Some Reminiscences of Early Trinity [pp. 17-32]

Some Reminiscences of Early Trinity.
Dr. Horton at the time of his death owned
the American Hotel; that the woman, though
not his wife, was so called, and conducted
herself with propriety as such. The hotel
and fixtures had been attached by San Francisco creditors, and closed by the sheriff;
but Horton, seeing the prospect of a rich
harvest that day, when many more miners
than usual would be in town, announced
that the American would give a grand dinner.
The sheriff, however, summoned a posse to
prevent the threatened re-occupation of the
property, and in the melee that followed,
Horton was shot by the sheriff, and the
woman by one of the posse. Years after I
saw the same boards and paling in the new
location, but now time has leveled the wood
work and obliterated the inscription, so that
the location of Horton's grave can only be
guessed at.
Numerous as the graves appear to be,
the one-half of them are not now marked;
the dust has returned to its native dust until not even the semblance of a mound is
shown; the lettering of the old headboards
has been washed away by the storms of
three decades of years; and if "Old Mortality" has ever taken his rounds through the
kirk yards of the Golden State, he has
passed ours by.
The dead of the first years of mining
countries were generally men who were
without near kindred, their most intimate
companions being either the partners of
their mining operations, or at best the
friends that might be in the vicinity who
were friends in the old home beyond the
Rockies-a tie much stronger than now,
when it has been supplanted by the closer
ties of marriage, the immigration hither of
their own kindred, or the kind of partnership relations, extending over periods of
many years, which have taken the place of
the here-to-day, there-to-morrow partnerships of the earlier day, in which men came
together for a few days or weeks as the case
might be, perhaps worked out the little
claim allowed them by the mining law of
the district, and separated never to see each
other again, and often without knowing even
the name of their quondam associates, except as they were called Tom, Dick, Doc,
Cap, Major, or some other of the countless
appellations by which men were distinguished from their fellows at the time. No costly casket inclosed the lifeless clay that was
reverently lowered to its narrow bed, but
oftentimes the boards of the sluice box, by
the side of which he had worked in his life
time; and often the highest ground of the
bar or flat where his lot had been cast became the narrow house and last home of
the pioneer miner. The case became different when wagon roads began to take the
place of the rude mountain trails that perforce sufficed at first; for then the rude
home-made coffin was prepared, and the
body was conveyed to some part of the
"God's Acre "atthe nearest town. Yet even
then, no shaft of enduring granite or polished marble was reared to mark the resting
place; for such, except of the lightest kind,
could not be brought in. In their place, a
pine slab or board with the name, age, and
birth place of the dead was erected; and of
these, few are left that now give any clue to
the identity of those whose sleep they were
designed to hallow. The elements have for
thirty years waged a pitiless war against
these memorial tablets, and man has done
little or nothing to arrest the progress of
decay.
It has been my purpose in the preceding
pages to record to some extent the incidents,
selected at random, of the times and tho
men of the times-the memories of which are
fading away as one by one the actors therein depart-of a locality which from its isolation retained for many years longer than
its sister counties the more distinctive features of the early days of mining life. Volumes might be written, but the above will
suffice to portray the oddities and peculiarities, the ups and the downs, the rude early
1887.]
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