Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Reminiscences of a trip to Pike’s Peak and down the Rio Grande in the year 1859, at the time of the Pikes Peak gold craze (Peter Westerlund)
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with their baskets of fruits and cakes. They carried
thorn on their heads, and every day in the week they
would come to this little place and peddle them out.
To all appearances there must have been an immense
number of poor people in the large Mexican town.
The little place called Franklin was an awful
gam-bling hole, a place I would, not like to live in. it
seemed that everybody gambled in some way. They
gambled with billiards, pool, and on bowling alleys.
We sal, watching them play billiards one evening
when a man they called Major, apparently an officer
of some government fort not far off, lost $1,500. Of
course he was quite drunk and they could easily have
plucked him of more, if they had let him keep on.
The other fellows told him they would play no more
with him and therefore he was forced to stop.
I mentioned that it proved to be to our advantage
that those two boys got away from us as they did.
To judge from the excitement that our landing on
the United States side of the river created, bad we
landed on the other side—which we most likely
would have done and stuck up our flag too—we
would have been arrested and got into no end of
trouble and international entanglements. After all,
there is nothing like good luck, and it favored us
from first to last.
Having promised the good people in Albuquerque
that we would write if we ever reached El Paso, we
did so. One of the party trailed the course and
curves of the river as we moved on and also marked
the rapids and described everything pertaining to
the river. He told of the possibilities of floating a
small lumber raft down to El Paso at high water,
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