CORRESPONDENCE.
THE GROWTH OF A BOOMING MINING CAMP. [The following interesting letter has been sent us for publics. tion.—ED. Spectator.] Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S.A., January 24th.
MY DEAR — ,—The week has passed without my writing, because I have been in the mountains, at the Cripple Creek Mining Camp. It is a curious experience to be in a spot which is growing to be a town instead of a quiet mountain valley without a house, and all in the course of a few weeks. Ten days before we went up, there was nothing in the nature of a hotel. When we arrived, we had a good bedroom, good meals, and suffered no hardships at all. The hotel, in fact, was habitable when we got there, and was nearly finished when we left, five days later. Most of the houses are, of course, built of planks sawed out of trees cut down in the neighbour- hood, and no building is painted,—everything is plain deal boards. The night we got to the railway-station. from which we drove the next morning to the camp, the thermometer showed 28° below zero, and on the night previous it had been 34° below. It is wonderful, though, how little we feel such cold here. The bed I slept in was against the window, and the window, instead of a pane, in one place had about half a pair of overalls, which only partially filled the hole; but I suffered no inconvenience, in spite of the 60° of frost ! Of course I slept in my clothes. Snow was all over the ground,
and it was most curious to see in every direction, where the wild animals usually have everything their own way, the tracks of men; and on every hill one could see little knots of two and three dark figures standing round little boles in which their partners were digging for gold, and in many cases finding it too. The exquisite whiteness of the snow against which the slender aspen-stems and the little groups of dark pines were seen ; the perfectly clear, cold, metallic blue-green of the sky; the sixty miles of the snowy range, peak after peak, like the teeth of a saw; and the pure white, shelf-like, narrow table-land that ran along their base, breaking away towards us into the hilly, canon-slashed country in which we were,—made up one of the most beautiful sights that I have ever seen here. Each prospector has a fire by him, generally consisting of half-a-dozen or so small trees laid nearly parallel, but just crossing each other, with their ends to- wards the wind, which drives the flames along and makes the fire a flaming streak. At night these look very pretty. In such a place you can easily imagine that " only man is vile;" but he makes the average up all right, for he is very vile indeed,—lawless, tobacco-spitting, blaspheming, gambling. Nothing is talked of but "ore." The floors of every building are covered at nights with a mass of snoring humanity, sleeping in its clothes, which are changed, no one knows how often! No washing but of hands and face, and all in one tin basin in each house.
Such is the Cripple Creek Mining Camp. No lives have
been taken there yet, but this summer will probably be an awful time there. I do not like the kind of thing, and am glad to be back here again; but I am glad to have seen a booming mining camp. Against the cold I wore shooting- boots with arctics outside, two pairs of stockings, three pairs of drawers, and three jerseys, an ordinary suit of clothes, a towel tied round my middle, a leather (additional) waistcoat, a huge ulster, a comforter, fur gloves, and a fur cap pulled down over my ears. In this way the cold was kept out
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