Talk:Daddy's Little Girl

Wallace Irwin on himself

HEN Wallace Irwin (“Daddy's Girl,” page 29) was asked for some material about himself, he replied that we might fix up something about him as a mining-camp character.

When I was in Cripple Creek [he continued], the town was burned down, supposedly by incendiaries—and I rode forty-eight hours on a stretch as a deputy sheriff with instructions to shoot first and ask questions afterward. Acting on that sage advice, I almost killed a colonel of the Colorado National Guard. During all my life in the wild parts. I've only seen two deeds of violence. One was an old-fashioned barroom murder, and the other an attempt on the part of a Belgian pick-and-shovel man to kill a friend by rolling a boulder on his head. I worked in an assay office connected with a gold-reduction company, and once caused a day's boom in a sterile mining district by salting a mine. I failed to clean off the board where the sample was ground before being assayed, and, as a result, a lot of loose gold dust got mixed up with some rock which had lain for a million years, quite innocent of contact with the precious metal. For a few hours Cripple Creek thought it had discovered a bonanza—then the excitement subsided and I was turned out into the cold world.