The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Water Street is now only a dirt trail, full of mudholes, which Zephyra has waded through disgustedly in order to stop here. Once it was a busy thoroughfare that also contained the town jail, which was built into an abandoned mine entrance across the creek; Wiley Rouse’s dam on his creek, where he built his original chair factory, of which no trace remains; Wiley Rouse’s spring, a fountain of pure water; and several of the better homes of Bear City, only one of which, built by Clarence Jewell’s mother, still stands, converted by its present occupants into a year-round semi-modern home.

  Because Water Street is so rarely used, a man driving a red pickup truck spots Zephyra parked there and pulls up to investigate. Without getting out of his truck, he hails Kim.

  “Lost? Could I help you find anything?”

  She turns to him, a handsome blond-haired near-forty outdoor type who looks like…well, perhaps an assistant superintendent of a power plant, which is what he is. His words remind her of Kate Scraper’s medicine men who “could tell you where to find something you’d lost.”

  “I want it lost,” she says. “I like it lost.”

  He laughs. “Bill Hopkins,” he says. “I can tell you anything.”

  “Tell me the history of Bear City.”

  Again he laughs. “Now, that I don’t know. You ought to talk to Dallas Bump. Lives right there.” He points at a house, or cabin, across the road. This building, with two towering ashlar stone chimneys at either end and a house-length front porch strewn with handmade chairs, rockers, and porch swing, was Lark Melson’s home, begun as a one-room log cabin and expanded in 1881, before the gold rush, into a dogtrot by the addition of a second pen or “house,” separated by a breezeway (the mountain man always refers to the other half of his dogtrot as “my other house,” even though it shares the same roof with the room he is in). As in many dogtrots, the breezeway was boarded over in modern times to make even more interior room.

  Kim knocks, then knocks again, but there is nobody home. Bill Hopkins’s red pickup pulls alongside Zephyra again. “Well,” he says, “I guess he must be up at his shop.” He gives her directions to the shop, just up the road, on Walnut Street, formerly much more the main street than Main or West Main ever was, and he starts to conclude, “You can’t miss it,” but seems to think better of this and says, “You can miss it, because it looks just like some old barn.”

  Bill Hopkins explains that he works full-time at the power plant, but in his spare time, especially during the Christmas rush, he helps his friend Dallas Bump fill chair orders, and throughout the year he maintains the factory’s equipment and helps Mr. Bump get his split timber. “I can’t tell you the history of Bear City, but I can tell you the history of the Bumps,” he says, and goes on to explain how Philander Bump passed on the skills to his son Fred, and Fred passed them on to his son Dallas, and Dallas tried to pass them on to his son, Freddie, who, however, would rather earn a lot more money working as a lineman in the construction business and doesn’t have much enthusiasm for learning the ancient family trade.

  With Freddie gone, Bill “takes up the slack” in the chair factory when he can.

  “Maybe Dallas Bump thinks of you as a son,” Kim suggests.

  “In a sense,” Bill admits. “That would be an honor, if he did. He’s one in a million, someone you just enjoy being around. He’s twenty-five years older than me, but he doesn’t act like it—he treats me like an equal, makes me feel a part of it all. Go meet him. Tell him I sent you.”

  Again Kim thanks him, and follows his directions a couple of blocks down Walnut Street, past the site of the splendid but vanished Ozark Hotel, now Dallas Bump’s cow pasture; past the equally disappeared Willingham Hotel; up to Uncle Jep Smith’s General Store, its false front removed, too, leaving the gable of a cottage in which lives Dallas Bump’s eighty-four-year-old mother, Delia Bump, and his “baby sister,” sixty-five-year-old Ola Bump. Up a rising circular driveway behind the former general store sits the board-and-batten long shed (apparently vertical boards rather than horizontal clapboards were favored throughout the erection of Bear City), with wings of sloped roofs rising to join the peaked gable of the central barn-doored chamber of the old, incognito furniture factory. Another porch swing, surely made here, hangs suspended from the branches of a graceful young sycamore tree, almost like a shop sign advertising the woodcraft; if indeed the swing was meant as such, it is the only “sign” in town.

  A lone automobile, an old bile-green Ambassador with a headlight missing, the front fender all crumpled, and the license plates gone, sits outside the door. All the doors of the factory are wide open, for the afternoon is becoming very warm; Kim removes her cotton jacket, beneath which she is wearing her favorite T-shirt, which says “Cotton” beneath a picture of a fluffy boll of it. Dressed thus, she steps through the big main barn door and confronts the dark interior of the shop.

  The moment is frozen, and preserved. With the blinding sunlight behind her, her hair becomes the color of the precious metal that men once hoped to find in this town. She stands still, letting her eyes adjust to the dark interior. She is tall, blonde, and blue-eyed. A man stares at her in wonder.

  He is sitting on a bench in the gloom deep in the clutter of the shop, an incredible jumble of machinery, wooden boards, wooden spindles, wooden chips, and many years’ accumulation of sawdust thickly carpeting the whole interior. This man sits whittling a stick with a pocketknife, and smoking a cigarette in disregard of all the combustibles.

  “Mr. Bump,” she says, “Bill Hopkins told me where to find you, and said you could tell me about Bear City. I’m Kim—”

  “Yes, yes,” he says. “Kim.” In a very deep voice, he says her name wonderingly, as if he were pronouncing a strange new language. He is not simply looking steadily at her, she detects as her eyes become adjusted to the darkness, but almost ogling her, although his eyes never leave hers to roam to other parts of her image. He certainly doesn’t look sixty-six years old, or even fifty He has large hands, capable of having made ten thousand chairs, but they are not gnarled or arthritic or scarred: they are smooth and young. His full head of long, soft hair is not exactly silvery but sort of pewter. Dressed in an old flannel shirt in a brown plaid, and blue jeans so faded that Levi Strauss himself must have hand-stitched them, he stands up, shifting his pocketknife to his left hand and using his right hand to take hers and hold it tightly. He towers above her, a very tall and big man. “You are lovely,” he says, and the way he says it does not embarrass her at all.

  “I was told you could tell me about Bear City,” she says.

  “Pardon?” he says, and gestures to his left ear, where there is a hearing aid. When she has repeated herself a bit more loudly or carefully, he motions for her to sit at the other end of the short bench. Strange that a chairmaker would have no chairs for sitting, only a bench; the room is filled with tossed and turned chairs and rockers in various stages of construction. “You really ought to talk to Clarence Jewell,” he says. “He knows so much more than anybody else about Bear City.”

  “You are modest,” Kim says, and, because he exudes such understanding and fellow-feeling, she confesses, “Everywhere I go, in the lost cities of Arkansas, I’m always being told, ‘So-and-so could tell you more than I could,’ or ‘I don’t really know very much,’ when actually they are the most knowledgeable people in town. Are they just trying to be self-effacing or self-doubting or what? So who is this Clarence Jewell?”

  He smiles at her, warmly and sympathetically, but she is not certain he has heard a word of what she has just said. At length he says, “Well, what would you like to know?”

  “Wasn’t there some sort of gold rush?” she asks.

  “Goldfish?” he says. “You mean those in Wiley Rouse’s millpond?”

  “Rush,” she says, shaping her lips. “There was a big boom here when people thought they had discovered gold.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Yes,” he says. Then he says, “Well.” A long moment passes, but he nev
er takes his eyes from hers, as if he were compensating for his inability to hear her by reading her entire soul. She is not uncomfortable, and waits. Then he says, “Well, I’ll tell you.” And speaking in his warm, throaty bass voice, he begins to narrate, as if it were engraved upon his heart, the entire story of the great Bear City gold rush of 1886-87.

  No one knows how it started. The times were ripe for rumors, just as in certain seasons flying saucers are seen: there are years when men have to see the saucers and years when they have to hunt for gold. (The Bear City fool’s-gold rush coincided with an almost identical one in faraway Five Corners, Vermont, of all places.) Neither Wiley Rouse nor Larkin Melson had any interest in gold, or any expectation that their settlement would grow into a city as a result of it, and neither made any profit from the booming of the town. While both men went on living in their log cabins, Wiley kept on making chairs and Lark kept on blacksmithing but sold his cow pasture for the construction site for two hotels. Both men, as high officials of the Masonic Lodge, which they had co-founded in 1881, were careful about which of the newcomer prospectors and boomtowners they accepted for membership.

  For years there had been talk of “Spanish gold” in old legends and folk tales. The Spaniards were almost stereotyped as gold-crazy; in the popular imagination every galleon was loaded with bullion, and every conquistador led a pack train of burros staggering beneath the weight of ingots, which were left buried in every conceivable cache of the Arkansas mountains. Tales of a “lost Spanish mine” and the fabled “lost Louisiana mine” opened every bear’s den and rabbit hole to digging by the greedy. The Spanish reputation was not totally undeserved: de Soto ransacked Arkansas in 1541, not to Christianize the Indians, but to find gold. The same year (the same fever), Francisco Coronado, that least of the Spanish explorers, had combed the Southwest, penetrating into Kansas and Nebraska, trying to find the “seven cities of Cibola,” each a reputed Fort Knox, and found only a few pueblos. You are searching for eleven lost cities of Arkansas; do you know of the Seven Lost Cities of Cibola? They were illusions, as was Bear City.

  But both Montgomery County (in which Bear City was then located) and Garland County (where it is now) had honest, earned reputations for being “the mineral belt” of Arkansas. Although little gold or silver had actually been discovered, there were deposits of platinum, copper, lead, and cobalt, not to mention the humble novaculite, used by the Indians for arrowheads, by millers for grindstones, and still considered today the finest whetstone for knife sharpening, known universally as “Arkansas Stone.”

  In 1881 the precious-metal fever had created a miniboom at a community a few miles west of Bear City that quickly called itself Silver City, and served as a preview of what would happen at Bear City five years later, even with many of the same supporting cast of prospector, stock salesman, saloonkeeper, and newspaper editor. Silver and gold are often found together in the same ore, but silver is of course the less valuable, and while both metals were supposedly buried in huge quantities in the hills of Silver City, the boomtown got its name and its central focus from the mineral of the moon, not the sun. If you go looking for the remains of Silver City after you leave Bear, you won’t find anything; much less is there than here.

  Itching for something better than silver, the men of Silver City moved in three directions. At the head of the valley of the Arkansas River, near its source in the territory of Colorado, was a place called Oro City, a gold-rush boom and bust town during the 1860s that renamed itself Leadville in 1878, after the discovery of lead and silver in great quantities. In the 1880s it was one of the largest boom cities in the country, and several Silver City disappointees went there to find the real stuff. Others, their fever hiked by the news of the huge South African gold rush of 1886 and the Washington rush of the same year, changed their goals from silver to gold and headed either north, to a place in Logan County called Golden City, or east, just a few miles down the road, where it was rumored that somebody had actually discovered the lost Louisiana mine on the southern side of a hill adjoining Bear Mountain. They tore down their jerrybuilt board-and-batten shacks in Silver City, moved them to Bear Mountain, and began staking claims everywhere. Larkin Melson and Wiley Rouse, who had shared equally in the division of the creeks and the establishment of the little community, each donated 160 acres from their spreads to the establishment of the 320-acre Bear City, which was expected to reach a population of ten thousand within a year.

  A man named Mr. Fulmer (his last name is all that is known about him) owned the claim, which he might or might not have purchased from Lark Melson’s southwestern forty, up on the south slopes of the nine-hundred-foot knob called Louisiana Hill, a claim fancifully called by Mr. Fulmer (or by his “mining operations superintendent,” Orson Hager) the Lost Louisiana Mine. Whether Fulmer and Hager were in collusion with other fraudulent operators, or were acting alone in the sincere belief that they had discovered a deposit of ore rich in gold, is a source of idle and almost irrelevant speculation, because soon the boom exploded all over Bear City, and other “mines” were established on every hillside and in every hollow. A man advertising himself as “Prof. R. R. Waitz, Assayer, Chemist & Metallurgist,” came to town and pronounced the ore samples to be loaded with gold. An old forty-niner named Captain Billy Johnson arrived on the scene, took a quick tour, and announced, “I have seen all the mining camps in the United States and I know Arkansas has the greatest mines in the world.” To prove his faith, he began constructing the handsomest residence in Bear City and buying up lots and claims. Herman Beyer, a former miner in Oro City, came from Colorado to inspect Professor Waitz’s ore samples (and perhaps, since he was an old friend of Waitz’s, to “salt” the samples with flecks of real Colorado gold). Charley Jacobs, who had been a mere notary public at Silver City and had failed to get rich, offered four hundred thousand shares of the C. H. Jacobs Mining Company for $10 million and found no shortage of investors from out of state.

  Forty-six other mining companies, with such names as Eureka, Ozark, Accident, Nonpareil, Phoenix, and Champion, were organized and incorporated, offering more than four million shares of stock for prices in excess of $80 million. Americans rushed to own stock certificates lavishly printed on fancy paper that was worth more than any gold they claimed to represent.

  Forty carpenters worked around the clock to build new structures in Bear City. The four hotels and six boardinghouses could not hope to hold the influx of people. Tent cities sprang up in every open field and along the roads. Wiley Rouse charitably posted a sign at his best bubbling spring of water: “Wiley Rouse, their owner, dedicates these springs to the public forever. June 10, 1887.” A weekly newspaper, the Bear City Times, congratulated itself in print for all the excitement in town, and promised to become a daily momentarily (the linotype had been invented in our newsy year of 1886). By the summer of 1887, Bear City had reached its apogee.

  How the new city could thrive for almost a year without any evidence of the actual mining or milling of gold is a mystery. Eventually some investors began to insist upon more proof of attempts to recapture the gold from the dirt. “Diamond Jo” Reynolds, a robber baron of the Gilded Age who had taken up permanent residence in Hot Springs after its waters had helped his rheumatism, and had brought a whole posh railroad with him, announced his intention to run his railroad onward into Bear City, if any gold was actually smelted there. A mining tycoon from Missouri, Colonel Moffet (his first name remains unknown), arrived in town with much fanfare (including the prearranged shooting off of sticks of dynamite in the branches of trees along his route of arrival) to build and operate a forty-ton smelter for extracting the gold from ore. Professor Waitz opened his Lixiviation Mill; “lixiviate” is an impressive word meaning simply to wash or percolate the soluble matter (water) from the metal (gold). Another “professor,” A. M. Beam, discovered what he called “Beam’s Electric Process” and set up a plant to extract gold from dirt by magnetism. Several “stamp” mills were built for the pro
cess of stamping the ore: pulverizing it to ready the gold for Beam’s magnets or Waitz’s lixiviation.

  Several more months went by. The stamp mills did not stamp any gold. Beam’s Electric Process failed to magnetize any. Colonel Moffet’s smelter did not produce any metal. Diamond Jo Reynolds’ railroad was never built.

  Thousands of investors lost their shirts. One of these out-of-state speculators (native Arkansawyers failed to invest, not because they knew of the hoax but because they were too poor), named John Benz (no known relation to Karl Benz, who in our mobile year of 1886 invented the motorcar), had plowed $1,375,000 into shares of the Ozark Mining Company. His worthless certificates were found years later hidden in the walls of an abandoned house in Bear City. Did Benz commit suicide or simply fade away in a poorhouse somewhere? In the whole history of Bear City, there is no record of a single suicide.

  The state geologist was called in, not just to inspect the “mines” of Bear City, but to conduct a survey of all the hundreds of supposed gold mines in Montgomery and Garland counties. His report: there was some gold, silver, and other minerals in tiny quantities, but not enough to justify the costs of mining it; the mines of Bear City were virtually worthless and in some cases fraudulent; the Lost Louisiana Mine was not an old Spanish mine. The state geologist was hanged in effigy on the streets of Bear City.

  Waymon Hogue’s autobiographical Back Yonder (1932), the best nonfiction book to come out of the Ozarks, recalls a trip he made as an Ozarks backwoods boy with an older neighbor, Tom Boman, to look for employment, if not actual gold, in the boom town of Bear City. As he and his companion neared the town,

  The road was full of men going to and coming from the mines. We met many who looked disappointed and dejected. We were stopped by a man wanting a match. He was a middle-aged man, carrying a bundle tied up in a red bandana handkerchief suspended from a stick which he carried on his shoulder. Tom asked him the distance to the gold diggings.