out nicer than he’d expected. He rolled a smoke, made dead certain his match was out before he tossed it away amid such pretty scenery, and hadn’t been smoking long before they rounded a bend to see yet another tunnel ahead. The little strip of Rocky Mountain greenery, like so many of life’s other pleasures, had been just a brief surprise. He had to get back down and drag his damned mount through again. Things went on that way for the next few hours. Then he noticed the grade was taking them ever lower instead of higher and, again, the slopes all about got bleak and bare, with an old tree stump rotting here and there to explain why. Mining took a heap of timber for pit props and there were a heap of mines in the gold fields up, or actually down, ahead.

  There wouldn’t have been enough timber on all of Pikes Peak to supply the many mines of Teller County this late in the game. That was why the surrounding stumps were so old. Everything from pit props to potatoes for some time had had to be shipped in bulk to the barren and bleak but still mighty prosperous gold fields.

  Stringer had done some background reading on the train from San Francisco. So he knew an elder race of American explorers had discovered Pikes Peak long before Zebulon Montgomery Pike had put the mighty monadnock or isolated massif on the white man’s map.

  The Mountain Utes insisted the creation of their known world had begun there, for anyone with a lick of sense could see how all the rocks and mud that rose above the original Great Bitter Water must have cascaded down through one hole in the sky, above such an obvious center of the world, to spread out in every direction, like a big buffalo turd.

  The Arapaho, who’d guarded its eastern slopes more ferociously, insisted the Utes were full of it and that Ma’tou, The Great Medicine, had given them the vast triangle bounded by the Shining Mountains, the Platte to the north and Arkansas to the south as their Happy Hunting Grounds on Earth. Only, the First Ones, weary of even easy hunting and food gathering, had decided they’d rather go on to the Ghost World, where things were even better.

  So they’d gathered all their medicine things together, including good earth, rock, seeds and such, and gathered on a high place to demand entry through the Sun Door, no doubt raising an awful din with all their chantings and thumpings until Ma’tou, pissed off at their noise and ingratitude, had let out such a roar that all the First Ones had dropped everything they owned in one big pile, which was, you guessed it, the impressive bump the pale faces called Pikes Peak.

  Left to local Indian legends and Zeb Pike’s laconic notations nothing more significant might have occurred in the Pikes Peak Country if a Cherokee guide called Falling Leaf hadn’t wandered into Leavenworth, Kansas, with an eagle quill of gold dust, panned, he said, in the Front Range of the Shining Mountain.

  Falling Leaf falls through a crack in history after getting into a nasty, if not fatal, saloon brawl he had to be carried away from. But word was out. There was gold in the Front Range, some damned where, and any fool could see Pikes Peak was as impressive as the Front Range got. So it was “Pikes Peak Or Bust!” and a lot of folk got busted. The Shining or Rocky Mountains extend one hell of a ways north and south, a heap of them rise higher than Pikes Peak, and there’s no reason gold, heavier than lead, should flow uphill to begin with. As a matter of fact, gold was found lots of other places before it came to pass that in the Year Of Our Lord, 1878 a rancher with a drinking problem and the handle of Bob Womack was riding along the rocky banks of Cripple Creek, just southwest of Pikes Peak and so-called because an earlier explorer’s pony had busted a leg trying to ford the boulder-haunted white water.

  Stringer suspected the tale was too pat to be true, but legend had it that good old Bob wasn’t searching for color aboard his pony, Old Whistler, that brisk May morn. He’d taken to hiding a little brown jug in the creek, out of sight of his modest homespread, to keep his medicinal red-eye cool and safe from confiscation by Eliza, A.K.A. Miss Liza, who was Womak’s spinster sister, common law wife or, as the least charitable version would have it, both. All versions agreed Miss Liza just couldn’t abide Bob’s drinking. Hence the need for the little brown jug in Cripple Creek, leading, of course, to his inevitable discovery of a big slab of float, or gold ore from somewhere higher up.

  That was where the story should have had its happy ending, had it been cut from whole cloth. But while the float he’d found assayed at $200 a ton, good old Bob never found a ton, and soon became known as “Crazy Bob”, driven now by dreams as well as hard liquor to neglect everything in search of the Mother Lode or source of that teasing chunk of High Grade. Soon literally busted by Pikes Peak, Womack was forced to sell off the land he’d inherited from his more ambitious father. Unable to hold a job because of his drinking and monomania about that one bit of color he’d found, Crazy Bob somehow survived until the fall of 1890, a dozen years later, when, to everyone’s astonishment but his own, he struck the El Paso Lode, a two-foot thick vein of gray volcanic rock all the experts had already dismissed as the wrong kind. It assayed at $250 a ton and there were obviously a heap of tons under a fifteen-hundred foot long claim he’d staked out near the confluence of Cripple Creek and Poverty Gulch. But, strange as it must have seemed to poor old Crazy Bob, nobody seemed to give a fig. The smart money boys had been warned by the experts that even if there should be gold in such unfamiliar rock, there was no assurance the infernal stuff could be refined by existing methods and, in any case, hadn’t the stuff been found to begin with by that Crazy Bob Womack?

  In the end, the weak and unfortunate Womack had been forced, or felt he’d been forced, to sell his claim to a Colorado Springs druggist named Grannis for $300 and, legend had it, a bottle of Jack Daniels.

  John Grannis had likely felt he was being charitable. He’d backed Crazy Bob before to the tune of a hundred or so and may have felt he was throwing good money after bad when nobody seemed to want to buy his hard gray rock, and other prospectors, with better reps than Crazy Bob’s, proceeded to go broke digging gold ore, good gold ore, from the southeast slopes of Pikes Peak.

  As a Californio, Stringer understood there was so much more to producing gold than simply finding it. As many a buyer of gold mining stock had learned the hard way, it was easy to lose money really digging gold. It wasn’t worth much mixed with rock. Refined to 24 karat bullion, the U.S. Mint would take it off your hands at circa $20 an ounce. The problem was producing an ounce of pure gold at less cost to you and your stockholders than circa $20. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded, once you started paying all the bills a going gold mine racked up, whether it was producing or not.

  Stringer wouldn’t have been riding for the Cripple Creek gold fields, of course, if things had stayed as grim as they’d turned out for Crazy Bob Womack, Charly Cocking and dozens of other hollow-eyed prospectors who, all told, never ripped $300,000 from the hard gray ore of Cripple Creek with the ball-busting methods of the old fashioned gut-and-gitters. The rich but stubborn high temperature ore only yielded its treasures to the most modern and hence expensive refining methods, which led in turn to the takeover of the Cripple Creek area by the Robber Barons, or “Financiers” as they preferred to be called.

 
; Stringer knew that, to be fair, many of the bigwigs President Teddy Roosevelt now cussed as “Millionaire Malefactors” had started with less jingle in their jeans than old Silver Spoon Teddy to begin with. So he was less ready to cuss a man who’d made more than he had before he knew just how the rich cuss had wound up so rich. But as he rode around a bend to spy what blocked the road just ahead, he was ready and able to cuss considerable. Then he had to grin. For that black and tan horseless carriage that had almost run him down and told him to fuck himself was stalled on a stretch of level grade and, better yet, the sissy-dressed dude who’d been burning up the road so high and mighty was standing there like a big-ass bird in his high-button shoes, canvas duster and peaked tweed cap with goggles strapped to it. As Stringer rode closer, he saw the cuss was older and more red-faced than himself. The stranded motorist glared up at Stringer to announce, “So help me, God, if you tell me to get a horse I mean to kick the shit out of you!”

  Stringer doubted the older and softer-looking gent was up to such a chore, but he’d been raised to speak respectful to his elders, if they’d let him. So he just said, “You more likely need to set your carburetor richer, amigo,” to which the obviously richer man replied, “What are you talking about, cowboy? What in the hell is a carboneater and do you know what could be wrong with the son of a bitch in any case?”

  Stringer reined in to reply, “Despite the cowboy duds, I know a little about gasoline engines, amigo.

  They drive ’em, some, where I bed down betwixt more rustic chores. I don’t know why I ought to help such a rude old rascal clear this public thoroughfare of fancy French scrap metal, but if you promise not to beat me up, I may be able to fix your fool machine for you.”

  The rich dude looked a heap friendlier than he had up to now, as he assured Stringer it was worth fifty dollars to him if he could make it on down to Cripple Creek before suppertime.

  Stringer glanced at the sky, muttered, “Hell, Cripple Creek can’t be that far,” and dismounted, adding, “I need a screwdriver.” When the fool mountain-motorist naturally moaned he didn’t seem to have any tools aboard his Panard, added, “Never mind. If my jack knife won’t do it I likely don’t know what I’m doing to begin with.”

  The rich dude watched with a certain interest tempered with suspicion while Stringer opened the hatch exposing the compact air-cooled engine, explaining, “They make these machines in France, which can’t get half as high as Colorado, and, we’re way higher than even Denver right now. So your engine has to have either more air, which it can’t get at this altitude, or more fuel, which we ought to be able to manage, once I figure out just how this French carburetor works.”

  The owner of the suffocated horseless carriage kept asking dumb questions as Stringer tinkered with its innards. Stringer wouldn’t have minded answering, had the old fart known one infernal thing about the way his expensive toy worked. But like a spoiled kid playing with a wind-up tin merry-go-round, up to now he’d apparently never cared, as long as it worked.

  Stringer figured he had the carburetor set richer and told the dude to get in and man the throttle and spark whilst he gave the old engine a crank. Stringer wasn’t expecting the Panard to start on the first try, but it seemed a good old machine, once you gave it something to run on. It started on the first crank and hummed like a sewing machine as the driver spun its rear wheels in the gravel to take off down the road, calling back, “So long, Sucker!”

  Stringer shrugged and plucked the reins of his mount from the dust to remount, muttering, “Poor bastard. Having enough money to know he won’t starve after all seems to have gone to his one brain cell.”

  Then he rode on, rolling another smoke as he walked his pony down the gentle slope. He told it, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better, Brownie. But let’s hope we never get rich enough, or poor enough, to turn mean. That poor bastard’s no doubt so used to paying for everything, including a kiss from his own wife, that he figures everyone he meets is out to skin him and, being he’s such a miserable old fart, they likely are.”

  He was more interested in finding Cripple Creek than he was in old farts in motor cars, so he’d about forgotten the incident when he rode around yet another bend to find his tormentor parked ahead, with his motor mysteriously running this time. As Stringer rode closer, wearing a bemused smile, the rich old dude smiled back, in a surprisingly boyish manner, to ask, “What’s the matter with you, cowboy? Don’t you have no temper at all? Most men would have gotten sore and pegged a shot, or at least shaken a fist, back yonder.”

  Stringer chuckled fondly and replied, “Well, hell, if you really want me to turn you over my knee and give you a good spanking, you know I’m as ready as most to do another wayfaring stranger a favor.”

  The older man stared up thoughtfully to say, “That’s my point. You don’t know who I am, do you?” To which Stringer could only honestly reply, “Nope, and to tell the truth I don’t much give a shit. The longer I know you the less I want to, you poor miserable cuss.”

  The motorist drew himself up imperiously to announce, “I don’t feel all that miserable, cowboy. It so happens you have the honor of addressing T.S. Murdstone of Murdstone Minerals Incorporated!”

  Stringer shrugged and replied, “Then I’d be S.K. MacKail of the San Francisco Sun. What does T.S. stand for, Tough Shit?”

  “Thomas Stanhope,” snapped the rich dude, adding, “You must not know who I am, after all.”

  Stringer shook his head and answered, “I know who you are. I still don’t give a shit. I’m not looking for a position as a hired gun or, God forbid, a strikebreaker, so you being a big shot in the Mine Owners Association don’t cut no ice with me. As for the fifty bucks you welshed on, I never asked shit for a simple enough favor and if it makes you happy, thinking you outsmarted me, feel free to jerk off with all fifty dollars wrapped around your dong. Just don’t mess with me no more. I mean that. You’re commencing to piss me as much as a fly buzzing around under my hatbrim might.”

  He would have ridden on. But Murdstone almost pleaded, “I want to ante up, damn it. I only spun out like that back yonder to see how you’d take it.”

  Stringer said, “I told you how I’m starting to take you and your rich-kid notions, Tough Shit. I don’t want your money. I doubt I’d even want your sister if she was half as stuck-up-piggy-looking as you.”

  He rode on. Murdstone threw his Panard in low gear to tag along beside him, calling up, “Hey, look, I was out of line and I’m sorry, all right?”

  Stringer smiled down, more pleasantly, and decided, “Sure. Forget it. We all have our bad days and I’m willing to call it a draw if you are.”

  He meant it. Murdstone said so and seemed surprised, even as he said so. He hesitated, then said, “Look, I owe you and there’s something you might not know about the road further down the damn mountain. “

  Stringer allowed he was listening. Murdstone said, “You can’t get through to Cripple Creek, the way you seem to be trying. The Colorado Guard has set up a brace of Browning machine guns as well as a lot of bob wire. You weren’t the first one to mention hired guns or strikebreakers in connection with Cripple Creek, see?”

  Stringer said, “I do now. I was sent here by my paper to cover such festivities. I thank you for the tip and I reckon I’ll just have to ride around the chocolate soldiers after sundown.”

  Murdstone shook his head and said, “Less, ah, regular gunhands posted on the slopes to prevent just that will pick you off for sure if you act half that sinister.”

  Stringer swore and muttered, “Damn it, there has to be some way I can cover Cripple Creek for my paper. It says so in the Constitution.” To which T.S. Murdstone answered, with just a hint of oil in his tone, “I can get you through the military roadblock, easy. Provided you’re willing to, ah, grant me one more little favor.”

  Stringer said, “Let’s hear it. I ain’t about to bend over for the soap, but, otherwise, we can likely work something out.”


  Murdstone nodded and said, “You may have noticed I don’t know too much about these here internal combusted engines.” To which Stringer felt it best to reply with no more than a sardonic nod. So T.S. continued, “A certain business rival of mine just bought a robin’s egg blue Buick runabout and, worse yet, knows more than me about motor cars and tends to brag about it beyond human endurance.”

  “You want me to let the air out of his tires?” Stringer asked with a dubious frown, which made Murdstone laugh like a mean little kid and say, “Not hardly. I want you to fix this Panard so’s it can climb Pikes Peak, all the damn way to the top!”

  Stringer swung in his saddle to stare soberly north, although he couldn’t see halfway to the summit because of the lesser but closer bulges between. He said, “I dunno, T.S. one can see from down in Colorado Springs that the mountain’s sloped steep and sort of Alpine-like to the north but takes a more gentle slope to the south. I doubt you’d need a rope and such just walking up the south slope but a horseless carriage, up a damn mountain … ?”

  “There’s both a wagon trace and a cog railroad to the summit,” Murdstone cut in, explaining, “The Pikes Peak Railway has been traipsing tourists to the top in tilt-built cars since the summer of ’91. The wagon trace had to be laid out first, for any railroad work to get done. Lots of folk have made it to the top every whichway, save by horseless carriage, if you follow my drift.”

  Stringer did. But he asked, “Don’t you and the other mining moguls have more to worry about than bragging on mountain climbing motor cars, what with your big miner’s strike and all?”

  T.S. looked sincerely puzzled as he replied, “Why should we be worried? We own the mines and, if the truth be known, most of the miners, along with their wives and daughters if we wasn’t so particular. That loco anarchist Big Bill Hey wood is just beating his head against a brick wall with his talk of the owners having to pay the medical bills of careless mine workers. We have three-quarters of the union rank and file down in the shafts where they belong and there are plenty of ambitious lads willing to take their places as Heywood can talk ’em into walking off their job and out of their company housing while they’re at it. Meanwhile, all the mines in and about Cripple Creek are producing as much ore as they did before Heywood called his fool strike, and life must go on. If you was to rig that carburetor thing on my engine right, do you reckon I could drive this critter to the tippy-top of this here mountain?”