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Show WHO ARE DISAPPOINTED AT LEADVILLE. Almost daily there arrive, by all the various roads which lead into Leadville young men who have left home and friends, and with no experience or money to back them, come here "to make a living," as they call it. Poor, vain, deluded youths! Not that there is not ample work here for the willing, not that those who come here fail to obtain employment - but alas! It is not always that which causes the young men who a week before came here with hopes burning brightly, to return home dejected and discouraged. It is a fact, which has been proven again and again, that the majority of the vast army of young men who come to Leadville in the delusion that a lax state of society prevails here, which will enable them to live in a romantic sort of way without working. Mining! What a sense of novelty the word conveys to an adventurous Easterner. To lead the free and easy life of a miner, to sleep in a log cabin, to work with a revolver strapped around your waist, to spend a couple of hours each day hunting among the mountains for elk and bear, and deer; perchance go through an Indian fight - and all that sort of thing which is supposed to make up the life of a miner; what joyous scenes of excitement the word miner calls up! Alas, when the stern reality presents itself to the deluded mortal, what tumbling down of air-castles is there, my countrymen, when the young man finds what in all the brief years of his existence he has never found out, that it is work - and the hardest kind of work at that - which makes the money that makes the mare go. The quick, active workers are those who make a success of it here. The first case of a failure by one of those so gifted yet remains to be recorded. Hunt these mountains high and low and you can't find a worker who has failed in Leadville. This is the class of people who, though they may not have more than what they have earned by hard labor when the week is past, see millions within their grasp, and who give you their solemn pledge that they will strike it three weeks hence. They are never discouraged, and take things just as they come, whether ill or good. Leadville is composed exclusively of a working class of people, in the practical sense of the word. These mines about us are filled with clerks, professors, lawyers and doctors. Don't for a moment imagine that they are there as ornaments, receiving large salaries and doing nothing. No, indeed. In their rough miner's garb you would take them never for what they are. They are workers, even though their early years were spent in colleges, banks and offices. They dig and delve side by side with your common laborers, who understand neither Latin or French, and know only one thing, and that is that they must work just as hard as their illiterate companions "to the manor born" if they expect to make the same wages. These are the men who compose the active element which has given Leadville its reputation for push and enterprise, and those who have not the means to build up a business here nor wish to do some hard work had better not come. - Leadville Chronicle. |