ts.

As soon as they finished eating, they hooked up their ox teams and drove
down to the creek and stopped at the bank and commenced to throw their
provisions into the water. As soon as Uncle Kit saw the men doing this,
he said, "What do they mean? Are they crazy? I will go and see what is
the matter."

As soon as he got in speaking distance, he asked them what they were
throwing their provisions to the creek for.

One of the men stopped and answered, "We are going back to Missouri, and
our oxen's feet are so tender that they can hardly walk, let alone pull
this load."

Uncle Kit said, "Why don't you throw the stuff on the ground? If you
don't want it yourselves, do not waste it by throwing it in the creek.
Someone else may want it."

One of them said, "I had not thought of that," and they threw the flour
and bacon and coffee and other small packages of food on the ground.

There must have been as much as twelve hundred pounds of provisions
laying on the ground when they got through, and I saw the contents of
two other wagons share the same fate that same day. How long that stuff
lay there I do not know. We left there the next morning, and I noticed
that it had not been touched.

I never saw so many discouraged-looking people at one time as I saw in
those wagons that were camped around Clear creek. I visited a number
of camps where six or eight men would be sitting around a little fire
talking about their disappointment in not finding gold to take home to
their families, and some of them were crying like children as they said
the expense of fitting out their teams and themselves had ruined them
financially.

This spot on Clear creek seemed to be the turntable for the
gold-seekers. They either went up the mountain to the mines or became
discouraged and turned around and went home, and I do not believe that
one out of ten ever left the creek to go up the mountain.

The way from Clear creek to the mines at Russel's gulch was through
the mountains, with nothing but a trail to travel on and the roughest
country to try to take wagons over I ever saw.

I do not know how many miles it was, but I do remember that we had a
hard day's ride from Clear creek to Russel's gulch, and we did not ride
a half a mile without seeing more or less wagons that had been left
beside the trail, and in many of the broken wagons the outfit that the
owner had started with was in the wagon.

[Illustration: I bent over him and spoke to