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Apparently, all the negro cooks, teamsters, officers' servants, and roustabouts from the adjoining camps had been gathered there, with Groundhog, Pilgarlic, and similar specimens of the white teamsters among them and leading them. Seated on a log were three negroes, one sawing on an old fiddle, one picking a banjo, and one playing the bones.
If along with the farmers we take those engaged in the occupations employing the next greatest numbers of men those of the building and hand trades, saw and planing mills, as well as those of railway firemen and porters, draymen, teamsters, and coal mine operatives we shall find a total of 71.2 per cent engaged in such work as represents the very foundation of American industry.
Men were in great demand, and the company was paying teamsters forty dollars per month in gold. An old and reliable wagon-master, named Lewis Simpson who had taken a great fancy to me, and who, by the way, was one of the best wagon-masters that ever ran a bull train was loading a train for the company, and was about to start out with it for Salt Lake. He asked me to go along as an "extra hand."
The yard was full of the teams which had left Winnipeg the day before, and the kitchen, or general living room, was crowded with teamsters, who, however, when we appeared, withdrew to a dark little cook-house a few yards from the door. The room vacated for us was low-roofed, with unplastered ceiling, whose rafters were hung with bunches of garden herbs.
It was gathered partly from details picked up at recess or on the playground, from the voluntary testimony of teamsters and packers, from a record in the county newspaper, but always shaping itself into a consecutive and harmonious narrative.
Gold was to mean its transformation from a struggling town into a turbulent, riotous city, a mecca of the world's adventurers. Benito Windham, early in the spring of '48 brought home an echo of it from San Jose. One of Sutter's teamsters had exchanged a little pouch of golden grains for a flask of aguardiente.
It was close on dusk when I fumbled through drifting, hissing snow and choking wind, to the door of the La Chance stable. And the second I got inside I knew Macartney's man had told the truth, and Macartney had fired my teamsters with Billy Jones. There was not a soul about the place, and ten hungry horses yelled at me at once as I stamped my half-frozen feet on the floor.
An expression of sheer terror might have been observed on the old negro's crinkled face, but his voice was drowned, and we swept out of the alley. Scarcely had we travelled a block before we began to be joined by all the boys along the line of march; marbles, tops, and even incipient baseball games were abandoned that Saturday morning; people ran out of their houses, teamsters halted their carts.
Indeed, at every stage of the road we had seen evidences of hard travel, exhausted cattle, anxious teamsters, hunger and thirst, despair, starvation, and death. However, Stoneman's Lake remains a joy in the memory, and far and away the most beautiful spot I ever saw in Arizona. But unless the approaches to it are made easier, tourists will never gaze upon it.
We kept open house so far as the fire was concerned; but our roof was a narrow one at the best, and one or two leaky spots made it still narrower. "We shall probably sleep out-of-doors to-night," said my companion, "unless we are a match for this posse of rough teamsters."
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