IN THE .MINING DISTRICT 217 



Such are Hie tools we work with; they arc rather rough 



and primitive; and rough and primitive is the life we 

 lead. (The theory on which they work is based on the 

 fact that gold is heavier than sand or rocks.) 



Up to the beginning of last month I took board and 

 lodging at one of the boarding houses here, for which 

 I had to pay eight dollars per week. Since then I live by 

 myself and do my own cooking, and that costs me hardly 

 four dollars a week. I am certain mother and Marie will 

 ask here together: but what does he cook? Answer: the 

 same things that every one else here in the mines cooks. 

 Pancakes (here called slapjacks) made of flour, water and 

 lard; dumplings, beans, gruel, rice and dry fruits are 

 about all we can have here. Beefsteaks are too expensive, 

 and for this reason I eat them but seldom, and so arc 

 potatoes at 10 cents a pound; bread I use only occasion- 

 ally, for instance, when I have a visitor. 



I live in a tent which, however, does not belong to me 

 but to a Southern German, an elderly man, who, while out 

 hunting in November last, had the misfortune to wound 

 himself so severely in the right foot — the gun going off 

 accidentally— that even now he can use it but very little, 

 and is still unable to work. He occupies the tent with 

 me. In front of my tent and close by the road is a store 

 and boarding house, kept by a young American of Ger- 

 man descent. My other neighbors are a ship carpenter 

 from Hamburg and Carl Kamke, a sailor from Dantzig, 

 with his partner, an old Hollander. But though I live 

 here in a "German corner" you would not hear any more 

 Gennan spoken around us than anywhere else on the bar, 

 because strange as it may seem it is nevertheless true that 

 the Germans here, even when among themselves, give 

 preference to the "American" language. There are men 

 here with whom I have been in daily intercourse for 

 months before I found out that they are Germans. 



I think that nowhere in the world are the characteris- 

 tics of a man so fully developed as here in the mines. 

 Everyone lives according to his own fashion or liking 

 without paying any attention to the ways of his neigh- 



