Читать книгу Vigilante Days and Ways. The pioneers of the Rockies; the makers and making of Montana and Idaho онлайн

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“’T is distance lends enchantment to the view,”

for upon entering it the fragility of the material soon disabused the vision and the admiration of the beholder. At night, when lights were burning in these frail tenements, a stranger would think the town illuminated. The number of drinking and gambling saloons was greatly in excess of stores and private dwellings, and to nearly all of these was attached that most important attraction of a mining town, the hurdy-gurdy. The sound of the violin which struck the ear on entering the street, was never lost while passing through it, and at many of the saloons the evidence of the bacchanal orgies which were in progress inside was often apparent in the eagerness exhibited by the crowd which surrounded the building without. The voices of auctioneers on the street corners, the shouts of frequent horsemen as they rode up and down the streets, the rattle of vehicles arriving and departing for the miners’ camps, troops of miners, Indians, gamblers, the unmeaning babble of numerous drunken men, the tawdrily apparelled dancing women of the hurdy-gurdys, altogether presented a scene of life in an entirely new aspect to the person who for the first time entered a mining town. It is a feature of modern civilization which cannot elsewhere be found, search the whole world over. The thirst for gold is shared by all classes. Those who are unwilling to labor, in their efforts to obtain it by less honorable means, flock to the mines to ply their guilty vocations. Hence there is no vice unrepresented in a mining camp, and no type or shade of character in civilized society that is not there publicly developed. The misfortune is, as a general thing, that the worst elements, being most popular, generally preponderate.