N. C. Creede was a prospector who had made some money in the Monarch district before he came to Willow Gap; he began prospecting there on Campbell, now Moses Mount, with G. L. Smith, of Salida. One of the two picked up a piece of rock so full of quartz that they sunk a shaft immediately below the spot where they had found the stone. According to all known laws, they should have sunk the shaft at the spot from which the piece of rock had become detached, or from whence it had presumably rolled. It was as absurd to dig for silver where they did dig as it would be to sink a shaft in Larimer Street, in Denver, because one had found a silver quarter lying in the roadway. But they dug the shaft; and when they looked upon the result of the first day’s work, Smith cried, “Great God!” and Creede said, “Holy Moses!” and the Holy Moses Mine was named. While I was in Creede that gentleman was offered one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for his share of this mine, and declined it. After that my interest in him fell away. Any man who will live in a log house at the foot of a mountain, and drink melted snow any longer than he has to do so, or refuse that much money for _anything_, when he could live in the Knickerbocker Flats, and drive forth in a private hansom with rubber tires, is no longer an object of public interest. But his past history is the history of the town. Creede and his partner knew they had a mine, but had no money to work it. So they applied to David S. Moffatt, the president of the Rio Grande Railroad, which has a track to Wagon Wheel Gap only ten miles away, and Moffatt and others formed the Holy Moses Mining Company, and secured a bond on the property at seventy thousand dollars. As soon as this was known, the invasion of Willow Gap began. It was the story of Columbus and the egg. Prospectors, and provisions with which to feed them, came in on foot and on stages, and Creede began to grow. But no more mines were found at once, and the railroad into the town was slow in coming, and many departed, leaving their posts and piles of rock to mark their claims. But last June Creede received a second boom, and in a manner which heaps ridicule and scorn upon the scientific knowledge of engineers and mining experts, and which shows that luck, chance, and the absurd vagaries of fate are factors of success upon which a prospector should depend. [Illustration: THE “HOLY MOSES” MINE]