Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/420

 The town was situated at the junction of the Whitewood and Deadwood creeks or gulches, each of which was covered by a double line of block-houses to repel a sudden attack from the ever-to-be-dreaded enemy, the Sioux and Cheyennes, of whose cruelty and desperate hostility the mouths of the inhabitants and the columns of the two newspapers were filled. I remember one of these journals, The Pioneer, edited at that time by a young man named Merrick, whose life had been pleasantly divided into three equal parts—setting type, hunting for Indians, and "rasslin'" for grub—during the days when the whole community was reduced to deer-meat and anything else they could pick up. Merrick was a very bright, energetic man, and had he lived would have been a prominent citizen in the new settlements. It speaks volumes for the intelligence of the element rolling into the new El Dorado to say that the subscription lists of The Pioneer even then contained four hundred names.

The main street of Deadwood, twenty yards wide, was packed by a force of men, drawn from all quarters, aggregating thousands; and the windows of both upper and lower stories of the eating-houses, saloons, hotels, and wash-houses were occupied by women of good, bad, and indifferent reputation. There were vociferous cheers, clappings of hands, wavings of handkerchiefs, shrieks from the whistles of the planing mills, reports from powder blown off in anvils, and every other manifestation of welcome known to the populations of mining towns. The almond-eyed Celestial laundrymen had absorbed the contagion of the hour, and from the doors of the "Centennial Wash-House" gazed with a complacency unusual to them upon the doings of the Western barbarians. We were assigned quarters in the best hotel of the town: "The Grand Central Hotel, Main Street, opposite Theatre, C. H. Wagner, Prop. (formerly of the Walker House and Saddle Rock Restaurant, Salt Lake), the only first-class hotel in Deadwood City, D. T."

This was a structure of wood, of two stories, the lower used for the purposes of offices, dining-room, saloon, and kitchen; the upper was devoted to a parlor, and the rest was partitioned into bedrooms, of which I wish to note the singular feature that the partitions did not reach more than eight feet above the floor, and thus every word said in one room was common property to all along that corridor. The "Grand Central" was, as might be