Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories: Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas
John Locke · en
Uncle Nick and Green Campbell had mined together in the Cherry creek
diggings—and the fact that his host of the day had cleaned up big, while
he himself brought home only alibis, and a cougar pelt, had not impaired
a fine friendship. Conscious of Mr. Campbell’s mine-made money, it then
seemed to me, a youngster, that the Campbells had everything—even a
“hired” girl. That girl was Elizabeth Dittman, now Mrs. Ed. Keggin,
living in Wetmore, who would tell you that everything was fine and
lovely with them then, as it had every reason to be.
Then rumor of a new mining strike in the West changed everything. Green
Campbell now found life irksome on his then none too productive acres
down on the banks of Elk creek. And as he turned over the soil with
his plow on a bright May day in 1871, he also turned things over in his
mind. His brother John, he decided, could remain on the farm and keep up
the fight against odds if he wanted to, but as for himself the Far West
was calling. That call had struck the man of my story with all the force
of a Kansas tornado, and it moved him from his anchorage on the farm
with a suddenness that brought a protest from his relatives.
So it was that Green Campbell, with his family now shifted to
Circleville, the home of his in-laws, went out again in quest of a third
fortune. And though millions came into his coffers, one cannot be sure,
after all these years and in the light of what followed, whether he
profited or lost by that abrupt decision back here on that bright May
morning sixty and seven years ago.
They called him a tenderfoot when he reached the end of the trail which
led out into a sand-blown waste two hundred miles and more beyond rail
transportation. Here, on the east slope of the San Francisco mountains,
in southwest Utah—about thirty miles from Milford, on the San Pedro
line—this man from the plains country, ripe for more adventure, was to
have a try for a third mining fortune. It was his first hard-rock mining
venture.
Green Campbell got the gold all right—millions of it — and distinguished
himself by developing one of the greatest silver mines of the age. But
that is only part of the story.
The great fortune was won by so close a margin that it hurt. Then there
was, to some extent, the usual anti-climax — spiced with complicated
domestic relations, growing out of an improvident situation.
But the name “tenderfoot,” as applied to Green Campbell, was not quite
right. He had already taken $100,000 from the placers; certainly enough
to lift him out of that classification. Even so, granting that he was
a seasoned miner at the time he entered the Utah field, Green Campbell
did, however, slip just a trifle.