340 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



out that he was right, and that intuitively he had divined the 

 truth, or that in his multitudinous experience he had met 

 the same conditions before. His readiness was undoubtedly 

 the stored-up result of persistent and almost unconscious study 

 of the actualities and problems of life. He might well have said 

 in the words of Daniel Webster, "There is no such thing as 

 extemporaneous acquisition." 



To go back to his Western experiences, there were few phases 

 of mining life, camp or town, with which he was not acquainted, 

 and his descriptions of them remain fixed in the mind. Of one 

 of these dwelling-places, he writes : " It is curious to notice the 

 perfect f orlornness of the mountain settlement : it is distinctly 

 a higher order of miserableness than any other region can 

 afford. A wide range of experience in the backwoods of lower 

 levels does not prepare one for the utter grovelling look that 

 hangs over these shanty towns." And again : " The dilapidation 

 that comes to these hut-towns is very rapid. Soon nothing 

 remains but a modern kitchen-midden of broken bottles and 

 crushed tin cans." Of the ranchers' houses, he says : " They are 

 mostly half underground, and are a sort of gopher-holes, gener- 

 ally with sod roofs and with a heap of empty tin cans excreted 

 at the only opening of the den." 



Where the railways stopped and coaches took up the burdens 

 they discharged to carry them still higher in the mountains, the 

 caravans they formed, in Mr. Shaler's eyes, gave the most pic- 

 turesque aspects of mountain life. "The teamsters," he writes, 

 "are silent, indefatigable fellows, brutal in every outward ap- 

 pearance, yet, withal, patient with their difficulties and helpful 

 of each other, unless the other is a 'Greaser.' In two hundred 

 miles' travel, I did not hear a brutal word from one man to an- 

 other, and I was indebted to them for many considerate acts. 

 In his difficulties with his teams a man will lift up his voice and 

 address the Infinite in a diabolical homily that would befit 

 Milton's Satan, and then, subsiding like a geyser, remain silent 

 for the rest of the day. At night when they gather around the 



