OREGON FOLKLORE - WORK PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION
Title: Hardrock mining
Surnames: Simms

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OREGON FOLKLORE STUDIES

Name and address of informant: Hank Simms, Odd Fellows' Home, SE
32nd Holgate St., Portland, Oregon

Date and time of interview: Nov. 29, 1938. From 10 in the morning until 2
PM.

Place of interview: Mr. Simms' room at the Odd Fellows' Home.

Name and address of person, if any, who put you in touch with informant:
Howard Corning, 400 Elks Bldg.

Description of room, house, surroundings, etc.: The Odd Fellows' home
for old people occupies large grounds and consists of two well-kept brick
buildings, of four or five stories each. I was shown around the institution
by the Superintendent and the entire establishment is clean, modern, and
nicely furnished. Each of the residents has a private room and it was in
Hank Simms' room that I conducted the interview. The furnishings of this
room were two chairs, a bed, and a chest of drawers. There were no pictures
on the walls [?] but a few of Mr. Simms' belongings on the dresser.
Everything was very orderly and it was evident that Hank Simms doesn't
belong to that school of elders who go in for exotic interior decoration.
In spite of the comparative bareness of the room, one felt at home.

1, 2, 3. Mr. Hank Simms is an old type of westerner and resents having his
family affairs pried into. He does, however, in the course of ordinary
conversation, reveal many of the answers necessary to the above questions. His
father, Henry Rutton Simms, was born in Illinois, in 1823, and came West in
the gold rush of 'forty-nine. Later he took up a donation claim two miles
north of the (2) town of Willamina, and it was there Hank Simms was born in
the year 1852 (3). About the rest of his family and his early years on the
homestead, Mr. Simms was uncommunicative and wanted to get on to talk of
mining, in which I had told him I was interested.
4. is answered by Mr. Simms' claim that he has lived in practically every
mining town from Alaska to Mexico.
5. is an yet unanswered, but Simms is a remarkably literate man.
6. Mr. Simms is a miner and has worked in every type of metal but tungsten,
and at every position in the mines from laborer to superintendent.
7. Mr. Simms' special skills and interests are those connected with mining and
geology, etc.

8. Mr. Simms is an atheist and from his present residence it can be assumed
that he was an Odd Fellow.
9. At 86, Hank Simms has the appearance of a man twenty years younger, and
his only infirmity seems to be a little weakness in the legs. He is a
tall and somewhat handsome man, clean-shaven, with clear eyes and a steady
countenance that at times where an ironic sort of smile. When he loads his
pipe you notice, with surprise, that his hands are steady and from the
clearness of his voice and the delivery of his speech, you have a hard time
bringing yourself to believe in his age. He has all of his own teeth and
though they are worn they seem strong and grip his pipe with some
determination. His weight is about one hundred and ninety, and he is still a
powerful man and one whose body has not been broken by labor, but built by it.
The hearing is good and, except for minor lapses there seem to be no flaw in
his memory.

10. One of the significant things about the man is his honesty about his
present position, and his says that he cannot see why a person who was
unsuccessful enough to end up in a home for the aged should be of interest to
anybody, or why anything he could say should seem important. It would be the
impression of this interviewer that Mr. Simms is an extremely reliable source
of information he is remarkably free from any that might color his
pictures of the past. Since he harbors no bitterness, his remarks on others
can be given some validity. When a person still living might be hurt by
anything he has to say, he refuses to give the proper name. Hank Simms is
the finest type of old western man.

Text: I was introduced to Hank Simms by the Superintendent of the Home and
he took me to his room. At once Hank Simms asked, "Well, young fellow, what
do you want [md] just some straight running off at the mouth or do you want
me to guide on something special? I am a long distance talker if you give
me a chance and I might take you for a long ride in the wrong direction." I
told Mr. Simms that I was interested in anything that he wanted to talk
about, but that I know a little about mining, and we might as well start on
that. "I reckon you do know little about mining," he said, "I have followed
it for fifty or sixty years and dug a shaft straight into this poor house.
You can't call that very good mining. Miner's is fools and I'll bet that
for every dollar lifted off the bedrock on this coast, two has been sunk
back in the game. Miners are liars, too, [md] honest liars. If you question
a miner's word about the claim he's working you might as well question his
daughter's virtue. That is the way they stand by their lies. I have lied
some tall ones in my days and there has been millions struck in this old
head that no man will ever see. That's how I got where I am."

At about this point the conversation Mr. Simms asked me if I was religious,
and when I assured him that I was not he continued by saying, "Well, then I
can talk as I want and kind of let loose. Miners are God-damned fools and I
been one of the worst. I have mined everything that they have in the West
except tungston, maybe, and so if there is any special kind of foolishness you
want to hear about, what is it?"

I asked Mr. Simms what sort of mining he did first. He said[:?] "First time
I lit out from the homestead it was to do beach mining in Southern Oregon.
I'd take a run at it, starve out, and then go home until I get fed up
enough to try another run. It was skimpy mining black sand, fine as
flour, with gold in it no fine you couldn't see it with the naked eye. It
was hard to catch and had a lot of platinum in it that we threw away in
those days - worth fifty-sixty dollars an ounce now, but we wouldn't
have no traffic with it then. There was two types of beach mining. One was
with a hopper and screens - they called that a Long Ton, but I never
worked one so I couldn't tell you much about it. The other was old, coast
sluicing. We didn't use regular sluice riffles but the frayed ends of
the planks in the joints served for that. The fuzzy timber was just right
for fine gold. No one ever got rich at beach mining that I know of, and
them stories you hear about gold washing up on the tide are all bull.
The gold washed in on the tide, settled in pockets in the rocks and there
it stayed. If you worked it out you had to wait till more settled. I know
two men to take forty dollars a piece in one morning and worked out a
couple of pockets it would take the tide two years to fill again. No one
knows much about that kind of mining, except that it is the poorest there
is. That is the last of it I did.

"George Collins, the Indian agent on the Alsea Indian reservation,
was the best beach miner there was, and he and his two half-breed sons used
to do pretty well, but they never got rich at it. He mined for thirty or forty
years and had beach mining down to perfection. The tide spreads the gold
and there can't be any rich pockets like you find at the foot of an eroded
mountain. I think that the platinum lay in some surface formation in the
coast mountains, for there was a lot of it in them days, but I don't know
where it has gone now. If I did I wouldn't be in the poorhouse talking to
you. I quit beach mining early and went south to some of the California
diggings.

"I am a hardrock man and I learned my business at Kormit, California
- up in the Feather River Country. That was a big diggings and some
of the best of the old hands worked there. I learned from the ground down.
You don't learn from the ground up, in that business. I can timber and cut
my own steel, could before I was twenty-five. A man had to know his
business then and a foreman could tell a greenhorn like reading beef
from a poor ox. You didn't ask a foreman how to do anything. He told you
'go ahead and if it doesn't suit me you'll know it'. No one ever got fired
in those days. If a man got criticised he knew enough to quit. There was
[none?] of his sucking around you have now, and a man didn't hang onto a
job like a priest to a parish. Ever one in a while he just drug down on
principal and went down the road. They'd call us hobos now I guess, but in
them days we was called Overland Johns and, by God, I knew ever creek and
cow between here and Mexico and right back up to Alaska. You see what it
has got me, but that was the way we lived in those days, and if you was a
mining man there wasn't no other way around. They didn't hire the
homeguard and if you stayed long in one place that is what you got to
be. I'll give you an example, and it wasn't so long ago either. I
drifted into Cornicopia one night on the late stage, just out shaking
the smell of Portland off myself, and I dropped int a blind pig to warm
up a little. I am not a drinking man but the bartender there could see I was
an old Overlander, and he grinned at the sight of me. We didn't talk much and
when I was leaving to go to the hotel to bed he asked me, "Liking for a job
old timer?" I told him that was the idea. He says, well you go see so and so
in the morning, he wants a man. "What's your name?" I told him and went on to
bed. The next morning I went around to see the guy he told me about and
he asked me a hell of a lot of questions about who I know and where I
worked, and I told him as much as I wanted him to know. I could see that
the job was in highgrade and that he wanted to know who he was hiring. Well
he was just about to point my check for me, when here comes that bartender,
and he says "Say, So an So, aren't you hiring this man. This is Hank
Simms, he don't ammount to nothing and never will, but he is a hard rock
from way back and so tight you have to take a ten pound sledge to drive a
drill, tight in this [sence?] [?] a clean [minor?] - one who leaves
little ore behind. (The [allusion?] here is unprintable). You're hired," So
and so says. Well, I handled some of the steepest highgrade you ever seen
for that man. I have seen the time we pulled down a stand of highgrade
that would run 600 ounces of silver to the ton, and maybe 300 gold. I
don't think the man ever watched me. He trusted me and that was the kind of
highgrade you handle in canvas so none of it will leak out. That bartender's
word was better than a deacon's.

"I had a Swede working with me that couldn't leave that highgrade alone. He
was an honest man I guess but there was just too dearned much highgrade
there for him to stand up under. The shaft ran straight back in the
mountain and this highgrade ore came in clumps ever so often. The way
you do with it is leave it hanging, work around it till you get in ordinary
dirt again. That way the super can see it and know you aren't highgrading
him. (Highgrading is stealing ore when it pays to sort it off). One day we
ran around a hanging of rich stuff and finished it off at quiting time.
I always came out of the tunnel but Ole couldn't seem to drag himself away
and about the time I got outside I knew he had weakened. I heard a crash
and the Swede had brought down the hanging. When he came out he said, "We
can pick it up first thing in the morning and we won't have to knock it
down." An hour later the super can around and said, "Ole, I am going to
have to lay you off. Your a good man but I got to lay someone off and it
might as well be you. I am going down the hill tonight and you can go with
me for company." You couldn't leave that Swede and that highgrade in the
same county and the super knew it. He didn't blame the Swede, and he
walked down to town with him to keep him honest. I have been too God-damned
honest. People used to call me Honest Hank Simms. They ought to have said,
"There goes honest Hank Simms on the way to the poorhouse."

"Besides highgrading there was a lot of salting and crooked assaying
want on in the early days, still does, I guess. I saw a lot of it, some of
those highbinders brought ore samples clean from Mexico to salt an Oregon mine
with, and a man that had ever worked this county would know it was foreign
ore, but people are prone to be fools, that's why we got places like this. I
didn't open my mouth about it many times for the chances are that the man who
was mining on a salted claim had just as much chance as he would any place
else. If he had to be digging a tunnel it didn't make much difference where,
just so it was a mining country. What was worse was the crooked assayers.
You'd take you samples to them and they'd pitch them out the back door and
tell you what they had been paid to tell you, that your ore was worth, say,
seventy - eighty dollars an ton. You take them a piece of highgrade and
they'd tell you the same thing. There was a way to get around that, though,
and I showed more than one man how to do it. You'd take a half dozen
samples and put them in six numbered envelopes and then take a half dozen
envelopes that were empty, and when you got in the office of the assayer
you split the samples between the envelopes and told him you were going to
have to Government check on him, but that you wanted a hurry-up assay.
You'd scare the Jesus out of him that way and he would be as honest as he
was able. Most assayers were drunkards and had the jimmies so bad that they
didn't know what they were doing. I saved one man, I won't give you his
name, a lot of money that way. When I tell you about him you'll wonder
why I did it. He was as big a fool as I am. He railroaded forty years
here in this state, starved his family, and spent every cent he made on
mines. The only thing that ever paid him was the pension he had spent forty
years staking a claim on. Miners are fools, boy, all of them."

"Take the way they gamble. I saw one poor galoot of a cousin Jack,
that's a Cornishman, come into a place with not enough clothes on
him to flag a handoar. He put his last dollar down on the double O on the
wheel in a gambling hall, and it hit. He was drunk and so the dealer said
'let it lay'. Double O pays thirty six to one. He did and, by God, he hit
her. The house didn't have enough money to pay him more than eighteen
hundred dollars. In three days all Cousin Jack had was the jimmies and no
breakfast, and the next I saw him he was a bull cook in a Mormon camp;
happy, said as soon as he made a stake he was going prospecting. A real
miner never goes prospecting until he has to beg or earn his grubstake the
had way. He'd no more take mining money and do that than a Catholic would
save with Holy water. I was a little different but you see what it has got me.
Ever time I start to get wise you point out to me where I am, I'll tell you a
story of a model man, though - you know the kind never drink or gamble. They
go to church every Sunday and pray ever once in a while. Good men, it's just
their way. I whored around, they went to church.

"Well this one model man had a claim in about a mile of mine, down in Southern
Oregon, forty years ago. He worked it hard and kept his nose clean and before
the diggings broke up he sold it for a thousand dollars. The rest of us stayed
till the diggings played out. I figure that man would amount to something.
When last I heard of him he was an honest farmer, doing a little mining on the
side, and raising a family. When I came in here I was sitting down in the hall
one day waiting for someone and there was an old dodger sitting next to me and
we got to talking. He knew something about Southern Oregon, and so we swapped
names back and forth to see who could stir up the most live ones. Finally I
played the model man at him. I says, "Have you ever heard what happened to
Cliff Paine, he must be a deacon by now and rich." I was talking to Cliff
Paine. You want to call on him, he'll tell you the other side of the story.
He's here in the poorhouse.

In questioning Mr. Simms I learned that he had worked in every mine in Oregon,
almost, and that he has a remarkable memory, if you ask him about a specific
place. He thinks that with the aid of an outline map he could place most of
the famous mines. He worked in Sumpter in its later days, but didn't think
much of the place or its one-horse molter. He should be talked to on specific
subjects, as information is needed. Though quite willing to talk he isn't a
man who is given to wild statements concerning things that should be be kept
in the realm of the reasonable. When I asked him about the lingo of the
hardrock miners he said that I would have to 'pan it out of his talk', that he
couldn't give it to me. He has quite a knowledge of geology and a good
vocabulary. In summing up mining be said that it was a guessing game, and that
in the end it 'didn't spell anything." As an illustration he pointed out
instances of miners getting their leads from oldrvoyants?. His last big job
was up in where he quit because he 'could pitch a biscuit out the kitchen door
and hit a glacier.'

Comment: Mr. Simms is one of eighty residents in this home for aged people,
and if he is a good sample of the rest of the residents the place should be
a valuable source of material. One of the requirements for entrance into
the home is a long residence in this state, and the type of people eligible
for the home are of good sound middle-class stock. They have kept up their
lodge dues and lived in one place long enough to know it well. Mr. Simms'
references to the place as a poorhouse are a touch of his own, and it is
doubtful if he really thinks he is in one. It is merely his way of lifting
the place out of the ordinary. There are at least two other residents with
mining backgrounds. Also there are 26 women. Interviewing is simple because
of the privacy allowed by the private rooms and the eagerness of the
people to talk to someone from the outside. Mr. Simms, as has been pointed
out elsewhere is a valuable store of information on mines and mining.
[Even?] at his advanced age people still come to him for advice. He is
going to give me the names of other people in his business.

While interviewing Mr. Simms, and listening to him tell about the workman of
the old West, it struck me that such men are most likely to be found in places
like the Odd Fellow home. The majority of men who worked in the mines and
construction camps of the early days are not the type who now own property and
have an income. Indeed it would have gone against their scruples to have
acquired either. As Mr. Simms says, they were journeymen who looked on a long
residence in one place as a sign of weakness. By moving from job to job where
they either had to 'put up or shut up', they were kept on their toes and the
men who could walk into any camp, take any job, and handle it skillfully was a
man to be looked up to. A great deal of the color in these men's lives
consisted of doing that. It was in this way that Mr. Simms became a tool
dresser (all hardrock miners in the early days out their own steel) a timber
man, powder man, assayer, practical engineer, and an all around mining man.
All of the stories he told me had as their dramatic climax the journeyman's
skill in triumph over the homeguard, greenhorn, or "high collar".

Obviously the day of such a man has passed, and passed many years back, and
so there is little to discredit such a man for being in a home for the
aged. If he, and his kind, had followed the economic precepts of the
righteous souls who have had the funds to endow historical institutions and
publish memoirs, the West would not have been built. It seems to this
interviewer that Mr. Simms represents a portion of the folk life that is as
important as that of his homeguard brothern, and that his kind should not
be penalized because of their lack of frugality and righteousness.