Sagebrushes Are Growing Up Around The Forges Of The
Blacksmith Shops, And Lizards Bask On The Crumbling Walls.
While traveling southward from Austin down Big Smoky Valley, I noticed
a remarkably tall and imposing column, rising like a lone pine out of
the sagebrush on the edge of a dry gulch.
This proved to be a
smokestack of solid masonry. It seemed strangely out of place in the
desert, as if it had been transported entire from the heart of some
noisy manufacturing town and left here by mistake. I learned
afterwards that it belonged to a set of furnaces that were build by a
New York company to smelt ore that never was found. The tools of the
workmen are still lying in place beside the furnaces, as if dropped in
some sudden Indian or earthquake panic and never afterwards handled.
These imposing ruins, together with the desolate town, lying a quarter
of a mile to the northward, present a most vivid picture of wasted
effort. Coyotes now wander unmolested through the brushy streets, and
of all the busy throng that so lavishly spent their time and money
here only one man remains - a lone bachelor with one suspender.
Mining discoveries and progress, retrogression and decay, seem to have
been crowded more closely against each other here than on any other
portion of the globe. Some one of the band of adventurous prospectors
who came from the exhausted placers of California would discover some
rich ore - how much or little mattered not at first.
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