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Show k l "OLD MAN" MURPHT. B f Rawhido is too new to have traditions. The H romance that hedges about the struggle for gold V ! has not yet endowed the baby camp of the desert H with tales of the red-blooded, two-fisted men who H undergo all manner of privation and denial in m ' tho effort to wrest fortune from a reluctant Mother m j , Earth. The men of Rawhide are men of other B camps and scenes, and their stories are stories H. of otherwheres. Not until they shall have made B i their struggle to its limits and recorded their suc- B ' i cesses and failures can their story be written no B I man in the new camp has a history that is linked B ' up with the spot where a year" ago Avas only B 1 desert waste, greasowood, sand, and scrubby B sagebrush save "Old Man" Murphy, and "Old B Man" Murphy died last week. B In the strength and vigor of a hardy manhood, B Murphy came to the place where now stands the B camp of Rawhide more than thirty-six years ago. B His coming to the desert was in response to the B lure of gold. It was the old story, or the story B that is most frequently told to account for pres- B ence on the desert Eastern opportunities seem- B I I ingly ( ' d at a time when fortuneward am- fl j bition m" i high. Bc Muri s vas upward of seventy years old B when he died. His form was but slightly bent by B the weight of years not until two days before Br his system collapsed under the strain of many B years did he show the ravages of age. His great B l shock of hair, bushy whiskers, and beetling eye- B brows were but slightly streaked with gray, and B ' every day he did a man's good work. To the mo- B ment of tho breakdown he was the embodiment B I ' of health and strength, and his proudest boast B i was that he had lived to see the fulfillment of his m ; i prophecy that some day there would bo a great i ! I mining camp established where Rawhide now ! stands. Of tho old man's life on the desert dur- i ing the thirty-six years he lived at Murphy's r Wells, remote from other human habitation, and m latterly especially with but few passers-by to B break the monotony of sand and sagebrush, there f j is no record. Only is it known that Murphy lo- B' I rated a silver-lead property far across the old dry B t t lake, on the northern edge of which he had his K homo for the span of a generation. Once he sold I this property and got a good cash payment to bind tho bargain. But that was the end of his mining venture. The property reverted to him h . through failure of the buyers to come through m with the deferred payments. To the time of his B death he continued to do the annual assessment B ' work on the claims, clinging to them with confi- B t dence in ultimate fortune to come because of his B i ownership. The dream he harbored for so long n ended as does a mirage, and "Old Man" Murphy B ( the sobriquet was affectionately bestowed by B I the first-comers in the rush to Rawhide had H neither part nor parcel in the Rawhide boom. B I Murphy was born at Mira Bay, Nova Scotia, By I near where tho western end of the first trans- B , i I Atlantic cable enflpd. With the advent of the B ' I electric telegraph, he took up its study and be- B came an accurate and speedy operator. When UP j j the cable project was carried to successful com- B , ijletion, Murphy joined the forces of the company, B, I J find was detailed on the first operating Btaff on B I f this side of the Atlantic. He was in the office B I 'f when the first message that evor passed beneath B ' tho waves of tho Atlantic flashed into the little !Cj I office on the Nova Scotian coast, and it fell to him jBr to take tho cable operator's transcript, and send B l the greetings of Queen Victoria on o the Presi- Hf dent at Washington. Of this achievement, Mur K I phy was proud to the day of hisf death, nor did B he ever lose interest in the electric telegraph. B It was in the days of the rush to Candelaria, H nearly forty years ago, that Murphy was lured to H "' tho West. He came first from Nova 'cotia to B i I Sacramento. There were big J ings in those days K ' wjL at Candelaria, Bodie, Colu . and Belleville, Bb ry and other camps in tho remote parts of the sagebrush sage-brush country that live now only in memory. Murphy heard the call, and abandoning the telegrapher's teleg-rapher's key, started for Candelaria, accompanied by his wife. They made their advent at Ragtown, the early name of the present, prosperous village of Fallon, capital of Churchill county, and over the old Candelaria-Wadsworth stage road, a section sec-tion of which is now the principal thoroughfare of Rawhide, they pushed their way to the Wells, where they took up their abode. Murphy saw money was to be made by catering to the needs of the travelers to and from Candelaria, and on the edge of the great dry lake lying below all the hills of Rawhide he set up a wayside station. There he sold water and meals, and furnished sleeping accommodations, and through a stretch of years his income from this wayside hostelry on the desert was no mean one. The Candelaria boom passed; and no others were born that took the gold-seekers in his direction, so Murphy went a-prospecting. Twenty miles away was Eagle-ville, Eagle-ville, once a producing camp, and at the farther end of the mud lake, the old Eagleville stamp-mill reared its walls. But Eagleville, save for Its present three inhabitants, passed away years and years ago, and the old mill fell into disuse when the present-day conquerors of the desert were still toddling at the maternal knee. From the passing of Eagleville to the birth of Rawhide last fall, "Old Man" Murphy lived his life of splendid isolation, rearing a large family, and sending his children forth into the world to make their own places. With the birth of Rawhide last fall, "Old Man" Murphy saw his dreams come true he had long predicted that some day the hills to the north of him would give up great treasures in gold and silver. From the day the rush to the new camp started he was a constant visitor In the town, minding not, despite his, seventy-two years, the dusty drive of six miles from the Wells to Moss' Corner. As the camp grew, Murphy's pride in the fulfillment of his prophecy took on the spirit of exultation, and the crowning moment of his life was when the electric telegraph came to him on the desert. When the first telegraph line construction con-struction gang came trooping down Nevada street, In the new camp, early In February, Murphy Mur-phy was the most interested of all the observers. For thirty-six years he and the telegraph had been strangers now the gap was to be filled; modern progress was to bring to his door the magic out of which he had first wrested his livelihood. liveli-hood. No other man in all the crowd that watched that construction gang was moved as was Mur- . phy, and when the instruments had been connected con-nected up, It was his fingers that caressed the keys as first they flashed communication across the desert. In all these years neither his fingers nor his ears had forgotten their "Morse," and from the day communication was established, Murphy never visited Rawhide without stopping in the telegraph office to hear the ticking of the Instruments. The beginning of the Rawhide boom fired "Old Man" Murphy with some of the spirit that had brought him to the desert, but which had been supposed to have shriveled under thirty-six years of scorching sun. Early this spring some claim-jumpers undertook to secure possession of the old man's silver-lead claims. They erected their monuments, set their stakes, and posted their notices. Murphy knew right well who the transgressors were, and while a party of passers-by passers-by stopped at his wells for water one afternoon, he vented his indignation, declaring that those notices had to come down. "I've held onto them claims for nigh onto thirty years now, and no damned scoundrel claim-jumpeis claim-jumpeis are goin' to get 'em now just because the boom's come." Early the next morning, riding his dilapidated old wagon, drawn by a span of cayuses, and carrying car-rying an old-model shotgun across his knees, "Old Man" Murphy drove into Rawhide. His was the light of possession, and he meant to enforce it. Hitching his team, and shouldering the gun, he. went hunting for the claim-jumpers. He found them soon, and in the twinkling of an eye for figMs were the order of those days, and always attracted a crowd the old man was at the center of 300 or 400 people. He had the claim-jumpers stood up straight on the desert, and with vehemence vehem-ence in every tone, and a free brandishing of the shotgun, ho laid down the law to themand to all of their kind. The old man carried the day with out firing a shot. The jumpers' notices came down, and the old man's claims were not molested mo-lested after that last big flash of his spirit. Strange coincidence is it, that Murphy's last communication with anybody of Rawhide was with the telegraph force there. Two days before his death, Tom McCauley, the manager of the Rawhide office, stopped at Murphy's Wells on his way home from the hot springs. He greeted the old man, and they chatted for a short while. As McCauley was leaving, he expressed the hope of seeing Murphy in the telegraph office in a few days. "No, son; I don't think I'll ever get up there again. My time is nearly done," replied Murphy. Two days lafer he died, his system collapsing almost withor warning. Last Friday evening, bound from ballon to Rawhide, passed all that was mortal of "Old Man" Murphy on the auto load near Sand Springs. The casket, inclosed in a stout board box, was securely loped to the bed of an automobile freight wagon. It was twilight, and the acetylene lamps on the wagons were ablaze. The approach of the wagon with its load of lifeless human freight was descried from afar by the lights, and as It drew nearer, the regular passenger car pulled to the side of the road. "There comes Murphy's body," said the driver, and as the freight wagon thundered by in its floud of dust, the passengers in the regular car, bound for the boom camp that for thirty-six yeais had existed only in "Old Man" Murphy's imagination, imagina-tion, sat with uncovered heads. It was the end of the only big romance that goes with Rawhide. A corpse in an automobile; the memory of thirty-six years amid the sagebrush; sage-brush; the coming of the electric telegraph to the septuagenarian who had taken the fiist cable message out of the Atlantic; the birth of a boom in fulfillment of a prophecy, and the prophet's hope deferred to the end of the struggle. |