IN THE WEST He spoke, and the waters that beat on the shore Was fairer than dreams of man's heaven may be; His hand was not stayed. A chasm was rent, It seethed, and it surged, and rebelled at its doom, Till the gray desert met it, and drank it, and said: "Lo! death is the fate of the waters I wed;" But still on the mountains Hope lifted her crest, Man came, and he viewed, and his spirit grew tall, In the land of the west, in the country of cheer." In the west, in the west, where, virgin and wild, 5 In the search for gold the scenes are shifted with lightning-like rapidity and the center of the stage changes with the wind. Just now Tonopah is the star toward which the greedy eyes of the gold-hungry are set. It is the center of the stage, and all over the world the nameless thing that attracts men to the feast, even if crumbs be their share, is working and the coming months will see the tide of fortune-seekers flowing toward the teeming camp of Tonopah. There is one good feature in this latest change in the gold-searcher's map, and that is the fact that the new diggings are fairly accessible. It is a great change from the frozen confines of Alaska and the torrid heat of the desert, and the all-kind Providence that provides for the prospector has evidently designed this relief with some good object in view. HE story of the discovery of Tono THE like an Arabian Night's pah reads like an Arabian Night's tale. In May, 1900, James L. Butler, at that time District Attorney of Nye county, left Belmont, the county seat, to prospect in the mountains to the southward. Before his departure he confided his intention to his friend, T. L. Oddie, a young attorney-at-law and mining man of Belmont, stating that "there is a place down in the desert where there is a great deposit of minerals." He had seen these mountains at a distance, he said, and they looked good to him. With his outfit packed on the backs of six burros, he started from Belmont, passed over the Manhattan mountains by way of Rye Patch, traveled all day and camped at nightfall at a spring known to the Indians as "Tonopah," meaning water near the surface. While encamped at this spring Butler made the discovery which in a little more than a year converted him into a millionaire, enriched his associates and turned the attention of the entire mining world once more to Nevada. He found numerous croppings of black, fine-grained quartz showing a large quantity of gold-so much, in fact, that he considered it of little or no value. He took several samples, however, passed over a great number of ledges, went on about four miles, and camped on May 19th near what are now known as the Gold Mountain mines. He was attracted by those ledges also, but as they were small compared with the ones he had discovered earlier in the day, he did not think much of them, although he took samples which were afterward assayed. He spent some time waiting for an assay to be made at South Klondike, and on May 26th returned to Tonopah, made a dry camp, and next day took about seventy-five pounds of ore from the several ledges and proceeded to Belmont. On his arrival at Belmont Butler showed the rock to several persons, but they took no interest in it. He then showed it to Oddie, who liked the looks of it and offered to have it assayed. Butler told Oddie that if he would have the rock assayed he could have an interest in the claims. Oddie sent the rock to W. C. Gayhart at Austin, requesting him to assay it and promising him part of his interest if he found values. Gayhart and Oddie had been partners in some mining deals, and as Gayhart was a mining engineer, Oddie felt that he would be of service if the prospect turned out to be a mine. Gayhart made eight assays, which ran from eighty to six hundred dollars to the ton. When the certificates were received by Oddie he forwarded copies to Butler, who was harvesting his hay crop at his ranch in Monitor valley. Butler did not receive Oddie's communication for more than a month, but when he did receive it he and his wife went to Belmont with a team. They wanted Oddie to go with them to locate the claims, but he had some important business which called him to Austin and could not accept their invitation. Butler and his wife proceeded to Tonopah, arriving there August 25th. The first location made by Butler was the Desert Queen, and the second was the Burro, which he located for Oddie. He then asked his wife to name one, which she did, calling it the Mizpah. This claim, which did not look any better than the others, has proved to be one of the richest mines ever discovered. Butler then located the Valley View, the Silver Top, the ΤΟΝΟΡΑ Η AND ITS GOLD Buckboard, the Sand Grass and the Red Plume. After an absence of a week or two Butler and his wife returned to Belmont and reported the result of their trip to Oddie, who later succeeded Butler as District Attorney of Nye county. Early in October Butler and Oddie, accompanied by Wilse Brougher, County Recorder, left Belmont for Tonopah with two wagons loaded with a complete outfit for development work. The party began work on the upper end of the Mizpah claim, on one of the smaller ledges, which showed some sulphurets. The other ledges were so large that it was thought they must necessarily be low-grade. A shaft was sunk to the depth of fifteen feet, Brougher and Oddie doing this work while Butler put up monuments and otherwise perfected the locations. They all worked hard, but the heaviest part of the labor fell on Oddie, who was the youngest and most enthusiastic of the party. This energetic young man did. the cooking, hauled water from the wells 9 four miles distant, sharpened tools and helped to sink the shaft. At night the horses were hobbled and turned out to pick up a precarious subsistence from the scanty bunch grass. Every morning before beginning the labors of the day it was Oddie's duty to look after the horses, and some mornings he had to walk many miles over the hills to bring the animals back to camp. In sinking the shaft the first ten feet about a ton of ore was taken out. Brougher and Oddie sorted and sacked this ore and hauled it to Belmont, a distance of fifty miles, over a very rough road. From Belmont it was hauled a hundred miles farther to the railroad at Austin, whence it was shipped to the smelter. The party then returned to Tonopah, taking with them a young man to assist them. Another ton of ore was taken out and shipped to the smelter in the same manner as the first. The returns from the two loads of ore netted the owners about $600, which enabled them to employ a number of men and |