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Their context was usually the same, that his proposition did not look good, and no investment would be made in a plan as vague as his. The correspondents understood that he had been grubstaked before without result. They remained, however, his respectfully, and Bill's great hand crumpled each in turn.
We followed the "float" up and they followed us. What the trapper was to the fur trade, the prospector was to the mining era that ushered civilization into the wilds with a blare of dance-halls and wine and wassail and greed. Ragged, poor, roofless, grubstaked by 'pardner' or outfitter on a basis of half profit, the prospector stands as the eternal type of the trail-maker for finance.
And whether I yielded to drink, as at Benicia, or whether I refrained, as at the laundry, in my brain the seeds of desire for alcohol were germinating. After the laundry my sister and her husband grubstaked me into the Klondike. It was the first gold rush into that region, the early fall rush of 1897. I was twenty-one years old, and in splendid physical condition.
It was the other man the western towns are full of General Lighters who did the talking. An attorney from Seattle, he had come up in the July rush with very little but boundless assurance, fell in with an old miner who had been grubstaked by Captain Rainey out of the Oklahoma's supplies, and got to Minóok before the river went to sleep.
"And anyhow, just because a man can't spell, that's no reason for calling him a fool!" "Well, he is a fool!" burst out Dusty Rhodes spitefully, "and more than that, he's a crook! Now that is what he done he covered up that find and went back to the man that had grubstaked him. But this banker was no sucker, if he did have the name of staking every bum in Nevada.
Queer stories are told of how during that winter almost bankrupt grocers grubstaked prospectors with bacon and flour and received a half-interest in a mine that yielded five or six hundred dollars a day in nuggets. But for one who found a mine a thousand found nothing. The sensations of the lucky one beggared description.
Then he crept forth and wormed his way through the gullies to the San Pedro Valley. Dawn found him miles from the spot. He came back to Tucson with his specimens. Marcus Katz and A. M. Franklin, who were working for the wholesale firm of L. M. Jacobs & Co., heard his story, saw the ore, and grubstaked him for another trip.
A chin-whiskered man in Walla-Walla, carrying a line of hope as excess baggage, had grubstaked us; and there we was in the foothills pecking away, with enough grub on hand to last an army through a peace conference. Along one day comes a mail-rider over the mountains from Carlos, and stops to eat three cans of greengages, and leave us a newspaper of modern date.
I want you to tell me who it was grubstaked you that winter you needed grubstaking mighty bad. I want you to tell me who it was got you out of that scrape over in Lincoln County two years ago. I want you to tell me who it was took care of you last winter under mighty trying circumstances, too and put you in the way of easy money this spring!
And, to cap it all, when "Lucky" Richard Forrest had lost everything in a series of calamities, so that San Francisco debated what price his Nob Hill palace would fetch at auction, he grubstaked one, Del Nelson, to a prospecting in Mexico.
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