Weepah

One afternoon last fortnight a battered flivver joggled and clattered over a desert road leading into Tonopah, Nev. Two dusty boys of 19 sat on the seat. They talked now and then but not much. When they reached Tonopah they took some heavy, dirty bags out of their car and locked them up. That evening they walked around the town, which is one big mining camp, showing chunks of glittering rock to the oldtimers. The chunks glittered so brightly and looked so rich that the oldtimers said: "Hell, that ain't gold!" The boys went to bed dubious.

Next day they went to see one Nick Ableman, a businessman. Mr. Ableman took one of their chunks of rock to be assayed.* After a while he told them what that particular kind of rock was worth-- about $39 per pound, or $78,176 per ton. Tonopah, Nev., began to seethe with rumors.

No one knew from what part of the hills the boys had come. A crowd collected and dogged their steps wherever they went around Tonopah. They kept their mouths shut until a train from Los Angeles pulled in, bringing the desert-bitten figure of Frank Horton, whom most of the Southwest remembers as one of the big win-and-losers in the Goldfield rush of 1902. One of the boys was his son, Frank Horton Jr. Tonopah sizzled with excitement while these two and young Horton's buddy, Leonard Traynor, shut themselves up for a talk.

Then the news came out and Tonopah went crazy. Had a stranger from the East dropped into town that day he would have glanced around to find where the movie cameras were hidden. Clouds of alkali dust whirled through the streets after a shouting, cursing, hurrying flock of humanity that suddenly began streaming from nowhere out into the desert after the Hortons and young Traynor. Stumbling mules wrenched along in makeshift harness. Automobiles of every make, rusty and knocking, shiny and squeaky, dodged and swerved along the crowded track. Derby hats, caps, fedoras and sombreros rolled by. Slick city men talked loudly. Rough desert men looked grim. The Bad Lands that the Indians call Malapai woke up as they had not awakened since Jim Butler's mule kicked open the silver vein that made Tonopah in 1900. They rattled and rumbled for 40 miles, to Weepah, a treeless place on the "bench" (foothill plateau) of the Silver Peak range.

There the rushers found Frank Horton Sr. triumphant on the site he bought for $25,000 six years ago. They fanned out and staked the plains for six miles all around the "strike." Icy winds whipped down from the range but fresh goldrushers swarmed up against it by scores every hour. A blizzard swooped in, but claim pegs flew in with the snow.

By the end of the week Weepah was a pup-tent town. It had a mayor, restaurant, hotel and bank. Lacking building material, truckers dragged shacks and sheds over whole from Tonopah. Painted ladies began to drift in. Nickel organs were on the way. The gold fever spread swiftly up to Reno and the State Assembly passed a bill to legalize wide-open gambling once more, as in the rip-roaring days. Claim-jumpers, confidence men, surveyors, state officials, gold-haunted stragglers, waiters and bootleggers trekked out to Weepah. Tonopah's gasoline pumps squirted night and day. Tonopah's printing presses crashed day and night, pouring out stock certificates for companies incorporated by telegraph. The first business shingle in Weepah read: "Water, $2 a barrel; gasoline, 50 cents a gallon; ham and eggs, 80 cents; white mule, 50 cents a drink, chaser free."

Newgatherers sidetracked Frank Horton Jr. and got "the human interest." Last year twins arrived in the Horton family. Frank Jr. had promised his mother he would do something that would save them from working too hard when they grew up. His father was in straits. He and the Traynor boy, after months and months of fruit less digging elsewhere, had gone out to the Weepah site on an off-chance, a last shot. They had taken only enough bologna sausage, cheese and bread for one day. They had spent the evening talking of the "big pay" dirt that ought to be there, near Horton Sr.'s old workings, if they could only hit it. In the morning young Horton, on a "hunch," had walked straight uphill from where they slept and started digging in a badger's hole. He dug a trench four feet deep, then handed over the shovel and went back to fix up some sandwiches. Pretty soon young Tray nor "let a war whoop out of him and tore down the hill." There it was, a vein with gold leaf stick ing right out, a vein that made oldtimers say when they saw it: "I'll never jaw about high grade ore agin!"

*Gold ore is assayed (tried, tested) by melting a known weight of it with metallic lead. The lead alloys with the gold, slag separating out. The lead-gold button is then "cupeled" (heated in a porous dish) to oxidize the lead and free the gold.