03/09/2023
This is a story of a young couple struggling at gold mining in Horse Gulch up near Highland City. Desperate, hungry and with the influence of alcohol, the young husband was going to rob the sluice boxes of neighboring miners until his wife stepped in.
The Anaconda standard December 17, 1899
STOOD GUARD AT NIGHT
How a Plucky Girl of Years Ago Prevented Robbery.
SHE SAVED HER HUSBAND
An Incident of Horse Gulch, Twenty
Miles from Butte. Which Happened in the Early Days.
John Sterling and his partner had worked industriously all the summer and their placer claim had yielded them just enough gold dust to prove that it was a no-good proposition. The bars, rims and the channel had been tried and found wanting. John's partner was his bride of the year. They were married" in Missouri and the long honeymoon was across the plains via the mule-train route. They left home and friends amid a shower of congratulations. John was an industrious farmer and had accumulated a few hundred dollars by thrift, economy, and energy. His wife was of the truly noble type of woman. She readily consented to the plan of coming to Montana with her young husband, where they should try their luck at mining. She looked forward to the journey and the little home in the mountains, and it all seemed grand. She would return with her husband some day and surprise her parents and friends by displaying great sacks of gold dust. John, encouraged by his wife's ready consent, was hopeful of success.
They pitched their tent in the mining gulch in which a dozen or more crews of men worked in the placers. John's claim adjoined one which had yielded much gold. But he was not so lucky as his neighbors were. His young wife assisted him in many ways about the mine. Sometimes she would go down the shaft and fill the bucket, which John hoisted and dumped into the sluice box. She helped him saw the lagging timbers and she did the house work. Being ambitious, she hastened her household duties to completion so that she might go down to the shaft and help her husband. Once or twice a week they would "clean up," and the results were discouraging only a little gold was taken from the boxes. Other shafts were sunk with success unvarying: the gold wasn't there and John was sore at heart. His wife encouraged him to persist, but the young husband advised a move to another camp. Continued reverses preyed upon the husband's mind.
His Missouri dreams had failed to materialize. I After all, he meditated, why did he leave the farm? His neighbors were continually singing the praises of their good fortune, and this grated on his senses. His was an unbroken succession of ill reports-he could do nothing. His savings from the wages on the farm was disappearing through the door of the grocery store. It was late
in the fall and the outlook was dismal. One night John failed to come home to his supper. That was the first straw to the heap which finally burdened the cares of a loving, constant wife. Supper had been ready for an hour. The wife had been down to the shaft and there found no husband. He had evidently quit work some hours before. She had called on some of the neighbors and they had not seen her husband that day. She imagined all sorts of dire things but did not guess correctly. Her long acquaintance of John had never once told her that he was faithless. She feared most of all that he had been kidnaped by someone who lived in the gulch.
Darkness came on time, but John was tardy. The little wife placed a candle in the window and then she sat down by the table and imagined many more strange and terrible things. Distant sounds of men's voices roused her and she ran to the door and peered out into the darkness. John's voice was detected by her keen ears. There was another and strange voice. But why was John so talkative? He seemed to be delighted, for he laughed heartily.
Could he have found a large nugget and taken it down to the camp and sold it? Surely, he brought good news to his patiently waiting wife. Her heart throbbing as only a glad heart can, she turned about, closed the door, and stirred the coals in the stove. She sat about warming up his over-due dinner. It was now time for her husband to be at the door, so she opened it and stepped out. No voice was heard. Could it all have been imagination? She was sure it was her John's voice. Still no sound was heard. With faint heart she turned to go into the house again, when she once more heard the voice of her husband.
"Pete. I wouldn't do it at all, but I'm broke and must have the money." were the words which startled the young wife. John and the stranger were holding a consultation a short distance around the corner of the cabin. It was John who spoke, and his wife, perhaps suspecting, probably only curious, tiptoed to the corner of the cabin and peeped around in the direction whence the sound of voices came. "I tell you, John," said the stranger, "I saw them fellers clean; up $2,000 in one day last week, and they don't clean up every day-they didn't today, and I heard one of them tell the bartender that they wouldn't clean up till 'Wednesday night. We must do it tomorrow night. There's a few thousand apiece in it for us."
"How about suspicions?" John suggested. "Let 'em suspect. They will never know. What do you say?" "I'll be there at 8 o'clock to meet you. I say. I wouldn't do it, but I must have money." The men separated, and the little wife, full of miserable forebodings of evil, ran into the house and threw herself upon the bed and wept the bitterest tears of sorrow, sorrows over the condition of the family exchequer, sorrow for the sudden change in her husband's manner. "'Smatter, dear, crying cause I'm late to supper? Don't mind. I went down to the camp and filled up on whiskey. 'We don't care, do we? We'll make the old mine pay all right." The young wife arose and went over to her husband and placed her arms around his neck.
"John." She spoke with an air of determination and resolution quite foreign to John's previous observation of her. "I will consent. We will leave this claim in the morning. You and I will go to some other camp. You are discouraged. I know it, else you would never have drunk that whiskey. I am willing to go anywhere with you, to the end of the earth, but John, we must start bright and early in the
morning."
"My dear, I know I am discouraged. I drank the whiskey because I was blue. I won’t' drink any more. But we can't leave this place tomorrow, for I am about to sell the claim for $2,500 to a man who called at the shaft this afternoon to see me about buying it. He represents a syndicate that is buying up all this gulch. We'll go, the day after tomorrow," and he shook her off with an impatient gesture and retired.
The heartbroken wife sat in her chair and rested her elbows on the table, her hands over her face. It was an agonizing hour for her; it was a new experience. She had conceived the purpose of her husband. The conversation in the dark with the stranger, her husband's determination not to go away until the day following, it was all too apparent. Her husband had assumed another nature-he would commit robbery. But upon whom was her husband resigning? Where was the rich sluice box he would rob? How
could she prevent it. To follow her husband would be to put him on his guard and possibly defer the robbery to an uncertain date. She must warn the owners of that rich sluice box, but how?
In the hours of restful slumber nature rebelled. Rankling in the true heart was a foreign element which stirred all the manly, noble spirit which had for a lifetime abided within, and nature arose in indignation to crush the wicked intruder. "No, no, I shall not do it. I need money, but Mac and Harry must not be the victims of our plot, Pete; I won't do it." This came from the lips of the man who lay asleep in the bed near where the young wife sat. She stepped to the side of the bed and placed a warm, fervent kiss on the lips which had just uttered the words which proved the superior nature of the man she loved. This declaration also put her in possession of the facts site wanted, for she knew Harry and Mac. Then it occurred to her that after all maybe he would regret his action and, in the morning, hasten to tell his companion of the night before that he had changed his mind. It was then far from her purpose to tell her husband that she was aware of his expressed scheme. She would leave the gulch with her husband and never recall the incident. But she erred in her calculations. In the morning at breakfast, her husband repeated the story about the agent of the syndicate who wanted to buy the claim. All that day John moved about in apparent misery. He was restless, nervous, and impatient. He was cross and answered his wife in tart monosyllables. But she knew
all, and within herself she forgave him. She would prevent the robbery.
At dusk John left. saying that he must go to the camp to meet the agent, and would be back at 10. As soon as he was out of sight the little wife took off her skirts, put on a pair of her husband's overalls and an old canvas coat, shouldered the shotgun and hastened to the claim worked by Harry and Mac. When John and the stranger approached the shaft they noticed a figure walking up and down the length of the sluice boxes. They admitted that they were outdone. They dared not attempt the job in the face of such disadvantages. Their only course lay back of them-the return trail.
"Say, that is only a kid, I'll bet, and we can scare him away," said Pete. who was bent on robbery now that so much progress had been made towards the culmination of their plans. "'Hi' there, partner!" he called to the little sentry, "how far is it to Silver Bow?"
This by way of a sounder. No response, and Pete called out a repetition: still no answer. Neither man carried a gun, and both thought the watchman was armed: In fact, they saw the outline of something on the shoulder of the silent sentry. Pete ventured a few steps nearer the mine and John followed. They were now close enough to distinguish the figure, and they agreed that it was only a
boy.
The sentry walked toward the men and came up within 75 feet of them and turned about and started to retrace steps, when. quick as a flash. Pete picked up a rock and threw it at the figure. There was a stifled cry of pain and the guard fell in a heap. In an instant Pete was at the side of the unconscious form, and the first thing he did was to take the shotgun and hand it to John. Then he bent over the form and turned the face upward.
"It's a boy, and he's not hurt much," said Pete. "Let's gag him so that he can't make a fuss when he comes to. Give us your handkerchief, John."
John held the gun in one hand and with the other drew from his pocket a red bandana. "Do you know who the kid is?" asked John, who stepped closer to the figure. He looked straight into the face. It was not such a very dark night. Even darkness is kind to some people, and this was the brightest night John ever saw in all his 32 years: he looked closely: his eyes pierced the shadow of the distance between them and the face of the fragile and limp form. He stepped back a few feet, raised the gun and fired both barrels into the heart of the man who in his moments of desperation tempted him to commit a crime, a crime which his own wife had nearly lost her life In the effort to prevent.
John and his dutiful wife left the gulch, but not until Harry and Mac had heard the truth regarding the dead man found near the rich sluice boxes.
Every cent of the clean-up was presented to John's wife. They returned to their Missouri home and the only reminder of their stay in Montana Is a log cabin. whose roof is caved in, a rustic monument of pioneer days in Horse Gulch. a tributary of Highland Gulch. 20 miles south of Butte.
The two pictures shown below are one of the only cabins I know of up in Horse Gulch and when I first read this story, this is the cabin I was thinking of that the young couple lived in. A very simple 16x16 log cabin as they were starting out in life.
