Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/422

 miner energetically insisted that she was "old enough to have another set o' teeth." We left the temple of the Muses to walk along the main street and look in upon the stores, which were filled with all articles desirable in a mining district, and many others not usual in so young a community. Clothing, heavy and light, hardware, tinware, mess-pans, camp-kettles, blankets, saddlery, harness, rifles, cartridges, wagon-grease and blasting powder, india-rubber boots and garden seeds, dried and canned fruits, sardines, and yeast powders, loaded down the shelves; the medium of exchange was gold dust; each counter displayed a pair of delicate scales, and every miner carried a buckskin pouch containing the golden grains required for daily use.

Greenbacks were not in circulation, and already commanded a premium of five per cent, on account of their portability. Gambling hells flourished, and all kinds of games were to be found—three card monte, keno, faro, roulette, and poker. Close by these were the "hurdy-gurdies," where the music from asthmatic pianos timed the dancing of painted, padded, and leering Aspasias, too hideous to hope for a livelihood in any village less remote from civilization. We saw and met representatives of all classes of society—gamblers, chevaliers d'industrie, callow fledglings, ignorant of the world and its ways, experienced miners who had labored in other fields, men broken down in other pursuits, noble women who had braved all perils to be by their husbands' sides, smart little children, and children who were adepts in profanity and all other vices—just such a commingling as might be looked for, but we saw very little if any drinking, and the general tone of the place was one of good order and law, to which vice and immorality must bow.

We started out from Deadwood, and rode through the beautiful hills from north to south, passing along over well-constructed corduroy roads to Custer City, sixty miles to the south; about half way we met a wagon-train of supplies, under charge of Captain Prank Guest Smith, of the Fourth Artillery, and remained a few moments to take luncheon with himself and his subordinates—Captain Cushing and Lieutenants Jones, Howe, Taylor, and Anderson, and Surgeon Price. Custer City was a melancholy example of a town with the "boom" knocked out of it; there must have been as many as four hundred comfortable houses arranged in broad, rectilinear streets, but not quite three