t business for myself. The town needed an
establishment of the kind I put up, and as I had always been a good cook
I cleaned up handsomely, especially as it was while I was running the
restaurant that Miner started his notorious stampede, when thousands of
gold-mad men followed a will-o'-the-wisp trail to fabulously rich
diggings which turned out to be entirely mythical.

It was astonishing how little was required in those days to start a
stampede. A stranger might come in town with a "poke" of gold dust. He
would naturally be asked where he had made the strike. As a matter of
fact, he probably had washed a dozen different streams to get the
poke-full, but under the influence of liquor he might reply: "Oh, over
on the San Carlos," or the San Pedro, or some other stream. It did not
require that he should state how rich the streak was, or whether it had
panned out. All that was necessary to start a mad rush in the direction
he had designated was the sight of his gold and the magic word "streak."
Many were the trails that led to death or bitter disappointment, in
Arizona's early days.

Most of the old prospectors did not see the results of their own
"strikes" nor share in the profits from them after their first "poke"
had been obtained. There was old John Waring, for instance, who found
gold on a tributary of the Colorado and blew into Arizona City, got
drunk and told of his find:

"Gold--Gold.... Lots 'v it!" he informed them, drunkenly, incoherently,
and woke up the next morning to find that half the town had disappeared
in the direction of his claim. He rushed to the registry office to
register his claim, which he had foolishly forgotten to do the night
before. He found it already registered. Some unscrupulous rascal had
filched his secret, even to the exact location of his claim, from the
aged miner and had got ahead of him in registering it. No claim is
really legal until it is registered, although in the mining camps of the
old days it was a formality often dispensed with, since claim jumpers
met a prompt and drastic punishment.

In many other instances the big mining men gobbled up the smaller ones,
especially at a later period, when most of the big mines were grouped
under a few large managements, with consequent great advantage over
their smaller competitors.

Indeed, there is comparatively little incentive now for a prospector to
set out in Arizona, because if he chances to stumble on a really rich
prospect